I so appreciate the things that Jim Winkler includes in his communications as he carries out his duties as General Secretary of the UMC’s General Board of Church and Society.  I consider it as a stamp of legitimacy on him when organizations like the Institute for Religion and Democracy have fits over Jim’s constant “anti-American” rants.  Of course,  they’re no more “anti-American” than MLK was.  These things are infuriating and disturbing  not only to citizens of God’s kingdom,  but also to our sense of American citizenship and the tragedy of our enslavement to the militarism that expresses the things “needed” to ensure the empire that the U.S. has built and continues to build,  pouring fra greater amounts into that vast hole of debt than do the boogeymen of unions, Social Security,  and those “nasty, greedy teachers” who they’re trying to tell us make way too much.  It’s such a crock that these miniscule budget items draw fire as hundreds of billions get dumped into the maintenance  of the Military Industrial Complex”. 

Given the near silence of our pulpits in the face of the violence and war that surrounds us, the exertions of our theologians in justifying war, the devotion of our denomination’s members to the myth of redemptive violence, it is certain that future historians will view the church as a slave to the vast war machine that engulfs us.

Word from Winkler | The General Board of Church and Society

Amen, Jim.  Amen.