In this month’s bonus episode, the team talks about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We get at the many ways our biases affect how politicians and the media are discussing the war and its refugees, the religious aspects of Putin’s desire to take over Ukraine, how the invasion fits with a growing international movement of religious conservatives from predominantly white countries, and a lot more.
Articles mentioned:
“The Secretive Prisons that Keep Migrants out of Europe” by Ian Urbina
“Next Year in Kyiv?” by Diana Butler Bass
“Why Far-Right Nationalists Like Steve Bannon Have Embraced a Russian Ideologue” by Brandon W. Hawk
Shake the Dust is a podcast of KTF Press. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Find transcripts of this show at KTFPress.com.
Hosts
Jonathan Walton – follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Suzie Lahoud – follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Sy Hoekstra – follow him on Twitter.
Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.
Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.
Production and editing by Sy Hoekstra.
Transcript by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra.
Questions about anything you heard on the show? Write to shakethedust@ktfpress.com and we may answer your question on a future episode.
Transcript
Suzie Lahoud: You know, I went to Russian school in the fifth grade and we were still reading books after the fall of the Soviet Union. It was late 90s and we were still reading books of “moya rodina,” and Mother Russia, the Motherland, all that stuff. And I'm like, “Oh my gosh, how can they be teaching this propaganda?” But this is the same battle that's going on in the United States today when you look at the 1619 Project versus the 1776 Project, or whatever they're calling it. It's the same thing. We fight over our national narrative because the way that you construct the story about yourself then feeds into your foreign policy, then feeds into domestic policy, then feeds into your narrative about whose lives matter and whose death and suffering is acceptable to you as a nation.
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Sy Hoekstra: Welcome to Shake the Dust: Leaving colonized faith for the Kingdom of God. A podcast of KTF Press. My name is Sy Hoekstra, I'm here with Jonathan Walton and Suzie Lahoud, as always. We are going to be talking today about Ukraine and the conflict there, and the refugees leaving the country, and the ways that we have been talking about this war. Kind of like I said in the Afghanistan episode that we did during season one, we're going to stay in our lane a little bit here, talk about how the church talks about and thinks about this conflict. We're not going to be talking about international politics and military strategy or anything like that.
We're going to be talking about how we think about, conceptualize the refugees, the white supremacy involved, the American exceptionalism, the Christian supremacy involved. We're going to talk a little bit about the religious aspects of this war, which is something that the media is not covering in anywhere near as much detail as just the economic and the geopolitical aspects of it. But before we get to that, really quickly, please just remember to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at KTF Press. Leave a rating and review on whatever your podcast app is.
Also Substack, which is the company that runs our website, or that we use to run our website, just introduced an app, an iOS app. So if you have an iPhone, you can now, you as a subscriber, thank you so much, this is a subscriber bonus episode. You, as a subscriber, can listen to this podcast and read our newsletter and any of the articles we put out all from within an app, if you don't want it to necessarily come to your inbox. I am definitely someone who prefers an app over an inbox. So if that's you, go find the Substack app in the App Store.
Okay. So we're going to get started now. We just, we want to talk a little bit about the white supremacy that is involved in our thinking and talking about the refugees, and in talking about this conflict. Jonathan, let's start out with you. How are you seeing this play out in the things that you're reading and watching?
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, you know. Jump right in the deep end.
Sy Hoekstra: For sure
Jonathan Walton: I think it was… and I think the deep end, because it was pretty stark from the beginning, because we have so many references for refugees from Syria, from Mexico… through Mexico, but from dozens of countries, we have images. Like we have names, we have consistent media around engaging with immigrants, especially in Europe, coming from the coast of, coming from Morocco to France, or Morocco to Italy. And just, so we have this backdrop of Black and brown people fleeing armed conflict, fleeing climate change, fleeing violence— sometimes inflicted by us, like the United States. Then we have the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and there are millions of racially-assigned white, in our minds, Ukrainians.
White meaning educated. White meaning like us. White meaning Christian. White meaning acceptable. White meaning can be integrated into our culture more easily. And these are quotes from Polish politicians, from Spanish politicians, from media members or like Prince William who can't believe this is happening in a country like this.
Sy Hoekstra: In Europe.
Jonathan Walton: In Europe, yeah. So Trevor Noah has said great things, Mehdi Hasan has said great things from The Intercept. There's no shortage of media calling out the hypocrisy of the European reaction, and by default, the American and global reaction because whiteness is ubiquitous across the world, of like how the hypocrisy of how these refugees are treated.
Yeah, I think the best example that I found was the speech by one, the leader of the far-right party in Spain speaking to parliament. The quote is, in English, I won't say it in Spanish. The English is, “These are real refugees. Women, children and elderly should be welcomed to Europe. Now, everyone should understand the difference between these refugees and the invasion of Muslim youth of military age who've crossed our borders trying to destabilize and colonize Europe.” Like that is a mess of assumptions. That's a mess of racism. That's a mess of internalized prejudice and ethnic hatred.
So often, I think that we think white supremacy, religious nationalism, Christian nationalism will be defeated by knowledge and clarity, and that's not true. Just because we know more and can see more and understand more, does not mean things will be different. I think that's what this is unearthing for me and proving again, there needs to be transformation. There has to be resistance. There needs to be Jesus and the Holy Spirit. People need to meet God, need to meet… There has to be a fundamental, internal change that leads to the social transformation that we actually all want to aspire to. It's not just a photo or an image of someone being pushed off a train.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Boy, I just had like 800 different thoughts.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I'm sorry. I said a lot, sorry.
[Laughter]
Sy Hoekstra: No, no, no. I just mean there's so much to talk about. I think one thing that I want to point out in the difference of how we're talking about these refugees versus those from other conflicts, most notably the Syrian conflict six or seven years ago, is that we have already welcomed into Western Europe and other places, so many more refugees from Ukraine than we ever did from Syria. But that was an utter panic. Like that was, how are we ever going to afford these people? We need to be really concerned about their extremism, like you just said, like characterizing them as military-aged Muslim men trying to come across and destabilize Europe, right?
Suzie Lahoud: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: When obviously the reality of Muslims is not, of course there are extremists among Muslims the way there are extremists among anybody else. But we don't care when it's coming from Europe. So the thing that I was thinking about a lot this week, and I have to be a little bit careful here, so bear with me. But among people in Ukraine, there are extremists. Of course there are, like there are anywhere else. And Putin has been using the extremists within the national guard of Ukraine as an excuse to invade. He's been talking about the denazification of Ukraine, which is propaganda. Like I don't want to give, I don't want to validate reasons for Putin's invasion.
But at the same time there are actual neo-Nazis in Ukraine. I mean, there are neo-Nazis anywhere in Western Europe. But we're not concerned about them as radicals the way that we are concerned about Muslim terrorists or Muslim extremists, because they're our radicals. They're our extremists. They're the ones that we have already. We have among the people that we see as the true inheritors of Western Europe or the United States. Like we have lots of neo-Nazis. We have the far-right. Those already are here, and like we, so we're just not concerned. We're not saying, “Oh, we need to surveil these people.” We need to do all the things that we've done, like all the obnoxious things that we've done to Muslims to counter extremism, because these are basically our terrorists.
And of course, when you talk about domestic terrorism in the United States post 9/11, it has basically been, as we've talked about before, all white men. It has been all disgruntled, many far-right, white men committing the mass shootings and the acts of terrorism that we've seen, almost without exception. Yet when it is a bunch of white men or white people refugees, like all we're talking about in the US is how many can we take and how do we grant them Temporary Protected Status and that sort of thing. So I will stop there. Suzie, what do you think?
Suzie Lahoud: Well, I think it's telling even if you look at how we're framing what's happening right now, versus, again making the comparison to the, what happened in Syria. So then the conversation was all about the Syrian refugee crisis. So the crisis is that we have all of these people fleeing conflict, what are we going to do about these people? They're going to destroy our economies. They're going to threaten our way of life. There are going to be, as you all said, extremists among them. Whereas now we see today it's framed as the invasion of Ukraine. So the emphasis is on the violence being done to the Ukrainian people, that is entirely unjust, that is unacceptable, that is horrific.
There is an empathetic response. There's a sense of compassion. And then you see that these European nations— and I have to give due credit to Volodymyr Zelensky, for putting out this rallying cry— that they are now essentially willing to shred their own economies to help save the Ukrainian people. So the conversation is no longer, “they're going to destroy our economy,” it's “we're willing to stop buying Russian oil. We're willing to put a hold on building this pipeline so that we can allow for this conflict to end and to preserve Ukrainian life and preserve the nation of Ukraine.” So it's a very different response, that double standard.
Then also if you look at the language around it, broadening the comparison from just what happened in Syria versus what's happening in Ukraine, it was interesting the conversation around the time of the conflict in Syria, around the time that it started. There started to be more conversations around the distinction between refugee versus migrant, because you also had all of these people fleeing from countries in Northern Africa, and then certainly we have the, what we've been calling a crisis on our own borders in the United States. Which again, the framing of that is so problematic. But that distinction, even though international law does provide for special protections for refugees as people who are fleeing violence and armed conflicts specifically, the way that that's wielded isn't consistent.
That distinction of migrant versus refugee, it's not always that clear cut. On top of that, states were being incredibly hypocritical and problematic in the ways that they were upholding the [1951] Refugee Convention in choosing to accept or not accept folks coming from places like Syria. So, for example, in Lebanon, and I think it's clear that we're always making distinctions between the governments of countries and the people of countries, especially in countries where people tend to be victims of their government. So I'm not talking about the Lebanese people here, but if you look at the country of Lebanon, one of the main issues that we were seeing there while I was working there was a violation of non-refoulement, that you cannot return a refugee to the country that they are fleeing from. That's illegal. And yet there were cases reported of that, and the government had sort of this backhanded way of trying to make life incredibly difficult and uncomfortable, and almost unlivable for folks who had fled from Syria. And I know that Lebanon was not the only case of that.
So it's just such a stark contrast to what we're seeing now in Poland. Moms leaving strollers at the train station for Ukrainian moms who are fleeing across the border. Those women get to be mothers. They get to be people. They have their humanity versus the language of them, it being an invasion. They're subhuman somehow. They're almost like vermin who are coming and taking over and infesting the nation. And it's just, again, it just shows that we, not only have we become anesthetized to the suffering of Black and brown people, we enable it. We don't think that it's our responsibility. We don't see that we're actually a part of the problem. We don't see them as human beings bearing the imago Dei.
So yeah, if you want to look at the church's response, it should be consistent with that theological truth. That you can't slap the label of refugee on them and think that that allows you to, that exonerates you from seeing them as an individual who is suffering. That it exonerates you from doing everything that you can to preserve their life and wellbeing, even to the point of sacrifice, which again, we're seeing in Europe. For everyone who said in the past that it's unrealistic to expect nations to sacrifice, to save life, we're seeing that happen today. So yeah, I think all of this is sort of broader political commentary, but I think it should be upheld first and foremost in the church if we call ourselves the people of God.
Sy Hoekstra: Can I bring up really quickly the article that you brought up in a recent newsletter that was this long New Yorker article about the shadow immigration system in Libya?
Suzie Lahoud: Yes!
Sy Hoekstra: That the EU is basically funding immigration detention centers in Libya, for the Libyan government, for other people to grab people on their way to Europe and put them in detention, right? People coming specifically from Africa, because Libya geographically is on the Mediterranean and is a place where people leave on boats to try and reach Europe.
The other thing, I'm only going to say this once, we don't need to go over it in a lot of detail. But the caveat we should probably say to this whole conversation is, we obviously don't want Ukrainian refugees to be treated badly, nor do we have any sort of… we just want everybody else to be treated the way that we're treating Ukrainians when they are suffering.
We're not trying to sort of cast aspersions on anything that's going on here. We think all the efforts being made across Europe and in the United States for Ukrainians are great and should happen for everyone, and we applaud them, and we're denouncing a double standard.
Jonathan Walton: We have to be able as people, in the same way that Jesus was fully God and fully man, there's like, we hold these things in tension of like, it's possible to call out white supremacy and racial prejudice and violence, and say, “isn't it amazing that the Ukrainian people are being accepted and received and loved?”
Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. I think that, Jonathan, I think you just raised such an important point. And just to bring it back to the Bible, I feel like that's what prophetic ministry does. You can't say that as prophets the only job is to encourage folks and tell them where they're doing well. It's also to call people to attention in areas of individual and collective and communal sin. So I absolutely agree that those two need to be held in tension. That yes, absolutely, I think it's just sort of… what we're seeing today is the response that folks working on the front lines had hoped that we would see when everything was and continues to fall apart in Syria.
Oh, and in fact, if we want to talk, to dig in a little bit to what exactly is playing out right now in Ukraine and part of why it is so horrific, I think if you want to see how far Putin is willing to go, you need to look at Syria. Because, as we know, Russia has been actively backing the Assad regime in Syria, providing the air power in that war. Essentially, Russia's the one that's enabled him to hold on, and what we're seeing on the ground right now is just this nihilism of Putin is now actively punishing the Ukrainian people for daring to stand up to him. For daring to act like they are not just sort of a vassal state of Russia.
So if you want to see how bad this can get, you need to look at what has happened in Syria and the horrific loss of life. And all of the violence in so many different forms that’s happened, all of the brutality. We allowed that to thrive elsewhere, and now it's coming home to roost in places where people now feel connected to it. They should have felt connected to it before. It should have been enough that Syrian people were being terrorized and murdered by their own government, but we didn't care enough to stop it, and now it's wreaking havoc everywhere.
Sy Hoekstra: So I think we should transition a little bit then to talking about kind of the ways that American exceptionalism creeps into how we're approaching this conflict as well. And then I think tied up in that is Christian nationalism and Christian supremacy. We all had a lot of thoughts about this, so I'll just open it up to anyone who wants to talk.
Suzie Lahoud: So one thing that keeps coming up that analysts keep pointing to is this concept that Putin has of “Russkiy mir.” The Russian World, or actually, it could almost be translated as Pax Russica. “Mir” in Russian means both world and peace. It's this idea that the sort of ideal Mother Russia, it's a linguistic unit of Russian-speaking peoples. It's also, obviously, there's a cultural element there, but then thirdly, there's a religious element of, essentially it's white, Russian-speaking Christians under the Russian Orthodox Church. So I think that's something we pointed to in our newsletter recently with the Diana Butler Bass piece, where she talks about this: that another component of this war is a response to this sort of schism that occurred within the Orthodox Church of Ukraine trying to come out with its own sort of Orthodox Church based in Kiev, and Russia is saying, “No, you can't do that. Kiev is the center of the Russian Orthodox Church. It's the center of our Christendom. It's our Jerusalem.” In an attempt to sort of reclaim it from any sense of Ukrainian nationalism. So I think it's, we need to, especially as Christians, we need to understand the religious elements that are at play here. We need to understand how dangerous that is and how religion fuels violence like this. And we need to understand how we are actually, with what we're seeing in the United States today, somehow connected to that.
Again, going back to the Diana Butler Bass piece, which I highly recommend. I think she does a good job of giving just kind of a broad overview of what's happening, but she refers to this sort of “authoritarian, neo-Christendom triumvirate.” Where you see folks like Trump in the United States, trying to build this concept of a white Christian America, and rallying conservatives around that. You're seeing the same thing happen in Russia today in attempts to sort of create links between these sort of Christian empires, essentially. Again, that's just so destructive, so dangerous, so scary, because when you marry religious ideology to violence, the potential for destruction is almost endless.
Sy Hoekstra: And it's not just those two places, right? It's also conservatives, a lot of conservative Catholics in Western Europe and some Protestants as well. But it is an actual international movement based around leaders who have, they have written extensively on their vision for where kind of the white world should go. It's this united, like you said, white Christian kind of international empire that is against at once, like Western secular decadence, and then also Islam and also China. They have very specific enemies, they know who they want to unite with and it's like a real international political movement.
Diana Butler Bass linked to this interesting article by a medieval expert named Brandon Hawk, who kind of writes about how Putin and Steve Bannon and all these other groups are sort of looking… and by the way, these groups also have connections to like David Duke and the Klan. How they look back to medieval kind of imagery and iconography for their inspiration, because they really do believe that they are kind of the next Holy Roman Empire, or the next Constantinople. That's the historical vision that they see themselves in. It's like, “We are going to be the people who are in charge of,” as Hawk put it, “the earthly and the heavenly destinies of European white people.”
So that's, I don't know, that's a vision that Putin has, has written about extensively. Suzie, you've clued me into this a little bit. I don't know, it's an angle of the war that we are not talking about as much in our media, because it's kind of, I don't know. It's just something that a lot of the Western, non-religious media doesn't have as much information or familiarity with, but it's very real in the minds of a lot of people who think like Putin.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I mean… oh man, I just have so many thoughts. So something that is, to me, that is important, but also missing, is like, I think we are so ignorant and so myopic, yet also assume the best. Okay, so we are ignorant of the pervasiveness of white supremacy. The pervasiveness of Christian internationalism, as Diana Butler Bass calls it. The pervasiveness of an internalized imperial mindset and posture towards anybody that is not quote-unquote “like us”.
And I'm included in that. Me and Priscilla, my wife is Chinese and Korean. She's like, “Jonathan, that is so Western in how you're thinking, and I don't have another way to think about it.” So I actually have to be quiet and listen to consider that there's another way of doing it, because I automatically think I'm right. I automatically think I'm just, and I automatically think I'm capital “G” good in how I'm thinking. So like, there's an ignorance to that, and then, to the pervasive internalized sense of that.
Then there's a… and I don't mean to be like alarmist, but it's like people are sold out to like Steve Bannon's podcast or Alex Jones' podcast, or like all these things. Like a dude doesn't just show up at a pizza place in Washington D.C. to kill people unless they're sold out. And there are millions of people who are imbibing this every day. This goes back to Chuck Armstrong who is like our first or second episode. Of him talking like we're listening over and over again. So when Tucker Carlson starts hearkening to Putin, and hearken — and having these narratives start to play, dropping in replacement theory, dropping the — you know, the white supremacist notion that they are quote-unquote “going to be replaced” by brown people. Using words like “invasion” and “vermin,” and all these things.
So we, as you were saying, Suzie, it’s like we're anesthetized to it. There's a desperate need to, and not to use the word, in the 90s it'd be, “conscious,” today it's called, “woke,” but like to be aware and engage with the narratives that are happening, because they're all connected. And the most dangerous thing is the divination of it. Like this is a divine thing. Because once somebody believes God is behind it, it's done. Like it's… Yeah, how can you argue?
Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. I think to put this, kind of drawing on that a little bit and going back to Sy’s earlier point about some of the psychology behind this, because I think there are a lot of questions of how could Putin still be popular in Russia? Sy, you brought up a great point, that actually thousands of Russians are now fleeing Russia because of this war and…
Sy Hoekstra: And protesting the war at great personal risk.
Suzie Lahoud: Yes risking, literally risking their lives to stand up and protest. You have officials and leaders of government-sponsored groups like the symphony orchestra, who are taking a stand. So really courageous individuals. So it's not that the Russian people is necessarily fully behind this, but you do have a lot of folks who also buy into this narrative and you need to see that there's this whole picture behind it. And one way of framing the religious component, is this is as if our culture wars took on the form of aggression towards another state. But Sy’s point about Putin seeing himself as standing up against the decadence of corrupted Western values, that's their culture wars.
You also have to understand culturally, so I grew up in the former Soviet Union. So many people in the former Soviet Union, the United States to them is synonymous with like MTV. That's American culture, and like the worst of what we have to offer in terms of Hollywood. And I constantly had to fight that sort of stereotype about who I was as an American girl. There's just, that's what we've, we’ve exported the worst of who we are to the rest of the world and that's how they see us. So there's that side of it. But then also the psychology that's kind of at work, and I say that because it's dangerous how the psychology of the culture wars is being weaponized in the United States in ways that are destructive to people's lives. People are dying because of this.
So I want to tear off the veil of what's happening in Russia to let us see that the same thing is happening in the United States as well. And in terms of, we always point fingers at Soviet propaganda and indoctrination. And I went to Russian school in the fifth grade and we were still reading books after the fall of Soviet Union— this was after, it was late 90s and we were still reading books of “moya rodina,” and Mother Russia, the Motherland, all that stuff. And I'm like, “oh my gosh, how can they be teaching this propaganda?” But this is the same battle that's going on in the United States today when you look at the 1619 project versus the 1776 project, it's like, or whatever, they're calling it. It's the same thing. We fight over our national narrative because the way that you construct the story about yourself then feeds into your foreign policy, then feeds into your domestic policy, then feeds into your narrative about whose lives matter and whose death and suffering is acceptable to you as a nation.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. By the way, what natural allies with American conservatives, like you hate Hollywood and MTV and that's what churches in America have been talking about. We basically hate the same things about the West. We just have like a different kind of view of ourselves and who we essentially are, you know what I mean? We don't have the stereotypes of the MTV girl being all Americans, but we still are raging against those same things.
Suzie Lahoud: We still decry it.
Sy Hoekstra: So when factions of our society start linking up with the similar factions of Russian society, it shouldn't be a surprise to us. It should not be a surprise that Tucker Carlson kind of loves Vladimir Putin. Because I think a lot of people have been asking this question, I've seen this a lot in the media and on social media. When did it become cool for conservatives to start loving Russia? Because we're hearkening back to the Cold War era when conservatives were so very anti-Soviet Union, because they were ideologically opposed, they were communists.
And I'm like, that doesn't, the idea behind hating Russia back then was not that those conservatives in America were anti-authoritarian, they were just anti-communist. They were not, if you want to talk about all the stuff that we did during the Cold War to try and suppress any sort of communist or leftist thought of any kind. It was extremely authoritarian. Like Joseph McCarthy was talking about what is unamerican and how do we blacklist it and ban it. I mean, we prosecuted people for advocating for communism. All those sorts of things.
Suzie Lahoud: We toppled governments.
Jonathan Walton: [simultaneously] Yeah, propped up authoritarian dict — yeah toppled governments and propped up… [laughs].
Suzie Lahoud: In foreign countries.
Sy Hoekstra: Right, right. We propped up dictators all around the world in favor of, like we are fundamentally the conservative movement in the United States is not anti-authoritarian. There may be people who believed that it was and have philosophies of being anti-authoritarian, but that has not been the reality of what has been going on in the US over the past several decades.
Jonathan Walton: Right. Yeah. The reality of the support of an illiberal democracy, basically. Like it is authoritarianism, but it wants to give the face of a democracy. So Putin is voted into office. Bashar al- Assad is voted into office, but obviously there is corruption and the crushing of dissent.
Sy Hoekstra: There's another angle about this that I want to talk about, which is our framing of Ukrainian refugees as Christians. This is something I've been hearing both from Christians and from just kind of the media in general, that makes them the good guys a little bit. We're talking about the Christianity of the refugees and of a lot of people in Ukraine. There is a tendency among, I think, a lot of American Christians to try and separate good guys. Good guys are Christians and bad guys are not real Christians. We try and make, and this plays into how we have so many guardrails around our orthodoxy and our beliefs, and the things that we say make you a real Christian or don't make you a real Christian.
It also plays into the ways that we separate ourselves from anything bad that Christians have done in the past, and we cling to and identify with things that they've done that are good. So in the American context, it's like we love Christian abolitionists and then we talk about Christian slaveholders as not real Christians. But what I'm getting at here is, Vladimir Putin is a Christian. You can't just say he's not a Christian because I don't think that he understands God the same way I do, he has different theology, he has different politics. The man is a Christian, like the same way that the slaveholders were Christians in the United States.
We can't just push ourselves away from that and sort of absolve ourselves of like any identification with those people that way. That is not how God's vision of the church works. So what I mean is, even if you're talking about like, okay, somewhere in the Bible, people might have said you should excommunicate or cast people out if they do X, Y, or Z. But in every instance, like if Paul was talking about, saying, you need to separate yourself from some person who's doing something terrible, who's like harming the community in some way, the whole point of saying that was in the hopes that they would see the error of their ways and then come back into the community. Specifically because they were your sibling in Christ, right?
We don't get to pick and choose who we think are Christian. We can say they're wrong. I can say, I believe that Vladimir Putin is absolutely wrong about the way he approaches Christianity. I can't say he's not a Christian. I can say he's a Christian who's wrong. Like he still is out there going to services and talking about worshiping God. There's no meaningful way in which I get to separate myself from Christians who have done bad things like that, just because I want to preserve the appearance of the goodness of Christianity. Does that make sense?
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, absolutely. Because what you hear a lot of the time, is like you don't want to quote-unquote “compromise your witness.” But we don't say that when it comes to issues of justice usually. We don't talk about compromising our witness around things that are resistant to dominant culture. We don’t.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. It's very strategically deployed and we do it in a way to like… I don't know, it ends up looking kind of inconsistent and sort of absurd when you think about the different ways that we deploy that idea of compromising our witness, but it's, we put it out… When there's an opportunity for us to say these Christians are good guys, and that person is a bad guy, we just take, I don't know, we take every opportunity to do that.
Jonathan Walton: And right now, I do think that is in a, we talked about this in the Hierarchy of Sins episode. There's a big argument and conversation, at least in my algorithm online, about who the real Christians are versus those who are not. And it is a, I think it's a very real thing, and it's been debated and argued since the Ascension and Pentecost. It's like, who is the real person that has the real truth and is doing the real thing? And I don't get to decide, at the end of the day, who goes to heaven, who knows Jesus, who's in relationship with him, what qualifies it. I don't get to do that, even though I would really like to, you know what I mean?
Sy Hoekstra: I've pointed this out before, I'll be brief here. The Bible talks about the disciples of Jesus being disciples before they know anything about what he was going to do. They don't know about the crucifixion, they don't know about the resurrection, they don't know about the ascension, they don't know about all the things. Like they could not have written most of the Apostles’ Creed, yet the Bible calls them disciples. Judas Iscariot, the Bible calls a disciple. So I just, our notions of who does and does not count as a follower of Jesus, as a Christian, are so, I don't know, bound up in our attempts to control our image and control how people think. And we need to just let go of that stuff if we want to think the way God thinks.
Jonathan Walton: The reality that pre-Constantinople, the sermon that was preached, at least from the little bit that I read, was usually the Sermon on the Mount, which is full of being and doing in the world. Post-Nicene Creed and obviously looking back from that, the core question became, what do you believe? Which is a different way of embodying, it's not actually an embodiment at all, but it's a different way of practicing our faith, which actually requires little practice to then claim relationship with God. Christianity post its marriage to politics and nationalism that we're talking about stripped out the being and doing. And when it is fundamentally about belief, things change. You get to define then what the doing and the being is.
Suzie Lahoud: I think too, just going to this element of certainty and kind of critiquing that a little bit. Kat Armas had a great post about this the other day, where she talked about, it struck her in the passage about the sheep and the goats that not only are the goats surprised that they're not the ones entering into heavenly rest, it's the sheep that are also like, “Whoa wait, we did it right?” And I think just, that's part of the point of why it's so important to be able to call these things out and to have prophetic critique in the church, because we need to beware of having the certainty of saying, “Yes, God should bless our armies.” And being able to say, as Sy said, “These are the good guys, these are the bad guys.”
I think we constantly need to be checking our own hearts and questioning things and yeah, being wise as serpents and innocent is doves. Also kind of what we were talking about reminds me of a great quote, which I think is appropriate here by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either— but right through every human heart.”
Sy Hoekstra: I like that quote, first of all. I've heard that many times before. I go back to it in my brain a lot. I think like, this is just another point that I wanted to make before we're done, is that it becomes extremely difficult for the United States, or any other Western power, to critique anything that's happening in Ukraine when we've been doing similar things all around the world for so long. And I don't just mean propping up the dictatorships and toppling governments that we did during the Cold War. I also mean the War on Terror. We have been invading and taking over countries on flimsy pretexts or for ideological reasons and for religious reasons for quite some time.
Which is not to say that nobody in the US should call out anything bad that's happening, that Russia's doing. I'm just saying it's, on the international stage, the fact of the matter is we don't have any credibility to talk about this because of the things that we have done or allowed to happen, and the fact that we've never gone back and acknowledged all the harms that we've caused and tried to do anything to rectify those harms. So I just, I don't know, when we're talking about our judgment or when we are criticizing Putin, as we absolutely should be, I think keeping in mind that that line goes right down your heart, the middle of your heart, is important. Because we are genuinely no better than him.
And I mean, that is hard, I think, for a lot of people to hear, but the three of us talk a lot about the piece that one of our previous guests, Wissam al-Saliby, wrote in our anthology, and how we like to pretend that there are false moral equivalencies to draw between the actions of the US and the actions of our enemies. And the reality just doesn't look that way for anyone who has experienced the, I don't know, just the suffering and the terror that the US has caused around the world for so many decades.
Suzie Lahoud: Yeah. And I mean, probably Jonathan's the best person to make this point since you wrote a whole book about it. But let that be a critique of the misconception, the lie that America is judge because America is somehow synonymous with the will of God. America is not the judge of the world. God is the judge of the world. Let us be clear on that distinction. And I think too, because again, to Sy’s earlier point, and I hope this goes without saying, but all of these ideas and points that we're raising are not to say that we don't stand in solidarity with the battle that Ukraine is fighting, the existential battle that Ukraine is fighting. And not that we don't stand with the Ukrainian people.
I can speak for myself, I absolutely do. And I think one of the powerful things that Volodymyr Zelensky has done, and I know I'm not the first person to say this, is he has demonstrated moral power and has wielded that. He's called these leaders to account and said, “You need to stand behind your values.” All of our critiques earlier still stand, that it's striking that that's the rallying cry that these nations have responded to. So we got into that earlier, but just that point of the power of moral leadership, and that yeah, you need to be willing to stand up and have that voice and call nations like the United States to account. Because in the past we've spoken the language of values, but really we've been acting in our interest.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I think we are talking like very big picture, trying to make historical references like ground ourselves so that we can engage. But I think a worthy point also to make is like, if we love something, we can critique it. If, all of us are married, people who are listening, we are in deep relationships, if we love something, if we care about something, if we care about someone, we tell the truth. And I think we have to be willing in the church and outside the church, for the sake of the world and the gospel, to tell the truth. I don't know what that will cost me one day. I'm sitting in Queens, I'm fine. I have heat. I have electricity. I have clean water. I have hot water when I shower. I have all these things.
Truth-telling does not cost me that much today. My prayer though, is that we would be people who are able to bear witness and tell the truth in word, in deed, in power, in the midst of even the gravest conflicts like what's happening in Ukraine, and pray that they're able to do so. Because I mean, I couldn't imagine, I know my ancestors had to do things like this. But I pray that one, I hope I never have to, but I pray that I would have the courage to respond in ways that are honoring to God and those I love and care about.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I think that's a good place for us to end it. Thank you all so much for listening. We've talked about a number of articles today. We will have those in the show notes for this episode if you want to reference them. Again, thank you to all of our subscribers for listening to this bonus episode. Please do follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at KTF Press, and leave a rating and review for this podcast wherever you're listening.
Okay, yeah, I think that is it then. So our theme song as always is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra. Our podcast art is by Jacqueline Tam, and we will see you all for our bonus episode next month.
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Sy Hoekstra: It's 10:34. Gosh. Do you guys have — when are your end times?
Suzie Lahoud: Marvin is not here, so I'm on my own the whole day. So it's until Nora gets sick of CoComelon.
Sy Hoekstra: Oh, Jonathan?
Jonathan Walton: Ideally, 11:30?
Sy Hoekstra: We can definitely do 11:30. So I guess Nora's capacity to watch CoComelon is our limiting factor here.
Suzie Lahoud: And I would guess that her limit on CoComelon is endless.
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] Okay, cool. So we have till 11:30.
