Attack on the Clowns

This is when I learned that there is a non-negligible subset of people who love to tell you they’re scared of clowns. But who genuinely thinks so much about clowns that they have a deep-seated phobia of them?

Personally, I think the whole phenomenon back then was mimesis nested within mimesis. In most of these cases, someone probably told you that you’re supposed to think clowns are creepy. It got a laugh, and you understood that it was funny to say something that is supposed to bring joy, is actually very scary. So you made calling clowns creepy a key personality trait, in lieu of developing authentic affinities and aversions.

If we’re being honest, how often are we really encountering clowns in real life? I think I’ve only seen maybe three or four in person in my nearly four decades.

Anyway, to be honest, they’re not really my bag, either. But the “creepy clown” thing makes me feel bad for clowns. It’s a noble artistic tradition that may have its roots in ancient Greece, but began in its current form in Italy during the Renaissance. I’m the kind of nerd who was excited to learn when she took her kids to Venice during Carnevale earlier this year, that they would get to see a genuine Italian clown plying his trade. I actually thought the show kind of sucked (again, traditional clowning is not my bag), but that’s not the point! It’s definitely an actual historic art form that takes practice.

But I am here today to talk about a different kind of clowning, a high concept type that is gaining in popularity and attracting notice (you know, in certain circles, I don’t see this ever going mainstream.)

Don’t You Love Farce?

I think I became aware of clowning-as-performance art via Natalie Palamides, who you might know from the Progressive insurance ads.

But she is also, no joke, an accomplished and serious clown:

What she does is basically performance art with a comedic edge. Her one-woman show, “Nate,” is fearless and funny and also disturbing. It may or may not be to your taste, but in the show, she is definitely earnestly exploring serious themes around gender and sexuality.

This week, a Wall Street Journal article about mid-career actors going to clown school as an outlet for burnout generated a lot of mockery.

And look, Natalie Palamides and affection for commedia dell’arte as a historical artifact aside, clowning isn’t really something I’m deeply interested in.

However.

It was obvious from the posts that this was the first most folks were hearing of the clowning renaissance. But if you’re like me, for months, you and your friend from high school have been DMing each other all of the evidence that avant garde clowning has in fact been gaining traction for quite some time.

But Where Are the Clowns? Don’t Bother, They’re Here:

Here are some examples pulled from my DMs with my high school friend (and fellow detective):

And you know it’s a real trend because no less a trend-spotter than has picked up on it:

Well, Maybe Next Year

So here’s why it matters.

AOC generated a little mini-controversy recently when she spoke aloud the meme, “Woke 1.0 was crazy.”

The idea is that circa Covid, we all kind of underwent a mass psychosis where a lot of fringe ideas from the academic Left went mainstream. Think microagressions, cancellations, phrases like “check your privilege.”

The implication in the phrase is that after the 2024 “vibe shift” that Trump’s reelection was supposed to signal, the pendulum will swing back, and we will see the reintroduction of some form of political correctness: Woke 2.0.

Because people at New York Magazine and the WSJ are tracking the new, challenging, in-your-face style clowning, I put out my prediction on X when everyone was dunking on the clown school article:

If the next President is a Democrat, we’re going to see something like “Clown Week at the White House” or whatever, and one of these high concept clowns will be front and center in the restored Rose Garden. Then a conservative outlet is going to take the funny-sounding clown-at-the-White House story and run with it, probably delving into the performer’s work to find some video where they’re promoting their Edinburgh Fringe Festival show wearing a strap-on or something. Then we’ll be treated to a new moral panic about clowns, this time a retread of Drag Queen Story Hour talking points. There might also be some more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger reactions about how liberals are desecrating the People’s House with their nasty pervert clowns.

And because no one but me and my friend from high school were paying close attention to the provocative-clownaissance during the woke interwar years, much of the discourse on the topic will appear totally out of the blue, bereft of context. It will make the hypothetical White House clown event appear much weirder than it already is.

Then, instead of worrying about, I don’t know, vaccine injury misinformation, our depleted missile stockpile, or China absolutely bodying us on AI, everyone’s going to be losing it over the freaky clowns who are just doing what artists do – pushing boundaries and working out ideas – and of whom there just aren’t that many in the grand scheme of things to begin with.

The point here isn’t that you need to be paying close attention to the kind of clowning that consists of strange women doing deliberately off-putting things in pursuit of bewilderment and shocked laughter. I’m here to reassure you. You can sleep soundly in your bed at night knowing that rough men stand ready to observe and explain bizarre trends, rendering them slightly more intelligible for you when the next skirmish in the culture war pops off. And hopefully, armed with context and background knowledge, you can help bring your friends back down to earth and redirect their attention to something more productive!

So as I’m easing my way back into my Substack grind, I’ve rounded up a few examples to give you a taste of why People Really Believe This Stuff is basically a one-person Polymarket for weird culture trends. Okay, it’s nothing like Polymarket because you won’t make money off of it. But it does include prediction, so if you just like feeling smug, then stick around!

And your standard disclaimer: I’ve planned out my last three pieces for my Arthur Vining Davis Foundations religious literacy grant, the one I’ve had at Tablet Magazine since 2021. Both AVDF and Tablet have been very good to me by launching my career, but now I’m looking for a soft landing place in November when it comes to an end, as all things must. So if you’re an editor interested in bringing on board a writer with a good nose for up-and-coming trends in faith, spirituality, and culture generally, I’m available for hire! I do religion reporting, culture analysis and commentary, and Burl Ives songs!

Anyway, here are three recent highlights:

The New York Times and The Rest is History Festival

First up, this NYT article, which includes color from July’s Rest is History festival, came out today:

“In a field on the outskirts of London, thousands of people settled onto picnic rugs and camping chairs, slathering on sunscreen for the unusually hot English summer. A few people had uncorked bottles of sparkling wine, though it was not quite 10 a.m. One woman knitted while a couple in Panama hats tiptoed to a spot with a prime view of the stage.

Then a familiar song began playing, and a ripple of excitement ran through the crowd. The rock stars of the event had arrived: two middle-aged British historians.”

And here’s me in The Dispatch on August 3rd:

“On the morning of July 4, the entry line for Henry VIII’s old stomping grounds stretched across the imposing forecourt nearly to the street. The Hampton Court Palace grounds wouldn’t open for nearly an hour, but the genial crowd, many carrying folding chairs and other sundries for a day out, chatted excitedly.

It was the first day of the Rest Is History Festival, two days of panel discussions and demonstrations hosted by the world’s most popular history podcast of the same name. Once admitted, the thousands of attendees grabbed coffee and pastries before heading to the lawn of the palace, settling themselves in front of the main stage to greet the festival’s stars, podcast hosts Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland (not the Spider-Man actor). It’s the kind of place where organic cheers spring up from different places in the crowd when their favorite historical figures garner a mention from the stage.”

The Time I Beat NPR to the Punch

Last month, NPR ran a profile of the , a startup religious order whose charism is ministering to abuse victims in the Catholic Church.

It was good! And I think the sisters deserve all the positive media they can get, because their work is super important. So important, in fact, that I was writing about them for The Dispatch back in March:

The Classic Learning Test under scrutiny

This SAT/ACT standardized test alternative, popular with religious private and homeschools, has become something of a culture war lightning rod since state schools with GOP governors and service academies began accepting it:

But on July 30th, USA Today ran an investigation that found some students may be exploiting a loophole in the test’s structure to get favorable results on graduation exams.

But your girl was interviewing CLT’s founder, Jeremy Tate, for Tablet back in 2024:

It’s a piece about the classical education trend more broadly (i.e., what is it exactly? vibes? essays?) that has only gotten more timely since its publication.

Culture matters!

I cover the beats I cover because I’m a religion nerd who has also always been a pop culture geek. And sure, it’s fun to quote The Simpsons. But I think with the advent of infotainment and a political reality where at least two cabinet secretaries (that I’m aware of) have reality and cooking shows, staying up on culture is almost a civic duty.

For another thing, our current Vice President is clearly some kind of geek. He correctly read the Nixonmaxxing zeitgeist (my piece on the trend was in editing when he appeared at the Nixon Presidential Library likening himself to Tricky Dick). The move confused a lot of people who didn’t realize that like Wu-Tang before him, Richard Nixon is for the children. Similarly, much is being made over his quoting Democratic populist Huey P. Long in a speech this week. Why, some are asking, would he bring up a long dead politician from the other party? There are policy reasons, of course. But there is also the fact that young gamer guys know Huey Long from Kaiserreich, an alternate history version of the World War II strategy game Hearts of Iron IV, and can read all about him.

And now, it is almost spritz o’clock, and so I bid you arrivederci.

Alla prossima!

One month ago today, on the 250th birthday of our great nation (America), I was applauding podcast hosts Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook as they appeared on the main stage in Henry VIII’s back yard, at the first ever Rest is History Festival.

I thought it might be a cool thing to write up simply because the vibes were immaculate. But the culture editor at The Dispatch, Valerie Pavilonis, had a better idea: history is definitely having a moment – but why? It was an interesting question I was excited to tackle, and then, suffering from an acute case of Odyssey fever (novel Nolan strain), Elon Musk went after Tom Holland1 on X:

Musk’s salvo proved a gift to me as I framed my piece, The Two Types of History, which is the Monday Essay in The Dispatch today (read it here).

It seems clear that the approach to the past that Sandbrook and Holland demonstrate with “The Rest is History,” both at their live event I attended and on their show, is part of the reason it was dubbed one of the most popular podcasts in the world. I’ve been revisiting their eight-part series on the fall of the Aztecs from a few years ago, and I am struck that they are less interested in civilizational power and might than they are in complicated human nature. On the other hand Musk, an avid fan of Greek and Roman history, embodies an extreme variation of the old adage about those who do not understand the past being doomed to repeat it. It’s a very militant understanding of history, interested primarily in strength and dominance. A few years ago Musk was pining for a return to the dark days of Sulla.2

The two approaches were thrown into sharp relief amid the (somehow still ongoing) online Odyssey contretemps, about whether an artistic adaptation of a story with witches and magic about a made-up guy returning home from a war that may not have actually happened, is historically accurate. I’m not saying our historical civilizational values don’t matter, I’m just saying one approach to preserving them – the one that prioritizes the dignity and worth of the individual over sheer will to power – seems like the more promising one if you’re also interested in maintaining your quality of life in a society that views you personally as an individual with dignity and worth.

Pagans!

And now for something completely different. A post from data scientist David Shor did the rounds on X recently:

Some people are quibbling with this, but given that there are actually a non-negligible number of self-professed pagans in the United States, I’d remind you that in a changing faith landscape, we dismiss or ignore people’s convinced spiritual beliefs to our great detriment.

I’ve rounded up some articles from my religious literacy back-catalog for you:

The portrayal of hoodoo in the movie Sinners

“A Return to Mount Olympus” (practitioners of Greek polytheism)

Attending a lecture by a voodoo priestess in a New Orleans hotel conference room

Norse pagans in the military, back when the Pentagon was more worried they might be white supremacists, and not that they had beards

Interviewing warlocks in Salem before their annual pre-Halloween seance

This kind of reporting is why I named my Substack “People Really Believe This Stuff!” It’s been a while since I’ve written any pieces like this, but I was recently at Stonehenge interviewing some Druids on Midsummer Eve and hope to have that one out later this year.

Recommendation for the Week: Sloveniamaxxing

Speaking of midsummer, I’m in Slovenia this week, where there is a genre of folk art that’s like if the cult in Midsommar were devout Catholics and it’s awesome

Slovenia is also gorgeous, inexpensive, and a sportsmans’ paradise.

I’m not on the Slovenian tourism board’s payroll or anything, I just think Americans are sleeping on Slovenia.

Anyway, I hope you have a great week. Nasvidenje!

I read this first book over the weekend. Readers who are familiar with the Grail Quest are likely to enjoy Guite’s Rashomon-like narrative approach to episodes in the Grail Quest. Seeing how your faves all end up at the same place at the same time and learning how the same encounter is experienced by different knights is entertaining. And whichever version of Arthur & co that you’re familiar with, there are plenty of nods to Chretien de Troyes and Thomas Malory.

But where it really clicked for me was in the second half, where Guite addresses the question-begging at the heart of what Jessie Weston called “the Grail Problem," something that has always bothered me: why is a story for and by people in a deeply Christian culture so concerned with finding the cup from the Last Supper? Because if you believe in the Real Presence, as medieval people definitely did, you can access the Blood of Christ at literally any Mass anywhere in the world.

Guite tackles this head on in brilliant language that demonstrates a deep appreciation for and understanding of liturgy. His appendices at the end are especially worthwhile for Arthuriana buffs, TS Eliot fans, and folklore appreciators.

His overall project is to return Christianity to the center of the King Arthur story. And if you’re familiar with Christianity (especially Roman Catholic and Anglican understandings of the Eucharist), you’ll find Galahad and the Grail a very rich text. I wonder whether readers who are unfamiliar with those things will find it very rewarding, however.

To his credit, Guite is aware of this challenge. “We take our present alienation for granted and mistake it for reality,” he writes in Appendix B: The Wasteland. “Unless we read old books and stories, we have no access to any other way of seeing and knowing.”

Alas, this is increasingly the waste land in which many of us live our lives.

Religious illiteracy is risky

When Jonathan Liedl approached me about doing some reporting on religious illiteracy for the National Catholic Register, the assignment proved trickier than I anticipated when I accepted it.

A particular challenge was explaining precisely why it mattered that fewer people seem familiar with Biblical language, types, and stories. For a Catholic, Christian audience, the problem is obvious enough. But in editing the piece, it took considerable time to outline the concrete implications for society, beyond intellectual and aesthetic impoverishment.

I’d urge you to read the piece, since there are quotes from smart people with interesting insights about how religious literacy is vital to America’s civic health. But this quote from Pope Leo (taken from a speech he gave, not because I snagged an interview) articulates the same concerns as Malcolm Guite about alienation:

While the Declaration of Independence’s assertion of inalienable human rights may be “couched in the language of the Enlightenment,” the America-born pontiff said the “claim is ultimately grounded in an understanding of the human person inspired by the great biblical vision of man and woman being created in the divine image.”

We become detached from our understanding of ourselves if we don’t take the time to acquaint ourselves with the way our forebears thought and felt and experienced the world. (Stay tuned for a related piece on this topic in another outlet next week!)

You call this Christian? Where’s all the misogyny?!

But religious literacy still matters for theological reasons. And even religious folks can’t assume they’ve done all their homework.

As I mentioned above, Odyssey fever is roiling X at present, where the novel Nolan strain is proving particularly devastating.

There, if I may indulge another extended metaphor, professional controversy milker Matt Walsh clocked in to his latest shift at the “hot take” farm and I don’t know what his quota was that day, but it’s safe to say he met it:

Now, look. Walsh’s kids have to eat, too, and he’s whinging all the way to the bank with this. I’m the stupid one, because I write my takes here for free and for an exponentially smaller audience. So taking as our premise that Walsh is smarter than I, let us assume that he also knows “less misogynistic film cannot reflect a value system shaped by Christianity” is a specious argument.

With this set of priors then, we can accept that Walsh believes that a lot of the people who tend to agree with him on various issues (and given the 15K likes the post received, we must assume there are at least several) are not religiously literate enough to know this is a bad argument or at least, a badly-put argument.

But Ben Shapiro, who founded the outlet that platforms Walsh and whatever you may think of his politics and polemical style is no slouch in the Biblical literacy department, had no problem recognizing and acknowledging the Biblical and specifically Christian themes in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey:

There is a non-negligible segment of people online for whom “classical” and “Western” and “Christian civilization” are mostly vibes. They are shibboleths to signal to others that they stand for tradition and traditional values (usually Christian, if only in a cultural sense). But as Institute on Religion and Democracy president said in my NCR piece:

“Christian labels are now losing their theological meanings and becoming cultural and political monikers for tribes, which are motivated to fight other tribes rather than focus on their own discipleship and sanctification,” said Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a conservative Christian thinktank in Washington, DC. “Many now identify as ‘Christian’ without understanding the spiritual commitments that go with it.”

Classical ≠ Conservative

While there are those on the online Right who seem to feel special ownership of the Classical tradition, that is not objectively the case. I wrote about this very debate over (and within) classical education a couple of years ago for Tablet. Cornel West is aboard member on the Classical Learning Test, for crying out loud!

Nolan’s Odyssey adaptation and Guite’s Arthur poetry cycle are useful examples of the ideological ambivalence of classics/Great Books/whatever. Both artists are taking civilizational narratives and shaping them around themes that they find relevant at this point in our history, using language that modern audiences will find inviting and dynamic. There are those on the right who find this approach to classic works objectionable, for whom classic works should remain magisterial and preserved in aspic. But dynamism is a feature, not a bug, of teaching the classics. These stories themselves often have many versions that go back centuries. Today the heirs of these stories reinvent them, and hopefully, will go on reinventing them.

Stay tuned for my upcoming piece at another outlet on just why studying the past matters, and how making history an inherently political or adversarial project is ultimately a doomed one!

Now More Than Ever

So I thought the most frustrating part about having a forthcoming piece on Nixonmaxxing was seeing other outlets publish pieces about it before mine, even though the Nixonnaissance has lived rent-free in my head for over a year.

It turns out, there is something more frustrating, which is a Nixon piece coming out the day after yours in the Wall Street Journal.

I thought I had exorcised the professional jealousy from my system when I happened across ’s article on social media fan edits in Tablet’s most recent print issue. She didn’t write about Nixonmaxxing, but she got at something fundamental about the fan edit I wish I had touched on.

Writing about Nick Fuentes, Dee says that to listen to him straight through, she finds his bigotry disgusting. But an edit with music? That becomes an invitation:

“Suddenly, I’m not horrified by Fuentes’ unveiled sexism, or not only horrified. I sort of want to read a work of fiction about him, or watch a narrative feature. Maybe I even want to write one! He becomes a subject in a way he woudln’t have been. I wonder to mysel fif he’s gay, and I’m seduced by that possibility. Is this clip really about sexism, or is it about some private wound that’s being concealed by his shocking rhetoric?”

It isn’t Fuentes himself, Dee explains, his gestures, his words. “All of it is contained in the music. That is the power of the fan edit.”

Apply this same logic to Nixon fan edits, and you can definitely see the same logic at play. But I think it matters that the fan edits seem to have begun organically (and contrary to popular belief, not all from conservatives!).

Thanks for hanging out with me on this last Monday of July! My kids have been setting light to our beacon again, which I just remembered is Grail-shaped, so I must go attend to it before some knight errant gets the wrong idea.

Welcome back. So we’re all on a level playing field now, I have some thoughts and questions I’d like to put to you now that you’ve seen The Odyssey.

Is it just me, or what it pretty bleak?

The whole thing at the end, when Odysseus seems to suggest that human history is a cycle of building up, knocking down, and forgetting. It didn’t feel very hopeful?

The plot changes

“You can’t have The Odyssey without the Lotus Eaters!” my 13 year old said before seeing the film. I assure you, you can! Other plot adaptations about which I’m curious to hear what people thought:

Odysseus doesn’t tell the Cyclops his name

There’s a school of thought that Odysseus imprudently revealing his name to the Cyclops is the reason that Polyphemus is able to curse him in the first place.

I didn’t have a huge problem that evidently, Odysseus impulsively firing a parting shot in anger at the Cyclops is meant as a stand in for this scene. It effectively communicates that Odysseus is occasionally a bit of a reckless character. And after all, the Promised Land is forbidden to Moses when, to bring forth water for the Hebrews, he strikes the rock with his staff twice in anger to bring. An apparently small thing, but leaders are called to a different standard, a recurring theme Nolan’s Odyssey.

But I’m curious if most viewers think that Poseidon’s wrath is clearly communicated, particularly the ones who may have forgotten their Odyssey. At least at my screening, I had a hard time understanding the Cyclops’ speech (based on some early reviews, I think Nolan’s history with sound-mixing is going to be a thing with this movie). So the fact that the explanation for the perilous journey home comes because one of Odysseus’ men says something like, “I heard the Cyclops talking about Poseidon, I think he’s his son!” is kind of an interesting choice.

Mentor (and the Rest)

The potential underplaying of Poseidon’s wrath brings up Nolan’s treatment of the gods more generally. So is Mentor Athena in this version, or not? Telemachus tells Mentor that he has the wise, gray eyes of Athena, but then Mentor gets killed in that weird rumble at the temple sequence. And then later, Telemachus says the same thing about Odysseus. Who is Athena? Are any of them Athena? Am I Athena?

It’s confusing, but I think part of the reason is because Nolan himself isn’t quite sure what to do with the Olympians.

I read a review (I forget which one, I’ve read quite a few by now) that said the gods in Nolan’s Odyssey have an opaque quality, and I think that’s right. You could almost be forgiven for thinking this is a movie that asks if the gods are even real, except that we’re given a few concrete indications that they are.

The choice to show Athena as a Trojan girl murdered by Odysseus’ men was interesting. It works on a few levels: it symbolizes Odysseus’ own sense that the Trojan War has irrevocably disrupted the civilizational order based on the norms and mores put forward by the gods. Nolan’s Odysseus is wracked with guilt over the sense that he delivered the coup de grace against xenia himself with the Trojan Horse ruse. Since a sense of moral injury pervades Odysseus’ war flashbacks, and Athena functions as a kind of Jiminy Cricket to his conscience, it could also be that she appears to Odysseus in the form of an actual Trojan girl that he saw his men kill.

Which brings me to my next thought…

Odysseus would be a terrible boss

I really enjoyed Himesh Patel’s portrayal of Eurylochus as Odysseus’ put-upon executive officer. The film really homes in on moments of near-mutiny and the dirty looks the men flash at Odysseus. You get a sense of how awful it would be to work for Odysseus, and what a flawed character he is.

I recently listened to Dan Snow’s History Hit podcast episode about the history behind The Odyssey. One of his guests traces the way we see Odysseus grow as a leader throughout the poem: he begins his voyage home impulsive and brash – he can’t resist telling Polyphemus his name – but by the end, he has been so humbled that he is able to spend several days incognito in his own palace, suffering the abuse and taunts of the suitors before he can exact justice. But the film does an excellent job of showing you just what a painful process of personal growth that is–and how costly it is to those who have been placed in Odysseus’ care.

His men aren’t much better though, honestly

The first raid on their voyage home and the extended Trojan War flashback scene serve as the film’s reminder that Bronze Age morality, and even the morality of Homer’s Greece, is fairly alien to a modern Western audience.

The guys we’re meant to root for are shown looting and pillaging and wantonly killing. Nolan’s way of letting you know this is not the film’s morality are some shots of Zendaya as Athena frowning and shaking her head, the way you’re supposed to do if you’re reading Mein Kampf in public.

Run Away!

There are what, at least three scenes? of these macho guys in heavy armor slowly creeping up to something, only to quickly realize that they’ve made a huge mistake, and then run away. I’m sorry, at times it was giving Monty Python and the Holy Grail just a little bit.

Xenia: Warrior Precept

I’m not the first person to make this connection. I get what Nolan is doing with the Trojan Horse/“you maniacs, you blew it all up” thing:

And I think ’s review over at gets it right when he says The Odyssey rounds out Christopher Nolan’s “Death Drive Trilogy,” comparing Odysseus to Oppenheimer.

In my reading, the film’s tagline, “Defy the gods,” is less about hubris, as it is in the poem, than the violation of xenia, the sacrosanct guest/host relationship, which the characters refer to throughout as “Zeus’s law.” From what I understand, xenia wasn’t really the same thing as the "Golden Rule” morality of our Enlightenment, Abrahamic milieu, which is underpinned by a lot of assumptions about equal human worth and inherent dignity that pre-Axial Age people didn’t generally share. In Nolan’s telling I think xenia is meant to stand in for civilizational values more generally. But ultimately, I’m just not sure that constitutes enough of a premise on which to hang a film as ambitious as The Odyssey.

Generally, I liked it

As this hits your inbox, I will have gone to see The Odyssey a second time. It is a visually stunning adaptation that for all its liberties, takes the source material seriously, and I think it will reward additional viewings.

I hope it does well, because we need more ambitious original fare. I hope that others are inspired to revisit The Odyssey and The Iliad (I have been!).

And if you are interested in a contemporary tale of warriors and the difficult journey home from war, I have one more recommendation for you. Over at The Dispatch, Ari David Blaff did an amazing job reporting on the reunion of the 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division, twenty years after fighting together during the Al-Anbar Awakening. My dad was the brigade commander during the Battle of Ramadi described in the piece and both he and my mom – , a real-life Penelope – both spoke to Ari quite a bit for the story.

There were aspects of Nolan’s Odyssey that rang true to me as the daughter and wife of Army officers. Among those were the seriousness with which they take their responsibility to those in their command. When Odysseus asks Penelope to come with him and spend the rest of his life dedicating to honoring his men, I thought of my mom and dad, arranging this belated homecoming for his men twenty years on. I also thought of my dad going to the nearest military cemetery on Memorial Day every year since then, and my mother going with him. That dialogue might not have been in the original source material, but I’m glad it’s there.

I wonder if The Odyssey will have legs. It’s unevenly paced, getting quite talky and philosophical in parts. It’s not the sword-and-sandals high adventure many people seem to hope it is. The audience of young soldiers – presumably squarely in the film’s demo – with whom I saw it didn’t really react even to the action sequences, and afterward, everyone filed out quietly to the parking lot.

It started about 18 months or so ago, when my Instagram algorithm began serving up Nixon content. Some of it was ironic, some of it was slick and celebratory. Strikingly, nearly all of it appeared at least kind of…affectionate? Then I noticed The Richard Nixon Foundation itself was getting in on the action with its merch, which was clearly aimed at Zoomers.

So I pitched an article on the real Gen Z revival, the Richard Nixon Revival, and the lovely , to whom I owe much of my career, saw the vision and Arc ran the article today. I’d really like you to read it, because I think Nixon’s online popularity says a lot about our politics and culture.

Read it here.

The surest indicator that Nixon-maxxing is a genuine online trend is that our terminally online Vice President has gotten out in front of the parade, speaking at The Nixon Library last month. The headlines afterward were predictable:

“Why JD Vance is downplaying Richard Nixon’s corruption.”

“Vance dismisses Watergate scandal, says ‘deep state’ went after Nixon.”

“Vance Downplays Watergate and Compares Himself to Nixon.”

The overall tenor of this coverage was something like: “The Trump administration would run cover for the corrupt Richard Nixon.” But there was little mention that Nixon is having a moment with the kind of young, right-leaning, Very Online voter that Vance seems to consider his demo.

I’d say both the critical coverage and Vance himself are each missing something:

1. There is some question-begging in the coverage, which tends to have as its starting point that all reasonable people agree that Richard Nixon was the literal worst. That was the default assumption in popular and news media for much of the last half-century, but it doesn’t suit our anti-establishment moment. Some have judged that Nixon’s legacy is up for reinterpretation. There are younger Americans who see Nixon as a guy hard done by in the way that Watergate was handled. They acknowledge that Watergate was bad, but they also see the reporting that Trump has made $2 billion in office this time around, and that a foreign power has a 49 percent stake in his lucrative crypto company. And more liberal young people wonder if we should totally write off the guy on whose watch abortion became legal, and whose administration started the Environmental Protection Agency?2

2. In comparing himself to Nixon, Vance may be trying to curry favor with the Nixon-maxxing crowd. But for the young people who find themselves drawn to Nixon’s complicated legacy, part of his appeal seems to be that he hearkens back to a less-partisan time. As a high profile representative of a Republican administration, it will be hard for Vance to assume Nixon’s mantle.

Do please read it!

The Odyssey FAQs

I’ve promised my spoilery review once you all have had a chance to see the movie. But I’d like to briefly address some of the more common or particularly interesting questions and feedback I have received since my post on Sunday after attending an advance screening of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Here goes.

1. It doesn’t sound like it’s a straightforward retelling? Why not?

Adaptations of civilizational stories keep them alive and dynamic and part of the cultural conversation. Just because I adore the 1995 Pride and Prejudice miniseries, which is basically a line-by-line transcript of Jane Austen’s novel, I don’t begrudge the many Pride and Prejudice spinoff novels or screen adaptations, even if they aren’t to my taste. A really rich text invites other artists into conversation with their work.

I’m taking my kids to see it this weekend. They are already very familiar with the original story so personally, I’m looking forward to the post-movie discussion where we contrast and compare what Nolan did with the film, versus what is in the original story.

For those who are concerned about Nolan’s version constituting many novices’ first exposure to The Odyssey, I’d hasten to remind that the classic work is still widely available. Nothing is stopping the literary purists from mounting a PR blitz for the source material. Billboards on the highway, ads at the multiplex. Something like, “You saw the movie, now read Robert Fagles’ translation.”3

2. Why don’t they talk old-timey? Why is it historically inaccurate?

Shakespeare’s history plays don’t give us a verbatim transcript of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. He added his own dialogue (in contemporary speech, by the way) and zhuzhed up the plots a little. Besides, I think we can forgive anachronisms in a story with cyclops and witches and sirens and giants.

If the cumulative effect of Nolan’s melange of ancient and contemporary, mythical and historical, feels kind of uncanny, it’s because the story itself is kind of uncanny. I mean, have you ever gotten lost in a strange place before? It’s weird and distressing! And for most of us, that’s without encountering any mythical monsters or Olympian gods.

3. Why is Helen of Troy black? Why is Sinon played by a trans actor?

Either Western civilization and its intellectual heritage is for everyone, or it isn’t. The actors portraying these characters in Nolan’s Odyssey are also inheritors of the Anglophone literary tradition. I find it interesting that there are people in the “we must preserve Western civilization” crowd who have already made up their minds to dislike this film on this basis. Shouldn’t they be excited at the idea that this might open up the tradition to new people?

Do we believe these great stories should be shared widely, or do the Western civilization RETVRN types merely want to gate keep Homer et al. for themselves?

It is okay to like things or not like things

My cards on the table, I liked Nolan’s spin on The Odyssey. I liked it quite a bit! I didn’t love it. It wasn’t life changing. I have my qualms.

So I’m not actually interested in dying on the hill of defending it from the preemptive haters. This movie definitely won’t be for everyone, and that’s okay. That’s the case with art.

Ultimately, some things just come down to taste. I have no interest in the various other Pride and Prejudice adaptations, nor in the Austen spinoff novels and TV shows. But I don’t mind that they exist. I don’t think they’re an affront to English literature. I would never try to talk someone out of liking them.

That said, one of my favorite movies is the Adam Sandler Mr. Deeds movie, and I recognize that it’s no Dr. Zhivago. Discerning whether a particular film, book, or play adaptation has more aesthetic merit than another is a question of educating audiences’ taste. And that simply isn’t the artist’s job.

Cultivating taste used to be the job of art critics, schools, parents, the individual themselves. And one thing I think that the current movement to lift up the true, the good, and the beautiful in our culture has yet to grapple with is the question of taste, and how to cultivate it. That starts with answering a question: what is art for? Is it simply nice imagery and uplifting stories with good morals? Or is it something more?

May the rest of this week find you tanned, rested and ready.

At least over on X, people are frantic with anticipation. Others are being a bunch of negative Nancies. Some people are saying they’ll never see it due to Nolan’s casting decisions. There are people worried about the use of modern colloquialisms like Telemachus saying, “dad.” Others are concerned about historical inaccuracies.

If you are curious about the movie and planning to go see it when it premieres this weekend, you may want to read ahead. I have some spoiler-free thoughts and some advance read/watch/listen recommendations for those of you who want to do your homework (homework isn’t necessary to enjoy the movie at all, but I do feel it will make for a more rewarding viewing experience!).

I didn’t sign an NDA, but I want to be a good sport. So there won’t be any spoilers here, but I can’t promise I can totally avoid spoiler-adjacency just by dint of talking about the film in the first place.

You’ve been warned, so let’s begin!

10 Initial Impressions + One Bonus Wish

1. I liked it.

2. A good movie is not necessarily the same thing as a fun movie.

3. The R-rating is kind of overkill, I think a PG-13 would have been fine.

4. If you’re expecting a straightforward narrative pageant, a picaresque adventure story, or a sword-and-sandals action movie – don’t!

5. Nolan takes some liberties and economies with the plot. Some people will like it, some people will hate it.

6. Elon Musk will hate it. Whereas if you believe that movies can be about flawed and morally complex men with the capacity for shame, guilt, and humility, you just might like it! Or at least find it interesting.

7. I’m planning to take my 13 and 11 year old kids, because they’re big Greek myth fans. My 9 year old is, too. We told him we’ll bring him, but he has to close his eyes during the Cyclops and Circe. And he might be bored in parts.

8. The tagline “Defy the gods” is definitely there for a reason. People have asked me if The Odyssey is about faith/belief, either pro- or con-. I’d say it takes it seriously.1

9. Some of Odysseus’ monologues should probably come with a trigger warning for combat vets and their families.

10. The special effects are cool and I would 100 percent watch the DVD “making of” featurette if those still existed. Do they still exist?

11. I’d love to see Nolan try horror sometime.

Watch/Listen/Read Before You Go (If You Want)

The Iliad by Homer

The Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today by Bryan Doerries

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline

Dan Snow is doing a series on The Odyssey over on his podcast, History Hit. If you don’t have time to re-read the poem but would like a refresher, I was glad I listened before I went. It’s a concise and engaging recap. Worth it for the reminder that the Lystragonians were a thing (had totally forgotten about them)!

Final Thoughts

There are people who have already made up their minds they’re going to hate this.

The language criticism is such a nitpick, I barely noticed it, which I think is kind of the point. It’s not Hamilton, they’re not trying to talk like modern people to relate to the youths of today. The characters speak in a recognizably human way, an especially valuable quality in a popular adaptation of a civilizationally important work, particularly when a lot of people evidently no longer read with any level of comprehension.

Ultimately, I guess how you feel about Nolan’s choices in his adaptation of The Odyssey will come down to whether you believe that artists should be able to interpret well-known stories in order to explore important ideas and existential questions for their own time.

If you’re of the Bart Neglia school of thought about movies, this might not be the Homer adaptation for you!

Catch you on the other side of the wine dark sea.

The Society of St. Pius X went against Pope Leo and consecrated their own bishops, something usually only the Pope can do. They got excommunicated, which is unsurprising given that they were warned that would happen.

Plus we had a whole thing about this very issue in the 11th century at Canossa:

The SSPX is an interesting organization within the Church. They have been both in and out of communion with Rome in the past. They are critical of Vatican II. They view themselves as custodians of the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM). You can be critical of Vatican II, and you can be a TLM devotee, but speaking (very) broadly, the issue is that the Vatican doesn’t want you to make either one your whole thing, especially if it comes with questioning the legitimacy of the reigning pontiff. Sedevacantism, or denying the legitimacy of the present Pope, is not the SSPX’s official stance. Rather, they insist that in sticking with what they believe to be right, they are in fact preserving the traditions of the church, an“I didn’t leave the Church of Rome, Roman Catholicism left me,” kind of thing. They insist they remain loyal to Rome, which has created all kinds of confusion.

This quote from an EWTN explainer boils it down nicely:

The SSPX, therefore, has set itself up as a parallel magisterium that alone possesses the proper interpretation of “tradition.”

There are some bishops who are hoping to keep at least some of the SSPX laity from falling into heresy. This is notably the case in Oslo, Norway, where the Bishop has taken a sort of, “If you’re going to do the TLM, I’d rather you did it in the house” approach and is offering the Latin Mass more widely now.

Obviously, any break within the Body of Christ is lamentable, and we can and should be working out ways to end schism. But what if we’re missing the bigger picture? I’ll explain what I mean.

Look to the Children

I’m on record as a Gen Z revival skeptic. One thing the revival boosters like to point to is tradition, the old timey smells and bells, the dead languages, the gender roles. The kids are going nuts for it!

And to be sure, on Instagram and TikTok you can find plenty of Catholic aesthetic and medieval mystic content. I wrote about HildegardTok for Tablet back in May.

But interestingly, tradition does not actually seem to be what young people themselves say keeps them hanging around Catholicism. I have some reporting coming out soon about OCIA converts at U.S. colleges, but in the meantime, let’s look at this data Springtide Research gathered in the latter half of 2025.

What did 1,000 young people between the ages of 13 and 25 tell researchers kept them Catholic?

The top five words that came up the most in their responses:

1. believe

2. family

3. feel

4. love

5. know

You can see from the graphic that tradition was relatively low on the list:

Religious Transmission: A Family Business

Two other words that ranked ahead of “tradition” in terms of frequency were “family” and “parent.” The researchers noted that retention numbers seemed to be closely correlated to a faith that is “lived, felt, and relational.” For a young person, most of that living and a relationship begins at home.

This isn’t a novel discovery. was writing for Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal for the McGrath Institute for Church Life that parental religious transmission can have a huge impact on whether or not a Catholic child grows into a practicing Catholic adult.

You can read the whole thing here. But I’d like to share the list that Bullivant and his co-author, Michael Rota, compiled of the biggest parental predictors of religious retention for children:

1. Shared religious identity between parents

2. Intact marriage

3. Parents live their religion and their religion is important to them

4. Parents talk with their children about religion

5. Parents provide both warmth and structure, and children form secure attachments to their parents

I think this last one is perhaps underrated. Anyone raised in a religious environment probably knew kids whose parents met most of the first four criteria, but didn’t exactly clear the bar on number 5. And if your experience is anything like mine, today, I bet a lot of those kids of your acquaintance are like, Reddit atheists.

Notice what is not on the list? “Took them to a Traditional Latin Mass.”

That’s one reason I’m skeptical of the uptick in attendance of young people at more traditional liturgies. There’s a kind of triumphalism in some of the discourse that suggests if young people are doing it, it must mean something. I’m skeptical because remember POGs?

You can get 10,000 Zoomers to show up to a Timothee Chalamet lookalike contest in Washington Square Park. To quote Shania Twain, that don’t impressa me much.

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’” and all that. What/where are the fruits? And will they last? Galatians gives us a handy list of fruits of the Holy Spirit that I think are kind of a helpful roadmap…

Maybe these outputs everywhere, and they’re taking root! Good, they should only continue to do so! The Mass is and always will be the Source and Summit of the Catholic faith, but the kids are telling us they want relationship more than they want traditional liturgies.

I Like Tradition as Much as the Next Guy

I’m a lifelong Novus Ordo girlie (aka the Mass in the vernacular language) and I’ve traveled a lot. As such, I’ve been to Mass in Korean, English, Spanish, Italian, German, French. The nice thing about the NO when you’re in another country is that in hearing the Mass in languages other than your own, you appreciate how the core is still the same. This isn’t my observation, it usually comes in the Office of Readings around Pentecost, but attending Mass in this way puts the congregation in the position of the people standing outside the upper room:

We are Parthians, Medes, and Elamites,
inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia,
Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia,
Egypt and the districts of Libya near Cyrene,
as well as travelers from Rome,
both Jews and converts to Judaism, Cretans and Arabs,
yet we hear them speaking in our own tongues
of the mighty acts of God.”

Hearing the Mass in your own language is such a powerful experience, which is why I’m such a fan of the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter. Pope Benedict XVI ushered in this rite as a pathway for Anglicans into communion with Rome. The result is a beautiful, reverent liturgy steeped in English tradition. The beautiful language of the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible – so pivotal to the English we speak even here in America today – has been adapted for Roman Catholic use.

I keep reading articles that Ordinariate parishes are flourishing, but personally, I have yet to go to an Ordinariate Mass that is well-attended, which is really too bad. It has enriched my appreciation for the Mass and the teachings of the faith in fresh new ways, and if you can find one near you, I’d encourage you to check it out!

Coming Attractions

I know I’ve been pretty quiet lately on here. But I’ve got a few articles in the queue at some different places, which should boost production around here soon. I started this newsletter as kind of a DVD commentary on my religion reporting and cultural analysis. But one of the frustrating things about being a freelancer is I’m not privy to the publication schedule of the various outlets for which I write.

Just know that we’ve got the aforementioned OCIA convert piece, a reported meditation of sorts about a mythical former president, and my bread and butter: religious literacy.

But I have my reasons. Last weekend found your loyal correspondent in Salisbury, Wiltshire, UK, there to attend the Solstice celebrations for a forthcoming piece on modern Druidry.

Once-in-a-lifetime stuff to be sure, but my hotel somewhat overstated its proximity to the monument for pedestrians. Thus I walked some four miles in the English countryside on a balmy midsummer night, where my alternating fears of being gored by bulls or pixie-led were alleviated only by occasional, unsettling signage:

And I would be remiss if I did not give my long-suffering family their propers:

But some stuff has happened in the meantime.

A high-profile 41 year old Catholic convert released his second memoir, and then went on a Nixon rehabilitation tour (WATCH THIS SPACE ON THIS TOPIC!!)1

Probably some other stuff. But I want to hit on the real news, which is that Focus Features released the trailer for Robert Eggers’ latest movie: Werwulf.

Going Medieval

I’ve got a lot of time for Robert Eggers. As a history buff and horror nerd who also suffers from OCD (I’m diagnosing him, here), I appreciate his attention to detail. That is a huge part of his appeal for me, but that’s largely because it is also closely related to the way he treats God, faith, good, and evil in his work.

A few years ago now, I did a series on faith-based horror over at Word on Fire. I concluded with an essay on Eggers’ debut film The VVitch.2

The coolest thing about the film is that the witch is real. Other writer-directors would be tempted to retreat into psychological horror – is it all just a figment of the heroine’s troubled imagination? Nope. The devil is waiting to prey on those who think they can strike out on their own, away from their obligations to others:

[V]oluntary separation from the community makes the devout Puritan family at the center of the story vulnerable to the predations of an actual, no-kidding witch and ultimately Satan himself.

William, the pater familias, has placed himself in opposition to the rest of his village on a theological matter, judging his neighbors to be “false Christians,” saying that they belong to an “unseparated church” that remains too loyal to the Church of England, where episcopal hierarchy remains. After William’s family is banished to the wilderness on the edge of the forest for his “prideful conceit,” the eldest daughter, Thomasin, finally succumbs to the devil’s invitation to “live deliciously” after the titular witch and the devil (in the form of the family goat, Black Philip) have terrorized and ultimately killed the rest of her family.

Too many people view the film’s end as Thomasin’s girlbossy feminist emancipation, but she doesn’t actually get anything the devil promised her. “Wouldst thou like the taste of butter?” Best I can do is cannibal witch coven. “Wouldst thou like a pretty dress?” Sorry, forgot to mention, actually, everyone here is naked.

And this X post is a good summation of my own view of Nosferatu, Eggers’ most recent film:

My man here gets it. Nobody in the fictional northern German industrial city of Wisborg is portrayed as conventionally religious. It takes place Christmas time, but Christ’s birth doesn’t get much of a mention. Van Helsing’s beliefs are a sort of proto-postmodern (if that makes sense) mashup of pre-Christian, Christian, and esoteric belief. Only two things effectively ward off Orlok in the end: devout Orthodox nuns and an act of voluntary self-sacrifice (remind you of anyone?).

So I was already excited to see what Eggers was going to do with Werwulf, but then this banger 2022 quote resurfaced:

“I think it’s hard to do this kind of creative work in a modern secular society because it becomes all about your ego and yourself. And I am envious — this is the horrible part — I’m envious of medieval craftsmen who are doing the work for God. And that becomes a way to … you get to be creative to celebrate something else. And also, you’re censoring yourself because it’s not about like me, me, me, me, me, me. So you say, ‘Oh, I got to rein that back because that’s not what this altar piece needs to be.’ Any worldview where everything around them is full of meaning is exciting to me, because we live in such a tiresome, lame, commercial culture now.”

Finding God in All Things

One of the things I love about Jesuit spirituality is the exhortation to “find God in all things.” I’m realizing now that’s essentially what I was getting at with a piece I had out this past Sunday in The Dispatch, about the limits of faith-based entertainment.

You can read the article, entitled “How to Get God in the Box Office” at the gift link here:

How to Get God in the Box Office

If you’re pressed for time, I think this pull-quote effectively distills my argument down:

Any message conveyed by that art is downstream of the artist’s need to express something, and the interpretation is left to the audience. The religious art of the past was beautiful and expressive because it was made by talented artists who also happened to be steeped in a Christian worldview—for audiences who shared the same worldview. In a pluralistic culture with declining religious literacy even among elites, faith-based entertainment that wears its belief on its sleeve is always going to hit a ceiling.

Stay Tuned

I hope everyone trapped in this heat dome with me is staying cool and hydrated! We’re all in this together, guys.

And stay tuned, I’ve got some more reporting and cultural analysis in the pipeline at a couple outlets, some for the first time. So I’ll be in touch soon!

In the meantime, as we dream of winter’s chill and the arrival of Robert Egger’s Werwulf that it heralds, I leave you with this lycanthropic masterpiece:

Utah Senator Mike Lee and others are painting this as a sort of victory. But this theological category error is almost tangential to the bigger questions people should be asking about reducing the recognized faith list from 211 to 31.

What is the Recognized Faith List?

As I wrote on Monday in Part 1, the U.S. military’s Recognized Faith list dates back to World War I. It does a couple of things – it gives military chaplains a sense of what faiths are represented in the ranks, and it also serves as the guide for identifying endorsing agents for chaplains and for supporting low-density faith groups.

Okay, What is an Endorsing Agent?

You can’t just walk in off the street as someone who has never belonged ISIS, proceed to pass a PT test and a drug test, and suddenly become a military chaplain. Before the U.S. military will send you to its chaplain school, some official religious body has to endorse you as a religious leader.

This prevents charlatans and grifters from accessing the ranks. It also makes sure that denominations are serviced correctly.

A news item from a couple of months ago highlighted concerns over Messianic Jewish chaplains insisting they be classified as Jewish chaplains instead of Christian ones, over the objections of non-Messianic (i.e. basically all) Jews. The chaplains of these respective denominations were able to appeal to their endorsing agents, who could then make their case to the military. In this way, the theology is seen to by the the subject matter experts, which frees up Uncle Sam from getting too deeply entangled in a debate over what, precisely, constitutes a Jew or a Christian.

Now that there is just a broad “Jewish” category, it could make it even harder to meet the spiritual needs of Jewish service members. There are Reform, Conservative, and Hasidic Jews. Similarly, there is the Southern Baptist Convention and American Baptist churches, which are different. Presbyterian Church USA and The Presbyterian Church (USA) are not the same. There are Roman Catholics and then there are Sedevacantists who identify as Catholic but don’t recognize the Pope. It is hard to see how putting all of these people in broad categories does not, as the memo accompanying the initial list insists, “provide chaplains with clear, readily available information that will better enable them to anticipate the religious support needs of service members and to provide religious support activities that align with service members’ personal faith and practices.”

When Simplifying Doesn’t Mean Clarity

When the military removed the “Christian” category from its streamlined list, it said it’s not in the business of entering into “theological debates.” That is precisely why a more diverse list matters, though. Imposing an arbitrary taxonomy on Latter-Day Saints as an administrative non sequitur invited a debate over the Trinity where there previously was none.

Denominational differences are in many cases not as small as they seem on the outside, and may matter a great deal to a service member looking for counseling on a matter specific to their faith tradition. Recognizing this helps the military identify a need among deployed troops, and send in a faith leader from a specific tradition to these places of spiritual – and often physical – austerity.

I’ve reported on this scenario in the Greek Orthodox tradition for Arc. If you just have “Orthodox” as a catchall category, as we do now under the new recognized faith list, it doesn’t quite transmit the entire picture of the specific need. An Ethiopian Orthodox soldier, for example, does not have the same beliefs about Christ’s divine and human nature as a Greek Orthodox soldier. Again, this seems small, but literal wars used to be fought over this kind of thing!

Creating a Problem Where There Wasn’t One

Whether or not this is actually the case, it’s hard not to read a kind of eye-rolling exasperation into this decision: “We see all your petty religious differences and quite frankly, we find them boring and insignificant.”

Who, precisely, this was for and why this was considered necessary at this precise moment in time are the questions I haven’t seen as widely asked as the question of whether or not Mormons are Christians. And maybe they should be.

I’m referring of course to the Pentagon’s new list of recognized faith groups that the Department of Defense1 released last week.

There are now 31 faith groups that the Department recognizes, down from 211. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell explained it is little more than an administrative action, which I think based on my own reporting on religion in the military is accurate. Crucially, service members can still put whatever religious affiliation they’d like on their dog tags, and no chaplains are going to be out of a job as of now.

I’m going to address the critiques and concerns I’ve seen in two separate posts. Today, we’ll start with some basic religious literacy and taxonomy. Later this week, we’ll explore what this categorical consolidation means.

What Is a “Recognized Faith Group”?

Many of the 180 faiths that no longer appear on the Recognized Faith Group list are termed “low density faith groups” in military chaplain parlance. As I explained in a 2022 Tablet article on Norse pagans in the military, a group that is now no longer recognized, the phrase simply means “a faith group without many adherents or clergy.”

I interviewed an Army chaplain about how Norse Pagans were able to practice their religion while serving:

There are no Norse pagan chaplains in the Army or any of the other branches of service, according to Ruiz. “When a need for a low-density religious support is brought and requested,” he said, “the Army has a certification process to authorize Distinctive Religious Group Leaders (DRGL). When someone volunteers to lead a group, they just provide some endorsing paperwork from the faith group they are part of.”

From there, he explained, the application goes up to a certain level of command, and includes an initial interview with a chaplain “to assess sincerity and verify credentials.” Then, if and when the volunteer DRGL is approved, they can lead services or studies for that faith group during a deployment or field exercise. “An Army Chaplain also endorses and oversees the DRGL while he/she conducts services,” said Ruiz.

You can read the rest of the article here. And here is the entire list of recognized faith groups as it stands today:

• Agnostic (AN)

• Baha’i faith (BH)

• Buddhism (BU)

• Christian - Assemblies of God (AG)

• Christian - Baptist (BA)

• Christian - Brethren (BR)

• Christian - Catholic (CA)

• Christian - Church of Christ (CC)

• Christian - Church of God (CG)

• Christian - Church of the Nazarene (CN)

• Christian - Episcopal/Anglican (EA)

• Christian - Evangelical (EV)

• Christian - Jehovah’s Witnesses (JW)

• Christian - Lutheran (LU)

• Christian - Methodist (ME)

• Christian - Non Denominational (ND)

• Christian - Orthodox (OX)

• Christian - Other (CO)

• Christian - Pentecostal (PE)

• Christian - Presbyterian (PR)

• Christian - Quaker (QU)

• Christian - Reformed (RE)

• Christian - Scientist (SC)

• Christian - Seventh Day Adventist (SA)

• Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (CJ)

• Hindu (HI)

• Islam (Muslim) (IS)

• Judaism (Jewish) (JU)

• No Religion (NR)

• Other Religions (OR)

• Sikh (SI)

Presumably, a Norse pagan could still seek recognition under the “Other Religions” category, but that presents other potential issues we’ll consider next week.

What’s in a name?

Secretary Hegseth has been publicly dismissive of Norse pagans as part of his war on “beardos.” I reported out my Tablet “Pagans in Uniform” piece a mere four years ago, and it is already something of a time capsule. In it, I addressed the difficulty this particular faith group had had in attaining official recognition in the first place, and the suspicion that still lingered around it.

But back then, the skepticism toward Norse pagans was coming from the political Left, not the MAGA Right.

At that time Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was worried about white supremacist extremism operating within the ranks. The white supremacist Asatru Folk Assembly was making headlines for taking over a disused Methodist Church in North Carolina. But the recognized Norse pagans in the military with whom I spoke were at pains to distance themselves from their coreligionists with more “folkish” beliefs.

This is where the value of a large number of recognized faith groups in the military can come in handy. The military officially recognized Norse paganism in 2017 after a group called Open Halls worked to gain recognition for their inclusive, non-white supremacist version of heathenry (another term for Norse and other paganisms). So in gaining recognition to operate officially as a low-density faith group, everyone could rest easy that it wasn’t the racist version.

When the Latter-Day Saints Go Marching In

The Pentagon’s new classification of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is where we encounter the difficulty of the military involving itself in classifying religious beliefs–a practice, it’s worth mentioning, that did not begin with the Trump administration.

Despite their denominational name calling themselves The Church of Jesus Christ, the Pentagon did not categorize Latter-Day Saints as Christian. On X, at least, LDS church members are incensed. Mike Lee, a Senator from Utah, has been leading the charge to include it under “Christian.”

My visit to the DC LDS Temple

Now, according to the traditional Christian understanding of the Trinity as stated in the Nicene Creed, many Christians would definitely dispute whether Latter-Day Saints could be considered Christians. For the vast majority of Christians, the Trinity as three beings-in-one is pretty foundational. However, Latter-Day Saints see the Trinity differently:

Like many Christians, we believe in God the Father, His Son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. However, we don’t believe in the traditional concept of the Trinity. We believe that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are three separate beings who are one in purpose.

Interestingly, Jehovah’s Witnesses are not trinitarians, either, yet the Pentagon did classify them as Christians. This decision is especially weird, since Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t take oaths, and therefore practicing JWs would be very unlikely to join the military to begin with.

From their website:

A true Christian would not take such an oath as to defend a country with arms or to renounce faith in God. Doing so would violate God’s commandments. Christians are to be “no part of the world,” so we cannot get involved in its controversies and conflicts.​

As I’ve reported, this refusal to take oaths is something for which Jehovah’s Witnesses have historically been willing to pay a very high price.

Unitarian Universalists have also been removed from the list, despite being almost the “heritage American” church. No less a Boston Brahmin than TS Eliot was born into a Unitarian family!

Conservatives dunk on UU quite a bit for being “woke,” but they are in actual fact the direct descendants of the Congregationalist Puritans who landed on Plymouth Rock.

Read my reporting on the Puritans’ progressive theological heritage here and here.

So What Are We Doing Here?

We’ll consider this later this week, but I do think it’s worth reiterating that categorizing religious beliefs is not something the Pentagon started doing this year. It actually started in World War I, when mass mobilization in a more diverse country revealed a need for chaplains from less common denominations.

Until next time!

And speaking of Vanessa Redgrave, you heard it here first: Ken Russell’s 1971 film “The Devils” is going to launch some discourse soon. The stuff of film nerd lore, the full length film – long suppressed – is supposed to be pretty scandalous. And I’ve been starting to hear more about it lately.

A couple of weeks ago, Guillermo del Toro visited the BFI’s National Archive and by his own admission, spent most of his time reading the screenplay for “The Devils.” Earlier this month, Warner Bros. announced that its new label Clockwork would screen a restored version of the original film negative at the Cannes Film Festival. For slobs like you and me, the restoration’s theatrical release will take place in October, which is when I predict you will see the hot takes begin to simmer.

The controversial film is based on an Aldous Huxley novel, The Devils of Loudun. I wrote about the book, a sui generis historical investigation of faith, deception, and hypocrisy, for ’s Cracks in Pomo last year.

Russell’s movie has nudity, sexy nuns, and clergy behaving badly. It’s not what I’d call a church youth group watch. But I can say that at least the version of the film that I saw was an excellent distillation of the themes Huxley explores in his book.

Because the film doesn’t portray the Catholic Church in a great light, I predict that you will hear the standard criticisms that “The Devils” is anti-Catholic smut.

I won’t say it isn’t spicy, as the BookTok ladies like to say. But it’s based on things that actually happened.

Also worth mentioning: Devils is a very cool looking movie. Vanessa Redgrave and Oliver Reed are great. Is it weird in a very late 60s/early 70s way? Sure. But it is incredibly visually arresting. The sexy nun stuff and creeptastic religious clergy are shocking to the religious viewer because Ken Russell wanted their misconduct to shock you. Because it was shocking.

Usually when we talk about faith-based entertainment, we mean something clean, family-friendly, and encouraging. It might get dark in places, but that’s usually in service to some kind of redemption arc. It’s seldom challenging, though. If people of faith want faith-based entertainment, we have to accept that not every production is going to be Anne of Avonlea.

Moreover, as I wrote in Cracks in Pomo, The Devils of Loudun’s themes are very relevant to us today:

Huxley’s excavation of the past is about what happens when the “anti-evil” project is more about getting loud in the public square than about becoming good oneself. Too often, bad actors sense an opportunity. Far from ushering in civilizational revival, the outcomes are depressingly grubby.

If you’re at all intrigued by catching the film during its theatrical release, I recommend reading Huxley’s book first to understand the way Russell portrays the characters.

Ryan Burge: Prophet of Doom

I’ve got a piece out in Tablet Magazine today, an interview with ’s Ryan Burge. It’s about his latest book, The Vanishing Church.

Read it here

Burge is skeptical about mixing faith and politics for the longterm health of either America or Christianity.

A relevant quote from the piece:

‘There seems to be a rapidly spreading phenomenon of people who say they are religious and believe that religion is an important part of their lives, even while they have essentially no connection to a local church’

Check it out!

And I hope to get back on a regular weekly posting schedule beginning next week.

As someone who has authored a column called “Religious Literacy in America” for the past five years, I have to say I found this more than a little dispiriting. On the other hand, at least I can survey the civilizational wreckage guilt-free, since I have proof positive that I did my darndest to prevent it.

The example in the WaPo piece was alarming though because it was so egregious. According to its author, a Princeton professor named Gregory Conti, several students didn’t know what the Ten Commandments were. At Princeton. A school founded by Presbyterian ministers.

This level of religious illiteracy is a problem in part because we’ve inherited a global system that was created by people who knew what the Ten Commandments were. In fact, they underpinned their entire ethical, moral, and legal framework those people inhabited. I’m all for the secular liberal order that allows for freedom of religion. But I frequently make the case regarding my own religious literacy series in Tablet that whether or not you personally are religious, religion should absolutely be of interest to you.

Why?

This becomes obvious any time you visit an art museum or cathedral in Europe. Some friends here in Italy told me how after a particular museum outing, they had screened a few “Veggie Tales” episodes to bring a house guest up to speed on the Old Testament allusions they hadn’t understood.

Since my family has been in Italy, I’ve seen the way our Catholic faith enhances my kids’ understanding of and appreciation for the things they see in the museums, architecture, and culture all around them. I’m amused when they tell me about the Church history or Catholic doctrine they’ve learned at their Pentagon-run public school that day, not because the Defense Department1 is trying to religiously indoctrinate the elementary schoolers, but because you kind of can’t teach Italian culture without going into those subjects.

And I can personally attest that there are not thousands of military kids converting to Catholicism as a result of this curriculum. Why, then, have we let ourselves become so allergic to teaching students about religion in an educational context?

Secular Doesn’t Have to Mean Ignorant

Just because America is more secular today than perhaps ever before, it wouldn’t hurt to acquaint Americans with the beliefs of the people who came before us – the heroes and the villains. Accordingly, I don’t think it’s any coincidence that religious illiteracy seems to have accompanied our increasing cultural and historical illiteracy. Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech, for example, is based a Biblical allusion, and you’re missing so much context and texture if you don’t know that. The Anglosphere’s history is steeped in language and imagery from the Jewish and Christian traditions. I have to think the past is almost unintelligible to someone without a working familiarity with them.

There’s also something about familiarity with religious texts that helps shape the symbolic imagination. Abstraction, symbolism, and figurative imagery feature prominently in spiritual and religious literature. These in turn have shaped the imaginations and informed the references and allusions of many of our greatest writers (even the ones who rejected religion).

We’re already seeing the effects of this dropoff in reading comprehension.

Scarlett O’Hara walked so Walter White could run

It has become common in recent years to dismiss Gone with the Wind as problematic, a romanticization of the Antebellum South. But of course, this is only true if you think the person the story is about is always the good guy who the reader is supposed to root for. If you’ve grown up with the stories of Saul, David, and Solomon however, you are familiar with problematic main characters. To adapt a phrase from children’s author Adam Gidwitz regarding the Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the stories in the Bible are weird, and sometimes gross, and often scary.

There is misconception that religious education consists primarily of transmitting dogmas to unquestioning tabulae rasae. But anyone who has ever tried to tell a child anything should realize that this obviously cannot be everywhere the case. If you’re teaching people stories from the Hebrew or Christian Bibles, you’re going to have to wrestle with the text a little bit, which is good mental exercise for engaging with other multilayered texts.

And people need the exercise.

An attentive reader of Gone with the Wind will notice that by the end of the novel, Scarlett O’Hara’s amoral narcissism has alienated everyone in her life except for the formerly enslaved plantation workers who owe her their livelihood. Nor does Mitchell allow the hardship that Scarlett experiences as a young woman during and after the war excuse her many sins: her contemporary Melanie Wilkes is Scarlett’s companion for nearly every struggle and never loses her virtue. And Mitchell makes her smartest and most moral characters either abolitionists or at the very least keenly aware that the South is fighting a losing battle, morally and literally.

The critique that Gone with the Wind romanticizes the Lost Cause myth is of a piece with the Breaking Bad viewers who hated Walter White’s wife, because they thought she was holding back the murderous meth cook they were rooting for. A phenomenon that, by the way, surprised even White’s own creator, Vince Gilligan.

Les Cousins Dangereux

A slightly lower brow example of our deteriorating ability to appreciate layered and allusive works:

If you needed a rewatch and someone else’s social media post to point out to you that there are a lot of incest jokes, may I suggest you try an in-depth reading of the Bible?

You’d Best Start Believing in a God-Haunted Civilization. You’re In One!

I wrote in Angelus news recently about how the Italian novel The Twenty Days of Turin anticipated our current struggles with the effects of social media and AI. Although it was written in the 1970s, the novel is concerned with what happens when a culture gives itself over to solipsism. In love with its own reflection, it has no memory. The past and history become alien, hostile, even dangerous.

Classical Education

On my short list2 of professional honors is the time I had an article make the “Breviary” section of Ross Douthat’s newsletter. It was a piece I wrote about classical education, and the way it has become kind of a political hot potato. An illustrative question from a friend of mine when I told him I was writing about classical education: “Oh, Ben Shapiro talks about that. Isn’t it supposed to like, turn your kids Republican or something?”

For the piece, I was able to interview Jeremy Wayne Tate, the founder of the Classic Learning Test (CLT), which is a college entrance exam designed as an alternative to the SAT. Although Tate is unabashedly socially conservative on social media – and the CLT has been embraced, endorsed, or adopted by many conservative (and conservative-coded) institutions – when we spoke, Tate drew my attention to the diverse ideological and racial makeup of the CLT’s executive board.

Classical education sometimes ends up in the “white supremacy” bucket alongside religious literacy, drawing as it does from so many dead white Christian men. But here’s a paragraph from that piece about the importance of historical literacy to responsible citizenship:

The American Black intellectual tradition, they write, has been an important custodian of the classical tradition in the U.S., including Frederick Douglass, who memorized Cicero’s speeches as part of his work to sway policymakers in favor of abolition, as well as the enslaved Revolutionary War poet Phillis Wheatley, who was “nourished on the classics,” and Black Panthers founder Huey Newton, on whom Plato’s Republic was an important influence.

And Frederick Douglass, of course, was also a devout Christian, a member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, about which I wrote for my religious literacy series.

And so I’ve brought it full circle.

Now go read a Bible or the Epic of Gilgamesh or something.

Buffalo is one of six New York dioceses out of eight currently undergoing Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, having filed in early 2020. In September of that year, the Diocese of Buffalo launched the euphemistically titled Road to Renewal, a tranche of structural and financial changes it says have been brought about by the Chapter 11 process, as well as a priest shortage and fewer Catholics in the area overall. Many parishioners contend the diocese is protecting itself at the expense of parishes, shifting the financial burden onto lay people’s shoulders, partly via the collection plate, but partly through plans to close what the faithful maintain are often vibrant parishes.

A group called Save Our Buffalo Churches didn’t think this was fair, and they (canon) lawyered up to take their case to the Vatican. The group has had some noteworthy successes. Last week, SOBC put out a release announcing that in the case of eight Buffalo parishes to date, the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Clergy had revoked decrees from the bishop that required the churches to contribute to the St. Joseph Fund, a financial arrangement structured to meet the diocese’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy needs. SOBC said the dicastery decision requires the diocese to return the monies to the parishes. EWTN news reported that the diocese disputes SOBC’s version of events.

Because this story takes place at the intersection of church and state governance, this is a complicated state of affairs. Please read my Tablet article, linked above, to get a better sense of the why’s and how’s behind the New York dioceses’ Chapter 11 filings and the lay resistance thereto.

It is notable to me that there is no coherent “Catholic Church scandal” narrative these days, since there has been one for most of my adult life until about 2022, when the New York Times proclaimed the Catholic Church New York City’s “hottest club.” Media outlets are still telling this story when they’re not reviving paranoid conspiratorial Da Vinci Code theorizing about Opus Dei. The latter kind of coverage is old news. But the “Gen Z Revival” coverage is interesting to me because it mostly ignores that the Catholic Church in the U.S. still has quite a bit of housecleaning to do if they’re going to properly welcome all of their new arrivals.

A few recent examples of the kind of mess I’m talking about from , EWTN News, and National Catholic Register:

1. Louisiana “Vos Estis” Complaint Remains Unanswered

2. Prosecutors say Oklahoma deacon stole more than $1.4 million from Tulsa parish

3. Broward Catholic school principal avoids jail time during sentencing of stealing over $200,000 from the school

4. Charlotte Diocese Says Priest Did Not Violate Conduct Policies During Confession With Teens

I’m a broken record about why this matters – see my reporting here and here – but basically, the American Catholic Church is losing more people than it’s gaining. It’s one of the few remaining institutions that retains any popular perception of moral authority, though, so we should do what we can to preserve that authority!

Hey look! An actual institution!

I wrote this in National Review after Pope Leo’s election:

In a sense, the people who find themselves suddenly fascinated by the Catholic Church and the papacy are really rooting for institutionalism. Kind of like Delta House in Animal House, the papal office and the Catholic Church both have a long history of existence. In an era of declining institutional trust, that really does count for something. The underlying sentiment driving many of the TikTok videos and Instagram reels often seems to be, “Hey, look! An actual institution!” Let’s not squander the enthusiasm.

And as Elias Wachtel recently reported in The Atlantic, the Catholic Church is hoping to use its moral authority to shape the future of Artificial Intelligence:

A key quote from Wachtel in this clip:

“For the last few decades scandal and growing secularism has drained the church of a lot of its moral authority in the West and many church leaders I spoke to described this as an opportunity to regain some moral sway in helping the world think through these brand new ethical and existential questions that AI is bringing about.”

Sincere good luck to them! I’m on record over at Angelus News about how I think the Catholic Church can and should address the real moral and ethical problems A.I. presents to humanity.

But to bring it back to Wachtel’s reporting, the Catholic Church will get much further in clawing its way back from the effects of scandal and growing secularism if it is seen diligently addressing those issues in a coherent and consistent fashion. And there are still too many stories coming out of the type I linked to above to make a serious case that they’re doing that yet.

The particulars of the Buffalo story aside, the broader picture shows that the Vatican can and does pay attention to the concerns of the laity. At the intermediate “middle management” level, speaking as a Catholic, it would be nice to see more bishops voluntarily shouldering the responsibility to make the Church more accountable in a visible and comprehensive way.

Play Ball!

On a semi-related topic of accountability, there was some recent discussion over on X about the lack of oversight on homeschools and private schools. There was this:

And around the same time, there was Ben Sasse weighing in on the topic of grade inflation at high-end private schools:

Ben Sasse has “one foot in heaven” as my mom recently described his situation to me, so if you won’t listen to me, listen to him. It’s a live issue!

The two oversight solutions I saw brought up most frequently in these online discussions were standardized testing and accreditation. The two are interrelated, since standardized testing often fits under the broader heading of accreditation. The latter evaluates schools using various academic and social metrics, and standardized testing can be a helpful measure.

But homeschools and private schools can be reluctant to submit themselves to accreditation because they sometimes feel that the implicit values of a given accreditation body do not align with theirs.

And as regards grade inflation at religious private schools in particular, state governments are often reluctant to involve themselves when parents have issues. There is good reason for this, namely, religious liberty/separation of church and state. Incidentally, this is the same reason that the New York state supreme court threw out a case about the ongoing beef between the Buffalo diocese and the laity protesting parish closures. The court didn’t think they should involve themselves in a church governance issue, which I think will strike many religious liberty advocates as fair.

But without some kind of independent review, there is greater opportunity for malfeasance. Especially for private schools who accept state money in the form of tuition vouchers, all it will take is a few high profile bad actors to reignite the school choice wars. In 2024 I interviewed school voucher critic Josh Cowen for an Arc Magazine piece about school choice. Cowen highlighted a potential issue with state vouchers – popular with school choice advocates –and unaccredited schools:

“The reason that I support accreditation,” Cowen says, “is at a minimum, you’ve got to have your act together.” He referred to reports last year about so-called “ghost enrollments” in North Carolina private schools, schools collecting money for no-show students. The North Carolina Justice Center conducted data analysis of private schools in the state; in at least one instance, they found schools receiving double the amount of vouchers as there were self-reported students enrolled. For example, according to the North Carolina Justice Center’s data, Bethel Christian Academy in Haywood County reported just six students enrolled in 2022, but had ten [North Carolina school voucher] Opportunity Scholarship recipients.”

Transparency where kids, religion, and money are involved is always a good thing. And anyway, at least in the traditional Christian context, religious formation isn’t supposed to be a bespoke experience.

Whatever their perceived flaws, because accreditation and standardized testing involve independent outside evaluation, in the long run they can prevent a whole slew of headaches and heartaches for schools – and for the cause of private religious education more broadly. A little creativity on the part of religious school proponents could help. Catholic schools for example don’t have to utilize accreditation systems they find objectionable: there is the Catholic University-created Lumen Accreditation for Catholic schools. Sure developing a parallel accreditation ecosystem takes time, money, and effort. But so do court battles.

As relates to the first half of this newsletter, it might also be unpleasant and difficult work for American bishops to get more proactive about diocesan financial and sexual scandals. But it’s probably a better long term strategy than circling the wagons and hoping everyone eventually leaves them alone.

Sunshine may be the best disinfectant, but when deployed voluntarily, it can also be (you’ll forgive the phrase) the best prophylactic.

It isn’t spoiling too much to say that a character takes what he thought was a shortcut to adventure, and ends up causing a lot of pain and devastation for others and ultimately for himself. He takes the wider way instead of the narrow one, and finds in the end that it wasn’t actually easier.

After yet another failed assassination attempt on the President over the weekend, Elon Musk retweeted a 2024 post from President Trump with the text from the Saint Michael prayer, one beloved of Catholics the world over and often recited after Mass.

Many people think of the St. Michael prayer the way that Trump’s Secretary-formerly-known-as-Defense evidently feels about a verse from Ezekiel, specifically the one Samuel L. Jackson’s character Jules misquotes and embellishes in the movie Pulp Fiction. “I just thought it was a cold-blooded thing to say to a motherfucker before I popped a cap in his ass,” Jules explains.

What’s not to love? Saint Michael is ripped. He’s got wings and a sword. He’s curbstomping a bad guy.

Honestly, fair enough.

A few years back, I wrote about St. Michael’s appeal to young men in particular for my Tablet Magazine series, “Religious Literacy in America.”

Read "The Army's Favorite Saint"

But the reason St. Michael is actually cool is because he represents a spirituality that demands something of us. If you think about any action or adventure movie, the hero is usually someone who has to give up and go through a lot. But we tend to forget that because we’re drawn to the grandiose. Making heroism look cool is aspirational, sure, but it also keeps it at enough of a remove that we can forgive ourselves if we don’t quite get there ourselves.

I think that’s one reason spiritual warfare and celebrity exorcists are having a moment. “Could it be…SATAN??” kind of let us slobs off the hook. The thinking goes that since evil is supernatural, it’s external. The struggle against it therefore must necessarily take place not in our mundane day-to-day lives, but on some astral plane that we can’t really do much about in practical terms. It follows then that we must outsource our struggle against evil to an esoteric priestly class. We don’t need to take stock of how we personally might be contributing to society’s Gross Domestic Product of evil.

But that’s actually not the case.

We all love the idea of a Prince Hal-to-Henry V moment, or a Sydney Carton arc, where someone suddenly goes from slacker to hero. But sadly for most of us, real heroic virtue is usually a habit we have to cultivate day by day. And even Sydney Carton had to give up something pretty valuable in the end:

It Ain’t Much, But It’s Honest Work

Much to my daughter’s dismay, I helped out in her Confirmation class yesterday. The subject was holy orders, and the lesson began with the story of Medal of Honor recipient Michael Monsoor.

This is what St. Michael is all about.

The reality of being killed by a grenade is not glamorous. But it is heroic. Just like going to the boring job you hate every day to support your family, or getting up in the middle of the night to change a diaper, or visiting an elderly relative. And at both the cosmic strategic and tactical levels, these little things are a big part of the how we cast into Hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. When we ask him, St. Michael defends us in battle by giving us the strength to do these mundane things heroically.

For Word on Fire, I’ve actually interviewed Monsoor’s former superior and family friend Jocko Willink, and the military chaplain who administered Monsoor’s last rites mentioned above, Father Paul Halladay. They both said pretty much the same thing about how you answer the call to adventure and heroism. To summarize: it is pretty much just service to others, and doing the hard thing no matter how small, without making a big deal out of it.

Just Do It

Since I started with polar exploration, I’ll bring it full circle to Ernest Shackleton. The Shackleton expedition was the second example in my daughter’s Confirmation book about the link between sacrifice and adventure.

A story I’ve always loved from the Shackleton expedition is about his crew, who waited for him for over four months on Elephant Island while Shackleton went off in search of help. This was itself a dangerous expedition that carried no assurance of success. Nevertheless, despite squalid conditions and near starvation, the men waited with hope:

Despite these appalling conditions, Frank Wild, the expedition’s second-in-command and now their appointed leader, would roll up his sleeping bag each morning with the words, ‘Get your things ready, boys, the Boss may come today!’

I almost never encounter this anecdote without getting choked up. While most people know in the abstract that adventure and heroism carry hardship, we don’t often stop to think about the unglamorous reality. Or the discipline. Or the possibility that your efforts might not receive recognition or reward on this side of heaven.

The fight against evil doesn’t always look like badass tattoo art inspo. But we shouldn’t let that scare us away from the fight.

My X post below has the gift link to the article:

The article began life before that news cycle, however. Originally, I was focused on the rise of the “Religious Left,” something U.S. religion-watchers have been excited about since clergy started showing up at anti-ICE protests and Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico arrived on the scene publicly talking about his Christian faith.

Then, President Trump posted The “Truth” Heard Round the World about what kind of pope he doesn’t want (personally, I want a Pope with a smooth liquidation, I want a Pope with good dividends). I quickly reworked the piece to get out in front of something I knew would happen: people were going to start predicting the end of a Catholic-GOP bromance and the beginning of a mass defection to the left.

And sure enough on the same day we got this:

I think this take isn’t wrong so much as it misses the bigger picture. I’m going to push all the pieces off the Monopoly board for a minute so we can focus on the longterm future of the relationship between politics and religion in America.

Forget everything you knew about the old religious right and the Moral Majority.

Forget everything you’ve been conditioned to think about organized religion, that it’s repressive, bigoted, and corrupt.

Because Gen Z is too young to remember either Jerry Falwell or Christopher Hitchens, and they are engaging with both religion and politics accordingly (read my Dispatch article to see what I mean).

I’m on record as a Gen Z Revival(TM) Skeptic, at least if your definition is “lots of people go to church now and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.” The numbers just aren’t there at present.1 But there is data that younger Americans have a definite “a pox on both your houses” attitude to America’s two major political parties. So if either the Democrats or the GOP are hoping to gain from a religious revival, they should probably start cleaning their houses to prepare for these new guests. But that’s if the guests even decide to show up.

Love Has a Nasty Habit of Disappearing Overnight

There was an interesting Washington Post article last week, with quotes from the smattering of college kids in Athens, G.A. who could be bothered to show up to see JD Vance at a Turning Point USA event.

I’m not saying last week’s events will prove electorally definitive in the midterms, or even in 2028. I am saying that as liberals and conservatives court the vote of the next generation of Christians, they should realize these kids don’t share previous generations’ sense of political tribalism. They’re definitely gettable, but they’re also losable. And the ones who are converting to new religious denominations are very likely to actually mean what they say about, you know, Jesus and Christian morality and stuff.

I’ll Take My Theology on the Side, Thanks!

As of this writing, the Vatican and White House appear to have reached a detente, although that isn’t quite le mot juste. The feud was always a little lopsided. It was a little like the Mad Men meme:

One of the more defensible critiques of Pope Leo’s war comments is that he should be more specific when he criticizes the war in Iran, and just say what he means about how Catholics should engage with it. But the fact is there are a lot of Catholics all over the world in war-torn countries. Pope Leo actually needs his remarks to be widely applicable and a little “evergreen,” as they say in the content biz. People reading into his every statement an subliminal critique of the Trump administration might occasionally be squinting a bit too hard.2

Ed Condon at explained it well on X the other day:

On the flip side, politicians all over the world have kind of a strange habit of weighing in on theology, and I wish they didn’t feel like they needed to. In Vance’s case it’s understandable, since he’s got to worry about pre-sales of his book about converting to Catholicism (sorry, finding his “way” back to “faith” – don’t worry, normalos, it’s nothing too Romish and weird!).

It’s especially hard for me to understand why secular leaders do this because there’s such potential for unforced error. See: the backlash when Benjamin Netanyahu weighed in on who would win in a hypothetical matchup between Genghis Khan and Jesus, or the mockery when Pete Hegseth publicly recited a prayer he attributed to a special forces commander that was itself adapted dialogue from Pulp Fiction .

When secular leaders start to shoot from the hip on theology, I feel a little like Tim Meadows at the end of Mean Girls:

Is it ok if I bring up Norse pagans real quick

There is a bigger problem beyond giving offense. When the guy quoting Pulp Fiction in prayer dismisses Norse pagans in uniform as “beardos,” it raises alarm among other traditional religious denominations for whom facial hair is also a component of their religious identity. What does it mean if your denomination isn’t part of the in group?

Of course politicians can be personally religious. Their religious principles can even guide them! But the people clamoring for a specifically Christian America occasionally run up against the limits of their position when the cabinet secretary holding worship services at the Pentagon brings in the pastor who founded the church he himself attends, a pastor who has said if he had his way, he would outlaw Catholic liturgical processions and the nineteenth amendment. The question begging involved in an America explicitly based on Christianity is, “Whose Christianity?”

If Vice President Vance is correct that the Pope needs to be “careful” when he talks about theology, it would be nice if secular leaders extended the same courtesy to religious folks.

April is the Cruellest Month of the Military Child

Happy Month of the Military Child!

Since I am an adult military child raising military children, just for funsies I’d like to draw your attention to some heroes and villains in our community and honor their sacrifice.

1. Amy Adams (film actress, born in Italy to an Army family)

2. Jim Morrison (rock star, Navy admiral’s kid)

3. Kris Kristofferson (music and movies, Air Force general’s kid)

4. L. Ron Hubbard (Scientology founder and Navy brat)

5. Giorgio (Castle Freak, son of an Italian contessa and WWII G.I.)

6. Caligula (Roman emperor, legendary pscyhopath, his name means “Little Boots,” a nickname given to him when he would visit his father’s army camp in a little soldier costume)

Have a great week, everyone, and I’ll see you next time for more religious literacy.

No, for my money the biggest indicator that as one Twitter wag put it, “the second Trump presidency was cooked up in a lab to personally humiliate JD Vance specifically,” is Trump picking a fight with the Vicar of Christ while his Vice President has a book coming out about his conversion to Catholicism.

And maybe also a little bit Trump posting an AI-generated image of himself as a sort of Christ figure (?) on Truth Social.1

I’m but a humble religion journalist, so I’ll leave the political prognosticating to a different person who holds their mental health more lightly than I. And the thing is, I don’t actually know if Vance’s standing in the Trump administration is diminished per se, so much as Catholicism is losing its electoral shine.

On Saturday I promised you an analysis of the cultural appropriation of the WASP aesthetic by a guy who also tried to go to Mass. And get it you shall!

Because I think the rise of anti-Catholicism from the Right (you heard it here first) is mixed up in the same phenomenon, which I shall attempt to name here.

White, Anglo-Saxon…Protestants (?)

We all know what “WASP” means. Beyond the literal acronym, it signals elite status. And in our populist moment, “elite” looks a little different than it has in recent memory.

As I wrote last year in National Review after Pope Leo’s election, from a cultural standpoint, Catholicism is kind of the moment:

During this recent conclave, (very) secular influencers made videos explaining how conclaves work and getting their followers up to speed on the various cardinals’ bios. Papalmania was already primed to go stratospheric when the new pope turned out to be an American with a digital footprint and two relatable brothers. By the time of Pope Leo XIV’s inaugural Mass, Oprah was posting Instagram photos from St. Peter’s Square with Maria Shriver and longtime bestie Gayle King.

Of course, part of the reason for all this is a flattened mediascape where the lines between showbiz and geopolitics are blurred. The Obamas have their post-presidential media empire. Donald Trump is, well, Donald Trump. And leaders all over the world are increasingly conscious of their social media personae. It often seems like historically significant events are only digestible now after they’ve been condensed, commoditized, and meme-ified.

With that comes something American elites have traditionally denied Catholics: elite status. Again, from my NRO piece:

In a sense, the people who find themselves suddenly fascinated by the Catholic Church and the papacy are really rooting for institutionalism. Kind of like Delta House in Animal House, the papal office and the Catholic Church both have a long history of existence. In an era of declining institutional trust, that really does count for something. The underlying sentiment driving many of the TikTok videos and Instagram reels often seems to be, “Hey, look! An actual institution!” Let’s not squander the enthusiasm.

Although I’m becoming increasingly whitepilled by some reporting I’m doing on the wave of Zoomer OCIA converts (stay tuned!), Catholicism for clout is obviously a thing on social media. In trying to jump on the bandwagon for engagement, Mid Thirties Manhattan Guy got a little more than he asked for when he inadvertently launched a debate over whether WASPs can be Catholics.

Speaking as a cradle Catholic, we can be every bit as guilty of in-group signaling as any Edith Wharton grand dame. And Mid Thirties Manhattan Guy is showing he he is clearly as unfamiliar with the newly-trendy Catholicism as he is with historical WASP culture.

For example, we know that one must arrive at Easter Sunday Mass super early to secure a spot. Another example: those of us whose forebears had multiple children and were advised to keep quiet their Democratic (and therefore, at the time, Irish Catholic-coded) vote, so that they could buy a house in a certain neighborhood, also know there is a clear historical contradiction in terms between attending a Roman Catholic Mass and identifying as a WASP.

I’ll leave it to people in higher, older tax brackets to determine whether namedropping SoHo House is also giving parvenue (but c’mon).

What’s In a Name?

So WASP aesthetics are clearly having a moment.

The penny loafers. The whole “clean girl” thing. Carolyn Bessette Kennedy worship (although that’s likely more due to the current 90s retro trend). The Kennedys of course, famously, weren’t WASPs but does anyone actually pretend that JFK Jr. – God rest – was practicing in any way, shape, or form? And in many ways, his parents kind of presaged our current “Catholics can be WASPs, too” moment.

Look, I went to a small Jesuit liberal arts college in New England, so I’m here to tell you Catholics can absolutely appropriate WASP aesthetics.

Mid Thirties Manhattan Guy’s post indicates something distinct and fundamentally different. Catholicism is establishment-coded now, and so the aspirational are adopting it alongside the establishment’s traditional sartorial trappings (which never stopped being cool, by the way, they’ve just been democratized by social media). It’s like how UK judges still wear wigs.

Even with an uptick in conversions, Zoomers are still America’s most unchurched generation. We can assume there’s a lot of religious illiteracy there that means the inherent contradiction between Catholicism and Protestantism doesn’t necessarily scan for many of them.

Aesthetic repeats itself, the first time as fashion, the second as LARPs.

U.S. Catholic Church Has to Go Live With Mommy Now

Daddy To Get At Christmas and Easter

I warned in my NRO piece last year that America’s Roman holiday from history couldn’t last forever. But I got something wrong. In my naivete, I assumed that as the Church’s public profile increased, the backlash would (deservedly) come for the Church over its continued legal and financial troubles – primarily the ongoing fallout from the abuse scandals. Or for its more socially conservative stances on sex and the family.

I did not see it coming from the Republican President who carried the Catholic vote, who has been used to posting “Happy Birthday Mary!” on the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary–a holiday not even most Catholics observe–or whose White House issued a statement on the Feast of St. Michael.

But it makes sense. The Religious Right as a coalition that includes Catholics – both fairly recent phenomena in American history – was always a shakier alliance than most have been willing to acknowledge. And Protestants and Catholics do have actual theological differences, after all.

The GOP has largely abandoned abortion as an issue, which was kind of the linchpin of the Religious Right movement. And the secular American Right that embraced the Church for its (mostly) social conservatism is suddenly surprised to learn that the word “catholic” actually means universal, and is re-learning that the Pope–even an American one whose brother voted for the President–will take stances at odds with the administration in office.2

Simply put, Catholics are no longer politically useful.

What Did You Think “Catholic Revival” Meant? Vibes? Essays?

So did Trump see all the Zoomers with whom he’s lost favor in the polls becoming Catholic last week, and decide out of jealousy to add the Supreme Pontiff to his digital Burn Book alongside Rosie O’Donnell and Kristin Stewart? And to bash the Bishop of Rome again on TV? Who knows. Who cares?

Even if Trump hadn’t taken on Leo, and even if we are getting more Catholics, Americans were never guaranteed some Golden Era of Catholic cultural or political hegemony. It’s just not promised to us anywhere in the fine print. And from a purely non-theological standpoint, attaining elite status in a populist moment has an inherently short shelf life!

Anyone hopping on the Catholic train thinking they had a one-way ticket to Clout Town is going to find themselves disappointed, sooner or later.

While you wait, please accept this X post as an amuse-bouche:

Now, on to more serious stuff.

Artificial Intelligence, Talking Statues, Italians!

Hard on the success of my Taylor Swift op-ed in Angelus News, I was asked if I had any more cultural commentary to give. I furnished forth a take, but I doubt it’s doing similar numbers to “Taylor Swift has a potty mouth.” Swift bestrides the world like a colossus, and dead Italian weird fiction novelist Giorgio de Maria does not. But you can read my piece about his novel, The Twenty Days of Turin, here:

A.I. concerns in a 1970s Italian novel

I shall once again briefly make a case here for his novel The Twenty Days of Turin as a prophetic novel for the the times in which we live. To be fair, Turin popped up a bit in the 2010s , mostly with regard to social media. But I’ve been surprised that it hasn’t gained more traction as an A.I. book (the following will assume you’ve read the Angelus op ed, btw1).

I couldn’t find much in the way of recent English commentary on the novel, but I was surprised how little of what I could find included the part about the statues coming to life. If you’ve read weird fiction – H.P. Lovecraft, but the ghost stories of M.R. James and Robert Aickman can also lay claim to the genre – the unnamed horror is a frequent trope. You’re often left to deduce from the protagonist’s reaction or some lurid detail what has actually happened. I frequently find myself going back through the pages when I’m done with these authors asking, “Wait, did what I think happened really just happen? Because if so, that is dark.”

De Maria teases it in the novel’s middle section, when the progatonist’s friend, a visiting Venetian, seems to provide some comic relief from the novel’s oppressive tone. He goes on an extended riff about Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni and the climax of the opera, when the statue of Il Commandatore comes to life and ushers in Don Giovanni’s end. I believe we called this “foreshadowing” in AP Lit.

The animated statues are the novel’s prescient A.I. warning. Like A.I., they are manmade replicas of humanity. Unlike A.I., they represent shared values and aspirational creativity. When the Torinese becomes narcissistically enamored of their own reflections in the works of The Library, the statues are not happy. Check out The Twenty Days of Turin and see if you agree!

Give Chime Travelers a Chance

The check hasn’t cleared yet, so you know I mean this. I recently reviewed this new animated Catholic kids’ series based on a series of novels for Word on Fire. You can read my Chime Travelers review here:

The Saints for Kids Today

Cradle Catholics of a certain age will remember watching the old “Saints and Heroes” series on VHS in CCD or religion class. It struck me as corny at the time, but looking back on it, the Saturday morning cartoon lineup in the 90s wasn’t exactly the Cannes film festival.

Only one of my kids had read the Chime Travelers books, the rest were coming to it fresh. But hey, they liked it! I should probably split my fee for this one with my three co-reviewers…

Coming Attractions

One of the most anxiety-producing aspects of being a freelancer is worrying that publications have forgotten about you. You’re not a staffer, so no one’s checking in on you. Do editors remember you’ve been diligently plugging away at that thing you talked about months ago? Will they hopefully not remember all the times you’ve unsuccessfully pitched them when you return with a new idea?

With other publications, you start to feel a bit like Agador Spartacus:

For the newcomers, part of the reason I launched this newsletter is because my longstanding contract through the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations to cover religious literacy for Tablet Magazine comes to an end later this year. It’s been a meaningful, amazing experience for which I’ll always be grateful, but all good things must end.

Each post here therefore, is an audition of sorts for a hypothetical publication that doesn’t yet realize they need a religion reporter who does a bit of cultural commentary and analysis. I’ve got bills to pay and children who need clothes, as they2 say!

Therefore, a taste of some things I’ve got in the works.

1. I’ll be in the May print edition of Tablet writing about sexy medieval mystics (Hildegard of Bingen and Teresa of Avila, you’re on notice!)

2. I’m pursuing some pieces yet-to-be-announced, but realheads know I’m still out here Gen Z Revivalmaxxing (with a healthy dose of skepticism) and also pondering the putative rise of the Religious Left. Stay tuned!

Have a great weekend, and we’ll touch base next week to talk about WASP cultural appropriation that somehow parallels the whole current Catholic trend.

1. Jesus Christ Superstar: The perfect Triduum Watch (this has the Dallas Jenkins interview)

2. The week the normies found out about the Gen Z Catholic Revival

3. The theology of the Holy Grail

Jesus Christ Superstar

We’re a few years into a family tradition I started with my kids: watching the Norman Jewison-directed Jesus Christ Superstar movie from the seventies. It’s weirdly timeless despite also being very seventies. The Mr. Show parody with Jack Black nails the aesthetic:

As far as the original goes, I’ve got my quibbles with the theology (if I had to take a stab at the theologies of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and librettist Tim Rice, I’d guess nominal/cultural Church of England). But on the whole, it’s got a few things going for it.

The Chronology of the Passion

A familiarity with the musical actually helps my kids follow along better on Good Friday during the Passion narrative, what with the back-and-forth between Caiaphas, Pilate, Herod, and then back to Pilate. And recognizing bits of dialogue at the service from the movie keeps them engaged, and vice versa

Motivation

Librettist Tim Rice is clearly well-versed in the New Testament. As someone who struggles with imaginitive prayer in the Ignatian tradition, I’ve found the show a very useful way to enter into scenes from the Gospels and to consider them from different perspectives.

The Pharisees are a particularly sharp example of this.

Despite the Pharisees’ sinister all-black getup, the film portrays their perspective in a really thoughtful and human way. It’s common in Christian circles to think the Pharisees hated Jesus for no good reason, or that they were religious prigs who couldn’t get out of their own way. But as the book for JC Superstar makes clear, the Pharisees are rational actors, concerned about preserving their people and their way of life under Roman occupation.

When I interviewed Dallas Jenkins a while back about The Chosen, he said something similar about his approach to the Pharisees after consulting with the Jewish advisory board assembled for the show:

Jenkins considers it the show’s responsibility to give audiences context, so that the Pharisees are not simply “mustache-twirling villains.” He is keen that viewers should understand the Pharisees as they would have understood themselves: the sincere protectors of a belief system and theological perspective, to which Jesus himself subscribed. “Jesus was a threat to the roots of their faith,” he said.

Read the whole thing here

Almost-But-Not-Yet

Because the film that doesn’t show the resurrection, it’s a great Triduum watch. I’ve found it an effective illustration of the tension the disciples must have felt between the Crucifixion and Easter Sunday. Judas embodies that ambiguity most especially, both in his own time, and again with his show stopping title number “Jesus Christ Superstar,” which Jewison provocatively juxtaposes with the Crucifixion.

Portrayed in his own time as an Apostle, Judas represents the sterility of seeing Jesus as simply a good moral teacher. As St. Paul says in one of his letters, “If Christ has not been raised, then empty too is our teaching.” From his own POV, Judas in JC Superstar isn’t wrong to be mad that Jesus has achieved God-tier elevation, because to paraphrase Bishop Barron, either Jesus is who he says he is, or he’s a bad man. And Tim Rice/Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Judas doesn’t actually think Jesus is divine, rather a nice guy with some good ideas about loving your neighbor and helping the poor. And to be sure, Judas says all the right things himself about loving the poor and compassion for others (he takes care to preface his criticism of Mary Magdalen with, “It’s not that I object to her profession!”). He’s one of the good guys, see. But as the musical shows, mere “cultural” Christianity is a dead end from the Christian point of view, leading to frustration and ultimately self-destructive nihilism. Poor old Judas.

Portrayed as a modern skeptic during the titular “Jesus Christ Superstar” number, Judas expresses a contemporary critique of Christianity. What was it all for? 2,000 years later, the world’s still a mess. The musical leaves us on a cliffhanger to contemplate the answer for ourselves – but it also leaves us plenty of helpful nudges.

Mine and the kids’ favorite part in the film is Jewison’s decision to depict a montage of the Crucifixion rendered in classical art, as Jesus weighs his death at Gethsemane. Will anyone remember or care about his death, he wonders? Then we see some of the most beautiful devotional art of all time. Yes, it matters.

The short, haunting “Pilate’s Dream” offers another rebuke to Judas’ limited temporal worldview:

I dreamed I met a Galilean
A most amazing man
He had that look you very rarely find
The haunting, hunted kind

I asked him to say what had happened
How it all began
I asked again, he never said a word
As if he hadn’t heard

And next, the room was full
Of wild and angry men
They seemed to hate this man
They fell on him and then
They disappeared again

Then I saw thousands of millions
Crying for this man
And then I heard them mentioning my name
And leaving me the blame

This evokes an idea put forward earlier by Dorothy Sayers, that Pilate’s wife’s distressing dream showed people in the future reciting “he suffered under Pontius Pilate, suffered death and was buried” in the Creed. Chills.

“Gen Z Catholic Revival” Narrative Escapes Containment…What Comes Next?

Holy Week is a great peg for religious news stories, which perhaps is why my timeline exploded with stories about Catholic influencers and the Gen Z Catholic revival in NYC. It was very humbling to realize that few close to me read my reporting and commentary, because they kept sending it to me like I’m not a broken record on both topics:1

Thou Shalt Not Scroll Past a Hot Priest

"Jesuitical" Hot Priest Interview

There Is No Religious Revival

Is Catholicism 'Cool' Now?

Now, I think there’s a trend, and I am doing some reporting that should be out later this year that takes seriously the reality that in some (maybe even many!) places, there are indeed more young people joining the Church.

But here’s the thing I’d like everyone to think about:

All of this positive attention doesn’t mean our problems as a Church have gone away. If anything, they’re going to get worse. I’m seeing denominational Protestant vs. Catholic division starting to crop up in ways not seen in years . Because I don’t care how trendy it is, the Catholic Church’s message is and always will be pretty countercultural.

Catholics are going to get flak when the Pope or a member of the USCCB speaks out on more “liberal” topics like immigration or against the war, just as they have for their more “conservative” statements about abortion and contraception.

It’s great to be Catholic when the vibes are great, but Catholic theology is not always the same as our fellow Christians’, so we should always be prepared to give a reason for our hope and to speak the truth in charity. Remember, in this world we will have trouble. But we were promised peace – just not as the world gives.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Some of my all-time favorite art for a story I wrote, and one of my favorite pieces, was one I did for Tablet about three years ago about the Holy Grail and the so-called “Grail Problem”: What is it? What does it mean? And why is the Monty Python version somehow the most faithful adaptation of the legend?

For Holy Week 2023, I looked at the theology of the Grail Legend:

Read "The Holy Grail of Grail Stories"

Happy Easter and Chag Sameach!

But American readers may be interested to know that the UK has its own “quiet” revival discourse at the moment. Why “quiet”? Is this framing just typical British self-effacing politesse? As in the U.S., excited headlines have reported more young people in Britain are attending church. However, the authors of the initial “quiet revival” report are perhaps more honest about the UK’s modest uptick in religious attendance than their American cousins:

The word ‘revival’ is freighted, particularly among Christians from the evangelical tradition, with folk memories of full-to-bursting congregations and dramatically emotional congregational experiences. This is not necessarily that. Our ‘Quiet Revival’ is low key, but it is widespread.

Both the report and its methodology have their skeptics. But the perhaps-not-altogether-disinterested Bible Society, who published “The Quiet Revival,” stand by their findings and methodology.

This excerpt from a Pew Research article on the controversy is instructive (and familiar):

The narrative of a religious revival in the U.K. appears to be receiving much more attention than data and commentary challenging this narrative. For example, in a December 2025 briefing paper – posted on the site of the National Centre for Social Research – political scientist John Curtice of the University of Strathclyde concluded that the findings of the BSA survey “do not replicate the Bible Society’s finding that there has been a revival of Christianity in Britain.” In the three weeks following the briefing paper’s publication, it generated no media coverage. However, findings from the April 2025 Quiet Revival study continue to be cited uncritically – for example, in stories published this month in The Guardian and Sky News.

Also familiar to me as an American religion journalist is this BBC article from February, “We thought Gen Z had started going to church in droves. But the truth is more complicated,” goes the hed.1 There may be a trend that is even quite noticeable in some areas and among some cohorts, but is not a true widespread rebirth that is going to yield immediate fruit:

even if the numbers of Christians in Britain are declining, members of clergy report anecdotally that those who remain are expressing their faith with more zeal and vigour than previously seen.

McAleer, of the Bible Society, says: “The discourse, the tenor of the conversation, is different in the last two years.

“We’re seeing a greater confidence among active Christians, particularly those who are younger.”

She says although she is confident the Quiet Revival report is “picking up a true trend”, the response to it has shown her that she cannot rely on statistics alone to get the whole picture.

“This is not straightforward, and there’s no church census coming that will put a stop to this once and for all.”

I guess we’ll really know if the Quiet Revival has taken hold when these devout young people organize to put a stop to the silent discos at Canterbury Cathedral.

A Faith So Quiet You Need Sonar Equipment to Detect It

I’m thinking about all of this because exciting news broke over the weekend – Prince William is religious, you guys!

A scoop in The Times revealed that the Prince of Wales, long suspected to be nonreligious, is in fact possessed of a “quiet faith.” That’s what the headline said, anyway.

I read the article and it revealed no such thing.

The second graf immediately disabuses the devout reader of any reason to get particularly excited. “William, 43, is not a devout Christian nor a regular churchgoer.” So the vast majority of Britons (more than half of whom in England and Wales opted not to identify as Christian for the first time in the 2021 census) can rest easy: when it comes to religion William is not, as George H.W. Bush might have said, a nut about it.

The rest of the article, which contains no direct quotes from the prince, talks vaguely around the idea that William respects and appreciates the historic role of institutions generally, up to and including the C of E. We learn that he intends to “evolve” the relationship between the monarch and the Church “from that of previous monarchs, whose strong faith underpinned their reigns.” Jesus isn’t mentioned by name, which I suppose is just the way HRH prefers it.

It’s the fashionable “cultural Christianity” point of view you hear these days out of people, ranging from Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson to Douglas Murray and even Richard Dawkins.

The actual text of the article didn’t stop religious people from taking the headline and ecstatically running with it. It was shared across social media. Yes! Prince William has found God!

You Need to Calm Down

With all this in mind, I’m going to revisit my second most-popular article on this platform. It was about Shia LaBeouf (who continues to melt down, if u even care).

His checkered past was forgiven a few years ago when he announced his conversion to Catholicism. All was forgiven again recently after he freaked out on a bunch of people in New Orleans during Mardi Gras this year, and then clips from a penitential YouTube interview were shared on Catholic social media as evidence that Shia LaBeouf was perhaps a Holy Fool or Drunken Saint, a figure such as Dostoevsky himself might have dreamt up.

In the most widely-shared clip, Shia LaBeouf stands guilty before all and tells “Channel 5” YouTube host Andrew Callaghan that he would be silent before Christ and kiss him, were he to see the Son of God on the street today. (The most widely-shared clips tended to leave out the part where Shia LaBoeuf defines his “traditional” Catholicism as “I really fuck with the Bible.”)

Those same folks who were only too happy to show Shia as a mystical penitent seem to be conveniently quiet now that he’s acting erratically again, this time in Italy.

In a similar way, evidently the Times headline “Prince William confirms ‘quiet faith’” got people so excited that they didn’t even read the article, or they’d have seen Prince William’s attitude is less “Quiet Revival” and closer to the young couple in this Mitchell and Webb sketch:

Whether you are a religious person (I am) who thinks there’s a revival happening in your country or not (I do not, although with some qualifications), the question we have to ask ourselves is why do we care? Because if we care about something, as Christians, we are also called to action.

So what is our part to play in this moment? Is there a convert in your church you can invite over for dinner or meet for coffee to see how they’re getting on with the faith? Are you inviting them to take part in ministry or outreach efforts to those in need at your church or in your community? How are we set for Corporal Works of Mercy – you know, the things Jesus specifically says will determine whether we get into heaven or not?

I’ll be honest, I’m not doing particularly great on any of these things at the moment. So maybe that’s something I need to be more intentional about for the rest of Lent and during the Easter season.

And look, I’ll be honest, I’m not against a religious Prince William.2 Longtime fan. I genuinely believe his wife and I could be best friends. So I hope he finds something that works for him. He’s had a rough life!

“I Told You So” Corner

This is a feature in which I point out some religious literacy topic I’ve covered before that is only now getting some play in the news.

This week: service members who want religious beard exemptions must prove the sincerity of their beliefs to Uncle Sam.

Secretary-formerly-known-as-Defense Pete Hegseth has been vocal about his opposition to Norse pagan “beardos.” But I’ve been covering Norse heathens in uniform since they were viewed with suspicion by the left, so I feel I have something to add.

My Substack from a few months ago on this topic here:

Recommendations

People are making fun of a top FEMA official for saying he teleported to a Waffle House against his will. But having read Carlos Eire’s They Flew and being midway through ’s new, excellent book Fairies: A History, I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt.