I have meant for a long time to reread Jeffrey C. Pugh’s Religionless Christianity: Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Troubled Times. But the book always rewards a random grab off the shelf.

[Bonhoeffer] wondered how the Christian faith can move away from the temptations of religion to be tied to national or ethnic identity, or psychological need. During this time, he is also trying to make sense of the ways in which Jesus becomes true concrete reality within the community of faith. In the midst of the manifold failures of the church, it was hard for him to discern the ways in which Christianity exhibits faithfulness to anything other than itself.

These failures were made particularly acute with the church’s failure to respond to the political situation it found itself in with the rise of the National Socialists. When Hitler came to power in January of 1933 he moved quickly to consolidate power through the passing of laws and the seduction of the church. His handling of both Catholic and Protestant churches led to the utter collapse of those communities as effective centres of real resistance to the evil within Germany. The church in Germany was co-opted because Hitler would only offer support to the extent that they supported him. The true shame is that whenever this type of support is offered to the church in return for its silence the church, for the most part, has taken the deal.

I don’t really like doing this sort of thing but I was really tempted to swap out a few words in that second paragraph. You could, I think, void any straight comparison to Nazis whatsoever and still find that as a description it works perfectly.

I can’t help myself:

These failures were made particularly acute with the church’s failure to respond to the political situation it found itself in with the rise of the (Christian) Nationalists. When Trump came back into power in January of 2025 he moved quickly to consolidate power through the passing of laws and the seduction of the church. His handling of both Catholic and Protestant churches led to the utter collapse of those communities as effective centres of real resistance to the evil within the United States. The church in America was co-opted because Trump would only offer support to the extent that they supported him. The true shame is that whenever this type of support is offered to the church in return for its silence the church, for the most part, has taken the deal.

Again, you don’t have to call anyone a Nazi to see that that’s a wildly accurate description of current events. Don’t get me wrong; I’ll do straight comparisons. But they do have to be done carefully if at all — if you want to do more than psychological soapboxing, that is. Most people are happy enough only to differentiate themselves, well before the real work begins. Bonhoeffer stayed with the real work; that, more than anything else, is why Bonhoeffer is so Bonhoeffer.

Pugh goes on:

Bonhoeffer saw that the choice was going to be a stark one for the German people:

It is becoming increasingly clear to me that what we’re going to get is a long, popular, national church whose nature cannot any longer be reconciled with Christianity and that we must be prepared to enter upon entirely new paths which we will have to thread. The question really is: Germanism or Christianity?

If I had the time to turn the previous post into a proper Poem, Prose and Praise (I never did like the word ‘praise’ there, but I never found a better one; the praise that I have in mind is much more subtle, even awkward, then the word ‘praise’ typically evokes), it would probably include the lyrics to Burl Ives’ “Mockingbird Hill,” which Lucille sings. And also some etymology tracing of “economy” — oikonomia and its use in the New Testament, particularly the epistles, as a stewardship which seems always closely tied to a kind of freedom and/of love within the mystery of the ages. But leaving it slant is just fine, too — and probably more economical…

Louise Bogan (read and hear the poem read here):

The cold remote islands
And the blue estuaries
Where what breathes, breathes
The restless wind of the inlets,
And what drinks, drinks
The incoming tide;

Where shell and weed
Wait upon the salt wash of the sea,
And the clear nights of stars
Swing their lights westward
To set behind the land;

Where the pulse clinging to the rocks
Renews itself forever;
Where, again on cloudless nights,
The water reflects
The firmament’s partial setting;

—O remember
In your narrowing dark hours
That more things move
Than blood in the heart.

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From Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping:

It was so dark that creatures came down to the water within a few feet of us. We could not see what they were. Lucille began to throw stones at them. “They’re supposed to be able to smell us,” she grumbled. For a while she sang “Mockingbird Hill,” and then she sat down beside me in our ruined stronghold, never still, never accepting that all our human boundaries were overrun.

Lucille would tell this story differently. She would say I fell asleep, but I did not. I simply let the darkness in the sky become coextensive with the darkness in my skull and bowels and bones. Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world’s true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable. Say that my mother was as tall as a man, and that she sometimes set me on her shoulders, so that I could splash my hands in the cold leaves above our heads. Say that my grandmother sang in her throat while she sat on her bed and we laced up her big black shoes. Such details are merely accidental. Who could know but us? And since their thoughts were bent upon other ghosts than ours, other darknesses than we had seen, why must we be left, the survivors picking among flotsam, among the small, unnoticed, unvalued clutter that was all that remained when they vanished, that only catastrophe made notable? Darkness is the only solvent. While it was dark, despite Lucille’s pacing and whistling, and despite what must have been dreams (since even Sylvie came to haunt me), it seemed to me that there need not be relic, remnant, margin, residue, memento, bequest, memory, thought, track, or trace, if only the darkness could be perfect and permanent.

(I have sometimes wanted to write about why this novel is called Housekeeping, and I think this passage comes pretty close to telling it slant. Maybe very slant; I’m not sure at the moment.)

I’ve been singing it wrong. Walking and talking…, singing and praying…, with my mind stayed on freedom. Not set on freedom; stayed on freedom. That’s a much better word.

A Prison gets to be a friend—
Between its Ponderous face
And Ours—a Kinsmanship express—
And in its narrow Eyes—

We come to look with gratitude
For the appointed Beam
It deal us—stated as our food—
And hungered for—the same—

We learn to know the Planks—
That answer to Our feet—
So miserable a sound—at first—
Nor ever now—so sweet—

As plashing in the Pools—
When Memory was a Boy—
But a Demurer Circuit—
A Geometric Joy—

The Posture of the Key
That interrupt the Day
To Our Endeavor—Not so real
The Check of Liberty—

As this Phantasm Steel—
Whose features—Day and Night—
Are present to us—as Our Own—
And as escapeless—quite—

The narrow Round—the Stint—
The slow exchange of Hope—
For something passiver—Content
Too steep for looking up—

The Liberty we knew
Avoided—like a Dream—
Too wide for any Night but Heaven—
If That—indeed—redeem—

Some slight ambiguity in there from Dickinson makes it all the better to ode with.

Oliver Burkeman:

Barely a day passes without some new viral warning that something big is happening and most people aren’t ready or that you have only 18 months before your skills are obsolete – with the implicit or explicit caution that if you mess this up, you’ll be permanently left behind, with catastrophic results for your life.

I’m not going to link to any of these contagious anxiety-spreading pieces, for the same reason I don’t go around actively sneezing in people’s faces when I catch a cold.

AI’s “mastery of the Christian tradition outstripped many a well-trained pastor or academic,” write the editors of Comment magazine, describing/promoting Matthew Milliner’s recent piece. “Yet real humans broke the spell.”

I like Matthew Milliner. Two pieces I highly recommend are Hive Mind and The Wisdom Hypothesis. But I will not likely be reading his latest essay in Comment.

People seem to really like the piece and that’s all well and good and whatnot; I’m happy enough to just be a curmudgeon here. And don’t get me wrong, I am all for more more more stories in more places about why we absolutely do not need AI in our daily lives at all. (Ethan Hawke: “I am in open rebellion.”) But I sense the rise of a kind of “I plunged into AI, survived and have a story to tell” genre of essays. And I expect a reasonably healthy dose of “No shit, Sherlock” response essays. Put me in the latter camp.

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I have long since more than moved on from my John Piper days. In fact, one of only two memes I’ve ever made was about those days:

I guess that’s less a meme than just a borrowed cartoon with a text edit, but to any past evangelical born in the 80s it could easily obtain memehood.

But still, I did happen upon a little Piper not long ago and, although I’m not really interested in his world anymore, I’m happy to see he’s still plugging along. His message in summary: “Computers do words better-than-you-duh!”

Words do not a human make, mmkay. Not at all surprisingly, John Piper gets this. But more than a little surprisingly, I actually prefer his hard, preacher-gonna-preach, jump-scare “No!” over some self-induced AI Stockholm syndrome recovery story.

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Frankly, JP is a bit tame compared to another JP. Here’s Jason Peters from the Front Porch Republic, whose Pure Curmudgeory I am more than partial to — and maybe even aspire to:

We are assured by the maniacal technocrats suffering from acedia that AI, like the smartphone or the atomic bomb, is “just a tool.”

AI is the most insidious manifestation we have yet seen of the affront to work—work as opposed to toil—and therefore an affront to play and to art and to pleasure. It is a middle finger to the imago dei. It is Gnosticism, that deathless heresy returning in a hockey mask, knife in hand, like an immortal villain in a horror flick, except of course this protean monster will never show itself thus. It will take whatever guise suits it. It will be General Patton standing in the hatch of a tank’s turret; it will appear before us meekly, as if riding on the foal of an ass. And this manifest evil will deprive us not only of our dignity but also of the pleasure permitted us in our work.

Preach it, JPs.

From Dr. Kevin Bird’s lecture Freedom Songs: The Songs and Singing that Inspired the Civil Rights Movement:

African Americans had this bold notion that the leprous body politic of the United States might even be washed and cleansed.

And that’s a bold notion after you’ve lived through the worst episode of political violence in the Western world as ever seen in 1875, from Virginia to Texas, untold numbers of political assassinations. When you’ve lived through other eras, eras like the last eight decades of the 1800s, the establishment of the Jim Crow regime, which the Nazis looked to and said, hey, that works pretty good. Maybe we should try something like that.

You know, they’ve got some pretty good laws over there in America. Let’s copy them. Hitler himself will tell you that.

And so to have the faith that you could baptize the body politic of the United States and cleanse it in some way, that’s big faith. That’s big faith indeed.

Bird had just played a clip of Fanny Lou Hamer singing “Going Down to the River Jordan.”

There’s a line from Mark Noll that I have mentioned before, one that regularly rings in my head and that I couldn’t help thinking of listening to that lecture: “reform was born aloft on the wings of song.” It comes from his book God and Race in American Politics:

As many of the histories of the Civil Rights Movement have documented, reform was born aloft on the wings of song, preeminently black gospel and classical evangelical hymnody. When in 1965 King and his associates in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were discussing where in the North they should take the civil rights campaign, one midsized city was ruled out because it could not assemble an adequate choir.

What I had forgotten is that immediately preceding this is a quote from and brief description of the life of… Fannie Lou Hamer. (“She had Mississippi in her bones.”)

I woke up this morning and had Hamer singing “Woke Up This Morning” stuck in my head. I’m driving an hour to Portland today and I’m going to do myself a favor and listen to Hamer talk and sing the whole way.

Also from the lecture, Dr. Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons briefly introduces herself and her story:

And I thought, Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into here? Because I was at the end of my sophomore year at Spelman College. So what did they give us? They gave us a list of members of the NAACP who lived in Laurel. And we were to go and knock on their door to see if they wanted to be a part of Mississippi Freedom Summer.

Well, that was scary. The idea of going up to somebody’s door and asking them, Are you interested in having a Freedom Summer project? Yes, you could get killed. Yes, your house could be burned down. You [could] lose your job. But are you interested? That’s what we were told to say.

And of course, I went to the first couch and the woman’s name was Eberta Spinks. And I knock on the door, she opens the door and I’m standing there trying to say… How do you ask somebody if they want to possibly be killed or have their house burned to the ground?

And I’m not getting much out and she looks me up and down and she says, Are you one of those Freedom Riders? Well, I hadn’t been one, but I thought maybe I should say yes. And I said, Yes, ma’am.

And she said, Come in, I’ve been waiting on you all my life. And she was in her 50s. So that was the beginning of the Laurel movement.

“If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?”

Something to keep in mind: If you want to understand what the problem is with evangelicals and “nationalism, etc.,” look no further than Psalm 11. Nearly every single thing you see or hear from that American-Christian world (and that includes the Rusty Reno Catholics), all the ‘splaining and justifying that makes up its political face, can be traced back to this problem: they are oblivious to the pure irony with which they quote that psalm. (Very few things that I have ever written or used to explain it or understand it are worth revisiting. But that little essay is.)

Mark Noll famously wrote, in one of the most unburied ledes of all time, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” That mindlessness continues apace. This particular problem, however, is hit more directly when Noll quotes Garry Wills’ 1990 book Under God:

The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But, swoll’n with wind and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread…

The problem with evangelical religion is not (so much) that it encroaches on politics, but that it has so carelessly neglected its own sources of wisdom. It cannot contribute what it no longer possesses.

And that is why Stanley Hauerwas says — hear this — that the most important task of the Church is to “take the Bible out of the hands of individual Christians in North America.”

Deconstruction has been one popular (though very understandable) way to escape the rot, but probably every generation of Christians in North America has been stuck with the bitter task of escaping a peculiar darkness intrinsic to American Christianity. The unpopular challenge (as Hannah Arendt also understood, in her own way) is to do it while maintaining the faith delivered, to reconstruct as much as you, however necessarily, deconstruct. And that task is right there in the 3,000-year-old Psalms.

Douthat and Catoggio below are largely approaching the same problem but from different angles (one Christian, one not). They make plenty of good sense of this mess on their own; it’ll make even more sense with Psalm 11 in mind. 

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Nick Catoggio:

And so, if Vance’s tone was that of an angry father warning his adult child to get a job or move out, Rubio’s was that of a concerned mother reminding the child that daddy’s only saying that because he loves you. “We are part of one civilization—Western civilization,” he said on Saturday. “We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.”

The only way to defend our shared culture against the forces of “civilizational erasure,” Rubio warned his audience, is for Europeans to embrace nationalism—namely, reindustrialization and tight borders rather than unfettered free trade and mass migration. If “we Americans … sometimes come off as a little direct and urgent in our counsel” on that point, he added, alluding to Vance’s speech last year and Trump’s perpetual belligerence, it’s only “because we care deeply. We care deeply about your future and ours.”

[…]

For postliberals, “civilization” is measured exclusively in terms of culture, not civics; illiberal modes of government don’t affect the calculation.

Absorbing that lesson has been part of Marco Rubio’s own education in nationalism.

In 2019, the then-senator from Florida co-signed a letter warning Trump about a meeting he planned to hold with Hungarian President Viktor Orbán. “In recent years, democracy in Hungary has significantly eroded,” it read, explaining that the country “has experienced a steady corrosion of freedom, the rule of law and quality of governance. … Under Orban, the election process has become less competitive and the judiciary is increasingly controlled by the state.” Sen. Marco Rubio was offended by Hungary’s departure from Enlightenment ideals and worried that the leader of the free world was normalizing that.

Seven years later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio swung by Budapest after his speech in Munich last week to … effectively endorse Viktor Orbán for president. And he did so at a moment when Orbán’s chief opponent is promising to end Hungary’s Putinist foreign policy if elected and reestablish strong ties with Europe.

There’s no way to reconcile that endorsement with support for “Western civilization” without reading liberalism out of your definition of the latter. Orbán, Trump, and Putin are all attempting to redefine “the West” in the same basic way, dialing up their followers’ chauvinism about cultural touchstones like Christianity while dialing down liberal expectations for constraints on their own power. According to that redefinition, the Russian army rampaging across Europe would be a triumph for Western civilization, not a calamity, which probably explains Trump’s and Orbán’s rooting interests in the Russia-Ukraine war.

Reimagining the West without liberalism is a form of “civilizational erasure” all its own. How far is Marco Rubio prepared to go to enable it?

Awfully far, it seems. … Where he and Vance get the nerve to lecture foreign diplomats on their supposed betrayal of Western culture while they preside over the institutional and ethical ruin of the United States, I simply can’t imagine.

Ross Douthat:

The secular mistake has been to assume that every theology tends inevitably toward the same follies and fanaticisms, and to imagine that a truly postreligious culture is even possible, let alone desirable. The religious mistake has been to fret over the threat posed by explicitly anti-Christian forces, while ignoring or minimizing the influence that the apostles of pseudo-Christianity exercise over the American soul. Along the way, both sides have embraced a wildly simplified vision of our culture, in which the children of light contend with the children of darkness, and every inch of ground is claimed by absolute truth or deplorable error.