We are Resurrection People
Christians are a resurrection people.
Also, the United States—as a nation-state—is neither inevitable nor exceptional.
At the center of the story, Christians claim—or the story that claims us—is God-with-us. An incarnation. Embodiment. Ethicist Traci C. West captures the significance of this story this way:
“The gospels focus on how God’s presence is located within human history and in a particular human body. The historical specificity, together with attention to how the lifework of Jesus concentrated on the concrete concerns of people in his community, makes Christianity an intrinsically materialist faith tradition.”
What does that mean for us? It means the myriad crises, uncertainties, violences, and horrors of this political moment matter.
What we each and all do in this political context matters. What happens next in our civic body matters. How and who I (we) am to be in this moment, in concrete and pragmatic ways, must shape my (our) yearnings, thoughts, and chosen behaviors every single day.
This materiality encompasses all matters at an existential level, and it matters in a particular way.
West goes on to remind us that “. . . the material reality of the crucifixion of Jesus by ancient Roman authorities was an unmistakably brutal form of bodily torture and execution . . . with its culmination in the resurrection of Jesus that defiantly responds to this political execution, [the gospel] directs Christians toward a recognition of, and struggle against, public practices of state terror and humiliation, especially those that reinforce social hierarchy and marginalization.” [1]
This understanding of our tradition brings into focus, in a particular way, the public terrors and humiliations being enacted in our civic body today. I don’t imagine I need to list them. I imagine you see them too.
But I want to highlight that this incarnational, material frame also directs our attention to Christian responsibility to engage—both in public and in the public—with strategic, coalitional, and concrete resistance to “public practices of state terror.” This is a theo-ethical imperative toward which we are to shape our daily lives.
It isn’t merely about “saving democracy,” though democracy can and will only be saved (built?) through such resistance, sustained over time by more and more of us (religious and otherwise). It’s about something far more transcendent; something theological, if you will. In its defiance of death, the resurrection, says West, gives divine sanction to behaviors rooted in solidarity praxis that, in Jesus’ time—and, frankly, in our own—can result in actual death.
Yet, given the times we’re living in and how “we” got “here,” I want to call attention also to a particular part of the gospel story; right before we become resurrection people.
Mary, Mary, and Salome are walking to the tomb three days after Jesus’ execution. They’re not going to celebrate resurrection. They’re going to tend a body.[2]
Imagine what that must have been like. Grief: You’ve just lost someone you loved dearly after watching him die a gruesome death. Fear: You’ve just spent months in public with a guy the state has brutally murdered.
It’s amazing these women go anyway.
You know what happens next. When the women arrive at the tomb, an angel appears and says, “Guess what? Jesus isn’t here because he’s alive. And not only that, but you’re about to see him.” Suddenly, the permanence of death proves not to be so. Mary, Mary, and Salome discover that the life-giving-ness of connection, a vision for the flourishing of all, and a sense of possibility despite the current circumstances—all realities they’d known as part of Jesus’ community—are still here.
Mary, Mary, and Salome didn’t experience resurrection because they averted their eyes or ran away, hoping to wait it all out. No. The women experienced resurrection (the first to do so!) because they went to the tomb, collectively willing to face the death that had irrevocably altered their lives.
And that’s the moment of the story we’re in right now.
Authoritarian destruction of democracy is being brought about and furthered through public practices of terror. This destruction has been possible, in large measure, because generational white settler supremacy has been allowed to run amok and systemic racial violence has gone unchallenged in multi-racial coalitional ways en masse over time. These histories have rendered democracy vulnerable in ways that authoritarianism is both exploiting and catalyzing.
It’s a Gordian knot. The many realities that enabled this moment of death—recall, for example, that a majority of white U.S.-Americans, including white Christians, voted the current regime into office, not once but twice—are the very same realities and phenomena that must be named, faced, and borne witness to if we’re to have any hope of collectively rebuilding civic spaces where human flourishing and democratic resilience might become possible. (There are reasons authoritarianism is frantically attempting to whitewash U.S.-American history and ban books; such naming threatens its strength.)
Of course, Black people, Indigenous peoples, and diverse communities of color have not only long struggled against principalities in the U.S. body politic but have also generationally borne witness to the death-dealing realities of white settler supremacy. The radical re-formation and reorientation of the behaviors, capacities, and racial, social, and cultural dispositions of white U.S. Americans (Christian and otherwise) are the key movements required in this political moment.
Being a resurrection people means being or becoming a people willing to bear witness to death.
As I see it, one theo-ethical imperative of the “now” is for more and more white U.S.-Americans to face and bear witness to how legacies of generational white violence have irrevocably altered U.S. civic life (and to call more of those in our communities to do the same). It’s for more of us to join those women—and the many others who have long borne witness to the death-dealing material realities of white settler supremacy—in a full-throated grief-walk to the tomb.
To be clear, there’s no guarantee that confronting our legacies will result in massive white U.S.-American re-formation. Moreover, the practical matter of what and how we each participate in what this moment requires will mean different things in different contexts. Perhaps most importantly, such participation must resist both a utilitarian logic of “success” and the temptation to premise itself on an invocation that it guarantees a return to some mythologized U.S.-American democratic past (a progressive version of “making America ‘x’ again”)—lest we undermine the very faithfulness on which the journey to the tomb depends. Jesus’ death wasn’t exceptional, nor was resurrection inevitable, and neither is U.S.-American democracy.
Instead, being resurrection people requires that we simply be like the women. Mary, Mary, and Salome went to the tomb regardless of what might come next. And so, my friends, must we.
[1] Traci C. West, Disruptive Christian Ethics: When Racism and Women’s Lives Matters (Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 40-41.
[2] This discussion of the resurrection story and its implication for how we think in the civic body draws heavily from my earlier work Antiracism as Daily Practice: Refuse Shame, Change White Communities and Help Create a Just Word (St. Martin’s Press, 2024).