The Vital Threat to the American Way

It is time for all Americans to stop pretending that Trump is something that he isn't. Donald Trump is nothing less than a dire threat to everything that our country has always said that it stands for. Yes, we've always been at least a bit hypocritical when we say what we stand for, our reality always falling far short of our expressed ideals; but that is no reason for us to give up on trying to make our ideals our reality. Donald Trump is the most severe threat to the American way in a very long time, and it's time we figured that out.

Donald Trump is first of all a threat to the rule of law. The rule of law is perhaps the most foundational American principle. Everything else we value depends on it. Trump sees the independent, nonpolitical operation of the law not as a foundational value but as a threat to his wealth and his power. His efforts to get Attorney General Sessions to "un-recuse" himself from the Russia investigation is a blatant attempt to obstruct justice. He wants Sessions in charge of the Russia investigation for one reason and one reason only: He wants Sessions to rein in Mueller and protect Trump from the legal consequences of that investigation, which will almost certainly show that Trump's campaign conspired with Russian operatives to influence the 2016 presidential election in violation of the law and that Trump obstructed justice in an attempt to avoid the legal consequences of that conspiracy. In the pardons Trump has issued he has sounded a "dog whistle" to people who know the facts about that conspiracy, signaling to them that if they keep quiet and/or lie to protect him he will pardon them. Trump is thus even using the constitutional prerogatives of the presidency to obstruct justice. I fear that there is nothing he will not do to save his own skin.

The policies that his administration pursues of tax breaks for the ultras-rich and deregulation so that polluters can more freely pollute and destroy the environment are reprehensible and contradict the supposed American values of equality and concern for generations that come after us. Trump is a racist and a misogynist. He works against the supposed American value of racial and gender equality at every turn. Trump and his administration want to return the world to the ways of the 1890s when industrial capitalists made immense amounts of money at the expense of the poverty and misery of huge numbers of people, explicit racism and legal discrimination, and the subjugation of women to the whims of men. 

As I once wrote in an essay on this blog Trump is an American fascist. He whips up an unfounded and immoral hatred of immigrants in the way Hitler whipped up an unfounded and immoral hatred of the Jews, and he does it for the same reason. Fascists always need an enemy on whom to blame people's problems. It matters not at all that the enemy chosen is not responsible for those problems. It matters only that the fascist leader can give frightened people an enemy to hate. Hitler did it with the Jews. Trump does it with immigrants, and he throws in such supposedly un-American people as Muslims as people he calls on us to hate as well. Hitler's hatred of the Jews led to the Holocaust. I can only pray that Trump's hatred of immigrants, especially non-white, non-Christian immigrants, will not lead to a similar tragedy in our land.

Trump is not just another bad president. We've had lots of bad presidents, but we've never before put a true American fascist in the White House. Not even Richard Nixon was the kind of fascist Trump is. We have put a fascist in the White House, and we need to do everything we can without violence to put an end to his destruction of American values. Yet we all just go on about our ordinary lives. We watch television news with its advertisements about the embarrassment of bad breath as if our very way of life were not threatened by the man in the White House. Well, folks, our way of life is threatened by the man in the White House, beginning with his threat to the rule of law seen in his attacks on Attorney General Sessions, the FBI, the Justice Department, and the Mueller investigation. I wish I knew how to get rid of Trump, Pence, and the spineless Republicans in Congress who won't stand up to them, but I don't. We face the most severe threat to the American way of governance and of life that we have faced perhaps since the Civil War, and I don't know what to do about it. I don't think the Democrats take the threat that Donald Trump represents sufficiently seriously. I think most Americans are unaware of just how dire a threat to us Trump is. (But then most Germans didn't realize how dire a threat Hitler was to them until it was too late.) I look at our political realities today and fall into despair. We are in serious, serious trouble. May God help us to find a way out of it.

Reflections on Vladimir Putin

Reflections on Vladimir Putin

In the United States today it is practically mandatory to despise Russian President Vladimir Putin (unless of course you love authoritarian rulers the way Donald Trump does). For most Americans Putin is simply a bad guy, an authoritarian ruler who suppresses or even murders his political opponents, takes territory from sovereign nations, engages in foreign military activity in support of murderous dictators, and meddles in American presidential elections. I do not mean to suggest by anything I say here that those things aren’t true of Vladimir Putin. They pretty much are true. Yet I think most Americans misunderstand Putin because they approach him only with American understandings of history and of politics. Yet Russia’s history and politics are very different from America’s. If we are going to understand Putin we need to understand him in his Russian context not in our American one. Here I wish to offer an explanation of Putin that takes his Russian context seriously as a way of explaining him a bit better than most Americans can or do. Explain, not justify. Explain, neither approve nor condemn. What I am about here isn’t passing judgment on Putin. It is merely trying to offer a better understanding of him than most Americans have.

The primary reason why so many Americans have so much trouble understanding Vladimir Putin is that they do not understand how different Russian history is from American or western European history. Here are some foundational facts about Russian history that we must understand if we are to understand Putin. We start with the truth that Russia did not participate in most of the major movements in western European history that shaped the western world. In the west great, more or less independent thinkers began to appear at least by the high middle ages. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries gave the west towering geniuses like Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard, and Thomas Aquinas. They developed their complex theologies in a context free from political domination. Russia produced nothing like them before its encounter with the west in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries introduced some western thinking to the upper levels of Russian society.

In the west there were always institutions and people who resisted the claims of secular rulers to absolute authority. In particular, the Roman Catholic Church conducted a centuries long struggle against the claims of secular rulers to authority over the church. The Church even functioned like a secular ruler itself. It ruled parts of Italy as a secular power as well as a religious one. Vatican City is a last remaining remnant of what were once much greater papal lands. In its acting as a secular power the Church came into direct conflict with other secular powers. The Roman Catholic Church never submitted willingly to rule by secular governments. There were no, or virtually no, parallel developments in Russia. No institutions independent of the government developed before at least the nineteenth century.¹ The Russian Orthodox Church was always subservient to the Grand Princes of Moscow or to the tsars those princes became. It always saw itself as a bulwark of state power, not a power center in its own right opposed to the state. Indeed, in 1721, Tsar Peter I, known as Peter the Great, abolished the Moscow Patriarchate and replaced it with the Holy Synod, a collective body presided over by an Over Procurator who was appointed by the tsar not the church. That system of institutional subservience of the Church to the state lasted until 1918, after the Bolshevik coup of 1917, when the Church reestablished the Moscow Patriarchate as the highest authority in the church. Any Russians who opposed the tsarist government never had any institutions separate from the state within which to work the way opponents of secular regimes did in the west.

The Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries radically transformed the way west Europeans (and Euro-Americans) thought. It emphasized human reason as the source of truth. It led to the development, not always peaceful, of more or less democratic state structures in Great Britain and (eventually) in France and elsewhere in western Europe. It elevated the thinking individual as a primary source of knowledge. It produced documents like the US Constitution with its guarantees of individual rights and freedoms. Nothing like that ever happened in Russia. Yes, Catherine the Great and other Russian rulers toyed with the great philosophers of the Enlightenment. Yes, western Europe’s scientific revolution which was part of the Enlightenment had some effect in Russia. Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov (1711 – 1765) was the first great Russian scientist. Moscow State University is named after him. Yet Enlightenment rationalism with its emphasis on the individual and modern European science penetrated only the top layer of Russian society. They had no significant effect on the masses of the Russian people.

By the dawn of the twentieth century essentially all of the countries of western Europe, with a few exceptions, had developed at least nominally democratic political systems that provided at least some legal protection for the rights of a citizen. So had the United States regardless of how limited those legal protections of the individual were for Black, Native, female, and other Americans. Nothing even remotely comparable ever developed in Russia. Only in the 1860s did Tsar Alexander II introduce some limited reforms that moved a short distance toward recognizing the rights of the people. He abolished the serfdom that had kept most Russians tied to the land, although he did it in a way that made the emancipation of the serfs burdensome on them financially and less liberating that at first it seemed to be. He introduced the jury system into Russian law. He created local legislative bodies called zemstvos that had some say in local administration without in any way compromising autocracy. None of those reforms created anything like a western political system. The tsar still ruled absolutely. After the Revolution of 1905, the first Russian revolution of the twentieth century but hardly the last, Tsar Nicholas II was forced to create a national Duma, a national legislative body that still hardly impinged upon the autonomous rule of the tsar. When the catastrophe of World War I hit, Russia was so politically and economically backward that the old system collapsed under its own dead weight. Then Lenin and his Bolsheviks took power. They had to fight a civil war to consolidate that power, but by the 1920s Russia was firmly in the grips of Soviet communism.

Soviet communism of course never allowed the creation of anything like western democracy, and it had no respect for the rights of the individual person. Various Soviet constitutions contained provisions like freedom of the press, freedom of speech, elections for political office, and other democratic institutions and individual freedoms, but those freedoms existed only on paper. A Soviet citizen couldn’t use them as a defense when charged with a crime. They created no effective rein on the power of the Communist Party and the state it controlled. The Soviet Union became one of most brutally repressive regimes known to human history, rivaling Hitler and Nazi Germany in its brutality toward its own citizens.

Enter Mikhail Gorbachev. He became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March, 1985. He tried to reform the Soviet system in the direction of limited market freedoms and individual rights. His policy of “glasnost” (literally “voiceness”) gave Soviet citizens freedoms they had never had before. Works were published in Russia that previously had been banned, including eventually Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Gorbachev had no desire to destroy the Soviet Union, but his reforms acted like a boy pulling his thumb out of a dike. The personal freedoms he introduced led to widespread opposition not just to Gorbachev but to the whole notion of Communist rule. He failed to reform the economy in ways that benefited ordinary people. On December 25, 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. What replaced it came to be Vladimir Putin.

Putin was born in what was then Leningrad (now once again St. Petersburg) in 1952. After graduating from Leningrad State University he joined the KGB (komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopostnosti—The Committee on State Security), the main Soviet intelligence agency and secret police force. From 1985 to 1990 he served as a low ranking KGB officer in Dresden in what was then Soviet controlled East Germany. With the Soviet Union on the verge of collapse he returned to Leningrad and became an important aide to Leningrad mayor Anatoly Sobchak. Sobchak had a reputation as something of a liberal, but he eventually fell from power in Leningrad. Putin wound up in Moscow working for the government of Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first more or less democratically elected president. He rose through the ranks of Yeltsin’s government, and on July 25, 1998, he was appointed Director of the FSB, the successor institution to the KGB in the Russian Federation. On August 9, 1999, Yeltsin appointed Putin Acting Prime Minister of the Russian Federation. Yeltsin announced that he wanted Putin to succeed him as President. Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned on December 31, 1999, and Putin became Acting President. On March 26, 2000, Putin won his first election as President. He has more or less ruled Russia ever since.

Putin’s rise to power in Russia is a bit hard to understand. It seems more like it is something that happened to him than something he brought about himself. It seems probable that Yeltsin chose him as his successor primarily because Putin was seen as a nonentity, essentially a nobody despite the high offices he had held. Nothing I have read about him suggests that he sought the highest office in Russia or that he did much of anything to engineer his reaching that position. He didn’t turn down higher offices when they were offered, but it isn’t clear that he ever sought such offices. He was, and is, very much a Soviet man, a functionary of the old system who became the leader of post-Soviet Russia.

Putin’s rule of Russia is characterized by developments that are firmly grounded in Russian history. Among them are a return to some of the repressive ways of the Soviet Union and an economy dominated by extremely wealthy men whose success they owe almost exclusively to the Kremlin. These two dynamics of contemporary Russia have made Putin both immensely powerful and immensely wealthy. Under Putin the Russian government has cracked down on opposition leaders and movements. Take Aleksei Navalny as an example. He is the most prominent opposition political leader in Russia today. The Kremlin had him convicted on trumped up charges of fraud and thus blocked him from running in the recent presidential election against Putin. Other opposition leaders have been murdered, one on a bridge just outside the Kremlin. The Russian government has cooperated with the Russian Orthodox Church in passing anti-gay laws that make Russia one of the hardest places to be LGBT. Russia today isn’t as oppressive as the Soviet Union was, but it is hardly a model of democracy and freedom.

Under Putin the Russian economy has come to be dominated by a small number of extremely wealthy men. We usually call them the “oligarchs.” They are all close to Putin because you can’t get to be an oligarch without being close to Putin. The Russian government owns substantial portions of the country’s industry, especially the gas and oil industry on which so much of the economy depends. We don’t know exactly how much Putin has enriched himself during his time running Russia, but some estimates make him one of the richest men in the world.

Beyond those factors of his rule Putin has undertaken a more aggressive foreign and military policy than post-Soviet Russia had before him (or indeed than the Soviet Union had for quite some time). He occupied the Crimean Peninsula, taking it from Ukraine.² He has engaged the Russian military in the civil war in Syria in support of Russia’s ally Assad. Internally he essentially leveled Chechnya, a semi-autonomous region in southern Russia, to end a militant independence movement there. He has made threatening moves toward the Baltic republics that used to be part of the USSR. He has engaged in military actions in the independent nations of Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova, all former Soviet Socialist Republics.

All of these things about Putin and post-Soviet Russia trouble people in the west. At least some of them are indeed troubling, but before we judge we must understand them in the Russian historical context not the western one. Primarily what we must understand is that it is not at all surprising that the government of post-Soviet Russia is not truly democratic and does not respect what we consider to be the individual rights of its people. History determines much in this world, and Russia has no history of either democratic institutions or governmental respect for individual liberties. Russia flirted with democracy and individual rights immediately after the dissolution of the USSR, but it did that in a context that provides no fertile soil in which they can take root and prosper. Russia has no significant history of institutions that stand in opposition to the state. During the Soviet period that only institution there was whose aims were different from those of the state was the Russian Orthodox Church. As I noted above, the Russian Orthodox Church has a long history of supporting state power not resisting is. That was true even in the Soviet period of Russian history. That the post-Soviet Russian state would oppose the development of political, social, economic, or other institutions that it did not control was virtually a certainty given Russia’s history.

Then there is the loss (or at least the weakening) of Russia’s imperial status. Putin has called the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century. Given the enormous scope of the tragedies of the twentieth century most of us find that assertion hard to understand, but the Soviet Union was essentially the old Russian Empire in communist guise. Russia has been at least a regional imperial power since the eighteenth century. The Soviets made it a world power. With the collapse of the Soviet Union Russia was no longer a world power, and it lost much of what had been its empire. All fifteen Soviet Socialist Republics that had made up the USSR became independent nations. Some of them have joined NATO, the western military alliance formed specifically to oppose the Soviet Union. With the end of the Soviet Union Russia suffered a huge loss of prestige and power. One of the main things Putin is about is restoring that prestige and power.³ That the post-Soviet Russian government and most Russian people would want to restore that prestige and power was as virtual a certainty as was the relatively undemocratic nature of that government.

I intend none of this as a justification for anything Putin has done and is doing. He has essentially made himself a new Russian tsar. That status of his is threatened by a term limits provision of the Russian constitution, and it will be interesting to see how he handles that limitation in 2024 when his current term expires. However he handles it, the important point for us westerners to understand is that Putin is acting entirely in accordance with the main outlines of Russian history. Putin is both a Russian man and a Soviet man. That he is Russian is obvious. He was born in Russia to a Russian family and has lived elsewhere only for a few years during his work with the KGB. That he is Soviet is perhaps less obvious; but he was born in the Soviet Union, grew up and was educated in the Soviet Union, and served in the Soviet Union’s primary intelligence agency. As a Soviet man he was indoctrinated into a Marxist-Leninist ideology that condemns western representative democracy as a sham and a tool of economic exploitation. As a Soviet man he served in the government of what he, correctly, knew to be a major world power. He learned how to work and prosper within a system that was undemocratic and oppressive in the extreme. He learned how to manipulate the levers of power in that system for his own purposes. He can hardly be anything other than a Russian Soviet man.

Because he is a Russian Soviet man, nothing about what he has done and is doing should come as a surprise to us. Given his historical context it would be remarkable if he acted much differently than he does. We don’t have to approve of him or his actions, but we do need to understand them. That means we must understand them within the Russian historical context. Putin is an predictable embodiment of that context. We would do well to keep that truth in mind as we seek to deal with him and his Russia.

1With the possible exception of the Old Believers. There was a schism in the Russian Orthodox Church in the seventeenth century that created a group called the Old Believers, which was and is an Orthodox sect opposed to the established Russian Orthodox Church. Under the tsars it came into conflict with the tsarist government in a way the established church never did. The Old Believers sect, however, was never big enough to change Russian history in any significant way.

2See my post on this blog “A Historical Perspective on Russia and Ukraine” for a discussion of Russia’s annexation of Crimea set in its proper historical context.

3I once heard President Obama refer to Russia as a “regional power.” I wonder if he said that intentionally as a slap across Putin’s face or if he even understood how that remark would be taken in Russia as an insult, for surely Putin and many other Russians took it as precisely that.

How America Ends

How America Ends

I’m sure I’m not the only one to have had this thought, and I don’t claim that it’s original to me. Still, the other day something came to me with unusual clarity. I thought: The American republic will not end because it is conquered from the outside by a foreign power. There is no power in the world that can conquer the USA militarily, at least not without being utterly destroyed themselves by American military might. No, it isn’t hostile foreign powers that we need to fear. Rather, the American republic will end as a republic when the American electorate becomes so fearful and so ignorant that it votes into office politicians who will end it. We have a good example of how that happens in the rise of Nazism in the Weimar Republic in Germany. Hitler didn’t take power by force. He wasn’t put in power by a foreign army. Rather, his Nazi party won so many electoral contests that the President of the country had no option but to appoint Hitler chancellor. He and his thugs then dismantled the republican structure of the country and created a brutal single party dictatorship in its place. That something much like that could happen in the US is the thing we have most to fear. It is in all probability how the American republic will end.

We are not to the point where it is likely to happen anytime soon. Still, we see the beginnings of it happening in the presidential administration of Donald Trump. Trump consistently and vigorously assails two institutions that are essential to the maintenance of any democratic system, namely, a free press and the country’s law enforcement agencies. When the free American press reports the truth about Trump and his minions he screams “fake news.” He threatens to cancel the White House press credentials of media outlets that criticize him. He calls the people of America’s intelligence agencies Nazis. He bellows about corruption in the Department of Justice and the FBI, corruption that simply does not exist. He says that the Mueller investigation into his campaign and administration is a plot by Democrats upset about losing the 2016 presidential election when the truth is that that investigation is led by Republicans. Moreover, recent press reports say that the Department of Justice began investigating Trump before the 2016 election but intentionally made nothing about that investigation public for fear of influencing the election against Trump. No dictator, not even a would-be dictator like Trump, can live with a free press and independent law enforcement agencies. Trump would abolish them both and replace them with toadying servants rather than independent professionals if he could.

He can’t do what he would like to do for three reasons. First, his approval ratings with the American public aren’t high enough. Polling never shows his favorable rating to be above about forty percent at most. That forty percent of Americans support him is itself a chilling statistic and a cause for great concern, but it isn’t enough so that he can really slap restrictions on the press and put sycophantic yes people in charge of the Department of Justice and the FBI. Second, the minority of the American electorate that made him president hasn’t sent enough like-minded fascists to Congress so that Trump could get legislation muzzling the press and castrating the DOJ and FBI passed. Third, though he has appointed several reactionary federal judges and gotten the Senate to confirm them, he hasn’t yet packed the Supreme Court or the other federal courts with his followers to eliminate the federal courts as a barrier to his dictatorial or at least authoritarian desires. So far we have only the beginnings of a reactionary movement that seeks to dismantle American democracy. It isn’t yet strong enough to make its desired results reality.

The movement against democracy in the US isn’t strong enough to do that yet, but the important word in that sentence is “yet.” The movement that would do it has begun among us, and it achieved a result in the last presidential election that no one thought was possible. The election of Donald Trump as president is a result not of an enlightened citizenry voting intelligently, it is a result of fear and anger over a world that is changing before the eyes of those who used to run it. Blue collar, relatively uneducated Americans used to vote for reasonable candidates and reasonable policies. Vast numbers of them no longer do. At least in the presidential election of 2016 a great many of them voted their fear not their hope. They voted their hatred not their commitment to justice. They voted for an impossible return to the past rather than for constructive policies that would actually improve their lives. They voted their racism and their sexism not their commitment to equal rights. These unsophisticated voters who put Trump in office are a fertile field for fascism. In 2016 they voted for a sort of toned down American version of fascism. When will they no longer be satisfied with Trump’s soft fascism and vote instead for a candidate committed to hard fascism, to real European style fascism? There really isn’t any way to know, but the election of Donald Trump puts us all on notice. Fascism is alive and growing among us. If we can’t stop it, it will be how America ends.

Dear World: I'm Sorry

Dear World: I’m Sorry

I did not vote for Donald Trump for President of the United States. A majority of the voters in the 2016 American presidential election did not vote for Donald Trump for President of the United States. Nonetheless, he became President of the United States. He became president because of the arcane workings of our Electoral College, in which small, conservative states have disproportionate power. His election was, sadly, legal under our system, as badly as that system needs to be brought up to contemporary standards of fairness. Only something a bit less than forty percent of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing as president. That as many Americans approve of him as do is itself a sorry commentary on the state of the American soul and is itself worthy of serious contemplation. Perhaps I will undertake that contemplation at another time. Today I just want to say to the world: I’m sorry. The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States was not my doing, but it was my country’s doing. We made a man president who not only has not one single qualification for being president but who is emotionally unstable and who as president is doing immense damage to our nation and to you, the people of the rest of the world. Trump pulled the US out of the Paris climate accords. He pulled the US out of the Iranian nuclear deal. He pulled us out of the Trans Pacific Partnership. His administration is doing everything it can to speed up the destruction of the earth through our human greed and indifference toward future generations. He has made the warmonger John Bolton his National Security Advisor, and I fear that a war with Iran for the benefit of Israel may be the result. He and his people disparage immigrants, never mind that this country was built by immigrants. He calls white supremacists decent people. He mocks people with disabilities. He is a racist, a misogynist, and a homophobe. He represents all of the worst angels and instincts of the dominant American culture. His throwback ideology of “America First” tells the rest of the world we don’t give a damn about your wellbeing, your job is only to make things better for us. Donald Trump is a disgrace to my country. He is an American fascist, as I wrote in an earlier post on this blog. He is personally immoral and politically destructive. He is easily the worst president in American history, and we are probably stuck with him until January, 2021, at least.

So dear world, I’m sorry. I wish I could tell you that Trump is not as bad as you think he is, but if anything he is worse than any of us think he is. You cannot expect anything constructive out of us as long as he is president. If there is to be any peace in the world, you’ll have to bring it about. As long as Trump is president we won’t. If there is to be care for the earth, you’ll have to exercise it. As long as Trump is president we won’t. If there is to be care for the poor of the world, you’ll have to provide it. As long as Trump is president we won’t. Perhaps in the past some of you looked to us for leadership in the world. Perhaps you saw us as a power that at least sometimes worked for peace and for the wellbeing of the world’s people. You can look to us for that leadership no more. As long as Trump is president we won’t provide it. You can look at us as a power that sometimes works for peace and for the wellbeing of the world’s people no more. As long as Trump is president we won’t provide leadership and we won’t work for the wellbeing of the world’s people. And for that I apologize.

Oh how I wish it were not so. I long for the days when my country was at least respectable in the world. For the days when many people of the world saw us as a beacon of liberty and opportunity. We never were the land of liberty and opportunity in the way many of you saw us, but we were that to at least some extent. We are that no longer. We are led by a fascist president and his toadies in Congress. Nearly half of our people constitute an ignorant, bigoted rooting section for Trump’s American fascism. The only hope I can retain comes from the knowledge that in November, 2018, we may be able to clip Trump’s wings a bit by giving the Democrats a majority in at least one of the two houses of Congress and that in 2020 we can end the nightmare by voting Trump out of office. Yet I must say to you that if we Americans fail to do those two things please turn your backs on us. We won’t deserve to regain your respect or your support. Those of us Americans who react to Trump with despair and disgust will have to look to you for the maintenance of decent human values in the world. We may have to look to you for a place to live that doesn’t destroy our souls the way Trumpism destroys souls.

So please accept my apology for what my country has done and is doing. I didn’t elect Trump. Most of us didn’t elect Trump and don’t support him. But there he is in all his ugliness. For that I am so very sorry. Please forgive us.

Why Religion?

Why Religion?

I recently watched a program on PBS about the rise of early civilizations. One of the themes of the program was that religion arose when civilization arose, that is, when humans made the transition from being hunter gatherers to being settled agriculturalists. The experts the program had talking about this phenomenon were mostly archaeologists not experts in religion. They stressed the way in which religion functions to stabilize societies, how it acts as a unifying theme in cultures that holds people together by giving them common beliefs and common commitments. They also stressed how the rulers of ancient civilizations, especially Egypt, used religion to legitimate their rule by giving it divine authorization. The program didn’t limit its secular explanations of religion to ancient times. It showed the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, massive and impressive on the outside, beautiful on the inside. It explained that some Sultan or other had built this mosque during a time when the Ottoman Empire was suffering military defeats on both its western and eastern borders. It said he built the mosque to distract people from the empire’s problems and to show that Islam was still vital. It didn’t in any way suggest that perhaps the Sultan or his people had spiritual reasons for building it, that perhaps they built it as expression of their commitment to Islam and to the God with Whom Islam connects its people. The program showed so-called “whirling dervishes,” devotees of Sufi Islam who dance in a circular motion to induce a trance-like state of connection with the divine. It showed some of the men who practice this kind of Islam saying that in this practice they get closer to one another and feel a connection to the group. It made little or no mention of how the practitioners of Sufi Islam find a connection not just with each other but with God. This program’s consideration of the religion was done entirely from a secular perspective.

Now, I don’t mean here to deny that religion has functioned in those secular ways across human civilizations. It has, and in some places it still does. Yet this PBS program completely overlooked a deeper truth about why human beings develop and practice religions and in many cases devote their entire lives to them. The program focused on the political and social functions of religion while ignoring or at least minimizing any actual spiritual truth that religions express. In the views of the academic archaeologists that the program used, spiritual experience and yearning played no role in the rise of religion. Yet we know that there is more to religion than its possible political and social ramifications. Theologians and philosophers today know that a yearning for connection with the transcendent, spiritual element of reality is a universal human characteristic. Every human culture we know of has had a way of expressing that yearning. Every human culture has had a religion. That is, it has had a system of symbols, myths, and rituals through which the people of the culture have sought connection with a dimension of reality beyond the physical plane in which we live. Human religion is grounded at least as much in this universal human striving for connection with the beyond as it is any social or political function religion may serve.

Indeed, is it not clear that human religion is more grounded in that striving than it is in any social or political function? Consider this reality. Religion survives in human cultures even when the ruling forces of a culture are dead sent against religion and committed to eliminating it from a country’s life. That was the situation in the Soviet Union. Most of the former Russian Empire was under Communist rule beginning in 1917 (or at least beginning by the end of the civil war that followed the Bolshevik coup of that year) until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Soviet Communism was expressly and aggressively atheistic. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union would have destroyed religion altogether if it could have. Churches and other places of worship were closed in huge numbers. The clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church and other religious institutions were infiltrated and compromised by the Soviet state security services (the KGB and its predecessors). It was illegal to take children to church. It was illegal for any church to seek converts. When I was doing research in the Soviet Union during the 1975-76 academic year all we heard about the Russian Orthodox Church was that only old women attended its services. Yet there seemed to be generation after generation of old women going to church. People continued to have their children baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church. Indeed, Vladimir Putin was baptized as an infant. Beyond that, the Easter service I attended at the St. Sergius Holy Trinity Monastery outside Moscow in 1976 was heavily attended, and not only by old women. Perhaps part of the attachment some people felt to Russian Orthodoxy had more to do with the fact that it was the only truly Russian institution that remained in Soviet Russia, but surely there was more to it than that. Russian Orthodoxy, Judaism, Islam, and other religious traditions survived decades of restrictions and hostile propaganda against them because religions arise from and answer a basic human existential longing, the longing for connection with the transcendent reality we call God, a reality of which humans across time and physical location have sensed and longed to connect with.

Let me use my own Christian experience as another example of the persistence of faith and how it has nothing to do with propping up human systems. I am a man of faith. I have devoted the last twenty plus years of my life to getting a seminary education and serving as pastor of two small Christian churches. I can assure that I did not do that because I wanted to support the social, economic, and political power structures in my country. I believe that those structures must be broadly redesigned from the ground up if we are ever going to approach anything like equity in our national life. To me, Christianity challenges the injustices of American life at the deepest level. Jesus Christ calls us to care for the least of these not the wealthiest of these. Jesus Christ calls us to radical justice, radical nonviolence, and radical commitment to a transformed world in which the last are first, the first are last, the peacemakers are blessed, the poor are filled with good things, and the rich are sent empty away. None of that adds up to cement for unjust and oppressive social, political, and economic systems. None of that adds up to a prop for the powers that be. I am Christian because I find a powerful, transformative connection with God in the myths, symbols, and rituals of the Christian faith. My commitment to Jesus’ teachings of peace and justice flows from that connection. I am no support for the powers that be. My version of the Christian faith, which I share with millions of other Christians today, is no support for the powers that be. My Christian faith calls me to, in the words of Walter Wink, engage the powers for the purpose of transforming the world.

So that program I saw on PBS, interesting as it was, totally missed the mark on the meaning of religion. Yes, religion can be conservative, although to me the phrase conservative Christian is an oxymoron. Yes, after it became the established religion of the Roman Empire Christianity abandoned most of Jesus’ teachings about life in this life and diverted people’s attention to how to get to the next life, something about which Jesus said virtually nothing. Yes, power structures have often used religion to prop up their regimes by convincing people that they rule by divine right. Yet the undeniable truth of Christianity is that they don’t rule by divine right at all. In all of the world’s great religions properly understood God sides with the poor and the oppressed. God calls us to radical transformation of the unjust systems of the world. And in all of those great religions and in myriad smaller ones people find an authentic connection with God. They experience the power of God in their lives. They find hope, courage, and peace in the teachings of their religion. None of that has anything to do with holding oppressive societies together. It is rather the beginning of their undoing. I just hope that the next PBS program I see that seeks to explain religion does a better job of it than that one I saw the other day.

Belief and Eternal Life: A Passage from Liberating the Bible

I have been editing the manuscript of my book Liberating the Bible, A Pastor's Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, because a reissuing of that book is in the works to have it come out again at a lower price. I came across these lines in the stop at the Gospel of John. I find the thoughts I expressed here to be immensely important. They do nothing less than redefine what Christianity is, and they do that in a way that makes it so much more powerful, so much more life giving, for us today. So I'm posting them here. I hope you find them as meaningful as I do.

(c)Thomas C. Sorenson 2018. All rights reserved.

Believe and Eternal Life: An Exercise in Biblical Language 

Incarnation is the major theme of John, but there are at least two other themes that we must consider in order to understand just what the Gospel of John is all about. The first is the concept “believe.” The second is the concept “eternal life.” Both concepts are widely misunderstood. It turns out that they don’t mean what we generally take them to mean. Both are good examples of the importance of understanding the original Greek for understanding some of the central themes, phrases, and concepts of the New Testament. 

Believe 

In the Gospel of John, Jesus’ mission is to get people to believe in him. We see this aspect of the Gospel of John in the most famous verse in the Bible, John 3:16 There Jesus says that God sent him to earth “so that everyone who believes in him” might have eternal life. To understand what the fourth Gospel is all about we have to understand what the Greek word or word root in words that get translated as various forms of the noun belief or the verb to believe meant at the end of the first century when the Gospel of John was written. It was of course written in the common Greek of the time, so understanding the original Greek is obviously rather important in our attempts to understand John. Believe didn’t mean what people today usually take it to mean. That difference of meaning has led to a wide-spread misunderstanding of what the Gospel of John is all about, indeed what Christianity is all about.

What does the word believe mean to you? In common parlance today to believe usually means something like to accept the truth of some proposition without conclusive proof that the proposition is true. We believe what we take to be true but cannot firmly establish to be true. To believe means to hold the opinion that something is true. Today to believe is mostly a mental, cognitive activity. It is an action of the mind in accepting something as true.

It was not always so. Theologians today have done much work to discover the origins of today’s understanding of the concept “believe” and to compare that understanding to older definitions of believe and to the original meaning in Greek of the word that gets translated in the New Testament as believe. That work has revealed that believe as it is used in the New Testament actually meant something quite different from what it means today, quite different from giving intellectual assent to the truth of some proposition.

All of the nouns and verbs in John that are translated as some form of belief or believe have as their root the Greek word “pistis.” In New Testament Greek pistis doesn’t mean give intellectual assent to or accept as true without conclusive proof or hold the opinion that something is true as believe mostly does to us today. It isn’t about cognitive activity at all, or at least it isn’t only or primarily about cognitive activity. “Pistis” doesn’t mean to accept as true. It means to trust, to be loyal to, to give one’s heart to. It isn’t a matter of cognition. It is a matter of commitment.

It may be helpful in understanding what pistis meant and what believe means in our translations of John if we trace the translation history of pistis as it came into English as believe. The first step was the translation of the Greek pistis into Latin. In the creeds it was translated as “credo.” You may be familiar with the first line of the Nicene Creed in Latin (many of us are). It goes “ Credo in unum deum,” always rendered in English are “I believe in one God.” The Latin word credo has as its root the Latin word cor, which means heart. Credo, in its original meaning, preserves the original meaning of pistis as to give one’s heart to. It is a good translation of pistis into Latin.

Jump ahead several centuries, and people began to translate the creeds and the Bible into English. They translated them into English from the Latin, which was the language of the western Church at the time. They translated the Latin credo into English as believe. That translation from the Latin was preserved when people translated the Bible into English not from the Latin but from the original Greek. The problem is that believe didn’t mean then, in the 15th, 16^th, and early 17^th centuries, what it means now. Theologians like Marcus Borg and Diana Butler Bass (who isn’t actually a theologian but who sometimes talks like one) are fond of saying that the original meaning of believe was the same as its linguistic cousin “belieben” in German. Belieben means to love or, as Borg and Bass say, “to belove.” We don’t use belove as a verb any more, but we see it in our word beloved, as in “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today…,” the traditional opening of a wedding ceremony. Early on in the history of English translations, believe was a good translation into English of pistis and credo.

As we have seen, however, the meaning of believe has changed. That change came about over several centuries, beginning with the rationalism of the European Enlightenment of the 17^th and 18^th centuries and the scientific revolution that was a big part of it. In the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution truth, which had been a much broader concept that included mythic and symbolic truth as well as factual truth, was reduced to fact. Science established facts, and religious people wanted their truth to be the same order of truth as scientific truth. Never mind that religious truth is unavoidably of a different order than scientific truth, that’s what they wanted. They wanted their truth to be factual truth. Over time factual truth came to be the only kind of truth people knew. For most Western people today it still is.[1] If only fact is truth, then the things we say we believe must be facts. Otherwise they are false. So believe came to mean to take as fact. The mind displaced the heart as the seat of belief. Intellectual assent to propositions about God as factually true replaced the whole person trusting in God, giving one’s heart to God, which was the original meaning of the word believe.

Consider what a difference this understanding of belief as trust, as loyalty, as giving one’s heart makes in how we understand the Gospel of John. Take our verse John 3:16 again. In the NRSV translation it reads: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” (Emphasis added) In the modern understanding of believe this verse becomes an instruction to give intellectual assent to the idea that Jesus is who in John he says he is, namely, the Son of God Incarnate. The key to eternal life (see below for what that means) is thinking that Jesus is God. The key to eternal life becomes holding the opinion that Jesus is the Word (or the Son) of God become human.

Now consider John 3:16 with the original meaning of the word believe rather than the modern one. The verse then becomes a call to “belove” Jesus rather than to give intellectual assent to propositions about him. The key to eternal life (see below for what that means) becomes trusting in Jesus Christ, being loyal to Jesus Christ, giving one’s heart to Jesus Christ and to the God we know in and through him. Certainly the mind is involved in this believing, for the heart cannot love what the mind cannot accept. Yet belief becomes so much more than a mere action of the mind. It becomes commitment of the whole person—mind, heart, body, and soul—to being a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ. It becomes a commitment to relate to him as beloved and knowing, not with the mind only but with our whole being, that we are his beloved and God’s beloved.

In this understanding of believe we show our belief in Jesus Christ not only or even primarily by the words we say about him but by lives lived after his example, lives of peace, justice, compassion, forgiveness, and love for God, neighbor, and self. Returning to the original meaning of believe does nothing less than change what it means to be a Christian. Our faith will be very different, and very much more life giving, if we can just recapture the original meaning of the word believe. 

Eternal Life 

Eternal life is another key concept in the Gospel of John, and any adequate understanding of the Gospel of John requires an adequate understanding of the term eternal life.[2] As with the word believe, it turns out that eternal life doesn’t mean what the modern world generally takes it to mean. What do you think of when you hear the phrase eternal life? If you are like most people today you probably hear “life without end in heaven after we die.” There are indeed a couple of passages in John that at least suggest that understanding of the afterlife (if not exactly of eternal life). John’s Jesus does say “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places….I go to prepare a place for you.” John 14:2. Yet endless life in heaven actually isn’t what the Gospel of John means by eternal life.

John’s Jesus tells us at one point in the Gospel (and only at one point) what he means by eternal life. At the beginning of his long prayer in chapter 17, known as the Great Priestly Prayer, Jesus says: “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people to give eternal life to all whom you gave him [i.e., all people]. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” John 17:1-3 (emphasis added) Notice that John’s Jesus doesn’t say “this is how you get eternal life.” I have often heard these verses interpreted that way, but that simply isn’t what they say. They don’t say this is the source of eternal life or the way to eternal life. They say this is eternal life, to know God and Jesus Christ.

Try thinking of it this way.[3] The original Greek phrase that is translated into English as “eternal life” is zoes aionis. Zoes (or simply zoe) is the ordinary Greek word for life. There are no issues there. The adjective aionis however is more problematic. Usually translated “eternal,” its root is the word aion. Aion means “age.” In the New Testament it is often used to refer to the world the way it is now when used with the adjective “this.” When Paul says do not be conformed to this world he says in the Greek do not be conformed to this aion. The word can also refer to the promised age to come, the age of God, the age of the Second Coming. In this meaning it refers to the world the way it will be at the end of time. It is an eschatological term, one that refers to God’s transformation of the world in the last days. In that age to come all people will know God intimately because God will be present on earth in a new way. The Book of Revelation, in one of its beautiful passages rather than one of its brutally ugly ones, puts it this way: “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them.” Revelation 21:3[4]

Now please consider how John’s Jesus defines the term “eternal life,” zoes aionis, this way. “And this is life of the age to come, that all may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” Eternal life becomes not something that we get after we die. It becomes a kind of life on earth, a life transformed by our knowledge of God in and through Jesus Christ.

Now take this understanding of eternal life and apply it and our revised understanding of believe to John 3:16. That famous verse now reads: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that everyone who gives their heart to him may not perish but live the life of the age to come, which is life in the knowledge of God through Jesus Christ.” Eternal life is life in the presence and knowledge of God the way Revelation envisions it for the age to come, only that life lived now, because giving our hearts to Jesus Christ gives us knowledge of the only true God now, in this life.

Think for a moment how different that way of understanding John 3:16 is from the conventional understanding. That famous verse today is almost universally understood to mean you have to take as true the proposition that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, your Lord and Savior, so that your soul can go to heaven when you die. That way of understanding the verse makes Christianity be all about giving intellectual assent to some words in order to secure some blessed thing after you die. As Marcus Borg says somewhere, it is strange to think that God cares that much about what we think; but today’s common understanding of John 3:16, and indeed of the whole Gospel of John and the entire Christian faith, makes the faith be about what we think, and about some longed-for future life after we die rather than this life. I think Jesus would be appalled. Our re-visioned way of hearing John 3:16 makes it, and the entire Christian faith, be about the whole orientation of our lives in this life, here and now. It makes the faith be about the whole person, not only the mind. It makes the faith be about how we live now, not only about how we may live hereafter. Don’t you think that way of seeing the Christian faith is a lot truer to what Jesus and God really want from us? I do.

---

[1] For a discussion of a much broader meaning of truth see my Liberating Christianity, chapter 4.

[2] Perhaps surprisingly, the phrase appears mostly in the first half of the Gospel but only rarely in the second half. That difference in the Evangelist’s usage of the term seems to be related to a change in Jesus’ audience as the Gospel unfolds. In the first half of the Gospel Jesus speaks mostly to the people generally and to his opponents. In the second half of the Gospel he speaks mostly to his disciples, people who already believe in him (see above for what that means). The disciples then already have eternal life (whatever that means—stay tuned), so Jesus speaks to them more about love. “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.” John 13:34

[3] I have never seen this exegesis anywhere, and perhaps a real Greek scholar could show that there is some flaw in it, but it makes sense to me. I offer it to you so see if it makes sense to you too.

[4] I do not mean to suggest by citing Revelation here that John of Patmos, the author of Revelation, is also the author of the Gospel of John. He isn’t.

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.