Pharisee Nation

American Nation Brainwashed

by John Dear

[John Dear is a Jesuit priest and the author/editor of 20 books including
most recently, "The Questions of Jesus" and "Living Peace" ]

02/17/05 "CommonDreams" - - Last September, I spoke to some 2,000 students
during their annual lecture at a Baptist college in Pennsylvania. After a
short prayer service for peace centered on the Beatitudes, I took the stage
and got right to the point. "Now let me get this straight," I said. "Jesus
says, 'Blessed are the peacemakers,' which means he does not say, 'Blessed
are the warmakers,' which means, the warmakers are not blessed, which means
warmakers are cursed, which means, if you want to follow the nonviolent
Jesus you have to work for peace, which means, we all have to resist this
horrific, evil war on the people of Iraq."

With that, the place exploded, and 500 students stormed out. The rest of
them then started chanting, "Bush! Bush! Bush!"

So much for my speech. Not to mention the Beatitudes.

I was not at all surprised that George W. Bush was reelected president. As I
travel the country speaking out against war, injustice and nuclear weapons,
I see many people consciously siding with the culture of war, choosing the
path of violence, supporting corporate greed, rampant militarism, and global
domination. I see many others swept up in the raging current of patriotism.
Since most of these people, beginning with the president, claim to be
Christian, I am ashamed and appalled that they support war and systemic
injustice, that they do it in the name of God, and that they feign fidelity
to the nonviolent Jesus who gave his life resisting institutionalized
injustice.

I am reminded of Flannery O'Connor's great book, "Wise Blood," where her
outrageous character Hazel Motes is so fed up with Christian hypocrisy that
he forms his own church, the "Church of Christ without Christ," "where the
lame don't walk, the blind don't see, and the dead don't rise." That's where
we are headed today.

I used to think these all-American Christians never read the Gospel, that
they simply chose not to be authentic disciples of the nonviolent Jesus.
Now, alas, I think they have indeed chosen discipleship, but not to the hero
of the Gospels, Jesus. Instead, through their actions, they have become
disciples of the devout, religious, all-powerful, murderous Pharisees who
killed him.

A Culture of Pharisees

We have become a culture of Pharisees. Instead of practicing an authentic
spirituality of compassion, nonviolence, love and peace, we as a collective
people have become self-righteous, arrogant, powerful, murderous hypocrites
who dominate and kill others in the name of God. The Pharisees supported the
brutal Roman rulers and soldiers, and lived off the comforts of the empire
by running an elaborate banking system which charged an exorbitant fee for
ordinary people just to worship God in the Temple. Since they taught that
God was present only in the Temple, they were able to control the entire
population. If anyone opposed their power or violated their law, the
Pharisees could kill them on the spot, even in the holy sanctuary.

Most North American Christians are now becoming more and more like these
hypocritical Pharisees. We side with the rulers, the bankers,

and the corporate millionaires and billionaires. We run the Pentagon, bless
the bombing raids, support executions, make nuclear weapons and seek global
domination for America as if that was what the nonviolent Jesus wants. And
we dismiss anyone who disagrees with us.

We have become a mean, vicious people, what the bible calls "stiff-necked
people." And we do it all with the mistaken belief that we have the blessing
of God.

In the past, empires persecuted religious groups and threatened them into
passivity and silence. Now these so-called Christians run the American
empire, and teach a subtle spirituality of empire to back up their power in
the name of God. This spirituality of empire insists that violence saves us,
might makes right, war is justified, bombing raids are blessed, nuclear
weapons offer the only true security from terrorism, and the good news is
not love for our enemies, but the elimination of them. The empire is working
hard these days to tell the nation--and the churches--what is moral and
immoral, sinful and holy. It denounces certain personal behavior as immoral,
in order to distract us from the blatant immorality and mortal sin of the
U.S. bombing raids which have left 100,000 Iraqis dead, or our ongoing
development of thousands of weapons of mass destruction. Our Pharisee rulers
would have us believe that our wars and our weapons are holy and blessed by
God.

In the old days, the early Christians had big words for such behavior, such
lies. They were called "blasphemous, idolatrous, heretical, hypocritical and
sinful." Such words and actions were denounced as the betrayal, denial and
execution of Jesus all over again in the world's poor. But the empire needs
the church to bless and support its wars, or at least to remain passive and
silent. As we Christians go along with the Bush administration and the
American empire, we betray Jesus, renounce his teachings, and create a
"Church of Christ without Christ," as Flannery O'Connor foresaw.

Troublemaking Nonviolence, the Measure of the Gospel

The first thing we Christians have to do in this time is not to become good
Pharisees. Instead, we have to try all over again to follow the dangerous,
nonviolent, troublemaking Jesus. I believe war, weapons, corporate greed and
systemic injustice are an abomination in the sight of God. They are the
definition of mortal sin. They mock God and threaten to destroy God's gift
of creation. If you want to seek the living God, you have to pit your entire
life against war, weapons, greed and injustice--and their perpetrators. It
is as simple as that.

Every religion, including Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism, is rooted
in nonviolence, but I submit that the only thing we know for sure about
Jesus is that he was nonviolent and so, nonviolence is the hallmark of
Christianity and the measure of authentic Christian living. Jesus commands
that we love one another, love our neighbors, seek justice, forgive those
who hurt us, pray for our persecutors, and be as compassionate as God. But
at the center of his teaching is the most radical declaration ever uttered:
"love your enemies."

If we dare call ourselves Christian, we cannot support war or nuclear
weapons or corporate greed or executions or systemic injustice of any kind.
If we do, we may well be devout American citizens, but we no longer follow
the nonviolent Jesus. We have joined the hypocrites and blasphemers of the
land, beginning with their leaders in the White House, the Pentagon and Los
Alamos.

Jesus resisted the empire, engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience in the
Temple, was arrested by the Pharisees, tried by the Roman governor and
executed by Roman soldiers. If we dare follow this nonviolent revolutionary,
we too must resist empire, engage in nonviolent civil disobedience against
U.S. warmaking and imperial domination, and risk arrest and imprisonment
like the great modern day disciples, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day
and Philip Berrigan.

If we do not want to be part of the Pharisaic culture and do want to follow
the nonviolent Jesus, we have to get in trouble just as Jesus was constantly
in trouble for speaking the truth, loving the wrong people, worshipping the
wrong way, and promoting the wrong things, like justice and peace. We have
to resist this new American empire, as well as its false spirituality and
all those who claim to be Christian yet support the murder of other human
beings. We have to repent of the sin of war, put down the sword, practice
Gospel nonviolence, and take up the cross of revolutionary nonviolence by
loving our enemies and discovering what the spiritual life is all about.

Just because the culture and the cultural church have joined with the empire
and its wars does not mean that we all have to go along with such heresy, or
fall into despair as if nothing can be done. It is never too late to try to
follow the troublemaking Jesus, to join his practice of revolutionary
nonviolence and become authentic Christians. We may find ourselves in
trouble, even at the hands of so-called Christians, just as Jesus was in
trouble at the hands of the so-called religious leaders of his day. But this
very trouble may lead us back to those Beatitude blessings.

-John Dear is a Jesuit priest and the author/editor of 20 books including
most recently, "The Questions of Jesus" and "Living Peace" both published by
Doubleday. He lives in New Mexico where he is working on a campaign to
disarm Los Alamos. For info, see:

www.johndear.org

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