Why do white nationalists attack religious congregations? Is God an enemy of the state?

All of us were stunned and disgusted when Robert Bowers, an ardent right-wing supporter of Donald Trump, slaughtered 11 Jewish worshipers in the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.

It was yet another instance of extreme violence by what are proving to be the most dangerous terrorist threats in our nation. They are not Muslims, but white male Christian nationalists with expressed Nazi sympathies. And their venues of attack always seem to be church-related and often connected with anti-Semitism.

Why?

Why did Bowers attack a synagogue? Why did Dylan Roof perform his massacre in a church basement where African-Americans were studying the Bible? Why the assassinations of spiritual leaders like King, Malcolm X? Why shoot Oscar Romero as he was celebrating mass or slaughter that team of liberation theologians in El Salvador? Why did Salvadoran Treasury Police rape and kill those U.S. nuns in 1980? And, why did the United States decide to wage what Noam Chomsky has called “the first religious war of the 21st century” specifically against the Catholic Church in Latin America killing hundreds of thousands of believers in the process?

Could it be that undomesticated faith’s insistence on social justice is especially threatening to the world’s ruling classes whose hallowed laws justify the exploitation, marginalization and exclusion of whole classes of people: women, orphans, day-laborers, the unemployed, the homeless, those with non-binary gender-identities, refugees and immigrants?

After all, even a quick perusal of the traditions of Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed finds all three Bible-based traditions contradicting such anti-poor legalism. The reference here is to Exodus, Deuteronomy, the Psalms, and Jewish prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, Zechariah, Malachi and John the Baptist. According to all these sources, widows, orphans, immigrants and refugees actually constitute the Chosen People of God.

That makes the undomesticated biblical God subversive and anarchistic before any laws supporting the status quo. That makes God an enemy of the state.

In response, according to white Christians like Bowers, Roof and the U.S. government with its CIA and FBI, those who study, worship and pray to such a deity are intolerable.

How did we arrive at this juncture?

The short answer is that the subversive character of the Judeo-Christian tradition was lost early on. After the conversion of Constantine, the laws of empire turned on their heads the teachings of Moses and Jesus by championing imperial law over a divine law which was increasingly relegated to the private sphere.

Even worse, the teachings of Moses and Jesus with their overriding concern for widows, orphans, refugees and immigrants became vilified as somehow heretical, diabolical and disloyal to Caesar. Tellingly in terms of anti-Semitism, Luther and Calvin consistently referred to such concerns as “Jewish madness” and “Jewish materialism.”

That, of course, was the theme adopted by Hitler’s Third Reich whose anti-Semitism was inflamed by Russia’s October 1917 Revolution and its insistence on social justice. From then on, and even from the middle of the 19th century, communism too was constantly referred to as specifically “Jewish madness,” and as “Jewish materialism.” Hitler called it “Jewish Bolshevism.”

So, there we have our answer to my earlier question about prophets like King, Malcolm X, Romero, liberation theologians and oppressed people who take seriously the God of Moses and Jesus. There we find the root of anti-Semitism.

Everyone who worships the God of the poor is subversive. All of them must die, especially Jews whose social justice tradition was inherited by Jesus and Mohammad. Their God must also die or at least be domesticated beyond recognition.

When you think about it (thanks to “Christian” agents like Hitler, Trump and the Republican Party) perhaps such deicide may already be a fait accompli.

Ironically however, those slaughtered at Tree of Life synagogue remind us that the resuscitation of the Bible’s subversive and anarchistic God might still be possible.

This story was originally published November 14, 2018 at 5:12 PM.