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God Wrecked America

Joe Raedle/Getty Images/AFP

I’ve seen this movie before.

It doesn’t end well.

As a Christian for most of my life and a pastor for nearly three decades, I’m quite familiar with the story: supposedly faithful people fashioning an idol made of gold and cravenly bowing before it, in complete contempt for the God they claimed to believe in because they had lost their collective minds.

This new reboot is a little on the nose.
It’s also far more tragic.
We’ve had a few thousand years to get it right.
We shouldn’t be here.

Watching the collective soul-selling of my fellow Christians here in America over the past five years has been something that has grieved me more than I can measure or accurately describe. It’s been particularly disheartening to watch ancient religious history repeating, and worse—to realize that nearly every disfiguring ugliness here in America: from the violent parade of white nationalism to the defiant anti-mask pandemic-deniers to the propagators of an abject election fraud lie to the suppressors of the voices and votes of people of color—is coming from professed Christians.

As someone still aspiring to a life of faith and still trying to speak into this religious tradition, it’s sobering to admit that we’re not here as a nation in this brutal battle for disparate humanity and we’re not steeped in this unapologetic supremacy, if not for people claiming to be devoted to the same Jesus I’ve grown up trying to emulate.

As they both literally and figuratively pledge their undying adoration to some golden-veneered, bastardized counterfeit idol of their whiteness, I’m left to wonder what I’m to do now:

do I attempt to redeem this thing I have found such meaning and beauty in, or do I resign myself to the fact that these myopic Caucasian cultists have commandeered it for good and it is beyond repair in the eyes of those outside of it?

do I defect from this polluted homeland and begin down a new spiritual journey, while  knowing it will be nearly impossible to differentiate myself from the shimmering-but-hollow-calf-worshippers, because they have permanently co-opted the trappings of my tradition?

And how can I show the world an alternative spirituality that is supposed to leave more compassion, more diversity, and more justice in its wake—while these delusional power-lusting hypocrites eat up market share, because otherwise decent, loving human beings are walking away from organized religion for good because they are fully exhausted?

The questions far outnumber any helpful answers and the prayers seem to slip into the ether without reply.

Having read and studied and preached the story, doesn’t make watching it repeat itself any easier.

I know that religious people ended up abandoning God and mindlessly worshiping a golden calf, so it shouldn’t be surprising that so many today are now bowing down to this orange jackass. It’s just more terrifying seeing it with this proximity.

It was a lot easier to view the story in the distant rear-view mirror of ancient history in a land thousands of miles away—and not in the windshield of the present of the country I call home with the sycophantic cultists so close and prevalent.

While they whirl around the gleaming, empty shell devoted to themselves and their imagined righteousness, shouting ‘God bless America,’ I’ll be here sitting with a mournful truth that makes me sick to my stomach:

God wrecked America, or at least the American God-followers have, and I’m not sure how we fix it.

One thing I know for certain: I will not join them in their mindless, fevered dancing.

I will not bow to this empty, shimmering monstrosity.

I will write a different story.

 

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