I normally don’t tell other people’s stories in my own writings as I usually try to stick to my own, but this one is different (and I have permission).
My oldest son spent the vast majority of last night in some state between weeping and wailing. I can’t blame him. He wanted to go to Target.
It’s a macabre ritual that this country goes through with alarming regularity. It had receded from the front page of the newspaper allowing for a short sabbatical for the majority of politicians’ thoughts and prayers. It would seem even mass murderers had quarantined in the midst of a global pandemic, leaving their AR-15s in the closet. But, with the gradual opening up of the country, as something that resembles normal has commenced its long journey, those darker moments in which the soul of the nation gets rended again and again, had returned, as well.
When I was growing up, my favorite books (as I imagine was the case for a great many of my peers) were the Chronicles of Narnia by the writer, CS Lewis. As a child, my father used to read to my brothers and I remember being enchanted by the magical world that Lewis created within their pages.
In both these cases, Greene and Paul failed to follow the precept offered by my grandmother McLeod when I was a small child, the one that demands if you can say nothing nice to someone, don’t say anything at all. Further, they both don’t realize that you can be dead set against something and still be a decent human being towards other human beings. You can vote and speak out against the rights of non-hetero folks all day long and still not demean or dehumanize them. Greene, for her part, said her actions were intended to defend religious liberty and were part of her commitments as a Christian. Herein lies the problem as the religion of Jesus is transformed from a faith of love, grace, and acceptance and into a cudgel with which to bludgeon someone. Bigotry and hate that masquerades as faith is still bigotry and hate and the true followers of Jesus must be able to distinguish between the love Jesus commanded and the hatred espouses by those who would carry Jesus’s name. It is critically important that we in the Church get this part right if we are going to survive the next hundred years.
I don’t remember who slid me the Thich Nhat Hanh book Living Buddha, Living Christ when I was in my second year of seminary. It, like Daniel Quinn’s magnum opus, Ishmael, had spent some time being passed around like contraband by many of the students in the program. I had spent the previous year completely deconstructing every single piece of the faith that I had brought with me the school but in the second year, I began the lifelong Sisyphean task of rebuilding that which I had torn down. In the midst of that endeavor, Hahn’s book opened up an entire new world to me—Eastern religions.
Those on the outside of the church building reaching up in a desperate search for God and those faithful being plunged down into the depths of the unknown reached an equilibrium with one another—hovering somewhere in the middle like scuba divers who have achieved buoyancy above the ocean floor. And here we both dwell. Unified, for the first time in a long time, by the same specter of sickness and mortality that continues to be on display all around us.
The violence enacted on law enforcement, the vitriol directed at all who were present on the Capitol grounds that day (to an extent that, I believe, transcended political party affiliation), the chilling chants of, “Hang Mike Pence,” shouted by the thousands of people who had made the 1.7 mile journey from the “Stop the Steal” rally at the Ellipse in front of the White House to the West Side of the Capitol after they had erected gallows, the voice—one part Jack Torrance from the Kubrick classic “The Shining” and one part nursery rhyme—calling out, “Nancy” as he roamed the halls looking for the Speaker of the house, a scared Sen. Mitt Romney turning and running from an oncoming mob, the graphic layout of the Capitol with moving dots showing just how close the nation came to watching Senators and Representatives being killed on live television, the whole of the facade of the Capitol from the ground to well into the sky being left a smoldering mess all painted a picture of the horror movie quality that consumed that day and that space.
For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.
There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.
― Desmond Tutu
Earlier this week, in a Facebook post, Franklin Graham, a man who has traded on his father’s (famed evangelist, Billy Graham) good name for his entire life, wrote:
Shame, shame on the ten Republicans who joined with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in impeaching President Trump yesterday. After all that he has done for our country, you would turn your back and betray him so quickly…the House Democrats impeached him because they hate him and want to do as much damage as they can. And these ten, from his own party, joined in the feeding frenzy. It makes you wonder what the thirty pieces of silver were that Speaker Pelosi promised for this betrayal..
For the last 40 years or so of American History there has been a commodification of Jesus’s name. This is not to say that this is a new practice. There have always been those who used the name of Jesus to line their own pockets. That being said, in the past 40 years, with the ascension of those in the White Evangelical church to the place of powerful voting bloc, there have been those religious leaders who have used the name of Jesus to somehow sanctify their particulate political beliefs. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, James Dobson, Tony Perkins, and, yes, Franklin Graham all parlayed their clout within the conservative church world to strengthen their political voice and the messiah came along for the ride.
At the same time, other more mainline Christians, most of whom are averse to outward conflict, largely regressed from speaking out on worldly matters. They understood the work of the church to be attending to loftier, spiritual matters while leaving earthly concerns to individual preference. Of course, this served to sever traditional denominations from people’s lived experience. For most congregations, the walls of the sanctuary became impenetrable either from the inside out or vice versa. It also cleared off the national stage for folks like Jerry Falwell to tell folks what Jesus thought about particular candidates for the highest offices in the land. It allowed James Dobson to critique everyone’s familial structure and choices in the name of God, make a virtue out of hating queer folks, and tell everyone how Jesus would have them raise their children. It allowed Ralph Reed to tell folks that one political party represented Christianity and the other was godless. And, absent any kind of pushback, it allows Franklin Graham to positively compare the President to Jesus and those who don’t support the president to Judas, selling his soul and his betrayal for 30 pieces of silver. This is not ok with me and I don’t imagine it is ok with a lot of my friends. And it is time that that is said.
Moreover, it is time for the traditional reformed denominations to get out from behind the stained glass and the pulpit and follow the advice of Desmond Tutu, the former Archbishop of Cape Town, who asked his followers to move beyond simply the needs of those who are struggling, and seek to address the root causes of suffering. Only once that has been determined can one truly begin the difficult work for systemic change, of being the hands and feet of Christ, and making it here, as we believe that it is in Heaven. Tutu is right. The mainline church, in its effort to be apolitical while focusing on “spiritual matters” has lost the ability to think in and challenge systems of oppression—to move beyond having a coat drive, food kitchen, homeless shelter, and ask why folks don’t have food, coats, or a place to sleep at night. And in a land of disparate groups to do so is political, as much as challenging those systems to change is. And we have to reclaim the language and actions of Jesus—of Christ challenging the larger culture (turning over tables, accusing the priestly class of being in the pocket of Rome, speaking truth to power)—not to elevate a politician or political party but to challenge all those with power to better embody justice and peace while offering dignity to all people regardless of partisanship, economic, status, race, gender, or sexuality.
If we remain silent, we can be guaranteed that the Franklin Grahams of the world will not and without any sort of pushback from those faithful who disagree with him, the assumption will be that he speaks for all of us. Further, he will proclaim with his words and we with our silence that Christianity is only interested in possessing earthly powers and engaging in the judgmentalism that has made up the vast majority of the faith for the past 50 years, while caring little for those who honestly struggle.
The Franklin Grahams of the world do not speak for me and most of the time the religion they practice is unrecognizable for a great many of the faithful. It is my hope that, in this time of chaos and upheaval brought on, largely, by politicians who have sought to gain power by convincing large number of folks of falsehoods and conspiratorial myths, others like me will find their voices and join together in decrying the false prophets of our day speaking only of Christ Jesus and him crucified.
Emma Green, the politics and religion report for The Atlantic, published a story earlier this week about the connections between religious imagery and the attempted coup d’etat at the US Capitol. She noted that throughout the crowd of infiltrators were religious signs, iconography, and clothing. Moreover, as the crowds swelled on the National Mall, on the ellipse, throughout the whole area of the District in which statues, memorials, a wall, and obelisk draw millions of tourists throughout most normal years, religious tracts were handed out, prayers said, and more crosses than could be counted commingled with anti-Semitic tropes, like the men wearing sweatshirts that proclaimed “Camp Auschwitz: Work Brings Freedom” and “6MWE” or “Six Million Wasn’t Enough” referring to Hitler’s attempted final solution for the Jews during the Shoah.