by Ray McGovern
Ray McGovern, a 27-year career analyst with the CIA, is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an outreach ministry in the inner city of Washington, DC.
"And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?"
A good quote for your shield... or for your Christmas card, which is where Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne, decided to put it. I find myself wondering how the Cheneys’ pastor reacted to their Christmas card.
This, of course, is not the first hijacking of "Him" for the needs of empire. In 312, before the great battle at the Milvian Bridge at Rome, Hijacker the Great—also known as Constantine—saw a cross in the sky with the words "In Hoc Signo Vinces" ("In This Sign You Will Conquer"). Constantine had a cross inscribed on his soldiers’ armor. The new "Christians" won the battle and lost Jesus’ message of nonviolence.
Several centuries later, "Deus Vult" ("God wills it") was the inscription chosen by St. Peter’s successors as they dispatched crusaders to war in the Holy Land. And "Gott Mit Uns" decorated Nazi belt buckles. So "He" was hijacked long ago, with countless imperial and other brutalities carried out in "His" name.
But wait. Was not "His" message a direct challenge to empire—which in his day meant the Roman Empire and its religious and civil collaborators? Isn’t that why the religious and civil authorities joined together to execute him?
Had Jesus allowed himself to be co-opted by the empire and its Quislings, had he chosen to divorce his nonviolent but challenging vision from the politics of the day, he could have died peacefully in his bed—as did the leaders of the institutional church in Nazi Germany.
And we can too. All that is required is a mind-trick to convince ourselves that Jesus did not really mean to say what he said, that he did not really mean to do what he did in exposing the evil of empire. Help is at hand. It is easy to find a pastor preaching a domesticated Jesus—an ahistorical Jesus far more interested in "piety" than justice.
Often it takes a compassionate but truth-telling outsider to throw light on our country, its leaders, its policies. Bishop Peter Storey of South Africa, who walked the walk in his courageous, outspoken resistance to the apartheid regime, provides this prophetic word:
"I have often suggested to American Christians that the only way to understand their mission is to ask what it might have meant to witness faithfully to Jesus in the heart of the Roman Empire. Certainly, when I preach in the United States I feel, as I imagine the Apostle Paul did when he first passed through the gates of Rome—admiration for its people, awe at its manifest virtues and resentment of its careless power.
"America’s preachers have a task more difficult, perhaps, than those faced by us under South Africa’s apartheid or by Christians under Communism. We had obvious evils to engage; you have to unwrap your culture from years of red, white and blue myth. You have to expose and confront the great disconnect between the kindness, compassion and caring of most American people and the ruthless way American power is experienced, directly and indirectly, by the poor of the earth. You have to help good people see how they have let their institutions do their sinning for them.
"This is not easy among people who really believe that their country does nothing but good. But it is necessary, not only for their future, but for us all. All around the world there are those who believe in the basic goodness of the American people, who agonize with you in your pain, but also long to see your human goodness translated into a different, more compassionate way of relating with the rest of this bleeding planet."
Let us begin the New Year with what scripture calls "circumcised hearts," before we ask that God bless America.
an excerpt from the book "Beyond Iraq" by Michael Tivana
With so many uses of the word God, “God Bless America” has taken on new meaning. We are the good guys with our good violence fighting the bad guys that use bad violence. The overconfidence of Bush is becoming the arrogance of an entire nation; will this be America’s undoing. The front page story in the July 1, 2003 issue of Israel’s “Haaretz,” mentions Bush told an Arab meeting on June 24th thatGod told him to bomb Afghanistan and Iraq. The Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, quoted Bush as saying:
“God told me to strike at Al Qaeda and I struck them.”
“And then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did.”
We are now a nation with a leader taking his orders directly from God. Here lies the hypocrisy - Bush condemns Osama Bin Laden for declaring a Holy Jihad on America and the West, but he does the very same thing in declaring a holy war on our enemies by acting upon orders from God. Bush promised he is the great unifier, but his relationship with God does not unify, it segregates humanity and lunges us blindly over the precipice into the merciless turbulent sea of war.
Are enough people in the world becoming leery of the deceitful ideologies of the Bush administration? Is there wisdom to move beyond the War on Terror to find ways to settle our differeneceswithout destroying ourselves? On the other hand, the indigenous cultures of the world hold the important view of a connected, integrated world, and they are ever willing to share this with those that have eyes to see, hearts to feel, and minds to know.
“When we realize that all life is connected as one world, one life, we will stop killing each other.”
- Tivana
