The Magnificast

Different Christian traditions have different potentials for leftist thought. Throughout The Magnificast, we've talked about a number of different Christian and Leftist perspectives, but we've never quite made it to the Orthodox Church. That all changed this week when Matt and Dean talked with Jonathan Murden about the history of the Orthodox Church and its interaction with the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution!

Derek Ford is back on the 'cast to defend his title as Most Faithful Guest with a whopping three visits. After talking with Jodi Dean in episode 24 about the People's Congress of Resistance, we wanted to follow up and hear how it went. Derek gives us a full report of some of the most exciting parts of the project, talks about what it might mean for future organizing, and gives a few suggestions about how Christians might get involved! **SPOILER** The Juggalo March makes an appearance.

It's time for another user created episode of the Magnificast! This episode is brought to you by all of you nice folks who send us your questions! Also, later in the episode Matt and Dean dunk on Joe Carter and the Acton Institute and talk a little bit about identity politics.

The late 19th and early 20th century saw an immense struggle between labor and capital in the United States. From the Haymarket Massacre to the Pullman Strike, Chicago was the site of many significant victories and defeats for the labor movement. There are loads of great histories attending to the burgeoning socialist movements in the midst of those struggles, but what were the Christians up to in Chicago, especially following revivals rolling across the country and a strong Catholic presence there? That's what Heath Carter asks in his book Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago. Unsurprisingly, the establishment Christian community is often on the side of capital. But the workers movement had an interesting strategy for dealing with this problem--identify Jesus as what he was, a worker. We talk to Heath about some of the interesting characters he discovered, how he pulled his research together, and what strategies Christians might find today to evangelize the churches for the sake of justice for working people. It's a mission that's increasingly important, and one that Christians slowly came around to in the last century in an effort to meet the demands in their pews for a pro-labor faith.

In this episode, Matt and Dean talk about The People's Congress of Resistance with Jodi Dean. The People's Congress of Resistance is an upcoming event (sept 16-17) in Washington D.C. In this episode, the three discuss what the People's Congress is about, what its demands entail, the importance of organization in politics, and what Christians can contribute to leftist struggle. You can learn more about the People's Congress of Resistance here:http://www.congressofresistance.org/

Christians on the Left are pretty good at being suspicious of things like the state or big business. After all, Jesus got killed by an empire and big businesses aren't exactly known for their sacrificial values. In this suspicion though, a lot of Christians (and even a lot of newly minted Leftists in the wake of Bernie Sanders) don't think very much about the problem of private property itself, which has been one of the grounding problems for radical leftists since Marx, Proudhon, Bakunin, and other Lefty saints. In this episode Matt and Dean give some quick overviews of anarchist and Marxist problems with private property and try to offer examples of where those problems have manifested today. But it's not just Lefty saints that have a problem with private property--the Christian tradition, too, was around before capitalism, and with its own suspicion of private property it can help build a world after capitalism, too.

This week, Dean and Matt circle back to review some user created content that all of you good Magnificasters have sent in over the past few weeks! Also, this episode launches a new segment (#theorytime) featuring The Lit Crit Guy, Jon Greenaway, that gives a 101 level introduction to Marx's theory of revolution!

The face of white supremacy is a manifestation of evil that Christians and leftists should categorically oppose without qualifications. That might seem like an obvious point, but Christians seemed to have trouble responding in a timely way to the Charlottesville tragedy, taken in by the liberal temptation to condemn violence "on all sides." That temptation creates a false equivalence between the systemic violence expressing itself through white supremacy, whether they throw blows or not, and the liberating actions of resistance, and it relies on a kind of moral posturing that assumes it's above the fray precisely because it misunderstands the fray in the first place. In the episode, we try to think through problems of violence and nonviolence, making an appeal for a more differentiated understanding of violence that we think helps parse out some of these problems. To help us out, Amaryah Armstrong offered some thoughts to get us going, and we interact with Dr. Cornel West's reflections on the presence of antifa and anarchists at the event. If you're still not convinced, we try to throw pacifists a bone by considering how John Howard Yoder, the arch-pacifist Mennonite theologian, looked at revolutionary theologies form his own perspective. At the end, we suggest Christians need to be more creative in their responses to white supremacy, whether pacifist or not--if nothing else, the Charlottesville rally should be a wake up call for a church that can't seem to make sense of the unadulterated and obvious oppressive form of violence that is white supremacy.

We got a chance to get some of our own #TheoryTime in with The Lit Crit Guy himself, talking about Roland Boer's book Criticism of Heaven, and specifically a chapter Boer wrote on the French communist Louis Althusser's Catholic undercurrents. (You might remember Derek Ford gesturing toward Althusser's Catholicism way back in episode 3.) We try to sort out some different relationships between religion and Marxism as articulated by Boer, and see if we can extend his taxonomy to Christian anarchists, too. We then chat a little about Althusser's "Catholic Marxism" (as Boer calls it) and how Christianity really does seem to lead down the path of communism (surprise!).

Matt and Dean are joined by Amaryah Shaye Armstrong to talk about her article "Of Flesh and Spirit: Race, Reproduction, and Sexual Difference in the Turn to Paul." The three talk about the failures of universalism, reconciliation, Rod Dreher and Pizza.