KINGDOM ETHICS D a v id p. G u shee
Bleeding Neighbors This summer I took students to Europe for a Holocaust travel course.This sobering visit to Berlin, Prague, Cracow, and Warsaw—and to such sites as the Nazi concentration camps Ravensbruck and Auschwitz—did more than deepen our understanding of the details of Nazi evil and Jewish suffering. It also clarified for me what matters most in Christian public engagement.However, the misuse of JWT, especially in the United States, is a common “worst practice” that contributes to war. It happened in the runup to the misbegotten Iraq War, and it happens in the run-up to just about every US war. Partly because of the abuse of JWT, we are a church that can’t “just say no.” That is a violation of the teachings of Jesus and thus a failure of discipleship. The Holocaust was a project of state-sponsored mass murder. It remains breathtaking in its grandiosity, hubris, and evil. The Nazi German state made a policy decision to murder every Jew it could reach.The bureaucracy then calmly developed the plans necessary for implementing that policy.At what is now called the Wannsee Conference, top officials from the key agencies of the state gathered together to discuss these plans and to clarify lines of authority. The minutes of the meeting actually give country-by-country estimates on the number of Jews still remaining in each European nation and describe a plan to “comb through Europe from west to east” to find each and every one of these Jews and “evacuate” them eastward to forced labor and euphemistically described extermination. The results, of course, are well known. The Nazis lost World War II but essen-
tially won their “war against the Jews.” They didn’t manage to kill every Jew, but they did destroy European Jewish civilization and murdered at least twothirds of all Europe’s Jews. Only tiny Jewish communities now exist in such places as Berlin, Prague, Cracow, and Warsaw.The great majority of all pre-war synagogues have been destroyed, abandoned, or converted to museums that memorialize a lost civilization. A walking tour of former Jewish quarters yields endless mementos of both the oncegrand Jewish civilization that flourished there and the five-year spasm of state violence that destroyed it. Any tour of “old Europe” also requires visits to her grand Christian churches, and we did that. Not to overstate the case, but these are pretty much museum pieces now as well. Our guide in Prague told us cheerfully that fewer than 20 percent of the Czech people claim any religious affiliation at all. The numbers are somewhat better in Poland, in part because Catholicism proved a bulwark of Polish national identity against both Nazism and communism. Pope John Paul II remains a great hero and is depicted everywhere you go in Poland. But in most of Europe, it is clear that the traces of Christianity are a vestige of a lost civilization. Many factors have contributed to this atrophy of faith, but one of them is the loss of Christian moral credibility during the Nazi era. “Christian Europe” spawned a generation of apostate mass murderers, and neither official church leaders nor grassroots Christians did enough to resist the genocide occurring right in their midst. “Where were you during the Holocaust?” This is the question that must come to mind when one visits grand Christian cathedrals in cities from which Jews were being deported and murdered. Some, but not enough, Christians understood that when your neighbor lies bleeding by the side of the road you must stop what you are doing PRISM 2008
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and go to her, bandage up her wounds, and take her to safety—even at the risk of your own life. Christian political engagement must focus on the bleeding neighbor by the side of the road. This is a clear lesson of the Holocaust and the Nazi era. Of course, this means first that we pay attention to things that are going on outside our own little cathedrals. It means that we understand that resolving internal church theological disputes and undertaking numerical growth efforts and institution-building projects are never the most important things we are doing. All internal church projects—and all personal growth projects—are in principle provisional and interruptible. All can and must be set aside when a human emergency beckons from outside our walls. More precisely, it is the bleeding neighbor by the side of the road that ought to be the focus of what is called “Christian political engagement.” The Holocaust clarifies that matters of life and death, of human rights and the sacredness of the human person, ought to be the center of our public work. There is something more than a little odd about, say, a primary focus on preventing social gains for homosexuals, in a world with millions of bleeding neighbors. Our eyes should turn to war, genocide, abortion, ecological disasters, hunger, crime, and every other worldly evil that takes or threatens human life. At least, this is the lesson that came home to me as I walked among the lifeless remnants of Jewish and Christian civilization in Europe. n David P. Gushee is a distinguished university professor of Christian ethics at McAfee School of Theology at Mercer University in Atlanta,Ga., co-chair of the Biblical/Contextual Ethics Group of the American Academy of Religion, and president of Evangelicals for Human Rights. His latest book is The Future of Faith in American Politics, reviewed on page 42.