Unpopular Thoughts, Part II

"Thinking NFL players are 'protesting the flag' is like thinking Rosa Parks was protesting public transportation." @jeffisrael25

Relatedly. It's a hard conversation, but I am deeply grateful for the charitable friends with whom I have shared it and from whom I have learned. The conversation is the one that opens itself to exploring that and how it is both possible and good to

• support the remarkable people who serve this country in the military AND 
• grieve and challenge the military-industrial complex that increasingly defines this country's relationships with the rest of the world, its own land (read Wendell Berry!), its approach to education, policing, incarceration (watch 13th!), and a bunch of other issues through which - significant among other problematic things - white supremacy is systematized and habituated. 

To confuse these tasks is to fail one another in the basic human obligation to listen and tend to each other. Moreover, to pit these tasks against each other is to leave the military-industrial complex, an ailment common to both "sides," unnamed and spared our critical reflection. Indeed, one of the glaring holes of the military-industrial complex is that it leaves little to no space for veterans to talk about the sacrifices this country asked of them (google '22 Kill'!). The absence of such a space is not patriotism; it is politically and financially incentivized dishonesty, very little of which has to do with the military personnel of this country and which hides behind other people's public disagreements over whether to stand or kneel. 

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It does not dishonor one's country to pray for its healing and the making right of broken things anymore than it dishonors our military to pray for peace and the flourishing of people. Moreover, I do not know anyone who prays prayers for peace more fervently than my friends who have served in the military.

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But the flag carries multiple symbols for people, and so the president is retweeting photos of amputee veterans in an attempt to shame those who would help us see the incompleteness of our freedoms. It is hard but important for white folks to see and own that no one is free in the charade of white supremacy, 

• which I do not wish to uniquely attach to the present administration (lest the nation become complacent) and 
• which simultaneously mocks the flag, our conception of freedom, and those who have served the military of this country for or under both. 

It has taken too long for white athletes (and many others of us who are white but not athletes) to join the human chains (actual and metaphorical), but they are there now, which is a significant step. 

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Prophets come to heal our blindness, and the reactive response of the powerful reveals that our blinding has not been an accident. You know you have been made a pawn in someone else's game when the subversive next step that threatens to undo it all is the befriending of the side you are being told to despise.

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Postscript: It is entirely possible that this short post takes too much for granted the story of Nate Boyer and Colin Kaepernick's remarkable friendship in ways that would have been better to make explicit. If that's the case, here's the story to compensate for the deficit.

PPS The above analysis is only implicitly Christian, in its valuation of friendship and its desire to see discourse shaped by truthful speech, but the post largely punts the still more difficult conversation about allegiance with which Christians are obliged to wrestle. As a student one time said to me, "Allegiance in the church? How would that work? We only have one pledge to give." Right. Another post, maybe, would consider the relative generosity of the Book of Common Prayer's rubric "The people stand or kneel" and the undeniable discomfort that comes from recognizing that the present debate is about how not if national liturgies should be performed. 

I do think it is important to name here on that score the work of folks like David Fitch, who would contend that mutual submission under the Lordship of Jesus, as we come together and listen to discern Christ's presence in our midst, is important to understanding the kind of friendship God in Christ has opened to us and so also the kinds of friends we might hope to become, even with people who are not Christian.

What Christian Worship Can Learn From Atheists

While recent signs indicate that the tenor of conversation between Christians and atheists may be improving (evolving, even?) in public discourse, there is some irony in the fact that there is such considerable room to improve. Irony because, in the first centuries of the Church, Christians were regularly accused of - and killed for - being atheists, having adopted, said the ancient Greek historian Dio Cassius, "the practices of the Jews." Or as Phil Harkland put it in the article cited above: "the denial of other gods was perhaps the most important source of conflict and the strangest thing about devotees of the Judean God and of Christ."

While it is not uncommon for Christians to consider the distinctiveness of Christian claims relative to Judaism, it is instructive that the early Greeks saw Christians as adopting the practices of the Jews. This outside Greek perspective helpfully recalls the continuity of Israel's vocation - Israel's "set apart-ness" - and God's mission to those beyond Israel.  Dio Cassius is observing exactly the scandal by which the blessing of Israel's Kingdom is, in Christ, opened to Gentiles and that mixed kettle of fish called the Church. For Christians, Jesus is both "a Light to enlighten the nations, and the glory of your people Israel."

To begin with Israel is to begin with one God: Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad; Hear, O Israel: the LORD is our God, the LORD is one (Deut. 6:4). 

Now, belief in one god is, in some sense, a question of movement from one's point of reference. That is, the one god of Israel's Shema could represent an increase, as in, "I did not believe in God before, but now I do." What the early opposition to the Church clearly saw, however, is that confession of "one true god" can just as easily - and far more probably - represent a decrease, as in, "I will not bow down to other gods."(1)  

Examples of the confession of one God as a decrease from the alternative in Scripture are many and too numerous to list. Consider a few representative instances: Israel and the golden calf (and God's response), Israel's request for a king (and God's reluctance), the refusal of the three men to serve the king's gods (and their subsequent deliverance from the fiery furnace), Jesus' crucifixion (and the people's haunting words, "We have no king but the emperor"), and the missionary encounters of the apostles recorded in Acts.

Similarly, the history of the Church's life and witness has consistently understood and engaged formation centered on one God as opposed to many. In his commentary on the Ten Commandments, Martin Luther writes:

Ask and examine your heart diligently, and you will find whether it cleaves to God alone or not. If you have a heart that can expect of Him nothing but what is good, especially in want and distress, and that, moreover, renounces and forsakes everything that is not God, then you will have the only true God. If, in the contrary, it cleaves to anything else, of which it expects more good and help than of God, and does not take refuge in Him, but it adversity flees from Him, then you have an idol, another god.

Thus, Christian formation consists, in part, of not believing; of saying "no" to the pantheon of the gods, where "gods" are understood to be anything from which we expect more good and help than God.

Of course, Christians are not atheists. Emphatically, believing in the one God who delivered Israel from bondage in Egypt and raised Jesus from the dead changes everything. Indeed, to the extent Christians fail to worship the one true God - by expecting more good and help than of God from the countless myriads gods of our day - we live what Stanley Hauerwas calls lives of "practical atheism." 

But if confession of the Christian God requires of those who confess this God the refusal to worship another, perhaps we can acknowledge that atheists and Christians have a shared agenda: the naming and dissuasion of the worship of gods we don't believe exist. For this reason, it is curious that Christians have not valued inter-faith conversations with atheists on the same level as conversations with peoples of other faiths. Christians believe that it is enough to believe, and forget that not worshiping gods is as distinctive of our tradition as is worshiping the Triune God revealed in Jesus.(2) The challenge to an inter-faith conversation with atheists, I suppose, is that Christians and atheists can't agree on the gods we don't believe exist. 

Disagreements notwithstanding, I have hope that generous atheists can teach the Church a thing or two about not believing. I hope, too, that a generous Church can raise questions for atheists - about the gods, with God's help, we are learning not to worship.

JRM+

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(1) Significantly, throughout the Church's history, one of the chief expressions of the Christian's refusal to worship other gods has been the Christian's unwillingness to legitimate the empire's claims of divine status. Thus, the Church understands "Jesus is Lord" to be a theological and political statement.

 (2) Cf. Hauerwas: Americans do not have to believe in God, because they believe that it is a good thing simply to believe: all they need is a general belief in belief. That is why we have never been able to produce interesting atheists in the US. The god most Americans say they believe in is not interesting enough to deny, because it is only the god that has given them a country that ensures that they have the right to choose to believe in the god of their choosing, Accordingly, the only kind of atheism that counts in the US is that which calls into question the proposition that everyone has a right to life, liberty, and happiness.