Bonus Sample: Antifascist Christianity: Black Jesus (Pt. 2)
Full episode on Patreon
Part 2 moves from Christofascist spectacle to the “mushy middle” of liberal Christianity—why it so often blesses order over justice and falters when fascism rises. Drawing on MLK’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, Reggie Williams’s Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus, and lived experience inside white urban churches, he traces how bureaucratic piety, respectability politics, and spiritual bypassing drain the Gospel of conduct and courage—what Bonhoeffer called a “funeral wreath” laid on the culture.
How do institutions become procedurally compassionate yet politically inert? Matthew weaves in memories of global South Christian art, Denys Arcand’s Jesus of Montréal, and the everyday service-industry grind of parish life to show how care without solidarity becomes maintenance—while Black Jesus points to co-suffering, mutual aid, and material resistance.
Touching grass means moving from abstraction to accompaniment and from decorum to defense.
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Hey everybody, this bonus is called Antifascist Christianity, Black Jesus Part 2.
Part one dropped on our main feed this past Saturday.
I am Matthew Remsky, and this is Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
You can follow myself, Derek and Julian on Blue Sky.
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Thank you so much.
You can also catch me on TikTok at Antifascist Dad, and my new independent podcast is out now under the same name, Antifascist Dad.
So this is the third of a number of two-part series I've been doing on anti-fascist Christianity.
It all goes into the woodshed series where I collect a bunch of stories that I hope are useful and resourceful.
And in Saturday's episode, I began with the image of Bonhoeffer arriving in New York, carrying the European vision of white Jesus, tied to empire and order, but leaving transformed by his encounter with Harlem churches and the liberatory presence of Black Jesus rooted in solidarity with the oppressed.
And I connected Bonhoeffer's White Jesus to the spectacle of Charlie Kirk's recent stadium memorial and its focus on national triumphalism and its use of a theology that reassures the powerful that everything is already accomplished, which relieves them of the burden of justice, even as systems of oppression continue outside the arena.
And I drew on Reggie Williams' Bonhoeffers Black Jesus on Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism and Janelle Hope and Bill Mullen's The Black Anti-Fascist Tradition to argue that White Jesus was born from colonialism and racial capitalism, while Black Jesus emerges from solidarity with suffering.
And for me, the contrast between the triumphalist mighty fortress hymns of the Lutheran tradition and the trembling grief of Were You There really captured Bonhoeffer's turn towards a faith that was grounded in vulnerability and anti-fascist hope.
So today I want to turn to the mushy middle of religiosity that makes it so difficult for both the social gospel and socialism to shine.
On this podcast, we have, as you know, investigated the influence of white Christian nationalism, Christofascism, and many other fundamentalist purification-based and elitist forms of spirituality that have helped propel the MAGA movement.
And I think we've developed a kind of typology that I'm going to start this episode out by trying to summarize.
So the Christofascists are easy to categorize.
They're on the extreme right.
And then we have the checked-out new age view from nowhere that pretends to be centrist, but usually drifts right word through its commitment to individualism and through things like pretending that Donald Trump must be a light worker.
There is a subset of New Age Progressivism that, you know, people who follow Marianne Williamson, you know, they might be an exception to that.
But when the shit hits the fan, Williamson doesn't ultimately see politics as a form of conflict.
And so she's going to wind up doing very little to mitigate fascism.
In fact, I don't think I've heard of her or about her in many, many months at this point.
Now, by contrast, in this series of episodes, I've tried to identify a type of sharply left-wing religious behavior and sensibility that finds its deepest expression in the social gospel of care and equality.
This is the Christianity of The Last Supper and of Bonhoeffer's sacrifice.
And, you know, the realization that he has no choice but to put himself in peril for the sake of those who Hitler is slaughtering.
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