The Testimony of a Christian Anti-Militarist: Part 2
"For too long we have allowed Christian Zionists to weaponize our theology to justify the state of Israel."
About the author: Tre is a Black Lutheran Marxist "Popular Theologian" and solidarity organizer in Minneapolis, MN. You can find more of their writing at childofjob.substack.com.
This is a two-part essay, written during Christmastime 2024. Read Part 1 here.
How did I unlearn the toxic and demonic ideology of American exceptionalism, the propaganda of American troops as global liberators?
I haven't. Or rather, I’m still working on it, the unlearning process a long journey I’m on to this day. A therapist once asked me, “Tre, did you trade one war for another one?” She was right, I still haven’t unlearned that part…I have indeed traded the concept of spreading freedom and democracy through force via the government to the same philosophy through an organization of the working class, though I would like to think my anti-capitalist and anti-state version of freedom and democracy is right. The truth is that the model of solving political conflicts via violence is ingrained in my mind, maybe forever.
Pictured: Tre, the author, preaching in a Palestinian keffiyeh.
I will spare you the long story of my politicization and political journey. However, the vague outlines of my journey do show this unlearning. I began my entry into the left by finding and joining a crew of anti-fascists, and the focus of my political action was getting dressed in black and going to fight at a series of fascist rallies held at the MN state capitol in 2017, and participating as I was able in civil unrest around Philando Castile. My focus at this point was not organizing our building power, it was fighting. Being under DoD tutelage as a child teaches you this valuable lesson: The state thinks and speaks only in force and violence, and if you wish to communicate with it you must also speak its language. And so I did. While bouncing between various organizations, my only through line was a desire to enter into conflict with state forces—to be a soldier, but for the people.
This was tempered at first by my first 2 years at Augsburg University, during which time my desperate struggle for survival was abated. Being independent from my mother and on financial assistance opened up opportunities for other safety nets to catch me: medical assistance, the cafeteria, the campus food shelf, etc. The respect I longed for was somewhat achieved, as at Augsburg I was treated as the full individual I am, whose thoughts were worth listening to. I studied with a Marxist professor the basics of left/ultra communist thought (essentially, Marxism that mostly rejects the party-form and the state as tools for power). I began to understand that organization is a powerful weapon in and of itself and lends itself much more to the current context of our times.
I also began to study theology—at first because of a required class, but then because I reconverted. In a dark time of being on my own entirely for the first time—my mother was back in rehab and I was homeless when I wasn’t on campus—I found solace in the theology of a crucified God, one who suffered beside me and others and freed us from oppression. My professors spoke of the early church fathers as proto-socialists. They showed us the sociopolitical context of a Roman occupied and colonized Judea, taught about the rural/urban divide of Judea, and interpreted Luther’s “Freedom of a Christian” as a text about serving the neighbor by any means necessary. My politics pointed towards action, but this theology filled my soul. My conception of struggle expanded from pure violence and opposition to a holistic model: making the world whole again, participating in God’s restoring work (even if that restoration sometimes means destruction). Most importantly, this theology diminished (some of) my arrogance in believing that my and my fellow radicals' ideas were perfect and would for sure create a utopia. I understand now that the world we fight for is indeed a better one, but the real utopia is still in the making and comes with God. That until that final moment, struggle will always happen (sounds a bit maoist, no?).
Shortly before the Uprising, my professor told me over coffee that he believed I would become a pastor one day. I scoffed—how could I become a pastor when I engaged in premarital sex, smoked weed most the day, and believed in a violent overthrow of empire? He simply said watch…and he was right. It took an uprising and an eco defense campaign to make me realize and accept that he was right. The George Floyd Uprising exposed me to evil that I had yet to see in its full force. For a brief moment—one week—the state and the power structure revealed its demonic mask. I saw the loss of humanity in riot cops as they wreaked havoc on unarmed people. I felt the loss of humanity in myself as I was forced to take violent actions I would balk at in my daily life. Yet I found myself walking towards danger and service despite my fear and skepticism. I found myself waking up every day and meeting the forces of evil, medical bag in hand, doing the best I could with my basic first aid training to treat my comrades in the street.
Through the resistance to Line 3, I came again to the frontline with a sense that this was the call God had made for me. In my first action I was faced with a choice: walk away and stop praying my rosary, or stay and get arrested. My mind screamed at me to leave—that there was no use getting tossed in a rural white jail for a night—but my body refused after being centered in God’s love through my rosary. I heard nothing, but felt the “no”...my feet stayed planted, I was arrested, and surely enough I was delivered out the next day into loving arms. I began organizing jail support for other arrestees, which required facing the demonic forces of police and prisons over and over again to care for my comrades. Slowly but surely I fell into a semi-chaplain role…unofficially, and surely without enough qualifications. I prayed my rosary outside of the jail for comrades, brought them food, water, and new clothing, and offered up my poor attempts at emotional counseling. During one of the largest and last actions against Line 3, a Jewish comrade told me I was already doing pastoral work. That day I witnessed my professor’s prediction come to fruition. God was calling me to be a minister and to bring the gospel to the street and frontlines—not through vocal evangelization, but through my presence and participation in restorative work.
Since October 7th, I, like many Christians, have been forced to reckon with my faith’s relationship to militarism and Zionism, as well as my own.
Since my politicization, I’ve always been anti-Zionist and supportive of the Palestinian liberation struggle, though my actions were (and arguably still are) insufficient to that demand. The constant underlying shame I felt about my faith’s participation in oppression reached its peak after October 7th. I witnessed siblings of my faith, some in my own denomination, openly support the genocide in Palestine and reject the self-defense of Palestinians. Over and over I saw Christian leaders backbreak to make the Bible support this genocidal project and to condemn the liberators. During Christmas of 2023, I struggled to celebrate the birth of Christ while knowing that bombs were falling that day on his very homeland in the West Bank. How can we celebrate the birth of our lord while our faith leaders do the theological justification work for murder in Bethlehem?
It has become clear to me, in part thanks to a conversation I had at the 2024 Socialism Conference with Amir Marshi, that one of the main duties for today’s Christians is to take up the theological fight. For too long we have allowed Christian Zionists to weaponize our theology to justify the state of Israel—in the most Antisemitic way imaginable—and the murder of Palestinians. We as Christians, and the Church as an institution, have no moral legitimacy if we cannot correct our theology to condemn the colonial project and genocide led by Israel. To be complicit in this means fully giving up on God’s mission for us to serve our neighbor and protect the orphan. Being complicit means we have lost our mandate from God, plain and simple. We must construct a new theology that can firmly stand against Zionism, colonialism, apartheid, and other oppressive systems. However, we must also construct this theology in a way that keeps the autonomy of the colonized at its heart (God has a preferential option for the poor, after all). This means a theology that condemns the evils of the world while not feeling the need to reflexively condemn liberatory violence. A theology that understands violence as the result of systems and historical conditions and does not deny the complexity of it.
Of course, our struggle against militarism and the occupation and genocide of Palestine must also be one of action, both of the individual Christian and the institution of the Church. Thankfully, the Lutheran tradition makes uncovering our path of action slightly easier. We know from Luther that God freed us from sin and came to fulfill the law, which we have always been incapable of meeting in full, so that we could better serve our neighbor. This does not mean we can cast aside the law—it is still God’s law, and a useful guide—but we know we will experience grace when we fall short…and we will fall short. This means we must never be constrained to inaction by our fear of possibly going against God’s law.
Building upon this principle, the 20th century German Lutheran pastor and political dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer pointed out that we must be willing to step out of our normal roles in society, outside of the normal rules that govern us both spiritually and materially, to serve our neighbor in times of deep crisis. Bonhoeffer’s response to the Holocaust was participating in the anti-Nazi resistance and a plot to kill Hitler, even while knowing that killing another human being went against God’s law and was a sin. But Bonhoeffer knew the crisis pitched all the rules into the trash bin—not forever, but as long as the crisis existed, all bets were off. He believed we must move with intense faith and grace for ourselves without resorting to justifying whatever desperate moves we might selfishly make. Simply put, if a mad man is driving a car into a crowd, we must leap into its spokes ourselves if we cannot wrestle the wheel away. Leaping into the spokes means risking not only our physical bodies but also our very souls, and it requires faith in God’s grace toward our desperate attempts to follow his demand to serve our neighbor.
I would like to propose that, in this historical moment, the next step for us is clear: our Church must be willing to throw itself into the mad man’s wheel. We are losing what little moral legitimacy we have left, and if we are to ever regain it we must be willing to sacrifice our institution on the altar and have hope in God’s power to see us through. I do not know what it would mean for us to smash the church into pieces in our attempt to reconcile the world and fight for justice, but we must be willing to do it. Perhaps this means excommunicating those who perpetuate the worst of evils like genocide. Perhaps it means pulling all church investments out of Israel, even if it bankrupts us. Whatever it means, we must be open to it.
In future essays I will go deeper into the role of the Church and individual Christians in fighting militarism alongside the people of Palestine. If it was possible to do it in one essay I would—however, I have received the unfortunate blessing of systematic theology training, and so the argument I wish to bring to you will require time, scripture, and tradition. What I have given you here is Experience, merely one leg of the 4-legged stool that makes up an orthodox theological argument (Scripture, Tradition, Reason, and Experience make up what is called the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, a method for thinking theologically). I look forward to sharing more of my thoughts with you, and I look forward to the day that you, I, and our other siblings will turn the world over again.
Blessings and Solidarity from Your Humble Servant,
Tre Tellor
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