The Attack on the Capitol.

Some perpetrating the assault on the Capitol building the other day carried signs mentioning Jesus, as if the Lord would somehow support what they were doing.  As if this attack were being made in Jesus’ name.  

Jesus himself sparks a disturbance in the Jerusalem Temple that involved violence against property.  Is that act an authorization for what happened on Wednesday?  I am waiting for the leaders of the religious right to start spewing this rationalization.

That analogy might be accurate if the agenda and goals of the mob storming the Capitol had anything in common with Jesus’ mission and ministry.  But they don’t.

The rioters were nationalists, white supremacist, pro-capitalist, and anti-democratic.  Their action was completely rooted in lies.  The first tier of lies had to do with the recent election, which they imagine was corrupted by massive “voter fraud.”  This of course has been conclusively and repeatedly disproven by scores of court rulings and the testimony of elections officials of both parties.  It is a completely invented fable.  But more generally the rioters were marinated in lies, fear, and anger about the direction and state of America.  Mainly they are afraid that it is becoming a multi-cultural, multi-racial democracy.

Jesus, on the other hand, did what he did in the Temple for precisely the opposite reasons and motivations.  He was angry that the center of Jewish life had been turned into a marketplace where the poor were routinely fleeced.  He refers to it as a “den of thieves.”  Jesus actually resists a market-based approach to anything.  He wants to restore the Temple as a “house of prayer for all nations,” which means he is not a believer in the priority, let alone exclusivity, of his own nation.

In his ministry, the Lord Jesus demonstrates radical inclusion of outcasts and the equality of women.  He gives away free food and health care, and implicitly calls for Jubilee, a Biblically mandated redistribution of wealth downward. Jesus commands service to, and identifies himself with, the poor and needy, the marginalized and the imprisoned.  These are exactly many of the people whom the insurrectionists despise and wish to see or keep disenfranchised.

Indeed, Wednesday’s mob, by spewing such lies about Jesus, by attempting to enlist him in their agenda of hate, exclusion, and domination, represented a profoundly anti-Christian perspective. 

Finally, the rioters explicitly attacked democracy.  Their toxic belief in non-existent “voter fraud” is part of an on-going effort to disenfranchise minorities so as to maintain the power of white people.  They therefore, with increasing explicitness, advocate an intensification of undemocratic minority rule.

While Jesus and the early Church do not talk about democracy, which was an impossibility at the time, they are clearly in tune with the Bible’s general suspicion of human autocracy.  The Kingdom Jesus proclaims is God’s, not that of any class or person “of this world.”  The argument can be made that, far from any kind of “divine right of kings,” Scripture leans towards a “monarchy of the anawim,” that is, a politics focused on the needs of the poor, the powerless, and the anonymous with whom God identifies.  A democratic system, while certainly not fully achieving this, holds the most promise.  

And in our 250 year history, the movement has consistently, if sometimes haltingly, been towards the goal of full inclusion of all in our politics.  Indeed, it is this trajectory that most alarms and enrages those represented by the insurrectionists last week.  It is no secret that “making America great again” means a restoration of the supremacy of mainly white, male, Christian, property-owners as the privileged class.   

Thus an attack such as we saw the other day on American democracy is also an attack on the hope implied in the best of the American story, based on the affirmation that all people are created equal and endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights.  The more we seek to live up to that dream, the more we will incur the vicious rage of those who want to drag us backwards.  

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