It was July 29, 2019—the worst day of my life, though I didn’t know that quite yet.

The traffic in downtown Washington, D.C., was inching along. The mid-Atlantic humidity was sweating through the windows of my chauffeured car. I was running late and fighting to stay awake. For two weeks, I’d been sprinting between television and radio studios up and down the East Coast, promoting my new book on the collapse of the post–George W. Bush Republican Party and the ascent of Donald Trump. Now I had one final interview for the day. My publicist had offered to cancel—it wasn’t that important, she said—but I didn’t want to. It was important. After the car pulled over on M Street Northwest, I hustled into the stone-pillared building of the Christian Broadcasting Network.

All in a blur, the producers took my cellphone, mic’d me up, and shoved me onto the set with the news anchor John Jessup. Camera rolling, Jessup skipped past the small talk. He was keen to know, given his audience, what I had learned about the president’s alliance with America’s white evangelicals. Despite being a lecherous, impenitent scoundrel—the 2016 campaign was marked by his mocking of a disabled man, his xenophobic slander of immigrants, his casual calls to violence against political opponents—Trump had won a historic 81 percent of white evangelical voters. Yet that statistic was just a surface-level indicator of the foundational shifts taking place inside the Church. Polling showed that born-again Christian conservatives, once the president’s softest backers, were now his most unflinching advocates. Jessup had the same question as millions of other Americans: Why?

As a believer in Jesus Christ—and as the son of an evangelical minister, raised in a conservative church in a conservative community—I had long struggled with how to answer this question. The truth is, I knew lots of Christians who, to varying degrees, supported the president, and there was no way to summarily describe their diverse attitudes, motivations, and behaviors. They were best understood as points plotted across a spectrum. At one end were the Christians who maintained their dignity while voting for Trump—people who were clear-eyed in understanding that backing a candidate, pragmatically and prudentially, need not lead to unconditionally promoting, empowering, and apologizing for that candidate. At the opposite end were the Christians who had jettisoned their credibility—people who embraced the charge of being reactionary hypocrites, still fuming about Bill Clinton’s character as they jumped at the chance to go slumming with a playboy turned president.

[From the April 2018 issue: Michael Gerson on Trump and the evangelical temptation]

Most of the Christians I knew fell somewhere in the middle. They had to some extent been seduced by the cult of Trumpism, yet to composite all of these people into a caricature was misleading. Something more profound was taking place. Something was happening in the country—something was happening in the Church—that we had never seen before. I had attempted, ever so delicately, to make these points in my book. Now, on the TV set, I was doing a similar dance.

Jessup seemed to sense my reticence. Pivoting from the book, he asked me about a recent flare-up in the evangelical world. In response to the Trump administration’s policy of forcibly separating migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border, Russell Moore, a prominent leader with the Southern Baptist Convention, had tweeted, “Those created in the image of God should be treated with dignity and compassion, especially those seeking refuge from violence back home.” At this, Jerry Falwell Jr.—the son and namesake of the Moral Majority founder, and then-president of Liberty University, one of the world’s largest Christian colleges—took great offense. “Who are you @drmoore?” he replied. “Have you ever made a payroll? Have you ever built an organization of any type from scratch? What gives you authority to speak on any issue?”

This being Twitter and all, I decided to chime in. “There are Russell Moore Christians and Jerry Falwell Jr. Christians,” I wrote, summarizing the back-and-forth. “Choose wisely, brothers and sisters.”

Now Jessup was reading my tweet on-air. “Do you really see evangelicals divided into two camps?” the anchor asked.

I stumbled. Conceding that it might be an “oversimplification,” I warned still of a “fundamental disconnect” between Christians who view issues through the eyes of Jesus and Christians who process everything through a partisan political filter.

[From the June 2022 issue: Tim Alberta on how politics poisoned the evangelical church]

As the interview ended, I knew I’d botched an opportunity to state plainly my qualms about the American evangelical Church. Truth be told, I did see evangelicals divided into two camps—one side faithful to an eternal covenant, the other side bowing to earthly idols of nation and influence and fame—but I was too scared to say so. My own Christian walk had been so badly flawed. And besides, I’m no theologian; Jessup was asking for my journalistic analysis, not my biblical exegesis.

Walking off the set, I wondered if my dad might catch that clip. Surely somebody at our home church would see it and pass it along. I grabbed my phone, then stopped to chat with Jessup and a few of his colleagues. As we said our farewells, I looked down at the phone, which had been silenced. There were multiple missed calls from my wife and oldest brother. Dad had collapsed from a heart attack. There was nothing the surgeons could do. He was gone.

The last time I saw him was nine days earlier. The CEO of Politico, my employer at the time, had thrown a book party for me at his Washington manor, and Mom and Dad weren’t going to miss that. They jumped in their Chevy and drove out from my childhood home in southeast Michigan. When he sauntered into the event, my old man looked out of place—a rumpled midwestern minister, baggy shirt stuffed into his stained khakis—but before long he was holding court with diplomats and Fortune 500 lobbyists, making them howl with irreverent one-liners. It was like a Rodney Dangerfield flick come to life. At one point, catching sight of my agape stare, he gave an exaggerated wink, then delivered a punch line for his captive audience.

It was the high point of my career. The book was getting lots of buzz; already I was being urged to write a sequel. Dad was proud—very proud, he assured me—but he was also uneasy. For months, as the book launch drew closer, he had been urging me to reconsider the focus of my reporting career. Politics, he kept saying, was a “sordid, nasty business,” a waste of my time and God-given talents. Now, in the middle of the book party, he was taking me by the shoulder, asking a congressman to excuse us for just a moment. Dad put his arm around me and leaned in.

“You see all these people?” he asked.

“Yeah.” I nodded, grinning at the validation.

“Most of them won’t care about you in a week,” he said.

The record scratched. My moment of rapture was interrupted. I cocked my head and smirked at him. Neither of us said anything. I was bothered. The longer we stood there in silence, the more bothered I became. Not because he was wrong. But because he was right.

“Remember,” Dad said, smiling. “On this Earth, all glory is fleeting.”

Now, as I raced to Reagan National Airport and boarded the first available flight to Detroit, his words echoed. There was nothing contrived about Dad’s final admonition to me. That is what he believed; that is who he was.

Once a successful New York financier, Richard J. Alberta had become a born-again Christian in 1977. Despite having a nice house, beautiful wife, and healthy firstborn son, he felt a rumbling emptiness. He couldn’t sleep. He developed debilitating anxiety. Religion hardly seemed like the solution; Dad came from a broken and unbelieving home. He had decided, halfway through his undergraduate studies at Rutgers University, that he was an atheist. And yet, one weekend while visiting family in the Hudson Valley, my dad agreed to attend church with his niece, Lynn. He became a new person that day. His angst was quieted. His doubts were overwhelmed. Taking Communion for the first time at Goodwill Church in Montgomery, New York, he prayed to acknowledge Jesus as the son of God and accept him as his personal savior.

Dad became unrecognizable to those who knew him. He rose early, hours before work, to read the Bible, filling a yellow legal pad with verses and annotations. He sat silently for hours in prayer. My mom thought he’d lost his mind. A young journalist who worked under Howard Cosell at ABC Radio in New York, Mom was suspicious of all this Jesus talk. But her maiden name—Pastor—was proof of God’s sense of humor. Soon she accepted Christ too.

When Dad felt he was being called to abandon his finance career and enter the ministry, he met with Pastor Stewart Pohlman at Goodwill. As they prayed in Pastor Stew’s office, Dad said he felt the spirit of the Lord swirling around him, filling up the room. He was not given to phony supernaturalism—in fact, Dad might have been the most intellectually sober, reason-based Christian I’ve ever known—but that day, he felt certain, the Lord anointed him. Soon he and Mom were selling just about every material item they owned, leaving their high-salaried jobs in New York, and moving to Massachusetts so he could study at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

For the next two decades, they worked in small churches here and there, living off food stamps and the generosity of fellow believers. By the time I arrived, in 1986, Dad was Pastor Stew’s associate at Goodwill. We lived in the church parsonage; my nursery was the library, where towers of leather-wrapped books had been collected by the church’s pastors dating back to the mid-18th century. A few years later we moved to Michigan, and Dad eventually put down roots at a start-up, Cornerstone Church, in the Detroit suburb of Brighton. It was part of a minor denomination called the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC), and it was there, for the next 26 years, that he served as senior pastor.

Cornerstone was our home. Because Mom also worked on staff, leading the women’s ministry, I was quite literally raised in the church: playing hide-and-seek in storage areas, doing homework in the office wing, bringing high-school dates to Bible study, working as a janitor during a year of community college. I hung around the church so much that I decided to leave my mark: At 9 years old, I used a pocket knife to etch my initials into the brickwork of the narthex.

The last time I’d been there, 18 months earlier, I’d spoken to a packed sanctuary at Dad’s retirement ceremony, armed with good-natured needling and PG-13 anecdotes. Now I would need to give a very different speech.

Standing in the back of the sanctuary, my three older brothers and I formed a receiving line. Cornerstone had been a small church when we’d arrived as kids. Not anymore. Brighton, once a sleepy town situated at the intersection of two expressways, had become a prized location for commuters to Detroit and Ann Arbor. Meanwhile, Dad, with his baseball allegories and Greek-linguistics lessons, had gained a reputation for his eloquence in the pulpit. By the time I moved away, in 2008, Cornerstone had grown from a couple hundred members to a couple thousand.

Now the crowd swarmed around us, filling the sanctuary and spilling out into the lobby and adjacent hallways, where tables displayed flowers and golf clubs and photos of Dad. I was numb. My brothers too. None of us had slept much that week. So the first time someone made a glancing reference to Rush Limbaugh, it did not compute. But then another person brought him up. And then another. That’s when I connected the dots. Apparently, the king of conservative talk radio had been name-checking me on his program recently—“a guy named Tim Alberta”—and describing the unflattering revelations in my book about Trump. Nothing in that moment could have mattered to me less. I smiled, shrugged, and thanked people for coming to the visitation.

They kept on coming. More than I could count. People from the church—people I’d known my entire life—were greeting me, not primarily with condolences or encouragement or mourning, but with commentary about Limbaugh and Trump. Some of it was playful, guys remarking about how I was the same mischief-maker they’d known since kindergarten. But some of it wasn’t playful. Some of it was angry; some of it was cold and confrontational. One man questioned whether I was truly a Christian. Another asked if I was still on “the right side.” All while Dad was in a box a hundred feet away.

It got to the point where I had to take a walk. Here, in our house of worship, people were taunting me about politics as I tried to mourn my father. I was in the company of certain friends that day who would not claim to know Jesus, yet they shrouded me in peace and comfort. Some of these card-carrying evangelical Christians? Not so much. They didn’t see a hurting son; they saw a vulnerable adversary.

That night, while fine-tuning the eulogy I would give at Dad’s funeral the following afternoon, I still felt the sting. My wife perceived as much. The unflappable one in the family, she encouraged me to be careful with my words and cautioned against mentioning the day’s unpleasantness. I took half of her advice.

In front of an overflow crowd on August 2, 2019, I paid tribute to the man who’d taught me everything—how to throw a baseball, how to be a gentleman, how to trust and love the Lord. Reciting my favorite verse, from Paul’s second letter to the early Church in Corinth, Greece, I told of Dad’s instruction to keep our eyes fixed on what we could not see. Reading from his favorite poem, about a man named Richard Cory, I told of Dad’s warning that we could amass great wealth and still be poor.

Then I recounted all the people who’d approached me the day before, wanting to discuss the Trump wars on AM talk radio. I proposed that their time in the car would be better spent listening to Dad’s old sermons. I spoke of the need for discipleship and spiritual formation. I suggested, with some sarcasm, that if they needed help finding biblical listening for their daily commute, the pastors here on staff could help. “Why are you listening to Rush Limbaugh ?” I asked my father’s congregation. “Garbage in, garbage out.”

There was nervous laughter in the sanctuary. Some people were visibly agitated. Others looked away, pretending not to hear. My dad’s successor, a young pastor named Chris Winans, wore a shell-shocked expression. No matter. I had said my piece. It was finished. Or so I thought.

A few hours later, after we had buried Dad, my brothers and I slumped down onto the couches in our parents’ living room. We opened some beers and turned on a baseball game. Behind us, in the kitchen, a small platoon of church ladies worked to prepare a meal for the family. Here, I thought, is the love of Christ. Watching them hustle about, comforting Mom and catering to her sons, I found myself regretting the Limbaugh remark. Most of the folks at our church were humble, kindhearted Christians like these women. Maybe I’d blown things out of proportion.

Just then, one of them walked over and handed me an envelope. It had been left at the church, she said. My name was scrawled across it. I opened the envelope. Inside was a full-page-long, handwritten screed. It was from a longtime Cornerstone elder, someone my dad had called a friend, a man who’d mentored me in the youth group and had known me for most of my life.

He had composed this note, on the occasion of my father’s death, to express just how disappointed he was in me. I was part of an evil plot, the man wrote, to undermine God’s ordained leader of the United States. My criticisms of President Trump were tantamount to treason—against both God and country—and I should be ashamed of myself.

However, there was still hope. Jesus forgives, and so could this man. If I used my journalism skills to investigate the “deep state,” he wrote, uncovering the shadowy cabal that was supposedly sabotaging Trump’s presidency, then I would be restored. He said he was praying for me.

I felt sick. Silently, I passed the letter to my wife. She scanned it without expression. Then she flung the piece of paper into the air and, with a shriek that made the church ladies jump out of their cardigans, cried out: “What the hell is wrong with these people?”

There has never been consensus on what, exactly, it means to be an evangelical. Competing and overlapping definitions have been offered for generations, some more widely embraced than others. Billy Graham, a man synonymous with the term, once remarked that he himself would like to inquire as to its true meaning. By the 1980s, thanks to the efforts of televangelists and political activists, what was once a religious signifier began transforming into a partisan movement. Evangelical soon became synonymous with conservative Christian, and eventually with white conservative Republican.

[Read: Defining evangelical]

My dad, a serious theologian who held advanced degrees from top seminaries, bristled at reductive analyses of his religious tribe. He would frequently state from the pulpit what he believed an evangelical to be: someone who interprets the Bible as the inspired word of God and who takes seriously the charge to proclaim it to the world.

From a young age, I realized that not all Christians were like my dad. Other adults who went to our church—my teachers, coaches, friends’ parents—didn’t speak about God the way that he did. Theirs was a more casual Christianity, less a lifestyle than a hobby, something that could be picked up and put down and slotted into schedules. Their pastor realized as much. Pushing his people ever harder to engage with questions of canonical authority and trinitarian precepts and Calvinist doctrine, Dad tried his best to run a serious church.

The author and his father in 2019 (Courtesy of Tim Alberta)

But for all his successes, Dad had one great weakness. Pastor Alberta’s kryptonite as a Christian—and I think he knew it, though he never admitted it to me—was his intense love of country.

Once a talented young athlete, Dad came down with tuberculosis at 16 years old. He was hospitalized for four months; at one point, doctors thought he might die. He eventually recovered, and with the Vietnam War escalating, he joined the Marine Corps. But at the Officer Candidates School in Quantico, Virginia, he fell behind in the physical work. His lungs were not healthy. After receiving an honorable discharge, Dad went home saddled with a certain shame. In the ensuing years, he learned that dozens of the second lieutenants he’d trained alongside at Quantico—as well as a bunch of guys he’d grown up with—were killed in action. It burdened him for the rest of his life.

This experience, and his disgust with the hippies and the drug culture and the war protesters, turned Dad into a law-and-order conservative. Marinating in the language of social conservatism during his time in seminary—this was the heyday of the Moral Majority—he emerged a full-spectrum Republican. His biggest political concern was abortion; in 1947, my grandmother, trapped in an emotionally abusive marriage, had almost ended her pregnancy with him. (She had a sudden change of heart at the clinic and walked out, a decision my dad would always attribute to holy intercession.) But he also waded into the culture wars: gay marriage, education curriculum, morality in public life.

Dad always told us that personal integrity was a prerequisite for political leadership. He was so relieved when Bill Clinton’s second term ended that he and Mom hosted a small viewing party in our living room for George W. Bush’s 2001 inauguration, to celebrate the return of morality to the White House. Over time, however, his emphasis shifted. One Sunday in early 2010, when I was home visiting, he showed the congregation an ominous video in which Christian leaders warned about the menace of Obamacare. I told him afterward that it felt inappropriate for a worship service; he disagreed. We would butt heads more regularly in the years that followed. It was always loving, always respectful. Yet clearly our philosophical paths were diverging—a reality that became unavoidable during the presidency of Donald Trump.

Dad would have preferred any of the other Republicans who ran in 2016. He knew that Trump was a narcissist and a liar; he knew that he was not a moral man. Ultimately Dad felt he had no choice but to support the Republican ticket, given his concern for the unborn and the Supreme Court majority that hung in the balance. I understood that decision. What I couldn’t understand was how, over the next couple of years, he became an apologist for Trump’s antics, dismissing criticisms of the president’s conduct as little more than an attempt to marginalize his supporters. Dad really did believe this; he believed that the constant attacks on Trump’s character were ipso facto an attack on the character of people like himself, which I think, on some subconscious level, created a permission structure for him to ignore the president’s depravity. All I could do was tell Dad the truth. “Look, you’re the one who taught me to know right from wrong,” I would say. “Don’t be mad at me for acting on it.”

To his credit, Dad was not some lazy, knee-jerk partisan. He was vocal about certain issues—gun violence, poverty, immigration, the trappings of wealth—that did not play to his constituency at Cornerstone.

Dad wasn’t a Christian nationalist; he wanted nothing to do with theocracy. He just believed that God had blessed the United States uniquely—and felt that anyone who fought to preserve those blessings was doing the Lord’s work. This made for an unfortunate scene in 2007, when a young congregant at Cornerstone, a Marine named Mark Kidd, died during a fourth tour of duty in Iraq. Public opinion had swung sharply against the war, and Democrats were demanding that the Bush administration bring the troops home. My dad was devastated by Kidd’s death. They had corresponded while Kidd was overseas and met for prayer in between his deployments. Dad’s grief as a pastor gave way to his grievance as a Republican supporter of the war: He made it known to local Democratic politicians that they weren’t welcome at the funeral.

“I am ashamed, personally, of leaders who say they support the troops but not the commander in chief,” Dad thundered from his pulpit, earning a raucous standing ovation. “Do they not see that discourages the warriors and encourages the terrorists?”

This touched off a firestorm in our community. Most of the church members were all for Dad’s remarks, but even in a conservative town like Brighton, plenty of people felt uneasy about turning a fallen Marine’s church memorial into a partisan political rally. Patriotism in the pulpit is one thing; lots of sanctuaries fly an American flag on the rostrum. This was something else. This was taking the weight and the gravity and the eternal certainty of God and lending it to an ephemeral and questionable cause. This was rebuking people for failing to unconditionally follow the president of the United States when the only authority we’re meant to unconditionally follow—particularly in a setting of stained-glass windows—is Christ himself.

I know Dad regretted it. But he couldn’t help himself. His own personal story—and his broader view of the United States as a godly nation, a source of hope in a despondent world—was impossible to divorce from his pastoral ministry. Every time a member of the military came to church dressed in uniform, Dad would recognize them by name, ask them to stand up, and lead the church in a rapturous round of applause. This was one of the first things his successor changed at Cornerstone.

Eighteen months after Dad’s funeral, in February 2021, I sat down across from that successor, Chris Winans, in a booth at the Brighton Bar & Grill. It’s a comfortable little haunt on Main Street, backing up to a wooden playground and a millpond. But Winans didn’t look comfortable. He looked nervous, even a bit paranoid, glancing around him as we began to speak. Soon, I would understand why.

Dad had spent years looking for an heir apparent. Several associate pastors had come and gone. Cornerstone was his life’s work—he had led the church throughout virtually its entire history—so there would be no settling in his search for a successor. The uncertainty wore him down. Dad worried that he might never find the right guy. And then one day, while attending a denominational meeting, he met Winans, a young associate pastor from Goodwill—the very church where he’d been saved, and where he’d worked his first job out of seminary. Dad hired him away from Goodwill to lead a young-adults ministry at Cornerstone, and from the moment Winans arrived, I could tell that he was the one.

Barely 30 years old, Winans looked to be exactly what Cornerstone needed in its next generation of leadership. He was a brilliant student of the scriptures. He spoke with precision and clarity from the pulpit. He had a humble, easygoing way about him, operating without the outsize ego that often accompanies first-rate preaching. Everything about this pastor—the boyish sweep of brown hair, his delightful young family—seemed to be straight out of central casting.

There was just one problem: Chris Winans was not a conservative Republican. He didn’t like guns. He cared more about funding anti-poverty programs than cutting taxes. He had no appetite for President Trump’s unrepentant antics. Of course, none of this would seem heretical to Christians in other parts of the world; given his staunch anti-abortion position, Winans would in most places be considered the picture of spiritual and intellectual consistency. But in the American evangelical tradition, and at a church like Cornerstone, the whiff of liberalism made him suspect.

Dad knew the guy was different. Winans liked to play piano instead of sports, and had no taste for hunting or fishing. Frankly, Dad thought that was a bonus. Winans wasn’t supposed to simply placate Cornerstone’s aging base of wealthy white congregants. The new pastor’s charge was to evangelize, to cast a vision and expand the mission field, to challenge those inside the church and carry the gospel to those outside it. Dad didn’t think there was undue risk. He felt confident that his hand-chosen successor’s gifts in the pulpit, and his manifest love of Jesus, would smooth over any bumps in the transition.

He was wrong. Almost immediately after Winans moved into the role of senior pastor, at the beginning of 2018, the knives came out. Any errant remark he made about politics or culture, any slight against Trump or the Republican Party—real or perceived—invited a torrent of criticism. Longtime members would demand a meeting with Dad, who had stuck around in a support role, and unload on Winans. Dad would ask if there was any substantive criticism of the theology; almost invariably, the answer was no. A month into the job, when Winans remarked in a sermon that Christians ought to be protective of God’s creation—arguing for congregants to take seriously the threats to the planet—people came to Dad by the dozens, outraged, demanding that Winans be reined in. Dad told them all to get lost. If anyone had a beef with the senior pastor, he said, they needed to take it up with the senior pastor. (Dad did so himself, buying Winans lunch at Chili’s and suggesting that he tone down the tree hugging.)

Winans had a tough first year on the job, but he survived it. The people at Cornerstone were in an adjustment period. He needed to respect that—and he needed to adjust, too. As long as Dad had his back, Winans knew he would be okay.And then Dad died.

Now, Winans told me, he was barely hanging on at Cornerstone. The church had become unruly; his job had become unbearable. Not long after Dad died—making Winans the unquestioned leader of the church—the coronavirus pandemic arrived. And then George Floyd was murdered. All of this as Donald Trump campaigned for reelection. Trump had run in 2016 on a promise that “Christianity will have power” if he won the White House; now he was warning that his opponent in the 2020 election, former Vice President Joe Biden, was going to “hurt God” and target Christians for their religious beliefs. Embracing dark rhetoric and violent conspiracy theories, the president enlisted prominent evangelicals to help frame a cosmic spiritual clash between the God-fearing Republicans who supported Trump and the secular leftists who were plotting their conquest of America’s Judeo-Christian ethos.

People at Cornerstone began confronting their pastor, demanding that he speak out against government mandates and Black Lives Matter and Joe Biden. When Winans declined, people left. The mood soured noticeably after Trump’s defeat in November 2020. A crusade to overturn the election result, led by a group of outspoken Christians—including Trump’s lawyer Jenna Ellis, who later pleaded guilty to a felony charge of aiding and abetting false statements and writings, and the author Eric Metaxas, who suggested to fellow believers that martyrdom might be required to keep Trump in office—roiled the Cornerstone congregation. When a popular church staffer who had been known to proselytize for QAnon was fired after repeated run-ins with Winans, the pastor told me, the departures came in droves. Some of those abandoning Cornerstone were not core congregants. But plenty of them were. They were people who served in leadership roles, people Winans counted as confidants and friends.

By the time Trump supporters invaded the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Winans believed he’d lost control of his church. “It’s an exodus,” he told me a few weeks later, sitting inside Brighton Bar & Grill.

The pastor had felt despair—and a certain liability—watching the attack unfold on television. Christian imagery was ubiquitous: rioters forming prayer circles, singing hymns, carrying Bibles and crosses. The perversion of America’s prevailing religion would forever be associated with this tragedy; as one of the legislative ringleaders, Senator Josh Hawley, explained in a speech the following year, long after the blood had been scrubbed from the Capitol steps, “We are a revolutionary nation precisely because we are the heirs of the revolution of the Bible.”

That sort of thinking, Winans said, represents an even greater threat than the events of January 6.

“A lot of people believe there was a religious conception of this country. A biblical conception of this country,” Winans told me. “And that’s the source of a lot of our problems.”

For much of American history, white Christians have enjoyed tremendous wealth and influence and security. Given that reality—and given the miraculous nature of America’s defeat of Great Britain, its rise to superpower status, and its legacy of spreading freedom and democracy (and, yes, Christianity) across the globe—it’s easy to see why so many evangelicals believe that our country is divinely blessed. The problem is, blessings often become indistinguishable from entitlements. Once we become convinced that God has blessed something, that something can become an object of jealousy, obsession—even worship.

“At its root, we’re talking about idolatry. America has become an idol to some of these people. If you believe that God is in covenant with America, then you believe—and I’ve heard lots of people say this explicitly—that we’re a new Israel,” Winans said, referring to the Old Testament narrative of God’s chosen nation. “You believe the sorts of promises made to Israel are applicable to this country; you view America as a covenant that needs to be protected. You have to fight for America as if salvation itself hangs in the balance. At that point, you understand yourself as an American first and most fundamentally. And that is a terrible misunderstanding of who we’re called to be.”

Plenty of nations are mentioned in the Bible; the United States is not one of them. Most American evangelicals are sophisticated enough to reject the idea of this country as something consecrated in the eyes of God. But many of those same people have chosen to idealize a Christian America that puts them at odds with Christianity. They have allowed their national identity to shape their faith identity instead of the other way around.

Winans chose to be hypervigilant on this front, hence the change of policy regarding Cornerstone’s salute to military personnel. The new pastor would meet soldiers after the service, shaking their hand and individually thanking them for their service. But he refused to stage an ovation in the sanctuary. This wasn’t because he was some bohemian anti-war activist; in fact, his wife had served in the Army. Winans simply felt it was inappropriate.

“I don’t want to dishonor anyone. I think nations have the right to self-defense. I respect the sacrifices these people make in the military,” Winans told me. “But they would come in wearing their dress blues and get this wild standing ovation. And you contrast that to whenever we would host missionaries: They would stand up for recognition, and we give them a golf clap … And you have to wonder: Why? What’s going on inside our hearts?”

This kind of cultural heresy was getting Winans into trouble. More congregants were defecting each week. Many were relocating to one particular congregation down the road, a revival-minded church that was pandering to the whims of the moment, led by a pastor who was preaching a blood-and-soil Christian nationalism that sought to merge two kingdoms into one.As we talked, Winans asked me to keep something between us: He was thinking about leaving Cornerstone.

The “psychological onslaught,” he said, had become too much. Recently, the pastor had developed a form of anxiety disorder and was retreating into a dark room between services to collect himself. Winans had met with several trusted elders and asked them to stick close to him on Sunday mornings so they could catch him if he were to faint and fall over.

I thought about Dad and how heartbroken he would have been. Then I started to wonder if Dad didn’t have some level of culpability in all of this. Clearly, long before COVID-19 or George Floyd or Donald Trump, something had gone wrong at Cornerstone. I had always shrugged off the crude, hysterical, sky-is-falling Facebook posts I would see from people at the church. I found it amusing, if not particularly alarming, that some longtime Cornerstone members were obsessed with trolling me on Twitter. Now I couldn’t help but think these were warnings—bright-red blinking lights—that should have been taken seriously. My dad never had a social-media account. Did he have any idea just how lost some of his sheep really were?

I had never told Winans about the confrontations at my dad’s viewing, or the letter I received after taking Rush Limbaugh’s name in vain at the funeral. Now I was leaning across the table, unloading every detail. He narrowed his eyes and folded his hands and gave a pained exhale, mouthing that he was sorry. He could not even manage the words.

We both kept quiet for a little while. And then I asked him something I’d thought about every day for the previous 18 months—a sanitized version of my wife’s outburst in the living room.

“What’s wrong with American evangelicals?”

Winans thought for a moment.

“America,” he replied. “Too many of them worship America.”

This article was adapted from Tim Alberta’s new book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. It appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “The Church of America.”

The shadow of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invasion of Kuwait in 1990-1991 still looms over the Gulf emirate.

Netanyahu is taking advantage of the war in Gaza to push the United States into a direct confrontation with Iran.

Baghdad denounces the strikes as a breach of its 'sovereignty'.

One day toward the end of the 20th century, John Rizzo, a career lawyer at the Central Intelligence Agency, found himself chatting with Jack Downing—a former Marine and stalwart Cold Warrior who had been brought out of retirement to oversee the clandestine service.

The two men were talking about an analyst named Michael Scheuer, the cerebral but polarizing leader of a team focused on a terrorist group called al-Qaeda. Skeptical that Scheuer was up to the job, Downing brought up a perceived weakness of his staff. “The only people who work for him are girls,” he scoffed.

It was a small moment, but one Rizzo never forgot. “I remember him saying girls,” Rizzo told me in an interview before his death in 2021. Ironically, Downing, who also died in 2021, was seen as relatively supportive of women at the CIA.

Back in 2018, I met with a group of CIA historians to talk about women’s roles and experiences at the agency. The historians pointed to the striking number of women engaged in several key missions, chief among them the tracking of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, both before and after the 9/11 attacks; Scheuer’s team of “girls” played a key part. Over three years of book research, I interviewed more than one hundred female officers at the agency, including at least a half dozen who were involved in the bin Laden effort—some of whom had not spoken previously about their work, or not extensively—as well as many of their male colleagues. What became clear in these conversations was that many of the women who charted al-Qaeda’s rise felt that their work was undervalued or ignored and that their gender was part of the equation.

This article has been adapted from Mundy’s new book.

For decades, the CIA, founded in 1947, had been a boys’ club. The agency made a practice of hiring women as clerks, record-keepers, and secretaries, but not placing them in top jobs, particularly those that involved spying. According to a series of reports conducted during the Cold War decades, the view among many officers at Langley was that women were more emotional than men, less likely to be taken seriously abroad, and unable to succeed at the vital spycraft of running agents—that is, recruiting foreign nationals to share state secrets. When the agency’s equal-opportunity office investigated a discrimination complaint brought by a female officer in the late 1970s, the resulting report found “unwitting, subliminal, unconscious discriminatory procedures which have become institutionalized by practice.” The agency settled with the complainant, but then, in the mid-1990s, found itself settling two major sex-discrimination lawsuits brought by women in the clandestine service.

[From the June 2019 issue: Female spies and their secrets]

Sexism also existed in the analytic directorate, the large cadre of officers who take what the spies collect and make conclusions and predictions. A 1992 “glass ceiling” study commissioned by the CIA found that women made up nearly 40 percent of the professional workforce but only 10 percent of the elite Senior Intelligence Service. Women often found the headquarters environment “uncomfortable and alienating,” the study said, while white men tended to be given “career-making assignments.”

This history helps explain the dismissiveness that the largely female group tracking al-Qaeda perceived. For more than a decade beginning in the mid-1980s, the emerging discipline of counterterrorism was a low-priority mission, which is one reason so many women were shunted into it. But although they were well positioned to spot the earliest signs of al-Qaeda’s rise, they often had trouble getting their voices heard when they sounded warnings. That the male analyst they were most closely associated with—Scheuer—was contentious in the building didn’t help.

Not all the women were heroes; the team had flaws just as any team of men would. They did not always make themselves pleasant to colleagues or bosses. They did not always agree on the approach, methods, or level of aggression warranted toward terrorists and their leaders. After 9/11, some were as susceptible as men to the excesses of the War on Terror. But for years beforehand they endeavored to make known that a dispersed group of fighters—while lacking a formal military or high-tech weaponry—was capable of turning America’s own technology against itself, and fully intended to do so.

Countless investigations have examined why the United States didn’t see 9/11 coming, and the explanations are many. But one factor these assessments don’t fully capture is that some analysts did know that such an attack could happen, and that many of the earliest, most tenacious, and most perceptive of them were female, in an institution that had long underestimated women and their work.

One of the first officers to pay attention to al-Qaeda was a twentysomething analyst named Cindy Storer, sharp-eyed, good at math, a lover of puzzles. In 1989, Storer joined the desk responsible for looking at Afghanistan, which for 10 years had been occupied by Soviet invaders, with the CIA basically running the resistance. The year she arrived on that account, the Soviet Army was defeated; two years later, the Soviet Union fell. Afghanistan, for most officers, faded into unimportance. “We walked away from it,” William Webster, then the CIA director, later admitted.

Storer, however, stayed on the beat, watching as tribal factions fought for control of the country. She began noticing something else: Arab fighters who had traveled from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia to help repel the Soviet occupiers were now fanning out across the world. In Afghanistan, they were known as “foreign fighters” or “Afghan Arabs.” They called themselves mujahideen: Islamic warriors pursuing jihad, or holy war, against infidel nations. They were violent, anti-Western, and growing in number.

Storer began teaching herself how to do terrorism analysis, a new skill that entailed making sense of fragments such as travel records and intercepted conversations among fighters using code names. Sifting through transcripts, cables, and Arab-language news articles, she set out to track which fighters were being influenced by which people and groups. As she talked to colleagues and bosses, however, it seemed to her that they minimized the threat at a time—the “peace dividend” era—when CIA resources were shrinking and desks were competitive and short-staffed. “Nobody wanted to hear about it,” she told me.

At least, not until she met with a more senior Near East and South Asia analyst, Barbara Sude. Sude was a perfect example of how women at the CIA had been funneled: She’d earned her PhD in the mid-1970s and applied to the agency on a whim. At the time, women were mostly being hired as secretaries, and the agency had a special test with a pink cover, which included questions like: Would you rather spend time putting on makeup or go without? Upon being hired, she was routed to an offshoot unit—the Foreign Broadcast Information Service—where she worked for a decade before making her way into an analyst job at CIA headquarters.

An expert in medieval Islamic thought, Sude turned her attention to political Islam and, at Storer’s suggestion, added Islamic extremists to her portfolio, including those with links to terrorism. The two analysts studied illicit financial transactions, looking at nongovernmental organizations to see which ones were diverting donations for nefarious purposes.

[Julia C. Morse: The counterterror war that America is winning]

Soon, a third woman, Gina Bennett, joined their efforts. After Bennett graduated from college in 1988, she applied to the CIA. She didn’t get an interview, so she took a job as a clerk-typist at the State Department. She was quickly promoted to the department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, known as the INR, where she worked as a junior analyst in the terrorism “watch office,” which fielded cables about explosions and threats. Months into her new job, on December 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. Nearly 300 people died in a terrorist bombing attributed to Libyan agents.

The killing of civilians—students, families, children—was horrific, and Bennett, like the other women, sensed a pivot: Terrorism was rising and changing form. From her desk in Foggy Bottom, she began to study the flow of foreign fighters leaving Afghanistan and going into Chechnya, Kashmir, the Philippines, surfacing in Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Burma.

Bennett, pregnant with her first child, began working on a memo for the INR’s daily bulletin, a compendium of intelligence for diplomats and the national-security community. In early 1993, she was finishing a draft when her water broke. Twenty-four hours later, she underwent an emergency C-section. A few days later, the phone rang by her hospital bed; a car bomb had gone off in a parking garage of the World Trade Center in New York City. “Your people did this!” her supervisor exclaimed, meaning that she’d had her eye on the right target. Bennett was back to work within weeks of giving birth.

Her stunningly farsighted memo “The Wandering Mujahidin: Armed and Dangerous” ran in the August 21–22, 1993, weekend edition of the INR’s bulletin. The same network of donors that had “funneled money, supplies, and manpower to supplement the Afghan mujahidin,” Bennett wrote, “is now contributing experienced fighters to militant Islamic groups worldwide.” The fighters excelled at guerrilla warfare, could travel easily, and had technological know-how. “The perception that the U.S. has an anti-Islamic foreign policy agenda raises the likelihood that U.S. interests increasingly will become targets,” she warned.

At a time when the name Osama bin Laden had appeared almost nowhere in the Western press, Bennett named the man to beware of. “Among private donors to the new generation [of fighters], Usama Bin Ladin is particularly famous for his religious zeal and financial largesse,” she wrote.

Having crossed paths with Sude at the CIA, Bennett invited her to join an informal interagency group studying the fighters. Sude invited Storer, and the women teamed up with a handful of officers from State, the CIA, the FBI, and the FAA, who met in borrowed offices, sharing papers, insights, and research.

Storer created a slide deck that showed where the fighters were moving and used symbols to denote what they did: Establish an office. Set up a training camp. Make a bank deposit. Blow something up. Another member of the group, the State Department analyst Lyndsay Howard, invited Storer to share her insights with people higher up. Around late 1993 or early 1994, Howard went door to door to leading bureaus at State and begged colleagues to send somebody senior to Storer’s briefing. The group listened to the presentation, but when Howard followed them out, she heard two or three people walking down the corridor laughing, she told me. They seemed to think Storer was exaggerating, ginning up a new enemy to justify the CIA’s continued existence.

At Langley, Storer could barely get the threat acknowledged. In February 1993, her team sent an item about the foreign fighters, authored by two colleagues, to the editors of the President’s Daily Brief, the compendium of urgent items that is presented every morning to the “First Customer” in the White House—Bill Clinton, at the time. The editors declined to include the item, Storer told me. After the WTC bomb exploded, an editor called and asked what her office knew about “Afghan Arabs,” she recalled. She suggested he read the PDB item that had been sitting in the drawer for two weeks.

Eventually Storer and Sude both found their way to the CIA’s counterterrorist center, a niche unit created in the 1980s to respond to hijackings and attacks in the Middle East. By 1995, the agency was becoming more cognizant of the threat posed by bin Laden. A small “virtual station” was created within the center, initially to examine his financial dealings. Mike Scheuer headed the outfit—dubbed “Alec Station,” after his young son—and recruited a team of mostly women analysts. Scheuer, by his own description, was the second or third pick for that job, which was not ardently sought by ambitious colleagues who perceived that the bureaucracy, overall, still had not fully embraced the mission.

[Garrett M. Graff: After 9/11, the U.S. got almost everything wrong]

The hardworking Scheuer grasped early on the magnitude of bin Laden’s success in cajoling other extremist leaders to come together in a multiethnic effort to kill Americans and drive the United States out of the Middle East. But Scheuer was also aggrieved, contemptuous of the political establishment, prone to go after his critics, and incessantly at odds with the FBI, from whom Alec Station sometimes hoarded information (and the other way around). “He was always a little nuts,” as one officer put it, “but he was our nut.” Storer and Sude each did stints working alongside Scheuer’s team, though not as part of it.

“I had enormous respect for the women who worked for me,” Scheuer told me, describing them as “experts at minutiae, putting pieces of information together or thinking, ‘Hey, two months ago I read something about this,’ and they’d go back and find it. They didn’t spend much time at all around the water cooler telling war stories.”

Having a female staff made it harder for Scheuer to get buy-in within the larger organization, however. Operations officers scoffed at his team. “What’s his staff? It’s all female,” the ops officer Glenn Carle is quoted observing in the journalist Peter Bergen’s book Manhunt. “It was just widely discussed at the time that it’s a bunch of chicks,” Carle continued. “So, the perspective was frankly condescending and dismissive.”

Scheuer’s team was not given its own ops officers to collect information overseas, so he tapped his reports officers—a traditionally female job that entailed disseminating cables—to wheedle materials from colleagues on other desks. Another Alec Station team member, Jennifer Matthews, helped create a new field—targeting—that entailed finding terrorists where they hid. Working with her was Alfreda Bikowsky, known as Freda, who combined a steel-trap memory with a restless manner and an aggressive approach that some of the other women, including Storer, sometimes argued with. Darrell Blocker, a CIA officer who worked with Bikowsky years later and saluted her focus and competence, described her personality to me as “not warm and fuzzy.” When Bikowsky came to Alec Station in the late 1990s, as chief of operations, she set about expanding what “operations” could mean: no longer just recruiting foreign nationals to pass secrets but also “figuring out who it is that we should be looking for, who they’re connected to,” she told me. It was, she said, “manhunting.” (Bikowsky later drew controversy when she participated in the post-9/11 “enhanced interrogation” program, working as an analyst vetting detainee assertions, and served as an architect of the agency’s efforts to defend what was condemned by many as torture.)

Gina Bennett, at Scheuer’s urging, left the State Department and joined the CIA to work on the al-Qaeda mission. Over the next few years, Alec Station grew to about two dozen people, and remained 80 percent female. The women did not always get along. Those working for Scheuer, or some of them, exhibited ferocity and suspicion. Some, Storer felt, regarded outsiders, even Storer herself, as not necessarily entitled to know what they knew.

Nonetheless, diving into the “troves” of files that the Alec team collected, Storer had an epiphany moment: “I’m like, holy crap, it’s a terrorist organization.” Bin Laden’s fighters weren’t a loose federation but a bureaucracy, complete with a payroll and franchises. Yet even in the counterterrorist center, colleagues on other accounts remained doubtful that scattered fighters could pose an organized threat on the level of Hezbollah or Hamas. As Storer put it, many officers regarded the terrorists as “ragheads who lived in a cave,” when in fact the leaders were “doctors and lawyers and military officers who knew their shit.”

The agency’s bureaucracy presented another problem. Most of the classified reports the CIA produces are “corporate products,” which means that anyone with a stake in a memo or paper must sign onto it before it’s published. Consensus must be secured, desk by desk, and that’s especially hard when you are female, junior, and laboring in an obscure unit. Around 1997, Storer said, she set out to write a definitive paper with “everything you wanted to know about bin Laden and al-Qaeda.” The draft was 60 pages long. But she “couldn’t get other desks to agree,” she told me. A supervisor wanted her to break it into small parts, she recalled. Storer said the full version was never published.

By mid-1998, Storer had long been warning colleagues that bin Laden’s organization had the ability to stage simultaneous attacks. On Friday, August 7, she turned out to be right: Major explosions occurred at U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing hundreds and injuring thousands. When the attacks were conclusively linked to al-Qaeda, this was, as one operations officer later wrote, a “profound” revelation, in that it showed that bin Laden could conduct “large-scale bombings of U.S. targets.”

Gradually, the truth was working its way to the agency’s seventh floor and to CIA Director George Tenet, who tried to convey to the White House the extent of the threat. A series of plans to capture bin Laden were formed but were rejected by top officials, who worried about how precise the targeting was and the danger of putting civilians at risk. After the 1998 embassy bombings, Tenet paid a visit to Alec Station. As he wrote in his 2007 memoir, a female member approached him and, “quivering with emotion,” confronted him about one plan to apprehend bin Laden that had gotten nixed. Many CIA women later noticed the phrase and resented its implication that the women had been emotional and weak.

As 2000 gave way to 2001, Storer found herself reading terrorist communications that used words like “Olympic-sized” and “Armageddon.” In October 2000, suicide bombers in Yemen blew a hole in the USS Cole, killing 17 American sailors, and analysts were shocked when the outgoing Clinton administration did not retaliate. In 2001, Tenet began begging the incoming administration of George W. Bush to let the CIA mount an operation that allowed for killing bin Laden rather than capturing him. Analysts expected that another major attack could happen in the summer, and Storer felt responsibility and dread: This is going to happen on your watch.

In July, Barbara Sude was tasked with writing a PDB that tackled the question everyone was wondering: Might the big attack occur on the U.S. mainland? She remembers her boss saying words to the effect of, “They are looking for a piece on bin Laden and the U.S.” From this loose instruction, Sude fashioned one of the most famous warnings in American history.

She and a few other analysts had written nearly 40 warning items that year alone. She had a pile of papers two feet high on her desk, including one by the FAA about hijackings. Crafting the memo with the input of colleagues, Sude noted that bin Laden had implied in TV interviews that he wanted to follow the example of the 1993 World Trade Center bomber, Ramzi Yousef, and “bring the fighting to America.” The memo pointed out that the 1998 bombings of the embassies in East Africa, which bin Laden associates had scoped out as early as 1993, showed that al-Qaeda was patient and “not deterred by setbacks.” Al-Qaeda members “have resided in or traveled to the U.S. for years,” she wrote. Threat reporting suggested that bin Laden wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft, and the FBI had noted patterns of activity suggesting “preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks.”

[Ben Rhodes: The 9/11 era is over]

She faxed a draft to the FBI, and sent it up to the PDB editors, who titled it “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S.” But the editors wanted more statistics from the FBI. Sude called the Bureau again and learned that it was conducting “approximately 70 full field investigations” looking into “bin Ladin–related” activity in the United States. Sude added that information to the draft. The item was put in the book on August 6, and the president was briefed.

Sude would always wonder: When President Bush was told of the existence of more than 70 FBI investigations into bin Laden activities in the American homeland, did the commander in chief worry? Did he ever call the FBI director and ask him what was going on? Bush later told congressional investigators that he felt heartened to learn of so many investigations. He took it to mean that things were under control. After the August 6 PDB ran, four weeks passed before the Bush administration had its first Cabinet-level meeting about the threat posed by al-Qaeda, on September 4, 2001.

The day of the attacks, the CIA staff evacuated headquarters, except for people in the counterterrorist center. The women there, who thought that a plane might be headed for Langley—and for them—felt a mixture of fear, anger, failure, resentment, and guilt. In the coming years, they worked to prevent more attacks and to track down the perpetrators, particularly bin Laden. One team member, Jennifer Matthews, died in that effort, killed alongside colleagues when a suicide bomber infiltrated the CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan. Some, like Cindy Storer and Barbara Sude, continued hunting terrorists for many years, until they retired. Gina Bennett was still at the CIA when bin Laden was found and killed on May 2, 2011, and stayed on for years after that. Freda Bikowsky, who went on to direct the “global jihad” unit, married Michael Scheuer in 2014 (she now goes by Alfreda Scheuer). Scheuer, meanwhile, was eased out of Alec Station in 1999 and left the agency in 2004, after growing more and more outspoken about the Iraq War and other issues. He went on to create a blog where he has expressed admiration for QAnon, claimed that the 2020 election was stolen, supported mob violence against Black Lives Matter protesters, and called for the killing of journalists and Democratic politicians, among other extremist views. (“He bears no resemblance to the man I knew,” Bennett told me.)

That these women’s warnings—and many other warnings—were not acted on owes to many factors. With any failure as big as 9/11 comes hindsight bias and I-told-you-sos. But there’s no question that early strategic warnings, and later tactical ones, were made by women who worked in an un-prestigious, discounted unit, and who had their ears to the ground.

After the attack, Tenet demanded that analysts, with their granular knowledge, be included in high-level briefings. When the hunt for bin Laden was reinvigorated nearly 10 years after 9/11, a team of targeters—strikingly female—proved key to the mission’s success. Whatever else it is, the CIA is a workplace, one with institutional biases, turf wars, bureaucracy, and, yes, sexism. When the stakes are so high, those dynamics can have history-making consequences.

This article has been adapted from The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA.

Just in the past 24 months, an astonishing number of armed conflicts have started, renewed, or escalated. Some had been fully frozen, meaning that the sides had not sustained direct combat in years; others were long simmering, meaning that low-level fighting would intermittently erupt. All have now become active.

The list encompasses not just the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, but hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh, Serbian military measures against Kosovo, fighting in Eastern Congo, complete turmoil in Sudan since April, and a fragile cease-fire in Tigray that Ethiopia seems poised to break at any time. Syria and Yemen have not exactly been quiet during this period, and gangs and cartels continuously menace governments, including those in Haiti and Mexico. All of this comes on top of the prospect of a major war breaking out in East Asia, such as by China invading the island of Taiwan.

The Uppsala Conflict Data Program, which has been tracking wars globally since 1945, identified 2022 and 2023 as the most conflictual years in the world since the end of the Cold War. Back in January 2023, before many of the above conflicts erupted, United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed sounded the alarm, noting that peace “is now under grave threat” across the globe. The seeming cascade of conflict gives rise to one obvious question: Why?

[From the March 2015 issue: Be not afraid]

Three theories can plausibly explain the phenomenon, and whichever one of them is right—or even if all of them are contributing—their upshot suggests that conflicts will likely continue proliferating for some time to come.

The first explanation holds that the cascade is in the eye of the beholder. People are too easily “fooled by randomness,” the essayist and statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb admonished in his 2001 book of the same title, seeking intentional explanations for what may be coincidence. The flurry of armed confrontations could be just such a phenomenon, concealing no deeper meaning: Some of the frozen conflicts, for instance, were due for flare-ups or had gone quiet only recently. Today’s volume of wars, in other words, should be viewed as little more than a series of unfortunate events that could recur or worsen at any time.

Though this theory may be reasonable, it is not reassuring, nor does it help predict when conflicts will arise or how large they will eventually become.

Although coincidences certainly do occur, the current onslaught happens to be taking place at a time of big changes in the international system. The era of Pax Americana appears to be over, and the United States is no longer poised to police the world. Not that Pax America was necessarily so peaceful. The 1990s were especially disputatious; civil wars arose on multiple continents, as did major wars in Europe and Africa. But the United States attempted to solve and contain many potential conflicts: Washington led a coalition to oust Saddam Hussein’s Iraq from Kuwait, facilitated the Oslo Process to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, fostered improved relations between North and South Korea, and encouraged the growth of peacekeeping operations around the globe. Even following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, the invasion of Afghanistan was supported by many in the international community as necessary to remove a pariah regime and enable a long-troubled nation to rebuild. War was not over, but humanity seemed closer than ever to finding a formula for lasting peace.

Over the subsequent decades, the United States seemed to fritter away both the goodwill needed to support such efforts and the means to carry them out. By the early 2010s, the United States was bogged down in two losing wars and recovering from a financial crisis. The world, too, had changed, with power ebbing from Washington’s singular pole to multiple emerging powers. As then–Secretary of State John Kerry remarked in a 2013 interview in The Atlantic, “We live in a world more like the 18th and 19th centuries.” And a multipolar world, where several great powers jostle for advantage on the global stage, harbors the potential for more conflicts, large and small.

Specifically, China has emerged as a great power seeking to influence the international system, whether by leveraging the economic allure of its Belt and Road Initiative or by militarily revising the status quo within its region. Russia does not have China’s economic muscle, but it, too, seeks to dominate its region, establish itself as an influential global player, and revise the international order. Whether Russia or China is yet on an economic or military par with the United States hardly matters. Both are strong enough to challenge the U.S.-led international order by leveraging the revisionist sentiment they share with countries throughout the global South.

Great-power competition can be a recipe for disorder. As Hanna Notte and Michael Kimmage recently observed in Foreign Affairs, great powers consumed with the need to variously vie and collude with one another are often too distracted to respond when “midsize powers, small powers, and even nonstate actors collide.” The result is that even if the great powers avoid war with one another, their actions can foment war elsewhere.

Multipolarity isn’t the only systemic change preceding the present wave of conflicts. But the others, including climate change and the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, seem to point back toward multipolarity, if not as a cause, as a factor in the ineffectuality of the global response, and therefore the spiral toward more conflict. Global problems require cooperative solutions, but cooperation can be in short supply when the great powers are motivated to compete and deny, rather than collaborate and share.

[Read: The world could be entering a new era of climate war]

Suppose, though, that the proliferation of wars doesn’t have a systemic cause, but an entirely particular one. That the world owes its present state of unrest directly to Russia—and, even more specifically, to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022 and its decision to continue fighting since.

The war in Ukraine, the largest war in Europe since World War II and one poised to continue well past 2024, is absorbing the attention of international actors who otherwise would have been well positioned to prevent any of the abovementioned crises from escalating. This case is not the same as the great-power distraction, in which the world’s most powerful states simply fail to focus on emerging crises. Rather, the great powers lack the diplomatic and military capacity to respond to conflicts beyond Ukraine—and other actors know it.

Consider the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan anticipated that Russia would be unable or unwilling to respond if it moved forces into the Nagorno-Karabakh region and reset the territorial status quo with Armenia. That gamble proved correct. Though Russia played a role in helping to end previous conflicts between the two countries, Moscow has not responded to Azerbaijan’s recent actions against its longtime ally Armenia. The strongest statement from Russia came from Vladimir Putin himself, who only quipped, “If Armenia itself recognized Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan, what do we have to do with it?”

Consider also the war in Gaza. With the major powers focusing their diplomatic and military resources on Ukraine, Hamas judged the international environment opportune for striking Israel. The deputy head of Hamas, Saleh al-Arouri, was explicit on this point back in April, telling Al Jazeera: “Sensing the importance of the current battle with Russia over global influence, the United States places a priority on preventing the outbreak of other conflicts and maintaining global calm and stability until the end of the Ukraine battle … Our responsibility is to take advantage of this opportunity and escalate our resistance in a real and dangerous way that threatens the calm and stability they want.”

These three explanations—coincidence, multipolarity, Russia’s war in Ukraine—are not mutually exclusive. If anything, they are interrelated, as wars are complex events; the decline of U.S. hegemony contributes to growing multipolarity; and great-power competition has surely fed Russia’s aggression and the West’s response. The consequence is that others are caught in the great-power cross fire or will seek to start fires of their own. Even if none of these wars rise to the level of a third world war, they will be devastating all the same. We do not need to be in a world war to be in a world at war.

Wars were already a persistent feature of the international system. But they were not widespread. War was always happening somewhere, in other words, but war was not happening everywhere. The above dynamics could change that tendency. The prevalence of war, not just its persistence, could now be our future.

A Nepalese historian once told me a story. On a plane to Kathmandu, he was sitting next to an American legal expert who had been called in to help design Nepal’s first-ever republican constitution. But after sparking a conversation about Nepal’s history and its diverse peoples, the historian was shocked at the expert’s lack of knowledge about the country. The American was quick to explain that this ignorance was deliberate, and that he had no desire to learn about Nepal. “You see, good constitutional law is good regardless of the context,” the expert said. “I make a point of not learning details about a country, because they are irrelevant to constitutional design.”

This case might be extreme, or perhaps embellished in the retelling, but something about it feels terribly familiar in regard to the Middle East. Americans debating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict often resort to simple categories and narratives, seeking to impose them without regard to context. One such narrative ignores the history of nationalism and the national right to self-determination. Israel, by this account, is uniquely evil because it is an ethno-nationalist state, and thus the only acceptable solution is for all the land between the (Jordan) river and the (Mediterranean) sea to be part of “one secular democratic state,” presumably without an ethno-national reference, similar to the United States.  

I’ll say at the outset that many reasonable debates can be had about the nature of both Israel as a Jewish state and any possible solution to its conflict with the Palestinians. Israelis, both Jewish and Arab, have long contested what exactly it means for a state to be Jewish, or for Israel to be “a state of all its citizens.” Many Israelis and Palestinians have made eloquent cases for various forms of a one-state solution, as is their prerogative.

My problem isn’t with raising these questions, but with having prepackaged answers to them based on facile categories. In a view common on the American left, ethno-nationalism is no different from racism, and for Israel to be a Jewish state is comparable to the United States wanting to be a white state. Many American proponents of the one-state solution use a similar logic. When he abandoned his long-held liberal Zionism in 2020, the journalist Peter Beinart claimed that he had embraced a vision of one state for all in the name of opposing “Jewish-Palestinian separation” and condoning “equality.” The strong implication is that a two-state solution would not bring genuine equality.

[Read: My message of peace to Israelis]

Many in this crowd take support for what liberal proponents of Israel have long called a “Jewish and democratic state” to be a demand for ethno-supremacy. A recent letter that calls for “Palestinian liberation,” signed by a number of eminent scholars, such as Étienne Balibar, Judith Butler, and Angela Davis, condemns Israel for having been “an ethno-supremacist state” since its foundation in 1948. By this logic, anyone who supports a two-state solution, which stipulates that a state of Israel exist alongside a state of Palestine, must be racist and ethno-supremacist. For this reason, even Representative Ilhan Omar, of Minnesota, was once attacked as defending “pure racism” due to her support for the two-state solution.

Progressives have many good reasons for treating nationalism with skepticism. But proponents of Palestine seem to miss the irony that, even as they disavow any idea of Jewish nationalism as verboten ethno-supremacy, they are asserting a rival form of nationalism—Palestinian nationalism, which comes with its own rich traditions and history. The Palestinian flag they wave at demonstrations isn’t a random symbol of liberal secular democracy but one based on pan-Arab national colors. In other words, it is very much an ethno-nationalist flag.

Does that mean the Palestinian flag is one of Arab supremacy? Of course not. Like other nationalisms, Palestinian nationalism can have many variants with different degrees of inclusivity. The Palestinian National Charter, written in the 1960s, called Palestine “an indivisible part of the Arab homeland,” entitled to all the land between the river and the sea, and asserted that the majority of Israeli Jews had no place in a liberated Palestine. The charter also asserted that Jews were not “one people with an independent personality” (in the 1964 version) or “a single nation with an identity of its own” (in the 1968 version). But many Palestinians have long contested this exclusionary version of nationalism. Palestinian thinkers and scholars, such as Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi, and Mahmoud Darwish, came to recognize the reality of Israeli nationhood. So did the leadership of the Palestinian national movement, which, in 1996, amended the charter to make recognition of the state of Israel possible.

Jewish nationalism, or Zionism, also has many variants. Under its right-wing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel has become more and more discriminatory toward its non-Jewish citizens, as evidenced by the 2018 passage of the Nation-State Law, which demoted the status of the Arabic language. Things got much worse last year, when Netanyahu invited outright anti-Arab and Jewish-supremacist fascists into his government. But many in Israeli society and politics, including many Zionists in the political class, heavily oppose this government and its discriminatory legislation. Millions of citizens fight for a more equal vision of Israel even as they defend its existence as a national state.

These values are reconcilable because the core idea of nationalism is not the supremacy of one ethnic group over the other, but the right of a nation to self-determination. The right to self-determination has long been central to progressive politics, among both liberals and socialists. The world of empires crumbled in the First World War, and in its aftermath, postwar leaders, including Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Lenin, championed this right (at least in rhetoric, if not always in practice), as did their ideological descendants. The world of empires was thus turned into a world of nations, with nationalism a cornerstone of the modern global order (it’s called the United Nations for a reason).

Of course, like all political movements, nationalism has its share of contradictions, not to mention a gory track record. The demographic and geographic boundaries of nations, and the status of minorities within them, have occasioned no end of contestation and conflict. Zionism, in fact, was born from this contestation, as Jews found themselves excluded from most forms of nationalism in the places where they lived. Additionally, as the political scientist Joseph Huddleston has argued, international law has long struggled to find a balance between the national right to self-determination and the right of states to their territorial integrity.  

National boundaries are everywhere soaked in blood. Ultranationalist governments have helped kill millions of people, in atrocities such as the Holocaust in the 20th century, and in campaigns of ethnic cleansing in both the last century and the present one. The creation of Israel was followed by a war that displaced an estimated 750,000 Palestinians; Arab states subsequently drove out hundreds of thousands of their own Jewish citizens. India and Pakistan were co-created in an orgy of violence that killed up to 2 million people. Millions of ethnic Turks, Greeks, Germans, Poles, Hungarians, and Russians were driven out of their ancestral lands.

Yet, terrible as nationalist history is, national identities can’t be reduced to exclusion and bloodshed. These identities have endured precisely because they have demonstrated the power to connect millions of people together into meaningful communities. The historian Benedict Anderson is known for his critical take on nationalism. But he also appreciated its integrative qualities and noted that “regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.”

Both Israelis and Palestinians have shown deep attachments not just to their shared homeland but to their own nations, in precisely this form of “horizontal comradeship.” Edward Said, who remained devoted to his Palestinian identity through long years of exile, is known today for advocating a one-state solution. What’s often missed is that he believed in a binational version of such a state that would recognize the national rights of both communities in Israel/Palestine: Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. He also acknowledged the necessity of starting with a two-state solution before such state unity could take place.

This strong sense of national belonging explains why the idea of sharing one united and democratic state usually doesn’t poll very well among either Israelis or Palestinians. Not a single political force in either Israel or Palestine supports it. This despite the fact that Israel’s intransigent and brutal occupation of Palestinian territories and its expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank have made many lose hope in the feasibility of a Palestinian state. Whenever such feasibility improves, so too might enthusiasm for a two-state solution, which even now enjoys a plurality of support in both communities in most polls.

The idea that Palestinians and Israelis can simply give up their respective national identities and merge into one peaceful democratic nation-state doesn’t seem to have much basis in history. Nations in the modern era have almost never decided to willingly dissolve themselves into a single state, and even confederations are quite rare, although laudable when they do happen.

[Read: When Britain and France almost merged into one country]

The hubris of outsiders in ignoring the national realities of Israel/Palestine resonates eerily with American attitudes of an earlier era. After 9/11, many liberals and neoconservatives seemed to bank on fantasy visions of the Middle East, thinking that the region could be forcibly rightsized to match such projections. Then as now, many didn’t take the Middle East and its actually existing nations seriously, even as they cheered on the disastrous invasion of Iraq.

Beinart was one such liberal. He realized his mistake, writing a few years later that he was wrong to be “willing to gamble,” because, as he wrote, “I wasn’t gambling with my own life.” Yet a similar attitude underlies his endorsement of turning Israel/Palestine into a federation like Belgium without following the lead of people who actually live there and have no lives to gamble with but their own. Last year, hundreds of thousands of Israelis came out to protest Netanyahu’s government, and Beinart dismissed them as offering merely “a polite brand of ethnonationalism.” They received a similarly cold shoulder from most of the American left. The attitude of Palestinian citizens of Israel could hardly be more different. Ayman Odeh, a popular left-wing member of the Knesset in Israel, greeted the demonstrators as “my future partners in creating a better life for this country.”

Today Odeh calls for a cease-fire in Gaza but remains clear-eyed about what will be necessary to secure a future of peace and coexistence: “The only way we can fulfill our responsibility to the nation of our youngest ones—and to ourselves—is to recognize the nation of Palestine and the nation of Israel, and to establish a state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel,” he wrote in The New York Times.

Neither Israelis nor Palestinians are going anywhere, and neither will give up their national identity. Those who truly want peace and justice in the Holy Land should start by recognizing this reality. Israel can and must be pushed to end the occupation of the Palestinian territories and stop the obstruction of Palestinian sovereignty. But neither it nor Palestine can be pushed to commit ethno-national suicide.

Mohammed al-Halbousi calls decision 'strange', implies it violates constitution and undermines national stability.

How do you decide who owns a country? At 10:30 this morning in London, a group of black-clad men were gathered about 100 meters from the Cenotaph, Britain’s most famous war memorial. They were chanting. “We want our country back,” went one refrain, followed by “You’re not English, you’re not English, you’re not English anymore.”

This group was—as another of their chants put it—“Tommy’s Army.” That refers to Tommy Robinson, the pseudonym of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a convicted mortgage fraudster who is the former head of a far-right, anti-Muslim group called the English Defence League. Robinson was here, somewhere, in person—and as of last week, he was back on X (formerly Twitter), five years after being “permanently suspended.” Violence and disorder follow him around, so London’s Metropolitan Police had drafted reinforcements from around Britain to deal with the situation. Walking down the Mall, a long, open road stretching from Trafalgar Square to Westminster, I saw police vans from Durham and Northumbria, in the north of England, and some officers wore caps reading HEDDLU, the Welsh word for police.

The police had penned Tommy’s Army into a narrow stretch of sidewalk, from which they were roaring and throwing the occasional bottle. Today is Armistice Day, which commemorates the end of World War I. Less than half an hour before Britain was due to observe two minutes of silence for its combat dead, I watched as the right-wing group charged the police line and broke through it, then seemed unsure what to do next.

“Are you from the media?” a woman asked me, as she followed the line of rebels. “Tell people that the police attacked us.”

“When did that happen?” I asked.

She looked at me again: “Are you from the mainstream media?”

“Yes.”

She gave me the thumbs-down gesture and walked away.

What was Tommy’s Army doing at the Mall? Robinson later tweeted that he and his band of “veterans and patriots” had paid their respects before leaving peacefully—apart from a “tiny scuffle.” As I watched, some of his followers waved Union Jacks and the cross of Saint George, but a disciplined force this was not. Beer cans lay discarded on the ground. One young man in a balaclava had a flag representing the West Ham soccer team, which as far as I know wasn’t a combatant in either of the two world wars. The stated intent of Tommy’s Army was to defend the Cenotaph from another event happening in central London—a pro-Palestine march running from Speakers’ Corner to the American embassy. But that march wouldn’t start until the afternoon, and its route would not take it past the Cenotaph.

After breaking through the police line, Tommy’s Army ended up farther away from the Cenotaph that its members were supposedly protecting. I stayed by the war memorial, and when a crowd observing Armistice Day fell quiet at 10:54 a.m., the sound of the hooligans’ distant chanting floated over the quiet at the memorial. Someone near me called out, in an East End accent: “Oi, shut the fuck up.” I briefly wondered if a fight would break out between the veterans surrounding me—many wearing their combat medals—and a group that claimed to revere Britain’s military but was hijacking its rituals to preach against immigration.

When Suella Braverman, the country’s Conservative home secretary, had warned about a “hate march” taking place this weekend, she wasn’t talking about the scene I’d just witnessed. She was referring instead to the protest against Israel’s action in Gaza. In an article for the London Times, she warned about a double standard being applied to protests, but her own silence on Robinson’s demonstration suggests she finds one side easier to condemn than the other. In reality, each of the protests that I saw today in London—the xenophobic one and the pro-Palestine one—contained some disturbing elements. Taken together, they showed how the conflict in Gaza is polarizing Britain and emboldening both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

Organized by a coalition of leftist and Muslim groups, the pro-Palestine march was only the latest in a series of events on the theme. In the weeks since the October 7 Hamas terror attack, and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, the old left-wing machinery set up to oppose Britain’s role in the 2003 invasion of Iraq has come back to life. Pro-Palestine activism is a mixture of general anti-imperialists, critics of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, peace activists, trade unionists, and a large contingent of university lecturers and students. It commands broad support among British Muslims, who make up 7 percent of the population. This alliance of minority Britons and left-wing academics is what makes pro-Palestine activism so triggering to Tommy’s Army—and to many mainstream right-wing opinion columnists, who believe white leftists have become useful idiots for Islamists who share none of their values.

Braverman has gone further than this, accusing the police of being too soft on pro-Palestine protesters. In her telling, the police—who have rounded up climate protesters and, last time I encountered them en masse, were dragging feminists away from a vigil commemorating a murdered woman—are too sympathetic to the left.

As it happened, at a press conference before the marches, the Metropolitan Police refused to even call Tommy’s Army the “far right,” instead sticking to the neutral term “counterprotesters.” They also declined to enforce a ban on face coverings in the area around the Cenotaph. But Braverman wanted more: Last week, in her Times article, she criticized the police for their reluctance to stop the Palestine “hate marchers,” as she described them, from gathering at all on Armistice Day. “I do not believe that these marches are merely a cry for help for Gaza,” she wrote. “They are an assertion of primacy by certain groups—particularly Islamists—of the kind we are more used to seeing in Northern Ireland.”

This was an extraordinary thing for a British home secretary to say, particularly a Conservative one. Most marches in Northern Ireland are led by pro-British unionists, who are the traditional allies of the Tory party, rather than Irish Republicans. Either Braverman did not understand that, or she was peddling misinformation, or she was changing the British government’s position on the legitimacy of unionist protests. (Her allies later claimed that she had meant to criticize Republican marches.) It then emerged that she had refused to tone down the article when the prime minister’s team asked her to do so before publication.

As I walked from the Cenotaph to Hyde Park, where the Gaza protest was starting, I began to see signs referencing the home secretary’s remarks. Suella, this is a love march, read one. We hate Cruella Suella, said another. At Hyde Park Corner, a woman in a headscarf was giving out neon-yellow vests with WE DON’T HATE JEWS printed across the back. It was simultaneously a sweet gesture and one that raised a lot of questions supposedly answered by the vest.

Because there is no getting around the fact that the pro-Palestine cause does sometimes shade into anti-Semitism. After the Hamas attacks on October 7, some leftists celebrated the atrocities, while others excused or minimized them as an understandable act of “resistance.” Many invoked the language of colonization to do so, or parsed the situation as a racial conflict between white Israelis and people of color in Gaza and the West Bank. (In fact, half of Jewish Israelis are of Middle Eastern or North African origin, and many descend from families expelled from Muslim countries.) The world stands with Palestine. The Imperialists stand with Israel, read one sign. A thief never becomes an owner, read another. No peace on stolen land, declared a third. Someone had even managed to squeeze all of this onto a 12-by-18-inch placard: You can’t convince yesterday’s colonizer that today’s colonizer is wrong.

Having just come from watching a group of white men shout about how their land was being colonized—by Muslims—this discourse struck me as intensely unhelpful. So, too, was the widespread use at this march of the chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Many British and American Jews, among others, hear this as an anti-Semitic demand to obliterate Israel, the world’s only Jewish state. In the United States, Representative Rashida Tlaib, who is Palestinian American, was censured for defending the slogan, while here in Britain a member of Parliament for the left-wing Labour Party was suspended for alluding to it.

[Juliette Kayyem: Rashida Tlaib’s inflammatory language]

At Hyde Park corner, I saw a stall run by the hard-left Socialist Worker newspaper, which had put the phrase on its cover. I asked one of the activists selling those papers how he understood those words. Harold, who only wanted to be identified by his first name, described himself as a nonpracticing Jew and told me that he did not find the slogan offensive. “It’s about one state,” he said. “Equal for Palestinians and Jews in one state. You won’t hear that mentioned in the mainstream media.” What about those Israelis who would say that the October 7 attacks show that they aren’t safe in a single state? “The answer is: Stop murdering the Palestinians.” Shireen, a Londoner out marching with friends, had a similar answer: For “everyone that I know that chants it—Palestinians, English, many Jewish friends—it literally means peace and justice for the Palestinians in that land.”

The sincere belief of many marchers is that Israel is a “terror state” conducting a “genocide” in Gaza. Posters with captions referring to murdered children were plastered on bus shelters, and the leaders of one bloc carried tiny bundles in white shrouds. The marchers want a cease-fire, and then a political solution. I asked one woman if she thought Hamas wanted that too. “I don’t care about Hamas,” she said.

I followed the march for two hours. People had brought their children, and most were happy to carry the ready-made signs that the far left supplies to any march like this. (The Socialist Worker had translated its slogans into Arabic for the occasion.) But although you could attribute the “river to the sea” chants to ignorance rather than malice, that wasn’t the only disturbing element. Spectators reported some hateful imagery, including a sign depicting a “puppet master” wearing a Star of David.

I caught up with a woman in a headscarf who carried a sign showing the faces of Hitler and Netanyahu, the latter thoughtfully labeled in case of confusion. What you’re doing is no different! it proclaimed. I asked her why she had brought the sign and she seemed confused: “It’s exactly the same. What they’re doing is the same.”

One of her friends turned to me and asked, “How is it different?”

“Well,” I said, “Hitler killed 6 million Jews.

“Are you on the march?” she replied.

“No, I’m reporting.”

The woman dragged her friend away, saying, “Don’t talk to journalists.”

Outside Embankment station on the way home, I ran into another police line—two groups of hooligans had started a fight in a bar and were now being kept apart. On the train back to South London, I watched clips of some Tommy’s Army types who had finally found some pro-Palestine protesters to fight on Vauxhall Bridge. Eighty-two people were arrested nearby “to prevent a breach of the peace,” according to the Metropolitan Police, and a few hours later, after the official Palestine march had ended, about 150 people in a breakaway group were also detained and searched for throwing fireworks and refusing to remove their face coverings.

Since October 7, Britain has felt feverish, the result of a conflict 3,500 miles away over which Britain has little influence. British Jews are understandably alarmed over the rise in anti-Semitic incidents since then—and the way that anti-Semitism has been dismissed by some of those who are normally on high alert for offense. The least that protesters could do to address this is abstain from chanting “From the river to the sea,” whatever they intend it to mean.

[Helen Lewis: The progressives who flunked the Hamas test]

Islamophobia has increased, too, as the far-right has latched on to the conflict to advance the argument that Muslims don’t belong in Britain. Even some commentators who write for the mainstream right-wing press have flirted with this idea; The Spectator’s Douglas Murray told the American podcaster Dave Rubin that Scotland’s First Minister Humza Yousaf, who is Muslim and whose in-laws were only recently able to leave Gaza, did not care about Scotland. Instead, according to Murray, Yousaf’s social-media posts revealed him to be the “first minister of Gaza,” and someone who had “infiltrated” British politics.

Amid this tinderbox, politicians have been found wanting. Braverman made the police’s task more difficult by prejudging their actions and accusing them of bias. She might now usefully reflect on the contrast between the tens of thousands of peaceful demonstrators in the pro-Palestine march and the ugly scenes at the Cenotaph caused by agitators who might have taken encouragement from her words.

After watching both protests, I realized something. Britain has been consumed by dueling symbols, in real life as well as in our social-media bios. Many of Tommy’s Army carried large banners decked with poppies, a symbol of World War I patriotism, while the red, black, and green of the Palestinian flag was everywhere in Hyde Park. Each symbol would have looked out of place at the other event. Some see the red poppy as a totem of enforced patriotism for an imperialist vision of Britain—one that gets involved in foreign conflicts—rather than a neutral way to remember the war dead. On the other side, the Palestinian flag has been wielded by actual anti-Semites—those who say “Zionist” when they mean “Jew”—and is taken to imply a callous disregard for the events of October 7.

These divides in understanding will be incredibly difficult to bridge while the extremists on each side feed off each other. Britain should be a country where the poppy and the Palestinian flag can coexist.

Rep. Seth Moulton says Israel is heading to a ‘Forever War’ by focusing on military solutions to political problems.