Pause for joy

When was the last time you were genuinely happy?

You may be a fortunate soul who has no trouble answering this question. You may have led a charmed existence free from trouble, or you may be a natural Zen master, who suffers like everyone else but lets those pains roll off leaving without a mark.

Or it may require some thought. You may have happy memories in the past, but they’ve grown misty with time. It may take an effort of will to recall them.

Or this may be a difficult question. Your life may be scarred by regret. You might strain to recall even an instant of joy.

Either way, I’d suggest that if your life is lacking, you schedule more happiness into it.

It sounds absurd, because you can’t conjure emotions into existence by willpower. But what you can do is create the conditions for happiness. If you put yourself in the right circumstances, the emotion often follows.

We all know this works in the opposite direction. If I’m tired or hungry or stressed, a minor inconvenience can put me in a bad mood. Our emotions are more dictated by circumstance than we might realize. You can use this to make yourself happier as well.

It doesn’t have to be a peak experience. It can be a simple thing that brings you joy: a party with music, a neighborhood cookout, a gathering with friends or family, a walk in nature, an afternoon in a coffee shop with a good book.

Only you can decide what holds meaning for you. But whatever it is, you should make a deliberate effort to have more of it in your life. Happiness will only come if you leave a space for it to show up.

Happiness is what we should be fighting for

In my view, happiness is the only thing a moral system can sensibly be based on. If you accuse me of being a utilitarian, I’ll gladly plead guilty to the charge.

The alternative to utilitarianism is a morality that’s based on either virtues or rules. You can hold up martial courage, or adherence to tradition, or obedience to duty, or honoring your elders, or religious faith, or any of a thousand other qualities as the supreme guiding principle of life.

However, those moral systems all fall short because they have no explanation for why we should prefer one rule, or one virtue, over a different one. Why tradition, rather than innovation? Why sobriety, rather than hedonism? Why the family rather than the state, or vice versa? Why one church rather than another? If there’s no answer to the “why”, all these choices are ultimately arbitrary.

By contrast, when happiness – or well-being, or flourishing, or whatever you choose to call it – is the key to your morality, you have a guide for how to choose among priorities. You go by what produces the best outcome for human beings, rather than maximizing some impersonal measure of goodness, like getting the high score in a video game.

That doesn’t mean morality is always easy. People can argue (and do, at length) over what the rules should be, when we should hold firm and when we should make exceptions. It will always be difficult to judge between mutually exclusive claims. But if we agree on what the goal is, and if we agree that arguments have to be based on evidence that everyone can see for themselves, it is possible to reach consensus. The expanding circle of moral progress across history testifies to this.

However, a utilitarian philosophy comes with an important asterisk. That’s that we have, in a sense, a duty to be happy. If happiness is the desired state for everyone, doesn’t that mean we should try to nurture it in our own lives?

A duty to be happy

In a society built on capitalism, it can be hard to make time for happiness. Our jobs tend to demand everything we’re able to give and then some. Even among those of us who don’t have bosses to report to, there’s the insidious “hustle culture” mentality that we should devote every waking moment to “productive” (read: money-making) pursuits.

There’s also a political angle to unhappiness. In my experience, where conservatives are prone to disastrous overconfidence, atheists and progressives are habitually gloomy and downbeat. That’s because we look at the world and imagine how it could be, and reality comes up short by comparison.

We dream of a world without violence, exploitation, or suffering. Yet those evils persist, and often it seems like they’re multiplying. We hope for change, but those hopes have so often been dashed – whether because the powers that be strangled reform in its cradle, or because people were kept divided and powerless by their worse impulses of bigotry, ignorance and greed.

When fascism and climate change are knocking at the door, it can seem like the only moral response is to redouble your activism. But if the struggle demands all we have, then leisure and happiness can seem like luxuries you can’t afford. At best, they seem like inexcusable selfishness; at worst, a betrayal of your comrades. Some leftists act as if we have a positive duty to be discontented, the better to motivate us toward rejecting the present order and creating a better one. When the world is so bad, how can you be happy, unless you don’t care?

However, I see a problem with this outlook. If we have it so bad, what about previous generations, who lived in even worse poverty with even fewer rights?

When should past generations have been happy?

What if you were born a medieval peasant, legally bound to a feudal lord, in a rigidly stratified society ruled by kings and churches? The common people in those times had none of the rights we take for granted, and starvation was rarely more than a bad harvest away. Or what if you were born into a Jewish family in that same era, when the entire Christian world was viciously antisemitic?

What if you were born a woman, in any of the patriarchal societies of the past and some that still exist today, that grant women far fewer rights and freedoms than men? Or what if you were a Black person in America in almost any era of the past – or for that matter, America today? (If you’re not American, you can substitute whatever minority is in disfavor in your country.)

What would we say to people born in those repressive, unenlightened times? Was it their duty to be miserable their entire lives, hoping that the far future would be better? Or did those generations have a right to find happiness where they could get it?

To my mind, any morality which claims that happiness is an unaffordable luxury isn’t worth advocating for. It’s a morality that, literally, offers us nothing. No one should be expected to sacrifice their entire life for the sake of others – not a capitalist ruling class, and not their descendants in the distant and uncertain future.

As much as struggle is necessary, you can’t build your entire life around it. We need to make room for joy.

We have to work, and we should fight for a better world. But life can’t be all duty and work and obligation. We also need time and space for ourselves. We need music and art, we need love and beauty, we need rest and celebration. Our lives should partake of all the colors in the palette.

On Catholic integralism

A statue of Pope Paul V in a position of domination

[Previous: We will tell you what you want]

We need to talk about Catholic integralism.

In American politics, it’s usually evangelicals – especially so-called “seven mountains” dominionists – who believe that the Christian church should control and run the state, and that everyone else should be second-class citizens or worse. However, Roman Catholics have their equivalent to this:

The basic position of Catholic Integralism is that there are two areas of human life: the spiritual and the temporal, or worldly. Catholic Integralists argue that the spiritual and temporal should be integrated – with the spiritual being the dominant partner. This means that religious values, specifically Christian ones, should guide government policies.

Like evangelical dominionists, Catholic integralists despise secularism. They want to demolish the wall of separation and replace it with an authoritarian order where the state tells people what to believe. The individual freedom to choose your own beliefs would be heavily discouraged, if not punished.

(The classic problem of theocratic societies is which Christian sect would get to run things and make its particular dogmas into law. Integralists tend to be vague on this point, but it’s not hard to guess who they have in mind.)

This isn’t a new belief – far from it. It’s a medieval idea, literally. It’s the position that Pope Boniface VIII expressed in 1302, in the bull Unam sanctum, which arrogantly proclaimed that the Catholic church should rule the world and all political leaders should bow down to the Pope:

Therefore, both are in the power of the Church, namely, the spiritual sword and the material. But indeed, the latter is to be exercised on behalf of the Church; and truly, the former is to be exercised by the Church. The former is of the priest; the latter is by the hand of kings and soldiers, but at the will and sufferance of the priest.

The philosophy of integralism came up in this post about Edgardo Mortara, a nineteenth-century Jewish boy who was kidnapped from his family by the Inquisition and forcibly indoctrinated into Catholicism because a Christian servant secretly baptized him. First Things, a conservative religious journal, published an article – in 2018! – defending the church’s behavior in the Mortara case as right and proper. It all but said outright that the Vatican should still do this kind of thing today, if not for the regrettable inconvenience that the Pope no longer has an army to do his bidding.

As I wrote at the time, First Things‘ stance on the Mortara case is a symptom of the sharp right turn that the Catholic church has taken. Pope Francis notwithstanding, the Vatican is stuck firmly in the past. It hasn’t changed its dogmatic stance on any of the issues that people care about – no contraception, no divorce, no abortion, no women’s equality, no gay rights. As a result, it’s hemorrhaging members by the millions, as young people who reject these cruel and irrational teachings leave the church or never join in the first place.

This is a good thing, to be sure. But it means that the remaining Catholics, both the laity and the clergy, tend to be the most conservative ones. They’re the hardcore traditionalists who want to turn the clock back seven hundred years. And in a shrinking church, they have more influence without liberal members around to counterbalance them:

They often stand out in the pews, with the men in ties and the women sometimes with the lace head coverings that all but disappeared from American churches more than 50 years ago. Often, at least a couple families will arrive with four, five or even more children, signaling their adherence to the church’s ban on contraception, which most American Catholics have long casually ignored.

They attend confession regularly and adhere strictly to church teachings. Many yearn for Masses that echo with medieval traditions – more Latin, more incense, more Gregorian chants.

These traditionalists don’t stop at bringing back Gregorian chants or Latin, of course. Many of them want to restore the medieval worldview, not just its trappings: medieval views on women’s equality, on human rights, on law, and how society should be run.

On the national level, conservatives increasingly dominate the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference and the Catholic intellectual world. They include everyone from the philanthropist founder of Domino’s Pizza to six of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices.

Then there’s the priesthood.

Young priests driven by liberal politics and progressive theology, so common in the 1960s and 70s, have “all but vanished,” said a 2023 report from The Catholic Project at Catholic University, based on a survey of more than 3,500 priests.

You can already see the influence of the integralist right on American bishops. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is far-right-wing, so much so that Pope Francis fired one of them last year for insubordination. (Conservatives are all in favor of hierarchy until they disagree with the guy in charge.)

It’s also influencing American politics. Kevin Roberts, one of the architects of Project 2025, is Catholic and has close ties to the reactionary Catholic group Opus Dei. Roberts’ dream of America as a libertarian theocracy where Christian morality is enforced on everyone is the end goal of integralism. J.D. Vance has also argued for integralist ideas, including at a 2022 conference at Franciscan University of Steubenville.

It’s not likely that these wannabe theocrats will realize their medieval dream. Their numbers are dwindling and their goals are simply too unpopular. In all likelihood, the only thing they’ll achieve is to accelerate the decline of the Catholic church. But they can still do damage in the meantime, with politicians and Supreme Court justices in their back pocket.

That’s why sunlight is still the best disinfectant. When Project 2025 was publicized, the voting public was appalled by its noxious ideas, and even Donald Trump felt pressure to publicly back away from it. The same way, the more that ordinary people know about Catholic integralists and other theocrats, the more prepared they’ll be to stand up against religious encroachment on their rights.

Image credit: Herbert Frank via Flickr; released under CC BY 2.0 license

New on OnlySky: The future is a prisoner’s dilemma

I have a new column today on OnlySky. It’s about why progressive change is so difficult to achieve, why grand utopian dreams often come to grief, and why people stubbornly persist in lives of misery and dissatisfaction when a better solution is right in front of them.

All these evils are tied together by the moral framework called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It’s the fear that motivates people to resist change – even change they’d benefit from – because they fear someone else will take a bigger piece of the pie.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece:

Humans are naturally conservative. Small c.

Not in the sense of a political ideology, but of an inclination. We Homo sapiens are contradictory creatures. We dream of change, but we also fear it. We’re full of hopes and wishes for the future, but all too often, instead of buckling down and doing the work to make those dreams a reality, we fall into a rut of doing what’s familiar and comfortable. Everyone’s familiar with the lies we tell ourselves: “I’ll quit tomorrow,” “I’ll make a New Year’s Resolution to go to the gym more,” “When I get that next promotion, I’ll really turn my life around.”

What’s true of individuals is also true of society as a whole. Everyone wants a better world for themselves and for their children. And it’s not as if we don’t know what we’d need to do to make this happen. The solutions to most of our problems aren’t mysterious.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

Uncle Vladimir wants you

Conservatives love Russia.

That was true well before the invasion of Ukraine. Russia under Putin has spent years positioning itself as a defender of traditional Christian values, a bulwark against the weak and decadent West, and a pure white ethnostate.

This 2017 report from Right Wing Watch shows how both white supremacists and the religious right noticed what Putin was doing, and liked it:

For Richard Spencer, the coiner of the term “Alt-Right” and a leader of the emerging white nationalist faction it represents, Russia is both the “sole” and “most powerful white power in the world.” Matthew Heimbach, head of the white nationalist Traditionalist Worker Party—and someone who, like Spencer, desires the creation of a whites-only nation-state within the U.S.—believes Russian President Vladimir Putin is the “leader of the free world,” one who has helped morph Russia into an “axis for nationalists.” Harold Covington, the white supremacist head of the secessionist Northwest Front, recently described Russia as the “last great White empire.” And former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard David Duke has said he believes Russia holds the “key to white survival.”

…Since he returned to the presidency in 2012, Putin has made a concerted effort to establish his country as a center for religious, especially Christian, conservatives throughout the world, most notably for those who oppose any legal or public support for same-sex relationships. This shift has taken the form of legislation that prioritizes the interests of the Russian Orthodox Church, that rolls back abortion rights, and that sidelines attempts within the LGBT community to obtain any kind of societal acceptance.

While they’ve praised Putin on many occasions, most American conservatives had to admire Russia from a distance. Those few who tried to move there have had a bad time, largely because of the language barrier and Russian bureaucracy.

But those days may soon be over. Good news for anti-woke Western conservatives: Russia’s state-owned news agency, TASS, has announced that Putin is throwing open the doors.

Russia offers safe haven for people trying to escape Western liberal ideals

…Moscow will provide assistance to any foreigners who want to escape the neoliberal ideals being put forward in their countries and move to Russia, where traditional values reign supreme, according to a decree signed by President Vladimir Putin.

Under the document, such foreign nationals will have the right to apply for temporary residence in Russia “outside the quota approved by the Russian government and without providing documents confirming their knowledge of the Russian language, Russian history and basic laws.”

Some American conservatives are ecstatic. Alex Jones, for example, was overjoyed:

BREAKING: PUTIN JUST DROPPED A BOMBSHELL DECREE—INVITING PEOPLE FROM ACROSS THE GLOBE WHO ARE FED UP WITH THE GLOBALIST, NEOLIBERAL NIGHTMARE TO SEEK SANCTUARY IN TRADITIONAL RUSSIA!

This new decree blows the lid off the establishment’s agenda, letting freedom-loving folks bypass the usual bureaucratic nonsense like language tests or history exams. If you’re ready to reject the insane policies of your home countries that push these destructive, anti-human, neoliberal agendas, Russia is rolling out the red carpet!

The Russian government is about to compile a list of countries poisoning minds with these twisted ideals, and the Foreign Ministry is gearing up to issue visas to true patriots as soon as September! It’s time to stand up for spiritual and moral values!

Yep – if you love freedom, move to Russia! Forget those twisted, neoliberal ideals like “the right to protest” and “the right to oppose the government” and “the right to practice your own religion“. Russia has something much better: the freedom to agree with the Great Leader about everything at all times. And if you disagree, you’re free to “mysteriously” die by falling out a window!

Could Alex Jones be serious about moving? If so, how many others feel the same way? Are we going to see an exodus of religious-right figures packing their bags and buying one-way tickets to Moscow, fleeing Western liberalism for Putin’s warm embrace?

If they really want to go, I won’t stand in their way. (Insert Willy Wonka meme here.) However, for the sake of my own conscience, there’s one thing I’d encourage them to consider first.

Putin’s three-day invasion of Ukraine is dragging on into its third year, and Russia is reeling from a casualty toll that now surpasses 600,000 dead and wounded. Russian soldiers are dying in the trenches every day, getting blown up by Ukrainian drones and artillery, or being sent to their deaths in human-wave assaults. There’s no doubt that Putin desperately needs more bodies to fight his war. Where better to obtain them than to throw open the doors to willing Western dupes? Entice them to come, and once they’re settled in, inform them that they’re subject to conscription.

The fate of Russell Bentley is instructive. He was a Texan who admired Vladimir Putin and believed Russian propaganda about how Ukraine was under the thumb of Nazis. He emigrated to Russia and joined the Russian army to fight in Ukraine. Then he had a falling out with his fellow soldiers (for reasons unclear, although I’ve seen reports suggesting they suspected him of being an American spy). According to Ukraine war journalist ChrisO, they arrested him and tortured him to death.

Any conservative who’s tempted by Putin’s offer isn’t likely to listen to me. Still, if you’re thinking of moving to Russia, you’d better ask yourself: is there even the slightest possibility that Putin isn’t doing this out of altruism, but because he needs fresh meat for the grinder? Are you willing to risk that for yourselves – and your kids?

We will tell you what you want

If you want to understand Project 2025, the Republican plan to rewrite the DNA of America, you should start with Kevin Roberts.

Roberts is president of the conservative Heritage Foundation and one of the creators of Project 2025. He’s written a book, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America (with a foreword by J.D. Vance) in which he describes the world that would result from Project 2025’s policies.

Alas, you can’t read it yet. Roberts’ book was originally set for publication in September, but for some inexplicable reason, its release was delayed until just after the 2024 election.

However, some reviewers got their hands on it early, like Colin Dickey at the New Republic. His review is worth reading in full to get a sense of how radical and regressive the modern right has become.

According to the review, Roberts and Project 2025 want to destroy, basically, all of modern society. They want to scrap all institutions of higher education, the entire federal government, the public school system, unions, corporations, and most nonprofit foundations.

In place of these things, they want to turn back the clock to a semi-imaginary era – half colonial frontier, half medieval theocracy – where Christianity reigned supreme, where women were broodmares with no rights, where families worked the land or labored in sweatshops while pumping out huge numbers of kids, where all law is vigilante justice enforced by whoever can gather the biggest armed mob, and where the role of government is a bully pulpit telling people to go to church.

This isn’t an exaggeration for emphasis. He says all this in the book. For example, here’s Roberts saying we need to get rid of religious freedom, which is “offensive to Christian morals”, and establish a society where Christian belief overrides other rights:

A man’s religious tradition is a matter of his conscience, but that we have a faithful people is a matter of public concern. Accordingly, the state must not discriminate against religious organizations in government programs, and freedom of religion should take precedence over the enforcement of other rights. Policies that encourage religious observance, such as Sabbath laws and voucher programs that include religious schools, should be encouraged. American society is rooted in the Christian faith—certainly public institutions should not establish anything offensive to Christian morals under the guise of “religious freedom” or “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Here’s him saying that we should ban divorce and contraception, coerce people to marry early, and then coerce them into having as many children as possible, regardless of their willingness to do so or their ability to care for them:

“Men and women,” he explains, “should marry (and do so younger than most do today). They should marry for life and should bring children into the world (more than most do today).”

“The birth control pill,” he tells us, “was the product of a decades-long research agenda paid for by the Rockefeller Foundation and other eugenicist and population control-oriented groups.” These eugenicist-sponsored technologies, Roberts believes, are the true culprits, for they “shift norms, incentives, and choices, often invisibly and involuntarily,” making us think we want something that we in fact don’t.

…But Roberts admits these solutions won’t be enough to fight the anti-natalist cabal; the biggest headwind against fertility, he notes, “is not this or that government policy but prosperity itself: the wealthier a society is, the greater the opportunity cost involved in raising kids.” Having children is thus “not an economical calculation but an act of faith and love.” Which is to say, not only should you be having more kids, but you should be prepared to go into poverty to do so…

The biggest problem, from Roberts’ point of view, is that nobody wants any of this. Americans are increasingly secular and nonreligious. Americans overwhelmingly support contraception, IVF, abortion and other reproductive technologies that are anathema to the religious right. Americans marry later, have fewer children, and desire comfort and prosperity over shotgun weddings, overcrowded hovels, and lives of manual labor and poverty.

All the ideas Roberts proposes are massively unpopular among everyone outside of a tiny minority of religious fundamentalists. And he knows this, which is, of course, why the publication of this book was delayed until after the election. He doesn’t want to tip his hand too early, lest these unpopular ideas become known to voters and swing the election against Republicans who want to implement them.

The problem he can’t get around is that we live in a democracy. Roberts isn’t ready (yet) to call for burning the Constitution and installing a king who rules by absolute decree. He still has to explain how these ideas will triumph despite their being electoral poison.

To square this circle, his preferred solution is a massive, shadowy, world-girdling conspiracy (he calls it the “Uniparty”) whose only purpose is to trick people into voting for these things. This is intolerable to him, because in Kevin Roberts’ mind, only Kevin Roberts is entitled to decide on other people’s behalf what they really want. And once Republicans take over the country, demolish every legal and cultural institution established in the last hundred years, and force people to live the way Project 2025 wants them to live, everyone will be grateful.

If this sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same argument as Ayn Rand saying that only Randian protagonists have dreams, feelings or beliefs, and everyone else is a vacant flesh-suit mindlessly echoing words they’ve heard elsewhere. It’s Christian evangelists declaring that no non-Christian is sincere in their beliefs because everyone feels the Holy Spirit in their hearts. It’s the fallback of every religious fundamentalist who, having failed to persuade anyone, simply declares that everyone already agrees with me, and it’s only the wickedness of sin that keeps them from admitting it.

As the review says:

Roberts is convinced that the broad unpopularity of many of his proposals is due to conspiracy. The decadent tone and posturing of Dawn’s Early Light, with its refusal to understand what Americans want and what gives them value in life, leads him straight to paranoia. Having watched culture slip away from his draconian values, Roberts fishes for an endless series of shadowy cabals to explain this state of affairs. He opens his book hinting at “a trillion-dollar conspiracy against nature”; he decries birth control as a eugenicist plot and claims “our current educational environment is … the result of a hundred years of plotting by progressives who want to create generations of obedient drones.”

When it’s just a ranting street-corner preacher, this paranoia is comical. It’s an implicit admission of defeat. It says that they can’t convince anyone and they’ve given up trying, so spite is all they have left.

When this paranoid conspiracy mindset is espoused by those in power, it’s less amusing. It leads straight to the conclusion that democracy doesn’t work, because people don’t know what they want, so they need to be coerced and brainwashed for their own good. And if your opponents aren’t ordinary, decent people with their own sincerely held views, but the fingers of a sinister worldwide conspiracy, then no measure is too extreme to stop them.

There’s a straight line connecting this mindset to Republican election denial and election theft, to the January 6 insurrection, and all their unveiled threats of civil war and bloodshed. (Roberts has also said that “a second American revolution is coming” which “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”)

Democracy, to the religious right, isn’t valuable in itself but only a means to an end: the end of them being in charge and getting to do what they want. If it doesn’t give them that outcome, they’re willing to throw it overboard and impose their views at gunpoint. They’ve said so many times, and this is only the latest example. They’re eager to be dictators if they get the chance.

Totally not a cult

Evangelical Christians are having a very good and normal one in 2024. For example, here’s one who wrote a worship song about Donald Trump:

The song, titled “The Chosen One”, was written by Christian musician Natasha Owens. She released it in June, after a New York jury convicted Trump of 34 felonies. The video features his mug shot and video clips of him walking into court, interspersed with shots of the Statue of Liberty, cheering crowds and soldiers saluting. The lyrics say that he’s “imperfect” and “gets in trouble bigly”, but he’s been appointed by God as a “warrior” to lead and save America.

Lest you think it seems a little, well, blasphemous, to worship Donald Trump in song – don’t worry! The lyrics reassure listeners that Trump isn’t divine. He’s just God’s chosen one on Earth. Totally different!

I have to emphasize, this isn’t satire or parody. It’s in dead earnest. Natasha Owens isn’t a comedian or a leftist, she’s a successful evangelical Christian musician who’s recorded several albums of praise and worship songs. She says that she got into music to heal her grief after her father accidentally killed himself while cleaning his gun (yes, this is 100% true).

After listening to this song, if you can stomach it, you may have questions. For example, if Trump is God’s chosen one and there “ain’t no stopping what the Lord’s begun”… why did he lose in 2020?

Well, no worries, Owens has you covered. She has another song with the self-explanatory title “Trump Won”, explaining that Trump did win, including California and New York, but the election was stolen by Democrats. (So why did God permit that to happen? Sorry, you only get to ask one follow-up question.)

You might think, from a believer’s standpoint, that it’s risky to declare on God’s behalf who the chosen one is. After all, the Bible is famous for insisting that God’s ways are not our ways and that humans can’t grasp the divine plan. To appoint yourself God’s spokesperson, informing everyone else what he wants and what he’s planning, seems more than a little arrogant. After all, if you’re wrong (as many “prophets” were in 2020), you not only look foolish, you risk incurring the punishment that the Bible decrees for false prophets. You would think a Christian wouldn’t want to chance that.

However, if there was a time when American Christians considered humility a virtue, it’s long past. They’ve decided that God isn’t speaking loudly enough, so they’re going to do it on his behalf. As with the Jericho March, where one speaker after another announced that God personally revealed his will to them, they’ve crowned themselves infallible messengers proclaiming God’s wishes to the rest of us.

I’m an atheist, but if I were religious, I’d say that all this worshipful iconography Christians have constructed around Trump looks just like idolatry, which the Bible emphatically warns against.

After all, Owens’ song contains a perfect example of the-lady-doth-protest-too-much denial. She includes the lyric “I’m not saying / He’s something divine”. Why would she write that unless she knew other people were saying that, or might reasonably interpret her as saying that? Do Christians normally feel the need to add a disclaimer that their leaders aren’t God incarnate?

It’s not even the first time the religious right has done something like this. In 2021, CPAC unveiled a literal golden idol of Trump to cheers and applause. At least one person was photographed bowing down to it.

Evangelical Christians have constructed a cult of personality around Trump in the most literal sense. This greedy, lying, racist, pussy-grabbing felon has become the focal point of the religious right’s zealous worship and devotion. They’ve literally deified him, in the same way ancient people believed that their kings were either appointed by the gods to rule, or else were gods themselves.

But whether they realize it or not, they’re facing a problem: the subject of their worship isn’t a conveniently ethereal messiah, but an elderly, out-of-shape man. When he dies, and he will die some day, they’re going to go into a tailspin. How do you cope when God’s chosen one dies a failure, without accomplishing all the things you believed he’d do?

When that time comes, it’s going to be a full-blown theological crisis. Just as with other failed messiahs through history, I won’t be surprised if Christians cope by inventing a new mythology that Trump sacrificed himself for the sins of the world.

Ironically, we could be witnessing the birth of a new religion in real time. In a thousand years, if Christianity is still around, it may have mutated into a messianic religion of Trumpism. We might well see a certain orange tycoon shoehorned into the Trinity; or written into the Bible with his own set of gospels that bear only a tenuous resemblance, if any, to the actual events of history; or made the subject of prophecies that he’ll return to earth one day.

(Imagine the apologists: “We know for a fact that Donald Trump miraculously healed COVID using blessed bleach, and multiplied Trump steaks and paper towels at his rallies, because we have five hundred testimonies from people who saw it happen! If they had been lying, there would have been critics who would have pointed it out!”)

It’s probably a tribute the man would enjoy. But it will be proof of the moral decay and terminal collapse of Christianity.

Who’s afraid of being weird?

I’m weird. Statistically, if you’re reading this, you are too.

As an atheist, a secular humanist and a socialist, I’m aware that my philosophical and political stances aren’t shared by the majority of Americans. And that’s fine with me.

In every era of history, conventional wisdom was rife with prejudices and fallacies. It was the weirdos – people with the courage to stand apart from the crowd – who deserve credit for all the progress humanity has made. I aspire to follow the example of those brave nonconformists. I want to believe what’s true, not what’s popular.

Of course, I hope to persuade everyone else, but I’m realistic about the chances of that. If it doesn’t happen in my lifetime, I have the consolation that I was true to myself. If other people view me as weird, so be it.

Not only am I weird, I’m also WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. Again, there’s nothing wrong with that, but it puts me in a minority among the world population. (That acronym was coined to remind university researchers that college students, the most common pool of research subjects, aren’t representative of human diversity.)

I’d be a hypocrite if I said it was inherently shameful to be weird. I’m not afraid to stand up for my convictions, and I think more people should do likewise.

That said, I’m delighted by Democratic VP nominee Tim Walz, who came up with one of the most viral lines of 2024:

“These are weird people on the other side. They want to take books away. They want to be in your exam room,” Walz said in a TV interview last month.

…Walz went back to the reference at his first rally Tuesday with Vice President Kamala Harris, saying of Republicans: “These guys are creepy and yes, just weird as hell.”

This line of attack has gained traction among Democrats, especially because Republicans really, really hate it:

“Well, they’re the weird ones,” the former president insisted Thursday on a conservative talk radio show. “And if you’ve ever seen her, with the laugh, and everything else, that’s a weird deal going on there. They’re the weird ones. Nobody’s ever called me weird. I’m a lot of things, but weird I’m not… And he’s not either, I will tell you. J.D. is not at all. They are.”

“We’re actually just the opposite,” he said, after a string of complaints about the media covering the talking point. “We’re right down the middle.”

I’m in favor of anything that keeps America from falling to fascism, but there’s a tension here. How can we embrace the “Republicans are weird” message without sending the message that nonconformity is a bad thing?

The resolution to this, I’d argue, is that “weird” says something about where you stand relative to everyone else. One side has made our peace with that. The other… hasn’t.

We’re not weird, please don’t put in the newspaper that we’re weird

The reason why “weird” so stings the religious right is because they’ve gone to great lengths to convince themselves that they’re not weird. Just think of how they’ve have described themselves through the decades: the silent majority, the Moral Majority, the real America. They very badly want to believe that they’re the normal, respectable ones and everyone else is a gang of freaks and weirdos. All their self-conceptions rest on this conceit.

The reality is very much the opposite. The religious right’s core beliefs aren’t normal, ordinary, or shared by the majority of people.

Whether it’s their creepy obsession with policing everyone’s sex lives and reproductive choices (most people are willing to live and let live); or their insistence on total obedience to a long list of dogmas (most people aren’t so ideologically rigid); or their belief that God’s will is the only definition of right and wrong (most people think human well-being and happiness are on the list somewhere too); or their morality rooted in might-makes-right, strict hierarchy and submission to authority (most people value equality and democracy); or their economics rooted in laissez-faire libertarianism and unchecked power for the rich (most people think some regulation is a good thing)… in every case, the religious right is out of the mainstream. Often well out of it.

But they don’t want to admit this to themselves. They cling to the belief that these are normal ways of thinking and therefore can’t be wrong. Often, religious proselytizers go so far as to insist that everyone believes what they believe, whether they admit it or not.

Being called “weird” isn’t a trivial thing for the religious right. In fact, it’s deeply threatening. It strikes at the heart of their self-flattering illusion. It says they’re not as normal or mainstream as they tell themselves they are.

Religious conservatives want conformity to work in their favor. Their chief argument is, “You should believe this because it’s what normal people believe.” But if their beliefs aren’t normal, then they can’t rely on that. They’d have to defend their ideas on their own merits and not merely as the default. That’s turf the GOP doesn’t want to fight on.

Being weird isn’t necessarily a bad thing for those who embrace it. If your ideas stand up to rational scrutiny, if they’re good ideas, then you can defend them on those grounds – whether other people view them as weird or not.

But if your ideas aren’t founded in reason, then the only argument left is conformity. Do this because it’s what we all do, because it’s what we’ve always done, because it’s what people are supposed to do. That’s the strategy the religious right has always relied on. Without it, they have nothing left. That’s why they’re terrified of being viewed as the weirdos they are.

UK riots: Social media (and Elon Musk) stoke the flames of racist violence

The United States may have the most gun massacres, but we’re not the only nation prone to random murderous violence. Last month in England, there was a horrific mass stabbing at a children’s dance studio. A knife-wielding assailant killed three girls and injured ten more people, for motives yet unknown.

The attacker, who was arrested at the scene, is a 17-year-old British citizen of Rwandan descent. He was born in the U.K, and based on later reporting, his family are Christians.

However, because the suspect is a minor, U.K. law initially prevented media outlets from publishing his identity. In the turmoil of rage and grief, far-right racists stepped into the information void, spreading inflammatory lies claiming that the killer was a recently arrived Muslim immigrant:

Within hours of the attack, the supposed name of the attacker was posted on social media by a channel called @artemisfornow, which has 44k followers. The name they posted was “Ali Al-Shakati”.

…an account called Europe Invasion, known to publish Islamophobic and anti-immigrant content, posted on X, formerly Twitter, claiming that the suspect was alleged to be a Muslim immigrant.

…It was followed by additional spurious claims that the suspect had crossed the English Channel on a small boat, which were also entirely untrue.

These lying posts were viewed millions of times. They were boosted by right-wing influencers, especially Andrew Tate and British fascist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a.k.a. Tommy Robinson, and they took off like the spark igniting a wildfire. In the following days, right-wing thugs erupted in anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim riots across the country.

In Southport, where the stabbings happened, a vigil for the victims was hijacked by far-right groups and broke out in violence. The rioters surrounded a mosque, throwing bottles and trash cans, while the terrified staff barricaded themselves inside. They clashed with police and set a police van on fire.

In two cities, right-wing rioters tried to burn down two hotels housing asylum seekers. There were street attacks on people of color and harrowing video of white supremacists setting up “checkpoints” to hunt down immigrants:

As unrest grips the nation, footage that has been widely shared across social media shows several white men in Middlesbrough screening vehicle drivers’ ethnicity.

In one clip, men stop a a grey car at an intersection and look through the window, before another man wearing a red t-shirt beckons the driver forward.

“Are you white? Are you English?” the same man can be heard saying, while pointing at drivers.

In Liverpool, rioting thugs burned a library and tried to prevent firefighters from putting it out.

However, the anti-immigrant right didn’t have it all their own way. After the initial spasm of violence, hundreds of rioters were arrested, and further gatherings fizzled out. In cities all across the U.K., pro-immigrant groups gathered for counter-protests that outnumbered the rioters and protected establishments they sought to target:

But by the early evening, thousands of counter-protesters had gathered at more than a dozen cities to guard the immigration centers and prevent them being targeted by the far right.

“There are many, many more of us than you,” crowds chanted at anti-racist demonstrations across the country, bolstered by a markedly stronger police presence than over the weekend, and with virtually no sign of any far-right supporters.

Mob mentality doesn’t have a single instigator, but to prevent future outbreaks of violence, we should analyze how these riots started and who deserves the greatest share of the blame. How should we think about the causes?

It’s tempting to blame the riots on social media. On the surface, there’s a strong case for doing exactly that. This almost certainly wouldn’t have happened if not for racists using platforms like Twitter to peddle disinformation and fan the flames of hate. The speed with which the lies spread outran all possible correction, whipping xenophobes and bigots into a violent frenzy. By the time the U.K. legal system recognized the harm of secrecy and allowed the suspect’s identity to be published, it was much too late.

However, I wonder if putting the blame on social media is too easy. It’s not as if we never had race riots or lynch mobs before Twitter. People have always been willing – far too willing – to lash out against disfavored minority groups at the merest whisper of an excuse.

The explosive spread of misinformation is a recurring feature of history in every era. The Roman poet Virgil wrote, “Rumor, than whom no evil thing is faster,” and Jonathan Swift said in 1710, “Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it; so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale has had its effect.”

After the Labour Party’s historic victory in this year’s elections, the British far right is smarting. It may be that they were eager for an excuse to lash out. If the stabbing hadn’t happened, they might have tried something like this eventually anyway. The specific cause might have been different, but the result would be the same.

On the other hand, it’s undeniable that social media has been an accelerant to mob violence, like gasoline poured on a blaze. It’s never been so easy for racists to spread inflammatory rumors, to target naive people for recruitment, or to find each other, coordinate and organize.

Elon Musk in particular deserves a large share of the blame. Under his ownership, Twitter has devolved into a cesspool of lies and hate. He scrapped the trust and safety team and lifted bans on a horde of racist, misogynist, and generally hateful characters like Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate. He’s rolled out the welcome mat for neo-Nazi, antisemitic and white nationalist content.

Even worse, Musk has personally sided with the instigators of violence and disorder in the U.K. He’s echoed rioters’ claims that the police were treating them unfairly.

He responded to a tweet falsely blaming the riots on “mass migration and open borders” with the words: “Civil war is inevitable.” As one U.K. counter-protester put it, “The richest man in the world is stirring the pot for a race war.”

As long as human nature is what it is, there’s no single solution to this. Racists will always have a motive to lie and to spread toxic misinformation, and other racists will always be eager to believe those lies. There’s no technological fix for the problem of people being eager participants in their own deception. No social media site, however competently run, can squash the spread of poisonous rumors or screen out all harmful falsehood.

But that doesn’t excuse these platforms from the responsibility of even trying. That’s where we can assign blame, because for the most part, they’ve given up trying to do anything about it. And some of the world’s biggest tech giants are actively doing the opposite, stoking the coals of hate whether for profit or just to advance their own twisted ideologies.

The church of childless cat ladies

As we all know by now, Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance is a natalist. Like many of his religious-right comrades, he believes that people should be coerced to have more kids for their own good.

It’s one thing to believe that falling birth rates are a crisis and urge people to have more children. That’s not a viewpoint I agree with, but I can understand why others believe it.

However, Vance goes much further than that.

Judging by his public statements, Vance resents childless people. He dismisses them as “miserable cat ladies”. He looks down on them and regards them as mentally unhealthy, miserable, sociopathic, deranged. He’s used all these epithets and more:

“We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made,” Vance said. “And so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

“You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” he went on. “And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”

(I can’t let that whopper pass without comment: Kamala Harris does have children. She’s a stepparent to two children.

But in Vance’s bigoted reckoning, stepchildren, adopted children, foster children, children conceived by IVF or surrogacy, and all other kinds of blended families don’t count and shouldn’t exist. The only arrangement that should exist is the one that comes naturally: children dying young in huge numbers powerful men having polygamous harems conquering armies forcibly taking wives from the subjugated population monogamous heterosexual couples having biological children, as God intended.)

This hostile attitude isn’t a one-off, but something Vance has emphasized on multiple occasions:

“There are just these basic cadences of life that I think are really powerful and really valuable when you have kids in your life,” Vance said in November 2020 on a conservative podcast. “And the fact that so many people, especially in America’s leadership class, just don’t have that in their lives.”

“You know, I worry that it makes people more sociopathic and ultimately our whole country a little bit less, less mentally stable,” he said. “And of course, you talk about going on Twitter – final point I’ll make is you go on Twitter and almost always the people who are most deranged and most psychotic are people who don’t have kids at home.”

And again:

“Did you see me on FOX Primetime recently? I needed to speak DIRECTLY to patriots like you about the serious issue of radical childless leaders in this country,” reads one Vance fundraising email from August 2021. “We can’t have people who don’t have a direct stake in this country making our most important decisions.

“We’ve allowed ourselves to be dominated by childless sociopaths – they’re invested in NOTHING because they’re not invested in this country’s children. Fighting back won’t be easy – our childless opponents have a lot of free time. That’s why I need YOU to stand with me.”

Another fundraising email reads, “Our country is basically run by childless Democrats who are miserable in their own lives and want to make the rest of the country miserable too… What I want to know is: why have we turned our country over to people who don’t have a direct stake in it?”

To summarize: Vance thinks that childless people are sick, miserable, sociopathic, deranged radicals. They’re invested in nothing, they have no stake in the future, they’re unfit to hold power. That’s the shot; now here’s the chaser.

Vance is Catholic.

How many children does the Pope have?

By Catholic rules, every member of their hierarchy, from nuns to priests to bishops to the Pope, is required to be celibate. This is an enormous, jarring contradiction between Vance’s politics and his religion.

The child-free ideology he caricatures and looks down upon actually holds true for the religion he chose to join – and he did choose. He wasn’t raised Catholic, he’s an adult convert. If he detests childless people, why did he join a religion where they literally have all the power?

By Vance’s logic, the Pope, the bishops and the priests must be miserable, mentally unstable sociopaths who are unsuited to be leaders because they have no stake in the future. Yet he reveres them as God’s representatives on earth. There’s no way to square the circle of this contradiction. It’s one more example of the religious right’s hypocritical and deeply weird ideology.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons via New America; released under CC BY 2.0 license

Russia is devouring its own future

For the sake of a dictator’s ego, an entire nation is being fed to the flames. It may turn out to be the greatest act of national self-immolation in history.

It’s been more than two years since Russia launched its genocidal invasion of Ukraine. In that time, they’ve suffered half a million casualties, squandered almost their entire stockpile of Soviet arms, made themselves an international pariah, and achieved none of their original war aims.

As the war drags on and the costs mount up, the Russian state is becoming more paranoid, autocratic and violent at home. Putin’s thugs are no longer satisfied with shutting up anyone who tells the truth about the regime. They’ve resorted to murdering or imprisoning anyone who even has the ability to tell the truth. For example, they’ve started killing economists:

Valentina Bondarenko, a top Russian economist, has died at the age of 82 after falling out of her apartment window in Moscow, Russian state-run media reported on Tuesday.

“Falling out of a window” is a barely-disguised euphemism for extrajudicial killing by Russian state hitmen. Bondarenko is the latest of a list of Putin’s critics whose deaths were explained away with this obvious vranyo.

Unlike most of the other Russians who’ve died, Bondarenko didn’t speak out openly against Putin, as far as I’m aware. But we can guess that she told someone in power something he didn’t want to hear, and it’s obvious what that was: Western sanctions are slowly strangling Russia’s economy. Their only significant export, fossil fuels, is hobbled by the Western price cap; and over the long term, fossil fuel revenue is shrinking away as the world transitions to renewable energy. When it’s gone, they have nothing left to replace it.

The Russian state’s paranoia runs so deep that they’re even going after scientists, engineers and other intellectuals whose work was once considered shining jewels of national prestige. Like Alexey Soldatov, the “father of Russia’s internet“:

Alexey Soldatov, a Russian Internet pioneer and a founder of the first Internet provider in the country, has been sentenced by a court to two years in a labor colony on charges of “abuse of power.” Soldatov, 72, had been detained by a court in Moscow. He is terminally ill.

Prominent Russian scientists, like the physicist Dmitry Kolker, have been charged with treason for participating in the ordinary work of the scientific community:

Kolker, the son of the detained Novosibirsk physicist, said that when the FSB searched his father’s apartment, they looked for several presentations he had used in lectures given in China.

The elder Kolker, who had studied light waves, gave presentations that were cleared for use abroad and also were given inside Russia, and “any student could understand that he wasn’t revealing anything (secret) in them,” Maksim Kolker said.

Nevertheless, FSB officers yanked the 54-year-old physicist from his hospital bed in 2022 and flew him to Moscow, to the Lefortovo Prison, his son said.

…Other scientists working on hypersonics, a field with important applications for missile development, also were arrested on treason charges in recent years. One of them, Anatoly Maslov, 77, was convicted and sentenced to 14 years in prison in May.

The Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics in Novosibirsk wrote a letter supporting Maslov and two other physicists implicated over “making presentations at international seminars and conferences, publishing articles in highly rated journals (and) participation in international scientific projects.” Such activities, the letter said, are “an obligatory component of conscientious and high-quality scientific activity,” both in Russia and elsewhere.

At the same time as it jails physicists and computer engineers, Russia is cannibalizing its other industries by redirecting all its resources into domestic war production. It keeps their guns firing a little longer, but it’s losing exports and knowledge it may never get back. Up to a million Russians have fled the country, mostly educated professionals who want nothing to do with the war, in the biggest brain drain since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

That was the right decision, as the Soldatov case and others like it show. Anyone who stays in Russia can come under suspicion at any time, for any innocuous act that offends the leadership, and be imprisoned after a show trial or summarily executed with no trial at all. Putin and his thugs have resorted to full-on Khmer Rouge-style anti-intellectualism, purging anyone who they merely suspect might be smart enough to harbor doubts about what the regime is doing.

All these other harms stack on top of the direct damage caused by sending an entire generation of men to die in the trenches. Russia’s population was already shrinking, and Putin’s war has been a demographic catastrophe. He’s ensured that hundreds of thousands of Russians are permanently erased from the population at the exact time of their lives when they should have been settling down, finding jobs and starting families. The long-term damage will be immense.

Any rational cost-benefit analysis would have told him to pull out long ago, but Putin is stuck in the trap of the sunk-cost fallacy. He’s convinced he’s in too deep to give up now, that he has to press on to make it all worthwhile. The consequence of his folly, in the long run, will be a downward spiral: a nation permanently weakened, impoverished, and drained of its best minds.

Take note, also, that Russia is what religious conservatives want to make America into. They dream of an authoritarian state run by an autocratic strongman, where media and opposition parties are crushed beneath the boot of the law and the church joins hands with the state to pump out nationalist propaganda.

But authoritarian states have a fatal flaw: no one can override the leader when he makes a disastrous decision. Unaccountable absolute rulers can and often do ruin the lives of their people and sacrifice their countries for the sake of their own egos. Russia’s violent convulsions and inevitable decline are a warning to America. The same fate lies in store for us, if we go down the religious right’s path.