Category Archives: Religion

Stop the Madness

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I am angry on Father’s Day. I am deeply disturbed by what I am seeing. I am a Christian who is insulted by the use of the Bible to justify the separation of children from parents who brought them to the U.S. border in search of safety and political asylum. First, it is a policy decision of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Trump administration that the United States will not consider flight from violence and gang warfare a reasonable excuse for seeking asylum. The families now being torn apart with minimal ability even to find out where their parents or children are made a dangerous trek across hundreds of miles in the belief that this country would treat them with some sort of dignity once they surrendered at the border with a request for asylum. Few, if any, expected the treatment now being imposed upon them.

The news reports are now widespread and, however painful to read, I encourage readers of this blog to follow them. The tactics in practice by U.S. border authorities remind us of horrors long ago that we thought this nation had put to rest—slave fathers and mothers sold away from their children, never to see them again, while auctioneers were deaf to their pleas for mercy, American Indian children removed from reservations to be sent to distant “Indian schools” where they punished for speaking English. Are we still no better than that?

I have been a father for decades. My wife and I became foster and adoptive parents in the 1990s, and we know firsthand the difficulties of locating children in a new environment when the state has determined that the birth parents have failed in their duties through neglect or abuse. It is difficult even then but often necessary to protect children whose health, safety, and welfare are in jeopardy. That is and long has been a primary state responsibility. But even then, courts and social workers provide notice of what is expected and give parents an opportunity to improve before taking more drastic steps. And yes, it is true that convicted criminals are removed from their spouses and children when they are incarcerated, but if the convictions are just, we can at least say that the crime was a choice made by the parent, not the state. And despite all this, my heart aches when it becomes clear such intervention is necessary.

It aches even more in this situation because very young children are being pulled away from their parents with no idea why, no idea where they are going, and no idea when or whether they will ever see them again. Even in cases of convicted criminals, the family can visit the prisoner and knows where he or she is and the length of the sentence. In foster care, parents typically have visitation rights. None of that appears to be happening with these refugees.

I find myself all the angrier when I hear people justifying the current Trump administration policy by comparing asylum seekers to these situations by saying the parents at the border are breaking the law. International conventions on asylum do not at all contemplate that asylum seekers will be treated by democratic nations as criminals upon arrival. They need a fair hearing to demonstrate their claim for asylum. In the vast majority of cases, their clear motive for making the dangerous trip across Mexico to the U.S. border from nations in Central and South America and elsewhere is not to commit a crime but to protect their families from political and gang violence and, in some cases, sexual and physical abuse tolerated by a foreign government that is either unwilling or incapable of preventing it.

Quoting Bible verses about respecting the law is no defense of unjust laws and never was, even in Biblical times, when St. Peter once stated, “We must obey God rather than men.” His assertion was the very basis of the insistent rise of Christianity through what was effectively a form of civil disobedience because Christian faith was illegal in the Roman empire, which required primary fealty to the emperor. I do not wish to engage defenders of administration policy in a battle of Bible quotations because such battles generally involve short passages taken out of context amid a larger failure to understand the comprehensive message of Jewish and Christian scriptures, but if there is one passage that may highlight that larger message of Jesus, it is in Matthew 25, and for that reason I have used it before because it goes to the heart of Christian morality:

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’”

Jim Schwab

Power, Perception, and Pilate

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On May 10, my wife and I attended a matinee performance of Jesus Christ Superstar at the Lyric Opera in Chicago. Coming a month after the Easter evening (April 1) NBC broadcast of this ground-breaking rock opera by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, it allowed some comparison of how the show is staged and presented, which was summed up by a woman behind us at the Lyric: “Never the same way twice.” Composed in 1970 and first presented on stage in 1971, the show’s lasting impact can, I think, be traced, like any other vintage composition, to its versatility, universality, and the way it probes deep themes in the human experience. In this case, that involves a search for the meaning of divinity and exactly where the Gospel stories fit into that experience. What could it possibly mean to be human and divine at the same time? How did those around Jesus relate to him in real life? Rice and Webber gained fame by packing a lightning bolt of musical interpretation into a two-hour show. Curiously, in the 47 years since the show’s debut in New York, this recent run, which ended May 20, was the first time the Lyric had chosen to stage Jesus Christ Superstar.

Seeing this performed twice in consecutive months prodded me to think a little more deeply about a question that has been roaming around in my brain for a while already. As a Christian, a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, I have maintained both an intellectual and spiritual curiosity over many years concerning the life of Jesus of Nazareth and the Bible generally. I am anything but a biblical literalist. I feel strongly that the route to some meaningful truth involves a healthy skepticism and a good deal of reading between the lines, so I have little patience with the fixed and sometimes even cartoonish scriptural interpretations that some people cling to. I do not believe that politics and faith are or even should be completely detached, but I am not an ideologue, either. I am a firm supporter of religious freedom and tolerance because I think Christian faith calls on us to be considerably humbler in our relationships with others than some people wearing the label have sometimes been. And that brings me to my topic.

One thing I noted in the Webber-Rice spectacle is that the narrative hews relatively closely to the core of the Gospel stories of the Passion, Christ’s last week of life on Earth—at least within the broad framework of artistic presentation. One question that has dogged Christianity for centuries concerns how Jesus was delivered into the hands of the Romans, which leads to the question of the nature of his startling interaction with Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea. It is clear enough, according to the Gospel accounts, that Jesus was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane by agents of the Jewish high priests, and clear enough that they were upset with his preaching because it challenged the established order in profound ways. After interrogation by both the high priests and King Herod, who ruled Galilee under Roman sovereignty, he was turned over to Pilate. The interactions at this point become much more powerful, given the fate that we all now know awaited Jesus. And this is the point that I wish to explore.

I am not a professional biblical scholar, but my perspective here does not depend on being one. It is rooted more in a lifetime of observing the behavior of the powerful, usually at a distance but occasionally up close. It is an analysis of power relationships in personal interactions. I am not sure most biblical scholars are any better at that, and I will certainly not assert that mine is necessarily the most accurate set of observations possible. I hope only to shed light and spur further thinking by those willing to join me in this search for deeper meaning in one of the more remarkable events in human history.

First, I must note that bad or oversimplified interpretation of these events has led to a good deal of bad blood between Jews and Christians over two millennia. Some of this continues, but none of it is appropriate or necessary. Anti-Semitism, like racism, contradicts the fundamental tenets of Christian morality and respect for others. The fact that Jews were involved in the arrest of Jesus does not change the fact that everyone else in the story is also Jewish, except for the Romans. On the eve of Christ’s crucifixion, Jerusalem was a dangerously divided community. Sympathies ran in all directions. Rome had maintained control for years with unrelenting brutality, including many other crucifixions of real and perceived rebels, and challenging Rome was no one’s route to survival. Jewish leadership was understandably concerned with national and institutional survival (deeply intertwined in their world view), and thus wary of the spiritual challenges this unconventional preacher presented. Christ’s message gained a following in this religious and political tinderbox and thus inevitably triggered a reaction by officials concerned about maintaining control. Ultimately, it was the Roman Empire that maintained control, and Rome was never very subtle in its methods. Crucifixion was a form of state-sanctioned terrorism to achieve such control. It was intended to be both demeaning and terrifying.

We should not be surprised. We need merely look around at the actions of dictators and oppressive regimes in our own time to see how this works. Much of the artistic achievement of Jesus Christ Superstar is to take a story from 2,000 years ago and reframe it with modern music and sensibilities that allow us to reassess its relevance in a modern context. That is the job of any good artist with such a story.

And that is precisely what makes the personal interaction between Pilate and Christ so powerfully intriguing. What I would deem naïve interpretations of Pilate’s reaction and response to Jesus have led over centuries to the unfortunate perception that this Roman governor believed Jesus was innocent but was afraid of the crowds that called for his crucifixion. As many scholars have noted, Pilate had already sent numerous others to their deaths by the time he encountered this itinerant preacher. Assigned to maintain control of a difficult province that most Romans viewed as a backwater, Pilate generally had little hesitation about sending to their doom anyone he saw as posing a threat to Roman hegemony, and such movements persisted for decades until the destruction of Jerusalem by Roman troops in 70 C.E. This history is very clear. As for the crowds and Pilate’s offer to free one criminal for the Passover to placate Jewish opinion, it is not hard to believe that a man like Pilate knew how to manipulate such crowds and play vicious mind games with his opponents. The overriding goal for anyone like Pilate was political survival. Just a generation later, in 66 C.E., notes John Dominic Crossan in Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, the Roman governor Florus sent no fewer than 3,600 of Judea’s leading citizens to crucifixion after mass arrests intended to forestall rebellion, which ultimately led to the Jewish diaspora. Empathy with the oppressed was no more part of the empire’s perspective than it is that of Kim Jong Un in North Korea or Vladimir Putin in Russia. Suppressing and destroying any following of any movement independent of the state is part of the standard playbook for modern totalitarian regimes.

Still, there is this haunting interaction between Pilate and Jesus. We must keep in mind that, in the end, Pilate sent Jesus and two other men to their deaths that day. If he was deeply troubled by his prisoner’s innocence, he could easily have spared him, but at most he went through the empty gesture of washing his hands. It is worth noting the conversation in the Gospel of John, which provides the most detailed report of the exchange between the two men:

Pilate: Are you the king of the Jews?

Jesus: Is that your own idea, of have others suggested it to you?

Pilate: What? Am I a Jew? Your own nation and their chief priests have brought you before me. What have you done?

Jesus: My kingdom does not belong to this world. If it did, my followers would be fighting to save me from arrest by the Jews. My kingly authority comes from elsewhere.

Pilate: You are a king, then?

Jesus: “King” is your word. My task is to bear witness to the truth. For this I was born; for this I came into the world, and all who are not deaf to the truth listen to my voice.

Pilate: What is truth?

Pilate then offers the release of Jesus to the crowd, which demands the release of Barabbas; Pilate then has Jesus flogged, the soldiers place a crown of thorns on his head, and he is mocked and belittled. A further exchange between Pilate and the crowd occurs in which the demand is that he be crucified. It seems obvious to me that Pilate knew how to use the crowd to advance his own ends. Then comes the final exchange:

Pilate: Where have you come from?

Jesus: (No answer.)

Pilate: Do you refuse to speak to me? Surely you know I have the authority to release you, and I have authority to crucify you? (Note that, at this point, Jesus has almost surely been beaten within an inch of his life.)

Jesus: You would have no authority at all over me if it had not been granted you from above; and therefore, the deeper guilt lies with the man who handed me over to you.

What I want to offer at this point is a question that, I think, is often missed or underemphasized in both scholarly accounts and religious interpretations of this powerful dialogue: Why did Pilate take pains to react in this particular manner? Aside from riling up the crowds, why not just sentence Christ and be done with the matter? Surely, Pilate did not take such pains with most prisoners.

But if we take seriously the nature of men like Pilate, we might realize that the horror of the means he would use to eliminate most perceived troublemakers would make most prisoners squirm in terror. He was probably used to, and even enjoyed, making subjects squirm in his presence, the high priests and prominent local citizens included. Absolute power tends to bestow on most human beings a perverse and even sadistic sense of superiority over others.

But at no point in this or any other New Testament accounts does Jesus squirm in the face of political power. He certainly knew what awaited him and was aware of the torture and physical agony involved. Yet here he is, still challenging authority to the point where Pilate may have thought him a madman. Zealots (Jewish rebels of the day) might simply have been defiant in such circumstances, knowing that all was lost once they were captured. They would not have engaged in any philosophical repartee. There is no indication of Jesus seeking mercy or anticipating a way out of his dilemma. Why does this matter?

Because Pilate’s reaction could very well indicate that such a fearless confrontation with his authority, which Jesus even effectively denies, leaves him utterly perplexed. Who does that?

Well, some people do, you may answer, and I suggest this: Jesus’s unflinching insistence on spiritual authority, combined with almost unflappable acceptance of the consequences of his stance, left Pilate temporarily flummoxed, groping for a means to reassert his accustomed sense of psychological dominance over those around him. One does not need even to be Christian to perceive the dynamics of the situation. But it does add some clarity because we know, as Pilate did not, that this nascent religious movement would survive three subsequent centuries of intermittent but vicious Roman persecution. Much of that would occur because of the courage people drew from the story of Christ’s confrontation with Pilate—and, of course, an abiding belief that Pilate did not have the last word.

I will also suggest that the serenity of Jesus in the face of a looming horrific end to his life has become a model that inspired numerous others to challenge unjust power by calling upon a higher morality. These included Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms, who faced potential burning at the stake; Nelson Mandela, who suffered years of imprisonment by the apartheid regime in South Africa; Martin Luther King Jr., who challenged racist violence with peaceful protest and was assassinated; or the Mirabal sisters, who were killed for challenging the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic (the subject of a novel by Julia Alvarez). And then, there is the powerful case of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed by the Nazis after challenging their authority. One can name many other examples.

However, honesty demands a recognition of other sources of such profound witness. Jews, for example, may point to a line of prophets who preceded Christ, some of whom faced dire crises of faith and provide inspiration. Mohandas Gandhi used pioneering methods of nonviolence to challenge British colonial rule in India, only to die at the hands of a fanatical Hindu assassin. His primary inspirations arose from Eastern traditions, although he seems to have blended what he considered the best of Christian spirituality into his Hindu practice, even as he expressed distaste for many of the barnacles that had attached themselves to organized religion. But he clearly faced persecution with an equanimity that put his adversaries to shame.

Of course, like all of us, each of these heroic figures had their human shortcomings. But in each case, their serene courage drew inspiration from a deep well of faith. That faith includes a resolute refusal to cede moral authority while acknowledging political authority. It includes the integrity of one’s belief system with a focus on love, mercy, and peace. And it always includes a recognition of the power of one’s conscience, but that conscience must be driven not just by passion, but by compassion, a clear recognition of the value of others. True conscience involves not just a personal set of beliefs but clarity about one’s moral commitments and their potential consequences, and the acceptance of those consequences. That anyone meets that test is a testament to the capacity of the human spirit to unite itself with divine wisdom. How that occurs is a story I will leave to saintlier souls than mine to tell.

Jim Schwab

Author’s note: The lack of images in this post is deliberate in order to maintain a focus on the ideas presented.

Will Rogers without the Humor

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IMG_0202Back in the Great Depression, amid the New Deal, when the Republican Party was the very face of the Establishment, a good-natured, lasso-twirling Oklahoma humorist named Will Rogers quipped, “I belong to no organized political party. I am a Democrat.”

To some extent, amid a rebellion led by Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist from Vermont, that quip may still seem to hold true. But it is looking pretty tame alongside the free-for-all on the Republican side, where ideological dysfunction seems to reign supreme after years of fairly orthodox nominees leading its party into quadrennial battle. The Establishment is in some ways shaken to its roots.

The moment of silence Saturday evening following the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia at the outset of an otherwise raucous Republican debate may have honored proper protocol, but it seemed almost anachronistic in some ways. The uprising within the party is firmly anchored within the conservative elements of the American working class. Polls have consistently shown that Sen. Ted Cruz and Donald Trump draw support from those with the lowest average levels of education within the party, and one can probably assume correspondingly low average income levels as well—if one excludes Trump himself, that is, who is clearly at the other end of the wealth spectrum but a far better self-promoter than any other candidate on the stump. There is irony in watching a multimillionaire real estate developer become the voice of right-wing working-class populism.

All the candidates honored the memory of Scalia, but it should be noted that he was no friend of the working class. His hide-bound originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution represented a particularly rigid brand of legal intellectualism that was increasingly out of touch with current American realities—and was intended to be. Originalism hews to the idea that the Constitution must be always interpreted in light of the intentions of the Founding Fathers, which may sound logical until one considers all the contingencies of American history that they could never have foreseen or even understood. I have seen this kind of originalism applied in the religious arena as well, trying to freeze in time the thinking of people like Martin Luther or others who themselves were revolutionizing the world’s thinking. It has always been hard for me to believe that the Founding Fathers, who themselves challenged the orthodoxy of the British monarchy, truly expected that their vision would be frozen in time for all who followed. Surely they understood the fluid nature of the revolutionary principles they enshrined in the new American system. I do not have to be a lawyer to see through the philosophical flaws in originalism, just as I do not have to be a theologian (but I am a Lutheran) to know that Martin Luther surely understood that he had set in motion with the Reformation certain forces that would lead to periodic reevaluation of the application of essential Christian principles over time. Modern American Lutheranism, fortunately, is for the most part more creative and dynamic in its spirituality than to follow an originalist path. Scalia, however, was a conservative Catholic whose originalism, curiously, did not strictly follow the separation of church and state advocated by Jefferson, Madison, and others. They surely never envisioned today’s Religious Right alliance between conservative Catholics and evangelicals. Those interested in a powerful dissection of the origins of this brand of politics, by the way, can read Thy Kingdom Come, a decade-old treasure by Randall Balmer, a politically liberal evangelical who is deeply critical of the submersion of evangelical religion within the right-wing Republican political agenda.

That point leads us back to the bifurcation to date of the rebellion within the Republican Party. Basically, despite some cross-over in both directions, the Cruz vote relies very heavily on evangelical support from the Religious Right, while Trump relies on a more secular brand of support from working-class Republicans who see jobs slipping away, have lost the unions that used to support their aspirations within the private sector, and who exercise a kind of knee-jerk patriotism with distinctively nativist roots. But, of course, evangelicals can be blue-collar workers, and vice versa, and some evangelicals surely also recoil at their constant media characterization as conservatives, as Balmer does. All that said, indications are that the two candidates, each posing as anti-Establishment, together have been commanding about half of the Republican caucus and primary vote, which means that traditional pro-business Republicans face an uphill battle to maintain control of their party.

What is interesting is that they also face a rather incoherent threat, if judged by the rants and promises of Trump, who seems to enjoy playing a disruptive, destabilizing role in the Republican debates that nonetheless serves very well to keep the focus on Donald Trump. Despite the deference to the Scalia legacy, the debates seem far from the traditions that planted him on the U.S. Supreme Court in the first place. A Reagan nominee, Scalia won enough respect for his professionalism to win unanimous confirmation from the U.S. Senate. Not one Republican candidate in the Greenville, South Carolina, debate noted the obvious fact that every Democrat at the time respected Reagan’s prerogative, although later they did feel Reagan had pushed things just far enough with the nomination of Robert Bork, who was persuaded to withdraw his nomination in the face of intense opposition. This year’s candidates all insisted that President Barack Obama had no right to nominate a successor to Scalia and that they had every right to block confirmation, even before knowing whose name he would submit. The intent, of course, is clear—to withhold that right until a Republican wins the White House in the fall.

But one wonders: Have they considered what they will do if, perhaps as a result of their current intraparty fratricide, they lose that election, especially if the general electorate recoils at granting them such a privilege? Will they pledge to block any Clinton or Sanders nominee for an entire term in office?

It is an intriguing quirk of the American political system, perhaps part of the original intent of the Founding Fathers, that judges of one persuasion often die during the terms of presidents with quite different philosophies, who then get to replace them for life. It cuts both ways, as any intelligent person has seen over time. The failure to contemplate where the logic of obstruction leads may be the truest indication of a disorganized political party.

 

Jim Schwab

But for Fortune

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Less than three weeks ago, on June 2, a Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) bus mysteriously crashed a red light on Lake St. during the evening rush hour, jumped the curb on the eastern side of Michigan Ave., and killed one pedestrian while injuring several others. The lady who died while pinned under the bus was a mother who seemed beloved by all who knew her.

I learned about the incident after going home, where my wife was watching the news. I immediately realized that this happened on a plaza in front of the office where I work, at 205 N. Michigan Ave., and that I had crossed that very corner not more than a half-hour before the accident. A co-worker related later that he had left just five minutes later. But for a matter of simple timing, either of us could have been swept up in the maelstrom. In the words of the Joan Baez folk tune, “There, but for fortune, go you or I . . . “

I was reminded of that when the news burst onto our screens this past Wednesday, June 17, of a mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, at the Emanuel AME Church in the heart of the downtown tourist district. As related in my blog just a week before today, my wife and I had spent the better part of a week in Charleston celebrating our 30th anniversary. While we did not step foot in the church—indeed, we did not visit any churches during our stay—we passed in front of Emanuel or near it multiple times while visiting museums and tourist attractions in the city. Had Dylann Roof chosen to launch his attack the previous week, who is to say that we might not have been caught up in some other kind of maelstrom, perhaps as he was fleeing the scene? Admittedly, being white, we were not among his intended targets, but when plans go awry, there, but for fortune, go you or I. And who is to say why it was the turn for any of his nine victims, including preachers who counted among them a state senator, to become part of the carnage? For that matter, how much do we know as yet of what made this young man the racist terrorist he apparently became?

I will not belabor the matter because we are all, at various times in our lives, either victims or beneficiaries of dumb luck. What makes us most human is simply our humility in coming to terms with that fact. Let life take a left turn here, a right turn there . . . . yes,  some people fight back nobly in the face of adversity while others collapse and surrender, but even that is to some degree a reflection of prior good fortune and mental conditioning, getting enough of a running start in life to acquire the necessary resilience, but still . . . . At some point a gun shot, a bullet in the wrong place, makes an end of things.

What makes me reflect on this is the almost absurd level of self-confidence and lack of reflection in some of those who seek leadership roles or some sort of public office. Sandwiched between the two incidents I mention above, for instance, was the announcement by Donald Trump of his latest campaign for the presidency of the United States. No humility was on display there. No sense of the limitations, real or potential, of Donald Trump. No sense of the degree to which fortune has shaped him for good or ill. He will solve everything for us, while others are simply stupid. Listen to the tape to count the number of times he uses “stupid” to describe others.

But he is not alone in his vanity or lack of self-knowledge, although his certainly seems to run deeper than the norm. Rick Perry reverts to the usual gross exaggerations of the National Rifle Association by decrying the “knee-jerk reaction” of the left in supposedly trying to take everyone’s guns away after violent incidents such as that in South Carolina. Rick Santorum, a lawyer but no scientist, says Pope Francis, who studied chemistry and once worked as a chemist before joining the seminary, should leave climate change to the scientists. (But he did attend the Sunday service at Emanuel AME Church the Sunday after the shooting.) It is a sorry spectacle.

And then there is Abraham Lincoln, a man of known frailties who somehow united a nation in the face of the worst conflict over its fate that it will likely ever face, who bled with his nation, who could express humility and inspire confidence, who led in part because he understood both the complexities of his times and how to lead in the face of controversy. And in the end, an assassin’s bullet found him. There, but for fortune, went our nation. We have not yet escaped the consequences, as another young man with a gun he should never have obtained proved yet again just last week.

Fortunately, in the most meaningful demonstration of the spirit of Christianity imaginable, several relatives of the victims of the Charleston shooting have publicly forgiven the young man. He may have a long time to ponder that forgiveness.

 

Jim Schwab

In the Name of God

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This is the sin against the Holy Ghost: – To speak of bloody power as right divine,
And call on God to guard each vile chief’s house,
And for such chiefs, turn men to wolves and swine:-

To go forth killing in White Mercy’s name,
Making the trenches stink with spattered brains,
Tearing the nerves and arteries apart,
Sowing with flesh the unreaped golden plains.

In any Church’s name, to sack fair towns,
And turn each home into a screaming sty,
To make the little children fugitive,
And have their mothers for a quick death cry,-

This is the sin against the Holy Ghost:
This is the sin no purging can atone:-
To send forth rapine in the name of Christ:-
To set the face, and make the heart a stone.

Vachel Lindsay

 

Illinois poet Vachel Lindsay, one of the founders in 1915 of the Society of Midland Authors ,with which I have long been involved, penned this poem, “The Unpardonable Sin,” in the midst of World War I, as a screed against the presumption of those who would claim to be committing murder and mayhem on behalf of Almighty God. It has become a classic because it states the obvious so simply while confronting a tendency that has been all too prevalent in human history—the quest to justify one’s own cruelty in the name of God.

I doubt that this poem will have any influence on the leaders or followers of Islamic State, if they even are familiar with it. For starters, it is posed primarily as a challenge to Christians who would justify war in the name of Christ. Nonetheless, I would maintain that, despite its context amid a war that tore Europe apart, it has more universal meaning that condemns any attempt to justify war in the name of a deity, no matter the faith involved.

This is not the subject matter I have most typically addressed in this blog, but I was appalled, though not surprised, to read this week that Islamic State, in an English-language e-zine called Dabiq, actually stated in blunt terms that it has a right to enslave and sexually abuse captured Yazidi women whose husbands ISIS has killed or taken prisoner, on the grounds that “even cross-worshiping Christians for ages considered them devil worshipers and Satanists.” It goes on to note that the women were divided among Islamic State fighters, some of whom sold them into slavery. And all of this is supposedly endorsed by the Koran. One could go on with the grim details, but the fundamental picture seems obvious.

Once we have deemed another group of people subhuman because of their differences in belief, or race, or ethnicity, or whatever excuse we have, their feelings matter not a whit because Allah, or God, has given us permission to treat them as mere chattel or to kill them outright. In cases of what we now euphemistically call “ethnic cleansing,” God has supposedly given us permission to wipe them off the face of the earth.

The whole idea behind this makes many, if not most, of us recoil in moral revulsion, but we need to do more than that. We need to come to grips with the fundamental illogic that makes parts of the human race function in this way. There is an essential arrogance behind all this that cannot be ignored, nor can it be ascribed solely to one radical group or one religion. Christianity has too much to answer for in its own history to assume such a stance. It was only 150 years ago, as the Civil War was winding to a close, that many clergy in southern churches in the U.S. still found it possible to use Holy Scripture to justify slavery. Their “unpardonable sin,” in Vachel Lindsay’s phrasing, was to provide cover for an entire society that was racist to its core and used perverse religious logic in many cases to excuse unspeakable cruelty. There is a scene in the movie Twelve Years a Slave, based on the Simon Northup book in the 1850s, in which the sadistic slave owner to whom Northup has been sold stands in front of his slaves with a Bible and reads from Proverbs , “The servant who does not serve his master will suffer many lashes.” He proceeds to note, in a matter-of-fact tone of voice, that “many lashes may mean 40, or 100, or 150. This is holy scripture.” The fact that his slaves are not permitted to learn to read this scripture on their own to find the context from which their cruel owner has extracted this gem is more than ironic. It was a deliberate element of a system of subjugation.

So now we have ISIS resurrecting all the worst tendencies of every religion of every time in justifying the subjugation of other human beings, at a time when intelligent human beings have been hoping and praying that such notions have become a thing of the past. Sadly, that appears not yet to be the case; we have a long struggle ahead of us to expunge such logic from the human race once and for all. Too many people are still hanging on to too many prejudices and looking for justifications of one sort or another. And the most unpardonable of all, as Lindsay suggested, are those that justify their hatreds in the name of the Creator.

What lies at the core of this problem? I once heard Dr. Martin Marty, the theologian and long-time professor in the University of Chicago Divinity School, quote someone—I cannot remember whom—as stating that “a fanatic is someone who is determined to do for the Lord what the Lord would surely do for himself if only he were in full possession of the facts.” As absurd as that notion sounds on its face, it is all too real as human motivation. Somehow, we get it into our heads that a God whom Christians, Jews, and Muslims all describe as omnipotent, omniscient, and loving nonetheless needs the intervention of humans to solve problems that He has failed to perceive and remedy. And if this God is not taking care of business, well, then, it is up to us to do it for him. It is as if we are rushing to defend the honor of a helpless lady rather than worshiping a force far greater than ourselves. Here, God, let me help you by destroying these infidels.

Except that those “infidels,” however defined, are fellow human beings. And in order to get to the idea that these fellow human beings are lesser creatures who need to be slaughtered, enslaved, raped, or maimed, we have to cultivate the notion that the same God who created them and the entire universe somehow passionately hates a part of his creation so badly that he needs our help in getting rid of them.

I don’t care what passages out of the Bible, the Koran, or any other text some fanatic can extract or twist to construct this logic. If you believe in a deity who created the universe, that logic is an insult to the Almighty. And we need to grow up and accept the fact that it is all too easy to manipulate scriptural passages in isolation as justification for our own moral shortcomings. God does not hate the humans He created. He may very often be disappointed in their utter failure to achieve their own high moral potential, but what He does about that is his business, not ours. It is not our right to kill, injure, or enslave based on any differences among us.

There remains the problem of what to do about the people who insist on inflicting such injury on other people. When our own daughters were growing up, I did not endorse or employ corporal punishment because I do not think it is an appropriate remedy and certainly not the best. That said, I had no hesitation about using physical restraint to prevent them or their friends from doing harm to themselves or each other. I once gang-tackled one of our daughters in our living room to stop her from running away when she did not want to confront a serious issue in her life.

I think the same principle applies in both domestic and international situations where violence threatens to dominate people’s lives. Police are allowed to use force to prevent violence, for the same reason. None of this is because God wants us to hurt someone, but because there are times when we need to prevent such harm. The challenge in facing an insurgency like that led by Islamic State is that it inherently involves such complicated scenarios that may produce collateral damage. It is nearly impossible to find surgically sterile solutions; every option seems to leave blood on our hands. Even inaction, as President Barack Obama, like his predecessors, has learned on the job, can leave blood on our hands. There are few perfect solutions. But at least we can avoid the unpardonable sin of presuming that what we are doing is in the name of God. Far better to settle for the more humble proposition that, however imperfectly, we are simply seeking to reduce the level of pain in the world, and ideally to increase the volume of love and mutual respect. That is a goal that will ennoble any human being, no matter what faith he or she professes.

 

Jim Schwab