Christian Extremists: Is Jerry Falwell White Isis?

Last updated on: December 18, 2015 at 4:47 pm by Andy Gill

Christian Extremists: Is Jerry Falwell White Isis? 2015-12-18T16:47:32-05:00 Andy Gill

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Can we talk about Christian extremism for a second? How it’s unnecessarily perpetuating an “us vs. them” narrative. And seemingly, getting more and more ridiculous over the course of our existence and given Christian history.

Screenshot of Jerry Falwell Jr. speaking at Liberty University, via CNN’s YouTube Channel.

As most of you know Jerry Falwell Jr. took the stage on campus at Liberty University and called for students to arm themselves against “those Muslims” so that we can “end” them. He is echoing a rhetoric that’s seemingly all too familiar of previous leaders who incited ethnic cleansing of entire groups of people, lead to slavery, and the internment of Asian’s that resided here in America.

I want to clarify that I’m not at all saying Falwell is solely responsible for Christian extremism. Neither am I arguing for or against violence or the legislation of more gun control. What I am saying is that the bible is seemingly clear in that it’s against furthering oppression through reckless abuse of one’s leadership. In other words, Christian extremism is all too, ironically, similar to the white version of terrorism, and Jerry Falwell Jr. is an unfortunate symbolic representation of all that is responsible for it.

If you look at the history of our country, the Christians hands are covered in blood.

We’ve as the institutional Church produced core leadership that incited things like anti-Semitism, homophobia, patriarchy, and/or anything else that fall underneath what could otherwise be described as outright hateful bigotry. And today, despite our history, have large groups of people shouting “AMEN!” to not just Trumps suggestion to banning all Muslims, but [again] Falwell’s encouragement to arm oneself against “those Muslims.”

And when there aren’t any others available to inflict with our anger, we invert and kill each other (Stacy Schiff in the NY Times paints a good picture of this angry history here).

The ignorance, silence, and unfortunate lack of education is, to a large extent, what’s causing the repetition of our atrociously wicked history. It’s what makes people buy into the lie that Hitler didn’t also claim to be Christian, that if the Holocaust or Civil Rights Movement was now they’d be the evangelical version of Bonheoffer and MLK. Yet fail to recognize that the need for the civil rights movement didn’t stop when King died, or that ethnic cleansing is still a thing of our present, not past.

But, the most bothersome aspect of this is that in order to be leaders you need to have followers. As I watched a recent episode of the Daily Show where they attempt to have a conversation with Trumps supporters I had these unsolicited flashbacks to my experience of growing up in a ridiculously evangelical home, working a youth ministry internship alongside three other [conservative] Liberty University students, and enduring ignorance to this level.

[I wouldn’t have believed these people to be real, if I had not previously grown up in a home filled with them…]

It’s delusional; it’s as if they live in some alternate imaginary reality in which “God” only cares about them, because they could do absolutely no harm at all.

If Donald Trump, is rightly described by Complex.com as “the zit on politics that no amount of prescription acne medication can seem to erase…” then the American church is the cancer of religion [at large] that chemo therapy cannot seem to rid of.

The hope of this post is a call for us to nonviolently step up, engage this conversation (if you’re in a healthy season of life to do so); for us to speak louder than those calling for violence, because again, in the words of Plato:

“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”

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