Bearing Witness as Protest

Our testimony to Jesus is the foundation of our dissent

For the past couple of weeks we’ve been reflecting on why Christians will protest forms of injustice. We began with the way Christians are inherently a prayerfully protesting people. We then considered the contextual differences between God’s people in Scripture and those of us living in a representational democracy which has been significantly shaped by Christianity. Despite these differences, borrowing from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s examples, we saw that there are still good reasons for us to engage in protest today. To wrap up this short series of reflections, I want to consider how Christians protest.

Throughout this year, as the presidential administration has mobilized against its more vulnerable citizens and residents, Christians have found a variety of ways to make our dissent known. Some have protested with our wallets, participating, for example, in the upcoming boycott of “Target, for caving to this administration’s biased attacks on DEI; Home Depot, for allowing and colluding with ICE to kidnap our neighbors on their properties; and Amazon, for funding this administration to secure their own corporate tax cuts.” Others have joined mass demonstrations like No Kings or the rallies here in Chicago and other cities in support of immigrants and refugees. Still others have taken the risk of direct, non-violent action, placing their bodies in harm’s way.

Behind these different tactics we find a shared commitment which activates how we protest: bearing witness. Christianity is fundamentally a faith built on testimony; we share with others what Jesus has done in the world and in our lives. We are all the Samaritan woman who, having encountered Jesus at her village well, returned to her community with an invitation, “Come and see.” (John 4:29)

But what does it mean that this distinctively Christian posture of bearing witness is the base for different expressions of protest?

First, followers of Jesus bear witness to him as the world’s only true Lord and Savior. While this world’s rulers make petty claims like, “I alone can fix it,” Christians are the witnesses to the “First and the Last and the Living One.” (Revelation 1:17-18) So, when we observe political powers speaking beyond their identities and acting beyond their authorities, followers of “the Alpha and the Omega, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty” (1:8) will speak truth to those deceptions.

Second, bearing witness to the presence of Jesus means seeing our Lord in our harassed, exploited, and abused neighbors. Not simply among them, but as them. “Truly I tell you,” said Jesus, “just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:40) When Christians here in Chicago protest the government’s cruel deportation campaign, whether gathering for a prayer vigil or wading through tear gas-choked streets, we are looking for Jesus. It’s our assumption that the older woman gasping from the chemical gasses released by masked government men and the child whose parents are too afraid to allow her to leave the apartment for school and the neighbors awoken by the sound of military helicopters descending onto their building in the dead of night, it’s our assumption that Jesus has so identified himself with each of these neighbors that we cannot help but associate ourselves with them too. This also is what it means to bear witness to Jesus.

Earlier this week, after giving a lecture at Wheaton College, I met Audrey and Ben Luhmann. Ben is a professor at the college and the two of them have been active in responding to the ICE raids that have terrorized their west suburban city.

But, as this article points out, the real activists in the family are the couple’s teenage sons, Ben and Sam, who spend hours each day patrolling their community, alerting their community when immigration agents are sighted, and filming those agents when they attempt to detain their neighbors. “They’ve documented immigration enforcement from Carpentersville to Little Village. They’ve gone toe-to-toe with federal agents, asking officers questions and checking to make sure they’re abiding by court orders. And they’ve started to compile a list of plates on federal vehicles that appeared altered.” (See the photo above of Sam filming a vehicle of federal agents.)

Their advocacy has been costly, keeping them on the road and away from family as they stay up with school work and college applications. In one memorable instance, while following a federal vehicle, the young men were pulled over. Pounding on their windows, the agents demanded the brothers get out of their car. “Sam had been recording the confrontation but when he opened his window, an agent took his phone and then pushed him against the car with his arms behind his back, he said. The agents threatened to arrest them for obstructing their investigations and endangering other drivers on the road.”

In Ben and Sam’s courageous actions, we see how bearing witness is the foundation of our protest. Standing up to armed and intimidating agents, their actions reveal that the state’s violent and dominating power is not ultimate. And by rearranging their lives around the vulnerabilities of their neighbors, they point to where Christ is abiding among us today.

Your protesting methods will likely be different than what Sam and Ben are doing in Chicago’s western suburbs. But followers of Jesus will find that the call to bear witness to our Lord opens countless creative opportunities to join our dissenting voice with theirs.

The View From Here

It was great to have a few of you show up for my lecture a few days ago. Thanks! And thanks to John Ross for this photo. The slide in this photo is a quote from Plundered and it’s one that keeps me oriented when our world gets wobbly.

It is Jesus the Creator and Re-creator, holding all things together, who frees us to live in harmony with all of his creation: with God, with our neighbors, and with the other members of the community of creation. This, for those who have been reconciled to our original vocation, is where we begin. Choosing to live in harmony with all of creation is the most pressing responsibility confronting us. This has always been the work in which we were made to find joyful meaning; the grief of a warming climate, the loss of our nonhuman kin, the fracturing of our communities each makes plain how necessary and urgent is our original task. And Jesus, the Creator and Re-creator, makes it possible.

I still really believe this!