Is your God dead?

George Yancy

I don’t mean the God of the philosophers or the scholars, but, as Blaise Pascal
said, the “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob.” With no disrespect, I
hope the question comes as a jolt. And without being outraged or quick to
accuse me of “blasphemy,” know, too, that I am a hopeful monotheist. I might
even be called a Christian, only I continue, every day of my life, to fail.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s observation weighs heavily on me: “There was only one
Christian and he died on the cross.” Call me a failed and broken Christian, but
a Christian nevertheless.

So, is your God dead? Have you buried God in the majestic, ornamental
tombs of your churches, synagogues and mosques? Perhaps prosperity
theology, boisterous, formalistic and mechanical prayer rituals, and skillful
oratory have hastened the need for a eulogy.

Perhaps by remaining in your “holy” places, you have sacrificed looking in the
face of your neighbor on the street. You know the one: the one who smells
“bad” because she hasn’t bathed in days; the one who carries her home on her
body; the one who begs. Surely you’ve seen that “unholy” face. I’ve seen you
suddenly look away, making sure not to make eye contact with the “unclean.”
Perhaps you’re preoccupied with texting, consumed by a work or family
matter. Then again, perhaps it’s prayer time and you need to face east, or
perhaps you’re too focused on holy communion as you make your way to
church. Your refusal to stop, to linger, to look into her eyes, has already done
its damage. Your body has already left a mark in its absence, in its fleeing the
scene.

My hands are also dirty; I’m guilty of missing the opportunity to recognize
something of the divine in the face of the Other on the street. I’m pretty sure I
looked away when I caught a glimpse of a homeless man approaching the
other day. How different is this from those who walked by the beaten and
abandoned man in the parable of the good Samaritan? I failed to see the
homeless man as a neighbor.

When we turn away like this we behave as if our bodies had boundaries, as if
our skin truly separated us from the Other. But what if, as I would argue, our
bodies don’t have strict edges? What if we could develop a new way of seeing
the body that reveals that we are always already touching, that we are
inextricably linked to a larger institutional and social body that binds us all?

In meditating on these questions, I have found that the prophetic voice of

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972), a Polish-born Jewish-American rabbi
and activist, can help us toward an answer. Heschel, who studied in Germany
with Martin Buber, and later became a close friend of Martin Luther King Jr.,
warned frequently of the dangers of theological and religious shallowness, of
our tendency to “worry more about the purity of dogma than about the
integrity of love.”

Heschel cautions against “an outward compliance with ritual laws, strict
observance mingled with dishonesty, the pedantic performance of rituals as a
form of opportunism.” And while there are many who worship in churches,
synagogues and mosques, who understand that religious truth must be lived,
who make a point of looking into the eyes of the woman on the street and
show her mercy, too many of us refuse to look, to stop.

As the religious scholar Elisabeth T. Vasko writes, “to be human is to be a

person in relation.” And it is this social and existential relationality that ties
you to, and implicates you in, the life of that destitute woman. Heschel writes,
“How dare we come before God with our prayers when we commit atrocities
against the one image we have of the divine: human beings?” If there is a
shred of life left in your God, full resuscitation might begin with remaining in
the presence of that suffering face. If your God is dead, the possibility for a
resurrection might be found in attending to the pain and sorrow of that image
of the divine there on the street.

AS A YOUNG BOY, the idea of exempting no one from redemption tested

my mother, who was a Baptist. One night I asked her if I could pray for the
Devil. Strange, I admit. My mother eventually said yes. So there I was on my
knees,

“Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray the Lord my soul to keep,

If I should die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

God bless my mother, my sister and my friends. And God bless the Devil.”

My older son recently brought to my attention a Mark Twain quote: “Who in

18 centuries has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that
needed it most … ?” Well, there I was as a little boy doing just that. Beyond
boyhood now, and thinking of evil in a less personified way, I no longer pray
for the Devil. The more important point here is that we need a paradigm shift
in how we lay claim to our religious identities. Why not claim those that are
suffused with compassion, a shared reality of suffering together, in which
your pain is my pain?

Indeed, King wrote in his letter from the Birmingham jail, “Injustice
anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Heschel suggests that we should
be mortified by the inadequacy and superficiality of our anguish when we
witness the suffering of others, the sort of anguish that should make us weep
until our eyes are red and swollen and bring sleepless nights and agonizing
days. He writes, “We are a generation that has lost the capacity for outrage.”

I have been troubled by the lack of religious and theological outrage against
national and global poverty, white racism and supremacism, sexism,
classism, homophobia, bullying, building walls, “alternative facts,”
visa/immigration bans and xenophobia. Heschel reminds us that when we
establish a way of life predicated upon a lie, “the world can turn into a
nightmare.” He makes it clear that the Holocaust did not emerge suddenly.
“It was in the making for several generations. It had its origin in a lie: that the
Jew was responsible for all social ills, for all personal frustrations. Decimate
the Jews and all problems would be solved.”

Those signs are here, too. Jewish people I’ve met, whose parents escaped
Hitler’s tyranny, have shared with me their parents’ sense of deep alarm
under the Trump administration. “Make America Great Again” is a call for
law and order buttressed by a white nativist ideology. The lie on which the
Holocaust began is still with us.

Anti-Semitism is on the rise. So is the belief that Black pathology is eroding

America from within. Black people are told that we live in poverty. That our
schools are no good. And we have no jobs. In addition, if we just build a wall,
so this divisive logic goes, more of our problems will dissipate. After all, it is
Mexicans, we are told, who are bringing drugs, crimes and rapists.

“Any god who is mine but not yours, any god concerned with me but not with
you, is an idol,” Heschel writes. Think of segregated white churches during
Jim Crow, or the many churches today, in our “post-racial” moment, that
continue to be de facto segregated every Sunday morning. Think, too, of the
blood that has been spilled in the name of the God we claim as our own. You
have all heard the underpinnings of this idolatry: “God Bless America,” which
I see as the words of a bankrupt neoliberal theology. In fact, there is
something profane in that statement, which worships and calls upon a God
that blesses America only.

If there are any blessings to be had, the request, surely, mustn’t be partisan.
At least in Christianity, Judaism and Islam, it is believed that human beings
were created in the image of God. Not just the faithful of these religions,
but all humans: Syrian refugees, whom our current administration have
deemed threats, were created in the image of God. Kim Jong-un, Vladimir
Putin, members of the Ku Klux Klan and Bashar al-Assad all were created in
the image of God. So even as we ask God to bless America, surely we must ask
God to bless those whom we have deemed threats or enemies. Our blessings
must be scattered across the entire world, inclusive of all of humanity.
RECENTLY, TRUMP, SPEAKING at Liberty University, said to a
graduating class of future evangelical leaders, “In America, we don’t worship
government, we worship God.” The students applauded and cheered. If what
Trump said was true, then why didn’t the students turn their backs to him, to
protest the contradiction between the poisonous effects of his white nativism,
extreme divisiveness and his “theology”? Unless, of course, Liberty
University’s God is clad in a profane theological whiteness.

When they were applauding Trump, the students were not applauding a
prophetic visionary but someone with a dangerous Pharaonic mentality, one
who is intemperate, self-indulgent, power hungry, unpredictable and
narcissistic. Remember that the applause was for someone who refuses to
take the nuclear option off the table, who said that global warming was a hoax
and has now pulled out of the Paris climate agreement, who said of ISIS that
he would “bomb the shit out of ’em.”

The graduating students at Liberty University should have been told, as

Heschel wrote, that “the age of moral mediocrity and complacency has run
out. This is a time for radical commitment, for radical action.”

Heschel, in a speech on religion and race, reminded us of the persistence of

autocratic power when he stated that “Pharaoh is not ready to capitulate. The
exodus began but it is far from having been completed.” That exodus,
originating with Moses and the emancipation of the Jews, as Heschel
suggests, is eternal, and signifies the march toward not just an outward
physical emancipation but a spiritual one — one that demands fierce self-
reflection. I take it that for Heschel, all of the oppressed of the world are in
need of an exodus. In another work Heschel later wrote, “One’s integrity must
constantly be examined.” Bob Marley, in his song “Exodus,” says, “Open your
eyes and look within. Are you satisfied with the life you’re living?” Some
voices refuse to let us rest. King had such a voice, and so did Socrates.

AND WHAT HAVE WE SEEN? I am pretty sure that no contemporary

Christians have seen God, no contemporary religious Jews have seen Yahweh
and no contemporary Muslims have seen Allah — certainly not face to face.
Yet all of us have seen the aftermath of murdered children from war-torn
countries, their fragile bodies covered with blood. I am haunted by the little
body of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi who lay dead and face down in 2015 on a
Turkish beach after his family fled violence in Syria. I continue to be haunted
by the murder of an unarmed Trayvon Martin in 2012. Hundreds of
thousands of children around the world are suffering. We all have known
about the cruel and despicable violence toward transgender individuals. We
know about the magnitude of human trafficking, the magnitude of poverty,
and the sickness of hatred.

Vasko writes, “Through lamentation, voice is given to pain.” Yet our

lamenting, our mourning for those who suffer, is far too short-lived. And our
charity to those who wail in the night only temporarily eases their pain.
According to Heschel, “one may be decent and sinister, pious and sinful.” We
easily forget the weight of human suffering, the agony. Heschel asks, “If all
agony were kept alive in memory, if all turmoil were told, who could endure
tranquillity?” Heschel and Vasko help to remind us that we ought to be
suspicious of our tranquillity.

In fact, I would ask, what if that tranquillity, that peace of mind, rests on the
rotting corpses beneath our feet? What if as we pray and rejoice in our
churches, synagogues and mosques, we are throwing handfuls of dirt on
God’s casket? After all, prayer and rejoicing can also function as forms of
narcissism, as ways to drown out the screams of the poor, the oppressed. In a
story shared by Heschel’s daughter, Susannah, she writes that he found
praying during the Vietnam War impossible, but necessary to demonstrate.
“Whenever I open my prayer book,” he told a journalist, “I see before me
images of children burning from napalm.”

Heschel writes, “The prophet’s word is a scream in the night.” I wait to be

awakened by that scream. I have not yet heard it. It is that scream, that deep
existential lament, that will awaken us to the ways we are guilty of claiming to
“love God” while forgetting the poor, refusing the refugee, building walls,
banning the stranger, and praying and worshiping in insular and segregated
“sacred” spaces filled with racism, sexism, patriarchy, xenophobia,
homophobia and indifference.

WE HAVE FAILED TO DEEPEN our collective responsibility. Some of us

will never do so. What would the world look like if believers from every major
religion in every country, state, city and village, shut down the entire world
for just a day? What would America look like, on that day, if we who call
ourselves believers, decided to weep together, hold hands together, commit
together to eradicate injustice? We might then permanently unlock our
sacred doors, take a real step beyond our sanctimoniousness, and see one
another face to face.

I await the day, perhaps soon, when those who believe in the “God of
Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob” will lock arms and march on
Washington, refusing to live any longer under the weight of so much
inhumanity. Perhaps it is time for a collective demonstration of the faithful to
delay going to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, to leave the pews in churches
and pray one fewer time a day. None of us is innocent. “Above all, the
prophets remind us of the moral state of a people,” Heschel reminds us. “Few
are guilty, but all are responsible.”

In 1968, in conversation with King, Heschel asked, “Where does God dwell in
America today?” I ask myself this question today. But I do not find the
answer. Heschel also asks, “Where does moral religious leadership in
America come from today?” I look, but I have not seen it. Perhaps, like
Diogenes the Cynic, you’ll find me carrying a lamp in the daytime. But instead
of looking for an honest man, I will be looking through the catacombs of your
own making, asking, “Is your God dead?”