Opinion

Francis’ attempts at reforming the church often clashed with Catholicism’s growing right wing and failed to stop the flood of Catholics abandoning the church. It takes time to turn a 2,000-year-old church around, and ultimately, Francis’ papacy would be a complicated one, marred by the damage done in the church’s past, even as he tried to guide it forward into an unclear and troubling future. But like his namesake saint, he always put being a pastor first.

At some point this Easter Weekend, Christians will be reflecting on the final words that Jesus spoke from the cross, sometimes referred to as the seven last words of Jesus. 

When I was younger, I was convinced that System of a Down’s “Chop Suey!” was a Christian song because lead vocalist and lyricist Serj Tankian incorporated Jesus’ final declarations into the song. But dissimilar to the order that Christians have typically arranged Jesus’ final words, the song first quotes the cry of reunion and then climaxes with the cry of dereliction.

Considering that the Roman Empire believed Jesus was a terrorist and crucified him as one, emphasizing the cry of dereliction seems apt.

“The problem with the meritocracy ... [is that it] leeches all the empathy out of your society.”

The right-wing political commentator Tucker Carlson said that back in 2017 and, by my lights, there’s a kernel of truth there. It almost echoes the early 20th-century sociologist Max Weber’s critique of the Protestant work ethic, how Americans are trained to see wealth as a just reward for living a good life and poverty as punishment for living a bad one; an economic spin on Calvinism. Even if you think Carlson is a reactionary grifter (which I do), I think he’s onto something here.

It’s a straightforward part of the Easter story: The Roman governor Pontius Pilate had Jesus of Nazareth killed by his soldiers. He imposed a sentence that Roman judges often inflicted on social subversives – crucifixion.

What does it mean to celebrate Passover during a time of rising authoritarianism, climate crisis, and genocide? Every year, Jews mark Passover by reading the Haggadah and by refraining from eating leavened bread for eight days in commemoration of the ancient Israelites’ hurried trip out of Egypt. The Exodus story tells of their journey from slavery to freedom, and each year Jews are commanded to experience this ritual anew, imagining that God is setting them free as if in the days of old.

But as the yearly calendar brings us to a holiday celebrating divine redemption and freedom, it’s hard to avoid the despair of this historical moment.

Lent is typically a time when Christians engage in fasting or self-denial and reflect on the ways in which we need to repent. In the most unexpected place, a Nosferatu-themed party hosted by a friend of a friend, I encountered an opportunity to engage in the Lenten practice of repentance.

Within the Christian faith, at least within a formal church setting, there is a liturgical element that I’ve never experienced: the sacrament of reconciliation — a practice more commonly known as confession. Rather than sitting in a traditional confessional booth alongside an ordained priest, I made a confession while sitting in a random bedroom. A flimsy blue curtain divided me and the person playing the role of the priest. It was arguably irreligious, a party trick meant to satirize the Catholic Church.

For a Christian, standing up to oppressors isn't just a way to love the oppressed. It's also a way to love oppressors themselves by calling them to repentance. 

Since arriving to the White House, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, has been on a destructive whirlwind through the federal government. At the behest of President Trump, the South African billionaire and chief of the Department of Government Efficiency has led an effort to illegally gut numerous federal agencies, fire tens of thousands of federal workers, and perpetrate fraud while claiming to root it out.

Regarding the seemingly intentional turmoil of Musk’s actions, Trump bragged at the Conservative Political Action Conference that his administration had “effectively ended the left-wing scam known as USAID. The agency’s name has been removed from its former building, and that space will now house agents from Customs and Border Patrol.” Taken alone, these actions have the makings of an oligarchic heist or a coup that cripples the government’s capacity to provide and protect public goods.

But within a wider aperture of the administration’s priorities — ripping apart families, hoping to establish concentration camps, offering refugee status to white Afrikaners, attacking trans people, and engaging in a “war on woke” across institutions — a coherence comes into focus amid the chaos. These are men who destroy to build a racial hierarchy in service of their own wealth and profit. Or as political commentator Elie Mystal of The Nation has framed it, they are bringing a “a neo-apartheid economic agenda to the US government.”

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order setting up a task force to counter “anti-Christian bias.” Trump claims that the task force is necessary to fight discrimination against Christians. But in practice it seems designed to enforce a very narrow version of conservative Christianity. The task force will counter efforts to prosecute demonstrators who block access to abortion care and to allow for discrimination against LGBTQ+ people on campus. It will encourage the federal government to elevate right wing Christianity as a national ideology.

Imposing Christian morality on the U.S. seems out of step with the separation of church and state. But it’s not exactly out of line with American tradition. For example, at the height of the postwar Red Scare in March 1953, leftist poet and activist Langston Hughes was hauled before Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. PSI was looking to root out communist influence. But in that regard, many of the questions centered on religion — and on a poem which the subcommittee believed showed that Hughes was anti-religious and therefore pro-communist.

The poem in question was “Goodbye, Christ,” which Hughes wrote on a trip to Soviet Russia in 1932.