Christian Nationalism and the Church at the Flossenburg Concentration Camp

 

A Church built onto a guard tower at the Flossenburg Concentration Camp

When I visit concentration camps, along with learning about the horror, I pay attention to how the survivors, both victims and those who live nearby, deal with the evil happened in their midst.  

At Flossenburg, one response was to build a memorial chapel just two years after the end of the war in 1947. The stone building of the chapel is attached to a former guard tower.  The chapel honors the victims from 22 countries who were murdered in the camp.  Its design stands against every form of Christian Nationalism--the arrogant and hateful belief that God picks specific nations to be His representative here on earth.  

Christian Nationalism has been the justification for slaughter in the name of God since the Church melded with the government after the fall of the Roman Empire.  I recently read Karl Jaspers "Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus." Jaspers makes clear that Jesus pointed to the Kingdom of God and had no program for any kind of kingdom here on earth.  In the Gospels, there is nothing to support taking any kind of political power in the name of God.  A vegan butcher is less of a contradiction than conquest in the name of Jesus. 

The Beatitudes, or the Sermon on the Mount, one of the central documents of Christianity, says God is with the victims in this world.  "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth." That is not the marching orders for "Christian" army to slaughter its neighbors.

But Christian Nationalism has fully infected the Evangelical Church in America.  In 2016 nearly 80% of Evangelicals voted for the "America First" immigrant-hating candidate who expressed their beliefs.  The percentage went up in 2020.  Four years of lies and hate made the Christian Nationalist candidate more attractive. White supremacists like Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka just made fake Christians more excited.   

So in the midst of all the sadness of the remains of the Flossenburg concentration camp, I was glad to see a flat rejection of Christian Nationalism and all of the simmering hate behind it.  

No one can love the whole world. Abstract love is not love at all. The commandment of God to love our neighbor whether in the Hebrew Scriptures of the New Testament can only be brought into being by loving those with us and near us.  

The Holocaust, among its many horrors is a record of people who ignored, betrayed and murdered their Jewish neighbor.  From the Pyrenees to the Ural mountains, the Jew next door was beaten, robbed and dragged away in the night to be murdered. 

Every form of Christian Nationalism is wrong and hateful. Flag waving America First Evangelicals make the Jesus they claim to worship into a symbol of hate.  

Meeting an American Author in a Paris Bookstore

 

Author, professor Nita Wiggins at 

The Red Wheelbarrow bookstore opposite Jardin Luxembourg in Paris.   

My first full day in Paris, I walked to Jardin Luxembourg to visit The Red Wheelbarrow bookstore.  I have visited the store several times since 2018 when Penelope bought the store and moved it to this lovely location near the Pantheon and the Sorbonne.  

Penelope, owner of The Red Wheelbarrow

When I arrived at the store it was not open. A woman was waiting outside and said the store would open soon in English that was very American.  Penelope arrived a few minutes later.  While we waited outside the store, Nita Wiggins and I began talking about The Red Wheelbarrow and the beautiful day in Paris.

As we talked I learned that Nita is a professor. She teaches journalism in Paris at l’Ecole Supérieure de Journalisme de Paris. she moved to Paris in 2009 to teach journalism and has lived here ever since.  

Before moving to Paris, she was a sports reporter for all of the major US networks. Her book: 

Civil Rights Baby: My Story of Race, Sports, and Breaking Barriers in American Journalism

was published in March 2019.  It is the story of her career as a sports reporter and all of the difficulties she faced in the very-white-male-dominated world of sports reporting.   

Nita and I talked about living in Paris, loving Paris, journalism on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and how badly American journalism failed in predicting the rise of Trump and the cult he created.  I am looking forward to reading the book on the plane back to America.  

For more about the book and the author, her web page is here.

Talking to Amtrak Conductor About Late-Life Enlistment, Loving the Cold War Army

 

Many Amtrak conductors and other rail workers are veterans. Over the past quarter century of commuting to Philadelphia on Amtrak, I got to know many veterans. The most recent is a conductor named Darrell I have only got to know in the past year. I still go to Philadelphia every week. 

Darrell is a conductor on the 9:33am train. That train always runs to Philadelphia with the engine in the back of the train and the cab car up front. Until recently, Darrell’s crew did not let passengers use the cab car, leaving it for crew with nearly empty trains. But Darrell let me ride in the cab car knowing I was a long-time rider. A couple of weeks ago, Darrell and I talked about being in the Army. 

He asked me about my backpack, surprised I would have gear from a recent war. I told him I deployed to Iraq in 2009-10. We got into a long conversation about how I got back in and deployed at 56 years old. Darrell served four years from 1988-92. He served in Germany for right at the end of the Cold War and during the Gulf War sending supplies to Kuwait and Iraq. He said it was the best four years of his life. Then we talked about friends from Cold War service. 

I told him I was going to Europe to visit my roommate from the late 70s in Cold War Germany. Darrell is meeting some of his friends from the Army later this summer. Darrell said he got out, had kids and didn’t think he could ever go back in. He is more than a decade younger than I am and was thinking if I could do it, he could have.

The Army returned the enlistment age to the traditional 35 years in 2009, so the window has closed on older soldiers returning to service.  

Now Darrell and I are two old soldiers riding the train who can say with the crew of "Fury" that being a soldiers was "The best job I ever had."