A Balm in Gilead

 I've been working on a new book with the working title There Is a Balm in Gilead. I don't know if it will ever see the light of day, but here's the current draft Introduction.

Introduction

(c) Thomas C. Sorenson 2024. All rights reserved.

 

What is Christianity? Is it accepting certain alleged facts as true? Is it believing the right dogmatic assertions about God and Jesus Christ? Is it living according to the dictates of some ecclesial authority? What does Christianity require of us? To convert everyone else to our version (or any version) of the faith? To condemn people we think the Bible condemns? Or to comply with requirements we think are imposed by a particular book? To believe in the divine inspiration and infallibility of that book understood literally? Never to sin? To believe in God as cosmic judge just looking for reasons to condemn people to hell for all eternity? To tell people who do what we consider to be sin that they are in fact damned for all eternity? To build up and defend ecclesial structures as our primary task? To isolate ourselves from the world in what we think are truly righteous, closed communities? There are and from the beginnings of the faith there have been people who identify themselves as Christians who think that Christianity is indeed one or more of these things.

Here’s a profound truth that we must grasp if our sacred Christian faith is to have a future in today’s world. Christianity is none of those things. Those ways of understanding the faith are among the major things that have produced the crisis Christianity is experiencing among us today, and they get the actual truth of the faith all wrong. Christianity asserted to be one or more of those things does not speak to the existential needs of today’s people. In fact, it causes far more harm than good in the world. People in our context today, both outside churches and inside them, have a particular way of understanding the faith. It is what I here call Evangelical Christianity. We will examine this way of understanding Christianity in what follows.

For now we need only to understand that Evangelical Christianity, that is, Christianity as most people today understand it, is indeed causing immense harm to the church, to individual people, and to the world. It has caused immense harm in the past. In its zeal to make everyone Christian generally and more specifically Christian on the European model, it is responsible for European genocide against native people the world over. It has taught and practiced anti-Judaism so extreme that its entire history can, indeed must, be seen as preparation for the Holocaust.

Christianity hasn’t stopped causing great harm in the world today. It is wounding countless individual children of God. It is buttressing cultural prejudices against LGBTQ+ people. It is making these beloved people of God wonder if there is a safe place for them anywhere. It is causing some of them to take their own lives. It is propping up the hoary notion that women are to be subordinate to men. It is impeding human intellectual pursuits by insisting that nothing can be true that contradicts the way adherents to Evangelical Christianity understand the Bible. It is requiring church people to check their brains at the church door, and it is discouraging or prohibiting them from raising doubts about their faith or even asking serious questions about it. A tragic number of Christians today use their harmful faith in support of American nationalism and imperialistic American policies the world over. They even use it in support of white supremacy, thereby telling all of God’s people of color that they are somehow less than those of us who happen to have been born white. Christianity today, as most people understand it, produces far more harm in the world than it produces good. It wounds far more people than it heals.

So what is Christianity really? It is to follow Jesus Christ as best we can. The Christian tradition calls this way of seeing the faith the imitatio Christi, the imitation of Christ. To do that we must, of course, know who Jesus Christ was and is, which of course includes knowing what he wasn’t and isn’t. Evangelical Christianity understands Jesus as having been about saving our eternal souls from damnation. In truth however, Jesus was hardly about that at all. He was, more than anything else, a healer. In the Gospels, when crowds of people come to Jesus, they mostly come to have him heal them of their diseases and disabilities. And when they come, he heals them. For example, in both Matthew and Luke, the first thing Jesus does in the story of the feeding of the five thousand is cure people of disease. See Matthew 14:14 and Luke 9:11.

I have heard John Dominic Crossan say that what distinguished Jesus from many others of his time wasn’t that he was a healer, it was that he healed free of charge. All Jesus needed for him to heal someone was for him to realize that someone needed healing. Sometimes he would say to someone he had healed something like “Your faith has made you well.” But most of the time he just healed without the person healed doing anything but come to him for healing. Jesus healed every sort of human affliction. He enabled the paralyzed to walk. He enabled the blind to see. He cured what we would consider to be mental illnesses when he exorcized demons from one possessed. He even revived at least a couple of people from the dead. The gospels of the New Testament are filled with stories of Jesus being a healer. They have him say or do next to nothing about saving souls from eternal damnation.

The way in which the Christian faith today causes far more harm than good in the world is nothing but a gross betrayal of Jesus Christ, the one we call Lord and Savior. Jesus healed, he didn’t harm. He and the God we know in and through him call us to heal not to harm. That doesn’t mean heal in the sense of saving someone’s soul by converting them to Christianity. Jesus never converted anyone to Christianity. In fact, he was Jewish not Christian himself. He healed more people physically and psychically, that is, spiritually, than we can even know of. He healed people one on one. He healed people in large groups. He healed every sort of malady that afflicts God’s people here on earth without worrying about their future in heaven.

The Christian’s great call today is to follow Jesus into being a healer, a healer of all of the world’s wounds but especially those wounds Christians have themselves caused. Certainly we are called to do charitable acts of healing when we can. Most of us aren’t physicians, but we can support the healing work of those who are. We can volunteer with and contribute money to a vast array of worthwhile charitable institutions, and a great many Christians are very good at doing so. Doing charity is indeed part of the Christian call. But there is more to the Christian call than that. We humans cannot, even with the help of God, solve any serious problem without understanding the underlying causes of the problem. Unless we can transform that cause from something bad into something good, the problem will persist indefinitely.

It is the thesis of this book that the underlying cause of the harm Christianity has done and is doing in God’s world today is bad theology. I can’t begin to tell you how many times people have said to me, “Actions are more important than thoughts.” There is some truth in that assertion I suppose, but here’s a significant truth that it misses. All actions (except for purely instinctive or biological ones) begin with thoughts. Our hearts beat without our thinking about it. Many other bodily functions work on their own too. But every intentional thing we do begins with a thought in our heads. I feel thirsty, so I think “I’ll go get a drink of water.” That thought leads to the action of my going to get a drink of water.

It works the same way with far more significant matters than a passing thirst. Here are some extreme examples from fairly recent history: I think Jews are subhuman and the cause of all of my people’s problems, so I construct gas chambers and set out to kill every last one of them. I think Black people are subhuman and a threat to my way of life, so first I enslave them, then, when I can’t do that anymore, I pass Jim Crow laws and practice redlining and other forms of discrimination to deprive them of rights, keep them separate from me, and keep myself above them in the social hierarchy. I think American Indians are subhuman and stand in the way of my people’s conquest of new land. So I conduct wars against them for over a century. I turn a blind eye as my soldiers use Indian men, women, and children for target practice. I push Indians off of land their people have occupied for millennia. I confine them to small, generally undesirable places. I break every single treaty I sign with them. All of those horrors plus a tragically great many more are actions, but they all begin with thoughts. Bad thoughts. Wrong thoughts, but still thoughts. Thoughts really do matter—a lot.

Then there is the harm that Evangelical Christianity is doing to planet earth. The way that kind of Christianity distracts people’s attention from this life on earth and focuses it on a posited next life in heaven or hell has led far too many Christians to ignore the way we humans are harming the earth, the way we are causing global climate change that is threatening life on earth itself. Evangelical Christianity does nothing less than wound the only planet we have.

The harm that Christianity has done in the past and continues to do in the present all begins with thoughts. The foundational thought of Christianity is theology. In theology we develop our understanding of ultimate reality. We usually call that ultimate reality God. The word theology means logos about theos, word about God. All human faiths are grounded in a theology. They all have their foundational story. The foundational story of Christianity is, of course, the story of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of a first century Jewish Galilean peasant named Jesus of Nazareth. We call him Jesus Christ, with Christ being a title not a last name. We confess him to be God Incarnate. Our whole faith tradition is grounded in the stories we tell about him. Everything in our faith looks, or at least should look, to him for information and inspiration. Our faith is not true to its better angels when it fails to do so, and it has failed to do so again and again and again throughout its long history.

Christianity has again and again substituted distorted human ways of being for the divine ways of being we see in and learn from Jesus Christ. That demonic substitution results in very bad theology. That bad theology produces a great deal of harm. It is the underlying cause of the harm Christianity caused in the world in the past and causes in the world today. In this work we will dissect popular, harmful theology. We will examine how that theology is causing harm in the world today. We will propose a better foundational theology for our faith. Finally, we will consider how that better theology can heal the harm Christianity has done. And when it does that, it even heals itself.

There are a couple of different images we can use to designate the transformation we believe Christianity must undertake if it is to survive. One is to think of that transformation as a new Reformation. Its complete historical accuracy may be questionable, but in common understanding the Reformation began on October 31, 1517 CE. On that date an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther nailed a document containing ninety-five theses about issues in the church to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany. Luther’s theses challenged many things about the structure and practice of the Roman Catholic Church of Luther’s day. He intended them as a basis for academic discussion not the creation of a reformed Christian church and faith, but that’s what happened. Other reformers like Zwingli, Calvin, and the leaders of the Radical Reformation made their own contributions to different strains of what became Protestant Christianity.

Christianity needed reformation in the early sixteenth century CE. It needs new reformation today. I have not cast this work in the terms of a new reformation, though I am thoroughly convinced that a new reformation is precisely what Christianity needs today. I have not used those terms mostly because the notion that the Christian church and the Christian faith itself needs a new reformation is hardly a new one. It has become almost trite in some Christian circles. The world does not need me adding to the discussion of our faith needing a new Reformation.

I began this work with the original working title A Balm in Gilead, Liberating Christianity for the Healing of Our Wounds. The phrase “liberating Christianity” is one I have used over and over again for many years. The first book I ever put out was titled Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium.” I began drafting this book using “liberating Christianity” for the Christianity I believe we need to bring into the world. As I began writing this work, I used the term “Biblicism” for what I believe we must overcome if we are to save the Christian faith. Like liberating Christianity, Biblicism is a term I have used countless times over the years. If you want to know what it is, read Liberating Christianity in either its original or its revised form.

But then I began to wonder: What do those terms have to do with healing, which is what the book’s title and subtitle suggest it is about? Not much, I decided. So I became more intentional about writing this book in terms of harm and healing. In what follows I will refer many times to “Evangelical Christianity” and “Healing Christianity.” What I mean by those terms will unfold as you read the book.

The main title of the book, however, is There Is A Balm in Gilead. So perhaps it will be worthwhile if here, in the book’s Introduction, I say a bit about what “a balm in Gilead” means. It is a term that comes from Hebrew scripture, though it is not used often in those sacred texts. A balm is an ointment, or more generally a source, of healing or restoration. Gilead is the northern part of the region east of the Jordan River. The Balm of Gilead was a perfume used medicinally and named for that region because that’s where it was produced. It has become a term no longer limited to that perfume.

At the beginning of this Introduction I placed the words “There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.” That line comes from a well-known African-American spiritual. That spiritual begins, “There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole. There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.” Perhaps the Black Americans who created that song knew where Gilead was and what its balm was, but it isn’t necessary that they did. “A balm in Gilead” has passed into common English usage as a reference to any cure-all, anything that heals a wide range of ailments. I believe that the world today suffers from a great many aliments. I believe that what I here call Evangelical Christianity is one of the causes of those ailments. I believe that Christianity properly understood can be a balm that cures at least those ailments bad Christianity has caused. Hence the title of this book.

Some, or even much, of what you read here may be new to you. It may very well challenge some of your long-held and firmly believed understandings of God, of Jesus Christ, of the nature of faith, of the Bible, and of what you understand your faith to require of you. So be it. It is precisely disordered theological thinking that causes Christianity to do the harm it does. In this work I will spare no sacred cows. Our Christian faith is in crisis today. It has been shrinking in numbers for many decades now. Only a radical rethinking of the foundational nature of our faith can save it. I will, to the best of my ability, do some of that rethinking here. I pray that you will make this journey with me and that in the end you will find your Christian faith transformed and strengthened. May it be so.

On the Importance of Good Theology

 

On the Importance of Good Theology

Father Richard Rohr is one of the great practitioners and teachers of spirituality today. He his himself Roman Catholic, and to an extent he writes from a Roman Catholic perspective; but his work is not aimed only at Roman Catholic Christians. Rohr speaks to all Christians and indeed to all people who value the spiritual life. I have great respect for him and have learned from him, but here I have a bone to pick with him. I just read him say something that is not only wrong but dangerous. In his book What the Mystics Know, Rohr dismisses the value of being right theologically as merely an ego matter. He’s wrong about that. A great, late mentor of mine in Christian ministry once said to me, “Bad theology kills people.” He was absolutely right about that. Bad theology kills people. I want here to contemplate the value of good theology and the harm of bad theology and to explain why being right theologically matters.

Why is good theology important? Perhaps the best way to answer that question is to look at the harm of bad theology. One very extreme example of the harm of extremely bad theology today is the terrorism inflicted by Muslim extremists (not regular people of the great Muslim faith) on innocent civilians around the world. Bad theology led to people hijacking airliners an crashing them into buildings of symbolic significance on September 11, 2001. Bad theology led Hamas terrorists to attack Israel and kill some 1, 200 innocent Israelis on October 7, 2023. Bad theology led four Islamist terrorists to attack a popular music venue in Moscow on March 25, 2024, killing around 130 innocent civilians. Other incidents of Islamist terrorism are far too numerous to mention. Islam is, in its essence, a religion of peace through which countless generations of people have found a meaningful connection with God. Today, a very small percentage of Muslim people have corrupted Islamic theology into a justification for mass murder and suicide, both of which the Koran, Islam’s holy book, condemns. In Islam, bad theology is killing people. Even if it is only functioning as a cover for acts that really motivated by political or cultural issues, it is still killing people.

Bad Christian theology has killed people for millennia too. I’ll give just a couple of quick examples here. Bad Christian theology that says that only Christians are saved from eternity in hell led to Christian religious imperialism and the killing of countless numbers of indigenous people in many places around the world. Christian theology that called Jews devils, concocted wild stories about how evil they are, and blamed them for the death of Jesus Christ, led to the unspeakable, incomprehensible horror of the Holocaust. Bad Jewish theology that uses the notion of Israel as land God has given only to the Jews has led to Israeli displacement and oppression of Palestinian Arabs that has resulted in numerous deaths among the Palestinians. Examples of the harm of bad theology are not hard to find.

In the United States today, bad Christian theology does, on occasion, lead to killing. A Christian extremist who bought the lie of Christian anti-Judaism attacked the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018, killing seven people and wounding six others. Yet the harm that bad Christian theology does in our country today is less often actually murder than it is a kind of spiritual death that it imposes on millions of Americans who consider themselves to be good Christians.

The dominant theology of American Christianity, especially American evangelical Christianity, is something called the classical theory of atonement. That’s the theory of salvation that says the a cosmic price had to be paid for human sin before God could or would forgive that sin. The suffering and death of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was that price. Those who are saved are those, and only those, who take Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior and believe that his sacrifice bought their salvation from sin. The classical theory of atonement is simply appallingly bad Christian theology. It makes God a monster, a cosmic child abuser. It leads to a religion grounded in the fear of eternal damnation. A great many Christians spend their whole lives living in that fear because of what their church has told them Christianity is. The classical theory of atonement stunts Christian spirituality and thereby stunts the lives of countless Christians around the world.

Any theology that leads to physical killing and/or spiritual death is bad theology, and it matters a lot. Any such theology is bad theology because all of the world’s great faith traditions know that God is a God of grace. God saves everyone, and no one need live in fear for the eternal fate of their souls. God is a God of peace. God wants peace for all people not just for those who think that they are the only ones who really understand God. God is nonviolent and calls all people to lives of nonviolence. These and other blessings are not just the teachings of good Christian theology. They are the teachings of great religions the world over.

Good theology leads to life not death. Good theology leads to a lively spirituality that seeks good for all God’s people and the knows that all people are God’s people. Good theology leads to lives committed to caring for those in need and to reforming all human systems that put people in need. Good theology leads to lives of inner peace and the ability for a person to face whatever happens to them in life in peace and with hope in this life and beyond this life. Good theology enhances life, bad theology taints life. Bad theology detracts from the abundant life that God wants for all of God’s people.

So Father Rohr, as much as I respect you, I must strongly disagree with you here. Yes, it feels good the think you have the right theology, but that doesn’t make right theology a matter only or even at mostly of the human ego. Right theology, good theology, is an existential matter for all of humanity. The world has suffered immensely over the millennia because of bad theology, bad Christian theology most of all. God calls some of us to do what we can to correct that bad Christian theology. That’s what I try to do with my theological writing. Yes, I suppose that on one level I do it because getting it right strokes my ego, but that doesn’t detract from the importance of good theology. Bad theology kills people both physically and spiritually. Good theology saves people by opening for them the way to fullness of life. That’s why good theology matters.

 

I Just Don't Get It Yet

 

I Just Don’t Get It Yet

I just don’t get it. I don’t get what the hell is going wrong with my country. We have made a narcissistic megalomaniac the most famous person in the country. Millions upon millions of us have made a man found civilly liable for sexual assault who has been indicted on dozens of felony charges a hero. They care not what sort of man he is. They care not that he is wildly sexually irresponsible and unfaithful. They care not that he is sexist and racist. They care not what his political policies are. They care not that he says he will be a dictator. Yes, he says he’ll be that only for a day, but how many dictators give up power and become responsible leaders of democratic countries after they’ve been dictators? They care not that he admires some of the world’s worst national leaders—Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping, and Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban. They care not that he panders to violent white supremacists. They care not that he despises democracy and thinks it perfectly legitimate for his followers to use violence to install him back in power. They care not that nearly everything he says is a lie. They care not that he will violate this country’s longstanding treaty obligations and make us a subject of scorn around the world. They care not that his economic policies, which consist of nothing but tax cuts for the rich and tariffs on imported goods that would destroy this country’s international economic relations, would devastate the American economy. They care not that he despises the United States Constitution that he once swore to uphold and defend and thinks he can use all of the federal government for his own personal gain. This man, Donald J. Trump, is a threat to everything decent this country has long claimed to be and to stand for.

And I don’t get it. How can Donald J. Trump be anything but an object of scorn? He is nothing but despicable as a human being and as a politician. Yet millions of Americans want him to be president again and will vote for him no matter what. To make that fact even more outrageous, many if not most of them self-identify as Christians. Can they not see that Trump represents nearly everything Jesus preached and taught against? For that is surely what he does. He gives not one good God damn for “the least of these.” He’ll never bless a true peacemaker. He has no reservations about using violence to achieve his goals. It’s not that he would have paid the workers in the vineyard different amounts, it’s that he would have stiffed them and not paid them at all. He has no qualms about committing adultery many times over. I just don’t get it.

There must be something systemically wrong with this country. A healthy country would have Donald Trump in jail by now not poised once again to become president. How have we gone so far astray? Why have we abandoned every value for which this country has claimed to stand? I have no sure answers to those questions. The Trump phenomenon is so far outside of this country’s political experience that I’m sure answers are difficult for everyone. All I can do is speculate as to the causes using as much factual information as I can gather.

Since Donald Trump is an American fascist, we can start our attempt to understand him with the general question of what attracts people to fascism. There are two prime examples of countries becoming fascist within the last century. Perhaps looking at those examples will lead to some insight about what’s going on here at home.

The first country to go fascist was Italy. Benito Mussolini led a popular movement that gave us the term fascist. He wasn’t elected leader of the country, but he did take over the government relatively peacefully. Yes, he had his black-shirted thugs doing violent things to people they didn’t like; but when he led a mob into Rome in 1922, the government was simply turned over to him without a fight. He proceeded to create a right-wing dictatorship that he maintained until he fled Rome as allied forces advanced. He was killed by a mob in 1945.

Italy had sided with Britain, the United States, and Russia in World War I. It was on the winning side, but its people thought they had been treated unfairly when the victors gave the province of South Tyrol to Austria, which had been on the losing side. That loss became a festering sore with the Italian people.

Italy, of course, was the home of the Roman Empire for centuries. It is easy to romanticize that empire, and it did have some remarkable accomplishments both in culture, in engineering and construction, and in military conquest. By the 1920s, however, the Roman Empire had been gone for fourteen hundred years. Italy’s more recent history had been one of multiple states that divided up the Italian peninsula. There had been multiple foreign incursions into those states. There was no political entity “Italy” for many centuries. The country became united in 1871, only fifty years before the rise of Mussolini.

Mussolini played on the anger of the Italian people over the loss of South Tyrol. He also claimed that he was going to “make Italy great again” by reviving the Roman Empire. He claimed he would return the glory of Rome to the Italian people. Of course, he did no such thing; but his promise to do it surely rang true to many Italian people.

So, in 1922 Italy was a country that was angry, felt belittled by its allies, and longed to take a place among the world’s nations that reflected the long-lost glory of the Roman Empire. Mussolini and his fascist party promised their people that he would take firm control of the country, create order, create jobs, and make Italy great again. The Italian people fell for it, with disastrous consequences.

The next country to go fascist was Germany. Germany had lost World War I to the allied powers. That was bad enough, but Germany was treated grossly unfairly by the Treaty of Versailles that the country was forced to sign at the end of the war. The Germans looked for a distinguishable group on which they could blame that humiliation. They picked the Jews. A myth developed called “the stab in the back” that said Germany had lost the war only because of betrayal primarily by the Jews. The myth made no sense and had no factual support, but it gave the non-Jewish Germans a way to avoid responsibility for what had happened to their country. The anger over the Treaty of Versailles continued at least into the 1930s.

Germany experienced an economic crisis in the 1920s. It was characterized by inflation of the currency so rampant that, after a time, money literally was not worth the paper it was printed on. People’s life savings were wiped out. What should have been enough to support a comfortable retirement became worthless. That crisis had abated by the time Hitler came to power, but it was then still a fresh and painful memory.

On top of all of that, most of the Germans feared a takeover by the German communists. Russia, of course, had become communist starting in 1917. The Russian communists were promoting communist revolutions around the world. The communist Russia was hardly a shining example of the virtue of communist rule. Its government was on its way to becoming totalitarian. The economy was a shambles. And communists both Russian and German are assertive atheists while Germany was still a predominantly Christian country. By about 1928 or so, the German political situation amounted essentially to a battle between Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party and the communists for control of the German government, or at least that’s how it seemed to many people.

In 1933, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, the government office with all the power. He was appointed Chancellor peacefully by German president Hindenburg. Hindenburg’s motives in making Hitler Chancellor may be unclear, but it seems as he though Hitler was better than the communists and that the conservative German aristocracy could control him.

By 1933 then, Germany was an angry country with recent economic problems aggravated by the worldwide depression that began in 1929. The German people were looking for a scapegoat, and Hitler gave them one, namely, the Jews. Germany, tragically, had a long history of virulent anti-Judaism that Hitler could continue and make even more extreme. Martin Luther’s raging anti-Judaism is just one manifestation of that history. Far too many Germans bought Hitler’s lies about the Jews and saw Hitler as a force that would destroy the Jews’ supposed power over Germany. They saw him as the man who would free them from the limitations imposed on them by the Treaty of Versailles and “make Germany great again.”

So is there anything that these two situations have in common that might help us understand the Trump phenomenon in this country? There may be. In both cases, the people of a nation were angry and felt threatened. Would-be strongmen played on that anger and fear to generate support for simplistic, dictatorial solutions to the country’s problems. In both Italy and Germany, the conditions that led to fascist dictatorship were the consequences of war, but what matters is how the people of those countries were thinking and acting in the 1920s and 1930s.

Both of these countries have had one central characteristic that the United States does not have. None of them had a truly successful democratic tradition until after World War II. When Mussolini and Hitler came to power in the 1920s and 1930s, democracy’s roots in both of them were shallow at best. Lack of a commitment to democracy is essential for the rise of fascism, and a commitment to democracy is something the United States has had at least until the rise of the Trump phenomenon.

What do these examples of fascist governments tell us about the Trump movement in the United States? They tell us that a vital need for any fascist movement is popular fear and the anger that results from it. Fascism needs a political situation in which the fascist leader can convince the country’s people that their country is going to hell in a hand basket, and, at least in most cases, that there is an identifiable group on which the fascists can pin the blame for what the fascists make out to be the country’s problems. Fascism requires at least some instability in the country it seeks to rule.

Those conditions exist, or, at least, Trump can convince people that they exist, in our country today. There are a couple of elements at play. One is changing demographics. For all of this country’s history, white men have been in charge. They have been the ones who made all the important decisions. They have been the ones who prospered. Not all of them prospered of course, but there is the myth of the American dream, a myth that says those fat cats made it, you can make it too. White men’s grasp on power in this country is weakening. Women occupy prominent positions in every field of human endeavor, something that has been true only relatively recently. We have, after all, a woman as vice president who is also a person of color. The non-white percentage of the population is growing. Although this country is still significantly racist, Black Americans have made significant progress toward economic equality with white Americans in recent decades. The number of native-born Americans of Latin American heritage is growing. It is easy enough to understand why a great many white men, and the women who follow their lead, feel the ground shifting under them. They don’t like it at all.

Then there is the immigration issue. This is the primary one Trump dummies up in his effort to get the American people to abandon democracy and make him dictator. It certainly is true that very large numbers of people, mostly from Central and South America and Mexico, have been pouring across the US-Mexico border in recent years. The increase in the number of undocumented immigrants is due largely to the violence and poverty in so much of Central and South America. People come seeking asylum so that they can build better lives for themselves and their families than they ever could at home.

There is a great human pressure difference between the United States and its southern neighbors. Pressures on the people are far stronger in places like Honduras and San Salvador than they are in the United States. The United States, far more prosperous than any country to the south of it, acts like a vacuum that seeks to equalize those pressures or at least to ease them in countries where they are high. That an enormous number of people would risk everything to leave home and enter the United States through other than legal means is not surprising.

Donald Trump tells his followers that these undocumented immigrants are the cause of all of their problems. He says they are “poisoning the blood” of the American people, a fascist statement if ever there was one. He says they are all criminals, which only very, very few of them are. Their crime rate is actually lower than the crime rate of this country as a whole. Trump says immigrants are taking Americans’ jobs, which they are not. In many agricultural areas, including the central parts of my home state of Washington, profitable agriculture would not be possible without immigrants, legal or otherwise, who do jobs few Americans would be willing to do for wages few Americans would be willing to accept. Trump says they are straining Social Security and Medicare, which they are not. Some of them may qualify for some form of support from a state, but no one draws on Social Security or Medicare without a Social Security number, which undocumented immigrants do not have unless they have a forged one. Besides, if they do have one, authentic or not, they pay into Social Security and Medicare in the same way the rest of us do.

So what explains the Donald Trump phenomenon? Why are so many Americans abandoning our democratic tradition and following an oft-indicted, serially lying, megalomaniac who cares about no one but himself? In part because things are changing in this country in ways that make many Americans feel insecure. And in part because Donald Trump is a world class salesman of phony theories and lies that pander to people’s anger and fear. He has been a genius at making the immigration issue a much bigger issue, and a different kind of issue, than it really is.

Will American democracy survive the threat that Donald Trump poses to it? That remains to be seen, and this year’s presidential election will go a long way toward answering that question. This country has had would-be fascist dictators before, but Rachel Maddow of MSNBC has pointed out one difference between Trump and his properly obscure predecessors as American fascists. It is a difference that makes Trump’s success far more likely than success for earlier American fascists ever was. Trump has captured one of America’s two major political parties. The once respectable Republican Party is now the Donald Trump cult of personality. A great many Americans have voted Republican all their lives. Some of them may continue to do so just out of habit or out of an intense dislike of the liberal policies (such as they are) that Democrats advocate and enact. The Republican Party has a well-established political apparatus in every US state. Wealthy Americans donate enormous amounts of money to it. Today, it controls (albeit chaotically) the US House of Representatives. Many state governors and other state officials are Republicans. Trump has a political machine behind him that no other American fascist has ever had, something that makes him a bigger threat to this country than any other American fascist has ever been.

There is one factor that works against Trump’s success, and we must pray that it is enough to defeat him. This country has a democratic tradition well over two hundred years old. The United States Constitution, which Trump so despises and will ignore as much as he can if he becomes president again, is the world’s greatest document establishing a democratic form of government. It isn’t perfect. American democracy isn’t perfect. But they are our main bulwark against a fascist takeover of our national government. It gives us more hope than anything else, certainly more hope than Joe Biden does, that we may yet dodge the bullet and avoid seeing the fascist Donald Trump back in the White House. Only time will tell if it is enough.

I Don't Want to Human: A Rant Against Human Violence

 

I Don’t Want to Human

A Rant Against Human Violence

 

Not long ago I saw a thing online of someone saying they don’t want to adult. They don’t even want to human, they said. They want to goat. Jump around. Eat whatever they want. Headbutt anyone they don’t like. I thought OK. Makes sense. Living like a goat must look pretty good to most humans. But this little piece didn’t have the person say why she didn’t want to human. All we can do to try to figure out why she didn’t is to look at the things in human life that are other than the way she described the life of a goat. Be where you’re supposed to be when you’re supposed to be there and behave with decorum. Eat only what’s good for you. Don’t be violent, don’t even be rude, but be nice even when you don’t feel at all nice. OK. Fair enough. I don’t like those things much of the time either.

I don’t want to human either, but I have a much more profound reason for not wanting to human. I don’t want to human because I’ve had it up to my back teeth with human violence. I’ve seen things online about the most dangerous wild animals in my country. Hell! There is no wild animal whatsoever that is nearly as deadly as human beings are. Maiming and killing people is what we do. Just turn on the TV news, local, national, or international, any time of day or night, and you’ll mainly if not exclusively see stories of violence. Part of that truth is the fault of the media. “If it bleeds, it leads” certainly seems to be true. But our news is filled day and night with stories of war. Of mass shootings. Of domestic violence. Of hate crimes against Jews, Muslims, Blacks, gays, transsexuals, and others. Of the state-ordered murder we call capital punishment. Israel kills over 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza, and my government sits on its ass doing nothing about it, probably because of the political power of American Jews in the Democrats’ coalition. Russia invades Ukraine, causes the deaths of tens of thousands of people on both sides of its illegal war of aggression, and there is no apparent way to stop the killing. My country spends obscene amounts of money on the killing machine we call the US military. The US Supreme Court says a constitutional amendment designed to protect the ownership of muzzle-loading muskets protects the ownership of semi-automatic weapons that can kill hundreds in the time it took an eighteenth-century musket to kill one.

I have, so far, never been a victim of violent crime nor have I had to go to war, if only because of a medical condition that kept me out of the army during the Vietnam War. But I live in a culture awash in violence. I live in a world awash in violence. I am a Christian. I try to follow a savior who proclaimed and lived nonviolence though it got him crucified. But countless millions of others who say they follow the same savior support American militarism and claim that owning guns of a type the only purpose of which is to kill other human beings is a perfectly Christian thing to do. I am surrounded day in and day out by news of human violence against other humans, and I’ve had it. I’m sick of it. I’ve had it with being a member of a species of animal so inherently and apparently incurably violent as we human are.

And there’s not a damned thing I can do about that either other than kill myself. But that would just be another act of violence, the kind of violence I’m so sick of being associated with because I am a member of the species homo sapiens. What the hell is wrong with us? I wish I knew. I don’t, but I know there is something diabolically wrong with us. Perhaps at some level we know collectively that there’s something wrong with all of our violence. We go to elaborate lengths to make service in the military killing machine honorable. We salute the military at football games and have airborne killing machines fly overhead. We drape the coffins of dead soldiers in American flags and trot out military honor guards for them. We call them “fallen” not “killed,” which is what they really are. We convince young people that joining the military killing machine is their duty and that it is a good career move. Hone your tech skills we say, usually failing to say hone your tech skills in support of killing people, which is the only thing the military exists to do. We spend immense amounts of money and immense amounts of human skills for the production of ever more effective and efficient ways to kill people. Our culture says sure, go ahead and spend your life producing weapons of mass destruction. After all, we’re Americans. We’re the good guys, we claim; so there’s no moral question there. Like hell there isn’t! Or maybe there isn’t; but if there isn’t, it’s because doing so is obviously and undeniably immoral not moral.

And all I can do is rage against the killing machine. Rage against my country’s militarism. Rage against my country’s madness over guns. Rage against human violence across the globe. Get mad as hell at the Russians, whose history I have studied to the PhD level. Get mad as hell at the Israelis, though of course I know and am appalled by what other humans did to the Jewish people in the Holocaust. And all it does is keep me upset and not wanting to human. So I rant. I rage, and it accomplishes nothing. Oh well. I’m stuck being mad as hell. I’m stuck being depressed as hell. I don’t much want to be, but I’m stuck being human. So be it, but: Damn!

What Is the Good News Anyway?

 This is the text of a sermon I gave on February 18, 2024, at Prospect United Church of Christ in Seattle, Washington, USA.

Just What Is the Good News Anway?

for

Prospect United Church of Christ, Seattle, Washington

February 18, 2024

 

Scripture: Mark 1:9-15

 

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. Amen.

 

Today is the first Sunday of Lent, and Lent is a time of preparation. OK, but preparation for what? For Holy Week and Easter, but what are they all about? They are all about the coming of the good news. The good news that Jesus brings. The good news that Jesus is. You know, I’ve been ordained to the gospel, the good news, of Jesus Christ for more than twenty years. I’ve served a couple of different Christian churches as pastor. I’ve written a fair amount of theology. I’ve even preach here a few times. And I have to tell you. Passages like the one we just heard still bug me. In that passage, Jesus says, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” It appears that there is something called “the good news” that we’re supposed to believe in. Which is nice I suppose, but it unavoidably raises the question of just what this “good news” is. You’d expect this text to tell us what it is. You’d expect Jesus to explain what it is. But in this text, and time and again in the gospels, Jesus mentions the “good news,” then says nothing about what that good news is. Our passage this morning suggests that it has something to do with something called the kingdom of God coming near, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Apparently it has something to do with us repenting, whatever that’s supposed to mean. This past week I figured that if I was going to talk with you this morning on this good news, I’d better get a better idea of what it is than I often have.

So I did a bit of research. What I found in my sources is that the good news is that, with the coming of Jesus, salvation is at hand. The kingdom of God is, supposedly, the age of salvation. Well, isn’t that nice! Salvation! Surely a good thing. But one of the maddening, and wonderful, things about theology, and we’re talking theology here, is that every answer you find just raises more questions. So the age of salvation has come near. But what in heaven’s name is salvation? I figure we know what our Christian tradition has mostly said salvation is. It’s rescue from the supposed consequences of our sin. It’s having our sin forgiven so our souls go to heaven rather than hell after we die.

Now, I don’t doubt that, assuming that heaven and hell exist and that some part of us that is recognizably us lives on after death, that we go to heaven not hell. In fact, I don’t believe that hell exists. God, after all, is love; and what sort of love is it to send someone to an eternity of fiery torment because of something they did or didn’t do during their life on earth? Doesn’t make a lick of sense to me. God is love. Jesus came to demonstrate God’s love to us. God’s love is universal. It applies to everyone. God loves, God doesn’t damn. So yes, I believe in salvation in that sense.

But here’s the thing. Most people today don’t worry that much about sin and its supposed consequences for our souls. We may think about it. We try to be good people, but sin just isn’t the major existential concern of most people today. When I was a seminary intern here twenty-five years ago, your pastor Trish told me that this congregation would not let her put a prayer of confession in the worship service because the people didn’t think they had anything to confess. I’ve gotten some laughs when I’ve told that story to other congregations by the way. In any event, could the good news of Jesus Christ, that is, could salvation, mean something other than, or in addition to, forgiveness of sin and escape from damnation?

Well, I don’t think I’d be here this morning talking with you about it like this if I didn’t think that it could. So to get at what I think it means that can be more significant for us today than talk about sin and forgiveness, I’ll start with this assertion. Whenever anyone says that something or someone needs to be saved, they have to say what it is that that thing or person needs to be saved from. Some of our best theologians say that what people need to be saved from today is a sense of meaninglessness, the belief that their life doesn’t mean anything at all. I think that’s true for an awful lot of people today. That sense leads to despair, and what but despair could account for our high rates of alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicide? Certainly faith in Jesus Christ can give life meaning. I found that meaning for my life as a seminary intern here at Prospect twenty-five years ago when the Holy Spirit finally got it through my thick skull that pastoral ministry was what I was supposed to be doing with my life.

But our better theologians also talk about something else that people need to be saved from today. That something is alienation, that is, separation from something or someone from which or whom one should not be separated. It is to live apart from that which one should be close to, should even be united with. Theologians talk of three different kinds of alienation, and they are all prevalent among us. They are alienation from God, from others, and from the true self. Each of these kinds of alienation impairs wellbeing. Each of them taints life. Each of them is something from which nearly all of us need to be saved.

The good news of Jesus Christ is that we can be saved from each of these kinds of alienation. In Jesus Christ, we know that God offers us salvation from each of them. And here’s what I think is an important truth. Our salvation from each of them starts with overcoming our alienation from God. Our Christian tradition knows well that that’s where salvation starts. We see that that’s where we must begin living into our salvation from alienation in the Great Commandment, that most basic of all Christian admonitions. It appears in three of the four gospels. The oldest of them is the version in Mark. It reads: “ You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength,” and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Mark 12: 30-31. Living into our salvation in Jesus begins with our loving God.

OK, but wouldn’t it be nice if that were easier to do than most of us often find it to be much of the time? I mean, it’s God’s world, and God’s world is an awfully messed up place. There’s war, other kinds of violence, oppression, exploitation, discrimination, poverty, and any number of other ills everywhere. It sure is easy to ask God how we can possibly love God given all the evil in God’s world. Here’s the only answer I can give to how we can possibly love God. It is to come truly to know in the depth of our being that God loved us first. That really is the good news. God loves us. God loves each and every one of you. God loves every single person who lives, who ever lived, and who ever will live. God even somehow manages to love me.

That really is salvation isn’t it? I mean, even the old Christian understanding of salvation as salvation from sin and its supposed consequences has and has had powerful meaning for countless generations of Christians. But even that kind of salvation is grounded in God’s love for people. I mean, why would God bother to save us from sin if God didn’t love us? So please. Understand. Really get it. God loves you. Though the world may hate you, God loves you. Though you may sometimes doubt or even hate yourself, God loves you. Period. No matter what. Thanks be to God!

And that’s how we can love God. After all, how can we not love a power behind everything that exists in the entire universe that nonetheless deigns to love even tiny little us? And love so amazing, so divine, demands and calls forth our love of God in return. We’ll never love God as unconditionally as God loves us. We are, indeed, mere fallible humans not the infallible Creator of all that is. But I know that I can love God more than most of the time I do. Perhaps you can too. If you take anything from this sermon, please take this. You can love God because God loved you first. God still does. Realize that no matter how much you feel you are separate from God, alienated from God, as far as God is concerned you aren’t. Never have been. Never will be.

OK, so that’s how we overcome our sense that we’re alienated from God. But what about those other two types of alienation, alienation from others and even from ourselves? Well, when we know that God loves us conditionally—and God does—then we must also know that God loves everyone unconditionally. There are no “ifs” about God’s love for anyone. We humans may put conditions on love. We can fall out of love as easily as we can fall in love. But that’s precisely how we know that God’s love is not conditional the way ours is. God is so much greater than we are. God’s ways are so much greater than our ways. God transcends our pitiful human ways absolutely. Our love is almost always conditional. God’s love therefore is and must be unconditional—for everyone.

And how can we not love what God loves? No, it’s not easy to love everyone else. I sure know I can’t do it all the time, or even very much of the time. I sure do feel an alienation from an awful lot of people an awful lot of the time. Perhaps you do too. Just look at our politics today, and you’ll see what I mean. But when I really stop to remember that no matter how angry I may get with a person, God still loves that person as unconditionally as God loves me, I remember that God calls me to overcome my sense of alienation from that person. To overcome my alienation from every person. Why? Because God is not alienated. Not from me. Not from you. Not from anyone.

Now, that third kind of alienation, alienation from our true selves, may be the hardest of all to overcome. I sure know that I am the person I find the hardest to forgive, and perhaps you feel that way about yourself too. I also know that most of my life I lived alienated from who God made me to be. Maybe you have that sense about yourself too. In the culture in which most of us Americans live, far too few people ever discover who God really created them to be. Far too few people ever manage to live into being that person even a little bit. It took me decades to do it, and it was actually here at Prospect so many years ago that I did finally began to do it for the first time.

Our culture forces most of us to deny who we really are, forces us to try to become who our culture wants us to be not who God created us to be. There’s a hymn that’s not in the New Century Hymnal but that I sure wish was. It’s called “The Summons.” One of its verses begins, “Will you love the you you hide if I but call your name? Will you quell the fear inside and never be the same?” Love the you you hide. Become who you really are. That’s overcoming that third kind of alienation, overcoming perhaps the hardest alienation of all to overcome.

So, what is the good news anyway? It is that in Jesus Christ we know that God is love. It is that God loves you more deeply, more powerfully, more unconditionally than you can ever imagine. It is that because God loves you so much, you can love others the way the Great Commandment calls you to do. It is that because God loves you so much, you can even love yourself the way the Great Commandment calls you to do. Jesus began his public ministry by calling us to believe in the good news. Do we? Can we? No, it’s not always easy. But if we will open our hearts, minds, and spirits to God’s unconditional love for us, perhaps we can begin to do it. Trust me, it’s worth the effort. More importantly, trust God. Trust God’s unconditional, unfathomable love for you and for everyone. Then, perhaps we can actually believe in the good news that Jesus taught and Jesus is. May it be so. Amen.

On Christianity and State Power: The Example of the Russian Orthodox Church Today

 

On Christianity and State Power: The Example of the Russian Orthodox Church Today

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has been, in effect if not always in title, the ruler of Russia since the beginning of the year 2000, when former Russian president Boris Yel’tsin resigned and Prime Minister Putin became President Putin. Since then he has been elected president several times and has served as Prime Minister when the Russian constitution did not permit him to run for another consecutive term as president. When he first became president, Russia was a more or less democratic country. At least, it was more democratic than it had ever been before and than it has ever been since.

Back in the late 1990s, when Yel’tsin first made Putin prime minister, Putin was quite unknown to the Russian people or to the world. He was born in what was then Leningrad in 1952. He became a KGB agent. He served as a minor agent in East Germany at the time when the Berlin wall came down. Thereafter he served as an assistant to Leningrad mayor Sobchak, who had a reputation as a liberal at the time. From there he went to Moscow where, for reasons that are far from clear, Yel’tsin made him head of the FSB, the successor to the Soviet KGB in which Putin had served in a minor capacity. In 1999, Yel’tsin made him prime minister of the Russian Federation. To nearly everyone’s surprise, in December, 1999, Yel’tsin announced that he would resign as Russian president at the end of that year. When he did resign, Putin succeeded him as president as the Russian constitution provided. Putin then won his first election as president later that year. It is generally believed, though it hasn’t really been proven, that Yel’tsin chose Putin as his successor precisely because Putin was relatively unknown and because Putin promised to give Yel’tsin and his family immunity from prosecution for corruption, which Putin did shortly after becoming president.

Putin has turned what had been a relatively democratic and free Russia into a fascist authoritarian or even totalitarian state. He gets himself reelected through rigged elections. He imprisons or kills anyone who dares to run against him in his staged elections. He has even murdered opponents outside Russia. He has made opposition to him or his policies illegal, and he has had thousands of people arrested and imprisoned for voicing opposition to him. Until February 16, 2024, he had a prominent opponent named Alexei Navalnyi.[1] Putin once tried to kill him by having him poisoned, but Navalnyi survived when he got to Germany for medical treatment. Navalnyi returned to Russia, where Putin had him arrested and convicted on trumped up charges. On February 16, 2024, we learned that Navalnyi  had died in prison. Putin has managed to silence his most prominent opponent.

In 2022, Putin ordered the Russian military to invade Ukraine. In doing so, Putin has adopted a centuries-old Russian position regarding Ukraine. The Russian Empire occupied most of today’s Ukraine in the late 18^th century under Empress Catherine the Great. Imperial Russia always maintained that Ukrainians were really just Russians. Imperial policy was that Ukrainian is not a language separate from Russian but is only a dialect of Russian. In the nineteenth century, the imperial government prohibited the publication of books in Ukrainian and the use of Ukrainian in public administration and education. Imperial Russia considered Ukraine to be only a part of Russia that the Russian government had every right to rule as it saw fit.

The history of what today is the nation of Ukraine is complex, particularly, perhaps, as it relates to Russia. It is, however, undeniable that Ukraine has had stronger connections with western Europe than Russia has had. For a very long time, most of what today is Ukraine was part of the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth, a mostly Roman-Catholic European nation. There was no independent Ukrainian nation until a short-lived Ukrainian republic after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Ukraine became one of the original Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922. There was no lasting, meaningful Ukrainian independent nation until 1991, when the Soviet Union ceased to exist. In 1991 Ukraine became an internationally recognized sovereign state that covered the same territory as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. That Soviet entity had not originally included the Crimean Peninsula, but in 1954 Nikita Khrushchev, then head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, transferred that peninsula from the Russian to the Ukrainian Soviet republic.

In 2014, Putin’s Russia occupied  Crimea militarily and claimed to transfer it into the Russian Federated Republic, the current form of the Russian government. The international community of nations has refused to recognize that theft of part of the sovereign Ukrainian nation, but it was just the beginning of Putin’s aggression against Ukraine. In early 2022, Putin sent most of the Russian military into Ukraine in an attempt to destroy Ukrainian sovereignty and reincorporate Ukraine into Russia. In the nearly two years since that illegal, immoral invasion began, the Ukrainians have put up a much better fight against the Russians than most observers, the author of this piece included, thought they would be able to do. The NATO nations, including the US, have given Ukraine massive amounts of military aid, which has been crucial in making Ukraine’s resistance to Putin’s Russia possible, though the bravery of the Ukrainian people has played the major role in the surprising success they have had against their fascist invaders.

The religious, cultural, and political history of Ukraine and Russia is fraught. The religious, cultural, and political history of Russia begins in what today is Ukraine. The eastern Slavic people, who today include both Russians and Ukrainians (and Belorussians) became Orthodox Christians after the year 988 CE, when Grand Prince Volodymyr I of Kyiv, Vladimir I of Kiev in Russian and English, converted to Greek Orthodox Christianity. That’s when and where the study of Russian history usually begins. Moscow didn’t become the center of Russian cultural and political power for centuries thereafter. Moscow eventually became the capital city and center of power of an immense empire that, after the late eighteenth century, included all of today’s Ukraine and some Ukrainian territory that today lies outside the state of Ukraine.

It is hard to underestimate the significance of the fact that the Christianity the eastern Slavs, including the Russians and the Ukrainians, adopted was Orthodox not Roman Catholic. In western Europe, the church and the area’s political entities, including both nascent nation states and the Holy Roman Empire, were often at odds over who held the ultimate political authority. The pope in Rome always contended that ultimate power belonged to him as Christ’s vicar on earth. The various kings and emperors of western Europe often contested that claim. The pope may have crowned Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor in 800 CE, but neither Charlemagne nor most any other western European ruler ever recognized the pope’s ultimate authority over them.

It was not so in eastern Europe. Eastern, or Greek, Orthodox Christianity arose as the state religion of the Roman Empire. Roman Emperors, beginning with Constantine in the early fourth century CE, raised it to that level of recognition and power. The Christian leaders of the time were overwhelmed by the splendor and power of empire, of which they  were now a part. Their intoxication with power overcame their commitment to Jesus’ values of justice and nonviolence. The Christian church became the handmaiden of imperial might. It became a principal ally and support of imperial power not an opponent of it. The emperor, not a pope, was the head of the church. The imperial church never became more than an agency of state power. The fact that the Roman Empire ended in the west in the sixth century CE but continued on in the east until 1453 CE is part of the explanation of why western and eastern Christianity came so to differ with regard to their relationship to secular power.

That’s how it was, first in what became Ukraine, then in what became Russia, after the conversion of the eastern Slavs to Orthodox Christianity in 988 CE. The Russian Orthodox Church was never a center of power apart from the Russian autocracy the way the pope was a power apart from the secular states of western Europe. Henry VIII of England could, and did, take England out of the Roman Catholic Church. Peter I of Russia, aka Peter the Great, could, and did, abolish the Moscow Patriarchate and, in effect, reduce the Russian Orthodox Church to a ministry of the imperial government.

Western Europe and Russia give us two radically different examples of how Christianity relates to secular power. Christianity can stand against it as a counterbalance to secular power, or it can capitulate to it and function as one of its principal supports. It has functioned in both ways throughout its history. Today, in the United States, there are elements of Christianity that work to have it function in both ways among us. A great many American evangelical Christians advocate Christian nationalism. They say, wrongly, that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. They want to turn their country into the Christian nation they think it originally was. They want, in effect, to turn this country into a Christian theocracy. They want to merge Christianity with American secular power.

Other American Christians, your humble author included, consider Christian nationalism to be radically un-Christian. We seek to follow Jesus, and we see Jesus as profoundly anti-imperial. He lived under Roman occupation and oppression. The Romans saw him as such a threat to their power that they crucified him as a political criminal. He proclaimed what he called the kingdom of God. He called us to the creation not of powerful, secular, worldly states but to a transformed world the values of which would be essentially the values of the world turned upside down. The kingdom of God is the world governed by God’s values of nonviolence, peace, and distributive justice for all people. Jesus called us all to follow the ways of God that we see in him not the corrupt, violent, exploitative ways of both his world and ours. Christians who truly seek to follow Jesus understand that our faith’s proper relationship to state power is one of opposition at least to the extent that any state power in question engages in policies that are neither peaceful nor just, which nearly every secular power does at least much of the time.

Those of us who believe that our Christian duty is to work for the kingdom of God not for any worldly secular power always run into at least one problem from the Bible. That problem is Romans 13:1-7. Those verses read in relevant part:

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Do you wish to have no fear of the authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive approval; for it is God’s servant for your good. But if you do what is wrong, you should be afraid, for the authority does not bear the sword in vain! It is the servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be subject, not only because of wrath but also because of conscience.

Christians who see no distinction between the ways of the world and the ways of God often cite these verses as a reason for supporting, indeed for being subservient to, whatever secular power they live under.

But we have to ask: Was Jesus then a wrongdoer? For the Roman Empire certainly executed wrath upon him. It put him to a horrifically painful death on a cross. In the Gospel of Mark we see that, before his arrest, Jesus was afraid of the Romans. Does that mean he did what was wrong? These pseudo-Pauline verses certainly say that he did. He didn’t resist Roma with violence, but he certainly taught values that directly contradicted most of the values under which the Roman Empire operated. No true Christian can believe that what Jesus did was in any way wrong from God’s point of view. He was, after all, God Incarnate. He wasn’t crucified because he did what was wrong. He was crucified because the Roman authorities did what was wrong. Romans 13:1-7 are in the Bible, but that doesn’t make them right. They are just flat wrong, and no true Christian can take them as a legitimate statement of divine truth.

Today, the Russian Orthodox Church continues the ancient Orthodox tradition of subservience to the state with which it is associated. It supports Vladimir Putin’s illegal and immoral military invasion of Ukraine. How it can do so is essentially beyond the comprehension of any western Christian. Yet the Russian church today stands in complete conformity with its Orthodox tradition. There is much to admire about Orthodox Christianity. Its liturgy is spiritually powerful even for those of us who do not understand the language in which it is being celebrated. I have experienced that power myself. In 1976, I experienced the Orthodox Easter service at the monastery at Sergeev Posad, then called Zagorsk, the seat of the Patriarch of Moscow.[2] That service was conducted in Old Church Slavonic, the traditional language of the Russian Orthodox Church. I know a fair amount of Russian. I don’t know Old Church Slavonic. It didn’t matter. I found the ritual of the Orthodox Easter service, set in a space filled with sacred icons, to be immensely powerful even though I didn’t understand the words being said.

Orthodox Christianity’s subservience to the secular authorities is not one of its admirable characteristics. It is one of the ways in which that ancient variety of Christianity fails to meet Christ’s call to all Christians to represent the kingdom of God not the kingdoms of the world. The current Patriarch of Moscow kowtows to Vladimir Putin at every turn. He supports Putin’s destruction of Russian democracy. He supports Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. He fails to condemn the myriad war crimes Russian soldiers commit there. He opposes the heroic struggle of the Ukrainian people for independence and freedom. In all of these ways he may be truly Orthodox. He is not truly Christian.

So what is the proper relationship of Christianity to state power? It is not necessarily one of opposition. After all, most state powers do some good from time to time. When they do, Christians may and should support them. But all state powers, including our own United States of America, also do what is wrong. They do it a lot. The best example is perhaps the way nearly every secular power has and is willing to use a military to kill, maim, and destroy in support of its aims. Such death and destruction are never moral. They are never Christian. Romans 13:1-7 may call for mindless obedience to every state power. Jesus Christ doesn’t. God doesn’t. We Christians must always evaluate the actions of our governments under the standards of the kingdom of God that we learn from Jesus. Tragically, the Russian Orthodox Church doesn’t do that. We must not follow its example.

---

[1] This name is usually translated as Navalny, but its technically correct transliteration is Navalnyi.

[2] The Patriarchy of Moscow, which Peter I had abolished, was reestablished after the Bolshevik coup of 1917.

On American Evangelical Christianity

 This is the conclusion to a short book I've written with the title The Sins of American Evangelical Christianity. I may self-publish it, or I may not; but what I say in it is definitely worth saying.

In Conclusion

© Thomas C. Sorenson, 2024

 

American evangelical Christianity has developed into nothing short of sinful Christianity. It is a betrayal of Jesus Christ. Its failings begin with the fact that it has its adherents living in fear. Beyond that, it makes the great Christian religion be about how to get souls to a supposed next life in heaven rather than about transforming the world into the realm of God as Jesus calls us to do. It tells is adherents that they have to do something, namely, believe in Jesus, in order to avoid hell, often terrifying people into saying they believe when they really don’t. Its biblical literalism and belief in the divine inspiration of the Bible cut off intellectual inquiry. It raises ancient cultural prejudices to the level of divine truth. It disparages and restricts the role women. It condemns LGBTQ+ people. Its adherence to the classical theory of atonement makes God too small, makes God too human, turns God into a monster, and betrays Jesus by calling him a sacrifice, sacrifice being something he steadfastly opposed.

A great many of its adherents idolize the American fascist Donald Trump. A great many of its adherents idolize the United States of America, which they badly misunderstand. Nearly all of its adherents idolize the Bible. They call the Bible the word of God when the Bible says Jesus is the Word of God. Many of them call themselves Bible-believing Christians rather than Jesus-Christ-believing Christians. Many of them call their churches Bible churches rather than churches of Jesus Christ. Many American evangelicals are paranoid, thinking that the secular society in which they live and their country’s federal government are out to get them when there isn’t a shred of evidence that either of them is. They say the federal government will try to stop them from worshiping, something the federal could not constitutionally do. Many of them serve extreme right-wing politicians when Jesus, whom they claim to follow, was one of the most radically progressive people who has ever lived. Most of them support the militaristic policies of the American government and oppose sensible gun regulation when Jesus was one of history’s great prophets of nonviolence. American evangelism’s Christian exclusivism leads to hatred of and violence against Jews, Muslims, and people of other faiths. The list of the sins of American evangelical Christianity just goes on and on.

We’ve already considered some of the ways evangelical Christianity is harmful, yet there is one profound way that it is harmful that cannot be overstated. It is killing the Christian faith. It makes Christianity believable and attractive to a relatively small number of people while driving a great many people away from the faith. The loud public proclamations of its leaders have convinced most Americans that evangelical Christianity is true Christianity, which it is not. It is a bastardization of Christianity that fewer and fewer people all the time are willing even to consider much less accept. If Christianity cannot overcome American evangelicalism it will die, and it will deserve to die. Religious symbols cease being true symbols when they no longer correspond to the spiritual needs of a people. Christianity is symbolic, and its symbols appeal to fewer and fewer people all the time not because the symbols are wrong but because of what evangelical Christianity tells people they mean.

The symbols of Christianity appeal so little to so many because of the nearly universal belief among us that evangelical Christianity is the only Christianity there is. It isn’t. There is within the Christian denominations we used to call mainline a better vision of our ancient faith. Not everyone in those churches gets it of course, but some of us do. Some of us know that Christianity is a faith of love not hate. Of hope and courage not fear. Of inclusion not exclusion. Of respect for other faith traditions not self-righteous condemnation of them. Of justice not oppression. Of nonviolence not violence. Of open-mindedness not closed-mindedness. Of broad spiritual and intellectual inquiry not the checking of the mind at the church door.

In short, there is a Christianity that is the opposite of what evangelical Christianity has become in nearly every respect. Yes, both evangelical Christianity and true Christianity center their faith on Jesus Christ, but they understand Jesus Christ very differently. Yes, both evangelical Christianity and true Christianity use the Bible, but they understand and use it very differently. In essentially every other way, these two types of Christianity could hardly be more different.

They will, or at least can, lead to two radically different results. Evangelical Christianity will kill Christianity. Not tomorrow. Perhaps not for decades. But it will kill it. True Christianity has the ability to address the existential concerns of people today in a way evangelical Christianity cannot. It offers hope that the twenty-first century will not be the last century for a great faith tradition now nearly two thousand years old. It can lead people out of despair. It can give them hope and calm their fears. It can give their lives meaning in a way evangelical Christianity simply cannot. Will Christianity survive? I don’t know. If it cannot overcome American evangelical Christianity and give the world a better Christian vision, it will not. I hope and pray that it will.

 

Letter to the Editor Jan. 23, 2024

 This is the text of a letter I just sent to the editor of my local newspaper:

It is beyond doubt at this time that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president in this year's presidential election. He has made it perfectly clear that, with him as the Republican candidate, there is only one issue in that election: Do you believe in America's traditional political system, that we've had for well over two hundred years, or do you want to replace it with a dictatorship with Donald Trump as the dictator? It matters not if you are, in normal times, politically liberal or conservative. It matters not whether you are a secular humanist, or if you let your religious faith determine your vote. It matters not what you think about immigrants. It matters not what you think about abortion. It matters not what you think about any regular political issue. This is not a regular election. This election is a referendum on American democracy. If you want to keep it, you vote for President Biden even if you don't like him or his policies. At the very least you don't vote at all, or you vote for someone other than Biden as long as you don't vote for Trump. Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany not through a violent coup but under the constitutional political system of Germany at the time. We face the same disaster in the 2024 presidential election. If you support American democracy, you simply must oppose Donald Trump in every possible legal way.

On Overreading a Bible Story

 

On Overreading a Bible Story

I participate in a weekly gathering with a few colleagues via Zoom. I value that group of friends and the brief time we spend together, albeit only virtually. However, I’ve noticed something that my friends, or at least a couple of them, are inclined to do. They love to read things into a Bible story that aren’t in the story. In our most recent meeting, we consider the story in Mark of Jesus calling the first disciples. It’s at Mark 1:14-20. In it, Jesus appears on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. He calls his first four disciples, all of whom are fishermen. In the story all four of them immediately drop what they’re doing and follow Jesus. In our discussion, my friends read various things into this little story that the story doesn’t say. They said these disciples probably didn’t completely abandon their trade as fishermen but returned to it from time to time. There is a story or two in the gospels that suggest that might have happened, but the story in Mark doesn’t say that. They talked about how these disciples, especially Peter, who, according to a different story had a mother-in-law, having to balance a commitment to family with a commitment to Jesus. Many of us have to do that balancing, but the story in Mark doesn’t say anything about these disciples doing any such thing. So often in our discussions, I find myself saying, “But the story doesn’t say that.”

Yes. Of course. It’s possible to read all kinds of things into Bible stories that the stories don’t say. None of the Bible stories is a novella that can address all of the questions a story might raise for us. Bible stories, and especially Jesus’ parables, are short. They’re mostly terse. They give us what the storyteller thought was important in making the point he wanted the story to make. The Parable of the Good Samaritan is a good example. In that parable, a son of a father who appears to be quite wealthy takes his inheritance in advance and goes off to a far country. They story tells us that he squandered his money there, but it doesn’t give us any more detail about what he did to squander it. I’ve heard people say he spent his money on prostitutes. Well, perhaps some men in his situation would do that, but the story doesn’t say that this character in the parable did it. We can make up any story we want about what this son did while he was away, but no matter what we come up with, the story doesn’t say that. Frankly, making up details of a story that the Bible doesn’t give us about the story may be a fun mind game, but that’s all it is. I really don’t see much point in it. It is overreading the story.

So what are we to do with Bible stories? First of all, we work with what the story gives us not what the story doesn’t give us. We look for the issues the story raises for us not for issues the story doesn’t raise for us. The story of Jesus’ call of the first disciples raises at least two important issues for us. One is the question of decision making. In the story, the disciples decide immediately upon meeting Jesus to leave their current lives behind and follow Jesus. It seems a strange thing for them to do so precipitously to most of us; but in the story, that’s what they do. The story leads us to ask: How do we make decisions? What factors do we consider? How much time do we take to make certain kinds of decisions? Those are important questions for all of us, and it is legitimate to use this little story from Mark to raise them.

This story raises another important question as well. In it, the four men whom Jesus calls to follow him immediately follow him. The story suggests that that means they got up and walked away with him, something we can’t do, not physically at least. Yet the story raises this important question: What does it mean to follow Jesus? Over the course of the gospels we learn, more or less, what it meant to Jesus’ disciples; but their experience can’t be our experience, not literally at least. So what does it mean to follow Jesus in our context? That is a vital question for every Christian, and it is legitimate to use this story from Mark to raise it. Yet it is not legitimate for us to read our answer to the question back into the story. That’s overreading the story.

Working with what is actually in a Bible story is often challenging enough. It doesn’t help us understand the story to read things into it that aren’t there. Bible stories often, perhaps mostly, raise questions for us rather than answer them. It is perfectly appropriate, needful even, for us to consider the questions a Bible story raises in and for our own context. That, however, is a very different thing from reading things into the story that aren’t in the story. We don’t know what the Prodigal Son did with his money. We don’t know why the beaten man in the Parable of the Good Samaritan was going to Jericho. Every Bible story raises questions about what isn’t in the story. Our call is to spend our time working with what is in the story. This contention of mine has led one of my colleagues to say I’m a literalist. I am nothing of the sort. I just want to use the text as the text actually is not as how we might wish it were. So let’s not overread Bible stories. They are plenty important and often plenty puzzling in their own right without us adding things to them that aren’t there.