Attack is a strange word for protest. For standing up to injustice. It’s a shocking characterization. Then I looked up the word.
Webster’s defines it:
Transitive Verb
- : to set upon or work against forcefully
attack an enemy fortification
- to assail with unfriendly or bitter words
a politician verbally attacked by critics
- to begin to affect or to act on injuriously
plants attacked by aphids
To set upon forcefully. To assail with unfriendly words. Huh. Son of a gun.
So I determined it is, then, something quite close to the right verb. But not in the way they intend. For it to be true it must lose all force behind it; all implication. You know, the stuff it implies. Violence. Hatred. Vindictiveness. Blindsided attacks.
And then all of the color commentary that goes with that.
When the Attorney General of the United States declares that someone attacked a place of worship, one would assume they were armed. That people feared for their lives. Or worse: lost them.
One would assume the attacker is masked, brutal, overwhelming others with force, gaining entry. That, with others, they walk with paramilitary precision and certainty of conviction as frightened churchgoers in their hats and Sunday best would be scattering, frightened by physical danger, like children at a school or Gazans in a hospital. That’s what comes to mind when we hear this word. Kidnapping children off of city streets or militant thugs cold-cocking innocents. We think of gangs and violence and cowardly brutality.
Attack is also a word of instigation.
It is what South Carolina did when it sparked the Civil War to protect the institution of slavery: it attacked an American military base. The same word is what we use to describe the young man who attended a Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and went on to slaughter them. In fact, attack is a word we would use to describe the stalking and killing of Trayvon Martin by a would-be vigilante who was told by police to stand down and yet he still took his gun and shot a boy. And yes, attack is the word we need to use to describe Jonathan Ross’ multiple gunshots to the face of the poet Renee Good.
If we’re using the word to imply villainous actions, then we need to use it in the right way and reserve it for those cases. Times when humans strike first with vile intent to destroy.
Oh, but this, too, exposes the lie.
Christianity wasn’t attacked this weekend in a church. It was attacked in the streets and homes of innocents. It was attacked when ICE agents kidnapped a pre-teen boy on his way home from the store and the five year-old boy they kidnapped and used as bait. The sixteen year-old choked by ICE on the way to school and the six year-old left alone when they kidnapped her dad. It is being attacked by the supposed faithful arguing that God doesn’t support the immigrants, actually; no matter what scripture says.
Christianity is being attacked by people on Facebook sharing posts like this one, which purport to argue against God’s beautiful love of the powerless by picking which people deserve it. She argues that God loves the law-abiding, not the lawless; the immigrant abused, not the immigrant who protects; the child abandoned by a smuggler, not the child separated by the state; the innocent American murdered by an immigrant, not the thousands of innocents murdered by Americans. Not victims of state violence, just the right kind of victims. In short, not anybody merely living their lives free.
“It is because I love Jesus and because I love others, that I won’t settle for laws which seem compassionate but leave others exploited, trafficked or dead,” but this is precisely what ICE is creating. It isn’t the rule of law but selective lawlessness. It is suggesting that ICE should decide who is worthy of protection, love, and justice. This selective distinction of who gets to count as real: real Christian, real American, real human being. And who gets to decide.
These justifications of violence toward immigrants through dehumanization and a wretched refusal to respect the dignity of every human being defy the baptismal covenant, defy the character of Christ, defy the common character of God: love.
And yet, if we consider the dictionary’s definitions, holding back all these associations, we can see just how appropriate the word might actually be.
To set upon or work against forcefully.
A lot of the weight of this definition hinges on the word force. Often used as a euphemism for violence, the more general understanding of forceful often refers to one’s character. We describe someone as speaking forcefully, meaning with conviction and strong intention. To set or or work against another forcefully can include alleyship, or peacemaking. Standing up to a bully when he’s making plans to give someone a licking.
ICE attacked the people of Minneapolis.
And one of their own, against all the principles of theology I learned in seminary, a Christian pastor, who is called by God and ordered by scripture to place no nation (including ours) above God, joined this federal goon squad knowing he’d be asked to commit acts of violence, break up families, and prey on the innocent. And when Minnesotans figured this out, they worked against him. They stood up to him and his anti-Christ witness.
If we call this attack, then what these protestors have attacked was infinitely worse. Participants in a mass attack on the public. Instigated by Washington.
To assail with unfriendly or bitter words
How friendly should our words to abusers be? How much bitterness should we tolerate? Bitter as the words of God from the prophet Isaiah?
I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams
and the fat of fed beasts;
I do not delight in the blood of bulls
or of lambs or of goats.
Bitter for the evil the people have done; who then turned around to do their regular sacrifices to God in the Temple like it’s all good.
Bringing offerings is futile;
incense is an abomination to me.
These things we’re supposed to do, are now wrong. Why is God pissed?
Your new moons and your appointed festivals
my soul hates;
they have become a burden to me;
I am weary of bearing them.
Because the people are doing evil and thinking it is good. Abusive evil. Stop it! Repent!
Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
remove your evil deeds
from before my eyes;
cease to do evil;
learn to do good;
seek justice;
rescue the oppressed;
defend the orphan;
plead for the widow.
Isaiah shows us what faith looks like: defending the orphan, not making them! And it isn’t the tortured logic I’m so tired of hearing of how ICE is making an orphan today because a boogeyman brought them here (he’s the real problem, but we’ll deport the kid anyway) and really, the real problem was the parents shouldn’t have endangered . . . just stop it before I scream! Hell, Isaiah wouldn’t have let you get that far even. All clanging cymbals and hideous noise.
That pastor volunteered to wear his brownshirt. He chose bitter words and actions and faithwashed them as if they were God’s.
To begin to affect or to act on injuriously
No injuries, but that isn’t the point, is it? Since we’re selective in who counts as human, who has rights to protection, even who counts as real, then selectivity in injuriousness is going to be on the table. Moral injuries be damned. Most of us have pre-existing conditions of that anyway. Wars started in our names, genocides tolerated. The president is trying to collect peace prizes while murdering people in fishing boats, compromising NATO, trying to steal whole countries like he’s collecting Pokemon. So selective in what counts! What is even real here?
Yet there is something affirming in raising the potency of a single act of civil disobedience. In calling it an attack, the administration is heightening its rhetorical power. It becomes a true stand against the tyranny of abusers and the malevolence of Christian nationalism. It raises the virtue of the stand against the brutality and the banality of our leaders. And it raises the stakes of our common purpose: which begins by finding common cause, not shoving people out to sea because we don’t want them to count. Hell, racist southerners were willing to count slaves as three-fifths of a human being, which is three-fifths more than these zealots are willing to offer.
And yet, there is something far simpler.
It is a mere lie. A lie that is provable by experiencing the world as a rational human being. A lie that Christianity is under attack when it has always been no more than civil war. Just as we are free to wish each other merriment during the holiday season, pray for the success of our sports teams, or to be a bigoted baker and feel justified walking into church on Sunday morning, we are also free to embody the love Jesus in ways that are actually recognizably Christ like: offering water to the thirsty, food to the hungry, aid to the injured. To carry the beaten man to an inn and pay for his stay as the Good Samaritan does or to welcome the prodigal home like he will always be your son.
The thing about all of this junk is that the only people fooled by it are the fools — the ones so desperate to be the good guys and exercising their villainous impulses. The ones who put the Punisher skull on their police car and believe The Matrix is a libertarian allegory and not a gnostic/trans one. People trying so desperately to make evil match the goodness of God that it renders it dysfunctional — unless we pretend things don’t exist. Selectively.
There are reasons why the front lines in Minneapolis and Chicago are full of people of faith. Why clergy are being shot in the face with rubber bullets and maced. And it is the same reason that many Christians are being discriminated against — with laws that demonize trans persons, encourage discrimination on the basis of race and gender, and the dismantling of protections for the disabled. Because these are people of faith, too.
They’re White Christian Supremacists
And at the root of this, so often unsaid, refused to be included in these conversations, is the simple truth that Christians of all kinds are discriminated against by other Christians for going to public schools, listening to secular music, or drinking alcohol. We’re discriminated against because we supported gay marriage before it was legal and our predecessors fought for women’s ordination. And, by the way, who do you think marched with Dr. King? Who walked on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and were beaten within an inch of their lives? Inspirations to me, like the late Rev. Bill Boli. And the kind of Christians who were murdered like Jonathan Daniels for saving Ruby Sales’ life from a belligerent racist.
So when supposedly good people of faith talk about not disrupting a church service, take a minute to pan out to see the bigger picture. Remember it isn’t just a church service we’re talking about here, is it?And then when we hear on Thursday that federal charges are being brought against protestors, several months after the same administration eviscerated the sanctuary laws that prevent law enforcement from desecrating a place of worship, we have the wherewithal to recognize the problem isn’t a protest. Nor should we center our conversation on the protest. If you think we’re not allowed to confront evil in church, then you’re gonna hate being reminded that church is really the people and we are everywhere.
The tradition of Jesus’s Way of Love is not endangered by protestors demanding a pastor act more like Jesus. Our country has a long history of demonizing those people who actually do.