One of the most common metaphors throughout the Bible is that of shepherds (political and religious leaders) who are in charge of the sheep (AKA the common people). Throughout the Hebrew scriptures, God continually calls out the bad shepherds that are misleading and mistreating the people under them, while trying to put into place good shepherds instead – Ezekiel 34 is a great example of this type of metaphor.
Truthfully, as an individualistic American, I don’t really like the shepherd metaphor as it implies that most human beings are simple sheep, without the capacity to make complex decisions on their own. (The pejorative use of the term “sheeple” as a secular insult to castigate people who believe in vaccines and a round earth hasn’t helped my aversion to the concept.)
However, after witnessing the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th, I actually realize the metaphor of sheep and shepherds is quite apt. Without shifting away any blame from the average Joes and Karens who perpetrated the Capitol invasion (I hope they all face appropriate civil and criminal penalties), the simple truth is that this act would not have happened without the long list of political, cultural, and religious leaders/shepherds who instigated it. After all, six months ago virtually none of these Capitol invaders knew about the role Congress plays in certifying the Electoral College vote. Thus the mass gathering and violence we saw on January 6th is almost entirely due to the bad shepherds that organized it, promoted it, and then allowed it to happen.
It’s easy to imagine how differently January 6th would have gone if we didn’t have so many bad shepherds misleading the sheep
If Trump, the political shepherd of our nation, had peacefully conceded the election back in November or December, most of these sheep would have grumbled but peacefully gone along with it. If Trump had not demanded a mass rally in Washington DC on January 6, calling for his followers to march on the Capitol, a few diehard protesters still would have been there, but not the thousands we saw overpower the police.
If far-right newscasters, politicians, and media personalities hadn’t invented and spread hundreds of false and misleading narratives about the election, the sheep would have accepted the conclusions of the 60+ different federal judges (many of whom were appointed by Trump!) that the elections was free, fair, and without widespread fraud. If these same shepherds hadn’t kept stringing along false hopes that Mike Pence would magically overturn the election on January 6, the sheep would not have been so devastated when the inevitable certification of the election results happened.
If conservative Christian pastors and theologians had taught their flocks to love their enemies, instead of dominating and killing them, we would not have seen Christian banners and symbols waved as battle flags and taken into the halls of Congress. If these Christian leaders had accurately taught that white supremacy and Christian nationalism are satanic heresies from the pit of hell, these sheep would not have been so bloodthirsty and eager to overturn the legitimate election of someone who doesn’t represent those things to them. If these Christian shepherds had spent more time speaking against the dangerous Qanon / End Times conspiracies actively spreading in their pews instead of against scary liberal acronyms like “CRT”, “BLM”, and “AOC”, maybe their congregants would have been less likely to fly to Washington DC to beat up cops and scrawl “Murder the Press” on the Capitol walls.
The blame for what happened on January 6th does not solely fall on the far-right: If the liberal shepherds who run social media corporations such as Facebook and Twitter had heeded the warnings of experts and taken steps to stop the radicalization of sheep on their platform via viral fake news and incendiary accounts, there would be far fewer people falling prey to conspiracy theories like Qanon or the election fraud narrative. Granted, there’s always a few kooks in every society, but without the aid of social media their numbers would be much smaller. [On a related note, I have actually come around to agree with conservative pundits that Section 230 should be repealed and the federal government should regulate social media corporations much more firmly than it currently is. These massive, greedy companies have shown over and over that they care more about profit than people; they are the bad shepherds that are allowing wolves to eat their sheep and cannot be trusted to keep self-regulating without any checks and balance.]
Those are just a few of the bad shepherds who are to blame for the shameful actions we saw on January 6th. To my knowledge, none of these shepherds have publicly repented of their ways. What will God’s judgment upon these bad shepherds look like? And perhaps an even more important question: who will raise up a generation of good shepherds to better guide the sheep?