(RNS) — We’re almost a year into the second Trump administration, and it’s hard to keep up with the escalating spiral of violence: against immigrants, student activists, even random fishermen in the Caribbean. It’s especially hard to wrap one’s head around the cruelty because those inflicting it seem unable to distinguish between their targets. The people killed on those fishing boats, we’re told, were “narco-terrorists.” Left-wing protesters are “domestic terrorists.” And in fact the two terrorist groups are really a single conspiracy to kill ICE agents.
But cartel narco-terrorists aren’t only in league with antifa; they also work with China, smuggling “military age” Chinese men across the Mexican border. And wouldn’t you know it, Muslim “prayer mats” have been found at border crossing sites.
Christian nationalism’s various enemies have a strange tendency to muddle together into one single existential threat to the American way of life, one amorphous and dangerous “them” from which the Christian nation’s “us” must be protected at all costs.
I’m a theologian and a scholar of the history of Christian thought, and whenever I see this bizarre blurring happening, my mind goes to a very specific place and time: a leper colony outside the Italian town of Foligno, where one morning in 1292 a mystic named Angela packed up a washbowl and a towel and paid a visit. The way Angela describes this visit is, for my money, the most politically explosive passage in the history of theology, and I’ve been coming back to it these past months as a kind of guide through our dangerous moment of ascendent Christian nationalism.
Medieval mystics are a strange bunch, and Angela is certainly among the strangest. Her story begins unassumingly. She traveled to the leper colony, she says, “to find Christ,” and spent all day washing the hands and feet of the lepers. It’s what happens next that makes Angela’s book such an important political text. She mentions one man whose hands “were festering and in an advanced stage of decomposition.” After washing them, she noticed a piece of his rotten flesh had fallen off and was floating in the bowl of water. Then, like she’s describing something as unexceptional as folding laundry, Angela says she picked up the bowl and drank it, swallowing the festering chunk of flesh.
“The drink was so sweet,” she remembered, “it was as if we had received Holy Communion.”
Bear with me. Off-putting as it is, this passage really does have an important political lesson for our moment. I didn’t see the political upshot myself until I noticed that, unlike my own reaction to reading her story, Angela never mentions being disgusted by the leper’s body. She doesn’t dwell on his symptoms at all. She only mentions them to explain how the piece of his flesh got in the bowl of water. Angela doesn’t dwell on the man’s symptoms because his actual sickness, importantly, doesn’t have anything to do with the story. What matters isn’t why the lepers have been excluded from society. What matters is simply the fact of their exclusion.
Leprosy wasn’t a well-defined category in medieval Europe. The word could describe any number of skin conditions. According to the historian R.I. Moore, “the leper” shouldn’t really be thought of as a medical category. It was above all a category of social exclusion. The fractious communities of medieval Europe came to understand themselves as a coherent “Christendom” through the exclusion of various types. The leper was one of these, but there was also the Jew, the heretic and the newly invented category of the “sodomite.”
These different groups were subjected to the same indignities — forced to wear special clothing, herded into ghettos, having their property expropriated, and frequently killed in outbreaks of mass violence. Through suffering these same indignities they eventually stopped being, in the eyes of Christendom, different groups. Heresy was believed to be a sexually transmitted disease just like leprosy. Judaism was a heresy. “Sodomy” was a kind of excessive sexuality, which was a symptom of leprosy. They were all believed to be working together to bring down Christian society.
In 1321, France was gripped by rumors that Jews and lepers had teamed up to poison all the wells and kill every last Christian. The categories of the excluded melded into one single category: the them against which a Christian society could become a coherent us. All the “lepers” in this structural category were subjected to a brutal regime of surveillance, segregation, deportation and murder.
And it’s here, among these dispossessed outsiders branded as enemies of Christian civilization, that Angela not only “seeks Christ” but finds “Holy Communion” — the most sacred thing imaginable to a 13th-century Christian, the real presence of Christ, declared by Angela to be a cast-off piece of a cast-off man.
We no longer drive out from our towns lepers and heretics. But there are plenty of groups today whose exclusion is presented as necessary to secure the Christian nation: immigrants, trans people, Muslims, “antifa.” At home and abroad, political movements that claim to defend Christianity posit a despised and dangerous them to give coherence to their fantasy of a united us. Just as in Angela’s day, today the various figures who fill the role of that them blur into one single existential threat.
Angela’s theology is a direct attack on this logic of exclusion. The question of whose exclusion makes possible the fantasy of a united Christian society shifts over time. Once it was lepers and Jews and heretics. Today it’s refugees and trans people and Muslims. Tomorrow there will be new categories of exclusion. Christians today seeking to understand and resist the violence inflicted in their name would do well to learn from this strange, flesh-eating saint. Wherever the lines between us and them get drawn, Angela insists, the holiness we seek can only be found by crossing to the other side.
(Mac Loftin is a lecturer on theology at Harvard Divinity School. This essay was adapted from his forthcoming book, “In the Twilight of the Christian West: A Theology of Mourning and Resistance” and was produced in partnership with The Narrative Project, an initiative of The Christian Century. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
