BRATTLEBORO-For the fall semester at Vermont State College, I have been asked to teach on the Holocaust. As always, I endeavor to cross-pollinate that which I study and teach with that which I preach.
A friend recently loaned me Confronting Genocide: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, edited by Steven Leonard Jacobs, and it includes a chapter written by Stephen R. Haynes, "'Death Was Everywhere, Even in Front of the Church': Christian Faith and the Rwandan Genocide."
Haynes writes: "Genocidal Rwanda is reminiscent of Nazi Germany in many other ways, too. There are pregenocidal legal persecutions (including quotas and identity cards); there is the essentializing of 'race' in which one group is cast as a threat to the other's survival; there is the mystification of a hated minority into a powerful entity against whom the majority must defend itself; there are the same dehumanizing images ('rats' in Germany; 'cockroaches' in Rwanda) that make elimination of the victims easier once genocide is underway. And there is the same slow process of establishing what happened that has dogged attempts to explain the seemingly inexplicable."
First, I need to point out that discussing authoritarianism or genocide is not solely, or even primarily, political but theological. Therefore, as an ordained minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ, I am called to speak on the subjects.
Second, Haynes describes the process toward authoritarianism and genocide as "slow." It is incremental. It is gradual. The slippery slope toward the loss of our democracy and thus into authoritarianism is akin to the apologue of a frog boiling in water.
The moral fable illustrates gradual change leading to danger, complacency in the face of worsening situations, individuals, or groups unaware of their peril, the importance of recognizing slow, negative, changes. It is often too late after inaction.
Third, it is incontrovertible that:
• federal troops have recently been mobilized in Washington, D.C. to fight crime that is at a 30-year low.
• active duty troops were unnecessarily deployed during protests to protect property in California.
• the courts are being asked to reverse same-sex marriages, U.S. citizens' citizenship, and thus rights, that are being questioned despite constitutional provisions.
• transgender people are being erased from the military.
• universities are being blackmailed into curriculum and language changes under the guise of protecting students against antisemitism.
• policies relating to DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) are prohibited in federal government.
• immigrants are being labeled as criminals, drug dealers, terrorists, rapists, animals, "not human," etc., despite the fact that immigrants commit far fewer crimes and murder per capita than United States citizens.
• authority is being ceded by the judicial and legislative branches to the executive branch.
• government is decreasing a woman's rights to choose whether to carry and give birth to a child.
• funding for the arts are threatened.
• book bannings are increasing.
• welfare benefits are being cut.
• the rich are getting richer.
• states such as Vermont are giving sensitive information to the federal government as a future means by which to do surveillance and targeting.
• hooded, masked, and unidentified government agents are arresting, kidnapping, detaining, and deporting people without due process (at times even against judicial rulings).
Folks, we are marching, lockstep, into authoritarianism.
I just finished reading What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany (Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband). When Germans, both Jew and gentile alike, remembered the past, all, almost without exception, stated they were aware - they just never foresaw that each one step would lead to the Final Solution.
I will speak, write, and preach on this, as it is a substantive theological issue.
Centre Congregational Church
Brattleboro
Rev. Dr. Scott Couper, minister and teacher
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