Feminist Liberation Theologians’ Network  Annual Meeting November 2025

Feminist Liberation Theologians’ Network 

Annual Meeting Report

Friday, November 21, 2025, 4-6 PM ET

Old First Church, Boston, Massachusetts

Mary E. Hunt, Presiding

Video of the meeting can be found at: https://www.waterwomensalliance.org/feminist-liberation-theologians-network-2/ 

The Feminist Liberation Theologians’ Network, sponsored by the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual (WATER), held its 29th annual gathering at the 2025 Annual Meeting for the American Academy of Religion in Boston, Massachusetts, on Friday, November 21, 2025 at Old South Church in Boston. 

We are deeply grateful to Pastor John Edgerton, a friend of our colleague Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, and to Rebecca Pasipanodya who is the facilities manager. They have been so gracious as to welcome us and provide us space for our meeting. Staff at the church were especially hospitable to us and we thank them.

This year, the meeting was held in person as usual, but also accessible via Zoom. We thank our IT assistants, Eunchong Kim of Boston University and Caroline Perkins of Harvard Divinity School, for their work, and we welcome them to FLTN. 

We apologize for any technical glitches that made parts of the meeting inaccessible due to bandwidth problems. Most of those have been smoothed out in the video version. It is hard to manage all of the logistics of a hybrid meeting, but we decided that it was better to try and include as many people as we could. We hope you agree!

This meeting was attended by about 50 people in person

from at least eight countries (including Kenya, Scotland, Germany, England, Switzerland, Chile, the Philippines, U.S., and others) and about 30 on Zoom, coming from at least six more countries (including Canada, Ecuador, Estonia, Australia, Ireland, Argentina, and others).

For a helpful, synthetic overview of the meeting, read Kwok Pui-Lan’s Substack  https://kwokpuilan.substack.com/p/is-feminist-liberation-theology-still 

We opened with a Land Acknowledgement used by Old South Church:

“Old South Church in Boston resides on the ancestral and un-ceded land of the Massachusett People, past and present, whose name was appropriated by this Commonwealth. We pay respect to the Massachusett elders past and present. We name and recognize the Massachusett People as traditional stewards of this land and we acknowledge the enduring relationship that exists between them and their traditional territories. We admit the truth of violence perpetrated against the Indigenous Peoples of the land; perpetrated, moreover, both in the name of this country and in the name of Christ, and make a commitment to uncovering that truth. We comprehend that a land acknowledgment is a small yet important step towards ensuring a culture of respect, truth, and accountability in our church, in our City, in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and in our nation.” https://www.oldsouth.org/mission-vision 

Mary E. Hunt’s Introduction

Welcome to our 29th meeting since our founding in 1995 when Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and I convened this group. I plan to visit Elisabeth tomorrow and will carry our greetings.  

Last year, we met in San Diego with the theme “Elections Have Consequences.” Indeed they do! We live in what I say with regret is a fascist period of U.S. history. 

Many and varied horrors that have accrued so far—beginning with the dismantling of so much of what passed as a safety net for people in the U.S. (threats to health care, lessening of support for those who are unhoused; cuts in Medicaid and SNAP programs). The recent government shut down and this week’s closing of most of the Department of Education are just two examples of the turmoil we are living. The presence of armed National Guard troops in the nation’s capital and the growing presence of ICE agents throughout the country to root out immigrants strike terror in the hearts of millions who realize they could be next. 

I will not rehearse the various members of the President’s cabinet who are ill-prepared for their positions, nor will I mention the growing consensus that the President was deeply involved with people who perpetrate sexual crimes against women and young girls. Of great interest to us are the international dimensions of this situation, especially relations with Russia and China; wars in the Middle East and Ukraine that continue unabated; and the very precarious global economic situation precipitated by this nation’s imposition of tariffs. 

We come together in the midst of what I think of as a “break the glass moment.” It is time to name the tremendous problems we are living with in the United States and elsewhere. It is a time to come closer than ever to one another, to organizations and movements that are not only resisting but also creating a new, brighter, more just, safer, and joy-filled future. We do so not at the expense of one another, but in concert with one another. That is our reason for meeting today. 

It is, in my view, time for us as FLTN to make some kind of public statement that adds to the chorus of voices of people of good will. 

Introductions

We began as always with introductions of those in the meeting room while the people on Zoom were encouraged to add a word of self-description to the chat. We said who we are and what we are engaged in by way of resistance. 

It was edifying to see the variety of identities and starting points. We included a number of students and international colleagues, whom we thank for their choice to come to the U.S. at a time when inhospitality and worse reign.

Sites of resistance named include the classroom, research and teaching, Wikipedia contributions, women’s farming efforts, support for family members engaged in resistance, working with groups that have lost funding, banging pan lids in non-violent protest, and many others including attending meetings like this! 

Input from Speakers

Three colleagues kicked off our conversation. See the full text of their remarks (and in the case of Rita Nakashima Brock, an amplified version of what she said) in the Appendices to this report.

  1. Kwok Pui-Lan, Emerita Professor at Episcopal Divinity School and now Distinguished Scholar at Episcopal Divinity School, is a renowned scholar, writer, Anglican activist, now podcaster and Substacker on Kwok ‘n Roll.

Looking at the current situation, she observed that “China and the U.S. have built a symbiotic relationship, and we can describe it as ‘interimperial’. This interimperial relationship is not only between China and the U.S., but also with Russia.”

Kwok Pui-Lan noted that some say that feminist liberation theologies have failed because our efforts at global change have not been effective. Going forward, she said: “Feminist liberation theologies are needed more than ever. But they need to be broadened to address our times.” 

  1. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite is Professor and President Emerita of Chicago Theological Seminary, a regular Substack writer of “No Fear Religion and Politics,” and author of more than five mystery books. 

Susan began by saying that “Feminist liberation theology is essential not only to understand the rising fascism of these times in which we are living in the U.S., but also to disrupt it by any nonviolent means as we are able.”

She described feminism as experiential: “Patriarchy inflicts pain on women and girls and that pain is not accidental… that pain is created, actually literally constructed in order to prop up an ideology of white male “natural” dominance and female submission.” 

Her suggestion is that with the implementation of critical consciousness a la Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, “In all our organizations, and political networking, our feminist collaborations and in our own minds, we have to keep speaking and demonstrating and raising a ruckus so show the structures of inequality.”

  1. Rita Nakashima Brock is a feminist theologian and activist who retired as Senior Vice President for Moral Injury Recovery Programs and founded the Shay Moral Injury Center at Volunteers of America.

In her extended remarks for publication, she describes the context in which “Imperial religions, however, remain a feature of contemporary democracies. In the U.S., evangelical Christianity as white Christian nationalism is the core moral meaning system fueling fascism. It operates by inflicting moral injury on its believers. Moral injury is the spiritual crisis individuals and communities experience as the consequence of life conditions, systems, or events in the face of devastating harm.”

Moving forward, it is important to understand the pain of many people. Part of effective strategies is “forming interpersonal connections with courage; tenacity; honesty; solidarity; nondogmatic, innovative approaches to problem-solving; and respectful, empathetic openness when it is possible, we might more wisely address moral injury and keep living out the feminist, earth-loving, collective work that resists and undermines empires.” This demands, she claims, “deconstructing imperial monotheism in any form, whether goddess or god; re-enchanting material life; and understanding the wisdom of reality’s interconnectedness as spiritual truth.” 

These three short but impactful presentations laid a foundation for discussing the urgent issues of our day all over the world. They were followed by for very useful reports from FLTN colleagues in four places. Time did not permit a full recitation of their important data, but see the Appendices for their complete reports. 

Reports from selected regions

  1. Rosemary B. Ganley was inducted into the Order of Canada last year for her life-long commitment to social justice especially for women with work in Jamaica and Tanzania. She edited a progressive Catholic newspaper in Canada, and now writes a bi-weekly column in the Peterborough Examiner. 

Rosemary offered a sobering but realistic view of the U.S. situation from the perspective of our northern neighbor. “In our analysis, we see two factors that have rendered you powerless so far. One is the unconscionable accumulation of wealth for a few, and the gap that exists between two sectors of society. The other is the failure of education among your people, that your voters should be led by such a regime. Fascism is elected in most cases.”

Her insights into the role of feminist theology include amplifying our public voice. 

  1.    Kathleen McPhillips and Tracy McEwan from Australia, who specialize in women’s issues and violence in the Catholic context, presented a list of Australian dynamics. For example, “The election in May 2025 saw a re-election of Labor and resounding defeat of Conservative Party and pro-Trump agenda.”

On the religious side, they echoed Kwok Pui-Lan’s call for increased diversification of feminist liberation theology sources and collaborators. They pointed to the work of Indigenous theologians in their region whose work is having a very positive impact.  

EDITOR’S NOTE (12/19/25): In light of the Bondi Beach killings, FLTN colleagues send our sympathy to friends in Australia as that country reels from the toxicity of that terrible tragedy. 

  1. Monica Maher is a Community Minister in Ecuador connected to First Congregational Church, Cambridge, Massachusetts. She works with women, indigenous people, LGBTQIA+ people, as well as on anti-violence efforts with the Grail and many other groups.

Monica said that “Ecuador is experiencing a militarization of civil society and an increasingly authoritarian rule, reflecting the Latin American shift to right wing regimes modeled by Argentina and El Salvador.” 

Nevertheless, “A sign of hope recently in Ecuador has been the rejection at the ballot box of the current governmental direction by the large majority.” Indigenous people in Ecuador insist on “re-existence,” not just “resistance” as strategies for inclusion and power-shifting. 

  1. Ulrike Ernst-Auga from Berlin, Germany, is President of the International Association for the Study of Religion and Gender (IARG). She brought a perspective both from Germany and Europe.

In her extended remarks, she observed that in Europe “we see the strengthening of right-wing populist and neo-nationalist parties, for example in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, and parts of Scandinavia. These parties mobilize similar discourses: fears of migration, appeals to Christian heritage, the return to traditional gender roles, and hostility toward feminist and queer movements.” But at the same time “Europe also witnesses growing progressive, feminist, ecological, and pro-democracy movements, particularly among younger generations. Protest cultures around climate justice, anti-racism, reproductive rights, and migrant solidarity have transformed public debates.”

Implications for FLTN work are that “research on religion and gender must remain both critical and imaginative, confronting the biopolitical anxieties of the present while contributing to broader visions of justice and coexistence.”

Small Groups 

Small groups met in the Guild Room, spilling over into the Phyllis Wheatley Room (first African American published poet), as well as on-line. The questions for the groups were: 

  1. What are the top priority issues for your community?
  2. How can we link more closely with one another as this work unfolds?

Among the reported results of those conversations are:

  1. Socialize the work of people in this group. For example, use and share Substacks — Susan Thistlethwaite’s https://susanthistlethwaitewaite.substack.com/ and Kwok Pui-Lan’s https://substack.com/@kwokpuilan
  2. Listen to and empower young people and help to amplify their voices
  3. Pay attention to anti-U.S. sentiment; gratitude to all who attended from around the world for their courage and generosity in coming to the U.S. at this moment
  4. Important concepts for further consideration: pain, moral injury, interimperialism, brutalism
  5. FYI—AAR Women’s Caucus is experiencing funding cuts from AAR that risk putting it out of commission. Watch for further information; contact Janice Poss — bozarts@earthlink.net. 
  6. Strategic funding is needed on so many fronts—for example to help with south-south gatherings
  7. People using their privilege (e.g. clergy) to stand firm in the public arena
  8. Oppose school systems that allow groups like Turning Point to recruit in their institutions
  9. Boycott—starting with Tesla and Home Depot—companies that support right-wing agenda in general and ICE in particular
  10. What can we do together, for example, issuing a statement?

Concluding Remarks

This was an experiment of a meeting format that gave us a deeper sense of how important it is to work together. Technological challenges notwithstanding, we will persist! 

Thanks to all who participated, especially Rita, Kwok, Susan, Kath, Tracy, Rosemary, Ulrike, and Monica. Special thanks to our colleagues who did the IT—Eunchong Kim and Caroline Perkins. It seems clear that the FLTN is needed, perhaps now more than ever.

As the women of the Grail have long held, “Together, we are a genius.” When it comes to justice-making in the current moment, genius is required. Thank you for being part of it.

Next Steps:

  1. Early in 2026, we will attempt to write and circulate for signatures a short but pointed statement of FLTN’s resistance to authoritarian actions and our contributions to the creation of a just social order. Your ideas are welcome.
  2. The FLTN Midyear meeting on Zoom will be Wednesday, May 13, 2026, 1 PM ET. Please mark your calendar and plan to attend. 

The FLTN Annual Meeting is projected for Friday, November 20, 2026, 4-6 PM MT in Denver, Colorado, in conjunction with the AAR/SBL Annual Meetings. We will explore doing it in a hybrid fashion again if possible. 

Please send suggestions for speakers and topics for midyear and next year, and statement ideas  to mhunt@hers.com.

  1. Feel free to circulate this report and invite others to join our efforts. Feel free to use the Google list to share relevant information with all. Consult our website www.waterwomensalliance.orgfor additional WATER information. Feel free to use our resources—WATERtalks, WATERrituals, WATERmeditations, and more as you wish. All are welcome at WATER programs without cost. 

Appendices attached

  1. Remarks Kwok Pui-Lan
  2. Remarks Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite
  3. Remarks Rita Nakashima Brock
  4. Report from Canada by Rosemary B. Ganley
  5. Report from Australia by Kathleen McPhillips and Tracy McEwan
  6. Report from Ecuador by Monica Maher
  7. Report from Germany and Europe from Ulrike Ernst-August

Feminist Liberation Theologians’ Network,

Susan Thistlethwaite, November 21, 2025

 

Feminist liberation theology is essential not only to understand the rising fascism of these times in which we are living in the U.S., but also to disrupt it by any nonviolent means as we are able.

If I had a whistle, I would blow it signaling just what an emergency we are experiencing with this rising fascism.

Fascism is not limited to the U.S., of course, and its ideology is working its way through the U.S. political structures and those of other countries like a toxic oil spill.

Liberation theology begins with contextual analysis, the profound insight that oppression does not just happen, it is created. It is the result of structures that are deliberately constructed to suppress most of the people, steal their labor and their visions for their own lives, and blame certain designated victims. That is the essence of fascism.

In fascist political structures, most of the men are sold a lie that they are superior, and they have the duty, indeed the right, to ‘lord’ it over women. This is often accompanied by their inability to succeed in the current economy, but the blame goes to the women who are seeking equality and the immigrant who is seeking simply to live.

Feminism is experiential. Patriarchy inflicts pain on women and girls and that pain is not accidental. It must be at the center of our attention. It is the scream of a child victim on an island of adult male predators; it is the muffled cry of a woman beaten by her male partner or husband, a towel stuffed in her mouth; it is the gasping in shock of immigrant women and girls whose voices are suppressed and whose rights are being trampled. It is the horror inflicted on LGBTQIA people who are shamed and blamed so they will harm themselves. Why else eliminate funding for suicide hotlines?

The common denominator is pain and that pain is created, actually literally constructed, in order to prop up an ideology of white male “natural” dominance and female submission.

Contextual analysis of fascism in feminist liberation theology must include economic analysis. The world runs on the unpaid or poorly paid labor of women. You take that prop out and our current economy would crumble in certain sectors.

The key insight of feminist liberation theology is that what is constructed by a few privileged cisgender white men can be changed. And change has happened over time, though there are now concerted efforts to destroy those changes.

I think a fruitful line of discussion for our group can be what are the weakest props of fascism and what are effective means of knocking them down or at least crippling them.

One thing that is essential to start is the cultivation of critical consciousness. Many people, women as well as men, do not actually see oppression unless it is actively happening to them, and even then they can buy the lie that it is another oppressed person’s fault.

Actually seeing oppression is what critical consciousness is about.

There is a story about the great Brazilian educator Paulo Freire.[i] Freire taught people not only to read, but to see. He would go into a village and set up an easel. He would draw what he saw in the village such as a warehouse with bags of grain. One pile of bags was big, the other was small. “Why is one pile bigger than the other?” he asked. “Because the big pile is for the landlord and the small pile is for us,” came the reply. And he taught them to read the word “inequality.” And, of course, the people at the top threw him out of Brazil.

This is what we can do. We can see ourselves and help others see by getting in touch with the pain that is being inflicted and point to the ways it is deliberately created. In all our organizations, and political networking, our feminist collaborations and in our own minds, we have to keep speaking and demonstrating and raising a ruckus to show the structures of inequality.

Then when we have weakened them, we can bring them down.

Feminist Liberation Theologians’ Network Meeting, Boston, November 21, 2025

Kwok Pui-lan

 

On October 29, 2025, President Xi Jinping met President Donald Trump in Busan, South Korea. The leaders of the world’s two biggest economies agreed to dial back the trade war, which had affected the stock market and the global supply chain. The meeting is significant because it clearly demonstrates a changing multipolar world order defined by big-power rivalry, especially between China and the U.S. This change will affect everyone on the planet.

Behind the discussion about the competition of global hegemony and the rise of authoritarianism in many parts of the world, we can discern the glorification of the political strong men, the spread of toxic masculinity, and a disregard for the vulnerable population, especially women, non-binary persons, and children.

Some would say feminist liberation theologies have failed because what we have advocated for decades, such as equality between women and men and non-binary persons, did not seem to make a dent in global politics. Some younger women thought that feminist theology is outdated and belongs to an earlier generation.

But I want to argue for the opposite. Feminist liberation theologies are needed more than ever. But they need to be broadened to address our times.

One of the slogans of the feminist movement was the personal is political. Today in our world, we need to think about the political in new ways. Achille Mbembe, a Cameroonian social theorist and critic, describes this era as an era of brutalism. We have “caged humanity,” he says, in places like Gaza, and the U.S. sends undocumented migrants to a third country they have not been to and do not speak the language. Around the world, we see women abused, especially in sex trafficking. How can we respond to these situations with strategies for resistance and change?

For some time, we have argued for an intersectional approach to feminist liberation theologies. More than ever, we see gender and sexuality are embedded in larger power matrices shaping politics, economics, and culture. In the U.S. in the past weeks, we have been discussing the release of the Epstein files. The Epstein case underscores the intricate relationship between the abuses of women, the power elites, and toxic masculinity. The evangelical Christians are willing to put their moral compass aside when they support a thrice-married convicted felon and continue to support right-wing politics.

From my vantage point as a longtime observer of Chinese politics, we can’t describe the tension between China and the U.S. in terms of ideological differences. China is not a communist country but practices a form of state capitalism. The Sino-American relationship is also not what Samuel Huntington described as a “clash of civilizations.” If you go to Shanghai, you will see the strong influences of American culture. China and the U.S. have built a symbiotic relationship, and we can describe it as “interimperial.” This interimperial relationship is not only between China and the U.S., but also with Russia.

I want to ask all of us to think about what kind of feminist spirituality can help us at a time like ours. Sometimes when we look at the news, we feel depressed because we can’t find much good news. What is a feminist spirituality of resilience and resistance?

    Last year, I retired from teaching, and I thought all of us need to speak more publicly to intervene in the age of brutalism, interimperial dynamics, and the subjugation of women, non-binary persons, and children to poverty and marginalization. I started the Kwok ‘n’ Roll

Substack (https://substack.com/@kwokpuilan?),

Podcast (https://kwoknroll.podbean.com/ ),

YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSeO8hFgYu0).

    I hope in whatever way and wherever you are we keep the spirituality of resistance alive!

Feminist Liberation Theologians’ Network

Rita Nakashima Brock, November 2025

Patriarchy Is Collapsing: How Are We to Survive its Collapse?

“Goliath is a … metaphor for the kind of exploitative, hierarchical systems that have grown to organize human society.”                                               — Luke Kemp

Humanity has a long history of vast empires with class and caste systems to control asset extraction, distribution, and wealth maintenance. Internal rebellions were quelled with welfare largess and paternalism, and their militias provided both defense from other empires and expansion opportunities.

Luke Kemp’s Goliath’s Curse: A History and Future of Societal Collapse,[1] is a sobering, five-millennia analysis of the collapse of three hundred agricultural empires. It parallels, to some extent, the work of Gerda Lerner on the creation of patriarchy,[2] but instead of the rise of empires, Kemp examines risk factors leading to their inevitable demises. He describes their kings, lords, or emperors as “serial killers” possessed of a “dark triad of traits… psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism,” who seized and maintained power via “criminal gangs running protection rackets.” Bloated by colonization, which off-loaded the economic and environmental costs of extracting natural resources for the assets needed to maintain their power, they still failed.

Missing in Kemp’s analysis are the ideologies of empires—the systems of religion and ritual practices that undergird and extoll hierarchical imperial systems as more “advanced and civilized” than group-oriented, collectivist, hunter-gatherer societies. We have knowledge of imperial ideologies because writing, invented to track and monitor their assets, was also used to record stories of the powerful and their systems of power, both human and divine—i.e. making god(s) in their image.

One “advance” in religion, according to Western historians of religion of the last century, was monotheism, which emerged in the second millennium BCE in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, and Caanan. It is certainly no accident that imperial power would be envisioned as serving one ultimate and powerful entity as the source of life who sanctioned an earthly stand-in responsible for maintaining the empire and eliminating threats to it.[3]

Karl Jaspers coined the term “axial age” for the first millennium BCE, when kings were challenged by oracles and prophets for their oppressive practices and their wars. Hope for the prophets, to prevent an imperial collapse, involved a divinely-anointed monarch who cared for the oppressed and dispossessed enough to usher in a benevolent era of peace and justice or a sovereign or savior who ushered in a new reign in the aftermath of collapse.

Kemp describes multiple factors in collapse, which happens after an empire’s first few centuries from a lethal increase in:

  1. Authoritarianism: Violence for control of assets and people;
  2. Exploitation: Bloated, brittle bureaucracies with too much power at the top;
  3. Corruption: Feckless, incompetent rulers;
  4. Internal power struggles: Revolt by elites or uprisings of the exploited classes, often involving messianic movements and apocalypticism;
  5. Environmental destruction: Agriculture failures, deforestation, asset depletion, natural disasters, and climate change;
  6. Loss of populations: Migration, mass exodus, famine, wars, diseases and pandemics; and/or
  7. Invasions and colonization.

We are living now in fossil-fueled, multinational capitalist empires operating within a global system that is, of course, environmentally unsustainable and threatened by weapons of mass destruction in the hands of dark triad leaders. In addition, the birth rate, especially in industrialized countries, has dropped precipitously, stalling out growth-based economies, with a global rate that is below replacement.[4]

While a few unhinged billionaires are seeking a way to colonize Mars as an alternative human future—assuming they can persuade enough fertile women to join them—the rest of us must find ways to prevent both nuclear war and a catastrophic collapse of the ecosystem that supports most of life on earth.[5] Kemp identifies strategies that enabled human survival after the fall of empires that involved revolt or abandonment, but the collapses cost untold deaths and left degraded environments.

The wild card of hope that Kemp adds to the crises we face is democracy. The U.S. project was an attempt to escape an existing empire to form a republic that protected elite white men’s assets, including slavery and patriarchy. However, the idea of democracy they preached for themselves was infectious, and the last two and a half centuries of struggle internally and globally to create more democracy has given voice and power to entire populations long exploited and oppressed by empires.

Imperial religions, however, remain a feature of contemporary democracies. In the U.S., evangelical Christianity as white Christian nationalism is the core moral meaning system fueling fascism. It operates by inflicting moral injury on its believers. Moral injury is the spiritual crisis individuals and communities experience as the consequence of life conditions, systems, or events in the face of devastating harm. Inflicting, failing to prevent, witnessing, inheriting, or being victimized by harm results in guilt, shame, remorse, outrage, disgust, despair, hate of self or other, aggrieved victim anger, lethal fury, and suicidality.

Moral injury challenges core identities and meaning systems. Human biology builds the need for love and care into our very flesh, so that our first cry is a need for constant contact. Humans orient to being good to receive the love needed to flourish, and we imprint on the behaviors of those closest to us to learn how to be moral, mostly as habit. In effect, we are born to be moral and to need love as desperately as we need food. Moral judgment emerges with brain maturation and conscience formation, and moral injury is a function of conscience in relation to harm.

Western Christianity, however, has asserted we are born hopelessly sinful. Our fate is eternal torture unless we recognize and admit to our sinfulness and submit to an all-powerful deity whose human-and-divine son took on the consequence of our sinfulness to atone for it and paid the price in order to open a way to forgive, love, and bless us, as long as we remain faithful and obedient to divine will. Because of this doctrine of original sin, adults are responsible for disciplining and shaping children so they can learn to be good.

Violence is harm, and yet it is often used on children in the name of love as deserved. A child’s moral injury may manifest as self-condemnation, shame, and guilt or, if a child feels unjustly punished, as aggrieved victim anger. After my first 5 years as a child in Japan, I was shocked visiting my stepfather’s family in Mississippi by the angry violence used to discipline children and the ordinariness of racism.

In my last fifteen years of research and work on addressing moral injury, I have concluded that Donald Trump’s charismatic superpower, a power many underestimate, is the aggrieved victim anger of moral injury. It is no accident that a militant Christianity was blatantly obvious at the January 6th insurrection after Trump lost the election—he was to be their savior. His base is populated by cis white men whose expectations for a decent life, with a life purpose of value to others and prospects for work that can support long term family relationships, have been thwarted for many decades. At the same time, we have been celebrating the growing numbers of women and BIPOC people in leadership and positions of power.

The now successful backlash to advances in democracy began in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan, when the rich paid 95% in taxes. With increasingly lower tax rates for the rich, wealth has increasingly been held in obscene amounts by the few, while exported manufacturing, and a refusal to let the minimum wage keep pace with rising costs of living has meant the gutting of the middle class. The UN scale of inequality indicates that it is now rising in 90% of all countries, with the U.S. rates well above many countries in Europe, Japan, and Canada.[6]

To feel thwarted and trapped by circumstances beyond our control, with no avenues for moving forward, and unable to feel dignity or social value for others can lead people to despair, frustration, fury, substance use, or violence against self or others. It can also lead to fixating on a messianic savior figure who says he is the only one who can destroy or fix the system that oppresses them. Philosopher Joseph Wiinikka Lydon studies hate groups for the Southern Poverty Law Center and has concluded moral injury is their driving energy.

U.S. members of FLTN are in a race against a fatal collapse of our deeply flawed democracy, and due to our post-WW II military dominance, we pose a threat to other countries. The work of generations who risked their lives to widen who counts in our democracy has given us unprecedented access to knowledge and power, but to turn the tide on collapse, we must continue to  reach a wider public with our work to deconstruct the hollow, lethal religious ideologies and practices of empires that favor billionaires and their companies.

We must reach beyond our comfort zones to widen, as far as possible, our existing networks and recruit unlikely allies by refusing to demonize, ridicule, or condemn those ordinary people who remain enthralled by the lures, distractions, and false promises of empires. Enthrallment is immune to facts, ridicule, punishment, argument, or ostracism.

If we believe that even our enemies are born moral and can be reached, that process has to begin with respect, real listening, and, sometimes, getting out of the way if we don’t feel safe or productive in an alien context. Aggrieved victim anger can be transformed by people who are trusted not to judge and who are willing to listen empathetically to the shame, sense of failure and helplessness, loneliness, and grief underneath the fury and frustration that cover them.

This is not to say we should start taking care of adherents to fascism. Understanding the limits of our abilities to engage them is a reason to work elsewhere on coalitions and positive solutions, rather than focusing energy on how terrible they are. But many clergy and some of my friends have MAGA-identified people in their lives, and if we are wiser in how we treat them and the things that concern them, we might be able to engage them in ways that enable them not to hold so tightly to their pain and enthrallment.

In forming interpersonal connections with courage; tenacity; honesty; solidarity; nondogmatic, innovative approaches to problem-solving; and respectful, empathetic openness when it is possible, we might more wisely address moral injury and keep living out the feminist, earth-loving, collective work that resists and undermines empires. But to do that means, I suggest,  deconstructing imperial monotheism in any form, whether goddess or god; re-enchanting material life; and understanding the wisdom of reality’s interconnectedness as spiritual truth.

 

[1]Penguin Viking, 2025. Kemp is an expert in international relations and economics and a Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, part of the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at Cambridge University.

[2] Gerta Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy, Oxford, 1986. James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale, 1998, has also informed my analysis.

[3] The power of hierarchical systems is so strong, Western feminist theology has attempted to neuter or add female gendered language for divinity without challenging the underlying monotheism that orients people to hierarchical power, which polytheistic systems for empires can also possess.

[4] A discussion pro and con about whether the drop is good or bad for the world: https://globalaffairs.org/commentary/podcasts/population-paradox-are-declining-birth-rates-good-or-bad-world?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=15620481286&gbraid=0AAAAADCQMXZDH7gevosq0hakL5zJq9ye1&gclid=CjwKCAiA0eTJBhBaEiwA-Pa-hSm11tteW4vH7LVvJ9xdAojBhg8Nr2Ec6Sfi1KCf0Ooi6gSu75sgaBoCPIwQAvD_BwE

[5]See https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/18/peter-thiel-refused-consent-for-sprawling-lodge-in-new-zealand-local-council, Peter “Thiel … is one of a number of super-rich speculators who began buying up remote boltholes in New Zealand, in preparation for apocalyptic social, political or environmental disintegration.” Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are looking to Mars to save humanity. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/elon-musk-wants-us-flee-233100093.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAJU5RnDoBHKFKFO_DA0q_9sbP-v5nZeHnkdmB0NmdvhsXRR48hkJLzNsCeid4g1HbXSbwWpGkRmLtst8ay2k0eHSQRHtbvkOTwsDoVGwfXQty4GVrEyjunMgTvoZqWjjYnfJXSbr-DvH5nbaZf0ittOdrxQ4rEBnr9qp9DSmISLK.

[6] https://www.inequalityindex.org/report/the-commitment-to-reducing-inequality-2024/. 

FLTN Report from Canada

Rosemary B. Ganley, November, 2025

 

We are shocked and appalled at the turn that America has taken. We had thought, perhaps naively, that your form of democracy would prevent the ascent to power of such evil.

We, like most of the world, are being bullied, insulted and rendered fearful. At the same time, a latent patriotism is being shown and a moral, centrist leader has emerged for us.

In our analysis, we see two factors that have rendered you powerless so far. One is the unconscionable accumulation of wealth for a few, and the gap that exists between two sectors of society.

The other is the failure of education among your people, that your voters should be led by such a regime. Fascism is elected in most cases.

We have 3 political parties: centre, left, and right. Our judiciary is not politicized. Words such as “liberal’, “socialist” or “unions” are not bad words. Religious leaders are not influential.

We have a global perspective. Our women’s movement is strong. We admit our original sin with Indigenous peoples and are at work to make amends.

We hope and we pray for your turnaround

FLTN Report from Australia

Kathleen McPhillips and Tracy McEwan, November, 2025

Kathleen McPhilips

  • Australian election May 2025 saw a re-election of Labor and a resounding defeat of Conservative Party and pro-Trump agenda
  • Confirmation of Teal movement, a community-based political movement led by women and supported by people tired of party-based politics and wanting a different form of engagement in the political sphere. They sit on the cross bench and have power to amend bills etc.
  • Increase in interest in grass roots community work as a way of doing politics, e.g. Sydney Alliance movement bringing together unions, churches, community organizations based on principles of justice and diversity
  • Support for social contract moving forward on climate, cost-of-living, housing and health, the big issues
  • Rejection of Trump-style politics, but rise of far right continues to be a major concern, especially for young people looking for answers
  • How people handle diversity and division has become a cause for concern especially with rise of online harassment and abuse 

——————-

Tracy McEwan

  • Paradigm shift needed to move beyond Christian feminism as a middleclass white movement
  • Also, we lost a great feminist theological, political thinker and colleague this year with the death of Prof. Marion Maddox in September. She is deeply missed. 

FLTN Report from Ecuador 

Monika Maher, November, 2025

Ecuador is experiencing a militarization of civil society and an increasingly authoritarian rule, reflecting the Latin American shift to right wing regimes modeled by Argentina and El Salvador.  There has been a concentration of power in the executive branch and threats to the judicial branch, particularly Supreme Court judges. President Daniel Noboa, whose billionaire family is the wealthiest in the country, declared an internal armed conflict in January 2024. This has resulted in continual States of Exception in which basic civil liberties are curtailed for all citizens in the name of the war on narcotrafficking.

Protest in written word and nonviolent action is easily criminalized as the government can identify dissident groups as terrorists and employ the military against them. A rise in racism has been blatant, both in public rhetoric and State repression, with military crackdowns disproportionately impacting economically marginalized Afro-Ecuadorian and indigenous communities. Mainstream media plays into racist stereotyping and blaming of victims for the excessive use of force by the military.

The economic context is one of federal cuts in basic social services and an increase in taxes (to 15%) on most goods and services in order to cover higher military spending. Increased prices of essential products and decreased funding for health and education have placed great pressure on the majority who struggle to survive on a minimum wage of $470 per month. These economic policies reflect the austerity measures required by the International Monetary Fund, and have also included the elimination of the gasoline subsidy in September 2025.  

The response by the population has been frustration and protest, particularly on the part of the indigenous movement which declared a national transportation strike in October 2025. The government reacted to the strike by sending a convoy of 100 military tanks to indigenous communities, and repressing popular resistance with live bullets and tear gas which killed three people and injured hundreds. Protests in solidarity in Quito also met with military force.

The response by international human rights organizations, including the Inter American Commission on Human Rights, has been swift, calling for the respect of the rights to freedom of expression, assembly and movement, and an end to the excessive use of military force.

The progressive faith community in Ecuador has responded with an interreligious declaration calling for the respect of human rights, an end to racism, and dialogue between the government and the indigenous movement. This declaration was signed by individuals, churches and organizations throughout Latin America and North America, including WATER. Feminist faith leaders plan to commemorate the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, November 25, with an interreligious celebration focused on gender justice and collective healing, given the recent State violence against indigenous women leaders.

The response of feminists in the academia has included analyzing the neo-liberal authoritarianism sweeping Latin America, with particular attention to how fundamentalist religion plays a critical role, with huge amounts of financial and technical resources exported from the U.S. With other feminist theological colleagues, we have carried out research from an interreligious, interdisciplinary, international and intercultural perspective. Latin American community feminism and indigenous theology emphasize not just resistance but re-existence.

The academic community has also responded to the militarization of civil society with a detailed declaration of protest published immediately after the President declared the internal armed conflict. The President responded to the statement publicly with sexist profanity, calling the PhD signatories, many of whom were female, “HdPs”/“hijas de puta” or daughters of a bitch. The international program, Scholars at Risk took note, affirming the alarming authoritarian, anti-intellectual environment in Ecuador.  This hostility to academia contradicts the President’s own credentials, which include degrees from four elite U.S. universities: Harvard, Northwestern, George Washington, and New York University.

A sign of hope recently in Ecuador has been the rejection at the ballot box of the current governmental direction by the large majority. A national referendum in November, called by the President, was categorically voted down. The proposals included rewriting the constitution and establishing a U.S. military base on the Galapagos Islands. Important to note is the bi-nationality of President Noboa; he is also a U.S. citizen and strong supporter of Trump.

FLTN Report from Germany and Europe

Ulrike Ernst-Auga, November, 2025

 

When I speak about the political situation in Germany today, I often emphasise that we are living in a moment of deep transformation. To help a U.S. audience understand this context, I begin with a brief explanation of how our political system works.

Germany is a federal parliamentary democracy with sixteen federal states. At the national level, we elect the Bundestag, our federal parliament. We use a mixed voting system that combines proportional representation with direct constituency votes. Each voter casts one vote for a local candidate and one for a political party. The proportional vote largely determines the distribution of seats in parliament, so even smaller parties can enter if they pass the five percent threshold. This system fosters political plurality and almost always produces coalition governments.

In recent years, we have witnessed the significant rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which polls strongly in many regions, particularly in eastern Germany. Their agenda combines anti-immigration rhetoric, anti-Islam narratives, and demands to return to so-called traditional gender roles. Much of this resonates with what I examine in my own scholarly work: neo-nationalist imaginaries, biopolitical anxieties, and epistemic violence, in which religion and gender become boundary markers for who is considered part of the national community and who is excluded. The AfD draws heavily on such categories to construct a threatened, ethnically defined essentialist “German identity”.

At the same time, political developments on the left have become more complex. The newly formed Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) emerged from a split within Die Linke. BSW attracts voters who feel economically and socially insecure, who oppose militarisation and sanctions policies, and who seek stronger state-led social protection. It is a very recent party, and its long-term ideological direction is still evolving.

Interestingly, after this split, Die Linke has begun gaining traction again among young voters. Many young people in Germany are deeply concerned about precarious living conditions, housing shortages, climate anxiety, and global instability. Their renewed support for Die Linke indicates that a substantial portion of the younger generation is searching for left-wing visions centred on solidarity, democracy, equality, and peace.

These developments have a direct influence on academic research in Religion and Gender in Germany. The strengthening of the far right intensifies our need to analyse how discourses of religion, gender, sexuality, and nation are used to legitimise hierarchical and exclusionary political projects. In my epistemology, I argue that religion and gender function as formed and forming categories of knowledge, shaping perceptions of agency, belonging, and social value. Right-wing narratives often essentialise these categories, collapsing gender into rigid binaries and religion into a narrow Christian nationalist “identity”. Scholars must make these mechanisms visible.

 At the same time, the growing engagement of youth with left-wing politics opens intellectual space to study alternative solidarities: queer and feminist networks, ecological and spiritual movements, and post secular political imaginaries. These movements resonate with my argument that agency does not only arise from stable identities but emerges through shared imaginaries and relational futures.

Turning to Europe more broadly, the German developments reflect continental patterns. Across Europe we see the strengthening of right-wing populist and neo-nationalist parties, for example in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, and parts of Scandinavia. These parties mobilise similar discourses: fears of migration, appeals to Christian heritage, the return to traditional gender roles, and hostility toward feminist and queer movements. This creates a European climate in which gender and religion are increasingly politicised cultural markers.

 At the same time, Europe also witnesses growing progressive, feminist, ecological, and pro-democracy movements, particularly among younger generations. Protest cultures around climate justice, anti-racism, reproductive rights, and migrant solidarity have transformed public debates. These movements align with the intellectual and ethical commitments of Religion and Gender Studies: to analyse power structures, to expose epistemic violence, and to imagine life-affirming, pluralistic futures.

Thus, the German situation cannot be understood in isolation. It is deeply embedded in a Europe that is struggling between authoritarian retrenchment and democratic renewal. For our field, this means that research on religion and gender must remain both critical and imaginative, confronting the biopolitical anxieties of the present while contributing to broader visions of justice and coexistence.