Pot and Kettle

I was walking around the grocery store the other day, Headphones on, tuning out the other shoppers and the meanderthals: aimless wanderers who stop in every choke point to consider purchases without concerns for the disruption they cause other shoppers. I was having a Celtic punk day, letting one song roll into the next, when The Pot and Kettle by The Rumjacks, struck me in a way it never had before.

For those who are unfamiliar, you should check out the song, but if you’re lame and just want a summary, I’ve got you, my dude. Basically, the literal narrative is of a pot and Kettle arguing with each other over who is blacker with soot before agreeing that neither of them is as black as the roasting pan.

The Kettle

Adherents and apologists often describe Islam as the “religion of peace.” A personal faith, practiced privately or communally without coercive power. This is a claim no less credible than any other religion.

But when Islam is enforced by the state, when religious law becomes civil law, that rhetoric collapses before our eyes.

Everywhere that Islamic theocracy governs, violence stops being an aberration or a failure of the system but instead becomes the mechanism for maintaining order. Punishment becomes spectacle and dissent becomes heresy. Moral ambiguity is cast as the enemy of stability. Cruelty is called discipline, and fear is treated as a public good.

Islam isn’t uniquely violent in any way, it’s just the most visible in the modern world. Unlike other traditions it makes no effort to pretend that it separates belief from law, or mercy from enforcement. Your submission is explicitly required and authority is unquestionable. The state’s violence is justified not as a policy, but as obedience to a divine mandate.

The kettle is loud about its righteousness and honest about the heat building inside it.

The Pot

Christian nationalism presents itself as the “moderate alternative.” Islamic theocracy is cast as brutal and backwards. Christian rule is framed as gentle, moral, and restrained. It is not grounded in punishment, but love, forgiveness, and Judeo-Christian values.

This is, of course, a cosmetic distinction.

When Christianity fuses with state power violence doesn’t disappear. Instead, it becomes laundered through policy, bureaucracy, and social control. It’s easy to miss when the punishment is administrative rather than theatrical. Suffering is a justified consequence for moral failure. Harm is reframed as compassion and done reluctantly, for the good of your soul.

It's hard to remember in this day and age that Christian Nationalism traditionally doesn’t call for public executions or corporal punishment. For Americans we should all be able to see how it operates looking into our recent past. It’s most effective when it works quietly and unseen. If you blink, care for your fellow man is criminalized, shame is weaponized, and bodies are restricted.

The pot’s defining feature is that it claims innocence even as it’s insides roil with scalding hot liquid. If you touch it and get burned it was an unfortunate necessity, your suffering has meaning in that you learned a moral lesson not to test authority. Abuse of power is absolved in advance because it’s always better to act now and ask for forgiveness later unless you’re the one being crushed under the weight of theocratic law. It isn’t the pot’s fault for being hot, you should have taken better care not to be burned by it. The burns are the unfortunate reality of coming too close, or “Nothing quite hurts like Christian love.”

While Christian nationalists make a lot of noise about denouncing Sharia law, they also push legislation to enforce religious tests for citizenship and rebrand blasphemy as indecency. Regulation of your sexual behavior and suppression of dissent is a good thing, if they’re the ones doing it to you. They don’t object to theocratic rule in general; it’s only objectionable when someone might wield it against them.

The Roasting Pan

Islam and Christianity both define themselves against Judaism, the latter claims to be a fulfillment of it, the former, a correction. In effect they both claim to be more universal, just, and merciful. Jewish state violence is rhetorically useful to Islamic theocracy as proof of corruption and to Christian Nationalism as proof of obsolescence. In reality neither are opposed to what’s happening so much as they are deflecting criticism. Their objection is to who is dropping bombs, not that they’re landing on children.

The roasting pan can deflect criticism as well, after all, they’re being ganged up on for something that was necessary. The identity becomes law, law gives legitimacy, legitimacy is survival, and survival requires force. Once the chain is accepted, restraint becomes illogical. Morality has nothing to do with it, inhumane and disproportionate violence was inevitable, and necessary.

The roasting pan doesn’t claim to act righteously or morally. It treats the soot as a natural consequence of its existence. It doesn’t need a narrative like the pot and the kettle to explain its blackened appearance; it’s the inevitable reality of being so close to the heat source.

The Fire

The argument between the pot and the kettle was never the point. The accusations of hypocrisy are just noise. The noise is an endless distraction from the circular debate that hints at accountability while never actually confronting the issue or accomplishing anything. The real question is: Who controls the fire?

Islamic theocracy does not deny the heat. Christian Nationalism insists the fire is love. The roasting pan treats the burns as inevitable. Different stories from different vessels who are all reliant on the same flame.

The flame is sanctified power. Once we give divine providence to authority restraint stops making sense. Violence no longer needs justification; it needs continuity. Morality is optional, little more than convenience when it bolsters their claims and ignorable when it stands in the way. When proportionality becomes irrational, suffering becomes someone else’s problem.

The tragedy is that we spend our time arguing over soot instead of confronting the real culprit, the fire. Who lit it? Who benefits from feeding it?

When power claims holiness, and the fire keeps burning, everything above it will eventually blacken, crack, and burn no matter how righteous the vessel insists that it may be.