For months, community members and grassroots organizers had been protesting the genocide occurring in Gaza and the complicit role played by the U.S government in it. They employed various tactics, ranging from galvanizing elected officials and staging street protests to attending presidential events to maintain pressure on President Biden to listen to the demands of the people. 

However, it seemed that their voices were being disregarded by the President and large swaths of congress. It was then that the strategy of mobilizing community members to vote ‘Uncommitted’ was initiated. 

History teaches us that the strategic tactic of voting ‘Uncommitted’ was utilized previously in 2008 when former President Barack Obama was initially excluded from the ballot in Michigan during the democratic presidential primary. His supporters voted Uncommitted as a form of protest, with 40% of voters in Michigan casting their ballots in this manner, many of whom were Black and young voters. Numerous African American leaders, many who were also leaders of faith communities, encouraged community members to vote Uncommitted as a protest gesture. 

The cries of the people would not be stifled, and Obama would go on to win Michigan in November by a margin unheard of since Lyndon B Johnson ran for office. History teaches us that when we fight, we win; it might take time, energy, sacrifices and consistency but when we fight, we, the collective people, win. 

Throughout history, Christian protest and voting have served as disciplined avenues for expressing both lament and prophetic imagination. Grieving over the current reality while actively praying with our feet for a resurrected one. Echoing the call from God in Micah 6:8 to embrace faithful love, do justice, and walk humbly. This passage compels us to ask, What does faithful love look like in the face of militarism? When more than 30,000 people have died and U.S tax dollars are sacrificing the innocent on the altar of militarism and settler-colonialism.

Christian protest and collective voting power emerge as potent manifestations of faith, love, and hope, reminding us that our neighbor is us. Compelling us to remember that what happens to one person in the world, happens to all of us. Many of us are engulfed in grief due to our government’s emphasis on funding militarism and violence in Gaza. While at the same time many of us are advocating for a ceasefire, the release of all hostages, and an end to settler-colonialism in Gaza. It is in this liminal space that Christian protest embodies the proclamation that the principalities of militarism will not have the final word, that we believe that love can and will win.

Once again, we are confronted by the evils of militarism, settler-colonialism, and capitalism intertwined like a nightmarish orchestra playing a piece all too familiar in our bones and country’s history. These systems thrive on fear and silence, nourished by complicity and a commitment to the status quo, persisting as the current reality unfortunately under the guise of it being ” too complicated”.

Throughout history, moments of crisis have often catalyzed the prophetic Christian imagination in protest and solidarity. In the 60’s when many faith leaders and civil rights activists fought for civil rights and expanded voting rights, we saw the mobilization of the faith community in action, the voices of those most impacted by the evils of the time leading followers of Jesus and the wider country into contending for their beloved neighbor. Again, in the 70’s when many faith leaders—famously including Dr. King—were opposed to the ongoing investments in militarism and the ongoing war in Vietnam.

Protest beckons us, intimately connected to one another, to unite in personal and collective grief, remembering one another in everyday political acts of solidarity.

It is a communal prayer through action, propelling us to advance collectively while providing mutual support in shared sorrow. This movement guides us away from a scarcity mindset, leading us towards the abundance found in collective solidarity and mutuality.

The Uncommitted movement at the ballot box is a forceful and intentional rejection of the trinity of evils: militarism, racism, and poverty. It is an act of prophetic imagination that shifts us from scarcity to solidarity, from fear to embrace, and from complicity to action. It invites us as followers of Jesus to respond to Jesus’ call in Luke 4, to participate in our collective liberation and the freeing of those held captive by militarism’s chains.

This movement is an invitation for the American church to embrace solidarity with our Palestinian siblings, as well as with those impacted by war around the world. It is an opportunity for the American church to reject militarism and the ways that it manifests in our common collective body both domestically and internationally.

We are being invited to turn our swords into plowshares and begin co-creating a new world, a world where militarism breathes its last breath, and our infants safely can breathe their first. 

Co-creating a world where the sacred ordinary of life and love, safety and security can be experienced by all rather than a privileged few. We are the leaders of faith that we have been waiting for, the people of faith who will pray with their feet in a prophetic response to the principalities of militarism, capitalism and settler-colonialism actively harming our fellow beloveds. 

The world is watching, and the question remains: How will we, as the American church, respond in this moment?

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.”

In June 2008, I and several hundred others of my radical anarchist-leaning Christian friends at PAPA (People Against Poverty and Apathy) Festival camped out on a Mennonite farm in rural Illinois. Days of sessions about everything from community to living to circus tricks culminated each evening with fantastic concerts. I distinctly remember one night in particular where we all stood transfixed and transported by a silky falsetto, hip-hop-infused rhythms, and lyrics that seamlessly wove themes of God’s justice with an intimate, affective spirituality. After singing an anti-capitalist anthem called “Zion and Babylon,” the singer was called back for the only encore demanded by the crowd of PAPA Festival that year. He sat down and riffed on one word—“Hallelujah” for 3 minutes straight, to rousing applause and cheers. 

These were my people. I had just graduated from college a few weeks before and had always felt an outsider among evangelicals in my college fellowship who seemed preoccupied with private sin and faith and gave a pass to President Bush despite his war-driven presidency. Finding other Christians on and off campus who seemed to connect faith and justice gave me hope that the faith I professed wasn’t doomed to irrelevance in seeking the kind of world the Bible declares is God’s true vision. PAPA Festival was my Mecca; here were hundreds of people who loved Jesus deeply while shouting down hierarchies and capitalism and war and for a few days tried, in the words of Catholic Worker co-founder Peter Maurin, to create a mini-society where it was easier to be good. It was the first time in my life that I felt like I had found my true kindred. 

Josh Garrels was the singer who took the crowd to a mystical place that night at PAPA. When I got home, I found his MySpace page and started telling everyone I knew about this fantastic musician who had found a way to invite listeners on a compassionate spiritual journey that involved rejecting the material violence thrust on us by a corrupt system. For years afterward, I listened to his music and invited others to do so. On one of our first dates, my now-wife and I spent the evening listening to a new album from him. Josh Garrels symbolized something important to me: there was some good left in evangelicalism. 

Fast forward to March 12, 2024: Garrels posted on social media that he had been on the Wild at Heart podcast with his “dear friend” John Eldredge to talk about his new single, “Watchman.” Eldredge’s mark on evangelicalism comes from his book on Christian masculinity, Wild at Heart, and its companion for women Captivating. Eldredge’s books and focus on “biblical manhood”— another term for palatable patriarchy— are much at odds with the spirit of PAPA Festival and its anti-hierarchy values. 

In Jesus and John Wayne, Kristin Kobes Du Mez includes Eldredge in a group of influential men who have shaped evangelical views on gender:

“[They]all preached a mutually reinforcing vision of Christian masculinity—of patriarchy and submission, sex and power. It was a vision… that worshiped power and turned a blind eye to justice, and one that transformed the Jesus of the Gospels into an image of their own making.” 

Eldredge and Garrels spoke about Garrels’s new song “Watchman,” with Eldredge declaring it an anthem for the current moment. It is a song inviting listeners to hold on to a simple faith in Jesus, to keep their “lamp burning through the night” and through Jesus, make their “garments pure and white.” It laments that “darkness is upon us” and a culture where “Truth is looking stranger than the lies.” The conversation on the podcast circles back to these themes.

The podcast illuminates that people like Eldredge—and now, sadly, once-prophetic voices like Garrels—genuinely believe that threats to true Christianity are equal from the left and the right. I have a suspicion that both men do not like Trump and the brand of Christian nationalism that his evangelical followers embrace, but I am convinced that they see the threat of liberal “woke” issues around race, gender, and sexuality as equally or more so detrimental. 

I say “suspicion” because in the entire podcast, neither speaker actually gave any concrete examples of the cultural forces at odds with Jesus-loving people, and yet the whole thing felt like a wink and a nod to the assault on “Christian” gender norms and traditional views about sexuality.  The effect of vague allusions is to give the listener the impression that what true Christians ought to be doing is getting out of culture and politics altogether so that they can focus on a pure Christian life and watching out for the second coming of Jesus. There was no discussion of the role Christians ought to have in justice or what meaningful engagement might look like. If anything, Garrels only seems to reference his earlier flirtation with his PAPA friends as an illusory time when it seemed like there was overlap between the world’s values and that of a Christian. Now, he shared with Eldredge, that illusion is shattered.

The conversation sheds light on an oft-overlooked part of the Christian evangelical demographic: moderates. I use this word for lack of a more specific term for people who are opting out of engagement with politics and secular society. These are people who read books like The Benedict Option and fear the corruption of their deeply held Christian faith by liberal forces, even while disagreeing with extremists on the right as well.

Their answer is to circle their wagons and pull back from things that might align one too closely to a political ideology by doing things like homeschooling or moving to a farm in Indiana and taking stepping away from public life almost altogether, as Garrels and his family have. My encounters with this growing demographic have been with people who would have leaned Republican previously and those who would have voted with Democrats. More and more churches that may have once been called moderate are doubling down on a faith that is primarily personal and spiritual with only secondary (if any) attention to the world’s physical needs.

This type of retreat fills me with a deep sadness, because the tragedies in the world require deeper engagement with issues of justice, not pulling back. The immigrants being bussed from the border to cities need families willing to help house and support them. The ongoing brutality of the war against Gaza needs Christian voices that reject the way the Bible is being used to enable the horror there. The prison system, gun violence, and so much more need all people of faith to join in and get a little messy, not wash their hands and rely on a pure and untouched faith as a ticket to heaven. And people like Josh Garrels have a creative voice that once helped others reject the either/or of loving Jesus or loving the world. Instead, in what can only be described as shameful cowardice, they have retreated to the safe havens of other-worldly platitudes about Jesus. By pulling away from the messiness of life that comes with being “resident aliens”—the term coined by Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon for a countercultural Christian identity without abandoning the world—the very faith that they hope to preserve is in danger of becoming even more obsolete. 

In Garrels’s own poignant words from his song “Resistance:” “How do good men become a part of the regime? They don’t believe in resistance.” 

In the global crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, public education about the symptoms of this disease is critical. When we recognize that something which impacts anyone of us can quickly impact all of us, we know everyone must learn the signs of what the disease looks like before it is too late.

As we watch public health officials at press conferences and on public service announcements, we have all learned that if you have fever, headaches and difficulty breathing, you cannot take those symptoms lightly. You must quarantine and be tested because these are not only the symptoms of COVID-19; they are also a sign that you could in fact be moving toward death.

53 years ago this past Saturday, on April 4th, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King stood in the Riverside Church in New York City and declared that there comes a time when silence is betrayal. He listed racism, poverty and militarism as three evils that were placing the United States of America and even the world in danger. 

As he delivered his sermon that night, he also said that any nation that puts more money and resources into its military than into social and economic uplift is approaching spiritual death. Dr. King did not say that such a nation was dead, but he named these as the symptoms of a nation approaching spiritual death. In these critical days when we have been made especially sensitive to the need to watch for symptoms, it is not just our physical bodies we must watch but also our body politic. 

The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival has named the symptoms of approaching spiritual and moral death in America right now. In this moment, it is essential that everyone in the nation know the symptoms. To fail to address them for any person or group is to risk the well-being of every American. Now is the time to treat these symptoms with the medicine of moral revival.

We cannot delay. We cannot succumb to those forces who say we must put off larger systemic concerns until this public health crisis has passed. No, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed America’s pandemic of poverty, and we must act together to address these underlying conditions before they do irreparable damage to our democracy.

Epidemics emerge along the fissures of our society, reflecting not only the biology of the infectious agent, but patterns of marginalization, exclusion and discrimination. The coronavirus pandemic is no exception. The United States has many open wounds rooted in decades of racist policies and the criminalization of the poor. COVID-19 has revealed deep failures and will reinforce existing health inequities unless we proactively turn our attention to the how we serve the poorest and most marginalized in our societies.

Well before our present crisis, the symptoms of greed and lies pointed to the reality that we were approaching spiritual and moral death. But now one germ has exposed our weakness. One germ had laid bare the vulnerability of inequality. One germ has shut down the world because we can’t bomb it out, we can’t lie it out, we can’t pay enough money to make it go away. And so, we must attend to the symptoms of a nation approaching spiritual death.

Before this present crisis, we had 140 million poor and low wealth people in the wealthiest nation in the world. 43% of this nation was living in poverty and low wealth, and because of this underlying condition, 700 people were already dying each day from poverty. 

We hear the reports that 200,000 people could die from COVID-19 and we are terrified because we know that could be any one of us or our loved ones. But the US is quickly racing toward to highest death rate in the world because the extreme inequality we have long tolerated in this nation creates underlying conditions that make us peculiarly susceptible to this disease. 

For 40 years in this nation, Republicans have racialized poverty while Democrats have tried to run from poverty, only wanting to talk about the middle class and working Americans, as if there were not millions of working poor people in this country. Prior to this pandemic we had millions upon millions of Americans without health insurance. Many states refused to even expand Medicaid. Furthermore, we saw outright racist attacks on the most fundamental aspect of a democracy: voting rights.  

Before the pandemic ever hit, these were the symptoms of a nation fast approaching a kind of spiritual and moral death.

The symptoms also included a refusal to address the climate crisis that is threatening the planet. 

We also found ourselves with a war economy budget that took 53 cents of every discretionary dollar and fed it to an already bloated and overgrown military budget while working people were being denied living wages and union rights.

And this was all happening alongside a religious nationalism that suggests the only moral issues in the public square are standing against a woman’s right to choose, being against gay people, and touting a twisted notion of religious freedom that is actually about using religion to discriminate.

READ: King’s Poor People’s Campaign Lives Again

All of these things we believe were signs of a nation approaching spiritual and moral death.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the symptoms worsened. As soon as it became clear that the president had lied when he said that the virus would quickly pass, the first move was to give Wall Street and corporations a record bailout. The very people who’ve wondered aloud how we would ever find the money to address the needs of poor and low wealth people suddenly realized overnight that a government can invest in anything it considers essential to its survival. This is a glaring sign of a nation approaching spiritual and moral death because the greed of Wall Street was placed above the lives of people. 

While the pandemic grew, more signs of an approaching spiritual death became evident. Last week, Congress passed a relief bill that left out millions of poor and low wealth people. People in our society who make $12,000 as an individual or $24,000 as a couple do not have to file taxes, but only tax filers got a one-time $1200 bail out in this relief bill. It’s another symptom that we are approaching spiritual death.

As tens of millions live under stay-at-home orders, we now call grocery workers, janitors in hospitals, fast food and other service workers “essential.” But we refuse to ensure their paid sick leave, we deny them living wages, and we do not guarantee them access to healthcare if and when they do get sick. It’s one of the underlying conditions this pandemic is exposing, and it is a symptom of this nation’s approaching spiritual death.

When we take a moment to pay attention, these symptoms are all around us. Masks that were 76 cents a piece 6 weeks ago are selling on the open market for $7 a piece—and this is the market the Trump administration is trusting to get supplies where they are needed most quickly.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that 75% or the workers who need the direct cash payments from the IRS will not get them because they fall into categories of workers who were written out of the legislation. 

When we turn out the news at night, healthcare workers are holding pictures of their dead colleagues. A ship captain who spoke out to save the lives of his men has been relieved of duty. And the White House keeps saying they can’t do more because it would violate states’ rights, echoing the logic of the 19th century slaveholders.

These are, my sisters and brothers, signs of a nation approaching spiritual death.

11 million undocumented workers who pay sales tax and pay into Social Security were denied testing and treatment during this pandemic, as though the disease will not impact the people who are often preparing and picking this nation’s food.

Across this nation, as we take shelter in our homes, we’ve made few real provisions for homeless people, so that they can comply with stay-at-home orders. As America tries to protect itself from this pandemic, we’ve given trillions to corporations, but politicians refused to provide the $50 billion needed to provide childcare to essential workers. What moral sense does this make?

We see the symptoms of a nation fast approaching spiritual death. 

For those in our prison systems, there has been no real effort to remove nonviolent offenders or even nonviolent persons who are awaiting trial but cannot afford bail despite the fact that prisons are fast becoming petri dishes where the virus is quickly spreading. So, someone who is merely awaiting trial could die as an innocent person in jail or prison because of the underlying condition of an unjust system of mass incarceration.

Lastly, though we see all of the nurses and the doctors and emergency workers and the orderlies and the janitors who are going in on the front lines and treating people in hospitals begging for equipment, the President and his team refuse to use the Defense Production Act to nationalize manufacturing in a way that could ramp up production to get what is needed because of some misguided fear that this would look like socialism. When political ideology prevents us from acting to save lives, we are a nation fast approaching spiritual death.

When we look at what is happening in the mist of this pandemic, we see the symptoms of an approaching spiritual death. They cannot be denied. And we do ourselves and our posterity a disservice if we turn to false hope and look away from this pain.

This week what is happening became so glaring that the Boston Globe wrote, “The crisis was preventable… As the American public braces itself for the worst of this crisis, it’s worth remembering that the reach of the virus here is not attributable to an act of God or a foreign invasion, but a colossal failure of leadership. The months the administration wasted with prevarication about the threat and its subsequent missteps will amount to exponentially more COVID-19 cases than were necessary.”

But if we are willing to look honestly at our condition, we will also see that there are, even now, people standing up across this nation. Yes, we have symptoms of spiritual death and the underlying conditions that compromise our body politic. But we are also witnessing the fighting spirit of a democracy that is determined not to die. When we pay attention to organizing among poor and marginalized people who have always been this nation’s greatest hope, we see a revival of the desire to establish justice and to promote the general welfare. 

Click here to watch the full recording of Rev. Dr. William Barber’s livestream. 

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.”  

August 2024 will mark two years since my daughter, Michelle was released from prison. Even though we have both been through so much these past thirteen years of her incarceration, in some ways, her life is just beginning.

On April 9, 2009, my daughter was sentenced to life in prison for a murder she didn’t commit. No mother should go through what I have, and no daughter should endure what she has. It wasn’t just that day when I heard the judge sentence my daughter to life that my heart broke. It was the thousand others filled with millions of agonizing moments of unrest, terror, panic and defeat I experienced as I worked tirelessly to get my daughter justice and to make sure that she would have a life once she got out.

When a person is released from prison, they are walking into a new existence. One that, ironically, may be harder than the one they left behind bars. Why? Our legal system wants to keep people chained to their past.

It shouldn’t be this way.

According to the National Reentry Center, there are “40,000 state and federal legal and regulatory restrictions that limit or prohibit people convicted of a crime or adjudicated for a delinquent act from accessing employment, business and occupational licensing, housing, voting, education, and other rights, benefits, and opportunities.” That’s forty thousand ways to hear ‘no’, when you’re looking for just one ‘yes.’ It is hard enough to have the mental energy to go to the bank to open a checking account, without having to face barriers, prejudices, stigmas and actual regulatory restrictions every step of the way. From getting a job, to renting an apartment to buying groceries or simply voting, people need help.

April is Second Chance month. I was forced to take this call; many of us can do so on our own – and should. We have to understand that once someone completes their sentence, they deserve a second chance at living – to make money, get an education, and participate in our democracy. People want to rebuild their lives. They want to be a part of society and do something that is meaningful. They do not want to feel like they are still behind bars with little to no chance at flourishing.

Michelle earned her degree; she graduated from Life University. She began studying while still incarcerated. She probably could have done this on her own, but my daughter had me by her side encouraging her to keep going. She had help.

With my daughter’s release, I’m working to get my own life back together. I’m constantly asking God, “What was all this for? What does it mean? Where do I go?” As I put the puzzle pieces together, I see the big picture: helping others.

There are still hundreds of ‘Michelle’s’ behind bars. I never forget about those ladies that are still in there. I didn’t want to say, “Goodbye, see you later” just because my daughter was free.  Now, I advocate for them. I give them a branch of humanity upon which to grab hold. I continue to fight for their second chance. I believe we all can.

I knew I wasn’t going to let my daughter down. I also knew I couldn’t help her on my own. I leaned on my belief in God. Faith was key. I truly couldn’t be here without it or without prayer – that was the utmost importance. I also turned to community. It wasn’t easy. There is a lot of shame, embarrassment and fear that rise up when you have to share this type of reality with others. There can be a lot of judgement, but United Women in Faith  helped me emotionally and encouraged me to offer my testimony. Once I put it out there that I needed help, it started rolling in. When others learned about Michelle’s education costs, they donated $2,000 toward her books. With my prison ministry, I made an ask for suitcases. We received 80. That wouldn’t have happened without United Women in Faith. Believe me, having a group of people on your side gives you discipline and spiritual friendship. When things get tough, people will stand by you. United Women in Faith helped get me connected to the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, build my skills and share my story. I eventually became an advocate at the Georgia State Capitol for the conviction integrity unit which ultimately helped with Michelle’s release. I’m a leader in United Women in Faith, a board member of Georgians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, and a part of End Mass Incarceration Georgia. There are many organizations to turn to for help. The National Institute of Corrections offers a list here of Justice Involved Women Programs. You may also check locally.

Participating in Second Chance month can feel overwhelming or even unnecessary if you haven’t been affected by the carceral system as I have. However, there are two things I’ve identified in my work that help women (and others) after release. The number one thing is finding some place to stay. If women have this, it is a good start, and they don’t have it as hard. The other is to show value in a person. I show these women that they have worth; that they are wonderful human beings. For example, I write to them – even if there is no response – because you never know what impact you have on their lives. Helping someone have a second chance doesn’t have to be a family matter, as it was for me and Michelle; rather, it can be you letting someone else know they matter, and that life is waiting for them.

 – Cynthia Morrison Holland is a mother, advocate and member of United Women in Faith

LINKS in order of use:

1. https://nationalreentryresourcecenter.org/multimedia/re-introduction-national-inventory-collateral-consequences-conviction-niccc-and-clean
2. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/03/31/a-proclamation-on-second-chance-month-2023/
3. https://uwfaith.org/
4. https://info.nicic.gov/jiwp/womens-programs-all?page=3

Red Letter Christians signed a Memorandum of Agreement with The Shepherd Society, the outreach branch of Bethlehem Bible College, after the conclusion of the fundraiser in order to securely transfer the funds to trusted, hyper-local organizations providing humanitarian relief in Gaza. Staff at Shepherd Society have both a robust knowledge of local faith organizations on the ground in Gaza and an established process for securely transferring funds from U.S. donors to Palestine, making them an ideal partner for the transfer of funds. 

Together with Red Letter Christians and Churches for Middle East Peace, Shepherd Society developed a list of churches and organizations that will be the beneficiaries, many of which have been directly impacted by ongoing violence: Holy Family Latin Parish, St. Porphyrius Orthodox Church, Gaza Baptist Church, Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, Dar al Kalima University, YMCA in North Gaza, The Lighthouse School (Al Manara School), and Middle East Council of Churches. Limited funds are being reserved for rebuilding once supplies become available for such projects. 

Those who wish to make a donation to Shepherd Society for humanitarian and peacebuilding efforts in Palestine can learn more about making a secure gift on the Bethlehem Bible Co. website. 

About Red Letter Christians

Red Letter Christians is a faith-rooted organization dedicated to culture change and shifting the narrative around faith and politics. RLC focuses on civic engagement, direct action, and movement building through storytelling and social justice. We seek to amplify the voices of those on the margins to help counter toxic evangelicalism and to incite transformative social change.

About The Shepherd Society

The mission of The Shepherd Society is to provide a channel for the global family to encourage and financially assist struggling people as a response to the Gospel call to love our neighbors. Shepherd Society partners with international organizations, Christian institutions, and churches to extend Christ’s love in a practical way. 

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.

Expanding Our Scope: Land as a Means for Repair through Equitable Development 

Real estate is not a theologically neutral matter. In the United States, land ownership is a powerful means of wealth creation with a notorious sinful origin. 

I like to think of buildings as “the Ring of Power” in The Lord of the Rings. Whenever I hear folks talking about a building they manage, I am reminded of how the ring Frodo and Gollum stewarded brought up different aspects of their personalities, depending on how healthy their attachment style and sense of self were. It looks similar when it comes to property. Whoever controls the land has power, but the land also exerts a certain kind of power upon the landowner. Without a pure, discerning heart like Frodo’s, one can succumb to the temptation to hold onto the land like Gollum and lose perspective of the community around it and our mandate to work for restoration and the reconciliation of all things according to the teachings of our faith. 

In Seattle, the city’s Equitable Development Initiative has set the ambitious goal of building the capacity of grassroots groups seeking to own land by providing grants for land acquisition and predevelopment. I have had the honor to serve on the Equitable Development Initiative board since 2017. As part of my role, I have joined others in reviewing applications by community groups requesting city funding to secure land to house creative initiatives that serve their communities in everything from housing to cultural and arts centers to child-care facilities. The Equitable Development Initiative is place-based, so groups need to be sure to serve their neighborhoods. During the same time period, I have sat through denominational meetings in which clergy and leadership complained about their underutilized, aging buildings. Where one is full of land and lacking ideas, the other is full ideas and longing for land. 

What if these denominations and these groups talked to each other? If, for example, denominations were to adopt an equitable development strategy to assess their property in the Seattle region for the sake of racial justice, then they could consider liquidating some of the many buildings in the north end with a view to reinvesting that money in real estate serving redlined neighborhoods. If, in addition to securing land, denominations were to adopt a place-based ecclesiology and develop means to collaborate with neighborhood groups in the south end that are full of great ideas on how to make real estate work for their community, including innovative means of ownership, I think we could witness a truly liberating partnership in many corners of Seattle. 

Now, if congregations were to adopt a place-based strategy and engage their neighborhoods from a perspective of collaboration and accountability to the local values, culture, diversity, and leadership, then congregations could lend their resources to facilitate community visioning of initiatives that respond directly to priorities identified by the people who live in those neighborhoods. 

This is precisely what we were able to do in South Park. While we did not have a church building to put at the service of our community, we did spend many years listening to and joining in collaboration with South Park residents to identify opportunities for equitable development. 

One of the main priorities we identified was the need for affordable housing and space for the arts. I started slowly by opening a coffee shop in 2018, Resistencia Coffee, as a place-making initiative that would provide space for residents to connect and that would contribute to the local economy by providing a platform for local food and arts vendors. As the community grew, our corner of the neighborhood became a hub for the arts, community development, and food access, revealing the importance of this particular place to the well-being of our residents. With this new awareness came fear—what if this building gets sold to a random developer with no accountability to South Park? 

This is when my husband, Tim, and I partnered with our friends at the Cultural Space Agency, an innovative, mission-driven, public development agency that seeks to promote access to land for the arts by communities of color in Seattle. We put together a deal and raised the funds for the Cultural Space Agency to purchase the building and secured this piece of land for community ownership and equitable development for generations to come! The opportunities this project presents for economic justice for residents of this scrappy, young, and brown, immigrant neighborhood in Seattle is overwhelming. 

Place-based ecclesiology can truly unlock our imagination to rethink our collective relationship to land. By understanding the important role of land and locating ourselves in our place, we are better able to think of concrete ways in which the gospel and our mission as the body of Christ can become incarnate in the neighborhoods we get to love. In doing so, our strategies can be guided by real people, who are part of real stories, in real places. But please note that we really can’t let go of our responsibility as the church. What kind of story will we unfold for the church in North America? What will be the redemptive arc in the saga of colonization, land, neighborhood, and liberation? We get to make a dent together, if we shift our attention to God, our neighbors, and back to the land. 

Human Rights are perhaps the most powerful discourse that emerged in the 20th century. No other narrative has so disturbed the world order, at least since 1848. And this political prominence is perhaps one of the main reasons why religion and Human Rights “do not mix very easily,” (1) why Human Rights so often clash with religious narratives and traditions. Human Rights have paved the way to overthrown totalitarian and authoritarian regimes worldwide, including in my own country. (2) Because of Human Rights we have seen police authorities and violent bureaucrats go to jail, and we have seen presidents and generals sentenced by international courts. The fact that Human Rights discourse has also been used to justify military interventions disguised as humanitarian actions (3) does not diminish its importance – it is actually evidence that even those who violate Human Rights recognise their power in contemporary politics.

Imagine having rights that were not determined by any moral or political choice, nor limited by any action you could take. Imagine if just by being human, belonging to the human species, you could have unalienable rights, that could not be taken away from you by any decision of any individual, institution, or state. When this idea was first created it was revolutionary. This idea attached the notion of rights to a particular ethics of human dignity. The emergence of Human Rights made it impossible to diminish people’s value to that of property – or to those animals who were poorly treated by their owners. To make my point clear, I will do what lawyers usually do: I will look into three cases that help us weave the thread of Human Rights.

In late 19th century England, a woman sent an anonymous letter to Parliament requesting the approval of a bill that would allow women to be treated the same way as dogs. She explained the issue: a husband had beaten up his wife to death and, because of legislation and common law at the time, he was considered as exercising the defence of his honour, his Patria Potestas. As a result, he was not sentenced. She eloquently argued that if he had brutally killed his dog he would, at least, have been fined…

In the 1960s, in Brazil, a Catholic and conservative lawyer named Sobral Pinto walked to a Brazilian Army Barracks in Rio de Janeiro, to meet his client. At his arrival he found the young student to be sleeping over his own blood and bodily fluids, in a cell without a toilet. His body showed several marks of torture. Mr. Pinto decided, then, to file a complaint to the Courts, requesting the Statute of Animal Rights to be applied to his client…  

In the beginning of the 21st century, in Guantanamo Bay, a lawyer met the General of the US Army in charge of that detention facility. He asked the General if the Constitution of the USA would apply to his client. The General denied it. Then he asked if the Constitution of Spain would apply to his client. That was also denied. What about the Constitution of Cuba, he then asked. Finally, he asked the General about a particular species of lizard that lived in Guantanamo Bay and was threatened with extinction, and if American military personnel were taking all due care to protect that species of animal according to international obligations… 

What these three cases have in common is revealing what happens in the absence of Human Rights, when people are brutalized in ways worse than animals would be. The 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) celebrated last month, reminds us of a document that challenged this kind of infamy. But the event was largely ignored in Christian circles, with few exceptions. In the next section I will share a few academic reflections about the importance of the UDHR, and later about its close (and now problematic) relationship with Christianity.

The state of the art of the UDHR: global perspectives and legal paradoxes (4)

I have been privileged to work with some of the greatest minds and practitioners in International Human Rights Law. To celebrate the 75th anniversary of the UDHR, I had the opportunity to jointly organise an event and hear from three Professors in my own university: Alexandra Xanthaki, Javaid Rehman and Manisuli Ssenyonjo. Some of the ideas I am about to discuss here are owned to them, who spoke about the historical and political importance of the UDHR without losing sight of the troublesome times we are currently living in – with ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza.

Professor Javaid Rehman reminded us of the political and international context where the UDHR was discussed, drafted and agreed. Never before or after it a document with so many rights was signed by so many states. This was no small achievement, and one reason why we need to celebrate it. According to Javaid, there is poetry in the UDHR articles and this poetics reflects a specific moment in history, the aftermath of the Second World War (WW2). The Allied nations won that terrible war and decided to advance ideas and measures that could possibly prevent new violations of Human Rights, help keep peace and build up a new international order. However, Professor Rehman also reminded us what was left out and what has changed since then. The absence of the Right to Self-determination is probably the biggest gap in the Declaration – and reveals the building up tensions between colonized and coloniser of the time. And many states have completely changed their position since they signed the Declaration. It is the case of Iran and Afghanistan, who subscribed to its article 2 opposing distinction of “any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion,” but now promote what could be called a gender apartheid against women and girls. 

Nevertheless, the two biggest issues that undermine the UDHR are its lack of operationality in the International Law system and the absence of social and collective rights on its text, according to the UN Special Rapporteur for Cultural Rights, Professor Alexandra Xanthaki. These problems continuously haunt the Declaration and are currently explored by politicians who work to undermine the United Nations authority and Human Rights. Xanthaki pointed out to the democratic challenges we currently face when a significant number of UN member states are now represented by nationalist and xenophobic politicians. But she also adopted a strategic optimism when looking into new generations. According to her, people now seem to be much more inclusive and sensible to minority rights than in any generation before – such as to care and promote LGBTQ+ rights.  

The paradox of the UDHR ineffectiveness rests in its Article 28, according to Professor Manisuli Ssenyonjo: “Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.” In this article the UDHR turns its own efficacy and implementation in a Human Right. However, the entitlement to a social and international order that does not (yet) exists – and may never exist – constitutes an insolvable problem. Professor Ssenyonjo asked: “Has article 28 ever been respected by the signatory states in these 75 years since the Declaration?” He then pointed out to the heart of this paradox: the fact that there is no International Human Rights Court in the UN system, no international body capable of adjudication on Human Rights violations by member states. This would make the UDHR a kind of Constitution without a constitutional court and make it impossible to impose measures to guarantee peace, prevention of violations and sanctions against state perpetrators. 

But I wonder if this paradox is not the result of previous conceptual problems in the very way Human Rights have been originally conceived. How much of the notions of humanity, universalism and natural law are still alive in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Perhaps looking at the mobilization of Theology in Human Rights discourse by religious leaders and political organisations might explain some of these problems.

Human Rights, Natural Law and Theology

There is no doubt that Human Rights are a direct descendant from Natural Rights. What is disputed, however, is how deep our current ideas and legal documents were shaped by the re-emergence of Natural Law in the context where the UDHR was drafted. The return of Natural Law in the aftermath of WW2 has often been dismissed as either completely incorporated into Human Rights or as a strategy to blame atrocities on Legal Positivism and free the German Judiciary from the hook – such as in Radbruch’s formula. (5) I want to claim that Human Rights were not only influenced by Natural Law tradition on its later and Enlightened form, but also developed from two theological concepts linked to the idea of Justice. (6) I believe Human Rights, in the form they were given in the UDHR, are deeply connected to the theological notions of Grace and Imago Dei in Christian theology.  

The universality of Universalism can certainly be put into question when it is used as a power tool to exclude others – and becomes a “bully.” (7) But the idea of Human Rights as an unconditional defence of human beings has a lot in common with the unconditional love of God in Christian theology. In Christianity there is an idea that the love of God for humans is undeserved by peoples and individuals. God would love human beings not for their merits, but by their likeness – their divine image which resembles the image of God the creator. (8) The Christian God’s love for humanity is based on grace rather than merit, it is unlimited and able to forgive any kinds of sins. This all-inclusive and unlimited love in Christian theology sounds a lot like the idea of universal “inalienable rights of all members of the human family” in the first two sentences of the Preamble of the UDHR – which are perhaps the first secularised version of this universal inclusion. (9)

This is relevant for a series of reasons, but perhaps mostly to rebuke a common question that has repetitively been raised by nationalists and religious conservative groups alike: are human rights only available to defend criminals? I have heard this question so many times in Evangelical circles. Of course, the answer is always a resounding ‘no,’ but what I have found more interesting in my research on Human Rights and Religion is that this kind of question – which wants to exclude some people from grace or mercy – also has a precedent, a fossil theological form. 

I refer here to the discussions between Jesus and the religious leaders of his time, where these leaders constantly questioned Jesus on why he was always sitting and associating with sinners and gentiles. Jesus’ precise answer in Mark 2:17 also works for justifying the universality of Human Rights: it is the sick who need the doctors, not the healthy. I believe a similar argument could be applied to the universality of Human Rights to answer this insincere question: it is those who committed crimes and will be punished by the state who need their Human Rights most. The ground level of Human Rights is, then, to guarantee the humanity of the worst human beings. If this is achieved, we might believe that Human Rights apply to all human beings. 

It is, after all, those in prison who are most frequently subjected to violation of their basic rights – such as in suffering abuse, torture and rape in detention facilities. It is to stop the violation of these arrested bodies – also made in the image of God, one could argue – that Human Rights prohibit the use of torture. And here we have another intersection between Christian Theology and Human Rights: torture itself can be understood as the unlimited exercise of power over the human body and its (Western) paradigmatic case is the Passion and Crucifixion of Christ. (10) This is the brutal theological meaning of Human Rights, which restricts the use of power over the bodies of those considered as the worst human beings – such as those condemned to crucifixion. This points to the minimal standard of Human Rights, proclaimed in UDHR to protect those bodies, which should be followed by every state authority. 

The last 10 years have revealed a significant division among Christian organisations and individuals regarding the ethical values of Human Rights, as a concept, and the legal documents and international organisations that grant those rights – such as the UDHR and the United Nations. We have seen Christians supporting violations of Human Rights against minorities, promoting gun ownership and violence and denying the historicity of genocides. In extreme cases, Christian leaders and institutions have supported politicians who declared Human Rights to be the “manure of vagabonds” (11) and who forcedly separated children from their families – such as happened both in the USA, under the Trump administration; and in Ukraine, which led the International Criminal Court to issue warrants of arrest for Putin. These positions were, nevertheless, challenged by both Christian and secular institutions, either by their radical example (12), public statements (13), or legal proceedings. (14)

But there are at least two different kinds of criticism that can be laid upon Human Rights, as a concept, and the UDHR, as a legal document. One is criticism of exclusionary nature and the other a critique that demands inclusion. And I believe we should all stand for the later – which we shall turn to now.

Conclusion, inclusion and exclusion

The first criticism against Human Rights that is most common to find circulating online these days, derives from ethical values that were excluded from the public sphere after the WWII, by the member-states of the (then) emerging United Nations. The criticism I refer to is often an echo of ideological discourse produced by the Axis countries before that time. The values that inform these positions today are heavily based on racism, sexism, ethnic and religious discrimination such as anti-Semitism and islamophobia, and all sorts of prejudice against migrants and minorities. These are the very opposite of what one finds in the preamble and the 30 articles of the UDHR. 

On the other hand, the relevant criticism that we need to consider here is the struggle for inclusion and expansion of more people, rights and values than what is originally stated in the UDHR. This is the critique that denounce when Human Rights are used for protecting economic interests and mascaraing wars as humanitarian intervention – or justifying military invasions as preventive, self-defensive acts. This happens every time powerful and rich states make use of Human Rights to impose their own legislation and political power over Global South countries, disrespecting the right to self-determination – something that was not included in the UDHR, but more recently recognized as “integral to basic Human Rights, fundamental freedoms.” (15) The idea that Human Rights should include promotion of social justice, social rights and food security also falls into this category of critique. 

I believe this second kind of critique to Human Rights, which includes more people in the hall of humanity, is also more consistent with Christian theologies that observe the very words of Jesus in the Gospels, when he sets the criteria with which his followers would be judged: if they helped the hungry, the thirsty, the foreigners, those who had no clothes, the sick and those in jail. (16) If Christian majorities and minorities would stand for an inclusive understanding of Human Rights, this would certainly help making these once more the language of the oppressed (17), where the right to be free from torture and the desire to own property are no longer confused.

(1) Peter W. Edge and Graham Harvey, Law and Religion in Contemporary Society: Communities, Individualism and the State (Ashgate, 2000), 177.

(2) Elio Gaspari, “Carter, Si!,” The New York Times, April 30, 1978, sec. Archives, https://www.nytimes.com/1978/04/30/archives/carter-si.html.

(3) Costas Douzinas, The End of Human Rights: Critical Thought at the Turn of the Century (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2000).

(4) As I finish editing this piece, the International Court of Justice held its first part of the hearing on the case South Africa v. Israel, concerning alleged violations by Israel of its obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention and international law in relation to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

(5) Thomas Mertens, “Nazism, Legal Positivism and Radbruch’s Thesis on Statutory Injustice,” Law and Critique 14, no. 3 (October 1, 2003): 277–95, https://doi.org/10.1023/B:LACQ.0000005215.60293.99.

(6) Jacques Ellul, The Theological Foundation of Law (New York: The Seabury Press, 1969).

(7) Alexandra Xanthaki, “When Universalism Becomes a Bully: Revisiting the Interplay Between Cultural Rights and Women’s Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly 41, no. 3 (2019): 701–24.

(8) Genesis 1:26-27

(9) Juliana Neuenschwander Magalhães, “O paradoxo dos Direitos Humanos,” Revista da Faculdade de Direito UFPR 52, no. 1 (2010), http://ojs.c3sl.ufpr.br/ojs/index.php/direito/article/view/30694.

(10) See: W. J. T Mitchell, “Cloning Terror: The War of Images 2001–2004,” in The Life and Death of Images: Ethics and Aesthetics, ed. Diarmuid Costello and Dominic Willsdon (Cornell University Press, 2008). Also check: De Matos, Jesus Fights back: Easter torture and reverse racism (Critical Legal Thinking, 2022), https://criticallegalthinking.com/2022/06/30/jesus-fights-back-easter-torture-reverse-racism/

(11) Congresso em Foco, “Em meio à polêmica do Enem, Bolsonaro chama direitos humanos de ‘esterco da vagabundagem,’” Congresso em Foco, November 5, 2017, https://congressoemfoco.uol.com.br/projeto-bula/reportagem/direitos-humanos-e-“esterco-da-vagabundagem”-diz-bolsonaro/.

(12) “Evangelical Activist Shane Claiborne Wants to Beat Our Guns into Plowshares — Really,” Los Angeles Times, April 3, 2019, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-ol-patt-morrison-shane-claiborne-guns-christians-20190403-htmlstory.html.

(13) Jason Horowitz, “Pope Francis Criticized Family Separations Before Policy’s Reversal,” The New York Times, June 20, 2018, sec. World, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/world/europe/pope-francis-trump-child-separation.html.

(14) “Situation in Ukraine: ICC Judges Issue Arrest Warrants against Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova | International Criminal Court,” accessed January 9, 2024, https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-ukraine-icc-judges-issue-arrest-warrants-against-vladimir-vladimirovich-putin-and.

(15) “Self-Determination Integral to Basic Human Rights, Fundamental Freedoms, Third Committee Told as It Concludes General Discussion | UN Press,” accessed January 10, 2024, https://press.un.org/en/2013/gashc4085.doc.htm.

(16) Matthew 25:35-45

(17) Costas Douzinas, “What Are Human Rights?,” The Guardian, March 18, 2009, sec. Opinion, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/mar/18/human-rights-asylum.