We've all got works to do
Today Zack Budryk is back writing about the new Knives Out movie Wake Up Dead Man and how it feels becoming more religious and moving even further to the left as he gets older. He writes:
An age like this, when the world can feel more chaotic, incoherent and unresponsive to any moral order, seems like a time to either start believing more strongly or to recede into nihilism. Staying put doesn’t feel like an option. This may be why I’m significantly more religious than I was growing up, which probably sounds at odds with the fact that I’m also far to the left of where I was back then. But ultimately, I’ve found the two are part of the same trajectory, despair with the cruelties of empire and capitalism, and a conviction, strong and growing stronger, that either spiritual or secular redemption is possible.
Budryk has been on a heater lately. He recently wrote for Hell World about what it means to be a man, vigilante justice, One Battle After Another and being someone that can be trusted.
Luke O’Neil
You are not supposed to exist passively as a man under American capitalism. To fulfill your duties, you must be constantly thinking of how to become more of a man. Ideally that means buying products or subscribing to political ideologies that conveniently advance and expand your manliness. (This is true of being a woman too, of course, but better-qualified people have already written thoughtfully on that.)
For all the things masculinity has claimed to mean over the years, one of its most consistent themes is that a man is supposed to fucking do something in a crisis.
And also about what it was like being diagnosed with autism in the brief period where things seemed to be getting better culturally, and how much worse Kennedy and the Trump administration are making it for people like him going forward.
Luke O’Neil
It’s easy to feel completely disheartened by the words and actions of the Kennedy regime. This was never a society that fully affirmed our dignity and self-determination even at its high point, but as is often the case with social progress, it felt, albeit briefly, like there was nowhere to go but up back when we were in the middle of it. The institutional and spiritual damage Kennedy has done will echo beyond his time in office. A kid who is now where I was at the time of my diagnosis, lost and confused and struggling for an identity to guide them through all of that, will live out their life in the shadow of Kennedy’s hateful rhetoric and policies regardless of what happens next. It’s a sin to inflict that on someone now and it feels like a separate sin to allow it to continue to happen to a future generation. It is the worst kind of failure and disgrace to steal, from people like myself, a world where we can find meaning and love and participation in a human community after we were given the chance to comfortably grasp it.
You'll need to be a paid subscriber to read today's piece in full. Thanks for your support.
We've all got works to do
by Zack Budryk
Religious faith is something I think about far more often than I write about. Part of this is because I know there are people who will immediately tune out, often for understandable reasons. Notwithstanding personal belief, or lack thereof, right-wing Christianity of all denominations has been a malign force in American politics going back decades.
Its impact abroad has had even deadlier consequences, with America enabling decades of Israeli atrocities, to name one example among many, based not only on our cynical interests in the region but also on American evangelicals’ conviction that our allyship is vital to bring around the End of Days. This year, that culminated in the appointment of affable millenarian lunatic Mike Huckabee as our ambassador to Jerusalem.
For a lot of leftist Christians like myself, our first reaction is often to disclaim all of this ugliness. We emphasize what Christ taught about things like forgiveness, charity, love, and community with those the world at large despises, and denounce people like the above as pretender Christians. (My grandfather claimed to have coined the maxim “The Christian right is neither,” but I’m pretty sure he didn’t.)
This is an understandable instinct–God knows I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to be put in the same bucket as Mike Huckabee–but I’ve come to think of this exercise as a form of vanity, which, as the Devil himself once reminded us onscreen, is a deadly sin. A queer kid cast out of their home or a woman told she’s breaking a holy covenant if she leaves her abuser gains nothing from your reassurances that you’re not with the bad guy, and if they assume that you are that doesn’t make you the victim. If we want to distinguish ourselves from those who have used faith for malign ends, it is actual works that are asked of us, fruits by which to know us.