“Any god who is mine but not yours, any god concerned with me but not with you, is an idol,” Heschel writes. Think of segregated white churches during Jim Crow, or the many churches today, in our “post-racial” moment, that continue to be de facto segregated every Sunday morning. Think, too, of the blood that has been spilled in the name of the God we claim as our own. You have all heard the underpinnings of this idolatry: “God Bless America,” which I see as the words of a bankrupt neoliberal theology. In fact, there is something profane in that statement, which worships and calls upon a God that blesses America only.

If there are any blessings to be had, the request, surely, mustn’t be partisan. At least in Christianity, Judaism and Islam, it is believed that human beings were created in the image of God. Not just the faithful of these religions, but all humans: Syrian refugees, whom our current administration have deemed threats, were created in the image of God. Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin, members of the Ku Klux Klan and Bashar al-Assad all were created in the image of God. So even as we ask God to bless America, surely we must ask God to bless those whom we have deemed threats or enemies. Our blessings must be scattered across the entire world, inclusive of all of humanity.

RECENTLY, TRUMP, SPEAKING at Liberty University, said to a graduating class of future evangelical leaders, “In America, we don’t worship government, we worship God.” The students applauded and cheered. If what Trump said was true, then why didn’t the students turn their backs to him, to protest the contradiction between the poisonous effects of his white nativism, extreme divisiveness and his “theology”? Unless, of course, Liberty University’s God is clad in a profane theological whiteness.

When they were applauding Trump, the students were not applauding a prophetic visionary but someone with a dangerous Pharaonic mentality, one who is intemperate, self-indulgent, power hungry, unpredictable and narcissistic. Remember that the applause was for someone who refuses to take the nuclear option off the table, who said that global warming was a hoax and has now pulled out of the Paris climate agreement, who said of ISIS that he would “bomb the shit out of ’em.”

The graduating students at Liberty University should have been told, as Heschel wrote, that “the age of moral mediocrity and complacency has run out. This is a time for radical commitment, for radical action.”

Heschel, in a speech on religion and race, reminded us of the persistence of autocratic power when he stated that “Pharaoh is not ready to capitulate. The exodus began but it is far from having been completed.” That exodus, originating with Moses and the emancipation of the Jews, as Heschel suggests, is eternal, and signifies the march toward not just an outward physical emancipation but a spiritual one — one that demands fierce self-reflection. I take it that for Heschel, all of the oppressed of the world are in need of an exodus. In another work Heschel later wrote, “One’s integrity must constantly be examined.” Bob Marley, in his song “Exodus,” says, “Open your eyes and look within. Are you satisfied with the life you’re living?” Some voices refuse to let us rest. King had such a voice, and so did Socrates.

AND WHAT HAVE WE SEEN? I am pretty sure that no contemporary Christians have seen God, no contemporary religious Jews have seen Yahweh and no contemporary Muslims have seen Allah — certainly not face to face. Yet all of us have seen the aftermath of murdered children from war-torn countries, their fragile bodies covered with blood. I am haunted by the little body of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi who lay dead and face down in 2015 on a Turkish beach after his family fled violence in Syria. I continue to be haunted by the murder of an unarmed Trayvon Martin in 2012. Hundreds of thousands of children around the world are suffering. We all have known about the cruel and despicable violence toward transgender individuals. We know about the magnitude of human trafficking, the magnitude of poverty, and the sickness of hatred.