Picture of books in Spanish written by Enrique Dussel. Image via Wikimedia Commons
We might be approaching a time when we will speak of the first generation of liberation theologians and philosophers as ancestors. Since the late-1960s, theologians and philosophers in this tradition have created pathways for a radical rethinking of theology and religious studies, for the theological critique of modernity and of capitalism, and for theorizing the liberative power that religious communities can exercise. This generation is passing on, leaving an irreplaceable void in liberationist and decolonial thinking and activism. On November 5, 2023, the Argentine Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel passed away, joining a cloud of ancestral witnesses that will continue to demand from the living that we do not let go of the call to liberation. Undoubtably, the commitment to liberation is the signature trait of Dussel’s intellectual and political work. It informed a double gesture that integrates the political demand to stand in solidarity with the oppressed as well as a form of epistemic solidarity that integrates non-hegemonic ways of knowing for the sake of decolonization.
Ever since Dussel’s passing, I have been reflecting on how impossible it is to overstate the force of his claim in The Invention of the Americas that there could not have been a Cartesian I think, therefore I am, without Hernán Cortés’ I conquer, therefore I am. Who could forget that remarkable preface and its strong delineation of modernity? “Modernity dawned in 1492 and with it the myth of a special kind of sacrificial violence which eventually eclipsed whatever was non-European” (12). There is not descubrimiento (discovery) without encubrimiento (effacement, covering over). Dussel shaped generations of thinkers whose starting point was this framing of modernity as a sacrificial project. For theologians like myself, Dussel contributed to the inception of liberation theology through his books on the history of Latin American Christianity, which emphasized the passage from colonial Christianity to a Christianity of liberation. And Dussel should also be situated as a key figure in the development of the theological critique of capitalism alongside figures like Franz Hinkelammert, who also passed away in 2023.
Dussel’s commitment to provincializing European philosophy as well as to establishing the grounds for a Latin American philosophy of liberation date back to some of his earliest texts. In his 1968 lectures on philosophical anthropology, for example, Dussel framed his project by juxtaposing Heidegger’s concept of “ontological forgetting” with the axis of colonial modernity. Dussel understood that an open task for philosophy was to identify the historical situations and cultural patterns that have been forgotten—more like erased—by colonial epistemologies (194). These forgotten fragments, as it were, form the substance of Dussel’s initial articulation of a philosophy of liberation. According to Alejandro A. Vallega and Ramón Grosfoguel, Dussel finds in Heidegger’s “appropriative de-struction of the history of Western philosophy elements that will be useful for the destruction of Western colonialist systems of oppression” (11).
Dussel understood that an open task for philosophy was to identify the historical situations and cultural patterns that have been forgotten—more like erased—by colonial epistemologies.
Early on as well, Dussel encountered Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, a work that caused in him a “subversive disorientation” and led him to question “all that he [had] learned thus far” (7). Levinas instigated Dussel to consider the dimension of exteriority and the fundamental category of the “Other.” These are concepts that Dussel quickly appropriated to theorize a passage beyond the logic of colonial modernity. While “disorientating,” Dussel’s encounter with Levinas confirmed to him something he had intuited during the time he spent in Israel, between 1959 and 1961. And that is: that the Hebrew tradition may be said to present an alternative view of humanity, one that affirms the historicity of the human subject and that places a special emphasis on justice, the moral agency of the oppressed, and the political imperative of liberation. This type of commitment, formulated in Dussel’s 1969 book, El humanismo semita, remained with him throughout his career. Dussel concluded his response to Levinas by situating the Levinasian call to the face of the other in the context of the colonial conquering ego. Dussel pushed for a historicization and a politization of the Other, naming it in its historical enfleshment as a “Native American, an African, or an Asian” (8).
It is possible to say Dussel’s incipient efforts in decolonization were marked by his investigations of existentialist philosophy and phenomenology, his knowledge of the history of Latin America, his encounter with Levinas, and his participating in the formulation of Latin American liberation philosophy and theology. A defining element of his thought would be added later on.
San Miguel de Tucumán, July 8, 2015 – Within the framework of the “National and Latin American Forum for a New Independence” that took place at the San Martín Theater, the panel “The Return of Politics” was held with the presence by Ricardo Forster, Jorge Alemán, Enrique Dussel, Horacio González, and Roberto Caballero. Image Credit: Romina Santarelli / Ministry of Culture of the Nation.
In 1975, Dussel was forced to leave his native Argentina after receiving death threats from the military junta that ruled the country. He sought refuge in Mexico, where he remained for the rest of his life. Dussel tells that his move introduced him to an intellectual circle with deep ties to Marxism. That marked an important passage in Dussel’s trajectory that eventually led him to a deep exploration of the Marx archives. The result of that research were four books, published between 1985 and 1993. Dussel’s reception of Marx was marked by his previous political and philosophical commitments to liberation and to the category of the Other. According to Eduardo Mendieta, Dussel read Marx’s Capital as an ethical book based on a radical critique of capitalism as a system that creates wealth at the expense of human suffering and exploitation (8–9). These claims are made explicit in Dussel’s final book on Marx, The Theological Metaphors of Marx (whose English translation will be published for the first time soon). In it, Dussel refers to Capital as a theological work that sought to expose the historical and material bases of an idolatrous system of accumulation and exploitation, a true demonic system that deifies injustice (175). For Dussel, Marx was an “implicit theologian” who put theological metaphors to use in the task of exposing capitalist exploitation (131).[1]
The path I have sketched in Dussel’s thought suggests a necessary alliance, what I’m inclined to call an epistemic solidarity between decoloniality, the critique of capitalism, and theology. That is to say, Dussel’s commitment to liberation is what guided him in the path of decoloniality but he walked this path precisely because he understood the task of decolonization under a certain theological register. That register was a certain allegiance to the image of a liberator God, a God with whom one stands “more or less as a comrade,” to cite an intriguing formulation once given by Paulo Freire. Enlisting God as such a comrade, Dussel interrupted the “holy alliance” (Marx) between the religious establishment and coloniality. But he also pushed for a renewed understanding of religion as an active force in the shaping of a world beyond colonialism. Dussel’s work in theology and religious studies embodies the task of decolonization by building upon the suppressed histories and ways of knowing of colonized communities and their spiritualities. Epistemic solidarity, as Dussel modeled so well in his writings, integrates multiple forms of suppressed knowledge for the sake of justice and liberation.
These are tasks that remain open for those of us who have learned so much from Dussel’s texts and teaching. There is therefore grief for his passing. As the grief for, and the farewells to, the first generation of liberation theologians and philosophers continue to meet us, the living will need to develop strategies to enlist these ancestors as sources for our efforts in the direction of decolonization. The task of mourning, always labor intensive, is now open for newer generations to whom the project of decolonial thought and of Latin American liberation philosophy and theology has always been associated with Dussel’s name.
[1] I explore this claim as well as Dussel’s intellectual trajectory leading up to his encounter with Marx in an upcoming essay, “The Haunting of Liberation: Derrida and Dussel, Three Decades Later,” under review with the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.
Filipe Maia is Assistant Professor of Theology at Boston University School of Theology. He is co-chair of the Liberation Theologies Unit at the American Academy of Religion and co-convener of the World Parish webinar, a gathering of Wesleyan and Methodist scholars and leaders committed to the decolonization of the tradition. He is the author of Trading Futures: a Theological Critique of Financialized Capitalism and co-editor of Methodism and American Empire.
Secretary-General António Guterres (center) meets with a delegation of North American Rabbis. UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe. Used with permission.
On January 25, 2023, I, along with 9 other rabbis, representing another 265 rabbis from around the globe and every imaginable denomination, met with Secretary General António Guterres at the United Nations headquarters. You might think that we went to tell him what most Jews are presumed to believe, namely that the UN has it out for Israel and always treats the Jewish state unfairly. Nothing could have been farther from our minds. Rather, we went to thank him and the UN’s agencies for courageously calling out Israel for the humanitarian crimes they are committing in Gaza and to promote our cause: Ceasefire Now!
For me it was a powerful moment on a long journey. When I was a fourth grader in Brooklyn in the 1950s, my beloved teacher, Evelyn Farrar, taught us about the United Nations. We memorized the lyrics to “United Nations on the March,” because the idea of “a hymn to a new world at birth,” a “free new world” achieved by diplomacy, encapsulated her hopes and dreams for what the United Nations could be. We visited the sacred site of the UN Headquarters itself and learned about the peacemaking accomplished by the Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjöld. Her lessons worked: as a child I fervently believed that the UN could bring about a world without war.
When I was in high school, I returned to the UN. On June 5, 1967, I joined other young Jews in a rally to encourage the US to help Israel just as the ’67 war between Israel and the neighboring Arab nations of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan was beginning. The new Secretary General, U Thant, had just withdrawn UN peacekeeping forces from Gaza and the Sinai at Egypt’s demand, and American Jews were worried about Israel’s safety. Attending that rally led me to spend time in Israel two years later and soon thereafter to become one of the first women ordained as a rabbi.
Dag Hammarskjöld outside the UN building in 1953. Via Wikimedia Commons.
In the fifty-seven years since my last trip to the UN, I have struggled to come to terms with the results of the ’67 war. In spite of what I believed in my youth, I see now that it led to Israel’s continuous occupation of Palestinian lands and unwillingness to grant Palestinians freedom in the land they share. But I never imagined that the current crisis would lead me back to the United Nations, hoping, once again, that they could help bring about an end to war.
As an active member of Rabbis for Ceasefire, I am honored to have been part of the delegation that met with the current Secretary General, António Guterres to discuss the terrible destruction Hamas wrought on October 7, 2023 as well as the unfathomably disproportionate destruction that Israel has committed in response.
Our meeting took place a few days after the Secretary General’s bold speech at the opening of a summit of the G77+China that met in Uganda. In that speech, he condemned Israel’s “unprecedented” and “wholesale” destruction of Gaza that has claimed the lives of 152 UN staff members among the 27,000 dead. The Secretary General pointed to the daily dangers survivors endure, not only bombs and bullets but damaged roads, communication blackouts, disease, and famine. He called the conflict “a threat to global peace and security” that must come to an end. That speech was a resounding echo of what the 275 Rabbis for Ceasefire are demanding: Ceasefire Now.
We met with him both to thank him for his courageous words and to find out how we could help add a Jewish moral voice to the UN’s efforts: to stop the threat to global peace and security, end the current attacks that are destroying Gaza and its inhabitants, and hold Israel accountable.
His answer was clear: continue to work for a reconciliation between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. Help them understand that for the security of all they must learn to live together in peace. Keep up your efforts, he recommended. Likewise, he promised us that he would work toward a ceasefire and, to the best of his ability, carry out the provisional judgments of the International Court of Justice that, although they fell short of demanding an end to hostilities, recognized the critical need to end Israel’s assault on Gaza’s civilian population, cultural institutions, and infrastructure and allow humanitarian aid to enter unimpeded.
Our conversation moved us beyond words, for this Secretary General follows in the path set by Hammarskjöld and the other men who preceded him as rodfei shalom, seekers of peace. A deeply faithful Catholic himself, he clearly understood the importance of the religious faith that brought us to work for justice in Israel/Palestine. We left feeling seen and heard by him; believing that he would, with grace and humility, continue to work toward our common goal of a lasting peace.
His answer was clear: continue to work for a reconciliation between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. Help them understand that for the security of all they must learn to live together in peace.
We closed by offering him the ancient priestly blessing in the book of Numbers: “May the Holy One bless and protect you. May the Holy One shine upon you and be gracious to you. May you feel empowered to work for peace, shalom.” A hush fell over the room, and some of us found ourselves close to tears. The Secretary General told us that he’d sleep better having met us today. And we knew we would as well.
Little did we know that the day following the ICJ ruling, which will result in a long investigation of South Africa’s charges of genocide against Israel, Israel would react by claiming that 12 of the 13,000 UN workers for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) took part in the October 7, 2023 massacre. The UNRWA leadership responded swiftly and decisively, condemning the acts, firing nine of the workers (two are dead and one yet to be identified), and beginning an investigation into the claims. Despite this resolution and with no regard for the impassioned plea of the Secretary General, the US and many of its allies have temporarily suspended funding UNRWA. When funds run out at the end of February, the humanitarian crisis that exists in Gaza that was the focus of the Court’s mandate will become even more devastating. UNRWA is the only agency that makes medicine, food, and shelter available to the 1.5 million displaced residents of Gaza. The tragedy worsens and worsens.
We left the meeting with new hopes and now new fears, so we continue to pray: that the leaders of our country understand the gift that is the United Nations and its Secretary General. That they and their allies restore the funding to UNRWA and not become responsible for more death. That they heed the words of all of us who demand a permanent ceasefire now. That they stop using their veto to keep the UN Security Council from doing what it was created to do, as I learned in that song so many years ago, to bring into being “a new world at birth.” A world, as the song also says, “where our children (and all children) shall live proud and free.” And may it be so.
‘Peace For All’ sculpture by Derek A. Fitz Simons, Aghalane, Co. Fermanagh, erected 1999. Located at the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, at the south side of the Senator George Mitchell Peace Bridge. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Almost everyone who studies religion, conflict, and peace has tried to understand Northern Ireland, so I was thrilled by the invitation from colleagues at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security, and Justice to attend a workshop in Belfast.
I approached our shared task—to analyze “religious turbulence” and imagine “alternative futures”—as a historian of US religion associated with Peace Studies who has ancestors on both sides of the island’s troubled sectarian past. While more branches of my family tree include Catholics from the south, the Tweed branch descends from Protestants who were part of the seventeenth-century Scottish Plantation, settling on farmland in County Antrim and attending Presbyterian churches. While my direct ancestors left for America in 1848, during the Famine, those who stayed in the north went on to take sides during the Home-Rule debate, the Partition, and the Troubles. In other words, I have ancestral ties to the colonial past my Irish Catholic relatives lament and to the twentieth-century Troubles almost everyone laments, including those in my ancestor’s Presbyterian congregation who signed the 1974 “Witness for Peace” statement and who welcomed me warmly when I visited the day before the Belfast workshop.
I had not planned to visit those relatives or ponder my family history when I began preparing for our scholarly collaboration, but Northern Ireland religious leaders and US Peace Studies specialists reminded me that personal disclosures can help. Clergy in the north have recommended including “personal narrative in public discussions,” and Peace Studies specialists have said those hoping to cultivate the moral imagination required for “constructive social change in settings of deep-rooted conflict” must overcome the academic impulse to “eliminate the personal.”[1]
I tried to overcome that impulse as I considered what I might contribute as an outsider with distant ties to combatants on both sides of the sectarian conflict. I decided it might help if I took a step back and reflected on the most useful analytic frames, guiding metaphors, and interpretive terms for the analysis of religion and conflict in post-Brexit Northern Ireland. In particular, considering my research on the US and engaging scholarship about the island, I wondered how we might interpret both “specific trigger events” and “longer-term context,” or what others have called “short-term shocks” (Famine, Partition, and Brexit) and “long-term trends” (colonialism, urbanization, and industrialization)?[2] Almost all international, national, and local peacebuilding documents suggest islanders must confront the legacy of the past as they articulate a shared vision of the future, but polarization often sets in as soon as the stories start.
Maybe new frames, metaphors, and terms can help.
Frames, Metaphors, and Terms
The Peace Wall, Cupar Way, Belfast, Northern Ireland. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Scholars who write about the island have made helpful proposals. Brendan Murtagh has compared post-partition Belfast to political zones like Cold War Berlin and the Korean DMZ and argued the city is best understood as a “border landscape.” Others describe post-Reformation Irish religious space as a “theological palimpsest” and chronicle how the devout have inscribed competing notions of religious authenticity and collective belonging on the landscape.[3] Some highlight residential and activity segregation, suggesting that Belfast’s distinct communities can be understood as “ethnic enclosures,” or, analyzing local perceptions, they note that the barriers, flags, and murals that mark bounded space produce “landscapes of menace” and “landscapes of exclusion” (see, for example, F. W. Boal and Madeline Leonard). An ecocritic imagined the “Eden of the future” by foregrounding Belfast’s river-systems and figuring the city as a “riparian zone,” a transition area between fully terrestrial and fully aquatic systems (see Katherine M. Huber on this point). That analogical language is suggestive since just as riparian zones are prone to flooding, Belfast’s landscape has been the site of periodic deluges of sectarian hostility, and, as Ciaran Carson suggested in Belfast Confetti, the Farset, the city’s hidden river, follows “the line of the Peace-Line, this thirty-foot-high wall of graffiticized corrugated iron” (49).
The Comparative Gaze
While these interpretive vocabularies illumine some aspects of the conflict, I think terminology from the natural sciences, especially niche theory and sustainability studies, might help to reframe the conversation about the island by highlighting lifeway transitions, eco-cultural niches, and sustainability crises. That’s the approach I take as I analyze the history of religion in the lands that became America, where religion both escalated and eased crises of sustainability.[4] It inspired both status-reinforcing devotion and popular revitalization movements in stressed cornfield cultures between 1100 and 1350, when weather changed, crops failed, devotees clashed, and violence spiked. During the colonial exchange of biota, competing religious empires triggered demographic decimation, environmental stress, social inequality, and psychic trauma between 1565 and 1776 as settlers displaced Native Peoples and introduced the slave plantation. An urban industrial crisis intensified between 1873 and 1920, when fossil-fuel dependency increased pollution, and income inequality and health disparity in crowded northern cities signaled a wider decline in well-being. The global environmental effects of industrialization and urbanization peaked during the 1950s “Great Acceleration,” the onset of the time when human intervention in natural systems became predominant. The abrupt rise in carbon dioxide, methane, and ice-bound nitrates in polar ice levels signaled significant and long-term global ecological damage. That damage, in turn, threatened dramatic social and economic disruptions, from climate migrations to food scarcity, and presented new challenges to religious communities, which struggled to respond to deepening economic inequalities and mounting cultural polarization.
Descendants of the thirteenth-century cornfield cultures eventually confronted their difficulties, but the unresolved Colonial and Industrial Era crises were passed on to future generations. Americans now face the legacy of those social problems, including racial and economic inequality, while they also confront the unprecedented challenges of a global environmental crisis.
Reimagining the Island’s Past and Future
Can this framework help to reimagine the island of Ireland’s past as a series of resolved and unresolved sustainability crises? There was a medieval crisis as the climate-induced Great Famine (1315-1322) and the microorganism-caused Black Death (1347-1351) stressed farming and grazing niches in the fourteenth century. Were there lasting legacies of those crises that would shape the later sectarian conflict? Can we talk about a colonial crisis on the island? If so, when did it start and end? Was there a colonial exchange of biota, and a breaking of ancestral traditions, including spiritual practices focused on sacred sites, as with the veneration at holy wells? How did the displaced reimagine pilgrimage and recreate devotion in the new stressed niche? Was there an inequitable planation niche, as there was in the US South, and was it sacralized by a form of planter piety? If so, how did local revitalization movements use spiritual resources to challenge it? Specialists (for example here and here) have highlighted industrial Belfast, but does it also help to talk about an industrial crisis on the island, or at least in its northeastern corner, between about 1870 and 1920? Simon Purdue has documented ecological degradation in urban Belfast and demonstrated a decline in well-being, economic stability, and food security among mill workers. Most relevant for understanding the later conflict, Industrial Era employers constructed housing that would become the scene of post-1969 sectarian conflict, as Colm Heatley has argued.[5] During the Troubles, fatalities occurred disproportionately in the poorer, religiously segregated, working-class neighborhoods that had formed as grimy industrial niches. To what extent, then, can we see later religious conflict as the product of an unresolved colonial crisis and the legacy of an unresolved industrial crisis?
Demolition of Ewart’s mill in 1990. Belfast, Northern Ireland. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Does this analytic frame and interpretive vocabulary help? I’m not sure. But using sustainability and well-being has practical advantages because those terms have informed local and global thinking about possible futures. Similar language appears, for instance, not just in the UN Sustainable Development Goals but in The Belfast Agenda, the City Council’s vision for 2035. As I learned when I tried out the idea with my relatives in that North Antrim congregation, reframing those aims as the conditions for transgenerational sustainability and avoiding any mention of Protestant unionists and Catholic nationalists might open some participants to reimagining the troubled past as a series of shared sustainability crises and to envisioning future-focused deliberations as collective efforts to repair Belfast’s socially and ecologically stressed eco-cultural niche.
[3] Anna Gritching, “Introduction: Social Ecologies and Borderlands,” in The Social Ecology of Border Landscapes, 2, 5, 9; Gregory, et al., Troubled Geographies, 1.
[4] Thomas A. Tweed, Religion in the Lands That Became America: From the Ice Age to the Information Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming).
Walls of Derry, Derry/Londonderry, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Near New Gate Bastion: Mural of the main characters from the TV show Derry Girls. Via Wikimedia Commons.
What can we learn from the hit show, Derry Girls? (If you have not seen this, run off and start watching now!) Derry Girls is an Emmy-winning comedic coming-of-age series set in Northern Ireland. The show follows spirited teenagers navigating adolescence amidst a backdrop of political conflict. The show is set in the 1990s, before the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement that brought an “official” end to the Troubles. Today, Northern Ireland experiences a fragile peace. Yet, many themes behind the comedy still hold true for teens in Northern Ireland today.
Like the show, adolescents in Northern Ireland navigate history, culture, and the complex interplay between tradition and modernity. Our research team[1] is currently exploring how these teens learn and share their “truths,” which often are polarized by ethno-religious identity (Catholic/Protestant). We argue that a holistic approach is needed to study how polarized information is transmitted through traditional, structurally embedded narratives and systems that intersect with new information sources and modern values. We discuss novel methods that can begin to embrace these complexities, as now more than ever, information (and misinformation) are readily available literally at teens’ fingertips.
There is a large field of research in developmental psychology focussed on how young people learn information from others. We know that young people exhibit epistemic vigilance; that is, they are motivated to seek reliable information and bridge gaps in their knowledge. However, young people (like all people) also exhibit biases in their information seeking and sharing. As early as infancy, children prefer to learn from members of their own social or cultural groups, and take group membership into account when deciding with whom to share information. Children absorb and transmit information that aligns with the values of their community. This important area of study sheds light on the cognitive and social processes involved in children’s early understanding of information reliability at the individual-level.
A figure showing Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Theory of Development. Via Wikimedia Commons.
However, these findings currently lack perspective on how influences outside the individual, such as families, peers, schools, public policies, and cultural values, can combine to create a complex web of biases that shape the narratives young people construct about their communities. The socio-ecological framework (see, for example, Bronfenbrenner 1977) is a way of thinking about how different aspects of young people’s lives, from personal to societal to cultural, influence each other. The framework considers how individuals are shaped by their relationships, communities, and the larger society, as well as how they, in turn, can impact these environments. Using this framework, we can begin to elucidate how the push and pull of traditional post-conflict narratives and societal structures intersect with young people’s modernizing identities and values.
So, what can we learn from Derry Girls?
In episode 1 of season 2, the Derry girls participate in an attempt to mix their Catholic, all-girls school classroom with a classroom from a neighboring school of Protestant boys. A well-meaning but not-so-competent priest attempts to demonstrate overarching humanity through a brainstorming session of similarities across the mixed-background group. But alas, the failed exercise results in a full blackboard of “differences” between Catholics and Protestants, and an empty blackboard of “similarities.”
Re-created blackboard from Derry Girls for National Museums NI by Anna Mcaughtry, prop master on the show. Photo courtesy of Susan Dautel. Used with permission of Hat Trick Productions.
This replica of the now famous blackboard is on display at the Ulster Museum in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The show presented these stereotypes in a light-hearted, comedic way, but unfortunately, stereotypes of Catholic and Protestant identity contribute to polarized narratives still today. To highlight the necessity of investigating the development of polarization and epistemic vigilance within young people’s broader ecological frameworks, we provide two examples from this episode of Derry Girls. These examples demonstrate how societal processes seemingly interact with individual-level social cognitive processes.
Intergroup Competition
One “difference” suggested by the teens on the above blackboard is “Protestants are rich and Catholics are poor.” This common yet polarizing cultural narrative demonstrates the impact of a long history of zero-sum conflict and power dynamics across the island of Ireland. Historic narratives may enter into present day interactions with the “other.” For instance, in this episode Michelle, a Derry girl, says, “…I don’t see why we have to get them [Protestants] a present? I mean they already have all the land, all the jobs, and all the f***in’ rights.” This macro-level narrative of competition is upheld by contested symbols (like the “Free Derry” mural in the backdrop of many scenes in the show) in teens’ local communities, a micro-level influence. Take another micro-level example—when the Derry girls and “their” Protestants get into conflict, the dialogue immediately escalates into a polarizing narrative, e.g. “because all Protestants are the same.” Such intergroup competition across the ecological system may disrupt teens from seeking reliable epistemic cues, further fostering a preference for ingroup information, even when that information is likely unreliable. (How many Protestants actually keep toasters in the cupboard?)
Segregation
“Why is everyone so desperate for them to mix? I think we should keep them separate,” says the headmistress from the Londonderry Boys School in the show. Over 90% of schools are “separate” in Northern Ireland, still today. Some teens attend Catholic Maintained schools and other teens attend state-controlled (often majority Protestant) schools. Our research, so far, finds that not only do young people attend different schools, but they may be taught completely different content in different types of schools. In a sample of secondary schools, 96% of Catholic schools teach a class/module on the history of “The Troubles,” compared to only 46% of state-controlled (often majority Protestant background) schools. In a representative survey of young people, a whopping 33% of teens say they were not taught (or did not know if they were taught) about the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement in school. Religious education is also taught as part of the national school curriculum in Northern Ireland, but varies by school type. Studies of the two dominant school types during the Troubles found that they differed in time spent on religious education, rituals, symbols, and general ethos, but more current investigations are needed. Segregation also goes beyond schools into most layers of society. Teens often live in separate neighborhoods or towns, may attend church (Protestant) versus chapel (Catholic), have different hobbies, and read/watch different media. This separation within young people’s microsystems, i.e. their schools, classrooms, and local communities, can create false consensuses that reinforce ingroup perspectives and hinder the potential for cross-pollination and information sharing across group lines.
What may have changed for today’s teens in Northern Ireland since the 1990’s Derry Girls?
Anti Irish Sea border banner. Sandy Row, March 2021. Via Wikimedia Commons
A pessimist might say, not much. For instance, the “Protestants are British and Catholics are Irish” narrative on the Derry Girls differences blackboard features prominently in macro-level political discourse today. In the aftermath of Brexit, banners featuring polarized narratives around politics and national identity, like these, are frequent. Such macro-level narratives continue to intersect with micro-level structures, such as what young people learn in school and see in their local communities, leading to divided “truths” or knowledge structures at the individual-level.
“A United Ireland is for Everyone” poster via Sinn Fein. CC BY 2.0 DEED.
But thankfully, we are optimists. Now 25 years post the peace agreement, teens in Northern Ireland have been born into relative peace. Teens are motivated to move forward and continue to correct misinformation transmitted by previous generations: “Macaulay Culkin isn’t a Protestant, Ma!” (Erin, Derry Girls season 1, episode 1). Identities are shifting away from traditional dichotomous categories of Catholic and Protestant. Northern Ireland is secularizing—though it is important to note, not to the same extent as the Republic of Ireland or the rest of the United Kingdom. Teens are more likely to report having “no religion” or being “other” religion, as well as report being “neither” Unionist nor Nationalist. Churches, schools, and youth organizations are contributing to peacebuilding efforts through interfaith dialogue, cross-community initiatives, and integrated and shared education. What we still know less about is how and when young people today are motivated and able to seek out and share reliable information across group boundaries and beyond the limits of traditionally divided societal structures.
Call to Action: A Holistic Lens to Inform Effective Interventions
To navigate the intricate web of old and new, and micro- to macro-level influences on the development of polarization and/or epistemic vigilance in young people, we need innovative methodologies. Here are a few ideas that our team is working on (but we’d love to hear yours too, please comment below!):
Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Large Language Models (LLMs) emerge as powerful tools to analyze diverse texts, uncovering recurring themes and sentiments that occur in narratives across micro, meso, and macrosystems. This provides a nuanced understanding of the narratives influencing polarization. For instance, what were the Derry Girls learning about history and religion at Our Lady Immaculate College? Based on our current explorations, we have to assume a different history than their counterparts at the primarily Protestant background school down the road. Our team will use NLP to analyze pedagogical resources to understand polarization in history and religion education across Northern Irish classrooms.
Peer influence is a prominent theme in Derry Girls, pulling at times both towards (e.g., Erin tells her truth, “You can’t marry an Orangeman, Michelle!” Season 1, Episode 5) and away from polarization. Social Network Analysis expands beyond dyadic interactions, exploring naturally occurring social networks within settings like classrooms, local communities, or even more modern-day influences of social media. This approach helps decipher patterns of segregation, intergroup competition, and socialization practices, shedding light on the contextual factors influencing polarized (mis)information.
Diffusion paradigms, or experimental versions of the game of “telephone,” offer a real-time perspective on information transmission, allowing researchers to track how narratives, both polarizing and unifying, spread across groups. This method opens avenues to study the passing of stories and beliefs across peers, or across generations, contributing to our understanding of the perpetuation or amelioration of intergroup conflict.
Religion has influenced the narratives and perspectives of young people in Northern Ireland through community identity and belonging, education, rituals and commemorations, and moral and ethical interpretations of what is “true.” Employing interdisciplinary, mixed-method research is necessary to holistically explore how truth is defined and produced, how it is evaluated and transmitted at different levels of society, and how to increase epistemic vigilance. By synthesizing findings from various disciplines and methodological approaches, research can inform the development of targeted and effective interventions. These interventions, rooted in a deep understanding of the complexities highlighted in Derry Girls, can empower young people to enhance their epistemic vigilance. Ultimately, the goal is to equip young people with the critical thinking skills needed to catalyze positive social change, fostering healthier, more peaceful, and equitable societies, not only within Northern Ireland but also resonating beyond its borders.
[1] Our research team consists of Jocelyn Dautel (Queen’s University Belfast), Bethany Corbett (Ulster University), Kathleen Corriveau (Boston University), Emma Flynn (Warwick University), Eva Grew (Queen’s University Belfast), Mariah Kornbluh (University of Oregon), Caitlin McShane (Queen’s University Belfast), Jennifer Watling Neal (Michigan State University), Lara Wood (Abertay University), Christin Schulz (University of Amsterdam), and Jing Xu (University of Washington Seattle), funded by Templeton World Charity Foundation.
Dr. Jocelyn Dautel is a developmental psychologist researching how young people navigate their social worlds, especially when they are divided. She is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Psychology, Director of the Kids in Context research lab, and Fellow of the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. She leads on global research collaborations, such as Communicating Truth and the Developing Belief Network, researching children’s religious identity and beliefs across 30 field sites with over 50 international research collaborators. Through global education, research, and service, she contributes leadership in debates about unique and universal processes in social cognitive development with an aim towards reducing inequalities and promoting peacebuilding.
Dr. Bethany Corbett is a developmental psychologist and lecturer in the School of Psychology, Ulster University, Northern Ireland. Her research has examined factors contributing towards children's prosocial choices (for example, to help and share), including experiences of minoritization within settings of conflict. Her research informs strategies to reduce inequalities and increase cooperation, from the interpersonal (the formation of positive relationships) through to the macro-level (support for dismantling the status quo). Other research interests include how young people learn about historical - and particularly, contested - information. Understanding these processes contributes to strategies designed to increase young people’s critical thinking skills, and reduce their susceptibility to misinformation
It was no coincidence that the three presidents who were called by the US Congress on December 5th, 2023 to testify about “antisemitism on college campuses” were the presidents of Ivy League schools (Harvard, MIT, and The University of Pennsylvania). It was also no coincidence that all three presidents were women, and that one of them (Harvard’s) happened also to be Black. And so, as usual, impeccably seizing the political moment, the US Republicans had smelled blood and understood that they had in their hands a perfect storm opportunity, and, characteristically, immediately jumped into action.
First was the matter at hand: antisemitism, a subject that often shuts down debate and discussion. The Democrats would have no wiggle room and no choice but to side with their Republican colleagues (as they did, and with relish), no matter how vituperative and unfair and even flatly false the Republicans’ attack against the witnesses might get.
But second, and most crucially for the Republicans, here was a chance to expose, in their mind, the hypocrisy of liberal elites: They have no problem shutting down speech, creating “safe zones,” letting dissenting colleagues hang out to dry (and not infrequently, gang up on them), and firing those who persist in their unorthodox ways (tenure in many cases offering almost no protection) when it comes to topics that touch on the rights of women, LGBTQ+ communities, racial minorities, etc. Yet there they were, mum and tolerating what they, the Republicans (and the vast majority of their Democratic colleagues), described as “antisemitism” and “calls for genocide of the Jewish people.” Where were the safe zones and the requisite firings, the Republicans asked? Why were these demonstrations allowed to happen day in and day out, while hosting a simple lecture by someone outspoken in a politically incorrect way was often barred as a matter of course? Aside from the bottomless cynicism and the fantasy that the speech that they were calling out (calling for a ceasefire in a war zone where civilians were being slaughtered by the tens of thousands, and chanting demands for the freedom of a people oppressed and subjugated for soon a century) was antisemitic, the Republicans did have a fair enough point to make by bringing the liberal chickens back home to roost.
For me, the revolting spectacle during those congressional hearings had this one redeeming aspect to it: It was a salutary lesson for all to learn that when you start to restrict civil rights (in this case freedom of speech—and on campus of all places), no matter how noble your cause and your intentions may be, a time will most certainly come when the circumstances will make it impossible for you to resist being pulled by the forces of an establishment power wishing to assert itself to shut down the speech of majorities expressing sharp dissent (80% among Democratic voters and 56% among Republican voters, support an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in Gaza).
I sent an invitation to submit a reaction to Prof. Finkelstein’s Op-ed (published by the Washington Post on December 10th, 2023), where she calls for limiting free speech when it comes to pro-Palestinian demonstrations, to exactly seventy academics and activists. Each one of them was someone with whom I had previously corresponded and who always responded to my emails. Out of the seventy, fifty eight did not reply, seven declined to participate, and five agreed to write something. Out of those five, one changed their mind and withdrew, two wrote something, but a few days later, withdrew their pieces (with one of them citing that they were not tenured and so could not risk it), so that I was left with exactly two contributions. From there, and with the help of the two remaining academics who were sticking to their guts, we managed to get ten contributions after several weeks of pushing and pulling. At the very last minute, as if all of this needed more drama—and crucially, after I had shared my introduction (what you are reading)—one academic checked with their department and informed me that they needed to withdraw their piece! And so here we are.
I will let all those facts speak for themselves, as well as the nine pieces below. The reactions are listed below, in alphabetical order by first name.
Prof. Adam Rzepka
Associate Professor, English
Montclair State University
Prof. Claire O. Finkelstein’s op-ed extends a tradition of arguments from prominent legal scholars against constitutional rights in order to manufacture consent for war crimes executed or proxied by the U.S. I am reminded most directly of John Yoo’s infamous “torture memos”—the immediate application here is less atrocious, but the stakes are ultimately just as high. Finkelstein’s argument is effectively against the right of students and faculty to rely on the First Amendment in order to oppose a genocidal military campaign whose unconditional funding, supply, and political support is the current policy of our federal government.
As has been pointed out in other responses in this collection, the supposed rash of calls for “genocide against Jews” on campuses is a rhetorical phantom: such warnings are never accompanied by any actual examples. The slanderous implication that objections to Israel’s campaign in Gaza are aligned with violent antisemitism serves only one real purpose: to give institutional and intellectual cover for public acquiescence to what is at best a string of war crimes, almost certainly ethnic cleansing, and probably genocide, with the U.S. as its only foreign patron.
Like all such ideological covers, this argument necessarily proposes an abrogation of constitutional rights and the rule of law. In Finkelstein’s case, the forced consensus that genocidal violence must be lock-step public policy is the deeper point of the phrase “with or without the First Amendment.” Even on public university campuses, whose free speech standards must adhere to that amendment, calls for an end to the U.S.-supplied killing of some 3000 children per month in the Gaza campaign must also pass the test of whether or not those objections create a “hostile work environment” for specific ethnicities or national origins.
That last point is the most insidious one for public universities, especially, because it perverts the justice of Title VI and similar statutes by weaponizing them against objections to a specific government policy. Contortions like Finkelstein’s are already forcing cracks in longstanding free speech protections at public universities, which until now were set aside as a counterexample in the furor over private speech policies at Penn, Harvard, and Columbia.
At my public university, my own persistent advocacy for a ceasefire on our faculty discussion listserv quickly drew an anonymous complaint that I was creating a hostile work environment. For three weeks, I was banned from all speech on that listserv, without knowing any details of the complaint. When some (though not all) of these details were finally shared with me, the “investigation” was immediately dropped.
More than 2200 children in Gaza had been bombed to death in those three weeks. Nothing I could have said to the campus at large could have saved them, but I would have liked to speak out against this slaughter to those at my university who were publicly defending it. The next day, the university, in an effort to head off the flood of new harassment claims, unsubscribed all users from the discussion forum, effectively shutting it down. It did the same to the all-campus listserv, the only remaining channel of communication available to the full campus. Because of the way tactics like Finkelstein’s have manufactured a conflict between free speech and respect, we can no longer speak to each other as a community, for any cause.
Prof. Atalia Omer
Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies
Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies/Sociology
Co-Director, Contending Modernities
Keough School of Global Affairs
The University of Notre Dame
If the conclusion drawn from the university presidents’ congressional hearing on antisemitism on December 5, 2023, is that academic freedom needs to be restricted, it reveals how dangerous it is for Jews to fall into the false equation of antisemitism and criticism of Zionism and Israeli policies of occupation, apartheid, and settler colonialism. Rather than combating antisemitism, Representative Elise Stefanik (a New York Republican)—who ignorantly equated legitimate recognition of Palestinian resistance (intifada) with an eliminative intent (genocide) in her interrogation of the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania—exposed the weaponization of antisemitism in the service of White supremacy. Ignoring her embeddedness in White supremacist discourse, Rep. Stefanik conveniently instrumentalized the fight against antisemitism to come across as riding a moral high horse (scolding the university presidents for supposedly supporting a far-fetched hypothetical scenario of calls for genocide against Jews, an accusation leveled at a time when, according to leading genocide and Holocaust scholars, actual genocidal actions are unfolding against Palestinians in Gaza). Rep. Stefanik’s prior parroting of the “great replacement theory” that deems “the Jews” as instrumental in facilitating the “replacement” of White Christian Americans with minorities is underpinned by actual forms of antisemitism, Islamophobia, and anti-Black racism. Indeed, regardless of the rhetorical efforts to separate antisemitism from other forms of racism, these bigotries are always interwoven.
We need to go no further than the chilling chants by White nationalists in Charlottesville in August 2017, “Jews will not replace us,” in a “Unite the Right” march protesting the overdue plan to remove a symbol of the Confederacy, which inflicts constant moral injury upon Black Americans. The dangers and fallacies of disentangling an analysis of racism from antisemitism likewise manifested in the mass shooting in Pittsburg’s Tree of Life synagogue on November 4, 2018. The shooter was primed to carry out his attack because he learned about the synagogue’s involvement with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) and their commitment to working with immigrants and refugees. In this way, his actions reflected the perverse influence of the “great replacement” theory. These examples illuminate the entanglement of anti-Black racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and reactionary White Christian nationalism with antisemitism. Hence, the congressional hearing gestures toward a moment of opportunity in a broader “culture war” against wokeness enabled by an entrenched Jewish and Christian Zionist infrastructure already in place. This infrastructure criminalizes and litigates Palestinian narratives through the equation and conflation of Jews with a nation-state (represented by an aggressive promotion of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance “working definition” of antisemitism). Thus, weaponizing antisemitism is convenient for such forces that have assaulted LGBTQI, migrants, Muslims, and other marginalized communities. Jews need to be alarmed by their persistent assimilation into Whiteness and their instrumentalization in policing academic freedom and debates on campuses.
Prof. Ebrahim Moosa
Mirza Family Professor of Islamic Thought & Muslim Societies
The University of Notre Dame
A new meme—a usage, a style, code phrases—that subliminally replicates in our minds an entire ideology, “genocide against Jews,” is taking root in American public discourse. Literally menacing, this meme did not surface when White militias were braying, “Jews will not replace us” at Charlottesville, VA in 2017 under Donald Trump’s rule. Trump endorsed that right-wing protest with his shameful claim that there were “good people on both sides” at that protest. Neither Israel nor its supporters in the US amplified that horrific meme as “genocide against Jews.”
As the defining moral moment of our time, the post-October 2023 groundswell of support for the Palestinian cause on US campuses and around the world, criticism of Israeli occupation and settler-colonialism gets maliciously perverted as “genocide against Jews.” Everything from academic conferences on Palestinian literature to protests by Jewish Americans are framed under this self-serving and diabolically designated meme. The goal is not to squelch critique of Israel but to outlaw it. Calls for limits to free speech advocated by people like Claire O. Finkelstein are part of a wider ideological project in support of an Israeli propaganda war.
This meme is a hoax and ruse to silence critical debate and should be called out for what it is: a bid to justify Israel’s atrocities and comfort its conscience over its serious human rights violations. Imagine White South Africans who favored apartheid racism complaining because criticism of racism made them feel uncomfortable? In fact, the parallel is inadequate: apartheid ruined the lives of millions, but no apartheid government murdered and targeted more than 20,000 defenseless people with 2,000-pound bombs. Defenders of Israel’s atrocities ought to feel uncomfortable for supporting horrific murders and the dispossession of Palestinians going back to 1948.
Advocates of speech restrictions are surreptitiously importing Israeli propaganda memes into our public and campus discourses. Such speech restrictions would not even be tolerated in Israel itself. But the chutzpah to upend US free speech codes beggars the mind. It is a covert attempt to curb the political tide against Israel’s privileged status in US politics and to whitewash that country’s settler-colonial atrocities against Palestinians with US taxpayer dollars.
Prof. Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Professor of English and University Distinguished Scholar,
Montclair State University
Claire Finkelstein’s Op-Ed in the Washington Post deserves condemnation for several reasons, most obviously for its call to curtail First Amendment rights upon which much of the integrity and independence of thought and expression, which is the strength of US academia, rests.
More or certainly just as insidious, for me, is the way her convoluted and bad faith (il)logic, opens the way for a convergence of the worst excesses of right-wing politicians and their academic counterparts.
By equating chants of “intifada” or “from the river to the sea” with calls for the genocide of Jews—arguing that such speech thus incites violence “against a discrete ethnic or religious group,” and thus requires censorship of “free speech” tout court by college administrators—she is guilty of a disingenuous sleight of hand. By linking certain words and phrases to her interpretation of them, she is laying a trap of the exact same kind her congressional counterpart Elise Stefanik did, into which the presidents of UPenn, Harvard and MIT fell one after the other.
We should be clear, as these otherwise smart women were not: when Jewish Voices for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine chant “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free” they are not calling for genocide against Jews—many of them are Jews themselves! They are advocating for one secular and democratic state where all citizens can live together as equals. This is not possible in the current apartheid state of Israel, which has no right to think it speaks in the name of Jewish people of conscience: those who believe “never again” means never again for anyone!
If we in academia can’t debate and challenge illogical and pernicious views such as those of Ms. Stefanik and Prof. Finkelstein—to engage in the “dialogue” Finkelstein herself claims disingenuously to approve of—then the very foundations of critical thinking and vociferous, sometimes unpleasant debate we hold dear, never mind free speech, are doomed to extinction.
Prof. Genevieve Lakier
Professor of Law and Herbert & Marjorie Fried Teaching Scholar
The University of Chicago Law School
What a difference a month makes. A month ago, the public conversation about freedom of speech on American campuses took place in the shadow of a frightful specter: the image of antisemitic mobs who, according to Republican politicians, pro-Israel groups, and Claire Finkelstein, were rampaging across American campuses, calling for the genocide of Jews, with the permission or at least without the active constraint of university officials. That specter continues to haunt the imagination of some—and may continue to influence American law and university policy for years to come.
In the last month however, the story of speech on campus has become considerably more muddled. In the wake of South Africa’s arguments at the International Court of Justice last week—arguments that focused on the very real possibility that Israel has violated its obligations under the Genocide Convention of 1948—it has become increasingly hard to ignore the possibility that, when Elise Stefanik grilled the university presidents on their policies regarding genocidal student speech at the now infamous House committee hearings, the answers the presidents gave about their treatment of pro-genocide speech were more relevant to the pro-Israel speech on campus than the speech of pro-Palestinian groups.
This is not to suggest that the voices of pro-Israel students and supporters should be muzzled in the name of protecting students against genocide-encouraging speech. It is to suggest instead that there is a reason the college presidents—and American free speech law— is generally skeptical of efforts to identify exceptions to the ordinary principles of free speech, particularly when it comes to incitement. The reason is, of course, that judgments about what counts as (to use Finkelstein’s language) “hateful rhetoric” and “poisonous speech” are inevitably political judgments that can and have and—in the current climate—almost certainly will, if empowered, be used to repress political dissent.
This does not mean that there are no limits to what students or faculty can say. But it does explain why these limits are, as the university presidents explained at those hearings, very limited, particularly when it comes to protest and other kinds of speech. Ultimately her op-ed, with its deeply distorted understanding of what in fact is and has been taking place on campuses across the country, helps remind us of why it is so difficult to craft exceptions to the general free speech principles that do not swallow us whole.
Professor Claire Finkelstein recently argued that imposing restrictions on speech on US campuses is necessary to combat rising antisemitism. Her examples, however, cite only politically protected speech.
Such speech is at the heart of First Amendment’s protections. As the unanimous 2014 Supreme Court decision in McCullen v. Coakley held, even facially neutral “time, place and manner” restrictions on such speech can be struck down when they proscribe more speech than necessary. Private universities, while not obligated to follow the First Amendment, would surely be impoverished if they did not permit as wide a latitude for political speech as possible. The Supreme Court has only recently reaffirmed that political speech may only be proscribed when the speaker has a specific intent to foment imminent violence. Finkelstein provides no evidence that students at Penn or elsewhere, when they use these phrases, intend the genocide of Jews. Some Jewish students might subjectively experience such words as threats, but that does not provide a basis in our law to restrict the speech of others. Professor Finkelstein implicitly admits that the speech she describes as genocidal is equivocal, describing it as speech that “arguably incites violence.” Precisely because it is equivocal, controversial political speech invokes other crucial functions of the university that Finkelstein endorses: “civil dialogue across differences, . . . cultivating critical listening skills, . . . [and] promoting the ability to engage in moral reflection and building resilience in the face of challenge.” Students advocating for Palestine are engaged in a serious political critique of Zionism based on its devastating impact on non-Jewish Palestinians. Jewish students at Penn or other universities may experience this critique as painful or even hateful, but they are not entitled to immunity from hearing political critique of Jewish nationalism. Resilience, too, is a value the university promotes.
Prof. Nermeen Arastu
Associate Professor of Law
Co-Director, Immigrant and Non-Citizen Rights Clinic
The City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law
Professor Finklenstein argues that University administrators should surpass existing systems of collective governance, accountability, and analysis (she brusquely writes off task forces and study groups) to make unilateral top-down decisions about what constitutes hate speech, a category with no fixed legal definition. The focus of her essay, political speech in support of Palestinian liberation and critical of the Israeli government, deligitimizes speech in defense of one persecuted minority currently facing unprecedented death and destruction in favor of another historically persecuted group.
Glaringly absent from her analysis are the harms that Palestinian students, faculty, staff and their allies face where their legitimate speech critical of an occupying government are dangerously categorized as an incitement of violence, or genocide. In the last months and beyond, these communities have already faced harassment, surveillance, and physical violence. They too, deserve an academic environment where they can access equal educational opportunities, engage in collective action and grief, debate the effectiveness of international human rights systems, and build community relationships.
For Finkelstein, these populations, equally in need of protection and safety, are invisible at best. At worst, Finkelstein falls under the trap of employing tropes commonly used against minority religious and racial communities from the earliest days of the formation of the nation: calling them uncivil, hate-filled, and implying their inability to engage in reasoned dialogue. This language dangerously sets the tone for the surveillance, criminalization, and over-policing of minority students that follows them and their families off campuses and into communities long into their adult lives.
It is not possible to fully distinguish between speech and action. We live in communities largely characterized by meanings embedded in language. Speech shapes the character of these communities and, therefore, can profoundly affect the emotional and social wellbeing of those who live in them. In this respect, speech is action. Hate speech is a form of emotional and social violence even if it never results in physical assault. I believe, therefore, that College administrators have a responsibility to prohibit hate speech on their campuses. The problem comes in trying to distinguish between true hate speech and legitimate political expression. Take, for example, the word “intifada.” Intifada might be translated “resistance,” or “liberation.” A call for “intifada” against the state of Israel is legitimate political expression. A call for “intifada” against “the Jews” crosses the border into hate speech, as it is suggestive of the antisemitic charge that “the Jews,” en masse, are an oppressive presence in the world. How and where to draw the line between legitimate political expression and true hate speech is a difficult question. Nevertheless, I do believe a line must be drawn. Calling for the genocide of Jews, or the lynching of blacks, or the persecution of any ethnic or religious group is speech that should not be tolerated in communities dedicated to the advancement of truth and knowledge. How and where to draw the line between legitimate political expression and true hate speech is a difficult question that would need to be carefully considered on a case-by-case basis.
Prof. Tom Ginsburg
Leo Spitz Distinguished Service Professor of International Law and Director of The Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression
The University of Chicago
Professor Finkelstein is the latest in a long line of academics, from both the left and right, calling for the repression of campus speech they don’t like. Her position is the logical outgrowth of our era, in which students’ feelings take priority, and the use of terms like “violence” and “safety” have lost any connection with their traditional uses. Violence is what is happening in Gaza, while American universities are among the safest places on the planet. Our universities, with their ever-large bureaucracies, have encouraged rhetorical drift, but in doing so, have undermined one of their core missions—to prepare students as citizens of a plural, democratic society in which they will encounter opinions with which they strongly disagree. In the United States, with the First Amendment, this means that even private universities need to prepare students for a world in which all kinds of horrific speech is allowed, and so should generally take the same approach as public universities. This doesn’t mean that universities have to allow everything: perhaps a true call for genocide of Jews ought to be disallowed, though we have not to my ears yet heard one on an American campus in the wake of Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attacks. Israeli policy is an obvious area of democratic concern, and so must be fully debated, even if some find the slogans of one or the other side offensive. Of course, protests and speech must be carried out peacefully, without physically intimidating others, shutting down speakers, or interfering with classrooms. But Finklestein’s call for content-based restrictions is doubling down on a policy that is failing students and undermining public trust in higher education.
Enrique Dussel in 2013. Image via Flickr User Secretaría de Cultura de la Cuidad de México. CC-BY-SA 2.0.
Since the 1980s, Enrique Dussel has been regarded as the most important scholar in the fields of philosophy and theology in Latin America. An early contributor to liberation theology (teología de la liberación), a pioneering leader in the concurrent field of liberation philosophy (filosofía de la liberación), all the while being a highly respected historian of the Catholic Church in his own right, Dussel’s work spanned fields, geographies, and world history in an effort to dismantle the Eurocentric and colonialist pretensions of modernity. His contributions to these academic fields are simply too numerous to begin to list here. Without a doubt, the epistemicdecolonialization of these fields is at the front and center of his scholarship. However, the full potential of his work would be deficient if its reception were limited to a disciplinarily decadent interpretation that refused to cross boundaries. I argue that one of the most significant legacies of Dussel’s work is the urgency to rethink disciplinary divides with an eye toward epistemic decolonization. The relation between history and philosophy and the relation between history and theology are good examples of this interdisciplinarity.
The fact that Dussel was a contributor to the emergence of both liberation theology and liberation philosophy has often resulted in a misguided, if not outright dismissive, reception of his work from the fields of theology and philosophy. On one hand, some theologians argue that his liberation theology is not properly theological due to the strong influence of Marxism on its development. They argue that this influence leads his theological work to be a merely Marxist secular philosophy in disguise. On the other hand, some philosophers argue that his brand of liberation philosophy is not philosophical enough due to its close historical and theoretical relationship with liberation theology. Ofelia Schutte argues, for example, that if his philosophical work is not simply a theology in disguise, then at least it is a secular imitation of liberation theology (174). This is the case even though Dussel himself never sought to blur the boundary between philosophy and theology. Instead, he kept a strict distinction between the two discourses based on a division between faith and reason. For him, whereas philosophy is geared toward a universal secular community of reason, theology is geared toward a particular religious community of faith.
One of the most significant legacies of Dussel’s work is the urgency to rethink disciplinary divides with an eye toward epistemic decolonization.
Nevertheless, such formal distinction did not prevent creative and critical explorations of the ways in which the theological and the philosophical come together. In my view, these explorations are some of the most fertile moments in Dussel’s work. We see this in Dussel’s politico-philosophical study of Paul the Apostle. Here, a formal distinction between philosophy and theology is maintained in a way that seeks to overcome philosophy’s Enlightened secularism.
Picture of books in Spanish written by Enrique Dussel. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Without stepping into the ecclesiastical domain of theology, the philosopher can examine texts or topics that have traditionally been taken up in theology in the interests of determining a potential universal rationality. To be clear, this move is not the methodological discovery of a “philosophical theology” (which applies philosophical methods to elucidate theological frameworks) nor a “political theology” (which more narrowly analyzes the political field from the sectarian perspective of a religious tradition). As I have argued elsewhere, this move instead denotes the development of a dialectically postsecular philosophy that is invested in overcoming the ways in which the modern secular/religious divide has been falsely universalized through the coloniality of knowledge.
A more intricate instance of this exploration between the theological and the philosophical can be seen in Dussel’s The Theological Metaphors of Marx, a text that will be published for the first time in English translation in 2024. This text reconstructs Marx’s critique of theology as a critique of politics in a way that re-fashions political philosophy as an “anti-fetishist” philosophy of religion, where profane sacralization is diagnosed to be the root cause of political domination. While Dussel would write this text intermittently over a 20-year period parallel to the historical development of liberation theology, his argument largely stands on postsecularist philosophical grounds rather than theological ones. In this regard, it is similar to another heretically Marxist text: Ernst Bloch’s Atheism in Christianity, in which the German philosopher aims to establish a conversation between Marxism and religion “purged of ideology” (in the case of the latter) and “purged of taboo” (in the case of the former) (51). Interpreters who miss this methodological nuance end up all-too-quickly diagnosing the failure of The Theological Metaphors of Marx as a forced theologization of secular concerns. But this conclusion misses the entire point of the text, which is to rescue the critical value of theological metaphors as a critique of politics–which is to say, to probe the theological as the unspoken infrastructure of the politico-economic. It is in this way that The Theological Metaphors of Marx philosophically uncovers Marx’s own “proto-theology” or “implicit theology” made possible by the conceptual labor of a metaphorical language (18).
At the crossroads of the theological and the philosophical, the task of the decolonial postsecular philosopher is to diagnose the fetishisms or “false names,” which is to say, the false gods of the modern/colonial world that demand worship. This is why an atheist “anti-fetishism” is the very “first thesis” of liberation philosophy: it is an atheism of the fetish. And that secularism is one of these fetishes that plague modern philosophy is why a postsecularist impetus is important for the purposes of epistemic decolonization.
This is not to say, however, that all “dialectics of secularization” are absolutely doomed to culminate in irredeemably colonialist and fetishistic dynamics, as the ideology of secularism has done in modernity. This is why there remains, after all, a distinction between philosophy and theology, itself based on a division between faith and reason. If one can diagnose the irrational fetishisms of modernity, it is because somewhere a critically emancipatory and universal kernel of rationality remains alive. “There is no liberation without rationality,” Dussel claims, “but there is no critical rationality without accepting the interpellation of the excluded, or this would inadvertently be only the rationality of domination” (36). Accordingly, epistemic decolonization can be recognized as the interpellation of the excluded that calls out the fetishisms of a colonialist modernity. Evidently, this is not a crude call for the abandonment of modernity, nor simply a reaction against it. It is, rather, a creatively dialectical critique that goes through modernity itself. In Dussel’s terms, it is a “transmodern,” project, rather than an anti-modern or a postmodern one.
Decolonizing the relation between philosophy and theology is likewise not simply a matter of just blurring or undoing the boundaries between them. The lesson from Dussel’s work is to embrace the creative dialectics of decolonization which demands a new transmodern way of thinking about the points of mutual correspondence between philosophy and theology in a way that allows for liberatory interpretations of the world, beyond the fetishisms of modernity (such as secularism). At least this will be but one of the many legacies that his work will allow future generations to explore.
Rafael Vizcaíno is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at DePaul University. His work employs decolonial approaches to examine the intersections between race, religion, politics, and secularization. In 2020, he earned the American Philosophical Association’s Essay Prize in Latin American Thought. His first book (in final stages of revision) recounts the modern dialectics of secularization from the perspective of Latin American and Caribbean thought. His second book (in development) will examine the relation between philosophy of religion and political theology in the context of epistemic decolonization.
View of Gaza Strip from Israel – October 2009. Image Credit: Flickr User David Berkowitz. CC By 2.0 DEED.
There is no use pretending that all we know about time and space, or rather history and geography, is more than anything else imaginative… imaginative geographical and historical knowledge.
Hamas’ October 7, 2023 killing of over 1200 people in Israeli communities bordering the Gaza Strip precipitated the vengeful and disproportionate Israeli state military assault of Gaza that has since taken many thousand more Palestinian lives (over 23,000 at the time of writing), and as a result mass displacement and a humanitarian crisis. Predictably, White American Christian Zionists explain and refract these events through the opportunist eschatological prism by which they see the world. Sean Durban explains that this is all part of God’s greater plan for his son, the messiah, to vanquish evil and bring about a millennium of Christian peace. These conclusions are especially difficult to read in the context of these events. Such imaginations of past and future are stuck on “orthogonal time,” a concept I borrow from Philip K. Dick to illustrate the ways in which such events are imagined to have always already happened as God’s future events for the apocalypse are set in time like a record on a turntable. Christian Zionists interpret the assault on Gaza as one such event, bumping the stylus forward as evidence of Christ’s imminent return. This temporality explains how Christian Zionist prophecies for Gaza naturalize these awful human—all too human—atrocities as fatalistic predetermination.
In this piece, and as a geographer of the apocalypse, I explore the ways space, and specifically landscape, is used as an instrument to (1) provide evidence of the imminence of Christ’s return, (2) to justify settler colonial erasure, and (3) reinforce Christian Zionist national identities. However, landscapes also open a liminal space for counter discourses. Ethnographic work with Christian Zionists reveals dissonate perspectives on the dominate discourse of erasure and colonization of Palestinian Gaza.
Most famous among the Christian Zionist commentators is Hal Lindsey. Lindsey is the author of the best-selling non-fiction book of the 1970s, The Late Great Planet Earth. Ever the Cold Warrior, Lindsey explained the 7/10 Hamas attack as follows: “I consider it a precursor to the war prophesied in Ezekiel 38 and 39—a war led by Russia and Iran. And make no mistake, Russia is tied to this.” His perspective of omniscient fatalism is typical of dispensational premillennialist theology—the dominant evangelical eschatology that states Christ will return to Israel prior to the millennium—in orthogonal time. He explains that “Christians should remember that this did not catch God by surprise… his plan continues.”
Lindsey’s position illustrates the centrality of not just time within the Christian Zionist imagination, but also space. Conceptualizations of space bring us back to Said’s words in the epigraph; this “imaginative geography” allows Christian Zionists to predict the future, and in doing so close off its other potentialities by attempting to re-make the world from their maps about it. Rendering the apocalypse cartographically potentializes the present and actualizes the future as a method of persuasion by rendering the apocalypse visible, exploiting the specious infallibility of cartography, and reducing future complexity to the apocalyptic abstraction that erases both Palestinian and Israeli agency and presence as mere objects of future history.
Hal Lindsey’s Chart of Armageddon. Source: Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth. Image and permission courtesy of Tristan Strum.
Christian Zionists are a powerful political lobby and cultural force in both American politics and geopolitics. Domestically, “64 percent of Evangelical Republicans say [Israel] matters ‘a lot’ compared with just 33 percent of non-Evangelical Republicans and 26 percent of all Americans.” In other words, given that 38 percent of Republican voters are evangelicals, Israel is not simply an evangelical concern but a Republican issue. Christian Zionists are a central election base—both for campaign contributions and votes—that might determine Donald Trump’s future return to the White House in 2024. Geopolitically, and as Stuart Croft argues, the Christian Right has developed its own views on foreign policy that challenge Realist, Liberal, and Marxist positions, what he terms “evangelical foreign policy.”
Lindsey famously focused on geopolitics to explain prophecy, and in so doing avoided the austere and certain failure of apocalyptic date-setting. Michel De Certeau explains this modern god-trick tactic of transposing space and time: “to be able to see (far into the distance) is also to be able to predict, to run ahead of time by reading space” (36). But this focus on space by Christian Zionists is not limited to the global scale of geopolitics. I ask what is lost in our analysis of Christian Zionism by focusing only on its famous (mostly men) authors, its Hal Lindseys?
My current book project, The Future is Foreign Country, focuses on the landscape pilgrimage sites of the apocalypse, visited by over 100,000 American Christian Zionists each year. I’ve been conducting an ethnography in Israel/Palestine since 2008, travelling with dozens of Christian Zionist pilgrimage groups. The places of interest, where the coaches tend to stop and the pilgrims disembark, are not the places one would expect for Christians, i.e., sites of Christ’s miracles, but are instead landscape vistas from which pilgrims can look out and, as Stephen Daniels once succinctly put it, “picture the nation” (5) with its strength, beauty, history, and future.
Upon these landscapes, American Christian Zionists revere, even consecrate, a group of people—Jews—with whom they do not and cannot belong, and a territorial state—Israel—from which they usually cannot gain citizenship. Here the territorial fetishization of “the Jew,” as Jonathon S. O’Donnell argues, is an antisemitic construction for the proper place for Jews in Israel against which all other Jews are out-of-place globalists. This nationalism is religious at its core, sprung from a set of interpretations of the Bible that identifies the Jewish return to Israel as a prophetic sign of the imminence of the apocalypse. This is religion as nationalism where nationalism is embedded in their theology as a religious rite and portended expectation.
Why Landscapes?
Pre-American Civil War, America was imagined as the New Jerusalem in stark distinction to England where these new Americans created a “geoeschatolic and geoapocalyptic consciousness… of the sacralization of an alternative place within the eschatology and apocalyptic drama of salvation and redemption” (Zakai 1992, 72). During the Reconstruction Era (1863-1877), however, Palestine figured prominently in American popular culture. In particular, pilgrimage narratives and guidebooks found a market far beyond the small number of Americans who actually crossed the sea. Pilgrimage to Palestine’s landscapes was one of self-imagination and renewal after the deep and divisive scars of the American Civil War. Palestine became these pilgrims’ new and unadulterated origin story, divorced from Europe and the troubles at home in America. As Hilton Obenzinger illustrates, “Travel to Palestine allowed Americans to read sacred geography…. While the persistent preoccupations with the Bible and biblical geography stood at the ideological core of American colonial expansion, actual travel to Palestine allowed Americans to contemplate biblical narratives at their source in order to reimagine—and even to reenact—ethno-religious national myths” (5). Palestinian landscapes were, as John Davis points out in his magisterial book, The Landscape of Belief, sacred spaces and the medium for American national self-definition for Protestants. They served as an anchor of morally pure beginnings.
This nationalism is religious at its core, sprung from a set of interpretations of the Bible that identifies the Jewish return to Israel as a prophetic sign of the imminence of the apocalypse.
Christian Zionists seek landscapes for three main reasons: (1) When 19th century White American Protestants arrived in Palestine, most of the urban sacred sites and buildings in Palestine were already claimed by non-Protestant groups. (2) Combined with the Protestant rejection of idolatry, such claimed space helped foment the rejection of monuments, buildings, and cities. Like early Jewish Zionism, the soil itself served a validating purpose. Davis explains “that Christians should put their trust in the soil of Palestine rather than the urban sites of Orthodox and Catholic tradition became a fundamental precept of most American activity in the region” (46). (3) Landscape creates an open space for Christian Zionists to perform their beliefs with abstract generality from afar, and without counter discourses of Palestinians. If the landscapes of Israel can be possessed through performative definition, then so too can the credentials of truth and faith be possessed, validated, and confirmed. To possess the landscape is to possess the truth.
These performative apocalyptic logics are not only a form of terra nullius (empty land), but also more specifically the imaginings of a spatial vacuity of Palestinians and Palestine, a vacuum domicilium (empty of inhabitants). This is what Christopher Pexa more generally frames as “settler colonialism’s exterminatory logic and its apocalyptic temporality” (4). Christian Zionist settler imaginaries find justification for colonization through the pre-emptive logic of terra nullius as orthogonal time. In other words, terra nullius is perceived as a rational pre-emptive logic of natural law with material consequences for appropriating inhabited lands.
Landscape is a masculinist visual representation and as such an ideological subject position, in this case, an imperial one taken up by a particularly powerful religio-political group. Scripting landscapes or “landscaping,” despite giving the illusion of being simply static and inert objects, are processes. I focus on the scripting and practices through which both landscapes and national subjectivities are constructed. Landscapes are often argued to be objects or stages upon which they are attributed meaning. And as meaning is applied to landscapes through various social mediums, they also naturalize operations of power by simplifying them through the erasure of that which does not fit their imaginings. In this case the presence of Palestinians. Landscaping is therefore an organizing principle that sustains mystification and is constructed through performances: dances, tears, prayers, sermons, gestures, tour guides, books, pamphlets, and various Bible translations. Landscape is not just iconographic or performative; it can produce a hegemonic experience.
Landscape is a masculinist visual representation and as such an ideological subject position, in this case, an imperial one taken up by a particularly powerful religio-political group.
Landscape is of course open to other future imaginings and while the Hal Lindseys in the movement hold significant interpretive cultural capital, my ethnographic work upon these landscapes, by embedding myself within pilgrimage tours, illustrated moments of dissonance with such dominant narratives. Nearly every day during Operation Cast Lead (2008–9), I travelled with Christian Zionists to Sderot, a town bordering Gaza. We delivered food to elderly residents as Kasam rockets regularly fell. At the end of each trip, we travelled to a landscape location that was about 100 meters from the official “press hill,” and 200 meters from the Gaza border. The edge of Gaza City was visible but blurred by the humidity and smoke. We were there to watch the war take place on the landscape, a kind of setting sun on our “benevolent” acts in Sderot.
Christian Zionists watching the war from Sderot. Source: Tristan Strum.
The lookout was a theatrical performance which served as evidence for many pilgrims that God’s work was being done by the “the world’s most moral army,”a common legitimating phrase at the time invented by the Israeli Occupational Forces. Edward Said argued that all representation was of a theatrical nature, “the idea of representation is a theatrical one… a theatrical stage affixed to” (63) the national origin of the viewer. Despite seeing the various dense pluming puffs of white smoke that signified an Israeli bomb, it was the sound of the war that was most arresting and affecting; the sound of the bombs themselves that could be felt most acutely as the shock waves pushed through our bodies. It was here in this embodied landscape space that imaginations of Palestinian erasure were challenged.
I asked one of the American leaders of the trip what he thought about the ceasefire, and he replied: “The wars will never stop. My father said it would be the last war when I was a child. There have been five wars since. We must realize that there cannot be peace.” He then mimed a crash by bumping his fists together, and continued, “They will have their land we will have ours. Just separate, but not in peace…. Muslims are a people of death, and Jews and Christians are peoples of life.” This man was willing to concede that Palestinians did deserve land or at least that they would stubbornly never let it go. Such a concession is marginal, but nevertheless a discourse that challenges the dominate settler colonial discourse of Hal Lindsey’s erasure of Gaza as a prophetic event to make way for Christ’s return.
End Time
Israel’s 2023-24 military assault on Gazans is interpreted by Christian Zionists through an orthogonal apocalyptic lens that prophesizes a future settler colonialism of Gaza. The cultural capital of Hal Lindsey-type voices reinforces the eschatological fatalism that Christ’s return necessitates Palestinian erasure and hollowing out of Gaza. Lindsey and other powerful men like him, have, to borrow the words of Sacvan Bercovitch, converted “geography into eschatology.” As such, their imaginative geography of Palestinians being “out-of-place” to justify further atrocities as inevitable, even sanctioned by God, is awfully predictable. But as I theorize, the space of apocalypse does not operate just at the global geopolitical scale, but is crucially performative of the landscape. Their apocalyptic future is a foreign country where they advocate for a religious nationalism in a state of which they normally cannot become citizens. Such advocacy is predicated on a Christian eschatological discourse about a narrative of future affairs they believe to be infallible.
Christian Zionists thus attempt to performatively make the anticipated spatialization of the apocalypse tangible, and present, in the landscape through the insulated practice of American Christian Zionist pilgrimage in Israel/Palestine. Landscape is performed to tell a story about the virtual future, which becomes reinforced as everyday practice in the present by the tour guides, pastors, and the tour group. Crucial to understanding this co-constitution of landscape and nationalism is how it is performed not only as a place to see but also foresee. In a more recent article, Lindsey subtly conflates Palestinians with the devil. Quoting Ephesians 4:26–27 (NKJV) he helps his readers foresee and therefore justify Israel’s plans for Gaza: “do not let the sun go down on your wrath, nor give place to the devil.”
Landscape is performed to tell a story about the virtual future, which becomes reinforced as everyday practice in the present by the tour guides, pastors, and the tour group.
Ethically, the cultural “politics of hope” that Arjun Appadurai defines as a “politics of possibility over a politics of probability” is not always a progressive one (3). Anticipated spatializations of Israel are hopeful and eventually performative of exclusionary practices that mete-out Palestinians as at best racialized unwanted interlopers and at worst embodiments of evil as the Antichrist’s army. This said, the narrative is at times a contested one, though these spaces of pilgrimage are most often closed-off from transculturation due to the cloister of the bus and the oblique distance of landscape. It is here on the pilgrimage landscapes where discursive dissonance, and the inescapable question of the fate of people, namely Palestinians, are confronted by Christian Zionist pilgrims; where, as Rob Shields notes, “the ‘near,’ or the face-to-face and present-at-hand, [must confront] the ‘distant,’ the future, and the possible” (22).
I hope this piece encourages scholars of religion—and specifically apocalypse—to think about the geographies produced by their research subjects and how such spaces, in this case landscape, have co-constitutional affects. Landscape in this research reinforces Christian Zionist identities by providing evidence for a biblical apocalypse, and as such, the orthogonal time of apocalypse expects Palestinian erasure as a necessary precondition for Christ’s return and rule on Earth.
Tristan Sturm is Senior Lecturer in Geography at Queen’s University Belfast. He is the Director of the MA in Geopolitics and a Fellow of both the Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice and the Centre for Apocalyptic and Postapocalyptic Studies (CAPAS) at the University of Heidelberg. He is interested in apocalyptic thought related to climate change, conspiracies, and religious movements in the USA and Israel/Palestine. He has published over 30 academic articles and is co-author of the book, Apocalyptic Conspiracism (forthcoming with Bloomsbury), and co-editor of Mapping the End Times (Routledge) and The Handbook of Apocalypticism and Millennialism (forthcoming Bloomsbury). He has disseminated his findings in the Toronto Star, Haaretz, Jerusalem Post, National Post, THE Magazine, BBC Radio 4, ITV, BBC Newsline, among other media spaces.
Enrique Dussel at the Forum To Read in Freedom of the XIX International Book Fair, in Mexico City. Image Credit: Maritza Ríos / Secretariat of Culture of Mexico City, via Flickr. CC BY 2.0 DEED.
During a very hot South African evening in January 2016, I was sitting with Enrique Dussel in the backyard of an architecturally styled colonial bed and breakfast. A few weeks before, on Christmas Eve, he had turned 82. At this time, his body was likely fragile but his engagement with the work of others was as powerful, insightful, and constructive as ever. Having made the long trip from Mexico City to Pretoria, I remember asking him multiple times if he wanted to rest, but his mind was restless and relentless. Subverting the genealogy of the Judeo-Christian tradition was “too important” and thus “deserved five minutes more” (or to my delight over two-dozen “five minutes more”).
These extra hours of engagement were in addition to our work together as a part of the same teaching cohort at the University of South Africa Decolonial Summer School. Though jetlagged, I kept trying to take as many mental notes as possible. As one of the hundreds and hundreds of people around the world who enjoyed these personal dialogues with Enrique know, these conversations were events. The dialogues were part of an effort to build a future imaginary around a socially committed goal. It was not a naïve utopia Enrique desired to build, but, adapting Karl Marx to 20th global south realities, it was a solidarity movement built around what he called an “energetical principle,” a force that could guide theories and praxis for the generations to come.
After a few dozens of those “five minutes more,” a flood irrupted, but the conversation was not interrupted. But when it became impossible to ignore, we started walking toward his room so he could get a deserving rest. He gently but firmly grabbed my arm not to fall in the wet stone and kept conversing with me with even more vehemence than before. He fully acknowledged his physical vulnerability, but this challenge only seemed to grow with this acknowledgement. It is true that the passage from individual to social vulnerability requires a more sophisticated reflection. But this is precisely one of the tasks he had taken by radicalizing the asymmetrical Levinasian encounter. For Emmanuel Levinas the encounter with an other demands our attention because their vulnerability creates the possibility for a different intersubjectivity, one that rejects the “imperialism of the same.” For Enrique, the encounter with another demands our attention because their vulnerability creates the possibility of a different society that rejects actual political imperialism and colonialism.
It was not a naïve utopia Enrique desired to build, but, adapting Karl Marx to 20th global south realities, it was a solidarity movement built around what he called an “energetical principle,” a force that could guide theories and praxis for the generations to come.
If one can see a thread in the longstanding and incredibly prolific contributions of Enrique, it is precisely this geopolitical thinking “from vulnerability” of those who are not “the same.” The fact that two of his most important interlocutors (Marx and Levinas) are European-born Jews is not a coincidence. After critiquing Descartes’s division between mind and body, he argued that in the globalized history set by European philosophy, Jewish thought, which emerged from experiences of vulnerability, was a potentially revolutionary philosophical tradition that demanded attention, study, and (as soon we will see) radicalization from outside of Europe. This is why already in the 1970s, while generating his philosophy of liberation, he re-imagined how the world looked different from “The Greek” and “The Hebrew” perspective. The Greek, especially under the imperial categories hijacked by Western Christian imperialism (occluding the Islamic contribution to historical re-interpretations of it) represented the impossibility of “slave emancipation.” The Hebrew, the suffering language of people passing through multiple oppressive colonialisms represented, especially in pre-Holocaust Europe, the power of vulnerability that enabled “the possibility of the revolution of the poor.”
He understood the necessity of thinking power from vulnerability through his engagement with Marx, Levinas, and others (some Jewish, some from many other vulnerable communities). While recounting his experience of reading Levinas, Dussel argued that it produced a “desquiciada repulsion” (subversive overthrowing) for “all that he had learned until then,” i.e., the Greek. But as he attested to over and over again when writing from exile after pro-western reactionary forces destroyed part of his house (including his library) in Mendoza, Argentina, experience and thought are not divorced from one another. He also experienced this overthrowing repulsion when he received an interpellation working as a laborer close to Nazareth. After showing admiration for the Spanish conquistadors (“who conquered the Inca empire with few soldiers”) he was asked: “Who were the powerful and who were the vulnerable in that situation?” Understanding that the history of the peoples of the so-called “Americas” should be retold, he began to think again “from exteriority,” but this time from another geopolitically located position. For this reason, when he encountered Levinas in person, he asked if “the Other” the Jewish philosopher was speaking about could be “Indians slaughtered during the conquest of the Americas,” “Africans who were made slaves,” and “poor people” in a dependent system of global inequality. While Levinas in an interview shows his delight that young Latin American intellectuals saw “the same thing,” Dussel reports that Levinas’s answer was (perhaps in a methodologically Jewish manner) to return the question to his young Global South interlocutors: “it is something for you to think about.”
The relentless and restless Dussel took up the challenge. In dialogue and in a way that radicalized other relative exteriorities, he started to think with and from vulnerable communities of colonial western modernity. Dussel asked himself how to think from Latin America, a rich and diverse and yet wounded continent of “colonized, humiliated and dependent” communities. In Enrique’s thought, this does not negate the existence of a clear distinction between “the Greek” and “the Hebrew.” But this distinction does not account for everyone in the world. There are exteriorities that have been occluded by the Euro-American modern/colonial system and he was committed to explain why and how, and to learn from them. While his desire for encyclopedic knowledge led him to explore thought from around the world (China, Asia, Africa…), this was not just to contest the Orientalist project that constructed the other as in opposition to the European, but also to critique what Latin Americanists will call the Occidentalist project. The later occludes the other and rejects the possibility of alternatives. So while the rejection of Orientalism leads one to question the construction of difference, the rejection of Occidentalism requires one to also explain that there are other possibilities for living beyond the uniformity of the European model. For this reason, these other exteriorities became a key thread of his work.
There are exteriorities that have been occluded by the Euro-American modern/colonial system and he was committed to explain why and how, and to learn from them.
This is precisely the argument that my jetlagged brain was able to collect on that hot and rainy Pretoria night. In search of these alternatives, we can learn two lessons from Enrique on how to critique the post-World War II western consensus that led to the construction of “a Judeo-Christian tradition.” Both lessons remind us that there are other alternatives beyond the totalization and the uniformity of imperialism in the west. First, the west occludes the alterity of what Levinas calls “the Hebrew” by incorporating Jews into the western “Judeo-Christian” after almost two thousand years of persecution and genocide. Second it occludes the distinct alterities of what he called “the poor, the Indian, and the African” that are now represented in Latin America as lesser forms of “popular Christianity.” In actuality, these communities could foster creative resistances and re-existences for those who suffered persecution and genocide for over five-hundred years.
This is not to say, it is important to clarify, that Enrique was after “pure alternatives.” He departs from the conception that colonialism has violated all the world, and claims that not all alternatives were swallowed and that liberatory cracks exist and are opening every day. But as the system, from the very first years of the conquest of the Americas, used collaborationism to achieve its aims, we can find implications throughout the communities of the vanquished. For this reason, he will argue that a transmodern project can only be built with the encounter of members of these communities engaging in a dual critique: against the empire and against problematic modern/colonial reproductions and collaborationisms within these communities. This is why he protested against western imperialism, even at the risk of speaking openly about the treatment of Palestinians by a state that declared itself in Hebrew (and English) as representing all Jews. And when analyzing the history of Christianity in Latin America, being the editor of a monumental work with multiple volumes, he wrote again and again about the different roles that the Church and Catholic communities have played in Latin America. He does depart from a positive reaffirmation of what has been occluded (analectics). But he does so by supporting a dual critique that becomes a challenge to romantic purisms.
While today recounting the personal encounters with Enrique look idyllic, they were a part of committed work that resisted purism. In this sense, they were always events. Hundreds of hundreds of people initiated committed intellectual work following those memorable conversations. My work on Latin American Jewish thought, crossing occlusions and rejections across borders, would not have been possible without his contributions and his active dialogue with other Jews and Latin Americans, from Marc Ellis to Michael Lowy and Walter Mignolo to Maria Lugones. And thousands and thousands more will keep such work up by engaging his scholarship. This is especially true when he permanently challenged conceptions of individual ownership of work by making his texts readily available online for free at https://enriquedussel.com/ . So let us remember Enrique as someone who challenged us to keep building transmodern critical solidarity movements from the perspective of vulnerable exteriority.
Santiago Slabodsky is the Florence and Robert Kaufman Chair in Jewish Studies at Hofstra University in New York. He is co-director of the journal Decolonial Horizons/Horizontes Decoloniales at the GEMRIP institute in Latin America and convener of the summer program of Liberation Theologies and Decolonial Thought at the Global Dialogue Center in Spain. In the past he was co-chair of the Liberation Theologies unit at AAR, convener of the PhD Program in Religion, Ethics and Society at Claremont School of Theology and associate director of the center for Race, Culture and Social Justice in his current institution. Concurrently to his permanent posts in the US, he has served as visiting professor at institutions in the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, Costa Rica, Macedonia, and Argentina and has lectured throughout Europe, the Americas, Africa, South East Asia, and the Middle East. His book Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking received the 2017 Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association.
End of the World, Blue hour in Dirranbandi, Queensland, 2021. Via Wikimedia Commons.
In January 2017, newly elected president Donald Trump instituted Executive Order 13769, ostensibly to “protect the American people from terrorist attacks by foreign nationals entering the United States.” The order, in effect, limited immigrants, refugees, and visa-holding foreign nationals from several majority-Muslim countries from entering the US. It marked Trump’s delivery on his campaign promise during the 2016 presidential election to ban Muslims from entering the US. Behind the scenes, numerous reports indicated that it was Trump’s former campaign manager and presidential advisor, Steve Bannon, who orchestrated the planning and execution of this ban.
What was Bannon’s motivation for crafting such a ban? While Bannon’s nationalism and “America First” political ideology are no doubt linked to modern American White Christian nationalism, in this post I’ll suggest that another important influence on him is an esoteric intellectual movement called Traditionalism, which has its roots in the anti-modern perennial philosophy of René Guénon (d. 1951). More specifically I’ll suggest that Bannon’s political theology—a concept I ascribe to Traditionalism because of its assumption that spiritual and political realms are one and the same—is rooted in the cyclical notion of time laid out in Guénon’s work. This notion of time, I argue, helps us better comprehend the chaos of the early Trump days, the speed and alacrity with which the Muslim ban was implemented, and an alternative political theology of the Far Right. With different points of emphasis than mine, authors such as Benjamin Teitelbaum and Joshua Green have also documented the influence of Traditionalism on Bannon, even in the implementation of policies like the Muslim ban. I aim to deepen this account by showing its presence not only in his work on the Trump campaign but in the longer arch of Bannon’s career, specifically in his documentary films. Bannon, I contend, is not a fully-fledged Traditionalist in the vein of Italian theorist Julius Evola, or more recently the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin. However, Bannon does often make use of Traditionalism in his work, and it is thus important to grapple with this form of thinking if we are to better understand its influence on contemporary far-right politics.
There is always a risk in devoting increased attention to a figure like Bannon, who has been a driver of an increasingly authoritarian and oppressive turn in US politics. My aim here, however, is to take him seriously so as to better understand his place within a tradition of right-wing thinking that is not new, despite its treatment as such oftentimes in the media. When we do so we are reminded of the consequences of implementing this philosophy in the past and developing strategies for countering it in the present.
Guénonian Traditionalism
Guénonian-inspired antimodern Traditionalism has been on the rise around the world, in such places as the US, Brazil (via the late Olavo de Carvalho), Russia (via Alexander Dugin), and Great Britain (via King Charles III). As his failed attempt to build right-wing nationalist movements in Europe following his firing from the White House shows, Bannon himself perceived the US as but one manifestation of a wider global struggle to be fought against the forces of modernity.
Guénon argued that there is a primordial tradition from which all the various other traditions branch. This tradition no longer exists in its pure form, but its vestiges are present in the various traditions we commonly call “world religions.” To be a Traditionalist, as Mark Sedgwickhas shown, is to believe that one must be initiated into one of the world’s living religious traditions to partake in the primordial tradition. One has to commit to a particular religion in order to take part in the universal. This is what it means to participate in the primordial tradition in the present. For Guénon and others, it was in the traditions of the “East” that the primordial tradition was closest to being preserved. And it was in an elite vanguard that tradition could be carried forward. In the west, Traditionalists saw the onslaught of the characteristic modern values of materialism and individualism as adversaries.
From his earliest years in the Navy to the present, Bannon has engaged with Traditionalist thought. What is counterintuitive about Bannon’s use of this political theology is not only the fact that several of its most significant thinkers practiced Islam (to varying degrees of seriousness), but also that this vision of tradition assumes that communal exclusivism is an expression of a more foundational inclusive vision of the global political community. What is less counterintuitive is that several of the thinkers associated with Traditionalism were more than happy to test their ideas via the fascist politics of Europe during the early twentieth century. While Traditionalism itself was not by any stretch of the imagination the only (or most significant) source for fascist political philosophy, the fact that several of its leading proponents saw in fascism a potential political home for their more esoteric spiritual beliefs draws our attention to its potential to act as a violent and racist ideology.
Cyclical Time and the End of Days
For Guénon, time is cyclical rather than teleological. As he lays out in The Crisis of the Modern World (1946), it is a cyclical notion of time that the primordial tradition teaches, and this is most clearly preserved in Hinduism. Drawing on his interpretation of the Hindu doctrine of Manvantara, he contends that time moves from a Golden, to a Silver, then Bronze, and finally Iron age.[1] The final age is a “dark age,” or Kali-Yuga. We have been in this age for 6,000 years, according to Guénon, and are reaching a point at which the world as we know it is ending. Modernity, with its rampant materialism, is for him the culmination of this descent into darkness. Our descent into the Kali-Yuga has meant that we have moved further and further away from this original tradition. We can only see glimmers of it in the “west,” mostly in the Catholic Church. Given time’s cyclical nature, however, Guenon admonishes us not to despair, “for . . . the end of the old world will also be the beginning of a new one” (18).
While Traditionalism itself was not by any stretch of the imagination the only (or most significant) source for fascist political philosophy, the fact that several of its leading proponents saw in fascism a potential political home for their more esoteric spiritual beliefs draws our attention to its potential to act as a violent and racist ideology.
Among the more specific signs that Guénon argues are indicative of a decline into the Dark Age include the rise of individualism and the falling away of caste distinctions. For Guénon and other Traditionalists, a caste system that placed a spiritual elite at the top and manual workers at the bottom was the natural order of human society. The increase in an individualist ethos, especially one that treats all humans as equal because of their status as consumers, erodes the caste system in the “west.” In tandem with the falling away of caste and the rise of individualism is the ascendance of the value of equality and its attendant institutionalized political form in democracy. Over and against such a vision of society Guénon promoted a hierarchical social order rooted in a primordial tradition, where people know their place, and because they know their place (whether as a cook, blacksmith, mother, or father) had a clear meaning and purpose in their lives. This political theology sought to preserve hierarchy, suppress the individual, and enforce conformity to an ideal only known by a select few.
Bannon’s Traditionalist Political Theology
Bannon expresses his arguments in “documentary” films and in interviews. His films evince the drama that one would expect from a person who believes that we are in the midst of a dark age. This is especially clear in his documentary Generation Zero (Citizens United, 2010). The film adopts a cyclical view of American history, citing William Strauss and Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning—An American Prophecy, which itself dabbles in Traditionalist approaches to temporality. Importantly, like Guénon, they see the 4th cycle in American history much like the Kali-Yuga. The cosmic nature of Bannon’s own view—and his adoption of a Traditionalist account of temporality—is clear in the way he depicts the cycles of time in the documentary. The first image in a section in the film on cyclical conceptions of time is an image of a sundial, which is then followed by the movement of gears inside of a gold-plated clock, a depiction of the Big Bang, the formation of the planet Earth, life itself in its cellular form, a butterfly appearing from a cocoon, and so forth. What all this is meant to imply is that the decline we are experiencing in the US is not simply a story of one nation’s decline, but the story of decline on cosmic proportions. Further, this story of decline is one that calls for urgent action because we, along with the rest of the world, are at risk of falling into an abyss if we do not “do something” soon. In this case, doing something means preserving the hierarchical order of tradition over and against the forces of modernity. Given this doom-laden view which characterizes our current dark age, it is unsurprising that one would rush to implement policies like the Muslim Ban that lack pragmatism and strip individuals of rights in the name of so-called unity. Whether or not implementing these policies stave off a descent into chaos, or merely preserve a hierarchy that will take over after the current age passes, is not fully explained by Bannon. For Guénon, however, it is clear that in preserving the hierarchical order as best we can now, we hold out the chance of shaping a new order in this form when it has to be reconstituted in the future.
There are recurring images in Bannon’s work that also mark a decline in particularly Traditionalist ways. In both his movie on Ronald Reagan, In the Face of Evil: Reagan’s War in Word and Deed (Bannon Films, 2004) and Generation Zero, the decline is almost always represented by the disintegration of gender roles and the rise of sexual liberation, both of which require the proliferation of individualism that Traditionalists abhor. Images of minorities are rare in his films, but when they are pictured, it is typically of African Americans with afros, wearing sunglasses, and giving speeches about revolutionary action. Here, the image is meant to evoke fear in the minds of his mostly White conservative audience. These films convey a “cautionary” representation of heedlessness and rejection of authority that is deeply resonant with Traditionalism. Only by preserving the “proper roles” of men and women and a racialized caste system could a proper social order be maintained. Bannon did not adopt all of Guénon’s or other Traditionalists’ arguments—he differs from them in his evaluation of Islam and his belief in the “working class” as the people who will save us from modernity’s corruptions—but he does seem to have accepted a notion of cyclical time and the urgency to act that our descent into the dark age calls for.
Running Out of Time
Since his departure from the White House and his failure to launch a European-wide populist movement, Bannon has fallen from the mainstream media spotlight. This is in no small part due to his indictment on charges of defrauding donors through his We Build the Wall organization. While continuing to deal with these legal troubles, Bannon also hosts a podcast called Steve Bannon’s War Room where he takes on the persona of a right-wing radio host, commenting on the daily headlines, promoting anti-vaccine theories, and putting forward political conspiracies about the 2020 US presidential election.[2] Despite this, attention to Bannon’s political theology of Traditionalism remains necessary as the forces that gave rise to Trump and made a space for someone like Bannon to gain proximity to power have not gone away. Trump’s decisive win in the 2024 Iowa caucuses is just one indicator that these forces remain potent. It is perhaps an overstatement to claim that Bannon himself is a full-fledged Traditionalist. Yet, in his political decisions, his documentaries, and his speeches, there is clear evidence that he finds aspects of the movement appealing and is even willing to implement them within the halls of power. For that reason, it is important that we continue to pay attention to this political theology and those who draw on it.
[1] A close engagement with Guénon’s use of Hindu texts and sources remains beyond the scope of this post. It should be noted, however, that like other Orientalists, he saw the “East” writ large as harboring spiritual resources lost to the west. For a recent, more sympathetic, reappraisal of Guénon’s Orientalist legacy, see Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge.
[2] For a compelling analysis of the War Room podcast and the wider media ecosystem in which it operates, see Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (2023), esp. chap. 6.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Inchigeelagh Church and Cemetary. Image credit: Flikr User Mark Leary. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED.
More than a quarter-century after the Good Friday peace agreement, Northern Ireland remains divided along sectarian lines. In Belfast, imposing “peace walls” continue to cast long shadows, preventing interaction between one side and the other. Gardens of remembrance and murals are located near or even on the walls. Some sites memorialize paramilitaries, grieving and glorifying the dead. Others sacralize violence: in Protestant areas, the slogan “For God and Ulster” dominates; in Catholic areas, hunger strikers are depicted as Christ-like martyrs, laying down their lives for others.
The tragic and unnecessary deaths that took place during the Troubles and in the island’s church-run institutions may at first seem unrelated. Yet they can be linked to the churches’ historic pursuit of power, which resulted in the sins of sectarianism and cultures of abuse. Belfast’s peace walls and the grounds of Tuam’s Mother and Baby Home are just some of the many spaces and places where the ghosts of the island’s Christian past haunt the present and in doing so make demands on the future.
The churches, of course, are not solely responsible for these tragedies. And since the middle of the twentieth century, the churches’ social and political power has waned. But the churches can still address their own legacies and in that way contribute to alternative futures which include healing rather than (or, perhaps more realistically, alongside) pain.
Hauntings: The Ghosts of Religion Past
“Hauntings” and “ghosts” are not topics usually considered by social scientists, but they have gained traction as social scientific concepts in recent decades. Jacques Derrida’s 1994 Specters of Marx can be considered a starting point.
Building on Derrida, conceptions of hauntings alert us that, first, it is impossible to forget or suppress the past. Memories of traumas work their way into the present through anniversaries of atrocities, the recovery of the bones of the dead, the intergenerational transmission of violent patterns of relating, and so on.
Second, social scientific conceptions of hauntings are focused on justice, with the ghosts urging their descendants to right the wrongs of the past. As Avery Gordon insists: “To be haunted in the name of a will to heal is to allow the ghost to help you imagine what was lost that never even existed, really. … [it is] to long for the insight … that it could have been andcan be otherwise” (57).
So, we can ask of the churches’ roles on the island of Ireland: Whatcould have been and can be otherwise? But first, we must explore the churches’ sins.
Sins: Sectarianism and Cultures of Abuse
Sectarianism pre-dates the partition of the island in 1921, having become embedded during post-Reformation periods of “plantation” (or colonization). Over centuries, the churches contributed to processes that not only produced enmity between people of different Christian traditions, but created social, political, and economic structures that divided people and favored some over others across the entire island.
It is understandable that sectarianism is often reduced to a northern phenomenon, given the relationship between sectarianism and the violence of the Troubles. Despite reforms that have reduced inequalities and the introduction of power-sharing in the Northern Ireland Assembly, the legacies of sectarianism persist in continued segregation along “religious” lines in schools, neighbourhoods, and marriage patterns; prejudicial attitudes; and inter-generational trauma. Yet, as I have shown elsewhere, in the south religious segregation also exists (albeit to a more limited extent), and despite its recent fall from grace, the Catholic Church continues to hold a privileged cultural and societal position, including in its role in education, cultural rites of passage, and healthcare.
A culture of abuse is most closely associated with the southern state, the Republic of Ireland. The term “culture of abuse” emphasizes that the widespread abuse of women and children (and some men) in the churches—especially the Catholic Church—cannot be reduced to the acts of individual perpetrators.Derek Scally’s The Best Catholics in the Worldexplores how state and society enthusiastically embraced Catholicism as integral to its identity, then pursued policies that promoted a self-image of a holy, Catholic Ireland. This was, in some ways, a response to the centuries-long experience of colonization by an aggressively Protestant (and anti-Catholic) British state.
After independence, the southern state granted the Catholic Church far-reaching control in education and health, and Catholic social teachings were reflected in law. Those who did not conform to this pious self-image were institutionalized in Magdalene Laundries, Mother and Baby Homes, or industrial schools. In these institutions the inmates (and yes, this is the most accurate term) endured forced labour and other forms of physical and emotional abuse. At the same time, the all-island structures of the churches, which pre-date partition, remind us that cultures of abuse were island-wide. In addition, the British state (of which Northern Ireland is officially a part) abdicated some responsibilities to churches in education, health, and care, facilitating abuses of power.
We return, then, to Gordon’s question: Whatcould have been and can be otherwise? What would have happened had the island’s churches resisted the temptation to align themselves with political power in their quest to secure societal influence through rigid compliance? What if the churches had chosen loving service? In the twenty-first century, the island’s churches have, at least haltingly, begun to reckon with their sins of sectarianism and abuse.
Apologies: Addressing the Ghosts?
In 2021, the Church Leaders’ Group released a St Patrick’s Day video message. Noting the centenary of the partition of the island and creation of Northern Ireland, the message advocated reflection on the past as a basis for building a better future.
The Church Leaders’ Group consists of the Catholic and Church of Ireland Archbishops of Armagh, the Presbyterian Moderator, and the Presidents of the Methodist Church and the Irish Council of Churches. As I’ve discussed, during the video, Catholic Archbishop Eamon Martin delivered the churches’ most comprehensive confession ever for their historic contributions to division and violence:
As Christian churches we acknowledge and lament the times that we failed to bring to a fearful and divided society that message of deeper connection that binds us, despite our different identities, as children of God, made in His image and likeness. We have often been captive churches; not captive to the Word of God, but to the idols of state and nation.
Apologies for abuse have received more public attention. But these apologies have been ineffective because of the words chosen by leaders when delivering them. In 2010 Cardinal Seán Brady apologized for “hurt” caused by “any failure on my part”—avoiding the acceptance of responsibility (8). Similarly, Cardinal Desmond Connell deflected responsibility in his apology after the 2009 Murphy Report into abuses in the Dublin archdiocese.
There have been five official state apologies for historical abuse in church-run institutions. They have been better received than apologies by church leaders. This may be because the state has implemented some measures for redress. Religious orders have paid just €128 million of the €1.5 billion in compensation (102).
James Gallen argues that apologies on their own are not enough to deal with the legacy of the past, functioning only “as episodic forms of power” for victims/survivors and failing to address “broader structural, epistemic, and ontological forms of power” (223). Likewise, John Brewer claims that people cannot “remember forwards” in a positive way unless “social betterment and improvement help break the haunting hold that the past has over the future” (42).
How, then, might the island’s churches break that haunting hold and put their own ghosts to rest?
Alternative Futures
I want to suggest two ways the churches might move on from apology and construct alternative futures: theology and witness. The first, theology, could start with the island’s best-known theologian of the twentieth century, EndaMcDonagh, who was influenced by liberation theology, including its post-colonial context. Other theologians have articulated theologies of reconciliation, including David Tombs, Leah Robinson, Siobhan Garrigan, and Maria Power. Tombs has also explored theologies of trauma and abuse. The public theology of Methodist Johnston McMaster has been significant for its critiques of churches’ abuses of power.
There are also strong foundations for pursuing the second way: witness. Witnesses against violence and injustice—usually individuals and small groups—were present in the churches’ past. Their work has been documented in academicstudies and biographiesandmemoirsofclergy who contributed to peacebuilding. Some victim-survivors of abuse, such as Marie Collins, retain their Christian identities and can be considered witnesses to whatcould have been and can be otherwise.
The churches may struggle to incorporate these challenging witnesses into their own stories as institutions, given that their very witness critiques those institutions. But it is the stories of these people that could inspire younger generations to focus on justice, reforming the churches from within. This would require that the churches acknowledge and celebrate these witnesses, and perhaps even facilitate mentoring relationships between aging witnesses and younger Christians. For it will only be through the flesh-and-blood bodies of the next generation that visions for what can be otherwise will be lived out, animated by the witness of those who went before and by fresh theologies that through the pursuit of justice, put the ghosts of the past to rest.
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Prof. Nermeen Arastu
