Killin' fer Jesus

Good grief, talk about how your worldview shapes your actions: it sure did for Donald Rumsfeld and one of his top military aides. GQ Magazine broke this story which is enough to chill your blood. Yikes!

(thanks to Greg Boyd for his blog post alert on the subject.)

I don't think you have to be a wild-eyed bleeding-heart liberal to be repulsed by something like this. With advisors like these in his Cabinet, no wonder George W. had almost a missionary fervor about the spread of democracy into totalitarian parts of the world.

And yet... missionary fervor comes in all flavors. When you believe in the rightness of your cause, it's not hard to take the step of clothing the cause (and your actions in support of it) in garments of righteousness. It happened in the sixties by sympathetic theologians and social activists on the political left as well.  Not only did I live through it and watch, but it's also our topic this week in HS502.

Contextual theologies that emerged in those days, like Liberation Theology, Feminist Theology, Black Theology, Peace Theology (actually a Pacifist revival) and Nature Theology (ecology) often turned a blind eye to violence against persons and property in support of the "cause", as in peace activists throwing molotov cocktails.

Rabid segregationists, pro-lifers like Randall Terry's Operation Rescue, and militant gay-bashers who gave rise to hate crime legislation, were not the only ones who took the law into their own hands at times. We still have violence committed today by eco-terrorists, war protesters, PETA sympathizers, to name a few leftish causes to go with the rightish ones above.

From the KKK to the Black Panthers, what extremists on both sides agree on are the methods which become acceptable when the status quo becomes intolerable, and the validity of wrapping both cause and methods in a righteousness of one stripe or another.

Only the causes are different. Human nature is not.

But I do have a question (to which I don't have an answer): choose your definition of oppression, be it political, demographic, economic or religious... if people are being oppressed, what level of violence is justified in liberating them from said oppression?

Does anyone know?