Is your god a dictator?

in which i'm a little disgruntled...

I’ve got two or three other blogs (not what follows below) that I really should have finished, polished, and chosen from to send yesterday and last week. Instead, I have been waffling and having bad sleep and leaving my still packed suitcase by the front door for over a week now.

Yesterday I called the feeling that’s leaving me in this situation a “summertime sadness,” a product of the longer days, the better light and temperatures, the blooming trees, and the ways that all that beauty is of course not living up to the semi-feral expectations that I didn’t realize I was carrying with me all winter. I told my friends that I was pretty sure I’d feel better soon. I had food poisoning Sunday night, after all, and I gave myself a teensy hangover that I woke up with on Thursday morning, after all, and I haven’t done laundry in weeks, after all. Palestine is still begin bombed and Palestinians are still soldering through an ethnic cleansing, after all.

It’s all of that, certainly. But, also, it doesn’t really matter why exactly I’ve felt like this dusting of ennui lately. At least, I can decide it doesn’t matter why so much as it matters that I go ahead and do my laundry, I call up friends and family to check on them, I turn off screens as often as possible and read novels, and I find someone to send money to in Palestine.

Thanks for your patience as I’ve faltered a bit with my consistency here. I am getting back into it and don’t take for granted your support, financial or otherwise. You’re asked to give your attention a million different places daily, basically, so I appreciate the time you give to me.

Instead of finishing those other blogs I mentioned that I’m still drafting (including one about saints and politicians, a true story about a Texan middle school principal who once compared gay advocates to Nazis, and one about the limitations of “knowing” something), I’m going to dash off a response to blog I read today. This is, usually, a bad idea, but here we are. Sometimes we knowingly do something that is a bad idea, because we’d rather do something than nothing.

please join me in watching hbo’s the young pope, it’s deranged.

Everyone is talking about the pope, which makes sense because we only get a new one every so often. It also makes sense because we have had a decent one until his death last month. “Decent” is a complicated word when considering the Catholic church, as it’s been involved with countless tragedies big and small throughout its history and some of the loudest voices in the room very often advocate for pretty obviously bad things, like banning abortion, denying the validity of queer people’s lives, and resisting the “Islamification of Europe”. Still, this was a pope who mostly didn’t make people’s lives worse, put the cultural force of institutional Christianity behind the fight for an environmentalism ethic, and rejected hate, mostly¹.

It remains to be seen whether Pope Leo XIV is any good, though I think we have some reasons to be optimistic. The last Leo was one who argued for the rights of workers and the dignity of the poor. The new Leo has been imperfect, but does have a strong connection to South Americans and seems to understand the plight of migrants fleeing to the United States. Whether or not you think a pope should have influence in the world or not, he does and we want him to have the best values possible.

What I am interested in today is the blog I just read from Hamilton Nolan, one of my favorite writers especially when it comes to labor news and advocacy. He’s very smart and very dedicated to the labor movement and if you aren’t following him yet, you should. Still, I rolled my eyes a bit reading this blog.

I didn’t roll my eyes because I think he’s incorrect or even making unfair rhetorical attacks. The blog makes a pretty straightforward argument, which is that faith, especially religious faith, is a product of humans trying to make sense of things that are not simple or easily understood. He starts the blog by saying that anyone who calls themself anything other than Agnostic is kidding themselves. I tend to agree with him, though I see agnosticism as a modifier, a word that you tack onto other words rather than a static identity by itself. Bubble gun to head, I guess I’d call myself an agnostic, pantheistic Catholic? Also gay? For whatever that is worth.

Nolan takes a different tack, though. He believes that when many (most? all?) people call themselves religious, they are only religious insofar as they are able to suspend their disbelief. The more that they are open to “science” which is . He makes the evocative claim that “Religions of today are just the mythologies that haven’t died out yet.” I don’t think he’s wrong, exactly, but I braced myself as I skimmed through the blog in the waiting room of my optometrist. If nothing else, the tone rings with that particular resonance that I associate with the most ardent Bernie Bros or members of Pantsuit Nation. Like it’s being said with a kind of patronizing smile and a knowledge that, when the score is settled and the points are added up, they’ll be the winner and you’ll be the loser. You just aren’t accepting it yet.

I’ll just quote at length a selection from Nolan that covers his first main argument (his second is simpler and triggers less resistance in me):

The intellectual isolation necessary to sustain true belief in holy books and prescriptions handed down from God grows ever harder to sustain. Reasonably smart people with even modest educations and access to modern communication systems cannot, really, be genuinely “religious,” except as a purposeful act of rebellion against modernity. You can choose that, if you want. But do you believe it? All of it? Really and truly? I don’t think so. Not most of you.

So, I can probably make sense of how he and I disagree on the potential use of religion pretty simply here, which is that he (and a lot of people, to be fair) see religion and faith as a game of looking for answers. I have never understood this.

I’ve written about this in drips and drabs over the years, but I’m not sure I’ve done a great job of being succinct. That’s not really gonna happen today, but, I will say that I would argue there’s plenty of room in just about any religious life for unanswerable questions. I think this is also true in most scientific pursuits, or artistic pursuits, or political pursuits, or any other kind of human pursuit.

Does a belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, meddling God with a white beard and a wet lab with ingredients to make kinds of humans and a control board where He manipulates the weather and He makes you fall in love with one person and not another and He keeps track of your sins in a book that he checks twice each year before sending Santa to deliver presents or coal require intellectual isolation? Yeah, for sure.

Any kind of dictatorial figure who gets to define reality irrespective of your experience will require that of you. But I know plenty of people who would not call their relationship with their religion to be a dictator-subject relationship. I know of plenty who might, or if they didn’t define it that way it’s because their dictator god/patriarch doesn’t want them to. But to limit the possibilities of a religious life to that one group of people, those who sit dumbly in waiting for commands from an all powerful god, is a mistake. People do not make revolutionary change without a spiritual or religious element at play.

I really want to caveat that, but I won’t just yet. I will caveat it later I’m sure, in a longer piece about religious devotion and revolution (one of those I should have drafted to send instead of this one), but for now I’m just gonna leave that uncharacteristically direct claim alone. People do not make revolutionary change without a spiritual or religious element at play.

As for Nolan’s second main point in that blog, that Pope Leo XIV is first and foremost just a guy who is now a leader and not the mystical voice of god on earth, I would say, yes, pretty much agreed. The only hesitation I have here is that I haven’t given it much thought because I don’t especially care and the impulse to be the first one to wag your finger and tell everyone to calm down isn’t one I share. But I do think he’s right, and if you’re someone who feels differently about the pope, who feels that we should see him as something special, someone with some unique relationship with god, I’d be very curious as to why. I’m curious how that helps your world make sense and whether or not that viewpoint plays into how you see yourself as an agent who can make positive change in the world or not. Please, genuinely, send me a note or drop a comment, let’s chat!

Wrapping this up now, I am keenly aware of why I don’t usually write “responses”, especially underbaked ones that don’t get a full drafting process or edit. But I want to get back into my routine and I want to get back into conversation with y’all. Hamilton Nolan is still one of my favorite thinkers on the Internet, especially, as mentioned, about politics and the labor movement. I may sit with this longer and think differently about this little pope blog. Who can say?

Here are a few things I’ve read in the past week, not just about the pope, that I think you might enjoy!

1. On Francis, by Alicia Kennedy. It gets a lot right about being a Catholic by inheritance and what this last papacy meant.

2. This piece that my friend Valerie just sent me about “end times fascism”. Would love to chit chat about this one.

3. A write-up in the Philadelphia Inquirer about Leo XIV and what a friend of his from his time at Villanova thinks he’ll care about in his papacy.

4. Lena Dunham’s little essay about not being built for New York, New York. Say what you want about Lena, I don’t care!

1. Catch me doing the Italian hand wave thing and screaming “frociaggine!!!” alone in my house all the time now. I do this especially when my terrible cat Oliver knocks something over.