Today's Facebook Post

 I'm sorry, but this country is simply insane. Congress is about to take money away from poor, needy people like my twin brother so they can give more money to the fat cats who don't need it and most of whom don't give a damn about the rest of us. In Idaho, as I write, a madman is shooting at first responders in Coeur d'Alene and may have started the fire they were responding to so he could shoot at them. But gun control? Oh hell no! We can't do that! Well, like hell we can't, it's just that we won't. We've killed hundreds of innocent people in Iran, and that's just the most recent incident of our irresponsible use of our military. Save the environment? Hell no! That would cost money! Well again, like hell we can't do it, we just won't. End racism? Hell no! To do that we'd have admit that we white people are still racists and that racism is alive in our institutions. You can't expect us to do that! Admit we're not perfect? Hell no! We can't do that! Value people over profits? Hell no! That's not the capitalist way! Well, no it isn't, which is why this country must become less capitalist. This is the greatest country in the world! Well, like hell it is.

Am I A Literalist?

 

Am I A Literalist?

June 22, 2025

 

Those of you who have followed my writing about the Bible even a little bit know that I have criticized and deconstructed biblical literalism from many different angles. I consider it to be a deadly sin that will kill our great, ancient Christian faith if we can’t overcome it because it so out of touch with the cutting edge of our culture, with where that culture clearly is headed. I am not a literalist. I am not a biblical literalist, neither am I a literalist about any other Christian document or statement of faith. About that I have no doubt whatsoever.  So my answer to the question that is the title to this piece is: No, I am not a literalist.

Yet a friend and colleague of mine, with whom I do at least a little bit of Bible study nearly every week, has called me a literalist. Not to my face but apparently to others, perhaps including my wife. So I have to wonder: What is it about me that would cause him to call me that? What about my approach to the Christian faith could possibly seem literalistic? I’m so convinced that I am not a literalist that I’m not sure I can really answer that question, but I have given it a good deal of thought. So here are those thoughts, which may or may not actually answer the question of what about me could seem to be literalistic.

I’ll start by asking: What is a literalist? In other words, what, for our purposes, is biblical literalism? It is the belief that we must read everything in the Bible as literally correct. To put the matter in other but equally true terms, it is the belief that we must take everything in the Bible as factually correct. This belief is false in large part because it almost always rests upon the assumption that God wrote or at least directly inspired everything that is in the Bible. I won’t go into all the reasons why that assumption isn’t just wrong but is actually absurd. If you want to know, ready my book Liberating the Bible, especially the first volume of that book’s Revised Edition, which has the subtitle, Approaching the Bible. I’ll just say here that the Bible is so full of statements that are just factually false, and it is so full of obvious factual contradictions, that God can’t possibly have written it or even much inspired it.

Next I’ll present what I have been taught and believe is a foundational principle of biblical exegesis. The purpose of biblical exegesis is to understand the biblical passage one is considering. Exegesis means to bring out of. It doesn’t mean to read into.[1] And it perhaps is, and it certainly should be, obvious that to do exegesis of a biblical text you have to start with the text itself. Even when we read a biblical text in translation, which nearly all of us do nearly all of the time, we have to start with what the text actually says. With what the words of the text are. We cannot start with what we wish the words were. We cannot start with what we want to words to be. We cannot start with a meaning that we read into the words. We have to start with what the words of the text actually are.

And we have to start with what the words of the text actually mean. Now, knowing what the words of a biblical text actually mean can often be more difficult than we might assume it would be. After all, the biblical text were (almost all) written in either Hebrew or koine Greek, ancient languages that most of us, you humble author included, don’t know. We have to rely on our translations and on whatever we’ve learned about specific translation issues. Once we’ve taken any translation issues we know about into consideration, we can proceed with our exegesis relying on our translations.

We read what the words of our text actually are. Unless we’re doing it because we know of a specific translation issue, we read the translated words that we have just as we have them. We don’t replace them with words we prefer. We don’t replace them with words we wish were there, that we want to be there. What are the words of our text? What do they say? We have to know that before we move on.

Then, when we do move on, we must recognize that our text, whatever biblical text it may be, was written nineteen hundred or more, sometimes a lot more, years ago in and for cultures very different from ours. We must make an effort to understand what the words meant in their original context. We’re starting with the words, and those words weren’t written in a vacuum. They were written in and for the people of a particular time and place, the people of a particular culture. We need to understand what the words of our text meant in their original context before we ca move on.

Understanding our text in its original context isn’t always easy. Scholars spend lifetimes studying just small aspects of the ancient cultures that are the original contexts of every biblical passage. We non-scholars, ordained or not, don’t do that. We can’t. We don’t have the time. We don’t have the training. We have to rely on what we’ve been taught and what we’ve read about those cultures as we seek to understand our text in its historical context.

Sometimes a word, phrase, or passage will have meant something quite different in its original context than it means to us. A good example is the word “adultery” in the Ten Commandments. We all know that those Commandments prohibit adultery. See Exodus 10:14. What far too many of us don’t know is that “adultery” meant something quite different in ancient Israel than it means to us. Most of us take it to mean a married person having sex with someone other than their spouse. Some of us understand the word more strictly as meaning any sexual act outside of marriage.

That, however, is not what the word meant in ancient Israel. It is not what it meant, originally at least, in the Ten Commandments. In ancient Israel, only women were prohibited from having sex outside of their marriage, which was, of course if unfortunately, always to a man. Men were not prohibited from having sex either when they were not married or outside of their marriage.

The reason for this dichotomy had nothing to do with sexual morality as we understand it. It had to do with property rights. Property belonged to men not to women, perhaps with rare exceptions. Ancient Israeli culture put great emphasis on a man’s property passing to his biological offspring after his death. If a man’s wife had had sexual relations both with her husband and with someone other than her husband and become pregnant, the man would have no way to know if a child to whom his wife gave birth was his biological child or not. Therefore, married women were prohibited from having sex with anyone other than their husbands. That’s what adultery was, a married woman having sex with someone other than her husband. It is not what our culture means by the same word, by adultery. Yet, it seems, nearly no one in our culture is aware of the truth that that word originally meant something different in the Ten Commandments than it does in our culture today.

Which raises an important question about exegesis applied to this prohibition of adultery. Is it appropriate for us to apply our definition of adultery to that prohibition when we understand the word differently than the word’s author and its original audience did? I have long insisted that words can have meaning beyond what the author originally intended the words to mean. I have long understood that words can have an “excess of meaning,” that is, they can mean more than its author took them to mean. I have long insisted that we must allow the meanings of ancient texts to evolve as culture and language evolves. That’s post-modern hermeneutics in a nutshell. That’s what I was taught in seminary.

Yet as I write this post I’m struggling with that concept. I’m thinking: Really? It is supposed to be legitimate for me to read something written something like two thousand five hundred years ago as meaning something different today than it did way back then? I guess the answer to that question has to be yes, but for me it has to be a qualified yes. Perhaps it can be yes, but we can make words mean something different from their original meaning only if we truly understand that original meaning.

In the case of the Ten Commandments’ prohibition of adultery, we must always remember that that prohibition had to do with property rights not sexual morality as we understand it. So in determining what, if anything, that ancient commandment means for us, we must begin by asking not about sexual morality but about property rights. We have to ask whether property rights have anything to do with sexual acts in our culture the way they did in the ancient culture of the Ten Commandments. The answer to that question, I think, is no, they do not. Even if one is concerned that a man’s property pass only to his biological offspring the way the ancient Hebrews were, we have DNA tests that can determine definitively who is a man’s biological offspring and who isn’t. Ancient Israel, of course, had no such thing. So the first thing we have to conclude about the Ten Commandments’ prohibition of adultery is that its original reason for being in those commandments no longer applies to us.

So, does that make the commandment’s prohibition of adultery irrelevant to us? Well, not necessarily. The Ten Commandments’ prohibition of adultery, obviously, applies to sexual acts. And, of course, we all know that the morality vel non of sexual acts is a vital issue in the lives of us humans. Of course, we know that truth quite apart from the Bible. So I think the use we make of the Ten Commandments’ prohibition of adultery is to understand what the prohibition meant in its original context and then to ask: What does a prohibition of adultery mean in our context? Adultery is about marital relations. In the context that produced the Ten Commandments, marital relations weren’t really about love. They were mostly about procreation and property rights. In our context, marital relations are different. They are, or at least we believe that they should be, about love.

And that change of context makes a huge difference in what the Bible’s prohibition of adultery means to us. In our context, adultery is a violation of the bonds of love. To us, adultery means, or at least I am convinced that it must mean, sexual relations that violate that bond. That bond may be expressed in a marriage or not, but the value of the bond of love is that it directs the people who have entered into it to be faithful to the person with whom they have done so and to conform their behavior to the terms of the commitment they have made to the other person. It follows that where there is no bond of love between the people engaged in a sexual act, and when neither of them has formed a bond of love with another person, the sexual acts between them are not adultery. Those acts may or may not be legal. They may or may not be moral; but, in any event, they are not adultery.

So, am I a literalist? No, I am not. I do insist that in seeking meaning for our lives in any biblical passage, we must first understand what the passage meant in its original context. We must understand what the words of the text really are not what we perhaps might wish them to be. Then we must remember that no biblical text arose in a context anything like ours except that the people of biblical times were every bit as human as we are. But while any text may have a surplus of meaning, it also has an original meaning. That meaning may be one the author intended, or it may be one we must assume the text’s original audience would have found in it whether that was the author’s intended meaning or not.

We cannot legitimately go reading any meaning we want into a text. Every text has its own integrity, and any meaning-making we do with the text must understand and respect that integrity. We may draw a meaning from the text that its author never intended, but we can do that legitimately only if we can truly assert that the text means something in our context different from what it meant in its original context. That’s what I have done with the example of the Bible’s prohibition on adultery in this piece.

Perhaps it will help if I give another example of what I mean. In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells his disciples to love one another. John 13:34. In its original context, the words the gospel attributes to Jesus applied only to Jesus’ inner circle of disciples, the people he was talking to when he spoke the commandment. The context of this verse is that it was told from and to a very small, insecure, an perhaps persecuted group of Christians. Clearly, those Christians had to love one another if their community and their faith were to survive at all.

Christians today are not a very small, insecure, and perhaps persecuted group. Christianity is, rather, the largest faith tradition in the world, and it has been that for a very long time. It doesn’t exist only in small communities in the Roman Empire the way it did when John was written. It exists everywhere in the world. It doesn’t exist almost exclusively in one culture the way it did in John’s time. It exists in every culture there is in the world. Jesus’ directive to his disciples to love one another is still important inside Christian communities, but the changed context in which we read it today gives the directive a much broader meaning. The “one another” the author of John had in mind was the Johanine Christian community. To us, “one another” must mean everyone. Everyone in the world. I have heard this verse quoted for that meaning many times, though I have never seen an exegesis other than my own that explains how it came to have this meaning that is so much broader than its author ever intended. To read this verse as saying “love everyone” is legitimate even though that’s not what it originally meant. It has a surplus of meaning. It can mean more than its author intended, and to us indeed it does.

So, I’ll ask once again: Am I a literalist? No, I am not. I am, however, professionally trained in both history and ministry. When I was writing things that were history only I had no interest in considering whether an historical text I was working with could have a meaning for me and my world other than the one it had for its author, though I suppose some of them could have that surplus of meaning. Doing that is not the historian’s job. It is, or at least in many circumstances it can be, the Christian minister’s job. Yet the minister’s job when doing exegesis must begin where the historian’s job both begins and ends. It must begin with the text itself. It must always respect the integrity of the text. No one doing exegesis of a biblical text can ever legitimately make it mean something totally unrelated to the text itself. If you’re going to do that, just write your own text. Don’t do it an call it legitimate biblical exegesis. It isn’t.

So no, I am not a literalist. I do insist on staying closer to any biblical text one is considering than many of my clergy colleagues do. I object to reading any meaning into a text that is simply unrelated to the words of the text. I don’t go in for speculation about things we might want to know about a story that the story doesn’t tell us. I consider such speculation to be a waste of time. No. I am not a literalist. I just respect biblical texts more than many of my liberal/progressive Christian colleagues do, something for which I have no intention of apologizing.

 

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[1] Reading something into a biblical passage that isn’t actually there is called “isogesis,” something any decent biblical scholar will always seek to avoid.

On Juneteenth

 This is a post I put on Facebook today, June 19, 2025. It's short for a blog post, but I think it's important enough to post nonetheless.

Juneteenth is almost over for this year as I write, but it is still worth commenting on. Black Americans have celebrated it for a long time, but it became a federal holiday only recently. It is a day to celebrate and thank God for the liberation of millions of Americans from chattel slavery. Slavery was by no means the only one, but it was by far the most brutal, unjust, and sinful manifestation of America's original sin of racism. Juneteenth reminds us that it took a civil war to end slavery. Donald Trump, who is minimizing Juneteenth as much as he can, reminds us that we still have a long way to go to overcome racism. Today let us acknowledge the progress we've made in improving race relations in this country, but, more importantly, let us recognize how much work we still have to do. Then let's keep doing it, perhaps in part by making sure that the racist Donald Trump never succeeds in his effort to turn this country fascist and turn the clock to the bad old days after northern Democrats abandoned the South to southern racists and the US Supreme Court tragically and wrongly said that "separate but equal" does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Sound of Sheer Silence

 

The Sound of Sheer Silence

A Sermon for liberatingchirstianity.blogspot.com

June 17, 2025

Decades ago, when I was an attorney-at-law, a voice from deep within me told me that what I really am is a "preacher." I've come to believe that what I really am is a pastor, but preaching has been a big part of my pastoral work. I don't get to do it much anymore. So, I thought I'd try the practice of writing sermons for this blog using texts from the Revised Common Lectionary. Here's the first of them. 

Scripture: 1 Kings 19:1-4, 7-15a

 

It really is a very strange story. Elijah, supposedly the greatest of the Hebrew prophets, the one Jews expect to return before the coming of the Messiah, the one for whom they leave an empty chair at the Seder meal, is running for his life. He has good reason to be fleeing. He has just spent a fair amount of time in Israel, the northern of the two Hebrew kingdoms at the time, prophesying against the evil king Ahab and his evil wife Jezebel. In the process he killed 450 prophets of Baal. She Jezebel vowed to kill him, so he runs. He runs south and eventually ends up at Mount Horeb, another name for Mount Sinai, in the wilderness of the Sinai peninsula. He’s gotten some help on the way, but he is clearly still in despair  or at least is still very frightened. When he gets to the mountain, the Lord, that is, Yahweh, asks him what he is doing there. So Elijah gives a little speech. He says:

 

I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed the prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away. 1 Kings 19:10.

 

I guess Elijah didn’t equate what he did to the prophets of Baal to what the Israelites supposedly did to the prophets of Yahweh but never mind. The Lord doesn’t take Elijah’s life away. Instead, he tells him to go stand on the mountain because he, God, is about to pass by.

Then we come to the part of this story that is important for our purposes here. Three normally natural phenomena take place. First there is a great wind, but the Lord was not in the wind. Then there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. Then there was a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. All of these natural disasters were followed by “a sound of sheer silence.” That phrase is more famously translated as “a still, small voice,” but I’ll work with “a sound of sheer silence.”

Once again a voice, presumably that of Yahweh, asks Elijah what he’s doing there. Elijah replies:

 

I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed the prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away. 1 Kings 19:14.

 

In other words, Elijah has no other, no new, words. He answers God’s question the second time exactly as he had answered God’s same question the first time. Word for word.

What can we learn from this story? The key to the lesson for today is in the phrase “the sound of sheer silence.” Now, that’s an oxymoron, or, perhaps better, a paradox, a contradiction in terms, isn’t it? Our text says there was sound, but sheer silence has no sound. That’s why it’s silence. So how can there be a “sound of sheer silence?”

Well, I’ll say first of all that all profound truth in faith comes from paradoxes, things that can’t be true but are true. The Trinity is perhaps the main one. It says God is Three and One at the same time, which doesn’t make a lick of sense. It is, nonetheless, profoundly true. Moreover, I, and a great many other people, have experienced the sound of sheer silence. I’ll share my story of hearing it with you.

I used to be a lawyer. I burned out on law pretty badly. I was convinced that there was something else I was supposed to be doing, but I had no idea what it was. Then, the Roman Catholic university near where I lived opened its School of Theology and Ministry to Protestant students. That meant I could go there and earn a fully accredited Master of Divinity degree, the degree my denomination required for ordination at the time. (Don’t get me started on what it’s done since.) No one told me to go do it. I didn’t hear a voice tell me to go do it. Yet somehow I knew deep in my soul that doing it was what I was supposed to do. I couldn’t have told you how I knew. I couldn’t have told you why I was supposed to do the work and spend the money to get an MDiv. I just knew in the marrow of my bones that that was what I was supposed to do, what I had to do.

So I did it. I earned the degree, and in March of 2002 I got my first call as a parish pastor. I was ordained in the United Church of Christ in June 2002. Here’s the strange thing: The moment I walked into my church’s office as the church’s called pastor, I just knew that I was already a better pastor than I had ever been a lawyer, not that I was all that bad a lawyer. Tragically, my first wife was dying of cancer at that time, but while she was still well enough to understand and express ideas, she said to me: “I am so glad you finally are who you really are.” It turned out that, indeed, what I truly am is a pastor. Somehow, God had spoken to me in silence. My discernment around going to seminary had nothing to do with anything audible, yet I know that God was speaking to me in silence. I got it.

Elijah didn’t. In the story we’re considering, God asks Elijah twice what he’s doing there on Mount Horeb. God asks once before the natural phenomenon the story describes and once after they had occurred. Then we get what the text calls a sound of sheer silence. Elijah responds to God’s question of why he’s there exactly the same way both times. His responses are word for word the same. He pretty clearly didn’t get it. He didn’t discern God’s call, what God was trying to say to him, in the sheer silence the way I discerned my call to parish ministry.

Why did Elijah and I react so differently to God’s call? All I can do is speculate, but here’s what seems to me to be the answer to that question. I was open to God’s call. It’s not that it came at a quiet, peaceful time of my life. Far from it. But I knew there was something other than practice law that I was supposed to be doing. I was willing and able to hear a call in sheer silence. Elijah wasn’t, but it’s not hard to understand why not. He was running for his life. The wife of the king of Israel had sworn to kill him. He’d had to flee quite some distance from Israel, and he probably still didn’t feel safe. He had asked God essentially to kill him because he felt himself a failure. There was, it seems to me, so much noise in Elijah’s mind and spirit that he couldn’t hear God calling him. God has eventually to say something to Elijah out loud.

There’s a lesson there for us today. God’s primary way of communicating with us is to communicate in silence. To communicate in a way that is beyond human ability and is beyond human understanding. It’s not surprising that that’s how God prefers to communicate with us most of the time. After all, as Isaiah says, God’s ways are not our ways. See Isaiah 55:8. Elijah’s mental and spiritual turmoil shut out God speaking to him in sheer silence, and it’s horribly easy for us to do the same.

To hear God speaking to us in sheer silence two things must be true for us. The first is that we must be open to hearing God in silence. It is so easy for us to shut God out. Most of us do it most of the time. We go about our lives as though God were not going through them with us, or at least I know that I do that far too often; and I know that nearly everyone else does too. If you’re not one who does it, count your blessings. But we won’t hear God say something to us in silence if we don’t believe that God ever does that and if we’re not open to hearing God speak in silence, and most people don’t and aren’t.

Second, we must be silent. Silent both externally and internally. Nearly all Christian church people I know don’t like silence. I used to build a couple of moments of silence into my worship services, but I knew I had to keep them short because my people really didn’t like them. Most other church services I’ve experienced don’t put silence in them at all. We Americans are very bad at silence, and that is most unfortunate. The great mystics of every faith tradition know the value of silence. Practitioners of some eastern religions, and a few practitioners of Christianity, spend a great deal of time in silence. If we want to hear God talk, we’ve got to shut up. We have still our physical voices, and we have to still that voice in our heads that, it seems, never goes still on its own.

Doing both physical and mental silence well takes practice. That’s why practicing some sort of meditation regularly is so important, for in meditation the whole point is to silence one’s mind. Like with nearly anything else, the more one practices silence, the better one becomes at it. Which doesn’t mean it’s easy, for most of us, after all, when we meditate, are working to overcome a lifetime of noise both external and internal. For some of us, the lifetime we’ve lived has been very long by human standards. For others it is shorter, but for all of us it has been filled with noise. God speaks in the sound of sheer silence. It is so easy not to hear God, and it is so important to do so. So, let’s be silent and listen for God, shall we? May it be so.

On Our Fascist Rulers

 Donald Trump, the convicted felon fascist guilty of sedition against this country, in thrall to his uber-fascist advisor Stephen Miller, has set out to deport every "illegal" in this country. Never mind that doing so would bring American agriculture to its knees. Never mind that doing so would bring the American construction industry to its knees. They ignore, or deny, the truth that our contemptible immigration laws are in place not to continue the American tradition of welcoming people from other parts of the country who come here seeking a better life but to bar the gates and keep what is "ours" ours, the rest of the world be damned. Never mind that everyone who is here without proper documentation is still constitutionally entitled to due process of law. Never mind that no president has ever nationalized the National Guard for the purpose of suppressing people's constitutional rights, both those the ICE detains and those who protest ICE's unconstitutional actions and has done so without the consent of the governor of the state in which the president has nationalized the Guard. (Kennedy did it without the consent of racist southern governors to protect civil rights not to enforce violation of them.) 

How are we to understand what's happening in our country? Here's how. Look at what Hitler did toward Germany's Jews right after he came to power in early 1933. There were actually very few Jews living in Germany. They were not the cause of any of Germany's problems. Yes, some of them were successful in business, academics, the arts, and other areas of human endeavor, but that was a good thing not a bad one, for these good people had found ways to use their abilities for their own good and for the good of their country. 

Now, translate what Hitler did into an American context. Trump surely knows that using the Jews for his fascist purposes wouldn't work in this country. But using immigrants in the same way just might. It is, after all, true that there are a lot of people present in this country without proper immigration documentation. It is also true that a great many of them are people of color whose native language is not English. Attacking "illegals" plays into American racism and xenophobia. Those great sins of American culture will assist Trump in his effort to because an authoritarian fascist ruler. Trump hasn't actually enacted new laws against America's immigrants the way Hitler did against Germany's Jews, but he hasn't had to. He can use the bad law we've got, and he can ignore and violate the good, constitutional law we've got, to accomplish what he wants basically with the law be damned if it gets in his way. Trump's tactics aren't exactly like Hitler's, but that's not because he isn't trying to do the same thing Hitler did. It's because Trump is operating in an American context not a 1930s German one.

One thing is certain. Trump doesn't really give a good God damn about people being here illegally. Legality has never meant anything to him. It does matter to him that most of the people he attacks aren't white and aren't native English speakers. But mostly what matters to him is that he can use immigrants and Americans' bigoted fear and dislike of them to advance his goal of becoming an un-democratic dictator just as Hitler used Germany's (and Poland's and Hungary's and Austria's) historical anti-Judaism to advance his goal of becoming an un-democratic fascist dictator. 

That's what he's doing, folks. We have to stop him. I wish I know how to bring the entire federal government to a screeching halt to force him to knock it off, though of course I don't. And I will never advocate violence as to way to make him stop. But we need to start, nonviolently, throwing sticks into the spokes of the federal government. Trump will bring American agriculture to its knees if he can, though that may be a consequence of what he's doing that he isn't smart enough to see. We need to bring the federal government to its knees--nonviolently of course. Doing it would get lots of well-intentioned people arrested and attacked. It would provoke violence on the part of American fascists the way the nonviolent civil rights movement provoked violence from American racists. 

So be it. Something has to be done and waiting for the next off-term and presidential elections isn't enough. Trump's actions call for massive, nonviolent civil disobedience. It's the only solution we have. I'm a writer and a speaker not a protestor. I'm 78 years old, and I must confess that I almost certainly won't do anything to get myself attacked or arrested. But civil disobedience is what we need. I just hope and pray that enough Americans will do it to stop the American fascist Donald Trump from destroying our country.

On Memorial Day

 Today, May 26, 2025, is Memorial Day here in the United States. People nearly always get what this day is supposed to be about wrong. They say it is for commemorating everyone who serves or has served in the American military. That's not what it is. There are other days for that. Memorial Day is for remembering and honoring all of the American soldiers killed in battle or perhaps otherwise killed while in the military. Now, what I'm going to say here won't be exactly popular with most Americans, as it so rarely is these days. So let me say this first. I mean no disrespect toward American service personnel who lost their lives in combat. I do not deny, in fact, I emphasize the tragedy of those deaths. Please don't get me wrong about that.

And yet. There is something that happens not just on this day but always in my country. We don't say military personnel died in battle much less that they were killed in battle. We say they are "fallen." We say they "gave their lives." We call them "sacrifices." The truth is that each and every one of those ways of referring to military deaths is a euphemism. They are ways of avoiding the stark truth of military action. No soldier or sailor who died in battle is "fallen." They didn't fall down. They were killed. They didn't "give their lives." Their lives were stolen from them. They weren't "sacrifices," or at least most of them weren't. They didn't die as a sacrifice to some god. They didn't die voluntarily, with the possible exception of a few winners of the Congressional Medal of Honor. None of those things is what happened. What happened is that the lives of mostly decent Americans were cut short, take from them, robbed from them by military action.

Why do we use all those euphemisms? We do it because we have to brainwash the American public into believing that military service is noble, never mind that hardly anyone in the military ever does anything truly noble. And never mind that mass killing, which is what the military exists for, is never noble. We have to convince people that all American service personnel are great patriots willingly putting their lives at risk when many if not most of them these days join the military for entirely different purposes. Some of them join the military because they come from military families, and being a soldier is essentially the family business. Many young American women and men join the American military because they see it as a way out of poverty. Or they see it as a job they can get when they can't get any other. Or because they want the financial benefits we offer to military veterans. All of those reasons for joining the American military may be perfectly understandably, but they aren't particularly noble. They are men and women trying to make their way in life as best they can. Are these men and women noble? No, they aren't any more noble than the rest of us are, which is to say, not much.

And there is one other euphemism we use when we talk about our country's military. We say our military exists "to defend our freedom." That statement is nothing but pure bullshit. We haven't used our military to defend any American's freedom since the Civil War well over a century and a half ago. In our past we used our military to oppress, displace, and kill American Indians. We used it for imperialist expansion of our country. We used it for imperial purposes against Mexico and Spain. We used it to take Hawaii from native Hawaiians whose people had lived on those islands for centuries at least. We used it take the Philippines from Spain. We used it to bail out allies in both World Wars. Our enemies in those two wars were hardly any threat to American freedom at all. Yes, they were horrific threats to other people's freedoms, but neither Germany nor Japan ever had any reasonable possibility of invading the US. Hell, Hitler couldn't even invade Great Britain, and the Battle of Midway proved that Japan couldn't remotely invade the United States except for the Aleutian Islands, which were never important for American freedom. No, the American military has never, or at least hardly ever, had anything to do with defending American freedom.

Now, we aren't using our military these days to conquer and take other people's lands like we did so often in the past, but that doesn't mean we don't use it for imperial purposes. The United States is today's world empire. We're a new kind of empire. We have a few colonies--Puerto Rico, Guam, and others--but we don't have colonies on anything like the scale of the British Empire, or the Spanish, or the Portuguese, or the French empires once did. No, what we have is economic interests and claimed political interests all over the world that we think we need to defend. We pride ourselves on being today's dominant world power, and dominant world powers always use their military to defend and to project their power. That's what we use the American military for, to project and defend American power the world round not to defend American freedom.

So how are we to understand the American military? It isn't what we always say it is. It doesn't do what we always say it does. So is there any reason for its existence at all? No. Not really. They only way actually to justify its existence is to say that it is a tragic necessity at best. The world is a dangerous place. There are people and perhaps even countries in the world who wish to do us harm. That doesn't mean they are actually capable of doing us much harm, but some of them would if they could. Terrorists have done it in the past though, as tragic as what they did was, they have never been a real threat to our freedom. It may be, though it isn't certain, that Russia and China, countries that don't like us much and that have significant nuclear arsenals, would try to conquer us if they thought they could (though all they would probably do is displace us as the major world power, which is hardly the same thing). In an ideal world, that is, in the Kingdom of God, no one would have a military. That's why if our military is necessary at all, which I'm not quite prepared to concede, it is only a tragic necessity.

So let's knock it off with the euphemisms about what happens to soldiers. Let's knock it off with the lies about what we use our military for. Let's stop making something that exists to kill and maim human beings and destroy their property noble. It isn't noble. It's brutal. It's about death and destruction, and, though we may use military personnel for humanitarian purposes on occasion, death and destruction are its reason for existing. The powers of the world convince most of the rest of us that the military is an honorable, noble thing. It isn't. The world would be a much better place if we'd stop letting the powers get away with it.

On Christian Nationalism

This is an entry I made in my journal this evening, Sunday, March 25, 2025.

Something interesting happened at church this morning, church being First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, Bellevue, Washington, USA. The church’s two pastors were doing they answer questions routine that they do on three day weekends. One of the questions was what they thought of Christian nationalism. Pastor Lisa Horst Clark quoted UCC General Minister and President Rev. Dr. Karen A. Georgia Thompson as having said don’t call it Christian Nationalism. There is nothing Christian about it. She then developed that idea. Pastor Stevi Hamill disagreed. She said she hates it when someone says she’s not Christian because she does not believe like they do, and she is uncomfortable calling anyone not Christian because they believe differently than she does. It’s an interesting question, I guess, but I agree with Lisa. Christianity isn’t what anyone claims it is. Christianity is a commit to follow Jesus and to live one’s spiritual life according to what he taught and showed us. He taught and showed us love not hate. Inclusion not exclusion. Hope not fear. Anyone can claim that anything is Christian, but that doesn’t make it Christian. Christianity has been so horribly bastardized over the centuries that few people today understand what it really is. It’s not about doing and believing the right things and non doing and not believing the wrong things so your soul goes to heaven after you die. It’s about living the kingdom life that Jesus taught and showed us in this life not in some posited but unproven next life.

Jesus absolutely rejected the values of the Roman Empire, and doing so got him crucified. The empire values he rejected are still the values of empire, the US empire included. Empires are violent. Jesus taught and lived nonviolence. Empires favor the wealthy and powerful. Empires oppress the poor. Empires exclude, that is, they determine who is in with them and who is out. Jesus said the last shall be first and the first shall be last. He included everyone, symbolized in large part by his acceptance of the Samaritans most Jews of his time hated.

No ideology, whatever it calls itself, is Christian if it embraces empire and rejects Christian peace, justice, and nonviolence. That’s precisely what today’s Christian Nationalism does. It claims to be Christian, but it just flat isn’t. It’s adherents can proclaim Jesus and pray in his name all they want; but as long as they get him as wrong as they do, and as long as they pray for the wrong things the way they do, they are not Christians. So our General Minister and President is right. Don’t call it Christian Nationalism. It just flat isn’t Christian. Rev. Dr. Thompson is right, and this morning Pastor Lisa was right. That’s just how it is.