Faced with barbarism on such a scale, "what would Jesus do?"

Someone asks, "What would Jesus do and say if His followers were attacked?"

That is not the interesting question, not the one you should ask. As presumptive founder and leader of his personal divine cult or religion, he has got to stand up for his own supporters. The interesting question is "what would 'Jesus' (or those who think of themselves as inspired by him as prophet, messiah, savior, or God) do if people who reject him (as such) are attacked?" And while we are on the question, let's be clear that "attacked" obviously is ambiguous between argumentatively (as in political or other disagreements in a democracy) and violently.

Now, some of those who (were said to have) rejected him (as prophet, messiah, savior, or God) were a specific people living in what was until recently a predominantly and even governmentally, and not just in style but officially, Christian society. Those people were "the Jews." What happened to many of them when they were imagined as attacking their savior/God, and were then themselves attacked? Or when they were attacked, and sometimes killed or systematically eliminated from the society in a spectacularly violent manner making use of special prisons? Others were eliminated there along with them, though they were a special target.

What would Jesus do? What did those who represent him and follow him as prophet, savior, messiah, and God, do in the instance of these "attacks" (the term may seem at least ultimately a bit of a euphemistic understatement--in fact, Kristallnacht was a set of attacks - or pogroms, to use the usual term-- while the Holocaust itself was something more than that, driven not by passionate hatred by bureaucratic organization, efficiency, and the supposed duty to obey)? What almost all of them did -- Christians, and their leaders, of every kind and church denomination, was nothing. It wasn't enough of a concern for them to bother. (Or they approved of it, or did not think it noteworthy to disapprove of). Others-- many -- participated.

This silence speaks to all of us, still. And Jesus? Maybe he would have thought that, as Agamben describes the characteristic treatment of the "special person" or "homo sacer," they certainly should not be sacrificed, but might be killed with impunity -- or allowed to "disappear" with little clamor, at least outside these prisons in the countryside in Poland and elsewhere. Christ's salvation may be not enough even for the Christians. I'm not a Christian; should I leave it for you who are to decide?

The problem with Christianity is first that it is a private salvation that does not seek, at least not principally, to change the world. Secondly, it is actually deeply authoritarian. This is true in somewhat differs ways in both its Catholic or Orthodox and its Protestant forms, most of them at any rate. Perhaps both of these are consequences of the fact that, like Islam after it, it was and remains a religion of empire and faith. Like Islam, it can also be a faith of insurgents to empire, and unlike Catholicism, its Protestant form is individualistic and affirms modern "autonomy" of conscience. It does not in the first instance ask its followers to create social and economic justice and set free captives. Judaism, from which it took its principle of universal love, which it then absolutized and set against the idea of justice and "law," did and does. Next week's springtime Jewish holiday is about liberation, and that is both social and individual. Christianity has never been political in this sense, though it certainly become deeply governmental. (Agamben analyzes this at length in much of the Homo Sacer series). It was a religion of empire. Good Christians are, like good Muslims, obedient to God. Jews are conditionally and we can challenge even the most ultimate authorities. Judaism was not an empire. One of the last attempted European continental empires sought to wipe them out, and largely did, though not decisively, and only predominantly in a large part of central and eastern Europe. It wiped out Eastern European Jewish culture along with its language, which will soon be only an historical and literary ("dead") one, much more than Latin. Christianity seeks to be a universal empire of the faithful, as Islam did, through a set of conquests and wars. It offers on the basis of its ethics of universal love, wrongly opposed to justice when it is better to understood as its basis, a personal moral salvation from damnation by way of the inevitability (which it insists on, a fact that is different from its pervasiveness, which is a condition that theoretically could be historically overcome) of sin and crime. This also may mean that it tolerates crime in a certain sense. It offers redemptive forgiveness from all sin or crime, on the grounds of the basic assumption that love is a divine principle opposed to justice, which is merely worldly, and Christ's kingdom is somehow "not of this world." A good Christian should and surely does not hate the people who were murdered in those camps, and would never do what the Nazis and their collaborators did, though many who were Christians did, to their eternal shame. But would he or she make it a first order priority to change the world's institutions so that this kind of thing cannot happen, and will not continue to happen, as it does? There are other prison camps, and in fact Auschwitz may be a paradigm of them now in a way, and should be so considered, but was actually of course modeled on prior examples, including ordinary prisons for people actually guilty of real criminal offenses, which should be judged and not tolerated. Christianity is fine for those it works for, but, like Buddhism, and for similar and perhaps related reasons, it is not enough, not good enough.

Happy Easter, Christians. Your savior is risen, promising you life abundant and joyful, perhaps “eternal,” his sacrifice yielding the conditions of possibility of your absolute forgiveness as making possible that. Ok, so now what? Since we are all in this world together, and. must still live in it somehow, what do we do now?