A couple of weeks ago, I sat down with Rabbi Finestone, who serves Congregation Har Shalom, just down the road. We were speaking about the attack on October 7th, and what her community has been feeling since. She shared many things that have stuck with me, including that in the first few days, the most consistent calls of support her community received were from evangelical Christians.
My heart sunk when I heard this. Not because she received calls of support. But because I know – and she knows – that this support is not exactly what it might seem.
Today, some of the biggest supporters of Israel are evangelical Christians who believe that the return of Jews to their homeland is a pre-requisite for the second coming of Christ. In fact, as of 2017, 80% of evangelical Christians believe that the creation of Israel in 1948 was a fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Of course, most of these same Christians also believe that in returning, Jews must and will experience a conversion to Christianity. Which means that Christian Zionists support Israel, but they don’t actually support Jews.
In case you’ve wondered when you’ve heard some of the far-right politicians espousing both 100% backing of Israel and 100% support of establishing Christianity (their version) as American law, now you know why.
This impulse – seen especially in the American right today – is just one example of the ways that church, and faith can collude with hate-filled, fascist ideology. It’s a recent example, but not the most explicit.
Nearly a century ago, before the rise of Hitler, Germany was mostly Christian, and mostly German Evangelicals, who were working for the establishment of a national church, which, in the 1920s began to coalesce around issues of nationalism, ethnicity, and antisemitism. It was this group that in 1933, when Hitler came to power, took the Nazi ideology and ran with it. The church in Germany was not just a bystander in the face of fascism, it was, in many cases, an active collaborator.
In many cases – but not all. Some people in the German Churches weren’t so convinced. Especially around the requirement known as the Aryan Paragraph, which said that baptized Christians would have to prove they were of Aryan ancestry. This caused a huge conflict, not because it was antisemitic, sadly, but because it was saying baptism wasn’t enough to make you a “full” Christian.
This conflict led to the start of a resistance movement called the Confessing Church, which included theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer – although, Bonhoeffer’s eventual participation in a failed plot to kill Hitler, was far more radical than the Confessing Church ever managed to be.
This conflict also led to the Nazis taking control of local churches and arresting the bishops. In response, the churches launched a huge protest in the streets of Munich – not a good look for an emergent authoritarian regime.
In the 1980s, when the Republican party first joined forces with the evangelical church, they were taking lessons from what happened in Munich with the churches. Because they understood that when people are driven by and organized through their church – a different sort of power is unleashed. The resistance isn’t just another issue, it is core to who you are, it’s connected to self-worth, your existential responsibility.
So that when their churches called on them to resist, German Evangelicals didn’t just march, they declared an ultimatum. Nearly 90,000 people made it clear that they would leave the Nazi party if the bishops weren’t freed.
And guess what? It worked. The bishops were released. The state backed down. The bishops got to control their Churches.
There was so much power in these communities of faith. The sort of power that could have shifted the entire trajectory of history.
Imagine, if 90,000 people had instead shown up, in those early days, with the same insistence, that they would leave the party unless the persecution of Jewish people stopped. Instead of upholding the unjust dominant culture, perhaps they could have been a force of disruption, dismantling, transforming, and saving.
Church holds so much power. Power to cause harm, and power to save. But because so much of the power churches hold has been used to harm, and because of the hypocrisy this harm indicates – people of goodwill and big vision – in increasing numbers, especially over the last two decades – have been rapidly abandoning the practice of church.
30% of Americans now, compared to 17% just fifteen years ago, say that they have no religious affiliation. In place of joining a faith community, people today will often strive to be good people, and follow a spiritual path, outside of community, Finding tools and people, practices, and volunteer opportunities in the same way we do everything else – individually, and in whatever frequency or mode they can fit into their free time.
This consumer-like mode has made podcasts and pseudo-communities like Glennon Doyle’s Together Rising, and her podcast We Can Do Hard Things very popular. Which – I mean – I listen to We Can Do Hard Things, and a bunch of others like it, and I take a lot from them, truly.
And, still, neither Glennon Doyle, nor any of the pod squad brought my family dinner when my daughter had surgery a couple weeks ago. But you did. Maybe not you personally – but this church did. So, you did.
And Thich Nhat Hanh, or Valerie Kaur, inspiring teachers though they are, and important – neither they nor their Instagram posts have been greeting and sheltering trans folks fleeing unsafe states. But you have been.
You made those meals, and offered that shelter. You show up in real life, make love tangible, embodied.
And this is the power of church that we miss when we throw it all out. This central practice of showing up for each other in this collective casserole reflex that spans generations, and this covenantal community that shows up for more than ourselves – this is what makes church a uniquely powerful way to resist, and even transform unjust forces in the dominant culture – even when that culture includes the rising tides of fascism, as Sean described last Sunday.
Before you wonder, let me clarify, I don’t mean that you can’t be a good person, or have a real spiritual life, or experience authentic community without church. More, I mean that, when I talk to other non-profit leaders, or activists, or when I talk to my friends who are not a part of a church community, I can’t help but think that they are at a real disadvantage. And how much harder, and lonelier their path likely is.
To attempt to forge community without the standard practice of gathering together every week, intentionally co-regulating your nervous systems with one another – in silence, in song, in the simple act of greeting each other, and directing our shared attention towards a greater purpose and wider love.
I just don’t know how I would do it.
Not to mention, their people probably don’t sing to each other at the hospital, sit in parents circle each week while their kids are singing in the holiday choir, or think intentionally about what music they’d want playing in their final days, or make big batches of coffee for strangers – and for the most part, their communities do not include seven generations of people from infancy to age 103.
Intergenerational community, and intentional relationships are a part of many organizational mission statements, but rarely are they built into the very DNA of their organization in the way they are in church.
Let me pause for a moment to talk about the word “church,” which may have been causing some squinting or protective postures this whole morning, and I’m guessing it doesn’t help to tell you that the roots of the word church are from the Latin word for Circus.
Before Latin, we find the roots of church in the Greek ecclesia, which refers to a gathering of citizens attending to the concerns of their community. And still, it is the Christian appropriation of this term that most readily comes up. Church signals: Christian. And although our community includes Christians, and we find wisdom in Christian teachings, we are not a Christian Church.
The word Church can feel unwelcoming to some – especially those who are not from a Christian background – Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist UUs especially. All this is why sometimes, instead I say congregation, or faith community, or just community. All of these words are also true, and you are free to use any of them, or any other word that allows you to connect to rather than flee from the thing the word is attempting to point to, these practices and this power I am trying this morning to describe.
Ultimately, I keep coming back to the word church not just because it has fewer syllables….but because it is what we have been called since 1898, and so it connects us with all of those liberal religionists of more than 100 years ago.
“Church” is a way of laying claim to our own history, to the sacrifices, and positive purposes that made all of this possible. This gift of community we get to receive.
“Church” is a way to refuse to concede this tradition – our tradition – to those who use church in harmful ways, and refuse to let them take this beauty, this blessing, from us, or from our ancestors, who fought so hard for the right to practice this sort of church.
As Unitarian ethicist James Luther Adams wrote, “We have a responsibility to maintain the heritage that is ours, the heritage of response to the community-forming power [in the universe], which calls us to the affirmation of that abundant love, which is not ultimately in our possession but is a holy gift.”
James Luther Adams spent time in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, where he got a close in look at the church’s failure to stop the rise of the Nazis.
Later, he described this time as inspiring in him, a “conversion.” Not in the traditional religious sense, but in the sense that it inspired him to change his life, entirely. Change how he understood what it meant to be moral, what is required of each of us, and the role of faith and the church in resisting tyranny.
He asked himself – if fascism comes to the States, what in his past behavior would show a capacity for effective resistance? It’s something each of us might ask ourselves. What from our habits would safeguard freedom, and democracy? And how does our faith inspire, or shape these habits?
JLA realized his main habits on behalf of democracy were voting, and staying informed, which he decided was not enough. He recalled his anti-Nazi friends say, “If only 1,000 of us in the late twenties had combined in heroic resistance, we could have stopped Hitler.”
JLA spent most of the rest of his life attempting to articulate a religious liberalism that would center habits and commitments to ensure that both liberal churches and the people who in them would be not collaborators, or even bystanders – but rather active forces of resistance to fascist ideologies or strategies, or authoritarian impulses.
In this spirit, I want to end my sermon with an articulation four key practices that allow church to be the place where – as author Robin Meyers describes, “we learn and then take direct and indirect actions to oppose those things in the dominant culture that brings death and indignity to any member of the human family, or to creation itself.
- Practice 1: Covenant. Covenant is the practice that grounds all others, our promises. To self, to others, to something greater. Our promises of love, of abundant life. Covenant directs our commitment and our loyalty to the place where the good for self, others, and life itself overlap, which is why covenant makes individualism, as well as parochialism, impossible. Covenant is where social change, pastoral care, and self-care are inseparable, and interchangeable. To be a covenantal rather than creedal faith is to refuse to be a religion of domination and control. It is to invite explicit consent, to welcome difference, and to prize individual agency. Individual agency, that is, within the context of relationship – which is covenant’s way, and its end. Covenant requires negotiation and explicit conversation, and is therefore an affirmation of our interdependence, and inherent worth. And finally, covenant teaches us that humans are promise-making but also promise-breaking creatures, and so we must take seriously the human potential to cause harm, including the existence of evil, and learn and practice forgiveness, repair, and beginning again.
- Practice 2: Small Groups. Small groups are where we practice covenant. By small I mean fewer than 12, although anything smaller than what you experience on Sunday morning is probably a good start. Gathering like this is essential, but also insufficient. Margaret Mead described the power of a small group to change the world, but studies show that it’s not really one small group that makes a difference, it is a bunch of small groups intermixing with other groups – especially when these groups are from different demographics, perspectives, and ways of being – as with interfaith or cross-cultural relationships – small groups connecting with other small groups become engines of emergence and co-creation where new culture is discovered, and created, and they combine the power of deep relationships with the strength of a large network – which is how you can get 90,000 people working together to make Nazis – or anyone seeking authoritarian control – back down.
- Practice 3: Sustained Habits that Care for the Soul. Despite the trends in our wider culture, I still find getting up on Sunday morning and setting aside this time to be in community to be one of the most radical, counter-cultural acts we can practice, and one of the best ways to be able to face the harm that humans can and do cause, because it connects us relentlessly with the other story of human goodness, generosity, and love. Beyond Sundays, care for the soul includes intentional practices of rest, connecting in nature, vespers in the park, yoga, tai chi, meditation, singing, gardening, biking, art….whatever habits we can sustain, with regularity that help reset our nervous systems, build in us a deeper resilience, and connect us with beauty and the love at the center of our covenant. Integrating these habits into our community creates a collective embodied capacity to meet whatever challenges we face with integrity and courage.
- Practice 4: Holy Curiosity. This is the practice that affirms with everything in us, over and over, that truth is ever unfolding. There is so much we do not know, cannot know – about ourselves, about others, about this life – about the past, or the present, let alone the future – about our families, or science, or the cosmos, or about the meaning of it all….Holy curiosity means we are learners, rather than knowers – which means we do not know how this story turns out, and it’s never too late to act. Learners make mistakes, and are wrong, at least some of the time. Learners seek partners who hold them accountable, and who help them widen their view. Learners spend their whole lives trying to ask better questions, trying to listen more deeply, trying to expand their imagination, and their vision, and trying to unlearn systems of oppression. Learners celebrate their past, but also commit to learning from it, recognizing the tendency of humans to repeat patterns; learners understand that neither justice nor freedom is ever a given.
Maybe you thought I would share a list with more direct action – clearer mandates for protesting, or legislative action, or organizing – to ensure we are resisting. What I have learned, and seen happen here, is that when these other practices are sustained, the community itself identifies those requirements as they emerge, and does what is required. When we integrate the practice and wisdom of covenant in all we do, when we commit to knowing each other – and our wider community in small groups,when we sustain habits that care for our souls, and when we practice a holy curiosity, we are incredibly, and uniquely powerful.
In these days where churches continue to cause so much harm, we must not cede this power, our power, our gift – to the forces of division, and hatred. we must claim the power of church to resist injustice, dismantle oppression, and uphold the still possible vision of a world where all are free.
References & Further Reading
- Background on Christian Zionism
- The Confessing Church – Background on the Role of Protestant Churches in Nazi Germany
- The Coalition between the Religious and Political Right
- Changes in religious identity and affiliation in the US – Pew Research
- Origins of the Word Church
- James Luther Adams – 2007 article on his analysis of fascism; James Luther Adams Foundation
- On Being Human Religiously by James Luther Adams
Another Possibility 