Good Guys, Bad Takes
A Sunday Double Feature
I love the Netflix show Narcos.
In Narcos Season 1, multiple Marxist-leaning priests make an appearance, because Latin American Catholicism has spent the last century engaging in an extended and deeply dysfunctional love affair with leftist ideology. Case in point: Father Camilo Torres Restrepo, one of the patron saints of liberation theology, who didn’t just sermonize about the plight of the poor—he went full Che Guevara, picked up a rifle, and joined the National Liberation Army (ELN), a leftist guerrilla outfit. Predictably, his experiment in armed theology ended badly—he was gunned down in 1966, becoming both a martyr and a cautionary tale about what happens when priests start reading too much Marx and not enough Aquinas.
Then there’s Gustavo Gutiérrez, the Peruvian Marxist Catholic priest who effectively codified Latin America’s ideological Stockholm syndrome in his 1971 manifesto, A Theology of Liberation. This book was influential enough to trigger the alarm bells of one Joseph Ratzinger—future Pope Benedict XVI—who spent a sizable chunk of the 1970s writing polemics against the growing trend of Christianized Marxism. The irony, of course, is that his successor—one Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a.k.a. Pope Francis—would go on to embody everything Ratzinger warned about, a theological case study in “be careful what you wish for.” And yes, Francis named himself after St. Francis of Assisi, the medieval saint who made radical poverty trendy—much to the horror of his well-to-do merchant father. The historical symmetry would be poetic if it weren’t so painful.
The Catholic Church in Latin America didn’t just passively witness political chaos—it actively engineered it. The people needed the Gospel, but their priests handed them liberation theology instead; fathers needed jobs to support their families, but the Church peddled grievance narratives that wrecked entire economies.
Baptizing Marxism is a fool’s errand at best and outright civilizational arson at worst. The unspoken irony of mass illegal migration to the Protestant-Capitalist citadel of America is that the very people fleeing its dysfunction often arrive clinging to the ideological cancer that produced it. If there’s a cosmic lesson here, it’s this: beware the power of stupid people in large groups.
And yet, despite all this, I still have a deep admiration for the Catholic Church in many respects. Thinkers like Ratzingertried—valiantly, if futilely—to expose liberation theology for what it was: a spiritualized Marxist poison pill. But Latin America had been conditioned to see grievance as a form of righteousness, and you can’t build a future on weaponized nostalgia.
This is why Augustine’s Corpus Permixtum should be required reading for any racial or cultural group tempted by the seductions of Marxist resentment—because grievance mutates into hubris, and hubris, as we all know, is what got Satan kicked out of heaven in the first place.
David Bentley Hart once suggested that, were the devil to appear today, he’d take the form of Donald Trump—which is clever, sure, but entirely predictable. I’d argue that if Satan were to show up in the 21st century, he’d take the form of David Bentley Hart himself. We already know that Trump worships money; that’s not the scandal. The real scandal is that theologians—meant to illuminate the path forward—now prostrate themselves at the altar of identity politics and weaponized “kindness.” Trump’s vices are obvious and well-documented; the greater betrayal is that the very people meant to expose vice have quietly baptized their own under the guise of “progress.”
Here are the worst takes on the internet this week, but more important, the most dangerous:
