A word from Wendell Griffen: Epiphany,empire,and misfeasance in prophetic exposition

Preachers and empire

Billy Graham was the most recognized preacher in the world during his lifetime. His role in the growth of the Christian evangelical movement during the second half of the twentieth century is not disputed. Yet, across his many years of public ministry, Graham did not address the issue of empire.

The following account by Samuel DeWitt Proctor, a Black theologian who worked with Bill Moyer and Sargent Shriver to advance President Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty initiatives, provides an example:

One day Bill Moyers called from the White House and asked me to leave fast, go to the airport, and fly to Charlotte, North Carolina, with Billy Graham. We were helping a lot of poor mountain people near where he lived, and we wanted to get his support.

All through the flight down we talked church, religion, and social change. When we reached his mountaintop home, we had a delicious lunch and more conversation. It all settled down to a stalemate: Dr. Graham felt that his business was to preach the gospel and change the hearts of individuals. Changed persons would then change society.

I countered with the teachings of Jesus in chapter 25 of Matthew’s gospel, in which he admonished that at the day of judgment we would all be separated into sheep and goats. One got to be a sheep by feeding the hungry, giving water to the thirsty and clothing to the naked, visiting those in prison and taking in the stranger. The sheep entered into the Master’s joy. Goats did not do such things and were consigned to a burning hell.

Reverend Graham smiled and said that I was making Jesus a “liberal.” It was odd, though, that while he officially avoided political involvement, he often boasted of advising several presidents. ²

Billy Graham is correctly remembered for his “Crusades” across the United States and throughout the world as well as his preaching about human sin, divine grace, and eternal life. He refused, however, to apply the gospel of Jesus to elimination of societal inequities and imperial aggression.

In his 2021 book, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers, Miquel De La Torre exposes the root of Graham’s disregard for the love and justice imperatives Jesus proclaimed. De La Torre observes that proponents of the Social Gospel had told the nation and business leaders that capitalist greed caused the 1929 economic collapse that produced the Great Depression. When President Franklin Roosevelt used “religious jargon to sell his New Deal, which was picked up by liberal ministers throughout the nation and preached from their pulpits,” business leaders were inspired during the 1940 National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) conference by Rev. James W. Fifield, who preached against the sins of the New Deal and that salvation could be found through free enterprise and deregulation.

According to Fifield, business leaders were not responsible for the Great Depression, but were saviors. Miquel De La Torre then adds the following historical perspective:

During his talk, Fifield—nicknamed “The Apostle to Millionaires”—suggested clergy would be the key to regaining the upper hand in the capitalist struggle against Roosevelt’s liberal policies and dictatorial tendencies. This watershed moment made Christianity and capitalism soulmates in white America’s imagination under the phrase “under God,” which they then set out to popularize. Moving forward, the United States would henceforth be known as a Christian nation.

J. Howard Pew, president of Sun Oil, along with his brother Joseph N., despised Roosevelt and their former business competitor John D. Rockefeller, whose brand of ecumenism, interdenominationalism, and internationalist Protestantism that prioritized science and reform, was leading the nation, they believed, toward secularism. Later, they would back an obscure tent-revivalist preacher and fiercely pro-capitalist named Billy Graham. Called by Pew, not God, Graham railed against all liberal social programs—the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society—during his crusades. Social ills such as racism would not be remedied by government, Graham preached. Their solution could be manifested only with the second coming of Christ. ³

De La Torre writes that Graham and other white Christian nationalist “visionaries” cemented a nationalist Christianity that merged the state with the growing power of a group of wealthy white male capitalists who were steadfastly opposed to the “Social Gospel” and whose goal “was the Christianization of government, business, education, media, family, entertainment, and religion through the creation of a quasi-democratic theocracy.” ⁴

The events of the twentieth century’s final decades show the result of their efforts to achieve that goal:

The 1950s until the start of the new millennium was the golden age of white Christianity within the United States. The tentacles of nationalist Christianity spread and flourished under the tutelage of Billy Graham, Abraham Vereide, and Doug Coe—avatars for white capitalist men. These early religious superstars were called to strengthen a quasi-religious ideology that ensured the profit, power, and privilege of the few. With the Nixon administration of the early 1970s, a move away from Eisenhower’s civil religion was in full force. Nixon, with Billy Graham’s support, used Christian nationalism to divide rather than unite people by branding antagonists to his war in Vietnam or his administration as foes to Christian values. The cultural wars that would consume the 1980s, bringing about national discord still being felt today, found their footing when Nixon and Graham separated the faithful (those committed to their cause) from the ungodly, secular unfaithful. Basically, white conservative Christians began to flex their political muscles to ensure the phrase “under God” referred only to them. ⁵

The present state of the United States and the world is the result of the unholy union between the free-market fundamentalism and Christian nationalism mentioned by De LaTorre and the “giant triplets” of racism, materialism, and militarism that Martin Luther King Jr. denounced as heresies to divine imperatives of love and justice.

On April 4, 1967, a year to the day before he was assassinated, in an address titled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” given at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam held at New York’s Riverside Church, King, a Black Baptist pastor, defined the war in Vietnam as a civil rights issue. In doing so, King called for what he termed “a radical revolution of values”:

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit . . . I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. . . . A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities. ⁶

Public reaction to King’s message was swift and hostile. Several editorial writers attacked him for connecting Vietnam to the civil rights movement. The New York Times issued an editorial claiming that King had damaged the peace movement as well as the civil rights movement. Life magazine assailed the speech as “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The Pittsburgh Courier, an African American publication, charged King with “tragically misleading” Black people. And at the White House, President Lyndon Johnson was quoted as saying, “What is that goddamned nigger preacher doing to me? We gave him the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we gave him the Voting Rights Act of 1965, we gave him the War on Poverty. What more does he want?” ⁷

King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee exactly one year after he delivered the speech, written by Vincent Harding, a Black historian and trusted friend. Harding always believed the speech was the reason King was murdered. “It was precisely one year to the day after this speech that that bullet which had been chasing him for a long time finally caught up with him,” Harding said in a 2010 interview. “And I am convinced that that bullet had something to do with that speech. And over the years, that’s been quite a struggle for me.” ⁸

Nine years after his death, King was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by another Baptist from Georgia, President Jimmy Carter. Carter, a white Baptist Sunday School teacher, was committed to racial justice, gender equality, human rights, justice for Palestinians, environmental protection, and worker justice. His personal and political history was clearly different from his 1980 rival, former California governor Ronald Reagan.

In 1980, however, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Bill Bright (founder of Campus Crusade for Christ), James Robison (mentor to Mike Huckabee who later became governor of Arkansas and candidate for the Republican Party presidential nomination in 2008 and 2016), and other white Christian nationalists looked past Reagan’s ecumenicalism and marital history and led white Christians to elect Reagan in 1980 and 1984. They embraced Reagan because his views on free market capitalism, abortion, affirmative action, welfare, and Cold War militarism agreed with their sense of empire, including patriarchy, white supremacy, and religious nationalism. Somehow, leading figures of white Christianity chose devotion to imperial and capitalist power over the gospel of Jesus.

Meanwhile, a federal holiday has been established to commemorate the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. His statue has been placed in Washington, DC. Numerous US cities and towns have re-named major traffic arteries for him, and he is revered throughout the world as one of the most prophetic souls of the twentieth century, if not the modern era. When President Barack Obama took the oath of office to begin his second term, he placed his hand on a Bible that belonged to King, and he alluded to King during his inaugural address. ⁹

Yet the veneration of King has not included any significant or serious effort by US policymakers, social commentators, and moral leaders—including clergy, laity, associations, denominations, and educational institutions—to embrace the “radical revolution of values” King called for in “A Time to Break Silence.” The United States has not confronted the “giant triplets” of racism, militarism, and materialism and currently devotes more of its budget to national defense and homeland security than to educating children, fighting disease, feeding the hungry, and alleviating poverty.

Recent failures in expository discernment

We may never learn the true financial cost of the tragic military misadventure known as the war in Iraq. As the tenth anniversary of the war in Iraq approached, Reuters reported on a study by a team of academicians that tallied the cost of the war at $1.7 trillion, a figure that did not include $490 billion owed to Iraqi war veterans for disability benefits. The study projected that expenses related to the war in Iraq could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades. ¹⁰

The United States invaded Afghanistan after Al Qaeda terrorist followers of Osama Bin Laden commandeered and crash-bombed four commercial airliners on September 11, 2001, killing 2977 and wounding more than 6000 people in New York City, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania. When intelligence assessments traced the terrorists to Afghanistan, Congress authorized President George W. Bush to use military force. The “war on terror” began in Afghanistan because Osama Bin Laden lived there. Bin Laden was finally found in Pakistan and killed in 2011, 10 years after the Taliban regime that governed Afghanistan was defeated by US forces at the end of 2001. For the next 20 years, Taliban fighters matched wits and tactics while waging guerilla warfare against a multi-national military force led by the United States that was better equipped, had more personnel, and was better financed. Two thousand, four hundred forty-eight (2448) US service members died. Tens of thousands more were injured. Since 2001, the United States has spent more than $2.26 trillion, including more than $500 billion on interest, for the military effort in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan. ¹¹

The war in Afghanistan is a reminder that those who do not learn from past mistakes are likely to repeat them. Years ago, scholar Akhilesh Pillalamarri wrote that Afghanistan has long been known as the “graveyard of empires.” ¹² Nevertheless, the United States repeated the respective mistakes of the British and Soviet empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by invading and trying to occupy the country.

In doing so, US political and military leaders disregarded other truths. Despite US outrage about the 9/11 terrorist attacks and determination to seek revenge on Osama Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda network that operated from Afghanistan, foreign troops and weapons would never outlast Afghan mores, customs, history, ancestral warrior pride, and centuries of refusal to be ruled by foreign invaders, especially when the invaders propped up corrupt and incompetent indigenous rulers and Afghan military personnel who would not fight for the future of their society even with overwhelming military, logistical, and diplomatic advantages. A combination of bloodlust, Western hubris, white supremacy and racism, conservative Christian nationalist imperialism, and capitalist greed to enrich people who profited from selling weapons and war materiel were also contributing factors to the decision to wage the longest war in US history.

For those reasons, invading Afghanistan in 2001 was not enough. Chasing Bin Laden from Afghanistan was not enough. Displacing the Taliban from political power 20 years ago was not enough. Eventually finding and killing Bin Laden in 2011 was not enough. Capturing, killing, torturing, and holding his lieutenants indefinitely in Guantanamo and other sites around the world (but never in the United States) was not enough.

No matter how many troops were deployed, how many drone missions were flown, and how many US military personnel were killed and wounded, bloodlust, cultural incompetence, disregard for military and political history, hubris, white supremacy and racism, Christian national imperialism, capitalist greed, and national pride transformed the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan into a 20-year fiasco that bedeviled the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden. History will not be kind to the political and military leaders who counseled the nation to commit itself to that misadventure.

And history will not be kind to religious leaders in the United States who cheered and counseled the nation to go along with it. Religious leaders, people skilled in biblical exposition, did not warn the nation about the moral and mortal dangers of bloodlust. Religious leaders blessed the bloodlust while they offered pastoral support to grieving families and to people maimed and scarred by the physical, emotional, social, and spiritual wounds of warfare.

Religious leaders cannot blame the Central Intelligence Agency, State Department, Pentagon, and political parties for failure to discern and denounce the patriarchy, misogyny, and militarism that drove so-called Christian evangelical conservatives to champion war in Afghanistan a decade after Bin Laden was killed. All the while, the same Christian evangelical conservatives railed against the Taliban and other Muslim extremists. Prophetic discernment should have led more clergy in the United States to know and declare that these forces were merely different sides of the same hateful faith coin.

The failure of prophetic discernment and activity concerning the war in Afghanistan did not honor the lessons about Shiprah, Puah, Jochebed, Miriam, and Rahab. It did not honor the messages proclaimed by Amos, Daniel, and the other Hebrew prophets, including Jesus. It did not honor the tradition of prophetic men and women who, in later centuries, condemned bloodlust. It did not honor the tradition of prophetic people who challenged the imperialist aims of the Crusades.

That failure also disregarded the example of clergy who challenged the war in Vietnam three decades before 2001. Over the course of 20 years, religious leaders in the United States did not challenge public thinking about the war in Afghanistan the way Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam challenged the public 50 years ago. Religious leaders refused to follow the prophetic examples of William Sloan Coffin, Martin Luther King Jr., Father Theodore Hesburgh, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel in calling on political, military, and opinion leaders to ponder the tragic mistakes being made in Afghanistan.

Instead, Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, Phyllis Schlafly, Richard Land, Robert Jeffress, Paige Patterson, James Dobson, and Franklin Graham were considered by journalists, including religious writers, as exemplars of strong religious leadership. The same journalists, including religious writers, dismissed Jeremiah Wright Jr., Jim Wallis, as well as Congresswoman Barbara Lee of Oakland, California (and Allen Temple Baptist Church), who cast the only vote in the US House of Representatives against the Authorization of Military Force in Afghanistan that set the stage for what became known as the Forever War. To make matters worse, US religious leaders and congregations courted Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and other politicians while distancing themselves from Wright, Wallis, and Lee.

Prophetic discernment failed in numerous other times of the recent US past. Billy Graham and other “good” evangelical preachers refused to support desegregation efforts, including King’s work in Birmingham, Alabama that led to his historic “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.” They did not join King and other prophetic people in calling for the United States to end its military adventure in Southeast Asia. They did not oppose the racist apartheid regime in South Africa. And they denounced Jimmy Carter after he declared that the conduct of the Israeli regime amounted to apartheid in Palestine. ¹³

Palestinians whose homes and lands have been and are being seized, whose olive groves have been damaged, and who are being driven from their land by Zionist settlers supported by the US-financed Israeli government and the US-financed and US-armed Israeli Defense Ministry are like Naboth, the commoner in Jezreel whose vineyard was coveted by King Ahab so he could convert it to a vegetable garden (1 Kgs 21). In the same way that Naboth was falsely accused and executed as a pretext for what amounted to a land grab, Palestinians are being murdered, tortured, detained without trial, and subjected to countless indignities every day. Their experience is like that suffered by the Indigenous Black population of South Africa during that nation’s apartheid era and like that of the Indigenous people of this nation.

United States support for the apartheid regime in South Africa did not change until after prophetic people, including persons of faith and those who disavowed religious affiliation, engaged in years of sustained advocacy, civil disobedience, and demands for boycott, disinvestment, and sanctions against the apartheid regime. Prophetic people, including some religious bodies, pulled their investments from corporations that did business in South Africa. For those persons, experiencing the presence of God’s grace and truth meant more than pietism. It meant becoming allies with God in obedience with divine imperatives of love and justice to change the world.

United States policy surrounding Israeli West Bank settlements is a reminder of how gentrification of urban neighborhoods and similar displacement efforts by land speculators and commercial real estate developers force residents from their homes and neighborhoods through “urban renewal,” zoning changes, and other dispossession schemes, akin to the experiences of Naboth in the biblical text and Indigenous people in contemporary times. “Good evangelical Christians” who support and are complicit in Zionist racism concerning illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank are part of a long and bitter history of white evangelical tolerance for, if not endorsement of, injustice. The usual sponsors of legislation to suppress, censor, and punish prophetic opposition to Zionist racism in Palestine through laws that penalize supporters of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel and Israeli settlement business entities are “good” white evangelical Christians whose understanding of following Jesus is bottomed on the type of pietism preached and practiced by Billy Graham, Bill Bright, James Robison, Mike Huckabee, and other Christian nationalists.

At the same time, US leaders, including religious leaders, venerate King’s memory; they ignore or reject his call for the United States to use its wealth and prestige to lead the world in a radical revolution of values that rejects war as the preferred means of resolving differences. President Barack Obama could not have been guided by the vision of the Baptist preacher whose Bible he used for his second inauguration. Although Obama could not persuade US officials and global allies to embrace a military response to Syria the way George W. Bush did concerning Iraq, US militarism continues to cast an ominous cloud over the world and hinder efforts to address glaring problems at home.

In his 2012 essay about the war policies of the Obama administration, Jonathan Tran describes Obama as articulating what Tran termed “a theology of war.” ¹⁴ It is more than sadly ironic that the first African American to hold the office of President of the United States oversaw a policy of killing US citizens by using armed drones. The militarism King criticized was also clear in the virulent response by Obama and other US leaders to the disclosures by Edward Snowden that the country engaged in wholesale spying on US citizens and others throughout the world, including leaders of nations considered its allies.

Decades after King was murdered by a gunman, the nation suffered the massacre of 20 children and 6 adult staff members of Sandy Hook Elementary School in New Town, Connecticut by a shooter who had already killed his mother and then later killed himself. The militarism that drives US global policy seems to have turned on its own children. The response to the Sandy Hook massacre was not, however, to confront the giant of militarism. Firearm manufacturers and their lobbyist, the National Rifle Association (NRA), similar to defense contractors and their lobbyists, now hold more influence than ever before.

Sadly, devotion to corporate profit-making continues to hamstring efforts to make US society and the world safe. Thus, militarism has joined forces with materialism so much that US schools look and feel more like fortresses than places where children are nurtured to learn, work, and play together. People are somehow blind to the stark moral and ethical contradiction of singing “Let There Be Peace on Earth” while arming schoolteachers and cheering people who openly brandish handguns.

The moral and ethical disconnect between the rhetoric used to venerate King and the persistence of entrenched racism in US life also continues to afflict the country. Policymakers refuse to acknowledge the plain truth that the “law and order” and “war on drugs” mantras used by every US president since Lyndon Johnson have produced the mass incarceration of millions of people, disproportionately persons of color. Thanks to the not-always-covert racism of “law and order” and “war on drugs” enthusiasts, more black people are politically and socially disenfranchised in the United States now than were enslaved in 1850, 10 years before the Civil War began, a fact Professor Michelle Alexander forcefully presented in her 2010 book titled The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color-Blindness. ¹⁵

Oppressive law enforcement policies that gave rise to civil unrest during King’s lifetime still operate against people who are Black and brown. Years after President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder became the first Black persons to hold their respective offices, the terrorism of racial profiling remains as prevalent, if not more so, as when King was assassinated.

Insensitivity to the insidious racism that poisoned the United States when King was killed has not changed. Trayvon Martin, ¹⁶ Oscar Grant, ¹⁷ and Amadou Diallo, ¹⁸ like Martin Luther King Jr., were Black men shot to death by people who claimed the moral and legal right to take the men’s lives. The racism and militarism King deplored in 1967 were major factors in causing the August 9, 2014, death of Michael Brown Jr., an 18-year-old un-armed Black teenager shot to death by Darren Wilson, formerly of the Ferguson, Missouri Police Department. ¹⁹ That racism and militarism also accounted for the killing of Eric Garner, who was choked to death on July 23, 2014, by Daniel Pantaleo while other New York Police Department officers pressed their knees on Garner’s torso despite his repeated statement of “I can’t breathe!” ²⁰

The world has since suffered the trauma of George Floyd’s murder by former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin, who pressed his full kneeling weight against Floyd’s head and neck as the helpless man died pleading for his mother while other officers stood by and failed to intervene. ²¹ The world will also not forget how Elijah McClain died at the hands of Aurora, Colorado police. ²²

Plainly, the United States has not become more informed about or responsive to racial injustice since King died. We have simply militarized the injustice in brazen ways. We have not confronted or corralled the giant triplets of militarism, materialism, and racism. Rather, we have added sexism (including homophobia and transphobia), classism, and techno-centrism to the mix. The triplets are sextuplets now.

Judgment on expository misfeasance about empire

From pulpits, a strange silence about social inequities exists. Following the example set by Billy Graham and other white Christian nationalist preachers, termed by Miguel De La Torre as “avatars for white capitalist men,” many pastors and preachers appear unable to understand and declare that people who revere God also live to challenge and dismantle oppressive power as liberators, healers, and prophets.

The reasons for avoiding prophetic critique of empire vary from concern about losing favor with congregants to fear of persecution. At no time, however, has prophetic critique of and resistance to empire occurred without risk. Shiprah and Puah, Rahab, Elijah, Amos, Daniel, John the Baptist, and Jesus faced the same risks.

Many religious leaders refuse to engage in prophetic exposition and ministry because they prefer pietistic popularity and abhor prophetic perseverance. In the same way that Amaziah opposed the prophetic presence and exposition of Amos, preachers steeped in the tradition that produced James Fifield, Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, James Robison, and Robert Jeffress equate love of empire with love for God. In his “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” King wrote that he had “been so greatly disappointed with the white church and its leadership,” and added:

In the midst of blatant injustices . . . I have watched white churches stand on the sideline and merely mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard so many ministers say, “Those are social issues with which the gospel has no real concern,” and I have watched so many churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion which made a strange distinction between body and soul, the sacred and the secular. So here we are moving toward the exit of the twentieth century with a religious community largely adjusted to the status quo, standing as a taillight behind other community agencies rather than a headlight leading men to higher levels of justice. . . .

The contemporary church is often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch-supporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent and often vocal sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. I am meeting young people every day whose disappointment with the church has risen to outright disgust. ²³

Proof of the “outright disgust” people have with what King termed “the church of today” is more apparent now than when King’s 1963 letter was addressed to religious leaders in racially segregated Birmingham, Alabama. Obery Hendricks Jr., former president of Payne Theological Seminary and a renown biblical scholar, writes,

It is such a curious thing, perhaps blasphemy even, that today so many Christians seem to define themselves not by those they love, but by those for whom they have no love: Muslims, gays, immigrants, women who seek to exercise full sovereignty over their own bodies, and those who seek succor and asylum in our land from deadening poverty and the threat of deadly violence in their own. These Christians cry bitter tears for the unjust execution of Jesus two thousand years ago, but have few tears for the injustice visited daily upon those among us for whom Jesus expressed great love: the desperately poor, the sick and vulnerable, the refugees struggling to find a better life for the babies at their breasts . . .

Like the character Stamp Paid in Toni Morrison’s classic novel Beloved after he witnessed malevolence he could not comprehend, I, too, asked the heavens: “What kind of people are these?” . . . The answer should be obvious to anyone who has paid attention to current events: it is the result of successful shilling for [former President Donald] Trump by a cadre of influential evangelical leaders who seem to have decided that the teachings of Jesus can be ignored when those teachings get in the way of their quest to dominate American society. ²⁴

On January 6, 2021, the date of the Epiphany of Jesus Christ, white nationalists stormed the US Capitol. They threatened lives and vandalized the Capitol. When some of them reached the chamber of the US Senate, they offered a prayer of thanksgiving in the name of Jesus, after openly waving the campaign flag of defeated President Trump. On the date of the Epiphany, right wing people who professed to follow Jesus tried to overthrow the government of the United States.

Obery Hendricks has identified the problem. The divine imperatives of love and justice have been rejected by “a cadre of influential evangelical leaders who have decided that the teachings of Jesus can be ignored,” because they are bent on empire. That bent is not merely shameful. It is heresy.