Month: March 2021

Christian Nationalism and Political Conformity

Condemning Christian nationalism has become all the rage among certain members of the evangelical punditry. Even a few evangelical Republicans felt uncomfortable at the sight of Jesus flags and Christian paraphernalia on prominent display among the rioters who stormed Congress on January 6th.

In the immediate aftermath of those events, I saw a number of editorial condemnations on television and in print chastising any Christian’s involvement in violence or sedition. Each of them raised the same questions in my mind, for they all were morally tepid and intellectually shallow, ignoring the role those very media outlets had played in promoting president Trump’s “Big Lie” about a stolen election.

I wholeheartedly agree with the reminder that Christians should not commit acts of violence, especially when those actions lead to others being

FILE – In this Jan. 6, 2021 file photo, Trump supporters participate in a rally in Washington. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

killed and injured. However, I also found it very strange for right-wing, Christian, patriotic pundits, people who swear allegiance to a nation founded upon revolution, violence, and bloodshed, to suddenly clutch their pearls and faint at the sight of modern “patriots” doing what they believed needed to be done in order to save their nation and democracy.

I won’t even begin to address the hypocrisy on display when Religious-Right folks self-righteously condemn insurrection at home while heartily endorsing America’s many military coups and wars of aggression around the world! Apparently, Christians are only supposed to shun violence when the their fellow Americans become the enemy. Black and brown-skinned people around the world are always fair game.

All of this is very strange indeed unless we understand two crucial points:

First, these suddenly pacifistic, evangelical commentators were demonstrating how deeply embedded they are in the American, corporate establishment.

For all of their complaints about suffering as marginalized, Christian outsiders, none of them were willing to follow the logic of their messianic Trump-devotion to its logical conclusion. Why? Because they all had network executives telling them to toe a more establishment line or they would need to empty their desks and head for the unemployment line.

None of them were condemning police violence when BLM protesters were being assaulted by lines of militarized patrolmen wielding plexiglass shields and billy clubs.

Second, their exclusive focus on an anti-violence message exposed the consistent lack of self-awareness and intellectual rigor that characterizes so much of American evangelicalism today.

Of course, superficial critiques may be better than no critique at all, but if we only ever scratch the surface of a problem, then the underlying disease is allowed to deepen and spread. (On a side note, this was also my response to Mark Galli’s tepid critique of president Trump in his editorial at Christianity Today.” Only fellow evangelicals would interpret his words as shocking.)

Linking the errors of Christian nationalism to the dangers of patriotic violence (at home, mind you; violence abroad is always permissible for Christian America) is only the tip of the iceberg.

I recently began reading a book by the US historian, John W. Compton, entitled, The End of Empathy: Why White Protestants Stopped Loving Their Neighbors (Oxford, 2020). Compton first tells the story of how white Protestantism once led the way in condemning, addressing, and working to transform the many social, cultural, and political evils in this country.

Child labor laws, worker safety regulations, the 6-day work week, the 8-hour work day, a living wage, plus much more were policies all implemented in response to massive Christian political pressure during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

But all of that changed in late 1970s-early 1980s with Ronald Reagan’s presidency and the rise of his neo-liberal economic agenda. Nowadays, Christians concerned with things like social justice are regularly condemned for compromising the gospel. What happened?

I won’t answer that question here, but I will share a few thoughts from Compton’s introductory chapter where he begins to lay out his argument about the transformation that led to the wholesale conformity of American Christianity to the social/political/cultural status quo.

Concerning Christian political involvement:

Religious believers are on average much like similarly situated secular citizens when it comes to their behavior in the political realm. Like their secular neighbors, believers routinely base their political decisions on self-interest or ingrained prejudice rather than careful and disinterested study of sacred texts or deliberation about the will of a higher power. (4-5)

On the Christian vision for the church’s role in transforming society:

…from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1960s, most non-Southern Protestants not only professed to believe that Christian principles, properly understood, favored government efforts to aid the downtrodden; they were also embedded in religious networks that were capable…of focusing attention on specific social problems and incentivizing the faithful to take responsibility for correcting them.

On the current state of American evangelicalism:

In the new age of personal autonomy, the leaders of the Religious Right flourished by reshaping the Christian message to comport with the prejudices and material self-interest of their target demographic.

I will probably review this book here when I have finished digesting all that it has to say.

But in short, nowadays the average Christian doesn’t work at thinking, and thus acting, differently in the light of God’s word. We conform to the ways of those around us, ignore the illuminating study of the holy scriptures, and are afraid to stand alone on behalf of those less fortunate than ourselves.

For now, I will only note a deeper description of the dangers that accompany Christian nationalism. The heart of that danger is cooption, conformity to the national status quo — which explains a lot about American evangelicalism and the Religious-Right in this country.

Once Christians begin to imagine that their country is God’s country; that its national history is a story written by and for Christians like themselves, then it is a very tiny step to confuse national interests with Christian interests. National norms become Christian norms (think of laisse faire capitalism) and Christian norms become national norms (think of the fight over equal rights for gay citizens).

Granted, this confusion may require a reimagined past that describes our current state of affairs as a gross deviation from historic norms (think of  David Barton and Wallbuilders promoting a fictitious story of our “Christian” founding fathers and the Constitution’s adherence to the Bible). But modern diversions into sin cannot change America’s basic orientation as a “Christian nation” – at least, to the minds of Christian nationalists.

The identity between the one and the other is very simple for Christian nationalism and it goes far beyond a problem with violence. Christian values become America’s true, historic values. Thus, American true values are Christian values. This is where Christian nationalism becomes heretical.

Yet, this false identity between nation and church is ignored by pundits on the Religious-Right who now chastise Christian insurrectionists for colluding with violence.

The genuine danger for the church in this country is not that it would collude with violence but that it would continue to collude with American exceptionalism.

The greatest political danger facing evangelicalism today is our willingness to roll over and accept the economic and political status quo, embracing corporate, crony capitalism, labor exploitation, systemic racism, militarized policing, social Darwinism, and American exceptionalism as God’s preferred methods of directing a nation.

Where is the Christian voice of dissent to all these sins?

Where are the people who will not conform to their political surroundings and vote and think and act like their neighbors?

Where are the Christian activists willing to break away from the way things today are in order to pursue God’s vision of the way things ought to be tomorrow?

Israel’s Largest Human Rights Organization Declares It to be an Apartheid State

B’Tselem is an internationally recognized human rights organization located in Israel. Its original mission was monitoring the mistreatment of Palestinians by the Israeli army in both Gaza and the West Bank.

The organization has won several international awards, including the 2014 Stockholm Human Rights Award and the 2018 Human Rights Award of the French Republic.

In January 2021, B’Tselem announced that its mission was expanding. The announcement came in the form of a public declaration describing both the Israeli nation-state and the Palestinian Occupied Territories as a single territory uniformly governed by a system of Jewish Supremacy.

The declaration is titled, “A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is Apartheid.”

Apartheid is defined as systemic discrimination based on race and/or ethnicity that is endorsed by state authorities and embedded in the nation’s legal system.

In Israel and the rest of Palestine, this means that all Palestinians are always second class “citizens” (though many can never attain citizenship), while Jews enjoy first class citizenship within a society created exclusively by and for Jews alone.

I have posted an excerpt from B’Tselem’s announcement below. Encourage your pro-Israel friends to read it and to investigate B’Tselem’s website. They will find a wealth of information documenting their claims.

To learn about the details explaining how and why Israel imposes Jewish supremacy upon the Palestinians, I encourage you to read the entire proclamation by clicking on the title above:

The Israeli regime, which controls all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, seeks to advance and cement Jewish supremacy throughout the entire area. To that end, it has divided the area into several units, each with a different set of rights for Palestinians – always inferior to the rights of Jews. As part of this policy, Palestinians are denied many rights, including the right to self-determination.

This policy is advanced in several ways. Israel demographically engineers the space through laws and orders that allow any Jew in the world or their relatives to obtain Israeli citizenship, but almost completely deny Palestinians this possibility. It has physically engineered the entire area by taking over of millions of dunams of land and establishing Jewish-only communities, while driving Palestinians into small enclaves. Movement is engineered through restrictions on Palestinian subjects, and political engineering excludes millions of Palestinians from participating in the processes that determine their lives and futures while holding them under military occupation.

A regime that uses laws, practices and organized violence to cement the supremacy of one group over another is an apartheid regime. Israeli apartheid, which promotes the supremacy of Jews over Palestinians, was not born in one day or of a single speech. It is a process that has gradually grown more institutionalized and explicit, with mechanisms introduced over time in law and practice to promote Jewish supremacy. These accumulated measures, their pervasiveness in legislation and political practice, and the public and judicial support they receive – all form the basis for our conclusion that the bar for labeling the Israeli regime as apartheid has been met.

If this regime has developed over many years, why release this paper in 2021? What has changed? Recent years have seen a rise in the motivation and willingness of Israeli officials and institutions to enshrine Jewish supremacy in law and openly state their intentions. The enactment of Basic Law: Israel – the Nation State of the Jewish People and the declared plan to formally annex parts of the West Bank have shattered the façade Israel worked for years to maintain. . .

The Israeli regime’s rationale, and the measures used to implement it, are reminiscent of the South African regime that sought to preserve the supremacy of white citizens, in part through partitioning the population into classes and sub-classes and ascribing different rights to each. . .

As painful as it may be to look reality in the eye, it is more painful to live under a boot. The harsh reality described here may deteriorate further if new practices are introduced – with or without accompanying legislation. Nevertheless, people created this regime and people can make it worse – or work to replace it. That hope is the driving force behind this position paper. How can people fight injustice if it is unnamed? Apartheid is the organizing principle, yet recognizing this does not mean giving up. On the contrary: it is a call for change.

Fighting for a future based on human rights, liberty and justice is especially crucial now. There are various political paths to a just future here, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, but all of us must first choose to say no to apartheid.

Chris Hedges on The Evil Within Us

Smart people listen to their critics. Wise people take notes when their fiercest critics speak.

Chris Hedges, a former Presbyterian minister and graduate of Harvard Divinity School, is a particularly fierce critic of the evangelical-fundamentalist church in America today.

That is one of the reasons that I follow his work. The other is that his perspective on this world and the ways in which truly moral people — whether religious or not — are to navigate their way through life’s journey is far more Christian than most of what I see and hear from “Christian” media nowadays.

Unfortunately, Mr. Hedges fails to grasp the full measure of Jesus’ teaching, and he does not begin to understand the apostle Paul and his message of

Adam and Eve eat the apple in the Garden of Eden

grace, but then I also find both these deficiencies within large swaths of American Christianity, evangelicals included.

In his most recent essay, “The Evil Within Us,” Hedges offers a secular perspective on the Christian doctrine of Total Depravity. He discusses the recent mass shooting in Atlanta as an example of human sinfulness run riot.

In this instance, the murderous expression of Robert Aaron Long’s sinful nature had been nurtured rather than suppressed, he suggests, by the same  conservative religion that taught him to condemn sexual temptation.

Whether or not you agree with his views on sexual temptation, Hedges’ explanation of human depravity’s larger social and cultural expressions through American imperialism, American exceptionalism, and American racism is spot on.

Below is an excerpt. All emphases are mine:

. . . The externalization of evil, however, is not limited to the Christian Right. It lies at the core of American imperialism, American exceptionalism and American racism. White supremacy, which dehumanizes the other at home and abroad, is also fueled by the fantasy that there are superior human beings who are white and lesser human beings who are not. Long did not need the Christian fascism of his church to justify to himself the killings; the racial hierarchies within American society had already dehumanized his victims. His church simply cloaked it in religious language. The jargon varies. The dark sentiments are the same.

The ideology of the Christian right, like all totalitarian creeds, is, at its core, an ideology of hatred. It rejects what Augustine calls the grace of love, or volo ut sis(I want you to be). It replaces it with an ideology that condemns all those outside the magic circle. There is, in relationships based on love, an affirmation of the mystery of the other, an affirmation of unexplained and unfathomable differences. These relationships not only recognize that others have a right to be, as Augustine wrote, but the sacredness of difference.

This sacredness of difference is an anathema to Christian fundamentalists, as it is to imperialists, to all racists. It is dangerous to the hegemony of the triumphalist ideology. It calls into question the infallibility of the doctrine, the essential appeal of all ideologies. It suggests that there are alternative ways to live and believe. The moment there is a hint of uncertainty the ideological edifice crumbles. The truth is irrelevant as long as the ideology is consistent, doubt is heretical and the vision of the world, however absurd, absolute and unassailable. These ideologies are not meant to be rational. They are meant to fill emotional voids.

Evil for the Christian fundamentalists is not something within them. It is an external force to be destroyed. It may require indiscriminate acts of violence, but if it leads to a better world this violence is morally justified. Those who advance the holy crusade alone know the truth. They alone have been anointed by God or, in the language of American imperialism, western civilization, to do battle with evil. They alone have the right to impose their “values” on others by force. Once evil is external, once the human race is divided into the righteous and the damned, repression and even murder become a sacred duty.

Immanuel Kant defined “radical evil” as the drive, often carried out under a righteous façade, to surrender to absolute self-love. Those gripped by radical evil always externalize evil. They lose touch with their own humanity. They are blind to their own innate depravity. In the name of western civilization and high ideals, in the name of reason and science, in the name of America, in the name of the free market, in the name of Jesus, they seek the subjugation and annihilation of others. Radical evil, Hannah Arendt wrote, makes whole groups of human beings superfluous. They become, rhetorically, living corpses before often becoming actual corpses.

This binary world view is anti-thought. That is part of its attraction. It gives to those who are alienated and lost emotional certitude. It is buttressed by hollow cliches, patriotic slogans and Bible passages, what psychologists call symbol agnostics. True believers are capable only of imitation. They shut down, by choice, critical reflection and genuine understanding. They surrender all moral autonomy. The impoverished language is regurgitated not because it makes sense, but because it justifies the messianic and intoxicating right to lead humankind to paradise. These pseudo-heroes, however, know only one form of sacrifice, the sacrifice of others.

Human evil is not a problem to be solved. It is a mystery. It is a bitter, constant paradox. We carry the capacity for evil within us. I learned this unsettling truth as a war correspondent. The line between the victim and the victimizer is razor thin. Evil is also seductive. It offers us unlimited often lethal power to turn those around us into objects to destroy or debase to gratify our most perverted desires or both. This evil waits to consume us. All it requires to flourish is for us to turn away, to pretend it is not there, to do nothing.

Those who blind themselves to their capacity for evil commit evil not for evil’s sake, but to make a better world. This collective self-delusion is the story of America, from its foundation on the twin evils of slavery and genocide to its inherent racism, predatory capitalism and savage wars of conquest. The more we ignore this evil, the worse it gets.

The awareness of human corruptibility and human limitations, as understood by Augustine, Kant, Sigmund Freud and Primo Levi, has been humankind’s most potent check on evil. Levi wrote that “compassion and brutality can coexist in the same individual and in the same moment, despite all logic.” This self-knowledge forces us to accept that no act, even one defined as moral or virtuous, is ever free from the taint of self-interest. It reminds us that we are condemned to always battle our baser instincts. It recognizes that compassion, as Rousseau wrote, is alone the quality from which “all the social virtues flow.”

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said that “some are guilty, but all are responsible.” We may not be guilty of the murders in Atlanta, but we are responsible. We must answer for them. We must accept the truth about ourselves, however unpleasant. We must unmask the lie of our pretended innocence.

Long’s murderous spree was quintessentially American. That is what makes it, along with all other hate crimes, along with our endless imperial wars, police terror, callous abandonment of the poor and the vulnerable, so frightening. This evil will not be tamed until it is named and confronted.

What the Church Can Learn from Eugene Debs

Eugene Debs (1855-1926) was an American politician who became an important early leader in the labor union movement. He condemned

Labor activist Eugene V. Debs speaks at the Hippodrome in New York City in 1910

corporate greed, was a vocal proponent on behalf of American workers, helped to lead numerous strikes, and fought for genuine democracy in the workplace.

Naturally, figures like Debs are a thorn in the side of entrenched, establishment power, so he made many enemies in high places. President Woodrow Wilson had him imprisoned for speaking out against the US entry into World War I. [No, folks, “cancel culture” is hardly new!]

In my view, Debs is a true American hero who has been largely forgotten by mainstream America.

Ed Quish has an interesting article about Deb’s life and legacy at Jacobin magazine. It’s entitled “The Cold War is Over. It’s Time to Appreciate that Eugene Debs Was a Marxist.”

Whenever a learn something new about a figure like Eugene Debs (or a man like Henry Wallace, another person I admire for similar reasons) I can’t help but ask myself, “Where were his Christian counterparts?”

Though he didn’t claim to be a Christian (to my knowledge) in the

Eugene Debs

evangelical sense, his politics, ideology, and actions demonstrate a more profound appreciation for the nature of the kingdom of God and the demands that kingdom makes upon its citizens than is shown by the evangelical church today.

Below is an excerpt:

Throughout his life, Eugene Debs was smeared as an enemy of the American nation. During the 1894 Pullman strike, Harper’s Weekly attacked Debs’s leadership of the uprising as equivalent to Southern secession, claiming that in “suppressing such a blackmailing conspiracy as the boycott of Pullman cars by the American Railway Union, the nation is fighting for its own existence.” Thirty years later, when Debs was imprisoned for speaking against World War I, President Woodrow Wilson denied requests to pardon him, refusing to show mercy to “a traitor to his country.”

Debs’s sympathizers have often defended him against allegations of treason by highlighting his authentic Americanism. Rather than a traitor, they claim, Debs was a true patriot who stood up for nationally shared ideals like freedom and democracy while imbuing them with socialist values. Historian Nick Salvatore, for instance, argues in his landmark 1982 biography that Debs’s life “was a profound refutation of the belief that critical dissent is somehow un-American or unpatriotic.” Inspired by Debs’s example, socialists today might occupy the left flank of a progressive patriotism, pushing the United States to make good on its democratic promise in a way that liberals and centrists cannot do on their own.

Despite some intuitive appeal, this nationalist strategy is a dead end. . . At a basic level, democratic nationalism presents the nation as bound by a shared identity and shared interests, uniting different classes behind a common project domestically and internationally. In the United States, this project has only ever been a variant of capitalist empire that, even when grafted to the cause of democracy. . . 

In his own time, Debs rejected that kind of nationalist project, making his politics more than the radical edge of common sense “Americanism.” When Debs called out the absurdity of the wartime view that patriotism means dying overseas for capitalist profits while treason consists in defending workers everywhere, he showed us the proper response to nationalist ideology: not to try to hijack it for progressive ends, but to liberate us from its obfuscations.

Click here to read the complete article.

Who are the Sheep and the Goats on Judgment Day? Reading Matthew 25:31-46 in Context

In a previous post, I reviewed the book, Decolonizing Christianity. I mentioned that the author, Dr. de la Torre, roots his critique of “white Christianity” in an ancient, but completely erroneous, interpretation of Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats (Matt. 25:31-46).

Here is the follow-up post that I promised where I will explain the proper interpretation of Jesus’ parable. Yes, there are right and wrong ways to read scripture.

According to the interpretive tradition of the sheep and the goats followed by Dr. de la Torre, the exalted Jesus will determine who is and who is not received into his eternal kingdom according to the good works they performed for the poor, the needy, and the imprisoned (see verses 35-36). Here Jesus identifies himself with the disenfranchised:

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.

The sheep respond by asking, “When did we ever do such things for you, Lord?” (verses 37-39).

Jesus offers this famous response:

Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.

The message is clear, or so it appears: the resurrected Jesus identifies himself so completely with those who suffer in this world that whatever we do for them we also do for Jesus.

Jesus frequently taught that his true followers will be recognized “by their fruit” (Matt. 3:10; 7:16-20; 12:33); that is, the obedience they demonstrate to Jesus’ teachings (the parable about judgment in Matt. 7:24-27 is comparable to Matt. 25 in this way). So, it is conceivable that the message of Matthew 25:40 could be integrated into this “faith without works is dead” perspective that characterizes Jesus’ teaching.

However, when taken on its own – which is typically what happens when people read the gospels – this interpretation suggests that the major criteria for eternal judgment are our works of charity. Period.

This conclusion is curious, however, since there is nothing else comparable to it in the gospel of Matthew. Furthermore, nowhere else does Jesus make such an immediate, personal identification with the poor qua poor.

What should we make of this?

If we read the entire gospel of Matthew attentively and consider this parable in Matthew 25 as part of the book’s concluding episode, then several items will catch our attention and resonate with earlier episodes.

[Sadly, too many Christians read the Bible as if it were a collection of Hallmark greeting cards. When we do that, we blind ourselves to understanding the Bible correctly and grasping the depth of any book’s intended message. We must learn to read each book as a whole, literary unit. Every passage must be interpreted within its larger context.]

The key phrases and issues to notice are:

Who are the “brothers (and sisters) of mine” with whom Jesus identifies?

Where else has Jesus suggested that doing things for someone else is the same as doing things for him?

Are there other places where Jesus identifies with people who are imprisoned, are strangers, or hungry and thirsty?

I will give you a hint about where this is going. In Matthew’s gospel all of these traits and relationships apply only to Jesus’ disciples. Jesus is telling us that he will eventually judge the world on the basis of how it has treated his followers, the church.

Note that this outcome is the very opposite of the way Mother Teresa, de la Torre, and many others have read the parable.

Here are the crucial observations to make while reading Matthew’s gospel:

First, Jesus radically redefines family relationships. His brothers, sisters, mother, and family members are exclusively those who accept and follow him as their messiah. No one else is ever called a brother or sister in Matthew. Jesus explains this shocking redefinition of family in 12:46-50 where the context makes it clear that “doing the will of the Father” means allegiance to Jesus (also see 28:10):

While Jesus was still talking to the crowd, his mother and brothers stood outside, wanting to speak to him. Someone told him, “Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.” He replied to him, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”

Second, when Jesus commissions the Twelve to preach his gospel to others throughout Israel, he warns them that many will treat them with hostility. In fact, he admits that he is sending them out “as sheep among wolves” (10:16). Righteous people will open their doors, receive the gospel, and care for the needy disciples. But many others will reject them and even ensure that they are imprisoned (10:11-20).

By implication, only those who received Jesus’ gospel of the kingdom, and have become disciples themselves, will be interested in helping Jesus’ missionaries by feeding them and visiting them in jail.

In fact, while warning his missionary-followers about the rigors of discipleship, Jesus also comforts them by describing his essential, intimate identification with those who suffer on his behalf:

Whoever acknowledges me before others [while on trial], I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven. But whoever disowns me before others [to save their own skin], I will disown before my Father in heaven. (10:32-33)

Anyone who welcomes you welcomes me, and anyone who welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a prophet as a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward, and whoever welcomes a righteous person as a righteous person will receive a righteous person’s reward. And if anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones who is my disciple, truly I tell you, that person will certainly not lose their reward.” (10:40-42)

On the basis of this literary evidence, I am convinced that the long-standing interpretation promoted by Dr. de la Torre and many others, including Mother Teresa, is the last thing in the world this parable could mean. It is wrong because it does not read Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats in its literary context.

Jesus’ parable envisions the Final Judgment when all humanity is called before God’s throne. The goats are all those who ranged from politely indifferent to openly hostile to the gospel of Jesus. Their antagonism was expressed by failing to assist Jesus’ disciples when they needed help in fulfilling their mission.

The sheep, on the other hand, are all those who opened their doors, hosted, believed, and assisted Jesus’ disciples as they endured the hardships of testifying to the gospel in this hostile world.

Typically, it is only fellow believers who are willing to visit their imprisoned brothers and sisters in Christ around the world. I have heard more than one story about entire churches ending up in prison together as members persisted in visiting those who had been arrested.

When read within its Matthean context “the least of these brothers and sisters of mine” can only refer to one group of people: the disciples of Jesus who are suffering for their faithful witness.

I realize that those who embrace the “social gospel” alternative interpretation of this parable are likely to be offended by the church-community reading I am advancing here. They will see it as an abandonment of the church’s calling to care for society’s poor and needy. They will see it as an expression of privileged and chauvinistic religion, promoting in-group, religious believers above all others.

But then, a great deal of Jesus’ teaching is rejected by people for one reason or another – even by those who profess to be disciples. It is not my place, or anyone else’s, to rewrite Jesus’ teaching. Allow me to make a few counter arguments:

  1. Matthew 25 is not the sole basis of the Christian church’s teaching on social responsibility. This is a prominent theme throughout all of scripture which does not stand or fall on the basis of this one passage alone.
  2. The need for Christians to prioritize their care and concern for fellow believers is another important theme throughout the New Testament. Jesus is beginning an emphasis that will be continued by the apostle Paul (Gal. 6:10; 1 Tim. 5:17).
  3. Jesus assumes that suffering for the cause of the gospel, and finding oneself in need of kindness and generosity from others, will be a common experience for his disciples. Reflecting of this issue and its relevance to our own lives is an ever-present challenge for anyone calling him/herself a Christian.
  4. Nothing in this alternative reading limits the scope or the diversity of those who become Jesus’ brothers and sisters. By the time a reader gets to Matthew 25, the gospel mission has opened up to include those Gentiles and Samaritans who were previously excluded. In fact, Jesus’ final words in the Great Commission (Matt. 28:16-25) anticipate an inter-racial, multi-ethnic, international community of brothers and sisters from all classes and walks of life prioritizing their devotion to each other as Jesus’ exemplary New Humanity.

Pastor Raymond Chang on Why the Church Needs “Race-Conscious Discipleship”

This morning we learned about a mass shooting in Atlanta, GA. Eight people, most of them Asian women, were shot dead by a 21 year Southern Baptist man.

Raymond Chang is a campus pastor at the evangelical Christian school, Wheaton College and a leader in the Asian American Christian Collaborative organization. His article at the Religion News Service is entitled “The Atlanta massacre is yet another reminder we desperately need race-conscious discipleship.”

Below is an excerpt. All emphases are mine:

. . . Just like we address sin by targeting it in specific ways, we can’t lean on the mantra of “just preach the gospel” as though that hasn’t produced Christians who are also deeply racist. What we are learning about the Atlanta massacre suspect is that he was raised in a white evangelical, Southern Baptist Church and had described himself as “loving guns and God.” When you see these things together, you can often conclude white Christian nationalism is close by. 

Don’t hear me saying that we shouldn’t preach the gospel. Yes, preach the gospel in and out of season, but make sure you also shepherd people out of the patterns of the world (especially the patterns that perpetuate the racial hierarchies we see). You cannot treat every illness by giving it a chemotherapy treatment. In the same way, “just preaching the gospel” will not address the specific illnesses sin has caused. We also need to disciple people through and out of certain things.

In light of what we are seeing with the massacre in Atlanta, mourn with Asian Americans (and those from other communities), grieve with us, lament with us, pray with us and pray for us. For those who have their ears to the ground, these events weigh heavily on us. I am grateful for friends who have reached out as soon as they saw what happened. It was particularly special when they came from outside the Asian American community.

Preach to hearts and minds that need to get out of thinking that leaves them complacent when tragedies impact those they might not be proximate to. Call out racism whenever it rears its ugly head. Support churches and organizations doing holistic, race-conscious discipleship. Offer classes to help people learn about how the sin of racism uniquely manifests across different racial lines. Stand with us whenever you see injustice.

Racialization and racism impact different racial groups in different ways. Along the Black-white binary, racism against Asians and Latinos does not often register. It doesn’t register because we (Asians and Latinos) are racialized differently from white and Black people. If we want to address the sin of racism, however, we have to understand how it works. We have to understand that it often manifests differently for different communities.

In the ways we address specific sins with the gospel by discipling people through those sins, we need to do the same with racism. As long as the racial hierarchy of the world is unchecked in the church, we will see the same issues of the world in the church and lose our moral credibility as ambassadors for the eternal king, Jesus.

Is Christian Financial Advisor Dave Ramsey a “Jerk” or is He Just “Helping People Stay in Line”?

Several investigations into Christian finance guru Dave Ramsey’s leadership style and business practices hit the Christian press last January.

If you haven’t heard about them, here is an excerpt from Bob Smeitana’s article at the Religion News Service. It’s called “Is Dave Ramsey’s empire ‘the best place to work in America’? Say No and you’re out.”

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (RNS) — Dave Ramsey has spent the past three decades trying to build what he calls the best place to work in America.

From his headquarters south of Nashville, the evangelical Christian personal finance guru runs a media and live events empire that includes a popular national talk radio show. Tickets to workshops on topics such as “EntreLeadership”  run from $3,000 to $10,000.

Thousands of churches around the country, meanwhile, host Ramsey’s “Financial Peace University,” a 9-week program built around his principles for handling money “God’s way.”

. . . Ramsey’s intolerance for dissent has created what former employees call a cultlike environment, where leaders proclaim their love for staff and then fire people at a moment’s notice. . . 

At a staff meeting in July, Ramsey railed at his staff after an employee sued Ramsey Solutions for firing her for having premarital sex, which is against company policy, and said he would pay the price to protect what he had built out of love for his employees.

“I am sick of dealing with all this stuff,” Ramsey bellowed, according to a recording obtained by Religion News Service. “I’m so tired of being falsely accused of being a jerk when all I’m doing is trying to help people stay in line.”

. . . Ramsey’s return to in-person work frustrated Heather Fulk. She has asthma, which puts her at higher risk if infected with COVID-19. After learning employees were being called back to headquarters, she made what she thought was an innocuous comment in a private Facebook post.

“Jon’s company wants to bring all 900 employees back asap when a majority can do their work from home,” she wrote on April 20. “I do *not* understand how people don’t see we are setting ourselves up for a huge second wave. Ugh, people make me so angry.”

Before long, Jon got a call from his supervisor who said a co-worker had reported Heather’s comment. They had a screenshot of the post, sent by the co-worker’s spouse.

A few weeks later, Jon was fired. In his exit interview, Armando Lopez, head of human resources at Ramsey, confirmed that the cause was his wife’s social media comment, according to a recording of the meeting.

Deficit Hawk Hypocrisy Aims to Hurt the People

Once again, Republicans (and many Democrats) are  running around like Chicken Little warning about the economic sky collapsing now that Congress has passed the recent covid relief bill.

It is a tired, predictable, knee-jerk, conservative reaction to any government spending that aims to help the average American.

Remember that none of these folks expressed similar concerns about the folly of “deficit spending” when president Trump’s retrograde tax plan added between $1 to $2 trillion to the national debt.

None of these people complained about the CARES Act last March when a vast portion of that relief money, intended for the unemployed and small business owners, ended up lining the pockets of the richest Americans.

The litany of deficit-hawk hypocrisy could go on and on…

[For an excellent analysis of this misguided concern written by a well-regarded economist, I recommend reading the recent book by professor Stephanie Kelton called The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy (PublicAffairs, 2021)].

At the DCReport, Bruce Bartlett has a good article exposing not only the

Bruce Bartlett

hypocrisy of this deficit fear mongering but also how very wrong the warnings have always been.

The article is titled “Inflation Hawks: Never Right, But Never in Doubt.” You can read an excerpt below or click on the title to find the entire piece:

Predictably, conservatives are once again warning about inflation. This happens every time a Democrat takes office—even if he merely continues the identical policies of his Republican predecessor.

Unfortunately, these concerns, which always receive wide media attention, are costly both politically and economically.

Bill Clinton was forced to adopt a deficit reduction plan in 1993 that led to the defeat of many Democrats in 1994 and the installation of Newt Gingrich as speaker of the House.

Barack Obama was forced to scale back his stimulus plan in 2009 and was browbeaten into deficit reduction in 2011. That kept the economy running in slow gear throughout Obama’s presidency paving the way for Donald Trump.

Now that Joe Biden has gotten his stimulus, the inflation-mongers are just getting started again. . . 

. . . It’s been an article of faith among conservatives since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008 that inflation is right around the corner.

This conviction follows from a core conservative belief that inflation invariably results from increases in the money supply. As Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist put it a half-century ago in an oft-quoted line: “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.”

Thus, when the Federal Reserve vastly expanded the money supply in late 2008, conservatives anticipated a sharp rise in inflation. It didn’t happen. . . 

. . . Yet, year after year, there was no inflation. In 2009 we saw prices fall slightly, the opposite of these predictions and warnings. The Federal Reserve couldn’t even hit its own target of 2% inflation. The average inflation rate for 2009 through 2020 was less than 1.3% annually.

 

That did nothing to dislodge right-wing orthodoxy, however. Conservatives continue to say that inflation was right around the corner. No amount of empirical data could shake their deeply held belief. . . 

 

Book Review: Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers, by Miguel A. De La Torre (Eerdmans, 2020)

While writing my latest book about the Jewish-supremacist state of Israel, its ongoing decimation of the Palestinian people, and the role played by

Professor Miguel de la Torre

American, conservative Christianity (i.e., Christian Zionism) in perpetuating this Middle Eastern tragedy, I became convinced that two perspectives were crucial to understanding the Zionist-Palestinian conflict.

The first perspective requires grasping that the creation of Israel was the last venture of Western colonialism, launched – quite ironically – at the dawn of a purportedly post-colonial awakening in the West. (Actually, it was the beginning of a neo-colonialist era, but that’s a subject for another post). Israel is and always has been a settler-colonial state. This insight is key to understanding everything that happens there.

The second perspective developed as I explored the close affinity that Americans have long harbored for Israel – an affinity rooted in the colonial history, a white colonial history, that Israel and America hold in common. The power structures of both nations maintain and applaud this white, colonial heritage. Consequently, large swaths of their citizenry continue to maintain a white, colonial mindset that perverts their view of themselves and the rest of the world. The deadly results appear in the domineering policies directed by national commitments to American and Israeli exceptionalism.

Thinking about these matters made me eager to read Dr. Miguel A. de la Torre’s new book, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers (yes, I object to the subtitle, too, for a variety of reasons that I won’t go into here). Dr. de la Torre is the author of over thirty books and a professor of social ethics and Latinx studies at Iliff School of Theology. He is also an activist and a major voice crying out for justice on behalf of the Hispanic/Latinx/Immigrant community in the United States.

A more apt title for the book would be something along the lines of Ending White Christianity’s Addiction to Colonialism. As it is, the book’s title implies (intentionally or unintentionally) not that Christianity is inclined towards colonialism, but that Christianity itself has been colonized by some foreign, oppressive power. Perhaps that is the title’s intent, though it is unclear to me. If it is, then the title (remembering that author’s rarely get to select their own book titles) introduces a book that aptly and insightfully indicts white Christianity for allowing itself to become colonized by a demonic belief in white superiority and privilege.

Professor de la Torre argues (correctly in my view) that the Body of Christ has been infested with anti-Christian beliefs that have made white Christianity an eager agent of white supremacy throughout world history. One obvious consequence has been “missionary Christianity’s” collaboration with Western colonialism (including Jewish, political Zionism in Israel, curiously enough, but you’ll have to buy my book to learn about that); another is the contemporary power dynamics that entrench structural racism into American life.

Decolonizing Christianity offers a rigorous dissection of the crass immorality endorsed by white evangelicalism during the Trump presidency, exposing the many, pernicious ways in which “The Donald” brought the ugly reality of American race-consciousness to light for all to see. Nope, the Obama presidency did not prove that America had finally become a color-blind nation. Quite the opposite. Professor de la Torre rightly insists that Trump was not an aberration. He was/is the age-old, proverbial pig of historic, American white supremacy with all the fashionable make-up and lipstick wiped off its pasty mug.

More than that, de la Torre aptly excoriates white evangelicalism for abandoning Jesus Christ our Savior in exchange for Donald Trump our president. His lengthy exposé on the many ways church leaders compromised the gospel by extolling Trump as Christian America’s savior figure (supported with example after example) makes for shameful reading – even for an anti-Trump person like me. Professor de la Torre rightly argues that in making this exchange so fervently, white evangelicalism revealed its true nature: it is an apostate church body eager to embrace the latest anti-christ, primarily because it never understood Jesus and his gospel in the first place.

From this perspective, professor de la Torres offers a much-needed prophetic critique of American Christianity and the role it plays in normalizing some of our society’s worst characteristics. However, even though I deeply appreciate his prophetic message, I have several problems with the route he takes to arrive at his criticisms (that is, his methodology). Since my area of expertise is New Testament studies, I will focus my criticisms through engaging his troublesome use of scripture. (A related set of differences are foreshadowed in my recent survey of Critical Race Theory here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

Professor de la Torre roots his theology of social transformation in a long-standing (albeit totally mistaken) interpretation of Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats (Matt. 25:31-46). By his reading of Matthew 25, caring for the poor, the naked, the hungry, and the imprisoned is the sole measure for determining who is and who is not embraced by the Lord Jesus on Judgment Day. It is hard to avoid the impression that, according to professor de la Torres, radical social transformation, prioritizing the marginalized and afflicted, is the Christian church’s #1 mission in this world.

Of course, de la Torres is not the first to make this particular reading of Matthew 25 central to his understanding of the church and the Christian life. Mother Teresa was also convinced of its centrality to her mission and never hesitated to say so. However, regardless of its ancient roots, this interpretation of Matthew 25 has always been wrong. Unfortunately, its errors have shaped the false starts in professor de la Torres’ analysis, marring an otherwise excellent dissection of the American church. I will explain what I mean by this in an additional post (coming soon — it is now here) that will focus on the proper way of reading Jesus’ parable within its Matthean context and the radically different view of the church which results. Stay tuned.

But here I can more fully explore a briefer example of how professor de la Torres misinterprets scripture by looking at his use of Matthew 15:21-28, Jesus’ encounter with the Canaanite woman (69-78). Here Jesus initially refuses a woman’s request for help, and even likens her to a dog(!). De la Torres explains Jesus’ reaction by claiming that she was rejected because she came from a “mongrel race of inferior people” (69), just like modern-day immigrants at the southern border. Here de la Torres gives us an example of Biblical interpretation from the margins, as they say nowadays; that is through the eyes of the marginalized.

De la Torres argues that this uncomfortable encounter was pivotal in teaching Jesus to outgrow his parochial, Jewish chauvinism (77-78). He was being forced “to mature” in his humanity. The Canaanite woman taught him to become more inclusive and to reject his upbringing in Jewish, racial privilege. When Jesus suggests that the woman is like a dog begging for food (de la Torres prefers the word bitch) de la Torres draws from his own experience to make a connection with Latinx immigrants in this country who regularly are treated as dogs. For de la Torres, the Canaanite woman is a prototypical Latinx immigrant while Jesus exemplifies what the white Christian church ought to be doing – growing up and leaving its racial privilege behind.

Unfortunately, the professor does not recognize (or has deliberately rejected the idea) that Jesus initially rejects this woman because she is a Gentile, not because Canaanites were especially “mongrelized.”  This is an important theme throughout Matthew’s gospel. There is a tension, an unfolding development, between the initial exclusivism of Jesus’ early mission (recall that he sends out the Twelve only to the people of Israel, explicitly instructing them not to visit any Gentiles or Samaritans; see Matt. 10:1-6), on the one hand, and the emerging universalism that arises after Jesus is rejected by Israel’s leadership, on the other.

Regardless of what we modern-folk think about it, Jesus arrived as the Jewish messiah for the Jewish people first, just as the apostle Paul regularly went “first to the Jews and then to the Gentiles.” In rejecting the Canaanite woman, Jesus was not rejecting mongrelized Latinx farm workers or other marginalized groups, as de la Torre suggests.  He was rejecting all Gentiles at that point in his ministry as a feature of salvation-history. Gentiles needed to wait their turn, and their turn would come. Remember that the woman’s persistent faith quickly overcame Jesus’ reticence to help her. (Space limits prevent me from exploring this issue further here).

De la Torre’s twisting of Matthew 15 to his own political/social application illustrates several problems endemic to the current trend of racializing biblical interpretation. De la Torre regularly indicts what he perceives as the endemic racism of white Christianity as the inevitable result of “white, Eurocentric” philosophy and theology. Though he never fleshes out the specific intellectual connections he sees between white academic theology and the inevitability of white Christian racism, the clear implication is to highlight the importance of Latinx, Black, and Native American theology and interpretation. The fact that most academic theology has been written by white, Eurocentric men is (in de la Torre’s view) the prime facie reason to lay all responsibility for the racism of white Christianity at the door of Eurocentric white theology.

However, I suggest that more substantive evidence is required to demonstrate such cause and effect in this case. Perhaps the professor has fleshed this out more fully in his earlier writings. If he has, he does not refer to it here.

As an interpretive method, this racialization of theology and Bible reading is really no different than the subjective, impressionistic, reader-response approach to Bible reading so common in the average neighborhood Bible study. Failing to understand the difference between a text’s meaning (understanding it accurately within its original contexts) and its significance (making a contemporary, practical application) everyone proceeds to share their personal impressions of the biblical text and “what it means to me” (which is actually a misstatement referring to what its significance is to me). After an evening of communal, subjective impressionism, everyone then goes home marveling at the Bible’s magical ability “to mean” so many different things to different people. Thus, Dr. de la Torre’s misuse of scripture illustrates how the current emphasis on “reading from the margins” is actually no different than evangelicalism’s habit of “reading from the white suburbs.” The only difference is the change in neighborhoods.

Though I am not familiar with the full body of professor de la Torre’s writings, Decolonizing Christianity certainly demonstrates that his voice needs to be received and taken seriously by everyone in the white church in this country.

I must differ, however, in diagnosing the root cause of the American church’s crippling illness. In my opinion, the most basic problem of white Christianity and its scandalous love affair with Donald Trump is not that it is the product of white, Eurocentric theology, whatever that may be, but that it is not the product of sincere, sacrificial allegiance to the crucified Palestinian Jew, Jesus of Nazareth.

And that is an unavoidable, lifelong challenge for everyone who calls him/herself a Christian.

Stockton, California’s UBI Experiment is a Tremendous Success

Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Yang made a nation-wide

Andrew Yang

Universal Basic Income the centerpiece of his economic policy platform when he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination last year.

Of course, conservatives in both parties broadcast their age-old objection to such  social benefits programs by warning that giving people “free money” will automatically encourage them quit work and stay home where they will waste that money on beer and drugs.

Isn’t it funny how conservatives will always demonize the poor by insisting that welfare programs only encourage them to become more lazy and shiftless.

Ronald Reagan canonized this stereotype with his campaign trope of the “ghetto welfare queen.”

However, I have yet to hear a conservative warn against (the much more likely anti-social outcome that) giving the richest of the rich another large tax cut because it will likely make them more arrogant, greedy, and self-indulgent.

Funny how that works…

Well, Stockton, CA ran a UBI experiment where a group of families making below median incomes were given $500/month for two years. (The money was donated by a private contributor).

Below is an excerpt from an AP article entitled “Employment rose among those in Stockton’s universal basic income experiment.”

At least in this experiment, the conservative warnings were shown to be pure mythology:

After getting $500 per month for two years without rules on how to spend it, 125 people in California paid off debt, got full-time jobs and reported lower rates of

In this Aug. 14, 2019, file photo, Susie Garza displays the city provided debit card she receives monthly through a trial program in Stockton, Calif. A study of people in California who received $500 a month for free says they used it to pay off debt and get full-time jobs. A pair of independent researchers reviewed data from the first year of the study and released their finding on Wednesday, March 3, 2021. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File)

anxiety and depression, according to a study released Wednesday.

The program in the Northern California city of Stockton was the highest-profile experiment in the U.S. of a universal basic income, where everyone gets a guaranteed amount per month for free. Announced by former Mayor Michael Tubbs with great fanfare in 2017, the idea quickly gained momentum once it became a major part of Andrew Yang’s 2020 campaign for president.

Supporters say a guaranteed income can alleviate the stress and anxiety of people living in poverty while giving them the financial security needed to find good jobs and avoid debt. But critics argue free money would eliminate the incentive to work, creating a society dependent on the state.

Tubbs, who at 26 was elected Stockton’s first Black mayor in 2016 after endorsements from Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama, wanted to put those claims to the test. Stockton was an ideal place, given its proximity to Silicon Valley and the eagerness of the state’s tech titans to fund the experiment as they grapple with how to prepare for job losses that could come with automation and artificial intelligence.

The Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration launched in February 2019, selecting a group of 125 people who lived in census tracts at or below the city’s median household income of $46,033. The program did not use tax dollars, but was financed by private donations, including a nonprofit led by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes.

A pair of independent researchers at the University of Tennessee and the University of Pennsylvania reviewed data from the first year of the study, which did not overlap with the pandemic. A second study looking at year two is scheduled to be released next year.

When the program started in February 2019, 28% of the people slated to get the free money had full-time jobs. One year later, 40% of those people had full-time jobs. A control group of people who did not get the money saw a 5 percentage point increase in full-time employment over that same time period.

“These numbers were incredible. I hardly believed them myself,” said Stacia West, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee who analyzed the data along with Amy Castro Baker, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Tomas Vargas said the extra $500 a month was enough for him to take time off from his part-time job and find full-time work that paid better. He said he was depressed at the start of 2019, but now says he is happier and healthier.

You can read the rest of the story here.