Discipleship is the Resistance
I’ve put 54 posts on this website since August 2017. Blogging experts insist that readers will flock to blog sites that pick a topic and stick to it. The pros advise that writers “find their voice, have an identity, and adopt a theme.”
So, I’ve known about the importance of web site identity since I started this blog. But until a couple of days ago, I thought that I hadn’t found my theme. I’d written about different topics ranging from theology to race, from prayer to politics. Every time I thought that I’d found my path, I’d get interested in writing about something different. My website has been like a plane circling the field, waiting to come in for a landing.
Yesterday it hit me. There is a theme. It’s liberation. It’s getting free from tyranny. It’s resisting.
Without awareness or plan, I’ve been pondering the meaning of freedom, how people have lost it, and how we should live in order to recover it.
The first essay that I published here was a reflection on historian Timothy Snyder’s slim volume, Tyranny. Snyder is a historian at Yale University, specializing in Hitler and Stalin’s totalitarian regimes. His urgent point is that the same characteristics of Germany and Russia’s brutal regimes are visible in the Trump administration.
Snyder rushed out this 128 page book weeks after the 2016 presidential election. The book is famous for listing 20 things ordinary people can do to slow down the sweep of totalitarian dictatorship. I read the book hungrily and was surprised that his suggestions reminded me of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. I wrote about that.
That was my first step down what in hindsight has has been a path. In most of what I’ve written about here, I’ve touched on freedom in one way or another. I’m still writing about freedom and resisting creeping oppression. One of my recent efforts tells the story of how Martin Luther King Jr. borrowed from Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount” for his resistance operation.
I’m drawn to resistors like James Baldwin, the brilliant analyst of the oppression of African Americans, or Saul Alinsky, the social agitator who took union organizing to a community-wide level.
Now, given the current political environment, the idea of resistance is a fad. Everybody is a resister. Hillary Clinton has announced that she’s part of the resistance. It’s not easy, having been a Presbyterian minister for 40 years, to admit that I’ve been swept up in the political fashion of the moment. Will my readers think I’m going through a rebellious stage? Is this a new adolescence? Have I demoted myself from preaching the gospel?
As a rule, I think of myself as too independent in my thinking to be swept up in what a lot of other people are doing. I’ve probably spoken with 5 or 6 school teachers, some retired, who tell this story. “I woke up on November 8th last year, realized that Donald Trump was the new president, and decided that I was going to do everything I could to unseat him.”
Is that me? Well, the truth is that I’m worried about the United States being engulfed in tyranny.
Religion
My resistance-fascination goes beyond politics. I’m also curious about religious tyranny. Take the popularity of the Hulu mini-series, “Handmaid’s Tale.” One of that story’s insights about tyranny is that the regime usually wraps itself in religious lingo and invites pliable religious leaders to serve as props in order to claim legitimacy.
Dictators may be able to exploit Christianity in order to strengthen their grip on power when the Church and its message is weak as it is in our generation. People are, and have been, walking out of church for decades. Christian leaders are writing about breaking free of religious oppression. Barbara Brown Taylor’s 2007 book, Leaving Church, was among the first in this genre. Brian Mclaren’s, New Kind of Christian books have worked on this theme for a long time. Diana Butler Bass’s book, Grounded and Rachel Held Evans’ Searching for Sunday both ponder the beauty and truth that can be found in the outside world beyond the stained glass.
These books are the literature of people who are walking out of the Church’s doors, but who don’t wish to give up their commitment to Jesus or their prayer lives.
I’m trying to say something here that I learned a long time ago. This is difficult for people to understand. What I’m saying is that religion and faith in Jesus Christ are different things. The great American philosopher, William James is famous for saying that “people are incurably religious.” Everybody has his or her “ultimate concern.” but Jesus didn’t come to start a new religion. He was God’s initiative to connect with people and restore the planet.
In short, I’m not only concerned about government getting out of hand. And, as a Christian, I’m concerned about the ways that religion can become oppressive.
This craving to break out of something, to disrupt something, has bent my attention towards books, activities, and writing about resistance.
In my months of ruminating about false authority and how to break free from it, I’ve also re-discovered that the Christian life is at its core, a life of resistance. I’m not saying something frivolous. I’m not saying that a person can be politically active and still say grace at meals or that going to Sunday school and marching for more restrictive gun laws are compatible.
I’m saying that the Christian life is basically a rebellion.
Most of the time we think of religion as a way we become good boys and girls. It’s part of cooperating with whoever is in charge. Karl Marx thought that if the workers were less religious they’d be better revolutionaries. “Religion,” he famously said, “is the opium of the people.”
The very word, religion, betrays its basic character. Religion is essentially bondage. Try looking up “religion” in a dictionary that gives word etymologies. You’ll see descriptors like “bond” or “obligation.” To be religious is to be under an authority. Historians have discovered that Bronze Age kings were also the chief theologians of the land. They tended to manipulate the national religion so that it promoted worship of the king and his court. The coins minted in the Roman Empire depicted the various Caesars as gods. The Roman Empire persecuted Christians charging them with being atheists because they wouldn’t burn incense in devotion to statues of the emperor.
The Bible
The Bible, in contrast, calls people to a relationship with God which frees them all tyrants masters, including the tyranny of religion.
A prime example of the Bible’s liberationist nature is the Old Testament’s exodus story, the tale of how God unshackled his people from slavery in Egypt. In keeping with the tendency for tyrants to take on the mantle of religiosity, Egypt’s Pharaoh presented himself as god-like and connected to the divine realm. Egyptian society was organized around him. A careful study of what the Hebrew people were asking of the Pharaoh is illuminating. The Hebrews wanted to take a break from their brick-making tasks, travel into the wilderness, and worship the God of their ancestors. In that seemingly simple request is the heart of biblical faith. It encapsulates leaving servitude in order to meet God in a state of freedom.
The Exodus story tells not only about a large group of people leaving slavery, but also how God gave them a law, or a national constitution, in the wilderness. The Ten Commandments plus Deuteronomy’s elaboration on these laws were an enlightened way of life that extended the release from slavery.
The Bible calls people to a relationship with God which frees them all tyrants masters, including the tyranny of religion.
Accumulating a bunch of laws may sound like chains being fastened back on to people rather than falling off. But a careful look at these regulations reveals the paradox that in following the lifestyle that they outline an Israelite re-enacts the Exodus drama in his or her daily life. Take as an example the first commandment to have no other gods, except Israel’s God. It may sound restrictive at first, but it really frees believers from the kind of tyranny they experienced under the self-designated deity, the Pharaoh.
To summarize, biblical religion is based on a freedom movement and the effort to keep it going.
Jesus’ various directives in his Sermon on the Mount continue the Old Testament’s spirit of liberation. We learn from Jesus that the one who loves the enemy, who doesn’t worry about where the next meal is coming from, who turns the other cheek, is walking away from the behavior patterns demanded by the gods of this world. The tyrant wants his minions to hate his rivals. He wants them to be slavishly dependent on the tyrant’s handouts.
Worship
Even the thousands of worship services that are conducted every Sunday possess at least a whiff of resistance. One might think that going to church is about the most compliant, conformist thing a person can do. But maybe not, as Fuller Seminary President, Mark Labberton has said. Labberton insists that Christian worship possesses a counter-cultural character. When people stop what they’re doing in the middle of the weekend, gather with a group of like-minded believers, declare that Jesus is Lord, they are saying that the consumer culture, the political leaders, social class, money, sex, and power are not lord. There are no other gods. Sunday morning at 11:00 a.m. is a political rally.
The Civil Rights Movement
I think that the liberationist quality of the Christian life came into focus for me as I traced the story of how Howard Thurman brought Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas of non-violence to Martin Luther King Jr’s movement. First of all, Gandhi was not only working with Hindu ideas. He was also a student Henry David Thoreau, and Leo Tolstoy. He studied Civil Disobedience and The Kingdom of God is Within You as he developed as a social reformer.
When Thurman went to India in 1935, Indian separatists criticized his Christian belief. How could a Black man from America adopt the religion of his people’s slave masters? This challenge pushed Howard Thurman to reassess how Christian faith spoke to his own people in Jim Crow America.
The period between the mid-1930’s and the 1949 publication of Jesus and the Disinherited was a time of spiritual gestation for Howard Thurman. In this time he discovered or re-discovered, that Jesus himself lived a hard life. Jesus, however, didn’t let his condition in life draw him into hatred, sneakiness, or fearfulness. Thurman could see in Jesus’ personal behavior a template for the quest of the poor to improve their own condition.
Martin Luther King Jr., 30 years Thurman’s junior, was sufficiently impressed with Thurman’s insights that he carried this little book with him possibly for the rest of his life. The non-violent, non-retaliative character of King’s marches and protests are evidence of the influence of Christian ethics on at least the MLK wing of the Civil Rights Movement.
Social scientist, Rodney Stark has studied the rapid expansion of Christianity from the time of Jesus until the Edict of Milan, which the Roman Emperor, Constantine used to halt the persecution of Christians. Christian faith did not overthrow the Roman Empire. It did drain it of much of its viciousness. Christians were the only ones who stayed in plague-ravaged cities to minister to those too sick to move. Women found social status in Christian communities. Christians worked to alleviate the misery of overcrowded cities. The ferocity of empire was steadily tempered by the growing population of Christ-followers whose value system of humility, chastity, social inclusion, optimism, and preeminently love did battle with the imperial ethos of Roman society.
Following Jesus and doing as he asks is a disruptive way of living.
Following Jesus and doing as he asks is a disruptive way of living.
It tends to draw the ire of the powers that be, much as Jesus quickly attracted the aggression of those in charge in his time.
This essay feels to me like an overview of that the …first light…blog has been about for the last 8 months. Without awareness or plan, I’ve been pondering the meaning of freedom, how people have lost it, and how we live in order to recover it. Christ is at the center of that life.
I’m pretty sure that my fascination with resistance these days is the newest way that I’m being called to discipleship.
