‘Tis the season.
A weekly newsletter from our former (moderate Baptist) church announced that they’re participating in Operation Christmas Child and are hoping to get fifty boxes. They had never participated in this before, always opting instead to support a local foster kid support group.
My mom has been updating me with news about their church’s OCC endeavors. She’s their church’s point person for this. On one hand, I cringe because of all my feelings around Franklin Graham and Samaritan’s Purse. On the other hand, my mom is retired and this is about the only thing she does outside of her usual home routine so I’m glad she’s got this.
See, many years ago before we knew, we participated in Operation Christmas Child through our church. Franklin Graham carried the coattail legacy of his remarkable father Billy. At that point, I was still evangelistic enough that I respected the mission of Samaritan’s Purse. So we filled our shoebox and enclosed our check for $5 to cover the processing and shipping. It wasn’t long before the junk mail blitz started–full-page, glossy, colored pamplets whose one goal was to get us to donate money to Samaritan’s Purse. I’d estimate that it cost probably about $1 to print those and another $0.50 to mail them. Multiply $1.50 times the several of those we received times thousands of people. Wouldn’t Samaritan’s Purse be better served to scale down the solicitations and put that money back into, oh, I dunno, serving people?
Fast forward and we have the first Trump administration. It quickly became apparent that Franklin is nothing like his father. Franklin is a charletan, a false prophet who values power over the Gospel and his own personal prestige over the people God would have him serve. Franklin cozied up to power instead of humbling himself to serve all people like his father did.
Now we’re at today. Predominantly white churches are filling those shoeboxes with dollar store imported shit that will, in the short term, decimate parts of the local economies they’re going to and long term, pollute those areas. Those who fill their shoeboxes can feel SO GOOD about themselves, patting themselves on the back for sharing the gospel with “heathen children” in “heathen lands.” (In case you didn’t know, each shoebox gets a religious tract thrown in before it’s shipped.) These good Christian people can feel like they’ve followed Jesus’ teachings as their shoeboxes go to places south of the equator. Think about the skin tones of people who live in places like South America, Africa, the Middle East, Oceania, and South Asia.
Yet, these same people don’t really give a shit about black- and brown-skinned American children being ripped out of their beds by ICE, dragged into the streets, separated from their parents, and zip-tied like criminals. They don’t seem to care about the hundreds of young Hispanic children who got separated from their parents and lost in the system during the first Trump administration.
And lordy, don’t even dare to mention innocent young Black men who are lynched every week. These good church folks will find some reason to justify why it’s okay–“They were probably doing something wrong.” “They should’ve been home where they belonged.” “That isn’t really happening.” Or, my personal favorite, “What does that matter?”, followed closely by, “That doesn’t make any difference.”
My heart hurts for these kids. At least the “heathen children” don’t have to worry about being killed by an angry white man with an assault rifle while they’re going to school or church. They won’t be dragged out of their beds by pseudo federal agents (more angry white men) in the middle of the night and treated like criminals.
But who cares, right? As long as it’s only happening to melanine-blessed kids, white people can just keep on patting themselves on the back for their performative “evangelism” that strips away any pretense of humanizing others or forming relationships.
