William Cavanaugh (WC): Yaacov, your book, To Be a Jewish State: Zionism as the New Judaism, could hardly be more timely. You examine some of the tensions between Judaism and the state of Israel at a time when there is a tendency to conflate antisemitism with criticism of Israel, and you offer more general lessons on nationalism at a time when it is resurgent. Can you summarize the argument of your book?
Yaacov Yadgar (YY): Well, the shorter version of my argument is that to understand Israel we must take a critical account of Zionism’s (and, following its cue, Israeli political culture’s) relation to Judaism. Contrary to some prevalent, naïve assumptions (for example, that Zionism is a simple “secularization” of Judaism; or, alternatively, that Zionism is a modern development and even culmination of Jewish “religion”), this relation is far from straightforward. Zionism simultaneously appropriates and negates Jewish history, tradition, and identity. Reading Jewish history and tradition through a modern-nation-statist frame of reference, Zionist ideology has sought to rewrite the very meaning of Jewishness through its politicization or “nationalization”—that is to say, “fitting” or binding Jewish identity and Judaism itself—to the nation-statist imperative. The dual act of appropriation and negation has obviously created tensions and paradoxes that determine, to my mind, Israeli politics and Jewish politics more widely.
It is important to note that with all of its “Jewish” idiosyncrasies, the Israeli, Zionist case is far from being an outlier. This is merely a local, specific rendition of the playing out of some of the founding paradoxes of the so called “secular,” liberal modernity’s relation to its “religious” past. Or, more specifically—to use your own framing, this time—it is about the encounter between “the splendid idolatry of nationalism” and its traditional past.
It is interesting to reflect on the matter of “timeliness” or “topicality” of the book and its argument. The matters discussed in the book—from the meaning of Israel’s “Jewish identity,” through Zionsim’s relation to Judaism, the problematic implications of the “sanctification” of the state, and to the problem of the Israeli past—are foundational, and even if they have been ignored (or, I suspect, actively denied) in the past, they are not novel, nor are they necessarily tied to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict (rather, they function as the backdrop to this conflict, and in many ways determine the Israeli course of action in it). It is indeed a devastatingly sad fact that it is only in the context of such horrific violence that people both in the Jewish world and outside of it take a more serious note of these foundational issues.
(WC): So you are arguing that the distortion of traditional faiths by nation-statism is a more general phenomenon, but the warping of Judaism by Zionism is a particularly interesting case study of that broader phenomenon. Some Christian theologians have been trying to root out supersessionism from Christian views of Judaism, but you argue that there is also a type of supersessionism in which Zionism replaces Judaism, and that such nation-statism ultimately has Christian roots. Can you say more about the distorting effects of nation-statism on both Judaism and Christianity?
(YY): Nation-statism usurps tradition. The modern state must “deal” with the traditions carried and practiced by those in the name of which the state claims sovereignty. These traditions are too powerful, too constitutive of sociopolitical reality, to ignore; they are what makes the people who they are, and if the state is to succeed in making these people its loyal subjects, it must address their traditions. What we have come to call “nation building” thus means, among other things, adopting, appropriating, reinterpreting, rewriting, negating, etc. those traditions that preceded the state, and which often continue to live alongside the dominant “national tradition,” the tradition of the nation-state.
The issue is, of course, that what motivates and guides the state in its relation with these traditions is not the truth entailed in them, but the interest of the state. Moreover, it is not hard to see that often the interest of the state explicitly contravenes this traditional truth. Yet the state speaks as if it is the ultimate, most authentic embodiment of the essence of these traditions. Clearly, this entails a distortion of tradition, which preceded not only the modern state itself, but the very epistemology that gave birth to this configuration of power in the first place.
I find the notion of supersessionism helpful in understanding this relation between the state and the traditions that preceded it—in the case of my study, we call these traditions “Judaism,” which confusingly suggests a unified, homogeneous even, notion of tradition; it is rather heterogeneous and diverse—for two reasons. First, and primarily, supersessionism neatly captures the dual act of appropriating and negating. It is an act of capturing—or usurping—authenticity itself. You see it clearly in the case of Zionists ideologues, who speak for Jewish nationalism, and explicitly set out to eradicate what they would call Jewish “religion” in the name of allegedly salvaging the true meaning of Jewishness, which they would then seek to enshrine in a new national political theology or relegia of worshiping the nation-state. Second, employing the theological concept of supersessionism to what is usually discussed as a matter of allegedly secular politics helps us see much more clearly, I believe, the theopolitical play at hand. This should, of course, be trivial to anyone who has read your work, Bill. Employing the concept of supersessionism to analyze the relation between the state and traditions that preceded it helps us, I think, see the idolatrous nature of the act of nation-statist theopolitics.
(WC): Your critique here and in your book of Zionist ideologues who set out to eradicate Jewish “religion” seems to apply to “secular” Zionists, but you also critique “religious” Zionists who seek to sacralize originally “secular” things like Jerusalem Day. You show in fascinating detail this dual dynamic of redemption politics in Israel, both the secularization of the sacred and the sacralization of the secular. Can you say something about what remains once you have shown the dangers and inadequacies of both religious and secular Zionists? What is your positive vision about how to practice Judaism in Israel?
(YY): The construction of any positive vision for the practice and meaning of Jewish tradition(s) in Israel and outside of it must be—pardon the tautology—a traditional endeavor: that is to say, it must come out of a debate from within the tradition on the meaning of tradition. This means, among other things, that any such positive construction would have to be the outcome of a collective effort, not a product of a single author’s program or critique. It also means that such constructions cannot be directed by an identity-politics-driven type of intervention, where one’s accident of birth (that is, one’s being “a Jew,” in our case) allegedly gives one the prerogative to define the meaning of the tradition.
My humble contribution to such a collective effort would be to explicate the enormous—but necessary, I would say—challenge of allowing the traditional discussion to be held outside of the confines of the nation-statist imperative. We live in a world in which the nation-statist imperative is taken to be a matter of the natural order of the world, and much of what goes on as Judaism is bound to the altar of the state. Frustratingly, this is also true of much of what presents itself as a Jewish critique of Zionism and Israel—many of these critiques, too, remain bound to the state, even if they do so negatively, by way of negating aspects of it.
I offer in the book the case of Leon Roth as a wonderfully complex and nuanced iteration of an attempt to present a positively Jewish critique of Israeli politics. Roth’s critique of Zionist and Israeli politics, or actions, was an intimate critique—he himself was, up to a point, an active agent in the Zionist enterprise. And more importantly, this critique was the product of Roth’s deep, rich engagement with Jewish religion, with the teaching (the literal meaning of torah) that we call Judaism. He exemplifies the power, clarity, and depth of such a Jewish position. Yet he himself, I suspect, was also unable to break free of the nation-statist imperative.
Granted, this is an enormous, maybe simply impossible task. It is easy to be drawn to pessimism and even quietism in face of the now forcefully resurgent power of the nation-state. But I like to draw inspiration from the very last lines in the late Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue: “What matters at this stage”, he writes, “is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us” (263). The same goes for Jewish tradition.
(WC): I was struck by your appeal to MacIntyre and by your appeal to a certain kind of virtuous “tribalism” opposed to statism at the end of your book. I don’t expect a blueprint for the future of Jewish tradition in Israel, but could you give an example or two of what such a virtuous tribalism does or can look like?
(YY): Probably the most obvious example of what a “tribal” (or, if the term is too charged and misused: a “confederational”) approach to Jewish collectivity can yield is its devastating blow to the nationalist construction of the “Jew. vs. Arab” duality, opening venues for overcoming what seems to be the defining conflict of the Middle East in the past century. It is almost trivial to note that Jewish nationalism, in its Zionist construction, pitches “Jew” against “Arab” as mutually oppositional identities, ultimate enemies, the essential “us” and “not us.” This nationalism, in other words, has rendered the “Arab Jew” an oxymoronic construction, not only dismissing some of the most insightful, rich, and innovative historical expressions of Judaism itself, but also rendering people’s lived experiences an impossibility. A reaffirmation of Jewish diversity would, among other things, allow for these identities to cohabitate, and potentially to create coalitions and pacts that “criss cross” the nationally imposed binaries.
On a more substantial level, I think it also goes without saying that the diversity and heterogeneity of the human kind is in itself a virtue. One could make a strong argument that this exactly is the message of the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. Without pretense to speak theologically, I think it is a given that the multiplicity of human languages, traditions, practices, etc. diversify and enrich our ways of being in the world; this multiplicity is a good thing. We are justifiably worried about the disappearance of languages, as these are not mere tools of communications, but whole ways of seeing the world and being in it that are lost with the death of these languages. It is an incredibly sad fact of Jewish history that the State of Israel has been the burial ground of so many Jewish languages, lived and carried by communities throughout the world for centuries, only to be forcefully replaced by modern, Israeli Hebrew in Israel as part of the “nation building” project. The same goes for Jewish tradition itself: what we know as Judaism is historically diverse and heterogeneous, and this very diversity has been celebrated in the past as part of the essence of Jewish tradition. To lose this richness is, simply, too dear a price to pay.
Yaacov Yadgar (YY): Reading your work, The Uses of Idolatry, is a transformational experience. You engage with ideas and socio-political realities in ways that force one to rethink what might otherwise go unnoticed as un-self-reflective “truth.” Probably the most consequential of these alleged truths is the sociological and historical consensus, which we usually date back to Max Weber, and of which Charles Taylor’s work on secularism is a more modern iteration, that we live in a “disenchanted” world. Enchantment, you argue, hasn’t gone away; rather, it has “migrated” to other realms, transforming on the way. Can you explain what you mean by “enchantment”, and why you take such a critical approach to the ideas associated with Weber and Taylor?
William Cavanaugh (WC): Disenchantment is the common English translation of Weber’s Entzauberung der Welt, literally the un-magic-ing of the world. When I started working on this book, I went looking for Weber’s definition and was surprised to find not only that he doesn’t define the term but rarely uses it at all. The idea is supposed to be that religion, originally the agent of rationalization, has been pushed aside by the same process of rationalization, leaving a world devoid of spirits, mystery, and ordered meaning: the iron cage. What I found, however, is that even Weber doesn’t fully buy this story. For Weber, the gods are always human inventions, and modernity is not exceptional. “Many old gods arise from their graves,” he writes in “Science as a Vocation” (24). The state produces a more effective “religion” in war, for example, producing transcendent devotion and sacrificial community that churches can only envy. Money is “entirely transcendent and absolutely irrational”; we are ruled by capital, not vice-versa. Calvinism not only helped produce capitalism; it was replaced by it. Marx and Nietzsche thought we would be free once we got rid of the gods. Weber was more pessimistic, believing humans have a perennial tendency to be dominated by our own creations. So my problem is not so much with Weber, but with superficial readings of Weber, though as a Christian theologian I think, pace Weber, that not all divinity is of human manufacture.
Likewise, I try to tease the “unthought” out of Taylor. He largely buys the disenchantment narrative: Once selves were “porous” to the spirit world, and the world was full of “charged things” like saints’ relics that could effect changes in the external world. Now we are “buffered” selves, and meaning is interiorized; prayer changes our thoughts and feelings, not the world around us. Disenchantment means that God is optional in ways that were unthinkable pre-modernity; optionality is our new naïveté, as Taylor says. And yet, when Taylor tells the story of the collapse of post-war Breton Catholicism and its replacement by consumer culture, he remarks “It is almost as though the ‘conversion’ was a response to a stronger form of magic, as earlier conversions had been” (490). Taylor’s “almost” protects the boundary between transcendence and immanence; elsewhere “putatively” and “verges on” do the same work. I ask Taylor to drop the hedge words and question these binaries of religious/secular and transcendence/immanence. People watching the shopping channel for hours at a time are not buffered selves, and sports memorabilia are as charged as any saint’s relic. Disenchantment is not our experience of the world, but the way we have been taught to describe our experience. And if optionality is not optional, then we have succumbed to a more subtle, but just so more powerful, form of rule by our own creations. Idolatry is the relevant theological category that Taylor, as a practicing Catholic, needs.
(YY): The idols force themselves into the conversation, but before we let them in, I must ask: Why, then, is it so important for modernity to sustain this “myth” (as in untruth) of its disenchantment—or, may we dare say, of its “secularity”?
(WC): Western modernity is defined by its relationship to its “others,” both in time and in space.
Insofar as modernity is an Enlightenment project, it is defined over against the past. We are enlightened, that is, shining a light to break the “Dark Ages,” which were weighed down by superstition and irrationality. We were once subject to fear of spiritual forces beyond our control, but now we have learned to tame those fears through the cold light of reason. We once looked backward to past traditions for guidance; now we look confidently forward toward a new day. Yadda yadda yadda. It is worth noting that this progressive view of time is in some measure a holdover from the Jewish and Christian past and its linear view of salvation history and eschatology more generally.
The myth of disenchantment also reinforces our western sense of superiority over our spatial others, that is, the non-western world, which is populated by allegedly atavistic displays of belief in spirits of all kinds. There is supposedly a yawning gap between the enchanted global South and the disenchanted North, which is why we cannot recognize any similarity between, for example, fetish objects in Africa and sports memorabilia in the U.S. The baseball Mark McGwire hit for his 70th homerun in 1998 sold for $3 million, despite being physically identical to every other ball used that season, but the enchantment/disenchantment dichotomy allows us to erect an impassible barrier between us and them.
In short, the myth that we are disenchanted is a form of self-congratulation used to marginalize those who do not fit the secular paradigm.
(YY): The critique you offer of this self-delusionment of western modernity is distinctly “theological”: you name this (denied) modern enchantment an “idolatry,” and your critical engagement with it takes the form of an “idolatry critique.” I find your stance to be brilliantly illuminating and insightful: you force the “political” to address the “theological” baggage it has simultaneously assumed and denied. I am guessing that some skeptical readers would have dropped your book at this point, wrongly assuming that you are saying something like: “Mine is the correct form of worship, yours is wrong.” But you are quick to note that this admittedly problematic accusation of idolatry is not at all what you have in mind. So, what does “idolatry critique” mean, and how does one name something idolatrous without assuming such a self-righteous judgmental stance?
(WC): Using the language of idolatry is certainly a provocation. There is good reason why the term has largely been dropped from polite company. In the scriptures, accusations of idolatry were accompanied by violence against those who worshiped differently, and colonial history is full of charges of idolatry against the local “heathens” who required “civilizing” by the (usually Christian) colonizers. In official Catholic discourse, the language of idols and idolatry is almost entirely absent from the documents of Vatican II, partly as a way of repenting of our own sins against, for example, the Indigenous people of Latin America.
And yet, Pope Francis—the very embodiment of the spirit of Vatican II—revived talk of idolatry, usually in the context of critiques of capitalism. Francis learned from liberation theologians like Hugo Assmann and Franz Hinkelammert in the 1970s and 1980s who argued that, unlike in Europe, the problem in Latin America was not atheism—no god—but idolatry—the wrong god, namely, capital. These theologians in turn had picked up the language of idolatry from Karl Marx, of all people, who frequently resorted to biblical imagery; for example, capital was Moloch, the Canaanite god who demanded child sacrifice. The theological concept of idolatry is indispensable because it reveals the divinization of created things, and thus the mythological status of secularization theory. The difference between Marx and the theologians is that Marx wanted to do away with all gods, and Christian theologians like me hold out hope that there is a true God to save us from ourselves.
This does mean that, at some point, we will need to try to distinguish true worship from false worship. But this does not necessarily lead to the self-righteous judgement of others, if two protocols are kept in the forefront. First, as I try to emphasize in the book, there is a sympathetic moment in the very notion of idolatry, which is the recognition that we all worship. Even the most misguided idolater is in search of transcendence, something larger than the small self. I don’t think Marx’s goal of eradicating worship will work because we are worshipping creatures. Granted, this is a normative claim with which some will disagree, despite all the evidence I marshal in the book. That’s fine. But I think even nonbelievers in God can appreciate the way the ubiquity of worship levels the playing field. Rather than dividing humanity into “believers” and “nonbelievers,” we can recognize that we all believe in something. Tell me what you believe, I’ll tell you what I believe, and then we can have a conversation.
Second, as I repeat in the book, we all worship, and we all worship badly. In my case, just because I claim to follow Jesus doesn’t mean I actually do so. Idolatry critique should primarily be self-critique, as in fact it is in the Bible. The prophets spend most of their time condemning the idolatry of their own people, not that of others. I intend idolatry critique as a set of practices, primarily for my own fellow Christians, to try to follow a good God instead of the many bad ones on offer. At some point, I will need—with fear and trembling—to make normative claims about what God I think is good. But I will need to acknowledge that God is not an answer I have but rather an Other who throws my life into question. And I will need to be open to learning from what other traditions say and don’t say about God.
(YY): There is, then, something distinctly universal in your argument (“we all worship”), and something which is presumably “parochial” (yours, you say, is a committed Christian, Catholic critique). Let us address the former first: you begin the book with a quote from David Foster Wallace saying simply: “There is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships.” (The earworm of Bob Dylan’s “Gotta Serve Somebody” was drilling its way in my head throughout my reading of your book: “Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord/ But you’re going to have to serve somebody”). The two most universal idols of our era are nationalism and the market, and you focus your discussion in the book on each of them. Yet there is something distinctly different in the way the worshiping of each affects our lives. Nationalism is, in the terms you employ in the book, a “splendid” idolatry, while consumerism is “unsplendid,” depressive almost. Can you say something about how idolatry critique helps us see how each of these idols influences our lives in such distinct ways?
(WC): Thanks for mentioning the Dylan song, Yaacov. I tried to shoehorn it into my chapter on Augustine, but ultimately dropped it. John Lennon wrote a song in response to Dylan’s song which Lennon titled “Serve Yourself”: “You gotta serve yourself / Nobody gonna do it for you / Well you may believe in devils and you may believe in lords / But if you don’t go out and serve yourself, lad, ain’t no room service here.” The two songs perfectly represent Augustine’s two loves—love of God or love of self—from which we have to choose.
Nationalism is splendid because it aspires to serving something larger than the self. It is full of lofty ideals and self-sacrifice for one’s fellow citizens. There is a large body of scholarly work on nationalism as a “religion.” In the nineteenth century, nationalism comes to replace Christianity as the most significant public devotion in the west, though Christianity retains some social power as a support for national identity. Consumer culture also invests divinity into created things, but it is corrosive of networks of social solidarity, putting the focus on satisfying the desires of the self, often at the expense of the laborers who make and deliver our products. Marx’s commodity fetishism actually mirrors a dynamic found in the Psalms: making idols imputes life to inanimate objects while taking life away from human persons.
In the end, though, I argue that there is less difference than we suppose between splendid and unsplendid idolatries. Nationalism ends up being a type of collective narcissism, a worship of the “we,” just like Durkheim said. Your distinction, Yaacov, between a Jew’s state and a Jewish state captures this: the former is defined by the will of the “we,” not by any higher ideals. The danger of collective narcissism is the negative effects on those others, both external and internal to the nation, who threaten the dominant group’s self-image. War, scapegoating, racism, and exclusion are not incidental but endemic to nationalism. At the same time, consumerism is not only isolating but creates certain types of community. One group of studies in the journal Marketing Science titled “Brands: Opiate of the Non-Religious Masses?” found that brand loyalty is inversely proportional to loyalty to traditional religion.
I try to point to other types of belonging that aren’t exclusive and narcissistic. Ultimately, as Augustine saw, idolatry and self-worship are two sides of the same coin. We try to assert our autonomy, but end up serving gods of our own making. Worshipping a true God, on the other hand, does not negate the self but ennobles it, bringing it into communion with a higher self, God, and a wider self, our fellow human beings, without exception. Of course, worshipping in truth is not just a matter of what we say, but what we do.
(YY): Let us conclude with the “parochial” aspect of your argument. I suspect that many readers who do not share your Christian commitments might find the ending of your argument, where you consider Christian principles of incarnation and sacrament as antidotes to idolatry, most difficult to come to terms with. So much of Jewish and Muslim traditions, for example, is aimed exactly against any notion of the carnality of the divine. Yet it is obviously clear that Jewish and Muslim societies have not been better guarded against the idolatries of nationalism and the market. Do you think the reaction to these universal idols should be particularistic in nature, that is to say—each tradition should come up with its own defenses against them?
(WC): Yes, I don’t think we can come up with some universal theological Esperanto that hovers above all the particular traditions. I am certainly incapable of doing so, and so I stick to what I know in the final chapter, trying to develop some Christian protocols for me and my fellow Christians to worship less badly than we do. To be “parochial” in this way is certainly not to say that only Christians can be saved from idolatry or that Christians have nothing to learn from other traditions or that our traditions have nothing in common. Indeed, I show the incarnational logic in the Hebrew scriptures, what Martin Buber calls making “the spirit incarnate and sanctified in everyday life” (3). I quote Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik on the descent of God into the world. Different traditions will work these matters out in different ways, and I think a conversation on idolatry across traditions would be very rich. I recently contributed an essay on nationalism and idolatry to a Muslim publication. But precisely because idolatry critique should first and foremost be self-critique, we need to start with our own practices and our own theological resources.
The skeletal remains of the Catskills hotel, the Overlook Mountain House, welcomes hikers who journey to the top of Overlook Mountain, located near Woodstock, New York. Image licensed from iStock.
Book forums are generative when they move beyond the text under scrutiny to a broader conversation around foundational questions the book generates for differently situated readers. Therefore, I am indebted to my generous and thoughtful readers who engaged with my book to illuminate critical queries in the study and praxis of religion in conversation with their research trajectories. In what follows, I first telegraph what Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding is about. I then engage the productive reflections of my readers and use them as an opportunity to dive deeper into some motifs and questions animating the book. The book wrestles with what exceeds the gaze of (secular) decolonial theory. It does so in light of what the evidence from my fieldwork, interviews, and focus groups revealed about religious peacemaking on the ground. In his engagement with my work, Robert Orsi powerfully identifies this wrestling as amounting to an unrealized potential “for an epistemology of religion in the ruins of the modern.” Drawing on a layered account of the “abundant pluralism of contemporary global religions among people in movement on the planet,” Orsi pinpoints how my intersubjective research methodology enacts a decolonial move that nevertheless stops short of displacing the secular as the foundation of critique. In this piece, I move from Orsi’s discussion of the catastrophic ruins of modernity broadly speaking, to the particular ruins of Gaza in 2025. I ask what it means to discuss religion and the practice of peacebuilding in a time of live-streamed genocide enabled by a particular narration of religion and politics.
“Bad” vs. “Good” Religion?
When the box with my author’s advanced copies of Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding arrived in July 2023, I was preoccupied with what I had seen on a visit to Palestine in late June 2023 (months before October 7th). During that trip, I witnessed the charred aftermath of pogroms in Palestinian villages in the northern West Bank. Jewish Israeli settlers had conducted the pogroms in collusion with the Israeli military. Of course, in the months and now well over a year since the Hamas-led attack of October 7th, 2023 this Jewish supremacist violence—which intends the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank (along with Gaza, or under the guise of Gaza) has accelerated with impunity. Amid a continuous genocide and ethnic cleansing against Palestinians, it has been difficult to re-engage with a book that focuses on the cases of the Philippines and Kenya in order to highlight the operative frame of the religion and peacebuilding business. I have struggled with it not only because the book examines two cases that are remote from the Middle East and North African (MENA) region, but also because much of the industry of religion and peacebuilding was developed in Palestine/Israel. This industry has often de-emphasized the material realities of occupation, apartheid, settler colonialism, and eventually genocide.
In June 2023, I walked through the paths of Turmus Ayya and saw burnt homes and cars, shattered windows, and sites of utter destruction. All of this violence unfolded under a framework of a Jewish “landlords” theologyon Shabbat (a day usually designated for settlers’ ever-increasing and, post-October 7th, greatly augmented expressions of what they deem as sacralized violence). This site of destruction demands a lucid analysis of religion not as a simple causality of violence. Such arguments treat “bad religion”—i.e., the political kind that “causes” violence—as distinct from “good religion”—i.e., the apolitical kind that is “peaceful”—and in doing so normalize and authorize secular authority as that which parses what counts as good or bad religion. At times, secular violence is even treated as “good violence” in opposition to religious violence. Ultimately, the recognition of the “secular” as filled with a curated political theology is what led me to critique the praxis of religion and peacebuilding for its thin, reductive, depoliticizing, and ahistorical deployment of “good religion” as the common denominator (undergirding what I call the “harmony business”) to counter political violence and conflict. Such an argument assumes falsely that the “religious” stands over and against the other presumably more material and real issues. Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding traces the operative logic of the “harmony business.”
Depoliticized Plurality
Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding is based on empirical research of inter and intra-religious peacebuilding practices in Kenya and the Philippines, often underwritten by donor countries, organizations, and intergovernmental initiatives intent on “harnessing” religious actors for peaceful outcomes to political conflicts. This outcome, of course, is not necessarily the same as the redressing of historical injustices and conditions of structural violence. The book identifies two paradoxical findings: first, religious peacebuilding practices are both empowering and depoliticizing, and second, more doing of religion—“putting religion to work to promote various [measurable] objectives, such as reducing the rate of child marriages in Kenya” (3)—does not necessarily denote a deeper knowing about religion, or what Diane L. Moore understands as critical religious literacy. The book traces the neo-liberalization and securitization of religious virtuosity within the landscape of the so-called global war on terror. It interrogates how interreligious peace governance uses the language of empowerment and peace to promote inter-communal harmony but, in effect, depoliticizes communities through “double closures”—that is, the “mutual indexing of religion and culture to the threshold of communal belonging and vice versa [where] one’s religious or cultural identity provides a communal boundary marker” (124). Accordingly, communal belonging is defined by religious belonging and vice versa; “being Muslim” or “being Christian” is a communal marker, and thus, finding oneself labeled as one or the other contains one’s narrative within a predetermined script.
Ultimately, the recognition of the ‘secular’ as filled with a curated political theology is what led me to critique the praxis of religion and peacebuilding for its thin, reductive, depoliticizing, and ahistorical deployment of ‘good religion’ . . . to counter political violence and conflict.
This scripting disenfranchises and confines individuals’ agency and political imagination of what peace entails. It is a segregationist approach to managing a pluralistic society, that in turn prohibits broad-based conceptions of political-economic solidarity. The more there is a programmatic investment in religion as a mechanism for managing building peace and governing postcolonial “divided societies,” as they are called by those in the industry, the more the capacity of each communal actor to disrupt their ascribed religious and communal scripts diminishes. On the one hand, the book’s decolonial and intersectional prisms expose the entrenched and ongoing colonial dynamics operative in religion and the practices of peacebuilding and development in the global South. On the other hand, the many stories of transformation and survival that emerged from my fieldwork speak back to decolonial scholarship and theory, exposing their limited traction and, often, their irrelevance to people’s struggles for survival. At this juncture, I turn to the questions the book raises for my gracious interlocutors. I focus, in particular, on those questions that point to concerns that lay outside the purview of the book.
“Manualizing” the Decolonial Turn or Revolutionary Action?
Emma Tomalin, a prominent leader at the intersection of the academic study of religion and religion and development praxis, retrieves her extensive experience to highlight the multidirectional utilitarianism of the religion business. Specifically, I refer to her account of the Hidden Peacebuilders Network’s Muslim participant’s refusal to divulge the “intangibles” of his religiosity while eagerly embracing the other dimensions of the program’s focus on “strengthening the role of local faith actors in peacebuilding and reconciliation.” Tomalin wants to think through the concept of “decolonial openings” in strategic and operationalizable terms. I am unsure of how decolonial interruptions can become “manualized.” Broadly, in the book and through my ethnographic work, I wrestle not only with the question of what religion can do, for example, to enhance reconciliation practices in local communities (which itself is implicated in a neoliberal discourse of responsibilization) but also with whether there are openings for epistemic and theological or hermeneutical disobedience within its limited framework.
Therefore, to reiterate the book’s paradoxical finding, the more religion is integrated into peace and development policymaking, the less politically emancipatory it becomes. I persistently worry about hermeneutical closures while recognizing their agentic potentiality nonetheless. In his piece, Jean-Pierre Reed asks about the revolutionary potentialities of the praxis of religion and peace, if it does not entail decolonial justice. The empirical evidence I foreground in the book makes more complex, as noted, revolutionary conceptions of agency, religious or otherwise. Still, the life stories I collected illuminate how “unwoke” religiosity (heteronormative, patriarchal) can also express people’s agency and transform their lived realities. However, I call such a form of agency “Sisyphean,” which I further connect to a notion of “pious resiliency,” a concept deeply challenging for decolonial political horizons. By “Sisyphean” I refer to people in the margins’ “persistence against hopelessness and investing daily survival tasks with religious piety” (83). Programmatic peace/development practices themselves become sites of spiritual and vocational formation. Sisyphean persistence nourishes religious commitments by spiritualizing peacebuilding practices that are incorporated into neoliberal peace governance. Hence, a contrast between “woke” religiosity and the realities of “unwoke” but transformative practice is one of the points that emerged from the book’s empirical work. A purist critique of (neo)colonial dynamics often obscures people’s agency in rewriting conflict narratives of hate into inter-communal peace scripts. This rewriting also constitutes a spiritual reclaiming of a religious and communal sense of “authenticity.”
Pious Survival
My point about hermeneutical closures urgently connects with K. Christine Pae’s grappling with the transformative and disruptive prospects of hermeneutical and theological disobedience that she writes about from a South Korean context and as a feminist religious ethicist. Pae foregrounds a genealogy of feminist scholarship to disrupt the binarization of knowing and doing. I argue that more doing of religion entails the diminishment of knowledge about religion. By diminishment, I mean the foreclosure of hermeneutical horizons from the margins (queer, feminist, and others) as a result of the utilitarian logic of “capacitating” of so-called religious actors to do helpful things—Helpful for whom?, one might ask.
The more religion is integrated into peace and development policymaking, the less politically emancipatory it becomes.
Pae’s contribution, based on her work with women victims of a prostitution network connected with the American military stationed in South Korea, discloses the reluctance of her interlocutors to divulge religious knowledge when involved in various faith-related healing activities marked by power differentials. Pae foregrounds the experience of the women affiliated with the Sunlit Center to examine syncretism and the role of Minjung theology in understanding hermeneutic disobedience. Yet, my emphasis on doing rather than knowing religion signals the flattening of virtuosity as a utilitarian rather than a normative and disruptive intervention in peace/development (making it something other than pacification). “Survivalist piety” therefore links survival with piety and the reforming of subjectivities to be more conducive to (useful for) keeping the peace. The concept of “survival piety” exposes the spiritualization of survival and peace practices as well as how they unfold within a neoliberal frame that depoliticizes religion/culture. It does so through a reductive analysis of the causes of conflict (and poverty) and singles out the “religious” as the key to unlocking “local” buy-in. The latter is a neoliberal concept that denotes the “business” aspect of the religion and peacebuilding industry and its devolutionary logic. Under such a logic “partnership” is sought by peacebuilding professionals with religious and civil society actors and sectors.
The theoretical dimensions of my book challenge the limits of the language of “partnership” central to the post-secular turn to “religious actors.” I argue that this concept invisibilizes those on the margins by overlooking historical injustices and their long-term impacts. In a distinct manner, a social justice and solidarity lens prioritizes the margins and, as Pae notes, enacts multiple forms of “theological disobedience.” The very deployment of “religion” to define communal and individual narratives or scripts reflects a colonial taxonomic and segregationist logic. Hence, when Reed writes that my discussion of a hermeneutics of disobedience and resistance does not point to “practical” outlooks concerning intersectional politics and does not redress “the ‘doing [religion]’ dilemma” that I illuminate throughout the book, he is, in effect, reaffirming that doing religion and peacebuilding that is not disruptive of scripted forms of depoliticizing religion counters transformative politics. My critical approach to religion and peacebuilding praxis seeks to illuminate the disruption of enclosed communal boundaries that deploy religious affiliation to delineate boundaries of belonging and solidarity. I show that so much of the religion and peacebuilding industry—with its technocrats, research centers, intergovernmental bodies, and multiple projects that intersect with development, so-called counterterrorism, and peacebuilding praxis—fails to be disruptive of hegemonic systems of domination because it operates within a realist frame that deploys a utilitarian instrumentalizing logic.
My critical approach to religion and peacebuilding praxis seeks to illuminate the disruption of enclosed communal boundaries that deploy religious affiliation to delineate boundaries of belonging and solidarity
Hence, I develop the concept of the “prophetic lite” to denote the delimitation of religious agency to being useful but not disruptive or disobedient to dominant scripts. Pae comes to the question of agency from postcolonial feminist theology and transnational feminist interventions. These interventions center the practice of coalitional work from the margins in order to move power and radically transform both theologies and political economy. The feminist and intersectional decolonial framework, however, is in tension with the neoliberal utilitarian framework of religion and peacebuilding. This is the case even if the peacebuilding frame uses words like feminism or gender mainstreaming. Such words at the time of this writing are being excised from US-related initiatives (themselves under a massive dismantling, denoting a shift in the philosophy of “soft power” that underpinned investments in “religious actors”). Underpinning Trumpist assaults on “soft power” is a White supremacist, masculinist, extractive (neo)colonial reactionary vision of “world peace.” Counter to this vision, I articulate a decolonial critique of the peace business, including its utilitarian domestication of marginalized sectors and their subsequent depoliticization, which prevent a transformative justice-oriented formation of solidarities disruptive of persistent epistemic, structural, and direct forms of violence.
Nonrevolutionary Decolonial Openings
Finally, I return to Orsi’s reflection on the unrealized potential of Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding to build on my “critique of the thin secular pluralism of interreligious peacebuilding” and to make theoretical space for “abundant pluralism of presences” from the “ruins of the modern.” Such ruins, for Orsi, are found in “an ad hoc plurality of real presences from different worlds” that converge through “[t]he landscapes of contemporary migrations—border crossings, refugee camps, NGO-sponsored peacebuilding centers, and so on.” Orsi highlights that such convergences in modernity’s ruins “present an opportunity for cross-religious engagements apart from the imperatives of states and the harmony business.” Orsi then asks whether I smuggle in secular epistemology by focusing on the ethical which focuses on horizontal inter-subjectivity and inter-communality to the exclusion of the causal force and conviviality of the vertical (gods and other nonhuman agents and beings). Indeed, he pushes my account of the sacred and how and where it enacts decolonial openings.
I trace intersubjective love in sites of horizontal friendship across divides (and scripts) formed on “the underside of modernity,” often produced as an upshot of various neoliberal development/peacebuilding programs that nonetheless exceed the aims of both neoliberal rationality and decolonial theory. I suggest that they enact decolonial openings through nonrevolutionary love. Orsi vividly describes how “people in movement,” in their realities of dislocation, see one another in fullness. He gives the example of how Santa Rosalia populates the religio-social imagination of Sicilian Catholics and Tamil Hindus in Palermo, albeit differently. For Orsi, the syncretic (which Pae also examines) allows Tamils and Catholics in Palermo to “get glimpses of themselves in the other and of the other in themselves.” In distinction, he writes powerfully, “[s]ecular moderns are seemingly doomed to forever be encountering the religion that they themselves created. But Santa Rosalia shows that the gods may be practitioners of decolonial love too; they come with their own intentions and purposes.” On this basis, he urges me to unsettle the authoritative location of the modern/secular as the foundational ground of critique. This is a powerful challenge that I want to think through via the example of the US-backed Israeli genocidal assault on Gaza. To think about religion in and from the ruins of Gaza, it is necessary for one to think ethically, especially when she is confronted by the ethical claims Palestinians make on her. Is such ethics necessarily “secular? Is it possible to decolonize secularity and extract it from its nest in racialized modern and colonial formations?
In the Ruins of Gaza
Rather than “religious,” the underlying cause and driver of violence in Palestine/Israel is secular settler colonialism born in and enabled by Euro-American imperial patrons. As is the case in the postcolonial contexts I describe in Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding, positing the causality of violence in Palestine/Israel in terms of presumably competing religious claims contradicts centuries of interwoven communal life in the region. Such arguments are definitionally anti-historical. The critical work of Ussama Makdisi on the “ecumenical frame” in the region that existed before western Christian colonization and encroachment offers one example of how communal life was interwoven. Another comes from Iraqi-Israeli Jew turned Oxford historian Avi Shlaim’s recent memoir, Three Worlds, which tells the story of his family in Iraq. Yes, they were Jewish, but mostly they thought of themselves as Baghdadi, much like the other non-Jewish inhabitants of the city. Likewise, Ella Habiba Shohat relinks Jews to Arab and Muslim geographies of belonging and in doing so advocates for a “revolutionary nostalgia,” which is a form of what she calls “diasporic reading” that refuses the boxes and scripts into which the Zionist (Christian and Jewish) formations have relocated and enclosed her. Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding disrupts precisely the overwhelming force of colonial scripted foreclosures or what might be called a segregationist discourse of war and peace.
Is it possible to decolonize secularity and extract it from its nest in racialized modern and colonial formations?
Therefore, the case of Palestine/Israel is entirely consistent with the critique of modern/colonial secular epistemologies Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding traces. Incidentally, Palestine/Israel has been a site for the “religion and peacebuilding industry” in ways that enact multiple erasures and depoliticizations and illuminate the secularist extraction of religion for (settler)colonial agendas. Particular narratives about Jewish history and destiny that are themselves products of the modern/Christian colonization of Jewish consciousness have permeated across secular and religious registers of Jewish modern nationalist and statist projects. What exactly makes Israel “Jewish” beyond the fact of Jewish bodies or biology is a critical problem that has taught me continually to interrogate the religious hermeneutics underwriting secular ideologies (see also Yaacov Yadgar’s To Be A Jewish State). This connects to a throughline in my scholarship, namely “critical caretaking” as a peacebuilding praxis. Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding explores how the religion and peace industry works against critical caretaking. “Critical caretaking” uses the tools of critique to denaturalize the stability, and claims to authenticity, of public narratives and modes of memory modulations. In addition, it advocates for a relational and intersectional hermeneutical depth that is capable of rescripting public narratives and disrupting claims to ontological and epistemological authenticity.
One of the most grotesque manipulations of interfaith discourse is the so-called Abraham Accords orchestrated by the first Trump Administration, which, according to many analysts, catalyzed the occurrence of the Hamas attack of October 7th, 2023. On this analysis, the attack was an attempt to reject the “regional normalization,” which intentionally bypassed the Palestinians. The accords were designed to make them go away and/or be absorbed into other Arab contexts (reflecting, of course, the orientalism and Islamophobia shot through the peacebuilding frame). The cynical naming of the normalization accords—which were economic and military sets of agreements (among the U.S., the normalizing countries, and Israel) building on antecedent cooperation, especially in terms of Israel’s export of surveillance technologies—as “Abrahamic,” captures the depoliticizing, ahistorical, and reductive utilization of religion. Instead of talking about land theft and territory, the story is spun as being about “terrorism,” marked explicitly as “Muslim” (in other words, “bad religion”). Instead of talking about the material reality of one hundred years of settler colonialism as experienced by Palestinians, we talk about a rift between Muslims and Jews (the “Abrahamic” children supposedly). Even more strikingly, the framing is put in “civilizational” terms that assimilate Jews into the violent construct of the “Judeo-Christian”; instead of examining how a biblical grammar underpins even the most anti-religious articulations of Jewish nationalism and entitlement to a land that already had people in it, there is talk about needing to reconnect “Jews” and “Muslims” as generic categories into a peaceful discourse of co-existence. Instead of interrogating how the reliance on a biblical grammar of return, holy land, and the ingathering of exiles is, in fact, a Christian European discourse embedded in racialized accounts of Jews and anti-Muslim/orientalist frames, the religion and peacebuilding industry—under the postsecular cover of claiming to take religion seriously—ends up covering up and reenacting colonial violence while reinforcing secular epistemologies. Trumpism’s assault on “soft power” at the onset of Trump’s second presidency removed a liberal inclusivist façade deployed ultimately to maintain peace without radical accountability for addressing the roots of global and international injustice.
Overemphasis on unreconstructed foreclosed and segregated accounts of religion, hence, become a form of a reductive explanatory frame, which is especially weaponized in the case of Palestine/Israel. Such accounts may present themselves as “authentic” representations of religious claims. Still, such a framing is precisely a product of European modernity’s deployment of “religion” in the service of imperial designs. Connecting to Orsi’s discussion of the ruins of the modern, the ruins of the US-backed Israeli genocide against Palestinians also represent modernity’s violence. Since such violence deploys “Judaism” and “Jewish history” in spinning itself as “self-defense,” and since such justification mobilizes antecedent orientalist and Islamophobic dehumanizing discursive formations, redressing the legacies of such violence requires that we think on the level of the ethical and historical accountability, and such thinking requires excavating “revolutionary nostalgias” and counter-archives, digging in the debris of (Judeo)-Christian modernity for historical Islamo-Jewish secularity before the Euro-modern construction of religion in the service of colonialism. Thinking and analyzing religion and peace requires, therefore, a robust ethical account of secular/modern epistemic, ontotheological, and (settler) colonial violence.
Easter Candlelight Procession, Cebu Philippines. Via Flickr User Adam Cohn. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
The conversation around religion’s role in international development and peacebuilding has undergone a significant shift over the past two decades. Initially, much of the focus was on getting development actors to take religion seriously—a response to its long neglect in secular frameworks. However, as Atalia Omer highlights in her book Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding, the way religion has been incorporated into development and peacebuilding often reinforces colonial assumptions rather than challenging them. Religion is frequently instrumentalized to serve external agendas, categorized into “good” and “bad” forms, and repurposed to align with Northern development goals.
The role of religion in peacebuilding has long been viewed through a narrow, instrumentalist lens—either as a force for stability or a source of conflict. But what if this binary framing misses the deeper, more transformative potential of faith-based engagement? As someone who has worked extensively in this field, I have long been interested in moving beyond these rigid, western-centric definitions of religion. Instead, I advocate for an approach that recognizes the lived religious practices of communities, the nuanced roles of faith-based organizations (FBOs), and the structural limitations that often hinder true decolonization in peacebuilding. By shifting our perspective, we can uncover pathways for more equitable, locally driven peace initiatives that challenge, rather than reinforce, colonial frameworks.
The Harmony Industry and Its Shortcomings
One of the most striking arguments in Omer’s book is her critique of what she calls the harmony industry. This refers to the system of NGOs, donors, and development organizations that promote religion as a tool for peace and development while failing to acknowledge the power dynamics embedded within these structures. This approach assumes that religion can be neatly packaged into development-friendly frameworks—where “good religion” promotes harmony, while “bad religion” must be countered or reformed.
This is problematic because it imposes external definitions of religion onto diverse communities. In many societies, religious practices do not fit into the institutionalized categories familiar to Western organizations. Spirituality, ritual, and oral traditions often exist outside the formal structures that NGOs recognize as “religious.” By attempting to engage with religion through a narrow, predefined lens, the harmony industry reinforces colonial paradigms rather than dismantling them.
A Third Way: Moving Beyond Instrumentalization and Reductionism
Omer contrasts the harmony industry with decolonial scholarship, which tends to focus on religion’s role in colonial oppression. While this critique is essential, it can also be limiting if it treats religion solely as a problem rather than recognizing its potential as a source of empowerment and resilience.
The challenge, therefore, is to carve out a third way that neither instrumentalizes religion for external goals nor dismisses it as merely a colonial construct. This necessitates recognizing that religious actors can be both complicit in colonial power structures and agents of decolonization. It also involves engaging with faith-based peacebuilding in ways that respect local agency, rather than imposing external expectations.
Faith-Based Organizations and the Tensions of Decolonization
Many FBOs find themselves caught between competing pressures. On one hand, they are deeply embedded in local communities, often serving as brokers between international aid systems and grassroots actors. On the other hand, they rely on funding and partnerships that come with conditions shaped by donor priorities—priorities that may not align with the needs of the communities they serve.
This tension was evident in a research project I co-led in South Sudan, where two international FBOs—one Christian and one Muslim—sought to strengthen the role of local faith actors in humanitarian response. The project aimed to facilitate a two-way exchange: local faith leaders would learn to navigate the donor-funded humanitarian system and international humanitarian actors would gain religious literacy to engage with local communities more effectively.
In practice, however, this balance proved difficult to achieve. Local faith actors were eager to engage in training and adapt their approaches, but humanitarian workers were far less willing to prioritize attending religious literacy sessions. Ultimately, the component of the project that was designed to help international actors better understand local religious dynamics was underfunded and deprioritized. This reflects a broader pattern in development: while local actors are expected to adapt to global norms, international organizations rarely make equivalent efforts to understand and respect local epistemologies.
Hidden Peacebuilders: Capturing the Intangible Aspects of Faith-Based Peacebuilding
Another project, the Hidden Peacebuilders Network, highlights the often-overlooked dimensions of religious peacebuilding, including spirituality, supernatural beliefs, and ritual practices. One of the key challenges we faced was that while many religious leaders acknowledged the role of prayer and supernatural interventions in their work, they hesitated to discuss these aspects in NGO spaces. There was a clear discomfort—perhaps a fear that emphasizing spiritual elements would make them seem less professional or credible in the eyes of secular donors.
Similarly, in interviews conducted by local researchers, some faith leaders were reluctant to share details about their spiritual practices with outsiders, particularly those from different religious backgrounds. This response suggests that our conventional ways of asking these questions in research may not be suitable or culturally resonant for eliciting such information, particularly around deeply personal or spiritual practices.
Creating “Decolonial Openings” in Peacebuilding and Development
Omer’s book provides a useful framework for thinking about what she calls decolonial openings—moments where dominant paradigms are disrupted, creating space for alternative approaches to emerge. For FBOs and development practitioners, fostering these openings requires deliberate shifts in their engagement with religion. Some key strategies include:
Critically Examining Organizational Structures
FBOs should reflect on how their own practices may reinforce colonial and neoliberal agendas. This means questioning funding sources and the assumptions built into their operational models.
Engaging with Lived Religion and Local Spirituality
Instead of viewing religion through the lens of formal institutions and doctrines, development actors should engage with the everyday practices of religious communities. This includes recognizing indigenous spiritual traditions and their role in peacebuilding.
Empowering Local Voices and Leadership
Decolonization requires shifting power away from international organizations and toward local actors. This means creating funding structures prioritising grassroots-led initiatives rather than imposing top-down solutions.
Shifting from Instrumentalization to Genuine Partnership
Religion should not be treated as a tool for achieving pre-determined development goals. Instead, FBOs should work with communities to understand how their own religious and spiritual traditions define peace, justice, and development.
Advocating for Structural Change in Donor Systems
Many of the barriers to decolonial peacebuilding are embedded in the funding structures that shape development work. FBOs are uniquely positioned to challenge these norms and push for more flexible, context-sensitive approaches.
Conclusion: The Role of FBOs in Reshaping Peacebuilding
Faith-based organizations can potentially play a transformative role in decolonizing peacebuilding and development, but only if they actively resist the pressures that pull them toward reinforcing colonial paradigms. This requires deep self-reflection, a willingness to engage with difficult questions about power and representation, and a commitment to centering local voices in their work.
Atalia Omer’s book is an important contribution to this conversation. It critiques existing frameworks and offers a vision for a more just and inclusive approach. The challenge now is to translate these insights into concrete action, ensuring that peacebuilding efforts are not just about resolving immediate conflicts but also about dismantling the structural inequalities that sustain them.
It’s clear that God is getting tired
They worked so hard to keep that child alive under the rubble
For six days until she was rescued
But then They couldn’t save her from that 2000-pound bomb
It’s clear that God is getting tired
They spent so much energy keeping a mother and her twins healthy
Through an entire pregnancy and birth amidst a genocide
But as They took a breather thinking that the hard work was over
All three were killed in an airstrike
It’s clear that God is getting tired
They worked around the clock keeping a man who had lost three limbs alive
And it seemed that he was out of the woods
When the hospital was bombed and the building collapsed on top of him
It’s clear that God is getting tired
The prayers are not even reaching Them anymore
There’s just so many that They have simply given up
Like when you reach a certain level in Tetris
And the blocks start coming so fast
And for a time, you frantically move around the pieces in an attempt to maintain a semblance of control
Until at some point you just put up your hands in defeat
Recognizing that the end is inevitable and there is nothing more you can do
It’s clear that God is getting tired
That God is tired
That God has been tired for twenty horrifying months
For 76 horrifying years
God is tired and defeated and They’ve decided that it’s time
To vacate Their home in the sky and move down to a tent in Gaza
God is there now
Ready to die alongside Their people
In Israel’s next airstrike
Thandi Gamedze is a South African educator, theologian, cultural worker, and poet based at the University of the Western Cape’s Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice as a Senior Researcher. Her doctoral research was transdisciplinary, bringing together the worlds of education and theology to better understand the role churches play in both upholding and challenging dominant power relations relating to race, gender, and class. Thandi’s interests include black theology, liberation theology, social justice, education, and the arts – particularly poetry. She has broad experience working across multiple sites, including churches, universities, high schools, and community organisations.
President Donald Trump meets with President of South Africa Cyril Ramaphosa, Wednesday, May 21, 2025, in the Oval Office. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok). Public Domain.
From 2013 to 2017 I served as Special Representative for Religion and Global Affairs under Secretary of State John Kerry. During that period the global refugee crisis expanded and the Obama administration significantly increased US refugee admissions. From a Uyghur restaurant in Astana, Khazakhstan, to a cramped Church World Service refugee center conference room in Jersey City, New Jersey, and many other places, I met countless people, some of whom were refugees, others who were migrants, and still others who were internally displaced people. I had never seen such suffering personally, nor had I heard so many stories of persecution combined with tales of heroism and determination. And I also saw remarkable levels of human compassion and solidarity, especially from the broadest range of religious communities I had ever seen, all working to address the needs of millions of people on the move.
Made for TV
Needless to say, I was intrigued when I saw on Thursday May 15, 2025, President Trump hold a made for television conference in the Oval Office with President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa and his delegation in order to attack Ramaphosa for allowing what he called a “White Genocide.” In the process Trump made a fool of himself and his senior staff. The hour-long exchange, which took place before their formal private conversation, provided a master class in diplomatic failure and incompetence on Trump’s part for all to see, including allies, enemies, and dumb struck U.S. citizens. By the end, Ramaphosa successfully parried Trump’s attacks through a combination of charm, direct refutation, and the blunt testimony of the famous White South African golfer, Ernie Els. The latter told Trump he was wrong to say Whites, not Blacks, were the main victims of violence.
In the already vast landscape of President Trump’s lies, distortions, and chaos, this moment may not be the most egregious of his offenses. Nevertheless, it is instructive because so many of his now classic tropes that are displayed across all policy sectors in his cruel descent into fascism are prominent here. Among these are White Supremacy, the distortion and misrepresentation of data, a reliance on right-wing media, bullying of weaker partners, and attacking religious communities, both global and domestic, based on the peculiar theologies of his fundamentalist Christian supporters. The dynamics we see in this policy drama shed significant light on why his foreign policy is failing globally and justify a deeper look.
Ending Refugee Resettlement (For Some)
Trump radically reduced the numbers admitted as a part of the US refugee resettlement program in his first term by 85%. One of his first actions in his second term was to pause the US refugee resettlement efforts and most of the implementing partner organizations have laid off their resettlement staff and are currently fighting the Trump Administration in federal court.[1]
After shutting down America’s robust and historic refugee resettlement infrastructure by means of an Executive Order on January 20, 2025, President Trump issued another Executive Order on February 7, 2025 criticizing a law passed by South Africa in 2024 setting the legal conditions for government expropriation of land for public use to conform to the language in the constitution of South Africa. Trump’s Order incorrectly interpreted this legislation as authorizing the seizure of White Afrikaner farm land without compensation and its alleged redistribution to Blacks. The order also cited South Africa’s “aggressive positions” toward the U.S. and Israel by accusing Israel of genocide, and not Hamas, in the International Court of Justice. As a result, the US will cease all aid to South Africa and weirdly, it directed the US Refugee resettlement program, which Trump shuttered just days before, to prioritize refugee resettlement of White Afrikaner farmers who were alleged victims of unjust racial discrimination.
On May 12, 2025 a group of 59 White Afrikaners entered the US on a plane chartered by the US government, based on a false claim of being victims of a “White Genocide” in South Africa. In addition, the Trump administration asked Episcopal Immigration Ministries to be one of the implementing partners in the former refugee resettlement with the State Department to resettle some of the White Afrikaners to the U.S.
I do not believe these 59 Afrikaners were actually refugees. Part of the United Nations definition of a refugee is that a person has to have fled their country of origin out of fear of persecution and who also refuses to return because of that fear. One had to apply for refugee status from a second country. The US chartered flight that carried these people to the US came from Johannesburg, South Africa. The evidence, for me, suggest that the Trump Administration doesn’t actually understand or care about the actual legal refugee process. With no sense of irony, they are willing to use a program that they have killed, i.e., the refugee resettlement process, to bring a set of unqualified people into the country in irregular fashion. Currently there is an ongoing lawsuit against the Administration’s shutdown of the refugee resettlement program.
Similarly, the justification offered by President Trump was that these farmers were victims of “White Genocide.” This claim has been debunked by various news outlets and South African government officials. There is no international legal judgment for such a claim. While South Africa does have a very high murder rate, which is widely documented, the overwhelming number of murder victims are Black. All of the members of the Ramaphosa delegation, Black and White, told Trump he was wrong on this point and that all races are victims of violence, and that Whites were not disproportionally affected. Trump has not issued a detailed case for why he believes there is a legal case, based on the criteria of the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, that supports considering White Afrikaners as victims of genocide. He is simply repeating allegations from right-wing sources that also do not make any legal argument.
With no sense of irony, they are willing to use a program that they have killed, i.e., the refugee resettlement process, to bring a set of unqualified people into the country in irregular fashion
Ironically, or perhaps better yet, cynically, one of the “refugees” is Charl Kleinhaus, who has made a series of antisemiticposts on social media. The Trump administration is attempting to deport a number of nonwhite people, for among other things, making antisemitic posts on social media. DHS has said such activity is grounds for deporting immigrants while simultaneously suggesting the 59 White Afrikaners have been fully vetted in the accelerated security process in the first one hundred or so days of the new Trump policies. Either there are two sets of criteria for evaluating White applicants and nonwhite applicants, or the radically foreshortened time to approve the Afrikaners represents an amateur and incomplete security process for the Afrikaners. Neither option provides any comfort regarding the incompetence of the Trump refugee regime. While Secretary of State Marco Rubio is arguing in the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a US Lawful Permanent Resident, that unnamed antisemitic protests and disruptive activities are grounds for the deportation of Khalil while the president is simultaneously naming a White South Afrikaner who is an antisemite, the hypocrisy is there for all to see.
Religious Voices Respond
The typical Trump strategy of bullying who they deem weaker partners, in this case is also evident in his treatment of the Episcopal Church of America. The Episcopal Church response was even swifter than President Ramaphosa and just as effective. On May 12 Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe released a letter responding to the administration’s request that the Church’s organization, Episcopal Migration Ministries, assist in the resettlement of the White Afrikaners. He is worth quoting at some length:
Since January, the previously bipartisan U.S. Refugee Admissions Program in which we participate has essentially shut down. Virtually no new refugees have arrived, hundreds of staff in the resettlement agencies around the country have been laid off, and funding for resettling refugees who have already arrived has been uncertain. Then, just over two weeks ago, the federal government informed Episcopal Migration Ministries that under the terms of our federal grant, we are expected to resettle white Afrikaners from South Africa whom the U.S. government has classified as refugees.
In light of our church’s steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our historic ties with the Anglican Church of South Africa, we are not able to take this step. Accordingly, we have determined that, by the end of the federal fiscal year, we will conclude our refugee resettlement grant agreements with the U.S. federal government.
It has been painful to watch one group of refugees, selected in a highly unusual manner, receive preferential treatment over many others who have been waiting in refugee camps or dangerous conditions for years. I am saddened and ashamed that many of the refugees who are being denied entrance to the United States are brave people who worked alongside our military in Iraq and Afghanistan and now face danger at home because of their service to our country. I also grieve that victims of religious persecution, including Christians, have not been granted refuge in recent months.
As Christians, we must be guided not by political vagaries, but by the sure and certain knowledge that the kingdom of God is revealed to us in the struggles of those on the margins. Jesus tells us to care for the poor and vulnerable as we would care for him, and we must follow that command. Right now, what that means is ending our participation in the federal government’s resettlement program and investing our resources is serving migrants in other ways.
The Episcopal Church would not capitulate to the administration’s deceit in violation of a fundamental theological commitment. This attempt to bully the church into compliance with the bizarre request to violate the spirit and letter of the law in order to aid a contingent of White Afrikaners into the country failed. Such an act, the Church saw, was in in service of White Supremacy. By all appearances the request is retribution for an episode at the National Cathedral when Bishop Mariann Budde delivered a sermon during the inaugural prayer service at The National Cathedral on January 31, 2025 when she implored President Trump, at the end of her sermon, to show mercy and compassion to those who live in fear in America including LGBT persons, undocumented immigrants, and those fleeing persecution and war. Budde’s winsome plea was met with disdain and disgust by the new president and vice president, and apparently their grudges still endure. To the extent that there is a comprehensible theology underlying the Trump Administration’s engagement with the world, it is not premised upon an understanding or tenet of Christianity.
What the president’s approach seems incapable of grasping is that the historic efforts of U.S. refugee resettlement efforts since the end of World War 2 reflect a fundamental policy commitment of the U.S. to acknowledge that the mass displacement of human beings due to political persecution is in the American interest, broadly defined. The effort to assist refugees under the United Nations’ umbrella since World War 2 is one of the signal moral and political accomplishments of the liberal post-war era. And Trump’s withdrawal from participation in that system is a grave signal of fascist moral failure.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry looks on as Pope Francis shakes hands with U.S. Special Representative for Religion and Global Affairs Shaun Casey on December 2, 2016, following a one-on-one meeting in the Papal Apartments at the Vatican in Vatican City. [State Department photo/ Public Domain]
In June 2024 the United Nations High Commission for Refugees said there were 43.7 million refugees worldwide. In the United States a refugee had to undergo a vigorous security vetting, usually taking several years, in order to be eligible for admission to the US. It is the most difficult way for a person to legally enter the United States. The State Department engaged multiple implementing partner organizations to manage the entry and resettlement of vetted and approved refugees. Most of these organizations were religiously affiliated organizations, including Church World Service, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, World Relief, Global Refuge (formerly Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services), HIAS (formerly Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), and Episcopal Migration Ministries. Taken together these organizations represent a majority of Christians in America. That the Trump Administration would pull the plug on their global efforts signals either willful ignorance of the fundamental moral beliefs of religious Americans or a willful repudiation of those values.
The Interlocking Politics of Genocide
The last item to note in this story of malice, ineptitude, and just plain hypocrisy on the part of the new administration, is Trump’s attempt at undermining South Africa’s effort to present an international legal claim of genocide or other crime against humanity against Israel in light of an allegations of war crimes. If South Africa is guilty of White genocide against its own citizens, the argument runs, how could their claims against Israel for its response to Hamas in Gaza possibly have merit? By giving credence to the right-wing claim of “White Genocide” Trump helps to undermine the charge against Israel in international legal terms that are being lodged by the South African government against Israel.
The fate of this policy foreign policy on the part of the current Administration is in the hands of the Federal Judiciary. Only time will tell how and when the various legal cases will be resolved. In the meantime, all across the planet people are watching the various threads I have identified. Friends and foes are making a careful study of the lessons to be learned. And while these processes play out, tens of millions of refugees who have lost everything to tyrants wait in peril while the country that used to resettle more of their brothers and sisters sits idle as that number grows. And most interesting of all, perhaps, are the adherents of an astonishing array of American religious communities—including millions of Catholics, Protestants, Evangelicals, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, and many more—that are now lamenting the epic moral failure of our corrupt political leadership.[2]
[1] For a very helpful primer on the U.S. refugee resettlement process that has been shuttered, see the amici curiae brief by a number of former US Government officials in support of the ongoing federal case against the Trump administration currently before the Ninth Circuit of Appeals. This brief contains a compelling refutation of the Trump administration’s arguments and also provides a detailed but digestible description of how the refugee resettlement process actually worked. It is an indispensable guide.
Shaun Casey was T. J. Dermot Dunphy Senior Fellow of Religion, Violence, and Peacebuilding at Harvard Divinity School from 2021–2022. He was U.S. Special Representative for Religion and Global Affairs and Director of the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Religion and Global Affairs from 2013-2017. He served as Director of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and Professor of the Practice in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University from 2017 to 2022. He served as Professor of Christian Ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC from 2000–2013. He is the author of The Making of a Catholic President: Kennedy vs. Nixon 1960 and Chasing the Devil at Foggy Bottom: The Future of Religion in American Diplomacy (2023). Casey holds a B.A. from Abilene Christian University, MPA from Harvard Kennedy School, and M.Div. and Th.D. in religion and society from Harvard Divinity School.
A “Refugees Welcome” sign spray painted on the eastern side of the Malet Street Gardens, Bloomsbury, London Borough of Camden. Via Wikimedia Commons.
“It’s a genocide that’s taking place that you people don’t want to write about,” said President Trump to reporters on May 12, 2025, “but it’s a terrible thing that’s taking place.” You might have thought he was talking about Gaza where more than 54,000 Palestinians have been killed—including 16,000 children—and much of the coastal strip has been destroyed by Israel’s military assault, but you would be wrong. Instead, the Trump Administration, without evidence, has posited a “genocide” of Afrikaners, the White South African minority who are now the sole new “refugees” being resettled to the United States amidst an otherwise complete shutdown of the U.S. refugee admissions program. This, despite a judge’s February order blocking the program’s suspension based on a lawsuit filed by faith-based groups.
How has this come about, how does it connect to the broader contexts of the Trump administration’s policies on immigration and Palestine/Israel, and what can we learn from the responses of religious organizations and leaders?
Resettlement Agencies and Religious Leaders Respond
When the news broke that the Episcopal church, long tied to South Africa through the leadership of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, would end its partnership with the federal refugee resettlement program, Vice President Vance had one word in his re-tweet of the story: “crazy.” However, when faced with the prospect of receiving no refugees from dire contexts such as Afghanistan while having to resettle individuals facing no appreciable imminent threat, it is no surprise that the Episcopal church balked. As Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe said, “the idea that we would be somehow resettling Afrikaners at this point over other refugees, who have been vetted and waiting in camps for months or even years, is unfathomable to us.”
His view reflects that of more than 150 White South African Christian leaders who signed a statement rejecting Trump’s claims of White victimization in South Africa. “The narrative presented by the US government is founded on fabrications, distortions, and outright lies. It does not reflect the reality of our country and, if anything, serves to heighten existing tensions in South Africa,” the statement said.
Around 2000 people gathered in downtown Minneapolis to rally in support of immigrants and refugees on February 11, 2017. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Some resettlement organizations, such as the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, agreed to resettle the Afrikaners, “hopeful” that it indicated intention to restart the U.S. refugee program. Other faith-based groups wrestled with the issue or provided only limited support. Church World Service supported one family with remote services, while voicing frustration with the administration’s actions; Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Arlington assisted with processing some travel expenses at the state of Virginia’s request. Other organizations did not take part: Jewish Family and Community Services East Bay in California refused to participate; their director called it a “stunt.” A major national coalition focused not on rejecting Afrikaners but rather on leveraging their resettlement to get the broader program back: “It’s time for the Trump administration to honor our nation’s commitment to the thousands of vulnerable refugees that the United States has abandoned,” said John Slocum of Refugee Council USA, comprised of more than forty organizations.
The U.S. Catholic Church had already ended its cooperative agreement on refugee resettlement with the federal government; it is suing the Administration for its suspension of funds for the program. Bishop Seitz, head of the Bishops’ committee on migration, has also spoken out about this new resettlement policy, incredulous that a “new channel is open to white Afrikaners” while at the same time the U.S. is “closing the door for people who are poor and starving.”
A May 27 amicus brief filed by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim organizations in support of the original faith-based lawsuit challenging Trump’s refugee ban outlined theological arguments from their different traditions that put “service to the stranger—refugees, immigrants, neighbors—at the core of their practices and systems of belief.” Several used the word “obligation” to describe this work as something inextricably bound to their understanding of themselves as people of faith. At the heart of refugee resettlement is a call to accompaniment, a walking with those most vulnerable and on the margins. While refugees are often measured in the millions, the process of resettlement is a sacred and tactile work of encounter: collecting car seats and kitchen items; driving a family to the social security office; hearing stories of loss, terror and alienation. To prioritize groups that are not most in need is an affront to fundamental commitments and convictions. Thus, it is not unexpected that the resettlement of Afrikaners has been met with a combination of resistance, dismay, and redoubled advocacy by so many of the faith-based organizations and leaders confronted with this new policy.
“Refugees” Who Don’t Fit the Definition
The United Nations High Commission for Refugees, usually involved in the referral and vetting of refugees, was not part of the screening process for Afrikaners. Based on international law and a 1951 refugee convention, refugees are people forced to flee, unable to return to their own country because of “feared persecution as a result of who they are, what they believe in or say, or because of armed conflict, violence or serious public disorder.” Afrikaners are a far cry from fitting this definition.
At the heart of refugee resettlement is a call to accompaniment, a walking with those most vulnerable and on the margins.
“This is the land of milk and honey if you’re white,” says South African political scientist Piet Croucamp, who like many experts as well as Afrikaner farmers, argues there is no credence to the claim of “White genocide.” Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch colonists who first settled in Africa in the 1600’s, remain economically ascendant long after the fall of the apartheid government they led from 1948–1994. All indicators point to ongoing inequality; for instance, despite being just 8% of the population, White people occupied 65.9% of top management posts as compared to 13.8% of Black people in 2022. While economic privilege does not shield any group from other kinds of oppression, farm killings of White South Africans remain statistically low in the context of the country’s overall crime problem and high murder rate, which affects all races and especially Black South Africans who continue to bear the brunt of violence.
Somali-British poet Warsan Shire describes the experience of a refugee as one of desperation. “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark, you only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well,” she writes in the opening stanza of the poem “Home.” In my collaboration with immigrant and refugee organizations in Northeastern Pennsylvania and through a community oral history project, I have heard many hard stories in which being designated a refugee was simply a matter of survival. Chandra Sitaula, a Bhutanese refugee who faced persecution as part of the “Lhotshampas” minority, was expelled to Nepal after having relative status as a landowner. As he shared, “it is not [a] choice for us to become refugees.”
Resettled refugee Ushu Mukelo recounted how he and his father and brother ended up in a Ugandan refugee camp after a rebel group attacked their village in the Democratic Republic of Congo during its brutal civil war. “Our mom [was] killed. We lost everything…because of war…we were forced to flee, to save our lives.” In contrast, Afrikaner refugees were seen at the Johannesburg airport with carts full of suitcases; no one was running for their lives.
Moving Afrikaners to the Front of the Line
In February, Catholic Vice President J.D. Vance argued, drawing on a Catholic concept of “ordo amoris,” that love is ordered toward family and neighbors first in such a way that justifies this administration’s immigration crackdown. Many Catholics, including Pope Francis and then-soon-to-be Pope Leo XIV, pushed back—not to say that we don’t owe love to our family but rather that such love is not exclusive or scarce. Pope Francis wrote to the U.S. Bishops criticizing the administration’s immigration policies, exhorting Catholics “not to give in to narratives that discriminate against…our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters,” and clarifying that “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups.” Then-Cardinal Prevost shared a now famous tweet stating simply that “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others,” referencing the title of a National Catholic Reporter article critiquing the vice president.
Now, a couple of months later, Vance and others have found it in their hearts to show love for the stranger—just not by advocating for the Black, Brown or poor and persecuted ones of all backgrounds that have long come through the refugee resettlement program, but rather by moving White South Africans to the front of the line. The decision to accept Afrikaners comes amidst a backdrop of targeting immigrants of color—denying refugee admission for Afghan, Congolese, and other populations who were poised to enter; ending humanitarian parole for Venezuelans, Haitians and others; and marking for deportation unauthorized immigrants who have come to this country predominantly from Central and South America and Mexico—wrongly associating a lack of lawful status with criminality.
At a May 21 meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, President Trump doubled down on his claims of widespread Afrikaner suffering, using erroneous evidence. As proof of mass killings of White people, he showed his guest images that proved to be humanitarian aid workers lifting body bags in the Democratic Republic of Congo, not South Africa. As Gareth Newham, of the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa which tracks violent crime, has shared: “if there was any evidence of either a genocide or targeted violence taking place against any group based on their ethnicity…we would be amongst the first to raise (the) alarm and provide the evidence to the world.” Such expertise has had no bearing on Trump’s perspective.
Trump’s History with “Anti-White” Racism
Trump has been interested in the Afrikaners’ alleged plight of systematic persecution for years as part of his and his allies’ obsession with the manufactured cause of anti-White racism. Trump has had a longstanding cozy relationship with White supremacy and beliefs in White victimhood, which are the undercurrent of his mantra to “make America great again” and which have also brought him in contact with the views of South Africa’s Far Right—views shared by his outgoing appointee Elon Musk. This preoccupation began during Trump’s first term when he directed then Secretary of State Pompeo to investigate the South African government’s “land and farm seizures” from White farmers based on alarmist and inaccurate reporting by Tucker Carlson.
At particular issue for Trump now is a January 2025 law (Expropriation Act) that seeks to address unequal land ownership in South Africa and is cited in the February executive order promoting resettlement of Afrikaners. Apartheid had banned Black South Africans from owning land for decades and forcefully removed Blacks from their land. As a result, White South Africans continue to hold the vast majority of land; they make up 7% of the population but own 72% of private farmland. The 2025 law allows for limited state expropriation of land for a “public purpose” with compensation offered in some, but not all cases, in a process subject to judicial scrutiny. No land has yet been seized under the Act. It is important to note that according to Catholic social teaching, expropriation of land is sometimes called for. In Populorum Progressio, para. 24, Pope Paul VI wrote: “If certain landed estates impede the general prosperity because they are extensive, unused or poorly used, or because they bring hardship to peoples or are detrimental to the interests of the country, the common good sometimes demands their expropriation.”
Broader Contexts: The Palestine Factor
The administration’s February executive order also cut aid and assistance to South Africa based in part on policy differences on Palestine. In particular, the order cited that “South Africa has taken aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice.” Indeed, South Africa led the charge to bring international action against Israel’s assault on Gaza. In the end, the ICJ’s preliminary opinion in January 2024 ruled that Palestinians’ rights to protection from genocide were plausibly at risk and Israel should take steps to prevent genocide. Since then, many experts including Holocaust scholars and Amnesty International have concluded that a genocide is taking place in Gaza. In fall 2024, Pope Francis also urged further investigation into whether Israel’s Gaza military campaign constitutes a genocide.
Demonstration in Paris for an immediate ceasefire in Palestine and Lebanon. October 5, 2024. Via Flickr User Jeanne Menjoulet. CC BY 2.0
As part of their motivation for bringing the case and for their solidarity with the Palestinian people, South African leaders cited their country’s history of repression and violence, human rights abuses and the crime of apartheid. For its part, the U.S. under the Biden Administration called South Africa’s case “meritless,” refusing to reckon with how U.S. and Israeli policies had so devalued Palestinian lives. The Trump administration has now further upped the ante with its retributive stance toward the South African government. They see no irony in their willingness to recognize a “White genocide” in South Africa, with no evidence, while supporting ongoing atrocities by Israel in Gaza; indeed, President Trump is colluding in such wrongdoing with his own plan, which coincides with Israel’s, to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from the coastal enclave.
Conclusion: A Call to Solidarity
June 20th is the annual global celebration of World Refugee Day. Since January 20th, the Trump Administration has indefinitely paused refugee resettlement; that is, until it opened U.S. doors to Afrikaners. Daily, Palestinians are being killed, displaced, starved and deprived of humanitarian aid and basic rights by Israel. The resettling of Afrikaners and the shunning of South Africa makes a mockery of two important things: refugee resettlement based on international norms and the claim of genocide, which has been unfolding not in South Africa, but in Gaza. By making this move, the Trump Administration demonstrates that it does not care about either. Faith communities and all people of goodwill must continue to do their part to provide friendship, solidarity, and welcome to local refugee and immigrant communities and to raise their voices for a permanent Gaza ceasefire and a just peace in Palestine/Israel.
Julie Schumacher Cohen is a PhD student in Political Science at Temple University in the areas of American and comparative politics and political theory, focusing on issues of religion and politics, polarization and conflict, and forced displacement and territorial rights. Long involved in Israel-Palestine peacebuilding, she is a member of the Catholic Advisory Council of Churches for Middle East Peace, where she previously served as Deputy Director. Julie is also Assistant Vice President for Community Engagement and Government Affairs at The University of Scranton where her local engagement involves collaboration with refugee and immigrant communities. Her op-ed, “Catholics Must Oppose Detention of Mahmoud Khalil,” was published by the National Catholic Reporter on March 26, 2025.
Meeting of South Africa-Israel Chamber of Commerce taken in 1985. Via Wikimedia Commons.
In 1977, a few months prior to his arrest and subsequent murder by the South African apartheid state, Steve Biko, widely known as the leader of the Black Consciousness movement, said the following:
There is no running away from the fact that now in South Africa there is such an ill distribution of wealth that any form of political freedom which does not touch on the proper distribution of wealth will be meaningless. The whites have locked up within a small minority of themselves the greater proportion of the country’s wealth. If we have a mere change of face of those in governing positions what is likely to happen is that black people will continue to be poor, and you will see a few blacks filtering through into the so-called bourgeoisie. Our society will be run almost as of yesterday. (155–56).
48 years later, it is safe to say that Biko called it. Present day South Africa, over three decades since the end of apartheid, remains severely unequal. This inequality continues to exist along apartheid racial lines. And this is not surprising. If you create a politico-legal system which massively privileges White people in terms of land, education, wealth, and opportunity at the expense of Black people, and then replace this system with supposedly non-racial neoliberal economic policy, very little actually changes. The majority Black population, having previously been forcibly removed and relegated to particular sites and occupations under apartheid, are no longer legally barred from owning land and living and working wherever they would like. Instead, they are barred by the “free” market and various other structural obstacles. This leaves the majority unable to afford or access safe, let alone well-situated, housing, or sound economic opportunities, due to centuries of systematized oppression.
112 years after the 1913 Native Land Act (which, in a classic case of colonial expropriation of land without compensation, granted over 80% of South Africa’s land to the White minority), White people—who make up just 7% of South Africa’s population—still own close to three quarters of the country’s farmland. The distribution of other forms of wealth follows similar patterns.
Into this context, the Expropriation Act—the piece of legislation which provoked the wrath of Trump and his anti-woke brigade—was introduced in January 2025 after years of consultation, discussion, and failure to address the injustices of the past. In line with the provisions of the globally lauded South African Constitution, the Act, in exceptional cases, makes allowance for the state to expropriate property for reasons of public interest, and in even more exceptional cases, makes expropriation without compensation possible. The processes outlined by the document, through which both expropriation with and without compensation are governed, are detailed and stringent. The conditions under which the latter is possible are outlined in section 12 (3) (d) of the Act. Essentially, in relation to private land, for expropriation without compensation to be ruled just and equitable (a pre-condition for such action), this land is required to either be unused (with no plans for development of the land or income generation on it) or abandoned. Thus, the flurry of outcry around this is unjustified. Similarly, Trump’s claim that White Afrikaner South Africans are experiencing “government sponsored race-based discrimination,” his fabrications about a “White genocide” in South Africa (spoiler alert: this is not true), and his subsequent welcome of White Afrikaners as “refugees” into the US, are ludicrous. And if not so dangerous in terms of their intended delegitimization of South Africa’s democracy (and all related implications thereof), and the deeply problematic and untrue narratives that they act to justify, they would be laughable.
While the ridiculousness of this situation would make it easy to simply dismiss as unworthy of attention, we would be remiss in doing so. This current US-South Africa debacle is a microcosm of some much broader dynamics at play. As such it holds important potential for shedding light on this current moment.
South Africa has always been a site of struggle—a deeply contested landscape where there are clear clashes between marginalized (but majority) interests and hegemonic (but minority) ones. This was most overt under the apartheid system, where oppressed and oppressor identities were very (forgive me) black and white and constructed through a myriad of legislation. But while these delineations are somewhat more opaque today, shrouded beneath “rainbowist”[1] post-apartheid narratives—although these myths were effectively disrupted by the 2015 and 2016 #Fallist calls for decolonization—they remain ever-present. In this regard, there is something deeply sinister about Trump’s singling out of White Afrikaners for refugee status. While those with a deeper awareness of South Africa’s colonial history recognize that the British colonizers played just as, if not more (how to compare colonial violence?) harmful a role as the Dutch descendants, the history of apartheid as implemented by the Afrikaners is much more popularly known. Thus, Trump’s singling out and extending of “solidarity” towards White Afrikaners appears to be a not-so-subtle nod to apartheid—and indeed a call to “make South Africa great again” in the same way that “make American great again” is a not-so-subtle nod to slavery and White supremacy. If these intentions weren’t already abundantly clear in Trump’s actions, the words of US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau to the Afrikaner “refugees” upon their arrival to the US on May 12, 2025, sealed the deal. He welcomed them effusively, saying, in what can only be understood as a blatant celebration of apartheid, “We respect the long tradition of your people and what you have accomplished over the years.”
Inter-Racist Solidarity
Salim Vally categorises the close historical relationship between the South African apartheid state and the Israeli state as a case of “inter-racist solidarity”[2]. This term aptly describes the current US-White Afrikaner dynamics, as well as the broader convergence and consolidation of imperial, right wing, and White nationalist forces that we are seeing today. Indeed, the mention and condemning of South Africa’s ongoing International Court of Justice case—where the case is being argued that Israel’s actions in Gaza after October 7, 2023, amount to genocide—in Trump’s executive order makes clear that the administration’s response to South Africa is not just about South Africa. It is simply part and parcel of this inter-racist solidarity network that is currently being established, nurtured, and consolidated through various means.
As such, everything that threatens the right-wing White nationalist (yet transnational) empire is under the microscope. And the very existence of post-1994 Black-led South Africa is a threat, representing the failure of this empire’s White nationalist vision. This threat is magnified by South Africa charging Israel with genocide at the ICJ, and even more so given the global South connections and solidarities that this move has inspired. Of similar threat are the mass popular movements of solidarity with Palestine taking place globally, as are the Movement for Black Lives and the so-called “woke” politics and DEI interventions of recent years.
The athletes from South Africa parading in the stadium at the 2nd Maccabiah Games opening ceremony. Via Wikimedia Commons.
As we are seeing ever more clearly, this empire does not take kindly to threats. It is organized and knows how to mobilize to accomplish its goals. This is evidenced in the speedy travel, broad reach, and buy in to “White genocide” myths. It is evidenced in the recent expelling of Ebrahim Rasool, South African ambassador to the US. It is evidenced in the cutting of USAID and other US funding to South Africa. It is evidenced in the absolute impunity with which the US is operating in its continual funding of the genocide in Gaza. It is evidenced in Elon Musk’s encouragement and support of right-wing nationalist movements in “at least 18 countries.” It is evidenced in the current spate of unlawful and highly irregular arrests, detentions, and deportations of individuals seen as transgressing or challenging US White nationalist ideals. It is evidenced in the massive amounts of money raised for the legal defence of Daniel Penny, a White 24-year-old marine corps veteran, after he choked to death Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old unhoused African American man—and the broader pattern of which this case is representative. And of course there is much more evidence one could cite.
As this conversation makes clear, race remains a salient node of analysis, carrying clear material and structural implications. This reality notwithstanding, we must be particularly careful not to essentialize race. In this regard, Salim Vally and Enver Motala caution against uncritically reproducing “the apartheid state’s usage of racialised forms of consciousness” (39). Thus, it is necessary to hold the tension of race as both social construct and materially salient, in order to challenge and not reproduce the harms of racially oppressive realities. This tension is important in this conversation about inter-racist solidarity and White nationalist empire, as it is clear that this empire quite often has Black and Brown allies—whether this be the Black representatives at the UN voting on behalf of the US against a ceasefire in Gaza, or Gulf state leaders falling over themselves to secure massive deals with Donald Trump. In thinking about a framework to help understand this phenomenon, I offer two considerations. Firstly, it is important to recognize the fundamentally socially constructed nature of racial categories, which has meant that these categories are impermanent and ever shifting—the apartheid state’s contentious “pencil test” (one of the apartheid state’s official racial categorization tests involving sticking a pencil into a person’s hair and letting go to see whether it fell out or remained) evidence of this. Secondly, the capitalism aspect of racial capitalism shapes these relationships of “inter-racist” solidarity according to profit margins, in ways that can actually be quite racially inclusive. Here however, it is important to take seriously various Black thinkers’ critiques of Marxist understandings that erase race in favor of a pure class analysis. White nationalism is here and increasingly asserting itself in worrying ways, yet even White nationalism will put up with some Black and Brown people if the money is right.
The Role of Religion in Inter-Racist Solidarity
We would be remiss in failing to acknowledge the way that religion —conservative evangelical Christianity in particular—often underpins and is appropriated in these configurations of power. As outlined by Mitri Raheb, religion is often mobilized to act as the “software” that whitewashes, justifies, sustains, and sacralizes the “hardware” of empire. As such, through immaculate theological manoeuvring, South African apartheid was configured and framed as divinely ordained. Similar techniques have strategically shaped and deployed Christianity to effectively serve and provide the foundations for colonialism, slavery, land theft, and genocide over numerous eras and geographical contexts. Today these techniques theologically justify Israeli occupation, settler colonialism, and genocide. In this regard, it is not mere coincidence that the US, Israel, and White Afrikaners in apartheid South Africa have understood (or at least framed) themselves as nations or people chosen by God. This narrative, among others, works to justify and even sacralize the atrocities that these groups carry and have carried out. And importantly, as evidenced in the testimony of one of the Afrikaner “refugees,” while these notions of chosen-ness are held at the level of nations, they filter down to individuals. In his testimony, Mr. Kleinheis—a self-declared “religious person”—claims that his selection was, for him, evidence of his own chosen-ness, stating that “to be in this first group is an act of God.” He goes as far as to say, “if he (God) didn’t want me to come, I wouldn’t be here,” tacitly making the case that God is behind this whole saga, sanctioning narratives of “White genocide,” ordaining (or even instigating) the White House’s inter-racist solidarity moves, actively demonizing and rejecting actual refugees, and ultimately blessing the White nationalist empire.
Conclusion: The Hope of Transracial Solidarity
Bangladesh March for Gaza protest against ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
This current moment should be understood as one of heightened mobilization and consolidation of inter-racist solidarities for the purposes of securing an imperial White nationalist (yet transnational) vision. Conversely, however, there are rich histories of resistance through which such inter-racist solidarities have been countered. Notably, where the apartheid regime constructed and weaponized racial categorizations according to colonial “divide and rule” tactics, while consolidating its own power by various means, the Black Consciousness movement combatted this with what could be called “trans-racial solidarity.” By refusing apartheid race categories and reframing blackness as not just a racial identity but a political one—indicating an unwavering commitment to liberation—this movement emphasized and strengthened the connections between the struggles of the oppressed. Such trans-racial solidarity was and remains a powerful counter to that of the inter-racist kind. Hence, in these times, the martyred prophet Biko has much left to teach.
[1] Archbishop Desmond Tutu described post-1994 South Africa as a rainbow nation, and while perhaps unintentional, this descriptor has come to do the work of presenting South Africa as a happily diverse but unified society, belying, plastering over, and thereby sustaining the severe inequalities that exist. As analyzed by prominent South African feminist academic Pumla Gqola, “rainbowism” has functioned as an “authorising narrative which assisted in the denial of difference” foregrounding “racial variety even as it does not constructively deal with the meanings thereof” (99).
[2] Despite its staunch pro-Nazi origins, the South African apartheid state ruled by the National Party (the White Afrikaner party that instituted apartheid in 1948) grew to develop strong and intimate ties with the Israeli state. Among other things, these ties involved extensive military and economic collaboration. On this point, see Francesco Pontarelli’s interview with Salim Vally.
Thandi Gamedze is a South African educator, theologian, cultural worker, and poet based at the University of the Western Cape’s Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice as a Senior Researcher. Her doctoral research was transdisciplinary, bringing together the worlds of education and theology to better understand the role churches play in both upholding and challenging dominant power relations relating to race, gender, and class. Thandi’s interests include black theology, liberation theology, social justice, education, and the arts – particularly poetry. She has broad experience working across multiple sites, including churches, universities, high schools, and community organisations.
Professors Atalia Omer and Peter Beinart discussing Beinart’s new book on March 3, 2025.
The war in Gaza has surfaced deep divisions in the American Jewish community, most notably in generational divides as older American Jews cleave to support for the State of Israel while younger Jews take to the streets chanting, “Never Again for Anyone.” Renowned journalist, political commentator, and CUNY Professor Peter Beinart joined Contending Modernities (CM) and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies for a conversation on March 3rd about his introspective new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. Atalia Omer, CM Co-Director and Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies, spoke with Beinart on the intra-traditional debates taking place in Jewish communities in the face of the televised mass atrocity ongoing in Palestine and Israel. The lecture was cosponsored by the Mirza Family Professor of Islamic Thought and Muslim Societies.
With the first days of Ramadan underscoring the starvation across the Gaza Strip, Omer opened with the ways in which many American Jews have felt the need to unlearn, and reckon with, a particular narrative of Jewish history. In her own research for Days of Awe, Omer met Jews asking: “If occupation [of Palestine] is not my Judaism what is my Judaism?” While many older American Jews were raised in establishments defined by their relationship to the State of Israel, such as the Jewish Federation, Hillel, and most mainstream synagogues, increasing numbers of young Jews have begun to question their institutions’ and elders’ embrace of Zionism as central to Jewish life. This has entailed exploring non-Zionist forms of community and reviving Jewish diaspora ethics and identity through accountability to Palestinians. Omer quoted Beinart’s prologue: “From the destruction of the Second Temple to the expulsion from Spain to the Holocaust, Jews have told new stories to answer the horrors we endured. We must now tell a new story to answer the horrors that a Jewish country has perpetrated. . . . We are not history’s permanent virtuous victims, we are not hardwired to forever endure evil but never commit it” (10). Omer invited Beinart to explain his call for a new narrative.
Beinart, a professor of Journalism and Political Science at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York and editor at large of Jewish Currents, shared that his own unlearning had begun in his early 30s. An Orthodox Jew from Cambridge, Massachusetts, Beinart’s family had experienced the “fragility of diaspora” across Africa and Eurasia and viewed Israel as a place of security and cultural flourishing. It wasn’t until he met Palestinians in the West Bank as an adult that he came to face the level of brutality they experienced at the hands of a state that was completely unaccountable to them. Beinart likened this to Black Americans in the Jim Crow era, during which the state could restrict your movement, take your land, your life, with no consequences. He had to rethink his experience of Israel and Zionism, in the words of Edward Said, “from the standpoint of its victims.”
“I was unprepared for Palestinian humanity,” Beinart shared, having grown up in an environment where Palestinians were “a faceless threatening collective.” This book was “a re-exploration of what it means to be Jewish. . . . In many ways my teachers in this work . . . have been Palestinians.”
“They Tried to Kill Us, We Survived, Let’s Eat”
Painting of Queen Esther by Hugues Merle, 1875. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Beinart’s humorous chapter title references the joke that “every Jewish holiday has the same plot: they tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat.” Omer asked Beinart to unpack his re-reading of the story of Esther and the holiday of Purim in light of his commitment to Palestinian humanity and dignity. Beinart explained that Queen Esther of the Jews of Persia, through “a series of daring maneuvers” managed to turn the Persian King against an advisor named Haman who wanted to kill the Jews, thus saving the community. This is the story that’s generally celebrated at Purim.
But that’s not where the story ends, Beinart continued. “We tend to cut off these stories in our sacred texts at precisely the point that they might help us reckon with the Jewish capacity to be victimizers as opposed to victims.” The Persian King instead sided with the Jewish community, and the Book of Esther ends with Mordecai and his Jewish Kinsmen massacring 70,500 people from the advisor Haman’s community (Esther 9:16).
“Jews can be in many different roles, right? Not only the role of the oppressed, not only the role of the victim. I think there is a connection between what we don’t see and don’t reckon with at the end of the Book of Esther and what we refuse to see and reckon with so often in our organized communal space vis-à-vis Palestinians and vis-à-vis Gaza.”
Ways of Not Seeing
Omer asked Beinart to discuss chapter three of his book, where he debunks common talking points used to deflect criticism of Israel. Beinart noted that arguments about “Hamas’ use of human shields,” “the vote for Hamas in 2006,” and “Israel having no choice but to kill civilians in Gaza” served as emotional “defense mechanisms” for those defending the assault on Gaza. However, “[w]hen you’re fighting a guerrilla force that’s embedded in the civilian population, international law does not allow you to say, we think there’s some fighters in this building so we can destroy the apartment building or we can destroy the hospital,” Beinart emphasized. He noted that American revolutionaries, too, were a guerrilla force. “If you have the right to destroy an entire building because there were military people there then Hamas would be justified in blowing up apartment buildings all over Israel—Israel’s military headquarters is not in a remote location; it’s in downtown Tel Aviv surrounded by schools and other civilian infrastructure.” Every group that kills a lot of civilians uses the “human shields” excuse, he argued; Russia is one contemporary example in its invasion of Ukraine which has extensively bombed civilian infrastructure.
Idolatry and the State of Israel
Woodcut of Korach’s Rebellion by Hans Holbein, 1538. Rijksmuseum, Netherlands. Public Domain.
“[T]he magnificence of this people once lay in its belief in God—that is, in the way its trust and love of God far outweighed its fear of God. And now this people believes only in itself?” wrote Hannah Arendt in 1963.
Omer read this quote from Arendt cited in Beinart’s book to introduce a conversation on the final chapter, “Korach’s Children,” which warns of misinterpreting the Jewish concepts of chosenness and holiness. Beinart explained Israeli social critic Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s interpretation of Korach’s rebellion against Moses and Aaron. Per Leibowitz, chosenness means a set of obligations and responsibilities to the law, not impunity. Korach’s claim that holiness resided in the people signaled an idolatrous motif that must be challenged. The widespread belief in the inherent holiness and chosenness of the State of Israel is a form of Jewish exceptionalism, Beinart argued, where Israel is seen as self-justifying and not subject to the same moral standards applied to other states. Beinart notes in the book, “In Jewish tradition . . . states are not created in the image of God, human beings are. States are merely instruments” (100). At the event, Beinart concluded, the state’s “value is dependent on how good a job it does in protecting the lives of the people under its control, and if it radically fails in that effort, it should be rethought.”
Omer asked Beinart to speak further on Avodah Zarah, or idolatry. Drawing again on the work of Leibowitz, Beinart noted that the State of Israel can function as an idol when it becomes an unconditional object of worship, superseding fundamental Jewish values and the rights of Palestinians. He pointed out the phenomenon where support for the state has become a litmus test for being a Jew in good standing in some communities. “Idolatry is when you say Israel has an unconditional right to exist as a Jewish state with this particular political system, right? But the rights of Palestinians to exist . . . that is negotiable.”
“It’s the elevation of the state above the human being that makes this idolatry.”
Conclusion
Finally, Omer addressed critiques of Beinart’s book, specifically mentioning Chicago-based Rabbi Brant Rosen’s concern that while Beinart expertly dismantles blindly pro-Israel narratives, he doesn’t adequately reckon with genocide. Beinart responded that while he had largely avoided the term “genocide” in the book, partly due to its timing and a strategic decision to focus on the human impact in a way that might better resonate with his intended audience, it is a term he now uses more frequently. The conversation concluded with a sense of the urgent need for new narratives in the American Jewish community that grapple with the capacity for violence and that make human flourishing the litmus test for a state’s value, rather than putting states over people.
Beinart remarked: “I think the nightmare scenario . . . is really whether Israel can do in the 21st century what this country [the United States] did in the 19th century.”
A mural in Manila, the Philippines. Image via Flickr User Jonathan S. Igharas. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
There are many things to say about Atalia Omer’s Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding, a volume whose central thesis is that peacebuilding practices based on religion in postcolonial settings are not necessarily always empowering. I want to start, however, by saying that I appreciate the way the book problematizes the degree to which religion can be a vehicle of liberation. Omer does not discount the agentic potential of religion, but in my view she attends more to how religious agency is delimited. The use of religion in peacebuilding efforts, she reminds us, is no guarantee that decolonial justice will be attained. The use of religion in inter-organizational peacebuilding efforts—the “increased contact, collaboration on livelihood projects, and relationship building” they entail (139) as well as the “interreligious dialogue” they facilitate (185)—is both empowering and disempowering.
The use of religion is empowering in that it creates a “pathway for negotiating plurality or the possibility of coexistence amid or in the aftermath of violent intercommunal divisions, conditions of marginalization, and fatalistic despair” (3); enables the formation of “safe spaces for dialogue and interaction,” to reference an interviewee (14); makes it possible for the young and women to become “‘social cohesion and equal rights’” agents (99); opens the door for “grassroots empowerment” against religious extremism (174); makes it possible for people to “‘find[] the humanity of the other … [and] understand they are their own solution’,” to reference another interviewee (185); acknowledges “differences as empowering” (214); and can, to a degree, “restor[e] peaceful relations … and empower[] people to achieve minimal economic survival and communal sustainability” (224).
Yet, religious peacebuilding practices are also disempowering. They are disempowering because the business of creating harmony among parties in conflict has been coopted—if not hijacked—due to several different forces: geopolitical (the War on Terror) and geoeconomic (neoliberal globalization) agendas; the fact that communal belonging is primarily understood in terms of traditional religious identities, foreclosing the possibility for alternative interpretations, voices, and individual and social understandings to develop and play a role in breaking free of the neoliberal and War on Terror contexts under which they operate; because “problem-solving and resilience” (176) are “often appropriated and deployed as [] neoliberal mechanisms whereby marginalized communities” are left “to adapt to and persevere in precarious conditions” as well as “endure [the] further erosion of their humanity” (274); and because the “language of human rights” takes a back seat to economic and political interests (111). Instead of focusing on structures of oppression and their impact—i.e., geopolitical and geoeconomic contexts/trends and their effects on the lives of people—it makes individuals responsible for the personal and social circumstances in which they find themselves. Religious peacebuilding practices are similarly disempowering because they promote “a closed sociopolitical and religiocultural hermeneutics that ensures, rather than disrupts, the status quo” (74–76); because they “subordinate[] theological engagement to neoliberal rationality” and governance and in so doing produce “prophetic lite” orientations and trajectories (79); because they “bypass[] the orientalist association of Islam with violence” (201); because they disregard colonial histories; and ultimately because they encourage/enable androcentric, heteronormative, racial, and patriarchal understandings and practices.
Art Deco Floor Works in Iloilo City, Philippines. Image via Flickr User Shubert Cecil. CC BY-NC 2.0.
The focus on both the empowering and disempowering effects of religious peacebuilding practices is appealing for it speaks to the usefulness of a “both and” way of understanding, interpreting, and thinking about social reality. Such an approach is a hallmark of intersectional theorizing/methodology that takes us beyond “either or” ways of understanding, interpreting, and thinking about reality. Such an approach embraces complexity and it is a compelling part of the argument in the monograph. Before discussing this in more detail, I want to turn to some broader points and questions about the book concerning the agency of peacebuilders and practices of peacebuilding.
Agency and the Practice of Peacebuilding
Decolonizing Religion and Peace Building seems to suggest that the type of agency that one can expect from within the context of religious peacebuilding is a non-revolutionary religious agency, an agency with lowercase “a.” Peacebuilding practices based on religion cannot be oriented to move beyond geopolitical and geoeconomic conditions nor can they move us to overcome androcentric, heteronormative, racial, and patriarchal orders, although they do facilitate some, if “minor” changes. This, of course, raises a very important question: What is agency and what qualifies as agency? Can non-revolutionary religious agency (“a”) be transformed into revolutionary religious agency (“A”)? If so, how can this be accomplished? Relatedly, what might be the ethical responsibilities of religious actors in this type of transformation? How might they navigate the moral dilemmas they encounter as they move forward, in the “right” direction, towards religious agency with a capital “A”?
Another question that comes to mind as it pertains to the issue of agency, is: how does one get from religion-based peacebuilding practices that maintain existent orders of domination to peacebuilding practices that challenge and potentially transcend orders of domination? In the book’s last chapter, one finds an answer to this question. First, we are told that eliciting Indigenous epistemologies is not sufficient since “what is Indigenous is not necessarily feminist or decolonial” (294). Fair enough. Relying on decolonial and other critical thinkers, critical pedagogy, epistemological disobedience and resistance, critical border thinking, hermeneutical/theological resistance/disobedience, Indigenous criticality, and double critique are identified as other varied instruments of consciousness/epistemological liberation/transformation. Yet, this answer still raises two more questions: (1) How does one get to a place where one can embrace such critical instruments of appraisal/practice?, and (2) Under what circumstances is this a real possibility? It is one thing to identify what can facilitate transcendence or epistemological openings. Identifying how, by what means, and under what contexts one arrives at critical instruments of liberation is altogether a different task. It would be helpful for the author to illuminate how, by what means, and under what circumstances can one get a hold of such instruments?
How does one get from religion-based peacebuilding practices that maintain existent orders of domination to peacebuilding practices that challenge and potentially transcend orders of domination?
To be more specific, I am wondering about the practical implications of Omer’s work. I do think that what she has provided readers with is significant because it forces us to reconsider mainstream assumptions about the usefulness of religion when it comes to peacebuilding practices that operate in geoeconomic and geopolitical contexts inimical to their revolutionary potential. The author also conveys a complex that takes issue with the limitations of decolonial approaches: Omer states, “Decolonial critics tend to interpret religion reductively as an instrument of empire and neocolonialism…. [They] see only the patterns of disempowerment” (258). Is the use of religion in peacebuilding practices necessarily a good thing? Omer’s answer to this question is, of course, “it is not a simple answer, an ‘either or answer,’ but a ‘yes and no’ answer, an answer that embraces complexity, a ‘both and’ answer.” Omer does not side with religiocrats, since they tend to blindly overemphasize the empowering effects of religion, given their utilitarian, realpolitik, if not neoliberal orientations, and she does not side with decolonial critics either, given their tendency to focus on disempowerment. Omer seems to be in between and suggests a new horizon: “Decoloniality, along with emancipatory imaginations, points to double critique, border thinking, and interculturality as pathways” (268). Yet, one is still left wondering what might this look like on the ground. What are the practical implications of getting to and developing “pathways”?
Theoretical Questions: Intersectionality and Pragmatism
On Intersectionality
Intersectionality privileges the perspective of the marginalized. This is a point, it seems, that is underexamined in the book. Renown intersectional scholar Patricia Hill Collins privileges the perspective of the marginalized with one significant term, the “outsider-within”—a term associated with DuBois’s concepts of the “veil” and “double consciousness” as well as Dorothy Smith’s “bifurcated consciousness”—and a term that opens the door to understanding processes of change, precisely because this is the intended goal of intersectionality as a critical theory. Collins similarly calls attention to the power of self-definition for the marginalized and the processes associated with it. Self-definition and the outsider-within, as ways of understanding and reflecting on social reality in alternate ways, if not otherwise, can provide insight into the nature of oppression and can potentially function as platforms for crafting ways out of oppression. Transversal politics, a type of coalitional politics that is focused on interdependent group histories, intra-group dynamics, and “both and” thinking, is another key concept in her tool bag. Although Omer employs different terminology, she seems to address this type of politics in the last chapter. But I wonder about the two other intersectional terms. Who is/are the outsider-within(ers) in this account, but more importantly in what kind of self-definition processes does/do she/they find(s) herself/themselves and how might these play a role in religious agency with capital “A”? Intersectional theorizing places the marginalized and their subaltern understandings at the center of knowledge production, the critical assessment of social reality, and social transformation efforts. How would such a focus and attendant concepts inform/advance our understanding of religious agency?
On Challenging Pragmatism
I agree with Omer’s appraisal that doing religion is not enough, an insight specifically develop in chapter 3, which is appropriately entitled, “Doing Religion.” “Doing religion,” as she states, “simply answers the questions of what works, why it works, and how we can make it work more effectively.” When doing is delimited to practical approaches and solutions within a neoliberal framework of operation this does nothing to challenge/interrogate, as Omer rightly puts it, “the broader landscape of religion, development, and peacebuilding,” a necessary step if one is to move in the right direction (87). It is clear that a significant component of her criticism is how the absence/lack of integration of the broader context in peacebuilding practices/epistemology delimits peacebuilding practice itself. Yet, while I agree with this line of thinking, I am wondering if the author’s position aims to challenge pragmatism, a philosophical tradition that turns to thought and language—thinking and interpreting processes, to be more precise—to make sense of how we “practically”/“pragmatically” navigate and solve problems in our social worlds. The pragmatic maxim, moreover, suggests that our conception of reality is ultimately based on what is experientially useful. In sociology, my mother discipline, pragmaticism imparts the following 4 lessons to symbolic interactionism, a major research area in the discipline:
“true reality does not exist ‘out there’ in the real world; it ‘is actively created as we act in and toward the world’ …”
“people remember and base their knowledge of the world on what has proved useful to them. They are likely to alter what no longer ‘works.’”
“people define the social and physical ‘objects’ that they encounter in the world according to their use for them.”
“if we want to understand actors, we must base that understanding on what people actually do in the world” (332–33).
None of these lessons get at broader geopolitical and geoeconomic contexts; they are focused on the immediacy/imperatives of localized social situations. To point to the absence of broader contexts in peacebuilding practices, as Omer does, makes sense since it would tell us something about the thought-based and language-based practical orientations that potentially take place in localized social situations. What would the author name this lack, then? What is it that pragmatism—if not peacebuilding practices—is missing/lacking in their interpretations of reality? The term that comes to mind for me is “hermeneutic suspicion,” a central feature of any critical theory. In Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, Paul Ricoeur defines a hermeneutics of suspicion as “interpretation as exercise of suspicion,” further noting that it is defiance of faith, even “faith that has undergone criticism, postcritical faith;” and that it fundamentally stands for “the death of idols” (32, 28, 275). Ultimately, a hermeneutics of suspicion is an attempt at distancing oneself from taken-for-granted/“natural” meanings or the “objective validity” commonly attributed to “things”—it entails dispossessing of the immediacy, naiveté acceptance, and/or prejudices of the given—in order to have a more “accurate,” if not “freer,” meaning/understanding of human situations/consciousness.
Omer elaborates on “hermeneutic disobedience” and “hermeneutic resistance,” although she does not exactly connect these terms to the “doing” dilemma she identifies. In addition, they do not seem to fit. Omer emphasizes “hermeneutic closure,” which does not describe an orientation towards an object (e.g., broader contexts) but rather describes the problem associated with an object. Regardless, why not “hermeneutic suspicion”? If “hermeneutic disobedience” and/ or “hermeneutic resistance,” what is/are the difference(s) between these terms vis-à-vis “hermeneutic suspicion”?
All in all, Decolonizing Religion and Peace Building provides us with significant critical assessments of religious peace building practices. It compels us to consider, via intersectional, decolonial, and other critical lenses, the limitations of religious peacebuilding practices in postcolonial settings. Omer’s use of the intersectional approach, while useful, could have been broader. Her position on “doing religion”—in my estimation a significant step in peacebuilding scholarship—could have benefitted from a more precise conceptual exploration, if not more philosophical probing. The latter two points are not detractions. Rather, they stand as an invitation for Omer to open the door to new landscapes of understanding. Caveats aside, readers will recognize the book as a stimulating and crucial contribution.
Jean-Pierre Reed is Professor of Sociology, Africana Studies, and Philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. A qualitative sociologist by training, his scholarship lies in theoretically driven, historically informed, and empirically grounded analyses of socio-political processes. He specializes in the sociology of revolutions/social movements, social theory, and the role of religion and emotions in revolutions/political contention. He is author of Sandinista Narratives: Religion, Sandinismo, and Emotions in the Making of the Nicaraguan Insurrection and Revolution (Lexington Books, 2020) and co-editor of Religion in Rebellions, Revolutions, and Social Movements (Routledge, 2022). Presently, he is working to complete Social Movements and Positive Emotions: Advancing Theory through Latin American Cases (Routledge) with Karina Navarro and Rodrigo A. Asún (Universidad de Chile).
William Cavanaugh (WC): Yaacov, your book, To Be a Jewish State: Zionism as the New Judaism, could hardly be more timely. You examine some of the tensions between Judaism and the state of Israel at a time when there is a tendency to conflate antisemitism with criticism of Israel, and you offer more general lessons on nationalism at a time when it is resurgent. Can you summarize the argument of your book?
Yaacov Yadgar (YY): Reading your work, 
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
