Last weekend, I visited my home state of Illinois to attend the Church at the Crossroads conference, which was held at Parkview Community Church in Glen Ellyn. Conference organizers estimated that 580 attended in person and 300 more joined virtually. The conference was convened to encourage American evangelicals to listen to Palestinian Christians and to confront and correct those who use scripture to “justify war, occupation, or silence” in the face of the escalating violence in Israel and Palestine.
Practically speaking, though, what was the point of this shindig? From my perspective, Church at the Crossroads sought to emphasize that building relationships and pushing for structural change must be done in tandem and that this work must be done by a broad coalition.
On the first day of Church at the Crossroads, conference speaker and Nazareth-based social policy researcher, Lamma Mansour, set the tone. “For us as Palestinian Christians, what has been most wounding is the response of our many siblings in Christ,” she said from the main stage. “While many have shown solidarity and spoken up about the atrocities and injustices taking place in the land, many others have chosen differently. Some cheered on the violence. Some funded it. Some gave it theological cover. Some attempted to stay neutral. And some were simply silent.”
“For us as Palestinian Christians, what has been most wounding is the response of our many siblings in Christ. Some cheered on the violence. Some funded it. Some gave it theological cover. Some attempted to stay neutral. And some were simply silent.”
-Lamma Mansour
According to conference organizer and theologian Daniel Bannoura, 45% of those in attendance self-identified as evangelicals. A 2024 survey by the nonpartisan think tank the Chicago Council on Global Affairs showed that “64 percent of white Protestant evangelicals maintain that Israel is defending its interests and is justified in its military actions in Gaza, roughly double that of the overall population (32%).” The same survey showed that 60% of evangelical respondents opposed restrictions on U.S. military aid to Israel.
It’s because of data like this that, in June, when I first heard about the conference and its targeted demographic, I was skeptical about the possibility of persuading American evangelicals to listen to Palestinians, let alone change their minds about supporting the state of Israel.
During a pre-conference August phone interview with conference organizer Ben Norquist, who is a member of Parkview Community Church, I asked him why this conference was primarily focused on evangelicals. “We wanted to reach people who needed to be reached,” Norquist explained. “ In my work with the Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East, I’ve seen people go on a journey and learn and change, and it’s not necessarily been at a large scale. But it’s been genuine, and it gives me a lot of hope.” Norquist told me that this change emerges when evangelicals listen to Palestinians and forge long-lasting relationships with them.
Ray Kollbocker is the lead pastor of Parkview Community Church and has taken members of his congregation to Israel/Palestine with Telos Group, a nonprofit dedicated to equipping Americans to advocate for peace between Palestinians and Israelis. “One thing I learned from Telos,” Kollbocker told me in a pre-conference August phone interview, “is that when you sit across the table from someone different from you, it’s hard not to see the humanity. And that changes things.”
But researcher Ben Lorber, who led a breakout session at the conference and is a co-author of Safety Through Solidarity, told me that improving the situation in Israel/Palestine will take more than building relationships.
“I do think in a place like Israel/Palestine, there has to be systemic change of the fundamental structures of injustice that can come before everyone just gets along.” Lorber continued, explaining that “if people can agree on the fundamental humanity of everyone, if there can be agreement on the basic principles of ending apartheid and ending the genocide, then relationships can flow from that.”
A repeated theme I heard throughout the conference was that standing in solidarity with Palestinians wasn’t a politically partisan issue. At best, this struck me as an attempt to unify conference attendees around a single issue. At worst, it reminded me of writer Adam Joyce’s observation in 2022 that apolitical framings obscure the causes of conflict and injustice, truncating the Christian’s imagination when it comes to faithful political engagement.
Lorber, who approaches these topics from the Left, is convinced that we should attempt to have these conversations across a myriad of divides and remain open to the possibility that people can change their minds. However, he also emphasized an important point: We must acknowledge that the Republican Party is at the helm of an authoritarian movement.
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Some at the conference sought to distance themselves from politically partisan insights. From the main stage, Fares Abraham, who is the founder and CEO of Levant Ministries, asserted, “As Palestinian Christians, our bottom line is this: We want the gospel to win. The gospel of peace, the gospel of reconciliation, the gospel of love, the life-giving gospel of Jesus Christ that is not entangled with politics.”
Similarly, conference speaker and theologian Preston Sprinkle, who spoke from the main stage on the second day of the conference and described himself as “a bible believing, non-liberal, card-carrying evangelical Christian,” called bombing women, children, and civilians “immoral,” but insisted that he was neither making a partisan claim nor a political one. For Sprinkle, his claim was theological, based on his conservative reading of scripture, and not rooted in the politics of the world but in the politics of being on Jesus’ side.
Before continuing, I want to say that I agree with the journalist, poet, and Palestinian organizer Mohammed El-Kurd, who writes the following in Perfect Victims: “I do not make any attempts to undermine anyone’s contribution to our struggle, even if I disagree with their tactics.” And in this case, it seems appropriate to substitute “tactics” for “theology.” I express my criticism and disagreement in good faith, not to be divisive, but to clarify and challenge what is meant when some say—sometimes in the same breath—that Jesus sided with the occupied, but that he was neither partisan nor engaged in worldly politics.
The politics of solidarity cannot just be theoretical; they must be tangible. If it is true that Jesus decided to align himself with those the empire considered to be enemies, and that this alignment resulted in him being crucified as a terrorist, then we must ask: Who might Jesus align himself with today? If Jesus stands with Palestinians, then that means he stands against the Republican Party that is currently controlling the U.S. government and actively attempting to restrict freedom of speech and ban Palestinians from the country.
Now, just because Jesus would stand against the Republican Party does not mean that Jesus would be a Democrat. I am sympathetic to the argument that Jesus would have refused the binaries of the political establishment. But just because he would likely refuse those binaries does not mean that he would refuse to be politically entangled or take a side that the Republicans would dismiss as “radical leftism.”
I think part of the reason that speakers and conference attendees believed that affirming Jesus’ solidarity with Palestinians wasn’t partisan is because they held the sincere conviction that, if Jesus were alive today, he would critique both Democrats and Republicans. And while I would largely agree with that, I would also say that the political Left is best equipped to criticize Democrats and Republicans. As philosopher Cornel West notes in his Prophesy Deliverance, this tradition of critique is committed “to the negation of what is and the transformation of prevailing realities in light of the norms of individuality and democracy.”
From my perspective, Jesus’ political analysis today would share much in common with the analysis of lawyer and human rights activist Noura Erakat, who criticizes both parties but recognizes that it is the political Left that is mobilizing around issues of Palestinian solidarity. Ultimately, if it is “leftist” to say that Jesus would’ve chosen the side of Palestinians over and against a right-wing empire that valorizes extremists and consecrates bombs, then we should embrace that label and even examine what such a framework might add to our analysis of what it means to take Jesus’ side today.
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For Rev. Munther Isaac, who is a Palestinian liberation theologian, the author of Christ in the Rubble, and pastor at the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem, Jesus’s political commitment to the oppressed is what compelled him to say in October 2023 that Jesus was with Gazans buried beneath the rubble. Or, as Isaac put it during his message from the main stage on the first day of the conference, “The way of Jesus blesses the bombed, not those who throw the bombs.” When I heard Isaac say this, I privately wondered whether Jesus might also refuse to bless U.S. taxpayers, like me, who pay for the bombs to be dropped.
“The way of Jesus blesses the bombed, not those who throw the bombs.”
-Rev. Munther Isaac
Sometimes, social justice Christians—specifically in the United States—make the politics of solidarity too cheap. We think that if we verbally affirm our solidarity with “the oppressed,” it will somehow negate the fact that the bombs being dropped on Gazans have been paid for by us. Posting on social media about solidarity won’t change that. Signing petitions and statements about solidarity won’t change that. These actions are not necessarily bad, but I often wonder, when we say we stand in solidarity with the oppressed, if we are trying to convince people that we are “woke” so that we can gain clout and attention. And when I start wondering these things, I remind myself of El-Kurd’s warning that, “within certain progressive niches in media, culture, academia, and politics, ‘Palestine’ is emerging as a social currency for certain individuals.”
Bannoura knows El-Kurd is right in pointing to this tendency among progressives, which is why he was celebrating that the conference brought together “evangelicals, moderates, conservatives—all the way to Mainline, liberal progressive Christians, and Catholics.”
Credit: Matt Mansueto/Church at the Crossroads
“Palestine could be this very strange unifying issue,” Bannoura told me while at the conference. “Sad that we have to deal with a genocide for this to be the case. But at the same time, what are we doing? How are we being strategic and smart about it? How are we reaching out to the sheep who are out of the fold to bring them in?” For Bannoura, the novelty of this conference was that instead of preaching to the choir or gathering together like-minded individuals, Church at the Crossroads united people with differing theological and political positions to affirm that the situation in Palestine was an essential issue.
On the final day of Church at the Crossroads, conference organizers released a statement of solidarity with Palestinian Christians and invited conference attendees to sign. During a pre-conference phone interview in September with Sandra Maria van Opstal, who was a conference speaker and is the director of the mobilizing collective Chasing Justice, she told me that such statements were important because they encourage us to “see the work of justice and liberation as collective and communal.” While I would have liked the statement to focus less on theological pronouncements and more on encouraging signatories to, for example, participate in the Boycott, Divest, Sanction Movement, I signed it anyway because I think van Opstal is correct: Collective liberation—for Palestinians and everyone else—will only be possible through forming broad coalitions of people with diverging beliefs and opinions.
And while I have misgivings about assigning negative connotations to the word “politics” and am unable to affirm the majority of the faith claims made within the statement, I ultimately signed it because I took the following line to be an affirmation of coalition building across a variety of differences: “We are convicted to reorient our faith away from the us-versus-them binaries of politics and hatred and to recenter our faith in Christ’s summons to mercy, justice for the oppressed, and love for all humanity (Matthew 22:37-40; 23:23; 25:31-46).”
It may very well be the case that such coalitions are small and nascent, but as conference speaker, historian, and author of numerous books, Jemar Tisby told me at the conference, “The lessons of history teach us that it has always been a minority. So maybe we can disabuse ourselves of the idea that we’ll have a majority of people or even a lot of people. But we can have enough.”
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