Observing the protests and public discourse that have swept the country since a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, Joseph Bottum sees what looks like nothing so much as religious fervor. He traces the rise of this fervor to the decline since the 1970s of the Mainline Protestant denominations that once dominated American life. In an interview by Sean Collins, Bottum explains the deeply Christian impulses behind what has come to be called “wokeness”:

What we’re seeing now is . . . an intense spiritual hunger that has no outlet. There’s no way to see people kneeling, or singing “Hands up, don’t shoot,” or swaying while they hold up candles, and avoid acknowledging that it’s driven by a spiritual desire . . . that is manifesting itself more violently. Because to the post-Protestants, the world is an outrage and we are all sinners.

[Take, for instance, the] idea of white guilt—that there is this inherent guiltiness that comes from being white. This notion has the same logical shape and the same psychological operation as Original Sin. The trouble is that, unlike Original Sin, there’s no salvation from white guilt. But the formal structure of white guilt and Original Sin is the same. How do you come to understand that you need salvation? By deeper and deeper appreciation of your sinfulness.

Similarly, there is ostracizing and shunning. Cancel culture is just the latest and most virulent form of the religious notion of shunning, in which people are chased into further appreciation of their guiltiness. . . . If you profane, you’re [pushed] outside the Temple [and] the only way back is to become fanatic, to convince people that you understand how guilty you are. And even then, I’m not sure there’s any way back.

We live in just the strangest times. But understanding the historical roots of these radicals as post-Protestant, and understanding the spiritual hunger which has no outlet for them, helps us to explain it. This is what happens when you have a Mainline outlook that is broken loose from all of its prior constraints. These ideas used to be corralled in the churches. If you let an idea like Original Sin—that’s a dangerous and powerful idea—loose from its corral, it goes to a place where it can exist, which is politics.

As the negotiations leading up to the 2015 nuclear deal began in earnest, Tehran launched a major effort to cultivate support abroad for its positions, according to a report by Jay Solomon:

In the spring of 2014, senior Iranian Foreign Ministry officials initiated a quiet effort to bolster Tehran’s image and positions on global security issues—particularly its nuclear program—by building ties with a network of influential overseas academics and researchers. They called it the Iran Experts Initiative. The scope and scale of the IEI project has emerged in a large cache of Iranian government correspondence and emails.

The officials, working under the moderate President Hassan Rouhani, congratulated themselves on the impact of the initiative: at least three of the people on the Foreign Ministry’s list were, or became, top aides to Robert Malley, the Biden administration’s special envoy on Iran, who was placed on leave this June following the suspension of his security clearance.

In March of that year, writes Solomon, one of these officials reported that “he had gained support for the IEI from two young academics—Ariane Tabatabai and Dina Esfandiary—following a meeting with them in Prague.” And here the story becomes particularly worrisome:

Tabatabai currently serves in the Pentagon as the chief of staff for the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, a position that requires a U.S. government security clearance. She previously served as a diplomat on Malley’s Iran nuclear negotiating team after the Biden administration took office in 2021. Esfandiary is a senior advisor on the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group, a think tank that Malley headed from 2018 to 2021.

Tabatabai . . . on at least two occasions checked in with Iran’s Foreign Ministry before attending policy events, according to the emails. She wrote to Mostafa Zahrani, [an Iranian scholar in close contact with the Foreign Ministry and involved in the IEI], in Farsi on June 27, 2014, to say she’d met Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal—a former ambassador to the U.S.—who expressed interest in working together and invited her to Saudi Arabia. She also said she’d been invited to attend a workshop on Iran’s nuclear program at Ben-Gurion University in Israel. . . .

Elissa Jobson, Crisis Group’s chief of advocacy, said the IEI was an “informal platform” that gave researchers from different organizations an opportunity to meet with IPIS and Iranian officials, and that it was supported financially by European institutions and one European government. She declined to name them.