A Time to Gather
I was hoping for a lifeline. I expected the Supreme Court to eventually recognize the unconstitutionality of using race as a criterion to stop people on the streets. After all, the same court had recently ruled against affirmative action precisely because race cannot be a factor. I also thought that our higher education institutions, those that for years shouted from the rooftops their commitment to Equity and Inclusion, would unite to oppose government interference. Maybe I was naïve to believe that so-called progressive political forces would call the slaughter in Palestine what it truly is: a genocide, broadcast live for everyone to see, funded by our tax dollars. As I write this paragraph, four Democrats have voted against the War Powers Resolution to rein in Trump on Iran.
Our institutions are failing to uphold our democratic aspirations. Anyone knowledgeable about the history of US imperialism, including the extermination of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, and the funding of dictatorships in Latin America, can hardly argue that the current moment is truly unique. And still, although the crisis is not new, the present moment feels fragile and dangerous. To speak of a crisis in democracy seems fitting. There is no shortage of prophetic and political voices who do so compellingly and forcefully. The challenge remains to put forward a compelling alternative project that centers the value and dignity of all life (human, animal, ecological, etc.) in a genuinely plural nation.
The contributions of various branches of Christianity to our strongest democratic values are undeniable. Equally undeniable is how Christianity has become complicit with the forces of death. Our current political climate reveals this tension. I am concerned–grieving if I am honest–to see how most Christian groups have no reservations about supporting authoritarianism in the name of supposedly Christian values. Statistics show that most white denominations had no qualms in supporting the current regime, even when its role in the January 6th insurrection had become clear. Christianity is actively supporting a project that opposes pluralism, civility, and the common good. I am also hopeful about how Christians continue to voice their opposition to this political trend each week (No King demonstrations, for instance, visibly include theological messages, and the recent Minnesota anti-ICE movement partly found legitimacy in biblical sources).
Progressive theological education and discourse should make clear that our authoritative sources can only hope to be invitational rather than imposed. I support my Jewish, Muslim, and atheist friends living out their respective moral values. Their contributions, when at its best, strengthen democracy. Similarly, as a Catholic, I believe, for instance, that the church’s social doctrine on capitalism has much to offer to the betterment of our current democratic values. In such a democratic spirit and acknowledging the privileged status of Christianity in US culture, we should strongly oppose the imposition of our religious convictions on the rest of the population.
Considering the current cooptation–uninformed, superficial, and manipulative as it is–of biblical texts for the advancement of the contemporary conservative movement, theological education has a responsibility to resist authoritarianism and open invitational paths for believers and practitioners to live out their faith compellingly. Since many of our institutions self-identify as prophetic, they are charged with carving out life–giving worlds; that is, they should be modeling communities against the forces of racism and xenophobia, of homophobia and patriarchalism, of war-mongering and ecological decimation.
Let me name two strategies here, modest as they are, that resort to biblical texts to fulfill these double functions of resisting present oppressive dynamics while creating life-giving alternatives. Given my scholarly focus, these strategies draw on the New Testament, although I can see how the Hebrew Bible and other equally authoritative texts share similar drives.
For all cultural investment in the “traditional nuclear family,” a centerpiece of the religious right, the original Jesus movement organizes itself around new ways of kinship. It is quite impossible to square contemporary discourses on the family with Jesus’ politics: a single Jew who invited his disciples to abandon their families in search of a new community building. The Gospels make it clear that biological kinship is secondary, oppositional even, to Christian identity. It is impossible to legitimize the contemporary nuclear family–as any right-wing religious movement pretends to do–in a movement where Jesus encourages their disciples “to hate their father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters and even their life” to become a disciple (Lk 14:26). The so-called contemporary “Christian family,” then, quite ironically, is antagonistic to Jesus’ original family values.
For all the national flag-waving, aggressive, even militaristic, and triumphalist propaganda to the service of an imaginarily constructed “free nation,” Christianity is grounded in an executed, tortured, and dishonored victim of imperial Rome. The crucifixion narratives–the Gospels save us no details about such cruelty–always locate the victim at the center of any political and ethical proposal. The image of soldiers “torturing Jesus on the head with a stick and shaming him by getting on their knees to ‘worship’ him” (Mark 15:20) speaks against an enraptured version of Christianity willing to sacrifice the most vulnerable for its political success. The so-called “Christian nationalism” is, once again ironically, oppositional to Jesus’ ultimate identity as a victim.
I am not arguing, of course, that theological education embraces family-hating ethics or defends a victim mentality as a political strategy. To the contrary, these texts, I suggest, remind us of the impossibility of grounding current policies on the bible itself. These texts diagnose the extent to which the support of Christian denominations for Trump’s political project represents a diseased Christian imagination. These texts, and many others, also offer guidelines for those of us who want to organize the current world otherwise.