Followers of Who?

image Michael Hammets

This week has unfolded as yet another collision of competing interpretations of the New Testament and, more precisely, a public lesson in how Christians believe Scripture authorizes behavior. I deliberately distinguish Christians from followers of Jesus, because the gap between the two has become increasingly stark.

I recall my mentor, Peter J. Lee, Bishop, once naming the fault line with clarity: it is either law and order, or peace and justice. What we are witnessing now is the ascendance of law-and-order theology as the dominant public faith, versus peace and justice. That posture was on full display in the biblical exegesis offered by Mike Johnson, particularly his appeal to Romans 12 & 13.

Statements asserting that immigrants must assimilate, possess no standing to challenge unjust laws, and are therefore subject to civil authority and even to God’s wrath are not merely troubling. They represent a profound theological distortion. Paul’s words are being conscripted to sanctify coercion rather than to confront empire.

As if this were not enough of a “culture class,” Cornel West appeared on CNN and introduced language that unsettled many, myself included. Dr. West used the term “niggerize” to describe a process of systemic dehumanization. For many African Americans, that word is not theoretical it is incendiary, painful, and bound to generational terror. Hearing it on national television was jarring.

Yet Dr. West’s provocation was deliberate. He was not normalizing the slur; he was naming a methodology. To “niggerize,” as he framed it, is to objectify, vilify, and strip a people of moral worth so that domination can be justified. What are WE allowing to be created in this experiment of democracy? He argued that the same tactics historically deployed against Black people over 250 years of terror that produced Jim Crow, segregation, and mass incarceration are now being expanded. Whether we call it slave patrols, Gestapo or Ice, it’s still the same tactics and purpose terrorize, destroy, and control the narrative. And now expanded to all of the American people not just Black and brown bodies, but dissenting Americans themselves are being subjected to this logic.

In this sense, the nation is being disciplined into submission. “Assimilate or suffer” becomes the moral script language that sounds eerily like science fiction, more Star Trek than democracy, yet entirely real.

History has seen this before. The playbook was refined in Nazi Germany, studied in the United States, and deployed to dehumanize Jewish people across Europe much of it rendered legal through elected officials. This is not alarmism; it is historical memory.

So the question is unavoidable: what do we do?We vote without sentimentality. As prosecutors in Fulton County have warned, vote as if your life depends on it, because it does. Minnesotans understand this with tragic clarity; their political power has already exacted a deadly cost.

We also withdraw consent. We stop financially supporting institutions that have revealed their allegiances Target, Walmart, Sam’s Club, Chick-fil-A. As Michael Jackson reminded us decades ago: they don’t care about us.

Dr. West’s critique of empire its reliance on might, force, and militarization—provides the necessary frame. This is precisely the context in which Paul wrote: an empire abusing a marginalized community known as The Way. Romans was never a love letter to domination.

Assimilation occurs in only two ways: by genuine belonging or by coercion. African Americans and Jewish people understand both paths intimately. For African Americans, assimilation has never guaranteed safety. Even when fully “integrated,” terror persists. We witnessed this in the treatment of Michelle Obama, Barack Obama, and Kamala Harris figures who met every standard of respectability and were still vilified.

Assimilation driven by fear is not integration; it is submission. True integration nurtures both individual and communal flourishing. When political leaders weaponize “assimilation” to justify abuse, detention, torture, and death, the moral fabric of society is already torn.

And when Scripture what many hold as holy is used to manipulate rather than liberate, nothing good can emerge. Motherism names this moment for what it is: a crisis of care, a collapse of communal ethics, and a betrayal of the Jesus so often invoked but so rarely followed.

 #law and order

#peace and justice

#minnesota

#mike Johnson

#dr. cornell west

#motherism

#theway