LONDON — Reza Pahlavi was in the United States as a student in 1979 when his father, the last shah of Iran, was toppled in a revolution. He has not set foot inside Iran since, though his monarchist supporters have never stopped believing that one day their “crown prince” will return.  As anti-regime demonstrations fill the streets of more than 100 towns and cities across the country of 90 million people, despite an internet blackout and an increasingly brutal crackdown, that day may just be nearing.   Pahlavi’s name is on the lips of many protesters, who chant that they want the “shah” back. Even his critics — and there are plenty who oppose a return of the monarchy — now concede that Pahlavi may prove to be the only figure with the profile required to oversee a transition.  The global implications of the end of the Islamic Republic and its replacement with a pro-Western democratic government would be profound, touching everything from the Gaza crisis to the wars in Ukraine and Yemen, to the oil market.  Over the course of three interviews in the past 12 months in London, Paris and online, Pahlavi told POLITICO how Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei could be overthrown. He set out the steps needed to end half a century of religious dictatorship and outlined his own proposal to lead a transition to secular democracy. Nothing is guaranteed, and even Pahlavi’s team cannot be sure that this current wave of protests will take down the regime, never mind bring him to power. But if it does, the following is an account of Pahlavi’s roadmap for revolution and his blueprint for a democratic future.  POPULAR UPRISING  Pahlavi argues that change needs to be driven from inside Iran, and in his interview with POLITICO last February he made it clear he wanted foreign powers to focus on supporting Iranians to move against their rulers rather than intervening militarily from the outside.  “People are already on the streets with no help. The economic situation is to a point where our currency devaluation, salaries can’t be paid, people can’t even afford a kilo of potatoes, never mind meat,” he said. “We need more and more sustained protests.” Over the past two weeks, the spiraling cost of living and economic mismanagement have indeed helped fuel the protest wave. The biggest rallies in years have filled the streets, despite attempts by the authorities to intimidate opponents through violence and by cutting off communications. Pahlavi has sought to encourage foreign financial support for workers who will disrupt the state by going on strike. He also called for more Starlink internet terminals to be shipped into Iran, in defiance of a ban, to make it harder for the regime to stop dissidents from communicating and coordinating their opposition. Amid the latest internet shutdowns, Starlink has provided the opposition movements with a vital lifeline. As the protests gathered pace last week, Pahlavi stepped up his own stream of social media posts and videos, which gain many millions of views, encouraging people onto the streets. He started by calling for demonstrations to begin at 8 p.m. local time, then urged protesters to start earlier and occupy city centers for longer. His supporters say these appeals are helping steer the protest movement. Reza Pahlavi argues that change needs to be driven from inside Iran. | Salvatore Di Nolfi/EPA The security forces have brutally crushed many of these gatherings. The Norway-based Iranian Human Rights group puts the number of dead at 648, while estimating that more than 10,000 people have been arrested. It’s almost impossible to know how widely Pahlavi’s message is permeating nationwide, but footage inside Iran suggests the exiled prince’s words are gaining some traction with demonstrators, with increasing images of the pre-revolutionary Lion and Sun flag appearing at protests, and crowds chanting “javid shah” — the eternal shah. DEFECTORS Understandably, given his family history, Pahlavi has made a study of revolutions and draws on the collapse of the Soviet Union to understand how the Islamic Republic can be overthrown. In Romania and Czechoslovakia, he said, what was required to end Communism was ultimately “maximum defections” among people inside the ruling elites, military and security services who did not want to “go down with the sinking ship.”  “I don’t think there will ever be a successful civil disobedience movement without the tacit collaboration or non-intervention of the military,” he said during an interview last February.  There are multiple layers to Iran’s machinery of repression, including the hated Basij militia, but the most powerful and feared part of its security apparatus is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Pahlavi argued that top IRGC commanders who are “lining their pockets” — and would remain loyal to Khamenei — did not represent the bulk of the organization’s operatives, many of whom “can’t pay rent and have to take a second job at the end of their shift.”  “They’re ultimately at some point contemplating their children are in the streets protesting … and resisting the regime. And it’s their children they’re called on to shoot. How long is that tenable?” Pahlavi’s offer to those defecting is that they will be granted an amnesty once the regime has fallen. He argues that most of the people currently working in the government and military will need to remain in their roles to provide stability once Khamenei has been thrown out, in order to avoid hollowing out the administration and creating a vacuum — as happened after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.  Only the hardline officials at the top of the regime in Tehran should expect to face punishment.  In June, Pahlavi announced he and his team were setting up a secure portal for defectors to register their support for overthrowing the regime, offering an amnesty to those who sign up and help support a popular uprising. By July, he told POLITICO, 50,000 apparent regime defectors had used the system.  His team are now wary of making claims regarding the total number of defectors, beyond saying “tens of thousands” have registered. These have to be verified, and any regime trolls or spies rooted out. But Pahlavi’s allies say a large number of new defectors made contact via the portal as the protests gathered pace in recent days.  REGIME CHANGE In his conversations with POLITICO last year, Pahlavi insisted he didn’t want the United States or Israel to get involved directly and drive out the supreme leader and his lieutenants. He always said the regime would be destroyed by a combination of fracturing from within and pressure from popular unrest.  He’s also been critical of the reluctance of European governments to challenge the regime and of their preference to continue diplomatic efforts, which he has described as appeasement. European powers, especially France, Germany and the U.K., have historically had a significant role in managing the West’s relations with Iran, notably in designing the 2015 nuclear deal that sought to limit Tehran’s uranium enrichment program.  But Pahlavi’s allies want more support and vocal condemnation from Europe. U.S. President Donald Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal in his first term and wasted little time on diplomacy in his second. He ordered American military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities last year, as part of Israel’s 12-day war, action that many analysts and Pahlavi’s team agree leaves the clerical elite and its vast security apparatus weaker than ever.  U.S. President Donald Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal in his first term and wasted little time on diplomacy in his second. | Pool photo by Bonnie Cash via EPA Pahlavi remains in close contact with members of the Trump administration, as well as other governments including in Germany, France and the U.K. He has met U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio several times and said he regards him as “the most astute and understanding” holder of that office when it comes to Iran since the 1979 revolution.  In recent days Trump has escalated his threats to intervene, including potentially through more military action if Iran’s rulers continue their crackdown and kill large numbers of protesters.  On the weekend Pahlavi urged Trump to follow through. “Mr President,” he posted on X Sunday. “Your words of solidarity have given Iranians the strength to fight for freedom,” he said. “Help them liberate themselves and Make Iran Great Again!” THE CARETAKER KING  In June Pahlavi announced he was ready to replace Khamenei’s administration to lead the transition from authoritarianism to democracy.   “Once the regime collapses, we have to have a transitional government as quickly as possible,” he told POLITICO last year. He proposed that a constitutional conference should be held among Iranian representatives to devise a new settlement, to be ratified by the people in a referendum.  The day after that referendum is held, he told POLITICO in February, “that’s the end of my mission in life.”  Asked if he wanted to see a monarchy restored, he said in June: “Democratic options should be on the table. I’m not going to be the one to decide that. My role however is to make sure that no voice is left behind. That all opinions should have the chance to argue their case — it doesn’t matter if they are republicans or monarchists, it doesn’t matter if they’re on the left of center or the right.”  One option he hasn’t apparently excluded might be to restore a permanent monarchy, with a democratically elected government serving in his name.  Pahlavi says he has three clear principles for establishing a new democracy: protecting Iran’s territorial integrity; a secular democratic system that separates religion from the government; and “every principle of human rights incorporated into our laws.” He confirmed to POLITICO that this would include equality and protection against discrimination for all citizens, regardless of their sexual or religious orientation.  COME-BACK CAPITALISM  Over the past year, Pahlavi has been touring Western capitals meeting politicians as well as senior business figures and investors from the world of banking and finance. Iran is a major OPEC oil producer and has the second biggest reserves of natural gas in the world, “which could supply Europe for a long time to come,” he said.  “Iran is the most untapped reserve for foreign investment,” Pahlavi said in February. “If Silicon Valley was to commit for a $100 billion investment, you could imagine what sort of impact that could have. The sky is the limit.”  What he wants to bring about, he says, is a “democratic culture” — even more than any specific laws that stipulate forms of democratic government. He pointed to Iran’s past under the Pahlavi monarchy, saying his grandfather remains a respected figure as a modernizer.  “If it becomes an issue of the family, my grandfather today is the most revered political figure in the architect of modern Iran,” he said in February. “Every chant of the streets of ‘god bless his soul.’ These are the actual slogans people chant on the street as they enter or exit a soccer stadium. Why? Because the intent was patriotic, helping Iran come out of the dark ages. There was no aspect of secular modern institutions from a postal system to a modern army to education which was in the hands of the clerics.”   Pahlavi’s father, the shah, brought in an era of industrialization and economic improvement alongside greater freedom for women, he said. “This is where the Gen Z of Iran is,” he said. “Regardless of whether I play a direct role or not, Iranians are coming out of the tunnel.”  Conversely, many Iranians still associate his father’s regime with out-of-touch elites and the notorious Savak secret police, whose brutality helped fuel the 1979 revolution. NOT SO FAST  Nobody can be sure what happens next in Iran. It may still come down to Trump and perhaps Israel.  Anti-regime demonstrations fill the streets of more than 100 towns and cities across the country of 90 million people. | Neil Hall/EPA Plenty of experts don’t believe the regime is finished, though it is clearly weakened. Even if the protests do result in change, many say it seems more likely that the regime will use a mixture of fear tactics and adaptation to protect itself rather than collapse or be toppled completely.  While reports suggest young people have led the protests and appear to have grown in confidence, recent days have seen a more ferocious regime response, with accounts of hospitals being overwhelmed with shooting victims. The demonstrations could still be snuffed out by a regime with a capacity for violence.  The Iranian opposition remains hugely fragmented, with many leading activists in prison. The substantial diaspora has struggled to find a unity of voice, though Pahlavi tried last year to bring more people on board with his own movement.  Sanam Vakil, an Iran specialist at the Chatham House think tank in London, said Iran should do better than reviving a “failed” monarchy. She added she was unsure how wide Pahlavi’s support really was inside the country. Independent, reliable polling is hard to find and memories of the darker side of the shah’s era run deep. But the exiled prince’s advantage now may be that there is no better option to oversee the collapse of the clerics and map out what comes next. “Pahlavi has name recognition and there is no other clear individual to turn to,” Vakil said. “People are willing to listen to his comments calling on them to go out in the streets.”

The first American pope is on a collision course with U.S. President Donald Trump. The latest fault line between the Vatican and the White House emerged on Sunday. Shortly after Trump suggested his administration could “run” Venezuela, the Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV appeared at the Angelus window overlooking St. Peter’s Square to deliver an address calling for the safeguarding of the “country’s sovereignty.” For MAGA-aligned conservatives, this is now part of an unwelcome pattern. While Leo is less combative in tone toward Trump than his predecessor Francis, his priorities are rekindling familiar battles in the culture war with the U.S. administration on topics such as immigration and deportations, LGBTQ+ rights and climate change. As the leader of a global community of 1.4 billion Catholics, Leo has a rare position of influence to challenge Trump’s policies, and the U.S. president has to tread with uncustomary caution in confronting him. Trump traditionally relishes blasting his critics with invective but has been unusually restrained in response to Leo’s criticism, in part because he counts a large number of Catholics among his core electorate. “[Leo] is not looking for a fight like Francis, who sometimes enjoyed a fight,” said Chris White, author of “Pope Leo XIV: Inside the Conclave and the Dawn of a New Papacy.” “But while different in style, he is clearly a continuation of Francis in substance. Initially there was a wait-and-see approach, but for many MAGA Catholics, Leo challenges core beliefs.” In recent months, migration has become the main combat zone between the liberal pope and U.S. conservatives. Leo called on his senior clergy to speak out on the need to protect vulnerable migrants, and U.S. bishops denounced the “dehumanizing rhetoric and violence” leveled at people targeted by Trump’s deportation policies. Leo later went public with an appeal that migrants in the U.S. be treated “humanely” and “with dignity.” Leo’s support emboldened Florida bishops to call for a Christmas reprieve from Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. “Don’t be the Grinch that stole Christmas,” said Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami. As if evidence were needed of America’s polarization on this topic, however, the Department of Homeland Security described their arrests as a “Christmas gift to Americans.” Leo also conspicuously removed Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Trump’s preferred candidate for pope and a favorite on the conservative Fox News channel, from a key post as archbishop of New York, replacing him with a bishop known for pro-migrant views. This cuts to the heart of the moral dilemma for a divided U.S. Catholic community. For Trump, Catholics are hardly a sideshow as they constitute 22 percent of his electorate, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center. While the pope appeals to liberal causes, however, many MAGA Catholics take a far stricter line on topics such as migration, sexuality and climate change. To his critics from the conservative Catholic MAGA camp, such as Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon, the pope is anathema. U.S.-born Pope Leo XIV appeared at the Angelus window overlooking St. Peter’s Square to deliver an address calling for the safeguarding of Venezuela’s “sovereignty.” | Stefano Costantino/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Last year the pope blessed a chunk of ice from Greenland and criticized political leaders who ignore climate change. He said supporters of the death penalty could not credibly claim to be pro-life, and argued that Christians and Muslims could be friends. He has also signaled a more tolerant posture toward LGBTQ+ Catholics, permitting an LGBTQ+ pilgrimage to St Peter’s Basilica. Small wonder, then, that Trump confidante and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer branded Leo the “woke Marxist pope.” Trump-aligned Catholic conservatives have denounced him as “secularist,” “globalist” and even “apostate.” Far-right pundit Jack Posobiec has called him “anti-Trump.” “Some popes are a blessing. Some popes are a penance,” Posobiec wrote on X. PONTIFF FROM CHICAGO There were early hopes that Leo might build bridges with U.S. hardliners. He’s an American, after all: He wears an Apple watch and follows baseball, and American Catholics can hardly dismiss him as as foreign. The Argentine Francis, by contrast, was often portrayed by critics as anti-American and shaped by the politics of poorer nations. Leo can’t be waved away so easily. Early in his papacy, Leo also showed signs he was keen to steady the church after years of internal conflict, and threw some bones to conservatives such as allowing a Latin Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica and wearing more ornate papal vestments. But the traditionalists were not reassured. Benjamin Harnwell, the Vatican correspondent for the MAGA-aligned War Room podcast, said conservatives were immediately skeptical of Leo. “From day one, we have been telling our base to be wary: Do not be deceived,” he said. Leo, Harnwell added, is “fully signed up to Francis’ agenda … but [is] more strategic and intelligent.” After the conclave that appointed Leo, former Trump strategist Bannon told POLITICO that Leo’s election was “the worst choice for MAGA Catholics” and “an anti-Trump vote by the globalists of the Curia.” Trump had a long-running feud with Francis, who condemned the U.S. president’s border wall and criticized his migration policies. Francis appeared to enjoy that sparring, but Leo is a very different character. More retiring by nature, he shies away from confrontation. But his resolve in defending what he sees as non-negotiable moral principles, particularly the protection of the weak, is increasingly colliding with the core assumptions of Trumpism. Trump loomed large during the conclave, with an AI-generated video depicting himself as pope. The gesture was seen by some Vatican insiders as a “mafia-style” warning to elect someone who would not criticize him, Vatican-watcher Elisabetta Piqué wrote in a new book “The Election of Pope Leo XIV: The Last Surprise of Pope Francis.” NOT PERSONAL Leo was not chosen expressly as an anti-Trump figure, according to a Vatican official. Rather, his nationality was likely seen by some cardinals as “reassuring,” suggesting he would be accountable and transparent in governance and finances. But while Leo does not seem to be actively seeking a confrontation with Trump, the world views of the two men seem incompatible. “He will avoid personalizing,” said the same Vatican official. “He will state church teaching, not in reaction to Trump, but as things he would say anyway.” Despite the attacks on Leo from his allies, Trump himself has also appeared wary of a direct showdown. When asked about the pope in a POLITICO interview, Trump was more keen to discuss meeting the pontiff’s brother in Florida, whom he described as “serious MAGA.” When pressed on whether he would meet the pope himself, he finally replied: “Sure, I will. Why not?” The potential for conflict will come into sharper focus as Leo hosts a summit called an extraordinary consistory this week, the first of its kind since 2014, which is expected to provide a blueprint for the future direction of the church. His first publication on social issues, such as inequality and migration, is also expected in the next few months. “He will use [the summit] to talk about what he sees as the future,” said a diplomat posted to the Vatican. “It will give his collaborators a sense of where he is going. He could use it as a sounding board, or ask them to suggest solutions.” It’s safe to assume Leo won’t be unveiling a MAGA-aligned agenda. The ultimate balance of power may also favor the pope. Trump must contend with elections and political clocks; Leo, elected for life, does not. At 70, and as a tennis player in good health, Leo appears positioned to shape Catholic politics well after Trump’s moment has passed. “He is not in a hurry,” the Vatican official said. “Time is on his side.”

Well, it’s (almost) over.  2025 was a monster year of news for Europe, but a couple stories in particular shook the continent — and piqued our readers’ interest. The first was a new and hostile U.S. administration, led by Donald Trump, which dramatically upended the transatlantic relationship (and saw him named POLITICO’s most influential person in Europe).  And the second was the war in Ukraine, which dragged into its fourth, bloody year and — together with Trump’s return to the White House — forced Europe’s leaders to make hard choices about the EU’s security, agency and destiny.   The collision of the two, a paradigm-shattering American president, and the grim reality on Ukraine’s battlefield dominated the year’s news. And POLITICO was there for every consequential speech, summit, and Oval Office spat.  Without further ado, here are our 20 most-read stories of 2025.   20. Europe thinks the unthinkable: Retaliating against Russia As the Kremlin launched a wave of hybrid attacks against EU member countries, from menacing fighter jet incursions to mysterious drone sightings, POLITICO asked: What would it take for Europe to finally hit back? Read the story 19. North Korean troops are far from ‘cannon fodder,’ Ukrainian soldiers say Pyongyang’s entry into the war in Ukraine on the Kremlin side was one of the more surprising stories of 2024. As the fighting continued this year, North Korean infantry proved to be highly skilled combatants, not just expendable pawns, according to Kyiv. Read the story 18. Canada’s conservative leader Pierre Poilievre loses his own seat in election collapse Canada’s election in the spring saw the landslide victory of now-Prime Minister Mark Carney and the spectacular fall of Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, who was unable to hang onto his own seat. Read the story 17. Trump demands $500B in rare earths from Ukraine for continued support The transactional American president turned his sights on Ukraine’s rare earths, the critical elements and minerals vital to manufacturing modern technologies, asking Kyiv to cough up its natural resources in return for Washington’s help fending off Russia’s invasion … Read the story 16. Ukraine balks at signing Trump deal to hand over its mineral wealth … But that didn’t fly with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who refused to sign an agreement drafted by Washington to hand over half of his country’s rare earth minerals to American companies. Read the story 15. ‘Free world needs a new leader’: Europe defends Zelenskyy after Trump attack Trump and Vice President JD Vance’s acrimonious Oval Office showdown with Zelenskyy horrified European leaders and saw the EU stand up to Washington in a major turning point for transatlantic relations. Read story Vice President JD Vance joins as U.S. President Donald Trump meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office at the White House on August 18, 2025. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images 14. Trump blaming Ukraine for Putin’s war leaves Europe reeling The American leader’s insistence that Ukraine was responsible for its own invasion and parroting of Kremlin talking points didn’t exactly sit well with European governments, with one spokesperson calling his remarks “often incomprehensible.” Read the story 13. Russia to Trump: Back off Ukraine’s rare earths Trump’s efforts to ink an economic deal with Ukraine rang alarm bells in Moscow and triggered a response from the Kremlin’s chief spokesperson. Read the story 12. EU offers Trump removal of all industrial tariffs Trump’s punishing tariffs roiled the global economy, and in a bid to nab itself a better deal, the EU offered to scrap its tariffs on industrial products such as cars and chemicals if Washington did the same. Read the story 11. Macron calls emergency European summit on Trump, Polish minister says French President Emmanuel Macron, who did not exactly have the best year, led the European charge to respond to Trump’s disruption with a crisis meeting in Paris. Read the story 10. Huge blackouts cripple power supply in Spain and Portugal A massive outage in Spain and Portugal brought both countries to a standstill, affecting everything from public transport and traffic lights to hospitals and nuclear power plants. Read the story 9. Trump and Putin stun Europe with peace plan for Ukraine Just weeks after taking office, Trump confirmed Europeans’ worst fears when he called Russian President Vladimir Putin — who had previously been in the diplomatic freezer — and sought to broker an end to the war in Ukraine with the Kremlin, sidelining Kyiv and Brussels. Read the story 8. JD Vance attacks Europe over migration, free speech In a stunning tirade that set the tone for the Trump administration’s scathing stance on Europe this year, the American vice president ripped into the EU over everything from freedom of speech to migration policy. Read the story 7. JD Vance sparks British fury as he mocks Ukraine peacekeeping plan As the coalition of the willing took shape, with EU member countries and the U.K. devising a plan to potentially put boots on the ground in Ukraine, Vance poured scorn on the idea — and triggered backlash from London. Read the story 6. EU offers its own ‘win-win’ minerals deal to Ukraine Just as Trump was close to inking an economic deal with Ukraine to dig up Kyiv’s much-coveted natural resources, the EU swooped in with a rival proposition. Read the story 5. EU slams the door on US in colossal defense plan 2025 saw the EU race to arm itself with an ambitious €800 billion defense spending scheme— but Washington, which partly triggered Europe’s scramble to stand on its own two feet by denigrating Europe and cutting off aid to Ukraine, was shut out of the plan. Read the story 4. Top Trump allies hold secret talks with Zelenskyy’s Ukrainian opponents Weeks after Trump’s angry spray at Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, the U.S. president’s allies held secret discussions with some of the Ukrainian leader’s top domestic opponents. Read the story 3. ‘Parkinson’s is a man-made disease’ One of the most sobering stories of 2025 was the explosion in cases of Parkinson’s disease, which have more than doubled globally over the past 20 years and are expected to do so again in the next 20. A neurologist who leads a globally recognized clinic and research team told POLITICO the reason could be our exposure to chemicals. Read the story Photo-illustration by Laura Scott for POLITICO 2. EU to Trump on tariffs: Go ahead, make our day. As Trump prepared to unleash devastating tariffs on Europe, the EU locked and loaded its so-called “trade bazooka,” in a standoff that put Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry to shame. Read the story 1. Pope Francis, sensing he is close to death, moves to protect his legacy In the end, it was political machinations in the Vatican, not the U.S. or Ukraine, which most fascinated POLITICO’s readers. Facing the prospect of his death (which, when it happened in April following a stroke, triggered an outpouring of global grief), Pope Francis took steps to cement his reformist agenda and ensure his successor would follow in his footsteps. Read the story

Dan McClellan has spent much of his life learning—and relearning—what the Bible and its authors were trying to tell us. But the years he spent in graduate school studying Hebrew texts, Near Eastern cultures, and the concept of deity taught him something else: The way scholars talk about the Bible is much different from how churchgoers—or most people on social media—talk about it. So several years ago, McClellan began pushing back against what he saw as misguided biblical interpretations online and found an audience. Today, he has almost 1 million followers on TikTok who look for his thoughts on topics like the “sin of empathy,” what the Bible says about slavery, or maybe just to see what graphic T-shirt he has decided to wear that day. (He confesses to also being a comic book nerd.) But one strand of thought that weaves through many of his videos is how Christian nationalists have recently used the Bible to gain political power. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. “The hot new thing right now is to be a Christian nationalist,” says McClellan, who also wrote The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues. “And I think a lot of people are jumping at the opportunity to get on board this attempt to take over the government on the part of Christians. And unfortunately, it means hurting an awful lot of people along the way.” On this week’s More To The Story, McClellan sits down with host Al Letson to talk about the ways people throughout history have used the Bible to serve their own interests and describes a time when his own perspective of the Bible was challenged. This is an update of an episode that originally aired in July 2025. This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: So you got a new book out, but wait, before we get to that, before we get to that, I should tell my listeners that I am such a huge fan of your work. I’ve been following you for a while and I think I came across your work because I’m the son of a preacher man, grew up in the church and definitely have my own religious beliefs. But what I love about the work that you do is you are just kind of demystifying the Bible and putting it in context. How did you end up doing this type of work, for lack of better term, fact-checking people’s conception of the Bible on TikTok and Instagram? Dan McClellan: Yeah, that was definitely not what I was aimed at when I started graduate school. In fact, I think from an academic point of view, my career looks more like a failure than anything else. Because I have taught at some universities, but never on a full-time basis. I don’t have a tenure-track position or anything like that. But something that has always been a concern of mine, even when I was an undergraduate and then moving into graduate school was the fact that the way scholars and experts talk about the Bible and think about the Bible is very, very different from the way the folks on the street or in the pews think and talk about the Bible. There’s a very big gap between those two. And the more I learned about the Bible and an academic approach to the Bible, the more that gap bothered me and the more I wanted to be able to share the insights that come from that expertise with the folks on the street and in the pews, which is not an easy thing to do, not only because it requires packaging frequently very complex concepts into things that are more easily digestible, but also because there tends to be a lot of pushback from the streets and the pews when you say, “Actually, that’s not what the Bible is like, it’s more like this.” Because of how deeply embedded in their worldviews their own understandings of the Bible are. And so I’ve always tried to engage on social media with the discourse about the Bible and religion. And I’ve always tried to combat the spread of misinformation and speak out against hoaxes and fake artifacts that people try to pawn off as real, have been doing this for a long time on blogs and on message boards and on Facebook and things like that. And the reach is just not that great on those channels. And then for whatever reason, I stumble across TikTok and suddenly I’m able to find an audience that is interested in someone who is there to call balls and strikes rather than to try to defend one dogma or one identity over and against the other. And I’m very happy to be in a position where I say that I combat the spread of misinformation about the Bible and religion for a living. And I wouldn’t take a university position right now if somebody offered me one. So very happy to be in the position I am right now. If any of our listeners have not seen you on TikTok or Instagram and they’re just listening to this conversation and they’re being introduced to you for the first time, I think they would be surprised to know that you’re also a huge pop culture nerd, like myself, a specific type of nerd though. You’re a comic book nerd. I mean, I’m sure you cover many nerddoms, but the one we definitely have in common is comic book and so which makes your videos fun. I think, from what I gather, there are an awful lot of folks out there who find my work relatable precisely because I do not come across as some stuffed shirt, Ivory tower academic. I’m just another dude who likes to wear graphic tees and likes to read comic books and stuff like that. And so I mean, how much better off could things be for me that the things that I enjoy are things that my audience enjoys and that I get to just riff about? So when I think about you on TikTok, I mean, basically you’re fact-checking people who are bending the message of the Bible for their own purposes. I mean, people have been doing this since the Bible was written. But today with social media, those interpretations are now being delivered in a new and really effective way. Yeah. I think the Bible for a long time has been viewed as the highest authority, and particularly after the Reformation when a lot of Christians got rid of everything else and now all we have is the Bible. But if you have something, a text that is supposed to be God’s very word and inspired and inerrant and that is the ultimate authority, if you can leverage that in support of your identity markers, in support of your rhetorical goals and everything like that, that’s a powerful tool in structuring power and values and boundaries. And so it becomes the… That’s the holy grail. That’s what you need to have on your side. But because it’s a text, it has no inherent meaning. It has to be interpreted, which then means whoever best interprets the text in support of their ideologies is going to be able to leverage that ultimate authority. And so I think an awful lot of people spend an awful lot of time trying to read their own ideologies and their own identity politics into the text because that is a very attractive instrument that they can then leverage to serve their own ends. And unfortunately, far too often that means powerful people using that as a tool against less powerful people and groups. And I think that’s particularly true today. I would say that when we look at the way religion is being used to fight against things like homosexuality, the way the Bible is being used to reframe slavery. There was one clip where Charlie Kirk was a person that you were taking his, I wouldn’t say misinformation, I would say disinformation because I think that he actually knows the truth of what he’s saying, as someone that knows the Bible a little bit, even I can look at the things he’s saying and be like, “What are you talking about?” Yeah, he’s an example of somebody I get tagged in his videos a lot and I try not to engage unless there’s a plausible case to be made that what he’s talking about overlaps with the Bible. That’s an example of somebody who right now is trying to leverage the Bible in defense of Christian nationalism because that’s the hot new thing right now is to be a Christian nationalist. And I think a lot of people are jumping at the opportunity to get on board this attempt to take over the government on the part of Christians. And unfortunately, it means hurting an awful lot of people along the way and structuring everything to serve the interests of already privileged and powerful groups over and against the interests of already vulnerable groups. I think folks who love power more than they love people are the actual problem that is causing a lot of the social ills that we have today. And unfortunately, the Bible is very frequently one of the main instruments that we find in the hands of those people. A couple months ago, the thing that I was hearing a lot on social media specifically from right wing religious folks is the idea that there’s the sin of empathy. And on its surface I thought it was laughable, but I have you here now. So my question is is there anywhere in the Bible that talks about the sin of empathy? Certainly not. There are certainly times when in narratives God will say, “Show no mercy,” or something like that. And these are particularly problematic passages where God says, “You will go through the town and you will kill everything that breathes, men, women, children, the suckling baby. Show no mercy.” And so I think you could interpret that to mean there are times when God does not want you to be empathetic, at least there are times when the narrative calls for that. But I think we can point out that’s a bad narrative and that’s a bad message. There’s certainly no point where anyone says empathy is a sin just in general. And the notion of the sin of empathy is just an attempt to try to overturn the fact that we’re social creatures and we are evolutionarily and experientially predisposed to feel what other people are feeling. That is what allows us to cooperate. That’s what allows us to build larger and more complex social groups without things breaking down. Empathy is important to the survival of humanity, but it has a negative byproduct because we all understand ourselves according to specific sets of social identities. And if you have a social identity, you have an in-group and then you have an out-group. And so empathy can be problematic when we empathize with the in-group to the degree that we then become antagonistic toward the out-group. We call that parochial empathy. If you are empathetic toward the people you identify with to the degree that you then antagonize and harm the out-group, that can be harmful. But I don’t think that’s what people are talking about when they are talking about the sin of empathy because those are the people who are overwhelmingly trying to defend precisely parochial empathy because they’re trying to convince others it’s bad for us to empathize with undocumented immigrants. It’s bad for us to empathize with people from other nations. It’s bad for us to empathize with either conservatives or liberals. I think empathy that is outward looking is good. Empathy that is parochial, I mean, it serves a purpose. Smaller groups that are threatened, that are vulnerable, in order for those identities to survive, they have to kind of circle the wagons and you have to kind of be a little protective of your identity. This is what the Judeans and the Jewish folks throughout history have had to do. And that’s necessary, I think, in certain contexts for the survival and the protection of vulnerable identities. But once you become the oppressor, once you become the empire, once you become the dominant group to then say the out-group is bad and to exercise that parochial empathy, I think that becomes phenomenally harmful. And so ironically, there can be a way that empathy is bad and the folks who talk about the sin of empathy are primarily defending the bad kind of empathy and criticizing the good kind of empathy. So I think they have it precisely backwards. And I think all they’re trying to do is protect their own privilege and power. Yeah. I mean, I think they have it backwards, but I think they have it backwards purposefully so. I think that there are a lot of people who don’t know any better and they say things based in their ignorance, but I also think there are a lot of people who interpret the text in a way that justifies the things that they already believe to be right. It’s good for them to… I mean, sometimes when I’m listening to some folks talk about the Bible and Jesus, the image of Jesus that comes in my mind is Jesus riding horseback on a Tyrannosaurus Rex with two sub-machine guns in his hand. With an AK, yeah. Yeah, exactly. It’s like that’s not the Jesus that I see, but I understand how some people can twist their beliefs to fit that image. Yeah. And you do, anytime you have these movements, you’ve got a lot of people who are there along for the ride. They’re convinced of things, but a lot of the thought leaders and a lot of the people who are driving the car are conscious of what they’re doing, are very intentionally doing it. So tell me about your book. why’d you write it? All the things. All the things. It’s called The Bible Says So: What We Get Right and Wrong About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues. The framing that I came up with is the Bible says so because one of the most common things that I’m confronting in social media is the notion that the Bible says X, Y, and Z. And so that was the genesis of this manuscript that turned into this book, which has 18 different chapters, an intro, and then I give a little broad-level view of how we got the Bible. But then 18 different chapters, each one addresses a different claim about what the Bible says. So the Bible says homosexuality is an abomination. The Bible says God created the universe out of nothing. The Bible says you should beat your kids. A lot of different claims about what the Bible says. And in each chapter I try to go through and share what the data actually indicate about what the authors and earliest audiences of these biblical texts understood the text to be doing and to be saying, where normally when people say the Bible says X, Y or Z, they’re sharing what makes the Bible meaningful and useful to them in their specific circumstances. And what I do is try to say, “I’m going to set that aside and I’m going to try to understand what would’ve made this text meaningful and useful to its authors and earliest audiences irrespective of how meaningful and useful that may make it to us.” And so I try to share what we think the authors were trying to say when they wrote whatever they did right in the Bible. All of your studies that you’ve… And you’ve gone deep into all of this, is it fair to look at the Bible as a historical document or do you see the Bible more as a collection of stories that try to teach people, specifically people of that time how to live their lives, like how to be safe, how to create community, all of those things? I think there’s a degree to which many parts of the Bible are historical, but I think that’s incidental. The Bible was certainly not written as a history book. And I think overwhelmingly, the Bible is a collection of texts from that time period that were intended to try to do certain things with the audiences. It wasn’t also always necessarily about how to live right. I think a lot of the times it’s about trying to establish who’s in control and what kind of understanding of our identity we should have and things like that. So there are a lot of different rhetorical goals going on, and sometimes one set of authors might be arguing against another set of authors. You see that particularly between Samuel and Kings and Chronicles. You have a lot of things being changed because the editors of Chronicles were like, “I don’t like the way you do it. I’m going to do it this other way.” And they’re trying to make different points. But yeah, they’re definitely rhetorical texts. They’re definitely to some degree propagandistic texts, and particularly a lot of the historical texts having to do with the Kings and things like that in the Hebrew Bible. Once we get into the New Testament, I think it’s probably a little more in line with texts intended to help people understand how to live according to the opinion of the authors. Tell me if this categorization is fair. The God of the Old Testament is, my dad would kill me if he heard me say this, but the God of the Old Testament feels very much a God of get off my lawn, kids and very much like an angry wrathful God, like, “You step in line with me or I will smite you. I will burn whole cities down. And if you turn around and look at those cities, I will turn you into pillars of salt. I don’t mess around. There’s no mercy.” Then after Jesus is born and Jesus lives his life, the God we meet there is a much more generous and loving God, the God who hung out with tax collectors, who hung out with prostitutes, who told you to love your neighbor as you would love yourself, all of these things that are a much more softer and loving deity than what we see in the Old Testament. Would you agree that that’s true? I would agree that that’s a very common interpretation. And I would agree that on the surface, if we’re not looking incredibly closely, it can seem like that. But I think there’s a problem with that perspective, and there are a few things going on here. Because you have an angry vindictive God in the New Testament as well, but it’s isolated to only a couple places and primarily like the Book of Revelation represents a deity that will bathe its sword in the blood of victims, and you also find a phenomenally merciful and long-suffering God in different parts of the Hebrew Bible. And this is one of the reasons that I’ve tried to point out there’s no one God of the Bible. You have numerous different divine profiles being represented throughout both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Different authors are going to represent God in whatever ways serve their own rhetorical interests and goals, but there is a chronological trajectory as well. As things are changing in the world in societies, you go from far more warfare, far more conflict between societies to a time period when there’s still war and conflict, but there’s a lot more advocacy for peace. And it’s not the division between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament where that pivots, it’s actually before the end of the Hebrew Bible. I think that that dichotomy of the vindictive and violent God of the Hebrew Bible and the loving merciful God of the New Testament also is problematic from an antisemitism point of view because that has taken up frequently to frame the God of the Jewish people as evil and the God of Christianity as good. And that facilitates, or it historically has facilitated a lot of problems. So I try to help people understand that you’ve got a mix of both in both sets of texts, and it’s really your choice what you choose to emphasize, give priority to and center. This is exactly why I love your videos because I have a long-held belief that I’ve thought about over years. And then you come along and you blow it all up. You blow it all. Not only do you blow it up, you point out the places where that belief is problematic because until you said it, I never would’ve thought of it in the frame of like antisemitic. It’s the blind spot, I don’t see it like that, but when you frame it in that way, I get it. I get why that thinking is totally problematic, and I think that’s the power of what you do on social media. And that’s something that it’s a lesson I had to learn myself as well. Because I saw somebody posted on Twitter many years ago a picture of Santa Claus in somebody’s living room, but he was angry and had an ax or something, and there’s a little kid on the stairs looking around the corner and says, “Oh, no, it’s Old Testament Santa.” And I was like, “Aha.” And I shared this and some of my Jewish scholar friends immediately were like, “Bad form. Here’s why this is bad.” And it had never occurred to me either, and then I couldn’t unsee it. Once I accepted that people with very different experiences are going to feel very differently about the joke and what’s being expressed there, I couldn’t unsee that. It’s interesting to me growing up in the Baptist church that when I was in church and in the church that I went to, the Bible verse that I heard more than anything was that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than a rich man to enter the gates of heaven. And that was kind of a thing in the church that I was in, and most of the churches that I went to, that wealth did not equate that you were a pious and good person. It was more the opposite, that wealth meant that your actions had to be more because it was going to be hard for you to get through the gates of heaven. And it seems that that Bible verse is completely forgotten by, well, A, like a lot of these Christian nationalists or preachers who engage in the prosperity gospel. Yeah, it’s a big issue. And I mean, there are ways that people try to get around that verse. They say that, “Oh, eye have the needle doesn’t mean an actual sewing needle. It refers to what’s called a wicked gate, a little door that is inside of the main door of the city gate.” And so it just means that you have to open the little door and the pack has to be taken off the camel and they have to shimmy through on their knees. And I don’t think these people have ever seen a camel in real life who are saying this because camels are not going to do that. But there were no such gates anywhere in, around or near Jerusalem, anywhere near the time of the composition of the New Testament. And this is very clearly hyperbole that is coming at the end of a story about a rich young ruler comes to Jesus and says, “I’ve kept all the commandments since my youth. What do I have to do to inherit the kingdom of God?” And Jesus says, “Sell everything you own and give it to the poor.” And then it says the man went away sad because he had a lot of possessions. And that’s where Jesus goes, “Tsk, tsk. It’s going to be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven,” and then gives this hyperbolic notion of a camel passing through the eye of a needle. And for people who try to endorse a prosperity gospel interpretation of this, not only is it incredibly hard to do and it’s never really convincing unless you are already there and just need to be made to feel like it’s not impossible. But like everywhere else in the gospels, Jesus says, “You cannot serve God and mammon.” And Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor.” And you can look in the sermon on the Mount and in Matthew 5, and it says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” And so people say, “Aha. It doesn’t say… That’s not about economic poverty, that’s about humility.” But you can then go to the sermon on the plain in the Gospel of Luke and it just says, “Blessed are the poor.” Which very clearly is referring to economic poverty. As I said before, the Bible is a text. It has no inherent meaning. We create meaning in negotiation with the text, which means we’re bringing our experiences and our understanding to the text, and that’s generating the meaning. And if you have experienced privilege and wealth your whole life, you’re going to interpret the Bible in a way that makes that okay. It’s very rare that we have someone in a position like that who comes to the text and can think critically enough to realize, “This is about me. This is saying that I am the problem. I better fix myself.” That’s phenomenally rare. What is far more common is for someone to bring their own experiences to the text and say, “I was right all along. The problem is everybody else. The problem is not me. I can find endorsement or validation of my own worldviews and my own perspectives and my own hatred and my own bigotry in the text and that authorizes and validates it.” And that’s what we see going on overwhelmingly in public discourse about the Bible. Tough question that you’ve probably been asked a million times before, but the fact that you are doing such deep research on the Bible, how does that affect your religious belief? And I think for a long time I assumed that you are an atheist, that you didn’t believe in God, but then you did a video and you talked about being a Mormon, and I was like, “Wow, okay. That’s a wrinkle. That’s something there.” So yeah, talk to me about that. How do you balance the two things? Well, and this is something I’ve for a long time said, I don’t talk about my personal beliefs on social media, so that’s a boundary that I try to maintain. But what I will say is that I have always tried very, very hard ever since I started formally studying the Bible to ensure that I was compartmentalizing my academic approach to the Bible from my devotional approach to the Bible, keeping them firmly separate, which is not an easy thing to do because I was raised more or less without religion. And like I mentioned earlier, I joined the LDS church as an adult. I was 20 years old. I didn’t really have much that I had to deconstruct when I started studying the Bible academically. So I would say that a lot of people reach out to me for help with deconstruction, for help with trying to understand these things through a prism of faith. And that’s where I say, “That’s above my pay grade.” I don’t take a pastoral approach to this. I’m not here to hold anybody’s hand through faith crises and things like that. There are content creators out there who do that kind of thing. I’m just here to try to present the data and my own personal grappling with that is something that is private. So I do keep that separate. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

ROME — Christmas is becoming a new front line in Europe’s culture wars. Far-right parties are claiming the festive season as their own, recasting Christmas as a marker of Christian civilization that is under threat and positioning themselves as its last line of defense against a supposedly hostile, secular left. The trope echoes a familiar refrain across the Atlantic that was first propagated by Fox News, where hosts have inveighed against a purported “War on Christmas” for years. U.S. President Donald Trump claims to have “brought back” the phrase “Merry Christmas” in the United States, framing it as defiance against political correctness. Now, European far-right parties more usually focused on immigration or law-and-order concerns have adopted similar language, recasting Christmas as the latest battleground in a broader struggle over culture. In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has made the defense of Christmas traditions central to her political identity. She has repeatedly framed the holiday as part of the nation’s endangered heritage, railing against what she calls “ideological” attempts to dilute it. “How can my culture offend you?” Meloni has asked in the past, defending nativity scenes in public spaces. She has argued that children should learn the values of the Nativity — rather than just associating Christmas with food and presents — and rejected the idea that long-standing traditions should be altered. This year, Meloni said she was abstaining from alcohol until Christmas, portraying herself as a practitioner of spirituality and tradition.   France’s National Rally and Spain’s Vox have similarly opposed secularist or “woke” efforts to replace religious imagery with neutral seasonal language, and advocated for nativity scenes in town halls. In Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) has warned that Christmas markets are losing their “German character,” amplifying disinformation about Muslim traditions edging out Christian ones. CHRISTMAS SPECTACLE But Meloni’s party, Brothers of Italy, has turned the message into spectacle. Each December it hosts a Christmas-themed political festival — complete with Santa, ice-skating, and a towering Christmas tree lit in the colors of the Italian tricolor. Once held quietly in late summer, the event, named Atreyu — after a character in the fantasy film The NeverEnding Story — has since moved to the prestigious Castel Sant’Angelo, drawing families, tourists and the politically curious. Brothers of Italy said on their Whatsapp Channel that the festival had been “a success without precedent. Record numbers, real participation and a community that grows from year to year, demonstrating how it has become strong, like Italy.” Daniel, a 26-year-old tourist from Mallorca, who declined to give his last name because he did not want to be associated with a far right political event, said he and a friend wandered in after spotting the lights and music. “Then we realized it was about politics,” he said, laughing. CULTURAL CHRISTIANITY For party figures, the symbolism is explicit. “For us, traditions represent our roots, who we are, who we have been, and the history that made us what we are today,” said Marta Schifone, a Brothers of Italy MP. “Those roots must be celebrated and absolutely defended.” That message resonates with younger supporters too. Alessandro Meriggi, a student and leader in Azione Universitaria, the party’s youth wing, said Italy is founded on specific values that newcomers should respect. “In a country like Italy, you can’t ask schools to remove the crucifix,” he said. “It represents our values.” Religion, however, often feels almost beside the point. Many of the politicians leading these campaigns are not especially devout, and only a minority of their voters are practicing Christians. What matters is Christianity as culture, a civilizational shorthand that draws a boundary between “us” and “them.” U.S. President Donald Trump claims to have “brought back” the phrase “Merry Christmas” in the United States. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images “In the 1980s and 1990s, the radical right largely kept its distance from the church,” said Daniele Albertazzi, a professor at the University of Surrey who researches populism. “That changed between 2010–15, following Islamic terrorist attacks in Europe, which were framed as a clash of civilizations. Christianity became a cultural marker, a way to portray themselves as defenders of traditional family, tradition and identity.” Hosting a Christmas festival is a “very intelligent” move by Meloni’s party, he said. “They have tried to reverse the stigma of their past [on the far right] by becoming a broad-church modern conservative party, and this is part of the repackaging.” That strategy benefits from the left’s discomfort with religion in public life. Progressive parties and institutions, including the EU, have tried to emphasize inclusivity by using neutral phrases like “holiday season,” which for the far right amounts to cultural self-loathing. In Italy this year, the League and Brothers of Italy have attacked several schools that removed religious references from Christmas songs. In Genoa, right-wing parties accused the city’s left-wing mayor of delivering a “slap in the face to tradition” after she chose not to display a nativity scene in her offices. “We’re not embarrassed to say ‘Merry Christmas,’” said Lucio Malan, a Brothers of Italy senator, at Meloni’s festival. “I have always promoted religious freedom and know not everyone is Christian. But Christmas is the holiday people care about most. Let’s not forget its origins.” The irony, critics note, is that many Christmas traditions are relatively modern, shaped as much by commerce as by religion. Yet Christmas remains politically potent precisely because it is emotive, tied to family rituals, childhood memories and local identity. For Meloni’s government, taking ownership of Christmas fits a broader project to reclaim control over cultural institutions from public broadcasting to museums and opera, after what it sees as decades of left-wing dominance. The narrative of the far right as the defenders of Christmas presents a challenge for mainstream parties who have struggled to find a compelling counter-argument to convincingly defend secularism. And nowhere is that clearer than at the Brothers of Italy’s Christmas festival itself. As dusk falls over Castel Sant’Angelo, families skate to a soundtrack of Christmas pop, children pose for photos with Santa, and tourists wander in, drawn by lights and music rather than ideology. Politics is present, but softened, wrapped in nostalgia, tradition and seasonal cheer.

Pope Leo called on U.S. President Donald Trump not to “break apart” the transatlantic alliance after the Republican leader harshly criticized Europe in an interview with POLITICO.  Speaking to reporters after a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at Castel Gandolfo near Rome, the pontiff said Trump’s recent statements — in which he derided European leaders as “weak” and the continent as “decaying” — were an attempt to destroy the U.S.-Europe relationship.  “The remarks that were made about Europe also in interviews recently I think are trying to break apart what I think needs to be a very important alliance today and in the future,” Pope Leo said.    Trump slammed Europe as poorly governed and failing to regulate migration in an interview with POLITICO’s Dasha Burns that aired Tuesday in a special episode of The Conversation podcast.   “I think they’re weak,” Trump said, referring to the continent’s presidents and prime ministers, adding, “I think they don’t know what to do. Europe doesn’t know what to do.”  Pope Leo added the Trump administration’s peace plan for Ukraine “unfortunately” marks “a huge change in what was for many, many years a true alliance between Europe and the United States.”  Trump’s proposal to end the war, which sidelined Brussels and included several major concessions to Russia, including ceding vast swathes of Ukrainian territory and capping the size of its military, drew alarm from Kyiv and its European allies and led to frenzied negotiations in Geneva to come up with an alternative framework.  “It’s a program that President Trump and his advisers put together. He’s the president of the United States and he has a right to do that,” Pope Leo added.  But the Catholic leader said brokering peace talks “without including Europe” was “unrealistic.” “I really think that Europe’s role is very important … seeking a peace agreement without including Europe in the conversations, it’s not realistic,” he said. “The war is in Europe. I think in the guarantees of security that are also being sought today and in the future, Europe must be part of them.” Pope Leo — a Chicago native who was inaugurated in May as the first pontiff from North America — has hit out at Trump before, condemning Washington’s treatment of migrants as “inhuman” and urging him not to invade Venezuela.  Trump also tangled with Pope Leo’s predecessor, Pope Francis, who slammed the U.S.-Mexico border wall as “not Christian” and, months before his death, called Trump’s mass deportation plans a “disgrace.” Trump in turn branded him a “very political person.” Despite the current pontiff’s criticism, Trump signaled openness to talking or meeting with Leo in remarks to POLITICO.  “Sure, I will. Why not?” he said.   

On the night before Christmas in 1954, a Chicago housewife named Dorothy Martin begged her followers to step outside, sing together, and wait, at last, for the aliens.  Things hadn’t been going well for Martin, the leader of a small UFO-based religious movement usually known as the Seekers. She had previously told her followers that, according to her psychic visions, a UFO would land earlier that month and take them all to space; afterwards, a great flood would bring this fallen world to an end.  > Research based on recently unsealed records claims the book When Prophecy > Fails leans on lies, omissions, and serious manipulation. When that prediction failed to happen, Martin said an updated psychic transmission—known as her “Christmas message”—had come through, saying they had spread so much “light” with their adherence to God’s will that He had instead decided to spare the world. She soon followed with another message commanding the group to assemble in front of her home and sing carols, again promising that they would be visited by “spacemen” who would land in a flying saucer and meet them on the sidewalk. Martin told the Seekers to notify the press and the public. At 6 p.m. on Christmas Eve, the group gathered, sang, and waited; eventually, they retreated to Martin’s living room. A large crowd of journalists, curious gawkers, and some hecklers stood outside.  Dorothy Martin is helped into her home on Christmas Eve, 1954. Charles Laughead walks behind her, bareheaded.Charles E. Knoblock/AP We know about these shifts because the Seekers were, unbeknownst to Martin or anyone else, full of undercover researchers covertly taking notes. The observers were primarily interested in what Martin and her followers would do when the aliens repeatedly failed to land. What transpired was recorded in a 1956 book, When Prophecy Fails, written by Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter. It is considered an enduring classic in the fields of new religious studies, cult research, and social psychology. One Seeker, the book reported, said they actually had spied a spaceman in the Christmas Eve crowd wearing a helmet and “big white gown,” adding that he was invisible to nonbelievers. But in the face of another no-show, a more common response in the group, the authors reported, was to continue to insist that the spacemen would yet come, and their belief would not be in vain. The repeated “disconfirmation” of their beliefs that December, the researchers claimed, only strengthened their faith, and made them more eager to reach out, to convert nonbelievers, journalists, and anyone else who would listen.  The book is gripping, an in-depth social and psychological study of Martin’s group and how they behaved, both as it was forming and after their prophetic visions failed to take place. It has served as a key basis for the psychological concept of cognitive dissonance: what happens to people when they hold conflicting beliefs, when their beliefs conflict with their actions, or when they clash with how events unfold in the real world. The theory was taken further by Festinger, who wrote a widely-cited followup book on cognitive dissonance and how people try to engage in “dissonance reduction” to reduce the psychological pressure and unease they experience when confronted with conflicting information.  But a new study that examined Festinger’s recently unsealed papers claims that Prophecy leans on lies, omissions, and serious manipulation. The article, published this month in the peer-reviewed Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, also argues that, contrary to the researchers’ longstanding narrative, the group members all showed clear signs of quickly abandoning their beliefs when the UFOs failed to arrive, and that the group soon dissolved.  Thomas Kelly, the paper’s author, found that while core members of the group stayed active in UFO spaces, they did not keep insisting on a world-ending flood, or that aliens would land and take them away. To the contrary, Kelly says, the Seekers were quick to disavow those beliefs. Even Martin herself rebranded, insisting to an interviewer that she had never believed she’d be taken away by an actual spaceship. “Dorothy Martin distanced herself completely from these events, even rewriting the story of how she developed her psychic powers,” Kelly writes in the paper, shifting from claiming they had emerged after she awoke one morning with a tingling sensation, to a story where they came about after “she had been in a car accident, developed cancer, and was miraculously healed by an appearance of Jesus Christ,” as she told an interviewer in the 1980s. “The failed prophecy and Christmas message were omitted entirely,” Kelly writes, from her later narrative.  Kelly’s paper not only undercuts the researchers’ claims and their application of the theory developed from them, but also alleges they committed scientific misconduct, including “fabricated psychic messages, covert manipulation, and interference in a child welfare investigation.”  > “The conventional wisdom is just wrong.” Subsequent studies of new religious movements failed to replicate Prophecy’s findings, which isn’t surprising: a well-known replication crisis has shown that findings in psychological studies often can’t be repeated. But in the worlds of psychology, social science, and the study of UFO cults, the book has has remained a narrative juggernaut, influencing how we talk about cults, systems of belief, what it takes to change one’s mind, and why people cling to “unreasonable” or disproven beliefs. (In over a decade spent reporting on conspiracy theories and alternative belief systems, I have repeatedly cited the book myself.)  Kelly hopes his paper will show that “the conventional wisdom is just wrong. The expected outcome of a failed prophecy, what normally happens, is that the cult dies.” Kelly, a conservative-leaning researcher who’s worked on biosecurity and health policy,  is not a social scientist or an expert on cults or new religious movements. Previously a fellow at the Horizon Institute for Public Service, a think tank that says it bridges the worlds of technology and public policy, today he says he works as a “consultant for different advocacy groups” that he declines to name. He has advocated for tax credits for living kidney donors and written a paper on expanding access to pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV. In addition to his Substack, he has written for right-leaning publications including the Federalist and City Journal. One could argue he’s pushed fringe ideas himself: a recent piece for the conservative Jewish magazine Tablet expresses concern about gain-of-function virology research, and gives credence to the idea that Covid-19 was created in a lab.  “This is a side project I care a lot about,” Kelly says of his work on Prophecy. He read the book a few years ago “out of personal interest” and found that it made him “really nervous.” He was bothered by the authors’ claims that Martin and the Seekers never tried to proselytize before their prophecy failed at the same time the book actually provides several examples of just that: Martin enthusiastically talked to journalists and anyone who would listen about her psychic visions, even after claiming she received a visitation from mysterious visitors warning her not to discuss them. Another member, Charles Laughead, sent letters to at least two editors promoting Martin’s prophecies.  Laughead and his wife Lillian were Martin’s two most important followers. Kelly was able to determine they, well before Christmas Eve 1954, were holding study groups at their house and engaging in aggressive outreach to try to tell the world about Martin’s visions. Charles Laughead, a physician, was actually twice fired by Michigan State University ahead of that Christmas Eve for trying to convert his student patients.  Given all this, the book’s claim that proselytization only took place after the Christmas message “nagged at me,” Kelly says. “It seemed like a strange interpretation.” He argues that the researchers twisted the group’s behavior to fit their thesis, downplaying the proselytization they did before the prophecy failed and playing up any proselytization that occurred after.  This interpretation is important, because the thesis of When Prophecy Fails is clear: after Martin’s failed prophecy, her group doubled down, not only by refusing to acknowledge that their core predictions had utterly failed, but banding together with a new zeal to spread them.  Both Prophecy and Festinger’s 1957 followup, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, argued that the group employed cognitive dissonance to maintain internal consistency. According to Festinger and his coauthors, Martin and her followers reframed how situations had transpired, made changes and justifications to what they said they believed, and rejected information that didn’t align with their beliefs.  > “I can’t afford to doubt. I have to believe, and there isn’t any other truth.” When Kelly looked at Festinger’s 1957 book, though, he felt that the details of the Seekers relayed there didn’t really match what was in Prophecy—that Festinger was, in his words, already “massaging” the facts to make them match his emerging theory of cognitive dissonance. For instance: while Prophecy concedes that a few people walked away from the group after disconfirmation, Festinger’s followup book describes a more total state of belief for everyone involved that grew even stronger after the disappointments of December 1954. “The conviction of those persons who had met the disconfirmation together did not seem to waver,” Festinger wrote. “Indeed, the need for social support to reduce the dissonance introduced by the disconfirmation was so strong, and the social support so easily forthcoming from one another, that at least two of these persons, who before had occasionally shown some mild skepticism concerning certain aspects of the beliefs, now seemed completely and utterly convinced.”  Festinger’s papers, held at the University of Michigan, were unsealed in early 2025, giving Kelly more insight into the authors’ behavior during their time with the Seekers. Kelly says he was disturbed by what he found, including evidence of clearly unethical intervention and manipulation from the researchers and the observers they hired. He told me that he even found evidence the researchers briefly broke into Dorothy Martin’s house through a back door and looked around, though they found nothing of note; the incident is not mentioned in his published paper.  One focus of Kelly’s paper is Riecken, who immediately acquired a high-level of status in the group—he was even dubbed “Brother Henry”—for reasons that, Kelly writes, weren’t clear. The archival materials, he writes, show that Riecken manipulated his position “to shape group behavior including… pivotal events” in December 1954.   For example, according to notes by Riecken that were included in Festinger’s papers, after the spacemen initially failed to land that month, Riecken decided to bitterly mock Martin, calling a new psychic message she offered after the first time no aliens turned up “pretty dense.” Then he went aside with Charles Laughead, told him he was struggling with a lack of faith, and begged Laughead to reassure him. Laughead did so, responding with a long monologue about the need to stay committed.  “I’ve given up just about everything,” Laughead declared, according to Riecken. “I’ve cut every bridge. I’ve turned my back on the world. I can’t afford to doubt. I have to believe, and there isn’t any other truth.” Riecken then returned to the group, proclaiming his doubts were gone and his faith restored. Reassured, Martin brightened and began frantically writing what would become her Christmas message. “Martin’s despair, Laughead’s defiant affirmation of belief, and the Christmas message were all driven by Riecken,” Kelly concludes. Martin, who predicted a cataclysm on December 21, chats with Laughead in her Oak Park, Illinois home on December 22.Charles E. Knoblock/AP Kelly writes that another paid observer, Liz Williams, also ingratiated herself to the group—even becoming part of the Laughead household—under false pretenses, claiming to have had psychic visions, including “a mystical dream in which a mysterious, luminous man rescued her from a flood.” According to Kelly’s research, she also tried to manipulate another, less popular group member—one Williams admitted to finding “stupid” and disliking—into thinking she was psychic by performing automatic writing sessions in front of her. “So much of her writing is about how much she hates this one woman,” Kelly noted dryly in our interview; in an appearance on the Conspirituality podcast, Kelly describes the research team as being “gleeful” about how “easily fooled” group members were. > “I wouldn’t have published this.” The interference Kelly uncovered goes beyond manipulation. At one point, he writes that the Laugheads were being investigated by family services agents after Charles’ sister had contacted his bosses at Michigan State, concerned whether the Laugheads were fit to care for their two children. Williams and another observer, Frank Nall, intercepted a social worker affiliated with the university who had been sent to the Laugheads house, told her about the ongoing study, and instructed her not to interfere. The social worker, under pressure from her boss at the university, dropped the matter. (Prophecy notes that the Laugheads won a court case over their parental rights and moved their family away soon after the books’ events.)  Williams and Nall got married after their time at Michigan State and had a child together. Williams died in June at 99 years old, after a long career as a professor, researcher, and women’s rights advocate. Nall himself, now 100, has only spotty memories of his role in the study, and none of the incident involving the social worker. (“That was 75 years ago, how the hell do you expect me to remember that?” he said in a brief phone call, laughing.)  As for “Brother Henry,” Kelly writes that the researchers exploited Riecken’s exalted position in the group to the very end: “As the study wound to an end, the researchers wanted to gather additional information, so they invoked Brother Henry’s spiritual status,” having him proclaim himself “as the ‘earthly verifier’ who had been tasked with comparing the accounts of the members to what was already known to the Space Brothers.” Under that guise, he had Seekers sit with him for interviews and gained access to “private documents and ‘sealed prophecies’” belonging to Martin. According to notes by Riecken and Schachter, Riecken examined the box holding them, bound it with his own magical “Seal of Protection,” as the researcher called it, and gave it to another paid observer. “This contradicts the account in When Prophecy Fails,” Kelly writes, which claimed the box had been obtained from a true believing member they called Mark. The authors even claimed that Mark, Kelly writes, “wanted to open the box to retrieve some of his own documents that had been sealed in there, but was unwilling to do so since it would risk breaching the seal.” The authors, he charges, “use this apparently fabricated incident as an example of belief surviving disconfirmation.”  One professor with extensive experience in archival research, cults, and religious studies isn’t persuaded by the arguments in Kelly’s paper, and isn’t convinced it meets the rigorous scholarly standards they would expect from a peer-reviewed article. “I wouldn’t have published this,” says Poulomi Saha, a University of California-Berkeley associate professor in critical theory who is writing a book on the cultural fascination with cults. “This author ends up doing what he accuses the authors of When Prophecy Fails of doing, which is cherrypicking evidence,” says Saha, who reviewed Kelly’s paper at my request. Kelly used “a fairly narrow reading of limited archival materials,” Saha says, to argue that the researchers were “the singular lynchpins of what happens to this group,” as with Kelly’s interpretations that Laughead only delivered his monologue on continuing to believe because Riecken coaxed it out of him, and that Martin only wrote her Christmas message because of his influence as Brother Henry. Saha was also concerned by Kelly’s admission that he could not read one of Martin’s notes he found in Festinger’s archive, which he describes as revealing that she told Brother Henry he was “the favorite son of the Most God.” Kelly writes in an endnote that the note saying this “was written in faded ink in an old‐fashioned style of hand‐writing (cursive) on thin paper which I found difficult to read.” Kelly says that he used ChatGPT to decipher the text, which, Saha says, “wouldn’t pass muster with any real historian.” (Kelly concedes the words AI determined to be “the Most God” were completely indecipherable to his own eyes, but says that was the only place he relied on a machine interpretation of the text.) > “We’re talking about different academic and scholarly methods 70 years ago.” Saha also says the way Prophecy is generally viewed today is more nuanced than Kelly suggests. “It’s considered a really interesting case study. It’s not considered a definitive psychological theory.” It is never cited, they say, “as the reason some other event should be credible or not.”  Overall, Saha says Kelly’s paper “asks good questions,” ones that they hope will prompt other scholars to reevaluate Prophecy by also delving into Festinger’s archives. “If we want to critique the methods and think about how methodology has changed in 70 years, I would encourage that,” Saha adds. ”We’re talking about different academic and scholarly methods 70 years ago around things like participant observation.”  Indeed, unethical and grossly manipulative science was far from uncommon at the time the Prophecy authors were working. The Tuskegee experiments, a 40-year syphilis study in which Black men were left untreated, were ongoing. The CIA mind control experiments known as MKULTRA began in 1953; before they were halted in 1973, both soldiers and civilians would be drugged with LSD, barbiturates, and amphetamines, usually without their knowledge or consent. In the 1940s and ’50s, children at a Massachusetts school were secretly fed irradiated oatmeal in a study funded by the U.S. government and Quaker oats; survivors were eventually paid a $1.85 million settlement. In that way, the alleged misconduct from the Prophecy researchers isn’t unusual, Kelly concedes: “It’s disappointing—it’s not surprising.” Other famous midcentury psychology studies also came under fire after a hard look, he points out, including the Stanford Prison Experiment, which purportedly demonstrated that people given the role of prison guards would quickly deploy brutality if ordered to do so, but which has been undermined by revelations of sloppy methodology and unethical researcher interference. An account of the murder of New York woman Kitty Genovese gave rise to a host of studies on the so-called bystander effect, but the notion that people watched idly while Genovese was killed has been proven false.  “The academic standards in the ’50, ’60s, and ’70s were perhaps not as high as they are today,” says Thibault Le Texier. He’s an associate researcher at France’s European Centre for Sociology and Political Science who reviewed a previous version of Kelly’s paper favorably when it was submitted to the journal American Psychologist. (It was not accepted; Kelly says the version was written before he gained access to Festinger’s files.)  It was a “time of great enthusiasm for psychology,” Le Texier says, when “you could do quite strange and uncontrolled studies” that would no longer be authorized. “When you look at the methodology of these studies, it’s based on a few elements or pieces of evidence. The experiment is not well controlled.” Le Texier’s 2018 book critiquing the methodology and conclusions of the Stanford Prison Experiment was recently translated into English, and has been hailed in the scientific world as a serious challenge to the research’s validity. (Philip Zimbardo, the experiment’s lead researcher, who died in 2024 at the age of 91, defended his work after Le Texier’s book was published in French and, in a 2020 paper, accused Le Texier of making “unusually ad hominem” attacks.) “My research is really bad for the integrity of When Prophecy Fails, and bad for its use in new religious studies,” Kelly told me recently. That said, he adds, “in itself it doesn’t show that all cognitive dissonance theory is wrong.”  Le Texier agrees. “Cognitive dissonance theory has been proven on many other occasions,” he says. “There’s very strong literature on the subject. You can’t debunk the whole concept based on one experiment that’s flawed. It casts doubts on the seriousness of the authors and casts a dark shadow on their other work. But the theory of cognitive dissonance is a concept that lives on.”  Earlier this year, Kelly published another paper in a different journal arguing that “group demise” is a more common outcome after disconfirmation occurs. That’s also more or less what he found happened to the Seekers, even if Martin’s Christmas message after the aliens first failed to come briefly delayed its breakup.  > “If Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance is right, reappraisal of the > value of When Prophecy Fails may be slow.” “Rather than immediately admit to a hostile press that their beliefs were false,” he writes, “they instead acted as if their beliefs were true for up to several days after the prophecy failed.” Given that short timeframe, Kelly argues that the 1956 book’s authors wildly overstated the importance of their findings when they claimed “that their case study provided insight on the origins of the Christians, and the Millerites, and the Sabbateans who maintained their beliefs for years (or millennia) after outside events proved those religions wrong.” Kelly, an Episcopalian, argues it did no such thing, with the authors failing “to show any evidence of long‐term persistence of belief” of Martin’s UFO prophesies.  Sometimes, though, people’s belief or lack thereof is not black-and-white, says Saha, the Berkeley professor, especially when judged from the outside. “A failed realization does not always mean a loss of belief,” they explain. “You continue to believe and the world now says you’re wrong. That’s a profound psychological barrier to talking about it… We can’t know what people believe—only what they say.”  “That’s the question that this author doesn’t have any room for,” Saha says, finding Kelly “very dismissive” of the fact that group members continued to believe in UFOs. After the failure of Christmas Eve, Kelly writes, the Seekers quickly dissolved. Martin briefly went into hiding, concerned she might be charged with disturbing the peace or contributing to the delinquency of a minor. She soon left Chicago and relocated to a “dianetics center” in Arizona, according to Prophecy. (Martin had been an early Scientology practitioner, in addition to her many other interests.) “Exactly what has happened to her since, we do not know,” the Prophecy authors wrote, adding that, judging from a few letters received by the researchers and her followers, “she still seemed to be expecting some future action or orders from outer space.”   It isn’t true, Kelly argues, that Martin disappeared. She actually quickly and publicly recanted, telling Saucerian magazine in 1955 that she “didn’t really expect” to be picked up by “a spaceman.” Yet Prophecy, published in 1956, depicts her, in Kelly’s words, as “completely committed.”  “Within 2 years,” Kelly writes in his paper, “Martin was publicly denying any ability to predict the timing of cataclysms.” She would go on to a long and fruitful career in the New Age movement, renaming herself Sister Thedra, living mostly in Mount Shasta, California and throughout the Southwest, and transmitting psychic messages that she said had been delivered by various astral entities. One of Kelly’s central points is that the main subjects in Prophecy were reachable and findable, and indeed, spent a lot of time talking to UFO magazines. The Laugheads and Martin even met up briefly in Latin America to study aliens again. So why didn’t anyone uncover this before?  The elisions in the book could have been clear, Kelly writes, had “anyone sent a postcard to Dorothy Martin, Charles or Lillian Laughead, or their daughter,” he says, concluding the book “could have collapsed decades ago.”  “You could have asked Dorothy herself,” Kelly says, or several other Seekers. Despite the pseudonyms deployed in the book, he says, “they weren’t hard to find.”  Kelly is realistic in his paper that his critical look at Prophecy may never be widely accepted—ironically, because its alleged inaccuracies might create some cognitive dissonance in the fields it has influenced. “If Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance is right, reappraisal of the value of When Prophecy Fails may be slow,” Kelly writes in the paper. “If he is wrong, perhaps reappraisal will be swift.”   “If you spent a lot of your career teaching and citing this, it’s hard,” he told me.  “There are findings that people want to hear and findings that people don’t want to hear,” Le Texier says. “If studies such as the Stanford Prison Experiment and When Prophecy Fails gained a lot of attention and will probably continue to, in spite of being debunked, it’s also because these are fascinating stories, as riveting as a great movie.” For now, at least, Prophecy continues to be widely referred to as a classic of the genre. The aliens, it must be said, have not yet landed.

Sean Duffy has spent most of his adult life as a professional attention-seeker. He is a former reality TV star, for one, and also a former Fox News host. Tough luck, then, that in the second Trump administration, Duffy got stuck as secretary of the most dreary of federal agencies—transportation. When was the last time that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration went viral? But Duffy has found a way to turn even the most mundane highway procurement matters into an opportunity for pandering to the MAGA base—and getting back on Fox News. His secret sauce? He has been enthusiastically using the agency to spread the Gospel and advance his mission to make America fecund again. “In Trump 2.0,” laments Peter Montgomery, the research director at the nonprofit civil liberties group, People for the American Way, “every place is a place to wage holy war.” Duffy was once the “resident playboy” on MTV’s “Real World,” where he danced naked, called a roommate a “bitch,” and talked about getting laid. Now, he’s a devout Catholic with nine children who never misses an opportunity to urge young men to get married and have big families. Legal experts say Duffy’s activities are a stark violation of the Constitution’s prohibition on mixing church and state, but his fervor seems to override his obligation to uphold the law. Shortly after Duffy joined a Trump cabinet full of MAGA influencers, he made his first attempt to grab headlines and advance his religious mission by promising to prioritize transportation funding for areas with high birth and marriage rates. The policy was roundly panned as unworkable and failed to generate the sort of media coverage a camera-hungry secretary would like to see. Duffy was learning the hard way that, unlike other federal agencies—Health and Human Services, for instance, or Education—the Transportation Department is a tough spot from which to launch a culture war. After toiling away for a few months to excise Biden-era “woke” procurement requirements and “Green New Scam” projects, Duffy finally landed on a more promising vehicle for his Christian worldview: The US Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, New York. Something of an anachronism, USMMA is the only service academy that falls under the purview of the US Department of Transportation rather than the Defense Department. It trains midshipmen in marine engineering and other skills needed to run large commercial ships. Graduates serve as officers in various military branches and in the private maritime industry. But as the US merchant marine industry has dwindled to 188 ships, down from 282 in 2000, it has endured repeated calls to shut it down. “It’s an educational institution for an age that the US doesn’t participate in anymore,” Capt. John Konrad, the editor of the maritime industry blog, gCaptain, told the New York Times in 2012. A string of sexual assault scandals threatened the academy’s accreditation in 2016. A survey highlighted in a 2017 congressional oversight hearing found that USMMA had the highest rate of sexual assaults but the lowest rate of formal reports of any of the nation’s five military service academies. For all its shortcomings, the Merchant Marine academy’s backwater status has made it the perfect venue for Duffy’s one-man religious crusade. In early April, the secretary visited the academy and made an official DOT video for Good Friday in which he spoke “with an amazing group of young midshipmen about Jesus’ sacrifice for our sins.” The midshipmen—indeed, all men, even though the student body is more than 20 percent female—are shown talking to Duffy in the chapel, where they take turns quoting Bible passages to him. > On Good Friday, we commemorate the crucifixion of Jesus. During my visit to > the US Merchant Marine Academy, I spoke with an amazing group of young > midshipmen about Jesus’ sacrifice for our sins. > > A complaint from ONE “concerned citizen” got the Academy’s beautiful & > historic… pic.twitter.com/n66pgSLKOM > > — Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) April 18, 2025 During his visit, Duffy discovered the perfect controversy on which to focus his righteous outrage. In his video, Duffy highlighted “Christ on the Water,” a 1944 10-by-19-foot painting near the academy chapel by Hunter Alexander Wood, a lieutenant in the US Maritime Service. In it, a giant glowing Jesus stands on a vast body of water, presiding over an open lifeboat of the survivors of a sunken merchant ship. The painting originally resided at the academy’s San Mateo, California, campus, but when it closed in 1947, “Christ on the Water” was moved to Kings Point and placed in Wiley Hall, a space that then served as a chapel. But in 1961, Wiley Hall became an administrative office, where for decades, midshipmen facing “honor boards” for misconduct were forced to sit in front of Jesus while they awaited disciplinary action. In early 2023, a group of more than a dozen fed-up alumni, staff, faculty, and midshipmen reached out to Mikey Weinstein, the founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, to complain about the overtly religious painting in the public space. Weinstein is a Jewish civil liberties lawyer and third-generation graduate of the US Air Force Academy, who spent 10 years working as a lawyer in the Judge Advocate General Corps and served as a legal counsel in the Reagan White House. The pugnacious advocate has been a thorn in the side of religious fundamentalists in the military for more than two decades. “Jerry Falwell used to refer to me as ‘the field general of the godless armies of Satan,’” he told me in a call from his hospital bed, where he was recovering from surgery. > “Its location in the administration building implies that the Academy > officially endorses Christianity over other faiths.” Immediately recognizing the constitutional issues with the Jesus painting, Weinstein fired off a complaint to Vice Admiral Joanna M. Nunan, whom President Joe Biden had appointed as the first woman to serve as superintendent of the USMMA. The painting, he wrote, has denigrated non-Christians. “Its location in the administration building implies that the Academy officially endorses Christianity over other faiths,” he continued, noting that his clients were Jewish, Muslim, Protestant, Roman Catholic, Atheist, Agnostic, Buddhist, and one Native American Spiritualist. Nunan quickly responded and hung drapes over the painting while plans were made to move it. The MAGA faithful in Congress were outraged. In February 2023, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) wrote to Nunan, suggesting that she was “overtly hostile to religion” and called Weinstein’s complaints an “objective absurdity.” (Nunan left her post a few months later.) Ohio Republican Rep. Mike Turner even got the House Armed Services Committee to insert language in a Defense authorization bill that would have made it illegal for servicemembers and Defense officials to communicate with Weinstein and MRFF. (The language failed to make it into the final bill.) In September 2023, after a significant restoration, “Christ in the Water” was rehung in the academy’s chapel. But anger over the painting apparently festered, leaving Duffy an opportunity. During his April visit to the academy, he gave a speech in which he promised to get funding to improve the campus, and then closed by saying, “Could we bring Jesus up from the basement?” The room erupted into cheers, which Duffy encouraged while he assured the crowd he would restore the painting to its previous glory in Wiley Hall. A few weeks later, the Newark airport had a massive meltdown, as air traffic controllers walked off the job and hundreds of flights were canceled for two straight weeks through the first part of May. Nonetheless, Duffy found time to keep the Jesus painting saga alive. He announced on his official government accounts that he had commissioned a replica of the painting to hang in his DOT office. Moving the painting was “a personal affront to the midshipman at the academy,” he said in a DOT video. “This was such a touching story for me, I thought, ‘let’s get a replica of the painting and hang it in a place of prominence here at DOT.’ It looks beautiful.” > The @USMMAO Christ on the Water painting is a beautiful reminder of the power > of faith when we need it most. > > While we work on getting the piece out of the academy’s basement and back in a > place of prominence, I figured there was no better place to hang a copy than > right here at… pic.twitter.com/zrhtS6JRmw > > — Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) May 7, 2025 Coming to the rescue of “Jesus in the Water” allowed Duffy “to trash the Biden administration as woke (and by implication anti-Christian), something sure to win him points in the White House,” says Montgomery. “And it generated a whole lot of fawning coverage of Duffy in religious-right and right-wing media.” Among those who weighed in was Ted Cruz. “Your statement—’Can we bring Jesus up from the basement?’—was more than rhetorical. I trust it will be seen as an imperative,” Cruz wrote in a letter covered in the conservative Daily Wire. “Thank you for your principled leadership, for defending our nation’s religious heritage, and for working to ensure that this government-commissioned memorial is returned to its rightful place.” Duffy continued to use the academy for proselytizing. During his commencement speech in June, he offered graduates dating advice and urged them to “always work out,” get married, and have lots of kids. And then he declared, “There are two kinds of people in life: those who believe in God and those who think they’re God. There’s something beautiful, humbling, and properly ordered about a man and woman who understand that there is a power greater than themselves…A good sailor knows that in the end, only God can calm the seas and bring them to safety. So stay faithful and never underestimate the power of prayer.” > “There are two kinds of people in life: those who believe in God and those who > think they’re God. There’s something beautiful, humbling, and properly ordered > about a man and woman who understand that there is a power greater than > themselves.” His speech constituted “an astonishing violation of the Establishment Clause,” says Caroline Mala Corbin, a professor at the University of Miami law school. She says the First Amendment wasn’t just designed to separate church and state, but also to protect religious minorities, who may be coerced by a state-sanctioned religion to violate their own religious beliefs. “I’m willing to bet there are people in the Department of Transportation who have gone along with some religious activities that they felt really uncomfortable participating in,” she says. “And that’s why we have an Establishment Clause: So the government can’t force you to choose between your job and honoring your beliefs.” Duffy, a lawyer and former Wisconsin congressman, doesn’t seem familiar with that particular part of the Constitution. During a July hearing, Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) grilled him about his pledge to return the Jesus painting to the hall. “You don’t think the Establishment Clause prohibits favoring a single religion over all others?” he asked. Duffy responded, “I would just note that we have freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.” Huffman attempted to probe further, asking, “What’s the message to Jews and Muslims and Hindus and non-religious folks in their disciplinary proceedings?” As the two talked over each other in a contentious exchange, Huffman concluded, grumbling, “We have a First Amendment for a reason.” Duffy’s brazen use of government resources to promote his vision of Christianity doesn’t surprise some observers who’ve been warning of the creep of Christian nationalism in the US government for years. “It’s a pretty standard playbook among MAGA influencers to throw a little God into the mix if you want to make the base happy,” says Matthew Taylor, a senior Christian scholar at the nonprofit Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies. “It’s a great path to career advancement because it builds out their constituencies. [Duffy] just has a much more limited set of options than, say, Pete Hegseth.” As Duffy has been hard at work imposing English-only requirements on truckers, banning rainbow crosswalks, and making official DOT videos blaming Democrats for shutting down the government, he has continued to visit the Merchant Marine academy to spread the Word. In early September, he showed up for a football game and made an official video of himself praying with the “Christian” players in the locker room before it started. > I was moved by this moment of prayer with the incredible young men of > @USMMAFootball before their game on Friday. Thank you! God is good > pic.twitter.com/VoG6mzzpAa > > — Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) September 9, 2025 Then, he walked along the sidelines offering pregame analysis as if he worked for ESPN. “The excitement on this field for this Academy is remarkable,” he said in a video, as players jogged by. “They have the most amazing prayer. You have Christian men dedicated to country, ready for a great game. This is America at its finest.” The video so enraged Weinstein that he dashed off an op-ed for the Daily Kos calling Duffy a “piece of shit” and noting that he’d “heard from Academy faculty, staff, midshipmen, and graduates who are neither Christians nor male and as you might imagine they are furious.” Duffy seems impervious to such complaints. On September 29, he put out an official DOT press release celebrating the “restoration” of “Christ on the Water” at the USMMA. The agency also produced an official YouTube video entitled, “Jesus Has Risen at the Merchant Marine Academy!” One of the midshipmen in the video thanks Duffy “for allowing us the opportunity to glorify God on campus.” Civil liberties groups find Duffy’s shameless use of federal resources to promote Christianity shocking. “The Department of Transportation’s duty is to serve the public—not to proselytize,” says Rachel Laser, President and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Weinstein was a little blunter. In a press release, he compared Duffy’s restoring the Jesus painting to “its original unconstitutional place” as “akin to a stray dog urinating on a neighborhood tree to mark its territory.” The Transportation secretary, he fumed, “is making sure to brand the Academy as conquered Christian nationalist territory. All others are not wanted and need not apply.” Of all the madness coming out of the Trump administration this year— the ICE violence, the destruction of the East Wing, the extrajudicial killings of people on boats in the Caribbean—Duffy using his official perch to promote Christianity may seem mild by comparison. But legal experts say his targeting of the USMMA, and the spread of Christian nationalism in the military more broadly, is potentially very dangerous. “Military officers are trained to resist unconstitutional orders,” explains Robert Tuttle, a professor of law and religion at George Washington University law school. “If you can have the troops believing they are fighting the cause of God and Christianity, you can get them to do things they might not do otherwise.” And in the current administration, where Trump has claimed the Lord saved him from an assassin’s bullet, he says, “You can very easily see how folks could get into a mindset that serving Trump is God’s will.” As with so many of the norms smashed by the Trump regime, there is no easy remedy for Duffy’s religious crusade. The Supreme Court has made it much more difficult to bring lawsuits over Establishment Clause violations. Weinstein says he’s considering legal action over the Jesus painting, but he needs a midshipman at the academy willing to head up the litigation—an extremely difficult challenge for a young person, he says. “If you become a plaintiff in a military system like this,” Weinstein says, “you are putting yourself in a position where you are like a tarantula on a wedding cake.” In the meantime, Weinstein has issued an alert urging parents to keep their kids away from the “unconstitutional, fundamentalist Christian nationalist filth-saturated institution that the US Merchant Marine Academy has tragically devolved into.” The Transportation Department, possibly too busy figuring out how to keep unpaid air traffic controllers on the job, did not respond to a request for comment.

Earlier this week, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson hosted far-right influencer Nick Fuentes on his livestream show. Carlson had undoubtedly anticipated a blockbuster interview, and Fuentes, the leader of the extremist “groyper” movement, delivered handsomely, offering a buffet of provocative sound bites designed to spread far and wide on social media. He made the case for the importance of Americans “to be pro-white,” sang the praises of brutal Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, and bemoaned the problem of “organized Jewry in America.” But perhaps the most widely shared moments of the discussion had to do with Carlson and Fuentes’ shared distaste for Christian Zionism, the popular evangelical movement that calls Christians to support Israel. The conversation began with Carlson and Fuentes musing about the origins of the neoconservative movement—populated by such notables as William Kristol and Irving Podhoretz—that they blame for interventionist US foreign policy. “It arises from Jewish leftists who were mugged by reality when they saw the surprise attack in the [1973] Yom Kippur war,” suggested Fuentes. This explanation didn’t satsify Carlson who countered, “But then how do you explain [US Israel ambassador] Mike Huckabee, [Texas senator] Ted Cruz, and [former national security adviser] John Bolton?” Carlson then went on to include, “George W. Bush, Karl Rove— all people I know personally who I’ve seen be seized by this brain virus. And they’re not Jewish. Most of them are self-described Christians.” He continued, “And then the Christian Zionists who are, well, Christian Zionists. What is that? I can just say for myself, I dislike them more than anybody, because it’s Christian heresy. And I’m offended by that as a Christian.” The backlash by the right wing on X was swift. In a tweet to his 411,000 followers, Will Chamberlain, an organizer of the influential National Conservatism conference, accused Carlson of betraying the memory of avid Israel supporter the late Charlie Kirk. An anonymous account with the name Insurrection Barbie tweeted to a million followers. “Christian Zionist here and I’ll gamble my eternal salvation on my theology over that of Tucker Carlson all day.” US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told his two million followers, “Wasn’t aware that Tucker despises me. I do get that a lot from people not familiar with the Bible or history. Somehow, I will survive the animosity.” Jumping to Huckabee’s defense, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who has 7.1 million followers on X, tweeted, “Mike Huckabee is a pastor and a patriot who loves America, loves Israel, and loves Jesus. I’m proud to be in his company!” There are, in fact, a lot of people in his company. In a recent piece, I wrote about the astounding size of this movement. > A 2013 poll by the Pew Research Center found that 82 percent of white American > evangelicals believe that Israel was given to the Jewish people by God, > compared with 81 percent of ultra-­Orthodox Jews and 44 percent of respondents > overall. A 2024 survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that 64 > percent of white evangelicals believed Israel’s actions in Gaza were > justified, compared with 32 percent of the American public overall. Christians > United for Israel, the evangelical Zionist group founded in 2006 by Texas > pastor John Hagee, claims 10 million members, more than the entire population > of 7.5 million Jews in the United States. The movement has enormous financial > heft: A 2018 investigation by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz found that > Christian groups had invested an estimated $50 to $65 million in Israeli > settlements in the West Bank over the previous decade. The online skirmish over Carlson’s remarks about Christian Zionists is only the latest evidence to emerge of a growing fissure on the right over the extent to which the United States should be involved in foreign conflicts, especially those in the Middle East. As I wrote in a piece around the time that the United States bombed Iran, Christian Zionism has everything to do with this schism: > Broadly speaking—though there are certainly exceptions—many of the most ardent > supporters of Trump’s decision to bomb Iran identify as Christian Zionists, a > group that believes that Israel and the Jewish people will play a key role in > bringing about the second coming of the Messiah. As Christians, they are > called to hasten this scenario, says Matthew Taylor, a senior scholar at the > Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore and author > of The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening > Our Democracy. “The mission, so to speak, is to get the Jews back to Israel > and to establish themselves within Israel,” he says. “Then you fulfill the > preconditions, or one of the preconditions, for the second coming.” Christian Zionists often profess to love both Israel and the Jewish people, but for many of them, this devotion is intrinsically tied to their beliefs about the fate of the Jews in the end times—and it’s not pretty: > During his first term, Taylor noted, Trump made strong connections with > influential figures in the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, a charismatic > Christian movement that teaches followers to take “dominion” over all aspects > of society, including government. Over the last decade or so, Christian > Zionism has become an important part of NAR theology—so much so that during > worship, some adherents now wear Jewish prayer shawls and blow shofars, the > ram’s horn instruments that ancient Israelites used to call troops to battle > and still features in some Jewish holidays. This is an example of what Taylor > refers to as philosemitism—the idea of loving Jewish customs and cultures. But > within end-times theology lurks a dark side to Christian Zionists’ fixation on > Judaism. Once the Messiah arrives, many Christian Zionists are convinced that > Jews will convert en masse to Christianity; in many versions, those who don’t > convert will perish. It can be tricky to disentangle anti-interventionism from straight-up antisemitism—especially after the October 7 Hamas attacks that kicked off the catastrophic war in Gaza. But it’s worth noting that the Christian Zionist faction of the pro-interventionist side isn’t necessarily in it for the love of the Jewish people, either. “If you actually read up on antisemitism and philosemitism,” Taylor told me, “they really are two sides of the same coin.” Image credit: Jason Koerner/Getty; Al Drago/CNP/Zuma, Bob Daemmrich/Zuma (2), Mattie Neretin/CNP/Zuma

WASHINGTON — Former Conservative Prime Minister Liz Truss thinks the Green Party might end up becoming the official opposition after the next election. In an interview with POLITICO’s Anne McElvoy for the Westminster Insider podcast, Truss said “I think there’s a certain kind of honesty about the Green Party that you don’t see in the Labour Party,” adding that people are sick of “technocratic managerial crap” in politics. The former prime minister also insisted she will not be joining Reform UK in the foreseeable future, despite criticizing her own party’s record in office. She poured scorn on both Conservative chief Kemi Badenoch’s leadership of her old party and on Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves. Asked what she made of Reeves’ claim that Truss’ controversial mini-budget in September 2022 had contributed to Britain’s flailing economy today, making tax increases in her budget next month inevitable, Truss shot back: “I think she is a disingenuous liar. I have no time for Rachel Reeves. I don’t think she’s telling the truth about what is wrong with the British economy. I think she’s desperate … the public are now cottoning on to the fact that our country is in serious trouble.”  She also accused the Labour chancellor of having “bought the narrative of the Bank of England [about the dangers of the Truss mini-budget], which was a false narrative. Now she is being hung on her own petard.” The government has returned to the Conservatives’ economic record in preparation for a likely tax-raising budget next month, claiming this week that “things like austerity, the cuts to capital spending and Brexit have had a bigger impact on our economy than was even projected back then.”  Truss took issue with this assertion. “It is ludicrous to blame Brexit for a 30-year problem,” she said. “These arguments, like the mini-budget or Brexit or austerity, they’re just distractions from what the real problems are.” Speaking to POLITICO, Badenoch’s leadership of the Conservative Party also came in for a lengthy pasting from one of her recent predecessors. “I don’t believe the Conservative Party has come to terms with why we were kicked out after fourteen years,” Truss insisted. “What I was trying to do was shift the Conservative Party into the nationalist space. And what I faced was huge resistance from the Conservative blob who actually want to kowtow to the woke agenda. They want to be part of the transgender ideology, green climate change stuff.” Badenoch, she believes, still needs to choose more decisively “between representing places like Rotherham and Norfolk on the one hand and places like Surrey and Henley-on-Thames on the other. They haven’t chosen, and that’s a fundamental issue. And what Nigel Farage has done is he has moved into that space. That’s an existential threat for the Conservative Party.” But she had an optimistic assessment of the outlook for the Greens, reenergized under Zack Polanski’s leadership. “People don’t want this kind of technocratic managerial crap anymore. [Polanski] might end up leader of the opposition at this rate,” she said. “I think there’s a certain kind of honesty about the Green Party that you don’t see in the Labour Party … because there’s nothing for people to believe in.” Truss was speaking during a trip to Washington, D.C. and Virginia, where she met with leading figures from the conservative MAGA movement. In an extensive interview, Truss hinted, however, that her position could change when it comes to staying above the party fray. Asked how she saw Reform, she retorted: “I’m not offering my services,” even if there is a chance of bumping into its leader, Farage, who enjoys close links with U.S. President Donald Trump’s White House. However, she didn’t shut the door on some alignment with Reform: “I’m doing what I’m doing on an independent basis for now … reaching out to people, to network and to understand the lie of the land. I’m not going to say … my definite plans for the future.”  Truss resigned three years ago after just 49 days — the shortest period in office of any British prime minister. After losing her seat in last year’s general election, she has made regular visits to the U.S., attending right-wing conferences and conventions where she has praised Trump. Last week she joined a roster of Christian conservatives who support the MAGA movement. She spoke at a business summit at Liberty University in Virginia, founded by the late televangelist and conservative activist Jerry Falwell, alongside Gen. Mike Flynn, the former national security adviser to Trump, whose stump speeches described a Manichean fight between good and evil and Trump as the nation’s savior. Reflecting on the event afterward, Truss told McElvoy: “There’s a huge amount we can learn from [Trump] and what is happening in America and the MAGA revolution in the U.K. and Europe.”  Asked if she identified with the more fundamentalist view of religion and politics of the evangelical pro-Trump activists, she described her work “mission” to remake the U.K. and said:  “I think the [Church of England] needs to be restored to its former glory … it needs serious change.” Even Badenoch, who has fought “woke”  institutions and now wants to abandon the Climate Change Act, remains in hock to “modernizers” who Truss believes still control the party. But she had a positive word for Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick’s recent plan to restore the lord chancellor’s direct role in appointing judges. “I did agree with his policy on that — he’s right about it.” Liz Truss said she is “not offering services” to Reform UK, even if there’s a chance of bumping into its leader, Nigel Farage, who enjoys close links with U.S. President Donald Trump’s White House. | Neil Hall/EPA Truss remains defiant about the circumstances of her resignation as prime minister. She admitted to having been “upset to be deposed,” but was dismissive of her detractors and the jokes about her premiership being outlasted by a supermarket lettuce. “The people who joke about it or take the mick … I mean if I had been just a truly kind of mediocre, incompetent prime minister, I wouldn’t have been deposed. We’ve had plenty of those. I was deposed because people didn’t like my agenda and they wanted to get rid of me. “We’ve had years and years of pantomime personality politics, like Angela Rayner’s tax bill. And it doesn’t actually change the fact that the country is going down the tubes. And until the public and journalists understand where power and the British system actually lies and start to challenge it, start to question it … nothing will change.”