We are all the people...

 

This is a story I wish I could fill with details, but I am afraid for the safety of its central characters.

A woman who helps us with an important job in our house immigrated to the United States from Central America several years ago. She is friendly, energetic, and a good worker.

Recently she, with the help of her husband whom we’ve not met, did a very great kindness for us. What she did was far beyond her job description. It was justplain neighborly, and she neither asked for nor seemed to expect anything in return.

She is a U.S. citizen, and has a U.S. passport. She recently returned from a visit to her homeland.

She told us that not long ago she was stopped by the police in a neighboring suburb, apparently for no other reason than that she looked foreign. At least that’s the only reason she can think of. She had to show them proof of her citizenship.

This is terrifying. I know it’s not new for police to stop people whose skin color seems to them to be reason enough to stop them. But it is always wrong, and it seems likely only to get more common as the Republican administration ramps up its war on immigration and immigrants.

It it is also one step closer to even more wrong as the Republican party takes aim at more and more Americans whom it considers outside its norms.

If we can’t save a man our government admits it wrongly deported to a two-bit dictator’s prison, who else will we not be able to save? In the end, none of us.

Christian belief and Christian nationalism, according to Karl Barth

 

Does what we believe matter? You bet it does! And it matters very much when it comes to so-called “Christian” nationalism in our own time.

Twentieth-century Swiss theologian Karl Barth had no doubt that belief mattered. And that is the point of Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac post for today, Barth’s birthday anniversary (1886). Find the whole post if you can.

Keillor writes that Barth “became disillusioned with the liberal theology he had learned at the university, and this came to a crisis point in 1914. Liberal theology was optimistic about modernity and felt that humanity's progress was part of God's plan and therefore had divine blessing. Barth believed that there was a fundamental divide between humanity and God, and that the line was too often blurry. He believed that the truth about Christianity came only from the revelation of Jesus Christ — he called Christ "the one word of God." He was particularly upset when governments used Christianity as a way to justify actions that he considered very un-Christian. In 1914, 93 German intellectuals signed a manifesto declaring their support of the German cause in World War I, and among the signers were several of Barth's former teachers. Barth was disgusted, and he began to doubt ‘everything which flowed at that time from the pens of the German theologians.’”

Keillor’s Barth birthday essay ends with this: “When the Third Reich came to power in Germany, Barth was strongly opposed to Hitler and the ‘German Christians’ who merged the Gospel with Nazi nationalism. He wrote most of the famous ‘Barmen Declaration,’ which rejected the idea that the state could have power over the Church, or that the Church could have power over the true essence of Christianity. When he refused to begin his classes with ‘Heil Hitler!’ or to swear allegiance to him, Barth was kicked out of his teaching post and Germany. He moved back to Switzerland, where he spent the rest of his life writing his monumental work Church Dogmatics, which at the time of his death was 13 volumes and more than 9,300 pages.” (italics are mine)

Terms like “liberal” and “conservative” can be slippery and their meanings certainly change with the passage of time. And thank God we don’t have to read all 9,300 pages of Church Dogmatics to get to the gospel truth that the melding of state and church is heresy. But maybe we should dust off at least some of Karl Barth's writings to help us clarify what we believe and how that belief informs our political convictions.