Dear Pastor,

I’m writing because you are deeply committed to your vocation. You take seriously your responsibility to invite your congregation ever further along the way of Jesus. Through thick and thin, you’ve loved the people in your care, praying they would grow increasingly into the likeness of Christ.

I’m writing to you because you are a particular kind of pastor who is facing unique challenges in this politicized season. Unlike some of our colleagues who have syncretized American nationalism and Christian faithfulness, you’ve been troubled as this country has been led toward authoritarianism fueled by racial grievance. It’s clear to you that the federal government’s cruel tactics and deceptive propaganda are a threat to your vulnerable neighbors and an affront to the God you serve. Even more, you have been regularly grieved at how this administration cloaks its cruelty and lies in the language, symbols, and even scriptures of our Christian faith.

What has consistently brought you to mind is that, while you have been grieved by these events, many in the congregation and community you serve see things differently. Some are delighted by the administration’s policies, willing to tolerate the brutality of their tactics for the outcomes they support. For you to express your lament publicly would quickly evoke charges of partisanship from these members. Others have largely looked away from the current politics of hate and destruction; the last thing they want is for their pastor to say something that sounds even a little “political” from the pulpit.

I’ve watched your ministry over recent years and have felt the tensions you’ve carried. While there are some Christian traditions which have a memory for this sort of societal upheaval, you and I are products of the culturally dominant version of Christianity. We weren’t taught about pastoring through authoritarianism and we didn’t have models to show us how it was done.

So, given these deficiencies, like so many other pastors struggling through this season, you’ve chosen to mostly remain silent about the country’s politics. In your delicately worded sermons, in your weekly congregational prayers about loving all of our neighbors, in your invitation to the Lord’s Table where, “because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, because we all partake of the one loaf,” you are desperately hoping and praying that your congregation would wake up to the moment, would come to understand how their allegiance to Jesus would lead them to reject the ideology of MAGA. But speaking directly about the president and his policies has been a risk which, so far, you’ve been unwilling to take.

As best I can, from my own very different context, I understand your silence. But Pastor, we need you to speak up. Your church needs you to speak up.

The vows you and I took when we said yes to this strange vocation include fidelity to Jesus Christ alone. Yet the people in your congregation are being tempted to place their hopes in a leader obsessed with his own greatness. The fact that his administration adapts our faith for its own manipulative ends means your people are made even more vulnerable by your silence. In a speech at the recent National Prayer Breakfast, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth claimed, “The warrior who is willing to lay down his life for his unit, his country, and his Creator, that warrior finds eternal life.” You and I recognize Hegseth’s ugly heresy, the affront it is to our Savior’s death and resurrection. And while we want to believe the members of our churches would also respond with horror, it is our responsibility to ensure that they do.

One of the reasons I imagine that it has been hard for you to find your voice is that you and I have thought that conflict and love are incompatible. You rightly believe that speaking truthfully about the presidents politics of violence could lead to disagreement in your community. I don’t doubt it. People who have been discipled into partisan ideology, a framework which understands group identity in opposition to perceived enemies, will react when their loyalties are challenged. You can already imagine the emails (“Pastor, I was so disappointed to hear you say…”), hear the post-sermon comments (“Pastor, but what about Joe Biden letting in millions of illegal…”), and anticipate the backlash (“Pastor, our family won’t be tithing until you apologize for bringing politics into the pulpit…”).

But some things are worth fighting about and faithfulness to Jesus and loyalty to his kingdom are some of those things. There is a long history of culturally comfortable churches searching for a moderate middle way in response to the culture’s injustice and idolatry. But you know as well as I that the moderate way is always the way of a status quo which is of little use to the thousands of Black women who’ve lost their jobs this year, to the desperate asylum seekers turned away at our borders, to the fragile ecosystems newly opened to exploitation.

No one likes conflict but by siding with the shallow peace of the status quo we abandon our vulnerable neighbors to the conflicts thrust upon them by powerful people who nothing for their well-being.

And while it can seem that there is little you can do in the face of the fear-mongering political and media voices shaping your congregation, I’m convinced your pastoral voice is especially powerful during this chaotic season. While the people in your church have been told that they have to choose between one partisan side or the other, one ideological camp or the other, you stand ready to proclaim not a moderate middle path but a radically different way, the way of Jesus. Certainly there will be those who distort your prophetic cautions and pastoral invitations as partisan messaging, but there are others in your church who are, even now, longing for their pastor to speak the truth plainly as a light slicing through the haze of misinformation and purposeful distractions.

We are pastors, not organizers or politicians, which means that when we find our voices in this fraught moment we simply need to reach for the tools of our trade. Maybe events will call us to the streets to protest or to the state capitol to pressure our elected officials, but mostly we go about our quiet work of inviting people to mature in Jesus.

What does that look like today, facing a Christian nationalistic form of authoritarianism? For those believers who’ve largely been insulated from this long-standing strain of U.S. political life it can be hard to imagine what faithful discipleship looks like under these circumstances. Which means that describing reality accurately and providing theological frames for how to interpret that reality is some of the most helpful pastoral work we can do right now.

For example, when the president and his enablers use their power to propagate dehumanizing lies about certain groups of our neighbors, we have weekly opportunities to point out these deceptions, pray for those impacted, and replace the lies with the truth. Immigrants from Mexico, asylum-seekers from Haiti and Somalia, and urban residents of color are just some of the people this president has lied about. Each of those lies places the recipients of his slander at risk. It is our responsibility to speak truthfully about these fellow image-bearers of God and to invite our congregations to do the same.

We are helped in this theological framing by our scriptures, many which speak to the realities of corrupt power and how God’s people are to respond in such situations. Our church happens to be moving through Revelation on Sunday mornings and studying Daniel on Thursday nights. Each week we are reminded that enduring the trials and temptations of empire is nothing new for God’s people. In these letters, histories, and visions we are being provided templates for courageous witness, vulnerable love, and worship– always there is worship of the God who tolerates no rival.

While it’s true that you and I don’t have much experience navigating these harsh complexities, there are many pastors who do. Black churches, for example, have long histories of discerning the signs of the times and responding bravely. Authoritarianism, while new for us, has manifested historically in slavery, segregation, voter disenfranchisement, housing discrimination, and more. Here in Chicago there are a few local African American pastors whose sermons I regularly listen to in order to provoke my pastoral imagination beyond what I’ve personally lived. There is, in fact, a wealth of wisdom available to those willing to ask for it.

Pastor, for all of the challenges these days have forced us to confront, I’m convinced they are also offering us a unique invitation. It’s been a while since the differences between Jesus and his priorities and this nation and its competing priorities have been so spectacularly evident. You are in the enviable position of getting to call people who profess allegiance to Jesus to actually live their loyalty. Trials, wrote the apostle Peter, can serve to prove the genuineness of our faith. And while we’d all prefer to avoid these current troubles, the faith that is refined by them will “be found to result in praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.” (1 Peter 1:7) Could any pastor hope for more?

Sincerely,

Another (stumbling my way through these strange days) pastor

(Photo: Luis Quintero)

The View From Here

I’m in Titusville, Florida this weekend for the A Rocha USA board meetings and yesterday afternoon we drove over to the Canaveral National Seashore. Just slightly different from Chicago in February.

Reading

I picked up a copy of How Fascism Works while waiting for my flight to Florida and it’s frightening how much about our contemporary events feels recognizable. From the first chapter: “When it does not simply invent a past to weaponize the emotion of nostalgia, fascist politics cherry-picks the past, avoiding anything that would diminish reflective adulation of the nation’s glory.”