Week of January 31, 2010

  • Pastor Duane Cross
  • Feb 1, 2010

Scapegoats, Violence, and America

Continued from last week….

As Christians we must refuse to scapegoat.  We must refuse to identify fundamentalists or liberals, bankers or immigrants, or even TV pundits as the problem.  We refuse to do this first because it requires us to despise a group of people beloved by God.  God loves every suicide bomber who ever strapped on explosives.  God loves every southern bigot who ever used a racial epithet.  God loves every liberal congressman and every conservative senator.  Second, we refuse to do this because we are concerned with the truth.  We refuse to accept the lie that all people in a certain category think the same way, act the same way, and live the same way.  This is lazy, incompetent, and perverse thinking.  (I grew up in the South and know for a fact that not all conservative southern white Christians are racist.)  Finally, we refuse to accept this because we believe in original sin.  We know that liberals and conservatives, Christians, Muslims, and Jews are all sinners.  We are all broken.  We are all in need of God’s grace.  We all err, misapprehend, and misspeak.

None of this is to say that we should not have opinions and hold them fiercely.  This is not to say we should not argue our cases.  This is also not to say there are no unhealthy, violent, destructive people out there.  But when Jesus went to the cross he put an end to scapegoating.  Although sacrificed himself as a scapegoat, as a threat to the unity and survival of his people (see John 11:49-50), he was clearly and unambiguously innocent.  The effort to scapegoat and destroy him failed.  He demonstrated that the very process of scapegoating was flawed, broken, and ineffective.

Nevertheless, human history is full of attempts to save a people, a nation, a political process, even a community by rallying against the despised other:  Jews, African Americans, immigrants, communists, capitalists, fundamentalists, liberals, homosexuals, abortionists, abortion protestors, feminists, rednecks—the list is endless.  Christ-followers may have differences with people on this list, but we must not scapegoat them.  We must not sacrifice them.  God loves them.  Jesus died to remove the stigma of scapegoating.  And we are all in need of his grace and forgiveness.

Jay Phelan

P.S.  I hope you enjoyed this article.  If you have any comments, let me know.

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