Weaponized rosaries: Humanist lessons from The Atlantic’s latest misfire

There is a long and storied history of religion being weaponized to spread fear and rally followers into violence. The KKK burned crosses. The Wehrmacht, like preceding German military forces, wore belts with buckles that read “Gott mit uns”, “God with us”. In India today, saffron, a color strongly associated with Hinduism, is used by an extremist party leveraging religious nationalism against minorities. Although Muslims say ٱللَّٰهُ أَكْبَرُ‎ to praise Allah in everyday contexts, the expression is now also associated in the West with a jihadist’s cry before committing murder. And today in the U.S., some radical traditional (“rad trad”) Catholics apparently sport rosaries alongside their guns.

So how did a recent Atlantic article on the weaponization of this religious item, beloved and essential to well over a billion Catholics, go so very wrong?

Easily. Because even though the U.S. faces extreme division between its subcultures, exacerbating an already strained political union, many prominent media outlets are still far better at sensationalizing the crisis than building platforms for change.

We all need to be better humanists when reporting on risks of worldly violence. Here’s how this piece made our struggle for a better world much harder.

What happened with The Atlantic

Daniel Panneton wrote an article that built in part from religious news sites sounding the alarm about U.S. gun culture, QAnon conspiracies, and “militant authoritarianism” seeping into mainstream Catholic life. Panneton’s thesis hung on the phenomenon of social media posts where Catholics posed with both guns and rosaries, or reconfigured Catholic hagiography with firearms. The article portrayed this trend as urgent and concerning, in light of church histories of violent rhetoric and the extremist direction of rad trad Catholicism in the U.S. today.

For atheists frustrated by the encroachment of religion in public life, and the rise of white Christian nationalism, this was the easiest clickbait. Another article about the sordid nature of U.S. Catholicism? Insta-repost material, right?

But put on your critical thinking caps, set aside your biases, and read the article from a rhetorical standpoint. Take a look at its argumentation. Note the errors, logical leaps, and lack of historical context for many phrases used to suggest a dangerous recent turn from the figurative to the literal for the rosary.

For one, the only concrete evidence of rising rosary literalism is those vaguely referenced social media posts. There’s a later, unsourced mention of Christian fantasies of killing abortion activists, but how does this serve the article’s thesis about rosary symbolism? Christian extremists have committed such murders for decades, and the 2019 U.S. Congress already named far right extremists as “the most significant domestic terrorism threat facing the U.S.” Where does the rosary come into play?

For another, paragraphs on military-themed religious merchandise and masculinist Christianities fail to establish any sort of timeline that supports the author’s claim of a dangerous escalation in recent years. But how could they? Such markets have existed for a while, especially around the purchase of World War I and II paraphernalia, while variations on masculine or warrior Christianity show up in every period after the end of literal Crusades and colonization in the name of Christ.

Panneton claims that “[t]he rosary-as-weapon also gives rad-trad Catholic men both a distinctive signifier within Christian nationalism and a sort of membership pass to the movement”, but where is the evidence that anyone is using the rosary specifically as a swipe-key to entry to these hate groups? When did Christian nationalist movements start requiring beads at the door? The article then talks about how Catholics and Protestants have bypassed their often stark theological differences by finding common cause against legalized abortion and queer people—so which is it? Is the rosary now an essential extremist key to entry, or simply part of a blend of religious icons tolerated in service to a broader coalition?

A 2020 comment by Pope Francis about “spiritual warfare” also seems to exist to lend credence to this idea of a recent shift in meaning for the rosary, but instead only undermines Panneton’s thesis about U.S. extremism now taking a literalist direction. After all, the major crisis in U.S. Catholicism is that Francis is not well respected by rad trads. How then do his figurative comments, which belong to a long history of generic warring-with-Satan rhetoric in relation to the rosary, give us any meaningful intel about the U.S. guns-and-rosaries movement as a more literalist threat?

The conservative Christian response

Now look at the title. Rewritten after initial backlash, it’s currently “How Extremist Gun Culture Is Trying to Co-opt the Rosary”, with an image of a traditional rosary. But when the article first published, it was “How the Rosary Became an Extremist Symbol”—a far more provocative claim, requiring a much higher standard of evidence. And the associated image? A rosary made up of gunshot holes, with a second headline that inaccurately treated the rosary a “sacrament”.

Is it any wonder that Christian commenters were easily able to spin this article as a hit piece revealing the anti-Catholic underpinnings of mainstream media? When the whole article had to cherry-pick from a range of traditional and conservative Catholic positions, even blurring Francis’s statements with the actions of his extremist detractors, to come even close to justifying its claim that the rosary is now a fully co-opted symbol of literal, imminent violence?

Well, those commenters did. Catholics on social media, along with broadly alt-right conservative forums like One America News and Breitbart, had a field day tearing into the many lazy elisions and misrepresentations of longstanding Catholic rhetoric and tradition here. Rosary sales have also shot up, as average Catholics reacted to the religious-commentator talking point that mainstream media essentially thinks grandma praying the mysteries with her heirloom rosary makes her a violent militant.

And just like that, a piece on the weaponization of the rosary by a gun-fetishizing fringe of U.S. extremists has now become a far-reaching Catholic call to arms to see mainstream culture as out to take their whole religion from them.

The humanist alternative

What made The Atlantic piece such good fodder for Christian conservative outrage is probably also what made it such an appealing sell in the first place. It’s a piece that ties every Catholic who’s anti-legal-abortion, every Catholic who’s anti-trans and anti-queer, every Catholic who thinks society would just be better if everyone were heterosexually married with women in their place and the whole family at mass on Sundays, into a nice neat package: all as good as gun-toting murderers, this close to pulling the trigger on the rest of us.

And with the U.S. deepening its already alarming cultural schisms? With far right conspiracy theorists and white supremacists driving so deep a wedge into federal and state politics that civil war or something even uglier isn’t off the table? With Christian nationalist violence already in brutal play in the country? Of course we’re primed and ready to believe in further imminent turns from rhetoric to horrific action.

But it’s precisely because the U.S. is such a powder keg at this moment, and because radical extremists benefit more than anyone else from broadly drawn tribalist lines in the cultural sand, that we as humanists cannot afford to approach these topics as mere fodder for sensationalist and clickbait reporting.

We may strongly feel that conservative Catholic positions on abortion, queer people, and the ideal hierarchical structure for family and society do immense harm. We may also be well versed in the strong overlaps between rad trad Christianities and white nationalism. But there was not enough evidence in that Atlantic piece to make the dangerous claim that the rosary itself is now synonymous with extremism—and shoddy argumentation does immense harm to us as well.

The rosary is a symbol and tool used in a faith of 1.3 billion human beings, most of whom are not violence-seeking, and most of whom are also not part of the U.S. religious-extremist schism currently rocking the Catholic world. Just as many humanists would rightly call foul on anyone trying to paint the almost 2 billion Muslim followers with the same brush, so too must we refuse to accept a sweeping claim about everyday Catholics that relies on a vague feeling of truthiness alone.

What’s at stake? The societal rift already so deep between us, and our ability to heal it by looking for common cause, to build a secular society where all are free to practise non-encroaching faiths (or lack thereof) in a more perfect union.

Because not all trad Catholics were centrally outraged by The Atlantic‘s shoddy treatment of the rosary as a symbol of their faith. Many recognize that any Catholic community fetishizing guns alongside rosaries, or invoking Christianity in pursuit of white supremacist and nationalist ends, is a danger in need of immediate redress. The problem is that now the conversation has changed into something else entirely: a well-seasoned persecution narrative for Catholics, with strong historical precedent that can and will be leveraged to further silo many from broader shared discourse.

Sensationalist and poorly evidenced reporting abounds, of course, and plenty of religious and conservative sites make use of spin and clickbait tactics, too.

But that’s no excuse for not doing better in secular media. Our media.

As The Atlantic‘s sensationalist piece illustrated to devastating results, our most prominent media platforms are dangerously susceptible to exacerbating real sociopolitical crises.

Lesson (hopefully) learned.

Do we now have it in us to lean into more humanist reporting instead?