The last couple of weeks, while most of the prurient media has been obsessed with the slow roll-out of salacious and titillating news from the Epstein files, there were other more disturbing, underreported new stories that should concern us in the church. On Monday the US Office of Personnel Management issued a memo allowing federal employees to pray publicly at work, as well as to try to “persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views.”
Last Saturday, the State Department confirmed the appointment of the President’s choice of Darren Beattie to head the US Institute of Peace. The President wants it closed, but in the meanwhile, Darren Beattie. He founded a right-wing website that said January 6, 2021, was an inside job led by Biden’s FBI; he called it a “Fedsurrection.” He’d been fired as a speechwriter in Trump’s first term for attending a white nationalist conference and for a number of incendiary writings, including: “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,” and, “Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.” This is the new leader of the US Institute of Peace.
Third, the Great Replacement Theory says woke leftist elites are conspiring to demographically and culturally replace white Europeans in the West with non-white, especially Muslim peoples through immigration policies and supporting lower white birth rates, a plot to destroy the US by replacing “true Americans” with aliens.
So while the President deports such asylum seekers, immigrants, and other people of color, in a July 5 speech to the right-wing Claremont Institute, Vice President, J. D. Vance declared – listen carefully: “I believe one of the most pressing problems for us to face is to redefine the meaning of American citizenship in the 21st century. Those with ancestors who gave their lives on the pro-slavery side of the Civil War (wink, wink, “Confederates in the South”) have a helluva lot more claim to be American than recent immigrants or others who say they don’t belong.”
Vance dog-whistles MAGA tropes – “legacy Americans,” “heritage Americans” – to signal it’s no longer America’s creed, nor laws, nor America’s values that bind us together, no, instead – note his subtle coded language trying to put a pretty face on this not-so-subtle racism – he says, it’s a common history, culture, language, a common Judeo-Christian faith. Add to this, on the official Department of Homeland Security website, two recent posts, since removed: “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending,” and “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage”; in both, the two “H’s” capitalized, bold, “H H,” code for the MAGA crowd, “Heil Hitler.” It’s not just nationalism, not just Christian nationalism, its white Christian nationalism. By the way, same for Israel, too: not just Zionism, not just Jewish and Christian Zionism, it’s white European Jewish and Christian Zionism.
We get that it’s quantitatively different than ever before in our lifetimes, we know we ought to do something, but it’s like a firehose coming at us every day, and we just don’t know what to do. It’s tempting to withdraw into cocoons of family and church hoping if we ignore it all, somehow it won’t touch us. But we progressives have done that for at least a century and now we’re eating the bitter fruit of our passivity. We’re standing at a moment of truth – for our country, the church, for the gospel of Jesus Christ itself, which we are its custodians. When our children and grandchildren ask us what we did – our generation’s Holocaust, civil rights, Vietnam – how we resisted during this time, how shall we answer them?
As you know, I just returned from two days of intense meetings sponsored by Churches for Middle East Peace at the Carter Center in Atlanta where 120 of us, church leaders, community organizers, other Christian activists gathered – from Palestine, South Africa, the US, Black and Hispanic churches, Europe, over two dozen denominations. There were four working groups – Church speaking to Church, Church speaking to Government, Church speaking to Society, and the Strategic Foresight Group (the group I’ll be working with).
The moment is critical, the need great – starvation as a weapon of war; children walking miles to US-approved food centers gunned down like a carnival shooting gallery; international law flouted; 100s of 1000s deported, displaced, killed. Palestinian pastor Munther Isaac tragically put it: “‘Never again’ has become ‘Yet again.’” And the church passes well-meaning but toothless resolutions, with thoughts and prayers, not wanting to offend too much. No wonder religion is seen as part of the problem. We asked ourselves the question: “How can the followers of Jesus present a unified witness to stand against the genocide happening in Palestine?” “What can we do together to stop the killing of children?”
First, we must begin with repentance. All our prayers and good intentions have not stopped the bloodshed; what we’ve been doing is not working. We’ve failed. Shane Claiborne asked us a simple question: “What if Jesus really meant what he said?” What can we do differently, still based in our Gospel values, but now more effective? Who cares if we win the moral argument if Palestinian men, women, and children, if men, women, children, people of color in our country still die?
Second, the ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank and the MAGA “blood and soil” policies here both rest on a racist, exceptionalist political ideology sanctioned by a racist, exceptionalist theology that worships a racist, exceptionalist deity that rules by fear and guilt. The solution? The same for our Palestinian activism and activism here at home will come from the insights of civil disobedience and non-violent creative resistance practiced and honed by the peace churches for centuries.
Third, this means that in addition to what we do inside our walls – worship, ministry of care, faith formation, more – I say the church must also get out of the church. We too often forget that the church is more than its theology, the good news we have to share gives us a moral, a political voice in society. All those young people who’ve left the church over the last decades, the “nones,” every survey shows they still want the church, they need the church, they respect the church when it speaks with moral clarity. That’s how a Southern Baptist Martin Luther King, Jr. could mobilize 100’s of 1000’s, not because they agreed with his faith, but because his was a clarion call for justice based in universal human values. The church’s Gospel power is its moral voice, then action that moral voice demands. Conservatives get this; we progressives still shy away from embracing it.
Fourth, fundamental to social change is understanding that a ruler’s power depends on the consent of the ruled; withdrawing that consent, the ruled can disrupt, even destroy the power of the ruler. How can we make Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, how can we make the cancerous MAGA agenda costly? Corporations, religious institutions, politicians, individuals, all who profit as purveyors of hate and death, how can we make them pay a price – their financial bottom line, reputation, elections, moral standing in the community – pay a price through peaceful, ethical, non-violent means? We must demonstrate that non-violent creative resistance is at least as effective as violence and armed struggle. Make it too costly for them.
Fifth, private empathy while maintaining public polite respectability costs us nothing. Children dying, 100s a day in Gaza – today, 100 children will die in Gaza, like yesterday and the day before, like tomorrow and the day after – and policies in our own country that will result in 1000s of deaths of children, women, others on the margins, and the most we can muster is empathy and a prayer. Not enough. If Jesus is where the suffering are, if I want to say I follow him, then what foolishness must I bear, what uncomfortable price must I pay in order to stand with those he stands with? Rev. Munther Isaac again: “Our people are not asking, ‘Where is God?’ They’re asking, ‘Where are the people of God?’” I’m not joking, this is what I’ve been asking myself; now I’m asking you.
Finally, Sixth, we must run to where the road is leading not to where we already are. If we consistently make decisions only on where things stand in the present, we’ll always be reactive rather than proactive. We who are in the Gospel-can-really-change-the-world business, we must anticipate the next stages in our culture, our politics, in society, and in the church, too. What will our children need to live as God’s people, and their children, then make our decisions and act based on them, their needs. The Gospel invites us into an open and abundant and free future based not in fear and guilt but in inclusion and compassion for all. Strategic Foresight.
So, for us here, how shall we live the Gospel in our community that’s authentic, real, and effective, too? Good intentions, empathy, purity of heart without costly action won’t bring about the change we seek. Anglican Archbishop of Southern Africa Thabo Makgobe, with whom we’ll be meeting in Cape Town this October, was with us in Atlanta. During apartheid he was arrested, imprisoned, tortured. He said, “They want us to believe they are the writers of the story. As I sat in my jail cell, I came to the realization these people had lost their humanity, and they needed us to help them reclaim it.”
“Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door shall be opened for you,” Jesus said. But then, what will we do with the gift we asked for? What will we do when we find what we’ve been seeking? And will we walk through the door now that it’s been opened for us? That’s the real question, isn’t it? Not simply what are we willing to pray for, but what are we willing to do once it’s been given to us, now that it’s been given to us, now that we’ve been entrusted with the good news the world needs to hear? What are we willing to do? “What if Jesus really meant what he said?”