On a Sunday morning in March 2003, on the eve of the American invasion of Iraq, I experienced the worst moment in my (then) 42 years as a professing Christian and 52 years spent in Baptist churches, from cradle roll to adult. My wife and I had been members of that particular church for over 15 years, and we had found ourselves frequently frustrated by some of the attitudes there. Nevertheless, we weren’t prepared for what we encountered that morning.
In his Sunday morning sermon, the pastor used God’s house and pulpit to launch an angry and hateful diatribe against the critics of President George W. Bush. He cited several examples of what he called “liberal Hollywood actors” who had questioned the president’s intelligence and his qualifications for that office. Then he compared their academic degrees with those attained (I hesitate to call them ‘earned’) by the president; in every case, the president’s degrees were ‘higher.’ He built his diatribe to a crescendo as he shouted: “President Bush isn’t stupid. It’s his critics who are stupid!”
But that wasn’t the ‘worst moment’ to which I alluded earlier. No, the worst moment was when the hundreds of ‘worshippers’ (I use the term advisedly) erupted in the loudest applause and “amens” I had heard in my 15½ years worshipping in that space.
It is beside the point that I am a Democrat and voted for George W. Bush’s opponent, Al Gore, in the 2000 presidential election. If the president being defended had been a Democrat whom I had supported, I would have been every bit as sickened by the pastor’s misappropriation of God’s house as a political precinct, denouncing those who disagreed with the president.
More than that, though, I was sickened by the air of hatred I felt throughout that room at that moment, hatred for anyone who thought differently than them politically. That hatred – make no mistake about it – was directed at people like my wife and me. And many of these were our friends, or so we thought, some of them longstanding friends. Yet I never – then or later – heard one person object to what had occurred that morning.
This was a betrayal of the love and unity Christ demands of His people.
There was a mob mentality, a tribal mentality, a lust for power, for destroying the enemy – not loving your enemy as Jesus had taught – whether that (perceived) enemy be innocent Iraqi citizens or simply fellow Christians and fellow Americans who thought differently than them.
So here I sit, 18 years later, watching a mob take over the U.S. Capitol – where the people’s representatives meet to conduct the people’s business. Earlier this morning, I watched as many Republican representatives and senators lustily applauded an attempt at a hostile takeover of the American government, which THEY themselves had orchestrated!
And so I had a flashback to that morning in church in March 2003. In one case, God’s house had been profaned by God’s people. In the other, the American people’s house had been profaned by a group of the people’s representatives. Their action, egged on by the president’s insistent tweets and rally speeches (including one this morning to the protesters), has incited the insurrection we now see in protesters who have stormed the U. S. Capitol building.
There are a couple of common threads that connect those church members back in 2003 with the participants in today’s insurrection against the U. S. government: (1) a lust for power at the expense of principle, and particularly at the expense of any ethical considerations; and (2) a loathsome contempt (read: hatred) for anyone who thinks differently than they do.
These ‘threads’ are inimical to (1) worship of the Christ who told us to love our enemies; and (2) adherence to the U. S. Constitution and the representative democracy that has been our country’s hallmark since its founding.
They also demonstrate (1) a faith in self rather than God; and (2) a faith in power rather than a faith in our country’s democratic principles.
Sadly, in the 18 years since that moment in church (we left that church the following year), I have seen such attitudes demonstrated across the ‘Christian’ landscape. The actions we saw this morning, similarly, are the result of attitudes we have seen on social media, and heated rhetoric by politicians, especially by this president and his supporters. For that matter, they’ve been brewing for decades, incited by incendiary talk radio hosts.
As Christians and as Americans, we have a lot of work ahead of us. Many among us have turned their backs on our founding principles. Let us not grow weary in well-doing.
Well stated friend.
Thanks so much, E. B.