Let's Paint Horus Heresy: Age of Darkness

Into the Abyss I'll fall, the Eye of Horus

Into the eyes of the night, watching me go

Green is the cat's eye that glows

In this Temple

Enter the risen Osiris

Risen again

 - Iron Maiden, Powerslave

Yes, I have succumbed to big box madness and bought the new Horus Heresy starter set.

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It's a big old box, and the templates particularly warm my heart.

And so does the scatter die.

The rulebook is nice and chonky too.

However, I have two complaints. First, the art is a little too standardized for my taste; a 21st century John Blanche would never get hired by Games Workshop. And secondly, there's this.

Let's be very clear about what's going on here. Printing something like this in a rulebook published in 2022 is an overtly political act, whether the people doing it realize it or not. In the States and the UK, the right is fomenting a huge moral panic over trans rights, with the help of a multimillionaire children's book author turned hatemongering bigot. In this day and age, talking about "biological males" lands you squarely in the middle of a reactionary hate campaign, and on the same side as some of the most horrible people possible. I cannot understand why anyone would print anything like that in a wargame rulebook. Only last year, Games Workshop had to distance themselves from what they referred to as "real-world hate groups". This is a step in the opposite direction.

Which is to say nothing about the specific question of female Space Marines. GW themselves used to produce female Space Marine models, but in shall we say the particular environment of 1980s wargaming, they were unpopular and were discontinued. Since then, there have been occasional mentions in the fluff that Marines are all men, which has lately been at odds with GW's attempts to be more inclusive. For whatever reason, this issue has become a rallying cry for bigots in the hobby, who are somehow threatened by the idea that someone else's space soldier toys might be girls. They cry "retcon" at it because they don't actually know anything about the hobby they imagine they're defending. If there's something we've learned in the third millenium, it's that some people have unbelievably fragile masculinities.

For Games Workshop to include this abjectly silly "biological male" nonsense in the Horus Heresy rulebook is throwing red meat to these bigots, who will be encouraged by this to terrorize women and other less privileged hobbyists online. Again, doing this is exactly the opposite of "Warhammer is for everyone" - and during Pride month at that! It's absolutely deplorable.

I am deeply disappointed in Games Workshop for doing this. There's no reason that sentence needs to exist. It will hurt vulnerable people and encourage the worst bigots in the hobby. Whether they realize it or not doesn't matter, because the effect is the same. I also have to say that the repeated references to "pure bloodlines" and "tainted gene-seed" and so on made for deeply uneasy reading in 2022, especially after the "biological male" nonsense.

So I don't know, maybe one really simple reason that Warhammer has a Nazi problem is that Games Workshop is perfectly happy to dogwhistle to them every now and again.

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As for the box, Age of Darkness indeed, we split it three ways. I already made a Contemptor for my Custodes, and while I like Dreadnoughts in general, I don't particularly  care for these ones. That, along with some beakies and the axe Praetor, went to one friend. Another was quite keen on the Spartan, so he got that and a pile of beakies as well. I mean there's plenty in this box to go around!

Since I decided ages ago that my Chaos Marines were Word Bearers, on account of my theology degree and so on, I feel like I've already made my choices as far as 30k is concerned as well. We're told in the rulebook that Word Bearers chapters were named after one of the constellations as seen from Colchis, and they seem to mostly be an adjective and a noun. Therefore, my Word Bearers are from the Morbid Fane chapter.

The first models I built from the box were the Cataphractii Terminators. Five of them ended up on Deathwatch duty, but the other five are my first 30k Word Bearers. I went with basically the opposite layout to the Deathwatch squad: these dudes are here to punch, with two chainfists and three power fists.

The heraldry of the Morbid Fane will be simple: chapter symbol on the left shoulder pad, unit symbol on the right. The main armor color will obviously be Word Bearers red, in this case Vallejo Dark Red. They'll wear the campaign badge on their right knee. Here's the first model I painted.

Word Bearers fluff mentions that the legion has a whole parallel command structure through their Chaplains. This gave me the idea to include squad-level chaplains in my army: lots of Horus Heresy Legion units let you give some models in a squad power weapons or something similar, or in this case, a chainfist. I'll also give them slightly different livery, like a bone trim on one shoulder plate and a black helmet here. I'm calling them Deacons.

Here's the sergeant.

And here's the whole unit: the Cataphractii Terminator squad House of Justice.

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As I mentioned earlier on this blog, I bought Liber Mechanicum and was surprised to realize that I actually have a Horus Heresy army already, namely my Mechanicum Knights. Or indeed my Renegade Armigers. That means a good starting point for my Word Bearers would be to make an allied detachment. I can't think of a better place to start than a basic tactical squad: ten guys, bolters and bayonets, maybe a vexilla.

I decided I want the vexilla to be a proper old-fashioned back banner, so I got one off an old marine sprue, as well as chainsword and pistol arms for the sergeant. Even though the Mk VI marines are clearly bigger than old 40k ones, old bits fit just fine on the new models.

My squad is going to represent some Word Bearers signal troops. I mean there must have been some, you can't run massive military operations without signals. Therefore the squad will bear what I insist is the Imperial signals logo on their right shoulder pads: a red twin-tailed comet on a white background.

The vexilla also proclaims their battlefield role.

Here's the signals squad Deacon.

And the sergeant.

Come to think of it, they should probably also have one of those vox things.

This is the legion tactical squad Mightier are your Voices than the Manifold Winds in its entirety.

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I did also end up getting Liber Hereticus, i.e. the traitor codex. It's another really big, satisfying book with lots and lots of rules and datasheets inside, which I feel I haven't even remotely started to come to grips with.

I'm also not really all that interested in any of the Rites of War, so I'm unsure whether I actually want a Praetor at all. So I'm leaving mine in the box for now.

However, as I was decorating my Cataprachtii from my collection of marine bits, I realized that I have one of those skull shoulder pads left over from my ancient Berzerkers, and a power axe from the Chaos Terminator Lord kit. That means I can build the most Word Bearer HQ possible: a Chaplain.

The arms are from the Berzerker and tactical marine kits, and I built a handle for the axe with copper wire, green stuff and a Wargame Exclusive skull.

As near as I can tell, chaplains and their black, skull-themed armor were a Word Bearers innovation. Therefore, Centurion Sor T'rizaron is decked out as an original Imperial Herald. I didn't have a proper crozius arcanum, but Liber Hereticus actually says it can be an axe as well.

Quite happy with the paint job, and I think that Berzerker skull pad is perfect.

She is Centurion Sor T'rizaron, Whose Name amongst ye is Wrath. With a Centurion and a tactical squad, I could now field an allied detachment for my Knights.

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Now that I'm doing conversions, I might as well also start my Apothecarion Detachment, Come Away from the House of Death! I don't know why I like Apothecaries, but I do. Since neither GW nor Forge World will sell us Apothecaries at reasonable prices, I ordered a Legionary Apothecary conversion set from Kromlech. I already used one to make a Sister Hospitaller and liked it, so here's a Mk VI Apothecary for my signal troops.

There's an option to give Apothecaries volkite chargers, and since I have that special weapon box, why not? Volkite go bzzzt. The only additional work required was trimming down the Kromlech shoulder a bit, as it's slightly too wide at the bottom to take the Mk VI shoulder pad.

While I was at it, I made a second Apothecary for the Despoiler squad I was planning. The chainsword and bolt pistol are from the Deathwatch sprue.

Here they are painted up:

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I mentioned a Despoiler squad; building Marines turned out to be so much fun that I also got a box of Mk IV Marines. All I've done so far is a tactical support squad, the Pillars of Gladness.

Rotor cannons are awesome. I also made a deacon for them, and gave the sergeant some extra detail.

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And finally: the Kratos. I love big tanks, and I'm definitely getting myself at least one Shadowsword at some point. Actually, with the classic unit rules, I could make it a Legion Shadowsword. Or wait and see if they do a plastic Fellblade. But anyway, my point is that when the Kratos was announced, obviously I was getting one.

The kit was, perhaps surprisingly, an absolute breeze to build. I know I want my Kratos to do anti-tank things, so I wanted lascannons as my hull weapons. However, as near as I can tell, there's actually no reason to glue the hull weapons in, as they seem to slot into place and stay there quite nicely.

The sponsons I wanted to magnetize, and luckily that was very easy: the holes in the sponson mounts and the weapons are just about exactly the size of a 3mm magnet.

You can really tell the difference between a model where they've thought about magnetization, and one where they haven't.

I couldn't be bothered to magnetize the main gun; I knew I wanted the big battlecannon, so I went with it. All in all, the Kratos is a nice, chunky model, and it was fun to build.

So to round out my first, but sadly almost certainly not last tranche of Horus Heresy purchases, here is the Kratos Behold! his Mercies Flourish.

Complete with campaign colors.

It is a big chunk of tank, and I am pleased.

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So, here's a poorly lit group shot of my Word Bearers so far.

While I was finishing all this up, Games Workshop announced the upcoming tenth edition of Warhammer 40,000, which looks a whole lot like Age of Sigmar 40,000. I'm not thrilled. We already had 9th edition codexes restricting wargear options to what came in the box, and the beginnings of the sigmarification of faction names with Drukhari, Aeldari and so on. While I agree that 40k could do with a rethink, I don't think this is one I like.

Most of all, the pace of change in 40k is just too much for me, and new statlines and everything is a bit much on top of that. One of the reasons I haven't been able to muster any enthusiasm for Age of Sigmar is that I feel like everything keeps getting changed for the sake of change. I fully expect that 40k will also begin to sigmarify. We'll have a Systyrs of Empreure codex soon enough.

So maybe it was quite lucky that I bought this Horus Heresy box.

Why Sanna Marin and her cabinet weren't all that

Earlier this year, Finland had a very miserable election. Our prime minister, Sanna Marin of the social democrat party, had become an international celebrity, but her party lost the election, and she is stepping down as party leader. This has surprised people around the world, because she cut a very progressive and popular figure. Sadly, I'm here to tell you that she was not exactly a great prime minister.

First, there was our pandemic policy. Finland had a world-class response to Covid and we were doing a great job suppressing the virus - until we quit. In September 2021, Marin and her cabinet decided to lift practically all suppressing measures, including things like mask recommendations. Since then, thousands of people have died. I did another post on the subject, with the statistics. So when people say Marin's cabinet handled the pandemic well, I don't entirely agree. They did, until they decided to stop.

Another failure was the Sami parliament act. Finland has been reprimanded several times by the UN for our failure to implement proper representation for the Sami indigenous people, whose lands Finland continues to colonize. The Marin government was supposed to change that with a new bill on the Sami parliament. However, the cabinet allowed the agrarian party, which resists indigenous rights, to sabotage the bill, and it failed to pass. This is absolutely disgraceful.

The most colossal disappointment of the Marin cabinet, though, was their environmental policy. It was sold to us as a "climate cabinet". What they did was the total opposite.

We can start with peat. Finland produces approximately 5% of our energy by burning peat, which accounts for 10% of our greenhouse emissions, while peat extraction is immensely destructive. It's an incredibly dirty and wasteful fuel. So obviously it receives huge government subsidies and tax breaks into the hundreds of millions of euros.

In 2021, the end result of a huge budget battle with the obstructionist agrarian party was that the Marin cabinet handed 70 million euros of additional subsidies to peat production (IL). 

Later that same year, the social democrat minister for communications, Timo Harakka, called a new motorway "a climate act" in a tweet. The same minister oversees domestic flights, which have received additional subsidies of tens of millions of euros during his time in cabinet. There's so little demand for the flights, that some have flown with single passengers, or even empty (Yle).

When the invasion of Ukraine made electricity prices spike, our government rushed to subsidize households by dropping the tax on electricity. Most of the subsidies are going to well-off households that spend large amounts of energy (Yle). Similarly, when fuel prices rose, the government was there to subsidize diesel fuel (Yle).

I could go on, but I think you get the point. Marin's cabinet spent millions upon millions of extra euros subsidizing fossil fuel consumption, sometimes in the stupidest possible ways, propping up tiny, moribund industries like peat, or ridiculous boondoggles like flights with no passengers on them.

It just so happens I've taught the 1973 oil crisis quite a few times already. Finnish Wikipedia has quite a nice list of energy-saving measures the government of the time implemented, which ranged from regulating indoor temperatures to shop window lighting. The prime minister was also a social democrat, by the way: Kalevi Sorsa. Fifty years later, it did not apparently even for a moment occur to his successor that something like this could be done. Instead, as with every other crisis and policy question, Marin's answer was subsidies for fossil fuels.

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I've lived in Finland for almost 40 years, and the media persecution of Sanna Marin was like nothing I have ever seen before. The misogyny was absolutely hysterical. One of the main precepts of Finnish journalism is that no criticism of it can ever be justified, so there will be no post-mortem, as it were. All our major medias are busy reassuring each other that they did a great job. This is deeply depressing, especially since we all know full well that they're going to spend the next several years worshipping the ground the new right-wing government walks on.

We also suffer from the same disease as Britain, as explained by Professor Simon Wren-Lewis: our media doesn't understand macroeconomics at all, and believes the right's austerity fairy-tales. This was also painfully obvious in this year's election, which was dominated by all our major medias and the ministry of finance battering us into submission with their austerity agenda of billions of euros of cuts.

However, two things can be true at the same time: Marin can be the victim of concerted misogynist media persecution, and a terrible disappointment as a prime minister. Her cabinet let thousands of people die needlessly in the pandemic, cheerfully trampled over indigenous rights, and faced the escalating climate and biodiversity crisis with millions upon millions of subsidies to fossil capitalism. Yes, misogyny was a large reason why her party lost the election. But so was the fact that the policies of her cabinet were absolutely terrible.

Conservatism, the law and the climate crisis

In this blog post, I will argue that our failure to understand conservatism as an ideology is putting the survival of humanity in peril.

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In the morning on August 8th, 2022, the FBI raided former president Donald Trump's Florida mansion. This prompted fury among Republicans, who portrayed a police raid against a senior politician as a terrible violation of norms.

As legal commentator and blogger David Allen Green points out, these are the same people who called for Hillary Clinton to be not only investigated but imprisoned. As Green has it:

The only explanation for the two stances is hyper-partisanship.

And like many hyper-partisans, he has invoked constitutional arguments of first principle when it suits his cause, but does not apply them the same way against his cause.

I have a great deal of respect for David Allen Green as a commentator, but on this subject I believe he is entirely wrong.

The "two stances" here are that a) Hillary Clinton must be investigated and prosecuted for suspected crimes related to official documents, and b) Donald Trump must not be investigated and prosecuted for suspected crimes related to official documents. Looking at the matter this way, there appears to be an obvious hypocrisy. But this is not the only possible explanation at all.

In 2018, US composer Frank Wilhoit posted an excellent description of conservatism:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

If we take this description of conservatism as a guide, we see that there is no contradiction or hypocrisy. To US Republicans, Trump belongs to the in-group and Clinton to an out-group.

In their worldview, the law protects Trump, but does not bind him: in his press release on the raid, Trump was indignant that his safe had been broken into. In the conservative worldview, his property must be protected, but cannot be investigated.

Conversely, Clinton must be bound by the law and is not to be afforded any of its protections. After all, the chant was never "investigate her", it was always "lock her up". Trump routinely referred to her as a criminal. Investigating Trump for a crime is unacceptable, but Clinton is not even granted the due process of an investigation.

If we accept Wilhoit's definition of conservatism, the Republican response to the Mar-a-Lago raid is consistent and perfectly understandable. Speaking as a historian, it has greater explanatory power. Republicans do not hold two contradictory opinions - two stances - but rather one.

On our side of the Atlantic, the day before the raid on Mar-a-Lago, British Conservative MP Nadine Dorries described a parliamentary inquiry into outgoing prime minister Boris Johnson's conduct as a "witch-hunt" and a "kangaroo court", and demanded Tory MPs refuse to participate in it. She is hardly the only British Conservative politician who seems to likewise believe that Johnson is above both law and parliamentary scrutiny.

To ascribe behavior like this to a general "hyper-partisanship" is, in my opinion, a poor explanation. It fails to account for the fact that this is not a bipartisan phenomenon, but rather a conservative one. There is no comparable movement on the left demanding their political leaders be above the law.

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This confusion is only one example of a broader trend. For whatever reason, large parts of the media and the liberal commentariat do not treat conservatism as a political ideology with its own particular history. Instead, they largely accept conservatives' own formulations of their ideology at face value, and ignore the history of conservatism. There is also a marked reluctance to question conservatives in ways that representatives of other political ideologies are questioned.

As a political movement, conservatism was born as a reaction to the French Revolution. The guiding ideal of the revolution was enshrined in the motto "liberty, equality, fraternity". The conservative mission was to oppose this. US political scientist Corey Robin and others have defined conservatism as an ideology that defends an unequal, hierarchical society. If conservatism is seen in this historical context, the reason why they subscribe to the worldview described by Wilhoit is clear. Equality before the law is incompatible with the idea of hierarchy.

It's instructive to look at the history of the idea of the rule of law. The rule of law and the German Rechtsstaat are liberal concepts, formulated in opposition to conservative hierarchies. In the English-speaking world, the idea of the rule of law was conceived as a criticism of the idea of the divine right of kings. The American Revolution was fought, according to its proponents, on these principles: that even kings should be subject to law.

The American and French revolutions are the origin of the modern idea of human rights. Conservatives everywhere have consistently opposed these rights. Of course, they routinely misrepresent this history. The idea that the political right was ever in any sense liberal was an artifact of the cold war, where human rights were a useful rhetorical weapon against the Soviet Union. After the Soviet bloc collapsed, conservative parties in the west have been progressively abandoning the idea of human rights, to the point where entire conservative parties are represented by authoritarians like Trump and Johnson.

Both Trump and Johnson are thoroughly illiberal politicians. They do not accept, indeed do not even seem to understand, the idea that there should be any limit to their powers, or that they should be accountable to anyone. Both gleefully attack any institutions that they deem hostile to their ambitions. Trump instigated a coup attempt against the US Senate; Johnson has consistently fought parliamentary oversight and even blatantly lied to the Queen. While they flagrantly break the law, they fulminate about law and order.

To conservatives, there is no contradiction, because to them, law and order means using state violence to enforce social hierarchy. It does not mean, and never has meant, rule of law.

If we imagine conservatism as the defence if established structures, both Johnson and Trump seem profoundly unconservative. Some right-wingers have argued that they are not, in fact, conservatives at all. This is not very persuasive, because in both their countries, the conservative parties wholeheartedly support these disgraced leaders. Clearly, to most US and British conservatives, these men represent their values.

Those values are privilege and hierarchy. Both Johnson and Trump come from immensely privileged backgrounds. Neither has ever done a day of honest work in their lives, let alone actually earned a living - supposedly conservative values. They constantly break the norms they claim to uphold, and this barely dents their popularity with their supporters. Again, this is because conservatives do not believe they should be bound by these norms, but rather that others should. They are the in-group, we are the out-group.

It's worth noting that the backlash against Johnson only began after he started lying to his own supporters. He remains very popular among members of his party.

To conservatives, the impunity with which Johnson and Trump break laws and conventions demonstrates their superiority. It "triggers the libs" by making the hierarchy of society visible. Johnson can violate lockdown regulations without penalty, while others are fined. To conservatives, this is as it should be.

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If we conceive of conservatism in terms of hierarchy and privilege, it becomes obvious why conservative parties are so fanatically opposed to fighting the climate crisis.

The conservative worldview is based on the idea that the privileged in society are entitled to do what they want. Rules and regulations are for other people. Even to supposed law-and-order conservatives, the idea of the law being enforced on them is an abomination.

Twenty-first century conservatism reflects the values of individualism and fossil capitalism. Regardless of their station in life, conservatives tend to believe that they are the ones who create value for the economy, and therefore to society. They believe this entitles them to a privileged position in it. In fossil capitalism, this means they must be allowed to consume more than others. Any restriction of their consumption is a restriction of their privilege, which amounts to a denial of their superior position in the hierarchy. Therefore it is unacceptable.

This is why things like private car ownership, flying and eating meat have become fetishes of right-wing policy with such astonishing speed. Conservatives believe they are entitled to these things as marks of their superiority over others.

If we believe conservative rhetoric about the importance of responsibility, the common good, future generations and so on, it is impossible to explain why conservatives are everywhere at the forefront of the fight against environmental protections. They talk about responsibility and preservation, and defend limitless consumption and destruction. When we realize that this rhetoric of responsibility is only ever mobilized to oppose policies that would lead to a more equal society, conservative policy is much more coherent. Throughout, they are defending their privilege.

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Whether it be Donald Trump's assault on the US political system or the infinitely more serious matter of the climate crisis, we are consistently failing to see conservatism as an ideology of hierarchy and privilege. This means that for the most part, conservative policies and attitudes are not seen as what they are, and are not effectively critiqued. Instead, the media largely pretends conservatives share the same values as the rest of the population, and treats clear indications to the contrary as some kind of errors of thought, rather than manifestations of their values.

When it comes to environmental policy, this reluctance to engage with conservatism as an ideology provides a smokescreen for their obstructionism and sabotage. By opposing policies that are necessary to control the climate crisis, conservatives are literally destroying our planet. And they are doing it to sate their unlimited greed.

We have to stop them.

The decline of Christianity in Finland

I was looking for a cute graph of the fall in church membership in Finland, to go with this tweet, and decided I had to make it myself. That led into a little bit of reading and organizing my thoughts, and I've collated the results here.

It was fully illegal to not be Christian in the Kingdom of Sweden. From 1634 onward, your choices were either to be Lutheran or leave the country. Some practical exceptions were made for Orthodox Karelians living in the eastern provinces, and I don't know to what extent individual people were persecuted, but basically the law said you belonged to the state church and that was that. They later allowed some other Christian denominations, mainly for foreigners: Swedish subjects weren't allowed to convert.

What got me reading was that I was curious as to what the status of Jews in Sweden was, and I learned that they were entirely prohibited from moving to most of the kingdom, including the Finnish provinces. In 1802 Sweden banned the immigration of Jews altogether, and although the law was soon repealed in Sweden, the Finnish provinces were lost to Russia in the war of 1808-09 and the law not only stayed on the books here, but was enforced until independence. I never knew that the Grand Duchy of Finland was so ferociously antisemitic. Jewish citizens only gained full civil rights in 1917.

So the religious situation in Finland at independence was basically that the law forced the entire population to be Lutheran. There was a small Orthodox minority, along with tiny Jewish and mostly Tatar Muslim communities, as well as some other, vanishingly small Christian churches. So officially, something like 98-99% of the population was Lutheran.

This only begins to change in 1923, when the first ever law on the freedom of religion is passed. Now, for the first time, it's possible to found new religious organizations and freely join or leave them, and even not belong to one at all. Full freedom of religion this ain't: the Lutheran and Orthodox state churches maintain their privileged positions, Christian churches get special tax exemptions, and the process for registering new religious denominations only recognizes religions that are Christian or broadly similar to Christianity. This is how the law still works: the Finnish wicca community, for instance, have been denied religious status because, among other reasons, they lack a holy book. This is a totally absurd criterion for a religion, but it's still the law.

The law came into force in 1924, so that was the first year Finnish citizens were allowed to leave the church. Since then, if I recall correctly, overall church membership has only gone down: there has never been a year in Finnish history since when the church had more members than in the previous year. Membership now stands at something like 68% and is continuing to fall.

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So what happened? Why is church membership collapsing?

A new religious freedom law was passed in 2003, which made leaving the church easier. Earlier, for instance when I quit the church, you had to actually go to a church office in person, fill out a form and talk to a priest, and if they couldn't talk you out of it, a month later your papers were transferred to the civil registry. The 2003 law made it possible to quit the church through a simple letter, which could be sent electronically. That same year, the Tampere "free-thinkers" atheist organization opened a website, eroakirkosta.fi, where you could input your personal details and they would take care of the process. As of this writing, they were coming up on 800 000 people having used the service, which you have to admit is a little bit impressive in a country of five million. But if you look at the overall graph, it's not like the trend started in 2003.

While the membership decline has been fairly steady, it's been given tremendous momentary boosts by both the church itself, of which more later, but also various public scandals involving religion. Several of those have involved Finnish Christian conservative politician Päivi Räsänen, a disgusting bigot who hates everyone different from her, and has consequently but presumably inadvertently done more to eradicate Christianity from Finland than anyone, up to and including the national hero who murdered a bishop with an axe. Whenever she shows her face on TV, there's a spike at eroakirkosta.fi. Lutherans sometimes complain about this, but the effect is real.

In my opinion, the fundamental reason behind the collapse of church membership is that the vast majority of people leaving the church were never Christians to begin with. We have no real information on how many people were actually Christian back when it was illegal not to be, because they didn't do a lot of polling back then, but also because the poll question would literally have been "do you confess to treason against God and your King".

What we do know is that in several surveys done by the church in the 21st century, the Finnish population divides into three approximately similarly sized groups. One is Christian and believes more or less what the church teaches; one believes in some kind of higher power or whatever, but not in the sense taught by the church; and one believes in nothing at all. So you could say that while some 70% of the population belongs to a Christian denomination, only about 30% say they're Christians. Suddenly the graph becomes a lot easier to understand, I think.

This also seems to be the mechanism behind the various Christian conservative-inspired brouhahas causing people to quit the church: if you don't actually believe in what the church teaches, and you see these odious bigots declaiming their hatred without any real pushback from the church, I think it's easy to see that this can lead quite a few people to ask themselves why, exactly, are they paying money to stay affiliated with this kind of activity.

As a point of interest, we have no compelling reasons to think that number of Christians was ever much higher. It may have been, but it may not have been; we have no direct way of knowing, but we can make some guesses. Until at least the 19th century, everyone in Finland had to pass an examination on the catechism to be confirmed into the church. It was never a particularly difficult examination, but in large parts of the country, people legitimately suffered with it and many were almost certainly being confirmed without passing it. This doesn't exactly make you think the average person was deeply devout.

Similarly, Finnish folk religion persisted well into the 20th century, and was only really wiped out by the elementary school system. While it incorporated lots of Christian language and ideas, it was still fundamentally a pagan belief system which the church tried to eradicate for centuries - in vain. Despite considerable efforts, the church also failed to impose Christian systems of gender and sexuality on the broader population; homophobia and strict bourgeois gender roles only became anything like universal in the 20th century through public education and conscription.

So we have no real reasons to believe Christianity was ever particularly popular or widespread in what later became Finland, in terms of things people actually believed in, whatever their nominal (compulsory) allegiance was. Again, I feel like this makes the decline in membership seem like a return to normality.

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Finally, there is a core reason for the collapse in church membership that it's considered taboo to really talk about. It's that what the church teaches is complete nonsense. The Bible is, in parts, an interesting collection of books with some historical value. As an actual guide to organizing your life or thinking about, well, anything germane to living in the 21st century, for the vast majority of us, it is useless. The Finnish Lutheran church officially expounds doctrines like the Trinity, which is pseusophilosophical garbage, and the resurrection, which is a very silly fairy tale. The question isn't really why people are leaving an organization that professes to believe in this blather, but rather why anyone would join it in the first place once they're no longer being forced to by state violence.

Education in what is now Finland was a church monopoly until the 1860s, and the modern school system was founded in the 1920s. I don't think it's a coincidence that as the quality of secular education improves, membership in organized superstition declines. Or in other words, when the church loses access to the coercive power of the state, and critical thinking skills become more widespread, church membership begins to collapse. Obviously it is a more complex social phenomenon or series of phenomena than just this, but if we're going to pretend that broadening access to high-quality education doesn't matter at all, well, that's a pretty big choice to make.

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So what will happen in the future? Who knows. A fellow theology freshman told me in 2012 that maybe god will send a new reformation to Finland. Who am I to argue?

Most commentators, even from the church, reckon that the membership decline will continue. If you think that the previously cited figure of 30-ish percent of the population being Christians will stay that way, then maybe church membership will drop to around that number.

A church with a membership around 30% will be quite a different organization from the state religious bureaucracy it is today. At that point, the church will probably no longer be able to discharge its remaining public functions, like burial services, and considerable state subsidies to a minority religion will hardly be a sustainable solution. As with schools, at some point in the not so distant future, the public sector will have to reclaim the rest of the public services the church has monopolized.

Even now, with a declining membership and massive pension burdens, the church is in a somewhat perilous financial position. They also have great swathes of real estate that may prove somewhat difficult to unload; who do you sell a cathedral to in Finland? The state already directly subsidizes the church to the tune of over a hundred million euros a year, not without controversy. There are those who think that the church is headed for financial collapse; I remember a panel at the faculty of theology where one provocative participant told the attending students that none of us would ever retire from the church, because it will have gone bankrupt by then. He may not be wrong.

The church may also collapse because there will no longer be any demand for it. So-called mainline protestantism has been in a global decline for quite a while, and the same seems to be happening in Finland. Roughly speaking, as more and more people are leaving organizes religion, the influence of the extremist bigots in churches is increasing. Maybe the most spectacular instance of this is the way white USian Protestants are rallying around, of all people, Dolan fucking Trump. The more influence these fanatics gain over their denominations, the more repulsive they will appear to the general population.

The strategy of the Finnish Lutheran church has been to sit on the fence as long as possible. They triggered one of the bigger waves in membership loss by their uncompromising opposition to women in the priesthood in the 1980s, and went on to resolve the issue in such a stupid way that clerical misogyny is rampant to this day. They're now doing a similar thing with same-sex marriage, which is accepted by the state and not the church, and the church's homophobic bigotry is one of the main reasons members are quitting. At the same time, the opposite side of the culture war professes to believe that the church has sold out to cultural Marxism or whatever they're calling it now, and bigots are also leaving the church.

It's easy, and not entirely wrong, to say that the church is choosing the worst possible alternative by equivocating. The truth may be that there's simply no position they can take without potentially catastrophic consequences. If the church came out in favor of gay marriage, against racism and inequality and so on, they would not only alienate quite a large portion of their members, but according to what we know about their opinions, most of their staff. Similarly, for the church to come down even more firmly on the right of the culture war would be a complete disaster for them in terms of not only popular support but potentially even their official position as a state church. So it's not at all clear that they can actually do any better.

The final dilemma for the church may be that there just isn't any real demand for a national mainline Lutheran denomination. When both the liberal and fundamentalist believers are minorities in a large church, they can coexist. It's the middle between them that's falling out of the church, and if this keeps up, it'll be just the extremes left. Who, at that point, is the former state church for?

Anyway this is all premised on current trends continuing, so if something new and unexpected happens, all bets are off.

**

So this is the kind of thing that happens when I'm working and in the middle of a record-breaking heatwave where it's impossible to do anything except lie down in front of a powerful fan. I hope you've enjoyed these random thoughts on the Finnish state church and their membership problems.

The US is a failing state

 So Joe Biden was sworn in as President, and the previous guy flew off to Florida in a sulk. All well and good, and frankly, very relieving. But the US has serious problems that aren't going away nearly as easily.

**

I wrote about the Forever War a couple of years ago, but it's not like anything has changed. American troops have spent 30 years in the Middle East and achieved absolutely nothing. They're still occupying Afghanistan and Iraq, there's still a civil war in Syria even though nobody cares about it any more, and so on. What I want to highlight here is the total ineptitude of the Forever War. The USians have spent three decades fighting and have learned nothing.

Take Syria, for instance. When the country collapsed into civil war, the US couldn't decide whether or not to actually intervene. The Obama administration drew several "red lines" and then dithered over them, while the next guy was more than happy to order airstrikes that accomplished nothing. The point is not to debate what the Americans should or shouldn't have done in Syria. It's that two consecutive administrations were unable to formulate or execute any kind of coherent national policy, or use military force to achieve national political goals. This is how a failing state acts.

US policy toward Iran is similarly senseless. Trump withdraws from the JCPOA, seemingly for no reason except that Obama signed it and therefore it must be bad -- only to then turn around and insist, in a ridiculous and failed diplomatic maneuver, that even though the US withdrew from the treaty, they're still a "participant" in it. Trump then had Qasem Soleimani murdered, again seemingly for no particular reason. At the time, it looked like the US was trying to provoke Iran into a war, but when the Iranians retaliated by striking US bases in Iraq, Trump lied that they hadn't and nothing came of it. You tell me: is this a superpower executing a strategy of regional dominance, or an empire as decrepit as the idiot con man who pretended to lead it?

This January marks the 30-year anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq. Over those three decades, the US has taken a sledgehammer to the Middle East and achieved nothing at all, except killing untold thousands of people and destabilizing the entire region. And they're not done yet: US forces are still stuck in Afghanistan with no end in sight, and no-one even expects the new administration to do anything different. There's no exit strategy and there never was. In Vietnam, they had to leave when the other guys kicked them out, but US military supremacy is now so overwhelming that this is very unlikely, but they won't leave of their own accord. Nobody can define an end state, let alone a victory condition, for the Forever War, and because it's constantly spun as somehow a patriotic defensive effort protecting American liberties, it can't be stopped.

In other words, the supposedly greatest country in the world can't figure out how to stop spending literally trillions of dollars murdering innocent people in the Middle East.

**

Speaking of people dying, as I write this in early January, the death rate to the coronavirus pandemic in the US is a little over 1 000 per million (Statista). At that rate, over five thousand Finns would have died. The actual number was under six hundred when I wrote this. So despite spending over twice as much per person on health care, the US system is delivering an outcome that's ten times worse. They also can't get people vaccinated: the US government set a target of 20 million vaccinations by the end of 2020; they managed two million.

Now, it's easy to say that this is because of the idiot who's been in charge, and obviously he's to blame. You don't want a vacuous populist with stupid hair in charge of your country during a pandemic; just ask the Brits. But Trump is a symptom, not a cause.

The Forever War has turbocharged American racism. Most obviously through the massive islamophobia constantly incited in its name, but also in indirect ways. The ongoing police brutality in the US, for example, and the militarization of US policing, long predate the "war on terror" but are being accelerated by it. Veterans are strongly overrepresented in US police departments, and according to at least one study, are more likely to shoot people than non-veterans. Law enforcement agencies across the US gained massive, intrusive new powers of surveillance in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, and the flood of military equipment to police departments only increased. A more militarized police force with more veterans is then more likely to brutalize and murder minorities, which leads to protests, which justifies more policing.

As with the Forever War, there's no end in sight for the rampant police violence in the US either. One party openly cheers for it, with the unwavering support of the police unions, but the other one can't figure it out either. I'd like to say it's unbelievable that Biden's response to the police riots against the Black Lives Matter movements is to increase police funding, but it isn't. His position didn't change when off-duty cops stormed the Capitol and on-duty cops let them.

**

Trump himself, as a politician, is obviously a product of the Forever War. His racism, crude even by American standards, is boosted and justified by the rampant islamophobia of the "war on terror", and is key to his popularity among his overwhelmingly white, mostly well-off supporters.

But I think there's another way in which the Forever War ties into Trumpism. The supposedly constant threat of terrorism lets white Americans pretend that they're being victimized. White people living in the middle of rural nowhere, USA, can profess to be terrified that any moment now, an ISIS technical will pull up on their main street and shoot out the only traffic light in the name of the Caliphate. This doesn't just excuse white USians' racism, but it lets them play-act being oppressed, and there's nothing Trump supporters love more than pretending they're being oppressed. It's why Trump's repellent and ridiculous mix of bombast and self-pitying whining appeals to them: they want to both revel in their privilege and pretend it doesn't exist. The "war on terror" provides a way to get there. And, of course, once you've convinced yourself that ISIS is coming, you'll find it a lot easier to believe that buses full of Antifa are on their way to your hometown, as so many USian conservatives at one point claimed to believe.

This impossible idea, by the way, of simultaneously being the privileged and invaluable backbone of society, and a persecuted minority, has historically been the position of Christian churches. Which makes it entirely unsurprising that white Christians overwhelmingly support Trump.

Even though the most deranged conspiracists were bitterly disappointed when Biden was sworn in, the conservative persecution complex is carrying on as if nothing had happened. Moments after voting to overthrow the results of a democratic election, various Republican politicians were on the usual platforms whining about how mean the Democrats were being. Fox News and their ilk have spent the past year telling their viewers Joe Biden is a communist who is going to take their guns, ban cars and beef and whatever, just like they told everyone Obama was going to do. When none of that happened, it didn't put so much as a dent in the hysterical screeching, nor will it now.

Of course, in the dying days of the Trump regime, a huge number of these people convinced themselves that any election they lose isn't legitimate. Their elected representatives voted to overturn election results, and incited an armed mob to storm the Capitol, trying to stop the election result from being confirmed. Nearly half of all Republicans supported the attack.

A strong faction of Republicans now openly oppose democracy. If they took back the House and Senate in the midterms, judging on their behavior so far, they would vote to throw out a presidential election result that didn't go their way.

It's one thing for a party to elect someone lile Trump, who openly opposes democracy. It's another for some politicians, like the Zodiac, to support him and echo his rhetoric. But when a large part of the supporters of the party start opposing democracy and believing that only they are entitled to rule, it becomes a serious problem.

This mentality is being driven by the brutalizing racism of the Forever War. It's being driven by the constant police brutality and racism. It's being turbocharged by the radicalization engines of the right-wing media, Facebook and Youtube. It isn't going away. If anything, it's going to get worse, because the structural forces driving it aren't going anywhere.

**

This year will mark the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Of course, they didn't create problems like American racism and militarism, or the fascist contempt so much of the USian right has for democracy. We can't know what the 21st century would have been like without the War on Terror. But it would be very difficult to argue that that Forever War hasn't made all of these problems so much worse, and so much more difficult to solve.

The US has been in mortal peril before. It survived the Civil War, even though the subsequent efforts to fix some of these deep-rooted inequalities was sabotaged. Now, real structural change seems even harder, and the saboteurs are legion.

No-one knows what will happen. In one of the more spectacularly silly journalistic outpourings in my country, someone compared Joe Biden to FDR. I can't help thinking that's spectacularly wrong. To stay in that context, I'm afraid Biden isn't the great reformer who will actually grapple with the great problems of US society that FDR was. Instead, he's Herbert Hoover: the studious technocrat who won't address the actual issues, and is overwhelmed by them. I suppose in 2024 we'll see if he's succeeded by an FDR - or a Buzz Windrip.

I can't say I'm very optimistic.

The Forever War

The Forever War is a great novel by Joe Haldeman, but it's also what several national security professionals have come to call either the US war in Afghanistan, or the "war on terror" in general. And for good reason: the US went to war with the Taleban on October 7 2001, almost seventeen years ago as I write this. Depending on which casualty estimates you want, tens to hundreds of thousands of people have been killed. President Trump has escalated the war, increasing air strikes and sending in more troops. With no clear strategy, there's no end in sight.

The other forever war is in the Middle East proper, and it's been going on a lot longer than the War on Terror. Now that US foreign secretary, oligarch Rex Tillerson seemed to commit US forces indefinitely to Syria, it seems like it would be a good idea to look back on how long the US has been fighting in the Middle East.

**

A century ago, the Middle East, with the exception of what is now Iran, was ruled by the Ottoman Empire. The Empire took the side of the Central Powers in World War I, and collapsed at the end of the war. The Allies had made contradictory promises to the Arab and Jewish subjects of the Empire during the war, and eventuallu decided to take over the Empire's territories in the Middle East as colonial protectorates. Eventually these protectorates gained their independence, leading to the map of the Middle East that we know today.

As British and French influence declined, the Americans stepped in. Saudi Arabia actively cultivated ties with the United States, and during World War II, the Americans came to believe that Saudi oil was of vital strategic importance. There has been a US military presence in Saudi Arabia ever since.

During the Cold War, the Middle East was a battleground for US and Soviet interests, with the Americans supporting Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Shah of Iran, and the Soviets backing Arab socialism in Egypt, Iraq and Syria. Neither side prevailed: Israel was never destroyed but didn't rout its opponents, and the incredibly bloody Iran-Iraq war ended indecisively. No one state or superpower could control the region.

In 1990, with the Cold War coming to a close, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded the tiny neighboring emirate of Kuwait. A US-led alliance kicked him out the next year, with coalition ground forces crossing the Saudi border on February 24. The poorly led and motivated Iraqi conscript forces were swept aside with ease, and Kuwait was restored.

Saddam, however, stayed in power. To stop him from oppressing Iraq's Shi'ite and Kurd minorities, no-fly zones were set up in north and south Iraq, monitored by US, British and French aircraft, the French later withdrawing. These no-fly zones were enforced until the 2003 invasion of Iraq, accompanied by cruise missile strikes in 1993 and 1996, and a sustained four-day bombing campaign in 1998.

So by the time the Americans invaded Iraq in 2003, the US military had been operating in Iraq non-stop for twelve years already. As we know, the US-led invasion of 2003 led to the death of Saddam Hussein and the collapse of the Iraqi state, ushering in a thoroughly unstable situation where a US-supported regime is faced with a massive insurgency. Militarily, the invasion was a success; the decision to destroy the Iraqi state without any kind of realistic nation-building strategy to replace it was a disaster. American combat troops stayed in the country until 2011, when they declared "mission accomplished" and withdrew, marking 20 years of continuous operations in Iraq. The insurgency simply continued as before.

2011 was also the year of the Arab Spring: regimes were overthrown in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, protests crushed with Saudi help in Bahrain, and Libya collapsed into civil war. Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad tried to suppress protests with force, triggering the Syrian civil war. A Sunni extremist group calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant took advantage of the US withdrawal from Iraq to launch a full-scale offensive on the Iraqi government, and also became a participant in the Syrian Civil War. The Americans are intervening in the still-ongoing Syrian Civil War, along with the Russians and the Turks, and returned to Iraq in 2014. Meanwhile, a civil war also broke out in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia is carrying out air strikes to support one side. And I haven't even mentioned Israel's continuing occupation of Palestine and its ongoing violence.

So from the 1991 Gulf war to several wars still being fought in 2018, the Middle East is nearing a full thirty years of war.

**

To put all this into some kind of context, I see two major developments. First, obviously, the Arab spring exposed the unusustainability of the Cold War order. Arab socialism had atrophied into venal despotism, and with money and military aid no longer pouring in from competing superpowers, the edifices began to collapse.

Secondly, the US destruction of Iraq shattered the geopolitical balance of the Middle East. In the short term, it created the power vacuum in which ISIS was born. In the longer term, the region will be looking for a new power balance. Iran is expanding its influence, but its capabilities are being massively overhyped. Iran is not an expansionist power outside the fever dreams of American islamophobes.

Saudi Arabia, however, is taking a very different approach, which Wikipedia is already calling the Iran-Saudi Arabia proxy conflict. The Saudi intervention in Yemen and the diplomatic offensive on Qatar are the most visible tips of this iceberg, but the Saudis' growing rapprochement with Israel and their bizarre orb ceremonies with Egypt and Trump certainly make it look like Saudi Arabia intends to flex its muscles. This is the essential background to the war drums being beaten against Iran in so many places today.

In the longer run, what we're seeing is the realignment of the Middle East from a superpower battleground to an area under a US quasicolonial hegemony. The extent of the conflicts, and the number of the dead, will depend on how far the US and its allies push their advantage. A war on Iran would be the ultimate exercise in remaking the whole Middle East, which is the only actual rationale of such a war. It's particularly absurd that such a pivotal time in the history of the region is being presided over by Donald Trump, a true idiot in the classical sense: completely ignorant and seemingly unable to hold a foreign policy opinion for as long as a week, but given to random, blustering fits of childish rage. It verges on impossible to decipher whether the US actually has some kind of strategy for the Middle East, let alone what it could be. Simply because he is president, Trump's idiocy and unpredictability make every global crisis more dangerous.

In retrospect, it's difficult to overstate how catastrophically bad the US decision to invade Iraq and Afghanistan without a proper exit strategy was. There's a ton of strategic literature by various American thinkers and pundits penned after Vietnam on how the US must never again be drawn into such a quagmire again, but it was all a waste of time, because American combat troops have been in Afghanistan for twice as long as they ever spent in Vietnam, and they show no signs of getting out. Whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria, there are no signs that the Americans have any kind of credible strategy for resolving the conflicts they have become involved in, let alone the ones they started.

The only thing that seems certain is that the forever war shows no signs of ending.

Christianity, the body and neoliberal individualism

There's a huge industry dedicated to making people feel bad about their bodies and then selling them a product, whether cosmetics, clothes, superfoods, a fitness regime, whatever, that will make their supposedly hideous and ugly body more like the photoshopped perfection in these companies' ads. This kind of business model is rightly condemned, but its roots are rarely looked at. The fact is, if you traveled back in time to before this body-shaming nonsense was big business and wanted to found an industry based on tricking people into hating themselves, you would have found the perfect blueprint for your hateful con in the nearest church.

Christianity was born some time in the first century CE as an offshoot of Judaism in Roman-occupied Hellenic Palestine; to make a long story short, it largely consisted of taking a series of Judaic theological ideas and combining them with Greek philosophy and a lively expectation of the end of the world. The Greek philosopher who had the biggest impact on Christian thought was undoubtedly Plato: the dualism and juxtaposition of mind/soul and body in Phaedo became central to Christian theology. In Plato's concept of the universe, the world of ideas was the home of pure truth, while the material world was nothing but a reflection of it. The body, being of the material world, was imperfect and acted as a brake on the higher ambitions of the immaterial soul. Thus Socrates, according to Phaedo according to Plato:

We have found, they will say, a path of speculation which seems to bring us and the argument to the conclusion that while we are in the body, and while the soul is mingled with this mass of evil, our desire will not be satisfied, and our desire is of the truth. For the body is a source of endless trouble to us by reason of the mere requirement of food; and also is liable to diseases which overtake and impede us in the search after truth: and by filling us so full of loves, and lusts, and fears, and fancies, and idols, and every sort of folly, prevents our ever having, as people say, so much as a thought. For whence come wars, and fightings, and factions? whence but from the body and the lusts of the body? For wars are occasioned by the love of money, and money has to be acquired for the sake and in the service of the body; and in consequence of all these things the time which ought to be given to philosophy is lost. Moreover, if there is time and an inclination toward philosophy, yet the body introduces a turmoil and confusion and fear into the course of speculation, and hinders us from seeing the truth: and all experience shows that if we would have pure knowledge of anything we must be quit of the body, and the soul in herself must behold all things in themselves: then I suppose that we shall attain that which we desire, and of which we say that we are lovers, and that is wisdom, not while we live, but after death, as the argument shows; for if while in company with the body the soul cannot have pure knowledge, one of two things seems to follow-either knowledge is not to be attained at all, or, if at all, after death. For then, and not till then, the soul will be in herself alone and without the body.
- Phaedo, trans. by Benjamin Jowett

Christianity eagerly took up this vilification of the body, and created a reinterpretation of the paradise story of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, where in addition to being the grounds for humanity's expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the episode of the fruit also came to symbolize an original sin, the Fall, which doomed us all to the imperfection of the material world.

Whereas with Plato, the body interfered with the philosopher's quest for truth, in Christian thought the body came to symbolize original sin and acted as a barrier between humanity and God. The body was sinful, and therefore shameful, and had to be disciplined. Thus the apostle Paul:

Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. Therefore I do not run like someone running aimlessly; I do not fight like a boxer beating the air. No, I strike a blow to my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.
- 1 Corinthians 9:24-27, New International Version

Later, the writers of what became the canonical gospels had Jesus propound an even more unrealistic and hateful version of the same doctrine:

If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or crippled than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell.
- Matt. 18:8-9, New International Version

It's interesting to note that these teachings never seem to have been taken literally in the early church. When enemies of the third-century theologian Origen wanted to bring hin into disrepute, they spread an apparently false rumor that he had taken the Gospel of Matthew literally and castrated himself - because apparently actually doing what Jesus purportedly commanded would have been universally condemned.

This makes sense if you consider what the purpose of teachings like these are. If you can get people to literally hate their own body, and feel ashamed of their normal everyday life, they'll be permanently unhappy. In Paul's metaphor, the race only ends when you die. This is where the priest comes in. The clergy appoint themselves referees in this ghastly parade of self-flagellation; they can tell the suffering faithful that they're mortifying their bodies enough, or shame them for doing too little. Because ordinary life is a constant progression of sins that are impossible to avoid, a good Christian must necessarily be constantly ashamed and guilty. This gives the priest tremendous power over his congregation; exactly like a cult leader over their cultists, only we don't call them cults any more when they get big enough. So these entirely unhinged commandments to mutilate your own body were never meant to be taken seriously: they're there to give priests power over anyone who makes the mistake of believing in them.

This idea of the filthy, sinful body that needs to be constantly disciplined has since jumped from Christian theology to the weight-loss and beauty industries, where it thrives like it once did in churches. For both Christianity and Weight Watchers, cultivating a mind-body dualism where the body is the repulsive enemy of the mind has been excellent business, because it creates a demand for their services in people whose bodies would have been just fine had they not been taught to loathe them. Then again, at least the beauty industry only wants to sell you stuff you don't need; Christianity has done far worse.

The other prominent descendant of the early church and its hatred of the body is neoliberal individualism. In the logic of contemporary politics, unemployment is always the fault of the person without a job. They just need to try harder. In a neoliberal society, each and every citizen needs to heroically strive forward every day of their lives in order to be eligible for full membership in society. All distinctions of privilege are elided; if you were born poor, you should have worked harder. Those of us who are felt by our ruling elites to not be working hard enough are subjected to a constant stream of patronizing advice on how to get ahead, and it's hardly a coincidence that most of it focuses on disciplining the body. People who have never had to add up the cost of their groceries on their way to the checkout will give sermons on how to eat econonically. Tabloids run by millionaires will stoke rage over excessive "benefits" going to undesirables who will supposedly spend the money on extravagances rather than living frugally like the deserving poor should. If only all these lazy wasters would discipline themselves, the refrain always goes, they wouldn't be so poor. Obviously this political system has complex roots, but it's very difficult to not see more than a hint of the Christian idea of unending self-flagellation to prove one's worth. We even treat mental health problems as symptoms of individual weakness that should be adressed through discipline. The net effect is the same as in Christian theology: you are flawed, you are to blame, you must discipline yourself.

It's worth remembering that whatever cruel and hypocritical scam the advertisers come up with next to shame you into buying their products, or whenever a politician stands up to pour scorn on the lazy and idle parasites of society, they're doing nothing that wasn't pioneered two millenia ago by the apostle Paul and the evangelists.