Where is God in American Politics?


We claim, we Christians, that our God is everywhere. He is omnipotent and omni-present, too big to be imagined and always with us.

This week I’m in the news. I’m watching Christine Blasey Ford testify on C-SPAN and then reading about Anita Hill on Wikipedia. I’m watching history repeat itself and hearing my Christian brothers and sisters say things like

“We have to love the accuser and the accused”

 “Leave judgment to God”

“We are praying for Brett and his family”

And, behind closed doors, “He’s pro-life” and “What does it matter? Nothing happened in the end?”

Where is God in these times and these manners? In us, purportedly his people?

I sincerely doubt he’s in the temple “praying for Brett and his family.” He showed up to temples for confrontations with the religious elites of his time, reminding them that their suppositions were out of line with his true nature. Reminding them that the Brett Kavanaugh’s they love so much are not the people he came for unless they get rid of their privilege and their power and follow him.

He spent much more of his time teaching his closest followers, so it’s tempting to believe he’d stay out of it. But Jesus the person didn’t have the luxury or the privilege of staying out of it and leaving judgment to God because he is God. He had to take a stance.

So perhaps he’s in the camp of people who’s stance is simply “love.” Jesus does love to shift our attention away from the guilty/innocent paradigm. Except that in cases of crimes against women and systematic marginalization of “lesser” people, Jesus always takes the same (loving) stance. He doesn’t stand with the people who have power.

Where is God in American politics? Where is Jesus?

He’s huddled in his closet the morning after he was attacked and he doesn’t know who to tell. He’s hurt and lonely and scared and he doesn’t think anyone will believe him. Because he was out drinking with friends, because his skin is dark and because he hardly believes it himself. So, he tells a friend, a woman he knows whose lived through the same thing. She is, in that moment, his priest.

They are connected now, in something that looks like a church, a community of people who believe and support one another at the edges of society. They hold on to each other and to a host of other mostly-silent survivors who watch history repeat itself and listen to Christians say “What does it matter? Nothing really happened. Anyway, it was 35 years ago.”

But something happened. And it matters deeply to Jesus, to God, and to God’s real people. 

Where is God in American politics? Where he’s always been: strung up on a cross, violated and murdered by people who say they’re praying for Brett Kavanaugh and his family.

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