When Jobs Disappear

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I am told that all across Germany are plaques memorializing places where Jews lived, worked, or worshipped before being sent to the ovens. Auschwitz draws thousands annually to try to insure we “never forget.”  German youth face the atrocities of their grandparents, not to foster guilt but to better guard against repeating the horrific sins of the past.

By contrast, nothing in New Orleans alerts shoppers that they are passing the largest slave auction house in the world. No plaques commemorate the 4,000 sites in our country where African American men were tortured and lynched as late as the 1950s. No southern statues honor the Underground Railway and its heroes. Southern plantations today romanticize the lives of white slave owners and barely mention the half million black people whose lives were brutally stolen.

The North was deeply complicit. In a small gesture, Harvard University recently memorialized Titus, Venus, Bilhah, and Juba, who worked in Wadsworth House while owned by Harvard presidents Edward Holyoke and Benjamin Wadsworth. Some of Harvard’s land and buildings were paid for with wealth derived from slavery (by insuring slave ships, financing plantations, offering credit to purchase slaves). Slavery was not an abstraction, but a vast cruelty that defined and built our American society. It is responsible for much of the wealth and the racial attitudes we all have inherited. In Boston today the average net worth of white families is $256,500 while that of no minority group exceeds $18,000.

I am not immune. I’ve given fifty years trying to combat racism in my part of the church, but I’ve discovered that I too am prejudiced. I can be singing praises to Jesus when out of nowhere an arrogant racist thought will invade my mind. “Oh, no, Lord,” I say, “there it is again. I am sorry. Please take it away.” Racism is not just the Original Sin of America. It is mine too. It is in the air. All of us breathe it in.

Following Emancipation, slavery continued under another name—Jim Crow—until 1877 when federal troops were removed from the slave states and the Confederacy finally won. “Freed” blacks were lynched by hooded Ku Klux Klansmen. It was a terrorist insurgency, yet described by President Woodrow Wilson as: “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation … until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.” Slavery founded our country on white supremacy and the fear that black males will dominate whites and sexually force themselves on white women.

Unlike Germany, white America has not come to terms with its past. We are repeating the sins of our grandparents. Frightened by the coming non-white majority, America is actively legislating to maintain white supremacy: racial gerrymandering has almost eliminated black political power; mass incarceration disenfranchises non-whites for life (more are in prison now than were slaves in 1850); voter ID laws restrict blacks with “almost surgical precision”, and immigration to this “land of Immigrants” is being shut down. Apparently, too many non-whites are voting. And now, the safety net for the poor—both black and white—is being shredded to benefit the rich.

Racism is not a partisan charge. It is our problem. We talk of disappearing jobs in coal country and the rust belt. But fifty years ago, when jobs disappeared from the black community, the power structures were unconcerned. White churches blamed the “welfare mentality.” In 1997 the New York Times wrote “the issue is not welfare but the disappearance of work in the ghetto. The problem has now reached catastrophic proportions and if it isn’t addressed it will have lasting and harmful consequences for the quality of life in the cities and, eventually, for the lives of all Americans.” That was twenty years ago!

Today, in multiple ways, those with power over black lives reflect the Constitution’s valuation of African Americans as 4/5 human. Fearful partisan minds promote wildly immorally inaccurate views of the “irresponsible poor” while ignoring the irresponsible rich. For a second year President Trump refuses to speak to the NAACP. The organization’s response: “We have lost the will of the current administration to listen” to the concerns of the minority community. This is beyond personal racism. Our country is desperately embracing the legal, structural racism that has plagued us from the beginning.

Most African Americans face this organized rebuke and scorn as nothing new. They’ve been here before—many times. They held on to survive slavery. With faith, they will survive this too.

But on television you can hear the fear—liberals fearful of the future, supporters of Trump fearful of “the other”. Healthy Christianity would give hope, even in the face of disaster. Yet its loudest voices trust instead in structures of power. The religion has forgotten the Jesus who said not to fear. But I believe he is real, and alive today, and offers himself as an “ever-present help in time of trouble.”

The predicted catastrophic days are here. All Americans, rich and poor, left and right, are facing the impact of slavery and our national hangover from slavery. We long to end this civil war of character assassination. And we see the danger of trusting strong leaders who listen only to themselves.

But where are the political leaders committed to helping people who need help? We hear only the tired professional repetition of answers to last century’s questions. We are desperate for a bold vision that responds to genuine needs across the political spectrum. We want to be challenged. Like a bright North Star, we need a vision adequate to inspire action by the millions of us, wherever we find ourselves in all our wild diversity. E Pluribus Unum.

Who knows? Such a vision might even inspire the honest confession of more memorial plaques. And that would be a true miracle.

 

Christianity Today wants me to show mercy to Donald Trump

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I appreciate their challenge not to judge the President. But usually mercy is accompanied by justice.

“What to Make of Donald Trump’s Soul?” was the title of the editorial in the May issue of Christianity Today. In a featured sentence set in capital letters, editor-in-chief Mark Galli suggests that, “Instead of being quick to speak truth to power, we might also, from time to time, speak mercy to the immoral.”

And that is my dilemma, virtually a crisis of faith.

For fifty years I have lived in the black community and worked—I believe at God’s instigation—for political and economic justice and against racism in the church. I don’t like a lot of what Donald Trump is doing. Yet I have loved Jesus since I was a child and have spent much of my life trying to respond to his encouragement to love those who hurt us. I regularly struggle to pray for—not against—President Trump. God loves President Trump as much as he loves me, and I require no less mercy and forgiveness.

In not too many years I will be face-to-face with Jesus, who said never to ridicule someone or call them a fool.  I want Jesus to approve of the way I treat this man, whom many revile, but for whom Jesus died.

The evangelical church provides little guidance for how to treat opponents. Even before Barack Obama was inaugurated, evangelical leaders questioned his legitimacy, assassinated his character, and plotted his failure. I kept wondering how evangelicals could ignore everything Jesus taught us about how to treat others. Today, in direct contrast to their own actions toward President Obama, these same evangelical leaders want my acceptance and patience for a president they concede is immoral.

I want to follow Jesus even when his way appears complicated or dangerous, and I cannot simply ignore Christianity Today’s call for outrageous mercy. Shouldn’t God’s love be our model for this? In the early scriptures love was not merely an emotion, but a legal term. God loved his kings even when they rejected him by choosing to trust in national strength. Yet God in his love held them accountable, sending prophets to condemn their misplaced trust. God disciplined the whole nation when their king failed to use his power to protect the poor and the strangers within their gates. What does this mean for how Jesus wants me to treat President Trump?

God answered that question for me through an encounter with “the angry man.” That was how I thought of the neighbor I had seen stomping down the middle of our street, spewing invective. I spent days asking Jesus how on earth I was to love this neighbor. How could I start a conversation?

Late one night I was awakened by music blasting from the man’s car. Perhaps this is my answer, I thought. So, dressed in bathrobe and slippers in to appear non-threatening, I went out and tapped on his car window. When I began to talk he turned down the radio to hear me. I told him that for days I had been asking Jesus how to start a conversation with him. He was surprised and non-defensive. Eventually he told me he was having a hard time because his mother had just died. I shared about how I had felt when that happened to me and added that I would ask God to comfort him until the pain had begun to heal. Then I asked him to pray for me about a problem I faced. Since that night my neighbor and I greet each other with, “Hi, friend.” Occasionally I remind him to keep praying for me. Now, when I see him acting out, I rarely feel spiritually superior. Instead I feel sorrow for the burdens he bears.  I ask God to strengthen his very best intentions, his hope of being a better man and his genuine desire to help people.

Since that day my prayer has been that God will grant every prayer and hope of President Trump that fits God’s purposes. I pray for his healing from the childhood abuse that convinced him he was only acceptable if he was a winner, and I admit to God that I do not exist on a higher moral plain. Still, I cannot deny the damage President Trump is causing as he pursues his obsession to destroy everything accomplished by President Obama. And so I try to pray for our current president the way Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Desmond Tutu, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and the black worshipers in Charleston prayed for those who exercised power against them. I pray that President Trump will seek wisdom in the advice of diverse counselors and feel less need to defend his ego. I pray that President Trump will be more careful with the words he chooses so as not to get himself into so much trouble (and I feel a twinge of God’s sadness when commentators ridicule this child God loves).  I pray that President Trump will humbly recognize the vast difference between being a CEO who gets rid of problems by firing those who challenge him and being the president of the United States. Finally, I ask God to strengthen President Trump’s best intentions and reward his hopes of being a good president.

I have seen God honor my feeble attempts to “speak mercy” to those I am tempted to judge. But Christianity Today’s focus on mercy ignores its essential companion: justice. Yes, in the story of the prodigal son Jesus encourages limitless mercy. The son who demands half his father’s wealth, and then wastes it all, returns home powerless and repentant. His father responds by exuberantly embracing him and fully incorporating him back into the family.

But Jesus responded differently to the powerful and arrogant. When the Pharisees brought Jesus a woman caught in adultery, he condemned their injustice and exposed the self-deception in their belief that the woman was a law breaker and they were not.

God desires both mercy and justice. The two are radically different. In mercy, the Good Samaritan lifts a bloody victim onto his donkey, interrupting his own plans to take the wounded man to a doctor. Then, having done what he can personally, he pays someone else to cover the man’s ongoing health care.

Mercy is personal and direct. But we dispense justice impersonally through governmental and economic systems and laws. This protects poor people from the humiliation and manipulation that often accompany personal handouts, and it serves the overwhelming majority who are never picked up off the side of the road by those with resources. It is easy to give a hundred-dollar donation of mercy while taking away thousands of dollars’ worth of justice.

So in mercy I pray for Donald as if he were my own brother. And if he does not stop doing reprehensible things, I will seek justice—and President Trump’s removal from office—to limit the damage to those I was called to serve.

 

What to make of Donald Trump’s soul?

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That was the title of the editorial in this month’s Christianity Today. Capital letters proclaimed “Instead of being quick to speak truth to power, we might also, from time to time, speak mercy to the immoral.” And that is my dilemma, virtually a crisis of faith.

For fifty years I have lived in the black community and worked—I believe at God’s instigation—for political and economic justice and against racism in the church. I don’t like a lot of what Donald Trump is doing. Yet I also have loved Jesus since I was a child, and tried to respond to his encouragement to love those who hurt us. I regularly struggle to pray for—not against—President Trump. God loves Mr. Trump as much as he loves me, and I require no less mercy and forgiveness. In not too many years I will be face to face with the Jesus who said never to ridicule someone or call them fool. I want him to approve of the way I treat this other child he loves, this one whom many revile and for whom he died.

The evangelical church provides little guidance for how Jesus would have us treat opponents. Before Obama was even inaugurated its leaders questioned his legitimacy, assassinated his character, and plotted his failure. I kept wondering how evangelicals could so ignore everything Jesus said about treating others. Today they want my acceptance and patience for this “immoral” president, in direct contrast to their own actions toward Obama. Yet I want to follow Jesus even when his way appears complicated or dangerous. I cannot simply ignore the outrageous mercy CT calls for.

Shouldn’t God’s love be our model? “Love” in the early scriptures was not merely an emotion. It was a legal term: “I, King X, love King Y, and the evidence of this love is that our troops will not poison his wells, etc.” God loved his kings even when they rejected him by trusting in national strength. Yet God’s love held them accountable. God sent prophets to condemn their misplaced trust, and punished the nation when the king failed to use his power to protect the poor and the strangers within their gates. But what does this mean for how Jesus wants me to treat President Trump?

Ironically, I think God answered that question through an encounter with one I simply thought of as “the angry man.” I had seen him stomping down the middle of our street spewing invective at various people. I asked Jesus how on earth I was to love this neighbor. How would I ever start a conversation? Then late one night I was awakened by music blasting from his car. Perhaps this is my answer, I thought. So I went out in bathrobe and slippers (to appear non-threatening), and tapped on his car window. When I began to talk he turned down the radio to hear me. I told him that for days I had asked Jesus how to start a conversation with him. He was surprised, and non-defensive, and eventually told me he was having a hard time because his mother had just died. I shared some feelings from when that happened to me, and added that I would ask God to comfort him until the pain had begun to heal. I asked him to pray for me about a problem I faced. Since that night we greet each other as “Hi, friend.” Occasionally I remind him to keep praying for me. Now, when I see him acting out, I rarely feel spiritually superior. Instead I feel sorrow for the burdens he bears. I ask God to strengthen his very best intentions, his hopes of being a better man, his genuine desire to help people even though he does not know how to do that and ends up hurting them instead.

Since that day my prayer has been that God will answer positively every prayer or hope of Mr. Trump that fits God’s purposes. I pray for his healing from the childhood abuse that convinced him he was only acceptable if he was a winner. I admit to God that I do not exist on some higher moral plain. Still, I cannot deny the damage Trump will do by his obsession to destroy everything accomplished by President Obama. I pray that he will seek wisdom in the advice of diverse counselors and feel less need to defend his ego. I feel a twinge of God’s sadness when commentators ridicule this child God loves. I pray that Mr. Trump will be more careful with the words he chooses so he will not get himself into so much trouble. I pray that he will humbly recognize the vast difference between a President and a CEO who gets rid of problems by firing those who challenge him. I ask God to strengthen Trump’s best intentions, and reward his hopes of being a good president. I try to pray for Donald Trump like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Desmond Tutu, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and the black worshipers in Charleston prayed for those exercising power over them.

I have seen God honor my feeble attempts to “speak mercy” to those I am tempted to judge. But CT’s focus on mercy ignores its essential companion: justice. Yes, Jesus encourages limitless mercy with his story of the prodigal son. The son was powerless and repentant. His father exuberantly embraced him, fully incorporating him back into the family. But, toward the powerful and arrogant Pharisees, Jesus expressed condemnation for their injustice toward the woman caught in adultery. Jesus was disgusted by their self-deception that she was a law breaker and they were not.

God desires both mercy and justice. They are radically different. In mercy, the Good Samaritan lifts a bloody victim onto his donkey, and interrupts his own plans to take him to a doctor. Then, for justice’ sake, having done what he could personally, he paid someone else to cover the man’s ongoing health care. Mercy is personal and direct. But we dispense justice impersonally through governmental and economic systems and laws. This protects poor people from the humiliation and manipulation of personal handouts, and serves the overwhelming majority who are untouched by those with resources. It is easy to give $100 donation of mercy while taking away thousands of dollars’ worth of justice.

So in mercy I pray for Donald as if he were my own brother doing things I find reprehensible. And I will seek justice—if there are no major changes—by helping remove him from office to limit the damage to those I was called to serve.

 

Blue Ocean Faith

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The most hopeful book I have read in a long while is “Blue Ocean Faith” by Dave Schmelzer. It is fresh air for those tired of today’s self-righteous religion dominated by liberal/conservative antagonisms. And it is as life-giving as the talk my parents gave me at seventeen—that no matter what I encountered in life or what mistakes I made I could always count on God’s astoundingly unconditional acceptance and love. Sixty years later I know they were right—despite my failings I have (almost) never felt alone.

I think we are in a time of religious change as significant as when God told Peter and Paul to reach out to us heathen. A recent Atlantic article described today’s Christianity as the vestige of a religious tradition that no longer has the living Jesus at the center. This may be why most young adults reject evangelical culture. But Blue Ocean faith opens a whole new level of access and depth for our personal experience of God. Like old Abraham’s journey, it facilitates our experience of walking one day at a time into an unknown future, secure in our enjoyment of companionship with the living God.

This Jesus is a living alternative to the debates of today—an actual Third Way. Most churches focus on drawing lines between good people and bad people and good behavior and bad behavior. They are better at excluding people than gathering people in. They get uncomfortably close to the attitudes Jesus condemned, as if we were intended by correct opinions and actions to make ourselves acceptable. Significantly, most of their arguments never mention Jesus, his teachings, or his example.

But Jesus accepts with outrageous love the broken ones like me who do not measure up. This gives me the freedom and potential of the childlike hope that first drew me to him so many years ago. Blue Ocean Faith is not a simple “how-to” book. As one reviewer said, “it’s a rock-your-whole-world-and-everything-you-thought-you-knew sort of book.”

The six distinctives of Blue Ocean are:
1. Our primary framework is SOLUS JESUS.
2. Our primary metaphor is CENTERED-SET.
3. Our approach to spiritual development is CHILDLIKE FAITH
4. Our approach to controversial issues is THIRD WAY.
5. Our approach to other churches is ECUMENICAL.
6. Our approach to secular culture is JOYFUL ENGAGEMENT.

Give yourself a present and buy “Blue Ocean Faith”. Soak in God’s invitation to an open-hearted, helpful walk together through your life.

 

General Eisenhower on the Republican Priorities

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“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children … This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
— 34th President, Supreme Commander, Integrated European Defense Forces, April 16, 1953

Jesus: “Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me. Then they will go away to eternal punishment.” Matthew 25: 44-46

Jesus: “Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’ ” Matthew 7: 21-23

What is presidential adviser Steve Bannon up to?

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This is an edited version of a blog by Heather Cox Richardson, Boston College History professor. It seems balanced yet highly concerning, and I wanted to share it widely:

 

“… What I think Bannon is up to might be right, it might be wrong, it might be completely moot because something else will overtake it. In a sense, [it] matters a great deal less than what Americans will do as they insist on a government that responds to all of us rather than to a wealthy elite. But … here it is:

“I got interested in Bannon last summer, when a reporter asked me to comment on a speech Bannon gave at the Vatican in 2014 … What jumped out at me was that Bannon was using the language of what I guess we would call a “civilizationist”: someone who believes that western civilization is currently engaged in a war of conquest against the Islamic world. …

“I found that Kellyanne Conway was involved in that movement, as was General Flynn. And suddenly it occurred to me … that every time Trump got called on something uncomfortable, he seemed to jump back to the idea that ISIS was beheading people, even if that had nothing to do with the question at hand. … Now it started to make sense. So did the Trump team’s coziness with Putin, whom they repeatedly praised for being the only leader willing to take a strong stand against ISIS. So did the emphasis on saying the words “radical Islam.” … This idea ties closely to some American evangelical religions (not all, by any means, but some).

“So I started reading Breitbart as it was under Bannon’s direction … The big picture that emerged was ideologically coherent. It seemed to me that Bannon believes we are involved in a war of civilizations, and that western civilization must win. But to do that, current society must be completely reconfigured. His version of “Judeo-Christian” society is a very traditional one, in which a few wealthy white male leaders run society, directing and protecting subordinates. … I recognized the ideas as very similar to those of slaveholders in the Old South: it is a system of paternalism that its advocates claim is best for everyone. Hence, under Bannon’s direction, Breitbart could run articles attacking politically active women and suggesting they should stay at home, and also attack African Americans, and yet insist that Bannon was neither sexist nor racist. In this formulation, a return to a traditional society will benefit everyone.

“[Recently,] people were protesting the Muslim travel ban and paying little attention to the events that spoke to my sense that Bannon is pushing a war with “Islam,” beginning in Iran. There was a shakeup in the State Department the previous week in which four career leaders were let go; Trump had just reorganized the National Security Council to elevate Bannon to the inner circle and had taken the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Energy (who oversees the use of nuclear weapons) out of that inner circle. Then we had the very visible attack on Muslims, which … seemed to make an attack on America more, rather than less, likely.

“To me, these added up to maneuvers designed to justify a war in Iran. Unfortunately, nothing I have seen since has made that idea seem far-fetched.

“But again, the future is not yet written. I think I’m right about what drives Bannon (what makes Trump go along with it is another matter, by the way). But he could accomplish the same thing by pivoting to another issue.

“Or the American people could continue to step up … and our institutions could check Trump’s hand, and the future could be written in an entirely different way.

“In the end, it is our story. No one else’s.”

— Heather Cox Richardson

(For a corroborating article see: “Steve Bannon’s obsession with a dark theory of history should be worrisome” Business Insider.com, by Linette Lopez, Feb. 2, 2017)

And this:

“Trump himself—no man of ideas, to say the least—is unsuited to the task of thinking through what his popularity means or how to build on it. Others will have to do the real work.”

“Muslims coming to America are “tribal, sub-Third-World foes.” … We must stop the “ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty.” … Immigrants are “typically guilty of rape, shooting, bombing or machete attack.”  — Michael Anton

Anton is “the leading conservative intellectual to argue for the election of Donald Trump,” and senior director of strategic communications at the National Security Council. This is virtually the only attempt by a Trump insider to present a holistic explanation of what his presidency stands for and seeks to accomplish. Anton was speechwriter and press secretary for NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and then speechwriter for Rupert Murdock, owner of News Corp and CEO of Fox News https://theintercept.com/…/dark-essays-by-white-house-staf…/

 

Something’s Happening Here

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I read recently that if any of us—progressive coastal dwellers or lower-middle class whites—lets anger build up inside, we will perform our daily tasks resentfully, focus on others as the source of our troubles, and probably make it more difficult to find actual solutions.*

Today this is a huge problem. My sense is that most Americans—rich, poor, white, black, left, right, whatever—feel that our increasingly competitive culture requires us to do more, better, faster, with fewer resources and with no gratitude. For a long time this resentment was deep, but unfocused. The genius of Donald Trump, I believe, was to turn our broad cultural anger onto scapegoats from Hillary to immigrants. This not only multiplied our divisions of race and class but continues to turn our attention away from the real forces manipulating us.

Conservative Christians, for example, could never have overcome their disgust at Trump’s crudeness and immorality without this manipulation of their frustration and sense of powerlessness. Sure, racism fueled their acceptance of this human savior—as America’s original sin, racism is in the air. We all breathe it in, myself included. But when Trump fails to deliver on their sky-high hopes, his inability to admit any error will make him double down on blaming his enemies. It seems likely that anger will become more pervasive and genuinely dangerous.

I think you and I dare not let our own anger and fear keep us from looking inside for the spiritual resources that can deliver our nation from a wretched future of division and death. We need an inclusive human rights movement. But so many of us are so turned off by religion that we miss the central importance of faith to MLK’s historic success. To me, it seems critically important that we again combine the energies of the religious and the non-religious. Their separation is our Achilles’ heel. Even a potentially massive rights and peace movement could be thwarted by the government stoking warfare between us. I think that strategy is underway.

I correspond with those across the political spectrum. I especially seek out honest people who will explain to me their divergent opinions. Their responses, and the nature of the divisions in the last election, encourage me to imagine that an inclusive movement for human rights still could be supported by as much as 90% of Americans. Just think about the implications of this statement from an 85 year old wealthy white conservative Christian man in a very red state:

“Mr. Trump has embarrassed himself and all those who supported him. Thanks to you and another old friend, I am making a real effort to examine my thoughts and my actions in the area of race relations and Middle East prejudices. We all are acculturated in our attitudes, one way or another. I need to turn over some rocks and see what is harbored underneath.”

Any movement that can combine progressives with such self-reflective religious conservatives —and I think there are many—could restrain the more dangerous aspects of this government. Can we unite those I am talking about who currently are divided into partisan camps? Can we, you know, love our enemies? Yea, nobody wants to hear that. It sounds naive. Self-delusional. But that was a central teaching of the Jesus who walked this planet. And my life has convinced me that he is alive now. Perhaps he knows something I don’t. So what if…? What if respect for those who disagree with us is the supernatural strategy for opposing tyrants? Autocratic leaders succeed by dividing their opposition. They goad us into fighting each other, to distract us while they plunder the country like some banana republic.

We can fight together despite important disputable matters. We don’t have to agree on everything. Jesus teaches the common good—the direct opposite of today’s narcissistic radical individualism. And Jesus wants us to pray for this sad, broken, and dangerous man who is in control of our country. That small graciousness would be one step toward loving those with other opinions into becoming allies. (And we seek to expand our capacity for love not for an agenda or for Trump’s sake, but for our own benefit, to keep our own soul from dying.)

*The Quotidian Mysteries, by Kathleen Norris

Post-Election Fears

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Dear friends,

Hundreds of you responded to my post about those frightened by this election. I’m not used to this. Thank you all! Most comments were positive, but several good friends were concerned that I was “catering to a spirit of fear,” that people needed instead to be encouraged to trust more in God. These conservative friends seemed to read my motivation as primarily political.

But my comments had little to do with Trump or Hillary beyond the hidden spiritual allegiances they exposed. Each of you, I expect, faces similar conversations. So here is how I respond. I see Jesus as providing us a Third Way, a neither-liberal-nor-conservative-but-transformed alternative world view. But world views take time to express, so please take your time with this. I think it is tremendously important.

Because of the faith my parents instilled in me, Jesus’ world view became my life’s theme. At first it meant simply that Jesus provides our only sure security. In the 1980s, my most frequent sermon was “The Delicious Fear of Insecurity.” (Link) But my Board of Directors convinced me I was freaking people out – that instead of freely admitting our human insecurity and trusting Jesus, most Christians were desperately seeking “real” measurable security wherever they could find it. So back in the 80s I began to challenge congregations to step out of their comfort zones and risk, trusting only in Jesus (including in politics). This definitely is NOT a recent argument to favor “my” politician.

An analogy: as a child, a friend of mine cried herself to sleep many nights for several years, convinced she could never be good enough, that God would probably throw her into hell. Obviously her parents never said that. And theirs was a standard evangelical church. No one intended to give children such insecurity. But that message, unspoken, unintended, which the pastors would have forcefully rejected, got through nevertheless. Her scars endure today. I have talked to many others with a similar story. This judgmental evangelical spirit is a primary reason most of those in their 20s and 30s have given up on the institutional church. Fortunately some still are intrigued by the possibility of a living Jesus, one who does not demand that we shape up before he can find us acceptable.

I identify as an evangelical, but I believe the evangelical movement is dying because of misplaced faith in the “strengths” of conservative American culture (read The Bible They Never Told Me About). Our crisis is as major as during the Reformation, and I pray that the Church becomes changed that radically. Today’s evangelicals, for instance, reject as naïve the Jesus who said to love our enemies, from what is, to become more faithful to the spirit of Jesus. Evangelicalism is splitting, much of it becoming like the State churches of Europe – happy to be a voting bloc in a nationalistic power – while a growing minority want to forge a faithful alternative to conservative and liberal idolatries. A Third Way. This is the dynamic opposite of “catering to the spirit of fear in others.” Jesus encourages us to walk securely into the real dangers of this life with open eyes and a radical trust, not seeking political might, nor power, but his Spirit. “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…”

A local black pastor expresses a similar tough spiritual analysis in “A message for people whose backs are against the wall.” (Link) Could he express his honest opinion and be as transparent in our churches, or would his faith be questioned?

I feel embarrassed by the ease with which so many white pastors move quickly from a brief confession to a one-sided celebration of God’s grace. (Whites’ freedom to move beyond others’ problems into our own comfort is the central meaning of “privilege.”) Would Jesus have praised a Samaritan who said to the one beaten up “You simply have to pray more and depend more on God”? No, the story Jesus told was opposite to that. Today, many non-white Christians and others who feel excluded, threatened and abused by our culture are crying out for our sacrificial incarnational support.

To me, the unspoken, unintended message in those dismissive words is that people are wrong to feel threatened. They are not praying enough, or in the right way, and their faith is not as strong as the speaker’s. That sounds like the Pharisee in Luke 18:9. I believe pastors should be challenged by those who genuinely love them, when they convey an unspoken message of prideful judgement. Other people will not tell them. They will just stop going to church.

But what if peoples’ fears, grounded in bloody history, have some merit? Can the white Body of Christ simply dismiss the insights and experience of most black Christians? A missionary friend, a long-time resident of South Africa, wrote me:

“This whole crazy election feels eerily like when the Nationalists came to power in South Africa and the country woke up in shock. Dark times!! Calling for courageous actions in the coming years. Nothing subtle about these guys, yet, as a young black American pointed out, already the press is working to normalize them. Chilling!! Our democracy is more fragile than this country realizes. South Africa taught me how fragile it is and how potent tribalism remains in our world!”

Even if things do not work out as darkly as some fear, is it really as simple as they need more faith? Can we really disparage the immense faith of slaves while they were lynched by Christians? Or the faith of South African blacks under Christian Reformed Apartheid? Or the fears of today’s black parents over police shootings? The missionary said “courageous actions” will be required. Either this is our shared problem as one Body or we are supporting the abuse! What could that mean? Millions of us seeking to pay (as the Good Samaritan did) for others’ health care? Possibly another MLK? I don’t know.

It is biblical to enter an extended lament while waiting for God’s guidance. I encourage you to read Prophetic Lament – A Call for Justice in Troubled Times, by Soong-Chan Rah, an evangelical seminary professor. Eldin Villafane of Gordon Conwell Seminary calls it “needed medicine for a Christianity enamored with a theologia gloriae and not the wisdom and power of a theologia crucis. It critiques our success-centered triumphalism and calls us to repent of our arrogant hubris.” Why is it always “others” who need to stop trusting in themselves? The proud triumphalism of the “haves” easily drowns out God’s cries for the “have-nots.”

On a personal level, for months Claire and I prayed for both Trump and Hillary, that God would answer whatever prayers they had that were in accord with the values of Jesus. I always prayed for George W and called him my brother in Christ (unlike many Christians’ character assassinations of Barak Obama). I am sad so many Christians put their hope in one who is the antithesis of every Gospel value I hold dear. The Bible warns against the idolatry of trusting in “a strong man.” The primary biblical idolatry is our trust in the power of money, political power and military strength. (See The Bible They Never Told Me About,  p. 19)

Most who wrote negative comments assumed incorrectly that I trusted in Hillary. But there were not just two options. True, the third way of Jesus does not show on a ballot, but that is not defining for one whose real allegiance is not to this country. (My parents sang “This world is not my home…”) I avoided posting until after the election specifically to avoid being dismissed as being merely political. My concern is to share the real Jesus, the nonreligious Jesus, the one almost totally obscured by this election.

At my age, I soon will stand before my Savior. No political agenda is worth seeing Jesus’ disappointment because I misused his name for political gain. I am cynical about political claims that the answers for our country’s problems lie in either party’s platform, in the next funding bill, or in the Supreme Court.

It is in everyone’s interest for President Trump to succeed beyond his wildest dreams, to achieve all the positive things his people think he will do. I pray sincerely that I am wrong about my interpretation of his goals and attitudes. But when people say to be patient with Mr. Trump, I hear no rejection of the Republicans’ opposite strategy! By now in Obama’s first term, even before he assumed office, Senator McConnell had told Congressional Republicans that their chief goal was to insure that President Obama totally failed! They were to oppose everything the first black president did without regard to its merits, even to shutting down the government. I pray for Mr. Trump, but the difference is hypocritical.

I hope that white pastors will not ignore the leaders of those whose backs are to the wall.

         -Roger

I Think I Hear God Crying…

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“I am spiritually exhausted. I’ve spent the last 36 hours weeping with those desperately frightened by this election – girls traumatized by fear more boys are emboldened to abuse them, black parents worried their children are more likely to be shot by police, LGBTs who fear open attack on the streets, hardworking Hispanic Christians who fear deportations and family breakups. This is a disaster.”

This, from an evangelical pastor speaking to thirty conservative pastors in a prayer retreat I attended yesterday. Many murmurs of assent. I heard anguish from the one who drove me to the event and from the pastor who drove me home. Later another pastor shared similar crushing stories of distress and confessed his anger that so much of American Christianity caused this disaster.

These pastors and missionaries used phrases like “the churches made a bargain with the Devil,” voting for one who “gleefully admits without repentance to embodying the seven cardinal sins,” and, our nation has chosen “to worship the Golden Calf.” These pro-life Christians seemed to disdain the hypocrisy of single-minded trust in government to reduce abortions joined to the total rejection of government for everything else.

What would the real Jesus do? Jesus weeps with those who weep. Jesus shouldered all our abuses. As one pastor said, “Jesus drank the full bowl of wrath on our behalf.”

I have no idea what this might mean for me. But somehow, like Jesus, I want to become totally identified with the frightened girl, the black parent, the LGBT, the Hispanic family, and with all the lost and broken outcasts who expect more abuse. I seek suggestions.

I am a rich white male. In my privilege I can easily walk away from the one beaten down. I can spend my time arguing politics or theology as abstract ideas, secure because “Christ has created in me a clean heart,” ignoring those who my sin has traumatized. But if I want to follow the real Jesus I cannot. I must change. I hear Jesus saying to us today

“Away from me, you who say ‘Lord, Lord, we prophesy in your name and perform many miracles.’ I tell you plainly, I never knew you. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was an alien and you did not invite me in, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me. Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these you did not do for me.” (See Matt. 7:21 and 25:41)

Forgive my sons who claim the Light
Yet see through such dark glass
Anorexics they appear to you
So small where I am vast
Their plastic Jesus kept you away
Like their sad trust in war
They simply can’t imagine
That it’s them I’m crying for.
— Dear Leonard, by Roger Dewey

Book Review – The Hitchhiking Diaries

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Hitchhiking

Amazon Book Review:

“The Hitchhiking Diaries is a richly rewarding adventure into unknown territory~both geographically and spiritually. What sets this true story apart from similar youthful wanderings is that the narrator sets out with a focused purpose in his search. Outwardly his intention is to explore an unknown country and its people. Simultaneously, on a deeper and more personal level, the author seeks to understand a God outside the bounds of organized religion. With a rare gift for distilling meaning from experience, the narrator’s travels involve a parallel journey to discern the role this God plays in the lives of all human beings.

Along the way we encounter vivid scenes and unforgettable characters. With perceptive insight, Dewey is able to describe the political and philosophical atmosphere of the sixties. The opposing ideologies of that time turn out to be as interesting and pertinent today as they were then.

At the heart of the book is a compelling challenge, in the manner of Brother Lawrence, which invites readers to be aware of their own relationship with an invisible companion who loves them unconditionally and will never leave them.”

Susan Luke