I too am an Indian, a woman and a committed Christian too. Please do not make insensitive comments about helpess and hopelessly overwhelmed groups of beleaguered Indians being persecuted for thier faith for years, because their so-called leaders have only been turning thier cheek and/or building thier own empires instead of working out what it takes to further the citizenship rights of the tiny christian minority in India.

Cynthia Stephen

I also thank you for your critique and my apologies for not explaining my point. I’m not comparing anyone in the USA to Pilot. Here’s my reasoning: (We did this in a class at Church…)

Name the groups of persons mentioned in the Gospels:

Disciples (and/or “Believers”)
Jews
Pharisees
Sadducees.
Zealots
The Roman Army (+ Herodians +Sadducees = local Govt)
The sick.
Scribes + Lawyers
Demoniacs
Jesus’ direct family.
Samaritans.
A few disparate Gentile groups.

There is one group - that held sway over all these persons. It is a *central* group in the Gospels (and in the Epistles). But it is never mentioned.

Which group are we (Modern, N. American, Middle Class - or even lower class - and Upper Class, largely white, but a few other races are represented as well) most like?

We are most like the group not mentioned at all: the group that sent the Army in to oppress the Jews, the group that propped up Herod, the group that took the wealth away in taxes. In many cases we could care less about the ins and outs of politics in some tiny little corner of our empire (where God is now living in the flesh). The revolution started in that oppressed corner was aimed *exactly* to topple our towers. The message of inclusion, protection, equality was aimed exactly at our heads. The message that “Jesus is Kyrios” is subversive exactly to our leader - and only by inference to those petty kings we’ve set up in other parts of the empire. We are living in the modern centre of the Roman Empire - even up here in slowly dying impoverished Buffalo. We might like to imagine ourselves as publicans or Pharisees, or like tax collectors and harlots, but we’re not even in the story yet.

And neither party is set up to topple our system of oppression. Instead, both parties are set up to support our system of oppression - albeit with different means; means which we may like or dislike in the ways that some Romans preferred The Republic to Caesar.

I see in the SDS - in the activism of Students (some are supporting Obama and some not) a much greater amount of hope than I do in Obama or Hillary or, certainly, McCain. But the hope I see in SDS (etc) has nothing to do with Democrats or Republicans. And, let us be clear: only recently are the Democrats on “our” side. They could just as easily switch later. The SDS represents now (as it did in the 60s) an appeal to direct democracy, and a toppling of our own towers. The folks in the 1960s largely lost site of that: the oppression America makes on the rest of the world was forgotten, for some reason, as the Baby Boomers all became Yuppies and did cocaine and voted for Reagan.

Maybe (only maybe) this generation won’t loose sight of the ultimate end of the struggle. But neither party would dare ally itself with that struggle’s ends - save only as a means to more votes which, in the final tally, are all votes against that struggle.

I think the Church - the revolutionary community that was sharing all things in Acts - would most identify with that struggle because that Church did something no one else had ever done: celebrated the Kingdom not as something to struggle for but as something to be *lived* now, here. I don’t need to topple a gov’t tower just to win my rights. My rights are from God - Gov’t can’t take ‘em or giver ‘em - and my rights, my property, my freedoms are all best used in laying them down and giving them to you.

That’s the Kingdom. That’s the world the SDS (etc) is struggling to achieve - but they don’t see it when they look at any church - because we’ve all signed up for a party. So when they look at us, they don’t say “See how they love each other!!!!” Rather, they say, “they are part of the problem we have to overthrow…”

That’s our fault: because we’re Romans.

I just finished reading a three-part history of Britain by Simon Schama, and he quoted someone who said in response to a question about what Winston Churchill did for the war effort, “Talk about it.” Churchill may have been a slightly hypocritical out-of-touch elitist semi-racist imperialist but his speeches brought together a generation of people when they needed to be united, when they needed to come together and survive, despite the Blitz, despite the temptation to give up. Schama argues that at the very least, Churchill’s impassioned rhetoric meant that Jewish schoolchildren in Britain were not rounded up into sports stadiums to be sent to Auschwitz like in Vichy France. He may have been part of an unconscienceable, reactionary political system, but that’s no excuse to just immediately write off the power of symbolic leaders to call us to justice and freedom and unity– whether or not you “get” it yourself. It’s certainly not an excuse to label anyone who does as equivalent to Pontius Pilate.

Schama’s personal favorite Briton of the 20th century though was not Churchill, but George Orwell. One quote he cites from him might be appropriate here: “To be loyal both to Chamberlain’s England and to the England of tomorrow [his socialist England] might seem an impossibility, if one did not know it to be an everyday phenomenon… [to this day,] it gives me a faint feeling of sacrilege not to stand to attention during ‘God Save the King.’ That is childish, of course, but I would sooner have had that kind of upbringing than be like the left-wing intellectuals who are so enlightened that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions.” I’m not saying insinuating that of you, whom I respect greatly, but I will say that I am tired of the cynicism of others who share my political/social opinions and their quickness to be frustrated with any imperfect sign of hope and change.