Before allegedly attempting to assassinate the president, Cole Tomas Allen reportedly wrote his motivations and answered objections in a brief, 1,000-word manifesto. The first objection was that Christians ought to turn the other cheek.
“Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed,” the manifesto reads. “I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration.”
Reporters for Religion News Service and The Washington Post have excavated Allen’s Christian history, one rich with Bible studies and a serious engagement with the faith. Allen’s alleged motivation reads not like someone who hates Christians, as the Trump administration has claimed, but as someone who—at minimum—has loved Christians deeply and takes their theology seriously enough to engage it directly.
Allen allegedly wrote that “turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.” Malcolm Foley, a theologian and pastor in Texas, has wrestled with that. His church spent nearly a year preaching through the Sermon on the Mount, where “turn the other cheek,” comes from.
In our interview, we broke down Jesus’ command to turn the other cheek, the question of violence for Christians, and how communities can sustain a commitment to love.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mitchell Atencio, Sojourners: Why do you care about violence, as a theologian? And what grounding principles do you bring to this question?
Malcolm Foley: When I started my PhD, I wanted to do it on the Greek church fathers and Calvin, and all this other stuff. But I ended up doing my work on lynching in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Focusing on the most violent instantiation of white supremacy in American history, that’s what led me to ask some of those questions. I was not only asking “Why that violence?” but also “Why so brutal?”
A lot of historians would ask, “How could these white people who claim to be Christian be members of lynching mobs?” And Black Christians contemporary to them would say, “Well, Christians don’t gather in mobs to kill people, so they’re not Christians!” It was that simple logic and they move on.
When you add on to that my preaching through the Sermon on the Mount, a commitment to nonviolence is very, very clear to me. All that remains to me is to answer how that works its way out in the world.
What is the Sermon on the Mount? What type of knowledge is it meant to be: Proverbial? Aspirational? Rulebook?
I see what Jesus is doing there similar to what Moses is doing when he gets the law at Mount Sinai. It’s a charter for the Christian life. If you’re wondering what Christlikeness looks like, it looks like that. When you have the beatitudes, those are essentially descriptions of Christ. Our fundamental calling, one of the reasons why the Son of God takes on flesh and lives this perfect life, dies, is raised, and ascends, is in order to unite us to himself.
What we see in the Sermon on the Mount is a description of what that discipleship looks like. What does it look like to take up your cross daily and follow Christ? It looks like the Sermon on the Mount.
When we preached through it over the course of 11 months, one thing I pressed to the congregation was that they may be used to sermons on the Sermon on the Mount where you hear Jesus say things and you get immediate qualifications. I wanted them to hear Christ’s words as actually addressed to them, as though there’s actually the expectation that they live in that way. Not just you individually, but communities bound together by the holy spirit. That’s the only way you can actually, consistently work in this way, because there are all these exterior forces that try and convince us otherwise.
I don’t want to ask you to throw too much shade, but in preparation for this I read a professor of Christian morals at Harvard Divinity named Rev. Matthew Potts who said, “The problem with Christian ethics is that we have these commands which are given to us and we have to make judgments about what we’re going to do when we cannot live up to all the commands we’re given.” The Bible Project says, “Jesus is not claiming we should never resist those who seek to harm us.”
One wrong way to read the Sermon on the Mount is to read it as an impossible standard that Jesus met so you don’t have to. [Laughs] That dilutes the message of the sermon.
When you read these things and immediately feel the reaction, “I can’t do this!” the response ought to be, “By the spirit we can do this.” Not only “we can,” but this is what true life, true peace, and true power looks like.
One of the reasons we don’t experience the power, peace, and joy that Christ has for us is because we find excuses not to live the life God has called us to live. That’s the way I’ve experienced it.
Let me read starting in Matthew 5:38. “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you: Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also, and if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, give your coat as well, and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to the one who asks of you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.”
Start at the beginning, why does Jesus say, “You have heard that it was said?”
When he refers to eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, he’s referring to the lex talionis. It’s a law that’s meant to prescribe what true justice looks like; its purpose is to curb revenge. If somebody attacks you, what this eye for an eye law tells you to do is respond with the same force that was visited upon you. In the Old Testament, there’s a limit on the force that you ought to exert.
READ MORE: A Woke Sermon Drove This Fundamentalist to Leftism
But what Jesus is doing here is saying, “No, actually, we don’t fight fire with fire. We fight injustice with love.” And in many ways, this is exemplified with the cross. The way that Christ defeats the powers and principalities is not by out-dominating them, but by the means of his own death and resurrection.
Jesus is pressing something much deeper than equal retaliation. And also much more difficult.
“Do not resist an evildoer.” Some suggest that should be “Don’t resist in kind” or “Don’t resist with vengeance.” What does it mean that we shouldn’t resist an evildoer?
That particular phrase also shows up in 1 Peter and Paul uses it in Romans 12. When it shows up in other books of the New Testament, it’s in many ways a quotation of Jesus. It’s one of these really significant ethical elements of the faith. Evil will not be overcome by evil. Violence will not be overcome by violence. The way that violence functions is in a constantly cyclical way. The only way to break that cycle is with something that is actually counter to the root of the cycle.
My favorite quote on Christian nonviolence is Antonio González in God’s Reign and the End of Empires. He says, “Christian nonviolence is not based on an ethic of respect for life or on the tactical superiority of nonviolence, but on the determination to confront evil at its very root.”
Romans 12 says "Do not repay evil for evil." But how do we know that to mean "Do not repay violence for violence”? Someone might object that not all violence is evil.
I want us to think through what the scriptures mean when they talk about love. In 1 John 3:16, it tells us, “We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.” Immediately in the verse that follows, John says if any of you have material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need and has no pity on them, how can you say God’s love abides in you?
Love, in the scriptures, is a material commitment to your neighbors and brothers and sisters. But! When we think about violence, we generally don’t think about enacting violence on neighbors and siblings, we think about visiting it on our enemies. But! We seem to be told by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount to love even our enemies!
Paul says in Romans 12 never to seek revenge, “for vengeance is mine,” says the Lord. Then, he says if your enemy is hungry, you don’t starve them, you give them something to eat. If they are thirsty, you give them something to drink. Which suggests to me that the love we are to show to our neighbors and siblings is the same love we are to show to our enemies.
The next part of this section has three instructions for going further than demanded of us. For example, if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, give your coat as well (Matthew 5:40). One popular interpretation is Walter Wink’s idea that these are actually forms of nonviolent resistance, and a sort of spiritual judo. What do you think?
I like it, but we ought not interpret the instruction in a way that is dependent on a person responding a particular way. When the primary interpretation becomes “this mode of resistance will be aimed toward ultimately ending that oppression”—that oppression might not end by you acting this way. And some might argue, then why do it?
The most important thing for us to remember about these three responses is that the Lord wants to shape us into particular types of people. He wants to shape us into people who, when we see another human being, we are seeing somebody who is a unique, unrepeatable icon of God. Regardless of what they may do to us or how they present themselves. Each of those responses is you making a commitment to love even those who oppress and mistreat you. And that’s really hard!
We’re preaching through 1 Peter right now. And this emphasis on “You will suffer injustice” is something none of us want to hear. When we see or experience injustice, our first impulse is to want to stop it. Then you read the scriptures, and the apostles facing persecution are flogged, and they leave the council saying, “We are thankful to have the honor to suffer dishonor for the name of Christ.”
To get from where we are naturally, where we see suffering as something to be avoided at all costs, to the place where, when people revile and persecute you, that makes you blessed? There’s a distance that needs to be traveled for most of us.
So, even if Wink’s interpretation doesn’t have the result we would like it to have, it’s still the right thing to do.
A word I heard again as you talked about the apostles: “we.” Is there a Christian emphasis on the ability of communities, rather than individuals, to resist evil and to return good?
When Elijah is fleeing from Jezebel in 1 Kings 19, and he goes before the Lord and says, “I want to die, I’m all alone,” and all that stuff. The two words of comfort that God offers are: “Go anoint these folks,” and also, “I have 7,000 that haven’t bowed the knee to Ba’al.” Those two words of comfort are: Go do the job you’re supposed to do, and you’re not alone.
The position that sin, death, and the devil want us to be in is distracted from the task that the Lord has set for us and thinking we’re alone. Because when we’re isolated, we’re weak. It’s not just important that God has called us individually; God works in community. One of the only ways you’ll be able to experience the joy, the encouragement that’s necessary to live this life, you can only do this within community.
Think about the fruit of the Spirit. Those attributes all have to be exhibited in community. In order for me to be patient, I gotta have people to be patient with. In order to love, that love must be expressed. To bear one another’s burdens, we have to be open about those burdens and then we can bear them together.
Looking back in history, it’s hard to say “do not resist an evildoer” if that would mean we never filed lawsuits against school segregation, never walked into the schools even though people were trying to stop us. Is that resisting an evildoer?
This also gets raised around questions of submission to the government. When submission to the government is not opposed to the word of God, then we do it. But if it is opposed to the word of God, our first commitment is to the Lord.
We have to be the type of people who have the stamina and fortitude to face the consequences that could be visited upon us if we make those types of commitments. In the case of many forms of injustice, my first commitment is to love my neighbor. I want us to be communities that think creatively about what that love looks like, especially in a world economy that presses exploitation and domination in diabolically creative ways.
I had never heard someone say “turn the other cheek” is addressed to the oppressed rather than bystanders, as Cole Tomas Allen allegedly wrote.
The funny thing is, I myself have thought along those lines sometimes before. I get how attractive that interpretation is, because turning the other cheek is so hard. We really do want to emphasize that when we see a brother or sister suffering, and we have the opportunity to intervene on their behalf, we are called to do so. To use that to justify killing? That doesn’t work.
The way that it’s framed, even though Jesus is talking to folks who are on the bottom, it extends broader than that. Big picture, Jesus is saying regardless of circumstance, when you face violence and injustice, your response is love, all the time. That’s hard! That’s hard when you’re the one suffering, and also when you see someone else suffering injustice.
It’s why I use the language of antiviolence in my book. In being committed to love, that’s an active commitment to the wellbeing of my neighbor. When we see things that undermine your wellbeing, we’re going to come next to you and stand beside you even if it means we suffer with you.
What are arguments you find compelling for other interpretations of violence? And why is it worth it for Christians who are committed to nonviolence to spend time studying those who feel differently?
One critique, especially for Christians—this is something James Cone rails against—is that white people can’t tell Black people to respond nonviolently; you don’t know what we’ve been through. When nonviolence is expressed with a kind of condescension, that’s not helpful. It’s really important to be aware how difficult the things Christ calls us to do are. It’s not easy. It’s calling us to resist what is a natural impulse toward self-protection.
I’m named after Malcolm X. I love Malcolm! The great thing about a number of the things he said is they are so reasonable. “If someone comes after you, put them in the ground.” That just makes sense. I get it! It’s not what Jesus said, but I get it!
We’ll only actually believe nonviolence if we can do it together, and if we can witness the fruit of walking through these things together. I think about Romans 8—if we’re children of God then we’re also heirs, “heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if we in fact suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.” I am deeply convinced that walking that road together, the road Christ calls us to, the cross, is really the only way to experience the glory that Christ has prepared for us. There’s not greater glory than that.
“One wrong way to read the Sermon on the Mount is to read it as an impossible standard that Jesus met so you don’t have to.” —Malcolm Foley
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