My (ex) best friend, the Trad Cath

We'd talk anarchist theory and social justice, go to panels and actions, and spend the holidays together. Now the friend I once loved is lost to Christian extremism.

I don’t recommend lurking old friends on social media. And yet, pouring over the Twitter account of Jack*, my ex-best friend who went from being a prickly but endlessly loving white Protestant Anarchist to an antisemitic, anti-trans, anti-queer, racist, sexist Traditional Catholic is exactly where I found myself at two in the morning the other night. 

That’s right, my ex-best friend is a self-declared far right Catholic extremist now.

Once queer-identifying, calls LGBTQ people groomers, rapists and perverts and hopes for our mass incarceration. 

Once an abolitionist, he now supports the death penalty. 

Once a borderline Philosemitic Judaism-researching Christian, he now likes posts calling Jewish people “Christ Killers” and declaring Christianity the “Only Abrahamic Religion”.

Once opposed to US nationalism, war and global colonialism, he now opposes “Anti-Western” values on the premise that, in his words, you “Cannot oppose the west without ultimately opposing the Christ who built it.”

As I looked over more of his horrible tweets littered with slurs and bigoted attacks shrouded with a veil of Catholic piety, I wondered what could lead a person to take such a hard swing politically and socially from the left to the far right, from a strange but witty chronically online Anarcho comic nerdy loner Protestant to running an anonymous Twitter from which he attacks and harasses people between posting alt right Catholic memes.

I can’t help but feel partially responsible for Jack’s radicalization. Not guilty so much as a classically lingering Calvinist regret that I was not principled or rigorous enough to notice the red flags in the friendship—of which there were many—and challenge Jack more—which I did, but clearly not enough. And seeing as challenging him as much as I did wasn’t cutting it, maybe I should have just left him behind long before he was the one to leave me. So why didn’t I?

I know it’s more complicated than that. An 8 year age gap between us, I met Jack when he was almost in his 30s and I was 21 and newly escaped from the ultra conservative Protestant home from which I am still to this day unscrambling my brain. I did spend a lot of my time in the duration of our strange codependent friendship standing up to him, encouraging him to meet more people, to read more, to keep educating himself, to join the radical community of our hometown. Regardless of any of that, I cannot be responsible for this turn, only he is. He is also the one responsible for the friendship ending how it did: Over text.

At the time it angered me to no end. It was just days after my 28th birthday and a month after I had to put down my beloved calico cat Shampoo, all of which he was there for. I wanted to confront Jack about it in person. I ultimately left it alone however because ghosting a friendship of over seven years in that way is inconceivable and cowardly to me. It revealed a fundamental incompatibility that had always existed in our friendship-Jack was loud and condescending, opinionated and stubborn on Facebook, Vine or one-on-one with me, but it was all hot air. He could never actually follow through with what he believed with much energy in principle, much less in person, because “in person” wasn’t his strong suit. Jack was chronically online and that was where his realm of power was—we had met as Tumblr mutuals first and I watched he intertwined so much of his identity into his blogs, his Facebook posts, his Vine videos and eventually his Twitter.

There was no way I was going to get through to someone that full of himself yet fundamentally avoidant and unable to face his problems, fleeing from anything that challenges or scares him. Jack had little outside of these small online social circles where he could cosplay the tough and loud radical leftist film and comics dude. I figured as frustrating as it was, never talking to Jack again and letting him believe and say whatever he wanted about what went down between us to his small pool of mutuals was for the best.

Over the following years I’d check in on Jack’s social media in part because he started subtweeting his antagonistic mis-recollections of me on a now-suspended Twitter account in a way I found alarming. As I watched, I noticed him only getting worse, his encounters and opinions of not just me but also those few mutuals and friends around him becoming increasingly caustic, irrational and bitter. Already fairly lonesome and into his own online persona and tightly curated spaces to a fault, he was lashing out and becoming even more dogmatic, reactionary, isolated and alone.

I watched as he argued with and cut off other old friends over the internet, from a safe and righteous distance. I saw more clearly how under the thin veneer of a hip, aggressive, in-your-face anarchist was a classically avoidant and proud West Michigan Dutch dude. Behind the reactionary and difficult persona, he hid a stunted late bloomer who lacked practice in relationships, both platonic and romantic. Jack simply never learned how to be in relationships or handle a conflict and lived his life unable to sustain connections or figure out his problems after starting them and never having to. Jack would kind of just do and say whatever he wanted and other people had to accept how he decided to navigate the relationship-or not.

Before long, his embattled online accounts were gone-suspended or scrubbed-and the new one he created proclaimed his conversion to Catholicism and his denouncement of his old life of comics, film and leftist politics.

Watching Jack’s descent led to many scrambling disjointed sad and scared feelings and thoughts, one of the loudest being this nagging fear: Will I be next? Will something happen to let my guard down and push me back into the cult-like grasp of the church and right wing political fundamentalism?

I know that this is somewhat irrational. Jack’s conversion and radicalization is deeply contextual to him in particular-he had many political flaws and weak spots that made him vulnerable and more apt to turn out this way. There was the looming threat of what I long feared would be triggers, like the end of our friendship as well as the death of one of his dogs. And then there’s the fact that he was always a white Christian with a conservative streak he struggled challenging and unpacking. 

As for myself, I couldn’t be more different from Jack. I constantly had issues with the faith and walked from the church early, identifying as agnostic by the age of 14 because of their stance on queer people, their continued abusive patriarchal repression of teen girls in the congregation and their jingoistic racist support of the war. I am frankly more practiced at a principled rebellion beyond a superficial knee-jerk, much more involved socially and in communities resisting against the hegemony of this world, much more politically educated and stronger than in Jack in person and conviction in every possible way. That said, radical pride comes before a fall. We are all just human after all.

I don’t think the remedy to this is despair however, because this isn’t inevitable-we are not born flawed and predestined to become fascists. When you see a problematic pattern, you can demystify and stop it. Where you see weakness-and with Jack there were so many-you can protect against it. And where you feel alone in shame, guilt or responsibility, you must reach out. I have felt deeply alone in all of this—in the manner of church I was raised in and how I left, in the rise and fall of Jack and I’s friendship and other similar experiences with friends from similar religious backgrounds who seem to regress back into our former conservative faith, lifestyle and politics after brief stints flirting with the free radical world in the 20s and 30s. But I know I am not alone, we just simply don’t talk out loud enough about this in radical communities, specifically those of us who are Deconstructors and former Christians.

While it is necessary to note our flaws and how we are all vulnerable to Christian religious right wing radicalization in big and small ways, we must also recognize how many of us are not simple lone reactionaries cosplaying as leftists. We have worked hard to educate and de-radicalize ourselves from religious fundamentalism and social conservatism and prevent ourselves from returning back there again. We have built our defenses within ourselves and socially over the years. We—I—have worked hard to leave behind my fundamentalist past and never return to it. I was going to leave Jack behind one way or another.

Shame, paranoia and fear about our pasts are not motivators nor do they make us stronger. We need instead to learn how to identify these risks for right wing radicalization, have more open conversations about our weaknesses and our bulwarks against it, and build stronger senses of self and connection with one another so as to not leave ourselves open, especially during moments like now where economic downturns, genocide and colonialism globally as well as political upheaval and moral panics stateside lead us vulnerable to falter. 

I don’t think we can change and save anyone, I don’t think I could have changed or saved Jack. But with more open conversation and connection, we can protect our movements and spaces from reactionaries, Christian fundamentalists, Zealous right wing converts and other right wing elements that run a risk of infecting our ranks during fraught personal, political and social times.

*Not his real name.