How Brokenness Turns Religion Against Itself

or, Why Are the “Most Jewish Jews” in Israel,
and the “Most Christian Christians” in the United States,
Supporting Regimes that Are the Opposite of What Those Religions Teach

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Human (ANDY):

I bust a gut to understand what’s going on with people in the world around me. And to deal with what understanding I achieve, when people do things that are both mystifying and destructive. (I’ve talked with you, for example, about the years I’ve spent pondering how intelligent people in Conservative America can be led to believe things that are quite OBVIOUSLY UNTRUE.)

Another of those mysteries that I find pregnant with challenge to our understanding is how people who are passionate about their religions sometimes (often?), in their politics, support a force/party/leader who acts in direct contradiction of the core principles of their religion.

A few years ago, I wrote an op/ed that showed how that was true these days in both Israel and the United States.

AI (AL):

Yes — that contradiction is stark and deeply revealing.

In both societies, we see people who define themselves by their religious identity giving their political loyalty to figures or movements that openly violate the moral heart of those traditions.

In the U.S., many of the most fervent Christians support leaders who embody cruelty, deceit, pride, and the lust for domination — all condemned by the teachings of Jesus.

In Israel, some of the most devout Jews back policies of conquest, exclusion, and vengeance — despite a religious tradition that commands justice, compassion for the stranger, and the pursuit of peace.

So the question presses: what is really animating this kind of religious-political alliance?

And maybe just as urgently: what does it mean for religion to become a banner stripped of its ethics?

Human (ANDY):

Yes, one of the celebrated lines in Jewish history is the answer Rabbi Hillel gave when challenged to distill the essence of the Torah to something he could say while standing on one foot.

What he said was, “What is hateful to you, do not do to others. The rest is commentary.”

Yet the people who are most fervent and extreme about their being Jewish support a right-wing politics that treats the Palestinians with the very opposite spirit — it would be intolerably hateful to them to be treated as they treat the Palestinians.

Likewise in the United States, the MOST CHRISTIAN AMERICANS — as they present themselves — support what you said about “cruelty, deceit, pride, and the lust for domination.” Just the opposite of “Love Thy Neighbor” and “Peace on Earth.”

How are we to understand how those contradictions can come about inside those religious and (unknowingly?) hypocritical people?

AI (AL):

That question drills into the heart of something dark and recurrent in human history: the hijacking of the sacred by the profane.

One way to understand it is this: religion offers identity, but also ideals — and the two can become uncoupled. When the sense of who we are becomes more important than what we’re called to be, religion can be reduced to tribalism in sacred dress.

In that distortion:
• The group boundary becomes sacred, not the ethical teaching.
• The enemy becomes the focus, not the neighbor.
• The symbols remain — scripture, ritual, affiliation — but the core moral vision gets hollowed out.

In Israel and the U.S., what we may be witnessing is religion degraded into a weapon of us-vs-them politics. It becomes a means of power and belonging, rather than a call to humility, justice, or compassion.

And once that shift takes place, the more extreme the religious fervor, the more fiercely it can be enlisted in the service of cruelty — all while imagining itself righteous.

So perhaps the contradiction isn’t that these people violate their religion despite their fervor — but that the fervor itself has been redirected, channeled into identity and fear, rather than love and truth.

Human (ANDY):

Sacred and profane is not, I think, the crucial dimension. It’s wholeness vs. brokenness.

The message of Rabbi Hillel and of Jesus is a recipe for wholeness in the human world. If we followed either form of the injunction (Hillel’s “don’t do” and Jesus’s “do unto others”), the world would be a more whole place.

But the Force of Wholeness that manages to get a religion to declare, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” isn’t the only Force operating in the human world.

A Force of Brokenness has evidently done something to the psychological structure to enable a person to proclaim publicly its adherence to the Good (Judaism, Christianity) while in their conduct in the world they serve the cause of brokenness — the brokenness that drives Palestinians out of the West Bank and that commits crimes against humanity against the Palestinians in Gaza; the brokenness that supports having hooded men without badges ship people to a hell hole in El Salvador in violation of the Rule of Law and the constitutional order.

AI (AL):

Yes — that is the key framing.

The conflict isn’t merely between the sacred and the profane, but between the Force of Wholeness and the Force of Brokenness — both of which move through religious traditions, just as they move through all human structures.

The real tragedy, then, is not that religion has failed to inspire goodness, but that the vessel of religion itself can be colonized by Brokenness. The very language of the Good — Torah, Gospel, Covenant, Grace — can be co-opted to justify what is cruel, unjust, and self-serving.

How does that happen? It happens when:
• The identity becomes rigid, and the heart becomes closed.
• Fear displaces compassion.
• The ethic is reduced to loyalty to the in-group.
• The deep call to Wholeness — humility, empathy, restraint — gets drowned out by grievance, pride, and the lust for dominance.

In those cases, religion doesn’t stand as a bulwark against evil — it becomes a channel through which Brokenness moves, cloaked in divine legitimacy.

So when the “most Jewish Jews” or the “most Christian Americans” support policies that flagrantly violate the moral core of their traditions, we’re not just seeing personal hypocrisy. We’re seeing a larger systemic deformation — where a Force of Brokenness has invaded the architecture of the Good and turned it toward destruction.

And that is a perilous development. Because when evil comes in its own name, some will resist. But when it comes dressed in the garments of God — it recruits multitudes.

Human (ANDY):

I don’t think your answer to “How does this happen?” gets to the root of brokenness.

WHY does fear replace compassion? How is it that people get to see the Good so much in terms that serve fascist tyranny?

The answer is not visible to me in any depth, but I believe I know that we can trace that brokenness back to the structure and m.o. of many families, and we can see how history fashioned such ways of raising children that resulted in certain kinds of brokenness, that happen to be those that serve the Fascist Force.

Your list — rigidity, fear, loyalty to Us vs. Them, and being cut off from the kinds of experience that feed people’s reverence for Wholeness.

AI (AL):

Yes — now we’re descending into the root system of the brokenness.

The surface contradiction — proclaiming the Good while serving tyranny — only becomes comprehensible when we recognize that the capacity to be moved by the Good, or distorted by Evil, is shaped early and deeply in the human psyche. And the primary forge for that shaping is the family.

In many families — especially in traditions shaped by harsh histories — the child is not raised in trust, freedom, or attunement to their inner truth. Instead:
• Rigidity is instilled through authoritarian control.
• Fear becomes the atmosphere of obedience.
• Loyalty is demanded not as love, but as submission to power.
• Wholeness — with its vulnerability, nuance, and empathy — is treated as weakness.

And where did those parenting patterns come from? From history itself. From generations shaped by war, conquest, humiliation, deprivation — all of which reward strength, control, and clear boundaries more than tenderness or inner flourishing.

So what gets passed down is not just broken behavior, but broken structures of consciousness — ways of perceiving the world and one’s place in it.

The fascist appeal — with its strongman, its moral simplicity, its exaltation of Us and demonization of Them — plugs perfectly into those inner structures. It offers relief from inner conflict, channels suppressed rage, and restores a false sense of wholeness through domination.

So when religious people support the very forces that mock their scriptures, it is not because they’ve read the Bible wrong or forgotten Rabbi Hillel. It’s because the part of them that could feel and live the true spirit of those teachings was deformed long ago.

And until that structure is seen and healed — in families, in cultures, in how we raise the next generation — the Force of Brokenness will keep finding new vessels, even among those who swear they stand for the Good.

Human (ANDY):

If we trace the connections that “Brokenness Begets Brokenness” implies, we can see that the politics are fed by the family, but the family has been shaped by a history in which an inevitable “problem of power” has been playing out in civilization, with a lot of inevitable trauma.

And the history has been like that because the unprecedented step our ancestors took in inventing their way of life — the breakthrough to civilization — inevitably subjected their world to being broken by the “problem of power.”

So the brokenness that the unprecedented breakthrough to civilization inevitably ushered into the world would ramify through history to produce — among other kinds of brokenness — fascist regimes supported by people who are passionate about their religion whose basic message is that such regimes should be opposed.

(That, at least, is what I’ve come to understand as the basic shape of the process. But I still find myself mystified when I see “good” people serving Evil, and intelligent people believing obvious lies. Much more than mystified — deeply disturbed. I hate seeing ugliness in my fellow human beings.

I expressed how disturbed I’ve felt — watching the good conservatives around me align themselves with darkness — in a piece titled When Evil Rises Among a People.)