Give Us Barabbas, No Wait, Rittenhouse!

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Tamir Rice

Ahmaud Arbury

Trayvon Martin

Michael Brown

Jordan Edwards

Breonna Taylor

Kyle Rittenhouse.

One of these kids is not like the others. One of these kids traveled across state lines armed with an AR-15 and inserted himself as an armed vigilante in a situation that had nothing to do with him. One of these kids bragged, “Bro, I wish I had my F*cking AR. I’d start shooting rounds at them,” before killing two Black Lives Matter protestors. One of these kids, wearing a t-shirt that read “Free As F*ck,” posed and drank beers with white supremacists just minutes after pleading not guilty to murder. One of these kids walked out of an American courthouse free of all charges after being coddled by a judge and a system built for his protection. One of these kids will now monetize that experience, embarking on a nationwide speaking tour of Republican stages and evangelical spaces for his part making America white again. 

The rest of these kids are dead. 

Rittenhouse followed a dominator script written by his colonial forefathers: He left his home with a dangerous weapon and traveled to a foreign community where he committed an act of violence and then claimed self-defense when they reacted to the threat he created. Yet his verdict was as gut-wrenching as it was predictable. Did anyone expect anything different from the American empire? An empire built on the backs of black and brown bodies for the benefit of white ones. As a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Tennessee, I engaged in the complex and often painful history of the United State’s cultural, economic, racial, and imperial past to better understand the present. And what I found was the hallmarks of American democracy--opportunity, freedom, and prosperity--were reserved for whites through the intentional exclusion and oppression of people of color. Starting in 1619 with the arrival of the first slave ships, America defined blackness as savage, inferior, subhuman, and something to be afraid of. 

But it doesn’t take a graduate degree to see this. Every empire from Egypt to America exists for the benefit of some at the expense of others. The privileged class is protected, the serving class is abused. All ordained and absolved by imperial religion. However, as New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan writes, “In any situation of oppression, especially in those oblique, indirect, and systemic ones where injustice wears a mask of normalcy or even of necessity, the only ones who are innocent or blessed are those squeezed out deliberately as human junk from the system’s own evil operations.” 

It was no different for Jesus 2,000 years ago. A colonized person living under the boot of Roman oppression, Jesus navigated his culture from below. A poor, brown man living in an imperial world, he spent his life subversively resisting the empire, not protecting it. He resisted a patriarchal culture of hierarchy by championing a society of egalitarianism. To the peasant he gave free healthcare and healing, to women he offered equality, to the hungry he provided shared provision, and to the racially profiled he provided honor and dignity. Jesus resisted imperial ideology which draws lines, invokes false boundaries, builds walls, establishes racial hierarchies, and maintains discrimination all through military force. And like Trayvon, Ahmaud, Jordan, and Tamir, they killed him for it. It seems the religious conservatives then and now would rather side with an armed vigilante than a nonviolent resister. “Give us Barabbas, er, Rittenhouse!” 

As followers of the colonized Christ, our task is to subvert the empire, not take up arms in defense of it. Resistance is in our DNA. “Our Gospel was birthed in resistance to the brutal normalcy of the Roman Empire,” writes Robin Meyers. And we should add that the gospel will only continue in our time through the ongoing resistance to the brutal normalcy of the American empire. 

The church can no longer serve as spiritual legitimation for the empire. Instead, we must prophetically speak truth to power. Lesslie Newbigin reminds us, “The place of the church is thus not in the seats of the establishment but in the camps and marching columns of the protestors.” So we march. We march in Selma and Springfield, in Kenosha and Kennewick, in Palm Springs and Portland, in Ferguson and O’Fallon. We stand in solidarity with the suffering because we serve a suffering savior who knows full well the rod of imperial violence. 

The church of the crucified Christ is the church of the oppressed, not the church of colonizers. We are resistors, not defenders. Unfortunately, for a growing number of conservative Christians, the sign of allegiance to Christ is a militant defensiveness that leads them to protect their empire by taking up arms against their fellow citizens. Sadly, they continue to suffer under the illusion that American is a Christian nation that needs their protection. As you join hands with the underclass, may you even liberate the oppressors from their bonds of oppression by helping them see the Kingdom of God will never come through the kingdoms of this world. And in so doing, may you resist the greatest temptation of all, to return their evil for evil.

I’m curious, how are you dealing with systemic injustice without resorting to injustice? What does it look like in your own life to resist racism and nationalistic ideology? How are you embodying noncompliance and nonviolent resistance to a godless world? And what might it look like to start transformative conversations with evangelical friends and family who continue to be seduced by the lie of American exceptionalism and Christian nationalism?

We honestly don’t have the answers. We would love to know what you are doing to bring about shalom in your city…

Gary Alan