
Photo by Keith Allison, CC2 License
Oakland Raiders
Members of the Oakland Raiders kneel during the national anthem at a game with the Washington Redskins.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” has been making the rounds on social media again in response to the controversy over kneeling during the national anthem that is roiling the sports world. What is often missed in the discussion of King’s letter is that it was written in response to a call for patience and moderation from several Alabama faith leaders. Those faith leaders included two Methodist bishops. Those bishops may be long dead, but their preference for half-measures and considerate dialogue in the face of racial animus is alive and well in The United Methodist Church.
The primary concern that I’ve seen expressed by presumably well-meaning United Methodists is that kneeling during the national anthem is disrespectful to the flag. These folks generally argue that they support the racial equality that is at the core of the protests, but not the means by which the players are protesting. While the linkage between kneeling and disrespect may be unclear to some, let us assume that kneeling is indeed deeply disrespectful to the flag and the country. But how is being disrespectful in the face of evil, injustice, and oppression un-Christ-like?
Jesus had a profound disrespect for the civil and religious authorities of his day. Indeed, Methodist theologian Walter Wink understood many of Jesus’s teachings as advocating a form of nonviolent disrespect. For example, in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells his listeners that when someone takes their cloak, they should give them their shirt as well. To Wink, Jesus is not simply advocating meek compliance, but a form of disrespectful nonviolent resistance in the face of evil. In the culture of the time, a cloak was used as a form of collateral for impoverished people who had nothing else to give. Wink argues that Jesus is telling his hearers that they should subvert this practice: if someone is so greedy that they would demand a poor man’s cloak, Jesus argues that the poor man should humiliate the greedy man by also giving him the shirt off his back. To undress in public would have been seen as profoundly disrespectful and embarrassing for everyone involved, but Wink argues that this nonviolent disrespect is a core part of Jesus’s teachings about loving our enemies.
So, if disrespect for evil, injustice and oppression is a core part of Christianity, the only question left to answer is, “does the United States participate in evil, injustice, and oppression?” This is not just a theological question but an empirical one, so some facts are in order. First, the statistics: African Americans are incarcerated at a rate five times that of whites, black men are 2.8 times more likely to be legally killed by police than white men and poverty rates for African Americans are roughly double the rates for whites. Then, there is the fact that a group of white supremacists marched through a U.S. city last month advocating for a racially “pure” country, killed a woman, and were described as “some very fine people.” Is any of this evil? Is any of this oppression? Is any of this injustice? If it is, then it is our baptismal vow to resist it.
Still, many people argue that disrespecting the flag and the national anthem is particularly egregious. To understand this sentiment, we must turn to the work of another great Metheologian, Stanley Hauerwas (see “War and the American Difference”). Hauerwas argues that we Americans are strongly bound to something called our civil religion. Like our actual religions, our civil religion has its own sacred holidays (July 4th, Memorial Day), sacred texts (Constitution and Declaration of Independence), sacred narratives (Valley Forge, D-Day), and sacred symbols (the flag, the National Anthem). Because of our strong emotional attachment to this civil religion, an attachment which is cultivated since our birth, we react rather poorly when some pillar of our civil religion is threatened, as many feel the NFL players are doing now.
From a Christian perspective though, the concern is that our civil religion can become more important to us than our actual religion. That is, that the flag can become an idol. I fear that if we are putting our concern for the sacredness of the flag above our concern for racial equality and social justice, we have made the flag into a golden calf; we have found a god more important than God.
Disrespecting the forces of systemic injustice is profoundly Christ-like. It is what Jesus did when he cleansed the temple and when he healed on the Sabbath, it is the subtext of the Sermon on the Mount, it is how he responded when questioned by the religious and civil authorities, and it is what got him executed. As in Christ’s day and King’s time, challenging the status quo remains deeply uncomfortable; but for those who aspire to follow Christ, it is literally the only path.
Brian Snyder is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Science at Louisiana State University and a member of First United Methodist Church in Baton Rouge, La.