Almost speechless October 4, 2007
Posted by Zack in Georgia , trackback
It’s too much! What I’m seeing here is just too much to describe.
This stadium is full of eleven thousand mostly white suburban, Republican evangelical Christian pastors and church leaders. And here’s a little bit of what they’ve come from all over the country to hear:
… We’re to vote for the poor, we’re to vote for the peacemakers, we’re to vote for Jesus. …
And here are those eleven thousand “confessing” aloud sins of war, judgment and greed at the close of Shane Claiborne’s sermon/talk, as he led them in a “Litany if Resistance”:
Please listen to the clip. But here’s a little bit of it transcribed:
With governments that kill…
…we will not comply.With the theology of empire…
…we will not comply.With the business of militarism…
…we will not comply.With the hoarding of riches
…we will not comply.With the dissemination of fear
…we will not comply.But today we pledge our allegiance to the kingdom of God…
…we pledge allegiance.To the peace that is not like Rome’s…
…we pledge allegiance.To the Gospel of enemy love
…we pledge allegiance.To the poor and the broken…
…we pledge allegiance.
The sound clip is just the tail end of a long incredible litany that Shane wrote with friends Jim Loney and Brian Walsh (who we interviewed in our first real post on this blog—I’m trying to get a full copy of the text from him).
Above is a picture of the stadium as it recited the litany. The words were projected up on the screen. The words on the screen in the shot below were: From the idolatry of nationalism, deliver us.
Tag: Catalyst conference
Comments»
zack,
i just wanted to thank you so much for doing this blog. having grown up in the evangelical movement (and since left it for the progressive movement), i’ve long wanted progressives to learn from what they’ve accomplished. and you’re making that happen.
Please tell me how the litany from which you transcribed correlates with this crowd being political Republicans. Whatever Jesus might have done, or would do, I have a difficult time believing that he would countenance the sorts of corrupt and contemptible behaviours that have been justified by those who have held political power over the past half dozen years. Besides, whatever happened to, “If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”
Beautiful stuff. Glad to hear it.
Good to read, but also keep in mind that for them it’s their idea of God and Jesus first, country second. Not too bad in citizenry, but in public officials and the military it’s downright frightening.
A former Air Force officer talked to Salon awhile ago about the growing problem of evangelicals in the military: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/12/13/weinstein/index_np.html
Mark: I don’t mean to speak for the author, but I figured I’d try to answer your question. The reason he seemed to be pointing out the large number of Republicans attending this conference is because that party DOES have a history of “corrupt and contemptible behaviors” as you put it. That’s what makes this such a big deal. They’re being pushed to re-evaluate that history. And from what’s being reported here, they are listening. That IS groundbreaking.
Full Disclosure: I’m a recovering evangelical myself. I’m personally aware of what he’s describing here.
Zack, thanks for sharing this story. Its wonderful to see this step in a gradual transformation among mainstream evangelicals.
You say Jim “Ronney” helped write this litany. I think you may mean Jim Loney, a member of Christian Peacemaker Teams, who wrote the Litany of Resistance in 1991 during the first Gulf War. The we will not comply section that Shane used is definitely borrowed from the sixth section of that piece.
The Litany of Resistance is well worth reading in its entirity. For many years now Its been widely used among Christian peace and justice activists involved in peacemaking work and direct action. It’s great to see parts of it working their way into broader Christian consciousness.
Revolution in Jesusland ยป Almost speechless
Zack Exley is doing an amazing blog digging into the story, success, challenges and religion behind progressive Christian movement. He is digging into the themes and organizing inspiring crowds of people to see the progressive side of theology. It is
I’m an evangelical who is heart-progressive but politically is more conservative than most of the crowd here.
I want to approach what you folks say with an open mind and with receptiveness to God. If my voting should change on the basis of my faith, it is my responsibility to settle that before the next election!
So, will you (without rancor) give me your best arguments, please?
I ask you, because in my (sometimes fitful and shallow) spiritual experience, one of God’s favorite responses to a question asked in prayer has been, “I already TOLD you about that, in Scripture, or life experience, or through the mouths of people you weren’t listening to at the time. So go back and REVIEW.”
So tell me: Why would a devout Christian prefer to vote for political progressives over political conservatives?
I can’t find a reason.
True, political progressives talk about helping the poor, and it sounds like what Christians do (or ought to do).
But what Christians do (or ought to) is help the poor voluntarily, out of their personal belongings and time. What Christians are forbidden to do is: hire armed men to take, by force, their neighbor’s money, and give it to the poor, and call it “charity.” (Whether or not the armed men in question are called “the IRS.”)
This is what politically progressive elected officials support. It’s not Jesus’ way. Jesus was all about heart-change, and generosity and morality was to be the result of a change in a person’s heart. When a person’s heart did not change, Jesus did not resort to force to make them “do the right thing anyway.”
This, I’m sure, meant that some poor people went hungry when those Jesus instructed to feed the poor refused. In a sense, you could blame Jesus for their hunger since he neglected to hold the sword over folks’ heads and say, “No, you WILL be generous, and chaste, and honest…or else!” But that’s not his way.
And I don’t think it should be mine, either. I’ll continue at the soup kitchen, and through tithes and charitable giving, to do my bit. But I won’t rob my wealthy (greedy? how can I know?) neighbor. It’s a short-cut. But it’s not my master’s style, y’know?
But maybe I’m wrong. Give me an argument to consider.
[…] Claiborne spoke about the importance of voting for the poor in next year’s election, but the made the important point (whether you’re old enough to vote or not): “We vote […]
Zack - thanks for your work in gathering and telling these stories. This is so inspiring. I look forward to talking to you in person about your travels soon…
I’d like to try to respond to R.C.’s question in post no. 8. Your concern, if I understood it correctly, about progressive politics (or progressive taxation at least) is that it is collective charity rather than individual charity, thus taking away moral choice from the individual.
I agree that this is a danger.
However, it is only the danger on one side - on the side of being too collective. There is also a danger on the other side - of being too individualist. Charity is over-individualist if it sees the effectiveness of charitable action as less important than the warm glow or righteous feeling it gives to the individual practicing it.
So the question is important: is progressive taxation necessary to genuinely bring about equality of opportunity. The answer from history would seem to be ‘yes’. The rich-friendly tax policies brought in by Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK reversed a 100-year trend in increasing equality of wealth in society. Since then, both societies have become increasingly polarised, divided and unequal. Individual charity in both countries has remained high, but completely inadequate to address the true extent of poverty. If we practice individual charity but vote for political parties which make the poor poorer, we run the risk of practicing a very selfish kind of charity where the poor could be seen to be there for the convenience of those with the resources to be charitable.
This might seem like an ‘end justifies the means’ kind of argument, such as Christians should have nothing to do with, so let me add one more point. To do nothing in the tug-of-war between the poor and the rich is not to be neutral: it is to side with the rich. There are lots of forces in society which transfer money between people and most of them transfer it from the poor to the rich. Taxation is meant to be the collective action of decent people to transfer some of it back. I do not recall Jesus ever advocating that we live by the law of the jungle.