I'm Not Trying to be a "Good" White Christian Anymore
Choosing safety over resistance is not what Jesus modeled
I bring my conscience with me everywhere I go. Including into my faith. Maybe especially my faith.
I’m Christian and I’m sick from people twisting my faith into something shameful, hateful, ugly and fake. I’m done listening to people who say my faith means my place is to keep my mouth shut, play it safe with my politics and opinions, and pretend to be compassionate and merry.
Time for we Christians in the U.S. to stop playing along to get along. Especially White women, like me. I've let my BIPOC friends and colleagues carry the weight of speaking up for far too long. I'm sorry I've let you down so long and I'm going to do better.
My conscience - and my faith - demands that I now speak up against genocide, against Christian nationalism, against White supremacy and against patriarchy. And that I speak out in solidarity with Palestinians who are being slaughtered - and with the Jews who want nothing to do with the genocide being committed in their name for political gain.
There is no room in my heart this year for the fashionable, White-centered Advent narrative.
Jesus was a brown-skinned, undocumented Middle-Eastern immigrant. He and his family spent his toddler years as refugees to escape the slaughter of all male infants and toddlers in his homeland. A slaughter that was ordered by the nation’s leadership. They returned to their beloved homeland, the land that would soon become known as Palestine, where Jesus would live the rest of his life.
Jesus was poor. He was a simple craftsman and lover of good parties, and a gentle healer and fierce humanitarian. He relied on others to provide his food and shelter out of their abundance. He was a revolutionary teacher on peace, forgiveness and inclusion. By caring deeply for the outcasts and the discarded, the physically and mentally ill, and those balanced on the knife’s edge of survival, he modeled powerful kindness and sacrificial resistance.
Jesus was a resister who spoke out against every injustice. He rejected comfort to live the way of resistance in the name of faith, no matter the cost.
Last week, while I was wrestling with this massive question of how to reclaim my faith while so many Christians I know and admire are being profoundly silent about the injustices in the world, I came across this article, “The good White Christian women of Nazi Germany - Despite what you’ve read, most of them didn’t resist,” by D.L. Mayfield, The Christian Century, April 7, 2021.
"Owings writes in the introduction to Frauen that the more she talked to and thought about German women—the half of the German population that had been ignored in efforts to understand how the Third Reich was so successful in its devastation—the closer these women seemed to American women. I am only now starting to understand the parallels between Christian nationalism in the United States and that of the Third Reich, partly because my education focused only on the few Christians who resisted evil. The majority did not. But focusing on those few who did made it easier for me and others to ignore the reality that most good Christians did not call out evil during the Third Reich."
“I am only now starting to understand the parallels between Christian nationalism in the United States and that of the Third Reich…”
Jesus modeled resistance, never allowing his followers to settle for supporting the safe political position. He showed us the way to be kind without worrying about if anybody thought he was conventionally “good.”
Kind people resist. Kind Christians must resist. Right now.
Amen. I grew up a post-Vatican II Catholic but the RCC grew away from me. There was a folk hymn we sang often when I was a kid, "They'll Know We Are Christians By Our Love." I think of this hymn every day lately, with sadness. I shake my head wondering how our pastors & congregations are not filling the streets over the genocide of Palestinians. Showing our elected representatives what moral leadership of a people looks like.
In the meantime:
"For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them.” Matthew 18:20