����vlog����

The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges. 

Timothy Patrick McCarthy
Morning Prayers | Memorial Church
March 31, 2025

A Reading from the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 20, Verses 20-26:

Keeping a close watch on him, they sent spies, who pretended to be sincere. They hoped to catch Jesus in something he said, so that they might hand him over to the power and authority of the governor.
So the spies questioned him: “Teacher, we know that you speak and teach what is right, and that you do not show partiality but teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. Is it right for us to pay taxes to Caesar or not?”
He saw through their duplicity and said to them: “Show me a denarius. Whose image and inscription are on it?”
“Caesar’s,” they replied.
He said to them: “Then give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”
They were unable to trap him in what he had said there in public. And astonished by his answer, they became silent.
 

There ends the reading.

These silences are still swirling, still lying, still growing.

The last time I was here, I spoke about the silences that lie all around us: the silence of obfuscation that seeks to avoid accountability, the silence of intimidation that instills fear and imposes punishment, and the silence of abdication that enables these abuses of power. These silences are still swirling, still lying, still growing.

Our reading today offers us another kind of silence: Jesus’s success in silencing the insincere “spies” who hoped to “trap him” for speaking and teaching “what is right.” Though the larger stories of both Jesus and Caesar are complicated—as Easter season and the “Ides of March” remind us—the moral of this story is clear: sure, pay your taxes, but don’t get it twisted, your ruler is not your god. Jesus avoids the trap set by the insincere spies and lives to teach another day.

It turns out Jesus contained multitudes. Here we have the example of a clever and steadfast Jesus, as opposed to, say, the brave and rebellious Jesus who on other occasions was a model of peaceful civil disobedience in the face of state violence. What connects these different versions of Jesus is a moral clarity about the nature of power: state power, higher power, our power.   

Our country, as we know it, is under assault. Rule of law rejected. Civil rights violated. Free speech denied. Free press corrupted. Elected officials captured. Government dismantled. Research halted. People detained, deported, and disappeared. The principal perpetrators of these present-day evils are the political rulers put in place by a sufficient percentage of the people. They will remain in place—and succeed in their assaults—if enough people consent to confuse these rulers for gods and regard them as such. This is how power works, in monarchies and tyrannies and democracies alike. Let us not forget that Hitler was elected, too.        

Higher education is one of the major targets of this assault. There are many reasons for this, but it seems the most convenient justification is that institutions like this one have become citadels of woke intolerance and indoctrination where people like me—Homosexuals! Heretics! Historians!—are grooming the young with “improper, divisive, anti-American ideology” and forcing them to embrace things like democracy and diversity, equity and empathy. So the ruler-gods and their spies and enablers ban books, control curriculum, weaponize words, silence speech, punish protest, freeze funding, and deliver demands designed to bring the colleges and universities to their knees. This is happening, here and now, across the country, every single day.

All of this can seem so unprecedented, but you don’t have to be a gay communist with the last name McCarthy to understand how much of this is all too familiar. As tempting as it is, there’s no need to go to Nazi Germany in search of historical precedents. We have our own American forms of fascism. Take Jim Crow, the home-grown system of white supremacy and racial segregation, which the Nazis studied before building their own concentration camps. Or the Red Scare and Lavender Scare of the McCarthy era (no relation), where communists and homosexuals and other dissidents, both real and imagined, were persecuted and purged, their lives upended and undone. History overflows with such examples, which is precisely why the ruler-gods and their spies and enablers are so hellbent on gaslighting us and silencing the truths that we teach.      

Another historian by the name of Tim (Snyder) has warned us about such treachery. In his book, On Tyranny, Snyder writes: “Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want and offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.” He calls this phenomenon “anticipatory obedience” and considers it a “political tragedy.”

It is also a moral tragedy. Everywhere we look, we see examples of “anticipatory obedience,” individuals and institutions caving to the ruler-gods who are also bullies. Higher education offers its own tragedies in this regard. Some schools, like Northeastern and Michigan, have obeyed well in advance. Others have decided to submit to the dangerous demands without resistance or opposition, the most spectacular and heartbreaking example of which is Columbia, where I learned to become a historian. There will surely be others.         

   
Harvard’s moment of truth hovers over us. The early indicators are not good: the coup against Claudine Gay, the crackdown on campus protest, the new “use of space” and “institutional voice” policies, the weaponization of prejudice and “viewpoint diversity,” the firing of faculty, the cancelling of workshops and courses and (if word has it) affinity group graduations. If we pay close enough attention, we can see that the caving has already begun. And though I’m a historian and not a prophet, if I were a betting man, I’d predict that things are about to get a whole lot worse here. I sincerely hope I am wrong about that.
We cannot allow ourselves to be trapped or forced into submission by the ruler-gods and their insincere spies and enablers. In a recent letter to the Harvard Corporation and Board of Overseers, signed by nearly 800 Harvard faculty, we wrote that now is the time to “publicly condemn attacks on universities,” to “legally contest and refuse to comply with unlawful demands that threaten academic freedom and university self-governance,” and to “mount a coordinated opposition to these anti-democratic attacks.” Here’s hoping that Harvard’s rulers will follow the lead of Harvard’s teachers.

Any one of us who has been taunted on the playground knows that there is only one way to defeat the bullies. So my prayer this morning is this: that we stand up to them—cleverly, bravely, fiercely, together—for as long as it takes. Our time for truth has come.