Only the Church Can Truly Defeat a Christian Insurrection

Source: The Dispatch | January 14, 2021 | David French

It’s time to combat the right’s enabling lies.

I’m going to be honest. I can’t shake the sadness. I can’t shake the anger. We have to be clear about what happened in Washington D.C. on January 6th. A violent Christian insurrection invaded and occupied the Capitol.

Why do I say this was a Christian insurrection? Because so very many of the protesters told us they were Christian, as loudly and clearly as they could. The Atlantic’s invaluable religion reporter, Emma Green, compiled considerable evidence of the Christian presence in her excellent report. I saw much of it with my own eyes. There was a giant wooden cross outside the Capitol. “Jesus saves” signs and other Christian signs were sprinkled through the crowd. I watched a man carry a Christian flag into an evacuated legislative chamber.

I could go on and on. My colleague Audrey Fahlberg was present at the riot, and she told me that Christian music was blaring from the loudspeakers late in the afternoon of the takeover. And don’t forget, this attack occurred days after the so-called Jericho March, an event explicitly filled with Christian-nationalist rhetoric so unhinged that I warned on December 13 that it embodied “a form of fanaticism that can lead to deadly violence.”

Are you still not convinced that it’s fair to call this a Christian insurrection? I would bet that most of my readers would instantly label the exact same event Islamic terrorism if Islamic symbols filled the crowd, if Islamic music played in the loudspeakers, and if members of the crowd shouted “Allahu Akbar” as they charged the Capitol.

If that happened conservative Christians would erupt in volcanic anger. We’d turn to the Muslim community and cry out, “Do something about this!” How do I know we’d respond in that manner? Because that’s what we’ve done, year after year, before and after 9/11. And while there were many times when Christians painted the Muslim world with an overly-broad bigoted brush, it is true that violent insurrections do not spring forth from healthy communities.

That’s true abroad, and it’s true at home. During this summer’s riots, I wrote multiple posts detailing the extraordinary difficulty in quelling urban unrest once violence starts. Sometimes the unhealthy community is suffering from the effects of systemic injustice. Sometimes it’s dominated by outrageous and unreasonable grievances. Sometimes it’s infested with unhealthy fears and grotesque ambitions. Often there’s a combination of all these factors in play. But the violence always has a cause.

This is the time when some readers will respond, “Now’s your chance, David, tell the world the legitimate grievances of the Christian church! Tell the left why people are so angry!” No. Sorry.

Think of it like this. Riots weren’t justified when police knelt on a man’s neck while his life drained away in Minneapolis. Riots weren’t justified when police killed an innocent woman in a botched, reckless raid in Louisville. Riots weren’t justified when a black man was executed in broad daylight by wannabe vigilantes in Georgia.

If that’s true (and it is), then don’t think for one second it’s appropriate for Christians to air their grievances when the right-wing Christian riot was motivated by terrible lies. If a riot isn’t justified when agents of the state actually kill innocent black men and women, it really isn’t justified when you falsely believe wild election conspiracy theories or when you falsely believe a cabal of cannibal pedophiles control Washington and Hollywood.

Marching for a lie is bad enough. Rioting for a lie is an atrocity.

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