Category: Evangelicals & Politics

The current student anti-war, pro-Palestinian demonstrations are if historic significance.

Despite the establishment media’s scurilous attempts to vilify these college students and their supportive professors as churlish antisemites, the abundance of video clips avalable on youtube, X, tic tok, facebook and elsewhere reveal the truth.

Whatever violence my occur is consistently started by the police.

The rare instances of genuine antisemitism are either the outlier having nothing to do with the demonstration’s organizers and membership, or they are false flag incidents committed by pro-Israel agitators trying to make trouble.

These campus demonstations give me hope, not only for the future of our country, but for the eventual demise of Israel as an apartheid state.

The American journalist, Chris Hedges, understandings all these things and eloquently expressed his support by delivering a sermon yesterday on the grounds of Princeton University.

As a Christian, I wish that I could call Mr. Hedges my brother in Christ. Unfortunately, his disbelief in the incarnation and the bodily resurrection of Jesus prevents me from saying that.

I do not believe, as Hedges does, that the crucifixion of Jesus Christ stands as metaphor for the redemptive power of unjust suffering. I see the cross, as I believe the New Testament does also, as the inevitable climax of a life lived in complete obedience to our Father in heaven. (There is much more to be said about this, but that is for another post.)

Nevertheless, as a fellow human being I can only applaud Chris’ profound understanding of the human condition in this world and the cries for justice that arise from those who suffer.

In fact, Chris Hedges has a better understanding of God’s heart for justice, and the work that our Creator asks his people to perform in the temporal pursuit of this justice here and now than does the typical church-goer — fundamentalist, evangelical, liberal or mainline — in this country.

There is much to learn from Chris’ message. I urge you to read it all, prayerfully with a heart ready to respond.

All truth is God’s truth no matter who says it or where it is said.

Here is an excerpt:

. . . To resist radical evil, as you are doing, is to endure a life that by the standards of the wider society is a failure. It is to defy injustice at the cost of your career, your reputation, your financial solvency and at times your life. It is to be a lifelong heretic. And, perhaps this is the most important point, it is to accept that the dominant culture, even the liberal elites, will push you to the margins and attempt to discredit not only what you do, but your character. When I returned to the newsroom at The New York Times after being booed off a commencement stage in 2003 for denouncing the invasion of Iraq and being publicly reprimanded by the paper for my stance against the war, reporters and editors I had known and worked with for 15 years lowered their heads or turned away when I was nearby. They did not want to be contaminated by the same career-killing contagion.

Ruling institutions — the state, the press, the church, the courts, universities  — mouth the language of morality, but they serve the structures of power, no matter how venal, which provide them with money, status and authority. All of these institutions, including the academy, are complicit through their silence or their active collaboration with radical evil. This was true during the genocide we committed against native Americans, slavery, the witch hunts during the McCarthy era, the civil rights and anti-war movements and the fight against the apartheid regime of South Africa. The most courageous are purged and turned into pariahs.

The theologian James Cone in his book “The Cross and the Lynching Tree” writes that for oppressed blacks the cross was a “paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world’s value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and the first last.”

Cone continues: “That God could ‘make a way out of no way’ in Jesus’ cross was truly absurd to the intellect, yet profoundly real in the souls of black folk. Enslaved blacks who first heard the gospel message seized on the power of the cross. Christ crucified manifested God’s loving and liberating presence in the contradictions of black life—that transcendent presence in the lives of black Christians that empowered them to believe that ultimately, in God’s eschatological future, they would not be defeated by the ‘troubles of this world,’ no matter how great and painful their suffering. Believing this paradox, this absurd claim of faith, was only possible in humility and repentance. There was no place for the proud and the mighty, for people who think that God called them to rule over others. The cross was God’s critique of power—white power—with powerless love, snatching victory out of defeat.”

Reinhold Niebuhr labeled this capacity to defy the forces of repression “a sublime madness in the soul.” Niebuhr wrote that “nothing but madness will do battle with malignant power and ‘spiritual wickedness in high places.’ ” This sublime madness, as Niebuhr understood, is dangerous, but it is vital. Without it, “truth is obscured.” And Niebuhr also knew that traditional liberalism was a useless force in moments of extremity. Liberalism, Niebuhr said, “lacks the spirit of enthusiasm, not to say fanaticism, which is so necessary to move the world out of its beaten tracks. It is too intellectual and too little emotional to be an efficient force in history.”

The prophets in the Hebrew Bible had this sublime madness. The words of the Hebrew prophets, as Rabbi Abraham Heschel wrote, were “a scream in the night. While the world is at ease and asleep, the prophet feels the blast from heaven.” The prophet, because he or she saw and faced an unpleasant reality, was, as Heschel wrote, “compelled to proclaim the very opposite of what their heart expected.”

This sublime madness is the essential quality for a life of resistance. It is the acceptance that when you stand with the oppressed you will be treated like the oppressed. It is the acceptance that, although empirically all that we struggled to achieve during our lifetime may be worse, our struggle validates itself.

You can read the entire sermon here.