Galileo Figaro. On Losing Christianity.

Freddie Mercury reminded us of something beautiful.

Religions are two things: beautiful and dangerous. Historian Michael White once counted the dead and found that in the last 2,000 years, 20 million people have died in religious violence, much of it in conflicts between Christianity and Islam. That doesn’t count the dead from the appropriation of whole continents and the slaughter of their indigenous peoples or those killed refusing to convert. Of course, they’re not the deadliest. Communism killed 100 million people in the 20th century alone, with Mao responsible for 80 million of them, making him the deadliest mass murderer in history.

We can wrap our heads around terrible political states slaughtering their own, but we have a hard time reconciling “religions of peace” and “religions of love” doing such damage to people as we fear will come with Project 2025 and Trump’s second term, when we’re promised that red state conservative guards will police blue state liberal snowflakes and that the federal government will track women across state lines to make sure they’re not traveling to get an abortion. That’s before we get to Trump’s plan to deport 11,000,000 people—that’s men, women, and children—largely so brown people don’t breed on U.S. soil and threaten a white majority.

The TRUMP GOP, not to be confused with the party of Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower, just won big—the Presidency, the Senate, and probably the House, too—on the reactionary-misogynist male vote and the far-right Evangelical vote. It finds itself allied with an Opus Dei-like Supreme Court running a Vatican playbook, one willing to issue rulings to get a corrupt man out of his responsibility for an insurrection and overturn a woman’s right to reproductive health care even when her life is in danger. This was a move to return women to the position of religious and state slavery, and there’s much, much more to come as this government (to Clarence Thomas’s delight) will try to destroy access to contraception, even for married couples. This effectively Trad-wifes every woman of child-bearing age and for 20 years after while she raises children and is reduced to eternal maid service.

I grew up Methodist in a small town in the South. Even then Christianity had two faces: on the one hand, the church was 100% segregated, and some of its people were soaked in both racism and anti-gay hatred—but not all. And Rev. Eben Taylor, as close to a saint as anybody I’ve ever known, ran an incredibly brave campaign to integrate the Methodist church and rid it of its racist bent. Inspired by love, we rolled bandages every Wednesday night at MYF to send to a medical mission in Africa. We put together packages of food for poor people and bundles of flowers for the old people. And when hurricanes flooded our town—we’re talking six feet of water everywhere—the men came and picked up my dad, and then they all went in boats to rescue black sharecroppers and bring them to the church. They saved the lives of hundreds of people they would not have even thought about abandoning. They were Christians, and that’s what Christians did, even if they had unresolved issues around skin color. And woe be to any man who hurt a woman, despite the sexism that was so rampant and deep-seated that people most often didn’t really realize that it was so much part of their unconsciousness that it was like the very air they breathed: they were simply unaware it was even there.

The Civil Rights Movement split the population of our little town. Frankie Evans, my brave, brave best friend in high school, introduced me to Martin Luther King, Jr., and I think it’s fair to say he saved my soul just in time, for had he not lived, I might never have seen the river of racism in which we were so blindly slogging; I might never have heard the cries of pain to which we were so deliberately deaf.

Galileo Figaro

It would be Freddie Mercury who would bring us a phrase from the Middle Ages that would say it all for me.

“Galileo Figaro” meant, in the Old Days, “Walk in the image of the Galilean”—walk in the image of Christ. In Medieval Europe, when friends ran into each other on the streets or on the roads, they’d chat. And then, as they took their leave of each other, one would say, “Galileo Figaro.” And the other would nod and return the blessing, “Galileo Figaro.”

Galileo Figaro means to be your best possible self, to emulate the love, kindness, generosity, goodness, truthfulness, forgiveness, and tolerance of Jesus—who stopped a mob from beating a woman, who forgave everyone, who modeled the care of the hungry, who healed the sick, who preached the dignity of every human being.

It is very possible that as sprawling churches reap tax-free billions and Marjo preachers build mansions with 100 rooms—as a Supreme Court rolls back the clock and creates a new Inquisition—as Evangelicals rally around a rapist they say may be the Second Coming and line up to vote for an administration that will deport 11,000,000 people—that we have already lost Christianity.

Because this form of greed-soaked, racist, misogynist “worship” has exactly nothing to do with the Galilean. It can be surmised that it is not Christianity at all because it is based, at best, on Old Testament, Bronze-age cruelty, and at worst, on the Apocryphal teachings of Sirach, Enoch, and Reuben, some of the Hebrew pseudoipegrapha, with a heavy dose of St. Paul misogyny thrown in, along with the ravings of Tertullian, all delivered while the damned souls of Kramer and Sprenger hover breathless above the steps of the cathedral, hoping to slip in again.

But if it is not entirely too late, and if those of you who have become lost can remember how we once felt about who Jesus was, come home. We have a lot of work to do because Christianity is off its rails and we have little time to prevent its being used in the worst, and most destructive, of ways. The forces that will drag this religion back to its Dark Ages are strong, and it will take all of us.

And as I take my leave of you, I bless you:

“Galileo Figaro,” my friends. Please wake up from this drugged sleep and remember who you are.