Violence is Violence

Well that was quite an orange fire that raged for four years, put out by a mostly friendly blue ocean wave, but I think that as the steam hisses and people trudge through the charred wasteland to determine what can be salvaged, something that will turn out to be much less flammable than expected is evangelical Christianity. During recent days, some people in surprise occurrences of political integration have started testing christian claims of evangelical identity, looking for whether people actually share their faith or just found themselves as part of a popular and maybe comfortable social club that seemed immune to some of the suffering felt by oppressed and alienated groups. But that is where I and others will probably have to draw certain lines with how patient to be. Surprising to some, these lines may not be the bad lines of gerry mandering in voting districts, pipelines through indigenous territory, or even Wal-Mart lines that were always too long on purpose. But they will be confrontational and supernaturally unchallengeable boundaries where our persecutors are faced with our unanimous outrage at their own hypocrisy of silencing us and then calling us silent. People love the MLK quote about the appalling silence of good people, a little too much, in fact, and not coincidentally enjoy even more the sport of comparing faithful Christian patience to the horrific silence of the Holocaust, famously brought to attention by Elie Weisel and others since then. People who question complicity in these matters usually have the best of intentions, which is to re-enlist the goodness of those they think they should have already been able to count on for defense against evil assaults on entire populations. But it is their own slouching when people demand the very moral compromises at the root of the problems themselves from people who do plenty of what they are supposed to and know it. What do people say they wanted from us. The criticism was of a lack of campaigning. And yet we were already muted for that very reason: the fact that we actually believed that people needed to know something and went to the trouble of being associated in any way with the message. So either people really believe we are wrong, and are about to be surprised sooner than anyone realizes when God comes through for us all, or there could be a second category of people who were secretly us and would not admit it. And in that case, I will say to those people this new famous quote: "when you point a finger, you have three more pointing back at you, plus my two middle fingers now too."