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Barber speaks on Our War Economy: Militarism and Gun Violence

by John K. Stoner (May 25, 2018)

I put it this way: Can any country embrace overwhelming violence as its national policy and not see individuals mimic that violence domestically?  Or promote violence on the wholesale level and expect to contain it on the retail level?

I don’t think so.

Rev. William Barber, Jr. preached a powerful sermon on Sunday evening May 6 at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington DC.  He described and excoriated the war economy, militarism and gun violence of the United States of America.  He did it fifty years after Martin Luther King’s courageous Riverside Church condemnation of America’s militarism and war on Vietnam.  Barber leads  the Poor People’s Campaign which he is bringing back to give this nation a second chance.

I am here today to urge you to listen to this sermon from beginning to end.  If you spend any time listening to voices or reading the words of people who claim to inform you on what is happening in this nation and world, take time to listen to this one.

The sermon is wonderfully long, courageous, prophetic, passionate, fact-filled and moving.   Historic, in a word.

The sermon is on YouTube here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G4oJOQWFTA

There is exegesis (The Legion exorcism), history (genocide and slavery, pillars of American greatness), economics (53% of US discretionary budget military), psychology (moral injury—ubiquitous and debilitating),  and invitation (higher ground).


Listen, learn, weep and act.