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David Doel Invites Us to Share in the Grief and Anger of Dante Wright’s Family

Canadian reporter David Doel of The Rational National shares the speech made by Dante Wright’s aunt at the family press conference held yesterday.

We all need to listen to her. Hear why she not only grieves the death of her nephew but is angry over the way he died. She points out details in the shooter’s actions that raised my eyebrows, too.

Afterwards, Mr. Doel goes on to provide excellent commentary, placing Mr. Wright’s murder in its historical context. His challenge must be taken seriously by everyone, please.

 

 

 

George Floyd, Daunte Wright, Caron Nazario Remind Us of Why African-Americans Are Afraid to Get Out of Their Cars

In the midst of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s trial for the death of George Floyd, a new wave of demonstrations has erupted protesting the death of another unarmed black man, 20 year old Daunte Wright.

Here is a video of Mr. Wright’s shooting:

Almost simultaneously, a Virginia state police video was released showing the unnecessary use of force, bullying, and intimidation against another unarmed man of color, Army second lieutenant Caron Nazario. Fortunately, though both officers had guns drawn at this traffic stop neither pulled the trigger.

Here is a video of lieutenant Nazario’s police encounter:

Naturally, each of these situations is unique in its own way. I won’t discuss those differences here. I will simply encourage you to follow these stories on your own if you aren’t already.

But all of these incidents have at least two traits in common.

First, notice how quickly the police begin to apply force (verbally, emotionally, and physically) against the black suspects. Yelling, threats, intimidation, grabbing, pulling, pushing, handcuffs, tasers, and guns are all on display almost immediately.

It looks as if the police have just received a dramatic, red-alert dispatch warning them that the man they are pulling over is a violent mass murderer transporting a nuclear bomb in the trunk of his car.

From my perspective — and I have been on the receiving end of such treatment — the police are needlessly escalating a situation that could have been handled much more calmly.

Why are they acting like marines on a search-and-destroy mission?

Second, a tipping point seems to occur when the black man refuses to get out of his car (or climbs back inside). The police are clearly angered by this display of personal autonomy, which they interpret as another act of lawlessness that requires physical restraint and arrest.

As best as I can determine (I am not a lawyer), citizens are legally obligated to comply with an officer’s “lawful orders” (emphasis on lawful). If a police officer orders a driver to get out of his/her car, for example, then the driver is supposed to obey (see here and here; for a detailed discussion in the Santa Clara Law Review, look here).

Unsurprisingly, conservative reactions to such arrests and shootings are typically straightforward. Just comply! Do what the officer says, and you will be fine. Or so says the white guy…

[I am reminded of an old joke. Question: What is a liberal? Answer: A liberal is a conservative who just got arrested.]

It is now well known that the increasing militarization of US police training encourages officers to view citizens (whether explicitly or implicitly) as “the enemy” and every engagement as a combat situation. Trainees are now taught to to think of themselves as “warriors” not as “guardians” or public servants.

Frankly, I can easily understand why black men and women are afraid to get out of their cars when pulled over by police. This country has a long history of unarmed black citizens winding up dead after meeting with the police.

Recent events show that little has changed.

I would be afraid to get out of my car, too, if I shared the same history and personal experiences of black Americans who are often mistreated, even terrorized, by our so-called peace officers.

Really now, how many more George Floyd type videos does white America need to see?

Of course, the naysayers have their come backs. Most commonly, we are told that police shoot more unarmed white people than black people every year.

That is true.

But what these conservative, racial apologists neglect to mention is that, according to the US Census Bureau, African-Americans make up only 13% of the US population.

It’s not surprising, then, to learn that a larger percentage shootings occur within the majority of the population. More white people means more police encounters which means more shootings. It only makes sense.,

But what is truly shocking, and often erased from the equation, is the dramatic increase in the percentage of police shootings against unarmed African-Americans given their minority status in our population.

Over 76% of the US population is white. 18.5% is Hispanic/Latino. 13% is black. Yet, when fatal police shootings are calculated as a percentage per million of the total population, incidents involving African-Americans jumps to the top of the list by a wide margin.

This more equitable calculation shows that of all (fatal) police shootings in this country, 14% of the victims are white, while 35% are black (Hispanics are 26%). In other words, black Americans are 2.5 times more likely to be shot by police than white Americans.

Predictably, many conservatives and others will suggest (if only behind closed doors) that perhaps African-Americans are 2.5 times more likely to behave like criminals.

If you were holding on to that opinion, let me say two things: first, it is demonstrably false, but that argument must wait for a future post; second, get down on your knees, confess your sins, and repent. Your white privilege and racism are showing.

Every American, but especially anyone with even a passing acquaintance with our God, should be outraged at that statistic. If anyone can produce as many videos of white men and women being strong-armed from their cars, pushed to the ground, punched, stepped on, handcuffed, arrested, and finally shot as we have of African-Americans suffering such treatment, please send them to me.

Produce the evidence and I will recant.

But I’m not holding my breath. The fact that the police ever treat anyone so shamefully, with such unwarranted brutality and violence, is more than enough reason to campaign with Defund the Police organizers.

The fact that America’s black citizens continue to live in fear; the fact that they have good reason to be afraid of an approaching police officer; to suspect that getting out of their car may be their first step into the morgue; to know that they are consistently handled with more violence and aggression than their white neighbors; all of this and more means that this country has a long, long ways to go in the fight for racial justice and equality before the law.

This is why the Black Lives Matter movement remains essential for our society.

This is why all God’s people must share in these same goals.

Matt Taibbi on “The Two Faces of Joe Biden”

Matt Taibbi’s latest article on Joe Biden’s presidency — The Two Faces of Joe Biden — makes two important points with plenty of supporting evidence.

Matt Taibbi

First, all presidents and their administrations lie to us. It’s a fact of life and we all need to remember it.

It is certainly true that Donald Trump set a new bench mark for the volume of pathological lies spewed daily from the Oval Office. But his special gift for dishonesty was only unique in volume not in kind.

Second, now that political partisanship is baked into the DNA of American media outlets, pure propaganda (as opposed to actual investigative reporting) is the established norm in cable and network news.

No matter which stations or networks you watch, you are being lied to much of the time. That, too, is a fact of modern life.

Taibbi lays all of this out in black and white as he explains not only the two-facedness of Joe Biden’s policies, but the eagerness of so-called journalists at places like CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post to carry water for this Democratic administration.

Taibbi gives special attention to those lap-dog stenographers who are  enthusiastically describing Biden as America’s new FDR.

Below is an excerpt from Taibbi’s article.

To read the entire piece requires a subscription, but it’s only $5/month and well worth the money:

. . . With a partisan divide wedded to a hyper-concentrated landscape, commercial media companies can now sell almost any narrative they want. They can disappear the past with relative ease, and the present can be pushed whichever way a handful of key decision-makers thinks will sell best with audiences.

In the case of Biden, we’ve seen in the first few months that the upscale, cosmopolitan target audiences of outlets like CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post want to believe they’re living through a “radical,” “transformative” presidency, the political antidote to the Trump years. The same crowd of West Wing power-tweeters was leading the charge against “purity” in politics about eight minutes ago.

In fact, in the 2019-2020 primary season, Bernie Sanders was regularly lambasted by the same blue-leaning press outlets for trying to re-imagine F.D.R. through programs with names like the “Green New Deal.” Proposal after proposal that had been directly inspired by F.D.R. was described as too expensive, unrealistic, or a political non-starter heading into a general election.

Now that the real version of that brand of politics has been safely eliminated, a new PR campaign is stressing that Democrats did elect F.D.R. after all. Moreover, a legend is being built that crime-bill signing, PATRIOT-Act inspiring, Iraq-war-humping Joe Biden wanted all along to be a radical progressive, but was held back by the intransigence of the evil Republicans. Is that even remotely true?

Observe, for instance, the hilarious Ezra Klein editorial that just ran in the New York Times, called “Four Ways to Look at the Radicalism of Joe Biden” (someone actually wrote that headline!):

Before Biden, Democratic presidents designed policy with one eye on attracting Republican votes, or at least mollifying Republican critics. That’s why a third of the 2009 stimulus was made up of tax cuts, why the Affordable Care Act was built atop the Romneycare framework, why President Bill Clinton’s first budget included sharp spending cuts…

Over the past decade, congressional Republicans slowly but completely disabused Democrats of these hopes. The long campaign against the ideological compromise that was the Affordable Care Act is central here…

The result is that Obama, Biden, the key political strategists who advise Biden and almost the entire Democratic congressional caucus simply stopped believing Republicans would ever vote for major Democratic bills. 

Question for Ezra: did Obama also accelerate the drone program, expand the surveillance state, and abandon enforcement of white-collar crime to a degree that made John Ashcroft look like Eliot Ness, in a similar effort to reach across the aisle? Or were those Executive Branch behaviors just expressions of unrequited love?

Obama as a presidential candidate in 2008 contrasted himself with Hillary Clinton by insisting he would be the guy to stop kowtowing to special interests. On health care, he was incredibly specific: he would green-light drug re-importation from Canada and allow Medicare to negotiate bulk pharmaceutical prices, insisting also he was a “proponent” of single-payer.

Obama went so far as to do an ad blasting former Louisiana congressman Billy Tauzin, who went from helping write the ban on Medicare bargaining to going to “work for the pharmaceutical industry making two million dollars a year” at the lobbying group PhRMA.

“Imagine that,” said Obama. “That’s an example of the same old game‐​playing in Washington. I don’t want to learn how to play the game better. I want to put an end to the game‐​playing.”

The year after this ad ran, Obama was meeting with that same Billy Tauzin in, ironically, the Roosevelt Room of the White House (Tauzin would end up visiting a dozen times). There, they hammered out a deal: Tauzin’s group, PhRMA, would fund a $150 million ad campaign boosting Obama’s health care program, in exchange for the Obama White House agreeing to kill the reimportation idea and leave the ban on Medicare negotiation in place.

Tauzin later described the deal, saying it had been “blessed” by the White House, and emails later released showed a union official who was part of health care bill negotiations explaining how Obama’s White House planned on paying for its PR campaign: “They plan to hit up the ‘bad guys’ for most of the $.”

Obama in other words won a contentious primary against Hillary Clinton by snowing reporters like me into hyping him as the clean hands guy who’d push aside Clintonian transactional politics. Then he turned around a year later and passed his signature program with help from the worst industry actors, paying for it by killing the progressive parts of the plan.

This history — important history — is now being rewritten by people like Klein as an “ideological compromise” inspired by the Obama/Biden White House’s misguided desire to govern with Republican votes. The fact that the Affordable Care Act passed with a grand total of zero such votes is apparently irrelevant, as was Biden’s ignored and erroneous (do we only say “lie” in some cases?) insistence as a candidate last year that he found “Republican votes” for “Obamacare.”. . . 

Click here and subscribe to read the entire piece.

Israeli Soldiers Arrest 230 Palestinian Children in the West Bank During the First Three Months of 2021

Imagine that one of these children is your son or daughter.

Imagine that you live under military law.

You have no civil rights; no freedom of speech; no freedom of movement or right to assemble; no right to protest or object to your mistreatment.

Imagine that you can be arrested without charge for anything at any time, based solely on the whim of the soldier who grabs you and throws you into the back of his truck.

Imagine that your child will be forcefully “interrogated” as he/she sits alone in a concrete cell surrounded by hostile, aggressive soldiers.

Imagine that these soldiers will hit, kick, slap, punch, ridicule, and humiliate your child with impunity. And you alone will be left to treat his/her injuries.

Imagine that you have no recourse for complaint. No one listens to your demands for an explanation. They may not even tell you where your child was taken.

Imagine that your complaints can only be heard by a military judge in a military court where Palestinians effectively never win a case.

This is Palestinian life under Israeli occupation.

Patrick Lawrence Explains Biden’s Inhumanity in Syria

Yesterday’s Consortium News had an illuminating article by Patrick Lawrence warning about the danger signs embedded in president Biden’s recent actions in Syria.

The US began to destroy Syria during the Obama administration as yet

Syrian school children meeting in front of their bombed out school building

another Democratic president initiated another attempted coup followed by incessant “regime change” operations in the Middle East.

It didn’t take long for American forces to ally themselves with al-Qaeda troops (yes, THAT al-Qaeda) in our imperial attempts to “rebuild” a “democratic” Syria. (You can’t make this stuff up…)

Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad is no saint. But America’s reckless,

Syrian president Bashar al-Assad

shortsighted, selfish interference makes Assad’s authoritarian nationalism look like an oasis of tranquility in the midst of Dante’s inferno.

Things have only gotten worse for the Syrian people since US interference in the country’s internal affairs. The Biden administration shows no sign of working to repair the damage we have done.

Below is an excerpt of this article. Read it and weep, oh ye citizens. For these are your tax dollars at work:

For a time after Joe Biden took office not quite three months ago, among the questions raised was how the new administration would address the Syria question.

I do not think we will have to wonder about this much longer. It is early days yet, but one now detects the Biden’s administration’s Syria policy in faint outline. From what one can make out, it is bleak, it is vicious, it is unconscionably cruel to the Syrian people. 

And it may prove yet worse than anything the Trump administration came up with, the Bible-banging Mike Pompeo in the lead as secretary of state.

Will Biden’s national security people drop the covert coup operation Barack Obama set it in motion nine years ago, its failure long evident? Or will they reinvigorate American support for savage jihadists in the name of “regime changing” the secular government in Damascus? What about the American troops still operating illegally on Syrian soil? What about the oilfields the Trump administration took to “protecting” from the nation that owns them? What about the brazen theft of crude from those fields?

And what, of course, about the murderous sanctions that various executive orders have escalated on numerous occasions since the Bush II administration imposed the first of them 17 long years ago?  

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.