Since arriving to the White House, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, has been on a destructive whirlwind through the federal government. At the behest of President Trump, the South African billionaire and chief of the Department of Government Efficiency has led an effort to illegally gut numerous federal agencies, fire tens of thousands of federal workers, and perpetrate fraud while claiming to root it out.
Regarding the seemingly intentional turmoil of Musk’s actions, Trump bragged at the Conservative Political Action Conference that his administration had “effectively ended the left-wing scam known as USAID. The agency’s name has been removed from its former building, and that space will now house agents from Customs and Border Patrol.” Taken alone, these actions have the makings of an oligarchic heist or a coup that cripples the government’s capacity to provide and protect public goods.
But within a wider aperture of the administration’s priorities — dismantling the victories of the Civil Rights movement, hoping to establish concentration camps, offering refugee status to white Afrikaners, attacking trans people, and engaging in a “war on woke” across institutions — a coherence comes into focus amid the chaos. These are men who destroy to build a racial hierarchy in service of their own wealth and profit. Or as political commentator Elie Mystal of The Nation has framed it, they are bringing a “a neo-apartheid economic agenda to the US government.”
Apartheid is often understood as a modern invention of settler-colonial states — such as the Jim Crow South, 20th century South Africa, or the modern nation-state of Israel — where institutional power organizes life and death along the lines of racialized oppression and economic domination. The apartheid state builds the segregated water fountains and swings the policeman’s baton. It fashions the bombs that fall and the insufficient aid that arrives afterward. It is violence with a purpose: solidify a social hierarchy and profit from it. From Mystal, “Apartheid was, first and foremost, a business plan.”
The apartheid-inflected objectives of the current administration do not exist in a vacuum. Apartheid politics also require what German liberation theologian Dorothee Söelle termed “apartheid theology.” According to Söelle, apartheid theology “is a certain way of thinking, feeling and living without being conscious of what is happening around us. There is a way of doing theology in which the poor and economically exploited are never seen or heard — and that is apartheid theology.” Apartheid theologies sustain apartheid politics, blessing racial hierarchies and extreme wealth inequality, and rejecting the existence of the horrors apartheid propagates.
If apartheid politics is a business plan, then apartheid theology is part of the marketing strategy. Whether it’s Vice President J.D. Vance’s malignant musings on the ordo amoris, genocide apologetics by Christian Zionists, or the growing conversation on the sin of empathy amongst conservative evangelicals, these reductive, miserly conceptions of Christian love use blood, race, and citizenship to winnow down our faith’s ethical dimensions.
While apartheid might be a recent invention, Söelle saw a precursor of apartheid-sustaining faith in scripture, specifically in the rich young ruler (Matthew 19:16-22, Mark 10:17-27, Luke 18:18-30). For both Söelle and Jesus, the rich young ruler is a walking illustration.
In asking, “What must I do?” the rich young ruler seeks wholeness and spiritual fulfillment. Jesus responds, not by interrogating his theology, but instead by asking if he has kept the commandments centered around loving your neighbor. The rich young ruler asks, “What do I lack?” and Christ’s answer rings with what Vance has called a leftist inversion: Christ tells the man to give his possessions to the poor and follow him. But this costly request is too much for this representative of apartheid theology, for here is another man who hoped that something other than his unjust wealth and power was the problem.
What was true of the rich young ruler is true of our current moment: Apartheid theology works to ensure the barns of the rich remain overflowing as our neighbors go hungry. It enables one to watch, even rejoice, as one senseless bomb after another drops or as families are torn apart by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Defined by an emptiness that provokes an infinite and deadly hunger, enough is never enough for the adherents of apartheid theology.
Yet what is the inverse of apartheid theology? What is the rich young ruler rejecting? Christ clearly faults the rich young ruler for his refusal, but the invitation wasn’t simply a narrow opportunity for philanthropic charity. This is more than a failure of empathy; it is a failure of solidarity. Christ is inviting the rich young ruler to do what the disciples have done: to pick up a new way of life, one truly defined by loving your neighbor, or more specifically, by solidaristic love.
More frequently heard on a picket line or at a protest, solidarity is the “interconnections across difference” that community and collective action are made of. Solidarity is not simply mercy or empathy. It is not a thin, universal benevolence. And while often framed as a leftist virtue, it is a Christian one too.
Solidaristic love is both moral and materialistic, a principle and a political action — the call of Christ “to love your neighbor as yourself” given form and direction. We can form solidarity through the tender and mundane intimacies of life, actions that build communal trust such as meals together, mutual aid, and sharing in the joys and sorrows of life. We practice solidaristic love when we struggle for justice, working to build the material conditions where everyone has what they need while also working to dismantle systems such as apartheid.
The expansive responsibility that solidarity places upon us requires courage, not only to weather the boomeranging violence that is central to the business model of apartheid systems but to prevent our love from being ensnared by the narrow confines of blood and borders. Unlike the rich young ruler, we must refuse to allow our faith’s ethical dimensions to be circumscribed by apartheid’s profit margins. Ultimately, the core of loving our neighbors is not piecemeal beneficence, but an active commitment to solidaristic love, and participation in a shared political struggle for a world that Christ wants for all.
Recently on The Joe Rogan Experience, Musk claimed that empathy was a scam: “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit.” Empathy is not a scam, but individualism is. Like the rich young ruler, Musk’s wealth makes him a menace to everything, including himself. Indeed, apartheid’s lies of individualism and the soul-deep loneliness that comes with it make it easier to believe in a life sheltered by extreme wealth.
Within apartheid systems, everyday elements of life are built to divide us. Our social media feeds, our workplaces, and the design of our neighborhoods are all structured to tear us apart — to turn us into individuals. Within these divisions, the soteriological hubris of apartheid theology tells us that we don’t need solidarity and that we can save ourselves. Yet what apartheid theology mocks as weakness — interweaving your life with your neighbors’ lives — is the sacred calling of Christ. We are all born from God-breathed dust.
All of us were “made for love,” and the holy center of our faith’s activity is found outside of ourselves. Faith-driven love in pursuit of justice, like the best parts of life, is a shared project.
The work of faith is a project of solidarity. Working together across shared struggles is sacramental, the grace of God given its form. It offers us a chance to be knit together in new ways and generate the soul-building wholeness the rich young ruler sought. As theologian Rowan Williams has commented, “Solidarity builds the integrity of the spiritual life.” Apartheid, in all of its forms, stands as an unhealed wound in our common life. Solidarity’s holy power is to abolish the structures that profit from this wound’s existence. Only through solidaristic love can we truly become human as Christ hopes for us. Solidaristic love is about others, ourselves, and in the end, the heart of faith itself.
Adam Joyce has written for Christian Century, ABC Religion & Ethics, as well as other publications. His forthcoming book, No More Pharaohs: Christianity, Racial Capitalism, and Socialism will be published with Cascade Books.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!
