Episode Transcript
Antifascist Dad — Episode 37: Enough is Enough, Part 1
Guests: Dean Dettloff and Matt Bernico (The Magnificast)
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Matthew Remski: Hello everyone, this is Matthew Remski, your host at Antifascist Dad podcast with episode 37, Enough is Enough, with Dean and Matt of the Magnificast podcast.
For housekeeping: you can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name, and I'm on YouTube and TikTok as antifascist dad. The Patreon for this show is antifascistdadpodcast, where subscribers get early access to a second weekly episode. Sometimes it's the second part of the main feed topic, as it will be today, because I talked with Matt and Dean for about an hour and a half and there's a nice breakpoint halfway through. And remember, if you can't afford to support the show, those Patreon episodes all eventually get unlocked. Also in the show notes you'll find a link to order my book Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times. If you have the paperback and you've started reading it, if you have the ebook, if you have the audiobook recording, please leave a review wherever you leave reviews.
Over on that other podcast I work on, Conspirituality, I've just filed a big review of JD Vance's new memoir. It's called Finding My Way Back to Faith, and it'll be out on Thursday of this week. In reading it I found a calculated rebranding operation disguised as a spiritual diary. Trump's regime is faltering, as we know, and Vance has to position himself for 2028. And so the most annoying Catholic convert on the planet is turning back to the genre that made him visible back in 2016: the memoir. Now Vance is pretty full of himself, pretty narcissistic I'd even say. Just as Hillbilly Elegy transformed his personal, diagnosis-teal, patronage-assisted trajectory into a diagnosis of the failings of the Appalachian culture he came from, in Communion Vance turns his spiritual journey into a blueprint for how conservative American Christians should find common ground in the twilight of the Trump era.
I also think of Vance's book as a kind of tactical mop-up operation to gather up the fragmented constituencies of Christian nationalists, tech right, political theologians, Catholic integralists, and disoriented exvangelicals. I say a lot more on that episode — again, it drops tomorrow. But the most important trick in Vance's book, in my opinion, is that it uses Catholic social teaching — which is an anti-Marxist framework with authoritarian precedents — to acknowledge inequality and social reproduction costs while routing the solution away from feminism, class analysis, or ideas about redistribution.
Now Vance is a fascist-enabling bootlicker, and he's going to be the 48th president if Trump drops dead before 2028. In head-to-head polling against Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom, he's four points down and four points up respectively. So I continue to think it's important to understand his religious discourse, and specifically how he's using his Catholic identity as he gathers steam for his campaign.
And from an antifascist perspective, this also means for me at least that boosting anticapitalist and antifascist religious thinkers and activists is super important — because they have the tools to intervene on this particular type of propaganda on its own terms. They can deepen the histories that guys like Vance simplify and cheapen. And I don't think we can underestimate the moral and institutional weight that Pope Leo brings to antifascist resistance, even if that influence coming through the Catholic Church is troubled and contradictory.
And so I'm very happy today to welcome Dean Dettloff and Matt Bernico of the Magnificast podcast to talk about their new book, which is called Enough is Enough: Degrowth, Capitalism, and Liberation Theology, now out from Fortress Press. I'll put the link in the show notes along with links to all of the other resources that they name in our conversation.
This is a lovely book. It's accessible, it's sometimes harrowing, especially as they go into climate details. Their argument is that the global obsession with infinite capitalist growth is ecocidal — it's causing a metabolic rift, in the terms that Marx uses, between humanity and the natural world. They critique global north imperialism, which is predicated on the underdevelopment — the conscious, planned underdevelopment and resource drain — of the global south. And they use the language of degrowth economics swirled together with liberation theology to deconstruct the pursuit of gross domestic product as a form of modern idolatry or fetishism.
Now, as we'll hear, St. Francis of Assisi is at the heart of this book. But they also draw heavily on Pope Francis and a full roster of liberation theologians to not just criticize the current regime, but also to examine repair strategies like the Jewish Jubilee — or debt cancellation — monastic co-living as a kind of possibility of re-educating desire outside of consumerism, and the preferential option for the poor advocated for by liberation theologians, which imagines a society based on solidarity.
Dean and Matt of the Magnificast, welcome to Antifascist Dad. It's so great to meet you. Thanks for taking the time.
Dean Dettloff: Yeah, thanks for having us.
Matt Bernico: Appreciate it.
Dean Dettloff: That is the true melding of the minds here already. So we're off to a good start.
Matthew Remski: So we've got some language things that I'd like to ask you about first — a couple of vocabulary issues. The podcast is called Magnificast, which is great, but there are going to be a lot of non-Catholics out there who might want to know what it refers to. So what is the Magnificat and why might secular leftists want to learn about it? Either of you just, you know, jump in.
Dean Dettloff: Matt, I'll let you field this one.
Matt Bernico: Yeah, sure. Thanks. Cool. Great question. If you are not a religious person, the pun is not going to smack you in the face like it would otherwise. So the Magnificat is a bit from the Gospel of Luke — some real inside baseball of Christianity. At the very beginning of Luke you get this hymn from Mary, who's the mother of Jesus. You might have heard of her. And she's singing this song while she's still pregnant that's reflecting on the things that God has done in the past and that God will do in the present. It is like a hymn in the Bible, a liturgical piece. Who knows if Mary actually said anything like that — that's neither here nor there — but it's a bit from the Bible that's used in Christian worship. The part of it that is cool — I mean, it's all cool — but it's Mary reflecting on what God has done in the past. And what she says is quite interesting, especially for leftists: that God has brought the mighty down from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. There's a real revolutionary vibe to it. In fact, in revolutionary contexts there are situations where peasant farmers have read this text alongside radical priests and concluded, oh, Mary's a communist. All kinds of interesting things. So people have looked at the Magnificat over time and found some pretty radical inspiration for it. Whereas Dean and I have looked at the Magnificat and thought that would be a funny pun for a podcast. So you can see maybe we're a little bit different. But yeah, it is a very cool part of Christianity that is quite exciting for people.
Matthew Remski: Let me ask about the temporality part, though, because she speaks about the mighty being cast down as though it's already happened. I grew up with that going — huh? Did that really happen? When did that happen? What is she talking about? Is that aspirational? So how does that work?
Dean Dettloff: Yeah, there's a lot of commentary on that exact thing, the temporality of it. The most interesting for us, though, I think, is you get this sense in Mary that she's expecting the liberator. Jesus is the liberator. That is how she is anticipating her own role as a mother to a person who has been hoped for, et cetera. And the fact that this is already done — that the rich have been sent away empty, as she said, and the hungry have been filled — all these reversals, these are things that God is doing in her own midst even before Jesus even comes. And I think the challenge of the Magnificat and so much of the New Testament is a challenge to say: could you live into a reality where this has actually already occurred? Not in a quietist way where you're like, just sit back and God will take care of it —
Matthew Remski: Watch the show.
Dean Dettloff: Yeah. Instead it's like, can we make this real? What would it mean to accept that that is actually the case — that the rich are not actually in the position of power that they think they are, and that God has already scattered them? So I think that's the revolutionary challenge that Mary gives all of us, reverberating through history. Could we build the society where that's actually true?
Matthew Remski: Okay. So next vocabulary thing is the title of this great new book, which I'm really enjoying: Enough is Enough. We'll get to the subtitle in the midst of our talk. Enough is Enough says a lot of things. It's more than just boundary-setting on capitalism. It's more than just grumpy dad at the table saying that's enough noise. It kind of reminds me of something like no pasarán from Spanish antifascism. But I know that antifascism doesn't stop at forcing the fascists out of your neighborhood. So what else does Enough is Enough mean?
Matt Bernico: Yeah, so in the book we use it in three different ways. In the intro we kind of lay these out really distinctly, but they come in through the book all kinds of different places. In the first sense we're talking about enough in terms of the grumpy dad — though we're not grumpy about too much noise at the table. We're grumpy about capitalist governments allowing creation to be destroyed. We want enough of that, right? Enough of neoliberals who can barely utter the phrase climate change. Enough of capitalism driving us towards ecocidal trajectories. The second way we think about enough is enough economically. In the global north we have an ever-growing economy based on consumption upon consumption. But all of that consumption has a real physical material toll in the exploitation and extraction from the global south. So the sense of economically enough: there's enough in the world, enough exists for everybody, there's enough to go around — a sense of abundance sitting at the table together. We don't need growth for the sake of growth. We have enough to pass around. And then the last sense is enough spiritually. And that is maybe the most challenging one — for me, maybe just for people in general. It's tough. And that is this sense that humans as a part of nature are all sort of enough ontologically — we all exist together. Nature, ecology, the planet — however you want to parse that out — it doesn't have to have an economic value for it to be meaningful and important. It's enough on its own just being what it is. So yeah, enough in these three senses. Dean, is there a fourth secret one that I've maybe missed?
Dean Dettloff: You got it. I think that's enough on Enough is Enough.
Matt Bernico: Thank you.
Matthew Remski: Except I just want to follow up by saying it's this third one that I think is probably most absent from secular leftist discourse. It's only really filled, I see, in discussions that admit to spiritual needs or where religious traditions are welcome. And I think it's a really important consideration — and I think we'll talk about this at the end because I've got some questions about the monastic ideals that you talk about as well.
But I'm recalling a conversation that I had with a friend who had a conversation with Michael Parenti about how he was talking with some East German ex-apparatchik after the fall of the Soviet Union who told him — look, we thought that creating a really good society would create really good people, and it didn't. We thought that providing for people's needs would encourage them to continue on in providing for each other's needs. And that didn't really happen. And it really smacked me with this sense that if you don't prepare yourself for the post-capitalist life or a post-collapse life with some sort of understanding that you might have to be happy with just what you have, or less than what you have, or far less than what you have — that you have to generate some kind of internal joy and let that be sustaining — I think we're setting ourselves up for a lot of disappointment or grief really. I just wanted to throw that out there.
Dean Dettloff: Yeah, I think you're kind of getting at the slippage between that second and third meaning. Can we be satisfied with having enough on the one hand, and then also can we let the world be enough for us without having to transform it into a commodity — something we have to buy and sell and use, where things are only as good as they're exchangeable or usable? And what you're getting at is absolutely right. The tough thing is that saying we should all accept less is a bad marketing pitch. There are some people who are going to really get psyched about that. I'm one of them. I love leading a life of self-imposed austerity, but that's a very bad brand. Nobody wants to sign up for that movement. At the same time, degrowth — a very easily misunderstood discourse — is not really about accepting less per se. It's about reorienting the coordinates for thinking about how we get enough and how we have our needs met. You can buy all the individual books you want — I have many of them — but I also belong to the local library because we live in a society where we've collectivized a ton of books. Books I can never buy on my own, books I'll only read once and never again. And I have much more abundant access to knowledge by virtue of that collectivization rather than the private accumulation of a library. You can extend that logic to everything — healthcare, transportation, et cetera. The better brand pitch is to say that the irony is when we accept that we might just need enough, we might find that we actually have more than we had before, though it may not be more tchotchkes or whatever we think we need to be happy.
Matt Bernico: Yeah, I think that's true. And also with that pivot towards less stuff but more communal structures that still provide something to you — you get community where you don't have that in capitalism. You don't have thick communities in capitalism. We have lots of isolated, very lonely people who don't have people. With community spaces, with sharing stuff at a library, for example, you have spaces where people can exist together — less material stuff but richer and thicker community interaction, which is what you want in society.
Matthew Remski: We're going to get into more detail on the book, but I have two more preparatory questions. First: Dean, I know that you're Catholic. Matt, you're a Protestant. I'm a Catholic myself. But I do have to ask the you're-not-on-a-religious-podcast question — and it's one that I have to answer as well as somebody born Catholic. I want to know how long you can be a Marxist, a leftist, aware of the church's contradictions and complicity with colonialism and slavery and the epistemicide of Indigenous knowledge and clerical abuse and failure to treat women equally — and still say, I'm still here. This is still my thing. This is still my home. How do you answer that question?
Dean Dettloff: Yeah, this is a theme we talk about a lot on the podcast and have over the years with lots of different people working it out in different ways. Maybe that's a cheap plug — go listen to our show and find out some more tools. But I have a couple of off-the-dome thoughts about it. The first is that complicated legacies are not the exclusive monopoly of Catholicism. If you're a person on the left, you are going to be in trouble if you have a mature understanding of history and contradictions bother you. The left is also not a pure tradition.
Matthew Remski: It is funny, actually, if you flip that around — oh, really? Are you worried about why I still call myself a Catholic?
Dean Dettloff: Exactly. There's that bit. But I think there's also a more sophisticated answer, which is that I think it's authentically Catholic — sincerely — to metabolize it all. I think that is actually what it means to be Catholic. There have been times in Catholic history where we've had three popes who all hate each other and everybody else is killing each other over it. This is not a new problem. And I think to be Catholic is to commit yourself to wading through that stuff and figuring out what's there. I think there's also a kind of logic that allows conservatives to be the people who determine the true essence of this or that thing, whether it's Catholicism, Christianity, or whatever else. The assumption goes: if you don't sign up on every checkbox of the most dogmatic idea possible, then you must not be a true this or that. And I think we shouldn't concede that point. As Matt and I often talk about, I feel like for us being a Christian is not like — well, I'm locked in here with you, but you're locked in here with me — we all have to figure this out. And being Catholic is the beauty of that dialogue and struggle. The contradictions will be everywhere. I think the point is to embrace them, try to learn from them, face them head on. I like that. I also have to add — I do not have religious trauma from growing up Catholic, and I'm very lucky as a result of that. I understand that's complete and total luck. It comes from a certain position and I fault nobody else for not having that same willingness to stick with the shit of it. That's totally fine. But for me, I like the contradictions.
Matthew Remski: That's an incredible thing to add to that answer — there are some people who are going to be able to tolerate staying and working, and some people who can't, and they're all there.
Matt Bernico: Yeah, definitely. Some of us do have a little bit of religious trauma to deal with. I grew up in a pretty conservative evangelical faith community. But when we're working this out, it is really important to figure out how to approach these things in really authentic ways. Dean and I run into a lot of liberal, progressive types of Christians. And there is a particular rhetorical strategy that I think is unhelpful. There's a tendency for Christians on the left — who are more liberal, progressive, whatever that big blob of people are — to see a particular type of Christian action in the world, like especially someone like Rod Dreher, who we'll talk about later, or JD Vance or any other right-wing Christian dirtbag. And you'll say, ah, well, they're not true Christians. That's not true Christianity. That phrase true Christian makes me cringe and want to curl into a ball. The idea behind it is that there's a type of true Christianity that can be distinguished from the bad stuff, and all the good stuff you think about Christianity is the true Christianity. And I think that is a problematic rhetorical approach to the question of complicity. Because if JD Vance is not a true Christian, it creates a way for Christians to escape the complicity of the Christian project — of all the things that Christianity has done. It also helps preserve a sense of moral superiority and that purity of faith, which is just false. It's lying to yourself and everybody. I think it's better to find the interesting other currents within Christianity, sit with it all, and recognize that there's good, there's bad, and there are ways we can run counter to these bad things within Christianity. Contest them, try to liberate it, or cut it loose where you need to.
Matthew Remski: I think contesting is a really great word there, because it suggests that JD Vance is on the Christian field and I'm going to push him into the corner, but he's still there. I'm not going to say he's not part of this — because that would disown my responsibility for what this theology, what this history, is able to do for people or to people. But I wanted to say that what you've just said, Matt, is something I haven't really articulated for myself, but it's really good for me to hear. Because I had a very strong vision of having an inside track into true Christianity for a long time — the fact that I was brought up in a church, a Catholic church initially, that was very influenced by liberation theology. But that was only a couple of years. And so it's remained as this kind of halcyon place in my child mind of — oh, that was the true thing. And so maybe some people are dealing with a sense of originality or a developmental thing where they're trying to get back to something that is authentic to themselves, and everything else is some sort of heresy or digression that went too far off the path. But it's good to get over that — because as much as I am attached to liberation theology, I know how it only really emerges in the dialectic of what it opposes.
Matt Bernico: Just a quick plug on this point — if you're a listener and this is resonating, there's a really important contemporary theologian named Marika Rose. She's a theologian in the UK, academic but very accessible. She has a book called A Theology of Failure, which is great. We talk about it a lot on our podcast. She makes the argument in the book that Christianity can't be about the purity of a certain type of person or a certain ethic — it has to be about being faithful to the person of Jesus as Jesus appears in history, struggling and doing the things that Jesus does. But the point she makes at the end of the book, which I think is really profound, is that that means being truthful and faithful to the person of Jesus means that we might find ourselves in situations where we have to betray Christianity altogether. We might have to say so much of this is bad, and contest it, fight against it, say this is not for us. So I think it's always helpful to have that language and permission to engage with Christianity in this way and say — it's all Christian, but we don't have to accept it all. We can say, get lost.
Matthew Remski: Onto the content of your book. St. Francis of Assisi is at the heart of so much of what you unpack in Enough is Enough. And you rightly characterize him as a radical and a prophetic figure whose spirituality challenges the foundations of capitalist exploitation. He also places creation at the center of worship. My question about many saints, to be honest — and perhaps Jesus himself — from a materialist point of view, is: what was it about him? What made him like that? I have a hard time with the notion that this person was singled out for some sort of insight or communication from God. My sense of Francis is that he's hella neurodivergent, right? He finally unmasks himself from his noble life in the village square, takes all his clothes off, flees to the woods, and then talks to birds and animals. I just wanted to throw that out there and ask whether that's resonant with you guys.
Dean Dettloff: Yeah. St. Francis is very important to both of us. In fact, at one time in history this book would have been a book about St. Francis. That's one reason there's so much St. Francis content in there. We had a great guest on our show a while back — our friend John, who is the host of another podcast called Christianity on the Spectrum. He's a Christian who has autism and he interviews many other people about that intersection. Brilliant guy. I would defer folks to him because he has a really great understanding of that intersection. With respect to Simone Weil — another person who's often characterized as autistic or neurodivergent — the way he parses that out is really nice, cool, and insightful. Whether or not St. Francis is neurodivergent — maybe he was, maybe he wasn't — he's clearly somebody calling us to live in a different kind of way, as many people who are neurodivergent also do in their own ways. And what St. Francis offers is a real challenge to open ourselves up to welcome everything — other people but also creation and the environment — and to welcome that in such a way that it truly puts our way of life on trial in a good way, giving us the opportunity to do something different. So in so far as he's embodying at least an alternative, a different way of thinking and being in the world — as many people do, with or without diagnoses — that's an important kind of lesson that allows us to become more porous to what's happening around us. Anything to add, Matt?
Matt Bernico: Yeah. With St. Francis it's so hard to know. He's a real person who really existed, but there's history, biography, and myth all stacked on top of each other — magical and interesting. Who can say if he's neurodivergent? That seems like an interesting hypothesis that's fun to play with. I'm here to entertain this idea. But with Francis, like Dean said, you do get this different sense of being where it's not just humans trying to know God and experience nature, but a flattening of creation where humans and birds and worms and grasshoppers are all doing their thing and in the process trying to know each other and the world and whatever divinity exists — all at once. It's quite exciting and interesting to think about. It always feels a little bit embarrassing because whenever you think of St. Francis you think of your grandma's birdbath in her garden. But legitimately it does make me think about animals differently, and how I interact with them and how I interact with nature. He's an interesting guy. Also an important figure for understanding the history of proto-socialist, communist ideas. Lots of interesting stuff wrapped up in this guy.
Matthew Remski: Well, I really gravitate towards that particular vision. And I agree about Simone Weil as well from a number of different pieces of evidence, which we have a lot more of, of course. I just think that the notion of the saint — as I've been Catholic all my life — seems to be sort of mystically exclusionary. Unless there's some sort of difference, some inbuilt capacity that the species has for different ways of being. Like, 85% of the population seems to follow along with whatever the convention is, and then we have this 15% who just don't — and they don't in many, many different ways. They wind up discovering a whole bunch of things but also suffering terribly. From a material perspective it always resonates with me.
Dean Dettloff: Yeah. I also think there is something to be said about how people who either voluntarily or involuntarily find themselves on the margins of society are then able to learn things about that society that you don't learn when you're stuck in the middle of it. Francis and Clare — his female counterpart and colleague — they were both class traitors. They both grew up in positions of privilege in their time in Italy and they chose to leave that and get closer and closer to those who were pushed out of medieval society. I think that really matters. It reminds me of a quote that we tried so hard to get into the book and at the end just couldn't. Probably my biggest regret. There is a really interesting thinker named Vilém Flusser, a Czech-Brazilian philosopher. He wrote a crazy book about squids. And in it he says that there are two ways of looking at biology — a right-wing way and a left-wing way. He says Charles Darwin is the right-wing way of looking at biology because you go from the bottom of biology up to the human being at the top, who is the naturally superior animal, the ultimate organism. He says that's a quasi-fascist understanding of the natural world.
Matthew Remski: Wow.
Dean Dettloff: Whereas he says St. Francis is the left-wing view of biology — all things in a weird circular, reciprocal, mutual relationship, and we have to lower ourselves to the lowest point of creation in order to really get what's going on there. And Flusser, by the way, is not a Christian — just being very funny and playful in a book about squids. But I think that is totally true. There's something very lefty about Francis, and you only get that by virtue of being the kind of person who's willing to take that risk and be yourself in a society that's really trying hard to stop you from doing that.
Matthew Remski: I'm really glad you told me about that book. That's fantastic. Okay, so liberation theology is not the hero of your book as St. Francis is, but it's the theoretical backbone of what you're working with. Can one of you give the elevator pitch on liberation theology and its history?
Dean Dettloff: One of us definitely can. Which of us should it be? That's a Dean question.
Matt Bernico: It's a Dean question all the way down, man.
Dean Dettloff: Liberation theology is a discourse that emerged in many parts of the world in the 1960s, the late 60s and early 70s. There are lots of interesting debates about exactly where it starts. James Cone, for instance, is writing his black theology of liberation in the US in the late 60s. A Brazilian Protestant named Rubem Alves is writing his work on it in the late 60s. And then Gutierrez — Gustavo Gutierrez, a Peruvian Catholic Dominican priest — is writing his Theology of Liberation in the late 60s. To me, it doesn't really matter who got there first — some people play that game, I think that's exactly the wrong way to think of it. What it expresses is that in that moment in the world in the late 60s, all kinds of stuff is going on. There are waves of decolonial movements happening around the world, especially in Africa. There is this post-war reconstruction where the capitalist north is trying to save the south from its poverty through development, which surprise, only created more poverty. And you also have the Catholic Church opening itself up to the world through what's called the Second Vatican Council — extremely inside baseball stuff if you're not Catholic, so I won't bother. All this upheaval both in the church and the world. And so I think it's only natural that many different people in many different places would think: Christianity has to have something to say about this theme of liberation. Over the 70s in particular in Latin America, it really took over the discourse in many different countries. Theologians in lots of countries were trying to express what it would mean for Christianity to really throw in with the material struggles of oppressed people working to overthrow those conditions of oppression, to contribute to liberation. It did take off in the Catholic Church — it's not only Catholic. It took off in Latin America — it's not only Latin American. You find it in Africa, in Asia, in the Americas, in Europe. But people usually shorthand to a Catholic Latin American development, and that's certainly where the bulk of the writing emerged. The important thing for us is that these were Christians who had a sincere concern about poverty and wanted to ask not just where are there poor people, or how do I deal with poor people, but why are there poor people? And that why question drove them to learn from discourses like Marxism and other sociological vocabularies. They called out the idols of growth and militarism and capitalist accumulation, and they attempted to explicitly endorse socialist kinds of movements and alternatives in ways that even now in the 21st century remain super relevant and really challenging. That's what we tried to pull out in the book — this is not a dusty old 20th century movement. It's a living tradition that we should keep propagating in our own time.
Matt Bernico: Yeah, exactly. What Dean said is the great and good answer — factually correct in all ways, and I appreciate it. What's really interesting about liberation theology is that it's not what you'd usually think of as theology. There are grounding theological ideas about the dignity of persons and the person of Jesus — it is theological — but it engages with economics way more than you might expect. It's not angels dancing on the heads of pins. It's questions like: how has the global north underdeveloped Latin America? The other point worth pressing is that while we're talking about a particular slice of liberation theology in Latin America, there is a whole other part that we probably haven't touched on much in our book, especially as it moves into more academic circles in the United States. You get womanist theologies, lots of feminist theologies, queer theology, and things like that as well. All of them are still trying to figure out what it means that Jesus was incarnate as an oppressed person, and what we make of that in these different aspects. So it's a big field with lots of interesting little bits floating around it.
Matthew Remski: And a lot of friction. I was very happy to see that in the book you referred to another piece you were doing as part of the podcast — you got to interview Leonardo Boff, one of the central figures of Latin American liberation theology. It's incredible he's still alive, for one thing. But also that he answered your email. He's not a priest anymore — and the fact that he's not a priest anymore is part of the story of the development of liberation theology as we're seeing pieces of it today coming to the world from Francis and Leo. Can you tell us about how Rome welcomed and did not welcome this new set of ideas coming out of the global south?
Dean Dettloff: Yeah, Boff is a very interesting case. He was a Franciscan also — just to pull the thread full circle. Somebody who was activated by that weird medieval Italian all the way in Brazil. Very interesting thing about Catholicism, I guess. Boff was famously silenced in the 1980s by the Vatican for a book that's been translated into English under a couple of different titles — Charism and Power, or Ecclesiogenesis. It was his attempt to account for the rapid transformation of what it meant to be the church in Brazil through base communities. Really interesting book. And the Vatican didn't like that.
Matthew Remski: But when you say base communities, what do you mean by that?
Dean Dettloff: Yeah, sorry, lots of jargon. Base communities are not exactly church, but not not church. They're a unique Latin American form of social organization. The architecture, believe it or not, came from the bishops themselves of Latin America in 1968 — they called for the construction of base communities, although they were already being constructed. So they were responding to what the people were already doing. They're kind of these associations of people that happen within the life of a Catholic parish. People go to Mass, do all the regular Catholic stuff, and then they also get together at different times and do a range of things — including Bible study, but also literacy campaigns, making sure people have access to healthcare. A lot of labor unions came out of base communities. And especially during dictatorships in Brazil, the base communities were the place where people were able to organize in a safer way, under the moral cover of the church. They really became the functional nodes even of things like the Workers' Party in Brazil — Lula is the president today — or the Landless Workers' Movement, the MST, the most powerful social movement in the world if you ask me. Extremely tied to base communities. So important, and a very unique Christian formation of progressive organization. Boff was trying to say: this is the future of the church. Whatever we do in the church ought to be based on this experiment. And the Vatican was not enthusiastic, to put it lightly. They suggested to Boff that he should be silent — that he shouldn't speak or write publicly for a period of one year, and should reflect on the bad ideas he had or whatever.
Matthew Remski: How do you think that conversation goes? Like, you're wrong about this. He says, well, actually, no. What's that like?
Dean Dettloff: Yeah. There are so many interesting things about that because Cardinal Ratzinger — who became Pope Benedict — was the head of an office called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is actually the Inquisition. And his job was like theology police. His dad was also an actual police officer. So lots of very funny historical rhymes. But anyway, he investigated Boff, but he had been Boff's teacher, and they were quite warm when Boff was a student. So there's a lot of personal stuff involved too. Anyway, Harvey Cox — a Presbyterian pastor in the US — wrote a great book called The Silencing of Leonardo Boff if people really want to get into the gossip of it. What's so funny about it is also that Fidel Castro heard about all that and was like, hey, Leonardo, why don't you just come to Cuba and hang out here for a while and see what's going on? Which he did. So they're like, Boff, you got to be quiet, you need to chill out. And he's like, all right, I'll just go to his country for a while, I guess. But Boff, to his credit, finished his sentence and then said lots of other things publicly after that that were quite powerful and remarkable. There is a change in his writing — you can tell he's trying to be on his best behavior — but without sacrificing his true intentions. By the time the 90s came around, I think he got word that he was going to get investigated again and had no desire to go through that process. And so he was laicized — he left the priesthood, but didn't leave his commitment to Christianity. He's still an extremely powerful Christian theologian and voice. That is one story in liberation theology. There are so many others that go in different directions. There are stories of priests who leave and come back. There are stories of priests like Tissa Balasuriya, who we quote in the book in Sri Lanka, who was excommunicated and then was like, you can't excommunicate me, you're just wrong — and eventually won his case and was reinstated in the church. So many wild, crazy stories about it. A really great book if people want to get into it: Penny Lernoux, a brilliant Catholic journalist who has since passed away. She wrote a book called People of God: The Struggle for World Catholicism. It's a great look at the Vatican's disciplinary attitude toward not only Latin Americans but many other progressive Catholics.
Matthew Remski: Okay. Let me see if I have an overly crude vision of this. My sense is that through this suppression and investigation process through the 80s, liberation theology has been kind of disciplined and now laundered back into the basics of Leo XIII-style social teaching — which is, downplay class conflict, avoid real structural self-reflection. You can talk about excesses of capital and injustice to labor, but you're not going to say these are irreconcilable differences and capital actually has to be destroyed. You're not going to go that far. And so it feels like that's a kind of predictable arc considering how much the church would have to lose if it were to really transform itself or take on communistic ideals. Is that fair?
Dean Dettloff: I'll say what I think and then I'll ask Matt, our resident Protestant here, for his free take as well.
Matthew Remski: Yes, thank you. I would appreciate that.
Dean Dettloff: I think it is and it isn't fair. It is fair insofar as certainly the Vatican — it's not like the liberation theologians won the day after Pope Benedict died, then we got a Latin American pope with Pope Francis, and then a second Latin American pope — because he's Peruvian — with Pope Leo. It's not like the liberation theologians won and are now in control of the Vatican. And yes, the rhetoric of Catholic social teaching is explicitly an anti-Marxist rhetoric over the course of history, though less so nowadays. That being said, the role of the pope is a complicated one. It's a diplomatic role internally to the church. The job of the pope is to prevent schism, really, at the end of the day. And there are many right-wing Catholics in the world. That being said, the fact that Pope Leo actually intentionally went out of his way to rehabilitate liberation theology — which he did do in so many ways — is so important. Leonardo Boff's words — the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor, the title of his book — show up in Laudato Si. They're uncited, but that is fine. If Leonardo Boff was asked about it, he was like, I think it's great. Good for him. Pope Francis also celebrated Mass with Gustavo Gutierrez — something the previous popes would never have done. And he rehabilitated our hero on our podcast, the patron saint of the Magnificast: Ernesto Cardenal, a Nicaraguan revolutionary priest who had been given an ultimatum — stay in the revolutionary government and quit the priesthood, or become a priest and leave. He chose to stay. And Pope Francis brought him back into the faithful. So those are real victories for liberation theology. They show a Vatican trying to say: liberation theology is not a schismatic force in the church — which was the accusation. And what that also means is it is actually welcome in the church. And that matters because there are schismatic right-wingers in the church. The SSPX — a very far-right movement — is probably about to do a schism on their own in the next month or so whenever this podcast comes out.
Matthew Remski: So they're going to do the schism.
Dean Dettloff: Yeah, exactly. So they're going to do it. I would like the pope to come out and say we're doing World Catholic Socialist Revolution tomorrow — I would sign up, I'd be there. That's not going to happen. But what we have gained in the last two papacies is remarkable, and I think it's a vindication of liberation theology. So yeah, lots to complain about, but I'm quite happy. What do you think, Matt?
Matt Bernico: Just a zoomed-out Protestant perspective from the outside — this is actually not a Protestant perspective, just my take. The phenomena we're talking about here with liberation theology is one that happens in Christianity over and over again. In our book we have a chapter called Christian Tools for Conviviality where we lay out all of these more radical Christian thinkers who would be on the left side of the spectrum if that distinction made sense in medieval Europe or whatever. But there's this impulse within Christianity that you find up and down the entire religion about everything for everybody — a really radical idea where property is kind of meaningless, it all belongs to God, so we should share it communally. All this kind of stuff. And that's in the Book of Acts, that's in Thomas Müntzer, that's in Gerrard Winstanley, that's in liberation theology. It's a current running through. And what you find in the history of Christianity is those people will pop up, they'll be suppressed, they'll be pushed back on. But the interesting thing is they do get folded into the church — folded into the history of Christianity. This even happens with St. Francis. He has a far more radical vision in his life that he brings to the pope and he gets pushback on it. But still St. Francis becomes St. Francis. He becomes like an important piece of yeast in the dough that is Christianity. It's such a stupid metaphor, but that's what I'm saying — Christianity contains all of this stuff that is more radical, that gets folded in. And when it gets folded in — like liberation theology gets folded in, or any of these other radical ideas — it's baked into the dough and there's nothing anyone can do about it. You can't get rid of St. Francis and you can't get rid of people like Boff or liberation theology. Those ideas are now in Laudato Si, even if a bit watered down. So it's all there. And I think there's something powerful about that.
Matthew Remski: I agree. And I wonder from a reform versus revolutionary perspective — the notion that the most radical ideas often will become co-opted and defanged by institutional movements. Is the pattern you're describing — the yeast gets baked into the dough — but doesn't the dough become something fundamentally different? Like, it changes the flavor of the bread, I suppose. But didn't we want the bread to become a different thing? Because if my understanding of Gutierrez before and after the interrogation process with Ratzinger is that he had to take language regarding the necessity of social revolution out of his text — what do you think? Is it good to be hopeful about how the absorption happens, or am I really cynical to worry that liberation theology becomes something that gets absorbed so we can make good poetry out of it and not really push it forward?
Dean Dettloff: When it comes to Gutierrez, it's actually a great example. The first edition of his big book, Theology of Liberation, had lots of Marxist arguments for the structural causes of poverty and the necessity of revolution. Then later he re-edited that book and changed a lot of that rhetoric, substituting it mostly with references to Catholic social teaching — the kind of papal magisterium. And that being said, if you read that edition, yes, some of the intellectual lights have changed. But the actual substance of what he's saying has not. It's not like he said, now we have to do class harmony and not class struggle — which you could have said, because that's the case in Rerum Novarum. And he explicitly calls for socialism in that edition of the text. I think arguably what he has done is the exact reverse of what you're suggesting — he folded in Catholic social teaching into a revolutionary theology such that he made it more radical than it would have been otherwise, and made it serve the purpose of advancing a socialist goal. I think that's really impressive. And institutions by nature are always going to lop off the most radical dimension of what that institution is — that's what it means to institutionalize something, for better and for worse. But one point we're trying to make in the book is that liberation theology is what we do with it. It could definitely become poetry that people cite as an old-timey discourse where people did something cool and don't do that anymore. The point we want to make is that it's a super vibrant, extremely living tradition. By writing a new book about liberation theology, we're just continuing to blow on those coals and see what kind of fire we can get going. For those who want it to stay radical — we've got to do it. We've got to tell Pope Leo, that's the church we want. And who knows what we'll get out of that.
Matthew Remski: So we'll pause there for today. And again, part two is up on Patreon now — the link is in the show notes. And when we continue there in that second part, we dive into Dean and Matt's analysis of the GDP as a modern idol, and also the necessity of handling the language of idolatry with care because of colonialism. We also discuss Walter Benjamin's fragmentary essay on capitalism as religion, which is one of my favorite things ever. We talk about the possible links between degrowth and monasticism, and I asked them about what happens when all the encyclicals don't change a thing, when your prayers aren't enough. What would the Berrigan brothers — the Catholic priests who broke into US army recruitment offices back in the late 60s to burn draft cards — what would they do if they saw a data center taking over the power and water of their neighborhood? That's it for this week, folks. Take care of each other.
