Who's Afraid of Renaud Camus?
London
Renaud Camus may be the most important living thinker no one has heard of. He's certainly the most misunderstood. Mr. Camus, 78, is author of 'Le Grand Remplacement' (2011), which describes how decades of mass migration have altered his native France. He warns that Europe's current trajectory will, within a couple of generations, lead to the eclipse of its native peoples, their cultures and even Christianity.
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Los Angeles Times
6 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
‘A huge loss.' In remote Nagasaki islands, a rare version of Christianity heads toward extinction
IKITSUKI, Japan — On this small island in rural Nagasaki, Japan 's Hidden Christians gather to worship what they call the Closet God. In a special room about the size of a tatami mat is a scroll painting of a kimono-clad Asian woman. She looks like a Buddhist Bodhisattva holding a baby, but for the faithful, this is a concealed version of Mary and the baby Jesus. Another scroll shows a man wearing a kimono covered with camellias, an allusion to John the Baptist's beheading and martyrdom. There are other objects of worship from the days when Japan's Christians had to hide from vicious persecution, including a ceramic bottle of holy water from Nakaenoshima, an island where Hidden Christians were martyred in the 1620s. Little about the icons in the tiny, easy-to-miss room can be linked directly to Christianity — and that's the point. After emerging from cloistered isolation in 1865, following more than 200 years of violent harassment by Japan's insular warlord rulers, many of the formerly underground Christians converted to mainstream Catholicism. Some, however, continued to practice not the religion that 16th century foreign missionaries originally taught them, but the idiosyncratic, difficult to detect version they'd nurtured during centuries of clandestine cat-and-mouse with a brutal regime. On Ikitsuki and other remote sections of Nagasaki prefecture, Hidden Christians still pray to these disguised objects. They still chant in a Latin that hasn't been widely used in centuries. And they still cherish a religion that directly links them to a time of samurai, shoguns and martyred missionaries and believers. Now, though, the Hidden Christians are dying out, and there is growing certainty that their unique version of Christianity will die with them. Almost all are now elderly, and as the young move away to cities or turn their backs on the faith, those remaining are desperate to preserve evidence of this offshoot of Christianity — and convey to the world what its loss will mean. 'At this point, I'm afraid we are going to be the last ones,' said Masatsugu Tanimoto, 68, one of the few who can still recite the Latin chants that his ancestors learned 400 years ago. 'It is sad to see this tradition end with our generation.' Christianity spread rapidly in 16th century Japan when Jesuit priests had spectacular success converting warlords and peasants alike, most especially on the southern main island of Kyushu, where the foreigners established trading ports in Nagasaki. Hundreds of thousands, by some estimates, embraced the religion. That changed after the shoguns began to see Christianity as a threat. The crackdown that followed in the early 17th century was fierce, with thousands killed and the remaining believers chased underground. As Japan opened up to foreign influence, a dozen Hidden Christians clad in kimono cautiously declared their faith, and their remarkable perseverance, to a French Catholic priest in March 1865 in Nagasaki city. Many became Catholics after Japan formally lifted the ban on Christianity in 1873. But others chose to stay Kakure Kirishitan (Hidden Christians), continuing to practice what their ancestors preserved during their days underground. In interviews with The Associated Press, Hidden Christians spoke of a deep communal bond stemming from a time when a lapse could doom a practitioner or their neighbors. Hidden Christians were forced to hide all visible signs of their religion after the 1614 ban on Christianity and the expulsion of foreign missionaries. Households took turns hiding precious ritual objects and hosting the secret services that celebrated both faith and persistence. This still happens today, with the observance of rituals unchanged since the 16th century. The group leader in the Ikitsuki area is called Oji, which means father or elderly man in Japanese. Members take turns in the role, presiding over baptisms, funerals and ceremonies for New Year, Christmas and local festivals. Different communities worship different icons and have different ways of performing the rituals. In Sotome, for instance, people prayed to a statue of what they called Maria Kannon, a genderless Bodhisattva of mercy, as a substitute for Mary. In Ibaragi, where about 18,000 residents embraced Christianity in the 1580s, a lacquer bowl with a cross painted on it, a statue of the crucified Christ and an ivory statue of Mary were found hidden in what was called 'a box not to be opened.' Many Hidden Christians rejected Catholicism after the persecution ended because Catholic priests refused to recognize them as real Christians unless they agreed to be rebaptized and abandon the Buddhist altars that their ancestors used. 'They are very proud of what they and their ancestors have believed in' for hundreds of years, even at the risk of their lives, said Emi Mase-Hasegawa, a religion studies professor at J.F. Oberlin University in Tokyo. Tanimoto believes his ancestors continued the Hidden Christian traditions because becoming Catholic meant rejecting the Buddhism and Shintoism that had become a strong part of their daily lives underground. 'I'm not a Christian,' Tanimoto said. Even though some of their Latin chants focus on the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ, their prayers are also meant to 'ask our ancestors to protect us, to protect our daily lives,' he said. 'We are not doing this to worship Jesus or Mary. … Our responsibility is to faithfully carry on the way our ancestors had practiced.' Hidden Christians' ceremonies often include the recitation of Latin chants, called Orasho. The Orasho comes from the original Latin or Portuguese prayers brought to Japan by 16th century missionaries. Recently on Ikitsuki, three men performed a rare Orasho. All wore dark formal kimonos and solemnly made the sign of the cross in front of their faces before starting their prayers — a mix of archaic Japanese and Latin. Tanimoto, a farmer, is the youngest of only four men who can recite Orasho in his community. As a child, he regularly saw men performing Orasho on tatami mats before an altar when neighbors gathered for funerals and memorials. About 40 years ago, in his mid-20s, he took Orasho lessons from his uncle so he could pray to the Closet God that his family has kept for generations. Tanimoto recently showed the AP a weathered copy of a prayer his grandfather wrote with a brush and ink, like the ones his ancestors had diligently copied from older generations. As he carefully turned the pages of the Orasho book, Tanimoto said he mostly understands the Japanese but not the Latin. It's difficult, he said, but 'we just memorize the whole thing.' Today, because funerals are no longer held at homes and younger people are leaving the island, Orasho is only performed two or three times a year. There are few studies of Hidden Christians so it's not clear how many still exist. There were an estimated 30,000 in Nagasaki, including about 10,000 in Ikitsuki, in the 1940s, according to government figures. But the last confirmed baptism ritual was in 1994, and some estimates say there are less than 100 Hidden Christians left on Ikitsuki. Hidden Christianity is linked to the communal ties that formed when Japan was a largely agricultural society. Those ties crumbled as the country modernized after WWII, with recent developments revolutionizing people's lives, even in rural Japan. The accompanying decline in the population of farmers and young people, along with women increasingly working outside of the home, has made it difficult to maintain the tight networks that nurtured Hidden Christianity. 'In a society of growing individualism, it is difficult to keep Hidden Christianity as it is,' said Shigeo Nakazono, the head of a local folklore museum who has researched and interviewed Hidden Christians for 30 years. Hidden Christianity has a structural weakness, he said, because there are no professional religious leaders tasked with teaching doctrine and adapting the religion to environmental changes. Nakazono has started collecting artifacts and archiving video interviews he's done with Hidden Christians since the 1990s, seeking to preserve a record of the endangered religion. Mase-Hasegawa agreed that Hidden Christianity is on its way to extinction. 'As a researcher, it will be a huge loss,' she said. Masashi Funabara, 63, a retired town hall official, said most of the nearby groups have disbanded over the last two decades. His group, which now has only two families, is the only one left, down from nine in his district. They meet only a few times a year. 'The amount of time we are responsible for these holy icons is only about 20 to 30 years, compared to the long history when our ancestors kept their faith in fear of persecution. When I imagined their suffering, I felt that I should not easily give up,' Funabara said. Just as his father did when memorizing the Orasho, Funabara has written down passages in notebooks; he hopes his son, who works for the local government, will one day agree to be his successor. Tanimoto also wants his son to keep the tradition alive. 'Hidden Christianity itself will go extinct sooner or later, and that is inevitable, but I hope it will go on at least in my family,' he said. 'That's my tiny glimmer of hope.' Klug, Yamaguchi and Ono write for the Associated Press. Tokyo photographer Eugene Hoshiko contributed to this story.
Yahoo
10 hours ago
- Yahoo
Joni Ernst's "we're all going to die" pushes MAGA's toxic Christian compassion on us all
Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, certainly has absorbed the first rule of MAGA: You're never in the wrong as long as you're "triggering" the liberals. On Friday, she drew outrage from her constituents at a town hall in Butler County, Iowa, with her bizarre defense of taking away people's medical care to pay for tax cuts for billionaires: "Well, we're all going to die." The crowd, furious about her plans to vote for drastic cuts to Medicaid that will deprive millions of health care, booed her. Ernst, having absorbed Donald Trump's philosophy of always doubling down, responded on Saturday with a favorite lady MAGA trick: pretending to be stupid. "I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that, yes, we are all going to perish from this earth," she sneered while walking in a cemetery. "So I apologize, and I'm really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well." Ernst may play the mean bimbo for the camera, but she is aware that people aren't asking to live forever. They just don't want to die decades before their time, due to a lack of basic health care. But while most of the media focused on her act, her follow-up spin was, if anything, even more callous. She invoked Jesus Christ as the reason it's okay to let people die from easily preventable causes. "But for those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I encourage you to embrace my lord and savior, Jesus Christ," she smugly those whose understanding of Christianity is based on compassion and love, this comment was jarring. But Ernst understands the second rule of MAGA: their version of Christian "love" is cruelty. When Ernst was asked again about her comments by a CBS News reporter on Monday, she snapped. "I'm very compassionate," she barked while running for an elevator. Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark speculated on MSNBC that Ernst "must be having a nervous breakdown." That's doubtful, as Ernst drove to the cemetery, recorded herself, and likely had a younger staffer edit and post the video to Instagram. This was a deliberate choice, which makes more sense in light of the larger trend in white evangelical circles to redefine empathy as a "sin" and insist that unfeelingness is a higher form of compassion. As David French explained in the New York Times: At the same time, hard-right Christians began to turn against the very idea of empathy. Last year a popular right-wing podcaster, Allie Beth Stuckey, published a best-selling book called 'Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion.' This month, a right-wing theologian, Joe Rigney, is publishing a book called 'The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits.' These Christians claim that true compassion comes from rejecting empathy, arguing that empathy gets in the way of speaking what they believe are "hard truths" they need to browbeat alleged sinners with. This is how the conservative Christian convinces himself it's love to deny LGBTQ people their freedom, because compelling heterosexuality will get them into heaven. Or to believe it's compassion to scream invective at a woman entering an abortion clinic, which gets reimagined as "counseling" the women to stop sinning. These are the rationalizations of people who want to hate while denying they are hateful. Ernst's behavior also shows how it can be used to justify opposition to Republican hostility towards Jesus' call to care for the poor and the disabled, especially if doing so means a slightly higher tax rate for the wealthy. Holly Berkley Fletcher, the author of the upcoming book "The Missionary Kids: Unmasking the Myths of White Evangelicalism," explained this in her Monday newsletter. Evangelicals tell themselves they "prioritize saving souls for eternity over helping bodies in the here and now," she wrote. In reality, of course, it's a way "to avoid responsibility and reform and to serve their own interests." Ernst's implication that people should welcome suffering and death has a long and ignoble history. Fletcher notes slave owners used this message to bully enslaved people in the 19th century. In recent years, the idea was revived due to the COVID-19 pandemic as a way to justify Republican opposition to life-saving measures like social distancing, masks, and eventually, vaccination. By October 2020, Tucker Carlson of Fox News was sounding this message, declaring, "At some point we are all going to die. Dying is the central fact of life," and suggesting that was reason enough to pull back all public health measures. It was a message that got a huge boost from evangelicals, especially pastors at megachurches who didn't want to put church services online, depriving them of the adulation of the adoring crowd. Rev. Tony Spell of Louisiana drew headlines in early 2020 by declaring, "True Christians do not mind dying." Caleb Mathis, pastor at the enormous Crossroads Church of Ohio, wrote at the time, "I hope it's the end of the world," because he believes heaven "sounds pretty freakin' amazing." Even after the vaccine, Joy Pullman of The Federalist wrote an article titled, "For Christians, Dying From COVID (Or Anything Else) Is A Good Thing." In it, she argued, "There is nothing we can do to make our days on earth one second longer or shorter," and also "death is good." None of these folks live by their own pro-death rules, of course. They see a doctor or take other measures to protect their health. It's only when they're asked to help others, whether through vaccination or paying slightly more in taxes, that they find this duty in others to welcome death with a smile. But this is worse than the usual Republican hypocrisy. It also reflects the increasingly Christian nationalist bent of the GOP. They are explicitly arguing that everyone else has to live by their fundamentalist religious belief that death is good. You may be an atheist, a non-Christian, or a more liberal Christian who believes in healing the sick. Too bad for you. In the MAGA view, we're all members of their fanatical death cult, whether we like it or not. The good news is that Ernst's shut-up-and-die ideology is not popular, even with a lot of people who consider themselves conservative Christians. On Monday, Democratic state Rep. J.D. Scholten announced that he's challenging Ernst in the 2026 election. Scholten told the Des Moines Register, "When she doubled down on Saturday with her, I felt, very disrespectful comments, I was like, 'OK, game on.'" It's a long shot in a deep-red state, but Scholten has some advantages, including being the pitcher for the Sioux City Explorers. He also has a long history of advocating for universal health care, drawing a contrast with Ernst's nihilistic views. Iowa is considered conservative, but its voting population has a significantly higher percentage of elderly individuals compared to the rest of the country. They may be especially hostile to Ernst's suck-it-up-and-die message.
Yahoo
15 hours ago
- Yahoo
Takeaways from AP's reporting on looming extinction of rare version of Christianity in rural Japan
IKITSUKI, Japan (AP) — On the rural islands of Nagasaki a handful of believers practice a version of Christianity that has direct links to a time of samurai, shoguns and martyred missionaries and believers. After emerging from hiding in 1865, following centuries of violent persecution by Japan's insular warlord rulers, many of the formerly underground Christians converted to mainstream Catholicism. Some Hidden Christians, however, continued to follow not the religion that 16th century foreign missionaries originally taught them, but the idiosyncratic, difficult to detect version they'd nurtured during centuries of clandestine cat-and-mouse with a brutal regime. On Ikitsuki and other remote sections of Nagasaki prefecture, Hidden Christians still pray to what they call the Closet God — scroll paintings of Mary and Jesus, disguised as a Buddhist Bodhisattva and hidden in special closets. They still chant in a Latin that hasn't been widely used in centuries. Now, though, the Hidden Christians are disappearing. Almost all are elderly, and as the young move to cities or turn their backs on the faith, those remaining are desperate to preserve evidence of this unique offshoot of Christianity — and convey to the world what its loss will mean. 'At this point, I'm afraid we are going to be the last ones,' said Masatsugu Tanimoto, 68, one of the few who can recite the Latin chants his ancestors learned 400 years ago. Here are some key takeaways from The Associated Press' extensive reporting on a dwindling group of faithful who still worship today as their ancestors did when forced underground in the 17th century. They rejected Catholicism even after the persecution ended Christianity spread rapidly in 16th century Japan when Jesuit priests converted warlords and peasants alike, most especially on the southern main island of Kyushu, where the foreigners established trading ports in Nagasaki. Hundreds of thousands, by some estimates, embraced the religion. That changed after the shoguns began to see the religion as a threat. The crackdown that followed in the early 17th century was fierce. Many continued to practice in hiding, and when Japan opened up and allowed Christianity, they emerged and became Catholics. But others chose to stay Kakure Kirishitan (Hidden Christians), continuing to worship as their ancestors did underground. Hidden Christianity developed when a lapse in secrecy could be deadly Catholics have churches, priests and centuries of hard-fought dogma. But Hidden Christians were forced to hide all visible signs of their religion after the 1614 ban on Christianity and the expulsion of foreign missionaries. Households took turns keeping precious ritual objects hidden safely and hosting the secret services that celebrated both faith and persistence. This still happens today, and one of the most remarkable things about the religion is the ease with which an observer can feel unmoored from time, transported by rituals unchanged since the 16th century. Different communities worship different icons and have different ways of performing the rituals. In Sotome, for instance, people prayed to a statue of what they called Maria Kannon, a genderless Bodhisattva of mercy, as a substitute for Mary. They take pride in clinging to the old ways Many Hidden Christians rejected Catholicism after the persecution ended because Catholic priests refused to recognize them as real Christians unless they agreed to be rebaptized and abandon the Buddhist altars that their ancestors used. Tanimoto believes his ancestors continued the Hidden Christian traditions because becoming Catholic meant rejecting the Buddhism and Shintoism that had become such a strong part of their daily lives underground. 'We are not doing this to worship Jesus or Mary," he said. "Our responsibility is to faithfully carry on the way our ancestors had practiced.' An important part of Hidden Christians' ceremonies is the recitation of Latin chants, called Orasho. The Orasho comes from the original Latin or Portuguese prayers brought to Japan by 16th century missionaries. Tanimoto recently showed AP a weathered copy of a prayer his grandfather wrote with a brush and ink, just like the ones his ancestors had diligently copied from older generations. Today, because funerals are no longer held at homes and younger people are leaving the island for work and school, Orasho is only performed two or three times a year. Hidden Christianity is dying, and the faithful know it There were an estimated 30,000 in Nagasaki, including about 10,000 in Ikitsuki, in the 1940s, according to government figures, but nobody has been baptized since 1994. Hidden Christianity is linked to the communal ties that formed when Japan was a largely agricultural society. Those ties crumbled as the country rapidly modernized after WWII, with recent developments revolutionizing people's lives, even in rural Japan. Hidden Christianity has a structural weakness, experts say, because there are no professional religious leaders tasked with teaching doctrine and adapting the religion to environmental changes. Researchers are collecting artifacts and archiving video interviews with Hidden Christians in an attempt to preserve a record of the endangered religion. Masashi Funabara, 63, a retired town hall official, said most of the nearby groups have disbanded over the last two decades. His group, which now has only two families, is the only one left, down from nine in his district. They used to perform prayers almost every month; now they meet only a few times a year. 'The amount of time we are responsible for these holy icons is only about 20 to 30 years, compared to the long history when our ancestors kept their faith in fear of persecution. When I imagined their suffering, I felt that I should not easily give up,' Funabara said. Just as his father did when memorizing the Orasho, Funabara has written down passages in notebooks. He hopes the notes will help convince his son, who works for the local government, to one day be his successor. ___ Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP's collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
