Introduction to a New Book

This is the draft introduction to a book I have begun writing with the working title "The Principles of Progressive Christianity. I'd appreciate any comments you might have.

Introduction

(c) Thomas Calnan Sorenson, 2018. All rights reserved.

It may seem a strange way to begin a theology book, but let me tell you a little bit about myself. Why I want to start that way will, I trust, become clear shortly. I began life as a premature twin who wasn’t supposed to live through my first night. I’m seventy-one years old now, so I guess I beat that prediction by a good bit. Still, I grew up a skinny, uncoordinated, unathletic, quite mousy and meek boy. My story here sounds a bit trite I suppose, since I’m hardly the only one to have lived it, but it is true nonetheless. I was always the last kid chosen for the grade school sports teams. I was an easy mark for bullies. Once when I was in about the fourth grade some bullies stopped me as I was walking home from school, harassed me verbally, and wouldn’t let me keep walking. Once when I was in high school I came out of a neighborhood convenience store and some bullies blocked my way, berating me and not letting me go on my way home. I was never cool. I was never “in.” I was never very good at anything at least until I got to college, where all of a sudden I became a pretty good student. I never felt fully accepted anywhere but at home. I’m straight, but I didn’t have a girlfriend until I was well into my twenties. Even being a good college student made me a bit of an outsider with the small circle of friends and roommates I did develop there. I was the brainiac, not the party guy, not the fun guy, not the popular guy. I was a weakling, a nerd, a geek, and in my own mind at least always an outsider.

So why do I begin a book on the principles of progressive Christianity with that bit of biographical background? Because progressive Christianity is about, among other things, justice, and I have long had a passion for justice. I have long taught and preached that Christianity is about transforming the world from its typical worldly ways, the ways of violence, exploitation, hatred, and war, to the ways of God as taught by Jesus Christ, the ways of nonviolence, justice, love, and peace. My parishioners have known me as having a passion for justice. My clergy colleagues know me as having a passion for justice. And in my later years of life I have come to understand the connection between that passion and my perhaps not atypical but certainly unpleasant childhood and young adult years. I am passionate about justice because I have felt the injustice of the bullies who picked on me when I was young. I am passionate about justice because I have felt the isolation of being the outsider, of not being accepted or at least not feeling accepted. And I am passionate about justice because I am a Christian. 

I have just about every kind of privilege it is possible for an American to have. I’m male, white, straight, reasonably able-bodied, Christian, not wealthy but not poor either, very highly educated, respected by most who know me, looked to by some as a teacher and maybe even as a prophet. Yet I know at least a little of what it is to be none of those things for the reasons I just stated above. Even my twin brother, who was always bigger than I was, picked on me sometimes. I knew then and remember now what it is to be vulnerable, never to know when the tough guys were going to bully me. I know what it is to feel unaccepted and unacceptable. I don’t claim to know what it is to be Black in America, or gay, transgender, poor, female, or undocumented. I’ve never been any of those things, but I know at least something of what it is to be the outsider, to be unaccepted. So I stand for justice. I argue for justice. I get angry at all the injustice that is always afoot in the world, and I tie my Christian faith to Jesus’ demands for justice. To Jesus’ rejection of all prejudice. To Jesus’ inclusion of the excluded. How I see Christianity as entailing all of these things will, I trust, become apparent in the pages that follow. 

Here’s another relevant thing about me. At least since I began seminary at age fifty-one I have been accused of living way too much in my head. I readily admit that I do, although I know that there is an emotional and even a sentimental side of me that isn’t always as apparent to others as is the intellectual side. Why do I live so much in my head? Perhaps I’m just built that way, but I suspect that it is because academics was the first thing I was ever any good at. If academics is what you’re good at, you spend most of your time being academic. You approach subjects, issues, maybe even life itself as an academic exercise, and academics is head work. So what follows here is theology. It is head work. That’s what I write mostly. Head work. So be it. 

Yet the head work of theology matters. How we think about God, about Jesus Christ, and the Bible matters. Elizabeth Johnson, the great Catholic feminist theologian, says the God image functions. It works in the world. It determines a lot of things, including what is good and what is bad, what is true and what is false, what is normal and what is abnormal, what is beautiful and what is ugly. I write theology because I love theology, but I also write theology because theology matters. It really matters in the world whether we see Christianity as progressive or conservative; and, by the way, I am convinced that the phrase “conservative Christianity” is an oxymoron. So here I go again into another piece of head work. Yet what I say here really matters. If Christianity can’t free itself from the straitjacket in which conservative faith tries to constrain the faith it will die; and in that case, die it should. 

At the end of 2017 I retired from parish ministry. I resigned as pastor of the First Congregational Church of Maltby and entered into what in my local Conference of the United Church of Christ, in which I hold ordained ministerial standing, we call active retirement.[1] The Rev. Kimbrough Besheer, LMHC, the Jungian analyst and retired Episcopal priest whom I have seen regularly for the last twenty years as my therapist, told me once as I neared retirement that he wants me to be a voice of progressive Christianity in my retirement, a voice that he says isn’t heard at all or at least not nearly enough today.  (About the voice of progressive Christianity not being heard enough today at least he is right.) Kimbrough says he can’t think of anyone better able to be that voice than me. As flattering as that statement of his is, I don’t know that I will ever be such a voice. Yet shortly before I retired at a meeting of the West-side Committee on Ministry of the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Church of Christ on which I serve the Rev. Catherine Foote, doing our devotions, read something from a book that leaped out at me. I don’t recall the title or author of the book, and most of what she read didn’t mean much to me. There was however that one line that jumped out. Catherine read: “Make your limitations part of your story not an obstacle to your story.” At least, that’s how I recorded the line in my notes that day. My limitations are many, and they prominently include the utter inability to be a self-promoter. When I say I doubt that I will ever be the voice of progressive Christianity that my Jungian analyst wants me to be it’s not because I don’t think I have a voice that deserves to be heard. It’s because the voices that get heard are for the most part the voices of self promoters. I am not and never will be a self-promoter. I’m too introverted for that. I may be too insecure for that. I wouldn’t know how to do it even if I wanted to. Yet for all that I do have things to say. I am a lousy self-promoter, but I am a good theologian and a decent writer. I will make my limitations as a self-promoter part of my story not a limitation to my story. I won’t let my shortcomings in promotion stop me from using my gifts as a theologian and writer though the audience I reach may be small. One way or another as I retire from parish ministry I will be a voice for progressive Christianity in our current disturbing, even appalling, American context. 

Perhaps a few brief stories from my time as a parish pastor will illustrate why we must transform Christianity back into the progressive faith that it really is, why we must help Christianity rediscover its true self. Sadly, for most people both inside the church and outside it, Christianity isn’t progressive at all. In other words, they don’t get what Christianity really is. As a progressive Christian pastor in conservative communities I have accumulated several stories that at least show what we progressive Christians are up against. So here, for what they’re worth, are a few of those stories. 

At times during my career as a parish pastor it was my practice most every Friday or Saturday to send out an email to the members of the church I was serving telling them a little bit about what would be happening at the church on the coming Sunday. Once I said in such an email that I was going to disagree with some Gospel text or other because I think it reflects first century anti-Jewish prejudice rather than any kind of divine truth. Right before that service one of my congregants, a good man who served as the church’s treasurer, told me he would like a couple of minutes after my sermon to say a few words. I should perhaps have put him off, but I didn’t. Maybe I didn’t because I knew, though the congregation didn’t, that I had already decided to resign my position as pastor of that church. Whatever the reason, I said OK. After I finished my sermon I recognized him, and he stood to speak. He said that every word of the Bible was inspired and that therefore we had to find truth in every part of it. At least, that’s what I remember him saying. I didn’t argue with him though I strongly disagree with his statement. I did respond by telling the congregation that I was about to resign as their pastor.

In 2017 during Advent I was leading the worship service at the church I was serving at the time. During the time for the prayers of the people a woman who I always called (to myself, not publicly) my Fundamentalist offered a prayer that people remember what Christmas is really about and that it isn’t about shopping and gifts and all the cultural falderal that we surround it with. Up to that point I couldn’t have agreed with her more, but then she said what Christmas is all about for her. Indeed, I suspect that what she said sums up pretty well what the whole Christian faith is about for her. She said Christmas means that “he came down so we could go up.” Over the years I had gotten pretty good at finessing prayer concerns that included statements I didn’t want to affirm as I repeated them for the congregation, and I guess I handled this one well enough. Trust me, Christianity is not about “he came down so we could go up.” That widespread understanding is both hopelessly simplistic and totally misunderstands what the Gospels tell us about Jesus.

Once when I was leading a worship service I was disagreeing with a Gospel text that had Jesus saying somehow that belief in him is the only way to be in good with God. It was probably from the Gospel of John, where Jesus says lots of things that sound like that. A couple of people I didn’t know were visiting that Sunday. They were sitting in a back pew near the front door of the church. One of those folks, a woman, stood up, shouted “You’re wrong!” and walked out. Other visitors to that same church on a different Sunday when I was saying that Jesus isn’t the only way to God approached me after the service and asked me if I really thought Jesus hadn’t said that he was the only way to God. I said yes, I don’t think he ever said that. One of the visitors replied “that really troubles us.” I was relieved to see in the church’s guest book that they were from out of town and wouldn’t have been back in any event.

The first church I served as pastor became what we call Open and Affirming early in my time with them, and our being Open and Affirming, that is, our fully accepting gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people as worthy and fully equal children of God, got splashed all over the front page of the weekly newspaper in the little town that church is in. A woman I knew in the town to be a Pentecostal minister called and said she wanted to come see me. I didn’t find that request surprising because I was serving on the board of a community organization she had organized. We held our board meetings at my church. I knew there was trouble, though, when she walked into my office with little bits of Post-it notes sticking out of the Bible she was carrying. She apparently thought that I must not have been aware of the places in the Bible where conservatives say, mistakenly, that God condemns homosexuality. I assured her that I was well aware of those passages and still believed that God loves and accepts LGBT folks on the same terms as God loves and accepts straight folks. Our relationship ended shortly thereafter when she asked the members of the board to suggest places we could meet other than at the church I was serving.

I knew another minister in town when our acceptance of gay people got splashed all over the local newspaper. He was a very conservative Spanish-speaking pastor of a Baptist church of some sort. He called and said he wanted to come see me. Of course he wanted to talk about our heretical position of not hating gay people. He kept asking: Do you really believe what the paper said you believe? I said that the paper had gotten a couple of minor details wrong but that on the whole yes, I believed what the paper said I believed. He couldn’t actually believe that I, a Christian pastor, could believe such a thing. I suggested that he read Marcus Borg’s The Heart of Christianity, which was a fairly new book at the time, if he wanted to understand how I see the faith.[2] He said that he would and would get back to me; but as he left my office he said: “Until then I can have no more contact with you because I consider your position to be apostate.” I never heard from him again. I’d never been called apostate before. Apostate means abandoning some religious belief, principle, or tradition. It applies historically to people who were once Christian who renounced their Christian faith, often when threatened with persecution or martyrdom because of it. I certainly hadn’t been aware that to be Christian you have to hate gay people. I’m still not.

After that local news story came out the phone rang in my office one day. I made the mistake of answering it. The caller identified herself as a Christian who lived in a nearby town. She said: How can you call yourself a Christian pastor if you believe those things? To her, it seems, you couldn’t be a Christian if you didn’t hate gay people. She spouted Leviticus 18:22 at me, the verse that calls lying with a man as with a woman an abomination.[3] I asked her if she ever wore clothing made of mixed fibers, say a cotton wool blend. She allowed as how she did. I told her Leviticus prohibits that too. See Leviticus 19:19. She said “It does?” I assured her that it does, and I must give this woman her due. She said that if it does prohibit that, then probably we shouldn’t do it. 

Allow me just one more story about that church becoming Open and Affirming. I knew the pastor of a conservative church across the street from my UCC church. He is a good man. He has served as chaplain for the town’s police department for many years, and he was a wheel in the town’s pastors association to which I nominally belonged but had never had anything to do with. He told me that he and the pastor of the largest conservative evangelical church in town, who was also the head of the pastors association, wanted to see me. We met the Monday after Easter. I expected my church and me to be thrown out of that association, so I asked a lay member of my church to come with me to that meeting. I thought that if we were going to be thrown out of the only pastors association in town, I wanted my people to hear it from someone other than me or at least in addition to me. We weren’t thrown out of the association, but a couple of interesting things happened during that meeting. These two ministers wanted to know if I had preached Jesus’ resurrection the day before, on Easter. I assured them that I had, twice. I didn’t bother to tell them that I probably understand the resurrection much differently than they do. I didn’t think there was any point in doing that. During that meeting I explained that modern science understands human sexuality much differently than the ancient world did, that the worlds of the Bible had no understanding of homosexuality as a naturally occurring variety of human sexuality. The fellow who was the lead pastor of the big conservative evangelical church responded: “Yes, but the problem with applying your sociological understandings (sic) to the Bible is that then you don’t know what to take literally.” I allowed as how that was true. I didn’t explain that while he tries to solve the problem by taking it all literally, I solve it by taking none of it literally.[4] Again, I didn’t think there was any point in doing that. 

All of these stories illustrate a central truth about Christianity in our world today. In our context today most people are ignorant of true Christianity. They think that “evangelical Christianity” is true Christianity. It isn’t. They think that Christians vote for Donald Trump and other politicians of his ilk. Most of us Christians don’t. Even many people who attend Christian churches and have done so all their lives think Fundamentalism is the true old time religion. It isn’t.[5] A great many people would agree with that person I mentioned who summed up the meaning of Christianity as being “Jesus came down so we could go up.” That is most definitely not what Christianity is mostly about. It is however what most of the Christian church since the fourth century CE has succeeded in convincing people that Christianity is mostly about. The understanding of Christianity as being about what we have to do and believe and not do and not belief so that our eternal souls will go to a blissful eternity in heaven after we die is a gross distortion of biblical faith. Ancient Judaism, the original biblical faith and the originating faith of Christianity, did not believe in an afterlife that involved judgment and either eternal bliss or eternal agony at all. It hardly believed in a human soul at all, only that we all end up in some place of a sort of shadowy pseudo-existence called Sheol, often translated as “the Pit.” 

Christianity grew out of that ancient Judaism (as indeed did today’s rabbinical Jewish faith at essentially the same time). The earliest Christians believed in an afterlife that involved judgment, but it wasn’t an afterlife of an eternal soul. Rather, it entailed bodily resurrection at the end time here on earth. It is not clear whether Jesus shared that belief, though he may have. It is clear that it was not what his life and teaching were primarily about. It is not what today’s progressive Christianity is primarily about either. So just what is today’s progressive Christianity about? What are its principles? What follows is an attempt to state in relatively condensed form what those principles are. 

Progressive Christianity is true Christianity. Progressive Christianity is the old-time religion, though original Christianity wasn’t just progressive, it was revolutionary—nonviolently revolutionary. Jesus of Nazareth, the one most Christians confess to be God Incarnate and to be the world’s Lord and Savior, preached a radical overturning of the ways of his world—and ours. He called that overturning the kingdom of God. Today we don’t much like his use of the word “kingdom,” for it is too male exclusive and domination centered for our liking. Many progressive Christians today replace Jesus’ word kingdom with words like realm or, one I really don’t like, “kindom.” I don’t like “kindom” because it is entirely too cutesy for my taste, and it isn’t really a word; but I suppose it is preferable to kingdom in today’s world. In what follows I will use realm of God rather than kingdom of God. I think that phrase conveys Jesus’ meaning to people today without the negative connotations of kingdom.

The important point, however, is what Jesus meant when he said realm (literally kingdom) of God. He meant a world turned on its head. In the realm of God the last are first and the first are last. The poor are blessed and the rich are sent away empty. The meek shall inherit the earth, and the peacemakers are the children of God. Enemies are loved and prayed for, and all violence is rejected. The transformation of the world comes not through violence either human or divine but through the transformation of human hearts and minds one person at a time. In the realm of God the highest value is justice, and justice means not due process but real care about and care for the poor and the marginalized. All are equal, and no one is judged or rejected because of any aspect of her or his God-given humanity. The principles of progressive Christianity which follow are grounded primarily in Jesus’ teaching of the realm of God.

One criticism that is often leveled against progressive Christians both by conservative Christians and by progressive Christians themselves is that progressive Christians can easily state what they are against but have a hard time explaining what they are for. There is significant truth in this criticism. One purpose of the principles which follow is to state concisely and precisely what progressive Christians stand for. These are of course my principles of progressive Christianity. Progressive Christianity does not insist that everyone believe the same thing. Some, perhaps many, progressive Christians will disagree with the inclusion of some of these principles and will wish that others that are not included here had been. So be it. The acceptance of diversity of opinion as well as diversity of people is one of progressive Christianity’s primary virtues.

Finally, before I begin setting forth the principles of progressive Christianity it is, I suppose, incumbent on me at least to attempt to define progressive Christianity. Anything close to a full understanding of progressive Christianity will come from studying its principles, yet we should have some common understanding of what we’re talking about when we talk about progressive Christianity before we begin. There are, obviously, two words in the phrase progressive Christianity. They both deserve definition. Christianity is perhaps the easier of the two to define. Christianity is the conviction of the reality of a transcendent, spiritual dimension of being that we call God experienced through Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ, that is, as God’s Anointed One, come to reveal to humanity as much of the nature of God as humans are capable of comprehending. It is a decision and commitment by a person to live her or his relationship with God through the myths, symbols, and rituals of the Christian tradition. It is a commitment of the entire person, body, mind, heart, and spirit. It is not an uncritical commitment precisely because it includes commitment of the mind with all of its God-given capacities, including the capacity to critique, analyze, and change.

The word “progressive” is harder to define in the context of progressive Christianity. One of the difficulties in defining progressive in this context is that one tends to start by saying what it is not, thereby running the risk of falling into the shortcoming of much progressive Christianity I mentioned above that I’m trying to avoid here. I’ll run that risk. Progressive Christianity is not conservative Christianity. It is not conservative evangelical Christianity. It is most definitely not Fundamentalist Christianity. To turn to what progressive Christianity is, it is a Christianity that emphasizes Jesus’ teaching of personal and social transformation rather than personal salvation understood in any other way. It is a Christianity that seeks to recover, build on, and live into Jesus’ teachings about the realm of God. It is a Christianity that takes the Bible and other ancient sources of the faith seriously but understands them as human documents that we must study carefully and in depth if we are properly to understand them. We are then free to accept or reject them as we see fit. It is a Christianity that looks toward a transformation of the earth away from the earth’s usual violent, oppressive, and materialistic ways to the nonviolent, liberating, and spiritual ways of God as found in Jesus’ teachings on the realm of God and in the way he lived it during his lifetime. It is, in short, a Christianity that dreams of and works toward the world transformed into that realm of God. It intends its word progressive as the opposite of conservative. It dreams of a world progressing toward the ways of peace and justice, indeed, to borrow from Borg and Crossan, a world progressing toward peace through justice. 

Yet progressive Christianity is one more thing. It is original Christianity. It is Christianity focused on Jesus’ teachings of peace and justice, that is, on the things Jesus cared about most. It is in some ways Christianity before Christianity. It is Christianity as it was before the Constantinian establishment that so changed the faith and distorted it away from the teachings of Jesus. It is Christianity that focuses on this life and is content to leave the next life up to God. It is Christianity that can save the world. It is Christianity that can save itself from the straitjackets of literalism and otherworldliness in which it is so confined today but from which it is at least beginning to free itself. If Christianity has a future, which by the way is something that isn’t at all obvious, it will a progressive one. The better we understand progressive Christianity the better we will be able to bring our great faith to that promising future.

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[1]          The First Congregational Church of Maltby is not a UCC church. It is a member of the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches. I served it under an arrangement with the Pacific Northwest Conference of the UCC that maintained my UCC standing while I served that non-UCC church.

^[2]              I would have suggested that he read my Liberating Christianity, but I hadn’t written it yet. See the list of my other works at the beginning of this one for the cite to this book.

^[3]              This verse does not actually condemn homosexuality. The world from which that verse comes knew nothing of homosexuality as a naturally occurring variety of human sexuality, so it can’t have condemned that understanding.

[4]              For a discussion of the nature of the language of faith see Liberating Christianity, Chapter Three.

[5]              Fundamentalism dates from the early twentieth century, when some conservative Christians published a series of pamphlets titled “The Fundamentals.” In its inception Fundamentalism was, and remains, a reactionary movement resisting the work of the higher biblical criticism of the nineteenth century and the then relatively new science of evolutionary biology. It is not old time religion. It is modernist reactionary religion.

Living on the Outside

Living on the Outside

I live on the outside. I am a 5 on the Enneagram. That means, among other things, that I am the outsider. I know the Enneagram is right about that. For my entire life I’ve felt like the outsider in nearly every environment I’ve ever been in. My natural inclination is to stand on the outside of things and observe. I observe and analyze far more than I participate. Maybe that’s why I enjoy photography. The photographer is an observer of scenes not a participant in them. I don’t know why that’s how it is with me, it just is. It’s an important part of who I am and of who I’ve always been. I’ve always felt myself to be an outsider, but today in the land of my birth I feel more the outsider than ever. In recent days I’ve found myself wondering how I ever ended up living my life in a country with which I am so out of touch. To use Myers-Briggs terminology for my condition, I’m an INFP in an ESTJ culture. I’m pretty much the opposite of what most of American culture is. I guess that’s always been true, but today it feels more true than ever. Here are some of the ways that dominant American culture and I just don’t fit:

1. I value spiritual things over material things. I know that money can’t buy happiness. It can’t preserve youth. It can’t prevent death. The dominant American culture of which I am a part is all about making money. That old saying “the business of America is business” is true, and I am no kind of businessman. I don’t value commercial virtues. I can’t sell anything, and I don’t want to. Yet in my culture I cannot avoid being bombarded by SELL SELL SELL.  It drives me nuts. The mute button on my TV remote helps, but of course it can’t block out the selling altogether. In advertising I don’t typically see useful information, I see people trying to get my money to benefit them not me. The commercial world turns me off. I’ve always thought of business as what you do when you can’t do anything else, anything more worthwhile, like practice a profession (and contemporary usage to the contrary notwithstanding business is not a profession), like be a doctor, or a teacher, or a pastor. Spirituality has to do with relationships, and in true spirituality the other in your relationship, be it God, or a spouse, or a child, or frankly anyone else, is more important than you are. Spirituality is about losing yourself in relationship. American culture is about aggrandizing yourself at the expense of others. I suppose that’s a kind of relationship too, but it is relationship that doesn’t value relationship. It only values the self.

I left the practice of law, which was well on its way to killing me, to go to seminary and become a small church Christian pastor. To my culture that move makes no sense at all. Law is prestigious, ministry isn’t. You make a lot of money in law, or at least you can. Small church pastors barely make enough to live on. Lawyers make headlines, pastors don’t unless they’ve done something monumentally stupid like damning gay people or predicting the end of the world or are saints of the faith like Martin Luther King, Jr. Being a lawyer led me to burn out and depression. Being a pastor led to deep personal satisfaction and a sense of fulfillment, and to my culture that’s just wrong. It should work the other way around. For me it didn’t.

2. I’m an intellectual in an anti-intellectual culture. I’m far from the most erudite person in the world. I’m not even the most erudite person I know. But I have always valued and to some extent pursued the life of the mind. I have more advanced degrees than I know what to do with—Ph.D., JD, M.Div. I know that ideas matter. I know that how we act is grounded in how we think. I know that cultures change from the top down. I’ve often said that in 1637 Rene Descartes said “Je pense, donc je suis,” I think, therefore I am, and the world hasn’t been the same since. That’s how culture operates. Some lone person sitting at a desk somewhere has some new insight, expresses it, and over the following centuries it changes the world.

My culture is anti-intellectual. It thinks generals are more important than philosophers. It doesn’t just not care about ideas, it is deeply suspicious of people who have ideas and who think ideas matter. At best it dismisses them because it doesn’t want to deal with them. At worst it attacks them and their ideas because those ideas are new and challenge the culture’s long-held beliefs and prejudices. Just look at who we made president in 2016. Donald Trump is the least intellectual president we have perhaps ever had. He doesn’t think, he reacts. He has no guiding ideas, no concepts that ground his actions and give them form and direction. He has no time for people who think. In his disdain for the workings of the mind he reflects the anti-intellectualism of the people who elected him. He is a symptom of the unthinking nature of mass American culture, and we are the worse off for having elected him to the highest office in our land. Yet I shouldn’t be surprised that we did that. Trump is symptom not cause. He is a symptom of a lot of things about America, its anti-intellectualism being prime among them.

3. I teach and practice Christian nonviolence in a violence mad culture. American culture is the most violence prone mass culture of any so-called advanced nation in the world today. We solve problems by shooting at them. When gun violence kills our school children we say put more guns in schools. We maintain an enormous military that devours an absurdly large amount of our national budget and keeps us from doing many far more constructive things. We say everyone in the military is a hero whether they have done anything heroic or not. We don’t call teachers, nurses, pastors, musicians, or artists heroes, though they contribute to life in far more constructive ways than the military does, or at least some of them do. Even our progressive Christians are loath to list nonviolence as one of their values or commitments. The Phoenix Affirmations, for example, don’t mention nonviolence as a central precept. Yet there simply is no doubt that Jesus, the one we Christians supposedly follow, taught and lived radical nonviolence. Not passivity but nonviolence, which isn’t the same thing. When I preach nonviolence I’m called unrealistic. I’m told nonviolence doesn’t work, never mind that in my lifetime it ended British rule in India and apartheid in South Africa. Our country is grounded in violence, violence against the British, Native Americans, Mexico, and Black Americans from slavery on among others. We are a frontier culture that worships the gun. Our popular entertainment consists almost entirely of different versions of the myth of redemptive violence.[1] So does our foreign policy. My commitment to nonviolence perhaps more than anything else about me puts me outside the American mainstream.

So I am an outsider in my own country. I don’t fit. Most of what I see of dominant American culture repulses me. I value the spiritual over the material, the intellectual over the unthinking, and nonviolence over violence. My culture’s values are the reverse of mine. Well, so be it. I’m not going to change American culture, and I sure can’t change the history that gave rise to that culture. I’m never going to fit in, so perhaps I need to stop letting that truth irritate me as much as it does and look at the matter a different way. See, there is a crucial role for the outsider in any culture. The outsider is the only one who can truly critique a culture. Every culture needs outsiders who are willing and able to call it on its failings. Who are willing and able to see through its defenses and its self-delusions to its true essence and to name that essence for what it really is. Who can identify its myths and see through them to its real identity. Who can and will identify those myths as the idolatry that they truly are. I think that’s actually what I’ve been doing for a long time. My audience is small, nearly nonexistent actually. Again, so be it. I’ll keep writing. I’ll keep posting essays on my blog. They will continue to be the essays of an outsider in American culture. Perhaps they will serve some useful purpose precisely because come from where I live, on the outside.

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[1] If you don’t know what the myth of redemptive violence is read The Powers That Be by the late Walter Wink.

Reflections on Billy Graham

Reflections on Billy Graham

Billy Graham died, and we are loath to say anything negative about the dead. Yet for me Billy Graham was a negative factor in American Christianity. Yes, he perhaps attracted a great many people to faith, but it was attraction to a version of the faith that is largely negative and whose day has come and gone. Here are some of the things about Graham’s faith that I find negative at best and destructive at worst.

His Christianity was fear based Christianity. He saw humans as hopeless sinners and God as a stern judge who would eternally punish sinners who did not repent and turn to Jesus. Fear based religion has its power I suppose, but it is based on a misunderstanding of grace and draws people to the faith for the wrong reasons. It has people fear God not love God, or at least it has them fear God first and love God only for overcoming their fear. Graham’s faith was mostly about a supposed afterlife rather than being about this life. Fear based faith always is. Graham didn’t get it that because God is a God of universal grace no one ever need fear for their soul’s eternal fate. Graham didn’t get it that Jesus didn’t come to save souls in an afterlife, he came to teach us God’s ways for this life. Like all fear based faith, Graham’s Christianity was ego centered and selfish. It was about personal individual salvation, not about remaking the world. The world is moving beyond fear based faith. Graham never did.

He was a Biblicist of the first order, that is, he thought of the Bible as the literal, inerrant words of God. I have written extensively against Biblicism elsewhere, so I won’t go into detail about it here. Suffice it to say that belief that God wrote the Bible is simply untenable. The Bible contains far too many impossible things and far too many contradictions for it to be God’s work. Moreover, seeing the Bible as God’s words rather than human words locks ancient cultural understanding and prejudices in as divine truth, which they most definitely are not. Graham may have drawn lots of people to the Bible, but he drew them an understanding of the Bible that will not hold up and that the world and the Christian faith are already moving far beyond.

He never got over condemning gay people. His condemnation of LGBT people is of course grounded in or at least buttressed by his Biblicism. He was technically correct when he said that the Bible speaks of homosexual acts negatively every time it mentions them at all. What he never understood is that while the Bible has a very few passages that mention homosexual acts, it says nothing about homosexuality. The ancient world from which the Bible comes had no understanding of homosexuality as a naturally occurring variety of human sexuality. Thus it says nothing about our contemporary understanding of homosexuality. Graham perpetuated Christian bigotry against LBGT people. He could and should have known better.

He was an anti-Roman Catholic bigot. He opposed the election of John F. Kennedy to the presidency precisely because Kennedy was Catholic. American Evangelicals have long harbored misunderstandings of and prejudices against the Roman Catholic Church and people who find their connection with God within its teachings and practices. Graham reinforced those misunderstandings and prejudices by repeating them to enormous audiences. He did Christianity and the world at large no favors with his preaching of anti-Catholic bias.

He probably wasn’t a racist, or at least he outgrew his native southern racism. He did however harbor prejudice against Jews. He engaged in anti-Jewish banter with Richard Nixon in the White House. When Nixon’s man Haldeman said publicly that Graham had done so, Graham denied it. Then the Nixon tapes came out, and everyone could hear him doing it. Being a bigot is bad. Being a hypocrite about it only makes it worse.

He was in bed with secular power. He loved associating with American presidents, especially Richard Nixon. He didn’t get it that Christianity when properly understood is radically anti-imperial. Late in life he said he regretted having been as political as he was in his ministry. There are several things wrong with that statement. First of all, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is precisely political. It is about how we live together in human community, and that makes it political. Graham wasn’t wrong for being political, he was wrong for advocating the wrong politics. I’ve read that he was a registered Democrat, but he supported conservative political positions over progressive ones. He seems to have loved being associated with men in power, and he never called them to repent of oppressive, violent political opinions and acts.

He could be a blind fool, as when he said there was no religious persecution in the Soviet Union. In 1984 a Soviet front organization invited Graham to preach in the USSR. He accepted. While he was there the Soviets pulled the wool over his eyes about the reality of religious persecution in that country. They showed him a Potemkin village Baptist church in Moscow that the Soviets used as a show piece to deny that they oppressed religion. Graham bought it. He didn’t understand how Soviet propaganda worked, setting up show pieces to prove to the world the exact opposite of Soviet reality. He said there was no religious persecution in the Soviet Union. About that he was just flat wrong, and it wouldn’t have been at all hard for him to discover the truth about religious persecution in Communist Russia. He didn’t bother. He bought what the Soviets sold him. In buying what the Soviets sold him he was nothing but a fool

He raised a son, Franklin, who is a flat out bigot. Billy Graham was bad on social issues, but his son Franklin is far worse. Franklin takes things like his father’s anti-Semitism and carries them to the extreme. We can assume that Franklin learned his bigotry from his father. No, you can’t always blame the parents for the sins of the children, but there is a direct line from Billy’s failing to Franklin’s religion of hatred.

So I guess you’ll have to excuse me. I see virtually nothing positive in Billy Graham. Like I said, he may have drawn lots of people to the faith; but he drew them to a literalistic Evangelical faith that will kill Christianity if we can’t move beyond it. So I pray for peace for his family in his passing. I do not mourn the passing of a hero. Billy Graham was nothing of the sort.

Symptom Trump

Symptom Trump

Ever since the 2016 presidential election I have been asking myself: How could it have happened? How could this country have made the utterly unqualified, incompetent, American fascist Donald Trump president? On its face it doesn’t make a lick of sense. Sure. We’ve elected bad presidents before. We elected George W. Bush twice, and he was simply awful. We elected Ronald Reagan twice, and he was just as bad. We don’t have a great track record when it comes to electing presidents. But Donald Trump? Really? They don’t get worse than that. True, he didn’t win a majority of the popular vote; but our presidential elections don’t depend on the popular vote. They depend on the electoral college vote, and Trump isn’t the first candidate to win the electoral college with a minority of the popular vote. Enough Americans voted for him in enough states that he won the electoral college, and that’s what made him president. How could it happen? There’s got to be an explanation somewhere. Bizarre, dangerous electoral results like this one don’t come out of nowhere. So where did this one come from? I have been wrestling with that question since Trump’s unexpected victory in November, 2016. I want here to work through what I think is a possible explanation of Trump’s disastrous victory.

The explanation begins with the realization that the United States of America is an empire. European settlement of North America was an act of people from European empires—Spanish, French, British, and others. So we European Americans got our start here as a manifestation of empire. The nations of the Americas, including the United States, were once colonies of empires. Our European American ancestors may have rebelled against their colonial status, but they never rebelled against the concept empire. Instead they adopted it, or at least we white people of the United States did. The American nation spread across the North American continent through a series of imperial acquisitions. We bought the Louisiana territory from the French empire. We conquered much of the west through wars against Mexico. Those were imperial wars of expansion. We competed with the British Empire for control of the northwest and nearly went to war with it over the slogan “54'40" or fight.” We bought Alaska from the Russian Empire. The American empire took land that belonged to someone else, namely, the Native Americans. Taking other people’s land is a hallmark of empire. Then we expanded our empire beyond the limits of the North American continent. We colonized Hawaii and other Pacific islands. We took control of Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The basic nature of the United States has been imperial from its very beginning.

After World War II we became not just an empire but the dominant world empire. We engaged in a protracted struggle with another major world empire, the Soviet Union, for control of the whole world. We call that struggle the Cold War, but it wasn’t always cold. We fought the Soviets or their surrogates militarily in Korea and Vietnam. We very nearly got into a nuclear war with them in October, 1962, over the Soviet empire’s desire to strengthen its position in Cuba and threaten our empire with their nuclear missiles. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and we became essentially the only world empire. Yes, there were other powerful countries, China chief among them. Yet none of them had the worldwide political and economic power that the United States had. We had fought our major imperial rival and had won. We were on top of the world, or so we thought.

We were the dominant world empire, but here’s the thing about empires. They always collapse and fall. Every empire there has ever been has done it. Some have been conquered by other empires. Think of the Aztecs and the Incas conquered by the Spanish for example, or the Persians conquered by Alexander the Great. Some fell because they they were attacked from without and decayed from within. Rome is the best example here. Some declined because their overseas colonies wised up and demanded and fought for independence. Here think of Great Britain as a good example. Empires decline and fall in various ways, but they all decline and fall.

When they do, bad things often happen within them as people fight back against decline and fall. Rome was attacked from without by the Huns and others, but it also decayed from within. The government lost control of the provinces. What had been the most powerful military in the world was no longer able to fight off supposedly less civilized peoples from the north and elsewhere. As Rome was attacked Christianity abandoned Jesus’ commitment to nonviolence, thereby betraying him and one of his central teachings. Empires always think they will last forever. Hitler called the Third Reich (which means the Third Empire) the “thousand year Reich.” There has never been anything remotely like an empire that lasted a thousand years. Rome lasted maybe six hundred, which is a very long time for an empire to survive. Most last a matter of a few centuries or less. Some, like Hitler’s, last only a few years. Empires decline and fall in many different ways, but they all decline and fall.

The American empire has clearly entered its declining phase. We arrogate to ourselves the role of policeman to the world, but we are a hopelessly ineffective policeman. We choose which bad guys we’re going to go after. Most recently we’ve chosen Iraq, Afghanistan, and various expressions of Islamist terrorism. We’ve been fighting in Afghanistan for over fifteen years with no end in sight. Our invasion of Iraq, which clearly violated international law, produced only chaos and destruction and led directly to the rise of ISIS. We’ve been able to do nothing to stop the horrendous civil war in Syria. If anything our halfhearted military efforts there only make things worse. We and other nations have perhaps stopped Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, but we sure haven’t been able to stop North Korea from getting them. We did nothing to stop genocide in Cambodia or Rwanda, I suppose because we didn’t see our imperial status challenged by the regimes that conducted it in those countries. We project our imperial military power all over the world, and it truly is impressive military power; but history mostly proves its limitations. When we apply it things generally turn our badly.

Then there’s our position as the dominant economic power in the world. It isn’t at all clear that we still are that. China either has assumed that position or very probably soon will. We export most of our manufacturing to low wage countries. Our economy has become one based only on consumerism. Traditionally at least that’s a weak reed against which to prop a nation’s economy. We don’t so much create value as we move it around. The titans of Wall Street have replaced the titans of industry as the leading figures of our economy, and all they do is make money off other people’s money. We still claim to be the richest nation in the world, and maybe we are. Still, we have an enormous amount of poverty for such a rich country; and we seem unwilling or unable to do anything about it. Our health care system is a disaster, leaving millions of people unable to access it or having to access it as charity cases that the rest of us pay for. The moneyed interest have such a stranglehold on it that the obvious solution, a single payer universal system like those in every other developed country, doesn’t stand a chance of enactment. Racism remains a central characteristic of American culture. It is expressed more as institutional racism than in expressly racist laws, but institutional racism is if anything even more insidious. We imprison far more people per capita than other developed nations, and a disproportionate number of the people we imprison are Black. We enact tax laws that so obviously have the effect of redistributing income upward that we can only assume that redistributing income upward is the intention of the politicians who enact those laws. The gap between the ultra-rich and the rest of us is enormous, and it gets worse every day.

Of course every country has its problems. The significant thing about the US today isn’t so much that we have problems as it is that we are unwilling to address them in ways that would actually solve them. Doing that might cost the super-rich donors to the political parties some money. Heaven forbid! So the politicians do nothing. Economies prosper when enough people have enough money to spend, but our economy and our law are funneling money away from people who need it and would spend it to people who don’t need it and will just horde it. All empires function primarily to benefit the rich and powerful, but they are likely to do that more and more when they enter an unhealthy decline. The American empire has clearly entered an unhealthy decline.

Donald Trump is a symptom of that unhealthy decline. He represents all the worse angels of our nature. He is racist. He is sexist. He is personally immoral and expects everyone else to be immoral too. He thinks his fame and wealth give him license to attack and abuse other people, especially women. He is a jingoist, caring nothing for countries other than the US and, frankly, not really caring for the US in any meaningful way. He says “America first.” He clearly means “me first.” He admires authoritarian regimes more than democratic ones and panders to the fear of many Americans who think authoritarianism will solve their problems, which it won’t. He makes promises that he obviously can’t fulfill. Mexico will pay for the wall. I’ll bring back coal mining jobs. I’ll make America “great” again, by which he seems mostly to mean I’ll make America white again. He threatens nuclear war with impunity, apparently having no idea of the horror that any nuclear war would be. The United States has enough nuclear weapons to destroy all life on earth several times over, and he thinks we need more. He is a religious bigot, thinking that all Muslims are a threat to American security. He thinks white supremacists are decent people. He wants to reintroduce discrimination against transgender people in the military and would probably like to keep gay people out too. He is xenophobic, thinking that people not from the US are less than people from the US, or at least less than native born white people in the US. He has no empathy. He has no sympathy for anyone outside his immediate family, and he probably doesn’t have much for them. He is heartless, careless, classless, and a terrible role model for Americans and others around the world. Fear and money put him in the Oval Office, thereby presenting this country and the world with the potential for unmitigated disaster.

And in all of those ways he is a symptom not a cause. He is a symptom of the unease, the anxiety, even the fear of a people that is losing its dominant place in the world and can think of no constructive way to deal with that loss. Fear produces backlash. Fear makes people yearn to go back to how they think things used to be, never mind that they never really used to be that way. Fear and the anger it produces brings out the worst in people. Fearful, angry nations resort to the worst angels of their nature. A good example is Weimar Germany. Germany lost World War I, and the victorious allies imposed a harsh, punitive peace treaty on it. Things in Germany went from bad to worse. The Germans reacted by resorting to the worst angels of their national character—authoritarianism, militarism, and antisemitism. They made the German fascist Adolf Hitler Chancellor and proceeded to inflict untold horror on virtually all of Europe. Hitler was a symptom of everything that was wrong in Weimar Germany, and he was a reaction to it. He was a symptom of Germany’s humiliation after World War I and the economic catastrophe that followed it. From being, or at least seeing itself to be, the most civilized, developed, and powerful country in Europe Germany, lost everything that constituted its self-image. Hitler was the result.

Donald Trump is a symptom of similar dynamics going on the US today. Sure, what’s going on in the US today isn’t nearly as bad as what went on in Weimar Germany, and Donald Trump, bad as he is, is no Hitler. Still, just as Germany lost its position of dominance in Europe after World War I, the US is losing its position of dominance after the Cold War. A great many Americans are reacting to that loss in a way similar to if less extreme than the way a great many Germans reacted one hundred years ago. Donald Trump is of course important in his own right. He is an unstable and incompetent man with his hand on the nuclear trigger. More significantly Trump is a symptom of the underlying dynamics of American society. Until we face those dynamics honestly (and few if any prominent American politicians are willing to do that) we run the risk of reelecting Trump in 2020 and electing others like him, or maybe worse, in the future.