There can be only one Jesus, and he was a person of color murdered in the streets simply for proclaiming God’s kingdom, where the poor are blessed, not forgotten.
Letting go of the past and moving forward is a splendid suggestion. I’m just wondering how ministers and pastors will entice people to return to church. We saw how easily evil infiltrated our faith. Now we need to see how it is routed.
It’s so important for us multiethnic folks to hear these truths. Contrary to the lies that the evil one whispers in our ears, we are not cosmic mishaps.
We recognize that evangelicalism, and white evangelicalism, in particular, has been susceptible to the heresy of Christian nationalism because of a long history of faith leaders accommodating white supremacy. We choose to speak out now because we do not want to be quiet accomplices in this on-going sin.
How can a community of believers maintain that strength if the truth is buried for the sake of power, if the Gospel plays second fiddle to money, and if appearances matter more than the spiritual condition of those coming through the door?
This theocratic theology contrasts with historic Christian polity, based on the life and teachings of Jesus who espouses a domain called the Kingdom of Heaven, different from and challenging to the governing entity leading the country.
With all due respect to the literal house of worship that stands at the center of the lower 48, we should not be working to preserve a chapel founded on denigrating “the Chinese” as godless, Black Americans as criminal, or Indigenous Americans as non-existent. We should be tearing down that figurative chapel instead, sundering flag from cross once and for all.
Unless the church in America is to be consigned to the ash heap of social history, we must identify actions that are hateful and unchristian, cast them out, and redouble our work for justice and repair. Seeking accountability for GiveSendGo by calling on Amazon to drop the site from its cloud servers is a good place to start.
But it’s worth celebrating Virginia, the “home of the Confederacy,” as the first state in the old Confederate South to abolish the death penalty. The two facts are related, because the death penalty cannot be separated from our history of race and slavery in America.