The Great American Christian and the Fat Golden Calf

How the GOP kidnapped Jesus for votes and brainwashed the faithful

I went to Mass yesterday. I cannot tell you why. Catholic-curious again, the way one is curious about an old lover who has resurfaced looking unexpectedly well. A great deal of it is Pope Leo, an American in white, which still feels like a typo. (One forgets how much a single person can rearrange the furniture of the conscience.) And I am, as ever, helpless before an old church. The cool stone. The wax. The light through glass someone bankrupted a guild to pay for. This time it landed differently. Not because of God. Because of the men who have spent fifty years renting him out.

The crucifix did it. Christ nailed up there, all sinew and surrender, looked barbaric, violent, and sad; a torture device gilded into furniture. And my mind, the ungrateful organ, went straight past the theology to the racket, because what unsettled me in that pew was not doubt. It was the dawning clarity that the most powerful religious movement in American life was never a revival at all. It was a recruitment…