To the average observer concerned with the future of American democracy, it might be easy to conclude that religion has been part of the problem — particularly over the last few years. Right-wing religious leaders, including the leading Southern Baptist televangelist Robert Jeffress, have endorsed “Christian nationalism”; other evangelical pastors and conservative Catholic intellectuals have been openly pondering if America should become more of a theocracy; Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who once called for an “American crusade,” evoking bloody medieval religious campaigns, has referenced Christian theology in statements about the Iran war.

To critics, these examples show that American religion is becoming an active threat to pluralism and tolerance — the ideas that make American democracy work. 

But what if the solution to this anti-democratic slide is also religion — more religion than the US currently has?

A new book by two thinkers from opposing ends of the ideological spectrum argues that declining levels of religiosity across the board, but particularly among liberals, have deepened political polarization, which in turn has corroded democratic norms. Now, they argue, one of the most effective ways for liberals to stand up for democracy is to engage with religious communities and their scriptural traditions with more respect, openness, and curiosity. The authors also urge liberals who are believers themselves to embrace organized religion and return to it themselves.

Conservative evangelical Christian Matthew Kaemingk and liberal Muslim writer Shadi Hamid argue in Can Religion Save Democracy? that there’s a necessary and unique role that religious institutions and organized religion must play in American public life. Religion serves a fundamental regulating purpose, tempering emotions, fundamentalism, and nihilism. And when that fades away, those base instincts and emotions get channeled into our politics.

They write:

As Americans exit churches in droves, they’re not leaving behind their religious passions. Instead, they’re transferring those passions to the political battlefield. In this new post-religious context, Christian faith and Scripture function less as moral constraints within evangelical circles and more as political cudgels to use against one’s opponents.

“We’re not trying to convert [nonbelievers],” Hamid told me in an interview. “Believing is one thing, but believing that religion can play a positive role is another. And we want to encourage secular readers to embrace the second proposition, even if they don’t believe religion is true or don’t believe God exists.”

What happens when religion recedes from the public square

At the core of Kaemingk and Hamid’s argument is a simple case: There is an innate religion-shaped hole in people in the 21st century, which has been slowly replaced with politics, unbridled passions, and secular ideologies. The loss of religion hasn’t meant a loss of religious convictions, but instead has meant the rise of a new fanaticism, either secular or fundamentalist, while depriving everyone of the good things that organized and institutional religion can do.

It’s not a completely novel argument; it’s a combination of St. Augustine’s famous line that “our hearts are restless until they rest in [God]” and of the political scientist Robert Putnam’s modern case that churches and religious communities provided the third spaces that fostered civic partnership, trust, meaning, and belonging. 

But they also connect these lines of thinking to what the Dutch philosopher Abraham Kuyper used to argue around the turn of the 19th century: that all people are religious, and that something very similar to religious fervor quietly powers all political movements. Religion is “pervasive, public, and pluriform” — an essential part of being human, whose absence leaves nihilism, fear, and distrust in isolated, but still fanatical, individuals.

“If Kuyper is correct that all human beings desire ultimate belief and belonging, then erasing or sequestering religion won’t extinguish our spiritual passions. They will simply shift elsewhere,” Kaemingk and Hamid write. And that shift has been toward politics, candidates, elections, and secular “creeds” that provide identity, belonging, moral certainty, and salvific promises without the accountability, guidance, and caution that religious traditions can provide.

It’s not hard to find examples of what Kaemingk and Hamid mean here. From 2016 to 2024, many observed elements of quasi-religious fervor in movements powering Trump and Woke 1.0. Trump’s strongman appeal generated a cult of personality around him, while anti-Trump resistance efforts and progressive social movements often took on qualities people also found quasi-religious: in-group markers, language, and customs, BlueAnon theories. What’s left is a stalemate, with more conservative religious believers bunched up on one end, and nonreligious but equally passionate citizens on the other end.

Kaemingk and Hamid argue that people on the left often respond by denigrating religion and religious people, dismissing those who try to defend or practice it in the public square, or forcing them to adopt secular language and thinking instead of letting religious people bring their full selves to the public space. But the way out of this current stalemate, Kaemingk and Hamid suggest, is for people on the left to be open, curious, and respectful with the devoutly faithful, whether they’re neighbors or candidates running for office. 

“For that audience, my desire is to say, ‘Hey, you don’t have to believe in religion, but you can recognize the positive aspects of religion,’” Hamid told me.

That involves practical, daily activities and more high-minded appeals. In regular life, the authors recommend prayer, or prayer-like practices for nonbelievers, to help better understand and forgive opponents. They suggest there can be benefits for both nonreligious and religious people to meditate on scriptural and theological teachings about forgiveness, debate, disagreement, salvation, and why earthly politics shouldn’t be taken so seriously. 

And they urge liberals in particular to reengage with religious communities and congregations. Religious liberals should avoid isolation or solitary, individualized faith, the authors recommend, and instead return to congregations and specific churches or places of worship to become part of a community and find purpose. For nonreligious liberals, Kaemingk and Hamid suggest they reexamine their own ideological priorities and be open to the possibility of being wrong on some of them, and potentially engage with organized religion to better understand a religious worldview.

Kaemingk and Hamid offer a specific challenge for liberals and secular Americans that might seem a bit unsavory: They have to realize that they are not blameless for the polarization and radical religious fervor that exists right now through their dismissal of organized religion. Their earlier denigration of organized religion around the turn of this century (think of the New Atheist movement), combined with many leaving institutional churches or failing to participate in religious life, has all contributed to the capture of these institutions by unsavory political opponents, or helped in the decline of more moderate congregations. And any attempt to stop this continued slide away from pluralistic democracy hinges on a collective effort between religious and nonreligious Americans to reverse these trends.

This argument has its limitations

Here’s an obvious question: If religion is so good at moderating people, why hasn’t it been able to temper emotions among the religious already? The most loyal Republican voters over the past few cycles have tended to be evangelical and nondenominational Christians, followed by white Catholics — both of which tend to report above-average levels of religious participation. They’ve stuck with Trump and the GOP over the last decade, which has been defined by polarization, authoritarian policies, and even moments of political violence, that both Kaemingk and Hamid say religion can fix. 

Here’s an obvious question: If religion is so good at moderating people, why hasn’t it been able to temper emotions among the religious already?

More generally, while there is evidence to suggest that evangelicals who leave their churches become more cynical and individualistic — a point in Kaemingk and Hamid’s favor — there’s not much evidence to suggest that the converse is true: that religious participation has actually tempered emotions, passions, and politics. Instead, there’s a case to be made, as the writer Robert P. Jones laid out recently, that the opposite seems to be true: The most religious folks tend to still be the most likely to support harsher Trump-era policies.

Hamid acknowledged that this is a challenge, but argued this isn’t about the religion itself — rather a Trump-specific phenomenon: “Many evangelicals have let partisan loyalties take precedence over religious commitments,” he told me. “This is the distorting effect that Trump has had on the evangelical movement.”

He emphasized that evangelicalism has suffered because many of the most fervent MAGA supporters who identify with that religious movement are not actually very religious. “Evangelicals aren’t going to church as much as they used to on average,” he said. “There has been a kind of process of de-institutionalization in the kind of Protestant domain. And the people who tend to be more fervent MAGA supporters tend to go to church less.” He compared the level of evangelical support that Ted Cruz and Trump got in 2016: Trump had an upper hand among unchurched evangelicals.

Beyond this, the practical reality is that, as things stand today, religiosity does not seem likely to bounce back to the levels it was at two decades ago — at least, not without the help of secular Americans.

What the authors prescribe for politics and elections

Still, it’s an attractive idea, and it’s not hard to see why people might be open to it. Even Democrats themselves seem to understand that writing off religious voters for years was a bad idea. Some of the most promising Democratic candidates in red states in upcoming midterm elections are religious, including Texas Senate nominee James Talarico and Kansas Senate nominee the Rev. Adam Hamilton. A dozen other pastors or believers are running in down-ballot races across the country, while potential 2028 presidential candidates like Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro talk openly about their personal faiths, the role of organized, institutional religion, and seem comfortable doing so.

“It’s promising,” Hamid told me about this trend. “Part of what we argue in the book is that Americans should be able to bring their full convictions into the public arena. If they’re editing themselves or suppressing their religiosity out of fear of alienating constituencies, that’s not good for democracy.”

And Kaemingk and Hamid also have a very influential intellectual ally in this mission: Pope Leo XIV just made a similar case in France for secular liberals to reexamine their understanding of religious liberty and how to balance it against the rise of right-wing religious politics.

“A Christian engaged in public service and guided by the light of his or her conscience, illumined by faith, cannot be considered a proselytizer or a threat to the unity of the nation,” he said in Paris, appealing directly to France’s fiercely secularized civic leaders. “Indeed, authentic secularity does not exclude religion but is capable of valuing it as an educational resource.”

Aboard a plane back to Rome, Leo continued, arguing that religion must have a role in the public square and pointing to the decline of religion in Germany as something that may have facilitated the rise of a far-right movement that cloaks itself in religious language.

“It would be interesting to study, analyze if and how there may be a relationship, for example, between the growth of these groups on the far right,” Leo said mid-flight, “…with some expression of a combination of these far-right points of view with a certain kind of religion, which…is not an authentic expression of Christianity.”

This may be an unsavory ask for liberals and secularists most upset about creeping religious nationalism in the Trump administration and around the country. The recent creation of a new Office of Religious Affairs in the Pentagon, the invocation of God and Scripture to support military action and immigration enforcement, and the attacks on the wave of religious candidates running as Democrats this year all make it understandable why there may be hesitancy in accepting this challenge. But Kaemingk and Hamid are undeniably right about one thing: In a diverse and pluralistic nation, we have no choice but to live with each other.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

Hi readers, happy Friday! It’s been a big week for the AI debate — not the one about whether it will cause the robot apocalypse, though there’s still plenty to worry about there, but instead about whether the technology is conscious. 

The folks at Anthropic, the AI company behind the large language model Claude, certainly seem to think it is — or at least, they’re extremely open to the possibility. 

As the New York Times reported earlier in the week, the company has spent the last year grappling with the question by speaking with religious thinkers from many faith traditions in an effort to chart a moral course for the LLM (that is, to keep it from killing us all, so maybe it is all one big debate). 

In the process, the Times reports, some of those thinkers observed that members of the Anthropic team were “relating to [Claude] like a conscious being” and even, according to it, a degree of “moral status.” 

On the flip side of this debate is Pope Leo XIV, who decidedly does not seem to buy into AI consciousness arguments. His “Magnifica Humanitas” encyclical earlier this year argued that AI will never be able to replace humanity — and reportedly “alarmed” Anthropic’s co-founder, Christopher Olah.

Since then, Pope Leo has continued to emphasize the differences between humans and machines this week. “There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others,” he posted on Friday. “Algorithms lack the spark of humanity.”

Loneliness machines

Conscious or no (and that’s a no from me), it’s hard to argue that tech companies don’t want you to interact with their models like people. That includes OpenAI and Meta, both of whom introduced “cute” new AI agents — called Dots and Muse, respectively — last month. 

As my colleague Adam Clark Estes reported this week, though, the promise of a companionable, always-there AI might not be the best idea in the world — especially for children. A new study, still under review, suggests that AI use may be causing loneliness in middle schoolers. 

Adam spoke with the lead researcher on the study, UNC Chapel Hill professor Anne Maheux, who explained that “middle school students using AI for emotional intimacy and companionship developed greater loneliness over time.” 

According to Maheux, one big point where AI chatbots fail compared to human beings is “friction,” or the complicated push-and-pull dynamic of any connection with a real human being. By contrast, chatbots are “sycophantic, highly agreeable, anthropomorphized,” she says, which can lead to kids “developing expectations or understandings of interactive relationships that are actually fundamentally at odds with a normal human relationship.”

People, in other words, still matter, no matter how much the AI companies want us to build our lives around machines instead.

One link for later

➨ Why is horror so fun? It’s October, which means you might be planning a horror movie marathon or a trip to a haunted house/forest/corn maze/what have you in the near future. It’ll probably be a great time — but why? Terrifying yourself doesn’t intuitively sound like fun, but humans love to seek out frights, whether that means ghost stories or a rollercoaster. In 2024, Vox’s Unexplainable podcast spoke with some researchers trying to figure it out.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that Disney’s “Magic Kingdom” in Florida is way, way better than most of the US at managing a complex network of underground cables and pipes? My colleague Sara Herschander dug into why, and whether other American cities can catch up.
• Today’s trivia: What musical note is equivalent to a G sharp? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in Monday’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday, we asked you which constellation contains the North Star and the Little Dipper. That would be Ursa Minor, the Little Bear. 

Editor’s note, September 20, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below was originally published last September.

This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism: the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Submit your own question here.

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The Jewish High Holidays are coming up, and that includes Yom Kippur. It’s a holiday that encourages people to reflect on their behavior and make amends. That’s all well and good, but I’m someone who struggles with scrupulosity — constantly worrying about my morality and if I’m doing The Most Possible Good™.

In practice this is far more paralyzing than motivating. Fixating on the ethical implications of all possible decisions makes it harder to take any action, and I’ve lost hours scouring my memories of my past behavior for immorality like a football player watching footage of their games to analyze what they could do differently. Guilt simply isn’t serving me, but I worry that saying to hell with all that means I’ll stop striving to be a better person and become morally complacent.

I’ve observed Yom Kippur for decades, and don’t want to simply avoid the day. But the holiday is a moral scrupulosity trigger. How do you think I should approach this? I want to stop feeling guilty for letting guilt get in my own way.

Dear Scrupulous, 

Have you ever heard the story about what happened when God decided to give the Bible to flesh-and-blood human beings? According to the ancient rabbis, the angels hated the idea. They argued that humans were deeply flawed mortals who didn’t deserve such a holy scripture; only angels could be worthy of it, so it should stay up in heaven. 

It fell to Moses to rebut the angels’ argument. He asked them: What do you angels need the Bible for? The Bible says not to murder, not to commit adultery, not to steal — do you have jealousy or other emotions that could lead you to do those things? The Bible says to honor your father and mother — but you don’t have parents, so how could you ever do that? And the Bible says to sanctify the Sabbath — but you never do any work, so how could you even honor the Sabbath by resting? 

The angels saw that Moses was right. Angels are really great at one thing: being perfect. But perfect creatures are static. They don’t experience painful challenges, they don’t grow, and they don’t make choices that add beauty to the world. We humans do those things. God gives the Bible to humans not to make them into angels — but to make them better at being the unique thing they are: human animals, with feelings, flaws, and all, that can learn to use their capabilities in more beautiful ways.

I think there’s a lot of wisdom in this story. And I want you to notice how far it is from demanding that humans do “The Most Possible Good™.” That language suggests a maximizing ethical theory like utilitarianism, which says that we have to do the action that produces the greatest good for the greatest number. In other words, we have to optimize. 

Moral optimization may be possible for angels, but not for humans. We each hold multiple values, and sometimes those values are in tension with each other, forcing us to strike a balance as best we can. We’re not omniscient beings who can know with certainty how best to strike the balance. 

What’s more, sometimes different kinds of moral good straight-up conflict with each other. Think of a woman who faces a trade-off: She wants to become a nun but also wants to become a mother. She can’t balance between those options — she has to choose. And what’s the better choice? We can’t say because the options are incommensurable. There’s no single yardstick by which to measure them so we can’t compare them to find out which is greater.

Given that this complexity is baked into the human condition, it’s impossible to be a perfect optimizing machine. And the more you try to force yourself to be that, the harder it’ll be for you to actually help others, because you’ll just be so burned out. As you’ve already discovered, the optimizing mindset is exhausting — you end up expending a lot of precious mental resources that you could be spending on something else. It can even lead to paralysis. And a lot of the time, there’s no knowably best decision.

So instead of trying to optimize everything, you can adopt a goal that’s humbler but more realistic: to live in line with your values as best you can. 

I know that can feel scary. Optimizing makes being human feel less risky. It provides a sense of control, and therefore a sense of safety. The unspoken premise is that if you optimize, you’ll never have to ask yourself: How could I screw up that badly? 

But there’s another way to feel safe. It’s about leaning into the fact that we are imperfect and vulnerable creatures and that even when we’re trying our hardest there will be some things that we do not do optimally.

Of course, we should still try to live in line with our values. But in those moments when we fall short, we shouldn’t berate ourselves, thinking, “I sinned!” In Hebrew, the word we typically translate as “to sin” (lachto) actually means “to miss the mark.” It’s the same word we’d use to describe someone with a bow and arrow who’s targeting the bullseye but misses it slightly. This is a useful image, because it reminds us just how normal it is to miss the mark. Just as the archer’s arrow is buffeted around by the wind, we’re buffeted around by all the physical and psychological conditions acting upon us — naturally we won’t always hit the bullseye! And when we do miss the mark, we deserve compassion.

I know what you’re thinking: What if adopting this mindset means you’ll become morally complacent and let yourself off the hook too easily? This is one of the most common objections to practicing self-compassion. But research shows it’s not well-founded. In fact, psychologists have found that more self-compassionate people are better able to acknowledge when they’ve made a mistake. They’re more likely to want to apologize and make amends to others when they mess up. And they try to do better the next time around. Why? Because, to them, mistakes don’t feel so psychologically damning. That allows them to take more — not less — responsibility for their actions.

Yom Kippur can feel terrifying when any mistake you’ve made over the past year seems damning. But according to the ancient rabbis, Yom Kippur is not meant to be a somber day — it’s one of the happiest days of the year! After all, it was on Yom Kippur that Moses descended from Mount Sinai carrying the second set of tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments, ready to gift them to the people. 

You probably know what happened to the first set of tablets: Moses shattered them after seeing the Israelites engaged in idol worship. What’s less known is that, according to one rabbinic story, God’s response to the shattering of those tablets was to actually congratulate Moses. Why did God think breaking them was the right move? And what was different about the second set? 

While the first tablets had been fashioned by God and God alone, the second tablets were a human-divine collaboration: Moses carved the stone and God inscribed the words. And while the first tablets contained only the words of the Ten Commandments — a black-and-white, rule-based morality — the rabbis tell us that the second tablets contained within them all the stories and interpretations that Jewish sages would later develop.

In other words, God recognized that you can’t just give humans a list of moral rules and call it a day. Maybe that would work for angels, who live in a simplified, disembodied world, but our ethical life is just too messy and multifaceted to be captured by any single set of universally binding moral principles. Yet God chose people over angels anyway, inviting us into the collaboration and embracing our humanness rather than rejecting it.

So, to the rabbis, Yom Kippur was a happy day because they fully expected that God would accept and embrace messy humans. 

Please, don’t try to be more zealous than God.

When you’re taking action, by all means, aim your arrows as true as you can — try to hit the bullseye, the place that captures as much of what you value as possible. But once you’ve released the arrow from your bow, let it be. 

If it turns out that you missed the mark, that you acted suboptimally, I put it to you that that is okay. You are not an angel. You are not a perfect optimizing machine. You do not have access to a magical mathematical formula that can consider countless incommensurable variables and spit out the very best move with certainty. You are human and you do the best you can with what you’ve got. 

The wisdom of these millennia-old stories is that that’s good enough for God. Let it be good enough for you, too. 

Bonus: What I’m reading

• Writing this column reminded me of The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook, written by the psychologists Kristin Neff and Chris Germer. It really helped me develop a self-compassion practice, which has in turn helped me get a grip on my own scrupulosity. I also strongly recommend the eight-week self-compassion course run out of Neff and Germer’s nonprofit, the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion.

• I’ve always associated the philosopher Thomas Nagel with questions about consciousness, but I recently learned that he’s also super interested in questions about religion. In a great essay called “Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament,” Nagel asks: What, if anything, does secular philosophy have to put in the place of religion? More specifically, can it answer the question: What is the underlying nature of the universe, and how can the human individual live in harmony with it? 

• In this Aeon essay, philosopher Elad Uzan argues that AI will not be able to solve ethics for us, despite what some people hope. Drawing on the mathematician Kurt Gödel’s famous incompleteness theorems, Uzan writes, “just as mathematics will always contain truths that lie beyond formal proof, morality will always contain complexities that defy algorithmic resolution.” 

Why do I cry when I see a donkey? 

It’s completely involuntary. As if my heart’s defenses are swept aside by a giant wave of compassion and I’m left unnerved by the intensity of love that I feel: raw and a little foreign.

I wonder about this because I’m not a big animal guy. There’s no desire in me to own a pet; I’m allergic to cats and I will actively do what I can to avoid meeting your dog. (Sorry! It’s the nonconsensual licking! The crotch jumping! No thank you.) And yet, there I’ll be: leaning over a fence, arm outstretched to let the donkey nuzzle my open hand, feeling a sudden and desperate sadness. 

It’s happened so often that I wonder if these encounters point to something precious. The tears suggest that there’s a mismatch between the way I’ve been taught to understand animals as separate from myself and the connection that actually exists between us. Our paradigm of anthropocentrism distinguishes us from the natural world and puts us on a pedestal of worthiness, forcing us to look at the whole of nature as somehow less real than we are. Each animal and plant, the land and the water, the very air we breathe — all are resources for us to use rather than beings to be in relationship with. 

But the donkeys keep disrupting that notion.

Even if those sad Eeyore-like eyes don’t make you emotional, you have probably experienced some version of it. For many pet owners (and notice how that language of ownership emphasizes the idea of separation!), it may be a creeping uncertainty about the validity of the love that they feel for their pet. You might ask yourself, “Am I crazy to love an animal this much? Is this feeling of mutual friendship and understanding actually real?” 

This week, dear friends of mine had to put down their dog. Like most dog owners, they understood their pup to be a part of their family. And so the intensity of their grief — and the heavy burden of having to decide whether the time had come to say goodbye — opened up not just emotional questions, but spiritual ones, too. Is it wrong to euthanize a family member you love? What happens to a dog when it dies? Does your dog have a soul? 

Your deep connection to your animal companion might also make you question your relationship to and understanding of other animals: How is it that my beloved has a soul, but a pig or a cow or a bird does not? To kill one animal but to love another demands significant mental gymnastics. The modernist, mechanistic view of the world where humans are separate and death is the end doesn’t hold true to my experience. And so perhaps it is wise to look at spiritual traditions that affirm the ways the animate and inanimate are connected.

What religious tradition can teach us about the souls of animals

The idea that animals are not equal to humans is rooted in a dominant refrain in Christian theology — which David Clough, chair in theology and applied sciences at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, says has done great disservice to animals. Significant church figures like Thomas Aquinas and the philosopher René Descartes have argued that animals don’t have an immortal soul. Other doctrines like predestination (where some people are chosen for salvation and others are damned) have further broken the world into separate spheres. This stratification of significance, where humans sit above everything — from the stones and stars to the pets we share our homes with — has led to a paradigm where we’ve been able to desecrate the natural world and continue to practice cruel factory farming, killing hundreds of millions of animals every day.

But this particular Christian worldview isn’t the only way to think about a spirituality of animals. 

Indeed, says Clough, in the first centuries of Christian life, theologians like Irenaeus and Origen imagined a very different ordering of the world. Rather than envisioning a judgment that separates us, these early thinkers believed God would regather the whole of creation in what Clough calls “a comprehensive redemption.” Here, because God created the world, all of life will one day be regathered together, including the pets we love and the places we live. At the end of time, the thinking went, all of life will be embodied once again, but free from pain and suffering.

Maybe that’s what I long for when I see those donkeys: a union of all living things, free from pain and suffering. 

David Haberman, professor emeritus at Indiana University who studies South Asian religious traditions, tells me that a Hindu worldview sees humans and animals as inherently connected. He points to the concept of Ātman, which dates back thousands of years: “Some translate it as soul, some translate it as self, some translate it as the ultimate essence. I think all those work in various ways, but the notion is that it’s shared amongst all beings,” he says.

This worldview enables us to see “the self present in all beings and all beings in the self. … So whatever happens to a human happens to a dog, whatever happens to a dog happens to a human.” Haberman says that this ontology establishes a “deep connection between all things and a recognition that it’s the same essence.” So, whether canine or human, individual souls are described in the Bhagavad Gita as “eternal, immortal, and ageless. It is not destroyed when the body is destroyed.” 

Other spiritual practitioners are of the same mind. Susan Allen is a medium who specializes in communicating with pets that have died. It wasn’t a career she was planning on, but her intuitive and sensitive nature has meant many grieving dog owners seek her out when their pup passes away. Allen believes animals have a continuation of consciousness that transcends death.

“The body leaves and dies,” she says, “but the soul stays with us.” Allen says she senses messages and emotional states that pets want to share with their former owners — usually feelings of gratitude and love, a message that is especially consoling for those who had to make the decision to end the pet’s life amidst increased suffering. Though there is great sadness when a pet dies, it is, Allen says, “the consequences of living with so much love.”

Maybe that’s what holds me back from welcoming an animal into my home. Sure, there is the hair that gets everywhere and the picking up of poop and the need for walks at all hours of the day — but I suspect there’s a big part of me that recoils from the inevitability of grief that loving an animal so deeply will lead to. I became a vegetarian when I left home and started to cook my own meals and found it difficult to put a knife through the flesh of a chicken or a fish. That decision seemed to open a window into seeing the truth of our interconnectedness. 

Perhaps that’s what so many traditions try to help us realize: that we are part of one another. All living things are inherently bound together. Separation is an illusion that fuels harm. “At its best, a relationship with a companion animal is a sort of anticipation of a sort of redeemed future where humans and other animals will live peaceably together,” Clough says. “A companion animal relationship could be a small anticipation of that sort of restored mutuality of relationship.”

Haberman agrees. “It doesn’t have to stop with dogs,” he says. Though we may start by loving a pet, we must embrace an “ever expanding circle of love.” When we embrace our interconnectedness, we embrace something sacred. The love that exists between a human and their animal can be a bridge to a redemptive love for all living things; for every animal; for the very fullness of life itself.

Anti-Muslim messaging has been on the rise among Republican elected officials for a while, and last week it took center stage at the GOP’s midterm convention in Dallas, where speakers warned that leftists and “Islamists” were joining forces.

“We are witnessing a new and dangerous red-green alliance. Communists and Islamists coming together and sweeping over the Democrat Party,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) told attendees. “They are united because they share the same enemies. They hate Christians. They hate Jews. They hate capitalism. They hate the Constitution. And they hate America.”

Former Rep. Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate candidate in Michigan, attempted to link his opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, to the 9/11 attacks: “I never imagined that 25 years after 9/11, I would be running against somebody that campaigns with Hasan Piker, who thinks America deserved it,” he said. “Together, they attack America. They excuse extremism. They treat our country like it’s the villain.”

The convention’s rampant Islamophobia isn’t a one-off: It fits a trend of Republican lawmakers attacking Islam and Muslims in the runup to the midterms. 

Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) said on X that “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) said “we need more Islamophobia, not less.” Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) said, “No more Muslims.” Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith said that “I hate Islam; it’s a demonic death cult.” 

The attacks have gotten specific: High-profile Muslim figures like El-Sayed, Piker, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar have all been targets of anti-Muslim rhetoric, and the GOP is also pushing anti-Muslim legislation.

A new “Sharia Free America Caucus” in the US House now includes dozens of members, all Republicans. Texas Republicans made banning and investigating cases of sharia law an official plank in their party platform. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has called for a federal probe of Muslim washing facilities at Texas airports.

To break down the disturbing uptick in Islamophobia this midterm season, what’s driving it, and where it could be headed, Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with journalist Rozina Ali, author of the new book Seasons of Fury. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Do you think that we are partly seeing a rise in Islamophobic rhetoric because this year we have high-profile Muslims like Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, and Hasan Piker criticizing US foreign policy?

We have had really prominent Muslim politicians in the last several years. The same year that President Trump was elected, we also elected Ilhan Omar to the Minnesota House of Representatives. And then we had the [2018] election of Rashida Tlaib. These are remarkable because not only were they Muslim politicians, but they were also critical of US foreign policy and the government. 

What’s actually been a turning point has been the post-October 7 period because, one, we had a lot of politicians, especially from the Republican Party, starting to label this entire war as a religious war. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) immediately said, “We’re in a religious war,” which is astonishing, quite frankly, because that’s not even the rhetoric the Bush administration used after 9/11. 

What also happened is that a lot of Muslims — Muslim experts, Muslim scholars, Muslim journalists, and Muslim politicians — started being very vocal about US foreign policy. And that wasn’t necessarily the case after 9/11. A lot of Muslims who did criticize US foreign policy back then were sidelined or monitored or seen as suspicious, but they are so vocal now. The younger generation that has come up — Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, and others — they’re so vocal. 

And it’s not just foreign policy. What they say is that the way we conduct US foreign policy actually has direct ties to what’s happening at home. They’re very critical of the inequality they’re seeing at home, the rising costs, inflation — there’s so much to criticize about what’s happening at home. And I think this is one of the reasons we see so much backlash against them — because they’re unapologetic in their criticism.

The US has always had these fights over who gets to criticize the United States of America. I wonder why you think, at this moment, they feel safer launching those criticisms. 

Do they feel more free because the wars were such disasters? What opened the door to allow younger Muslims running for office to run in part on, “The United States is a really imperfect country and we’re not going to stop talking about what we’ve done overseas and at home”?

I think they’re able to do that because so many Americans do that. A lot of politicians and policymakers are openly critiquing what has happened abroad and what is happening here. One of the marked differences between the post-9/11 period and now is that there was widespread support for the Bush administration’s “war on terror” from policymakers on both sides of the aisle, from media, from the public at large. The few scholars and Muslim community members who did critique what the Bush administration was doing were often shunned. 

In later years, it became very clear that we were not winning the wars in Iraq, in Afghanistan, or even the war on terror. There was a lot to be critical of, not just with the Abu Ghraib scandal and Guantanamo, but also what was happening at home. There was mass surveillance, [and] then we had the rise of the NSA. 

I think, ultimately, we have reached a point in this country that we actually have a society that has deep, profound distrust of its institutions. That larger landscape allows politicians like Zohran Mamdani, like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, but also any other politician to critique the government and feel comfortable doing so. 

I would say this is the Democrats’ side. I think what’s so interesting about the Republican Party now is that so much of their rhetoric and their vision is about who loves America. I was listening to clips of JD Vance at the convention and he kept talking about “America belongs to those who love it, not those who hate it.” And I think this is just a fascinating declaration to make when there is such a disconnect between what the public is feeling right now and what the Republican Party is saying.

I’m glad you brought up JD Vance, because one thing that is true of the vice president is that he too is a critic of America. It doesn’t always come out, but it has come out in the past. There are parts of America, including the wars overseas, that JD Vance has been fiercely critical of. 

Mamdani and El-Sayed are also Americans. It seems to me like some of the pushback they’re getting is rooted in the idea that “you don’t have the right to do this, you’re lucky to be in America.”

Do you think there is something going on here where you can criticize America if you look like JD Vance, but you cannot if you look like Zohran Mamdani?

Unfortunately, yes. And I will say, it’s unfortunate, but it’s not just the Republican Party who perpetuated that narrative. Some of the Democrats in earlier years did the same thing. I very clearly remember Bill Clinton on the DNC stage in 2016, saying, “If you’re a Muslim and you love America and freedom and you hate terror, stay here and help us win and make the future together.”

“I really think that there needs to be a concerted effort to challenge anti-Muslim rhetoric coming from policymakers and from the top that we’re not really seeing yet.”

It placed a conditionality on the way that Muslims would be accepted in the United States. But that was an absurd statement to make because there was a lot to be critical of with the way that the US was fighting its war on terror. 

And that conditionality — we have continued to see it over and over again, except it has morphed and mutated to the extent that someone like JD Vance can say that “we were tired of being called racist for noticing that our country was becoming dirtier and poorer and less safe and less prosperous.” He blames that squarely on immigrants or foreigners or what he considers un-American values. He can say that, but not anyone else who is, perhaps, brown or Muslim. 

I don’t think it’s just targeted towards Muslims. I actually think the problem and fascinating thing about what the Republican Party is doing is combining all of these labels into one. And there’s this narrative that they’re creating that anyone who is against us will be Muslims, will be leftists, will be immigrants, will be people who don’t look like us. 

It’s really creating this cultural, religious, racial divide, which is quite frightening. 

I wonder if you think this fearmongering is about winning the midterms and then it’ll die down in the same way that a lot of political rhetoric gets very heated in the run-up to contested elections and then dies down, or whether you worry that this talk keeps escalating?

I have been wondering about that because I think there are two things happening. 

One is that anti-Muslim sentiment has become a feature of American politics and seems to come out during election season. And I think what the GOP is doing is actually seeing if this anti-Muslim rhetoric is going to be effective in helping them win. This is what they were trying during the Mamdani campaign and it didn’t work. And I think they’re trying this in Michigan and, let’s see if it works. They’re trying this elsewhere too. 

But the other thing that’s happening, which is a bit more lasting, is the effort to change the very structures and laws regarding Muslim expression and the freedom to practice Islam in the United States. For example, in Texas, we are seeing efforts to frame the entire religion of Islam as a political ideology rather than a religion itself. 

There are efforts to, for example, ban sharia, which still makes very little sense because I don’t know if anyone can quite explain that. There is a very concerted effort to try to block signs of visible Islam at a local level. And if they’re successful, we’re going to see that at a national level.

I was in Michigan last month and I interviewed Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. There are a lot of things that make him interesting, but one of them is how easy it is to look at a politician like that and call him “all-American,” right? He’s high-achieving, he’s married, he’s handsome, he’s a jock. He’s got two kids. He is all-American. 

Can you conceive of a world where Abdul El-Sayed being Muslim is not the first line of attack when he makes a point about what the US has done wrong? In short, can you see him occupying, at some point in the future, a place like JD Vance occupies: You get to criticize the country because you are American enough?

There was a time when being Catholic was considered a really big deal. John F. Kennedy was the first Catholic president and it just kept coming up over and over again. Now, no one even remembers. I bet you half the country doesn’t realize he was Catholic. 

I think that could happen to Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, but I don’t think it’s going to be in the near future. I think it’s going to take a generational change for that and it’s not going to come organically. I really think that there needs to be a concerted effort to challenge anti-Muslim rhetoric coming from policymakers and from the top that we’re not really seeing yet.

But you think we might?

I think we might, in decades’ time.