Now Trending: Good Friday

Good Friday trended this week, which sounds like a strange thing for a calendar date to do until you remember that on X, everything is content. For the uninitiated: Good Friday is the day observed by Christians worldwide as the anniversary of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, three days before Easter Sunday. It is, depending on who you ask, the most solemn day in the Christian calendar or just another three-day weekend with a churchy name attached.

What got it trending is exactly what you'd expect from a holiday that means fifteen different things to fifteen different tribes of people who all happen to use the same hashtag. One camp turned it into a movie-night bit — a viral thread asking people which films they pair with which holidays, with more than one reply pairing "The Long Good Friday" with, well, Good Friday. Cute. Harmless. Another camp, considerably more serious, spent the day arguing about the Catholic Mass itself — traditionalists loyal to the old Latin liturgy sniping at those in communion with Rome's modern rite, litigating decades-old grievances about how Communion was distributed at a Mass said by a Pope who has been dead for years. And then there's the piece nobody on your group chat is going to bring up: a report making the rounds arguing that sermons delivered at a mosque in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, echo the same antisemitic tropes that Good Friday itself has historically been used to spread.

That last thread deserves the most unpacking, because it's the one actually rooted in verified reporting rather than vibes. This reporting notes something historians have long documented: in medieval Europe, Jews knew it was a good idea to stay indoors when their neighbors celebrated Good Friday, because Good Friday was the day Catholic priests throughout Europe took to their pulpits to remind their congregants that Jews were responsible for the death of Christ — even though it was Roman soldiers who put Jesus on the cross. Those homilies had a documented, real-world impact on medieval Jewish communities. One can then draw a direct line from that history to sermons reportedly delivered at Dearborn Heights' Islamic House of Wisdom, arguing that people in the interfaith community need to speak up, particularly in the Dearborn area, because Christians have learned that transforming a religious holiday into a platform for conspiratorial antisemitism has historically created an atmosphere in which anti-Jewish violence becomes likely. The mosque's imam, per the reporting, served as head of the Iranian Navy's political-ideological office during the 1980s and has praised the Islamic Republic's founder and Hezbollah — claims attributed to that reporting, not asserted here as this columnist's own finding.

So you've got three completely different arguments wearing the same hashtag. The movie-night people aren't arguing about anything — they're just doing what people on the internet do with any date on the calendar, turning it into a bit. The Catholic infighting is a real, decades-old theological rift about liturgy and authority that isn't going away no matter how many quote-tweets pile up. And the antisemitism piece is making a serious historical argument that deserves to be engaged with on its merits, not memed into oblivion.

In my opinion, this is a good encapsulation of what's broken about how we process anything online: three tiers of seriousness, flattened into one trending topic, competing for the same fifteen seconds of your attention. The movie jokes get more engagement than the history lesson, because they're funnier and cost nothing to enjoy. That's fine on a normal Friday. It's a little more damning when the history lesson is specifically about how unchecked religious rhetoric turns into real hostility against real people — a pattern that has repeated itself for a thousand years and, according to this reporting, may be finding new life in a Michigan suburb right now. The people who actually shape religious and political discourse rarely pay a price when that discourse curdles into hatred. The people in the pews, and the people targeted by it, do. If there's one thing worth taking seriously out of this week's Good Friday churn, it's not the movie list — it's the reminder that words from a pulpit, any pulpit, have never been just words.