There is something in particular that I appreciate about this (overall pretty good) Episcopalian Bishops’ statement about protest and policing:

1/x thread https://episcopalchurch.org/posts/publicaffairs/episcopal-church-house-bishops-july-2020-word-protest-and-federal-policing?fbclid=IwAR2p6lYgLm0evNv-a_Z8SnMmQPVeibj3ecqlXaSNpLnT9jMPDqc3w5HbN3s

It is this bit:

We Episcopalians stand in a creative tension with regard to civil authority. We are the inheritors of an established church tradition and so it is our longstanding custom to honor legitimate government. At the same time, +

we follow One who challenged the civil authority of his own day.”

They own their positionality and perspective in a way that I think is really important. I sometimes see progressive Christians take this line about how Jesus was against Empire and so we have to be +

(Or maybe: Christianity is at its core inherently) against Empire that eludes the last 1500 years of actual reality, the many places where Christianity has been part of empire, (the harm it has sometimes caused because of this), and the privileged status it has here in the US.

This statement doesn’t necessarily unpack all of that, and I don’t think it needs to, but it acknowledges that Christianity is sometimes part of/connected to ruling authority as well as claiming the ways in which Jesus was anti-authoriarian. They name that it is both.

I think this can be a useful model for other progressive Christians viz owning both faces of their relationship to power. When Christians try to downplay or deny the facts of the last 1500 years it feels somewhere between disingenuous and gaslighting to me, as a Jew.

There is lots that is awesome about Christianity. I’ve talked before about how formative Merton and Dr. King and some of the medieval mystics have been on my thinking, as well as my many real-life Christian peeps, who are my compatriots in all the best ways.

But there is also the unalterable truth about Christianity and power, and state power, and what that has meant, and imho that needs to be named too. How these bishops did it is one good way.

Ok but can we talk about the ways in which indigenous populations under the Roman Empire were forcibly christianized? And all the ways in which these so-called fragile rulers expelled, massacred, persecuted Jews? This is what I’m talking about.

https://twitter.com/justinglynsj/status/1293648905607946240?s=21 https://twitter.com/justinglynsj/status/1293648905607946240

NB this is all connected to why I get so frustrated when I hear progressive Christians refer to members of the Religious Right or etc as “fake Christians” or “not really Christian.” I know you mean that these actions go against what you understand Jesus’ message to be, but +

If you go by the last 1500 years of Christianity, a lot of these folks are right out of the what-Christianity-is playbook. There’s a lotta power and coercion and hurting outsiders in Christian history, by agents of Christianity. I know what you MEAN when you say that, +

I too feel frustrated or angry when I see Jews interpreting my holy texts in ways that I believe belie the Torah’s intent, that I believe are desecrations of the Divine name, but pretending they’re not finding justification in other readings of our texts helps nobody.

When Christians call other Christians “not real Christians” I just hear that you’re not going to take responsibility for your tradition’s historical harms or your privilege in this country today. Which harms religious minorities here (and isn’t great for those of us whose +

Ancestors suffered greatly because of persecution by Christians.)