In this space in the last month, colleagues from different traditions have written about positive actions one may take in these times that are so challenging. They have expressed a moral urgency regarding our nation’s military moves and threats against other nations, and the challenges befalling people living peaceably in our own country.
They joined the voices of many across our nation pleading for change. Yet the assaults become more appalling, and the crisis is deepening.
Every great religion upholds the dignity of the human person. Some teach that humans are created in God’s own image (Genesis 1:27). When one degrades the dignity of another, there is a violation that raises alarm bells with moral urgency.
In my Christian tradition, the great commandments are to love the Lord our God with all one’s heart, soul and mind, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself (Matthew 22:7-40). In Jesus’ last discourse before his arrest and execution (Matthew 25:31-40), he described the “judgment of the nations,” in which those who did not respond with care to the needs of the hungry, the stranger, the unclothed, the sick and the imprisoned were condemned.
Those who had fed the hungry, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked, nursed the sick and visited the imprisoned were told that they had done this for Christ himself.
Assaulting the human dignity of another doesn’t only harm the one being assaulted. The one performing the hateful deed also has their own humanity degraded.
I am deeply troubled by the reality of masked federal agents moving in packs and drawing weapons while hunting individuals and families for detention and removal.
I am deeply troubled by the modern-day slavery that exists when people put in immigration detention centers are working for $1 a day, and allegedly threatened with solitary confinement, withholding of food or other punishments if they do not “volunteer” to do so. These for-profit prisons are extracting the labor of people who are there against their will.
When in our collective life those using the weapons of the state assault the vulnerable, we all have a big problem. Now, this is not new.
Slave patrols and later Jim Crow laws terrorized Black people seeking their own freedom. Governments kidnapped Indian children and forced them into boarding schools, where they met cultural death and sometimes physical death.
Japanese Americans were taken out of their communities and put into detention. We can decry all these things and fail to recognize the urgency of this moment.
Clear doesn’t always mean easy. Moral clarity is the first and critical step that must lead to action. When evil deeds are being perpetrated against one’s neighbor, righteousness requires non-cooperation with evil. Silence in the face of evil is complicity with it.
As people are exercising their First Amendment rights to speak and assemble, some are suffering injury and arrest. These are true neighbors and also true patriots, as they call our nation back to the principles of the rule of law and the liberties described in the Bill of Rights.
So-called Christian Nationalism is not Christianity at all but rather is idolatry. Jesus proclaimed a kingdom of God that was never to be confused with any political regime of any time or any place.
His rhetoric, in fact, described that it is idolatry to have a first allegiance to any nation, political party or person over God and over the well-being of humanity in general. Our churches, our religions, are not national but international bodies of believers who worship God and serve the neighbor.
I believe that makes us better citizens. I pray for all of us to have clarity, truth, hope, community and communion amid the challenges of these days.
Finally, I would like to invite you to the next installment of the Interfaith Community’s Faith of Our Neighbors: Lifecycles series. On Feb. 1, 3-4:30pm, leaders in the Liturgical Christian Tradition (Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopalian) will share and answer questions about our traditions’ practices throughout our lives. This will be at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, 651 Broadway, Gilroy.
Rev. Anita R. Warner (pa*****@*************an.org) serves as Pastor of Advent Lutheran Church in Morgan Hill and is a founding member of the Interfaith Clergy Alliance.
There is a problematic notion generally shared by many institutional or conventional ‘Christians’ around the world — that to defend the natural environment from even the greatest polluters, including mass fossil fuel extraction and consumption, is by extension to go against God’s ultimate plan or ‘will’ and therefore is inherently wicked.
That plan, most notably, includes eventually destroying then replacing this world with a new and better one. More than just conservatives willing to pollute the planet most liberally, their recklessness also largely has to do with The Bible apparently not mentioning anything about global warming or climate change.
In the serious case of Brazil, its then-president Jair Bolsonaro, a hard-right and thinly-veiled Evangelical Christian theocrat, was a great environmental hazard, both domestically and on a global scale (the latter being due to pollution, ecosystem devastation and greenhouse-gas-induced global warming not respecting national boundaries).
Incredibly, in the midst of yet another unprecedented rampant-wildfires season six summers ago involving the Amazonian rainforest (as usual), Bolsonaro declared that his leadership — and, I presume, all of the formidable environmental damage he inflicts while in power — was/is somehow divine: “It is difficult to be president of Brazil because it is a president that has less authority. I am fulfilling a mission from God.”
Perhaps as Big Fossil Fuel’s greatest friend, Donald Trump publicly stated on Nov.6, 2024: “Many people have told me that God spared my life [from two assassination attempts] for a reason. And that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness.”
As a befitting Canadian-leader example, also-Evangelical Stephen Harper was a prime minister quite enthusiastic about the fossil fuel industry while unrelenting, yet secretive about it, in his war against environmental science and protections.
Harper’s faith may have also inspired him to take a group of 208 people with him to the Holy City, Jerusalem, in 2014. The entourage included 21 rabbis along with some representatives from Crossroads Christian Communications, Trinity Bible Church, the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches in Canada and Canada’s Ambassador for Religious Freedom.
At the same time, there are conservative politicians who don’t believe in Biblical accuracy yet will claim to do so and implement governmental policy accordingly in order to secure the conservative/theocratic Christian vote in every election.
Not surprising, some of the greatest hazards are theologically inclined people or thinly-veiled theocrats getting into high office with their dangerous disregard — if not contempt — for the natural environment and human efforts to protect it.