With God on Our Side
New music out for 4th of July
What’s good everyone,
Today is July 4th, the year’s bittersweet day for me. It is bitter because the birth of my nation sits atop the death of many nations, back in 1776 and now. But it is also sweet because it is the womb through which many gifts have come, including the gift of my own life, life of many loved ones, and the gift of many offerings to the world from the USA.
I write you today from Sète, France, preparing to play tonight at the Worldwide Festival with Isaiah Collier, hosted by the legendary DJ Gilles Peterson. I know that we are here in part because we are cultural exports of a superpower, a topic I took up in a recent post. Europeans pay mad money to watch Americans play the Black American art form known as jazz, and American Airlines flew us here. For all of these reasons, to simply poopoo July 4th would be disingenuous to my existence.
My dear friend Nico Segal, also a musician, took up the complexities of American identity in his tender rendition of Bob Dylan’s “With God on Our Side,” which drops today. Bob Dylan wrote this in 1964, when the Cold and Vietnam Wars were raging and the world still reeling from the advent of the nuclear age. Dylan, and now Nico, sing about how political theology fueled and fuels the States’ martial violence.
In the second stanza, they note that “God on our side” licensed the near genocide of indigenous peoples who first called, and call, home the Americas home. In the third stanza, they lament that “God on our side” justified nuclear bombs. And in the spirit of Dylan, Nico released this song today because of the use of “God on our side” to justify martial violence around the world, including in Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Haiti, and Ukraine.
The artwork by Nico’s friend Esteban Whiteside is heavy, isn’t it? Ironically, the devil burning White Jesus invites me into visio divina. Visio divina is the contemplative practice of beholding a piece of visual art long enough to sense God beholding you in return.
When I apply visio divina to the visual art and musica divina to the song, a piercing question comes to me from the colonized brown Jew as he hangs on the cross naked and alone: will you come to my impaled side? Jesus the suffering servant said come and follow me into new life that comes through death, that comes through loss, that comes through being called foolish by the world’s standards, that comes through deep vulnerability before your neighbor, that comes through tender life lived together with others searching for healing. Instead of the self-righteous assertion that Jesus is always on our side, will we risk the vulnerable possibility of being at His?
Chances are, if you’re reading this, you have benefited in some way from “God on our side” theology, no matter your religious background or political persuasion. This 4th of July, I invite you to reflect on a concrete step you can take to help someone for whom that theology has been harmful. In addition to this day being a time to cherish family and friends, I pray this can also be a day marked by repentance and humble thanksgiving for God’s nevertheless grace.
abundantly,
Julian