I was recently made aware of a slightly different way of thinking about the flight of the family of Jesus from Bethlehem. A farmer who fled from the war in Guatemala into Honduras in the early 1980s, meaning he was a refugee, told Chris Hedges that when the family left Bethlehem, “It was on this day that Christ became a refugee.” (See: The Cost of Bearing Witness).
A refugee is someone who has been forced to leave their home, often because of armed conflict or persecution. A migrant is someone who chooses to move, often to improve their lives by finding work, education, or for family reunion.
In another article, Chris Hedges expands upon what we are taught about Jesus being oppressed by Empire, relating that to modern times.
The story of Christmas—like the story of the crucifixion, in which Jesus is abandoned by his disciples, attacked by the mob, condemned to death by the state, placed on death row and executed—is not written for the oppressors. It is written for the oppressed. And what is quaint and picturesque to those who live in privilege is visceral and empowering to those the world condemns.
Jesus was not a Roman citizen. He lived under Roman occupation. The Romans were white. Jesus was a person of color. And the Romans, who peddled their own version of white supremacy, nailed people of color to crosses almost as often as we finish them off with lethal injections, gun them down in the streets or lock them up in cages. The Romans killed Jesus as an insurrectionist, a revolutionary. They feared the radicalism of the Christian Gospel. And they were right to fear it. The Roman state saw Jesus the way the American state saw Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Then, like now, prophets were killed.
The radicalism of the Christian Gospel would be muted, distorted and denied by the institutional church once it came to power in the third century. It would be perverted by court theologians, church leaders and, in the 20th century, fascists. It would be mangled by the heretics in the Christian right to sanctify the worst aspects of American imperialism and capitalism. The Bible unequivocally condemns the powerful. It is not a self-help manual to become rich. It does not bless America or any other nation. It was written for the powerless, for those the theologian James Cone calls the crucified of the earth. It was written to give a voice to, and affirm the dignity of, those being crushed by malignant power and empire.
What Christmas Means by Chris Hedges, truthdig, Dec 24, 2017
I have never been able to reconcile my own beliefs with those who call themselves Christians, specifically White Christians. Unable to understand how White Christians support Empire in the domination and oppression of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. Throughout Medieval and subsequent history, the Church was aligned with Kings and others who held political power. The Church instigated the military Crusades to fight against the spread of Islam and retake control of the Holy Land.
The Romans killed Jesus as an insurrectionist, a revolutionary.
In more recent history, White Christians colonized vast regions of the world. Here they were involved in the genocide of Indigenous peoples by taking over their lands, and using all kinds of abuse as they attempted to force native children’s assimilation into White culture. Many White Christians were involved in the enslavement of Black peoples.
As James Cone wrote, “What is at stake is the credibility and the promise of the Christian gospel and the hope that we may heal the wounds of racial violence that continue to divide our churches and our society.”
I don’t find the White Christian version of religion to be credible.
An example of what I have found to be credible is the work of my Mutual Aid community in meeting the survival needs of the oppressed, which includes ourselves. The key to Mutual Aid is knowing we all are one, not separating “us” from “them.”
“The Cross and the Lynching Tree are separated by nearly two thousand years,” James Cone writes in his new book, “The Cross and the Lynching Tree.” “One is the universal symbol of the Christian faith; the other is the quintessential symbol of black oppression in America. Though both are symbols of death, one represents a message of hope and salvation, while the other signifies the negation of that message by white supremacy. Despite the obvious similarities between Jesus’ death on the cross and the death of thousands of black men and women strung up to die on a lamppost or tree, relatively few people, apart from the black poets, novelists, and other reality-seeing artists, have explored the symbolic connections. Yet, I believe this is the challenge we must face. What is at stake is the credibility and the promise of the Christian gospel and the hope that we may heal the wounds of racial violence that continue to divide our churches and our society.”
So begins James Cone, perhaps the most important contemporary theologian in America, who has spent a lifetime pointing out the hypocrisy and mendacity of the white church and white-dominated society while lifting up and exalting the voices of the oppressed. He writes out of his experience as an African-American growing up in segregated Arkansas and his close association with the Black Power movement. But what is more important is that he writes out of a deep religious conviction, one I share, that the true power of the Christian gospel is its unambiguous call for liberation from forces of oppression and for a fierce and uncompromising condemnation of all who oppress.
Cone, who teaches at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, writes on behalf of all those whom the Salvadoran theologian and martyr Ignacio Ellacuría called “the crucified peoples of history.” He writes for the forgotten and abused, the marginalized and the despised. He writes for those who are penniless, jobless, landless and without political or social power. He writes for gays, lesbians, bisexuals and those who are transgender. He writes for undocumented farmworkers toiling in misery in the nation’s agricultural fields. He writes for Muslims who live under the terror of war and empire in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he writes for us. He understands that until white Americans can see the cross and the lynching tree together, “until we can identify Christ with a ‘recrucified’ black-body hanging from a lynching tree, there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy.”
James Cone’s Gospel of the Penniless, Jobless, Marginalized and Despised. The true power of the Christian gospel is its unambiguous call for liberation from forces of oppression and for a fierce and uncompromising condemnation of all who oppress by Chris Hedges, truthdig, Jan 9, 2012
“Until we can identify Christ with a ‘recrucified’ black-body hanging from a lynching tree, there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy.” James Cone
I’ve written of how I feel threatened to be writing about these things in these increasingly authoritarian times. Not only from political repression but from the continuation of White Christian oppression as well.
Polycrisis Center 
There is no “power of the Christian gospel.” Despite all of the cultural and social forcing of oppressed communities into the hierarchical nonsense of supernatural religion, there are strong movements of actual rebels and dissident intellectuals against the obvious buncombe that Hedges and Cone try to sell.
Black and brown freethinkers are swimming against multiple strong currents, but they are swimming hard nonetheless. They may not be the modern day Jesuses Cone and Hedges want so badly to be as patriarchs of an ancient sect, but they are actual human heroes. Nobody needs more Stone Age story-telling gibberish to deal with life in our polycrisis.
LikeLike