It is Lent. Perhaps it was as a subconscious penance that I found my way to recent clips from the FOX News Channel’s flagship primetime cable “news” program hosted by Tucker Carlson (née Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson). I must confess, I’ll take ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Mary’s any day. The comments below are in response to some of what I heard and saw as TC stirred his nightly brew.

WITH ALL DUE DISRESPECT, Tucker Carlson, the motivation for welcoming immigrants to this (or for that matter, any other) country, especially those people fleeing violence, terror, war, unpardonably inflicted and preventable poverty and avoidable starvation is not a thinly veiled ploy of the concocted deep state in order as you say  “to change the racial mix of the country, to reduce the political power of people whose ancestors lived here and dramatically increase the proportion of Americans newly arrived from the third world.”

By the way, based on your last name and the pale pink pigment of your skin, my guess is that your people were immigrants to this country just like mine. The true ancestors so conveniently, continuously, and flippantly forgotten in the conversation around immigration were the actual First Peoples of this land so cavalierly, arrogantly, and brutally murdered, disenfranchised, sent to reservations, and dehumanized. You never talk about their reduction of political power.

I agree with Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League who took you to task last Friday writing “It cannot be overstated enough. For Tucker Carlson, host of one of the most-watched news programs in the country, to use his platform as a megaphone to spread the toxic and xenophobic ‘Great Replacement’ theory, is repugnant and a dangerous abuse of power.”

Exactly who has replaced whom? Or is to ask such a question considered critical race theory?

Mr. Greenblatt goes on to offer “A reminder: ‘The Great Replacement’ theory and its racist and xenophobic roots have served as the inspiration for multiple mass shootings and deadly attacks.”

No, Mr. Carlson. I beg to differ. The motivation for such actions as welcoming the stranger are not some left-wing, trumped-up conspiracy (unless we’re talking about conspiring with the Spirit of God) but rather what Christians call the Corporal Works of Mercy: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, offering hospitality to the homeless, caring for the sick, visiting the imprisoned, and burying the dead. For anyone who takes the name Christian, they are mandatums—commands not suggestions. The corporal works of mercy are rooted in the Jewish tradition’s emphasis on justice and piggyback the obligation of compassionate care extended to neighbors and especially the most vulnerable—orphans, widows, the poor, strangers, outsiders. To do so is not merely offered as retributive or distributive acts of kindness or justice but rather as a way of enacting life as it should be, as God would want it.

For the confessionally irreligious—no less than for the confessionally religious—the corporal works of mercy are a summons to the heart of humans about what it means to be human, what it means to be humane, what it looks like to act as we should act. These core principles of the gospel preached and taught by Jesus are constitutive dimensions of the basileia tou Theou (the reign of God) which was Jesus’ central teaching. What he came to inaugurate, announce, and embody. What he came to invite us to be an integral part of.

Scholar and teacher John Dominic Crossan was asked the meaning of Jesus’ term the kingdom of God or the kingdom of Heaven as Matthew’s Gospel has it. He first clarified that the reason Matthew tends to rephrase it as the kingdom of heaven is out of deference and reverence for the holy name which was in keeping with an intended Jewish audience for whom using the “name” of God is at best, irreverent, at worst, blasphemous. But the problem with the term kingdom of heaven is that it is too easy to think Jesus is talking about heaven or the next life. Crossan says nothing could be further from the truth stressing Jesus was talking to first-century folks in Palestine about this life on this earth. Crossan says “the kingdom of God means what this world would look like if God, not Caesar, sat on its imperial throne; if God, not Caesar, was openly, clearly, and completely in charge. It is at the same time, an absolutely religious and absolutely political concept. It is absolutely moral and absolutely economic at the same time. How would God run the world? How does God want this world run? It is not about heaven, but about earth.”1

Enacting the core principles of the basileia tou Theou is non-negotiable for Christians. We don’t get to pick and choose. We don’t get to dodge them like thrown red balls with asterisks that take us to footnotes that qualify what Jesus meant, weaseling our way out of or around the counter-cultural core of Jesus’ gospel. It is far more honorable—and I suspect pleasing to Jesus the vine and his gracious Gardner—for us to confess we are piss-poor branches than to have the audacity to redraw the essence and ethics of Jesus’ message as self-servingly as Mr. Trump diagrammed the movement of a hurricane or as unconscionably as certain Republicans gerrymandering states or redrawing voting rights to voting wrongs.

I have no idea if you are an adherent of a particular religious tradition. But the fact of the matter, Mr. Carlson, is that we who are Jews or Christians by choice (or from other faith traditions) are obliged people. It is an obligation by virtue of our faith, our spiritual path, our community’s understanding of who we are. But, the nones, those persons who either choose not to ascribe to a particular religious conviction or spiritual path or perhaps identify as atheists are also obliged people, by virtue of their humanity. Are they not? By virtue of our inherent humanity, we are summoned to be humane, to live as we should if we lived to our utmost.

Mr. Carlson, I humbly submit, that if and when we get within shouting distance of the Pearly Gates the Golden Gatekeeper holding the celestial clipboard will not yell to us, “How were your ratings?” I suspect we will be asked whether we were sowers of discord, animosity, divisiveness, self-aggrandizement, and self-serving lies or sowers of the seeds of hospitality, generosity, human decency and reverence, kindness, mercy, justice, and yes, a fierce commitment to peace and love even if we go down in the dominant culture’s weekly ratings.

1 Who is Jesus? Answers to Your Questions about the Historical Jesus, p. 44.

© Dan Miller. All Rights Reserved.

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