ICE is on the loose in our cities, acting with seeming impunity. They've repelled from Black Hawk helicopters, thrown journalists and protestors to the ground, and belligerently refused to unmask, provide identification, or present warrants for the people they're kidnapping.
Among the social media videos documenting this despicable stormtrooper behavior came the image of a priest being hit in the head and knocked to the ground by a pepper ball shot from an ICE building rooftop.
We've homed in on this disturbing moment to ask if what we'd seen so far had not crossed a red line for the American public, what does it mean to shoot at a priest protesting injustice in prayer?
Show Notes
Surge in U.S. Concern About Immigration Has Abated
Portland’s ‘War Zone’ Is Like Burning Man for the Terminally Online
DC Churches to Trump: Stay Out of Our Parking Lots
Religious protesters say ICE threatens religious freedom in Chicago
In LA, faith leaders protest to stand up for the detained and keep the peace
Chicago Pastor Sues Trump Admin After Allegedly Being Shot by ICE Agents
Federal lawsuit brought by Black et al against Noem and DHS
Evangelical Pastor Doug Pagitt on Christian Nationalism
Exclusive: The Churches Fighting Back Against ICE
Religious leaders offering communion to detainees turned away at Broadview ICE facility
Bishop Rojas on rise in ICE raids: ‘It is not of the Gospel of Jesus Christ'
Religious leaders offering communion to detainees turned away at Broadview ICE facility
Signs of Faith Against Fascism: An Interview with Eric MartinPaul Elie: Daniel Berrigan was a fierce critic of the United States. He was also a great American.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Had 30 agents ready to go with shotguns and rifles and you.
Five, six white people pushing me in the car, I'm going, what the hell?
Basically, your stay-at-home moms were picking up these large amounts of heroin.
All you gotta do is be see the packet.
Don't have to open it, just accept it.
She was very upset, crying.
Once I slowly gun, I try to take his hand and I saw the flash of light.
Listen to The Chinatown Sting wherever you get your podcasts.
The Chinatown Sting Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
You can find us on Instagram and threads at Conspirituality Pod, as well as individually, we are all over on Blue Sky.
And you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon at Patreon.com/slash conspirituality.
You can also grab our Monday bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions every Monday, if that is your platform of choice.
As independent media creators, we appreciate your support and know we will not be selling our site to Barry Weiss anytime soon.
Right.
Okay.
Because spirituality 279.
They're shooting the priests.
Ice is on the loose in our cities, acting with seeming impunity, ramming cars, smashing windows, zip tying kids in pajamas, and endangering babies.
They've repelled from Black Hawk helicopters, thrown journalists and protesters to the ground, and belligerently refused to unmask, provide identification, or present warrants for the people they are kidnapping.
Amongst the social media videos documenting this despicable stormtrooper behavior, as well as hundreds of moments of brave community protection and small protests outside ice facilities involving face-offs with protesters in frog or chicken outfits, came another image, that of a priest being hit in the head and knocked to the ground by a pepper ball shot from the ice building rooftop.
He was part of a quite small group of protesters and had just been praying with his arms raised as he looked up at the three figures in military gear standing on the roof.
Reverend David Black said he was actually hit multiple times in the head, the face, and the body before being shielded by his compatriots, and that he could hear the shooters laughing as they did it.
Thereafter, Ice came out of the building in force and doused the protesters in tear gas.
We've homed in on this disturbing moment to ask if what we've seen so far had not crossed a red line for the American public, what does it mean to shoot at a priest protesting injustice with prayer?
*music*
So I've got two sort of setup opening comments to tie this episode back to the last several weeks in which we've looked at the Kirk Memorial and also Trump's memo NPSM 7, which six the federal agencies on anti-American and anti-capitalist and paradoxically anti-Christian thought crimes.
We'll see how that plays out in the context here.
And the first question I have is is it Antifa or is it clergy?
And I just want to say that I'm gonna guess that the clergy, women and men who are standing up to ice uh at the present moment, represent far greater numbers in terms of the parishes and communities they serve than any anti-fascist or antifa group leader or cell would represent.
Behind every surplus and stole stands dozens or maybe even hundreds of parishioners.
Uh, one of the guys I'll talk about later is a chaplain at Loyola University Chicago.
You know, and meanwhile, behind every black block protester, you might find four to five support people that are willing to raise bail or offer medical care or a couch to sleep on if the person has to lie low.
And the thing is that none of Trump's MPSM 7 Memo touches clergy, unless they are super woke, progressive Christians who can be accused of gender extremism.
And this really makes me wonder what it would take to slide over into actually accusing protesting clergy of thought crimes.
Now, relatedly, as you refer to Julian, what does the collar and the stole and the habit mean in this landscape?
And speaking as you know, a cradle Catholic with enough muscle memory on board to have a really specific response to seeing, you know, a guy in a collar or a woman in a habit.
I can say that there's this instant conveyance of some kind of apartness from the world, some kind of specialness, warranted or not.
And my instinct is to walk carefully in their midst.
Now, that could be different.
I could have the muscle memory to flinch if uh if I'd been a clerical abuse victim.
But seeing these scenes of military assault on clerics reminded me of the preachers and the liturgical performers at the Kirk funeral and how they were not generally collar inhabit people.
They looked a lot more like influencers.
That if you went to their church music Instagram pages, there would be MLM and supplements links in the link tree.
And it made me wonder whether tolerance for beating up guys in collars or women in habits might in part be coming from a rejection of an assumed clerical weakness or effeminacy, which is something that we're going to get to when we talk about the history of religion and fascism.
You know, maybe the the sort of feeling is well, they're nerds, and uh if they're Catholic, they're probably gay anyway.
It's fine to roll them.
And I think that this sets us up to look at how the regime is looking at Derek, your hometown of Portland more generally.
Hey, y'all, this is Reverend Dr. Chuck Curry.
You know, I keep hearing about how here in Portland right now, at this very moment, we are living in hell, a warscape.
And, you know, I've been looking for evidence of that, and I think I found it.
Look here.
This is a free library.
We've got these all over in Portland.
They are not using the Dewey Decimal system in this free library.
Not one bit.
The books are not even alphabetized.
This is, in fact, hell.
And if the National Guard can help with that, fine.
But unless they're here to alphabetize books or do the Dewey Decimal system, I don't think we really need any help, but thanks anyway, y'all.
Thanks, Trump.
This cuts close to home.
I mean, I don't talk a lot about my relationship with my wife, but she organizes books by color.
And she is a designer, so that kind of makes sense, but it infuriates me.
And you can hear, you can hear old Chuck here has his own problems, which I also agree with.
Chaos.
Chaos, dogs and cats sleeping together.
Hey, Bob Marley said that can, well, I guess not the sleeping together.
So you just heard United Church of Christ clergy and Pacific University chaplain and professor emeritus, Reverend Dr. Chuck Curry.
And he's talking about things close to my heart because Portland's little libraries are awesome.
They're all over the city.
I drop off all my used books at them.
I pick some up if I find something I want.
We used to have one right in front of the townhouse pod that I live in until someone fucking vandalized and destroyed it for some god awful reason.
But I regularly check in and out books from them.
Now, Chuck here is using the library to talk about something bigger, which is Portland is not a hellscape.
He's also on his bike when he's he's making that message, which is also close to my heart.
And like a lot of Portlanders, he's using sarcasm and mockery to show how little of what the Trump administration is saying about our city is true.
Now I know we're going to talk about other cities where clergy is being shot at and their responses, but opening here with a little levity might ease us in.
Now, my social media feeds are tuned to Portland right now.
I've like why I've likewise been seeing what's happening in Chicago, which is much different.
And I think that actually makes for a really important dialogue about how to effectively resist and push back to what's happening, depending on where you are geographically and what you can offer.
Now, Trump sent ICE to terrorize Brown and black people in Chicago.
Meanwhile, here he's been using five-year-old footage to claim Portland is on fire.
Now, the goal is the same on a federal level, but the approach is different.
And that hasn't been lost to people online.
So I've seen a number of commenters note that Portland's response with mockery and satire can only happen because We're a predominantly white city, and there is some truth in this.
But it's also important to use that privilege at least while we can.
So just for a little bit of history, Oregon is the only state in which black exclusion laws were written into our state constitution, and that legacy has not been exactly inviting to non-whites.
That language, even though it was written in 1845, I believe, wasn't removed until 2002.
And even then, not every politician voted for its absence.
Which in this current situation makes Portland's white privilege an asset.
Mockery is our superpower, and it's working to great effect online and for people who are seeing what's happening in front of IC.
Even Joe Scarborough on Morning Joe, who initially towed the Portland is on fire line like two weeks ago.
He changed his tune once the local station KATU set up a 24-hour live stream focused on the ice building.
And so recently, more recently, he's been laughing along with the other hosts as dozens of people in frog, bear, and unicorn costumes dance around while armed agents stand on the roof peering down and occasionally shooting rubber bullets at them.
We just had an emergency world naked bike ride to protest, and hundreds of cyclists showed up.
Many did wear clothing because it was pouring rain all on Sunday, but some were actually out there completely naked.
There was a brass band, there were plenty of frogs, unicores, unicorns, bears, Garfield was there, and they greeted the cyclists as they pulled up to the ice facility.
So here's a moment captured by Bike Portland.
*Cheering*
I mean, extremely violent behavior going on right now.
Sounds like Mardi Gras.
It sounds like you're in New Orleans.
And it looked like that too.
It's from a two-minute video.
Bike Portland's a great follow if you're local.
And uh, yeah, it was it was a very joyous celebration.
There was a counter protest, though, by a few dozen Magastans who set up a banner with Charlie Kirk standing in front of a cross, which is pretty ironic given the nature of today's show, the whole no graven image thing.
Now, this Saturday will be a little more serious here because we, like many other cities across the nation, will be partaking in the No Kings protest.
But overall, you can't contest the power of people wearing inflatable animal costumes mocking the entire charade.
Now, mockery works until it doesn't.
The citizens, from what I can see, they're not armed.
More right-wing influencers and instigators are congregating trying to create that gotcha moment here.
And at some point, the privilege will run out.
Then it's not gonna matter what shade your skin is or if you're a person of the cloth, which is why some local clergy are speaking out and have been speaking out for many months here.
I mean, it's not an overwhelming amount because Portland, Portland leads the country in terms of per capita for two things, which is kind of ironic strip clubs and churches.
So we have 736 churches in the city, the greater region has 2300, but we are seeing some real activity from people from those churches.
On September 29th, a number of faith leaders met at Augustana Lutheran Church in Northeast to protest ICE.
And speaking of Lutherans, Pastor Ron Werner told The Atlantic.
I showed up to oppose the misuse of military power in our city at a time when everything is relatively peaceful.
We're committed to nonviolent protest and action.
Derek, I imagine with 736 churches, a bunch of them, maybe the majority, are not actually going to be progressive.
Have there been any clerical counter protests to the protests against ice?
I haven't seen any of that.
I mean, yeah, a lot of the churches are storefronts and strip malls and old houses, like the ones in my neighborhood are very old.
And there's a there's a lot of evangelical churches here.
There's a couple of cult-like ones.
So yeah, it's a it's a broad number, but I I have not seen any instances of of clergy coming out for ice, for example.
Right.
Then we also have Adam Erickson, who is a progressive pastor at Clackamas United Church of Christ.
Now, I see this church all the time, both on my bike rides, but also because they host a popular local notice board, and they regularly, for I mean, for years, they've proposed progressive messages like it is cheaper to house everyone than to have anyone on the streets.
Uh, Another one is Jesus never condemned being gay.
He did condemn being greedy.
Yes, very true.
A more recent one is from Portland to Palestine occupation is a crime, flagging ICE's presence with the genocide in Gaza.
He also posted this video around the same time that he put up that church sign.
Hey, everybody, it's Pastor Adam.
I am here in Portland at the ICE facility with a whole bunch of other clergy and people of faith from the Portland area and belong and beyond to rise up and say no to ICE and yes to our fellow human beings, our immigrant siblings who are created in the image of God.
You know, scripture says over and over again that we are to love the immigrant in our midst as if they are a native born.
It also says Jesus himself says how we treat the stranger in our midst is how we treat him.
Christianity, especially, has a long way to go to make up for our demand divine mandate to love our neighbor, including our immigrant neighbors as we love ourselves, God bless.
As I've long said, I'm not particularly a fan of religious beliefs, but I love any community that rises up to fight against injustice.
I don't think we need a divine mandate to be a good human being, and I'm glad that they are out there in this fight.
To me, it's especially true when it comes to religious communities because of the whole love your neighbor thing.
That sometimes means at the very least, making room for neighbors who you might not like very much, but you can at least recognize your shared humanity.
And everything ICE is doing right now is aimed at dehumanizing the targets of their violence, which makes the violence palatable to MAGA and their stands.
Even this might be a losing proposition, though, because a recent Gallup poll found that 79% of U.S. adults say immigration is good for the country, which is the highest percentage ever recorded.
Now we're seeing some signs that Trump has pushed too hard, and I don't think shooting clergy in the head with pepper balls is going to help their cause.
If you're obsessed with true crime cults or conspiracy theories, I've got the perfect show for you.
Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is a new weekly podcast from Crime House and Pave Studios that dives into the darkest corners of human behavior.
Every Wednesday, we uncover the true stories behind the world's most shocking crimes, deadly ideologies, and secret plots, from mass suicides and political assassinations to secret government experiments and UFO cults.
You'll hear about infamous cases like Jonestown and JFK, as well as hidden horrors like the octopus murders and starvation heights.
But remember, these aren't just stories, these are real people, real events, and very real consequences.
So if you love mystery, madness, and diving deep into the world's most unbelievable true stories, you won't want to miss this.
Follow conspiracy theories, cults, and crimes now, wherever you get your podcasts.
And for ad-free listening and early access to episodes, subscribe to Crime House Plus on Apple Podcasts.
So Trump's opportunistic alliance with Christian nationalism and Catholic conservatism, alongside his ICE henchmen's willingness to crack down on priests protesting their massed abduction of civilians, mirror historical dynamics.
And given how much we're all using the term fascism these days, which harkens back around a hundred years and has continued since, I looked into some history as I prepared for today.
I find that religious faith and political power maintain a roughly similar uneasy truce in all democracies, but authoritarian regimes vary widely in their relationship to the priest.
In theocracies, he, and it seems to always be a man, can enjoy unquestioned power as the scripture he preaches constitutes the law of the land.
Minority sects, apostates, atheists, and blasphemers then Suffer God's wrath at the flick of his pen.
Theocracies has often historically been in bed with monarchies.
Because they work together to perpetuate inequality, the clergy and the royal families have been first to face the firing squad in communist revolutions.
Islamist revolutions have tended to follow suit by brutally purging those same communists with whom they had either collaborated or fought against in coming to power.
And during and after communist revolutions, thousands of priests have been executed or died in gulags, along with others designated as enemies of the state or counter-revolutionaries.
And this was especially the case under Stalin, but also Mao and Castro.
The same story applied under the Second Spanish Republic during the Civil War of the 1930s that would bring Franco to power.
From the far right, fascism, as originally implemented by Benito Mussolini in the 1920s in Italy, exploited legitimate fears of the Red Terror unfolding in Russia.
And although Mussolini had often reviled religion, he aligned himself strategically with the Catholic Church.
After the Lateran Treaty of 1929, he made Catholicism the official religion of Italy and recognized Vatican City as an independent nation.
Adolf Hitler likewise paid lip service to Christianity while rejecting religion behind closed doors.
Germany at the time had very high levels of religious identification.
The country was majority Protestant, minority Catholic.
Hitler really wanted religion to be subsumed under the power of the state and of his nationalist racial identity.
But in his early days, he would call himself a Christian in his speeches, and even at times a Catholic.
As with Mussolini, the Vatican signed a treaty with the emerging German Reich in 1933.
And this guaranteed the rights of the church within the country, but in exchange for bishops taking an oath of loyalty to the leader of the regime and agreeing not to work for or in political parties.
This was partly to maintain some influence and role in the society.
It was a compromise that the Vatican made, but it was also partly based in the fear of communist revolutionaries seizing all their assets and then imprisoning or killing them.
Now, at the same time, the Nazis created a theology called positive Christianity that justified Nazism as divinely ordained.
It was taught within something they called the Protestant Reich Church, which sought to unify Protestant denominations behind this political ideology.
And this actually continued Otto von Bismarck's late 19th century anti-Catholic culture kamp, which was a struggle to try to make Protestant Christianity part of the German identity.
Positive Christianity did away with the meek, self-sacrificing failures of a Jewish messiah, emphasizing instead the bold heroic preacher, somehow of Aryan descent, who actually fought against the Jews.
And then they also downplayed the crucifixion, because that's kind of a loser move, right?
The muscular Jesus, the original muscular Jesus.
Yeah.
But by 1937, the Nazis had issued decrees forbidding members of their party from participating in religious organizations.
And they encouraged a kind of deconversion from Christian denominations while still requiring the type of belief in God deemed necessary for loyalty and respect toward authority.
And this non-denominational God carried the more deist overtones of Germanic folk religion.
Hitler initially privileged Catholicism and Protestantism and attempted to eradicate, obviously, Judaism and Jews, but he also banned more fringe religious groups like the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Seventh-day Adventists, and the Baha'i.
And interestingly, he also banned esoteric practices like folk healing, fortune telling, witchcraft, and histrology in these early moves, which contradicts the fact that the elite inner circles of the Nazis, especially Heinrich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg, were actually obsessed with occultism, with the Bhagavad Gita, with social Darwinism and a kind of spiritualized warrior aesthetic of racial purity.
This isn't a direct correlation, but it's interesting that MAGA has Maha to push forward similar pseudoscience, pseudo-religious concepts.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
For the most part, the rest of MAGA brass avoids Kennedy's wellness shtick outside of the broader anti vax talking points.
But Maha, in a sense, has taken up this aesthetic in the administration, even though uh, like I said, a lot of them don't, although Trump has been talking about not getting into heaven recently.
So there is some reflection going on, maybe, maybe post-stroke, as some doctors are speculating.
Yeah, it seems if the pseudoscience is more sort of technical, if you can really sort of pin it on uh the mechanism of the vaccine or Tylenol, then that is something that the brass can accept.
But once we get into like squirting blue juice down your throat or, you know, uh juice cleanses or things like that, then it gets a little bit militant woo.
And I do think, however, Derek, that the correlation is pretty direct.
Like it seems, I think it seems as though a fascist movement needs a militant woo-wing that has to be cordoned off from the top dogs because it's like too volatile, it's too fluid, you know, it's too interpretable.
Uh, maybe the militant woosters provide cover.
Like I'm thinking about how Maha is really necessary to get the Maha mamas to kind of digest the Pete Heggsiths and people like that within the within the upper echelon.
Well, the anti-vax movement traditionally is very religious in 1795 when Edder Edward Jenner was doing his cowpox violations.
Like the people protesting him were specific to you cannot play God with this.
Right.
And that really persisted throughout the history of the anti-vax movement up until Andrew Wakefield, and they really tried to make it science-y at that point.
But the reality is there's still there's still a metaphysical aspect to a lot of the anti-vax.
And we're seeing that with like Mickey Willis regularly talking about Christianity and God.
Uh JP Sears, like a lot of the anti-vaxxers relate what's happening to their Christianity in some way.
So it never really left, they never really shed the vaccine sheds, but the anti-vaxxers haven't shed their religious thinking.
Well, they haven't shed it, but they come back around to it, I suppose, right?
It's like it becomes more effective at a certain point.
And I suppose what do they get tired of arguing over the science?
And so it's easier to default to the metaphysics or something.
I don't know.
I think they have to keep appeasing the coalition.
I mean, I think that they might actually feel that.
But if you watch, as we've tracked for years, some of them move into Christianity.
It just their base is going to be there.
They're going to get more support, which means more clicks and more downstream monetization at some point for the fucking fierce immunity pills that they're selling.
It's also easier content-wise, right?
Yeah.
Like it's just easier to spew, you know, pseudo-religious, you know, Catholic or Tragh dogma than it is to continually make up, do the effort required uh by pseudoscience, which you know, you have to make credible in some way.
Yeah.
If conspiracy theories are easier than pseudoscience made to look like science, then metaphysics is even easier than conspiracy theories.
I think so.
I think it could be.
Yeah.
And the, and you know, the original kind of MAGA mamas were very politically conservative and very caught up in in the moral panics around protecting our kids, right?
Right.
And I think to hold together this coalition that came in under RFK Jr. and under being Maha mamas, uh, you need something a little bit less hardcore right-wing political and a little bit more uh metaphysical appeals to, you know, the the crunchy granola blood and soil, right?
Well, I also think that if, as we know, uh the crunchy demographic that is, you know, sort of centered, you know, infrastructure-wise on yoga studios and wellness clinics and health food stores like that.
I don't think there's enough social infrastructure there uh to really sort of give Maha mamas over time what they need, and maybe churches become more sort of attractive because of that.
You know, there's we, you know, oh, yes, people actually do things in these places.
There's like regular organizational times, it's not just transactional.
We can actually meet in this building and there's something that we're supposed to do, and it's not just like sign up for the next workshop.
Yeah, totally.
I don't think that people sometimes, or that maybe that's better say they underestimate The power of those spaces.
I remember going to Rick Warren's church when I lived in LA just to check it out.
And the campus, it has a child care center.
It has a coffee shop.
It has multiple classrooms.
And when you're talking about living in such as so many people do in this fragmented online culture, creating those spaces that people can congregate and gather and kind of wink wink and you know can feel comfortable in, that currency is tremendous.
Well, exactly.
And I'd like to say too about the social service support of churches large and small, is that they will provide what the sort of neoliberal wellness uh economy will not, right?
It's it's the childcare and the um, you know, community dinners and uh the community outreach stuff that is just not part of what the infrastructure of wellness offers.
Well, they'll they'll provide it, but it's gonna cost thousands of dollars.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
So in a way, it's like it's like they can have their MLM downline stuff in one part of their lives, but if they also have this opportunity to sort of land on two feet and touch grass in what feels like a more traditional and grounded community, I think that's probably really good for them.
Yeah, and Rick Warren really positioned himself brilliantly with regard to this particular demographic, because it was all about what the purpose-driven life, right?
It was all about like being intentional and having a sense of meaning and community and it like overlapped very nicely with the workshop circuit that they were more used to, but actually, as as you're both saying, provided perhaps more support, more resources.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, no, more of a sense of community that wasn't just marketing shtick.
So the origins of Nazism are really interesting too.
I did a bonus episode about this because they were actually influenced very strongly by the original new age syncretist Helena Blavatsky, who created uh uh Theosophy.
Uh, these early movements like Arianism and Aryosophy, which predate Nazism, were always more aligned with pagan, occult Germanic legends, blood and soil returned to nature, and rejection of Christianity altogether as being an imposition of the Jews.
The swastika we know is drawn from Sanskrit sources and the symbol for the SS created by him like uh Heinrich Himmler, I believe, was meant to give ancient vibes, like these are ruins.
Some historians believed that the longer term was actually to eliminate Christianity altogether as the Third Reich ascended to its true glorious vision.
I miss this part about Christianity being the imposition of the Jews.
How do they understand that?
It was that somehow because it emerged out of Judaism that the Jews forced it on.
That's very interesting.
Yeah, this is this is Judaism 2.0, and it doesn't come from our glorious heritage, right?
Yeah.
And I think in the shifts that we see here from any kind of like socially coherent religious practice to, you know, the occult and, you know, uh reading runes and stuff like that is what you mainly eliminate is a sense of like communal responsibility or perhaps shared ethics, right?
It's really about how you're going to investigate your own soul or read your own tarot cards or like figure out your own chakras or something like that.
How are you going to tap into uh a very kind of um primordial sense of power?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so that Christianity is not good for that ultimately.
I think what I'm getting from this, uh, Julian is that like so power uses religion as opportunistically as it can.
Yep.
Um, I mean, I'm thinking about the Kirk funeral that, you know, we see this huge display of Christianity as this throbbing nerve in American fascism.
And anyone can just stroke it in the right way, and that will be political gold.
And, you know, in parallel to ICE provoking violent street reactions, the DHS Twitter feed, I don't know if you guys saw this, but they're pumping out Charlie Kirk-style religious frameworks for violence.
So they've been doing a lot of that.
And but just a couple of examples are, you know, that in one post back in July, they posted an this intimidation porn montage of agents.
They were gearing up in their loadout and they're going on assault with Proverbs 28.1 overlaid on the screen.
The wicked flee when no man pursueth, but the righteous are as bold as a lion.
And then there's this other one where there's a montage shot at night, same kind of thing.
They're gearing up, they're you're going on assault.
And uh Christian rocker Zach Bryan is in the background singing all night.
Revival is the backing track.
So, you know, they they will use anything, uh, you know, but as for any actual commitment to, I don't know, principles or morality or something like that.
That's that's got to be put into the background.
Yeah, this kind of extremist evangelical vibe is something that we definitely did not have back in the in the early days of fascism.
And it's it's another element, right?
Yeah.
The Nazi Catholic Alliance became strained over time because Pope Pius uh the 11th eventually published a famous encyclical in 1937 titled Midbrennin de Sorge, which means with burning concern.
And that document condemned the Nazis' myth of race and blood, their racial and nationalist idolatry.
Those are both quotes.
It also warned against neopaganism and emphasized the importance of the old testament.
You can't just do away with the old testament in your new kind of uh uh Reich church.
And they criticized breaches of that 1933 treat or uh a treaty that Hitler had signed with them.
Uh Midbrenned A Sorge was written in German instead of the usual Latin and then smuggled into the country to be read from Catholic pulpits.
This led the next day to crack down's arrests and the banning of Catholic publications.
But meanwhile, in America, throughout this period, the hugely influential pro-Nazi, anti-Semite, uh uh Mussolini admiring Catholic priest Charles Coughlin was broadcasting fascist propaganda to approximately 30 million listeners, which at that time represented a staggering 25% of the American population.
Yeah, in previous coverage, I tagged him as the template for Bishop Strickland today, the QAnon Pope, who's kind of faded out of the limelight, but I'm sure he'll be rearing back at a certain point.
But like Coughlin, uh, he became as popular with right-wing Protestants as he was with Catholics, actually.
Yeah.
Analysis of Cauchin's broadcasts revealed that he his actual mentions of anything to do with religion were were very low.
Very low compared to his political agitation.
But he had great robes, man.
Now, similar to Italy and Germany, Franco's regime in Spain formed an alliance with the Vatican, signing a concardat, I'm I'm mispronouncing that, corn concordate, never said that word out loud in 1953.
The Vatican seems to have been willing to legitimize the Spanish dictatorship under the rubric of what they called national Catholicism for most of its 36-year-old existence.
And then this broke down somewhat after the liberalizing mood of Vatican II and had deteriorated significantly by the time of Franco's death in 1979.
In all of this, I would argue that the similarities between religious and political authoritarianism can make them either compatible bedfellows or combative rivals.
But in general, more traditionalist nationalist reactions against the internationalism of revolutionary movements make for a better fit with these far-right nationalist regimes.
Left-wing revolutionaries usually seek to break down old power structures, including traditional religion.
And the notable exception here, especially in Latin America, has been liberation theology's synthesis of the social gospel and support for Marxist revolution, though this fragile synthesis has in the past been under siege from both Marxist and Catholic sides.
Yeah, I I wouldn't say siege so much as like an endless unresolvable argument about the primacy of materialism or idealism like Marxists or argue over the insistence on materialism.
And by the book, Catholics will argue that we are more than our material conditions.
So that's in my segment coming up.
And actually, one of the one of the Jesuits who's at the prominent at the ICE protests in Chicago really demonstrates that unending argument in a very embodied way.
Yeah.
I mean, there is that unending argument sort of underneath all of this.
I was thinking too of the clergy who supported revolutionary efforts in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cuba, and then they often were being disapproved of by the Vatican.
And then after the revolution found themselves on the wrong side of the new communist regime, right?
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, very complex unfolding history uh in that.
Yeah.
I would Say that the core typological difference is that the Nash in the history that you're you're covering here is that the nationalist Christian movements that are supportive of fascism, they retain the function of the older colonial church in authorizing power and having to make up conspiracy theories about outsiders and their spiritual value, right?
Like we don't really see the opposite thing emerge, the internationalist church emerge until ironically, those colonized Christians in Latin America and the descendants of uh enslaved people in the U.S. take on the influence of decolonial politics and then bring that back to the Imperial Corps and its churches starting in the 1920s and 30s.
And that drive is about the Christianity of restoring equality and dignity.
It's not about the fascist sort of palingenetic, you know, reinvigoration or resurrection of the nation.
And so it doesn't rely on conspiracism or blood and soil tropes.
And I think this division might also be predictive of how violence against clergy from regime to regime plays out in terms of political alliances.
Like communists will attack and sometimes kill clergy that they view as monarchical or fascist collaborators, and fascists will attack and sometimes kill clergy that they view as in league with revolutionaries or capable of rallying the moral resistance of common people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I think it's important.
All of that sounds right.
Maybe to not downplay the general persecution of religion after communist revolutions.
Because I think it tends to be pretty complete and it's driven more by first principles than a kind of on-the-ground assessment of who are the collaborators and who are not the collaborators, right?
gets swept up in the purge.
*music*
Okay, so we got clerics on the protest lines in Chicago, in Portland, and a bunch of other places.
What are they bringing to the table?
Like what's the content?
What's the rationale?
Most of them are framing their protests through biblical commandments to welcome the stranger, protect the vulnerable, and to love one's neighbor.
Uh, there was a chant in Chicago that they started up: love your neighbor, love your God, save your soul, and quit your jobs, which I thought was pretty snappy.
And aside from the on the ground protests, uh, churches are also bringing lawsuits invoking first and fourth amendments.
The Fourth Amendment is about uh unreasonable search uh and um seizure, I think.
Uh, and they're also bringing lawsuits based on the religious freedom restoration act, because if ICE targets clergy and faith-led demonstrations, the plaintiffs say that constitutes religious discrimination.
And so it's very interesting because I think David Black, who, you know, is famous for now being shot in the head with a pepperball, has readily at his disposal a bunch of people who can send him right to court almost immediately after this happens.
And I think that's one of these sort of organizational strengths that we're talking about when we look at clergy.
I've heard commentators on the history of the constitution recently talk about how people usually perceive that the First Amendment was written to protect the government from religion, but in reality, it was probably more written to protect religion from the government.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'd like to learn more about that.
I don't know the history there.
Um in DC, uh, you know, one of the big things is that black and mainline Protestant churches are demanding that federal immigration authorities stop using church parking lots for enforcement activities, which is totally gross.
Uh so they say that ICE is violating religious sanctuary uh provisions and provoking community members by showing up on Sunday morning and waiting outside to like round people up, which is just so incredible.
I mean, I don't know whether that's worse, that or probably hospitals are worse.
But back in June, there's also a response to the arrest of union leader David Huerta at an ICE operation in LA, uh, at which multiple local clergy joined protests and demanded accountability from ICE.
They advocated for detainees, they attempted to de-escalate tensions by holding hands and singing hymns in front of enforcement lines.
But The most dramatic attack that we've pinged a few times now has been in Chicago.
So this is David Black of First Presbyterian in Woodlawn, leading a prayer vigil outside the Broadview Ice facility on September 25th.
And, you know, there's video circulating of him calling up to a trio of armed ice agents on the roof of the building.
He's got his arms raised.
He, you know, he's looks like he's giving a shout of praise or something like that, or you know, a welcome greeting.
Uh, it's a very church posture.
And then he turns away because I think they're laughing at him.
And one of the agents shoots him on the top of the head with a pepper ball.
Now, I don't know if you guys have played paintball, but basically that's what that is.
Uh it's 68 caliber, but it's filled with pepper.
Uh, it goes at a speed of about 350 feet per second.
500 feet per second is firearms speed, but then the pepper like disperses over like 12 feet or something like that.
And of course, it's like a chemical irritant.
So, along with other clergy and journalists, Black is one of these guys who's a plaintiff in one of these federal lawsuits.
Uh, the suit is very Christian and forgiving in that it doesn't specify monetary damages.
Uh, it's just really seeking an injunction against all ICE policing tactics.
Then we have uh Reverend Hannah Cardin from Chicago's United Methodist and the Reverend Quincy Worthington, uh, also Presbyterian, his churches in the suburbs of Chicago.
Uh, and they describe being hit by pepper balls while praying and advocating for detained immigrants as well at the ICE facilities.
Cardin was targeted while wearing clerical attire and praying aloud for both detainees and ice agents.
I guess they didn't hear her.
Worthington specifically called out the DHS scripture posts on Twitter as an affront to the gospel, and he talked about reading Dietrich Bonhoffer to help cope with the violence seen at protests.
Um, I just posted a few episodes about Bonhoeffer recently, so you can check those out.
And then we have uh from another denomination, Progressive Evangelical, which I'm still trying to learn more about.
This guy named uh Pastor Doug Padgett.
He was the guy in that God and country documentary that aired before the election, if you remember, about you know, the white Christian nationalists who had broken rank with their fellow religionists and they're trying to warn us all about the threats of Christian nationalism.
He was the guy in the blue straw pork pie hat.
He's very distinctive look, uh, no collar on him.
Um Paget runs vote common good, which is a think tank for broadcasting, broadcasting evangelical arguments for progressive policies.
So this is from their mission statement.
They write, we are dedicated to flipping the script, the way we do politics in America.
Flipping the script means changing the narrative with that has undergirded white evangelical and Catholic reflexive support for Republicans who have put other priorities over the common good for a variety of reasons.
So Pagett and his group have launched a rapid response strategy to shield worshippers during ice raids.
So basically they've created a how-to manual for clerics around the country, if you know, they're trying to protect their congregations coming to church.
So they've been distributing uh these materials.
Uh and the bulwark reported that there were 5,000 churches on the mailing list, but I wasn't able to verify that.
But because it sounded like a high number to me, I then looked up how many churches there are estimated to be in the U.S. Derek, you said there were 796 in Portland alone.
Do you want to guess uh guys, how many in the country all together?
Well, okay, so how many um gallons of water fit in the World Trade Center uh famous interview question?
Uh, you know, there's almost 5,000 denominations of Christianity that are accepted in the US or around the world, actually, but each one would have more than a church.
So I would say 100,000.
It's 350 to 400,000 churches in the U.S. That's one church for every thousand human beings.
Wow.
So if you want to talk about an organizing force, that's in, I mean, they're gonna be all over the map, politically their ecumenical differences.
Which brings us to the Catholics.
Uh multiple bishops and diocesan leaders have publicly condemned the raids.
They've issued statements of solidarity with immigrants.
They've instituted practical and pastoral responses to support their congregations.
Uh, the tone was set back in June with a statement from uh Bishop Alberto Royas of the Diocese of San Bernardino.
This is the sixth largest Catholic diocese in the entire country.
Quote, authorities are now seizing brothers and sisters indiscriminately without respect for their right to do process and their dignity as children of God.
He added that the clerics were with the detained in carrying the cross.
Other bishops have given dispensation for people to not show up at Mass on Sunday.
And by the way, that's a big deal because that's a required sacrament.
If you get a dispensation from attending mass, it's usually because you are bedridden.
You are the only caregiver for somebody who's bedridden.
But basically, this means that if you want to maintain your kind of sacramental relationship with the church...
Somebody has to go to your house and deliver communion to you.
So that's actually, it sounds like, oh, you don't have to come.
It sounds like a common sense thing, but it actually has a lot of implications.
Now, this access to the Eucharist or communion was the focal point of a recent protest at the Broadview Ice facility in Chicago when about 200 folks showed up to support priests requesting to deliver communion to detainees and Illinois state troopers turned them back.
And we've got a clip here.
And let me be clear, and woe to me if I do not say it.
the detention of migrants is evil And the deportation of migrants is evil.
This evil is unacceptable in the eyes of our loving God.
Detention and deportation are acts that wound the body of Christ and deny the dignity of God's people.
Okay, so that is David in Zoskis.
He is a priest, he's a Jesuit.
He's standing in front of an altar table that has a big monstrance on it.
So this is the sort of gold trophy-like object that has a little window in it, and then it looks like a sun.
And in the window, they have the wafer that is actually the consecrated host.
And when I was saying earlier, Julian, that like there's this conflict between the material and the ideal.
Here's this guy who's like a big proponent of liberation theology, who is probably going to try to carry one of the most sort of magic-y looking things in, you know, the Catholic uh sort of uh, you know, culture into a jail.
And I think it's his perfect symbol of the conflict between, or at least the tension between these, these these two.
Yeah, and how he's actually navigating it.
He's doing it, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He's a Jesuit, as I said, like Pope Leo, he spent a lot of his early years, ultimately radicalizing years in South America, Honduras specifically.
So he talks about taking trips into the deep mountains to visit parishes in villages where U.S. owned mining companies are hollowing out like burial sites and then dumping cyanide into rivers after they're using it to spray down rocks to try to extract the gold from it.
So real avatar stuff.
He gets radicalized during the time.
And he's the leading Catholic, I would say, liberation theology scholar influencer at this point in America.
He's got a podcast, he's got a social media presence.
Now, if we zoom out farther, in Rome on September the 25th, Leo releases his first exhortation.
It's called Dilexate.
Now, I'm not quite sure what an exhortation is.
I forgot to look it up, but like it's different from in an encyclical, a letter.
Um, it's it's a statement of sort of intent for the world, I think, or this is what I would like to people to reflect on.
Uh, but the lexei means I have loved you, and it's on the subject of loving the poor.
And it's a document that's going to be read by, you know, probably most of the 400,000 plus priests around the world.
And it was started, but left unfinished by Francis.
Like it was literally half done on his desk when the guy died.
And in it, Leo hits uh at the Trump administration as directly as any Pope would be likely to do.
And it's very interesting Because there's all been all this discussion about like, oh, is he going to be a Francis stream pope?
And I think he basically picked up this letter, this diary entry and just completed it, uh, sort of whole cloth.
And I found it quite stirring because it collates all of these scriptural verses on serving the poor, going right back to Jesus' own unhoused status.
You know, foxes have holes, birds have nests, but the son of man has no place to lay his head.
And Leo writes our response to the challenges posed by contemporary migration can be summed up in four verbs: welcome, protect, promote, and integrate.
But I think the most important aspect and maybe surprising aspect of the document is that half of it relies heavily on liberation theology.
It's out in the open.
It's it's just cited.
Wow.
The next brief I'm working on is actually about how for 40 years the CIA has actively tried to undermine liberation theology in central and south America by boosting evangelical missions that focus on the prosperity gospel and sex panic stuff and like, you know, individual bootstraps theology.
And I started that because I was wondering why are there so many evangelicals in Brazil being a Catholic country originally?
Why are they all supporting Bolsonaro?
There's an answer for that, or at least a partial answer.
Now, with Francis being from Argentina and Leo spending decades in Peru, uh, liberation theology was really the water that they swam in.
And you can hear it uh with, you know, just burning in Leo writing that the church must continue to quote, denounce the dictatorship of an economy that kills, and to recognize that while the earnings of the minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by the happy free few.
This imbalance is the result of ideologies that defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation.
Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good to exercise any form of control, a new tyranny is being born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules.
So Leo's an anti-capitalist.
Yeah, I mean, pretty fire writing there and also very, very, very clear.
And I wonder too whether it reads so well because he's writing in English.
Uh I mean, he's a polyglot, but like pretty pretty, pretty good uh um prose there.
So this is coming from the Vatican today, 2025.
And I think it's just an example of how radical uh a change we have is that in the 1960s, Catholic radicals, like the Berrigan brothers, uh, Daniel was the priest, also a Jesuit, you know, there were lots of people like them who engaged with acts of direct action and anti-war resistance.
So the Berigans were part of the Catensville Nine.
And they used to break into government offices and steal draft documentation and then burn it.
And then after they were convicted, you know, they violated the standards of civil disobedience by running.
They'd say went on the lamb.
And that, you know, civil disobedience, you're you're supposed to accept the punishment, but they were like, no, we're not gonna do that.
So the FBI had Daniel Berrigan on their most wanted list for a while, and they eventually caught him and he served two years in prison.
And then part of his protest, of course, was against his own church because of their silence and their apathy in relation to Vietnam.
So he was not favored from above.
While he was in prison, there is no record of any Jesuit visiting him or advocating for him legally.
If you can imagine that, like he grows up in the Society of Jesus, he he goes to jail because he protests the Vietnam war, and nobody from school comes and visits him in prison.
That's how sort of marginalized he is within his own church.
Brave guy.
Yeah.
I would say that David Enzoskis is in some ways more ideologically radical than Daniel Berrigan.
I haven't read all of Bergen's works, but I don't think he's uh quoting so directly or sort of pushing the content of liberation theology out, you know, over the internet.
Certainly, I mean, he wasn't back then anyway, but I don't think he's he's as radical as in Zoska's his.
And there he is standing in his vestments, facing off against ice.
And at this point, at least, Rome is standing behind him.
And I think the litmus test for how the world's, you know, 1.8 billion Catholics are going to orient themselves in relation to Trump will be to see how tacit or explicit that support for Enzoscus is, if that support holds at all.
