Solidarity Under Attack

The Strange Alliance Between American Traditionalist Christians and the Far Right

 

Paolo Cugini

In recent decades, the United States has witnessed the strengthening of an alliance between traditionalist Christianity and formations of the political far right. This phenomenon may appear contradictory, especially considering that many of Christianity’s core teachings—such as solidarity, welcoming others, and charity—seem to stand in open contrast to positions that often reject or devalue these very principles. Nevertheless, this alliance is rooted in deep cultural, historical, and theological foundations. In the following lines, I will attempt to explain why a significant portion of American traditionalist Christians support far-right ideologies and movements that interpret solidarity in a negative light.

To understand this contemporary phenomenon, it is necessary to trace the origins of the relationship between conservative Christianity and American politics. Historian Kevin M. Kruse, in his book "One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America" (2015), argues that the link between traditional Christianity and right-wing economic policies emerged as early as the 1940s and 1950s, when businesses and religious leaders joined forces against the New Deal and the growing influence of the welfare state. According to Kruse, from these years onward, Christianity was progressively associated with the values of individualism, economic freedom, and mistrust of public intervention, all of which were seen as "threats" to individual liberty.

Anthropologist Kristin Kobes Du Mez, in "Jesus and John Wayne" (2020), shows how white American evangelicalism promoted a vision of Christianity as a bastion of conservative values—authority, order, patriotism—often in opposition to the idea of collective solidarity or social responsibility, and oriented primarily toward defending "law and order" against any form of dissent or claim to civil rights. To understand why solidarity is viewed negatively by many far-right groups, it is useful to refer to the thought of Patrick J. Deneen, professor of Political Science at Notre Dame and author of "Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future" (2025). Deneen explains how part of the American right believes that collective social projects—often associated with the term “solidarity”—have brought only dependency and inefficiency, undermining individual freedom and responsibility.

Among the most frequently cited sources by traditionalists is also the thought of Ayn Rand, although not herself a Christian. In "The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism" (2023), Rand defends the moral superiority of individualism and considers any form of forced solidarity a threat to human dignity. For Rand, solidarity imposed by the State amounts to a kind of moral slavery, depriving individuals of their autonomy and obliging them to take on the needs of others. Many American traditionalist Christian leaders have paradoxically integrated this vision into their public preaching, as highlighted by Michael Sandel in "Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?" (2013).

Another decisive element is the emergence, in the postwar period, of the so-called "prosperity gospel," according to which personal and material well-being is a sign of divine blessing. According to Kate Bowler, author of "Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel" (2013), this theology has led millions of American Christians to identify individual success as God's will, devaluing all forms of institutional and public solidarity, seen as undue interference in the private relationship between God and the believer.

The Cold War played a central role in strengthening the mistrust of the traditionalist Christian world toward the idea of solidarity. In the American context, solidarity was associated with socialism or, worse, Soviet communism. As historian David W. Swartz notes in "Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism" (2012), any welfare, redistribution, or social protection project was attacked as a potential “Trojan horse” for atheist and totalitarian ideologies. This gave rise to a rhetoric that identified solidarity as a direct threat to faith and the foundational values of the nation, and at the same time as the danger of possible communist infiltration into the country.

In contemporary America, according to Robert P. Jones in "The End of White Christian America" (2016), many traditionalist Christians perceive a crisis of values, accentuated by the rise in ethnic diversity, secularization, and the loss of religion’s public centrality. In this context, the far right offers a reassuring narrative, focused on defending a cultural and religious identity perceived as threatened by outsiders, in which any form of universal solidarity is viewed with suspicion, as if hiding a threat to the traditional order. This helps explain the easy penetration into American imagination of the ideas of the current President of the United States, Donald Trump, and his political project to "purify" America of immigrants.

A key role is played by conservative media outlets, such as Fox News or the Christian Broadcasting Network, which promote a vision in which solidarity policies are represented as instruments of state control and moral corruption. According to sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in "Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right" (2016), many traditionalist Christians identify with a narrative that sees the far right as the defender of religious and individual freedoms against the oppressive “political correctness” and “globalist ideologies” of universal solidarity.

The support of American traditionalist Christians for the far right, which devalues solidarity, is the result of a complex web of historical, theological, social, and media factors. While early Christianity placed love of neighbor and sharing at its center, contemporary American Christianity—at least in its traditionalist and politicized version—has often privileged the defense of the individual, private property, and negative liberties, perceiving public solidarity as a threat. Understanding the deep roots of this phenomenon is essential to confronting the political and social challenges of contemporary America.

 

 

Rethinking Theological Categories in Light of Neuroscience, Postmodern Philosophy, and Emerging Spiritualities

 

Toward an Epistemological Reconfiguration

Paolo Cugini

Classical Christian theology emerged within philosophical and anthropological frameworks shaped by Hellenistic metaphysics and medieval scholasticism. Categories such as anima rationalis, liberum arbitrium, peccatum originale, salus, and transcendentia were articulated within an epistemic regime presupposing the universality and immutability of truth (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q.75). In the contemporary horizon, these inherited categories are destabilized by converging intellectual trajectories: postmodern philosophy has dismantled the authority of metanarratives (Lyotard, 1979/1984), neuroscience has reconfigured the discourse on mind and selfhood (Damasio, 1994; Gazzaniga, 2018), and the proliferation of new spiritualities has displaced the locus of the sacred beyond institutional boundaries (Heelas & Woodhead, 2005). These developments compel theology toward a methodological and hermeneutical recalibration.

Neuroscientific research has elucidated the neural correlates of cognition, emotion, and moral decision-making, challenging dualistic ontologies that posit a radical ontological distinction between res cogitans and res extensa (Churchland, 2013). The work of Damasio (1994) and LeDoux (2002) has shown that consciousness and emotional processing are deeply embodied phenomena.
From a theological perspective, this invites a reconsideration of the imago Dei not as an immaterial essence but as a relational and embodied reality (Johnson, 2014). Eschatological hope, in this view, may be grounded not in the evacuation of corporeality but in its transformation (Romans 8:23). The challenge is to engage neuroscientific insights without reducing the human to its neurobiological substratum, preserving the irreducibility of the spiritual dimension.

The postmodern critique articulated by Derrida (1967/1978), Lyotard (1979/1984), and Vattimo (1999) undermines claims to epistemic finality and absolute foundations. Lyotard’s “incredulity toward metanarratives” (1979/1984, p. xxiv) requires theology to renounce its aspiration to monopolize religious meaning and instead to embrace a plurality of interpretations.
This entails adopting what Ricoeur (1970) termed a “hermeneutics of suspicion” alongside a “hermeneutics of faith,” acknowledging the provisionality of doctrinal formulations as historically conditioned articulations of communal belief, subject to ongoing reinterpretation in light of shifting horizons of meaning.

 Emerging Spiritualities and the Re-mapping of the Sacred

The contemporary spiritual marketplace is characterized by eclectic, hybrid practices—mindfulness, neo-shamanism, eco-spirituality—that often operate outside traditional confessional frameworks (Heelas & Woodhead, 2005). Such practices challenge the presumption that divine agency is confined to ecclesial structures. A constructive theological engagement demands a pneumatology capacious enough to recognize the Spirit’s work beyond institutional boundaries (Congar, 1983) while exercising critical discernment to avoid collapsing all spiritual phenomena into undifferentiated relativism.

Reconsidering theological categories under these conditions requires a dialectical methodology:

·      Deconstructive, to interrogate inherited categories whose metaphysical presuppositions are no longer tenable;

·      Reconstructive, to generate a framework capable of mediating between empirical insights from the sciences, the hermeneutical sensibilities of postmodern thought, and the plural phenomenology of contemporary spirituality.

Such a methodology resists the binary opposition between tradition and innovation, aiming instead for a ressourcement that remains faithful to the Christian kerygma while engaging the epistemic shifts of the present (de Lubac, 1946/1998).

In this epistemological horizon, theology cannot remain a defensive bastion against modernity’s disruptions. It must become a site of generative interruption (Taylor, 2007), where inherited truths are re-voiced in forms resonant with a world shaped by neuroscientific anthropology, postmodern hermeneutics, and post-institutional spiritualities. Truth, thus conceived, is not a static possession but a pilgrim reality—ever provisional, yet continually drawn toward the inexhaustible mystery it seeks to name.

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References

·      Churchland, P. S. (2013). Touching a nerve: The self as brain. W. W. Norton & Company.

·      Congar, Y. (1983). I Believe in the Holy Spirit (Vols. 1–3). Seabury Press.

·      Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

·      de Lubac, H. (1998). Catholicism: Christ and the common destiny of man (L. C. Sheppard, Trans.). Ignatius Press. (Original work published 1946)

·      Derrida, J. (1978). Of grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press. (Original work published 1967)

·      Gazzaniga, M. S. (2018). The consciousness instinct: Unraveling the mystery of how the brain makes the mind. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

·      Heelas, P., & Woodhead, L. (2005). The spiritual revolution: Why religion is giving way to spirituality. Blackwell Publishing.

·      Johnson, E. A. (2014). Ask the beasts: Darwin and the God of love. Bloomsbury.

·      LeDoux, J. E. (2002). Synaptic self: How our brains become who we are. Viking Penguin.

·      Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge (G. Bennington & B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1979)

·      Ricoeur, P. (1970). Freud and philosophy: An essay on interpretation (D. Savage, Trans.). Yale University Press.

·      Taylor, C. (2007). A secular age. Belknap Press.

·      Vattimo, G. (1999). Belief (L. D’Isanto & D. Webb, Trans.). Stanford University Press.

 

THERE IS STILL TIME

 

 

Paolo Cugini

 

Perhaps one of the greatest errors committed in Christianity was to make people believe that God was present exclusively in the Catholic Church. After all, the famous phrase attributed to Saint Cyprian in the third century AD, "extra ecclesiam nulla salus," says it all. Parishes were structured around this statement, becoming, over time, bastions of defense of the correct doctrine of God. Outside was the world, the devil. Salvation was found only within the Church. And where was God?

Then came the Crusades, the Holy Inquisition, and the witch hunts: all part of the control of the supposed truth by the ecclesiastical institution, which, the further it distanced itself from the Gospel, the more rigidly it tightened its doctrine, to the detriment of the authentic evangelical truth and, above all, of the many people tortured and killed. Then there was the Pope with his army, and no one asked whether it made sense for a Pope, Christ's representative on earth, to have an army. How many pages of false history have been written to justify all this filth.

Exercising control over the truth was the West's great mistake. It is a sin of presumption, which has led to the extermination of other peoples, cultures, and religions. Every time the Christian West encountered culturally and religiously diverse peoples, it did not apply Jesus' teaching of mutual love, but rather the principle of extermination, implemented by Joshua when he entered the fateful promised land. He who sows violence reaps hatred. He who seeks to impose his own truth at all costs becomes a liar, because truth is not found in hatred and war, but in peace and love.

And yet, it took very little. All it took was to listen, instead of squawking about one's own supposed truth. Presumed, because what the Christian West tried so hard to defend, even through the extermination of peoples and cultures, was not the Gospel it claimed to defend, but something else entirely: a system of power that had nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus, an inquisitorial and oppressive system that had nothing to do with the dialogical style of the Master of Nazareth.

If only they had listened! They would have discovered that the Spirit blows where it wills and that no one in the world can claim the right to control it. They would have grasped the presence of the Mystery in the history of the men and women of the peoples, cultures, and religions scattered throughout the world. They would have understood that the Spirit is love and that he inspires love in all who welcome him. They would have perceived that the Holy Spirit blows within and without us to build bridges of communion and not to raise walls of separation. If the presumptuous men of the Church had listened to those they encountered, they would have discovered that the Holy Spirit was already present and had entered into the path of that culture, that people, that religion.

If the attitude of listening to others, as Jesus embodied, had existed from the beginning, and his dialogical and welcoming style had been put into practice, perhaps the world would not be as it is. All is not lost. There is still time to set out and listen to the presence of the Mystery in all that lives, abandoning the pretense of pigeonholing it into a single source of rational categories. Because the Mystery is much more than a rational framework. Now that we have understood the lesson, we can live Jesus' message differently. There is still time to allow the Spirit to act within our lives, to make room for him. There is still time.

Source: https://regiron.blogspot.com/2025/07/ce-ancora-tempo.html  

The Necessity of a Theology from Below

 

Reflections on a Faith Embodied in the Lives of People

Paolo Cugini

 

Within the broad landscape of contemporary theological thought, there is a growing awareness that theology can no longer be constructed solely "from above," as an abstract reflection disconnected from the concrete needs of people. The call for a theology from below arises from the lived experiences of communities, of the peripheries—stories often marked by marginalization, exclusion, suffering, but also by hope and resistance. This need is not merely a passing trend in academic or pastoral contexts; it emerges from a profound movement within the history of faith, Christianity, and religions more broadly—a movement toward rereading the experience of God starting from the real lives of believers and seekers.

Theology from below stands in contrast to a theology from above, which is often centered on doctrinal and dogmatic systems produced by religious or academic elites, sometimes far removed from the everyday realities of ordinary people. “From below” signifies a movement that begins with the people, with concrete experience, and with reading the Word in dialogue with the social, cultural, political, and economic realities of life.

This theology is nourished by the stories, struggles, dreams, and wounds of people—especially those on the margins: the poor, the excluded, victims of injustice, LGBTQ+ persons, and women. It also includes those labeled by society as minorities: Indigenous peoples, persecuted ethnic groups, the homeless, nomads, Roma communities. There is an entire world living in the “underground” of history—systematically excluded not only by a society that tells its story from the center, but also by the Church and Christian communities trapped in a dominant theological narrative. The goal is not to replace one vision with another, but to integrate the perspective of lived experience into the reflection on God, the Church, and the ultimate meaning of life.

The biblical tradition itself shows how God often reveals Himself to those in the most difficult situations: Abraham is called from the desert, Moses leads a people out of slavery, the prophets speak for those who have no voice. The Gospel of Jesus is deeply marked by encounters with the excluded—women and men who are sick, poor, or foreigners. The cross of Christ is the supreme expression of a God who joins wounded humanity.

Throughout Church history, the tension between “official” theology and the popular faith lived in the concreteness of daily life has always been present. One need only think of popular devotions, reform movements, and struggles for social justice.

In recent decades, movements such as liberation theology in Latin America have made it clear that reflection on God must begin with the concrete experience of the poor and the oppressed. Likewise, feminist theologies, queer theologies, Indigenous and postcolonial theologies remind us that many often-silenced voices have something essential to say about the mystery of God.

We live in an age shaped by multiple crises—social, economic, environmental, and a profound crisis of meaning. In many parts of the world, religious institutions appear distant from the real needs of communities. In this context, a theology from below is not only timely but urgent. It offers a renewed credibility to the Christian message because it places the person—with their history, their suffering, and their hopes—at the center. Through genuine listening to the questions, anxieties, and longings that arise from real life, theological reflection becomes more human, more accessible, and more prophetic. A theology from below also creates space for the recognition of experiences that have historically been excluded from theological production and decision-making—due to origin, social class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or economic condition.

Experiences of theology from below have already borne extraordinary fruit: greater attention to inclusion, a fresh rereading of Scripture, interreligious and intercultural dialogue, and engagement in the pursuit of social justice and peace. Pastoral practices have emerged that are more participatory and inclusive, valuing the richness of diverse experiences. This perspective does not abandon the search for theological truth; rather, it grounds it in the life of the community—in shared experience, concrete service, and mutual listening. In this way, theology ceases to be only words and becomes gesture, action, and daily commitment.

While theology from below opens new horizons, it also brings challenges. The first is the risk of fragmentation: listening to many voices is enriching, but it also requires careful synthesis and discernment. Moreover, it is important not to radically oppose “above” and “below,” but instead to foster a fruitful dialogue between academic reflection and daily life. Another challenge is the risk of relativism: placing experience at the center could lead to a loss of coherence or meaning. Yet a theology from below that is rooted in Scripture, in living tradition, and in communal discernment can maintain a clear and strong orientation.

Looking forward, theology from below must become ever more dialogical, plural, and attentive to the signs of the times. It is a theology that hears the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor, as Pope Francis has reminded us. It is capable of taking seriously the questions of new generations, minorities, migrants, Indigenous peoples, women, and LGBTQIA+ persons. It will become increasingly important to form communities capable of discernment and deep listening, where reflection on God emerges from encounter and shared experience—not just from authority or doctrine. Theology from below is not a trend, nor merely one option among many: it is the response to a deep need in our communities and societies. It is a way of restoring meaning and strength to the Christian message, and of building more just, open, and welcoming Churches and societies. Only by listening to those who walk at the margins of history can theology truly become a living word—capable of transforming the world.

 

Theology from Below: Horizons of Theological and Cultural Contamination

 

Toward a New Understanding of the Sacred Through the Encounter Between Differences

 

Paolo Cugini

Theology from below represents one of the most significant and innovative developments in contemporary theological thought. It is not simply a movement, but a methodological and anthropological perspective that chooses to begin with the concrete lives of people—on the margins, in the peripheries—to reflect on the meaning of the sacred, the action of God in history, and the ways in which human communities give voice to the ultimate questions of existence. In this sense, theology from below does not merely invert the traditional “top-down” approach—often starting from doctrine or ecclesial hierarchy—but opens new spaces for theological and cultural contamination, fostering authentic dialogue between diverse visions, experiences, and languages.

At the heart of theology from below lies the recognition of the plurality of theological subjects: anyone, by virtue of their experience, can be a bearer of meaning and contribute to collective reflection. This challenges the idea of theology as the product of the magisterium or a narrow elite, affirming instead the conviction that truth is built through dialogue, openness, and mutual listening. One of the most significant consequences of this bottom-up approach is the possibility—and indeed the necessity—of entering into fruitful dialogue with other theologies, spiritualities, and traditions. Theological contamination thrives on plurality and dialogue. It recognizes that faith, like all human experience, is shaped by historical, social, and cultural contexts, and that the richness of theological thought also lies in its ability to be traversed by different voices, to welcome new perspectives, and to be challenged by difference. Here, contamination is not understood as confusion or a weakening of roots, but as enrichment—as an opportunity to discover new dimensions of the mystery. The encounter between Christians from diverse social and cultural contexts, for example, has led to a deep revision of traditional theological categories, opening the way for new languages, images, and narratives.

A privileged space for theological contamination is interreligious dialogue. In a world that is increasingly multicultural and multireligious, faith communities are called not only to defend their identities, but to discover the other as a resource. Dialogue with Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and many other traditions is no longer an optional choice, but a necessity for building bridges of understanding, respect, and cooperation. Recognizing the other, welcoming their questions, and reinterpreting one's own heritage in light of new challenges are all elements of a contaminated theology. In this sense, contamination is not a threat, but a resource: it allows theology to evolve, to renew itself, and to speak credibly to the men and women of our time.

In Latin America, contamination with indigenous religious traditions has given rise to an inculturated theology, capable of embracing ancestral symbols, myths, rites, and worldviews without abandoning the Gospel message. Similarly, in African American contexts, Black theology has drawn from the spiritual and cultural richness of experiences of diaspora and resistance, blending Christian and African elements into new forms of spirituality and social praxis.

Because it begins with lived experience, theology from below is especially attuned to intercultural dynamics. Religious experience is never neutral with respect to context: it is shaped by the language, gestures, music, and narratives of each people. Open to listening to others’ stories, theology from below fosters the emergence of spaces of cultural contamination, where differences are not obstacles but resources. In today’s migratory contexts, faith often becomes a place of encounter between different worlds. Christian communities welcoming faithful from various continents find themselves living a plurality of practices, sensibilities, and languages. This encounter generates tensions and questions, but also new forms of communion that enrich the face of the Church and invite a rethinking of what it means to belong ecclesially.

Theology from below is also characterized by its ability to generate new languages—languages closer to real life, less tied to academic formality or doctrinal abstraction. In many experiences, storytelling, personal narratives, poetry, song, and shared rituals become privileged tools for speaking of God and the human. In this sense, cultural contamination is not only about content, but also about expressive forms. Theology from below draws from the arts, literature, popular music, and collective imagination to give voice to the questions of meaning that arise from the existential peripheries. In this way, theological reflection becomes more accessible, engaging, and participatory.

Every process of contamination carries a certain degree of risk: the fear of losing one’s identity, of compromising the purity of tradition, of diluting the message. However, theology from below invites us to move beyond a logic of defense and closure, and instead to embrace the evangelical dynamic of hospitality. The encounter with the other and with difference does not erase anyone’s uniqueness, but rather projects it into a broader horizon, capable of interpreting the signs of the times. By opening itself to theological and cultural contamination, theology from below does not remain confined to the religious sphere but assumes an active role in social transformation. In giving voice to the oppressed, denouncing injustice, and proposing new forms of coexistence, it becomes a promoter of change. Practices of solidarity, struggles for civil rights, and paths of intercultural reconciliation find in theology from below a solid theoretical and spiritual foundation.

In a world increasingly marked by plurality and complexity, theology from below offers itself as an open laboratory—a shared journey. Its strength lies precisely in its ability to be contaminated, to be questioned and transformed by the encounter with otherness. Along this path, faith becomes history, doctrine becomes narrative, and the Church becomes a people on the move. Only in this way, perhaps, can we remain faithful to the Gospel, which is always good news for those on the margins, and which calls us to build communities where everyone can find a home.

 

Escape from Religion that counts decline and minority

 

 

Paolo Cugini

Abandoned churches strike me. I have passed by some churches in small towns and have seen the obvious decay of church structures—parish halls, cinemas, and churches—due to abandonment. I stopped in front of some of these buildings and, besides taking a few pictures, I reflected and wondered about the reasons for this abandonment, which takes on the sad aspect of decline. These now-abandoned spaces were undoubtedly once filled with children and adults in the usual course of parish life. How many priests worked enthusiastically in those now-abandoned rooms; how many catechists and adults worked hard to organize catechism, parties with children, group events and prayers. Why does everything seem abandoned now? What happened?

The first answer that comes to mind as I pass in front of the also-abandoned parish house is that now there is no longer a priest. Italian parishes depend on the presence of the priest; without him, everything fades away. If there is no priest, there is no Sunday Mass. As I observed this sad sight, I thought of the small base communities I accompanied for many years in Brazil. On Sundays, people gather in the chapel or at someone’s house to celebrate the Lord’s Day, because their faith does not depend on the priest. They have become used to organizing the community’s life themselves, organizing catechism for their children, forming youth groups where numbers allow, celebrating novenas of their saints, Marian devotions, and gathering once a week to read and reflect on the Word of God. The priest, in these contexts, passes through the communities from time to time to celebrate the Eucharist, and, above all, is concerned with the formation of laypeople by organizing courses for catechists and ministers of the Word and the Eucharist. And so, when the priest isn’t there, the communities suffer, but they don’t die: this is what I saw in Brazil.

Abandoned churches and parishes are also clear signs of an undeniable fact: the unstoppable decline of the Catholic Church, or at least the Church as it has imposed itself in the Western world. This is what historians and philosophers call the end of Christendom. Churches closed not only in the countryside but also in cities, churches given to other religious groups, or churches used for art exhibitions, are increasingly signs of this unstoppable decline of a way of being present in the world that has characterized the Catholic Church until now. We are retreating because we no longer have the numbers or the strength to maintain the structure that characterized our way of being Church. Until a while ago, the end of Christendom was not taken very seriously because it seemed just the analysis of some isolated philosopher; now it is an increasingly evident fact—it is a fact that everyone can see.

How to live faith in a time of the end of Christendom? Put more simply: how to live faith in a context of marginality, of being a minority? We count less and less, not only numerically, but also socially, politically, and culturally. Increasingly, people live and organize themselves independently of religious proposals. We were used to living our faith in a context where everything revolved around the church tower, and those who did not live that way were frowned upon, and themselves felt bad. Now, many people live well and are well, even better, without attending parish buildings.

It is not enough to become aware of this historic and epochal transition, but something must be done. The general impression is that we are slowly letting ourselves be buried by history. It's as if we don’t want to see or hear the crumbling of the building that is coming down, and so we risk dying under the rubble. This seems to me the tendency of the nostalgic: not to accept reality and so to restore the forms of the past, to live as if nothing were happening. Priests are fewer and older, and they are expected to maintain the services of the past. If a priest does not visit homes to bless them, he is looked down upon by parishioners. At the same time, even today, laypeople in our parishes count for almost nothing—or rather, they count only to the extent they can carry out the tasks the parish priest assigns. Even though we are facing an evident epochal transition, which would require significant pastoral choices, we are living in the same system as before: ecclesiastical hierarchy lined up on one side and the people of God on the other. We are destroying ourselves.

For those, instead, who let themselves be guided by the Holy Spirit, the end of Christendom can become a great opportunity to rediscover our origins. In the Gospel, Christians are never called to count for something in society but to be leaven in the dough, the salt of the earth. At the Last Supper, Jesus warns his disciples that they will be hated by the world, that they will be persecuted, and that they will have to learn to rejoice in that. Christianity is born as a small mustard seed, as a hidden treasure. There is an entire spirituality of concealment that permeates the pages of the Gospel, which we can recover in this new phase of history. By giving up places of command, the Church can increasingly live on the knowledge of its Lord, letting itself be guided by the Holy Spirit to create the community of brothers and sisters. And so, instead of organizing crusades to force peoples to convert, what happened at the beginning of the Christian era may happen: seeing how Christians loved each other and how they shared, many people drew near, asking to join the community.

The end of Christendom can represent for us, disciples of the Lord, a great opportunity to fulfill Isaiah's prophecy: “In the last days the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established as the highest of the mountains; it will be exalted above the hills, and all nations will stream to it” (Is 2, 2). What history is offering us is the possibility of fleeing from religion that wants to count, from the religion of power, from religion made of privilege, of those who always want to be on the side of those who are well off, from religion that is the contradiction of the Gospel. From this religion of appearances, we can finally free ourselves once and for all, to see if the life the Gospel offers us is authentic and possible. Because this is what the religion of power has called into question—it is precisely what the religion of those who want to be on high, paying the very high price of inconsistency and scandal, has cast doubt on: the possibility that the Gospel is authentic, and not just a grand fraud. The postmodern era, then, as a time of the decline of the religion of the strong and the powerful, so that we can live in the minority the style proposed by Jesus, who never needed the squares to demonstrate his truthfulness and authenticity.

Escape from dogma: Omnipotent?

 

Paolo Cugini

I always find it difficult to answer young people's questions about the omnipotence of God, or God's foreknowledge. Certainly, I know very well that the creed says: "I believe in God, the Father Almighty." Nonetheless, I feel embarrassed, a certain discomfort at this adjective, whose meaning I do not understand, not the etymological sense, but the existential and spiritual sense, especially within the current postmodern culture. The Church Fathers of the early centuries taught us that the message of Jesus always needs to be inculturated. They did so in their preaching and mystagogy, taking concepts from the Greek culture they lived in and returning words and speeches in which the same Greek philosophical concepts were transformed to give substance and voice to the new message of the Risen Lord. Philosophical concepts which today, in a cultural and social context, really struggle to express what evangelizers would like to announce. We lean on, we cling almost desperately to that very deep conceptual apparatus, but today incapable of convincingly and engagingly telling the mystery of God manifested in Jesus Christ. Among these ancient-tasting concepts, which once went a long way but now struggle to assert themselves in the new cultural context, is precisely that of omnipotence.

So, we might ask: what is the use of knowing that God is omnipotent? Who does it serve? How did we come to such a definition? Do men and women today need the omnipotence of God to live, or something else? These are questions that enter the mind when we meet people burdened with their problems, seeking advice, a helping hand to move forward. In these cases, it is difficult to propose the omnipotent God. Another one comes to mind, though, the one who did not care about his omnipotence, did not display it, at least not as the authorities expected, or as the world expected, as we all expect, constantly seeking a God who replaces us in the problems of life, a God, as Bonhoeffer would say, a “gap-filling God.” In this regard, we might recall that God decided to manifest his omnipotence in his Son Jesus: by making himself a servant, taking the last place, washing the disciples’ feet. It’s omnipotence upside down, that which Jesus manifested, omnipotence in reverse, omnipotence not found in power that crushes empires or enemies, but in the free gift of self, in dying instead of, in giving oneself for us. If this is the case, instead of calling Him omnipotent, the God of Jesus Christ could have been called love, humility, mercy.

"Then," some say to me, "if God already knows everything, in what sense are we free?" How do you answer such a question? Omnipotence is the power to do everything, without any limit. What is the use of a God like that, who does everything, who knows everything in advance? What do we do with the omnipotence of God? Even St. Thomas recognized the difficulty in understanding divine power, finding it hard to explain in what sense God’s omnipotence consisted. The medievals had a field day with this theme, seeking to understand whether God can do whatever He decides to do or whether God can do whatever is logically possible for Him. We might ask: what kind of problems are these? How can you think of God in these terms? Such reflections probably arose in certain cultural contexts, in monasteries far from reality or among hermits in the desert. A God thought about, more than encountered; a logical God, more than a feeling; a reasoned God more than passion, a God to be contemplated with a full belly, rather than an empty one. In fact, if your belly is empty, if you haven’t eaten all day, you don’t think of an Omnipotent God: you think about and seek Him in another way. If one is weakened by hunger, by the injustices of the world, one has no strength to think, to elaborate deep definitions of God, but only to invoke something that feels close, near. And so, the Omnipotent God terribly resembles our homes full of everything, and very little those of the poor, full of nothing. The Omnipotent God is the projection of the strength of those who are well-off, who have no problems, who live carefree, who, when they get up in the morning, can open the fridge and find something to eat and drink, who have energy to spare. The Omnipotent God greatly resembles the lord of armies, the God who destroys enemies, the God of the powerful on earth, who, to create peace in the world, leave trails of blood and destruction behind them.

Very different is the action of the weak God, manifested in the cross of Jesus. He, in fact, as the apostle Paul taught us, created peace between two divided peoples, not by destroying one in favor of the other, but by absorbing their hatred upon himself, on his own flesh, defeating hatred with love. The God of Jesus, whom he revealed to us with his lifestyle, with his way of Being, is weak and not omnipotent, because, as Paul always teaches, it is in weakness that God’s power is manifested. Jesus is the Emmanuel, the God-with-us, who does not live among the clouds of heaven, but came to dwell among us, and his Kingdom, which is not of this world, he created among us, within us. So we feel the Omnipotence of the God of Jesus Christ not in the abstract concepts of philosophers, but in the simple gestures of the poor, the excluded, all those who are daily robbed by an unjust economy or, to use Pope Francis’ words, by the economy that kills, the economy generated by the worshippers of the Omnipotent God.

The God of Jesus Christ also manifests his Omnipotence whenever he listens to his interlocutors, helping them to understand reality, helping them above all to escape from the confusion of a world that lives only in illusions. It is not an omnipotence that is manifested from above, that puts the one who turns to it into a listening position, a one-way manifestation. The Omnipotence that comes from Jesus’ style upends the situation, because He is the one who listens, He is the one who stimulates the interlocutor to open up. The model of this dialogical style of Jesus is undoubtedly the dialogue with the disciples on the road to Emmaus. It is the Risen Lord who appears to the two sad disciples fleeing Jerusalem without understanding what happened. Jesus, the Risen One, manifests his power to them by approaching discreetly, by listening, by allowing them to share their frustrations, with patience and gentleness. In the Risen One’s response there is nothing assertive, nothing of absolute truths that descend from above like a slab of cement that flattens everything—feelings, emotions, subjective experiences. On the contrary, the Word of the Risen One rests on them like a balm, a Word perceived as true by the two disciples because it is embedded in their personal experience of the Lord. A truth, therefore, intuited, gently given, grafted onto the listeners’ lives. It is in this sense that the Word of the Risen One becomes the Omnipotence of meaning that gives life and strength to lives defeated in their existential frustrations, to dead bodies because locked in their small spiritual failures.

Omnipotence of the Risen One, of the One who, before rising again, had walked with men and women, lived with them. This is the Incarnate Omnipotence that we need, this Omnipotence made history, which is not recognized by external manifestations, but by the way it acts differently in the company of men and women. The other, that omnipotence of arrogant lords, sitting in five-star restaurants talking about other people’s lives; that conceptual omnipotence for respectable, ethically upright people, we leave to you.

What miracle did Elijah perform in the house of that poor woman? Elijah was hungry and wanted to be fed. Does it make sense to work a miracle, demand a miracle, lower the heavens to demand a piece of bread? Isn’t it that typical arrogance of the delirium of omnipotence that wants to bend everything to itself, even God? Where did Elijah learn such presumption? He had set out on his journey so docile, so humble and simple—how did he change so much, and in so little time?

Becoming overbearing, arrogant: it’s the path one slides into in false religion. When God is only useful to the extent that He answers our desires, then, my friend, we’re in trouble

Escape from Disembodied Spirituality Spirituality and Reality

 

Paolo Cugini

I often experience strange sensations that make me feel uneasy. Every day I am in contact with the spiritual world—rituals, liturgies, prayers. And it is precisely in these circumstances that I experience these strange feelings, namely the sensation of being outside the world, that the spiritual is something detached from the real. In fact, sometimes I feel that the spiritual is the exact opposite of the real. I notice, in fact, that there is a whole kind of spirituality that, instead of springing from reality, is born elsewhere—and I still haven’t figured out where, though I’m starting to sense it—instead of arising from earth, from flesh, from personal life, it emerges as if its goal were to shield men and women from reality. There is a whole spirituality that seems to have nothing to do with the life that men and women live, with real life made of flesh and blood, joy and pain, sacrifice and enthusiasm, eros and agape, work and play, life and death. It seems that a spiritual world is invented to protect oneself from life, from the reality of life, as if this were something negative, as if reality were negative, as if the life that springs from reality were something to be protected against.

How does this spirituality of escape from reality, from life, work? It operates by playing ahead, anticipating the future, spiritually leaping over the present, in order not to feel it, not to sense it, to dull as much as possible its explosive force. As if the present were negative, as if life were something to flee from, and, above all, as if living life fully and authentically were something blasphemous. It is very strange that the spiritual is confused with the unreal or even identified as such. Charles Péguy used to say that the spiritual constantly lies stretched out on the storm's bed. These were the reflections of a poet who made the incarnation of the Word the center of his life. One immediately wonders: how did we manage to reduce it to this? How could it happen that the great mystery of the incarnation was so debased as to serve as a surrogate, as an anesthetic for reality, as if the spiritual were something false? How could this great distortion happen, that the spiritual, in the line inaugurated by Jesus Christ—a spirituality entirely saturated with flesh and earth, blood and life, because He was a man like us—could become a tool for religious paths that deny reality, that deny all those dimensions that are part of life such as suffering, tears, smiles, choices for something definitive? Above all, though, I ask myself: why do we let people believe it? How could the greatest act of love in humanity be reduced to a rite and locked within it, as if the love of Jesus were a matter of folded hands and not of life choices, a matter of censers and lace rather than the total gift of self, a matter of rubrics and formulas and not a matter of life lived to the fullest?

Every day, I live with the sensation of being a religious official, an official of nothingness, someone who dispenses nothingness, who allows people to fill themselves with nothing, with emptiness, to feel good, to have the sensation of well-being or, at least, of feeling better. Because that’s what devotions, disembodied spiritualisms, devotees of nothing, and masters of the void produce: a momentary well-being, like an anesthetic or a tranquilizer. This is what disembodied spirituality, emptied of the mystery of the incarnation of the Word, proposes: a justification for one’s life, a pass to not change anything, a quick fix for what has become dirty, a cure-all to keep doing what one has always done. What do I have to do with all this?

Jesus proposed the Gospel, the Kingdom of God, a kingdom of justice, of communion. Jesus walked the streets of Israel inviting people to welcome one another, to respect each other, to forgive, to give dignity, to not live as servants, to not seek the first place but the last, to love each other, to share what one has, to not humiliate the poor but to welcome them, to not consider themselves superior to others but to stay in their place, to not seek happiness in material things, to not sell out for money but to give one’s life for love. It is clear that, to accept his proposal, conversion, change, the desire for a new life were needed. And yet, no. Disembodied spirituality asks nothing of this, but offers only an inner tranquilizer. The devotion of the easy candle demands at most a few coins, and then you can stay where you are, keep doing what you did before, because these wretches teach you that a couple of formulas well said are enough for everything to be set right, everything to go back as it was, that with two well-recited formulas and a few candles God is happy. As if the problem were God! As if the whole issue of religion were God and not men, God and not women, God and not the world. Wretches! What have you done? What a disaster you have built, servants of the fleshless spiritual, of heaven without earth, of the spirit that reeks of emptiness! The Gospel was so beautiful! Beautiful because it tasted of life, of earth, of love and passion. Beautiful because it invited you to reflect, to think, to go inside yourself, to look within, in order to walk better on the roads of life. Because it was precisely there that Jesus lived: on the road. And it was exactly there that he taught us to be: on the roads of life, to be there with dignity, facing what must be faced. In the Gospel Jesus invited us to be ourselves, to not be afraid of our weaknesses, because with Him by our side even weakness turns into strength and peace becomes the unmistakable sign of his presence.

Perhaps this is what people are looking for when they go to church: a tranquilizer, to feel a little better, to flee for a few moments from real problems, from the problems of life, from all those problems that have piled up and for which there seems to be no solution, no way out. Luckily there is religion, churches, priests in confessionals; luckily, there is someone who can relieve pain, suffering, the malaise of living. So it's not just devotions, but also those who encourage them, propose them, invent them. There aren’t only devotions born in an era—the modern one—when everything was derived from humans, as if we men were the center of the world, lords of history: there are also those who keep them alive and, let’s say it, those who find it convenient to do so. Spirituality as a synonym for the unreal, not necessary for life, something one can do without, useful precisely for distraction, to feel better in a moment of displeasure or depression. For this reason, many people do without the spirit, the churches, and feel no need for this kind of spiritual guide, who lead you, that is, into the unreal, outside of time, out of history, out of life. Those who live well, who love life, who feel good in reality, do not seek something to distract them from what they love, that leads them out of reality. Those who love life, who are comfortable in this world, will never seek that kind of religion that offers the kind of spiritual proposal I have described above and will stay as far away as possible from the priests of nothing, from the masters of emptiness. To return to the Gospel so as not to die, to escape from empty religion and find the light of life, the reality of things: this is our task.

When Elia was young, he thought religion was something serious. He thought it was impossible to do without it. Elia was convinced that all men and women were religious. In a sense, he was not wrong. We know how much religion shapes the culture of peoples. For this reason, Elia committed himself so much that everyone would believe. He was so happy to be God’s favorite prophet and did his best not to disappoint Him. But perhaps, he had not well understood that God was not much interested in his religious performances. God wanted Elia to become a free person, not a warrior; He wanted him to become an open-minded person, not a bigot, ready to destroy the opponent. Understanding what God wants is not always easy. The difficulty increases in periods when you feel driven by a divine force, from the awareness of having understood exactly what God wants from man and woman. When the mind is too clear about God’s ideas, it means that presumption has taken over and the distance between His will and ours has become abysmal. Only a wall can stop the arrogance that has invaded the soul of the religious man or woman. And Elia already had his wall waiting for him.

Perhaps this is what threw Elia into crisis and led him into the desert: the realization that everyone has the right to believe what they want and that no one can despise the gods of others. In the end, the urge to suppress another's religion is a sign not only of great ignorance, but also of fear of the other and a lack of certainty in one’s own faith. In fact, after killing Jezebel’s 400 prophets, Elia flees into the desert. Perhaps he had long been considering the possibility of the coexistence of many religions, that everyone could worship what they wanted. It’s true that in his case it was about solving a political problem. This, too, is an aspect worth attention. Religion can become a tool of abuse and injustice. In such cases, it’s no longer a matter of religion or God, but of human instruments to obtain and defend one's own benefits. Perhaps Elia was wondering what he was doing, whose service he was at. It’s possible to enter a crisis, to have doubts to try to understand. Sometimes, carried away by enthusiasm, we embark on dangerous paths, headlong in defense of values whose origin, history, and evolution we do not know. And then it happens that, the more we enter life and have experiences, the more we feel the fragility of our certainties, a fragility that increases the more we have embraced causes with the stomach rather than the heart, more with passion than with love. In these circumstances, two roads open before us: either we harden our faces, our minds, closing ourselves in the extreme defense of those certainties that have now become nothing but smoke, or we stop, give ourselves time to understand and to reconstruct ourselves. Elia is the great prophet who taught us precisely this: it is not virtuous to stand and defend the indefensible. One is not more a man or a woman by being tough, but by admitting one's confusions, giving oneself time to understand.

Every time in our journey we meet arrogant people, we can be sure that deep insecurities are hiding there. The desert, then, as a necessity to rediscover the god received in childhood, to realize that he probably does not need our muscles or our reasoning to defend himself, to realize above all that it is nothing but a heap of cultural fantasies, not even very elaborate, indeed, often poorly thought out and poorly developed.

If personal identity is built on the hardness of a monolithic god, we are destined to become hard and cold, full of insecurities to be defended tooth and nail. What an unsettling mirror this reflection offers us, on all those religions built with spears and swords, inventing the fables of the lord of armies. How many tough fathers had to make sacrifices to an unmerciful god, who demanded the destruction of enemies. How many sons and daughters suffered the harshness of these heartless and monstrous gods. How many people in the world have never been able to free themselves from the moral, ritual, existential slaveries created by hard men, incapable of love. How I suffer for them!