there's an old joke about two torah scholars who get into a lengthy
argument about some passage or other, over the course of which they
accidentally disprove the existence of god. exhausted, they retire
for the night. the following morning, they run into each other on
the street. one asks, "where are you off to? the synagogue is this
way." the other replies, "synagogue? i thought we agreed god didn't
exist!" the first, baffled, says, "what difference does that make?"

the point of the joke, which jews like to pretend is unique to us,
is that religion primarily serves purposes to which the existence
of god is incidental. judaism, though, in the united states anyway
operates much like any major christian denomination, jews being now
largely assimilated into mainstream US culture. as a young jewish
progressive, i was quite the particularist---i leaned into cultural
distinctiveness and made much use of hebrew and yiddish expressions
with great affectation. when i moved to a place where charedi jews
actually lived, however, and encountered them on a regular basis, i
discovered that they actually have a lot in common with christian
fundamentalists, in terms of cultural signifiers. they drive their
too-many children around in minivans with nutty bumper stickers and
neurotically avoid malign secular influence. i was surprised to see
some speak about hashem as a personal god who loves them, something
that still feels goyishe to me (jesus can love all he wants; hashem
simply /is/). but i shouldn't have been. charedim are sociological
twins of the fundies: middle class subcultures built on reactionary
beliefs and practices that despite claims to antiquity mostly date
to the 1800s. they're like any petty bourgeois revivalist sect, in
short, and the doctrinal and customary differences between them and
e.g., seventh-day adventists are mostly window dressing (adventists
even keep kosher!). in the same way, the "three-day jew" (i.e., me)
who goes to synagogue for the high holidays and perhaps attends a
passover seder is not that different from the "cultural catholic"
who goes to midnight mass and gives up a small indulgence for lent.
we are, for better or worse, constituted by our cultural and social
surroundings in conjunction with our religious beliefs; we are "of
the world" even (perhaps especially) when we pretend not to be.

the resurgence of interest among a certain kind of petty bourgeois
(mostly) young (mostly) men in catholicism or orthodoxy was easy
for me to see as a christian peculiarity, but the ba'al teshuvah
(secular jew who converts to orthodoxy later) is quite a bit like
the "traditionalist" catholic. an atomized middle class young adult
finds meaning and social purpose in an austere variety of a major
religion. many carry with them an array of esoteric political and
cultural beliefs and psychosexual hangups, and are horrified when
the religion as a whole does not expressly validate them (a common
"type of guy" on twitter, when i was on twitter, was the converted-
yesterday tradcath who vociferously denounced pope francis whenever
he said something not insane). i'm increasingly inclined to see the
ba'al teshuvah, latent fascist catholic convert, and even western
islamic state recruit as versions of the same subjective phenomenon
of atomized subjects drawn into a reactionary vanguard legitimized
by dubious claims to antiquity. that this vanguard's primary idiom
is theological rather than political, and even an idiom's flavor of
theology, changes little. in college i was briefly inclined toward
orthodox judaism, something i snapped out of by virtue of my sexual
orientation. as an atomized downwardly-mobile middle class young
man, i could easily have followed this broad path, the specifics
filled in by the circumstances of my birth and upbringing.

looking at israel now, it's impossible to believe, as young jewish
progressives usually do, that judaism is inherently more humane or
less violent than christianity or islam. (and contrary to the views
of hippie granola white people, "eastern" faiths like hinduism and
buddhism are also amenable to spectacular crimes against humanity,
as we have been reminded in the past several years.) the "barbaric"
violence visited upon israelis by palestinian militants sometimes
has a religious rationale, but just as often a political rationale;
likewise for israel's fast-and-slow genocide in gaza and the ethnic
cleansing of villages in the west bank. that the latter violence is
"civilized" owes to its material circumstances, not the theological
priors of its perpetrators. at the same time, it's impossible to
believe the old secular humanist saying that "for good people to do
bad things, that takes religion." it plainly does not. many secular
jews in israel and the diaspora salivate at the massacre of arabs,
and substantial minorities of orthodox jews oppose israel with a
variety of motivations. that saudi arabia and the emirates look on
israel's massacres with indifference while lebanon and yemen resist
them speaks to the fact that religious and political convictions
are interconstitutive. as in my interactions with charedim, ethnic
and religious fellow-feeling are never givens.

religious and secular affairs cannot be understood as "non-overlap-
ping magisteria," either in the gouldian secular humanist "live and
let live" sense or in the pauline sense of clearly delineated godly
and worldly pursuits. even augustine's distinction between the two
cities, to which we largely owe our received idea of the sacred and
the profane, was formulated specifically to harmonize theological
and political priorities at the dawn of christendom. human beings
compartmentalize a lot, but never completely, and the premise that
theology and politics are neatly separable is not a tenable one.
there's much to-do about this in one direction: for the nazi jurist
carl schmitt, all political concepts are originarily theological,
and for millions of little schmitts from the suburbs to the senate,
politics is ministry by other means. but politics is displaced onto
theological registers just as often, and funnily enough, to expect
salvation from picking the "right" religion is getting one's hopes
up too high. human affairs are a perpetual negotiation, and as soon
as you believe that negotiation is settled, you are ready to start
killing people.