It is a temptation when we see someone who spews vitriol about migrants and claims to be a Christian to then say (perhaps a little self-righteously) “Well, they aren’t really Christian.”
Same for those who would keep the poor in their poverty, the hungry without their food, the sick in their pain, the cast out in their sleeping bags and tents, the ill with their want, the stranger in their lostness.
It is an easy temptation indeed to call them out for not being “Christian” as we think that Christians should be.
But I’d be careful with saying “not Christian” or even “Not All Christians.”
We have to face the fact that Christians often pick up odious behavior traits and exhibit them while singing songs of love and praise to Jesus of Nazareth.
The solid support by wyte Christians for enslavement in the 1500s-1800s, for example, is not an example of “not-Christians” doing bad things, but of sincere, Bible-believing Christians doing bad things in the name of Jesus.
The solid support by wyte Evangelical Christians for kidnapping Hispanic children and losing them in the adoption system is being done by sincere, Bible-believing Christians.
The solid support for weapons of mass killing by wyte Evangelical Christians is being done by sincere, Bible-believing Christians.
You will find that the theological works of the initiators and sustainers of wyte Christian praxis contain both what we think of as the “Evangelical gospel” AND the odious behaviors of violence and hatred perfectly entwined as the snakes of the caduceus. The theological basis for the Southern Baptists and Southern Presbyterians and Southern Methodists was that Black human beings bearing the Imago Dei were simply not humans worthy of full dignity and love. These claims were made right alongside their demands for obedience to the gospel and to the commands of Paul. If you’d like, I can post a link to one such document prepared by a minister of the gospel in the South that “proved” the eternal submission of the Black human to the wyte human, all by using the Bible and human reason. “It just makes sense.”
These people are Christians by their own words.
We have to deal with that, and we can’t escape responsibility by saying “well, *those* people aren’t Christians.”
They are.
It’s a terrible thing to see the name of Jesus stained by these actions, but we have the responsibility to own it and to push back as hard as we can by the grace of God to not allow these heresies to become orthodoxy.
We simply don’t have the luxury of letting bad behaviors be excused by words of dismissal about their sincere religious faith.
I’m afraid that we are going to have to speak up and speak out a lot more in our circles when these words and these behaviors come out. There are going to be a lot of people who don’t know what to say or how to act when this happens, and little by little these examples of poor Christian behavior will not only be seen as “normal” but will become what “normal” is for Christians.
We’re going to have to be a lot more disruptive and unaccommodating at these attempts to make Jesus look like a hard-hearted warrior who is out for vengeance against the weak. We’re going to have to not only say the right words but show the right words. And we’re going to have to do this in the face of a lot of pushback. But it has to be done.
Time to get to work, fam.