How Pope Francis Saved the Catholic Church From JD Vance

Money wasn’t up for discussion, and as the printing of easy dollars continued under Obama, inequality soared and culture turned brutal. There was division along every axis, accelerated by data mining, screens, and algorithms. Soon there were two antagonistic poles that held each other beyond redemption. On the left, some unfortunate soul recalled a word, woke, from the Civil Rights days, as a call for vigilance amid injustice. The right was merciless, hammering “wokeness” as a secular religion. The left, in turn, taunted MAGA as a death cult whose members had mistaken a living Cheeto for the Hale-Bopp comet. In reaching for sectarian terms, neither side was wrong. The demons Gog and Magog didn’t materialize in the Middle East, but after the desert wars two equally dangerous religious forces emerged at home: founding strains of American Protestantism that, once bizarrely contained in the person of George W. Bush, now began fighting across society.

In 1632, the first Bush sailed from England and settled in Plymouth with other Puritan zealots who had the misfortune of believing that only a handful of souls would ever go to heaven, and humanity was irretrievably fallen.

In Albion’s Seed, a survey of founding American folkways and how they still define us, David Hackett Fischer describes the consequences of this grim view—endless purification and joyless theocracy. They frowned on bright colors. A Puritan church’s only adornment would be an eye painted on the pulpit, its surveilling gaze extending to the bedroom. Unable to accept human nature, they obsessed over bestiality, once admitting a deformed piglet as a witness in order to convict and hang the man suspected of fathering it. When another piglet was born “with one red eye and what appeared to be a penis growing out of its head” it was all too much; “the magistrates compelled everyone in town to view it in hopes of catching the malefactor.”