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Pope Francis, Liberalism, and a New Theology of Poverty


The tomb of Pope Francis in Santa Maria Maggiore. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Pope Francis will undoubtedly be remembered as a reformer of the Catholic Church. He was often perceived as radical, even revolutionary in his approach to changing contemporary Catholicism. Yet it was precisely the meaning of reform from the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) that has divided papal commentators, especially Catholics on both sides of the political spectrum. In the global North the political barometer often used for measuring Francis’s reform legacy was how well he adhered to, or deviated from, an ideal of progressive liberalism. This ideological and partisan political standard has confused and obscured much more than it has clarified and explained the reform papacy of Francis. Its continued usage will only perplex commentators trying to understand yet another pope from the Americas, Leo XIV, who is evidently pursuing the reform program of his predecessor, though perhaps in a different style.

The late pontiff had an approval rating in the US that apparently made President Donald Trump envious of the papal office. But he also had vehement critics among conservatives and progressives. Notably, both sides of the “culture wars” were in agreement that Francis had a failed liberal papacy. Francis’s opponents on the Left took his reform efforts to be, at best, ineffectual and half-hearted. The papacy ultimately failed to follow through and implement the doctrinal changes, usually related to sex and gender, demanded of a modern, more liberal Catholicism. On the Right, his papacy was viewed by some in the worst possible terms as disorderly, disastrous, and even diabolical. It was a futile attempt at liberal subterfuge against an unchanging faith and morality that younger traditional followers will find vindicated with a future conservative pope. As a Jesuit trained in the Spiritual Exercises, Francis did not conform to a progressive liberal ideal for Church reform but instead applied the spiritual standard of Jesus’s poverty. Despite the mixed reactions to Francis’s effort to reform the papacy in the example of its divine founder, his theology of poverty opened new pathways for Christian social and political engagement.

Contextualizing Francis’s Theology of Poverty

Pope Francis was not a liberal. Such a claim is a categorical error that ignores his Latin American social and pastoral background. One event that helps situate Francis’s theological inheritance from the global South happened just before his papal election, which he mentioned in his Spanish language memoir of Pope Benedict XVI, El Sucesor (2024). On March 13, 2013 during lunchtime at the Conclave that would elect Francis, a group of European cardinals asked then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio about the politics of liberation theology in Latin America and “the supposed political deviation of that theology” (54). For these European cardinals the political deviation was not progressive liberalism, but revolutionary Marxism. Bergoglio did not relate all he said to the cardinals, but his response would have drawn on his familiarity with Argentina’s distinctive theology committed to the integral liberation of poor communities through an analysis of the cultural history of a people instead of a Marxist social analysis of class.

The liberation of the people (along with their wisdom traditions) from both a domestic and foreign “enlightened” liberal culture, which prizes instrumental rationality and unrestricted wealth accumulation, was a rallying cry across the Patria Grande in the twentieth century. After the Second Vatican Council and Pope Paul VI’s social encyclical, Populorum progressio (1967), many Catholic leaders believed the Church could not remain silent on a continent longing for hope amid drastic social inequality. In this context of widespread poverty, Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez made a novel claim in A Theology of Liberation that “participation in the process of liberation is an obligatory and privileged locus for Christian life and reflection” (46). To a certain extent, liberation theology, like the “new political theology” of Johann Baptist Metz in Europe, was a form of Christian spiritual resistance to modern bourgeois liberalism with its privatization of religion, techno-scientific rationality, and sanctification of private property.

In Argentina, Paul VI’s opposition to the “international imperialism of money” and “private ownership of the means of production as an absolute right” inspired the Movement of Third World Priests, which faced deadly repercussions for its actions under the anticommunist military dictatorship (para. 26). The political assassinations of high-profile clerics associated with the nonviolent revolutionary movement in the 1970s during the “Dirty War” included Fr. Carlos Mugica and Bishop Enrique Angelelli, both of whom shared the cause of the working poor and a commitment to the socialization of property in urban and rural settings. Two Argentine priests who also belonged to the movement yet outlived it, Lucio Gera and Rafael Tello, were the architects of the pastoral ministry on the streets of Buenos Aires that became the basis of a people’s theology (teología del pueblo). Gera and Gutiérrez had a theological friendship that focused on prioritizing the poor. Their friendship lasted nearly a half century. It began at a small gathering of theologians at Petrópolis in 1964 and crystalized at the Latin American meeting of Catholic Bishops at Medellín in 1968, where poverty as institutionalized violence was explicitly addressed. Their great friendship even endured the official exclusion of Gutiérrez by conservative churchmen from the Puebla meeting in 1979, though that did not stop the new language of the preferential option for the poor from being included in the final document.

Cardinal-Archbishop Bergoglio’s leadership in Buenos Aires during the 2000s imbibed the teología popular y pastoral of Gera and Tello. It amplified the lived faith of the poor on the social peripheries and their struggle to flourish with dignity. Numerous priests under Bergoglio’s care had been taught by them, especially Gera who served as Dean of Faculty of Theology at the city’s Pontifical University. Bergoglio frequently turned to the more affective sensus fidei (an instinctual sense of faith through love) known among God’s beloved poor, themselves agents of history, to evangelize and bring the hope of Jesus Christ to broader secular society. When he oversaw the drafting of the Latin American Bishop’s final document at the Aparecida meeting in 2007, the term “people’s mysticism” (mística popular) was used to convey the inseparability of traditional popular piety and progressive social justice, thus unsettling conventional political categorizations (no. 262). A main target of the Aparecida document was a neocolonial culture of liberal individualism, which detaches persons from communities and traditions of meaning in the quest for personal self-advancement and is indifferent to the common good (no. 46). This self-serving uniformity flattens cultural diversity, especially among poorer and historically dispossessed communities, such as Afro-Americans and Indigenous peoples in Latin America. For this reason, the document stated the need for the “decolonizing of minds and knowledge, to recover historical memory” of cultures systematically repressed and excluded (no. 96).

Remembering the Poor as Pope

Whatever transpired at the 2013 conclave over lunch must have assuaged any lingering political concerns about Bergoglio and liberation theology since he was elected pope later that evening after only five votes. Once he had more than the required two-thirds votes, his longtime friend from Brazil, the late Cardinal Cláudio Hummes, embraced him, saying, “Do not forget the poor” (No te olvides de los pobres). Francis’s papacy immediately began with a spiritual decision to choose the mendicant lover of poverty, peace, and creation from medieval Assisi as his namesake. He dropped the fancier papal attire and lived at the humble guesthouse of Casa Santa Marta instead of the Apostolic Palace. His papacy ended in a simple wooden casket at Santa Maria Maggiore, a Roman papal basilica outside the Vatican, after a corporal work of mercy donating €200K of his personal money to a juvenile prison. Francis was by all means a pastor to the world’s poor and excluded, not a sovereign prince for a new gilded age.

Although there has been some attention to the question of whether Pope Francis was a proponent of liberation theology, it is clear that he was an unqualified advocate for a theology of poverty, itself based on St. Paul’s teaching about “the mystery of Christ who lowered himself, impoverished himself, to enrich us” (2 Corinthians 8:9).  Liberal cultures indeed contain good and humane values that seek to minimize material poverty, lift up the poor, and aid the needy with charitable giving and philanthropy. However, Francis’s theological meditations go much further than bourgeois moral ideals: Christian poverty, a spiritual and voluntary act, is about giving what is one’s own and not merely from one’s excess. To choose poverty for the sake of enrichment because Jesus himself was poor exposes what no liberal ideology based on luxury or middle-class comforts would ever endorse. Pope Francis’s entire pastoral ministry and teachings make this preferential option for the poor the spiritual nucleus for converting the Church. The kind of reform Francis had in mind was formulated by ressourcement theologians of Vatican II, like Yves Congar, OP, and Henri de Lubac, SJ, whom Francis occasionally cited in his speeches and writings.

Francis was by all means a pastor to the world’s poor and excluded, not a sovereign prince for a new gilded age.

Francis’s first trip outside Rome was to the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, where he brought to the world’s attention the poverty of stateless migrants and refugees from North Africa. In the twentieth century, the Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt referred to such persons as “superfluous” in her monumental work that deserves urgent re-reading today, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt’s exhilarating diagnosis of the bourgeois origins of modern tribal and racial ideology challenged her readers to recognize “the existence of a right to have rights” despite the liquidating effects of imperialism and later Nazism and Stalinism (296). Francis often called contemporary migrants “throwaways” (descartados) of a globalized economy of exclusion and indifference, or displaced victims of a piecemeal Third World War. Neoliberalism, the technocratic paradigm, and the idolatry of money were, for Francis, twenty-first century threats not only to social well-being, but also to political stability and ecological sustainability.

The Annual World Day of the Poor created by Francis during the 2016 Jubilee Year of Mercy was a deliberate effort to recognize the dignity and worth of “socially excluded people.” It was one among numerous examples from his pastoral leadership going back to his Anti-Human Trafficking Masses in Buenos Aires. God chooses the poor by giving them a name. For example, the angel of the Lord told Joseph that Mary, his betrothed, would give birth to “God with us” (Emmanuel) in the flesh of an infant, named Jesus, born naked and poor. Pope Francis reminded listeners that the homeless man Lazarus, from Jesus’s Gospel parable, had a name at the divine judgment, whereas the rich miser begging Abraham for mercy after death did not (Lk 16:19–31). There is no greater recognition of social and political belonging, no greater dignity, than receiving a name directly from the Creator who loves and wills our existence. On the Fifth Annual World Day of the Poor, Francis declared that poor persons are icons of the flesh, “a sacrament of Christ” who “represent his person and point to him” (para. 3).

The concrete faces of the poor and excluded, not unlike Emmanuel Levinas’s biblically and Talmudically inflected phenomenology, communicate divine transcendence. Riffing on Arendt, I would often hear Gutiérrez say later in his career that “the poor are those who do not have the right to have rights.” In Francis’s final autobiography, Hope, coinciding with the Jubilee Year and his death, Francis returned to the characteristic theme of his reform papacy: “The Church’s preferential option toward the poor must also bring us to know and appreciate their cultural way of living the Gospel… When, as members of the Church, we get close to the poor, we discover—beyond the enormous difficulties of life—a transcendent sense of life” (174).

Against both political liberalism and economic neoliberalism, Francis identified popular piety in the streets and the social function of property as antidotes to the privatization of religion and the new tyranny of money.

The way of poverty, as lived by the earliest followers of Jesus, was the stubborn anchor and controversial standard of Francis’s reform papacy devoted to changing the worldly culture of modern Catholicism in the West, from the Vatican to the parish. Francis sought to clean house, so to speak, by introducing a new culture of apostolic poverty at the Roman Curia, which is the administrative center of the Holy See at the Vatican. This alternative logic (or way of thinking) had greater and lesser successes, though it was largely misunderstood by political commentators. Whether reducing the annual salaries of the cardinals, or making “simplicity of life and love for the poor” a necessary job requirement for working in the Curia, Francis was determined to institutionalize proximity to the poor as the authentic criterion of Christian discipleship and unity. In his first address to the media after the 2013 conclave, he told the audience, “How I would like a Church which is poor and for the poor!” If this spiritual standard of apostolic poverty did not afford the late pontiff a ready-made solution for rectifying the worldwide clergy sex abuse crisis, straightening out Vatican finance, or strengthening women’s participation in the Curia and across the life of the Catholic Church, at least it broke open the possibility for sincere structural reforms centered on love for the poor and listening to the excluded without the traps of worldliness and clericalism.

Francis’s blueprint for radical Church reform under an “apostolic” framework was his first letter, The Joy of the Gospel (2013), which expressed his desire for a Church of and for the poor (para. 198). He also exhorted “each individual Christian and every community… to be an instrument of God for the liberation and promotion of the poor, and for enabling them to be fully part of society” (para. 187). This apostolic exhortation, which Pope Leo XIV resolutely reaffirmed in his first speech to the cardinals, shows just how mistaken the label of liberalism is for understanding Francis. Against both political liberalism and economic neoliberalism, Francis identified popular piety in the streets and the social function of property as antidotes to the privatization of religion and the new tyranny of money. Francis even referred to popular piety as a locus theologicus (or source) for gaining wisdom about God (para. 126). He stressed the image of the polyhedron to reflect a unity in diversity instead of a neocolonial culture of liberal individualism. All these themes received more theological explanation in his two social encyclicals on integral ecology (Laudato si’) and social friendship (Fratelli tutti).

Decolonizing Ecology with Indigenous Knowledge

In Francis’s reflection on the Amazon synod, Querida Amazonia (2019), he showed the decolonial aspects of his thinking through his constructive dialogue with Indigenous cultures of the region. On the one hand, he claimed—in an unprecedented way among popes—that the Amazonian bioregion is itself a theological locus where believers can encounter the living God (para. 57). On the other hand, he praised the culture of material simplicity among Indigenous Amazonians who uniquely know how to live well (buen vivir), because “God’s little gifts” matter more than “accumulating great possessions,” and ecological care for creation is privileged over needless destruction of things (para. 71). What may appear as living in poverty to a bourgeois standard is considered great wealth when harmony between family, community, and Pachamama (Mother Earth) are preserved. This alternative way of thinking from Indigenous communities can contribute toward an integral ecology not focused on economic progress, but sustainable living and intergenerational solidarity to better care for our common home. Francis’s letter to the Amazon also showed the influence of the Argentine cultural anthropologist and philosopher Rodolfo Kusch, from whom Francis learned the mythical and organic sense of a people rather than a logically abstract concept. In the Introduction to the English translation Kusch’s Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América, Walter Mignolo makes the important point about Kusch’s contribution to decolonial thinking and “awareness of immigrant consciousness.”

Conclusion

With nearly half of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics inhabiting the Americas, it is not surprising to see the first pope from this side of the Atlantic followed by a US-born pope indebted to a Latin American pastoral approach learned in Peru. The observation of Brazilian Jesuit Henrique de Lima Vaz in 1968 that the Latin American church was shifting from a projection of Europe to a source for global Catholicism has now been validated by history and, in the eyes of the faithful, the Holy Spirit. That Pope Francis brought a theology of poverty from his home continent to reform the Church, beginning with the Curia, and to address the new challenges to today, is a legacy sure to endure in the twenty-first century with Leo XIV.

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David Lantigua
David Lantigua is Associate Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame where he is Co-Director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism. He is author of Infidels and Empires in a New World Order: Early Modern Spanish Contributions to International Legal Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and co-editor with Lawrence Clayton of Bartolomé de las Casas and the Defense of Amerindian Rights: A Brief History with Documents (University of Alabama Press, 2020). His current book manuscript examines the Latin American theological and cultural dimensions of Pope Francis's social thought and its implications for global Catholicism in the twenty-first century.
Global Currents article

Cracks in the Wall: Pope Francis and Palestine

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Pope Francis touches the wall that divides Israel from the West Bank, on his way to celebrate a mass in Manger Square next to the Church of the Nativity, believed by many to be the birthplace of Jesus Christ, in the West Bank town of Bethlehem, Sunday, May 25, 2014. /GALAZKA_1405.01/Credit:Osservatore Romano-Pool/SIPA/1405251417 (Sipa via AP Images).

In 2014, Pope Francis’s unscheduled stop at the Israeli apartheid wall in Bethlehem, adjacent to “Free Palestine” graffiti, marked a pivotal moment in his papacy. This act came to symbolize his profound engagement with the plight of the Palestinian people, an engagement that gained renewed urgency with the ongoing Nakba of the Palestinian people.

With his passing, and in the context of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, many Palestinians as well as marginalized communities globally mourn the loss of a crucial spiritual advocate and ally. Pope Francis’s legacy extends beyond Palestine; it embodies compassion to all, resistance to Eurocentric power structures, and unwavering solidarity with the oppressed. As global upheavals, particularly in Palestine, persist, it is imperative to reflect on and perpetuate his legacy to foster a more just and decolonized future. This reflection on Pope Francis’s legacy remains critical even as the bombs fall and starvation continues, and there is no accountability for those who have committed and continue to commit these crimes.

The Visibility of Palestinians

Despite the live-streamed genocide in Gaza and the intensification of the occupation and the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, Palestinian suffering has been normalized. Following decades of settler colonialism and constant dehumanization, Palestinians have been left invisible, their pain muted, and their lives disregarded. Decolonial thinker Frantz Fanon observed how the colonized are reduced to an “animal existence,” stripped of dignity in ways that make their suffering not only bearable to the oppressor but structurally permissible. In this sense, Israel’s siege on Gaza and erection of the apartheid wall are not just physical barriers, but instruments designed to erase Palestinian humanity.

The erasure of Palestinians thus does not occur only through their physical annihilation by bombs and starvation tactics. It also happens through the complicity of individuals and institutions that maintain or accommodate the colonial status quo, a complicity that fits the definition of what Hannah Arendt termed the “banality of evil.” Yet in this context of systemic invisibility, Pope Francis emerged as a rare global voice who, to a meaningful degree, resisted this erasure and affirmed Palestinian humanity on the world stage.

Israel’s siege on Gaza and erection of the Apartheid Wall are not just physical barriers, but instruments designed to erase Palestinian humanity.

His 2014 pilgrimage to the Holy Land was not a routine diplomatic visit. It was a journey marked by empathy and moral clarity, where he was attentive to the literal and symbolic walls that structure Palestinian life—walls that define political, social, economic, and ethnic boundaries. Pope Francis did not repeat sanitized, Eurocentric platitudes; instead, he aligned himself with the marginalized. His intentional stop at the Apartheid Wall created a crack in the dominant narrative that Palestinians are a violent mass that are to be feared and therefore need to be controlled. Instead, it reflected the reality that they are a people yearning to live with dignity in their homeland despite the brutal grip of occupation.

For many Palestinians, this unscheduled and spontaneous stop followed by prayer was an unfamiliar but deeply affirming experience: the feeling of being seen. It was reminiscent of Christ’s healing of the haemorrhaging woman (Mark 9:25–34). In this story, Jesus defies social taboos when he stops and restores humanity to a woman cast aside by the world.

In his final years, even as illness overtook him, Pope Francis continued to offer radical visibility to Palestinian suffering. His statement—echoing the conclusions of legal and human rights experts—that the atrocities in Gaza bear the hallmarks of genocide was a powerful and necessary intervention. Pope Francis’s call for a thorough investigation shattered the dangerous complicity of silence among world leaders, including within the Vatican itself. Beyond statements, he conducted daily phone calls with members of the Holy Family Church in Gaza, embodying a form of solidarity that was not abstract but grounded in direct pastoral solicitude.

Through both his public declarations and private acts, Pope Francis offered a holistic witness to Palestinian humanity. He may not have had the power to halt the genocide, but through his papacy—from the 2014 stopping at the Apartheid Wall to his final sermon in 2025 calling for a ceasefire—he made the suffering of Palestinians visible in a world led by those who are determined to look away.

Sacredness and Institutional Solidarity

For many of those who stand in solidarity with the Palestinians’ cause, and aim to protect their lives, Pope Francis has been an ally. His role as the spiritual father of the Catholic world, one that includes Palestinian Christians, imbued his stop at the Apartheid Wall in 2014 with profound spiritual significance. That act was not merely symbolic, political, or diplomatic, it was a liturgical gesture of resistance, a sacred disruption of the empire. In placing his head against the wall and praying, Pope Francis enacted a theology of incarnation and solidarity, embodying the Church’s preferential option for the oppressed. His stillness proclaimed loud and clear what the Church must never overlook: that God’s preferential option is always for the oppressed. To truly follow Christ is to draw near to the wounds of those who are overlooked in the world. In this way, the wall becomes a holy altar for lament.

Through that gesture, Pope Francis reorients the spiritual and prophetic imagination of the Church. He names Palestinian suffering as not only a human rights issue but also a reality of people crucified, echoing the suffering Christ. Many Palestinians, confronting the threat of their imminent annihilation, echo Christ’s plea in Gethsemane: “Let this cup pass.” In contrast to the silence preferred by the empires of the world and those who choose to remain asleep, just as the disciples did in the garden, Pope Francis makes visible what power seeks to erase, stirring conscience where indifference prevails. In this way, stopping and praying at the wall, as well as his daily calls to the Holy Family parish community in Gaza became a faithful act of solidarity.  Such sacred acts pointed to God’s presence among the poor, dispossessed, and the oppressed. Pope Francis is also demanding a divine act for justice in the face of structural sin.

In placing his head against the wall and praying, Pope Francis enacted a theology of incarnation and solidarity, embodying the Church’s preferential option for the oppressed.

Sacredness and religious expression are often organized and mediated through institutions that can both constrain and amplify spiritual and moral witness. Indeed, many of today’s most potent prophetic voices regarding Palestine have emerged from outside institutional walls, even as powerful institutions have actively attempted to suppress the global solidarity movement for Palestine. Yet Pope Francis, through his pastoral approach, represents a prophetic voice from within an institution often perceived by Palestinians as complicit in their colonization.

The affirmation of Palestinian humanity, enacted both through acknowledging their suffering and validating their political aspirations, powerfully demonstrates that even amidst the historical failures of many Christian institutions concerning Gaza and Palestine, work needs to be done inside and around these spaces. These voices remind us that while institutions may often be slow to act, they remain vital spaces where moral authority is contested and redefined. It is crucial to recognize prophetic allies within institutions. Institutional comrades matter profoundly because they possess the capacity to shape narratives, mobilize resources, and influence global norms, especially when it comes to audiences that the pro-Palestinian camp may not have access to.

Resisting Eurocentricity

Pope Francis’s witness to the humanity of Palestinians and their aspirations for freedom stands as a powerful moral and theological statement. Combined with his broader commitment to the poor and oppressed and his identity as a leader from the Global South, Pope Francis’s witness establishes a legacy that positions Palestinians as a matter of prophetic concern within the Vatican. His stance also challenges the Eurocentric discourses and attitudes that have long shaped Christian engagement with the question of Israel and Palestine. This is especially significant in light of post–Vatican II Jewish-Christian dialogue, which often excludes Palestinian Christians and remains silent in the face of settler colonialism and genocide.

Beyond this exclusion, the crimes of the Holocaust and European antisemitism have rightly produced a deep sense of guilt among western Christians, particularly theologians. However, this guilt has become a theological and moral stumbling block, leading many to idolize Jewish suffering while ignoring or denying the suffering of Palestinians. As a result, Jewish-Christian dialogue has too often become a protected space for Zionist assumptions rather than a forum for honest theological and ethical engagement with colonialism in all its forms.

Institutional comrades matter profoundly because they possess the capacity to shape narratives, mobilize resources, and influence global norms, especially when it comes to audiences that the pro-Palestinian camp may not have access to.

Pope Francis, through his solidarity with Palestinians, confronts the limitations of western Jewish-Christian dialogue and calls the Church to reflect on its moral and theological failures. This challenge is both necessary and urgent, offering a path toward a more holistic commitment to the protection and liberation of Palestinian lives, both Muslim and Christian, alongside Jewish lives, whether Israeli or international, without denying or excluding the suffering of any.

From Intuition to Strategic Action

For Palestinians, especially Palestinian Christians, Pope Francis’s legacy is a call to believe that even within ancient institutions and hegemonies, cracks can form, light can enter, and solidarity can emerge. Undoubtedly, Pope Francis’s legacy suggests a new path that must be taken forward. His intuition to stop at the Apartheid Wall and engage with the Holy Family parish in Gaza needs to evolve into a concrete stance and strategic action that opposes discrimination, occupation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. In other words, it is not enough to simply acknowledge the situation; the available resources must be used to dismantle the wall and stop the atrocities in Gaza. If we do not transform Pope Francis’s legacy into robust change, we risk failing to fully realize the vision it embodies.

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John Munayer
John Munayer is a Palestinian theologian from Jerusalem and holds degrees from King’s College London, the University of Edinburgh, and VU University Amsterdam. John is currently involved in interreligious activism and the founder and editor of the Journal of Palestinian Christianity at the Bethlehem Bible College. He is also a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh, researching the political theology of the Palestinian laity in relation to the Holy Fire ceremony. Together with his brother, Samuel, they co-authored the book: The Cross and the Olive Tree: Cultivating Palestinian Theology amid Gaza (Orbis, 2025). 
Samuel Munayer
Samuel Munayer is a Palestinian theologian from Jerusalem and holds degrees from Durham University and Exeter University. Samuel works as an advocacy and access officer for a humanitarian organization that works in Gaza and the West Bank. He recently co-authored with John the article entitled, “Decolonising Palestinian Liberation Theology: New Methods, Sources, and Voices,” and their new book The Cross and the Olive Tree: Cultivating Palestinian Theology amid Gaza (Orbis, 2025). 
Global Currents article
Scott Appleby
Scott Appleby is the Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Global Affairs in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. He joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1994. The author or editor of fifteen books on modern religion and conflict, he currently serves as the interim director of the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion.

Previously Appleby served as the Marilyn Keough Dean of the Keough School (2014-2024), as the John M. Regan Director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies (2000-2014), and as the director of Notre Dame's Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism (1994-2002). In 2010 Appleby founded Contending Modernities, a multidisciplinary study of religions and secularisms in interaction. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, he holds the Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1985) and is the recipient of five honorary doctorates.
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Zohran Mamdani and Strategic Islamophobia


Zohran Mamdani at the Resist Fascism Rally in Bryant Park, New York City on Oct 27th, 2024. Via Wikimedia Commons.

On June 24, 2025, Zohran Mamdani won the most votes of any candidate in NYC primary history for the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City. Mamdani ran a confident, creative,  and populist campaign, wherein he was refreshingly plainspoken about his democratic socialist commitments, his unwavering focus on the working class, his unequivocal support for the equality and dignity of the Palestinian people, and his focus on New York City alone.

Mamdani’s message clearly resonated with New York City voters, who delivered him a stunning victory across all demographics. Voters under 50 favored him by a 2:1 margin. He won the Asian American vote by 15 points. He won the White vote by 5 points. He won the Hispanic/Latino vote by 5 points. Overall, he won 56% of the vote over Cuomo, the favorite’s, 44%. Mamdani also won a significant share of the American Jewish vote (20%), and was cross endorsed by Brad Lander, New York City’s Controller and the highest ranking Jewish politician in New York.

Though New York City can get a bad rap in the rest of the United States, those of us who live here know that there is a version of it that is a beautiful and successful social experiment. New York City does not have a majority ethnic or religious population, but is instead made up of a series of pluralities. In the face of this incredible diversity, everyone gets along rather well. At New York City’s best, the ethos is not so much “live and let live” as it is “we are all in this together.” This is the heart of New York City—perhaps not appreciable from the outside—but a core that was manifested in the results of this election.

Crusader Logic

Despite this inspiring on the ground reality, since his election, we have seen a wider Islamophobic backlash to Mamdani’s win that exposes deeply entrenched media and elite narratives, as well as forms of social control that are threatened by his ascendancy and what it might represent. Simply put, his election unearthed a Crusader logic that exists under the surface of a western civilization that sees itself as defined against “Islam” and Muslims. This logic was repackaged from its medieval origins in the twentieth century through an ideology most famously articulated by Samuel Huntington in his “Clash of Civilization” thesis, which argues that “Islam has bloody borders,” and that while the world temporarily was occupied by a bilateral struggle between Communism and Capitalism, once Capitalism “won,” the deeper structure of world enmity became, once again, Islam vs. Christendom. In the United States and Europe, particularly after the creation of the State of Israel by combined Zionist and European powers after the Holocaust, the idea of Christendom was amended, and a new concept called the “Judeo-Christian” was born, wherein European Jews joined with Christians in the old, Crusader-era struggle (ironies here, of course, abound) as long as, the deal implicitly goes, European Jews would stand on the front lines of the confrontation with “Islam.”  It is also worth noting that there is a version of this conception of a clash of civilizations that is mirrored in the Muslim-majority world, though with slightly different contours. In any case, it is an inherently base and simplistic way of thinking, but one that nonetheless inspires fear, irrationality, and suspicion.

This substructure is of course not the only one animating western Civilization and has been admirably challenged through the tradition of liberalism, with its concepts of equal human rights and citizenship. But liberalism itself is often grafted onto this older Clash of Civilizations/Crusader mentality, which largely explains, in my view, “liberal Islamophobia.” In this version of Islamophobia, Muslims are assumed incapable of respecting liberal values that uphold difference and dissent. This might all sound too weighty a historical buttress for the election of one young Assemblyman as the Democratic nominee for mayor in New York City, but the extremity of the rhetoric against him suggests otherwise. His election has been described as an “invasion.” A Congressman who tweeted that Palestinians should “eat rockets” with the hashtags #BombsAway and #StarveAway, and who told one of his Palestinian constituents “go blow yourself up,” declared that Mamdani would install a “caliphate” in New York City. Far-right activists declared him a “jihadist Muslim,” and a Republican representative wrote a letter to the Department of Justice calling for Mamdani’s citizenship to be revoked and for him to be deported. A partner in a prominent Silicon Valley firm declared that Mamdani, “comes from a culture that lies,” and a Senator from New York falsely claimed Mamdani had “made references to Global Jihad.”

The Islamophobic Backlash

To explain this vociferous response to Mamdani’s win, I would offer this striking assertion: Islamophobia is one of the ideological currents that significantly undergirds our current world order, which is a product of the history I laid out above, and Zohran Mamdani’s election disrupts the flow of that ideological current.

It bears mentioning, of course, that Islamophobia is not the only reason people object to Mamdani.  Concern about his economic policies, for example, are real, and can and are articulated without coming close to Islamophobia. I focus here, however, on the Islamophobic response, and what is at stake in it.

I believe Mamdani’s unusually courageous support of Palestinian human rights and justice has triggered a particularly acute Islamophobic response. In an address to the UJA-Federation of New York, a prominent American Jewish organization in June of 2025, he said,  “My support for BDS is consistent with the core of my politics, which is nonviolence. And I think that it is a legitimate movement when you are seeking to find compliance with international law.” On X, on July 9, 2025, he wrote, “Can any pro-Israel voice explain why baby formula is being blocked from entering Gaza?” Mamdani’s first statement about the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, which he issued the day after, expressed mourning for “the hundreds of people killed across Israel and Palestine in the last 36 hours.” He then added that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “declaration of war” will “undoubtedly lead to more violence and suffering… The path toward a just and lasting peace can only begin by ending the occupation and dismantling apartheid.”

Islamophobia is one of the ideological currents that significantly undergirds our current world order . . . and Zohran Mamdani’s election disrupts the flow of that ideological current

I would argue that if Mamdani did not articulate a political vision and set of stances that stood up for the dignity and equality of the Palestinian people (who are both Muslim and Christian), and if he did not ground that in the norms of international law, and if he did not explicitly criticize Israeli policies, he would be facing far less, if any, Islamophobia.

Take the reaction to figures such as Fareed Zakaria or Mehmet Oz—prominent media figures in America who one might not have even realized are Muslims. These figures either never comment on the question of Palestine or take positions in support of Israel. They face little to no Islamophobia and are embraced by the political and media establishment. It is clear that perhaps the most contentious issue that critics have with Mamdani is his stance on Palestine, and that Islamophobia is a tool used to attack Mamdani on that issue.

The current world order—which seems to be steadily changing—is one in which the United States continues to exist as the strongest military and economic power in the world, with much of Europe dependent on it for its security and hence often in lock step with it politically. There are at least nineteen U.S. military bases in the Middle East (especially in the Arabian Gulf) and at least 50,000 troops stationed in the region. Israel is the US’s closest ally and sits in a strategic location in the region where it has a calculated military and intelligence edge against all of its neighbors. It has launched offensives against surrounding countries on several occasions and illegally occupies land in the region. (Israel does not have declared permanent borders.)  The US is interested in asserting control of this region because of its oil resources, and because of a sense of “Judeo-Christian” affiliation with the European population of Israel.

Though the destabilization of the Middle East has been unfolding for almost eighty years, the current manifestation of conflict in Israel/Palestine has become perhaps the most contentious in the world today. The genocide in Gaza and increasing governmentally sanctioned settler violence and ethnic cleansing on the West Bank are largely condemned by civilian populations and human rights organizations around the world, including Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, while allowed to continue or actively supported by the governments of world powers, especially the United States. This state of affairs has created outrage across the world. American Muslims (and Christians from the region) make up the subset of the American population that have the most exposure to this conflict and can speak to it most poignantly from an intimate and humane perspective. Hence their voices—voices like Mamdani’s—must be silenced. The liberal “Judeo-Christian” civilizational logic that I argue often functions as the contemporary version of Crusader logic—“us against Islam”—requires that the Muslim, especially in in western politics, not be able to speak for themselves. They must be contained, spoken for, and marginalized. Contemporary Islamophobia is focused on creating a narrative about Muslims and Islam from the outside. This is a strategic Islamophobia that aims to prevent Muslims from assimilating as equals into western populations. The narrative about Islam and Muslims fashioned by this strategic Islamophobia turns Muslims into objects to be constantly demonized as figures of suspicion who are assumed to want to “dominate,” and thus are labeled as “supremacists,” and much more. Mamdani refuses this; he claims a Muslim identity and asserts his pro-Palestinian politics, which challenges an important current of the existing world order —and hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers of all races and religions agree with him. It becomes easy to see why this is such a large threat to modern-day Crusader logic.

Geopolitical positions are not the only threat to this Crusader form of liberalism—one’s stance on social issues are also scrutinized. Here again the figure of Zohran Mamdani presents a dangerous disruption to the stereotypes about Muslims upon which the Judeo-Christian modern Crusader logic depends. He is American, well spoken, attractive, empathetic, sincerely championing policies that benefit all New Yorkers, especially the working class of any race or religion. Here is a Muslim with significant Jewish American support, a Muslim who marched in NYC’s pride parade and carried a trans flag, a Muslim who smiles and laughs easily. In short: a normal, amicable, well-meaning person.

Mamdani’s Challenge to Strategic Islamophobia

Simultaneously—and dangerously, for the neo-Crusaders—Mamdani made a few brilliant rhetorical choices during the primary campaign that challenged long-held orthodoxies regarding the question of Palestine. During one of the primary debates, all of the candidates were asked which foreign country they would visit first as mayor. Many of the candidates answered, “the Holy Land” or “Israel.” Mamdani was the only candidate to say he would stay in New York City, where he will meet extensively with Jewish New Yorkers: “I would stay in New York City. I’ll be meeting Jewish New Yorkers at their synagogues, temples, or at their subway stations.” Not satisfied with this answer, the establishment media followed up with a seeming non-sequitur, asking if he believed Israel had the “right to exist” as a “Jewish state.” His response once again struck at the heart of elite American political orthodoxy while echoing the sentiments of the majority of Americans: “I am not comfortable supporting any state that has a hierarchy of citizenship on the basis of religion or anything else.” It is widely speculated that rather than derail his campaign, this answer bolstered it and earned him more votes. This in and of itself is a political earthquake.

To uphold the strategic project of Islamophobia, the complex reality of who Zohran Mamdani is as an individual—emblematic, I think, of the majority of American Muslims—must be obscured by stereotypes and slander that have nothing to do with him. The reality is that Muslims function like any other religious community. There are people that are more observant, and people that are less observant. There are people that identify with the right politically and people who identify with the left. But obscuring the banality and normality of Muslims—keeping them in a permanent state of exception and stifling their authentic and complex voices—is essential to manufacturing the consent to continue to militarily dominate and subjugate Muslim-majority lands. American Muslims, many of whom have ties and/or deep knowledge of the countries, people, and life-worlds that have been demonized and attacked in the “War on Terror,” are the western demographic most likely to speak up for those oppressed people. Thus, modern Crusader logic wants to silence those voices.

To uphold the strategic project of Islamophobia, the complex reality of who Zohran Mamdani is as an individual . . . must be obscured by stereotypes and slander that have nothing to do with him

Mamdani also threatens another important rhetorical tool of strategic Islamophobia—the idea that all Muslims are inherently antisemitic. He has made his opposition to Israeli policies clear and made his unwavering support for the Palestinian people clear, and it turns out that most people agree with him. This has nothing to do with his, or certainly “Muslims’” feelings en masse about all Jewish people—and this seems obvious to most people observing Mamdani, including many Jewish people in New York. The relationship between Mamdani and Lander threatens the narrative of constant, ancient immutable strife between Muslims and Jews—an ahistorical narrative that is again needed to manufacture consent for present-day conflicts—instead modeling the reality: centuries of friendship, mutual respect, and future possibility for collaboration between Muslims and Jews (and everyone else) toward the common good, right here in New York City.

Conclusion: Beyond the Conflict Framework

Islamophobia is a latent phenomena that can be fanned and flamed, but we do not have to think of it inflexibly as an inevitable or intrinsic feature of western civilization. As a professor of Islamic Studies, I have seen how histories of strife and conflict appear to be more exciting objects of study—if you want to study the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, for instance, you will have to study revolts and conflict between Muslim and non-Muslim communities.  It is, for some reason, more mundane to produce research on histories of friendship, breaking bread, mutual aid, solidarity in the face of natural disasters or other external threats, or the millions of everyday instantiations of common humanity that make our world turn. And this is what I think explains the cognitive dissonance of Mamdani’s Islamophobic detractors, who cannot understand the gap between the real affective and political expressions of a vastly diverse population living together peacefully in New York City, and the metanarratives and stereotypes that are operationalized to fuel and sustain conflict. The former reality is quiet, every day, unassuming, and frequently under theorized; the latter is loud, brash, designed to frighten and create binaries that make populations easier to control. New York City is poised to offer a much-needed injection of this logic of the everyday and the normal into the public consciousness that, added together, is the stuff that injects peace and humanity into our political discourse.

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Sarah Eltantawi
Sarah Eltantawi is Associate Professor of Modern Islam in the Department of Theology at Fordham University in New York. She is currently at work on a book on the Political Theology of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which is a study of religion and politics during the period of the birth of Egyptian modernity. Her first book, Shari’ah on Trial: Northern Nigeria’s Islamic Revolution (University of California Press, 2017) examines the career of the stoning punishment in Islamic Law through the infamous trial of Amina Lawal in Nigeria. Eltantawi has published numerous articles on Islamic law and Islamic modernity and post-coloniality. She holds an MA in International Studies from Harvard University and a PhD in the Study of Religion from Harvard University.
Global Currents article

The Eyes of Silwan: The “Undefeated” Powers of Palestinian Struggle


Along the narrow streets of Silwan, East Jerusalem, “The Eyes of John Berger,” English poet, painter, essayist. Photo by Kobi Wolf. Used by permission from Art Forces.

Shown above are the eyes of John Berger (1926-2017), a renowned English poet, essayist filmmaker, painter—and advocate for Palestine. His eyes are depicted in a mural in the occupied Palestinian community of Silwan in East Jerusalem.

But Berger’s eyes are only one pair of many sets painted along Silwan’s neighborhood streets. Some eyes are those of East Jerusalem’s own Palestinian dead, like Eyad al-Hallaq, a special needs young man with autism whom an Israeli border police officer killed in 2020. Others’ eyes commemorate those with whom Silwan organizers feel a close international solidarity, such as Bai Bibyaon (leader of her Indigenous tribe who sought to defend ancestral lands in the Philippines), Ghassan Kanafani, Shireen Abu Akleh, Che Guevara, Hamad Mousa (a Palestinian farmer from Akka, Palestine), George Floyd, Alex Nieto, Rachel Corrie, Malcolm X, and more.

Why are Berger’s and these eyes on the walls of buildings in Silwan? I suggest that they express a sense and belief that the “whole world is watching.” Indeed, they represent the power of the dead for the living in Palestine. They manifest what John Berger once named Palestinians’ “undefeated despair” amid decades of occupation and a hundred years of British, Israeli, and U.S. domination.

Consider the occupation. As Israeli forces occupy Silwan’s community, they also guard Jewish settlements there. Israelis’ aim is to displace and replace Silwan’s 50-60,000 residents. They invoke a “bogus archaeology” to justify this, interpreting the ancient Jerusalem sites underneath Silwan as being what a majority of archaeologists agree they are not, a biblical “City of David.” Israeli Zionists and Christian tourists relish this biblical fantasy while real-world residents of Silwan are dispossessed to create these archaeological parks.

Even if archaeological evidence proved Israeli claims (which they do not), the Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem and the “City of David” settlement are illegal by international law (Occupation Remains, 18), and the land confiscation in East Jerusalem is part of Israel’s “belligerent occupation” of Palestine. There is no justification, then, for displacing current residents, surely not for their continuous repression, as reported by Silwan’s Madaa Creative Center: “Not a day goes by where the residents aren’t rained [on] by gas bombs, sound bombs and rubber bullets during the clashes while trying to defend their existence, their lives and their land.”  Overall, as historian and archaeologist Nazmi Jubeh summarizes, the plight of Silwan’s Palestinians is desperately precarious. They live below the poverty line and are crowded into homes often unfit for human habitation. Silwan has experienced almost every form of maneuver for eradication by Israel’s occupation and repression.

In painting their murals, however, the people of Silwan are also organizing.

Silwan is active: its residents mobilize themselves and international visitors, like the delegation of theological educators with whom I visited Silwan and East Jerusalem. We were hosted by Sabeel, a Jerusalem-based ecumenical liberation center. Silwan’s organizers explained to us, as they do to all visitors, their history of dispossession. They showed us their property lots reduced to rubble by Israeli demolitions. They pointed out the Jewish settler’s homes which were replacing their own. Local activists, artists, and residents showed us the mural art gracing the neighborhood streets—like the bold eyes painted throughout Silwan. This art is the fruit of solidarity between the U.S.-based public art group, Art Forces, and Silwan’s own Madaa-Silwan Creative Center. As videos at the “I Witness Silwan” site show, Silwan is home to a world movement, full of vitality—even festivity—amid resistance to occupation.

The displacement we saw being creatively resisted by residents of Silwan was supplemented by what we also knew of the occupiers’ exterminating ways. In fact, the same day as our visit in Silwan (June 3, 2025) Israeli forces were intensifying their genocide in Gaza, firing upon Gaza’s hungry people at designated food distribution points. On that single day, 90 were wounded and 27 were killed. A Haaretz investigation confirmed the intentionality of this latest phase of the Gaza genocide: “IDF Soldiers Told to Shoot Deliberately at Unarmed Civilians Waiting for Humanitarian Aid.”

Since October 7th, well over 58,573 Gazans have been killed and 92% of Gaza’s housing units have been destroyed. After just one month’s bombing, Israel dropped on Gaza some 25,000 tons of mostly US-made bombs, equivalent to the two nuclear bombs dropped in Japan. After six months it had dropped 70,000 tons on Gaza, more than the tonnage dropped in World War II on London, Dresden, and Hamburg combined.

Israel in Gaza now stands charged with “genocide” in the International Court of Justice. The charge is confirmed by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and by three reports of the UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine (March 2024, October 2024, July 2025).

Genocide Studies scholars remind us that the word “genocide” names not only a horrible singular event (which it does), but also a structural process at work in peoples’ everyday living in racist and capitalist systems emergent from colonial and imperial powers (on this point, see Wolfe, Estes, Koshy).

So, maybe as we stood there in Silwan, we were watching “slow genocide” as a structural process, while nearby, Gazans were experiencing genocide as a stark and brutal event. Genocide in either form, though, is a harrowing, elongated, dehumanizing brutality.

Berger knew of Palestinians’ persistence when he wrote of their “undefeated despair.” Surely the mural eyes show an “undefeated” people, throwing back at occupiers the very gaze that Israeli surveillance and occupation impose. As Susan Greene writes in a stellar article on the eyes of Silwan, “The Israeli state has placed all Palestinians under extensive systems of surveillance, a ‘colonial gaze’ that renders the population hyper-visible as objects but invisible as subjects.” Palestinians, however, are watching, and looking back—and we the world with them.

I suspect Israelis feel the resistance from the painted eyes of Silwan. Occupiers do not like to know they are watched, to have their fancies and brutalities unmasked. Reminding us of this is the great twentieth-century African American scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois described how he countered the White imperial gaze of his day, how he, as a Black man gazed back at “the souls of white folk.”

I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. . . . I know their thoughts and they know that I know. This knowledge makes them now embarrassed, now furious. . . . As they preach and strut and shout and threaten, crouching as they clutch at rags of facts and fancies to hide their nakedness, they go twisting, flying by my tired eyes and I see them ever stripped—ugly, human.

To see like this—to have eyes like those of John Berger and Du Bois—is to see through the occupier’s pretensions and brutalities. It is one part of organizing against them. It is to be “undefeated.”

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Mark Lewis Taylor
Mark Lewis Taylor is a Professor of Theology and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary. His research and teaching focus on critical theory for “political theologies of liberation.” He teaches courses on white racism and hegemonic masculinism, empire and capital in theological perspective, cultural-political hermeneutics, and on the theologies of Paul Tillich and Gustavo Gutierrez. Among his books are Religion, Politics and the Christian Right: Post-9/11 Powers and American Empire (2005), The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America (2015), and The Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World (2011).
Global Currents article
Scott Appleby
Scott Appleby is the Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Global Affairs in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. He joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1994. The author or editor of fifteen books on modern religion and conflict, he currently serves as the interim director of the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion.

Previously Appleby served as the Marilyn Keough Dean of the Keough School (2014-2024), as the John M. Regan Director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies (2000-2014), and as the director of Notre Dame's Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism (1994-2002). In 2010 Appleby founded Contending Modernities, a multidisciplinary study of religions and secularisms in interaction. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, he holds the Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1985) and is the recipient of five honorary doctorates.
Theorizing Modernities article

Bibles Belong to All of Us: Elizabeth Shakman Hurd Interviews Hannah Strømmen

and
Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica,” housed at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain. Cropped and edited from a photo taken in 2024. Via Wikimedia Commons

In the previous post I reflected on how Hannah Stømmen’s The Bibles of the Far Right reveals the interrelation between ideas of masculinity, “civilization,” and religion. In this interview I dig deeper with Hannah into the theoretical positions and ideas that shape her analysis.

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (ESH): Your chapter on the Crusades, Middle Ages, and masculinity as part of the “War Bible assemblage” also evoked other “sticky” factors for me, such as the significance of violent video games and gun culture in the lives of many of the aggrieved men discussed in this chapter. Would you include those factors as well? More generally, how much “Bible” content does there need to be for something to “count” as a biblical assemblage and when does it morph into something broader? Is gun culture a biblical assemblage?

Hannah Strømmen (HS): Violent video games and gun culture could absolutely have been included as factors in the War Bible assemblage. And not just guns but weapons more generally. It is striking that several of the missiles used by western forces against ISIS were biblically named “Brimstone” and “Hellfire” missiles. In 2015 the UK politician Hilary Benn argued in favor of military intervention in Syria by alluding to the Good Samaritan story from Luke 10:25–37: Britain should not walk by on the other side of the road. In the book I discuss the way the story about David fighting Goliath (1 Samuel 17) is used to frame those on the far right as warriors defending Europe against Islam. Receptions of this story are able to tap into the idea of the valiant underdog, where violence against a much stronger enemy can be justified as righteous.

The War Bible assemblage is not only about biblical components or influences, though. Breivik drew on Norse mythology to name the weapons he used. What I find helpful about the assemblage concept is that it can elucidate how different sources and traditions—from video games, to Norse mythology, or indeed the Bible—are not as incompatible as they might appear, but can be combined to reinforce fantasies of masculinity and drive violent action.

It is, I think, often not clear where biblical reception morphs into something broader. Sometimes direct citations of the Bible are straightforwardly recognizable. But vague references to the Bible are worth studying in addition to direct citations because much biblical reception is about what people think of as “biblical.” Many examples could be mentioned here. In addition to Benn’s comment about “walking by on the other side of the road” mentioned above, there are references to storms and catastrophes having “biblical” dimensions, or modern-day activists such as Greta Thunberg being compared to biblical prophets. In the case of the far-right politics I discuss in The Bibles of the Far Right, it is crucial that the Bible is not only directly cited. More important than citations is its association with western civilization, whiteness, masculine heroism, and righteous truth-telling in opposition to “elites.”

The blurred line between biblical reception and something broader is important also for thinking critically about how the “secular” is imagined. The popular perception that people in the west were biblically literate but no longer know the Bible obscures the fact that perceptions of the Bible circulate in numerous ways and with varied effects. As Peter Phillips points out, we need to get away from the idea that biblical literacy is only about reading the Bible. Some fairly extreme forms of biblical reception gain visibility, such as in debates about abortion or visions of the apocalypse. But much political and cultural Bible-use goes unnoticed and unstudied due to a secularization narrative in which the decline of biblical literacy is a key part. As the contributors to Katie Edwards’ Rethinking Biblical Literacy show, that narrative depends very much on what we mean by biblical literacy and biblical knowledge. Hanna Liljefors has recently shown how problematic attitudes to the Hebrew Bible stubbornly persist in Swedish media culture—a country which is often declared to be one of the most secular in the world. The attitudes toward the Hebrew Bible she identifies participate in long-standing supersessionist receptions that demonize Judaism, but are professed with no awareness of this history and its impact. It is crucial to pay attention, as Holly Morse argues, to the “myths and meanings” surrounding biblical texts (4).

This is the reason why I prefer to talk about Bible-use, where “use” can be implicit and explicit, textual and non-textual, related to Bibles as artifacts or as an archive of ideas and inspiration for theologies, ideologies, and practices. “Use” can be reading as well as not reading. In fact, some uses of the Bible require that the texts have not been read!

(ESH): You draw on an impressively diverse array of thinkers in this book (including several of my Northwestern colleagues including James Bielo, Regina Schwartz, and Robert Orsi). Setting aside Deleuze and Guattari, which thinkers or approaches influenced you most in this project, and how? Do you expect to stay with them in future work, or explore new paths? If the latter, which ones?

(HS): I hadn’t realized the scholars you mention are all at Northwestern! It must be a great place to work.

Yvonne Sherwood’s work has influenced me greatly. Her work on the Bible of George W. Bush Jr. has been very important for explaining more broadly the way contemporary assumptions about a “Liberal Bible”—a Bible that vaguely supports the ideals of liberal democracy—go back to the Enlightenment period. Her book on the afterlife of Jonah was also inspiring for me in identifying different dynamics in the reception of the Bible, from receptions that become so mainstream they are barely questioned, to more minority or “backwater” receptions, as she calls them.

Your own work on the “two faces of religion” paradigm, which has taken hold in political debate in the last decades (and continues to operate), has also been instructive and inspiring for me. It allowed me to see how the Bible becomes caught up in a global dynamic in which the category of religion is frequently split into the problem of so-called bad religion (which is sectarian, intolerant, and therefore requires discipline and surveillance), and the solution of so-called good religion (which is irenic, peace-building, respectful of rights, freedom, and tolerance).

I am excited by emerging work in biblical reception criticism, particularly by PhD students. I am thinking of, for instance, Rebekah Carere’s project at the University of Oslo on Trump’s Bible, Rebekah Hanson’s research at the University of Chichester on the Bible in digital culture, and Samuel Auler’s work at Lund University on the Bible in Brazilian far-right politics. Also, the team of postdocs for the project I am currently leading at Lund University, “Scripture and Secularism”—Joel Kuhlin, Hanna Liljefors, and Frida Mannerfelt—are all producing exciting work that explores how the Bible is used in different modern publics. Their work will no doubt inspire me in continuing to research the complex dynamics between the “biblical” and the “secular” in modernity.

(ESH): Sara Ahmed’s approach to affect appears to have shaped the project in significant ways, such as in your discussion of responses to biblical violence in Chap. 7. Can you discuss how attention to the nonlinguistic and nonrational influenced how you approached this project? What looks different in your field when viewed through the prism of affect, or “socially-produced sensation” as you describe it on page 219, citing Fiona Black and Jennifer Koosed?

(HS): Questions about affect have significantly impacted my way of thinking about biblical reception. Most biblical scholars are trained to work closely with texts, with textual analysis, and with exegetical work. Working on the reception history of the Bible could easily be a history of exegesis, where exegesis takes the form of textual commentaries and works consisting of systematic engagement with biblical texts. Towering historical figures such as Augustine and Luther would be obvious contenders for projects tracing biblical reception. But much biblical reception does not consist of close readings of biblical texts or of systematic treatises (by “great men”). Or, at least, you miss significant aspects of biblical reception if you only investigate explicit and textual exegesis of biblical texts throughout history. Biblical reception scholars working on art, music, TV and film, demonstrate the importance of appreciating the Bible beyond textual reception (see, for instance, the Visual Commentary on Scripture; T&T Clark Companion to The Bible and Film; The Handbook of Jesus and Film; Bibles in Popular Cultures). There is an enormous amount of work to be done on biblical reception, not least when it comes to politics.

Many scholars and journalists pointed to the way Breivik’s manifesto was a patchwork compilation, a cut-and-paste document, and not a systematic treatise. The biblical citations in the manifesto could easily be dismissed (along with the whole manifesto) as incoherent. But the manifesto continues to be circulated and cited. Its success does not depend on a rigorously systematic argument. Ahmed asks about what emotions do. I wanted to reflect on how emotions stick to different uses of the Bible and make them compelling. Why might a series of biblical citations be compelling to include in a far-right manifesto? Why is the Bible proudly held up as a civilizational marker of the west in contrast to the Qur’an? Why is the supposed loss of the Bible lamented due to immigration to Europe? What nostalgia, anger, resentment, and desire might be fueling this use of the Bible?

Ahmed takes seriously the “affective value” that sticks to particular works, particularly classics and canonical texts. The Bible operates with an “iconic” dimension; it is “ritualized” (and not only by faith communities!), with various forms of authority tied to it depending on the context, as James W. Watts has so helpfully explained.

Emotional investments and interests may be resistant to arguments that operate on a rational or intellectual level. It is important to point out that I am not only thinking about “ordinary” people’s reception of the Bible—as if they are beholden to irrational feelings while scholars are the privileged bearers of rational knowledge who can appear with their “corrective expertise”, to quote the classicist Clare Foster (62). Scholars also have affective investments. Some Bibles make us feel good. Others will make us shudder or cringe. The affects that are produced will depend on our beliefs, commitments, contexts, and experiences, as well as the larger histories, ideologies, and practices in which we are embedded. Biblical assemblages can be resilient and stubborn, accumulating theological and cultural capital over time, and stabilized in peoples’ assumptions about what “the Bible” is. For scholars to critically map different forms of biblical reception, then, it is necessary to identify the affects and effects of uses of the Bible. Only through this work can one uncover which kinds of reception become entrenched and resistant to change.

Taking affective investments seriously can, I think, be transformative for understanding the staying power of trends and tendencies in biblical reception. Here I draw also on Brian Massumi’s understanding of affect, where affect is not only or primarily about feeling or emotions. It is about the potential for change—for something to affect and be affected. How might different kinds of biblical assemblages challenge the far-right assemblages that are part of propagating racism?

Towards the end of the book, I suggest “BibleLab”—inspired by Erin Manning and Massumi’s SenseLab project—as a mode and space for experimenting with Bibles. The idea of BibleLab is not that people can somehow engineer a particular assemblage that is benign for ever after. No one has the power to control and constrain an assemblage. But through experimentation, different Bibles can emerge. BibleLab is about what encounters can be curated, in bringing together different bodies, things, artifacts, texts, feelings, words, movements, materials. Such experimentation will obviously not “solve” the violence and racism of far-right movements. The mapping of biblical assemblages furnishes indirect ways of tackling the use of Bibles by figures on the far right.

Deterritorializing Bibles in the way I discuss in the book is about forging new connections between people, challenging assumptions, creating new attachments and foregoing old ones, inspiring and provoking different ways of thinking about Bibles, and prompting the emergence of other, more liberative Bibles. This way, deterritorializing Bibles can help to awaken new solidarities.

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Hannah M. Strømmen
Hannah M. Strømmen is Senior Lecturer in Bible, Politics, and Culture and Wallenberg Academy Fellow at Lund University in Sweden. Her scholarly passions are focused on uses and interpretations of the Bible in philosophy, literature and politics. In her first book, Biblical Animality after Jacques Derrida (SBL Press, 2018), she examined how distinctions between gods, humans, and animals are constructed in and by way of the biblical archive. Over the last years she has been working on the Bible and the European far right. With Ulrich Schmiedel she has written The Claim to Christianity: Responding to the Far Right (SCM Press, 2020). Her latest book is The Bibles of the Far Right (OUP, 2024).

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies and Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She studies the public and political careers of religion in U.S. foreign and immigration policy, the international politics of secularism and religious freedom, American borders, and US actions in and representations of the Middle East. She is the author of Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders, and the Global United States (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (Princeton University Press, 2015), The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton University Press, 2008), and four co-edited volumes on religion and politics, including, most recently, At Home and Abroad: The Politics of American Religion (Columbia University Press, 2021). At Northwestern, Hurd co-directs the Global Religion & Politics Research Group and is a core faculty member in the MENA Studies program.
Theorizing Modernities article

Bibles Belong to All of Us: Masculinity, Civilization, and the Bibles of the Far Right


Sometimes a book is exciting because it prompts you to think in new ways. At other times it seems important to understanding a particular historical moment. Rarely does a book do both. Hannah Strømmen’s The Bibles of the Far Right is an exception. In the circumstances in which I write, one could re-title this provocative book “Bibles of the increasingly-not-so-far-and-shockingly-entering-the-mainstream right.”

While ostensibly focused on the multiple and various sources that “stick” to the manifesto of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, the scope of Strømmen’s study is far more ambitious. Versions of what she describes as the “Civilization Bible” and “War Bible” assemblages are ubiquitous. As I write, they are emerging as federal policy guideposts in the United States, for example.

Strømmen prepares the ground well for a capacious interpretation of her argument. As a scholar of biblical reception, her central gambit is that Bibles belong to all of us, whether we like it or not, are aware of it or not, and acknowledge it or not (227). Drawing on an impressively diverse range of scholarship, including the work of James Bielo, Sara Ahmed, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Strømmen focuses on what she describes as “Bible-use” (163). She seeks to understand how the authority associated with Bibles works in practice (233), and specifically how texts function “beyond the textual,” including how affect is mobilized and circulates in and through biblical assemblages. Bibles in this view are artifacts and archives (287) that can never be fully disentangled from their “non-Biblical components.” She explains:

What I have attempted to do in this book is to map key elements in Bible-use that have become—for a time—stabilised as part of a political narrative in which Christian Europe is battling “Islamisation.” The Civilization Bible assemblage and the War Bible assemblage have both played a role in the political pronouncements and practices of people peddling far-right conspiracies about the decline of Europe and the threat of Islam (295).

Importantly, these assemblages include not only specific biblical texts but also “the other elements that are stuck to these bits of Bible” (222). The notion of assemblages comes from Deleuze and Guattari, for whom assemblages “select elements from the milieus (the surroundings, the context, the mediums in which the assemblages work) and bring them together in a particular way” (Strømmen, 59; citing J. McGregor Wise, “Assemblage,” 78). As Strømmen emphasizes, however, assemblage “is used not only to describe a number of different things brought together…but is a mode of analysis that allows something new to be seen” (68).

What does a focus on biblical assemblages together with the far right allow us to see anew? When it comes to biblical assemblages of the far right, the “War Bible” and “Civilization Bible,” (as well as, though less prominently, the “Colonial [or Cultural] Bible” [198, 201] and the “Slavery Bible”—rich and fascinating elements of the discussion), there is certainly more to them than meets the eye. Rather than dismissing these currents as pathological misreadings or misapplications of an antiquated text that is (or should be) isolated from “normal” society and politics, Strømmen shows that these assemblages draw on, contribute to, and are immersed in a range of powerful cross-cutting narratives, including but certainly not limited to those associated with far-right extremism. Exploring the “citational network” of Anders Breivik’s manifesto allows her to unpack and explore these narratives. That fine-grained work makes up the bulk of the book. It also allows her to foreground “counter-Bibles,” which, as their name suggests, work at cross-purposes to the assemblages that Strømmen tirelessly maps, catalogues, and critiques.

This swirling tempest of Bibles, counter-Bibles, and biblical assemblages came together in the following especially lucid passage describing the varied elements of the Civilization Bible:

This Civilization Bible assemblage is assembled with the institutions and artifacts of high art found across Europe’s galleries and museums, with literary canons and musical giants such as Shakespeare and Bach; it is assembled with the notions of secularity that are seen as shaping European societies; it is assembled with the colonial missions that celebrated Western superiority with an unparalleled confidence. Most of these associations or components are not and do not need to be spelled out when the Civilization Bible is invoked (202).

The Civilization Bible assemblage invoked by Breivik, she explains, “works because it is reterritorializing Bibles that were operative in the past, in the making of modern Europe, particularly in theological developments during the Enlightenment and Europe’s colonial era.” Non-biblical elements are crucial to this assemblage, including for example the clash of civilizations thesis which “makes the Civilization Bible work as an effective part of a far-right worldview in which the othering of Islam is central” (202). And not only the far right.

Strømmen’s mapping of notions of masculinity in these assemblages is especially compelling. Aggrieved entitlement—or what Axios described recently as “masculine maximalism”—are at the heart of the War Bible assemblage (169–74). Strømmen opens the discussion with the (under)statement that “gender issues are highly pertinent in the Breivik case and in the politics of contemporary far-right movements more generally” (169). She offers as evidence Breivik’s manifesto in which he “brings together his antagonism toward feminism and modern approaches to the Bible when he bemoans the way ‘traditional courses on “dead white males” (such as Shakespeare, Milton and Chaucer)’ are being replaced ‘with courses on women’s studies or “The Bible as Literature” (a course designed to denigrate the Bible as cleverly crafted fiction instead of God’s truth)'” (169).  Elsewhere in the manifesto he complains about how so-called Cultural Marxists designate ‘“Muslims, Feminist women, homosexuals and some additional minority groups as virtuous and they view ethnic Christian European men as evil’” (170).

Masculinity as a component of the War Bible assemblage is simultaneously biblical and non-biblical. Here Strømmen draws on Jorunn Økland’s comparison of misogyny in the Book of Revelation to Breivik’s hateful views of women in the manifesto, while also relying on Michael Kimmel’s work to explore the extra-biblical “aggrieved entitlement” that is also pervasive in the manifesto. Kimmel explores “’how downward mobility, economic instability, sexual insecurity, and shifts in gender politics combined to contribute to a sense of loss among many American men, leading to a pervasive sense of aggrieved entitlement’”(Kimmel, 18; in Strømmen, 171). Arlie Russel Hochschild has also explored this sense of loss in her more recent work.

Breivik’s misogynistic, Islamophobic, and homophobic statements do not bear repeating, but the War Bible as invoked in his manifesto, as well as the many parallel biblical assemblages circulating in the US and Europe today, resonate broadly with the trope of aggrieved masculinity. In Breivik’s case, as Strømmen convincingly concludes, the War Bible assemblage was “made up of references to David fighting Goliath; it is made in conjunction with Brievik’s dress-up as a policeman on Utøya, with his game-playing of World of Warcraft, with his crusader costume, his paganly named weapons, and his car named after Thor’s wagon. Connecting the Breivik case to Kimmel’s discussion of aggrieved entitlement points toward broader tendencies relating to violence and masculinity, particularly as they function in right-wing ideology and practice” (171, emphasis mine).

We know these men. We know their “ugly freedoms.” Aggrieved entitlement leads to “’sporadic outbursts, clandestine terrorist conspiracies, and paranoid political thinking’” (Kimmel, 18; quoted in Strømmen, 171) in which anger is funneled toward “’a generalized ethnic and racial “other”—who is seen as threatening to transform America from a Christian (read: white) nation into a multicultural polyglot with no center of racial gravity’” (Kimmel, 28, quoted in Strømmen, 172).

Aggrieved entitlement is not only worked into Breivik’s War Bible assemblage, however. It is the political air we breathe in the United States today, coursing through a tsunami of executive orders issued in the first hours and days of the Trump administration, jumping off the pages of Presidential Actions including “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” and “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats.” Aggrieved entitlement has boiled over in the global United States.

Strømmen keeps her cool, however, taking the analysis further by observing that even as the term toxic masculinity may be appealing, to use it would be a mistake. Citing Elizabeth Pearson’s study of the English Defence League, Strømmen insists that “labelling it as ‘toxic’ occludes its continuities with wider patriarchal norms” and subtly downplays the fact that these actors “activate notions of masculinity that are already there in society” (Pearson, 1268; cited in Strømmen, 173). Indeed. Describing aggrieved masculinity as “toxic” serves to stigmatize a few “bad” men while sanitizing and quietly exonerating the rest of the “masculine maximalist” playing field. Strømmen warns that this could “be seen as a problem with the Breivik case, where he becomes an exceptional figure who is dismissed as irrelevant” (173). As this powerful book demonstrates time and again, Breivik’s views are far from exceptional, and anything but irrelevant.

In the subsequent interview, I ask Professor Strømmen to reflect on the conceptual limits of the various biblical assemblages she identifies, the theoretical influences that shaped her thinking, and the role of affect in her account of the Bibles of the far right.

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Elizabeth Shakman Hurd
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies and Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She studies the public and political careers of religion in U.S. foreign and immigration policy, the international politics of secularism and religious freedom, American borders, and US actions in and representations of the Middle East. She is the author of Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders, and the Global United States (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (Princeton University Press, 2015), The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton University Press, 2008), and four co-edited volumes on religion and politics, including, most recently, At Home and Abroad: The Politics of American Religion (Columbia University Press, 2021). At Northwestern, Hurd co-directs the Global Religion & Politics Research Group and is a core faculty member in the MENA Studies program.
Global Currents article

The Enigma of Pope Francis


Pope Francis blessing a child. Image via Flickr User ThiênLong. CC BY-SA 2.0.

In the days and weeks since the death of Pope Francis, the international news media has been full of tributes to Francis’s progressive vision for the Church and speculation as to whether his successor, Pope Leo XIV, will continue his approach or return to the more conservative vision associated with his predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI. This sort of language has been embraced by both Francis’s critics on the right, who saw him as far too willing to adapt Church teaching to fit modern liberal sensibilities, as well as by supporters and those who would like to see the Church embrace more progressive stances on contraception, same-sex relationships, and the role of women in the Church. And yet, one of the hallmarks of Pope Francis’s papacy was precisely the way he defied distinctions between “progressive” and “conservative.” On the one hand, he placed the defense of the poor and the marginalized, of migrants and the environment, at the center of his papacy. On the other, he reaffirmed the Church’s traditional prohibition on abortion, same-sex marriage, and the ordination of women. On the one hand, in speaking of gay Catholics, he acknowledged “who am I to judge?” and allowed priests to bless same-sex couples. On the other, he used a homophobic slur and attacked what he called “gender ideology.” On the one hand, he elevated a few women to leading roles within the government of the Church; on the other, he initially resisted efforts to open the way for women to become deacons.

How are we to make sense of these apparent contradictions? That Pope Francis seemed to resist the logic of the progressive/conservative binary is an indication of how ill-equipped we are to make sense of religious actors using categories derived from a political framework. This is doubly true when those categories emerge from a specifically North Atlantic political context that does not reflect the concerns and priorities of the global Church.

Beyond Political Ideologies

From the very beginning of his papacy, Pope Francis insisted on holding together values and commitments that European and American politics tends to prize apart. This was most evident in Francis’s insistence that the defense of human life cannot begin and end with opposition to abortion, but must just as vigorously condemn other affronts to human life and dignity such as poverty, war, and the death penalty. “We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods,” he explained in the first interview he gave as pope. “Proclamation in a missionary style focuses on the essentials, on the necessary thing,” he continued; “The message of the Gospel, therefore, is not to be reduced to some aspects that, although relevant, on their own do not show the heart of the message of Jesus Christ.” Pope Francis made a similar argument in a 2018 apostolic exhortation in which he called for a more holistic defense of human life. “Our defence of the innocent unborn needs to be clear, firm and passionate, for at stake is the dignity of a human life,” he explained. But “equally sacred,” he insisted, “are the lives of the poor, those already born, the destitute, the abandoned and the underprivileged, the vulnerable infirm and elderly exposed to covert euthanasia, the victims of human trafficking, new forms of slavery, and every form of rejection” (para. 101). This integral commitment to human life was also central to Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si’. In it, Francis lambasted a “throwaway culture” that treats not just material goods but life itself as disposable—a culture manifest most obviously in the vast amount of waste generated by our insatiable thirst for consumption, but also in the attitude that some forms of life are less valuable than others. “When we fail to acknowledge the worth of a poor person, a human embryo, a person with disabilities,” he wrote, “it becomes difficult to hear the cry of nature itself; everything is connected” (para. 117). Again and again, Pope Francis insisted on holding together commitments that conventional politics, and especially those animated by the American “culture wars,” have tended to pit against one another.

Here, it’s worth probing why exactly Pope Francis’s vision is so difficult to classify ideologically. In the first place, it arose from a set of philosophical and theological principles that are distinct from the ones that animate most political projects, even if such projects are often embraced and championed by religious actors. This tension was most clearly on display in a controversial recent document prepared by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, which condemned so-called “gender theory” alongside a host of other “grave violations” to human dignity. It justified this critique by drawing a sharp contrast between Catholic anthropology and a secular liberal model, which “identifies dignity with an isolated and individualistic freedom that claims to impose particular subjective desires and propensities as ‘rights’ to be guaranteed.” “Human dignity cannot be based on merely individualistic standards,” the document insisted; it must be grounded “on the constitutive demands of human nature, which do not depend on individual arbitrariness or social recognition” and “have a concrete and objective content based on our shared human nature” (paras. 18 and 25). According to the document, this disagreement on the anthropological grounds for human dignity explains why Catholics and liberals arrive at opposing positions on such issues as reproductive freedom and LGBTQ rights.

That Pope Francis seemed to resist the logic of the progressive/conservative binary is an indication of how ill-equipped we are to make sense of religious actors using categories derived from a political framework.

Pope Francis’s teaching on the environment and global solidarity likewise reflected this suspicion of liberalism and political ideologies more generally. In Fratelli Tutti, written at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the pope pushed back against the rising tide of nationalist and populist movements, which threaten the bonds of international solidarity needed to grapple with global challenges such as climate change, poverty, and the pandemic. And yet, he was equally concerned in that document to resist what he saw as the dominant form of global integration—that of neoliberalism and the market, which can only impose a false universalism leading to deeper forms of inequality and isolation. Indeed, in the chapter of the encyclical devoted to establishing a “better form of politics,” Pope Francis explicitly framed his own distinctively Catholic vision of universal fraternity rooted in the parable of the Good Samaritan as a rejoinder to both populism and a technocratic liberalism that privileges the individual at the expense of communal solidarity. In this latter model, he argued, “liberty becomes nothing more than a condition for living as we will, completely free to choose to whom or what we will belong, or simply to possess or exploit. This shallow understanding has little to do with the richness of a liberty directed above all to love” (para. 103). Passages such as these give the lie to the critique frequently levelled against Pope Francis by some on the right, who accused him of uncritically embracing modernity or accommodating liberal values. They also reveal that the pope was not hostile to politics per se, but only to those political formations he perceived as being at odds with Catholic teaching, whatever position they happened to occupy on the political spectrum.

Pope Francis and the Global Church

Large billboard of Pope Francis on 9 de Julio Avenue in Buenos Aires. Via Flickr User Barcex. CC BY-SA 2.0.

That Pope Francis’s vision seems to scramble our political categories is thus a useful reminder that the politics of the American Church and the “culture wars” issues that have come to dominate it do not always reflect the priorities and concerns of the global Church. Though Pope Francis was certainly not a proponent of Latin American liberation theology during its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, his abiding commitment to the poor and the marginalized very much reflects the “preferential option for the poor” so central to that theological movement. It’s a reminder that for so many Catholics across the global South, poverty, migration, violence, and war are by far the most immediate and pressing concerns that the faithful confront in their daily lives and must therefore be front and center to the ministry of the Church in these regions. These priorities informed Pope Francis’s teaching on the environment, which stressed the way that climate change and ecological devastation disproportionately affect the poor and poorer countries, as well as his insistence on the need for the Church to go out to the peripheries. They were likewise reflected in his commitment to synodality within the Church—the effort to decentralize decision-making and encourage greater dialogue, consultation, and participation of all the faithful in the mission of the Church. In all these ways, Pope Francis brought the priorities and concerns of Catholics from the global South to the forefront. Given that the demographic face of the Church continues to shift inexorably from Europe and North America to the global South, these are likely to remain pressing questions , and they are questions which cut across any simple distinction between “conservative” and “progressive” forces within the Church.

A Jesuit Vocation

Finally, I think we can’t fully grasp the complexities of Pope Francis’s vision without understanding something of his vocation as a Jesuit. Critics of the pope would often point to the tension between his rhetorical or symbolic gestures of inclusion—such as allowing priests to bless same-sex couples or his famous statement “who am I to judge?”—and his unwillingness to make substantive changes to Catholic doctrine. Some argued that such discrepancies sowed “confusion” in the minds of the faithful. But it might be more helpful to view them as an effect of the Pope Francis’s commitment to the typically Ignatian practice of discernment. Discernment is a mode of prayerful decision-making that involves listening and seeking out the guidance of the Holy Spirit, rather than adhering to a pre-established set of rules. It is an attitude that allows for greater flexibility and an appreciation for the complexity of human life. It may well reflect Francis’s intellectual debt to some of his Jesuit forebears, such as the mid-century French Jesuits Gaston Fessard and Henri de Lubac, who were committed to holding opposing ideas and values in a productive tension.[1] As Pope Francis explained in an interview with the Jesuit publication America, “a Catholic cannot think either-or (aut-aut) and reduce everything to polarization. The essence of what is Catholic is both-and (et-et). … The Holy Spirit in the church does not reduce everything to just one value; rather, it harmonizes opposing differences. That is the Catholic spirit. The more harmony there is between the differences and the opposites the more Catholic it is. The more polarization there is, the more one loses the Catholic spirit and falls into a sectarian spirit.” Such a sectarian spirit, he noted elsewhere, “turns contrapositions into contradictions, demanding we choose, and reducing reality to simple binaries,” and for Pope Francis, it was associated above all with “ideologies and unscrupulous politicians” (79). His suspicion of this sort of either/or thinking and his willingness to embrace the complexity and ambiguity of human life is a testament to one of the great hallmarks of Pope Francis’s papacy—his commitment to being a pastor first and foremost. Beyond the imperative to maintain doctrinal purity, Francis always tried to keep the person front and center, inviting the Church to meet people where they are.

For all these reasons, Pope Francis often disappointed those who looked to him hoping he might confirm their pre-existing political priorities, and they are likely to be similarly disappointed by his successor as well. Let us hope, then, that the new pope will maintain Francis’s pastoral approach, his humility, and his commitment to discernment. In this era of deep polarization within the Church and our wider world, there is still something valuable to be found in the “both/and” perspective to which Pope Francis remained committed, even if it sometimes frustrated both progressives and conservatives alike.

[1] On Pope Francis’s debt to Fessard and de Lubac, among others, see Robert Barron, “Gaston Fessard and the Intellectual Formation of Pope Francis,” in Renewing Our Hope: Essays for the New Evangelization (2020), 131–48; Massimo Borghesi, The Mind of Pope Francis: Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s Intellectual Journey (2018).

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Sarah Shortall
Sarah Shortall is an intellectual historian of modern Europe and Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics (Harvard University Press, 2021), which received the Laurence Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies and the Giuseppe Alberigo Award from the European Academy of Religion. She is currently at work on a second book, tentatively called Planetary Catholicism, which explores how Catholics have imagined the global as a theological, ecological, and political problem since the Second World War. In addition to these projects, Shortall has co-edited a volume of essays titled Christianity and Human Rights Reconsidered (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and her work has appeared in Past & Present, Modern Intellectual History, the Journal of the History of Ideas, Commonweal, and Boston Review.
Theorizing Modernities article

The Urgency of Idolatry Critique: A Synthetic Response to Yadgar and Cavanaugh


Demolition of St-Sauveur Church / Trinity Episcopal Church. February 16, 2011. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Situated Critics of Christian Secular Modernity

Yaacov Yadgar’s To Be a Jewish State: Zionism as the New Judaism and William T. Cavanaugh’s The Uses of Idolatry together provide sharp conceptual and interpretive tools for a robust and layered intervention in the study of religion and modernity. One book is written by an Oxford-based Jewish Israeli political theorist and the other by a Catholic theologian based at DePaul University. Both books speak to the urgent questions of religion and European Christian modernity. Their interwoven theses illuminate a substantial engagement with European Christian secular modernity as a broader discourse undergirding international and global structures and reigning rationalities. Both authors, albeit differently, wrestle with Christian secular European modernity’s assault on religious traditions through the production of idols and sequestering of “religion” to its own presumably depoliticized lane. In particular they focus on how their critiques apply to the US, Europe, and Palestine/Israel. In this post, I’ll draw out fruitful points of connection that arise in reading their interviews and books together, focusing in particular on their conceptualization of the secular, the key role that the concept of idolatry plays in their works, supersessionism, and the role of tradition in their understanding of the practice of critique.

Both authors remain grounded mostly in European canons in their effort to expose secular/modern mystifications of nation-state power. To this extent, their works are decidedly not decolonial. A decolonial approach calls for an epistemic puncturing of the hegemonic hold of the Euro-Christian canon and its internal critics and reformers. At the end of this essay, I suggest why being in conversation with such theories—along with sustained engagement feminist interlocutors and others outside the “traditional” canon—would strength their cases and avoid the pitfalls of nostalgia. In spite of these criticisms, I contend that these two books speak to the need to interrogate, from the position of one’s own positionality, the theopolitical and idolatrous dimensions of secular (Christian) modernity.

Nationalism as Splendid Idolatry

Under a redemptive ethos of overcoming their shackles and creating a “disenchanted” world, secular modernity for both these authors amounts to a story of redirecting the sacred to an array of idols (Cavanaugh) and the supersession of the Jewish tradition through the political and theopolitical realities of Zionism (Yadgar). Certainly, this line of analysis places Yadgar and Cavanaugh in the broader genealogy of scholarship in political theology that seeks to excavate and demystify the theological scaffoldings undergirding the secular frame. Both thinkers converge in their critique of nationalism or nation-statism. Drawing on Jean Luc Marion, Cavanaugh interprets nationalism as a “splendid idolatry,” by which he means its ultimately deceptive sense of partaking in something larger than self-interest. The latter, on the other hand, animates the “unsplendid idolatry” of market capitalism. Cavanaugh walks the reader through the complex literature that has examined the relation between religion and nationalism, often within a conceptual landscape replete with secular/modernist assumptions.

Accordingly, Cavanaugh traces, among other adjacent interpretative traditions, functionalist (Durkheimian) accounts that examine how the nation functions like religion once did prior to modernity. Ultimately, such a functionalist interpretative prism obscures what both he and Yadgar are concerned with: the relationship between nation-statism, or nationalism as idolatry, and the religious traditions that predated their consolidation and misdirection of worship, allegiance, and sense of belonging. Further, situated in his Christian American location, Cavanaugh interrogates how and why the migration of the holy to the nation reconfigures the meanings of the Church. Challenging a secularist approach that only asks how religion is used to cohere nationalist sentiments (“the opium for the masses”) but not what nationalism does to religion, and vice versa, he writes:

Nationalism does not simply pick up and adopt Christian themes and symbols and stories; it adopts Christians too, and thus changes the identity of the church. In other words, when the holy migrates from the church to the nation-state, it brings a lot of the church along with it. When nationalism becomes the new religion, the nation-state becomes the new church (250).

Likewise, the reliance of modern/secular nationalism on religiocultural building blocks (always through a selective retrieval) exposes, as Benedict Anderson writes, the paradox of nationalism’s philosophical poverty and even incoherence versus political power (5). This insight is critical for unpacking and tracing how even iconoclastic secular nationalism can come to define “religion” through racialized dynamics of exclusionary citizenship. This point is pertinent for Yadgar’s analysis of Zionism, even though, like Cavanaugh, Yadgar does not engage with the intersectional literature on race and religion explicitly. Locating his interrogation of Zionism within a broader critique of modernity/secularity, Yadgar effectively de-exceptionalizes Zionism as a form of racialized nationalism. In his interaction with Cavanaugh, he writes that Zionism is but “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.”

Idolatry Critique & Zionism as the New Judaism

Indeed, Yadgar traces how the Jewish tradition is both appropriated and negated by Zionism. Provocatively in this case, Zionism becomes “the New Judaism,” as the subtitle of Yadgar’s book conveys. For Cavanaugh, “idolatry critique” entails self-critique of the “divinization of things,” such as nationalism. Unlike, but in continuation with his earlier non-theological critical account of modernity’s mythology about itself, The Uses of Idolatry digs into Catholic theological sources, exemplifying “idolatry critique” as a form of self-critique. Idolatry critique is also precisely what Yadgar is doing in his book, which, like the film Israelism and Naomi Klein’s powerful reflection on the April 2024 “Seder in the Streets” amid the Gaza genocide, interrogates Zionism as a form of idolatry. Klein discussed the rage that led Moses, when he descended from Mount Sinai to see the people worship the golden calf, to shatter the tablets upon which God inscribed the ten commandments. Klein rereads this plotline as a story about “the human tendency to worship the profane and shiny, to look to the small and material rather than the large and transcendent.”

Klein’s decrying of Zionism as idolatry—along with the diagnosis of idolatry by Yadgar and Cavanaugh—resonates for me as I watch a Jewish Israeli genocidal assault on Gaza, underwritten by the United States and other enablers, continue to unfold. This last detail is essential for this synthetic reflection because both these books illuminate modern nationalism as a catastrophic form of idolatry and a departure from and negation of traditional religious traditions. For Yadgar, the story of how Zionism became the new Judaism is not simply a parochial account of the history of modern Zionism and the creation of the State of Israel, but a broader intervention that exposes, like Cavanaugh, the relation between nation-statist theopolitics and “traditional” theology (e.g., 3). Cavanaugh examines nationalism as a deceivingly “splendid idol,” whose deception resides in its narcissistic and destructive logic. It hides behind a rhetoric of “horizontal solidarity” and an ethos of sacrifice for the greater good, as described by Marxist scholars of modern nationalism, such as Benedict Anderson.

Misdirection & Sacramentality

To recap some key points: Cavanaugh critiques the established philosophical canon for subscribing to Max Weber’s concept of “disenchantment,” i.e., the secular as emptied of religious enchantment. Instead, for Cavanaugh, secular modernity entails the migration of the holy to the market and the nation. In other words, secular modernity does not vanquish religion from the public sphere, it rather relocates it. He catalogues and wrestles with the diminishment of human flourishing and solidarity that is a result of the idolatry of the market and nationalism. Further, he illuminates a distinction between western modernity’s mythology about disenchantment and the intellectual traditions marshalled to establish this form of idolatry or what he also calls “misdirected worship” (4). For Cavanaugh, therefore, exposing the aspirational rather than empirical descriptive force of the concept of disenchantment opens pathways for disrupting the binarization of believers versus non-believers, one of the key categories of analysis that a critical study of religion interrogates. In this conceptual framing, there is not a way to opt out of belief, there are rather different objects at which belief aims, i.e. God or the Nation.

Cavanaugh’s anthropological approach to worship as unavoidable and inscribed in the human qua human leads him to elaborate “a practice of sacramentality” to “overcome idolatry” (5). Hence, he offers a situated intervention from within Catholic theology that articulates “an ethic of immersion in material creation that neither elevates material realities into gods nor lowers human beings into instruments to be dominated, but rather participates in divine life through the material realities that God sustains in being” (5). This approach is deeply theological and grounded in the Christian motif of Incarnation. It is, therefore, difficult to see how and where his ethic of immersion can also lead to a relational political ethics of interculturality that disrupts nostalgia’s conservative force.

“American Jesus.” Photo via Flickr User Christ barker. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Nostalgia is present in both authors’ desire to return to traditions outside the nation-statist modernist/secularist frame. It is also present in the political projects that they oppose. Yadgar’s discussion of (Ashkenazi and Mizrahi) nostalgia is thought-provoking. It captures how, within the context of the Israeli nation-state, nostalgia for exilic and diasporic Judaism is policed or prohibited. At the same time, biblical archeology is used to construct ancient Jewish origins in the land and thereby manufacture a biblical nostalgia (e.g., 99–100), which sanctifies and authorizes the ongoing Palestinian catastrophe of depopulation, domination, and denial. This manufacturing of nostalgia, Yadgar writes, is pivotal for Zionism’s self-fashioning “as a revolution that confrontationally, aggressively seeks to redefine and appropriate the very meaning of Judaism” (53). It is also, as Yadgar acknowledges, pivotal for the sacralization of settler-colonial violence which Yadgar acknowledges. But rather than settler colonialism, he focuses instead on the category of the nation-state to ascertain how the case of Israel and “Jewish nationalism” exemplifies a broader critique of secular modernity. The exclusive focus on nationalism rather than on settler-colonial nationalism obscures the need to engage with other explanatory paradigms and relevant ways of thinking about religion and political and epistemological forms of violence.

Zionism as Supercessionism

Nationalism is a product of western Christian secular modernity, even if it is articulated as “religious” or ancient. Yadgar’s account of the particularity of Zionism illustrates this broader point about modernity’s political project. For Yadgar, Zionism is unintelligible outside European Christian modernity, the other side of which, as decolonial scholarship shows, is a coloniality predicated on systems of racialization. In the case of Palestine, the aspiration of some Jewish Zionists to call their nationalism a “Jewish” one, violates not only the multiple histories of the land and the humanity of its Indigenous people, but also the validity of their stories. It also violates Jewish traditions and histories that reside outside the assimilation of Jews, as Santiago Slabodsky has shown, into western Christian secular modernity and its civilizational (Islamophobic and orientalist) discourse. Yadgar’s idolatry critique, therefore, entails a meticulous analysis of Zionism as a product of European Christian modernity.

Indeed, Yadgar (along with others) reflects on how Christian Zionism predated Jewish Zionism by centuries, going back to the Reformation. Rather than reflecting a love for Jews, this form of Zionism entails their instrumentalization and ultimate demise in a Christian eschatological drama. In many forms of this narrative, Jews will either convert or be sent to hell at the time of Christ’s second coming in Jerusalem. Christian Zionism’s supersessionist logic persists in the naturalized (but very recent) construct of the “Judeo-Christian,” which is deployed to promote Islamophobic and other racialized agendas. Yadgar’s account of Zionism shows how it continues to deploy and replicate a Christian supersessionist logic that negates Jewish traditions and Jewish pasts outside a Zionist teleological frame. He writes: “Zionism rebels against its past, and against what it sees as an outdated meaning of Jewishness captured by this past, while seeking to appropriate this past to promote its politics and ideology” (55). His application of the concept of “supersession,” which denotes a Christian theological logic of replacement (“the Old” with “the New”), exposes “the dual action of appropriation and negation of Jewish tradition by Zionism, even if [its ideologues] do not use the term ‘supercessionism’ itself” (44).

Yadgar, therefore, delineates distinctions between the construct of “the Jewish State” and Israel as a Jews’ State. He concludes his incisive analysis with the debates around the Knesset’s ratification in 2018 of the Jewish Nation-State Law that declares the entirety of “the Land of Israel” as belonging to the Jewish People (and them only). For him, this law indicates that “Zionism and the Israeli polity have shifted the discourse…from asking, ‘What makes someone or something Jewish?,’ to constructing a polity based on a majority of ‘Jews’” (39).  Further, the Jewish Nation-State Law showed how “Jewish nation-statehood…as a ‘state of Jews’—is found to be undermined by its inconsistency with basic democratic principles of equality” (39). This is where Yadgar’s analysis echoes Cavanaugh’s account quoted above of how “nationalism becomes the new religion, the nation-state becomes the new church.”

“Tribalism”

Beyond the materiality of genocidal violence experienced by Palestinians, the “Jewish State” supersedes, in Yadgar’s account, the Jewish tradition, which is not singular but instead contested, plural, and polymorphic both historically and geographically. If, for Cavanaugh, the “parochial” practice of sacramentality disrupts the idolatry of nationalism, Yadgar deploys the concept of “tribalism” to counteract the destructive logic of western Christian modernity/secularity. By “tribalism,” he refers to “communal identities fed by and carrying varying traditions.” Such “tribalism,” he continues, “may be the way out of the nationalist bind” (159).  To offer an example of this alternative to Jewish nationalism, he zooms in on counter-archival Jewish remains and histories, such as what Jewish Israeli scholar Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin describes in his study of the sixteenth-century Palestinian Ottoman town of Safed. Raz-Krakotzkin endorses a Mishnaic consciousness, which refers to the rabbinic textual hermeneutical praxis, to that of a messianic biblical consciousness, which is rooted in Christian eschatological imagination (160). Drawing this move to the counter-archival, for Yadgar, has a reparative potential. It recovers from the homogenizing logic of modern European nationalism (as manifested in Zionism) the “universally parochial nature of our communal identities: we are all (hence the universal) members of such traditional or local (either geographically or culturally; hence the parochial), communities or identity groups” (159). This focus on “triablism”—or Jewish variety outside Zionist teleology and homogenization— gestures to what Yadgar asks Cavanaugh about regarding his parochial move to engage in idolatry critique via a sacramental practice. In their interview, Cavanaugh responds to Yadgar’s question, saying, “precisely because idolatry critique should first and foremost be self-critique, we need to start with our own practices and our own theological resources.” It is the limits of that immanent critique that I turn to now.

Broadening the Conversation

Neither author engages with feminist hermeneutics and critiques of nation-statism and religious traditions underneath the modernist construction of theopolitical secular regimes. Nor do they articulate their idolatry critique with the literature about modernity/coloniality that traces, as Nelson Maldonado-Torres does, for example, the construction of religion as a racialized category that was brought into being via colonial violence. Their critique of modernity would be greatly enhanced through a conversation with scholarship in religious studies that links the critique of secularism/modernity with decolonial scholarship, as An Yountae does, for example. This scholarship pushes the critique of the secular/modern beyond the analysis of idolatry by engaging with the question of religion and colonialism through a robust interrogation of racialization. The lack of such feminist and decolonial nuances, or an epistemology from the margins, simply points to where Yadgar’s and Cavanaugh’s critique of the modern/secular can fruitfully converge with transformative relational ethics and hermeneutics that resist conservative claims to an authentic tradition that existed before the ideological project of modernity. Such an authenticity discourse, which both Yadgar and Cavanaugh seem to resist—while not necessarily offering a future-oriented pluralistic methodology for engaging in such resistance—too often converges with regressive policies and political ideologies. Therefore, reading Yadgar and Cavanaugh together enhances a religiously literate critique of the modern/secular while also pointing to where such a critique can cross-pollinate with an intersectional account of religion along the matrices of gender, race, class, ability and so forth. This modes of analysis, in combination with decolonial epistemologies from the margins, offer ways to resist romantic and conservative nostalgias.

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Atalia Omer
 Atalia Omer is Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame in the United States. She earned her Ph.D. in Religion, Ethics, and Politics (2008) from the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Her research focuses on Israel/Palestine; religion, violence, and peacebuilding; as well as theories and methods in the study of religion. Omer was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, resulting in Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2023). Among other publications, Omer is the author of When Peace is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (University of Chicago Press, 2019). She is also a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2015).