“I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Those are the words of Dr. King in 1967, in his historic speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” delivered at Riverside Church in New York City.

This past weekend dozens of faith leaders gathered at Riverside, putting our voices together to read King’s words on this 55^th anniversary of the speech. The group that gathered at Riverside for the event — a collaborative effort, sponsored by Red Letter Christians, LIVEFREE, the United Church of Christ, the Black Church Action Fund and the Quincy Institute — included bishops, authors, pastors, activists from around the country and Dr. King’s daughter, the Rev. Dr. Bernice King. Also participating was Bishop Herbert Daughtry, who was present when King delivered the speech in 1967.

Over the course of the evening, we were reminded multiple times how controversial and how courageous the words were … and are. Many of King’s peers deserted him for taking a stand against the war. His board turned against him, except one board member, the Rev. Otis Moss II. In the speech itself, Dr. King mentions all those who question his judgment in speaking out against the war in Vietnam and connecting it to all the other issues of his day. He was increasingly unpopular, and it should not be missed that he was assassinated exactly one year after the Riverside address, to the day.

So what’s so controversial about it?

Well, for starters, Dr. King refers to America as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” He names America’s “triplets of evil” as racism, extreme materialism and militarism. He calls out the hypocrisy of telling young people “in the ghettoes” that violence will not solve their problems while condoning our government when it resorts to violence. He names the sad irony that we are sending Black kids to fight for liberties thousands of miles away that we haven’t even been able to guarantee them here at home. And yet, just as the speech is filled with hard-to-hear truth, it is also full of hope.

Many folks appreciate the sanitized King and would prefer the “I Have a Dream” speech. You don’t see many monuments with quotes from the Riverside sermon. Bishop Daughtry noted that he doesn’t think a single quote on the King memorial in D.C. comes from this iconic speech.

Before we write off King’s assessment of the U.S. as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, dismissing it as extreme or exaggerated, consider this:

Of the 196 countries in the world, only nine of them have nuclear weapons. And 93% of the nuclear weapons of the world are owned by only two countries — the U.S. and Russia. We are the only country that has ever used them, and we did it twice in one week, killing hundreds of thousands of people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We now have bombs 100 times more lethal than the Hiroshima bomb. And the U.S. arsenal has the capacity of over 100,000 Hiroshima bombs. We have the biggest stockpile, and we have the largest military budget in the history of the world. The Pentagon spends more in 3 seconds than the average American makes in a year, reminding us of King’s words at Riverside: We are approaching a spiritual death.

It is easy for us to be critical of Russia’s violence in Ukraine right now, and we should be. The Riverside speech, however, invites us to get the log out of our own country’s eye.

There are many who speak of “American exceptionalism” — and by that they are referring to America being a beacon for freedom and democracy, the last best hope on earth, God’s anointed messianic force for good. This is a notion King continually challenged with increasing passion all the way to his death. In fact, the sermon King was writing when he was killed, that he never got to preach, was entitled: “Why America Might Go to Hell.”

It’s not hard to see why King’s words were hard to hear and why he was opposed by so many, even by former friends and board members.

But truth sets us free. There is another version of American exceptionalism. We are exceptional in our embrace of violence. Using violence to try to get rid of violence. Among all the world’s nations, we are one of only a handful of countries that continues to practice capital punishment. When it comes to the number of executions, we are always in the top 10, and often in the top five.

SIGN: RED LETTER CHRISTIAN PLEDGE 

America is exceptional in our infatuation with guns. With only 5% of the world’s population, we own nearly half of the world’s civilian-owned guns. There are five times more gun dealers in the U.S. than McDonald’s restaurants. We produce about 9.5 million guns a year, 26,000 guns a day, one gun every three seconds. We have an exceptional problem when it comes to violence. Just as there are companies making millions of dollars off gun sales, we also have corporations like Lockheed Martin that are profiting from war. Over 150 countries have had arms contracts with U.S. companies. After 9/11, the U.S. went to war with Afghanistan and Iraq, even though 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. And Saudi Arabia is still our biggest buyer of weapons, using them to destroy so many lives in Yemen. Dr. King saw all of these connections in his own time, and that is why he had to “break the silence.”

“Live by the sword, die by the sword” — those are the words of Jesus, Dr. King’s inspiration and savior, and we have proved those words to be true again and again and again.

That is the real American exceptionalism — we are exceptional in our addiction to violence.

In addition to this month being the anniversary of the Riverside speech and of King’s death, it is also the anniversary of the most ambitious and horrific bombings in history. In 2003, the U.S. and coalition forces launched the “shock and awe” bombing campaign, dropping more than 900 bombs a day on Iraq, killing thousands upon thousands of people. More recently, in 2016, when Barack Obama was president, we dropped 26,000 bombs, an average of three bombs per hour.

Our military spending is not a partisan issue. Obama raised Bush’s military budget. Trump raised Obama’s budget. Biden raised Trump’s budget. What would King say to that? Probably exactly what he said in 1967: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching a spiritual death.”

We have work to do to continue to “break the silence.” As our world is increasingly plagued by violence — not just in Ukraine but also in the streets of America — we must continue King’s legacy of nonviolence. We, too, must keep breaking the silence.

This piece first appeared at Religious News Services.

Mary was said to be ‘perplexed’ when the angel Gabriel told her she was carrying the hope of a broken people. Like her, we must set aside our fears in a divided world and respond, ‘Here I am.’

Across the globe, from small communities in southern India to the splendor of the Vatican in Rome to homes across Oregon, people will gather Christmas Day to celebrate the birth of Jesus, the Prince of Peace. It is a joyful time. Families come together, churches fill up, gifts are exchanged and children can hardly contain themselves as they await Santa in his many forms — Father Christmas, St. Nicholas, Père Noël and others.

For Christians, Christmas is also a time for engaged reflection.

Howard Thurman, the theologian, author and civil rights leader, wrote a beautiful poem called “The Work of Christmas” that can help move American Christians from the commercialism of Christmas and into the heart of Jesus’ message for the world:

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.

Faith is work, after all.

Through the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian New Testament, those who follow Jesus are given a vision of the world that directly contrasts with the world we live in. For all that is good with the world, we also live in a time of unparalleled crisis. In times of crisis, God calls us into a partnership to find solutions.

Many of the issues that confront us today, such as greed and oppression, are issues the Hebrew prophets and Jesus would have recognized. What is different for this time? The scale of what confronts us. From the reality of human-caused climate change and the implications that brings for the future of all creation, to the growing threat of nuclear conflict, to increasing economic inequality. Crisis greets us whether or not it is a holiday.

Small children opening gifts under the tree this year, regardless of where they live, face the genuine threat that climate change will, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported this past October, produce a future of suffering that will fall hardest on those Jesus called the “least of these.” Still, all of humanity will be impacted. The chaos caused by the gathering storm increases the risk of world war, terrorism, hunger and poverty, and it will further divide people along regional and economic lines.

Religion, which is too often used to divide, can be a tool to inspire the world to action. Mary, the mother of Jesus, was said to be “perplexed” when the angel Gabriel informed her that she was carrying the son of God, and the hope of a broken people. Her first response is understandable but her second response is remarkable. Like Moses and others called by God to great tasks, Mary sets aside fear and responds: “Here I am.”

This Christmas we live in the shadow of conflict. Historians tell us the United States has not been this divided since the period before the Civil War. The world itself is in peril.

At best, our government stumbles in the face of complexity; at worst, we lash out in misdirected anger fueled by racism and xenophobia as we separate children from parents and tear gas others, refugee families not unlike Mary, Joseph and Jesus.

Our answer to all this must equal Mary’s: Here we are!

At the start of the Gospel of John, we are told: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

There is darkness today, to be sure. That darkness comes in many forms. The light of God’s people, known by different faiths and traditions, can still overcome it if we reunite this Christmas Day and each day after in common cause, as Jesus taught, to free the world from oppression and offer love in place of hate. If we genuinely honor Jesus and celebrate his birth, we cannot be the generation that allows all of creation to wither due to neglect or war. We must bring light and love to help creation grow and thrive.

Merry Christmas. Let’s get to work.

This past weekend dozens of faith leaders gathered at Riverside, putting our voices together to read King’s words on this 55^th anniversary of the speech. The group that gathered at Riverside for the event — a collaborative effort, sponsored by Red Letter Christians, LIVEFREE, the United Church of Christ, the Black Church Action Fund and the Quincy Institute — included bishops, authors, pastors, activists from around the country and Dr. King’s daughter, the Rev. Dr. Bernice King. Also participating was Bishop Herbert Daughtry, who was present when King delivered the speech in 1967.

Over the course of the evening, we were reminded multiple times how controversial and how courageous the words were … and are. Many of King’s peers deserted him for taking a stand against the war. His board turned against him, except one board member, the Rev. Otis Moss II. In the speech itself, Dr. King mentions all those who question his judgment in speaking out against the war in Vietnam and connecting it to all the other issues of his day. He was increasingly unpopular, and it should not be missed that he was assassinated exactly one year after the Riverside address, to the day.

So what’s so controversial about it?

Well, for starters, Dr. King refers to America as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” He names America’s “triplets of evil” as racism, extreme materialism and militarism. He calls out the hypocrisy of telling young people “in the ghettoes” that violence will not solve their problems while condoning our government when it resorts to violence. He names the sad irony that we are sending Black kids to fight for liberties thousands of miles away that we haven’t even been able to guarantee them here at home. And yet, just as the speech is filled with hard-to-hear truth, it is also full of hope.

JOIN: MARCH4MERCY TO PROTEST THE DEATH PENALTY 

Many folks appreciate the sanitized King and would prefer the “I Have a Dream” speech. You don’t see many monuments with quotes from the Riverside sermon. Bishop Daughtry noted that he doesn’t think a single quote on the King memorial in D.C. comes from this iconic speech.

Before we write off King’s assessment of the U.S. as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, dismissing it as extreme or exaggerated, consider this:

Of the 196 countries in the world, only nine of them have nuclear weapons. And 93% of the nuclear weapons of the world are owned by only two countries — the U.S. and Russia. We are the only country that has ever used them, and we did it twice in one week, killing hundreds of thousands of people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We now have bombs 100 times more lethal than the Hiroshima bomb. And the U.S. arsenal has the capacity of over 100,000 Hiroshima bombs. We have the biggest stockpile, and we have the largest military budget in the history of the world. The Pentagon spends more in 3 seconds than the average American makes in a year, reminding us of King’s words at Riverside: We are approaching a spiritual death.

It is easy for us to be critical of Russia’s violence in Ukraine right now, and we should be. The Riverside speech, however, invites us to get the log out of our own country’s eye.

There are many who speak of “American exceptionalism” — and by that they are referring to America being a beacon for freedom and democracy, the last best hope on earth, God’s anointed messianic force for good. This is a notion King continually challenged with increasing passion all the way to his death. In fact, the sermon King was writing when he was killed, that he never got to preach, was entitled: “Why America Might Go to Hell.”

It’s not hard to see why King’s words were hard to hear and why he was opposed by so many, even by former friends and board members.

But truth sets us free. There is another version of American exceptionalism. We are exceptional in our embrace of violence. Using violence to try to get rid of violence. Among all the world’s nations, we are one of only a handful of countries that continues to practice capital punishment. When it comes to the number of executions, we are always in the top 10, and often in the top five.

SIGN: RED LETTER CHRISTIAN PLEDGE 

America is exceptional in our infatuation with guns. With only 5% of the world’s population, we own nearly half of the world’s civilian-owned guns. There are five times more gun dealers in the U.S. than McDonald’s restaurants. We produce about 9.5 million guns a year, 26,000 guns a day, one gun every three seconds. We have an exceptional problem when it comes to violence. Just as there are companies making millions of dollars off gun sales, we also have corporations like Lockheed Martin that are profiting from war. Over 150 countries have had arms contracts with U.S. companies. After 9/11, the U.S. went to war with Afghanistan and Iraq, even though 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. And Saudi Arabia is still our biggest buyer of weapons, using them to destroy so many lives in Yemen. Dr. King saw all of these connections in his own time, and that is why he had to “break the silence.”

“Live by the sword, die by the sword” — those are the words of Jesus, Dr. King’s inspiration and savior, and we have proved those words to be true again and again and again.

That is the real American exceptionalism — we are exceptional in our addiction to violence.

In addition to this month being the anniversary of the Riverside speech and of King’s death, it is also the anniversary of the most ambitious and horrific bombings in history. In 2003, the U.S. and coalition forces launched the “shock and awe” bombing campaign, dropping more than 900 bombs a day on Iraq, killing thousands upon thousands of people. More recently, in 2016, when Barack Obama was president, we dropped 26,000 bombs, an average of three bombs per hour.

Our military spending is not a partisan issue. Obama raised Bush’s military budget. Trump raised Obama’s budget. Biden raised Trump’s budget. What would King say to that? Probably exactly what he said in 1967: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching a spiritual death.”

We have work to do to continue to “break the silence.” As our world is increasingly plagued by violence — not just in Ukraine but also in the streets of America — we must continue King’s legacy of nonviolence. We, too, must keep breaking the silence.

This piece first appeared at Religious News Services.

NEW YORK – LIVE FREE USA joins The Quincy Institute and Red Letter Christians to host: “55 Years Later: Can the Church Study War No More?”

The event comes amid a harrowing war in Ukraine, violent crime spikes in US cities and continued economic distress in communities of color across the country.  This FREE forum will invite people of faith and good will to reflect and commemorate the life and legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Beyond Vietnam speech where he calls on all people to defeat the “triplets of evil: militarism, racism and poverty.” National leaders will gather to re-read the historic speech, followed by a panel conversation featuring Rev. Dr. Bernice A. King. Special musical guests Brian Courtney Wilson, Aaron Niequist, and Common Hymnal will perform.

“Violence abroad and violence at home require the active engagement of the church if we are to be agents of peace and justice in these times. We cannot allow our tax dollars to be a slush fund for military contractors abroad or militarization in US cities.” says Pastor Mike McBride.

Adds Shane Claiborne “the prophets call people of God to study war no more! We intend to amplify this call among faith leaders and congregations with an aim to resurrect a faith driven anti-war movement which encompasses the foreign and domestic expressions of state violence: international military actions in Ukraine, Yemen, Somalia and Israel/Palestine; police and state violence including the death penalty; and community gun violence in black and brown communities”.

Executive Director of Quincy Institute Lora Lumps says, “The importance of the faith community, in partnership with bi-partisan policymakers, advocating for peaceful resolutions to violent conflicts at home and abroad has never been more critical. As the Biden administration and this Congress adds close to $100B to already bloated military budgets and private contracts, poor people in the United States and underdeveloped countries around the world are met with death and needless suffering. We cannot not be so committed to funding violence and strength through might.”

This event is April 2 from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. at Riverside Church, the location where Dr. King gave this historic speech. The event is free and open to the press.

Proof of vaccination or negative PCR test (within 72 hours of event) and masks are required for entry to Riverside Church. 

WHO: Rev. Dr. Bernice A. King, and RLC Leaders, Shane Claiborne, Rev. Michael McBride, Rev. Traci Blackmon, Rev. Todd Yeary (RLC Board Chair), Lisa Sharon Harper (RLC Board Member), Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, Jemar Tisby, Sharon Risher,  Michael W. Waters, Erich Kussman, Carlos Rodriguez, Diana Oestreich, Common Hymnal, and Aaron Niequist.

WHAT: MLK Beyond Vietnam 55 Years Later: Can the Church Study War No More

WHEN: Doors open at 3:30 ET on Saturday, April 2; the event will run from (approx.) 4-6 ET.

WHERE: The Riverside Church, 490 Riverside Dr, New York, NY. Live stream can also be viewed on RLC’s Facebook, YouTube, or website.

RSVP: bit.ly/mlkvietnamspeech2022

CONTACT: Katie Kirkpatrick, sc@redletterchristians.org, (856) 477-3277

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He was an absolute legend. He was one of the kindest, grooviest people I’ve ever met (he liked the word “groovy”). We spent a lot of time together these last few years. I sure will miss him. 

He was 87 and had been battling pancreatic cancer. He also just got baptized and was so at peace with everything. I talked to him on the phone a few days before he died. He smiled as he told me he would probably be dying soon, but everything was just fine. He was fearless and such an inspiration. He sent me the original photos he took of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. In fact, I have a whole box of his photos here in my office. They are like gold – better than gold – and I’ll post some of them from time to time.  

One of the many memories I have is when I asked Steve curiously if he’d ever met Abbie Hoffman, one of most eccentric organizers of the anti-war movement in the 1960s, jailed along with seven others as part of the famous Chicago 8 trial. He smiled and said to me, “I photographed his wedding.” Of course he did. 

Steve died last month on Martin Luther King’s birthday, January 15. Now he is with Dr. King in glory land. My heart goes out to his family, Maura, Theophilus, and all whose lives he touched.

Here’s a little more about the life of our brother Steve Schapiro:

Steve Schapiro discovered photography at the age of nine at summer camp. Excited by the camera’s potential, Schapiro spent the next decades prowling the streets of his native New York City trying to emulate the work of French photographer Henri Cartier Bresson, whom he greatly admired. His first formal education in photography came when he studied under the photojournalist W. Eugene Smith. Smith’s influence on Schapiro was far-reaching. He taught him the technical skills he needed to succeed as a photographer but also informed his personal outlook and worldview. Schapiro’s lifelong interest in social documentary and his consistently empathetic portrayal of his subjects is an outgrowth of his days spent with Smith and the development of a concerned humanistic approach to photography.

Beginning in 1961, Schapiro worked as a freelance photojournalist. His photographs appeared internationally in the pages and on the covers of magazines, including Life, Look, Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Sports Illustrated, People and Paris Match. During the decade of the 1960s in America, called the “golden age in photojournalism,” Schapiro produced photo-essays on subjects as varied as narcotics addition, Easter in Harlem, the Apollo Theater, Haight-Ashbury, political protest, the presidential campaign of Robert Kennedy, poodles and presidents. A particularly poignant story about the lives of migrant workers in Arkansas, produced in 1961 for Jubilee and picked up by the New York Times Magazine, both informed readers about the migrant workers’ difficult living conditions and brought about tangible change—the installation of electricity in their camps.

An activist as well as a documentarian, Schapiro covered many stories related to the Civil Rights movement, including the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the push for voter registration, and the Selma to Montgomery march. Called by Life to Memphis after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Schapiro produced some of the most iconic images of that tragic event.

REGISTER: Race in America: A Conversation with Michael W. Waters on February 27th

In the 1970s, as picture magazines like Look folded, Schapiro shifted attention to film. With major motion picture companies as his clients, Schapiro produced advertising materials, publicity stills, and posters for films as varied as The Godfather, The Way We Were, Taxi Driver, Midnight Cowboy, Rambo, Risky Business, and Billy Madison. He also collaborated on projects with musicians, such as Barbra Streisand and David Bowie, for record covers and related art.

Schapiro’s photographs have been widely reproduced in magazines and books related to American cultural history from the 1960s forward, civil rights, and motion picture film. Monographs of Schapiro’s work include American Edge (2000); a book about the spirit of the turbulent decade of the 1960s in America, and Schapiro’s Heroes (2007), which offers long intimate profiles of ten iconic figures: Muhammad Ali, Andy Warhol, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, Ray Charles, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, Barbra Streisand and Truman Capote. Schapiro’s Heroes was the winner of an Art Directors Club Cube Award. Taschen released The Godfather Family Album: Photographs by Steve Schapiro in 2008, followed by Taxi Driver (2010), both initially in signed limited editions. This was followed by Then And Now (2012), Bliss about the changing hippie generation (2015), BOWIE (2016), Misericordia (2016), an amazing facility for people with developmental problems, and in 2017 books about Muhammad Ali and Taschen’s Lucie award-winning The Fire Next Time with James Baldwin’s text and Schapiro’s Civil Rights photos from 1963 to 1968.

Since the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s seminal 1969 exhibition, Harlem on my Mind, which included a number of his images, Schapiro’s photographs have appeared in museum and gallery exhibitions worldwide. The High Museum of Art’s Road to Freedom, which traveled widely in the United States, includes many of his photographs from the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr. Recent one-man shows have been mounted in Los Angeles, London, Santa Fe, Amsterdam, Paris. And Berlin. Steve has had large museum retrospective exhibitions in the United States, Spain, Russia, and Germany.

Schapiro continues to work in a documentary vein. His recent series of photographs have been about India, music festivals, the Christian social activist Shane Claiborne, and Black Lives Matter.

In 2017, Schapiro won the Lucie Award for Achievement in Photojournalism. Schapiro’s work is represented in many private and public collections, including the Smithsonian Museum, the High Museum of Art, the New York Metropolitan Museum, and the Getty Museum.

I am grateful for Steve Schapiro – our friend and our brother. His images show us how the world is changed. They show us what courage and joy and resilience and defiant hope look like. I will miss him, but I am so thankful for every moment I have had with him. And as I think of the ear-to-ear smile he had when he told me he was dying, I am confident there is a party on the other side welcoming him home. I know he is smiling down on all of us now, alongside his friends John Lewis, Dr. King, James Baldwin, Rosa Parks, and the cloud of witnesses on whose shoulders we now stand.  

Find more information at http://steveschapiro.com. 

I (and virtually everyone I know) will one day be on that list. Those who do this killing (theoretically or otherwise) have gone by many names over time: lynch mob, death squad, vigilantes, and more. What do they often have in common? They kill in the name of God, cause, or country. Many justify their blood-taking by the Bible.

“Thou shall not kill,” as many pastors including my own insist, has an asterisk beside it—an all-purpose disclaimer that allows or even justifies killing for any cause required by the party or the faith. But if that Commandment allows exceptions, why not any of the others? 

Could any of us even begin to imagine a community or even an individual life where the Commandments – without exception – were followed?  Where killing of fellow creatures – not behavior or beliefs – is what was not tolerated or excused?     

Killing in the name of God should be the ultimate oxymoron – the most extreme self-canceling, obvious-to-all contradiction. And yet it is the one “philosophical exception” most of us hold to and defend passionately. It is the one “right” that we protect so dearly that it almost defines us. In fact, most of us have a working list of those we would be “better off without.”

We rarely speak of or even acknowledge such a list; we even more rarely act on it. But acting on it is always, in most cases, justified—or so it seems. Whether it is revenge, patriotism, or defending a way of life, killing seems to be always an option (maybe even the preferred option) among us. This primary belief, though few of us recognize it, surges through our conspiracy theories, our national anthems, and our personal philosophies. From Cain to the latest mass shooting in our headlines, murder – its action or its justification – hangs over us like a spirit of our own creation, a specter of death and destruction. We might mistakenly, almost romantically, call it power.

History, God, and even our own consciences might consider it a paltry power, but this power to take life in the name of our own cause is a distorting and potent elixir. It’s not just a surging lynch mob or murderous group of vigilantes, it is us: we humans who love blood and will do anything to preserve our right to take it.

The question remains, though: who among us is worthy?

READ: The Ones Who Led the Way

The irony in this reality is that the philosophy is half true. The Bible clearly tells us (and I think, in our hearts, we all know) that no one is righteous, no one is perfect, no one of us deserves the fragile, beautiful, and wondrous gift of life. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are all premised on the belief that life is an incomprehensible miracle, one that no person or belief system can fully comprehend or control.

Life and community—like peace—pass our understanding. We are created in the living image of a being, a presence, a power we could not even begin to explain or comprehend. Our humility, as well as our grandeur, is beyond us. That’s the half that is true.

The half that is not true is the presumption that followers in any particular belief system are exempt from any “list” of who “doesn’t deserve to live.” And, further into the falsehood, is the belief that they or someone in their name is authorized to ensure that those who “don’t deserve to live” are actively persecuted. The Holocaust, pogroms, persecutions, slavery, and even bullying would not exist without people like this.

Murder is only possible if one presumes that others “don’t deserve to live”.  

To put together such a list is a direct contradiction of anything remotely resembling any ‘Gospel’ as well as a declaration against humanity – against being human.

Virtually every faith tradition calls us to welcome, to heal, to restore, and forgive – to celebrate even – those who are outside of our traditions and our ways.

It is real work to do that, of course.

And we’d rather not. Sometimes.

Even when we are willing, it is often a sacrifice – but usually a sacrifice with rewards we cannot begin to define. God, as always, calls us to a larger vision—one that gives and advocates for life. There are those who claim to act in God’s name, who use faith to reduce life, to cut us off from what would restore and redeem us. To condemn those who we could, if we were humble and teachable, actually learn from. Our faith could grow deeper and our compassion and humility more grounded and fruitful were we to posture ourselves with curiosity over condemnation. 

Wishing people death—or nodding in agreement with others who do—will not bring us life, freedom, or satisfaction. Bullies, from the schoolyard to the boardroom to the halls of power, operate on the assumption that some people, some human beings created in the image of the living God, are expendable and disposable. But they forget that God has his eye on the fragile and dispossessed (as well as on those who take unfair advantage of them).  Justice might feel far away, and it often is, but it is never absent.

As we should have learned from the Holocaust, death is never satisfied. Death, like every fire, is never quenched by feeding it more. The “list” is never complete until no one – or everyone – is on it.

Every 9-11 for the past 20 years, I weep when I remember the smoke coming from the Pentagon with the sound of fighter jets and helicopters swirling above. I remember the live footage of the towers falling that morning while standing across a crowded room from a young woman who had a loved one inside one of them. I never saw her again, but I will always wonder if her relative survived. I will never forget her face. I will also remember an interfaith prayer service an hour or so later. I was in uniform, and I remember opening my eyes during prayer to see my hands tremble in anger. I will always remember that day and the 2,977 civilians who died.

I also recall how things changed immediately after 9-11. The ROTC upperclassmen and the Army instructors began talking about “going to war.” As we held deactivated M16s and wore camouflage fatigues, the tone and intensity of the weekly role-playing scenarios in a nearby park became more dark and serious. I suddenly began hearing dehumanizing language towards foreigners. One course instructor led a close combat drill where he told the assembled cadets what to do when encountering an unconscious enemy combatant. He instructed us cadets to “kick the guy in the nuts as hard as you can to see if he’s still alive. If he moves, double tap him in the head.” No one spoke up. I didn’t.

Double tap means to shoot the incapacitated enemy combatant twice. To be clear, this was only a drill. Yet, a veteran of past failed wars was instructing officers of future failed wars to commit a war crime, a summary execution that would be at odds with the Geneva convention and the “rules based international order” for which we claim to fight. Weeks later I was injured running with the Army Ten Miler Team. I was kicked out of the program.

Every 9-11, I imagine what life would have been like without that injury and how I would have acted in the field of combat. Every 9-11, I feel such mixed feelings: I deeply regret not serving. Yet, on 9-12, I will always remember what has happened since.

While I couldn’t serve because of my injury, as a citizen and taxpayer in this democracy, I still do have blood on my hands. Every 9-12, I remember the 244,000 civilians who died in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan alone. Even the right-leaning Cato Institute calls this number an underestimation. This also doesn’t include the destabilization and destruction we directly caused in many other countries, especially Syria, Libya, and Yemen. In all theaters of this endless and sprawling war, a conservative estimate brings the total civilian death count to 335,000 innocent men, women, and children. The true civilian cost of the amorphous “War on Terror” is much higher. While most Americans suffered the mild inconvenience of increased TSA checkpoint scrutiny as a result of 9-11, our military interventions abroad have caused the displacement of 38 million civilians. This forced movement of civilians is larger than that of all wars since 1900 with the exception of World War 2. Was it worth it? What was gained? 

Every 9-12, I remember how that the well-meaning “never forget” sentiment I hear incessantly the day before does a lot of forgetting. At some point in last 20 years, “never forget” became synonymous with collective amnesia and indifference. Not caring about all subsequent civilian deaths is a disservice to the 2,977 civilian victims in our country whose memory was cynically invoked as a causus belli for America’s longest, costliest, and most counterproductive war.

In fact, “never forget” seems to forget the fact that most of the families of the 9-11 victims couldn’t rely on their own government and took matters into their own hands: today 2,000 of these families are still in court to expose our “ally” Saudi Arabia’s involvement in 9-11. “Never forget” really means a gradual forgetting of our values, our Constitution, and our civil liberties at home. Abroad, “never forget” hides a slow forgetting of the universal morality to which we once aspired as a country. Our high water mark was in 1945 when we helped establish the “rules based international order,” which we’ve abandoned over the decades in favor of the solipsism of that befalls all empires. The towers were not the only thing to fall on 9-11.

Some might ask, how can you connect the loss of civilian life at home to the loss of civilian life abroad? How can I not? How can I not see the intrinsic worth of all civilian life beyond arbitrary political, racial, cultural, or geographic boundaries? Furthermore, if I am really a follower of Christ, aren’t I supposed to extend empathy beyond my biology and nationality? Isn’t that the point of the parable of the Good Samaritan?

I can connect state abuses abroad and state abuses at home because of the least common denominator of racism. We wildly devalue and even ignore the body count from state violence at home and abroad because we see these victims as less-than-human. That very discounting or downplaying of another’s humanity is the very core of racism.

READ: Faith Leaders Gather in Houston in Response to Gun Violence

Our indifference to civilian deaths caused by the US abroad is directly tied to the same racism that emboldens police to indiscriminately shoot minorities at a higher rate. For me it is impossible to just mourn the tragedy of 1,000 or so yearly victims of state violence here while not also mourning the 16,750 civilians who have died every year, year after year, for the past 20 years because of the very same state’s violence abroad. It’s connected. Does morality stop at the water’s edge or some arbitrary boarder? What sort of morality would that be?

On 9-12, I remember my utter surprise at how dozens of even my “liberal” friends – many who have Black Lives Matters signs on their suburban front yards – have directly dismissed my concern about the dead civilians abroad and my insistence upon their full humanity.

“Those civilian casualties are different,” one allegedly “woke” white friend said. “They were not our citizens,” he insisted.

How is a dark skinned victim of state violence at home any different than a dark skinned victim of state violence abroad? Do foreign families weep for their loss any less than American families? Isn’t it the same racism that has led to indifference of the state’s violence at home and the same state’s violence abroad? Both our empire abroad and police abuses at home have direct antecedents in the concept of settler colonialism, marked by slavery of Africans and genocide of native peoples (both of which required the prerequisite of racism to allow perpetrators see the victims as “less than human”).

How – for example – is the Haditha massacre (where Marines killed 24 unarmed innocent civilians in cold blood) any less evil than similar state violence at home? It’s the same shoot-first/questions-later approach. It’s the same dehumanization process that precedes most acts of human violence. Does it matter what passport an innocent civilian holds?

On 9-12, I remember that we have responded to the very real trauma of 9-11 with the civilian equivalent of nearly six 9-11’s per year, every year, for the past 20 years. Why do so many ration their tears, mourning only 0.8% of the total civilian casualties because of the arbitrary fact they held American citizenship? And given how an average of 15,750 more dark-skinned civilians have died each year for the past 20 years abroad than die from state violence at home, why do many on the left resist adding a robust anti-war and anti-imperial element to a broader anti-racist coalition, just as MLK Jr. called for in his almost universally condemned  “Beyond Vietnam” speech? Perhaps the centrist war hawk Democrat is the modern equivalent of MLK Jr.’s “white moderate?” 

King made a moral and financial link between the misdeeds of empire abroad and their intimate connection to the misdeeds of empire at home. He knew that dollars diverted abroad are directly related to the same as dollars denied at home. MLK Jr. saw the internal moral rot that befalls all empires. He was literate in what Jesus preached, that to be a follower of Christ means you no longer have an “other” in your politics and morality.

He knew that love and empathy ought not stop at the parochial and arbitrary boundary of a tribe, a race, or a nation state. The Jesus who informed King’s politics was clear about extending empathy towards those outside of his tribe and re-humanizing those who have been deemed to be “less than” human. Just as the FBI hounded and harassed MLK Jr. before his death, Jesus was of course also targeted by the empire of his day for his radical message that inverted the script of the normal human tendency towards intertribal barbarism. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they need all the help they can get.

On 9-12, after I mourn both our 2,977 victims and the at least 100 times more civilians who died abroad than died here on 9-11, I remember the $5.4 to $6.4 trillion spent on the longest, costliest, and most counterproductive war in American history. (This could pay for the spending of even the most radical left-wing domestic proposals out there today, yet both Republicans and centrist Democrats call for brutal austerity.)

Isn’t there a moral difference between the deficits spent abroad in military defeats and the ongoing cost of 800 plus military bases worldwide compared to deficits that could be spent investing in people, their infrastructure, their healthcare, and their education? If a nation’s budget is a moral document, our moral priorities are laid bare.

Trillions are spent abroad in an endless succession of military defeats while our bridges collapse, tent cities of homeless swell, and 17 million children suffer food insecurity. While 40% of US aid to Afghanistan is now in the hands of criminals, warlords, drug lords, and insurgents, our government bails out banks, defense contractors, and “corporate citizens” first.

In the words of King, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” I would only argue that “defense” might not be an accurate way to describe what happened in the ensuing two decades.

On 9-12, I remember the strategic incompetence of the “experts” of our bipartisan foreign policy establishment who rotate through the revolving door between the Pentagon, industry-funded “think tanks,” defense contractors, and oil and gas corporations. This conflict was designed – legally and strategically – to combat terrorism (an ancient tactic that will always exist as long as nation states do) instead of any one state actor. It was meant from day one to have its center nowhere and circumference everywhere, an embodiment the same Military Industrial Complex nightmare feared by President Dwight Eisenhower. After an awkward soul-searching decade of America not having an external enemy after the unanticipated implosion of the USSR, 9-11 gave the “defense” establishment exactly what was needed: justification for permanent war mobilization. The War on Terror metastasized into a War of Terror.

Every 9-12, I remember the lies from the Pentagon of multiple administrations who knew from as early as the second half of the Bush administration that the war was not winnable. I remember Obama’s continuation of this delusion, the surge, and his drastic escalation of drone warfare based on legal gray zones, the same sort of creative legal carve outs created during the Bush administration. I remember the distraction and destruction that was the second Iraq war, and the directly-related destabilization of regimes like Syria.

I remember Fallujah, white phosphorus being used around civilians, and Abu Ghraib. And, I will especially remember that nearly 20 years ago, just months after 9-11, the Taliban tried to broker a deal with the Bush administration to hand over Osama bin Laden, an offer which was quickly rejected outright. As I write this the Taliban has rejected an attempt by the US to give the civilian evacuation effort more time. While that is tragic, I can’t ignore the tragedy that the best time to negotiate with the Taliban – when we had all the cards after bombing started – was in 2001. Such negotiation was attempted but rejected by the US. Any student of history should not be surprised that every empire is susceptible to the fatal flaw of hubris.

The founders and framers based their cautious optimism for our Republic on the assumption of highly educated public. That is nearly impossible when our corporate media has been distracting and entertaining us instead of informing us. (No, liberals, while Fox is egregious, it’s not just Fox). Your favorite columnist and TV show personality has been feeding you the Pentagon’s propaganda instead of speaking truth to power. If history is any guide, in a decade or so another crisis will be used as a justification to maintain and expand the budget of a military that already outspends the next ten countries combined yet still can’t manage to decisively end a conflict on favorable terms since 1945. The very amnesia behind “never forget” will make the repetition of history inevitable.

Big flags cast big shadows. We must have the moral imagination to illuminate these shadows. In the last 20 yeas we have become much more similar to the Roman Empire described in the gospels than we are to the radical moral vision of Jesus, whose ministry had everything to do with the social injustice caused by Rome and it’s collusion with the religious establishment of his day. At ballgames and commemorative events many politicians parrot the platitude that we are “one nation under God,” without stopping to wonder which God? The one who commanded us to love the other before he was executed by the empire of his day? Or Mars, the Roman god of war and empire? Or Baal? Or mammon? Or power? Or the U.S. flag? Or Trump? Why are those who like to call us a “Christian nation” the very same people who are so very un-Christ like in their politics and morality?

If we only see the victims on our side of an arbitrary tribal, geographic, or political boundary, our morality is closer to the Neanderthals than a species who may have prematurely named itself Homo sapiens sapiens, or wise wise human. There is no “other” in the politics of someone who really follows what Jesus preached. We must re-humanize the dehumanized “other.” We must tear the veil that surrounds the tribe and practice empathy where it is difficult to do so. We must question and confront the inherited human impulses towards parochial tribalism, narrow self interest, and intertribal brutalism.

Jesus was tortured and executed by the empire of his day for this very message. This irony seems to be especially lost on mainstream Christians in this country who – of all things – overwhelmingly support the use of state torture. They were joined by the “New Atheists” who also helped sell the war and its related human rights atrocities. Should we at all be surprised when the injustices abroad are mirrored at home? It’s the same racism, it’s the same state, it’s the same tax dollars, it’s the same myopic morality, it’s the same voters, it’s the same apathy and indifference, so where is the same outrage? Racially-motivated state violence towards innocent civilian life must be called out no matter where it happens.

I have more than enough tears to shed for civilian victims on both sides of arbitrary imaginary lines. This 9-11, let us shed a tear for our own victims. On 9-12, let us also mourn those whom we have victimized in the past 20 year quagmire. On 9-12, let us remember our amnesia. I hope you will join me in a boundless morality that doesn’t stop at the ocean’s shore. A morality that illuminates the shadows cast by big flags. A morality overflowing with empathy. A morality that emulates Christ instead of many emulating the “Christians” who often seem so Christ-illiterate. A morality that doesn’t ration its tears domestically or close its eyes abroad.

This is the higher path to which Jesus pointed, a morality that isn’t afraid of crossing imaginary lines on maps or in our hearts.

There are and will continue to be political debates about President Biden’s decision to pull US troops out of Afghanistan at this particular point in time, but what is shocking is how little reflection there is on why we invaded Afghanistan in the first place, either by our political and military leaders or even among leaders in the church. It is intriguing to hear so many people question the timing of pulling out of Afghanistan when I know so few of these same folks who questioned our initial invasion. The truth is we will only continue to invade countries, stay for decades, and then act shocked when we suddenly leave those countries in a complete mess unless we first reflect on why we were there in the first place and what is driving us to determine what is best for other nations. 

With Afghanistan, we were originally told we were going in to get Osama bin Laden because he attacked the U.S. on 9/11. That sounded reasonable, though it was a full 9 years later under a completely different administration when bin Laden was assassinated. And since 2011, when bin Laden was killed and the Al Qaeda networks were largely disrupted, we were told U.S. troops were needed to remain in order to build up a stable and strong Afghanistan. Now, in all of ten days, all of those years of creating a stable and strong Afghanistan were dashed. I can’t say I am surprised. 

I learned early on that our presence in Afghanistan was doomed to fail through a mission trip I led with some college students from Baylor University to Atlanta in the Spring of 2002. During that trip, we had dinner one evening in the home of a family who had recently arrived from Afghanistan. The son translated for his father as he told us their story.

Essentially, they were a Christian family who was persecuted for their faith by their government, fled to other countries to escape, experienced persecution in those countries as well, and eventually, after many years, were allowed to come to the United States. Because of the persecution the father experienced through beatings, he was unable to work. This created hardship for the family financially and in their marriage as the mother had to become their primary breadwinner. You could hear the pain in the father’s voice: the pain of him losing his status and especially the pain of him losing the country and culture he loved so much. 

All the while we listened, CNN was playing in the background showing U.S. helicopters and tanks and troops moving across the Afghan terrain, taking over this man’s country. It was eerie, but there was some slight solace in the Taliban government—who had persecuted this man for his faith—now being displaced by the U.S. and what was then called the Northern Alliance.

The Northern Alliance was made up of various Afghan non-Taliban factions, with the former pre-Taliban government, the Mujahadeen, being primary. So, one of us asked the man how he felt seeing the government that had persecuted him now being thrown out of power. The father told us that the government that had persecuted him was not the Taliban government, it had been the Mujahadeen government—the very same forces our country were escorting back into power. Naturally, we were absolutely stunned.

READ: With Red and Blue Fingerprints on Afghanistan Horror, a Call to Grieve

I will never forget that night. It was the words of a refugee father, an Afghan Christian, persecuted by the people the U.S. had decided to aid, that radicalized us against the Afghan invasion and later, the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq. Few were questioning the wisdom of the invasion of Afghanistan at that time just as few are doing any serious reflection today on why we were there in the first place. Few seem to be asking what are the implications of the violence we have helped perpetuate on that country and their culture. 

We invade. We occupy. We leave. Things fall apart. Rinse and repeat. 

Now, the media and U.S. political leaders are saying we should feel bad for Afghan refugees and welcome some of them into our country. They are wrong. We should certainly feel horrible (isn’t that a part of repentance?) and make space for as many of them who want to come. We owe them as much due to the recklessness and short-sightedness of our policies and actions over the last 20 years. The number of refugees could easily go into the tens of thousands. Bring them all. If this end to our occupation of Afghanistan is like any of the other historical calamities that the U.S. has caused, we will never truly live up to what we promised when we invaded: an American tradition. 

But our hospitality should not flow out of pity for the people of the country we ravaged and colonized for the past twenty years. Our hospitality must flow out of the reflection, acknowledgment of past corporate sin, lament for that sin, and honest repentance for policies that were clearly based on vindictiveness, cultural ignorance, and racism. We are all complicit. We are all guilty. We never should have invaded. We never should have occupied. 

Our refusal to learn about the history of Afghanistan and to at least know more about the Mujahadeen with whom we partnered to remove the Taliban before we took over the country was beyond detrimental. Afghanistan has a long and proud history of resisting change from outsiders, which is common among most counties to be honest. We should remember that the next time we opt for invasion and occupation. And yes, there most definitely be a next time. 

President Bush’s insistence that Afghanistan would become a U.S.-style democracy begs the question: Why do we assume other countries and cultures want what we have, which, if we are honest, is a proclaimed idea of democracy (an idea not widely experienced by most of our residents as can be seen with the plethora of anti-voting rights bills sweeping through state capitals right now). President Bush’s continued pleas even today for keeping a military presence in Afghanistan reflect his lack of understanding of how cultures change. 

It is true that faith communities throughout the United States will rise up and welcome resettled Afghani refugees, and that is a good thing. This is what faith communities do best. But our hospitality, if not matched by passionate advocacy for an accounting of the horrific and racist policies started by President Bush and continued under Presidents Obama and Trump, will be something of a hollow effort. I have never met a refugee who actually wanted to be a refugee. They fled their home countries not out of joy, but out of sheer terror, without knowing where they would end up. 

We should demand a political, economic, and spiritual accounting for how all of us created such suffering and violence in Afghanistan (and we should quickly move to Iraq while we are at it). This knowledge should lead us to lament the terrible damage we have caused, and this should then shape how we move forward. The U.S. cannot save Afghanistan. The U.S. cannot even save itself outside of honesty, lament, and repentance. And let that work begin with the House of God. 

Sadness is a strange emotion. Of all the primary things humans feel, it’s the one emotion that is difficult to get people to sit in either alone or together. We aspire to happiness, we compound our fears, and we justify our anger. But we run from sadness, and oftentimes that’s exactly where we need to stay for a moment.

The mere suggestion to sit in that sadness, however, doesn’t always go over well. Western cultures especially don’t like the idea of sadness because it means something is broken. As an achievement-oriented society, sitting in sadness is considered a sign of helplessness. Tragedy after tragedy, any offerings of “thoughts and prayers” on social media is met with derision: Thoughts and prayers don’t bring the dead back to life and delays us from producing actionable solutions.

Such criticisms aren’t exactly without merit, but they fail to recognize the power that grief has in helping illuminate what keeps us from recognizing honest-to-goodness resolve that produces sustainable solutions.

READ: The Generational Grief of Decolonizing Faith

In his book Art + Faith, artist and author Makoto Fujimura expounds on the idea of grief modeled by Jesus in John 11 after the death of Lazarus.

“Before showing his power as the Son of God to resurrect Lazarus, he does something that has no practical purpose: he ‘wastes’ his time with Mary, to weep with her,” Fujimura writes.

Mary and Martha, who are sisters of Lazarus, become angry with Jesus for not coming sooner.

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died,” Martha says in verse 21.

Jesus becomes deeply moved by her words and he weeps. Fujimura explains:

“We are used to hearing the Christian gospel as a victorious message, but when viewed through the pinhole of Christ’s tears, that gospel may appear a bit ‘upside down.’ We are told that by following Christ, everything will be restored; in some cases, we are promised prosperity. Church programs seem to be dedicated to helping us improve our lives, have better marriages, and become better parents. All of these good outcomes are not against God’s design for abundance in the world, but John 11:35 adds to the complexity of this version of the Good News.”

Grief, then, isn’t a barrier to restoration; it is a portal. Grief forces us to acknowledge our brokenness and to tend to our wounds. Our first inclination might be like Mary and Martha: we want to identify someone at which we can direct our anger. But that merely puts a band-aid on a bigger problem. And just like a doctor who cleans a flesh wound before bandaging it up, so too our tears help flush away toxins from the human condition that could leave our hearts prone to infection down the road.

As these images continue to flood out of Afghanistan, you aren’t wrong to be angry. But do give yourself permission to grieve and sit under its weight. Feel it. Acknowledge the brokenness that could produce such gut-wrenching darkness. Internalize. And then get to work with fresh perspective and clarity, the kind of which is only possible through the cleansing of tears.