Times of crisis are, by definition, difficult to navigate. This difficulty is complicated when you have bad leadership. On the national scale, America is nigh unto leaderless, both politically and spiritually. There is virtually no organizational leadership that combines real moral clarity with genuine, effective calls to action. (There are certainly smaller grassroots non-partisan activist organizations that are an exception to this rule.) People have been calling the resistance to Trump’s violent tyranny in Minneapolis a leaderless resistance movements. It is leaderless because we have no leaders.
I read the signed letter by 154 Episcopalian bishops condemning the Trump regime’s violence. (Yes, I am a progressive Episcopalian, if you find labels useful.) I thought I had exhausted my disappointment in the institutional church, but it turns out these religious (and political) institutions keep showing us that on the one hand they have almost no insight into the nature of evil, and two, that they intend to do almost nothing about it.
You can read the letter from the bishops here. Now, if you are yet another person who expects exactly nothing from your religious leaders, then you might be confused as to why this letter makes me so angry. After all, the letter from the bishops opens this way:
What happened a week ago in Minnesota and is happening in communities across the country runs counter to God’s vision of justice and peace. This crisis is about more than one city or state—it’s about who we are as a nation. The question before us is simple and urgent: Whose dignity matters?
In the wake of the tragic deaths of two U.S. citizens, Alex Pretti and Renee Good, we join Minnesotans and people across the nation in mourning two precious lives lost to state-sanctioned violence. We grieve with their families, their friends, and everyone harmed by the government’s policies. When fear becomes policy, everyone suffers.
We call on Americans to trust their moral compass—and to question rhetoric that trades in fear rather than the truth. As Episcopalians, our moral compass is rooted firmly in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
I will grant you this. The “moral compass” of the Episcopal church at large is sufficient enough to understand that the christian nationalism/white supremacy fascism going on right now in the United States is wrong. They’ve been saying it’s wrong for years, if you did not know. But the moral compass of the Episcopal church is not, and I want to say has almost never been, sufficiently morally intelligent to do a single useful damn thing about it. As evidenced by the next section of this letter, laughably entitled, “A Call for Action”:
This is a moment for action. We call on people of faith to stand by your values and act as your conscience demands.” and “We cannot presume to speak for everyone or prescribe only one way to respond. For our part, we can only do as Jesus’ teaching shows us.
I can only characterize this as institutional cowardice and an abdication of responsibility. In a moment where you are called to speak, these people decide to say almost nothing. It is an indefensible response to the moral and spiritual crisis that has engulfed the United States. I’ve read the Bible a few times–maybe a few dozen times at this point–and I know exactly what the Scriptures have to say about times like these. Because, sadly, THERE ARE ALWAYS TIMES LIKE THESE. This is a consistent pattern of human behavior in which the rich oppress the poor. You know what wasn’t in that letter? The word “evil”, “immoral”, “wicked”, “cruel”, “unjust”, “ungodly”, “bad”, “tyranny”, or “tyrant”, “murder”. (State-sanctioned violence is the closest it comes.) And that is because the comfortable, rich Episcopal church knows only how to look to God for comfort only and not for strength, and to be weakly resigned to the evil that it claims to deplore. Yes, Episcopal leadership, I am insulting you with our own prayer book and our own hymnody.
The Bible and the prophets raged with the evils and injustices in the world. They were not so addicted by and enslaved to comfort and conciliation that they forgot how to do that. I’m considering writing another blog post on the “top ten evil dictator deaths” in the Bible. My personal favorite one at this very moment is when the same King Herod who killed John the Baptist and Jesus committed blasphemy, and was struck down by God–eaten by worms and died. Good. That is exactly what dictators deserve. (Acts 12:23.)1
It’s self-evident to me that what passes for leadership in mainline protestant denominations has the same spiritual sickness that the spineless, weak, and morally vacuous Democratic elected party is infected with. They don’t really have the courage of any convictions about right and wrong. The reason why they have no convictions is because 1) they identify with empire, wealth, and imperialism and 2) they have already compromised and sold too many parts of their souls for power. In order to get to power in these systems in the first place, they’ve had to compromise too much to begin with.
Why is it that the so-called progressive Episcopal church can’t even muster any moral anger or indignation at the American gestapo shooting white people in the street after kidnapping black and brown people and throwing them into concentration camps funded by our damn tax dollars? It’s because, like the Democrats–they do not know how to have real conflict. They do not know how to fight. They also do not want to alienate the rich white people in their congregations that are still sitting on the fence and also funding their endowments–who will be offended at any real, substantial challenge to either the status quo or the profound spiritual evil infecting our modern life–because those two things are the same thing. They just can’t admit that because that’s the thing that put them into power to begin with.
The modern church, whether it identifies progressive, liberal, evangelical, or fundamentalist, is almost entirely compromised by being “in love with the world” and the temptation to trivialize the evils of the world when they don’t directly make our material conditions worse. The way the Bible uses the word “world”, we would say “status quo”. Listen to an actual biblical prophet give some real spiritual advice. I am going to paraphrase 1 John 2:15-18 so it speaks directly to us:
Do not love your society’s status quo or the benefits that come from it. If anyone loves the way the world works today, they don’t actually love God or God’s kingdom. 16 For all the promises of going along with the status quo—the deceptive allure of unlimited wealth, power, money, fame, and ambition—is not from God but is from the wicked system that wants to enslave you. 17 These evil institutions, all their power and violence, and all their ambitions and pretentions will ultimately fail and disappear, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.
I don’t think any of our leaders know how to inspire people to do good. They are too caught up in these systems themselves to really understand what real action looks like. In the case of these 154 Episcopal bishops, they gave some general advice to “get involved” and to “do what your conscience demands”. I think that’s inadequate. So I am going to end this blog post with some specific pieces of spiritual advice.
Tell the truth. Do not lie, or allow people to lie to you about what is going on right now. Stop trying to be friends with people who say they are Christians, but what they say and do sounds like Nazism. To misquote a proverb from our modern age: if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a fucking Nazi. Abhor what is evil. Cling to what is good. Stop pretending that people feeling comfortable is more important than the people who are being kidnapped and dying right now. If someone acts like a sociopath, they probably are a sociopath.
Do not make the mistake of thinking that Jesus is weak because he is full of compassion. Jesus, who is full of compassion, pissed people off so much they had him publicly executed for it. Jesus, who is full of grace and love, threw people out of the temple because he was sick of people with means preying on people without means. Jesus was constantly in conflict with the religious leadership of his time because they did not care about human beings–they cared about getting power and influence for themselves. Jesus set his face like flint against Jerusalem because he opposed everything about the way religion and politics worked there. And he shamed those institutions because they thought they could silence him by killing him. Fat lot of good that did, Rome–you killed Jesus, and his Spirit lives on in the world today, but Rome is fucking dead. The wicked losers who run the world today are mostly a bunch of pathetic old apparently pedophilic rich men who are about to die–but God’s people and God’s kingdom is forever.
- The Bible, by the way, is pretty comfortable with divine vindictiveness and vengeance–but human vindictiveness and vengeance is explicitly impermissible. Why? Well, I imagine it’s because we screw it up. Our moral frailties make doing justice pretty hard for us. But God’s justice is unshakeable–so when a dictator who has caused the senseless death and ruin of hundreds or thousands, or hell, its 2026, millions of people die by the hand of God, you’re supposed to be happy he’s dead and it’s over. ↩︎