Put on the Breastplate of Righteousness
The heart is an organ and a muscle. To protect our hearts, we have to exercise them.
“Beloved, let us love one another.”
“Love your neighbor as yourself.”
We are called to love whomever has been deemed unworthy. This is the righteousness of Jesus.
Christian Discipleship should equip people with the tools to resist dehumanization. So, how did Christianity become the path toward dehumanization?
Develop a Private Life
What if we’ve been taught that there’s no such thing as a private life? What if it was drilled into us from childhood that someone is always listening? Someone is keeping track of every impure thought, every blasphemy, every dark fantasy.
What if what we were taught about an omnipresent and omniscient God was a corruption of the truth, conjured up by people who were more interested in our obedience than our faith?
What if at the heart of Christian deconstruction is the search for a private life - a place where we can be free to wonder about God, about the universe, about evil, and about salvation? What if people want the freedom to walk into the wilderness and encounter the living God?
Resist Milieu Control
“Empathy can become dangerous when it leads people away from building a society guided by God’s truth.”
According to recent polling done by PRRI, 54% of white evangelicals agree with that statement, the highest of any demographic group. Sit with that for a moment because it is quite revealing.
How did this particular subgroup within Christianity grow to believe that empathy was an impediment to participation with God’s redemptive work in the world?
Welcome to the Faithful Resistance
ave you ever considered that if you lived in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, you would have voted to convict someone of witchcraft?
Over a period of about 16 months, good and decent people, Christians, sent 19 of their friends and neighbors to their deaths, based on false testimony and a belief in spectral evidence.
It wasn’t the witches who believed in magic, it was everyone else.
Practice Corporeal Politics
People often say that attending a rally or a protest doesn’t change anything. They are wrong.
Corporeal politics is about showing up in the flesh, having our voices heard and our bodies seen. Those of us who claim to follow Jesus are called to be the body of Christ in the world, we are called to be corporeal beings that represent Jesus.
That summer revealed where the body of Christ could be found.
Deliver Us From Evil
Christianity is supposed to be the “force” that resists evil, the light in the darkness. People actively being formed as disciples of Jesus should have a built in resistance to this kind of formation.
I am not willing to give up on Christianity. After looking at where formation practices went wrong, we need a plan to do better.
A New Hope
Did you know that grasslands have only covered the earth for around 5 - 7 million years?
I was taught that evolution undermines “biblical authority,” but I don’t think that’s true. Evolution is the scientific evidence of the great narrative arc found throughout the Bible: the meek always inherit the earth while the mighty always perish.
It’s not just a promised future outcome, it’s history, and it’s the story embedded in the earth.
Make Eye Contact and Small Talk
Christianity should not instill within us a spirit of fear or of superiority, but modern evangelicalism has embraced the fundamentalist idea of holiness through separation, which is biblical, but not Christlike.
In a time when so many leaders use their words and actions to dehumanize, let us take every opportunity to humanize, and allow ourselves to be changed for good.
Investigate
“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits.” -Matthew 7:15-16
When the wolves in sheep’s clothing have been in the herd long enough, they normalize wolflike behavior to such a degree that the sheep begin to take on the characteristics of the wolves.
The wolves are running amok now...
The Empire Strikes Back
How did millions of American evangelicals become stormtroopers (and not even know it)?
Be Kind to Our Language
Maybe it’s a story, right at the beginning of the Torah, that says: “the path to freedom begins by developing languages that the oppressors do not understand, so that only those with ears can hear.”
How the Mighty Have Fallen
Liberalism, the rights of the individual over the State, dealt a crushing blow to the patriarchy.
The forces of oppression - greed, racial supremacy, religious fundamentalism, and patriarchy - had been exposed and were eroding, but they did not disappear.
Believe in Truth
Imagine for a moment, a Christmas Eve service; the people are singing Silent Night, one candle lights another until the room is filled with light.
“…heavenly hosts sing Alleluia!”
Then, with two verses remaining, someone starts blowing out candles. It’s not a child, it’s an adult, walking down the aisle, quietly extinguishing the lights.
The voices soften and begin to quiver, “…with the dawn of redeeming grace…”
When America Was Great
I began this series talking about a different view of the peak of Western civilization, one from the much more distant past, when men were men and everyone knew their place in the order of things.
Two competing views: cooperation vs. order; peace through negotiation vs. peace through strength; democracy vs. autocracy; liberalism vs. authoritarianism.
I wonder if the nostalgia that people have for the 1950s and 60s is for liberalism. They picture it as a time when church attendance peaked (at 49%) as families went to their local mainline churches to learn the Golden Rule.
Help! A Dinosaur Ate My Bible!
There was no authority on earth that could force the South to end its practice of slavery or become a true democracy, because the Bible did not compel them to do so.
Appeals to biblical authority are often used to abuse power and escape accountability.
Beware of Paramilitaries
The dual state does not exist accidentally. It is constructed through fear, codified, and protected by “tradition.”
The civil rights movement sought to dismantle the dual state.
Those who advocate for equality are often demonized as leftists, socialists or even communists. Demanding equal application of the Bill of Rights is neither; it is the liberalism on which the United States was founded.
It is also the way of Jesus.
Blessed Assurance
I understand that this might sound a little too mystical, but I wanted to go through this exercise to remind us that Christianity is more than a ticket into heaven when we die.
I also want us to see how when Christians mature into stages 4 and 5, when they see those cracks, they become awakened to the suffering in this world and they try to do something about it.
Faith of Our Fathers
The Constitution is the authority, not the Bible, nor the Church, nor any creed.
As concerned as they were about the abuse of power by a despot, these men did not extend the freedom and authority they took for themselves to all the people around them, but over the next two centuries, the distribution of power increased.
Not everyone likes that. Christian Nationalism seeks to return power to the few.