Conscience of the State

Third Sunday after the Epiphany - January 25, 2026

Father Vincent Pizzuto, Ph.D.

St. Columba's Episcopal Church

LISTEN HERE

Isaiah 9:1-4 + Psalm 27:1, 4-9 + 1 Cor 1:10-18 + Matthew 4:12-23

Grace to you and peace from God, our father and the Lord Jesus Christ. + I speak to you today in the Name of the Three-in-One and One-in-Three. Amen.

While today I had been planning to resume our series of reflections on the liturgy, I feel morally and spiritually compelled to speak to the brutal murder of 37-year-old Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis, on January 7^th by ICE agent Jonathan Ross who shot her first through the head as she drove her car past him, and who continued to fire, striking her two more times: once in the forearm and once in the breast. As Mrs. Good’s car careened out of control down the street, with a now deceased driver behind the wheel, the rageful ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, is heard clearly and unambiguously shouting at his already dead victim: “F-ing Bitch!”

And just yesterday, another American civilian, 37-year-old intensive care nurse, Alex Pretti was also murdered by ICE agents who fired 10 shots into his body in a span of 5 seconds, despite the fact that he collapsed helpless on the street after the first. A murder that was precipitated by his attempt to defend another American citizen from pepper spray.

In an age of smartphones and body cams the gruesome, indeed, heart-sickening details of these murders have been on public display for all the world to see from multiple angles, by which any objective viewing reveals in both cases (regardless of what details political hacks may try to quibble over, or of the scandalous way this administration is attempting to ‘spin’ these stories): make no mistake: the world has witnessed the brutal murder of two American citizens by the rise of a new Gestapo, whom we call ICE agents.

If that moniker feels hyperbolic, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has already scrambled to defend Jonathan Ross’ actions without naming him, while Vice President JD Vance has now said that ICE agents are “protected by absolute immunity.” “Absolute immunity” means absolute impunity. And absolute impunity of our government agencies and its armed forces is the very basis of a totalitarian state.

In his recent sermon, Fr. Andrew acknowledged a chilling recognition that for all of his adult life he could not imagine how the citizens of pre-World War II Germany had come to acquiesce to such a vile dictatorial leader as Hitler. That is, until now. I have to confess, I had always wondered the same. And with Fr. Andrew, and perhaps many of us here today, experience that chilling sense of “I see now…this is how it happens…”

As many thoughtful Christian contemplatives and social activists from Simone Weil, to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from Thomas Merton to Dorothy Day, to Archbishop Desmond Tutu. As all of these spiritual giants have observed the steps to a totalitarian regime can be recognized in the progressive stages of:

·Loss of truth (Indeed, as Merton wrote in his Raids on the unspeakable: “When a people become indifferent to truth, they become vulnerable to collective illusion.” Have we not seen this progression in the accusations of fake news, the attempts to silence and intimidate the free press, in the escalation of unvarnished lies and spin, and conspiracy theories?);

The next state of the rise of the totalitarian state is the growth of Fear and Loneliness (I know people who are part of an underground network to help protect people should there be an ICE raid in their location).

Moral Laziness (the overall dismissal of the horrors of “Alligator Alcatraz” and the incursion of the government on people’s liberties)

Substitution of Power for Love (we see this clearly in the toxic masculinity of this regime and the lust for scapegoating, otherizing, egregious insults to one’s political opponents, and the cruelty in the treatment of anyone and everyone who is not loyal to Donald Trump). 

Efficiency Without Conscience (the giving of ‘absolute immunity’ to ICE agents who openly and publicly murder American citizens on our streets with impunity).

I challenge anyone to deny that we have seen a lock-step progression of each of these stages ushered in by the Trump regime. And in the midst of this escalation which has now unabashedly exposed itself without even a hint of subtlety there grows an ever-pressing question, voiced best perhaps by Anglican Archbishop, Desmond Tutu in his book, Hope and Suffering, where he says: “The Church must be reminded that it is not the master nor the servant of the State, but rather the conscience of the State.” 

For those priest and ministers who hear these words in purple or red churches or who fear the consequences of what it means to ask the church to be the conscience of the state in these politically divisive times, I implore you to take courage in the fact that you have the Gospel and History on your side. Imagine looking back to a German Pastor in the 1930’s who said, I am not going to say anything to my congregation for fear of being accused of being political in church. For fear that I might offend some of my Nazi supporting congregants…for fear that some might walk out. 

I implore you to find a way. Whatever it means to be the conscience of the state, one thing is absolutely clear: the church’s vocation is not in times like these to find a ‘balance’ it is to tell the truth. Hard as that may be. Indeed, Bonhoeffer was murdered for doing just that, yet before they took his life he wrote in his Letters from Prison, “The most common form of stupidity is moral, not intellectual.” And Simone Weil, murdered two years earlier by the same Nazi regime, rightly observed in her Oppression and Liberty that “The totalitarian state is not a form of government; [but] a religion of power.”

That this new totalitarian state, this ‘religion of power” (not from the 1930s but from the 2020s) should claim for itself a Christian nationalism must unequivocally be condemned as a modern heresy in no uncertain terms – and it must be condemned by Christians. Christ never claimed for himself any nation, state, or kingdom of this world and in fact flatly and unambiguously rejected any such offer in his formative temptations by Satan in the desert (Mt. 4). To the contrary, the only Christ we follow, the only Christ who ever is, was, or will be, is the one who insisted without qualification, “My Kingdom is not of this world.” (Jn. 18:36)

Now the idea the church cannot or should not be political, is nothing but a convenient and false narrative that can only be perpetuated by Christians who at any given time are aligned with a regime whose ideologies and actions they do not want to see challenged. Make no mistake that in a Post-World War I Germany, in the rubble Germany’s destruction, Hitler’s promise to his people was to “Make Germany Great Again”! Do not forget that!

If you want to know then what is ours to do, what it means for the church to be the conscience of the state, hold first and hold fast to that truth. God forbid we should ever let our faith be collapsed into an identification with any political party, nor, for that matter, with any church institution – all of which are subject to co-option and corruption by government as the history of Christendom from Constantine until today has revealed over and over again. Indeed, this is why, when the Third Reich infiltrated the National Lutheran Church of Germany, Bonhoeffer inaugurated the underground “Confessional Church” (as he called it) which served as a remnant of the authentic Christian Church and as a resistance movement against the regime.

Bonhoeffer realized then what Thomas Merton would observe some 30 years later when he said, “The danger in the totalitarian system is not merely that it is oppressive, but that it is false. It forces men to live in a world of systematic lies.”

Against the national loss of truth, then, it is our vocation as church, to stand for truth. Against the fear and loneliness, it is our vocation to stand in solidarity, to make our homes, our hearts, our churches, to be a refugio (a refuge) for those in who are fearful and sought after. Against the moral laziness that paralyzes a nation throughout the rise of a totalitarian regime, we must possess the moral courage to look within ourselves at the source of our own paralysis. 

To look at the inner demons I diagnose in Contemplating Christ, as like those clever spiritual parasites that make their home in us. You will recognize them by the way they comfortably exist alongside our virtues and are cunning enough to leave us in stasis. Those inner demons whose aim is not that we should self-destruct but something far more insidious: that we should become ordinary, that we should be neutralized or worse, co-opted, in service of the powers of “this present darkness” (Eph. 6:12). Demons who convince us without much effort that we should remain complacent in the face of our hypocrisies and in the face the world’s injustices. Better, they tell us, that we should find ourselves just comfortable enough to lack the motivation to challenge the status quo of our interior lives, the state of the world, or the plight of others.

Indeed, while most of us will never be counted among the infamous tyrants or conspicuous villains of history, the only moral climate these demons need to flourish is one that renders us extraordinarily mediocre. But these temptations to hold onto our complacency are, in fact, the very forces that make evil possible in the world. Moral paralysis and mental distraction are enough to allow the most egregious tyrants to carry out their work of oppression without resistance. They are enough to allow the most unjust social systems to remain in place because they do not adversely affect me personally. And therein lies again the insidious primordial curse of Eden rising up in our midst: that primal illusion of our separation from God and one another, an illusion that is as much of a social crisis as it is a spiritual one.

Indeed, one we accept the totalitarian narrative of “us” versus “them,” we have become adept at turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to any inconvenient truths that would otherwise expose the scaffolding of our self-constructed identities as individuals, societies, and entire nations who need to believe we are good, that we are innocent, and that we are benevolent. This is precisely the milieu of discord and fragmentation in which our demons thrive and in which totalitarian regimes flourish. It is what clears the way for the Substitution of Power for Love. It is the wisdom of the world against which the Cross stands as a sign of contradiction.

When unchecked this development results inevitably in efficiency without conscience, for which there could hardly be a better example than the scrutinizing efficiency of the Nazi regime in their plans to carry out their so-called ‘Final Solution.’ And when we see American citizens being murdered with impunity by ICE agents on our streets in plain view – we know we with perfect clarity and in no uncertain terms that we have witnessed the Substitution of Power for Love, in a State which has now taken full license to carry out its agenda efficiently and without conscience. And it why each of us, all of us, must be that conscience.

Sisters and brothers, Renée Wood and Alex Pretti are our fellow citizens. Our sister, our brother. The are our kin. They are us. Let us not fail to be their conscience. Let us remember with Bonhoeffer, that “One act of obedience is better than one hundred sermons.” That “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil.” And perhaps most of all, that in such silence “God will not hold us guiltless.”

+ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.