Enough

If you don’t know by know I’m a believer and follower of Jesus Christ, then I’ve done a damned poor job of making my faith explicit, and for that I’m sorry. I believe in Jesus the son of God, true God of true God, born, lived, died, and risen.

But with that said, I stand with my brothers and sisters in the Muslim Ummah right now as we all are reeling in shock from the latest atrocities of white supremacist terrorism that’s being done in the name of Jesus Christ and for the followers of Jesus Christ.

It is an abomination. Full stop.

If your church is teaching that whiteness is witness, then your church is in heresy, and you should leave. Immediately.

If your pastor is teaching that Jesus is exclusive to white supremacy (and believe me, any preaching that elevates whiteness and Americaness and the American way is white supremacist), then your pastor is teaching heresy, and you should leave. Immediately.

If you yourself believe that there is something unique and God-given about your whiteness, that you and I as white Christians are somehow under attack by the brown people, and that it’s time to fight back—and especially if you have the white American Christian idolatry of gun worship as part of your religion—then you are living and believing an active heresy that is diametrically opposed to the Jesus Christ of the New Testament texts. Note that it might be the Christ that you were taught and the Christ that you believe in, that your guns will save you from the brown infidels, but your Christ is a false Christ, your God is a false God, and your gun will not save you in the end from the wrath of God who is opposed to the man of violence. You will stand before Christ in that last day and he will say to you “Depart from me, for I never knew you.”

It is beyond time for us white Christians of America to repent of our idol worship of whiteness and white power and guns and the flag and white supremacy. We white Christians have built up a toxic system that is killing people around the world—men, women, children—for the incidents of their faith, their gender, their skin, their sexual orientation.

The terrorists are not “those people” or “lone wolves” or “sad, lonely men.” They are us, and we have deliberately bred them to enact violence on our behalf.

We white Christians are not innocent of this. We have tolerated and encouraged this hatred, a hatred which is epitomized by our red hats and the chanting crowd we are part of.

We must repent.

And while we must repent and pray to God for forgiveness and ask our brothers and sisters to help up, we must—we simply must—stand with our Muslim brothers and sisters, and with all men and women of peace and goodwill, black, brown, yellow, red, white, straight, queer, gay, trans, believer, atheist, rich, poor, Western, Eastern, Northern, Southern.

Enough.