It Ain't Gonna Happen

 

It Ain’t Gonna Happen

November 26, 2024

There simply is no doubt about it. The Christians who wrote the texts that became the New Testament believed that Jesus would come to earth again. Likewise, there is no doubt that they believed that this posited “Second Coming” hadn’t happened yet. The oldest Christian text is 1 Thessalonians. It is a letter from Paul to a church he had founded in the Greek city of Thessalonica. Paul wrote it in the year 50 CE give or take a couple of years. The letter speaks of different things, but it appears that the main concern of the Thessalonians, and Paul’s main concern in writing to them, was that though Jesus had been gone for something like twenty years, he hadn’t come back yet. That was a big problem because these earliest Christians believed that no Christians would die before he came back. Yet of course Christians did die before he came back. The Thessalonians apparently feared that they would not be saved by being raised when Jesus finally did come back because Jesus would come only for those who were still alive when he came.

Paul writes to assure them that that is not the case. He writes: “For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died.” 1 Thessalonians 4:15. He the goes on to describe his posited Second Coming: “For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first.” 1 Thessalonians 4:16. Paul assures the Christians of Thessalonia that Christ will indeed come back and would do it with a great albeit earthly flourish. Paul tells the Thessalonians that when this happens, “we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air….” 1 Thessalonians 17.[1] Paul, the earliest Christian writer we have, believed that Jesus would come again.

He’s not the only New Testament author who believed that Christ would indeed return. There is in the Gospel of Mark something called “the little apocalypse of Mark.” It’s at Mark 13:3-37. There Mark’s Jesus says: “Then they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory.” Mark 13:26. Matthew has Jesus also refers to the “coming of the Son of Man” at Matthew 24:27. The book of Acts refers to a Second Coming. Acts 1:11. Then, of course, there is the book of Revelation. A great many Christians have thought, wrongly, that Christ’s return is what that book is all about and that they could discern from it exactly where and when Christ would return. I’ll quote the next to last verse of the book to make the point: “The one who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.’” Revelation 22:20. Many other New Testament verses also refer to a Second Coming of Christ. The early Christians thought Christ would return during their lifetime. He didn’t, and that he didn’t shook the faith of many of those Christians, so strong was their conviction that he would return soon.

Christ didn’t return then, and Christ has not returned now, at least not in the way those early Christians expected. So I think we have to ask: What was that erroneous belief in a speedy return of Christ to earth all about? We explain it, I think, by looking at the context in which early Christians expressed that belief. These Christians believed in a Second Coming for one reason and one reason only. Jesus Christ had been here. He had preached and healed. He was crucified, then rose from the grave and ascended to heaven. But it hadn’t worked! The world was still as unjust and violent as it had ever been, and those God-damned Romans were still doing a lot of the injustice and violence. It seems they believed that the first coming of Christ hadn’t done them much good, or at least that it had not done them the kind of good they wanted.

Surely, these people thought, God wouldn’t let the world’s evil go on indefinitely. Surely God would send Jesus back to finish the job he left unfinished when he left the first time. And, they believed, Jesus would be very different upon his Second Coming than he had been during his first coming. They believed that this time Jesus would come in power and glory. See the quote of Mark 13:26 above. They knew that during his human life on earth Jesus of Nazareth had neither power nor glory, at least not in the earthly sense of those words. He had the power to cure illness and calm storms, but he didn’t even try to get rid of the Romans by using power against them. That, however is exactly what these people said Christ would do when he came back. He’d have power, worldly power, and he'd use it to kill off of the bad guys and set the world aright.

So here’s what I hear these early coreligionists of mine saying. They’re saying: “Hey Jesus! All that stuff about love, acceptance, inclusion, and forgiveness that you gave us when you were here before was nice enough. Sure, those words probably came from God. But they didn’t work! So now, come back and do it our way! Do it with violence. Smite the bad guys. Destroy Rome. Get rid of everyone and everything that is violent and oppressive. Yeah. That’s what we need. So, Lord Jesus, come on back down here and get on with it. Come back and do it our way this time!”

The great Jesus scholar John Dominic Crossan characterizes this belief brilliantly. I have heard him say that “belief in the Second Coming is the great denial of the first coming.” Here’s what I understand Crossan to mean. What was the first coming all about? It was about Jesus bringing a word from God about how the world should be and would be if it lived by God’s rules not by human rules. Jesus wanted the world to change, but he didn’t want anyone to use violence to make it change, and he certainly didn’t use violence to make it change. Instead, he wanted to change the world by freeing people’s minds and spirits from the ways of the world so they could be open to the ways of God. See, for example, the story of the healing of the Gerasene demoniac at Mark 5:1-13, in which Jesus exorcizes a demon named Legion who was actually a great many separate demons all possessing one unfortunate man. He got Legion out of the man, and the man returned to his right mind. A legion was an organizing unit of the Roman army. So, symbolically, Jesus got Rome out of the possessed man, and the possessed man became sane. Jesus wants us to get truly sane by getting the world out of our minds and souls too. Our scripture tells us that Jesus had power over demons, but it wasn’t the power of physical force. It wasn’t the power of violence. Jesus was all about love and nonviolent transformation of the world through transformation of individual people.

The early Christians who believed in the Second Coming did not want Jesus to come back and do more of that. After all, it hadn’t worked! Sure. Some people experienced the inner transformation that Jesus said was the way to transform the world, but the world most definitely hadn’t been transformed. It looked very much the same as it had when Jesus was here the first time. The early Christians desperately wanted the world transformed, but Jesus hadn’t done it the first time he had a chance. So they said he’d get a second chance. He’d come back and do it right this time. He’d do it our way. He’d employ the world’s ways of hatred and violence not God’s ways of love and peace. nd this time he’d get the job done.

See how all of that denies Jesus’ first coming? It doesn’t focus on divine teachings of love, forgiveness, inclusivity, and nonviolence. It focuses on the world’s ways not on God’s ways. It really does amount to no more than calling on Jesus to come back and do it our way this time. And it ain’t gonna happen. Jesus is not going to come back sometime in the future to scourge the earth with violence. That’s not Jesus’ way. It’s not God’s way.

So we have to ask ourselves: What are we to do with all of this blasphemous nonsense about a Second Coming. One way I’ve heard of dealing with it is to say that the Second Coming has already happened. It happened a very long time ago. The book of Acts tells of when it gives the account we know as Pentecost. Pentecost is the story of the Holy Spirit coming upon the disciple community forty days after Jesus’ Resurrection. The Spirit comes upon them with a sound like the sound of a mighty wind and with tongues as of fire. See Acts 2:1-4. And what does the Spirit do with the disciples? It doesn’t turn them into an army. It inspires them to get on with God’s work in the world. That’s quite a model for us, don’t you think?

In Trinitarian theology, the Holy Spirit is both the same as the Son and not the same as the Son at the same time.[2] But since one of the attributes of the Holy Spirit is that she is identical with the Son, the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples is the same thing as the Son, that is, Jesus Christ, coming upon the disciples.[3] The Christian tradition has never thought of Pentecost as the Second Coming; but then, the Christian tradition has gotten a awful lot of things wrong over the centuries. It makes sense for us to look our Christian tradition in the eye and say, “You got this one wrong too.” Which may or may not work for you. It sort of works for me although it goes so against the tradition and the ways I and the tradition have always thought of Pentecost that I don’t really find this solution to the problem of the supposed Second Coming completely satisfying.

The other way to deal with the problem of the Second Coming is simply to reject the whole notion. To say to our forbears in the faith who believed so firmly in it, “Sorry. You were just wrong.” Indeed, I cannot doubt that they were wrong. Even if we overlook the part of their belief that said that Jesus would return during their lifetimes, perhaps even before any Christians died, the belief in the Second Coming remains simply untenable.

There are at least a few reasons why it is untenable. First, the texts that speak of it are nearly two thousand years old; and unless we accept Pentecost as the Second Coming, the Second Coming hasn’t happened yet. If God hasn’t caused it to happen for nearly two thousand years, how can we think that God is still going to do it sometime in the future? I, for one, cannot think that; and I think a great many people today can’t think it either. Believing that it is still going to happen is nonsense. The people who believe it are mostly biblical literalists, but they aren’t perfect biblical literalists because they ignore or somehow try to explain away the part of the story that says the Second Coming would happen in the first century CE. I’m not a biblical literalist, and I am convinced that biblical literalism is killing the Christian faith. Be that as it may, there is no denying that the Second Coming as our forbears expected it hasn’t happened. It is nonsense to believe that it still will.

A second reason for us to reject the notion of a Second Coming of Christ is the harm that notion has caused over the centuries. Time and time again people, well intentioned or not, have claimed to have determined when and where the Second Coming will happen. They usually ground their prediction in an amateur reading of the book of Revelation, believing that it is something that it is not, namely, really a prediction of the future.[4] Time and time again gullible but good-faith people have accepted someone’s prediction of the Second Coming. Sometimes they have done extreme things like quit their jobs and sell their homes because they believed they wouldn’t be needing them anymore. Even worse, the failure of the prediction in which they had put so much faith surely has shaken or even destroyed their Christian faith altogether. Belief in the Second Coming has caused a lot of harm. We really do need to get rid of it.

And there is a perhaps even more compelling reason to reject the idea of a Second Coming of Christ. It calls for God and Jesus Christ to do things neither God nor Jesus Christ would ever do. It calls on God to send Jesus Christ this time not as a poor boy from a backwater part of a backwater province of the Roman Empire but in power and glory as the world understands those terms. It calls on God to appear with trumpets and angels proclaiming his coming. It calls on Christ to descend from the heavens through the air not to be born to a virgin mother the way he was the first time around. To come in some way even more unnatural than his virgin birth was.

Worse, it calls it calls for violence. It calls for God and Jesus Christ to rid the world of its bad guys basically by slaying them. That may well be what most of us humans (though not your humble author) would do with them if we could. It is not, however, something Jesus would ever do. He said, “Love your enemies.” A bumper sticker the Church of the Brethren once put out read: “When Jesus said love you enemies, I think he probably meant don’t kill them.” Duh! Because it contradicts one of God’s basic characteristics, the characteristic of love, belief in the Second Coming is indeed blasphemous.

And finally, belief in the Second Coming calls us away from that which God calls us to. We know from Christ’s first coming that the work of transforming the world is humanity’s work to do. It is our work to do. God calls us to go into the world to care for people in need and to confront the powers of violence and oppression with God’s word of love. The historical Jesus surely never called anyone to just sit around and wait for God to come to solve the world’s problems. That, however, is exactly what belief in the Second Coming calls us to do. It says to us, “You don’t have to do kingdom work in the world. Just be patient. Someday Jesus will come back and do it for you.”

That notion is simply un-Christian. It is un-Christian because, as Crossan says, it denies Jesus’ first coming. It denies what he came to do. It denies the essence of what he taught us. We really do need to jettison it. It was wrong when the first Christians latched onto it in the first century CE. It is wrong today. So let’s move beyond it, shall we? Let’s get on with transforming the world ourselves. Christ isn’t going to return to do it for us. Folks, it ain’t gonna happen, and that’s all there is to it. Amen.

 

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[1] This is the sole biblical passage that sounds anything like the absurd notion of “the Rapture,” a word that appears nowhere in the Bible in the sense our fundamentalist Christians who believe in it give it.

[2] Yes. I know. That’s not possible. It is indeed not possible, it’s just true.

[3] And at the same time not that at all, but don’t worry about it. Trinitarian theology is valuable precisely because it makes no sense.

[4] It’s really a condemnation of empire, but that’s beyond the scope of this essay.

Fools Give You Reasons, Wise Men Never Try

 

Fools Give You Reasons, Wise Men Never Try

In the Rogers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific, there’s a song titled “Some Enchanted Evening.” The song is about falling in love. It comes when the lead male character Emile has seen the lead female character Nellie and fallen in love with her. He sings to her about having seen her “across a crowded room.” The song includes this line: “Fools give you reasons, wise men never try.” The line refers to falling in love at first sight. I don’t really believe in love at first sight. I knew the two women with whom I have fallen in love for a long time before I fell in love with them. I was more than surprised when they fell love with me. I still find it rather hard to believe that they did. And I thank God that they did, for they have made my life richer and more worth living than it would have been without them. Love is what makes life worth living. It is the only thing that makes life worth living.

Yet I believe that the line “Fools give you reasons, wise men never try” applies in more contexts than falling in love. It’s true there, but it has much more truth as well. Thank you Oscar Hammerstein II. It is a profoundly true statement about love; but, perhaps surprisingly, it is also a true statement about faith in God. See, people have been trying to give reasons for believing in the reality of God for a very long time. Thomas Aquinas tried to do it through reason, though he didn’t even really rely on his proof for his faith in God. In our world today, countless numbers of people have rejected the reality of God because the reality of God so vastly exceeds the puny realities of human reason. They believe, so it seems, that you cannot accept the reality of anything that isn’t reasonable, of anything the truth of which you can’t prove or disprove through the scientific method. Of anything for which there are not purely rational reasons.

It’s true. You can’t really reason your way to God. You can reason your way to the question of whether or not there is an ultimate cause of all that is. You can reason your way to the question of an uncaused cause from which everything else proceeds. Aristotle did that a very long time ago. You can’t, however, reason your way beyond the conclusion that there must be an uncaused cause because otherwise nothing would exist. But “must be” and “is” are not the same thing. Reason leads most people today to atheism. At best, it can lead you to agnosticism, to thinking there must be something at the beginning but not knowing whether there ever was an uncaused cause or not.

Acceptance of the reality of God is not rational, but it is not unreasonable. You can get to that point of agnosticism, then make what Kierkegaard called “the leap of faith.” One can choose to have faith that there was and is an ultimate cause of all that is, namely, that God is real. Then you can proceed to live on the basis of that faith. Many of us have done that. Perhaps, in a way, every person of faith has done it.

But faith in God doesn’t actually arise in a cerebral vacuum. There are existential reasons, though not rational ones, for accepting faith in God. One of those reason is that human beings have believed in some kind of supernatural reality for as long as there have been human beings or for at least as long as human beings have left any record of themselves. Every human culture that we know of has or has had some kind of faith system. Every human culture that we know of has had some kind of belief in some transcendental reality beyond the reality we perceive with our usual senses. Such acceptance of a reality beyond normal reality is a perfectly human thing to do.

Moreover, a great many humans have, over the millennia, had personal experience of such a transcendent reality. That’s not true of everyone, but it is true of a lot of us; and it always has been. Things happen in life that, as far as the person having the experience can tell, come from beyond ordinary reality. I once felt myself lifted up as sunk to my knees in grief over the death of my wife when I could not possibly have done it myself. The force that lifted me has to have come from beyond me, and I trust that it did. Years later that same wife appeared to me as I was driving to have the dog that had been hers and mine put down to end his suffering. She’s not God of course, but that experience I had of her appearing to me is, or at least I can trust that it is, an experience of a reality beyond this reality breaking into this reality if only very, very briefly. Believing in such a transcendent reality is not rational in the sense that you cannot reason yourself to it, but it is not irrational either.

Yet, of course, a conviction of the reality of some transcendent plane of being that we usually call God does not prove that that plane of being is real. About the reality of God, fools give you reasons, wise men never try. Reason has little or nothing to do with faith in God. Which does not make God unreal or irrational. It just means that God transcends human reason. Having faith in God has no reasons, at least not in the sense of your being able to reason yourself to it. No one has ever truly reasoned their way to faith in God. Wise men and women don’t try for reasons. They don’t need them. They believe because to them it is just right to believe. They believe from experience not from reasons.

So no. Belief in God isn’t reasonable, but it isn’t irrational. It is human. There is something about us humans that drives us to it. That makes us long for it. Sure. We can deny whatever that is. We can ignore it. We can live, more or less, without it. But that doesn’t make it unreal for those who feel it. For those who heed it. To strive for connection with transcendent reality is a existential thing for us humans to do. It is part of who we are. Reasons? No thanks, at least not rationalistic ones. Experience? Absolutely. Trust? Absolutely. Being fully human? Absolutely. I only wish that more people in my rationalistic culture got it. You can’t reason your way to God. You can reach out for God, and you can trust that God is reaching out for you. May it be so.

 

Pastoral or Prophetic?

 

Pastoral or Prophetic?

November 19, 2024

I belong to a group of four people ordained in the United Church of Christ that meets weekly via Zoom. Two of us, including me, are fully retired. One is transitioning to retirement. One isn’t sure whether she is retired or not. We call ourselves a lectionary group, and most weeks we get around to talking about one of more of the readings for the upcoming Sunday from the Revised Common Lectionary. We also “check in,’ that is, we share what’s going on in our lives. Our doing so is sometimes helpful, sometimes not, but we keep doing it week after week. We’ve been doing it for years. I like and, more importantly, respect the other members of the group, and, as far as I know, they respect me. The group must be meaningful for all four of us or else we wouldn’t keep meeting the way we do. Which doesn’t mean we agree with each other on everything. We come from different backgrounds. We have different strengths and different interests. Still, we meet online and talk, and that is a good thing.

We met this morning, and as we did a difference between the other three members of the group and me became perfectly clear to me. I’ve noticed it before, but it was screaming at me this morning. It is a difference in what we believe ourselves called to be doing these days. In terms of Christian ministry, it is the difference between charity and justice. Put another way, it is the difference between being pastoral and being prophetic. It is the difference between primary focus on the personal or primary focus on the societal or political. It is indeed a significant difference.

It came up this morning because I am scheduled to preach at a local UCC church this coming Sunday. I am using part of one of the readings for that Sunday from the Revised Common Lectionary. It is 2 Samuel 23:3b-25a: “One who rules over people justly, ruling in the fear of God, is like the light of morning, gleaming from the rain on the grassy land. Is not my house like this with God?” NRSV. The “my” in question here is King David. The “my house” refers to him and his descendants as kings of Israel and Judah.

A couple of my Zoom friends and I drew very different lessons from these words. One or two of my colleagues wanted to dismiss them as meaningless to us because they refer to the house of David. There hasn’t been a house of David for over 2,500 years, and no descendant of David, of course, has ever ruled over our country. I said no. These ancient biblical texts are still alive for us because they have broader meanings that transcend their narrow, technical meaning. I didn’t say, but I understand, that that doesn’t mean you can read anything you want into them. You have to stay true to the text as you seek meaning in it. But that’s not hard to do in the case of these verses. These verses are about the blessing of just rulers whether they be individual people or governmental institutions. Just rule is a great blessing for the people. That meaning is clearly there in these few words. Conversely, these words also at least imply that unjust rule is a curse for the people, which indeed it is.

Whereupon one of our group in particular started talking, as he usually does, about taking care of individual people in need right where we are. He has a great history of doing that. He has worked with unhoused people in the greater Seattle area for years. He has done great work with them. He has aided individual people, and he has advocated for the homeless at the state and local level. I respect him greatly for that work. It is work of vital importance, and this man has done more of it than just about anyone I know, myself included.

This kind of work is what we can call “pastoral.” Most of us ordained folks are or at one time in our lives have been called to pastoral work. That work is often the work of being a parish pastor to a local church, but it can include other things too. Pastoring is the work of caring for people. It is sacred work. It is standing with Christ’s people both individually and collectively, helping them in whatever way we can in whatever is going on in their lives.

We can also call this kind of work, or at least some of it, “charity.” It is giving of what we have to people in need of it. It is often the giving of money to charitable institutions, but it can be other sorts of giving too. It can be giving of one’s time. It can be what may seem to be very little, like simply sitting with someone who is in need, something that is far more powerful than most of us realize. Charity can be using whatever skills, talents, and abilities we have to help others. President Jimmy Carter has famously done that working with Habitat for Humanity. There is no question but that God calls all of us to do as much charity as we can.

But charity is not all that God calls us to. God also calls all of us to be prophets. At Numbers 11:29, for example, Moses says: “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets.” Now, to understand what that means, we have to understand what a prophet is. In common parlance, a prophet is often understood to be one who can accurately predict the future. That, however, is not the primary meaning of the word in the Hebrew Bible, where the biblical prophets mostly appear. Yes, the prophets of ancient Israel did sometimes accurately predict the future, especially when they said that the Hebrew kingdoms of Judah and Israel would be destroyed because of their sinfulness. A prophet, however, was, and is, someone who speaks the truth of God to the people, which may or may not include predicting the future. The Hebrew prophets often say that God has given them a word to proclaim to the people, and that’s what they did.

I have a personal experience of God calling me to be in effect if not in title a prophet. In 1994, I was a lawyer trying to run my own law office. I was not succeeding at it, and I was finding it nearly impossible to make myself do the little bit of legal work I had to do. So one day I cleared my mind as much as I could and asked myself: Why am I having so much trouble practicing law? From somewhere deep inside me the answer immediately, instantaneously came: “You’re not a lawyer!” Which was of course ridiculous since I was actually a lawyer; but when I argued with the answer, the answer just kept coming: “You’re not a lawyer!” So I asked myself: “So what am I?” Again the answer appeared in literally no time at all: “You’re a preacher!” Which was of course also ridiculous because at that time I was nothing of the sort. So I ended my psychospiritual exercise and went back to trying, unsuccessfully, to practice law. Years later, of course, a preacher is precisely what I became.

Now, my inner voice, which I now understand to have been the voice of the Holy Spirit, said I was a preacher not that I was a prophet. But what is preaching? Is it not proclaiming, to the best of one’s ability, the truth of God? Is it not attempting, to the best of one’s ability, to bring divine truth to the people in ways that are meaningful to them? One way to do that is to be pastoral, and I am arrogant enough to believe that I have been a good pastor for the people of the churches I served.

But the call to be a preacher is also, necessarily and unavoidably, a call to be a prophet. Or at the very least, I am convinced in the depth of my soul that my call to be a preacher included a call to be a prophet. Of course, I’m no Moses. I’m no Isaiah or Jeremiah or Amos or Micah. I am, however, someone with an understanding of as much of God’s truth as I am capable of having. And I am someone with a certain skill with language both written and spoken. At least since I did that exercise thirty years ago in which God told me I’m a preacher, I have been convinced that I have truth to tell that the world desperately needs to hear. It’s not my truth. It is God’s truth as I understand it, truth that I have discerned over the entire course of my life but most especially since I started seriously to study the Bible and good Christian theology many, many years ago. It is truth I have learned from Tillich, Hall, Borg, Crossan, and other great theologians and popularizers of good Christian theology. It is not truth that God has revealed exclusively or especially to me. But it is truth of which I am quite sure, and it is truth that I truly feel called to proclaim. I truly believe that God calls me to be a prophet to the limited extent that I am able to be and within the narrow confines within which I may have any influence.

Two weeks ago today, my country, the United States of America, elected the American fascist Donald Trump president for the second time. It gave Trump’s cult of personality called the Republican Party control of both houses of Congress. In other words, my country put itself in the hands of American fascists. Donald Trump is following a well known fascist handbook of telling lie after lie after lie and of stirring up public rage at innocent people while telling the public that only he can deal with those horrible peope effectively. That’s what Hitler did with the Jews. It’s what Trump is doing with immigrants.

Now, tragically, Trump will soon be in a position of power from which he can, and will, unleash immense amounts of harm on this country and on God’s world. He will give the selfishly wealthy even more control over the country than they have had before, which was already far too much. He will destroy as many governmental programs that actually care for people as he can. He will at least attempt to do with people who have immigrated to this country what Hitler originally wanted to do with the Jews, namely, not kill them but deport them. Nothing but harm will come from the upcoming Trump presidency, and about that there simply is no doubt.

So, what does God call us to do today? To do charity of course. There have always been far too many people in this country who need charity. The need for charity is one of the primary things the American political and economic systems create. The upcoming Trump administration will make even more people poor. It will discriminate in new ways against people Trumpists don’t like, people like transgender folk. We are in for hard times, harder times, indeed, than this country has faced at least in decades and in some ways has faced ever. And some of us are in for harder times than others of us are.

Therefore, we must be prophetic. We must speak up. We must speak out. We must speak truth to the people. We must speak truth to power. Can any one of us actually defeat the Trump administration? No, of course not. But that truth does not relieve us of the obligation to speak out. To proclaim God’s truths of love, justice, and peace to an aching world. We simply have no choice but to do it.

Now, I just mentioned “peace.” Peace is of course a kingdom value, and I mean in no way to diminish that truth. But during my Zoom lectionary group meeting this morning, one of us spoke of us pursuing “the ways that make for peace.” When I heard that I thought: No. Pursuing the ways that make for peace is not what we are called to do today. In 1933, the Nazis were in the process of taking over the government of Germany. Hitler became chancellor, the head of the government, by legal means in January of that year. But he had no intention of retaining power by legal means. He intended to create a fascist dictatorship grounded in violence, hatred, and fear. The German people were not called to work for peace with the Nazis. Rather, God called them to denounce the Nazis. God called them to be prophets. Prophets for peace, yes; but not peace with the Nazis. Peace opposed to the Nazis. The bringing of peace by getting rid of the Nazis.

Some German Christians got it, but most didn’t. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was an anti-Nazi prophet, though we can disagree over whether or not he was justified in joining a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. Far too few Germans got it about Hitler, but God was calling all of them to resist. To resist nonviolently I suppose, but still to resist. To be prophets. To speak God’s truth in the face of the diabolical lies the Nazi regime was feeding them.

Far too few Germans got it about Hitler, and far too few Americans get it about Donald Trump. Trump has already begun to create an administration intending to destroy the American government rather than build it up as a source of justice for the American people. He’s doing it because he is a fascist who wants to be an American dictator; and fascist dictators cannot have healthy governmental institutions functioning the way they should, for such institutions get in a dictator’s way. Fascist dictators like the one Trump wants to be need personal loyalty not professional competence. In Nazi Germany, soldiers and civil servants signed the Hitler oath in which they pledged allegiance to Hitler not to the German constitution. Trump and his people will swear an oath to support and defend the US Constitution, but they won’t mean it. Trump is loyal only to himself. His people are loyal only to him. Will he introduce an explicit Trump oath and require all American soldiers and civil servants to take it? We’ll just have to wait and see.

Or not just wait and see. Rather, be God’s prophets in the dangerous, threatening atmosphere Trump is creating and will continue to create in our country. Speak God’s truth every chance we get. Proclaim God’s word of justice for the poor, the weak, and the marginalized every change we get. Speak God’s truth to everyone we know. Speak God’s truth in public every chance we get. Speak God’s truth to power strongly and without ceasing. Will our doing it change anything? Perhaps not, but we know one thing for certain. Our failing to heed God’s call for us to be prophets will only ease Trump’s path to the dictatorship he so wants to create. So let’s be prophets, shall we? It’s the least we can do.

On Trump's Deportation Plans

 This is the text of a letter I just sent to the Everett Herald, my local paper here in Washington state.

President-elect Trump says he wants to deport 15-20 million people. His doing so would destroy the agricultural and construction industries. Beyond that, before they decided to kill them all, the Nazis planned to deport all the Jews. They had a plan to deport them to Madagascar, a plan they gave up only because the British navy stood in the way. Deporting the people you have made your scapegoats and whom you have used to rile up hatred among the people against the people who aren't really the cause of any problems is an old-time fascist tactic. Donald Trump is a fascist, and he is following a fascist playbook. Is it too late for the American people to wake up to who they have actually made president? I pray not and fear so.

Is Trump a Totalitarian?

 Is Trump a Totalitarian?

 

In his book On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder (thank God for Timothy Snyder!) he says that by totalitarianism Hannah Arendt didn’t mean an all-powerful state. She meant the disappearance of the distinction between public and private life. Is that happening among us? Maybe. I mean, I’m not sure I make much of a distinction between my public life (such as it is) and my private life. There is, of course, always an interplay between one’s private life and one’s pubic life; but there is, or at least must be, always a distinction between the two. The example of the disappearance of such a distinction that I know best isn’t Nazi Germany, it is Communist Russia. When the Communist oppression was at its most extreme, people had to treat their private lives as if they were public. The could not, for example, say things in their private lives that they could not say in public because they could never know that the person they said it to wouldn’t report them to the KGB. People of course held private opinions about public matters that they couldn’t express in public. But one of my learnings about Stalinism is that everyone opposed it, and everyone thought they were the only person who did. They thought that because no one could express their opinion even in private. People thought they were the only one who disagreed because the Communists had obliterated the distinction between public and private. 

I don’t think I conform to some fascistic norms in my public life just as I don’t in my private life. But I’m just one isolated individual. What about society as a whole? I don’t think the distinction between one’s public and one’s private lives has disappeared to any significant extent. Trump is, after all, an authoritarian not a totalitarian either in Arendt’s sense or in the sense of an all-powerful government. As an authoritarian, Trump wants to suppress anyone who opposes him publicly. He doesn’t, however, give a damn about what people think in private. That may be the only distinction between him and a true totalitarian.  

So I’m not sure Trump will try to impose totalitarianism on us. Totalitarianism requires an ideology. The Soviet Communists certainly had an ideology. The Nazis certainly had an ideology. The Chinese government today has an ideology, though it isn’t clear that the North Korean regime has one. Donald Trump does not have an ideology. He isn’t smart enough to have one, and he would never take the time to develop one. He does, however, have a desire for power, indeed, much more than a desire but an ego need to have it. So I will not say Trump is a totalitarian—yet. Whether or not he becomes one in the future remains to be seen. 

The End?

 The End?

Monday, November 11, 2024

It occurred to me this morning that no empire lasts forever and no democracy lasts forever. The mightiest empires the world has ever known fell. No democracy lasted as long as American democracy did. Sure, it was far from perfect; but it was more or less democratic, and it lasted a long time. Now, perhaps, it has come to its inevitable end. The American people rejected it last Tuesday when they gave the federal government to the fascists much like the German people gave their government to the Nazis in 1932-33. I suppose American democracy is something to mourn, but its demise was inevitable. People always turn their back on the good, then regret it later. Last Tuesday, the American people turned their back on the good. They—we—face at least four years of our federal government doing very bad things. Nothing good can come from another Trump administration. That it couldn’t was obvious last Tuesday, and the American electorate selected it anyway. They put opponents of democracy in charge of the country’s government. So be it. It isn’t good, but it was probably unavoidable in the long run. So we live with it. The people suffer under it.. The people Trump hates especially suffer under it. There’s not a damned thing I can do about it. So my life goes on for at least a little while longer. I never thought I’d live in a fascist country, but now I do. So be it. 

This Is Who We Are

 

That Is Who We Are

November 6, 2024

 

This is who we are. What sort of person Donald Trump is was no secret. He has even boasted of some of his worst personal characteristics. The destructive nature of the policies and procedures he wants to impose on us was no secret. They’re all laid out in Project 2025. He was president for four years, though I won’t say he served as president because the only people he served were himself, his family, his uber-rich backers, and deranged people calling themselves Christians who want to subject women to control by men. We saw what kind of president he was. He told us to drink bleach to deal with COVID-19 and otherwise handled the pandemic about as badly as it would be possible to handle it. The Russians put him in power in 2016,[1] and he took the word of the Russian fascist dictator Vladimir Putin over that of our country’s intelligence agencies about Russian interference in the that presidential election. He made no secret of his admiration of murderous dictators like Putin, someone he clearly wants to imitate.

He instituted utterly inhumane policies at our southern border and spoke of immigrants in purely fascist terms. He put incompetent right-wing judges like Eileen Cannon on the federal bench. He put far right-wing justices on the Supreme Court, who overturned Roe v. Wade. He called white supremacists “fine people” and told gangs of thugs to “stand back and stand by.” He incited a seditious mob to attack the US Capitol to stop congressional certification of his loss of the 2020 election. He still spouts the big lie that he actually won that election. High ranking military officers who served in his administration have called him fascist, which indeed he is. We knew that he is inherently incapable of telling the truth and that indeed truth doesn’t matter to him. On November 5, 2024, we knew exactly what Donald Trump is, and we reelected him anyway.[2] We even gave him a majority of the popular vote, something we didn’t do when he became president in 2016.

And I can hear many of our people saying: “Well, that’s not really who we are. We aren’t like Donald Trump.” And I have to say: “Hell yes, that is who we are! Hell yes, we are like Donald Trump!” We would not possibly have reelected him if that weren’t who we are, if we weren’t like Donald Trump. In reelecting Donald Trump, the American people expressed the dark side of the American character. They tied themselves to and continued the dark side of American history. Perhaps most Americans will not acknowledge that our national character and our history have a dark side, but there simply is no doubt that they do.

What is that dark side? It has many facets, but it is at least a history of racism and genocide; and it is the refusal of most Americans to acknowledge that we are racist and that we have committed genocide. It is a history of enslavement of Black people followed by violent suppression of them as human beings and denial of their civil rights. It is a history of patriarchy and the oppression of women. It is a history of military violence. We stole much of the western part of our country from Mexico through an imperialistic war. We waged an imperialistic war against Spain in 1898 then made someone who boasted of his participation in that war a hero and president. We carried on a immoral, utterly useless war in Vietnam for many years. We started an illegal, unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq in 2023. We have created the world’s largest military by far, and we have enough nuclear weapons to end all life on earth. We are and have been one of the most militaristic nations on earth.

We are mostly a nation of immigrants and the descendants of immigrants, but we have a history of hatred and oppression of every new wave of immigrants that has come to us. Most of us may not know about our history of hatred of Jewish, Irish, Italian, and Chinese people, for example, but that hatred is part of our history and part of our character.

At least since 1980 we have had a federal government that, with a few exceptions like the Affordable Care Act, has worked for the benefit of the wealthy not of the people. That government has done nothing truly significant to address the global climate crisis. The dark side of American history is at least as determinative of American character as is our supposed advocacy of freedom and democracy, something has always been more words than reality.

Our reelection of Donald Trump as president is both an expression and a continuation of all of those dark aspects of our country. There is absolutely nothing good about the man or about what he wants to do to our country. Yet we put him in position to do immeasurable harm. He will make the federal judiciary fascist for decades to come, continuing something he started quite successfully the last time he was president. He will dismantle all federal regulatory agencies as much as he can, thereby leading to the destruction of, among other things, worker protection and the environment. If he gets control of the House, he will impose a nationwide abortion ban, something most Americans by far don’t want. Such a ban would make oppression of women national and not just regional policy. It would inflict immense harm on an untold number of women and the people who love them. On November 5, 2024, we either knew all of these things about him or had knowledge of them readily available to us. We reelected him anyway.

The only thing that made our doing so possible was the concordance of his character and ours. We reelected him because we are who he is. We reelected him because we fell for his pandering to our worst instincts and our worst fears. We reelected him because our professed commitment to “liberty and justice for all” is and always has been a farce. We reelected him because we have always been prone to fall for demagogues. We reelected him because so many of us are frightened by the changes taking place in our country and around the world. Perhaps most of all, we reelected him because we are as racist as he is. Because we are as sexist as he is. Because we are as mentally unstable as he is.

So no. Don’t believe the people who say “This is not who we are.” The hell it isn’t! It is precisely who we are. Yes, there are a great many good people among us, but there aren’t enough. We will never be better than we are until we admit that it is who we are and commit ourselves to doing something about it. I’m 78 years old. I don’t expect to live to see us doing that, if indeed we ever do. The dark side of our history and of our national character has us in its grasp. Donald Trump personifies that dark side. Yes, tragically, this is who we are.

 

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[1] If you doubt this truth read Timothy Snyder’s book The Road to Unfreedom.

[2] We also gave him control of the Senate. As of this writing, it is unknown whether we also gave him control of the House of Representatives.

The Road to Unfreedom

 The Road to Unfreedom

I just finished reading Timothy Snyder’s boot The Road to Unfreedom. Snyder is the most impressive historian I’ve ever read, but he is transitioning from history into political theory. His explanation in The Road to Unfreedom of what’s going on in the United States is bone chilling. It is immensely depressing, and the problem is that he is right. He says we are following the path of Russia to even greater inequality of wealth and the death of democracy. The Russians are pushing us along that path. They made Trump president in 2016, and they may well do so again in 2024. Snyder says, I think, that the only way to reverse the direction we’re going as a nation is to restore the notion that there is indeed truth. That’s because one of the foundational tricks of fascism is to convince the people that there is no truth. So just follow the leader. Believe the leader because his lies are not different from anyone else’s lies except that they play on your fears and your bigotries. We may or may not reelect Trump next Tuesday. If we do, American democracy is doomed. It may be doomed even if we don’t. Do Kamala Harris and the Democrats really understand what’s going on in this country? I doubt it. If they don’t, there’s no way they can lead a reversal of the country’s direction. Even if they do, they may not be able or willing to lead a reversal because the needed reversal would, at first, encounter massive and probably violent resistance. Snyder’s right, and we’re in bigger trouble than all but a very small handful of Americans understands.

American Democracy Is Critically Ill

 

American Democracy Is Critically Ill

American democracy is critically ill. Our political system still looks, more or less, like a democracy, but that appearance is a false façade. It covers up the truth that our political system is at risk of being no longer at all democratic—if indeed it ever was truly democratic to begin with. Of course, most Americans don’t know that American democracy is critically ill; and even if they suspect that it might be, they won’t admit that it could be. Several undeniable truths show how critically ill American democracy is. We’ll look at some of those truths here.

Before we get to those truths, however, we must consider what democracy is supposed to be. Linguistically, it means “government by the people.” In theory, in a democracy the people that the democracy governs determine the what their government is and who is to lead it. The people usually do that through free and fair elections in which every eligible voter has to opportunity to cast a vote. In a true democracy, all votes are equal. No one’s vote carries more weight than anyone else’s vote. Most commonly, the people elect representatives, who are the one who carry out the government’s work.

The US Constitution was never intended to be perfectly democratic nor has it ever been perfectly democratic. We see two significant ways in which it is not democratic in the document itself. It creates a federal judicial system. That system has immense power over many aspects of American life, but the people do not elect its judges. A judicial vacancy is filled by the president nominating someone to fill it and the Senate either approving or rejecting that nomination. There are solid arguments why this is a better way of selecting federal judges than having the people voting for them would be, but what this system is not is democratic.

Yet the undemocratic way our nation fills judicial vacancies is not the most important undemocratic aspect of our federal government. The undemocratic aspect of the Constitution that is the most important has two related features. The first is the way the number of senators is assigned to each state. Our states differ wildly in how any people live in them. The population of Wyoming, for example, is around 590,000. The population of California is nearly 40,000,000. Thus, California has an enormous number more people than Wyoming does. Yet each of those states has the same number of US senators, i.e., two. The vote of each citizen of Wyoming, then, is substantially more important in determining the makeup of the Senate than is the vote of each citizen of California. This system of allocating senators to the states may have made some sense when it was created in the late eighteenth century when the country was much more a union of sovereign states than it is today. It makes no sense whatsoever today; but even if it did make any sense, it would not be democratic because it weights the votes of some Americans more heavily than the votes of other Americans.

The undemocratic aspect of the Constitution that is closely related to the problem with the allocation of senators to the states is the electoral college. Under the US Constitution, the American people do not directly elect their president and vice president. Rather than count the national popular vote, the Congress approves the vote that each state has submitted to the federal government separately. The weight of the vote of each state is determined by the number of the members of the House of Representatives each state has plus two for the state’s senators.

A state’s number of representatives is based on the state’s population. Thus, Wyoming has one member of the House of Representatives while California has fifty-two such representatives. The allocation of the number of members of the House is thus more or less democratic. But the fact that every state has the same number of senators unbalances the presidential votes of the states. Just as small population states have disproportionate power over the makeup of Congress, so the small population states have disproportionate power in the election of the president and the vice president.

The disproportionate power of the small population states in the selection of the president and vice president has resulted on five different occasions in a person being elected president though that person lost the national popular vote. That has happened twice quite recently. George W. Bush was elected president though he lost the popular vote in 2000. Donald Trump was elected president though he lost the popular vote in 2016. A person who lost the popular vote becoming president is, of course, grossly undemocratic. Because our constitution allows it, it has actually never been appropriate to call America a pure democracy.

Then there is the question of money. It costs an immense amount of money to run any political campaign, with presidential campaigns, of course, costing the most. It seems that candidates and their staffs spend as much time and energy asking people for money as they do explaining their policy positions. Money has always been a corrupting factor in American politics, but it’s worse now than it has ever been before. In 2010, the United States Supreme Court issued its decision in the case of Citizens United v. FEC. That decision held that it is unconstitutional to restrict the amounts of money corporations, nonprofit organizations, labor unions, and other associations may give to political campaigns. The result was the opening of the floodgates for unrestricted money to flood American politics through nonprofit organizations such as political action committees. That’s why so many political ads don’t come from a political campaign itself. They come from misleadingly named PACs whose donors are concealed or disguised.

Money corrupts politics. Of that there simply is no doubt. In large part because of Citizens United, political candidates most Americans would not support but for massive amounts of misleading political advertising have won election to Congress and to the presidency. Because of the influence of money, the United States Congress has often been controlled by a political party, the Republican Party, whose policies most Americans reject. Those Republican-led congresses have, among other destructive things they have done, passed tax cuts for the very rich and the very big corporations that do not benefit the American people at all and which most Americans would reject if given the chance to vote on them. Republican presidents, the most recent two of whom did not receive a majority of the popular vote, have signed that legislation. They thus have ballooned the national debt and imposed hardship on the American middle class, that is, on most Americans. Citizens United called the giving of money to political campaigns free speech. It isn’t. It is people doing something that involves speech not at all, i.e., donating money. The result of Citizens United has been to make American politics even less democratic than they were before.

There is, however, an even more important indicator that American democracy is critically ill. It is the rise of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. Trump and his deluded supporters are, quite simply, fascists. They do not believe in democracy, and Trump makes no bones about the fact that he does not. Trump has made it perfectly clear that he would be America’s Vladimir Putin if he could, and Putin is nothing if not a Russian fascist. Trump believes that elections are legitimate only if he and his designated candidates win them. He continues to claim that he won the 2020 presidential election when he undeniably did not. He tried every legal way he could to overturn the result of that election. When legal means didn’t work, he sent an angry mob to attack the US Capitol in an attempt to stop Congress from carrying out its constitutional duty of counting and certifying the votes of the states in the electoral college.

One clear indicator of Trump’s fascism is his willingness to use violence to achieve his political ends. His attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, is the most egregious example of that willingness, but it is not the only one. He openly supports anti-democratic movements like the country’s numerous white supremacy groups. He tells armed thugs who attack peaceful counter protesters to “stand back and stand by,” an encouragement to prepare for violence if ever there were one. As I write these words, we have just learned that Trump has called for his political opponent Liz Cheney to be put in front of a firing squad. He does not think of his political opponents as opponents. He thinks of them as enemies. He is quite prepared to treat them as such, which is another of his fascist tendencies.

There is very little doubt that if Trump wins the 2024 presidential election, American democracy will be more critically ill than it already is. But, of course, he may not win the 2024 presidential election. What would it mean for American democracy if he lost? What would it mean if not only he lost but his designated minions running for Congress lost as well? It would mean at most that American democracy has received a stay of execution. Vice President Kamala Harris, as nearly as we can tell, believes in American democracy. She would not try to set herself up as America’s dictator the way Trump would. Her winning the 2024 election, however, would not be a miracle cure for American democracy’s critical illness.

That’s because even if Harris wins, nearly half of all American voters will have voted for the fascist Donald Trump. However the congressional races come out, at least nearly half of all American voters will have voted for Trump lackeys to represent them in our national legislature. Democracy is fragile. The American constitutional government, as not completely democratic today as it has ever been, has survived longer than any other democracy ever has. Yet it is still fragile. It cannot survive if nearly half of all Americans no longer believe in it. It cannot survive if a significant number of Americans take up Trump’s call to use violence to overturn legitimate election results. If that many Americans have lost their faith in their constitutional government, future elections will be what this one is; not a contest between legitimate candidates and legitimate though differing views of what the country needs but a battle for the very survival of America’s good if imperfect democratic system of government.

If that’s what future American elections become, the American people as a whole, including those who have not lost it already, will lose faith in their system of government. They will not continue to participate in such a bastardized democracy. Extremists on the left will arise to counter the MAGA extremists on the right. Politicians on the left will begin to assert that we need a leftist dictator to fend off would-be fascist dictators. If that happens, American democracy will not be critically ill, it will be dead.

The only way for our country to avoid that tragic fate is for the American people as a whole to reject Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. Many of us, of course, already reject them. Indeed, we condemn them, but tens of millions of Americans don’t. Is there any way to lead those tens of millions of Americans out of the trap of Trumpist fascism? I wish I had an easy answer to that question. Perhaps our hope lies in Donald Trump’s inevitable death. I am not advocating violence here, but Trump is 78 years old and, like all of us, will die someday. Popular movements that are cults of personality the way the Trump movement it don’t often survive the death of the cult leader. After all, they essentially never have a system of succession that puts someone else legitimately in charge of them. We can hope that Trump’s cult of personality won’t long outlive him.

But the task we face of ending the MAGA movement is at best formidable. We can make all of the fact-based arguments we want to counter the deranged claims of that movement. But facts don’t matter to Trump or to his followers. If facts mattered, Trump would still be nothing but a sleazy New York real estate developer, and there would be no MAGA movement. It may be that the only thing that will end that movement is its coming to power and failing spectacularly to make life better for most Americans. Perhaps the country will have to hit a fascist rock bottom before it begins to recover from Trump and his fascism.

I hope that such is not the case, and I may not live long enough to see whether it is or not, for I’m just as old as Trump is. But German and Italian fascism ended (to the extent that they have ended) only when Germany and Italy suffered devastating defeat in World War II. Soviet fascism, calling itself communism not fascism, ended only when the Soviet economy failed dramatically because of the way the Soviets tried to keep up with the United States militarily and because of the internal contradictions of the Soviet planned economy. It may well be that something similar will have to happen in this country before we will truly be rid of Trump and his threat to American democracy.

So. American democracy is indeed critically ill. A healthy democracy would never produce a Donald Trump or the MAGA movement. A healthy democracy would never produce a movement like Trump’s that is grounded not in actual reality but it fear and hatred. We people of faith can pray and work for a cure for our country. I sure wish I had more hope that we could effect such a cure.