On March 13 Breonna Taylor was murdered by Louisville Metro Police officers while sleeping in her bed.
Police had obtained a “no knock” warrant to search her apartment on the basis of a lie fabricated by the police officers. Three policemen broke down Ms. Taylor’s front door with their weapons draw and entered her home.
Eleven witnesses on the scene all testify that the police never identified themselves.
Taylor’s boyfriend was awoken imagining that dangerous criminals had broken into the apartment. He was correct in this assumption. Except these criminals all wore a police badge, which apparently gives any cop the right to do whatever he/she pleases to any African American, without consequences.
Grabbing his registered handgun, Ms. Taylor’s boyfriend fired once to let the intruders know that he was armed. The police fired their weapons 20 or more times into the darkness. Five to eight (reports vary) of those bullets penetrated Breonna’s body, killing her.
Ms. Taylor was an EMT who worked as an emergency room technician. She had no criminal record. A search of her apartment revealed none of the things the police were looking for.
Today, the 3 officers responsible for Taylor’s death were all found not guilty of murder.
One officer was convicted of “wanton endangerment” because his shots penetrated into the surrounding apartments.
Since no one (fortunately) in these other apartments was injured, we are left to conclude that property damage is a more heinous crime in Louisville, Kentucky than murder. Especially when the murder victim is a young black woman.
Once again, Louisville has proven that black lives do not matter in America. But, heck, we will happily let others die, especially if they are people of color, as long as the police will protect our property.
Another obvious lesson from this injustice is the need for all second amendment, militia types to sit down and be quiet. Repeatedly, we have listened to these “patriots” warn about the imminent dangers of heavily armed government officials breaking into the homes of innocent Americans.
Well, Ms. Taylor’s tragedy is the literal enactment of every gun loving, militia member’s worst nightmare. So, where are they? Why aren’t they marching through the streets of Louisville condemning government oppression with their long rifles at the ready, locked and loaded?
I’ll tell you.
They are sitting at home on their fat butts saying and doing nothing because Breonna Taylor was black. All they are truly interested in is “defending” their vision of a white America.
I fear that the majority of evangelical church leaders will also remain silent over the grotesque injustice of this entire affair. If they do eventually speak up, I predict that it will only be to chime in with Fox News propaganda to condemn the “looters,” and “rioters” who are “destroying property.”
Where have these church people been? In which hole in the ground have they buried their useless heads?
The wanton hypocrisy of such “spiritual leadership” knows no bounds.
Can anyone honestly wonder why we see African Americans – at least, those who are caught on film – running from the police or resisting arrest? The reasons are obvious. In far too many cases, the police are the enemy.
I would behave in exactly the same way if I were a black man in America today. AND SO WOULD YOU, MY DEAR READER. Admit it.
Jesus commands his people “to love your neighbor as yourself.” Love requires empathy.
Godly empathy requires carrying (or at least sharing) the other person’s burden — the burden of their oppression; the burden of unrelieved injustice measured out to them; the burden of grief, lament, and loss; the burden of struggling for righteousness, yes RIGHTEOUSNESS, on this earth.
This was the message of the Old Testament prophets. This was Jesus’ message, too.
Any so-called spiritual “leader” who does not already understand this point needs to resign now, for you do NOT understand what it means to live as a citizen of God’s kingdom.
Neither do you grasp Jesus’ ethical teaching.
I don’t know about you, but my next task is to check out the airfare to Louisville. I hope I’ll see you there, too.
It is long, long past time for God’s people to mercilessly attack the walls of American racism and injustice.
It’s long past time for a truly righteous revolution.
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.
The New Testament makes no distinction between confession and lifestyle.
Jesus is clear. “A good tree produces good fruit. A bad tree produces bad fruit. So by their fruit you will know them” (Matthew 7:15-20). And I can tell you right now, There ain’t no bad trees in heaven.
The apostle Paul repeats Jesus’ warnings in his own words. Here is only one example:
Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither…thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God (1 Corinthians 6:9-10).
Our lives, our words, our actions, our attitude towards others and how we treatment them all matter. Our lifestyle tells the tale of whether or not we genuinely know the Lord Jesus Christ.
Recently, I heard three stories that have disturbed me deeply.
First, I saw the news of a young African-American woman in Wisconsin who was set on fire by a carload of strangers. As they drove past, they shouted the “N” word, doused her with lighter fluid, and hit her with a cigarette lighter.
Fortunately, she was able to put the fire out and get to a hospital for treatment. When I saw her photo, her hair and skin tone were an exact match to my bi-racial granddaughter’s.
Second, on my Facebook feed I read the story of a local African-American activist who is now being harassed for her participation in Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
She had pressed charges against a man who verbally assaulted her as she stood on the sidewalk. Now this man has gathered a number of friends from the police department (not the Kalispell police) who surround her home after dark, pounding on the walls, making loud noises, while shining lights through the windows.
She and her family are terrified.
Third, I spoke yesterday with a former student, a young woman of color now pursuing graduate work in the northwest. She is also a foreign student who grew up overseas.
She shared with me how frightening it has become for her to be a visiting foreigner, a person of color, and a single young woman in today’s United States.
She is afraid that the Trump administration will not renew her student visa.
She is literally terrified to walk outside alone, never knowing who might throw something at her, scream an epithet, or do something much worse. Would the police offer any help or protection?
She also said that her all white church has remained silent about the problems of racism and police brutality dominating our headlines. The very few comments she has heard were criticisms of the recent protests, and admonitions always to obey the police.
She did not mention anyone empathizing with her personally.
No one has approached her to ask how she doing, as a foreign visitor with a dark complexion. How does she feel about life in this country right now?Nobody has taken the initiative to ask her about her thoughts and experiences. About how this unrest is affecting her as a woman of color; how they might be able to help her?
All of these stories are about racism and expressions of white privilege.
I have never faced anything comparable. And I know the reason why – I am a white male. This means that in American society, I am privileged.
I have never had to live my life facing the daily possibility that this might be the day – the day that someone calls me another derogatory name; the day that I am denied a loan, even though I have a well-paying job; the day that the police pull my son over for no good reason and put him in a choke hold; and the list goes on…
The church, too, is infected with this cancer of racism and the blindness of white privilege.
Listen to the chorus of “Christian” people who join the common rebuttal “All Lives Matter”; or deny the existence of any such thing as white privilege; or worse yet, twist their brains into a knot and claim (with Tucker Carlson) that the claims of white privilege are themselves a racist view of the world.
All of God’s people must address these problems specifically, clearly, Biblically.
Do you not know that racists will not inherit the kingdom of God?
What else is racism but the attempted theft of human dignity?
It is a greedy people’s way of thieving the resources, opportunities, and expectations from one group of people in order to horde them for another.
Most importantly, it is slanderous blasphemy against the image of God – the divine image borne by every human being, no matter the color of their skin or the shape of their eyes (see James 3:9).
Now is an historic moment for authentic followers of Jesus Christ to stand up, to stand apart, to identify themselves. It is a time to protest, to demand change, to examine themselves, to repent, and to correct their misguided, fellow church-goers, even to rebuke those who refuse to listen.
No, such behavior is NOT divisive. It is moral. It is obedient. It is loving. It is necessary. It is what it looks like to follow Jesus.
For, don’t you know that racists will not inherit the kingdom of God?
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.
The predictable mantra has begun – “we have to maintain law and order.”
Calls for law and order in the midst of nation-wide demonstrations against police brutality and in favor of racial justice are as predictable as the sunset. It always happens.
Well timed calls for law and order always served the purposes of the powerful who pretend to care.
Keith Childress, shot for carrying a cell phone
It is always the great “BUT” working to obscure the issue at hand; to distract from the problems of racial injustice and police violence.
Law and order is the subversive language deployed by people who are not at risk as they feign comradeship with those who are. It allows the bogus compatriot to say, in fact, “I am with you as long as you keep your objections within my boundaries of safety.”
When members of the establishment say things like, “I believe in peaceful protest, BUT…I believe in racial equality, BUT…I support the protests, BUT I condemn the looting…BUT we need to maintain law and order,” they merely repeat the establishment code for defending the status quo.
Defending law and order has always been the message of the establishment,
Bettie Jones, shot and killed for helping a neighbor and opening the door to police
allowing it to maintain its mask of humanity while tacitly supporting acts of inhumanity.
We have seen it all before.
Law and order was the message of pro-segregationist governors and mayors in the deep south who believed that ANY expression of civil disobedience, no matter how peaceful, especially when committed by black people and other civil rights advocates, was a dangerous act of lawlessness demanding brutal, police suppression.
Lester Maddox, the racist, segregationist governor of Georgia, always insisted that he accepted black people as equals. He just didn’t want them living next door. And he would gladly sic the police on any black person who tried to move into his neighborhood. (Watch his racist confessions with Jim Brown on the Dick Cavett show here. I recall watching a different Cavett show where Maddox walked off the set).
It was also Richard Nixon’s Republican party code for keeping black people
Jamar Clark, witnesses say he was shot and killed while handcuffed and unarmed
in their place at the height of the civil rights movement in 1968. It was also a very successful code language that spoke volumes to conservative America and led to his presidential victory that year.
But every reactionary plea for “law and order” must first answer the question, “Whose law, and whose order?”
Because the fact is that, in America today, there are two difference types of law and order, one for white, middle/upper-class communities, and another for (poor) communities of color.
As the repeated, public murders of African-Americans demonstrate, law and order for black people in America is unlike law and order for white people. For African-Americans, law and order means (1) people of color are born guilty; they are always suspect, which means that (2) the police are free to treat them as they wish.
Law and order for black people in America includes breaking down their doors for no good reason; shooting them dead inside their own homes, even when police are at the wrong address; planting evidence while making
Michael Marshall, suffered from mental illness; died after being “restrained” into a coma
illegal arrests; and the list goes on.
That is the “law and order” enforced in America’s black neighborhoods today.
So, whose law and order are the public pearl-clutchers advocating and defending when they condemn protesters for violating the norms of “law and order”?
Where were these easy-street advocates of public order when black neighborhoods were being patrolled by cops who viewed community residents as the enemy to be controlled rather than as citizens to be protected and served?
Where were the white marches launched in defense of black communities when they needed defending against a local, militarized police force eagerly searching for excuses to deploy their new body armor, armored vehicles, stun guns, rubber bullets, 4-foot batons, rubber bullets and tear gas?
George Floyd, Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, and Ahmaud Arbery are only the tip of the iceberg.
Unarmed black people are 5x more likely to be shot and killed by police than
Ahmaud Arbery, shot and killed for jogging in a white neighborhood
are white people in America. That shocking statistic alone tells us that murdering unarmed black people (although possessing a weapon is not a significant distinguishing factor) is completely acceptable and well within the bounds of American law and order.
Concerning the present protests, an overwhelming amount of video evidence proves that the police themselves regularly instigate violence where protesters were behaving peacefully.
The police are masters at escalating violence needlessly as an expression of their own presumption of authoritarian privilege. (Watch this compilation video of cops attacking peaceful demonstrators with impunity). I have personally experienced how the police use excessive force to instigate violence during an anti-war protest in Chicago in 2012. I then watched as the establishment media turned the facts upside down to accuse the demonstrators of attacking the police!
By condemning these calls for law and order, I am not condoning violence.
Sandra Bland, arrested during a routine traffic stop; supposedly (and unbelievably) committed suicide in jail
Rather, I am highlighting the fact that we must learn to insist and to resist.
First, we must insistthat the public spot light remain focused on the central issues: racism and police brutality. We cannot be distracted.
Second, we must resist the power of corporate media to socialize us into (a) complacency and (b) collaboration. The problem being exposed by protesters right now is notsome tendency for peaceful rallies to be exploited by chaotic troublemakers. Don’t allow the media to suggest otherwise.
The problem is white America’s sleepy indifference to the daily mistreatment of our black brothers and sisters – an evil with which God’s people can never collaborate or become complacent.
The problem is white America’s indifference to the fact that a separate code of law and order is applied to communities of color every single day.
The problem is not the disintegration of law and order but the historic
Eric Garner, choked to death by police while pleading, “I can’t breathe.”
application of arbitrary, dehumanizing law and order at the whim of our dehumanized police force.
Here is a basic Christian principle: God’s people must always stand with the oppressed and the disadvantaged, just as we must always stand up for equality and justice. This is God’s way, and it must always be ours.
Thus, the ethics of God’s kingdom demand both pacifism and civil disobedience whenever cultures work to shape kingdom people, both black and white, into ungodly configurations.
Resistance is difficult but essential if we hope to become more like Jesus. Which means that the church cannot lazily mimic cultural mantras, whatever they may be.
Instead, God’s people are obligated to INSIST on justice and to RESIST falling in line.
I believe that political engagement is an important task for the Christian church. I don’t buy the rationale that says secular politics is a distraction from gospel priorities. On the contrary. Political engagement is demanded by gospel priorities when properly understood.
If believers in Jesus Christ take his Lordship seriously, then submission to our Savior King requires us to behave as citizens of God’s kingdom in every element of our earthly citizenship. Politics in the public square is unavoidable.
The question is, what does that mean in practice?
I know that I am not alone in believing that the church needs to be
Rev. Jerry Falwell
politically active. The African-American church has always understood this fact. Jerry Falwell helped American fundamentalists and evangelicals finally come to grips with this, too. Obviously, maintaining this conviction makes for strange bed-fellows nowadays.
So, is Christian political activism nothing more than the public expression of privately held religious preferences; preferences created by the kind of neighborhood you grew up in and whether it was on the right or the wrong side of the tracks?
Answering this question is crucial in the present era of “Christians for Trump.”
I am firmly convinced, and quite happy to debate anyone who cares to
MIAMI, UNITED STATES – JANUARY 03, 2020: Evangelical supporters of Donald Trump are being led in prayers inside the El Rey Jesus church. – PHOTOGRAPH BY Adam DelGiudice / Echoes Wire/ Barcroft Media (Photo credit should read Adam DelGiudice / Echoes Wire / Barcroft Media via Getty Images)
disagree, that the evangelical church’s uniform support for Donald Trump, the Republican party, and their policy agenda, has exposed the thorough-going secularization of American Christianity.
It is symptomatic of the wholesale debasement of genuine Christian faith into unabashed, nationalistic civil religion. And that is the definition of American apostasy.
This damning secularization of Christian thought and action is, perhaps, the most influential legacy of the Religious Right. Anyone who takes his/her
Ralph Reed, founder of the Faith & Freedom Coalition
marching orders from partisan political strategists (like Ralph Reed, for example) has abandoned the Lordship of Christ. The ethics and righteousness of God’s kingdom do not align with any of the Republican or Democratic party agendas given to us.
Obviously, many religious conservatives think otherwise. I don’t doubt the sincerity of their convictions, but sincerity alone doesn’t manufacture truth. Aristotle and Ptolemy sincerely believed that the sun orbited around the earth, and they were sincerely wrong.
The question becomes: Which partner is leading in the evangelical dance with politics?
Is your partisan, political commitment leading your life of discipleship?
Or is your citizenship in the kingdom of God leading your political commitments?
We all know what the correct answer is. And, of course, members of the Religious Right insist that they are living out that answer, for example, in their support of the “pro-life” movement, their fight for staff-led prayer in public schools, and their hostility against equal rights legislation for LGBT human beings.
All of this begs the question. How should the Christian’s citizenship in God’s kingdom transform the way we live out our American citizenship? If Jesus’ teaching about kingdom righteousness becomes our benchmark for public engagement, then what elements of our partisanship (whether to the right or the left) must be thrown away and replaced with Jesus’ new kingdom ethic?
Here is an historical example:
Members of the Confessing Church. Bonhoeffer is in the 2nd row at the far left
When the “Confessing Church” (composed of German, Protestant leaders who opposed Hitler’s attempts to control their churches) began its resistance against Nazi religious policies, debating these questions eventually led to a deep divide in their movement.
Everyone agreed that resistance to Nazi attempts at manipulating Christian worship services and determining church membership was every leader’s duty before God. But where should they draw the boundaries? The leaders often disagreed over which acts of resistance were (a) necessary expressions of Christian faith (so everyone could support it) and which actions were (b) merely an expression of personal political preferences. Seldom was there unanimity on this question. In fact, bitter arguments sometimes erupted threatening the organization’s future.
Of course, those accused of being “too political” or “unspiritual” in their
A Nazi German “Christian” flag
proposals responded by pointing out that it was impossible to separate the gospel’s ethical requirements from one’s evaluation of a patently immoral government policy. (I will ignore the ghastly role played by Martin Luther’s “two kingdoms” theology in the German church’s submission to Hitler).
The angry differences that erupted among these sincere, committed
churchmen exposed the differing horizons of their moral universes. After all, isn’t immorality in the eye of the beholder? Well, it shouldn’t be if everyone claiming to be a disciple of Jesus actually “fixes their eyes on Jesus,” as the writer to the Hebrews insists we should (12:2).
Every Christian’s moral universe ought to align with Jesus’ example of living as a righteous citizen in the kingdom of God.
Among all the members of the German Confessing Church, the leaders most remembered and applauded today are those who traced out the most expansive moral universes, with boundaries unconstrained by partisan politics or subservience to government authority.
After the war, surviving members of the Confessing Church sometimes admitted that, for all the risks they had taken (and some were imprisoned and/or executed), they had not gone far enough. Their ethical boundaries had been too narrow. They had not always acted as faithful citizens of God’s kingdom.
Martin Niemöller (who was imprisoned) became one of the most outspoken in lamenting the fact that the Confessing Church had never publicly
Karl Barth’s statement on the failure of the Confessing Church to defend Jews throughout Europe
condemned Hitler’s policies of anti-Semitism. They had never publicly defended their Jewish neighbors. Nor had a single church leader publicly opposed the Nazi eugenics program that took thousands from their medical asylums and sent them off to die.
This is our challenge today.
Every Christian’s lifetime goal must be the conformation of one’s own moral universe to the righteousness of God’s kingdom as taught and modeled for us by Jesus of Nazareth. As our Lord said in the Sermon on the Mount, “Seek first the Father’s kingdom and his righteousness, and everything else will follow” (my paraphrase, Matt. 6:33).
I once preached a message on those words of Jesus in a white, middle-class, Protestant church where the elders nearly banned me from the pulpit. [There were two services. An elder walked out of the first service in protest. I was summoned to a meeting with the others before the second service. At least one of them believed that I ought not to preach again).
The goal of my message was to pose this challenge: How should our commitment to live as righteous citizens of God’s kingdom here and now shape the ways we think and behave as earthly citizens of an imperialist nation with a massive military budget that loves to make war?
IF we want to take Jesus’ words seriously, that we seek God’s kingdom righteousness first, then we MUST grapple with these kinds of questions. And change our behavior accordingly.
Tragically, those church elders were spiritually crippled, straight-jacketed inside a minuscule moral universe grossly deformed by their American first, nationalistic, Republican party world-view. They were not interested in seeking the Father’s kingdom and righteousness FIRST in EVERY area of life. They were not thorough-going disciples of Jesus Christ.
We are currently facing a spiritual pandemic that is killing evangelicalism and its public witness.
An American “Christian” flag
The church is infected with a deadly political virus called partisanship. That partisanship is an ugly symptom of our deeply rooted secularism. In pursuing the cause of militaristic nationalism, we have taken our eyes off Jesus.
Huge swaths of the church have been coopted by the commercialized, smoothly marketed messaging created by high-paid political operatives who began courting evangelicals during the Reagan presidency. Rather than seeking God’s kingdom, we seek victory for their side, predominantly Republican, in the next political campaign.
This brand of herd loyalty is easy to implement. Whereas, conforming our lives to the pattern given to us by the suffering, crucified Jesus of Nazareth is far more difficult and costly.
Following a crucified Savior entails suffering, but it also demands carefully focused, consistent thinking, from top to bottom. How must Jesus’ kingdom-directed life and teaching transform the way we address our contemporary problems? There is no political playbook from any party providing easy answers to that question.
Take for instance the “pro-life” movement. The label itself is an example of a very self-conscious political framing. The words pro-life do not honestly describe the movement. As many others have pointed out, the pro-life movement is not actually pro-life. It is anti-abortion and pro-birth, but the movement’s pro-life interests vanish quickly once a baby is delivered.
For example, it is a demonstrable fact that publicly funded preschool programs, the WIC nutrition program and Head Start, to name only a few, make significant improvements in the future prospects, health and well-being of young children, especially those growing up in poor communities.
Yet, conservative “pro-life” voters typically back policies intended to defund these sorts of community assistance programs that give a leg up to our most vulnerable citizens. In this regard, supposedly pro-life conservatives most often vote anti-life.
Worse yet, these faux pro-lifers support politicians who want to slash the budgets of social benefits programs and in order to channel those funds to
A US bomber over Afghanistan
the ballooning budgets for military contractors and our wasteful Pentagon. Instead of helping to enrich the lives of America’s most vulnerable, our tax dollars are spent on expanding assassination programs, and devising new weaponry intended for the efficient slaughter and impoverishment of hungry people around the world who happen to stand in the way of American empire.
That is the opposite of pro-life. It is pro-death, pain, exploitation, and suffering.
But what about the Supreme Court?! (I hear certain readers ask). This is the new clarion call among today’s pro-lifers. Overturning Roe vs. Wade is the end-all-and-be-all of to a pro-life political victory.
It’s true. Adding anti-abortion advocates like Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to the court may eventually lead to that result. But in the meantime, America’s highest court is now stacked with justices who regularly act to strengthen corporate power against the interests of the working class.
For example, Justice Kavanaugh only appeared on the president’s list of nominees after his decision as an appeals court judge to support a trucking company’s decision to fire one of their drivers. The driver violated
Brett Kavanaugh at his Senate confirmation hearing
company policy by leaving his truck unattended in order to walk to a nearby convenience store. The truck had broken down in a blizzard. After calling for help and waiting, the driver soon found that he could no longer feel his legs. He feared that he might die of hypothermia as he waited. Should he stay with his truck? Or should he walk to a nearby convenience store to warm up?
What would you have done?
Judge Kavanaugh, the latest pro-life darling, determined that the company was justified in firing an employee who refused to lay down his life for their sixteen-wheeler. That ruling won Kavanaugh his contentious nomination. And the vast majority of evangelicals stood to cheer. (I won’t even begin to comment on the vile conservative abuse spewed out against the women who accused Kavanaugh of sexual abuse).
Was Kavanaugh really a pro-life nominee?
America’s broken, corrupted “justice” system serves the political purposes of bi-partisan mass incarceration laws filling our jails and prisons with people of color who are slapped down by onerous convictions, while white people – especially wealthy white people – receive a slap on the wrist for committing identical offenses. This country’s “injustice system” has become a calcified showcase for the most racist, Jim Crow artifacts in a nation where all people are notequal before the law.
Why did the NYC police department implement its “stop and frisk” policy in black neighborhoods but never on Wall Street? I suspect they would have collected more cocaine stashed comfortably in the sleek suit pockets of hedge fund managers than they ever discovered in the hands of African-Americans walking to the market.
Yet, American evangelicals regularly rally around the bi-partisan flag demanding that officials get “tough on crime” – excepting, of course, the white-collar crime flagrantly committed by men like Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, and their corporate donors.
Tell me again. What, exactly, is pro-life about any of this behavior?
America’s population is now separated by the greatest economic divide between the haves and the have-nots since the Great Depression. That divide expands and deepens year by year as a result of government, economic boondoggles ensuring that wealth redistribution is always moving upwards to further enrich the already rich. All the while, most evangelicals link arms with the wealthy, corporate interests who exploit the poor and the working class.
There simply is no excuse for any Christian supporting the policies of either party which perpetuate national behaviors so cravenly antithetical to Jesus’ teaching about the righteousness of God’s kingdom.
Let’s call such public behavior for what it really is, especially when it is endorsed by a majority of evangelicals: grotesque displays of hypocrisy, partisan blindness, and anti-Christian thinking.
Such misguided thinking is an investment in the work of the anti-Christ. The resulting behaviors reveal the overt repudiation of Jesus’ Lordship over his church.
Genuinely pro-life behavior begins among the citizens of Christ’s kingdom who live it out in the streets by enhancing the lives of those who most need help. That includes influencing the culture around us, our society, our leaders, and our nation, by working to enact consistent pro-life policies for all people everywhere.
To further stretch our moral boundaries, evangelicals should be in the forefront of calling for the US to abandon its budget-breaking quest for global supremacy, a quest that tramples other nations underfoot like discarded human refuse left behind for global scavengers to devour.
Now that would be pro-life.
Jesus is clear. His kingdom’s pro-life values declare:
The first will be last, and the last will be first
Woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your reward
Woe to those who neglect to do justice
Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry
Our Lord welcomes every immigrant and asylum seeker with open arms.
Our Lord prioritizes the poor. He picks them up and cares for them. He does not ridicule them as lazy creators of their own hardships.
How can any society be positively influenced by a secularized church that long ago exchanged the mind of Christ for the distorted thinking of this evil age?
How can the church show others the importance of thorough-going pro-life policies when we are incapable of implementing them among ourselves?
American evangelicalism has become the useless salt described by Jesus: You are [supposed to be] the salt of the earth, but once that salt loses its saltiness, it becomes useless, good for nothing. It can only be thrown out onto the dirt (my paraphrase, Matthew 5:13).
Jesus’ words address the American church today.
No, Donald Trump is not the church’s greatest friend. He is another in a long line of anti-Christs. He is a parasite who has attached himself to the Religious Right in order to exploit their evangelical base for his own political benefit.
Evangelicals are president Trump’s useful idiots.
I am sorry, but any purported “Christian” who cannot perceive these facts about our president, American politics, and our nation’s behavior throughout the world has become a spiritual alien who knows little if anything about God’s kingdom.
Such people are spiritually malnourished, perhaps even dead, after suckling at the swollen teats of American civil religion, that secular, bastardized gospel which subverts Jesus’ kingdom values while substituting the depraved values of this fallen world.
God’s kingdom is what truly matters. The church is its citizenry. All of which entails much, much more than simply “getting people saved.”
Saved for what?
Jesus calls us to love indiscriminately. To prioritize people in need, no matter who they are. Yes, personal acts of benefaction are crucial, but that is not enough. The scale of America’s social problems is so vast that our government must play a major role in rectifying our problems. Only true citizens of the kingdom of God possess the vision necessary for developing the required solutions.
Will a mass movement of the Christian church stand up to demand that our government take greater and greater steps towards mercy and justice for all?
My title for this post is an attempt at summarizing a current online debate, involving Greg Gilbert, Scott McKight and others, about the nature of the Gospel message in the New Testament.
Honestly, I don’t follow “theological debates” online for a variety of reasons that I won’t go into here, so I confess that I am only responding to a good post I read today at Patheos from Michael Bird. (This is a very old, very tired debate.)
Michael is an excellent New Testament scholar, and I recommend that you read his new post, especially if you have been following the debate online. Michael is spot on in his conclusions.
(As a side-note, I originally tried to hook my blog up with the Patheos blog site, but couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to do it. Given the site’s drift towards right-wing craziness, it was probably for the best.)
“Gilbert wants to make the cross and a transaction within the atonement the centre of the gospel with kingdom and kingship as a kind of back story. McKnight and Bates emphasize Jesus’s kingship, Israel’s story, fulfilment of Scripture with justification and forgiveness as benefits of the gospel. Gilbert is not entirely absent of kingdom/kingship, but neither are McKnight and Bates arguing for ‘mere kingship.’
“Truth be told, I think that Bates and McKnight have the better end of the argument in terms of what the NT emphasizes. If one surveys Acts 2:29-36, 13:32-33, Rom 1:3-4, 1 Cor 15:3-4, and 2 Tim 2:8 then it is pretty hard to deny the fact that the gospel is a king Jesus gospel – it is a bit of slam dunk for my mind. The gospel is a royal summons to believe and obey Jesus as God’s messianic king, a king who has shown his might and power by laying down his life for his people to make them right, forgiven, and reconciled, etc. Or, as I define the gospel in my Evangelical Theology: ‘The gospel is the announcement that God’s kingdom has come in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, the Lord and Messiah, in fulfillment of Israel’s Scriptures. The gospel evokes faith, repentance, and discipleship; its accompanying effects include salvation and the gift of the Holy Spirit.’”
Further on in his post, Michael addresses the New Testament passages that explain “justification by faith,” the touchstone for evangelical orthodoxy in many people’s minds.
I would only add to Michael’s argument by pointing out something that is widely overlooked: the apostle Paul only talks about “justification by faith” in those letters where he is combating some sort of Judaizing influence within the church. “Judaizers” were the folks who insisted that Gentiles must become good Jews in order to become real disciples of Jesus. This meant circumcision and adherence to the Torah.
So, Paul’s argument for “justification by faith alone apart from works (signifying works of the law)” always (maybe I should say only) arose in a very specific polemical environment. That does not offer much of a basis for insisting on its “centrality.”
To my mind the conclusion is pretty obvious.
Justification by faith was not the irreducible, central component to Paul’s way of understanding the work of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.
It was one important aspect of the gospel. But not its essence.
For both the root and the branch of the Good News, we must turn to Jesus of Nazareth. What was essential to him?
Read the New Testament Gospels and the answer becomes obvious: the Kingdom of God and the Lordship of Jesus over God’s kingdom.
The book becomes available on June 1st from Wipf & Stock publishers (also the publisher of my next book about Israel-Palestine). I have already pre-ordered my copy, and I am anxious to dig into it.
While the partisan political blindness of the “Court Evangelicals” (to use the extremely apt term coined by historian John Fea, professor at Messiah College) has gone a long way towards identifying the evangelical label with their own far-right, Christian nationalism, this new book is a much needed antidote to their hijacking of the movement.
Here is the publishers’ description:
What should Christians think about Donald Trump? His policies, his style, his personal life?
Thirty evangelical Christians wrestle with these tough questions. They are Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. They don’t all agree, but they seek to let Christ be the Lord of their political views. They seek to apply biblical standards to difficult debates about our current political situation.
Vast numbers of white evangelicals enthusiastically support Donald Trump. Do biblical standards on truth, justice, life, freedom, and personal integrity warrant or challenge that support? How does that support of President Trump affect the image of Christianity in the larger culture? Around the world? Many younger evangelicals today are rejecting evangelical Christianity, even Christianity itself. To what extent is that because of widespread evangelical support for Donald Trump?
Don’t read this book to find support for your views. Read it to be challenged—with facts, reason, and biblical principles.
With contributions from: Michael W. Austin Randall Balmer Vicki Courtney Daniel Deitrich Samuel Escobar John Fea
Irene Fowler Mark Galli J. Colin Harris Stephen R. Haynes Matt Henderson Christopher A. Hutchinson Bandy X. Lee David S. Lim David C. Ludden Ryan McAnnally-Linz
Steven Meyer Napp Nazworth D. Zac Niringiye Christopher Pieper Reid Ribble Ronald J. Sider Edward G. Simmons James R. Skillen James W. Skillen Julia K. Stronks Chris Thurman Miroslav Volf Peter Wehner George Yancey
Please, order your copy now, and help to make this book an important factor in educating the church:
to regain its footing in the gospel of Jesus Christ, rather than Republican politics
to live as citizens of the kingdom of God, rather than “culture warriors” eager to destroy their enemies
to prioritize the poor, the needy, the sick, and the disadvantaged, rather than the opulent corporate enrichment policies of president Trump, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Shumer
to work as true peace-makers, at home and around the world, rather than cheering on the global war-mongers, happy to expand American Empire at the expense of destroying others
President Trump spoke yesterday in Minneapolis to loud applause supplied by a large crowd of supporters, many wearing bright, red shirts emblazoned, “make American great again.”
If you didn’t see the speech, check out the excerpts and excellent response provided by The Young Turkshere. It’s well worth watching.
In the course of his rambling diatribe (the longest he has yet given), the president mocked and ridiculed individual Democrats and members of the House.
He targeted more lies and slander against Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Somali refugee from Minnesota. Rep. Omar and her family already receive around the clock security protection because of the regular death threats she receives, week in and week out, as she does her job for the people of Minnesota who elected her.
Omar also receives a surge in the number of threats against her life every time Trump mocks her in public, as he did again last night.
Trump then expanded his racist threats against the entire Somali refugee community in Minnesota, leading the crowd in cheers and applause as he bemoaned the horrible presence of hard-working, brown-skinned families finding refuge from their own war-torn country (partly facilitated by the U.S. military) in the bosom of white America.
The audience cheered again when the president promised that he will protect the good, white people of Minneapolis from the inconvenient threat of more dark-skinned refugees from Africa moving into their city.
How many of these red-shirted fans applauding Trump’s grotesque, racist drivel claim to be Christians? How many say they are evangelicals?
Well, it’s long past time to draw the line, folks.
And here’s the line:
People who follow Jesus will NEVER cheer or applaud for such wretched, verbal trash.
People who follow Jesus will NEVER endorse the inhumane policies – like closing our doors to refugees and asylum seekers, separating families and kidnapping children at the border – that are produced by this man’s dark and evil heart.
As I now listen to Trump speaking at the “Voters Values Summit,” he is
Rep. Ilhan Omar
again falsely accusing Rep. Omar of saying things that she has never said. And he is being applauded by the audience!
We are witnessing the complete apostasy of American evangelicalism. It’s happening before our eyes.
If you or your friends voted for Trump in 2016 and now regret that decision, hallelujah! Confession your foolishness. Ask for forgiveness for facilitating the rise to power of this latest anti-Christ now spewing his putrid filth onto the American stage.
Pray for wisdom to do better next time as a well-educated voter.
But if you or your friends plan to vote for Trump in 2020, if you too applaud at his rally speeches, then you must face the truth.
You have driven the Holy Spirit from your heart, if, indeed, you ever knew Him.
You, too, are a racist.
You have become an idolater.
Your conservative politics are more important to you than Jesus Christ.
You are cheering for a fascist, a blasphemer, a sexual predator, a racist, and a career criminal.
It is impossible to be an obedient follower of Jesus of Nazareth and persistently endorse such wickedness.
You may have known Jesus at one time, but no longer.
You have become one of the choked, blighted, dying seeds woefully described in Jesus’ parable of the Sower in Mark 4:1-20. You have lost whatever connect to the Savior you may once have had.
You have become like the pompous “miracle workers” condemned by Jesus at the close of his Sermon on the Mount. Despite their protests of devotion, he says to these people boasting of their “godly” accomplishments, “Get away from me, you evil doers, for I never knew you” (Matthew 7:23).
It is LONG past time for faithful pastors to speak up and to speak out against the evangelical apostasy occurring before our eyes.
Pastors, your people need Biblical teaching and education in the ethics of God’s kingdom. Hiding behind the pretense of avoiding partisanship in the pulpit is and has always been a cop out.
The church desperately needs your help.
Where are the true, faithful shepherds who will risk giving offense by teaching the FULL counsel of God and emphasizing the radical, upside-down lifestyle demanded by Jesus Christ?
Within evangelical congregations, they seem to be few and far between…
The El Paso gunman left behind a manifesto proclaiming his allegiance to white supremacy, decrying the dangerous hordes of brown immigrants “flooding” across our southern border. I haven’t heard any details yet about the shooter in Ohio, his motives or political ideology.
At least, law enforcement has begun to describe these horrific incidents for what they are: domestic terrorism.
The FBI continues to warn that the vast majority of these incidents are committed by right-wing political extremists who are, without exception, white men. In most cases, their targets are people of color. Nowadays, anyone who looks like they might be Hispanic or Muslim is scrutinized without mercy.
Look at YouTube to watch the many videos posted there showing the white vigilantes who have deputized themselves to harass people of color. They call the police because they overheard someone speaking a different language, or saw a black person walking through the neighborhood and “looking suspicious while being black.”
No informed citizen with an ounce of common sense can deny the overt,
Survivors of the El Paso shootings
blatant, explicit encouragement that such anti-immigrant, white, racist extremism is receiving from the White House.
If you don’t understand or believe that previous sentence then, I am sorry, but you are lost.
You need to be converted.
Your conscience has been swallowed up by the swamp of moral relativism and outright evil that has taken hold of this country’s public life, especially within the comfortable parlors of political conservatism, Republicanism and establishment D.C. power brokers.
And, yes, that moral degeneration includes the Democrats as well as anyone else who remains silent while the newest wave of neo-Nazis, skin-heads, neo-fascists and every other stripe of authoritarian race-baiter feels that this moment in our nation’s history is their opportunity to resurrect the Confederate flag and wave a banner of white, racial superiority over the graves of innocent men, women and children whose skin-tone carries too much melanin.
But I reserve my strongest condemnation for conservative evangelicals who continue to endorse this president’s policies and turn a blind eye to the daily dose of hatred spewing forth from his puerile and filthy mouth.
He is the latest anti-Christ who has risen up to deceive the church; like a false prophet crying, “Peace, peace!” while he sows seeds of hatred, lies and racial division.
Everyone likes to imagine they would have been a hero in Hitler’s Germany. We all tell ourselves, “I would have resisted. I would have hidden Jews in MY attic. I would never have allowed the Nazi flag in MY church. The Fuehrer’s censors would have never have been allowed to edit MY sermons.”
We swear that we would have been a faithful Israelite, never to be counted among the idolaters that sent the nation into exile.
We would have been faithful disciples. Unlike Simon Peter, we would have spoken up in Jesus’ defense when the time came.
Well, folks now is the moment, another moment of truth.
Another opportunity for faithfulness to Christ is staring us in the face. The question is – what will we, what can we, do?
I have a few suggestions:
Every church, and every member of every church, located in a town, village, city or unincorporated township with a population of dark-skinned immigrants needs to walk door-to-door through those neighborhoods, shaking hands and offering hugs, help and resources while welcoming those people of color into your community. Listen to their stories. Ask if there is anything you and/or your church community can do to help meet their needs. Then follow through, and do it. Make new friends. Have them over to your home; eat together and publicly testify to their humanity at every opportunity. Push for your church to become a more inter-racial community, if it isn’t already.
Challenge all racist, white-nationalist types of conversation whenever, wherever you hear it – especially among Christians. Remind people that Jesus of Nazareth was a very brown-skinned, Palestinian Jew who had once been an immigrant himself seeking safety in a foreign land (Egypt). We worship a dark-skinned Savior. Avoid fights, but faithfully and boldly represent the universal love of God for all people everywhere.
Remind people that there is a difference between illegal immigration and seeking asylum. Asylum-seeking is perfectly legal. In fact, I believe that America owes automatic asylum – even citizenship – to anyone fleeing a dangerous situation in a country that has been destabilized by U.S. intervention, whether military, political or economic. THAT, my friends, includes the whole of Central and South America. When the United States helps to destroy the social fabric of a nation by forcing it to adopt policies that serve American interests first, then we must take responsibility for the human fall-out. (Personally, I also believe that illegal immigration ought to be decriminalized. We would still have border guards patrolling the southern border humanely, seeking to care for the people they detain and send back, but what is the point of jailing these people as felons after their second capture? It serves no purpose but to enrich those who own America’s private, for-profit prison/detention system.)
I haven’t touched on the many related issues such as the American gun lobby, gun ownership, etc. because I don’t want this post to become a book. We could also talk about the policy of separating children from their parents when detained at the border, and the fact that our government admits to having “lost track” of nearly 1,500 of these children. Imagine if they were your children…
Urge your pastor to talk about these issues in the context of obedient Christian discipleship. It is obvious and easy to “pray for the victims” of a mass shooting. Perhaps, it is the pastoral thing to do. But think about it: what good did it do for patriotic, German pastors to offer nice pastoral prayers for those who were being arrested and tortured by Hitler’s SS guards, while remaining silent about the immoral policies being implemented by those unjust arrests? The church needs more than safe, pastoral prayers for victims. We need strong leadership and pointed Biblical teaching that identifies immorality and injustice in the public square; that gives direction to God’s counter-cultural ways of kingdom living in a nation wrestling with its own racist demons.
basis of a lie fabricated by the police officers. Three policemen broke down Ms. Taylor’s front door with their weapons draw and entered her home.
their support of the “pro-life” movement, their fight for staff-led prayer in public schools, and their hostility against equal rights legislation for LGBT human beings.
everyone claiming to be a disciple of Jesus actually “fixes their eyes on Jesus,” as the writer to the Hebrews insists we should (12:2).
describe the movement. As many others have pointed out, the pro-life movement is not actually pro-life. It is anti-abortion and pro-birth, but the movement’s pro-life interests vanish quickly once a baby is delivered.
of bi-partisan mass incarceration laws filling our jails and prisons with people of color who are slapped down by onerous convictions, while white people – especially wealthy white people – receive a slap on the wrist for committing identical offenses. This country’s “injustice system” has become a calcified showcase for the most racist, Jim Crow artifacts in a nation where all people are not equal before the law.
collected more cocaine stashed comfortably in the sleek suit pockets of hedge fund managers than they ever discovered in the hands of African-Americans walking to the market.
Let’s call such public behavior for what it really is, especially when it is endorsed by a majority of evangelicals: grotesque displays of hypocrisy, partisan blindness, and anti-Christian thinking.
long line of anti-Christs. He is a parasite who has attached himself to the Religious Right in order to exploit their evangelical base for his own political benefit.
For both the root and the branch of the Good News, we must turn to Jesus of Nazareth. What was essential to him?
Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. They don’t all agree, but they seek to let Christ be the Lord of their political views. They seek to apply biblical standards to difficult debates about our current political situation.
