![]() One group carried a large wooden cross there were banners that read “In God We Trust,” “Jesus Is My Savior / Trump Is My President,” and “Make America Godly Again” some marchers blew shofars, ritual instruments made from ram’s horns that have become popular in certain conservative Christian circles, owing to its resonance with an account in the Book of Joshua in which Israelites sounded their trumpets and the walls of Jericho came tumbling down. Thank you for filling this chamber with patriots that love you and love Christ.”įalsehoods about a stolen election, retailed by Donald Trump and his allies, drove the Capitol invasion, but distorted visions of Christianity suffused it. “Thank you, divine, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent creator God for filling this chamber with your white light and love, your white light of harmony. “Thank you, heavenly Father, for being the inspiration needed to these police officers to allow us into the building, to allow us to exercise our rights, to allow us to send a message to all the tyrants, the Communists, and the globalists, that this is our nation, not theirs, that we will not allow the America, the American way of the United States of America, to go down,” he said. As rioters milled about on the Senate floor, a long-haired man in a red ski cap bellowed, from the dais, “Jesus Christ, we invoke your name!” A man to his right––the so-called QAnon Shaman, wearing a fur hat and bull horns atop his head, and holding an American flag-raised a megaphone and began to pray. This is what Christianity looks like in the belly of the beast.It was among the most jarring scenes of the Capitol invasion, on January 6th. I’m honored to be one of the signers of the #BostonDeclaration. Join Shane Claiborne and other Red Letter Christians in signing the Boston Declaration. (Read the full text here.)Īdd your voice to this prophetic appeal. Confessing racism as the United States’ original and ongoing sin, we commit ourselves to following Jesus on the road of costly discipleship to seek shalom justice for the least, the lost, and the left out. We are outraged by the current trends in Evangelicalism and other expressions of Christianity driven by white supremacy, often enacted through white privilege and the normalizing of oppression. The opening statement of the Boston Declaration reads:Īs followers of Jesus, the Jewish prophet for justice whose life reminds us to “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31), we hear the cries of women and men speaking out about sexual abuse at the hands of leaders in power, and we are outraged. This is the opposite of Jesus’ teaching of love and mercy.”Ĭrafted after the 1934 Barmen Declaration, which called out the German church’s complicity with Nazism, the Boston Declaration asserts “that following Jesus today means fighting poverty, economic exploitation, racism, sexism, and all forms of oppression from the deepest wells of our faith.” They make excuses for racial hatred and sexual abuse, and some have even said that it would be better to vote for a pedophile than a Democrat. She stated: “Today, too many Christians are placing politics over the foundational teachings of Jesus. ![]() Lightsey, a military veteran and an Associate Dean at Boston University School of Theology, served as one of the key organizers of the Boston Declaration. The statement was officially launched with a press conference at Boston’s historic Old South Church, where a group of theologians put on sackcloth and ashes to demonstrate the crisis of American Evangelicalism. “Responding to Jesus’ courageous call to love ‘the least of these,’ we pray for the conversion of the converted.”Īt the 2017 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, more than 300 Christian theologians signed on to the Boston Declaration to denounce the abuse of the Christian faith by religious conservatives and extremists. Peter Heltzel, a Red Letter Christian and Associate Professor of Theology at New York Theological Seminary. “Many Evangelical Christians have embraced the politics of exclusion and hatred, such that the Good News of Jesus has become cover for a social and economic order that can only be understood as bad news for many,” said Rev. Taking a page from the Hebrew Bible, a diverse group of theological experts recently gathered in Boston wearing sackcloth and ashes to dramatize their grief and sorrow over the corruption of U.S.
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