By Lowell Bliss
Here’s a little known fact of historical irony: when American volunteers returned from Spain in the 1930s, having fought against Franco’s fascists who were supported by Nazi Germany, they later tried to enlist in the US Army when America as a whole finally declared war on fascists in 1941. “Send us back to Europe,” they told FDR. “We were firing on Germans and Italians when the rest of you were lukewarm isolationists.” The Army enlisted them, but distrusted them, shuttling them off to inconsequential jobs, certainly far away from any classified information. The Army never outwardly labeled them “Communist sympathizers;” that accusation would wait for the McCarthy blacklists. Instead, the Abraham Lincolns were designated “PAF,” which stood, believe it or not, for “Prematurely Anti-Fascist.”
This is an article about processing your emotions about being proven right (particularly about fascism in the Trumpist movement and white nationalism in the church) but not being acknowledged as being right. Sorry kid, you too are PAF. You may as well process it and explore the blessedness of it.
I was triggered this week by a statement made about the January 6th insurrection. The statement was released by CRU, the evangelical campus ministry group formerly known as Campus Crusade for Christ. My training about triggers kicked in and I ABC-ed it. I ACKNOWLEDGED that I had been triggered. I BREATHED in some oxygen to reassure my prefrontal lobe. I then CHOSE what I proactively, not reactively, wanted to do.
What I CHOSE to do was to stop and recognize that it is a pretty incredible statement from CRU, that it shows growth and promise, and that these guys need to be cheered on. The statement was as follows:
Yesterday’s events in D.C. come as only the most recent in a long line in which the name of Jesus has been abused, misaligned, and co-opted to justify racism, militancy, abuse of power, and greed. We cannot turn away. The presumption of God’s approval is evil. We weep. We repent.
Wow, pretty good, right? And then I CHOSE to stop and be curious about my trigger. How is it possible that such a beautiful statement sparked an instantaneous mixture of anger and grief in me? That’s when I remembered an elder at our previous church in Kansas who was on staff with CRU. He was an old and beloved friend, and unfortunately, one of the two elders assigned by the other elders to help ease my wife and I out of the missionary budget after 26 years. He reported that the elders could no longer support our “political activism.” Explicitly, our activism referred to the work that Eden Vigil was doing in support of the Paris Agreement and against Donald Trump’s anti-environmental agenda. Implicitly, our activism referred to the anti-racism work that I was doing on my private blog and Facebook posts. At one point, this elder tried to patiently explain that CRU had a policy of apoliticism. It apparently allowed them to more freely “preach the Gospel” and kept them out of trouble with their donors and supporting churches. Whether he was saying it or not, what we heard was, “Why can’t Eden Vigil be more like CRU? Why can’t you be more like me?” So, here I am, three years later, reading a statement by CRU that was decidedly not apolitical. “We cannot turn away,” they were suddenly crowing.
I CHOSE to stop and look again at the statement. It in fact was not from CRU (i.e., from its national office) but rather from “Cru Cleveland,” a ministry which serves nine campuses in and around Cleveland, OH. Their website is inspiring:
In this beautifully gritty place, with all of her challenges, there’s a rich, diverse culture rooted in a number of historic African-American and immigrant migrations, all seeking safety and opportunity, and finding themselves here. . . . Our vision is that smaller lights bearing the light of Jesus will brighten the shadows of our city. That we will bring light to bear on darkness, truth to falsehoods, righteousness and mercy on injustice, and healing to pain. We want to empower and release these lights, with hearts of strength and hope, to every corner of the city, every sector of society, for the common good and human flourishing.
It is not the CRU national office that released a statement about repentance from a long line of racism and militarism. In fact, I could not find the statement again until my wife tracked it down to the tiny outskirts of Instagram where it was posted. This statement seems to be the individual action of CRU Cleveland. Perhaps they’ve gone rogue. Perhaps they are challenging the national office. Perhaps the Kansas State University chapter of CRU is also crafting a similar statement as we speak. Mostly though, my main thought was, “Oh man, I suspect these kids are now like me. They are Designation: PAF. Welcome kids, to the pain, the temptations, and the blessedness.”
The final thing I CHOSE to do was start on this article. I chose my audience: it’s the Cru Cleveland kids, and it is YOU, that is, it’s you if you opposed Trump’s election in 2016, if you pleaded with your friends, many of them fellow churchmates, “Don’t support this man: he is racist, xenophobic, sexist, and corrupt. What you think you will get from him in terms of judges or policy, it’s not worth the price of a soul,” by which you meant your friend’s soul, the national soul, the souls of all those that you and your friends had committed to share the Good News of Jesus Christ with. This article is written for you who chose to be “activist” in the church, whether about climate change, BLM, kids in cages, the bombing of Yemen, the Kavanaugh hearings, fascism, or now about conspiracy theories and a failed insurrection. You have been faithful in your activism to a large gospel and the Kingdom of God. If you have at all paid the price of broken relationships, this article is for you. This article is for you if you are triggered by those who now seem to have “seen the light,” who are ready to still be around and retain leadership over us all in calls to unity and in “being who we really are,” (while of course not going so far as to acknowledge that systemic racism, for example, is a thing).
We are in confused emotional space. For example, what does it feel like to admit that you would really like to hear an apology from a Trump supporter or a Trump voter, from someone in particular, or from someone, anyone? Are you sad? Despairing that it will ever happen? Do you feel afraid that if you publicly admitted that you wanted an apology that you would just get beat over the head with that admission? Do you feel shame for even wanting an apology, some sort of niggling voice that says, “Oh that’s just self-pity,” or “Don’t be petty,” or “Wanting an apology is just another way of being judgmental when there is nothing really to apologize about.”
Please hear, my PAF friends, that emotions are not good nor bad. They just are. They are neutral, despite the way our culture wants to pour shame on certain emotions. There are however comfortable and uncomfortable emotions. Most times (but not always in certain situations or people), joy, happiness, peace are all generally comfortable emotions whereas anger, grief, or unfulfillable longing are not. You may as well find a safe space, perhaps in the confines of this conversation, O reader, and just ACKNOWLEDGE what you are feeling. What gets suppressed ends up getting expressed anyway.
As another example, how does it feel when someone does come out and admits things about Trump that—Hello!—you were saying all along? They say things as if they just discovered them, or if they finally had the truly biblical interpretation that represents a breakthrough. Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia? Mike Pence? Ben Sasse? Russell Moore? CRU? Your pastor? New York magazine ran this headline four days ago: “Senior Trump Official: We Were Wrong, He’s a ‘Fascist’.” Again, I was triggered. I had floated the idea in 2016 that this might be true. The mildest pushback I got at the time was from a friend in New Jersey who wrote: “Trump’s not a fascist; he is a narcissist, and New York City is full of them.” I look back and realize that I spent at least two years subconsciously trying to appease the elders of my old church (and many of my mom’s friends) by writing about Trumpism as “proto-fascism,” and then laboriously having to explain that “proto-“ as a suffix means “the beginning of” and so proto-fascism is just the sowing of the seeds which could unfortunately grow into full-blown fascism somewhere down the road, but hopefully not. (“No, Mrs. Church Friend, I’m not saying that Trump is Hitler, nor that kids-in-cages are ‘concentration camps’. For one thing, Trump is more akin to Mussolini, not Hitler and actually he, or rather Steven Bannon or Stephen Miller, is more like Gabrielle D’Annunzio the Italian poet and playwright for whom proto-fascism was the nascent blah, blah, blah, blah.”-- I bored my own self into silence.) So, the New York magazine finds some anonymous senior Trump official who declares that his boss is indeed a fascist. I’m triggered. I want to use the F-word followed by the pronoun “you” against him or her. I feel shame at my filthy language. I feel like I want to shout from the mountaintops, “I was right! I told you so.” I feel afraid because if any of those old friends of my mom are reading this article, some might publicly accuse me of pride and arrogance and self-protectiveness, and I find that I still value what they think of me. I feel sad that I chose to speak less boldly over the last four years than what I really felt. Am I brave or am I a coward? Then, I feel angry again, and somehow energized. No, dammit, anti-fascists are heroes, whether they are premature or not.
There are plenty of obvious triggers afloat. What emotions do you need to acknowledge when someone says to you?
Those rioters at the Capitol were actually Antifa infiltrators.
“Blue Lives Matter” (as the insurrectionists bludgeon Capitol police with fire extinguishers and American flags, even unto Officer Brian Sicknick’s death.)
It was only a small number of bad actors in an otherwise peaceful and legitimate protest.
The election WAS stolen, and so that makes these protestors “patriots.” This is 1776.
What about the BLM protests that “burned whole cities” like Portland or Kenosha?
Trump said nothing that can be interpreted as “incitement.”
Socialism!
I could never vote against the only party that has anti-abortion in its platform.
Twitter and Facebook bans are censorship on conservative free speech.
“Shame, shame on the ten Republicans who joined with @SpeakerPelosi & the House Democrats in impeaching President Trump yesterday. After all that he has done for our country, you would turn your back & betray him so quickly? What was done yesterday only further divides our nation.” (A tweet from Franklin Graham.)
What statement triggers you the most, whether listed above or another one you’ve identified? We need to ABC these things. Acknowledge that you’ve been triggered. Name the emotion.
Secondly, breathe. Seriously, take three deep breaths. Oxygen signifies.
Then, choose.
On December 31, 2020—the last day of a traumatic year--my wife, my two daughters, and my daughter’s dog accompanied me down to Nickel Beach on the north shore of Lake Erie. They joined me in a ritual that my spiritual director, David Sachsenmeier of Colorado Springs, had been recommending to me ever since I had begun to gain some emotional distance from our old church in Kansas. I brought along a shovel and a box of matches. I had listed on a sheet of paper a number of people and things that I wanted to release and bury. That morning before we left, I re-watched on YouTube the two eulogies that I had written for the (recorded) memorial services of my dad (2014) and my mom (2018). I wanted to remind myself what eulogies sounded like, how the best ones, the honest ones, acknowledge both the good and the bad, the health and the brokenness, the joy and the grief. At the beach, I said a few words. I read out loud my list. My daughter Bronwynn added hers. We dug a hole in the sand, burned the papers, and dropped them in, along with one artifact “from those days.” We buried everything and my wife Robynn read a small prayer of mourning and release.
A lot has happened since New Year’s Eve, including an insurrection and an impeachment, but I’ve been able to use our little ceremony as a marker. For example, it usually takes me two or three days to write an article like this, and just this morning I saw on Facebook that the CRU elder at our old church is having a birthday today. There’s his photo with his happy smiling face. The dog and I took a walk on Nickel Beach where my relationship with him and his fellow elders is buried. This man however isn’t buried, and I truly suspect that the spirit of CRU [Cleveland] can find purchase in his heart. The dog stopped and waited patiently while I made the sign of the cross over the gravesite, muttered an audible “I forgive you” once again, and wished him “Happy Birthday” in my heart. I choose however not to write him on Facebook. I am free to do so. I am free to not do so.
When the PAFs of the International Brigade left Spain, having failed to defeat Franco, they received various receptions. Churchill welcomed the British mercenaries home after the war, playfully calling them “armed tourists.” Canadian fighters were part of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion. A monument to the “Mac Paps,” as they were known, was unveiled in Ottawa in 2001. Members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which is how the American volunteer fighters were known, had to be content with being lionized in the novels of Ernest Hemingway and the songs of Pete Seeger. Even that had to wait for a couple of decades, and even that ran face first into the fascism of Sen. Eugene McCarthy’s hearings. Here’s the thing that PAFs always have to face: the struggle against fascism is never over. When the bulk of the nation or the church turns toward anti-fascism, we need to be healed up enough to re-enlist, even if we end up getting relegated.