The Day After

Rumor has it there’s an election coming up! If you haven’t already voted, I hope you’ve made plans to do so. Elections matter, and, as Calvin understood clearly, followers of Jesus have a deep responsibility to participate in civic affairs, including serving in office and casting our votes for candidates willing to serve.

The low regard in which we hold public servants these days is one of the sad ironies of the American experiment in self-governance. I suppose that is both a symptom and a cause of the deep political divisions in our society.

We may not share equally in creating these divisions, but it is not false equivalency to say that we all share responsibility for it. It is our society, and we shape its culture even as we are shaped by it.

We have a responsibility – indeed, a duty – to engage critically both the issues of the day and the individuals who would lead us through them. Critical engagement is a faithful response to the world.

Cynical disengagement is not. It undermines the institutions that it pretends to critique, and it damages the individuals who attempt to lead them. When deep cynicism becomes the default response to express disagreement it short-circuits systems built on honest accountability. Cynicism can never stand in for honest criticism, because cynicism is fundamentally dishonest. As such, it is an unfaithful response to the world.

A faithful response to the world holds onto these honest truths, articulated by Steven Mattson at Sojourners this fall:

·      God is not glorified by xenophobia.

·      God is not glorified by sexism.

·      God is not glorified by systemic racism.

·      God is not glorified by rejecting the maligned.

·      God is not glorified by fear, hate, shame, and pride.

We want to glorify God, but it is so very easy to be so deeply cynical these days. The presidential campaign seems designed to undermine trust in every candidate, and has devolved into a contest destined to undermine trust in the outcome, as well. While I have clear thoughts and strong opinions on the race (see the previous post), I have deep concerns about the system’s ability to function well no matter who prevails next week.

As followers of Jesus, we must faithfully proclaim some fundamental truths:

·      God is not a Republican. Or a Democrat. Or a Green. Or a Libertarian.

·      Each of the candidates is loved by God.

·      No matter who prevails, God continues to reign in sovereign love.

This is true today, and it will remain true on Wednesday morning.

No matter where political candidates stand, God stands on the side of the poor, the marginalized, and the victims of violence. If we want to be close to God, we must be close to those with whom God stands. When we stand in those places we may be surprised to find folks with whom we disagree politically standing there, too.

That is to say, no party holds a corner on the market of political or policy ideas to address poverty, violence, and injustice.

That is why I remain committed to keeping the church wide open to people who hold a wide range of political perspectives so long as they remain committed to engaging those core concerns with compassion and love.

Standing together in those places where God is calling we might just be able to see a path out of the cynical morass of these days.

We stand together in worship, remembering all of this. As we re-member, we are also working to put back together a body politic that seem dismembered by cynicism these days.

So, come and worship!

I'm with Her. Here's why.

(This post is offered in my capacity as a citizen, not in my role as pastor to a particular congregation. It reflects my personal opinions and not those of the church that I serve.)

This post began its life as a comment on Facebook responding to an invitation to view Dinesh D’Souza’s film, Hillary’s America, before casting my vote in this fall’s presidential election. That invitation came in response to this note I had posted earlier in a friend’s thread:

I no longer engage [political] arguments on Facebook, but I do ask often and (I hope) respectfully for those with whom I disagree to tell me more about why they hold the position they do or support the candidate they support. I don't try to dissuade them. I do cut them off if all they want to do is run down the candidate they oppose, or if they run off into conspiracy theory BS. I offer to share why I hold the position I do, and if they take me up on that, I try to share it clearly and passionately and without rancor. I've had some interesting threads with Trump supporters over the past few weeks.

A Trump supporter on that thread recommended the film, and I responded with an effort to stay true to my earlier statement. I’ve fleshed out my response here a bit, but this is pretty much what I posted.

I'm sorry, but I just cannot take anything Dinesh D'Souza does with any seriousness. I've read his work before. His reading of the histories of the two major American political parties on race is just silly in its one-sidedness and its complete ignorance of the past 50 years of American political history. He writes as if nothing has changed in the ways the two major parties address race since Lincoln was in the White House, or, at best, since George Wallace was a Dixiecrat standing in the schoolhouse door. As to what he's written about the Clintons: he's rehashing scandal conspiracies that are either long-since debunked or molehills out of which their political opponents have spent decades constructing mountains. I just don't buy it. 

Is Hillary Clinton secretive? Yes, perhaps to a fault, though millions of dollars for thousands of hours of investigations have turned up nothing more than innuendo and non-criminal carelessness. I respect being doubtful about her in that regard. I wish she was more transparent, but given the partisan scrutiny she has endured for the past 30 or more years I understand her reluctance to show her cards. 

Does Bill Clinton play fast and loose with the rules? No doubt. And if the combination rises to the level beyond which one is unwilling to go, I can understand it. Of course, Bill is not on the ballot in November. If we’re going to hold Mrs. Clinton to that kind of standard … well, let’s just say at least of few of the presidents’ wives were at least a little bit crazy including that of the sainted Great Emancipator himself.

Even so, I trust the system of checks and balances to function no less well with regard to the Clintons than it has for the past half century -- that is to say, not great, but sufficient to ensure that the Constitutional framework of the government is not undermined beyond redemption. If the system didn’t collapse under the weight of Watergate nor any of the subsequent “gates” I’m confident that it will hold up to Hillary. 

For me, with respect to the so-called "honesty" question, I trust the system to function well enough. Given that, it becomes a question of which candidate's stated positions align more closely with my own vision of the commonwealth. 

At that point, it is easy for me. Hillary Clinton has worked for the interests of women and children for her entire life. The Children's Health Insurance Program she helped shepherd during her husband's presidency has been one of the most important and successful anti-poverty/child welfare programs since the establishment of Medicaid in the mid-60s.

Her uncompromising support of women's right to control their own bodies is important to me. Her support for the rights of GLBTQ people matters deeply to me. Her commitments to work for racial justice are crucial to me.

On perhaps the most important issue facing the country, and the world, over the coming years, Secretary Clinton is committed to continue the work begun by President Obama to address climate change. I’d prefer to visit the beach rather than have the beach visit me here in Northern Virginia, and thus I support a candidate who believes the international scientific consensus on the climate crisis.

Her pledge to address the higher-education debt crisis is in keeping with her life-long commitment to support children and young people, and though it will not matter to me personally, it matters to scores of friends of our children and to millions of kids I’ll never know.

That it matters to people I’ll never know matters a great deal. That is to say, beneath all of the particulars, I believe that Hillary Clinton shares my conviction about the importance of the commonwealth. It really isn’t all about me, and we truly are better – each of us – when we work together. Secretary Clinton shares my belief about the essential importance of community, and the positive role that the public sector can play in strengthening communities. 

These convictions grow, first and foremost, out of the deepest values of my faith. For me, because Jesus drew to himself a community, following the way of Jesus is always a project in community formation. Moreover, Jesus consistently led his community with compassion and concern for the outcast, the poor, the sick, the least of these. No national political party shares those concerns consistently, and all of them give way more attention to the concerns of the middle class than they do to the conditions of the poor. Within that context, however, the platform of Secretary Clinton’s party and the commitments that she has made standing on that platform offer, in my judgment, a political path that is more communitarian than not.

I disagree with her on a number of specific issues, but that's going to be true no matter who's running. Hell, it'd probably be true if I had to vote for myself! But I also know that we're not electing a savior; we're electing the presiding officer of the executive branch of a huge government and the commander in chief of a massive military. 

I believe Secretary Clinton is the best-qualified candidate for those two roles. I say that inclusive of the third-party candidates, as well. I am about as far from a Libertarian as one can get, so it’s easy to dismiss Gary Johnson. I simply do not share a fundamental worldview with him.

Jill Stein, on the other hand, is quite close to me on most issues. But even though I agree with her on many issues, I do not think that she would make a better president than Hillary Clinton. Being president is more than having a list of issues and positions.

Being president is presiding, and thus, being able to lead a team of cabinet officers who direct the multiple agencies of a sprawling government. Being president is also leading the executive branch in negotiating and compromising with the Congress. Being president is, finally, being the face of the government of the United States on the global stage.

Being president is being the one who is in the room where it happens. I believe that Hillary Clinton is the best-qualified candidate to be that one. I’m with her. 

Coffee and Resistance

One of the perks of serving a church in metro DC is the need, time to time, to meet a colleague for coffee on Capitol Hill. Today I got to the coffee shop way earlier than scheduled. I could have spent the unexpected free 45 minutes strolling the historic grounds, but it is just too damn hot here to be outside more than absolutely necessary so I hung out in the air-conditioned space.

I found a nice space next to the windows opposite the counter and just past one of the big tables around which were gathered earnest young adults tapping away at their laptops.

Most of the time, under such circumstances, I’d have been right with them, whiling away the time on line. There’s Facebook to check, news to read, baseball scores to check on, but the shop where we met required a password to log into the wifi. That’s practically un-American in my book, but it’s their shop.

So I had some time to read and write. I’m carrying around Rick Ufford-Chase’s recently published Faithful Resistance and reading it in small chunks. Any collection of essays (and responses) that wants to proclaim a gospel vision for the church in a time of empire merits slow and careful consideration.

As Rick notes in one of his response pieces, “the church of tomorrow will have to look remarkably different than the church of today, and getting there is likely to be an enterprise that involves a great deal of daring behavior.”

That observation begs several questions:

•       What are these differences?
•       Where is “there”?
•       What kind of daring behavior?

The coffee shop that I was waiting in is a church-based operation. I know nothing about it other than that, but, as Fozzy Bear said when he and Kermit walked in a band rehearsal in an old church (in the original Muppet Movie) “they don’t look like Presbyterians.”

Which is not to say that we Presbyterians don’t love our coffee. Surely we do, but could we be the church as a coffee shop, could we do church as a coffee shop? More to the points pressed by the various contributors to Rick’s book, how would church as coffee shop (or coffee shop as church) be a form of faithful resistance to the culture of the empire?

I’m not trying to be critical of the coffee shop where I was today (other than the wifi password thing; seriously, if you’re going to insist on a password, as a church-based one the least you could do is use “shibboleth”). But a church of resistance has to get at least one part of Dorothy Day’s famous admonishment: comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

From what I saw today, this shop does a bang-up job of comforting the comfortable. As one of the comfortable, I appreciated it, but I didn’t feel particularly challenged by anything I saw or experienced in the shop.

As I noted, I know nothing about the overall operation of the place (which is why I’m not naming it), and they may do lots of lovely things. But lots of churches do lots of lovely things: we feed hungry people, we send bandages to bind up the victims of disasters, we fix up housing for folks who need some help.

Alas, we don’t do nearly so much to change an economic system that confines so many to hunger and poverty. We don’t do much to challenge that economy’s fossil fuel foundation which is changing the global climate and spawning so many of the storms that become huge disasters. We don’t do much to transform a system (and, let’s be honest, a mindset) that refuses to consider that housing might just be a fundamental human right.

Can a coffee shop be church? Can church be a coffee shop? It seems to me that those are the wrong questions. If a coffee shop can be a center of resistance to the values and practices of empire, then sure, it can be church. But it’s wifi should be as open as the table that sits at its center.

Mondays with Martin: Standing on Holy Ground

I’ve been volunteering with the National Park Service at the MLK Memorial for more than a year now. I’m there for several hours most Mondays. I’ve met people from every continent that has more people than penguins.

People come to the space, I’m sure, with every imaginable expectation or none at all. Some are checking off another National Park site. Others are part of whirlwind DC tours. Some are not sure where they are, so I doubt they know why they are there. Some are, no doubt, searching for an elusive Pokemon.

But for some, whether they expect it or not, the granite on which they stand becomes holy ground for at least as long as it takes to snap a photograph – of somebody else’s loved ones.

I’m pretty sure that I have not gone an entire shift – even on slow days in January – when I didn’t see strangers help each other with photographs. I have noticed, over and over again, a particular understated joy that people of different hues find in helping each other take the standard souvenir shot beneath Dr. King’s unblinking gaze.

It’s an incredibly small thing of likely equally small consequence, but it is noticeable. I am willing to wager that few, if any, other public memorials witness as many white folks taking pictures of black folks or black folks taking pictures of white folks.

Yesterday I watched two families consecrate another such moment. I don’t know any back stories beyond the ten minutes I witnessed, but in those few minutes I watched a young white woman engage a young woman of color in conversation. Then I watched the young white woman introduce her new friend to her mother. Then the new friend introduced the white mother and daughter to her mother and folks I took to be another African-American mom-and-daughter pair. The six women – three young adults and three well-into-middle-age women – stood talking together for a couple of minutes, took their pictures, then they joined hands and prayed together for peace and reconciliation.

They shared hugs, and then the white pair got on the bikes and rode off toward the Roosevelt Memorial and the black folks headed off in the general direction of Mr. Lincoln. I handed out a few more brochures, and realized again that I was standing on holy ground.

Mondays with Martin: Stay Woke

Monday afternoon at MLK I noticed more than the usual number of folks with their faces buried in screens. I didn’t investigate, but I’m assuming lots of them were searching for Pokemon critters. For all I know, the memorial is a Pokemon gym.

I’ll confess that I don’t know what any of that means, though my two young-adult sons could surely explain it. I do know that this is, in the popular culture, “the summer of Pokemon Go.”

I could, at this point, shake my cane and say, “get off of my lawn,” to those who are searching for these digital images, but it seems mostly harmless good fun and I am a huge fan of good fun. I can't begin to count the hours I've spent playing disc golf over the past few years!

On the other hand, as I watched three young men standing at the edge of the memorial focused on their screens I couldn’t help but thinking, “glance up from your screen and take a look around. You’re standing next to a wall into which are carved these words: ‘The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of convenience and comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.’” 

We stand, all of us, in a time of challenge and controversy. Taking Sabbath time for rest and recreation is fine. But, friends. stay woke. There's too much at stake to spend the entire summer with your nose buried in a screen searching for imaginary creatures. 

Tin Soldiers and Nixon's Coming

Forty years ago today Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on a crowd of unarmed college students at Kent State, killing four and wounding 13. In the aftermath of the shootings President Nixon remarked, "when dissent turns violent it invites tragedy." Of course, it was not the dissenters who turned violent that Monday morning. It was the empire's police, armed with weapons of war trained on unarmed college students in the middle of a campus that was stirred in protest against the empire's war in Vietnam.
I graduated from Kent 13 springs after the shootings, and participated in memorial vigils each of the five springs I was on campus. I've stood in the spots where the kids were mortally wounded, and I've stood on the spot where other kids turned and fired their weapons.
In other words, I've looked at the shootings from both sides now, and from both sides it has always been clear to me that had Nixon been capable of honesty he would have said, "when dissent begins to threaten the foundations of established order then the established order will bring to bear deadly force to quell the dissent." But no president can ever be that honest.

As a Kent alum I have a bagful of memories of May 4 memorials, but the most affecting May 4 connection for me happened more than 15 years after I'd graduated during the time when I lived in Pittsburgh.
In the spring of 2000 the organizers of the memorial events that year invited all of the survivors of the shootings to Kent. I don't know if that happens every year. I do know that in the early years, including the years that I was a student, the school administration really did not want the survivors on campus because they were a visceral reminder of something the university simply wished to forget.
But in 2000 the surviving victims of the shooting were invited back and many returned, which was really neither here nor there for me except that in the spring of 2000 I was serving a church in Mt. Lebanon, PA, a suburb of Pittsburgh.
In 2000, May 4 fell on a Wednesday. It was both a work day for me and a school day for our children so we quickly concluded that the trek to Kent, about two hours west of Mt. Lebo, was not going to happen. I was at the church on that Friday afternoon later than usual, and the rest of the staff had left for the day. I was walking around the front of the church, something I rarely did because the main entrance off the parking lot actually went into the back of the place. I noticed a middle-aged man and woman and a teenage girl trying the door to the fellowship hall, so I walked over to them and asked if I could help.
The man said he had grown up in Mt. Lebanon and attended the church as a child, and was back in town for the first time with his daughter. He wanted to show her some of the places that had been important to him and the church, which had hosted dances for high school kids on Friday and Saturday nights in the late 60s, was one of those places.
One of the family, I don't recall which, was wearing a 30th anniversary May 4 t-shirt and I remarked that I was a KSU grad. 
That was when Jim Russell introduced himself. He told me that he had been shot at Kent on May 4, 1970. He was standing at a 90-degree angle from and more than a football field's distance from the National Guardsmen who turned and opened fire on the students that afternoon. He was shot in the thigh and the forehead by the only Guardsman firing a shotgun. The rest had machine guns.
In 2000 he lived in Oregon, having moved west in the mid-1970s to escape the shadow of Kent. He shared with me the bitterness he felt toward the university and the authorities, who wanted either to forget the whole thing or blame the students. 
He vividly remembered the calls to "shoot 'em all," and the names --"worse than brown shirts and night riders" according to Ohio Gov. James Rhodes -- that the students were called by high ranking government officials.
He shared with me that he'd lost a job in Ohio in the early 70s when his employers learned of his connection to the shootings, a story he also shares in the story linked above. He also noted that a new university administration during the 1990s had changed the way the school dealt with the survivors of the shootings and had made them feel welcome on campus for the first time in a quarter century. While time had healed his physical wounds and many of the psychological ones as well, I doubt that Jim Russell ever felt completely at peace with the events of May 4, 1970. He died in 2007 at 60.
A memorial service was held at Kent and the story on it in the Akron paper at the time drew echoes of the same response the shootings did in 1970: the students deserved what they got.
Forty years on and it remains true that the powers that be will bring to bear deadly force on those who threaten the base of the power, and they will also go to any length to avoid being held accountable for their actions.
They used to produce t-shirts each spring at Kent that read, "long live the spirit of Kent and Jackson State." I never bought one because I was always skeptical that there was any such thing as a spirit of those places and the killings deaths of the spring of 1970. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps the spirit is simply the tireless search for the truth about what happened that day and the pursuit of something like justice even all these years later.

A Modest Proposal

A Modest Proposal

When Bill Maher calls for a tax on religion he could be right, just not how he believes he’s right.

The host of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher closed a recent show declaring, “If we levy taxes – sin taxes, they call them – on things that are bad to get people to stop doing them, why in heaven’s name don’t we tax religion?”

Maher, who is almost as well known for his outspoken atheism as he is for his comedic chops, went on to say, “You want to raise the tax on tobacco so kids don’t get cancer? Okay, but let’s put one on Sunday school so they don’t get stupid.”

If you take him at his word, Maher is out to protect society’s innocent victims from the violence, intolerance, and ignorance of religious beliefs. To be sure, both history books and contemporary media are filled with horrific stories of the victims of religious violence and intolerance. From Christian pogroms of the Middle Ages to the terror attacks of ISIS this year, from the church’s treatment of women throughout history to the church-driven law’s treatment of transgender persons in North Carolina and Mississippi last month, it’s all-too-easy to mock religion for the sake of an easy, albeit uncomfortable laugh, and to use that laugh track as the backdrop for a call to tax religions.

But that’s not why societies should tax religions. Beyond taxes imposed across the board to pay for common infrastructure, taxes can be used to discourage activities that threaten the common good. Carbon taxes are one example.

But even in the examples Maher cites or alludes to, religions aren’t a threat to the social order. More often they are and have been, in fact, a supporter. After all, in the Middle Ages the church and state marched hand-in-hand to persecute Jews. ISIS claims that it wants to set up a state power. The misogyny of religious groups throughout history has served patriarchal social orders quite well, and there’s a direct line from the bathroom to the voting booth tying together conservative evangelicals and many Republican politicians these days.

Those deep ties between religion and state are no reason, from the point of view of the state, to impose taxes on religions. Religions founded on what might be called a theology of respectability nurture obedient adherents to the status quo of the society of which they are a part. It’s easy to understand why the state supports them with tax advantages.

Sure, the adherents of such religious convictions might believe silly things about the origin of species, but that’s not taking a bite out of the bottom line of the corporate state. They might even have tendencies toward violent repression of minorities, but as long as those minorities continue to serve the economic and political interests of the powerful then a little controlled violence is just the cost of keeping order. Religions that preach personal piety and encourage respectable behavior don’t threaten the social order. In fact, they support it.

But that’s not the only theology available to the church or mosque or synagogue.  As Brittney Cooper notes in a recent issue of Christian Century focused on the Black Lives Matter movement, “the movement has issued a clarion call to the church […] to affirm a theology of resistance rather than a theology of respectability. This movement demands reckoning with who Jesus is. Is Jesus only a savior come to deliver us from punishment for personal sin? Or is Jesus a savior who joins with us in the work to end racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and transphobia?”[1]

A theology of resistance threatens power and stability. Societies should tax religions not to protect members of the society, but to protect the existing social order. Using the power of the IRS, the government could weaken the grip that prophets have on the imaginations of people who might be inspired to embrace a vision of a future otherwise.

Preachers following the Revised Common Lectionary through this Eastertide are in the midst of a brief sojourn through Revelation. The Roman emperor did not confine John of Patmos to that Greek island because he feared that the gospel would make children stupid. He exiled John because he feared that the gospel would make Christians rebel against the authority of Rome.

Likewise, J. Edgar Hoover did not spy on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. because the FBI director feared that King’s proclamation of the gospel would make black folks ignorant. Hoover harassed King because he feared that the gospel proclamation would make black folks rebel against white supremacy and call the capitalist order into question.

That’s a sin against the state. That’s cause for taxation. Maybe Maher was completely right after all. Sin taxes all around!

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[1] Brittney Cooper, “Black Lives Matter,” Christian Century, March 16, 2016, 27.