Tyranny is dependent on citizens who are willing to comply with terror.
How does that happen? How do people support their own government terrorizing their fellow citizens?
Once we believe our neighbors are a threat to us, we want that threat neutralized. It takes very little effort to convince people to fear their neighbors; just sprinkle a few half-truths, sensationalize one extreme story, and continually use defamatory language. Day after day, year after year.
Then, harden their hearts so that no story, no evidence, no amount of suffering will penetrate the narrative you have created.
Over the last few years, there has been a movement to deliberately harden the hearts of Christians. Books like “The Sin of Empathy” and “Toxic Empathy,” use Bible verses and spiritual language to justify dehumanization and “othering.”
When we pick and choose Bible verses and insist that the Bible can only be interpreted literally, we miss that the Bible reveals a God who destroys those who allow their hearts to be hardened. Salvation comes to those whose hearts are broken.
The story of God goes like this:
There was once a great king whose people were oppressed, yet he did respond to their cries for mercy. As their voices rose, the Most High God did hear their cries and came to rescue them.
God sent a servant to go before the great king to ask for mercy, but the great king’s heart hardened.
The servant went back several times and gave warnings that if the great king did not extend mercy, if the great king did not hear the cries of his people, that pain and suffering would result.
Each time the great king’s heart hardened, and each time calamity followed. Until one day, the suffering reached even the great king’s house, and his heart softened for a brief moment, and he let the people go.
Then, his heart hardened once again, and he was filled with anger. He mounted his great army to chase after the people and wipe them out once and for all.
The people did not fight back. Indeed, through all of the oppression they suffered, they never met violence with violence. So, God opened the sea before them, and they walked into freedom while the great king and his army were swallowed by the sea.
To insist this is the story of a literal pharaoh and a literal Moses is to deny the God-breathed nature of Scripture. This is the story of how God responds to the oppression wrought by Empire.
It is a story that reveals that those who allow their hearts to harden choose the side of Empire. Empire draws its power from the resentment that builds in people whose hearts have hardened.
Do not let your heart be hardened but instead, be filled with hope. Have hope that the moral arc of history does bend toward justice, because the Most High God hears the cries of the oppressed and brings down great kings from their thrones.
Empires draw power through terror and fear of neighbor, but rebellions are built on hope and love of neighbor.
Jesus taught that the way to undermine the fear tactics of Empire is to not play along. Love your neighbor. Make eye contact with them. Make small talk. Do not repay evil with evil. Turn your cheek, give your cloak, walk the extra mile.
Ask God to break your heart for the things that break God’s heart and let your heart break. It is the broken hearted who inherit the earth.
This is part 13 of a series inspired by my reading of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons Learned From the Twentieth Century, by Timothy Snyder as part of my effort to offer Christian insight to those wondering what to do in this moment.