Bonus Sample: Antifascist Christianity: Black Jesus (Pt. 2)
Full episode on Patreon
Part 2 moves from Christofascist spectacle to the “mushy middle” of liberal Christianity—why it so often blesses order over justice and falters when fascism rises. Drawing on MLK’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, Reggie Williams’s Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus, and lived experience inside white urban churches, he traces how bureaucratic piety, respectability politics, and spiritual bypassing drain the Gospel of conduct and courage—what Bonhoeffer called a “funeral wreath” laid on the culture.
How do institutions become procedurally compassionate yet politically inert? Matthew weaves in memories of global South Christian art, Denys Arcand’s Jesus of Montréal, and the everyday service-industry grind of parish life to show how care without solidarity becomes maintenance—while Black Jesus points to co-suffering, mutual aid, and material resistance.
Touching grass means moving from abstraction to accompaniment and from decorum to defense.
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Brief: Antifascist Christianity: Black Jesus (Pt. 1)
In this first installment of Antifascist Christianity: Black Jesus, Matthew revisits Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s journey from the theological classrooms of Berlin to the Black churches of Harlem — where he encountered a Jesus entirely unlike the imperial figure of his upbringing. Bonhoeffer arrived in New York a servant of white European Christendom, and left transformed by the radical, suffering, and liberatory presence of Black Jesus.
Matthew connects Bonhoeffer’s awakening to today’s spectacle of white nationalism in worship — from the triumphalist religion on display at Charlie Kirk’s memorial to the enduring cultural power of “white Jesus” as theology for empire. Drawing on Reggie Williams’s Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus, Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, and Jeanelle Hope and Bill Mullen’s The Black Antifascist Tradition, the episode traces how colonialism created a Christ built to bless domination, and how the Black church reclaimed him through solidarity, suffering, and resistance.
The contrast between the fortress hymn A Mighty Fortress Is Our God and the spiritual Were You There becomes the turning point in Bonhoeffer’s faith — from triumph to trembling, from power to empathy.
Part 2, out Monday on Patreon, explores how liberal Christianity tried to stand between these poles, and why it failed.
Show Notes
Hope, Jeanelle K., and Bill V. Mullen. The Black Antifascist Tradition. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2023.
Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Revised and Updated Third Edition. Foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley. Preface by Damien Sojoyner and Tiffany Willoughby-Herard. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020.
Williams, Reggie L. Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014.
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278: This Podcast is Illegal
Our podcast is not actually illegal—yet. Thanks to Trump’s recent Security Presidential Memorandum, NSPM-7, or “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” it soon could be.
Today we talk about one of the starkest moves into fascism Americans have yet seen from MAGA: what it is, how pre-crimes can soon be reality, and the fear factor this memo is designed to inspire. We’ll also discuss some possible responses to the next phase of MAGA authoritarianism.
Show Notes
Trump’s NSPM-7 Labels Common Beliefs As Terrorism “Indicators”
What Is NSPM-7? Over 3,000 Nonprofits Sound Alarm on New Trump Directive
Trump Orders Broad Effort to Root Out Groups He Says Organize Political Violence
The meme-ification of political violence
The Upside of Collapse
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Bonus Sample: Death is Just A Doorway
The People’s Temple in Jonestown, Heaven’s Gate, The Order of the Solar Temple. All cults that ended in tragic mass suicides. How could such lofty aspirations end so badly?
For today’s self-contained installment of The Roots of Conspirituality series, Julian explores the shadow side of the anxiety-relieving religious notion that death is just a doorway into a better place.
How do charismatic prophets indoctrinate believers into ending their lives, and often the lives of their children, in the name of spirituality?
Julian briefly examines each of these groups, along with Paul Nthenge Mackenzie’s Good News International Ministry—450 of whose followers starved themselves to death in a Kenyan forest in 2023. Then he transitions into exploring philosophical, psychological, evolutionary, and neuroscience-based ways of understanding the elements that make these spiritualized perversions of our survival instincts possible.
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Brief: He’s Coming For All Vaccines
RFK Jr posted a seven-minute video earlier this week that assures us that vaccines aren't all that great, actually. Derek reads the studies Kennedy references as proof. You might be surprised to learn the HHS Secretary has very selective reading.
Show Notes
Annual Summary of Vital Statistics: Trends in the Health of Americans During the 20th Century
The Questionable Contribution of Medical Measures to the Decline of Mortality in the United States in the Twentieth Century
Infectious Diseases and Social Change
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Dismantling New Age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy-mad yogis. At best, the conspirituality movement attacks public health efforts in times of crisis. At worst, it fronts and recruits for the fever-dream of QAnon. As the alt-right and New Age horseshoe toward each other in a blur of disinformation, clear discourse, and good intentions get smothered. Charismatic influencers exploit their followers by co-opting conspiracy theories on a spectrum of intensity ranging from vaccines to child trafficking. In the process, spiritual beliefs that have nurtured creativity and meaning are transforming into memes of a quickly-globalizing paranoia. Conspirituality Podcast attempts to bring understanding to this landscape. A journalist, a cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic discuss the stories, cognitive dissonances, and cultic dynamics tearing through the yoga, wellness, and new spirituality worlds. Mainstream outlets have noticed the problem. We crowd-source, research, analyze, and dream answers to it.
Sverige