This post is from founding Friends of Justice board member, Charles Kiker.

A couple of weeks or so ago, Alan Bean posted on the Friends of Justice website a blog which he called “A New Kind of Christianity.” There’s something about the title which doesn’t quite set well with me.

I’m not sure what it is. I’m not a purist who thinks there can be only one kind of Christianity. I know that Christianity has evolved over the centuries into different forms. Even the early church was not in total agreement. And there evolved Augustinian-Constantinian Christianity, Catholicism of the Eastern and Western varieties, Reformation Christianity in all its multicolored hues, the Radical Reformation in its various forms, the rise of Christendom, Modernism, Liberalism, Fundamentalism, Evangelicalism, post-modernism ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

Maybe what I was feeling is that we don’t need just another leaf to tack on to the many branches of the Christian tree. (It should be added that Dr. Bean is not proposing a new movement in competition with the current world of Christianity.)

Christianity, in all or almost all its forms, is too much identified with Christendom, and we don’t need a new kind of Christendom.

Well then, what do we need? I think we need a new commitment to becoming and being followers of the Way. To do this we will have to read afresh the synoptic gospels and take seriously the teachings of Jesus, to become red letter Christians, as Tony Campolo puts it.

What are some of the ramifications of a movement of this kind? What will happen if we become more serious followers of the Way?

What will not happen if this movement becomes a movement, is that it will not provide a formula for building big churches. As Alan Bean correctly observes, “. . . you can’t build a megachurch or a popular movement on this kind of religious foundation.” I’m not sure you can even build a small church on this kind of foundation. I know you could not in small town places like my hometown of Tulia, Texas. I think it would be difficult even in large metropolitan areas like Dallas.  Even if we could build such a church, I’m not sure we should. I fear the tendency would be to talk to each other, and maybe pat each other on the back about how we have a better understanding of the gospel than those poor benighted souls in the established churches.

Perhaps it will be better if we can provide a prophetic presence in established congregations in the established Church. But neither is that easy. There can be a strong social opprobrium approaching shunning against those who have a radically different understanding of what church is all about.

Radical followers of the Way will have a kind of innate Anabapist/Radical Reformation suspicion of  the governments of this world “from the court house to the White House” in American parlance. A church that aligns itself with political movements or governmental institutions is a church that will have grave difficulty in having a prophetic witness to those movements or institutions. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was aghast at seeing the American flag in American churches. I am somewhat troubled to recite the pledge of allegiance at civic events, and am aghast to find it in the order of worship on patriotic weekends.

I humbly suggest that what can happen is that we can become what Jim Wallis calls approvingly and Glenn Beck and his ilk call disparagingly “social justice” Christians.  

As social justice followers of the Way we will have a strong emphasis on the kingdom of God rather than an almost exclusive emphasis on going to heaven when you die. I have not done a concordance word count, but people who have indicate that the kingdom was the topic Jesus talked about most often. He taught us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven. (Italics mine.)

When Jesus died on a Roman cross instead of ushering in the kingdom, it provoked a crisis among followers of the Way. Was the kingdom just wishful thinking, or is it delayed until some end time? This crisis is reflected in the New Testament. When Jesus speaks of the kingdom in Matthew, the language is almost always “the kingdom of heaven,” rather than “the kingdom of God.” Many scholars believe this is due to the Jewishness of the Gospel of Matthew and its reluctance to speak directly of God. Might it also be a move toward transporting the kingdom to some ethereal realm? Mark and Luke do not share the Matthean reluctance to have Jesus speaking of the kingdom of God. John, writing near the end of the first Christian century, has almost totally spiritualized the gospel. But in the rare instances John’s Jesus speaks of the kingdom, it is the kingdom of God.

The Apostle Paul expected the imminent return of Christ to inaugurate the kingdom. And of course there is the Book of Revelation, with its apocalyptic encouragement of the coming victory of Jesus for those suffering under the Roman Empire.

But Jesus didn’t come, and after almost two thousand years the kingdoms of this world still oppress “the least of these.”

So, if we are to be radically concerned about what happens to “the least of these” in this world how can we be radically committed to a kingdom of God which is long delayed in coming? Unless the kingdom has come among us, as Jesus said.

Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For in fact, the kingdom of God is among you. (Luke  17:20-21, NRSV)

Maybe that’s the kind of Jesus movement we can become, one which can not be definitively pointed out as the essence of the kingdom, but which nevertheless is or at least contains the essence of the kingdom, with its essence as a prophetic witness within Christianity, even within or among the kingdoms of this world.

Alan Bean says in his blog, “Religious people, white Christians in particular, must come to the grips with the spiritual wickedness in the criminal justice system.  Can we stand up for the victims of wrongful prosecution?”

While I would not view this movement of followers of  the Way as being focused exclusively on “spiritual wickedness in the criminal justice system,” certainly we must have our eyes, ears, and hearts attuned to the sights, sounds, and vibrations of injustice wherever it occurs, including injustice in the criminal justice system.

Charles Kiker,

Tulia, Texas 

Please check out Mark Osler’s recent contribution to the Huffington Post, Jesus Christ, Capital Defendant.

You will also want to check out the tone deaf comments that follow Mark’s excellent piece.  They help explain my longing for a new kind of Christianity.

We are proud to have Professor Osler on the Friends of Justice board.

People often ask me what distinguishes Friends of Justice from other advocacy groups.  In lieu of an answer, let me tell you a story.

Five women have been raped by a black man in a mid-sized college town.  An alarmed community is crying out for justice.  Investigators have been working on the case for months but still have no suspect.  So they get creative. 

An attractive young woman in revealing clothes enters a popular college pizza joint.  Patrons have no way of knowing she is a police officer.  A few moments later, the woman leaves the restaurant.  A young black male follows her out the door.  He walks to her car.  He offers to drive her home.  He asks for her phone number.  He offers to take her to a bar and buy her a drink.

Back at the station, the police officer gets the name of the man who followed her out of the restaurant and does a background check.  It happens to be the same guy she arrested a few months earlier for possessing marijuana and carrying an illegal weapon. 

Officers take a Polaroid picture to the most recent victim.  “That’s him,” she says. 

Shortly thereafter, the victim picks the suspect out of a police line up.

Convinced they have their man, police make an arrest and move toward trial. 

No physical evidence ties the suspect to the crime and several witnesses are ready to testify that they were with him at the time of the rape.  A classic he-said-she-said stand-off.  Who are you going to believe, the woman who was raped or friends eager to bolster their buddy’s alibi?

A trial date is set.

Now, suppose you are the man charged with rape.  The prosecutor offers you a sweetheart deal in exchange for a confession.  You won’t take the deal.  You aren’t going to confess to a crime you didn’t do.  The DA shrugs and tells you to have it your way.

Who ya gonna call?

The ACLU?  The NAACP?  The nearest Innocence Project?  Amnesty International?  The Southern Poverty Law Center?  The Center for Constitutional Rights? 

You have never heard of most of these outfits and it wouldn’t matter if you had;  None of these organizations has a strategy for pre-conviction intervention in criminal cases.  They do some wonderful things, but pre-trial intervention isn’t one of them.  The need is there, certainly, but, apart from securing qualified legal counsel, no one has a strategy that addresses cases like this. 

You’ve already got a defense attorney and he’s doing everything he can.  But ethics rules make it hard for defense counsel to get their side of the story to the media.  The attorney tries to get additional facts into the courtroom, but the judge slams the door.

 The case goes to trial.  Nobody learns that the state had identified another suspect.  Nobody learns that four additional rape victims couldn’t pick the defendant out of  a line-up.  It never comes to light that the case involving the dope and the gun occurred after the defendant had been robbed.  When he called the police, they weren’t interested in his story, but he looked suspicious so they decided to conduct a search.

The jury never hears that several police officers, aware of these facts, were beginning to question the state’s handling of the case.  The defense attorney has spoken to some of these officers, but the judge won’t let them testify.

The jury and the media hear only one story.  The rape victim says the suspect raped her.  It feels so good to put a rapist behind bars.  It feels so bad to contemplate letting a guy who can’t prove his innocence walk free over a technicality like reasonable doubt.

The all-white jury deliberates for six hours and comes back with a unanimous verdict.  Guilty as charged.

In retrospect, an air of inevitability hung over the case.  You take a heinous crime, a sympathetic white victim, a black guy who has already been charged with two felonies, unswerving eye-witness testimony, an all-white jury and a law-n-order town and you will get a conviction every time.

But is the guy guilty? 

With evidence this ambiguous, how can you be sure?

It’s simple, really.  Twelve jurors heard all the evidence and reached a unanimous verdict.  That’s how you know he’s guilty.

The defendant in this case has a name: Timothy Brian Cole. 

Ten years after conviction, the real rapist (the man the police were considering until they pulled their surveillance trick in the Pizza Joint) wrote a letter of confession.  He had waited patiently for the statute of limitations to expire, then he made his move. 

A judge refused to hold a hearing.

Four years later, Timothy Cole died; his asthma aggravated by stress and prison condictions.

In 2001, the actual rapist, a man named Jerry Wayne Johnson, was released from prison.  He made a second attempt to confess.

Same result.

Finally, in 2007, Johnson’s third confession, combined with a request to re-test the rape kit, was presented to a Lubbock Judge.

Same result.

This appeal was made to an Austin judge who granted a hearing at the conclusion of which Timothy Cole was fully exonerated . . . eight years after his death.

Michelle Mallin, the woman whose confident testimony put Tim Cole behind bars got the news from investigator George White.

“You shouldn’t feel bad about this, Michele,” White told her.  “[Cole] put himself in that lineup . . . It’s OK.  He had asthma.  He was going to die anyway.”

In the great city of Lubbock, a confession from the actual rapist and  irrefutable DNA evidence wasn’t enough to prompt a re-evaluation of Tim Cole’s case.  How would Tim have faired if, like 90% of defendants charged with violent crimes, there was no DNA evidence to examine?  He would still be known, if he was known at all, as the woman who raped Michelle Mallin in 1985.

If possible, Friends of Justice intervenes prior to final conviction.  We tell the story defense counsel is usually prohibited from telling.  We get the background information courtroom reporters rarely find.  We review the case from every angle imaginable: history, sociology, even theology come into the process.  We aren’t bound by the rules impinging on officers of the court. 

We are loose canons, but we are never reckless. 

When legal professionals cannot or will not or will not tell the truth, Friends of Justice fills the gap.

Is Rand Paul a racist?  And what about Rand’s father, former presidential candidate Ron Paul?  Does civil rights resentment run in the family?

Rand Paul attracted media attention when he told Rachel Maddow that he rejected key provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Maddow: “Do you think that a private business has the right to say we don’t serve black people?” 

Rand Paul: “Yes:

Rand Paul, the Tea Party victor of Tuesday’s Republican primary in Kentucky, is beginning to backtrack.

After listening to Rand Paul for thirty seconds you realize that the son got all of his father’s ideas, but only a modicum of the old man’s intelligence.

I doubt either man is a racist in the sense of hating individual black people for the color of their skin.  But Ron Paul grew up in a world saturated with neo-Confederate clap-trap and deep racial resentment.

Two years ago, James Kirchick with the New Republic wrote an article called, “Angry White Man: The Bigoted Past of Ron Paul.”  The article created a brief Tea Pot Tempest before passing into oblivion.  Kirchick tracked down some of Mr. Paul’s old newsletters dating back to the mid-1970s and was shocked by the content.  Paul (or his surrogates) regularly made crudely disparaging remarks about Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement, homosexuals, Jews, Israel and AIDS victims while describing low-income African Americans as lazy, welfare dependent criminals.  Moreover, Paul appeared to embrace a full range of One World conspiracy theories.

Asked to explain the newsletters on Wolf Blitzer’s CNN program, candidate Paul expressed shock and bewilderment.  He hadn’t written the offensive newsletters, he said, and didn’t know who did.  He was doing a lot of traveling and public speaking at the time, Paul explained, and had a medical practice to look after.  As a result, he farmed the newsletter out the underlings and didn’t give it a lot of attention.

That was enough to satisfy Mr. Blitzer.

More troubling, however, is the comments section.  Ron Paul devotees defended their leader against Kirchick’s “smear campaign” but seemed untroubled by the content of the old newsletters.  This is typical:

While many of the statements are politically incorrect. Are they exactly errant? To me it seems like messages of frustration for a government that literally has kept blacks down by welfare and other means to get their votes. As for Israel, I know RP says he would also not give money to their enemy. Does it make sense to fund Israel and then fund their enemies even more? As for Alex jones and the central bankers, bilderburg, etc. If people don’t see that has been happening since about 1913 then they are the loons! This is not conspiracy but fact. As for racism! I don’t think there is a race that doesn’t have bad people, lazy people, corrupt people, etc. which I believe was also in one of those newletters but wasn’t mentioned here! Can’t wait to see what you write when the One World System is in place…and it will be! We are so far along in globalization it would make your head spin and somehow you spent too much time writing this article instead of researching the latter.

The most common reaction boiled down to: “So, what’s the big deal?  Every right-thinking American believes that stuff.”

I am profoundly unconvinced by Ron Paul’s exercise in spin control.  Kirchick asked all the right questions at the conclusion of his article:

Paul’s campaign wants to depict its candidate as a naïve, absentee overseer, with minimal knowledge of what his underlings were doing on his behalf. This portrayal might be more believable if extremist views had cropped up in the newsletters only sporadically–or if the newsletters had just been published for a short time. But it is difficult to imagine how Paul could allow material consistently saturated in racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy-mongering to be printed under his name for so long if he did not share these views. In that respect, whether or not Paul personally wrote the most offensive passages is almost beside the point. If he disagreed with what was being written under his name, you would think that at some point–over the course of decades–he would have done something about it.

Even if the real Ron Paul is a big fan of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, his association with groups like the John Birch Society and proponents of Christian Reconstructionism raise troubling questions.  In a 2008 address at a John Birch Society convention, Paul praised the organization and thanked its supporters for working supporting him over the years. 

The John Birch Society was, and remains, deeply opposed to the goals and successes of the civil rights movement.

Christian Reconstructionism is a philosophy rooted in the writings of Rousas John Rushdoony, a pseudo-scholar who denied the holocaust and saw slavery as fully legitimate.  According to Rushdoony’s Wikipedia article: “Rushdoony believed that interracial marriage, which he referred to as ‘unequal yoking’, should be made illegal. He also opposed ‘enforced integration’, referred to Southern slavery as ‘benevolent’, and said that ‘some people are by nature slaves’.”

Gary North, Rushdoony’s son-in-law (and ardent Reconstuctionist), worked for Ron Paul when he first went to Washington in 1976.  Ron Paul’s racial views may have evolved over the past few decades, but this stuff is in his DNA.

I like Ron Paul.  On a few subjects (the drug war, the Iraq war) I find his arguments compelling.  I met him when I was giving a talk at a libertarian convention in College Station, Texas a few years ago and he seemed like a genuine guy.   But he isn’t the kind of secular libertarian you will find at Reason Magazine or the Cato Institute. 

I predict that neither Rand Paul nor his illustrious father will be damaged by charges of closet bigotry.   This supposedly negative press will help both men more than it will hurt them.  It is virtually impossible for an outspoken supporter of civil rights to succeed in conservative politics.  The bigots may be in the minority, but they comprise a powerful constituency that no savvy Republican can ignore. 

How widespread is civil rights resentment in white America?  Here’s one way to find out: ask a representative sample of Americans if they share Rand Paul’s concerns about the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

I predict that a majority of white respondents would answer in the affirmative.   I pray I’m wrong about that.

Charlie Smith interviewed me for this article several weeks ago and has done a good job of representing my views.  My take is featured in the second half of the piece.  (More on the Friends of Justice perspective can be found on our website). Greenwood is thirty miles west of Winona and the Commonwealth has been following the Flowers case since four people were brutally murdered at a Winona furniture store in 1996.  Coverage from other Mississippi outlets has been sporadic.  In a state still stuggling with a painful Jim Crow heritage, the racial implications of the Flowers case are troubling.  I was in Mississippi again last week and discussed the story withy Jerry Mitchell, a reporter noted for his investigative work on civil rights era murders.  I think it is safe to say that Flowers 6 will get improved coverage.  In a case this flimsy, media scrutiny forces everyone, jurors included, to second-guess their easy assumptions about this case.

Sixth trial for Flowers in Winona quadruple homicide begins June 7

By CHARLIE SMITH

News Editor

Published: Saturday, May 15, 2010 7:50 PM CDT

WINONA — Fifty-four jurors have been convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that Curtis Giovanni Flowers fired the shots that killed four people at a Winona furniture store in 1996.

The Mississippi Supreme Court has overturned 36 of those votes — three convictions — based on what it held to be prosecutorial errors and racial discrimination in jury selection.

Two other times at least one juror remained unconvinced of Flowers’ guilt, resulting in mistrials.

Starting June 7, 12 more registered voters of Montgomery County, selected from a pool of 600, will weigh Flowers’ fate. (more…)

Across America, violent crime rates are falling.  Homicide rates for 2009 were down sharply, continuing a decade-long trend. 

According to the Washington Post, “The national decrease in murder began about two decades ago. In 1991, the national homicide rate hit 9.8 per 100,000 inhabitants, prompting forecasts of permanently rising street violence — then fell to 5.7 in 1999. Many wondered whether this “Great Crime Decline” could be sustained for another 10 years. The answer would appear to be yes: By 2008, the murder rate had drifted down to 5.4 per 100,000, the lowest level since 1965. And given the preliminary figures, the rate for 2009 should be lower still. Indeed, if present trends continue, America will experience a degree of public safety not known since the 1950s.” (more…)

The acquittal of Jeffrey Cotton, a Houston police officer, has brought racial tension in Houston, Texas to the boiling point.  As the New York Times points out, Houston has a reputation as a tolerant and racially diverse community.  But when a jury composed of ten white and two black jurors ruled that Mr. Cotton acted according to proper police procedure local opinion quickly divided along racial lines.

An officers in an overwhelmingly white, upscale Houston neighborhood saw two black youths getting out of a parked car and jumped to the conclusion that the car had been stolen.  The boys were told to get face down on the ground.  At that point, the officer called for back-up and a second officer, Jeffrey Cotton, arrived. 

That’s when Bobby and Marion Tolan came out of their house, saw their son, Bobby lying face down on the ground, and started accusing the officers of abusing their authority.  When officer Cotton threw Marion Tolan against the garage door, her son started getting up and was shot in the abdomen.  Fortunately, the shooting wasn’t fatal.

Most white observers would read a story like that and identify with the officers.  In their eyes the two young men were suspected felons so, of course, they were handled roughly.  Officer Cotton thought Bobby Tolan had a gun and fired his weapon in self-defense.  From a white perspective, there was nothing racial about the incident.  Who knew that an ex-baseball player owned the home?

Most black residents, including it seems, the entire civil rights community, see the incident differently.  Would the first officer on the scene have reacted the same way if he had seen two white adolescents pull into the driveway and get out of the car?  To ask the question is to answer it.  How often do police officers in upscale neighborhoods like Bellaire see young white boys getting out of vehicles?  Wouldn’t this be a regular occurrence?

But this officer thought the young men looked suspicious because this was a white neighborhood and the kids were black.  There is no other explanation for the officer’s behavior.  There is nothing intrinsically suspicious about getting out of a car. (more…)