This week on Anishinaabe land (from the 25th floor of the Guardian building, Detroit, MI - PC: Erinn Fahey).
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When I graduated from college back in the 90s, I wanted to become a high school basketball coach. Honestly, I was not very good at it. I lasted a few years, and then I left the bench and focused on becoming a better teacher in the classroom.
One of my former basketball players became a pastor at a large fundamentalist Christian congregation in Southern California. He has six children and lives in a home worth more than two million dollars.
One might wonder how he can afford all of this on a pastor’s salary. I’m not totally sure what’s going on behind the scenes, but I do know that his dad was the CEO of the company that developed the predator drone.
Back in the early 2000s, before the basketball player became a pastor, he told me about how his dad studied the bible, scanning the Old Testament for end-times prophecies, looking for possible ways they might be fulfilled in contemporary geopolitics.
Back then, I did not know that his dad was making millions off defense contracts. But now it makes a lot of sense.
Predator drones and end-times prophecies maintain a symbiotic relationship.
The Palestinian theologian Mitri Raheb says that u.s. weapons manufacturers provide Israel with the military hardware to occupy Palestine - and u.s. Christian pastors provide Israel with the religious software to sanctify it.
The sky-rocketing Pentagon budget is basically a self-fulfilling biblical prophecy for evangelicals who earnestly believe that the sooner the u.s. can usher in Armageddon, the sooner Jesus will return in glory.
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This week, I was thinking about the basketball-player-turned-pastor and his predator-drone dad after I heard Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth cherry-pick the book of Psalms to conclude his press conference:
Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle. He is my loving God and my fortress. My stronghold and my deliverer, my shield, in whom I take refuge. May the Lord grant unyielding strength and refuge to our warriors. Unbreakable protection to them in our homeland. And total victory over those who seek to harm them. Amen.
Pete Hegseth and Ambassador Mike Huckabee participate in a weekly bible study at the White House facilitated by Ralph Drollinger, who is 7’2” and played for two national championship basketball teams at UCLA. After college, he chose to sign a free agent contract to play for the Dallas Mavericks so that he could attend Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS) at the same time.
In 2000, a few months before George W. Bush was elected President, I worked at an evangelical Christian sports camp in the Ozarks called Kanakuk. A lot of the staff members studied at DTS. They were trained to never deviate from two doctrines: biblical inerrancy and dispensationalism.
Biblical inerrancy was literally invented by white evangelical men in the 19th century to support slavery. In 1833, Southern Baptists adopted an official confession of faith that insisted that the scriptures were “truth, without any mixture of error.” Other denominations followed suit. This allowed white preachers to proof-text passages from Paul’s letters that demanded slaves obey their masters.
Dispensationalism, which was also invented by white evangelical men the 19th century, is the idea that God divides history into dispensations. It claims that our current dispensation is a time of testing to see who the true Christians really are. Dispensationalists believe that we are on the cusp of the final dispensation: “the millennial reign of Christ.”
For now, the final dispensation is delayed. Because the predator drone bible prophecies have not all been fulfilled. Yet.
Ralph Drollinger runs Capitol Ministries which has a mission of reaching 500,000 local elected officials in the u.s. with the dispensationalist version of “the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” On its website, it says that Capitol Ministries teaches the bible to public servants so they can craft policies committed to God’s precepts.
Drollinger teaches that the cultural foundation of the u.s. is connected to “biblical truths borrowed from historic Israel.” He says that scripture mandates support of the modern nation-state of Israel, which all dispensationalists equate with the descendants of Abram.
In Genesis 12, God promises Abram that everyone who blesses his future progeny will be blessed – but everyone who curses them will be cursed. Drollinger and the dispensationalists take this to mean that anyone who does not support everything the state of Israel is doing right now will be cursed too.
It’s one hell of an interpretive leap.
Drollinger also emphasizes Romans 9-11, a highly contested text among biblical scholars. In it, the Apostle Paul wrestles with why most of his fellow Jews aren’t into Jesus. Drollinger interprets it as saying that God has “temporarily sidetracked His chosen people” because they “did not recognize their Messiah.”
Dispensationalists like Drollinger, Hegseth, Huckabee and John Hagee, the founder of Christians United for Israel (which boasts more than 10 million members), say that anyone who does not support Israel is “antisemitic.”
The brutal irony is that these men believe that Jews who do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah are going to burn in hell. They also believe that God will give Jews a final chance to convert in the end-times, before Jesus comes back in a Rapture to rescue believers and build the New Jerusalem.
Drollinger says that the Jews “badly stumbled,” but the good news is found in Revelation 7, which says that in these end-times, 144,000 Jews will turn to Jesus and become some of his most effective evangelists who “will herald the Second Coming of Messiah throughout the world.”
Drollinger says that these events will take place in the lead-up to the final battle of Armageddon and the Great Tribulation, a period of suffering when God will pour out wrath on nonbelievers.
This is what Ralph Drollinger and the dispensationalists say that Revelation says.
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Bible scholars like Brian Blount say that Revelation says Something Else.
Brian Blount is a retired pastor and theology professor who reads the bible in historical and literary context. He also comes out of the Black church, which gives him an interpretive advantage. The Black church trained him to read the bible through the lens of oppressed people.
Revelation was written by and for a marginalized and persecuted community experiencing their end-times in the first century. The early Christians suffered in prisons and on crosses.
Revelation called them to “faithful resistance,” to refuse to fit in, to reject acquiescence to imperial values, at all costs.
Revelation is apocalyptic literature, which utilizes metaphor and hyperbole to “reveal” reality.
Revelation pulls the curtain back on power. Speaking in code, it incessantly critiques empire, with all its greed and violence.
Brian Blount says that the message of Revelation is that, despite all the hell that the first-century followers of Jesus were catching, despite the fact that the forces of chaos and destruction seemed to be victorious at every turn, Something Else was in control.
In the Book of Revelation, the lamb who was slaughtered is actually a roaring lion.
It means that Love conquers empire in a way that is radically nonviolent.
Love is at work and winning, even though it seems like chaos and destruction reign.
Brian Blount says that the only appropriate way to read Revelation is “from below,” through the lens of oppressed communities. He compares it to the way that enslaved Africans sang the Spirituals as an act of resistance.
The Spirituals, like Revelation, cast dreams and visions of a new world on its way, assuring oppressed people that Something Else is at hand.
The Spirituals, like Revelation, have inspired radically liberative experiments that turn the tables on empire. Like underground railroads and bus boycotts and sit-ins and all sorts of other creative interventions.
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The real meaning of Revelation interrogates the might-makes-right mentality of Ralph Drollinger and the dispensationalists, who interpret the text from above, through the lens of their place of privilege and power within the American empire.
The Christian Zionism of the dispensationalists is mired in a sick-and-twisted obsession with the end-times, muting the life and teachings of Jesus, particularly the parts about loving neighbors and enemies, forgiving and serving others, living with compassion and mercy, sharing material possessions, and carrying the cross.
Christian Zionism swims in denialism, refusing to face the fact that Jesus was a dark-skinned Palestinian who lived under Roman occupation, and was killed by occupation forces in collaboration with the religious elites of his day.
Christian Zionists believe that Donald Trump has been anointed by Jesus to be an instrument to fulfill end-times prophecies. They compare him to the evil King Cyrus, who God used to free the ancient Hebrews from captivity so they could return home to rebuild the Temple.
My friend Jonathan Brenneman of Christians for a Free Palestine says that Christian Zionism is the foreign policy wing of white Christian nationalism. It believes that the u.s. government is an instrument of God's wrath, not a source of God’s love and compassion.
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Palestinian pastor Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac says that the explosive growth of Christian Zionism has not come out of a political disagreement, but a theological crisis.
When the dispensationalists and predator drone developers counterfeit the bible to promote their destructive and violent agendas, we cannot afford to bail on the bible. We must reclaim it.
Palestinian liberation theologian Naim Ateek calls Western Christians to the subversive task of "de-Zionizing" the sacred text.
De-Zionizing does not just play defense. It goes on the offensive.
Naim Ateek says that this other way is committed to loving God and neighbor, to loving enemies (which means being liberated from hate, animosity, revenge and retaliation), to truth and integrity, to prayer and nonviolent direct action, to becoming champions of the oppressed, the poor, the marginalized, and all those who are disadvantaged in the land, and to demanding justice first, then peace, and then a long process of reconciliation.
The good news is that, even though it feels like we are losing to some of the lowest forms of humanity, Love is on the move, working from below, where the rinds of genocidal theologies are composted, and becoming Something Else.
