I was raised in a Protestant Christian home.  But saying only that much reveals little.  There are all kinds of Protestants.  Not all of them consider the others real Christians.  The kind of Protestant Christian home I was raised in was a fundamentalist one.  We thought that we alone were the true believers.  

We took the Bible literally (or, we were told we did; we were taught that we did).  How literal?   Adam and Eve were real people, the Flood flooded the entire world, Jonah was really swallowed by a whale, and so on.  We were told that the liberals (mainline Protestants) who took these stories metaphorically were not genuine Christians.  

Neither were Catholics.  Their veneration of saints and Mary made them nearly, if not entirely, idolaters.  We were, after all, the descendants of the 16th-century Reformation in which people like Martin Luther were happy to identify the Pope as an anti-Christ.  As a child, I had a Catholic friend, but I was not allowed to go to church with him.  They were not real Christians.  

I moved on from that perspective a long time ago, but I still remember it.  Our world of true Christians was a small one.  Heaven was going to be a lightly populated place.  

The question is, who gets to define who a real Christian is and who is not?  

When you hear people speak of American Christian nationalism today, it may sound like a big tent movement supporting a broad Christian consensus, tolerant of a variety of views within Christianity, and of non-Christian monotheistic religions like Jews and Muslims (of the non-radical sort).  

That would be a mistake.  Recently, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense (or of War, as he would have it), has invited his spiritual mentor, and avowed Christian nationalist, Doug Wilson, to the Pentagon to lead a prayer service.  You may not have heard of Doug Wilson, but his being platformed at the highest levels of the American government should raise concerns.  

First, why are there religious services preferencing one particular religion in our constitutionally pluralistic country taking place at all?  

Second, what does attendance or non-attendance mean for the military careers of people outside of that particular religious perspective?  

And third, what does Doug Wilson’s brand of Christian nationalism want for our country?

Christian nationalists are inherently non-pluralistic.  “Exclusionary tribalism”  is characteristic of that perspective, as Paul D. Miller explains in his book, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with White Christian Nationalism. In interviews, Wilson has said that in his version of Christian America, only the Protestant version of Christianity would be legitimate.  He would outlaw Catholic parades, including a statue of Mary as a form of public idolatry. 

Maybe that restriction on religious liberty seems relatively benign (to a Protestant), but what about allowing married women to vote?  According to Wilson and other Christian nationalists, “family voting” would be the rule.  And of course, the man, as the Biblical head of household, would, after appropriate conversations with his wife, make the final decision about whom they would both vote for.  

But though Wilson has Hegseth’s ear, other forms of Christian nationalism hold different perspectives and wield influence.  The people seen in White House photos surrounding President Trump, with extended prayer hands, are all part of a loosely defined movement, called by some the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR).  They take the Bible literally, too, as Wilson claims to, but with different interpretations. They believe in modern prophets who speak inspired messages.  They practice spiritual warfare against demonic forces and call on angelic forces to battle evil.  

They were at the Capitol on Jan. 6 praying that the election, which they, like Trump, believed had been stolen, would be reversed by spiritual power.  The Christian banners, flags, and symbols at the Capitol that day were their inspiration.  All of this has been discussed in Matthew D. Taylor’s book,  The Violent Take it By Force: The Christian Movement That is Threatening Our Democracy.  These are the ones who have embraced Lance Wallnau’s “Seven Mountain Mandate,” whose project of social domination has been detailed in Project 2025.  

Neither the NAR nor Wilson’s brands of Christian nationalism believe that mainline Protestants like Presbyterians (PCUSA) of which I am one, Lutherans (ELCA), United Methodists, or Episcopalians have Christianity right.  They are all mistakenly open to women in leadership and far too inclusive, far too soft on immigration, and far too woke to be legitimate.  Some Roman Catholics, like Vice President JD Vance, may be acceptable, but even the Pope, when he criticizes war in favor of peace, may be theologically suspect.  

Christian nationalism is not a single broad consensus perspective on Christianity in general.  It comes in multiple, often mutually exclusive varieties, none of which are tolerant of others.  

What does this mean when their leaders are surrounding the President in the Oval Office or preaching at the Pentagon?  Where would it leave those of us who do not share their versions of Christianity (whichever one among them might eventually prevail, that is)?   

Once the State is involved in asserting one particular religious perspective as authoritative, how far would it go to enforce its views?  Could a Mainline Protestant Sunday school teacher be accused of corrupting children?  Could a wife who voted against her husband’s preference be prosecuted?   Would we be free to disagree with a prophet’s pronouncements?   Is this the kind of  America we recognize?

America is a religiously diverse country.  Religious liberty has been one of our defining characteristics.  We have had a checkered history of religious tolerance.  In the early days, some colonies excluded Catholics, others, Unitarians.  But over our nearly 250-year national history, we have learned to respect each other’s right to practice their faith, of whatever variety.  We have shunned religious litmus tests for employment or leadership in government.  We have even made religious discrimination illegal.  We have not always been consistent nor successful in living faithfully to this inclusive vision, but we have, until recently, upheld it as an ideal to aspire to and to work toward.  Christian nationalists, of whatever variety, wish to dismantle this vision of a religiously tolerant America.  Insofar as their vision excludes me, I find this alarming.  Insofar as their vision undermines fundamental American ideals, I find it frightening.  

In 1630, John Winthrop, soon to become the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, delivered a sermon entitled “A Modell of Christian Charitie” to his fellow passengers on the Arbella, one of the fleet of 11 ships carrying 700 Pilgrims to begin the new colony. In that sermon, Winthrop, a deeply pious man, told the colonists on board that they had “entered into a covenant with God.”

That was an extraordinary claim. It is not at all clear what led him to make that bold assertion. The Bible describes several covenants God made with humans, first to Noah and all creation, after the flood, then to Abraham, the father of the Jewish people, and subsequently with the Israelites under Moses, renewed by Joshua, and to King David, but no covenants were ever made with any other nation.

Winthrop was not a clergyman, nor had he studied theology formally. His training was in law. But he imagined that this new colony could, by some means, inherit the status that had been uniquely Israel’s alone as God’s chosen nation. He went on to explain to the colonists that “we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants.”

The “city on a hill” phrase, according to the Gospel of Matthew, originated with Jesus. Addressing his (Jewish) disciples, in what we call the “Sermon on the Mount,” Jesus told them:

“You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. No one, after lighting a lamp, puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven” (Matt. 5:14-16).

The “city on a hill” that “cannot be hid,” is like a lit lamp, not meant to be covered but to shine. The “light of the world” that shines is “your good works” on display.

So the “city on the hill” and the shining light are metaphors for the impact of the disciples’ “good works” that bear witness to their faithfulness to God, as exemplified in the Beatitudes (also from the same Sermon on the Mount). It should be clear that the disciples were not, then or ever, the leaders of any colony, state, or nation. Being the city on the hill was about righteousness (e.g., “blessed are the pure in heart”) and justice (e.g., “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness/justice [Greek uses one word for both]”).

Winthrop, however, pulled out that description of the disciples’ good works and applied it to the task of forming a colony of pilgrims in Massachusetts as a Christian commonwealth, as if that missional calling had been given to them.

Nowhere in the Bible is any nation other than Israel given the status of the Chosen People. In the New Testament, however, that description has been applied to the Church. According to the Apostle Paul, Israel is like a cultivated olive tree, onto which Gentiles, like wild olive branches, have been grafted (Rom. 11). Supported by the roots, that is Israel’s long history as God’s chosen people, the wild Gentile branches are grafted on, making one new multi-ethnic entity in which there is “no Jew nor Greek” (Gal. 3:28). The church, now participating in Israel’s status as chosen people, is not a nation, but comprises “every nation and tribe and language and people” (Rev. 14:6).

In spite of this most obvious fact, Winthrop started a cascade of people gratuitously identifying America as the “city on a hill” with a special covenant with God. Paul D. Miller, in his book The Religion of American Greatness, recounts the many historical references that used this highly charged language. Once the concept that America had, by some sleight of hand, acquired Israel’s or the church’s status of God’s chosen people, other scriptures were taken out of context to support it. Popular was 2 Chronicles 7:14, which says,

“If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, pray, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”

In context, this is part of the prayer King Solomon prayed as he dedicated the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. The “my people” are the Israelites, and “their land” is Israel. Only stripping away the context could make this apply to other people or land. But that is exactly what many have done.

Miller recounts:

“President Dwight Eisenhower took the oath of office in 1953 on a Bible opened to 2 Chronicles 7:14 at Billy Graham’s suggestion. In fact, he placed his hand on two Bibles: one opened to 2 Chronicles 7:14 and the other opened to Psalm 33:12 [“Happy is the nation whose God is the LORD, the people whom he has chosen as his heritage”]. Jerry Falwell cited both verses and directly applied them to America in his 1980 book, Listen, America! Ronald Reagan once told someone that his favorite verse was 2 Chronicles 7:14, and, like Eisenhower, took the oath of office on Bibles opened to the verse in 1981 and 1985.”

Miller says, “Reagan invoked Winthrop’s image repeatedly throughout his presidency, popularizing the notion that America is that shining city on a hill in covenant with God.”

That claim is not faithful to the Bible. That’s part of the reason I wrote a book. I wanted to demonstrate that the biblical vision, while it does indeed begin with Israel as God’s chosen people, opens the door to non-Israelites as well. After all, in the very place where God promised to bless Abraham and his descendants, God also promised, through him, to bless “all the families of the earth” (Gen. 12:3). So the title of my book is All the Families of the Earth: Recovering Scripture’s Vision Beyond Nationalism.

The book is divided into two sections, one for the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and one for the New Testament. I explore stories of non-Israelites who are crucial to the success of the chosen people, such as Ruth the Moabite, the great-grandmother of King David, and Rahab the prostitute in Jericho, who hid the Israelite spies and saved their lives. In the New Testament, I show how much Jesus interacted with non-Israelites, such as the Roman Centurion, the Canaanite woman, and the people on the Gentile side of the Sea of Galilee. The final vision in Revelation is of people from every language, tribe, and nation together.

The idea, so prominent in American Christian Nationalism, that America is God’s chosen nation, the “city on the hill” with a covenant with God, is not biblical. The dream, expressed by some who advocate for American Christian Nationalism, that people flourish best when with their own kind, runs counter to the biblical vision of a multi-ethnic, trans-national community.

The American Christian nationalists’ assertion that the people who descended from Europe are somehow uniquely equipped to govern because of their Christian cultural heritage is sheer chauvinism. When we consider the history of brutality that the Europeans brought to the New World, from the displacement of the native population to the long history of enslavement, followed by the Jim Crow period, we may not have a corner on virtue as much as we would like to believe.

Those of us who respect and value the Bible need to be clear about its authentic vision of a reconciled humanity. So, I hope my book will help.

I am happy to provide an online study guide for groups that would like to read the book together. You can learn more here.

Unconfirmed reporting has asserted that US military commanders have told troops serving under them that President Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” The Department of Defense has not affirmed nor denied that reporting.

Jonathan Larsen’s Substack

U.S. Troops Were Told Iran War Is for “Armageddon,” Return of Jesus

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But whether or not that reporting is accurate, it is the case that many American Christians expect a future Armageddon: an enormous end-of-times battle that ends with God’s annihilation of evil and the return of Jesus. In some versions of this event, it ends with blood “as high as the horses’ bridles for one thousand six hundred stadia” (NRSV “200 miles”; Rev. 14:20). More on the blood in a moment.

The reporting made me want to review the passage about Armageddon in the book of Revelation, so I tried to look it up in my Bible app. It came up with nothing. No references at all to Armageddon. It’s not in my Bible.

My Bible app was set to search the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) — a translation widely respected for its accuracy. But Armageddon is absent in my Bible.

I have since learned that the key words there are “my Bible,” meaning the NRSV. The NRSV translates the place of the battle described in Rev. 16:16 as “Harmageddon.” A little searching on BibleGateway.com, which allows searches across many versions, reveals that some go one way and others go the other. Here’s what I found:

Armageddon

• NIV New International Version

• KJV. King James Version

• Good News Translation

• J.B. Phillips New Testament

• The Message

• Living Bible (a paraphrase) “Armageddon—the Mountain of Megiddo.”

• New Catholic Bible (with a footnote: “the “mountain of Megiddo,”)

Harmageddon or Harmagedon

• NRSV New Revised Standard Version

• NASB New American Standard Bible

• ASV American Standard Version

• AMP. Amplified

• Disciples’ Literal New Testament

This is the only reference to (H)Armageddon in the entire Bible. There is no known location that is ever called (H)Armageddon in the Old or New Testament or any other known literature. Many scholars, like Brian K. Blount, have concluded that “More than likely John [the author of the book of Revelation] has conflated two Hebrew words, har megiddon, which means “mountain of Megiddo.”

John, in Rev. 16:16 says the name comes from Hebrew: “And they assembled them at the place that in Hebrew is called Harmagedon” (NRSV).

The Hebrew word for “mountain” is “har”. Putting “har” with the well-known place known as Megiddo yields the meaning “mountain of Megiddo.”

But Megiddo is not a mountain. As Blount goes on to explain, “Megiddo was an ancient city that guarded the pass through the Central Highlands at the Jezreel Valley.” The city in that plane is on a rise that archaeologists call a “tell.” A tell is a mound made by accumulated layers of habitation in one location. After destruction (e.g., by fire or war) and abandonment of a site, later settlers would rebuild on top of the ruins. Megiddo is on a tell; a far cry from a mountain.

By itself, that fact alone should be enough to alert everyone that this is not meant to be taken literally. There is literally no mountain of Megiddo. It does not exist. So, it is symbolic. The whole battle then symbolizes God’s triumph over the forces of evil.

So what about all that blood? New Testament scholars have alerted us to the fact that gross exaggeration of quantities of blood after a battle is what they call a literary “topos,” or commonplace.

David Aune cites another scholar, Richard Baukam:

Bauckham has shown that this hyperbole, consisting of an extraordinary amount of blood indicating a slaughter of exceptional proportions, is a topos frequently found in ancient literature The earliest occurrence of this topos is found in I Enoch 100:3 (tr. Knibb, Enoch), “And the horse will walk up to its chest in the blood of sinners.” A parallel from perhaps the second century AD occurs in 4 Ezra (6 Ezra) 15:35b–36, “and there shall be blood from the sword as high as a horse’s belly and a man’s thigh and a camel’s hock.” Though there is no evidence of any literary borrowing among these sources, it is striking that they share a common hyperbole for the extent of slaughter, namely, that horses will be wading in three to four feet of blood…. Josephus [a first century Jewish historian] historicizes this topos by referring to the many Jews killed by Romans when Jerusalem was captured in AD 70 (JW 6.406): the number of corpses “deluged the whole city with blood to such an extent that many fires were extinguished by the gory stream.”

So both the mountain and the blood are meant to be taken as literary symbols, not literal descriptions of a human battle in the near term.

The problem is that we live in a time when books like the Left Behind series and many others have popularized a reading of Revelation that completely ignores its symbolic nature. As scholar Greg Carey says,

[T]he vast majority of readers agree that Revelation responds in part to Roman imperialism with a particular emphasis upon imperial cults [that is, Emperor worship]…. Revelation reads Rome as idolatrous but also as violent, arrogant, and oppressive. Like other ancient Jewish apocalypses, Revelation is an example of counterimperial resistance literature.

Rome is called “Babylon” in the book of Revelation. Why? Again from Blount:

Though [the author of Revelation] gives it the name “Babylon the Great,” he is speaking to Rome, the beast from the sea (13:1–10; cf. 1 Pet 5:13). Babylon, we know, is the name of the great imperial force that destroyed Jerusalem in 587 B.C.E., desecrated the temple, and drove much of the populace into exile. For that act of infamy, Babylon became the prototypical enemy of the people of God.

Craig Koester agrees, saying, “Revelation’s imagery expresses an anti-imperial perspective.” Rome was the empire. The emperors were increasingly insisting on being worshipped as gods, pressuring—and sometimes even persecuting—Christians who refused.

Though the Book of Revelation depicts a symbolic battle between God and the forces of evil, it never suggests that Christians take part in any earthly battle. Blount again:

“John never sees God’s people operating with violence in the book, not even in response to the evil that is perpetrated continuously against them. Even the Lamb, operating like a lion of war at 19:11–21, wields a sword that John images more like a rapier tongue than a killing saber.”

The book of Revelation is not a roadmap for the future. It is a highly symbolic text. Scholars call this kind of work “apocalyptic”. John Collins defines an apocalypse this way:

“Apocalypse” is a genre [type] of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological [end time] salvation, and spatial, insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.”

In Revelation, the angel reveals to John the reality of the heavenly struggle between good and evil and that, in the end, God will win.

Scholars whose work I have cited do not enjoy the popularity of the Left Behind thrillers. They write big, expensive books after years of tedious research, which non-specialists do not read. So, scholars know that Revelation:

• is not predicting a human battle of (H)armageddon,

• is not about a roadmap for the future,

• never calls for human involvement in God’s struggle against evil,

but rather was about:

• the Roman Empire,

• its effect on Christians in the first century, CE,

• and the eventual triumph of God over evil.

Did the author of Revelation believe there would be a literal battle on earth in which humans would fight and be killed? Yes, he did. It’s been 2,000 years, and we are still waiting (although by now, there is no more Babylon/Roman Empire left to battle).

He believed the battle would be in some undisclosed future time of God’s choosing. Was he calling Christians to take up arms in his day? No, he was not. That future battle would be fought by God alone against people who opposed and even cursed him. Like the Old Testament’s description of the plagues of Egypt, no human participation would be required.

So now, after so much entertaining disinformation and so little attention to genuine consensus scholarship, we are left with the fact that it is conceivable that some US military commanders may, in fact, believe in a final battle and encourage their troops to join it. Let us hope that the reporting about that turns out to be incorrect. Otherwise, the results of that could be apocalyptic.

Works Cited:

Aune, David E. Revelation 1–5. Word Biblical Commentary 52A. Dallas: Word Books, 1997.

Aune, David E. Revelation 6–16. Word Biblical Commentary 52B. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1998.

Aune, David E. Revelation 17–22. Word Biblical Commentary 52C. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1998.

Blount, Brian K. Revelation: A Commentary. New Testament Library. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009.

Carey, Greg. Rereading Revelation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999.

Collins, John J. “Introduction: Towards the Morphology of a Genre.” Semeia 14 (1979): 1–20.

Koester, Craig R. Revelation: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. Anchor Yale Bible 38A. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.

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In Black History Month, many of us have come across articles and social media posts celebrating the achievements of black Americans. Many have contributed to science, mathematics, engineering, physics, and many other areas. (For example, see The Complete List of Genius Black American Inventors, Scientists and Engineers – Part One)

This is important, especially in light of the recent social media depiction of a former president and first lady, both of whom are black, in a disparaging and dehumanizing manner.

My area is the Bible, so I would like to highlight the role an Ethiopian played in the book of Jeremiah. I develop this story in chapter 10 of my forthcoming book, All the Families of the Earth: Recovering Scripture’s Vision Beyond Nationalism. Without this Ethiopian, who risked his life in dangerous circumstances to save Jeremiah from execution by slow starvation, what would we miss?

It was Jeremiah who introduced the concept of the new covenant, so important to Jesus’ self-understanding, according to the Gospels (Jer. 31:31; Luke 22:20) and to Christian theology and liturgy (1 Cor. 11:23–36).

Jeremiah gave us the concept of God’s law written upon the heart, not solely on tablets of stone, as the law of Moses was (Jer. 31:32–34). This Jewish prophet anticipated Jesus’s emphasis on inward transformation (Matt. 5:18–19).

Without the book of Jeremiah, we would not have heard his strong criticism of those who believed that the temple of the Lord, apart from faithfulness to God, would provide magic protection, obligating God to defend the nation (Jer. 7:4). Jeremiah specifically defined faithfulness as defending the “the alien, the orphan, and the widow,” and protection of the innocent from violence (Jer. 7:5–7).

It was the book of Jeremiah which gave us the concept that the written words of the prophet, that is the text of Scripture, could continue the prophet’s voice, apart from his physical presence, thus expanding the understanding of the role of scripture for the future life of the community (Jer. 36).

If an Ethiopian man named Ebed-melech had not risked his life to save Jeremiah’s, we would not have his book, nor any of these important theological concepts so essential to Jesus and the New Testament. It is interesting to note that the color of an Ethiopian’s skin was specifically noted in the Bible as a distinguishing feature of difference: “Can Ethiopians change their skin or leopards their spots? (Jer. 13:23).”

The Story of Ebed-melech in Brief

Jeremiah lived during the time of the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem. The king and his advisors had been counting on Egypt to come to their rescue, and at first, it did. But after the Egyptian withdrawal, the Babylonians were coming. Jeremiah advocated surrender as the only way to prevent annihilation. That sounded like treason to the courtiers, who demanded Jeremiah’s arrest. His sentence was to be thrown into a muddy, but otherwise waterless cistern and to be left there to slowly starve to death.

Because of his sentence of treason, associating with Jeremiah was a mortal danger. But that is the risk that Ebed Melech took. It was all the more risky because as a non-Jewish person, he was vulnerable to being accused of working against the national interests.

But in spite of the danger, when he learned what had happened to Jeremiah, Ebed-melech “went to the king and said, ‘My lord king, these men have acted wickedly in all they did to the prophet Jeremiah by throwing him into the cistern to die there of hunger, for there is no bread left in the city’” (Jer. 39:9).

Evidently, the king respected Ebed-melech highly enough to allow him to rescue Jeremiah. He got some men to assist him and found some ropes to pull him out with. But out of an abundance of compassion, knowing that the ropes might injure the emaciated prophet, he took care to provide old cloths to pad the ropes with.

Because of this, his brave and compassionate action, Jeremiah survived, and we have the record of his life and teaching today. For his action, Ebed-melech and his Ethiopian family were rewarded with God’s blessing (Jer. 39:17–18).

Far from disparaging this African man for the color of his skin, Ebed-melech is held up as a hero, honored by God. He is responsible for saving the life of the prophet at the risk of his own, thus enabling the Christian tradition to benefit from Jeremiah’s insights. We are all indebted to this black man of courage.

The administration, in the wake of the shooting deaths of two Americans in Mineapolis at the hands of ICE agents could have said to the American people something like:

“There have been two terrible tragedies in America, for which this administration apologizes to the American people. We have an Immigration and Customs agency and Border Patrol that are supposed to make Americans safe. We have failed. We will investigate the deaths of these two citizens with full transparency and cooperation with local and State officials. We will conduct a thorough review of our policies, training procedures, and command structure to ensure this never happens again. We offer our sincerest condolences to the families and loved ones of both Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, whose Constitutionally protected right to freedom of speech and of assembly was violated and whose lives were cut short, and whose families now grieve. We accept full responsibility. We are deeply sorry.”

But instead, we heard the opposite. We saw multiple videos from several angles, so we know that we were being lied to when Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, said that Ms. Good had “weaponized her vehicle” and that she was a “domestic terrorist.” We knew that she lied again after Pretti was shot, saying that he was “brandishing a weapon” and had acted “violently” towards officers as they attempted to disarm him. The fact that the President was forced by overwhelming public outcry to walk back these falsehoods was not an act of moral courage but of political necessity. At no time did we hear an apology.

We have a lot to be proud of here in America. We have a Constitution and Bill of Rights that enshrine ideals of freedom and equality for all people. We have been successful in helping to end the scourge of facism in Europe. We have created opportunity and prosperity at an enormous scale. We have opened the door to a vast variety of people from around the world whose creativity and diligence has helped make us the envy of the world.

But, can America ever get it wrong, do bad things, enact bad policies, or make mistakes?

Is it unpatriotic to publicly admit that we are not now, and never have been, perfect? Does it project “an image of weakness before both allies and enemies,” as Nile Gardiner, foreign policy analyst with the conservative Heritage Foundation, said, referring to Obama’s speeches?

Mitt Romney wrote a book called No Apology to criticize President Obama for what he called his “apology tour,” because, without ever saying the word “sorry,” Obama had admitted that, like other countries, America had a checkered past that included things for which we should not be proud.

On a recent visit to Memphis, I toured The National Civil Rights Museum. It has incorporated the Lorraine Hotel into its venue, the place where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. In it are pictures that are hard for anyone with a moral compass to see: firehoses and dogs attacking peaceful civilians. A firebombed bus filled with “freedom riders” demanding voting rights. Black people in suits and dresses under violent attacks at lunch counters. The pictures and videos go on and on.

Should we not be able to say that our nation, for centuries, has enslaved, persecuted, lynched, and discriminated against people of color? And if that history is a record of shame, should we not apologize, recognizing that for white people, we have for generations, been able to accumulate and transfer wealth to our heirs, while black people, historically, have been kept out of VA benefits, good neighborhoods, good schools, bank loans and employment opportunities, such that our current wealth has a direct bearing on injustices of the past? I also visited the Freedom Riders Museum in Montgomery, Al; more of the shameful same.

I have been to the Greenwood Rising Museum in Tulsa that recounts the race massacre of 1921, in which a prosperous black commercial district known as “Black Wall Street” was bombed and burned out, and hundreds of innocent people were killed. I have yet to visit “The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration” in Montgomery, Alabama, which tells the story of slavery, lynchings, segregation, and racial bias in America, but I have seen samples of it online.

There was an entire cottage industry during the Jim Crow period of postcards people would send to each other of the crowds of approving white people surrounding the bodies of lynched African Americans. They even took their children to these “barbeques” as they cynically called them, as if killing human beings was a light-hearted afternoon frolic, fit for the entire family.

Is this not our national shame? Are we diminished by admitting our past? Does it make us weaker before other nations to uphold a moral standard higher than our predecessors did and accept that the harm they caused has lasting effects today?

I am writing from Arkansas, one of twenty-five American states whose names are derived from Native American words. I live near the Ouachita Mountains, now a national park, which took me months to learn to pronounce; another native-based word. I’m surrounded by State names, mountains, towns, and rivers whose names are Native American language-based.

But the native populations were dispossessed, and the survivors were pushed onto reservations generations ago. The “Trail of Tears” was watered by the ones who could still cry; many others died. Now, their land is our land. Have we nothing to feel guilty about? Nothing to apologize for?

The doubly tragic irony for me as a person who has been raised as a Christian in an overwhelmingly Christian-influenced culture, I find our lack of humility in the face of our dark national history irreconcilable. Why? Admitting we are on the wrong track is fundamental to being a Christian.

Jesus’ first public proclamation was “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news” (Mark 1:15). Jesus called people to “repent.” Today, that sounds like a call to grovel in shame, but that is not at all what the word “repent” meant. The word comes from roots that mean to change your thinking (metanoeo: meta – as in “metamorphosis,” + noeo, “to perceive, or think”).

Of course, changing your thinking about something may involve remorse or regret if your former thinking (such as thinking of whites as superior) involved causing harm to people. But the point of “repent” is to acknowledge that you were wrong and want to put it right. It is all about realizing that you should apologize — at least to God, if not to living people, for the way you had been living.

I recently read Learning from the Germans, by Susan Neiman. She recounts the way small four-inch square brass plaques are sprinkled all over German cities, one for each person abducted, deported to concentration camps, and killed by the Nazis. The plaques bear the names of the people taken, the dates of their abductions, and mark the spot on which those crimes against humanity happened, as passersby ignored what was happening. They are called “stumbling stones.” They are meant to be a present reminder of the horrors of Germany’s Nazi past. They bear witness to what happened so that this present generation will not forget what the nation needed to repent for doing.

The Germans have tried to come to terms with their past in ways that America never has. Instead, we make apologies into weaknesses. “Sorry” is almost surrender. But surrender is the essence of the Christian life. Christianity is, at its very root, about redemption. Redemption requires something to be redeemed from, something to repent about, missteps, mistakes, missing the mark, or, to use a word full of red flags, “sin.” Sins like enslavement, lynching, discrimination, and a host of cruelties.

In America we have come a long way. In the government offices I have recently visited in Alabama and Arkansas there were many people of color working beside white colleagues, from the police at the door to the staff behind the desks. But now, we seem to be on a different path.

It takes a strong person to admit failure. It takes integrity to own your past failings. It takes self-reflection and courage to acknowledge that your present privilege may have been founded on your predecessors’ brutality.

It takes a strong nation to admit its past failures. It makes an even stronger nation to say, “never again” about its own past. We can honor the Germany of today for the way it has and does condemn past atrocities. Germany is not weaker for it; just the opposite.

It is profound patriotism to hold your own nation accountable to its own ideals, values, and Constitutional commitments. It is patriotic to love the Constitution and the Bill of Rights enough to apologize when they have been violated.

Today, we call on our leaders to repent of the brutalities of the ICE and Border Patrol agents’ actions, not just in Minneapolis, and not just because two white people were victims.

We call upon our leaders to be honest and admit the truth that we all see with our own eyes. We call upon them to apologize to all the people harmed by the cruelty of deportations to third countries.

We call upon them to stop calling people criminals who have only committed civil offenses (there is a difference in our legal system, and it is not trivial).

Is it patriotic to say, as a nation, “We are sorry”? It is the ultimate act of true patriotism, a strength severely missing in America at present.

Does God hate? Franklin Graham says yes. Oddly enough, that was part of his Christmas message at the Pentagon’s “Christmas Worship Service” called by Pete Hegseth this year. Graham also preached that God is a “God of war.” He spent much of the sermon recounting the story of how God told the people of Israel to slaughter every man, woman, and child, as well as all the animals belonging to the Amalekites.

You are in good company if you have never heard of the Amalekites or of the story Graham cited. The story has two Acts. Act one appears in two versions: Exodus 17 and Deuteronomy 25. The Hebrew people, recently freed from years of bondage under Pharaoh’s Egypt, are on their long journey to the Promised Land. On the way, they encounter the Amalekites who attacked them. If you have a church background, you may remember the story of the battle in which, as long as Moses lifted his hands, the Israelites prevailed, but when he became tired and let his hands down, the enemy prevailed (Exodus 17). This is that story. (Spoiler: the people helped Moses keep his hands up, and Israel won.) The other version of Act One in Deuteronomy 25 includes the detail that the Amalekites attacked when the Israelites were “faint and weary” and focused on the most vulnerable who “lagged behind.” For that, the Lord says, “you shall blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; do not forget” (Deut. 25:19).

Act Two takes place, according to the Bible’s chronology, 400 years later. Samuel has anointed Saul as king, so the tribes of Israel have just become a monarchy. Nevertheless, Samuel is still in charge. He orders King Saul to attack the Amalekites, who are surprisingly still around, because of what they did 400 years ago. The memory of that episode is still alive with emotional force. Samuel specifies that Saul’s forces should “utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” (1 Sam. 15:3).

The story of divinely authorized genocide has been troubling—if not horrifying—for centuries to Bible readers. How God could ever have been conceived of as authorizing such wanton cruelty is hard to imagine. But once that story was written in that way and became part of canonical scripture, then it was left to morally alert readers to deal with it.

In his sermon, Franklin Graham retold all these details, pointing out that God’s hatred of the Amalekites had not abated, even after four centuries. God is a God of war, he said. The story ends with Samuel upbraiding Saul for keeping the Amalekite king alive and keeping some of the animals as spoil. For his insufficiently thorough genocide, Saul’s kingship is curtailed.

Graham’s point was that God hates sin; we all sin, so we need salvation, and that is why Jesus came at Christmas.

Regardless of that point, Graham took the story of genocide literally and without hesitation or moral qualm. He even anticipated protests from someone who might say, “That’s not the God I believe in.” Graham’s response to that objection was to say, without a hint of irony, “Well, you had better believe in him.”

If you believe that all the stories in the Bible are historically accurate* and must be taken literally, then you must accept that God is a God of war who hates, and who remembers (holds grudges for centuries), and who responds to violence against the Chosen People with genocidal fury. Graham is apparently content to leave it at that.

The morality of this story, and the other similar stories of violence and genocide in the Bible, has troubled people for centuries and for many reasons. How is this depiction of God consistent with the Bible itself? How can this kind of God be the same as the God whose self-description includes being “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Exodus 34:6)?

Let’s say that one could find a way to reconcile these two Janus-like faces of God. Are we then to accept that genocide is morally defensible today? Is God a hateful God of war, as Graham believes?

Some are willing to say that if God commands something, then it must be good. We may not understand God’s moral justifications, but whatever the Divine commands must be good. This has been called the Divine Command Theory. It has been defended by figures such as St. Augustine and by modern Christian apologists such as William Lane Craig. Most people, however, cannot accept that there could be any justification for genocide. What then are we to do with those Biblical stories?

Jewish scholars have struggled with this moral issue for centuries. Philo of Alexandria, a first-century Jewish philosopher, used several strategies for accounting for genocidal texts in his Biblical commentaries. Sometimes he would skip over verses that advocated genocide, simply ignoring them. When discussing the command to kill all the Amalekites, however, he used a different tactic: he allegorized the text. The Amalekites represented unholy passion that must be resisted. Later rabbis used another strategy, arguing that even if God commanded the Israelites to kill all the Amalekites in the past, there is no present justification for using it as a precedent in the future. Maimonides in the 12th Century said that before going to war, peace terms must first be offered, making the command to commit genocide inoperable. Of course, people would rather settle than be annihilated.

There have been other strategies for dealing with texts that some have called “texts of terror.” Eric Seibert, in his Disturbing Divine Behavior, makes the point that “God” is a character in the Bible. Someone wrote down those stories in which the character “God” commands genocide. But might there be a difference between the character “god” that shows up in the text of the Bible and the real God? Seibert says yes: the text comes from a time in which God could be imagined to hate and authorize violence, but for centuries, morally sensitive people have found ways to obviate that morally repugnant presentation.

Seibert and other Christian interpreters add more reflection on the subject. Jesus (who was, of course, Jewish) highlighted the Hebrew Bible’s presentation of God’s merciful and forgiving nature, making it central to his God-construct. The gospels record Jesus as teaching, “But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High” (Luke 6:35).

Jesus, instead of teaching a God of hate, taught that God is “kind to the ungrateful and the wicked” (Luke 6:35). Seibert points out that “Jesus’ view of God as one who ‘makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous’” (Matt. 5:45) runs counter to texts which present God as hateful (Disturbing Divine Behavior, Fortress Press, 2009, p. 204 Kindle).

Instead of holding a 400-year grudge against your enemies, Jesus taught, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:43–44).

When Graham chastises people who say that a warrior God of hate is “not the God I believe in,” did he know that Jesus would be included as one of them? Apparently not.

The Bible is a set of writings that have been collected and compiled over centuries. Ancient texts are still meaningful to many but pose numerous challenges. These challenges include the Bible’s complex and varied moral teachings. In the ancient world, slavery was permitted. Rebellious children were to be stoned. Touching a pigskin and eating shrimp were abominations. Women’s roles were severely restricted. And yes, God was described in various ways, some of which were beautiful, but others of which were brutal. The fact that Graham does not make those moral distinctions is troubling. The distance between his view and Jesus’ understanding of the Divine is telling. From my perspective, it certainly makes for a morally vexed Christmas sermon.

*The historicity of this and many other stories is a large, complex, and vexed topic. Archeology offers no support for the existence of the Amalekites, for example. One of the best treatments of the archeological record is A History of Ancient Israel 2nd. Ed. by Christian Frevel, SBL Press, 2023.

I participated in a prison ministry to death row inmates several years ago. It struck me that none of them described the reason for their imprisonment as having anything to do with a crime. They all described their imprisonment as catching “a case,” as in “I caught my case five years ago.” Perhaps that is simply prison slang and nothing more should be read into it, but I could not help hearing it as an evasion of moral responsibility. Being convicted of a crime, especially a capital offense, is not a matter of “catching a case,” like you might catch a cold.

Evading moral responsibility has a long history. Like questioning God, it seems hardwired into humans. Our universal tendency to excuse ourselves, to consider ourselves special cases and exceptions to the general rule, is acknowledged as far back as the Biblical story of the brothers Cain and Abel.

Genesis chapter four sets out the story of the two sons of Adam and Eve. Being the first generation of humans on earth who have come into existence the way all subsequent humans do, by birth, rather than by special creation as their parents had been, marks them as quintessential humans. As adults, they diverge occupationally. Abel is a herdsman; Cain, a farmer. Some have taken this narrative as an etiology of the natural competition between herdsmen and farmers, but nothing in their story is made of their occupational difference. Except that when they bring offerings to God, they bring different kinds. Abel’s offering was “the firstlings of his flock, their fat portions” (Gen 4:4). Cain brought “an offering of the fruit of the ground” (Gen 4:3). The narrator is laconic. He makes no comment or evaluation of either offering. That they are different and arise from their divergent occupations is all we know.

According to the text, however, God does make an evaluation: “The LORD had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard” (Gen 4:4–5). This story is set in the distant past, long preceding the Law of Moses, so no one suggests that either offering violated a Biblical law. But from the Rabbis of the third to fifth centuries CE, who produced the Genesis Rabbah, all the way to present scholars, the reason given for God’s lack of regard for Cain’s offering was that it seemed off-handed, if not second-rate. Able offered, not just a sacrifice, but the “firstlings” of his flock, including the best part, the fat. Cain just brought “an offering” as if “any old plant” would do. But the fact that the author gives no reason for God’s differentiation means that we must look elsewhere for the point of the story.

The point is made clear by what follows next: Cain’s reaction to God’s disregard. He became “very angry” (Gen 4:5). “Anger” comes from the word “to burn”; we could say that Cain “burned with anger.” God noticed the angry look on his face and asked him about it, and warned that it was putting him in dangerous territory: “sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it” (Gen 4:7). Cain has choices. Though sin, like a crouching predator, is waiting at the door to pounce at the earliest opportunity, Cain, as a morally responsible adult, must “master it.” Cain does not reply to God’s warning.

Instead, we watch his plan to murder his brother unfold. It is premeditated; “malice aforethought.” Cain invites Abel into the field where “Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him” (Gen 4:8). Thus, Abel, whose name comes from the word for “mist” or “fog,” vanishes from the story. All that remains of him is his blood, which stains the ground.

God makes note of Abel’s absence and asks Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” (Gen 4:9). We notice that God’s question includes the phrase “your brother,” reaffirming their familial and moral ties to each other. Cain knows the answer but lies directly to God, saying he does not know. Then comes his attempt to evade all moral responsibility. Cain asks God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Gen 4:9).

In the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), God rarely reacts to people who question him. Most of the time, he lets questions, even accusatory questions, even unhinged rants go unnoticed. When he does notice, as in the case of Zechariah (see Part One), his displeasure produces only a mild punishment — temporary muteness in that case. In the case of Malachi, God threatened to act harshly against the insolent questions of the lax worshippers, but we are not told that the threat was ever carried out.

Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”, however, is different. This time, God reacts with shock and horror: “What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground! And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand” (Gen 4:10). As God reacts, instead of naming Abel, he twice calls him “your brother.” Cain’s doge has failed utterly. Nothing is clearer than a moral obligation between brothers. Cain’s effort to deflect moral responsibility, as if it involved “keeping” his brother like a shepherd keeps his sheep with constant vigilance, is an absurdity that God does not buy for a second. Brothers bear moral obligations to each other. In that sense, yes, of course you are your brother’s keeper. There is no smudge blurring that moral clarity.

We tell stories to teach lessons. The lesson of moral responsibility between brothers is clear. The meaning seamlessly expands to include moral obligation to all related kin. But the question remains, Can or should it be extended beyond kinfolk? How far do our moral obligations go?

The Law of Moses drew lines of distinction between “neighbors” and non-neighbors. The tenth Commandment forbids coveting one’s neighbor’s wife or property. In fact, Moses goes so far as to command, “You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin (lit. “brother”); you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.” (Lev 19:7).

It is this distinction between neighbor and non-neighbor that formed the basis of the question an expert in the law of Moses asked Jesus. After establishing that the greatest commandments are to love God and neighbor, the man asked, “And who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29). In other words, what is the extent of my moral obligation?

Jesus’s answer was to tell the parable of the Good Samaritan. In that parable, a man is robbed, beaten, stripped, and left for dead beside the road. A priest and a temple employee, called a Levite, see the victim but pass by without offering aid. A Samaritan, a person from an ethnic community that despised Jews and was despised by Jews showed him mercy, dressed his wounds, and took him to a place in which he could recover, paying for it out of pocket. Jesus turned the lawyer’s question upside down by asking him, “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” Not “who is my neighbor” but who was a neighbor to him?”

The legal scholar knew the correct answer, but still could not bring himself to say “the Samaritan,” so he said, “‘The one who showed him mercy.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise’” (Luke 10:36–37).

The question of moral obligation is no longer limited to “brothers” or “neighbors” as relatives, but encompasses everyone in need of merciful care. This moral trajectory helps us re-frame Cain’s horrible question: “Am I humanity’s keeper?” If, as Cain’s question tried to do, this is asked to imply an impossible ethical demand to solve all the world’s problems, then no, we could no more do that than Cain could shepherd his shepherd-bother. But the answer has to be yes, we are humanity’s keepers as never before. Collectively, we live on the verge of destroying ourselves by multiple means. Whether by war, especially nuclear war (and subsequent nuclear winter), or by climate change, to evade being humanity’s keeper is now to become humanity’s killer.

We began this series in Part One by asking when, if ever, it is permissible to question God. We saw that the Biblical witness is varied, but the majority of good-faith questions of God were permitted as legitimate. Part Two concerned the way a belief in a God who is good in the face of a world of injustice and unfairness forces humans to question God’s morality. The Biblical characters of Jeremiah and Abraham both questioned God’s morality without reproach.

In Part Three we have seen that the one question that received a response first of horror, “What have you done?!” then severe punishment, was the question designed to evade moral responsibility, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” To question one’s moral/ethical obligations to brothers, to neighbors, or to humanity is to ask a murderer’s question. The very question is a horror.

According to the Bible, the question God reacts negatively to most strongly and decisively is the question posed as an attempt to dodge the most fundamental ethical fact: we are our brother’s keeper.

If we ask, what does the Bible say about whether or not we can question God, we get a mixed answer. Generally, and in the great majority of cases, God seems not to mind being questioned, unless the motivation is hostile (Malachi’s people) or needlessly skeptical (Zechariah). That’s what part one was about. Part two is about ethics: Is it okay to question God about His ethics, that is, His morality? The idea that God could possibly do something wrong seems absurd on the surface, but there is one glaring issue that forces the question: justice. Or, following some moral philosophers like John Rawls, justice, while not being identical with fairness, nevertheless depends on fairness. Is God fair? Is God okay with the conditions of unfairness among us?

One of the first cold, hard facts of life is that it is not fair. Some have more than enough, while others go without the basics. Some have all the luck, others feel like life keeps kicking them down. Some get away with murder, others are severely punished. This most obvious condition requires no further elaboration. It is what it is.

If there is no God, then this unfair and unjust condition of the world would simply be a brute fact. But for a believer in the Biblical God, it represents a problem. The Bible depicts God as just and as demanding justice of us: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice” (Micah 6:8). The Bible also depicts an imaginary scene in which God, surrounded by his heavenly court, criticizes them saying, “How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? (Ps 82:2). In what specific ways were they judging unjustly? The Psalm continues, “Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked” (Ps 82:3-4). When the strong dominate the weak, when the rights of the defenseless are violated, when the bad guys get away with it, justice is not being done. So God demotes his divine council members, in this imaginary scene, removing their celestial status, condemning them to die like mere mortals. “I say, ‘You are gods, children of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, you shall die like mortals” (Ps 82:6). Do justice or lose your job and your status. So, God Himself, according to the Biblical witness, is not content to let conditions of injustice continue unchallenged. But look around: that is exactly what happens. It is a commonplace that “life is not fair.” That’s a problem. Biblical characters notice, and they react.

Jeremiah Legal Case Against God

We begin with the prophet Jeremiah. From the beginning of the monarchy, Israelite society was deeply stratified between the few rich, the aristocracy, and the vast majority of poor peasants. The elites occupied the places of power in the monarchy: they were the courtiers who advised the king — sometimes with ultimatums that he ignored at his peril.

In the days of Jeremiah, the couriers had the king’s ear and they were, besides maintaining lavish lifestyles on the backs of their peasants, were advocating disastrous foreign policy moves that Jeremiah believed would destroy the nation. But when Jeremiah challenged them, they accused him of treason and plotted his death. I have a chapter about this in my forthcoming book, All the Families of the Earth: Navigating Identity and Nationalism in Biblical Narratives.

In response to this social and political nightmare, Jeremiah questioned God. In fact, more than asking, Jeremiah framed his question as a charge, as if he had God in court: “You will be in the right, O LORD, You will be in the right, (that is, “I know you will win the case anyway, but”) O LORD, when I lay charges against you; but let me put my case to you.” (Jer 12:1a) His double edged charge against God includes injustice and allowing the treacherous courtiers to lead the king into political disaster “Why does the way of the guilty prosper? Why do all who are treacherous thrive?” (Jer 12:1b).

Did God find this insulting insubordination? Judging by His reply, not at all. He told Jeremiah that he needed to suck it up because things were about to get a lot worse: “If you have raced with foot-runners and they have wearied you, how will you compete with horses? (Jer 12:5). God goes on to detail the manner in which it will get worse, but our focus is simply on the fact that God does not take offense, even as Jeremiah accuses him of a failure to address the multiple evils of his day. Technically, this is called the issue of “theodicy”: Is God acting justly? Jeremiah does not judge him or accuse him of sin or doubt. He knows Jeremiah is suffering; God no more condemns him for his pain-based reactions than he did Jesus’ cry of dereliction from the cross many years later. The astonishing tolerance of God to be treated like a criminal suspect in court is part of the Biblical record.

Abraham’s Negotiations with God

Next, we look at Abraham in a scene from the Bible full of mystery and oddities. It begins simply enough: Abraham and Sarah, now elderly but still childless, are set up in their nomadic tent by the “oaks of Mamre,” a location within the Promised Land to which they had sojourned. Abraham looked up and suddenly, as if out of nowhere, “saw three men standing near him” (Gen 18:2). Their identity is not explained. Abraham and Sarah provide hospitality to them, then Abraham converses with them.

This is where the story becomes mysterious. The three men asked where Sarah was. Abraham says that she is in the tent. Then the original says “Then he said to Abraham” — suddenly the 3 speak as one, or become one (?) (Gen 18:10). The NRSV says “one of them said” but that is interpretive. The Hebrew says, “then he said,” as if the three merged into one. Anyway, he has a message that next year he will return, and Sarah will have a son. I include these details only to give you a sense of the narrative’s numinous nature. That will be important in what happens next. Clearly, this mysterious three-in-one is not a mere mortal.

Then the men, now plural again, rise to leave, facing Sodom (where Abraham’s nephew Lot and his family live) and apparently disclose to Abraham their next task. Suddenly, we hear the voice of God, musing to himself: “The LORD (Yahweh) said, ‘Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?’” (Gen. 18:17). The LORD then, in internal dialogue, reflects on the fact that Abraham is going to be the greatly blessed father of the chosen people through whom God will bless all the nations of the earth (Gen 18:18). As such, God says that he will “charge his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing righteousness and justice; so that the LORD may bring about for Abraham what he has promised him” (Gen 18:19). The point to notice is that Abraham’s family line is given the task of doing righteousness and justice. This is the condition of the world that it is God’s will to achieve.

The LORD continues his internal dialogue saying “How great is the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah and how very grave their sin!” (Gen 18:20). This implies that the LORD plans judgment against the twin cities, though that fact is only revealed by implication.

The scene shifts back to the departure of the plural men as Abraham watches them set out for Sodom. Abraham pursues them with a question, showing that somehow the planned Divine judgment has been revealed to him. He asks them, “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? (Gen 18:23). A bargain sequence begins. Abraham first asks if there are as few as fifty righteous people – implying that they would not be deserving of the group punishment they would be swept up in – “will you then sweep away the place and not forgive it for the fifty righteous who are in it?” (Gen 18:24). Abraham makes his objection explicit: “Far be it from you to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you!” (Gen 18:25a).

Abraham then asks the fundamental question that is at the heart of all discussions of theodicy, the justice of God: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” (Gen 18:25b). If God has a right to judge the earth, then God has the obligation to be a just judge. Justice would demand that the righteous not suffer the fate that the wicked deserve. Righteous suffering produces the emotional intensity behind the question of theodicy. It is unfair that the righteous should suffer. Maybe the wicked deserve it, but not the righteous. This will become Job’s complaint as he, a righteous man, suffers horribly, and his so-called friends say he must have been wicked. They assumed that the answer Abraham asks, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” is clearly “Yes!”

Mysteriously, now it is not the men who answer, but the LORD (Yahweh) himself, as if he has been behind the apparition of the men/man/men all along: “the LORD said, ‘If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will forgive the whole place for their sake”’ (Gen 18:26).

Emboldened, but humbly, Abraham asks if five righteous are missing, then what? The LORD says he would not destroy the city if there were forty-five righteous in it. The negotiations continue: what about forty? No. What about thirty? No. Twenty? Ten? The LORD said, “For the sake of ten I will not destroy it (Gen 18:32). Abraham did not dare press the negotiations further. Perhaps he was satisfied that Lot’s extended family had to have at least ten righteous people, making them the salvation of the city. In any case, the whole negotiation was based on Abraham’s challenge to God. It would be unjust to make the righteous suffer the same fate as the wicked. “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” God does not react negatively to the question. It was fair game.

Conclusion

Both Jeremiah and Abraham challenged God’s morality. They questioned God when it appeared that the unjust condition of the world constituted malfeasance on God’s part. They believed they could hold God accountable for acting ethically. God had, in his own internal dialogue, revealed his intention that Abraham’s family would be the means by which justice and righteousness would be done on the earth, indicating that He knew what justice looked like: a condition of fairness in which the needs of the vulnerable and powerless were not abused by the powerful. A condition in which the righteous were not made to suffer the fate of the wicked.

The basic fact that “the world is not fair” makes this question perpetual. One of the conundrums of monotheism is that it struggles to give an adequate account of evil. Theologians throughout the centuries have offered a host of solutions, but their inadequacy is apparent: none of them satisfies. After an attempt in one generation fails, the next generation offers a new one. We are still left with the facts of the world and the question, shown to be legitimate, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” Is it right to question God? Given the conditions we live in, it is almost necessary. Apparently, God understands and can take it.

In Part 3, we will look at one line of questioning God that goes too far.

Are we allowed to question God? Are we allowed to call God to account? Are we allowed to accuse God? According to the Bible, it’s a split decision. Many Biblical characters do question God and get away with it. But others have a different experience. Some experience a bit of both. We will look at a representative sample of God-questioners in the Bible in search of an answer.

The Questions They Got Away With

First, Abraham. God made a promise to Abraham, saying, “I am the LORD who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess.” But childless Abraham could not understand how that could be fulfilled. He asked, “O Lord GOD, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” (Genesis 15:8). Surprisingly, he was not rebuked for that question, even with its implication that God’s word, without an evident means of accomplishment, was not good enough. In response, God instructed Abraham to prepare for a solemn covenant-making ceremony in which God, in a deep, dark dream, cursed himself, lest he break his promise.1 (That scene will be the subject of another article.)

Many people in the Bible ask God the “Why?” question. “Why, O LORD, do you stand far off?” (Psalm 10:1). “Why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1). These are similar to the question, “How long?” The poet of Psalm 13 asks it three times in a row:

“How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your face from me?

How long must I bear pain in my soul,

and have sorrow in my heart all day long?

How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?” (Psalm 13:1–2)

The prophet Habakkuk joins the Psalmist with the same question, “O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? (Hab 1:2).

Both “Why?” and “How long?” are interrogative accusations. “Why?” implies there is no good reason for what God has done or allowed. “How long?” accuses God of uncaring neglect or a failure even to listen. In none of these does the questioner seem sheepish or embarrassed at holding the Divine to human account, and in none of these does God get defensive. Apparently, in the eyes of the Hebrew Bible, this is just what mortal humans do, and God seems OK with it.

Job’s questions, like “Why did I not die at birth?” (Job 3:11) and “Why have you made me your target?” (Job 7:20), were shut down by a voice from a whirlwind meant to overwhelm him into silence. God asks Job, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” (Job 38:4) to which Job replies with repentant dust and ashes (Job 42:6). Job’s humble response was his idea, not God’s. The fact that God responded to Job’s question with his display of power only shows that he considered the question legitimate. That display may not have constituted an answer, but the fact that God responded without reproach meant that he took Job’s question seriously as legitimate.

Moses, encountering God at the burning bush, innocently asks God his name, and receives an answer without reproach (Exod 3). Sometimes, Moses’ questions were clearly accusatory. When the Egyptian taskmasters force the enslaved Israelites to make bricks with straw that they themselves must procure, Moses asks God, “O LORD, why have you mistreated this people? Why did you ever send me?” (Exod 5:22). Despite two accusations, one, that God himself was mistreating the people, and two, that God lacked wisdom and foresight in sending Moses on such a fool’s errand. But God’s response is mild: “Then the LORD said to Moses, ‘Now you shall see what I will do to Pharaoh.”’ (Exod 6:1). It was as if Moses challenged God to prove His plan was wise, and God said, in effect, “Just watch me prove it.”

When the Israelites run out of water in the desert wilderness, trouble breaks out. Moses asks God, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me” (Exod. 17:4). God’s gentle reply is to instruct Moses to strike the rock from which waters will flow in abundance, thus assuaging the people’s rebellious mood. The question with its implicit criticism of God was passed over in silence.

According to the Bible, Moses is capable of leveling a barrage of accusatory questions at God. When, in the wilderness, the people grow weary of the daily supply of manna from heaven and crave a meal of meat, with garlic and onions as they had back in Egypt, they form a rabble against him. So Moses launches into his tirade, “Moses said to the LORD, ‘Why have you treated your servant (himself) so badly? Why have I not found favor in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me? Did I conceive all this people? Did I give birth to them,…? Where am I to get meat to give to all this people? …If this is the way you are going to treat me, put me to death at once” (Numb 11:11–15). As if God knew that sometimes Moses just needed to rant and that he would calm down afterwards, God again let his insolence pass without comment, saying, “Is the LORD’S power limited? Now you shall see whether my word will come true for you or not.” (Numb 11:23). Sometimes God answers accusatory questions with his own question, but not with judgment.

After an unexpected defeat in battle, the commander of the Israelites, Moses’ successor, also questioned God, “Joshua said, ‘Why have you brought this people across the Jordan at all, to hand us over to the Amorites so as to destroy us?’” (Joshua 7:7). While not reacting to the insolence of the question per se, God seemed irritated. But the source of his ire was more that Joshua did not get the gravity of the sin that had prompted God to withdraw his military aid, thus allowing for the defeat. God said to Joshua, “Stand up!… Israel has sinned… Therefore the Israelites are unable to stand before their enemies” (Josh 10:10–12). God’s reply is a correction, but not judgment for asking God to justify himself.

The great prophet Elijah, when staying in the home of a widow whose son died, asked God, “O LORD, have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I am staying?” (1 Kings 17:20). God made no reply to Elijah, but answered his prayer and restored the child’s life.

The Questions with Adverse Consequences

On the other hand, sometimes, according to the Bible, the questions are too much, and God responds negatively to them. The prophet Malachi includes some examples of questions that get a negative response from God. Malachi, speaking as if he is repeating the questions of the people (fairly representing them?) has them ask God, who has professed his love for them, “How have you loved us?” (Mal 1:2). Speaking for the priests who have been offering polluted sacrifices, Malachi says they ask, “How have we despised your name?” In response, Malachi then speaks for God, telling them he would rather they not open the temple doors at all, nor light sacrificial fires, so lax and disrespectful was their religious observance: “Oh, that someone among you would shut the temple doors, so that you would not kindle fire on my altar in vain! I have no pleasure in you, says the LORD of hosts, and I will not accept an offering from your hands” (Mal. 1:10). Their questions themselves were not the problem exactly. Still, it was the fact that the questions betrayed an attitude of dishonoring God, in a way they would never think to dishonor even their governor.

In the New Testament, questioning God or a messenger angel can signal a lack of faith, which God does not approve of. When the angel Gabriel told John the Baptist’s father Zechariah that his wife Elizabeth would conceive and bear a son, Zechariah asked, “How will I know that this is so? For I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years.” (Luke 1:18) It seems like a legitimate question. Still, Gabriel cries “foul:” “But now, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time, you will become mute, unable to speak, until the day these things occur.” Temporary muteness is not very severe, but it is a punishment. Here again, perhaps it was not the questioning that was punished, but the lack of faith it implied. As a counterpoint, however, Mary asks a similar question of Gabriel, after he announces her impending pregnancy, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” but is not punished with muteness or anything else. Perhaps her question is more curiosity than unbelief?

The harshest criticism of questioning God comes from Paul, who could get caustic when challenged. After describing God’s sovereign choice to save some and not others, Paul anticipates an adverse reaction among his readers, who may question God’s fairness. Paul’s response is to say that God, just like a potter, can mold from his clay whatever he chooses. He can mold some objects for special use and others for ordinary use. In either case, humans, no more than the clay, have no right to object: “Who indeed are you, a human being, to argue with God? Will what is molded say to the one who molds it, ‘Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one object for special use and another for ordinary use?” (Rom. 9:20–21). For Paul, the very act of questioning God was out of bounds. Humans have no more rights before God than lumps of clay do before the potter.

But we must ask, was Paul in or out of bounds himself? The final act of questioning God we will look at in this part one is from Jesus himself. According to Matthew and Mark’s gospels, Jesus, nearing the end of his life, from the cross asks, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46; Mark 15:34). If Jesus can feel God-forsaken and can accuse God of abandoning him, which is what his question does, then surely, Paul has overstated the case. Perhaps, because the gospels were written after Paul wrote his letters, Paul had not heard that narrative account. Nevertheless, the Gospel writers present Jesus in his humanity as fully capable of feeling hunger and fatigue, compassion and frustration, love and grief, and, finally, doubt. The very human situation is of not knowing, not seeing the Divine perspective, not understanding the mind of God, and hence needing to ask questions, even to doubt.

Conclusion

The fact that Jesus himself was depicted as doubting the God whom he had asked his followers to trust implicitly, like the Good Shepherd, shows how endemic the difficulty of faith is in mortal minds. Faith itself, according to the author of Hebrews, is “the evidence of things unseen” (Heb. 11:1). But that can seem like weak evidence in the face of life experiences that we, like the Biblical characters, are subject to, including experiencing evil, pain, oppression, injustice, and even regular human depression.

They say that “To err is human, to forgive, divine.” We might also say that “to question is human, and to forgive questioning is divine.” According to the Bible’s majority witness, questions are fair game. To have even a mustardseed-sized faith, as well as having questions and Jesus-like doubt, is to be in the honest position of the desperate man who brought his seizure-afflicted son to Jesus for healing. Jesus told him that all things were possible for those who believe (that is, have faith). To which the man replied, “I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24).

As a young boy on a choir tour with the Dayton Rotary Boys’ Choir, Mexico City amazed me. And in some ways, it confused me. I had seen the homes of wealthy people in the States and poverty from the back seat window of a car and on TV, but in Mexico City, they were often side by side. One shack was next door to a mansion. The mansions always had high walls around them with broken glass shards cemented into the top layer. I understood the wall; everyone wants security. However, the glass shards on the top of the wall seemed to be two things at once: an extra barrier to entry, and overt cruelty; “If you climb my wall, I’ll cut you to ribbons.” The glass pieces made the protected wealth behind the wall both the indulgence of he wealthy and a sneer to the poor. It seemed to assert the lack of relationship between the two, not to mention the absence of any obligation.

Do we have obligations to each other? Nothing seems more evident to me, but I admit, I am a product of my social situation. I was raised a Christian in a sincerely practicing Christian family. I have heard Bible stories forever; probably from the womb. The only one who would dare to ask, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” as Cain did after he murdered Abel, was asking it as a dodge to avoid his obvious culpability. God was not having it. Able was banished; the lesson was clear.

Then, there was that parable Jesus told about the rich man and Lazarus, the beggar, lying at his gate (Luke 16). The story always grabbed my little mind; the Bible was graphic. The dogs licked poor Lazarus’ wounds, while the rich man ignored him. Of course, their fortunes would be reversed in the world beyond the grave; that was only fair. The poor man went to Abraham’s bosom while the rich man suffered in flames. He got what was coming to him, according to my impressionable mind.

Then there was that other parable about another rich man who, instead of setting up a food bank for the poor when he had a bumper harvest too big for his present barns to hold, planned to build bigger barns (Luke 12). How will bigger barns make you any happier? How much can one person eat? Are there no limits on accumulation? How much is enough? To the rich man, the answer is “a little bit more.” But to God, in the parable, that idea was scandalous. The night on which he planned more barn space was his last. His soul was “required of him.” Jesus made the lesson, in case we missed it, explicit, saying, “a person’s life does not consist in the abundance of their possessions.” Two facts of life have always been true: wealth does not make you happy, and you can’t take it with you. The third fact seemed obvious to me, too: we have obligations to each other.

At home, at evening Bible story time, the Hebrew prophets never showed up. The Old Testament wasn’t absent; we had the Flood story, David and Goliath, the falling walls of Jericho, and others, but never the prophets. So it wasn’t until I was older that I found them as part of my morning Bible reading practice. When I did, I remember the thought occurring to me that Jesus seemed to have absorbed their take on poverty and wealth; he was not innovating, but amplifying. The prophets often seemed angrier than Jesus on the subject. They didn’t just tell parables, they pronounced “woe”s, or curses. They were furious, and they had reasons to be. The wealth disparity in ancient Israel was vast. A tiny aristocratic elite allied to and benefiting from the king’s court feasted while peasants scrounged and scraped to coax a living out of the soil of Palestinian farms. Taxes were high — someone has to pay for the banquets. So high that resisting them split the nation in two after Solomon’s death, according to the Bible’s telling. The prophets, raised in the Mosaic legal tradition, at least as literature if not history, believed every Israelite had the obligation to see every other Israelite as “neighbor.” The poor had the right to glean behind the reapers in fields and vineyards. The national tithe every third year was to support the quintessential disadvantaged, the “widow, the orphan, and the stranger (resident non-citizen, that is, immigrant).

But that was not happening, and it made the prophets apoplectic. Isaiah called the people who should have had the nation’s interests at heart, “dogs” because instead, they said to each other, “Come,” they say, ‘let us get wine; let us fill ourselves with strong drink. And tomorrow will be like today, great beyond measure’” (Isa 56:9–10). It got worse. He told them they were “offspring of an adulterer and a whore” (Isa. 57:3). From Isaiah’s perspective, religious observance was worthless in the face of such social conditions. Fasting was pointless. “ Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? (probably meaning the yoke of debt slavery) Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house? (Isa. 58:6). Even offerings and sacrifices could be called an “abomination” to God, who was so offended that he said, “I cannot endure solemn assemblies (that is, worship)” (Isa. 1:13).

Amos was angry, too. He said, the rich were trampling “the head of the poor into the dust of the earth” (Amos 2:7). He accused the elite of lying on beds of ivory while they “sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals” (Amos 6:4; 2:6). He, like Isaiah was not beyond animal insults. The wives of the elite were guilty too, not that they were out there trampling the heads of the poor themselves, but that they were passively participating in luxurious indolence that the wealth of oppression provided. So Amos called them “cows” and pronounced this curse on them, “Hear this word, you cows…who oppress the poor, who crush the needy, (indirectly) who say to their husbands, ‘Bring something to drink!’” (Amos 4:1). Ordering drinks while the poor were being crushed was an outrage. Amos predicted it would precipitate their demise. Their corruption extended all the way to the legal system, which they bent to their advantage. “You who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate (the ancient court). Therefore the prudent will keep silent in such a time; for it is an evil time” (Amos 5:12).

It is easy to see why the Bible molded my moral world, convincing me that obligations to each other were foundational. Wealth disparity was a problem, to say the least. And passively enjoying the benefits of a system that left so many in such misery was as bad as actively harming them. Those were my takeaways.

The prophets of Israel, and hence, Jesus, believed obligations were fundamental. You don’t just walk past the man whom the robbers beat half to death, like the Priest and the Levite did, you help him, like the “good” Samaritan did, why? because the question was never “who is (and so, who is not) my neighbor?” But instead, “Which one was a neighbor to him?”

But that does not solve any modern problem. Is it wrong to start a business that produces products that people want or need in such quantities that you become fabulously wealthy? Is it a sin to have a skill in enough demand that you are paid an enormous salary? How could it be a moral problem to provide a service that people find useful and will pay money for, making you rich? Wealth was not produced in these ways in the ancient worlds of Israel or Rome, so no one asked those questions or offered answers. The Bible has nothing to say about DNA or capitalism, which it knew nothing about.

But some things seem evident to me, given all those Bible stories. While having wealth and acquiring it by honest means is not the problem, it does present some issues for us. The first issue is the question of obligation. Are we obligated to provide for each other or not? Are we our brother’s keeper? The next question is about juxtaposition. Flaunting wealth in the face of poverty seems obscene. It is not wrong to remodel your kitchen, but it may be immoral if you know that the carpenters are not paid enough to keep their families housed and fed properly. Like glass atop a wall, it seems cruel to go out your door warm and well-fed, stepping over the bigger at your gate. It seems to me that there are times when ordering a drink puts you in moral peril.

I am happy to announce that the manuscript of the book I have been writing has been accepted for publication by Wipf & Stock Publishers. It still needs to go through the copyediting process, but it should be available sometime next year. My working title is All the Families of the Earth. This comes from God’s promise to bless Abraham and his offspring (Gen. 12:1–3), and through them, to also bless all the families of the earth.

I am excited to see it get published because the topic is important, even urgent at this time in America. Christian Nationalism has swept the Evangelical world and has taken many others along with it. It claims to be Biblical. My book will lay bare that claim. I show that from beginning to end, literally from Genesis to Revelation, there is a tension running through the whole Bible. That tension is that on the one hand, Israel is God’s chosen nation. God says as much.

On the other hand, the Creator God is the one who made humankind in his image and likeness and is the Lord of all the earth. The tension exists because while telling the epic story of the Chosen People, foreigners keep showing up, playing crucial roles in the narrative. Moses would have been killed if not rescued and raised by the daughter of Pharaoh. The Israelite spies would never have survived without the help of Rahab the prostitute in Jericho. David’s family line would have died out had it not been for Ruth the Moabite. And that is just the beginning; there are many more.

By the time we get to the New Testament, we see Jesus healing foreigners, going to their territory, and finally commissioning his disciples to go into the world with the gospel’s good news. Paul says that in Christ, there is no Jew or Greek anymore. The book of Revelation imagines people from every tribe and nation worshipping around the throne of the Lamb. The tension finally resolves: God loves the world. The quest for Nationalism is ethnic division. The Bible’s message is unity.

Thank you for following me here. I’ll keep you posted about the book.

Violence was not new to Colombia nor to Uribe’s family. His mother, a journalist, was kidnapped by the Medellín Cartel and killed in a botched rescue attempt in 1991. After Uribe was shot, everyone was asking, Will this mean a return to the days of frequent political violence in Colombia? That possibility did not seem far-fetched. Colombia’s experience with violence has been long and intense.

According to a study by Colombia's National Centre for Historical Memory,

“220,000 people died in the conflict between 1958 and 2013, most of them civilians (177,307 civilians and 40,787 fighters,), and more than five million civilians were forced from their homes between 1985 and 2012, generating the world's second-largest population of internally displaced persons (IDPs).”

Those deaths include more than 45,000 children.

Why is this important to me, and to Americans?

Because the majority of Colombians know that violence is not the answer, and they know that reactions to violence, including rhetoric from politicians who hope to benefit from pointing accusing fingers, is part of the problem; it leads to more violence.

So, political figures from across the ideological spectrum agreed to participate in a march that the centrist Union Party for the People called “a civic act that transcends partisan divides and calls for collective reflection.”

The Bogota paper El Tiempo reported:

“Congressmen and presidential candidates, both opposition and independent, have emphatically called for citizens to unite and carry the same message of peace. ‘The violent ones will not write the destiny of Colombians. Therefore, we want to invite you all this Sunday to the great “silent march,” ‘said Senator Paloma Valencia, who insisted that Colombia will not surrender: "Long live the life of Miguel Uribe and all Colombians. No to terrorism.’"

Jennifer Pedraza, representative of the Dignity and Commitment party, set the conditions for the march, including

“not wearing political or electoral colors or insignia, nor cheering on teams or supporters. Likewise, refraining from spreading messages of hate or aggression. ‘This demonstration belongs to all Colombians. The message that unites us is peace and the rejection of violence,’ Pedraza emphasized.”

The united politicians called for a silent march, free from political slogans and speeches. On September 15, 70,000 people filled Bolívar Square. They could not keep silent. But their chants and slogans were not political. They called for an end to violence and expressed hopes that Uribe, still in the hospital, would recover. Many carried rosaries. Their chants included, “"Strength Miguel (Uribe),” "There Are More of Us," and "Strength Colombia.”

El Tiempo reported that

“Bogotá's Bolívar Square was a white sea of flags waving (the national) tricolor flags during the March of Silence . Thousands of people sang the national anthem with their hands on their hearts, then sang the song ‘Colombia Tierra Querida’ (Colombia Beloved Land) in the center of the Colombian capital. Finally, they let fly white balloons to close the day.”

People interviewed by El Tiempo at the square said things like, “I came because I reject violence,” and "I want to leave my children a democratic and peaceful republic.” One woman, wrapped in a Colombian flag, said, “I love my country and I'm pained by violence, wherever it comes from. This isn't about political parties, but about Colombia united for peace.”

The political parties agreed that no candidate, congressman, or other member of their organizations would appear on the platform. Together, they renounced polarization and called for peace.

What can we learn from Colombia?

After so much political violence here in America, especially this year, perhaps Americans can have the humility to learn from our neighbor to the South. They demonstrated that there is nothing but more violence to be gained by using violent acts for political gain. Politicians showed their integrity and decency by staying off the platform. Neither they nor their supporters wore party hats or t-shirts, nor waved their party flags. They waved their country’s flag. They showed us the dignity of solidarity against the scourge of violence that their country had endured for so long and was now sick of.

Democracy is precious. The freedom to have open, honest debates with people we disagree with without fear is fundamental. We all suffer when good people choose not to run for office for fear of violence. We all lose when violence snuffs out voices, even those voices with whom we disagree. Argument, not violence, is the only legitimate tool of persuasion in a functioning democracy. Silence, not recrimination and accusation, is what we require from decent leaders and supporters on every side of the political landscape. As voters in a democracy, we deserve this. As voters, we can support candidates who show such dignity. As long as we have free and fair elections, we can get the government we deserve. The alternative is the unthinkable reality that Colombians know too well.

I’m writing a book because I have to do something. I have lived in a place (the former Yugoslavia) where nationalism motivated a needless civil war that killed thousands of people. I lived within 30 minutes of mass graves — in more than one direction from my home. I have toured depopulated, bombed-out villages. I have had to raise money to pay the salaries of pastors in exile from the war.

This is personal for me. I’m writing it now because nationalism is on the rise in my native America and is already harming thousands of people. It could easily explode into outright violence. I’m particularly alarmed that Christians have gotten swept up into this nationalist fervor, and people are publicly calling it “Christian nationalism.” I believe that is a deeply perverse oxymoron. They cite the Bible in their attempts to justify it. I am the person to write this because the Bible has been my area of study all my adult life. I taught the Bible on a college level for over a decade in Croatia and taught adult Bible studies in the Presbyterian Church (USA) congregations I served in the States. So, I know when religious leaders and cynical politicians are abusing the Bible, and it makes me angry.

My book, however, is not an angry screed. Just the opposite. It is a gentle walk through 20 passages that show that, according to the Bible, though God chose Abraham and his descendants in particular for special blessings as the “chosen people.” Nevertheless, that blessing also included “All the families of the earth.” (Gen. 12:3). So, my provisional title is All the Families of the Earth: Navigating Identity and Nationalism in Biblical Narratives. Non-Israelites show up in the Bible as crucial to the story, from Moses’ Midianite wife, Rahab, who hid the Israelite spies in Jericho, to Ruth, the ancestress of David, and hence, Jesus himself. Non-Israelites were also part of Jesus’ ministry, like the Canaanite woman with the sick daughter and the Roman Centurion with the sick servant. Paul’s whole mission was to the Gentiles, whom he called “the Israel of God” because “there is no Jew nor Greek” in God’s eyes anymore. All along the way, I point out that the entire Biblical narrative runs counter to Christian nationalists’ claims to be the inheritors of the “chosen” status, and that their exclusivist agenda is diametrically opposed to God’s universal love for “all the families of the earth.”

People who consider themselves Christians and are interested in what the Bible has to say about nationalist claims will want to read this book for a sober assessment of what the Bible actually says. Study groups will find this book an asset to help them clarify Christian nationalists' claims against the clear message of the Bible.

This book could make a difference if people are open to facts. The Bible is clear. The Christian nationalists cherry pick verses out of context; this book will show how inappropriate their attempt are — not by taking each of their claims on, one by one, but by showing that the sweep of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation is about the Creator God who made every human being in God’s image, who loves the entire world, and wishes to redeem and bless “all the families of the earth.”

I am close to finishing my first draft. I hope the book will be available sometime in 2026. I plan to make an audio version as well.

In the meantime, if you want to get up to speed with what is happening in the world of Christian Nationalism, I recommend these excellent books:

Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

Katherine Stewart, Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy

Matthew D. Taylor, The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy

Andrew L. Whitehead, American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church

Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism

Jim Wallis, The False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith, and Refounding Democracy

Croatian war damage near my home, ca. 1991

“Like getting kicked in the head by a horse” is an expression I’ve heard, but never experienced literally. But that’s what it felt like to move from the States to Romania in 1991. I was in for kicks in the head I never expected. Just like a head-kicking horse, Romania didn’t have any animosity towards me; it was just what happens. When you walk too close to a horse, it can happen. When you take a white guy who grew up in the suburbs of middle America and put him in a Romanian city, he is going to feel kicked in the head by all the things he didn’t know.

The biggest kick in the head for me was learning that history is a battlefield. History is a big deal in Europe, where borders have often changed over the centuries. Everyone has their own version of history, and they do not agree with each other. They have conflicting answers to the questions: Who was here first? When did “our people” get here? Who was here before us? Did they have a right to be here, or were they squatters on land that belonged to us? How long were our people in control of the land? Who were the interlopers who invaded us? How will we regain our former hegemony over this land? Can we sing songs that celebrate our former glory? Can we wear the traditional costumes of those glory days and dance to traditional music? Or would that dancing and music be interpreted as a politically subversive act?

I’m old enough to remember overhead projectors. Teachers would put a plastic page on the glass, and the light below would shine through it to the lens that focused it on the screen. This was before PowerPoint projectors, but it did the same job. The teacher could project, for example, a map outline from one plastic page. On top of that, another layer could be added, with cities and rivers indicated. The layering could go on for several pages, adding more detail. When I discovered the competing versions of history that different communities had claimed, I thought of those overhead projectors. The base layer was the geographical outline of the continent. The layers would be the borders of the empires or nations, one layer for each century or whenever the borders changed. In Romania, you would have the indigenous tribes layer, followed by the Roman layer. There would be layers for the Ottoman Empire, followed by the Habsburg Empire. That’s the short version. If you were teaching a graduate class, you would have layers for the Goths, the Huns, the Gepids (never heard of them), the Avars, the Slavs, the Magyars (Hungarians), the Pechenegs, the Cumans, the Uzes, the Alans, and the Tatars, if Wikipedia is to be trusted.

While abroad, I became aware of an American prayer movement that had an inkling of a concept of historically significant locations. This is going to sound cynical. I don’t want to be cynical about true believers and their practices, but I can’t help myself about this one. I heard they planned a trip to the Balkans to pray for peace. They apparently chose a location because multiple warring nations claimed it. If, somehow, prayers on location are more potent than prayers at a distance (something I didn’t think we Protestants believed), then being in one location shared by both sides could count for both of them. Or something like that. There was a place in modern Croatia that had been, at one time or another, under the control of the Ottomans, Venetians, Italians, Habsburgs, Serbs, and Croats, so I thought they should pray there, if anywhere. Again, apologies for the cynicism, but that struck me as ridiculous. I’ll probably never outlive my non-Pentecostal Protestant presumptions. Prayer, if it is real, is about talking to a God who is both timeless and unbound geographically. That’s what I was taught to believe.

When I lived in Romania, I lived in the northwest corner called Transylvania (yes, the home of the Dracula legends). Transylvania used to be in Hungary before the end of World War I, and the Hungarians I became acquainted with believed it was still meant to be Hungary. But the Romanians told another story. They remembered that Michael the Brave had united all the regions of Romania under one unified rule for one year, 1559-1560, establishing forever the Romanian’s claim to Transylvania.

The Hungarians had a joke to undermine that claim. You need to know this one detail to get the joke. In the city of Cluj (Hungarians still call it Kolozsvar), there is a big square in the center by the Gothic cathedral where a statue of Hungarian King Steven, atop a war horse, flanked by statues of foot soldiers, is proudly displayed. Several blocks away, two diagonal streets come together to form a triangular park on which a statue of Romanian king Michael the Brave sits alone on his horse. So here is the joke. A father and young son walk past the big square and notice the Hungarian King Steven, then pass the small triangular park and the Romanian Michael the Brave’s statue. The son asks his father, “Dad, this is Romania, right?” The father answers, “Yes, son, this is Romania.” The son, puzzled, then follows up, asking, “Well, if this is Romania, then why does the Hungarian king have a big statue in the big square, and the Romanian king has a small statue in a smaller place?” The father, not wanting to have his son repeat anything that might be considered a political position (since this joke was told during Communism), said, “Son, I don’t know anything about politics. All I know is that the one who comes first gets the best seat.” History is a battlefield.

The biggest kick in the head to my naive American mind was that everybody seems to fight on the battlefields of history. Putin has his version of Russian history. Ukraine has another. How do you win on the history battlefield? War is a brutal way that Russia has chosen. So far, Russia has lost over 1 million people to establish its historical claim, and the war appears to be nowhere close to a conclusion.

Israel and Palestine have their own versions of history, too. Both claims have God and scripture on their side, but the two gods and sacred scriptures authorize competing versions of history. They also authorize genocide. Nobody wants to talk about Joshua’s genocidal conquest of the cities of Canaan, described in the Bible, but they are there to be read. After the battle for Jericho, when the walls “came a tumblin’ down,” they went in and killed every man, woman, and child, oxen, sheep, and donkeys too (Joshua 6:21). It looks like Gaza may be next.

I have learned that there are even competing histories of Jesus. Thomas Jefferson championed one at odds with the classical Christian concept of Jesus as the Son of God and Savior of the world. Jefferson, and many of his friends whose names appear on our Declaration of Independence, were Deists. As such, he conceived of God like a Swiss watchmaker, only infinitely more precise. He made a perfect world, or “the best of all possible worlds,” as Leibniz said. Once a perfect world has been made, you don’t mess with it. So, no miracles. However, Jefferson held Jesus’ moral teachings in high regard. He constructed his version of Jesus’ teachings by cutting and pasting the good parts out of the New Testament, leaving the rest on the cutting room floor. Today, you can buy Jefferson’s cut-up, miracle-free version of Jesus’ teachings, called The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (1820).

But modern Christian Nationalists don’t want you to know that about Jefferson and his Deist pals. They want them all to be traditional Christians, to help justify their claim that America was founded as a Christian nation and so should always and only be just that. They also want to control the history curriculum because they understand that history is where the battle needs to be won. So, their version of America goes light on slavery, the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population, and continues to have praise for Columbus, who we now know was a genocidal maniac. Learning about him, not in school, but much later, as an adult, was another kick in the head for me.

No one, so far, is rewriting the history of the success of seatbelts. They are surprisingly non-political anymore, even in this present polarized context. It has been reported that from 1960 to 2012, seatbelts saved 329,700 lives, more than any other technology in that period. Across all safety standards combined (belts, airbags, etc.), at least 860,000 deaths were prevented from 1968 to 2019. Happily, no one disputes that. But vaccines are not so lucky. Even though before widespread measles vaccination in the 1960s, for example, 2–3 million children died of measles annually, by the 2010s, that number had dropped by over 80%. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), among U.S. children born between 1994 and 2021, routine childhood immunizations will prevent more than 472 million illnesses, 1,052,000 deaths, and 30 million hospitalizations over their lifetimes (source: CDC, 2021 Immunization Impact Report). But who needs CDC experts anymore? RFK knows better. Never mind real history, he has his own history of side effects that would make L. Ron Hubbard blush. Seatbelts are probably next.

The unkindest kick in the head for me is learning that when you are fighting on the battlefield of history, you don’t need to be constrained by facts. You can make up alternative facts. And people will believe them. They will change health policies, discount science, tell you that your people are fake, your nation is phony, and go to war to prove it. They will use their made-up histories to justify ethnic cleansing, famine, genocide, anything. And they will tell you that God approves.

Jonathan Rauch wrote a book called The Constitution of Knowledge about living in the “reality-based” community. He said we have created a worldwide brain in which scientists in a lab in Harvard Square can publish findings that scientists in Beijing can replicate in their labs. This has enabled us to define the human genome, create gene-splicing technology, invent mRNA vaccines, and save millions of lives. The history of scientific progress is real history, at least to those who wish to live in the reality-based community. Not everyone does. History, however, doesn’t stand still. The next generation of unvaccinated children may give their parents’ generation a kick in the head that you don’t get back up from. I don’t want that future, but if reality lies limp on the battlefield of history, I don’t know what will prevent it.

When the Europeans arrived in the New World, the land was not empty. People were already living there. The story of the relationship between the newcomers and the indigenous population varied. Sometimes relations were positive, even friendly. Sometimes there was brutal violence. But whatever the relationship was, the Europeans were immigrants. They were not indigenous to the land; they came as aliens.

I am a descendant of those Europeans. My ancestors were immigrants. We were lucky. We Swiss-Germans faced no discrimination when we arrived. Pennsylvania was welcoming to us. The native populations had been pushed out long before my people arrived. We built farms, raised livestock, harvested the food we grew, and survived. We built communities. Churches, schools, town halls, courthouses, jails, and parks. At least, that’s the story I’ve been handed. It did not take us many generations to forget that we were once aliens to our adopted land. Our immigrant history could be forgotten. And it was.

Our family never developed any traditions that tried to keep the memory of our former immigrant status alive. Eventually, as America expanded westward, prairie land opened up in Kansas, so our branch of the Pennsylvania Deutsch jumped at the chance. They broke prairie sod into squares to build their first house on the Kansas plains. By my father’s generation, we were indistinguishable from any other Kansas family. Nobody even remembers the last German speakers. We ate no German dishes, knew no German songs or dances, celebrated no German holidays; we were just Americans, former immigrants who had forgotten their history. In fact, we had forgotten our history so thoroughly that the Swiss part of being Swiss-German was only uncovered recently by one of us, who did the genealogical spade work for us.

So now, having forgotten how we got here, we do not identify with modern immigrants. We do not remember our family's reasons for making that giant, dangerous, uncertain leap into the New World all those years ago. But they had to have had their reasons. They must have concluded that old Europe had no future for them. They must have held out dreams of making a new life in a land with new possibilities in America. Even though they did not speak the language when they arrived, they assumed they would make it, and it would be worth it.

In many ways, my family is like and unlike Biblical Israel. According to the Biblical account, the Israelites came into a land that they were not native to. They entered the “Promised Land” as non-indigenous aliens, as immigrants. They had come from Mesopotamia hundreds of years before. They had lived in Egypt as slaves under the Pharaoh for four centuries. They had been wandering nomads in the wilderness of Sinai for a whole generation before finally entering the land. Finally, like the Europeans in the New World, they displaced the native populations. “Displaced” is a euphemism for the wars of Joshua that enabled them to conquer the land. But conquer, they did, and eventually it was theirs alone, just like America.

Unlike a genealogy blog, the Biblical story is not told to merely recount a distant past for future generations. The story in the Bible is told to form the consciences of future generations into the ethical ideals deemed essential. In other words, the remembered stories are lessons in ethics. By today’s standards, however, some of them are ethical nightmares: holy war? Genocide? All justified because God “gave us the land”? No. Those lessons from the Iron Age need to end in the dustbin of history after further ethical reflection, which they did. No one supports those ideas today, right? (Well, almost no one.)

But there are plenty of other ethical ideals that these stories encode that still live and breathe with a vitality that makes them relevant for our times. We still have immigrants. We still struggle as a society with what to do about them. How many should we let in? What reasons do they have for wanting to leave their native lands to come to a land in which they are aliens? Should their reasons make a difference? Do we have any special reasons to care, one way or another? What are the ethical issues we should face about immigration?

The Bible's story of the ancient Israelites includes ethical reflections on immigrants. The Bible calls them (in English translations) “aliens.” Some English versions call them “strangers.” That means non-natives; immigrants. The Biblical story is about how Moses gave the people the law, which he received directly from God on Mt. Sinai. They called the law of Moses the “Torah.” So, the “law of Moses” was, according to the story, God’s law. Therefore, the Torah has been held in the highest regard in the Jewish community and subsequently by Christians.

What is the ethical guideline given to Israel by God about the treatment of alien immigrants? Here is the law, and the reason for the law:

“When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God” (Lev. 19:33-34).

The ethical law has three clauses and a rationale:

• No oppression (discrimination, taking advantage of).

• Treat immigrants as citizens (rights, responsibilities, obligations of fair treatment).

• Love the immigrant as you love yourself.

Rationale: You yourselves were aliens in the land of Egypt. Memory is a basis for empathy.

In other words, God called Israel to do what my ancestors forgot to do. Israel was to be a community of memory. They were to know who they were: former alien immigrants. Remembering who they were was intended to motivate them to have empathy: other people are in the same condition your people were in, so treat them the way your ancestors would have wanted to be treated. A good summary of this ethical admonition might be, “do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” The “others” in this case are immigrants.

Losing the memory of who you were has the ethical effect of losing your motivation for empathy. If you cannot imagine people like you being people like them, why should you care about them? But your people were like them. They had reasons for leaving old Europe. They had hopes and dreams that made the risk of immigration tolerable. They wanted a better life; if not for themselves, then at least for their children. They hoped that the New World would welcome them, or at least tolerate them. They did not expect that they would be treated like “citizens,” much less that they would be “loved” as the Israelites were commanded to do. They expected only simple human decency and an opportunity to work hard. My people got that opportunity.

America has always had a hard time giving that same courtesy of simple human decency to immigrants who do not fit the mold of a Western European. We have a long record of discrimination against people who, by some measure, were “other”. We even gave the Irish a hard time of it — Irish people — why? And then the Italians, Greeks, Slavs, Jews, Asians of all kinds; none of them got the welcome mat like my people did. Now it’s the people from Latin America; same story. We did not remember that we, too, were once “slaves in Egypt,” so to speak. We forget who we are, and so have no basis for empathy. Even without memory, we could appeal to our faith tradition. But we were not so good at Bible reading, as it turns out; who reads Leviticus? Who could find the 10 commandments in the Bible? Who could locate the Sermon on the Mount?

Nevertheless, our sacred text stands as a witness against us. How are we called to treat the “alien” that resides with us in our land?

“When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God” (Lev. 19:33-34).

How are we doing with that?

If you are the king, does anything go? Do you have carte blanche? Should you have limits? Are there behaviors or actions that are incompatible with good governance? Should you be immune to criticism?

Ancient Israel is an interesting test case. As everyone knows, they had many kings; most of them disastrous. However, according to the narrative in the Hebrew Bible, they did not begin as a monarchy. In fact, the monarchy was an innovation after many years of being a confederation of tribes that would periodically muster together to resist an enemy, like the dread Philistines.

How did they evolve from a tribal confederacy into a monarchy? The story is told in I Samuel. The elders of Israel came together to confront Samuel, the “judge” or recognized spiritual and judicial leader of the tribal confederacy, with a request.

 “You are old and your sons do not follow in your ways; appoint for us, then, a king to govern us, like other nations.” (1Sam. 8:5)

The elder’s desire to be “like other nations” is a cryptic sign that the request to become a monarchy was misdirected. According to the Torah (Hebrew Bible), Israel was not supposed to be “like other nations.” God gave them a mandate to be different: “You shall be holy to me; for I the LORD am holy, and I have separated you from the other peoples to be mine” (Lev. 20:26).

But they wanted a king, and their reason seemed legitimate. A king, they believed, would be more effective at organizing a defensive military. Samuel objected, but they pressed him, saying, “No! But we are determined to have a king over us, so that we also may be like other nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles” (1 Sam. 8:19).

The books of I and II Samuel and others (Judges, 1 and 2 Kings) are filled with bitter irony. The irony in this story is that their last conflict with the Philistines was a total victory for them, without a king. God won the victory for them. “…the LORD thundered with a mighty voice that day against the Philistines and threw them into confusion; and they were routed before Israel” (I Sam. 7:10).

By the way, the name Ebenezer comes from the memorial stone commemorating this victory that Samuel erected. To remember how the Lord had made them victorious, “Samuel took a stone and set it up … and named it Ebenezer; for he said, ‘Thus far the LORD has helped us’” (1 Sam. 7:12). Ebenezer comes from the Hebrew word for stone, “eben,” and the word for help “ezer.” An Ebenezer is a stone of help. The miser Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” ruined that name for the rest of us.

So, their desire to be “like the other nations” so that the king could “fight our battles” was already a sham, evident to anyone reading the story. But they wanted a king anyway. So, Samuel went home and prayed about it, but he did not get the expected answer. God said to him, “Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them” (1 Sam. 8:6). There you have it. The very desire for a king was a rejection of God. This was a huge mistake they were making. God added this message to Samuel,

“…you shall solemnly warn them, and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them” (1 Sam. 8:9).

So Samuel reported to them the consequences of becoming a monarchy that God had spelled out to him. He probably knew them already. He had lived long enough to know that kings do what they always do: take. “Take” is the keyword in his warning against the monarchy.

“These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; … some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. (1 Sam. 8:11-17)

This sad story was the beginning of the monarchy. The first king anointed was Saul. He was a disaster from the start. He was replaced by King David, whom Solomon followed. People often associate Solomon with wisdom, but that is part of the irony of the story, too. He “took” so much from the people, he basically enslaved them to fund his court and lavish building projects. When he died, so deep was the resentment against him that a revolt split the kingdom of Israel in two. That was a rift that was never healed. The entire story of the monarchy is told in a collection of books of the Bible, starting with Deuteronomy and ending in 2 Kings. So, this long epic begins with Moses telling the people how to live in the land they will soon enter, and ends with the sole survivors, exiled in Babylon. It is, in other words, the story of the rise and fall of the monarchy. It ended in complete disaster.

Whoever wrote that epic began with Deuteronomy, which gives a prequel to its dire end. In Deuteronomy 17, Moses offers this prescient instruction to the people who, remember, were just a loose confederation of related tribes. This has been called “The Law of the King:”

“When you have come into the land that the LORD your God is giving you, …and you say, ‘I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me,’ you may indeed set over you a king whom the LORD your God will choose”. (Deut. 17:14-15).

However, strict conditions were set, which placed strict parameters on the king’s behavior. Among them were these:

“…he must not acquire many horses for himself (for war), …And he must not acquire many wives for himself, …also silver and gold he must not acquire in great quantity for himself” (Deut. 17:16-17).

Some say that King Solomon sat for that portrait. That’s precisely what he did.

So, the king was forbidden from militarizing the nation (horses), indulging his own personal lusts (wives), or becoming a kleptocracy (acquiring gold). Israel’s wisdom tradition, notably the book of Proverbs, includes reflections on the role of a king that make him subject to ethical standards. Even the king is not above the law. Consequences, for good or ill, will flow from his actions. For example:

Prov. 29:4 By justice, a king gives stability to the land,

Prov. 29:14 If a king judges the poor with equity, his throne will be established forever.

Prov. 16:12 It is an abomination to kings to do evil, for the throne is established by righteousness.

The Biblical story of the monarchy is that the kings did not do justice, provide equity for the poor, or refrain from evil. So the land did not have stability, their thrones or reigns ended miserably, and righteousness was nowhere to be found. The prophets of Israel were scathing in their indictments against the systems those kings administered, in which people were permitted to:

“sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals—they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth.” (Amos 2:6-7).

Amos excoriates a system in which there is a vast disparity between the wealthy few and the many poor. He even goes after the wives of the landowners who, “…oppress the poor, who crush the needy, who say to their husbands, ‘Bring something to drink!’” You can almost see them lounging at the poolside at the golf course clubhouse. They were passively indulgent, but indulgence created by oppression.

Similarly, the prophet Isaiah put the king and his administration, the ones who made the laws of the land, in the bull's eye for creating unjust conditions:

“Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless” (Isa. 10:1-2)

The lawmakers, in other words, the government, under the king's authority, were held responsible for making unethical laws and decrees that adversely affected the most vulnerable, the poor and widows. Isaiah shared the same ethic as the wise author of Proverbs 14:31:

“Those who oppress the poor insult their Maker, but those who are kind to the needy honor him.”

What do we take away from these texts, which are sacred to the Judeo-Christian tradition? What principles do these texts embody that may speak to our different times and circumstances?

Here is how I see it.

According to Biblical tradition, there are such things as justice and injustice, to which even the king, the highest power in the land, is held accountable.

Some behaviors are incompatible with proper governance.

The social conditions of the people are the direct result of the laws and policies set by those in power.

Those policies can and often do create inequality, wealth disparity, and poverty.

A leader’s unethical personal behavior has national effects.

Ultimately, if the leadership is bad enough, it can ruin the nation.

I’m in a small reading group; right now our book is Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations.” Aurelius was both a practitioner of Stoic philosophy, a Roman emperor, and a man who cared deeply about morality, unlike so many other emperors. He wanted to be good. He believed he knew what that meant, unlike today, when claims to “goodness” evoke questions like “whose version of ‘good’ are you talking about?” We live in the days of “my truth,” not “The Truth.” And, I guess there is no going back to a simpler time. Marcus Aurelius can seem naive to us now.

People in Marcus’s day believed that being good meant being virtuous. Today, we call this perspective “virtue ethics.” To be virtuous, one would do what a virtuous person would do in any situation. We do not talk about virtues much anymore. Instead, we are more likely to talk about our “duty” to something like the laws of the land, the Constitution, God, our “moral compass” or conscience. Or, we talk about what would be best for the most; the greatest good for the greatest number of people. (Ethicists call duty ethics “deontology” and the ethics of “the greatest good for the greatest number” either Utilitarianism or Consequentialism).

One topic that is off the table in polite company is shame. Shaming someone is considered an act of harm, perhaps leading to psychological trauma. I agree that shaming someone is something done only by self-righteous people, and it does cause harm. But shaming someone as a punishment is not the same as feeling shame. Aurelius believed that feeling shame played a role in his own spiritual development as a virtuous person. In Book 3 of “Meditations,” he says, “Never regard something as doing you good if it makes you betray a trust, or lose your sense of shame, or makes you show hatred, suspicion, ill will, or hypocrisy, or a desire for things best done behind closed doors. ” Losing your “sense of shame” could lead you to want to do “things best done behind closed doors,” where no one could see what you were doing.

In “Meditations,” Marcus frequently advises himself (Meditations are journal entries, often “notes to self” reminding him of his own ideals to strive for) not to pay any attention to applause, praise, or the opinions of others. So the “sense of shame” he believed was important was not that he wanted to avoid negative opinions. It was rather an internalized sense of not betraying his own moral code. He did not want to be ashamed of himself.

Where does that highly internalized value system come from? Where do we get that sense of morality that gives us our “moral compass” or conscience that makes us feel bad about ourselves, even when no one is looking and no one finds out? For people raised in the Western world who share the stories of the Bible, we remember the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden. Before “their eyes were opened” and they became “like God, knowing good and evil,” Genesis says, they were innocent, “And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.” (Gen. 3:5; 2:25). But after they ate the forbidden fruit, “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (Gen. 3:7). They felt shame.

Did they blush? We are not told. As far as we know, our species is the only one that blushes. We alone advertise our sense of shame to each other as the blood rushes to our faces. Why do we do that? What purpose could it serve? One theory is that the blush of shame signals to our community that we have internalized their values and stand corrected. In his book “Moral Origins,” Christopher Boehm reports that Darwin was curious about human blushing. He wrote to colonial administrators and missionaries all over the world to ask them whether indigenous people in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere blushed with shame” (p. 13). The result? “…indigenous people everywhere did seem to blush with shame. And on this basis [Darwin] could assume that, as an important aspect of our conscientious moral sense, human shame reactions surely had to have an innate basis.”

But why blush? Boehm says blushing is “…a mystery of natural selection that no scholar has begun to explain to date” (p. 133). He recounts the findings of modern anthropologists who work with the few remaining hunter-gatherer societies known to still exist as analogues to our ancient ancestors. They have learned that group cooperation is essential to survival, but to maintain cooperation, at least three problems must be solved: equitable meat sharing, free riders, and bullies. Free riders attempt to enjoy the benefits of the hunt without participating appropriately. Bullies try to get more than their fair share. When a group learns that a free rider cheated in the hunt or otherwise failed to participate, they have hell to pay when they return to the group. Even younger people will not yield their seat to them. They are called names. People move away from them. Social disapproval is intense until they come clean with an excuses-laced apology. A blush would signal their sincerity. Boehm concludes, “In terms of evolutionary priority, it seems to me that the internalization of rules and values probably came first, as one basic function of the evolutionary conscience, and that blushing somehow became associated with these self-control functions afterward.” “But,” he admits, "this is sheer speculation” (p. 133).

Boehm also reminds us that studies of American children have shown that by age 2, they recognize themselves in a mirror, and “…start to blush with embarrassment and experience feelings of shame” (p. 166). At this point in our development as a social species, blushing has become hard-wired. At age two, children instinctively help others in need, like showing them the right way to open the box to retrieve the ball. Compassion for others in need develops along with blushing with shame, two components of an emerging moral sensibility.

So what about adults who seem to be shameless and lack compassion? Every culture has its share of free riders and bullies. Even ancient writers faced this problem. In the Hebrew Bible, the prophet Jeremiah said of his fellow Jerusalemites, “…from the least to the greatest of them, everyone is greedy for unjust gain; and from prophet to priest, everyone deals falsely...They acted shamefully, they committed abomination; yet they were not ashamed, they did not know how to blush” (Jer. 6:13, 15). Free riders and bullies apparently learn to suppress their blush response. Interestingly, Jeremiah provides a solution. If you cannot blush to show that you have internalized the community’s values, then you could demonstrate the same by positive actions. He tells the free riders and bullies, “For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, then I will dwell with you in this place…” (Jer. 7:5-7). Jeremiah seems to have drawn the same conclusions about virtues as Marcus Aurelius who said, “to care for all human beings is part of being human” (Meditations, Book 4). His list of virtues included, “acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity, prudence, honesty, humility, straightforwardness…” which are the “…qualities that allow a person’s nature to fulfill itself” (Meditations, Book 5).

Marcus, like Jeremiah, recognized that there will always be non-blushing free riders and bullies. He asked himself, “When you run up against someone else’s shamelessness, ask yourself this: Is a world without shamelessness possible? No.” Our world proves him right. There are shameless people, often with power, who seem to lack both the capacity to blush and to feel compassion for others.

Americans, who, by age two, have learned to blush and to help others in need, now live in a country that seems to mock the virtuous life with glee. Empathy itself has been identified as a problem to be solved. On “the Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, billionaire Elon Musk said, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” On the “Stronger Men Nation” podcast, Josh McPherson agrees with Musk, saying, “Empathy almost needs to be struck from the Christian vocabulary.”

It is hard to imagine a Christianity without empathy. What else motivated the Good Samaritan? What other emotion was behind the “righteous” ones who helped “the least of these” when they cared for those in need? In his parable of the sheep and goats, Jesus said to “the righteous”, “…for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’’ (Matt. 25:35-36). This confuses them because Jesus himself was nowhere around when they were performing their acts of mercy. “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’” Jesus, as the king in the parable answers, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” (Matt. 25:40). Despite the billionaire and the podcasters’ assessment, empathy seems to be a virtue baked into the Christian cake.

But the issue of a society of non-blushers who are not ashamed to reject empathy and flaunt their lack of virtue is far deeper than pontifications on podcasts. America is now a society in which people sell merchandise celebrating the cruelty of the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” immigrant detention facility in Florida. The budget for ICE, for personnel, weapons, and detainment facilities now exceeds the size of most of the world’s entire defense budgets. ICE agents impersonate police and probation officers, disguise their faces, pull people from cars, detain people on their way to work or at work, and, without due process, send them to detention facilities in other states without informing family members, separating parents from children, and even deporting them to counties they have never lived in.

Cruelty seems to be the point.

A moment’s reflection is all that is needed to recall other societies in which cruelty replaced virtue with disastrous results. The names of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Pinochet, and so many more non-blushers live in infamy. Forgotten are the names of the countless prison guards, militia members, and empathy-despising sympathizers who facilitated those regimes. It is a wonder that virtue survives at all after what the human race has experienced. But it does. Hardwired into us as social beings, despite all our vices, is our instinct for goodness, kindness, honesty, and the other social virtues of which Marcus Aurelius so often reminded himself. He also reminded himself of the brevity of life. “Soon you’ll be ashes, or bones…”. What happens when there is no one around to practice virtue? “Trust, shame, justice, truth (will be) gone from the earth and only found in heaven.” (Meditations, Book 5). “Shame” takes its place alongside the virtues of trust, justice, and truth, which are up to us to embody, lest they be “gone from the earth.”

Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations” are his private journal entries, which he never intended to publish. Marcus was a Roman Emperor and a Stoic. Stoicism is becoming popular now in some circles. It began in Greece centuries before Marcus’s time. The Roman version of Stoicism is less philosophical and more practical. In his Meditations, Marcus reflects on Stoic virtues, reminding himself of the personal character he aspires to. Book one is like his gratitude journal. He remembers the people in his life, parents, teachers, and models he looked up to, and gives them credit for teaching him virtue. Book 1 has 17 sections, each dedicated to someone he is grateful to have learned from. In section 11, he thanks Fronto for helping him to “recognize the malice, cunning, and hypocrisy that power produces, and the peculiar ruthlessness often shown by people from “good families.”

In that short sentence, Marcus recognizes two facts of life that have remained unchanged over millennia: that power corrupts and that respectableness is no guarantee against vileness. Power tempts people to “malice, cunning, and hypocrisy.” With power comes the ability to make others suffer, to deceive them, and, at the same time, pretend to be virtuous. These vices are not the result of deprivation or lack of education. Even people from “good families” can be “ruthless.”

Today, we see his insight everywhere. Right now, people with power in Israel are acting with unrestrained malice against the population of Gaza. Clearly, Hamas is a terrorist organization, dedicated to the total destruction of Israel. They use the innocent men, women, and children of Gaza as their human shields. They put missile launchers in apartment buildings. They stash weapons in hospitals. They tunnel everywhere, endangering the entire population. Nothing justifies their callous disregard for human life in Gaza. But they never thought that a member of the Knesset would say publicly, “Stop humanitarian aid, cut off electricity and water, start destroying and expelling... There are no innocents (In Gaza)….”. “No innocents” includes women, children, babies, and the men who have no sympathy for Hamas. To miss the distinction between combatants and non-combatants violates one of the core principles of the “just war” theory. Targeting them is a war crime. Saying that there are “no innocents in Gaza” is exactly the kind of “cunning” Marcus Aurelius was talking about. Pretending to “do everything to avoid civilian casualties” in the face of at least 60,000 dead Palestinians, half of whom are women and children, is what Marcus would call “hypocrisy.” The stench rising from the flattened apartment blocks reveals that the number of dead is probably significantly higher. The fact that Netanyahu, his right-wing Knesset members, and the military leaders all hail from “good families” has not prevented their ruthlessness. It is evil.

Six million Jews were killed by the Nazi’s in the holocaust. Countless others have perished at the hands of Christians in Europe through the centuries. There were pogroms, crusades, and untold persecutions. Israel has been attacked by its neighbors multiple times. Arab states have vowed to “drive it into the sea.” Bombings have killed scores in Israel over the years. Israelis have been victims of atrocities long before Hamas attacked them on October 7. But victims do not automatically become heroes. Victims can and do become victimizers. When victims get power, they can be people of “malice, cunning, and hypocrisy that power produces.”Even victims from “good families” can become “ruthless.” Genocide is extreme ruthlessness. Shooting nearly 1,000 people dead, just for trying to get food to keep their families from starving to death, is the most evil form of ruthlessness. Now, Gazans are starving. Most of the “good families” look on, nonplused, or look away.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu receives an invitation to the White House, where he presents his letter nominating Donald Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize. His bombs that level Palestinian neighborhoods are American-made. His nation lives on $3.8 billion annually from US taxpayers, nearly all of it going to Israel’s military, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. According to the so-called Leahy Law, the United States is not permitted to give military aid to foreign governments that commit gross human rights violations. But we do not apply that standard to Israel. Marcus Aurelius would call that the kind of “hypocrisy that power produces.”

The irony of all this genocidal evil is that the children of Palestinian survivors will likely become Israel’s worst nightmare for generations to come. The cry of “never forget” that Jews proclaimed to call the world’s conscience to remember the holocaust will undoubtedly be the cry of future generations of Palestinians. Vengeance is predictable. Israel is conducting vengeance for the October 7 Hamas invasion and the 1200 brutally savaged innocents. Palestinians will predictably seek vengeance for the 60,000+ victims Israel has killed. Should we expect there to be any future “good families” who are, like Marcus Aurelius, surprised by each other's capacity for ruthlessness?