For Christ's Sake, Step Up!

Because faith isn't a private thing

I'll never cease insisting on this: we Christians have a biblical duty to oppose injustice by practicing virtues like hospitality, tolerance, and compassion on the one hand and prophetically calling out and standing up to oppressors on the other.

That our religious duty as both individuals and faith communities is to defend justice is simply non-negotiable, particularly when both personal well-being and the common good are in peril. We're called to be disruptive when powerful men and their minions normalize wickedness, to challenge the status quo when it bends towards an embrace of evil, and to do so not vengefully or wantonly but, as best we can, lovingly. The books of the Pentateuch tell us this. The prophets shout it. The psalms teach us that orphans, widows, and aliens—the holy triad of oppressed groups—are our special concern. The Wisdom literature attests to the imperative of communal righteousness. And don't even get me started on what Jesus has to say about defying structures of evil.

Faith is not an exclusively private thing, a one-on-one affair between you and God. There’s never been a worse definition of religion than William James’ inane “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider divine.” No, religious faith in the Judaic and Christian traditions always presumes covenant, koinonia, community, fellowship. The very notion of the Christian Triune God entails community!

Fellow Christians, it's time for us to put on the breastplate of righteousness. If we would be authentic in our discipleship, we can't respond to threats to the common good by refusing to acknowledge and challenge them. We mustn’t retreat into private devotions or insist that our mandate is to "stay out of politics" to focus on individual acts of charity. The former might well be a disguise for cowardice and the latter distorts service into a zero-sum game. At best, they’re both rationalizations that get us off the hook of picking up the cross. They belong to that class of “tepid” responses to God’s call that will get us “spewed” from Christ’s mouth.

Let’s not be tepid.

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