If conspirituality names the ways religion and spirituality are weaponized to justify power, prospirituality points to religious traditions doing the opposite: grounding resistance, ethical clarity, and solidarity in moments of crisis.
So: is there a growing prospirituality response to fascism, genocide, climate collapse, and AI-driven labor precarity? Matthew argues that yeah, there’s some good news.
In Israel, scripture has been mobilized by political and religious leaders to sacralize violence in Gaza. But there’s also a surge of Jewish religious resistance among U.S. rabbis and Peter Beinart’s On Being Jewish After Gaza sets a new landmark of reckoning.
Mona Haydar’s rapping and chaplaincy models a form of Muslim spirituality that is feminist, anti-genocide, and rooted in mutual aid, while resisting both Islamophobia and liberal domestication.
Then there’s Pope Leo’s escalating critiques of U.S. immigration policy and his renewed emphasis on liberation theology.
Show Notes
Dark Mirror: A Torah View of Revenge, and its Reflection in Israeli Media During Operation Iron Swords
Peter Beinart, “I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State,” The New York Times
Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza by Peter Beinart: 9780593803899 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books
Even if you hate it- I still wrap my hijab — Haydar
Mona Haydar: Ask a Muslim Program Fights Prejudice
Conservative Muslims and Islamophobes Have One Thing in Common: Hating Mona Haydar
Pope Leo replaces New York's Cardinal Dolan in shake-up of US Church | Reuters
New archbishop ‘committed’ to immigration issues, accountability on abuse — and staying a Cubs fan
Pope’s naming of New York archbishop signals continued challenge to Trump on immigration
Pope Leo's new US bishops are critics of Trump's migrant crackdown | Reuters
Pope Leo calls for Venezuela to remain an independent country | Reuters
Pope Leo says Trump administration 'extremely disrespectful' to migrants | Reuters
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Then your yoga teacher says that sex-trafficked children are being sacrificed by satanic liberals.
But it's all okay.
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Every week on Conspirituality Podcast, we explore the fever dreams that suck friends, family, and wellness gurus down the right-wing cult spiral in a search for salvation.
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That's H-A-R-B as in boy, I-N as in Nancy, G-E-R, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Hello, everyone.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
This is Conspirituality, where we investigate the roots and intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
You can follow myself, Derek and Julian, on Blue Sky, and the podcast is on Instagram and threads under its own handle, Conspirituality Pod.
You can also support our Patreon.
And you can also find me personally on YouTube and TikTok at antifascistdad.
So I've long been of the opinion that if there's a conspiratuality zeitgeist out there, there must be a pro-spirituality tendency as well.
If there are religious communities and leaders who justify the status quo and accelerate fascism through fantasy and spiritual bypassing, there will be a response to that.
So my understanding of religion is dialectical in that way.
It's a space of material struggle expressed in metaphysical terms where one movement is always being responded to by another.
So today I'm going to speed run through three positive religion stories from 2025 that I predict will continue to respond to the rise of global fascism as well as threats to labor from AI and climate disaster.
Netanyahu's Apocalyptic Rhetoric00:10:30
I'm combining a number of enormous hyper-object themes here because, as old William James put it, quote, religion is a person's total reaction upon life.
Part 1, Judaism Within days of the October the 7th attack, Israeli leaders, media, and influencers mobilized religious texts and apocalyptic rhetoric to justify military revenge in Gaza.
Netanyahu invoked the biblical command to, quote, blot out Amalek, casting Hamas as a modern incarnation of an ancient enemy to rationalize total destruction.
He framed the war as a metaphysical struggle between the sons of light and the sons of darkness.
Chief rabbi David Lau dedicated artillery shells with verses from Psalm 79 calling for sevenfold revenge for spilled blood.
The very name of the operation, Iron Swords, mirrors language found in certain biblical translations, signaling a biblical war to the Israeli public.
Media, rabbis, and military personnel also circulated the story of the massacre of Shechem by Jacob's sons Simeon and Levi as revenge for what they believed was the rape of their sister Dinah.
But we need some background on this to unpack the ironies.
Jacob had settled with his family in an area around present-day Nablus in the West Bank, so that's irony one, which was then ruled by a local prince named Shechem.
Now, in one Genesis passage, it says that Shechem, enamored of Dinah, abducted her by force.
But then other passengers talk of him clinging to her soul and loving her with tender speech.
And so there's a feminist reading of this encounter as actually a consensual love affair across cultural boundaries, and that the claim of assault is used to justify the collective punishment that follows when Simeon and Levy concoct a ruse and tell Shechem and his men that he can marry their sister if they are all circumcised.
And so they agree to that.
But while they are recovering from the surgery, they are slaughtered by Simeon and Levy and their goons because they're obviously in a weakened state.
So in Israel, after October the 7th, the Hasburgh machine used this story to provide a biblical precedent for disproportionate revenge and deterrence.
Soldiers inscribed graffiti on Gazan edit.
Soldiers inscribed graffiti on Gazan walls, quoting the brothers' justification for the massacre.
Should he have treated our sister like a prostitute?
Whole units incorporated religious imagery and described themselves as war-anointed priests, while commanders said that their sacred work was akin to the deeds of Simeon and Levy.
Now, the second irony here is that IDF soldiers and commanders identifying with Simeon and Levy verges on, you know, blaspheming the original story because Jacob rebukes his sons in Genesis 34, 30 for exactly this behavior.
Quote, And Jacob said to Simeon and Levi, ye have troubled me to make me to stink among the inhabitants of the land, among the Canaanites and the Perizzites, and I being few in number, they shall gather themselves together against me and slay me, and I shall be destroyed, I and my house.
So in fact, the original story presents the actions of Simeon and Levy as a cautionary tale against committing genocide.
So imagine that, a one-to-one disconnection between the point of a story and its usage.
And I personally think it's an example of a kind of movie mindset in which the spectacle of an action scene takes precedence over its moral valence.
I think it's what we see today in the White House social feed with footage of the illegal attack on Caracas running over the anti-Vietnam rock anthem Fortunate Son by Credence Clearwater revival.
Now, in response to this absolute garbage, there has also been an upsurge of Jewish religious resistance to Likud's brand of violent ethno-nationalism.
Some of the strongest anti-war language has come from U.S. rabbis.
Now, some are politically centrist in a kind of all-lives matter mode, like Dania Ruttenberg and Jill Jacobs, who tend to frame the violence as being a matter of mutual responsibility.
And in so doing, they avoid the language of settler colonialism.
But then there are other American rabbis like Alyssa Weiss, who concentrate on the clear power differential, and also Brandt Rosen, who minces no words about the reality of forced starvation and other brutalities in Gaza while framing solidarity with Palestinians as a spiritual obligation.
Wise and Rosen are clear with their use of the term genocide.
But one of the most visible and poignant instances of public grappling with Jewish religious response to the actions of Israel comes from Peter Beinart's new book on being Jewish after Gaza.
It's all the more extraordinary, in my opinion, because of how much and how transparently his positions have changed over the decades.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he was editor of the New Republic and all in on a confident post-Cold War liberalism and U.S. global hegemony.
He backed the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
But by the 2010s, Beinart had repudiated that position and was challenging U.S. militarism and liberal exceptionalism while also emerging, because it's all tied together, as an influential internal critic of mainstream American Zionism.
And that too had a developmental arc.
He initially identified as a liberal Zionist, arguing that the problem with the method of Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories was that it was eroding democratic norms and moral legitimacy.
But that position didn't survive his unusually open self-reflection.
So by the early 2020s, he'd concluded that the two-state solution was no longer viable and publicly endorsed a single democratic state with equal rights for Jews and Palestinians.
And that brings us to his book, in which Beinhardt focuses on Jewish ethics and prophetic responsibility, and he argues that unconditional support for Israeli state power is incompatible with Jewish moral traditions.
He tracks his own ideological shift in tandem with his evolving Jewish identity from a kind of, as he describes it, tribal familial solidarity to spotlighting aspects of Jewish theology that seek universal justice.
And part of this education came through his family's residence in South Africa, where he saw that cultural and ethnic separatism was built on notions of supremacy.
Part of it also came through examining, as Naomi Klein did in Doppelganger, the weaponization of what he calls virtuous victimhood, or the idea that the historical oppression of the Jewish people made the culture impervious to sin and incapable of irrational violence.
One of Beinart's guiding lights has been the Russian-born Yeshayahu Leibovitz, who lived from 1903 to 94, who immigrated to Israel in 1935 to become one of the nation's most formidable and controversial intellectuals.
He's been dubbed by some as the conscience of Israel.
And as an Orthodox Jewish theologian and philosopher of science and a chemist and a moral critic of Jewish state power, his work resonates through to the present day and it's very strong in Beinhart's work.
Now, Beinart's reflections on Leibowitz focus on his deconstructions of Jewish exceptionalism.
Quote, for Leibowitz, it was essential that being chosen by God did not make Jews better than anyone else.
It meant they had a special set of obligations to follow the Torah's commandments, not a special set of virtues.
Unquote.
Finally, Beinard also leans into an ancient Jewish taboo.
Quote, Jewish tradition has a term for investing supreme value in things other than God.
It is Avodazara, commonly translated as idolatry.
It was considered idolatrous to worship a Jewish state to elevate its value beyond that of the human beings under its control.
Part two, Islam.
That is Mona Haidar, a Syrian-American rapper, poet, and activist whose work blends spirituality, feminism, and social justice.
She was born in Saudi Arabia.
She was raised in Flint, Michigan.
And that was a clip from her 2017 viral hit, Hijabi, or rap my hijab.
Challenging Islamophobic Rhetoric00:09:48
And I'll come back to this.
And I want to note off the top that one has to work harder as a white commentator to survey and understand progressive, radical, or revolutionary Muslim thought.
If one is writing in English within reach of American news sources, one has been inundated with decades of Islamophobic rhetoric and framing that relentlessly characterize the Muslim world as uniformly backward and incorrigibly violent or terroristic by nature, as opposed to in rebellious and agency-seeking response to imperialism.
I was in my 50s before I learned that there is a vibrant tradition of Islamic socialism.
Now, often this isn't so much Sam Harris style explicit as the result of liberal or mainstream gatekeeping on information sources.
One recent example I can give is that reporters at Jacobin magazine studied MSNBC's coverage of Gaza over a six-month period in 2024.
One of the things they did is they reviewed the guest list for Morning Joe, which attracts up to a million live viewers every day, including at that time, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and other top Democrat officials who watched the show religiously in the lead up to the 2024 election as part of taking the pulse of current events.
Jacobin found that when it came to segments on Gaza, Joe and Micah did not talk to a single Palestinian guest during that entire six-month period.
But this is changing and quickly.
And one driver is the growing visibility of Muslim student associations joining forces with Jewish anti-Zionist groups in the campus protest efforts that surged to their peak in the spring of 2024.
On my other podcast, I interviewed Muslim organizer Sarah Rasik from the U of T encampments here in Toronto, and she gave a rich description of the ecumenical rituals that gave the protests grounding and momentum.
The Jewish students hosted seders for all campers, and the Muslim students invited their fellows to Friday prayer.
A more globally visible shift for the portrayal of Muslims is the rise of Zorhan Mamdani, whose campaign has really exploded the culture war fiction of a singular Muslim politics.
He embodies a lineage shaped by art, scholarship, anti-colonial struggle, and urban material politics.
Through the films of his mother, Mira Nair, and the scholarship of his father, Mahmoud, Zoran's South Asian and Muslim heritage is dynamic, it's internally complex, it's inseparable from history, power, and class considerations.
I think that for a lot of Americans, those reels of Mamdani walking Manhattan's neighborhoods for grounding housing, transit, healthcare, Gaza, and queer safety provided a new view that Muslim political expression can be plural, modern, and materially grounded, not reducible to religiosity or foreign policy loyalty tests.
Mamdani's refusal to perform the good Muslim script as defined by his father, Mahmoud, in compliance with U.S. Empire or Israeli policy, exposes how culture war discourse erases Muslim agency by treating a poorly understood faith as destiny rather than as a language used for diverse political ends.
Now, back to Mona Haydar.
She's 37.
She got her artistic start performing Arabic poetry at Open Mics as a teen in Flint, where she hung out with the black spoken word community there.
And in 2018, she completed an MA in social ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, studying under the Reverend Dr. James Cohn, who is the founder of Black Liberation Theology.
Now, for those of you who recall my episodes on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Union Theological was where his life and theology got turned around and radicalized back in 1935 and then influenced his entire promotion of the confessing church movement back in Nazi Germany.
Haydar's last decade has focused on public theology, chaplaincy, artistic and cultural outreach projects.
Like she had in 2016, she set up this stand in front of Cambridge campus with her husband, and it was called Ask a Muslim, and she put out coffee and donuts.
And the whole thing was this effort to generate just open conversations between Muslims and non-Muslims.
And this was with her husband.
And it was during a spike of media attention directed at Muslims, prompted by tragedies like the massacre at San Bernardino.
She told People magazine at that time, quote, I'm in deep mourning for the loss of life and violence and for the continued hijacking of my religion.
It's so heartbreaking and furthers our drive to wholeheartedly stand up against any and all acts of violence, no matter the perpetrators.
Our Ask a Muslim project was us standing up to ISIS and their sick and twisted understanding of what Islam teaches.
Anti-violence and pro-justice acts of love are a part of my path and work in the world as a Muslim.
As Americans, we have to stand up to dog whistle politics and the fear-mongering rhetoric that separates us.
Acts of violence make it all the more obvious that those of us who believe in love need to work even harder to counter hate and violence to manifest our more beautiful world.
Uque.
Now, with Robbins, her husband, she went on to film something called The Great American Muslim Road Trip for PBS in 2022.
I haven't watched it yet, but I'm looking forward to it.
Now, by the way, Robbins is a Muslim convert and a jazz drummer.
And he has this whole argument that the reason that black American Muslims, a lot of them converts themselves, rose to prominence in modern jazz because Muslim worship, in his view, is this perpetual balance between rules and improvisation.
So that's very cool.
And I'd like to learn more about that at some point.
Now, across songs and interviews, Haydar presents Islam as a chosen, pluralistic devotion that women can own, but also, contra to fundamentalist streams, can find public moral authority within.
But not because Western liberalism gives her permission.
Quote, even if you hate it, I still wrap my hijab, she sings.
I'm not your oppressed woman.
In 2017, she quipped to Marie Clare, it's really entertaining to me that the music has created this bridge between the alt-right white and conservative Muslim communities.
The alt-right says, she's a terrorist, a mouthpiece for ISIS.
We hate her.
Conservative Muslims say, she's not even Muslim.
Look at this liberal feminist.
She's watering down everything we believe in.
She's pandering to heathens.
We hate her.
Suddenly, these communities have this shared love of hating me.
I think it's fabulous, unquote.
Now, I'm pretty ignorant in this zone, but I know enough to know there are many Muslim influencers and mutual aid groups out there that I could profile with more time and study.
And I intend to keep up with that project.
I'm focusing here on Haydar because three things stood out to me when her page came across my Instagram feed.
And the first thing I saw was a story she posted that I didn't capture, but it was in the week that Trump allowed SNAP benefits to lapse.
And she went onto her feed to ask her almost 100,000 followers who are Muslim to figure out how they could quickly mobilize mosques as food banks, appealing to the notion of Ummah, or the global spiritual nation of mutual aid in the Muslim imaginarium.
From there, I found her pro-Palestine and anti-genocide work.
She's writing, she's singing, she's speaking at protests.
The focus is always on decolonization.
But thirdly, I also found her public chaplaincy sermons to her fellow Muslims filmed in selfie style in her home or her car.
And the subjects range from existential, as in the value of trusting in the goodness of God on the path to social justice, to logistical tips for women who are Muslim, who want to date and they want to, you know, have the most respectful and dignified experience in finding a mate.
But then I noticed something else that was interesting.
In one of her videos, she fielded a question from a viewer about quantum entanglement.
And then she went to her Quran and she found a verse to speak to the interconnection of all things.
Now, on this podcast, this sort of thing usually activates some heavy side eye.
A progressive using science-type terminology to validate a progressive reading of a medieval text for spiritual reasons.
I mean, we know that this has many bad applications.
But this is the first time I've heard New Age tropes providing theological support for decolonial and anti-genocide politics.
Marianne Williamson at times comes close to this, but then she's got this whole emphasis on miracles that just really tips the scale toward the magical.
Pope Leo's Call for Dignity00:04:47
Haydar's theology of interconnectedness is really focused on community bonds.
Part 3.
Pope Leo Finally, and to follow up on some earlier predictions, including notes on his first encyclical Delexite on loving the poor, it's increasingly clear that Pope Leo will be a thorn in the side of the Trump administration for the foreseeable, as he calls on U.S. Catholics, who make up about 20% of the population,
to think carefully about what their faith means and how consistent or hypocritical they are as they evaluate the progress of fascism.
The first direct political intervention he makes comes in September of 2025 in a news scrum outside his residence in Rome, in which he remarked, quote, someone who says I am against abortion, but am in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States, I don't know if that's pro-life, unquote.
In November, he continued with his comments on ICE, asserting that migrants were being treated in a manner that was extremely disrespectful.
He urged Catholics, quote, to work for ways of treating people humanely, treating people with dignity that they have.
In December, Reuters reported that at least 10 of Leo's first 13 U.S. bishop selections had publicly called for better treatment of immigrants or had criticized the administration's approach.
One notable case was his replacement of the conservative Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who led prayers at both Trump inaugurations, with Bishop Ronald Hicks as Archbishop of New York.
Now, Hicks is a fellow Chicagoan of Leo's, but he's a Cubs fan, not a White Sox fan.
But like Leo, Hicks spent years in Latin America, El Salvador, to be precise.
And he's not a social media guy, but he has spoken out about the importance of welcoming migrants and upholding human dignity.
And he endorsed a viral U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops message condemning ICE raids and the climate of fear around immigration enforcement.
Dolan signed the statement as well, but he didn't publicly endorse it.
Now, with regard to Venezuela, Leo grabbed the mic before the fires in Caracas were even out to say, quote, we must not delay in overcoming violence and embarking on paths of justice and peace while guaranteeing the country's sovereignty.
And, quote, the good of the beloved Venezuelan people must prevail over every other consideration, unquote.
Now, he's going to have to be very persuasive, especially in the face of pro-MAGA bishops in the UCCB like Robert Barron of Minnesota, who tweeted out the following roundup of many of my subjects today to his 400,000-plus ex-followers.
Barron, who like Dolan, has lent his voice to many Trump events, is responding to Mamdani's inauguration in the following, quote, There was a line from Zorhan Mamdani's inaugural address yesterday that took my breath away.
He said he intended to replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.
Collectivism, in its various forms, is responsible for the deaths of at least 100 million people in the last century.
By the way, he's quoting from the Black Book of Communism, which is statistically very dodgy.
Many of its theses have been debunked.
But anyway, that's another issue.
He goes on, socialist and communist forms of government around the world today, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, et cetera, are disastrous.
Catholic social teaching has consistently condemned socialism and has embraced the market economy, which people like Meir Mamdani caricature as rugged individualism.
In fact, it is the economic system that is based upon the rights, freedom, and dignity of the human person.
For God's sake, spare me the warmth of collectivism.
Now, a lot of U.S. Catholics agree with Barron, and so we'll have to see whether they remain a majority as American fascism continues to reveal itself and as Pope Leo continues to spotlight liberation theology.
And also, anti-fascists around the world are going to have to continue to grapple with how to effectively organize with a church that still suppresses the reproductive rights of women while excluding women from theological leadership.
Bishop Hirschfeld's Call to Action00:00:55
Now, I want to throw in a last-minute addendum here.
On January 9th at a vigil for René Good, Episcopalian Bishop Rob Hirschfeld of New Hampshire gave a speech in Concord that didn't pull any punches on the responsibilities of clergy in a time of crisis.
And I've asked them to get their affairs in order, to make sure they have their wills written, because it may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us with our bodies to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable.