The doors of the church are open. Good morning, Saints.
Beloved children of the sun, today I wanna bring all the gods into the sanctuary. Yes, let’s bring ‘em in.
Come, Yahweh. Come, Allah. Come, god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Come, Krishna, Shiva, and Vishnu. Come, Odin. Come, Zeus. Come, Waheguru. Come, Buddha. Come, Wakan Tanka, Ahone, and Taiowa.
Come, orishas: Eshu, Ogun, Oshun, Shango, and Oya. Come all of y’all. The thousands of gods in the universe . . . GET IN HERE! Hallelujah.
Now Saints, lemme ask Y’all somethin’ . . .
Is your faith strong? If you believe in something greater than yourself, is it sacred? Do you believe that your god is powerful? Powerful enough to stand on its own? Can your god survive disagreement and folk asking hard questions? Can your god withstand somebody else’s faith?
Or is your god fragile? Does your god suffer from low self-esteem and restless leg syndrome? Is your god petty? Is your god thin-skinned, easily threatened, and have bad emotional regulation skills? Does your god constantly need an ego stroke? Does your god need a PR or campaign manager?
Does your god diss other people’s gods? Does your god rule like a jealous dictator who is scared of losing followers? Is your god sittin’ around worried about other people’s prayers? Does your god need judges, the police, and prisons to shut down other folks’ temples and houses of worship? Does your god need a state legislature or governor to defend its reputation and to decide which prayers are legal?
Saints, we have been told that the Christian god is omnipotent. We’ve been told that the Christian god is all-powerful. We’ve been told that the Christian god is a ‘he’ that created the heavens and the earth. Parted the seas. Healed the sick and raised the dead. This is an almighty god who has the whole world in his hands. We’ve been told that there is no greater god.
But Saints, if this is true, then tell me why a Christian nationalist Republican who is running for governor of Tennessee is out here tryin’ to defend god?
That’s right, Monty Fritts is trying to protect the lord from what he calls “pagan religions.” Especially Islam. Fritts claims that god whispered to him and called him to run for office, and he wants to ban mosques and other non-Christian religions. This man wants us to believe, that the god who supposedly created the heavens and earth, heard a Muslim pray “Allahu Akbar,” god started pacing around heaven like, “Oh shit, somebody call Monty Fritts in Tennessee. The Muslims are comin’ for me.”
Tell me somethin’, Saints . . . what kind of Christianity needs a racist, xenophobic, Republican lawmaker to ban somebody else’s religion to prove that its own god is real?
Brotha Willie, they don’t wanna hear me preach this morning!
He wants to ban these other religions because he believes they are false, dangerous, and incompatible with the U.S. and state constitutions. Sounds to me like he wants to ban these other gods because his own faith is politically insecure.
Church, the Bible talks about the psychology of this kind of insecure worship.
In Daniel 3:5-6, Nebuchadnezzar built a giant golden statue, called on every official, and commanded: “That at what time ye hear the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer, and all kinds of musick, ye fall down and worship the golden image.” Anybody who refused “shall the same hour be cast into the midst of a burning fiery furnace.” That’s what weak power does. It threatens and wants some kind of spectacle to make everybody else fall in line.
Nebuchadnezzar had some strong personal beliefs, didn’t he? Just like Monty Fritts. He called on an entire political system to impose them on them people. He used a sacred image, government officials, public ritual, the law, and the threat of capital punishment by fire. Saints, hear me when I say that whenever a government tells you which god you gotta worship, the altar ain’t never far from the furnace because you can’t ban a religion without building a furnace for the people who refuse to bow before your god.
But I hear some of Y’all in the sanctuary whispering, “But Rev. Dr. Staceypants, what about **Exodus 20: 3 **where the first of the 10 commandments tells the believers, “You shall have no other gods before me?” But even here, Saints, the Christian god does not say, “Shut down the temples and mosques.” The Christian god does not say, “Make every faith you think is false illegal.” The Christian god does not say, “Send the po-po to prove that I am supreme.” The Christian god said, “worship ME,” not become my lawmaker or police department.
Monty Fritts is what happens when folk who claim to follow a Jesus Christ who was persecuted and crucified acquires enough political power to become a persecutor and calls that kind of evil faithfulness.
Sista Johnson, tell me . . . what kind of powerful god would need the governor’s office to prove that ‘he’ is god? Deacon Jones, what kind of gospel needs state or federal legislation to eliminate the competition? Saints, what kind of Christianity is so damn weak that the existence of a mosque, a temple, or some burning incense, or an atheist like me threatens its survival?
Saints, touch your neighbor and say, “Neighbor, this ain’t just about Monty Fritts.”
That’s right, church. We can’t fool ourselves and make the mistake of believing that this is just about one politician in Tennessee. We need to be asking ourselves what kind of politics produces a hateful theology like this? Fritts is a symptom of a collective disease in this country.
Folk don’t suddenly wake up one morning and decide they need to outlaw somebody else’s god. You and I know that kind of fear and theology has a long history in America and it’s called white Christian supremacy which has always mistaken dominance for divine favor. And it always gets especially toxic when white racists fear the world they believe belongs to them is changing too fast, when they feel their power is slipping and their cultural dominance no longer feels guaranteed.
Listen, white Christian nationalism isn’t simply afraid of Islam, or Hinduism, or Buddhism, or African orishas, or atheists. It is afraid of losing the monopoly it has required for centuries as the center of American life. Despite the lie of separation of church and state, white Christianity has undergirded laws, shaped schools, marriage, parenting practices, views about the nature of children, and whose history matters. Millions of people like Fritts are becoming one voice among many instead of the only voice that matters.
And Saints, here’s what really gets me about white Christian nationalists . . . they don’t even know the history of the religion they’re fighting so hard to protect and preserve. The delicious irony in all this is that the Christianity they're out here trying to preserve first conquered their own ancestors.
Think about it. If you ask one of these people, “Where did Christianity originate?” Pretty much all of them, without batting an eyelash, will say, “Europe!” But they would be wrong. Christian began as a persecuted faith. It actually began in Roman-occupied Palestine and then spread into North Africa. And get this, that spread into North African happened long before much of northern Europe had converted to Christianity.
These same Christian nationalists will look you in the face and say that Christianity is the foundation of “Western civilization.” But that Christian faith arrived in Europe by colonizing and converting their own pagan European ancestors! Europeans weren’t born Christians. Their ancestors were out there in the cold forests worshipping Odin, Thor, Týr, Freyja, Brigid, Lugh, Cernunnos and whole bunch of other gods before kings, emperors, missionaries, and wars brought Christianity to Europe and displaced those old religious traditions that eventually boarded ships, crossed oceans, and used the Christian god to justify conquest, genocide, land theft, and the enslavement of millions of Africans while calling their god’s false, their practices savage, and their ancestors heathens.
And now, centuries later, here is Monty Fritts an n’em trying to use the power of the state, to preserve very same religion that first colonized their own ancestors before it was weaponized against everybody else.
Turn to your neighbor and say, “Neighbor, Empire got a cross around its neck.”
And don’t try to tell us that Christianity belongs here in America, as if it is native to this land and culture. That is the false history beneath the right-wing’s story. They wanna try to tell us that Islam is some kind of new, foreign religious intrusion into American cultural life. But Islam and Muslims were here on this land in the 1500s, two who centuries before there was even a United States. They need to read about Mustafa Zemmouri, an enslaved Muslim from Morocco who traveled through Florida, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.
They must not know that upwards of 30 percent of enslaved Africans brought here in chains were Muslims who carried the Quran in their memories, prayed toward Mecca and helped build this country before white men wrote the Constitution. Truth be told, Islam is older than this so-called Christian nation he and the MAGATs are trying to govern.
Church, what I’m about to say might ruffles some feathers, but Y’all know I speak the truth and shame the devil. I am absolutely convinced that the white Christian nationalist god that Monty Fritts an n’em worship is a mighty weak god!
His god is fragile. Petty. Easily startled and offended. Dysregulated. Gets intimidated by mosques and temples. Scared of prayer rugs, incense and foreign languages. Loses sleep over atheists. Needs governors, legislatures, judges, ICE, the po-po, and prisons to protect it.
Saints, I dunno what kind of god these degenerates are worshipping, but it don’t sound like the god who said, “Let there be light.” It ain’t the all-powerful almighty one who flung the stars into the heavens. It ain’t the one who parted the Red Sea. It ain’t the one who raised Black Jesus from the dead.
It ain’t the one Nat Turner prayed to when he led a rebellion against slavery. It ain’t the god Harriet Tubman trusted when she grabbed her *gat *and led our people through the darkness and under the North Star toward freedom. It ain’t the god that our enslaved ancestors sand and prayed to in the hush harbors after Massa’s church told them to obey.
I dunno what kind of god them people worship, but it ain’t the one who gave Fannie Lou Hamer the courage to say she was sick and tired of being sick and tired, or Malcolm X the audacity to say, “by any means necessary.” Umph. It ain’t the god that carried Black folks across that Edmund Pettus Bridge while getting brutalized with billy clubs and tear gas. And it sure as hell ain’t the god of Black liberation that does not need white supremacy to survive.
Saints, the god imagined by Monty Fritts, by Donald Trump, by MAGA, by right-wing Christian nationalists is weak because they have remade god in the images of their own damn political anxieties! They have made god smaller so that their politics can feel powerful.
Saints, at the end of the day, white Christian nationalism has ZERO resemblance to Jesus. Think about Nebuchadnezzar. He demanded that the people bow. Jesus knelt to wash feet. Nebuchadnezzar threatened to throw folks in the flaming furnace. Jesus hung on the cross. Nebuchadnezzar used political power to protect and preserve his rule. Jesus was executed by political power because he challenged authority.
Jesus never demanded that Rome to close synagogues or destroy a pagan temples. He didn’t demand that Pilate to establish a government office for religious purity. He called on the believers to follow him. He didn’t spend his time criminalizing other faiths and gods. White Christian nationalism is not about the life that Jesus lived. It wants to wield the kind of violent power that crucified him.
And Black Liberation Theology teaches us that Black faith was born among the oppressed people who needed god to help them survive and deliver them from the nightmares and chambers of horror in this nation. We have never confused America with god.
The real test of religious freedom in America is not gonna be whether Christians will protect other Christian churches. It will be whether Christians will defend a mosque or temple or synagogue they may never enter. Will they finally realize that our freedom is bound together and defend Muslims and other people of faith when they refuse to bow to Empire.
In Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar throws the three Hebrew men into the furnace. But when he looks inside, he sees four figures walking through the fire. God does not appear beside the king, helping him enforce the law. God appears inside the furnace with the people the king condemned.
In the book of Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar ends up throwing three men into the fiery furnace because they refused to bow before the golden image and worship the government’s approved god. Their names were Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. And scripture says that the furnace is so hot that even the soldiers who throw them in there are themselves killed by the flames.
But when King Nebuchadnezzar looks into the flames, he expected the furnace to prove his power. But church, instead of seeing three men, he sees four. **Daniel 3:25 **says: *“Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like a son of the gods.” *
Saints, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego came out of the furnace alive and unharmed. **Daniel 3:27 **tells us: *“The fire had no power over their bodies, nor was a hair of their head singed; their cloaks were not harmed, and there was no smell of fire upon them.” *
Beloved children of the sun, what is the message? The fiery furnace revealed the lord’s presence. The king, Empire, thought it could burn faith into submission but god showed up in the blazing flames where the Empire tried to destroy it. God didn’t stand next to the king. God didn’t sit on the throne with the persecutor and applaud him for defending religion. No, god stood in the fire with the people who were persecuted and condemned to die.
A just and secure god won’t be standing with Monty Fritts and the MAGATs who want to criminalizes people’s worship today. God will be standing, once again, with the people who refused to surrender their souls.
So if these degenerates come for the mosque, the temple, the synagogue, or any other places of worship we must stand at those places too, regardless of what we believe. And if they come for the unbelievers, we must defend them too.
When all is said and done, the question before us all will not be whether America will remain a Christian nation. The question will be whether Christians will remain followers of Jesus when they are offered the power to become Nebuchadnezzar. Christianity has survived for more than 2,000 years, but will white Christian nationalism be able to survive equality and racial justice?
Let us pray.
God, Allah, Yahweh, Olódùmarè, Waheguru, Great Spirit, Creator, Oshun, Shango, whatever sacred name you are known . . .
God of the oppressed. God of the persecuted. And for those of us who call upon no god at all but remain committed to truth, justice and the dignity of every human being, draw us all toward what is good. Give us the courage of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Give us the strength to refuse every idol that demands our conscience and the power to resist religion that seeks dominion instead of justice.
Make us defenders of the persecuted and protectors of strangers. Make our love greater than fear. Make truth and justice greater than Empire. O lord, walk with those the Empire tries to burn. Deliver us from fear masquerading as faith and righteousness. Help us build a world where nobody has to fear because of how they pray, or if…
