There are an estimated 370,000 Christian churches in America.
There’s probably one within a few minutes of you. You likely drive past dozens in the course of a day. You may even call one of them your spiritual home.
And in those 370,000 buildings dotting every corner of this nation, nearly 200 million professed followers of Jesus gather in the name of loving their neighbors as themselves.
200 million supposed understudies of Christ confidently recite creeds, speak effusive prayers of praise, and passionately sing songs of devotion to a borderless God who they claim embraces the entirety of the world, a God whose image is reflected in every human being who walks the planet, a God whose heart is with the beleaguered and the broken.
370,000 communities of faith here allegedly come together every week, pledging adoration to a brown-skinned child born under duress and weaned in the shadow of genocide. Without reservation, they stand and boldly promise to emulate an itinerant foreigner street preacher whose life was marked by a fierce affection for those crushed beneath the weight of cruel and corrupt power.
And right now, it’s fair to wonder if a terrifyingly large portion of those 370,000 churches aren’t just cosplaying Christianity, if a massive number of those 200 million disciples aren’t completely full of it.
In this very moment, in the homes, streets, schools, parks, and businesses surrounding these buildings supposedly filled with people committed to making an earth that reflects Heaven, hell is being unleashed.
The children of the God they say they serve are being driven into the ground, stolen from the street, torn from their loved ones, kidnapped in carpool lines, targeted for their pigmentation, terrorized for their homeland, and executed in their cars—and the Christians are saying nothing.
Oh sure, they might be making vague, carefully-crafted allusions to the horrors around them during Sunday services, but these watered-down, word-smithed press releases are designed not to offend any of the gathered faithful, more than to confront comfortable Christians with the prophetic precision of their namesake. They are attempting to do palatable, permissible activism in the face of unrepentant, unholy malevolence, and that simply isn’t possible.
ICE is the vile, violent, snarling embodiment of the very evil Jesus spent his life opposing, and Christians who have any interest in his mission should be forcefully turning it over like the sinful table that it is. Instead, too many of them are being rendered silent and invisible.
This is not true of every church or every believer, of course. Thankfully, there are thousands of courageous faith communities doing beautifully subversive justice work beneath the radar of recognition; quietly caring for their neighbors, obstructing the aggressors, and being the places of refuge that buildings called sanctuaries are supposed to.
And there are also churches loudly leveraging their pulpits and platforms, speaking with unmistakable moral clarity, prioritizing preaching the Gospel over filling the pews, calling out the malevolence in their midst, and standing between the masked monsters and those they gleefully prey upon.
But it’s not nearly enough.
Until 370,000 churches and 200 million Christians are fully positioned on the front lines of this brutal battle against this Government-sanctioned inhumanity, we will be collectively rejecting Jesus, mocking God, and failing the neighbors we have been entrusted with.
These are the moments actual, true, substantive faith is made for. This is the space in which our morality is made real, where are theology is no longer theoretical but tangible.
Friends, our religion is not revealed in our creeds and prayers and songs offered in cloistered privilege; it is revealed in our choices in the turbulence and trauma outside of them.
Faith isn’t what we say in a building for an hour on Sunday, but what we do for the other 167 hours of our week, where the costs and pushback come.
We, 200 million people filling those 370,000 buildings, can call ourselves anything we want, we can make all sorts of declarations, and we can tell ourselves whatever sanctified story helps us sleep at night, but unless we are the visible, vocal opposition to the most shameful, violent, and anti-Christian presence in our nation that is ICE, we will not be Jesus Christians.
And that is a sin. What is your church or a church near you doing to oppose ICE, support our Latino and immigrant communities, or embody the teachings of Jesus right now? If you are a person of faith, what are you doing individually? Let me know in the comments.
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