Tag: Religious Right

Dave Ramsey Has Become a Demonic Voice Within the Church

Some time ago I blogged about the public complaints made by some of Dave Ramsey’s (former) employees. Most of their charges accused him of an  authoritarian, even dictatorial, management style that intruded into employees’ private lives.

Most recently Mr. Ramsey has come to the attention of several independent news podcasts because of his advice to landlords about raising rent and evicting tenants from their homes because “the market” is dictating rent increases.

Watch the video below called “Should Landlords Feel Guilty.” I offer my reaction below:

The most important thing to notice in this video is the way Mr. Ramsey has surrendered his conscience and his behavior to the requirements of our capitalistic “marketplace.” 

When it comes to his economic, investment decisions the marketplace is sovereign over Mr. Ramsey’s financial life. If the market “demands” that he, as a landlord, evict families from their rental homes, then he apparently has no choice.

The rules of capitalism and the “free market” command his allegiance.

Never mind that the country is experiencing a housing crisis with its dire lack of affordable housing.

Never mind that large corporations are in a buying frenzy scooping up foreclosed properties in order to rent them out at top dollar prices, thus maximizing their bottom line and the profits paid to corporate shareholders.

Never  mind that the homeless population continues to grow at a shocking rate.

Oh sure. Mr. Ramsey assures his listeners that they need to be kind and thoughtful in their personal relationships with other individuals. But this is a disingenuous smokescreen typical of American evangelicals whose morals are so enslaved to American individualism that the larger, collective questions of system evil never cross their minds.

Ramsey flippantly throws out Christian sounding language that serves only  to distract from the colossal compromise of both character and conscience revealed by his abject submission to the laisse faire market forces that obviously have gained Lordship over his life.

At this point, Mr. Ramsey’s economic advice is more demonic than it is Christ-like.

Not long ago I argued that the primary way in which we experience “demonic temptation” is through the corrupt power structures that surround us. To catch up on that analysis I urge you to revisit my blog post.

It’s important for the current discussion.

Because he exists within a supposedly free-market, capitalist, economic environment, in which anyone who questions the system is vilified as a Marxist (or worse), Ramsey obviously accepts this system as, at least, morally neutral, and perhaps even, virtuous.

Thus, surrendering to the dictates of the market, and behaving as any good capitalist would, obviously has no bearing on Ramsey’s Christian confession. He can remain a “good Christian” while ejecting people from their homes into an uncertain, competitive, laisse faire, dog eat dog housing market.

Yep. It’s a cruel world, but that’s the way the capitalist, cookie crumbles.

On the other hand, as I have argued extensively on this blog and in other writings, if we understand the Christian life in terms of our citizenship in the kingdom of God, then Mr. Ramsey has made himself the poster child for the besetting sin of American Christianity: Cultural Captivity.

Rather than critiquing our cultural environment; rather than analyzing, evaluating, and then criticizing the various power structures in which we find ourselves — as serious citizens of God’s kingdom should — we have a lamentable tendency to roll over and play dead in the face of society’s structures of power.

We accept our corrupted, and corrupting, systems of power and control as normal, inevitable, unchangeable, and even preferable to their alternatives. Yet, I am convinced that it is through these normalized systems of power, control, and domination that the Evil One is more successful in tempting and corrupting humanity.

In the face of “what is normal,” the ethics of Jesus and the lifestyle required of every citizen in the kingdom of God all become “unrealistic and unmanageable” given the nature of the world we live in.

I am sure that this is what Mr. Ramsey will say were anyone to challenge his highly dubious ethics of landlordship. Making people homeless when I have the opportunity of higher income in the face of higher expenses is, after all,  normal.

We need to take a lesson from the early Christian church about how to deal with such ideas of “normal.”

For the first several centuries of Christianity, church leaders insisted that no church member could ever work for the police, the military, or the judiciary. (For more on this issue, check out my book I Pledge Allegiance.)

Anyone in the church who did happen to work for any of these three power structures had either to quit their job or be excommunicated from the church.

Why?

Because the early Christians understood — far better than most Christians do today — that Jesus taught his disciples to live lives of non-violence. Thus, no follower of Jesus had any business being party to violence or coercion.

And anyone serving in the police, the military, or the judiciary would eventually have to be involved with violence and/or coercion in the course of fulfilling their “normal” responsibilities.

But early Christian leaders insisted: It does not matter what society and its power structures have normalized for this world. Certain behaviors are always unacceptable for Christians because the Lordship of Jesus Christ always defeats the secular attempts at material lordship this fallen world tries to impose upon us.

I suspect that Mr. Ramsey’s cultural captivity may have begun with his extraordinary success which led to his great wealth and influence.

For all of these things, wealth, success, and power, have a sly, corrupting, acidic effect on the conscience if we do not guard ourselves against them.

Consequently, I want to suggest that it is time to excommunicate Dave Ramsey from the Christian church. Or, at least, to depose him from any leadership or teaching roles.

His financial advice is becoming demonic.

 

 

The Entire Rittenhouse Scenario Reeks of Arrogance and Sociopathy

The author Ron Jacobs has a new article at Counterpunch discussing the Rittenhouse trial and the final verdict declaring him innocent of all charges.

Illegally armed vigilante, Rittenhouse, was welcomed and thanked by local police

Two unarmed men are dead and the shooter goes free because he was scared. Welcome to America in 2021.

Jacob’s piece is entitled “A Land Where Justice is a Game.”

Below is an excerpt:

Another right-wing vigilante walks free in the USA. The fact that I was even mildly hopeful Kyle Rittenhouse would get some prison time only proves my eternal optimism. Once again, that optimism was misplaced. After all, it is the United States of America that I’m talking about; a nation whose history is replete

Rittenhouse drinking beer and sharing white supremacists hand-signs with members of the Proud Boys shortly after he killed two men and wounded a third

with stories of white men walking free after murdering individuals who made them afraid. It is the United States of America; a nation whose history is replete with stories of Black men lynched, executed, or imprisoned for crimes the state knew they didn’t commit. It is the United States of America; a land where the defense of property takes precedence over human life in the courts and in the streets. Especially when that property is owned by a white man.

Nothing could be more typically American than Kyle Rittenhouse’s murder spree and its aftermath. From the shooting itself to his courtroom defense that he “was only defending himself,” the entire scenario reeks of arrogance and sociopathy. Indeed, it’s a perfect metaphor for the US empire and its “foreign policy,” where

Right-wings groups, including white evangelicals, donated $2 million to Kyle’s defense fund

the concept of self-defense often involves traveling away from one’s home with a loaded weapon, walking down unfamiliar streets away from home, and then murdering people who tell you to go away? This series of events is the template for what US politicians (and many citizens) call US foreign policy. The mindset it inculcates is one that creates the Kyle Rittenhouses among its residents.

Make no mistake, the Rittenhouse trial was a political trial. The far-right knew it could manipulate the evidence in its favor, especially given the nature of stand your ground laws. The jury selection was also manipulated and the judge was not sympathetic to the murdered men. As for the prosecution, I was reminded of those grand juries that fail to indict murderous police officers because the state presents its case in such a way that makes indictment unlikely if not impossible. The assumptions of a jury’s members are played upon with the intention of bringing forth their fears and prejudices. A sophisticated legal team can convince a jury that what they see is not fact and that the legal team’s fiction is. Often, this manipulation involves removing the context of the acts being considered, shortening the timeline, and ultimately transferring the blame to the victims. This is a standard approach for the defense when police officers are charged with murder. It was used quite deftly by the Rittenhouse defense team.

Let’s pretend Rittenhouse was a leftist/BLM protester and had murdered two pro-police protesters in the same scenario like the one he was in when he killed those men. I doubt he would be a free man today. Instead, he would have been portrayed as the active shooter that he was, walking the streets of Kenosha fully armed and under the illusion he had the right to shoot people if they challenged him. In this imaginary circumstance, the pro-police protesters attempting to disarm a scared left-wing Rittenhouse would have been the heroes, and that Rittenhouse would have been the killer the real Rittenhouse is. This scenario assumes that a murdering left-wing Rittenhouse would not have been shot down in the streets by the police—a big assumption. I have protested too many Klan and Nazi rallies that were protected by the forces of law and order to think otherwise.

You can read the entire article here.

Karen Swallow Prior Laments Evangelicalism’s Selective Tolerance

Karen Swallow Prior has a good article in the Religious News Service lamenting the often hypocritical and dangerously excessive quality of

Professor Karen Swallow Prior

“tolerance” among evangelical Christians.

Her article is called “Truth, Justice and the Torturing of Tolerance.”

Ms. Prior describes her own acculturation into the norms of lopsided church tolerance — heavily tilted towards favoring men and conservative politics.

My only disagreement is with her description of “some conservatives” being intolerant of others. Sorry, but in my experience intolerance describes “most” conservative evangelicals.

Below is an excerpt:

. . . Conservative evangelicals often call out the hypocrisy of progressives whose tolerance goes only one way. But some conservatives have also made tolerance a one-way street, failing to support the religious and personal freedoms of those who believe differently than we do.

Instead of offering rigorous and compelling arguments in defense of what we understand to be true, some simply take up the other side of the rope in a tug-of-war game of intolerance, making each side no different from the other side.

I have a lot to process and even confess about what I have tolerated in Christian institutions and among fellow believers. A lot of us do. Too many in the church have tolerated too much for too long.

To be sure, situations can be complicated. Motives and actions can be mixed. Facts can be disputed. Perspectives can differ. Pictures can be incomplete.

Nevertheless, some things are clearly and simply wrong. It takes wisdom to discern what should be tolerated and what should not. It also takes wisdom to know when to speak up and when to wait. It takes wisdom to understand when institutions are set up to perpetuate wrong rather than prevent it, to recognize when corruption is a feature, not a bug.

And it takes courage to tolerate no more what is wrong — and to speak up and act for what is right.

You can read the entire article here.

My New Book, Like Birds in a Cage, Is Now in Print and Available

I am happy to announce that my new book, Like Birds in a Cage: Christian Zionism’s Collusion in Israel’s Oppression of the Palestinian People (Cascade, 2021), is now available.

So place your orders now (please!) and share what you learn with your family and friends. Just click this link.

Rather than talk about my own book, allow me to share a few of the recommendations the book has received from other scholars in this field:

A keenly reasoned, comprehensive, full-frontal critique of Christian Zionism. Equally at ease interpreting St. Paul, critiquing ideologies of privilege, deconstructing Israel’s discriminatory legal regime, and narrating scenes of unarmed, tear-gassed villagers, David Crump mounts a formidable case against the troubling logic, and deadly deployment, of ethnocracy and territorial exceptionalism. This prophetic call to walk not where Jesus walked, but as Jesus walked, is more urgent now than ever.

Bruce N. Fisk, Ph.D., Senior Research Fellow, Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East

This new volume by David Crump may be the most comprehensive critique of Christian Zionism by an evangelical author to date. As a former ‘insider,’ his unique perspective has delivered a tour de force by combining scholarly biblical exegesis of key texts the incisive theological analysis. His solid grasp of the relevant political and historical context of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle adds context and texture to this wonderfully written book. I hope this volume will be widely read and reviewed across the evangelical spectrum by pastors, biblical scholars, students, and perhaps most urgently, evangelical politicians.

Don Wagner, author of Anxious for Armageddon

Like Birds in a Cage is destined to become a standard text on Christian Zionism in the USA. With devastating precision, Dave Crump exposes the cancerous nature of this deviant theology. For Evangelicalism to survive with any credibility, it must repudiate the justification of apartheid and ethnic cleansing in Palestine. Crump’s book provides not only the diagnosis but also the cure.

Steven Sizer, Founder and Director, Peacemaker Trust

This book is quite unique in the way that it combines a sound grasp of the history of Zionism, careful interpretation of the Bible, and first hand, recent experience of everyday life for Palestinians living under occupation on the West Bank . . . My hope and prayer is that this book will help American Christians of all kinds to wake up to the very significant ways in which Christian Zionism has contributed — and continues to contribute — to this tragic conflict. They might then be more able to challenge their government’s policies.

Colin Chapman, author of Whose Promised Land?

Glenn Greenwald: Civil Liberties Are Being Trampled by Exploiting “Insurrection” Fears. Congress’s 1/6 Committee May Be the Worst Abuse Yet.

Glenn Greenwald has published a lengthy, detailed analysis of the many ways in which the Democratic party is currently exploiting the Capitol Hill riot on January 6 to implement drastic government overreach and the curtailment of American civil liberties.

The mechanism for this overreach is the House Select Committee currently  investigating the January 6 riot.

I have excerpted the heart of Greenwald’s conclusions below. However, I encourage you to read the entire article at Greenwald’s substack space. It is truly impressive and deeply disturbing.

The article is entitled “Civil Liberties Are Being Trampled by Exploiting ‘Insurrection’ Fears. Congress’s 1/6 Committee May Be the Worst Abuse Yet.”

Below is the excerpt:

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) arrive for the House Select Committee hearing investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol on July 27, 2021 at the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, DC. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

This congressional committee is designed to be cathartic theater for liberals, and a political drama for the rest of the country. They know Republicans will object to their deliberately unconstitutional inquisitions, and they intend to exploit those objections to darkly insinuate to the country that Republicans are driven by a desire to protect the violent traitors so that they can deploy them as an insurrectionary army for future coups. They have staffed the committee with their most flamboyant and dishonest drama queens, knowing that Adam Schiff will spend most of his days on CNN with Chris Cuomo comparing 1/6 to Pearl Harbor and the Holocaust; Liz Cheney will equate Republicans with Al Qaeda and the Capitol riot to the destruction of the World Trade Center; and Adam Kinzinger will cry on cue as he reminds everyone over and over that he served in the U.S. military only to find himself distraught and traumatized that the real terrorists are not those he was sent to fight overseas but those at home, in his own party.

But the manipulative political design of this spectacle should not obscure how threatening it nonetheless is to core civil liberties. Democrats in politics and media have whipped themselves into such a manic frenzy ever since 1/6 — indeed, they have been doing little else ever since Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator in 2015 — that they have become the worst kinds of fanatics: the ones who really believe their own lies. Many genuinely believe that they are on the front lines of an epic historical battle against the New Hitler (Trump) and his band of deplorable fascist followers bent on a coup against the democratic order. In their cable-and-Twitter-stimulated imaginations, shortly following this right-wing coup will be the installation of every crypto-fascist bell and whistle from concentration camps for racial and ethnic minorities to death or prison for courageous #Resistance dissidents. At some point, the line between actually believing this and being paid to pretend to believe it, or feeling coerced by cultural and friendship circles to feign belief in it, erodes, fostering actual collective conviction and mania.

And when fanatics convince themselves that their cause is not only indisputably just but an imperative for survival, then any doubts or questions about methods and weapons can no longer be acknowledged. The war they are fighting is of such overarching importance and righteousness that there is no such thing as unjust or excessive means to achieve it. Just a cursory examination of liberal discourse is enough to see that they have long ago arrived at and flew past this point of sectarian zealotry. And that is what explains their overwhelming support for state and corporate censorship of the internet, increasing reverence for security state agencies such as the CIA and FBI, love for and trust in corporate media, and a belief that no punishment or level of suffering is excessive when it comes to retaliation against their political enemies, including but not only those who participated in any way in the 1/6 protests.

This is, after all, a movement that has long opposed the death penalty and whose more left-wing factions spent 2020 rioting in cities to protest police violence and chanting “Defund the Police!,” yet their only lament about Ashli Babbitt seems to be that she was the only pro-Trump “fascist” shot and killed by noble police officers on that day. They have pranced around for decades as criminal justice reformists, denouncing harsh prosecutorial strategies and judicial punishments, yet are indignant that people who put their feet on Nancy Pelosi’s sacred desk or vandalized the sacred halls of American power with their dirty and deplorable presence are not spending decades in a cage. They spent 2020 depicting police officers as racist savages, only to valorize the Capitol Police as benevolent public servants whom only barbarians would want to harm, then gave them an additional $2 billion to intensify their surveillance capabilities and augment their stockpile of weapons. Their fury that Trump officials did not end up spending decades in cages due to vague associations with Russians is exceeded only by their rage that pro-Trump protesters at the Capitol are being sentenced to months rather than years or decades in prison.

A political movement that operates from the premise that its cause is too important to be constrained is one that inevitably becomes authoritarian. That such authoritarianism is the defining feature of American liberalism has been evident for several years. And an investigative congressional committee that they control, aimed squarely at their political enemies, accompanied by demands that anyone resisting it be imprisoned, can only lead to very dark and dangerous destinations.

You can read the entire piece here.

News Flash: CBN Actually Stands for the “Capitalist Broadcasting Network”

David Doel, host of The Rational National

Canadian commentator, David Doel, host of the YouTube program Rational National, is right to mock Pat Robertson’s cold-hearted, uninformed, slanderous, Republican propaganda report on the CBN program, The 700 Club. Watch Doel’s comments below as Pat Robertson spouts neoliberal nonsense about the recently passed Senate Infrastructure Bill:

It is clear, as if it wasn’t before, that the CBN abbreviation actually identifies this channel as the Capitalist Broadcasting Network, or perhaps the Conservative Broadcasting Network.

There certainly is nothing Christian about any of THIS. (Robertson’s remarks conclude at the 4:20 mark):

This, folks, is neither news nor informed commentary. It IS hard-core, right-wing propaganda of the worst sort.

Of course, faithful Christians can be politically conservative. But God’s people cannot confuse lies, misinformation, slander, propaganda, or blind partisanship with honest, informative communication. 

From all that I can see, neither Pat Robertson, the 700 Club, nor CBN are able to distinguish truth from falsehood much less integrity from manipulation.

Whether or not you watch CBN, I am sure everybody knows by now that Congress has passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill with a $3.5 trillion dollar price tag.

That may sound like a lot of money, but it really is pocket change when compared to the cumulative expense, contributing to the national debt, that piles up annually from our:

  • ever-expanding military budgets,
  • continual war-making around the world (I have never heard Pat Robertson, precious few conservatives at large, nor many Democrats for that matter condemn the many wanton, US military adventures we carry out around the world),
  • government subsidies paid out to America’s largest corporations (otherwise known as corporate welfare — Come on. Am I really supposed to believe that companies like Exxon haven’t yet figured out how to make a profit on their own dime?),
  • tax cuts consistently given to the largest US corporations,
  • additional tax cuts given to the wealthiest members of society (Remember, Trump’s big tax give away?),
  • the trillions of dollars the IRS estimates is lost by the US treasury each year through tax fraud and evasion among the richest Americans and corporations (Remember that Jeff Bezos, the richest man on the planet, paid no income tax last year!).

The list could go on…

Now, in the face of so many obscene, public injustices, all of which drain the public purse to the tune of billions if not trillions of dollars annually, conservatives are lamenting a direly needed infrastructure bill that will improve essential services for the poor, elderly, and working class members of our society.

Oi vey!

Study Uncovers the Core of White Supremacy at the Heart of Jan. 6 Insurrection

Robert Pape is a researcher at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, a think tank he runs at the University of Chicago.

He recently published the results of a study into the backgrounds and identities of all those arrested and charged for their participation in the January 6th attack on our Capitol building in Washington, D.C.

We have long known that Christian Nationalism was an important, motivating ideology for many of the Trump followers involved in that attack.

Dr. Pape’s report now shows the equally important role played by White Supremacy in motivating that attack.

This marriage of Christian Nationalism with White Supremacy is not new, of course. It has a very long history in this country.

The fact that many people who call themselves Christians believed that Jesus Christ had blessed this violent attack; the fact that they claimed their involvement was integral to their patriotic, Christian witness; that “keeping America white” is a major plank in their “Christian worldview”; all combined with the evidence indicating that this movement continues to expand is more than abundant reason to weep for the evangelical church in this country.

If you know Christian leaders/teachers who are instructing their congregations about the gross, anti-Biblical, anti-Christian errors of this American idolatry, then please encourage them and offer your support.

If the leaders and pastors of your church are remaining silent or, worse yet, endorsing the heresies of Christian Nationalism and White Supremacy, then talk with them, correct them, express your dissatisfaction with their departure from Biblical truth; tell them that they are wrong and pray for their transformation.

The Truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is on the line.

The New York Times article by Alan Feuer entitled “Fears of White People Losing Out Permeates Capitol Rioters Towns, Study Finds” explains the details [all emphasis is mine]:

Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic white population were the most likely to be homes to people who stormed the Capitol.

Jason Andrew for The New York Times

When the political scientist Robert Pape began studying the issues that motivated the 380 or so people arrested in connection with the attack against the Capitol on Jan. 6, he expected to find that the rioters were driven to violence by the lingering effects of the 2008 Great Recession.

But instead he found something very different: Most of the people who took part in the assault came from places, his polling and demographic data showed, that were awash in fears that the rights of minorities and immigrants were crowding out the rights of white people in American politics and culture.

If Mr. Pape’s initial conclusions — published on Tuesday in The Washington Post — hold true, they would suggest that the Capitol attack has historical echoes reaching back to before the Civil War, he said in an interview over the weekend. In the shorter term, he added, the study would appear to connect Jan. 6 not only to the once-fringe right-wing theory called the Great Replacement, which holds that minorities and immigrants are seeking to take over the country, but also to events like the far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 where crowds of white men marched with torches chanting, “Jews will not replace us!”

“If you look back in history, there has always been a series of far-right extremist movements responding to new waves of immigration to the United States or to movements for civil rights by minority groups,” Mr. Pape said. “You see a common pattern in the Capitol insurrectionists. They are mainly middle-class to upper-middle-class whites who are worried that, as social changes occur around them, they will see a decline in their status in the future.”

One fact stood out in Mr. Pape’s study, conducted with the help of researchers at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, a think tank he runs at the University of Chicago. Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic white population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists. This finding held true, Mr. Pape determined, even when controlling for population size, distance to Washington, unemployment rate and urban or rural location.

Law enforcement officials have said 800 to 1,000 people entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, and prosecutors have spent the past three months tracking down many of them in what they have described as one of the largest criminal investigations in U.S. history. In recent court filings, the government has hinted that more than 400 people may ultimately face charges, including illegal entry, assault of police officers and the obstruction of the official business of Congress.

In his study, Mr. Pape determined that only about 10 percent of those charged were members of established far-right organizations like the Oath Keepers militia or the nationalist extremist group the Proud Boys. But unlike other analysts who have made similar findings, Mr. Pape has argued that the remaining 90 percent of the “ordinary” rioters are part of a still congealing mass movement on the right that has shown itself willing to put “violence at its core.”

Other mass movements have emerged, he said, in response to large-scale cultural change. In the 1840s and ’50s, for example, the Know Nothing Party, a group of nativist Protestants, was formed in response to huge waves of largely Irish Catholic immigration to the country. After World War I, he added, the Ku Klux Klan experienced a revival prompted in part by the arrival of Italians and the first stirrings of the so-called Great Migration of Black Americans from the rural South to the industrialized North.

In an effort to determine why the mob that formed on Jan. 6 turned violent, Mr. Pape compared events that day with two previous pro-Trump rallies in Washington, on Nov. 14 and Dec. 12. While police records show some indications of street fighting after the first two gatherings, Mr. Pape said, the number of arrests were fewer and the charges less serious than on Jan. 6. The records also show that those arrested in November and December largely lived within an hour of Washington while most of those arrested in January came from considerably farther away.

The difference at the rallies was former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Pape said. Mr. Trump promoted the Jan. 6 rally in advance, saying it would be “wild” and driving up attendance, Mr. Pape said. He then encouraged the mob to march on the Capitol in an effort to “show strength.”

Mr. Pape said he worried that a similar mob could be summoned again by a leader like Mr. Trump. After all, he suggested, as the country continues moving toward becoming a majority-minority nation and right-wing media outlets continue to stoke fear about the Great Replacement, the racial and cultural anxieties that lay beneath the riot at the Capitol are not going away.

“If all of this is really rooted in the politics of social change, then we have to realize that it’s not going to be solved — or solved alone — by law enforcement agencies,” Mr. Pape said. “This is political violence, not just ordinary criminal violence, and it is going to require both additional information and a strategic approach.”

Mr. Pape, whose career had mostly been focused on international terrorism, used that approach after the Sept. 11 attacks when he created a database of suicide bombers from around the world. His research led to a remarkable discovery: Most of the bombers were secular, not religious, and had killed themselves not out of zealotry, but rather in response to military occupations.

American officials eventually used the findings to persuade some Sunnis in Iraq to break with their religious allies and join the United States in a nationalist movement known as the Anbar Awakening.

Recalling his early work with suicide bombers, Mr. Pape suggested that the country’s understanding of what happened on Jan. 6 was only starting to take shape, much like its understanding of international terrorism slowly grew after Sept. 11.

“We really still are at the beginning stages,” he said.

Evangelicals Must Stop Cherry-Picking Their “Prolife” Arguments

I am currently reading a good book by Daniel K. Williams entitled The Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship (Eerdmans, 2021).

I suspect that I will eventually post a more thorough review of this work at some point in the future. But given my recent encounters with several books and articles examining the lustful, nationalistic ties that have long bound American Christianity to the nation’s callous, military bloodletting around the world, I wanted to write a short note on Dr. Williams’ defense of the pro-life movement.

Williams looks at four political issues that tend to divide Americans along party lines: abortion, marriage and sexuality, race, and wealth and poverty.

His goal is to show that all four of these concerns should equally animate all Christians into a bipartisan – or better yet, nonpartisan – alliance that would work together towards a wholistic “politics of the cross.”

If you have read my book, I Pledge Allegiance, you won’t be surprised to learn that I couldn’t help but notice that war and peace (unsurprisingly) don’t make it onto Dr. Williams’ list of important Christian political issues.

This absence was underscored as I read his biblical/theological arguments against abortion. He naturally begins with the early Christian apologists and church fathers who condemned abortion in the ancient world. Their arguments are important and powerful, laying the groundwork for Christianity’s longstanding opposition to abortion. [This point requires elaboration, but I won’t do that here.]

However, these same ancient, Christian leaders used similar arguments to oppose all Christian involvement with violence, warfare, and the military. The same men who condemned abortion and defended unborn children were equally adamant in insisting that all Christians must be pacifists who condemned all forms of violence.

Unfortunately, Dr. Williams continues the evangelical habit of cherry-picking the “prolife” evidence.

For the early Christians, the reasons we must oppose abortion (while simultaneously providing all the supportive social services required by a newborn) are the same reasons we must oppose war and refuse to be involved in violence.

You can’t claim one part of the argument while denying the other.

Ron Sider has produced an excellent book on this subject, gathering all the ancient evidence together for the modern reader. It’s called The Early Church on Killing: A Comprehensive Sourcebook on War, Abortion, and Capital Punishment (Baker Academic, 2012). It’s well worth reading.

So, if abortion is wrong, all violence and warfare are wrong, too. Yet, precious few Christians in either the Republican or the Democratic (yes, that is the proper adjective) party openly advocate for a national “peace/antiwar” policy in this country.

And that’s a tragedy.

For, if you believe that abortion-providers deserve to be picketed and closed down, then so do military bases, nuclear weapons facilities, war colleges, ROTC programs, weapons manufacturers, and the Pentagon.

As the earliest Christian teachers and apologists all insisted, IF Christians should not get abortions, THEN neither should they join the military, serve in the police force, or work in the judiciary, because all these roles demand an association with or the execution of violence and dehumanization.

We can’t cherry-pick the Biblical evidence, folks.

America’s Warmongering Civil Religion

An American “Christian” flag

Perhaps the most grotesque feature of American civil religion is its  manipulation of Christian faith to fit the role of pious cheerleader for this nation’s militaristic imperialism throughout the world.

Of course, this requires the collusion of our religious leaders — I hesitate to call them “Christian” — who applaud the “sacrifice” of our noble troops, willing “to give their lives for the nation.”

You can find my critique of civil religion, nationalism, and the collusion of American evangelicalism with our militaristic, national idolatry in my book, I Pledge Allegiance: A Believer’s Guide to Kingdom Citizenship in 21st Century America (Eerdmans, 2018).

More recently, Dr. Kelly Denton-Borhaug, a professor of religious studies at Moravian College outside Philadelphia, has written a book entitled, And Then Your Soul Is Gone: Moral Injury and US War-Culture.  Her book explores the ways in which Christian vocabulary is used to justify, and to valorize, America’s endless wars.

She further explores the long-term damage of “moral injury” ravaging the consciences of soldiers who come home from the battleground.

Below is an excerpt of an interview with Dr. Denton-Borhaug conducted by Robert Scheer and Scheer Post. The interview transcript is titled, “Christianity is the Linchpin in America’s War Machine,” a title that ought to make every Christian gag. [All emphasis mine.]

RS: Well, really what you’re talking about is a sickness, a profound cultural sickness that has a unique, dare I say American-exceptional variant in its relation to Christianity, modern Christianity, that has inflicted great pain not only on the world–I shouldn’t say “not only”–and on innocent civilians throughout the world, but on the warriors that are summoned or encouraged or paid–mercenaries–to go out and do this. And you’re saying there’s a fundamental connection as well as a contradiction between this nation’s claim to be influenced by notions of a deity and an almighty and accountability in a religious sense, and the barbarism–the barbarism that has consumed our relation to the world.

KDB: That’s absolutely right, and you know, part of the–I’m really glad that you used the word “contradiction,” because contradictions abound in this landscape. And part of the contradiction has to do with the way that U.S. Americans tend to understand ourselves, and especially our system of government, with respect to religion. So we like to think that we have these nice and comfortable and straightforward separations between the ways that we operate in the world politically and whatever religious commitments we may have. We like to think that we have successfully relegated those kinds of commitments to the private sphere. But what I have come to understand is that that, in fact, is not true at all. There’s a tremendous amount of interplay that goes on between those supposedly private commitments and then the way that we understand and act within these much larger political realities.

So of course, a lot of this falls under the heading of what scholars call civil religion: the way in which religion is intertwined with, and impacts, our systems and our practices and our rituals of civil government. But I think we have tended to think that all of this is very conscious and under control, and thoughtfully executed. And my work really exhibited to me that there is this sort of deep emotional, rather subconscious and very destructive subterranean stream of religious violence that impacts the ways that we think about war, and actually that acts also as a very strong mechanism of concealment and mystification. So we tend not to see these things; we tend not to be aware of them. And simultaneously, we’re really deeply impacted by them. We approach the realities of war and militarization in the United States as a kind of sacred reality.

But, again, even as I say that, when these subterranean streams are lifted to the surface, because they have become sacred in so many people’s ways of thinking, it can be very disconcerting to hear them named as such. And it can raise a lot of uncomfortable feelings, and even feelings of anger, on the part of many people.

RS: Well, but your basic research is with the one set of victims. I mean, we should never forget that bombing weddings with drones creates, in a traditional sense, real victims out there that we sort of discard; we think of war as a video game now, and we just blow people up all over, and we’ve been doing it, whether it was shock and awe and the great display of military power, or what we do mindlessly, or our president does almost every day, whether it’s Biden or Trump. But you’ve focused on the warriors.

KDB: Right.

Read or listen to the entire interview here.

NEME Interview About My Forthcoming Book About Christian Zionism

My friends at the Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East (NEME) interviewed me last month about my book, Like Birds in a Cage: Christian Zionism’s Collusion in the Oppression of the Palestinian People (Cascade, 2021).

I am told the book will be available for purchase around October 1st. I am waiting to hear about the possibility of pre-publication purchases.

My friend, Dr. Bruce Fisk, formerly a New Testament professor at Westmont College in California, asked me a number of questions about the book as well as my experiences living in Palestinian Occupied Territory of the West Bank.

The interview is about 1 hour long. I hope you will take the time to watch and learn more about the truth of Israel as an apartheid state.

Also, feel free to share the video’s web link with your friends. (I tried to download the video onto this post, but it is too large.)

Then buy my book and share its message with as many Christian Zionist friends as possible. The majority of the American evangelical church needs to learn the truth about Israel-Palestine.

I am also eager to speak with any groups interested in listening, whether large or small.  Please contact me for possible speaking engagements on the subjects covered in my book.  Thanks.