Every day, as I read the political news, I think to myself “This is not America.” A country where masked men assault people on the streets, drag them out of their cars and homes, run them over with their cars, even kill them. A country where authorities deport people to lands they never lived in. A land where casual cruelty is tolerated. A land where the President insults the free press daily. A land of obscene wealth at the top and a shrinking middle class. This is not the country to which I pledged my heart every day in school and for many years afterwards.

Rev. Benjamin R. Cremer of Idaho was raised and home-schooled by his strict fundamentalist parents, but he came to think differently as he reconciled the world with Jesus’s words.

He wrote:

On October 12th, during a Trump rally at Youngstown, Ohio, several men physically assaulted a woman as the crowd chanted “USA! USA! USA!”

The woman was wearing a t-shirt that said “Release the Epstein files!” and was loudly calling Trump a fascist. She was exercising her first amendment rights. Peacefully protesting at a public event. 

Several men then began to push, punch, slap, and pull her to the ground. They even bragged about it later online.

The police came and instead of taking the men who were attacking her away, they removed her from the rally.

And the president of the United States was watching it all unfold. Instead of demanding them to stop. Instead of acting honorable and presidential. Instead of acting like a man. He called her “terrible” and a “big fat guy” as the police drug her away. “These are the people who want to destroy our country!” he said.

All while the crowd continued to chant “USA! USA! USA!”

This is just days after the president weaponized ICE to go after a sitting representative, Ilhan Omar and raided her home. A person he’s continued to target with overtly racist and bigoted rhetoric.

This is just days after the secretary of defense announced the live streamed execution of a prisoner confined to a wheelchair by firing squad.

This is in the wake of continued dehumanization and mistreatment of migrants and their children.

This is in the wake of barring journalists from the White House, book bans, eroding women’s rights, rounding up people in our streets, and making student read the Bible in schools, and so much more cruelty, all in the name of “patriotism” and “Christianity.”

All while people chant “USA! USA! USA!”

This is where we are as a country right now. It shouldn’t matter where we align ourselves politically or theologically. This dynamic should deeply disturb us all and drive us to oppose it.

History warns us time and time again that moral collapse in a society and the rise of authoritarian regimes rarely begins with a population openly declaring itself evil. It begins when people persuade themselves that their cruelty is necessary, their prejudice is justified, their enemies deserve what happens to them, and it is someone else’s responsibility to speak out.

That is why we must pay attention when dehumanizing language becomes ordinary, when humiliation becomes entertainment, when injustice is excused because the victims belong to the wrong group, and when religious leaders bless the very attitudes that the teachings of Jesus should compel them to confront.

The question is not simply whether we call ourselves Christians, patriots, conservatives, liberals, or defenders of freedom. The question is what those identities are producing in us. Are they making us more truthful, more merciful, more courageous, and more protective of human dignity? Or are they teaching us whom we are permitted to despise?

When the name of Jesus is invoked to excuse contempt, when political loyalty overrides mercy, when the vulnerable are treated as disposable, and when cruelty toward an out-group is celebrated as righteousness enmeshed with patriotism, Christ followers must ask whether they are bearing witness to Christ or merely baptizing the prejudices of their surrounding culture.

Cruelty, bigotry, corruption, and greed our masquerading themselves around as the definition of patriotism and Christian virtue.

While sitting in a concentration camp, awaiting his sham trial and execution, German theologian, pastor, and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote:

“If we look more closely, we see that any violent display of power, whether political or religious, produces an outburst of folly in a large part of mankind; indeed, this seems actually to be a psychological and sociological law: the power of some needs the folly of others. It is not that certain human capacities, intellectual capacities for instance, become stunted or destroyed, but rather that the upsurge of power makes such an overwhelming impression that people are deprived of their independent judgment, and-more or less unconsciously give up trying to assess the new state of affairs for themselves. The fact that the fool is often stubborn must not mislead us into thinking that he is independent. One feels in fact, when talking to him, that one is dealing, not with the man himself, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like, which have taken hold of him. He is under a spell, he is blinded, his very nature is being misused and exploited. Having thus become a passive instrument, the fool will be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. Here lies the danger of a diabolical exploitation that can do irreparable damage to human beings.”

As a Christian in America today, I refuse to be silent as this same mentality and evil continues rise among us.

May we raise our voices in solidarity together, not in mindlessly chanting “USA!” as blatant harm takes place before our eyes, but in speaking out against injustice and for liberty, freedom, and love to lead us.

Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy.