By Cecilia Gonzalez-Andrieu, Ph.D.
These days, we hear about a constitutional crisis as the U.S. system of government unravels. Crumbling is the desire to do the work needed to nurture a sense of “we” in “the people.” Collapsing is the hope of e pluribus unum (out of many, one). And erased is the belief that all human beings “are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Yes, the Constitution is in danger, but something even greater is at risk — our very humanity and, with it, the possibility of God’s loving dream for us in Christ awaiting our response.
To be Christian is to be grafted into an ancient community, while living in a constantly evolving reality. These days, it seems that every hour a decision comes from Washington that moves the United States further from the priorities of a genuine Christian faith. It is a time that, as Pope Francis insists, calls for “charity and clarity.”
Our Sacred Scriptures don’t have much to say about CO2 emissions, artificial intelligence, drones raining bombs, the unchecked power of multinational corporations, xenophobic nationalism, racism and disinformation. While our Scriptures do not speak directly to these modern crises, they illuminate deeper questions of kinship, dignity and mutuality that must guide our response.
Are we lost? Christianity has been in danger of losing its way before. On April 16, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., warned of the danger racism and segregation posed to the Christian Gospel and called attention to it with prophetic clarity. Four days after being arrested for leading a peaceful march on Good Friday, King penned his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” It remains one of the greatest examples of Christian theology responding to a political crisis.
Showing up and speaking up. In the letter, King argues for the ancient power of being present where one is needed. Criticized for going to Birmingham by white clergymen, he uses the prophets and the Apostle Paul to exemplify the need to respond and “carry the gospel of freedom” to all places.
Six decades later, Pope Francis echoes King, responding to the dehumanizing treatment of migrants in the United States in his letter of Feb. 10, 2025. Speaking of “the love that builds a fraternity open to all without exception,” he eloquently argues that the isolationist position espoused by U.S. leaders that limits our care to individual or national identity “introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth.”
Feeling our radical interconnectedness. In one of the most quoted passages in the letter, King cries out that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” adding that “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
This awareness of the mysterious unity of all that exists is the direct opposite of current slogans about being “first” and touting our self-proclaimed “greatness.” As Gandhi reminds us, “A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members.”
If we persist in turning a blind eye to the suffering of the world’s poorest and giving in to individualism and greed, we are turning away from God and from the good. I believe there will be consequences. Not just in more suffering caused by unrest, war, sickness, environmental degradation and famine, but about that quality within us as human beings that carries the image of God.
The image of God in us cannot withstand this frontal assault on it. Unless we cry out loudly and resolutely with the world’s dispossessed and act to lessen their suffering, we are disfiguring our Imago Dei and making ourselves unrecognizable to our Maker.
As Jesus reminded us, “What you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me” (Matt 25:45).
Human history is full of once-thriving societies that imploded as a result of their hubris and selfishness. Today, as the pandemic showed us, we are inescapably tied together as a world. Our tradition affirms that God so loved the world that God sent God’s son to be with us (John 3:16). The ultimate sin would be to prove God wrong — to show that in the end, we were not worth loving after all.
