Peter Wehner:

“It has become virtually impossible to write a survey question about immigration policy that is too harsh for white evangelicals to support,” Robert P. Jones, the president of the Public Religion Research Institute, recently wrote.

America in 2026 is not Germany in 1936; far from it. But we would be mistaken to pretend that political movements that aren’t as malevolent as Nazism can’t still advance sinister ends. We should also acknowledge that over the course of its history, Christianity, which has had glorious moments, has also taken some very dark turns.

Huge numbers of American fundamentalists and evangelicals—not just cultural Christians, but also those who faithfully attend church and Bible-study sessions and prayer gatherings—prefer the MAGA Jesus to the real Jesus. Few of them would say so explicitly, though, because the cognitive dissonance would be too unsettling. And so they have worked hard to construct rationalizations. It’s rather remarkable, really, to see tens of millions of Christians validate, to themselves and to one another, a political movement led by a malignant narcissist—who is driven by hate and bent on revenge, who mocks the dead, and who delights in inflicting pain on the powerless. The wreckage to the Christian faith is incalculable, yet most evangelicals will never break with him. They have invested too much of themselves and their identity in Trump and what he stands for.

This moment, and what it reveals about American Christianity, will be studied for a long time to come.

Robert Kagan:

Americans are entering the most dangerous world they have known since World War II, one that will make the Cold War look like child’s play and the post–Cold War world like paradise. In fact, this new world will look a lot like the world prior to 1945, with multiple great powers and metastasizing competition and conflict. The U.S. will have no reliable friends or allies and will have to depend entirely on its own strength to survive and prosper. This will require more military spending, not less, because the open access to overseas resources, markets, and strategic bases that Americans have enjoyed will no longer come as a benefit of the country’s alliances. Instead, they will have to be contested and defended against other great powers.

Americans are neither materially nor psychologically ready for this future. For eight decades, they have inhabited a liberal international order shaped by America’s predominant strength. They have grown accustomed to the world operating in a certain way: Largely agreeable and militarily passive European and Asian allies cooperate with the United States on economic and security issues. Challengers to the order, such as Russia and China, are constrained by the combined wealth and might of the U.S. and its allies. Global trade is generally free and unhampered by geopolitical rivalry, oceans are safe for travel, and nuclear weapons are limited by agreements on their production and use. Americans are so accustomed to this basically peaceful, prosperous, and open world that they tend to think it is the normal state of international affairs, likely to continue indefinitely. They can’t imagine it unraveling, much less what that unraveling will mean for them.

[…]

If Americans thought defending the liberal world order was too expensive, wait until they start paying for what comes next.

Once again, I give you Charles Krauthammer in 2016:

At a time of such tectonic instability, even the most experienced head of state requires wisdom and delicacy to maintain equilibrium. Trump has neither. His joining of supreme ignorance to supreme arrogance, combined with a pathological sensitivity to any perceived slight, is a standing invitation to calamitous miscalculation.

Two generations of Americans have grown up feeling that international stability is as natural as the air we breathe. It’s not. It depends on continual, calibrated tending. It depends on the delicate balancing of alliances and the careful signaling of enemies. It depends on avoiding self-inflicted trade wars and on recognizing the value of allies like Germany, Japan and South Korea as cornerstones of our own security rather than satrapies.

It took seven decades to build this open, free international order. It could be brought down in a single presidential term. That would be a high price to pay for the catharsis of kicking over a table.

All predictable and predicted… and currently widely celebrated and excused. Brace yourselves.

On that note, Kagan is weirdly on the same page as Chris Smaje. They’re coming from, and going in, very different directions, but they have a good deal of diagnostic and predictive overlap. 

Smaje quotes political scientist Michael Albert:

Some nation-states may retain effective governance capacities, but most would eventually fragment and give way to a complex neofeudal geography composed of political-economic and security assemblages cooperating and competing over territory and resources — including corporate quasi-states, city-states, feudalized rentier capitalists and warlords that offer livelihood protection in exchange for tribute, and numerous communities of surplas populations left to develop their own survival strategies.

Smaje later adds, “I’d argue that staying committed to the sun model of the present nation-state system as a way of avoiding troubled future times now looks pretty utopian.”

Kagan:

Even the most well-managed multi­polar orders were significantly more brutal and prone to war than the world that Americans have known these past 80 years. To take one example, during what some call the “long peace” in Europe, from 1815 to 1914, the great powers (including Russia and the Ottoman empire) fought dozens of wars with one another and with smaller states to defend or acquire strategic advantage, resources, and spheres of interest. […]

Today’s equivalent of 19th-­century multi­polarity would be a world in which China, Russia, the United States, Germany, Japan, and other large states fought a major war in some combination at least once a decade—redrawing national boundaries, displacing populations, disrupting international commerce, and risking global conflict on a devastating scale. That was the world as it existed for centuries prior to 1945. To believe that such a world can never return would seem to be the height of utopianism.

Ruth Graham:

When asked if he had ever said anything negative publicly about Mr. Trump, Mr. Johnson paused for several seconds. “I doubt it,” he concluded. After reflecting more, he offered one potential area for improvement: The evangelist Franklin Graham, he said, is working to get the president to stop cursing.

(The concomitant willful ignorance and general effusion of associated aromas notwithstanding…)

Addendum: This post is really about a personal beef I have with a few folks I know on the “conservative” “Christian” right, who are not even close to alone, apparently. Namely, the excusing or ignoring or spreading all manner of lies and injustices and nonsense while the complaint about people who (gasp) use fowl language is never far from them.

Of course, everyone knows that on behalf of the Lord Jesus Christ, the first question St. Peter shall ask will not be about widows and orphans, nor about justice, mercy, and humility, nor about bearing witness, but about whether you said or condoned saying fuck, shit, or asshole like some goddamn heathen. (“I’m just proving a point. You don’t have to celebrate it, Frank.”) 

Naturally, President DJT is never mentioned, and if I bring him up I’ll get a “Well, I didn’t say I like his language.” (“Well” is the only meaningful part of that sentence.) The woke F-bomb mob is public enemy number one, of course, all day and night, but no thought is given to Mr. “Get the fuck out of the car or my friend will shoot you in the face.”

You could call it a righteousness narrowly defined, but as I’ve encountered it I would only call it self-righteousness — petty psychological appeasement for a shallow corrupted American conscience. Anything to tell yourself — thank God! — you’re not like them.

Frederick Buechner:

OUT OF THE GROUND the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name” (Genesis 2:19). Following Adam’s lead, we say that is the elephant and the albatross, that is the weasel and the goldfish. What or who they really are we do not know because they do not tell. They do not tell because they lack what is either the gift or the curse of speech, depending on your point of view. …

Humans live largely inside their heads, from which they tell the rest of their bodies what to do, except for occasional passionate moments when the tables are turned. Animals, on the other hand, do not seem compartmentalized that way. Everything they are is in every move they make. When a dachshund takes a shine to you, it is not likely to be because he has thought it over ahead of time. Or in spite of certain reservations. Or in expectation of certain benefits. It seems to be just because it feels to him like a good idea at the time. Such as he is, he gives himself to you hook, line, and sinker, the bad breath no less than the frenzied tail and the front paws climbing the air. Needless to say, the whole picture can change in a flash if you try to make off with his dinner, but for the moment his entire being is an act of love bordering on the beatific. 

“Ask the animals, and they will teach you,” Job says to his foul-weather friends. Innocence, as above, is one of their lessons, but the one Job has in mind is another, that is, that “in [the Lord’s] hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of every human being” (Job 12:7,10). When the ravens came and fed Elijah bread and meat by the brook Cherith (1 Kings 17:6), we’re told they did it because the Lord commanded them to. However, I suspect that since, in spite of Poe, ravens are largely nonverbal, the Lord caused the sight of the old man to be itself the command the way the smell of breakfast is a command to be hungry or the sound of your best friend on the stair a command to rejoice. 

Elijah sat there all by himself—bald, on the run, in danger of starving to death. If the ravens could have talked, they would probably have tried to talk either the Lord or themselves out of doing anything about it. As it was, there was simply nothing for it but to bring him two squares a day till he moved on somewhere else. The sleek, black birds and the bony, intractable prophet—since all life is one life, to save another is to save yourself, and with their wings, and beaks, and throbbing birds’ hearts all working at once, the ravens set about doing it.

Antón Barba-Kay:

The relationship between media and regimes is not controlling or monocausal but formative or teleological.

Exempli gratia:

Text message from Mr. Store to Mr. Trump on Sunday, Jan. 18, 3:48 p.m.:

Dear Mr President, dear Donald – on the contact across the Atlantic – on Greenland, Gaza, Ukraine – and your tariff announcement yesterday. You know our position on these issues. But we believe we all should work to take this down and de-escalate – so much is happening around us where we need to stand together. We are proposing a call with you later today – with both of us or separately – give us a hint of what you prefer! Best – Alex and Jonas

Text message from Mr. Trump to Mr. Store on Sunday, Jan. 18, at 4:15 p.m.:

Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT

(Barba-Kay: “Nor is it a coincidence that President Donald Trump, having initially led the effort to ban TikTok in the United States, has emerged as its champion.”)

Christopher Alexander:

The fact is, that even when we have seen deep into the processes by which it is possible to make a building or a town alive, in the end, it turns out that this knowledge only brings us back to that part of ourselves which is forgotten.

Although the process is precise, and can be defined in exact scientific terms, finally it becomes valuable, not so much because it shows us things which we don’t know, but instead, because it shows us what we know already, only daren’t admit because it seems so childish, and so primitive. […]

This is why it is so easy for others to play on our fears. They can persuade us that we must have more method, and more system, because we are afraid of our own chaos. Without method and more method, we are afraid the chaos which is in us will reveal itself. And yet these methods only make things worse.

The thoughts and fears which feed these methods are illusions.

It is the fears which these illusions have created in us, that make places which are dead and lifeless and artificial. And—greatest irony of all—it is the very methods we invent to free us from our fears which are themselves the chains whose grip on us creates our difficulties.

For the fact is, that this seeming chaos which is in us is a rich, rolling, swelling, dying, lilting, singing, laughing, shouting, crying, sleeping order. If we will only let this order guide our acts of building, the buildings that we make, the towns we help to make, will be the forests and the meadows of the human heart.

Alongside Smaje’s Finding Lights in a Dark Age, I’m also reading Romano Guardini’s The End of the Modern World. So far a good complementary pair.

Guardini:

It became clear to medieval man when he turned his spirit in upon itself, when he descended to the core of his soul, that he reached a frontier of “inner finiteness.” Beyond it was the dwelling place of God again, but it was just as inconceivable as was the great expanse of transcendence where dwelt the Lord. To maintain his total cosmology, medieval man had to allow his spirit to think of “something” lying beyond the innermost side of that frontier of “inner finiteness”—a not-something and yet a something—the “place of God,” Who has crossed over and come into the world, into man’s soul as Immanence. There also “lived” God. In the Empyrean, however, God reigned publicly as the high Lord of all things; within the depths of the human soul He dwelt inwardly and privately. Both were “places” transcending the two farthest poles of reality: the first, lying beyond the uttermost sphere of creation; the second, lying buried to the “other side” of the inmost core of the soul of man.

Between these extreme points floated the world. As a whole and in each of its parts the world was the portrait of God; that is, the rank and excellence of every created being was determined by the degree to which it bore within itself the stamp of God’s image. A vast hierarchy of being—the non-living, the plants and the animals—was formed by the interrelations of the many things found in these realms of essence. At the highest, man in his rational-spiritual life was enabled to gather all lesser things into a unity unknown to the ancients and true to the revealed creation of God, into the unity of the macrocosm in all its ranks and degrees, in the fullness of its meaning.

Modern astronomy has refuted this total construction of the medieval genius which gave expression to reality as it is directly grasped by the human eye and consciousness. For this very reason the theory has a most penetrating symbolic power in human thought. Even today its existential validity cannot be denied, while its influence upon the ways of medieval man was profound.

He goes on to describe what he calls “the key to medieval efforts”: “namely, that medieval man neither wished to explore the mysteries of the world empirically nor did he want to illuminate them by a rational methodology.”

[T]he medieval thinker went directly to the world of existing things, to those things which he experienced immediately in sensation; he reflected upon their essences and status within the interdependent ordering of creation. From those reflections medieval man garnered a wisdom which even today has its value. Medieval anthropology, for example, in both principle and application, is superior to its modern counterpart. In morality and moral attitude, medieval life had a firmer yet richer hold on reality than is possible for modern man; it also made possible a fuller perfecting of human nature. In social philosophy and jurisprudence, medieval thought encompassed and ordered its concrete cultural situation to its own time, yet it offers insights which have basic validity for man at any time.

Charting A Moral Vision of American Foreign Policy

In 2026, the United States has entered into the most profound and searing debate about the moral foundation for America’s actions in the world since the end of the Cold War. The events in Venezuela, Ukraine and Greenland have raised basic questions about the use of military force and the meaning of peace. The sovereign rights of nations to self-determination appear all too fragile in a world of ever greater conflagrations. The balancing of national interest with the common good is being framed within starkly polarized terms. Our country’s moral role in confronting evil around the world, sustaining the right to life and human dignity, and supporting religious liberty are all under examination. And the building of just and sustainable peace, so crucial to humanity’s well-being now and in the future, is being reduced to partisan categories that encourage polarization and destructive policies.

For all of these reasons, the contribution of Pope Leo in outlining a truly moral foundation for international relations to the Vatican diplomatic corps this month has provided us an enduring ethical compass for establishing the pathway for American foreign policy in the coming years.

He stated:

In our time, the weakness of multilateralism is a particular cause for concern at the international level. A diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force, by either individuals or groups of allies. War is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading. The principle established after the Second World War, which prohibited nations from using force to violate the borders of others, has been completely undermined. Peace is no longer sought as a gift and desirable good in itself, or in pursuit of “the establishment of the ordered universe willed by God with a more perfect form of justice among men and women.” Instead, peace is sought through weapons as a condition for asserting one’s own dominion.

Pope Leo also reiterates Catholic teaching that “the protection of the right to life constitutes the indispensable foundation for every other human right” and that abortion and euthanasia are destructive of that right. He points to the need for international aid to safeguard the most central elements of human dignity, which are under assault because of the movement by wealthy nations to reduce or eliminate their contributions to humanitarian foreign assistance programs. Finally, the Holy Father points to the increasing violations of conscience and religious freedom in the name of an ideological or religious purity that crushes freedom itself.

As pastors and citizens, we embrace this vision for the establishment of a genuinely moral foreign policy for our nation. We seek to build a truly just and lasting peace, that peace which Jesus proclaimed in the Gospel. We renounce war as an instrument for narrow national interests and proclaim that military action must be seen only as a last resort in extreme situations, not a normal instrument of national policy. We seek a foreign policy that respects and advances the right to human life, religious liberty, and the enhancement of human dignity throughout the world, especially through economic assistance.

Our nation’s debate on the moral foundation for American policy is beset by polarization, partisanship, and narrow economic and social interests. Pope Leo has given us the prism through which to raise it to a much higher level. We will preach, teach, and advocate in the coming months to make that higher level possible.

Signed,

Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, Archbishop of Chicago
Cardinal Robert W. McElroy, Archbishop of Washington
Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin, C.Ss.R., Archbishop of Newark

From Ruth Graham:

Cardinal Tobin said in an interview that he had been struck by voices in the Trump administration who seemed to be advancing a moral framework that he described as “almost a Darwinian calculus that the powerful survive and the weak don’t deserve to.”

He added, “I would say that’s less than human.”