“Do you betray Me with a kiss?”

When Christ gathers the nations at the Last Judgement, I imagine that the first thing He will say to America is, “Did you betray Me with a kiss?”

America likes to think of itself as a nation uniquely destined by God Almighty to establish justice in the world. Ancient Rome, the Rome of the Caesars, thought of itself the same way, but the United States has, from a Christian perspective, done far worse: Rome merely claimed the Pantheon of Greek/Roman religion, but the United States claims the One, True God of the Judeo-Christian religions. It even claims a mandate from Christ Himself.

Taking God’s name in vain covers way more than just saying, “Christ, it’s hot.” Claiming divine sanction for evil is an infinitely more grievous offense.

The pursuit of naked power by the founders and developers of the United States is a betrayal of everything Christ stood for, and a rejection of the way of the cross he modeled for us. Indians, the settlers told themselves, were savages who had no souls, and were ruthlessly uprooted and exterminated so that white people could build their “superior” civilization. This subjugation and annihilation were replicated by the other nations of the West – all across the world – and none of this was necessary.

Human beings were dragged out of villages, put in chains, and brought in ships to be sold on our shores as slaves with no more rights than cattle have – and none of this was necessary.

A war was fought at the insistence of powerful people in the north that did not want competition from slave labor to deprive them of their wealth, and powerful southerners who wanted to keep the structures of privilege that put them atop the pecking order in the old south. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, and cities and towns burned and obliterated – and none of this was necessary.

Europe too, postured and connived and conquered and enslaved, until, the world conquered, they turned their greed and heartlessness toward each other, the guns of August blazed, and millions fell in trenches and mud in the Abomination of Desolation that was the First World War; the guns were silenced for a time, and then they blazed again, and this time with such utter, hellish ferocity that sixty million were dead and entire civilizations were living in death-stenched holes in the ground and eating cats at the end of it – and none of this was necessary.

Remember too that, when all these things were done, the perpetrators claimed divine blessing for their destruction; that it was God’s will that peoples should be exterminated and children burned to death in their cribs and millions should be enslaved and beaten until their spirits broke. This was all done in the name of God Almighty.

At the final judgement, I fear that you and I will hear about these events. Not because we necessarily personally, directly did these things ourselves, but because none of them were necessary – all of them preventable but for the echoing, yawning, icy, damnable silence from all of us in the face of all these manifest evils.

Christ was and is being bombed and shelled; Christ was and is being beaten and tortured and enslaved; Christ was and is burned to death in his bed, in jungles, in the arms of His Mother; Christ was and is being scourged, nailed to His Cross and His possessions divided; and we stood and stand by through the ages up until right this very instant, and cowered and cower in the face of evil and told and tell ourselves lies to avoid facing the agony of Him Whom we watched and watch being crucified.

To serve any power other than God Almighty was anathema to the early Christian martyrs. They went to their crosses, to the lions, to the gladiators, bursting with joy in their hearts – and praying, as their Master showed them, for their persecutors. For centuries they went joyfully to their deaths to set an example for us, their brothers and sisters in Christ, to show us how to be worthy successors; our silence and cowardice is a betrayal of their witness.

May the God Who consoled the martyrs break our hearts. May He turn us from the pursuit and protection of worldly power, and help us to accept, with peace and joy, the martyrdom that inevitably comes to those who conform their lives and wills to His.