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On Good Friday, 2007, the Christian Progressive Alliance led a long march up,
down, and across all of downtown Dallas. While many were thinking of Easter
Eggs and Easter Bonnets, they were concentrating on the real meaning of their
religion in today's context. Their signs came directly from the New Testament
as applied to the present situation.
KNON radio recorded an explanatory interview as the long march progressed. Unscupulous opportunists have misled the faithful. Americans are being told that true religion embraces hated, war, homophobia, and the oppression women and the poor. Theology professor Joerg Rieger explained at one of the stops that Jesus was engaged in opposing the Roman occupation of Israel, and that he exposed himself to danger on behalf of the oppressed.
The group first gathered at The Stewpot, where the First Presbyterian Church has offered free meals to the homeless for decades. Kim Batchelor, carrying a cross, led them to the four corners of downtown. Listen to the "Workers Beat" program at 8:05 AM Wednesday for an audio interview.
The great labor leader Eugene Victor Debs, while in prison for opposing war,
said this: I told my friends of the cloth that I did not believe Christ was
meek and lowly but a real living, vital agitator who went into the temple with
a lash and a knout and whipped the oppressors of the poor, routed them out of
the doors and spilled their blood and got silver on the floor. He told the robbed
and misruled and exploited and driven people to disobey their plunderers, he
denounced the profiteers, and it was for this that they nailed his quivering
body to the cross and spiked it to the gates of Jerusalem, not because he told
them to love one another. That was harmless doctrine. But when he touched their
profits and
denounced them before their people he was marked for crucifixion
On another occasion, Debs told the Federal Council of Churches in Girard, Kansas:
Am I my brother'skeeper? [That frequently asked question] has never been answered
in a way that is satisfactory to civilized society. Yes, I am my brother's keeper.
I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by maudlin sentimentality,
but by the higher duty I owe myself. It is when you have done your work honestly,
when you have contributed your share to the common fund that you begin to live.
Then, as Whitman said, you can take out your soul; you can commune with yourself;
you can take a comrade by the hand and you can look into his soul and in that
holy communion you live. And if you don't know what that is, or if you are not
at least on the edge of it, it is denied you even to look into the Promised
Land.