On the Revival of Religion in the West

During his recent visit to Rome, Chicago Mayor Johnson shared the following, “As far as reaching young people and even church attendance, the real encouraging thing right now is what we’re experiencing with Pope Leo the XIV, is that there are folks who are coming back into the faith.” He also stated, “I’m hopeful that as the church continues to emerge, as our communities continue to cry out for justice, that you’ll see a revival of sorts.”

I think that Mayor Johnson is correct and that the trend towards secularization in the West will eventually begin to reverse itself. In fact some recent data suggests that it already has. I offer the following reasons why we will see a resurgence of religiosity in the West in our lifetimes:

  1. Ecological uncertainty: As climate change continues to upend people’s lives, religion will be increasingly seen as an anchor of stability in a chaotic and uncertain world.
  2. Political conflict: Religion will both provide a social-emotional salve to some in relation to political upheaval. However, it will also be a source of conflict and division, that is, a way of aggregating humanity along partisan lines.
  3. Social justice: In contrast to the above, discourses pertaining to justice will also be a draw for many, bringing back into the fold of religion. The politics of the current and previous pope (to say nothing of certain Islamic scholars, practitioners of indigenous traditions, Buddhist exponents, and so on) will play no small part in the growth of religion in the West, especially among younger adherents.
  4. Moral reversion: Many will consider aspects of the progressivism of the last decades as indicative of amorality, if not immorality, leading to an embrace of religion as a source of moral authority.
  5. The search for meaning: Religion (along with philosophy) remains one of the most potent tools for finding meaning and addressing existential questions about the nature and meaning of existence. This capacity remains potent despite science’s profoundly useful explanatory power pertaining to the material universe.

Source: Yin, Alice. 2026. “Mayor Brandon Johnson predicts revival of faith in Chicago following Vatican trip.” Chicago Tribune, May 31, 2026. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2026/05/31/chicago-mayor-brandon-johnson-vatican-trip/.

Islamophobia and Racism

It is interesting to me how many people do not see Islamophobia as both a form of racism, but also an ideological weapon of western imperialism. I pose this because people seem to be easily susceptible to it. This is curious to me, especially among Black folks in the US, for whom Islam has been interwoven with Black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Black critical consciousness for nearly a century. A number of scholars such as Michael Gomez in Black Crescent and Sohail Daulatzai in Black Star, Crescent Moon explicate this history. Further, Maulana Karenga frequently addresses this in his writings and talks on Malcolm X.

If memory serves me correctly, this also came up on Wise the Dome TV recently where Bro. Rakeem Shabazz interviewed Bro. Rashad Abdul-Rahmaan.
While I am not a muslim, I find Islamophobia deeply problematic given its implications for how we reckon with our own history and the history of our movement, in addition to how we reckon with other people’s resistance to imperialism. We need to come correct in our analysis, and parroting the position statements of our oppressors is not the way to freedom.

Do nothing. Win: The US, China, and 21st Century Global Power

I’m sure that some of you have seen the meme of the US gymnast that engages in all manner of feats, while a Chinese gymnast does nothing and still wins. It is so very interesting to me how the current administration is manifesting this very reality.

We are learning that China’s universities are increasingly surpassing the US, which only makes sense if you consider the irrational hostility of the administration to science and its cancellation of millions of dollars in research funds. Who did this benefit?

The global energy crisis that the US and Israel have created has inadvertently created a boon for Chinese automaker BYD, the world’s largest manufacturer of electric vehicles. Bear in mind that the US government not only ended subsidies to support EV sales, but also has lowered fuel economy standards as a gift to fossil fuel companies. Was this a choice that enhanced US international competitiveness in the auto sector? Or was it instead another backwards-facing decision based on myopia?

The current administration has also attacked projects and subsidies focused on renewable energy. This is despite the fact that climate change threatens species extinction (a scientific reality which the current administration rejects). However, its short-sightedness has, once again, proved beneficial to China who has not only expanded its adoption of renewable energy, but is also a global leader in manufacturing in this domain. Is governance in the interest of the short-term profits of the fossil fuel industry in the best interest of society as a whole?

As an aside, some commentators have pointed out that while the US is run by people whose expertise lies in law and finance, China is run by engineers. If true, this is a damning insight into the kind of interests and logics which dominate systems of governance in the US given its increasingly sad outcomes.

Lastly, the US empire’s over-reliance on sanctions and use of financial coercion to sustain dollar-dominance appears to be unraveling. Not only has Iran been demanding payments in Chinese Yuan for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, I am now hearing that Russia is demanding Yuan from European nations who are, due to the current crisis, returning to it as a supplier. Hence, the overuse of sanctions as an instrument of coercive control led to the creation of alternative vehicles, a process which increasingly appears to be oriented towards China.

Again, China doesn’t have to invade or bomb other countries, destroy their economies or assassinate their leaders, it doesn’t even need to meddle in their elections and finance insurgents to gain power. And it is precisely because it has eschewed this path, focused on technological development, manufacturing and construction, trade, and diplomacy that it has and will continue to prevail.

The US elite, by contrast, has been driven by an insatiable desire for dominion over the world. Such power, if attained, is doomed to fall. A Mandinka proverb tells us, “Niŋ i lafitaa a bee la, i ka fo a bee le la,” that is, “If you want all, you lose all.” Not only is US power finite, as is all power, the increasingly desperate actions taken to sustain it will only accelerate its decline.

Unchanging Sameness

This is a good reminder of how much Black political discourse over the last decade–with its emphasis on “representation” and the fetishization of secondary and tertiary identities–was ultimately vacuous. Far too many people ceased to be concerned with social change or even the acquisition of power, but rather with hyperindividualistic acquisitiveness within the neoliberal order. Black “activists” reveled in fashionable and vociferous (but impotent) rhetoric yet eschewed the lessons of Malcolm X and others that correctly identified our condition as internal colonialism, and also posed solutions to it (territorial sovereignty). Hence, in turning away from the historic traditions of Black radicalism, many instead embraced Western liberal theories–ideas that have proven incapable of even freeing whites from the thrall of capitalism or growing authoritarianism.

We were never going to sing, march, or boycott our way to freedom. We certainly weren’t going to twerk our way to it. Now that all of these illusory paths have exhausted themselves, perhaps we can take the path less traveled.

Culture and revolution

Cedric Robinson wrote that revolutionary movements are a signifier of a broader cultural orientation towards resistance. Values such as group solidarity, sharing of resources, communal ethics, and so on, while not revolutionary in and of themselves, provided the foundation for the revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

This reflected Cabral’s thesis that the culture of a people is the principle basis upon which the struggle for independence is sustained, as well as the need for cultural dissimilarity between the oppressor and the oppressed. The latter serves as a point of demarcation in terms of the values, practices, and beliefs of a people—elements which also stimulates a people’s consciousness of the need for struggle—not only for the establishment of territorial sovereignty, but also to create those social conditions wherein their culture can thrive.

Values of the kind noted above, once salient in the culture of Africans in the US, have been thoroughly corrupted and eroded over the last six decades. The last three decades in particular have evidenced a thrust towards cultural assimilation (one that is couched in discourse of progressivism of late), which is nonetheless destructive to our ethos and social capacity.

Consequently, I do not believe that the cultural conditions exist to create leaders like Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Fred Hampton, Assata Shakur, or Robert Williams today, not on a mass scale in any event. The emergence of critical intelligence of that kind is augmented by the extant organizational and communal infrastructure, and this infrastructure has been systematically dismantled in recent decades. It has been supplanted by atomistic individualism, the celebration of material excess, the valorization of amorality, and neoliberalism. In short, a culture of counterrevolutionary norms and values.

Wars and Rumors of Wars

Can you hear that sound? That drumming?

Those are war drums being beaten.

Do you see who’s playing them? Do they look familiar to you?

They should. That’s the Western, capitalist elite. For them war, chaos, terror, and death is just a business opportunity. That’s for them. The dying part, that’s for you.

Can you see those lines? The ones being drawn between different blocs of allies?

Notice how former alliances are dissolving and new ones are being forged; how fading powers, desperate to cling even to the shadow of power, have grown more and more desperate–more and more bellicose.

Can you see that sign up ahead? The one that reads “Caution”? The one that’s being ignored because avarice and hubris are a dangerous combination?

We are being ushered into a world where danger and uncertainty will crest, giving rise to one where suffering and destruction become general, rather than particular conditions.

This is the world born of the savagery of colonialism and slavery and the avarice of their progeny–capitalism. This is the world as is it and as it will be, that is, until we decide to do something about it.

The Fashion of Pseudo-Radicalism and the Myopia of Contemporary Social Movements

I am continually intrigued by the “activism” of the last decade with its emphasis on an imagined purity, either of the ideological or of the blood quantum variety. These corresponding movements generally failed to either forge novel criticisms of or strategies against any forms of structural oppression (i.e., racism, capitalism, colonialism, imperialism), to provide the kind of political education that truly revolutionary movements require, or to effectively marshal the masses in opposition to these forces.

For example, has the preponderance of “anti-racist” activism or writing served to illuminate paths to reform which were not solely reliant on either a sympathetic administration or the largess of white liberals or institutions? Did these movements articulate an end goal short of structural integration within a settler colonial state or the cultural assimilation of all elements within their communities to white progressive views, values, and objectives? Both questions can be answered definitively in the negative. And how could they when their end goals consisted of puerile ends such as “representation” in corporate mass media or “delineation” from other African and African Diasporic populations. As such, these movements captured mental energy and material resources which should have served more revolutionary purposes, yet in the end either expended such potentiality into the ether or enriched their figureheads.

Though they failed in substantive ways, these movements did succeed in advancing the cause of atomization (i.e, division) in spectacular fashion. This atomization has been so thorough that it has served to estrange elements among us in the present-day, as well as severing vital linkages to our past struggles which could serve to guide our actions.

The lesson which I maintain should be learned from this period and its myopia is captured by and Ewe proverb which states, “Ŋkuagbãtɔ mekplɔa aʋa o,” that is, “The blind does not lead in a battle.” This teaches us that those of limited vision should never be entrusted to guide others. Further, it illustrates the fallacy of seeking to conceive of any liberatory project de-linked from the dynamic history of revolutionary struggle which has been forged by our ancestors. In my book,Jacob H. Carruthers and the Restoration of an African Worldview, I discuss the failings of these contemporary movements in contrast to the victorious Haitian Revolution.

“These contemporary movements do not seek to avenge the wrongs perpetrated against African people over centuries, or to ‘conquer or die,’ and in so doing to topple the oft-lamented system. Instead, they seek reconciliation with that system or inclusion within it. They reflect [Jean Jacques] Dessalines’s critique of the various elements who vied for power in the course of the Haitian struggle yet were all hobbled by their ultimate allegiance to the European model [of social development].
‘The always recurring factions . . .
toyed, each in turn with the
Phantom of Liberty which France
displayed before their eyes.’ (quoted in Carruthers 1985, 30)” (Rashid 2024)

Let us draw upon the sobriety of history and find inspiration and wisdom required to envision and engage in Black struggle.

References

Carruthers, Jacob H. 1985. The Irritated Genie: An Essay on the Haitian Revolution. Chicago: The Kemetic Institute.

Rashid, Kamau. 2024. Jacob H. Carruthers and the Restoration of an African Worldview: Finding Our Way through the Desert. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Western Liberalism and the End of History

In a rather puzzling way I suspect that many of those people who wedded themselves to Western notions of progressivism over the last decade–notions which betrayed both an uncritical belief in linear concepts of human and social progression, in addition the rejection of their ancestral orientations including modes of resistance and ways of knowing which were incongruous with liberalism–concluded that they had reached the imagined end of history; that is, that the aforementioned paradigm had triumphed over all others, rendering other ideas of human progress as, ultimately, irrelevant. The exposure of liberal social theories (particularly the vulgar identity politics of the last decade) as insufficient vehicles to either explain or confront the current global and domestic political economy, the genocides in Africa and western Asia, and rise of authoritarian fascism in the US all exposed the inadequacy of liberalism. Not only has it been exposed as vacuous, but also dependent on the largess of the state and corporate sector.

One hopes that in times like these that revolutionary ideas are rediscovered and that faux radicalism is dismissed for the farce that it always was.

AI: A Prediction

I believe that the pervasion of artificial intelligence will eventually trigger extreme reactions from segments of the populace. Some will react to the impact of AI data centers on electricity costs and local ecologies. Others will be angered by the impact of AI on labor, not just the displacement of human workers, but the further deskilling of workers and their increased alienation from the process and product of their labor. Lastly, there will be some who will decry AI’s undermining of people’s connection to reality. That is, many people will find it increasingly difficult to distinguish between real photographs and AI-generated images, videos of actual human events and AI-generated fabrications, and the replacement of human relationships and connections with AI-based avatars. In fact, we already see these things occurring. These disaffected individuals and groups will posit that AI has occasioned a break of humanity from their social world, and will therefore conclude that AI’s societal impacts are intolerable.

I offer this to suggest that while much of the economy hinges on the success of artificial intelligence and while the so-called tech oligarchs increasingly bend the policy-making apparatus to their will, it is highly presumptive to believe that the ascent of AI will proceed absent any concerted human resistance. There will be resistance, some forms of which will be unpredictable. However, I think that it is highly plausible that many will consider AI to be a source of profound alienation, and thus an intolerable source of social and cultural malformation.

The future remains unwritten.