If I Cannot Love (Insert Your Preferred Villain Here), I Cannot Love Anybody: A Reflection on Christian Love

The other day on Facebook, I posted a lengthy reflection on what it means to pray for healing, given my commitment to Christian love, and inspired by the recent COVID diagnosis of President Trump. I stressed that prayer for healing should encompass all brokenness: physical and psychological, moral and social. We should always pray for more healing rather than less. When our society is riddled with all the problems we see, I am convinced that the solution is more love, not less.

But on reflection, it seems to me that these ideas, absent a deeper context, can lead to misunderstanding. So here, I want to offer some deeper thoughts about what Christian love calls for in relation to those we might think are not good people, those we think might pose a threat to others. Because even as I pray for Donald Trump's full recovery, I believe that for the good of this country, his presidency must end.

At the height of the Nazi ascendancy, pastor and activist A.J. Muste said, “If I can’t love Hitler, I can’t love anybody.” He was making a point about the logic of Christian love, sometimes called “agape”: it is the kind of love that does not wait on worth, but extends to each person, even the enemy. If your love excludes the enemy, then it isn’t this kind of love. It isn’t agape. 

That doesn’t mean your love for your family or friends isn’t real and beautiful. It doesn’t mean you’re a villain on the order of Hitler. It just means that this particular difficult kind of love that Jesus called his followers to display is not the kind of love you are cultivating in your life. Or, if you are trying to cultivate it, then it has eluded you.

It eludes all of us. It has to be and always is an ongoing struggle. To be committed to living by this sort of love is not to actually live by it, but to constantly try anew.

A couple decades after Muste, Martin Luther King, Jr., made very similar points when he led a movement that targeted racism, not racists, and when he insisted that an unwavering and relentless opposition to racial injustice should be paired with love for the agents of injustice.

But it is very important to know, not just the scope of this kind of love, but its character. What does loving Hitler look like?

It doesn’t mean being “nice.” It doesn't mean not trying to stop them from committing crimes against humanity. It doesn't mean enabling abuse or remaining silent in the face of injustice.

Years ago, I wrote my dissertation on the Christian Love Ethic and its relationship to violence. One of the points I made was that agape looks very different when it is directed towards the robbery victim lying in a gutter along the Jericho road than it looks when directed towards the elites who are abusing the poor or those who watch it happen in silence because they don’t want to risk their comfort. At its heart, agape is a love that desires that the brokenness within each person be healed and that seeks, in the most fitting way, to promote such healing.

For the racist, the most egregious brokenness is their racism. For the compulsive liar, it is their profound disconnection from truth. These are afflictions of the soul, wounds that separate the afflicted from the true and the good while also causing untold damage to others. My love for the liar and my love for the liar’s victims demands that I stand against the lies and pray for a transformation that will restore to the liar the love of truth that is essential for human welfare.

Let me be clear. Agape is not the sort of love that calls an abuse victim to remain with their abuser. Because agape is a love that extends to everyone, it extends to the victim of abuse. It extends to yourself. And so agape calls abuse victims to protect themselves from toxic relationships. By virtue of the love they are called to have for themselves, they are called to escape the kind of relationship that enables abuse. But this love also extends to all the future potential victims of the abuser. And so it can mean denouncing the abuse (if that is safe). It can mean warning the world about the threat that the abuser poses.

And because it extends to the abuser—and because the brokenness Christians call sin is the worst kind of brokenness of all, a brokenness that separates the sinner from the most fundamental truths in a way that leaves them adrift, that leaves them furiously chasing after dominance and control of others as a surrogate for the deeper peace and joy that is possible when one lives in tune with reality—because the abuser's sin is so crushingly destructive of the sinner, love for the sinner calls for interventions that shake them out of the illusion that the path they are on is anything but evil.

This can and often does mean punishment. This was one of the most interesting conclusions I reached in my study of Christian love and violence: the infliction of punishment on someone who has committed egregious wrongs may be the most loving thing we can do for them. Of course, our systems of punishment are themselves broken and need to be healed. The privileged often escape punishment while the marginalized are punished, not for serious wrongs, but for desperate acts pursued to meet their basic needs or escape their pain. But for those who are mired in viciousness, who have lost their capacity to empathize with others, who are so selfish or so trapped by ideologies of hate that they have become severed from the true and the good, the most loving thing we can do for them may be to punish them.

When I began doing weekend conflict resolution workshops in prisons, and I found myself forming bonds of human connection to murderers and rapist and even child molesters, I never thought they shouldn’t be there. They were exactly where they belonged, both for their own sakes and for the sakes of their victims. But for their sakes, they also needed a healing from afflictions they didn’t understand. They needed a grace they didn’t know how to ask for. Some were so closed off from the true and the good that they thought they weren’t broken—and the most powerful breakthrough of an intense weekend workshop came when they found themselves face to face with the depths of their own brokenness and began to weep for all those they’d hurt, all those who had hurt and abused them, all those ways they’d been hiding from the truth about themselves, and all those ways they had dealt with wounds inflicted on them when they were innocent by simply inflicting comparable wounds on the innocent around them.

This kind of brokenness—moral brokenness—is the most damaging kind of brokenness of all. Especially when its victim lives within layers of delusion that hide the truth of their brokenness from themselves. And so love calls us above all to care about healing such brokenness where we find it. But the most serious kind of brokenness is not necessarily the most urgent. Sometimes, to even begin to focus on moral brokenness, other kinds of brokenness must be addressed first.

This is why we are called to love the poor and the sick by offering food and healing without thought to their character, without exploring what other forms of brokenness might lurk beneath the surface. The Good Samaritan, coming upon the robbery victim lying in a gutter, didn’t first grill the robbery victim to find out if he was a racist or an abuser before helping bring him to safety and care. The Good Samaritan just helped.

When it comes to those who are physically wounded, sick with a deadly illnesses, starving, or homeless, their desperate human need cries out in such a way that if we walk on or place conditions on our aid, it means we don’t love them with the agape kind of love. If Martin Luther King, Jr., found one of the most vile racist sheriffs of his day lying in a gutter, bleeding, King would get that man to a hospital and pray for his health. He would also continue to oppose and fight to overthrow everything that this sheriff was fighting to defend.

Even as we punish those who commit egregious wrong, we must feed them a healthy diet, provide adequate shelter and health care, and pursue their deeper psychological and moral needs. In so doing, we show (or at least strive to show) that the punishment we inflict is not about hatred of them, not about petty vengeance, but about repudiating and hopefully transforming the moral brokenness that harms both them and all those they victimize.

Sometimes, when our bitterest enemies fall sick or become destitute, we are not in a position to drive them to the hospital or give them a bowl of stew. When we cannot do these things directly, we do it by praying for those needs, an act that displays our commitment to those needs in the face of our own impotence. For me, this is what prayer is about, first and foremost: a way to commit myself to my neighbor’s welfare even when there is nothing else that I can do. It is a way to orient my will towards their health, their safety, their general welfare, their moral development, despite my limits.

One reason we might not be able to provide help ourselves is because we lack the skills or the resources But a different reason is because, in doing so, we might put ourselves within the reach of someone who would exploit that closeness in order to hurt us. This is why I would not encourage an abused wife who has escaped the hell she was in to return to her abusive husband if he fell deeply sick and needed a caretaker. Such an act would expose her, someone she is called to love, to renewed abuse. 

Sometimes, the reason we can’t help someone is because we know that if we try, they will take advantage of our good will to attack us, to dominate or bully or abuse us. Our love for ourselves demands that we remain at a distance. And so we express our love by opposing their abusiveness, condemning their actions, perhaps insisting they be punished, and praying for their health.

(Some use this as an excuse, for example, to not provide help for refugees. But there is a difference between refusing to take in someone you know to be a terrorist and refusing to take in innocent victims of terrorism and violence out of a fear, unsupported by concrete evidence, that they *might* be terrorists in disguise or might be prone towards terrorism—simply because of their ethnicity or religion. This is prejudice, not self-protection. We create more terrorist threats to our safety when we turn away those in need out of prejudice than when we offer them safety, a home, and a way to live with dignity.)

In this moment, I am thinking about what this ethic means for how I should respond to Donald Trump’s COVID diagnosis. What is clear to me is this: I am called to pray for his health. In this moment, that has an urgency that I cannot ignore. I am called to pray that he gets the care he needs to recover fully from this disease that has the power to kill. But his illness does not change my belief that his administration poses a credible danger to the health of this country, that his character is such that his occupying the office of the presidency is doing harm, serious harm, to the country I love.

And so even as I pray for his full recovery, I will vote against him, and I will call out in appropriate ways and in appropriate places the offenses he has committed—the bullying, the refusal to condemn white supremacists, the chronic indifference to truth, the self-serving exploitation of people’s fears and the deliberate stoking of divisiveness and polarization at a time when these problems have become so serious that our country urgently needs a leader who at least tries to do the opposite. As I pray for his healing I will pray for the kind of breakthrough in grace I occasionally saw with some of the prisoners I worked with: a coming to grips with the depths of his own brokenness.

I am called to love everyone. And this means I am called to see and respond to all the brokenness in the world to the best of my ability. I am called to cry out for bodily healing if Trump’s body is broken, and to cry out for moral healing if his character is broken, and to cry out for social healing if his brokenness exacerbates the brokenness of my country. To oppose what I think is dangerous in his character, in his policies, does not preclude me from praying for his health and the health of his family and those around him. In fact, it all springs from the same source. I am called to love in a way that seeks the end to brokenness wherever I find it.

This is the ethic I try to live by. I am no better at it than others who try to live by it. I fail, and then I try again. I will not tell you that this is the ethic you must live by, but I will say that I have found it to have an astonishing potential to heal forms of brokenness that looked to be so fixed, so permanent, that there was no possibility at all of any change. It doesn’t always work. But the more that this sort of love spreads within a community, the more immersive it becomes, the more powerful it is.

One Statue, One Symbolic Gesture: The Case of the Texas Ranger Statue at Love Field

The other day, airport officials at Dallas Love Field removed a 12' brass sculpture that has greeted travelers for decades.

The sculpture is of a law enforcement officer, a Texas Ranger. The sculpture's caption reads, "One Riot, One Ranger"--a reference to the apocryphal story that when a single Texas Ranger appeared in response to a riot there was someone who asked if he was really alone and the ranger replied, "You only have one riot, don't you?"

The model for the sculpture was a Texas Ranger by the name of Jay Banks. The impetus for the removal of the statue comes from a recently published excerpt, in D Magazine, from a forthcoming book, Cult of Glory, by Doug Swanson (a Pulitzer Prize finalist and, for a year, a John S. Knight Fellow in Journalism at Stanford University). But while that publication called attention to some uncomfortable truths about Jay Banks, current national events almost certainly played a big role in the swiftness of the decision to remove the statue. What Swanson's excerpt reveals is that Banks commanded Rangers who carried out a deeply troubling assignment: they blocked the integration of a public high school and a junior college in Mansfield, Texas.

The move to take down the statue is predictably controversial, peppered with cries of political correctness run amok. One person I know on social media bemoaned the fact that, because Banks did one thing people don't like, we are tearing down a tribute to someone who spent a career serving and protecting the public.

But just as one Texas Ranger can, purportedly, quell a riot, so too can one act by a law officer have far-reaching and career-defining implications.

A favorite quote of mine, from A.J. Muste, is this: "If you can't love Hitler, you can't love anybody." Muste is here make a very challenging but also a quasi-logical claim about the nature of Christian love, the distinct kind of love that does not wait on worth but extends unconditionally to all. His point was that if I can't love Hitler, then my love has conditions; and if my love has conditions, it isn't this unconditional Christian kind of love. And that means that this ONE instance tells us something about all of my acts of love: none of them are Christian love in the full sense.

Likewise, one police action by an individual officer can, at least in certain cases, reveal to us something career-defining, something about who that officer is and what values and commitments shape the nature of his police work. It can tell us, among other things, whom he sees himself as serving in his vocation--and whom he does not serve.

And that, in turn, can tell us a lot about what his name and likeness mean, symbolically, when lifted up--or taken down--by a community. A career-defining moment may not only tell who this officer is, but the values of the community that chooses to honor that officer. If a community hoists up a statue to that officer, what is the community saying about itself, about its members, about its values? If they leave it up when they learn something troubling, what does that say? And if the same community takes the statue down, what does that say?

The decisions about erecting monuments, keeping them up, and taking them down are decisions about what a community wants to say about itself to its citizens and to wider world. One statue can thus mean a lot, and what we do with that statue can both express and shape the values of a community. It can help determine whether Black Lives Matter, really matter on an equal footing with White lives, to a community and its criminal justice system.

With this in mind, let's look at the story about Jay Banks that Swanson shares in the published excerpt from his forthcoming book.

I want to review the story that Swanson tells in my own words, since I want to highlight certain features of it that are important for drawing moral conclusions. In 1956, in keeping with the Brown v Board of Education Supreme Court Decision, the NAACP tried to integrate the high school in Mansfield, Texas. White citizens responded with outrage, threats of violence, and an effigy of a lynched black man strung up at the entrance to the school. The governor responded by sending in the Rangers--not to quell the angry white supremacist crowds and help the black children go to school, but to help the angry white supremacists keep integration from happening.

Let me say that another way: these Rangers were not sent to enforce the law of the land but to help the white citizens of Mansfield to continue segregationist policies in violation of the highest laws of the land.

Jay Banks was the Ranger in command. And he did as ordered. It was his mission to enforce unconstitutional segregationist policies, and he carried it out.

We could imagine a brave officer of the law refusing such a mission on the grounds that his job was to enforce the law, not help citizens violate it. We could imagine some Texas Ranger taking a principled stand for justice in that moment in history, bucking the white supremacist values that were so widespread and instead speaking a prophetic moral message of racial equality. It would make a great story. But Jay Banks was not the hero in such a story. He made no such courageous stand.

Nor did he did make any attempt to disperse the violence-threatening mob of white citizens who were gathered to defy US law and enforce white supremacist principles.

Nor did he make any attempt to take down the sinister effigy of a lynched Black man--a symbol used to terrorize the Black population of Mansfield just as lynchings and the threat of lynchings have been used for generations to terrorize Black people. He let that stay up.

Here's a picture of Jay Banks, leaning against a tree in front of the school, the dangling effigy in place:




When asked about it later, he explained his actions as follows: “They were just ‘salt of the earth’ citizens. They were concerned because they were convinced that someone was trying to interfere with their way of life.”

Banks and the Rangers dispatched to Mansfield were successful. As Swanson notes about the high school integration effort, "Blacks were so intimidated that none attempted to enroll at Mansfield." When two young Black people, aged 17 and 18, attempted to enroll at the local junior college, they were met by an angry mob--one that a Life Magazine photographer described as among the meanest he'd ever seen.

The Rangers, including Banks, stood with the mob. They made no attempt to disperse the mob but, instead, threatened to arrest the two young Black people, who then retreated. Afterwards, the White Citizens Council treated Banks to a chicken dinner.

So what does all of this tell us? What I know specifically about Banks' career overall is limited to what I just shared. But I assume that he did many good things in the course of a career in law enforcement. I assume he apprehended violent criminals and helped to prevent acts of violence. I assume he protected innocent people from harm and gave a helping hand to people in trouble. Maybe he helped a lost child find her parents. Maybe he stood his ground in the face of dire threats to his life in order to keep other people alive. Maybe he saw people broken down on the side of the highway and stopped to help.

But when I use the word "people," I wonder who these people are. Because here's the thing: in Mansfield, Texas, a mob comprised of one segment of the population threatened violence against another. They hoisted up one of the most terrible, terrifying symbolic images one can imagine: a lynched body, a symbol of hanging someone until dead. A Black body, of course, not a White one. The symbol probably did not instill terror in Whites. But it surely did to the Black citizens of Mansfield. It said to them, loudly and forcefully, "We will murder you if you exercise your newly-acknowledged legal right to attend this school."

Jay Banks called the people who delivered this message "the salt of the earth." He defended them on the grounds that "someone" was trying to "interfere with their way of life."

And he acted to protect their way of life from the "someone" who threatened it.

He saw that as his job. He did not protest it or resist it. He saw it as his job: to serve and protect the White community and its way of life from the threat posed by Blacks, by the prospect of Black equality, and by those outsiders (whatever their color) who worked for equality and justice.

I keep returning to this portrayal of violence-threatening mobs as "the salt of the earth," because it communicates a vision of what law enforcement is about, a vision that's bound up with white supremacy. Mobs that gather and threaten violence in order to thwart people from doing what the highest law in the land says they have a legal right to do? THAT is the very definition of lawlessness. A commitment to law enforcement that was impartial with respect to race would balk at defending such a mob.

In order to do what Jay Banks did in Mansfield, he had to have an understanding of his role, of his purpose, that was not impartial with respect to race. He had to believe that it was his mission to protect and serve White people--and a big part of what he was supposed to protect them against was the threat posed by Blacks. Not just Black violence, but Black presumption--the presumption of equality and dignity and respect that trying to enroll in a junior college represents.

This means that Jay Banks did not merely see his role as being about protecting and serving White citizens but about protecting and serving their White privilege. He stood with the White citizens of Mansfield to face down that threat to their privilege posed by integration.

Now let me pause here and say something important: I'm not claiming here that Jay Banks was some kind of moral monster who helped to fire up the racist sentiments in Mansfield. Far from it. In seeing things the way that he did, and in seeing his role as a law enforcement officer as he did, he was probably pretty normal.

It was probably how he was raised to see things. It had to be, for him to look at mobs threatening Black children with lynching and call then the salt of the earth. The people who did this were his people, people like him who were raised to think as he did about race in America. And he saw his job as a Texas Ranger not to be the egalitarian administration of justice or the unbiased enforcement of the law but the protection of these White citizens and their privilege, even against threats that came from the law itself--from the highest law of the land, the Constitution of the United States of America and the rulings of the Supreme Court.

The way that an officer of the law carries out an assignment like this tells us how that officer of the law sees his role and his purpose in society. And what we see on display here is a racialized vision of law enforcement. It is about protecting and serving White citizens and their privilege. It is about protecting them from the threats posed by Black citizens (although I doubt he'd call them citizens), whether that threat came in the form of theft or promised violence, or whether it came from the attempt to assert equality and dignity.

The fact that this way of seeing things was commonplace at the time may well serve to soften the force of our moral repudiation. Today, people know better and have no excuse for thinking in a such a way--but maybe in Jay Banks' day, they didn't know better. Or perhaps they were just beginning to encounter the insights that could help them to know better. In terms of assessing the moral blameworthiness of people in the past, it can lead us into trouble if we simply apply our contemporary standards and values without qualification. While I believe injustice is injustice no matter what the era, understandable cultural blindness can partly excuse people for failing to be just, even if such blindness can never make injustice anything other than wrong.

But in taking down a statue of someone from the past, the issue at hand is not how we should morally assess the overall moral praiseworthiness or blameworthiness of the person represented in the statue. The question is what values we want to symbolically affirm today with the public symbols we choose to display.

The fact is that precisely because Jay Banks was a man of his time rather than a man ahead of his time, he represents something far bigger than himself: he represents a vision of law enforcement that has for generations led to the marginalization and violation of Black Americans. It is precisely this vision of law enforcement whose legacy we have to cast off if we want to move into a future in which fewer George Floyds are murdered by police officers. It is precisely this vision of law enforcement that has no place in any system of law enforcement today. Not that it did back then, either, but we have the clarity of vision today to stand against that vision and to lift up in its place one that is truly egalitarian and just.

To do that, we need to clearly repudiate racist visions of law enforcement. This is what the historic moment we are in calls for: unambiguous repudiation of the vision of law enforcement that sees the mission of police to be the protection of White Americans and White privilege against the threats posed by people of color and their demands for equal dignity and respect.

In other words, this moment in history calls us to unambiguously repudiate the vision of law enforcement that Jay Banks represents--the one so clearly on display during his defining moments in Mansfield, Texas. He was perhaps no more guilty than anyone else in his day for affirming and acting on such a racist vision. Still, he was an uncritical agent of that racist vision and its evils. And that means he represents this vision. And there is no way to unambiguously repudiate that vision while, at the same time, leaving intact a symbol in a public space that lifts up someone whose career represents it.

At the same time, a public act of taking down such a symbol is a public message with its own symbolic meaning: "We are turning away from this racist conceptions of policing; we are choosing not to honor it."

Of course, there are difficulties here because public symbols are complex. This is especially true of the public symbols that are tied to the legacy of human lives, such as statues and the names of famous people attached to building or streets or town squares. No human being symbolizes just one thing. And neither does Jay Banks. And there are surely things in Jay Banks' life that we want to lift up today.

If we look at the lives of those officers of the law who, in earlier generations, saw their mission through racist lenses and went out to serve and protect White citizens while keep Black ones down--if we are honest and fair as we examine their stories, we will find them standing for things we want to honor: their courage in facing danger for the sake of the helpless, for example. But surely we can find people in our history who exemplify these virtues without the limitations that racism imposes on their expression. It's probably true that, at some point, Jay Banks went out of his way to help a child. But my guess is it was a white child, and that he wouldn't have shown the same compassion for a black child. But surely there are law officers in the state of Texas who have shown compassion without racist constraints. So let's honor those officer.

If we want to honor the virtues of law enforcement without also honoring the racist history of policing in America, let's find those prophetic officers who stood for racial equality when it wasn't popular to do so, the ones who were asked to enforce inequality and said no. Let's find the officers who took a stand for racial justice. Let's find Black officers who had the courage to take up a calling in law enforcement despite a hostile environment, who blazed a trail paved with moral courage and helped to challenge racist assumptions.

Let's find those officers who represent the values we want our law enforcement agencies today to embody. Let's commission statues of them.

Maybe the people of Dallas want to lift up what is best in the history of the Texas Rangers. So let's find someone who can symbolize that--someone who saw the mission of the Rangers as demanding opposition to racist oppression rather than someone who happily went along with a Governor's order to enforce racial oppression. Surely in the storied ranks of the Texas Rangers it is possible find such a person, right?

So find that person, make a statue, and erect it where Jay Banks' statue used to stand. One statue, one symbolic gesture that affirms our community's opposition to racist law enforcement and the respect we hold for those officers of the law who truly embody a commitment to equality under the law, to even-handed administration of legal justice, to fairness and dignity, to the idea of serving and protecting everyone in the community regardless of such markers as race or ethnicity, creed or sexuality.

Our symbols matter. Even one symbolic change can, like a Texas Ranger wading into a riot alone, make a big difference in who feels included in the community, who feels marginalized, who sees law enforcement as an ally in the quest to live a good life, and who sees law enforcement as a threat.

In this historic moment, let us make the kinds of symbolic changes that reflect the values of equality and justice and human dignity that can help us move towards a more inclusive and harmonious nation.

I Can't Breathe

"I can't breathe."

There are people out there these days who are protesting rules that require wearing masks during this pandemic. They think the law is pressing itself into their lives, restricting their freedom. Some complain that it's hard to breathe in those things.

The force of law, restricting their breath.

"I can't breathe."

Eric Garner was put in a choke hold after being detained by police for selling loose cigarettes. We know how it ended: Eric Garner died and the police officer walked free.

The force of the law, restricting his breath.

A year later, in Tulsa, Eric Harris was fleeing the police. He died when a volunteer reserve deputy shot him after he'd already been tackled. It was apparently a mistake: the volunteer meant to pull out his taser but instead pulled out his gun. As Harris was dying, he gasped out, "I'm losing my breath." The deputy responded, "F**k your breath." Perhaps they were the last words he heard before he died.

The force of the law, restricting his breath.

The other day a police officer knelt on the throat of George Floyd, who was suspected of forgery and resisted when the officers tried to arrest him. He gasped for breath, gasped out the words, "I can't breathe." Onlookers became involved, afraid for Floyd's life, asking the officer to relent. The police officer did not relent. Floyd was picked up by an ambulance but he died.

The force of the law, restricting his breath.

Stopping it. Ending it.

An utterly predictable ending in this most recent case. I saw the size of the officer who had his knee on George Floyd's throat. I know that if someone that size had their knee on my throat for thirty seconds or less, I'd almost certainly die. George Floyd looked bigger and stronger than me, so I'd give it a little longer. Still, this was a murderous form of restraint. A deadly form of restraint. Certainly not the only thing the officer could have possibly done under the circumstances with an unarmed man being arrested for a nonviolent crime.

Three black men who couldn't breathe. Three black men who lost their lives. And they are only a few among many.

Most police officers have not ended someone's life by cutting off their air supply, certainly not by kneeling on the suspect's throat. We need to point that out. But it isn't enough to point this out. We also need to ask how many, under identical circumstances, would do the same.

I hope the answer is not many. I think the police officers I know would be critical of what this officer did. We need to point that out. But pointing that out is not enough. Because we also need to ask how many police officers will circle the wagons and defend those in their ranks who cut off someone's breath.

I hope the answer is that far fewer will do so this time than has happened in the past. And if this is right, we need to point that out. But again, pointing that out is not enough. We need to ask other questions, broader questions:

How many in our society will look at what happened and say, "He shouldn't have resisted when the cops came to arrest him. It's his own fault." As if the death penalty is the right punishment--imposed without judge or jury, there on the scene, on the street, caught between a tire and the weight of a man's body concentrated through the knee and applied to the throat. As if that is what resisting arrest deserves.

How many will say, "The man was big and dangerous, and when he resisted they had to subdue him. They had no choice." As if, in a confrontation between an unarmed man outnumbered by armed police trained in various methods of restraint, there was no other possible choice but to kneel on his throat and keep kneeling on it even after he started gasping, even after it was clear that he was struggling to breathe, to live, to live one more moment if not another day. "No alternative. Gotta do it. Big black guy. Dangerous. Gotta put him down like a mad dog." How many say such things? And of those who don't say it, how many think it?

How many in our society, even if they do not think such things, are hesitant to speak against blatant inhumanity, homicidal inhumanity, for fear of alienating those in their circle of friends and family who do think such things?

This is not just about a single person committing a single homicidal act. That police officer who killed George Floyd is clearly responsible for his actions, but the rest of us are responsible for how we respond to those actions. The rest of us are responsible for shaping and reshaping our shared culture and society.

Do we shape it in ways that minimize the gravity of such crimes? Do we shape it in ways that help to form the hot thin soup out of which such crimes evolve?

Do we shape it in ways that result in Black lives being treated as less precious than white lives? Do we shape it in ways that, while virtuously condemning overt in-your-face racism, perpetuate a quiet refusal to consider how implicit biases and unconscious prejudices create a more dangerous world for our Black neighbors?

If so, then our voices are there, helping to shape the words of the officer who said "F**k your breath" to a dying man.

Or are we, instead, gagging along with Eric Garner, Eric Harris, and George Floyd? Are we encouraging the empathy that is required to see the humanity, the image of God, the face of God, in strangers who are dying on the street? Do we feel the everyday racism that our Black neighbors endure as a weight on our own shoulders, even if we aren't ourselves Black and even if we cannot fully inhabit or understand it? Do we endeavor to do so with enough persistence and compassion to at least try to envision what it is like to be Black in America and to see white police officers ending the lives of unarmed Black men only to be acquitted time and time again, and to see white vigilantes gunning down Black joggers and not be charged until there is a public outcry?

If so, then how can we not find ourselves vicariously gasping and crying out, "I can't breathe"?

Since I started by talking about face masks, let me return to that now--because I think there some lessons there.

Except in rare cases, a cloth face mask does very little to restrict breathing. People can wear it for hours and suffer no ill effects except for mild discomfort, fogged eyeglasses, and some chafing. These masks help keep asymptomatic carriers of COVID-19 from unwittingly spreading it to others, by trapping the respiratory droplets that spread the disease before they can splash outward into the grocery store or the pharmacy. Any law or policy requiring you to wear such a mask is not intended for your safety. It is intended for the safety of those around you. But the policy only works if everyone does their part.

There are two lessons to draw from this. The first is this. Except in rare cases where medical conditions make mask-wearing harmful, those who complain that they can't breathe when they wear a mask are operating from a position of privilege. They are operating from a space of unfettered breathing, from a social space in which they are used to filling their lungs and breathing out across their world without a care. The restriction is nothing compared to the knee at George Floyd's throat. So if you think the mask is the law demanding too much, then so is the knee. If the mask calls for protests and rallies and hours of your time fighting in the name of human breath free of legal tyranny, than all the more so should the knee demand the same. Perhaps something even more dramatic, more sustained, than quietly taking a knee during the National Anthem at a football game.

And here is the second lesson: the mask requirement is about collective responsibility. It is a small thing, but if all of us collectively do it the outcome could be dramatic: people alive who would otherwise be dead; small businesses able to stay afloat which would die if another surge in the pandemic created the need for more sheltering in place. All of us do this little thing, and the burden of the pandemic will be eased from the shoulders of the minority who fall into the highest risk categories. We all do our little part, a tiny inconvenience, and people live who otherwise would have died--like my mother who is in her 80s, or my mother-in-law who is in her 70s and has diabetes.

This is about collective action: everyone seeing themselves as part of the solution rather than treating it as someone else's problem. That is what the masks represent. And that is what is required to change our society enough that our Black neighbors can breathe easier.

The problem of racism is in part a problem of overt racist people acting out their hate in the world. If and when police officers are identified as such overt racists, they should be fired. And when their acts rise to the level of crimes, they should be punished.

But the problem of racism is also a problem of hidden systemic forces and widespread patterns of thinking and acting that are most unconscious and, individually, probably not very harmful. Let's call this the problem of systemic and implicit racism. With respect to this problem, it is a mistake to single out the police as some special locus of systemic and implicit racism. That's just a trick some people play--people who aren't police officers, often white liberals--to avoid responsibility. The problem of systemic and implicit racism is everywhere, including in the system of higher education of which I am a part.

What we need is collective action and collective responsibility. What we need is a willingness to take action from our place of privilege, despite the chafing and the fogging of our glasses, so that someone lives who otherwise would have died.

In the case of systemic and implicit racism, the steps are less obvious and more complicated than simply putting on a mask before stepping into Walmart. It will be harder work. And just as there are those who refuse to wear a mask, there are those who refuse to do this harder work. But hopefully enough of us hear the anguished cry, "I can't breathe," deep in our bones. Deep enough so it aches. Deep enough so it stirs us to act.

The cynic will say, "I'm not holding my breath." But I am not a cynic. I am a person of faith, and I believe that every breath is a gift. As long we can breathe, we have the power to carry into our world the very breath of God. Let us use it well.

Iran, Jesus' Third Way, and the Notion of a Christian Nation

Iran did exactly what they said they'd do. Notice that the US threat of strong reprisals should they do this did not deter them. And when they say that should we strike back they will feel compelled to strike again, that will not deter us. In a dynamic like this, each side from its own perspective sees each escalating act by the other as a new wrong that demands a violent response: an eye taken that demands an eye be taken, a tooth knocked out that demands the knocking out of a tooth. We never reach a point where things are "even" because each side has their own moral perspective from which the other side's act of getting even is seen as a new affront that demands that we get even. That's the engine that drives escalation to all-out war.

And the entire pattern of thinking and relating that creates this engine makes the world a far worse place than it would be if we could only cultivate a "third way" of response--an alternative both to "taking it" and to "striking back in kind."

This kind of third way was what Jesus was attempting to describe in the Sermon on the Mount. As theologian Walter Wink noted, turning the other cheek was not for Jesus a call to simply endure abuse but a call for a creative third way of response that neither strikes back in kind nor meekly submits. It matters, for understanding Jesus, that he specified that if someone strikes your right cheek you turn the left cheek to them. This matters because a blow to the right cheek was the kind of back-handed blow a master would use to strike a slave. A blow to the left cheek was a blow that one struck against a perceived equal. Turning the other cheek was thus an example of a creative way to assert one's equal dignity in the face of a demeaning attack, without striking back in kind. (Wink offers a similar analysis of walking the second mile and giving all of one's clothes to the one who demands your outer garment.)

Jesus did not here offer a specific solution to be used in every conflict but rather a way of thinking about conflict, a way of approaching conflict, distinct from the eye-for-eye approach that serves as an engine of escalation. This different approach, this third way, demands thought and planning and imagination. It cannot be carried out by rote but by bringing thoughtful people to the table who understand the enemy and how our actions will affect them. Massive symbolic gestures that startle and disarm, responses that make continuing to strike culturally costly or shameful, responses where the only face-saving move is not to escalate. Responses that aren't in the script, that leave everyone momentarily stunned.

Imagine if we as a nation devoted a fraction of what we devote to the military towards the cultivation of our capacity to launch such creative third-way responses. Imagine if we were as committed to developing and implementing such responses as we are to developing and implementing effective military ones. To imagine such a thing is to imagine a nation that as a matter of national policy takes seriously Jesus' strategy for responding to violence and injustice. To imagine such a thing is, in a real sense, to imagine a Christian nation.

In this sense, the world has never seen a truly Christian nation. Perhaps we never will.