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 unvaccinated 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: 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 if only a couple things were different, 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-overlapping magisteria," either in the gouldian sense of a multicultural modus vivendi 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 untenable. 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.