Rev Left Radio - Christianity and Communism with Southern Catholic Worker

Episode Date: July 16, 2025

In this episode, Breht is joined by Alex Zambito, the voice behind the Instagram account Southern Catholic Worker, for a wide-ranging conversation on the intersections of Christianity and revolutionary struggle. Together, they explore Alex’s journey into the Catholic Worker movement, how his Southern roots and spiritual convictions shaped his politics, and what the life and teachings of Jesus Christ - himself a Palestinian born to working people - have to offer a world ravaged by capitalism, empire, and despair. The conversation dives deep into liberation theology, the legacy of figures like John Brown, St. Francis of Assisi, Fanny Lou Hamer, Dorthy Day and Thomas Merton, and the ways theology can inform and animate anti-capitalist resistance. Alex discusses the contradictions between mainstream American Christianity and the gospel's radical call to justice, post-atheism, and the possibilities for a spiritual reawakening amid the decay of late capitalism. ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio: https://revleftradio.com/ Outro Beat Prod. by flip da hood

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. It feels like it's been a while since we've done a proper interview after the best of series and some of the guest spots and the Red Menace episodes we've released. So we're back to form here. And today we have on Alex Zambito from Southern Catholic Worker, which is a wonderful Instagram page that I've followed for a very long time. that is kind of coming out of the Catholic worker tradition as well as the Marxist tradition

and combining those two traditions and I just always have loved that page and gotten a lot out of it. So it's overdue for me to have Alex on the show and to discuss the intersection of communism and Christianity and explore the Catholic worker tradition, explore some major figures within the Christian tradition that have been engaged in social justice

and revolutionary and liberatory activity. So we cover all of that today. We talk about American Christianity and its relationship with militarism and capitalism. We talk about the connections between the core values of socialism and communism and the core values of Christianity and the message of Jesus Christ. We talk about the necessity of opening your heart

and transcending selfish egoism and desire within both the Buddhist and Christian traditions. And we just touch on a lot of. of fascinating and interesting aspects of the intersection between Christianity and, you know, communist socialist politics. So really, really fun conversation that I'm excited to get into. And, of course, we'll link to his page, Southern Catholic Worker in the show notes, if people don't already follow it. And as always, if you like what we do here at RevLeft Radio, you can support us directly on Patreon.com forward slash Revleft Radio, link in the show notes, where for only

$5 a month, you can get hundreds of backlogged Patreon exclusive episodes as well as new episodes every single month. And we're doing this new thing on the Patreon where I'm calling it tentatively the Rev Left Situation Room, where when big political news breaks international or domestic political news, what we started doing is having a huge Zoom calls where the Rev Left Patreon community and I jump on a big Zoom call. And we have a facilitator, the wonderful Saya, who helped facilitate our first call to organize the whole thing. And we just, we all are in community discussing this event and making sense of it in real time together. I think it's a really cool way to add a communal dimension, or at least extend the communal dimension of the, of the Rev.

Left Patreon, which is already communal in nature. And it's, you know, one of the great rewards of my life is to be in contact with, with all the wonderful supporters of the show and to learn from them and to be in dialogue with them about the big issue. So if you're interested in that at all. It really helps put food on the table for me and Dave and our families. It means the world to us. And it literally allows this show to continue going. We're now eight years in to Rev Left, believe it or not. I'm so grateful to be able to be a part of this project and the community that's popped up and emerged around it. Again, it is one of the great rewards of my life. So thank you all to anybody who supports the show. But if you don't want to join Patreon, you don't like the

subscription model you just want to show us some love we also have a buy me a coffee one time donation link in the show notes as well which i know some people prefer to do that way and that also really really helps you know just pay the bills and put food on the table and get us through month to month so thank you to everybody who supports the show and if you don't have money hard times we get it you can like the show leave a positive review share it with friends and family and those are all really meaningful ways to help the show grow and extend our reach all right Without further ado, here is my interview with Alex Zambito, who is the creator of the Southern Catholic Worker page on Christianity, Communism, Catholic Worker, and so much more. Enjoy.

Um, Alex Zambito, I am. I run the Instagram account, Southern Catholic Worker. Um, I also live at the New York City Catholic worker at St. Joseph's House. when I'm a volunteer, I help out on the soup line. I guess my political, just should give a quick idea of my political identification, generally identify as a communist. Yeah, that's about me. Wonderful. Yeah, well, before we started recording, I had mentioned that your page, Southern Catholic

workers, one of my favorite on Instagram and has been for a very long time. So obviously, if people listening are not following you, they absolutely should. It puts out really consistently good stuff, and I love, and it's no surprise, a long time where I've left listeners. I love the infusion of sincere liberatory religiousness and the religious impulse and that whole side of the human condition into the political sphere. I think it always has been relevant and it will continue to be relevant. Most people on earth have some sort of religious orientation.

And if communists and people that are interested in political organizing and education and revolution I want to be taken seriously. They need to at least not be dismissive of it. Of course, I have my own sort of spiritual or religious inclinations, but have always explored others. And I think your page is a really good job of maintaining a really principled approach to both religion and politics, which, yeah, I just appreciate. So I guess before we get into even the first question about your own personal journey, how long has that page been active and what made you want to start it? Let's see. So originally I started the page

It was called Southern Marxists When I first began it That was I'm not sure, probably like Maybe before the pandemic So probably like 2019 2018, something like that So I started a while ago

But that was like the first iteration in the account Eventually I got too many Guideline or community Guideline warnings from Instagram And that first account got taken down So I created a second one I don't know how long it's been on the second one But that one

I've been renamed to Southern Catholic Worker. I guess the original, like, impetus to start it was just I was at the time living in Savannah, Georgia. That's my hometown. And just, like, not really feeling like there's a whole lot of a political outlet all the time sometimes. And it felt like a good way starting Instagram page, kind of felt like a good way to be able to learn more about the issue and kind of like about issues. And, yeah, just like be able to talk to more like-minded people about. politics and use that to like help with like you know it's good to have like people to bounce ideas off up especially once you want to talk to um more reactionary people and your

more immediate surroundings so um that was kind of like the original intention for why i did it cool yeah well i've i've never been to savannah georgia i've heard it's a it's a beautiful little mid-sized city um obviously i live born raised and continue to live and raise my family in omaha nebraska so another you know conservative mid-sized city where the average person that you come in contact is not even really a liberal, but, you know, mostly like a center right, moderate conservative type, which kind of shifts the dynamics of political education, of organizing, et cetera, and with the smaller city aspect, you just don't have access to as many long-term organizations that have been around, like in places like Chicago and New York City

and Seattle and L.A., which, you know, just creates a little obstacle for organizing in general and to keep that momentum going and the longevity and the sort of institutional memory and lessons of long time organizing that occurs in perhaps bigger cities. So, yeah, I relate to a lot of that. But we're going to get into a lot of this as we go through this conversation. I'm definitely interested in the Catholic worker aspect, which we'll get into in a couple questions here. But just kind of just orienting people to you as a human being. Can you just tell us a bit about your own journey, kind of how you came into the Catholic worker tradition and how you're political and and spiritual commitments developed over time?

Yeah, so I guess for me, I mean, this is kind of like not a very profound answer, but I think it's kind of true for most people, even though they don't say it, is that I think, like, my original, like, religious background and, like, why I'm still why I'm Catholic is because I was raised Catholic. I know it's not like, it's a very not profound answer, but it's, I think, kind of true in that, I think, like, a lot of our religious identity just kind of gets formed with, like, just how I raised, like, I was, my parents stuck with the church, and I went to, to Sunday school and that sort of stuff. So, like, that's kind of, I think, like, where the

original, like, religious impetus comes from, but also, I think people on this is, we'll talk about a little bit more, maybe later. Like, I think most people, their experience, like, with religion is large part just kind of, like, the first experience with being, like, a broader community. So I know for me, I grew up with, like, in a pretty small, relatively small town, like, a little outside of Savannah. And my parish was pretty small. And just, like, everyone, kind of in the town like getting to know each other like that's where I would hang out with my friends um like everyone kind of knew each other at mass um so I think like a big part of it is that like church provides like a large part of like community cohesion for a lot of people and I think

that's kind of like something that um brings people like really suddenly brought me back to being in like um to my current like faith identity and I know like growing up um something that I had as a child was like my family had like I had like a nanny and the papa that's what we called them like basically just an elderly couple that lived across town that kind of took care of us and um they would take us to the church like they were also in charge of cleaning our church so spent a lot of time with them like cleaning church uh cleaning the church is kind of being around the church and um also just like you know developing relationship with them they were probably two of the closest people I ever had in the whole life and I think that's kind of true for a lot of people is that a lot

of times like us coming back to our faith or for me it's coming back to my faith but um for us like our faith experience is like really shaped by these relationships we have like along the way like their their faith is something you don't necessarily experience by yourself it's something you experience in community with other people and for me that's kind of like a big aspect about also what brought me to the catholic worker so just in my own little faith journey um i originally like i said was raised catholic my parish was even though i liked it was also a little bit more more conservative. I think for a while, for a long time, that was like pretty alienating for me is that it's just something I didn't really relate to a lot of those aspects of it. So I spent a long

time, especially I probably around high school through college, where I was kind of broken away from the church. I was probably more like Richard Dawkins style like Reddit atheist, which is a little bit such as they're now. I think what kind of brought me back to the church was just exploring like actually kind of explain other faiths, too, and kind of like how they interpreted God, like, reading more into Buddhism and Islam and other religions, and how they, like, interpret the spirituality and how they think about God, like, kind of helped me bring me back to the church, or help me bring me, bring it back towards religion. And then I think once I learned, like, started reading more to Catholicism and learning about these different strands in the church that, you know, I think

the, oftentimes the mainstream hierarchy. the church tries to hide, um, was very, uh, a big reason why I kind of came back. And as I said, like what brought me to like the Catholic worker, um, was just kind of like, like I said, that sense of like community and being with other people. Like there's just the, uh, like the Catholic workers like now kind of like kind of like taken on my like religious community and just kind of living with other people, which sometimes can be difficult, but also just like, being there for each other. I know Dorothy Day, who's the founder of the worker, said, like, you know, the way we get through this world is through community and love. That's not the exact

quote, but, you know, kind of the gist of it. And that's kind of like a big, that was like a big deal for me coming to the worker. Then also, I think it was just kind of a way for me to integrate a lot of the values I had even as like a Marxist or a communist inside my life, like in how I was actually living um because like we you know here we like live together live in a community tried to at least do the best we can to serve people who need it and um and also just kind of like breaking away from capitalism like now i you know one thing i hated about um i think was having like a nine to five and kind of getting away from that like the rat race um of all that is also like a very nice a very good aspect for me it um kind of allows me to more live out the religious and political values

have of like you know get like jesus say give away your possessions and all that sort of stuff so yeah i think that's kind of like what brought me here yeah and i think i think that ethical foundation is is essential to any sincere religious life whether it is Islam or christianity or you know in my personal case buddhism you know in buddhism the eightfold path is heavily ethical like you can extract the process of enlightenment or waking up um in the in the buddhist tradition from that ethical foundation, and I think the best of Christianity has always had that service orientation, that ethical foundation. It goes back to the core message, the beating heart of Jesus's entire life and the message that he put out into the world that still resonates

2,500 years later. I won't go too deep into my own personal connections, but when I was around 13, 14 years old, I grew up in a very, I would say atheistic, but in the sense not that there was a rejection of anything, just that there was a complete absence of any discussion whatsoever about religion or God or anything. There wasn't even a belief. There wasn't even like an anti-belief. It just wasn't present. But around my early teens, I had some friends that went to a Catholic school and I got interested in it and I kind of converted at age 13 to Catholicism. And yeah, I don't think I was mature enough to engage with the religion at the level that I needed to, and I eventually, as you did, fell into a new atheist phase in my late

teens, early 20s. But the thing about the new atheist phase is that it is just, it's like irony, and that it's just, it just dismantles, right? It just rejects. It just sees through. It just destroys. It doesn't build anything. It doesn't create anything. It doesn't even create community. In fact, the communities are mostly online and pretty fucking toxic. And there's no a way to build anything constructive or meaningful out of the ashes. It's just ashes. And so I think once you go through that phase, it's a part of a maturing phase, for sure, an intellectual, developmental phase, and then a return to the religious impulse, which is still there, and rediscovering the spiritual or religious tradition at a higher level. Having left it

and then come back to it, I think is an important part of a lot of people's process. So, yeah, I think that's that's really interesting and resonates with a lot of people but i am interested in the catholic worker i've never as far as i understand over eight years of rev left i don't think i've ever done an episode about the catholic worker movement um so can you kind of talk about what it is what you know i guess you kind of touched on what resonated with you about it but maybe some of the history of it and um and maybe it's presence in the in the american south so the catholic worker originally was founded during the Great Depression. I believe in 1923. Originally, it was founded as just kind of like a paper. It was founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Moran. Dorothy Day was actually

originally a communist and was very involved with like communist and like a suffragette organizing in her early life and eventually converted to Catholicism. And she like looked at it and kind of saw like all of this like political organizing that was happening by like socialist, communist, and anarchists and others, and, uh, she looked down, it's like, well, where's the actual, like, where's the Catholic leadership? Where's Catholics being evolved in this? And that was kind of, like, her impetus and Peter Moran's impetus for, like, uh, beginning the paper. Um, and eventually the paper morphed into, um, houses of hospitality. So, um, like, the story that they, that they kind of gets told is that, um, originally just kind of started off, people would

come by the paper, um, office that they had on, I think it was on Mott Street was the original one. here in New York, and people would just come up and, like, asking for coffee, and then, you know, so they would give them coffee. And then more people would come by asking for coffee and just give them more coffee. And then everyone would just, like, start hanging out and, like, talking to each other and really kind of like getting to know each other and kind of getting to know the people that they were serving. And that's kind of like where the houses of hospitality really came from to just, like, serve the people particularly impacted by the Great Depression.

So that's kind of like the impetus for it. And it's been going on pretty much ever since then, like different phases. Dorothy passed away in 1980. I'm not sure when Peter Marne passed away, but it was I think sometime like maybe the 1950s. But yeah, and it's still going today. We're still in on the Lower East side. We have two houses, St. Joseph's House and Mary House. St. Joseph's House mainly serves men.

Mary House mainly serves women. But like we just do run the houses like with soup kitchens in the um like out of our kitchen so guys come in get to like sit down have a nice meal get to like talk to each other because a big part a big aspect of the catholic worker too is personalism so kind of getting to know the people on an like the people were serving on an individual basis kind of getting to know they're like what they're like what their lives are like and where they came from and you know the situation they're in so um yeah and i think those that's kind of like the main foundations for what um for like what the catholic worker is and

it's mainly devoted to like uh the works of mercy so that means like helping the poor serving like helping the orphan the widow visiting people in jail like those sorts of things i kind of consider the works of mercy um yeah it's like kind of the main aspect of what we try and do is there a political line or a vague ideological orientation or is it just the message of christ applied in the social realm is it does it stay away from kind of like having a coherent or specific politic? I think it's a, there's not like, you know, there's not like a party line or anything like that.

But there is like, there's, yeah, definitely a general, like political orientation. I think it's mainly like identified as like an anarchist, um, an anarchist like community and ideology. But I think mainly the most like, the main way I can put it is just like it's very focused on direct action. Like you see that there's a problem and you try and adjust the problem and, you know, fix it. So you see those hungry people.

So you just feed them, like, pretty, I think, so in that way, it's pretty simple, but, like, also, like, I said, big emphasis on, like, trying to build community and getting to know, like, yeah, big, like, focus on community and also, like, living among oppressed people and, like, people and living among the poor and kind of taking on their condition. So, like, a big part of the worker's philosophy is called, like, voluntary poverty, which obviously kind of drives from Jesus and, like, thing Francis and others, the idea of giving up your possessions to and then going to serve the poor. And I think like the way the way person I interpret is kind of more like, you know, is in the sense of like not being attached to worldly possessions and kind of giving them up and living in, yeah, living in community with others. Yes, that's beautiful. Yeah, it's serving the people, really. It's like wherever there's a need, there's human need, we're going to go out and meet it and it has yeah in an anarchist uh history dorothy day it has a sort of communist history

are there just also just like well-intentioned good-hearted liberals that are a part of the movement as well that don't necessarily have radical politics but just like the like the christian dimension of service yeah i think i mean that that kind of like uh covers too i think a lot of people don't you know when they come they kind of just think of it as like i suppose probably go do, like, volunteer work. But I think also part of the worker is, um, is trying to, like, build consciousness on that. That it's not just like, you know, you don't just come to the soup kitchen, like, once a week through your thing and then leave and then go back to doing whatever you're doing. It's about trying to integrate all the things, um, all those things like into your

life as you go through the world too. So, I mean, the big thing that like liberation theologians say, and I think that we say here pretty often saying like, uh, Christ in the face of the poor. So, like, and that's just how you, just like an orientation you have to take, like, you're in your everyday life, like, you, uh, you know, seeing Christ in the face of the oppressed. And I think part of that's like trying to struggle for a better world for them, um, or struggle for like a better world for everyone. And also struggling like with them. I think that's like the big, the biggest thing I hope that we like trying to, um, emphasize is that like we're not, we are not just like giving. things were like traveling with people we're like um we're accompanying people through their lives and try and help them and also like trying to be with them not just like trying to uh like here's your sandwich later and like you know see you later like not going to talk to you again or whatever like you know it's it's trying to keep taking away from being purely just a service thing which is i think important but also kind of turning into a solidarity thing i think that's a big

part of like what the message is and hopefully what people get from like coming here to volunteer. Yeah. That's beautiful. That's beautiful. And I think what the Catholic worker and other iterations of service-oriented liberation-oriented Christianity offer is this strain, this very real tradition, going all the way back to Jesus Christ himself, of, you know, serving other people, serving the meek, the sick, the poor, you know, rejecting consumerism, rejecting nationalism, militarism, violence, which so much of American Christianity has been warped into in this country and we'll get to that. But my position as a Marxist on religion is not that we should reject it, you know, sort of simplistically and embrace atheism. I think we need to engage with

it dialectically. There are some Marxists who are just atheists and that's fine. Maybe they don't have a religious community and aren't interested in that aspect of the world. But there are many, many, many Marxists around the world who are in religious communities, who do have a religious faith of some sort. And the proper dialectical move is to go into these strains that exist within every religious and spiritual tradition. Engage with them, deeply, learn from them, and then help develop them. Pull out this strain of the Catholic worker within Catholicism. Anybody listening knows the Catholic Church has plenty of problems, plenty of sites that we can critique it from a Marxist perspective. And Marxists do do that.

but there is also this beautiful element that gets tossed out with the bathwater if you just reject the entirety of it. And I think what you're doing is the absolute, you know, best thing that somebody coming out of the Catholic tradition who is also a communist or a Marxist or a socialist can possibly do. And I think, you know, dialectically developing these strains and carrying them for these traditions forward is the right and most principled sort of path for people who are in religious communities. have religious backgrounds, um, rather than just a straight up negation of the entire thing. So food for thought. Um, but I kind of want to zoom out from the Catholic worker and even maybe from Catholicism in and of itself and kind of talk about Christianity more broadly. Like what does, you know, Christianity mean to you? What about the message of Jesus resonates with you? I know you've touched on it, but maybe you can go a little deeper. And what does Christianity

have to offer people in our very secular, very skeptical postmodern age? I think the most important thing in Jesus says this in the Gospels is the two most important rules are to love your God above all, to love God above everything else and to love your neighbor as yourself. And I think that, at least in terms of like how we live our daily lives, that second part is incredibly important. And that's kind of like where, like I would say all of my, mostly like all my political beliefs essentially stem from is loving your neighbor as yourself. Like part of communism is that you believe that everyone is in time. titled to, like, basically the bare necessities of life, just based on the fact that they're human, that they're people. And same thing with, like, being Christian. I believe that people deserve to flourish and have a good life just because they're human, not because they, like,

did anything, just because they were created by God, just like I was. One of my favorite phrases, actually, something John Brown said a lot, and we'll talk about him more, is that God is not any respecter of persons. And by that, he means this comes from the Acts of the Apostles, where St. Peter is basically saying that, like, the word of God is for everybody. God doesn't care. He doesn't give a shit, like, where you're from, like, if you're a Gentile or a Jew or whatever, he just cares that you're a person and he created you. And that, um, he believes that God believes that, like, you are entitled.

You deserve to, like, have, he loves you and wants you to, like, have a good life. And as humans, you know, what am I going to do to disagree with God about that? Not really. Um, so, uh, that's not like a big part of the aspect for me, just that, that one simple line. But then also just, like, more aspects of, like, Jesus's, um, story. I think he really, in Jesus' life, he emphasized or kind of epitomized more than most other. And pretty much anyone else that can think of, like solidarity with the oppressed. So first, like, one thing you'll get talking about theology is that Jesus was the son of God. Like, at least, you know, Christians, we believe Jesus is the son of God.

Jesus could have been born to anybody. He could have been born to King, to Herod. He could have been born to, like, a royal person, a Roman, to anybody he wanted to be. but instead he was born to a poor peasant family in Palestine who were forced to flee as refugees. And I think that's like a big aspect of it. God decided to, when he decided to incarnate himself, made himself a poor person and decide to live among the oppressed. And Jesus does that throughout the rest of his life and the rest of his ministry. He says, like tells people, you need to give away your possessions to come join me.

And when they travel on the, when him and the apostles were traveling around, they largely depended on the providence of God and other people's like, you know, goodwill towards them to take care of them to make sure they got food. And I think that's just like, and then obviously, you know, the end of Jesus's life where he is obviously crucified. And in my view, large part he was crucified because he stood with the oppressed, he stood with the people that the temple authorities and the Romans didn't like. And that's another big part about Jesus is that he didn't care.

like he like going back to that respecter of persons the pharisees um who are like the religious authorities in ancient um israel were kind of viewed themselves as above like holier than now above everyone else and he's just like no y'all like don't care about the poor y'all like uh you know basically oppressed people all the time and and then that's like and you know y'all are just basically kind of full shit and he basically would tell that to that tell them that to that face and that's kind of like probably one of the reasons why or it is probably the main reason why he was crucified. And that also kind of goes back to his actions in the temple where he flips the table and drives out the moneylenders. Jesus was so in solidarity with the oppressors

that pretty much the one time in the entire Bible, an entire New Testament where he uses violence is when he sees that these people are just like abusing and oppressing and exploiting poor people in the house of God in his father's house. And so like these all these things kind of add up to just someone who I view as who is in complete solidarity with oppressed people, even when he could have, like, could have put himself in a much easier situation. Yeah, and also a big part, another aspect I really love about Jesus is he is motivated, kind of like what Chase said, like a revolutionary. He is motivated by, like, a deep sense of, like, love for other people.

And even, like, even the people who oppressed them, even the Pharisees. Jesus loved the Pharisees and wanted them to change. She would just tell them, you're wrong to their face, and I hope, and I pray that you get better, and I pray that you, like, change your ways. And that was kind of like, and that's also, like, I think, a big aspect about Christian, about Jesus' story that really resonates with me is just, like, trying to be active, like, loving your enemies, even when they're very difficult to love, and striving to make a better world where they're no longer able to oppress other people. And that's something like one of my favorite people in history is Paula Ferey. He has a very kind of similar idea where, like, the oppressors through their actions of oppressing other people also dehumanize themselves. By dehumanizing other people, they dehumanize themselves. And by struggling for a better world where everyone gets to have all their needs met and people aren't oppressing others, you are also helping them.

And that's like how you can express your love with them, taking away. their ability to oppress other people. So like Elon Musk, like a big, the biggest, one of the best ways you can show your love for Elon is to create a world where he's not able to like act like a huge like oppressive dork all the time. So, um, so, you know, even that like trying to love your enemy and create a better world even for them. And then I think the way that kind of like can resonate with people today is that I think a lot of people are disillusioned with are kind of like very materialistic and I mean that in a non-Marxist sense of materialistic like what do we live in where everything is kind of just about like consumption and consuming things and like looking out for

number one like looking out for yourself and in a lot of ways in the capitalism like obviously screwing other people over and I think Jesus offers a message of like actually caring for other people and trying to build a better world for them for your own good and for their own good And I think that's kind of like why I still see like even young people kind of coming back towards religious spaces is that they have been kind of disillusioned with the what the world that like the secular neoliberalism has offered us. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's the it's like taking out the sacred dimension. It's it's flattened everything. It's flattened the mystery. It's commodified the natural world. It's commodified relationships between people. And we call this scientific and rational. progress, but it's so one-sided. There are kernels of progress within that, you know, the development of science and technology and, and medical advancements. That's all the good parts of this, of this development, but it's, it's packaged in this broader sort of just

flattening, desacralized element that reduces everything to a, to a price tag. And, you know, you were talking about the, the sort of the dialectics of dehumanization, that when you dehumanize another, you simultaneously and inexorably, dehumanize another, you simultaneously and inexorably, dehumanizing, your relation to life and to the other is brought low by your own dehumanization of the other the slave is dehumanized and the slave master is dehumanized in that dialectical relationship and the irony of socialism the irony of communism is that it would actually create a world where rich and powerful people would be happier where they wouldn't be alienated from the rest of the world by their insane wealth where they wouldn't be completely driven forward by their competitive greed while where they could live in a world where they could set their ego aside for a second and not be driven relentlessly forward by this egoic need to hoard and consume and dominate. And so communism would actually, like you mentioned Elon Musk, like it would create a better world for everybody involved. And I don't think we should lose sight of that aspect, that deep love for all humanity, that we're trying to build a world that's even better for the people that in this iteration are absolutely pretty, you know, whatever. or sociopathic, antisocial, et cetera.

So I think we know, you know, we always have to keep that in mind. But I love what you're saying about Jesus. And I think this also relates deeply to the Buddha and Buddhism, which is this loving your neighbor as yourself, this overcoming of selfishness, this overcoming of egoic self-concern, and this radical compassion and sense of non-separation from the that emerges when one is able to transcend that that small egoic prison of relentless self-concern

and the sort of bland narcissism that emerges from egoic you know seeing the world through the lens of the ego and in capitalism and consumerism and competition and get yours and get your bag and you know shine and try to become famous and high status and successful this is just an ego game and it's it's ultimately incredibly empty the people that win that game the people that amass all the wealth and all the fame and all the status they're miserable people you know because they're driven forward by a sort of insatiability you'll you know once once you start seeking power and wealth and status and success it's never enough uh Elon Musk has all the power and all the money will any human being could reasonably ask for he still just wants to be

liked you know he still wants people just to laugh at his jokes and that insecurity destroys him because money can't buy that only community and being real and in embedded community with others can afford you that that depth of social relationship where you feel totally secure because you have you're surrounded by people that love you for who you are not because of how much money you have or the access that you can give them so i always talk about in my spiritual practice and i'll shut up after this and i would love to hear your thoughts on any of this but in my spiritual practice i kind of frame it as try to cultivate the mind of the Buddha, right, a calm, non-attached, non-desirous mind, resting in awareness, and cultivate the heart of the Christ, this wide open, loving, unconditionally loving approach to the world. It's not easy, right? Even the, even the commandment, love your neighbor as yourself, it's actually impossible for the ego because it is, it is unthinkable, let alone achievable, that the ego could love somebody else as much as it loves itself. The ego, even when it's self-loathing and inwardly hateful, is obsessed with itself.

And so the prospect of really obsessing about the well-being of another person, as much as you obsess about your own well-being, your own desires, your own moment-to-moment once, it's unthinkable. So the only way you could actually fulfill that command of loving your neighbor as yourself is to begin to transcend that egoic prison. And on the cross when Jesus is being crucified and he looks up into the sky and says, forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.

He is practicing radical, extreme, selfless compassion even for the people driving nails through his body. And that is a spiritually profound and I always have found it a deeply moving thing to reflect upon. Yeah, I think I want to just touch on that one thing you mentioned about like people having, you know, the wealthy having like this insatiable desire because that's like a very common thread that you're like here like with the early church fathers like St. Basil who's one of my favorites. He would just kind of kind of talk about is like all of these people are just like as soon as you get one thing, okay, now you want more. As soon as you get another thing, now you want more than that. And it's just like a constant. And that's, you know, we see that reflected in capitalism. You kind of like constantly need to grow. Um, he has one sermon where he's talking about the, um, the parable of the man who like tears down his barns to, um, basically the, basically the story is that, um, a wealthy, like, farmer or something, um, has a barn. And then he, he ends up, like, having too many, too many goods to put in the barn. So he tears down the barn and puts up a new barn. But, um, little does he know that at the end of that, um, as soon as he about to build the new barn, like, God takes his life. And all of a sudden, and he's dead. And now he has no use for that. And he has no use for that. And he has no use for that. And he. And he's dead. And now he has no use for that. And he has no use for of the barn and he's kind of talking about how useless it is to kind of constantly like be constantly worried about accumulation as soon as you've got um one thing you want more and as soon

if you got more you need more is like he says uh if you've got if you have trouble finding a place store your stuff you have plenty of storage places in the bellies of the poor um you just give those away instead you'd rather just like put them in a warehouse somewhere yeah yeah profound profound um and yeah buddism totally aligns with that with the with the more you desire the more you strengthen the machinery of desiring and it's never ever ever enough and you know and i think yeah that's the the root of so much unhappiness and you know even though you and i and many people listening we're not rich we still have because we are socially conditioned to have this wanting like we're never quite fulfilled we never quite arrive at at peace inward peace

we always want more if I could just get that relationship if I could just get that job if I could just get that amount of money I would be finally happy and then you get that thing and all of a sudden you find yourself wanting the next thing looking over its shoulder to see what else you can get and it's that very process of desiring that does create so much misery and is never ever ever satiated ultimately and so we have to reject that whole apparatus and that comes with the ego that comes with constant wanting and that comes with a radical rejection and as hard as it is because we are so embedded in this society, but a radical rejection of consumerism and trying to find what that would mean in our lives. We have to provide for ourselves and our families for sure. But I find myself with excess stupid shit that I don't want. That is an albatross around my existential neck. And then I know that I would live a much happier life

if I had much fewer things and I had much more relationship, right? And that's ultimately, it speaks to our nature as social. beings. But yeah, so I want to move on here. And I want to kind of, you've mentioned John Brown, and I know that John Brown is a big influence for you and for great reason. And you mentioned St. Francis earlier and a few others in this conversation. I'm wondering if you could talk more about who have been some of the most formative political and religious influences in your life, thinkers, activists, saints, writers, and maybe, you know, how they have impacted your worldview. You can take this question in any direction.

Yeah. So you mentioned John Brown. John Brown is my favorite person in history probably. Just because for me, John Brown really exemplifies the example of kind of like solidarity with the oppressed because not only did he like basically give his life to try to about enslave. His approach was entirely influenced by his study of black people, black culture and black resistance. So like he was really inspired by. like slave revolts. So like Nat Turner, the Haitian revolution, he was really inspired by all of those things. And then also, um, when he established his like home up in North Elba where he's buried, um, he basically created that community as a place for escaped, um, slave or escaped enslaved people, or just black people in general to, um, come and like live and truly try and see like create a truly integrated society. And like, unlike pretty much even the abolitionist of his age, he interacted with other people of other races on complete

social equality. So like there are stories of people going to visit his household and then he's got like black people just sitting at the table having dinner with them and they're like, wow, this is weird. I've never had I've never experienced this before. And he just like, you know, he just didn't give, he didn't give a fuck. He's like, he was like, I believe

black people equal. I don't give a shit what you think. And if you like try, you know, if you disagree with me or are you trying to scream me against black people my presence. I'm basically just going to, like, tell you you're wrong and that God is upset at you. And that's kind of like what he did throughout his life. And then also not even just his approach to, with just black people, it extended to other people. So John Brown, if you read stories about his life, life, and even like Kansas and in like frontier territory, his like relationships with indigenous people and indigenous tribes were always kind of like

reciprocal. They're always mutually beneficial. And he used that, he like lived with them as like a good neighbor like that was like kind of kind of his biggest thing he would like um allow like indigenous people to like stay on his land if they're like traveling somewhere he would like give them supplies like that sort of stuff so he tried to live with like complete reciprocity with the other people around him and then also with women so like he believed john brown and his lean created that provisional constitution before he was going to attack at carpers ferry in that it gives everyone rights regardless of race or gender so he would It was in the 1860s, he's a man, or in 1850s, he's a man supporting basically women's right to vote.

And if you, like, hear stories about his, like, family life, men would do as much of the caretaking work, like, clean dishes, you know, cook food just as much as any, any of the women in his household. So all those things are just, like, very important for me with John Brown is that just not only was not only just like his, obviously actions, but like where the inspiration for that came from. came from like actually like complete identification and um solidarity with oppressed people that he sought to serve um so yeah that's my little speak on john brown who i love but before before you move on um you talk about his inspiration for behaving that way this egalitarian minded you know feeling that he had but also how was he influenced by his faith because that was a huge part of his life right he saw these these sort of beliefs as natural outgrowth of his faith correct yeah so his um obviously john brown was a calvinist so he could be very severe in a lot of areas because like

calvinism very big on predestination very big on like god's total like authority over the entire world and that humans are essentially helpless um in the power of god like when he read some of his like things he wrote like while he was in prison he's like you know this this god predestined this shit when he like created the earth so i'm not upset about it um so just like that sort of stuff but he's like where it kind of comes from his commitment to social justice as a Christian is he was very big on the golden rule like he mentions that um in his trial and his final final speech before the um court and the golden rule obviously treat other people as you want to be treated he was heavily raised with that and i think that's like a line that kind of comes up for him

a lot just like the whole like i mentioned respecter of persons um is also a big thing and he i would also say his one of the most important lines to him and again he mentions it in his um final speech trial as um remember those in bonds is bound with them so i think just that ultimate like his his like solidarity with other people comes from his religious interpretation as like these are all beings created lovingly by god and that god didn't like create anybody to be above anybody else so why should i it's like why what how is my judgment better than gods it's kind of like how he i think he would interpret it absolutely yeah beautiful but yeah go on and you can talk about others and i Sorry to interrupt.

Oh, no, cool. I already mentioned St. Basil, who I love. He was from Capadocia or no, Cesaria. He lived under the Roman Empire, but he created something called the Piscilliad, which was where there was a great famine that happened in his area, in his region. And basically, like, he created the Baciliad as like a house of hospitality where people could come and get food, clothing, sometimes shelter. But also a big emphasis on, like, religious practices. practice, but also like education and kind of raising consciousness too, like just having like

shops where, uh, I know people could like read and have like religious services and kind of be not only, um, nourished in the physical sense, but also in the spiritual sense. Um, and he also would some of his best writings. There's a, um, popular patristics book with his, um, like writings on social justice. And he has a lot of bars going after the wealthy and how they're like, reading and not getting to the poor, and it's really great. So I recommend checking out St. Basil, super awesome. Then another one of my favorite people in history is Gerard Wynne Stanley, who I know people are familiar with the diggers during the English Civil War, English, like, Revolution,

however, in like 1649, they like establish, they basically, England, I don't know how England's, like, Lance tenure system works, but they would go on commons, the common common lands and just start like growing stuff and be like we're going to live here because we like got thrown out of like off our land and our poor and don't have anything else to do so we're just going to like grow food on the common land and live here as a community and he um his big thing and why i really like about him is he considered the earth as common he says the earth was created by god as a common treasury without respective persons so again going back to that respected persons so that um everyone should have a perfectly good right to um seek their livelihood and their

subsistence from the earth, and that no one should have the right to buy and sell land. He mentions that God didn't create, and, you know, when God created the earth, he did appoints certain people as landlords and other people as, like, tenants, he just created the earth as a common as something common. So for me, it's, like, a big part of just, like, thinking about, like, land and how, like, land ownership and how, like, obviously that is a major process for capitalism. Because, yeah, what's interesting about when Stanley is that he's living at a time when capitalism is kind of emerging, people are beginning to get kicked off of their, like, ancestral lands and having to move to cities to work or have work as agricultural laborers. And just, like, seeing kind of a religious reflection of that is super interesting.

I just want to mention a couple more people. Sure. We got, like, the Berrigan brothers, who I love, who are also super cool. They were, um, Jez was their part of the Plashers movement, which I'll bring up kind of later. and we talk a little more about like militarism but um their part they're big like leaders in the plowshares movement and um did uh like where some of the people are responsible for like they would basically take draft files and burn them um in the catensville case i believe it was they um stole draft files from a uh a draft office and um burned them using like homemade napalm and what they figured out was that if you burn the draft files

that's the only way they would be able to track these people so that means they couldn't draft the guys that they're going after. So, yeah, the Bergen brothers, cool guys, Daniel and Phil Berrigan, and then just like the whole whole milieu around them, that Catholic left in like the 60s, like against the war in Vietnam, just like a lot of activism came out of that. Then I'm just going to name drop some people for people to like look into because I'd be like Ernesto Cardinal, well, I'll give a little more about Ernesto Cardinal. Yeah.

It's also one of my favorites. He was another Jesuit priest. I think he was Jesuit, maybe. No, he was a, whatever. He was diocesan. It doesn't matter. He was a priest in a little town or like a little like very rural town in Nicaragua called Santanaame where they established like base communities.

A big part of like my inspiration for me is liberation theology and like the base communities because the whole idea behind that was that the oppressed can kind of can form their own theology. They can, like, read the Bible and interpret it and apply it to their daily lives. And Cardinal was really big on that. He released a couple books called The Gospel and Sentenominee, which is like a recording of a lot of these conversations with, recording of these conversations with, like, the peasants that live there, and they're very, they're awesome. Super interesting to see, like, what people have to say and what they think about their faith.

Yeah, and Cardinal worked closely with the Santinistas and actually ended up being part of the government. after the revolution. So, awesome. So I love, so yeah, Ernessa Cardinal, cool guy. And then I would also be bad to mention, not mention St. Francis, who I already mentioned, but St. Francis, his whole idea of, like, same thing, like living in voluntary poverty and in service to the poor. And also his ideas on ecology.

So he was very big on caring for the environment. and particularly came for animals. So in the church, St. Francis' Day is like a day where people bring their, like, pets to the church to get, like, blessed and stuff, which I think is super cool. But also, just, like, the idea of, like, kind of creating the Earth is, like, something that we live with as, like, companions. We don't, like, dominate the Earth. We live as companions with other creatures and other things on the planet. So, yeah. And then a couple of people I just want to mention just, I'll shout them out.

So people don't think I'm just listening dudes. It's like Fannie Lou Hamer, who's super great. She was very inspired by her religious belief, and she was active in the surprise movement, also very active with education. Dolores Williams has a lot of interesting writing about theology. And then this is a man, but James Cohn, who was the author of the Black Theology of Liberation, which is a very good book. And he was, yeah, very big on, like, kind of continuing the conversation,

taking liberation theology out of Latin America and applying it to the black context in America. So, yeah, those are just a small list of some of my inspirations. And I guess in terms of politics, you know, the normal ones like, like Lenin, Mao, all those guys. And then other people like that. So absolutely. Yeah, no, I love all that. You know, there's, I'm, I'm interested also in like mysticism. And this isn't really about liberation theology, but it is a part of the Catholic tradition, especially in medieval Europe. where you had many, many women mystics that, I'm reading a book right now called mysticism by Simon Crowley, which is just this, you know, mysticism in this Catholic sense is this

total radical, intimate unity with God, this complete transcendence and obliteration of self into God. It's a spiritual act. It's a divine union. And if people are interested in learning about that history and the many, many, many women mystics throughout Catholic history, I would recommend that book. It's also a philosophical explainer of mysticism, which can be very difficult to find your way into if you're not really already knowledgeable about what it is. It's very obscure. But yeah, so many great people. And St. Francis in particular, you mentioned his ecology, his reference to himself as the brother to all creation, not even just animals, but saw himself as a sibling of the sun and the moon and the trees and the water and it's a really radical

orientation that as you said sees sees the earth as a living breathing companion and a part of the big self a part of this gorgeous gift from God and St. Francis's relationship to it is always inspiring. I have many St. Francis statues around my house for that reason. He's one of my favorite religious figures in history. I have episodes as well. If people want to dive deeper on this, I have episodes on John Brown, on St. Francis, on the life, the actual material life of Jesus Christ. I'll link to those in the show notes so people can follow up on some of these figures. And I certainly want to do episodes on like Ernesto Cardinal and others in the future as well. So that's really great. And another figure I just want to quickly mention that was a huge

impact on me is, and we talked about this before we recorded, is Thomas Merton, who is, you know, sort of socially engaged, progressive Christian during the civil rights movement, but also had a deep, intimate and sincere relationship and engagement with Buddhism and sort of brought in Buddhist practices and Zen practices of meditation into his Christian faith. And I remember I came across a book randomly. I didn't even know who he was yet when I was like 19 years old. Thomas Merton book, No Man is an Island, where it's just these essays of spiritual reflections and so much of it is about this other orientedness, this ego transcendence. And it's very resonant with Buddhist ideals, but it's framed within Christian language. And I found

it very beautiful and meaningful and spiritually impactful for me at that age. So people can look into him if they're also interested in that. But you did, go ahead. Yeah, if you have anything And him and Cardinald were friends, too. Oh, cool. He's, like, one of the people that encouraged Carter and all to go to Latin America. Nice. Lots of connections. All right.

But, yeah, you did mention militarism, and I want to kind of address this aspect of it. Because many mainstream American churches, Catholic and Protestant, are deeply entangled with nationalism, capitalism, and even militarism. How do you make sense of those contradictions? And kind of, how do you respond to them as a Christian within Christian? community. Yeah, so I wanted to actually go give a quote from Frederick Douglass to this because that I thought worked well. So he said, between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference. So wide that to receive the one is good, pure and holy is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. So my whole thing is

I don't like, you know, a lot of times you'll get people that will say that, um, it's kind of like the same thing we have in like communist circles will be like, well, they're not real Christians because they don't agree with me on these things. And I'm like, well, that's, you know, it's, well, it's too bad. Because like they, these people, uh, identify as Christian and they had come from a, an interpretation of the Christian religion. So you can't just say they're not Christian. I mean, you know, I'll do it occasionally. I'll call them like false Christians or something as just to piss them off. But like not. I mean, I think it's, I think it's, think that's just a very easy like get out of not a you know kind of an easy cop out or like get out of jail free card just say oh you know this that these people just don't actually represent Christianity and I think that's kind of like not a good I don't think that's a very good approach to it I think it is a better approach is to be like yeah these people are part of Christianity and that's just a bad thing and we kind of need to be working towards trying to change them like we need to as like a leftist or communist Christian I need to be or take that responsibility onto myself to like try and change that about the Christian of faith is that we need to be reaching you know you don't have to like you know go to like uh some sort of like revival or something and get yourself beat up but like you do like should be like you know talking to these people and wherever you can trying to like change their you know trying to raise their consciousness or take get them away from these sort of like reactionary beliefs and that's like a big thing that I noticed with like particularly like younger.

Christians. Like, the Catholic Church is seeing a lot of particularly younger men coming to the church because they, like, view it as, like, this all super traditional and, like, all of this, like, you know, they like, they like the aesthetic and that sort of stuff. And oftentimes, they're pretty reactionary. And I think as, like, leftist Christians, we need to be kind of, like, working against that, trying to, um, draw those guys who are kind of opening them up to the church and, like, a way more towards, like a, hopefully a better understanding of Christianity and, like, what, um, like, trying to identify and, like, live, like, the original Christian community was. So that's, like, a big part of it. So you have, like, and that's, um, a big, like, theme that appears in, um, in, like,

particular, like, liberation theology is viewing, it's talking about, like, the church of Christ and then the church of Constantine. So, like, for, I'm sure most people kind of know is that Constantine, the Roman Emperor. He exposed the stories. He sees like a, I think he has like a vision of a cross and he pledges that if God helps him win this battle, he'll convert to Christianity. He naturally wins the battle and converts to Christianity and converts the whole empire, supposedly, to Christianity.

And for most people, for a lot of like the institutional church, what that meant was, well, adapting, taking what was originally kind of a subversive religion that, like, opposed like, wealth and like lived as a community and taking that and making and accommodating it to being kind of a in service of empire and I think that's still kind of something we obviously see today is that that's kind of like a big through line from that time to now is that the church essentially at the time got co-opted by by power to as like a basically to serve power and then but you also have another strand that I think it still has been present in the church throughout its whole

history even from that. time. That is kind of like what we'll call like the Church of Christ, where it is still kind of trying to imitate the original Christian community where I can't remember some ancient Greek philosophers that like the way you can tell Christians apart from other people is by the way they love one another. And like, so a lot of people, there's still like that strain to the church that the entire history of the church that has still tries to imitate the original Christian community and like their approach to like living community and like loving one another and being kind of subversive and resisting power. And like once you like learning about like even

the history of like Europe, oftentimes we kind of the idea that we think a lot of times think this in Marxist circles too is that like religion kind of purely served as a way to make people docile and not challenge the existing order. But like when you actually go back and, like, looked through the history, most, like, rebellions or, like, uprisings or something that happened in, like, medical Europe or other places were, like, religiously inspired. Like, the Peasants Revolt in England, in, like, the 1300s was in large part, was inspired by religion, like, that one of the leaders was a priest named John Ball, and, like, similar thing with, like, the diggers during the English Revolution, they were obviously religiously inspired

and it kind of goes that way, you know, throughout history, is that people, the poor, the oppressed have, like, always had their own ways of how they experience and interact with faith. It hasn't always just been something that's, like, been imposed from above, and they've always had, like, their own way to interpret and implement faith in their life. So I think that's, like, kind of something that I always, like, wants to emphasize that there's always been like these sorts of like liberatory strands of Christianity. And then, you know, today we still have, we still have similar problems.

Like I said, Douglas's quote, he's saying that like, you know, there's very clearly like two different types of Christianity, one that's like, like, well, liberatory, you know, that's not. And it kind of reminds me of like during the Vietnam War, when I mentioned the Bergen brothers, one of the greatest promoters of the Vietnam War was Cardinal Spellman, who, ironically, I think it was um jadker hoover referred to him as the most notorious homosexual in all of new york city or something like that just a funny quote about him but carnal spellman was a huge booster of the vietnam war he was um as sometimes even called spellman's war and if you hang around new york city enough you're going to definitely come across like things named after cardinal spellman like

because of cardinal spellman high school which i think is pretty whack but um he yes he was big but then you also have the bergin brothers and dorothy like uh and dorothy day like the um because, like, you know, the Catholic worker, obviously is very focused on, like, very focused on, like, peace movements and, like, resisting war. And Colonel Spellman really hated Dorothy and he really hated the Bergen brothers. So it's like that kind of divide. And it's like, I also think about that with, in terms of, like, in terms of slavery, like, one of the, in the history of the United States in terms of, like, slavery is that when you go back and look at the history, there's a book called, um, White Too Long. I forget who it's by, but it just kind of explains how the church not only played a part in, like, maintaining slavery, but also built, like, an entire theology around justifying it. And one of the major denominations that was kind of responsible for that was Southern Baptists, but the irony is that, like, while the Southern Baptist, the major mainstream Southern Baptist church said that Nat Turner himself was a Baptist.

So, like, you have these, even within the same denomination of people, you can have, like, very widely. varying takes on society and how it's supposed to work. So, you know, you have, so, like, you have Colonel Spelman, you have the Bergen brothers. You have, like, racist, you know, slave-loving pastors in Alabama, in Virginia. And then you have Nat Turner in Virginia, too. And then even, like, today, you know, the church, I think, has gotten a lot better about its stance on, like, militaryism. Like, Pope Francis was pretty big on emphasizing peace. And Leo is kind of like continued in that strain, but then even then like the people that are involved in all these religions have a wide array of beliefs. So like here, the Catholic worker in New York

City, some of our members and, you know, other people that were part of, they did like the plowshares movements. So like one of like one of the guys I live with was part of the Kings Bay Plowshare movement, plowsher action, where they broke into the Kings Bay base in Georgia, which is like a nuclear submarine base and like symbolically deactivated the nuclear weapons they like threw their own blood on like a on some stuff there

and you know kind of vandalized a little bit of the base which is a major theme in anti-war Catholic actions is throwing your blood on stuff which I think is kind of cool but it's very it's a metal form of protest and then not just the Kings Bay there's also like Jessica

Resnich who I don't know if and Ruby Montoya I'm not sure how familiar everyone is with them, but they were arrested and convicted for vandalizing. I think it was the Dakota Access Pipeline. I might be wrong. One of the pipelines that, I think, that was big in like the 2010s.

There's a lot of activism around. I can't remember exactly which one. But they were arrested for sabotaging and for sabotaging those pipelines. And Jessica Reson-Chicke was a Catholic worker. I don't remember. I forget which community she was but, yeah, she was a Catholic worker. And then, finally, I want to bring up one other group that kind of shows this high kind of differences that, like, throughout the, thing like the 70s and 80s, we have the sanctuary movement.

So this was largely based around El Salvador. And, oh, I forgot, person I forgot to mention in my inspirations, Oscar Romero, St. Romero from El Salvador. I'll just look at him. He's very famous. It's super cool. But the sanctuary movement largely popped up around immigration from El Salvador. while the U.S. was funding, like, you know, the dictators and stuff there to, and the military there to, like, you know, just kill peasants. So a lot of people were fleeing to the United States

from Central America. And the sanctuary movement was churches basically opening up their doors and saying, y'all can come to stay here and then claiming kind of like this ancient right of sanctuary that cops and ICE and at the time, INS, couldn't come in and arrest these people. They claimed that the church was a sanctuary and you can't arrest people in the sanctuary. so and that movement is hopefully i'm hopefully getting revived a little bit today there's still some churches out there that are declaring themselves sanctuaries which i think is cool um yeah that's like i mean just in terms of like you know active like currently stuff going on like undermining the police state we have today so yeah i love that that emphasis on these different strains that

you know it's not one thing the christian religion the catholic church it's not just the church of constantine it's not just the church of power and empire there's always been and there still is this organic counter process within that that evolution fighting against that every step of the way and that's what needs to be emphasized and when you just see it as one thing when you just take those two processes and chop them in half and only emphasize the one you do a real disservice to all the people and movements past and present um that are fighting um from within the the christian tradition against these very forces and doing so in a lot of cases incredibly effectively.

But I also wanted to mention you said the Dakota Access Pipeline, and I think the one you might have been talking about was the Keystone XL pipeline. And I remember that because it cut straight through Nebraska. So it was a huge, huge local issue for us here as well. So that's really cool to hear about that history.

I had no idea that they did that. But yeah, and you mentioned the trad sort of Can I just cut it? Yeah, please. Okay, I'm sorry, but I just want to cut in there. I mentioned that Jessica Resonichick, I think Ruby Montoya are still in prison. They were convicted to, like, I think since, like, more than eight years, even though they, like, took a, they supposedly took a plea deal that would lower it down, but they kind of got tricked and were charged with terrorism. So they're still in jail. You can write there places on the internet where you can, like, write to Jessica while she's in jail.

So just look into her and see how you can help her out. I'm just going to put that out there. Yeah, that's really important. And I'll look into that as well. And if I can find a link for maybe an organization that directly supports them or some way that people can access and write to them, that'd be wonderful thing to help. But I just wanted to quickly touch on that trad aspect because there is on the reactionary right, this sort of re-fascination with religion, this attempt to become trad, which is really just this sort of nostalgic attempt to recreate in the postmodern world, a sort of sincere religious. practice that I think is inherently inauthentic because it's not rooted in the deepest values of Christianity. It's rooted in this reactionary nostalgia for the cultural accoutrements of a previous Christianity, mainly like patriarchy and the subordination of the wife in the

home and all of this stuff that speaks to an insecure masculinity in an era of neoliberalism. So it really is a grotesque development. But as this influx of reactionary young men come into the church, we would love to hope that there are people and institutions that are aware of it and ready to act against it with compassion. But quickly, before we move on, what are your thoughts on the new Pope? Leo, cool. I like him for the most part. I think he's obviously like a continuation pick. like he's supposed to be like kind of a continuation of like Pope Francis and some of the reforms he began to make. So I think in that way, definitely like him. I mean, there are obviously plenty of things to criticize about him because he's the head of the Catholic Church, which like kind of obviously

puts like obvious limitations on what he can say, which, you know, whatever. I'm not trying to make excuses for him because he has been like pretty open in making statements that are like very obviously about Israel, which is good, but I would prefer that he actually just says it, like, says, I'm talking about Israel right now, and they're killing people, and that's wrong. But I like that. And also, he just did a mass for the dedicated to the care of creation. So very clearly, he's trying to continue on the same path with Francis in terms of, like, his ecology.

So, like, France's big thing, he published La Dadee C, which was, like, a big encyclical, I'm not sure what a, it was, you know, writing about, um about ecology and like you know taking care of the earth and he was like telling people you are fucking up and we need to make we need to make things better um so yeah i think in a lot of ways leo is um hopefully gonna is positive and hopefully going to be taking things in the correct direction i hope i'm in better in just a better direction not because like you know the other thing the other balance um in the shows you can see this if we watch conclave is uh that there's like basically this other, like you said, the trad part in the church that are like trying to take

us back to like pre-Vatican 2, which if y'all don't know what that is. It's like a church council where that's where like a lot of, they basically want to bring us back to just like Latin masses and stuff. And I don't want that. So at least in that sense, Leo is definitely good because he's not going to do that at least. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, an imperfect organization and institution for sure. And you can only expect so much from somebody like that. But I do like the turn to Francis and then the continuation through Leo, it does seem to be pretty progressive for what the institutionalized church can offer. So there's reason for hope for sure. So a couple more questions and we'll wrap this discussion up. Do you see space for a realignment or a reawakening

within American Christianity? Or do you think the institutional church has become too compromised by empire? Or do you think American Christianity has been too fragmented by its very denominations to ever have a coherent like a singular awakening or anything like that like what do you see as the future of american christianity hmm yeah that one's that one's interesting because it can be very easy to be super dumer about the uh the current like state status of like christianity in the country because really the majority of christians in our country are you know kind of christophascist and you know very much like basically you know they think that I've been grown up in, like, an area where it's pretty prevalent, like, the whole, like, you, we've got a disturbing amount of people who think that the apocalypse is coming and, like, you know, Trump's going to usher it in or some, you know, just stuff like that.

Like, weird, like, revelations that are just super reactionary. And yeah, it's difficult to imagine how, you know, you're going to take that and, um, change it. I just think for me, I think it's not necessarily, we don't need to get like the whole institutional church. on board. That's not like, because that's probably just not going to happen, particularly in American, you know, even with the Catholic Church. I think, uh, it's a matter of Christians, like, leftist Christians, a liberatory Christianity can be part and can contribute to a larger revolutionary process or like a larger, like, mass movement is that it doesn't have to be something. And I think that's important for a lot of Christians to realize is that it's, uh, we're obviously not going to be, we're probably not going to be the ones that, like, lead it. And that's good. that's probably a good thing, but we can contribute it to it in the ways that we can.

And part of that is, like, can be through our faith, through reaching out to people who, to Christians who would be open to, like, a more liberatory understanding of Christianity. But also, you know, in terms of, like, the church, I think, most importantly, I am an advocate in the Catholic Church of, like, greater power for the lady and less and moving a little bit more away from, like, the hierarchy. and I think that's how we get, like, changed in the church is usually do, like, bottom-up actions and organizing with members of the lady to try and, like, make their voices heard in the church and push for those changes.

So, yeah, I think that's kind of, like, my approach to it is that we're probably not going to get the whole institutional church on board, but we can get other people that can contribute you to a larger mass movement and be part of it. Yeah, absolutely. You know, just the phrase Christophascist, it's a very real social phenomenon, but it's so unfortunate and so oxymoronic to its absolute core that you could combine the name and message of Jesus Christ with the political movement that is fascism. Those are two, you know, diametrically opposed, you know, words and meanings. But, of course, it's a very real thing. And as I've always said, every religious, every religion has a political spectrum.

Every single religion, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, have a radical revolutionary liberatory left, an accommodationist center, and a reactionary right. And so, you know, it's not unique to any one religion. And it's about, you know, combating the center and the right from a liberatory left-wing perspective and drawing on the very real traditions within every single religion that advance those core values that we believe in. And I don't know who said it, maybe you do, but the quote that the real Christians are the communists, that can be taken too far, of course, but I think it gets it something very

real. And on the flip side of that, Frederick Nietzsche's critique of Christianity was also his critique of socialism, right? It's too egalitarian. It believes in inequality. And Nietzsche's coming from this perspective of Uber-Mention versus the herd, this reaction aristocratic politic that was disdainful of what he saw as present in both Christianity and socialism. But for me, that's a point of pride.

Like, yeah, Nietzsche, you were right. There's something beautifully true in both Christianity and communism, a radical egalitarianism, that we aim to continue to develop in the face of reactionary politics, like the ones, you know, advanced by Nietzsche and still carried forward to some extent today, which is, you know, the Nietzschean right. are very anti-communist, anti-socialist, and anti-Christian, right? They're hostile to all of these things because of the egalitarian core, which exists within them. So there's a real space for us to, for Christians on the left to reclaim, at least that beautiful tradition that you've been pointing out, Alex, that's always been present within the Christian

tradition. And all these figures throughout going all the way back to Jesus, whose messages were clearly more aligned with egalitarian social justice-oriented. political movements instead of brutal capitalist, militaristic, consumerist forms of the church that, or the religion that have been manifested today super structurally. So as we wrap this up, I first want to say thank you so much for coming on and sharing your experiences, your journey, your wisdom and knowledge. I hope there are people listening that find inspiration in this conversation and can find new figures and writers and thinkers and historical people that

they can turn to, learn more about, draw inspiration from. I really encourage everybody to follow your page, which of course I'll link to in the show notes. And as we wrap up here, do you have any last words you want to say and anything you want to promote or any place you want to point people towards where they can find you and your work online? Yeah. So I did, there's one thing I just wanted to hit on before. And it's kind of about the relationship between like Christianity and potential like with revolutionary movements. It's like talking about historically, I think there's like a lot of baggage there um when it comes to like how christianity has uh interacted with like more like socialists and anarchists and communist movements and one thing i get really annoyed with people about

in the church is when they talk about like how like revolutions like kind of talking to the church and sometimes and i'm like you know those ass I always say like those ass weapons didn't fall from the sky like they didn't like come out of nowhere they were like basically part like they're part of like a long tradition of the church upholding oppressive structures, at least in the hierarchy, upholding oppressive structures. And that's where like a lot of resentment and wrath ultimately came from. And I think it's important to understand though that the church and most churches and most religions are kind of like little microcosms of the societies they're in. So like one example I always go to is like the French Revolution. When you look at like when we talk

about the French Revolution, we kind of talk about the three estates, especially like the first to say being the clergy and kind of talking about their like this. united kind of like front that like had no disagreements but in reality when you get down to it like a lot of the priests and stuff that like priests on the parish level actually supported the revolution and they generally supported and sided with the third estate because ultimately they were from the third of state that's where they came from like that in a lot of cases that's the same thing with like parish priests today they come from like the common people um but then you have like the hierarchy that were like obviously more aligned with like the king so i think it's like important

to realize that within the church, like I've already been pointing out, there's a whole, like, array of, like, opinions. And I also think it's important to know, to be kind of, like, a member of, like, I say, like, being a member of the church in reality or by even being member of the communist, um, communist movements in reality. Because, like, particularly in the church, like, a lot of people be like, you need to believe this, this, this and this in order to be, like, a Catholic. And I'm just like, well, I need to do all these things. And my opinion is, like, if you go into a church, 99 out of 100 people there are breaking the church's rules in some way or another. Like, uh, and it's not like really about like this idea of, um, of, uh, saying like, oh,

you're not a real Christian because you don't agree with this certain thing, this certain doctrine. It's, um, well, you'll be surprised to find that like, you know, there are a lot of people that, no matter how you work it out theoretically, they can like still identify as as but like a communist and a Christian. And that's just like, the reality of and there's thousands of people that do that um every day and like have that have that like influence their lives so these kind of like theoretical discussions of like saying like um you know you can't be both a christian and a marxist or you can't do with a Marxist and a Christian like they are kind of to me just kind of pointless because well the reality is is that

there are people that are Marxists and Christians and that people that are anarchists and Christians and um because that's just how like people and their like identities work so those are the things I just wanted to hit on that is that just like all of these things you know these things can like work together and be in dialogue and be in dialogue with each other and like my finally just like you asked um about where people can find me um I'd recommend just yeah my Instagram account Southern Catholic Worker um also subscribe to the Catholic Worker newspaper and um if you're ever in New York City uh I live at 36 East First Street um St. Joseph House, you can come on by, volunteer, talk, whatever you want to talk about. I'll be here most likely. So, yeah, those are the main ways. Hell yeah. Very, very cool. Very awesome. Yeah, Leo Tolstoy jumps to mind when you mentioned Christian anarchism. I got to give him a shout out. And I just wanted to touch on one quick thing. I'll link to all that in the show notes as well. But you mentioned the conflict historically between Christianity and the revolutionary left.

We saw it in the Spanish Civil War, you know, incredibly strongly with the Catholic Francoist government and the revolutionaries. going to war with the clergy in so many instances. And also theoretically, we see it in Marx and Engels and Lenin, which is this sort of advancement of atheism. And what I want to say there is that they themselves were part of a broader historical materialist development coming out of the enlightenment and reacting righteously and correctly to what you alluded to, Alex, which was this institutionalized force that was very conservative, was very reactionary, was part and parcel with the very power structures that their movements were seeking to overthrow. But as we've moved forward in history, especially in a sort of secular West, the religious

institutions have become weakened. And while there still is some engagement with power on some level, there's much less. And the broad orientation of our societies is a desacralized secular consumerism that has largely done away with religion and so now there's now a dialectical spiral where we've we've overcome as we had to through the enlightenment the religious superstitions and stupid rigid hierarchies of the past we've come through the scientific period of enlightenment we've embraced atheism we've used atheism as the hammer to deconstruct much of these you know the the harmful superstitions and rigid social hierarchies. Now we live in a sort of spiritual wasteland of consumerism

and what we're doing now dialectically and historically is we are returning to and reclaiming spirituality and the religious impulse at a higher level because the religious impulse is just the human condition. There's always going to be a deep yearning within the human mind and the human heart to relate to infinity and eternity and the mystery and majesty of the cosmos and of life itself there's always going to be an element of human of our of our being that wants to engage with and explore that dimension of our lives and that's never just going to go away once and for all so we can learn from and understand why those conflicts happened historically without copy and pasting them to our current situation which is fundamentally different and so you know

part of my goal and part of yours whether it's explicit or implicit is to reintroduce the spiritual and religious impulses, hopefully at a higher level, emphasizing their liberatory potential and emphasizing them as ways of relating not just to politics and economics in the social realm, but to the very human condition of life and death and mystery and majesty that we find ourselves in. And so I think that we both have that sort of implicit goal in both of our works. And so that's why I've always appreciated what you do. And thank you so much for coming on and sharing all of that with us today. Yeah, no problem.

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