The name of God was everywhere during Wednesday’s insurrection against the American government. The mob carried signs and flag declaring jesus saves! and god, guns & guts made america, let’s keep all three. Some were participants in the Jericho March, a gathering of Christians to “pray, march, fast, and rally for election integrity.” After calling on God to “save the republic” during rallies at state capitols and in D.C. over the past two months, the marchers returned to Washington with flourish. On the National Mall, one man waved the flag of Israel above a sign begging passersby to say yes to jesus. “Shout if you love Jesus!” someone yelled, and the crowd cheered. “Shout if you love Trump!” The crowd cheered louder.
-Emma Green, “A Christian Insurrection,” The Atlantic, January 8, 2021
Taken from: https://metro.co.uk/2021/01/07/man-wearing-auschwitz-camp-top-was-among-trump-supporters-who-stormed-senate-13868267/
Emma Green, the politics and religion reporter for The Atlantic, published a story last 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 dotted the whole area. At the same time, commingled with these traditional symbols of the Christian faith were 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.
Taken from: https://www.timesofisrael.com/right-anti-semite-wrong-trump-protest-tweets-of-racist-t-shirt-may-help-bigots/
There has always been a connection between Christian Nationalism and the fringier movements on the right. Each week on various media platforms, a number of televangelists proclaim the need for this country to be a theocracy under the rule of their narrow interpretation of the Christian faith. With the ascension of Trumpism, this view has gained a foothold within the halls of Congress and the Oval Office. President Trump, not someone who could ever be mistaken for being particularly religious, enlisted a large number of the faithful, mostly from Evangelical traditions and Prosperity Gospel ministries, to speak for him to their followers and quickly, a movement in which America would be made “great again” was united with a religious fervor that saw and believed the United States had a special covenantal relationship with God. And it has become the face of Christianity for much of the nation. The atrocities at the Capitol Building left untold damage: countless injuries, members of both the legislative and executive branches of government shaken to their core, and six people dead. In the midst of all this carnage, the cross of Jesus played a staring role and absent a strong rebuke and rebuttal from the rest of us who claim to follow the savior, it will be assumed that this is what Christianity is.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/capitol-breached-protesters/story?id=75081629
Perhaps the most frustrating part of all that happened is the painfully predictable nature of all of this. The MAGA movement has been on a crash course for this moment, visible to anyone with eyes to see. The transition of power from Donald Trump to someone else, either by ballot box or term limits, was always going to be fraught with peril. There was little chance that the President himself would voluntarily relinquish power and even if he decided to so, there was no chance the most passionate of his followers were going to allow that to happen without significant efforts to stop it. In that sense, the insurrection attempted coup that took places in the Cathedral of Democracy—largely instigated by the President himself, along with his son, his lawyer, some in the legislative branch, and a cadre of his faithful—was the logical conclusion to the first chapter of the movement. It was, in a sense, the coming out party that alerted the whole of the nation of the strength and devotion of a great many of our neighbors. And the presence of so much religious paraphernalia so prominently displayed made a strong argument for whose side God was on.
The nation finds itself at a crossroads today much as the German people did in 1923 following the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. (And I don’t make this analogy lightly). The revolt against the nascent Weimar Republic, led by the son of a shoemaker with a Charlie Chaplin mustache, declared to the German people that a new power was on the rise and the arrest and imprisonment of those who led the initial revolt would do little to stem the tide of revolution. In a similar manner, does anyone really think that we have heard the last of the movement that infiltrated the Capitol Building further than anyone since the British in the War of 1812? Now that such power and number has been placed on display while the very act of sedition has poisoned the well, it would be foolhardy not to assume that similar events will take place in the near future. It will take a concerted effort by all of us in the nation who do not subscribe to violent riots to decry the actions of the few. This is where the church comes in.
Having been raised in a relatively typical southern household, I was taught that there were three things that should never come up in polite conversation—money, religion, and politics. And for the first three and a half decades of my life, this held true. Growing up, with a few very specific exceptions, I could not have told you the political leanings of my friends’ parents. Even as we moved into adulthood, neither my classmates nor those to whom I was closest ever really talked about ballots cast. One just didn’t talk about those things. The same held true for religion. I had friends who were Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian, Mormon, but these differences were less important than if a guy liked basketball, tennis, baseball, or golf. In one sense, this was a good thing. There was little overt discrimination of which I was aware in my circle of friends. But absent such conversations, none of us really learned how to talk about political or religious differences. This is a weakness that has been exploited by a sect of the faithful and those on the right.
Taken from: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10188427
Over the past decade, using the breadcrumbs left by Jerry Falwell and the “Moral Majority,” a larger and more powerful version of Christian Nationalism has risen through the ranks of elected office. This group, far from avoiding discussion of politics and faith commitments, has steered headlong into it and made subservience to them a requirement for membership. At the same time, not wanting to run the risk of losing members or sowing seeds of discontent into individual ecclesial bodies, the mainline church has remained largely mute on some of the great questions and debates of the current moment. By declaring that political debate has no place within religious communities, those in the old line traditions have watched as its lifeblood has drained while younger generations leave, never to return again. And in its effort to remain silent in the midst of these moments of questioning, and arguing, and fighting, the church believes itself to be rising above the temporal quarrels of the society in which it finds itself and focusing on more ethereal matters. The reality, however, is that rather than rising above, it just comes across as apathetic to the suffering and struggle of so many and to the ill winds arising from a segment of the body politic and availing itself of the likeness and image of the savior with little if any pushback from those who should be bothered the most. Moreover, this understanding lacks historical analogy and certainly does not represent the religion of the followers of Jesus.
The reality is that to be in the world (though not “of the world”) is to be political. To be a responsible member in any society, whether as an individual or a collective, is to take responsibility for one’s own interaction with neighbor and beyond. To choose to ignore these responsibilities is still a choice—in fact an incredibly dangerous choice as it affirms one’s comfort with the status quo and a lack of desire for things to be different in a broken world. And for followers of the risen Christ, there is simply no time in the history of the faith that one can look to support that position.
From the moment Jesus was born into this world his presence was viewed through a political lens. In the Gospel of Matthew, the author notes that when Jesus of Nazareth was born Herod "was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him." That is, on its face, a political statement. The arrival of Jesus threatened the stability and power of a corrupt system. On the other bookend of Jesus’ life we see an intentional act of protest against Roman authority when he enters the City of Jerusalem through an entrance traditionally reserved for a Caesar or conquering military leader on Palm Sunday. There is no other way to see this event. Continuing with the story, Jesus’ appearance before Pontius Pilate, a Roman puppet governor and his eventual killing was a political charge (sedition) that demanded a political punishment. So it was that Jesus was killed in the most public manner possible to send a message to other would-be seditionists. The Apostle Paul was killed by an act of the state. If tradition is to be believed, almost all the disciples were killed by the actions of various governments. The earliest Christians were fed to lions and placed in coliseums for the entertainment of the state and to scare other Christians into non-belief because their recalcitrance to reify Caesar over and against Christ put them at odds with the state. Every single martyr of the faith, from Polycarp to Justin, was killed by order of the state. Jan Huss, John Wycliffe, Jean Calvin, John Knox all challenged the state (Huss to the point of execution, Calvin to the point of creating his own little enclave of believers in Geneva). In the history of the United States slavery was ended, at least in part, because of abolitionists who were also pastors. Elizabeth Cady Stanton stood in a pulpit in a church in Seneca Falls, New York to announce to the world the arrival of a women's suffrage movement. More recently, the Civil Rights movements arose from the church. Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail," maybe the greatest piece of writing in the 20th century, was a political document chastising other clergy for not supporting the movement because they didn't want to be too "political." The reality is that from the prophets, to the savior and his earliest followers, to the martyrs, to the Desert Fathers and the mystical mothers, to every era of the Holy Roman Empire from Charlemagne to Francis II, to the Reformation, to the struggle over slavery, and Jim Crow, racial equality, to the ongoing quest for LGBTQ inclusion has been political in nature. In each time and place the Spirit of the Most High has asked and continues to ask folks to stand and be counted in a broken and, at times, spiteful world. Rebuilding the world, binding up the broken, is our chief task as followers of Christ and the only way to do that is through enacting political influence until that day when things are on earth, as they are in heaven.
Today, in the face of all that we have seen (in the past week, past year, past four years, and past decade) for the Church to remain silent either arises from apathy or cowardice and neither of those qualities should be in the range of responses to the call of Jesus Christ on our individual lives or the lives of the Church. To choose to say nothing is in fact a declaration that we are okay with the status quo. Never to wholly support one political party over another as a church is not only the right thing to do, it is written into the tax code of the nation. But to say that the church possesses no interpretive lens through which to view the world that we can elevate in times of confusion, like those we are living through today, merely reduces what we do to an esoteric exercise and the church's words and indeed the gospel, should always touch the ground somewhere and not simply remain in the ether.