Matthew follows up on his interview with Mike Lewis about Bishop Strickland with thoughts about:
1) Building a bridge with progressive elements of a religion that claims 1.36 billion people globally, as it goes through another surge of paranoia and reactionary radicalization, and
2) Building a bridge into a personal past
Show Notes
Vatican II: It's about that 'fresh air' | National Catholic Reporter
The Smoke of Satan on the Silver Screen: The Catholic Horror Film, Vatican II, and the Revival of Demonology | Journal for the Academic Study of Religion
More sexual assault survivors connected to Michigan-based religious groups surface
Inside the People of Praise, the Tight-Knit Faith Community of Amy Coney Barrett - The New York Times
And Scales Fell From His Eyes | PDF | Protestantism | Catholic Church
Pope Michael – WRSP
‘The most conspiratorial demographic’: white evangelicals and the QAnon connection - The Conversationalist
Evangelicals are looking for answers online. They’re finding QAnon instead. | MIT Technology Review
QAnon Conspiracies Sway Faith Groups, Including 1 in 4 White Evangelicals | News & Reporting | Christianity Today
New poll: QAnon embraced by 11 percent of white Catholics and 15 percent of all Americans | America Magazine
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Hello, everyone.
Welcome to Conspiratuality Podcast, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
We are on Instagram at ConspiratualityPod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon, or just our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
We've got a book out, it's called Conspiratuality, How New Age Conspiracies Became a Health Threat, and it's in print, ebook, and audiobook format, narrated by me.
This is a Patreon bonus episode called Post Lapsed Catholic?
There's a question mark at the end of that.
It's about building a bridge with progressive elements of a religion that claims 1.36 billion people globally, currently going through another surge of paranoia and reactionary radicalization.
There's a personal essay aspect about maybe building a bridge to the past.
Okay, where to begin?
We've started adding this cold open to main feed episodes to flag the thesis and tone right off the top.
And when we were preparing for the episode featuring Stephanie Kammerer's story about recovering from conspiracy theories, I initially proposed this bit where I would ask Derek and Julian if they'd ever believed in a conspiracy theory.
And the joke would be that they're both very level-headed, and of course, they had never fallen for anything, but then I would say, well, as a lapsed Catholic, I totally bought into the idea that the church was actually an international crime syndicate run by a tiny, unelected elite who gathered in sumptuous hidden palaces to plot out their schemes, to plunder the colonies and hide predators, and then make it all seem like God's plan.
And then they were going to say, well, that happened, bro.
So it was going to be a bit, but also point to the reality roots within conspiratorial thinking.
And in the episode, I went on to suggest that when that reality is suppressed, when no one is held accountable for what everybody knows, to quote Leonard Cohen, It may open the door to the allure of exaggeration and vengeful fantasy.
But there was another layer in that joke, which is that the actual conspiracy that the Roman Catholic Church really has acted like a crime syndicate is also only one picture among many.
I was calling it a theory because it was true, but also felt narrow.
It was reasonable, but it also felt reductive.
When I close my eyes and say it aloud, I see the cold, hard faces of some of the priests I knew as a boy.
I think of the enormous wealth accumulated through the Vatican's colonial collaborations, the golden cruelty radiating from every ritual object.
I think of Cardinal Raymond Burke who just got his rent subsidy slashed on his posh Vatican apartment after years of undermining the Pope, railing against the gays, and collaborating with Steve Bannon.
I think of thousands of priests and nuns running residential schools like racist workhouses and basically shrugging when children died of malnutrition or common illnesses.
I think of people I've known who've been abused by priests.
And there's no denying any of that, no minimizing it.
And there are also people I don't see in that black-pilled montage.
And with a little internal shift, I can see them.
I can see my grandfather in his brown fedora driving me to morning mass in his ratty Chevy Chevelle.
He had huge meat hook hands from driving a garbage truck with manual steering for decades.
I can see people who sit in churches alone, those who hear the hymns begin and automatically start to hum.
Regular people who know the church as their third space between home and work.
