justice – Forging Ploughshares

What Louie Giglio Doesn’t Get in his Inadvertent Confession and Subsequent Apology: The Form is the Substance–In Other Words, “No, I think you meant it.”

When you’ve predicated your whole approach to church and the Gospel on making the cross look attractive, then you’ve given up any moral authority you had to acknowledge and speak to its inherent injustice. When you can’t speak to the injustice of the cross and our call to bear it because it’s not attractive, then you can also no longer identify with others on their own crosses, such as brown people suffering systemic injustice and violence, without attempting to make that palatable as well.

When it comes to churches, Atlanta is a fascinating place. On the one hand, you can visit the old Ebenezer Baptist church and sit before the pulpit that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. cut his preaching teeth behind. I’ve sat in that building and felt the chills of its history and choked on the lump in my throat. You can also find the small Berea Mennonite church that operates a farm in a neighborhood deep in East Atlanta. I have worshiped with those saints as well. And, of course, as with any town there are as many myriad other churches per capita as one might expect.

What I hadn’t prepared myself for before I got to Atlanta was the immense popularity of the “megachurch.” The place is loaded with them. In a galactic analogy, it’s like a stellar nursery of red giant stars, but sick ones, always threatening to collapse in on themselves under the weight of their own structures into theological black holes of inanity…always needing to “attract more ‘butts in the seats’” (as a former colleague invested heavily in “church growth” once so eloquently put it when telling me how to solve all the problems at my church) in order to sustain themselves.

There are white megachurches (always systematically planted in affluent, up-and-coming regions) and black megachurches. Among both black and white megachurches, there are many who are unabashedly prosperity-oriented, and others denominationally structured. And there are megachurches for every denomination, some having grown up organically, often with more traditional architecture, their appearances reflecting the life cycle of their surroundings.

Others were clearly planted using the “church growth” model, having been strategically built, facilitated, and marketed based on careful market and consumer research. This model, having been cursed to us by Donald McGavran and his disciples, has been elaborated on more fully by Paul Axton. At its heart is a narcissistic, consumer-driven ideology, founded on growth capitalism, and modeled after the modern corporate CEO structure. It’s intentionally designed to give religious consumers the “worship experience” they want in a competitive religious market. Customer service can get those butts in the seats. Corporate America can show us how.

I remember being shocked and disturbed the first time I saw a commercial for a church. Worse yet, I remember after an experience we had where we were treated poorly in an application process, telling another minister how hurt we were and seeking solace. I was mortified by his response. “Yeah, we did that to an applicant once. I feel bad about it. I guess we need to spend more time looking to the business world to figure out how to treat people.”

I’m not making that up. A minister of an organization claiming to follow (at the very least) the greatest ethical teacher in the history of the world recommended turning to greedy corporations to learn how we ought to treat each other in the church. Failure.

These megachurches are all over the place, though, mammoth structures where throngs get whatever religious fix they prefer in front of the shiny lights and smoke machines and volunteer baristas, while three-chord guitar players lead them in emo-style, stupid-redundant, romance ballads to a God who calls them only to be more comfortable and fulfilled, while their kids jump on trampolines and play on McDonald’s playland gym sets. And somehow they always leave more biblically illiterate than they entered.

It’s why you can be a part of a “large church” doing some “good things” and not understand that Jesus wants you to care about black people being murdered.

Enter Louie Giglio, white evangelical preacher at the enormous Passion City Church, another big-box, multi-location “Six Flags over Jesus” (seriously, check out the link) that markets itself as an “inner city” church. In the midst of what may be the most profoundly important moment for racial justice since the civil rights era, when after the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks and countless others, a slumbering white giant is finally starting to wake up and feel the pain of their “red and yellow and black” brothers and sisters and say, “We’ve HAD it!” and protests are finally becoming harder to ignore, and change may finally be on the horizon again–when the time to stand with our brown brothers and sisters and let them speak and be counted with them came, Louie decided to step in.

You can’t hardly blame him. In a moment with so much attention, it’s hard to pass up the opportunity to capture some of that lime-light. My friend posted an ad for their upcoming Sunday “panel discussion”. Giglio, the Christian rapper Lacrae, and (of all people) Dan Cathy (white, fabulously privileged CEO of Chic-Fil-A) were going to sit with Bernice King (daughter of MLK and head of the King Center), who later (thank Christ) withdrew from the panel.

My conversation with my friend did not go well. The panel went worse. At one point Giglio, free-riffing in front of the only black person on the stage revealed that, in his private conversations with Cathy (a wealthy, white, capitalist) they’ve often lamented that the term “white privilege” (being distasteful to privileged white people) is met with such resistance. Why not call it “white blessing” so they can more readily accept that, although slavery and racism have been a blessing, they were still kind of unfair.

He might as well have said, “I bet we could sell that.”

Giglio, when the issue rightfully exploded on him, has issued an apology. But that damage is done. He said it because he thought it. But I’m glad he said it because it revealed something ugly about his version of the church.

Giglio, on the surface of the comment, is talking about “the cross.” He wants to call people to bear the cross.” But the cross…it’s hard. And in a church culture (like the church growth movement) where the goal has always been to make Christianity attractive in order to attract people to it, one’s goal in preaching the cross is going to HAVE to mean making the cross palatable. But the cross is the cross. “Palatable” isn’t the way it works.

Again, the church growth philosophy and the megachurches are predicated on making Christianity attractive. The problem with the inevitable rebuttal one always hears “But what’s wrong with smoke machines and drum solos” is that it is based on the idea that the form of the message is different from the substance of the message. It’s predicated on the idea that it doesn’t matter how we say it, it only matters that we say it. But the question is, “what is ‘it’ that we’re trying to say?”. Is it true that the form of our lives is different than its content?

What Bruce Gorman’s work can help us see is that Christianity was never supposed to be a message that is divorced from its form. It’s not just a set of belief statements that can be repeated like magic. It’s not just a set of trite religious rituals to be completed to sate a bloodthirsty deity. It’s none of that.

What it is is a cruciform lifestyle of following Jesus. This means that (contrary to well-meaning folks who try to overemphasize following over the content of our faith) what we believe (substance) is vitally important but only because what we believe is what we live (form). It is both form and substance because the form is the substance. When Jesus said “pick up your cross and follow” he wasn’t saying “yeah it might get hard sometimes if you believe in me.” He was saying, “This is what it is like to be my disciple. Come and die with me.”

This means that things like wealth and comfort and self-indulgence and smoke machines and drum solos (though nice at a rock concert) are not worship of the God who submitted to the cross. It means that consumerism and growth capitalism, both of which are contributors to and sustainers of things like injustice and racism and exploitation are absolutely antithetical to the cross. You can’t do the cross AND base your church on a theme park. Once you turn to capitalism (Dan Cathy?) for the answers, you lose the moral authority to talk about things like systemic racism.

Let me take that further: when you’ve predicated your whole approach to church and the Gospel on making the cross look attractive, then you’ve given up any moral authority you had to acknowledge and speak to its inherent injustice. When you can’t speak to the injustice of the cross and our call to bear it because it’s not attractive, then you can also no longer identify with others on their own crosses, such as brown people suffering systemic injustice and violence, without attempting to make that palatable as well.

I used to ask my students: how do you challenge people’s idolatry when you’re using it to attract them to the cross? You can’t. And what Giglio revealed in his Freudian slip was the failure of church growth: that it makes the cross incomprehensible.

If Giglio was concerned with calling people to the cross instead of attracting them to a show, he wouldn’t need to call white privilege something else or try to turn slavery into “blessing” so that his rich white patrons could swallow the idea. If he called people to the cross, then his white members would understand that they’re supposed to be willing to suffer and die with their brown brothers and sisters. Because if you’re willing to die for brown brothers and sisters, then at the very least you’ll be able to bear the hurt of the notion that you have it better than them and that systemic racism and slavery were just bad–with no qualifiers.

But telling rich white Atlantans that the culture that works so well for them is inherently evil is not attractive. The cross isn’t attractive. And that’s why guys like Giglio and others such as Andy Stanley, who may mean well and may even stumble on a nugget of truth every now and then, are ultimately not doing the Gospel. They’re selling a religion that is a different form than Christianity.

And the form is the substance.

When I Am 64 – Life’s Lesson

Today, on my birthday, Jason and I had a long discussion about the nature of salvation – sort of a meaning of life lesson. I must admit that David Bentley Hart’s universalism makes perfect sense at one level and at another seems to empty the world, humanity, and the particulars of our individual history of meaning. Jason, my earth bound, Wendell Berry loving, poetry making friend, sent me back to a strange reminiscence. I was relating the simple story of Wacky Cake, my traditional birthday cake, and its meaning (which I warned him I was making up). Then he began to question if my mother really was a Mississippi shrimp boat captain and I realized the key element of our discussion is how we see meaning woven into our own lives and history.

At birth, like baby Moses, they put me in a Singer Sewing Machine lid as we floated out of Kansas City, stopping for a time at a trailer court on Dixie Highway in Louisville Kentucky. A few blocks away a missionary family, the Maxey’s from Japan, kept a small house for furloughs and Pauline Maxey gave birth to my wife. Faith and I must have crossed paths at the local Safeway, where I would have nodded and cooed, “I will be back.” Our ancestors had sailed from Maxey and Harlaxton, only a few miles apart in England, to converge in both Virginia and Kentucky and our lives would eventually merge to produce an ongoing stream.

But my father had called the trip a “vacation” and a trailer court along Dixie Highway did not fit the bill. We moved on to Biloxi Mississippi to the Ever Breeze trailer court where Mama ran a shrimp boat and Dad headed back north while we vacationed – the next four years. Hinkle, a family friend, owned a cypress shrimp trawler named “Shirley,” built in 1928 and requiring three crew members captained by my mother. They hired a young man out of the Air Force, Jim Slayton, who could nurse the engine along, and a very religious first mate, Joe Dee, whom my father said devoutly made the sign of the cross on all important occasions – according to Mom he must have “double crossed” when stealing the days catch and tools . High winds beached the Shirley just out of Gulf Port. My memory is of hard rain beating down on a flimsy trailer roof along the wind-swept coast. Luckily, the hurricane of 59 sank the Shirley before Joe Dee could completely bankrupt the family and before my mother was lost at sea.

So, we headed to Page, Arizona where my father would build the Glen Canyon Dam (it was not clear to me if he required help). We were leaving the “gween gwass” of Mississippi for a miserable desolation, and my only consolation, as I explained to my mother, would be in catching a small Indian. Dad wore a hardhat and carried a metal lunch pail with a thermos, so as to build the dam. My first memory of a present, I presume it was my fifth birthday, was a miniature pail with a miniature thermos, my Rosebud. Objects invested with a weight of meaning, a magic C. S. Lewis describes in his boyhood garden contained in a dish, from which Narnia would spring.

At 7 I acquired a beagle who was my own hound of heaven. My father was running for mayor, promising to close down all gambling in Parsons Kansas and promising to rid the town of its arch villain, Ed Thompson. Ed was a political operative all over Kansas and my father was in the basement printing off anti-Ed literature when huge Ed Thompson knocked on our door at midnight, and my father at about 5 feet 4 inches confronted the meanest man in Kansas. Ed followed my father to the basement and helped create more anti-Ed Thompson literature and helped run Dad’s campaign, which my father won.

Much later, my father and I met Ed downtown, and I remember feeling important that I was in on this special meeting, which was about Mr. Magee, Ed’s beagle. For some reason Mr. Magee wanted to abandon political life with Ed, and required a country home. Ed and I walked with Mr. Magee and I noticed the dog was eating grass and Ed explained the medicinal effects of grass. Meeting Ed and his dog became a warm memory – a living sort of magic.

Mr. Magee, who would politely wipe his feet when coming inside and could open his own cans of dog food, became the center of my life. I remember a long morning in which we had a rabbit trapped in a pipe and I was trying to slide the rabbit my way to rescue him from the jaws of death at the other end of the pipe. After hours of struggle I grabbed the rabbit by the ears and took him home as a pet – but something happened that morning. Part of it was that Mr. Magee must have gotten the point, as he later gingerly carried a baby rabbit unharmed and set it at my feet. The patterns of memory I have with this dog are tinged with a deep spiritual sensibility. My first great trauma in life and my first religious experience, prayer, occurred when Mr. Magee disappeared.

Could it be that this little piece of history, trivial, nearly nonsensical, bears meaning? Isn’t the world and our passage through it somehow enchanted? Is there one point where we can say, here eternity intersected time, so that this moment is weighted forever as part of the life of God and it now pervades all things. If the cross, the life of Christ, the resurrection, is such a moment in time, then why not a similar significance interwoven throughout life. The old woman hidden behind a mound of plastic flowers whom I have come to help make artificial flowers at age 7. Her small kindnesses, our quiet conversation, the sheer delight of my first ice cream sandwich, my salary. Hours and days spent alone on the Texas prairie; are they empty or lost or woven into my eternity.

What weight does any history bear and what dignity? Aren’t we to be about creating, constructing, weaving eternity throughout the moments of time? We are not simply the passive recipients of the divine future presence, but are to be conduits of eternal purpose as co-creators here and now. The great danger in notions of post-mortem universal correction is that creations purpose is denied its eternal weight – its intersection with the divine worked out in the history of the cross and all history. Justice will amount to nothing. None of it will have mattered one way or another. The devil will be saved according to Origen, and Hitler, Himmler and Stalin are on the same level as Mother Teresa.[1] The world enchanted by eternity, or left un-created, unmade, unfulfilled, is part of the weight borne in the responsibility of Imago Dei.

[1] Clifford Dull in correspondence. See the Patheos article by Geoff Holsclaw https://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2019/10/02/reviewing-david-bentley-hart/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Best+of+Patheos&utm

A Gospel for the Earth and its Creatures

A friend who writes a lot about gender equality admitted that someone once said to him, “Stop worrying about women and concentrate on the gospel!” The assumption, of course, is that whatever one takes to be “the gospel”[i] has nothing to do with whether women are treated as human beings. It’s just about getting your “sins” erased so that you can “go to heaven.” And any time we spend worrying about anything other than getting people to heaven is a distraction.

The problem, of course, is that the actual Gospel[ii] has next to nothing to do with “getting our sins erased so we can go to heaven” and everything to do with the establishment of the Kingdom of God. As the Lord said in his prayer, we seek God’s will on earth as it is in heaven. In other words, being saved from sin means being saved to live differently according to a very different set of values and assumptions. These assumptions are shocking to the world.

The religious dualism that convinces people the Gospel has nothing to say about systems of power, injustice, and oppression is the same one that has convinced many that it also has nothing to do with “economy” or “economics.” I use “economy” here broadly, not just (but including) the concept of money. Economy is bigger than money. It’s about how everyone and everything survives, how resources are used, and how things, creatures, and people are taken care of.

It’s no coincidence that after the Pentecost event and the establishment of the church in Acts 2, the first description of what the church did included worship, prayer, teaching, and the establishment of an alternative economy within the body that looked very different from the power-driven, exploitative, military-checked capitalism of the Roman empire—an economy which most folks back then assumed to be necessary. It was just the way things worked. There were poor classes and rich classes and slave classes, merchants and consumers, everyone in their place under Caesar.

It’s not much different for 21^st century Christians whose thinking about things like shopping, how much we consume, what we throw away, what we eat and drink, and where we get our food (and whether or not slaves are involved) is captivated by the central assumption that our economic values are “necessary,”[iii] that they require no reflection and are morally and theologically neutral. Shopping is a form of entertainment, food comes in throw-away plastic containers, and what does going to heaven have to do with any of that?

It’s similar to asking the question (even without assuming the answer), “should Christians serve in the military?” Frequently, one is met with, “What do you mean ‘should?’ Of course they do! You want a bunch of pagans fighting your wars?” The lack of ambiguity is simply a forgone conclusion.

When pressed, though, the person asked will, invariably, become irritated and, eventually, offended. And it’s precisely because assumptions formed by the teaching of Jesus about something like violence undermine the assumptions that people use to make sense of the world around them—assumptions which help them feel safe and secure. There simply are “bad people” who want to harm “us” and must be killed. We prepare to kill them if they ever enter our homes and we send our children to kill them overseas on the world scale. That some of them will certainly die doing so is the “sacrifice” that makes our “freedom” noble. To begin to rethink this reality calls into question every other assumption one has about what is true and right. To consider the possibility that it’s wrong is deeply unsettling.

I have found the same incredulity of response when questioning American consumerism. In a conversation a few months ago I made a statement that made sense to me but just bewildered a friend of a friend. I said, “I think we have to learn to stop treating the earth like it’s a source of resources.” I thought it was obvious that I meant we ought to think of the world as more than a source of resources and that those resources are limited and meant to be shared—that we should treat it like it’s our home and like it requires our carefulness. This person, clearly astonished that I could be so naïve, responded, “Where else are we going to get our resources, Mars?” His next comment implied he had serious doubts about my intelligence. I was the guy who was against killing cows but thought hamburger was ok because it “came from the store.”

The exchange would have been humorous if it weren’t so sad. His incredulity was due to his unwillingness (perhaps inability) to consider that the ways and rates at which we consume “resources” (a useful reductionist euphemism for the land, creatures, trees, and people around us) has moral and even theological implications. “Hell, we gotta get our resources from somewhere!” What I was presenting him with was so different and so challenging that it undermined his central assumption about how economies work. It was outside of anything he had ever thought about and was unsettling for him. And he responded the way people do when their core assumptions are called into question.

On a larger scale, one sees this in the phenomenon of climate change denial. For some time, I’ve wondered why the notion that our lifestyle has affected the climate generates such passionate screeds and accusations of “liberal agendas.” Why is clean water a political agenda? Well, it’s actually obvious. When people respond to data suggesting CO₂emissions are harming the earth, it implies that driving cars and clearcut logging are no longer morally neutral things. Pointing to plastic islands in the Pacific and plastic crises in third world or developing countries implies that our greedy, throw-away lifestyle is ruining other people’s lives and we have an obligation to stop.

Think of it this way: the accusation that being concerned about climate change is tantamount to “socialism” is an admission that western rampant capitalism is destroying the planet.[iv] Even Donald Trump understands this. In a recent press conference, when asked whether he still rejected the data on climate change, Trump claimed he wasn’t interested in losing American wealth on dreams and windmills. He understands (I make no claims on how explicitly) that love for our neighbors, plants, creatures, and the earth means changing the values of the economy. And he (explicitly) chooses greed over love. That “believers in Jesus” applaud this reveals just how dualistic and simplistic the faith they’ve been taught actually is.

This is what becomes evident when one examines it in much detail. These economies (I want to speak more broadly than just American capitalism) are inherently violent and unjust. They exploit and use up and destroy without concern for neighbors, fish, trees, and birds. The way we set up and live in our societies are, in fact, extensions of the way we view one another and the world. They are contingent on the minds and imaginations of sinful, greedy, and violent people. They are founded on a lie that we are all individual consumers in a land of unlimited resources, tasked by God to use up as much as we can before we die.

But the Gospel of Jesus presents an alternative. This is the alternative we hope to understand in our class, THE 310-Christian Community in the World. The description is: A study of the Kingdom of God as it restores community and creation. You can listen to Vangie Rodenbeck and me talk about it here. We’ll be reading together one of the greatest novels I’ve ever read, one that puts feet on some of the remarkable values we’ll be discussing, a book called Jayber Crow. If you’re interested in the author, Wendell Berry, the best introduction to his work I’ve ever read is here. For myself, I can tell you that this perspective has affected me deeply, and I’ve written extensively about it. Here is one of my more meaningful attempts.

These are the questions which will be informing the dialogue of our class:

What does peace look like when it comes to how cantankerous people live near and with one another?
How does peaceful community challenge the myth of western individualism?
What values shape Christian thinking about economy and consumption?
Where does our food come from and why does that matter?
What does a life shaped by these values look like?
What does our theology have to say about the land and waters, the plants and creatures that live in these, the value of humans and their relationship to all of it?
What does it mean to exercise the image of God in his creation?
What is the eschatological message of a theology that cares about the earth, its people, plants, and creatures?

In one of my classes years ago, I quoted NT Wright about the irony that some who were strict “creationists” were those who were the least concerned about taking care of “creation.” The immediate (and sincere) response from one of my students was “but what about abortion?”[v] She, like many evangelicals, had been fooled into thinking that abortion is the only contemporary moral issue the Gospel has any application to. That to care about how we treat the earth means we must accept partial-birth abortion. This, however, is a lie which has distracted evangelicals from a myriad of other important issues, manipulated them into blind political allegiance which embroils them in ceaseless culture wars, and is itself antithetical to the Gospel. In my opinion it has even disrupted their ability to think about abortion itself.

The truth is, the Gospel speaks into every part of our lives because it seeks to restore God’s whole created order, and believing this only deepens our understanding of the work of Jesus in this world, of peace and the value of life, and how to live as an alternative Kingdom community within the kingdoms of the world whose values are not the Lord’s…but, more on this when you take the class.

Please join us.

Follow the Link here to register.

[i] I want to point out that I use a lower-case “g” when I’m referring to a gospel that I take to be different from the Gospel.

[ii] See what I mean?

[iii] It may not be clear, but my intent is to use the term “necessary” in an ontological sense—as opposed to “contingent.” “Necessary” here meaning “having itself as the source of its own being.” It just “is” and can’t be helped.

[iv] Politically, this is something that “progressives” like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez readily (if not partially) accept and have attempted to write into their national policies. It is something that, I believe, “conservatives” try to ignore and have attempted to stifle by drawing ridiculous caricatures of these policies. My concern is that conservatives and progressives, each, are too invested in this economy to adequately address the problems. It will require a change of thinking and values to truly present a Kingdom solution.

[v] The truth is, this is a common reaction and one which genuinely mystifies non-conservative folks who struggle to understand how people who can be so adamantly “pro-life” can be so unconcerned about the places we “live” in.

A Christian Reflection on the Antitheses of Voting and Jesus’ Narrow Way

For the first time in almost two decades, I plan to vote in an upcoming election. I am not proud, nor do I plan to wear an “I voted” sticker. Mine is a confessional statement. A repentance.

I am not a “loyal citizen” of the nation, as much as it may offend my close friends. I am, instead, a person torn between my first and only allegiance to a Kingdom not of this world and the sense I have that the powers of this nation have become more ruthlessly cruel than ever in my lifetime.[i]

You must understand that I am not a Democrat. I was raised to be a “conservative,” but I found that my reading of the Gospel changed the way I understood the Christian’s relationship to this world’s politics. As I continued to read Jesus, the apostles, and especially John the Baptist in Matthew’s gospel, I realized that none of them (especially Jesus and John the Baptist) ever encouraged Christians to seek power in this world’s power structures. This was, inherently, anti-Christian (in the sense that it is the opposite of what Christ taught), because the politics of this world are exercised through violence and exploitation of the weak.

Instead, their politic was one which was antithetical to the politics of power and, importantly, their engagement to those politics was purely prophetic. Apparently, we followers of Christ would not change the world by working our way into the structures of powerful kings and rulers (something Jesus was tempted with when he was tempted in the desert), but we would strive to create an alternative Kingdom—God’s Kingdom—in and among the kingdoms of this world. And this Kingdom would grow like yeast in a lump of dough or like weeds in a garden to gradually overturn it.

The politics of the King of our Kingdom are about servanthood, humility, and peacefulness–not power, self-aggrandizement, control, and violence.

Few people who call themselves Christian understand the Gospel this way (the way I think we do at Forging Ploughshares). For this reason, for almost two decades, I have found myself a critic, not just of this world’s power structures, but of people who claim to follow Jesus and who dismiss the message of the gospels as they pursue political power for their chosen party. The apostle Paul (as Paul Axton has articulated so well, so often) would, I think, call this “doing evil that grace may abound.”

In other words, many of my friends and neighbors, people that I preached to for years, I believe have rejected everything Jesus taught in the pursuit of control of the Supreme Court, for the purpose of overturning Roe vs. Wade.

Being willing to oppress and cage children whose families seek asylum from corrupt governments or gang violence and blindly supporting a man who is accused of sexual assault without even caring whether the claim is adequately investigated because you want to “save unborn babies” is engaging in evil in order to do what you take to be good.

Take, for example, evangelical support for the endlessly corrupt Trump administration. Or the insanity of the Republicans in the Senate who have hypocritically broken every one of their own rules and run over any opposition no matter who it hurts or who it decimates for the purposes of taking over the Supreme Court (Lindsay Graham’s shouting “God, you all want power! I hope you never get it!” is, perhaps, the most revealing moment of gas-lit, Freudian slippage I have ever seen on television—Shakespeare could not have written greater irony).

The confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is, perhaps, the ugliest example of this evil in the Trump era so far. Acknowledging that the claims of sexual assault made against Kavanaugh were, as yet, not proven, it was clear to nearly any onlooker that the Republicans were dead set against actually looking to see if they were true (and, admittedly, the Democrats were using these women [and any women who have been sexually assaulted] as well). That said, it was easily apparent that no amount of hash-tagging “MeToo” would affect the steely hearts of a bunch of old rich white men inches away from controlling what they’ve lusted to control for forty years by putting a younger version of themselves in the court—a white man of obvious means with a self-documented history of bullying, carousing, drunkenness, and womanizing privilege.

Meanwhile, the “Christians” I have known in recent years have blindly gone along with it and even defend it—because, they, too, believe in the politics of power over and against the person they call “Lord” on Sundays without realizing that calling Jesus “Lord” means putting oneself at odds with “voting Republican” for the purpose of establishing “good” through power and control. They do not realize that they have aligned themselves with the very wealthy hypocrites James chastises throughout his letter.

Listen, my dear brothers and sisters: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who are exploiting you? Are they not the ones who are dragging you into court? Are they not the ones who are blaspheming the noble name of him to whom you belong? James 2:5-7

How could people whose sacred text contains these words have ever thought that putting the world’s greediest, most lecherous and gluttonous sexual predator in the office of president was a means of doing good? How could they still claim to follow the one who said, “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head?” Simply put—they can’t. And the world recognizes it, even if they don’t. And my neck (along with those of my friends) bears the scars of the people who have tried to behead me for saying so.

That Said…

That said, as much as some of my more progressive friends who are just as angry about the current state of affairs believe that voting “Democrat” this year is our only hope, I don’t. I do plan to vote Democrat, but only because of my guilt that my “brothers and sisters” whose daily church is Fox News have sold their souls to put evil in power. And, at this point, I am convinced (however self-deluded I may be) that my voting is not about taking power as much as it is about checking the power of the most evil group of people I can think of.

I feel like Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrestling with how to confront the political evil of his time.

Today, in response to the Kavanaugh decision, a friend of ours posted a picture of a woman in tears on her Facebook. Like all things Facebook, one has to trust that the story behind the image is true, but this story seemed plausible. It was an image of a woman weeping after the Kavanaugh confirmation because she wondered if women who had been sexually assaulted would ever be believed or even heard.

And, at that moment, as much as my friends are urging one another “Let’s hold them accountable at the polls,” the only words I could muster were “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for Justice,[ii] for they will be filled.” These words, one of the Beatitudes of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, promise that in God’s Kingdom, those who are hungry for what is right will be satisfied because they find what is right and just in Jesus’ Kingdom. This, of course, is not possible in the economy of power of this world’s political structures, no matter which Caesars, kings, or presidents and senators are in power. This is because the politics of power are antithetical to self-emptying politics of the Kingdom, which is the only true way to peace and real justice.

Yet, this is an idea which is so far removed from our imaginations as to be nearly incoherent. And it is precisely because we cannot imagine a life without power that it is so. Or, as Jesus said it, “It’s a small gate and a narrow way to this Kingdom, and few find it,” a statement rarely quoted in today’s Americanized Christianity which sees no tension between Jesus’ call to “let the little children come to me” or “go and sell everything you have, give it to the poor, and come and follow me” and turning asylum-seeking children away or the selfishness of prosperity theology. In a recent conversation in which I argued that VP Mike Pence is not a Christian because of his willingness to participate in and defend kidnapping innocent children whose parents are seeking asylum, I was told, “You’re claiming someone is not a Christian because of their politics? Come on!” Apparently, in this new faith, one can do all manner of anti-Christian evil and as long as one calls it “politics” the call of the Gospel is irrelevant.

My response? “You will know them by their fruit.”

Recently, I had a conversation with a friend which I am hesitant even to share, but which I have concluded indicates that I, also, clearly struggle to find Jesus’ gate. I told him that even as there is so much public pressure to overcome the tradition of the dismissal of women and children who claim to have been sexually abused or assaulted, I, too, in my darkest imagination (even knowing all of the statistics) have worried about being falsely accused of abuse. In my heart of hearts, I know that Donald Trump’s vile fear-mongering speaks to a fear deep in my own heart.

My friend, wisely, admitted that this is a legitimate concern and that there are evil women out there as much as there are evil men who could, in fact, take advantage. But he challenged me back that saying so could only hurt the “movement” which is drawing attention to centuries (millennia) of injustices to women. There is, I suppose, no shortage of modern naiveté in assuming that such injustices can be cured with the proper application of democracy and social revolution. But, as he and I talked, it occurred to me that the thing I’m really afraid of is my own vulnerability. I’m afraid of my own cross.

The truth is, as a man, the socio-political structures in place favor me on this issue, and as a white man, even more so. And I draw some comfort in that, knowing that a person who makes an accusation may not be immediately believed. But that position of privilege puts those who are not in it at a disadvantage—one which is easily exploited by the Trumps and (perhaps) Kavanaughs of this world. And, so, I find myself resistant and worrying that a change in this privilege makes me more vulnerable. As it must.

Acknowledging, for the moment, that this supports my theory that what is behind all politics of power is fear (fear of insecurity, or of death—which John has told us that perfect love has “cast out”) the real idea that I must accept is that, as a follower of Christ, my own vulnerability is simply an accepted reality, or, more precisely, the entire point. To follow the one whom the apostle Paul has said, “emptied himself” of power by becoming a human, a servant, and obedient to death on a cross, means that I, too, must empty myself of power (privilege) and become like him, obedient to death, even death on a cross. Jesus, himself, said, “Pick up your cross and follow” and in another place, “A student is not greater than his teacher,” (meaning, if they did it to me, don’t think they won’t do it to you—be ready).

And this concept is entirely foreign to the pursuit of political power.

This year, I am voting for the first time in nearly two decades. I do not do it lightly, and I do not do it proudly. I do it begrudgingly, having agonized about it for nearly two years. I do it primarily because I recognize the failure of the American churches to articulate the Gospel as Jesus preached it and, in doing so, have adulterated the Gospel of kenosis (self-emptying) for the false gospel of power and nationalism. I do it because, if all Christians believed as I do, Donald Trump and these power-hungry monsters would not be in power, for all Christians would have seen what was obvious—that what we are seeing is the opposite of our faith, an idolatry of epic proportions, and would have been too busy being salt and light to have been taken in by Trump’s angry, hateful rhetoric.

But, as I vote, I will do it with eyes wide open, knowing that what I am participating in is not the Kingdom of Heaven that Matthew so carefully taught us, but the kingdom of this world that is fallen and cruel. I do it knowing that my real hope for this world is that, after we have been crucified with Christ, we, too, will be raised with him on a new earth, one without earthly kings and presidents, one without powers and principalities, one that is just and peaceful.

I do it, repentantly, praying as John the Revelator did, “Amen. Even so. Come, Lord Jesus.”

[i] It is difficult not to hear NT Wright arguing that Jesus’ Kingdom may not be of this world, but it is certainly for it. In this way, Wright argues for participation in the politics of power and violence, something he can hardly avoid as his church structure is tied to the British House of Lords. This I take to be an equivocation and a contradiction to of Wright’s own teaching on Paul’s statement that Jesus has disarmed these powers (a question I once had the privilege of posing to Dr. Wright).

[ii] Most often translated “righteousness,” the word from the root dikaios, is likely better translated “justice” (think hunger and thirst for what is right or just). In the first century, the term “righteousness” carried that sense. In ours, it is more likely to be understood as “personal righteousness” which is often translated to “being cleared of guilt.” Using the word “justice” helps us to see that this was intended to appeal to those who are oppressed and marginalized, I think.