Category: Evangelicals & Politics

Remember, Jesus Was Killed by Law Enforcement

Just a few reminders for anyone calling him/herself a Christian:

Jesus of Nazareth brought the kingdom of God into this world.

Authentic Christians understand that living obediently in God’s kingdom takes priority over every other group, party, and allegiance.

Politics can never establish, empower, or extend God’s kingdom.

Jesus was not white. He was a Palestinian Jew with dark skin and (probably) kinky hair.

Jesus’ teaching and personal behavior overturned a great deal of the social and religious status quo normalized in his culture.

Jesus defied conventional legal authority  on numerous occasions and paid the ultimate price. That is what obedience to God commonly looks like.

In this way, Jesus did not “respect” authorities that disrespectfully abused their power and mistreated others.

Jesus taught his followers to show mercy and kindness to everyone without exception.

Jesus taught his followers never to cooperate with wrongdoing, no matter how “official” its proponents.

Jesus taught his followers to stand for justice and righteousness on behalf of those from whom it is withheld.

Jesus insisted that his people give practical assistance to those in need of help.

Jesus rejected violence and taught his followers always to do the same.

Anyone who imagines that a political agenda, especially an agenda that sanctions violence, will somehow help God in accomplishing his work is sorely mistaken and is NOT following Jesus.

Leaders who do not condemn injustice, whether individual or corporate, do not understand what it means to live as citizens of God’s kingdom.

Neither do they understand their responsibility as leaders.

Jesus never exalts or approves of those who commit violence. He always condemns it.

Jesus always condemns any thought, word, or action (e.g. Tweets and Facebook posts) that demeans or dehumanizes another human being.

Jesus insists that his followers always uphold the truth.

Upholding the truth requires confronting lies whenever possible, confronting lies with truth, and challenging others when they are caught spreading lies among God’s people.

[For example, John MacArthur needs to confess and repent for the lies he has repeated about the Center for Disease Control and his potentially lethal claims from the pulpit (!) that the covid pandemic is a hoax.]

Following Jesus and living in God’s kingdom requires more than faith. Jesus demands faithfulness — a Christian virtue that seems to be in increasingly short supply in the church today.

 

 

 

Is Billy Rolling Over Yet?

Billy Graham’s granddaughter, Cissie Graham Lynch, spoke at the Republican National Convention last night to recite the predictable pablum of the Religious Right.

No, it was worse than that. Mrs. Lynch spewed rank idolatry for the Republican party. It’s the kind of behavior that got Old Testament Balam scorched by the Lord.

But nowadays, she is only one among many, for Trump seems to keep a kennel of false prophets on hand for every conceivable occasion.

Lynch opened her speech with a declaration on the importance of “our faith.”

She didn’t mention whose faith happens to be our faith, but the confusion was quickly clarified. She meant the pagan, American faith placed in our blasphemous civil religion.

This became evident as she listed her topics of concern. They were all the gems of Religious Right activism: abortion, the Supreme Court, and transgendered civil liberties.

Lynch’s flawless interweaving of (1) her descent from Christian evangelist, Billy Graham, (2) a rote recounting of Religious Right political priorities, and (3) the themes of American civil religion all stamped Mrs. Lynch as yet another immoral Siren working hard to bewitch the innocent, the ignorant, and the depraved into shipwrecking themselves against the rocks of bogus national piety.

Alas, if only the Christian faith WAS being persecuted in America today! Perhaps the genuine church could finally shed itself of this dead wood and dull-witted false teachers.

Notice that Mrs. Lynch’s examples of what she means by the Christian faith being “bullied” in the public square all consisted of threats, not to Christian faith or practice, but to the various privileges that church institutions enjoy at public expense.

I am fairly certain that Jesus never commanded his disciples to build religious institutions like schools or hospitals while demanding tax breaks or other special dispensations denied others operating in the same public arena.

Tax breaks and exemptions are nice, if you can get them.

Just as religious institutions (operating in a world unto themselves, ignoring the standards to which others are held) are beneficial, if you can build them.

But PLEASE stop pretending that those things have anything to do with either religious freedom or practicing the Christian faith. They don’t.

Just as losing those privileges has nothing to do with a loss of religious liberty.

So, Cissie, listen up:

No one is stopping you from following Jesus through the American public square.

No one is prohibiting you from living out your faith to your heart’s content.

Stop confusing religious privileges with religious freedoms. They are very different animals.

And please stop the horrible confusion of American civil religion with the Christian gospel.

I fear that you’ve set your grandfather spinning in his grave.

The 75th Anniversary of Nuclear War

Today is the 75th anniversary of the American nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United States remains the only nation to have used

Hiroshima after the bomb

nuclear weapons in warfare.

Brett Wilkins, an independent journalist who often writes for Common Dreams, has a good article at Antiwar.com which tells the story, I suspect, from a new perspective for many readers. It is entitled “Nuclear War or Invasion: The False Dichotomy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

Every American should also know and remember that we used nuclear weapons offensively when it was unnecessary.

With the passage of time comes more and more evidence about the past.

Over the years, a great deal of evidence has come to light underscoring the

Nagasaki, September, 1945.

fact that almost everything Americans have always been told about America’s justification for wiping Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the face of the earth in two nuclear conflagrations are lies.

In fact, not only has the story always been false, it was known to be false at the time but was perpetuated as a part of a US domestic propaganda campaign.

Below is an excerpt of Wilkins’ excellent article:

Seven of the eight five-star US generals and admirals in 1945 opposed using the atomic bomb against Japan. One of them, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, later said that “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

“Japan was already defeated and dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary,” President Eisenhower wrote in 1954. “I thought our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was no longer mandatory to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of face.”

Despite so much high-level misgiving, the US did “hit them with that awful thing.” The idea of giving Japanese officials a live demonstration of an atomic bomb on a remote island, proposed by Strategic Bombing Survey Vice Chairman Paul Nitze and supported by Navy Secretary James Forrestal, was rejected. The US was already destroying multiple Japanese cities every week; it was believed that such a demonstration would likely not have moved the Japanese any more than the ongoing destruction of their actual cities.

Throughout the spring and summer of 1945, Japanese officials increasingly sought an honorable end to the war. Although they had no way of knowing that the US was planning to wage nuclear war against them, they knew that the defeat of Nazi Germany meant that a Soviet invasion, first of Manchuria and Korea and then of Japan itself, was now imminent.

“The Japanese could not fight a two-front war, and were more anti-communist than the Americans were,” Martin Sherwin, an historian awarded the Pulitzer Prize for co-authoring a biography of Manhattan Project leader Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, said a recent webinar sponsored by over two dozen international peace organizations. “The idea of a Soviet occupation of Japan was their worst nightmare.”

Read the entire article here.

Gideon Levy: Making Hypocrisy and Violence Sound Nice and Inescapable

Gideon Levy has a new piece in Haaretz newspaper calling for national self-awareness in Israel.

Gideon Levy

Mr. Levy is a modern day prophet; the lone voice calling for national repentance in the Israeli wilderness.

Although this article focuses on the retired general, and now leading Israeli politician Benny Gantz, you don’t need to know much about Gantz or Israeli politics to grasp Levy’s point.

Think of the way our government continues to sell arms to Saudi Arabia so the Saudis can continue their treacherous attacks in Yemen.

Or look at the Federal agents attacking demonstrators with bats, gas, and

Benny Gantz

pepper spray across this country. All in the name of “restoring order.”

Here is an excerpt:

What the state can do, the individual cannot. Let’s leave aside the jargon where everything the other side does is terrorism and everything Israel does is for the sake of security. It’s common wisdom that what the state does is never considered violence, only self-defense. The state and the army can act as violently as they please, as much as they want, and go as crazy as they want. The state will always do this in the name of lofty values of defense. An individual who acts violently is an anarchist, a serial disrupter of law and order. There are laws that are also supposed to apply to countries, but Israel decided a long time ago that it is not bound by such laws.

And yet, is it possible that in one breath you can threaten violence and stand against it? Knowing the impact that state violence has on the way individuals act? One needs a special lack of self-awareness or a special degree of double standards to make such a claim. What Israel threatens to do in Lebanon is immeasurably more violent than anything the most dangerous anarchist could imagine. Israel’s actions in Lebanon have sowed much more anarchy and destruction than any demonstration. And so Gantz, and all his colleagues have no moral right to speak against violence. It’s almost the only language they know and it’s their bread and butter.

You can read the entire article here.

Don’t Believe Network News About Portland

One of my daughters lived in Portland, OR for many years.

She keeps in touch with many of her friends in the area, a good number of whom have been out in the streets protesting. Some of them have been arrested. All of them tell the same story.

You can read much of this for yourself on Facebook. Just check out the hashtags #WallOfMoms, #WallOfVets, #WallOfDads.

The story goes like this:

Mixed groups of demonstrators have been in the streets regularly ever since George Floyd’s murder and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement across the country.

The demonstrations have been overwhelmingly peaceful. When unknown agitators destroyed property, group leaders told them to stop and to go away. They were damaging the cause.

Then Federal troops appeared on the scene and began arresting people for no apparent reason, putting them into unmarked vehicles, and locking them up without charges. Some have been kept jailed in undisclosed locations for several days, while family and friends wondered where they were.

These unconstitutional actions by the Feds energized more citizens to march in the streets. Yes, a small group of agitators ramped up their property destruction. But both black and white organizers regularly tried to stop their activities, and were typically unsuccessful.

It is not surprising that this small minority of agitators garner most of the headlines and nearly all of the time on the TV networks, making it look as if Portland is in chaos. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Feds have escalated the confrontations unnecessarily, with their rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray, unnecessary aggression and violence against protesters.

It is totally unnecessary.

This is when the Wall of Moms was created, intentionally putting themselves between the demonstrators and the Feds. At this point, a

This protester-mom, was standing, linking arms with fellow demonstrators, when a Federal agent shot her in the face with a rubber bullet

portion of the protests became focused around the Federal courthouse, because that was were the Federal agents were concentrated.

Now the focus of the demonstrations became bifurcated.

The movement’s leaders worked to maintain their focus on Black Lives Matter and police brutality. You don’t have to watch many Facebook videos and pictures to see and hear large crowds chanting “Black Lives Matter.”

But, with the unsolicited intervention of Federal agents, another section of the movement gave their attention to demonstrating against the “police state” activities of Trump’s anti-demonstration forces. The increase in violence is due entirely to the brutal behavior of these Federal marshals and Border Patrol agents.

Yes, a minority of people get out of hand. After the Feds erected a fence in front of the courthouse, a few people focused their anger there and began to build fires under the fence. Again, the organizers consistently tried to stop this from happening.

But, get real! Have you seen the fires? They hardly pose a real threat to anyone, especially to the courthouse!

As the Feds continued to attack both the BLM demonstrators and the Wall of

The bruises on this mom’s body were made by the many rubber bullets fired at her by Federal “police.” Obviously, the Feds don’t hesitate to shoot a woman at close range when her back is turned

Moms, two additional sectors of society began spontaneously to appear: military veterans and dads.

Many veterans, understandably upset at what they were seeing, began to show up in support of the protesters and the moms. A number of videos show how brutally they too have been treated by the Federal agents, beaten with clubs for simply trying to speak to the officers.

Then dads appeared with leaf blowers to fend off the clouds of tear gas being fired by the Feds at unarmed civilians.

Naturally, conservative outlets such as Fox hate all anti-establishment movements, especially when they call for racial justice and condemn police violence.

By definition, conservatives support the establishment.

That is what conservatism means. It’s who they are. Their reporting is pure propaganda, tailored to anger their like-minded viewers, and to condemn the protesters.

Also, remember the old journalistic motto: “if it bleeds it leads.” All the news networks succumb to this principle. They would rather show us the few violent clashes than the masses protesting peacefully. It’s the way news/journalism has always worked in this country.

So, if you want to get angry, then get angry at our government. Get angry at “law enforcement” run amuck, attacking fellow citizens who are exercising their constitutional rights to free speech and freedom of assembly.

Get angry at our president for intentionally making a difficult situation worse, as he manipulates civil unrest for his own personal, political advantage.

Trump is using the predictable FASCIST strategy of generating violence so that he can run on a “law and order” platform in November. You can count on it. This is how he hopes to win reelection.

Don’t fall for it.

We are already well underway to authoritarianism.

When is a Revival Not a Revival?

John Fea is a professor of American history at Messiah University in Pennsylvania. Professor Fea has an excellent blog called “The Way of Improvement Leads Home” which I follow regularly.

He recently offered a post with this title: “Is a Spiritual Revival Leads to More Christian Trumpism, Is It Really a Spiritual Revival? Or is It Something Else?” I encourage you to read the entire piece, if you haven’t already.

Evangelicals tend to believe that “spiritual revivals” or “Christian awakenings” will provide the ultimate solution to all of society’s problems.

Christian media promotes this story-line regularly:

Protests aren’t the answer. Boycotts aren’t the answer. New laws aren’t the answer. What we need is a spiritual awakening! If everyone will only come to Jesus, then all our problems will begin to solve themselves!

Or so we are told, over and over and over again.

Professor Fea’s important post draws from the story of a great American, Frederick Douglass.

Douglass’ autobiography tells the story of his own conversion to Christianity, and why he did not see “personal conversion” as the cure all for the the sins of slavery.

Douglass was a slave who witnessed his master’s spiritual conversion. And then marveled at how the master’s new-found faith in Christ made him a more abusive master than he had ever been before.

Quoting from a recent biography of Douglass, Fea notes:

“A recent convert himself to Christian faith, although now struggling to

Frederick Douglass

understand whether God intended any justice on earth, Frederick witnessed the spectacle of master Thomas’s wrenching emotional breakdown and confession in that pen. Blacks were not allowed in the pen, nor in front of the preacher’s performances, but Douglass tells us that he imposed his way close enough to hear Auld “groan,” and to see his reddened face, his disheveled hair, and a “stray tear halting on his cheek.” Here festered the dark heart of the moral bankruptcy of slaveholders that the future abolitionist would make his central subject. . . 

“Douglass converted this memory into angry condemnations of the religious hypocrisy of the entire Christian slaveholding universe, especially the little microcosm of Auld’s household, where the young slave now had to listen daily to loud praying and testifying by the white family, and to participate in hospitality extended to local preachers who were sometimes housed at Auld’s home, all the while enduring the good Methodist’s verbal and physical cruelty. For Douglass, the proof of any sincerity in Auld’s ‘tear-drop’ manifested in his actions. In his deeds and his glances, wrote Douglass, it was as if the pathetic master had concluded, ‘I will teach you, young man, that, though I have parted with my sins, I have not parted with my sense. I shall hold slaves, and go to heaven too.’”

I am sorry, but the naive, ignorant belief that “spiritual revival” alone will solve all of society’s problems is merely another symptom of our crippling addiction to American Individualism.

More than that, it reveals an extremely simplistic view of both human nature and the work of the Holy Spirit.

All of these intellectual and theological mistakes serve as chains locked around the ankles of American evangelicalism. They prevent us from genuinely following after Jesus as we should.

When the church ought to be in the lead of the Black Lives Matter movement, talking about the Image of God and His new kingdom come, most evangelical leaders sit on the sidelines calling for more prayer and waiting for revival. The exceptions to this hackneyed response are extremely admirable but very, very few.

Sometimes the best way to pray is to get off your butt and march with those who suffer, publicly condemn the “masters” who want to control us, and work for social revolution — all in the name of Christ.

An Important Word from Mehdi Hasan on Fascism

Mehdi Hasa is a British journalist who wears many different hats. I always try to listen to him when I can. Over the years he has done reporting for the British version of the Huffington Post, Al Jazeeera (which I also watch regularly), The Intercept, and MSNBC.

He recently did on editorial on American fascism that I believe is worth watching and digesting.  I hope you will listen to what he has to say:

A Critical Look at Jordan Peterson’s Revisionism of Hitler and the Nazis

For whatever reasons, Jordan Peterson remains a popular “culture critic” among evangelical Christians.

The Swedish Hitler scholar, Mikael Nilsson, has an interesting article analyzing Peterson’s revisionist account of Adolf Hitler in Haaretz newspaper, linking it with Peterson’s strange obsession with cultural Marxism (whatever the heck that is). A boogeyman he finds under nearly every bush.

The article is entitled “Exposing Jordan Peterson’s Barrage of Revisionist Falsehoods About Hitler and Nazism.”

I have posted an excerpt below.

The railing against “cultural Marxism” (a phrase with a long antisemitic history) is of course something that Peterson, unfortunately, has in common with Hitler and the Nazis. It is his blind spot, and to what degree this hatred of Marxism has influenced his analysis and understanding of Hitler and National Socialism is unknown. 

Perhaps connected to this is his trouble deciding whether Nazism was ideologically “radical right” or “radical left,” suggesting that “maybe they pulled from the worst of both extremes.” This, too, is built on a massive ignorance of the historical research on these topics. 

It’s worth noting that this narrative happens to fit rather nicely with the views of a pool from which he draws many of his fans: the pro-Trump American right, whose leading figures are engaged in a persistent attempt to brand Nazism as socialist and Hitler as a leftist, if not a Democrat. 

It is not unreasonable to assume that this monomania has affected not only his framing of Nazism – but goes to the heart of his discomforting take on the Holocaust and its perpetrators.

Book Review: The Spiritual Danger of Donald Trump

Cascade books (the publisher that will eventually release my forthcoming book on Israel-Palestine) recently released a significant book entitled The Spiritual Danger of Donald Trump.

The book is a timely collection of 30 essays by prominent, and not so prominent, evangelical Christians in the hope of convincing evangelical voters NOT to vote for Trump in November.

I hope and pray that the book will be a great success.

If you have family, friends – or even complete strangers our regularly see at the coffee shop – who voted for and continue to support Donald Trump, they are the target audience for this book. Go out and buy a box load and distribute them widely in your local evangelical, fundamentalist churches.

It will be a worthy act of responsible citizenship in a country desperately in need of a genuinely moral majority.

The majority (but not all) of the book’s 30 essays are written by conservative, Republican, evangelical Christians. Some of them admit that they voted for Trump in 2016 and have come to regret that decision.

All of them offer substantial, pointed, evidence-based denunciations of Trump’s egregious moral and political failures over the past 3 1/2 years. Several essays document Trump’s habitual misogyny, his pathological lying, his malignant narcissism, his public, petty demeaning of those who disagree with him, his race-baiting and endorsement of white supremacy, the abuse of immigrants and asylum seekers at our southern border, the financial profiteering from his presidency, his consistent abuse of executive power, and his utter disregard for the constitution.

I was happy to see that a few of these Republican authors even condemned the Republican controlled Senate for acquitting Trump at the end of his impeachment trial.

The best essays, for my money, are Randall Balmer’s chapter on the long (and nearly extinct) history of evangelical social activism.

He offers an important history lesson for the entire evangelical church, reminding us of evangelicalism’s past commitments to pacifist, anti-war activism, anti-capitalist economics, anti-big business, anti-slavery, prison reform, public education, universal health care, women’s rights, and much more.

I found Balmer’s dissection of the Religious Right’s origins to be especially interesting. He argues that the modern juggernaut of religious, conservative, political power was not sparked by the anti-abortion sentiments that we see today — as so many imagine. In fact, the Religious Right began as a white, pro-segregationist movement fighting against the desegregation laws emerging from the civil rights movement, especially in the south.

It was no accident that both Bob Jones and Jerry Falwell were running segregated, all white educational institutions at the time. The seeds of the Religious Right sprouted and grew in the soil of racism, the degradation of life, not “pro-life” activism.

Against this backdrop, it’s not very surprising to see how many of today’s evangelical leaders continue to condemn the Black Lives Matter and anti-police brutality movement.

Steven Hayns’ chapter about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and contemporary evangelicalism’s distortion of Bonhoeffer’s social, political theology – especially at the hands of moral miscreants like Eric Metaxis, the deluded, self-proclaimed Bonhoeffer “expert” – is particularly helpful for anyone who wants to think more deeply about Christian political engagement.

(Ahem…my book, I Pledge Allegiance, would also be a great follow-up read for those who are interested in thinking more deeply.)

John Fea provides a refreshing chapter entitled “What White Evangelicals Can Learn About Politics from the Civil Rights Movement.” It is the only chapter I read twice.

If you are looking for a good resource explaining the spiritual dangers of the Trump presidency, written by conservative Christians for other conservative Christians, then look no further. This is the book to give to family and friends (even if they are not Christians) at the 4th of July family barbecue, summer outings, fall dinner parties, and everything else in between.

Now for a brief critique.

For a reader like me, the book’s strength is also its weakness; and it’s a serious weakness.

Written by conservatives for other conservatives, the majority of its criticisms against Trump predictably conform to the standard conservative, evangelical view of the world.

Only a few of the contributors (thankfully there are a few) indicate that Trump’s moral failures have led them to re-frame, or re-imagine, what their expectations of a Christian moral politics/politician might look like beyond the old, evangelical culture wars.

For most of the book’s contributors, America’s #1 moral failing is abortion. Full stop.

A handful of essays thankfully include racism, poverty, and income inequality to this list of corporate sins, but they are a small minority.

No one calls out the corporate, structural oppression created by American imperialism, the military-industrial complex, our global war mongering, the economic sanctions that kill tens of thousands of people in other nations, or America’s continuing sponsorship of military coups…and that is only the short list of issues ignored here.

The majority of the book’s criticisms focus on Trump’s personal demeanor, individual immorality, and its personal consequences.

I very much agree that all of these are serious issues.

Yet, it is also symptomatic of evangelicalism’s obsessive individualism, something that offers them very few tools for knowing how to construct a more just and equitable politics for the whole of our society and our global partners.

Trump’s principle problem, it seems, is that he has stretched the elastic, moral boundary of evangelicalism’s ethical code beyond its very flexible  breaking point.

For too many contributors (but again, not all), Trump himself is the problem — as opposed to being a symptom of deeper political problems in our country. Once he is replaced by a morally acceptable Republican candidate (no Democratic could ever fit the bill, of course) the nation’s troubles will be solved – provided he (or she?) continues to fill the Supreme Court with conservative, anti-abortion justices.

For instance, whenever a contributor offers examples of good vs. bad candidates, the opponents are always Republican vs. Democrat.  Apparently, with the exception of Donald Trump, Republican candidates who fight abortion are always good by definition, whatever their other policy positions may be.

Bill Clinton was a bad president because he was an adulterer, not because his draconian crime bills stoked the prison industrial complex, helping to put 1 of 4 African American men in prison, most of them for no good reason.

George H. W. Bush was a great president, despite the fact that he supervised numerous atrocities while head of the CIA, as well as several dirty wars in South and Central America that slaughtered thousands of innocent people.

But at least Bush didn’t swear in public.

Many of the contributors rightly condemn Trump’s womanizing, his multiple marriages, and his extra-marital affairs.

Yet, none of these folks would condemn their iconic Ronald Reagan, a prolific Hollywood fornicator and twice married star whose second wife regularly consulted a spiritualist medium in the White House. Never mind that Reagan’s administration was subject to more ethics violations inquiries (up to that point) than any previous presidency.

At least Reagan didn’t swear in public.

I know, I know. None of this is the point of the book.

Yet, the fact remains, only a select few of the contributors have a broad enough Christian vision to poke their heads up beyond the pious horizons of American, evangelical culture.

And that makes this book a disappointment to me.

Black Lives Matter in Kalispell Montana [reposted with photos]

My daughter and I attended the Justice for George Floyd/Black Lives Matter demonstration in Kalispell, MT yesterday. The organizers’ Facebook page

I am the masked man on the right

warned that members of several armed militia groups would also be there.

We both wondered what would happen.

Kalispell demonstrations are always limited to a public park at the end of main street cutting through the city center. The organizers applauded how cooperative the local police department had been in helping to plan the event. As a result, we were all instructed not to bring signs with any type of derogatory, anti-police messages.

Instead, the organizers announced, the demonstration’s intended message was “unity.”

“Unity with whom for what?,” I asked myself.

Demonstrators line main street

o, Kendra and I are going to demonstrate against police brutality in a country where unarmed African-Americans are 5 x more likely than white Americans to be shot and killed by police. The organizers have agreed with the local police department to restrict the protest to the police-approved section of the public park, where the police have also decided that we will experience “unity” with heavily armed members of local militia groups.

Let freedom ring.

On the positive side, I was happy to see the largest turnout for any protest I have yet attended in Kalispell.

Demonstrators lining both sides of the street

The Sunday morning paper estimated there were at least 1,000 people in attendance — including, of course, our semiautomatic rifle-toting, American flag waving, self-appointed, “don’t tread on me” guardians.

A small group of armed cowboys walked through the crowd carrying American flags and yellow signs calling people to repent and believe in Jesus. At one point, as they approached me I loudly reminded them that Jesus is not white.

While my fellow protesters got the point and laughed, the gang of gun slinger

Armed militia

patriot-evangelists remained totally oblivious to the mockery they were making of the gospel they came to promote.

I took time out periodically to talk with the militia members. I picked the guy with the biggest rifle and asked him why he was here? What was the group’s goal in attending this protest?

Each one repeated the same response. I got the impression that they had all been briefed on how to answer questions from the public. “We are here to protect you,” they said.

I probed further.

Armed and ready

“We don’t want to see the kind of looting and property destruction in our city that we see everywhere else these protests happen. We especially don’t want anyone defacing our veterans’ memorial,” referring to a large statue near the street.

“But,” I would say, “There is a large police presence here already. They would stop people from defacing the statue. Did the police ask for your help?”

“No. We just volunteered,” I was told.

The mass of demonstrators would periodically chant “Black Lives Matter”

Guarding the war monument, and chanting USA, White Lives Matter

while receiving a chorus of horns honking in agreement from cars passing by.

But each time we chanted “Black Lives Matter,” the militia members waved their flags more aggressively and took up a counter-chant, usually “USA! USA!” or sometimes “White Lives Matter!”

I took another break, approached a chanting militiaman and asked why he did that. Why did he respond to Black Lives Matter with USA? How was his a counterpoint to ours?

“Well,” he said. “This is America. And in America everyone is equal.”

“But I still don’t understand,” I said. “Why can’t you say Black Lives Matter with us, if everyone here is equal?”

Well, you guessed it. With that the racist damn broke. I was now listening to a heated  monologue about how “black people bring all their problems on themselves.”

It was impossible to get a word in edgewise, so I thanked him for his time and said goodbye.

As Kendra and I left the park later that evening, we talked about what we had learned. It was evident that everyone carrying a handgun and a rifle were devotees of Fox News. They had never seen any of the abundant video footage of peaceful demonstrations all across the country, nor had they seen the gangs of police attacking innocent protesters.

They had all arrived believing that every “liberal” demonstration was a riot-in-

How many semi-automatics does it take?

waiting. They stood guard believing that were it not for their armed presence, Kalispell would have been the next city victimized by looting liberals run riot.

I wish I could say that I feel encouraged this morning after Kalispell’s largest (maybe first?) Black Lives Matter demonstration. But I don’t.

I fear that America’s deepening divisions will never be bridged, much less mended, as everyone remains comfortably ensconced in their preferred information bubble. Between the alternate realities of Fox News and MSNBC (not to mention the others), our segmented mass media has destroyed the possibility of any truly national conversation.

We don’t live in the same world. We live in different worlds, different universes separated by contrary “facts,” alternate realities that too many of us meekly accept without challenge, investigation, or alternate, independent thinking.

It’s too easy to grab another beer in a self-assured, reaffirming world where confirmation bias goes unrecognized. Not a one of my armed conversation partners would believe that the vast majority of the nation’s recent protests were peaceful, that the looting was marginal — graphic but marginal.

And why should they? After all, Fox News told them otherwise.

I am too old to be surprised by racism. But it is still depressing to hear the stream of ignorant words pour from the mouth of a man immediately in front of me. I can’t imagine what it must be like for African-Americans to repeatedly hear from ill-informed, prejudiced lips that all their problems are of their own making.

Sure, we all make many of our own problems. But asymmetrical police brutality is NOT one of them.

How often can any person tolerate being told that when the police attack you, kneel on your neck, and choke the life out of you, it is because something is wrong with you; that you create your own problems? That if you were a better citizen, the police would not be murdering your friends and family at 5 x the rate of everyone else?

Racism is endemic to the human heart. I saw that again last night. We will never be rid of it till Jesus comes.

Sadly, the young ensemble of armed patriots qua evangelists provided vivid witness to the fact that “confessing and repenting of sin” is no guarantee of a transformed heart or a renewed Christ-like mind.