Thursday, April 25, 2024

Reflections on what we face given the last week in news...UT protests and Christian Nationalism

I have been thinking a lot about the issues on our front pages and feed for some time now, the interesting parallel with Passover and the campus protests - especially the one most recently in my diocese at the University of Texas. The issues we confront are complex and not easily reconcilable. 

We must face the reality that we are seeing a rise in antisemitic behaviour on campuses along with a rise in violence against Jews in the US and in Israel; we are dealing with the reality of mass destruction of Palestinian Christian and Muslim lives in Gaza. As a Christian bishop, neither is acceptable as a global people created by our shared Abrahamic God.

(This rise is happening in the midst of the rise of hate groups and violence against people of colour combined with a deadly mix of xenophobia.)

The above is the most difficult thing for us to grasp. What we as Christians must work towards is realizing that each human being, by God's very creation, is beloved of God. The proper response is grief, sadness, and the ignominy of our human condition to right the wrongs of our forebearers. Moreover, our own citizenship actually benefits from the world as it is and in which we live.

The UT protests today and the blanket call for a violent response recall the complexity of our time and harken to Kent and other generational mistakes. This is often too quickly boiled down into a pro-Israel or pro-Palestine fight - but that is oversimplified.

The real question we face at UT is a rather more disturbing reality. We need to ask why is it that free speech of the Patriot Front and other white supremacist organizations are allowed at UT without a call for police, while a peaceful protest by those who disagree with Christian nationalism’s support of Israel due to their false apocalyptical far Christian right beliefs about the Holy Land deserves the present response by the state? Here is a juxtaposition that we know and remember, but nobody is speaking out loud.

We need to ask more questions about Christian Nationalism in this country. How it affects women, people of colour, and our approach to the wider global community. God has no country but the cosmos, no one people but humanity, no nation-state but the world. Remember the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. This is not about shelter but in our context needs to be read immediately as a revelation of God's ultimate concern for all people of every tribe and nation.

As for Israel and Palestine, we as Christians need to focus our efforts on the security of Israelis and the self-determination of the Palestinian people for a free, enduring and durable state in the future, focusing on the day after the war, where a just and lasting peace may be maintained.

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Quotes

  • "Christianity is not a theory or speculation, but a life; not a philosophy of life, but a life and a living process." Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  • "Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer." Oliver Wendell Holmes
  • "Perfection, in a Christian sense, means becoming mature enough to give ourselves to others." Kathleen Norris
  • "Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can." John Wesley
  • "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried." G. K. Chesterton
  • "One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans." C. S. Lewis
  • "When we say, 'I love Jesus, but I hate the Church,' we end up losing not only the Church but Jesus too. The challenge is to forgive the Church. This challenge is especially great because the church seldom asks us for forgiveness." Henri Nouwen, Bread for the Journey
  • "Christians are hard to tolerate; I don't know how Jesus does it." Bono
  • "It's too easy to get caught in our little church subcultures, and the result is that the only younger people we might know are Christians who are already inside the church." Dan Kimball