ANP

ProfielOostenrijk

Deze invloedrijke pater pleit voor dictatuur en wordt onderzocht door het Vaticaan. ‘Zijn netwerk heeft diepe zakken’

De Oostenrijkse pater Edmund Waldstein leidt een grote priesteropleiding en heeft het luisterend oor van de Amerikaanse vicepresident J.D. Vance. Net nu hij op weerstand stuit, kondigt het Vaticaan een inspectie van zijn klooster in Heiligenkreuz aan.

Jelmer Mulder                27 juni 2025, 22:00

Wie de reactie van het Oostenrijkse klooster Heiligenkreuz leest op een recent aangekondigde inspectie door het Vaticaan, zou denken dat er niet veel aan de hand is. ‘We zien dit als een welkome gelegenheid tot reflectie en versterking’, schrijft prior Johannes Paul Chavanne.

Maar een inspectie door het betreffende ‘ministerie’ van het Vaticaan (in rooms-katholiek jargon: een apostolische visitatie door het Dicasterie voor het Gewijde Leven) komt niet uit de lucht vallen. Het is geen strafrechtelijk onderzoek van de kerk, maar wel een spaarzaam ingezet instrument, waarvoor gegronde aanleiding moet zijn. De abdij met bijna honderd cisterciënzer monniken wordt dan ook gecontroleerd op een reeks aan mogelijke misstanden.

Interesse vanuit conservatieve hoek

Het Dicasterie wil onder meer weten hoe de abdij omgaat met mogelijke gevallen van misbruik en wangedrag. Ook is de inspectie, volgens de uitgelekte Vaticaanse aankondigingsbrief, gericht op de stijl van leidinggeven en de naleving van kerkelijke regels binnen het klooster. De genoemde aanleiding voor de inspectie: ‘enkele aanwijzingen’, die niet verder worden toegelicht.

De al in de twaalfde eeuw opgerichte abdij van Heiligenkreuz treedt graag naar buiten via bijvoorbeeld YouTube-filmpjes. Het heeft een conservatief imago; daaraan droeg bij dat de beroemde antiprogressieve psycholoog Jordan Peterson in de rust van het klooster aan zijn laatste bestseller mocht werken.

Een katholiek weblog van conservatieve snit reageerde gealarmeerd op de aangekondigde inspectie. Volgens Silere non Possum opent het Dicasterie met de inspectie de aanval op het klooster ‘onder het mom van ideologisch evenwicht’. Het Vaticaanse onderzoek zou neerkomen op repressie van een florerende abdij, die ‘geworteld is in traditie’.

Dat Heiligenkreuz floreert, in tegenstelling tot veel andere kloosters, klopt. Dat komt met name door interesse vanuit conservatieve hoek, denkt Vaticaankenner Rik Torfs. “Maar je moet hen niet als een gesloten groep beschouwen”, waarschuwt hij. “Binnen dat conservatisme bestaan verschillende tendensen.”

Extreme denkbeelden

De nu aangekondigde inspectie moet vanwege de benodigde voorbereiding al langer in de pijplijn zitten. Het is dus een erfenis van de ‘progressieve’ paus Franciscus, maar de huidige paus heeft blijkbaar ook geen reden gezien om de inspectie tegen te houden. Daarnaast noemt het Vaticaan zelf het traditionalistische karakter van het klooster in ieder geval niet als reden voor de visitatie.

Wel is de timing van de aankondiging van de inspectie saillant. Die komt op het moment dat een van de monniken van Heiligenkreuz, de reactionaire pater Edmund Waldstein, onder vuur ligt vanwege zijn extreme denkbeelden. Sowieso is het voor de cisterciënzers een merkwaardige tijd: er loopt ook een Oostenrijks strafrechtelijk onderzoek naar de afzender van vele anonieme, beschuldigende brieven over de abdij.

De 41-jarige Oostenrijker Edmund Waldstein is theoloog en geeft les aan twee katholieke hogescholen, waaronder die van Heiligenkreuz, dat momenteel honderden studenten heeft. Al jaren is Waldstein een prominent verkondiger van een theocratie, een reactionaire staatsvorm waarbij de kerk de hoogste autoriteit is – het zogenoemde ‘integralisme’.

Doodstraf voor ketters

In zijn artikelen loopt Waldstein te hoop tegen de ‘zieke’ moderne staat, en fantaseert hij over vervanging door een katholiek, meer autoritair regime. Tekenend is zijn uitspraak over de Iraanse ayatollah-regering, dat superieur zou zijn aan het westerse liberalisme ‘omdat het religieuze regels aan de bevolking oplegt’.

Onder de religieuze regels die Waldstein voor ogen heeft is bijvoorbeeld de herinvoering van de doodstraf voor vasthoudende ‘ketters’. Hij zegt daar wel bij dat het pauselijk gezag daar momenteel geen toestemming voor geeft. Waldstein accepteert dat gezag.

Ook over de beruchte Mortara-affaire, waarbij een heimelijk gedoopt Joods jongetje in de negentiende eeuw werd gekidnapt door het Vaticaan, heeft Waldstein een controversiële mening. De Joodse ouders ‘ontkenden Christus’, stelt Waldstein, en kregen terecht het kind niet terug omdat zij zich niet lieten dopen. Het Vaticaan was daarmee redder van het kind, geen gijzelnemer.

Wat de verschillende stromingen binnen het integralisme verder ruwweg bepleiten is een afgedwongen terugkeer van het belang van traditie en familie. Dat betekent: vrouwen- en homorechten de deur uit, een grotere kerkelijke invloed op het onderwijs, en een verbod op goddeloze zaken zoals pornografie.

Luisterend oor van J.D. Vance

Binnen Heiligenkreuz heeft Waldstein een belangrijke positie. Hij is directeur van het instituut waar nieuwe studenten theologie worden geholpen bij het vinden van hun roeping. Zij besluiten er bijvoorbeeld of ze priester willen worden. Van die laatste categorie studenten kent Heiligenkreuz er veel: de opleiding van het klooster levert het hoogste aantal priesters af van de Duitstalige wereld.

Ook buiten de muren van het klooster heeft Waldstein enige invloed – zelfs tot in de hoogste regionen van de Amerikaanse overheid. Waldstein, kind van een Oostenrijkse vader en een Amerikaanse moeder, heeft het luisterend oor van de Amerikaanse vicepresident J.D. Vance, stelt de Duitse onderzoeker Andreas Kemper. De naar eigen zeggen ‘post-liberale’ rechterhand van Trump laat zich graag adviseren door anti-liberale denkers.

Sowieso onderhouden integralisten in de VS en Oostenrijk innige banden, met samenwerkingsverbanden en bezoekjes over en weer, zegt de Oostenrijkse theoloog Sigrid Rettenbacher. De Amerikaanse universiteit van Steubenville, waar Waldsteins vader hoogleraar is, noemt ze ‘een hotspot voor integralisme’. Het komt daarbij goed uit dat die universiteit een campus heeft in Oostenrijk.

Binnen de netwerken van integralisten en uiterst rechts waarin Waldstein zich begeeft bestaat het ‘expliciete doel om democratieën te verzwakken’, zegt Rettenbacher. En dat lukt ze. “Je ziet de gevolgen in Hongarije en de Verenigde Staten. Het zijn groepen met diepe zakken en veel invloed”.

Eerder waarschuwde het wetenschappelijk bureau van de Duitse christendemocraten, de Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS), in een rapport ook al voor het gevaar van (neo-)integralisme. De Kas noemde Waldstein daarbij als voorbeeld van de beweging in Europa.

Streep door promotie

In een kritisch stuk dat Rettenbacher in april van dit jaar schreef over Waldstein, benoemt ze dat gevaar voor de democratie van deze netwerken. Na haar artikel reageerde klooster Heiligenkreuz dat het ‘onvoldoende aandacht had besteed aan bepaalde theologische standpunten van Waldstein’. Het klooster zou met Waldstein in gesprek treden en distantieerde zich, in de lijn van Rome, van het integralisme.

Daar bleef het niet bij voor Waldstein. Er ging ook een voorlopige streep door zijn zogeheten habilitatie, een soort wetenschappelijke promotie. In mei distantieerde de Universiteit van Innsbruck, waar Waldstein zou promoveren, zich van hem vanwege zijn extreme standpunten. De universiteit vroeg hem zijn habilitatie in te trekken.

Rettenbacher – die ook voorzitter is van de Oostenrijkse afdeling van de Europese vereniging voor vrouwelijke theologen – vroeg in haar artikel ook aandacht voor de bedreigingen en intimidatie die zij en een aantal van haar progressieve vrouwelijke collega’s het afgelopen jaar ontvingen.

‘Poging tot chantage’

De theologen worden lastiggevallen in telefoontjes, mails, of een brief naar hun thuisadres. Bij een overnachting op een seminarie sloegen en schopten onbekende daders tegen de deur van de slaapkamer van twee theologen. Rettenbacher zegt zelfs slachtoffer te zijn van een poging tot chantage. De aanvallen lijken uit christelijk-fundamentalistische hoek te komen, schrijft het Oostenrijkse Furche.

Rettenbacher houdt Waldstein niet verantwoordelijk voor de aanvallen op haar en haar collega’s. “Maar als standpunten als die van Waldstein door priesters worden geuit, is het geen wonder dat sommige christenen denken dat ze het recht hebben om mensen lastig te vallen”, zegt Rettenbacher.

In een reactie schrijft Waldstein dat hij ‘niets te maken heeft met pogingen om theologen op welke manier dan ook te intimideren of lastig te vallen’. Hij ‘veroordeelt dergelijke daden in de krachtigste bewoordingen, ongeacht wie ze begaat’. Rettenbacher heeft de Oostenrijkse bisschoppenconferentie gevraagd om zich over deze kwestie uit te spreken.

Dwang en misbruik

En dan is er nog een ander opvallend aspect aan deze roerige geschiedenis. Er gaan al een tijdje vele anonieme brieven naar ‘verschillende instituten’, waarin beschuldigingen worden geuit over klooster Heiligenkreuz, meldt het Oostenrijkse Kurier. De beschuldigingen gaan over onderwerpen als dwang, misbruik en ‘geschillen over het toekennen van functies’.

Het klooster deed aangifte van poging tot laster en smaad tegen de afzender(s) van de brieven. Het strafrechtelijk onderzoek ging midden juni van start. Volgens prior Chavannes gaat het om brieven ‘met volstrekt ongeloofwaardige beschuldigingen tegen een lid van onze gemeenschap’.

De visitatie van het Dicasterie bij Heiligenkreuz vindt plaats in het najaar. Tot dan zijn het onrustige tijden voor pater Waldstein en zijn geliefde klooster in het rustieke Wienerwald.

Lees ook:

Amerikaanse christenen proberen Europa hun conservatieve agenda op te dringen, en dat gaat gepaard met veel geld

Radicaal-rechtse Amerikaanse christenen ondersteunen Europese geestverwanten om hun politieke idealen te realiseren met tientallen miljoenen dollars.

https://www.trouw.nl/religie-filosofie/deze-invloedrijke-pater-pleit-voor-dictatuur-en-wordt-onderzocht-door-het-vaticaan-zijn-netwerk-heeft-diepe-zakken~bdb18b48/

This Land Is Not Your Land : The Ethnic Cleansing of Native Americans

 

vrijdag 10 juli 2020

The Ethnic Cleansing of Native Americans

This Land Is Not Your Land

The Ethnic Cleansing of Native Americans

By David Treuer

July/August 2020

In his first annual message to the U.S. Congress, in 1829, U.S. President Andrew Jackson—a slave-owning real estate speculator already famous for burning down Creek settlements and hounding the survivors of the Creek War of 1813–14—called for the “voluntary” migration of Native Americans to lands west of the Mississippi River. Six months later, in the spring of 1830, he signed the Indian Removal Act into law. This measure gave the president the authority to negotiate with Native American tribes for their fertile lands. The statute set off waves of litigation, mineral prospecting, and land speculation—not to mention waves of violence committed by nonnative settlers against Native Americans.

As the historian Claudio Saunt shows in his new book, Unworthy Republic, U.S. administrators and politicians gradually turned the voluntary removal into compulsory expulsion using a mix of legal and extralegal measures. State and federal militias hunted, killed, and often scalped Native Americans. Squatters and opportunists moved onto Native American lands both before and after tribes officially relocated. And the government gave banks and other lenders the power to force Native Americans into punitive sales and forfeitures, rendering tens of thousands of Native Americans homeless in their own lands. Thousands of Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, Delawares, Hurons, Potawatomis, Sauks, Seminoles, and Senecas died in the process of removal. The myriad relocations and displacements are now commonly referred to by a single name: the Trail of Tears.

By the end of this decadelong process, the federal government had spent $75 million to eject Native Americans from the eastern United States. That is the equivalent of over $1 trillion today, or $12.5 million for each Native American removed. In 1836, 40 percent of every dollar the U.S. federal government spent went toward enforcing the Indian Removal Act. In 2019, by contrast, only 17 percent of the federal budget went to national security and defense.

But the economic returns on this massive project of ethnic cleansing and displacement were also considerable. In the 1830s—the decade of removal—the federal government made nearly $80 million selling Native American lands to private citizens, around $5 million more than it spent. And in the 1840s, those lands produced 160 million pounds of ginned cotton, 16 percent of the national crop. The real winners, then, were southern slaveholding landowners and their investors in New York.

Today, migration—both forced and voluntary—looms large once again. And the lessons from this nineteenth-century history have a renewed relevance. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has estimated that in 2018, there were 70.8 million displaced people worldwide. The UN has similarly noted that around 272 million—a full 3.5 percent of the world population—are migrants. Many of their lives and stories parallel those of the Native Americans who lived through the Trail of Tears.

ILL FARES THE LAND

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, life for the roughly 100,000 Native Americans living east of the Mississippi was pretty good. It in no way resembled the savagery that European American settlers imagined. None of the scores of tribes in the eastern third of the country was made up of nomadic hunter-gatherers: they hadn’t been for hundreds of years. Nearly all lived in settled villages; they farmed and gathered edibles in the woods and shellfish along the coast. The Cherokees had developed a syllabary and published their own newspaper. They had also begun to create their own form of representational democracy. Other tribes, such as the Chickasaws and the Choctaws, had adopted Christianity, built schools, and even selectively embraced slave ownership.

But no matter how many European American practices Native Americans adopted, settlers remained suspicious of them and their ways of life. Isaac McCoy—a preacher who evangelized among the Miami, Odawa, and Potawatomi tribes of the Great Lakes—believed that “the Indian problem” was one of proximity. McCoy concluded that, on the whole, Native Americans were hard to save. “How grossly mistaken are those writers who would have the world believe that the Indians are quite a virtuous people,” he complained. This was even truer for the Native Americans who were constantly exposed to the derelict fringe of American society on the frontier. “The great mass,” he wrote, “have become more and more corrupt in morals, have sunk deeper and deeper in wretchedness, and have dwindled down to insignificance or to nothing.”

A print of U.S. President Andrew Jackson at the Battle of Tallushatchee, 1813Pictorial Press / Alamy Stock Photo

McCoy imagined an “asylum” to the west. He shared this idea with Lewis Cass, governor of the Michigan Territory. And Cass brought the notion with him to Washington when he became Jackson’s secretary of war. Of course, the idea that there was an “Indian problem” was already widespread. Previous presidents and state governors had tried to solve it in myriad ways. George Washington, for instance, burned so many Native American villages in the Northeast that it earned him the Seneca name “Town Destroyer.” And Thomas Jefferson proposed luring Native Americans into debt and obligating them to sell their lands in lieu of payment. But never before had the country’s chief executive so explicitly endorsed segregationist removal policies on this scale.

Power brokers and land speculators on the eastern seaboard knew that the best weapon they had to gain access to tribal lands was the states themselves, which felt that they could pass whatever legislation they wanted and subject everyone within their borders, including Native Americans, to their own laws. In 1832, the Supreme Court ruled that the individual states had no authority in Native American affairs. But Jackson felt strongly that the federal government should stay out of tribal matters. The drama of states’ rights versus the federal government was staged at the expense of the Native American nations.

The Indian Removal Act provided for an exchange of lands and fair compensation. What is more, the statute explicitly stated that its provisions should not be construed in a way that violated any existing treaties with Native American groups. But the act was vague. How would compensation work? Who exactly would be compensated, and how? How would land in the West be chosen? And how would the Native American migrants get there? In the end, the results were neither fair nor in accordance with existing treaties. State representatives and assorted business interests immediately seized on the law’s ambiguity, formulating a disjointed and confusing array of methods that were, in Jackson’s words, “calculated to induce . . . a voluntary departure.” Saunt notes that “the phrase perfectly captured the bad faith that underlay the policy.”

In the meantime, the federal government assigned clerks to deal with the day-to-day logistics of the removal, appointed commissioners to negotiate land cessions, and mobilized thousands of soldiers to make the deportations a reality on the ground. Jackson even invited his friend General George Gibson to oversee the operation.

Some Native American tribes did leave voluntarily; many of them, however, were transported by private contractors who kept the cost of moving people as low as possible by denying them any medical care and by forcing the old and infirm to march on foot, resulting in untold suffering and death. Other Native Americans stayed despite orders to leave. In time, voluntary deportation became compulsory. Many Native Americans in the East were persecuted and killed as individuals. Consider, for instance, a nineteen-year-old Creek man who was captured by slave hunters. When they realized that the youth wasn’t an escaped slave, and thus had no value, they shot him and scalped him. Still others were hunted as groups. The Seminoles effectively fought off the U.S. government for years, suffering thousands of casualties in the course of the Second Seminole War.

The Seminoles ultimately remained in their ancestral lands in central Florida. But they were the exception rather than the rule. By 1830, roughly 20,000 Native Americans remained in the eastern third of the continental United States. Many of them were engulfed by settlers and forced to live on mountainous and agriculturally unproductive land, separated from their kinfolk who had migrated, with their cultural and political systems in a shambles. Those who left were rarely better off. The land set aside for Native American settlement in what is now Oklahoma lacked water for irrigation; the terrain was rocky, and the soil thin. What is more, the boundaries were unclear and often overlapped. Many Native American people who ventured to the territory in advance of settlement noted that it was completely unsuitable for agriculture. The government, however, persisted in referring to it as “fine country.”

Meanwhile, landowners in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, and North and South Carolina quickly expanded the plantation system—and, by extension, chattel slavery—onto Native American lands. Saunt does an incredible job of linking northern financiers to southern slave owners and both to the process of Indian removal. Over the course of the 1830s, Saunt notes, “the enslaved population in Alabama more than doubled to 253,000. By the end of the decade, nearly one out of four slaves worked on land that only a few years earlier had belonged to the Creeks.” This was largely financed by northern bankers—such as Joseph Beers, the president of the North American Trust and Banking Company—who skimmed handsome profits off the cotton planted, picked, and processed by the enslaved.

A CAUTIONARY TALE

Unworthy Republic is a study in power. It describes, in detail, the coming together of money, rhetoric, political ambition, and white-supremacist idealism. Saunt shows his readers the cost of a racial caste system in the United States. The immoral and illegal ethnic cleansing of the eastern third of the country via Native American removal was not merely a historical crime in its own right; it also abetted another such crime, by solidifying and extending slavery and its attendant racial hierarchy, which would only be partially overturned in the 1860s, with the end of the American Civil War.

Despite the magnitude of the social and political forces involved, however, Native American removal was in no way necessary or inevitable. It didn’t just happen: a thousand small decisions and a few big ones made it so. At the heart of this process was the nation’s first populist president, Jackson. “Old Hickory,” as he was known, first made his name as a military commander in the Indian Wars, but his private fortune came from real estate speculation. He premised his worldview—one of limited federal control and vocal support for “the common man”—on his status as a political outsider and his personal experience as a landowner.

The parallels with the present are eerie. Contemporary Americans, much like their counterparts in the 1830s, have a president who is a real estate developer of dubious character—a man for whom the rhetoric of success hides a disregard for the most vulnerable and for whom corporate profit is more important than the public good.

U.S. President Donald Trump openly admires Jackson. Before an audience at Jackson’s estate in Tennessee, Trump noted that Jackson “confronted and defied an arrogant elite” and asked, “Does that sound familiar to you? I wonder why they keep talking about Trump and Jackson, Jackson and Trump.” In 2017, he selected a portrait of Jackson to hang just behind his desk in the Oval Office. More important, Trump echoes the ethnonationalist xenophobia that drove Native American removal. Last year, for instance, he wrote a series of posts on Twitter warning that the “bad ‘hombres’” from Mexico and Central America “will be removed from our Country . . . as we build up our removal forces.”

Saunt’s book thus serves as a cautionary tale in the modern age of mass migration. The complicated process of Indian removal reminds readers that consent and willful action are shaped by economics, policy, and the culture of rule. Ultimately, the story of the Trail of Tears is not a happy one. But it would be false to assume that the government won. It did not. Native people persisted despite the odds. They rebuilt their tribes and their lives, their farms and their schools, their families and their traditions. That, after all, is the American way.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2020-06-09/land-not-your-land?utm_medium=newsletters&utm_source=twofa&utm_campaign=Is%20Taiwan%20the%20Next%20Hong%20Kong?&utm_content=20200710&utm_term=FA%20This%20Week%20-%20112017

• DAVID TREUER is Professor of English at the University of Southern California and the author of The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America From 1890 to the Present. 

World / June 24, 2025

These Trump Supporters Hope Bombing Iran Will Trigger the Apocalypse

For many ardent evangelicals and Christian nationalists, a military confrontation with Iran is the fulfillment of a biblical prophecy.

Pastor John Hagee speaks during the March For Israel at the National Mall on November 14, 2023, in Washington, DC.

(Noam Galai / Getty Images)
Chris Lehmann

 For many weary observers of US politics, the events of the past week felt like an accelerated redux of the buildup to the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq. Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, a key supporter of the case for regime change in Iraq, supplied the same threadbare alibi for President Donald Trump’s bombing attack in Iran: Here was an Islamic regional power gearing up to unleash terror on the West and its allies via a program to acquire weapons of mass destruction. (Never mind that Netanyahu has been invoking the specter of Iran’s imminent military nuclear capabilities for more than three decades and that the only reason the United States isn’t enforcing a deal to contain the country’s nuclear program is that in 2018, Trump ripped up an Obama-negotiated accord out of nothing more than churlishness and vanity.) Once more, an abrupt and unprovoked US attack looks poised to trigger a regional anti-American backlash, as Iran has launched a retaliatory strike on a US air base in Qatar.

The long political hangover from the catastrophic Iraq invasion is a crucial reason that some elements of the MAGA coalition are dissenting from Trump’s bombing attack. Even stalwart Trump lackeys like Georgia GOP Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene are distancing themselves from the action, while longtime MAGA propagandists such as Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon are rushing to disclaim any support for another American “forever war” in the Middle East. America First critics of the Trump attack are also quick to cite opinion polls showing a vast majority of Americans opposing a US war in Iran.

Yet, for all the genuine reluctance that prominent MAGA figures are airing over the prospect of veering into another Middle East quagmire, there’s a bedrock constituency that has always promoted aggressive military action against Iran: the increasingly influential evangelical wing of the Trump movement. For ardent evangelicals and Christian nationalists, a military confrontation with Iran is far from a threat to upend the region’s delicate balance of power or to derail US diplomatic aims in the Middle East. A war with Iran is, instead, a fulfillment of biblical prophecy and a step on the path to final redemption for embattled Christians.

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This line of theocratic bellicosity is most closely associated with right-wing Pentecostal pastor John Hagee, the founder and chairman of Christians United for Israel. In the run-up to Trump’s weekend attack, Hagee told Fox News that Trump was uniquely suited to pursue a biblically mandated policy of cutting down Israel’s enemies. “I do not think President Trump will allow himself to be played by Iranian negotiators or American isolationists,” Hagee declared. “When it’s all said and done, I believe President Trump is willing to do what it takes to ensure Iran is defanged either by enabling our strongest ally, Israel, to defend itself or otherwise.”

After the attack, Hagee amplified his battle cry in a recorded statement: “We must stand with Israel today and every day. Iran’s future as an evil force in the Middle East is now in question.… Now the US must take its seat at the head of the international table and stand alongside the only American ally in the free world willing to do what is necessary to protect the free world.”

Such bloody-minded cheerleading is nothing new for Hagee. Indeed, in the initial phase of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Hagee was already urging the United States to attack Iran. “The righteous rage of America must be focused on Iran,” he announced from the pulpit. Hagee’s son and co-pastor, Matt, took up the same theme with scriptural gusto:

Let me say it to you in plain Texas speech: American should roll up its sleeves and knock the living daylights out of Iran for what they have done for Israel. Hit them so hard that our enemies will once again fear us.… God has a hook in the jaws of these nations, and he’s drawing them here. God tells Ezekiel exactly how he’s going to defend Israel. He speaks about raining down fire and hail and brimstone. That’s a heavenly air assault.

The prophetic character of these pronouncements reflects the purely instrumental view that evangelicals adopt in their embrace of Israel. Because New Testament prophecy holds that the repatriation of Jews to Israel—and their subsequent conversion to Christianity—is a pivotal sign that the End Times are at hand, the Netanyahu government’s vision of a greater Israel, keen to punish rival faiths and nations, supplies a glide path to the Final Judgment for US evangelicals and the ensuing mass elevation of Christian believers into eternal bliss. Hagee’s version of this prophecy faith is perhaps the most extreme one on the evangelical right, but he’s far from alone in championing a righteous US-Israeli alliance against Iran. Dr. Mike Evans, founder of the evangelical pro-Israeli group Friends of Zion, which claims some 30 million members, cited a scriptural passage of the pro-Zionist evangelical right in making the theological case for an Iran war to Fox News: “In Genesis chapter 12, God said, ‘I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you.’ Evangelicals believe that pressuring Israel to give up land will bring a curse on America. If they have to choose between God’s word and anyone else’s, they will choose God’s word.”

You also don’t have to look very far in the Trump White House to find the same sentiments. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the administration’s point man on the Iran bombings, is an ardent Christian nationalist who has endorsed the idea of an “American crusade” to “push Islam back”—sentiments he’s inscribed on a pair of back tattoos, one memorializing the Jerusalem Cross from the European Crusades of the Middle Ages and the other citing the crusaders’ slogan “Deus Vult,” Latin for “God wills it.”

Hegseth is formally aligned with the Reconstructionist-wing of evangelicalism, which isn’t steeped in the dispensationalist tradition of End Times prophecy, but like many spiritual figures in the MAGA orbit, he embraces a synthetic and improvisational view of the encounter between history and scripture—and in a way that can one-up the eschatology of the older evangelical movement. “There’s this video on YouTube, from the first Trump administration, when Hegseth was at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and he’s saying, ‘Hey, you know people talk about the third temple’”—a triumphalist fantasy of the independent charismatic movement and messianic Jews alike—“‘it looks unlikely but you know, it could happen,’” Matthew Taylor, a student of the Trumpist-charismatic alliance, said. “That is grounds for an interreligious World War III—a Christian effort to take down the third holiest site in Islam. And this is the [future] secretary of defense making this casual speculation, and in an almost giddy mode.”

Hegseth’s broad endorsement of a prophecy belief that’s more or less bespoke to the US evangelical worldview is in line with the distressing convergence of MAGA with what Taylor calls independent charismatic Christianity. This brand of Christian nationalism commands broad allegiance on the MAGA right—Paula White, senior adviser to Trump’s White House Faith Office, and Russ Vought, his enormously influential director of the Office of Management and Budget, are both aligned with its theology and governing agenda, and Texas Senator Ted Cruz is the son of a well-known charismatic pastor. The independent charismatics’ brand of present-minded spiritual warfare was also pivotal in the run-up to the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.

With the prospect of an expansive war in the Middle East, MAGA-minded charismatics will seize on the rush of events to sanctify their preexisting worldly vision of conquest and success, Taylor, the author of The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy, said. “We’re in a moment now when we could see a much more unruly evangelical theology than the older dispensationalism take hold,” he observed. “Dispensationalism is very straight and narrow. It’s quite conservative in a certain sense, in that the goal is to create a state of Israel and to protect that state until Jesus comes back.”

“But this other, more bellicose, ad hoc version of prophecy is in line with the goals of the charismatics—global domination, conquest, prosperity,” Taylor said. “It tends to embrace a more unequivocal support of the state of Israel, and even a desire for drama. The charismatic aesthetic is about melodrama and cosmic war, and about this celebration of geopolitical fights as symbolic of the battle between God and the devil.”

In other words, just as Trump has shed his bogus anti-interventionist posture to embrace the neoconservative delusion of regime change in Iran, a significant segment of his base is in the process of annexing the unprovoked attack on Iran into their choose-your-own-apocalyptic-adventure version of prophecy belief. Be afraid.

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/trump-evangelicals-christian-nationalists-iran-israel-end-times/

Tipping points: on the edge?Climate crisis

‘This is a fight for life’: climate expert on tipping points, doomerism and using wealth as a shield

Composite: Jesse Winter / Guardian Design

Economic assumptions about risks of the climate crisis are no longer relevant, says the communications expert Genevieve Guenther

Climate breakdown can be observed across many continuous, incremental changes such as soaring carbon dioxide levels, rising seas and heating oceans. The numbers creep up year after year, fuelled by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

But scientists have also identified at least 16 “tipping points” – thresholds where a tiny shift could cause fundamental parts of the Earth system to change dramatically, irreversibly and with potentially devastating effects. These shifts can interact with each other and create feedback loops that heat the planet further or disrupt weather patterns, with unknown but potentially catastrophic consequences for life on Earth. It is possible some tipping points may already have been passed.

Dr Genevieve Guenther, an American climate communications specialist, is the founding director of End Climate Silence, which studies the representation of global heating in the media and public discourse. Last year, she published The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It, which was described by Bill McKibben as “a gift to the world”. In the run-up to the Global Tipping Points conference in July, Guenther talks to the Guardian about the need to discuss catastrophic risks when communicating about the climate crisis.

The future of her son and all children motivates Dr Genevieve Guenther to protect the planet from further global heating. Photograph: Laila Annmarie Stevens/The Guardian

The climate crisis is pushing globally important ecosystems – ice sheets, coral reefs, ocean circulation and the Amazon rainforest – towards the point of no return. Why is it important to talk about tipping points?

We need to correct a false narrative that the climate threat is under control. These enormous risks are potentially catastrophic. They would undo the connections between human and ecological systems that form the basis of all of our civilisation.

How have attitudes changed towards these dangers?

There was a constructive wave of global climate alarm in the wake of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on 1.5C in 2018. That was the first time scientists made it clear that the difference between 1.5C and 2C would be catastrophic for millions of people and that in order to halt global heating at a relatively safe level, we would need to start zeroing out our emissions almost immediately. Until then, I don’t think policymakers realised the timeline was that short. This prompted a flurry of activism – Greta Thunberg and Indigenous and youth activists – and a surge of media attention. All of this converged to make almost everybody feel that climate change was a terrifying and pressing problem. This prompted new pledges, new corporate sustainability targets, and new policies being passed by government.

This led to a backlash by those in the climate movement who prefer to cultivate optimism. Their preferred solution was to drive capitalist investment into renewable technologies so fossil fuels could be beaten out of the marketplace. This group believed climate fear might drive away investors, so they started to argue it was counterproductive to talk about worst-case scenarios. Some commentators even argued we had averted the direst predictions and were now on a more reassuring trajectory of global warming of a little under 3C by 2100.

There is a misconception that wealthier places, such as the UK, Europe (including Italy, pictured) and the US will not be affected by the climate crisis but this is wrong, says Guenther. Photograph: Tiziana Fabi/AFP/Getty Images

But it is bananas to feel reassured by that because 3C would be a totally catastrophic outcome for humanity. Even at the current level of about 1.5C, the impacts of warming are emerging on the worst side of the range of possible outcomes and there is growing concern of tipping points for the main Atlantic Ocean circulation (Amoc), Antarctic sea ice, corals and rainforests.

If the risk of a plane crashing was as high as the risk of the Amoc collapsing, none of us would ever fly because they would not let the plane take off. And the idea that our little spaceship, our planet, is under the risk of essentially crashing and we’re still continuing business as usual is mindblowing. I think part of the problem is that people feel distant from the dangers and don’t realise the children we have in our homes today are threatened with a chaotic, disastrous, unliveable future. Talking about the risks of catastrophe is a very useful way to overcome this kind of false distance.

In your book, you write that it’s appropriate to be scared and the more you know, the more likely you are to be worried, as is evident from the statements of scientists and the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres. Why?

Some people at the centre of the media, policymaking and even research claim that climate change isn’t going to be that bad for those who live in the wealthy developed world – the UK, Europe and the United States. When you hear these messages, you are lulled into a kind of complacency and it seems reasonable to think that we can continue to live as we do now without putting ourselves, our families, our communities under threat within decades. What my book is designed to do is wake people up and raise the salience and support for phasing out fossil fuels.

[It] is written for people who are already concerned about the climate crisis and are willing to entertain a level of anxiety. But the discourse of catastrophe would not be something I would recommend for people who are disengaged from the climate problem. I think that talking about catastrophe with those people can actually backfire because it’ll just either overwhelm them or make them entrench their positions. It can be too threatening.

The Donnie Creek wildfire burns in British Columbia, Canada, in 2023. Photograph: Noah Berger/AP

A recent Yale study found that a degree of climate anxiety was not necessarily bad because it could stir people to collective action. Do you agree?

It depends. I talk about three different kinds of doomerism. One is the despair that arises from misunderstanding the science and thinking we’re absolutely on the path to collapse within 20 or 30 years, no matter what we do. That is not true.

Second, there’s a kind of nihilistic position taken by people who suggest they are the only ones who can look at the harsh truth. I have disdain for that position.

Finally, there’s the doomerism that comes from political frustration, from believing that people who have power are just happy to burn the world down. And that to me is the most reasonable kind of doomerism. To address that kind of doomerism, you need to say: “Yes, this is scary as hell. But we must have courage and turn our fear into action by talking about climate change with others, by calling our elected officials on a regular basis, by demanding our workplaces put their money where their mouth is.”

You need to acknowledge people’s feelings, meet them where they are and show how they can assuage their fear by cultivating their bravery and collective action.

The most eye-opening part of your book was about the assumptions of the Nobel prize winner William Nordhaus that we’ll probably only face a very low percentage of GDP loss by the end of the century. This surely depends on ignoring tipping points?

The only way Nordhaus can get the result that he does is if he fails to price the risk of catastrophe and leaves out a goodly chunk of the costs of global heating. In his models, he does not account for climate damages to labour productivity, buildings, infrastructure, transportation, non-coastal real estate, insurance, communication, government services and other sectors. But the most shocking thing he leaves out of his models is the risk that global heating could set off catastrophes, whether they are physical tipping points or wars from societal responses. That is why the percentage of global damages that he estimates is so ridiculously lowballed.

The idea that climate change will just take off only a small margin of economic growth is not founded on anything empirical. It’s just a kind of quasi-religious faith in the power of capitalism to decouple itself from the planet on which it exists. That’s absurd and it’s unscientific.

Some economists suggest wealth can provide almost unlimited protection from catastrophe because it is better to be in a steel and concrete building in a storm than it is to be in a wooden shack. How true is that?

There’s no evidence that these protections are unlimited, though there are economists who suggest we can always substitute technologies or human-made products for ecosystems or even other planets like Mars for Earth itself. This goes back to an economic growth theorist named Robert Solow, who claims technological innovation can increase human productivity indefinitely. He stressed that it was just a theory, but the economists advising Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s took this as gospel and argued it was possible to ignore environmental externalities – the costs of our economic system, including our greenhouse gas pollution – because you could protect yourself as long as you kept increasing your wealth.

Floods due to heavy rains at Porto Alegre airport left a plane stranded on the runway in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, last year. Photograph: Diego Vara/Reuters

Except when it comes to the climate crisis?

Yes, the whole spectacle of our planet heating up this quickly should call all of those economic assumptions into question. But because climate change is affecting the poor first and worst, this is used as evidence that poverty is the problem. This is a misrepresentation of reality because the poor are not the only ones who are affected by the climate crisis. This is a slow-moving but accelerating crisis that will root and spread. And it could change for the worst quite dramatically as we hit tipping points.

The difference between gradual warming and tipping points is similar to the difference between chronic, manageable ailments and acute, life-threatening diseases, isn’t it?

Yes. When people downplay the effects of climate change, they often represent the problem as a case of planetary diabetes – as if it were a kind of illness that you can bumble along with, but still have a relatively good quality of life as long as you use your technologies, your insulin, whatever, to sustain your health. But this is not how climate scientists represent climate change. Dr Joelle Gergis, one of the lead authors on the latest IPCC report, prefers to represent climate change as a cancer – a disease that takes hold and grows and metastasises until the day when it is no longer curable and becomes terminal. You could also think of that as a tipping point.

This is a fight for life. And like all fights, you need a tremendous amount of bravery to take it on. Before I started working on climate change, I didn’t think of myself as a fighter, but I became one because I felt I have a responsibility to preserve the world for my son and children everywhere. That kind of fierce protectiveness is part of the way that I love. We can draw on that to have more strength than our enemies because I don’t think they’re motivated by love. I believe love is an infinite resource and the power of it is greater than that of greed or hate. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t be here.

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Tipping points: on the edge? – a series on our future

 Composite: Getty/Guardian Design

Tipping points – in the Amazon, Antarctic, coral reefs and more – could cause fundamental parts of the Earth system to change dramatically, irreversibly and with devastating effects. In this series, we ask the experts about the latest science – and how it makes them feel. Tomorrow, David Obura talks about the collapse of coral reefs

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2025/jun/24/tipping-points-climate-crisis-expert-doomerism-wealth