Summer is the most grueling time for justice-minded Christians who long for our siblings to our ideological right to stand up for our neighbors at home and abroad who our government is brutalizing in our names.
On July 7, three days after the fireworks went off celebrating 250 years of “liberty,” Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was shot dead by ICE in Houston while driving his work crew to their construction site. Araujo had lived in the U.S. for 30 years, raised a family here and begun the process of becoming a legally authorized resident.
Less than a week later, in Biddeford, Maine, ICE agents rammed the vehicle of Durán Guerrero before shooting and killing him. His three-year-old daughter screamed in horror as she watched them shackle the wrists of Guerrero’s limp body.
Araujo and Guerrero join a growing list of people whose lives have been cut short in Donald Trump’s and Stephen Miller’s war on immigrants. The incidents prompted ICE to suspend traffic stops in its enforcement operations. Still, the administration has proven extremely adept at finding new ways to kill people when old tactics come under public scrutiny.
Across the globe, there is still no transparency from the federal government regarding the February 28 U.S. attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Iran that killed 156 people, 120 of whom were children. We do know that most of the deaths were the result of a “double-tap” strike, in which a second bomb is deployed to deliberately maximize casualties. Between the first and second strikes, teachers moved students into a prayer room for safety.
The attack occurred on the first day of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. The conflict has heightened an economic crisis affecting all but the wealthiest Americans, whose 401(k)s continue to soar on the wave of an AI boom that is decimating water supplies and job opportunities.
Meanwhile, my social media feeds are overflowing with pictures of evangelicals boarding planes for mission trips to save the souls of people whose deaths would evoke nothing more than a shrug if they occurred at the hands of ICE on our streets. A church in my community back home is receiving praise for offering $0.99-a-gallon gas for a few hours to help temporarily ease the economic burden created by the policies most of its members voted for. And for some reason, I can’t rid my algorithm of those catchy-but-vapid videos of Forrest Frank singing about a gospel that has little meaning for this world beyond hope for the next.
I can’t help but think that the reason some Christians lean into a get-your-soul-into-heaven message is to distract us from the hell we are enabling here on earth.
Where can we look for hope? For people of faith, there is Scripture and a Spirit that overturns tables and causes empires to crumble.
We also have our prophets. One I can’t get out of my mind these days is the late John Prine, whose tunes often seem silly at first glance but turn devastating upon further examination.
In “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore,” Prine sings about filling his car’s windshield with so many American flags that he ends up dying in a crash caused by the lack of visibility. When the narrator arrives at the gates of heaven, he is informed:
Your flag decal won’t get you
Into Heaven any more.
We’re already overcrowded
From your dirty little war.
Now Jesus don’t like killin’
No matter what the reason’s for,
And your flag decal won’t get you
Into Heaven any more.
At the risk of conjecture, I’m guessing Prine would also agree that our mission trips, token benevolence, and songs about heaven won’t get us to heaven anymore either.
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Senior Editor at Good Faith Media.