Ep 21 - Nazis Are Bad

The face of white supremacy is a manifestation of evil that Christians and leftists should categorically oppose without qualifications. That might seem like an obvious point, but Christians seemed to have trouble responding in a timely way to the Charlottesville tragedy, taken in by the liberal temptation to condemn violence "on all sides." That temptation creates a false equivalence between the systemic violence expressing itself through white supremacy, whether they throw blows or not, and the liberating actions of resistance, and it relies on a kind of moral posturing that assumes it's above the fray precisely because it misunderstands the fray in the first place. In the episode, we try to think through problems of violence and nonviolence, making an appeal for a more differentiated understanding of violence that we think helps parse out some of these problems. To help us out, Amaryah Armstrong offered some thoughts to get us going, and we interact with Dr. Cornel West's reflections on the presence of antifa and anarchists at the event. If you're still not convinced, we try to throw pacifists a bone by considering how John Howard Yoder, the arch-pacifist Mennonite theologian, looked at revolutionary theologies form his own perspective. At the end, we suggest Christians need to be more creative in their responses to white supremacy, whether pacifist or not--if nothing else, the Charlottesville rally should be a wake up call for a church that can't seem to make sense of the unadulterated and obvious oppressive form of violence that is white supremacy.