The disturbing origins of this custom Bible and the campaign to stop its proliferation.

During Holy Week, Donald Trump posted a video promoting sales for the “God Bless the USA” Bible.

The name is borrowed from a 1984 song of the same name by country singer, Lee Greenwood.

Trump’s shameless peddling of God’s word for profit garnered intense backlash and commentary online, but the saga of the “God Bless the USA” Bible goes back further than the former president’s ad.

Three years ago, I was part of a group of Christian authors who successfully lobbied our publisher Zondervan, a division of Harper Collins publishing, to refrain from entering into an agreement to print the “God Bless the USA” Bible.

HarperCollins Christian Publishing division, which includes Zondervan Publishing, owns the licensing rights to the New International Version (NIV) translation—the most popular modern English translation of the Bible.

The company, Elite Source Pro, petitioned Zondervan for a quote but never entered into an agreement. Nevertheless, marketing for the “God Bless the USA” Bible advertised it as the NIV translation.

Hugh Kirkpatrick heads up Elite Source Pro and spearheaded the effort to produce the “God Bless the USA” Bible.

In an article at Religion Unplugged, where this story first broke in May 2021, Kirkpatrick explained the origins of this custom edition of the Bible.

The idea began brewing in fall 2020 when Kirkpatrick and friends in the entertainment industry heard homeschool parents complain that public schools were not teaching American history anymore— not having students read and understand the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.

“We noticed the divide in the public where some people started seeing pro-American images like the flag, the bald eagle, the statue of liberty as weaponized tools of the Republican party, and we didn’t understand that,” Kirkpatrick said.

Then in the height of Black Lives Matter protests, activists began tearing down or destroying statues and monuments they connected to racial injustice.

“In past civilizations, libraries have been burned. Documents torn down. We started seeing statutes coming down and we started seeing history for good or bad trying to be erased,” Kirkpatrick said. “That’s when we started thinking, okay how far does this erasing of history go? Love it or hate it, it’s history. But how far does it go…? Part of having these statues … is so that we don’t repeat those same mistakes.”

A custom Bible inspired by reactionary sentiment opposing Black Lives Matter protests is concerning on its own.

Kirkpatrick apparently failed to understand why Black people and many others would want to remove public homages to slaveholders and the violent rebellion they led against the United States.

Nor did Kirkpatrick manage to spot the irony of printing a Bible that honors the United States while defending statues of Confederate leaders who attacked the Union.

Once the news that Zondervan was in talks to print this Bible came out, several Christian authors who had published with them approached me about publicly opposing the deal.

All of my books, so far, have been published through Zondervan, including my forthcoming book The Spirit of Justice: Stories of Faith, Race, and Resistance.

I was eager to join in the protest.

The effort to stop the deal included an online petition that said,

Zondervan/HarperCollins has a been a great blessing to Christian publishing for many years. But a forthcoming volume damages this fine record. To commemorate the 20th anniversary of 9/11 Zondervan has licensed releasing the “God Bless the USA” Bible that will include the U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence and pledge of allegiance, in addition to the lyrics for the song of the same name by country singer Lee Greenwood., “God Bless the USA.” This is a toxic mix that will exacerbate the challenges to American evangelicalism, adding fuel to the Christian nationalism and anti-Muslim sentiments found in many segments of the evangelical church.

The campaign to stop Zondervan from printing the “God Bless the USA” Bible also included a letter by Shane Claiborne of Red Letter Christians and several other Christian authors, including me, as co-signers of the statement.

The letter read,

This customized Bible is a reminder that the “Christian industry” must do better to stand against the heretical and deadly “Christian” nationalism that we saw on full display on Jan. 6.  It is like a spiritual virus, infecting our churches, homes and social institutions.  Just as we take intentional actions to stop the spread of COVID, like wearing masks and staying six feet apart, we must take concrete steps to stop the spread of this theological virus.

The letter continued with a theological and pastoral word about the Bible.

We don’t need to add anything to the Bible. We just need to live out what it already says.

And if we are to be good Christians, we may not always be the best Americans.  The beatitudes of Jesus where he blesses the poor, the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers – can feel very different from the “beatitudes” of America.  Our money may say in God we trust, but our economy often looks like the seven deadly sins.  For Christians, our loyalty is to Jesus.  That is who we pledge allegiance to.  As the old hymn goes – “My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness/ On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand.”  Our hope is not in the donkey of the Democrats or the elephant of the GOP… or even in America.

Our hope is in the Lamb.  The light of the world is not America… it is Christ.

Our endeavors were successful, and Zondervan did not enter into an agreement to publish an NIV translation of the “God Bless the USA” Bible.

That’s when Kirkpatrick decided to pursue a King James Version (KJV) of the Bible because that translation does not require copyright permission in the US.

The fruit of Kirkpatrick’s effort is an official endorsement by Donald J. Trump and Lee Greenwood and the latest push to sell “God Bless the USA” Bibles at a cost of $59.99.

The purveyors of this custom Bible fail to see, refuse to see, or simply don’t care that the United States is not a church or God’s holy nation.

They continue to spew myths that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and that the government should favor one religion for special privileges above all others.

Including political documents in a Bible translation is as blatant a blend of religion and politics as it gets. It is a physical flouting of the separation of church and state.

The multi-year crusade to produce the “God Bless the USA” Bible demonstrates that white Christian nationalism is not going away, and its advocates have the will and the means to secure their desired ends.

As we hurtle closer to the 2024 presidential election—likely a rematch between Biden and Trump—Christians must loudly and consistently oppose any movement to make Christianity synonymous with the political power structure.

We must oppose the “God Bless the USA” Bible as white Christian nationalist propaganda because Jesus said, “I will build my church,” not “I will build this nation.”

Living in the evangelical world. you learn quickly there’s a focus on “traditional family” roles. It’s also called “living out God’s ideal,” “God’s plan,” or – my favorite – having a “Biblical marriage.” In other words, evangelicals believe there is a preordained designed ideal of marriage and family. I was taught the dangers of single parenting, stay at home dads, divorce, and of course, same-sex marriage.

If you’ve never read the Bible, and if you listen to many Christians, you’d think that Christianity centers on sexual and gender identities and behaviors linked to those identities. You would think that Jesus’s main concern is for you to have traditional relationships in the model of Adam and Eve.

But if you ask any of these Christians what it means to be a follower of Jesus, they would respond with a completely different answer.

They would reply that a Christian is someone who believes or trusts in Jesus Christ, or that Jesus died and rose from the dead for them.

Or they might talk about the greatest commandment to love God and to love others.

Or they may mention possessing the fruit of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. 

Or perhaps they’d point out the big three: faith, hope, and love — the greatest being love. 

In fact, the mention of marital status, sexuality, and gender are astonishingly infrequent in the Gospels and letters of the New Testament. 

But What Does Jesus Say?

When attempting to poke holes in the idea of life after death, a religious leader of a sect, which didn’t believe in the resurrection, asked Jesus about marriage after death. Jesus corrected him, “At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.” With these words, Jesus was revealing that marriage was temporary, cultural, and of this world (Matthew 22:23-32).

One reason Christians focus so pointedly on traditional marriage is because of a statement Jesus makes in Matthew 19. He was asked about easy divorces (for men) which was instituted under Moses. This form of divorce, which benefited men and was oppressive to women in marriages that didn’t produce children, allowed the man to cast off the “barren” wife and get another with a simple written notice (Deut. 24:1). Jesus, always looking out for the weak and voiceless, condemned this practice. He explains they should follow the example of Adam and Eve — which precedes Moses — “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.” (Matthew 19:8-9).

In this passage, Jesus is not creating a prohibition against same sex marriage, as many Christians mistakenly believe. He’s promoting fidelity and commitment — foundational elements of love — to combat the selfishness of a husband’s desire for an easy divorce. Jesus was asked about a loophole in the law, and Jesus closed it, pointing to the responsibility of love.

Paul

Paul addresses some debauched behaviors in his letters, admonishing the people of God to abstain from things like lying, gossip, greed, gluttony, and sexual immorality. From these passages, many have tried to prove that same sex acts and attractions are sin. They are called the clobber passages by some. Again, it is the selfishness, distractedness, and baseness to which Paul is referring. It is not the fact that it’s same-sex sexual behavior. Paul here is concerned that many are following the cravings of their bodies over following Jesus’s way of self-denial. For Paul, it was not so much about specifics — although he pointed some out to various congregations. It was about following the way of love.

Today, there are many believers and people in general that live quiet lives of love and imperfection. Some are in your church, fix your car, work alongside you, teach your children. And some are part of your family, simply pursuing the way of love and fidelity that Jesus, Paul, and other New Testament writers taught.

Some follow Jesus. Some don’t. Either way, the Christian way is to focus on the law of love, which transcends gender, sexuality, and marriage, no matter what you might hear from Christians today.

I read an article about the event in ussanews. It described those who attended the White House event as “leftists who pretend to be Catholics”. I am not sure who the author was referring to.  I knew most of the people that were in attendance. I have worked and worshiped with them.  They are among the most committed and dedicated faith leaders. They each can share their story about how being Catholic is what moved them to the work of peace and justice. I will share mine. 

My parents were poor Irish Catholic immigrants who came to America in 1950. We attended a mostly Irish Catholic parish which my parents were very active in and made sure all of us kids were as well. My siblings and I all attended Catholic schools. All of my brothers were altar boys. Several times a week my mom would gather us around her bed in the evening to pray a Rosary. Prominently displayed on our living room wall were two pictures. One was Pope John XXIII and the other was President Kennedy.  But for my mother, being Catholic went much deeper than just the rights and rituals. Mom taught me that being Catholic was more than just attending Mass and obeying the Commandments. Being Catholic was about how you lived every moment. Did you treat others with love and respect? Our neighborhood during my childhood was in transition. My mother would be the first person welcoming new folks. Regardless of the color of their skin, their race or even their sexual orientation. She told me that being Catholic was not a way to get to Heaven but a way to create Heaven on Earth. 

Stella and I have been married for 35 years. She was raised in the same town as me, but in a poor Italian Catholic immigrant neighborhood. Our Catholic faith has been a major part of our life and spiritual journey. We have four children. We did not follow the traditional route of having children. When we were first married Stella was a single mom, so I became a stepdad. We then had a child together. After a few years we decided to become foster parents and ended up adopting a brother and sister whom we were fostering. We also opened our home to several of our kids’ friends who were in trouble. It was our Catholic faith that led us to become foster and adoptive parents. Despite raising a family and both working we found time to volunteer. We both felt blessed, and our Catholic faith taught us to share that blessing. Today I volunteer at a soup kitchen at St. Thomas More Catholic Church in New Haven, Connecticut. Stella volunteers two days a week at Hospice. 

I have been an activist for peace and justice for most of my life. I have helped to organize marches and rallies, participated in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, and have gone on extended hunger fasts.  I was the Executive Director of the Franciscan Action Network and co-founded the Global Catholic Climate Movement. Most recently I co-founded and serve as the National Co-Director of Catholics Vote Common Good, www.votecommongood.com/catholics-vote-common-good/.  I am not an activist to prove that I am a good Catholic. I am an activist because that is what my Catholic faith and the words of Jesus call me to do. I am not sure what the author meant when he called me and others “pretend Catholics”.  But based on what he wrote, I am pretty sure if Jesus were walking the Earth today, he would be identified as one of those “pretend Catholics.”  

What has the North American church gotten itself into? Known more for infighting, schisms and splits, the focus has largely been on doctrinal beliefs and buildings. But what about the church as the very real body of Christ, as baptized believers?

There are 215 somebodies buried in shallow graves behind a Jackson, Mississippi jail and nearly 30,000 Palestinian somebodies in mass graves or rotting under buildings, a number that far exceeds even the Old Testament exchange rate of “an eye for an eye” in response to Hamas’ attack on October 7th. There were 1,243 somebodies killed by police in 2023, which was the deadliest year for police- involved homicides in over a decade. 

Does it trouble our conscience that asylum-seeking somebodies are used in political stunts, that indigenous women and girl’s bodies are missing and murdered? That LGBTQIA bodies are not safe, that bodies racialized as black are not free, that Jewish bodies are being physically assaulted? That 1 in 3 Asian and Pacific Islander bodies face racial abuse? 

Where are the ripple effects of our shared baptism, this womb water for the born again? Why don’t we rise from it screaming our heads off that we belong to each other, that we are members of one another? Where is the proof that we are “new creatures in Christ” as Paul expressed to the members at Corinth and the evidence that we are connected to each other (Second Corinthians 5:17)?

How did we “wade in the water” of baptism without it troubling us that the North American church is still segregated? Why don’t we feel compelled to explain why we racialize Jesus’ gospel? 

How long are you going to keep those idolatrous paintings in your homes and sanctuaries? It’s just a question. You don’t have to answer it but just as a reminder, it breaks the second commandment.

Why don’t we quote the Apostle Paul at least three times a day to keep racism away from our neighbor and our prejudices at bay: “For not all flesh is the same, but there is one kind for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish” (First Corinthians 15:31)? Yes, there is only one kind of skin for humans—no matter what race tries to slip or stuff under it.

For some, my inquiries are just asking for trouble. But isn’t that the point? 

Jesus was always getting into trouble, under the Pharisees’ surveillance, dodging stones, getting run out of town and was even nearly thrown off a cliff. Some would say, “He was asking for it.” 

To be sure, the call is to “to find a way to get in trouble. Good trouble, necessary trouble” like the late Congressman John Lewis said—not with committees or councils but in community for the sake of shared belovedness. 

“Good trouble” is a necessary distinction. And since it is not clearly marked in places of privilege, some of us must “find a way to get in trouble.” It will require that we get in the way, that we put our bodies, our livelihoods, our names on the line, that we call it like Jesus sees it instead of looking away. 

This clarification regarding “good trouble” is so important for Christians because the image of goodness is so often blonde haired and blue-eyed. Goodness is often color-coded, racialized, embodied and located in planned and gated communities, which are in good neighborhoods with good schools. 

Goodness is viewed as “white” and located solely in socially colored white bodies. I, for one, believe that the church should faithfully question that designation since we’re all God’s children and God has no favorites (Romans 2:11).

W.E. B. DuBois calls it “the religion of whiteness” and writes in 1920 from his book Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil in a chapter titled “The Souls of White Folk”:

“This assumption that of all the hues of God, whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness or tan leads to curious acts; even the sweeter souls of the dominant world as they discourse with me on weather, weal and woe are continually playing above their actual words an obligato of tune and tone saying:

‘My poor unwhite thing! Weep not nor rage.   know, too well, that the curse of God lies heavy on you. Why? That is not for me to say, but be brave! Do your work in your lowly sphere, praying the good Lord that into heaven above, where all is love, you may, one day, be born—white!’

I do not laugh. I am quite straight- faced as I ask soberly: ‘But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?’ 

Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of all the earth forever and ever, Amen!”

Whiteness is about possession then, about conquest, colonialism, and sovereignty. Because white is not a country but a color and a useful one in a color-coded capitalist pyramid scheme. 

Professor Cheryl Harris calls whiteness “property.” But the social perks, privileges and prejudices packed in this box should’ve been ruined during our baptism.

Baptized believers should get out of the water asking themselves, “What have I gotten myself into?” Because the water should trouble our allegiances, alliances, and ascribed attributes. And if not, then I have a few questions.

For years, Bible scholars have danced around the matter by saying slavery in Rome was far different from slavery in the first few centuries of American history. No doubt their observations carry a measure of merit. Often, Roman slaves were more educated than their owners and were people of great means prior to their captivity. Many were professionals of great service to their owners. What’s more, they were not enslaved because of the color of their skin. So, yes, there exist significant differences between the Roman and American approaches to slavery. But aren’t we just splitting hairs? At its core, both systems’ commitment to slavery was based on its very definition—the owning of people. 

While I was born much too late to be the legal property of a person in America, I have been the recipient of racism. When a classmate called me a racial epithet in my first year of college, I was devastated. No, it wasn’t my first time being called such language. But the wound was especially painful because it happened at a Bible college where everyone claimed to be followers of Jesus. His words that noonday hour on campus sent me into an emotional tailspin. I felt the waters of bitterness and hate toward him and all White people rise within me. 

Around this time my father visited me, and unaware of the incident, he asked me about my future plans. I told him I’d much rather drive trucks than be around White people. My words jarred him, and me. As these “feathers” left my mouth, I knew I was in sin and needed to begin the long road back to Colossae. It would take me a considerable amount of time to take my first steps back, but I finally mustered up the courage to write a letter to the person who had hurt me, asking him to forgive me for my sin of unforgiveness. I don’t say these things to guilt White people or to make myself look like some hero. Hardly. But the main reason for my delay in leaving the Rome of my unforgiveness is that the flesh and the Spirit within me were embroiled in a very long back and forth. The flesh articulated more than its fair share of justifications as to why I owed no attempts at reconciliation. 

Today, being counted among the oppressed is equivalent to receiving a congressional Medal of Honor. Because of this, many choose to wear oppression as an ornament and use it as an excuse to not forgive. Unforgiveness is an act of theft whereby we refuse to acknowledge the humanity of those who wronged us because we do not look the beast in the eye. While there are certain acts of cruelty and injustice that close the door to reconciliation, we must take the first steps out of Rome nonetheless by offering forgiveness, without which reconciliation is never possible. 

There will always be very good reasons as to why you should not be reconciled to certain people. Justifications abound as to why you should never sit at the table of friendship with your ex-spouse whose act of betrayal took your breath away. And why you should not make amends with the father who abandoned you. 

The older I get, the more difficult friendship seems to be. I’m running out of energy to come back for yet another round of sit downs, truth encounters, and “come to Jesus” moments to do the inescapable work of friendship. Much has been made of the dissipation of sexual vitality as we age, but we don’t really talk about the relational vitality needed as our emotional bandwidth recedes. Sometimes I wish there was a pill for this as well. There goes Frank, popping off at the mouth again. Let me take this friendship pill so I can get the energy needed to have yet another chat. Oh, Cheryl disregarded my feelings? Hold on, let me go to the medicine cabinet. In the absence of these pills, it’s easy to shrug my shoulders and sigh to myself, “I just don’t have the time to do this anymore.” 

But remember, most relational breakdowns have more than one offender. I’m not the only one who would love to have a friendship pill. When both parties have the truth encounter, they are bound to bring two very different perspectives on what led to the downfall of their relationship. The dad who neglected his responsibilities at home could gently push back and say there was a lot more at play, like the demise of his relationship with the child’s mother. But the problem is, children well into adulthood do not see their father’s departure as merely leaving their mom but as leaving them. Then there are all the justifications surrounding the gap between what was done and what was intended. When confronted, the offender reaches for their version of “charge it to my head and not my heart,” which is far from helpful. Or the offender suspects they have wounded the other—but because they have not been confronted, they shrug as if to say it wasn’t that big of a deal, and the friendship slowly dies. And of course, there’s always the offender’s pride lurking beneath the surface. Even if they do see the wrong they committed, the apology just won’t roll off their tongue but gets caught in traffic somewhere around their esophagus. 

I’ve laughed and cried over the years when I think of the sovereign irony of God at play in my own life. To think of the number of books I’ve written, conferences I’ve spoken at, and lives I’ve shaped in the area of ethnic unity and racial reconciliation is indeed laughable, considering at one point I was so embittered with racial trauma I would rather drive a truck than work with a certain race of people. My “ascendency” up my own ladder began in my little bedroom, where I put down my excuses, picked up a pen, and asked forgiveness from the one who had wounded me. That decision to leave Rome has brought me to the Colossae of my destiny. 

The work of repentance and reconciliation is not so much about the relationship, as important as that is, but something far more. When we refuse to remain enslaved to our justifications and instead decide to leave Rome to go back and make things right, we are marching down not just the road of change but the road of destiny. We are headed to the place where God wants to transform us from slaves to brothers to bishops. 

Adapted from Enduring Friendship by Bryan Loritts. ©2024 by Bryan Loritts. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com. 

From Rethinking Life….

The Christian movement started on the margins with a small group of renegade Jews who were a peculiar little sect within the vast terrain of the Roman Empire. By AD 100, there were roughly 7,500 Christians, which is smaller than many of our megachurches today. A generation later, in AD 150, there were 40,000. But that was still only .07 percent of the population—not even a tenth of one percent of the empire. One hundred years after Christ was here in the flesh, there was roughly one Christian for every 1,430 people in the Roman world.

Then this little revolution began to spread beyond the periphery and to all sectors of society. Check this out. Historians estimate that between AD 100 and 300, the Christian movement grew from roughly 7,500 people to a whooping 6.3 million. By AD 300, Christians were 10 percent of the empire’s population—one person in every ten was now a Christian. But with the growth came complexity, and it is at this point that Emperor Constantine entered the picture.

Constantine’s reign is seen as a turning point for Christianity because it’s when Christianity the Roman Empire. Given the persecution Christians had long endured, this might seem to have been a miraculous deliverance, and it many ways it was. However, the so-called “Constantinian shift” was also when the first cracks began to appear in the early Christians’ ethic of life. Once they were in power, Christians went from being the persecuted to being the persecutors. They stopped loving their enemies and started killing them. They exchanged the cross for a sword.

Many scholars rightfully point out that Constantine was a symbol of something bigger happening in the culture, that he was the effect rather than the cause. Just as many of us point out that Donald Trump revealed America more than he changed America, perhaps the same can be said of Constantine. However, Constantine did crystalize some things that forever changed what it meant to be a Christian. But before we get to that, it’s important to understand more of the context that led up to Constantine’s reign and how it shaped the early church.

Constantine’s Backstory

Constantine came to power in the wake of horrific persecution of the church. To be sure, killing Christians had been a Roman pastime going all the way back to AD 33, but things had only gotten worse since. Historians point out that emperors such as Nero, who reigned in the generation after Jesus (AD 54–68), turned sadistic execution into a form of entertainment. There are reports of Christians being dressed in animal furs to be killed by dogs. They were crucified, even crucified upside down. Their bodies were often disfigured and contorted for the sake of the dark appetites. According to the Roman historian Tacitus (ca. AD 56–120), Nero turned his own garden into a killing field, setting bodies on fire and using them as human torches.

Then there was the persecution under Domitian, who reigned from AD 81–96. Domitian is the emperor who exiled John, the author of Revelation, to the island of Patmos. Persecution continued under Decius, who ruled from AD 249–251. Finally, there were the brutal, barbaric reigns of Diocletian from AD 284–305, and Galerius from AD 305–311, right before Constantine.

Most historians consider this era prior to Constantine to be the worst persecution Christianity had ever seen. Church buildings and property were destroyed. There were raids on churches in which sacred texts and relics were burned. Some Christians were demoted from places of honor if they would not renounce their faith. Some had their legal rights taken away, and others were forced into slavery if they refused to burn incense to Caesar (a loyalty test) or to recant their commitment to Christ. Under Diocletian, many were murdered during what historians call the “wholesale slaughter” of Christians. So, this is when Constantine entered the scene—following the terrible reigns of terror under Diocletian and his son-in-law Galerius.

Constantine was the son of Constantius Chlorus, a lower-ranking emperor who ruled in the West (Britain, Gaul, and Spain) during the bloody reign of Diocletian. Although his father Constantius was not a Christian, he was quite tolerant of Christians and did not carry out vicious orders and persecutions. When Constantine became emperor after Constantius’s death in 306, he took his dad’s tolerance of Christians to a new level. And his devotion to the faith, even though some question its sincerity, became personal.

It’s important to note that Constantine’s ascension to the throne wasn’t as simple as his father passing him a baton. The region historically had four regional emperors rather than one. When Diocletian stepped down in 305, there was a struggle to gain control of the empire as rival regional leaders fought for the throne. It wasn’t until 312 that Constantine won the decisive Battle of Milvian Bridge that ended the civil war and secured his place on the throne. But this is what’s so significant about that legendary battle against another aspiring emperor named Maxentius, especially with regard to our conversation about the sacredness of life. Prior to the battle, Constantine is said to have had a vision of the cross coming down from the sky in heavenly glory to bless him in the battle. Here’s an account of the vision, written by an historian named Eusebius:

About the time of the midday sun, when day was just turning, he said he saw with his own eyes, up in the sky and resting over the sun, a cross-shaped trophy formed from light, and a text attached to it which said, “By this conquer.”

“By this conquer.” In other words, kill in the name of Jesus.

Some question the credibility of the vision since it wasn’t until ten years later and two years after Constantine died that we have any account of it. It’s also important to note that the account we do have was written not by Constantine but by Eusebius, whom Constantine, as he died, had appointed a bishop. Eusebius had previously written his classic Ecclesiastical History, published ten years into Constantine’s reign, and he makes no mention of Constantine’s vision in that work, which seems like a significant oversight.

Could Constantine’s vision of the cross be imperial revisionist history? Totally possible, but it almost doesn’t even matter—it became Roman legend, and eventually church legend. In the centuries that followed, this same theology is invoked and the cross continued to be used as a symbol for battle and license for all sorts of atrocities. The cross, which had been such a powerful symbol of love and grace and redemption, would eventually be used in the Crusades and by colonizers doing the most unChristlike things imaginable.

Constantine was not a Christian when he became emperor in AD 306. In fact, he wasn’t even baptized until just before he died. But one of his first acts after winning the Battle of Milvian Bridge and killing Maxentius was signing the Edict of Milan, which proclaimed religious tolerance throughout the Roman Empire. No doubt, the relatively peaceful reign of Constantine that followed, while providing temporarily relief from persecution, was a massive shift for Christians.

As the church entered this new season of peace, it faced a whole new set of challenges and tensions, many of which were consequences of centuries of persecution. One of those tensions was that some Christians had begun to make compromises with the empire. To avoid becoming literal fodder for the empire’s fires, they essentially denied their faith with their fingers crossed behind their backs. They burned a little incense to Caesar to avoid being burned alive. As one ancient proverb aptly put it, they would bow before the emperor—and fart. They paid only enough homage to avoid getting killed.

It’s understandable, right? To be a Christian at the time of Constantine meant you and everyone you knew had, for generations, lost friends and family members to the brutal persecution of the Roman Empire—the same empire that had killed your Messiah. It’s hard enough to gather the faith and courage to die for Jesus, but harder still to sustain that fervor decade after decade and century after century while the empire is killing you, your kids, your parents, and the poor and vulnerable everywhere. So, if you had the option to make a small compromise in exchange for your life, it probably seemed like a worthwhile trade. And the temptation to acquire or align yourself with power and resources to stop the oppression would be hard to resist. It was one of the temptations Satan posed to Jesus in the desert. And it is a temptation we face in America today. So, that should give us some grace for the early Christians who, just a few hundred years in, made some regrettable, even if understandable, compromises.

Even so, not all of them compromised. Some felt more convicted than ever, believing that a willingness to die for Christ was the ultimate test of true discipleship. Persecution had only stiffened their spines and solidified their resolve. And herein lies one of the most significant crossroads of the early church. Those who refused to compromise excommunicated many of those who did, including leaders, for making concessions and assimilating within the empire. The early Christians knew they could not serve two masters. There was a choice to be made—would they serve Jesus or Caesar ? Excommunication has a bad vibe for many of us today, but the early Christians saw it as preserving the radical call of Christ and not compromising the cost of discipleship. There was no room for “cheap grace,” as Deitrich Bonhoeffer would call it centuries later, before he himself was martyred.

There’s an old saying we often hear in social movements today, “We have nothing to lose but our chains.” And while that was true of many of the early followers of Jesus who were poor or otherwise disenfranchised, it had become less unilaterally true a few centuries later. By this time, many new converts had a whole lot to lose. They wanted to hold onto their possessions and even stay in careers that earlier generations had deemed incompatible with Christian discipleship. Could you be a politician, much less the leader of the Roman Empire, and still be a follower of Christ? I think you see the source of the tension, which is one we still face today.

Constantine’s Impact

There is a lot we could say about Constantine and the evident contradictions in his faith and his leadership, but there is no denying that he radically parted ways with previous emperors and initiated welcome reforms. The reforms he instituted throughout society and the church were significant, and still leave a mark to this day—for better and for worse. In addition to proclaiming religious tolerance, he banned the gladiatorial games. He made it harder to kill babies by banning the Roman practice called “exposure.” He also banned the branding of criminals, which was done on the face.

Constantine explicitly acknowledged that human beings are made in the image of God. He funded the mission of the church, rebuilt church buildings, and reproduced copies of the Bible. He established the Sunday as a Sabbath day and ordered that the holy days of the Christian calendar be recognized. He even provided tax exemption for clergy and church property. I suppose he could be credited with setting up the first 501(c)(3) tax exemptions for the church, for better or worse.

He also ended the practice of crucifixion. Unfortunately, he didn’t end capital punishment, just execution by crucifixion. In fact, he ended up killing his own wife and son, so let there be no mistake—I’m not trying to defend him. I just want to be honest about the complexities and contradictions of a man many Christians today recognize as a saint, especially regarding the sanctity of life. Certainly, there are questions to be raised about his motives for all of these reforms, whether they came from an authentic respect for the Christian faith, political pragmatism, or some messy combo of both.

While scholars may debate how much Constantine himself actually changed the church, one thing is clear—the church was changing and the reign of Constantine certainly was a manifestation of that change. And Constantine took an active role not only in initiating social reforms, but also in shaping and solidifying the theology of the church.

By the time Constantine came to power, there were serious divisions in the church, many of which stemmed from the rapid growth of Christianity and its proximity to the power and wealth of Rome. Christians under Constantine began asking questions we still ask today. Does God want Christians to use worldly power to transform the world? Should Christians impose their values on others? Can Christians be political without losing their souls? Other contentious issues were more theological, such as disagreement about the full divinity and humanity of Christ and the nature of the Trinity.

In an effort to create unity and restore peace, Constantine tried to bring church leaders together. He hosted a summit of bishops in 314 at Arles in southern Gaul. And in 325, he convened one of the most significant ecumenical councils in the history of Christianity, the Council of Nicea. There, he brought together bishops and church leaders in an attempt to resolve differences and establish some norms and procedures within the church.

The rapidly growing church needed clarity about the structures of leadership as well as what church discipline looked like with heretics and lapsed Christians. What were the dignity standards for clergy? What did real repentance look like, and could someone be reinstated after they fell from grace? There were also questions about organizational structure and liturgical practice. One of the most pressing of issues before the Nicean council was how to understand the relationship between God and Jesus. The council produced the Nicene Creed, a defining statement of belief, which is still recited today, 1,700 years later, by Christians all over the world.

While the councils addressed various heresies and defined orthodox belief in the Nicene Creed, the message of Christianity itself did not change much. What did change, however, was how Christians lived out the message of Jesus in the world. The early church was called “The Way” and was known for its countercultural way of living. However, over the centuries and in response to persecution, Christianity gradually became primarily a way of believing rather than a way of living. During the era of Constantine and in the years that followed, much more energy was spent on defining how Christians are to think rather than how Christians are to live. The theological conversations progressively move from the heart to the head, focusing more on doctrines and less on actions.

From Christianity’s earliest days, friends and foes alike had described how radically different Christians were. Jesus had said that the world would know we are Christians by our love, and that is exactly what happened in those first few centuries. The onlooking world marveled that Christians fed the pagan poor as well as their own. They turned enemies into friends and loved even those who hated them. They would rather die than kill. Sadly, however, it was not these ways of living that were codified during the councils Constantine convened. What was debated and crystallized were doctrinal beliefs. To be clear, some very important clarifications were needed. And yet, you can’t help but wonder what might happened if it hadn’t been just doctrine that was set into stone, but also an ethic of life, lifestyle commitments, and a strong stance against violence.

What if the creed millions of Christians still recite every Sunday in worship also stated a commitment to life and affirmed the dignity of every person—the imago dei? Maybe it’s time to write a few new creeds today.

Historically, Christianity has always affirmed “orthodoxy,” meaning “right belief,” from which we get doctrine. But it has also held orthodoxy together with “orthopraxis,” meaning “right practice” or right living. Like the two blades of scissors or the two paddles of a rowboat, orthodoxy and orthopraxis go together.

Faith without works is dead (James 2:14–26). They will know we are Christians by our love (John 13:35). We can’t say that we love God and ignore our neighbor in need (1 John 3:16-17). Even as we look at Jesus, we do not see him teaching doctrines and theology alone, but also teaching us and showing us how to live.

Jesus put flesh on doctrine by literally becoming the Word made flesh (John 1:14). Jesus was not just inviting people to sign a doctrinal statement, he was inviting people to join a revolution—and still is. But that’s what began to give way during Constantine—the revolutionary, counter-cultural way of life of early Christianity.

Some point out, and rightly so, the irony that Constantine wasn’t even a baptized Christian as he oversaw these historic gatherings. Many contend that his primary interests were political more than they were religious—a divided church meant a divided empire and a weaker base. Perhaps he did have a deathbed conversion and got baptized before he died, as many believe. But in all those years before his death, he was quite a paradox, and ultimately did much damage to our understanding of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus.

A tree is known by its fruit, as Jesus said. In the end, if Christianity was more than just a political endorsement for Constantine, it is hard to see how that really translated into his own life. In fact, the year after he hosted the Council of Nicaea, he killed his own son Crispus. And a month or so later, he killed his wife Fausta by having her basically boiled to death in hot water. Not very befitting of any man of God, if I might be so pretentious to say. And yet, to this day, Constantine is recognized by many Christians as a saint. The Orthodox Church calls him “isapostolos”—equal to the apostles. And that itself, is part of the problem.

What had fundamentally changed was the church’s proximity to power, and now the church faced decisions about how to use its power. Specifically, should it use the power of the state to enforce the doctrines of the church? And by “enforce,” it’s important to know that the church now had the authority not just to excommunicate heretics, but to actually kill them.

It was also during Constantine’s reign that we begin to see the seeds of Christian colonization, which we’ll dig into in chapter 8. The words of Constantine’s vision, “By this conquer,” will echo throughout the ages to conquistadors and colonizers, providing holy cover for unholy missions.

The reign of Constantine is where we recognize the first cracks in the steadfast commitment to life that characterized the early Jesus movement. It’s also when we begin to see what compromised Christian faith can look like, more generally speaking. I guess some would call it the evolution of Christianity. I would call it the dissolution. Some would call it progress. I would call it digress, especially when it comes to how we value life.

The Post-Constantine Era

By AD 350, just over a decade after the death of Constantine, there were 33 million Christians in the Roman Empire. They were now more than half the Roman population—56 percent. The number of Christians outnumbered the number of non-Christians for the first time. Let that sink in. In a mere seventy years, Christianity went from being a persecuted revolutionary movement to an accepted minority religion, and then to the established religion of the entire Roman Empire.

While Constantine had made Christianity the majority religion in the empire, it would be the next emperor, Theodosius (AD 379–395), who would make it the official religion of the Roman Empire. Theodosius was the emperor who began to aggressively “Christianize” the empire. He used his power to ban both unorthodox Christians and pagans. He destroyed pagan temples and incited mob violence alongside the violence wielded by the state. At one point, undoubtedly provoked and emboldened by the emperor, the archbishop of Alexandria rounded up a group of monks to destroy the serapeum, one of the shrines to the Egyptian god Serapis. And Theodosius congratulated the Christians who tore it down. This was his decree:

It is our will that all the peoples who are ruled by . . . our Clemency shall practice that religion which the divine Peter the Apostle transmitted to the Romans. . . We command that those persons who follow this rule shall embrace the name of Catholic Christians. . . . The rest, however, whom we adjudge demented and insane, shall sustain the infamy of heretical dogmas, . . . and they shall be smitten first by divine vengeance and secondly by the retribution of our own initiative, which we shall assume in accordance with divine judgement.

Obviously, that didn’t go over well with many people, namely the formerly pagan majority that was now quickly become a minority both in numbers and in access to power. At one point, there were riots and Theodosius was absolutely brutal, slaughtering thousands of men, women, and children. On another occasion, he killed 7,000 people in three hours. Theodosius was so relentlessly violent that he was temporarily excommunicated by one of the bishops of the church, Bishop Ambrose of Milan. He was not permitted to take the Eucharist because he had betrayed Christ by spilling blood. You may recall the statement of the third-century bishop Cyprian, that the hand that takes the Eucharist should not be “sullied by the blood-stained sword!”

Shortly after the rule of Theodosius, fifteen years later to be precise, the Roman Empire collapsed, sacked by Visigoths in 410 AD. For the first time in 800 years, Rome was unable to defend itself from outside invasion. The Roman Empire fell, but the church lived on.

Other emperors would come and go. Some, such as Justinian in AD 527, considered themselves to be what historian Susan Wise Bauer describes as “the representative of Christ on earth.” As a Byzantine emperor and professing Christian, he began the ambitious mission known as “renovation imperii,” or “the restoration of the empire.” In service of his cause, Justinian slaughtered 30,000 people in one week to put down what came to be called the Nika Riots in Constantinople. It is unclear if he saw himself representing God or the state—or both—as he killed these men, women, and children. It was hard to know where the emperor’s reign ended and God’s kingdom began. The marriage of church and state had begun.

Christians began to kill other Christians whom they considered heretics. And Christians began to kill people of other faiths, along with native peoples and pagans. Those who had been tortured and jailed became the ones who tortured and jailed others. The ones who had seen their books burned and their buildings torched became the ones who burned the books and destroyed the buildings of others. The persecuted became the persecutors. Those who had been the victims of state power now wielded that power. Those who had suffered from the military occupation now served in the military. The executed now became the executioners. After 300 years of steadfast commitment to life and standing up against death and violence in all its manifestations, Christians became the empire and exchanged the cross for a sword.

The brilliant Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard insisted that where everything is Christian nothing is Christian. In other words, we lose our essence, the distinctive, counter-cultural witness of the upside-down kingdom.

We can say that we are a Christian empire, but the question is, how much do we remind the world of Jesus? As history shows, Christian empires, if there is such a thing, usually lose their souls.

A wise man once said, “What good is it to gain the whole world but lose your soul?”

Excerpt from Shane Claiborne’s Rethinking Life, Zondervan Books, Published 2023, Used by permission.

Shared Values

• Base skepticism, critical questioning, cultural criticism, and having the courage to speak truth to power are all values that I share in common with contemporary deconstructionists.

• These values are important because the church is deeply flawed. In a lot of ways, the church in the United States has departed from the criterion of Christ and the example of the early church. If no one speaks up and offers criticism, then nothing will change for the better.

The Protestant Reformation

• There are strong parallels between the Age of Reformation and the current era of deconstruction. There is much for deconstructionists to glean from this turbulent period of church history. This, of course, is the value of history itself: it enables us to learn from both past successes and past failures; it gives us the ability to replicate the good of previous eras and to evade the bad. The Protestant Reformers were not all that different from the deconstructionists of our age. In fact, the Reformers were deconstructionists in their own right. Their overall goal was to reform a wayward church that had departed from the standard of Jesus and his apostles. This involved deconstructing distorted beliefs and perverted practices that had seeped into the church over time.

• Though I believe that their intentions were often pure, they didn’t always do this with the right spirit (some of the crude, childish, and venomous rhetoric of Martin Luther serves as a great example). The Reformers themselves departed from the way of Christ on many occasions (one can think of all the senseless violence and “killings in the name of” that occurred during those volatile times, for instance). Deconstructionists who are seeking to reform or renovate the church would do well, then, to study the ambivalent example of the Reformers, learning from both their triumphs and their failures. A list of lessons that we could learn from such research might include: how to offer good criticism rather than bad criticism, how to disagree with someone in an ethical manner rather than in an unethical manner, and how to “speak truth in love” rather than in contempt.

Testing & Falsification

• Sometimes people need to question their beliefs and deconstruct their faith in order to deepen their beliefs and refine their faith. Beliefs often need to go through a process of testing and falsification in order to become secure, stable, and strong. Deconstructionism can be an ally in this process.

• Of course, if the central claims of Christianity are false, then faith deconstruction can be a useful tool in uncovering the truth. People should believe in things because they are true. If Christianity isn’t true, then one shouldn’t have any desire to believe in its claims.

Personal Critique

• My critique is focused not so much on the deconstructionist’s point of departure, but on her place of arrival: as you run away from something, what are you running towards? As you walk away from something, what are you walking towards? Where are you going? What will be your final destination?

• I mentioned three types of deconstructionists in part one: (1) the “arsonist,” (2) the “gentrifier,” and (3) the “renovator.” When I discussed these three forms of deconstruction, I compared worldviews or belief systems to dwelling places or places of residence. The arsonist is left without a home, which, in most cases, is much worse than having a home—even if the home is in poor condition. The gentrifier has a new home, but there’s no guarantee that this new build will be any better than the old one—and it could end up being worse. The renovator has an updated home, but some of the new renovations could easily lead to new problems.

• Here’s my main question and my main concern: is the new living arrangement truly better than the old one? Is the destination better than the place of departure? Isn’t it true that there are no perfect living spaces, no perfect structures, no perfect homes? If you move to a new neighborhood, if you become a member of a new religious subculture, won’t you just find the same problems—even new problems, different problems? If you change your address, if you change your belief system, how do you know that you won’t find yourself right back in the housing market, right back at square one, in a few years? Every system has flaws and shortcomings. Every community has its problems. The new thing is not always the better thing. Sometimes it is even worse than the thing that came before it.

• Holding two degrees in theology, I have had the privilege of studying both the history of religions and the history of cults. When you study the history of cults, one thing that you will notice is that many cult leaders come from Christian backgrounds, often fundamentalist backgrounds. After deconstructing their Christian beliefs—regardless of how distorted those beliefs may have been—they end up constructing something far worse. The same is true for many cult members: they are usually people who have walked away from the church, for one reason or another. What seems like heaven on earth, what seems like paradise, what seems like the perfect dwelling place, the ideal home, soon becomes a living hell! How do we know that what lies in front of us is better than what lies behind us? That’s my main question.

Conclusion: Words of Advice for Those Deconstructing Their Faith

I have gone through my own journey of deconstruction. I am almost 37 years old now. I have had the opportunity to study all the major world religions, all the major cults, and all the major worldviews and ideologies, and I think I might be able to offer some counsel that has some worth. So, I want to close with some friendly words of advice for those who are currently engaged in the process of faith deconstruction—no matter where you might find yourself within that process:

1st, self-criticism is so important here. We are capable of criticizing others, but are we capable of criticizing ourselves? Are we willing to criticize our destination with the same vigor with which we criticized our place of departure? Will we allow ourselves to wage the same criticisms towards our new home that we waged against our old home? Doing so might enable us to avoid a lot of new problems and new difficulties down the road.

2nd, is our criticism constructive and fruitful or merely destructive and unfruitful? Sometimes we can be right while also being wrong; sometimes our words can be true, but our intentions can be venomous. As a result, the truth of our words can fall on deaf ears.

3rd, I think we should focus more on reconstructing than deconstructing, more on building and repairing than demolishing and destroying. As a society, we should emphasize what we believe in, not what we don’t believe in; we should highlight what we love, not what we hate.

4th, in the same spirit, we shouldn’t seek to burn bridges, but to build bridges. Generally speaking, I don’t think burning bridges is a good idea. In life, you never know how things are going to unfold. You never know who is going to come back into your life and who you might need again in the future. That’s why I think we should be very cautious and very wary about burning bridges.

5th, we would be wise not to be so quick to put ourselves in boxes and label ourselves. Be your own person! Think for yourself! Come to your own conclusions! For instance, you might currently find yourself in a process of deconstruction, but that doesn’t mean that you have to be an “arsonist.” Don’t allow other people to control who you are and who you will become. Make your own decisions. Own your own decisions.

•  Final Words: wherever you have come from, wherever you are, and wherever you are going, I wish you all the best… with all my heart, I really do…. Grace be with you. Peace be with you. Love be with you. Always. Godspeed, my friend.

The Main Reasons for Faith Deconstruction

1. Idealism and Perfectionism: 

Much of this comes from the church itself: spiritual pride; moral superiority; self-righteousness; and a pretense of spiritual perfectionism can permeate church culture. Some church leaders represent themselves as God-like figures who can say no wrong and can do no wrong—creating cult-like environments. This produces false expectations. When Christians are exposed to some of the uglier sides of church ministry—which demonstrate that churches and the people who lead them are messy and flawed—it can damage their faith: “The church isn’t perfect! It’s not what they claim! They’re phonies and hypocrites! I was lied to and deceived!”

Some parishioners may even experience personal abuse at the hands their leaders—whether sexual, physical, verbal or otherwise. Personal hurt—personal pain and trauma—plays a big part in all of this, as those who have been wronged and mistreated in the church often carry the weight of those experiences with them for the rest of their lives: “I thought I would find healing here, but I was wounded and scarred instead; I thought this would be a place of refuge, but instead it’s a house of horrors.”

Outside of traumatizing experiences in the life of the church, people can sour on Christianity for a variety of reasons: Christians might gain a greater appreciation for the checkered past of the church (you can’t erase it from history!); believers who actually read their Bibles might discover some unpleasant truths in the midst of their studies (especially if they are studying the Old Testament!); Christ-followers may also find that their theology doesn’t always make sense of their experiences.

Idealism and perfectionism are not just church constructs; they are often our own constructs. Sometimes we enter the church—and the Christian faith—with an unrealistic and idealistic expectation of perfection: “If it’s not perfect, then I can’t accept it; every minute detail of Christianity needs to be flawless in order for me to receive the general, overarching message of the church.” As soon as we become aware of any blemishes or imperfections in the nooks and crannies of the faith, we discard it all.

The contemporary deconstruction movement tends to focus heavily on the failings and hypocrisies of the church. My process of deconstruction was never really focused on these things. I was always more concerned with beliefs than with behavior, more focused on the doctrine of the church than on the leaders and congregants of the church. I never expected Christians to be perfect. I was never surprised by stories of moral failures. I expected that kind of thing, partly because I was quite familiar with the biblical narrative. In Scripture, the great “heroes” of the faith are all tragically flawed. The Bible actually intimates that God chose them for this very reason! For example, Noah was a drunk; Abraham was a liar; Moses was a murderer; Aaron—the first high priest—was an idolater (yes: there is biblical precedent for wicked and corrupt priests); David was an adulterer; and the list goes on and on…. In Christianity, Christ is the sole object of faith—not one’s pastor, priest, or worship leader. So, when your church leader falls, and it shakes your faith, I would ask you this: is your faith in your church leader or is it in Jesus Christ?

Misconduct doesn’t negate truth. Some deconstructionists act as if religious hypocrisy is an automatic “defeater” of religious faith, but it’s most certainly not. There is a difference between poor character and poor doctrine. Truth transcends behavior. Just because a person acts like a jerk doesn’t mean that his beliefs are unsound; his bad attitude may cause the truths that he proclaims to fall on deaf ears, but this doesn’t mean that the truths themselves are untrue. We seem to acknowledge this fact in the political dimension of life but have a hard time accepting it in the religious dimension. When a political leader from our favorite political party commits adultery or lies under oath, we don’t treat the politician’s actions as an automatic invalidation of their political positions. Instead, we recognize that the sporadic moral failings of individual leaders in our chosen political party do not discredit the beliefs and policies of the party as a whole. Why do we seem to understand this in the political realm but not in the religious realm?

2. Poor Thinking & Poor Communication: 

This reason for deconstruction has to do with both the doctrine of the church itself and the way that it is taught—with both what is communicated and how it is communicated. In the church, it is not uncommon to hear very simplistic, unnuanced, and superficial lessons taught in a very closed-minded, objective, and dogmatic environment. Questions are discouraged; concerns are dissuaded. When a moral law or precept is presented, no explanation is given as to why the precept exists. There’s no attempt to answer the “why” question, which is—more often than not—where one will find the heart of a loving God. The letter of the law is taught with no mention of the spirit of the law. The heart of God is concealed under the dryness and coldness of a rule.

In many churches, theology is also taught in a very rigid manner, in a way that restricts God—putting him in a box and limiting his freedom: “God only does things this way”; “God always acts in this manner.” When these external expectations, which are projected onto God, are not met, the faith of believers can sometimes be shaken. See, this god is too small; this view of God is too narrow. People need a “bigger God.” All of this is very Pharisaic. It is both sad and ironic that many American Christians more closely resemble the enemies of Christ than Christ himself. A Pharisaic perspective distorts the message of Christianity.

Poor thinking and poor communication are not just pervasive in the church; they are also rampant outside the church as well. For example, perversions of the Christian message that are sometimes propagated by the church itself have a tendency to evoke straw man arguments from zealous deconstructionists who might think that they are deconstructing Christianity, but, in reality, they are actually just deconstructing a misrepresentation of Christianity. We also have a tendency to universalize or absolutize our subjective experiences, to view our personal experiences as normative when they might not be. I’ve seen this a lot in deconstructionist circles: “because my pastor didn’t have the answers, no pastor has the answers” or “because my church leaders failed me, all church leaders are unfaithful” or “because I was exposed to false teachings in a Christian church, Christianity as a whole is false.” My subjective experience represents an extremely small sample size in the grand scheme of things.

3. Conflict in Values: 

So far, we have mostly discussed conflicts between church members or former church members and imperfect church leaders, and between Christians or former Christians and distortions of the Christian message, but what about natural tension between people and Jesus of Nazareth himself? Jesus was a countercultural figure in his day, so much so that he was nailed to a cross. If he was countercultural in his time, how much more countercultural would he be in our time? To say that there is natural conflict between the values, practices, and beliefs of a deeply-religious, 1st-century Palestinian rabbi and the values, practices, and beliefs of 21st-century Americans is an understatement!

I would argue that there is tension between Jesus and all people, both people inside the church and people outside the church. I talked about the conflict between Jesus of Nazareth and evangelical Christians in my podcast episode, “Cultural Christianity,” but much of what I said in that episode also applies to those outside of evangelicalism and outside of the church. Without rehashing everything that I stated in that episode, I will just leave it at this: people tend to make Jesus in their own image. So Jesus becomes the conservative Jesus or the liberal Jesus—the fundamentalist Jesus or the progressive Jesus—but the Jesus of history was neither. Jesus transcended all categories and all labels, for he was wholly other.

Today, especially in the West, we tend to approach Christ and approach Christianity from an ego-centric and self-centered perspective. I think this is true for both evangelicals and non-evangelicals, for those outside the church and those inside the church. I make Christianity about me; we make Christianity about us. It’s about what I believe, what I think, what I feel, what I want. But Christianity isn’t primarily about me; it’s about Christ. It’s about what he believes, what he thought, what he felt, what he wants. Christ is the object of Christianity, the object of Christian faith—not me! There will always be natural conflict between my values, my priorities, my belief system, my wishes and his! But if anyone is to capitulate or submit in this relationship, it’s me. As a Christian, I’m summoned to conform to him, to sacrifice for him, to follow him. He’s not supposed to conform to me, to capitulate to me, and to obey me! This religion is called “Christianity,” not “Ryan-ianity.”

Jesus said, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, paraphrasing this statement, famously said that when Jesus calls you, he “bids you to come and die.” These are tough words, but the fact that they are difficult doesn’t make them any less true. Christianity is not an easy path; it is a trying and challenging one, but one that I believe is more than worthwhile. Now, some within the current deconstruction movement fully realize this. Others, I think, have come to realize this over time. On social media, this realization is sometimes reflected through a simple hashtag substitution, as the “ex-evangelical” hashtag is suddenly exchanged for the “ex-Christian” hashtag. I think that some people come to realize—to their own credit—that their values aren’t merely in conflict with the values of evangelicals or conservative Christians, but with the values of Jesus himself. I respect those who have come to this realization because such people are taking the call of Christ seriously and are counting the cost.

Check back in on Monday, February 5, for Part 3 of this 3-part series on Deconstruction. 

We all have prejudices, ways we “pre-judge” people based on anything from how they look to their religion, their culture or language, their sexuality, or the color of their skin. We are comfortable around people who are like us and we are uncomfortable around people who aren’t. Even when we work hard to be fair and unbiased, too often we treat people who aren’t like us differently than we treat people who are like us.

When our prejudice leads us to treat others unjustly, it’s called discrimination. To discriminate, we need a certain degree of power.(1) For example, the power to create a welcoming or a hostile environment, to include or exclude, to give or refuse service in a restaurant, to hire or not hire, to rent or not rent housing, to worship or not worship together. The more power we have, the more we can discriminate; and the more we discriminate, the more harm we can cause. With enough power, we can discriminate not just against individuals but entire people groups. That’s what happens when prejudice moves from the small scale to the large scale: organizations and governments paint an entire people group with a broad brush of interiority and systemize prejudice into laws and policies.

Certainly, many of us are working hard to purge ourselves of our prejudices and to learn to love as God loves, but one of the worst things we can do is ignore that our history has shaped how we see people today, sometimes in ways we may not even realize. While some prejudices are based on our experiences, others are not. Instead, they are transmitted through cultural biases, inherited directly or indirectly from others, or taught as truth. Sadly, this has happened even in the church. Over the course of history and into the present, the church has actually theologized prejudice and hatred, sometimes even to the point of supporting genocide, which is what happened in Nazi Germany.

Some historians consider anti-Semitism the original sin of Christianity because we see the roots of it from the very beginning. Following Jesus’ crucifixion, there were some who said it was the Jews rather than our own sins that killed Jesus. This anti-Jewish prejudice began to take root in Christian theology early on, but it took centuries for the power dynamic to shift in such a way that prejudice could turn into large-scale discrimination and ultimately genocide.

Hate Escalates

We need to understand how hate becomes policy because the kind of resentment that leads to genocide doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It follows a predictable pattern that begins with biased attitudes and progresses to acts of bias, discrimination, bias-motivated violence, and then genocide.(2) What’s important to note is that the seeds of genocide are first sown as biased attitudes, which include stereotypes, fear of differences, and believing negative information about others—all of which are abundantly evident in our current climate.

The Holocaust in Nazi Germany followed this pattern of hate. It didn’t spring up overnight. There were social conditions, policies, and, yes, theology, that made Hitler’s Germany fertile ground for genocide. Holocaust scholar and Christian ethicist David Gushee traces the long history of anti-Semitism as evidenced in anti-Jewish laws over the centuries. Take a look.

• Prohibition of intermarriage and sexual intercourse between Jews and Christians (306)
• Jews and Christians not permitted to eat together (306)
• Jews not allowed to hold public office (535)
• Jews not allowed to employ Christian servants (538)
• The Talmud and other Jewish books burned (681)
• Jews obliged to pay taxes to support the church (1078)
• Jews not permitted to be plaintiffs or witnesses against Christians (1179)
• Jewish clothes marked with special badges (1215)
• Construction of new synagogues prohibited (1222)
• Compulsory ghettos mandated (1267)
• Adoption of Judaism by a Christian banned (1310)
• Jews not permitted to obtain academic degrees (1434) (3)

One of the striking things the list demonstrates is how persistently these laws appear across the centuries. Hate is a resilient thing. It’s also important to note that such laws are rarely one-offs but reflect deeper hostilities and prejudice that can eventually manifest themselves in full-blown violence. Sometimes policy violence is the precursor to physical violence. It’s like a warning light on the dashboard of a car: it signals trouble ahead. It was the same with Black codes or Jim Crow laws in the US, and it has many other expressions across time and around the world.(4)  We can all think of people who face discrimination today. That’s why a pursuit of equality and justice in policies is a way not only of affirming human life and dignity but also of nipping hatred in the bud.

We’re going to take a closer look at anti-Semitism in the church because it is one of the earliest cracks in our foundation when it comes to affirming the sacredness of every person, and it is a crack that persists to this day. Understanding our history of anti-Semitism can also help us think critically about other forms of discrimination, help us combat it in other forms, and keep us from repeating the mistakes of history. The devil may be a liar, but he often keeps telling the same lies over and over, just in new ways.

A Brief History of Anti-Semitism in the Church

Christians have had a complicated relationship with our Jewish cousins pretty much from the beginning, ever since folks 2,200 years ago started proclaiming that the long-awaited Messiah had come to us as a Jewish carpenter from Galilee. As much as some folks might prefer to believe otherwise, it’s impossible to erase Jesus’ Jewishness. He went to synagogue. He observed Passover. He knew the law, and he knew when to break it. He expanded his followers’ imagination and blew their minds by showing how big God’s dream for the world is, and how big God’s grace is—for the Jewish people, but also for non-Jewish people.

Remember, as more and more non-Jews became recipients of grace, one of the debates in the early church was what it meant for a gentile to become a Christian. Did they need to become Jewish in order to become Christian—for instance, did they need to get circumcised and eat kosher? What about when someone converted, such as a centurion in the Roman army? This was a question Peter really wrestled with (Acts 10), and much of the tension in the early church formed around how Christians related to Jews. You can see why it was a legitimate question, and the early church did a pretty great job navigating these waters, for at least a few centuries.

Then came the Constantinian shift. Anti-Jewish sentiment certainly existed in the Christian community before Constantine, but, as we have seen, what changed was proximity to power. Before Constantine, Christians didn’t have the power to overtly discriminate against Jews or anyone else in any systematic way. But that changed once Christianity became the majority religion and then the official religion of the empire.

Over time, we developed some toxic ways of twisting Scripture that fueled anti-Semitism. Some Christian leaders blamed the Jews for killing Jesus, rather than rightfully seeing all of humanity—including Romans officials, Jewish religious leaders, and the sins of you and me—as being responsible for Christ’s death. We were all culpable. Many Christians, then and now, interpreted the destruction of Jerusalem and all the lives that were lost as God’s judgment on the Jews for rejecting Jesus, the Messiah. In support of their view, they referred to verses such as this one from the apostle Paul: “You suffered from your own people the same things those churches suffered from the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and also drove us out. They displease God and are hostile to everyone” (1 Thess. 2:14–15). Some now saw “the Jews” as the culprit and made them a scapegoat.

While many Christians clung to their ancestors in the faith, including the ancient prophets and sacred texts, they rejected their Jewish roots and origins. It became known as supersessionism—the idea that the Jewish story ended with the birth of Christ and the church has superseded Israel as God’s chosen people. There is even an entire theology known as adversus Judaeos, meaning “against the Jews.” This theology can be traced all the way back to the fourth century and is especially evident in the teachings of John Chrysostom (ca. AD 347–407), who is sometimes referred to as the “golden mouthed,” which is what chrysostom means in Greek but was also a reference to how eloquent his sermons were. However, his writings reveal a not so golden theology of contempt that portrayed Jews as heretics, blasphemers, and prophet killers. As we attempt to be honest about some of these iconic church thinkers, many of whom are now revered as saints, it is helpful to see that someone can be brilliant on some things and still be blind on others. Some of the things Chrysostom said were gold, and others were fool’s gold.

Chrysostom called Jews dogs, goats, and pigs. He characterized them as fat and lazy drunkards, and called their synagogues “haunts of demons.” He called them “assassins of Christ,” held them responsible for the crucifixion, and considered them guilty of “deicide”: they were God-killers.(5) More subtle anti-Jewish themes also can be seen in several writings of other early Christians, including Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Cyprian, and Origen.

Dangerous Words

It is vitally important for Christians, and for everyone who believes in life, to stand against hatred in all its forms. And a good place to start is with our rhetoric. As we’ve seen in history, we sow deadly seeds the moment we use or even tolerate dehumanizing language, such as calling any group of people cockroaches, dogs, or vermin. Not too long ago, there was a president of the United States whose rhetoric and policies sowed many of those dangerous seeds on a global scale. He referred to Mexican immigrants as “rapists and murderers.” He referred to entire countries as “shitholes.” Those are dangerous words, the kind of words that led to a surge in hate crimes and acts of overt racism.(6) All the while, he insisted that he did not have “a racist bone” in his body.(7) Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.

Words have consequences, whether they’re spoken by a school bully, a politician, or a preacher. We can all be interrupters of hateful and dangerous words by standing against language that tears people down and denies the image of God in them. One way we can do that is simply to ask the speaker, “Don’t you think they are made in the image of God, just like you are?”

Fast-forward to the sixteenth century and the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther began with some sympathy and compassion for Jewish people, speaking against the anti-Semitism of the Roman Catholic Church. He even wrote an essay in 1523 titled “That Jesus Was a Jew,” in which he condemned the fact that the church had “dealt with the Jews as if they were dogs rather than human beings.”(8) He was clearly right to condemn that. However, just twenty years later in 1543, he published “The Jews and Their Lies,” a sixty-five-thousand-word manifesto calling for a litany of horrors, including the destruction of synagogues, Jewish schools, and homes.(9) I cringe as I type his words: “We are at fault in not slaying them.”(10) He called them a “whoring people” with a law that “must be accounted as filth.”

Ugh.

It’s not hard to see how his hateful rhetoric ultimately provided a theological foundation for the outright slaughter of Jews under the Nazis. From its earliest days, the Nazi regime used Luther’s writing to fuel their movement. Martin Sasse, a Lutheran bishop in the German state of Thuringia, is just one example. Following Kristallnacht, two days of Nazi-incited mob violence that is now seen as the beginning of the systematic destruction of Jews,(11) Bishop Sasse wrote and distributed a pamphlet titled Martin Luther on the Jews: Away with Them! In it, he defended and justified the mass slaughter that would soon unfold.(12)

Some who defend Luther are quick to point out that he was old and starting to lose it as he wrote his anti-Semitic work. But that defense skirts the fact that he was nevertheless capable of having Jews expelled from Saxony and other areas of Germany in 1537, just six years before writing his anti-Semitic manifesto. And he didn’t die until 1546, three years after writing those sickening words. I wish I could say that there was universal outrage when he published his remarks, but that would be a stretch. Although Christians did eventually condemn Luther’s words, it took centuries.

Unfortunately, anti-Semitism in the church didn’t end with Luther. In 1555, on the other side of the Reformation and a decade after Luther died, Pope Paul IV issued a papal bull removing the rights of Jews. And it wasn’t until Vatican II in 1965 that the Roman Catholic Church formally rejected its doctrinal anti-Semitism.

In the case of Nazi Germany, it’s important to acknowledge that some Christians were part of the resistance and many of those ended up being killed alongside their Jewish neighbors. We’ll consider their example next. However, it would be hard to imagine Hitler coming to power without the twisted theology and moral defense of the church. He did it all with a Bible in his hand, even likening himself to Jesus. He said that just as Jesus cleansed the temple of the Jews, he, Hitler, was cleansing the world of Jews.(13)

All you have to do is twist the cross to get a swastika.

The Genocide in Rwanda

For some of us, the Holocaust might feel like distant history even though we are just a generation or two removed from it. We might be tempted to think we would never allow something like that to happen now. That’s why it’s important to remember that another atrocity of history took place in Rwanda in 1994. We need to remember this history so we don’t repeat it.

At the time of the genocide, Rwanda had one of the highest concentrations of Christians of any country in Africa, and really of nearly any country in the world. Some estimate that up to 90 percent of the population was Christian, at least nominally. It does raise the question of how one of the worst atrocities of our generation happened when nine out of ten people involved were Christians.

In his brilliant book Mirror to the Church, Ugandan theologian and priest Emmanuel Katangole shows exactly how it happened. Certainly, there were demonic forces at work, but there was also a propaganda machine. In a country comprised of approximately 85 percent Hutus and 14 percent Tutsis, Tutsis were routinely dehumanized. There was also a complex historical backdrop of inequality that led to the propaganda and the narrative of hatred that became so deadly. Among other things, the Tutsis were called cockroaches and their lives equated with bugs, just waiting to be crushed.

The Rwandan genocide claimed some 800,000 lives in 100 days.(14) About 10,000 people were killed each day, mostly by machetes, in one of the most sickening events in my lifetime. I can remember it—I was in my first year of college. Years later, I got to visit Rwanda. Almost everywhere we went there were memorials, markers indicating mass graves, and in some places even the bones of those who died were left in place so we dare not forget.

On one of the monuments I visited were the words, “If you had known me, you would not have killed me.” It is a powerful quote, a reminder that it is harder to kill people when you know them. But it is also a complicated quote because many of the people in Rwanda did know the people they killed. Many of them slaughtered their neighbors.

It was the same with slavery and lynching in the United States. Theologian and civil rights leader Howard Thurman spoke poignantly about this, naming the fact that proximity alone didn’t guarantee compassion and respect. Black folks and white folks were living in proximity to each other even as Black folks were abused, tortured, raped, and sold on street corners. White folks did not really see Black folks, certainly not in an I-Thou kind of way.

Being a Christian, perhaps also just being a decent human being, means having more than just new ideas. It means having new eyes. Lots of smart people throughout history have also been racist. They had big ideas, but they did not have the “eyes to see,” as Jesus said (Matt. 13:16). When we say, “I see you,” we are affirming not just that we are looking at someone but that we notice them, feel with them, and stand in solidarity with them.

It’s easy for us to look back at this horrific event with disbelief or even a sense of moral superiority, thinking, “We would never do that,” or, “We would never let that happen again.” And yet I bet that’s what every generation says as it looks back on the horrors of the past. Nearly every new generation has its own genocide, and, as we will soon see, the twentieth century was the bloodiest century in the history of the world. We must never take progress for granted. And it is worth noting that this genocide happened primarily with knives. How much more damage could have been done with nuclear bombs and weapons of mass destruction?

Faithful Resisters

When it comes to anti-Semitism, we can grieve the failures of the church even as we celebrate its faithfulness. In Nazi Germany, heroes such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and members of the Confessing Church movement stood against hatred and fascism, and it cost many of them their lives. There were also many underground movements of subversive love and hospitality, and courageous individuals who risked their lives to save Jewish lives.

Certainly, one of the most well-known Christian resisters was Corrie ten Boom, daughter of a Dutch watchmaker, who rescued hundreds of Jewish people before she and her family were arrested and sent to concentration camps. After surviving the war, she wrote a book about her story in which she recounts a conversation with a pastor who had come to her father’s watch shop for a repair. Hoping to enlist the pastor’s help, she went to another room and came back with a little baby who, with his mother, needed to be rescued. The pastor leaned over and looked at the baby, initially moved as anyone would be. But then he pulled back. “We could lose our lives for that Jewish child!” he said. Corrie’s father overheard the comment, took the child in his arms, and then said to the pastor, “You say we could lose our lives for this child. I would consider that the greatest honor that could come to my family.”(15) Courage is contagious. And so is fear.

There were also courageous youth movements that resisted Hitler’s theology and policies. The White Rose was a youth movement sparked by a few dozen university students whose faith and idealism inspired them to act. At the center of the group were two siblings, Hans and Sophie Scholl. Hans was twenty-four and Sophie was twenty-one. They illegally printed and distributed hundreds of leaflets, doing all they could to counter the narrative of hatred. They were convicted of treason, sentenced to death, and beheaded on February 22, 1943, just four days after their arrest.

Other Christians, such as Franz Jägerstätter, a conscientious objector who refused to fight for the Nazi regime, met a similar fate for their courageous witness.(16) That’s what faithful Christianity—good religion—looks like. Their courage and faithfulness can inspire us today as we stand up for life and resist the forces of death and hatred.

In the years since the Holocaust, the work of faithful resisters has continued through courageous and noble endeavors to heal the wounds and repair the cracks in our ethic of life. While such resistance may not be like resisting the Nazi regime, it does show us other versions of courage and repair. Sometimes faithful resistance can be as simple as building a new relationship, one in which we speak truth to one another in love and try to heal some of the wounds of history.

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner tells a powerful story of a healing friendship with an Episcopal priest that began about forty-five years ago. The two men had decided to meet once a month for a meal together so they could share about their faith and deepen mutual understanding. Eventually, they decided to share their thoughts about Jesus, which they first wrote out and then read to one another as they ate. These are some of the words Rabbi Kushner wrote to his Episcopal friend:

I am wary of Jesus. Not because of anything he taught or even because of anything his disciples taught about him. . . .

I am wary of Jesus because of history and what so many of those who said they believed in him have done to my people. Christianity, you could say, has ruined Jesus for me. Somehow through the ages the suffering Jesus has become confused with the suffering of the Jewish people, my people. That is the key to my problem with him. His death has even become causally linked with some denial on my part. And this in turn has been used as a justification for my suffering.

In this way Jesus means for me not the one who suffered for the world’s sins but the one on account of whom I must suffer.(17)

Rabbi Kushner then relayed what happened next. He looked up at his Episcopal friend, whose face was “ashen.” “I winced,” he said, “fearing that I had crossed some line, that with my smug bluntness I had injured my new friend.” But then the priest responded with a tearful whisper, “Please forgive me, forgive us. It could not have been Jesus those Christians served.” Rabbi Kushner described it as a transformative moment. Their conversation continued.

“Your religion,” I said, “wants you to care about me that much?”

“Oh yes,” he said. “Don’t you see, I must continuously seek to find God in every person. Jesus is only the beginning. You, Larry, are easy. But the ultimate goal is to find my Lord within everyone—even people I like a lot less than you, even people I dislike, even ones I despise.”

And then it dawned on me: So that’s what it means to say that God can take the form of a human being.(18)

To heal some of the wounds of the past, we need that kind of honest cross-faith dialogue today, that sort of deep mutual understanding and trust.

These are a few glimpses of what courage in the face of hate can look like. Resistance has many different forms. Sometimes it looks like risking our lives and sometimes it looks like building a friendship with someone who is different from us. I guess the real question is, What does courage in the face of hate look like for us today?

Love Overcomes

I have had several wonderful opportunities over the years to visit Israel and Palestine. It is an incredible thing to walk the land that Jesus and our Jewish ancestors walked. One of the people I spend a lot of time with when I am in Israel and the West Bank is my friend Sami Awad. Sami comes from a long line of Palestinian Christians who are also advocates for peace and champions of life. On one of my first visits, Sami told me his story as we walked along the Israeli West Bank wall that separates Israel and Palestine.(19)

Growing up in Palestine, he had seen so much hatred that he knew it was a dead end. I guess you could say, as Dr. King put it, Sami had “seen too much hate to hate,” and he chose love because hate is too heavy of a burden. As an adult, he ended up taking a pilgrimage to Germany to study and, more important, to experience the history of what his Jewish neighbors suffered in the Holocaust. He visited concentration camps, a Holocaust museum, and memorials. His heart ached because of what was done to them. The experience gave him new eyes. It enabled him to grieve and to be outraged about what has happened to the Jews over the centuries, and especially in the Holocaust.

Sami’s grief and compassion for his Jewish neighbors doesn’t prevent him from also being grieved by and outraged at what the state of Israel is doing to his neighbors in the West Bank and Gaza, but it does change what he sees. “I used to look at the wall and see hatred,” he said. “Now I look at the wall and I see fear.” That understanding doesn’t justify the injustices he witnesses every day, but it does help him understand the fear behind the wall. It is love that fuels his desire for the wall to come down and for both Jews and Palestinians, Muslims and Christians, and all people, to be honored equally as beautiful and made in the image of God.

Sami’s willingness to see and love his enemies—to affirm their humanity—makes me want to advocate for those on all sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It makes me want to be pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, pro-peace. It makes me want to advocate that schools and healthcare in Gaza should be as good as schools and healthcare in Jerusalem. And just as we can see throughout history why it is important to say “Jewish lives matter,” the injustice and violence in Israel and Palestine should also compel all of us to say with equal conviction, “Palestinian lives matter.” We cannot be quiet when someone is hurting our brothers and sisters, no matter what language they speak, what religion they practice, or what side of the wall they live on.

Believing and living out a consistent ethic of life always leads to compassion rather than hate. I got to witness a beautiful example of that several years ago following an act of hate that could have been explosive. Amid rising anti-Muslim tensions in our city and around the country in 2015, someone dumped the head of a pig in front of a mosque in Philadelphia, a gross display of hatred against Muslims, for whom pork is forbidden. But what happened next is where the light of life shines.

Leaders from multiple faith traditions, including many Christian and Jewish communities, gathered outside the mosque as our Muslim neighbors went to prayer, to stand in solidarity with them and as an expression of love.

A couple of years after the incident at the mosque, there was another act of hatred in our state. Someone went into a Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia and defaced the tombs, vandalizing them with symbols of hate. In an immediate act of solidarity and love, the Muslim community in Philly started a campaign that ultimately raised thousands and thousands of dollars to repair the Jewish cemetery.

We need more of that kind of love. The kind of love that repairs the cracks in our foundation for life. The kind of love that affirms the dignity of every person—and not only affirms it but also celebrates it. The kind of love that heals the violence of hatred. The kind of love that refuses to be enemies. While it is true that we have theologized hate over the centuries, the answer to hateful theology is not no theology but a theology of love. For God is love.

I am convinced that love and fear are enemies. They cannot coexist. And while the biblical promise is true that “perfect love casts out fear,” fear also has the power to cast out love. They are like opposing magnets. Too often, it is fear rather than love that motivates us in both our personal lives and in our local and national policies. We are driven by fear of scarcity, fear of being replaced by immigrants, fear of people who are different from us. So the question we need to grapple with is this: What might it look like for us to be driven by love rather than fear? What does love require?

(1) My friend Jemar Tisby puts it plainly: “Racism is prejudice plus power.” Jemar Tisby (@jemartisby). Instagram, May 31, 2022, www.instagram.com/p/CeOTKGtOn_8/.

(2) “Pyramid of Hate,” Anti-Defamation League, 2018, https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/pyramid-of-hate-web-english_1.pdf

(3) David P. Gushee, The Sacredness of Human Life: Why an Ancient Biblical Vision Is Key to the World’s Future (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 207–8.

(4) Lest we think anti-Semitism is on its way out, we need only look to recent events to see how alive the fires of hatred still are. When white supremacists with tiki torches marched in Charlottesville during the Unite the Right rally in 2017, one of their chants was, “Jews will not replace us.” Just a year later in my home state of Pennsylvania, a man armed with multiple guns, including an AR-15, entered the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh and opened fire during their morning Shabbat service. He killed eleven people and wounded six. A subsequent review of his social media posts found them full of anti-Semitic hatred and conspiracy theories as well as photos of his guns.

(5)  John Chrysostom, “Homily 1,” Against the Jews, Tertullian Project, www.tertullian.org/fathers/chrysostom_adversus_judaeos_01_homily1.htm. St. John Chrysostom, The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, vol. 72, trans. Paul W. Harkins (Washington, DC: Catholic Univ. of America Press, 1979), 39.

(6) Ayal Feinberg, Regina Branton, Valerie Martinez-Ebers, “Counties That Hosted a 2016 Trump Rally Saw a 226 Percent Increase in Hate Crimes,” Washington Post, March 22, 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/22/trumps-rhetoric-does-inspire-more-hate-crimes/.

(7)  I particularly like how many people pointed out that it was not his bones that were racist but his heart, his words, his actions, and his policies.

(8) Eric W. Gritsch, “Was Luther Anti-Semitic?” Christianity Today, May/June 2022, www.christianitytoday.com/history/issues/issue-39/was-luther-anti-semitic.html.

(9) Michael Coren, “The Reformation at 500: Grappling with Martin Luther’s Anti-Semitic Legacy,” Maclean’s, October 25, 2017, www.macleans.ca/opinion/the-reformation-at-500-grappling-with-martin-luthers-anti-semitic-legacy/.

(10) Martin Luther, “On the Jews and Their Lies,” in Luther’s Works, vol. 47, ed. Franklin Sherman (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971), 267.

(11) According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, approximately 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses, homes, and schools were destroyed; 91 Jews were murdered; and 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps. “Kristallnacht was a turning point in the history of the Third Reich, marking the shift from antisemitic rhetoric and legislation to the violent, aggressive anti-Jewish measures that would culminate with the Holocaust.” “Kristallnacht,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, undated, www.ushmm.org/collections/bibliography/kristallnacht.

(12) Coren, “The Reformation at 500.”

(13) Hitler makes this connection in Mein Kampf, but he avoids using the name of Jesus, referring to him only as “the Founder of Christianity.” Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, [1925], 1971), 254. He makes the Temple comparison on p. 307.

(14) “Rwanda Genocide: 100 Days of Slaughter,” BBC, April 4, 2019, www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-26875506.

(15) Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place, 35th anniv. ed. (1971; Grand Rapids: Chosen, 1984), 115.

(16)  My coauthors and I celebrate also sorts of courageous champions of life in our book, Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals. I also recommend the wonderful work of my friend Robert Ellsberg in his books Blessed Among Us and All Saints. We need new heroes.

(17) Lawrence Kushner, “My Lunch with Jesus,” in Jesus through Jewish Eyes: Rabbis and Scholars Engage an Ancient Brother in a New Conversation, ed, Beatrice Bruteau (New York: Orbis, 2001), 120.

(18) Kushner, “My Lunch with Jesus,” 121.

(19)  Israel has erected one of the largest separation walls ever built, and one many consider the most sophisticated apartheid system the world has ever seen. Approximately 441 miles in length, it separates Israel from Palestine and makes life exceedingly difficult for Palestinians. It is important to remember the historic backdrop of centuries of anti-Semitism that have contributed to Israel’s actions in the West Bank. While it doesn’t justify their actions, it does help us understand them. It is not uncommon for groups who have been oppressed to become oppressors, especially as they gain access to power. It is the story of our faith as Christians, and of other faiths as well. The corrupting influence of power is a part of the human story, and no religion is immune to it.

To see the images from this chapter in the book, Rethinking Life, see Shane’s post on Instagram.

On January 16, 2024, hundreds of Mennonites and interfaith allies from across the United States met in Washington, DC for a historic gathering calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

Mennonites are members of a historic peace church with roots in the Anabaptist Reformation. They have a long history of nonviolence and anti-war resistance. They also have a long history of aid work in Palestine through humanitarian groups such as Mennonite Central Committee, Mennonite Palestine Israel Network, Community Peacemaker Teams, and more.

The civil disobedience action and peace vigil action were coordinated by Mennonite Action, a grassroots movement formed in November 2023. As snow fell through the weekend, Mennonite Action gathered participants for art builds, trainings, and fellowship to prepare for the peaceful action. 

“Civil disobedience is divine obedience,” a participant who was later arrested shared during a training.

On the morning of January 16, 135 participants—as young as 18 and old as 83—peacefully entered and occupied the rotunda of the Cannon House Office Building. Risking arrest, they sang hymns in four-party harmony and chanted “Let Gaza live!” calling on elected officials to support a permanent ceasefire. Protesters held banners designed as quilts proclaiming messages like “Send Food Not Bombs,” “Let Gaza Live,” “Release all Hostages,” and “Mennonites for Ceasefire.”

Even as police arrested them, put them in restraints, and led them out of the rotunda, protesters continued to fill the halls of Congress with hymns calling for peace as they waited to be transported offsite for processing. By evening, all were released safely from custody and welcomed with food and cheers before returning home.

While Mennonites peacefully occupied the rotunda, around 200 others of all ages held a peaceful outdoor vigil across from the Cannon building. They braved snow and wind to pray, sing hymns, share stories, and hold a children’s time. Some said the singing of the inside demonstrators could be heard from across the street. As the arrestees were loaded into police vans, peace vigil attendees surrounded them in support, singing and praying and blessing their journey.

In the afternoon, participants hand-delivered copies of a petition to their representatives showcasing Mennonite support for a ceasefire. Congregations and individuals spent weeks circulating the petition and it reached 5,000 signatures the night before.

Jonathan Brenneman, a spokesperson for Mennonite Action, told The Washington Post, “As Christians who see Christian nationalists championing Israel’s genocide, we felt compelled to speak clearly as Christians,” he said. “To demand a cease-fire. To demand an end to U.S. military funding of the Israeli military. To call for a release of all hostages—Israeli and Palestinian—and an end to the occupation.”

The January action followed a day of action on December 19, where Mennonites in 40+ regions across US and Canada took peaceful action for a ceasefire. That action was known as the largest Christian-led coordinated day of action for a ceasefire since the war in Gaza began.