Hell No We Aren't

 

Hell No We Aren’t

 

            Introduction

We’ve all heard it. “America is the greatest country in the world!” with the “America” being the United States of America. That claim, folks, is just flat not true. The United States is my country, though it is that only because I was born here having no choice in the matter. It's my country, but any objective observer of the facts of the matter will unavoidably see that it is not the greatest country in the world. I will review some of those facts by enumerating, in no particular order, some of what would have to change in this country to make it even close to the greatest country in the world or close to being even any kind of great country at all.

Drastically Cut Military Spending

We would have to cut the amount of money we spend on the military at least in half if not more. This country spends more money by far than any other world military power. We even outspend China, which today probably has the second more powerful military after us. Our expenditures on defense eat up an enormous amount of our federal budget. The military does at least employ a lot of people, but it employs them for a purpose most Americans won’t recognize or admit that it has. We hear over and over again that the military is there to “defend our freedom.” That statement is simply and obviously not true. That is not what the American military does. It is not why we maintain it at such a high level. There is essentially no foreign threat to American freedom. There are significant domestic threats to that freedom, but the military doesn’t and can’t deal with those. Yes, there are terrorist groups out these against whom we have always to be alert, but they pose no actual threat to our freedom whatsoever. We have nations with which we compete that are not democratic, China being the primary example. But China is located a huge ocean away from the United States. It may have ballistic missiles that could hit us, but the Chinese surely know that if they launched them we would utterly destroy China with our ballistic missiles in retaliation. Chinese missiles are no serious threat to us. The USSR used to pose a significant military threat to western Europe, or at least we thought it did. But it doesn’t even exist anymore. Yes, Russia inherited its nuclear weapons and missiles, but the Russian military has shown itself to be inept if not totally incompetent in waging war. And the same thing is true with regard to Russian missiles as is true of Chinese missiles. Perhaps we have to maintain our retaliatory nuclear forces to counter Chinese and Russian nuclear forces, although actually being at peace with those nations would achieve the same thing for far less cost. Defending American freedom simply is not why we maintain a huge military.

So why do we maintain such a huge military? Clearly we do it not to defend our freedom but to project our political and economic power around the world. We have at least some military forces in something like eighty countries around the world. No other country comes even close to having that many military bases outside its borders. China and Russia certainly don’t. How can we justify putting American military bases all over the world? Only to make a showing of American might. Those bases don’t defend our freedom. The countries they’re in pose no threat to our freedom. They are there to buttress American political influence the world over and to protect America’s global economic interests. There is no legitimate reason for us to have political power in countries other than our own. American economic enterprises could protect their own interests by being more competitive with countries like Korea, Japan, and China. We have no need of most of our military. Cutting our military expenditures at least in half would be a big step toward making this country a better one.

            Change the Culture of Patriotism and Militarism

We’re all supposed to be American patriots. We’re all supposed to be devoted to our country above everything else, often even above God. We’re supposed to stand and take off our hats when we hear our national anthem. We’re supposed to say the Pledge of Allegiance, an allegiance to a flag of all things, which makes not sense, but never mind. We’re all supposed to honor, even idealize, anyone who serves or has served in the US military. We say “Thank you for your service” when we meet a member of the military or a veteran, never mind that we don’t say that to people like teachers and nurses who do indeed truly serve.

Patriotism and glorification of the military are blots on this country’s character. Patriotism makes no sense. There are some people in the United States because they choose to be, but most of us are in the United States only by an accident of birth. Patriotism can seem harmless, but it contains at least three lethal risks. It can keep people from seeing the things about the country that need to be changed. It can keep people from seeing the good in the ways some other countries do certain things. And it can morph into a fascistic nationalism that is nothing but destructive. I’m no starry-eyed optimist. I don’t expect Americans to stop being as patriotic as they are. I just wish they would.

            Stop Being the World’s Policeman

This thing we must do is closely related to our need to cut our military spending. Since the end of World War II, the United States has acted, or at least tried to act, as the world’s policeman. We have created a global situation in which we get involved in conflicts that have nothing to do with us because we think that somehow stopping those conflicts is our responsibility. That’s why, for example, the US gets so heavily involved in the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. It’s why we invaded Afghanistan. It’s even more clearly why we invaded Iraq. It’s why we fought the utterly unjustifiable war in Vietnam. Yet no one ever made us the world’s policeman. There is no United Nations resolution that says “The United States of America shall police the world.” We have arrogated that role to ourselves. Doing it costs an immense amount of money. Perhaps more importantly, it makes a lot of people all around the world hate us, see us as their enemy. It’s way past time we stopped doing it.

            End Racism

Here is one unavoidable fact about the United States. This country was founded as, always has been, and still is a racist nation. White Europeans brought the first enslaved African person to this continent even before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth rock. Many of our so-called founding fathers, whom our public education system so teaches us to revere, owned slaves and saw no harm in doing so. Several southern states withdrew from the American union because they feared the north would abolish slavery, and the southern economy was entirely dependent on slave labor. Americans fought a vicious civil war in which more American died than have died in any other war, not even World War II. The Civil War was always about slavery for the south, and before it was over it had come to be about slavery for the north. After the Civil War, beginning in 1877, the northern part of the country withdrew forces from the formerly Confederate parts of the country and turned hundreds of thousands of Black Americans over to the tender mercies of southern racists. The result in the south was Jim Crow, the system of laws that, while they couldn’t reinstate slavery, came as close to doing it as they could. It permitted the creation of a culture in which lynching Black people was considered perfectly acceptable and even honorable. And it’s not that the north was much better. Most Americans of the states that fought for the north in the Civil War were as racist as their southern cohorts. Violence by whites against Blacks motivated by nothing but racism was common in the north as well as in the south. In the north, “redlining” created segregated neighborhoods and schools nearly as effectively as the south’s Jim Crow laws. Nowhere in this country was they anything close to racial equality after the Civil War.

It didn’t get better over time. Most Americans consider Woodrow Wilson to have been a great American president. He led the country in World War I. He opposed the Treaty of Versailles, that made World War II essentially inevitable. He supported the US joining the League of Nations. Fair enough. But what I was never taught about him in school is that he was a horrific racist to the marrow of his bones. He was born in racist Virginia and grew up in racist Georgia. He segregated the formerly integrated civil service in Washington, DC. He did and said nothing against the Jim Crow laws of the south that kept Black southerners in economic poverty and political powerlessness. When I graduated from the University of Oregon in 1970, I was named a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. The Woodrow Wilson Foundation supported promising students in pursuing post-graduate education. The people of that foundation finally figured out what a racist Wilson had been, and they changed the name of their foundation to the Institute for Citizens and Scholars. Franklin Roosevelt was one of the greatest American presidents in many ways, but failed to integrate the US military and did nothing to dismantle Jim Crow. (His wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, was far less racist then he was. She exerted some influence over him, but not enough.)

American racism was ignored in much of the country. I grew up in almost entirely white Eugene, Oregon. I attended public school through the 1950s and into the 1960s. I was never taught about American racism. I was never taught about Jim Crow. I was never taught about the American genocide of this continent’s first nations. No one showed me the grotesque caricatures of Black people that were so common in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. We enjoyed listening to Nat King Cole and being entertained by Sammy Davis, Jr., But no one ever told me that they were not allowed to stay in the Las Vegas hotels in which they performed because they were Black. I got a legal education at the University of Oregon School of Law, earning my JD degree in 1981. No one at that school ever told me that the American legal system was rotten to its core with institutional racism, which it was and is. No one told me that the way we imprison so many Black Americans amounts essentially to a new version of slavery, but it is.

While racism lies at the core of this country, most Americans deny being racists. Yet it simply is not possible to grow up in this country without being affected by racism. Many people of my children’s and grandchildren’s generations seem to be less racist than my generation is, but systemic racism still contaminates every single American institution. Forces of white supremacy work to keep it that way by outlawing affirmative action programs and seeking to make our pathetic social welfare system even more pathetic. Sure. We’ve had a mixed race president who self-identifies and whom we all see as Black. So what? The Obama presidency did little or nothing to dismantle American racism.

The United States is racist in a way no other so-called developed country is. Even our neighbor Canada is less racist than we are. We will never be anything close to the greatest country in the world until we end both personal and institutional racism. Institutional racism is the bigger problem. It operates in secret. Most Americans don’t know that it exists and don’t even know what it is. Racism is a huge factor in making us far from the world’s greatest nation. Will we ever get over it? I have to say, I’m not optimistic.

            Abolish the Electoral College  

The American form of government has never been purely democratic. Our constitution creates a republic but not a pure democracy. It is a constitution for a union of sovereign states, and it gives the states more power than a pure democracy ever would. It provides that a state’s representation in one branch of the legislature, the House of Representatives, depends on the size of the state’s population. In the other branch of the legislature, the Senate, however, every state has the same number of senators regardless of its population. Thus California, the state with the largest population, has the same number of senators as Wyoming, the state with the smallest population. That every state has the same number of senators certainly has consequences for federal legislation, but it has truly dire consequences for the way we elect the president.

Technically, Americans do not vote for the president. Rather, they vote for a slate of “electors,”  who are the people who actually choose the president. Each state’s number of electors is equal to the number of the state’s representative plus its number of senators. The structure of the “electoral college” therefore gives disproportionate electoral power to small population states. The disproportionate power of small population states in the Senate is duplicated in the electoral college. As a result, a candidate who wins the popular vote nationwide does not necessarily become president. We have had several presidents who lost the popular vote. Donald Trump is the most recent example. Hillary Clinton, his  opponent in the 2016 presidential election, won the popular vote in that election. But many small population states voted for Trump. Their disproportional representation in the electoral college made Trump, not Clinton, president. Thus, the will of a minority of American voters was imposed on a majority of American voters. The same was true of the election of George W. Bush in 2000. The existence of the electoral college is unconscionable in a nation that calls itself a beacon of democracy.

Small population states also have a power inconsistent with their percentage of the American population when it comes to amending the constitution too. There are a couple of different ways to amend the constitution, but the most commonly used way requires a vote of two-thirds of both Houses of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states. There are then easily enough small population states to block any constitutional amendment that takes away their disproportionate power. There is therefore no realistic possibility of us changing the constitution to eliminate that disproportionate power. So we’re stuck with a foundational scheme of government at the federal level that is, quite simply, a disgrace that is utterly unacceptable in todays world.

This undemocratic system would be a scandal even if large and small population states had similar political opinions, but to a significant degree they don’t. Not all, but many, larger population states tend to elect moderate to liberal Democrats to federal office. This is true of California and New York, two states whose combined population totals nearly 58,400,000, or nearly 18% of the US population. That is more people than the populations of many small population states put together. Not all small population states are extremely conservative, but the numerous small population states in the Midwest and the South are. They tend to elect reactionary, even fascist Republicans to federal office. They gave us the disastrous presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump when a majority of American voters had voted against them. The disproportionate power of small population states tilts the country’s politics in a direct most Americans oppose, a situation that is simply unacceptable. We will never be a great democracy until we get rid of the disproportional power of small population states.

Get Money Out of Politics

We Americans, most of us anyway, claim that our country is the most democratic of all the world’s countries. We have proclaimed the principle of “one person one vote” for a long time (even though we didn’t live up to that principle until very recently if we do even now). Most adult American citizens by far are able to vote in local, state, and federal elections. That is a very good thing, and many people, especially Black people, have given their lives in the struggle to make it a reality. It is the American dream, the American myth actually, that our free elections truly express the will of the voters.

Wouldn’t it be nice if that were true? In fact, however, it is not true. Money has always corrupted American politics. Sometimes it does it in the form of bribes, but more commonly it does it through manipulation of the media and control of people’s thinking through propaganda and by allowing unpopular politicians to spend immense amounts on political advertising, advertising that does in fact sway how people vote. Not that long ago, the US Supreme Court made the absurd ruling that we cannot significantly regulate how much money individuals give to political campaigns because giving that money constitutes speech protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution. We are and always have been a predominately conservative country. But most Americans are not as conservative as many of the politicians they elect. Why? Because those with wealth and power in this country spend enormous amounts of money to influence the people’s vote. Money spent on political campaigns together with the false claims and outright lies it finances gets Americans to vote against their own self interest. That it does makes our claim to be truly democratic into a farce. We will not be a truly great nation until we get money out of politics by having political campaigns publicly financed with every viable candidate receiving and spending the same amount.

            Stop Freezing the Law with Untenable Hermeneutics

In seminary we used to joke that the great value of a seminary education is that we can use hermeneutics in a sentence. That flip remark, however, can tend to minimize the actual significance of hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation. It examines and explains how meaning arises from an act of reading, listening to music, and doing other activities that involve the concept meaning. Here I will briefly consider the hermeneutics of written texts.

There are two basic schools of hermeneutics. One we can call modernist believes that a written text means what it says and means what the author meant it to mean. For this school of thought, the meaning of a text does not change with the passage of time or with a change in the life and cultural circumstances of the person reading the text. Meaning resides in the text and is unchanging no matter what.

The other school of hermeneutics, which we can call post-modernist, says that meaning never resides in a text alone. When no one is reading a text, it is just marks on paper with no meaning at all. Meaning arises in the encounter of a reader with the text. This means that the meaning of a text can vary over time and according to who’s reading it. Post-modern hermeneutics keeps old texts alive in a way modernist hermeneutics does not.

Which becomes really important when we look at how the courts, especially the US Supreme Court, interpret the US Constitution. For a very long time conservative Americans have demanded what they call “strict construction” of the Constitution. What they are calling for is the application of modernist hermeneutics to constitutional questions. They want the courts to say that the Constitution means what it says and that it means what its drafters intended it to mean. Never mind that the original US Constitution and the first ten amendments, called the Bill of Rights, were drafted well over two hundred years ago. Never mind that the drafters’ world and our world are radically different in nearly every way. The Constitution means what its words say. Period. Now of course, what that really means is that the words mean what the reader thinks they mean, but modernist hermeneutics will not admit that truth.

Applying post-modern hermeneutics to the Constitution often produced very different interpretations of its provisions than does the application of modern hermeneutics. Post-modern hermeneutics says that the meaning that arises between the encounter between a contemporary reader and the document’s old texts can be different from the meaning modernist hermeneutics draws from them. The texts’ meaning can be different from what the men who wrote the Constitution intended it to mean. When we apply post-modern hermeneutics to the Constitution we are saying that we seek meaning in the old texts that is meaningful to us and our world, not just to the drafters and their world.

Modernist hermeneutics locks any text into a fixed and often ancient meaning. It freezes the text. It makes it impossible for people to find meaning for their lives in old texts (or new ones for that matter), for they are allowed to find only a supposed original meaning of the text. Modernist hermeneutics freezes documents. It keeps them from being living documents that speak meaningfully to people who are very different from the people who wrote them.

What does this have to do with US law? It has lots to do with it. Below I discuss this country’s gun mania. I point out the difference between eighteenth century weapons and twenty-first century weapons. Modernist hermeneutics says that that difference makes no difference in the meaning of the Second Amendment. Post-modern hermeneutics says that that difference most definitely does make a difference in the meaning of that text. To apply a strict construction the Second Amendment in today’s world allows dangers and disasters of which the men who wrote that amendment could not even dream. A strict interpretation of that text may have made sense in 1790. It makes no sense whatsoever in 2023. Our Constitution will never be a living document that speaks meaningfully to today’s world as long as our judges cling to modernist hermeneutics. The court’s rulings coming from that kind of interpretation are another reason why we are not the greatest country in the world.

            Create a Universal Health Care System

The United States is unique among “developed” nations in many different ways. One of the most unfortunate of those ways is that every other such nation has a universal system of health care financed through taxation. Except for Medicare and Medicaid, which apply to some but nowhere near all Americans, the United States does not. The political power of the insurance industry and Americans’ dislike of government still keep us from creating one. Our failure to have such a system has tragic consequences.

The most tragic of the consequences of our failure to provide universal health care is that millions of people who do not qualify for Medicare of Medicaid have no health insurance coverage whatsoever. Health insurance is horribly expensive. Most Americans who have such insurance have it as a benefit of their employment. They may have some of the cost of that insurance deducted from their paychecks, but they don’t bear the whole cost of their coverage. Private, individual health insurance policies are available, but there are millions of people who can’t afford them. Many people have to forego health insurance if they are going to be able to pay their rent and buy food. Some limited health care is available for no charge at hospitals, but adequate health care is nowhere available at a cost millions of people can afford.

Countries like our neighbor Canada do not have uninsured people. We’ve got millions of them precisely because we do not have a national, universal health care system financed by taxes. The Obama administration addressed that problem in a pathetic, totally inadequate way (and over almost unanimous opposition from Republican legislators), though it at least did something. I don’t know exactly how much suffering our horrific system of providing medical care causes, I just know it’s a lot. I don’t know exactly how many preventable deaths our horrific system of providing medical care causes, I just know it’s a lot. We will never be a great nation let alone the greatest nation until we create a system of universal health care supported through taxation like the ones every other “advanced” nation has.

            Deal Constructively with Poverty

The United States has the largest economy in the world. We claim and consider ourselves to be a wealthy country. Most Americans, indeed, have at least enough economic resources to survive, but many do not. In 2022, 11.5% of Americans lived in poverty. That means that nearly thirty-eight million Americans didn’t have enough to live on. And those statistics are based on a standard of poverty that is absurdly low. Many Americans who don’t technically qualify as poor live in very difficult economic situations.

Millions of American children go to bed hungry every night. Over half a million Americans are unhoused. We usually call the “homeless,” though that isn’t necessarily accurate depending on what we mean by home. Every American city of any size has people on the streets begging for money. Every American city of any size has tent encampments where unhoused people live; and most of the time most of us who are housed just want the tent encampments to get out of our neighborhood, but we do nothing significant to address the conditions that produce so many unhoused people.

The number of unhoused people in this country is a great stain on our country, and here’s what makes that stain even greater than it otherwise would be. We have the resources to solve the homelessness problem and other matters of poverty. We do indeed have enormous economic resources at our disposal. The problem is that we use them all wrong and do not have the will to use them properly. We don’t devote anywhere enough of them to addressing poverty. There are various reasons why we don’t. A great many Americans think poverty is the personal fault of those who are poor. They think the unhoused are just getting what they deserve as are those without medical care and other necessary aspects of life.

Very few Americans think in systemic terms, yet systems not individuals control most of life. Dealing effectively with poverty requires the creation of an adequate social safety net, and this country simply does not have one. Yes, we have things that could be part of an adequate social safety net. We have Medicare and Medicaid, though Republican politicians keep trying to gut or even abolish them. We have Social Security, though Republican politicians want to gut or abolish it too. States have various welfare agencies and policies that provide some help to people in economic need, but none of those institutions is nearly adequate for providing the kind of financial security people really need. State and federal welfare programs use an absurdly low standard for determining poverty. They usually provide pitifully small amounts to money to people who truly do need money to obtain the necessities of life. The system of universal health insurance I discussed above would be a crucial part of a meaningful social safety net, but we need to do a lot more than create such a health care system. We need to provide housing for everyone who is capable of having it but doesn’t. We need welfare systems that truly take care of people not ones, like the ones we have, that address only a small part of that need. We will never be a great country much less the world’s greatest country until we begin adequately to care for our fellow human beings who truly do need help.

            Create an Equitable Tax System

A problem closely related to and responsible for our failure to deal with poverty is our grossly unfair system of federal taxation. In the 1950s, under Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, the marginal federal income tax rate on large incomes was high. It could be as high as 52%. Marginal individual tax rates could be even higher, up to 90% on large amounts of income. Then, twenty years after Eisenhower left office, we elected Ronald Reagan president. Ever since, the federal government has been slashing tax rates for corporations and wealthy individuals. The corporate tax rate today is 21%. The individual tax rate today only goes as high as 37% on large amounts of income. The burden of these slashed tax rates falls disproportionally on middle-income individuals. More significantly, these rates (combined with our huge expenditures on the military) make it impossible for the federal government to do anything meaningful about poverty.

The advocates of cutting tax rates for the wealthy say reducing taxes will cause people to invest more in the economy and thereby create jobs. They say “A rising tide lifts all boats.” The simple truth is that these claims are false. First of all, cutting taxes for the wealthy does not create a “rising tide.” The wealthy don’t invest more in the economy when their taxes are cut, they just use any money they save on taxes for their own personal purposes, usually to make even more money. Moreover, to the extent that the economy does improve, it doesn’t lift all boats. It lifts all yachts. Essentially all aspects of the American economy and American taxation function to do two things. First, make the wealthy wealthier. Second, they keep a majority of Americans sufficiently economically secure that they don’t revolt but keep voting for Republicans who always want to cut taxes for the wealthy even more than they already have.

 People in some west European countries pay more in taxes than Americans do, but for their money they get things like free medical care and free or inexpensive higher education rather than an enormous military. The United States will never be close to being a great country until we can say the same things about ourselves.

            Deal Effectively with the Climate Crisis

The world faces a climate crisis of enormous proportions. Scientists who have studied the matter are nearly all convinced that this crisis really is happening. Highly industrialized nations like the United States play a significant role in causing that crisis. They (we) emit enormous amounts of carbon dioxide and other green house gases that cause the earth to get warmer. Our industries pump carbon dioxide into the air. We burn coal to generate electricity. We buy more gas-guzzling pickup trucks and huge SUVs than we do smaller, more efficient cars. We think electric cars are the answer. Maybe in places like my home in Washington state, where most of our electricity comes from dams already in place on the Columbia river, that’s true. In the many, many places where utilities generate electricity by burning coal, it isn’t. All that electricity for all those vehicles has to come from somewhere, and where most of it comes from contributes to the climate crisis.

As the climate crisis continues and the earth gets warmer, the climate in various places around the world changes. There are longer droughts in some places and deeper floods in others. Tropical storms like hurricanes get stronger. At least as significantly, as the world warms the ice everywhere but especially at the poles melts. As it melts, sea level rises. A large percentage of the world’s population lives at or only slightly above sea level. As the sea level rises, the places where they live will be covered with water. The size of the resulting demographic and economic catastrophe is too large to measure, and we’re responsible for it in significant part.

Yet conservative politicians stop us from doing anything truly significant to stop warming the planet. They say doing so will hurt the economy, as though the climate crisis won’t. They say it will cost jobs, never mind that there are great opportunities for more jobs in work in response to the crisis. There is a handful of scientists, though not respected ones, who deny that there is a climate crisis. Some Republican politicians cite these scientists and say we don’t have to do anything because there is no crisis. Sure. It would be great if there were no climate crisis. The truth, however, is that there is one. No amount of wishful thinking will make it go away. The United State will be nowhere near a great country until it starts to deal with the climate crisis in truly constructive ways.

            Get Over Our Gun Mania

Sure. There are good things about this country. We’ve had a constitutional form of government for over two hundred years. Today that constitution prohibits slavery and guarantees several important civil rights. It creates three branches of government and, at least in theory, it keeps any one of them from dominating the other two. In addition to the issue of the disproportionate power of small population states discussed above, there is one more thing in that constitution that we must get rid of if we are ever to be anywhere near a great country. It is the Second Amendment. It reads: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” This Amendment is, or at least has been interpreted so it can be, the constitutional basis of one of the primary things wrong with the United States. Racism is probably this country’s most damaging disease, but the mania Americans have for guns runs it a close second. We Americans, with few exceptions (which include me), are gaga about guns. Our mania for the ownership of firearms is one thing about this country that foreigners simply cannot understand.

I can’t understand it either, but I know some of the facts about it. There are more guns in this country than there are people. The NRA and the gun manufacturers buy politicians, mostly but not exclusively Republican, so they won’t pass any meaningful laws of gun regulation. In District of Columbia v. Heller a case decided in 2008, the US Supreme Court read the phrase “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State” out of the Second Amendment, thereby making repeal of that amendment a pressing need. The “arms” to which the Second Amendment refers were muzzle-loading muskets. The drafters of the Second Amendment couldn’t even imagine today’s guns even in their wildest dreams. No one could do the kind of damage with an eighteenth century musket that anyone can do today with an automatic or semiautomatic weapon. When guns, particularly automatic or semi-automatic weapons are used in mass killings, as tragically they so often are, Republican politicians say the solution is more guns not gun regulation, a response which is simply insane. The easy availability of guns leads to any number of suicides in this country every year. Far too few gunowners keep their weapons and their ammunition secure from children. “Unloaded” guns kill people every year. People say they need rifles for hunting, but no one needs to hunt to provide food for their family today. They say they need pistols for self defense, as if protecting one’s home from theft were more important than a human life. Some of them say they need automatic weapons to defend themselves against the government as though an assault weapon could protect them from one well-aimed smart bomb from a military drone or from a single shot from one Abrams tank.

It is true that a majority of Americans favor some kinds of gun regulation like background checks for all purchases. The gun lobby keeps those regulations from being made law; and even if they were made law, they would hardly cure America’s mania for guns. This country will be nowhere near great until we repeal the Second Amendment, forbid the sale of automatic weapons and their ammunition, confiscate the automatic weapons already in people’s hands, and get people to understand that a gun has only one purpose, which is actually immoral. It is to kill. Sadly, I do not believe these changes will ever happen. Americans are just too crazy about guns. America’s gun mania is one of the things that keep us from being a great, much less the greatest, country.

            Conclusion

So are we the greatest country in the world? Hell no we aren’t. We aren’t even close to being the greatest country in the world. Yes, we are the world’s longest standing democracy (though that democracy is and always has been corrupted by money). We are nothing like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union were or like North Korea is. I lived in the Soviet Union for one academic year, and I know what really, really bad countries are like. We aren’t such a country, but numerous countries around the world do a far better job of providing a decent life for their people than we do. I’ve mentioned some of our shortcomings here. There surely are others. I’ve also mentioned a few of our virtues, and perhaps the question is whether our virtues outweigh our shortcomings. In my opinion they definitely do not. Are we the greatest country in the world? If we are, the world is an even sadder place than I believe it to be, and that takes some doing.

Do We Need Sheepdogs?

 This is the text of a sermon I gave on November 26, 2023, at Northshore United Church of Christ in Woodinville, Washington.

Do We Need Sheep Dogs?

Scripture: Ezekiel 34:11-15.

 

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.

Let me ask you something. How many of you, at some point in your life, memorized the twenty-third psalm? Many church people have, probably as a Sunday school exercise. I’m sure we all know how it begins: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures….” Now, if the Lord is our shepherd, what does that make us? In this metaphor, aren’t we are the sheep? We are the ones the shepherd leads. Lots of Bible passages use this image of God as the shepherd and the people as the sheep. Psalm 100 calls us the sheep of God’s pasture. Psalm 95 says “For he is our God, and we are the sheep of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand.” In the lectionary reading for this morning from Matthew that I didn’t use Jesus separates the sheep from the goats, with the sheep being the good guys. In the Gospel of John Jesus calls himself the good shepherd. There’s lots of biblical references to God, or Jesus, as a shepherd.

Then there’s passage we heard this morning from Ezekiel. In a way I want to apologize for inflicting Ezekiel on you. I say “inflicting” because Ezekiel is by far the worst writer in the Bible. His prose is stiff and horribly repetitive. About the only part of Ezekiel most people know is the story of the dry bones coming back to life. That story may be the only part of Ezekiel that’s worth knowing. But there’s also the passage we just heard. It has God say God will seek out God’s scattered sheep and return them to Israel. It says God will feed these sheep with good pasture. It says God will be the people’s shepherd. Even though it’s in Ezekiel, who is usually far from clear, this passage clearly uses the common biblical image of God as shepherd and the people as God’s sheep. I once gave a sermon with the title “Baa!” but I’m not going to do that this morning. Instead, I want to work with this metaphor of God as shepherd and us as sheep.

Now, I’m no shepherd, though I once had a college roommate who grew up on a sheep ranch in central Oregon. I have, however, seen images of herds of sheep being shepherded. In these images there is a shepherd, a person who is in charge of a flock of sheep. In these images, however, the shepherd isn’t usually herding the sheep alone. They have help in the form of sheep dogs. The shepherd has trained the sheep dogs to herd sheep, and the dogs get the sheep to stay together and to go where the shepherd wants them to go. The dogs, in effect, act as mediators between the shepherd and the sheep. Perhaps the shepherd could herd the sheep without the dogs, but using trained sheep dogs sure makes the shepherd’s job easier.

Now I want to ask you another question: Do we need sheep dogs? Not for literal sheep. For us. Do we need some kind of mediator between God and us, someone trained in getting us to go where God wants us to go? Different parts of the Christian tradition answer that question differently. The Roman Catholic Church says yes. Absolutely. The people need sheep dogs, and we, the church, are the sheep dogs. We know where God wants the people to go, and God has charged us with the task of getting them to go there. We tolerate a wide variety of opinions within the Church, but we set the limits beyond which people cannot go and still be Catholic. In the Catholic Church, the priest is indeed a mediator between the people and God much like a sheep dog is a mediator between a shepherd and the sheep.

In our Protestant Congregationalist tradition, however, we believe that no one needs a mediator between themselves and God. One of the Reformation’s great reformations was to realize that everyone has their own direct, personal, unmediated relationship with Jesus Christ and with God. So does that mean we Protestants don’t need sheep dogs, don’t need someone or something to direct us in our life of faith?

Well, no, I don’t think it means that. See, here’s the problem. The life of faith often isn’t all that easy. The basics of Christianity may seem easy enough. We believe in God. We believe in Jesus Christ. We believe something or other about the Bible. Fair enough, but of course both God and Jesus can get pretty complex when we really consider who they are. And the Bible is far more complex than most Christians think it is.

The life of faith can get complicated in other ways too. At some time or other, all of us face ethical or moral decisions that are not easy. It’s sometimes really hard to discern just what the Christian thing to do or to say in a particular situation is. At some point in our lives all of us feel deep pain, physical pain or perhaps even worse, emotional pain. The pain of loss. The pain of grief. Is God with us in our pain? We all face a world full of violence and injustice. Where is God in that world? The life of Christian faith cannot avoid these circumstances and these questions.

So, do we need sheep dogs to nip at our heels until we get the right answers? Well, no. Of course not. But we do need something or someone to help us as we face the questions and the difficult times of our lives. That something can be many different things. We read the Bible, and we come to some understanding of what it means. We pray to God in the name of Jesus Christ, and we listen for what we think God’s answers to our prayers are. We gather in Christian community, where we can share our joys and concerns with our friends and other members of our congregation. All these things can be guides for us in our life of faith.

And we Christians who belong to and attend a church usually have an ordained pastor to whom we can bring all those joys and concerns. Northshore certainly does. We can make an appointment and come in to spend some time with our pastor. (And when you do, please don’t say “I don’t want to take up your time.” When people say that to me, I always respond, “What do you think I’m here for?”) Will the pastor give us firm answers to our questions? Probably not. It is only occasionally appropriate for a pastor to do that. But the most important thing I learned in my years of serving as a church pastor is the power of listening. Knowing that someone has heard us can have a powerful healing effect as we struggle with difficulties in our lives. In the speaking and listening between a pastor and a parishioner, new insights can arise. Questions can be reformulated. Answers can be suggested, often not by the pastor but by the parishioner themselves.

None of those things is a sheep dog exactly, but at some point in our lives and in our lives of faith we all need help. (Trust me, we pastors need help too. That’s why in seminary they hammer us on selfcare. That’s why it is so good for a pastor to have a group of colleagues to meet with regularly and discuss thing with.) We all need help, and, mercifully, there are many things that can help guide us through that need. Bible study. Conversations with other Christians. Conversations with a trained pastor.

And perhaps most of all our own conscience. We all know the basics of right from wrong, don’t we? I’m sure we all do, at least in general terms. The Christian answer to a question is rarely one that clashes with our conscience. We can all turn inward, sit in silence, practice meditation, or use some other prayer practice. We can seek the knowledge of right and wrong that lies deep within each one of us. Will those things give definitive answers to our questions, definitive responses to our needs? Maybe, but maybe not. Still, doing those things can certainly point us in the right direction as we make decisions in our lives.

We may be the sheep of God’s pasture, but we don’t need sheep dogs. Neither, however, must we be left entirely on our own. I suppose it’s possible to be a Christian in isolation. Some people have done it. Some have sought isolation as the only way to do it. But one of the great gifts of a life of faith is the gift of community. For me and, I know, for a lot of people, being Christian is a lot easier in Christian community than it is in isolation. Being part of a congregation of God’s people who have committed themselves to living their relationship with God through the Christian faith is an immense blessing. Sadly, fewer and fewer people do it today. But you’re all here this morning on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, when church attendance is usually lower than normal. Perhaps we have made a commitment to the Christian faith. Perhaps we are still seeking a way of relating to God that works for us. Either way, Christian community can be a great gift in our lives.

We all need help. We all need guidance. But we don’t need sheep dogs. One of the great gifts of Christianity is the gift of freedom. We don’t need a church to dictate truth to us. Heck, even God doesn’t dictate truth to us. As Christians we live with the freedom to seek the guidance we need in any way that is constructive, that is helpful. We are all free to reach our own conclusions about what Christianity is and what Christianity means. We are free to make our own decisions about our lives. Freedom is one of the greatest of God’s blessings.

So, sheep dogs? No. The shepherd uses sheep dogs to take away the sheep’s freedom. God never does that to us. Do we sometimes need help? Yes. Absolutely. But we don’t need to be barked at. Nor nipped at the heels. Nor forced to go where we don’t want to go. Nor forced to say we believe in God or understand our faith in any particular way. Guided yes. Commanded, never.

We can go it alone if we want, but one of the parts of the good news of Christianity is that we don’t have to. There are lots of things and lots of people out there who can guide, not force, us as we live our life of faith. May we all have the wisdom to seek out not sheep dogs but those things that are truly helpful as we strive, as best we can, to be faithful to our God of unlimited grace. May it be so. Amen.