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Powerful forces are dismantling democracy in America. President Trump’s murdered ally and influential supporter, Charlie Kirk, was given a five hour funeral ceremony in a packed Phoenix stadium on 21 September. It was both spectacular and unprecedented. Oration after oration, from the President, Vice-President and key leaders at high levels of the administration, fused Christian Nationalism with the Trump project.
The dominant message from a carefully crafted tribute to Charlie Kirk, mostly implicit, sometimes explicit, was that here, assembled in pious memory before over 63,000 people, and worldwide, were the Christian leaders of the world, the US government tending the ‘shining light on the hill’. Here in Phoenix’s State Farm Stadium were the representatives of the US middle and working class, the victims of a Left wing conspiracy by the former ‘satanic’ Federal government, victims all, reflecting on the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk, a modern St. Stephen. By my own count at least two speakers made this comparison. So did Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York on 19 September, ten days after Kirk’s death. “This guy is a modern-day St. Paul". "He was a missionary, he's an evangelist, he's a hero. He's one I think that knew what Jesus meant when he said, 'The truth will set you free.' ", he told CNN. As far as anyone knew at the time of the funeral, - no trial had taken place - the assassin was a ‘lone-wolf’ motivated by personal grievances, yet repeatedly from the platform ‘they’ were accused of responsibility for the killing. ‘They’ included any or all who opposed Trump and the Maga project and who by implication rejected Christianity. Many – mainly - white evangelicals are Trump supporters but the funeral presentation of the relationship between Christianity and Trumpian politics was of a different order altogether. The two had fused. In a country whose Constitution demands a strict division between Church and State, a quasi-State funeral, opening with military fanfare and national anthem, conflated the religious and political. Ayatollah Khomeini might have recognized the synthesis. Trump’s turn to Christian Nationalism is strategic as well as striking. But where does this effusion of public piety by President, Vice-President and heads of key government departments come from? In this second Presidential Term, unlike the first, a thought-through plan has gained momentum led by his exremist enforcer, White House Deputy-Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller. The plan, which attacks Islam, immigration, globalization and a rules-based international order, as well as ‘woke’ culture, gender diversity, and the world of LGBTQ, overlaps with popular feeling. It aims to establish America as saviour of Western civilisation. In its traditional understanding of marriage and the family and its stance against abortion, certain aspects of Christian Nationalism also appeal to Catholics. Trump was following the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Published in April 2023, it expresses the aims of some 100 highly conservative organisations, setting out proposals for an agenda of sweeping, disruptive change, including for marriage, family, work, Church, School, and volunteering. Christian Nationalism, promoted by Russell Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, founder of the Centre for Renewing America, also finds a place. Charlie Kirk picked up on these ideas even down to arguing that employers should allow workers to take their Sabbath rest. Trump issued an Executive Order Eradicating Bias Against Christians in February 2025, with an extensive agenda and Task Force including several government departments. Liberal and Leftwing intolerance of social conservatism had fed the crocodile, enabling the far-Right to pose as champions of Freedom of Speech. “History does not repeat but it does instruct” writes Professor Timothy Snyder, one of Trump’s fiercest critics, in On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Penguin. In 1934, led by Swiss theologian Karl Barth, several Churches came together to publish the Declaration of Barmen denouncing the German Christian movement that supported Nazi rule. Article 8.24 “We reject the false doctrine, as though the church, over and beyond its special commission, should and could appropriate the characteristics, the tasks, and the dignity of the State, thus itself becoming an organ of the State”. Clearly things are not this bad in America today, but the supporters and language of the Declaration, known as the Confessing Church, are instructive. Opponents of Christian Nationalism need to speak out powerfully and theologically, in words stronger than ‘disappointment”, ‘forgiveness’ and ‘reconciliation’. The German Confessing Church in the 1930s is not unique. The more than 150 theologians and clergy in apartheid South Africa who signed the 1985 Kairos Document, Challenge to the Church: A Theological Comment on the Political Crisis in South Africa were a similar, less official, phenomenon. I experienced Christian Nationalism in apartheid South Africa in the 1980s: the ethnic Bantustans as supposedly national entities, racial groups with segregated churches, the legalised oppression of a national security State. In this instance, the Dutch Reformed Church supplied the theological justification. My late friend, the theologian Albert Nolan OP, a key contributor to the Kairos Document, called apartheid ‘sin made visible’. In a different context the Trump administration is parroting a Christian narrative in the hope it might elevate their plans to moral legitimacy. Patriarch Kirill’s vision of Russian Orthodoxy: blessing Russian aggression, giving absolution to the military going off to slaughter and be slaughtered, officer corps attending monasteries for injections of piety, denunciation of Western civilisation as decadent, is also instructive . Pope Francis’ description of the Moscow Primate as ‘Putin’s altar boy’ captured Kirill’s collaboration undiplomatically but succinctly. Significant parts of the global Orthodox family have criticised Kirill, led by the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew who described his declaring Putin’s war in Ukraine as a “Holy War as “un-christian” and ‘shameless’, ‘better that he resigned’ than follow this path. Timothy Snyder’s twenty lessons/instructions in his book are, in the main, as valid today as they were when he wrote them in 2017. It would make a suitable, if demanding, gift to young people, preparing them for decisions they should make in a dangerous world. Tyrants, he writes, learned the lesson of the 1933 Reichstag fire: “one moment of shock enables an eternity of submission”. Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) in a signature understatement, had summed up Snyder’s approach: “I was no longer of the opinion that one can simply be a bystander”. That is a lesson for everyone. In Nobel Laureate and Holocaust Survivor, Elie Weisel’s words: “What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor but the silence of the bystander”. Church leaders urgently need to bestir themselves and counter contemporary Christian Nationalism. It is a grave, perverse abuse of the Christian Faith that must not be left unchallenged. Christian symbols are already appearing in the 150,000 demonstration against immigration called by Tommy Robinson in London. The future of democracy, the resilience of national institutions depend on enough people having the courage to stand up in their defense. “Over-reaction, let’s wait and see” is an easy, dismissive answer to the appeal above. The reply to that is: haven’t we seen enough? If we wait too long it may be too late. “But they share some of our core doctrinal beliefs”. Indeed, but apply Matthew 7:16: "by their works shall ye know them”. See also TheArticle 29/09/ 2025
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I was living in New York in Spring 1968 and recall the sense of threat that April on hearing the sound of police sirens going up to Harlem after Martin Luther King was shot, and then news of Robert Kennedy’s killing just two months later. Assassinations lurk in America’s DNA like a deadly mutant gene. It is hard to predict, or describe, their impact on a society.
Whatever anyone thinks of Charlie Kirk, patriot, pilgrim or pariah, he leaves a grieving wife, a mother and father and a fatherless young son and daughter. Along with a thousands of other families in the USA, bereaved because of the easy accessibility of guns, they deserve sympathy for their loss. Charlie Kirk’s was a short but, what might be called, a ‘consequential’ life. The tenets, themes and tropes of right-wing extremism and Christian nationalism range through the arguable to the offensive to the dangerous and morally abhorrent. During his last five years, Charlie Kirk deployed elements of the full range with great panache and significant effect, promoting lethal conspiracy theories, including an Islamic-Leftist threat to the West, modifying elements of his rhetoric keeping in step with Trump’s xenophobia and racism. Kirk added to the smog that swirls through the politics of the USA today. The key word in his obituaries is “dialogue”. But he didn’t always out-argue or outreason his opponents. Edited recordings of his debates which he broadcast widely omitted exchanges or moments in which he lost. Kirk was no Yankee Socrates. He just had a masterful grasp of political communication. Unlike President Trump’s ponderous ramblings and coarse abuse, Kirk was a smart, fast-talker who could and did direct Biblical references like a howitzer at his opponents. He built up his audience on social media such as Tik Tok into the tens of millions, worked through a variety of organisations, starring in campus debates, podcasts, talk radio, television shows, and rallies. His performances and preaching were exciting and attractive to youth, compelling for some, particularly young men, and particularly young men like himself who were without a college education. Into the bargain, he dovetailed Trump’s version of American political discourse with evangelical Christianity and, for many, normalized it. In his teens Kirk became a secular activist forming Turning Point USA (TPUSA) in 2012, promoting the Republican Right in the educational sector with seed money from the Christian philanthropist, canny investor and Republican donor, Foster Friess. By 2016 TPUSA was compiling and publishing a Professor List of college teachers allegedly spreading leftist propaganda in the classroom, hoping either to get them removed or forced to repent and preach the far right Republican Gospel. To feature on the list being black helped. Kirk did not seem to find such witch-hunts incompatible with presenting free speech as his central political tenet. By the end of the decade, Kirk had moved to more perilous ground. In 2020 he promised 80 bus-loads of students for the 6 January rally outside Congress, though it is not clear how many turned up. He was cleared of any complicity in the subsequent mayhem and deaths during the assault on the Capitol by the subsequent inquiry. Kirk’s eclectic religious beliefs are difficult to categorise but put him amongst a significant number of US conservative, mainly white, evangelical Christians. These beliefs included: Christian Zionism, expectation of a thousand year reign of Jesus from Jerusalem, heralded by the creation of the Jewish State; a final ‘tribulation’ in which the elect would be spared the world’s destruction and miraculously saved; promoted by Trump’s former spiritual adviser, Paula White, the ‘Seven Mountains Mandate’– a ‘revelation’ to two evangelicals in the 1970s – that Christians are mandated by the Bible to conquer seven social spheres from family life to government; hence the idea that a triumphant Trump was leading the take-over of a ‘satanic’ Federal Government. Some of Kirk’s reflections were less outlandish with wider appeal. He preached passionately on the importance of Sabbath rest in the frenetic pace of modern life - reportedly - honoured by himself on Saturday, the Jewish Shabbat. In Netanyahu’s words, a “lion-hearted friend of Israel” who “fought the lies and stood tall for Judaeo-Christian civilization”, he had because of Gaza, though, become more critical in his last months on moral grounds. He remarkably described the Virgin Mary in a recent broadcast as “a counter to so much of the toxicity of feminism in the modern era”– perhaps influenced by his wife, a fellow evangelical, who was brought up a Catholic. How much the content of Kirk’s messages mattered, or was it his charismatic personality, expressing a general anger at the Washington elite that resonated with his audiences, is hard to judge. Considering Trump’s electoral appeal in the 2024 elections, exit polls suggest Kirk did draw in young men who subsequently voted Republican. Trump increased his share of young men’s vote by 8% and took 57% of the votes of young men without a college education compared to the Democrats’ 40%. In the five previous Federal Presidential elections the Democrats never won less than 60% of young people’s vote. Kamala Harris did hold on to 60% of young women’s votes. Kirk’s views on ‘toxic feminism’ do seem to have been heard - by both sexes. What next? The immediate response to Kirk’s death from his religious constituency has been to declare him a martyr. If he died because of his religious beliefs, the term is at best understandable. But the political response from the White House - linking his assassination to a ‘vast, domestic terrorist network’ funded by liberal charities, before any objective evidence emerged as to the motive of Kirk’s killing - is deeply worrying. The most hopeful interpretation is that much of the rhetoric coming out of the White House is merely performative. But much of it in Trump’s second presidency clearly isn’t. Nonetheless, this assassination has provided a pretext for harassing those posting critical comment about Kirk. At Vice-President J.D. Vance’s bidding, those expressing pleasure at Kirk’s death on social media risk being denounced to their employers and some losing their jobs. This is the same J.D. Vance who on grounds of freedom of speech ‘called out’ the UK for prosecuting Hate crimes. In this worldview President Jo Biden and George Soros (the philanthropist and businessman who has given over $32 billion to his Open Society foundations dedicated to democracy and justice) were criminals who should be imprisoned. At Kirk’s Memorial in Phoenix, Arizona this Sunday, there will be abundant sympathy for his bereaved family and lavish praise bordering on beatification for Kirk himself . The populist Right in Europe are already using his death as a rallying cry against a sinister international ‘Islamic-Leftist’ threat. Condolence is an important expression of community and a shared humanity. But it should not be ‘weaponised’. In a divided nation, the USA will be fortunate if this man’s untimely death heralds a common understanding of patriotism, peace and unity. English-speaking Catholics might have expected some benefits from a Native English-speaking Pope: a return to the good English of the old pre-2011 Missal, nothing lost in translation, promises of visits. But Leo has seemed reluctant to communicate in English. And the British are notoriously bad at foreign languages. We need to try harder. Perhaps going to Mass on holiday abroad might help. The words are in English in your head as you hear or read them in another language. Someone else has done the work translating. The universality of the Church shines out in the marvelous equivalence of meaning in the liturgy. Translation in its struggle to preserve and transmit meaning between different cultures and epochs is notoriously difficult. I remember a new, young, Belgian White Father in Kigali in near despair preparing a sermon in Kinyarwanda on Trinity Sunday. The problem is compounded when dealing with religious texts in which individual words themselves, rather than meanings, are treated as sacrosanct. Hence the deadening word-for-word translation, a malady of Vatican authoritarian centralism, once known as ultramontanism, that prevailed for many years. Contemporary translations of Mass and Missal in English grew out of the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council. ‘Lost in Translation’ Commonweal. Vol. 132, no. 21, New York 2005 by John Wilkins tells the story. The Council lead to the creation in 1964 of an International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) made up of ten anglophone Bishops’ Conferences. Philippines joined later as did 15 associate members such as Nigeria with its popular pidgin English. British bishops played an important role. But the most outstanding figure was Archbishop Denis Hurley of Durban, South Africa, a hero of the anti-apartheid struggle. He was appointed by Pope Paul VI to serve on the council to implement liturgy reform and was ICEL’s chairman from 1975-1991, and subsequently associated with its work for several years. Taken forward by Hurley, the revision of the 1973 Roman Missal began in 1983 and succeeded in finding a balance between preservation of the religious meaning of the Latin text and adaptations to capture English idiom and expression. American bishops did, though, balk at the inclusive language ICEL had used in translation of the Psalter. Then in 1995, at the instigation of a minority of some 30 conservative bishops, the United States Catholic Bishops Conference complained the work wasn’t literal enough. With full translation of texts under scrutiny, to use succinct Nigerian pidgin, ‘troubles dey come’. And they came. At an ICEL board meeting in Washington DC in June 1998, the new US representative on the board, Archbishop of Chicago , Francis George, arrived from Rome bearing bad news. Archbishop George had just been made cardinal by Paul VI in the same January cohort as Bishop Medina Estévez of Valparaiso, Chile, Prefect of the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments (CDWDS) since 1996. Estévez was a stickler for keeping to Latin grammatical structure and word-for-individual word translation, what is known by professional translators as ‘formal equivalence’ versus ICEL’s ‘dynamic equivalence’, that is in words that convey meaning in modern language. He had supported the Pinochet coup and, as dean of the Pontifical Catholic University in Santiago, been accused of informing on left-wing students. Cardinal George’s message to ICEL boiled down to four words: their work was unacceptable. The then ICEL chairman, the gentle Bishop Maurice Taylor of Galloway in Scotland, did his best to find a compromise. Archbishop Hurley tried to explain ICEL’s methodology and wondered what had happened to the collegiality and dialogue advocated in the Second Vatican Council. An angry outburst was Cardinal George’s response. There was to be no dialogue. Instead the Vatican CDWDS produced a ponderous 130-page Instruction, Liturgiam authenticam, insisting de facto on comprehensive control over the principles and practice of translation. Anything produced by ICEL had to be authorized by Rome, CDWDS staff were changed in compliance with the Vatican’s wishes and an oversight committee Vox Clara was set up in Rome by Pope John Paul II. In July 2002 Bishop Arthur Roche of Leeds was appointed ICEL chairman. That, in summary, is how we arrived at the wording of the 2011 Missal and Mass. “Consubstantial with the Father” not “of one being with the Father”; “chalice not cup”; “keep us safe from distress” not “protect us from all anxiety” and, in the Offertory prayer for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, “prevenient Grace”. The Vatican might easily have come unstuck in their changes to the words of consecration: back to the literal Christ’s blood shed ‘for you and for many’ following the Latin ‘pro vobis et pro multis’. This is not the wording in Italy - of all places. Holidaymakers at mass may notice the words are “per voi e per tutti”, for you and for all/everyone. Which is it then, tutti or multi? St. Thomas Aquinas comes to the rescue. The power of the sacrament is sufficient for the salvation of all but its efficacy may not be universal because it may be rejected - hence ‘the many’. Or something like that…. So neither wording contradicts the other while conveying a different nuance in their meaning. The trouble is we are not all Dominican scholars. This does not indicate a soft spot for slang or attention-grabbing vernacular versions. The Archangel Gabriel’s greeting to Mary “you who are highly favoured” translated, for example, as “pick-me girl for God” on Tik Tok. But Christian thinking has been enriched by scriptural texts and prayer passing from Aramaic, to Greek and Hebrew, to Latin and then into the vernacular. The late Lamin Sanneh, a Professor in Yale Divinity School for many years amongst other distinctions, went further. “Christianity identified itself with the need to translate out of Aramaic and Hebrew”, he began his 1989 book Translating the Message, published by Orbis, an important contribution to missiology. Born in Gambia, a 96% Muslim country, Lamin Sanneh became a Catholic and served on the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences. His Muslim background gave him insights into a fundamental differences between Christianity and Islam, the importance of Catholicism’s passage through, and translation into, different cultures and languages over the centuries. Muslims have the poetry and beauty of Qur’anic Arabic which they hold to be the very Words of God passed to his messenger, the Prophet, rasul, Muhammad [Peace be Upon Him]. But translation of Qur’an into the vernacular is generally felt by Muslim scholars to involve desacralization so diminution. True piety means receiving the message of the Qur’an in its unchanged original language, in Allah’s words. For Christianity, transitions accompanied fresh translations allowing not only adaptation of idiom and expression, but a development of doctrine in Newman’s sense, and a potential deepening of faith. In summary, the Council’s Documents were a development too far for the likes of Cardinal Estévez, and their implementation a source of anxiety for Pope Benedict XVI. This was what lay behind the approach to the wording of the 2011 Mass and Missal with its now jarring lack of inclusive language and rewording of the familiar Nicene creed. In September 2017, Pope Francis made the necessary changes to canon law and returned control over translations to Bishops’ Conferences. Henceforth, English-speaking bishops would approve translations - with their approval confirmed/ recognised by the CDWDS. Francis issued his Motu Proprio (an edict ‘on his own initiative’) just prior to leaving for Medellin in Colombia, famous for the Latin American bishops’ commitment to the option for the poor made at its 1968 meeting, and the first major post-conciliar expression of collegiality. A vindication of the late Archbishop Denis Hurley. But, eight years later, no signs of the English-speaking bishops seizing the opportunity offered by Francis. There are 1.5 billion native or second language English speakers in the world. There are 1.4 billion Catholics, a significant proportion in Africa, and probably some 5-8% will understand English. The Pope should speak to them in English more. We appreciate that he does not wish to project an American identity. But it is time for an English-speaking Pope to ensure the faith is available to “you and to all”, in the best, most meaningful English possible. Culture is an amorphous concept. On holidays abroad, it can shrink to what is different from home apart from not being at work , plus a few galleries, museums, and churches. Identity, no less amorphous, is its twin, sometimes ugly, sister.
Take northern Italy for example – the rolling countryside of Emilio-Romagna, carpeted with vineyards, Trebbia where in 218 BC Hannibal’s Carthaginians defeated a Roman army which retreated to today’s Piacenza. A walled city on the edge of Lombardy, once a mediaeval pilgrimage stop on the way to Rome, Piacenza today is a fairly typical largish, Italian town. Its piazzas are convenient places to observe cultural difference. All that is required is a shady seat, a cafè macchiato to blend in and a penchant for possibly odious comparisons. Italian food, notable for its regional specialties and locally-sourced ingredients, is a striking and basic cultural difference. Out of the most unpretentious café in a backstreet comes a delicious meal at a modest price. The rich everywhere can eat good food but in Italy so can most of the poor. 80% of expenditure on food is for eating at home. The quick-service chains, such as McDonalds, Greggs, KFC, and Nando’s control only 7% of the Italian food service market compared to 34% in Britain. And probably correlated with this is a worrying difference in the percentage intake of ultra-processed food: 60% in the UK against 10% in Italy, admittedly the lowest in Europe. Even the many Italian pizza bars have generally fresher ingredients and thinner bases. It is no wonder that without managing an empire, Italian restaurants and food spread around the world. We are all Europeans. How come there is such a difference? It probably has much to do with Britain’s early industrialization and urbanization changing roles of women, plus the need to feed a large, poorly paid labour force. In the 19th century, mass produced fast-food came to serve both women in mills, too exhausted to cook, and men in heavy (labouring) jobs: in factories, mining and quarrying and on farms, docks and railways. The new railways allowed fish to be moved quickly from the coast to the cities and thus make fish and chips widely available. The first fish and chip shops appeared in the 1860s and by 1910 there were 25,000 , down to below 10,000 today, serving the ‘national dish’. So important for morale were fish and chips, they were never rationed during the Second World War. Then there’s the British cup of tea. It never managed to supplant beer but we still drink 100 million cups a day in contrast to Italy’s 90% coffee habit. Sugar - and tea was sweetened - was an important source of energy for the hard labour needed in an industrial society. Consumption shot up from 18lbs per person per year in 1800 to 90lbs in 1901, the highest in Europe but fell to 44lbs average today the same as in Italy. But British consumption is skewed towards refined cane sugar, with zero nutritional value, compared to Italy’s significant intake from fruit and vegetables, 30% of daily diet. Sitting in a piazza , not in a poor part of town, so not watching a cross-section of Italian society, the male and the female gaze takes in the elegance of both men and women. Italians in the main look slender and dress to enhance the impression. The temperature is hovering around 30C but everyone, even the elderly, seems to be trying to look their best. Grandparents look groomed, some elegant, in well-chosen clothes. In Britain, during summer, except for the young, you could be forgiven for concluding most people had given up trying to look good. But how come? Italy has many admired fashion designers, Armani, Gucci, Prada, Versace. And their clothes cost less in Italy but they aren’t cheap, even the imitations. But this doesn’t work as an explanation. I can only speculate what might. Can this difference in dress be connected to our British climate obliging us to spend more time indoors, away from any gaze except that of the immediate family? Or is it some hangover from Cromwell, Puritanism and a Protestant tradition? Pre-Reformation, ordinary people absorbed the Gospel stories from sumptuous pictures on church walls and in stained glass windows. The Catholic counter-reformation was the proximate cause of a flourishing in art after the Council of Trent 1545-1563: Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese and the pious Flemish painter from Catholic Antwerp, Peter Paul Rubens, stand out. All four artists clearly delighted in the female body clothed or unclothed, and most notably in religious contexts Tintoretto particularly captures the humanity of both his male and female subjects. The film directors Bertolucci and Fellini are in some ways their descendants in a different and secular, medium. The Puritans, our own Taliban, made sure Britain was denied this cultural experience. So perhaps visual religious culture got by osmosis into the Italian bloodstream and not ours. Finally as you sit in the piazza in the late afternoon shade, listening to lively conversations all around, hands providing the emphases and punctuation, you may compare and contrast with gloomy pubs in provincial towns in Britain. As a verbal culture, Italy seems to come somewhere between Ireland and the UK. Of course, each are fighting a (possibly losing) battle with the mobile phone. Italy’s eating habits are changing though. Milan-Bergamo airport has a large and popular McDonalds. The average weight of Italians may soon creep out of the top of the BMI index to join the UK beyond the safe zone. Obesity (above 30 on BMI scale) is increasing and for Italian men is only 5% behind the UK’s score of 30% of the male population. “A nation’s culture resides in the hearts and soul of its people”, Mahatma Gandhi once said. Agreed. And perhaps just a little bit in their stomachs and in their clothes and in their conversation. |
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