Rev Left Radio - Christian Socialism: The Fusion of Faith and Revolution

Episode Date: September 22, 2017

Matt Bernico is the assistant professor of Media Studies at Greenville College, where his teaching and research concerns cultural studies, media theory, and the history of science and technology. Dean Dettloff is a Catholic PhD candidate at the Institute for Christian Studies, where his research deals with the intersections of media theory, religion, and politics.  Together, they host the Christian Socialist podcast "The Magnificast". Brett sits down with Matt and Dean to discuss the philosophy of Christian Leftism. Topics include: Key figures on the Christian Left, Marxist Materialism, political violence and pacifism, Nietzsche, New Atheism, and much more.     Our Outro Music is "Looking For The Sun" by ParticleHead which you can find here: https://soundcloud.com/dirklind Please support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio and follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio This podcast is officially affiliated with the Nebraska Left Coalition: https://www.facebook.com/TheNebraskaLeftCoalition/ and the Omaha GDC: https://www.facebook.com/OmahaGDC/

Please support my daddy's show by donating a couple bucks to patreon.com forward slash rev left radio. Please follow us on Twitter at Rev. Left Radio. And don't forget to rate and review the Revolutionary Left Radio on iTunes to increase our reach. Workers of the world, unite! We were educated, we've been given a certain set of tools, but then we're throwing right back into the working class. Well, good luck with that, because more and more of us are waking the fuck up. so we have a tendency to what we have, we have earned, right? And what we don't have, we are going to earn.

We unintentionally, I think, oftentimes kind of frame our lives as though we are, you know, the predestined. That people want to be guilt-free. Like, I didn't do it. Like, this is not my fault. And I think that's part of the distancing from, like, people who don't want it to do it with their prejudice. Because that's always how our imperial war machine

justifies itself. It's always under the context of liberating the Libyan people, liberating the Iraqi people. The U.S. Empire doesn't give a fuck about anybody except the U.S. Empire and its interest. According to the legend, Sterner actually died due to a beastie. So the ultimate individualist was actually killed by the ultimate collectivist. Both sides are responsible for the violence. What the fuck are you talking about, dude? Are you kidding me?

there's one side inciting fascist violence. The other side saying give us free health care. Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. I am your host Anne Comrade, Brett O'Shea, and today we have Dean and Matt from the Magnificast on to discuss Christianity and socialism and how they overlap. Dean and Matt, would you guys like to go ahead and introduce yourself, maybe starting with Dean? Sure. Yeah, I'm Dean. I am a Catholic Ph.D. student at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto. Canada. I'm originally from Michigan, rural town there, and let me think here. My background, I guess, I got radicalized by evangelicals. We can talk more about that later. That's kind of an interesting thing in my life. But these days, I spend time with the Communist Party of Canada

and do that whole thing and hang out with Matt. That's part of my background now. So people ask me, what's my background? It's all about Matt these days. That's one of the one thing. That's very sweet of you. Well, Emily, my partner, she agrees. So she calls Matt my work husband, and she is not wrong. That's very good. It's beautiful. All right, Matt?

Yeah, I'm Matt. I'm the assistant professor in media studies at Greenville University in Greenville, Illinois. It's like a really small liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere. Just smack dab in cornfield. And it's kind of great, very into that. Let's see. So I teach media studies. I have degrees in media studies.

I have a degree in cultural studies and also a degree in philosophy. So lots of theory, lots of stuff about culture and technology. It's kind of what I'm all about. But on the podcast, I am, I guess, strictly about Christianity and leftist politics. So I'm a Protestant Christian, I guess. That seems to be important. I'm not Catholic like Dean. I don't know, there's not really, living in the middle of nowhere, there aren't like a ton of political organizations to be a part of, but I am a member of the St. Louis Democrat Socialists of America as well. So that's a thing.

Yeah, very cool. So, yeah, so how do you guys identify, before we start into the questions, how do you guys identify politically? Do you uphold a certain tendency or how do you think of yourselves politically? When I was younger, I used to be really into anarchism, and that I guess is kind of stayed with me in some subtle ways. but I am not an anarchist these days. I identify as a communist, and like I said earlier, I spent time with the Communist Party of Canada. They're a Leninist, Marxist-Leninist party here. And, yeah, I guess I'm not, like, an extremely dogmatic Leninist, but all of my friends seem to be Leninists, and I like them a lot. So that's my default tendency by virtue of my environment, I suppose.

Yeah, I also don't have a very strong tendency either. In my master's thesis, my, like, big mentor was this guy named Richard Gilmnopalsky who wrote some very cool books. One of them is called precarious communism, and that's kind of how I like to think of myself as a precarious communist. So basically, I think I'm, like, I'm very anti-capitalist, but I'm, I think that the way we're going to overcome capitalism is always precarious. So I'm not set on one sort of tendency.

I think that leftists should link up wherever they can and fight together, and I guess when you can't, you can't. So, not a strong tendency kind of person. I guess maybe like a Marxist with some very strong anarchist tendencies. I don't know. I mean, I think that's true of me as well. Some listeners refer to the show and me as a pan-leftist. I hate sectarianism when it can be avoided.

I think it should be invoited. Yeah, I guess I'm very influenced by both Leninism and anarchism and Marxism. So I kind of take, you know, a little bit of each and run with it. So that's all very interesting. Let's go ahead and dive into the questions here. So what was your personal, political, and religious development, and how did each of you come to combine socialism with your Christian faith? So Dean and I have talked about this a few times on our own podcast, but, well, I'll

him speak for himself in a minute, but I grew up as an evangelical Christian, and that was a rough way to come up, I guess. Evangelical Christianity is pretty weird and mostly very gross, but one thing that it did for me, I think, was that it gave me a really strong, like, anti-status position, but for, like, completely dull and silly reasons, mostly having to do with sort of conservative talking points. But a lot of where I'm now, I think, is due to my experience in Christian high red and that type of formation that I got in college, which is also

strange, too, that like an evangelical institution got me somewhere good. So, like, I got to read some cool stuff from Christian pacifists and kind of transformed my conservative distrust in anti-status positions to more, like, Marxist

distrust in anti-status positions. So after I got into Marx and, like, could leave behind a lot of that conservatism. That's where I kind of melded together, Christianity and socialism. So evangelical gave me a good setup. I just needed marks for that good, that good slam dunk of communism. Absolutely. Yeah, my story isn't too dissimilar, though. I didn't grow up as an evangelical. My parents were, like, average Catholics, I guess. Like, they weren't extremely devout

or anything but they did send us to Catholic school and eventually all my friends were evangelicals so I ended up doing that in my adolescent years and went to an evangelical college Matt and I met on the internet on a forum on Reddit for radical Christianity so I don't know we were kind of on similar trajectories I guess but yeah I don't know I always say it's very weird my anarchism initially stemmed from I had this Baptist pastor who was very conservative but ultimately his talking point was like you should read the Bible and care about what it says and I thought that was a good idea so I read it a bunch and I kind of felt at that time and still sort of due that if you read the Bible naively you definitely don't come away with a kind of default

I don't know liberal capitalist position so that turned me away from I guess the alliances that evangelicals made with Republicans and Democrats together and then when I got to college and started reading Marx there with a couple of interesting profs. Yeah, I sort of moved in that direction. And then when I came back to Catholicism, my Marxism kind of went up, I guess, because Marxism and Catholics have a really fascinating history around the world. So there's a lot more like points of contact, I guess. And that's kind of where I found myself, you could say.

Yeah, absolutely. I think we have a small but still present chapter here in Omaha. of the Catholic worker sort of association, a couple radical, yeah, Catholics. And I wanted to reach out to them. We all want to organize with them because I think it's important, and I like the intersection of Christianity and socialism,

and that brings me to the next question. In your opinion, what are the primary benefits of bringing the Christian and the socialist traditions together? Yeah, I think in some ways they're not completely separable. Like socialism oftentimes grew out of a Christian tradition And self-consciously, like if you read, for example, like Prudan, we just did an episode where we talked all about Prudan. And though he himself is not an avowed Christian by any means, he's self-consciously borrowing from Christian tradition. And there's a couple famous passages in the book of Acts in chapters two and four where the distillation is that early Christian communities got together and sold all their possessions and held them in common.

and the line or the slogan is everybody gave each according to their ability and each according to their need. And that's been self-consciously taken up and appropriated by a lot of socialist discourses. So, yeah, I mean, in some ways, bringing them together isn't too hard because if you look very carefully at history and the textual traditions of both of them, the points of contact emerge if you're not kind of, you know, assuming they have to be opposed right off the bat. But more than that, I guess strategically, like there are. loads of Christians around the world. Many places in the global south, for example, when they started to organize against global capitalism, the church and Christian traditions provided a lot of symbols and even organizational structures that really helped to shield revolutionaries from

reactionary violence. And not always, obviously. I mean, the church can be a very reactionary force in the world. The church being like all Christians, not just the Catholic Church. But yeah, I don't know. So the benefit, to me, I guess, is one that it helps to see that they're not very far apart in the first place. And then secondly, that historically, these two communities have already really found ways to organize in societies that already take for granted that Christianity is a thing worth participating in for a lot of folks. Maybe even just taking a step, I don't know, closer to like the personal, like, understanding that Christianity might be able to give.

Herbert McCabe is like a, he's a Dominican priest who also has a lot to say about Marxism. And if you're interested in Christian socialism, he's a guy to read for sure. Herbert McCabe says this thing, though. He says that Christianity, like, it's not just a theory, but it's more of a practice, right? Like it has a lot to say about how we should interact with individual people. But the difficulty is that it can't really speak to structural issues like Marxism can or like, I don't know, lots of leftist ideologies can. So to me, Marxist philosophy, it seems like a really invaluable tool for Christians,

especially in the United States, because it lends like a really systematic lens, I guess, to think about culture way more broadly and to think about what it really means to love your neighbor, especially when you live in a society that is built off their exploitation. So to me, the primary benefit of Christianity and socialism is like a better diagnostic in a more systemic way to love people. Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's been, you know, historically, there's been, you know, positive and negative relationships between various Christian denominations and socialist movements. I know on your guys' podcast, you've talked about some of that interaction in the Philippines. Before we had this interview, I interviewed Professor Alex Avena, who's a historian of Latin America in Mexico specifically, and during the Mexican Revolution, there was a, I forget the name

of the bishop, but he was known as the Red Bishop, precisely because he had communist sympathies and lent his ideas and his work and his position to the revolution in Mexico. So I always think that's super interesting. A lot of people on the left will, when they hear the term Christian socialism, and especially in the U.S. context, will think of Martin Luther King. But I'm sure there are a lot more. So who are some of the key figures in the history of Christian leftism? And which one of them have had the biggest impact on you and your thinking personally?

I think Dean has a really good list of more modern thinkers. But Christian leftism, especially contemporary Christian leftism in the United States, is like a really mixed bag. Like, I don't know. you've got lots of just like lots of liberal folks out there and it's hard to kind of weed through them. So I made a list of like heretics that I thought were pretty important to me. So, and they're all kind of like older, they're all older folks that have since passed.

But I think a few people we can, we can mention is Thomas Munser, who led some rebellions in Europe, a religious thinker for sure, an early Christian heretic, Pelagius. the guy who didn't believe in original sin but also chastised the rich for stealing from the poor pretty cool figures I'm also so I did say earlier that I'm not Catholic and that I'm a Protestant I'm specifically a free Methodist

and the free Methodist will probably be pissed I'm saying this on a leftist podcast but I don't care one of like the founding dudes of the free methodist church is this guy named BT Roberts and BT Roberts is very cool and maybe you should go look him up if you're not familiar

with that weird part of church history but he was an abolitionist and because of his abolitionism he like split off from the Methodist Church and started his own thing. So B.T. Roberts is totally cool. Someone that I'm like really

always interested in not perfect at all but a pretty cool leftist thinker well someone who I'm appropriating as a leftist thinker maybe not. Not a communist but for sure tends toward the left, I think. Yeah, there are a bunch of really fascinating kind of moments, I guess, in the history of

Christianity, and I think it's cool, Matt, that you brought up, especially the heretical side of it, because, in a lot of ways, Christianity has been kind of fighting with itself over class divisions for a very long time. More recently, I guess, all the people who sprung to mind for me were like 20th century figures. So I was thinking about, for example, Blessed Oscar Romero, who is an archbishop in El Salvador, and he was murdered during mass by CAA-backed paramilitary forces, basically for saying that the church should become a church of the poor.

He is on the road to sainthood in the Catholic Church, which is a pretty big deal right now. Really inspiring guy. A few others I was thinking of, so there's this guy named Louise Hollandone, who is a member of the NDF, the revolutionary group in the Philippines. And we, as you said earlier, Brett,

talked about that a little on our episode. Really fascinating guy, He started out doing peasant organizing and then slowly over time as the Communist Party the Philippines emerged, just really got involved and became a spokesperson for them and really saw that as an extension of his faith as so many other Christians did around the world as revolutionary movement that's happened in the last century, especially. And I also listed, coincidentally, Bishop Samuel Ruiz and Chiapas, who you might have been referring to earlier as well, Brett.

He really helped to till the ground for the Zapatistas. It would be wronged. It would be overstating it to say that he, like, built that movement or something. And some people, some of his critics tried to pin that on him actually as a, as a, you know, I don't know, that was a really bad thing. But he famously helped to really decolonize Chiapas through establishing these different indigenous Christian communities there. And so, yeah, people like that are really fascinating to me. I don't know, in Nicaragua, there were loads of priests who participated in Sandinista Revolution. and they're all very cool. So, yeah, I guess I'm attracted to those kinds of people on the ground

who really kind of put themselves on the line and see that self-consciously as an extension of their faith even when it comes into conflict with either governments or church authorities, I guess. Yeah, and I think we've seen that here in the United States a little bit recently with Antifa movements, but we'll get into that later as far as the role that the clergy plays. But all throughout history, in all contexts,

the Christian church has really been at the forefront of a lot of these movements. You know, there are elements of reaction in the church, but there are also elements of extreme progressivism, which I'm excited for leftists who might not know these things to know these things. Now, this next question might seem a little silly, but I think it's important. I'm interested in your guys' perspective on this. So a lot of people on the left of center from liberals all the way to leftists,

They would like to claim Jesus Christ as kind of this peace-loving, you know, wealth redistributing, hippie radical. Do you think this interpretation of Jesus is more or less correct? How do you view the figure of Jesus in terms of a political perspective? I guess that's fine. The hippie Jesus is a problem. He's okay. There are worst Jesuses out there. Yeah, for real.

There are tons of worst Jesuses out there. Jizai, is that the plural? Probably not. I think that the historical context of Jesus is, like, actually pretty important, though. So, I mean, like, there are many Jesuses, and that's fine. Interpretation is very good and important. But if you think about the character of Jesus sort of narratively and historically, I don't think that you'll find that he really fits into many of the religious categories of his time.

And, like, as a result of that is, like, a really radical figure. He definitely stands outside of the religious hierarchy at that point. in history. Peace loving is probably right, but I think that liberals like to use the peace loving Jesus to be sort of like a liberal tolerance Jesus. And I think that is actually wrong. Because like the peace loving Jesus isn't, it's not the kind of peace where everyone should just like hang out and get along and whatever, but it's the kind of piece where like the lowly are lifted up and the rich are sent away empty, like that sort of peace. It's a piece that's like pretty disruptive. So I can get down with peace, peace loving hippie Jesus as long as we

think about peace in the right kind of way. Yeah, I think that's right, man. I mean, there are so many moments in especially the four Gospels where Jesus says things that liberals probably wouldn't particularly like. I mean, the big one that people always key on on is overturning all the tables, the money-changing tables in the temple and fashioning a whip to drive out people who had, you know, basically turned the temple of God into a marketplace. So that's like a pretty cool and not exactly hippie-like move, I guess you could say. depending on your hippie. But I think there's something interesting too

about just the rhetoric force of Jesus in his time. So he's calling people like whitewashed tombs to their faces. And, you know, like really intentionally staging these performative critiques of Caesar as an emperor. And he takes on these titles that are sort of ironic. Like, the son of God is a very funny political title because Caesar is also, he also claims to be a demigod, a son of God. And so when somebody like Jesus like wanders into a town riding a donkey, which we remember every year on Palm Sunday in liturgical churches, he's staging basically like a massive awesome joke because that's the kind of thing that an emperor would do and they would ride another war horses and take all these captives with them to kind of parade them around.

So alternatively, you know, Jesus finds a donkey and like comes in and everybody hails him as this king. and it's sort of this ironic picture. But that's the kind of thing that Jesus does. It's almost like political performance art a lot of the time. And I think, you know, that's not the kind of thing that liberals are after or that even necessarily the kind of standard, like, sanitized, like, hippie Jesus is after either. Yeah, I never knew that, the sort of like, you know, purposefully ironic and sort of mocking perspective on why Jesus did those things. So, yeah, you never see that sort of analysis from liberals generally that like to prop him up as a figure of liberalism.

Right. Here's a question that I have that when I was listening to you guys as a podcast, you touched on this, and this was actually really, really fascinating as somebody who identifies as a Marxist like myself and somebody who, you know, has training in philosophy and has wrestled with these ideas. How does a Christian Marxist reconcile the materialism inherent in the Marxist tradition? with their faith in God and the non-materialist metaphysics that faith in God gives rise to.

Dean and I were talking before, and I think he has a really good answer to this question, but I guess it all really depends on how weird and philosophical we want to get with this question. Let's get weird. Okay, let's get it. You ask for it. So I'm not strictly a materialist

for some kind of weird philosophical reasons and not theological reasons. but in the last like 10 years five years or so there's a pretty important philosophical movement that's been going on called speculative realism speculative realism is a metaphysics that tries to distance itself from anthropocentrism and because like materialism is caught up in that I think that's my main objection to Marxist materialism and not because I'm a theist or something So anyways, metaphysics are weird, but what that leads me with is, like, I believe in

God, but I'm not super sure what that, like, what that, like, what that, how that works sort of metaphysically in terms of philosophy. So, uh, Marxist metaphysics, uh, in terms of, like, materialist metaphysics are, I think, good for explaining situations as far as they can, but, uh, I think there's some places where they'll, I don't know, not do a great job. Dean, what, what do you think? You have a better answer. Yeah. My answer was basically, like, actual Marxists and Christians don't seem to be bothered by this on the ground, this difference. So, you know, I mentioned some examples of people earlier, like, especially in Nicaragua. Like, if you look up, a really great guy to read on this is a guy named Ernesto Cardinal, who was a Catholic priest who became the minister of, I forget what, something in the Senate East.

the government after the revolution. And he's written quite a bit on this question. But it's also interesting to think that like Lenin has some stuff to say about religion. And we talked to a guy named Derek Ford, who's a Leninist, a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation on our podcast. And we read some of Lenin's writings on it. And I mean, his approach is basically like, yeah, well, I'm an atheist. I think that Marxism leads to atheism. And like, I hope that other people are atheists someday. But that's not really like a barrier to people participating in what we're up to. So, like, Lenin was a lot more concerned with, like, well, sure, you can be a priest and join our crew, but you got to be on the right side of the class problem. That's the real

important thing. And he specifically argued against, like, rabid kind of atheist propagandizing within the Bolsheviks. So, you know, I don't know. It's like, these are interesting questions to have around, like, drinks at a bar or something like that. Like, I'm not a theologian and neither is Matt. So this question also doesn't really, like, bother me that much, I guess you could say. But at the end of the day, I think, like, Marxism, like materialism in general, encourages people to look for actual structures of production and relationships that put people in positions. And there's nothing about a belief in God that should preclude you from, you know, taking that on board. Even though it does, there are plenty of people who, for whom

their theistic metaphysics are exactly what preclude them from materialist analysis. but you know historically there's nothing necessary about that yeah and i think you guys addressed that on the podcast episode where you wrestled with this question and i think that you can totally separate sort of trying to understand how history unfolds and how certain you know dynamics in society give rise to other dynamics and then kind of separate and kind of bracket those questions from the more ontological questions about the nature of the cosmos and who's behind it so i mean i think you're right in that there's not necessarily this this huge issue there that needs to be resolved. I just thought it was kind of interesting and I really enjoyed, again, I point people

to go listen to the Magnificast because I really enjoyed that discussion. Cool, thanks. Yeah, of course. Talking about atheism, this is something that I enjoy talking about and I have to admit that in my late teens and early 20s, I actually was a new atheist. I was one of these people that read Dawkins, that read Harris, that read Hitchens, that read Dennett. And, you know, I probably unironically at some point in my life said that religion is the root of all evil, which is unfortunate in retrospect. But, you know, I have to be honest about my own political development. So, you know, in my opinion now, as I've developed my leftist, you know, politic, new atheism, in my opinion, these days combines, like, the worst aspects of liberalism,

neoconservative imperialism, this reductionist scientism and atheism and kind of gives it a bad name in the process which oppose both the values, I think, of socialism and Christianity. But what are your thoughts on and critiques of new atheism? I kind of think that a lot of listeners would like to hear this discussion. Yeah, Matt has a better answer than me, so I'm going to talk first so that he has the last word on it. Yeah, so new atheists are very funny because, like, their whole shtick, I guess,

is saying, well, people are religious. just because they, you know, never thought twice about, I don't know, what their parents were telling them or the cultures that they grew up in. But then ironically, all of them are just grossly Eurocentric and capitalist and reactionaries and, I don't know, defend Islamophobes. And I think it's just a weird thing because what starts out as this, you know, massive, seemingly massive critique of what we take for granted actually stops at like the least dangerous part. like Christians are I don't know like a force in society that's true but it's not because people believe in God really that we live in a capitalist I don't know hell hellish global system right now so it's I've always just found it as profoundly ironic I guess that the one thing they'll never question is you know why they are committed to I don't know liberal capitalism or this of that I know a lot of people a lot of of interesting theologians have argued against them, and I don't know, that's fine. But my favorite

argument actually comes from Terry Eagleton, who's a British Marxist, and he's written a few articles and books, specifically just, I don't know, giving them the kind of snarky response that only Terry Eagleton can give to them. So I just encourage everyone to read that. I guess I just think whatever he thinks about a new atheist. That's a very good position to take, I think. Just whatever Terry Eagleton thinks. Brett, I kind of hope that maybe in the past we have accidentally fought one another on the internet about this topic. That would be my favorite thing to know. So, I don't know.

There's probably no way of finding it out, but maybe the NSA could give us a ring and just tell us what's up if we've ever interacted before. My biggest objection to new atheism is that it's boring as hell. It's like the, like, atheism is something that is, like, so radical, like, existentially radical and, like, possibly politically radical, but they just do, like, the most boring thing possible with it and, like, use it to prop up, like, enlightenment ideas. So, like, I think being an atheist is totally fine and, like, understandable. Like, I can totally get why people don't believe in God. That makes sense to me, actually. And I especially get, like, the political appeal for it, especially with anarchists. No gods, no masters is a very good brand.

But there's this book that I always think back to when I'm thinking about atheism, and it's written by a guy named Federico Campania, who's like, he's like an Italian anarchist. It's called The Last Night. And it makes a really cool argument for atheism that I think is even actually compatible with Christianity. It's about atheism is about like always attacking these kind of like big abstractions in the world. And I think I'm even doubt.

down with that but new atheism i guess just to me is silly because it's boring it's just like it's conservatives it's conservatism it's scientism it's reactionary it doesn't get you anywhere very interesting just like uh it's just a cool a cool pedestal from which you can yell at people on the internet yeah and it it has like the sort of shallowness that like taxationist theft libertarianism has yeah where it's like this it reduces the complexities of the world political system to like these little you know these shitty sort of like platitudes about what the the real cause of problems are and it misses so much nuance and complexity. You mentioned Terry Eagleton and I never pass up the attempt to plug his book why Marx was right. Yeah, yeah.

It's such a great book. He lays like the 10 biggest arguments against Marxism out and every chapter is like, here is an argument and then I'm going to spend 10 pages just deconstructing it methodically. So I point, point listeners that way. Go ahead. In that book, he also has a great chapter on materialism and makes an argument for why it isn't, like why Christians shouldn't be scared of it, I guess. So that's probably a good like appendix to what we were just saying. Absolutely. Yeah. And I also think there's a way to look at the new atheist movement in a sort of Marxist materialist sense in that, you know, after 9-11, these sort of like self-proclaimed liberals, intellectuals came out, you know, Harris, Dawkins, etc. And they proclaimed that they put forward

this sort of, you know, anti-religion, but it was really anti-Islam. I mean, you know, Sam Harris wrote a letter to a Christian nation, et cetera. But what they really did was they provided intellectual and moral cover for U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. And that's why those people were brought on, like, Fox News and celebrated as thinkers, that novelty of, like, we're liberal, but also, like, seriously bomb them, you know? Yeah, exactly. And recently, I've, you know, I've, because of my new atheist days, I've been following

Sam Harris ever since then. And his politics are just abysmal. I mean, they are center-right liberalism in the worst way. And because he is an intellectual and because he's, you know, a self-proclaimed neuroscientist and he has a bachelor's degree in philosophy, he thinks that he can enter the political realm and that he has some sort of authoritative clout. But like, you know, he called, like in a recent podcast, he called Black Lives Matter a divisive, dangerous, and retrograde movement.

And he called Antifa goons who attack peace. peaceful Nazis. I mean, these are actual terms that he's used. So, I mean, they discredit themselves. That is very funny. Like, who, first of all, who uses the word goons anymore? But secondly, peaceful Nazis is just, I don't know, a very telling phrase in itself, I guess. As a rich white guy, you know, Nazis can be peaceful to him. Do you guys follow Richard Dawkins on Twitter? I consciously don't. Go ahead. Well, you should just take a few minutes, scroll through his timeline, and it is super funny.

Like, I honestly cannot tell his tweets apart from, like, a joke, a joke Twitter account. They're so weird. Yeah, he has kind of, like, made a Twitter brand also off of just complaining about feminism and whining about, I don't know, people who think that, like, Muslims are people. it's just it's not great yeah it's kind of sad to see what is otherwise an intelligent evolutionary biological mind reduced to basically a guy just screaming get off my lawn he's so detached you know he's he's so he's so clueless when it comes to social issues yeah completely okay so moving on because this is a this is a question that I'm kind of really interested in you know Christianity like

many religions which we were just talking about it seems very adaptable to to different political ideologies. There seems to be an interpretation for any political starting point. So, for example, you know, you have like fascist Christians, you have liberal Christians, libertarian Christians, et cetera. Do you think a well-understood Christianity lends itself more to certain political ideologies than others, or do you think one can find justifications for any political program in the holy texts and traditions of Christianity? Well, yeah. Go ahead, Dean. Go ahead, man. I'll let you. this is the Christian way you just you never get anywhere because you're constantly deferring

to no after you um that's right all right i'll go i'm gonna do it please um so i don't know i don't think christianity or its texts have any like programmatic outlines um but they do have some really interesting suggestions uh so i have a in my bachelor's degree i had a minor in biblical studies which i am like i'm not a biblical scholar but i'm thankful for that formation because one thing that is really fascinating is when you take the time to really think through and read these texts, you really get a picture of what is happening for the Jewish community and then later the early Christian community. So the Jewish Bible, for example, is just full of prophets denouncing the rich, valorizing the poor. It's basically a narrative that's built on the assumption

that they used to be slaves and they shouldn't be anymore. And even though they do kind of slowly coalesce into an empire, uh, there are all these fascinating critical voices in, um, the biblical texts constantly kind of checking that. At one point, like the Israelites want a king and God says, actually you don't want a king because you're just going to have to do whatever he tells you and go to all these wars for him. And they say, no, we do want one for real. And, uh, he's like, fine, you asked for it. And then the rest of the Bible is basically them like complaining about their kings to God. And he just keeps saying, I told you so. So, uh, it's, it's a pretty interesting book in that way. And that's very suggestive.

Right. Or if you look at, for example, how, I mean, Israel's laws are very weird and there's not like a cohesive sort of move that at least we can uncover anymore. But there are a lot of ways in which property gets relativized and private property gets screwed over. Like every seven years, debts just get canceled and you have to start over. So just things like that that are fascinating. And then by the time you get to the early church, like we mentioned before, Jesus has all these performative critiques. And then once you get to act, it's very clear, and a lot of leftist scholars are totally willing to admit this, that the early Christians practiced primitive communism. And that very spirit kind of continues in the history of Christianity. So, you know, Christianity, it's a weird thing because it gained this massive historical power almost on accident when Constantine, the Emperor Constantine, converted to Christianity.

And it embarked on all these colonial projects, and that was really bad. but that's sort of, I guess, it's not understandable without Christianity, but also neither is the primitive communism of Christianity or the kind of a variety of peasant revolts and things like that that happened from within Christianity in Europe and then later in other parts of the world. So, you know, I guess I just, I think we have a tendency to want to really essentialize religious traditions and ideas. And I think it's better to talk about Christianities in the plural and then kind of look for how these different Christianities get off the ground. I mean, you can use the Bible to justify whatever you want.

I'm a Catholic, and Catholics use papal writings to justify whatever they want. But the point, I guess, is to kind of figure out where to go from there. Herbert McCabe, who Matt mentioned earlier, has this great insight, I think, where he says the next reformation in Christianity will have to happen along class lines because the doctrinal divisions that divided Christianity 500 years ago don't really matter anymore. Like, nobody cares. People aren't killing people over whether or not you're going to baptize your baby. Um, so I think that that is probably the best way to come at, you know, does Christianity have a way of justifying this of that political program? Like, yes, it does. And it kind of justifies all of them. Uh, but that's

exactly why Christianity is always going to kind of have these internal contradictions. And it's also why Marxists, like we Christians need Marxists to keep pointing that out and keep pushing those contradictions within our own churches and communities. So, yeah, I think that's like a really helpful way to look at it, at least for me. That's a really good answer, Dean. Wow. Mine is not as good. Well, I was thinking about my own, like, very small section of Protestantism and, like,

one of the, one of the Christianities within the larger Christianity. And at least in my experience, in my very localized, position in place, I don't think that Christianity is actually very adaptable to other ideologies. So only speaking again from like the social norms of the place that I'm at, but like I think that Protestants, especially evangelicals, are really concerned with Jesus as a person, the historical character of Jesus and like the things Jesus tells you to do. And I think that if you just go off those things, like the Gospels, it's. it's going to, you're going to have a really hard time to adapt fascism to those things.

Unless you want to make huge concessions about what it means to follow Jesus, at least in terms of my particular corner of Protestantism, just want to make that as clear as possible because everything that Dean said is very true. So I think that American Christianity, American Protestant Christianity is in a place particularly good, prime to like radicalize for that reason that I think that uh if you can just kind of if if Marxists can uh stomach going to church for a minute and pointing out some of the inconsistencies and how um what Jesus says can play out at a larger scale um would be all better off yeah there there was a weird

and this is you know kind of off script there's a weird phenomenon of uh you know evangelical Christians supporting Trump and and some people chalked it up to well he promised them a Supreme court nomination. Do you think there's a contradiction between the sort of, you know, vulgarian and clearly not religious sort of person that Trump is and his ability to gain those votes from segments of the Christian population? This is something we've actually been exploring on our podcast in a variety of angles. I think Christianity is weird because there's a stereotype that assumes that, well, Christians are people who read the Bible and believe what it says. And that is just not the case. Christianity, especially in the United States, is a sociological phenomenon,

and it is a demographic with histories and major players and minor players. And the Christian right in particular is time and time again a brutally cynical Christianity. I mean, you know, major megachurch pastors, it's like every couple of years you see a huge one, it turns out, I don't know, they're involved in like a massive sex scandal or an embezzling scandal or this and that. And those are exactly the kinds of people who rallied and continued to rally around Trump. But I think it's like easy to poke fun at that, but the more troubling thing is that average Christians also find ways to kind of, I don't know, cozy up to a vision like Trump. So that happens through things like one issue voting, for example, where, I don't know, evangelicals,

Catholics, a variety of conservative Christians are obsessed with abortion. It is the only thing that they will ever care about. Satan could run for the president of the United States and he would say, I'm going to get rid of abortion and they would vote for him 100% because that's the single issue. I mean, arguably, that's basically what happened. So, you know, it's kind of terrifying because in the United States in particular, you can't think of white supremacy without thinking of Christianity. You can't think of capitalism without thinking about Christianity. And the reason for that is it's not like they're betraying or being faithful to the Bible or the Christian tradition. It's just that this is one way in which the ruling class has successfully

mobilized a series of metaphors and language and symbols to get its interests accomplished. And Trump is such a bald example of how that operates, you know, willing to go to church and put up with sitting in a room full of really annoying pastors so that he can, I don't know, make more many hotels by virtue of being the president. So, yeah, it's a troubling situation. Yeah, do you guys personally, just kind of following up on this question, do you guys personally have any success with your fellow Christians who might not, you know, obviously be radicals or whatever? Do you have success in kind of pushing a socialist perspective on Christianity with them? How do people generally receive that argument, or do you even

spend time trying to do that. Yeah. So, um, okay, I will lay bare my master plan right here. Um, so at the church I go to, it's a nice church full of really wonderful people who I love dearly. Um, but they are mostly liberals and that's okay for now. Um, so I'm on, I'm on the mission committee, which means, uh, I'm like in charge of figuring out where some of our mission money goes. Like, who do we support, like, and what initiatives do we support, et cetera. Um, So this is like, that's something I don't actually really find very valuable in Christianity. I think like proselytizing to people in other countries is not really that good of an idea. So what I've done and the way that I've gained most traction with the folks at my church is just like,

first of all, knowing the language and knowing like the sort of symbols and terms to use. and then just making very clear that whatever it is that I'm trying to do, like, start, like, stop proselytizing to folks in different countries and start being a sanctuary church to protect, like, immigrants or something. Like, to couch that in, like, the language of Christianity and the language of the Bible is actually very successful. So it's also not hard to do because there's, like, in that specific example, there's tons of biblical metaphor. foreign language about immigrants and that kind of stuff. But knowing how to talk the language is very helpful. I hope that doesn't sound disingenuous, because I really believe that's what it means to be a Christian, but it sounds a little disingenuous when I have to say, like, you have to couch it in those terms. Yeah. No, I actually don't think it sounds disingenuous because I think

Martin Luther King was doing the same thing, and I think it's a very valid way to approach text, but go ahead. Yeah, no, I think that's right. In terms of having success or not, I guess it depends on the community like I went to an evangelical school and there were times that I talked to the people and was surprised by kind of how open they were to this idea that Christians would be socialist. The nice thing about evangelicalism is they want so badly to care about the Bible. So what you do is you say, well, for example, in the book of acts,

everyone's taking care of each other each according to their ability and their need. you know who else does that? Socialists. Yeah. And you know who doesn't do that capitalist. And, you know, there are these ways in that it's not totally cynical. It's like, listen, do you really want to model the very thing that early Christians seem to think was how you should socially kind of respond to the event of Jesus' death or whatever and his resurrection? And, you know, when you make that gamble, of course, there are a lot of ideological screens that immediately go up with a lot of people and it just prevents them from hearing it. And, you know, I've heard a variety of ways that people try to, I don't know, decide that that's not a passage they care about in favor of other passages.

But for the most, like, authentically kind of, you know, Christian people trying really hard to figure out what that means for them, you can, I think, find ways to do that. That's what happened to me. Like, I had people who started kind of suggesting that to me, and that's what brought me around. So I guess I look at it as, you know, I could very easily have grown up as a, like, I could easily have voted for John McCain when I was in even jail. and I didn't because people said you should read the Bible and then I did and I was convinced. So, you know, it's just a matter of having the patience and the willingness to do it, which I admit I don't actually have enough of. But that's, I guess, something I'm still praying about, if you will. Yeah, and I would say that it's not only not cynical to take that line,

but it's actually way more cynical to try to argue for a sort of brutal free market capitalism using, you know, trying to, trying to draw out these, you know, biblical justifications for for the brutality, like the prosperity gospel, you know, making money off your parishioners and preaching that as an end in and of itself is actually more cynical than actually talking about caring for the poor and, you know, redistribution of wealth. I guess I'm just always worried I'm doing like entreeism and like a weird, backwards well. I understand the worry for sure, but we should put that, we should put that burden on the

shoulders of the people that want to claim capitalism is fitting with Christianity. All right, I'm in. Okay, so moving on to the next question. In Charlottesville this summer, you know, I mentioned this earlier, but there were clergy members, including, you know, well-known people like Dr. Cornell West, and Antifa, they actually teamed up to resist fascism. Antifa protected vulnerable clergy members from the violent fascists, and together they defended churches from like fascist infiltration. So what are your thoughts on that event generally? And then also what are your thoughts as Christians on the use of political violence and pursuit of leftist goals more broadly?

So we did an episode about this a while back. And it, I think, is one of our most listened to episodes, which is really interesting. I think we're kind of branded now, intentionally or not, as Christian leftists, are decidedly not pacifists. I don't know if that's good or bad, but it's where we're at. We try not to praise violence or something like that, which I think is not a good idea for Christians or leftists, but rather to recognize that, like, it is a part of our world, which is driven into justice and sin, and it's important to face that problem rather than sidestep it.

So, you know, the images of Antifa defending Christians at Charlottesville, I don't know, those images just stick with me a lot still. I think it's challenged a lot of Christians that I know who were a strict pacifist to reckon with that position. Cornell West, on Democracy Now, there's an interview that was going around that's really well done.

He said that if it weren't for Antifa, the clergy, and he would have been crushed like cockroaches, that's the language he had. And he was saying, too, at that time that, like, he went there to get arrested and the police weren't doing their job in terms of arresting,

but they were doing their job in terms of defending white supremacy. you know, they were just letting things escalate. And I think that really put the problem of violence and police on display for Christians because the police sided with fascists, not the clergy. And, you know, like, if you're a Christian, like, those are our people. Those are our authorities. Those are the people that you're supposed to listen to.

And those are the people who provide a moral witness. You know, every Sunday I listen to my parish priest, tell me what he thinks I ought to do. I don't know. I'd agree with him, but, like, I'll give him the time of day no matter what, for sure. so I think just seeing that put on display and seeing Antifa being there defending them and especially to have someone like Cornell West say that if they weren't there all these clergy folks would have been in real danger that I think has really changed the discourse to be honest I mean it's hard to gauge that but just based on how many listens

the episode of ours has gotten it was just us talking like we had no guest or anything it was just the topic. Based on that, based on some of the feedback we've gotten from messages or tweets or, you know, just seeing people talking about it in my own social media independently of anything that we're doing, I do think that was a bit of a shock to sort of the Christian pacifist system and I think it's important. Yeah, so I'm not a pacifist either. I don't have those convictions, I guess, at least not anymore.

I think that specific example of the way that, like, the clergy in Charlottesville and Antifa worked together is really good, something we should probably take note of a little bit more. Okay, so this is like a little bit of a different approach to answer this question, and maybe it's not one that's anyone wants to hear. But so I teach media studies in communication, and one thing I have to think through quite a bit is public relations and how to convince publics a bit. the missions of an organization and anti-fat protecting Christian clergy is a really good move for that like it's it's like it communicates exactly what anti-fat is about and and it gives like

Christians the ability to do like you know to like Christians that can't get past pacifism as like their modus operandi or whatever it gives them the ability to still do that while participating. So, like, it's good for anti-fat because it shows, it shows the public, it shows all media who's watching that, like, they're, they're fundamentally about defense and, like, you know, defense against fascists. So, um, I think that's a really cool symbiotic relationship that works for both parties in a really good way. Um, that being said, I think Christians, like, can and should, um, join anti-fat, like, and I think that's also fine good um so uh i don't know that's a different way of thinking about it uh i hope that those christians

uh who anti-fah protected like buy them pizza afterwards or something they should they should find some ways saying thank you uh because uh they saved their butts for sure an antifa collection plate that's a good idea oh my god yeah uh if someone could take an offering at their church specifically for the anti-fascist that would be a beautiful thing i really would Yeah. And I also like what you said about you don't have to be a pacifist, but you also don't have to worship violence. And I think it's very important for leftists to understand, as we talked on our previous episode with a member from its going down, how he phrased it is, we do not want an escalation of violence with the right or with the government, you know, because those are ways that we will get people hurt and get people killed. And so we shouldn't fetishize violence. But to be a pacifist is to be an idealist in the worst way, meaning that you're sort of taking a moral idea and abstracting it from the material conditions that vulnerable people have to operate in and then saying no matter what happens, you should just sit there and

take it. And that's also dangerous in its own right. So I think if you have an error too far to the fetishizing violence side, that's an error. And if you take it too far to fetishizing passivism, that's an error. You know, you have to, you have to operate in the situation that you're in. And sometimes militant self-defense is absolutely needed. And I think we all agree on that. Yeah, for sure. Also, I mean, on that, the, the biggest thing that Dean and I, I think, have against pacifism is just that it can't do, it can't understand what violence even is, right? So, I mean, this is another one of those areas where I think Marxism adds something very valuable to the, like, cultural diagnostics of Christians. Because pacifists, like, don't have a

very nuanced view of what violence is because they're idealists. So I think only with sort of like the large scale calculus of like the violence of everyday life can Christians start to see that like pacifism doesn't really like work in the way they think it does. Or at least that like violence is more than two discrete bodies like meeting each other in space. Right. Like violence is a thing that happens when you like swipe your credit card every single day. And that's the kind of thing that I don't know.

maybe there's like a really innovative pacifist out there who's like trying to find a way to you know like live a completely nonviolent life and i don't know they live off the grid or something but like that's also not a like that's a kind of stance of purity and self-preservation i think rather than you know acting on behalf of the other and really addressing what violence is in this world and how one would move beyond it or something yeah yeah that that non-n nuanced dogmatic approach to pacifism it almost always kind of conceals the structural violence that's just inherent in everyday interactions, like you mentioned. Right.

So we're coming up on an hour, and this is the philosophy nerd in me coming out, and I want to talk to you guys about this. The famous philosopher Frederick Nietzsche had objections to actually both Christianity and socialism. He criticized them both, which overlapped heavily. He argued that both traditions focused too much on the weak and the vulnerable. Can you go ahead and summarize Nietzsche's objection to slave morality and give me your thoughts on whether or not leftists and Christians can learn from Nietzsche, and if so, how? Yeah, I'm not an expert on Nietzsche, but I have taken some glasses on him in graduate school, and I think he's an interesting guy, even though he's really complicated.

I'm kind of two minds about it. I really like the way of setting the question up here, Brett, because putting Christianity and socialism together as a target for Nietzsche really, I don't know, elucidates things about that relationship that doesn't they don't often come out so i was thinking about this guy named malcolm bull who's a british marxist he's an editor at the new left review i think or at least at one time he was anyway he has this book called anti-nitchie and it is very good it's really hard uh it's hard for me i don't know maybe it's not very hard but it's good uh and he argues in that book that instead of like producing an overman to overcome nihilism or whatever that's what nietzsche is

about uh humans should identify with like their herd he says so instead of criticizing a herd morality we should just take it on board. And he has this analogy of like slowing down to the speed of the weakest possible member of that herd. And I think the connections between Christianity and socialism are definitely not lost on Bull. So he in the book, like he talks about Simone Vei, who's a really fascinating Christian person. She died in a factory in solidarity with workers, by the way. So somebody you should like spend a day Wikipediaing, I guess. She's very weird, but also cool.

I think at the same time Nietzsche identified some real pathologies in Christian faith at least So this is where I find Nietzsche really useful So when he talks about slave morality Like he This is a very View at a thousand feet thing

But he says It's born out of resentment So in the Nietzsche in the story Like the weak don't like the strong And they overcome that situation By creating these lofty values Like the good or the beautiful or the true.

Those are like classical virtues or whatever. And those things discipline strong humans. But behind those values aren't like God's laws or whatever you might think they would be. Instead, they're hatred and vitriol and jealousy and envy, that kind of thing. So I think Nietzsche is actually wrong to say that that's the sum total of Christianity or something. But if you go to church for like, I don't know, an extended period of time, you will definitely see exactly what Nietzsche is talking about on full. display. Like, if you ever have to be in a church planning committee or something, or, like, be part of basically any conversation with any Christian, you will, you will 100% see someone

start using these kinds of lofty ideals to cover over their own resentments. And, like, that's something that Nietzsche, to his credit, really, I think, helps Christians to exercise from ourselves. He had a lot of positive things to say about Jesus, incidentally. So the story's kind of complicated. I don't really know how that relates to the left, except that a bunch of leftist thinkers thought Nietzsche was important in France. So, you know, his, Nietzsche gets taken up by fascists in Germany and by leftists in France. And I think the French reception of Nietzsche shows that with a little tweaking, you can have a left that is built on creativity and built on life and an affirmation of how life works. And that can be like a pretty healthy thing, I think.

I don't know Matt What do you think No I think you got it all man I don't know You're the You're the real philosopher here I don't know I mean I think just like

Just like Marxism Sometimes Nietzsche's Sorry Nietzsche's like Ethical thoughts and stuff Are good And so far as they help us explain And understand the world

But I don't know I think that You have to draw some lines because, I don't know. If you're going to make a commitment to being a Christian, you can't just say it's like, you know, just all hate and vitriol back there. There's some other stuff going on.

Yeah, and I would actually argue that, you know, from my understanding at least, there's a certain tension between, and this is often a misunderstanding of Nietzsche. A lot of people think that he stands for nihilism when in actuality what he was doing was diagnosing the threat of nihilism in a world without God

and arguing that we need to, find ways to get beyond it as a culture as a society. So I think there's really a tension between transcending nihilism as cultures, as a species, and then his focus on individualism. So he kind of wants his cake and he wants to eat it too. He wants to simultaneously say that nihilism is a threat to entire societies, to in fact the entire civilization of human beings. But he also wants to put forth this uber mensch idea of the individual overcoming everything and rising above it all. And I think there's a tension there. Like if we're going to transcend nihilism, if we're going to create our own values, then we

have to do it not as individuals necessarily, because what good does that do if the rest of the society is quote unquote adhering to slave morality or the herd or whatever? You know, it has to be done culturally. And so there's a collectivist versus individualist tension in Nietzsche that I think is interesting and I think it's worth exploring and I think co-opting him for fascist movements is there's certainly stuff there that you can pump out of Nietzsche that that gives rise and gives credence to fascist ideas but overall I think I think Nietzsche would have been repulsed by what is fascism today and in Nazi Germany specifically so the one thing I do I mean okay um like I said

Dean's the real philosopher here but uh what I do remember from from Nietzsche too that I always appreciate is at the very beginning of the book twilight of the idols uh he's talking about philosophizing with a hammer and that just sounds like i mean it sounds like really badass like you're just like smashing stuff just add a sickle but well yeah yeah right well so but uh when he's talking about philosophizing with a hammer he's talking about not like a hammer hammer but like a tuning hammer like you would like you'd hit it against an object and you could tell whether that thing was hollow or not right so you could you would use your philosophy to like cultivate a type of suspicion about ideas and forms and culture and that's at least how

I see Nietzsche being helpful to anybody, not just Christians or leftists, but just like if you can cultivate that type of suspicion about power and ideas and seeing what is hollow and what is not, then I think then you've done something good. Yeah, absolutely. Well, we're at an hour here. The questions are out, so I really appreciate you guys coming on. This conversation was fascinating. really want to have more conversations with you guys.

Like, I'd love to have you guys back on. Your podcast specifically is extremely good. I cannot recommend for people that listen to me to go listen. Even if you're not a Christian, go listen to the Magnificast. It is worth listening to. You will find things of value all over the place in that show. And I do want to give a quick shout out to our mutual friend, Zach. He doesn't want to give his last name for obvious reasons.

It was Zach that brought us together. and I'm very appreciative and thankful that he did that. Before we go, though, before we end, can you please tell listeners where they can find your podcast and maybe give some recommendations outside of your podcast for listeners who want to learn more about anything we've discussed? Yeah, you can find our podcast on iTunes or Stitcher or Google Play, even.

We post them all on our SoundCloud page and on our WordPress, The Magnificast.orgepardpress.com. Follow us on Twitter at The Magnificast, and you can even support us financially, materially, at patreon.com slash the Magnificast. Yeah, and also, we've got a newsletter called The Magnifesto that we send once a week, roughly. And we round up, like, some stuff about Christianity in the left, and I don't know, if you're just new to it or this is just a curious thing. Like, that's a fun way to kind of get into it a little bit in a casual way. In terms of, like, things to read more, I guess.

I was just thinking about this earlier, and I really can't think of any, better book than one by a guy named Michael Lowy, who's a Marxist sociologist. It's called War of Gods, and it's all about religion in Latin America. It's very, very good. It's from Verso. And I was also trying to think of, like, other groups that you might be interested in, and one would be a group named Jesus Radicals. They're online. They have a very good online presence. They have, like, a really strong anarchist bent, but they were partly responsible for moving me to the left at one time in my life. I think I've kind of moved away from that. But they're very kind and cool and creative and good Christian leftists. So worth your time.

Yeah, worth checking out for sure. All right, cool. Thank you guys so much. And let's do, let's do this again. I want to have more conversations with you. Yeah, totally. Thanks, Brett. This is awesome. Yeah, thank you. The face to the window, face to it all. I know you well. I know your heart. And I know my own right from the start If you dance for your supper Or beg for your bed Oh if you sing hallelujah

In the land of the dead courage if you can and get ready to run. Here in the shadows all of us looking for the sun. You in your best Me and my own issues Some old to the west Some old to the full Oh do tell

Tales of the wonder Tales of the summer we were falling If you dance for your supper Or beg for your bed Oh if you sing hallelujah In the land of the day Gather courage if you can and

Get ready to run Here in the shadows All of us Looking for the sun All of us All of us Hearing our doorways Looking for absolution

waiting for change to filter through Do our worlds call out together In this beautiful sunlight Calling If you dance for you dance for you, your supper or beg for your bed oh if you sing hallelujah in the land of the dead

gather courage if you can and get ready to run here in the shadows all of us son, yeah, if you dance for your supper or beg for your bed, oh, if you sing hallelujah in the land of the day, gather courage if you can and get ready to run. the shadows all of us looking for the sun Thank you.