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Religion and Eschatology in Politics - 2. page

Religious ideas about the end of the world and other issues keep messing with our thinking.

The Self-Harming Elect and the West’s Long-term Problem with the Athletes of God

This essay is a “big think” essay that makes a multi-part argument. If you have a background in metaphysics or religious history, you can probably skip more than half of it and just read later sections but it is present in its long form so that readers without any such background can trace my arguments about why social movements celebrating self-harm and led by self-harming people constitute the threat that they do in our present moment.

If you don’t want to read a bunch of philosophical and religious background, either because you already know it or because you just don’t care that much, I urge you to move ahead to the section entitled “Canadian content.”

The Mind-Body Dichotomy in the West

One of the most significant problems the Church faced in Late Antiquity prior to and during its incorporation into the Roman imperial state was that of the Athletes of God. Philosophical and religious movements whose intellectual genealogy includes Plato and Platonist readings of other philosophers has a very real problem based on something that does not actually exist: the body-mind dichotomy.

Possibly due to some sort of mild autism, one of Plato’s most influential philosophical contributions was the idea that our material reality was an inferior and corrupted reality, a distorted shadow of what he called the “World of Forms.” God, the true creator, had created and inhabited a perfect, immaterial world composed of pure and perfect ideas. But unfortunately, creation had got all screwed-up by a being called the Demiurge, which had created the material world, as a mistake. The World of Forms, the immaterial world, was actually more real than the physical world.

Unfairness, stupidity and suffering were caused by this state of affairs, in which human beings were uniquely positioned because our bodies resided in the inferior, material reality but our intellects, our thoughts, existed in the world of forms. This generated a form of Greek junk science so popular that we see it influencing even the earliest Christian texts, the Pauline Epistles, the idea of immaterial “spirits.”

The Pharisees’ (of whom Paul had been a follower) knowledge of this popular Greek belief likely came from the Samaritans, who had used the idea of “hypostasis,” the fusion of a spirit and a body into a single being to explain their own messianic tradition of the God-man, a title claimed by Samaritan holy men like Simon Magus and Dositheus. But whereas this idea was likely originally used to cast Jesus in terms comprehensible to the Greeks to whom Paul was selling Christianity on commission, early in his ministry, he adapted the Platonic idea that being a union of spirit and flesh was actually the universal human experience.

But this did not mean that all people were equally spiritually gifted in the ad hoc cosmology Paul sold his converts in the third quarter of the first century. “Spiritual gifts” were unevenly distributed in the human population, with those most able to distinguish and separate mind and body being the most gifted. These gifts were also variegated depending on the nature of one’s spirit, making some healers and others, speakers in tongues. This framework was propounded in his first epistle to his Corinthian followers in direct response to political exigencies.

The letter, after all, was a response to inquiries from his flock about how to handle dissident members within and the Petrine faction of the Jesus movement, without. In an effort to maintain control of his flock, he explained that he could detach his spirit from his body and instantaneously send it to Corinth to surveil his followers and make sure that they remained loyal and followed his instructions. That is the origin of the expression Christianity has long sought to deliteralize when one asks the meaning of “I will be there in spirit.” At the foundation of Christian tradition, in what is likely the earliest book of the New Testament we have (circa 51 CE), is the idea that the most spiritually gifted among us are actually able to sever their spirits from their bodies at will.

This naturally intersected with pre-existing traditions of asceticism prevalent throughout the civilized world. Christianity by no means invented fasting and other ways of physically punishing the body to achieve some kind of greater union with the divine. Holy men might walk across hot embers, swear off food or water or draw their own blood both to seek and hold the attention of crowds and to achieve union with the divine. And it is in Buddhism, before Christ’s birth, that we see the first critiques of this behaviour and the rejection of asceticism in favour of “the middle way,” of limiting asceticism to prevent self-harm.

From Gnosticism to the Athletes of God

There is little question that Christianity’s unique fusion of the Platonic theory of the body-spirit dichotomy with universal and pre-existing traditions of asceticism amplified the dangers internal self-harm movements posed. The Gnostic movement within Christianity suffered persecution by the other sects for a variety of reasons, ranging from its magpie-like heterodoxy, to a predilection for creating pseudonymous scripture, to its rejection of institutional authority in favour of charismatic claims of special revealed knowledge. But we should not understate the importance of the fact that it most thoroughly rejected the material world in favour of the spiritual and the greater tendency on the part of its adherents to engage in acts of self-mutilation, starvation and other forms of self-harm.

As Christianity drew closer to the state in the third century, prior to Diocletian’s persecution which responded to this development with violence, Church Fathers were looking beyond the Gnostic heresy, one whose appeal was largely limited to the most urban, literate and intellectual adherents to a related phenomenon that had a true popular following and which implicitly contested the authority of the bishop-centred hierarchical institution they were building. That problem was the Athletes of God.

The Athletes of God were individuals considered to be more blessed with spiritual gifts than others and who displayed these gifts through public acts of spectacular self-deprivation or harm. An example sufficiently moderate to retain his recognition as a holy man, by the Church, was the hugely popular Saint Simeon Stylites of Aleppo, who lived atop a small platform atop a pillar for thirty-seven years. Simeon was a hugely popular figure who drew thousands of pilgrims as a popular saint, while still alive. In his day, many considered him a Church Father and co-founder of the Church, itself and small fortunes were made by Aleppo merchants selling his effluvia and counterfeits thereof to pilgrims.

Monasticism and the Leashing of the Athletes of God

But the exhibitionism, self-harm and disruption of institutional authority all led the Church to recognize a social movement that would either replace or contain the Saint Simeons of the future: the followers of Benedict of Nursia, a contemporary of Simeon. As I briefly mentioned in my piece on the Donatist Crisis, some Christian ascetics like Saint Anthony the Great had already begun separating themselves from society and becoming hermits or forming small collectives in ecologically marginal places with little permanent human habitation. Following in the larger Judean-Samaritan tradition that included groups like the Essenes, these communities were not unlike the 1970s back-to-the-land movement. They tended to feature a sole, almost always male, leader who propounded a set of specific teachings and established some form of hierarchical communitarian mini-society. These mini-societies tended to collapse with the death of the leader, such as the community led by Saint Anthony the Great who spent his life wrestling the Devil in the Egyptian desert.

Benedict, with the endorsement and assistance of the Church, transformed these phenomena in several key ways through his compilation and publication of the Benedictine Rule, a codified, standardized set of written instructions for how such communities should run without the necessity of a charismatic leader and with a built-in succession process for leadership. The Church’s adoption of the Benedictine Rule, which spawned the Benedictine Order, the first order of monks in Christianity, did a number of important things designed to make the likes of Saint Simeon the exception in Christian asceticism, primarily a relic of the past. Ascetics were increasingly evicted from the public square and sent to become part of monastic (first Benedictine and then other orders with approved rules, like the Dominicans) communities.

Like the Buddhist traditions before them, “reasonableness and moderation” were at the core of these communities’ practices. In addition to prohibiting extreme acts of self-harm and instead forcing regular meals, rests, etc. on the monks, Benedictine monasticism moderated the Athlete of God tradition in other important ways.

First, their status within the church and the status of individuals in the monasteries were not determined by something as volatile as personal charisma, flair, endurance or daring but instead by bureaucratic promotion processes that placed abbots within the ecclesiastical hierarchy but not at its top.

Second, acts of asceticism were out of public view. Whatever social currency or charisma might be gained from astounding stunts of self-harm was limited to an audience of other monks engaged in the same program. What happened at the monastery stayed at the monastery and this was not simply limited to sodomy but to any other weird antics the men there might be getting up to. Placed out of public view, many of the exhibitionistic payoffs associated with the Athlete of God tradition fell away.

Third, monasteries were supposed to be self-sufficient. This entailed breaking land and engaging in a lot of practical physical labour. Shoveling shit and digging ditches do not leave a lot of energy for protracted acts of exhibitionistic asceticism. If you starve yourself, you don’t have the energy to carry out the menial duties spelled-out for you in the Benedictine Rule. If you injure yourself, again, this may impinge on the basic duties that are required of your by your community. This meant that engaging in acts of self-harm too extreme actually compromised one’s status as a Christian ascetic.

What this effectively meant was that during the centuries of Catholic hegemony in the West, those prone to acts of exhibitionistic self-harm were institutionalized and required to sleep regularly, take regular meals and engage in forms of work designed to make their asceticism as ordinary and uncharismatic as possible.

The Albigensian Crusade and the Social Contagion of Self-Harm

Of course, this tradition stared-down many challenges. One of the most significant was the Cathar movement, a neo-Gnostic movement that went further even than Plato himself in declaring that God created our spirits, angels and the heavens but that the Demiurge was, in fact, Satan himself, and that the material world was intrinsically evil, a creation of the Enemy. Anorexia and other epidemics or self-harm and body hatred followed Cathar teachings as they spread through present-day France and Spain. Human sex and sexuality were also understood to be part of Lucifer’s curse, something of which we would be cured if administered the appropriate magical rituals at the time of death. The body was a prison, as was the earth itself.

By 1209, the movement had become sufficiently threatening that the Kingdom of France redirected many of their crusaders from the Middle East to the Cathar-controlled areas, hastening the demise of the last Crusader States, already suffering from the Fourth Crusade’s betrayal of the Byzantine Empire in 1204.

There were many ironies to the Albigensian Crusade, the name commonly given to the Pope’s decision to declare those armies a formal crusade of equal weight to the various invasions of the Levant that had been undertaken under the same name and to formally affiliate the Holy Inquisition with it. Whatever brutality the Crusaders meted out in the Middle East paled in comparison to the savagery of the first “crusade” inside Catholic territory; far too popular among the Church’s strategies for preventing people dying by their own hand through starvation or flashier forms of suicide was to pre-emptively execute them.

But the urgency of the Crusade and the desperation of the Church in prosecuting it indicates that the prospect of facing whole armies of Athletes of God was something Rome thought could bring Christianity itself down, that self-harm contagions, leavened by Plato-influenced ideas of body-mind dualism, was an existential threat. Further evidence of this belief is evinced in the decision by the Spanish Kingdom of Aragon to pull many of its troops out of its protracted war with the Spanish Muslims, the Moops (couldn’t resist), and send them North to assist in the Crusade after France experienced some military setbacks.

But the lack of troops also proved a problem, making the Crusade dependent on local mobs more interested in settling scores and seizing the property of their neighbours than in enforcing any particular religious orthodoxy. But, again, the level of panic on the part of common people may also indicate not just a simple intolerance but a response to a harmful social contagion that might cause a friend or relative to suddenly begin engaging in acts of radical self-harm leading to premature death.

And people really were starving and mutilating themselves en masse, swept up in a religious enthusiasm that was shattering families, disrupting communities and shutting down economies.

And Now Some Canadian Content

Following the costly and brutally savage victory over the Cathars, the church became programmatically vigilant about self-harm movements, about the resurgence of the Athletes of God, not just because the “spiritually gifted” charismatic leaders of these movements were a competing locus of religious authority but because they appear to have had genuine humanitarian and theological concerns.

There is no reason to doubt that Catholic intellectuals, who comprised the overwhelming majority of thinking people in Europe for much of its history, did genuinely care about people’s physical and mental health. They constructed large, elaborate, hospital systems, ran medical schools and crafted “penitentials” which served as almanacs of suggested treatments for recurrent psychiatric problems in parishioners. Similarly, theologians appeared motivated by the genuine desire to see the natural world as a key piece of evidence of God’s existence, his grace and his love for his creation. The beauty and abundance of the natural world were clear, unambiguous evidence both of his power and his love.  

That is why the church was especially vigilant, as it expanded across the oceans, beginning in the fifteenth century, that it not permit anti-life, anti-creation or anti-body ideas enter it through the conversion process. As early as the fifth century, the Church had seen mission and conversion as a complex social process in which converts could only adopt new ideas and practices if they were allowed to bring some of their pre-existing beliefs and practices into the church with them. Indeed, the foundational document for missionaries was composed in the sixth century by Gregory the Great, who exhorted his missionaries not to build new churches but, instead, to gradually redecorate pagan temples so that converts’ habits of worship be disrupted as little as possible.

For this reason, after experiencing huge initial successes, the Jesuit mission to Japan was scaled-back and little opposition was offered to the Tokugawa Shogunate’s expulsion of missionaries and confinement of Christianity to Nagasaki. This was a direct result of reports from missionaries that Catholic traditions of martyrdom and imitatio Christi (embodying Christ) were being too easily and frequently conflated with pre-existing traditions of ritual suicide. While being indifferent to suffering and death was noble and Christian, self-inflicted harm for religious purposes, especially exhibitionist self-harm, set off alarm bells. Missionaries began meting out punishments and withdrawing the Eucharist from enthusiastic Japanese self-harmers.

In colonial Canada, missionaries faced a similar challenge with Iroquois traditions of conversion-by-torture, a tradition that was amplified by the “mourning wars,” whereby the Iroquois Confederacy and other Iroquoian military powers, such as the Huron Confederacy, were increasingly motivated to absorb members of adjacent ethnic groups to replace population lost through the Virgin Soil epidemics of European disease. War captives were tortured until, according to Iroquoian cosmology, their spirit left their body and the spirit of a dead comrade entered and replaced it. Thereafter, the war captive took on the name, job and, often, family position of the deceased person whose spirit had entered their body.

Consequently, endurance of torture and the stigmata left behind had a double meaning in Iroquoian society: the marks of torture on the body of a stranger might indicate that a miraculous event had taken place and that body was now actually the body of a beloved comrade, relative or friend; or, the marks of torture on the body of an escaped or ransomed war captive might indicate that will was so strong that their spirit refused to leave their body despite excruciating pain and that they had remained true to their people under the worst duress.

The first indigenous Canadian, Kateri Tekakwitha, to become a Catholic Saint attained this status because she became involved in something that should seem eerily familiar to contemporary readers:

Like many young women in Iroquoian society, exhausted by continuous martial law, and political crisis, and enticed by Catholic promises of a quiet, peaceful life Kateri chose to leave her community and become part of a church-organized settlement where young, indigenous women could try out the ascetic life and see if they wanted to become nuns.

Kateri and the other girls soon became subject to what we today term a “social contagion,” whereby they entered into a concurrently solidaristic and competitive pact of egging each other on to engage in increasingly extreme acts of self-harm. Although she was initially an instigator of these practices among the girls, Kateri grew increasingly uncomfortable as they facilitated and participated in each other’s acts of physical mortification, doing increasingly severe injuries to themselves and others, in a syncretic crescendo of extreme acts that concurrently fulfilled both Iroquois traditions of public torture and Catholic ideas of imitation Christi.

Eventually, Kateri took it upon herself to exhort the other girls to stop and, when they persisted, she appealed to the clergy running the compound to shut down what had become a danger to both the bodies and souls of the girls. Despite her best efforts, Kateri was unable to convince most of the other girls to stay within the community, abandon their vicious cycle of self-harm and comply with the moderate asceticism inspired by the Benedict and the monastic tradition.

Today’s Athletes of God

In 1996, historians of Canadian religion, Nancy Christie and Mark Gavreau, building on the work of earlier scholars like Ramsay Cook, argued that Canada had taken a unique path to secularization, through the Social Gospel movement, of which Canadian statesmen Tommy Douglas, JS Woodsworth and William Lyon Mackenzie King had been prominent members.

Christie and Gavreau argued that Canada did not so much secularize as preside over a massive institutional migration of Protestant clergy from churches into the caring professions in the non-profit sector and civil service, that declines in church attendance were so sharp and so closely synchronized with the rise of proto-welfare state institutions between 1900 and 1940 that the clergy simply migrated from one set of institutions to another, bringing with them a largely intact set of beliefs about the moral order of society, just with the state, rather than God, at the top.

Consequently, I would argue, Canada has been uniquely vulnerable to religious enthusiasms that grip Protestant Christian communities because Protestant theology is embedded throughout our civil society organizations, the state and all the QuaNGOs in between. It makes sense, then, that our country is uniquely vulnerable to common Christian heresies and religious revitalization movements.

This is why, when those charged with our social welfare and hygiene see prominently displayed and fetishized mastectomy scars on teenage girls, they see imitation Christi; they see an Athlete of God. When social workers and public health nurses see track marks on the arms of career heroin addict, they see the stigmata of someone in privileged contact with the divine.

Of course, troubled, self-mutilating children should be seen as special authorities on human sexuality and gender; of course, habitual drugs addicts should be the guides of Canadian drug policy. Spiritual gifts, according to Saint Paul, are not evenly distributed. We live in a time when we need only look to the most sickly and exhibitionist self-harmers to see who is most spiritually gifted. The real authority in the room is the person whose privileged knowledge is revealed by their stigmata.

Religion Without God

To understand why the grip of self-harm movements is so especially tight in English Canada, it is important to recall a salient feature of the Cathar worldview: that God was not god of the material world, that Satan was its god. Material creation was not just as mistake, as in original Gnosticism, but an evil, a wrong that merited correction.

It is only by depriving our worldview of the idea that the material order is good or divine but still using Christian cosmology and habits of thought to structure it, can we reach the conclusion that those who are most spiritually gifted are, naturally, those who are “born in the wrong body.” Of course it would be the spirits most at odds with their material being that would be greatest spirits in the world, to whom we should defer, morally and politically.

Those seeking escape from the material world through drugs, those seeking escape through surgery, those seeking escape by fusing with the machines through which they communicate are the most spiritually gifted. One can see this by the stigmata tattooed on their bodies in the form of scars, amputations and prostheses. The more at odds a body is with physical creation, the more that body commands authority in the bizarre religious revitalization movement that has seized control of my country.

Wokeness Is An American Space Religion

Today’s Athletes of God have not come out of nowhere. The incomplete and superficial secularization of Canada only explains our unique vulnerability to this sinister neo-Cathar movement. A series of religious movements have been refining the key ideas we see gripping progressive society today, a group of organizations and belief systems existing at the periphery of Christianity.

Mormonism, as propounded by Joseph Smith from 1830-44, first put forward the idea of a universe in which God was not the creator but simply an intelligent being who learned the rules of a godless pre-existing universe, enabling him to create planets and people them with ensouled beings. Smith gave us the idea that before our conception or birth, we were pre-existent immaterial spirit beings who possessed an inalterable gender before they attached to a body. The idea of us as spirit beings, imprisoned in an inferior reality, on a prison planet was then developed in Elijah Mohammed’s Nation of Islam and elaborated in L Ron Hubbard’s scientology.

These beliefs have been powerfully synthesized into a religious revitalization movement of fanatics and enthusiasts whose subconscious motivation is to undo the flawed creation that is Lucifer’s material world.

Canadian Politics Politics of Identity Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

The Omnicide and the Level Boss: Thoughts On A Weekend With Deep Green Resistance

On the last weekend of August, I gathered with a group of two dozen extraordinary people. All of us are members of Deep Green Resistance. Like pretty much every group I join, I like DGR’s analysis a lot but am not sold on their eschaton, kind of like my relationship to Marxism and Christianity. I don’t think we actually have the capacity to make any plans about really big, complicated things, like, for instance the end of the world.

One of the things I like most about DGR is that Derrick Jensen is the Saint Jerome of environmental thought; they have turned a maelstrom of factional arguments and a disorganized, variegated body of writing into a coherent synthesis. Back in the 80s and 90s, during the first generation of Green politics, there were four (as opposed to zero, in the present) intellectual movements that vied to become the dominant Green philosophy: Bioregionalism, Ecofeminism, Deep Ecology and Social Ecology. Or rather, Bioregionalists were happy to work with any of the other folks and everyone else was having a fight.

Those were heady intellectual times, times that I, in my youthful exuberance, helped to shut down. Perhaps, had those philosophical debates continued into the present, there might have been some intellectual guardrails, some moral scaffolding to prevent the BC and German Green Parties from running brute squads for and handing sacks of cash to the fossil fuel industry. Oh well…

Like Saint Jerome and his associates, DGR has recognized where these philosophies actually reinforce each other and agree, where the power of their analysis has revealed some more predictive and relevant than others. And, instead of engaging in the massive cut-and-paste operation Jerome did, Jensen and his collaborators’ books synthesize these ideas into a single authorial voice as well. There is Dave Foreman’s biocentrism from Deep Ecology, the close connections between male domination of women and societies’ treatment of the land from Ecofeminism, and the belief in valley-scale society from Bioregionalism. And, fortunately, no sign of Social Ecology (our Gospel of Thomas, I guess).

DGR also has the distinction of being the first left organization to be canceled due to Genderwang, way back in 2012, and rendering their campaigns subject to sabotage by genderist-captured environmental groups, who would rather side with the corporations than tolerate non-Woke environmentalists succeeding at saving endangered ecosystems. Seeing the danger these folks pose, Jensen’s co-leader and author, Lierre Keith, spun off the Women’s Liberation Front, now at the forefront of fighting for the rights of incarcerated women.

Anyway, I encountered some amazing people doing amazing work. But, because of the authoritarian turn we are experiencing, many are secret members who, if exposed as DGR members, would lose their jobs, friends and connections to the mainstream of the movement, not because DGR advocates the total destruction of industrial civilization but because they do not believe women have penises.

Those who had come out not as members but merely as associates of members told stories of losing 60-80% of their organization’s volunteers, their funding and almost all of their mainstream media access. And that is not to mention the personal toll. Activists from around the Global North recounted the social carnage that surrounded them, most of their long-term relationships, friends, coworkers, romantic partners: gone.

It was there that I realized two very important things: (1) no one, no matter how brilliant, no matter how organized, has figured out how to either withdraw from or to confront rising authoritarianism that stops the authoritarians continuing to harass and sabotage them (after all, Keith was punched in the face on live video by ANTIFA last fall and not a single word of condemnation was uttered by anyone on the mainstream left) and (2) the first priority of any rational socialist or environmentalist should be to fight genderwang, not, because of facilitating prison rape, mass-sterilizing autistics, practicing FGM, cheering for conversion rape, beating women in the street and the host of other associated atrocities it entails, but because it is the means by which authoritarianism is being enabled. The point is that until you defeat the authoritarians, the only politics that exists is defeating the authoritarians.

Getting politics back is the prize we will win only if we defeat them.

To believe that politics can be carried out when people’s speech, association and assembly rights are being annihilated is simply naïve. Recall that in the early 1990s we were all surprised to learn what the actual political views were of people like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn actually were. That is because as long as the USSR existed, as long as any authoritarian regime runs, there was only one political identity an opposition politician could have: dissident.

The authoritarians that ran the USSR and its client states conflated all opposition to party orthodoxy as capitalist stoogery, and contrary to what you hear these days, identities really are social constructions but actual social constructions, not personal fantasies, i.e. you are who society decides you are. You can’t identify out of the social construction in which you are placed.

In Wokeistans like Canada, Scotland, New Zealand and Australia, it does not actually matter what you think your political identity is. Everyone at the event who was an “out” DGR member was, like me, understood by the hegemonic ideology to be a member of the “far right,” along with Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Jimmy Dore, Russell Brand and Noam Chomsky.

Until this state of affairs changes, our first priority must be to dismantle the power of the authoritarians who have captured our political parties, news media, law enforcement and educational institutions, so as to make politics possible again. Until that time, society will remain in a post-political state and all projects that assemble broad coalitions that challenge the establishment will be impossible to form. Our only hope of that being possible is to form a coalition whose sole basis of unity is anti-authoritarianism.

In other words, we have to punch our way out of this corner.

This bums me out, obviously because I think there are some rather urgent matters that I have to place on the back burner to deal with this atrocious state of affairs. It is not like any part of our stressed global ecosystems has the luxury of time. This is, after all, The Omnicide. And that is not to say I will not keep doing environmental activism; I just have to recognize that society has placed stringent limits on those activities that I cannot just break out of by an act of will.

I have come to think of this political moment in videogame terms: you want to get up to Level Six where you get back to battling Royal Dutch Shell and its many minions but unfortunately, this is Level Five, the Woke level, where you have to defeat the Woke level boss so you can get back to the fight you came here to have. Of course, you should pick off any oil industry enemies you can on this level but recognize that most are going to be out of range until you defeat the exploding milk demon.

Canadian Politics Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

Canada Is And Must Be More Than Its Past

I am a Canadian; I have been a Christian; I am a Marxist; I have been a Green. These forms of identity have something in common: they are concurrently descriptive and aspirational. In other words, they are descriptive of communities in multiple contradictory ways.

Each of these groups refers to a community that exists in the present day that has a variegated and complex historical track record. Canadians, as a people, have done some crappy things. We disenfranchised and forcibly re-educated indigenous people. We fought against liberalism and democracy in the American Revolution and War of 1812. We interned Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. We hanged Louis Riel and stamped out his movement. We turned away Jewish refugees trying to escape the Third Reich.

Even if one dodges some responsibility by taking refuge in the fact that the USSR, Warsaw Pact and Communist China can be described as “state capitalist” regimes or “dictatorships of the commissar class,” the fact is that, globally, Marxists have historically cheered for authoritarian regimes and looked the other way when Mao, Stalin, Deng, etc. committed unspeakable atrocities in the name of Marxism.

Christians, the oldest community I have been associated with have committed plenty of atrocities too, from the murderous ruthlessness of the Albigensian Crusade to Charlemagne’s massacres in the name of Christianizing Saxony to the conquest of the New World by the sword and the sanctification of African slavery based on the Church’s theory of “just war.” And then of course, there are the multi-generational pedophile grooming rings that have been given cover by a number of Christian denominations.

Even in their short history, the Green Party has, globally, done a number of shameful things from leading the charge to bomb Serbia with depleted uranium in the 1990s, to voting through massive fracking and fossil fuel increases during their three years in government here in BC, to the German Greens current support for the mass eviction of Bavarian villagers so that their villages can be turned into open pit coal mines right now.

But that is not the only way to define these communities.

Many people identify with these communities because they agree with the precepts laid down in their canonical texts. The New Testament, the Communist Manifesto, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Small is Beautiful: these are all great texts that describe a way of ordering society and solving moral questions that are compelling. Also, there are many great tributes to and interpretations of these texts, like the City of God and Imperialism is the Highest Stage of Capitalism, etc. Furthermore, there are great orators who have made compelling, inspiring speeches based on these communities’ principles; and then there are the communities themselves. There are lots of superb groups of people who congregate, meet and organize around these ideas even though their execution beyond the scale of a small group either never happens or goes terribly wrong.

But the most important way people identify as part of communities is based on what that community could be. “Make America great again,” the slogan of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump epitomizes that ethos, that if one identifies, aspirationally with a community, it is not merely a way of experiencing loyalty, hope and solidarity. It is also a way of criticizing the errors your community is making in the present by describing a future that does not contain them. And this kind of loyalty as criticism appeals across all sorts of communities, whether it is Roman Catholic traditionalists praying for the conversion of the pope or Aaron Sorkin’s Newsroom lectureporn, “American isn’t the greatest country in the world anymore. But it could be.”

This last example, like “make American great again,” is also descriptive of another aspirational aspect of community identity, the idealization of a half-imagined past, or the presentation of a collage of past events that speak to the best angels of the community. While some of these curated pasts simply point to an ahistorical imaginary idyll, a self-congratulatory fiction under which a community chooses to bury the errors and atrocities of the past, not all such aspirational nostalgia is necessarily dishonest. Sometimes a community simply chooses to shine a spotlight on the moments in its history when it rose to the occasion over those that it failed to; as long as those moments of failure are not denied or blotted out. A community should focus on the moments when it overcame prejudice over those when it failed to; a community should focus on the moments when it made a shared sacrifice to achieve an important collective goal over the times it failed in those efforts.

A final aspect of aspirational identity that merits discussion is what I have termed “incarnational.” Based on the work of Mormon theologian and philosopher James Faucloner, I am using an idea I have previously used to argue against denunciations of “strategic voting.” It is an idea that resonates with my own experience of Pearsonian nationalism growing up as a CBC listener in the 1980s. Back then, I asserted that Canada only existed four hours a day, the four hours of every weekday you could hear Peter Gzowski hosing Morningside on CBC Radio, that Canada only seemed real, only truly existed while Gzowski was describing it; without his voice announcing it into being, it was little more than a legal fiction.

When it comes to any successful big, shared idea of community, one way of understanding being a Canadian, a Marxist, a Christian is that these communities do not exist at all points in space-time or even most; they only exist when they are being ritually celebrated, that one is only Canadian when one is singing O Canada, or celebrating Canada Day, cheering on some CFL team in the Grey Cup, that there is no global Marxist community except on May Day or at a communist meeting or on a pilgrimage to Havana, that Christ’s self-sacrifice, as Faulconer’s argument originally went, is real, not in the historical sense but instead, wherever in space-time the Eucharist is enacted.

It is my view that, of the five different ways we can be part of and assert the existence of big communities with broad membership, communities that have made and will continue to make lots of mistakes, by virtue of their breadth and complexity, the incarnational is most underrated in importance. In other words, much of the work and experience of a nationalism, a world religion a political movement of millions, are the moments of celebration and mutual recognition that occur within it. And the main way to judge whether these movements are pro-social is not to examine their grandiose plans for the future or the trail of mistakes stretching behind them into the past but instead to just how they are shaping the relationships of those participating in them in the present.

It is very clear that the nationalism of Justin Trudeau and the White Consciousness Movement, at this moment, in this country is making all of us into worse people, more isolated, more suspicious, more divided, more alienated, more disconnected, angrier and more confused. We need to fashion a way of being Canadians that functions as a countervailing force, that is collaborative, genuinely welcoming and inclusive, less hierarchical, more participatory.

I was inspired to put off my article about the Waffle movement and publish this because of an experience I had this weekend, attending the convention of the BC Conservative Party. Although I came away from the experience convinced that I am not a conservative and that, while I have many allies and friends among conservatives, they are not my tribe. Nevertheless, the weekend began with a simple yet profound experience: they began the convention not with a land acknowledgement but with the singing of O Canada.

First of all, the irony was not lost on me of a group of mostly rural Anglo Canadian social conservatives in the West belting out an anthem their movement had opposed replacing God Save the Queen, as atheistic, anti-monarchy social engineering by the liberals of the Laurentian elite half a century ago.

But more importantly, it felt so different than a land acknowledgement, which is an inherently hierarchical act of intermediation. A single individual stands at the centre of the room acting as an intermediating officiant in the relationship between an indigenous nation and a group of meeting attendees. Like a Roman Catholic priest administering the Eucharist, the land acknowledger has a hierarchical relationship to the crowd and an immaterial relationship to the nation (not just the nation in the present but concurrently through all of space-time). And its job is to emphasize the distance the acknowledger is covering and the incommensurability of the realities and communities on either side.

The Tory meeting opener, on the hand, was also easily comparable to a religious ritual, in this case more like a Quaker meeting or a small Pentecostal congregation breaking into an acapella hymn, everyone belting out the words slightly off-key from everyone else, slightly out-of-sync but all making a big, joyful noise together. That ritual was about building connection, sharing experience, dismantling hierarchy, reminding people they were starting with common ground, common knowledge.

The ephemeral effect of this was very important, as the room was full of long-simmering resentments and novel suspicions as new people came into the organization, occupying and contesting space, creating new upsets and confusion. But it really did appear that the anthem helped, as individuals being pushed out of leadership positions or forced to share them with new recruits took time present these occurrences as things they had long desired and the fulfilment of their past work and dedication.

And I cannot help but contrast this to how a meeting or a training session goes after a land acknowledgement, how co-workers behave after being forced to do a “privilege walk” to show how socially distant they supposedly are from one another.

It is my view that this imagined community we call Canada and the people with whom we share it will treat us better if we go back to celebrating it and them, if we return to symbols and celebrations that are as broadly shared and universally recognized as possible. Doing that will not change who Canadians have been; it will not make our national project seem any clearer or less absurd; it will not heal all wounds or solve all problems. But I do believe that the Canada we ritually enact, the Canada in which we live in the present and the future Canada we aspire to be will get better.

I am not simply saying that Canada is more than its past; in my view, it must be.

Canadian Politics Politics of Identity Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

Honey Boo Boo and the Fourth Punic War: How Gender and Climate Politics Are Linked

The Fall and Rise of Honey Boo Boo

Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, a deeply disturbing “reality” show took to the airwaves in 2012. It depicted the life of a child beauty queen, groomed by her mother to put on sexualized performances for audiences of grown men in her pre-pubescent body. The show’s launch was really the culmination of a set of bizarre pedophilic fads that had ripped through the heartland of American conservatism post-911. Shocking numbers of pre-pubescent girls got to experience a novel variant on Munchausen-by-proxy as abusive parents found a new way to seek attention by publicly hurting their children.

Closely coupled with this phenomenon were the father-daughter dates and dances, culminating in formal dress “prom” dates, in which men displayed their adolescent daughters as surrogate wives, again to receptive audiences that applauded these displays of Platonic incest.

But by the third season, however, ratings were falling as was the popular cultural practice the show represented. Father-daughter proms also went on the wane at around the same time.

Ironically it seemed as though, during the rise of Donald Trump, himself, an obvious abuser of his own daughter, that his base was quietly abandoning the very kind of exhibitionistic abuse in which he himself was engaging.

Today, it is the creature shambling around in the flayed skin of the Left that we most associate with pedophilic exhibitionism. We have trans child beauty queens and trans child reality shows. Dylan Mulvaney has moved on from making videos about his ability to show off his erection in a leather mini-skirt and holding summits with the leader of the free world to making videos of himself as six-year-old girl inviting you into her bed. And, of course, there is Drag Queen Story Hour, where progressive parents bring their children to watch transsexual strip club routines and slip $1 bills into the exotic dancers’ g-strings, when not being read stories from the Ally Baby series, which explains to pre-pubescent children that they can and should consent to sex acts.

I want to suggest that there is a logic to this bizarre dance with child safeguarding practices in which Anglo America has been engaged.

And, each year that goes by, less of this dereliction of child safeguarding duties is even being laundered through the discourse of the Gender Industrial Complex. School sex education curricula are teaching kids that the term “pedophile” is a stigmatizing pejorative and that the term “minor attracted person” should be used in its place. Progressive opinion leaders like University of Victoria professor Hope Cleves propound the doctrine that adults raping children is not, in fact, abuse but a mutually beneficial interaction she euphemistically calls “intergenerational sex.”

It’s the climate.

From 1996-2015, conservative Americans’ leadership acknowledged that the Greenhouse Effect was real, consequential, harmful and also not something they were going to do anything about. In other words, conservative Americans found themselves subscribing to a set of beliefs that forced them to conclude that failing to protect one’s children from a genuine threat that could ruin or impoverish their lives was okay. In fact, it was good.

“Children are resilient,” “children are hard to hurt,” “children can consent,” “children can make adult choices,” “it’s okay to hurt kids if you get something out of it materially,” “children are really just small, dimwitted adults,”—these thoughts became normalized. Publicly staging derelictions of parental duty, of the collective duty of adults to protect kids became something a huge swath of the population needed to applaud.

But by 2015, the mainstream view of the Republican Party’s leadership and of evangelical religious leaders was that the destabilization of our climate was a “Chinese hoax.” In fact, the person who most vigorously propounded the idea that there was no climate crisis was the person chosen not just as conservative America’s president but as its Caliph, a man who could also pronounce on matters of evangelical religion from his seat in the White House.

While the effects of the mainstreaming of climate denial have been devastating in many ways, they did, ironically, I believe, spare a lot of kids in places like Oklahoma from being turned into sexualized display objects by their parents.

Meanwhile, the statistics do not lie. As I explained in my previous post, governments that talk tough on climate and whose leaders march with Greta Thunberg actually build more pipelines and sink more new wells than those run by climate denialists. And, as much as progressives try to hide those ugly facts from themselves, the reality is that they cannot.

Everybody knows the German Green and Social Democratic parties are destroying people’s homes and fields, annihilating their property rights and civil liberties, assaulting and incarcerating villagers whose homes are getting in the way of the new coal mines they want to dig. They know that it was Justin Trudeau, not Stephen Harper who poured billions of dollars and hundreds of RCMP officers into forcing the Trans Mountain Pipeline through Western Canada, that oil exploration in the US is experiencing a renaissance under Joe Biden’s presidency.

In other words, progressives now hold the same position regarding climate that conservatives held 1996-2015. And so they are compelled to engage in practices of exhibitionistic, perverted child hatred to normalize their total dereliction of duty to their children, something that has only intensified since Biden returned to a level of nuclear sabre-rattling not seen since Ronald Reagan’s first term. If nuking Eastern Europe is okay; if the carbon-forced omnicide is okay; why not FGM and pedophilia?

That is why there is almost no overlap between people who believe the Greenhouse Effect is real and that it is wrong to perform hysterectomies on healthy teenage girls. Because I am such a person, engaging with this civilization is very challenging for me.

The Fourth Punic War and the Future of the West

While I vehemently disagree with Matt Walsh on gay rights and a host of other issues, I think there is one thing he and only he is saying right now that cuts right to the heart of the matter: the current progressive child endangerment movement is at war with Western Civilization itself.

While many trace the start of Western Civilization to the Iliad and the Odyssey and the civilizational competition between Greek and Phoenician city states in the Mediterranean that began in the seventh century BC, I argue that it begins a little later.

The Greek and Phoenician colonies that dotted the coasts of the Mediterranean and Black Seas, from present-day Gibraltar to Crimea were vibrant multilingual, multicultural societies that traded luxury goods and slaves. But there was a fundamental difference between the two kinds of city states. While both types of colony lived and died by the commerce that was transacted in the agora, the marketplace, the core of civic life was not there.

In Greek city states, the centre of civic life was the bouleuterion, where political decisions were made by a group of citizens through a process of deliberation and voting. While some Greek colonies has small bouleuteria that only included members of the wealthiest and most powerful families, others, like Athens, accommodated as much as 15% of their resident in enormous amphitheatre-style meeting spaces.

But in the Phoenician city states, the centre of civic life was the altar to the god Baal, where the priests sacrificed infants by heating the idol’s bronze hands so that they would literally fry the bodies of babies placed in their embrace. While the Greeks found this disgusting and condemned it, that disgust is as far as it went, and, as I have said elsewhere, it is not like the Greeks were the best advocates for child safeguarding, given their embrace of pedophilia as a natural and laudable part of their formal education systems.

It is my argument that Western Civilization truly began during the Punic Wars, between the Rome and Carthage, an empire composed of Phoenician city-states in North Africa, Sicily and the Iberian Peninsula. While these wars were largely motivated by the conflicting commercial interests of the two maritime powers vying for control of the Western Mediterranean, as the wars grew more costly, they also became more ideological. Increasingly compelling narratives had to be presented by Rome’s senate and consuls to mobilize the volunteer citizen-soldiers on which the Roman Republic relied to fill the ranks of its armies.

And the most successful and compelling narrative, the one that caused thousands of Roman soldiers to cross the sea and fight and die in North Africa was this: the Carthaginians are sacrificing their own children to their god, Baal and that Romans had a duty to protect the children of strangers.

Irrespective of the motive for doing so, it is this moment that I choose to see as the birth of Western Civilization, the radical act of imaginative empathy that makes you want to protect the children of monstrous people and exact revenge upon them for their crimes against humanity. No doubt this belief has led to much cultural intolerance, conversion at swordpoint and unnecessary bloodshed. But it has also produced a compassionate, empathetic universalism that we also associate with the West.

That is what is on the line as we stare down the climate crisis and the psychiatric comorbidities it is generating in the human brain. And there is only one way out of this: we have to build a movement that will actually confront the omnicide, not just one like, the world’s Green Parties that pay lip service to doing so, while flooring the gas over the cliff, or one that will not just throw cans of soup at it. That isn’t climate politics; it’s post-political climate nihilism. Because, like it or not, the battle against the Greenhouse Effect is also the Fourth Punic War.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence Religion and Eschatology in Politics US Politics | fusangite |

“Can You Secede from Reality?”: The Oil Industry’s Fake Autonomist Idyll

The 1920s were a watershed decade in so many ways. They remain, in many ways, the tragedy to the farce of the 2020s, according to Karl Marx’s “first as tragedy, then as farce” aphorism. Among other things, it was the first decade in which we can truly say that the oil industry began functioning more as a horizontally integrated cartel, in contradistinction to its previous sixty years as part of vertically integrated industrial production systems, its interests largely subordinate the manufacturing sector it served.

It is as a horizontally integrated cartel and not as a set subordinate extractive corporations dominated by the manufacturing sector that it made its alliance with the auto industry and began its long-term project of shaping and controlling public opinion in North America. Ideas and practices that would culminate in the “car culture” of the 1950s began being shaped in the 1920s.

Given that the Greenhouse Effect been discovered by Svante Arrhenius in the 1890s and passed peer review for the first time in 1896 and Standard Oil and its Rockefeller owners were among the most hated entities of the American corporate world by the 1920s. Even a century ago, America’s oil men already felt a strong impetus to build new tools to control public opinion. And so they did.

One initiative of America’s oil men was a monthly journal, mailed free to every Evangelical, Pentecostal and non-denominational church in America, covering a wide variety of issues, designed to provide independent clergy with little education or denominational support, a Christian analysis of the issues of the day, to assist them in their preaching. The journal was called The Fundamentals and it is this journal’s impact that introduced the term “Christian fundamentalist” to our lexicon.

In 1925, against the backdrop of the Scopes Monkey Trial, the Fundamentals broke with the mainstream Christian belief that read the six days of creation described in Genesis metaphorically as referring to periods of millions or billions of years of slow geological change, often inclusive of evolution, as long as evolution did not pertain to or explain human beings. Instead of backing this reading, as propounded by Scopes prosecutor, three-time Democratic presidential candidate and Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, the editors of The Fundamentals took a more audacious position.

Back in 1844, one of the most popular religious movements in America was the Millerites. Pastor William Miller, their founder, believed he had calculated the precise date of Christ’s return. On that date in 1844, thousands of Millerites donned white robes and stood on their roofs waiting for Jesus to descend from heaven on a big disc. A day came and went and the bewildered Millerites tried to make sense of their lives. Ever since, October 22nd, 1844 has been known as “the Great Disappointment.”

As with most movements caused by social contagions that experience a concurrent crisis of popularity, visibility, humiliation and failure, most former Millerites came down off their roofs, folded up their robes and went back to their former lives and mainline churches. But a handful devolved into tiny warring factions that sought to explain the failure and come up with a new date for Christ’s return. Two survived into the twentieth century (and, for that matter, up to the present day), the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Seventh Day Adventists.

Unlike the Witnesses, the Adventists have developed a whole pseudoscience to underpin their worldview including something we today call “Young Earth Creationism,” invented by George McCready-Price, an Adventist minister in rural New Brunswick. It is McReady-Price from whom we get the idea that creation was precisely one hundred forty-four hours long and that dinosaurs cohabited with humans but were not loaded aboard the Ark (no doubt due to space constraints).

From an obscure denomination numbering only a few thousand adherents, at the very margins of Christianity, the oil men cherry-picked this doctrine, which they saw as the beachhead for inculcating anti-science belief favourable to the fossil fuel industry. As Young Earth Creationists believed (and still do) that fossils can be formed in a decade or two, the geological science underpinning the creation of oil and coal could be occluded from the worldview of the devout.

Another aspect of oil industry propaganda that formed part of a larger whole was the repackaging of petroleum dependence as rugged individualism, independence and autonomy. In the 1920s, when Anglo America had a comprehensive and effective rail grid that provided frequent passenger train service both within and between communities, most of our forbears did not need automobiles to meet their transportation needs.

Furthermore, it would be another three decades before the Eisenhower Administration created the Interstate highway system, meaning that the network of properly paved and maintained roads was smaller than the area covered by the continent’s rail grid, much of which had been financed through government subsidies. The oil industry’s response to these three entwined challenges, a) a comprehensive passenger rail system, b) a road system substantially inferior to rail and c) ongoing government subsidies to repair and expand the rail grid, was ingenious.

They marketed the car as a nostalgic return to the age of the horse, the autonomy, the freedom, the ruggedness, etc. The marketing campaign that introduced sport utility vehicles at the end of the Cold War was just a pale retread of the original automobile marketing strategy. Magazine and movie palace ads in the 1920s depicted first-generation rubber-tired automobiles parked in improbable locations, overlooking stunning vistas of natural and pastoral beauty.

In other words, from the beginning, the auto industry was pivotal, instrumental and first-on-the-ground in re-narrating the era of the Anglo American frontier from being an embarrassing, poverty-stricken, hardscrabble life from which people had escaped into an imagined idyll of valour, beauty and, most importantly, independence—autonomy.

America is full of idylls, of imagined pasts, of utopias unrealized. But such utopias often wither with time. The idyll of Joe Rockefeller and the oil men who gave us fundamentalist Christianity persists, sometimes existing in our collective cultural unconscious and sometimes bursting to the surface, as it is today with Western Canada’s autonomist movement.

“Autonomism” entered the Canadian political lexicon in the early 2000s, following the defeat of Québec’s second independence referendum in 1995 and the proclamation of the Clarity Act by the Jean Chretien government in 2000. Action Démocratique du Québec, the province’s third party, staked out this position, which its successor party, Coalition Avenir Québec, inherited and rode to victory at the polls in 2018. This was hardly the first time in Québec history that a party had won an election on a platform of increasing the province’s power and independence. Indeed, this was the rule in twentieth-century Québec politics, rather than the exception, since the 1930s, from the premierships of Maurice Duplessis to Lucien Bouchard.

This desire for greater independence within the Canadian federation has not been confined to Québec. Voters in Alberta and, to a lesser extent, British Columbia and Saskatchewan have long mirrored the Québecois desire for greater autonomy. However, these movements have proven less politically successful for a variety of reasons, chief among them, their populist stoking of anti-Québecois bigotry to win seats in the rural West. Alliances between Western and Québec movements for greater independence have been as short-lived as they have been numerous, generally ending in betrayal, fragmentation and resentment, such as the Anglo-Québecois split in the federal Social Credit Party in 1963, to the collapse of the Gang of Eight in 1982.

Today, however, we see a different situation. Danielle Smith, the autonomist premier of Alberta and Scott Moe, the autonomist premier of Saskatchewan are conducting themselves differently than the Western decentralists of the past.

First, rather than seeking to form a common front with a large coalition of provincial and federal politicians inclusive of leaders outside the West, Moe and Smith show little interest in reaching outwards beyond their region or upwards into parliament. A key reason for such coalitions in the past has been a tendency on the part of mainstream Western decentralists to use methods recognized by the Canadian Constitution to increase their powers, i.e. a coalition of at least seven premiers to amend the Constitution or a majority of parliamentarians to cede a federal power to a province.

Second, even though the primary site of conflict with the federal government, for Alberta, Saskatchewan and Québec is energy policy and Québec’s government holds polar opposite views to those of Saskatchewan and Alberta, an apparent shared social conservatism among the three governments appears to have restrained autonomists from bashing the people and governments of other provinces.

Third, and most importantly, unlike Québec, which uses legal, constitutional tools like international law concerning partition referenda and the Notwithstanding Clause to advance separatist and autonomist agendas, Alberta and Saskatchewan have passed clearly unconstitutional laws through their legislatures that are best described as “nullifier” bills, the kind of legislation Anglo America has not seen since South Carolina’s efforts to unilaterally nullify the federal government’s jurisdiction over tariffs and trade two hundred years ago.

I believe that this fantasist nullifier approach to law-making is part of a larger epistemological problem. Although I am currently making major revisions to it, my 2011-12 writing on the epistemology of “authenticity” bears repeating here. While it is not the newest, most popular or most pernicious deviation from Enlightenment rationalism anymore, “authentic” epistemology dominates the United Conservative and Saskatchewan parties from which Smith and Moe hail.

In addition to being closely aligned, financially, with the fossil fuel sector, the prevalence of authentic epistemology means that Western autonomists tend to believe that any abstract claim made by untrustworthy people must, axiomatically, be false. If untrusted, corrupt and/or industry-captured public health officials say Covid-19 is a danger, it must, axiomatically, be relatively harmless; if these officials state that vaccines mRNA vaccines are effective in reducing mortality, they must be either useless or dangerous. Similarly, if Justin Trudeau, Greta Thunberg and Klaus Schwab state that anthropogenic climate change is a genuine and immediate threat to life on the planet, it must, axiomatically, be true that climate change is not happening, if it is, it must not be human caused and, if it is human caused it must be necessary and good that we change the climate’s planet as fast as we can.

It is in this environment of woolly thinking and dysfunctional epistemology that modern Western autonomism has emerged. Central to this thinking and helping to culturally and economically bind it together is its adherents’ nigh-mystical conflation of fossil fuel use with freedom and independence, in other words, autonomy not only at the level of the state but of the individual and society.

Amplifying tropes of autonomy, individualism and self-assertion that have suffused a century of oil and auto industry propaganda, the movement reasons about personal prosperity and freedom and the horizon of possibility for an autonomous Western Canada in a way more akin to sympathetic magic than any recognizable theory of causation.

The autonomous region of Alberta-Saskatchewan, whether inside or outside the Canadian federation, believes that it can make the price of oil rise by flooding the global market with more of the gnarliest, shittiest, greasiest, hardest-to-mine oil on earth, the cost of extraction often becoming prohibitive when oil prices fall, as they do when production levels go too high.

Subscribing to the broadly-shared fallacy that the laws of supply and demand apply to everything except whatever Canadians are most upset about that day, be it oil or housing, these folks seem to think that a bunch of wells that are not currently profitable at today’s oil price will somehow become so if only they increase the supply of oil, despite the fact that—as any freshman economics student will tell you—doing so has a 100% chance of doing the opposite.

Perhaps, one might think, that this oil could be made marketable and its by-products (i.e. plastics) manufactured into industrial goods with an aggressive campaign of state-financed import substitution industrialization. One would think the autonomists would be proposing government loans and grants to build oil refineries, plastics plants, etc. and begin working towards true autonomy and independence. Such a plan might even be financed some sort of tariff on industrial goods from the hated Greater Toronto Area, which seems to have been passed the baton of hate by Québec in the minds of discontented Westerners.

But no. These governments are interested in just two forms of industrial investment: carbon capture boondoggles and more oil pipelines for unrefined bitumen and fracked natural gas. In other words, the only things for which autonomists support industrial investment are things that forestall the emergence of a local industry by subsidizing the extraction of raw fossil fuels. And, to further inhibit the growth of an industrial sector, they favour lower tariffs on foreign manufactured goods. In other words, the whole thrust of the industrial strategy is to make the region less economically independent, less autonomous.

Another thing high on the wish list of autonomists is paring back not just the size of the region’s protected areas but the list of prohibited activities therein. Already, UNESCO has warned Canada we are already in imminent danger of Wood Buffalo National Park losing its World Heritage Site designation due to pollution of the park from fossil fuel extraction upstream. This downstream damage is happening all over Alberta, with local oil wells and fracked gas wells befouling farms and ranches and trapping local farmers and ranchers in a vicious cycle of permitting a new wells on their land to replace the lost revenues from declining yields.

In other words, not only do autonomists favour less industrial independence; this desire to become nothing more than a single-industry state extends to all areas of economic activity. And so, autonomists plan to intensify and accelerate policies that are already hammering other industries. You see: the tourism, hunting, ranching and farming sectors are just places where people work, not places where people interact with the material manifestation of freedom itself.

And it should surprise no one that these almost petrosexual beliefs about oil are concentrated in the regions where Young Earth Creationism and other venerable pseudosciences are most popular.

In other words, total abject dependence on and control by one industry is the so-called “autonomy” Alberta and Saskatchewan want, absolute thrall to a hated and unstable industrial complex, prone to boom-bust cycles and more strongly implicated than any other sector in the extinction event we are causing. As George Orwell wrote in 1984, “freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength.”

Or so it would seem. It turns out, from talking with many autonomists, that my representation of these ideas mistakes fanciful thinking for hypocrisy. As first observed in 2009 by a political analyst whose name escapes me, the Tea Party movement and its relatives, the Trump movement and today’s Prairie Autonomists are the first social movements since the death of Mao Zedong to believe that backyard steel mills were both desirable and possible. Several folks with whom I have spoken appear to imagine that oil wells will be like drinking water wells, effacing questions of scale or refining. They imagine, because they are imagining their aspirations for freedom, that petroleum, because it is freedom, will be abundant and available for use by regular folks.

In other words, autonomists are not really imagining a real place. Because I believe that, lurking within the movement is a deep reservoir of post-political despair. Like so many other political movements, autonomist policies are synodal, in character; they seek to describe the order of heaven, not to change the order on earth. And that is why, unlike the government of Québec, their self-emancipatory laws are not really about emancipation from Canada but from reality.

Canadian Politics Politics of Epistemology Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

Reaction Formation and Climate Denial: Why Wildfire Season Will Produce More Denialists If We Don’t Change Course

Ever since climate activists adopted the “no debate” policy with respect to climate denialists, and since the rise of the modern far-right, we have seen an ongoing decline in Canadians’ belief that anthropogenic climate change is real. Since around 2010, the number of Canadians who actively disbelieve that our climate is changing due to human activity has climbed to between 25% and 30% of Canadians today, trending upwards with other, adjacent beliefs, like Young Earth creationism.

But these increases have not been even or steady. The biggest jumps have been associated with developments like the “heat dome” that killed hundreds of British Columbians with extreme heat last year, the increasingly out-of-control wildfire seasons and, relatedly, the destruction of towns like Lytton and near-destruction of communities like Fort McMurray.

Similarly, increases in climate skepticism has not merely increased in reaction to extreme weather episodes; its increase has also been uneven geographically. Increased denialism is something we see as concentrated in the resource extraction periphery of the rural West, in a strip from Timmins to Terrace, taking in Lloydminster, Fort McMurray, Fort St. John and the other hubs of extractive activity.

Some might argue that as Canada increasingly realigns its cultural and politics to resemble that of the US, this is only to be expected as rural Westerners are swept up in the anti-intellectualism of the American Right. Others might argue that the region’s economic dependence on the fossil fuel industry for the government subsidies it can command is all that is driving this.

But I want to suggest that these things are as much effects as causes and that the primary cause is a problem far more daunting than the Americanization of Canadian culture or the continued swagger of Big Oil in America’s crankiest vassal state:

Climate denial increases when people are directly presented with evidence of the Greenhouse Effect, of the climate crisis, when it incinerates their home or that of their neighbours, when it incinerates the trees on which they were depending for work, when unexpected late and early frosts destroy the crops on which one depends. It also appears to increase when an environmental comorbidity becomes too palpable, too apparent, like the lack of mosquito bites on one’s arm or the lack of dead bugs on one’s windshield, the eerie silence of a bird-less forest. The people experiencing these things most directly are concentrated in the region where climate denial is greatest.

In cities where people spend their days in climate-controlled spaces, where the birds and insects were already mostly gone, where gardening is a bourgeois pastime that exists primarily to demonstrate control of scarce land, not provide food, where only the smoke arrives from the wildfires because the region is already so heavily defoliated, climate skepticism is actually less.

In other words, the relationship between firsthand evidence and belief is the opposite of what one would assume.

This news is especially troubling because the environmental movement has always subconsciously relied on the climate event doing most of the work of mobilizing people to stop it, the way Marxists used to assume that the ever-increasing alienation produced by capitalism would do most of the work of mobilizing revolutionaries. But contrary to David Suzuki’s predictions in 1990, the approach of the climate event is increasing disbelief.

Yet, strangely, climate activists are not merely unprepared for this reality; they are non-responsive to it. Because the movement embraced an “awareness” versus “conversion” approach to persuading the public, one so obtusely unwilling to consider how people narrate changes in their lives, it is especially unprepared and ill-suited to pivoting on this basis. But there are other reasons: most climate activists are especially likely to succumb to the psychological phenomenon we are witnessing, but in different areas of their lives, affecting different aspects of their political beliefs.

The phenomenon we are witnessing is called “reaction formation.” It is a well-documented psychological response to manage protracted feelings causing discomfort, usually in the form of fear. For instance, a fear of death may manifest as a vehement assertion of the existence and importance of an afterlife. The intensity of a person’s professed conviction is not powered by belief in that conviction but rather, by its opposite. In other words, the more a person fears death, and the closer they come to that death, the more vehemently they will propound their belief in the afterlife, because the main person they are trying to convince is themselves, as a means of controlling their feelings of fear.

Whereas fear of death has powered Christian and Muslim fundamentalism, fear of the climate crisis has powered “climate fundamentalism.”

I want to suggest that one of the reasons the adoption of the package of beliefs that are included in conservative American thought is so popular in Canada’s northwest is because evidence of climate change is more immediate and frightening. The chance that your home will be destroyed in a wildfire, the chances that your job will be destroyed by extreme weather events, the chance that you will become geographically isolated by a flash flood, the chance that your food security is on the line as frosts and hails become more frequent and unpredictable—these things engender a kind of fear nobody in Toronto or Vancouver is going to experience, because our physical safety is more mediated by capitalism and the urban built environment.

This is yet another reason that 1980s climate activist David Lewis (the firewood collector and giant, not the former NDP leader) was so far ahead of his time. He felt that the most important message the climate activist movement could deliver to people was that losses were inevitable but we would “share the losses” equitably and not leave communities behind.

But instead, we have chosen to adopt the Hillary Clinton move and decide that the people living in our rural periphery are “deplorables,” something that came into sharp relief during the trucker “freedom convoy,” in which Canadian citizens were referred to as “invaders” of their own country and smeared repeatedly based on falsehoods or massive exaggerations.

The more we let our rural brothers and sisters know that we do not see them as full citizens of their own country, the more we will intensify the reaction formation that extreme weather events are already causing and the more climate denial we will breed. This is something we cannot afford to do at this time. If our political system were not completely captured, Greens or New Democrats would be touring rural areas offering government insurance against climate events, talking not about the “transition” of rural communities but the preservation of rural life in Canada. But instead, the plan is to call frightened people cruel names and condemn them as non-citizen interlopers when they try to express their anxiety to us.

We must share the losses and we must develop a concrete plan for sharing those losses, not aspirational debt-leveraged nonsense like the LEAP Manifesto, claiming there will be no losses and everyone will get richer. The rural working class know what that’s code for: them getting screwed again. We must do this and do it soon or fear will grow in the communities that are being hardest-hit by the Greenhouse Effect and that fear will intensify climate denial.

Canadian Politics Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

What the Left Should Learn from the overturning of Roe v. Wade

It finally happened. Roe vs. Wade, one of the greatest pieces of liberal judicial activism of the twentieth century was struck down. For me, my comrades and millions of American women of childbearing age this is a tragic moment, another huge piece of the Cold War social democratic welfare state’s social contract sheared-off.

But this defeat was especially searing because, unlike P3s, a US-led global order, free trade, austerity and privatization, this was not a wind-assisted victory of an elite consensus. Because that is how people of the political left see those other losses: the establishment endorsed these things; they heavily bankrolled or Astro-turfed smaller or non-existent social movement groups to echo that consensus; they got pretty much all mainstream political parties, major corporations and the liberal media to present these things as not just beneficial but inevitable. “There is no alternative,” Margaret Thatcher said.

This win is different because the establishment was on our side and was, for the most part, against the movement that just won. While anti-abortion activists enjoy the support of some major corporations in America, they are not the majority; and while they enjoy the support of one of America’s major political parties, that support is not unanimous across jurisdictions. America’s extreme Northeast and Northwest still have pro-choice Republican parties. And it was not until the early 1990s that there was even one major mainstream anti-abortion media outfit, FoxNews. And it was not until the early 2000s that TV and movie dramas touching abortion, even on Fox, ultimately came down on the side of choice.

Finally, we must remember that, even in the religious sphere, most churches were not anti-abortion when Roe v. Wade was handed-down. The Roman Catholic Church officially and vehemently opposed abortion and so, partly to distinguish themselves from the largest single denomination (Catholics), most Protestants, including most Evangelicals used abortion as a means of distinguishing themselves from Catholics. Indeed, nothing short of a complete remaking of the American religious marketplace over the next four decades was necessary to create the near-consensus among regular churchgoers in the US that the state must regulate abortion. “Mainline” Protestant churches went from being the second-largest group of American churchgoers to a tiny portion comprising no more than a tenth; evangelicals pulled away from mainline denominations and joined with the rapidly-growing fundamentalist and Pentecostal movements; historically black churches soured on abortion; and churchgoing became a rural, rather than universal American pastime.

A grassroots movement, and one that does not enjoy the support of a majority of Americans, even today, conducted a half-century struggle and beat us.

Any person of any level of political seriousness must study this victory if they have any interest in beating the establishment at anything. Whether one agrees with the anti-abortion movement or vehemently opposes it, any person truly interested in a grassroots struggle against money and power should be studying this victory with a fine-toothed comb for years to come.

So, I thought I would offer a little bit of what I have learned, as an outsider, from my experiences of organizing with anti-abortion activists and the insights I gleaned, that other social movements would do well to follow.

In 1996, mathematician and political organizer Julian West and I decided to create a coalition of political parties and civil society organizations that would champion a provincial referendum on proportional representation. Early adopters who pulled in their organizations, and built our group, the Electoral Change Coalition (ECCO), so-named by Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation’s Troy Lanigan from the ground up. They included Troy, the BC Reform Party’s David Secord, the BC Marxist-Leninist Party’s Charles Boylan and the BC Family Coalition Party’s Kathleen Toth, among many others. As the organization evolved and took its various twists and turns, I worked with a number of anti-abortion folks on voting reform work, like Kathleen’s husband Mark, FCP candidate John O’Flynn, Christian Heritage Party leader Heather Stillwell, along with BC Reform Party pro-life insurgents Bev Welsh, backer of Wilf Hanni’s successful takeover of the party by the Christian Right, Wilf, himself and, finally, Chris Delany, the Bill Vander Zalm surrogate who merged Reform into the BC Unity Party.

In fact, my last speech as leader of the BC Green Party was as part of a panel on electoral reform the month after my defeat as party leader. It ended with a hug of appreciation for my work on the file from the Zalm himself.

ECCO’s sister, and later, successor organization was Fair Voting BC, founded by Nick Loenen, the Zalm’s seat-mate representing Richmond in the legislature 1986-91. Nick’s book on PR, the original bible of BC’s voting reform movement, A Case for Proportional Representation, was explicit in arguing that PR could be a vital tool whereby the anti-abortion advocates could wield real political power in the BC legislature and was crucial in piquing so much interest in PR on the Christian Right in the 1990s.
           

Most participants in our coalition were eager to try being in such a broad, disparate and diverse group but lacked cultural experience of this kind of work. And so it fell to those most experienced with this sort of thing to take the lead, and so our organization in many ways was imprinted with the style of coalition politics practiced by the anti-abortion movement.

Learning how to formulate complex communications, strategies and tactics with allies who disagree with most of one’s political views and find a significant portion of said views not just wrong but offensive is quite tricky. But this was a movement of Catholics who had persuaded members of evangelical churches that believed the Pope was the literal Antichrist to lock themselves to abortion clinic doors together.

A fundamental tenet of our meetings was that we needed to agree on as few things as possible; the more things we added to our list of points of agreement, the more likely the coalition was to fray, to collapse into arguments. Nearly every annual general meeting featured Canadians for Direct Democracy, a junior member of our coalition, attempting to get us to expand our mandate to include support for easier-to-use initiative legislation, binding referenda and other democratic reforms. Every time, CDD was voted down.

Because we learned from our Christian comrades that the strength of a coalition comes from its size and breadth and that every additional demand a coalition makes is one that makes is narrower, smaller and weaker, no matter how apparently small or intuitive.

We also learned how to have political conversations in which we could share stories about highly charged, highly polarizing political experiences by changing the kind of story they were. Stories of logging road and abortion clinic blockades ceased being stories about old growth forests and the human soul; they became stories about being the kind of person who does this sort of thing, the run-ins one has had with the courts and police. Kathleen and I shared stories about what it was like to be a beleaguered party leader in a small organization full of eccentrics and fanatics.

In this way, what we agreed on stayed small but what we could talk about was as much as any group of people thrown together possibly could. I especially savour the memory of one night when we went for drinks after staging our annual general meeting. Every year, we would re-elect Troy president and, as he was a member of the Taxpayer movement, we always counter-balanced this by having Charles, the Marxist-Leninist, give his nominating speech. That year we had got into quite a personal tussle with CDD, whose representatives had shouted “the president is a dictator! The president is a dictator!”

Troy was commiserating with us afterwards and said, “It’s like they think I’m some kind of Stalinist,” to which Charles replied, “I’m a big fan of yours Troy. I’ve got your back. But I consider Joseph Stalin to be just about the greatest human being who ever lived and I’ll be damned if you’re going to say another word against him.” We all laughed very hard after that, led by the CHP’s Heather Stillwell, if memory serves.

Another big thing I learned from the anti-abortion movement is that you can turn a media blackout into a kind of internal publicity and morale boost. A generation before one could share crowd photos and selfies on social media and be seen by thousands of eyes, North America’s anti-abortion movement trudged through a worse media blackout than any I have ever faced—and I sure have faced a couple.

In Canada, the mainstream media would cover nomination contests in the Liberals and Tories where anti-abortion candidates for office would fight it out at nomination meetings or, as the 90s wore on, suddenly find their nomination bids vetoed by the party leader. But this did not extend to other demonstrations of the sheer size of the mobilized anti-abortion movement. When abortion clinics were blockaded, mainstream media would assiduously ignore the confrontation, no matter the turnout, even when those blockades led to multiple arrests.

But the most extreme moment of the blackout would occur annually on “Life Chain” day in which anti-abortion protesters would link hands and form into incredible multi-block chains of as many as five thousand human beings at a single location. I even asked Kevin Evans, then-anchor of CBC British Columbia’s six o’clock news about this and he confirmed that not covering the Life Chain was a matter of shared policy among all major broadcasters.

Imagine Extinction Rebellion going years or even decades without a single word of their bridge and road blockages hitting the mainstream media!

But what I found was that the week after the Life Chain was the week anti-abortion activists were most serene. Rather than feeling cheated by the lack of coverage, there was a sense of purity, of power that came from being so intentionally and obviously ignored. The Life Chain imbued a sense of confidence, the sense that their adversaries had run out of ideas for stopping them but the chain was lengthening anyway, that the power they wielded was growing and nobody co-owned it; it was all theirs.

And the very absence of coverage, the media’s implicit denial of the movement’s momentum served as proof of the real momentum it genuinely possessed.

A third important feature that merits rehearsal is perhaps the most surprising to outsiders: standing behind female leaders and listening to women. Kathleen had risen to prominence as the last president of the Social Credit Ladies’ Auxiliary, succeeding its long-time head, Hope Wotherspoon, who had ascended to the presidency of the whole party. Social Credit was the last of BC’s political parties to hold separate (sometimes concurrent) women’s conventions. And as any man who has tried to interrupt an assertive Mormon woman knows, the best place to build strong leadership skills for women is in single-sex spaces.

Not only did the churches from which anti-abortionists hailed contain and defend single-sex spaces and single-sex leadership positions, the province’s natural governing party had refused to abandon the separate spheres model until the late 1980s. This meant that there were female leaders trained, tested and promoted in female-only spaces who could meet any room she entered authoritatively and command that space. Phyllis Schaffly was not an outlier; she was a type within the Christian Right, a woman who had learned to control a room, unmediated by male power.

Given that the first and most powerful interfaith organizations in Anglo America, all the way back to the WCTU, were female-led, there was an additional expectation that conditioned this organizing. It was expected that single-faith gatherings were clergy-led and therefore male led; but by the same token, it was expected that interfaith groups and other coalitions would be more appropriately led by women. And women seemed logically qualified because if there is one gender cliché of which progressives and conservatives equally partake it is the idea of the woman as social bridge-builder, peacemaker and fence-mender.

The last observation I will make is that anti-abortion activists shared something that used to be more universal among climate activists like me: a never-ending sense of urgency, the sense that lives were being lost, people were dying every day they did not win.

That kind of profound urgency actually keeps activists from working themselves to the point of burnout, because of the knowledge that one needs to be able to keep struggling every day, that one cannot give up until victory has been achieved.

But that sense of desperation also breeds a cold political calculation, one that is willing, on the large scale, to ride on the backs of the corrupt and godless Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, if that’s the only way to get to the Supreme Court. That desperation was enacted on the small scale every day, at the grassroots level.

Kathleen Toth and I didn’t just find a way to be joyful comrades because we were friendly people who love the other humans; we did so because we were desperate, so desperate as to not let some ethos of personal purity get in the way of making the deals we had to, to save the lives we understood ourselves to be trying to save.

If we really care about the issues that animate us, it behooves us to ask: (1) is our coalition broad enough, permissive enough? (2) can we build our power and momentum without needing others to recognize it? (3) do we have a pipeline that is producing powerful female leaders? and (4) if we are as desperate as we say, are we really doing all we can?

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The Modern Donatist Crisis: What the Fourth Century Roman Empire Can Tell Us About Today’s Left

A lot of what I write on this blog these days falls into the “comparative empire” school of writing. I make extended arguments by comparing some aspect of one or more pre-modern empires to a modern empire. I am going to do the same here but my argument is going to be less state-centred; the Roman state following the Crisis of the Third Century certainly comes into the story but it does not sit at the centre. Instead, a movement or set thereof within the empire is the centre of the comparison; and that movement is Christianity.

The Christianity that existed by the end of Constantine the Great’s imperial reign in 337 was radically different than the Christianity that existed a generation previously when Diocletian’s Great Persecution began in 302. The massive changes that produced the martial, state-sponsored heresy-policing Orthodox Catholic Church that Christianity had become by 337 were not just accepted. They were contested and vigorously resisted.

This resistance came to be known as the Donatist Controversy. And I want to argue that the heterogeneous set of social movements and ideologies known as “the Left” is very much like the similarly heterogeneous, diverse Christian movement of the late third century. And that we have been plunged, since the 1990s, into our own Donatist Controversy.

The Diversity of Christianity in the Roman World

Christianity, from its inception, was riven with factionalism, as confirmed by the earliest scriptures in the New Testament. The Pauline epistles, dated to about 51 CE, are a record of disputes within the intentional communities founded by Paul as well as a larger dispute between Paul and Peter over questions of jurisdiction, revenue and compliance with Levitical ordinances. While we can see that, by the last decades of the first century, a proto-Catholic movement seeking to unify the factions had already appeared and attempted to smooth-over differences with its publication of Luke-Acts, the movement’s existence already attested to the belief on the part of many Christians that their movement was too factionalized and divided.

While it is difficult to assess the relative sizes of the different movements within Christianity, we can see that by the third century, early church historians like Irenaeus were already making long lists of all the different sects and factions that claimed the mantle of Christianity.

At the same time, members of these disparate factions had a lot in common and necessarily cooperated to advance or defend their shared interests.

Some, more moderate Christians, were little different than other residents of the Roman Empire. They served in the military; they owned slaves; they believed in Greek theories of physics; they paid taxes; they didn’t stand out at the baths because they were uncircumcised; they awaited resurrection at some distant future date when Jesus would return and take them up into the heavens.

Other Christians avoided all military service and other government jobs; they didn’t use slave labour; they adopted obscure Judean and Samaritan theories of physics; they dodged taxes; they avoided public baths or were received with scorn there because they were circumcised; they lived in hope that, any day now, Jesus would return and upend the socioeconomic order and declare the permanent Jubilee.

And there existed a wide range of Christian movements and sects between these two poles.

For more mainstream Christians, Christianity was about staying aloof from the ritual and political life of the empire so as to better sock money away for things like their kids’ education or invest in Christian burial societies that were much like modern life insurance companies, designed to take care of funerary and burial arrangements. There was a weekly Lord’s supper and they kept a low profile around the festivities for other gods because theirs was a jealous one.

And the Roman state wasn’t so concerned about them anyway. Since the reign of Trajan, the Empire had conducted few persecutions and generally adhered to a kind of “don’t ask; don’t tell” policy that Pliny the Younger, as a regional governor, had hammered-out in his correspondence with Trajan early in the second century.

For less mainstream Christians, life was that of a drop-out, living in an intentional community composed of other radical Christians, at the margins of legality, outside of the social mainstream. Christianity was the centre of life, political, social, intellectual, etc. And the Empire was not irrelevant because it was tainted with devotion to pagan gods; it was a force for evil that Jesus would smash upon his return in glory.

When Diocletian’s great persecution began, regional governors and junior emperors were told that all Christians, even the most moderate, would be subject to state oversight and punishment. Suspected Christians were rounded-up and ordered, at sword point, to make sacrifices to Roman gods like Saturn and Jupiter.

And many, many did.

Those who did not were sometimes imprisoned, sometimes tortured and occasionally executed. The thinking is that out of approximately four million Christians, comprising 10% of the Roman population, only 0.1% were actually killed in the persecutions. But the number of Christians the persecutions touched was enormous.

Obviously, these persecutions helped to rally moderate Christians, especially those in the regular army, and Germanic barbarian Christians who populated the irregular units of foederati,  on which the Empire had come to depend, to back the heterodox Constantine, who came from a Christian family, in his bid to succeed Diocletian.

But nearly a decade elapsed between the start of the persecution and the legalization of Christianity following Constantine’s seizure of power. And during that decade not only did many ordinary Christians recant their religion and sacrifice to pagan gods, so did many of the highest-ranking ecclesiastical officials, all the way up to bishops.

The Council of Nicea, Worst Corporate Retreat Ever

Following the persecution, two closely linked processes began to unfold that would result in the radical remaking of the Christian oecumene within the Roman Empire.

First, there was the state-led process initiated by Constantine, that sought to establish a doctrinal consensus and create a single normative, universal Christianity throughout the empire. As the process dragged on, the state became increasingly involved and increasingly coercive in its efforts to create a uniform, universal Christianity that would put the disputes that divided Christians behind them.

This process ultimately culminated in the Council of Nicea in 325, arguably the worst corporate retreat of all time, in which approximately three hundred bishops met for six straight months to hammer-out a single statement that was supposed to settle the major disputes in something akin to a modern “vision statement.” The meeting was so terrible that Saint Nicholas enters the historical record here as the guy who punched Arius, the Cyrenian presbyter and leader of the Arian movement, in the face.

Constantine chaired the meeting and would vacillate among different bishops’ positions, at one point requiring bishop Athanasius to flee into hiding in the Egyptian desert to avoid an imperial order to arrest him for heresy. In this way, participants in the council were acutely aware of the violent, coercive force of the state as a factor in their decision making.

In the narrative of Orthodox and Catholic Christianity, the meeting was about resolving a dispute between the soon-to-be Orthodox faction, led by Athanasius of Alexandria and the Arian faction led by Arius of Cyrene. And the story mainstream Christians tell themselves is that it was a dispute about the relationship among, God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Was there a moment that God existed and Jesus did not? Was Jesus God or God’s son? These sorts of questions.

The Donatist Crisis

In what is often considered a parallel process rather than a closely linked one, a conflict began within Christianity that, like the debate between Athanasius and Arius, was centred on North Africa. In this case, it was between those who had held firm during the persecution and those who recanted. Were those who recanted able to administer the eucharist still? Perform baptisms? What about those who had been baptized by those who later recanted? Would those baptisms still count?

Donatus, the bishop leading those who did not break under threats or torture, argued that those who had not kept faith were not and may never have been true priests able to administer the sacraments.

We typically date the Donatist Controversy to 312-21 and Nicea to 325 but, if we stop looking at these as doctrinal disputes and see them as disputes about political power, their linkages become obvious and inextricable.

From the beginning, those who had submitted to the power of the Roman state saw the legalization and imperial patronage of Christianity as an opportunity to fuse with the state and come to co-own the very system Christianity originally opposed. But not only were they opportunistic, they resented those who had held firm to their convictions and paid a material price for doing so. While they were enthusiastic about dead martyrs and organized festivals to commemorate their sacrifice, it was easy to side with the dead because the dead cannot speak for themselves. They cannot contest the power or narrative of those commemorating them.

The living martyrs were the problem. Even those who were not Donatists were, nevertheless, an implied criticism. Their very existence, especially those bearing the marks of torture, offered a criticism of those who had apostasized, just by being alive and walking around.

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For this reason, it became increasingly important that the collaborators with aspirations to state power have their own alternative set of criteria for true faith, true Christianity. The theory they settled upon was that the power of salvation and efficacy of religious rituals did not inhere in the personal holiness of the person administering them. Rather, it inhered in the specific word sequences and formulas used in religious rituals.

The idea was that the power lived in specific sequences of words canonized as orthodox. There was already the Lord’s Prayer. But the problem was that the Lord’s Prayer made sense. It could be mistaken for non-ritual communication, as a plea for physical sustenance and forgiveness from a benevolent god.

A set of words, if it means something clear and everyone in the community generally agrees with the meaning, is a pretty lousy boundary maintenance tool or internal loyalty test. If you want to push people out who are so committed to forthrightness, directness, truth-telling that they get themselves arrested, incarcerated and tortured, because they refuse to say something false or disloyal, then you need to craft language intrinsically offensive to that sort of person.

Of course, language was not the first place the emerging alliance between the state and Christian “moderates” went. First, there was material patronage. The churches of the soon-to-be Orthodox were repaired with government money; jobs, monopolies, contracts became plentiful for these more flexible Christians. Meanwhile the Donatists continued to meet in damaged and ruined churches and struggle financially as pagans and moderate Christians formed a united from in denying Donatists financial opportunities and privileges.

But language was ultimately where it went. While the intent of past actors is never available to us and we can only guess at how much the results of the Council of Nicea were a genuine effort to build consensus with a formerly fractious social movement, only those steeped in Christian ritual and doctrine can see the Nicene Creed as anything other that word salad. By “word salad,” I mean a set of words that, on a superficial first glance, appear to mean something specific and precise but are actually nonsensical and corrosive of any adjacent meaning:

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen. We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.

“Father” and “begotten” in close proximity seem like they are part of some sort of idea about the relationship between a father and his offspring. But what happens to the meaning of “begotten” if “eternally” modifies it? There is “one god,” the father and “one lord,” Jesus Christ. But he is also “God from true God.” So, are there two gods or one? Of course, there are no real answers to these questions because, for word salad to be successful word salad, it must sound like it means something but contain not just an absence of meaning but a negative meaning, a force of intellectual disruption that beats meaning out of adjacent words.

The Nicene Creed was just the highest-profile piece of word salad that the Church, in collaboration with the state, introduced in the fourth century because these formulas were more effective, I would argue, than patronage, threats or force. After all, the Donatists had already survived those things.

Word salad, on the other hand, is a well-known tactic in domestic abuse because, unlike any other class of language, agreement with it is necessarily coerced. Because word salad does not and cannot mean anything, no person will express agreement with it of their own volition; some form of external fear, pressure or threat is what compels verbal accord with and repetition of word salad. Therefore, the repetition of, or expression of agreement with, the nonsense cannot be anything but an expression of submission. One cannot voluntarily agree with it because there is nothing to agree with.

And so, the Nicene Creed became one of a set of tools of the newly fused Orthodox Christian Church and Roman state. These tools did not just help to push Donatists but the kind of person who would become a Donatist, a person resistant to authority, a person who so abhorred dishonesty that they would pay a price to tell the truth as they saw it. Furthermore, by making the saving power of the Church inherent in nonsensical sequences of words, one could effectively select a future leadership class by drawing from those who, as abused, abuser or both, were already familiar with these thought-terminating discourses of veiled intimidation.

The Third Way as Diocletian’s Persecution

I want to suggest that, while no means identical, there are many important parallels between this period in Roman history from 302-337 and our present moment.

In the 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, every left, socialist and social democratic party enacted policies of austerity, privatization, investor rights, trade liberalization, labour mobility, etc. Having spoken to some folks who were part of these governments, there is no doubt that they truly believed that there was no alternative. And Standard and Poors and the other bond-rating agencies of the world teamed-up with the World Bank and its International Monetary Fund to punish any government that did not comply with punitive credit downgrades and coercive “structural adjustment” programs.

But there were those who could not abide these things and burned their party cards, resigned their party memberships or parliamentary seats, took to the streets with the anti-globalization movement or even took up arms against neoliberalism like the Zapatistas.

For a while it seemed that socialist, social democratic and other left parties of the world were heading for extinction. But then something strange happened. As I have written elsewhere, the Third Way movement of liberal, socialist and social democratic that incorporated free trade, contracting out, austerity, privatization, investor rights and seamless labour mobility did not die out.

The first reason for their survival was that there were some greasy, shitty jobs that parties of the right struggled to get done when opposed by mobilized citizens. Strikes, rallies, blockades and other forms of direct action could slow or demoralize a conservative government. Furthermore, elections make governments fearful of angering a majority of the population. Capital soon found that Third Way governments could grease the wheels for radical reforms governments run by their friends could not.

This was, of course, epitomized in the coalition between the NDP-Green government of John Horgan and Andrew Weaver, which was able to triple fossil fuel subsidies in just three years, something the previous right-wing governments had been unable to do in sixteen consecutive years in office. That’s because Third Way governments can demobilize lefties and environmentalists by claiming to be their comrades and buying off those needing to be bought off.

The second reason, more important in this comparison, is the way Third Way contracting-out practices function. Contracting-out is a practice whereby a government reduces the costs of providing a service by laying off the government employees who are providing it and hiring a private company to do the job instead. The private company is able to do this and make a profit by reducing wages for the work, which is easy, as the workers providing it are no longer direct employees of the government.

Third Way governments are more creative and cost-effective in much of their contracting-out because they contract charities and other non-profits to take on government work. Frontline workers in the non-profit and charitable sectors are especially reluctant to seek higher wages because they are often altruistically motivated to do the work they do and because they can see that money spent on their wages is being taken from some other area of charitable endeavour. Guilt is a powerful force in keeping wages down in the charitable sector. Furthermore, many non-profit workers labour shoulder-to-shoulder with volunteers who are being paid nothing for doing the same or similar work.

While wages are driven down in such arrangements, they tend to rise dramatically for those in charitable and non-profit management. Their organizations grow; their budgets grow; and so do their salaries and status. Over the past generation, the high-level manager class has expanded to include thousands of non-profit executive directors and management consultants and become seamless with senior civil servants, MBAs in the corporate sector, lobbyists and, as Lenin termed them, “the labour aristocracy.”

We often use the term “Astroturf” to talk about non-profit organizations that appear to be grassroots but have actually been created by a wealthy individual or consortium thereof. But I want to suggest that there is a kind of Astroturfing of pre-existing organizations that the arrival of more government money caused. The leadership of non-profit organizations came to be increasingly selected from above, based on who can redirect state patronage towards the groups rather than democratically from below.

The putative leaders of our social movements are increasingly those either patronized by the state or by wealthy individuals. And they are filling our organizations with people who resemble themselves, ambitious ladder-climbers eager to burnish their resumes with time in the non-profit sector, mainstream people who see social movement groups the way their grandparents would have seen fraternal organizations like the Rotarians or mainline churches like the Presbyterians.

We Are the Donatists

The problem is us. We stupidly think that local environmental, feminist, anti-poverty, anti-racism, etc. groups are our groups. We think that those of us who lost jobs, influence, power during 1990s austerity but held firm to our principles are the true foundation, the backbone of social movements and left-wing political parties. We stupidly think that the kids joining the local environmental group are there to get a criminal record for being arrested on a logging road when, in fact, they are there in the expectation that they will do some community service in exchange for a flattering line on their CV.

We are the Donatists, my friends. Our standing has declined as governments have lavished patronage on our rivals in civil society; theirs has risen.

We are today’s Donatists because those who vote austerity and climate arson through our legislatures, and those who campaign for them, are not satisfied with the wealth and prestige their capitulation has brought them. They are today’s version of Constantine’s moderate bishops. And they hate us. Because, like the Donatists, we are an implied criticism of them just by getting out of bed in the morning.

We are today’s Donatists because dead martyrs like Ginger Goodwin are memorialized, and praised to the skies, while surviving martyrs like Svend Robinson are being airbrushed out of our past, targets of a concerted campaign of at best, Forgetting and, at worst, Damnatio Memoriae.

Like Christianity 1800 years ago, “the Left,” has become, in a little more than a generation, a captured political formation hellbent on weeding out the vibrant discourse, diversity of opinion and strength of character on which it once relied to survive. It has turned against these virtues and is now, consequently, the enemy.

And so, it should not surprise us that we are being tested, with increasing frequency, by word salad being placed before us as one loyalty oath after another. “Sex work is work,” is just one of the thought-terminating clichés vying for the status of becoming our modern Nicene Creed.

Painful as it must have been for true Christians in the fourth century, we have to acknowledge that the institutions in which we grew up fighting for peace, socialism, feminism and planetary survival have, seemingly overnight, been captured by the very forces we oppose and are now being turned on us.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Religion and Eschatology in Politics US Politics | fusangite |

There Is No Alternative: Ontological Dualism and the Fiction of Political Choice in Canada

The Uselessness of Policy Resolutions

In a recent post, I suggested that no policy resolution passed by Canadian political party convention between 1994 and 2020 had effect on party election platforms or policies enacted while in government. While there may have been instances of party conventions adopting policies also adopted by their part in government, these adoptions were either post-facto or coincidental.

Time and again, every Canadian political party from the Greens to the Conservatives has defied the policies passed at party conventions and written election platforms into which, not just members but ordinary MPs and MLAs, have negligible input. With all power concentrated in the office of party leader, to select candidates and caucus members at will, since 2003, it is not surprising that Canadian political parties run like the imperial Russian state. Power flows into the office of the autocrat by vote of the members in convention. Thereafter, all power remains concentrated in that single person until removed by a party convention or stepping down.

In such a system, there are other powerful people with decision-making power, finance ministers, attorneys and solicitors-general, chiefs of staff and candidate vetting committees but their power is not derived from party members or even voters at election time. It comes from and is solely dependent upon selection by the party leader.

I have rehearsed these arguments in other essays in recent years, more than once. But what I have not chosen to examine further is the thinking and behaviour of party activists who spend hour upon hour drafting policy resolutions, getting them prioritized on convention agendas and building a supportive coalition of convention delegates to vote them through.

A half-remembered tradition of convention resolutions affecting party platforms and government policies from Canada’s first century seems an insufficient explanation. We are approaching fifty years since consequential votes at national policy conventions were part of our political culture. And given the general state of collective amnesia that envelopes our politics today, it seems quite improbable.

So, what does motivate these folks to pass resolutions at the conventions of parties that they know will ignore them?

I want to make a radical suggestion in the form of some fancy religious studies/theology terminology: ontological dualism.

Ontological Dualism

As Los Altos Institute approaches its tenth birthday, we are settling into an organizational identity, history and culture in which we can observe patterns. One is that, unlike many ecologically conscious, socialist communities, our culture is not especially atheistic, even though atheists are likely a majority.

Rather, it is a culture friendly to and representative of atheists and other “ontological monists,” like Jews, Mormons and Sikhs. These faith communities, like atheists, tend to either reject or minimize the idea of the supernatural. All of creation, whether originating in God or not, is governed by the same set of rules in ontological monism. If people have spirits, they are material, either epiphenomena generated by brain activity or physically detectable parts of the body our instrumentation cannot yet pick up. If angels exist, they have physical being of some kind and operate within the same systems of physical causation as human beings.

More importantly, ontological monists focus their religious practice on creating a just order on earth. The work you do for God here on earth is an end in itself, not a means of purchasing a ticket to heaven. If God has a kingdom, the centre of religious practice is building the part of it that exists on earth. In other words, our institutions members may be atheists but if they are theists, they are likely “religious but not spiritual.”

Ontological dualism, on the other hand, is something we associate with most religious folks. Their discourse and practices are heaven- rather than earth-centred. What we do on earth is understood to be “just a test,” as memorably characterized by David Shore’s Gregory House. Our actions on earth are highly consequential only insofar as they are the basis on which God judges how we will live our next life, whereas, for ontological monists, they are consequential for the opposite reason, that this earth, this society, are the ones that are most real and merit our sole or primary attention.

For ontological dualists, then, religious debates are often about guessing, deducing and describing the divine order and divine judgement that are understood to follow this life on earth. The phrase “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” seeks to mock this kind of speculation that has characterized most theological and cosmological writing across religious faiths.

Ontological dualism is a way of thinking that grew up gradually between the Classical Period (500-322 BCE) and the Englightenment (1750-1849), with Plato often credited as its progenitor. The idea that material reality was an inferior creation made by a fallen divinity called the demiurge, and that it was but a shadow of the true reality, the world of forms, which could only be perceived in one’s mind’s eye, was easily hybridized with a wide variety of religious traditions. And as hard science increasingly diverged from the descriptions of the cosmos in religious doctrine, we built a category of ever increasing size to enable science to continue advancing unimpeded by religion.

In the Middle Ages, this even became formalized in educational institutions. There were two separate academic fields that studied the heavens, Mathematical Astronomy, an empirical discipline used to calculate the length of years, the timing of eclipses and the like and Physical Astronomy, the discipline that described how the universe really is. In this way, the crystalline spheres made from the quintessence (fifth element) that encircled the sun, moon and each of the planets orbiting the earth could be safely protected from the insights of mathematical astronomers about how the planets moved.

In this way, religious authorities were happy to admit that the discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo constituted major advances in the field of Mathematical Astronomy. They were just not pertinent to Physical Astronomy.

This was something Galileo could not abide. The existence of Physical Astronomy as a discipline was anathema to him. “It is for the church to decide how to go to heaven, not to decide how the heavens go,” the quotation attributed to him goes. Rather than being content with their being two universes, a natural one governed by empirically discoverable physical laws, and a supernatural one governed by laws communicated through the church, Galileo saw only one universe, making him a heretic and an ontological monist.

Although the Scientific Revolution from Copernicus to Newton saw the movement of the boundary between the natural and supernatural, it nevertheless required the continuation of this bifurcated view of the universe to prevent religion and science from going to war. As long as science did not pronounce heaven, angels and the immortal soul either subject to discoverable physical laws or non-existent, an uneasy peace could be maintained, until the next time the nature-supernature boundary had to be moved.

Secularized Dualism

I have spent some time writing about how conservative religious folks today are focused on pushing the dividing line between the natural and the supernatural backwards. Faith communities that once broadly accepted that our climate, geology and evolution of species were in the “natural” category of phenomena now campaigning to place these in the “supernatural” category, things that only God can describe through his chosen ministers. But what I have not done is adequately examine the ways that these categories have been maintained in the mental architecture of the secular and the unchurched.

Among scholars of religion who have sought to explain the sharp differences between American and Canadian religiosity, the most important theory is that the Social Gospel movement came to be absorbed and institutionalized through the Canadian state and its party system. Canada’s first truly national socialist party, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation and the first to form government was an explicitly theocratic party led by a succession of churchmen. The party’s first leader was Methodist minister and former Canadian Labour Party MP, J S Woodsworth; its first premier was T C Douglas, a Baptist minister.

And not only was the Social Gospel the animating ideology of the CCF; it also functioned as a hegemonic discourse within progressive, liberal Canada. Liberal Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King had written his own book on the Social Gospel and declared it to be the principal ideology of the longest premiership in Canadian history, comprising just shy of a quarter of the twentieth century.

Canadian secularization proceeded more rapidly and more completely than US secularization, it is argued, because liberal Protestantism essentially fused with the state and its party system, while religious conservatives were much more averse to leaving traditional denominations that were based on religious affiliations that could be traced back to the Old World.

But evidently, this secularism is more superficial than we realized. As so often happens with an idea you drum out of language and discourse, it actually grows more powerful in the dark, in the uninterrogated unconscious of groups and individuals.

The Modern Policy Convention

How better to explain political party conventions than as secularized ontological dualism, our Protestant heritage returning to bite us?

Think of a political party convention as an Anglican or Lutheran synod. Geographic delegations arrive from all over to do three kinds of business:

  • hard-nosed, bare-fisted organizational politics, deciding who holds powerful positions, how resources are divided-up and which team of adherents gets to dominate the positions that control the organization’s purse strings and real estate portfolio;
  • enjoying all the social connections that are based around the organization, great conversations with people of like mind that one rarely sees, leavened by free food and drink often dispensed in acts of competitive hospitality by different factions of the organization; and
  • forging agreements, reaching compromises, conducting votes and holding debates about a divinely-ordered world you have never seen, settling questions like whether gay couples stay together in heaven and are recognized by God as spouses, deciding whether the soul enters the body at conception or quickening, deciding whether evolution is a hoax or whether it is actually the hand of God himself, in other words, making supernatural decisions about what God, his angels and heaven are like
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Folks sure have got excited about whether God blesses same sex unions, whether gender exists is heaven, whether slave-owners are served by their slaves in heaven and conducted contentious votes on these subjects, despite the fact that they know their votes do not control God, nor do they control the created, physical world. And yet they vote and fight and organize and undergo schisms, all because they disagree about things they cannot affect.

This is the modern political convention. No one is debating policy resolutions about what their party’s next government will actually do. They are debating what hypothetical governments that will never exist should do. Party policies are hypotheses about the organization of heaven, not plans for organizing on earth.

The Policy Consensus

There are reasons, of course, that this shift followed the end of the Cold War. Even after Canada moved from the British imperial sphere to the US from the 1930s to 50s, it was viewed as advisable for Canada to have a stable, thriving manufacturing sector, supplied with food and raw materials by the country’s Atlantic and Western peripheries. Local elites in Atlantic and Western Canada functioned concurrently as clients to what is termed the “Laurentian elite” of Quebec and Ontario and clients of American elites who were extracting an increasing proportion of the materials from the Canadian periphery.

The central dynamic arose after the Second World War in Canadian political economy were efforts by Western Canada’s peripheral elite to become a US periphery, unmediated by the needs of Central Canada. Deregulation, ending supply management, free trade and investor rights were the calls of Saskatchewan potash, Manitoba hydroelectric, British Columbia timber and Alberta oil interests. These interests were vigorously opposed by and typically lost to the Laurentian elite that presided over the Windsor-Quebec City industrial strip.

But since the end of the Cold War, all of Canada is now the periphery. The Laurentian elite are presiding over the deindustrialization of Quebec and Ontario and are seeking to reach an accommodation, even to merge with the rentier elites of Western Canada. But the now-ascendant resource elite of the West are split over whether to accept this fusion with the Laurentians or to seek dominance in their own right and the creation a new Central Canadian resource elite.

That is all Canadian federal elections are about now. The Conservative Party of Stephen Harper represented the latter, and, to the horror of the Laurentian elite, was able to govern Canada with little assistance from Central Canada’s old elite. Attempts by the Laurentian elite to retake power on their own ended in disaster in 2008 and 2011 with Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff.

We must understand that Justin Trudeau was able to take power because of his efforts to accommodate the resource elites of the West in new and unprecedented ways, not just as junior partners but senior partners in his political coalition. The price for dealing the Laurentian elite back in was policy continuity with the Harper government; in fact, the Laurentian elite are being tested, even now, to see how far they will go for the oil industry, whether they will be successful in amplifying the policies of Stephen Harper when it comes to fossil fuel subsidies, pipeline-building, etc.

And as we have seen from the Horgan government in British Columbia and the Notley government in Alberta, every political party in this country has got them memo: we are the periphery of the American and Chinese empires. Our local elites serve at their pleasure and here to tax local populations so subsidize the extraction of their resources.

And as much as they might pretend not to, the folks at the NDP, Tory, Green and Liberal conventions all believe this in their heart. They have truly internalized the belief that there is no alternative. The only break they have from the preordained policy consensus their labour carries is the chance to organize and win the debate how many angels can dance on the head of pin.

Otherwise, we would have to admit that our current political levers are no longer connected to anything in the real world and then, we would be responsible for fashioning new ones to bring the our omnicidal petrostate to heel.

Canadian Politics Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

American Caliphate II: The Caliphization of the American Presidency

Following my last piece, American Caliphate I, I am once again returning to the ways that government, religion, culture and class interacted in the various Muslim caliphates that existed from the seventh through twentieth centuries and how these interactions are similar to recent American history. In this second exploration, I am going to be emphasizing the ways in which the post-Reagan Republican Party has functioned like the government of a caliphate and not like an Enlightenment-era secular political party.

These pieces are being prepared as companion reading for my up coming course, The Holy American Empire, offered by Los Altos Institute starting in May of 2021

  1. The Caliph in Sunni Islam

Following the original Ummayad and Rashidun Caliphates, the predominant Muslim caliphates, the Abassid and Ottoman, treated Sunni rather than Shi’a Islam as the normative religion of their state, even if not the sole or even always the official religion. While there exist many what Christians might call denominations of Islam, Druze, Alawite, Sufi, Ismaili, etc. most of the world’s Muslims fall into two groups, Sunni and Shi’ite.

While there are many important doctrinal and historical differences between these two branches, differences relevant to our discussion here are their institutional differences, i.e. the organizational structures of these faith communities.

Shi’ite Islam is characterized by a pyramidal organization with ranks like Allamah and Ayatollah for clergy hierarchically above other Imams. We might compare it to Christian episcopal structures we associate with Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism and Orthodox Christianities where above a priest is a bishop and, above a bishop, a pope.

Sunni Islam is characterized by a flat organization of equal Imams with no ecclesiastical ranks above other ranks. We might compare it to Pentecostalism and the non-denominational movement in the United States and Latin America, a free religious marketplace where churches compete against one another for congregants. When Sunni Islam is functioning unrestricted by the state, the “call to prayer” is literally a competition to call folks within earshot to prayer by offering an attractive advertisement for the mosque in question.

Because of this lack of hierarchical authority, the role of the Caliph has traditionally been more important in Sunni societies. Although a Caliph attains his job by winning an essentially secular crown through some combination of dynastic inheritance and military support, the Caliphal model installs the head of the empire and its army as head of the various imams in his territory. While he might not be trained in doctrine, he nevertheless is head of the Sunni oecumene upon attaining the office of Caliph, in the way that pre-1453 Byzantine emperors and pre-1917 Russian Tsars were the chief churchmen of their respective empires.

Given the plurality of doctrine and competition for congregants, one might argue that one of the reasons we see Sunnis over-represented in the great caliphates of history is that Sunni Islam needs a caliph in order to make necessary doctrinal, liturgical and other changes in order to adapt and move with changing times, as all great world religions must. Without a caliph, the Sunni system will eventually break, either due to an inability to adapt and make new doctrines about new things, or due to the unrestrained centrifugal force of different Imams making different local doctrines sending the religion off in new and different directions, depending on local congregants. In this way, it should be understood that the institution of the caliph was not just important for Sunnis under the political authority of the current caliph but for those outside the state he controlled who nevertheless looked to him for leadership, a role formalized in law in 1001.

So, what does all this have to do with America, a nation purportedly founded on the separation of church and state?

2. America and Religious Freedom

First, let us begin by looking at what “separation of church and state” has traditionally meant. When the United States came into being as the first state in the world based on liberalism, the eighteenth century social movement we associate with Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire, it became a vital tool, an experimental ground, that liberal thinkers used to see how ideas of individualism, equality and limited government played out.

One of the things that was unclear to the founders of the US was the difference between a right accorded to a sub-collective, e.g. a state, a territory, a county, a town, a private club and one accorded to an individual. This was bound-up in the question of what rights could be operationalized at the level of the individual and what rights could only have meaningful force in the hands of a sub-collective. As Sarah Barringer Gordon has persuasively argued, it was not until the first election of the Republican Party to national government in 1860 that these tensions began to be resolved in a relatively clear and consistent way, due to America’s conflict not just with the Confederate States of America over slavery but with the Kingdom of Deseret (i.e. the Mormon Church) over polygamy.

3. The Structure of American Religion 1850-1975

Until the 1860s, the separation of church and state and guarantees of freedom of religion were understood to protect the rights of states, territories, counties and towns to select their religious affiliation. In nationalizing and elaborating on the social contract developed in Puritan Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the US guaranteed the right of the state of Maryland to be Catholic, of Massachusetts to be Congregationalist, etc.

But in the 1850s and 60s, its meaning inverted. It became the obligation of the US federal government to prevent states, territories, towns, etc. from imposing a single religion on their residents. Freedom of religion ceased to be seen as a right that could only be made operational through a collective to one that any individual could exercise in defiance of their neighbours’ belief. A law created to protect sub-collectives from federal government interference became a law that was used to protect individuals from the imposition of their neighbours’ religion on them through local government.

While the US had always been a free religious marketplace, this severing of religious institutions from governments forced otherwise minimally hierarchical religions to develop and maintain large representative bodies uniting people across the country by denomination. The forging of these stronger federations of Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, etc. was contemporaneous with the intensification of sectionalism associated with the Civil War. It is in this period that we see the creation of powerful, regionally affiliated but technically national denominational organizations like the Missouri Synod Lutherans and the Southern Baptist Convention.

As readers can see, embedded in their very names are theories of centralized, deliberative decision-making. Conventions and synods are meetings, meetings where decisions about doctrine are made. While churches could technically opt out of these bodies, this was often disadvantageous, not just because of the loss of economies of scale in publishing, something central to the success of any nineteenth-century religious mass movement, but because, in an increasingly mobile, kinetic America, leavened by massive railroad subsidies, folks who moved for work liked to stay in the same denomination, not try out some new local flavour. This was especially important as many Christian denominations did not recognize the baptisms performed by other churches.

In this way, most American Christians were part of major national religious denominations for the next century and a bit. Annual and biannual synods and conventions would entail hundreds, often thousands, of ministers from a particular denominational grouping coming together to fashion doctrinal responses and changes to move with a changing society and changing needs of congregants.

These denominations were politically powerful and could and did swing elections by delivering congregants to the polls with a religiously-based voting agenda. After all, the constitution prohibited the institutional fusion of church and state, not the ideological fusion of religion and politics.

4. America: From Secular Republic to Caliphate

But during the 1960s, that began to change. Religious denominations we might call “liberal,” Quakers, Congregationalists, Methodists began suffering crippling declines in their congregations. Many people became “spiritual but not religious,” non-religious folks who had previously gone to church out of a sense of civic-mindedness stopped and even those continued to see themselves as members significantly reduced their church attendance, aside from special holidays and festivals. The expansion of both government and non-profit charity work gave a lot of new options to folks whose main payoff of attending church was helping out or bossing around people in need.

But conservative denominations also began suffering not long after the demographic tailspin of liberal Christianity began. Old school hellfire Baptist preachers had begun losing congregants, especially those in remote communities, to Sunday radio broadcasts by preachers skilled in using broadcast media, as far back as the 1930s. This was followed by the rise of the televangelists of the 1970s, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart and their ilk.

The corrosive force represented by the holy men of radio and TV was not just one that permitted congregants to make their religious observances from home; it also steered people towards two relatively new and rapidly growing movements, Pentecostalism and non-denominationalism. These were religious movements lacking denominational structures and, in the case of the non-denominationalists, actively hostile to those structures. While these churches were independent from one another, organizationally, they had the following common characteristics: fundamentalism, avowed scriptural literalism, political conservatism, anti-communism and beliefs in Biblical pseudoscience. This pseudoscience took the main forms of (a) effacing modern knowledge about women’s reproductive systems in favour of supporting the distinctive Roman Catholic doctrine that any miscarriage of a zygote, embryo or foetus that can be blamed on a person is murder; and (b) young earth creationism, the idea that the earth is literally 6000 years old, that fossils can be created in less than ten years, that humans and dinosaurs cohabited and that evolution is a hoax.

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By the mid-1970s, there were efforts by the most powerful and popular televangelists to create denomination-like entities that could give these new conservative religious movements, that were growing at the expense of mainline conservative groupings like the Baptists. Pat Robertson and Jimmy Swaggart offered an attempt at a Pentecostal denomination, the Assemblies of God. Jerry Fallwell took a different path in creating non-denominational organizations of Pentecostals, non-denominationalists and others to carry out specific tasks, Liberty University for religiously-based postsecondary education and the Moral Majority for the purpose of engaging with electoral politics.

Thanks to the US primary system, organized political entryism can dramatically reshape national politics, which is what we witnessed, first with large numbers of these new conservatives registering to participate in the 1976 Democratic Party presidential primary to support the first Born Again Christian, Governor Jimmy Carter, to run for the presidency. They quickly soured on Carter as he came to be seen as soft on communism, supportive of an expanded federal government and guided by mainstream science on energy policy.

A far more appealing candidate was populist California governor Ronald Reagan, who had lost the Republican nomination in 1976 but was now heavily courting the Moral Majority and their allies. Republicans’ dog-whistle messaging had already been used to bring Southern white supremacists into the party’s expanding coalition. As chronicled by Fred Knelman in Reagan, God and the Bomb, this project now extended into the conflation of a first-strike nuclear war and US support for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon with the fiery eschaton described in the Book of Revelation and the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party with the Antichrist. Opposition to abortion ceased to be a Catholic issue and was taken up by Reagan’s new conservative coalition too.

But a strange thing happened.

One might think that the Jerry Fallwell, Pat Robertson, Assemblies of God and Moral Majority would shoulder past the Southern Baptist Convention and Billy Graham, and others who had claimed to be leading God-fearing conservative voters, and become America’s answer to the Ayatollahs who had seized power in Iran the previous year.

But the opposite happened.

The new, increasingly theocratic America was not structured like a Shi’ite kingdom or republic. It began transforming into a caliphate. The authority of figures like Robertson, Fallwell and Swaggart receded, and in their place was Ronald Reagan, arguably America’s first caliph. Republican national conventions became not just a place to make public policy and nominate a candidate for the presidency. This quadrennial event has become the place where America’s religious conservatives, not just Pentecostals but conservative Baptists, Lutherans and others go to make doctrine. And this group has come to be known as “conservative evalgelicals.”

The Republican party’s policies and public pronouncements have become, for forty percent of Americans, the equivalent of hadiths, formal additions to Islamic doctrine, made by committees of Imams appointed by a Sunni caliph. In other words, just as Republican candidates are necessarily parasitic of these technically independent, autonomous congregations for votes in primary and general elections, the congregations are reciprocally dependent on the Republican Party and its leader to organize, systematize and pronounce on doctrine.

While God Bless America, was originally a piece of popular music composed by a secular Jew in 1918 in support of isolationism, the song, and, more importantly, the phrase, was adopted by conservative imperialists in the 1960s who saw America as an especially divinely-favoured and divinely-mandated imperial hegemon needed to confront the atheistic, Antichrist-led Soviet Union.

Presidents, beginning with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had already been using the clause “God bless America,” in political rhetoric but whereas Richard Nixon mentioned God in just one in six speeches (16%) in his 1972 presidential campaign, eight years leader, Reagan mentioned God in nineteen in twenty (95%) of his stump speeches in 1980. And during the Reagan and first Bush presidencies, this clause increasingly took on the character of a caliphal benediction.

The president transformed from a first-among-equals supplicant, personally asking God to bless his country into a more clerical role. The president was acting as an intercessor between God and His chosen people, utilizing his privileged access to God to make a plea on behalf of the American people. In this way, the president transformed, for conservative evangelicals, into the head of American Christianity, a role similar to that of Constantine the Great and his successors, vicegerent of God on Earth.

5. The Elaboration of the Caliphate in the Twenty-first Century

Following the turn of the century, 9/11 and the beginning of the second Bush presidency, two additional shifts took place, one at the level of discourse, the other at the level of institution.

First, a new benediction came into being following the September 11th terrorist attacks, “may God continue to bless America.” This amplification of the benediction now made it clear that God’s blessing was a contingent blessing, implying that a lack of blessing of the Democratic Party presidencies of the 1990s, and the social liberalism with which they were associated, could help to account for God’s unwillingness to protect the US from Osama Bin Laden. Now, the president was asking, pleading, negotiating with God for America to continue receiving His blessing, provided they behaved according to the moral order of the Bush Administration. In this way, the president’s role was that of a divinely, favoured intercessor, proximate, as medievals would say, to God’s right hand.

In this way, America’s caliphs have become keepers of America’s covenant with God, granted unique intercessory powers to plead on the nation’s behalf when it falters.

The other innovation of the Bush presidency was the expansion of school vouchers and other systems permitting the state funding of conservative evangelical religious schools, both of the fee-paying and non-fee-paying variety. The Bush era also these schools increasingly exempt from curricular demands that might get in the way of teaching young earth creationism and other kinds of conservative evangelical pseudoscience.

To this were added the “faith-based initiatives.” The Bush Administration argued that, contrary to earlier legal interpretations, the separation of church and state need not apply to the federal government partnering with and funding churches, provided the partnerships carried out secular activities. While the Blairite austerity of the Clinton-Gore years had entailed increasing partnerships with the secular non-profit sector to deliver things like school lunches and care for the disabled, Bush-era austerity, unique among the austerity programs of the Global North, included the delivery of an increasing number of services through parts of churches supposedly walled-off from their proselytizing arms.

In this way, the post-2001 US has come to resemble a caliphate, more and more, with the highest spiritual, religious, political and military office in the land fused in a single person when the Republican Party is in power. This caliph engages in increasing patronage of the nominally independent churches affiliated with the GOP. A mutual dependence now exists between conservative evangelical churches and the presidential candidate of the Republican Party; without the caliph, new doctrine cannot be made or imposed on diverse churches because no alternative mechanism to do this exists. The Southern Baptist Convention and Missouri Synod Lutherans are dying on the vine, their higher officials largely irrelevant in the platform/doctrine-making process, their individual ministers more likely to wield doctrinal power by becoming a delegate to a Republican national convention than any synod.

The extent of this transformation was impossible to gauge until the rise of Donald Trump and his decisive primary victory in 2016. Trump had not previously been a religiously observant man. He was a serial philanderer, divorcer and patron of prostitutes. He was ignorant of the Bible and of basic Christian theology. And he did not present himself as having undergone a conversion experience; he continued to use lewd and vulgar language and chose to feel-up his daughter on national television while accepting his party’s nomination.

Despite an inauspicious start and apparent constitutional incompatibility with the role of holy intercessor, the Trump presidency turned out to be the greatest doctrinal innovator in the history of conservative evangelicalism. First of all, to account for Trump’s behaviour being at variance with that of conservative evangelicals, key churchmen like Franklin Graham came forward to explain that Trump could not be judged by the standards of other mortals, that God had granted him a series of divine “mulligans,” exempting him from the rules applied to ordinary mortals. These exemptions are very much along the lines of those granted medieval caliphs to consume alcohol, miss holy observances and keep harems.

Second, policies and actions by the American state framed as necessary evils by previous caliphs, became positive goods. Separating toddlers from their parents and imprisoning them, state-mandated rendition and torture and war itself changed from being imperial practices to be swept under the rug and formulaically denied or condemned, to practices that were good and merited celebration in America’s expanding Theatre of Cruelty. God now demanded torture, murder, and torment of tiny state-created orphans. The caliph said so and the chorus of agreement from Pentecostals, non-denominations and other conservative evangelicals was deafening.

The live dismemberment of political opponents by bone saw, like an end to elections and term limits, was something to which Trump openly aspired for the future of his caliphate, a new wave of divinely-mandated torture and extra-judicial killings.

Like caliph Abu Bakr, founder of the original dynasty of caliphs, Trump has been accepted unproblematically as the leader of a religious community with whom he had little prior affiliation or specialist knowledge because of a theology that conflates the head of state, head of the army and head of the church. And they eagerly await the return of a legitimate ruler following the “stolen” election of 2020, a candidate anointed not by votes but by God himself.

If one wants to understand the broad Republican acceptance of massive voter suppression and growing demands to throw out any ballot that does not result in the continuation of caliphal rule as illegitimate, it is because, central to America’s transformation into a caliphate, is the understanding that what makes a president legitimate is not votes or elections, it is recognition of his intercessory status by the churches of the land, as God’s vicegerent on earth.

Authoritarianism Religion and Eschatology in Politics US Politics | fusangite |