Matthew Remsky (30:02)
And you know what I loved about it so much, and I'm really interested in this, I want to know what you guys think is that when a dude like that, that makes a statement like that, he doesn't rely on the typical affects of politics or spiritual influencing that we're familiar with. Right. There is nothing more normie than that guy. There is nothing more sort of mundane, straightforward, you know, uncharismatic about, you know, Bishop Hirschfield is Just a guy. And he was probably just a good student in school. I don't know anything about him, but he strikes me as this kind of person who just attained a position of administrative power within this organization because it's an institution, because it has these sort of stages of verification and vetting and review and so on. He advances, and then it's just part of his sort of. Of office daily work to go and make this statement that, oh, you know, we're maybe at this state of martyrdom and we should probably get our affairs in order. It wasn't, like, overly emotional. It wasn't. I don't know, I think people were impressed who was moving to people because it was so straightforward. But there's something about the Christian cleric not needing charisma in these moments that I find super interesting, and it says something to me about all of the other religious influencers that we followed over the years, is that they. They have. They have to sort of create something in order to, I don't know, substitute for a lack of institutional support maybe, or validity. So a recurrent theme, you know, around here on this podcast, centers on the American pastime of political crisis that provokes religious revivalism. So we have, you know, early Great Awakenings that were grappling with the fallout from the Revolutionary War. And then we have, you know, the industrial explosion. And then when we get to the Civil War and Reconstruction, we have Union and Confederate armies that experience revival waves as well, going in different directions. Black churches become sites of politicized community protection. White evangelicals laid the groundwork for a white Christian nationalism to carry the lost cause forward. And in the Depression era, the emergent social gospel visibly challenged, intensifying exploitation. And then we have Catholic paranoia adding jet fuel to the Red Scare a generation later. And then again with the Reagan era, Satanic panic. So now the crisis is fascism. And historically, religious culture, en masse responds to fascism, I think along a familiar political spectrum from pro fascist to conservative to liberal to radical. So in the 1930s, some religious folks blessed the fascists as messianic saviors from the disorder of the modern world. In 1936, there's this gaggle of Irish bishops who stood on the dock at Galway and blessed with holy water. Irish volunteers sailing off to fight for Franco in Spain under a swastika flag. But then in some other port at the same time, I can't remember the story, like, I can't remember where it was, but Irish volunteers for the brigades included Catholic monks and Protestant vicars. Then there's another faction of religious who I think usually try to preserve the status quo, at least within those church walls, by just continuing on, doing what they do, bypassing what they can, as if nothing new was happening, or because their objective, and this is true of the Vatican in World War II, is basically to preserve influence and assets through neutral neutrality. And Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who I've done a couple of episodes on, identified this kind of moral and political disengagement in the liberal German Lutheran church of the 1930s. And this made him start wondering whether Christians, through apathy or inaction or just self interest, would they wind up running cover for the Nazis. And so then he goes on his journey and he figures out how he doesn't want to do that. And then I think there's always maybe, I don't know, often at least a minority radical flank that sees the political moment as a call to champion whatever revolutionary themes it finds in its heritage and liturgy, or as we were saying before, what it can pull out and develop from those histories. So in the 1960s, there was a guy named Camille Torres Restrepo who was a classic classmate of Gustavo Gutierrez, the founder of liberation theology. And Restrepo leaned into his Marxism so hard that he gave up his collar and he joined guerrilla forces battling the US backed government. And he would say things like, if Jesus were alive today, he would be a guerrilla fighter. And the Catholic who is not a revolutionary is living in mortal sin. Which, if I had heard that when I was like 12 years old, I don't know what I would have done. I guess I'm grateful I didn't because I might have just gone totally off the rails. But I've got three last thoughts. For me, what this moment clarifies is the coherence of religious and political cultures. And I think it seems to me that any denomination you can look for, that you look at, you will probably find within it a radical flank. And my strategic speculation is that finding, understanding and standing with that flank will pull it into more prominence in the denomination. And that's of potential benefit to those in more conservative streams. Like, there's a lot of literature and influencers out there talking about leaving religion altogether. Like, that's the exvangelical story. But I also know there's another group, I don't know how large, and that group upgrades their religion by moving churches or considering new views generally in response to political conditions.
