Guinness, Gaza, and the Gospel: When Ethno-Nationalism Masquerades as Faith

n July 17th, an Israeli strike on Gaza’s only Catholic parish killed three—including two elderly women—and left many wounded, including the pastor. The next day, Babylon Bee Editor Joel Berry had this to say about the victims: There are “only about 200 professed Catholics still living in Gaza and they all support Hamas.” They “aid and support the terror regime,” he added.

On July 16th, one day before the attack on the church, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee stated this in response to Irish lawmakers trying to hold radical Israeli extremists accountable for nearly destroying a church in the only remaining all-Christian village in the Holy Land: “Did the Irish fall into a vat of Guinness?…Sober up Ireland!”

These aren’t just flippant remarks. They are theological signals, cultural relics, and dangerous political weapons. What unites them is a Protestant-inflected security: mock the Catholic, disclaim the non-white Christian, demonize the immigrant—all while draping the rhetoric in Christian respectability.

Berry’s remarks don’t just amount to a geopolitical argument but a theological one. He claimed “true Christian faith still exists in Gaza, but it’s all underground. Anyone allowed by Hamas to practice openly is allowed to do so only because they aid and support the terror regime.”

In other words, he divided Gaza’s Christians into two categories: the visible, sacramental Church—painted as collaborators with terror—and the “true” underground believers, invisible and therefore morally acceptable.He [Berry] divided Gaza’s Christians into two categories: the visible, sacramental Church—painted as collaborators with terror—and the “true” underground believers, invisible and therefore morally acceptable.Tweet This

This isn’t satire. It’s an erasure. Berry’s words echo centuries-old Protestant suspicion toward Catholicism and Orthodoxy—faith too public; too ritualistic; too embodied in visible, sacramental witness and liturgy to be “real.” 

For Berry, the Christians sheltering in Gaza’s church, caring for neighbors and praying in a bombed-out sanctuary, don’t count as disciples. They’re not martyrs; they’re moral liabilities to the tame, civic religion that blends in with (rather than standing as a sign of contradiction to) the princes of this world.

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But they are not erased. In the smoldering rubble of St. Porphyrius Orthodox Church and beneath the shell-shattered roof of Holy Family Catholic Church, ancient hymns still rise. The Eucharist is still celebrated. That is the scandal Berry cannot abide: the visibility of a Church that endures not underground but under fire.

Meanwhile, Mike Huckabee reached back into 19th-century nativist archives to belittle Irish Catholics. By asking if Ireland had “fallen into a vat of Guinness” and telling them to “sober up,” Huckabee resurrected the “drunken Irish” trope that once animated Know‑Nothing anti-Catholic cartoons and fueled waves of discrimination.

The Ancient Order of Hibernians condemned Huckabee’s remarks, calling them a revival of “19th-century anti-Irish caricatures.” Yet the ambassador’s comment passed largely unchallenged in American media—because anti-Catholicism still enjoys a cultural hall pass here.

Embedded in Huckabee’s quip is the same Protestant suspicion of Catholicism as in Berry’s post: Catholics are an unserious, simplistic, primitive tribe. Our public faith is at best irrelevant, but it is treacherous when it takes real public action—in which cases we ought to expect a condescending rebuke from our cultural betters.

This rhetorical pattern isn’t confined to Gaza or Ireland. Once, Irish and Italian Catholic immigrants were widely seen as existential threats to American Protestant identity. Today, that role is also assigned not only to the Catholic and Orthodox victims of Israeli violence in the Holy Land and Gaza but to Catholic immigrants from Latin America and Africa.

The language is remarkably unchanged: these Catholics, you will hear, are emotional. Superstitious. Un-American. 

And immigrants are painted with the same brush as Gaza’s Catholics—complicit in uncivilized chaos, tolerable only if invisible.

Catholics must not make the mistake of viewing remarks like Huckabee’s and Berry’s as haphazard, unrelated expressions of ignorance. They are reasserting an old theological hierarchy. For civilization to flourish, they believe, whiteness and Protestantism must remain on top, while ancient Catholicism must remain under suspicion.

Racism sparks backlash. Anti-Semitism rightly draws condemnation. But anti-Catholicism? Huckabee jokes, Berry dismisses, few care. This prejudice is so culturally acceptable that it flies under the radar—even among Christians.

This latent bigotry corrodes the universality of the Church. When we allow it, we side with power not the Cross.

It is true: the underground Church in Iran is growing explosively. Their faith is courageous and inspiring. But the visible, embodied faith of Gaza’s Christians is no less heroic.

Priests celebrating the Eucharist amid falling bombs. Nuns sheltering Muslim neighbors. Lay Catholics forming human shields for the elderly. This is Christian witness in its most raw and public form. To erase them because they refuse to go underground is to redefine martyrdom into invisibility—into conformity with the world.

Catholicism claims universality. Her sacraments are for all: Irish, Palestinian, Iranian, and, in a word, “the foreigner.” 

G.K. Chesterton reminds us: “If there is anything more absurd than Liberalism it is conservatism. If it is true that the earth belongs to the living, it belongs to the dead whom they have taken into their keeping.”

The Church remembers the dead. It defends the living. And it refuses to bow to tribal gods of race, nation, or political expediency.