Tony Keddie is Assistant Professor of Early Christian History and Literature at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Revelations of Ideology: Apocalyptic Class Politics in Early Roman Palestine (Brill, 2018).
When we hear religious conservatives using the language of “prayers” and “favor” as a disaster strikes, it’s important to recognize that this pious rhetoric conceals neoliberal politics that impede the work of government institutions of disaster management.
O’Reilly and Dugard’s interpretation of the gospels in Killing Jesus was motivated by the same politics of resentment that Trump inherited from the Tea Party—a politics of fiscal, ethnic/racial, and religious conservatism.