Welcome to the Off the Page Podcast from Franciscan Media, a podcast featuring Franciscan conversations
with authors, artists, and educators.
My name is Stephen Copeland, and I am Franciscan Media's book editor.
Our next guest on the podcast is author and blogger Mark Shea.
Mark is the author of the St. Anthony Messenger's September cover story titled, The Dangers
of Christian Nationalism.
Mark is a longtime contributor to the St. Anthony Messenger, often taking on challenging
topics that are facing Catholics today.
Mark lives in Washington State with his wife Janet, their sons, and grandkids.
His book, The Church's Best-Kept Secret, a primer on Catholic social teaching, was
published in September 2020 by New City Press.
You can learn more about Mark's work at markpshae.com.
A couple quick things before we get started.
Mark and I did experience some technical difficulties with the video, not the audio.
The audio sounds great.
But if you do enjoy this podcast on YouTube, that is why there is no full length video
on that platform.
And lastly, this episode features some hot topic issues, which is what we want with this
podcast.
We want these conversations to be relevant, relatable, and to make you think.
And we welcome a diversity of thought on this podcast.
Francis himself modeled that you can have heart to heart connections with people and
not always agree.
And that's the fun of this, experiencing Christ in each other.
So with that being said, I hope you really enjoy this episode.
It's a fun one.
And even if you don't agree with everything that is said, I think it'll make you think
critically about the social and political climate we're navigating.
Here is Mark Hsieh.
Thank you again for joining the Off the Page podcast.
Happy to be here.
Thanks for having me.
So your September cover story in the St. Anthony Messenger addresses Christian nationalism.
For starters here, what is Christian nationalism and why did you want to write about it?
Christian nationalism is, I would describe Christian nationalism as a heresy that is
to the Christian's relationship with the state as the sin of pride is to the Christian's
relationship with himself, if you will.
We are commanded, the two great commandments that we have from our Lord are to love the
Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, to love your neighbor as yourself.
What Christian nationalism teaches is kind of a photographic negative of that.
So the command to love your neighbor as yourself has various applications.
So we apply that to our families, of course, and we also continue to extend the boundary
of what it means to be a neighbor to our fellow citizens, and that makes sense.
So you could say that patriotism, for example, is the love of neighbor extended to your borders.
What Christian nationalism does is it weirdly perverts that command to love neighbor into
an excuse for hating those who are not citizens of your country.
So it's the sin of pride.
What made the devil the devil was the sin of pride.
What does the devil do?
Well, pride loves the self above all else.
You can turn other people into extensions of the ego in that way.
So we saw its most extreme example that we saw came in the 20th century in Hitler's Germany,
where Hitler turns the German people into the extension of his own ego and then uses
that, weaponizes that against the rest of the world.
And yet what we saw at the end of World War II, of course, was that as Hitler loses the
war, what's revealed, of course, is that the German people never meant anything to him.
And so he's ready to just burn it all down because the German people failed me, is Hitler's
attitude to this.
And so Christian nationalism, the grave danger of Christian nationalism is that it perverts
these commands to love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, mind and all
of your mind and all of your strength and to love your neighbor as yourself.
It perverts them into turning the nation into an extension of the ego of the Christian nationalism
and in fact, turning God into an extension of the ego of the Christian nationalist.
Why does the Christian nationalist love God?
Because God's going to make us big and powerful.
And as long as he comes through, that's the contract which God has never signed.
This is something that the Christian nationalist brandishes and says, this is how it's going
to be.
God is on our side, all who are not us.
And of course, in the mind of the Christian nationalist, the not us includes not simply
foreigners, people at the border, et cetera.
It also means any countrymen who is not part of the Christian nationalist sect.
That's how this is played out.
And so what Christian nationalism inevitably attempts to do is impose what it calls gospel
values by the one means that St. Paul absolutely guarantees can never possibly work, which
is by means of the law.
If there's anything that Paul bangs away at more than anything, it is that we cannot be
saved by law.
That is not how grace works.
We are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ.
We are not saved by forcing people to live usually by the fragments of a moral code that
we don't keep ourselves and which as we've seen recently in attempts, for example, to
Louisiana is trying to stick the 10 commandments into school rooms.
Why?
Well, it's performative piety.
Look at us, we're standing for Christian values.
Okay, goody for you.
But while you're doing that, of course, as Paul tells the Romans, you who oppose idols,
do you rob temples?
And so at the same time that there's this attempt to impose fragments of law on people
who perhaps see no particular reason to revere the 10 commandments because they're not Jews,
they're not Christians or whatever, what's being accomplished there?
Some Buddhist parent with kids in the classroom got to come away from that going, wow, okay,
I believe.
Of course not.
And so the key to this use of law in the hands of Christian nationalism is that the law is
understood by the Christian nationalists to bind the people that they want to have the
boot on their neck and to exempt those who are imposing the law.
And so this whole attempt to impose by law, force, fear, razor wire, threats of deportation,
descriptions of their enemies as vermin, and this is a historically resonant phrase that
also takes us back to Hitler's Germany, people who are poisoning the blood of our country.
All of this is a grotesque perversion of the gospel.
I'm coming at all of this not from the perspective of, although one certainly can, but I'm coming
at it not from the perspective of our heritage as Americans and the need for the Constitution
to apply to all and so on and so forth, and the president, God help us not to be immune
from having to obey the Constitution.
That's a very serious problem, but for me as a Christian and as a Catholic who understands
what the teaching of the gospel is, I'm coming at this from the perspective that this is
a deadly, deadly dangerous heresy and a perversion of Christian teaching.
So it's evil because of that.
It's also evil, of course, because the guaranteed outcome from this Faustian bargain, this deal
with the devil, is going to be the destruction of the church and the witness of the church
in the United States.
Absolutely guaranteed.
No question about it.
And so I believe that it's incumbent on us as Christians to bear witness to the gospel
against this profoundly dangerous notion of Christian nationalism.
You hit on it a little bit.
I'm wondering, what is it about Christian nationalism?
What is it in this ideology that makes it so psychologically appealing to people?
I mean, it's one of the primal temptations.
It's the third temptation that Christ faced in the wilderness.
All this will I give you if you will bow down and worship me.
The devil takes Jesus up to an exceeding high mountain and shows him all the kingdoms of
the earth and says, all this has been given to me and I can give it to whoever I want.
All this I will give to you if you will bow down and worship me.
What could be simpler?
This has been a standing temptation.
The reason that we're told about those temptations is because the four great idols of human history
have always been money, pleasure, power, and honor.
And Christian nationalist leaders always promise those things as nationalist leaders always
promise those things because the active word in Christian nationalism is always nationalism.
It's not really about the gospel.
It's just, you're a Christian.
You come from a Christian background, you're used to Christian culture.
So we'll add in a dollop of this feels familiar to you and you get to have these familiar
things that remind you of your culture, your home, and whatever.
But the real goal is always money, pleasure, power, honor.
And that's what the appeal of Christian nationalism is.
And that's what the temptations were about.
The temptations were temptations to you're hungry.
You want to fill your belly.
Great.
Turn these stones into bread.
You're worried about your security.
Terrific.
I will make it so that you can throw yourself off the temple and you won't get hurt.
Nothing can hurt you.
You'll be fine.
And the last great temptation is bow down and worship me and I will give you power.
And this is exactly, I mean, this is literally the words, you know, that the biggest Christian
nationalist threat in our history has been promising ever since 2016.
When I am in power, Christianity will be powerful again.
The primal heresy in Christian history is the Aryan heresy.
This is the great heresy that occasioned the first ecumenical council in the history of
the church.
And how did Aryanism work?
Aryanism took the most important thing that the Christian gospel had to offer us, the
glory of God the Father, and weaponized that against the rest of the gospel, weaponized
it against the deity of God the Son, weaponized it later against the deity of the Holy Spirit.
And because the glory of God is a really good thing, it was easy for people who sort of
developed this mania around this one truth to reject all the other truths that the faith
also gives us, including the truth that Jesus is God, that the Son is God, that the Holy
Spirit is God.
And so that's what the council had to settle.
And every time Catholics tried to speak to Aryans, of course, Aryans said, you are attacking
the glory of God the Father.
You are an enemy of God.
You are not a friend of God.
Because what happens with the heresy always is that one truth or a small cluster of real
truths from the tradition become infected and inflamed and turned into this crazy, like
a cancerous tumor that attacks the rest of the body.
And that's what happened with the Aryan heresy.
And so what the church calls us to do, the church says, pay attention to the entire common
good.
So work against the death penalty as well as working to protect the unborn.
What drives our abortion rates is and always has been demand, not supply.
And the reason for the demand is economic.
Poverty is the number one abortifacient in the United States.
If you want to lower abortion rates, then you attack poverty.
So we wind up being turned one against another.
And this is one of the classic ways in which the person who is playing on the Christian
nationalist nerve works his audience so that their anger gets directed toward their enemies,
their imagined enemies, the burger flipper, who somehow is a threat to the poorly paid
soldier who somehow is a threat to the poorly paid cop who somehow is a threat to the ambulance
driver.
The burger didn't do any.
He's not paying their wages or refusing to pay their wages.
He's just trying to get by.
And so this way of turning people against one another while at the same time sort of
pulling them in and saying, if you stick with me, I will make you powerful.
You're going to be one of my lieutenants.
You're going to be one of my fellow alpha wolves.
And together, you and I are going to defeat all these enemies that you are so angry at.
It's a psychological ploy that has worked for centuries and centuries.
It's at the foundation of American racism as well.
It's one of the classic ways in which wealthy slave owners told poor whites, for example,
in the South, if you don't help out, these black slaves are going to get free and they're
going to come after you.
Now that same method is being used.
If you don't side with me, who will make you powerful, those brown people are going to
come across the border.
They're going to take all of your jobs.
They're going to kill your daughter and all the rest of it.
This is a strategy that has worked again and again and again.
And all you have to do is just find a scapegoat group.
And this is how Christian nationalism always works.
This is how nationalism always works.
You mentioned this a little bit earlier.
Can you describe the difference between patriotism and nationalism?
A lot of conservatives feel like the far left is very anti-American at times in their rhetoric,
but then patriotism at the same time, if I'm hearing you correctly, it seems like it can
drift into nationalism.
So can you help make a distinction between those two and explain how it drifts into the
other?
The distinction is always between love, which is legitimate as long as it's rightly ordered,
and pride, which is never in Christian understanding a good thing.
The problem is that in English, of course, pride can often be used as a synonym for love.
So I'm proud of my son.
He did a great job.
He got his PhD.
I'm proud of him.
That's not the sin of pride.
In English, that's just another way of saying I love my son.
And love in that sense is always fine.
It's healthy, of course.
So the two great commandments that we are given is to love God and to love neighbor.
And so patriotism is a healthy is when it's healthy, is a healthy expression of love,
just as love for family when it's rightly ordered is a healthy expression of love as
well.
Self love is it can be you know, Jesus loved himself.
Why wouldn't he?
He's good.
He's perfectly good.
And so we're commanded to love our neighbors as ourselves.
And so all of that is legitimate.
And so there are different ways in which that's played out.
It's played out of the family.
It's played out among friends.
It's played out toward your neighbors, which is rightly understood can be applied to your
country.
So we owe our country huge debts that we'll never be able to repay.
I didn't create our constitutional order.
That was established for me and defended for me by generations that lived and died before
I was born.
I owe them a debt that I can't repay.
And so the way we live that out is we pay it forward.
We pay it to our children.
We pay it to our neighbors.
We try to hand them a better country than the one that we were born into.
But it doesn't stop at our borders.
The great model of this that we're given is the parable of the good Samaritan, because
that's exactly the question that's brought to Jesus is, who is my neighbor?
And the answer that Jesus gives at the end of the day is, everyone is your neighbor.
Everyone is your neighbor.
So we are called to love everybody, and Jesus is so radical about this that he says that
we are to love even our enemies.
Of course, the shocking thing for Jesus' listeners when he tells us the parable of the good Samaritan
is that there was no love lost between Samaritans and Jews in the first century.
There was all kinds of historical bitterness, stuff that went back centuries.
And it was ethnic bitterness, and it was religious bitterness, all kinds of hostility going on
there on both sides.
Nobody on either side liked each other.
And because he's really trying to drive home to us the fact that blood kinship is not the
determinant of who we're supposed to love, which was, of course, a huge driver in antiquity
and remains a huge driver today.
And when you wind up making the second greatest commandment more important than the first
greatest commandment, when you start narrowing the definition of who your neighbor is to
your ethnic kin and blood, that's when you are preparing to turn the world into hell
on earth.
You've taken something that really is part of the Christian tradition, as all heresy
is, and then you've weaponized it.
And one of the deadliest things that a Christian can do is go on to one part of the Christian
tradition and turn it into a cancerous tumor that attacks the rest.
And this is what Christian nationalism always does, because it's what nationalism does.
What nationalism does is it takes the ethnos, the blood kin, the pride of the nation in
our family, our kind, and weaponizes it against all the rest of the human beings who have
a perfect right to live and to be who they are and their particular ways of life and
so on and so forth.
And what Christian nationalism does is it says, we're doing this for God.
And so anyone who opposes us opposes God.
That combination, incredibly dangerous.
And I think a big thing is that you get to be right.
And I see this in some aspects of progressive Christianity, too.
You did mention one thing, that the two greatest commandments that Jesus gives us, they pull
us deeper into our conversion in relationship with the other.
The neighbor is not who I decide is my neighbor, someone who looks like me, acts like me, votes
like me, believes like me.
The neighbor is the person that shatters all of my constructs.
And I think this may be a strategic time to bring in someone like St. Francis of Assisi,
who his entire Christian conversion, some would argue, deepened in relationship with
the other.
Whether it is the leper, these people who are outcasts in that society.
And Francis is called deeper and deeper and deeper into loving and accepting and eventually
sharing a meal from the same bowl with a leper and hugging them.
And then same thing with the Sultan Malik al-Kamil, where he thinks he's going to go
give the Sultan the answer.
Nope.
In a very real way, Francis was animated by his own fundamentalism, his own certainty,
thinking he's going to go convert the Sultan.
And the opposite happens.
The heart ruptures everything that he thought was absolutely true.
There's something there, I think, in the time that we're navigating that I think it's important
to elevate.
What would you, what's your interpretation of how St. Francis and his legacy and his
spiritual trajectory can help us right now in something like Christian nationalism?
Or do you see some similarities between the time, the times he was navigating and the
times that we're navigating right now?
Well, Francis, of course, is living in a world, at least in his local world.
He's living in a world where literally everybody except for small communities of Jews, everyone
in Western Europe is a Catholic.
And yet, of course, what's also ironically true is he's living in a Europe that's riven
by all kinds of little regional wars and that kind of thing.
You've still got power struggles, you know, Game of Thrones kind of stuff going on.
And you know, Italy is broken up into little nation states that are all fighting with each
other and that sort of thing.
But it's a time in which everybody in Europe lives, even if they live in a patchwork political
quilt, they live in the same universe.
And the big challenge to that universe is the rise of Islam.
And so that's where you get things like, you know, Francis going off to convert the Sultan
and that sort of thing.
But there's a terrific book by an English historian, he's not a believer himself, a
guy named Tom Holland, he wrote a book called Dominion, which I highly recommend, in which
he makes this that the gospel was a colossal depth charge at the foundations of classical
civilization.
Within a thousand years of the foundation of the church, it had ignited the first revolution
in European history, which was the reforms of Gregory VII, in which concepts like separation
of church and state, which, you know, we still we take for granted the United States, that's
part of the Catholic legacy to the West.
And that the chief thing that the Christian revolution has done is it's set off a
a series of concussed revolutions that have formed our modern world that were, ironically,
they're profoundly based in Christian theology, and at the same time, have become reactions
against Christianity.
So reform movements in the 14th century that led into the Protestant Reformation, which
was itself taking for granted certain aspects of the Christian tradition in order to attack
the Catholic Church.
The Enlightenment did the same thing, revolts like communism did the same thing.
Communism takes for granted things that are in no way evident, you know, from the sciences
of the senses, the dignity of the little guy, you know, that somehow the future lies with
the slave and not with the slave owner.
All of these kinds of things are all, you know, they go back to his cast down the mighty
and their arrogance and lifted up the lowly.
And we're still seeing that today.
And so one of the ironies that strikes me again and again is that people on the left
beg and plead with people who announce themselves to be devout conservative Christians to be
like Jesus.
That's ironically, it's the people who often view themselves as opposed to the church,
opposed to the Christian tradition, who their anger is the anger of prostrated lovers who
really want to see the Christian tradition lived out with, you know, mercy for the least
of these and care for the least of these and so forth.
And that weird schism that we're living in is something that Francis didn't have to contend
with.
He lived in a universe that was fragmented in that way.
He lived in a universe that was fragmented politically.
It was fragmented for straightforward stuff about that's my piece of turf and I want your
stuff.
And you know, you get that kind of thing.
But so it's weird how it has reconfigured itself and yet the same answers that Francis
looks to, humility before God, humility before neighbor, care for the least of these, looking
to love even your enemy, which is a huge challenge.
I mean, because of course, people like me who are mortally opposed to Christian nationalism
have it incumbent on us to love Christian nationalists.
We have to figure out a way to do that.
And you know, how that is to be done is I think is a daily challenge.
I do it poorly.
It's difficult to love people who gloat over cruelty.
We're all looking for some way that we can give into money, pleasure, because anger is
a pleasure.
It's like, oh, finally, I can cut loose with all the self-control stuff that I have to
do in order to rein in my anger and I can really just indulge myself.
That's a form of pleasure to which our culture is prey because the four great idols, this
cannot be said enough, are money, pleasure, power, and honor.
What the gospel teaches us to do is restrain all those appetites and turn that energy over
toward the love of God and the love of neighbor.
And that is steady work.
That's what Francis did.
He practiced the kinds of austerities that were the way you reigned in those appetites
in that time.
So no, we are not required to go barefoot in the snow and practice those kinds of austerities
that Francis chose to do.
But what we are absolutely required to do, as Francis did, was refuse to give in to these
wild animal appetites for money, pleasure, power, and honor, and to turn our direction
toward as best we can, loving God above all things and loving our neighbors as ourselves.
And never pitting those two commandments against one another and never pitting the second
commandment, placing it over the first commandment.
The first commandment has to rein in the second commandment.
And one of the things, theologically for Francis, I think it would be very apt to bring this
in to the Christian nationalist conversation, is that the Franciscan approach to the incarnation
is, some may say it was countercultural in that day, where at a time where not all across
the board, but Jesus was very often depicted, or the divine was very often depicted as this
being on a throne, glorified, who is-
Right.
Kingly and royal.
Yeah, you can try to, you can almost make a direct link to a justification for something
like the Crusades, when that is your God view.
And again, I know it's way more nuanced and complex than that, but when your God is this
King on a throne, I mean, you want to join the army, you know, but for Francis, it was
the opposite.
And for Francis, what invited him into this lifestyle of charity and love and self-emptying
was the humble God, the God who enters in.
Right.
The God that incarnates God's self in this little baby that cries and pees and poops.
How radically humble is the trajectory of this God?
And that's very, that's very different.
I think a lot of it, like theologically, when it comes to Christian nationalism, it's like,
what's your God metaphor?
Is it a God on a throne that's saying, this is the way, if you don't join this team, well,
one, join the team and you're going to be right and certain and you're going to attain
power and glory.
And if you don't, you're an enemy, you know, that kind of binary.
And then whereas the humble God that Francis fell in love with, it just shatters all your
binaries.
Right.
Well, and this is one of the things that Tom Holland talks about is that, you know, there
was an enormously popular, it was the fastest growing cult devoted to the worship of a son
of God.
In the first century, it was the worship of Augustus Caesar.
The cult of Augustus Caesar was hugely popular.
In the first century, it was, you know, people ascending to Godhood.
That happened a lot in the first century.
You know, Julius Caesar raised to Godhood, his heir, Octavius Caesar, who becomes Augustus
Caesar, you know, same thing.
Right.
And of course, what a God looked like in the first century was he's the guy that's able
to crucify people.
He's the guy that's able to have them burned alive or beheaded.
You know, the whole point of crucifixion in the first century was that it instilled Stockholm
syndrome in its victims so that the victims of crucifixion or the people who were standing
near the victims of crucifixion identified with the crucifier rather than with the crucifieds.
And that was what crucifixion was supposed to do.
And we see that in the Gospels.
So you know, not just the crowd is jeering at Jesus, but even the guys who are crucified
with him are jeering at Jesus.
I may be crucified and a loser, but at least I'm not as much of a loser as he is.
That's what crucifixion was designed to do.
And the staggering thing about the rise of Christianity in the first century and the
thing that Holland is gobsmacked by, he's a historian of ancient Rome and Greece and
of these sort of, you know, tyrannosaur predators of the ancient world and how they operated
is that the figure of a crucified God could come to upend the entire Roman order.
That staggered, he says that is beyond weird, you know, because there was nobody in the
ancient world who was ready to say, yeah, crucifixion, that's a real honor.
And it's still the same thing today that Christ calls us to identify with the losers.
Jesus becomes a loser and it is through that kind of weakness that the gospel triumphs.
And that is a tall order.
That is a very difficult thing to say yes to because, you know, that means those awful
people win and really win.
And can there really be any hope after that?
The promise of the resurrection is there is hope after that, that it doesn't end there
and that God really can defeat the powers of hell.
But it doesn't happen through, you know, taking the one ring for yourself and destroying Sauron
by becoming Sauron, not how it happens.
And that is hard, hard.
It is.
Well, this kind of goes back to something you mentioned earlier, the whole scapegoating
mechanism where I heard one theologian say, and I forget who said it, but something along
the lines of the crucifixion, basically it reveals that scapegoating doesn't work and
that it should never happen again.
Here's God being scapegoated.
So it's almost like if you find yourself a part of some kind of Christian ideology on
the left or right that gets all its energy from scapegoating still, you're almost going
against the very trajectory of the tradition you claim to follow.
Do you know what I'm saying?
It's a hard temptation to resist.
It is.
It feels good.
It feels really good to make an other and to scapegoat them.
I have to remember Francis's humble God and be like, there's goodness in this person that
I completely disagree with.
And they have something to teach me somehow, some way, even if we're ultimately still going
to disagree.
And I'm still going to say like, Christian nationalism is a huge threat.
Can I see that the person that has been duped by this thing is still doing the best that
he or she can in some way?
Can I see goodness rising up even in a place that I don't understand?
And again, that's not to dismiss it and say it's not a big deal.
That's even more of a reason to talk about it is because now you can talk about it because
you're trying to see the humanity in that person that you disagree with very, very well.
And it's getting back to my Bailey work.
It's good theology.
Good theology.
American politics loves Manichaeism.
This side is all white and this side is nothing but black.
And Christianity refuses to do that.
Christianity is so radical on this point, it even refuses to say that Satan is nothing
but pure evil because Satan is a creature and therefore made by God.
And therefore to the degree that he retains existence, that he retains intellect, that
he retains will, these are all good things that God made.
And yes, they can be corrupted, but if any being is purely evil, it would cease to exist
because existence is a good.
And so Christian theology is very subtle on this point.
And one of the results of it, as a priest friend of mine pointed out to me, which again,
this is one of those things like loving your enemies that it's just that I hated having
to admit the truth of this because it just makes my life harder.
But the reality is, is that he said, we often speak of someone who does evil.
We say of them that the mask is off, that now we see what they're really made of when
they do some evil thing.
He says that is lousy theology, particularly lousy theology in the confessional.
He says the reality is human beings are made in the image and likeness of God.
And so at root, along with all other things that God has made, they are good.
And there's yes, of course they're fallen.
And when they sin, as Augustine puts it, they assert their nothingness.
But when people come into the confessional and confess their sins, that's when the mask
comes off.
That's when it's when their sin is forgiven and they enter into at least an attempted
state of grace.
They may be very bad at it, as are we all.
But that's when the mask comes out.
And when you walk out of the confessional, you're showing your true face.
Your true face is when you are most truly the creature that God has made you to be.
Not when you put a mask on because sin anonymizes.
One of the remarkable things about the great sinners of history is at the end of the day,
how boring they are.
You know, Stalin famously remarked that one death is a tragedy and a million deaths is
a statistic.
That when you lose touch with your humanity, you lose touch with what makes you interesting.
Great saints are endlessly fascinating because, you know, they were fully human.
And so that temptation, that Manichean temptation is something that really wants to work against
that.
You know, my enemy is nothing but X, Y, and Z. And believe me, I fall prey to that temptation
as much as anybody does.
It is so easy to do because what you want to do is you want to hurry past this threat
and get to the good stuff that the future will surely bring once this threatening person
is brushed out of the way.
And that's exactly Francis's story where it's like, okay, hurry, hurry past the leper.
You know, don't look at the leper, hurry past.
Don't look at him.
Yeah.
God's tugging him, you know.
No, get off your horse.
Give the leper an offering.
No, that's not enough either.
Look the leper in the eyes and give the leper the offering.
That's not enough either.
Hug the leper, embrace the leper, kiss the leper, share a meal with the leper.
Let the leper become your brother in Christ.
Actually it's even more radical than that.
It's will you let yourself become the leper's brother in Christ because the leper has it
more figured out than you have it figured out.
Yeah.
So like that's the, it just, it flips everything on its head.
And I think that's what something like the incarnation should do is it should just completely
obliterate all your categories.
And that's not to say that there's not a time for debate or there's not a time for justice
or there's not a time to take a stand.
There absolutely is.
But then you let the incarnation obliterate your categories again.
It's like that, that person's trying or that person's wounded.
And that's why they were duped for some kind of radical ideology.
The Franciscan invitation, again, I'd love to get your thoughts on this.
It's to get back to the heart.
That's one of the bad things I think about social media is that it just plays in the
realm of ideas for the most part.
Whereas the Franciscan invitation is get back to your heart.
When you get back to the heart, you're going to find more in common with the person that's
most different than you, than you realize.
Well, you know, somebody once said that, you know, the, the congregationalist model of
church is, uh, like-minded people getting together to talk about being like-minded.
The Catholic model of the church is and always has been, you know, this giant block party
of people with nothing in common except one thing, the mass.
And that's it.
And, and God seems to like the block party thing, uh, since he's, you know, called together
people from every, you know, nation, language, tribe and tongue as, as revelation puts it.
I mean, it's right there on the label Catholic.
So the church's way of living community, uh, I think is one of the great sort of built-in
strengths to the faith.
Uh, yeah, there have been in the church's history, uh, mostly because of historical
accidents, you wind up with ethnic churches because everyone in your village is Italian
and all you've got is an ox cart.
So you're not going too far, you know, but also, uh, in the history of the church, especially
because the church was born in the Roman empire, which was a vastly, it was just this maelstrom
of ethnicities, you know, all moving around in what the, the Romans called our sea, which
is a great way to, you know, mix up a lot of different people.
You wound up with, uh, huge mixtures, uh, right from the get-go.
Uh, Paul is always writing to a multi-ethnic church.
What Paul's dealing with, uh, in the early church is the fact that the church is multi-ethnic.
Well, you put that verse in your article, it's Galatians 3 28.
There's neither Jew nor Greeks.
There's neither slave nor free.
There's neither male nor female for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
Right.
And one of the great happy accidents of the American experiment, uh, is that we have just
because of our historical circumstances, not because there was any human plan behind it.
We have wound up with a profoundly multi-ethnic to that degree, deeply Catholic country, not
because it's, it's religiously Catholic or denominationally Catholic, but because we
have as a people had to figure out how to live together.
And uh, one of the, you know, one of the great things that, that I deeply object to about
Christian nationalism is this myth that there's something called a real American, you know,
who is white and male and rich.
And then there are people who are not real Americans, you know, um, Chesterton remarked
that America was, he described it as a nation with the soul of a church.
And he said that because he said, if you want to become American, uh, all you have to do
is sign off on a creed, which is the, that's how you become a Catholic too.
Sign off on a creed, you know, do you think these things?
Yes.
Okay.
Good enough.
You're an American now.
Uh, um, that approach can, it holds a lot of opportunities for us, I think as American
Catholics, uh, because it takes away the, many of the, the ethnic hatreds that, for
example, have afflicted Europe for centuries.
Immigrants come here, uh, and, and a lot of those ethnic hatreds, uh, vanish.
So you get, you know, um, the, the heirs of Frenchmen who came here voting for a German
named Eisenhower.
And nobody in, you know, 1952 is, is going, he's a German.
Nobody is thinking that they're, they conceive of Eisenhower as an American because his ties
to his German ancestry just don't matter.
And um, that happens again and again.
And I think that it's, it's a place where our Catholic heritage that says there is neither
Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male or female, can be an assist to living in community as
Americans.
Although, of course, the goal and point of the Catholic faith is not and never has been
and never will be, uh, we have to keep this America thing going forever.
America is not the kingdom of heaven.
America is just, it's a human setup that is working reasonably well as all human setups
at their best can do.
Uh, it's got all kinds of problems.
But that American approach to things that says it's, your ethnic background doesn't
matter to whether you can be an American.
It matters in as much as sure, you know, celebrate your heritage, have, have a great St. Patrick's
Day, you know, enjoy your Oktoberfest or your, uh, you know, your, uh, you know, have a good
time at Diwali.
You know, do, do the things that, uh, uh, your culture does great.
Um, but none of those are a disqualifier or a qualifier for whether or not you can be
part of a common conversation working toward the common good.
America is a human construct invented by human beings trying to figure out a way, uh, to
live together as neighbors without going through what for the founders was pretty recent memory,
the religious wars of the 17th century, uh, and all the horrors of, you know, uh, and
you know, they deeply feared Christian nationalism.
You know, what, what Europe arrived at was, um, who's the region, who's the religion,
you know, have the, have that compromise and let us please God put in the past, you know,
the nightmare of the 30 years war.
And uh, you know, so you had compromises like the treaty of Westphalia, uh, that, that worked
out things like that because, uh, Christians had shown themselves spectacularly unable,
uh, for a long time to live in peace.
And so one of the things, one of the great achievements that I think that the founders,
uh, were able to achieve was they put that in the rear view mirror.
Um, you know, you, you, for all of its failures, we didn't have that on our soil.
And uh, yes, we have, we have had plenty of other, you know, we've had genocides, you
know, against native Americans and we've had slavery and we've done, you know, we've done
horrible things that we are still ashamed to look in the eye, but you know, that's one
of the ways in which human beings react to their own sins.
Sometimes it takes them a long time to be able to go to confession and say, I did this.
I'm ashamed of it.
Well, Mark, this has been awesome.
I know we went a little bit longer.
We're experiencing some technical difficulties and stuff.
My last question would be, I know this is such a heavy topic and it's confusing.
And um, as you write in your article, your really wonderful cover story in the September
issue, um, you know, it's a growing problem.
Do you, what would you say the invitation here is for listeners during our own social
and political climate?
Um, that the focus has to be always.
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.
And you shall love your neighbor, including your Christian nationalist neighbor, like
yourself.
And then go out and do the next practical thing to make that happen.
Again, that was author and blogger Mark Shea discussing his September, 2024 cover story
in the St. Anthony messenger, the dangers of Christian nationalism.
You can check out Mark's work at markpshea.com.
If you would like to subscribe to the St. Anthony messenger, visit franciscanmedia.org
and click on the subscriptions link in the banner.
Once again, huge thanks to Mark Shea for being on the off the page podcast from Franciscan
media and thanks as well to father Cyprian Concilio for providing the music for this
episode.
This is Stephen Copeland signing off.
Peace and all good.