1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:14,920 Welcome to the Off the Page Podcast from Franciscan Media, a podcast featuring Franciscan conversations 2 00:00:14,920 --> 00:00:18,420 with authors, artists, and educators. 3 00:00:18,420 --> 00:00:22,560 My name is Stephen Copeland, and I am Franciscan Media's book editor. 4 00:00:22,560 --> 00:00:28,280 Our next guest on the podcast is author and blogger Mark Shea. 5 00:00:28,280 --> 00:00:33,160 Mark is the author of the St. Anthony Messenger's September cover story titled, The Dangers 6 00:00:33,160 --> 00:00:35,760 of Christian Nationalism. 7 00:00:35,760 --> 00:00:40,320 Mark is a longtime contributor to the St. Anthony Messenger, often taking on challenging 8 00:00:40,320 --> 00:00:43,600 topics that are facing Catholics today. 9 00:00:43,600 --> 00:00:48,360 Mark lives in Washington State with his wife Janet, their sons, and grandkids. 10 00:00:48,360 --> 00:00:53,560 His book, The Church's Best-Kept Secret, a primer on Catholic social teaching, was 11 00:00:53,560 --> 00:00:57,680 published in September 2020 by New City Press. 12 00:00:57,680 --> 00:01:03,680 You can learn more about Mark's work at markpshae.com. 13 00:01:03,680 --> 00:01:06,120 A couple quick things before we get started. 14 00:01:06,120 --> 00:01:11,240 Mark and I did experience some technical difficulties with the video, not the audio. 15 00:01:11,240 --> 00:01:12,820 The audio sounds great. 16 00:01:12,820 --> 00:01:18,440 But if you do enjoy this podcast on YouTube, that is why there is no full length video 17 00:01:18,440 --> 00:01:20,240 on that platform. 18 00:01:20,240 --> 00:01:25,400 And lastly, this episode features some hot topic issues, which is what we want with this 19 00:01:25,400 --> 00:01:26,600 podcast. 20 00:01:26,600 --> 00:01:31,000 We want these conversations to be relevant, relatable, and to make you think. 21 00:01:31,000 --> 00:01:34,240 And we welcome a diversity of thought on this podcast. 22 00:01:34,240 --> 00:01:38,000 Francis himself modeled that you can have heart to heart connections with people and 23 00:01:38,000 --> 00:01:39,600 not always agree. 24 00:01:39,600 --> 00:01:43,280 And that's the fun of this, experiencing Christ in each other. 25 00:01:43,280 --> 00:01:46,260 So with that being said, I hope you really enjoy this episode. 26 00:01:46,260 --> 00:01:47,440 It's a fun one. 27 00:01:47,440 --> 00:01:50,880 And even if you don't agree with everything that is said, I think it'll make you think 28 00:01:50,880 --> 00:01:54,920 critically about the social and political climate we're navigating. 29 00:01:54,920 --> 00:01:58,280 Here is Mark Hsieh. 30 00:01:58,280 --> 00:02:01,560 Thank you again for joining the Off the Page podcast. 31 00:02:01,560 --> 00:02:02,560 Happy to be here. 32 00:02:02,560 --> 00:02:03,800 Thanks for having me. 33 00:02:03,800 --> 00:02:10,040 So your September cover story in the St. Anthony Messenger addresses Christian nationalism. 34 00:02:10,040 --> 00:02:16,940 For starters here, what is Christian nationalism and why did you want to write about it? 35 00:02:16,940 --> 00:02:28,080 Christian nationalism is, I would describe Christian nationalism as a heresy that is 36 00:02:28,080 --> 00:02:41,960 to the Christian's relationship with the state as the sin of pride is to the Christian's 37 00:02:41,960 --> 00:02:45,780 relationship with himself, if you will. 38 00:02:45,780 --> 00:02:53,680 We are commanded, the two great commandments that we have from our Lord are to love the 39 00:02:53,680 --> 00:03:02,740 Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, to love your neighbor as yourself. 40 00:03:02,740 --> 00:03:12,760 What Christian nationalism teaches is kind of a photographic negative of that. 41 00:03:12,760 --> 00:03:20,400 So the command to love your neighbor as yourself has various applications. 42 00:03:20,400 --> 00:03:32,360 So we apply that to our families, of course, and we also continue to extend the boundary 43 00:03:32,360 --> 00:03:45,040 of what it means to be a neighbor to our fellow citizens, and that makes sense. 44 00:03:45,040 --> 00:03:55,160 So you could say that patriotism, for example, is the love of neighbor extended to your borders. 45 00:03:55,160 --> 00:04:08,660 What Christian nationalism does is it weirdly perverts that command to love neighbor into 46 00:04:08,660 --> 00:04:15,680 an excuse for hating those who are not citizens of your country. 47 00:04:15,680 --> 00:04:20,400 So it's the sin of pride. 48 00:04:20,400 --> 00:04:26,360 What made the devil the devil was the sin of pride. 49 00:04:26,360 --> 00:04:27,880 What does the devil do? 50 00:04:27,880 --> 00:04:32,560 Well, pride loves the self above all else. 51 00:04:32,560 --> 00:04:39,360 You can turn other people into extensions of the ego in that way. 52 00:04:39,360 --> 00:04:51,240 So we saw its most extreme example that we saw came in the 20th century in Hitler's Germany, 53 00:04:51,240 --> 00:05:02,400 where Hitler turns the German people into the extension of his own ego and then uses 54 00:05:02,400 --> 00:05:07,680 that, weaponizes that against the rest of the world. 55 00:05:07,680 --> 00:05:15,000 And yet what we saw at the end of World War II, of course, was that as Hitler loses the 56 00:05:15,000 --> 00:05:22,680 war, what's revealed, of course, is that the German people never meant anything to him. 57 00:05:22,680 --> 00:05:31,480 And so he's ready to just burn it all down because the German people failed me, is Hitler's 58 00:05:31,480 --> 00:05:33,560 attitude to this. 59 00:05:33,560 --> 00:05:43,680 And so Christian nationalism, the grave danger of Christian nationalism is that it perverts 60 00:05:43,680 --> 00:05:50,280 these commands to love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, mind and all 61 00:05:50,280 --> 00:05:54,240 of your mind and all of your strength and to love your neighbor as yourself. 62 00:05:54,240 --> 00:06:07,760 It perverts them into turning the nation into an extension of the ego of the Christian nationalism 63 00:06:07,760 --> 00:06:17,800 and in fact, turning God into an extension of the ego of the Christian nationalist. 64 00:06:17,800 --> 00:06:20,800 Why does the Christian nationalist love God? 65 00:06:20,800 --> 00:06:24,600 Because God's going to make us big and powerful. 66 00:06:24,600 --> 00:06:34,520 And as long as he comes through, that's the contract which God has never signed. 67 00:06:34,520 --> 00:06:38,960 This is something that the Christian nationalist brandishes and says, this is how it's going 68 00:06:38,960 --> 00:06:39,960 to be. 69 00:06:39,960 --> 00:06:45,720 God is on our side, all who are not us. 70 00:06:45,720 --> 00:06:53,160 And of course, in the mind of the Christian nationalist, the not us includes not simply 71 00:06:53,160 --> 00:06:57,120 foreigners, people at the border, et cetera. 72 00:06:57,120 --> 00:07:06,640 It also means any countrymen who is not part of the Christian nationalist sect. 73 00:07:06,640 --> 00:07:10,840 That's how this is played out. 74 00:07:10,840 --> 00:07:22,480 And so what Christian nationalism inevitably attempts to do is impose what it calls gospel 75 00:07:22,480 --> 00:07:33,960 values by the one means that St. Paul absolutely guarantees can never possibly work, which 76 00:07:33,960 --> 00:07:38,840 is by means of the law. 77 00:07:38,840 --> 00:07:45,000 If there's anything that Paul bangs away at more than anything, it is that we cannot be 78 00:07:45,000 --> 00:07:47,440 saved by law. 79 00:07:47,440 --> 00:07:50,720 That is not how grace works. 80 00:07:50,720 --> 00:07:54,920 We are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. 81 00:07:54,920 --> 00:08:05,480 We are not saved by forcing people to live usually by the fragments of a moral code that 82 00:08:05,480 --> 00:08:17,920 we don't keep ourselves and which as we've seen recently in attempts, for example, to 83 00:08:17,920 --> 00:08:24,880 Louisiana is trying to stick the 10 commandments into school rooms. 84 00:08:24,880 --> 00:08:25,880 Why? 85 00:08:25,880 --> 00:08:29,400 Well, it's performative piety. 86 00:08:29,400 --> 00:08:32,080 Look at us, we're standing for Christian values. 87 00:08:32,080 --> 00:08:35,040 Okay, goody for you. 88 00:08:35,040 --> 00:08:48,560 But while you're doing that, of course, as Paul tells the Romans, you who oppose idols, 89 00:08:48,560 --> 00:08:53,280 do you rob temples? 90 00:08:53,280 --> 00:09:04,840 And so at the same time that there's this attempt to impose fragments of law on people 91 00:09:04,840 --> 00:09:13,200 who perhaps see no particular reason to revere the 10 commandments because they're not Jews, 92 00:09:13,200 --> 00:09:27,440 they're not Christians or whatever, what's being accomplished there? 93 00:09:27,440 --> 00:09:35,480 Some Buddhist parent with kids in the classroom got to come away from that going, wow, okay, 94 00:09:35,480 --> 00:09:36,480 I believe. 95 00:09:36,480 --> 00:09:39,560 Of course not. 96 00:09:39,560 --> 00:09:48,880 And so the key to this use of law in the hands of Christian nationalism is that the law is 97 00:09:48,880 --> 00:09:57,840 understood by the Christian nationalists to bind the people that they want to have the 98 00:09:57,840 --> 00:10:06,400 boot on their neck and to exempt those who are imposing the law. 99 00:10:06,400 --> 00:10:20,760 And so this whole attempt to impose by law, force, fear, razor wire, threats of deportation, 100 00:10:20,760 --> 00:10:30,040 descriptions of their enemies as vermin, and this is a historically resonant phrase that 101 00:10:30,040 --> 00:10:39,480 also takes us back to Hitler's Germany, people who are poisoning the blood of our country. 102 00:10:39,480 --> 00:10:52,840 All of this is a grotesque perversion of the gospel. 103 00:10:52,840 --> 00:11:00,920 I'm coming at all of this not from the perspective of, although one certainly can, but I'm coming 104 00:11:00,920 --> 00:11:10,260 at it not from the perspective of our heritage as Americans and the need for the Constitution 105 00:11:10,260 --> 00:11:15,960 to apply to all and so on and so forth, and the president, God help us not to be immune 106 00:11:15,960 --> 00:11:19,080 from having to obey the Constitution. 107 00:11:19,080 --> 00:11:28,400 That's a very serious problem, but for me as a Christian and as a Catholic who understands 108 00:11:28,400 --> 00:11:34,840 what the teaching of the gospel is, I'm coming at this from the perspective that this is 109 00:11:34,840 --> 00:11:44,440 a deadly, deadly dangerous heresy and a perversion of Christian teaching. 110 00:11:44,440 --> 00:11:47,160 So it's evil because of that. 111 00:11:47,160 --> 00:11:58,720 It's also evil, of course, because the guaranteed outcome from this Faustian bargain, this deal 112 00:11:58,720 --> 00:12:08,080 with the devil, is going to be the destruction of the church and the witness of the church 113 00:12:08,080 --> 00:12:10,440 in the United States. 114 00:12:10,440 --> 00:12:12,000 Absolutely guaranteed. 115 00:12:12,000 --> 00:12:14,360 No question about it. 116 00:12:14,360 --> 00:12:22,440 And so I believe that it's incumbent on us as Christians to bear witness to the gospel 117 00:12:22,440 --> 00:12:29,400 against this profoundly dangerous notion of Christian nationalism. 118 00:12:29,400 --> 00:12:31,040 You hit on it a little bit. 119 00:12:31,040 --> 00:12:36,160 I'm wondering, what is it about Christian nationalism? 120 00:12:36,160 --> 00:12:41,840 What is it in this ideology that makes it so psychologically appealing to people? 121 00:12:41,840 --> 00:12:50,000 I mean, it's one of the primal temptations. 122 00:12:50,000 --> 00:12:54,400 It's the third temptation that Christ faced in the wilderness. 123 00:12:54,400 --> 00:13:00,320 All this will I give you if you will bow down and worship me. 124 00:13:00,320 --> 00:13:06,440 The devil takes Jesus up to an exceeding high mountain and shows him all the kingdoms of 125 00:13:06,440 --> 00:13:14,040 the earth and says, all this has been given to me and I can give it to whoever I want. 126 00:13:14,040 --> 00:13:17,020 All this I will give to you if you will bow down and worship me. 127 00:13:17,020 --> 00:13:19,400 What could be simpler? 128 00:13:19,400 --> 00:13:20,920 This has been a standing temptation. 129 00:13:20,920 --> 00:13:33,000 The reason that we're told about those temptations is because the four great idols of human history 130 00:13:33,000 --> 00:13:39,720 have always been money, pleasure, power, and honor. 131 00:13:39,720 --> 00:13:47,060 And Christian nationalist leaders always promise those things as nationalist leaders always 132 00:13:47,060 --> 00:13:52,600 promise those things because the active word in Christian nationalism is always nationalism. 133 00:13:52,600 --> 00:13:55,260 It's not really about the gospel. 134 00:13:55,260 --> 00:13:58,180 It's just, you're a Christian. 135 00:13:58,180 --> 00:14:03,240 You come from a Christian background, you're used to Christian culture. 136 00:14:03,240 --> 00:14:15,160 So we'll add in a dollop of this feels familiar to you and you get to have these familiar 137 00:14:15,160 --> 00:14:20,160 things that remind you of your culture, your home, and whatever. 138 00:14:20,160 --> 00:14:26,360 But the real goal is always money, pleasure, power, honor. 139 00:14:26,360 --> 00:14:30,160 And that's what the appeal of Christian nationalism is. 140 00:14:30,160 --> 00:14:34,320 And that's what the temptations were about. 141 00:14:34,320 --> 00:14:38,240 The temptations were temptations to you're hungry. 142 00:14:38,240 --> 00:14:40,240 You want to fill your belly. 143 00:14:40,240 --> 00:14:41,240 Great. 144 00:14:41,240 --> 00:14:42,960 Turn these stones into bread. 145 00:14:42,960 --> 00:14:46,240 You're worried about your security. 146 00:14:46,240 --> 00:14:48,040 Terrific. 147 00:14:48,040 --> 00:14:54,840 I will make it so that you can throw yourself off the temple and you won't get hurt. 148 00:14:54,840 --> 00:14:55,920 Nothing can hurt you. 149 00:14:55,920 --> 00:14:59,520 You'll be fine. 150 00:14:59,520 --> 00:15:07,560 And the last great temptation is bow down and worship me and I will give you power. 151 00:15:07,560 --> 00:15:15,360 And this is exactly, I mean, this is literally the words, you know, that the biggest Christian 152 00:15:15,360 --> 00:15:23,560 nationalist threat in our history has been promising ever since 2016. 153 00:15:23,560 --> 00:15:28,760 When I am in power, Christianity will be powerful again. 154 00:15:28,760 --> 00:15:34,560 The primal heresy in Christian history is the Aryan heresy. 155 00:15:34,560 --> 00:15:40,720 This is the great heresy that occasioned the first ecumenical council in the history of 156 00:15:40,720 --> 00:15:41,960 the church. 157 00:15:41,960 --> 00:15:44,640 And how did Aryanism work? 158 00:15:44,640 --> 00:15:50,960 Aryanism took the most important thing that the Christian gospel had to offer us, the 159 00:15:50,960 --> 00:15:58,080 glory of God the Father, and weaponized that against the rest of the gospel, weaponized 160 00:15:58,080 --> 00:16:11,200 it against the deity of God the Son, weaponized it later against the deity of the Holy Spirit. 161 00:16:11,200 --> 00:16:22,440 And because the glory of God is a really good thing, it was easy for people who sort of 162 00:16:22,440 --> 00:16:33,280 developed this mania around this one truth to reject all the other truths that the faith 163 00:16:33,280 --> 00:16:39,040 also gives us, including the truth that Jesus is God, that the Son is God, that the Holy 164 00:16:39,040 --> 00:16:41,840 Spirit is God. 165 00:16:41,840 --> 00:16:43,960 And so that's what the council had to settle. 166 00:16:43,960 --> 00:16:50,720 And every time Catholics tried to speak to Aryans, of course, Aryans said, you are attacking 167 00:16:50,720 --> 00:16:53,500 the glory of God the Father. 168 00:16:53,500 --> 00:16:55,680 You are an enemy of God. 169 00:16:55,680 --> 00:16:58,800 You are not a friend of God. 170 00:16:58,800 --> 00:17:06,640 Because what happens with the heresy always is that one truth or a small cluster of real 171 00:17:06,640 --> 00:17:16,760 truths from the tradition become infected and inflamed and turned into this crazy, like 172 00:17:16,760 --> 00:17:21,040 a cancerous tumor that attacks the rest of the body. 173 00:17:21,040 --> 00:17:23,840 And that's what happened with the Aryan heresy. 174 00:17:23,840 --> 00:17:30,960 And so what the church calls us to do, the church says, pay attention to the entire common 175 00:17:30,960 --> 00:17:32,120 good. 176 00:17:32,120 --> 00:17:39,400 So work against the death penalty as well as working to protect the unborn. 177 00:17:39,400 --> 00:17:46,680 What drives our abortion rates is and always has been demand, not supply. 178 00:17:46,680 --> 00:17:50,800 And the reason for the demand is economic. 179 00:17:50,800 --> 00:17:54,760 Poverty is the number one abortifacient in the United States. 180 00:17:54,760 --> 00:17:59,680 If you want to lower abortion rates, then you attack poverty. 181 00:17:59,680 --> 00:18:04,000 So we wind up being turned one against another. 182 00:18:04,000 --> 00:18:11,500 And this is one of the classic ways in which the person who is playing on the Christian 183 00:18:11,500 --> 00:18:21,440 nationalist nerve works his audience so that their anger gets directed toward their enemies, 184 00:18:21,440 --> 00:18:26,980 their imagined enemies, the burger flipper, who somehow is a threat to the poorly paid 185 00:18:26,980 --> 00:18:34,400 soldier who somehow is a threat to the poorly paid cop who somehow is a threat to the ambulance 186 00:18:34,400 --> 00:18:35,400 driver. 187 00:18:35,400 --> 00:18:37,880 The burger didn't do any. 188 00:18:37,880 --> 00:18:41,520 He's not paying their wages or refusing to pay their wages. 189 00:18:41,520 --> 00:18:44,260 He's just trying to get by. 190 00:18:44,260 --> 00:18:52,440 And so this way of turning people against one another while at the same time sort of 191 00:18:52,440 --> 00:18:58,360 pulling them in and saying, if you stick with me, I will make you powerful. 192 00:18:58,360 --> 00:19:01,240 You're going to be one of my lieutenants. 193 00:19:01,240 --> 00:19:06,280 You're going to be one of my fellow alpha wolves. 194 00:19:06,280 --> 00:19:14,640 And together, you and I are going to defeat all these enemies that you are so angry at. 195 00:19:14,640 --> 00:19:21,580 It's a psychological ploy that has worked for centuries and centuries. 196 00:19:21,580 --> 00:19:26,080 It's at the foundation of American racism as well. 197 00:19:26,080 --> 00:19:33,840 It's one of the classic ways in which wealthy slave owners told poor whites, for example, 198 00:19:33,840 --> 00:19:41,720 in the South, if you don't help out, these black slaves are going to get free and they're 199 00:19:41,720 --> 00:19:43,960 going to come after you. 200 00:19:43,960 --> 00:19:46,400 Now that same method is being used. 201 00:19:46,400 --> 00:19:53,280 If you don't side with me, who will make you powerful, those brown people are going to 202 00:19:53,280 --> 00:19:54,280 come across the border. 203 00:19:54,280 --> 00:19:56,560 They're going to take all of your jobs. 204 00:19:56,560 --> 00:20:01,280 They're going to kill your daughter and all the rest of it. 205 00:20:01,280 --> 00:20:06,680 This is a strategy that has worked again and again and again. 206 00:20:06,680 --> 00:20:11,920 And all you have to do is just find a scapegoat group. 207 00:20:11,920 --> 00:20:15,200 And this is how Christian nationalism always works. 208 00:20:15,200 --> 00:20:18,520 This is how nationalism always works. 209 00:20:18,520 --> 00:20:20,840 You mentioned this a little bit earlier. 210 00:20:20,840 --> 00:20:27,460 Can you describe the difference between patriotism and nationalism? 211 00:20:27,460 --> 00:20:33,520 A lot of conservatives feel like the far left is very anti-American at times in their rhetoric, 212 00:20:33,520 --> 00:20:38,540 but then patriotism at the same time, if I'm hearing you correctly, it seems like it can 213 00:20:38,540 --> 00:20:40,280 drift into nationalism. 214 00:20:40,280 --> 00:20:46,720 So can you help make a distinction between those two and explain how it drifts into the 215 00:20:46,720 --> 00:20:48,320 other? 216 00:20:48,320 --> 00:20:57,520 The distinction is always between love, which is legitimate as long as it's rightly ordered, 217 00:20:57,520 --> 00:21:05,960 and pride, which is never in Christian understanding a good thing. 218 00:21:05,960 --> 00:21:14,360 The problem is that in English, of course, pride can often be used as a synonym for love. 219 00:21:14,360 --> 00:21:16,040 So I'm proud of my son. 220 00:21:16,040 --> 00:21:20,360 He did a great job. 221 00:21:20,360 --> 00:21:21,800 He got his PhD. 222 00:21:21,800 --> 00:21:23,240 I'm proud of him. 223 00:21:23,240 --> 00:21:27,440 That's not the sin of pride. 224 00:21:27,440 --> 00:21:30,760 In English, that's just another way of saying I love my son. 225 00:21:30,760 --> 00:21:34,840 And love in that sense is always fine. 226 00:21:34,840 --> 00:21:36,880 It's healthy, of course. 227 00:21:36,880 --> 00:21:43,200 So the two great commandments that we are given is to love God and to love neighbor. 228 00:21:43,200 --> 00:21:50,480 And so patriotism is a healthy is when it's healthy, is a healthy expression of love, 229 00:21:50,480 --> 00:21:58,480 just as love for family when it's rightly ordered is a healthy expression of love as 230 00:21:58,480 --> 00:22:00,720 well. 231 00:22:00,720 --> 00:22:10,000 Self love is it can be you know, Jesus loved himself. 232 00:22:10,000 --> 00:22:11,000 Why wouldn't he? 233 00:22:11,000 --> 00:22:12,000 He's good. 234 00:22:12,000 --> 00:22:13,000 He's good. 235 00:22:13,000 --> 00:22:14,000 He's perfectly good. 236 00:22:14,000 --> 00:22:21,280 And so we're commanded to love our neighbors as ourselves. 237 00:22:21,280 --> 00:22:24,280 And so all of that is legitimate. 238 00:22:24,280 --> 00:22:26,920 And so there are different ways in which that's played out. 239 00:22:26,920 --> 00:22:28,040 It's played out of the family. 240 00:22:28,040 --> 00:22:30,240 It's played out among friends. 241 00:22:30,240 --> 00:22:43,600 It's played out toward your neighbors, which is rightly understood can be applied to your 242 00:22:43,600 --> 00:22:45,120 country. 243 00:22:45,120 --> 00:22:53,320 So we owe our country huge debts that we'll never be able to repay. 244 00:22:53,320 --> 00:22:58,000 I didn't create our constitutional order. 245 00:22:58,000 --> 00:23:06,280 That was established for me and defended for me by generations that lived and died before 246 00:23:06,280 --> 00:23:08,040 I was born. 247 00:23:08,040 --> 00:23:12,000 I owe them a debt that I can't repay. 248 00:23:12,000 --> 00:23:14,620 And so the way we live that out is we pay it forward. 249 00:23:14,620 --> 00:23:16,800 We pay it to our children. 250 00:23:16,800 --> 00:23:18,280 We pay it to our neighbors. 251 00:23:18,280 --> 00:23:26,200 We try to hand them a better country than the one that we were born into. 252 00:23:26,200 --> 00:23:28,760 But it doesn't stop at our borders. 253 00:23:28,760 --> 00:23:33,560 The great model of this that we're given is the parable of the good Samaritan, because 254 00:23:33,560 --> 00:23:40,680 that's exactly the question that's brought to Jesus is, who is my neighbor? 255 00:23:40,680 --> 00:23:49,320 And the answer that Jesus gives at the end of the day is, everyone is your neighbor. 256 00:23:49,320 --> 00:23:51,040 Everyone is your neighbor. 257 00:23:51,040 --> 00:23:59,840 So we are called to love everybody, and Jesus is so radical about this that he says that 258 00:23:59,840 --> 00:24:04,520 we are to love even our enemies. 259 00:24:04,520 --> 00:24:13,360 Of course, the shocking thing for Jesus' listeners when he tells us the parable of the good Samaritan 260 00:24:13,360 --> 00:24:20,920 is that there was no love lost between Samaritans and Jews in the first century. 261 00:24:20,920 --> 00:24:29,920 There was all kinds of historical bitterness, stuff that went back centuries. 262 00:24:29,920 --> 00:24:40,480 And it was ethnic bitterness, and it was religious bitterness, all kinds of hostility going on 263 00:24:40,480 --> 00:24:43,040 there on both sides. 264 00:24:43,040 --> 00:24:46,200 Nobody on either side liked each other. 265 00:24:46,200 --> 00:24:57,280 And because he's really trying to drive home to us the fact that blood kinship is not the 266 00:24:57,280 --> 00:25:08,120 determinant of who we're supposed to love, which was, of course, a huge driver in antiquity 267 00:25:08,120 --> 00:25:13,080 and remains a huge driver today. 268 00:25:13,080 --> 00:25:21,840 And when you wind up making the second greatest commandment more important than the first 269 00:25:21,840 --> 00:25:29,480 greatest commandment, when you start narrowing the definition of who your neighbor is to 270 00:25:29,480 --> 00:25:39,880 your ethnic kin and blood, that's when you are preparing to turn the world into hell 271 00:25:39,880 --> 00:25:41,520 on earth. 272 00:25:41,520 --> 00:25:47,360 You've taken something that really is part of the Christian tradition, as all heresy 273 00:25:47,360 --> 00:25:52,120 is, and then you've weaponized it. 274 00:25:52,120 --> 00:25:58,760 And one of the deadliest things that a Christian can do is go on to one part of the Christian 275 00:25:58,760 --> 00:26:06,800 tradition and turn it into a cancerous tumor that attacks the rest. 276 00:26:06,800 --> 00:26:14,280 And this is what Christian nationalism always does, because it's what nationalism does. 277 00:26:14,280 --> 00:26:25,720 What nationalism does is it takes the ethnos, the blood kin, the pride of the nation in 278 00:26:25,720 --> 00:26:35,160 our family, our kind, and weaponizes it against all the rest of the human beings who have 279 00:26:35,160 --> 00:26:48,360 a perfect right to live and to be who they are and their particular ways of life and 280 00:26:48,360 --> 00:26:50,360 so on and so forth. 281 00:26:50,360 --> 00:26:57,520 And what Christian nationalism does is it says, we're doing this for God. 282 00:26:57,520 --> 00:27:01,720 And so anyone who opposes us opposes God. 283 00:27:01,720 --> 00:27:05,880 That combination, incredibly dangerous. 284 00:27:05,880 --> 00:27:08,680 And I think a big thing is that you get to be right. 285 00:27:08,680 --> 00:27:12,560 And I see this in some aspects of progressive Christianity, too. 286 00:27:12,560 --> 00:27:21,200 You did mention one thing, that the two greatest commandments that Jesus gives us, they pull 287 00:27:21,200 --> 00:27:27,720 us deeper into our conversion in relationship with the other. 288 00:27:27,720 --> 00:27:34,160 The neighbor is not who I decide is my neighbor, someone who looks like me, acts like me, votes 289 00:27:34,160 --> 00:27:36,100 like me, believes like me. 290 00:27:36,100 --> 00:27:41,440 The neighbor is the person that shatters all of my constructs. 291 00:27:41,440 --> 00:27:47,160 And I think this may be a strategic time to bring in someone like St. Francis of Assisi, 292 00:27:47,160 --> 00:27:53,880 who his entire Christian conversion, some would argue, deepened in relationship with 293 00:27:53,880 --> 00:27:55,680 the other. 294 00:27:55,680 --> 00:28:00,760 Whether it is the leper, these people who are outcasts in that society. 295 00:28:00,760 --> 00:28:06,340 And Francis is called deeper and deeper and deeper into loving and accepting and eventually 296 00:28:06,340 --> 00:28:11,520 sharing a meal from the same bowl with a leper and hugging them. 297 00:28:11,520 --> 00:28:16,020 And then same thing with the Sultan Malik al-Kamil, where he thinks he's going to go 298 00:28:16,020 --> 00:28:17,840 give the Sultan the answer. 299 00:28:17,840 --> 00:28:18,840 Nope. 300 00:28:18,840 --> 00:28:24,640 In a very real way, Francis was animated by his own fundamentalism, his own certainty, 301 00:28:24,640 --> 00:28:27,360 thinking he's going to go convert the Sultan. 302 00:28:27,360 --> 00:28:28,440 And the opposite happens. 303 00:28:28,440 --> 00:28:33,640 The heart ruptures everything that he thought was absolutely true. 304 00:28:33,640 --> 00:28:39,400 There's something there, I think, in the time that we're navigating that I think it's important 305 00:28:39,400 --> 00:28:40,520 to elevate. 306 00:28:40,520 --> 00:28:48,280 What would you, what's your interpretation of how St. Francis and his legacy and his 307 00:28:48,280 --> 00:28:54,020 spiritual trajectory can help us right now in something like Christian nationalism? 308 00:28:54,020 --> 00:28:59,400 Or do you see some similarities between the time, the times he was navigating and the 309 00:28:59,400 --> 00:29:01,760 times that we're navigating right now? 310 00:29:01,760 --> 00:29:10,760 Well, Francis, of course, is living in a world, at least in his local world. 311 00:29:10,760 --> 00:29:19,500 He's living in a world where literally everybody except for small communities of Jews, everyone 312 00:29:19,500 --> 00:29:24,960 in Western Europe is a Catholic. 313 00:29:24,960 --> 00:29:31,960 And yet, of course, what's also ironically true is he's living in a Europe that's riven 314 00:29:31,960 --> 00:29:38,520 by all kinds of little regional wars and that kind of thing. 315 00:29:38,520 --> 00:29:43,880 You've still got power struggles, you know, Game of Thrones kind of stuff going on. 316 00:29:43,880 --> 00:29:48,720 And you know, Italy is broken up into little nation states that are all fighting with each 317 00:29:48,720 --> 00:29:54,200 other and that sort of thing. 318 00:29:54,200 --> 00:30:03,440 But it's a time in which everybody in Europe lives, even if they live in a patchwork political 319 00:30:03,440 --> 00:30:09,240 quilt, they live in the same universe. 320 00:30:09,240 --> 00:30:20,760 And the big challenge to that universe is the rise of Islam. 321 00:30:20,760 --> 00:30:30,360 And so that's where you get things like, you know, Francis going off to convert the Sultan 322 00:30:30,360 --> 00:30:33,600 and that sort of thing. 323 00:30:33,600 --> 00:30:41,360 But there's a terrific book by an English historian, he's not a believer himself, a 324 00:30:41,360 --> 00:30:48,000 guy named Tom Holland, he wrote a book called Dominion, which I highly recommend, in which 325 00:30:48,000 --> 00:31:01,040 he makes this that the gospel was a colossal depth charge at the foundations of classical 326 00:31:01,040 --> 00:31:04,800 civilization. 327 00:31:04,800 --> 00:31:18,800 Within a thousand years of the foundation of the church, it had ignited the first revolution 328 00:31:18,800 --> 00:31:28,160 in European history, which was the reforms of Gregory VII, in which concepts like separation 329 00:31:28,160 --> 00:31:39,040 of church and state, which, you know, we still we take for granted the United States, that's 330 00:31:39,040 --> 00:31:44,480 part of the Catholic legacy to the West. 331 00:31:44,480 --> 00:31:57,600 And that the chief thing that the Christian revolution has done is it's set off a 332 00:31:57,600 --> 00:32:06,920 a series of concussed revolutions that have formed our modern world that were, ironically, 333 00:32:06,920 --> 00:32:14,340 they're profoundly based in Christian theology, and at the same time, have become reactions 334 00:32:14,340 --> 00:32:17,160 against Christianity. 335 00:32:17,160 --> 00:32:28,800 So reform movements in the 14th century that led into the Protestant Reformation, which 336 00:32:28,800 --> 00:32:39,800 was itself taking for granted certain aspects of the Christian tradition in order to attack 337 00:32:39,800 --> 00:32:41,480 the Catholic Church. 338 00:32:41,480 --> 00:32:50,960 The Enlightenment did the same thing, revolts like communism did the same thing. 339 00:32:50,960 --> 00:32:57,000 Communism takes for granted things that are in no way evident, you know, from the sciences 340 00:32:57,000 --> 00:33:05,640 of the senses, the dignity of the little guy, you know, that somehow the future lies with 341 00:33:05,640 --> 00:33:10,200 the slave and not with the slave owner. 342 00:33:10,200 --> 00:33:15,280 All of these kinds of things are all, you know, they go back to his cast down the mighty 343 00:33:15,280 --> 00:33:19,480 and their arrogance and lifted up the lowly. 344 00:33:19,480 --> 00:33:22,680 And we're still seeing that today. 345 00:33:22,680 --> 00:33:28,960 And so one of the ironies that strikes me again and again is that people on the left 346 00:33:28,960 --> 00:33:37,400 beg and plead with people who announce themselves to be devout conservative Christians to be 347 00:33:37,400 --> 00:33:39,640 like Jesus. 348 00:33:39,640 --> 00:33:47,760 That's ironically, it's the people who often view themselves as opposed to the church, 349 00:33:47,760 --> 00:34:02,040 opposed to the Christian tradition, who their anger is the anger of prostrated lovers who 350 00:34:02,040 --> 00:34:09,800 really want to see the Christian tradition lived out with, you know, mercy for the least 351 00:34:09,800 --> 00:34:16,360 of these and care for the least of these and so forth. 352 00:34:16,360 --> 00:34:27,200 And that weird schism that we're living in is something that Francis didn't have to contend 353 00:34:27,200 --> 00:34:28,200 with. 354 00:34:28,200 --> 00:34:33,040 He lived in a universe that was fragmented in that way. 355 00:34:33,040 --> 00:34:36,040 He lived in a universe that was fragmented politically. 356 00:34:36,040 --> 00:34:44,000 It was fragmented for straightforward stuff about that's my piece of turf and I want your 357 00:34:44,000 --> 00:34:48,560 stuff. 358 00:34:48,560 --> 00:34:52,880 And you know, you get that kind of thing. 359 00:34:52,880 --> 00:35:03,720 But so it's weird how it has reconfigured itself and yet the same answers that Francis 360 00:35:03,720 --> 00:35:10,560 looks to, humility before God, humility before neighbor, care for the least of these, looking 361 00:35:10,560 --> 00:35:18,240 to love even your enemy, which is a huge challenge. 362 00:35:18,240 --> 00:35:27,200 I mean, because of course, people like me who are mortally opposed to Christian nationalism 363 00:35:27,200 --> 00:35:31,160 have it incumbent on us to love Christian nationalists. 364 00:35:31,160 --> 00:35:35,880 We have to figure out a way to do that. 365 00:35:35,880 --> 00:35:43,560 And you know, how that is to be done is I think is a daily challenge. 366 00:35:43,560 --> 00:35:47,440 I do it poorly. 367 00:35:47,440 --> 00:35:55,200 It's difficult to love people who gloat over cruelty. 368 00:35:55,200 --> 00:36:04,000 We're all looking for some way that we can give into money, pleasure, because anger is 369 00:36:04,000 --> 00:36:05,240 a pleasure. 370 00:36:05,240 --> 00:36:12,240 It's like, oh, finally, I can cut loose with all the self-control stuff that I have to 371 00:36:12,240 --> 00:36:17,880 do in order to rein in my anger and I can really just indulge myself. 372 00:36:17,880 --> 00:36:25,440 That's a form of pleasure to which our culture is prey because the four great idols, this 373 00:36:25,440 --> 00:36:30,200 cannot be said enough, are money, pleasure, power, and honor. 374 00:36:30,200 --> 00:36:39,240 What the gospel teaches us to do is restrain all those appetites and turn that energy over 375 00:36:39,240 --> 00:36:42,080 toward the love of God and the love of neighbor. 376 00:36:42,080 --> 00:36:45,080 And that is steady work. 377 00:36:45,080 --> 00:36:48,080 That's what Francis did. 378 00:36:48,080 --> 00:36:55,200 He practiced the kinds of austerities that were the way you reigned in those appetites 379 00:36:55,200 --> 00:36:56,600 in that time. 380 00:36:56,600 --> 00:37:08,160 So no, we are not required to go barefoot in the snow and practice those kinds of austerities 381 00:37:08,160 --> 00:37:09,600 that Francis chose to do. 382 00:37:09,600 --> 00:37:19,760 But what we are absolutely required to do, as Francis did, was refuse to give in to these 383 00:37:19,760 --> 00:37:29,680 wild animal appetites for money, pleasure, power, and honor, and to turn our direction 384 00:37:29,680 --> 00:37:38,280 toward as best we can, loving God above all things and loving our neighbors as ourselves. 385 00:37:38,280 --> 00:37:43,680 And never pitting those two commandments against one another and never pitting the second 386 00:37:43,680 --> 00:37:48,640 commandment, placing it over the first commandment. 387 00:37:48,640 --> 00:37:53,000 The first commandment has to rein in the second commandment. 388 00:37:53,000 --> 00:37:57,720 And one of the things, theologically for Francis, I think it would be very apt to bring this 389 00:37:57,720 --> 00:38:04,080 in to the Christian nationalist conversation, is that the Franciscan approach to the incarnation 390 00:38:04,080 --> 00:38:12,960 is, some may say it was countercultural in that day, where at a time where not all across 391 00:38:12,960 --> 00:38:20,600 the board, but Jesus was very often depicted, or the divine was very often depicted as this 392 00:38:20,600 --> 00:38:24,680 being on a throne, glorified, who is- 393 00:38:24,680 --> 00:38:25,680 Right. 394 00:38:25,680 --> 00:38:26,680 Kingly and royal. 395 00:38:26,680 --> 00:38:32,840 Yeah, you can try to, you can almost make a direct link to a justification for something 396 00:38:32,840 --> 00:38:38,160 like the Crusades, when that is your God view. 397 00:38:38,160 --> 00:38:44,360 And again, I know it's way more nuanced and complex than that, but when your God is this 398 00:38:44,360 --> 00:38:51,000 King on a throne, I mean, you want to join the army, you know, but for Francis, it was 399 00:38:51,000 --> 00:38:52,000 the opposite. 400 00:38:52,000 --> 00:39:00,720 And for Francis, what invited him into this lifestyle of charity and love and self-emptying 401 00:39:00,720 --> 00:39:03,640 was the humble God, the God who enters in. 402 00:39:03,640 --> 00:39:04,640 Right. 403 00:39:04,640 --> 00:39:12,560 The God that incarnates God's self in this little baby that cries and pees and poops. 404 00:39:12,560 --> 00:39:17,840 How radically humble is the trajectory of this God? 405 00:39:17,840 --> 00:39:20,440 And that's very, that's very different. 406 00:39:20,440 --> 00:39:25,680 I think a lot of it, like theologically, when it comes to Christian nationalism, it's like, 407 00:39:25,680 --> 00:39:27,320 what's your God metaphor? 408 00:39:27,320 --> 00:39:36,880 Is it a God on a throne that's saying, this is the way, if you don't join this team, well, 409 00:39:36,880 --> 00:39:40,920 one, join the team and you're going to be right and certain and you're going to attain 410 00:39:40,920 --> 00:39:42,640 power and glory. 411 00:39:42,640 --> 00:39:45,780 And if you don't, you're an enemy, you know, that kind of binary. 412 00:39:45,780 --> 00:39:51,560 And then whereas the humble God that Francis fell in love with, it just shatters all your 413 00:39:51,560 --> 00:39:52,560 binaries. 414 00:39:52,560 --> 00:39:53,560 Right. 415 00:39:53,560 --> 00:39:59,040 Well, and this is one of the things that Tom Holland talks about is that, you know, there 416 00:39:59,040 --> 00:40:09,520 was an enormously popular, it was the fastest growing cult devoted to the worship of a son 417 00:40:09,520 --> 00:40:11,920 of God. 418 00:40:11,920 --> 00:40:16,200 In the first century, it was the worship of Augustus Caesar. 419 00:40:16,200 --> 00:40:20,880 The cult of Augustus Caesar was hugely popular. 420 00:40:20,880 --> 00:40:27,260 In the first century, it was, you know, people ascending to Godhood. 421 00:40:27,260 --> 00:40:31,240 That happened a lot in the first century. 422 00:40:31,240 --> 00:40:38,960 You know, Julius Caesar raised to Godhood, his heir, Octavius Caesar, who becomes Augustus 423 00:40:38,960 --> 00:40:42,200 Caesar, you know, same thing. 424 00:40:42,200 --> 00:40:43,200 Right. 425 00:40:43,200 --> 00:40:52,160 And of course, what a God looked like in the first century was he's the guy that's able 426 00:40:52,160 --> 00:40:53,800 to crucify people. 427 00:40:53,800 --> 00:40:58,880 He's the guy that's able to have them burned alive or beheaded. 428 00:40:58,880 --> 00:41:07,620 You know, the whole point of crucifixion in the first century was that it instilled Stockholm 429 00:41:07,620 --> 00:41:16,600 syndrome in its victims so that the victims of crucifixion or the people who were standing 430 00:41:16,600 --> 00:41:28,920 near the victims of crucifixion identified with the crucifier rather than with the crucifieds. 431 00:41:28,920 --> 00:41:33,720 And that was what crucifixion was supposed to do. 432 00:41:33,720 --> 00:41:36,640 And we see that in the Gospels. 433 00:41:36,640 --> 00:41:45,520 So you know, not just the crowd is jeering at Jesus, but even the guys who are crucified 434 00:41:45,520 --> 00:41:47,720 with him are jeering at Jesus. 435 00:41:47,720 --> 00:41:54,240 I may be crucified and a loser, but at least I'm not as much of a loser as he is. 436 00:41:54,240 --> 00:41:58,060 That's what crucifixion was designed to do. 437 00:41:58,060 --> 00:42:06,160 And the staggering thing about the rise of Christianity in the first century and the 438 00:42:06,160 --> 00:42:14,480 thing that Holland is gobsmacked by, he's a historian of ancient Rome and Greece and 439 00:42:14,480 --> 00:42:22,660 of these sort of, you know, tyrannosaur predators of the ancient world and how they operated 440 00:42:22,660 --> 00:42:38,800 is that the figure of a crucified God could come to upend the entire Roman order. 441 00:42:38,800 --> 00:42:45,880 That staggered, he says that is beyond weird, you know, because there was nobody in the 442 00:42:45,880 --> 00:42:57,240 ancient world who was ready to say, yeah, crucifixion, that's a real honor. 443 00:42:57,240 --> 00:43:09,120 And it's still the same thing today that Christ calls us to identify with the losers. 444 00:43:09,120 --> 00:43:27,600 Jesus becomes a loser and it is through that kind of weakness that the gospel triumphs. 445 00:43:27,600 --> 00:43:30,920 And that is a tall order. 446 00:43:30,920 --> 00:43:41,880 That is a very difficult thing to say yes to because, you know, that means those awful 447 00:43:41,880 --> 00:43:48,280 people win and really win. 448 00:43:48,280 --> 00:43:51,120 And can there really be any hope after that? 449 00:43:51,120 --> 00:43:58,640 The promise of the resurrection is there is hope after that, that it doesn't end there 450 00:43:58,640 --> 00:44:05,560 and that God really can defeat the powers of hell. 451 00:44:05,560 --> 00:44:19,720 But it doesn't happen through, you know, taking the one ring for yourself and destroying Sauron 452 00:44:19,720 --> 00:44:24,200 by becoming Sauron, not how it happens. 453 00:44:24,200 --> 00:44:28,800 And that is hard, hard. 454 00:44:28,800 --> 00:44:29,800 It is. 455 00:44:29,800 --> 00:44:32,760 Well, this kind of goes back to something you mentioned earlier, the whole scapegoating 456 00:44:32,760 --> 00:44:38,560 mechanism where I heard one theologian say, and I forget who said it, but something along 457 00:44:38,560 --> 00:44:45,320 the lines of the crucifixion, basically it reveals that scapegoating doesn't work and 458 00:44:45,320 --> 00:44:47,680 that it should never happen again. 459 00:44:47,680 --> 00:44:50,300 Here's God being scapegoated. 460 00:44:50,300 --> 00:44:57,240 So it's almost like if you find yourself a part of some kind of Christian ideology on 461 00:44:57,240 --> 00:45:03,960 the left or right that gets all its energy from scapegoating still, you're almost going 462 00:45:03,960 --> 00:45:08,560 against the very trajectory of the tradition you claim to follow. 463 00:45:08,560 --> 00:45:11,760 Do you know what I'm saying? 464 00:45:11,760 --> 00:45:14,240 It's a hard temptation to resist. 465 00:45:14,240 --> 00:45:15,240 It is. 466 00:45:15,240 --> 00:45:16,240 It feels good. 467 00:45:16,240 --> 00:45:20,240 It feels really good to make an other and to scapegoat them. 468 00:45:20,240 --> 00:45:26,600 I have to remember Francis's humble God and be like, there's goodness in this person that 469 00:45:26,600 --> 00:45:28,760 I completely disagree with. 470 00:45:28,760 --> 00:45:34,280 And they have something to teach me somehow, some way, even if we're ultimately still going 471 00:45:34,280 --> 00:45:35,600 to disagree. 472 00:45:35,600 --> 00:45:40,260 And I'm still going to say like, Christian nationalism is a huge threat. 473 00:45:40,260 --> 00:45:46,960 Can I see that the person that has been duped by this thing is still doing the best that 474 00:45:46,960 --> 00:45:49,600 he or she can in some way? 475 00:45:49,600 --> 00:45:54,720 Can I see goodness rising up even in a place that I don't understand? 476 00:45:54,720 --> 00:46:01,140 And again, that's not to dismiss it and say it's not a big deal. 477 00:46:01,140 --> 00:46:05,800 That's even more of a reason to talk about it is because now you can talk about it because 478 00:46:05,800 --> 00:46:11,120 you're trying to see the humanity in that person that you disagree with very, very well. 479 00:46:11,120 --> 00:46:14,860 And it's getting back to my Bailey work. 480 00:46:14,860 --> 00:46:18,200 It's good theology. 481 00:46:18,200 --> 00:46:23,540 Good theology. 482 00:46:23,540 --> 00:46:29,720 American politics loves Manichaeism. 483 00:46:29,720 --> 00:46:36,480 This side is all white and this side is nothing but black. 484 00:46:36,480 --> 00:46:43,520 And Christianity refuses to do that. 485 00:46:43,520 --> 00:46:54,140 Christianity is so radical on this point, it even refuses to say that Satan is nothing 486 00:46:54,140 --> 00:47:01,040 but pure evil because Satan is a creature and therefore made by God. 487 00:47:01,040 --> 00:47:07,600 And therefore to the degree that he retains existence, that he retains intellect, that 488 00:47:07,600 --> 00:47:13,260 he retains will, these are all good things that God made. 489 00:47:13,260 --> 00:47:23,360 And yes, they can be corrupted, but if any being is purely evil, it would cease to exist 490 00:47:23,360 --> 00:47:26,520 because existence is a good. 491 00:47:26,520 --> 00:47:31,960 And so Christian theology is very subtle on this point. 492 00:47:31,960 --> 00:47:38,680 And one of the results of it, as a priest friend of mine pointed out to me, which again, 493 00:47:38,680 --> 00:47:43,600 this is one of those things like loving your enemies that it's just that I hated having 494 00:47:43,600 --> 00:47:48,460 to admit the truth of this because it just makes my life harder. 495 00:47:48,460 --> 00:48:00,840 But the reality is, is that he said, we often speak of someone who does evil. 496 00:48:00,840 --> 00:48:07,720 We say of them that the mask is off, that now we see what they're really made of when 497 00:48:07,720 --> 00:48:09,440 they do some evil thing. 498 00:48:09,440 --> 00:48:16,240 He says that is lousy theology, particularly lousy theology in the confessional. 499 00:48:16,240 --> 00:48:20,920 He says the reality is human beings are made in the image and likeness of God. 500 00:48:20,920 --> 00:48:28,760 And so at root, along with all other things that God has made, they are good. 501 00:48:28,760 --> 00:48:33,440 And there's yes, of course they're fallen. 502 00:48:33,440 --> 00:48:39,760 And when they sin, as Augustine puts it, they assert their nothingness. 503 00:48:39,760 --> 00:48:48,000 But when people come into the confessional and confess their sins, that's when the mask 504 00:48:48,000 --> 00:48:49,520 comes off. 505 00:48:49,520 --> 00:48:58,980 That's when it's when their sin is forgiven and they enter into at least an attempted 506 00:48:58,980 --> 00:49:01,040 state of grace. 507 00:49:01,040 --> 00:49:05,900 They may be very bad at it, as are we all. 508 00:49:05,900 --> 00:49:07,840 But that's when the mask comes out. 509 00:49:07,840 --> 00:49:11,000 And when you walk out of the confessional, you're showing your true face. 510 00:49:11,000 --> 00:49:18,620 Your true face is when you are most truly the creature that God has made you to be. 511 00:49:18,620 --> 00:49:25,000 Not when you put a mask on because sin anonymizes. 512 00:49:25,000 --> 00:49:29,880 One of the remarkable things about the great sinners of history is at the end of the day, 513 00:49:29,880 --> 00:49:32,520 how boring they are. 514 00:49:32,520 --> 00:49:38,040 You know, Stalin famously remarked that one death is a tragedy and a million deaths is 515 00:49:38,040 --> 00:49:39,680 a statistic. 516 00:49:39,680 --> 00:49:47,640 That when you lose touch with your humanity, you lose touch with what makes you interesting. 517 00:49:47,640 --> 00:49:56,580 Great saints are endlessly fascinating because, you know, they were fully human. 518 00:49:56,580 --> 00:50:05,800 And so that temptation, that Manichean temptation is something that really wants to work against 519 00:50:05,800 --> 00:50:06,800 that. 520 00:50:06,800 --> 00:50:13,280 You know, my enemy is nothing but X, Y, and Z. And believe me, I fall prey to that temptation 521 00:50:13,280 --> 00:50:15,160 as much as anybody does. 522 00:50:15,160 --> 00:50:23,300 It is so easy to do because what you want to do is you want to hurry past this threat 523 00:50:23,300 --> 00:50:33,280 and get to the good stuff that the future will surely bring once this threatening person 524 00:50:33,280 --> 00:50:36,160 is brushed out of the way. 525 00:50:36,160 --> 00:50:42,160 And that's exactly Francis's story where it's like, okay, hurry, hurry past the leper. 526 00:50:42,160 --> 00:50:44,560 You know, don't look at the leper, hurry past. 527 00:50:44,560 --> 00:50:45,560 Don't look at him. 528 00:50:45,560 --> 00:50:46,560 Yeah. 529 00:50:46,560 --> 00:50:47,840 God's tugging him, you know. 530 00:50:47,840 --> 00:50:49,640 No, get off your horse. 531 00:50:49,640 --> 00:50:50,960 Give the leper an offering. 532 00:50:50,960 --> 00:50:53,880 No, that's not enough either. 533 00:50:53,880 --> 00:50:56,840 Look the leper in the eyes and give the leper the offering. 534 00:50:56,840 --> 00:50:58,800 That's not enough either. 535 00:50:58,800 --> 00:51:03,240 Hug the leper, embrace the leper, kiss the leper, share a meal with the leper. 536 00:51:03,240 --> 00:51:05,960 Let the leper become your brother in Christ. 537 00:51:05,960 --> 00:51:10,760 Actually it's even more radical than that. 538 00:51:10,760 --> 00:51:15,280 It's will you let yourself become the leper's brother in Christ because the leper has it 539 00:51:15,280 --> 00:51:17,400 more figured out than you have it figured out. 540 00:51:17,400 --> 00:51:18,400 Yeah. 541 00:51:18,400 --> 00:51:22,720 So like that's the, it just, it flips everything on its head. 542 00:51:22,720 --> 00:51:28,240 And I think that's what something like the incarnation should do is it should just completely 543 00:51:28,240 --> 00:51:31,400 obliterate all your categories. 544 00:51:31,400 --> 00:51:38,000 And that's not to say that there's not a time for debate or there's not a time for justice 545 00:51:38,000 --> 00:51:40,320 or there's not a time to take a stand. 546 00:51:40,320 --> 00:51:41,820 There absolutely is. 547 00:51:41,820 --> 00:51:45,880 But then you let the incarnation obliterate your categories again. 548 00:51:45,880 --> 00:51:50,240 It's like that, that person's trying or that person's wounded. 549 00:51:50,240 --> 00:51:56,600 And that's why they were duped for some kind of radical ideology. 550 00:51:56,600 --> 00:52:00,220 The Franciscan invitation, again, I'd love to get your thoughts on this. 551 00:52:00,220 --> 00:52:01,920 It's to get back to the heart. 552 00:52:01,920 --> 00:52:08,200 That's one of the bad things I think about social media is that it just plays in the 553 00:52:08,200 --> 00:52:11,040 realm of ideas for the most part. 554 00:52:11,040 --> 00:52:15,880 Whereas the Franciscan invitation is get back to your heart. 555 00:52:15,880 --> 00:52:19,000 When you get back to the heart, you're going to find more in common with the person that's 556 00:52:19,000 --> 00:52:21,120 most different than you, than you realize. 557 00:52:21,120 --> 00:52:28,000 Well, you know, somebody once said that, you know, the, the congregationalist model of 558 00:52:28,000 --> 00:52:37,040 church is, uh, like-minded people getting together to talk about being like-minded. 559 00:52:37,040 --> 00:52:43,280 The Catholic model of the church is and always has been, you know, this giant block party 560 00:52:43,280 --> 00:52:52,000 of people with nothing in common except one thing, the mass. 561 00:52:52,000 --> 00:52:53,400 And that's it. 562 00:52:53,400 --> 00:53:01,920 And, and God seems to like the block party thing, uh, since he's, you know, called together 563 00:53:01,920 --> 00:53:07,960 people from every, you know, nation, language, tribe and tongue as, as revelation puts it. 564 00:53:07,960 --> 00:53:11,920 I mean, it's right there on the label Catholic. 565 00:53:11,920 --> 00:53:27,280 So the church's way of living community, uh, I think is one of the great sort of built-in 566 00:53:27,280 --> 00:53:29,680 strengths to the faith. 567 00:53:29,680 --> 00:53:35,280 Uh, yeah, there have been in the church's history, uh, mostly because of historical 568 00:53:35,280 --> 00:53:42,160 accidents, you wind up with ethnic churches because everyone in your village is Italian 569 00:53:42,160 --> 00:53:44,440 and all you've got is an ox cart. 570 00:53:44,440 --> 00:53:51,720 So you're not going too far, you know, but also, uh, in the history of the church, especially 571 00:53:51,720 --> 00:53:58,180 because the church was born in the Roman empire, which was a vastly, it was just this maelstrom 572 00:53:58,180 --> 00:54:07,120 of ethnicities, you know, all moving around in what the, the Romans called our sea, which 573 00:54:07,120 --> 00:54:10,800 is a great way to, you know, mix up a lot of different people. 574 00:54:10,800 --> 00:54:17,520 You wound up with, uh, huge mixtures, uh, right from the get-go. 575 00:54:17,520 --> 00:54:25,720 Uh, Paul is always writing to a multi-ethnic church. 576 00:54:25,720 --> 00:54:31,920 What Paul's dealing with, uh, in the early church is the fact that the church is multi-ethnic. 577 00:54:31,920 --> 00:54:36,760 Well, you put that verse in your article, it's Galatians 3 28. 578 00:54:36,760 --> 00:54:38,840 There's neither Jew nor Greeks. 579 00:54:38,840 --> 00:54:40,760 There's neither slave nor free. 580 00:54:40,760 --> 00:54:44,520 There's neither male nor female for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 581 00:54:44,520 --> 00:54:45,520 Right. 582 00:54:45,520 --> 00:54:54,960 And one of the great happy accidents of the American experiment, uh, is that we have just 583 00:54:54,960 --> 00:55:02,120 because of our historical circumstances, not because there was any human plan behind it. 584 00:55:02,120 --> 00:55:12,560 We have wound up with a profoundly multi-ethnic to that degree, deeply Catholic country, not 585 00:55:12,560 --> 00:55:19,760 because it's, it's religiously Catholic or denominationally Catholic, but because we 586 00:55:19,760 --> 00:55:26,200 have as a people had to figure out how to live together. 587 00:55:26,200 --> 00:55:33,960 And uh, one of the, you know, one of the great things that, that I deeply object to about 588 00:55:33,960 --> 00:55:42,120 Christian nationalism is this myth that there's something called a real American, you know, 589 00:55:42,120 --> 00:55:48,400 who is white and male and rich. 590 00:55:48,400 --> 00:55:55,280 And then there are people who are not real Americans, you know, um, Chesterton remarked 591 00:55:55,280 --> 00:56:01,480 that America was, he described it as a nation with the soul of a church. 592 00:56:01,480 --> 00:56:08,680 And he said that because he said, if you want to become American, uh, all you have to do 593 00:56:08,680 --> 00:56:15,760 is sign off on a creed, which is the, that's how you become a Catholic too. 594 00:56:15,760 --> 00:56:19,080 Sign off on a creed, you know, do you think these things? 595 00:56:19,080 --> 00:56:20,080 Yes. 596 00:56:20,080 --> 00:56:21,080 Okay. 597 00:56:21,080 --> 00:56:22,080 Good enough. 598 00:56:22,080 --> 00:56:23,080 You're an American now. 599 00:56:23,080 --> 00:56:35,520 Uh, um, that approach can, it holds a lot of opportunities for us, I think as American 600 00:56:35,520 --> 00:56:45,520 Catholics, uh, because it takes away the, many of the, the ethnic hatreds that, for 601 00:56:45,520 --> 00:56:51,040 example, have afflicted Europe for centuries. 602 00:56:51,040 --> 00:57:01,440 Immigrants come here, uh, and, and a lot of those ethnic hatreds, uh, vanish. 603 00:57:01,440 --> 00:57:12,240 So you get, you know, um, the, the heirs of Frenchmen who came here voting for a German 604 00:57:12,240 --> 00:57:15,240 named Eisenhower. 605 00:57:15,240 --> 00:57:23,760 And nobody in, you know, 1952 is, is going, he's a German. 606 00:57:23,760 --> 00:57:28,920 Nobody is thinking that they're, they conceive of Eisenhower as an American because his ties 607 00:57:28,920 --> 00:57:33,120 to his German ancestry just don't matter. 608 00:57:33,120 --> 00:57:38,320 And um, that happens again and again. 609 00:57:38,320 --> 00:57:49,720 And I think that it's, it's a place where our Catholic heritage that says there is neither 610 00:57:49,720 --> 00:57:57,960 Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male or female, can be an assist to living in community as 611 00:57:57,960 --> 00:57:58,960 Americans. 612 00:57:58,960 --> 00:58:06,040 Although, of course, the goal and point of the Catholic faith is not and never has been 613 00:58:06,040 --> 00:58:12,680 and never will be, uh, we have to keep this America thing going forever. 614 00:58:12,680 --> 00:58:15,360 America is not the kingdom of heaven. 615 00:58:15,360 --> 00:58:22,000 America is just, it's a human setup that is working reasonably well as all human setups 616 00:58:22,000 --> 00:58:24,560 at their best can do. 617 00:58:24,560 --> 00:58:29,120 Uh, it's got all kinds of problems. 618 00:58:29,120 --> 00:58:43,000 But that American approach to things that says it's, your ethnic background doesn't 619 00:58:43,000 --> 00:58:47,000 matter to whether you can be an American. 620 00:58:47,000 --> 00:58:52,840 It matters in as much as sure, you know, celebrate your heritage, have, have a great St. Patrick's 621 00:58:52,840 --> 00:59:02,840 Day, you know, enjoy your Oktoberfest or your, uh, you know, your, uh, you know, have a good 622 00:59:02,840 --> 00:59:03,840 time at Diwali. 623 00:59:03,840 --> 00:59:11,080 You know, do, do the things that, uh, uh, your culture does great. 624 00:59:11,080 --> 00:59:18,160 Um, but none of those are a disqualifier or a qualifier for whether or not you can be 625 00:59:18,160 --> 00:59:23,960 part of a common conversation working toward the common good. 626 00:59:23,960 --> 00:59:32,640 America is a human construct invented by human beings trying to figure out a way, uh, to 627 00:59:32,640 --> 00:59:41,700 live together as neighbors without going through what for the founders was pretty recent memory, 628 00:59:41,700 --> 00:59:50,040 the religious wars of the 17th century, uh, and all the horrors of, you know, uh, and 629 00:59:50,040 --> 00:59:55,920 you know, they deeply feared Christian nationalism. 630 00:59:55,920 --> 01:00:02,200 You know, what, what Europe arrived at was, um, who's the region, who's the religion, 631 01:00:02,200 --> 01:00:11,160 you know, have the, have that compromise and let us please God put in the past, you know, 632 01:00:11,160 --> 01:00:13,720 the nightmare of the 30 years war. 633 01:00:13,720 --> 01:00:22,640 And uh, you know, so you had compromises like the treaty of Westphalia, uh, that, that worked 634 01:00:22,640 --> 01:00:31,720 out things like that because, uh, Christians had shown themselves spectacularly unable, 635 01:00:31,720 --> 01:00:35,280 uh, for a long time to live in peace. 636 01:00:35,280 --> 01:00:41,520 And so one of the things, one of the great achievements that I think that the founders, 637 01:00:41,520 --> 01:00:49,280 uh, were able to achieve was they put that in the rear view mirror. 638 01:00:49,280 --> 01:00:58,200 Um, you know, you, you, for all of its failures, we didn't have that on our soil. 639 01:00:58,200 --> 01:01:05,360 And uh, yes, we have, we have had plenty of other, you know, we've had genocides, you 640 01:01:05,360 --> 01:01:09,080 know, against native Americans and we've had slavery and we've done, you know, we've done 641 01:01:09,080 --> 01:01:16,920 horrible things that we are still ashamed to look in the eye, but you know, that's one 642 01:01:16,920 --> 01:01:21,240 of the ways in which human beings react to their own sins. 643 01:01:21,240 --> 01:01:30,440 Sometimes it takes them a long time to be able to go to confession and say, I did this. 644 01:01:30,440 --> 01:01:32,360 I'm ashamed of it. 645 01:01:32,360 --> 01:01:34,760 Well, Mark, this has been awesome. 646 01:01:34,760 --> 01:01:36,480 I know we went a little bit longer. 647 01:01:36,480 --> 01:01:40,200 We're experiencing some technical difficulties and stuff. 648 01:01:40,200 --> 01:01:47,160 My last question would be, I know this is such a heavy topic and it's confusing. 649 01:01:47,160 --> 01:01:51,560 And um, as you write in your article, your really wonderful cover story in the September 650 01:01:51,560 --> 01:01:55,600 issue, um, you know, it's a growing problem. 651 01:01:55,600 --> 01:02:02,200 Do you, what would you say the invitation here is for listeners during our own social 652 01:02:02,200 --> 01:02:05,200 and political climate? 653 01:02:05,200 --> 01:02:11,520 Um, that the focus has to be always. 654 01:02:11,520 --> 01:02:15,840 You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. 655 01:02:15,840 --> 01:02:22,520 And you shall love your neighbor, including your Christian nationalist neighbor, like 656 01:02:22,520 --> 01:02:25,000 yourself. 657 01:02:25,000 --> 01:02:35,160 And then go out and do the next practical thing to make that happen. 658 01:02:35,160 --> 01:02:43,480 Again, that was author and blogger Mark Shea discussing his September, 2024 cover story 659 01:02:43,480 --> 01:02:48,480 in the St. Anthony messenger, the dangers of Christian nationalism. 660 01:02:48,480 --> 01:02:52,680 You can check out Mark's work at markpshea.com. 661 01:02:52,680 --> 01:02:57,800 If you would like to subscribe to the St. Anthony messenger, visit franciscanmedia.org 662 01:02:57,800 --> 01:03:01,320 and click on the subscriptions link in the banner. 663 01:03:01,320 --> 01:03:06,020 Once again, huge thanks to Mark Shea for being on the off the page podcast from Franciscan 664 01:03:06,020 --> 01:03:10,640 media and thanks as well to father Cyprian Concilio for providing the music for this 665 01:03:10,640 --> 01:03:12,000 episode. 666 01:03:12,000 --> 01:03:14,240 This is Stephen Copeland signing off. 667 01:03:14,240 --> 01:03:42,240 Peace and all good.