Pope Francis said at his evening Mass on Christmas Eve, “Tonight, our hearts are in Bethlehem, where the Prince of Peace is once more rejected by the futile logic of war, by the clash of arms that even today prevents him from finding room in the world.”

In Bethlehem itself, where Pastor Isaac preaches, the city elders canceled the Christmas parade and other festivities in commemoration of the shivering Palestinians a few miles away whose stomachs are being gnawed at by hunger and whose throats are raspy with thirst. Bethlehem is a town of some 25,000 in the Palestinian West Bank occupied militarily by Israeli troops. About 11,000 of its residents are Palestinian Christians, descendants of the Near Eastern pagans and Jews living under Roman rule who embraced the message of Jesus of Nazareth in his lifetime and after.

Bethlehem’s population is not being bombed from the sky the way the Palestinians of Gaza are, but they also suffer from Israeli occupation. According to a 2020 poll 80% of Palestinian Christians worry about being attacked by militant Israeli squatters, 83% worry that these colonizers will drive them from their homes, and 70% are concerned that the Israeli government will simply annex their land. Fully 62% of Palestinian Christians believe that the ultimate goal of the Israeli government is to expel Christians from their homeland. A good 14% have actually lost land to the Israelis, and 42% have to regularly go through Israeli security checkpoints, which have carved the West Bank up into cantons and make it difficult to get to hospital.

Aljazeera English: “‘No joy in our hearts’: Bethlehem’s Christians face heartbreak at Christmas ”

Although there are only about 800 Palestinian Christians in Gaza, they have suffered from Israeli bombardment, sniping attacks, and razing of civilian infrastructure. The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem revealed in a letter last week that an Israeli army sniper “murdered two Christian women inside the Holy Family Parish in Gaza”. It said that besieged mother and daughter Nahida and Samar “were shot and killed as they walked to the Sister’s Convent. One was killed as she tried to carry the other to safety”.

They were among hundreds of Christians taking refuge in the Parish. The church had given the GPS coordinates of church properties in Gaza to the Israeli government in hopes they would be spared, but local Palestinians say that church building has been shelled by Israeli armor.

Pope Francis responded at that time, lamenting of the Israeli campaign against Gaza that “unarmed civilians are the targets of bombings and gunfire.” He condemned the assualt at the compound of the Catholic parish, “where there are no terrorists, but families, children, people who are sick and have disabilities, and nuns . . . A mother, Mrs. Nahida Khalil Anton, and her daughter, Samar Kamal Anton, were killed, and others were wounded by the shooters while they were going to the bathroom,” he announced.

The Pope continued, “Some say, ‘This is terrorism. This is war.’ Yes, it is war. It is terrorism . . . That is why the Scripture affirms that ‘God stops wars… breaks the bow, splinters the spear’ (Psalm 46:10). Let us pray to the Lord for peace.”

The Israeli army denied the charges and got in a snit about a “blood libel.” But when you are the 17th most powerful military in the world and you genocide 20,000 civilians in 11 weeks, there isn’t any libel involved. It is just blood.

Israelis with a conscience, such as activist Orly Noy, the chairman of the human rights organization, B’Tselem, in contrast called desperately for a ceasefire. This issue isn’t about Judaism or Islam or Christianity, since there are people from each of those traditions who are on opposite sides of it.

As for Lutheran Pastor Munther Isaac, on Friday he preached a sermon, “Christ in the Rubble.”

He cited the enormity of the death toll, including of thousands of children, and said that as in the case of South African Apartheid the theology of the state has been wielded against the helpless. Not even that some Palestinians are Christians has evoked sympathy in European and American Christians. “This war has confirmed to us that the world does not see us as equal. Maybe it is the color of our skin. Maybe it is because we are on the wrong side of the political equation. Even our kinship in Christ did not shield us. As they said, if it takes killing 100 Palestinians to get a single “Hamas militant” then so be it! We are not humans in their eyes. (But in God’s eyes… no one can tell us we are not!).”

He implicitly referred to US Evangelicals, many of whom have enthusiastically cheered on the Israeli army’s genocidal (my word) actions.

“I feel sorry for you. We will be ok. Despite the immense blow we have endured, we will recover. We will rise and stand up again from the midst of destruction, as we have always done as Palestinians, although this is by far the biggest blow we have received in a long time.

But again, for those who are complicit, I feel sorry for you. Will you ever recover from this?”

No, I don’t think this campaign’s supporters ever will regain their souls, which they have sold for the thirty silver coins of conformism, militarism, cowardice and Islamophobia.

Pastor Isaac went on:

“In our pain, anguish, and lament, we have searched for God, and found him under the rubble in Gaza. Jesus became the victim of the very same violence of the Empire. He was tortured. Crucified. He bled out as others watched. He was killed and cried out in pain – My God, where are you?

In Gaza today, God is under the rubble.

And in this Christmas season, as we search for Jesus, he is to be found not on the side of Rome, but our side of the wall. In a cave, with a simple family. Vulnerable. Barely, and miraculously surviving a massacre. Among a refugee family. This is where Jesus is found.”

So he inspired me to a digital painting. I’ll leave you with it.

“Gaza Guernica 19: Nativity,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream/ Dreamland v.3, PS Express, IbisPaint, 2023.

The Mayor of Bethlehem, Hanna Hanania, said that this year’s holiday message was titled “Christmas brings us together”, that is, it unites us on goodness, love and giving, and it is a message to the international community of the need to stand up to its responsibilities and to stop Israeli practices.

I don’t know about you, but the ending of that sentence brought me up short. Christmas brings us together: check. Christmas unites us in goodness, love and giving: Check.

But, Christmas is a wake-up call to the international community to intervene to stop Israeli occupation practices toward the oppressed Palestinians?

This last point makes sense only if you know that according to a 2020 poll 80% of Palestinian Christians worry about being attacked by militant Israeli squatters, that 83% worry that these colonizers will drive them from their homes, and 70% are concerned that the Israeli government will simply annex their land. Fully 62% of Palestinian Christians believe that the ultimate goal of the Israeli government is to expel Christians from their homeland.

A good 14% have actually lost land to the Israelis, and 42% have to regularly go through Israeli security checkpoints, which have carved the West Bank up into cantons and make it difficult to get to hospital.

Christmas is back this year in Bethlehem, a town of 25,000 or so, where about 11,000 are Christian and the rest Muslim, after two years during which tourism evaporated in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. The municipality lit up the Christmas tree and held a Christmas market, and the tourists came flooding back in. The mayor cautioned, however, that it would take the local inhabitants time to recover from the deep economic recession caused by the pandemic. He thanked the Palestinian ministry of tourism and antiquities for its help in recovering some of the glitter of the holidays.

The West Bank, however, is a tinderbox, especially with the prospect of new government led by Likud, Jewish fundamentalists and hard line anti-Palestinian expulsionists. That shadow falls on Bethlehem, too, which has been boxed in by Israel’s Apartheid Wall, built on private land of Palestinians and cutting the town off from Jerusalem. The mayor, a Christian, explained that he was referring to deliberate Israeli practices and intentional escalation around Christmas time, involving major incursions by Israeli forces into the city and its refugee camps (such as Dheisha, which houses Palestinians expelled from their homes in what is now Israel in 1948). He said that Israeli forces had made arrests and had tightened what amounts to a siege on the town. He pledged that despite this harassment, Christmas celebrations would go forward as planned.

In this part of the world, holy days are political. Palestinian rights activist Mustafa al-Barghouti said that all Palestinians are devoted to celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ in the face of the new “fascist” Israeli government, adding that the Palestinians see Christ as “the first Palestinian who was tortured in this land and who triumphed over his torments.” He said that the message of the Palestinian people on Christmas is that they will triumph, as well, over their own torments, “over fascism and criminality.” He sees Palestinian participation in Christmas festivities in Bethlehem as “a form of resistance” to the Israeli occupation.

Jesus was crucified by imperial Roman authorities in the province of Palaestina on suspicion of sedition, which makes him a sympathetic figure to contemporary Palestinian Christians and Muslims (Muslims believe in Jesus as one of God’s prophets).

The paragraph I wrote over a decade ago still holds true:

““Most Americans when polled are not able to say where exactly Bethlehem is or who lives there. Only 1 in 6 know that it is a Palestinian city of 30,000 in the West Bank with a mixed Christian (40%) and Muslim (60%) population. Almost no one in the US knows that the Israeli wall or separation barrier, which has ghettoized many Palestinians and expropriated from them property and farm land, is strangling Bethlehem. The barrier cuts Bethlehem off from Jerusalem and steals private property from its residents. It has created an economic crisis that has caused Palestinian Christians to emigrate from the city. The “Christians of Bethlehem overwhelmingly (78%) blame the exodus of Christians from the town on Israel’s blockade . . .”

Jason Casper at Christianity Today did a deep dive on the Christian Palestinians of the Occupied West Bank. He cites a poll from a couple of years ago that showed that where Palestinians want to emigrate to Europe or the Americas, it is overwhelmingly because of straitened economic circumstances. The economic problems in the area, in turn, stem from Israel’s occupation.

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) estimates that since the year 2000 the Israeli Occupation has cost the Palestinian economy $58 billion.

Palestinian Christians for the most part don’t leave their homeland because of religious persecution or fear of their Muslim compatriots. Only about a third of them consider themselves religious, and they are the least likely to emigrate. Palestinian Christians find it easier to go to Europe and the Americas than do the Muslims, but even so most say they are committed to staying with their family and friends in the place they love.

Toronto (Special to Informed Comment) – The November edition of First Things, a magazine of the Christian Right, features a lengthy statement from a group of theologians called Evangelicals and Catholics Together. The church friend who spontaneously sent me a link indicated that the statement is about Christian citizenship and that he is proud to be one of the signatories. Its title is “Fear God, Honor the Emperor”. The reference is to 1 Peter 2, which advised early Christians on how to relate to hostile Roman authorities. While the recommendations of St. Peter, first bishop of Rome, appear sensible and practical enough – show your contribution to society through good works and be respectful – the vanguard of the American Christian Right thinks a more radical strategy is needed.

Concerns for American democracy are absent from “Fear God, Honor the Emperor,” even though recent research indicates that only 9% of Americans believes it is functioning well. A simple word search of the roughly 4,800-word document results in no matches for “democracy”. By contrast, the word “authority” (of God, the moral law, and civil government) appears 46 times. Freedom, ten times and almost exclusively in the sense of religious freedom or excessive freedom that should be restrained. The emphasis throughout is on obedience to a government that imposes a moral order with a heavy hand and on age-old spiritual authorities recommending that governments should favor religious virtue. This represents a political model the Western world left a long time ago, following the American lead expressed in the Constitution. By contrast, authoritarian leaders in Hungary, Turkey, Iran, Russia, and other places still like it and use religion as their prime support structure. One wonders who the emperor might be who the statement wants to have honored. Emperor-wannabe Vladimir Putin comes to mind.

Although most of the ideas in “Fear God, Honor the Emperor” go back decades, it is also a document that further demonstrates the American Christian Right’s decisive shift towards authoritarian and anti-democratic ways of thinking. Still, only by engaging these Christian ideas it is possible to understand why political Christians have aligned themselves with the most unsavory and deceitful elements on the American the political scene, including the intellectual heirs of segregation and the cultivators of lies and conspiracies over scientific method, to the point that they would even throw in with a decidedly un-Christian figure such as Donald Trump.

First Things is the magazine to which the intellectually inclined segment of the Christian Right would ‘turn for their marching orders’, as one earlier commentator put it. It briefly became notorious under its founding editor, the late Richard John Neuhaus, because of a special issue of 26 years ago titled “The End of Democracy”. Its editors then wrote, “Perhaps the United States, for so long the primary bearer of the democratic idea, has itself betrayed that idea and become something else. If so, the chief evidence of that betrayal is the judicial usurpation of politics.” The same 1996 issued of First Things carried an essay by former Watergate felon and born-again evangelical Charles W. Colson that appeared to call for violent Christian revolution against the secular American state.

The specific incident that incensed Neuhaus and his collaborators back then has been long forgotten, but judicial usurpation of politics is still very much with us. In fact, by the time the special issue came out, the Catholic-conservative takeover of the U.S. courts was already being planned, as observers of the movement such as Damon Linker and Katherine Stewart have shown. And not only the courts, also local churches and whole denominations have been victims of hostile takeover in an effort to crush the social justice wing of American Christianity and recruit foot-soldiers for conservative efforts.

The appropriately titled Steeplejacking by John Dorhauer movingly describes the process whereby the Right infiltrated churches, and the damage it did. And these practices are still ongoing, as this past summer, right-wingers in the Christian Reformed Church of North America succeeded in forcing a polarizing vote on elevating opposition to same-sex marriage to a confession, that is, a declaration of faith. Some faculty at the Church’s Calvin College have reportedly responded by looking for jobs elsewhere.

The Evangelical-Catholic manifesto in First Things contains several offhand remarks suggesting that democracy should be exchanged for a better system — presumably a theocratic system with a total abortion ban, and that loyalty to the American government is conditional on a narrow set of pre-defined moral values. Consider these quotes: “Moreover, the Church has functioned in a remarkable variety of regimes. There is no Christian system of government.” “A society that fails to deter murder [read: abortion], theft, and other crimes does not deserve our loyalty.” “Although prudence requires us to adapt to circumstances, Christian political witness can be pursued under any type of government, righteous or unrighteous.”

On the contrary, most contemporary Christians feel that the gospel upholds freedom and human dignity and that democracy serves those values best.

This new statement is a dangerous document, because the alliance advocated by Evangelicals and Catholics Together is really the linchpin holding the American Christian Right together. In its present political context, Evangelicals and Catholics Together continues to cement and fuel the accord between the Christian Nationalist Right and the Republican Party. These Christian leaders selectively reinterpret and narrow Christianity in a misguided and self-destructive attempt to defend it from a perceived “liberal” cultural onslaught. Probably most of them are not aware that it is exactly an extreme form of laissez-faire, nineteenth-century British-style Liberalism that motivates neoliberal attackers of American democracy. Nancy MacLean, a professor of history at Duke University, has described this process very well in Democracy in Chains, including the origins of today’s Right in the organized racism known as segregation.

Whatever the merits of First Things and Evangelicals and Catholics Together in overcoming prejudice between the two branches of Christianity in the 1990s, they have now become partisan hacks in cahoots with the libertarian Right that funds their institutions. In effect, these Christians have worked to seduce American Christianity into worshiping a golden calf, be it authoritarianism or Donald Trump. The Christian leaders involved in this movement would do much better to cultivate connections to their brothers and sisters in other parts of the world. For example, continental Europe has developed electoral systems that accommodate traditional religious views and allow them contribute to a democratic system.

In other words, it is self-defeating for conservative Christians to subvert the American political system just because they feel threatened by other people’s political liberalism. The state is not requiring them to get abortions or accept LGBTQ people into their congregations, and if they cannot democratically persuade the majority of Americans of their values, they will simply have to tolerate diversity. Further, white evangelicalism is in steep decline. The U.S. will likely not even be a majority-Christian society for much longer, and an authoritarian system that imposes a state religion whether people want it or not would replicate the British Anglican-monarchy alliance of the 18th century, which the Founders wrote the U.S. Constitution to avoid.

Alito posed as a defender of religious freedom, but what he seemed to mean by that was the religious people who are bigoted against gays shouldn’t have to serve gay people. This is, by the way, the same argument that bigoted white evangelicals deployed against desegregation — they didn’t think they should be made to serve people with the mark of Cain and that their bigotry was inherent in their religion. If Alito’s notion of religious freedom prevails and is reinforced, you have to wonder whether we don’t go back to Jim Crow Apartheid.

de Vogue explains,

“In 2021, the court said that Philadelphia violated the First Amendment when it froze the contract of a Catholic foster agency that refused to work with same-sex couples as potential foster parents because the agency believes that marriage should be between a man and woman. Alito wrote separately to complain that the court hadn’t gone far enough in its opinion and should have made it much more difficult for the government to enforce laws that burden some individuals’ religious beliefs.”

Alito went on to say, that he saw a challenge in convincing “people that religious liberty is worth defending if they don’t think that religion is a good thing that deserves protection.”

Alito’s pose as a mere beleagured defender of “religious liberty” attempts to conceal his role as a reactionary attempting to carve out civil rights exceptions for the religious that allow them to injure the rights of other Americans on the basis of their faith. That isn’t religious liberty, it is religious license, and the Founding Fathers tried to get rid of religious license with the Establishment Clause.

Ironically, even as Alito has managed to impose 20th century Roman Catholic dogma on all Americans, striking down any right to privacy or for women to control their own bodies, he is puzzled as to why anyone would be hostile to his agenda. Jewish Americans have pointed out that he has taken away their rabbinical right to an abortion and given control of Jewish women’s lives in the Red states over to right wing Christians.

That isn’t religious liberty. It is the tyranny of a religious majority.

As for the place of religion in American life, it is rapidly declining. The US was unusual in the period between the end of WW II and about 1990, among industrialized democracies, in having very high rates of self-reported belief in God and church membership and attendance.

On the order of 40% of French did not believe in God in the late 20th and early 21st century. The figure today is a majority, 51%.

In contrast, until the 1990s only 2% of Americans said that the had no religion, and even in the 1990s that figure only rose to 8%.

This year, Gallup found that religious “nones,” people who say they don’t believe in God or have no religion, are up to 19%. Only 81% of Americans now believe in God, by Gallup’s projection.

But get this: 11% of Americans don’t think that the God they believe in hears prayers or intervenes in the world. I.e. they hold that he is not what the theologians would call “provident.” Then another 28% believe in God and think he hears their prayers, but they also don’t think he intervenes in this world.

Thomas Jefferson’s Deism has won! Only 40% of Americans, a minority, believe in a God who hears prayers and answers them!

Historian Bradley C. Thompson wrote, “This much can be said with confidence: when Jefferson wrote of “Nature’s God” he almost certainly meant the impersonal, far-removed, deist God that set the world in motion according to the laws that were meant to govern in his absence. The Declaration’s God is not the God of the Old Testament (nor is it even the God of the New Testament) but is Nature’s God.”

This decline of religion is in part generational. Alito is 72 and his was the generation when only 2% did not believe in God.

Among young adults in the US, according to Gallup, 32% do not believe in God.

Self-identified liberals are even less religious than the Millennials and Gen Z. Only 62% of them say they believe in God.

It isn’t clear what has driven this stampede away from the church. But sociologists have some ideas.

Patricia Wittberg notes that “young adult Catholic women are now less observant in their attendance, less orthodox in their beliefs, and less likely to remain Catholic than young adult Catholic males.” She notes that it has been suggested that they are alienated by a male-dominated church hierarchy. I don’t think she’s giving enough weight to the Church’s anti-abortion, anti-birth control stances, which directly and negatively affect young women.

I confidently predict a further outflow of young American women from the church in the wake of Alito’s Dobbs decision, because he has made it crystal clear that elderly religious Catholic males are not the friends of young women.

Many youth were also raised by Baby-Boomer parents who themselves were open-minded about religion and perhaps not very observant.

A 2019 poll found that fully 37% of American Catholics are considering leaving the church over the priest pedophilia scandals.

It has been suggested that many younger Americans have dissociated themselves from their parents’ church because churches have tended to be homophobic and hostile to gay rights, whereas acceptance of gays is at 72% among US youth. You hate to hear your pastor or priest badmouth your LBGTQ friends.

If Alito, Thomas and other religious conservatives overturn gay marriage rights, they will be further driving young people away from religion.

Then, the COVID-19 pandemic has cut church attendance in half, and many pastors think the congregations are never coming back. Donations are way off in consequence, as well.

So, Alito is being disingenuous in representing himself as merely fighting for religious “liberty.” He is fighting to let religious people refuse to serve the rest of us and to allow them to dictate our behavior according to their theology. Most ironically of all, Alito may single-handedly have killed off religion in the United States in the coming generation by associating religion with the end of women’s rights.

Both streams of Christianity decidedly opposed any supposed right of the individual to privacy if that meant a right to use contraception, to sleep with someone to whom the person was not married, or to engage in anything but straight sex. The inability any longer to keep women barefoot and pregnant, moreover, had challenged the ingrained patriarchy of these churches, empowering women, a process which the men wanted to reverse. Some southern Evangelicals still regretted the striking down in 1966 of “miscegenation” laws allowing interracial marriage, a sentiment that has seen a recrudescence in the white nationalist branch of the Republican Party. It, too, is rooted in a denial of any right of privacy.

An alliance of Catholics and Evangelicals has proved powerful, especially once they captured the Republican Party, which had previously mainly comprised mainstream Protestants. The Republican Party had long represented big business, but suffered from a structural problem of finding majorities of ordinary Americans who would vote for plutocracy, The marriage of Big Capital with Big Fundamentalism allowed Republicans to develop popular constituencies who would put them in office and keep them there, with tax cuts for the wealthy and overturning Roe v.Wade as the primary planks of their platform.

Samuel Alito, who wrote the manifesto against privacy rights, is a conservative Roman Catholic whose opinions often challenged the separation of religion and state. He was appointed by George W. Bush precisely for the purpose of overturning Roe v. Wade so as to get out the Evangelical and Catholic Latino vote for Bush, the basis on which he won two terms as president. Bush’s consigliere, Karl Rove, actively colluded with 80 organizations of the religious Right in putting Alito forward.

They have gotten what they wanted, a painfully unequal America dominated by a handful of billionaires and a return to the early nineteenth century when states had Established churches even though the Federal government was prohibited from favoring any one religious group. For thirty years after the Constitution was enacted, some states collected religious taxes for churches. It was not until the 1830s that Establishment of religions faded at the state level. After the Civil War, the 14th amendment settled the issue (at least so far), requiring that state law conform to the federal constitution. But the outlawing of abortion at the behest of Evangelicals and Catholics is a stealth return of Established religion at the state level, at which Justice Samuel Alito is conniving,

The American Religious Right is only one example of a global phenomenon. The Muslim world has its equivalent of the Evangelical Christians, determined to impose their moral and legal ideas on the rest of the population through gaining leverage over the state, such as the Muslim Brotherhood.

As I have noted before, the American conviction that all Muslims are fundamentalists has led to a misunderstanding of Muslim societies. The 18 Muslim-majority societies with Draconian anti-abortion laws are all countries where the Muslim Religious Right is powerful. In contrast, more secular or “civil” Muslim countries often have laws that are more liberal. In countries where women have a relatively high status, such as Turkey and Tunisia, predictably abortion is offered on demand. I earlier observed:

Gilla K. Shapiro, writing in Health Policy and Planning, found that ten Muslim-majority countries out of 47 surveyed permit abortion on demand. These are Albania, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tunisia, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Another two, Burkina Faso and Guinea, allow abortion in cases of incest and rape, which the new Texas law does not, and Sudan allows it in case of rape.

Several other Muslim-majority states allow abortion where the mother’s physical or mental health would be impaired, not just if her life was endangered . . . Even Saudi Arabia permits abortion where the mother’s health is in danger, as do all but 18 of the 47 nations Shapiro surveyed . . .

Since 43 U.S. states have some restrictions on abortion, in fact, there are more Muslim-majority countries with abortion on demand than there are U.S. states . . .

In medieval Islam, the Hanafi school, which predominates in Turkey and much of Asia, permitted abortion up until 3 months. Some Shafi’is, the school favored in Lower Egypt, also allowed it that late date. Let me underline this. A significant proportion of medieval Muslim jurists favored rules for abortion that were more permissive than today’s law in Texas . . .

Shapiro did a comparative survey of abortion laws in 47 Muslim-majority countries. She identifies 7 levels of abortion rights. The least permissive are laws that only make an exception for a danger to the life of the mother. The new Texas law resembles those in 18 Muslim-majority countries, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Iraq, Egypt and Lebanon, which only allow this exception.

That is, only 18 of 47 Muslim-majority countries have abortion laws today as restrictive as that in Texas . . [which is the model for a raft of laws to be enacted as soon as Roe is struck down].

This issue is not along a Christian-Muslim or East-West axis.

She said, “What it is, is Satan’s controlling the church. The church is not doing its job, and it’s not adhering to the teachings of Christ, and it’s not adhering to what the word of God says we’re supposed to do and how we’re supposed to live.”

In many ways the success of the contemporary Republican Party depends on an Evangelical-Catholic political alliance against abortion rights and the sexual revolution. Evangelicals in Congress have been willing to vote six Catholics onto the Supreme Court for this reason. Greene’s vitriolic diatribe, however, raises the possibility that the QAnon white nationalists who are taking over the Republican Party are breaking with the Church over some of its social policies, which are often liberal or at least humanitarian.

She later said that foreign aid should be cut to countries from which refugees are fleeing to the US and that “If the bishops were reading the Bible and truly preaching the word of God to their flock and not covering up child sex abuse and pedophilia, loving one another would have the true meaning and not the perversion and the twisted lie that they’re making it to be.”

She had said that the Christian principle of “loving one another” should not involve surrendering to a “globalist agenda” to make “America become something that we are not supposed to be.”

I have thought about her diction here and I can’t make it mean anything other than “we Christian white people are supposed to love one another but that doesn’t mean we have to love brown or Black people, and certainly doesn’t mean we have to minister to non-white refugees. And if the Roman Catholic Church interprets Christianity as requiring charity to all, then it has itself become a tool of Satan.”

In other words, she views Christianity only through the lens of white nationalism.

But the (literal) demonization of Catholicism stands out in her remarks because it resonates with a long-term strand of Protestant white nationalism, as with the mid-19th century “Know-Nothing Movement,” a conspiratorial hate group that burned Catholic churches and attacked Catholic Americans.

Although Greene was brought up Catholic, she says she fell away from the church.

Being an army brat, I traveled around the world growing up, but in between postings we would spend time in Northern Virginia. I can’t remember now how it happened, but somebody once dragged me to a Baptist revival meeting when I was a kid and I was given a pamphlet about how the Pope was the antichrist and had 666 sewn into his mitre. Our branch of the Coles are fallen-away Catholics, but I remember being appalled. My generation had a positive impression of Pope John XXIII and the reforms of Vatican II. In fact, the latter helped inspire my BA thesis, the field work for which I conducted in Beirut, about the inter-religious dialogue it kicked off with Muslims.

The vicious anti-Roman Catholic sentiments expressed by Greene, as I said, evoke an ugly side of American history.

Three decades ago, historian Bryan Le Beau wrote in his address “Saving the West from the Pope”: Anti-Catholic Propaganda and the Settlement of the Mississippi River Valley,”

“Arthur M. Schlesinger, the elder, once told John Tracy Ellis, dean of the historians of American Catholicism, that he regarded prejudice against Roman Catholics to be “the deepest bias in the history of the American people.” By this, he did not intend to suggest that it was the most violent, though at times it certainly was; or that it was the most consistent, as it tended to wax and wane throughout American history; but rather, that the roots of anti-Catholicism lay buried in the depths of the American consciousness, bearing fruit over time across the American cultural landscape.”

On the East Coast from the 1820s forward, as German and Irish Catholics came to the country, the slogan of “no popery” was raised and riots were staged against the latter. In 1844 St. Michael’s Catholic Church in Philadelphia was burned and 20 people were killed. Between 1800 and 1840 a million Roman Catholics immigrated. (My paternal ancestor Georg Kohl [Anglicized as Cole] arrived in 1830, so he and his family would have known that atmosphere.) A Protestant riot greeted papal nuncio Archbishop Gaetano Bedini when he came to Cincinnati in 1853, Le Beau reminds us.

Catholic associations that had begun in Austria and France were attacked as threats to Republican liberties, since, it was alleged, the Church supported royal absolutism and opposed the idea of a Republic with the sort of individual rights adumbrated in the US constitution. Although it is true that the 19th-century Church profoundly disliked the French Revolution and its ideals, and much preferred monarchies that would back Catholicism, it isn’t the case that American Catholics were seditious. Some did object to Protestant hegemony, especially in public schools, and one man burned some King James Version Bibles, which made a bad impression.

It is ironic that in the 19th century Catholic Americans were attacked for being too conservative, and now Greene is attacking them for being too liberal. I pointed out some time ago that some right-wing Catholics make a big deal of their faith but completely ignore or even oppose the contemporary church’s social teachings.

The 19th century hate groups, however, did associate Catholics with immigration and saw a danger that they would convert the other immigrants, so that Nativist concern is common to our moment and the 1840s.

If Greene’s anti-Catholic sentiment becomes widespread in today’s GOP, it could be fatal to the party, since of the 72 million Catholic Americans, about half now vote Republican.

Xinhua’s reporter visited Syria and found that the Christians in Damascus don’t appear to be able to put up much in the way of Christmas lights in the Christian district of Bab Touma. They complain of a lack of electricity and a lack of money.

The Christians aren’t different in that regard from all the other Syrian civilians. US sanctions on Syria are part of the reason for this dilemma.

United States foreign policy has become so opaque that it is hard to divine what President Biden is up to in Syria, where the Department of Defense still has about 900 troops — even though the legality of their presence is highly questionable. One of their tasks appears to be to keep the petroleum pumped from Syria’s eastern fields out of the hand of the Syrian government. One thing is clear, however, which is that U.S. sanctions on Syria are mainly hurting ordinary people and interfering with rebuilding the country.

Meanwhile, Christians in Jerusalem, who are Palestinians, are warning that Israeli squatters are attempting to take their homes and that they may find it difficult to remain in the city. While the Biden administration has complained to the Israelis about their policy of taking away the homes of Palestinians who have lived in them for decades, Washington is never willing to punish Israel for breaking international law, and so the expulsions continue.

Things are pretty glum in Lebanon, as well, this year, with an ongoing political and economic crisis. A few years ago, one in three Lebanese were living under the poverty line. This year it is four out of five. Power blackouts have also blacked out Christmas lights. Some parents have warned their children that Santa Claus won’t be coming this year. Christians there, who make up a sizeable proportion of the population and from whom the president is drawn, are trying to extract what cheer they can from the holy day.

Lebanese typically spend $250 million on gifts in the week before Christmas. Arab News says this year people only spent $10 million to $15 million, the worst performance since 1975 when Civil War broke out.

Many Muslims are happy to join in the Christmas festivities, posting Qur’an verses about Jesus’ birth to social media and pointing to Jesus’ birthday as something that can unite all Lebanese.

Lebanon’s crisis is complicated, but let us just say that American sanctions on Syria have also hurt its people, including its Christians. Lebanon is a small country and Syria is its much larger neighbor, with which it does a great deal of trade, commerce and finance. Sanctions on Syria make businesses wary of those interactions, which has a deflationary effect.

If you want to help Lebanon, the UNICEF appeal is here

The sanctions-crazy foreign policy Blob in Washington, D.C. have invoked the Caesar Act against the Baathist Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad have imposed other sanctions. That government is full of genocidal monsters, so fair enough. But US sanctions on government officials have knock-on effects, making charities nervous about operating in that country lest they be sanctioned themselves, and making banks and lenders nervous about lending to or even doing business with the central back of the country, as Sam Heller points out.

Similar considerations obtain in Afghanistan, where US sanctions on the Taliban may contribute to a horrible humanitarian catastrophe this winter.

Sam Heller explains that at least the Biden administration approved a World Bank plan to bring Egyptian natural gas through Jordan and Syria to Lebanon. Syria will likely get some of the gas as barter for tolls for the pipeline going through the country. The Biden administration is eager that Lebanon’s energy come from Egypt, even if via Syria, because the alternative is for the Lebanese Shiite party-militia, Hezbollah, to bring it in from Iran. That makes Lebanon more dependent on Iran and also strengthens Hezbollah’s hand in national politics. Analysts whose main concern is using sanctions to overthrow the Syrian government were angered by the move, but sanctions don’t usually actually overthrow governments. Ruling elites can insulate themselves from the effect of sanctions, so they mostly harm the poorest people in the society.

Gilla K. Shapiro, writing in Health Policy and Planning, found that ten Muslim-majority countries out of 47 surveyed permit abortion on demand. These are Albania, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tunisia, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Another two, Burkina Faso and Guinea, allow abortion in cases of incest and rape, which the Texas law does not, and Sudan allows it in case of rape.

Several other Muslim-majority states allow abortion where the mother’s physical or mental health would be impaired, not just if her life was endangered. The Texas law speaks of a “medical emergency,” but I don’t believe mere detraction from physical or mental health is intended by its framers to allow an abortion. For instance, let us say a woman’s pregnancy has complications that would stop her from taking care of her existing children, or would stop her from practicing her profession or helping the family earn a living. That would be damage to her physical health. It would not justify an abortion in Texas, I’m quite sure, but it may well in those Muslim countries that guard women’s health.

Even Saudi Arabia permits abortion where the mother’s health is in danger, as do all but 18 of the 47 nations Shapiro surveyed.

So implying that the Texas Republican Party is like a Muslim party is not fair to Muslims. It is more restrictive of women’s rights than most Muslim-majority countries. Since 43 U.S. states have some restrictions on abortion, in fact, there are more Muslim-majority countries with abortion on demand than there are U.S. states.

The old saws of U.S. exceptionalism require Americans to think they are always more advanced than Muslims societies, which they code as backward. But in fact the U.S. is more religious and more bound by religious strictures in practice than some Muslim-majority countries. A poll back in the 1980s showed that 20 percent of Tunisians said they were not religious at time when only 9 percent of Americans did. It is mainly American Christianity that has caused prostitution to be made illegal everywhere but a couple of counties in Nevada, but it is legal in Senegal, Turkey, Bangladesh and Indonesia, all Muslim-majority countries. Many Muslims practice a fundamentalist, puritanical form of Islam, but not all do and not all governments favor it.

By the way, calling the Texas law a “heartbeat law” is a misnomer since the fetus does not have heart valves at six weeks and the noise heard during an ultrasound exam at that stage is from the ultrasound machine, though it may pick up an electrical signal from the fetus. There is no heart to beat.

In medieval Islam, the Hanafi school, which predominates in Turkey and much of Asia, permitted abortion up until 3 months. Some Shafi’is, the school favored in Lower Egypt, also allowed it that late. Let me underline this. A significant proportion of medieval Muslim jurists favored rules for abortion that were more permissive than today’s law in Texas.

In premodern times people in many cultures allowed abortion until the “quickening,” i.e. until the mother felt the fetus stirring, and this same criterion was common in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. The doctrine of a blastocyte being a person is a relatively recent innovation in theology and depends on modern medicine, which is typically misused by the theologians.

Shapiro did a comparative survey of abortion laws in 47 Muslim-majority countries. She identifies 7 levels of abortion rights. The least permissive are laws that only make an exception for a danger to the life of the mother. The Texas law resembles those in 18 Muslim-majority countries, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Iraq, Egypt and Lebanon, which only allow this exception.

That is, only 18 of 47 Muslim-majority countries have abortion laws today as restrictive as that in Texas.

A couple of things are worth noting here. First, for all the boasting among American supporters of the Afghanistan War about the way it upheld women’s rights, abortion was outlawed by the American-established government of Afghanistan for the past 20 years before the Taliban came back into power. The same thing is true of the American-established government of Iraq. So much for the Bush Wars as crusades for women’s emancipation. Is it an accident that George W. Bush had been governor of Texas before becoming president?

It should also be noted that Lebanon’s restrictive law banning most abortions except where the mother’s life is in danger reflects the influence of the Maronite Church, which is a uniate church in communion with Roman Catholicism. Shiite law allows abortion in the case of fetal impairment, as well.

In Europe, Malta, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Poland, the Vatican, Monaco and Andorra ban or severely restrict abortion. Ireland only allowed some abortions in a 2018 referendum, and most of the subsequent some 6,000 terminations have been before the passage of 12 weeks. These countries have these laws because of the stance of the Roman Catholic Church and because secular majorities have not challenged them as has happened in many European Catholic-majority countries.

This issue is not along a Christian-Muslim or East-West axis.

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Bonus Video:

France 24 English: “Texas abortion law: activists take to the streets to protest the new ban • FRANCE 24 English”

Granada, in southern Spain’s Andalusia region, was the final remnant of Islamic Iberia known as al-Andalus – a territory that once stretched across most of Spain and Portugal. In 1492, the city fell to the Catholic conquest.

In the aftermath, native Andalusians, who were Muslims, were permitted to continue practising their religion. But after a decade of increasingly hostile religious policing from the new Catholic regime, practising Islamic traditions and rituals was outlawed. Recent archaeological excavations in Granada, however, have uncovered evidence of Muslim food practices continuing in secret for decades after the conquest.

The term “Morisco”, which means “little moor”, was used to refer to native Muslims who were forced to convert to Catholicism in 1502, following an edict issued by the Crown of Castile. Similar decrees were issued in the kingdoms of Navarre and Aragon in the following decades, which provoked armed uprisings.

As a result, between 1609 and 1614, the Moriscos were expelled from the various kingdoms of Spain. Muslims had already been expelled from Portugal by the end of the 15th century. So this brought to an end more than eight centuries of Islamic culture in Iberia.

For many, the conquest of Granada is symbolised by the Alhambra. This hilltop fortress, once the palatial residence of the Islamic Nasrid rulers, became a royal court under the new Catholic regime. Today it is the most visited historical monument in Spain and the best-preserved example of medieval Islamic architecture in the world. Now, archaeology provides us with new opportunities to glimpse the conquest’s impact on local Andalusi communities, far beyond the Alhambra’s walls.

Uncovering historical remains in Cartuja

Excavations ahead of development on the University of Granada’s campus in Cartuja, a hill on the outskirts of the modern city, uncovered traces of human activity dating back as far as the Neolithic period (3400-3000 BC).

Between the 13th to 15th centuries AD, the heyday of Islamic Granada, numerous cármenes (small houses with gardens and orchards) and almunias (small palaces belonging to the Nasrid elite) were built on this hill. Then, in the decades following the Catholic conquest, a Carthusian monastery was built here and the surroundings were completely transformed, with many earlier buildings demolished.

Archaeologists uncovered a well attached to a house and agricultural plot. The well was used as a rubbish dump for the disposal of unwanted construction materials. Other waste was also found, including a unique collection of animal bones dating to the second quarter of the 16th century.

Archaeological traces of culinary practices

Discarded waste from food preparation and consumption in archaeological deposits – mostly animal bone fragments as well as plant remains and ceramic tableware – provide an invaluable record of the culinary practices of past households. Animal bones, in particular, can sometimes be connected with specific diets adhered to by different religious communities.

The majority of bones in the well in Cartuja derived from sheep, with a small number from cattle. The older age of the animals, mostly castrated males, and the presence of meat-rich parts indicates they were cuts prepared by professional butchers and procured from a market, rather than reared locally by the household.

The ceramics found alongside the bones reflected Andalusi dining practices, which involved a group of people sharing food from large bowls called ataifores. The presence of these bowls rapidly decreased in Granada in the early 16th century. Smaller vessels, reflecting the more individualistic approach to dining preferred by Catholic households, replaced the ataifores. So the combination of large bowls, sheep bones paired and the absence of pig (pork would have been avoided by Muslims) points to a Morisco household.

Politicising and policing dining

The Catholic regime disapproved of these communal dining practices, which were associated with Andalusi Muslim identity, and eventually banned them. The consumption of pork became the most famous expression of policing dining habits by the Holy Office, more popularly known as the Inquisition. Echoes of this dining revolution can be seen today in the role of pork in Spanish cuisine, including in globally exported cured meats such as chorizo and jamón.

Previously focusing on those suspected of clinging to Jewish practices (forbidden in 1492), in the second half of the 16th century, the Inquisition increasingly turned its attention to Moriscos suspected of practising Islam in secret, which included avoiding pork. In the eyes of the law, these Muslims were officially Catholic so were seen as heretics if they continued to adhere to their earlier faith. Moreover, since religious and political allegiance became equated, they were also regarded as enemies of the state.

The discarded waste from Cartuja, the first such archaeological example from a Morisco household, demonstrates how some Andalusi families clung to their traditional dining culture as their world was transformed, at least for a few decades.

Aleks Pluskowski, Associate Professor in Medieval Archaeology, University of Reading; Guillermo García-Contreras Ruiz, Profesor de Arqueología Medieval y Posmedieval, Universidad de Granada, and Marcos García García, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of York

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.