On Democratic Socialism

 

On Democratic Socialism

I consider myself to be a Christian democratic socialist. I am, of course, fully aware that most American Christians find “socialism” to be a scare word and not to be at all Christian. I am also fully aware that they are wrong about that. Democratic socialism is in fact, the only political structure that at least approximates Jesus’ Realm of God on earth. Yet democratic socialism is the best available form of social, political, and economic structure not only for Christians but for everyone. I want here to consider the history and advantages of democratic socialism both from a secular point of view and from a Christian one.

What is democratic socialism? The first thing to insist about it, and something few Americans understand about it, is that it is democratic. It is not an authoritarian system. It is not imposed from above on anyone. Rather, it arises and is created democratically by a people who have come to understand the evils of insufficiently regulated capitalism and who want their government and their society to work for the benefit of everyone not just for the benefit of those with enough money to buy politicians and election results as happens all the time in the US. The people create it, and the people are free to abolish it any time they have votes to do it through legal electoral processes.

Yes, it is of course true that systems that called themselves “socialist” have been authoritarian or even totalitarian regimes imposed on a country’s people by force. The classic example is Soviet Russia. Between 1922 and 1991, the Russians were the dominant nation by far in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.[1] Though nearly all Americans think of the Soviet Union as communist, which it was when we understand the term “communist” to mean a country ruled by a communist party, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union never claimed to have creates a communist nation. It had, rather, in the terms of the country’s official Marxist-Leninist ideology, created a socialist nation. Late in its existence that party claimed that the country was “transitioning to communism,” but it never claimed to have achieved communism.

To understand that that the Soviet Union considered itself socialist not fully communist, we must understand Marxist political ideology, the ideology by which the Communist Party of the Soviet Union claimed to rule and to have the right to rule. It is also the theory out of which democratic socialism, though it is today not Marxist at all, grew. In Marxist theory, a workers’ revolution created not a communist state but a socialist one. This meant that the role of the state was to transition a society from capitalism to communism. It was the stage of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” It functioned to end the private ownership of property, especially of the means of economic production, that characterizes capitalism. As the ownership of such property changed from private ownership to public ownership, the classes that had distinguished capitalism, in particular the classes of the capitalists and the workers, would begin to disappear. They would disappear because they were created by the class tension between capitalists and workers. In theory, if there were no capitalists there would be class tension and hence no classes. Again inn theory, the role of the state was to facilitate that disappearance. In practice, Marxists regimes generally did much of that work through violence against supposed enemies of the state, but for Marx, it would happen more or less of itself once the country’s economy was no longer capitalist.

True communism was the goal of this transitional period. In a truly communist society, there are no classes. All people are equal because private property is owned collectively not individually. In addition, because there are no longer any socioeconomic classes, the state withers away and disappears. In Marxist theory, states are all about class dominance. In capitalism, the capitalist class dominates the working class in part through the state which it creates and controls. In socialism, the working class dominates the capitalists class through the state which it creates and controls. When that class distinction disappears, as Marx believed it would do, there is no need for a state. There is no function for a state, so there is no state.

It is quite obvious to anyone who knows anything about it that the Soviet Union never came close to being a classless, stateless society. It was rather a nation ruled dictatorially by a small class of privileged elite who used Marxist-Leninist ideology to justify their position of privilege and of control of all aspects of the nation’s life. At different times between the 1960s and 1980s the Communist Party made differing claims about where the country was on the supposed transition of communism it was overseeing, but it never claimed actually to have created a communist nation. The nation was rather, in theory, at some point in the stage of socialism, the stage not of communism but of transition to communism. That’s why the country’s name was The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics not The Union of Soviet Communist Republics.

There is no denying that “socialist” is a dirty word for most Americans. Americans’ intense dislike of anything called socialist probably results from the fact that nations like the USSR that called themselves socialist were in fact, at least at times in their existence, ruled by unspeakably tyrannical and brutally violent regimes. Those regimes claimed to be free and democratic while in fact they were oppressive and dictatorial in the worst possible ways. The Soviet Union named itself socialist, but it was ruled by an entity that called itself the Communist Party. It became essentially unavoidable for Americans, taught to despise the Soviet Union (mostly for good reason), to equate socialism and brutal, dictatorial Soviet communism.

Yet Americans’ aversion to the concept of socialism has long been facilitated by the ignorance of most Americans about the history of socialism not only in the totalitarian Soviet Union but in democratic Western Europe. The German Social Democratic Party (known as the SPD) is a good place to start with understanding that history. It was founded in 1875 and adopted its current name, “Die Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland,” in 1890. At its founding, it was a Marxist political organization. It worked to bring about a Marxist workers’ revolution in Germany. It wanted to do essentially what Lenin and the Bolsheviks did in Russia in November (NS), 1917.[2] It actually attempted such a coup in the aftermath of World War I but failed badly. The party functioned as an opposition party under the Weimar Republic. The Nazis, of course, suppressed it violently, but it did somehow survive.

After World War II, the German Social Democratic Party kept its name but changed its tune. It no longer advocated violent revolution. Rather, it came to function as one of the two major political parties of the Federal Republic of Germany, that is, of West Germany, during the years of German division between democratic west and undemocratic east. It continues to operate in that way today. It is what we could call the more liberal or progressive of the historically two major German political parties. It does not call for revolution. I certainly does not call for violence. Rather, it works to create a Germany in which the interests of the country’s workers are advanced and protected. It has at times been the country’s ruling party. Willi Brandt, once the mayor of West Berlin and then Chancellor (the head of the government) of the Federal Republic of Germany, was a member of the SPD as have been other Chancellors of the German republic. It advocates policies that are considerably more progressive than those of the Democratic Party in the United States, but, in the German context, it is a mainstream, democratic, peaceful organization. It is indeed a democratic socialist party.

Democratic socialism, or, as we could also call it, socialist democracy, has made great strides in creating societies and economies of radical equality in the Scandinavian countries, most particularly in Sweden. Taxes in Sweden are high, but they finance things Americans can only dream of. Things like free education at all levels. Free universal health care. Meaningful retirement benefits. Meaningful parental time off for all workers. They finance the Swedish military, but Sweden’s military budget absorbs a much smaller percentage of the country’s national budget than does the US military. Essentially all of the countries of western Europe have social welfare systems that are far more extensive than anything we have in this country. Those countries are, in other words, to some meaningful extent democratic socialist.

Democratic socialism is not something for Americans to fear. Its origins may have been Marxist, but it isn’t Marxist today. A century and more ago socialists advocated violent revolution. True democratic socialists do no such thing today. They work within their country’s legal and political systems for the benefit of the people rather than for the benefit only of the people with money the way the American Republican Party and, to a lesser extent the American Democratic Party, do. That is what we American democratic socialists, Christian or otherwise, want to do in and for our country.

Is democratic socialism Christian? Can a Christian be a democratic socialist? Can a true Christian be anything other than a democratic socialist? The answers are definitely that democratic socialism can be Christian and that a Christian can be a democratic socialist. I will leave aside for now the question of whether a true Christian can be anything other than a democratic socialist. The main thing to understand is that democratic socialism advocates values and policies that are in fact far more Christian than are the values and policies of either major American political party and far, far more Christian than the values and policies of the most vociferous American self-identified Christians, of Christian Nationalists and MAGA supporters of Donald Trump. And, of course, we must begin defending that claim by describing what we mean by “true Christian.”

The tragic truth of far too much of Christian history is that most Christians have been anything but Christian. Yes, they have said that they believe in Jesus Christ confessing him to be their personal Lord and Savior. They’ve mostly done it because the church has told them that they have to do it to avoid spending eternity in the horrific torments of hell. That claim is, of course, inane theological nonsense; but it characterizes most of Christian history, at least in the west.

The truth is that it in only one of the canonical gospels does Jesus say anything about believing in him, and nearly everyone has misunderstood what the Greek word translated as “believe” actually means.[3] The other three synoptic gospels are actually about something else entirely. We see most clearly what Jesus was actually about in the gospels of Matthew (which tragically also contains a lot of horrific anti-Jewish error) and Luke. To make the point, I’ll just focus just a few passages from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.

The Gospel of Matthew begins the collection of Jesus sayings we know as the Sermon on the Mount with nine sayings that begin “Blessed.” See Matthew 5:1-11. They’re called the Beatitudes. Not one of them is about believing in Jesus. They are, rather, about how we are to live and how we are to be in the world. They bless the poor in spirit, the meek, the peacemakers, the merciful, and others. They notably do not bless those who merely believe in Jesus. They certainly do not bless those who oppress or use violence against anyone.

There are beatitudes in Luke too, though they are less well known than those in Matthew. You’ll find them at Luke 6:20-22. They bless not the “poor in spirit” as Matthew does but simply you who are poor, you who are hungry, and you who weep. It’s a much shorter list of beatitudes than Matthew’s, but notice what it emphasizes. First, is says that blessed are the poor, the hungry, and those who are weeping without mentioning (or excluding) any reason for their weeping. It then blesses you “when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man.” Luke 6:22. Because it appears in the context of the Gospel of Luke not the Gospel of John, I take the saying “on account of the Son of Man” to mean those who are hated, excluded, reviled, and defamed precisely because neither Jesus nor God does any such thing with anyone, precisely because they are the ones God most loves and works to lift up and relieve of their distress.[4]

Then we come to something quite startling that is not in Matthew at all. Luke’s Jesus follows his few beatitudes with sayings that begin “woe.” You’ll find them at Luke 6:24-26. They say “woe to you are rich,” “woe to you who are full, “woe to you who are laughing,” and “woe to you when people speak well of you.” We can conclude that Jesus is blessing those the world harms and condemning those the world honors and who cause others harm. He is, in other words, turning the world upside down to tell us that God’s ways are precisely the reverse of most of the ways of the world.

Do you want more proof of that truth? Consider something else that is in the Sermon on the Mount and that follows the Beatitudes and woes in Luke. In Matthew we read: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Matthew 5:43-44. Luke’s Jesus puts the same idea this way: “But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, and do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” Luke 6:27-28. Talk about turning the ways of the world upside down! Doing that was what Jesus was about more than he was about anything else.

Then, of course, there is the famous scene at Matthew 25:31-46 and the famous saying that comes from it. In this scene, Jesus first tells some people that they had seen him hungry, thirsty, as a stranger, naked, and imprisoned, and they had taken care of him. These people don’t know what he’s talking about, so he says to them: “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” Matthew 25:40. Then Jesus says to others that they had also seen him in various forms of distress and had done nothing to help him. Like the others, these people don’t know what he’s talking about. So he says to them: “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” Matthew 5:45. The text tells us that God blesses the first  group of people but punishes the second.[5] Once again we learn here not what to believe but how to live. Live by caring for “the least of these,” for those most in need not by kowtowing to those least in need the way so many American politicians do today.

Jesus’ beatitudes, woes, and words about caring for “the least of these” are nearly perfect descriptions of the world democratic socialism seeks to create.[6] That world is one in which all people have equal rights, dignity, and legal and social protection. No exceptions. Period. It is a world of peace in which the powers, such as they are, use the world’s resources for the good of the people not for the good only of the wealthy like those currently in power in the United States do. Use them for the ways of peace and never, ever for the ways of war. It is a world in which “enemies” are approached not in a spirit of hatred and destruction but in a spirit of reconciliation and nonviolent conflict resolution. Because the world will always be the world and not heaven, some people in a democratic socialist country will insist on the country maintaining armed forces though others of us will disagree and will work to make doing so unnecessary. Still, the commitment of a democratic socialist government is to nonviolence, with violence being at best an absolute last resort and, ideally, being no resort at all.

So. Is democratic socialism Christian? Yes it is, though it is not only Christian and imposes no religious belief on anyone. Can a Christian be a democratic socialist? Yes, absolutely. The ideals of democratic socialism are essentially the ideals of Christianity properly understood. I consider myself to be a Christian democratic socialist. Many of my progressive Christian friends and colleagues do too. Marxism was and is atheistic. Many democratic socialists may be atheists, but many others of us are people of faith. We will happily work together with people of faiths other than ours and with people of no spiritual faith to bring about the world of peace and justice of which we and all democratic socialists dream.

Now to that question I said above I was putting aside. Can a true Christian be anything other than a democratic socialist? I suppose I have to answer that question yes, a true Christian can be something else. Most true Christians do not consider themselves to be democratic socialists, though we can hope that that will change in the future. A true Christian can pursue peace through Buddhism, which is a way of being more than a religious faith and tends to be apolitical. In my country, many true Christians, myself included, usually vote Democratic. We do that not because the Democrats get everything right. Far from it. They do, however, get a lot more right and a lot less wrong than the Republicans do, and our country just isn’t prepared to elect many politicians like Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani who declare themselves to be democratic socialists. Still, democratic socialism comes much closer to advocating the values of Jesus’ Realm of God than does any other human political ideology. That’s why I and a great many other Christians today consider ourselves to be Christian democratic socialists. We hope and pray that democratic socialism is the wave of the future. May it be so.

---

[1] The Bolshevik coup took place in 1917. The USSR was created only in 1922.

[2] At the time of the Bolshevik coup d’etat, Russia used the Julian calendar not the more modern and accurate Gregorian calendar. Thus, the coup took place in October on the Russian calendar but in November on the western calendar. After the Bolsheviks took control, they switched the country to the Gregorian calendar. Thus, the Soviets celebrated “The Great October Revolution,” as they called that coup, on November 7.

[3] It means something more like trust or give your heart to than it does accept as true certain asserted but unprovable facts about Jesus, the latter being what nearly everyone takes it to mean.

[4] “The Son of Man” is one of Jesus’ common ways or referring to himself.

[5] Your humble author does not believe that God punishes anyone, but the author of the Gospel of Matthew, unlike essentially any other New Testament author, did. I do not think that Jesus believed any such thing. If he ever said some of the things Matthew has him say about God punishing people, surely he used that image only as a metaphor not as a literal truth.

[6] This parallelism between the gospels and democratic socialism is not a coincidence. Democratic socialism is no longer Marxist in any meaningful sense. As a matter of its history, however, it did arise from a Marxist movement. Marx’s “communism,” as I discussed it above, is in a real sense the Realm of God with the . religious and spiritual elements removed from it. See, for example Acts 4:32. Democratic socialism doesn’t insist on religious and spiritual elements being part of the solution to the world’s problems either, though it doesn’t exclude those of us who believe that they must be.

On Being Human

 

On Being Human

May 26, 2026

 

A question has occurred to me: Just what is it to be human? It is a foundational existential question, of course, but it is one people seldom ask and almost never consider seriously. We just take being human for granted. In seminary, the introductory theology class that I took was called “Christian Anthropology.” That is, the Christian study of what it is to be human. I didn’t understand why that was a theology class at the time, but, of course, the brilliant professor who taught it knew what he was doing. Theology is about God; but, more foundationally, proper theology is about the relationship between God and humans. So to understand that relationship you have to have an understanding of what it is to be human. Here’s my best take on an answer to that question.

The first thing that occurs to me about being human is that to be human is to be mortal. Maybe this truth occurs to me first because I’m nearly 80 years old, but it is truth for each and every one of us regardless of age. To be human is to know that you’re going to die. Most young people know that that truth, but it doesn’t always mean much to them. Not so for us elders. If you’re lucky, as you age you just get used to the reality that you’re close to the end of your life. You don’t know how or when you will die, but you know full well that you will.

Beyond that, to be human is to know that you will suffer. You will suffer both physically and emotionally. That foundational truth is the basis of Buddhism, which is above all else a way of avoiding suffering. Yet I don’t believe that avoiding suffering is possible for us humans. I suppose Buddhist nonattachment helps, but it isn’t a perfect shield against that aspect of being human. We will all at some time suffer. I have already suffered several times in my life both physically and emotionally, and I am sure I will suffer again. I am, after all, human.

Now, of course, some people suffer more than others. I have suffered quite severe physical post operative pain. I have suffered grief stronger than I ever thought possible over the death of my wife of 30 years. Yet I would never compare my pain to the pain of the victims of Hitler’s Holocaust. Or of the Holodomor. Or of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Or of so many other horrific events in human history that have caused suffering on a massive scale. Still, whether our suffering is great or relatively small, we all suffer. It’s part of being human.

That we are mortal and that we suffer both stem from one foundational existential fact about being human: We are creatures not gods. Psalm 8 says that God created us little lower than God, but even that high anthropology acknowledges that we are not God. We are “lower” than God. We are somehow less than God. God is infinite, we are finite. God transcends time, we live in a temporal world. God is both immanent and transcendent, we are earthbound and limited as to time and place. God’s love is universal and unconditional, ours is specific and usually conditional. God forgives all and extends grace to all, we judge and condemn whoever we like. We humans so like to play God. We like to think we know it all, control all, and can do all. We don’t, and we can’t. That we don’t and can’t results from us not being gods, and that is part of what it is to be human.

To be human is also to live as a centered self in a world that appears to us to exist outside of ourselves. It is to live in the experiences of that world that come into our consciousness, apparently from outside of us, with no guarantee that they have any objective reality beyond our subjective experience of them. Nearly all people deny that truth, or ignore it, and that denial and that ignoring are both of what it is for most of us to be human.

To be human is also to have a true Self. It is to have within you a persona, a way of being and of doing, that is who you really are. In religious terms, it is who God created and calls you to be, but you needn’t be a person of faith to have deep within you your true Self. Discovering who that true Self is and living into being that person is the most spiritually rewarding thing anyone can do, but the reality of that Self creates an existential problem for essentially everyone. There are a few exceptions. My daughter, for example, has known that her true Self includes being a teacher for as long as she has known that there is such a thing as a teacher. Most of us by far, however, live a false self for most, or at least much, of our lives.

We live an ego self not our true Self. This is a self that is primarily concerned with two things. One is survival. The ego self will do nearly anything to assure its own survival. It will probably also do nearly anything to assure the survival of a small number of people who are particularly close to the person living an ego life. This is usually the person’s immediate family, especially the person’s children.

The other thing the ego self is most concerned with is “success.” For the ego self, “success” usually means “fitting into and succeeding according to the terms of one’s culture of origin.” Cultures almost always define success differently for women and for men. The important point for us here is that nearly everyone, for a significant portion of their life if not for all of it, pursues whatever their culture tells them is success for them. And that ego success is rarely if ever an expression of a person’s true Self.

The ego self by which live so much of our lives just isn’t our true Self. Because it isn’t, most of us lives most of our lives with a tension, almost always subconscious, between the ego self according to which we strive to live and the true Self that is pulling us in a different direction whether we’re conscious of that pull or not.

And it is easy enough not to be conscious of it. Our egos are very good at suppressing our true Selves. Our egos suppress the true Self because, often if not always, our true Self is not the person our culture of origin is forming us into. If you will permit me, I will use myself and my life story as an example of this existential tension.

When I was 32 years old, I decided to go to law school. I had spent years preparing for a different career, but that one didn’t pan out in terms of job possibilities, so I went to law school. I got a law degree. I was admitted to the bar in my home state. At first, I loved being a lawyer. I remember walking among the tall buildings of the city where I worked and hardly being able to believe that I was actually there. It was all just too wonderful, or so I thought at the time.

Fast forward about fifteen years or so. I started to burn out on law. Badly. Really badly. I became clinically depressed. I was making no money and had very little law work to do. I once tried to address the difficulty I was having by doing a psychological exercise I had learned of from a pastor I knew who had also been a Jungian counselor. In that exercise, something deep within me told me I wasn’t a lawyer but that I was a preacher. That, of course, made not one lick of sense to my ego self; so I ignored it and kept trying to practice law with no success whatsoever.

Then a local Catholic university in my home city began to offer fully accredited Master of Divinity degrees to Protestant students. Somehow I knew that I had to go get one of those degrees. I didn’t know why. When my wife asked me how I was going to afford it, I said I didn’t know how. I just knew I had to do it. So I did. I enrolled in seminary and began more than three years of study for that MDiv degree.

As part of my seminary experience I served for one academic year as a pastoral intern at a local church of my denomination. Not long after I began that work I looked up to heaven (not that heaven is really “up”) and said: “You’re kidding, right? This is it? This is what I’m supposed to be doing?” And indeed it was. It turned out that, at least with regard to my professional life, my subconscious had been at least partly right. My true Self was not a lawyer. Rather, my true Self was a pastor, which, of course, included being a preacher. I got a call as pastor of a small church. I will never forget the feeling I had the first day I walked into that church as its newly called pastor. I knew as surely as I have ever known anything that I was already a better pastor than I had ever been a lawyer, and, indeed, I was. My true professional Self is pastor, not the lawyer I had nearly killed myself trying to be.

It took a real shock in my life for me to realize who I really am. Experts in the field, like Fr. Richard Rohr, say that is often the case. I had to crash and burn before I would face the truth that I had been trying to live as someone I am not, that is, someone who my true Self is not. Rohr would say that I was moving into what he calls the second half of life. However you term it, as a pastor I experienced a wholeness and a satisfaction with my life unlike anything like I had ever experienced before. I was finally living a big part of my true Self.

Being the pastor of a small church isn’t prestigious like being a lawyer. It isn’t even all that respectable in society anymore. I was being paid but only a pittance by lawyer’s standards. Most of my culture of origin would not have considered me a success at that point in my life. I’m pretty sure my mother didn’t, but none of that mattered. It didn’t matter because I finally was living, or at least striving to live, my true Self. As a person of faith I will say that I was finally being who God created and called me to be. I had experienced and survived an existential tension between my ego self and my true Self, a truly human tension nearly everyone lives with if only subconsciously as it had been subconscious for me for so long.

There is another thing that characterizes us humans and, as far as we know, distinguishes us from all other animals. We humans are meaning making creatures. We humans often agonize over the meaning of life. One of the true existential dilemmas of our modern, or postmodern, world is whether life has any meaning at all. We want life generally to have meaning, and we want our particular lives to have meaning. So many of us humans look for meaning as something objective. Something outside ourselves. Something that is universally true for all of us human creatures. At an unconscious lever at least, so many of us live in despair because we can’t find any real meaning in our lives. When I was a lawyer I worked with many other lawyers who were, but the world’s standards, truly successful. They were partners in big law firms. They were respected. They made a lot of money. And the alcoholism and divorce rates among those people were very high. I am convinced that so many of these “successful” lawyers had troubled personal lives because in their depth they knew that their success was not giving their lives true meaning.

And I am convinced that these people dealt badly with their failure to find true meaning in their lives because they didn’t realize that the only meaning life in general or any particular life can have is the meaning we create. Life has no objective, absolute, universal meaning. It can, however, have meaning that we give it. And we humans are driven to give life meaning. Doing so is just part of what it is to be human.

Though we cannot establish that life has any objective, absolute, universal meaning, there is a truth about the meaning of life that a great many wise people from cultures and spiritual traditions across the globe and across the centuries have discovered and created. Our lives, it seems, have more meaning when we live them for others than when we live them only for ourselves. We may conceive of the “other” for whom we live to be God, but that hardly needs to be the case. Most of us find meaning in living our lives for other people. Indeed, many of us believe that in doing so we are also doing it for God. So if you’re struggling with the meaning of your life, try this: Do something for someone else. Do it repeatedly. Do it for people you know, and, if you can, do it somehow for people you don’t know. It may be easiest to do that through some charitable organization that works in a field that is important to you. Maybe you’ll find that your life has a meaning after all.

Finally, here’s one more thing about being human. I first heard about in the Christian Anthropology class I mentioned above. To be human is to strive for connection with the transcendent. With transcendent reality. With the ultimately beyond. With ultimate truth and ultimate goodness. Many of us call all of that God, but not everyone who strives for connection with it does. Indeed, not every individual human feels a need to strive for it. In our western culture in particular, a culture formed primarily not by faith but by the rationalism and philosophical materialism of the Enlightenment, many people don’t strive for that connection at all because they don’t believe that any such transcendent things are real.

Yet some of us have experienced the reality of the transcendent, the ultimate, in our lives. We also know that every human culture there has ever been has had a way of expressing that striving. We know that because we know that every human culture that has ever existed has produced or adopted a religion. That is, every human culture has had a system of myths and symbols through which it expresses its understanding of the transcendent and through which it seeks a connection with the transcendent. Humans have done so in an enormous variety of ways. People have understood transcendent reality in more ways that we can really keep track of. The important point, however, isn’t the ways in which people have sought connection with the transcendent, it is that they have always done so in one way or another. As far as we know, no other animal has any conception of a transcendent reality and therefore has no desire for connection with it. We humans do have such a conception of it, and the great theologians have all understood that we, not necessarily individually but as a species, strive to connect with it. To do so is truly one of the things that makes us human.

So being human is quite a complex thing. Our smart brains and out higher consciousness enables us to do incredible things both for good and for evil. Yet being human is also a great blessing. We can think and create in ways no other creature on earth can. We can know beauty. We can know love. We can even know something of God. So rejoice in being human. Live fully into being the full, complete, blessed human being God created you to be. May it be so.

No. It's Not About American Freedom

 No. It's Not About American Freedom

May 25, 2026

I just saw a new posting of this old lie: “1.3 million died defending American freedoms.” Like hell they did! A great many of them died fighting against states that insisted on preserving slavery, so they were fighting for someone’s freedom but hardly that of all Americans. Neither of the world wars was about defending American freedom, as neither Germany nor Japan posed any real threat to them. Neither Korea nor Vietnam was about defending American freedom. They were about fighting Communism elsewhere. None of our recent wars in Middle East have been about defending American freedom except perhaps the first invasion of Afghanistan to go after bin Ladn. Trump’s attack on Iran isn’t about anything anyone with a brain can discern, It sure as hell isn’t about defending American freedom. That the US military exists to defend American freedom is one of the biggest lies American propaganda tells. It’s just flat not true. The US military exists, and essentially has always existed, to project American power around the world, which is a far cry from defending American freedom. We will never overcome American militarism as long as people keep believing this lie.

On Trump as Symptom not Cause

 

On Trump as Symptom not Cause

May 16, 2026

Essentially everyone in the world in which I live despises Donald Trump. I despise Donald Trump too. I despise him as a grossly immoral person and as a would-be fascist dictator hell bent on destroying American democracy. Donald Trump and his army of bootlickers certainly appear to be causing a great deal of harm in the United States and in the world, and, indeed, that is precisely what they are doing. Yet there is an underlying truth in our world that it is easy enough to forget or to ignore. Donald Trump would not be able to harm anything or anyone if the American electorate had not made him president not once but twice. The second time they elected him, he even garnered a majority of the popular vote as well as the necessary electoral college votes. Trump didn’t make himself president, the American people and the American constitutional system of electing the president did.

It is, therefore, perfectly appropriate to see Trump less as a cause of harm and more as a symptom of something far deeper than one deranged, immoral, incompetent man. A healthy society would never have made Donald Trump president. So since we did make him president we have ask: What is so unhealthy in our country that a fascist charlatan like Donald Trump could win two presidential elections? That question may be as hard to answer as it is easy to hate Donald Trump, yet I think there is an answer. That answer, I believe is: Change and privileged people’s resistance to and even fear of change.

So what is changing in this country that could explain the rise of Donald Trump and his American fascism? The simplest answer to that question is: Demographics. The United States of America was founded on white supremacy. White immigrants from Europe and their descendants considered themselves to be so superior in every way to Black and Indian human beings that they hardly considered those people to be human at all. I needn’t go into all the gory details. We all know about race-based slavery. We all know how white Americans took essentially all of the land that had been the home of Indian Americans, nearly eradicated their cultures and languages, and even very nearly exterminated them as a race of people.

Slavery ended with the Civil War of course, but American white supremacy certainly did not. Racism continued to rot the cultures of both the American south and the American north and west in forms other than slavery but with effects not much less horrific for non-white Americans. Until quite recent decades, white Americans controlled absolutely everything in this country that was not created by and specifically for people of color. Whites were the majority, and they ruled everyone else for the advantage of the whites at the expense of essentially all others.

In recent decades, that has started to change. Whites are still a majority of the population, but they are a significantly smaller majority than they used to be. People of color are playing ever larger roles in American life. There are very substantial Latin communities in many states. There are large Asian communities in many states including people from countries like Vietnam who previously were scarcely represented among us. There are more Muslim Americans than there ever used to be. Despite the deep-seated racism of American culture, people of color are more visible and powerful in American life than they have ever been before.

As a result, a great many white Americans, primarily but not exclusively poorly educated white men, feel threatened. They know, at least subconsciously and probably consciously as well, that their position of privilege in American life is ebbing away. These white racists used to be able to watch television and see only an occasional Black entertainer or athlete. Now people of color appear all over the TV networks. Perhaps most threateningly for these American racists is the fact that we’ve even had a Black president.

White privilege has always been foundational for the self-identity of most white Americans. It is perhaps an old saw, but it’s still true. The poorest, least educated, least sophisticated white American could say to themselves: Well, at least I’m not Black. The color of their skin gave them a sense of superiority even over a Black president. They learned white supremacy from the moment they were born in a culture rotten to the core with it. And they know that their position of privilege is eroding away.

Then, along comes Donald Trump. He’s white. He’s male. He’s straight. He may be richer and more sexually immoral than most Americans by far, but he’s still “one of us.” And he plays right into the fear that so many white Americans feel over their eroding status of authority and supremacy. He gives American racists “dog whistles,” things that may not be overtly racist  but which a great many people hear as racist. He calls torch-carrying, Nazi-loving fascist thugs “fine people.” He calls on a gang of white, racist thugs to “stand back and stand by.” He has virtually no people of color in his life. Indeed, early in his business life, the government sued him for racial discrimination in housing he and his father controlled. He plays to the worst things in American culture, things a great many Americans don’t think are bad at all but which constitute their view of themselves and of the world.

And, in true fascist fashion, he gives frightened, angry white Americans a scapegoat for all of their problems. He gives them “immigrants.” Mostly, perhaps, “illegal immigrants,” but really just immigrants. Immigrants, he tells them, are murderers and rapists. They both steal American jobs and freeload off of public services, he tells them. It matters not at all to either Trump or his audience that not one of those things is true just as it mattered neither to Hitler nor to millions of Germans that what Hitler said about Jews wasn’t true. It is appallingly easy to turn angry, frightened people against a designated enemy; and that’s true even if a person’s fear and anger are mostly subconscious.

That is precisely what Trump has done with his brutal campaign against immigrants. All immigrants. Documented immigrants. Undocumented immigrants who are nonetheless here legally seeking asylum. Even naturalized American citizens who were once immigrants. Many of us complain, rightly, about the rough and unconstitutional ways Trump’s ICE thugs treat immigrants, but we must remember. The cruelty is intentional. it plays directly into the fear inherent in Trump’s supporters and the anger that fear engenders. It is a purely fascist tactic, and it does for Trump what brutality always does for fascists. It may drive some people away; but it attracts more people than it repels as long, that is, as it is directed against the fascists’ designated enemy and not against the fascist’s supporters.

So yes, Donald Trump has caused, is causing, and will cause a great deal of harm to American democracy and to American and other people; but as well as being a cause of harm, Trump is a symptom of an underlying disorder in American society and American culture. He is a symptom of the fascistic reaction of white American racists to their perceived, and real, loss of privilege and power in today’s changing demographics.

We will be rid of Trump one day. He is, after all, as mortal as the rest of us. But getting rid of Trump will not solve the underlying problem that produced him in the first place. American white supremacism will still be there in all of its evil manifestations. It probably isn’t possible to cure the fear and anger that produced Donald Trump. At least, I don’t know how to cure it. What we must do is contain it. We must turn out intelligent, morally sensitive voters in such enormous numbers that the American fascists’ attempts to subvert American democracy fail. The MAGA mob is, after all, a rather small minority of the American people, and the support for Donald Trump is declining every day. My plea today is only that we be aware of what’s really going on in this country and that we be vigilant in keeping it from destroying us.

 

A Call to Nonviolent Revolution

 A Call to Nonviolent Revolution

May 2, 2026

The late, great John Lewis called on us all to get into "good trouble." Our country needs "good trouble" today as much as it ever has. Not violent trouble, but good trouble. The way things stand in this country politically and economically is simply unacceptable. Somehow, we must undo the Supreme Court's destruction of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. We must stop Trump's illegal and immoral attack on Iran. We must stop our country's support of Israeli genocide in Gaza. We must create a truly just tax system. We must create a tax-based system of universal health care. We must solve our horrific problem of homelessness. We must, at long, long last, overcome our country's original sin of racism in all of its overt and hidden manifestations. Politics as usual are not going to do it. The country's wealthy power structures are too effective in stopping it from happening. We need a revolution. A nonviolent revolution to be sure, but a political, economic, and social revolution nonetheless. We need a truly mass movement that says to the power structures: No! We're mad as hell, and we're not going to take it anymore!

Does a nonviolent revolution cause trouble? Of course it does! It causes trouble for the power structures that perpetuate economic and political injustice. It causes trouble for the country's racists who are doing everything they can to "keep niggers in their place." It causes trouble for the country's sexists who do everything they can to keep women "in their place." It causes trouble for those who would take this country backwards in time, back at least to the 1950s if not to the 1890s. It causes trouble for the economic and political forces that make the United States, along with Russia, the most violent, militarily aggressive country in the world. In other words, it causes trouble for all of this country's current economic and political power structures.

Now, we usually think of trouble as a bad thing. People, especially children, "get into trouble" when they do something bad. If you're mad at someone you might say "Boy am I gonna get that guy in trouble!" We speak of a "troubled relationship" when a relationship isn't what it should be. A socially disruptive person "causes trouble." The police prepare for "trouble" when there is going to be a large demonstration of any kind. Trouble, after all, means difficulty or problems. We see trouble as a bad thing not a good thing.

But when things are bad enough, trouble is exactly what we need. We need John Lewis' "good trouble." Nonviolent trouble, but still trouble. The Civil Rights Movement, at least in its nonviolent manifestations, was good trouble. So were nonviolent protests against the Vietnam war. The "no kings rallies" of recent times have been good trouble. The Black Lives Matter movement was good trouble. So was the Me-Too movement against sexual assault. Injustice and oppression of any kind call for a response of good, nonviolent trouble.

Calling for a nonviolent revolution is, of course, calling for something outside of the country's normal political systems. A great many Americans look to those systems for solutions to whatever they think the country's problems are. Your humble author has no such faith in his country's normal political systems. He lacks that faith for a couple of reasons. One is that those systems elected the fascist Donald Trump president not once but twice, the second time after he had instigated a violent uprising against the US Constitution and had been convicted of 34 felonies. The country gave control of Congress to Trump's bootlickers in the Republican Party, and the Republican Party has, on the whole, done nothing to stop the outrages Trump commits every day.

So why not rely on the Democrats? Well, the Democrats are certainly better than the Republicans. Most if not quite all of them are much better than the Republicans. The Democrats in Congress, however, and although a minority, have not done everything they could to stop Trump. Perhaps more importantly, the policies and programs the Democrats propose, to the extent they have any at all other than replacing Trump and the congressional Republicans, do not go nearly far enough. They do not call for slashing the so-called defense budget. They do not call for tax reform that is anywhere near radical enough to create justice. They do not call for a tax-based universal health care system. As nearly as I can tell, they have no plan for addressing homelessness at all. When they oppose Trump's Iran war, they do it mostly only on the grounds that he didn't seek congressional authorization first, a purely technical and the most insignificant of the numerous valid objections to that war. Yes, the Democrats are better than the Republicans, but they aren't nearly good enough to deal with this country's rank injustices. So no, our normal political system does not hold the solutions to our problems.

Now, I have used the word "nonviolent" many times in this piece, so it is, I suppose, necessary for me to say exactly what I mean by "nonviolent." Nonviolence is the refusal to inflict physical harm on any human being. In a nonviolent revolution, no one on the side of the revolution would intentionally, knowingly, or negligently inflict physical harm on any person. Period. No exceptions. That's what the revolution being nonviolent means.

Yet, of course, the revolution is not passive. It is actively, assertively attempting to turn the political and economic structures of the country completely upside down. It is attempting to put the people in charge politically and economically in place of the uber-rich power structures that rule the country today. The revolution will use every nonviolent tool available to it to bring about the desired upheaval in the country's power structures.

Which means that the nonviolent revolutionaries may on occasion violate the law. After all, the civil rights marchers in the south in the 1950s and 1960s violated the racist laws of the southern states at every turn. For the most part, at least, they did it nonviolently, but they definitely violated those laws. They violated laws against unlawful assemblies. They violated laws establishing segregated public facilities. They nonviolently violated any law that created and enforced the Jim Crow system of the south that denied people their rights and their dignity simply because of the color of their skin. Violating some law or other may well come with the conduct of the needed nonviolent revolution.

So, since your humble author is an ordained Christian minister, he must ask the question: Can a Christian morally engage in conduct that is intended to be disruptive and may well be illegal? Many Christians who belong to the so-called "historic peace churches" would probably answer that question "No." They take Jesus' prohibition of violence to require pure pacifism. They, when they are being true to their tradition's teaching, will sit passively by in the face of evil. They will probably pray against the evil, but they will not act against it.

We can respect the way these historic peace traditions oppose violence and wish for peace. We cannot, however, accept their position as truly Christian. Their refusal to act against injustice misunderstands Jesus' commands. Jesus commands nonviolence, but he does not command passive acceptance of evil. His teachings call for creative, assertive, but always nonviolent resistance to evil. For an explanation of that teaching, see the chapter titled "Jesus' Third Way" in Walter Wink's book The Powers That Be. Jesus never advocated or tolerated violence, but neither did he ever call on the people simply to accept injustice.

So, there we are. The United States of America is in terrible condition. It has never been the earthly paradise so many Americans have claimed it to be, and it is today, if anything, in worse shape than it has been in for a long time. It is in worse shape because of the concentration of immense wealth and political power in the hands of a very small number of greedy people. It is in worse shape because of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement that has put him in power. It is in worse shape because MAGA justices control the US Supreme Court and at least some of the lower federal courts. It is in worse shape because millions of Americans allow their fear and their bigotry to lead them to vote for politicians who actually work against those Americans' best interests. It is in worse shape because politics as usual have utterly failed to create a country truly based on freedom, on "liberty and justice for all."

And so. This ordained Christian pastor, who for most of his life has been an ardent advocate of Jesus' teaching of nonviolence, reasserts his commitment to that profound teaching and calls on the American people to engage in a mass, nonviolent uprising against the power structures in this country. Jesus didn't come to be our souls' passkey into heaven. He came to call us to "kingdom work," the work of establishing what he called "the kingdom of God" on earth. Of course, we aren't about to work for the establishment of a true kingship. We work, rather, for the creation of what we can call the realm rather than the kingdom of God. The realm of God is on earth not in heaven. It is not "of this earth," but it is in and is all about this earth. It is an earth in which people live together in peace. It is a world in which we achieve that peace never through violence but through the establishment of distributive justice everywhere on this lonely, tiny planet.

Doing that requires a revolution. Yes, historically speaking, revolutions have nearly always been violent. The "revolution" that founded this country, which was really only a war for independence, was horrifically violent. The French Revolution that followed it turned horrifically violent. The Russian "revolution" of 1917 and the Chinese revolution of the 1940s were both violent beyond comprehension. The revolution this country needs must avoid falling into the trap of violence at all costs.

And there have been nonviolent revolutions. Except in Romania, the revolutions of the communist countries of central and eastern Europe against the Soviets were nonviolent, and they succeeded in establishing democratic governments. The Scandinavian countries have established social democracies that come a lot closer to the realm of God than the United States does, and they have done it nonviolently. Most European countries have done something at least similar to what the Scandinavian countries have done if not quite as complete. Revolutions are often violent, but they are not necessarily violent. The revolution I call for here must be radical. It must be thorough. It must overturn most if not all of the power structures that control this country today. And it must do it nonviolently. May it be so.

More on the Gutting of the Voting Rights Act

 More on the Gutting of the Voting Rights Act

April 30, 2026

The more I think about what the Supreme Court did yesterday to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the madder I get. That decision is white supremacy in action and nothing else. It undoes decades of work on overcoming American racism. It slaps all who marched in the Civil Rights Movement in the face, and it says to those who gave their lives in that movement that their martyrdom doesn’t matter. It takes the US back decades in time, to an era when white supremacy was unchecked and Blacks has essentially no rights at all. At least it does that with regard to voting. Will the bigoted majority on the Supreme Court attack the Civil Rights Act of 1964 next? I would be more than appalled if they do, but I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised. Strict constructionists want the Constitution to mean only what it meant in 1789. But in 1789, our so-called Founding Fathers owned slaves as did nearly every wealthy person in the south and some wealthy persons in the north. The Constitution said a slave was only 3/5 of a person. People were owned, held, and sold as chattel property. We’ve still got a long way to go, but we have nonetheless come a long way since then. The racist majority on the Supreme Court wants to take us backwards not forward, and, because the Supreme Court has the final say on what the law is and what the law means, there isn’t one God-damned thing we can do about it. A Supreme Court decision that is only a ruling on a federal law can be overcome by changing the law; but a Supreme Court decision based on an interpretation of the Constitution can be overcome only if the Court itself overturns it or the Congress and the states amend the Constitution. That certainly isn’t going to happen. So Black Americans are fucked when it comes to voting, and that means we’re all fucked when it comes to voting. I don’t actually believe in damnation, but nonetheless I’ll say: God damn the majority of justices of the United States Supreme Court.

SCOTUS Guts the Civil Rights Act

 This is the text of a letter I sent today to our local newspaper;

On April 29, 2026, the United States Supreme Court delivered what may turn out to be the final, fatal blow to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It ruled that states may not adjust congressional districts to improve the chances minority communities have of having actual representation in Congress. That result completely ignores the reality of racial discrimination with regard to voting in this country, but it's even worse than that. We can be sure that the Supreme Court will do nothing to stop states from gerrymandering districts to see that minority communities do not have representation in Congress. That too is racial gerrymandering, but it is a type of it of which the Supreme Court majority, Donald Trump, and Trump's MAGA supporters approve. The issue is not racial gerrymandering. It is who benefits from a state's racial gerrymandering. The Supreme Court says whites do, and we all have to live with that unconscionable conclusion, a truly tragic result.