On Constantinian Christianity Repost

 This is a post I wrote and put up in 2010, sixteen years ago now. Tragically, given the rise of the un-Christian movement called Christian nationalism among us, it is even more relevant now than it was then. So I repost it here.

In his book If the Church Were Christian Philip Gulley has a brief but instructive section on the relationship between Christianity and the state, focusing on the vital issue of Christian nonviolence.  He writes:

I’m no longer surprised by my fellow Christians’ support of war.  Indeed, some of the most strident voices for military force emanate from Christian quarters.  This, I believe, is the inevitable consequence of an institution that has grown so fond of force and power that it doesn’t hesitate to recommend it to others.  Additionally, the church has so closely identified itself with the nation that it has lost its prophetic voice and witness, conferring God’s blessing to the most immoral undertakings.

It was not always so.  For the first several hundred years of the church, Christians believed the ethic of Jesus called them to love and redeem their enemies, not kill them.  But what appeared to be a blessing became their undoing.  The emperor Constantine was favorably disposed toward Christians, and they now had a stake in his rule and forsook pacifism to perpetuate their position of privilege.  So began the uneasy alliance between state and church, which exists to this day, where allegiance to the former almost always compromises the integrity of the latter.  To be an American Christian is to hold dual citizenship, forever feeling the tension between the push of country and the pull of discipleship.

Philip Gulley, If the Church Were Christian, Rediscovering the Values of Jesus, HarperOne, 2010, pp. 148-49

This brief and overly simplified statement raises an issue of vital importance to Christianity today.  It isn’t a perfect statement of the issue.  For example, I’m afraid that Gulley overstates the extent to which most American Christians feel “the tension between the push of country and the pull of discipleship.”  In my experience most of them feel no tension at all between the demands of country and the demands of faith.  And there are Christian groups, including at least to some extent my own United Church of Christ, that have not entirely lost their prophetic voice.  Nonetheless, Gulley raises an important issue, one to which Christians pay far too little attention.

That issue is the consequences of the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire by the emperor Constantine and his successors in the fourth century CE.  Gulley is absolutely correct when he says that allegiance to the state almost always compromises the integrity of the church and when he says that that compromise began with that establishment of Christianity as the official state religion of the Roman Empire.  The ways in which Christianity was changed and debased by the Constantinian compromise, the compromise with earthly values that made it possible for Christianity to become and to remain established as the official religion of the Roman Empire, are complex and multifaceted; and understanding that compromise is essential if we are to understand the issues facing Christianity today and if Christianity is to have a future.  That compromise involved at least the following issues.

First of all, the church compromised Jesus’ ethic of nonviolence by adopting the un-Christian doctrine of the just war, a doctrine developed to allow Christians to fight to defend the now supposedly Christian Roman Empire.  Beyond that, the church shifted its focus from Jesus’ project of establishing God’s reign of peace and justice in this world to getting people into heaven in the next, a shift that benefited the ruling powers of the world that the church now served by diverting the attention of the poor and oppressed off of their plight in this life onto some kind of hope for some other life.  It abandoned Jesus’ revolutionary ethic of inclusion, justice, and peace that time and time again stood the ways and expectations of the world on their heads.  In doing so the church became the ultraconservative prop of the existing power structures rather than a prophetic voice of God’s justice and peace.  It changed from a movement of the people organized into house churches into an institutional structure that, in its Roman Catholic form, mimics that of the Roman Empire, with an Emperor-Pope at the top, a Curia-Senate below him, and regional administrators called bishops answerable not to the people but to the central government in Rome.  It even took on the pomp and splendor of the Roman Empire, spurning the poverty, simplicity, and humility of the way of Jesus in favor of all the trappings of wealth and power that it learned from the Roman imperial government.  It is difficult to imagine anything farther from the way of Jesus than the imperial pomp and ceremony of the Vatican. 

The Orthodox Churches are guilty of many of the same vices.  Perhaps even more than in the west they threw their lot in with the worldly governments of the places in which they operated.  The Russian Orthodox Church, for example, was, during the Imperial period, a primary buttress of autocracy, that oppressive form of governance that distorted Russian life for centuries and made possible (if not inevitable) the abomination that was Soviet Communism.  The Protestant Reformation in the west addressed some of these non-Christian adaptations to empire, but certainly not all of them.  Most Protestant churches other than the historic peace churches (Quakers, Mennonites, Brethren etc.) have drunk the Cool-Ade of just war theory every bit as much as their Catholic and Orthodox sisters.  They too have seen their primary objective as getting people into heaven rather than building the Realm of God on earth.  In Europe they too made their bed with the ruling authorities; and they were only too happy to throw their support and, as they supposed, God’s blessing to the imperial schemes of secular governments, becoming in the process themselves instruments of cultural and religious imperialism.

It is no wonder that so many sensitive and discerning people today leave the Christian church or never have anything to do with it in the first place.  The salvation of Christianity, if one is possible at all, lies not in contemporary styles of worship and warehouse churches that do everything they can not to look like churches, for those are superficial changes that repackage to old, compromised Christianity in a worldly shell that is itself only more compromise with the culture of the world.  Christianity’s salvation, if one is possible at all, lies in reclaiming the way of Jesus, the way of assertive, creative, nonviolent resistance to evil, the way of justice, the way of inclusion, the way of compassion, the way of grace.  In a world addicted to power and violence that way of Jesus is needed now more than ever.  That way (which many follow and advocate outside of Christianity, for while it is Jesus' way it is not exclusively Jesus' way) may even be humanity’s only hope of saving itself from itself, as John Dominic Crossan contends.  The Christian church is a compromised messenger of that way, compromised by all of the concessions it has made to empire in order to maintain a position of privilege and power; but it is the only messenger of that way that we Christians have.  The future of Christianity, if it has one, lies in its pre-Constantinian past.  Not in slavish imitation of that past, which after all occurred in a cultural-linguistic world so different from ours as to be almost beyond comprehension to modern people, but in reclaiming the values of Jesus and proclaiming them to our world.  Proclaiming them in ways that speak to our world without watering them down to placate the world.  Proclaiming them in ways that give people today hope for this life and for this world and the courage to work to make that hope a reality.  Let’s get on with it.

On Israel's Genocide in Gaza

 This is the text of letter I have sent to my local newspaper. They may or may not publish it..

There is no doubt that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. The facts speak for themselves and are undeniable. Yes, Hamas conducted an outrageous act of terrorism against Israel on October 7, 2023. That truth is undeniable too, and there is no excuse or justification for it. All people of good faith must condemn it absolutely, and I do. It does not, however, in any way excuse what Israel has done in Gaza in response. Genocide is genocide regardless of who is committing it. Acknowledging the evil of what the state of Israel is doing in Gaza is, however, not anti-Jewish. The great, ancient faith of Judaism, the world’s oldest monotheistic faith and the mother faith of Christianity, is not the same thing as the state of Israel. I am an ordained Christian minister, and I have nothing but respect for Judaism and God’s people who practice if faithfully. I can do nothing but condemn Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netahyahu and the government he heads. All people of good faith must do whatever they can to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza and work to restore the horrific damage Israel has done there.

Why Don't We Have Universal Health Care?

 

There must be a reason why the US does not have universal, tax-supported health care. It is simply inexcusable that we do not, but we don’t. I can think of two reasons why we don't. First, Americans have been so brainwashed into idolizing large corporations and hating government that they think private insurance companies are a safer bet than the government is. So, they think, stick with the private insurers rather than turn the matter over to government bureaucrats. Second, the powers that be use their money and the political power they buy with it to stop the government from taking business away from private insurance companies. The top executives of those companies are unconscionably rich just as are the top executives of essentially all big corporations. Those guys form a sort of informal club dedicated to preventing the government from diminishing the wealth and power of any of them. They use their wealth to buy politicians of both parties in order to make sure none of that ever happens. So, we’re stuck with for profit health insurance companies that are, like all big corporations, concerned almost exclusively with profit in general and with increasing return to the shareholders in particular. They care about profit not about people. They will deny any claim they think they can because paying claims costs them money and denying claims saves them money. They know that they are legally bound to comply with the law and with the terms of the insurance policies they issue, but they will skate as close to line of violating that law or the terms of their policies as they think they can get away with.

As a general rule, I am not particularly opposed to private insurance companies. Back in my lawyer days, I used on occasion to write coverage letters for one or more of them analyzing whether a particular claim is covered by the terms of a particular policy. I understand that insurance, though insurance agents often call it a product, is actually a contract between the insurer and the insured. The insured is, therefore, entitled to have claims paid that the terms of the insurance policy cover but is not entitled to have the insurer pay any claim that the terms of the insurance policy do not cover. There is no reason for the government to take over most of the insurance business. Property, auto, and personal liability insurance from a private insurer is perfectly legitimate.

But surely health insurance is a different matter. Not everyone requires property insurance, but all people require health insurance. All people require it because all people have health. Some have better health, some have worse health, but all have health. Not everyone has an insurance claim for property loss in their life, but all people require health care at some point in their lives. Health care has become prohibitively expensive for enormous numbers of people. Only health insurance makes it possible for them to receive the health care they require. Health insurance deals with matters inherent in being human. It touches a person’s very being in a way property or liability insurance does not. Health insurance is a human need in a way other insurance is not.

But not everyone can acquire private health insurance. Health insurance companies have various ways of denying a policy for people they don’t want to cover. Perhaps more importantly now that insurance companies cannon deny coverage on the basis of preexisting conditions, health insurance has become prohibitively expensive for millions of Americans. I would not be able to afford it were I not old enough to be on Medicare, Medicare being, of course, a government run health insurance system supported by tax dollars. I paid for it all of my working life. I still pay for it because, though I am retired, I still have to file an income tax return, and the amount of my Medicare contribution is included in what I have to pay. I also have some Medicare premium deducted from my Social Security income every month. But I can afford Medicare. I could not possibly afford the $12,000-dollar monthly payment for most private health insurance. Because millions upon millions of Americans cannot afford private health insurance, the government must step in and create a system something like the “Medicare for all” system our social democrats are proposing.

We are the only so-called developed country in the world that does not have a tax-supported universal health care system. That we do not exposes the lie of the claim that we are the greatest country in the world. There are other reasons that we aren’t as well, but our leaving millions of our fellow Americans without affordable health care perhaps tops the list of those failings. It is way past time for us to do something about it.

What is Communism?

 

What Is Communism?

July 18, 2026

Donald Trump and his MAGA acolytes have started screaming “communist” at progressive Democratic candidates who call themselves “democratic socialists.” There is only one conceivable reason why they’re doing so, and it isn’t that democratic socialists are really communists. It’s because the rise of politicians who actually care about the people and are prepared to do things like raise taxes on the ultra-wealthy to pay for social programs scares them to death. So rather than debate Democrats on the level of policy preferences they dig up the old smear term communist, hoping to scare American voters off of candidates who actually do something to improve the people’s lives.

Now, it’s possible to respond to Trump’s newfound passion for throwing the term communism around the way I just did, and doing so would be to tell the truth. However, intelligent people will want more than that. They will want to know what communism actually is so they can compare it to the programs of social democratic politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Mayor Zohran Mamdani to see whether the label communist really applies. So here I want to explain, perhaps unfortunately at some length, what communism really is both in Marxist theory and in Soviet reality—and those two are a long, long way from the same thing.

Before I undertake to explain communism, let me briefly set out my qualifications for doing so. I have a PhD in Russian history, and Russia was a fully communist country at least from 1922 to near the end of 1991. As part of my training as a Russian historian, I learned Marxist ideology. Not because anyone was trying to make me a Marxist but because you couldn’t begin to understand the USSR without understanding Marxism. I went to Russia twice. I was there first in the summer of 1968 on a Russia language study tour through Indiana University. More importantly, I spent the 1975-76 academic year in Russia doing dissertation research. My wife, our son, and I lived in the dormitory of Moscow State University. I did most of my work in Moscow but also spent some time in what was then Leningrad, now, of course, once again St. Petersburg. I had certain advantages that Soviet citizens didn’t have, but I still learned a good deal about what it meant to live in that communist country. So I think I can describe communism both in theory and in practice with some authority.

As a matter of historical reality, the term “communism” originated, or at least became important, with the politico-economic theory of Karl Marx (1818-1883). Marx was a German philosopher who did most of his work in England. He develop a philosophy called “dialectical materialism.” Both of those words are important. By “materialism,” Marx meant that only the material is real. Reality consists only of that which we humans can perceive with our senses. Philosophical materialism denies the reality of the spiritual dimension of human existence. True Marxists are, therefore, assertively atheistic. Many Americans used to throw around the phrase “godless communism,” and that phrase does indeed fully apply to Marxist ideology.

To understand the term communism, however, we need to understand what Marx meant by the term “dialectical.” Though he denied any spiritual reality, he did believe that human history progresses through what he called a dialectic. He learned dialectical philosophy from the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), but he applied it in a way Hegel never did. In a dialectic, you start with a position or proposition or, for Marx, an political economic system. This starting point is called the “thesis.” According to this philosophy, a thesis produced its opposite, called the “antithesis.” Then, eventually, the thesis and the antithesis somehow merge to create an end state called the “synthesis.”

Marxist ideology is called dialectical materialism because Marx asserted that human history progresses through such a dialectical progression. Most significantly for our purposes, Marx took capitalism to be a thesis and socialism to be its antithesis. For Marx, everything was about class and how different classes relate to the means of production, that is, to things like land and factories, etc. In capitalism, the capitalist class owns all of the means of production. The whole system is based on private property, and the private property that matters belongs to a small class of owners and entrepreneurs. Most of the people in a capitalist system are workers who work for the capitalists under conditions set by the capitalists. Marx was working within the capitalist system of nineteenth century England, and he saw that system as consisting of a class struggle between the capitalists and the workers, whom Marx called the proletariat.

Marx believed that that class struggle would eventually lead naturally and inevitably to a class revolution of the proletariat against the capitalist system. This revolution, he said, would lead to the creation of “socialism” not communism. This socialism is the antithesis of capitalism. In capitalism, a moneyed class owns the means of production. In socialism, the working class owns the means of production. The capitalist class, often called the bourgeoisie, is displaced if not physically eliminated, and their property passes to a state created by and for the proletariat. Marx anticipated that this socialist revolution would be violent, and he had no problem with it being violent. The capitalists and the institutions they created—and they created all of the society’s institutions from the state to the arts and the churches—would not go peaceably. The proletariat, through its socialist state, would have to force them out and eliminate them.

Socialism was not the end of Marx’s historical inevitability. Rather, over time, as the elimination of the class distinction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat progressed, the socialist state would “whiter and die.” Once the proletariat eliminated the bourgeoisie and appropriated the means of production, there would be no more class distinctions within society. Only the proletariat would remain. And because there would be no longer any class conflict, there would be no need for a state. So the socialist state, created to bring about the elimination of all class conflict, would simply disappear.

This situation, in which there is no longer any state, is Marxist communism. All property would be held communally. There would no longer be any conflict between people because all conflict is the result of conflict between socioeconomic classes, and there would be only one class, the proletariat. It’s not entirely clear to me how Marx’ communism is a synthesis between capitalism and socialism except perhaps that in it both the bourgeoisie and, essentially, the proletariat disappear into a classless society. In any event, the historical dialectic would end in the state of communism.

That, of course, is not what essentially anyone means by the term communism today. It is, actually, what the Soviet communists meant by the term. They never claimed to have created a communist nation. They created a socialist nation and claimed to be transitioning to communism not that they had attained it. However, in the world today the term communism usually means something quite different from pure Marxist communism. That’s because of what people, first in Russia but also in China and elsewhere, who claimed to be communists did when they came to power. To a review of those horrors we now turn.

The Bolshevik wing of the Russian Democratic Socialist Workers Party staged a coup de état in St. Petersburg, Russia, on October 25, 1917 (old style).[1] The Soviet communists would come to call this coup the “Great October Revolution,” but, at first at least, it was nothing of the sort. It was a coup that displaced the so-called Provisional Government that had assumed power after Tsar Nicholas II abdicated earlier in the year. A civil war followed that lasted until 1922. Only when the Bolsheviks finally won that civil war did Russia and most (if not quite all) of the Russian Empire become the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ruled by the Bolsheviks, who changed their name to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Soviet communism became a totalitarian regime founded in and enforced by terror. The terror began early. Very early on, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Ilich Lenin put a man named Felix Dzherinsky in charge of an organization we know as the Cheka. This organization went through various name changes over the following years, but it is best known today as the KGB. The Cheka conducted a campaign of murderous terror against anyone it took to be an enemy of the Bolshevik regime. It surely murdered at least tens of thousands of people during the Russian civil war that followed the Bolshevik coup. Both Lenin and Dzherinsky, along with all of their Bolshevik associates, believed that terror was necessary to establish their socialist state and defeat its class enemies, all of it enemies being of course class enemies. In later decades it became popular to think of Lenin as a more peaceful Bolshevik. He wasn’t. He set himself up as a murderous tyrant.

The terror that Lenin instituted grew by orders of magnitude under Lenin’s successor Josef Stalin.[2] Before Hitler invaded the USSR in 1942, Stalin and the Cheka (usually called the NKVD in Stalin’s years) killed at least twenty million Soviet people. He imposed an artificial famine on Ukraine and elsewhere, known as the Holodomor, as part of his effort to enforce the collectivization of agriculture. At least four million Ukrainians starved to death. Stalin killed all of the so-called “old Bolsheviks,” the men who had known and worked with Lenin in creating the Soviet state. He eliminated nearly all of the members of the leadership of the Soviet Red Army, supposedly because they were enemies of the Soviet state (which, of course, they were not).

Stalin created the infamous Gulag system of prison camps, where millions of people disappeared and died. I have read of NKVD agents whose job, in eight hour shifts, was to shoot people in the back of the head. All Soviet citizens came to live in fear of the “black Mariahs,” the black cars the secret police used when coming to arrest some innocent person as an enemy of the people. No one could trust anyone, not even close friends or family members, not to file a false complaint against them with the secret police. Stalin made heroes of children who reported on “counterrevolutionary” acts by their parents.

In June, 1942, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin was able to rally the Russian people (and others) to defeat them, but they did it at the cost of between twenty and thirty million lives.[3] And during the horrors of the Nazi invasion, Stalin never called off the NKVD. It continued to arrest, imprison, and execute supposed enemies of the Soviet state in large numbers. They even did during the unspeakable horror of the Nazi siege of Leningrad, in which more than one million people starved to death. Stalin died in 1953, and the terror of the Soviet regime abated to a significant extent after he was gone; but it ended only with the dissolution of the USSR on December 25, 1991 (which is not Christmas in Russia).

So, that’s what communism is in theory and what it became in practice. It is responsible for some of humanity’s greatest grimes against humanity, particularly in the USSR and in Communist China. The Trump administration wants Americans to believe that progressive, social democratic Democrats are in fact communists. They aren’t. They aren’t Marxists. They aren’t all atheists. Your humble author, for example is a social democrat but not an atheist. They believe in democracy and in the civil rights of all people. They—we—don’t want to remake our country into anything remotely like Soviet Russia. Far from it. American social democrats abhor violence and have no intention whatsoever to use it to bring about their—our—goals.  

So, Trump and his bootlickers will probably continue to accuse American social democrats like Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani of being communists. They aren’t, but the MAGA crowd cares not who whit about factual truth. Trump and his acolytes throw the term communist at social democrats because they know that the word communism is still a scare word for most Americans. We Americans would have every reason to be scared if anyone were seriously trying to turn our country communist, but for all practical purposes no one is. The emerging social democratic wing of the Democratic Party certainly isn’t. I just hope and pray that Trump’s attempt to label social democrats as communists fails as badly as essentially everything else he has tried to do has failed.

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[1] Until the Bolsheviks changed it after they came to power, Russia used the older Julian calendar not the Gregorian calendar used in most of the rest of the world. In the 20^th century, there was a twelve day difference between the two. Thus the date the west knew as Nov. 7 was known in Russia as October 25. The Soviets celebrated their “Great October Revolution” on Nov. 7. In my imperial Russian history seminar in graduate school, my major professor asked us why we thought the Russians didn’t adopt the more accurate Gregorian calendar. I said it was probably because they thought that calendar, promulgated by a Pope Gregory, was some sort of papist conspiracy. My major professor said: “Yes, that’s precisely why they didn’t do it.”

[2] Stalin was not Russian. He was Georgian. His family name was Dzhugashvili not Stalin. He took the name Stalin to style himself as a man of steel.

[3] By comparison, the United States’ losses in all of World War II totaled less than 500,000, which is, of course horrible enough in its own right but is nothing like what the Soviet people suffered.

Trump and the Upcoming Election

 There simply is no doubt that Donald Trump is laying the groundwork for a campaign not only to contest the mid-term elections next November but to take active measures to overturn enough election results to keep the Republicans in control of both houses of Congress. We can't know exactly what he plans to do, but we cannot rule out the possibility that he will attempt to use the US military to seize ballots and voting equipment in states where his candidates have lost. If he does that, and if he gets away with it, American democracy will be dead. But then, that's exactly what Trump wants, the death of American democracy. I wish I knew of a surefire way to stop him, but I don't. Democracy always depends on the will of the people. If enough people have lost their faith in democracy in this country, our democracy will die. We must all do whatever we can to keep that from happening, for only in a democratic society can individual freedom truly be maintained.

No, I Am Not a Patriot

 No, I Am Not a Patriot

July 5, 2026

I’m supposed to love the United States of America, and I have lived in a place that was much worse than the United States of America, namely the Soviet Union, where I did one year of dissertation research in the mid-1970s. I was glad to get out of there. In fact, as I was leaving Moscow for the first time, with a group of students from Indiana University in August, 1968, shortly after the USSR had invaded Czechoslovakia, we sang the hit song of the time with the lyric: “We’ve got to get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do.” I remember driving home to Eugene from the Portland airport a short time later and seeing a business flying a truly enormous American flag near the freeway. I thought: Well, that’s not my style, but at least someone’s doing that because they want to not because they have to. So yes, this country does have certain virtues.

But. And the buts control here. We are and essentially always have been the most imperialistic nation on earth. Every square inch of the United States is land we stole from other people. And not only that. We did everything we could to wipe those people off the face of the earth. Hitler thought we couldn’t object to his planned genocide of the Jews because he had committed genocide against the American Indians, as indeed we had. We took much of what is now the United States from Mexico through imperialistic war, the War of 1848. We expanded our empire militaristically in 1898 too. We are and always have been an imperialistic country, and I reject all imperialism outright.

We maintain what is by far the world’s largest military. We lie and say that we have it to defend our freedom. We call all its members heroes whether they’ve ever done anything heroic or not. We glorify military service as noble and honorable when in fact the true purpose of any military, ours included, is to kill and be killed. In fact, we have our massive military only for imperialistic purposes. We have it to project and protect American economic and political power around the world, and that is a purely illegitimate reason for having it. There is nothing noble or honorable about it at all. Yet we tie patriotism to the military. The military participates in all sorts of American activities solely for the purpose of making people feel good about the military and the country that creates, maintains, and glorifies it. Why else to fighter jets fly over football stadiums? Why else to the Blue Angels perform (yes, perform brilliantly) at hydroplane races like they do every year in Seattle? I see people online being impressed by military hardware, but every piece of military hardware is nothing but part of a massive killing machine. I will not celebrate the American military, and I will not be patriotic with regard to a country that maintains and celebrates the American military.

Our most recent use of our military is particularly unjustifiable and shameful. Donald Trump ordered it to attack Iran though there was absolutely no reason for us to attack Iran. Trump couldn’t even give a coherent reason for attacking Iran. When we did, we sent a smart weapon into a girl’s school and killed over 100 children. Yes, the military said it was “a mistake,” but why do we even deploy forces capable of making such a mistake to a part of the world in which we have no significant interest and where there is no reason for military action whatsoever?

This country was founded in racism, and it remains rotten with racism to its core yet today. We had made some not insignificant progress toward eradicating racism until Donald Trump became president. Now avowed white nationalists parade openly in our country’s capital just as the Ku Klux Klan did in the 1920s (though in considerably smaller numbers). We imprison more people than any other nation in the world, and a grossly disproportionate parentage of our prisoners are people of color. Our president is an overt racist, and he panders to the underlying racism of American society to get and keep himself in power. I will not be patriotic toward a nation as racist as mine is.

Then there is the shame of our health insurance system. Every other industrialized nation on earth has a system of universal health care supported by taxes. We don't. The power of the wealthy keeps us from creating one because creating one would nearly abolish the enormous health insurance industry. The Republican Party has been making it impossible for more and more people to obtain health insurance, something that makes not a lick of sense even from a Republican or Trumpist fascist perspective. For-profit insurance companies, in business only to make money, make decisions about people's health care that belong only to practicing physicians and their patients. I will not be patriotic toward a nation that refuses to make health care available to all of its people the way this one refuses to do.

The American economy is capitalistic. It is regulated a little bit but not nearly enough. Our economy is dominated by enormous corporations in nearly every sphere of economic activity. American law says that the duty of corporate leadership is to increase the financial return for the corporation's investors and is nothing else beyond that other than comply with whatever laws there are that control what the corporation must or must not do--and there aren't anywhere near enough of those. Capitalism works for the wealthy. It does not work for anyone else. The United States government has regulated capitalism enough that it has survived, but today the income disparity between the wealthy 1% and everyone else is so great that there may be some hope that a democratic socialist system will eventually regulate it enough so that it works for everyone.

So, no I am not an American patriot. I wish no harm for the people of the country, but I then I wish no harm for anyone anywhere. I do not value American people over other people. I wish no harm for my country, but I don't wish it anything better than I wish for any country. I want my country to become the country of justice and freedom that it has always claimed to be but has never been, but I know that won't happen in my lifetime. I wish peace for my country just as I wish peace for all people everywhere. I want my country to stop being as militaristic and imperialistic as it has always been and remains today, but I know that won't happen in my lifetime either. The forces against peace and justice in this country are just too strong for any systemic change to happen except over very long periods of time if they happen at all. 

Are you an American patriot? You certainly have the right to be one. We do have at least that much freedom in this country (though it is much less socially acceptable not to be one). But if you are, let me ask you this: Have you thought about this country seriously and open-mindedly? Have you set aside the myths about this country and seen her as she actually is and always has been? If not, I beg you to do so to the greatest extent that you can. This country could be a whole lot better than it is, but it will never be better as long as most Americans buy our national myths over our national reality. Some will say that what I just said makes me a patriot. I do not believe that it does, for I do not value my country over any other. I am indeed not a American patriot.

I Will Not Celebrate Today

 I Will Not Celebrate Today

July 4, 2026

I, of course, see all kinds of things online about today being the 250th anniversary of the birth of the United States of America. Today it is, indeed, 250 years since the so-called founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence. I don't quite see how that event got to be considered the founding of the nation. It was a step toward independence, but it took five years of war to establish independence. Yet, of course, there's no point in making that argument. July 4 marking the founding of the nation is part of our national myth, and that's not going to change.

Today is supposed to be a big deal, but I will not celebrate today. Our national myth says that we are "the land of the free," and that claim is and always has been nothing but a lie. When Thomas Jefferson wrote "all men are created equal," he owned enslaved human beings. He meant only that landed white men are created equal. He did not say, he did not mean, and he did not believe that all people are created equal. When we read "all people" rather than "all men" into Jefferson's words, we make him say something he just didn't say, mean, or believe.

Nonetheless, the equality of all people became a foundational part of our idolatrous national myth. That claim is mythic in the technical sense, but it is not and never has been part of our national reality. It wasn't part of our reality in 1776, and it is not part of our reality today. Yes, we have made some not insignificant progress toward making it part of our reality, but we still have a very long way to go before it truly reflects who we are as a nation. There are all sorts of statistics one can cite to prove that point; but, for now, just consider this. Donald Trump said there were "fine" people among a mob of violent, anti-Jewish thugs. He told armed militias to "stand back and stand by," clearly indicating his willingness to use them extralegally and violently to achieve his ends. And we made him president not once but twice. No country that truly believed that all people are created equal would ever elect him to anything once much less elect him president twice. Land of the free? In myth yes, in reality, no. Today and throughout our history we are and have been free only for some. We parrot back Jefferson's words "and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." But we have allowed that noble claim to be reality only for some Americans, never for all of them, and certainly not for people here who are not technically Americans but are noncitizen immigrants whether here "legally" or not.

So no, today I will not be a hypocrite. I will not celebrate a myth that is not and never has been a reality. I don't expect this country ever to stop celebrating July 4 as the nation's birthday. After all, nations tend to have some sort of national day on which they celebrate themselves. For Canada, it's July 1. For France it is July 14. For the Soviet Union it was November 7. For us it's always been July 4, and it will stay July 4. Which doesn't mean that our celebration is anything other than either self-delusion or hypocrisy. Our reality is not and never has been what we have always claimed that it is. So, celebrate if you want. I will not join you.