Renee Good and Alex Pretti were caregivers, described by friends and family as compassionate and kind, and both were killed in the midst of caring for their neighbors. Renee had just dropped off her 6-year-old at school and her final words, in the midst of protesting the actions of ICE, was to give comfort to those who killed her: “I am not mad at you.” Alex’s last words were for a woman who had been pepper sprayed, “Are you okay, are you okay?” He put himself between the woman and her assailants, perhaps the natural response of an ICU nurse. Pictures of Alex helping veterans and offering comfort to patients, reminded me of the ICU nurse who cared for me after having heart problems. She seemed angelic, and Alex was clearly also gifted with compassion. Both Alex and Renee spent their lives caring, until there was no more to give.
The wanton slaughter of these two precious lives is obvious for all to see, such that the mystery is why some are blind to the reality. Beyond the obvious evil of the killings are the slanderous responses, betraying the same blindness. The claims that “they had it coming,” before and after the fact, are made of the same stuff. Clearly the killers are blind, but so too those unable to see that shooting a mother in the face or a man in the back ten times, is not justifiable. Blindness to slaughter of the good and beautiful is exposed for what it is at the cross, however, recognizing this “evil” means exposing the lie of the justifications, the law and order that killed Christ.
There are three levels of “legal justification” surrounding the murders, and accompanying each level is a more profound evil.
The Universal Law in Which the Evil Suffer and the Good Prosper
The main law justifying the killing is on the order of the unwritten law of the friends of Job, presuming “he had it coming,” otherwise it would not have happened. The instinctual presumption that the guilty suffer preserves from the troubling reality. We can identify with the “good” and not worry about the contamination involved in identifying with the “guilty.” In this absolute legalism, suffering is already guilt. The pervasiveness of this understanding struck me, when a local man in our little town was killed by the police and the wife of a man who is now a Republican legislator, immediately pronounced him guilty. The world is divided into the guilty and the innocent and those who are poor, black, brown, foreign, or immigrants, suffer because they probably deserve it.
The law “justifying” the killings and deployed in the form of ICE agents, is aimed at weeding out illegals, foreigners, and immigrants, and has been mainly leveled at people of color. “These people” are not protected by this instinctual law, but are its living proof. Justification is inscribed in the flesh of those being punished and those who do the punishing. Those white citizens who might empathize or even identify with the suffering have placed themselves outside of this unwritten law and are guilty by association. “Clearly, they had it coming.”
This law may float free of religion or it may be codified as part of a religious understanding. It may be called karma, nature, reaping what you sow, or lex talionis, but it is the misunderstood law written on the heart which stands behind many forms of “natural” and religious law.
The Christianized Version of the Universal Law
Ironically, Christians may be the most confused about where Christ stands in regard to the law, presuming that he died to uphold it rather than to expose its deadly nature. Rather than mere blindness, inherited from the universal law on the order of the friends of Job or the aggravated blindness of the scribes and Pharisees, some suffer from a doubly confounded blindness in assigning Jesus’ death to upholding the law that killed him. Penal substitution presumes God does the killing, and the killers are his instruments, assigned to play their various roles so as to achieve an atoning payment. There is a Christianity blinded to the evil which put Christ on the cross, assigning it to God, and it is this form of the religion that confuses God with the victimizers.
Here the Christian friends of Job can quote Romans 13 (in isolation from chapter 12), along with German Christians serving Hitler, justifying the murder of all who oppose the Leader. In this understanding Caesar, the President, the police, the soldiers, or ICE, cannot break the law as they are the law. They embody the law and serve as its instruments. These Christians imagine that their allegiance to Empire and their allegiance to God are one and the same and the presumption is that God put Trump, or Putin, or Caesar in power. The notion is that God ordains specific governments to accomplish his will and this is in line with his redemptive strategy in and through the Church, so that the ordination of Christ and the Church is on a continuum with God’s use of state and law.
In this understanding, Roman law and God’s law are united to bring about the death of Jesus, so that he might pay the penalty of the law. God is working out his providential intent to punish Jesus under the law so that he might be punished for all. Rome, with its god-Caesar is not being judged, nor is Israel and its leaders who bow down to Caesar. None are called to repentance, but Israel’s and Rome’s justice are perfectly adequate for God’s purposes. After all, Rome and the Church will unite under Emperor Constantine and this Constantinian Christianity imagines that human law, justice, and government, are in accord with God’s purposes in Christ. In this understanding the economy of salvation works with the economy of human cultures and nations so that salvation comes through Constantinian Rome or Christian America.
People fleeing violence and poverty are subjected to a law, which anyone vaguely familiar with the teaching of Jesus would seem to condemn as evil. Yet, it is Christians, steeped in a religion they link to Jesus, that are blinded to the forces which killed Jesus, which slaughtered Renee and Alex, which continues to kill Palestinians, and which can be linked to a catalog of genocidal violence.
This may seem as close to radical evil as possible, but something even worse is unfolding.
A Scapegoating Christianity
There is an elite who recognize the function of the law in creating scapegoats, who recognize Jesus’ exposure of the scapegoating mechanism, and rather than eschew violence, they are taking control by deploying new levels of violence. The oligarchs backing Donald Trump, and who have also shaped the career of JD Vance, recognize that their accumulation of wealth and power depend upon heightened fear, continued willingness of the masses to submit to authoritarian rule, and ultimately the suspension of democratic society, and several identify as Christians.
The Republican party has a long history of weaponizing Christianity, so as to manipulate the shift that is unfolding. Where I am located, in rural Missouri, thirty or so years ago there was next to no Republican presence, while today the opposite is the case. The fusion of the Republican party with evangelical religion runs from Ronald Reagan, Pat Robertson, Newt Gingrich, and George W. Bush, but in Trump and company it has taken a more virulent form, with its heightened rhetoric and action against immigrants, people of color, and notions of civilizational war. Establishing or “recovering” a Christian civilization is the well-known stance of Steve Bannon (the ideologue originally behind Donald Trump), who maintains that “we” in the West must affirm our Christian identity or be overrun by dangerous outsiders who will impose a different identity upon us.[1]
Peter Thiel, arguably the key ideologue among the cohort of oligarchs surrounding Trump (including his fellow South African, Elon Musk), writes, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”[2] He remains committed to the “Christian faith” but stands “against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual.” Thiel hopes to use technology, so-called “transhumanism,” to escape death. He plans to create a new order with its own currency, its own social order, and its own interplanetary colonies and is taking active steps to bring this about. He has not only funded Vance but Curtis Yarvin, the architect of “neocameralism,” advocating replacing “democracy with corporate governance, citizens with customers, democratic deliberation with algorithmic optimization.” His RAGE doctrine aims to “Retire All Government Employees”—and Musk’s DOGE (Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency) began systematically purging civil servants following this blueprint.[3]
Mike Brock lists the various means Thiel is deploying, but key to the death of Alex and Renee are his plans for ICE. As Brock notes, “Palantir’s ICE integration means deportation agents use Thiel’s surveillance software for mass raids—over $248 million in documented contracts since 2011, including systems that track Americans’ movements, associations, and communications. This isn’t law enforcement technology but population management infrastructure that makes democratic resistance impossible by eliminating the privacy necessary for organizing collective action.”[4] In Thiel’s overt deployment of scapegoating, some must die that a few (himself) will be saved. In one interview, when asked whether humanity should continue, he was unclear if this was his goal.[5] The overt weaponizing of the power he finds exposed in Christianity (through the work of René Girard), uses the evil power exposed by the crucified, and seeks to manipulate it for his personal enrichment and self-aggrandizement.
The Exposure of the Lie of Evil
Jesus exposed the lie that God is not with those on crosses, those who suffer, the poor, immigrants and the outcast. God does not wield power through death and suffering but in Christ has defeated this power. He exposes the blindness of those who cannot recognize the innocent victim. In the words of the Psalmist quoted by Jesus, “They hated me for no reason” (Jn. 15:25; Ps. 35:19). They demonize and criminalize Jesus, who submits himself to their blindness as, “These words of Scripture have to be fulfilled in me ‘He let himself be taken for a criminal’” (Luke 22:37; Mark 15:28). As with every scapegoat, Christ is the perceived source of the problem and he is killed to protect the law and the nation. He pronounced his killers blind, both before and from the cross. These blind guides cannot see they are crucifying the Lord of Glory because their vision is distorted by the law, which separates good from evil, Jew from Gentile, clean from unclean, and ultimately God’s people from his enemies. They imagine God is on the side of the victimizers, the crucifiers, those wielding the law and he is against all who fall outside the law.
This blindness is compounded by those who pervert Christianity and see scapegoating sacrifice as God’s instrument of salvation. They fail to benefit from Jesus’ exposure of the lie and due to their misconstrual, there is no rescue available. But there is something worse than this failed form of the faith: those who recognize Jesus was scapegoated, that he exposed and defeated this mechanism, but instead of implementing his defeat of evil they would manipulate it so as to control the world enslaved by its power. They are worse than blind, in that they would use their insight to manipulate the blind. Renee Good and Alex Pretti are victims of this engineered blindness, on display not only in their killers but in those blind to their murder.
[1] See my piece, “Have the Dark Ages Returned?”
[2] He explains in “The Education of a Libertarian” https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/
[3] Mike Brock, From the website “Notes From the Circus,” https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-oligarchs-bible-how-peter-thiel
[4] Ibid.
[5]https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?fr=mcafee&p=thiel+interview+questioning+if+humanity+should+continue&type=E210US105G91970#id=1&vid=ba10f2404febf524085599d5fd85c897&action=click