The post Escaping Ideology with Jonathan Church: Freethinker editor Daniel James Sharp in conversation appeared first on The Freethinker.

Pakistan embodies both modernity and pre-modernity, in that it is a nuclear power with a feudal social system. Throughout Pakistan’s history, feudalism has put political and economic power in the hands of large landowners (essentially feudal lords) and has prevented the rest of society from prospering educationally or economically. Some have argued that feudalism in Pakistan originated with British imperialists, but regardless of how it began, it has played a significant role in our politics and society for hundreds of years, right up to the present. As the analysts Jahanzaib Khan, Humaira Arif Dasti, and Abdul Rasheed Khan have put it, describing the situation since Pakistani independence was achieved in 1947:

The feudal lords, with massive amounts of mortgaged capital, invested massively in industry and the service sector. Pseudo-landlords became pseudo-capitalists. Similarly these feudal lords held high position[s] in [the] army and civil service…[and] almost all Pakistani politicians are feudal [lords]. Almost half of Pakistan’s Gross National Product and the bulk of its export earnings are derived primarily from the agricultural sector controlled by a few thousand feudal families. Armed with a monopoly of economic power, [the feudal lords] easily [took] political power. Thus there are very few efforts to uplift [the] poor…and society is divided into two groups; [the] have[s] and have not[s].

Essentially, feudalism deprives most members of society of their basic rights and keeps them silent in the face of injustice. Feudal lords act like dictators. They always wish to suppress the rights of the people, so that no one can speak against or challenge them.

Education and economic development would challenge feudalism, hence why both are opposed by the system. Education would lead to people challenging irrational social and cultural norms, while economic development would decrease the dependency of the peasants on the lords, inspiring them to decide their future without any fear or pressure.

The Pakistani political and bureaucratic system is largely manipulated by these feudal lords. They have been part of every political system since Pakistan’s founding in 1947 and have strong connections in law enforcement departments and the judiciary. They have effectively bribed the whole system.

Recently, in Sanghar, a local feudal lord cut off the leg of a camel. Why? Just because the innocent animal had entered his field. Such is the arbitrariness and cruelty of the landowners in Pakistan.

That incident reminded me of the time I witnessed the system in action. I remember that, in my village, Chirra Polad, in 2006, a local feudal lord, Seth Abdul Rahman, beat a 19-year-old boy in the middle of the crossroads because the boy had dared to not vote for Rahman’s favoured religious party.

Rahman and 15 men armed with sticks and guns stopped a bus in the middle of the street, entered it, and brutally dragged the boy out. They took him away to be tortured. My father tried to save the boy but was unable to do so.

When the police asked for evidence from the victim of violence, no one apart from my father was willing to testify. When he did so, Rahman threatened him with dire consequences.

Rahman proceeded to disconnect our electricity and support the usurpers of one of the canals on our land. Meanwhile, he threatened people, warning them to not have any economic dealings with us. I was a young boy at this time, but already I had experienced the dangers of standing up to my country’s feudal system.  

Later, in 2016, also in our village, another feudal lord, Malik Kalo Khan, kidnapped and tortured another young boy (Suleiman) who had offended against the system. Khan forced Suleiman’s family to pay large amounts of money and give their teenage daughter’s hand in marriage (to give an unwed girl to an aggrieved party is a Pakistani custom known as Vani—the word is derived from vanay, ‘blood’, as in ‘blood for blood’).

I raised my voice against this and Khan tried to bribe me with 50,000 rupees. I rejected the bribe and publicised the incident on Facebook. Though this helped to resolve the Vani issue, the family was still forced to pay Khan money—this was how the police tried to settle things down. But I was now more determined than ever to use my journalism to oppose this oppression whenever it reared its head.

In 2018, again in my village, a person named Inayat Ullah was accused of having illicit relations with the daughter of a relative of Haji Nawaz Seth, another influential feudal lord, and he was punished for it. According to Ullah, ‘the whole community came together and found me guilty and gave us this punishment.’

Ullah and his entire family, including the women, were made to walk barefoot through the streets of our village with a necklace of shoes on their necks and forced to ask for forgiveness. After hearing this story, I immediately wrote a news article in the Daily Times. Soon after, the police arrested all the people who had decided to punish us so cruelly. Again, though, the feudal lords got off lightly.  

The feudal lords had already long since decided that my father, Malik Nazar Isra, and I, who were the only people consistently opposing them, had to be taught a lesson. We were a nuisance to them, always raising our voices against their oppression and cruelty. Perhaps the lords thought that if our resistance wasn’t crushed, it could pave the way for others to challenge their power—the one thing they fear most.

For example, in December 2013, we heard the news that two houses in the village had been robbed. One of them was Haji Nawaz Seth’s, and many tolas of gold and silver had been stolen. The local feudal lords sent out a team of search dogs. My family got the blame, of course. Even today, the words of the feudal lord Malik Kalu telling the dog owners that ‘the thief is none other than Malik Ramzan Isra’s family’ still ring in my ears. The dogs ran around our house while Seth’s supporters chanted ‘Thief, Malik Ramzan Isra, thief!’.

My father and I were taken away by Seth’s men and kicked and beaten and I was pushed around the streets of the village before Seth handed us over to the police—who tortured us in the lord’s presence.

I was chained upside down and plunged into the cold water of the canal (it was winter). Despite our treatment, we refused to bow. We knew we were innocent. The torture continued until my father couldn’t take it any more and made a deal with Seth to pay seven tolas of gold and 40 tolas of silver.

The consequences were terrible. We were isolated: others in our village were forced to cut off relations with us. We were forced to take out a loan to pay Seth (we are still in debt today). My whole family suffered stress, and my father had a heart attack.

Despite all of this, I remain determined to call out injustice. I have survived various attacks from people who feel threatened by my journalism. For example, I covered the Sharifa Bibi case of October 2017, calling out the men who assaulted this teenage girl and forced her to parade around her village naked.

The stories above are just a few of the thousands of stories that could be told about the barbarism imposed upon Pakistanis every day. They are perfect examples of Pakistan’s rotten feudal system, in which landowners, buttressed by the system, use their power to intimidate and control ordinary people.

Pakistan will never be free until the feudal system is broken. Perhaps by telling these stories and making more people aware of the problem, that day of reckoning will come sooner rather than later.

Related reading

How the persecution of Ahmadis undermines democracy in Pakistan, by Ayaz Brohi

From the streets to social change: examining the evolution of Pakistan’s Aurat March, by Tehreem Azeem

Surviving Ramadan: An ex-Muslim’s journey in Pakistan’s religious landscape, by Azad

Coerced faith: the battle against forced conversions in Pakistan’s Dalit community, by Shaukat Korai

Breaking the silence: Pakistani ex-Muslims find a voice on social media, by Tehreem Azeem

The power of outrage, by Tehreem Azeem

Religion and the decline of freethought in South Asia, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

The post The evils of feudalism in Pakistan: a personal and political narrative appeared first on The Freethinker.

Myth? Legend? Folklore? History? Fiction? This is The Story of Russia, as the title of Orlando Figes’s 2022 book puts it.

Every nation, every country, and, indeed, every empire has a founding myth: some event or figure that is meant to embody the values and origins of the state and unify the people with an overarching narrative of where they came from and where they are going. Figes shows, however, that Russia is a peculiar exception to this norm. For many reasons, when it comes to Russia’s history and origins, there is no true consensus or understanding. Rather, Russia’s history and origins are so deeply intertwined with myths, narratives, legends, politics, folklore, and religion that you must first be willing to dive deeply into all these intricate components and then sift through them to discover even a morsel of truth.

As Figes demonstrates in his work, despotism is one constant truth of Russia over 800 years, from the authoritarianism of Kievan Rus’ (the progenitor of modern Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus) to Putinism. The systems and titles may have changed several times, but the brutal and violent methods of securing and maintaining centralised power in Russia have remained largely unaltered—because, circularly, the belief that Russia can only be ruled by brutality and violence has remained largely unaltered as well.

Russian industrialisation did not even begin until the late 19^th century, partially because of Russia’s reliance on serf labour. Because serfs had no social or economic mobility, and even their physical mobility was restricted to the confines of their village, there was no space for innovators, investors, and entrepreneurs who could revolutionise the system. The natural emergence of capitalism, inextricably connected to industrialisation (like an axle to a wheel), was impossible for a long time in Russia. In Russia, unlike the rest of Europe, the state, in the form of the Tsar, was the sole financier of industrialisation.

During the first half of the 18^th century, the skill of history writing was still emerging in Russia. A German scholar named Gerhard Friedrich Müller outraged the Russian academics at the newly established St Petersburg Academy of Sciences by daring to conclude, based on his research of the Primary Chronicle, that Russia’s origins could be traced back to the Vikings. To say that Scandinavians created Russia was not something to be lightly asserted at a time when Russia had just emerged from victory in one of its many wars with Sweden!

Müller was accused by Mikhail Lomonosov, his rival in the academy, of degrading the Slavs by presenting them as savages who couldn’t organise their state without outside help. The Russians, according to Lomonosov, were not Vikings, but Baltic Slavs, descendants of the Iranian Roxolani people, whose history dates back into the mists of antiquity.

Another fascinating aspect of Russian history that Figes delves into is the notion of Moscow as the ‘Third Rome’, the bearer of the Orthodox Christian flame after the fall of the ‘Second Rome’, Byzantium. This succession—or natural inheritance, as it is viewed by many Russians—means that Russia has a God-given mission in the world, a view that derives in part from the medieval theology it inherited from the Byzantines. The idea that the West is in a state of degeneration and collapse and that Russia is a superior civilisation thanks to its unbending devotion to Orthodoxy is an idea that has recurred again and again in Russian history. Holy Russia, in short, is the true source of humanity’s salvation. This view of Russia as saviour fundamentally influenced both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. The sacralisation of power was deeply linked to this because it portrayed the Tsar (or the Party) as the direct manifestation of God’s will on Earth (or the embodiment of the dialectic of history).

This messianic streak is still apparent. Putin’s ongoing war with Ukraine can be understood through this framework: divine right places Putin above human laws, human rights, and earthly realities, and Ukraine, due to its exposure to the degenerate societies of the West, is in need of cleansing by holy war.

Figes skilfully examines the reasons behind Russia’s failure to establish a democratic government over the centuries (contrast with Ukraine) by compellingly illustrating how democratic reforms were consistently hindered by pivotal historical events. These events include the impact of the French Revolution during Catherine the Great’s reign, Napoleon’s invasion of Russia during Alexander I’s rule, the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 (which halted his transformative reforms), the suppression of democratic ideals by the Bolsheviks after the 1917 revolution, and the perpetuation of autocratic tendencies following the fall of the Soviet Union. While Western thinkers have debated, discussed, and theorised about the abstract notions of the state and the people, the role of religion, and the role and structure of the state for hundreds of years, there has been no similar wide-ranging, long-term enquiry in Russia.

Yet another fascinating and critical topic explored in The Story of Russia is Russia’s eastward expansion. As Figes notes, between 1500 and 1917, the territories controlled by the Russian state grew, on average, by a staggering 1,300 square kilometres per day. This expansion, of course, was not merely of land; it also included expansion of control over the indigenous populations the Russians encountered. Russian expansion was, in essence, Russian colonialism. However, unlike in many Western countries, Russia has not reflected on or reckoned with its colonial past. Russian expansion is viewed as a kind of ‘self-discovery’—or, as Figes describes it, as the story of a country colonising itself.

It is certainly not shocking that no such reckoning has occurred or even begun in Russia given that the official narrative on all matters Russian has been crafted by authoritarian regimes, from the Tsars and the Soviets to Putin. But where, then, is the international community? Where are the protests against the bloody past, so common in the West? Where is the holding to account for the cultural genocide, forced assimilation, brutal treatment, and forced imprisonment of indigenous peoples in and along the eastern portion of Eurasia?

Perhaps the only apt comparison is that of the plight of the Uyghur Muslims, a Turkic-speaking ethnic group who live in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, China. Over one million Uyghur Muslims have been imprisoned by the Chinese government since 2017, and those not imprisoned are subjected to intense surveillance, religious restrictions, forced labour, and forced sterilisation. The outcry, protests, and condemnation from the international community on this issue have also been lacking, albeit not totally absent. Similarly, but to a worse extent, the silence on the ongoing plight of the indigenous peoples of Russia is stunning.

Figes’s assessment of the Putin regime’s endorsement of the doctrine called the ‘Russian World’ is particularly valuable. According to this doctrine, Russia is a civilisation characterised by its spiritual values, in contrast to what is perceived as the liberalism and materialism of the West. The ‘Russian World’ includes not merely Russia, but also Ukraine and Belarus, a view supported by Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, who believes that all Orthodox believers, whether in Russia, Ukraine, or Belarus, have a common origin and deep connection stemming from the coming of Christianity to Kievan Rus’ in 988. Kirill’s shocking inability to denounce Russia’s war on—not to mention his declaration of holy war against—Ukraine is a direct consequence of this view of history.

Among the many important themes discussed by Figes, one stands out to me as a necessary reminder of the malign uses to which prejudiced historical narratives can be put. That is, in true Orwellian fashion, control over how the past is understood grants control over the present and the future. The current unnecessary and unprovoked war with Ukraine is the result of Russia being detached from its history and at the mercy of an ever-changing narrative that benefits the ruling class and buttresses that class’s hold on power. This war is not just a crime against Ukraine, but also one against the best of Russia, whose literature and art have enriched Europe for centuries, and the people of Russia, whose desire for liberty has, tragically, never been fully realised. This war, in all its aspects, will only continue until and unless Russia is free to understand its own history—and learn from it.

Related reading

A view from Kyiv: Ordinary life during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, interview by Emma Park

Can the ‘New Theists’ save the West? by Matt Johnson

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp

What has Christianity to do with Western values? by Nick Cohen

Two types of ‘assimilation’: the US and China, by Grayson Slover

The post Russian history, Russian myths: review of ‘The Story of Russia’ by Orlando Figes appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

In October 2023, a rather bizarre piece of news from Pakistan made the national and international news: a professor was forced by the clerics to apologise for teaching the theory of evolution and demanding basic human freedoms for women. Professor Sher Ali lives in Bannu, a Pashtun-majority conservative city in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan; many of its nearby villages are under Taliban control. Wanting to know more about this man standing up to the darkness in such a remote corner, I interviewed Sher Ali at the academy where he gives tuition to intermediate-level students. He is a well-read and humble person and provided much insight during our interview, a translated and edited transcript of which is below. I hope that the example of this brave and good man inspires others in Pakistan to embrace enlightenment over dogma.

Interview

Ehtesham Hassan: Please tell us about yourself. Who is Professor Sher Ali?

Sher Ali: I come from a small village in the area of Domel near the mountains. It borders the Waziristan District, not far from the Afghanistan border. My village is a very remote area and lacks basic facilities even today. In my childhood, we travelled for kilometres and used animals to bring clean drinking water to the village.

I started my educational journey in a school in a hut. In those days there was no electricity available so we would use kerosene oil lanterns to study at night. Luckily two of my uncles ran their schools in the village so I studied there. Both of them were very honest and hardworking. My elder brother would give us home tuition. After primary education, we had to go to a nearby village for further schooling. We would walk daily for kilometres to get to the school. We are four brothers and all of us are night-blind so we were not able to see the blackboard in the school. We would only rely on the teacher’s voice to learn our lessons and we had to write every word we heard from the teacher to make sense of the lessons. This helped sharpen our memories.

My grandfather was a religious cleric and he wanted me to be one also and I was admitted to a madrasa for this purpose. Life in the madrasa was really bad. I had to go door to door in the neighbourhood to collect alms for dinner. Another very disturbing issue was sexual abuse. Many of my classmates were victims of sexual abuse by our teacher. This was very traumatic to witness, so I refused to go to the seminary again.

After completing high school, I came to the city of Bannu for my intermediate and bachelor’s degree at Government Degree College Bannu. For my master’s in zoology, I went to Peshawar University and I later did my MPhil in the same subject from Quaid e Azam University, Islamabad. In 2009 I secured a permanent job as a zoology lecturer and was posted in Mir Ali, Waziristan, where I taught for almost 13 years.

Can you please share your journey of enlightenment?

I come from a very religious society and family. I was extremely religious in my childhood. I would recite the Holy Quran for hours without understanding a word of it. I had memorised all the Muslim prayers and was more capable in this than the other kids. This gave me a good social standing among them.

When I started studying at the University of Peshawar, I visited the library regularly and started looking to read new books. I found a book about Abraham Lincoln which was very inspiring. Later, I read books on psychology and philosophy which gave me new perspectives. But even after reading such books, I was extremely religious. One thing I want to mention is that after the September 11 attacks in the US, I was even willing to go to Afghanistan for Jihad against the infidels.

During my studies in Islamabad, I met Dr Akif Khan. He used to discuss various ideas with me and he introduced me to new books and authors. He also added me to many freethinker groups on Facebook. In these groups, I met many Pakistani liberal and progressive thinkers and I regularly read their posts on the situation of our country. This had a substantial impact on my thinking. I started hating religious extremism and I even stopped practicing religion. This change enabled me to see that the Pakistani military establishment and clergy were responsible for the bad situation in my region.

In those days, I also read On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, which helped me deeply understand the idea of evolution and natural selection as opposed to creationism. I became tolerant and I started believing in pluralism. I began to realise that tolerance for opposing views is very important for the intellectual nourishment of any society. I changed my views from being based on religion to those based on scientific evidence. Any idea not backed by scientific evidence lost its charm for me.

What were the hurdles and obstacles you faced when you started preaching a rationalist worldview?

In 2014 I started a tuition academy where I was teaching the subject of biology to intermediate-level students. My way of teaching is very simple and interesting. I try to break down complex ideas and try to teach the students in their mother tongue, which is Pashto. Gradually my impact increased as more and more students started enrolling in my class. Students were amazed by the simplicity of scientific knowledge and they started asking questions from their families about human origins and the contradictions between religious views and the facts established by evolutionary science.

This started an uproar and I started receiving threatening letters from the Taliban. On the fateful day of 19 May 2022, I was travelling back from my college in Mir Ali to my home in Bannu when a bomb that was fit under my car went off. It was a terrible incident. I lost my left leg and was in trauma care for months. But finally, after six months, I recovered enough to start teaching again. I wanted to continue my mission because education is the best way to fight the darkness.

Could you tell us about the controversy over your teaching last year?

In September 2023, local mullahs and Taliban in Domel Bazar announced that women would not be allowed to come out in the markets and the public square. This was a shocking development. I was worried about the future of my village and surrounding areas if such things kept happening.

I, along with some like-minded friends and students, decided to conduct a seminar about the importance of women’s empowerment. In that seminar, I made a speech and criticised the decision to ban women from the public square I also criticised the concept of the burqa and how it hides women’s identity. I talked about the freedom of women in other Islamic countries like Turkey and Egypt. I clearly stated that banning any individual from the right of movement is a violation of fundamental rights enshrined in the constitution of Pakistan.

This speech sent shockwaves through Taliban and mullahs alike. Local mullahs started a hate/smear campaign against me. They started naming me in all their sermons and a coordinated social boycott campaign was launched against me. My father is 90 years old and he was really worried. My elder brother and my family were also being pressured. It was a very tough time for me. I feared for my family’s safety.

Ten days later, the local administration and police contacted me about this issue. They wanted to resolve the issue peacefully, so I cooperated with them and in the presence of a District Police Officer and more than 20 mullahs, I signed a peace agreement saying that I apologised if any of my words had hurt anyone’s sentiments. The mullahs then agreed to stop the hate campaign against me. But later that night, around midnight, I received a call from the Deputy Commissioner telling me that the mullahs had gone back on the agreement and were trying to legally tangle me using Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws.

I was advised to leave the city immediately, but I refused to leave my residence. The district administration then provided me with security personnel to guard me. During this period, I met many religious leaders who I thought were moderate and many promised to stand with me. A week later, I received a call from the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency, telling me that a major wanted to meet me.

Since I was vocally opposed to the military establishment on social media, I feared that they might abduct me, but I still went to the cantonment to meet the intelligence officials. They talked about the situation and how to resolve it. The ISI asked the mullahs to stop the campaign against me. I had to apologise again in the Deputy Commissioner’s office in the presence of the mullahs to save my and my family’s lives and the photo of the event went viral on the internet.

After that incident, I changed my approach. Now, I don’t want to attract any attention for some time and I am waiting for the dust to settle. Currently, I see many horrible things happening in my city, but I can’t speak a word about them.

Please share your thoughts about rationalist activism in Pakistan.

A long time ago I made a Facebook post in which I called Pakistani liberal intellectuals ‘touch me not intellectuals’. They block anyone who even slightly disagrees with them. On the other hand, I have added all the religious people from my village on Facebook so that I can present them with an alternative. I sit with the youth of my village. I talk to them. In their language, I give them examples of the problems with religious ideas and military establishments. I support people in different ways. I give free tuition to poor kids and those from religious seminaries. I give small loans to poor people. I let people use my car in emergencies.

In these ways, I am deeply embedded in this society. Many people love me and stand for me and therefore acceptance of my ideas has increased over time. Most young people in my village are now supporters of women’s education and they do not get lured by the bait of Islamic Jihad.

This change, to me, is huge. Don’t alienate and hate people. Own them. Hug them and in simple language, by giving examples from daily life, tell them the truth. People are not stupid. Education and the internet are changing things.

Some people have compared what happened to you with what happened to Galileo. What are your thoughts on that comparison?

There are many similarities. One is the battle between dogma and reason, between religion and scientific evidence. One group believed in the freedom of expression and the other believed in stifling freedom of expression. In both cases, the rationalist had to face a large number of religious people alone. Galileo’s heliocentrism wasn’t a new thing at that time. He developed it by studying previous scientific thinkers. What I teach about evolution isn’t a new thing either. I just studied scientific history and now I am telling it to new generations.

However, there are many differences between the situations. Galileo was a scientist for all practical purposes. He invented the telescope, too, while I am an ordinary science teacher. Galileo’s case was purely scientific but mine is social and scientific. I spoke about women’s empowerment. The last main difference is that many hundred of years ago, the Church had little access to the world of knowledge, while today’s mullahs have access to the internet, so ignorance is not an excuse for them.

Related reading

How the persecution of Ahmadis undermines democracy in Pakistan, by Ayaz Brohi

From the streets to social change: examining the evolution of Pakistan’s Aurat March, by Tehreem Azeem

Surviving Ramadan: An ex-Muslim’s journey in Pakistan’s religious landscape, by Azad

Coerced faith: the battle against forced conversions in Pakistan’s Dalit community, by Shaukat Korai

Breaking the silence: Pakistani ex-Muslims find a voice on social media, by Tehreem Azeem

The power of outrage, by Tehreem Azeem

The post The Galileo of Pakistan? Interview with Professor Sher Ali appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

Jared Huffman is the Democratic representative for California’s 2nd congressional district and the only open non-believer in the US Congress. He is also at the forefront of the fight against Christian nationalism in America. He helped found the Congressional Freethought Caucus and the Stop Project 2025 Task Force. Andrew L. Seidel, constitutional attorney and author of The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American and American Crusade: How the Supreme Court is Weaponizing Religious Freedom (and Freethinker contributor) had this to say about Huffman:

Rep. Jared Huffman is unafraid to publicly declare his belief in church-state separation and his lack of religion. That fearlessness is something we rarely see in American politicians, and it gives me hope for our future. There is no more stalwart defender of the separation of church and state than Rep. Huffman.

I recently spoke with Huffman over Zoom about his career and his opposition to the theocratic agenda of a future Donald Trump administration. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Interview

Daniel James Sharp: You are the only open non-believer in Congress. Could you tell us about that, and your personal background regarding religion?

Representative Jared Huffman: I had no intention of being known as the only open non-believer in Congress when I got elected back in 2012. I have been without religion for most of my adult life and in recent years came to sort of loosely identify as a humanist. But that was something I largely kept to myself. I had never been asked about it in politics. I’d spent twelve years in local government and six years in the California State Assembly and I could not imagine that it would ever come to be something I was known for in Congress.

But what I learned pretty early on is that there are all of these publications that want to know about the religious identification of people when they get to Congress. The Pew Research Center does this ongoing study about religiosity in Congress and there are all of these Capitol Hill publications that do surveys and ask you to choose your religious label. For the first few years, I essentially declined to answer those questions. I thought it was none of anyone’s business.

That changed when Donald Trump won the 2016 election and brought into government a growing number of strident Christian nationalists and an agenda that troubled me quite a bit and which I saw as deeply theocratic. I decided that this was something I needed to push back on.

However, it was hard to do that when I was keeping a little secret about my own religious identity, so I came out publicly as a humanist, making me the only member out of 535 in the House of Representatives and the Senate who openly acknowledges not having a God belief.

Do you think there are many other nonbelievers in Congress?

I know there are many more, but I’m the only one dumb enough to say it publicly!

Has coming out affected you politically?

I think that’s been an interesting part of the story. Conventional wisdom holds that you should never do that. And even in some of our more recent polls, atheists tend to rank lower than just about every other category in terms of the type of person Americans would vote for. So there was a lot of nervousness among my staff and from a lot of my friends and supporters when I came out in the fall of 2017.

But the backlash never came, and, if anything, I think my constituents appreciated me just being honest about what my moral framework was. I think they see an awful lot of hypocrisy in politics, a lot of fakers and people pretending to be religious, including Donald Trump, and I found that being honest about these things is actually pretty beneficial politically, and it also just feels more authentic, personally speaking.

Since Trump was elected in 2016, you have become very involved in resisting theocratic tendencies in government. You helped to found the Congressional Freethought Caucus in 2018, for example. Could you tell us how that came about?

Yes, that came next, after the Washington Post wrote a story about me coming out as a humanist. I think it was the next day after that piece was published that my colleague, Jamie Raskin, came to me on the House floor and said, ‘Hey, I think that’s great what you did, and I share the same concerns you have about the encroachment of religion into our government and our policies, we should think about some sort of a coalition to work on these secular issues.’ Conversations like that led pretty quickly to the creation of this new Congressional Freethought Caucus that we launched a few months later.

And what does the caucus do?

We support public policy based on facts and reason and science. We fiercely defend the separation of Church and State. We defend the rights of religious minorities, including the non-religious, against discrimination and stigmatization in the United States and worldwide. And we try to provide a safe place for members of Congress who want to openly discuss these matters of religious freedom without the constraints our political system has traditionally imposed.

It seems important to note that the caucus is formed of people from all different religious backgrounds. It’s not an atheist caucus.

Yes, it’s a mix, and it’s a mix that looks like the American people, which is different from Congress itself as a whole. The American people are getting less religious all the time and they are getting more religiously diverse, but Congress is stuck in a religious profile from the 1950s.

Do you think these changing demographics are part of the reason why there is this renewed Christian nationalist push?

I do. Religious fundamentalists correctly sense that their power and privilege are waning and that has caused them to become more desperate and extreme in their politics.

What is Project 2025?

Project 2025 is an extreme takeover plan for a second Trump presidency to quickly strip away many of the checks and balances in our democracy to amass unprecedented presidential power and use it to impose an extreme social order. It’s a plan to take total control over not just our government but also many of our individual freedoms. And the Christian nationalist agenda is at the heart of it.

Do you believe Trump’s statements distancing himself from Project 2025?

No, they are deeply unbelievable and implausible. Trump is inextricably intertwined with Project 2025 and until very recently both Trump’s inner circle and the Heritage Foundation, who published the plan, were openly boasting about the closeness of that connection. As Americans have come to learn more about Project 2025 and what it would do to their lives, it has become politically toxic to be associated with it, and that’s why you see these sudden attempts by Trump and his team to distance themselves from it.

How did people become more aware of it? It flew under the radar for quite a while.

Indeed, it flew under the radar for over a year. But our Freethought Caucus and others in Congress founded the Stop Project 2025 Task Force two months ago and, thanks to our efforts and the efforts of many others in the media and outside advocacy groups, more people have come to know about Project 2025 and the threat it poses to our democracy. Project 2025 went from being an obscure thing very few had heard about to, just a couple of weeks ago, surpassing Taylor Swift as the most talked about thing on the internet.

Quite an achievement! So, how exactly do you stop Project 2025?

It starts by understanding it, by reading the 920-page document that they arrogantly published and proclaimed as their presidential transition plan. That document lays out in great detail exactly what they intend to do. Our task force has been doing a deep dive into that, working with several dozen outside groups and leading experts to understand what some of these seemingly innocuous things they’re proposing actually mean in real life.

They hide beyond technical terms like ‘Schedule F civil service reform’ and we have been able to understand and help spotlight that what that really means is a mass purge of the entire federal workforce, rooting out anyone who has ever shown sympathy for Democratic politics, anyone who has ever been part of a diversity, equity, and inclusion programme, anyone who has worked on climate science—or anyone else who has offended the sensibilities of MAGA Republican extremists. They want to reclassify these employees and summarily fire them. This would affect well over 50,000 people throughout the federal workforce.

And then, as creepy as that already is, these people would be replaced by a cadre of trained and vetted Trump loyalists who are already maintained in a database housed by the Heritage Foundation. Essentially, they plan to repopulate the federal workforce with their own political operatives. This is not self-evident when you read the technical stuff in Project 2025, but that is exactly what their plan entails.

Can you give another example of their plans?

Yes. There are several ways in which they plan to impose their rigid social order. One of these is to dust off old morality codes from the 1870s using a dormant piece of legislation called the Comstock Act. The Comstock Act criminalises things that can be seen as obscene or profane and one of the things it criminalised back in the 1870s was anything that could terminate a pregnancy. Using this dormant legislation, which many believe is unconstitutional, Project 2025 are proposing what would amount to a nationwide ban on abortion, strict nationwide restrictions on contraception, and the criminalisation of in vitro fertilisation—very extreme and dystopic things.

It seems that the best way to stop Project 2025 is to stop Trump from being elected in November.

That’s the best way. That’s the most definitive way. But even if we beat Trump in this election, now that we have seen the Project 2025 playbook, we are going to have to build some policy firewalls against their plans in the future. The threat won’t go away. We need to build our defences against this kind of extreme takeover of government. But that is going to be much harder to do if Donald Trump is in the White House and his sworn loyalists are populating the entire federal workforce and they have broken down all of the checks and balances that stopped Trump’s worst impulses in his first presidency.

In essence, that’s what Project 2025 is: a plan to remove the obstacles that prevented Trump from doing many of the things he wanted to do or tried to do the first time around and to allow him to go even further.

Do you have a ‘doomsday scenario’ plan in the event of a Trump victory?

Yes, but it’s less than ideal. It relies on a lot of legal challenges in a legal system that has been well-populated by Trump loyalists. It relies on mobilising public opinion in a system where democracy and the democratic levers of power will not mean as much, because, frankly, Project 2025 is about accelerating the demise of a functioning democracy. Of course, there is no scenario under which we would just let all of this bad stuff happen without putting up a fight, but the tools that we would have to stop Project 2025 would be much less reliable if Trump wins.

How would the implementation of Project 2025 affect the rest of the world? What would be the consequences for America’s friends and allies?

I think that’s an important question for your readers. There’s no doubt that Project 2025 is hostile to the rules-based international order and our alliances that have kept Europe mostly free of war for the past half a century and more. It is hostile to globalism, as they refer to it, meaning free trade and the kind of trade relationships that we have with the European Union and many others around the world. It is hostile to confronting the climate crisis and even to acknowledging climate science. All of these are things that I’m sure folks in Scotland and the UK and throughout Europe would be deeply concerned by.

And there’s no doubt that Project 2025 is fundamentally sympathetic to strongman authoritarian regimes. In fact, it was inspired by Viktor Orbán in Hungary. The folks at the Heritage Foundation took a little trip to Hungary to learn about how Orbán had advanced all of these conservative, nationalist, authoritarian policies. Orbán has influenced the American right wing in a big way. He’s a bit of a rock star in Donald Trump’s world.

And so is Vladimir Putin, to an extent.

Indeed.

What are the chances of beating Trump in the election, now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic candidate?

A heck of a lot better than they were two or three weeks ago. My hope is that America is about to do what France did very recently. The French stared into the abyss of a right-wing authoritarian government and they realised what a scary and terrible prospect that was. In a matter of weeks, they united around a broad alliance to keep the far right out of power, and they succeeded. I think we are seeing a similar realisation and pivot from the American people. At least, I hope that is what’s happening. It certainly feels that way to me.

Looking in from the outside as an admirer of America, one thing I would like to see more of from the Democrats in particular is the patriotic case for secularism. The Christian nationalists and their ilk have claimed the mantle of patriotism, but their ideals are very far from the ideals America was founded on.

I think that’s a great point. And I know that you have worked with Andrew L. Seidel and others who are doing heroic work to recapture secular thought as part of what it means to be a patriotic American. I’m certainly all in for that. But the truth is that, though we did an incredible thing by separating Church and State in our Constitution, we have never done a great job of upholding that ideal. We have allowed Christian privilege and Christian power to influence our government for a long, long time, and in some ways what we’re struggling with now is a reckoning between the written law and the desperate attempts of Christian nationalists to hang on to their power and the founding premise of separating Church and State.

I suppose in some ways that’s the story of America. The battle between competing visions of America and trying to live up to those founding ideals.

Yes, that’s true. And the other thing that’s going on, I think, is that Christianity itself is in many respects changing around the world. I’ve spoken to secularists in Europe, in Scotland, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, and it does seem that there is a strain of fundamentalist Christianity that has become more pronounced in recent years, a strain that is hyper-masculine, focused on power, and militaristic. The old ‘love thy neighbour’ Christianity is falling out of favour. People are fleeing traditional Christian denominations and identifying with these extreme, fundamentalist versions of Christianity. And they even mock what they see as soft Christianity. There’s a violence to these strains, which we saw with the January 6th insurrection in a big way.

So there is a lot happening, and it is more than just a fight between secularists and religionists. It’s also an internal struggle within Christianity itself over some pretty core values.

Going back to your point about the influence of Orbán, it seems to me that it also works the other way around. You have American fundamentalists pouring money into right-wing groups in Europe and funding fanatics in Israel and Uganda. So what can people outside of the US do to help in the fight against American fundamentalism?

It’s hard to compete with the mountains of dark money spread around the world by billionaire Christian nationalists, but we’re not powerless. The good news is that most people don’t really want to live in an authoritarian theocracy. I think lifting up education and science and civil society around the world is essential, as is promoting the idea of keeping religion out of government, of letting people make their own private religious choices without being able to impose their morality codes on everyone else. It’s a huge challenge, but I welcome the influence of secularists in Europe and elsewhere to try to counterbalance this wrong-headed phenomenon that, unfortunately, is emanating from my country.

That seems like a good place to finish. Good luck in the fight, and in November.

I appreciate that very much. I hope to talk to you again after we have saved our democracy.

Related reading

Donald Trump, political violence, and the future of America, by Daniel James Sharp

Donald Trump is an existential threat to American democracy, by Jonathan Church

Can the ‘New Theists’ save the West? by Matt Johnson

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp

A reading list against the ‘New Theism’ (and an offer to debate), by Daniel James Sharp

The post ‘Project 2025 is about accelerating the demise of a functioning democracy’: interview with US Representative Jared Huffman appeared first on The Freethinker.

Related reading

Donald Trump, political violence, and the future of America, by Daniel James Sharp

Donald Trump is an existential threat to American democracy, by Jonathan Church

The post Image of the week appeared first on The Freethinker.

This article was originally published on the NSS’s website on 23 July 2024.

It’s easy to see how the idea of being saved by an act of ‘divine intervention’ might well appeal to a narcissist like Donald Trump. But his claim that he had ‘God on his side’ during the recent failed assassination attempt is more likely to be the sentiment of a grifter exploiting religion for political gain.

But sincere belief in the supernatural isn’t necessary for Trump and his cronies to dismantle America’s wall of separation between church and state. His nomination of conservative justices to the Supreme Court during his previous term of office paved the way for the overturning of Roe v Wade—a significant win for evangelicals. With a return to the White House looking distinctly possible, more laws to enforce the doctrines of his Christian support base could be on the cards.

The rise of Christian nationalism in the US is another indicator of a backsliding of secular liberal democratic values, the foundation upon which many successful modern societies are built.

Right across the world, wherever religion and political power are entwined, the chips are down for liberalism. Whether it’s Protestant evangelicalism in the US, Hindu nationalism in India, or Islamism in the Middle East, the closer clerics are to governance, the lower the likelihood that individual rights and freedoms can flourish.

Europe, too, is facing testing times.

American Christian Right organisations are pouring millions of dollars into the continent to fuel campaigns aimed at diminishing the rights of women and sexual minorities. Christian identity politics has become intertwined with nationalist ideologies, shaping the political landscape and contributing to the growth of far-right movements across the continent.

Meanwhile, mass migration and a failure to integrate sizeable Muslim populations have contributed to the undermining and challenging of fundamental liberal values like free speech, equality, and state neutrality.

One of secularism’s most important roles in protecting liberal values is in preserving freedom of expression—making sure that individuals are free to voice their ideas, beliefs, criticisms, and scorn of religious ideas without the threat of censorship or punishment.

Here in the UK, an incident at a Batley school starkly illustrated the erosion of this freedom. A teacher who used a cartoon of Muhammad to teach pupils about debates on free expression faced immediate and credible death threats and now must live under a new identity.

The writing has been on the wall ever since the Rushdie affair. But a spate of violent protests and murders across Europe since has sent the clear message to European citizens that, even if blasphemy laws have been abolished (and not all have been), they remain in place for Islam, and will be enforced by intimidation and violence.

Meanwhile, growing numbers of women and young girls on the continent are compelled to obey sexist religious modesty codes and thousands of children from minority backgrounds are attending illegal schools run by religious extremists.

Meaningful debates on these matters have become increasingly challenging due to the pervasive influence of ‘Islamophobia’, a term once noted by Christopher Hitchens as strategically employed to insinuate a ‘foul prejudice lurks behind any misgivings about Islam’s infallible message’. The language of Islamophobia has fostered a fear of being labelled ‘racist’ or bigoted, causing many liberals to refrain from criticising any manifestation of Islam, however worthy of disdain. This has created a void that is exploited by extremists on the far right.

Meanwhile, a crisis in confidence that secular liberalism can counter the ascendancy of radical Islam and ‘wokery’ has led some public intellectuals to be lured by the notion that Christianity is somehow indispensable in safeguarding the Western way of life. Daniel James Sharp and Matt Johnson have presented compelling critiques of this ‘New Theism’ and its defence of Christian privilege. But entrusting the preservation of liberal democracy to a belief one considers untrue yet expedient seems precarious at best.

All this is to say that the current climate for liberal values and human rights is challenging.

Amidst the ongoing threat posed by religious fundamentalism, a renewed embrace of the Enlightenment concept of separation of religion and state is sorely needed to safeguard individual rights and freedoms.

These are the issues we’ll be addressing at Secularism 2024, the National Secular Society’s upcoming conference on October 19th. A diverse range of expert speakers will shed light on some of the contemporary challenges faced by liberal societies and explore the role of secularism in protecting liberal values and social cohesion.

To be part of this important conversation about democracy, freedom of speech, individual rights, and the rule of law, join us at Secularism 2024. Tickets are on sale now.

Related reading

What secularists want from the next UK Government, by Stephen Evans

Secularism and the struggle for free speech, by Stephen Evans

Donald Trump, political violence, and the future of America, by Daniel James Sharp

A reading list against the ‘New Theism’ (and an offer to debate), by Daniel James Sharp

White Christian Nationalism is rising in America. Separation of church and state is the antidote. By Rachel Laser

Reproductive freedom is religious freedom, by Andrew Seidel and Rachel Laser

The rise and fall of god(s) in Indian politics: Modi’s setback, Indic philosophy, and the freethought paradox, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Campaign ‘to unite India and save its secular soul’, by Puja Bhattacharjee

The resurgence of enlightenment in southern India: interview with Bhavan Rajagopalan, by Emma Park

Three years on, the lessons of Batley are yet to be learned, by Jack Rivington

Keir Starmer must bring the UK’s diverse but divided people together, by Megan Manson

Islamic identity politics is a threat to British democracy, by Khadija Khan

The hijab is the wrong symbol to represent women, by Khadija Khan

Britain’s blasphemy heritage, by David Nash

The perils of dropping a book, by Noel Yaxley

Free speech in Britain: a losing battle? by Porcus Sapiens

Cancel culture and religious intolerance: ‘Falsely Accused of Islamophobia’, by Steven Greer, by Daniel James Sharp

British Islam and the crisis of ‘wokeism’ in universities: interview with Steven Greer, by Emma Park

Rushdie’s victory, by Daniel James Sharp

The Satanic Verses; free speech in the Freethinker, by Emma Park

The post An upcoming secularist conference on the safeguarding of liberal values in a time of crisis appeared first on The Freethinker.

More than three years have elapsed since former President Donald Trump nearly got former Vice President Mike Pence killed, if not by executive order (pun intended), then by sheer narcissistic disregard for Pence’s life. Pence had rebuffed the former president’s badgering demands that he violate his oath to honour the U.S. Constitution by decertifying state electors, duly chosen by American voters, during the U.S. Congressional proceeding on January 6 2021 to officially count the electoral votes of the 2020 presidential election. As the law clearly states, ‘the role of the President of the Senate [that is, the Vice President] while presiding over the joint session shall be limited to performing solely ministerial duties.’ The Vice President ‘shall have no power to solely determine, accept, reject, or otherwise adjudicate or resolve disputes over the proper certificate of ascertainment of appointment of electors, the validity of electors, or the votes of electors.’

At the Ellipse south of the White House on the morning of January 6, after months of relentless litigation in which he lost 61 of 62 court cases challenging the 2020 presidential election results (with 22 Republican judges and 10 Trump-appointed judges presiding, and the sole victory not altering the election results), Trump misled the crowd into believing that Pence could ensure a Trump re-election by ‘doing the right thing’, knowing full well that he could not. Moreover, as former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified to the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6^th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, Trump said of his audience: ‘I don’t [f—ing] care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me… They can march to the Capitol from here.’ Hours later, of course, after Trump told them to ‘fight like hell’, January 6 rioters marched to the U.S. Capitol and stormed through the doors, many of them chanting ‘Hang Mike Pence!’, as U.S. Congressmen barely escaped with their lives.

What lesson can we assume Trump learned from this? Never mind the constant stream of reports that Trump entertains the prospect of weaponising the U.S. Department of Justice in a vindictive campaign to persecute political opponents—or in Trump’s terms, his enemies—who have tried to hold him and his co-conspirators accountable. We got our answer when he selected Ohio Senator J. D. Vance as his running mate. Vance has declared that he would not have certified the 2020 election results and that Trump should ignore ‘illegitimate’ Supreme Court rulings. Vance has also embraced the views of an influential far-right blogger who does not believe in democracy and argues that the country requires an absolute monarch, even a tyrant, to purge a purported oligarchy of progressive automatons who populate and rule a ‘cathedral’ of mainstream American institutions where insidious left-wing ideology is ubiquitous. Vance, it can be safely assumed, was chosen as a ‘yes man’ for a presidential nominee who exercises complete control over a Republican party that, in the words of Senator Mitt Romney, ‘really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.’

In the wake of the unforgivable attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania, House Speaker Mike Johnson has implored America’s two political parties to tone down the rhetoric, as if the delusions of a lunatic assassin, whose motives remain an enigma, can be traced directly to the overheated rhetoric of a political environment which Trump himself has supercharged with his own long history of apocalyptic demonisation of immigrant ‘invaders’, blistering rants against political opponents, and proto-fascist MAGA harangues.

It was almost a year ago that Trump mocked and joked about former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband after an assailant fractured the latter’s skull with a hammer. In 2020, ABC News identified 54 criminal cases of violence, threats, and assaults in which the evidentiary record indicated that Trump had been invoked by an assailant (e.g., ‘This is for Trump’). In 2016, Trump callously mocked a handicapped reporter. In 2015, Trump, who avoided the draft, denied that the late Senator John McCain was a war hero because ‘I like people who weren’t captured.’ The Bulwark’s Cathy Young recently provided a catalogue of instances in which Trump has encouraged or stoked violence. Finally, Trump resurrected the Dark Side of American politics by claiming that Mexico sends drug lords and rapists over the border, conceding only as an afterthought that ‘some, I assume, are good people.’

The January 6 insurrection was perhaps the most dramatic spectacle of Trump’s anti-democratic, authoritarian rhetoric and behaviour. But it was far from being a singular case. Trump has since claimed that he would like to be dictator for a day (wink, wink). He has claimed that presidential immunity for official acts means that his 34-count felony conviction in the recent New York ‘hush money’ case should be overturned, even though he paid money to pornographic actress Stormy Daniels to bury the story of their affair before he was elected president in 2016. This case, by the way, exposed sordid details about his possible rape (on my reading) of Daniels while his wife was at home with their newborn son. In short, Trump is a man accustomed to possessing the kind of invincible and audacious power of men whose complicity in rape culture was epitomised by Trump’s remark that he can ‘grab [women] by the pussy’ without repercussion.

America is in imminent danger of succumbing to a proto-fascist movement reminiscent of the antidemocratic rumblings that shook the world in the interwar period of the first half of the 20^th century. The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision granting partial immunity to the former president, in a ruling that defers to lower courts to ascertain whether Trump’s plot to overturn election results in 2020 constituted an ‘official act’, has set a precedent whereby a lame-duck president unhappy with his election defeat can devise a plot to alter the results of the election and thereby disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, all the while taking comfort in the non-negligible probability that he will not be held accountable. (Trump certainly has not been held accountable by his legions of supporters who would not only hold fast in their blind allegiance even if the former president shot someone on Fifth Avenue but also deride any attempts to hold him accountable in a court of law before an independent jury as ‘show trials.’)

As much as President Joe Biden may deserve his historically low job approval ratings, it nevertheless has been a relief that, in the months and years after he was inaugurated, he restored a refreshing normalcy to the executive office after the insurrectionary crimes of former President Trump. In my lifetime, I have watched several former presidents—Clinton, Bush, Obama—face severe rebuke and censure for allegedly abusing the office of the presidency. Not once did it occur to me, however, that any of these presidents ever had even the faintest intention of being crowned an American Caesar. To say that Trump is an existential threat to American democracy is not rhetorical excess. It is an incontrovertible fact.

Related reading

Donald Trump, political violence, and the future of America, by Daniel James Sharp

What has Christianity to do with Western values? by Nick Cohen

Can Religion Save Humanity? Part One, by Brian Victoria

White Christian Nationalism is rising in America. Separation of church and state is the antidote. By Rachel Laser

Can the ‘New Theists’ save the West? by Matt Johnson

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp

The post Donald Trump is an existential threat to American democracy appeared first on The Freethinker.

Donald Trump was nearly killed a couple of days ago, and the consequences of this failed assassination attempt will reverberate for a long time, and in ways that nobody can now predict. Have the photos of a bloodied but unbowed Trump defiantly raising his fist as he was ushered off-stage won him the presidential election? Quite possibly. Such iconic images appear only very rarely, and even the staunchest of Trump’s critics (of which I am one) cannot but admire the man’s vigour in this instance.

Plus, Joe Biden’s cognitive state is no longer the centre of attention, which might mean that the pressure among Democrats for him to stand down and allow a more able candidate to contest the election will dissipate. I was sceptical that Biden would step down anyway, but now I think it a certainty that he will face Trump in November. Both these things—the sympathy, outrage, and defiance and the retaining of Biden as the Democratic candidate—mean almost certain victory for Trump.

This would be a disaster. I need not enumerate all the reasons why—or not at length, anyway. That Trump is a fascistic, racist, criminal lunatic; that he is openly antagonistic to democracy and the peaceful transition of power; that he is contemptuous of the American Constitution; that he is the darling of the Christian theocrats; that a Trump win would likely mean defeat for Ukraine and NATO, and perhaps even the liberal democratic world as a whole—all these things are known to everybody. And still, I fear, he will triumph.

Worse, the Supreme Court recently granted him, and all other presidents, some immunity for actions taken in office—so whatever restraints there may once have been are now gone, and Trump, if he wins, will be able to act as ‘a king above the law’, in the words of dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor. (Contrast this sorry state of affairs with the declaration of Thomas Paine in 1776 that in America, ‘so far as we approve of monarchy…the law is King.’)

Concern over a Trump victory being one of the consequences of the assassination attempt might seem cold. It is not. Political violence in a liberal democracy is to be deplored, no matter the target, and I am glad that Trump is okay. Conspiracy theories from Trump opponents, and the glee evinced by some at the attempt (all the while regretting only that the would-be assassin missed), are foolish and disgusting. I also feel for the man who was killed saving his family and the two people injured by the shooter. The former, Corey Comperatore, was a hero, and I have no compunction about saying that.

But the view of many Trump supporters that the shooting happened as a direct result of the rhetoric about Trump being a threat to democracy is misplaced, if not outright absurd. The only person responsible for the shooting is the shooter, not the words of others. It is possible—and necessary—to name and oppose anti-democratic politicians without calling for violence. Trump really is a threat to American democracy, and shooting him is not the answer. People like Trump are best beaten by arguments and ballots. If the Democrats and other opponents of Trump now shy away from telling the truth about him, they will do their country, and the world, a disservice.

Besides, Trump and other Republicans’ long history of promoting violence and using genuinely extreme rhetoric (which is still, I hasten to add, legitimate free speech) against Democrats shows this claim to be the shameless piece of hypocritical opportunism that it is. Contrast, for example, Trump’s vile public mockery of Nancy and Paul Pelosi after the latter’s skull was nearly caved in by a far-right fantasist in 2022 with Biden’s humane response to the Trump shooting (not to mention the decency of the Pelosis themselves). Accurately describing Trump and the threat he represents to America and the world is free speech, not inciting violence.

On the other hand, January 6 2021 was the climax of a months-long campaign conducted by Trump to cling to power and overturn the result of a free and fair election. The shoddy gunmanship of a lone attacker, whatever his motives, should not obscure the far more dangerous actions of Trump in 2020/21. A sitting president, using all the state, party, and personal resources at hand, attempted to destroy American democracy—and when this failed, he sat by for hours before calling his supporters, busy ravaging the Capitol, to heel. The attempted assassination of Trump was awful. Trump’s anti-democratic campaign and his supporters’ assault on the Capitol was awful. But one was much worse than the other: the two things are simply not comparable. Donald Trump and the Republican Party are the proponents and champions of political violence in America today.

This article is not an editorial, but it strikes me that the ideals of the Freethinker are more important than ever. Reason and argument, not political violence. Democracy, free speech, and secularism, not tyranny. As for those, like Tomi Lahren, who are praising ‘divine intervention’ for the delivery of Donald Trump and who were spouting conspiracy theories within minutes of the shooting, it can never be said enough: they really are irredeemably stupid—and, precisely for that reason, extremely dangerous. And they are the people who will cheer in November as Trump takes the White House. (I am no fan of Biden and the Democrats, either, by the way, but I recognise a genuine threat when I see one.)

I hope the people of the United States, the world’s first secular democratic republic, take these words of warning in the spirit of friendship with which they are offered. And I hope I am being overly pessimistic about Trump’s chances. Only time will tell, and perhaps there is still time for the American experiment to save itself.

The author republished this piece and added some additional reflections on new developments on his Substack on 1 August 2024. See here.

The post Donald Trump, political violence, and the future of America appeared first on The Freethinker.

Burma is known for its rich cultural heritage: full of golden pagodas, insight meditation, and charming people. But it is also known for its long history of civil war, political strife, and military dictatorship. After the pro-democracy 1988 Uprising against the dictatorship, which had been in power since 1962, Aung San Suu Kyi became a national hero. But her victory in the 1990 election was ignored by the regime, which arrested Suu Kyi and continued to rule the country as a totalitarian state. Following the 2010 general election, the military junta gave way to a liberalising, quasi-civilian government, and in 2015 Suu Kyi’s party came to power. Yet again, however, democracy was short-lived. Though her reputation was marred by the Rohingya genocide, Suu Kyi’s party won the 2020 election—only for the Burmese military (Tatmadaw) to oust her and reinstate military dictatorship in 2021. Throughout Burma’s long and troubled history, an ideology known as political Buddhism has played a significant, and often malign, role.¹

U Nu, who became the first prime minister of Burma after it gained its independence in 1948, used to hold a position of syncretism between Marxism and Buddhism. But he moved away from Marxism towards a form of political Buddhism, perhaps to enhance his populist appeal at this politically complicated time. Burma was home to many ethnic groups, but it was predominantly Buddhist, so this was a logical move on his part. It allowed him to bring an ethnically diverse country together as a ‘moral community’ to defend Buddhist teachings and values in the emerging post-colonial world, dominated as that world was by the Cold War between the secular capitalist West and the atheist communist East.

In 1954, U Nu hosted the Sixth Buddhist Council in Yangon. He maintained that his Buddhism-based modernisation methods and objectives were superior to those of the capitalist and communist models, since they combined material progress with spiritual rejuvenation, whereas capitalism promoted the profit motive above all and communism was materialistic and led to violence and dictatorship. U Nu became more and more critical of the Marxian evolutionary view of social development. In January 1958, he delivered a lengthy speech to the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League in which he categorically rejected Marxism. In 1961, he declared Buddhism the state religion. By transforming Buddhism into a political ideology, U Nu sowed the seeds of the dangerous populist ideology that would become known as political Buddhism.

Burma’s first era of civilian government came to an end in 1962 when General Ne Win overthrew U Nu and installed a military junta, the Union Revolutionary Council (URC). The URC’s philosophical framework was called the ‘Burmese Way to Socialism’ and emphasised self-sustainability and socialism, though it might be better described as isolationist and nationalistic. Later, the URC established a political party called the Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP), which became Burma’s ruling—and only legal—political party under the junta. The introduction of the Burmese Way to Socialism badly impacted Burma’s economy, living conditions, and educational attainment.

In 2007, thousands of Buddhist monks led the ‘Saffron Revolution’ against the dictatorship. This movement spread quickly throughout the whole nation and included peasants, workers, students, and monks. As usual, the military government brutally suppressed the protests, but they had no choice but to accept the organising capabilities of the Buddhist monks as a social class. So, the Tatmadaw tried their best to assert their influence over the monks, making an effort to recruit and organise them. In short, the threat posed by the monks to the established order meant that the monks had to be co-opted.

In the 2010s, Thein Sein, a former general and the president of Burma between 2011 and 2016, met with the influential monk Dhammaduta Chekinda to discuss how to win the support of the Burmese monks, particularly those who had participated in the Saffron Revolution. Following his conversation with Chekinda, Thein Sein’s government began to promote ultranationalism and political Buddhism and Chekinda approached some of the leaders of the Saffron Revolution. Although this had limited results, a seed had been planted within the community of Buddhist monks.

The Buddhist monk Ashin Wirathu was once a prisoner and opponent of the military dictatorship. But he is best known, as Times magazine put it in 2013, as ‘The Face of Buddhist Terror’. He is a major figure in the political Buddhist, nationalist, and anti-Muslim 969 Movement. In 2012, in Rakhine State, violence broke out between ethnic Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims, and the hatred spawned by the conflict soon spread to the rest of the country, with Muslims across Burma being targeted. Ashin Wirathu supported Thein Sein’s plans to send the Rohingya Muslims to another country, has called for restrictions on marriages between Buddhists and Muslims, and has advocated nationwide boycotts of Muslim businesses.

Many of the monks who supported democracy and the Saffron Revolution and who opposed the military dictatorship changed their minds after the 2021 coup. To them, the military government is a bulwark against Islam and Christianity; the surest way of protecting Buddhist purity. Even when the working, peasant, student, and capitalist classes united against the military junta in favour of federal democracy, the Buddhist monk class stuck by the government. Only a small fringe of Buddhist monks took part in the opposition to the 2021 coup, despite their prominence in opposition movements in the past.

Other monks who have joined the reactionary, sectarian political Buddhism movement include the late Venerable Maha Bodhi Myaing, who met with Ashin Wirathu to discuss how best to safeguard Buddhism against other religions. Venerable Thabarwa Ottamasara gave his support to the military after the 2021 coup, saying that the Tatmadaw’s success was due to ‘the power of the Buddha Dhamma Sangha’. He is the abbot of a meditation centre built on land provided by a retired military officer, which might explain his cosying up to the military. Venerable Sitagu Nyanissara even offered the military backup from the monks if necessary.

Summing up, political Buddhism is a populist ideology emphasising Burma’s Buddhist identity at the expense of everything else. It can be traced back to U Nu’s time, if not earlier, and it reemerged after 2012. Many influential monks are supporters of the military dictatorship that re-took control in 2021 and are complicit in the genocide against the Rohingyas. Burmese political Buddhism appears to be entirely at odds with both heterodox Western Buddhism and the genuine teachings of Buddhism. It preceded the military dictatorship and is just as dangerous as it is. Political Buddhism, with its nationalism and sectarianism, may thus endure even in the event of the junta’s demise. In short, dictatorship and religion mean that lasting democratic change in Burma is still a long way off.

1. I use ‘Burma’ rather than ‘Myanmar’ because the former is better known and the change to ‘Myanmar’ was one instituted by the military dictatorship in 1989, a year after the pro-democracy uprising was crushed. ‘Burma’ is thus much preferred by the grassroots. ︎

The post The roots of political Buddhism in Burma appeared first on The Freethinker.