Why Didn't Christianity Fall With Rome?

One of the most interesting and most important facts about the history of western
Europe and the culture it produced is that its imperial faith, Christianity, did not fall with the Roman Empire.  Why not?  It should have.  After all, by the time Rome fell in the fifth century CE Christianity was its official, established religion.  In the ancient world, imperial religions didn’t outlive the empires with which they were associated.  The religious systems of ancient Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Egypt (which was, with minor modifications, the pre-Christian religious system of Rome as well), no longer exist.  Those empires collapsed, were conquered, and disappeared from history.  Their religious systems went with them.  The Roman Empire too collapsed, was conquered, and disappeared from history; but its imperial faith, Christianity, did not.  Why not?

(Before we continue a brief word of clarification.  In the east Orthodox Christianity survived the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1454, but most people in the regions the Muslim Turks conquered became Muslim.  Orthodox Christianity survived mostly (if not exclusively—see Greece) in places like Russia that were never completely conquered by any Muslim power.  Yes, I know.  I do have a PhD in Russian history after all.  Russia went through a period known as the Tatar Yoke, and the Tatars were Muslims; but the Tatars, that is, the Mongols, never occupied and ruled Russia directly the way the Turks conquered and ruled Byzantium.  They never tried to displace Christianity with Islam, so I think my statement stands.  The dynamic in the east is, however, quite different from that in the west if only because the Roman Empire in the east, that is, Byzantium, lasted a full one thousand years longer than the Roman Empire did in the west.  My observations here are limited to the west, to the parts of Europe that became what we call Catholic.  All references to Christianity from here on in this piece refer to Christianity in the Roman west.)

There are, I think, three elements to the answer of the question of why Christianity didn’t fall with Rome.  First, Christianity arose apart from Rome.  The faith predates its adoption as the official religion of empire.  Second, by the time Rome fell Christianity had adopted the political structure of the Roman Empire.  Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Christianity, more so than other ancient imperial religious systems, was a living faith, one that functioned the way religion is supposed to function, that is, to connect people with God. 

Secular historians are probably comfortable with the first two of these three elements to an answer of why Rome fell.  Many Christians, on the other hand, would give an entirely different answer to our question.  They would say that the faith of Jesus Christ survived the fall of Rome because of the work of the Holy Spirit.  They would say that Christianity didn’t die with Rome because God the Holy Spirit determined that the true faith should not die and kept it alive.  That may be a satisfying answer to many Christians, but it not an answer that a real historian can accept.  A real historian cannot accept that answer because it appeals to something beyond this world, something that cannot be seen, described, or captured in scholarly discourse. 

The answer “the Holy Spirit” to the question of why Christianity survived Rome is one with which, on the one hand, I can sympathize.  I am a person of faith.  I believe in the reality of the Holy Spirit, although probably not in exactly the same way as most Christians.  In particular, as I have written elsewhere, I do not believe that God controls events on earth.  Rather, God is present with us in those events but not in a way that amounts to control.  That’s why the faith side of me has a problem with the Holy Spirit answer.

Beyond that, I am not only a person of faith.  I am also a professionally trained historian.  I hold a PhD in history from a secular university—the University of Washington.  (Go Dawgs!  Except against the Ducks of course.)  I haven’t worked much as a professional historian, but I am trained as one; and that training hasn’t gone away just because my work became something else.  So I do not here advance the Holy Spirit answer to our question.  It is not an historian’s answer.  For me it is also a problematic spiritual answer.  So I will put that answer aside and proceed to consider the three elements I have identified as part of the answer to the question of why Christianity didn’t fall with Rome.

Christianity Predates Establishment

Christianity existed before it became the established religion of the Roman Empire.  In fact, as Crossan points out so powerfully every chance he gets these days (and he gets lots of them), in its inception and spread throughout the Empire Christianity was fundamentally anti-imperial.  Its view of the world was different.  Both Rome and Christianity may have had peace as a goal, but their vision of peace and of how to achieve it were radically different.  Beginning with imperial ideology (that had theological elements in it) Rome waged war to achieve victory and thus bring about peace.  Christianity began with a theology, Christians advocated nonviolence as a way to achieve justice that would then lead to peace.  For Rome the emperor was a god or at least a son or descendant of a god.  For Christians that claim was blasphemy and idolatry.  For Christians Jesus was God’s anointed one, God’s Christ (from the Greek) or Messiah (from the Hebrew).  To Rome that claim was utter nonsense.  Christianity laid bare the violence and oppression of empire.  That is what the much misunderstood book of Revelation is about.  Rome reacted the way empire always reacts to threats, with violence, with persecution. 

The point for our purposes is only that Christianity originally did not depend on Rome for its existence.  It arose apart from Rome.  It criticized the political and spiritual dynamics of Rome.  Christianity’s anti-imperial edge was lost when the faith became the official religion of the Roman Empire, but Christianity’s history as an autonomous movement was still real.  The anti-imperial teaching of Jesus and Paul was still there for anyone to see who wanted to and who could look at the New Testament with clear eyes and critical insight.  I don’t think that Christianity’s extra-imperial foundations and its original anti-imperial teachings played a very large role in the survival of Christianity; but those things are facts, and they may have played some part in the faith’s survival.

Christianity Adopted the Structure of Empire

The institutional structure of the Christian church in the west is obviously borrowed from Rome.  The basic political structure of the Roman Empire was the emperor as absolute ruler on top, the Senate as a body that played a role in creating law, that the Emperor could consult, and that could on occasion oppose or even assassinate the emperor, and regional administrators who were responsible not to the people over whom they ruled but to the emperor back at the center of the empire.  The western church had an emperor-like ruler, the Pope, at the top.  It had an advisory body that played a role in the administration of the church, the Curia, which on occasion could and did oppose the Pope.  And it had regional administrators, the bishops, who were responsible not to the people whose spiritual leader they supposedly were but ultimately to the Pope in Rome.  The Roman Catholic Church was an institutional clone of the Roman Empire.  (It still is, by the way.)  When the various tribes from the north attacked, sacked, and conquered Rome they put an end to the Roman Empire as a political entity.  They did not, however, put an end to the Church as a political entity.  The empire fell and disappeared.  The Church stood and remained in place, in Rome and throughout the former Roman Empire. 

That continued autonomous existence of the political structure of Rome in the Roman Catholic Church played a major role in the survival of Christianity after the fall of Rome.  The church may be, in theory at least, a spiritual institution whose concern is faith, but the collapse of Rome created a power vacuum that only the Church could fill.  The Church became the one institution that could provide even a modicum of order amidst the chaos of imperial collapse.  The Church’s institutions, especially the monasteries, became centers of life in what had been the provinces of the Roman Empire.  They provided food and shelter for people in need.  Their priests and monks functioned as local political officials, resolving local disputes for example.  The monasteries preserved the culture of Rome, or at least its Christian parts.  The only literate people in most places were priests and monks, so people came to them with any matter that required literacy.  The church’s local institutions survived, I suspect, precisely because they answered not to the people living in chaos but to their ecclesial superiors in Rome.  They weren’t swallowed up by the chaos and anarchy of most of western Europe after Rome’s collapse.  They had central institutional backing in a way no other institution did.  For all these reasons the Church did not collapse when the Empire did.  The Church’s faith, Christianity, therefore survived the collapse of the empire whose official religion it was.

Christianity Was, and Is, a Living Faith

I am quite sure that the two considerations that I discussed above played roles, minor or major, in the survival of the Christian faith when Rome fell.  Yet I don’t think they provide the entire answer to the question of why Christianity outlived Rome.  After all, the political, economic, and cultural circumstances that made the Church’s institutional copying of the Roman Empire didn’t last forever.  It took a long time, but the so-called Dark Ages gave way new political and economic structures beginning no later than the late eighth century CE and gaining strength by the High Middle Ages of the eleventh through 14^th centuries.  Beyond that, people were perfectly capable of taking the things that the institutional church had to offer without ever holding onto the faith the church professed.  They didn’t.  Yes a great many people who called themselves Christians and who attended church more or less regularly were probably just going through the motions without the faith ever actually connecting them with God, but that is always true.  We know from the growth of the monasteries, for example, that Christianity really was powerfully attractive to many, offering them an alternative to the poverty from which everyone suffered and from the meaningless chaos and violence with which most people lived.  Through many difficult centuries Christianity gave people something permanent, something to hold on to, something that could give them hope in this life or at least beyond this life and that could give their life meaning. 

Christianity was very different from other imperial religions in this regard.  In the mythic system of Babylon creation came from an act of matricide, and people were created not in the image of God but to be the slaves of the gods.  The purpose of worship in ancient Greece and pre-Christian Rome was primarily to placate the gods and keep them out of your life, not to connect with God and get God into your life.  During the Dark Ages a mythic system that gave people no hope, no comfort, no meaning simply wouldn’t have survived.  Christianity did.  It had been doing so from before the Roman Empire fell, and it continued to do so after the Roman Empire fell.  The spiritual power of Christianity is, I believe, a major reason why Christianity survived the fall of its imperial sponsor.

Two of the factors I have identified continue to be powerful forces in the world today.  One of them is an anachronism that we could discard with very little loss.  The other is what makes Christianity alive and vital today despite the literalist straightjacket into which most Christians try to force it.  The political structure of the Roman Catholic Church is the anachronism.  That structure played a major role in the survival of the faith in the fifth century and beyond.  Then people needed that structure.  Today we don’t.  The imperial polity of the Roman Catholic Church today is a great barrier to creativity and spiritual freedom.  It causes the Roman hierarchy to be concerned above all else with the survival of that hierarchy and the monopolistic power that it claims in the lives of the faithful.  The world of the Dark Ages needed the church to have an imperial structure.  The world of the twenty-first century does not.

The same is not true of the spiritual power of Christianity, the other factor we have identified that continues in the world today.  The people of the time of the fall of Rome and the bleak centuries that followed needed the spiritual power of the faith to get them through very difficult times.  So do we.  Our world is very different from theirs, but all people have spiritual needs.  All people need a religion, that is, a system of symbols and myths, that connects them with something beyond themselves and that gives their lives meaning.  Christianity continues to do that for a great many people.  Christians have a bizarre tendency to try over and over again to strangle the faith, to choke all of the life out of it.  The Roman Catholic hierarchy is doing that today.  So is religious literalism or, as I would prefer to call it, factualism, whether in its extreme Fundamentalist form or in the slightly less restrictive form found in all conservative Christian circles.  Yet the spiritual power of Christianity survived the collapse of the faith’s imperial sponsor and the hard times that followed.  It is surviving the attempts to choke it to death that are so widespread today.  I pray that the spiritual power that I know inheres in Christianity will see our sacred faith through this time of institutional and theological barrenness just as it saw people through the cultural, economic, and political barrenness of the Dark Ages.

Yes, But What About Romans 13:1-7?

In the posts on this blog I have taken the position, that I have learned primarily from John Dominic Crossan, that in its origins in Jesus and Paul Christianity is fundamentally anti-imperial and that nonviolence must be the way of the Christian.  Yet there is one passage in Romans that has caused me, and others, to pause some in that conviction.  It is Romans 13:1-7.  That passage reads

    Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.  Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Do you wish to have no fear of the authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive its approval; for it is God's servant for your good. But if you do what is wrong, you should be afraid, for the authority does not bear the sword in vain! It is the servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer.  Therefore one must be subject, not only because of wrath but also because of conscience. For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are God's servants, busy with this very thing.  Pay to all what is due them--taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due.

I recently heard this passage cited as proof that Christians don’t have to follow Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence.  It was on the Bill Maher show, and the speaker was Robert Jeffress, the conservative Baptist pastor who called Mormonism a cult when he was introducing Texas Governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry.  I don’t much like Bill Maher.  He’s one of those atheists who rejects religion because the only religion he knows is bad religion.  Be that as it may, he asked Jeffress a really good question.  He cited some of the passages on nonviolence from the Gospels and asked Jeffress something like how could a Christian support a candidate who approves of the use of violence.  Jeffress answered by citing Romans 13:1-7. 

I once asked Crossan about that passage in a question and answer session after a public lecture he gave.  Crossan began his answer by saying that we have to remember that Paul was capable of saying a lot of nonsense.  True, but that statement doesn’t really address the problem.  My analysis of the passage that follows is at least consistent with the rest of what Crossan said or very close to it. 

We cannot deny that this passage appears in Romans as we presently have it, but when we look closely it is perfectly obvious that Paul did not write these lines.  There are two factors that support this contention, one in the text of Romans itself and one in a larger view of Paul’s life and work.  We begin with the text, where it is pretty clear that these lines are a later insertion into Paul’s letter.  In following this analysis remember that the biblical texts were not written with the chapter and verse numbers that we now use, so the fact that our verses appear as the first verses of a chapter has no significance.

We have to start with Chapter 12.  Romans 12, the short chapter that immediately precedes the verses in question, has Paul giving instruction on the Christian life.  Chapter 12 is the one place in Paul’s writings that suggests he may have been familiar with Jesus’ teachings rather than just with his death and resurrection.  The last verses of Chapter 12, verses 14 to 21, will show us what Paul is doing in that part of the letter.  They are the verses that immediately precede 13:1-7.  They read:

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord." No, "if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads." Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Next come the verses about established authority in Romans 13:1-7.  But now look at the verses that immediately follow Romans 13:1-7, verses 8 to 10:

Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, "You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet"; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, "Love your neighbor as yourself." Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.

The verses of 13:8-10 flow directly from the verses 12:7-21.  Read without the intrusion of 13:1-7, Romans 12:7-21 and 13:8-10 are clearly one piece.  Those verses all deal with the Christian life.  They reflect Jesus’ ethic of love.  Take out 13:1-7 and we read “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.  Owe no one anything, except to love one another.”  It’s coherent.  It flows well.  Verses 13:1-7 interrupt that flow.  They destroy that coherence.  Clearly someone has inserted them into Paul’s letter and not done a very good job of it at that.

The consideration that comes from an examination of the larger scope of Paul’s life and work is that the idea advanced in Romans 13:1-7 is radically inconsistent with everything else we know about Paul.  Paul was anything but submissive to the authorities in the cities in which he established churches.  He was frequently arrested as a threat to public order.  In urging people to worship God in and through Jesus Christ he was urging them to commit sedition, for worshiping the Greco-roman gods and making sacrifice to them was considered essential to the maintenance of public order.  The last we hear of Paul in the New Testament, in the Book of Acts, he is under arrest and being taken to Rome for trial.  The Christian tradition says that he was executed there as a martyr to the faith.  Paul quite clearly did not think that being a Christian meant you had to be “subject to the governing authorities,” at least not in the sense of meekly obeying every law those authorities enacted.

So what are we left with here?  On the one hand we have the clear and unequivocal teaching of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ that nonviolence is the way of God and must be the way of the Christian.  We have Jesus living that teaching even as it led to his unjust execution.  We have the life of St. Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, the man more responsible than anyone else for the spread of the faith of Jesus Christ throughout the Roman Empire, in which he was frequently arrested precisely for not being properly subject to the ruling authorities.  On the other hand we have a few pseudo-Pauline verses that counsel something different. 

So which hand are we to choose?  And how are we to choose?  We have before us here a good example of what a Christian is to do whenever presented with contradictory teachings in the Bible.  We are Christians, and our standard for choosing must be Jesus Christ.  Jesus Christ was so not subject to the governing authorities that those authorities executed him as a threat to public order.  As he was going to that miserable and unjust death he refused to let his followers use violence to defend him.  Romans 13:1-7 simply are not authoritative for us.  They can in no way legitimately be used to counsel Christians to disregard the teaching and the life of Jesus Christ.  They can in no way legitimately be used to contradict Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence.  They are powerless to overcome the much larger anti-imperial thrust of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the teachings and life of the Apostle Paul.

We might ask:  Why then are these verses in Romans as we have it?  I suspect that the answer lies in the political dynamics of the early Christian movement in a time later than the life of Paul.  As Christianity grew, and as it separated from its parent religion Judaism, the Roman authorities, on occasion at least, came to see Christianity as a threat.  There were persecutions.  Sporadic and local persecutions perhaps, but persecutions nonetheless.  Many passages in the New Testament seem to be intended to say to the Romans:  You have nothing to fear from us.  We are no threat to you.  Perhaps the best example other than Romans 13:1-7 itself is the way the Gospels try to shift the responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus from the Romans to the Jews.  Obviously it was the Romans not the Jews who crucified Jesus.  Yes, some of the Jewish authorities, who collaborated with the occupying Romans, probably supported the decision to execute Jesus; but it was the Romans who did it, and they had plenty of reason to do so quite apart from any Jewish religious considerations.  The Gospels pretty clearly are intended to say to the Roman authorities of the last third of the first century “you have nothing to fear from us.”  Romans 13:1-7 fit this dynamic perfectly.  I don’t know for sure, but it seems likely to me that these verses come from the time after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE and are part of a larger effort by early Christian communities to fend off Roman persecution.

So what do we make of Romans 13:1-7?  Nothing.  We have taken them seriously as we must.  They are in the Bible after all, but we have concluded that they are not binding on us.  They are not authoritative for us.  They are no authority for us rejecting Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence.  In the Bill Maher show I saw Maher the atheist was right and Jeffress the Christian was wrong.  So let’s, at long last, be done with Romans 13:1-7.

Can't We Be Done With This Nonsense?

In its edition of October 4, 2011, the weekly newspaper in the town where I serve as a pastor published a paid column with the title "Ask Your Preacher."  A local church, Monroe Valley Church of Christ, paid to have the column run.  The column is a classic example of Christian gay bashing.  It labels all homosexual acts as necessarily sinful.  It claims that sexual orientation, or at least the decision to act on it, is a choice, thereby denying the conclusions of contemporary psychology.  It refers to what it calls the "vileness" of same gender sexual relations and blames all sexually active gay and lesbian people for failing to have the strength of will to resist what it calls a temptation to sin.  When I read this crap I just want to shout:  Really?  Still?  Why do we have to keep fighting this battle?  We know that the gay haters have lost this fight, that their bigotry against God's gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people will go the way of biblically justified racism, the way of well-deserved oblivion.  Yet they keep spewing their hatred, and they keep justifying it in the name of the sacred Christian faith and its foundational scripture.  It's enough to make anyone who truly loves Jesus Christ and understands Jesus' ethic of love weep.

In response to that column I wrote two letters to the editor of the local paper.  One I wrote for my congregation, and more than twenty members of our small church signed it.  I'm sure more would of had they been in attendance this morning, October 9, 2011.  Here is that letter:

Ms. Polly Keary, Editor

The Monroe Monitor & Valley News

125 E. Main St.

Monroe, WA 98272

Re:  “ Ask Your Preacher” column in October 4, 2011 edition         

Dear Ms. Keary:

We, the undersigned pastor and members of Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ, write in response to the hateful column your paper printed under the rubric “Ask Your Preacher” in your edition of October 4, 2011.  As an Open and Affirming congregation that accepts and values all of God’s children, including those of minority sexual orientations and identities, we appreciate your editorial in that edition of the Monitor in which you identify yourself as an ally of gay and lesbian people in their struggle for equality.  However, we cannot let the hurtful vitriol the “Ask Your Preacher” column spews at gay and lesbian people go unanswered, especially since that column is a paid piece put in your paper by people at Valley Church of Christ, a name that creates the possibility that the church sponsoring that column could be confused with us, a congregation of the United Church of Christ.  We too support freedom of speech, but speech made in the name of our sacred Christian faith that is profoundly hurtful to a great many decent people simply must be answered. 

The paid column in question begins with a patently untenable assertion, that no one is born with a homosexual orientation.  That statement perpetuates an ancient understanding of human sexuality and dismisses with a stroke the findings of modern science.  Suffice it to say that the American Psychological Association removed homosexuality from its list of psychological disorders in 1973.  No one who knows and loves gay and lesbian people as we do at our church can believe this unscientific assertion.  Sexuality is an important and God-given part of human nature, and today we understand that human sexuality comes in many different varieties.  The very few references in the Bible to homosexual acts reflect not the word and will of God but ancient cultural and anthropological understandings that have long been superseded by scientific understandings.  Those scientific understandings better reflect human beings as God created them than do the ancient understandings and prejudices that the human authors of the Bible included in their writings.  One need not close one’s mind to new learning in order to be Christian.  At Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ, we don’t.

Beyond that, whether you intended it or not, your raising the standard of love in your column reflects the true Christian understanding of the issue.  Jesus Christ said nothing about homosexuality, but he said a great deal about love.  Jesus rejected the purity code of the book of Leviticus as the standard of faith and replaced it with the standard of love.  The primary biblical condemnation of homosexual behavior appears in that purity code that Jesus rejected.  Perpetuating that purity standard, as the “Ask Your Preacher” column does, is nothing less than a rejection of the teachings of the one we call Lord and Savior. 

At Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ we know that many gay and lesbian people are loving parents and committed partners, beautiful models of family life that many of us who are not gay or lesbian would do well to emulate.  We are pleased and proud to have them as fully accepted members of our congregation.

Sincerely,

Rev. Dr. Thomas C. Sorenson, Pastor

I then wrote a personal letter that says something I didn't say in the letter I wrote for my church.  Here's that letter, which is addressed to Ms. Polly Keary, editor of the local paper as is the first letter:

Dear Ms. Keary:

As pastor of Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ I have written a response to the appearance in the Monitor last week of the hate-filled paid column of Monroe Valley Church of Christ.  Many members of my congregation have signed that letter along with me.  I will deliver it to your office tomorrow morning, Monday, October 10.  However, I feel compelled to say a bit more in my personal capacity than I said in that letter.

I very much appreciate the editorial you published in which you distanced yourself from the hatred of gay and lesbian people expressed in the "Ask Your Preacher" column.  You say in that editorial that you published the letter because of a commitment to freedom of speech.  I too am committed to freedom of speech, but freedom of speech in this country has never been completely without limits.  Is hate speech that has the potential to incite violence, as the "Ask Your Preacher" column in question undeniably does, protected by a commitment to free speech?  I can't help but ask:  If the paid column had attacked Black people, saying that their skin color showed that they were cursed and claiming some biblical justification for that attack as many Christians did for many centuries, would you have published it?  I doubt it.  As much as I appreciate your editorial, I wish you had recognized this column as the dangerous hate speech that it is and refused to publish it.

Sincerely,

Rev. Dr. Thomas C. Sorenson

And I just want to cry:  At long last can't we be done with the gay bashing masquerading as Christian faith?  Let it be, Lord.  Let it be.

Occupy!

In my latest post "How Can We Keep Going" I asked:  "Why aren't we out in the streets in our tens of millions demanding some sanity?"  Well, we still aren't out in the streets in our tens of millions, but some of our fellow citizens are out in the streets in their thousands demanding some sanity.  The "Occupy" movement started on Wall Street, the symbolic home of our corrupt and broken financial system that benefits only the wealthy and is driving tens of millions of the rest of us into poverty and homelessness.  The movement has spread to virtually every major city in the country, including Seattle, the large city near my home in Washington state.  The ruling powers are reacting as they always react.  In New York and other cities peaceful protesters are being arrested by the hundreds for minor breaches of minor laws, like marching without a permit.  So far the reaction by the powers is mostly (if not completely) nonviolent; but we know that those ruling forces have no reservations about resorting to violence if they think they need to do so to preserve their hold on power.  If you doubt that just remember Selma, Alabama, and Chicago, Illinois, in the 1960s.  We can be pretty sure that the police will use as much violence as is necessary to stop the protests.  We can be absolutely sure that the corporate media will do everything they can to minimize the Occupy movement and denigrate its participants, as Fox News, that most obvious hand puppet of corporate power, is already doing.

Some commentators are drawing parallels between the new Occupy movement and the somewhat older Tea Party movement, and there are indeed similarities.  Both of them are movements of people who are fed up with the status quo.  They are movements of people who quite rightly perceive that they are losing all voice in the governing of their nation.  The participants in these popular movements see their country changing in ways they reject, and they see no hope of the established political parties addressing their needs in meaningful ways.  The two movements have that much in common.  The difference between them lies mostly in the way they identify who their enemy is.

For the Tea Party the enemy is big government.  Those folks perceive big government intruding on their freedoms and failing to remedy the economic problems from which so many of them are suffering.  Unfortunately, they also see cultural changes that they can't accept--a Black president, gay rights, and so on.  Because, among other things about the government they don't like, they can't accept a Black president, and because in some places at least the government is trying to stop them from discriminating against people they don't like, they identify government as the problem.  The Occupy movement on the other hand identifies Wall Street as the problem.  That is, they have focused on a symbol of the way the economic and political structures of our country have come to operate for the benefit of the wealthiest one or two percent of us as the target of their protests.  These people see the financial system and the power of the very wealthy that it functions to perpetuate and even expand as the problem.

There simply is no doubt which of these two popular movements has correctly identified the cause of the social, economic, and political problems we face in this country today.  Government is not the problem.  Indeed, if it were ever to function as in theory it should, the government could be the one institution in the country large enough and powerful enough to bring about some economic equality and thus a decent standard of life for all Americans.  The government is the one institution that has the potential to create a social safety net adequate to protect vulnerable Americans and see that all have shelter, food, and decent health care.  The government is the one institution with the power to protect the environment from the ravages of the greedy.  The government is the one institution with the power to enforce equality and provide a legal sanction against discrimination.  One of the major flaws in the Tea Party movement (apart form its radical social conservatism and even racism) is that it has misidentified the enemy.

The Occupy movement, whatever its failings and shortcomings may be, has at least the virtue of having properly identified the enemy.  Of having properly identified the root cause of most of the problems in our country today.  The enemy is greed.  The root cause of most of the problems in our country today is the corrupting influence of money in our political system, money that buys politicians of both major parties and prevents the passage of any meaningful legislation to benefit the people rather than the wealthy.  That much at least the Occupy movement has gotten right.

So let us stand with the Occupy protesters.  Let us pray that their protests remain nonviolent, for violence is always immoral and would only play into the hands of the powers that seek to discredit the movement.  The Occupy movement isn't big enough yet to force the politicians to pay attention.  Its specific demands and policy positions, if it has any, are unclear.  Still, maybe it's a beginning.  Maybe it is the beginning of the American people finally waking up to the real nature of the problems in our country.  We can at least pray that it is.

How Can We Keep Going?

I am beginning to wonder how we can possibly keep going in this world.  Whether anything is worth it.  Whether it makes any sense to care anymore.  Watching a Simon and Garfunkle special on PBS recently reminded me of how messed up the world was back in the 1960s, the decade in which I came of age.  It really was.  The insanity of Vietnam.  The insanity of racial discrimination.  So many other insanities.  Opposition to the movement for the rights of migrant workers.  Opposition to the rights of women.  Old white men in Washington making insane decisions and a majority of American voters electing the deeply flawed Richard Nixon president in a year we remember as the epitome of the Sixties, the decade that was supposed to change everything.  Change everything?  Hardly.  We young people wanted to change the world, but the country elected Richard Nixon.  We should have known then that change wasn't going to happen.  It took a lot longer than that for us to figure it out.

And today?  Not significantly better.  An insane war in Afghanistan and nearly a billion dollars spent to build a fortress that masquerades as an embassy in Baghdad, a city we have supposedly liberated and pacified.  Or at least that's what they tell us our illegal war of aggression against Iraq accomplished.  Mad politicians on the right lying to the people by telling them government is their enemy when in fact the wealthy individuals and corporations that fund those politicians’ campaigns are the people’s real enemies.  Mad politicians that the corporate media treat as legitimate alternatives for the American voter denying the science of global warming, denying the equal rights of gay and lesbian people, denying the rights of women to make decisions about their own bodies.  Major politicians on the right denying the science of evolution because of an utterly untenable biblical literalism.  And the Democrats?  Not significantly better.  A president who promised change but who is so timid and/or so naïve that he thinks he can get cooperation out of congressional Republicans who only want to destroy him.  Who pursues military policies that are indistinguishable from those of the war criminal George W. Bush.  After all, he retained Bush’s Secretary of Defense.  We should have known. 

One out of six Americans living in poverty—and that with an artificially low definition of poverty adopted to keep the statistics from looking as bad as things really are.  Unemployment actually so much worse than the official statistics indicate.  The social safety net, such as it ever was, being shredded so that rich people don’t have to pay anything close to a fair share of the cost maintaining a decent society.  A governor who is running for President claiming a job creation miracle in his state when the truth is that almost all of the jobs he talks about don’t pay a living wage and much of what was accomplished was done with federal stimulus dollars that this governor says should never have been spent and never will be spent again if he has anything to say about it. (And that same governor saying with a straight face that he will always be for life when as of this writing he has presided over 234 executions during his time as governor.)

Churches endorsing American militarism.  No politician of any note who is even raising a question about why we spend nearly as much on the military as the rest of the world combined.  An increasing militarization of American life.  A culture that calls everyone who wears an American military uniform a hero just because he or she wears that uniform, thereby making it all the more difficult to question the way the powers use the military.  Violent popular entertainment in the movies and video games that makes violence seem normative and redemptive.  A culture in which the one sure thing a president can do to drive up his favorability ratings is to go to war.  A culture in which even supposedly progressive Christian declarations like the Phoenix Affirmations, the 8 Points of the Center for Progressive Christianity, and my own denomination’s declaration on being a “just peace church” that refuse to claim nonviolence as a core value.

Then there’s the environmental degradation to which we all contribute.  And the politicians who oppose meaningful environmental regulation because it might cost their wealthy patrons at whose beck and call they serve some money.  They lie to the people saying that environmental regulation will cost jobs, and even our Democratic President gives in.  And all the while the truth is that there is great potential for job creation and economic renewal in creating and building the technologies of environmental cleanup and clean energy.

And so much more madness.  So much every day that you can’t even keep track of it.  So much that it overwhelms.  So much that sometimes I cry out Why aren’t we out in the streets in our tens of millions demanding some sanity?  But I’m not out in the street demanding some sanity, so who am I to blame others?  It seems impossible not to feel hopeless.  Not to feel that there is truly nothing that can be done.  The money is too strong.  The anti-intellecttualism and political ignorance and naiveté of the American people are too strong.

Yes, there are some voices of reason and decency.  Bernie Sanders.  Jim Hightower.  Keith Olbermann.  Thom Hartmann.  Bill Moyers.  Walter Wink.  John Dominic Crossan.  You may know of others.  Some people speak the truth, but not many.  Not enough, but some.  Most of the time they’re whistling into the wind.  Few hear.  Fewer listen.  Perhaps their true significance is that when history looks back on these times they will see that not everyone was mad.  Some saw clearly.  Not many, but some.
And yes, some things have gotten better.  Racial discrimination is now illegal everywhere in our country, although of course that doesn't mean it is no longer part of our reality.  Many people are more environmentally aware than we used to be.  Some states, not many but a few, recognize the equal rights and dignity of same gender couples by allowing them to marry, and more states have included sexual orientation and perhaps even gender identity in their anti-discrimination laws.  Some things have gotten better, but not enough things have gotten enough better to counter all of the glaring shortcomings in our reality today.

Yes, I know that the picture of American reality today that I paint is bleak.  It’s discouraging.  It’s even depressing.  I don’t see, however, how anyone can demonstrate that anything I have said about our current reality is untrue.  There’s a saying that’s been going around for years.  I’ve seen it on bumper stickers and elsewhere.  It’s become a bit trite, but it’s still true.  "If you aren’t completely appalled you haven’t been paying attention."  Our current reality simply is that bleak.

And it is so hard to keep going.  It is so hard to keep preaching the Gospel.  It is so hard to keep putting up blog posts that so few people read.  To write another book when so pitifully few have read the first one.  It all seems so pointless.  Some days I am tempted to stop paying attention, to retreat into a little world of work, family, and personal acquaintances.  Sometimes I get why the followers of monastic spiritual paths withdraw from the world.  Sometimes I get it why people in the Soviet Union, with which I have considerable familiarity, considered matters of state to be none of their business since they had no way to influence them.  Sometimes I try to be satisfied going small, caring only about those who cross my path in life immediately, in person. 

I try to be satisfied with small concerns, but so far I haven’t managed it.  You see, there’s a problem with narrowing the realm of our concern to those in our immediate sphere.  The problem is God.  The problem is God, and God can be very annoying because God won’t let us give up on the world, as messed up as it is and as hopeless as it seems.  God has this crazy idea that we’re all prophets.  Moses said “would that all of God’s people were prophets.”  Bruce Chilton tells us that the Hebrew original that is translated that way actually means that all of God’s people are prophets.  At the very least we have to admit that God calls all of us to be prophets.

OK, we’re all called to be prophets; but what is a prophet?  The word prophet is so often taken to mean someone who can foretell the future.  That, however, is not what prophet means in the Bible.  Yes, the prophets of ancient Israel talked about what would happen if the rulers of the Hebrew kingdoms of their time didn’t hear and heed the word of God; but predicting the future wasn’t what they were primarily about.  What they were primarily about was proclaiming that word of God and demanding that the rulers of their time hear and heed it.  Mostly what the prophets of ancient Israel did was demand justice from the rulers, demand that the ruling elites of their societies treat the poor and the marginalized justly.  Demand that those with the means to do so take care of those who are in need.  Their usual way of putting it was to demand justice for the widow, the orphan, and the alien in their midst.  Those were the most vulnerable people in those societies, and they were the ones for whom the prophets demanded justice.

Jesus was a prophet.  Mostly what he was about as an historical matter was reviving the ancient Hebrew prophetic tradition that had gotten displaced by the Pharisees’ focus on purity and sacrificial worship as the way of faith.  He too demanded justice, meaning by justice what the ancient prophets had meant.  Not due process.  Not that all get what they deserve in the eyes of the world.  Rather, that everyone receive enough to live on.  That everyone be treated as a beloved child of God.  To that ancient Hebrew prophetic message Jesus added a call to radical nonviolence.  To the love of enemies.  To active, creative, assertive but always nonviolent resistance to evil. 

God calls us all to be prophets, and the prophetic message that God calls us to proclaim is the prophetic message of Jesus.  Not to proclaim that Jesus is some sort of magic get out of jail free card with regard to sin, although there is a sense in which he is that.  That message is not, however, what Jesus proclaimed, the Gospel of John seemingly at least to the contrary notwithstanding.  He proclaimed the Kingdom of God.  That was the phrase he used to sum up the prophetic message he came to deliver.  There are many aspects of the Kingdom, but chief among them are distributive justice and nonviolence.  Those things God calls us to proclaim just as Jesus did.

And we’d so much rather not.  It seems so pointless.  The message seems to have so little effect in the world.  It’s so hard to find ways to speak that can reach anyone.  Beyond that, being a prophet is dangerous.  Jesus called Jerusalem the city that kills the prophets, and it’s not just Jerusalem.  It’s the world, all of it.  Even when the world doesn’t kill a prophet it can turn on the prophet with a vengeance.  Certainly it is true in our country that nothing will get you in trouble faster than speaking the truth.  In my line of work we hear time and time again of pastors who lost their pulpits because they spoke the truth about justice and peace more than their congregations could stand.  No politician can speak the truth about how America acts in the world or about the gross inadequacy of our social security programs and have much of a hope of reelection.  No politician can call on voters to be more concerned with what is good for the poor than with what is good for themselves and have much of a hope of reelection.  Being a prophet seems mostly like a really good way to become very unpopular at best and dead at worst.  In my line of work it can be a really good way to get yourself fired.

We want to do what the biblical prophets so often did when they discerned a call from God.  We want to say no.  We want to board a ship for Tarshish as we flee a call to go to Nineveh, that great city.  But when we do we’ve got the same problem Jonah had.  We’ve got God, and God doesn’t give up as easily as we do.  Jonah ended up on a beach in a pool of whale vomit.  That’s unlikely to happen to us, at least not literally.  Still, we know what God wants.  God wants us to go to Nineveh.  God wants us to be prophets, and God isn’t going to stop calling us to be prophets.

So what are we to do?  Is there in all of these considerations an answer to the question the title of this essay poses, the question of how we can keep going?  I think that there is, although it’s not an easy answer.  The answer is that for all of our call to be prophets it isn’t up to us to transform the world.  At least, it isn’t up to us to transform the world all by ourselves.  A prophet realizes that God calls us to the work of transformation, but the prophet also knows that the world belongs to God not to us.  Our call is to work, yes; but we do not work alone.  We are God’s partners in the work of transformation, and that partnership makes all the difference.  It makes all the difference because we can work while leaving outcomes to God, something that can substantially reduce our stress and frustration..  It makes all the difference because when we feel hopeless, when we feel helpless, when we start to burn out we can turn to God in prayer and worship and find renewal.  We can find strength.  We can find hope in God when we can find none in the world.  So how can we keep going?  The answer is the same as the problem we have when we want to quit.  The problem is God, and the answer is God.  That’s how we can keep going.  It’s the only possible answer.  There is no answer to be found in the world, except to the extent that we can find God in the world.  God is the answer.  God is how we can keep going.

On the Legal System and Capital Punishment

Yesterday I posted an essay on Christianity and capital punishment.  That post is written from my perspective as a Christian, indeed as a professional Christian, one trained and ordained in the Christian ministry.  But for many years before I became an ordained Christian pastor I was a lawyer.  I didn't practice criminal law, but I tried many civil cases and experienced the workings of the American judicial system from the inside in the context of personal injury and professional liability cases.  I certainly don't have as much experience trying cases to juries as many lawyers do, but I have a lot of such experience.  Putting aside for the moment, and for purposes of argument only, the foundational moral objection to capital punishment that I expressed in yesterday's post, today I want to explain how I do not see how anyone with any experience at all with the American legal system can support capital punishment.  I do not see how anyone with any experience at all with the American legal system can support capital punishment because the undeniable truth is that courts get it wrong.

Two fundamental truths about the legal system lead to the conclusion that courts get it wrong and cannot guarantee infallible results.  The first is that in a trial the court's primary concern is not with a proper outcome, that is, not with a verdict that accurately reflects what actually happened in the matter before the court.  The court's concern is with the proper functioning of the system, not with the result.  The legal system defines justice not as a result that reflects what actually happened but as a result, whatever it may be, arrived at through the proper functioning of the legal system.  In the legal system justice isn't about guilt or innocence.  It is about due process.  The court's concern is that the procedures established for the conduct of cases be correctly understood and applied.  The court's concern is that the parties, in a criminal case the defendant in particular, receive due process.  Due process doesn't mean that any particular result be reached.  It means that the defendants right established by law are respected.  It means that the law is properly interpreted and applied.  This concern once lead some of the conservative justices on the US Supreme Court to say that factual innocence is not a reason to grant habeas corpus relief to a defendant sentenced to death.  Some justices said that the execution of an innocent person is a constitutionally unacceptable result, but the statement by the conservatives that the court's concern is not innocence or guilt but the proper working of the system reflects, albeit perhaps in extreme form, a fundamental truth about our legal system.  In that system justice is not primarily about factual truth.  It is about process.  Thus, it is quite possible for the system to accept the execution of an innocent person, as the system in Georgia may have done last night.  It's concern is not primarily guilt or innocence in any objective sense.  It is the proper functioning of the system.  The legal system in fact defines justice as the proper working of the system.

The second truth about the legal system that results in results that are simply wrong is that juries get it wrong.  They don't always get it wrong.  They may not get it wrong most of the time, but they get it wrong often enough.  I was once told by a very experienced trial lawyer that you can't call yourself a real trial lawyer until you've won a case you should have lost and lost a case you should have won.  Anyone who has tried more than a handful of cases has had that experience of winning cases that should have been lost and losing cases that should have been won.  I certainly have, especially perhaps in my case the experience of losing cases I should have won.  Juries get it wrong.  They misunderstand the evidence.  They misunderstand the law that the judge gives them.  They are swayed by emotional arguments.  They are swayed by passion and prejudice.  This is not particularly to condemn the citizens who serve on juries or to say that they are flawed human beings.  It is only to say that they are human beings.  They are human beings who are trained neither in the law nor in the psychological dynamics at work whenever another human being gives testimony in court.  I often had the sense that jurors--and sometimes judges and attorneys for that matter--check their common sense at the courthouse door.  The atmosphere of a trial is so artificial and so foreign to most jurors that it is easy to start thinking and evaluating people and facts in ways that are different from the way we think and evaluate matters in everyday life.  For all of these reasons, and I suppose for many others besides, jurors get it wrong.  I am convinced that any trial lawyer who claims that juries always get it right is simply deluding herself.

In the kinds of cases I tried the court's lack of concern with determining what actually happened in a case and the juries getting it wrong had no truly catastrophic consequences.  Most of those cases were only about money, and none of them was about life and death.  Perhaps a defendant had to pay money he shouldn't have had to pay; but in most of my cases that meant an insurance company had to pay, so the result was hardly disastrous.  Maybe an injured person didn't get money she was entitled to, but still we're only talking about money.  We were never talking about a person losing his or her life.

In capital cases of course we are talking precisely about a person losing his or her life.  In that context the fact that juries get it wrong even when all of the proper legal procedures are followed is simply intolerable.  An execution can't be undone.  No one other than perhaps a conservative judicial extremist like the conservatives on the US Supreme Court, can accept the execution of an innocent person even if they can accept the execution of an guilty one.  Our legal system, no legal system, can guarantee that it's results are always correct.  I therefore fail to see how our legal system, how any legal system, can tolerate capital punishment.

Most Americans say murderers should be executed, but most Americans are unaware of the difficulties and uncertainties involved in every case of trying to determine if a defendant is truly a murderer or not.  They are unaware of the nature of the legal system and its concern with process over substance.  Those of us who have worked in the legal system, even if we've never come close to a capital case, know what the public does not know.  In the legal system there simply is no absolute safeguard against wrong results.

There's a famous story about how new law school students so often come to law school saying they are going to go out into the world and work for justice and how some crusty old law professor will say to them:  This is a law school.  If you want justice, go to seminary!  Some of us did.  That crusty old professor's statement may be a bit extreme, but it is not fundamentally untrue.  The legal system is a human institution, and as such it simply cannot promise just, infallible results.  For that reason alone, even if for no other, we simply must stop executing people.

On Christianity and Capital Punishment

There has been a lot of new lately about executions in the United States.  I can't read that news without getting sick to my stomach.  The death penalty is murder by the state.  Capital punishment is morally indefensible.  Period.  I fail to see how any Christian can support it.  The one we call Lord and Savior was executed by the state authorities of his time.  He taught us the way of nonviolence.  He wouldn't even let his followers use violence to prevent his own unjust execution.  He said love your enemies and turn the other cheek, which at the very least means do not repay violence with violence.  Matthew 5:38-39  His great Apostle Paul said do not repay anyone evil for evil and never avenge yourselves.  Romans 12:17, 19  Christianity came to accept capital punishment only after it became the established religion of the Roman Empire.  Accepting capital punishment is one of the many ways in which our faith abandoned its core principles in order to accommodate itself to empire and become powerful in the world.  That our faith accepted capital punishment is something of which we must repent.

So much of the discussion around capital punishment in our country misses the point.  We hear much talk about whether or not a particular prisoner is guilty.  For the Christian it doesn't matter.  Guilty or not every condemned person is a child of God.  That's all that matters.  We hear a lot of talk about the effect of race in capital sentencing.  The statistics prove that our juries are much more likely to condemn a Black man to death than a white one, but that's irrelevant.  Black or white, all people are children of God.  That's all that matters.  We hear a lot of talk about whether it is more expensive to keep a person alive in prison for many years than to execute him.  That's irrelevant.  How can a matter of mere money ever be a consideration in whether or not it is moral to kill someone?  We hear a lot about the deterrent effect of capital punishment.  The statistics prove that it has none, but that's irrelevant.  Every condemned person is a child of God and cannot morally be used as a tool to influence the behavior of others.

There is only one point that is relevant in any discussion of capital punishment.  It's murder.  It's the killing of a human being.  It is the killing of a child of God.  Whatever the victim of our state murder may have done, he or she is still a child of God.  Killing is still wrong.  Killing can never justify more killing.  Capital punishment is immoral.  Capital punishment is a sin committed by the society that sanctions it and the people who carry it out.  All of those other considerations that get discussed at such length in the little public debate that takes place over capital punishment in our country may be helpful in convincing people who don't oppose all capital punishment on moral grounds to oppose it on other grounds, but all of those considerations are morally irrelevant.  The only thing that's relevant is that capital punishment is murder.  It is immoral.  Period.

Every other supposedly advanced country in the world gets it about capital punishment.  We claim to be the most Christian of nations, and we don't get it.  Our commitment to state murder belies our claim to be Christian.  Capital punishment betrays Christ, the most famous victim of capital punishment.  I fail to see how any Christian can support capital punishment.  May Jesus Christ forgive us that we just don't understand.