"Lord, help us."

Someone I went to high school with recently posted a photo of a young child clinging to the bars of a cage—ostensibly in a border detention center—crying. The caption with the photo was, “This is what we’ve become. Shame.” One of my high school teachers commented, “This has been going on for wayyyyy too many years. I can’t even think about it. Lord, help us.”

Now, of course there are problems with the original post. The proliferation of decontextualized photos, memes, and Twitter posts that are sensationally shared and are treated as news or reputable analysis is highly problematic. An example of this was the 2019 viral video of the Covington Catholic High School student shown standing in front of a chanting native activist which has more going on than what is shown in the video but was immediately interpreted as the smugness and white supremacy of MAGA adherents. Complex issues such as U.S.-Mexico border relations, American immigration policy, the treatment of indigenous peoples, and white supremacy are incredibly nuanced discussions that cannot and should not be boiled down to 280 characters or fewer. We have no way of knowing that the photo in the original post was from a border detention center; we do not know when the photo was taken; we do not know why the child was crying; and hell, the caption doesn’t even clarify that this is referencing poor treatment of immigrants at a border detention camp!

But the primary focus of this blog post is the response from my former high school teacher. For the purposes of this argument, I will assume that the photo is indeed from a border detention center, and the child has indeed been separated from his parents, which is the reason for his crying. (It actually doesn’t matter if I assume this—my former high school teacher has almost certainly assumed this.)

The “Lord, help us” is what gets me. What the hell is the Lord supposed to help us with in this situation, exactly? Help us not put children in cages? What, pray tell, would the Lord’s intervention even look like? Begging for the Lord’s intervention in this manner suggests that our natural human impulses lead us to cage immigrant children, and there is nothing we can do by ourselves to prevent that from happening. It diverts all responsibility for this horrific action, denying that we are also responsible for fixing the solution. It treats the circumstance as inevitable, unavoidable. But this was entirely preventable. Calling upon the Lord to supernaturally fix the problems we created for ourselves is giving up.

 

 

Evangelical Christianity stresses the concept of humanity’s total depravity, which more or less means that we default to wicked behavior from the time we are born. This ideology helps explain the sense of powerlessness behind, “Lord, help us.” As a corollary, evangelical Christianity also teaches—whether directly or indirectly—that you cannot claim any credit for anything good that you do. Instead, God receives all the credit for anything good in the world. This follows from the concept of total depravity; if our default impulses are wicked and destructive, then how could we possibly ever create anything good? This ideology fosters a dependence on supernatural intervention to rectify the world’s brokenness, resulting in our cries of, “Lord, help us”. It also rings of hopelessness and futility—why would we bother trying to fix the world if everything we do is evil?

But, none of it actually matters anyway, because Christians are in the world but “not of the world” (John 17:16). Ultimately, evil in the world doesn’t particularly matter because Christians are to “set your hearts on things above, not on earthly things” (Colossians 3:8).

Christians should not be asking the Lord for help, but should be crying, “Lord, have mercy.”

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34) 

Donations

The world is a very difference place since my last post.

Obviously COVID.

But also, Black Lives Matter had a prominent resurgence in May and June following the brutal murder of George Floyd. That social reaction seems to have largely died away from the public consciousness now that media coverage has subsided. But it was quite a potent social force a couple months ago, certainly for me. It was the first time that I felt I needed to deliberately cut myself off from Facebook for a period of time because the content I was seeing was too much for me to handle.

As the movement gained traction and protests showed up in literally all 50 states and in countries around the world*, I felt like I needed to do something. For several days at the end of May and into early June, I struggled to figure out how I should respond and contribute to the pivotal societal moment that was unfolding. Protesting didn't seem right for me for a variety of reasons: (1) There was concurrently a pandemic, and the CDC recommended avoiding large gatherings of people; (2) Protesting requires a commitment to unknowns that unsettles me: the unknown of where the protest will travel to, the unknown of how long it will last, the unknown of how protestors will behave, and the unknown of what level of resistance will be encountered; (3) The measure of a protest's effectiveness, or "success", is unclear if immediate political action does not follow, as I learned in participating in Black Lives Matter protests in Berkeley in 2014; and (4) I was still employed full-time in a white-collar job as millions others lost their jobs or saw wages cut, so it seemed like there was something better I could do with my resources of time and money. I thought about giving a lump-sum donation to an organization associated with the cause, but then I was left with having to make the decisions of to whom to give, and how much to give. Who was most "deserving" of my contributions? How much would be "enough", and how could I measure that? Would my sensitivity to the issue become dulled if I donated once?

Out of a place of paralysis, I came up with an ingenious solution. I posted the following Facebook status:

I'm going to play a game.

Every time I encounter the phrases, "All lives matter" or, "Blue lives matter" on social media, I will donate $5 to Black Lives Matter. (https://blacklivesmatter.com)

Every time I see a new video of police arresting either peaceful protesters or members of the press, I will donate $5 to the Minnesota Freedom Fund. (https://minnesotafreedomfund.org)

Every time I see a new video of police using excessive force to harm protesters (e.g., tear gas, rubber bullets, vehicles, batons), I will donate $5 to Campaign Zero. (https://www.joincampaignzero.org)

For every day between George Floyd's murder and Derek Chauvin's initial arrest, I will donate $25 to the George Floyd Memorial Fund. (https://www.gofundme.com/f/georgefloyd)

For every day between Derek Chauvin's initial arrest and the increase of charges against him from third-degree to second-degree murder, I will donate $10 to the George Floyd Memorial Fund. (https://www.gofundme.com/f/georgefloyd)

For every day that curfew remains in effect in my city, I will donate $10 to Reclaim the Block. (https://www.reclaimtheblock.org)

The concept of per-infraction donations made a lot of sense to me. For one thing, the recipients of my donations were organizations that served to counteract approximately the infractions identified. For another, it would cause me to direct my donations to the issues that seemed to be the most pressing; that is, the more frequently-appearing infractions would result in a greater donation to the appropriate counter-organization. It also tapped into what I believe is the most meaningful way I could contribute to the cause: financial contribution. I'm certainly not the one who would organize or lead a protest, nor do I have the skills and expertise to work in political lobbying or community education. I believe my greatest asset is to help enable others who have the skills that I lack to drive for true social change. Lastly, donating on a per-infraction basis kept me engaged with what was happening. Admittedly, I primarily remained engaged through the overwhelmingly leftist echo chamber that is my Facebook feed, but that seems like the type of environment that would daylight the exact infractions triggering donations.

When I came around to making the donations, Reclaim the Block was actually redirecting donations. They had been financially saturated due to the heightened publicity they received as a good organization to receive donations. Instead of donating to Reclaim the Block, I donated to one of their recommended alternatives, the Pimento Relief Fund, whose objective was to provide relief funds to black businesses in Minnesota who had suffered either due to COVID-19 or property damage from the protests.

This post is not intended to be a virtue signal. That I've posted it two months after these thoughts were going through my mind is proof of that, as is the fact that I'm not saying how much I donated (which, to be frank, was less than I had both hoped to and been willing to donate). And no one reads this blog anyway, so it's definitely not virtue signaling.

* I frequently wonder if the murder of George Floyd would not have received as much traction as it did if not for the pandemic. I wonder if people who had been sheltered in place for so long so desperately needed an outlet, and the social response to George Floyd's murder was so great in part due to this need. If George Floyd had been murdered in the Before Times^TM, what would the societal response have been like?