Donald Trump’s supporters couldn’t overturn the election, but they still might destroy America

WASHINGTON—A year ago on Capitol Hill, it felt like the end of something. Or of some things.

The long, unbroken tradition of the peaceful transfer of power that George Washington invented and Ronald Reagan had memorably bragged was central to America’s greatness was an obvious casualty amid the violence and chaos and screaming lunatic weirdness of Jan. 6, 2021. And with it, maybe, the smug sense of exceptionalism that has long made Americans so certain that their democracy could never be seriously threatened by wannabe strongmen and the mobs they inspire.

But as the riot ended, it felt like the end of still more than that. As the tear gas and smoke bombs dissipated, the riot put down, the insurrectionists dispersed and Congress resumed its historic business of certifying the election, a fever seemed to have broken. A kind of twisted, howling madness that had gripped American politics through the vector of Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party — a stew of white resentment, cartoonish conspiracy theories and thuggishly authoritarian impulses — had shown what it was capable of becoming: not just a personality-driven political phenomenon, but an actual threat to American democracy.

It was, essentially, what Trump and his supporters had been promising, fairly plainly and for a long time. Many observers — including me — had written commentaries that wondered if something like this was coming. Like so many unprecedented episodes of Trump’s presidency, you could say it was shocking without really being surprising to anyone who had been paying attention. But a lot of Americans — including those long rumoured to be ready to act as “guard rails,” the figures of the centrist and Republican establishment leadership — had steadfastly refused to pay attention, dismissing talk of a threat to democratic traditions as fantastical products of “Trump derangement syndrome.”

The deranged scene Trump brought to the Capitol on Jan. 6 seemed to dispel such casual dismissals. Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, made a show of carrying on the vote certification that very night. Longtime Trump sycophants like Sen. Lindsay Graham said they were through. Sen. Mitch McConnell publicly blamed the outgoing president.

Trump was kicked off of Twitter as corporate donors abandoned Republicans. There was a wave of panicked or disgusted resignations from the White House. There was a second impeachment on the way, and the sense that McConnell and his caucus might actually vote to convict this time. A new president was on the way in, promising the nominally modest but still far-off goal of normalcy.

At the time, it felt like history’s page was turning, that a bizarre and scary chapter full of dangerous portents was ending.

With the benefit of a year’s hindsight, it’s fair to say that didn’t turn out to the be case.

The next pages may have begun a new chapter, but they largely continued the same plot lines on a similar trajectory, and the portents of danger seem more menacing than ever. I am currently reading two much-discussed books released this week — about which I’ll write more soon — with the words “civil war” in their titles, each weighing the likelihood of the U.S. descending into such a conflict. They capture the zeitgeist: in an Axios/Momentive poll released this week, a majority of Americans say the country is more divided than ever before — and 57 per cent think more events like the Capitol riot are likely to happen soon.

But here is one of the most telling results of that poll: one year after Jan. 6, 2021, only 55 per cent of Americans believe President Joe Biden legitimately won the election. That is depressingly close to the percentage of voters (51.3) who voted for Biden. Trump’s big lie, the one that inspired the insurrectionist assault on the Capitol a year ago, has prevailed against all evidence for a huge chunk of the public, including the roughly 75 per cent of Republicans who doubt the legitimacy of Biden’s presidency.

Trump himself has recast the Capitol riot as a glorious protest against the “real insurrection” that he says happened on election day, and has portrayed the rioters as martyrs and political prisoners. Most of the Republicans who seemed ready to abandon him in the aftermath of the Capitol storming have either come back to his side or fallen silent. Those like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who serve on the House of Representatives’ Jan. 6 commission and refuse to stop speaking about the danger of Trump’s culpability for that day, have been essentially exiled from the party.

As much as — or perhaps even more than—before, it is Trump’s party.

Moreover, Republican-led state governments have been rewriting rules to further ensure majorities for themselves, to restrict voting in ways that seem likely to suppress Democratic constituencies, and to give partisan political figures power over federal election results and the authority to overturn them. Election authorities who stood up to Trump’s attempts to fraudulently overturn his election loss are being hounded out of office and replaced by Trump loyalists.

A year ago, as I stood on the Capitol steps while the rioters rampaged, one of them said, “This could be the start of something.” Another replied, “Oh, it is. Today changes everything.” I wrote then that the change might be different than what they were expecting, that it might be the end of the indulgence of Trump.

One year later, it seems like the rioters were right. Their message has been embraced by many Americans, and their larger goals are now being pursued by other means. Their attack on the Capitol wasn’t the end of their attack on American democracy. And so the insurrection continues.

Opinion: The false prophets who inspired the violence on Jan. 6





By Joe ScarboroughColumnist
Today at 5:57 p.m. EST



My grandmother’s faith in God sustained her as she struggled to raise her family through the Great Depression, said goodbye to her teenage son as he left for World War II and buried her husband a decade later.

The sounds of Billy Graham’s crusades would fill my grandmom’s Georgia home in the 1970s. A decade later, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s “PTL Club” would win her loyalty, as well as her monthly tithes. My parents gently tried warning her that the “PTL” stars were scam artists less interested in her spiritual welfare than in her monthly Social Security checks. Even after being treated rudely by Tammy Faye in a chance encounter, Grandmom kept sending money the Bakkers’ way as they built their empire on the backs of working-class Christians. The dreadful pair’s get-rich schemes leveraged Americans’ love of God for cold, hard cash.

Looking back on the events of Jan. 6, perhaps we should focus more on the false prophets who inspired the violence of that day than the rioters we still highlight on video loops.

Those who beat cops with American flags should serve long jail sentences. But the most important lesson from that tragic day may come from deconstructing how plutocrats and trust-fund babies deployed propaganda campaigns to push that bloodthirsty mob up the Capitol steps.

The “big lie” bloodletting happened at the behest of a slumlord’s son, who inherited more than $400 million and used his presidency to undermine citizens’ faith in their country. His anti-American poison was spread through the arteries of one foreign family’s media empire and soon metastasized across the American heartland.

Just as the Bakkers used the Gospel of Jesus Christ to prey on gullible viewers, these right-wing billionaires and their allies are trying to brainwash millions of Americans into believing the U.S. government is deploying Afghanistan War helicopters to launch domestic attacks against them, that the FBI is purging patriots from society and that the “deep state” staged the Jan. 6 riot as a “false flag” to strip citizens of their constitutional rights.

These hate-filled hysterics spewed against the United States have been punctuated by verbal assaults targeting military heroes, the slandering of the U.S. intelligence community and a barrage of fire against the nation’s democratic voting system that would make Vladimir Putin blush with pride. These are the kind of anti-American screeds that fueled the Capitol riot, and they have been preached with increasing intensity since that tragic day.

The targets of their misinformation campaign now await trial or languish in jail while the authors of these phony crises sleep comfortably in their marbled mansions and beachside resorts. They are free to travel the world on their super yachts or private jets while Jan. 6 defendants beg for their freedom in federal court.

What a dichotomy between these plutocrats and the working-class populists they duped into doing their bidding on Jan. 6. The divide between the propaganda they preach and the policies they pursue has become just as stark over the past two decades. Republicans have spent the 21st century embracing a populist brand while tailoring their policies to help the super rich. The result has helped drive perhaps the greatest wealth redistribution in world history, at the expense of the middle class.

Maybe that explains why every Republican presidential nominee this century has come from the United States’ most powerful families and graduated from the country’s most elite universities. Their fathers ran automobile companies, Midwest industrial states, the United States Navy, New York real estate empires and the country itself. I can hear the voice of my grandmom saying, “To whom much is given, much is expected.” While we have not inherited the wealth and power of these American oligarchs, we have been given a republic. Let us spend the next year doing what we can to save it.



Opinion by Joe ScarboroughJoe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman from Florida, hosts the MSNBC show “Morning Joe." Twitter

Parents Spent More Time With Kids During Pandemic But Stress Was High, Census Survey Shows

BY AYUMI DAVIS ON 1/5/22

A new survey from the U.S. Census Bureau indicated that while parents spent more time with their children during the pandemic, stress was high.

"Families knew before the pandemic that they were overstressed. Kids had so many places to be. Parents were juggling an awful lot," said Roma Walsh, co-director of the Chicago Center for Family Health at the University of Chicago, in a phone interview, according to The Associated Press. "The pandemic made people not go to work, and our kids were home. It really helped parents to say, 'Hey, wait a minute. We are able to have real family time together that we weren't before.'"

The Survey of Income and Program Participation's findings were based on interviews with one parent from 22,000 households within the first four months of the pandemic in the U.S.

The Census Bureau released a report on the survey this week in which they noted that a large number of people did not respond to the survey. In addition, many of the parents in the survey were older, married, educated, foreign-born, and above the poverty level, compared to years past.

The survey did not measure the long-term effects of the pandemic, so it's unclear if the parents continued to spend more time with their children.

The survey discovered that the percentage of meals parents shared with their kids increased from 84 percent to 85 percent from 2018 to 2020 for "reference parents." For other parents, their proportion of meals shared with kids went up from 56 percent to 63 percent, the survey showed.

The pandemic also taxed many families. Job losses, financial worries, social isolation, the death of loved ones, virtual learning, and childcare and elder care demands hit hard, Walsh said, AP reported

The Survey of Income and Program Participation’s findings were based on interviews with one parent from 22,000 households within the first four months of the pandemic in the U.S. Here, Karen Albicy bonds with her daughter Kaia while waiting for her PCR test to process at George Bush Intercontinental Airport on December 3, 2021, in Houston, Texas.

BRANDON BELL/GETTY IMAGES

During the first several months of the pandemic in the U.S., Dina Levy made her young daughter and son go on walks with her three times a day.

They kicked a soccer ball around at the nearby high school. The children, then 11 and 8, created an obstacle course out of chalk and the three timed each other running through it. They also ate all their meals together.

Levy is among scores of parents who indicated in a new survey from the U.S. Census Bureau that they spent more time eating, reading and playing with their children from March to June 2020, when coronavirus-lockdowns were at their most intense, than they had in previous years.

"With school and work, you split up and go your own way for the day, but during coronavirus, we were a unit," said Levy, an attorney who lives in New Jersey. "It really was, I don't want to say worthwhile since this pandemic has been so awful for so many people, but there was a lot of value to us as a family."

The report found that outings with children decreased for parents because of travel restrictions and lockdowns, dropping from 85 percent in 2018 and 87 percent in 2019 to 82 percent in 2020. The drop was starkest for solo parents, going from 86 percent in 2019 to 75 percent in 2020, according to the survey.

"The key point is families have experienced extreme stress and strain over the course of this prolonged pandemic," Walsh said. She said her research showed that families do best when they share positive values, take a creative approach to problem-solving, and have the flexibility to adapt.

"Those families that can pull together and practice resilience are doing well, and it actually strengthens their bonds," she said.

That was certainly the case for Eugene Brusilovskiy, a statistician living in suburban Philadelphia. He said the pandemic allowed him to be with his daughter, who was born during the early months of the virus's spread. Since he was working from home, he and his wife decided not to put her in day care as originally planned.

"I was involved in every routine, everything from feeding her to changing her diapers," Brusilovskiy said. "I was able to spend real quality time, to go on walks and watch all of those first milestones that I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise."

Although many people are limiting their activities now with the Omicron-driven resurgence of the coronavirus, it's possible that once schools reopened in 2021 and kids returned to their extracurricular pursuits, parents fell back into earlier habits, said Melissa Milkie, a University of Toronto sociologist.

"Still, some families might have experienced eating more dinners together and reading as something they pushed to 'keep' even beyond those early months of the pandemic," Milkie said.

For Levy, the downside of all the meals with her kids was the intense cleanup.

"It drove me crazy," she said. "It was tons and tons of dirty dishes."

Still, that wasn't enough to diminish the once-in-a-lifetime sense of togetherness she was able to forge with her children.

"It was time we had never spent together," Levy said, "and probably never will again."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

The Heat: U.S. reports 1 million covid cases in a single day

People wait in line to receive a Covid-19 test on January 4, 2022, in New York. – The US recorded more than 1 million Covid-19 cases on January 3, 2022, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, as the Omicron variant continues to spread at a blistering pace. Johns Hopkins also reported 1,688 deaths for the same period, a day after top US pandemic advisor Anthony Fauci had said the country is experiencing “almost a vertical increase” in Covid-19 cases but the peak may be only weeks away. (Photo by ANGELA WEISS / AFP)

Published January 5, 2022 at 3:54 PM

On Monday, the United States set another grim coronavirus milestone: more than 1 million new cases reported in a single day.

The spike is stark. The Omicron variant is infecting people at alarming rates. President Joe Biden addressed the staggering numbers.

CGTN White Correspondent Nathan King has more.

To discuss:

• Dr. Peter Chin-Hong is a professor of medicine and an infectious disease specialist at the University of California.
• Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly is the Director of the Clinical Epidemiology Center at the Veteran Affairs Saint Louis Health Care System.
• Dr. Georges Benjamin is the Executive Director of the American Public Health Association.
• Joseph Williams is Senior Managing Editor for Color of Change.

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Can $1 billion really fix a meat industry dominated by just four companies?


by Jessica Fu

01.05.2022

Mario Tama/Getty Images



The Biden administration’s newly announced investment in small, independent processors is intended to level the playing field. But without addressing the root causes of market concentration, critics fear it may have limited impact.


The Biden-Harris Administration announced on Monday that it would dedicate $1 billion from the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to curb consolidation and boost competition in the livestock industry, which it blames for rising prices at the grocery store.

The plan was well received by farm groups and some supporters of stronger antitrust laws, including organizations like the Farm Action and the Open Markets Institute. But it also received pushback from some of the very factions the move was intended to please. For cattle ranchers and anti-monopoly advocates who’ve long been concerned that a tiny handful of global food corporations control prices on both ends of the supply chain, the news represented a missed opportunity to address the root causes of industry concentration.

To understand these divergent responses, and why “consolidation”—a decades-long trend that narrowed the market to a small group of processing giants—has become a newly urgent flashpoint amid persistent supply chain frustrations, you need to know how the meat industry became so concentrated in the first place, and how the White House plan fits into that larger picture.

Big Meat: Big problem?

Beef prices have jumped an eye-popping 21 percent over the past year, according to the Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) latest food price outlook report; prices for pork increased by almost 17 percent and poultry by more than 8 percent in the same period. White House economic advisors last month estimated that meat is the single biggest contributor to rising food costs right now, accounting for a quarter of total price increases.

At the same time as meat’s gotten more expensive, cattle prices have gone down. In theory, that shouldn’t happen—and critics say the concentrated power of a small cohort of multinational meatpackers is to blame.

The Big Four are beautifully positioned to take advantage of supply chain chaos.

Today, the so-called “Big Four” beef processing companies—which include Tyson Foods, JBS, Cargill, and Marfrig—control around 85 percent of feedlot cattle in the U.S. (Beef has seen the fastest rate of consolidation compared to poultry and pork). In recent years, producers have accused these companies of engaging in anti-competitive business practices, like depressing live cattle prices through restrictive contracts or artificially restricted supply, while simultaneously reaping record profits.

The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted how this dynamic can play out under extreme circumstances: Outbreak-related shutdowns in the early spring of 2020 caused backlogs of live animals with nowhere to go for slaughter, tanking the prices big packers pay to ranchers for their animals. Meanwhile, on the other end of the supply chain, the resulting inventory shortages at grocery stores drove up the cost of meat for consumers. These concurrent trends meant that the “meat margin”—that is, the difference between what processors pay for livestock and what they charge for meat—widened significantly, leading to soaring profits.

In other words, the Big Four are beautifully positioned to take advantage of supply chain chaos: disruptions led to historically low cattle prices, but spooked consumers have proven willing to pay more to stockpile their freezers with meat.

How did we get the “Big Four?”

Economists measure consolidation using what is called the “four-firm concentration ratio,” which refers to the market share controlled by the four biggest companies in any given industry. In 1977, the four biggest beef packers controlled just 25 percent of the market, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Within 15 years, that number had jumped to 71 percent—a nearly threefold increase. Today, that number hovers around 85 percent.

James MacDonald, a University of Maryland agricultural economics professor who has conducted research on meat industry concentration, said that two important factors drove what he described as a “dramatic” rate of consolidation in the industry in the 1970s and 1980s: economies of scale and lower wages.

“In beef packing, an important driver was that large firms realized they could reduce processing costs by building much bigger plants,” he said. Another key factor was a series of labor fights that resulted in lower wages for the meatpacking workers employed by those companies that were rapidly expanding, further accelerating their dominance within a consolidating industry.



“In beef packing, an important driver was that large firms realized they could reduce processing costs by building much bigger plants.”


“Through the early 1980s, there was a series of labor battles, strikes, lockouts, plant closures,” MacDonald said. “In a very short period of time, the average production worker wage in meatpacking fell very sharply, [particularly] in the larger plants, because that’s really where they broke the unions.” Average hourly wages in the largest meatpacking plants fell by almost 15 percent in the decade between 1982 and 1992.

Together, MacDonald said, those factors helped the biggest packers to become very large and cost-efficient, while making it harder for smaller packers to compete—setting the stage for the concentrated industry we see today.

What would the White House plan do to curb consolidation?

A lot—at least according to the White House. Its billion-dollar aid package will include $375 million in grants for independent processing plants (which it expects to pay out through the spring and summer of this year); $375 million in loan support; $100 million to fund worker safety and training programs; $50 million in research and development, and $100 million in subsidies to help small processing plants cover inspection costs.

But critics of the plan argue that the White House largely excluded from its announcement a concrete timeline by which it would enforce the robust competition laws that already exist.

In 1921, Congress passed the Packers and Stockyards Act, a set of laws aimed at protecting producers from anti-competitive practices on the part of meatpackers, like unequal treatment and price manipulation. In 2016, the Obama administration promulgated a set of rules under the act that would have given farmers and ranchers an avenue for legal recourse against those unfair practices, and outlawed delayed payment and economic retaliation, among other things. Those reforms were later rolled back under the Trump administration. In June of last year, USDA announced that it had begun working to reinstate them and to strengthen its enforcement actions under the Packers and Stockyards Act. That hasn’t yet happened, though—and now, six months later, supporters of these protections are scratching their heads, wondering when the agency will actually take action.



“USDA is going to essentially establish a hotline so cattle producers could continue complaining about potentially anti-competitive practices to a regulatory agency that hasn’t done anything about all of the previous complaints that have been filed.”


Monday’s announcement provided little clarity. Instead, USDA committed that it would, within 30 days, set up a tip line through which farmers and ranchers could file complaints about unfair practices. The agency would then refer them to the Department of Justice for investigation “as appropriate”—a far cry from the decisive steps that anti-monopoly advocates were hoping for.

“They’re going to essentially establish a hotline so cattle producers could continue complaining about potentially anti-competitive practices to a regulatory agency that hasn’t done anything about all of the previous complaints that have been filed,” said Bill Bullard, president and CEO of Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund United Stockgrowers of America (R-CALF USA). In 2019, R-CALF USA filed a lawsuit against the Big Four, alleging anti-competitive business practices. An amended version of the case is currently in discovery.

Who’s getting excited?

Owners of independent meat processing plants, obviously, as well as many livestock producers. In July, USDA received more than 400 comments from industry stakeholders, including farmers, ranchers, and processing companies, many of them largely enthusiastic about federal funding to expand meat processing capacity, worker training, and infrastructure investments.

Monday’s announcement was also warmly received by multiple lawmakers and organizations, including those that have advocated for greater scrutiny of meatpacking giants.



“We must get to the bottom of why farmers and ranchers continue to receive low payments while families across America endure rising meat prices.”


“For too long, our meat and poultry supply chain has been over reliant on a handful of large-scale companies that dominate the market,” wrote Representative Chellie Pingree, the Democratic congresswoman from Maine, in a press release. (Pingree has previously sponsored legislation that would provide funding for small processors.) “The Biden-Harris Administration’s action plan […] will work to create a more competitive and resilient meat and poultry sector and is a win for local farmers and small businesses, the market, consumers, and hungry Americans.”

Bigger groups like the Farm Bureau also welcomed the announcement.

“American Farm Bureau Federation appreciates the Biden administration’s continued work to ensure a fair and competitive meat processing system,” read a statement from president Zippy Duvall. “We must get to the bottom of why farmers and ranchers continue to receive low payments while families across America endure rising meat prices.”

Who’s not having it?

Those who believe that an influx of funding can’t fix a system rigged against small- and mid-scale processors. From an economic standpoint, said Darren Hudson, a professor of agricultural economics at Texas Tech University, who has researched concentration in agriculture, a $1 billion investment is unlikely to effect any significant, long-term change in the meat supply chain.

“It’s a horrible idea,” he said. “Subsidizing small processors isn’t going to solve any real problems. In a short run it might prop up or encourage some small processors to engage in meat processing [….] But unless they’re operating at a cost that’s equivalent to or very near what the major processors are, they won’t be able to compete over the long run.”

What’s an alternative?

Hudson’s sentiment was echoed by Austin Frerick, deputy director of the antitrust-oriented Thurman Arnold Project at Yale University, who called the plan “naive.” Going a step further, Frerick said that focusing resources solely on supporting small processors, instead of scrutinizing the practices of packing giants, meant USDA was missing the forest for the trees.

“They understand the issue, they want to pretend to have a solution, but they don’t want to actually do anything meaningful here or they don’t want to actually grapple with this industry, grapple with this corporate power that’s run amok,” he said.

Short of addressing the root causes of market concentration, any independent processors subsidized by federal dollars would still face the same economic challenges that pushed their predecessors out of business in the first place.

Like Bullard, Frerick said it would be far more effective to just enforce the Packers and Stockyards Act. Short of addressing the root causes of market concentration, any independent processors subsidized by federal dollars would still face the same economic challenges that pushed their predecessors out of business in the first place.

Since the 1980s, the meatpacking industry has undergone a series of mergers, in which larger packers edged out or bought up smaller competitors, usually those on the financial brink due to downward economic pressure that the bigger processors could exert. Frerick said he wouldn’t be surprised to see another wave of similar acquisitions between the Big Four and their smaller, subsidized competitors when the federal funding dries up.

“They’re throwing all this money at these plants,” Frerick said. “I just expect that in a few years they’ll go broke and then the big companies will buy them for pennies on the dollar.”


Jessica Fu is a staff writer for The Counter. She previously worked for The Stranger, Seattle's alt-weekly newspaper. Her reporting has won awards from the Association of Food Journalists and the Newswomen’s Club of New York.

One year after Jan. 6 — a Jewish look back

Arno Rosenfeld, Jacob Kornbluh and Mira Fox

January 5, 2022Photo-illustration by Mira Fox

In the hours leading up to the storming of the U.S. Capitol one year ago today, antisemitic rhetoric swirled through the crowds that had gathered in D.C. in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

“We are standing up to the evil globalists such as George Soros,” a former Breitbart News reporter told a group gathered the night before the riot. And just hours before the Capitol was breached, Rep. Mary Miller, an Illinois Republican, praised Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

The antisemitic vitriol on the internet prior to the attack on the Capitol was more intense and abundant, infecting the online communities that spread conspiracy theories about President Donald Trump winning the 2020 election – a lie that came to be shared by more than three-quarters of Republican voters.


Antisemitic conspiracies flew before extremists breached U.S. Capitol

Arno Rosenfeld January 6, 2021

The most prominent of those conspiracies was QAnon, a sprawling series of beliefs that included accusations that celebrities and Democratic politicians were running a satanic pedophile ring. It helped propel many of those implicated in the attack to Washington on Jan. 6. To many Jews, its falsehoods seemed eerily familiar.

“QAnon is, to a great extent, repackaged blood libel,” David Walsh, a researcher at the University of Virginia, said in an interview at the time. Most Jewish Americans, in a September poll, said that white supremacists, Trump and conservative media bear considerable blame for the insurrection.

Few Jews have been identified among the hundreds who mobbed the Capitol, although some Jewish Trump supporters were elsewhere in D.C. that weekend. They included Heshy Tischler, an Orthodox radio host and far right provocateur who cheered on a fellow protestor carrying a shofar during one of the outdoor rallies on Jan. 6.

“He’s going to blow the shofar for moshiach — or no, for Trump?” Tischler asked. “Go ahead, blow it!”

The violence at the Capitol that day was not focused on Jews.

Still, the events of Jan. 6 were laced with Jewish connections. One year later, here is the Forward’s look at some of the better and lesser-known figures with Jewish ties to that day – from the man who wore the “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt to a woman who lives in the shadow of the Capitol to a member of Congress still battling threats to free elections.
The congressman in mourning


Photo by Getty Images
Representative Jamie Raskin is comforted by Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, as she leaves a joint session of Congress to count the Electoral College votes of the 2020 presidential election in the House Chamber in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021.

On Jan. 6, the day after his son’s funeral, and only a week after his death by suicide, Rep. Jamie Raskin was in the Capitol, helping to certify the election; his daughter and son-in-law had come along to watch. And then the building was attacked, the family forced to hide separately, and Raskin afraid he might lose yet another child in the span of a week.

Yet the Maryland Democrat said he found strength in that trauma, and went on to lead the impeachment effort against then-President Trump, accusing him of inciting the attack.

Though he knew the role might bring death threats and violence, Raskin forged ahead; “I personally felt no fear, because the very worst thing that ever could have happened to me had already happened to me,” he told NPR. A former professor of constitutional law, Raskin’s robust defense of democracy, though doomed, was moving to many. He also spoke personally, recounting his promise to his daughter that the Capitol would be safe the next time she visited, and her response, devastating to him, that she never wanted to return.


In new memoir, Jamie Raskin recalls chaos and confusion of Jan. 6 insurrectionI

rene Katz Connelly  January 4, 2022

In the year since the multiple tragedies, Raskin has written a searing memoir, “Unthinkable,” about the insurrection and his son’s death, which he said is the main driver of his public service. Raskin now sits on the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, and is also working to reform the Electoral College.

“If a person can grow through unthinkable trauma and loss,” Raskin wrote in his new book, “perhaps a nation may, too.”

A neighbor to the chaos

Laurie Solnik lives 12 blocks from the Capitol and spent Jan. 6 watching the events unfold on her television with her family. “We all agreed we were just going to hunker down,” Solnik recalled. But her mind went to dark places. She said the fencing, police barricades and National Guard troops that followed the violence triggered thoughts of her parent’s experience during the Holocaust, when both survived Nazi concentration camps.

I’m getting over it.”

“I knew in my head this was different: nobody is trying to kill me,” Solnik said. “But it felt the same – as if a roundup was coming.”


Photo by Steve Kolb
National Guard members assemble in a park across the street from Laurie Solnik’s home in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, D.C., following the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Solnik, 68, is active in Hill Havurah, which is the closest synagogue to the Capitol – it meets less than two blocks away. Solnik said that after seeing protesters attack Black churches in D.C. during the previous year, she worried that her own Jewish community could be a target in the future. A year later, with her Capitol Hill neighborhood returned more or less to normal – no more imposing fencing or soldiers in camouflage milling about – Solnik said she is more relaxed.

“I guess I’m getting over it,” she said.


In court for mobbing the Capitol, they compared themselves to persecuted Jews

Louis Keene January 5, 2022

The ‘Camp Auschwitz’ sweatshirt guy


By ITV

A man wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” shirt stands among a mob of far-right demonstrators who stormed the US Capitol Wednesday.

Among the hundreds of protesters arrested for their role in storming the Capitol, Robert Keith Packer may be the best known to Jewish audiences.

Packer, with long hair and a raggedy beard, wore a “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt as he broke into the Capitol on Jan. 6, becoming the posterboy for antisemitic undercurrents running through the crowd. He was arrested several days later after a convenience store clerk near Newport News, Virginia., where Packer lives, told law enforcement that he was a regular customer.

Police found a trove of Nazi paraphernalia at Packer’s home, and charged him with illegally entering the Capitol and disorderly conduct. Packer pleaded not guilty in February but his trial has been repeatedly delayed and his next court hearing – scheduled for Jan. 26 – is expected to involve a plea agreement. An attorney for Packer did not respond to a request for comment. He remains free on bail.


Police found lots of Nazi paraphernalia at home of ‘Camp Auschwitz’ suspect

Arno Rosenfeld May 27, 2021

The judge’s son

Aaron Mostofsky’s participation in the Capitol insurrection stunned many. The Orthodox Jew, son of Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Steven Mostofsky, traveled from New York City and was photographed inside the Capitol wearing animal furs, a bulletproof vest and a riot shield emblazoned with the U.S. Capitol Police logo. A bewildered-looking Mostofsky was interviewed on video by the New York Post, telling the reporter that “we were cheated” and that 10 million more people voted for Trump than tallies showed.



This meme of Aaron Mostofsky was included in the criminal case brought against him by the Department of Justice for entering the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

In a private Instagram conversation revealed by prosecutors, Mostofsky wrote to an acquaintance of his time in the Capitol: “It was like I’m here now how did I get there.”

Mostofsky was charged with four crimes, including theft of government property and disrupting government business. He has pleaded not guilty and his trial is scheduled for March. He remains free on bail, though he is required to notify the court if he leaves New York City.


Hasidim bearing chocolate and gratitude

Image by Courtesy

Disgusted and saddened by the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, Aron Weider and Alexander Rapaport – two Hasidic friends from New York – felt helpless from 200 miles away. But the bravery of the Capitol Police and the National Guard that day inspired them to make the trip to D.C. two weeks later – for the inauguration of President Biden.

Few tourists or well-wishers were allowed inside a vast security zone surrounding the Capitol for the inauguration, but that wasn’t where Weider, the founder of a Borough Park soup kitchen, and Rapaport, a Rockland County legislator, were headed. With a van packed with $10,000 worth of toiletries, energy drinks, energy bars and chocolates – paid for by a D.C. security firm – the two drove around the perimeter of the secured area, handing out goodies to members of the National Guard, who were pulling 12-hour shifts in cold weather and taking their breaks in parking garages.

‘We brought you some love from Brooklyn,’” Rapaport told the troops, who often asked for selfies with these unexpected gift-bearers.


Meet the Hasidim who went to DC after Jan. 6 to give thanks — and chocolate — to the National Guard

Jacob Kornbluh January 4, 2022

Wieder’s four grandparents were rescued by the 3rd Infantry Division of the U.S. Army during the liberation of the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp in 1945. “I will never miss an opportunity to say thank you to you guys and what you are standing for,” he said. Rapaport said that as shaken as he was on Jan. 6, he felt more hopeful with the transition of power on Inauguration Day. He returned to D.C. days later after restocking the van in New York.

Both he and Wieder said that they hoped that their obviously Jewish appearance sent a message to all who saw them in Washington, that “the Jewish people support our servicemen and women and value the stability of our nation.”


‘We knew this day was coming’: Jews react to storming of Capitol building

Irene Katz Connelly and PJ Grisar   January 6, 2021


Authors


Mira Fox

Mira Fox is a reporter at the Forward. Get in touch at fox@forward.com or on Twitter @miraefox.


Arno Rosenfeld

Arno Rosenfeld is a staff writer for the Forward, where he covers U.S. politics and American Jewish institutions. You can reach him at arno@forward.com and follow him on Twitter @arnorosenfeld.


Jacob Kornbluh

Jacob Kornbluh is the Forward’s senior political reporter. Follow him on Twitter @jacobkornbluh or email kornbluh@forward.com.

What happened to the nonbelief channel at Patheos?

(RNS) — Bloggers were advised they could stay at Patheos so long as they stop writing negative or critical posts on religion or politics and instead focus on how to live a good life within their own worldview. They left.

January 4, 2022
By Yonat Shimron


(RNS) — Visitors to Patheos, the multifaith media platform that hosts commentary from writers in many of the world’s religions, may have noticed some changes lately.

Its nonreligious channel has become an empty hulk, bereft of most of the familiar names that once occupied the space, including its most popular blogger, Hemant Mehta, the “Friendly Atheist.”

Mehta and 14 other nonreligious bloggers, along with the channel manager, have decamped to a new site, OnlySky Media, set to launch later this month.

The changes come amid new surveys showing the number of people who are religiously unaffiliated has exploded in recent years, rising to 29% of the U.S. population, up from 19% in 2011. These “nones,” a catchall for a host of groups, including atheists, agnostics, humanists and just plain secularists, have established multiple service and advocacy organizations to serve this growing segment of the population. But there is no media platform solely dedicated to those who are not part of traditional religions.

RELATED: Poll: America growing more secular by the year

Efforts to reach Patheos’ management team were unsuccessful, but the departing bloggers and their channel manager, Dale McGowan, said that about a year ago, Patheos decided to change its editorial direction. Bloggers were advised they could stay at Patheos so long as they stopped writing negative or critical posts on religion or politics and instead focused on how to live a good life within their own worldview.

“The writing on the wall was that unless you’re prepared to say nice things about religion you need to find a new outlet,” said Mehta, who has written for Patheos since 2011, often posting multiple times a day, with a special focus on stories about religious hypocrisy.

Some 20 bloggers left the site in the last days of 2021. On Tuesday (Jan. 4), the top story on the homepage read, “Don’t Stop Believing: Faith for the New Year.”

Patheos is owned by BN Media, which last year created a new umbrella organization called Radiant. It includes Patheos, the lifestyle site Beliefnet and three other wellness and spirituality platforms with a mission of helping people “live their most fulfilled lives.”

Beliefnet, once a vigorous journalistic site, underwent a similar transformation after it was twice acquired, first by the Fox Entertainment Group in 2007 and later BN Media, where it became an inspirational site focusing on spirituality, health and wellness.

“What they were asking of us was not compatible with the editorial tone we had taken until then,” said Adam Lee, who wrote the “Daylight Atheism” blog for Patheos. “Many of us felt this would require an editorial shift to such an extent as to make our blogs unrecognizable.”

McGowan said he was told last March that Patheos wanted to rebrand.

“This was a business decision to position themselves for the long term,” said McGowan. It may have been hard for Patheos to attract advertising among religious businesses while at the same time providing a forum for atheists to criticize religion, he said.

McGowan, the author of 10 books about nonreligious life, including “Parenting Beyond Belief,” had already been talking with investors about creating a new platform for nonreligious people.

“When Patheos announced this change in direction, we realized it was an opportunity to provide a soft landing for some of these bloggers,” he said.

Fifteen Patheos bloggers agreed to join OnlySky, where McGowan is now chief content officer.

The new media platform is envisioned as a site that combines storytelling and commentary exploring the breadth of the human experience from a secular point of view, said Shawn Hardin, its founder and CEO.

A Bay Area entrepreneur who has created several media products for AOL, Yahoo and NBC, among others, Hardin said he envisions a space that explores a wide range of secular values.

“We think the unaffiliated are a woefully underserved segment of the population,” Hardin said. “We’re pretty optimistic about our opportunity to build a business that meets the interest of the audience and can invest in its own growth.”

(The name of the new media venture was inspired by John Lennon’s song “Imagine,” which envisions a world without heaven or hell — “above us only sky.”)

Author Hemant Mehta. Photo by Steve Greiner, courtesy of Mehta

A key will be creating a sense of community for a diverse set of people who are searching for meaning and want to connect with others on a similar path. Whether nonreligious Americans want community is not yet clear.

The Sunday Assembly movement, which tried to create local congregations for nonbelievers, had 70 congregations in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. About half have shut down or gone dormant.

Beyond polls indicating their growing numbers, little is known about the nonreligious or whether they want to engage on issues as a group.

“There are people passionate about secularism, atheism and agnosticism, perhaps because they don’t like what they see about religion in the news,” said Diane Winston, professor of religion and media at the University of Southern California. “But that’s a small minority of the people who make up the unaffiliated or disaffiliated. A lot of those people don’t care one way or another.”

Mehta, however, said he had high hopes.

“There aren’t any media outlets that cater specifically to atheists,” he said. “All the other atheist specific blogging networks are run by volunteers and people who are passionate about the subject but don’t do business-savvy anything, so they falter and die. This one has digital expertise.”

RELATED: The Sunday Assembly hopes to organize a godless future. It’s not easy.

Written in Protest
Deconstruction is a valid Christian practice. Ask Martin Luther.
Deconstruction has long been seen as a healthy expression of Christian faithfulness.
Martin Luther posting his 95 theses in 1517, painted by Ferdinand Pauwels in 1872. 

Image via Wikimedia/Creative Commons

January 5, 2022
By Andre Henry

(RNS) — I wonder what Pope Leo X would’ve tweeted about the Reformation, had Twitter existed in the 16th century. Would he accuse John Calvin of being on a desperate search for street cred? Would he reduce Luther’s 95 critiques of the papacy to “church hurt”?

Such are the epithets Christian leaders today are using against the bogeyman known as “deconstruction.” A buzzword in Christian circles, the term serves as a catchall for the many ways Christians are interrogating, reevaluating and often shedding Christian doctrines, values and practices they find outdated, problematic or just plain harmful.

Those who dismiss deconstruction as “a fancy word for doubt” or demonize it as heresy or apostasy are making a crucial error: Deconstruction has always been part of Christian practice and has been seen through history as a healthy expression of Christian faithfulness.

Parroting the Reformation era slogan sola scriptura (“Scripture alone”), deconstruction’s critics suggest that the Bible is sufficient to provide guidance, not just in matters of faith, but even to remedy social evils that our readings of those very Scriptures have been essential in creating, such as systemic racism.

RELATED: Philip Yancey on the blessing of deconstruction

But the Christian Bible itself contains some of the earliest cases we have of deconstruction. One potent example comes from the Book of Acts, in which the apostle Peter breaks a religious taboo to visit a Roman centurion named Cornelius. “It is against our law for a Jew to associate with or visit a Gentile. But God has shown me that I should not call anyone impure or unclean,” Peter confessed to Cornelius upon his arrival.

The apostle is referring to a vision from God he experienced the previous day, in which he saw a cloth laden with all kinds of animals deemed unclean in the Hebrew Bible. When a heavenly voice told him to eat from the spread of forbidden animals, Peter refused, until the voice admonished Peter, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”

Peter was following Scripture and keeping tradition to the best of his knowledge, but God gave him new information that demanded he reevaluate what those texts and traditions mean, and what faithfulness to God looked liked in his new context. The scene demonstrates that Scripture and tradition are at times insufficient resources to determine what faithfulness to God looks like.

Before the Reformation, Christians relied on church councils, and eventually the authority of bishops and popes, to clarify matters of doctrine and practice. Even after the schism, some Protestants recognized the need for more tools to define orthodoxy. Methodism uses a theological concept called the “Wesleyan quadrilateral,” in which Scripture is the basis for authentic Christian practice, but only in concert with tradition, reason and personal experience.


Photo by CongerDesign/Pixabay/Creative Commons

Indeed, the notion of sola scriptura arises from the greatest deconstruction movements in church history: The reformers called out the church of their day, interrogated and rejected papal authority, wrestled with the nature of the sacraments and reevaluated the place of Scripture in the life of the Christian.

Luther’s case in particular illustrates where the motivation to deconstruct often comes from. A devout biblical translator, he felt that the ecclesial practices of his time were deeply incongruent with the faith he discerned in the pages of Scripture. He called for reform because he took the text and the faith seriously. Had the religious authorities listened to him, Luther might have died a Catholic. Instead, they pressured him to recant and excommunicated him when he wouldn’t.

The Protestant reformers aren’t my heroes, but I relate to this part of their stories. I, too, was once a devout student of theology, poring over the Scriptures in the privacy of my bedroom as a boy, my dorm room as a college student and my apartment as a New York City minister.

So while deconstruction opponents rail against critical race theory, CRT scholar Kimberle Crenshaw didn’t teach me that God cares about social justice; the Book of Exodus did. God heard the cries of a stigmatized and subjugated people in the brickyards of ancient Egypt and rescued them.

The psalms reiterated that lesson when they envision God admonishing Israelite leaders to “defend the weak and the fatherless; uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”

The prophets taught me the same lesson when Amos announces on God’s behalf, “Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!”

Jesus taught me that God cares about social justice when he told stories like the one about the good Samaritan or when he told religious leaders that giving to the poor is like giving to Jesus himself. The apostle John taught me this when he presented a vision of God smashing the Roman empire to bits as angels shout “Hallelujah.”

So when recent anti-racist movements made it clear that the violence of chattel slavery has found an afterlife in America’s criminal legal system, I joined the protests and raised my voice against it — not just as an act of self-preservation, but as an act of Christian faithfulness.

I was surprised and disillusioned to see the level of Christian apathy and antipathy in response to the movement for Black lives: to be told that social justice isn’t part of the gospel. Worse, I was demoralized to witness the overwhelming evangelical support for Donald Trump, a candidate praised by the nation’s most overt white nationalists. I tried to reason with my evangelical siblings, until it became clear that the institutions were not likely to change. Had they listened, I might still be an evangelical Christian today.

While I’m thankful for Jemar Tisby’s work, I didn’t need to read his book “The Color of Compromise” to come to the conclusion that Christianity, as understood and articulated by many white Americans, could never be the cure for systemic racism. Those who stole Indigenous land and for centuries killed to oppose Black freedom often did so with the Bible in hand.

Deconstruction is the only logical way for victims of Christian violence to work out liberative Christian traditions of their own. Otherwise, it’s impossible to reconcile the blood-soaked history of Christianity with a healthy and liberating spirituality.

RELATED: With this much rot, there’s no choice but to deconstruct

Despite its urge to demonize deconstruction, the church is to be blamed for losing so many of the faithful. Christian leaders who claim to take Scripture too seriously to abide deconstruction should heed the apostle Paul’s words: “God’s name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.” Christian churches have long participated directly in systems that have harmed and continue to harm millions of marginalized people. They continue to refuse to confess or repent of these sins or to champion the oppressed.

This is why the faith is losing legitimacy. The Christianity preached by the likes of John MacArthur, Josh Buice, Albert Mohler, Mark Driscoll, Matt Chandler and other prominent white pastors has been weighed and found wanting.

Their attempts to get us to stop thinking critically about the sins and shortcomings of their institutions only confirm that something is deeply wrong. As a theology professor of mine once said, “A faith that can’t be tested can’t be trusted.”

The Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life takes on vaccine skeptics on social media

The Pontifical Academy for Life has become the most attacked Vatican department online

.
The Pontifical Academy for Life logo, left, and a CDC illustration of a coronavirus. Courtesy images

January 5, 2022
By Claire Giangravé

VATICAN CITY (RNS) — In a tweet laden with backstory and pointed frustration, the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life defended the COVID-19 vaccine and called out those who spread “malinformation” to discredit the vaccine as peddling “pure nonsense.”

The Pontifical Academy for Life, the Vatican’s think tank dedicated to protecting life from conception to natural death, took to Twitter on Tuesday (Jan. 4), using its official account to criticize “Catholics” who insult the think tank and its president, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia. “#COVID-19 exists, and the only way to return to normal is to get #vaccinated,” read the tweet.

The statement on social media pushed back specifically against critics who draw a direct line from abortions to the vaccines, saying “abortions have nothing to do with” the vaccines, and insinuating the opposition is instead born from the culture wars in the United States, home to many vocal papal critics.

Speaking by phone with Religion News Service on Wednesday, the spokesperson for the academy, Fabrizio Mastrofini, said the tweet — which has generated considerable pushback — was a response to media articles and online critics who oppose the Vatican’s support for vaccines.

On Dec. 22, the academy published a document addressing the impact the pandemic has had on children and advising a more holistic effort by Catholic and lay institutions to promote the well-being of minors. Beyond encouraging the accompaniment of families suffering due to COVID-19, the document seemed to support the vaccination of children over the age of 5, which is already underway in Europe and the United States.

The document was criticized by many who believe the vaccines are immoral. While the vaccines do not contain fetal cells, fetal cell lines were used during testing. The Vatican department overseeing doctrine deemed some vaccines “morally acceptable” and Pope Francis has backed global vaccinations efforts, calling getting jabbed “an act of love.”

The Vatican’s support for vaccination has not convinced some Catholics who have voiced their opposition in news articles, blogs and tweets, which “led to an avalanche of insults toward the academy and the pope on twitter,” Mastrofini said.

Mastrofini acknowledged the Pontifical Academy for Life is “the most attacked department in the Vatican,” but he believes this is because it’s “the only one who answers back.” All Vatican departments have some form of social media presence, but they tend not to engage with their audience and limit themselves to communicating information and updates.

Fabrizio Mastrofini. Photo via the Pontifical Academy for Life

But there are other reasons why the academy is the preferred target of disgruntled Catholics. “We are perceived as the spearhead of Pope Francis’ reform,” Mastrofini said. “This is an attempt to intimidate us. They try to scare us because they want us to be silent and not speak on controversial issues,” he added.

To understand why some Catholics, especially conservatives, hold a grudge against the academy, it’s necessary to go back to 2016 — when Pope Francis enacted a shake-up of the group’s composition, organization and objectives.

Pope Francis chose not to renew the mandate of some of the most vocal culture warriors in the academy and appointed instead academics from a diverse and pragmatic background. He also limited their term to five years and — most significantly — eliminated the oath of fealty to the Catholic magisterium, allowing people of different faiths to become members of the academy.

This last change was considered “the great betrayal for conservative Catholics,” Mastrofini said.

Pope John Paul II created the academy in 1994 to study the legal and moral questions surrounding life in light of Catholic doctrine, but its main priority was combating abortion.

RELATED: Pope on new year: Pandemic is hard, but focus on the good

Francis has expanded the focus of the academy, telling members on the academy’s 25th anniversary they need to embrace a “global bioethic” that addresses human life in its relation to technology and the environment while maintaining “abortion and euthanasia as extremely grave evils.”

“Before all else, we need to enter into the language and lives of men and women today, making the gospel message incarnate in their concrete experiences,” Francis said.

Mastrofini said the academy and Paglia are used to the haters on social media and so far have not held back because of it.

In September 2020, the think tank published a tweet with a picture displaying Michelangelo’s “Pietà” with Mary holding a Black Jesus to raise awareness of racism as it dominated the political discourse in Italy and abroad at the time. The academy published a tweet in April of last year in honor of the late theologian Hans Küng, known for his criticism of papal infallibility as well as his questioning of priestly celibacy and the Catholic ban on contraception. Both these tweets were met with pushback online.

As the Vatican enters a new year and Pope Francis prepares for the next step of his reform, the academy continues to raise the questions of its mandate in this new age — planning conferences and events focused on care for the sick and dying, and equal vaccine distribution globally.

RELATED: Observers, detractors and preachers of religion who died in 2021

‘Refusal to engage’: Gen Z sees gap in support of LGBTQ+ rights among faith groups

Those looking for accepting communities may need to look outside of traditional houses of worship.
LGBTQ+ issues are one of several issues that younger generations feel they care about more than faith groups. (iStock/Getty Images)

January 3, 2022
By Josh Packard, Robyn Henderson-Espinoza

(RNS) — It’s no secret that the young people born in the late 1990s and the first decade of this century are proving to be an activist generation, taking deeply to heart causes such as Black Lives Matter, gender equity, racial justice and environmental justice.

But of the values that they cared about most, a recent report by Springtide Research Institute found, Generation Z believes their faith communities are most falling short when it comes to LBGTQ+ rights. In Springtide’s study, The State of Religion & Young People 2021, the largest gap between what respondents felt “I care” about and “faith groups care” about came in regard to LGBTQ+ rights, showing a 27% difference.

Generation Z is coming of age at a time when the majority of Americans support gay rights, about half a decade after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage. At the same time, a growing percentage of the U.S. population identifies as LGBTQ+, including one in six Gen Zers, according to a recent survey. In all 71% of Gen Zers told Springtide they care about LGBTQ+ rights.


The growing support for LGBTQ+ rights has been occurring among people of all faith groups. A 2018 study from PRRI found that solid majorities of all major religious groups in the U.S. support laws protecting LGBTQ+ people from discrimination. In 2021, hundreds of faith groups and their leaders joined half of Americans in supporting the Equality Act, a bill that would ban discrimination against people based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

RELATED: Students at Catholic colleges leave with less positive attitudes toward gay people than their peers – but that’s not the whole story

This message isn’t getting through to Gen Z. When asked if they think faith groups care about LGBTQ+ rights, only 44% of them agreed.

Why, despite growing support among Americans across all faiths, do less than half of Gen Zers believe faith groups care about LGBTQ+ rights?

“Many people believe that associating with a faith that is anti-LGBTQ+ makes them just as immoral as homophobic and transphobic religious leaders,” shared Faryn, 16, who identifies as Catholic.

“There is a refusal to engage fully,” said Matthew Blasio, age 22, who has no religious affiliation but identifies as spiritual. “There is superficial acceptance of LGBTQ+ identities, but the language regarding LGBTQ+ acceptance in churches is often full of qualifiers, still regarding us as an ‘other.’”


Research focusing on young people and their relationships with religion found a disparity between how much an individual reports to care about and how much they think the faith community cares about different issues. Graphic courtesy of the Springtide Research Institute

When pastors do engage, Blasio said, LGBTQ+ Gen Zers often feel the effort is insincere. “Sometimes religious leaders act with forced love, pretending to lower themselves to our level, just to seem like heroes. It’s more of a selfish love, riddled with misunderstandings.”

These testimonies are not dissimilar from Robyn’s own experience as a young person in church, who was told they had an “allergy to myself” for embracing the term queer. Springtide’s research shows that religious leaders have a long way to go to create the conditions of acceptance that will make LGBTQ+ people feel welcome.

Given the clear evidence that Gen Z genuinely desires community, it is the more astonishing that churches and other faith groups continue to refuse to make room for differently sexed and differently gendered persons. The more work faith communities can do to create containers that can hold folks’ complexities, the better they will be able to present themselves as a true community.

Community is more than gathering; it is more than numbers. Community is about belonging to self and other, a kind of democratized space and place that creates conditions for radical flourishing. The Rev. Richard Rohr says, “Everything belongs”; so how do we belong together? We need to begin asking people what they need in order to belong. If we don’t create the kinds of relationships that help people articulate what they need and want, faith leaders aren’t doing their jobs.

These accepting communities may be outside of traditional houses of worship. Part of Robyn’s work with the Activist Theology Project has been to help create the Activist Theology Porch, an app where we are convening people and having conversations. There are all sorts of folks who have joined in an effort to build a democratized space for spiritual belonging and nourishment. People are finding that yes, they can belong somewhere with other folks who are trying to do good in the world.

Offering anything less, Springtide’s findings suggest, runs the risk of alienating a large portion of Generation Z, who find a lack of support for LGBTQ+ rights to be immoral and hypocritical.

RELATED: Gen Z is looking for meaning this holiday season, but maybe not where we expect

“I have no interest in uprooting my beliefs and values for the benefit of someone else feeling that they’re saving me. If someone is less than, or has less rights, just because of how they were born, yet their god is supposed to love everyone equally, then their god must not be the one for me or my friends,” said Blasio.

Indeed, supporting LGBTQ+ rights could be an opportunity for faith groups to earn the trust of Gen Z.

If faith groups can work toward taking concrete action to dismantle the systems that perpetuate the discrimination LGBTQ+ people continue to experience, it could make the difference between a generation that proceeds into adulthood turned off by institutions or a generation willing to pursue relationships within faith communities and allow faith leaders to walk alongside them.

(Josh Packard is executive director of Springtide Research Institute and the author of “Church Refugees.” He can be contacted @drjoshpackard. Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, (@iRobyn) is a politicized theologian and public ethicist in Nashville, founder of the Activist Theology Project and author of “Body Becoming: A Path to Our Liberation.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)