Recently a friend was asked, "What church do you go?" to which he replied he was an atheist. I heard his response and was left contemplating what does that mean today and in this historical moment. What did his declaration have to do with what we were doing on Saturday mornings on a street in Washington, DC educating and asking people to join the economic boycott against the Target corporation?

Target was one of the first companies to announce a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiative after the police murder of George Floyd. Target, being a Minneapolis-based corporation, evidently felt that it had a special responsibility to lead the country in terms of addressing racial injustice. This was until President Donald Trump came to office. Target was one of the first companies to bend its knee at the altar of the wannabe emperor, Donald Trump. Trump's attacks and demands on corporations and other entities to jettison DEI programs served as a litmus test of loyalty and patriotism. Nearly all of the other companies followed suit prostrating themselves before the gods of greed and political accommodation.

This is how dictatorial regimes work. They invent ways to distinguish the "believers" from the "non-believers," the trusted from those who cannot be trusted. Therefore, when my friend asserted boldly, proudly, and loudly that he was an atheist I was left to make a historical connection with what that meant in this heated political moment, and also what did that mean to me—a church person most of my life. "I am an atheist," he asserted, and that caused me to wonder what does that have to do with us boycotting Target these many months, and whether there was a historical correlation between what he was declaring and what we were doing?

After some time, I turned to my friend reflecting upon the history of the term atheist, and I shared that the term atheist was used in the first century CE to label and castigate those who would not participate in emperor worship or the trappings of all of the other Roman gods and goddesses. An atheist was a person that did not worship Caesar. The Caesars were generally deified, and the worship of Caesar and all of the Roman array of deities served as a test of loyalty. Those who fell into line and worshiped Caesar were loyal and patriotic, and those who resisted the test were seen as a threat. Early Christians were generally labelled atheists because they refused to worship the things of Caesar, and they generally resisted the Roman social order. It is rumored that John who wrote the letter Revelation, not the John of the gospel, was exiled to the Isle of Patmos for his refusal to "Hail Caesar" or worship all of the other trappings of the Roman order. I reminded my friend that he was standing in a time and place where his declaration, "I am an atheist" could mean something more than the fact that he did not believe in God. Without him even knowing, he was declaring the same sentiments that were stated in the first century that separated the believers from the non-believers. The non-believers refused to accept the false gods, deities of human making, and the trapping of those gods for the sake of money, position, and power.

Without honest critique and cynicism coming from non-believers not seduced by the Democrat-Republican beauty contest, or the quixotic notions of an independent candidate, we will find ourselves in this predicament again.

Given those historical facts it made sense as to why we were on the street in front of a Target store boycotting the business and urging others to do the same. We were doing historically what the atheists of the first century did, challenging the acquiesce to power and governments, and the........

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