Thomas Jefferson, multiple oppressor

In American history, Thomas Jefferson is commonly portrayed as a founding father saint.  Not so.
Thomas Jefferson was an evil multiple oppressor.  HIs combination of oppressions is as bad as it gets.

Thomas Jefferson was a rich, white, male as were all the founding fathers.  In 1776 times, the rich oppressed the poor, whites oppressed all non-whites, males oppressed females -- women were regarded as property, and women couldn't vote.

The poor, women, Native Americans and African Americans were all treated as second class citizens.
In addition, Thomas Jefferson owned 260 slaves; many other founding fathers owned slaves as well.
Jefferson had slave offspring.  In other words, Jefferson was a rape oppressor.

So Jefferson engaged in: rich oppression, white oppression, male oppression, slave oppression, and rape oppression.  Should all these oppression have been made crimes?  If so, Jefferson was a multiple criminal who should have been incarcerated, not memorialized.

Jefferson initiated the idea of removing all Indians east of the Mississippi and relocating them west of the Mississippi.  This idea later was passed by congress and called The Indian Removal Act.
From Wikipedia we find this sentence:

"Andrew Jackson is often erroneously credited with initiating Indian Removal, because Congress passed the Indian Removal Act in 1831, during his presidency, and also because of his personal involvement in the forceful removal of many Eastern Indian tribes. But Jackson was merely legalizing and implementing a plan laid out by Jefferson in a series of private letters that began in 1804, although Jefferson did not implement the plan during his own presidency."

One estimate of the Indian population  east of Mississippi in 1800 is 105,060:

"They were not allowed time to gather their belongings, and as they left, whites looted their homes. Then began the march known as the Trail of Tears, in which 4,000 Cherokee people died of cold, hunger, and disease on their way to the western lands."

So these brief facts show that Thomas Jefferson was not only an evil slave owner oppressor but he also came up with the evil idea of The Indian Removal Act. Thousands died making the trek from their homeland to west of the Mississippi. Unfortunately, in history, Jefferson is far more famous for the Lewis and Clark expedition than for coming up with the idea of removing Indians from their homelands east of the Mississippi.

It is hard to imagine a greater combination of evil: owning slaves and forcibly removing Indians from their homeland.

Jefferson's multiple oppressions became a model to imitated by future US presidents.  President Polk in the 1840s, initiated an unjust war with supposedly inferior Mexicans; the end result, Mexico was forced to cede half of its land including territories such as Texas,  Arizona, and California to the US.  Fifty years later, President McKinley practiced the same ruthless oppression in the Philippines killing a million Filipinos in the process [The Philippine Reader].

The demonic kingdom or the divine kingdom?

The demonic kingdom is characterized by oppression and ethnocentrism; the divine kingdom is characterized by justice.  In American throughout its history, the demonic kingdom has been winning hands down.  Why?  The white American church has no biblically based theology of oppression and it has only a weak biblically based theology of justice.  Therefore, the white American church has participated in or allows the oppression of American Indians -- Genocide: The extermination of people and cultures, and Indian land theft.  Also the multi-century enslavement of blacks to go on unchecked and largely unchallenged.

There is no clear and sharp biblical definition of oppression -- that oppression crushes, humiliates, animalizes, impoverishes, enslaves, and kills people created in the image of God.  Also, there is no in-depth understanding of how systems of oppression are created, maintained and redesigned.

There is little understanding of the kingdom of God as justice that releases the oppressed.  There is little grounding of the kingdom of God in Isaiah's Messianic Passages that calls the Spirit-filled church to do justice.

From 1994-2010, I volunteered at the Perkin's Center in Jackson, Mississippi.  John Perkins created Christian Community Development; a good applied version of the kingdom of God as justice that releases the oppressed by empowering the poor.

Over the years, hundreds of white volunteers came down to the Perkin's Center for a week to learn from John Perkins.  I asked hundreds of these volunteers, the cream of the crop from the churches, to write down a one sentence definition of the kingdom of God.  Essentially, they all flunked; nearly all definitions were all future and spiritually oriented.  Few were present and social oriented with a strong justice emphasis.

I have attended ten national CCDA conferences.  None of the CCDA leaders have grounded their understanding of the kingdom of God in Isaiah's messianic passages.  As a result, CCDA practice was not carefully grounded in biblical theology.

Next, a reference to Isaiah 10:1-2:

"Woe to the rich who make unjust laws, who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of the rights, to withhold justice from the oppressed, to treat the widows and fatherless as prey."

This verse from Isaiah not only concisely summarizes the social problems in Isaiah's time, it also perfectly applies to New Testament times where oppression of the poor by the rich was widespread to the times of America's founding fathers where oppression of the poor by the rich was widespread and in 2018, the oppression of the poor is still widespread.  The Messianic Passages of Isaiah would apply to the time of our founding fathers and to American in 2018.

Let us go back to our founding father, Thomas Jefferson, and look at him in more detail.  Thomas Jefferson was like many of the founding fathers; a rich, white, male, slave-holding elite.  In other words, our founding fathers were not angels.  To look at Thomas Jefferson in more detail, I call him a multiple oppressor, one who does not deserve a monument.  How was he a multiple oppressor?

1.  He owned and exploited as many as 260 slaves.
2.  He had slave offspring -- meaning he raped one or more slave women.
3.  He supported the Indian Removal Act  -- meaning the elimination of all Indians east of the  
     Mississippi.  Jefferson did not carry this out, President Jackson actually removed many of the
     Indians in the famous Trail of Tears.
4. Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark on a mission of exploitation which quickly led to the near
     extermination of Indian peoples and cultures west of the Mississippi.
5.  Jefferson supported French slave-holding oppressors, not Haitian slaves.

Conclusion:  Multiple oppressors do not deserve glorification in the pages of American history.  They should be obliterated from the pages of history and certainly no monuments should be built in their name.

In the last thirty years, in America, who can we trust to tell the truth, not a sanitized version of the truth?  God has raised up a number of secular prophets, sociologist Robert Bellah, author of Habits of the Heart [1985]; Bellah sounds like a secular Amos.  The messages about oppression and justice are the same as in Amos, even if there is no reference to God.  The same with politician/statesman, Kevin Phillips, author of The Politics of the Rich and Poor. [1990]
The same with secular social worker, Jerome Miller and his book Search and Destroy [1990s].
Political scientist, Pearson, in his book Winner Take all Politics. But my favorite 2018 article, by a secular philosopher, with an Amos type message can be found in the June, 2018 Atlantic, where Matthew Stewart, himself a member of the top 10 percent, criticizes the top 10 percent as a predatory group that rigs the politic and economic systems against the middle class and the poor.

Modern American Christians have no excuse for not knowing and obeying the truth; the truth about oppression and justice comes crystal clear from the scriptures.  But if you won't hear the scriptures, read above any of the secular prophets and you will get the same biting truth warning, in essence, repent, do justice, or face judgment.

P.S. Watch for a blistering book from Intervarsity Press which will be coming out in January, 2019, entitled Twelve Lies.  It explains the widely believed lies in American history where half truths are repeated as whole truths, where lies are repeated again and again until they take on aura of truth.

Housing for God or housing for the homeless?

When Los Angeles was originally founded, the United Methodist Church was planted.  Over the years the church, now located in downtown Los Angeles, became extremely valuable property.

In the 1980s, the gap between the rich and the poor widened and homelessness increased in Los Angeles.  What was the United Methodist church to do?  The L.A. church, in a bold and unprecedented move, sold its church and used the considerable proceeds in justice ministries geared primarily to the homeless.  The congregation continued to worship in a rather modest multi-purpose room near by.  The congregation did keep the church parking lot.

In 2017, the pastor decided to worship in a tent out in the parking lot.  Prior to moving to the parking lot, few poor and homeless were in the congregation.  After the parking lot church was started, the congregation was made up primarily poor Filipino women and the homeless.

Cathedrals are magnificent monuments for worship, but they consume scarce church resources that could have and should have been used to provide decent housing for the poor.  In this sense, beautiful church buildings are monuments of injustice.

John 3:16 is a Bible verse about a justification by faith gospel.  Luke 4:18-19 is a passage with a justice emphasis.  So also, 1 John 3:16.

Acts 8:12 blends both justice and justification by faith.  The reference to the kingdom of God is a reference to justice that releases the oppressed; the reference to Jesus Christ refers to the cross and resurrection; a justification by faith emphasis.

The Protestant Reformation highlighted the justification gospel, but in the process, left out the justice component or, in other words, it was a spirituality without justice.

Which comes first, justification by faith or justice?

We are all familiar with the old riddle: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
There is a similar theological riddle: Which comes first, justification by faith or justice?  The answer given by most of the Protestant church is justification by faith--preaching and planting of the church.
The Protestant Reformation got it wrong.

The Haitian Jean Thomas was trained in an American seminary that put justification by faith first.  Then providentially, Jean Thomas was mentored by a third grade black Mississippi drop out named John Perkins for four years in Christian Community Development.  CCD makes justice an equal partner with justification by faith.  Justice is the key to rebuilding poor communities.  Biblical justice must never be downplayed or ignored.

God declared in Amos: "I want justice-oceans of it!" [Amos 5:24 The Message]

When Jean Thomas returned to rural Haiti, [Fond-des-Blancs], he gave justice high priority.  Clean water was the top priority for the people of Fond-des-Blancs.  So the first thing Jean Thomas did in cooperation with the people was to provide clean water; this was a justice act.  For thirty-five years, Haiti Christian Development Fund has specialized in CCD--doing justice.  For example, clean water supply, education of 1500 children, planting millions of trees, starting a pig nursery, starting a credit union, and a farming project.  Also eight churches.  The above represents a rare biblical balance of justice and justification by faith.

The Corrosive Impact of Social Economic Inequality

Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson's new book is The Inner Level.

Picket and Wilkenson are British epidemiologists who examine social and environmental causes for disease, both physical and mental.  In a previous classic entitled, The Spirit Level, they showed how there is a close correlation between social economic inequality and mass incarceration.

This new book documents that economic inequality damages everything it touches; both persons and societies -- see quote:

"inequality eats into the heart of our immediate, personal world, and the vast majority of the population are affected by the ways in which inequality becomes the enemy between us."

"Socioeconomic inequality matters because it strengthens the belief that some people are worth much more than others.  Those at the top seem hugely important and those at the bottom are seen as almost worthless.  In more unequal societies we come to judge each other more by status and worry more about how others judge us.  Research on 28 European countries shows that inequality increases status anxiety in all income groups, from the poorest ten percent to the richest tenth.  The poor are affected most but even the richest ten percent of the population are more worried about status in unequal societies."

"Another study of how people experience low social status in both rich and poor countries found that, despite huge differences in their material living standards, across the world people living in relative poverty had a strong sense of shame and self-loathing and felt that they were failures: being at the bottom of the social ladder feels the same whether you live in the UK, Norway, Uganda or Pakistan.  Therefore, simply raising material living standards is not enough to produce genuine wellbeing or quality of life in the face of inequality."

"The UK charity we founded, The Equality Trust, has resources for activists and a network of local groups.  In the USA, check out inequality.org.  Worldwide, the Fight Inequality Alliance works with more than 100 partners to work for a more equal world.  And look out for the new global Wellbeing Economy Alliance this autumn."

"Our own focus for change is to work for the increase of all kinds of economic democracy--everything from more cooperatives and employee-owned companies to stronger trade unions, more workers on company boards and the publication of pay-ratios.  We believe that extending democratic rights to workers embeds greater equality more firmly into any culture."

Kingdom of God Concepts

As I have wrestled with oppression and justice issues over the years, it has become clear to me that most American Christians have a shallow understanding of these essential biblical concepts.  These believers fail to comprehend how oppression and justice connect to concepts such as poverty, love, shalom, reconciliation and the kingdom of God.  Most do not grasp that to love one's neighbor biblically demands that one execute justice on the neighbors's behalf, not merely offer a warm feeling or charitable gift.  A number of my experiences have increasingly alarmed me and led me to these conclusions.

Over the past fifteen years, I have done informal polling of hundreds of people of all types of denominations.  I've asked if they have ever heard a full-fledged sermon on the biblical teaching on oppression.  Roughly one in twenty has ever heard such a sermon.

During the spring of 2007, I spoke with a number of mission teams from three different Christian liberal arts colleges.  Each college requires at least two or three Bible coursed for graduation; one requires thirty hours.  I asked a total of about forty students from these schools if any of their Bible professors had taken one class period to teach about oppression.  Not a single student raised a hand.

I have searched for a comprehensive book on what the Bible teaches about oppression by a white evangelical scholar.  So far I have found none.  There appears to be a dearth of preaching and theology on oppression in evangelical circles.

If oppression and justice were minor biblical motifs, these things would not disturb me so.  But one can see that justice issues pervade the whole Bible if given the opportunity.  Unfortunately, many Bible translations deny American Christians that opportunity.

I am stunned by the discrepancies between Bible translations of different language in the use of the word "justice."  A reader of the King James Bible never sees the word "justice" in the New Testament.  A reader of NIV will see it sixteen times.  Yet a reader of the RVR Spanish translation will see the word "justice" (justice) no less that 101 times.  (See Steven Voth's discussion of justice and righteousness in Chapter 14 of The Challenge of Bible Translation.)  In the NKJV, the RSV and the NIV, justice occurs between 125-134 times in the whole Bible.  In contrast, the Spanish NVI has justice 426 times, a French translation has justice 380 times, and the Latin Vulgate over 400 times.  It appears that the reader of an English Bible is being shortchanged on the biblical importance of justice.

In his Informing the Future: Social Justice in the New Testament, biblical scholar Joseph Grassi asserts that references to "righteousness" in the Sermon on the Mount should be translated as "justice."  If so, the Sermon would have two major themes: The kingdom of God and justice.  For this reason, Grassi calls Matthew, "The Gospel of Justice."

Consider the implications.  What if Matthew 5:6 were translated:

          "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after justice..."?

What if Matthew 6:33 were translated:

          "Seek first the kingdom of God and his justice..."?

As I have searched for reasons behind the widespread ignorance of these issues, I have developed the following hypothesis:

If a Christian has not developed a profound understanding of the horror of oppression, he or she is highly unlikely to develop a deep and sustained passion for Jubilee justice.

A person can gain the necessary understanding of the horror of oppression from either experience or the Scriptures [preferably from both].  My experience began as I heard the personal stories of John and Vera Mae Perkins and their struggles in the Civil Rights movement.  This led me to study the Bible's teachings on oppression.  I discovered in Thomas Hanks' God So Loved the Third World that the Hebrew roots translated as "oppression" in the Bible mean crush, humiliate, animalize, impoverish, enslave, and kill.  Learning sealed the deal for me.  Over the years, oppression has continued to horrify me and drive me toward a passion for justice.

To provide a backdrop for the rest of the essays in this book, I will now outline the three concepts that have anchored my search for a biblical-based theology of society.  Then we will turn to an introductory study of those concepts in American society.  On a continuum, oppression is at one end, shalom at the other.

     Oppression <--------------------------------------Justice---------------------------------------> Shalom

Oppression may be one of the worst words in human language; shalom is one of the most beautiful.  Justice stands in the middle.  As I have stated, oppression means to crush and animals persons created in the image of God.  Oppression is the misuse of power and authority, usually through social institutions, to crush individuals or communities.  Shalom is the opposite.  It creates peace, harmony, well-being, and flourishing in a community, benefitting all individual members.

Justice stands between oppression and shalom.  Biblical justice, what I call "Jubilee Justice," is two-pronged.  First it releases individuals and even communities of people from oppression.  Then it provides them with access to the resources of God's creation so that the released can provide themselves with the necessities of life.  In an agricultural society [such as ancient Israel's], justice would provide each family with its own plot of land.

To illustrate the need for both sides of justice, let us consider Lincoln's famous Emancipation Proclamation.  It promised freedom for millions of slaves--a release from oppression, the first step of justice.  But neither Lincoln nor Congress took the second step that Jubilee Justice would have required--giving the freemen the resources necessary to provide for themselves [in practical terms, a plot of land].  The "Forty Acres and a Mule" legislation never passed, leaving freed slaves landless and homeless.  Many died.  Those who survived were forced into sharecropping.  Freedom alone is not enough; freedom must be followed by redistributive justice.

We cannot study oppression, justice and shalom in isolation from each other.  We need to see these basic concepts in relationship to each other.  I remember a detailed essay from a well-respected scholar on the Hebrew words for poverty.  His conclusions were seemingly thoughtful but misguided because he did not surround his study of the poor with other related biblical concepts such as oppression and justice.

Of course, scholarship must also pay special attention to Jesus' teaching on these subject.  In Luke4, Jesus identifies two social evils that trouble him deeply while preaching at a synagogue in Nazareth.  He addressed the first, oppression/poverty, in what we will call "Sermon A" [Luke 4:18].  In
"Sermon B" [4:25-30], he speaks to ethnocentrism--the Jews' belief that they were superior to the Gentiles.  At the end of Sermon A, the Jews applaud Jesus when he proclaims Jubilee Justice.  At the end of Sermon B, they literally try to kill him.  Why this abrupt reversal?

In Sermon A, Jesus introduces the concept of oppression from Isaiah 58:6.  One must read all of Isaiah 58 to grasp the importance of the themes he is invoking.  In Sermon B [vv.4:25-30], he introduces the social evil of a religiously-based ethnocentrism.  Originally the children of Israel were chosen by God to be a humble servant people who were to bring the Messiah into the world.  The Messiah would bless all peoples, Jew and Gentile.  Somewhere along the way, many Jews perverted their originally high calling, turning their closeness into superiority.  God became their own private deity, not accessible to the supposedly unclean, inferior Gentiles.

Jesus teaches about two familiar Old Testament prophets, Elijah and Elisha.  God sent Elijah to minister to a starving Gentile widow, bypassing starving Hebrew widows in the process.  God sent Elisha to minister to a Gentile leper, bypassing needy Hebrew lepers in the process.

The Nazareth Jews are enraged when Jesus implies that God is equally available to and compassionate toward the "inferior and unclean" Gentiles.  They regard this teaching as heresy and try toil Jesus on the spot.

Now we fast forward to American history, bringing the two social evils that Jesus identified to aid our understanding.  I am indebted to Ronald Takaki's A Different Mirror for some of the following historical information.

Just prior to the British establishing colonies in the New World, they were conquering and colonizing Ireland.  Led by English Protestants/Puritans, who saw themselves as chosen and superior, the British invaded Catholic Ireland.  This was ethnocentrism in its most deadly form-religioiulsy-based.  Although of the same race, the British viewed the Irish as subhuman.

Once ethnocentrism has dehumanized a people, it is easy to move to the next stop-acts of oppression against these "inferior" people.  The British were as ruthless as a Hitler or a Stalin as they invaded and conquered Ireland.  They perfected their ethnocentrism/oppression there.  Then they brought these two social evils with them lock-stock-and-barrel to American invading, conquering, and colonizing.  At first, the British even called the Native Americans "Irish."

It wasn't ling before the Puritans, who saw themselves as God's chosen people to establish a Christian nation in New England, were stealing land from Native American tribes and scalping them as well.  An extremely dangerous mix of religion, ethnocentrism and oppression began the destruction of Native Americans and their cultures.  Over the years near genocide occurred.

It wasn't long before the British colonists at Jamestown, after they had won the battle for survival, turned their brand of ethnocentrism and oppression on Afro Americans.  The colonists needed abundant cheap labor to grow and export tobacco to England.  Afro Americans were enslaved for this purpose.

The twin social evils of ethnocentrism and oppression, too often legitimated by a warped brand of Christianity, have pervaded and corrupted much of American history.  From time to time a few brave souls have stood for justice and reconciliation.  Looking at this and the rest of history, I am haunted by a continuing nightmare, but I am inspired by a beautiful dream.  At this point in history, my mind and spirit are dominated by the nightmare of oppression.  I see multiplied millions of people being crushed, humiliated, annualized, enslaved, and killed by White racism in the United States and
South Africa, by political and economic oppression in much of the Third World.  There seems to be no end in sight.  To this crushing of persons created in the image of the almighty God.  The oppressed cry out, "Who will deliver us from this massive and pervasive social evil?"  The answer that echoes is thundering silence.

By faith I see the answer in my dream.  The kingdom of God is hovering on the horizon, waiting for the people of God to see it and to bring it nigh to the oppressed.  The kingdom of God could lift up the crushed, give dignity to the humiliated, humanize the annualized, liberate the enslaved and stop the killing of the innocent.

The answer is at hand.  Why is it delayed?  The people of God need the power of the Spirit to incarnate the kingdom of God among the poor and oppressed.  By faith I see the answer in my dream.  By love and power that answer can become activated through works of grace.

          "The Spirit of the Lord is on me; therefore he has anointed me to preach good news to the
           poor . . . . to release the oppressed." [Luke 4:18]

          "For the kingdom of God is . . . . righteousness [justice], peace [shalom] and joy in the
           Holy Spirit." [Romans 14:17]

Combined, these two verses--one from Jesus and one from Paul--capture the essence of the ministry of the Holy Spirit through the kingdom of God here on earth.  Peter Heltzel expresses hope that we may carry that ministry forward in the last sentence of his Jesus and Justice.  After a careful, theologically-informed historical analysis of the white evangelical church and its massive failure to address racism and justice issues, Heltzel ends on this positive note [p. 218]: "Evangelicalism is moving, and moving quickly, to embody justice around the world."  If this is true, evangelicals will need help so they can execute quality justice which will be sustained for the long haul.

Now listen to the experts as they speak not only to the issue of biblical justice, but also to the related concepts of poverty, oppression, reconciliation, shalom and the kingdom of God.  May the church be enlightened and empowered by the Holy Spirit to do justice.

Musings on the kingdom of God

"Repent, the kingdom of God is near/hear!"  These are the first words from the lips of Jesus found in Matthew 4:17 and Mark 1:15.  Why did Jesus begin with the exhortation to repent?  Luke 6:24 may give us a strong hint.  Jesus said, "Woe to the rich!"  Why woe to the rich?  Because the rich oppress the poor.  This is explained in more detail in Isaiah 10:1-2.  This verse would equally apply to the New Testament: "Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless." [NIV]

Isaiah 10:1-2 would equally apply to United States history.  We also need to repent and then do justice.  Why?  Indian genocide probably eliminated about 90 percent of the original Indian population and Indian land theft.  It put 90 percent of Indian land in white hands.  Millions of Africans were enslaved.  Mexican land theft--at the point of a gun we took 50 percent of Mexico's land.

Trump says we should make America great again.  McCain said America has always been great.
Both are wrong.  America has always been ethnocentric and oppressive beginning with the Puritans.
The founding fathers were a rich white male slave holding elite.  In 2018, the top 10 percent are predatory rich.

Again, I would like to quote Isaiah 10:1-2:  "Doom to you who legislate evil, who make laws that make victims-laws that make misery for the poor, that rob my destitute people of dignity, exploiting defenseless widows, taking advantage of homeless children." [The Message]