The United States is seeing the rise of Christian nationalism and how it's deeply impacting today's political climate, especially with the far-right. Amanda Tyler, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and the lead organizer of the Christians Against Christian Nationalism campaign, has studied the roots of Christian nationalism. Tyler joins Reality Check's John Avlon to discuss how Christian nationalism is used as a political ideology to merge one's faith with partisan politics.

Left vs. right. Woke vs. the unwoke. Red State Jesus vs. Blue State Jesus.

It's one of the oldest holidays on the Christian calendar and a major celebration in the predominantly Orthodox country.

Former President Trump's advisers are criticizing him after he accused evangelicals of being disloyal for declining to immediately rally around his 2024 presidential bid. CNN's John Avlon discusses

A mosque in Kandahar houses a relic of the Prophet Muhammad: a cloak preserved, splendid and unpilled, almost 1,400 years after its owner’s death. The mosque’s caretaker claims that the cloak has extraordinary qualities, such as a color that transcends the visual spectrum. The color can be seen, but it has no name. I asked the caretaker whether I could take a look. He said no; unbelievers may not see it. And even if I did, God would delete the memory from my mind immediately afterward, like Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black. So I went home without seeing it—to the best of my recollection.

These tales of the supernatural have no basis in Islamic scripture (except in the general sense that God’s powers are limitless, so if he wanted to produce a technicolor dreamcoat, he could do so). But as a matter of theology, I greatly prefer this version of the Islamic God—who does as he pleases, and simply performs a neurological reboot on those who displease him—to the one that requires defending by Fayneese Miller, the president of Hamline University, a small Methodist school in Minnesota.

[Daniel Golden: ‘It’s making us more ignorant’]

Last year, Miller severed Hamline’s ties with an art-history professor, Erika López Prater, after she showed her students a 14th-century Persian painting of Muhammad. A Muslim student complained that she found depictions of Muhammad offensive. The administration agreed that López Prater’s act was “Islamophobic,” and that the offense taken “superseded” any claim that this masterwork of Islamic art needed to be seen to be understood. The punishment: banishment. “In lieu [sic] of this incident,” Hamline’s administration told the student newspaper, “it was decided it was best that this faculty member was no longer part of the Hamline community.”

After the story ignited the attention of the national media, Miller defended her decision. And the student, 23-year-old Aram Wedatalla, held a press conference where she wept over her distress at having looked at the painting. The usual defenders of academic freedom, such as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and PEN America, have raced to López Prater’s side. Most encouraging, though, is the range of allies she has found in Muslim groups. Last week, the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) supported her unequivocally. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which in the past has focused on its irritation at perceived slights against Islam, likewise called on Hamline to reconsider its position.

Who will save Muslims from their saviors? Miller’s administration pronounced the class “Islamophobic,” and said that such atrocities should prompt the community to “listen rather than debate the merits of or extent of that harm.” In this case, “listening” meant listening to Muslims. The positions of some of the most prominent Muslim advocacy organizations in America now complicate that advice. It turns out that Muslims have different views on this matter and many others, and that the fatwa from the president of a Methodist college in St. Paul, Minnesota, has somehow sided with the most intolerant element of the American Muslim spectrum. Miller invited a Muslim speaker to campus who compared the professor’s art-history class to a pro-Nazi or pro-child-molester class, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. Then he suggested that a Muslim might want to kill her, and that these murderous feelings deserved recognition. “You’ve seen what happened in the horrible tragedies of Charlie Hebdo,” Jaylani Hussein warned the faculty and students of Hamline. “Muslims revere our Prophet in a meaningful way, and regardless of whatever you are teaching, you have to respect them.” (Hussein runs a local chapter of CAIR, which distanced itself from his comments—perhaps because “American-Islamic relations” are not improved by reminding people to watch what they say, because some Muslims might want to kill them.)

Perhaps Miller received poor counsel, which led her to assume that all Muslims are reduced to tears when they fail to read the syllabus and cast their eyes upon paintings. But the statement she wrote under pressure last week suggests conviction. She wrote that “faculty have the right to teach and research and … publish under the purview of their peers.” Did she mean “review”? This sentence alone calls into doubt her commitment to academic freedom, because academic freedom is not, in fact, limited by the scrutiny of one’s peers. They can scrutinize all they like. I’m scrutinizing right now. But they can’t stop her from teaching and publishing what she likes. Citing an op-ed published by Inside Higher Ed, Miller went on to say that the right to academic freedom infringed on the right not to be “emotionally, intellectually, or professionally harmed.”

[Graeme Wood: Cowardice at Sundance]

Miller is deferring to the most fragile Muslims. She must think Muslims have skulls like crepe paper, and brains that can be bruised by a light gust of academic inquiry. Such people exist, and her student may be one. But most Muslims—including some who would object strenuously to a depiction of the Prophet—navigate the world without the shelter offered by the Hamline administration. The Muslims I know generally realize that the world is full of insults and challenges, and that education requires willingness to live with them and learn from them. Miller wants to make this resilient Muslim majority, and everyone else, hostage to their most brittle and blubbering brothers and sisters. If any Hamline students really need this kind of protection, I suggest they enroll at a university in Kabul.

Someone once said that Islamophobia is a term invented by fascists and used by cowards to manipulate morons. This line (falsely attributed to my late colleague Christopher Hitchens) has seemed to me truer at some moments than at others. It certainly seemed to apply during the heyday of the Islamic State, when one could be tarred as an Islamophobe merely for mentioning inconvenient truths about Islam, such as the fact that ISIS’s view of the apocalypse is grounded in Islamic tradition and, like the Christian apocalypse, bloody and unpleasant. The promiscuous use of the term served ISIS well, because many of ISIS’s Muslim opponents looked like petulant weenies, and it was of course delightful for actual bigots, who are happy to see accusations against them diluted.

In defending López Prater, CAIR and MPAC use the term Islamophobia, but their letters are neither fascistic nor cowardly nor moronic. They make encouraging distinctions that elude Miller and Wedatalla. Among them: It matters, morally, whether the giver of offense intends to offend, and whether the offended party has good cause to take offense. People take offense for good reasons and for bad ones, and the mere statement I am offended is worthless without a sound articulation of the cause for offense.

These distinctions are intuitive even to small children. But the instinct to treat Muslims like toddlers, incapable of dealing with unwelcome developments, and therefore in need of protection at all times, is powerful in some quarters. The same patronizing attitude is rarely applied to Christians or Jews or atheists. If any of them objected to a painting in an art-history course, they would be told that liberal education might not be for them, at least not until they can toughen up a little. It is a relief to find that nearly everyone outside the Hamline administration, especially Muslims themselves, thinks Muslims should be held to the same standard. Miller, for her part, answers to no higher authorities than God and the Hamline board of trustees, and I hope one of them someday calls her to account.

Supreme Court justices often get cross with lawyers arguing cases before them. But six months after the Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the justices are betraying signs of impatience and frustration with one another—sometimes bordering on disrespect. The Court has seen acrimony in its history, such as the mutual hostility among four of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s appointees. More recently, there have been reports of justices’ annoyance with Neil Gorsuch, and Sonia Sotomayor took the unusual step of publicly tamping down speculation of a dustup over his decision not to wear a mask during the Omicron wave a year ago. For decades, though, peace has mostly prevailed.

Justices of sharply different legal views have been dinner-party friends, skeet-shooting pals, and opera companions. Ketanji Brown Jackson’s predecessor, Stephen Breyer, and Clarence Thomas—ideological opposites but quite friendly—would whisper and tell jokes during oral arguments. The one-liners and jibes of Antonin Scalia, the ornery conservative, drew laughs from his conservative and liberal colleagues alike. As Ruth Bader Ginsburg grew frail in her final year, Thomas would offer his arm to ease her descent from the bench. Rancor has always animated the justices’ opinions, but it was limited to pen and paper. On the bench, civility reigned.

Not anymore. I’ve been attending Supreme Court oral arguments since 2013. As The Economist’s SCOTUS correspondent, I’ve watched arguments in the most contentious cases of the past decade—a Church-state fight in 2013; the Affordable Care Act and same-sex marriage showdowns in 2015; clashes over affirmative action (2015), labor unions (2018), voting rights (2018), and abortion (2020); and dozens of others. Only the justices are privy to the mood in their private conference room where cases are discussed after the hearings. But what I have seen this term on open display inside the courtroom is an obvious departure from the collegiality of years past.

[Linda Greenhouse: What in the world happened to the Supreme Court?]

The breaking point was clearly Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the ruling in June that overturned Roe. Several long-standing precedents have fallen in recent years at the hands of the Court’s conservative majority. But in overturning 50 years of abortion rights, the Court was split—and not amicably. The minority did not dissent “respectfully” in Dobbs. Instead the three justices dissented with “sorrow” for the women of America and “for this Court.”

Over the summer, discord stemming from the Dobbs decision was apparent in comments by Elena Kagan, Samuel Alito and the chief justice, John Roberts. Roberts responded to charges that the Court was risking its legitimacy by arguing that mere disagreement with a ruling “is not a basis for questioning the legitimacy of the Court.” Two weeks later, Kagan seemed to reply to her colleague, saying Americans are bound to lose confidence in a Court that looks “like an extension of the political process.” Then, days before the 2022–23 term, Alito said suggestions that SCOTUS is “becoming an illegitimate institution” amount to questioning the justices’ “integrity” and cross “an important line.”

Based on the Court’s two most heated days of oral argument this fall, these tensions have not passed. The mood on the bench during these hearings was unrecognizable. With the exception of Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett (who look quite happy sitting next to each other), the justices do not seem to be getting along. Questions are long and tempers short. The seating arrangement—by tradition, the newest justices sit on the wings—exacerbates the tension. The three liberal justices are either sandwiched between members of the conservative bloc (Sonia Sotomayor flanked by Thomas and Gorsuch, Kagan by Alito and Brett Kavanaugh) or, in Jackon’s case, stranded at the end of the bench with only Kavanaugh at her side.

At the oral arguments I attended for the affirmative-action cases on October 31, the most conservative member of the Court, Thomas, and his new neighbor, the most progressive member of the Court, Sotomayor, paid each other no attention. Gorsuch, on Sotomayor’s other flank, raised an eyebrow in apparent derision when she asserted that segregation continues to plague American society in 2022. Roberts, whose opposition to all governmental uses of race, such as for hiring and contracting, is among his most strongly held views, tried to appear, as he often does, affable and open-minded. But he ended up holding his face in his right hand, taking in lawyers’ defenses of racial preferences with waning patience.  

[Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone: The end of affirmative action would be a disaster]

Justices were once at least somewhat circumspect during oral arguments. They would refrain from announcing their actual views, fostering a pretense of open-mindedness. But during the hearings for Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina—both challenges to race-based preferences in higher-education admissions—the justices dropped the charade. In 2016, when this question was last brought before the justices, Thomas had said nothing during oral argument. But he was now contemptuous of the idea that diversity is valuable—or even a coherent concept. It seems to him, he said with a look of consternation, that diversity is just “about feeling good and all that sort of thing.” (Maybe I’m “tone deaf,” he added.) Kagan, meanwhile, was incredulous that the plaintiffs apparently believed that “it just doesn’t matter if our institutions look like America.” She opened her eyes wide and said, “I guess what I’m asking you is, Doesn’t it? … These are the pipelines to leadership in our society!”

Things were even more animated at the oral argument for 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, on December 5. The justices were being asked to exempt, on First Amendment grounds, a Christian graphic designer from an anti-discrimination law requiring her to design wedding websites for gay customers if she planned to create them for straight couples. (For the graphic designer this was a hypothetical grievance; she had not been asked to design such a website.)

[Glenn Fine: The Supreme Court needs real oversight]

Alito, the author of Dobbs, has always been a formidable interrogator. But since the Court’s rightward turn, he has become imperious. He slapped the bench as he asked his questions, firing them relentlessly and—this is new—sometimes sloppily. During this argument, he made clear that his sympathies lay with the graphic designer, not her potential gay customers. At one point, as Kagan was trying to interject with questions of her own, Alito just barreled onward. He wound up comparing the requirement to design a website for gay customers to forcing a “Black Santa” to sit for photos with children clad as Klansmen. (He was attempting to invert Jackson’s question about a Santa who refused to be photographed with Black children.) At this point, Kagan had had enough, shoving aside the norm whereby justices take care not to challenge one another directly. After Eric Olson, Colorado’s solicitor general, replied that KKK costumes are not protected characteristics, Kagan calmly fleshed out the fallacy of Alito’s logic. Her pace slowed and her register dropped: It would be the same white robe and hood, Kagan said, “whether the child was Black or white.”

Kagan may have already been irritated. Moments earlier, in spinning out another hypothetical involving a discriminatory photographer, Alito had remarked that he assumed JDate was a Jewish dating service. Kagan, who is Jewish, jumped in to say that it was, prompting laughter. Alito then joked that Kagan might also be familiar with AshleyMadison.com, a dating site for married people seeking affairs. The cringeworthy attempt at a joke prompted uncomfortable laughter, which Alito appeared pleased with, though he quickly backtracked. Kagan (who is not married) laughed but rolled her eyes.

Kagan has long been one of the savviest justices, using oral argument to appeal to persuadable colleagues or to limit the damage in cases that her side was bound to lose. Anthony Kennedy, the moderate justice who swung left in some high-profile cases until his retirement in 2018, was the recipient of many of Kagan’s subtle entreaties. In the session on October 31, seeing that she was probably two votes shy of saving affirmative action, Kagan focused her attention on Kavanaugh, who replaced Kennedy four years ago. Gesturing in his direction with an open palm, Kagan asked a lawyer who was contending that racial preferences are unconstitutional whether it’s constitutional for judges to aim for a racially diverse team of judicial clerks.

The unexpected query was a tactical reference to Kavanaugh’s own boast, during his famously contentious confirmation hearings in 2018, that he prioritized diversity in his hiring of judicial clerks. (Of the 20 clerks he has hired as a justice, only three have been white men.) In response, Kavanaugh turned to his colleague, eyebrows slightly elevated and lips pursed. But he didn’t say anything.

The Supreme Court that Donald Trump reshaped isn’t simply more conservative; it’s also much more strained. The tension is not on display every day. Much of the time—including at the oral arguments the comparatively low-stakes cases on attorney-client privilege and sovereign immunity,which the Court heard last week—the justices keep civil and carry on. Occasionally they even seem to like one another. In November, Alito and Kagan laughed—with Alito joking that he had “forgotten what my next question is”—as they jostled during oral argument in a below-the-radar case on the Quiet Title Act. But when ideologically divisive issues appear on the docket, the agitation bubbles up. In any other workplace, a manager would be concerned about the impact of such fractured relationships on the ability of a nine-member team to work together productively. The worry is more urgent when the testy interpersonal dynamics are among members of the nation’s highest court.

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On the second anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, Joe Biden decorated Americans for courage during the unrest, while on Capitol Hill, the House of Representatives remained in limbo as many of the same people who tried to overturn the 2020 election bickered over electing a speaker.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Tipping is weird now. The GOP is a battering ram against the truth. Damar Hamlin’s tragedy, anti-vaxxers’ gold A Slow Democratic Recovery

President Biden today decorated 14 Americans with the Presidential Citizens Medal, an honor established by President Richard Nixon in 1969 to recognize any citizen of the United States who has “performed exemplary deeds or services for his or her country or fellow citizens.” There are, I am sure, people on the right who will roll their eyes at honoring a Democrat such as Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, or a Republican such as the former Arizona House speaker Rusty Bowers (whose long political career ended with censure and a primary defeat from his own party). Likewise, the Capitol Police officers and the election officials who will be honored have already been the target of harassment and threats; their medals cannot make them whole now. Nor can such a posthumous honor restore Officer Brian Sicknick to life. (Sicknick’s family yesterday filed a wrongful-death suit against former President Donald Trump and two of the January 6 rioters.)

These American citizens are all, in fact, heroes. They took risks—not only politically but also by enduring physical threats from unhinged conspiracists—to protect our democracy. It’s easy to forget just how much danger these people were in, and how narrowly we escaped even greater chaos. Imagine what America would look like today if some of the people being honored by Biden had been intimidated or defeated, or if they’d just lost their nerve.

I reached out to Rosa Brooks today to explore that question. Brooks is one of the scholars who convened a group of experts and partisan operatives in late 2020 to game out the “worst thing that could happen to our country during the presidential elections.” She and her colleagues attracted a lot of snippy criticism at the time, but the events of January 6, 2021, proved their prescience. When I asked about her view of the worst that could have happened on that day, her scenario was chilling: She believes that had the rioters caught Vice President Mike Pence, or perhaps some members of Congress—such as the Democrats trapped in the House gallery at the time—they may well have been beaten or killed. “We know what happened to the police officers caught by the mob,” she told me. “Imagine if the mob had caught members of Congress.”

From there, Brooks suggested, more violence might have erupted, with more deaths. With Pence perhaps missing or incommunicado, there would have been no way to certify Biden’s victory, and Trump would have attempted to impose martial law.

Brooks’s most disheartening conclusion was that we escaped this disastrous possible outcome only by sheer luck. “I don’t think some sort of resilience in our system prevented that,” she said. “It wasn’t the supposed ‘guardrails of democracy’ that kept things from getting that bad—it was chance, plain and simple.”

I agree. We might be glad Pence stood firm at a key moment, but Pence had to be free—indeed, alive—to act. We might also comfort ourselves knowing that the clowns and opportunists who tried to overthrow our constitutional order have been outed by a thorough investigation in Congress. We can hope that justice is served, with prison sentences for some of the most dangerous seditionists and violent rioters. But is it enough? As the Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn tweeted this morning: “730 days later. We’re still waiting on accountability.”

Too many of the most important figures in the January 6 plot—and, as we know from the House investigation, it was indeed a plot, and not some random outbreak of violence—have escaped true accountability. From Trump on down to the group that the Washington Post writer Greg Sargent calls the “coup lawyers,” including John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani, we know their names. But severe consequences for such people have been rare.

Meanwhile, most of the Republicans who voted to overturn the election are still in Congress—or would be, if the House could get organized enough to swear them in. (At a ceremony at the Capitol today to mark the anniversary of the insurrection, only one Republican, apparently, bothered to show up.) The White House event to honor those who defended democracy took place at the same time that Representative Kevin McCarthy, just down the street at the Capitol, submitted himself for another few rounds of political bastinado, as the House, for the 12th and 13th times, failed to elect a speaker.

The anniversary of January 6 should remind us that the crisis of American democracy isn’t over, and that we should continue to take seriously what a close call we had in January 2021. (Exhibit A: Twitter’s new boss, the deeply unserious Elon Musk, trollishly chose today to reinstate the account of the disgraced Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn, the man who wanted the military to seize voting machines.)

I have been somewhat optimistic about America’s democratic recovery in the aftermath of the 2022 midterm elections, and I actually think the contest over the speaker’s job is an example of democracy in action. But we should not lose sight of the ugly reality that the people opposing McCarthy have not done so out of principle or because of policy differences. The “rebels” are members of a caucus of extremists who will be part of the new majority, and whose serial humiliations of the gentleman from California will grant them concessions in the House that will continue to endanger the stability of our system of government. Or, as my colleague David Frum put it yesterday, McCarthy is on the “verge of selling out the country to a nihilist faction so he can briefly occupy a now-powerless office—then cash in for whatever he can get after this fiasco.”

It is fitting that we remember the heroes of January 6, including the many people who weren’t at the White House that day but who stayed at their posts and did their jobs as election officials, volunteers, observers, and many other of the tasks that allow the millions of citizens of a giant federal democracy to govern themselves. But the events today on Capitol Hill and the ceremony at the White House are reminders that the threats to our constitutional order have not vanished, and that we cannot magically wish them away.

Related:

​​January 6 is a dangerous shorthand. (From June) ​​Kevin McCarthy’s predicament is a warning. Today’s News Kevin McCarthy lost his 13th vote for House speaker, but he did move 15 GOP holdouts into his camp after making some concessions. A new report showed that the U.S. economy added 223,000 new jobs in December, making 2022 one of the best years on record for jobs growth. Damar Hamlin, the Buffalo Bills player who suffered cardiac arrest during Monday’s game, had his breathing tube removed overnight and is talking. Dispatches Books Briefing: A new year doesn’t call for a new you, Emma Sarappo writes.

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Evening Read (Tyler Comrie / The Atlantic; Getty)

The Writer’s Most Sacred Relationship

By Lauren LeBlanc

Making a living as a writer has always been an elusive pursuit. The competition is fierce. The measures of success are subjective. Even many people at the top of the profession can’t wholeheartedly recommend it. The critic Elizabeth Hardwick, Darryl Pinckney recalls in his evocative new memoir, “told us that there were really only two reasons to write: desperation or revenge. She told us that if we couldn’t take rejection, if we couldn’t be told no, then we could not be writers.”

In spite of these red flags, countless people set out on this path. One lifeline, if you’re lucky enough to find it, is mentorship. Literary mentors offer the conventional benefits: perspective, direction, connections. But the partnerships that result are less transactional and more messy and serendipitous than those that tend to exist in other industries. While many people might think of such arrangements as altruistic or at least utilitarian, Pinckney’s book, which chronicles his tutelage under Hardwick, shows that artistic mentorships, especially literary ones, are far more fraught.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

In much of the Eastern Orthodox Christian world (Russia and Ukraine, for example), today is Christmas. Russian President Vladimir Putin declared a Christmas cease-fire, but within hours of the arrival of the holiday, air-raid sirens blared over Kyiv, and CNN reported artillery exchanges at the front lines near Bakhmut. Perhaps the most insulting aspect of the Russian declaration is that it ostensibly came at the behest of the Russian Orthodox patriarch, Kirill, who has been a vocal and especially bloody-minded supporter of the war.

In the meantime, you may wonder why some Orthodox celebrate Christmas in January. Not all Orthodox do this; I am Greek Orthodox, and we follow the Western tradition of celebrating on December 25. The simple answer is that the Christian world broke apart into its Eastern and Western camps in the 11th century, and when Pope Gregory XIII standardized a new calendar in the 16th century, the Eastern churches decided to stay with the old “Julian” calendar, in which Christmas falls on January 6. There’s no particular theological significance there, especially because no one really knows the exact date of Christ’s birth. Now, as to why Orthodox and Western Easter fall on different dates … that’s a little more complicated, and I’ll get back to you on that in a few months.

— Tom

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Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Anglican Archbishop Hosam Naoum says Israel is facing 'religious radicalism' as Christian graves are vandalised.