How Should We Relate to Russia?

How Should We Relate to Russia?

There are two things you have to understand if you want to understand what’s going on in Russia today, Russia itself  and Vladimir Putin. Few Americans understand either Russia or Putin well at all. We will never deal effectively with Russia on the international stage unless we understand both of them much better than most of us do.

I’ll start with Russia. Russia is not a western country. It is different from typical western countries in at least these ways:

It sits between Europe and Asia, and it has both European and Asian characteristics.

It has no tradition of democracy.

It has no tradition of respect for individual rights.

It has a centuries old tradition of government that is authoritarian at best and totalitarian at worst.

It has a centuries-old history of repeated foreign invasions. Over the centuries Russia has been invaded at least by Tatars, Lithuanians, Poles, Swedes, the French under Napoleon, and the Germans under Hitler. That history affects how Russians as a people think of issues like order, security, and individual freedom.

Except for the relatively short period of Communist rule (1917-1991), it has a centuries old tradition of unity between the government and the very conservative Russian Orthodox Church.[1]

Russia did not experience the Renaissance with its emphasis on the primacy of the human.

Most of Russia, except for a very small social and political elite, did not experience the Enlightenment with its emphasis on human reason as the primary source of knowledge.

Most recently Russia experienced totalitarian terror and oppression at the hands of the Communist Party, much worse under Stalin than after him but never entirely overcome.

Under the Soviet Communists Russia became for the first time a first rank world power. Not long after the US did the USSR created nuclear weapons. The Russians beat us Americans into space.

Russia lost its status as a major world power when the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia was no longer Communist. The Soviet Union consisted of most of the territory and peoples of the Russian Empire (absent Finland and part of Poland). It controlled territory from the border of Poland in the west to the border with North Korea in the east and from the Artic Sea in the north to the border with Iran in the south. It was huge. Today Russia is still huge, but it’s nowhere near as big as it was as the Russian Empire or as the dominant element of the Soviet Union.

It still has the world’s second largest nuclear arsenal.

Many if not most Russians feel diminished by Russia’s loss of global status.

Despite the country’s basically non-western character the Russian people have made enormous contributions to western culture. Think of Lomonosov (a scientist after whom Moscow State University is named), Pushkin, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Pasternak, Oistrakh, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and so many others. The Russian people are as talented and creative as any other and could be as productive given improved circumstances.

Few Americans understand Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. Here are some pertinent facts about him.

He was born October 7, 1952, in what was then Leningrad, now again St. Petersburg. His parents barely survived the Nazi siege of Leningrad in which well over one million people died—that’s more than twice the number of US deaths in the entire war.

He studied law at Leningrad State University (where I lived for a time while doing dissertation research in Leningrad in 1976).

He was a low level KGB agent who worked in Dresden, Germany, from 1985 to 1990.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union he left the KGB to enter politics in St. Petersburg, where he served under a reform minded mayor named Sobchak. He worked mostly in the city’s foreign relations and was accused of significant corruption.

He returned to the successor to the KGB, the FSB, and eventually became its head.

Boris Yeltsin, then President of the Russian Federation, made him a deputy prime minister, after which he became prime minister and Yeltsin’s chosen successor.

On Dec. 31, 1999, Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned, and Putin became Acting President. He was later elected President and has served as either President (the office with all the power) or the power behind the president as Prime Minister ever since.

In his many years in power he has done many things, few of them good.

He has cozied up to the Russian Orthodox Church and adopted its ultraconservative social agenda including discriminating against gay people.

He has turned Russia into a kleptocracy, ruling in alliance with massively wealthy, mostly corrupt Russian oligarchs who are exporting much of Russia’s wealth for their own benefit rather than reinvesting it in the country.

He has seized control of most of the media outlets including all of the major television networks.

He has killed journalists, oligarchs, and politicians who opposed him, and he’s done it both in Russia and abroad.

He has had political opponents arrested on trumped up charges to keep them from becoming significant political figures who could oppose him in his rigged elections.

He has said that the dissolution of the USSR is the greatest geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century, never mind the Holocaust or the Stalinist terror I guess.

He has identified opposition to western liberalism as his principal ideology.

He has to some extent restored many Russians’ pride in their nation after the humiliation of the disintegration of the USSR.

He wants as much as anything else for Russia once again to be a major, respected force in the world.[2]

He is both intrinsically Russian and Soviet, and it is unrealistic to expect him to act as anything else.

By American standards he is bad guy. He is anti-democratic, anti-civil rights, anti-personal freedom, and in bed with organized crime and oligarchs who are exploiting Russia’s immense natural resources and exporting most of their wealth.

By Russian standards however he’s rather predictable and unsurprising. It was probably inevitable that after the collapse of the USSR Russia’s history of authoritarianism combined with what Russia doesn’t have—traditions of democracy and individual freedom—would produce someone like Putin.

What’s surprising is that it produced Putin in particular. He came to power almost by accident. Nothing I’ve read suggests that he was ever particularly ambitious or plotted a path to power. He’s where he is because Yeltsin chose him. Yeltsin chose him probably for two reasons. First, he was a blank slate. He didn’t seem to have an agenda of his own, so Yeltsin didn’t have to choose between representatives of competing political camps vying for power. Second, because of his influence in the FSB he could (and did) protect Yeltsin and his cronies from prosecution for their multiple violations of law.

His future isn’t entirely clear. Russia’s constitution limits the president to two consecutive six year terms.[3] He is 66 years old and as far as we know in good health. A significant majority of Russian voters support him and his policies. He won a fourth overall term as president and a second consecutive six year term in 2018 with 76% of the vote. That figure is probably inflated by electoral fraud, but it is certainly still true that he has the support of a majority of his people. In 2024, when he will have to relinquish the presidency (unless he changes the constitution, which so far he has not done except to change the term of the president) he could do what he did at the end of his first second consecutive term—make an underling a more or less subservient president while he again assumes the post of prime minister.[4] Just what he will do remains to be seen.

So how should the US relate to Putin? We don’t have to like him, but he is a reality with whom we must deal. Russia may still be what it was when I was there more than forty years ago, a third-world country with nukes, but it has a lot of nukes. It also has massive reserves of natural resources, oil and natural gas among them. It has enormous human resources as well.

For Putin and for a great many Russians “Russia” includes all of the territory Russia lost when the USSR dissolved and all of its constituent “republics,” including Russia, became independent nations. In particular, for Putin and a great many Russians Ukraine is not something separate from Russia but a constituent part of it.[5] That’s a part of why Putin occupied Crimea and incorporated it into Russia and why Russia has been meddling militarily in eastern Ukraine, where much of the population is Russian not Ukrainian.[6]

There is a circumstance as a result of the history of the Russian Empire/USSR that has a troubling historical parallel. There are significant numbers of Russians living in all of the nations that used to be Soviet republics, not just in Ukraine where the issue has led to military conflict. The issue is also acute in the Baltic republics of Estonia and Latvia. Those places had been part of the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century. If you see photographs of cities like Riga and Tallinn in those nations you’ll see that there are Russian Orthodox churches as well as churches of other Christian traditions there. That’s because there are and have been lots of Russians in those nations. That circumstance has unsettling parallels to the situation in what was Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. Significant numbers of Germans lived in the Sudetenland, the western regions of Czechoslovakia that bordered Germany. Hitler used the presence of those Germans under Czechoslovak rule as an excuse to occupy the Sudetenland, one of the steps that led in short order to World War II.

Putin makes noises about Russians in Estonia and Latvia that sound a bit like the noises Hitler made about Germans in the Sudetenland. Will Russia invade Latvia or Estonia the way it has already invaded Ukraine and Georgia? Latvia and Estonia are now members of NATO. Russia invading them could well ignite a full-scale war between Russia and NATO, both of which have enormous numbers of nuclear weapons. I hope that the fact that Latvia and Estonia are members of NATO will stop that from happening, but time will tell.

So what are we to make of Russia under Putin? As it has been since at least the eighteenth century, Russia is an essentially non-western nation with a veneer of western culture superimposed upon it. Russia has a constitution that provides for elected governmental leaders, and so far Putin has complied with the constitution—at least superficially. Yet Putin is not a western democrat because Russia has no traditions anything like the western democratic ones. Putin is positioning Russia as the champion of conservative social beliefs including, among other things, denial of rights to LGBTQ people. He is doing that in close cooperation with the very, very conservative Russian Orthodox Church.[7] In the major cities life may be better for most people than it was under the Communists, or it may not. Moscow looks a lot more western today than it did when I was there in 1968, 1975, and 1976. It has western-style skyscrapers that weren’t there in Soviet times. There are neon signs for western brands like Mercedes Benz and many others. Yet Russia is still Russia. It is not a western country. Its political traditions are authoritarian and even totalitarian not democratic. Because of that history and because of Russia’s centuries-long history of repeated foreign invasions Russians as a people prefer order and security to western-style freedoms.[8] It is unrealistic to expect Russia to look or act like a western country anytime soon. We must understand Russia better than most Americans do, which doesn’t mean we must kowtow to it the way Trump does. We must be realistic, recognize Russia as a significant nuclear power with enormous natural and human resources, and not expect Russia to be what it is not.

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[1] Even under the Communists the Russian Orthodox Church was subservient to the government and was thoroughly infiltrated by agents of the KGB.

[2] President Obama once referred to Russia as a “regional power.” I don’t know if Obama intended that phrase as an insult to Putin, but I’m sure Putin took it in bad form.

[3] It was originally two consecutive four year terms, but one change to the constitution that Putin got through was to change the term of the president to six years.

[4] The first time around that person was Dmitrii Medvedev. Medvedev tried on occasion to act independently. Putin quickly put an end to those efforts.

[5] The tsarist government never recognized Ukrainians as a separate people or Ukrainian as a separate language. They said it was merely a dialect of Russian.

[6] Crimea was also important to Russia because the port of Sevastopol has long been the home port of first the Russian then the Soviet and now again the Russian Black Sea Fleet.

[7] Western Christians sometimes criticize Orthodox Christianity by saying that it hasn’t had an original thought since the eighth century. Orthodox Christians reply in effect “Yeah, ain’t that great?” To a considerable extent today’s Russia has reverted to the relationship between the government and the Russian Orthodox Church that existed before 1917 (except that the Church has a Patriarch, which it didn’t have between 1721 and 1918). The government has enacted laws giving the Orthodox Church a privileged position compared to other churches that could have been written by Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the ultraconservative Over Procurator of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church (the institution that replaced the Patriarch in those years I listed above) who was the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation. Given my experience in the USSR I was shocked some time ago when I saw film of a Russian Orthodox priest blessing a Russian rocket before it took off taking astronauts to the International Space Station. You’d never have seen that under the Soviets.

[8] An incident that I once experienced is telling. In the summer of 1968 I was in the USSR on a Russian language study tour through Indiana University. When we were in Leningrad (now again St. Petersburg) one of our number brought a Russian man he had met on the street up to one of our hotel rooms. The man said to us: “You Americans only like Russians who say bad things about us, people like Solzhenitsyn. How would you like it if people said bad things about your government? This was 1968. We were a bunch of liberal college students. The Vietnam war was raging, and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated for standing up for peace and human rights. We said bad things about our government virtually every day. We see here a major difference between how most Russians think and how most Americans think. It’s not that there was no political opposition in the Soviet Union. There was, and there is political opposition to Putin in Russia today. Still, Russians one the whole are much more likely to support whatever their government is and whatever it does than Americans on the whole are likely to support theirs.

The Wrong Question

The Wrong Question

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

For

Prospect United Church of Christ

Seattle, Washington

July 14, 2019

Scripture: Luke 10:25-37

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

An experience I had recently around that famous Parable of the Good Samaritan that we just heard reminded me of a truth about the great Gospel stories that I’ve known for a long time. You tend to learn it when you preach from the lectionary every week like I used to, for you end up preaching several times on the same texts. One of the really great things about the great Bible stories is that you keep seeing new lessons in them. You keep learning new things about them. In some writing I’ve done I laid out five different interpretations of the Parable of the Good Samaritan.[1] They include things like don’t trust the temple authorities, don’t trust religious authorities in general, reject the purity code of Leviticus, and get over thinking you’re superior to people who are different from you. I thought I had pretty much exhausted what there is to say about this parable.

Wrong. Recently my wife Jane told me of a way to understand that parable that I hadn’t heard before. She heard it from the Rev. Jeff Spencer, formerly a pastor in our Conference, and she said he got it from Martin Luther King, Jr. It goes like this: What’s going on in the Parable of the Good Samaritan is that different people are asking different questions. The priest and the Levite who pass by the beaten man without helping him ask: What will happen to me if I help him? What would happen to them is that they probably would be guilty of violating the laws of the book of Leviticus about priests coming into contact with blood or with a dead body. They would be ritually unclean. They would be excluded from the Jerusalem temple where they worked until they had undergone some kind of cleansing ritual. They probably would have violated rules in the part of Hebrew scripture that was most important to them, the Purity Code of the book of Leviticus. So they passed by. The answer they knew to their question “what will happen to me if I help” got them not to help. They put their personal piety and their personal interests above those of the beaten man. They passed by and left the beaten man to his fate.

The Good Samaritan asked a different question. He asked, in effect if not quite expressly, “What will happen to that man if I don’t help him?” Again the answer is fairly obvious. Assuming that the man was still alive, which it turns out he was, he might well die if he didn’t get help. At the very least he would continue to suffer. The Samaritan in this parable didn’t quite know what would happen to him if he stopped to help. Was the man faking it so that he could beat and rob anyone who stopped to help him? Maybe. Surely our Samaritan couldn’t rule that possibility out. Would the man, assuming he was Jewish, refuse the help the Samaritan offered because that man was a Samaritan not a Jew and Jews hated Samaritans? Maybe. Again our Samaritan couldn’t rule that possibility out. Would Jewish passers-by ridicule him for stopping to help a man who as far as they could tell might be dead? Again, that was quite possible. I think we can assume that our Samaritan knew all of these possibilities at some level of his consciousness. But he didn’t stop think about what might happen to him. He was concerned about what would happen to the other, to the beaten man, if he didn’t stop to help. The parable doesn’t make these questions explicit, but clearly when Jesus approves of what the Samaritan does and disapproves of what the priest and the Levite do he is saying that the Samaritan asked the right question and answered it in the right way and the two temple officials asked the wrong one and gave an answer that kept them from doing the right thing. The Samaritan gave the right answer to the right question. The priest and the Levite gave the wrong answer to the wrong question.

In our country today I see so many people, from the president on down, asking the wrong question. I see that happening in a great many aspects of our common life, but I see it most powerfully and most disturbingly in the arguments around what to do with the horde of people from Central America who cross our southern border seeking asylum, seeking refuge for themselves and their children from the violence, poverty, and lack of sufficient food in their home countries. About those desperate people so many of us ask: What will happen to us if we let them in? The people who ask this question about the situation at our border with Mexico give answers that lead to the conclusion.” don’t let them in at all and throw them out if they manage to get in.” They’ll take jobs away from real Americans. They’ll all be rapists, murderers, and members of violent gangs. At least that’s what our president has told them. They’ll be a horrible drain on social services that they’ve done nothing to pay for. They’ll be criminals if for no other reason than they broke our immigration laws in the way they came here.

All of these supposed consequences of migrant immigration from Central America lead Americans from the president on down to say these people don’t deserve our help. They deserve to be despised. They deserve to have their children torn from their arms and put in inhumane conditions in holding facilities that some have called concentration cmps. Never mind that there’s little or no evidence that any of these things are true. But then, Jewish hatred of Samaritans in the first century CE wasn’t based on any meaningful facts either. Hitler’s hatred of the Jews wasn’t based on any facts either. Far too many Americans ask the wrong question about these immigrants and give unfounded answers that lead to rejection and exclusion.

Jesus wants us to ask a different question. He wants us to ask the question the Good Samaritan asked: What will happen to these people if we don’t help, if we don’t let them in? What will happen to them is horrific. They’ll be stuck in Mexico where they are subject to violence by unlawful forces there. Or they’ll be sent back to Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador, the countries they fled to escape otherwise unavoidable violence and poverty. Their hopes for a better life for their children will be crushed. They will be left in situations of desperation with no way to remove themselves from those situations.

There are bad things that will happen to those of us who are already here if we don’t let them in too, although that’s a question Jesus is much less interested in having us ask. Without undocumented laborers both the construction industry and the agriculture industry in this country would collapse. But Jesus doesn’t want us to let these children of God in because doing so might be good for us. He wants us to do it for the same reason he approved of the actions of the Good Samaritan in his great parable. He wants us to do it because it is best for the other, for the people who are the subject of our decisions not for us, the ones making the decisions. Jesus wants us to let them in because it is the right, the moral, the Christian thing to do.

Now, as is always the case in moral issues some nuance is necessary. Jesus never called on us to disregard the consequences for ourselves in our decision making. After all, in his Great Commandment that we also heard this morning he lifts up an obscure verse from Leviticus that says “love your neighbor as yourself.” That’s not a call not to love ourselves. It is a call not to love the other less than we love ourselves, but it is not a call to disregard our own selves when we act for the other. So while Jesus never commanded us not to love ourselves, he did call us to think at least as much about the welfare of others as we think about our own welfare. More specifically he called us care especially about the welfare of people in need. People beaten by robbers and left by the side of the road. People fleeing poverty and violence in their home countries and coming to us for safety and a new chance at a better life.

Folks, the way the Trump administration is handling the issue of undocumented immigration is a great shame and a disgrace to our country. It is not inaccurate to call it nothing less than fascist. So let us call on ourselves, our fellow citizens, and our government to stop asking the wrong question. To stop asking what will happen to us if we let them in. To start asking what will happen to them if we don’t. Stop being the priest and the Levite. Start being the Good Samaritan. That is our lesson for this morning. May we truly take it to heart. Amen.

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[1] Sorenson, Thomas C., Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Revised Edition, Volume Three, The New Testament, Coffee Press, Briarwood, New York, 2019, pp. 126-133.

Fascism at the Border

Fascism at the Border

In a Facebook post I recently wrote that what Donald Trump is doing at the southern border of the United States is Exhibit A in the case against him as a fascist. I want here to explain that statement. For a more in depth analysis of Trump as an American fascist see the earlier post "American Fascist" on this blog. Here's what I mean when I say that what he is doing at our border with Mexico is strong evidence of his being a fascist.

What is he doing at our southern border? He is instituting a system of terror against people who cross that border without a documented right to do so. He calls his policy "zero tolerance." It consists of a practice of detaining anyone at the border who cannot produce documents that establish the person's right to be in this country. Most horrifically it consists of tearing children away from their parents and keeping them in inhumane, unsafe conditions in detention facilities that were never designed for that purpose and are incapable of implementing it without immense suffering by the children so detained. Trump makes his intent here clear. He is trying to terrorize families into not coming here without documentation. What we have here then is a cruel policy of terror directed against a target population nominally for the purpose of controlling immigration across the Mexican border. That policy is pure fascism.

It is fascism first of all because it is so cruel. We are holding innocent children torn away from their parents in conditions in which they do not even have toothbrushes or mats to sleep on. A few of them have died. A few of them have reported sexual assault. Trump has instituted a policy of ripping families apart for his own political purposes. That is fascism pure and simple.

Trump's policy is fascist also because it is illegal. Under international law every person may freely enter a country of which that person is not a citizen for the purpose of seeking asylum. Most of the people Trump is detaining have come to the US to do just that, to seek asylum. Most of the families he has torn apart are people coming from living conditions of poverty so severe that they produce malnutrition and even starvation, They come from countries in which violence by the government and by uncontrolled gangs of thugs make ordinary life impossible and blight the futures of their children. Whether our country will grant them asylum is a question separate from the question of these people's right to seek asylum. If they have come here to seek asylum they are not here illegally, and Trump has no legal right to do to them what he does to them even if he had that right in other circumstances, which by the way he doesn't.

What Trump is doing at our southern border is fascist because it is racist. The people coming across that border are for the most part brown not white, and they speak Spanish not English as their native language. If those people were white and spoke English Trump wouldn't be doing to them what he is doing to them. Anyone who doubts that contention is insufficiently familiar with the history and present reality of American racism. That person doesn't realize the depth and the power of the racism not of all but of most people who support Trump. Trump targets the brown Spanish speakers who cross our border not because they present a real problem but because his base hates them not for what they have done but for who they are. That's fascism pure and simple.

Most of all what Trump is doing at the southern border is fascist because it is a campaign of terror directed against a target population claiming to solve a crisis that doesn't exist for the purpose not of controlling immigration but of stirring up support from his base of not exclusively but mostly ignorant, prejudiced, frightened people by pandering to their ignorance, prejudice, and fear. That's what Hitler did with the Jews. Trump isn't intentionally killing them, and I don't think that he will. He is his own kind of monster, but he is not Hitler. Not yet anyway. He is however a stereotypical fascist, and his fascism is on full display at our border with Mexico. Blaming an innocent but identifiable group of people for problems that are not of their making is a classic technique of fascists. Hitler did it with Jews. Stalin did it with people he branded "enemies of the people, the differences between Stalin's Communism and Hitler's Nazism being more in their rhetoric than in their policies. Trump is doing it with brown people who enter this country without documentation. Different people, same technique of pandering to a base of people incapable of understanding (or at least unwilling to understand) the real problems they face and the real causes of those problems. That is quite simply fascism and nothing less.

So there is no doubt that Trump is an American fascist. There's lots of proof of that contention, but if you doubt it just open your eyes to what he is doing at our southern border. His policies there are brutally cruel and both legally and morally unjustified and unjustifiable. We Americans of good faith must somehow make it stop. We will do that if we thrown Trump out of office in next year's presidential election. We would do it if Congress would impeach him and remove him from office as it is clearly their constitutional duty to do but which they clearly will not do. There is a crisis at our southern border, but it's not a crisis caused by people crossing that border from the south. It is a crisis caused by what Trump and his people are doing to them once they're here. May we all do what we can to resolve that crisis as quickly as possible.

It's Time for a (Nonviolent

It’s Time for a (Nonviolent) Uprising

It has come this far. It has come to this. The United States of America is in crisis. A substantial number of Americans have so lost their way, have become so fearful and prejudiced, that they elected Donald Trump  President of the United States. Donald Trump. A dishonest New York real estate wheeler dealer who claims to be a brilliant businessman but who loses millions of dollars and repeatedly files bankruptcy. A man who cares nothing for truth but only for what he thinks benefits him. A man who very probably either has a borderline personality disorder or who is sociopathic. He has debased our political culture with his dishonesty and his bigotry. He disparages our alliances and our allies while cozying up to murderous dictators like Kim Jong-un. He has an inexplicable affection for Vladimir Putin, the authoritarian President of the Russian Federation who no commitment to democracy and civil rights and who imprisons and even kills his political adversaries. He dummies up a crisis on our border with Mexico to work up his ignorant supporters and get them to support him though his policies harm rather than benefit them. He has instituted  brutal policies at our southern border, policies that destroy families and treat innocent children like hardened criminals. There is nothing too dishonest or too cruel from him to do. He and his Republican allies enacted a tax bill that benefits only the very wealthy and harms the rest of us. He and the corporate shills he puts in his cabinet deny the science of climate change and implement policies that make global warming worse. He accepted and even solicited the help of the Russian government in his election campaign. He attempted to commit and indeed did commit obstruction of justice in connection with the Mueller probe of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, the election that thanks to our archaic federalist system made him president though he did not win a majority of the votes. He has loaded the federal courts from top to bottom with extremist ideologues who seem to care not one whit about the wellbeing of ordinary Americans. The list of outrages from him and his administration is virtually endless. Donald Trump is an unmitigated disaster for our country and for the world. What makes matters even worse is that there is every possibility that his fanatical, unthinking supporters will reelect him next year. He has even suggested that he might refuse to leave office even if he loses that election. We must do everything we can peacefully, nonviolently, to stop Trump’s reelection. It simply cannot happen. It simply must not happen. If he loses the election we must do everything we can peacefully, nonviolently, to make sure he leaves office as the law the would demand that he do.

That being said I can’t say that I know what we can do peacefully, nonviolently, to insure Trump’s defeat at the polls next year and to make sure that if he loses he leaves. We can vote against him of course. We must vote against. Yet that doesn’t feel like nearly enough. My home state of Washington didn’t vote for him last time, and it is very unlikely to vote for him next time, so my voting against him will actually have little effect. It won’t help swing a state against him next time that voted for him last time. We can give money to his Democratic opponent, whoever that turns out to be. That’s important, for the interests that support him have already donated millions upon millions of dollars toward his reelection. Money has more power in our electoral system than people do, so certainly we must give money to his principal opponent. We can urge third-party candidates like Howard Schultz not to run, for their running will only make Trump’s reelection more likely. We can urge any friends or relatives we have in swing states to vote for the Democrat. All of that is important, and none of it feels like enough. The stakes are too high. The crisis is too deep. Perhaps nonviolent civil disobedience in an attempt to disrupt his campaign rallies would help, or at least it would make some of us feel better. We must however most of all work the hell out of the political system in an attempt to ensure his defeat in 2020. It doesn’t feel like enough, but it is at least a starting place. What more we must do beyond that is an open question. I will never urge violence. I am a Christian, and I am committed to Jesus’ teaching of creative, assertive, but always nonviolent resistance to evil. So no violence. Never. Not for any reason. Everything else is one the table. Those of us who remain committed to simple decency in American public life must rise up as one. We must do everything we can, peacefully and nonviolent, to make sure that the tragedy of Donald Trump as President of the United States ends not later than January 20, 2021. May God be with us and help us in that sacred mission.

By Justice Alone?

By Justice Alone?

I am a Christian, and the United Church of Christ is my church. I have attended churches belonging to other denominations on occasion, but I have never belonged to any church that wasn’t part of the UCC. I never will. I was ordained in the UCC in 2002. I served as pastor of a UCC church for nearly thirteen years. I’m retired now, but I still have active ordained ministerial standing in the UCC. The UCC is of course a human institution. For all her very human faults I love and appreciate the UCC and what she has given me and so many other people less privileged than me.

I thank God for my UCC, but these days I’m feeling compelled to ask: What is it about the UCC that I love and thank God for? There are several different answers to that question. I guess what I appreciate most about the UCC is the way we respect individual freedom of conscience. We do not try to dictate to people what they must believe in order to belong. We are a Christian denomination, but we don’t tell people that Christianity means only one particular thing. We are noncreedal. We don’t require people to recite the Nicene or any other creed to belong to our church. We UCC pastors, when we’re at our best at least, seek to walk with people on their spiritual journey and to help them wrestle with their questions of faith.

Closely related to our tradition of individual freedom of conscience is our polity of autonomous institutions. Yes, we now say that all of the people and institutional expressions of the church are in covenant with one another, but local church autonomy has been a feature of the UCC since its foundation (which covenant has not, at least not explicitly). Local church autonomy was the longstanding polity of the Congregationalists, and the UCC adopted it and fully embraced it. No person or institution outside any of our local churches has the right or the authority to dictate to any local church what they must believe, how they must be organized, or how they must conduct their affairs. Because of that local church autonomy many of our congregations have taken progressive positions on matters of social and economic justice that local churches in more connectional denominations have not always been able to take.

I love our deep historical roots. Yes, the UCC was formed only in 1957, but its predecessor denominations have roots that go back a lot farther than that. I grew up in the UCC’s Congregationalist predecessor denomination, and it’s the predecessor of the UCC with which I am most familiar. Congregationalism goes back to England in the sixteenth century. Congregationalists first came to North America on the Mayflower in 1620. Our history since then has hardly been free from sin. We treated Native Americans as badly as any other Euro-Americans, which is to say we treated them horribly, sinfully. We held witch trials in which charges grounded only in ignorance and misogyny were made against innocent women. We preached a strict form of Calvinism that loved to threaten people with eternal damnation if they didn’t believe the right things. For example, in 1741 the Congregationalist theologian and pastor Jonathan Edwards preached the famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” a hellfire and brimstone sermon about the dangers of false belief. We outgrew that theology a long time ago, or at least most of us did. Still, that theology is part of our history. Like all other humans and all other human institutions the UCC has a lot of which to repent.

Yet there is another side to our history. We honor individual freedom of conscience, but we also have a strong tradition of being among the first Christians to stand and speak out for justice. We take this characteristic of our being again mostly from our Congregationalist forebear. In 1785 a Congregational church ordained the first Black minister in a mostly white denomination. Many leading Abolitionists were Congregationalists. A Congregational church ordained the first woman ordained in any church since New Testament times in 1853. One of our local churches and its regional body ordained the first openly gay man to be ordained anywhere in 1973. Starting in the 1970s many of our local churches have become “Open and Affirming,” that is, they fully embrace and affirm the equal human rights and dignity of LGBTQ people and welcome them into the life and leadership of the church. These are but a few of the justice milestones of the traditions that make up the UCC. We don’t all agree about everything, but as a whole the UCC has been and is the Christian denomination most on the front lines of many different social justice movements.

For most of my life I have shared the UCC’s commitment to social justice. Being a person committed to social justice and being known as a person committed to social justice have been part of my self-identity for many, many years. The first call I ever discerned from God was for me to become active in the Open and Affirming movement in the UCC. I knew of no reason why God should be calling me to that work, but I have no doubt that God was doing precisely that. I have long believed, taught, and preached Jesus’ Gospel of creative, assertive nonviolence. I have opposed every war my country has been in since Vietnam. The UCC’s commitment to justice fits well with my own faith-based conviction.[1]

Which leads me to the reason I’m writing this essay. I have become concerned that the UCC has gone overboard in its drive to be the social justice church. I don’t mean that the UCC has taken any wrong positions on social justice issues. I mean that advocating for justice on multiple fronts has become very nearly the only thing that the UCC is about. This overemphasis of the UCC is apparent nearly every time you open the denomination’s website, ucc.org. I did that as I was writing this text. The home page of ucc.org for Wednesday, May 8, 2019, has these items. A series of screens that scroll across the top of the page deal with the UCC’s upcoming General Synod. These screens begin with an introduction to the Synod’s keynote speaker Matthew Desmond. Clicking on that screen takes you to a brief introduction to Desmond. We learn that he is the author of a book titled Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Thus the main thrust of the 2019 General Synod, the UCC’s semiannual national gathering, is one of social justice. The next screen has the headline “Summer Communities of Service,” another social justice emphasis. The third screed is notification about a Saturday night “Dinner & A Show” featuring the Choir of Trinity United Church, the UCC’s largest predominately Black congregation. The screen says: “Proceeds from the concert benefit Justice and Local Church Ministries.” Once again we see that the main theme of this year’s General Synod is one of social justice. The next screen says “Just Act.” Clicking on that page takes you to a screen with the headline “The 3 Great Loves Daily Action Calendar for Creating a Just World for All.” Again a social justice emphasis. The fourth screen says “Season Two Podcast For A Just World.” More social justice. The fifth and last screen says “Into the Mystic.” That caption doesn’t sound like the screen is necessarily about social justice. It isn’t as much about justice as the other screens. It is about a podcast by the UCC’s General Minister and President John Dorhauer. Another entry on the homepage, however, has a picture of Dorhauer with the caption “Into the Mystic: The Spiritual Practice of Earth Care.” Thus, the UCC turns even something supposedly about mysticism into something about a social justice issue, namely, caring for the earth. These items appear on the UCC homepage for May 8, 2019, but log onto ucc.org most any day and you’ll find the same emphasis. The UCC has become a denomination much more concerned with justice than it is with any other aspect of the Christian faith.

Let me say again: There’s nothing wrong with a Christian church emphasizing social justice. That’s a big part of what Jesus did. It is a big part of what God calls God’s people to do. The problem I’m having with the UCC these days is not that it preaches social justice. It is that social justice has become just about the only thing the denomination is about. Yet there’s a lot more to the Christian faith than social justice. All Christians must be committed to social justice, but all Christians have other needs that Christianity can address very effectively as well. Christianity is first of all a way that people find a connection with God and live their lives in connection with God. Christianity challenges us to do the work of peace and justice, but it also offers spiritual solace and strength in a world that to often overwhelms us with its burdens and hurts. In Christianity we know that God loves us and every other person, indeed God loves all of creation, unconditionally. In Christianity we can find hope in the face of fear, comfort in the face of grief, courage in the face of doubt, grace when we know we don’t deserve grace. The rituals and sacraments of the Christian faith inspire us and bring us peace. They connect us with our God of transcendent love. They connect us with the spiritual dimension of reality. They connect us with that which is ultimately real, that which is ultimately true. Without those gifts of the faith our spirits and our lives are shallow and flat. Without those gifts of the faith the world really will overwhelm us.

The UCC can and on occasion does bring her people all of these gifts of faith, but sometimes it seems like they get overshadowed by our commitment to social justice. One reason that that happening is a problem is because one of the great truths of the faith is that unless our work for peace and justice is firmly grounded in our faith we have no chance of doing it effectively or for the long term. Jesus says I am the vine, you are the branches. John 15:5. If we as the branches lose our intimate connection with Jesus Christ and God as the vine we can do nothing, as Jesus also says. We Christians need the support of the church if we are to establish and maintain that intimate connection. We need to be guided in prayer. We need help with discerning God’s will for our lives. We need the water of baptism and the sacred food of the Eucharist if we are truly to be Christians. We need all of the gifts of the Spirit, not just a commitment to social justice. The UCC could do a much better job than it usually does of offering us everything we need from our faith. I pray that she will begin to do that soon.

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[1] There is one thing lacking in the UCC’s peace and justice commitments, namely, an express commitment to Jesus’ way of nonviolence. Most of my UCC clergy colleagues are committed to nonviolence, but the denomination has never formally renounced all violence. The UCC is not one of the historic peace churches. I wish it were.