Missiles spray past our votes, lining saffron skies with the milky white of a terrifying errand. We call our senators and the phone rings into a void shaped like democracy. Genocide is televised in high-definition, and if we're honest—if we're brutally, unforgivably honest—a small part of us has started to appreciate the cinematography. We scroll past the rubble with thumbs that have learned to move faster than grief. We like and share the infographic and feel the dopaminergic micro-hit of having done something. We sleep.
Meanwhile, the agreements are breaking. The structures that were supposed to hold us aloft—the discipline of international relations, international law, multilateral consensus, the architecture of human rights, the post-war settlement that said ‘never again,’ the stirring sirens of justice that bent Dr. King’s lips into songs that once made us dance—are cracking under the weight of their own suppressed contradictions. Fascism doesn’t march on the streets anymore. Now, it knocks on the door, offering the terrible burden of choice.
What do we do now? What should we do in these times when freedom bares its fangs and threatens to bite?
This is the question that haunts every faith community, every prayer circle, every spiritual assembly, every congregation that has been taught that God is good and the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. But what do we do when the arc seems to be bending toward something else entirely? Perhaps a burning building. Perhaps the extreme end of a carousel that bends around and restarts the journey. What does faith do now—now that its most cherished assumptions about progress, about goodness, about the basic decency of the human project, are being tested by the very systems that were supposed to embody those assumptions?