Thoughts on Russia and the West

 

Thoughts on Russia and the West

June 20, 2026

Something, I’m not sure what, has started me thinking about Russia again. I have a PhD in Russian history. I traveled to the Soviet Union twice and spent most if not quite all my time there in Russia.[1] I lived in the USSR for an entire academic year doing dissertation research, mostly in Moscow but also some in what was then Leningrad. I never got the chance to use my PhD much, but I still have it; and I still know more about Russia than most Americans do by far.

And I’ve been wondering a couple of things. The first is: What do Americans need to know about Russia? I think that mostly what they need to know is how different Russia really is from the West. Russia has no meaningful democratic traditions whatsoever. Russians, or at least their rulers, do not value human life nearly as much as most of us in the West do. Vladimir Putin may well have cost the lives of one million or more of his own people with his insane invasion of Ukraine, and that tragic fact seems to bother him not at all. That’s not surprising. Russian military tactics have long consisted of throwing wave after wave of soldiers at an enemy, losing many if not most of them, and simply overwhelming the enemy with numbers. That’s a big part of the explanation of how the Soviets were able to defeat the Nazis.

Putin has also reinstituted an authoritarian if not totalitarian government in Russia after the collapse of Russian communism. Civil liberties we take for granted (or at least did until Trump came along) simply don’t exist in Russia and never have. Russians were freer under the tsars than they were under the Soviets or are under Putin, but the Russian autocracy was an authoritarian, thoroughly un-democratic form of government too.

Which raises the second question: What historical developments account for the differences between Russia and the West? The first answer to that question that comes to my mind today is that Russia became Orthodox Christian not Roman Christian. Russia became Orthodox Christian in 988 CE when Grand Prince Volodymyr (better known in the West by his Russian name Vladimir) converted to Orthodox Christianity under the influence of the Greek Orthodox Church headquartered in Constantinople. He could have converted to Roman Catholic Christianity, but his economic ties to Constantinople made it quite likely that he would eventually convert to Orthodox Christianity, which, of course, he did.

When Volodymyr converted to Orthodox Christianity, the eastern and western Christian churches were still in full communion with each other, but there were already sharp distinctions between them. The eastern church was thoroughly Greek. The western church was thoroughly Latin. The Greek Christians traced their church’s lineage back to Constantine more directly than the Latin Christians did. The Greek Orthodox Church was grounded in Greek culture and history, the Roman Catholic Church was grounded in Latin culture and history. It was, I believe, inevitable that they would go their separate ways. In 1054, the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Bishop of Rome, that is, the Pope, excommunicated each other. This so-called Great Schism cemented the separation of eastern and western Christianity that had begun with cultural and linguistic differences (the east spoke Greek and the west spoke Latin) and, by the eleventh century CE, had developed into theological differences as well. Most significantly, the eastern Orthodox Christians never accepted the claims of the Pope to supremacy over the other Christian patriarchs, including the Patriarch of Constantinople.

By the time Volodymyr of Kiev converted to Orthodox Christianity, a major difference between the histories of the eastern and western Christian churches had already become apparent. In 800 CE, the Pope crowned Charlemagne, a secular ruler of territory now part of Germany and France, as a secular king. We see here the beginnings of something that became a major part of west European history but not east European history, namely, the conflict between the church and the state over secular primacy. Various princes and kings of western Europe fought the Papacy for their own independence for centuries. A well-known, if substantially later, example is Henry VIII of England breaking with Rome, nominally at least over the question of his divorce from his first wife.

No such conflict between the church and secular rulers ever occurred in the Orthodox countries, including Russia. Instead, in the Orthodox countries the church became a bulwark of the state. With the rather odd and ultimately not that meaningful schism of the Old Believers from the Russian Orthodox Church in the seventeenth century, the Old Believers not being affiliated directly with the Russian state, no significant schism ever occurred in the Russian Orthodox Church. Instead, the Patriarch of Moscow was always a staunch supporter of the monarchy., perhaps even more so after Peter the Great abolished the Moscow Patriarchate in 1721 and replaced it with a synod consisting mostly of bishops. The Russian Orthodox Church was tied directly to and never opposed the Russian autocracy about anything. It doesn’t oppose Putin about anything either.

Perhaps many westerners dismiss the importance of churches in history, but the way the Russian Orthodox Church always supported and never opposed the Russian state had immense consequences in Russian history. In the west, secular states became a power base separate from the church in effect if not in law. The church always remained a source of authority and independence separate from the authority of the state. Opposition to both the church and the state thus became a staple of western European history and culture. No such source of authority and independence separate from the authority of the state ever developed in Russia. There was never an institutional basis for opposition to the state the way there was in the West.

Another stark difference between the West and Russia developed beginning in about the fourteenth century CE. It was the Renaissance, first in Italy, then across western Europe. Most of the significant figures of the Renaissance remained Roman Catholic or, later, Protestant; but the Renaissance introduced something into western culture that has always been lacking in Russia. The artists of the Renaissance celebrated the human form. Many of them were, in effect, Christian humanists. They focused on individuals in a way Russian artists of the time never did. They painted nude women and sculpted nude men. No artists in Russia did any such thing at least until the nineteenth century. The value of the individual human being grew in western Europe during and after the Renaissance in a way it never did in Russia.

Then comes the Reformation of the sixteenth century. It comes in the West that is, not in Russia. Protestant Christianity, which became the dominant Christianity in the northern regions of western Europe, stressed the individual in a way the Russian Orthodox Church never did. Beginning with Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformers stressed the personal relationship of each believer with God apart from the church. That’s why they translated the Bible into their local languages, so that their people could read what they called the word of God themselves rather than learn of it only from the church. No such development ever occurred in Russia.

Then we come to the Enlightenment. In 1637, French mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes wrote “I think, therefore I am,” and the world has not been the same since. It’s not that western culture was completely unacquainted with human reason. The theology of Thomas Aquinas, for example is strictly rational. But before the Enlightenment, reason was not the ultimate standard of human knowledge or wisdom. Essentially everyone in the West accepted divine revelation, in the Bible and otherwise, as that ultimate standard. Anselm of Canterbury’s book Cur Deus Homo, which established the classical theory of atonement, is very rationalistic, but it Is not exclusively so. It accepts the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation without trying to reason its way to that doctrine.

In getting to his conclusion “I think therefore I am,” Rene Descartes did the radically new thing of using only his personal reason to answer the question he was asking. He set out to doubt everything he could doubt. He put nothing beyond his power of doubt. He found that he could doubt everything except that he was there doing the doubting. Hence, “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes’ process and his conclusion were rationalistic in ways western thought had not been before him.

Over the course of the next two centuries, human reason became the standard of knowledge, truth, and wisdom throughout western culture. The founders of the United States of America, for example, were children of the Enlightenment. Their thought was rationalistic not religious in any meaningful way. Jefferson’s famous statement “We hold these truths to be self-evident” is a thoroughly rationalistic statement. It relies not on divine revelation for its truth but only on human reason. By the middle of the nineteenth century, western thought was primarily rationalistic and scientific.

No such development ever took place in Russia. It is true that some of the tsars and tsarinas of the eighteenth century were attracted to and dabbled in western culture. Peter I, known as Peter the Great (ruled 168-1725), tried to westernize (though in no way to democratize) the Russian government with some limited success. Tsarina Ekaterina II, known to us as Catherine the Great (ruled 1762-1796) corresponded with French Enlightenment thinkers but then, she was German not Russian. And, like Peter, she did nothing to make Russia in any way more democratic. Enlightenment thinking made little or no impact on Russian culture generally. Russian science did appear in the eighteenth century and made some significant contributions to world knowledge. Moscow State University is named after the eighteenth century Russian scientist Mikhail Lomonosov. The Scientific Revolution was part of the Enlightenment, but neither rationalistic thinking nor science made any significant impact on Russian culture at least until the nineteenth century.

Russia has no meaningful democratic tradition whatsoever. The earlier Russian rulers were Grand Princes like Volodymyr of Kiev. They were essentially autocratic rulers. When Volodymyr converted to Orthodox Christianity in 988 CE, the entire Russian populace became Orthodox Christian. That conversion may have been nominal at first, but Russian Orthodoxy came to permeate Russian life and culture from top to bottom, and it began in Russia when an absolute monarch converted. The control of the country by the Grand Princes generally and the Grand Princes of Moscow in particular just deepened over the centuries. When Russian autocracy finally collapsed (at least in its tsarist form) in 1917, it was still true that, by and large, the Russian people remained at least superficially committed to both Orthodoxy and autocracy.

There is yet another aspect of Russian history that explains a good deal about Russian thought and the actions of the Russian government. Russia’s history is one of foreign invasion after foreign invasion. Russia has no naturally defensibly land borders. Moscow rose to prominence among the Russian states in the thirteenth century because in 1240 the Tartars, coming from the east, conquered what today is Ukraine, including the former Grand Principality of Kyiv. The Russian Grand Princes and tsars fought land wars at least with Sweden, the Teutonic Knights, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the French. Finally, the Soviets fought a horrifically devastating war against the German Nazis. National security from foreign invasion is a concern for the Russian people and their leaders in a way we Americans can hardly understand.

That’s why Putin can’t stand the thought of Ukraine joining NATO. That’s why, in my opinion, it was wrong for NATO to admit states some of which had been part of the USSR and others of which had been members of the Warsaw Pact. It was perfectly predictable that NATO doing so would provoke a reaction from Russia that may strike us as paranoid but that is perfectly reasonable in the Russian context. Putin may well not have invaded Ukraine had NATO not admitted Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechia, Hungary, Romania, and other states formerly under Soviet domination.

Russia has no history of meaningful democracy or concern for human rights, but there are a couple of things worth looking at. The first Russian revolution of the twentieth century took place not in 1917 but in 1905. Public unrest, rioting actually, and the revolt of much of the Russian military (especially the Navy, which had just suffered a terrible defeat at the hands of the Japanese) forced Tsar Nicholas II to adopt governmental reforms that had a democratic appearance. There was a national legislature called the Duma that was more or less freely elected. It debated and passed legislation like a western legislature, but there was a significant difference between it and, say, the British Parliament. The tsar didn’t have to obey any law the Duma passed. The reforms of 1905 changed Russian autocracy in name only.

Nicholas II abdicated in February (March new style) 1917, and Russian autocracy came to an end at least in its tsarist form. The first government that replaced the tsardom is known as the “Provisional Government.” It was nominally democratic, and there was no longer a tsar who could disregard its enactments. It was, however, utterly ineffective as a Russian government. It refused to pull Russia out of World War I though the country was falling apart because of the war. It refused to enact foundational laws because it said it had to wait for a “Constituent Assembly” to draft a new Russian constitution, something that never happened. And, of course, the Provisional Government lasted only from February to October (March to November new style), 1917. It had no meaningful impact on Russian thought or culture.

Comes October 25 (old style, November 7 new style), 1917. On that date, Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks staged a coup d’etat against the Provisional Government. The Soviet Communists came to call this coup “The Great October Revolution,” but it was nothing of the sort at the time. It did, however, lead to a civil war in Russia that lasted until 1922, from which the Soviet Communists, under Lenin, emerged victorious. Lenin and, most particularly his successor Stalin, created one of the most totalitarian, brutally violent, and brutally oppressive political systems the world has ever seen. It was only 74 years from the Bolshevik coup in 1917 to the end of the Communist regime in Russia at the end of 1991, but in those 74 years the Soviet Communists suppressed all opposition, often with long prison terms under murderous conditions or with bullets in the back of the head. More than they ever had before, the Russian people came both to fear their government and to understand that they had no say in what their government did. The Soviet Communists held elections, but they were fake elections. No one opposed to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was allowed to run, and the Communists always won by 95% or more. Soviet democracy was a pure sham.

When the Soviet Union ended on December 25, 1991, Russia adopted the most democratic constitution it had ever had. There were meaningful elections at all levels of government. The Russian presidency was powerful, but there were, and are, legislative bodies with real legislative authority. Yet even before Vladimir Putin became president on Jan. 1, 2000, Russian democracy was far from perfect. The way the government divested itself of the state-owned industries from the Soviet era created both a culture of mafia rule and the power of so-called “oligarchs,” immensely rich men who controlled all of the major industries including mining and oil and gas production. There were elections, but the national government was completely in the pockets of the oligarchs.

Whereupon Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin enters the picture. Putin had been a low-level KGB officer in East Germany when the Berlin wall came down. He’d had to deal with anti-Communist rioters in Dresden. President Boris Yeltsin first made him head of the Russian successor to the KGB and then named him Prime Minister. Yeltsin resigned at the end of 1999, and, as Prime Minister, Putin became president pro tem. He won his first election as president a short time later. He has essentially ruled Russia ever since.

Putin is in many ways an unreformed Russian communist. He no longer spouts Marxist-Leninist ideology, but he has created an authoritarian state that is about as close to Soviet totalitarianism as he can get. He has nationalized the public media and strictly controls the Internet. He has had his most prominent critics exiled or killed, sometimes both. He has suppressed opposition nearly as effectively as the Soviet Communists had done. Russia remains nominally democratic, but its democracy is for show only. It is, for example, illegal to criticize Putin’s immoral and illegal invasion of Ukraine. Note that the Patriarch of Moscow fully supports that invasion despite its undeniably sinful nature.

Let me share three experiences from my two times in the Soviet Union that may well demonstrate some of the differences between Russia and the West. I was first in Russia in the summer of 1968 on a Russian language study tour through Indiana University. One day, in what was then Leningrad, our group met a Russian man and chatted with him. He said to us: “You Americans always talk about what’s bad about our country and our government. But how would you like it if people went around saying bad things about your government?” This was at the height of the 1968 presidential election. Most of the people in our group had “Clean for Gene” stickers on their luggage, expressing support for the strongly anti-Vietnam War candidate Gene McCarthy. We thought: Hell. We say negative things about our government every day! That’s the American way!” Well, it definitely is not the Russian way.

Then, once again in Leningrad but this time at a dorm of Leningrad State University in 1976, the Soviet Defense Minister had just died. He had been a prominent figure in the Soviet government for a long time. I said something about it to some Russian students. They just shrugged and said: “That’s his business.” They not only didn’t care, they weren’t the least bit interested in the fact that a prominent Soviet leader had died. The specifics of that incident are probably understandable, but I think these students’ reaction tells us something important. The Russian people just didn’t care about what was going on in their government because they had absolutely no say in what it did.

Finally, the Berdyaev incident. When I resided at Moscow State University for the 1975-76 academic year, I got to know to know a Russian student at the University. He assured me that he was an atheist and that he didn’t understand how so many Americans could say they believe in God. Nonetheless, as I was about to leave Moscow for the last time, I gave him a book by the great Orthodox Russian theologian and philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev. My friend nearly began to weep. He said: “You cannot know what you have done for me.”

Perhaps not, but I think I have a pretty good idea what I might well have done for him. He knew full well that the communist regime under which he lived and studied had stolen his people’s history. They had bastardized it to fit a Marxist ideology. Historians wrote and spoke mostly not to discover and disclose the truth about the past but to prop up the Soviet system. The Soviet regime had also attempted to steal people’s nationality from them. Soviet citizens were supposed to be “the new communist woman” and “the new communist man” and not actually be Russians or any other of the numerous nationalities within the USSR. Berdyaev may have been a Russian Orthodox theologian, but that meant that he was profoundly Russian. He had left Russia to avoid the communists. Some Russian young people at the time were being attracted back to the Russian Orthodox Church not because it was Christian but because it is so quintessentially Russian.

My friend had probably heard of Berdyaev. Berdyaev had been a member of what’s called the Vekhi Group. That was a group of former Marxists who left Marxism behind and returned to the Russian Orthodox faith. The Soviet communists despised them. They called them class traitors. I’m sure the Soviets saw them as evidence of the way bourgeois society steals people away from the Marxist truth and gets them to accept a faith that, for the communists, served only to perpetuate that bourgeois society. I had given my friend an opening into something profoundly Russian that he thought he would never have.

Russians like my friend knew that they lived under a regime that bastardized and stole their people’s history. They expected, and today I’m sure expect, nothing better from their government. Until some MAGA fascists in Florida and elsewhere started to prohibit public schools from teaching the truth about American history, this is something none of us have ever had to deal with. It is, however, and long has been, part of what the Russian people live with.

It should be obvious from this brief overview of Russian history and my few personal stories that Russia is a very different place from the West, including from the United States. When the USSR ceased to exist, many people in the West thought Russia would become a functioning parliamentary democracy. That thought was unrealistic if not outright naïve. Few Americans understand the power of history, but a people’s history really does matter. Russia’s history and present lived experience are radically different from those of the United States and the rest of the West. Russia has no meaningful history of democracy of any kind. Human life does not mean in Russia what it means to us. Russia has no meaningful history of centers of power in the country other than the government together with either the Russian Orthodox Church, or the Communist Party, or both. Russia has a history of opposition to the state being brutally suppressive. That happened to some extent under the tsars. It happened vociferously under the communists, and it happens that way today under Putin. Russians see national security from a perspective of having been invaded over and over again. They have a memory of having been a world power and of having an extensive, geographically contiguous empire. They lost both of those things when the Soviet Union dissolved, and they aren’t happy about it.

We cannot expect Russia to function or behave like a western representative democracy. It may be such a democracy on paper today, but then it was such a democracy on paper under the Soviets too. We must not be led by superficial appearances and propagandistic claims. We must not project western ways and values onto Russia. Russia is far more Asian than are any of the countries of the West, especially in her politics. The Russias are a great people. They have achieved spectacular successes in science, beating the US into space. They have produced worldclass literature, visual arts, and music. The Russian people are quite cold and unfriendly in public, but in private they are among the most friendly and welcoming people you will meet anywhere.

I want very much to like Russia and the Russians, but today I cannot do it. I am so mad at Putin over his invasion of Ukraine that sometimes I fee like I’m going to burst. There isn’t a shred of justification for it anywhere. It has inflicted immense harm on both the Ukrainian and the Russian people. It has made Russia more of a pariah nation than she even was before the invasion. I admire Russian culture. I respect the Russian people. I despise their government, what it has done to its people, and what it has done on the international stage. Still, Russia has an important presence in the world, and we must do more than most Americans ever do to understand her. Perhaps my little effort will help my country in that regard.

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[1] In the summer of 1968 I spent a few days in Tbilisi, Georgia, and Kyiv, Ukraine. Otherwise my time in the USSR was all in Russia.

Conclusion of a New Book

 I will soon put a new book on Kindle Direct Publishing, accessible on amazon.com. Its title is: How Can I Be a Christian? Here is the conclusion to that book.

Conclusion

 

So how can I sum up my Christian faith? This whole book is an effort to express my faith, but summing that faith up is not an easy task. To me, faith is a very complex thing. It starts with ontology, that is, an understanding of the nature of being. It includes an understanding of the nature of human language and proceeds from there. Most Christians, indeed, most people, assume an understanding of being and of language unconsciously. They can’t articulate their understandings, but they have them nonetheless. I believe that we must discuss and decide about them openly, consciously. Here’s how I understand them.

Being is multidimensional. There is physical, material being, or at least we assume that there is and act as if there is.[1] We take material being as real. Since the European Enlightenment, much of western culture has assumed that this material reality is the only reality there is. Western culture is wrong about that. There is another dimension to reality. It is the dimension of the spiritual. Spiritual reality permeates material reality. It is the depth dimension of reality. All human cultures, though not all human beings, have recognized the reality of the spiritual. Even the materialistic culture of western Europe has never completely lost awareness of the spiritual.

Human language is incommensurate with the task of speaking about the spiritual. The spiritual both inheres in everything that is and utterly transcends everything that is. We humans can speak meaningfully about the spiritual only in the language of symbol and the mythic. Most people take their words about the spiritual literally, that is, factually; but the spiritual cannot be reduced to fact. Factual truth is important in its own realm, but it is unavoidably superficial. The language of symbol and myth connects us with the spiritual in a way mere fact never can. I understand all statements about God and Jesus Christ as symbols not as statements of fact.

I believe that spiritual reality is a higher reality than material reality. It is ultimate reality. It is the reality on which all other reality depends. That is what we mean when we call God the Creator of all that is. Our call as humans is to conform our lives to the ways of spiritual reality. None of us will ever do that anywhere near perfectly. That doesn’t mean we are not called to do what we can to live according to spiritual values not material ones.

My primary symbol for the spiritual is the word God. God is Spirit. As Spirit, God both inheres in everything that is and totally transcends everything that is. God is not a person, but we can relate to God personally through the use of symbolic language. Though God is not a person, we can relate to God as a person as long as we don’t reduce God to humanlike personhood.

I believe that God has God’s ways of being, has God’s own values, and that those ways and values are totally different from the ways and values of the world. God has thoughts, but they aren’t like our thoughts. God has a vision of the world transformed from the way it is to the way it would be if it operated according to God’s ways and values rather than its own corrupt ways and values. God’s ways and values are so grounded in love that we can truthfully say that God is love. God’s ways are the ways of nonviolence and radical, distributive justice for all of God’s people. God calls all people to the work of creating a transformed world through nonviolent action against the powers of the world and for the wellbeing of all people. The first step in doing that is inner transformation. God calls us to rid our minds and spirits of the worldly ways we have internalized so that we can better conform to the ways of God.

I believe that all profound truth is paradoxical. That God both inheres in all created being and utterly transcends created being at the same time is a paradox. It is something that isn’t possible, it’s just true. The Incarnation is also a paradox. It is simply impossible that Jesus could be both fully human and fully divine at the same time. It isn’t possible, it’s just true.

I believe in the Trinitarian conception of God symbolically. We cannot say anything that is directly, factually true about God. God is too transcendent for that. We can speak of God in the language of symbol. That’s what the Trinity is, a symbol for one way to understand God’s reality. The great virtue of the Trinity is that, because it makes no rational sense at all, it preserves the ultimate mystery of God. It is a paradox. It is impossible but true. Nothing can be three and one at the same time, but God is. I believe that the trinitarian conception of God gives us a mysterious, dynamic, and active God.

I believe that Jesus of Nazareth is God Incarnate. The Incarnation is another paradox. It is both impossible and true. No mere human could possibly also be all of God, but I confess that Jesus was. He was fully human and fully God at the same time. In this sense my Christian faith is quite conventional. I accept both foundational doctrines of traditional Christianity, Trinity and Incarnation, though I understand them symbolically not literally.

I believe that in Jesus as God Incarnate we humans see and can learn as much about God as our finite minds are capable of learning. I believe that if you want to see God, look at Jesus. As God Incarnate he was born, lived, and died as a human being; and in everything he did God was fully present and doing it with and in him. In Jesus we see God entering into as much of human life as any one individual can, even, or especially, the difficult, painful parts of human life. In Jesus’ death we see the death of God. Yet God is paradox. On the cross of Jesus God dies, but God remains the infinite, immortal God at the same time. That, of course, is another paradox. It’s impossible, but it’s true.

I believe that in Jesus Christ we see how God relates to us humans, to human suffering, and human sin. God does not scorn human suffering and death. God enters into them with us. No matter what happens with us during our lives and even after our deaths, God is with us and for us. Human sin no doubt angers God, but God does not punish it either in this life or after this life. God is infinite, universal, unconditional love; and divine love could never punish anyone because doing so would make God’s love conditional and therefore far too human.

I accept Jesus Christ as my Savior, but I do not believe that the Christ event (the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as the Christ) brought anything new into being. It did not get God to forgive sin God had never forgiven before. It makes no sense to me to say that it did. I see Jesus as Savior because he shows us in the most direct and powerful way possible that we’ve always been saved because God scorns none of human life. Rather, God enters into human life and thereby sanctifies it. All of it.

I believe that after Jesus’ death his followers had a powerful, life changing experience of Jesus’ continuing presence with them. We call that experience the Resurrection. It has great symbolic meaning and power. It means that with God death is not the end. It wasn’t the end for Jesus, and it isn’t the end for us. At least, it allows us to trust that death is not the end for us. Jesus’ Resurrection is another thing that isn’t possible, it’s just true.

I believe that Jesus calls us, as God does, to a nonviolent revolution on earth to make real what Jesus called the kingdom of God. In Jesus we learn that the values of the kingdom of God are basically the values of the world turned completely upside down. The kingdom of God is totally nonviolent. In it, people never resort to violence for any reason. In the kingdom of God those the world calls first are last and those the world calls last are first. In the kingdom of God the rich are brought down and the poor are lifted up. In the kingdom of God everyone has enough because no one has too much. In the kingdom of God the spiritual life and values are more important than material life and values. In the kingdom of God we humans relate to each other in love rather than in the world’s ways of competition, one-upmanship, oppression, and dominance.

I believe, as I believe Jesus did, that transformation of the world begins with the transformation of the self. The world will change when enough of its people change. Change their ways from violence and domination to the ways of nonviolence, justice, and peace. To attack the world for its faults without having first discerned and dealt with your own faults is just the way to more violence and domination, not the way to true peace.

I believe that morality is grounded in God’s unconditional love not in codes of laws and commandments. We can never reduce God’s love to ten commandments or even to the six hundred thirteen laws of the Torah. Morality is situational, and that is moral which facilitates wholeness of life for the people involved in the situation. Morality is always nonviolent. It says “thou shalt not kill” and means it. Always. In every situation. What is moral in one situation may be immoral in some other situation. Morality is always judged under the rule of love, not by whether or not an act conforms to some rigid code of conduct.

I believe that Christianity is far more about how we are to live this life than it is about how we are to get our souls to heaven in a next life. Jesus said almost nothing about how we get our souls to heaven.[2] I believe that if our souls do go to heaven, we have nothing to do with it. We don’t save ourselves. Whether there is any reality for us after death, and what that reality is, is entirely up to God not to us.

I believe that salvation is more about this life than it is about a next life. Jesus spent his ministry calling people to be people of the kingdom of God in this life not to be people in heaven in some afterlife. Salvation in this life is coming to know God’s unconditional love. It is to rest our minds and our spirits in that love. It is to live out of that love and to share it with as much of the world as we can.

I understand faith as trust not as the acceptance of unproven factual assertions. I know that everything I believe about God may be wrong. The possibility of error is unavoidable when we speak of that which transcends our ability to speak about it. Yet in faith I trust that what I understand about God is not false, or at least that not all of it is. I don’t know anything about God. I try to understand God as best I can, then live in trust under that understanding of ultimate reality.

I do not believe that Christianity has the only truth or that it is the only way to a proper relationship with God. Both Christianity and other faith traditions are true to the extent that they connect people with ultimate reality, which a tradition may or may not conceive of as God, and false to the extent that they connect people to something else. It’s obvious, if we’ll just open our eyes and our minds, that people all over the world find their connection with God in Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, Sikhism,  Baha’i, and a great many other faith traditions. We Christians have no right to condemn them just because they don’t find their connection with God the way we do. We should thank God that we humans can find God in so many different ways.

I believe that the Bible is a purely human product. It was written by men (sadly not by any women) who were people of their own times and places. Their writings express their understandings of God, which are not necessarily God’s understanding of God, nor must they be our understanding of God. I see the Bible as an invitation into dialogue with its ancient authors. There is much wisdom in the Bible, but there is also much that is false, some of it appallingly false. One of the challenges of faith is to discern which Bible passages express divine wisdom and which express earthly error. The Christian’s standard for making that distinction is Jesus, and therefore it is love.

The basics of my Christian faith are then these: God is real. God is Spirit. God is love. Jesus Christ is God Incarnate. God calls us to lives of love. God calls us to transform the world into one ruled by love, and God demands that we do it nonviolently. I believe with Jesus that transformation of the world begins with transformation of the self. Without individual transformation away from the ways of the world and toward the ways of God, transformation of the world is not possible. I believe that God’s grace is universal and unconditional. I believe that we humans are called to behave ourselves not from fear of punishment but in response to God’s love for us. So my bottom line is this: God is real. We know God in Jesus. Love is the standard for everything.

I don’t live a life of love better than anyone else, but I know that God has forgiven my failures and everyone else’s before we even commit them. For that greatest of all of God’s gifts, for God’s universal and unconditional grace, I say with all my heart: Thanks be to God!

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[1] For a much longer discussion of this issue see Appendix 1 of my book Liberating Christianity.

[2] A couple of parishioners once attacked me for not telling them how they could get their souls to heaven. I didn’t say this to them, but I never told them that because I don’t believe they had to do anything to get their souls to heaven, not that they would have believed me had I said that to them.

                                                                    On Love and Anger 

June 16, 2026 

Yes, there is Matthew 11:28, where the Gospel reports Jesus as having said that his burden is easy and his yoke is light. Frankly, I’ve never really understood that saying, for it seems to me that the life of following Jesus, which, after all, is what the Christian life must be, is hardly easy. One reason it isn’t easy is that the texts it is based on contain contradictions that make it seemingly impossible to carry out both sides. The most basic commandment for the Christian life is the Great Commandment. In Matthew’s version is reads: “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. this is the greatest and the first commandment The second resembles it: You must love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang the whole Law, and the Prophets too.” Matthew 22:37-40. New Jerusalem Bible (italics sic). The demands of the faith get no more foundational than these verses. 

On the other hand, there is no doubt that Jesus also calls us to witness for the realm of God, for God’s demand that we do what we can to reform this corrupt world from its own ways to the ways of God. Jesus calls us to work for a world of distributive justice achieved through nonviolent resistance to evil. And frankly, it is very hard if not impossible to work for that world in this world without getting awfully angry. Without feeling a deep righteous indignation over how wicked the world and the people who support its ways can be. We see that wickedness in our country today in Donald Trump and the MAGA movement that continues to support him despite his failings, which are more numerous than we can count. I must confess that Donald Trump, MAGA, and the advocates of “Christian nationalism” who are such a big part of the MAGA movement make me madder than hell. They are destroying my country. They are perpetuating precisely the kind of evil Jesus condemned. They are grounded in and perpetuate the evils of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, economic injustice, and world empire maintained through military violence. They are, in other words, nothing short of American fascists. They seek to destroy democracy, and they bastardize Christianity at every turn. Surely the Holy Spirit calls me to oppose them in every nonviolent way that I can. How can I not be madder than hell at them? 

Yet, as I must conclude from the Parable of the Good Samaritan, these people too are my neighbor in the sense of the Great Commandment. And, as hard as it is for me to do it, I must confess that they too are beloved children of God. So I have to ask myself: Do the facts that these American fascists are my neighbors and that God loves them even though I can’t mean that I can’t oppose everything they stand for? Does it mean I can’t be angry with them? Does it mean that I can’t feel righteous indignation toward them? These are questions with which I’m struggling today. 

One way to get at an answer to those questions, I think, is to ask: What does it mean to love your neighbor as yourself? And to answer that question I have to start, I think, with asking: What does it mean for me to love myself?1 More specifically in today’s context: Does loving myself mean I have to love myself even when I’ve thought or done something that is terribly wrong? Is there a distinction between myself and what I might think or do that is terribly wrong that will help answer my questions here? 

I think that there is, but before I get to what I think that distinction means for me, let me dispose of a cliche we’ve all heard. Self-proclaimed Christians who condemn God’s LGBTQ+ people are fond of saying that they “love the sinner but hate the sin.” These so-called Christians have used that cliche to justify the way they hate something that actually isn’t a sin, that is actually so much an intrinsic part of some people that you cannot legitimately separate the person from it. Thus, no matter how much they deny doing it, they actually hate the person and not just the person’s sex life, whatever that sex life may be. That is not the situation I’m dealing with here, as I hope to explain below. 

I don’t know that I am capable of hating what American fascists say and do and still love them. I can, however, confess that I do not love them and remain aware that, although I cannot and do not love them, God can and does. I don’t know how does that. I, after all, for all of the personal arrogance I sometimes feel, am not God. I don’t know how God does it or how God is able to do it, I just know that God is able to do it and does indeed do it. For that divine, transcendent truth I guess I can say, however reluctantly: Thanks be to God! So, just as I could not and would not love myself if I acted or thought like them, I don’t and can’t love American fascists. I’m content to confess my sin of not loving them and to leave the loving of them up to God. 

I am convinced, however, that I am not only free to feel righteous indignation toward them, I must feel righteous indignation toward what they say and do if I am to be true to my own Christian faith. And I am convinced that I must feel righteous indignation toward what they say and do if I am to be true to Jesus Christ as we learn of him in the four canonical gospels of the New Testament. Jesus Christ taught, lived for, and died for everything American fascists reject; and he rejected everything they stand for. Jesus preached love not hate. He preached nonviolence not violence (though not passive acceptance of evil), he preached distributive justice not the gross economic and political inequity of empire that we have in our country today. He could have saved his life by kissing Pilate’s ass the way American fascists kiss Donald Trump’s ass, but he wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t give in to the power of empire and its acolytes like Pontius Pilate. 

I won’t either. Jesus didn’t often get angry, or so it seems, though he did once call the Pharisees a “brood of vipers.” Matthew 12:34. He got mad at Peter when Peter said that Jesus’ prediction of his coming execution must not happen. Mark 8:31-33. Yet Jesus was in many ways a reappearance of the ancient Hebrew prophets. The Judaism of Jesus’ time had reduced itself essentially to the book of Leviticus and all of the laws that book contains. But Judaism had, and has, a much older tradition than the tradition of the law. It is the tradition of the prophets, especially the eighth century BCE prophets like Isaiah of Jerusalem, Amos and Micah or the sixth century BCE prophet Jeremiah. Jesus clearly associated himself with those prophets, as we see when we read of him associating himself with Isaiah at Luke 4:16-21. Those ancient men of God (sadly, they were all men) were nothing if not angry at the way the powerful in their world bastardized the Jewish faith by oppressing the poor and other marginalized people and by putting the Torah law above distributive justice. 

So yes. I am mad as hell over what our American fascists are saying and doing today. I will condemn what they are saying and doing until I take my last breath. And I will do so because I am convinced that my Christian faith not only justifies me in doing so, it requires me to do so. Anger can be justified. Indignation can be righteous. Anger is justified, and indignation is righteous, when they are reactions to hatred, violence and, and injustice, that is, when they contradict the kingdom values for which Jesus lived and died. Jesus insisted that we be nonviolent, but he never called us to be passive in the face of such evils.2 I will never be violent nor will I ever advocate violence, but neither will I be silent. Neither will I be at peace with the evil I see before me. I believe that words are my tools more than physical protest is, and I will keep writing words against Donald Trump, MAGA, and Christian nationalism for as long as I am able to do so. I pray that perhaps you too, dear reader, will do whatever nonviolent thing you can to bring down Donald Trump’s fascist regime, restore our precious American democracy, and build the realm of God on earth. May it be so.