The Persecution Solution

You have heard that it was said, "You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy," but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in Heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.  For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others?  Do not even the Gentiles dot he same?  Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

-Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 5: 43-48 (NRSV)

If you have some time, I suggest you read Michael Gerson's exposition about the recent history of the part of the church that is called "Evangelical." Warning, it's a bit long, because how we got from the abolitionists through Reinhold Niebuhr and ended up with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson is not simple, nor is it particularly salubrious to hope and faith.  What I have found interesting lately is the place that persecution is playing in a lot of our cultural neuroses.  Which is funny to me because honestly, in the history of the world, Americans are probably the least persecuted group that have ever existed.  That's not to say there is no persecution, you could certainly point to racism and discrimination of various stripes that seems to echo persecution, but the thing that's important to remember is that disagreement does not equal persecution.

For instance (and I will strive for balance here), a university professor giving their student a poor grade for spouting liberal talking points is not persecution.  Neither is the government saying that we can no longer force school children to pray or say the pledge of allegiance. Neither is a church deciding that they will not publicly endorse same sex marriage or say that abortion is just a wonderful right that every person ought to have. Neither is a major newspaper writing stories about the misbehavior of a powerful politician. These things are points of disagreement, and maybe even moral arguments, but they are elements of an ongoing dialogue about who we are and what our values should be.  In fact, one might argue that these things are precisely the opposite of persecution. 

The interesting thing I have noticed over the past few days is that whole bunches of people on both right and left feel persecuted, and the peculiar and almost laughable thing about it is that one of their favorite things to do is to mock people who feel persecuted on the other side of the debate.  So Fox News and NRA TV love to rant about the "liberal Snowflakes" at colleges and universities, even as they rave about how Obama (he's not even president anymore) and the "liberal media" are trying to oppress them and their freedom loving ways.  And indeed there are "Snowflake" types who seem to be just itching to get offended by anything and everything, so you have inevitable backlashes against #metoo and #blacklivesmatter, not just from the right but from the left as well, and you do have student groups protesting conservative speakers.  The thing is, none of this amounts to actual persecution, as long as you can turn on a TV and see both MSNBC and Fox News, and as long as you can read both the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, persecution is really a word we need to stop using, because it is an insult to people who actually are persecuted.  Not only that, but allowing yourself to feel persecuted when you are actually only facing disagreement is toxic over the long haul.

The men who wrote our Constitution were actually intimately familiar with what persecution looked like, and were rather keen on preventing further persecution from happening to them.  British Colonialism and European culture in general was super good at persecution and oppression of various sorts, which was (at least in theory) a large factor in why some folks were willing to brave the hardships of the "undiscovered country." Sadly, these refugees from the monarchy and religious wars, who felt the sting of the lash of persecution did not have such a problem inflicting it on other people though and so Native Americans and millions of Africans found themselves on the wrong end of the musket and the whip in short order.

Despite their failings though, they envisioned and drafted a legal code that was against persecution to it's very core.  Once you say, "All men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights," you can try to argue and say that it only means white men, or that it only means male humans, or that the list of rights that are "inalienable" is pretty short, but if you make that statement in the preamble to your legal foundation...

Let's just say it's only a matter of time before black folk, women, and all other sorts of humans that white, landowning men may not have envisioned making such claims.  If we are trying to live up to the ideals of our nation and it's laws, we must put away our idolatry of the "founders and their original intent," they were not perfect, or supernaturally moral people.  We should, however, appreciate the fact that their work was rooted in an ideal that was more divinely oriented than they could have possibly imagined: a place on earth that mirrors the justice AND grace of the Kingdom of Heaven.  In the Bible, this place is described as the Promised Land, but notably it is always a reality that remains a step ahead of the people. The Promised Land was most powerful and most holy when the people were striving to reach it, once they cross the Jordan and "inherit" the land, they immediately become the oppressors and the persecutors.

This cycle repeats itself in Scripture, and throughout human history: oppressed people rise up (in Scripture, God rescues them) and grow to the point where they are seemingly "ready" to take charge of their own destiny.  Inevitably, they mess this up, because they forget what it was like to be oppressed and persecuted and, despite God's impassioned pleas, they fall in love with power and wealth and grow enamored of violence towards their rivals.

Many of Jesus' followers were looking for a Messiah, as in a revolutionary leader who would help them rise up against a whole bunch of oppressors.  They had a bunch of them: Herod and the Sanhedrin were taking advantage of them from within their own house, the gentiles were an ever present threat, and Rome was the epitome of what the dominion of gentiles would look like.  It was an ever present temptation for Jesus to take the Satan's bargain and become exactly what most people really wanted him to be: a strong leader and a mighty king.

All he had to do was start naming enemies, and beginning the process of revolution.  He had angel armies and probably could have raised a human army in pretty short order, he could have made the world his own personal empire and justifiably called it the Kingdom of Heaven, but it would not have been, because God doesn't play favorites, he makes the sun rise on evil people and good people alike.  God's equanimity can be especially annoying when you really want God on your side, but forgetting to love your enemies is a huge mistake.  I admit, when I think of people who I label my enemy, it is really hard to imagine loving them, and thus I think that maybe Jesus means this as a sort of end point of enlightenment, where mostly only martyrs and saints really live, but I have to admit that maybe it's not an end point but a foundation of an actual Kingdom of Heaven.

Learning to live in a place where people have real freedom, and can disagree with you, is a rather challenging thing.  The wretchedness of our current state of dialogue and politics is a testament to this difficulty. The solution to this difficulty is not, and let me say this again, it is NOT persecuting your enemies.  An important first step in not becoming a persecutor is perhaps learning what persecution is and is not.  Disagreement is not persecution, laws that allow others to disagree with you are not persecution.  Being asked to forbear others who disagree with you is not persecution, laws that restrict your ability to harm people who disagree with you is not persecution.  Persecution is the restriction or violation of another person's "inalienable rights," which are defined by our constitution as "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The practice of law in our society is, at its core a way to litigate specific places where one person or group's "rights" come into conflict with another person or group's "rights."

The brilliant thing about "loving your neighbors" AND "loving your enemies," is that you can then treat those conflicts and friction points as exactly what they are: opportunities to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly, rather than places to exploit, oppress and persecute others.  They might even seem like places to offer a self sacrificial act for the good of society.  Maybe that seems crazy, even to some people who claim to be followers of this Jesus character, but he did actually mean it, and it is actually a shockingly good idea, it could even get us truly out of this mess that we're in.