Intro to Series Two

Featuring the finest minds in Catholic media, "finest" meaning minds that have been ground into very tiny dust

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies."
-C.S. Lewis

"Every person I knew in my life who loved C.S. Lewis deserved to be put through a wheat thresher."
- Felix Biederman

In 1926, a Catholic priest in Detroit named Charles Coughlin started a radio show about how much he hated Jews. In fairness to Coughlin, I don’t think he’d agree with me that his show was “about” that, but regardless, Father Coughlin’s show ran for over a decade and reached tens of millions of listeners, and is one of the first instances of clergy using mass media to discuss the intersection of Catholicism and American politics. Coughlin was also a rabid antisemite and used his show to promulgate wild conspiracy theories about Jewish people controlling the US government behind the scenes, and he was openly supportive of Hilter and Mussolini’s governments overseas. Permits for radio broadcasters were created in the 1930s specifically so FDR’s government could deny one to Coughlin and keep him off of the air; at one point, the attorney general considered charging Coughlin with sedition, and he was forbidden to distribute his newsletter through the postal service. Coughlin was defiant throughout his career, and brushed off his critics as enemies of the real America, trying to silence the truth.

You can find pop culture references to Coughlin as a fascist propagandist in Arthur Miller, Philip Roth, Sinclair Lewis, and Dr. Seuss; Coughlin is considered a forerunner of hard-right talk radio and right-wing opinion media in general. Right-wing opinion media, of course, is running the world today, to the extent that the President of the United States literally watches Fox and Friends every morning and makes policy decisions based on what Steve Doocey tells him through his screen. This isn’t great, and it’s especially not-great in a very polarized country facing foreign and domestic crises on multiple fronts. But our church is also very polarized, it’s also in crisis, and we also have a right-wing media infrastructure, run by men doing their best Father Coughlin impressions, and it’s those men that will be the subject for this February series of Grift of the Holy Spirit.

So to those of you wondering, “wait, does that mean you’re going to talk about the Catholic equivalent of Fox News”, I’d say “of course not, that’s so 2009”. There are plenty of other, far more reactionary media outlets with much clearer analogues in Catholicism. New media has Alex Jones spreading violent and outlandish conspiracy theories about the highest levels of our government; Catholics have professor Taylor Marshall redpilling his fans and detailing the secret Communist Masonic plot to control the Vatican. Conservatives have the National Review and Republican intellectuals trying to flop-sweat their way back into relevance in an increasingly brutal political era; Catholics have Sohrab Ahmari, who is willing to abandon American democracy because he saw one (1) drag queen. The internet had Andrew Breitbart, the now-deceased white nationalist who built his eponymous website to poison political debate and firmly plant fascism in the conservative movement; Catholics have Church Militant and Michael Voris, who maybe will also someday die of a heart attack while shitting. These three men carry on the legacy of Father Coughlin today, and I hope you enjoy reading their bonkers stories in this new series of G.O.T.H.S., and learning about how they shape large parts of the church today.