Why I’m not participating in this weekend’s Faith and Blue event for churches and police
The problem isn’t police-community relations. It’s our acceptance of a broken system.
Like thousands of my colleagues across the country, I recently received a letter from an organization called Faith and Blue. I was encouraged to participate in the National Faith and Blue Weekend, October 9–12, an event dedicated to “facilitate safer, stronger, and more just and unified communities by facilitating collaborations between officers and local residents through the connections of houses of worship.”’
As the pastor of a Mennonite church, I suspect I read the letter from Faith and Blue from a different theological vantage point than many of my colleagues. As part of the Anabaptist tradition, Mennonites recognize that we live within a world of competing loyalties. But our sole allegiance is to Jesus Christ, God who came in the body of a member of an ethnic minority and was murdered by the state. Because of this, we do not take oaths, and we don’t participate in institutions like policing and the military, institutions that ask us to enact state violence on people made in the image of God.
It is an absurd and radical conviction, and it has a history of getting us killed. When Anabaptists refused to participate in the First World War, a group of them were thrown into a military prison in Leavenworth, Kansas. Two of these men—the Hofer brothers, who were Hutterites—were refused water and thrown naked into a freezing cellar. For days their hands were tied to rods above their heads with their feet barely touching the ground. Eventually they died from this torture, American citizens in an American military prison.
