UNLOCK 37.1 Enough is Enough, Again w/ Dean and Matt of Magnificast (pt 2)

Antifascist Dad — Episode 37.1: Enough is Enough Again, Part 2 Guests: Dean Dettloff and Matt Bernico (The Magnificast) --- Matthew Remski: Hello everyone, this is Matthew Remski with Antifascist Dad podcast episode 37.1, Enough is Enough Again, with Dean and Matt of the Magnificast podcast. So this is part two. You can check out episode 37 on your main feed. If you are on Patreon, you're hearing this the day that it's released and I'm grateful for your support. I hope this project brings some joy and hope and utility to your works and days. You can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name, and I'm on YouTube and TikTok as antifascistdad. And please check out the show notes for a link to my book Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times. And again, if you have the time, please leave a review wherever you do things like reviewing things. So today is part two of my wide, rambling conversation with Dean Dettloff and Matt Bernico of the Magnificast podcast and the authors of the just-released Enough is Enough: Degrowth, Capitalism, and Liberation Theology, a great book now out from Fortress Press. The link will be in the show notes. In part one we talked about their podcast's namesake prayer, the Magnificat — uttered or maybe even shouted by Mary — as a revolutionary time-warp text calling a new world into being as she carries this child who becomes somewhat famous. We talked about how the word enough in their book title operates on at least three levels: political refusal, the sense that we really have enough economically, and the enoughness of the dignity of creation when it's not appraised through commodity value. Matt and Dean framed degrowth not as austerity but as a reorientation toward collective distribution — the library, for example, is a model, not the monk's cell necessarily. And we also discussed St. Francis as a proto-socialist and possibly neurodivergent revolutionary. In part two, we continue on with their thoughts on GDP, Walter Benjamin, and what liberation theology has to offer, even if it has been — as all things are — metabolized by the institution that both gave rise to it and was challenged by it. Here's part two. --- Matthew Remski: All right. Well, let's turn to the book and one sort of central piece of analysis that you use, which is you really go after, in a forensic, very detailed analysis, the logic of the GDP metric as what you call a modern idol demanding human sacrifice. You're citing a bunch of thinkers and theologians there too. And part of the background of your reasoning is that you're citing Walter Benjamin and his essay Capitalism as Religion from 1921. And you focus on his argument that the Reformation period saw this merging of Christian mysticism with notions of prosperity hoarding. So I wonder if you can just say a little bit about that and how it influenced your understanding of the nuttiness, the absurdity of GDP as a modern idol. Dean Dettloff: Matt, I've been handling all the Catholic stuff, so I'm gonna give this one to you. How about you talk about the mysticism part and then I'll come back in with some of the other bits. You're the philosopher amongst us. Matt Bernico: Okay, deal. Well, so Walter Benjamin — very interesting Jewish Marxist philosopher who wrote this kind of fragment, actually, Capitalism as Religion. Like, it's not even a finished essay, but it is brilliant and packed with lots of brilliant stuff. He says Christianity didn't so much give rise to capitalism as it turned itself into capitalism. Matthew Remski: Amazing. Matt Bernico: And he makes this note that because of that, capitalism is maybe the first religion that offers damnation with no salvation. I mean, it is like the worst kind of Calvinism you can imagine. And I think that what he's getting at is that there's actually something really spiritually disturbing about capitalism — that it produces these affects in us. Like, it's a material form of production, but it makes us feel all kinds of ways about ourselves and about the world and about each other. And Christianity bears some responsibility for that, because so much of capitalist subjectivity is a kind of secularized — or I don't like that term so much — but a sort of mutated form of Christianity that we encounter. So when we start thinking about what happens in capitalism, theological categories can actually help us unpack that. And even people like Marx spent tons of time borrowing theological vocabulary to articulate what really happens. And I think that's not just ornamental language. Like, it's not just rhetorical flourishing. That's an analytic tell. There's something deeper about capitalism and it does stuff to us that's not so good, including producing affects that feel like the worship of idols. Imperialism is there, capitalism is there, and it's happening through the veins of the church, kind of spiking out every direction. Matthew Remski: And just to get the mechanism straight in my brain — what Benjamin is saying is that the mysticism of infinity, or of endless growth, or ongoing never-ending creation, that that is some sort of mind virus that somehow gets secularized. It gets turned into this zombie force that cannot stop and that has to be worshipped. Is that sort of the line of reasoning that he takes, do you think? Dean Dettloff: Well, I think there's a kind of — I mean, first of all, that fragment is open to many interpretations, which is to say this is only one. So take it however you want. It's the kind of thing you can read a million times and come up with a new thing to say about it, which is what makes it so great. But I think what I find really generative is figuring out what it is in the structures of Christianity that seem to reproduce themselves in the structures of capitalism. And one that we talk about in the first chapter on the GDP — identified by a Latin American philosopher and theologian named Franz Hinkelammert — is that when people talk about the market even today, they often use religious vocabulary to do it. The economy is really a force of damnation and salvation — it doles out literal life and death. But it's also the kind of thing where it almost feels like the economy is actually the ultimate actor in the world in the way that God was once the actor in the world. It is the invisible hand of the market, the big divine watchmaker up there determining how all things move in the world — that's supply and demand. And there are salvific stories about capitalism. If we just build one more data center, that will transform our economy. If we just invest more in AI, or years ago in this housing stock or whatever, that's going to save the firm. All these kinds of theological dimensions to what we take to be actually quite pedestrian or non-theological activities. I think what Benjamin is trying to encourage us to do is to say, there's something a lot spookier happening. And that spookiness is because capitalism really is a kind of development of Christianity in a troubling way. There are other kinds of capitalisms that emerge differently — like the way that capitalism is practiced in a lot of Muslim countries. The sort of productive model might be similar — you're privatizing wealth — but you might have different laws around how you lend money, for instance, and how interest works. There are other ways of making capitalism go. And the one that we have globally, the hegemonic one, is the Christian one. And I think Benjamin wants us to think about that relationship in a constitutive way rather than like, you know, capitalism is the outgrowth and Christianity is like a vestigial part or it belongs to an old age. It's actually still haunting that system in an integral way. Matthew Remski: One of my favorite things that Benjamin says in that essay is that capitalism is a pure religious cult — perhaps the most extreme there ever was. And I think that this really becomes apparent to me when I speak to somebody who is really in that Mark Fisher zone of: I can't really imagine any other way of doing things. I can't imagine a different type of production or a different type of living. And so I think Benjamin is right about this. And that would mean that the development of class consciousness — or understanding what's happening to you as a worker — is actually like an apostasy against capitalism. You are becoming a heretic in a way. And I also think that this suggests that purely materialistic arguments against capitalism really fall short of addressing this kind of spiritual dimension. Is that resonant with you guys? Matt Bernico: Yeah, I think so. In the book we go hard talking about GDP and how it is idolatrous — idolatrous is the word that we use, coming from a Christian angle, but cultic is pretty apt as well. And yeah, apostasy is an interesting word. Something that we say in the book, that we borrow from a liberation theologian, a Chilean liberation theologian named Pablo Richard: he says that capitalism is idolatrous, it's not atheistic. There is a belief required in it. And that belief is like — when you zoom out, when you have a perspective that you're bringing to it where you can kind of see capitalism for what it is, it looks so small and so stupid because of what you're actually seeing. Which reminds me — Pablo Richard is kind of like the liberation theologian who talks maybe not the most, but quite a bit about idolatry. He brings out an example from Isaiah. So in the Book of Isaiah, a prophet in the Old Testament — great stuff — there's this story Isaiah is telling about a carpenter. And the carpenter goes into the woods, he chops down a tree, he splits the tree in two, and he burns half of it to cook his dinner. And then the other half of the tree he whittles down into an idol, and then he falls down in front of it and worships it. And that sounds so silly to us. Why would you do that? Clearly this thing is just the tree. What did it give you but fire to cook your dinner? But is that actually so different from the ways that people do worship the invisible hand of the market? Is it that different? You can imagine an economist going out into the world and seeing — ah yes, the market is growing, it is paying my bills when that happens, whatever I make money from when the market line goes up, when the GDP line goes up — and then they fall down and worship it. And as the sole good in the world, when that line goes up, we say everything is fine in the world. So anyways, yeah, I guess it's interesting because it is idolatrous. It requires a type of atheism from all of us to bring to capitalism — to say this is a god that does not exist. This is pure silliness at the end of the day. Matthew Remski: Well, it brings up this language question though, about how liberation theologians who are coming from the global south and engaged with Indigenous populations are using or sort of revamping the concept of idolatry, which is typically used to talk about outsider worship. So how do they manage that particular thicket? Because I think the image of the idol is — this is the thing that is fake, it's hollow, it's not the true god — but it's got a storied history to it, right? Dean Dettloff: Yeah. In the book we say that it's like a hazardous material. If you're going to pick this one up, you've got to be very careful when you handle it because idolatry is the language of imperialism as well. When colonizers, Catholic and Protestant, went around the world, they said what you're doing is not what you ought to be doing. That is idolatrous. Therefore you've got to be Christian, or whatever. Matthew Remski: Can you imagine spending your life doing that? Dean Dettloff: No. No. Seems boring. Not a cool way to be at all. And I think that is the trouble with using something like idolatry language. But it gets picked up also in vocabularies outside of theology, which we bring into the book too. Certain Marxists — Marx himself and Erich Fromm and many others — have used this term in ways that are trying to get at something a bit more than what we would use like ideology. The term fetishism actually comes from a kind of anthropology of idolatry. And by the way, that also raises questions of how secular discourse kind of repeats Christian colonization too. But what they're trying to pick out is this way that humans do create these things in the world — money, let's say, or the GDP or whatever. We made that up. And then we decide, I guess, that's kind of what should determine our whole behavior. The whole global economy is based on exactly that goofy problem. And that's more than just ideology — it is ideological for sure, but it's like a deeper lure that's pulling us around. And liberation theologians themselves, they're extremely invested in interfaith dialogue. They do not like Christian supremacy. They are constantly — especially in Asia, like you have all these liberation theologians, Sebastian Kappen in India for example, who are also super interested in particular forms of Bhakti Hinduism as a potential liberation tradition. Those Christian theologians themselves want to build bridges with other faiths. So when they use idolatry language, they're actually not at all thinking about other faith traditions who they would ally with against the true idol being the world system of capitalism. So it's a bit funny. It is a hazardous material for sure. But I think it's getting at something phenomenologically true about how we encounter capitalism. Matthew Remski: I would recommend to all listeners that just your chapter on the GDP alone is worth the price of the book, because it is hilarious and harrowing how you unpack its absurdity and its contradictions and this wild sort of conception of: well, anything that you spend money on regardless of what it does actually is going to be a marker of good. And the thing that I actually learned — I thought I knew GDP better than I did — but this whole notion that the GDP gets recorded as a growth factor in an importing country where the item is sold, and if it's sold in the global north, the labor power that generated it, that existed in the global south, is canceled out. It's not added to the GDP of Congo or what have you. I didn't realize that actually it's a game really for maintaining a particular type of global accounting imbalance. That was really incredible to see. But the silliness of it — I mean, idolatry is a great term, but it also just makes me think of a world of economists just sort of babbling like they're using a nonsensical term, like they're praying to the flying spaghetti monster. I suppose that would be okay, right? Matt Bernico: Oh yeah. That's not the language of empire. I think that's fine. Yeah, I mean, you're right, it is silly. And you can see the silliness really come into play when people start using the GDP for political analysis. And we do this a bit in the book, in the very beginning of that chapter on GDP — we talk about the Biden-Trump election cycle where people are trying to talk up Bidenomics and how important they are and how the economy is actually really good. What are people complaining about? The GDP is rising, it's going up and up, it's off the charts, it's great stuff. Meanwhile there's homelessness, there's extreme poverty, and it's just like people cannot put these two things together — how the GDP is unmoored from people's economic realities. And I mean, it's exactly how it is idolatrous. It's just out there governing how people think. Severely baby-brained. Not good. Matthew Remski: Yeah, like astrology or something like that. Something is happening in the cosmos far away from us that we'll have trust in. And meanwhile what we can see around us is actually immiseration. But somehow we should doubt ourselves, we should doubt what we see and feel. Matt Bernico: I don't want to give astrology too bad of a name. At least astrology is fun, right? Dean Dettloff: I had the exact same sentence in my head, Matt. Matthew Remski: I feel the same way. Dean Dettloff: But yeah, I do think it's true though, right? Like GDP — I mean, it is measuring something. That's true. It is a measurement that actually does measure something. And you could probably use that number to learn things about an economy and make good decisions about it. All that's true. But the fact that it is the sole number by which we judge an economy to be healthy or unhealthy, by which we judge whole populations to be worthy or unworthy of getting a loan, for example, at a concessional interest rate — like actual money they could use to build schools and hospitals and all the rest of it — that is absurd. And the guy who made up the GDP, Kuznets, an economist, he himself was like, do not use this to determine whether or not an economy is healthy. And guess what? That's exactly what we've done. So I think there have been alternative measurements, and even some states and countries use other measurements to try to figure all that stuff out. That's fine. But globally speaking, GDP is the only game in town. And it is wild. The more you learn about it, the sillier it does seem. Matt Bernico: And it is just politically applicable — like, politicians will actively use it. So I live in the UK and when it's election season, when people are campaigning, you hear nothing but talk about growth: how we have growth metrics, we have, you know, we're aiming for this amount of growth. And the media loves that because it's like, ah yes, growth, it's good. But it pays no real mind to people struggling with their heating bills, people not being able to turn their heat on in the winter. Just absolute absurdity. Matthew Remski: All right, speaking of growth, let me get down to the nuts and bolts of how we might think about living according to your wonderful book. You write a lot about degrowth as a potential model that resonates with older forms of communitarian or monastic life in Christian traditions. And I personally think something like this is really necessary in helping us think through not only how we draw down consumption, but about how — as I was saying before — we prepare for crisis. In fact, I don't think that any revolutionary thought is complete without some kind of preparation for surviving. But most of the old models that we have are celibate. And so I'm wondering what types of mixed communities you've looked at that might fit the bill for degrowth living — that avoid isolationism or that avoid cult dynamics. What have you seen or what do you envision? Dean Dettloff: Yeah, I mean, there are so many examples. And also our use of monastic in a positive sense to associate with degrowth is kind of a funny thing because people always accuse degrowth of being a monastic discourse pejoratively. They'll be like, well, this is about austerity, monasticism, pejoratively — nobody wants that, get rid of that. And degrowthers themselves will be like, trust us, we're not doing monk stuff around here. And Matt and I are like, well, some of the monk stuff — Matt Bernico: We could have a little monk stuff as a treat, I think. Dean Dettloff: Exactly. But I think we mean it that way because Matt and I are also not rushing out to go join a monastery. We don't live in monasteries. So I think there's a way to talk about these things and integrate them into our lives in other ways. That being said, my partner goes to a Zen monastery quite often, and that is a non-celibate community that is quite healthy and active, and really demonstrates a lot of the principles we talk about in the book — like farming for sufficiency, sharing it, living a life of voluntary simplicity with all the benefits of community. And not in an uncomplicated way — lots of complications in every community — but in a way that is gentler on the earth and gentler with other people. So they're out there. But I think in the Christian tradition, you're absolutely right. We're usually talking about single-sex communities that are celibate, and all the rest of it — though the more you read about monastic communities, the more you'll find they are probably wilder than you imagine. But I think two things come to mind. One is that what monasticism demonstrates, and why it's so important that those communities exist, is that the more you're willing to have in community, the more you have available to you yourself as an individual. We talked about the library example. Community gardens are another example. That is the basic logic of the monastery — if we put all our stuff in one spot and everybody agreed to use it and take care of it in a socialized kind of way, we would find that we get to enjoy more than we would have been able to enjoy just by our own merits. And I think there are ways of splitting the difference. Like, I live in a housing cooperative. I don't live in intentional community with my neighbors and I would not do so, but I enjoy living around them and sharing things with them. And we only have one lawnmower and that's awesome. We do not need a bunch of them. So I think there are ways to split the difference in modern society. And the second thing is when you have these figures like St. Francis or St. Dominic — and there are a few others — they themselves created what are called third-order religious orders. So you can become what they call a secular Franciscan or a secular lay Dominican. These are people who are married, who are lay people, and they associate themselves with the community in order to basically experiment with exactly this question: how would I not join the monastery, but pull those kinds of lessons into my daily life, live a simple life despite being a full participant in the economic world we live in? And that's available to people who want to do it in a religious way. So there are secular ways to do it — being in a cooperative, joining a union, whatever. There are religious ways of doing it without leaving your partner. But it's an important tradition of thinking about sharing and simplicity. I don't know. Matt, what do you think? Matt Bernico: Yeah, no, I think you're exactly right. I do like to re-emphasize the point that monasticism becomes in the degrowth discourse a very lazy shorthand for just going without, right? Like, that's what it means — oh, you're denying yourself, you're living ascetically. But I think that's too bad, because that's our misunderstanding of it. Asceticism is a word that we think of as meaning self-denial, but it doesn't. It means practice or training or discipline — not in a negative sense, but in a training-yourself kind of sense. And I like that because it makes me think of the ways that our habits are formed by the communities that we live in. And the communities that we live in are largely individualistic, consumerist-based. Our daily habits are radically different than probably the daily habits we actually want. The daily habits we have — you get up, you walk to the shop, you clock in for work, you've talked to your boss — all the worst stuff that anyone can imagine. It is hell. It's hell doing that stuff. But are there ways that we can use that type of training thinking to develop a type of life where we are living more communally? Like Dean said — can we live in types of communities where we have a housing co-op, where we have a community garden or whatever? Small stuff like that, but also bigger things too. Is the way that we come to problems individualistic or is it communal, is it collective action? Is that our solution, or is it litigation through a lawyer? It's things like that. It's about shaping the way that we see the world through our practices. And Christianity has a lot of things to give us on that front — whether it's this very straightforward sort of monk-nun type of monasticism, or then there's all kinds of other interesting Christian, I guess what you'd call, new monastic types of movements. Some are better and worse. In the early 2000s I had a lot of very hippie, left-wing, crusty Christian friends who lived in intentional communities. And what that meant was sometimes like glorified roommates, and sometimes something deeper and more serious than that. That's cool. In Scotland, there's a really cool sort of new monastic movement that started in the 30s called the Iona Community. There's a sort of daily habit, there's a prayer book, there's a set of daily practices and a community group that you're supposed to live within. It is faith-oriented, but it does have what are called common concern groups where you talk about things like the climate and labor and all kinds of things like that. So I guess all I'm trying to say is that it's not bad or about self-denial. It's about trying to train yourself to think a little bit differently about the world. And the only way that we can do that is to start changing our practices and coming to things with a different set of values and ideas. Matthew Remski: Well, I also wanted to say that just from an early experience that I had in my life, I think it might also be important to understand the difference between retreat and cooperation. Dean, it's really interesting that you and I live so close together in Toronto. I don't know whether you grew up here, but I did. Matt Bernico: No. Matthew Remski: But I would go from the age of 14 years old, I would take the Greyhound bus to east of Montreal and I would go to Saint-Benoît-du-Lac, because I had heard about it from this monk who came — he's now the abbot there — but he had come to do music lessons at the school that I was at. And he was very kind and I appreciated him. But he also said, you can come and visit at the monastery anytime that you like. And I took the bus and I hitchhiked, and it was $10 a night or something like that. And I got a little cell and I was absolutely enraptured by the simplicity and the cleanliness and the fact that I didn't have to be myself in the world. So I had a very early experience of a kind of vacation from myself, a spiritual vacation from myself that wasn't about, oh, how am I going to figure out how to live. And I think that stuck with me. And I think it can — maybe for some people — give a kind of romantic air to that way of life that might not be realistic. Dean Dettloff: Yeah, I think that's true for sure. And people do idealize the monastery. The more you get to know — I'm very fortunate to be in a position in my job where I get to know lots of priests and lots of religious men and women both. And the more you get to know them, the more you learn that community life is community life, no matter where you are, whether or not you go to Mass every day, all that kind of stuff. So I think that is true. At the same time, having a retreat every once in a while is not so bad. And that's why people do it — you go because sometimes you do have to just get out of it, get out of your daily repetitious routine, figure out how to share with a bunch of strangers for a minute and then go back and see what that means. And I think they can all kind of go together. But I agree — if it remains at that level of just pure idealism, or always chasing the high of a thing that's kind of artificial or not actually real, you know, you're never going to find a way to integrate that stuff back into life. And I think that's what really — even we talked about base communities earlier — that's what Christians in the global south have experimented with in such a compelling way. Could we create a space that kind of is and isn't the church, that is and isn't a community organization, where these boundaries actually don't really make sense? And instead it's like: these are people of goodwill working toward a different kind of future, happy to get together several times a week and really commit themselves to building a just place on earth. So I think there are lots of ways of figuring out how it all goes together. But the monastic tradition in Christian history was compelling to us just because it's also a bit funny. People like Matt said will say, well, you degrowthers are all monastics or whatever. And degrowthers themselves will be like, trust us, we're not saying that. And I think Matt and I are being a bit playful by saying, well, we could just say it. We just have to say it in the right way. And that's important too. Matthew Remski: I have a last question for you, which is something that I think gets right down to this core challenge of liberation theology — as you said, Dean, that we would like to see its perhaps original versus mainstreamed modern form. The climate reporting that you do in the book is harrowing to read. And every few years I read another climate survey in somebody else's book and things just keep getting worse and worse. And so this is a sort of repeated refrain in my intellectual life. And it doesn't seem like there's any — it's relentless. And currently we have AI centers that are being constructed by oligarchs who are suing townships that put up any resistance. And the worst people in history are becoming trillionaires and they seem to be completely unleashed on a global scale that no state or encyclical can slow down. Musk alone is responsible for a genocide on the poor through his USAID cuts. And now we're seeing clergy who go out to protest at ICE facilities and they get pepper-balled. And so what I wanted to ask you about urgency and what we do with our bodies is: what do you think the Berrigan brothers would do in response to data center construction today? Dean Dettloff: Matt, what do you think? Matt Bernico: Well, I'll leave the Berrigans. I feel so hesitant to say anything about Catholicism as not a Catholic, yet I've participated in this book explicitly. Yeah, I mean, I think you're right. The situation is dire, and we're seeing more and more people really putting their bodies on the line, intervening in these data centers, in energy projects of all kinds. So many things to name. And the Berrigan brothers would be involved in that, I guess, is what I would say. I think that much seems obvious to me — intervening in these things. I think the more difficult question is what should Christians do, or what should people on the left do? And at least for Christians, there's the really bad tendency to want to do something explicitly Christian, to make a Christian version of something. We got Christian music, we got Christian movies. So I guess that means we have to have Christian social justice. And I think that is actually bad, and it sucks. Let's not do that. I think what it comes down to is that the Christian mission for the foreseeable future is to intervene in these struggles bodily, spiritually, organizationally. Getting involved in something is all we can do. There's a liberation theologian from El Salvador named Ignacio Ellacuría. He has an essay called The Crucified People. And it is a really theologically interesting essay. It's about: is the crucifixion of Jesus historically necessary? That's kind of the question. And there's a funny — interesting, funny in a weird way — answer that he gives. It's that Jesus is crucified because people like Jesus are always crucified. People who put their bodies on the line, who are aimed at liberation, they will get repression. That is what happens. And that essay is scary because that's true. That's what happens to people who intervene in the construction of data centers. They get repressed. That's what happens to people who intervene in the construction of Cop City. They get repressed — or worse, incarcerated, all kinds of things. But I guess the thing that it makes me think is that if that's the case, what is our part in that story as people who are watching that, watching people get crucified in the metaphorical sense or in the real sense, who knows? And it is to try and stop it, to try to take them off the crucifix, to take them down off the tree, to participate and to add our bodies to the line. Which is not easy and not clean. It is difficult, scary, and terrifying. But it's all we can do in the face of all of this — to do that with hope that it will change something. Matthew Remski: When you say — can I just clarify — when you say there's a tendency for Christians to want to do the Christian thing, so I know of a group of liberation theologians in Chicago, for example, who would bring the Blessed Sacrament to the ICE facility. And the challenge to the state, to the officers was: we've got a monstrance here, and the people inside, they want to participate in the body and blood of Jesus. And so this is our action. You're not talking about that. You're not talking about the usage of a ritual in order to make an intervention. Matt Bernico: No, it's a good clarifying point. No, I think that's great. Do that for sure. I guess what I'm trying to say is that Christians have a tendency to set themselves apart in these things, to have sort of an area where they're doing their Christian thing, and it's apart from everybody else. But the event in Chicago that you're talking about — they're very much a part of the ICE protest, right? They're there with everybody. And people who are there are probably not Catholic, and they're still supporting them because it's about human dignity. So I think that's different. Do you understand the distinction that I'm drawing out? Is what I'm saying making sense? Matthew Remski: Yeah, totally. And I also wanted to make sure that we clarified it, because I think there's something — I don't know — it's almost cinematic to have this golden, shining sun that the dude in the vestments is carrying to the gates of the prison. It's so medieval. And it's such good spectacle in terms of protest. Like, if you're not going to confront the ICE agents with arms, then a monstrance is probably pretty good. Matt Bernico: Yeah, it's true. And there are all kinds of really great ways of doing that. Most of my activist experience is in the labor movement — that's where I've kind of done everything. I've been at strikes, for example, where we had a group of McDonald's workers walk off the job and they're on strike outside. And then there's a pastor outside with them who is giving the most fiery sermon you've ever heard about the bosses inside. And the people outside — we're not at church, we're on the strike line. And nobody — the lines blur, but everyone's kind of interested in playing in that space, with the pastor and playing along in a positive way, using that symbolism as a moment of resistance. I think that's great. But I guess the thing I draw out is just that Christians need to be there with everybody else — not as Christians trying to force their agenda on a movement or something. Matthew Remski: Yeah. I mean, I think the same criticism applies with the notion — in leftist organizing — of commandism. Right. Where if you see yourself as some sort of vanguard who's going to theorize from the outside and tell people what to do, that's probably not going to work. Dean Dettloff: Yeah. And I think you get this Christian tendency sometimes — it's like an exculpatory logic to participate where you'll be like, well, I would join this demonstration or these people or whatever if they weren't so rowdy, or they didn't use curse words, or they did it the way that I would do it, or they were totally nonviolent in the exact same way that I think you should be nonviolent. Even progressive Christians will do that kind of thing. And I think that's the tendency to be like, well, we sort of have it all morally figured out. And maybe that's the parallel to the kind of commandism that you're talking about too, Matthew — that once all the protesters behave and they get all the Christian prerequisites done, even if they're not Christian, then I could go out there. And you're kind of always waiting for the perfect protest that never arrives. So that's a very immature way of thinking, I guess — a bad Christian way of engaging. It's the kind of thing you can only think if you never engaged in the first place. I think when it comes to what there is to be done, the Berrigan brothers are amazing and they're experts in mobilizing the pageantry, the theater, the spectacle of the church. And that's so cool. Love that. Amazing. I can't do that. I'm not an ordained priest. I can't go say Mass over napalm that I made at home or whatever. But more power to them. I wish there were more people doing that, more priests out there doing it. If you're a priest listening to this podcast, I don't know, go do that. Matthew Remski: Yeah. Because you've got the robes, right. Like you've got the stuff. Dean Dettloff: You've got the magic stuff. Totally. But I think the thing I find even most interesting, having been a professional organizer working with a lot of Christians, is that anything only ever happens insofar as there was a ton of boring stuff that nobody wanted to do that they all showed up to do. Like, writing the agenda and reading the minutes and having the argument with the older lady who always comes and just is hashing on about the same point that you've talked about a dozen times. But she's there, and she's gonna come to the event, and she's gonna say something cool. I think it can be intimidating to be like, we should be like the Berrigans — because I'm never going to be like that, and I actually don't want to. I don't have the personality for that. But I can write the agenda. And when Daniel Berrigan is on the run from the FBI, I can be like, well, you can stay at my apartment one night if you want. You know, stuff like that. So it's important to find ways for people to also imagine struggle as the product of the accumulation of a ton of very average stuff. And everybody has an average thing to offer. Whatever — you can use Canva, I cannot use Canva, you can make a cool graphic. You can count money and you're good at math. I'm very bad at that. Somebody's got to do that. I think that's the real nuts-and-bolts stuff around organizing that I wish more people could understand. Because if you only ever aspire to be the heroic person, you're probably going to do a bad job, to be honest. But if you aspire to be a useful person who contributes what you have the sincere and genuine capacity to contribute without running yourself off a cliff, you will have done just as much if not more than whatever these amazing, beautiful people have done. Matthew Remski: Yeah. I mean, it's a very feminist argument too, because you're talking about social reproduction. You're talking about the soft stuff that just doesn't get recorded and doesn't really get noticed, but it actually holds up the entire world. And when I bring up this question of what would the Berrigans do, it's kind of like an anxiety-of-influence question. Like, how can you be as cool as that? As if that's the only sort of goal. You're right. Dean Dettloff: Yeah. I mean, here we are, three guys making podcasts — three white dudes who make podcasts — and all the jokes about that are completely accurate and fine and fair. But I think it does matter that people just sit in their basement and make a podcast about something. Like, that's a contribution. It's not the contribution. It's not the thing people should aspire to, which is dangerous. I think nowadays people do mistake having a voice or platform with material outputs. Those are not concomitant things — thank God, in many cases. Lots of podcasters I wouldn't want to see out there and thankfully don't see out there. But it matters that people just find their own way into the struggle in the way that they think. Even when you go to the rally that has 10 people, if you're the 11th person there, like, you really boosted those numbers. So I think that matters. Matthew Remski: Well, Dean and Matt, thank you so much for taking this time. I really appreciate this new book. And I also am going to tell all of my listeners to put Magnificast into their podcast feed subscription thingy, because I really admire the work you do — including, I didn't get to this, but you're willing to take this great encyclical from Leo XIV on AI and actually kind of rip it, which I was very impressed by. Like, you're able to do that. I was like, wow, I don't think there's anything else. There's no other sort of Christian Catholic commentary out there that's actually going to say, hey, you know what, he didn't go far enough. So kudos. Thank you for all of your work. It's great talking to you. Dean Dettloff: Yeah, thanks for having us. It's been great. Matt Bernico: Yeah, thanks, man. Matthew Remski: So yeah, that was really great to talk with Matt and Dean. Please check out their podcast, the Magnificast, if you're interested in this intersection between anticapitalism, antifascism, and Christianity. You'll find all the relevant links in the show notes. So please take advantage of that, and until next time — take care of each other, everyone.