The 5 million member Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
(ELCA) recently hosted a conference in Berlin, Germany about
sinister “walls.” The walls under examination were the former
Berlin Wall, the security wall that Israel has constructed between
itself and Palestinian territories, and the as of yet unbuilt
partial wall to be erected along the U.S. southern border to
inhibit illegal immigration.
“We insist that God calls us to be peacemakers,” explained ELCA
missions executive Rev. Said R. Ailabouni. “We are committed to
peace, not walls.” The conference was called “Mighty Fortresses and
Mustard Seeds: Life in the Shadow of a Wall,” referencing, of
course, Lutheranism’s flagship hymn: “A Mighty Fortress is our
God.”
But in typical fashion for liberal Protestantism, which has
largely forgotten the robust moral certitude of “Mighty Fortress”
author Martin Luther, the conference was befuddled over any moral
distinctions among these very different walls.
The Berlin Wall for nearly 30 years incarcerated East Berliners
who chaffed under Communism. But liberal Protestantism, during
almost all of those years, had little to nothing to say about that
wall. At most, church liberals saw the wall at the time as merely a
tragic symbol of misunderstanding and mistrust between East and
West.
Only since the Berlin Wall fell have mainline church liberals,
Lutheran or otherwise, been more willing to acknowledge the
unpleasantness of Soviet-imposed Communism. In recent years, the
Berlin Wall has become a useful metaphorical tool for condemning
the Israeli security barrier and, even more recently, for assailing
a security barrier along the southern U.S. border.
The moral distinctions among these walls should be obvious. The
Berlin Wall was built by an oppressive government determine to
imprison its own citizens. The Israeli security wall is intended to
block Palestinian suicide bombers. The U.S. security barrier is
meant to minimize the inflow of illegal immigrants. There is
tragedy involved with each wall. But the intent behind the Israeli
and U.S. walls is protection, not imprisonment of citizens. The
Lutherans meeting in Berlin were nonetheless painfully disturbed
and confused.
Mainline churches in the U.S., who are extremely interested in
human rights abuses by Israel, to the exclusion of almost all other
governments except for the U.S., have made the Israeli wall a
special target. In 2005 the ELCA’s governing Churchwide Assembly
established the “Peace Not Walls” campaign to advocate tearing down
the Israeli security barrier. Of course, the ELCA does not offer
any viable alternatives to the wall, other than further concessions
to Palestinian demands.
The ELCA bishop in Jerusalem, Munib A. Younan, declared in a
letter read to the Berlin conference: “The wall that is surrounding
us in Palestine is growing every day into a tighter concrete noose
around our cities, towns, homes and churches.” Younan is no doubt
sincere about the massive inconveniences caused to some of his
Palestinian parishioners by the wall. But Palestinian Christians,
who comprise a small minority in an overwhelmingly Muslim land,
must for the sake of their own survival constantly prove their
nationalist credentials by condemning Israel. ELCA officials in the
U.S. lack that excuse.
A Lutheran NGO official in Jerusalem explained her work among
Palestinian youngsters in response to the Israeli wall. “We work
with a lot of young people with art, music, multimedia. These are
very important tools to break the isolation that is being imposed
on [them], and at the same time [they] connect with the rest of the
world.”
If done with care, this work is admirable. But are Lutheran
NGO’s also working among young Palestinians to counteract
anti-Semitism, hatred, intolerance and radical Islam? It is
doubtful. According to an ELCA news service report, the
Palestinians at the Berlin conference plan to “promote nonviolent
resistance, to encourage church involvement internationally, and to
provide services for those who are suffering because of the
separation barrier.”
Again, these might be laudable. But is the Israeli wall, however
inconvenient, truly the chief cause of suffering for Palestinians?
Through the prism of Liberation Theology that still captivates many
liberal Protestants, nearly all global suffering is related to
Western imperialism. From this perspective, Palestinian happiness
depends upon removing the Israelis and their U.S. backers.
Similarly, from this Liberation Theology perspective, Mexico’s
chief problems are not poverty and corruption, but U.S.
exploitation. An ELCA relief worker in Mexico City asked the Berlin
conference if the U.S. should not redirect the $8 billion to be
spent on fencing towards investing “in the lives of the poor, who
suffer in their attempt to cross over to the United States.” Others
complained, accurately, of the hundreds of Mexicans who tragically
perish in the desert while transiting the currently porous border.
But wouldn’t a security fence help prevent those deaths?
According to an ELCA blog, participants at the Berlin conference
“disagreed on whether Berlin offers a parallel for the Palestinian
situation. Some maintained that the Palestinian case and others,
such as the U.S.-Mexico border, are different from the German
example because those walls have been constructed to keep others
‘out’ rather than to keep their own people ‘in.’”
But the mayor of Bethlehem, who was in Berlin for the ELCA
conference, argued: “We are here to speak against all walls —
whether they are in Germany, Israel-Palestine, Mexico-U.S.A., or
the invisible walls….As a church we should have a big stand
against all walls. You build bridges of love and understanding, not
walls of separation.”
So much for moral nuance. But liberal theology, even more so
than the “fundamentalism” that it supposedly rejects, insists on
seeing the world through its own limited symbols of justice and
injustice. The West, of which the U.S. and Israel are arch symbols,
is by definition oppressive. All Third World people are by
definition oppressed by the West. Hence, Israeli and U.S. security
barriers are, for church liberals, morally indistinguishable from
Berlin’s old machine-gun lined Communist prison wall.
Ironically, the builders of the Berlin Wall had a view of the
West not all that different from the ELCA critics who met in
Berlin. But do not expect ELCA officials to grasp that irony.
