Religion can make you better, or it can make you worse. A podcast on white evangelical populism in America.
Check out this video of the song “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Watch those young, beautiful children doing exactly as the lyrics would teach: preparing to become Christian soldiers, marching as to war.
The images are terrifying.
This subject is so hot, so alive and, frankly, so upsetting — precisely because it is about the weaponization of faith.
I also mean they were physically terrifying. While I believe everyone has the right to do with their bodies as they want to — these people seem to have gone out of their way to alter their appearances so as to look really scary. They define the meaning of terror.
All of which reminded me of something about faith. The late Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who served as the chief rabbi of Great Britain and who had a warm relationship with the current King Charles, once said — and it has always stayed with me — that religion has the power to make good people better, and it has the power to make bad people worse.
It is ultimately our choice.