Sabbath as Resistance

“AMERICA FIRST” is not a new mantra. While Donald Trump used the phrase during his campaign and in his inaugural address, some of its most telling roots are in the America First Committee of the 1940s, which advocated staunch isolationism (and less explicitly, anti-Semitism) and sought to prevent the U.S. from entering the second World War.

For Trump, the phrase is connected to economic wealth. “I’m ‘America First,’” Trump told The New York Times in a pre-election interview. “But you can’t make America great again unless you make it rich again.”

When Trump declares he will make “America” first and rich, he’s clearly not referring to everyone in the U.S. “America first” is a battle cry for the privileged, those who already reap tremendous benefits off the backs of the marginalized. When Trump wants America to be first by being rich, he means white Americans at the helm of corporations and lobbies, whose success comes at the expense of others.

‘Prosperity breeds amnesia’

Christianity is rooted in a gospel narrative that urges its adherents to strip ourselves of attachment to worldly treasure and the egoism of being first (see Matthew 20:16). Despite that, Trump’s most supportive base is among white evangelicals. As Frederick Douglass put it, “Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference.”

Why has so much of modern (white) U.S. Christianity—with its scriptures of the “first shall be last” and in light of hard-earned historical lessons of slavery, the Civil War, and the civil rights movement—aligned itself with values so antithetical to Jesus’ message? Perhaps some of the answer can be found in an insight from Walter Brueggemann’s Sabbath as Resistance: “Prosperity breeds amnesia.”

Have we forgotten the story of Exodus? Norman Wirzba of Duke Divinity School described Pharaoh’s frenetic “Egypt first” policy of brick-building—the original pyramid scheme—as “the wealth of the few ... secured at the expense of the many.” Scripture is clear, Wirzba says: We simply must do better than this.

Like Pharaoh, Trump wants his “mammon” (Hebrew for money, wealth, or riches) to grow. But Brueggemann warns that mammon comes at the cost of “endless desire, endless productivity, and endless restlessness.” Restlessness is a trait we’ve become accustomed to under Trump. It arrives in the form of angry tweets, ill-informed executive orders, and wall-building rhetoric that condones and perpetuates white supremacy.

How did God’s people resist under Pharaoh to become free? They fled to the desert, under Moses’s leadership, where they had nothing, but built community shaped by cooperation and love. God then gave them commandments of rituals and ethics—including the obligation to rest—a mitzvah completely antithetical to Pharaoh’s (and Trump’s) dictatorial agitation.

Have the sons and daughters of Abraham—and the people of the New Covenant in Christ—forgotten tyranny as we enjoyed American prosperity? Have we stripped the gospels and the story of Exodus so sharply from our canon that we’ve proof-texted our way into forgetting Pharaoh’s tyranny or Jesus’ commandments?

Negative and positive duties

How will the people of God break free from the modern Pharaoh’s enticing chains of first and rich? By acknowledging that we actually serve a God who is neither obsessed nor preoccupied with being first or rich. Rather, this is God who incarnates as a servant, who commands shabbat and love for neighbor.

Bowing down to the God of love, and not to Pharaoh, means that we utilize the fourth commandment (“Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy”) as both a negative and positive duty. First, we must embrace a negative duty to cease from conscious or unconscious participation in this system of violence and oppression accentuated, perpetuated, and maintained by Pharaoh.

An institutional approach to human rights, according to Yale’s Thomas Pogge, emphasizes that citizens have a moral duty to refrain from participating in oppressive institutions. And the economic institutions that surround us, as Wirzba describes, are built on oppression. “Whether we care to admit it or not,” Wirzba writes, “the church bears a great responsibility for the fact that we are abettors and willing participants in one of the most rapacious, violent, and destructive economies the world has ever known, an economy in which natural habitats, families and local communities, and moral principles are regularly sacrificed for the sake of financial gain.”

The problem with worshipping at the altar of mammon—often a cloak for systemic racism—is that it’s the altar of Pharaoh, not Jesus. The white American dream so many evangelicals voted for stands in sharp contrast to the gospel—a challenging narrative of inclusion where love, not bricks, is the commodity, freely shared and given to all. But love—cooperation—is the enemy of capitalism, because it fosters community and collaboration, not competition. among peoples.

Second, in Pogge’s view, Christians have a positive duty to create systems of care to protect and empower the oppressed from coercive institutions. These systems of care fulfill the greatest commandment: loving God and loving our neighbor. By opting out of Trump’s mammon empire, we can opt in to rightly centered systems. From the Israelites to Gandhi’s obstructive and constructive programs of resistance, the idea of negative and positive duties has for centuries led to societal change. Using this lens for the fourth commandment of ritual rest from our labor, we opt out of tyranny and opt into care for one another.

Opting Out

Sabbath—the longest of the 10 commandments—is both the tie back to Egypt and the fulcrum to the future. Remembering the Sabbath to lekadsho (“sanctify it”) becomes the bridge from our ritual way of life with God to our ethics toward family and neighbors. But Sabbath is not only for individuals and Israelite families; God says it must be extended to servants, animals, and strangers. Everyone—not just those in Trump’s America First—gets a day off.

“Sabbath-keeping is a way of making a statement of peculiar identity amid a larger public identity, of maintaining and enacting a counter-identity,” Brueggemann explains. It is a “bodily act of testimony to alternative and resistance to pervading values and the assumptions behind those values.”

As much as our privilege allows, we can use Sabbath to opt out of the mammon machine one day per week. If all U.S. Christians did this, we’d harness and mimic the enormous economic power of the most successful boycotts. But nothing will change if we remain in our silos, allowing the allure of prosperity and the power of empire to obstruct the true meaning of the gospel.

And Sabbath is practiced in community: “God did not give this commandment to a person but to a people, knowing that only those who rested together would be equipped to resist together,” Barbara Brown Taylor wrote in The Christian Century. Keeping Sabbath not only prevents our own exhaustion but also defends against the exploitation of others.

Opting In

Real Sabbath, Brown Taylor insists, is done in community each week and every seven years, Leviticus 25-style. Everyone and everything is affected: Land and animals are given rest; debts are forgiven; those who work in bondage (literally or metaphorically) are freed. It’s the kind of wild community cooperation we’ve come to expect from a triune God. Traditional order is turned upside down; the rules of the game are changed; new systems are created.

But such a radical interweaving of community dependence will not arrive in a white American Christianity that has too much invested in benefiting from Trump’s ethos of “America first and rich.” Resistance as a community, Brown Taylor insists, comes from those who remove themselves from the merry-go-round to join God in tikkun olam, the “holy work of mending the world.”

Sabbath as resistance is nearly impossible to practice in isolation. We must opt out of mammon to create new systems of care for the marginalized in our communities. Like Gandhi’s satyagraha (“truth force”) movement, our positive duty is to create spaces that foster truth, love, nonviolence, fearlessness, tolerance, and the dissolution of the U.S. “caste” system.

May we, like the Israelites, turn to God each week, to remember and keep holy the fulcrum commandment that connects us to the Divine and to one other. May we be reminded that systems of oppression and coercion can only be perpetuated by our participation. If we, as Christians, use Sabbath as a tool of resistance—both in a negative and positive duty—we free ourselves and others from the bigotry of America first and rich.