White Americanized Christians keep getting duped into believing something other than Jesus.
And once “being Christian” is successfully redefined apart from being like Jesus, all kinds of hatred, discrimination and cruelty find easy entry into a yet-again, perverted faith.
This is not the first time in our nation’s history that white professing Christians in large numbers have sided with cruelty strategically aimed at non-white persons. It is just the latest.
Tragically, it is a familiar, repeated pattern of being sucked in by poorly-disguised politicized efforts to gain control through manufactured fears of non-whites who are demonized as less than equal children of God and therefore easy subjects for abuse.
Targets have included Native Americans, African slaves and their descendants, and now vulnerable migrants from south of the border and elsewhere if not white.
This latest rallying of white Americanized Christians in support or defense of governmental discrimination and cruelty toward nonwhite persons has revealed yet again that what Jesus deemed the greatest commandment is unmoving to those who prefer their own privilege over his clearly stated principles.
For many professing Christians, apparently, Jesus’ call to “Follow me” is not nearly as appealing the present political appeal to “Favor me.”
All that Sunday school stuff about denying self and loving others was mere talk, not commitment. Once following Jesus is taken out of the Christian equation everything else that he said and did is easy to dismiss as well.
That’s why so many professing Christians love to celebrate Jesus’ birth and then ignore all that he called his followers to be and do. Then they rely on some expressed belief in his death and resurrection as a means of salvation as transactional as snagging a good dinner reservation.
Therefore, the one consistency in each and every major national violation of America’s commitment to liberty and justice for all and Jesus’ call to serve others is that white Americanized Christians keep eagerly flocking to the wrong side.
The seeds of this current form of Christian-infused cruelty were planted by the Religious Right in 1980s. It was a highly successful effort to convince gullible Americanized Christians that their faith is better defined by political opposition to abortion and equal rights for LGBTQ persons than anything to do with how Jesus told and showed his followers to live.
Like for those beforehand who put Native Americans on a death march and defended African slavery, a “biblical” case gets presented as sufficient justification for evil— even though it means telling Jesus to get lost.
Now let me be clear should anyone think I am drawing some moral equivalence between those who by vote, voice or indifference supported the gross mistreatment of Native Americans or the enslavement and ongoing discrimination of persons of African descent with professing Christians today who aid or excuse the governmental vilification and abuse of migrants.
Yes, that is precisely what I am saying.
Every single aspect is in clear parallel. Any distinction is without difference in that the same ingredients are baked into the resulting hostilities and injustices toward targeted, vulnerable persons today.
Feel free to follow along:
In each case the national atrocity is driven by trumped-up racial fear. Data to the contrary of the preferred narrative is dismissed as fake.
Vulnerable persons are not just generalized but demeaned and demonized in order to dehumanized them. Calling these people names like “savages” or “animals” does the trick.
Then any means of alleviating that perceived threat becomes acceptable — including whatever form of cruelty those in power choose. Just throw on the masks, grab the weapons and attack.
Families are destroyed. Brutality and intimidation are on full display.
Disregard for human rights is consider a necessary price to pay for purifying (whitening) a changing culture.
Toxic masculinity gets a boost while empathy gets booted. And the life and teachings of Jesus are ignored while isolated biblical texts are heretically mangled to wrongly suggest that God approves of such evil.
Yet professing Christians are often among the first to embrace an exclusive nationalistic identity at the high expense of others — despite having once claimed their identity in Christ alone.
As with previous capitulations of white Americanized Christians to gross injustices, the end result is always the exploitation of a targeted, subdued minority.
There is even talk now of turning kidnapped migrants — including those stripped of their legal status — into controlled farm workers with every semblance of forced and easily abused labor.
Making excuses and seeking distinctions that do not exist are nothing less than siding with injustice much like the ways many professing Christians have done historically.
The defenders of slavery and the abolitionists — while both claiming divine approval — didn’t have merely different opinions or biblical interpretations. They had vastly different measures of human decency and faithfulness to Jesus’ calling to love God and inclusive neighbors.
So do those today who stand for the ongoing abuses of God’s children and those who stand with and for their dignity and justice. Pick a side, prayerfully.
This current assault on human dignity doesn’t have to play out fully, God forbid, to see how it follows historic patterns and is clearly at odds with how God views all persons and how Jesus taught his followers to treat even the least of these.
But once professing Christians accept the authoritarian way of casting a racial minority as “other” and “lesser” beings, then white superiority becomes one’s lord rather than the brown-skinned incarnation of God.
Jesus must be asking, “What part of ‘Follow me’ do you white Americanized Christians not understand?”
The good word of hope is that Jesus is still extending that calling. Calling today, calling today.
John D. Pierce is director of the Jesus Worldview Initiative (jesusworldview.org), part of Belmont University’s Rev. Charlie Curb Center for Faith Leadership. Join us for the first Jesus Worldview Conference, October 13-15, in Nashville.