David J. Rothkopf is an American professor of international relations, political scientist and journalist.
Today’s issue of Haaretz newspaper published an insightful comparison witten by Rothkopf of the essential similarity between yesterday’s attack by Israeli soldiers against the murdered Palestinian journalist’s, Shireen Abu Aqla’s, funeral procession in east Jerusalem, and the mass murder of 10 African-American’s in Buffalo, NY by a young, white supremacist.
What do both have in common? Professor Rothkopf hits a bull’s eye when he says, Ethnic Nationalism.
The mass murderer in Buffal0 is a white supremacist worried about white people being “replaced” by immigrants and other people of color. In other words, he killed for his dream of a “white’s only nation.”
The entire Israeli state apparatus is built upon the foundation of Jewish supremacy, a supremacy that the Jewish state will defend at all costs. The murder of the Palestinian journalist, Ms. Abu Aqla; the unprovoked attack against her funeral procession; the continued military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, are all examples of Israel’s continuing efforts to preserve a “Jew’s only nation.”
Ethnic nationalism is never pretty.
My single disagreement with Rothkopf concerns his idea that Jewish ethnic nationalism is embraced only by Israel’s right-wing. However, my book, Like Birds in a Cage shows how very, very wrong this misconception is.
An 18-year-old walks into a grocery store in Buffalo, New York and opens fire, killing ten. On the barrel of his gun is written a racist epithet so offensive that most media simply refer to it as the “n-word.”
Israeli police brutally assault mourners at the funeral of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. They rip the Palestinian flag off the hearse carrying Abu Akleh’s coffin.
Two events, worlds apart. What could they possibly have in common?
After all, the Buffalo shooter, Payton S. Gendron, was an avowed antisemite who feared that Jews and Blacks and people of color were seeking to “replace” whites. Another symbol on his gun, the number 14, evoked a white supremacist credo, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” He was a criminal.
According to the Israeli police they were seeking to “facilitate a calm andIsraeli soldiers attack mourners and pall bearers at Ms. Abu Aqla’s funeral procession.
dignified funeral.” What could their behavior possibly have to do with that of an unhinged racist who perceived those who were different from him as a mortal threat and, as a result, felt justified in turning to violence against them? . . .
. . . the underlying impetus behind both assaults was hatred fueled by fear of the “other.” Yes, both Gendron and the Israeli police acted with reckless disregard human life or decency. Yes, the police and Gendron were both actively protecting a world view in which people of different races and creeds were seen as lesser, in which denying them basic freedoms, even depriving them of life, has become commonplace.
Yes, the white replacement theory espoused by Gendron was promoted by right-wing media like Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. And yes, when Fox star Tucker Carlson was attacked for espousing “white replacement theory,” his defense was to cite the case of Israel: “It is unrealistic and unacceptable to expect the State of Israel to voluntarily subvert its own sovereign existence and nationalist identity and become a vulnerable minority within what was once its own territory.”
And as repulsive as Carlson’s comments were, the logic that brought him to cite Israeli views toward Palestinians was akin to American white supremacists’ views toward non-Christians and non-whites is easily understood.
The racism and hate-mongering of right-wing media in both countries is linked directly to political parties in the U.S. and Israel who have tapped into race hatred and fears to fuel their popularity. . .
. . . Both acts flowed from irrational hate fueled by ethno-nationalist politicians who have made crimes like these ever more likely, offered the predicate for the attacks (even if the monstrous behavior was very different in nature), and one way or another made available the weapons used in the crimes. . .
Go here to subscribe and read the entire article. Sorry, it is behind a pay wall.
Here is an exercise in seeing the difference that “framing” makes in the way different “authorities” can tell the same story to very different effects.
The first clip below is from an Israeli national news program. You will hear a conversation about yesterday’s fatal shooting of the Palestinian journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh. Listen and make a few mental notes on what you hear.
What is emphasized? What are the guest’s primary concerns? What do you think is omitted from this discussion?
The next clip is from the alternative news site Democracy Now. Amy Goodman talks with Dr. Rashid Khalidi, the Edward W. Said professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University.
You will notice that professor Khalidi’s way of framing of the shooting is very different from Dan Perry’s framing in the Israeli clip.
Make some mental notes. What is Khalidi’s emphasis? What does he discuss that you did not hear in the previous interview? What did Mr. Perry discuss that you do not hear about from Khalidi?
How can you account for these differences?
A number of issues strike me as very important.
First, notice how Mr. Perry frames the issues in terms of competing media narratives, or battling storylines. He laments that fact that, in his opinion, Israel is currently “losing” the media battle to the Palestinian version of the story.
Personally, I do not believe that he has a basis for his lament, although his focus of the public’s perception of Israel — quite apart from what actually happened — is typical of what you will hear from Israeli representatives.
Second, I also hear Perry repeat the characteristic lament over “Israeli victimhood”; my words, not his. For the Israeli propaganda machine (yes, I know, I am letting my own framing show itself at this point), Israel is always under attack; Israel is always the innocent victim; any and all accusations made against Israeli behavior are inevitable examples of the world’s eternal hatred of the Jews.
This victim mentality is an essential component of political Zionism.
Third, I do agree with Perry, however, when he criticizes the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, for refusing to cooperate in a joint enquiry into the shooting. This is a foolish move on his part, which will hopefully be overturned quickly.
Fourth, notice the alternative framing offered by professor Khalidi. He describes this shooting as another in a long line of murderous incidents illustrating the brutality of Israeli settler-colonialism — a perspective with which I happen to agree.
Naturally, Mr. Perry never raises this settler-colonial perspective because the majority of Israelis refuse to see themselves in this light. This is not surprising, however.
All throughout history, colonizers have always tried to whitewash their
Filling a mass grave with frozen Lakota bodies after the massacre at Wounded Knee (1890)
crimes, in one way or another. Guilt is always laid at the feet of those who have been colonized. The settlers were bringing civilization to eradicate the barren wilderness and to bring enlightenment to primitive people.
Both the bloodshed, the shirking of responsibility, and the political rhetoric in Israel-Palestine are no different. This is why the two video clips above offer such divergent analyses.
The frozen body of Spotted Elk, leader of the Sioux band slaughtered at Wounded Knee in 1890
Think of the 17th to the 19th century settlement history of the United States. The white, European settlers commonly, almost universally, framed themselves as the innocent victims of Native savagery.
To the white mind, the Indians were always the senseless aggressors. Every
settler storyline began at the moment the Indians appeared threatening or attacked,
Spotted Elk’s village at Wounded Knee prior to the cavalry’s attack. Government authorities feared the Lakota enthusiasm for the new Ghost Dance ceremonies might lead to rebellion
unjustly, inexplicably. Rarely did anyone discuss what the settlers had been doing to the Natives beforehand.
White settlers also never lacked a noble justification for their latest betrayal.
Modern Israel is the last settler-colonial state in this world of ours, and we are seeing the same colonial distortions of history working themselves out in Israel-Palestine today.
Israel’s airwaves provide the final frontier of media battles over “competing narratives.” Israel, and its many Zionist sympathizers, tell their stories from the settlers’ perspective.
Frozen, dead bodies and burned teepees are all that remain after the soldiers attack at Wounded Knee
Palestinians, on the other hand, tell their stories from the Native perspective. The Palestinian narrative, whether or not it “wins” the nonstop media battle, explains how a powerless, conquered people continue to be abused by their conquerors, conquerors who hold the power and always carry the biggest weapons.
As usual, Chris Hedges hits the nail on the head when it comes to the disastrous Obama presidency. This clip is titled “The Obama Scam.” Take a listen:
In the wake of yesterday’s murder of Shireen Abu Akleh by the Israeli military, Mr. Levy recalls the numerous innocent Palestinians who have also been murdered recently in the West Bank.
Ms. Abu Akleh is not an outlier. Rather, her circumstances are characteristic of Israel’s ongoing colonial atrocities. The Palestinians are a subordinate, oppressed, occupied people. Israel holds all the power.
Below is Mr. Levy’s article (all emphasis is mine):
Al Jazeera reporter, Shireen Abu Akleh
The relative horror expressed over the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh is justified and necessary. It is also belated and self-righteous. Now you’re appalled? The blood of a famous journalist, no matter how brave and experienced she was – and she was – is no redder than the blood of an anonymous high school student who was traveling home in a taxi full of women in this same Jenin a month ago when she was killed by gunfire from Israeli soldiers.
That is how Hanan Khadour was killed. Then, too, the military spokesman tried to cast doubt on the shooters’ identity: “The matter is being examined.” A month has passed, and this “examination” has yielded nothing, and never will – but the doubts were planted, and they sprouted in the Israeli fields of denial and suppression, where no one actually cares about the fate of a 19-year-old Palestinian girl, and the country’s dead conscience is silenced again. Is there a single crime committed by the military that the right and the establishment will ever accept responsibility for? Just one?
Abu Akleh seems to be another story: an internationally known journalist. Just this past Sunday a more local journalist, Basel al-Adra, was attacked by Israeli soldiers in the South Hebron Hills, and no one cared. And a couple days ago, two Israelis who attacked journalists during the Gaza war last May were sentenced to 22 months in prison. What punishment will be meted out to soldiers who killed, if indeed they did, Abu Akleh? And what punishment was given to whoever decided on and carried out the despicable bombing of the Associated Press offices in Gaza during the fighting last year? Has anyone paid for this crime? And what about the 13 journalists who were killed during the Gaza war in 2014?And the medical personnel who were killed during demonstrations at the Gaza border fence, including 21-year-old Razan al-Najjar, who was shot dead by soldiers while wearing her white uniform? No one has been punished. Such things will always be covered by a cloud of blind justification and automatic immunity for the military and worship of its soldiers.
Even if the smoking Israeli bullet that killed Abu Akleh is found, and even if footage is found that shows the face of the shooter, he will be treated by Israelis as a hero who is above all suspicion. It’s tempting to write that if innocent Palestinians must be killed by Israeli soldiers, better for them to be well-known and holders of U.S. passports, like Abu Akleh. At least then the U.S. State Department will voice a little displeasure – but not too much – about the senseless killing of one of its citizens by the soldiers of one of its allies.
At the time of writing, it was still unclear who killed Abu Akleh. This is Israel’s propaganda achievement – sowing doubts, which Israelis are quick to grab onto as fact and justification, though the world does not believe them and is usually correct. When the young Palestinian boy Mohammed al-Dura was killed in 2000, Israeli propaganda also tried to blur the identity of his killers; it never proved its claims, and no one bought them. Past experience shows that the soldiers who killed the young woman in a taxi are the same soldiers who might kill a journalist. It’s the same spirit; they are permitted to shoot as they please. Those who weren’t punished for Hanan’s killing continued with Shireen.
But the crime begins long before the shooting. The crime starts with the raiding of every town, refugee camp, village and bedroom in the West Bank every night, when necessary but mainly when not necessary. The military correspondents will always say that this was done for the sake of “arresting suspects,” without specifying which suspects and what they’re suspected of, and resistance to these incursions will always be seen as “a breach of order” – the order in which the military can do as it pleases and the Palestinians cannot do anything, certainly not show any resistance.
Abu Akleh died a hero, doing her job. She was a braver journalist than all Israeli journalists put together. She went to Jenin, and many other occupied places, where they have rarely if ever visited, and now they must bow their heads in respect and mourning. They also should have stopped spreading the propaganda spread by the military and government regarding the identity of her killers. Until proven otherwise, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the default conclusion must be: the Israeli military killed Shireen Abu Akleh.
Today an Israeli army sniper shot and killed the Palestinian-American journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh. She was covering the most recent Israeli military attacks against the Jenin refugee camp for Al Jazeera.
Ms. Abu Akleh was unarmed. She was wearing a clearly visible, blue “Press” jacket when she was murdered.
Israeli soldiers shoot, wound, and murder unarmed Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank on a regular, perhaps even a weekly, basis.
But Ms. Abu Akleh’s murder is receiving noticeably more attention than the regular victims because she has been a high profile figure among Palestinians for decades.
As always, the Israeli press and military leaders are claiming that she was shot accidentally by a Palestinian gunman. After all, isn’t the Israeli army the “most moral army in the world,” as they say?
Watch this news panel of chattering dunderheads, otherwise known as “experts,” blather on about the impossibility of anyone in the Israeli army ever doing such a horrible thing!
The propagandistic i24 News, pearl-clutching is disgusting to watch, for none of these so-called experts has obviously taken the time to give their attention to the eye-witness accounts of the other journalists who were also being shot at.
Watch the video clip below to see those interviews yourself.
At least 4 Al Jazeera reporters came under repeated rifle fire for a sustained period of time. The shootings were obviously not an accident. They were deliberately targeting this group of journalists, all of whom were wearing blue Press jackets.
The shooting was deliberate, pre-meditated murder, pure and simple.
Two journalists were hit by this rifle fire. One was hit in the back and survived. The other, Ms. Abu Akleh, was fatally hit in the head/face.
This is not unusual. Israeli soldiers commonly aim for the victim’s face and head.
A third journalist drew repeated rifle fire whenever she tried to move in any direction. The shots aimed at her clearly demonstrate that the shootings, and the resulting murder, were intentional.
The journalists reported that there were no Palestinian fighters anywhere near them.
The Israeli military and its state propaganda machine specialize in two things: killing Palestinians and lying to the world about the horrible things they do.
The cold-blooded murder of a middle-aged, Palestinian Christian woman, who was doing her job reporting on Israeli violence in the West Bank, is only the most recent public instance of the continuing war crimes that Israel commits week in and week out in the Occupied Territories.
We cannot allow them to continue to get away with this!
Call your elected representatives and tell them that all American support and foreign aid to Israel must stop now.
Tell them that you do not want your tax dollars given to a racist, apartheid state that uses US weaponry to commit crimes against humanity.
Naturally, the American media continue to pump out false information about the origins and continuation of the war in Ukraine.
Remembering and reminding people of recent history does not make anyone a “Putin-puppet.” In fact, such facile and feeble accusations are a principle indicator that the accuser, without anything more substantive to say, is actually another US government stooge furthering the American party line.
Below is an excerpt from a recent post by the Australian journalist/blogger Caitlin Johnstone. She nails all the relevant issues with precision and accuracy.
Everything she says and documents has been maligned by one US news outlet or another as “Russian propaganda.” That, my friends, is a lie.
But, then, lies are a mainstay of all propaganda, including American propaganda, which is being manufactured fast and furious by the corporate media these days.
A few members of the Nazi Azov battalion which is now part of the Ukrainian military. They have successfully battled the Russian-Ukrainian population of the eastern Donbas region to a standstill. Much of the destruction presented by American media as the result of Russian actions is actually the work of these Russia hating neo-Nazis, who have always been violent ethic-nationalists fighting for a “pure” Ukraine.
As we hydroplane toward the brink of nuclear armageddon while Bono and the Edge play U2 songs in Kyiv, it’s probably worth taking a moment to highlight the fact that this entire war could have been avoided if the US had simply pledged military protection for Zelensky against the far right extremists who were threatening to lynch him if he enacted the peacemaking policies he was elected to enact.
To be clear, what we are indulging in here is entirely an act of fantasy. In imagining what would have happened if the US had pledged to protect the Ukrainian government from an undemocratic violent overthrow at the hands of fascists instead of waging a horrific proxy war, we are imagining a world in which the US government acts in the highest interest of all instead of working continuously to dominate the planet no matter how much madness and cruelty it needs to inflict upon humanity. A world in which the US hadn’t been taking steps toward the orchestration of this proxy warfor many years.
With that out of the way, it’s just a simple fact that for a fraction of the military firepower the US is pouring into Ukraine right now, it could have prevented the entire war by simply protecting Ukrainian democracy from the undemocratic impulses of the worst people in that country.
When he was asked by The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel last month what he thinks is preventing Kyiv from signing a peace agreement with Russia, John Mearsheimer, whose analysis of this conflict has been prophetic for many years, replied as follows:
I think that when Zelensky ran for president he made it very clear that he wanted to work out an arrangement with Russia that ended the crisis in Ukraine, and he won. And what he then tried to do was move toward implementing the Minsk II agreement. If you were going to shut down the conflict in Ukraine, you had to implement Minsk II. And Minsk II meant giving the Russian-speaking and the ethnic Russian population in the easternmost part of Ukraine, the Donbas region, a significant amount of autonomy, and you had to make the Russian language an official language of Ukraine.
I think Zelensky found out very quickly that because of the Ukrainian right, it was impossible to implement Minsk II. Therefore even though the French and the Germans, and of course the Russians were very interested in making Minsk II work, because they wanted to shut down the crisis, they couldn’t do it. In other words, the Ukrainian right was able to stymie Zelensky on that front.
When Mearsheimer says that the Ukrainian right was able to stymie Zelensky, he doesn’t mean by votes or by democratic processes, he means by threats and violence. In an article last month titled “Siding with Ukraine’s far-right, US sabotaged Zelensky’s mandate for peace,” journalist Aaron Maté wrote the following:
In April 2019, Zelensky was elected with an overwhelming 73% of the vote on a promise to turn the tide. In his inaugural address the next month, Zelensky declared that he was “not afraid to lose my own popularity, my ratings,” and was “prepared to give up my own position – as long as peace arrives.”
But Ukraine’s powerful far-right and neo-Nazi militias made clear to Zelensky that reaching peace in the Donbas would have a much higher cost.
“No, he would lose his life,” Right Sector co-founder Dmytro Anatoliyovych Yarosh, then the commander of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army, responded one week after Zelensky’s inaugural speech. “He will hang on some tree on Khreshchatyk – if he betrays Ukraine and those people who died in the Revolution and the War.”
In 1963, Jacques Ellul published a sequel to his earlier work, The Presence of the Kingdom. Ellul’s second discussion of the nature and significance of the
Jacques Ellul
kingdom of God was titled, False Presence of the Kingdom.
Having used the earlier book to lay out his understanding of what the kingdom of God is and how the Christian church ought to be living within that kingdom, Ellul now goes on to diagnose what he believes are the most common misunderstandings and misappropriations of the New Testament kingdom theology.
As always, Ellul gives today’s reader a lot to think about and to digest, most of it rather uncomfortable but absolutely necessary and, hopefully, not entirely indigestible.
Below is today’s excerpt from Jacques Ellul’s False Presence of the Kingdom (all emphasis mine). I quote a section where Ellul focuses on the classic distinction between fact and value and the modern error of assuming that facts have a self-evident, intrinsic value of their own.
By the way, as I write this, I am thinking of several recent conversations with fellow Christians who said things to me that are perfect examples of the problem Ellul is critiquing:
If one attributes inherent value to fact, and if the moment the fact exists it is useless to bring an ethical or spiritual judgment to bear upon it, then I say that this should be carried to its logical conclusion. Capitalism? It’s a fact. War? It’s a fact. Parachutists? It’s a fact. Torture? That’s a gross fact. . . One is quite simply hypocritical and dishonest in advancing the argument that one is faced with a fact, and that moral judgment is to be avoided on that account.
There remains, moreover, the question why one employs that argument. The answer, alas, is easy. . . one avoids debate by eliminating the moral problem on the ground that facts elude such judgment. . . (If) a fact is a final value, one yields to the fact. Nothing can be done about it. Whenever, in an ordinary argument, one person is able to say to the other: “First of all, it’s a fact,” there is nothing to be said in reply.
To give up passing judgment on a fact, to assume that all one can do from then on is to yield to it, to adjust to it, that is precisely and totally to abandon the Christian life in its entirety. There is no position more radically anti-Christian than to give way to a fact. It is to accept fate. It is to agree that the material factor is the determining one. It is to agree that the Christian life is nothing but a morality. At the same time, it is a renunciation of spiritual discernment, and of the possibility of injecting truth into the context of reality.
That entails enormous consequences, which, to be sure, are never foreseen by those Christians who think they are realists because they announce: “It’s a fact.” . . . (Such) Christians obey the world’s logical inconsistencies. Their thinking is so unstable that the very ones who accept fact as final judgment in matters of technology, progress, mass culture, economic growth, urbanization, etc., are the same ones who reject fact in the case of colonialism or of the present government. But perhaps, again, this is nothing but a conformism . . .
Once again, let’s make it clear that it is no part of our thinking to deny the facts, or to say that they do not have to be taken into account. What we are saying is simply that it is a gross intellectual error to transform fact into a value, to conceive of fact as being or as containing a value in and of itself. We are saying it is a gross moral error to renounce judging a fact, that is a gross spiritual error to urge man to bow before fact, that is to say, before the fatality of whatever exists.
I used to have a personal mantra that I would repeat to myself in times of difficulty. I’d say too myself:
I will only deal with what’s real in order to strive for God’s ideal.
That’s what Ellul is talking about. What’s your kingdom mantra?
I visited Grand Rapids, Michigan last month, and I did what I always do when I travel; I checked out the used bookstores!
This trip, I picked up two books by the French, Christian thinker, professor, philosopher, Jacques Ellul which were new to me.
Jacques Ellul (1912 – 1994)
If you’ve never read Ellul, you need to begin today.
You’ll find few Christian writers as thoughtful and penetrating in his deconstruction of the modern world, its technological idols, and what it means for a Christian to follow Jesus faithfully through the maze of an ever evolving and broken society.
Rather than write up two book reviews for my readers, I decided to post a few excerpts to give you the flavor of each book, both about the kingdom of God.
Naturally, I never agree with everything Ellul says. I don’t even agree with myself much of the time! But I am always challenged and stimulated, often in a surprising, back-handed way, to think about the issues more deeply.
I hope you will be challenged too.
The first book I am excerpting today is Ellul’s 1948 publication titled, The Presence of the Kingdom (all emphasis is mine):
. . . The Christian is constantly obliged to reiterate the claims of God, to re-establish this God-willed ‘order,’ in presence of an order which constantly tends towards disorder. In consequence of the claims which God is always making on the world the Christian finds himself (sic), by that very fact, involved in a state of permanent revolution. Even when the institutions, the laws, the reforms which he has advocated have been achieved, even if society be re-organized according to his suggestions, he still has to be in opposition, he still must exact more, for the claim of God is a infinite as His forgiveness. Thus, the Christian is called to question unceasingly all that man calls progress, discovery, facts, established results, reality, etc. He can never be satisfied with all this human labour, and in consequence he is always claiming that it should be transcended, or replaced by something else.
In his judgment he is guided by the Holy Spirit – he is making an essentially revolutionary act. If the Christian is not being revolutionary, then in some way or another he has been unfaithful to his calling in the world. . .
. . . Thus, one who knows that he has been saved by Christ is not a man jealously and timidly attached to a past, however glorious it may be. He does not cling to the past of his Church (tradition), nor even to the past life of Jesus Christ (on which, however, the certainty of his faith depends) – but he is a man of the future…of the eschaton, of the coming break with this present world…All facts acquire their value in the light of the coming Kingdom of God, in the light of the Judgment, and the victory of God. . .
. . . This theological truth also applies to social and political facts. The actual events of our world only acquire their value in the light of the coming Kingdom of God. It is the imminent return of Christ which gives genuine seriousness to each actual event . . . Without this direction history is an outbreak of madness. Now in this matter the Christian has no right to keep this truth to himself; by his action and by his thought it is his duty to bring the ‘coming event’ into the life of this present world. . . Every Christian who has received the Holy Spirit is now a prophet of the Return of Christ, and by this very fact he has a revolutionary mission in politics. . .
. . . To be revolutionary is to judge the world by its present state, by actual facts, in the name of a truth which does not yet exist (but which is coming) – and it is to do so because we believe this truth to be more genuine and more real than the reality which surrounds us. Consequently, it means bringing the future into the present as an explosive force. . .
The title to this post, But What About the Children, was a common catch phrase on the long-running Simpson’s cartoon on the Fox network.
Whenever the Simpsons’ neighborhood seemed poised to confront a new, intrusive cultural challenge, the local pastor’s wife could be counted on loudly to lament, “But what about the children?”, giving parody to conservative Christianity’s ostensible concern for the health and well-being of America’s young people.
Monday’s leaked draft of an (apparently?) imminent Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade is now fueling cries of jubilation among the evangelical community that has fought for decades to rid this country of abortion and the tearful tearing of garments among abortion’s distraught defenders.
Even though I am against abortion per se, I am also disturbed at what the social consequences will be if/when access to abortion becomes more restricted. (I also understand that nothing is certain about these things, and the aftermath will be complex and undoubtedly surprising. See the Constitutional, civil rights attorney, Glenn Greenwald’s helpful discussion of these Constitutional issues here.)
Daniel K. Williams fine book, The Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship (Eerdmans, 2021), contains a very helpful analysis of abortion in the United States, the evangelical battle against Roe v. Wade, and what should be the Christian church’s response to the issue’s complexities.
[I encourage you to buy the book and read especially chapter three – I do not agree with everything he says, especially in his chapter on marriage and sexuality. I am also shocked that Stanley Hauerwas does not appear in his bibliography! But overall, Williams provides the most balanced discussion of hot button social issues I have yet found written by an evangelical Christian.]
Here are a few short excerpts from The Politics of the Cross (all emphasis mine):
But what most people involved in the abortion debate seem not to realize is that we have largely returned to a pre-Roe past even without a direct repeal of Roe. The number of abortions per year in the United States is now lower than in any year since 1973[the year of the Roe v. Wade ruling]. . .The number of abortion clinics has fallen by about two-thirds during the past twenty-five years. There are now more than three times as many pro-life crisis pregnancy centers as there are abortion clinics [in this country]. (103)
The primary explanation given by women as to why they want an abortion is that they are too poor to successfully raise another child:
[Pro-lifers are right] in that restricting access to abortion. . . does reduce abortion rates. . . But pro-choice advocates are also right in saying that this method of reducing abortion rates is likely to keep more women in poverty. This suggests that if pro-lifers really care about protecting all human life, including the life of low-income pregnant women, they will not merely try to rescind Roe v. Wade but will instead couple their restrictions on abortion with expanded efforts to provide economic resources to the women whose poverty has been exacerbated by an additional pregnancy. (104).
Fifty-nine percent of women who have abortions are already mothers. . .75 percent of the women having abortions are impoverished or classified as “low income.” (105)
My conscience is deeply troubled by the close connection between abortion rates and poverty in this country.
The majority of women seeking an abortion in this country are moved by, not just a sense of hopelessness, but by the hopeless reality of their desperately impoverished lives. They have no hope that their new baby will have any chance whatsoever at a decent, safe, healthy future in America.
My conscience becomes even more deeply troubled when I remember that the number of Americans now falling into poverty has only continued to grow over the past thirty years.
When this fact is combined with the steady, draconian reduction of family, social services (both public and private) available to poor people today, my blood curdles and I begin to drift slowly in the forbidden direction of supporting Roe v. Wade.
Excuse me, but I find the conservative hypocrisy on this issue stunning.
For if we want to be genuinely pro-life, then we will not only care about reducing abortion, but we will care equally about providing universal health care, especially for mothers and their children, free neo-natal health care, free well-baby home visits, free classes in nutrition and infant care, free pre-school and Head Start programs, especially in poor neighborhoods.
Earlier this year politicians in D.C. fought tooth and nail over the “social welfare” provisions included in president Biden’s Covid Relief bill, ensuring that those aspects of the bill were whittled down to a mere shadow of their original goals.
Both Republicans and corporate Democrats – which is all Democratic Senators and the majority of Representatives – waved the red flag of “increasing the national debt” and “bankrupting our grandchildren!” So, the bill was raped and pillaged until it became a mere skeleton of its original version.
Yet, last week the president asked Congress to approve $33 billion for a new round of military support and arms purchases for Ukraine and our NATO allies.
I have no doubt that the same Senators and Representatives who were previously losing sleep over the nightmare of America’s poor and needy bankrupting the nation, will now happily sign their names to another $33 billion in armament to fight Russia!
Once again, as always, America has deep, deep pockets for war, but instantly becomes penniless and unconcerned when faced with her own impoverished mothers and children.
Every decision is made within a bigger context. Nothing is isolated. Nothing is pristine. Everything is connected.
The way in which those connections influence my actions will always reveal the truth about my moral priorities.
This constellation of recent, national actions concerning Covid Relief, the Supreme Court, poverty levels, and military appropriations lead me to one, inevitable conclusion: American conservatives are no more “pro-life” than the Roadrunner or Bugs Bunny. They are pro-a-particularly-sick-and-twisted-conservative-political-economic-ideology.
I am telling you here and now, Jesus of Nazareth has never been a member of that club. And neither should you.
Let’s begin by watching this short clip from the Christian Broadcasting Network interviewing pollster George Barna who offers dire warnings about the imminent dangers let loose by American Christians’ lack of a Biblical world-view.
The CBN video clip is titled “Few Professed Christian Parents Hold a Biblical World-View.”
Frankly, I have never been a fan of the idea that Christian’s must hold onto a well-developed “Biblical world-view.”
For many years I taught at a college that required all incoming freshmen to take a class intended to press upon their young minds the details of a Reformed world-view. I was never a fan of that curriculum decision, either, and I spoke out against it at the time.
As a Christian educator, my basic objection – which I will elaborate below – had to do with the difference between education vs. indoctrination.
A basic principle of all good education, including a so-called Christian education, I believe, is to grasp the crucial distinction between teaching a person how to think as opposed to indoctrinating a person into what to think.
Focusing on the maintenance and preservation of a “Christian” or “Biblical” world-view places the emphasis on indoctrination rather than on learning how to think for oneself. This is why indoctrination so often fails once the pressures, expectations, and boundaries of homelife and college performance are finally lifted.
In all likelihood, that young mind will eventually decide that he/she has outgrown the days of being told what to think and believe.
Young adults have agency. They are not robots. Mr. Barna’s facile insistence that every young person who lacks an adequate Christian world-view is necessarily the derelict product of parental failure is both glib and harsh. It is also offensive.
The church is filled with a wide variety of adults with very different views on parenting. Of course, the church has always had its share of hypocrites, which is certainly noticed by the community’s young people.
I observed a great deal of hypocrisy while growing up in the church. Yet, I eventually decided to devote my life to following Jesus. Others are raised by strict, religious parents far more intent on both indoctrination and the maintenance of an indoctrinated lifestyle than mine ever were. Yet, I have watched many of them walk away from the church and abandon their youthful professions of faith.
For years I was ordained in a denomination that included an extensive Catechism (that is, an exercise in doctrinal education – a world-view – that was laid out in a question-and-answer format, typically memorized by the students) among its doctrinal statements. This Reformed version of “Sunday school” was valuable to many young people. But, trust me, I have also heard many stories over the years from others who eagerly repudiated their Catechetical confession of faith as soon as they were free to do so.
So, in my not-so-humble opinion, Mr. Barna needs to zip it when it comes to asserting simpleminded, cause-and-effect relationships between parental responsibility and the irreligious world-views of young people.
But let’s probe more deeply into the fundamental errors of such misguided insistence on the creation of a Biblical world-view.
First, I must object to the indefinite article “a.”
Barna’s discussion is typical in its assumption that there is only one, that is “A,” Biblical world-view. Just as there presumably is A Marxist world-view, or A relativistic world-view, there is supposedly A Biblical world-view.
Really?
Whose interpretation of the Bible are we talking about? The original, ancient Biblical world-view insisted that the earth was flat, and that rain fell from an ocean of water contained somewhere in the sky, to mention only a few of its “Biblical” principles. Should “faithful” parents teach these archaic, anti-scientific notions to their children?
Furthermore, who draws the boundaries distinguishing (1) a properly Biblical world-view from (2) a tendentious cultural world-view?
For the vast majority of American evangelicals such cultural artifacts as raw individualism, inalienable rights to private property, unregulated capitalism, and US style “democracy” are all self-evident, necessary ingredients of a truly Biblical world-view.
But are they? Really?
So, the many thousands, if not millions, of faithful Christians throughout western history who espoused Christian socialism (like Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer), defended the divine right of kings (like John and Charles Wesley), or insisted that true Christian faith demanded communal living where all goods are held in common (like many, early Pietists) – they were all deluded by defective world-views that sadly led their children astray?
Who exactly decides THE one legitimate Biblical world-view? Who draws its boundaries? Who makes the final, authoritative distinction between the necessary, Biblical truths and the unnecessary, peripheral cultural add-ons? And whose Biblical truths become THE Biblical truths?
Personally, I have never heard these unavoidable questions addressed adequately in any of the conversations I have listened to or read that promoted this idea of a “Biblical world-view.”
And this is a big part of the reason why I think the entire conversation about world-views is bunk.
My most radical critique, however, drilling down to the most fundamental error of world-view thinking, is the neglect of discipleship.
Yep, I know that world-view advocates will protest here. They insist that possessing a Biblical world-view IS fundamental to Christian discipleship, and a large majority of the evangelical church agrees, in principle.
But this is precisely where the American church goes astray. Because the real focal point of Christian discipleship is Jesus, the crucified, resurrected Galilean.
Disciples know Jesus personally. They follow after Jesus closely. They submit the entirety of their lives to Jesus’ Lordship, and they want to conform their lives to Jesus’ own pattern of living and instruction.
Genuine discipleship is not acquired by memorizing theological principles, nor by mastering critiques of alternative world-views, nor by learning the right way “to think” about life’s questions.
Disciples are made through submission and obedience to the crucified Savior who becomes so loved and adored by the sinners he has saved that they will do anything he asks of them, no matter how odd, counter-cultural, counter-intuitive, offensive, or difficult it may be.
Many of the most serious disciples may never be able to articulate a coherent, integrated “world-view,” at least not to Mr. Barna’s satisfaction. But they will know the living Jesus and follow Him faithfully to the bitter end.
Certainly, genuine discipleship requires Bible study. But the focus of that study turns from learning doctrinal proof-texts to focus on the absorption of stories and lessons about Jesus’ shocking lifestyle among society’s most marginalized.
The focus turns to Jesus’ ethical teachings about selfless love, radical obedience, personal sacrifice, self-denial, anti-materialism, simplicity, generosity, sharing, and absolute allegiance to the resurrected Lord, even to the point of dying for Him, if necessary.
For much of my adult life I have been convinced that one of the great failings of the American church has been its preference for teaching the theological complexities of the apostle Paul rather than exploring Jesus’ outrageous moral requirements.
A proper, Christian world-view only emerges in the hearts and minds of those who wake up every morning with a renewed commitment to follow hard after Jesus, to become more and more like Jesus, to love Jesus with all the sincerity of someone who has pledged herself to “obey all of Jesus’ commandments.”
Does my alternative to world-view thinking give us a guaranteed, uniform answer to every philosophical question? Does it keep us all on the same page about knowing how to address life’s problems? Of course not.
But it does set us on the right path.
It does clarify that the heart and soul of the Christian life is not so much about what we know as it is about who we love and the way we live.
It does make us real Christians, not fakes.
It does put us in touch with God’s voice as He speaks through His Word, both through the words of holy Scripture as well as the words of His one and only holy Son.
And oh, my goodness, what a difference it would make in this world if the church were to prioritize wholesale obedience to our suffering Savior Jesus Christ – even to the point of our own suffering and death – as its number one value. The supposed need for a Biblical world-view would vanish in an instant.
My single disagreement with Rothkopf concerns his idea that Jewish ethnic nationalism is embraced only by Israel’s right-wing. However, my book, Like Birds in a Cage shows how very, very wrong this misconception is.
Presence of the Kingdom (all emphasis is mine):
intrusive cultural challenge, the local pastor’s wife could be counted on loudly to lament, “But what about the children?”, giving parody to conservative Christianity’s ostensible concern for the health and well-being of America’s young people.
Daniel K. Williams fine book, The Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship (Eerdmans, 2021), contains a very helpful analysis of abortion in the United States, the evangelical battle against Roe v. Wade, and what should be the Christian church’s response to the issue’s complexities.