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Why Graham, Falwell, and Copeland Are Not Heretics, but More Useful Than Heretics
June 07, 2019 by Lowell Bliss
By Lowell Bliss
It was meant to be a triumphant week for Franklin Graham and his 250 other Christians-who-are-leaders following their Call to Prayer for the President on June 2. Perhaps, according to the American Family Association's "spiritual warfare perspective," something did happen in the heavenlies against Trump's enemies, but objective data suggests that it was a rough week for MAGA Evangelicalism, and particularly for signers Graham, Kenneth Copeland, and Jerry Falwell, Jr.
The Inside Edition video of Kenneth Copeland's interview with a female reporter—whom he insisted on calling "baby" and "sweetheart" while complimenting her eyes—went viral. He came across as, in a word: creepy. Jerry Falwell Jr. sent what has been called a "crude" tweet when he told Pastor David Platt to "grow a pair" and not apologize for being caught off guard by a surprise visit from the president on Sunday. In the tweeting that followed, Falwell revealed how he wanted to be known: "You're putting your ignorance on display. I have never been a minister. UVA-trained lawyer and commercial real estate developer for 20 yrs. Univ president for last 12 years-student body tripled to 100000+/endowment from 0 to $2 billion and $1.6B new construction in those 12 years." He was intent on clarifying his role as chancellor at Liberty University: "While I am proud to be a conservative Christian, my job is to keep LU successful academically, financially and in athletics." Nonetheless, I suspect this will not prevent Falwell from speaking out on behalf of evangelicals, or on behalf of Jesus, the next time CNN wants an interview. He has however, it seems to me, revealed the cards in his hand from the values deck.
Franklin Graham's insistence that he be recognized as a "Christian leader" was called into question most forcibly by an OpEd in the Washington Post written by Michael Gerson:
Does he think that his servile devotion to Trump will clarify the Christian gospel in many minds, or obscure it? Does he think that more people, or fewer, will be open to following Christ after a day of partisan prayer? This is the greatest danger of a politicized faith on right or left: that it artificially narrows the offer of grace. For a minister of the gospel, making Christ secondary to anything is the dereliction of a sacred duty. Making the gospel secondary to the political fortunes of Donald Trump is betrayal compounded with farce.
Gerson writes: "In their day of prayer, Graham and other Trump evangelicals have used a sacred spiritual practice for profane purposes. They have subordinated religion to politics. They have elevated Trump as a symbol of divine purposes. And they are using Christian theology as a cover for their partisanship." But then he adds, "So: This is blasphemy, in service to ideology, leading to idolatry, justified by heresy. All in a Sunday's work."
Heresy? Hmm. I know that the "prosperity gospel," such as propounded by Copeland in defense of his three private jets, has long been under scrutiny: is the unashamed prosperity gospel, heresy? Even apart from that, Facebook commentators seemed quick to pull out the H-Word about Sunday's prayers for Trump. Something didn't seem exactly right to me. Once when my kids were young, we were in Al-Ain, UAE, where our local friends had taken us to an air show. Outside in the parking lot, the Government's Tourist Office had set up a series of exhibits, including one tent which replicated the lives of wealthy nomad herders. My friend could verify that the Arabic on the sign correctly identified the "Educational Heritage Village", but the English translation was laughably and unfortunately miswritten: "Educational Heretic Village." Yikes! Would my kids see severed heads and handless limbs? Heresy is a big deal, not unakin to Trump, Huckabee-Sanders, and various GOP Congressmen accusing Comey, Pelosi, and others of "treason."
Surely there's an official definition of heresy, I thought. I ended up on Scot McKnight's webpage. Here were my suspicions going in:
· Graham, Falwell, and Copeland don't qualify as "heretics," as Christianity has historically understood "heresy;"
· Accusations of heresy are not profitably going to participate in the transformation of the audience we are trying to convince. Listeners aren't going to believe us in the first place, but more importantly, there is no purchase there for their own examen because. . .
· … accusations of heresy provide us no good soil for our own growth. At the best, we can claim ourselves to be right and MAGA Evangelicals to be wrong. If the Gospel is true, then give me something that I can implicate myself in too so I can get busy moving toward Christlikeness.
"Let me suggest," McKnight says, "that the term 'heretic' is used in three ways, only one of which (I believe) is justifiable." "First, there is the slipshod use: a 'heretic' is used here for anyone who doesn't believe something we might think important. As when someone uses this term for someone who is amillennial or a preterist or a partial inerrantist or paedobaptistic or trans-substantialist … or a host of other things." The second, and other unjustified, usage he calls extended use: "for anyone whom someone else thinks is skirting [sic. "flirting"?] with danger on a central theological concept." Finally, for the "proper use", McKnight turns to Harold O.J. Brown's book, Heresy.
Most importantly, heresy pertains only to the central doctrines of God and Christ. Heresy is established by orthodoxy and orthodoxy was established by the classical creeds (Nicea, Chalcedon, etc). Brown once told me a heretic is someone who denies something in the classic forms of Christian orthodoxy, such that orthodoxy and heresy are mirror terms. That is, one is a heretic if one teaches what has already been judged to be heretical — say, Docetism or Arianism.
McKnight also throws in a church history and polity lesson from Kallistos Ware:
No one can be called a heretic until they have been informed by a proper authority of a theological error, until that person has understood what she or he is teaching, and only if the person then continues to teach such an idea. So the proper ingredients of the heresy accusation is: 1. An authority, 2. Explanation and confrontation of the error, and 3. Refusal to change one's teaching. What is often the case today is that #1 is seized beyond one's recognized status; in other words, one usurps the position of authority and then pontificates from that usurpation.
No one is going to believe that the head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association is in violation of the ancient creeds. Calling for a Day of Prayer for the current President of the United States may indeed be, in Gerson words, "in service to ideology" and "leading to idolatry," but is it, also in Gerson words, really "blasphemy," or "justified by heresy"? I for one don't want to, in McKnight's words this time, "usurp the position of authority and then pontificate from that usurpation."
Besides, I found something way more useful in McKnight's comments. It's in a throw-away paragraph at the beginning, but it's important to McKnight to say it and I find it important to me to act on it:
Before I get there, though, let me add another point: it is too bad we don't have such an evocative term for praxis. Jesus' focus was on "hypocrisy" more than "heresy," and it might just be an indication of how far we've strayed for us to give so much attention to "heresy" and not enough to failure in praxis. As far as we can see, failure in practice is just as bad as failure in theology. But this is not what this post is about. We are concerned here with the term "heretic."
"Jesus' focus was on 'hypocrisy' more than 'heresy.'" Ha! Hypocrisy: now, that's a sin I'm guilty of on a regular basis. That's a path of confession, repentance, forgiveness and reformation that I can walk more deeply into the embrace of my Saviour. And that's the temptation that I see so wildly afoot among my people group. We are so damn right about our beliefs that we (and Tony Perkins) are so damnably quick to give ourselves, each other, and President Trump a "mulligan" for immoral behavior. We are so sure about our speaking the truth that we think we are exempt from the full command, namely that we always "speak the truth in love." It seems to me hypocritical to pray about Bill Clinton one way, and pray for Donald Trump another. It seems to me hypocritical to treat Merrick Garland one way, and Brett Kavanaugh another. It seems to me hypocritical to treat a baby one way one week before birth and another way one week afterwards. It is--it seems to me and I may be wrong--hypocritical to send Christmas Child packages to a kid in Honduras, but pen him or her up the moment they cross our border seeking sanctuary. For those who know me well, I likely did not escape hypocrisy in writing up this last paragraph. Hypocrisy is a much more useful critique of MAGA Evangelicalism than is heresy, primarily because it is the wood that forms the beams and motes in all our eyes.
My prayer is that David Platt's generous prayer for President Trump will be fully answered in the wideness of God's mercy, but that it will be interpreted--by Trump, by everyone, and by God himself--prophetically not generically. (Ed Stetzer speak to this and repeats Platt's prayer here.) My prayer also is that this is the week that Graham, Falwell, and Copeland are marginalized among us. Are they Christian? (They're not heretics.) Are they leaders? (Not mine.) Are they "Christian leaders"? (I'd rather you just call them university leaders, or non-profit leaders, or Republican voting bloc leaders, but I have no control over such things.) I also pray that MAGA Evangelicalism will be short-lived; it has proven to be too fertile a breeding ground for hypocrisy.
June 07, 2019 /Lowell Bliss
Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell, Kenneth Copeland, MAGA Evangelicals, Evangelicals, David Platt, Prosperity Gospel, Scot McKnight, Heresy, Hypocrisy
Photo credit: HuffPost Canada, pool via Getty Images
Franklin Graham (and I) want you to pray for the President on June 2nd
May 29, 2019 by Lowell Bliss
If you are still a faithful supporter of Donald Trump. . . God bless you. You are very dear to God. There is nothing you can do to cause God to love you less, and nothing you can do to make him love you more. If you are additionally someone who listens to Franklin Graham's lead, then maybe you are already signed up to pray for President Trump on June 2. There are however many of your brothers and sisters in Christ who experience anguish over Mr. Trump's presidency. God's gracious and merciful shepherding extends to them too, and that's whom I will be addressing in the remainder of this article. If a defensiveness about your support of Mr. Trump causes you pain, for the sake of your own sense of well-being, I bless you if you choose to refrain from reading the rest of this article.
Perhaps you've seen Franklin Graham's call to prayer: "Along with 250+ Christian leaders, I am asking followers of Christ across our nation to set aside next Sunday, June 2, as a special day of prayer for the President, Donald J. Trump." The official statement on his ministry website mentions petitions "that God would protect, strengthen, embolden, and direct him. We believe our nation is at a crossroads, at a dangerous precipice. The only one who can fix our country's problems is God Himself, and we pray that God will bless our president and our nation for His glory." His Facebook announcement is more explanatory: "President Trump's enemies continue to try everything to destroy him, his family, and the presidency. In the history of our country, no president has been attacked as he has."
I suspect if Mr. Graham knew me and if I asked him whether he considered me one of Mr. Trump's "enemies," he would likely respond, "well, you aren't exactly one of his friends, are you?" I still consider myself a follower of Jesus Christ, and I suspect that I will never transcend my upbringing as an "evangelical Christian," so implicit in Graham's announcement is the demand that I "get with the program, i.e. with God's program." But the program is the problem! Whenever I encounter the fact that support by my people group (white evangelical Christians) still exists for a man whose character, words, actions and many of his policies—in my opinion—are contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ, I feel pain which borders on anguish. And when I read headlines like from HuffPost—"Franklin Graham Calls For 'Day Of Prayer' To Shield Trump From Enemies"—well, frankly, I often get triggered.
If you are looking for some help, here's some thoughts on how to personally process Graham's announcement:
1. Identify your emotional reaction. If your response is an indifferent "meh," then I hope you enjoy your Sunday. But if you have an emotional response to Graham's announcement, can you name it? Is it grief? Anger? Disappointment? Weariness? Despair? Pain over broken relationships? Maybe it's some nervousness over being at odds with anyone or anything associated with the venerable Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
2. Bless your own emotional response. Society (and the evangelical church) can pour a great deal of shame on our emotions, and some emotions feel more uncomfortable than other ones. Where in your body do you feel these emotions? Put your hand over that spot and be kind to yourself. You can say, "I bless this emotion; it's a natural and amoral response to a situation that troubles me somehow." If you've got the time and inclination, you can address Jesus and your emotions directly and ask them, "What is it you want to teach me about you, about myself, about this world?"
And now about whether and how to pray on June 2nd:
3. Try some humor. My first thought was of the opening scene in The Fiddler on the Roof when the rabbi was asked, "Is there a proper blessing for the czar?" He ponders this for a moment and responds, "Of course: May God bless and keep the czar — far away from us."
4. Pray along with Graham his "sensible" prayers. Graham's website actually has a link to a fine prayer guide entitled How to Pray for Your Leaders. The first two suggestions are: "Open the heart of our president [or any leader at any level] to hear and respond to the Gospel message if they do not know you (Acts 16:14); and, "Help [name] to accept wise counsel" (Proverbs 11:14; 15:22). I genuinely wish that for Mr. Trump.
5. Use this as an opportunity to love your enemies. To be honest, I do consider Donald Trump to be an enemy: an enemy of democracy, an enemy to vulnerable peoples and to God's creation, an enemy to my own aspirations. The Bible recognizes that enemies do exist in the world; they simply present an opportunity for us to give a test ride to this new-fangled "love of God poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit given us" (Rms 5:5). We can guess who Graham means by "President Trump's enemies" (the media, Pelosi, AOC, the FBI, the 2nd District on NY, Dems, Biden, Mueller, judges, etc.) Just because prayers of love won't be going their direction on Sunday, doesn't mean that you have to follow suit.
6. Remember that God is no respecter of persons when it comes to prayer. Jerry Falwell, Jr. may have more access to the Oval Office than you, but he has no more "access to the throne of grace in time of need" (Heb 4:16) than do you or I or any other miserable sinner. Jerry is the son of Jerry, Sr.; Franklin is the son of Billy; Richard is the son of Oral. God, meanwhile, is so enamored with Jesus, the son of God, the name on your lips in prayer, that he cares nothing for lineage nor reputation.
7. Pray your own additional set of prayers re: Trump. Go ahead and pray for impeachment if that is how the Spirit and discernment is leading you. Pray for justice to be done. Pastor and writer Brian McLaren said that he will be praying this way: "That he will repent of his lies and turn from his arrogance and hostility, that he will stop denying the existential threat of climate change, that he will be held accountable for his corruption, and that he will either be impeached as soon as possible or voted out of office next year, for the good of our country and the good of the world."
8. Consider the list of "250+ leaders" and recognize that they are not your leaders. I looked through the list of 250+ signatories and only recognized 23 of them, and I'm not uninformed about the national evangelical scene. In other words, ninety percent of these "leaders" mean nothing to me even by virtue of name recognition. The other ten percent mean nothing because, well, evangelicals don't have a pope and these men and women are not my leaders. Some of the names were just strange in that I have always considered them out on the fringe of evangelicalism: e.g. Richard Roberts, Kenneth Copeland, John Hagee, Joel Osteen's two sisters. Mike Huckabee and Michelle Bachmann are on the list—how are they "Christian leaders"?! Others once had influence in my life—James Dobson, Eric Metaxes—and I treat them with grief, but I no longer listen to them. For you too—you are under no obligation to consider them your leaders. For that matter, a few weeks back Morning Joe had an interesting segment where some of their [former] Republican and [currently] evangelical commentators speculated out loud, "Why do we even call Franklin Graham a religious leader any more. He's a political leader." And isn't Falwell just a university president, and nothing more?
9. Remember that there are other leaders who resist Trump. By now each of us can count a number of knees that have not bowed to Baal (and then divide by two (knees) to get the number of other Christian leaders who are resisting Donald Trump.) Just this week, charismatic and Pentecostal leaders (some whom I know personally and respect) sent their own letter to the White House: "Christian Leaders Write Critical Letter to Donald Trump."
10. Pray for the silent and unmobilized middle. I believe that most pastors across this land are good-hearted people who truly want to preach and obey the Word of God and serve the people that God has given them. They however have never been trained to shepherd others through such turbulent times. (And who can blame them? None of us were prepared.) They are afraid of messing up, afraid of doing more harm than good, and afraid, of course, of unnecessary backlash. We can show empathy. And maybe if we come to them, not with our anger at their silence, but with our vulnerability, perhaps we can spark their empathy as well. What if you approached your pastor and said, "Pastor, I'm in great turmoil regarding Trump's presidency and afraid for me, my family, my country, and "the least of these" as well. Can you help guide me in how I should even pray for him?"
May 29, 2019 /Lowell Bliss
Donald Trump, Franklin Graham, Prayer
A father's arm around international climate activist, Greta Thunberg. (Photo: Lowell Bliss)
Greta Thunberg Has a Dad.
March 18, 2019 by Lowell Bliss
by Lowell Bliss, The Liberator Today
We were a scant quarter mile into the climate march that civil society groups were hosting on the Saturday between the two weeks of the latest UN climate summit, COP 24 in Katowice, Poland. Someone inadvertently bumped into my hip and I looked over and saw a familiar face. It was 15-year old climate activist Greta Thunberg.
Greta, now sixteen, was a familiar face last Friday. In fact, in your news feeds, you saw either one of two photos from the worldwide strike by schoolchildren for climate action. Either you saw the huge crowds of kids marching in protest, or you saw a photo of the girl who had inspired them all. Greta was the first to scrawl a sign: "Skolstrejk för Klimatet." Three weeks before Sweden's parliamentary election on September 9 of last year, Greta took up position on the steps of parliament, demanding that government take more radical action on carbon dioxide emissions. After the elections, she returned to school for four days each week, but every Friday she was back out on strike. On this past Friday, she was joined by children in 123 different countries, and in all 50 states. Kids are creative; my favorite protest signs all had to do with playing hooky, such as "Why Should We Go to School if You Won't Listen to the Educated?," and "Civil Disobedience Requires No Permission Slip" and "If you didn't want us to skip school, you shouldn't have given us such good science teachers."
The climate march in Katowice was a long, slow affair. We shuffled. I had plenty of time to strike up a conversation with Svante Thunberg, Greta's father. He's forty-nine, an actor, and we chatted about his visit to the Niagara region back when he was in grad school. "I doubt if I'll get back," he told me. He and his family have given up flying. I bragged a little also about my own two remarkable daughters, Adelaide and Bronwynn.
During the COP, Svante and Greta appeared for a press briefing sponsored by scientistswarning.tv. Moderator Scott Stuart introduced him, "And with her is her father who is an author and actor," and then putting his hand up to the side of his face as if to create an 'aside' with the audience, he said, "he happens to be her PR person, her chauffer, her protector, all of the above; a very, very dedicated man."
Much has been said about Greta, and her younger sister Beata, being diagnosed with autism and ADHD. Their mother, Svante's wife, Malena Ernman wrote a book about their care. At the press briefing however, Svante was able to fill in the picture about Greta's move into climate action: "Greta fell ill – I think it was four or five years ago. She stopped eating and she stopped talking and she fell into a depression. And she stayed home from school for almost a year. She lost a lot of weight and went away to hospital. So we stayed at home, my wife and I. We stopped working. . . . We have two daughters and we made sure they were feeling well again. Once Greta was coming back, it turned out she was very concerned and upset about the climate. She has been going on about this before, obviously, but it sort of stuck to her and she could not get this out of her head: the fact that everyone was saying one thing and doing the exact opposite all the time, not least, us parents."
Svante, picking at his beard with his left hand and staring off into his memories, described his wife and himself as "very concerned" people: they were active in issues of human rights and care of refugees. "But in Greta's eyes, of course, we were missing out on one big point, in fact the most important point, which was the climate and the sustainability crisis going on all around us. While we were saying all these things about taking care of our fellow man, we were flying around, eating meat, buying things, and driving a big car, having two homes and of course, that's not really sustainable. And then we realized that we were, of course, a huge part of the problem. In fact, we were the problem. Greta could not, sort of, get around that, and it made her very, very upset."
Then Svante said, "So, listening to her, we started taking in the sustainability and the climate crisis and we embarked on a road which we are still upon. She told us that we had to change." They did.
Svante Thunberg, forty nine years old, father of two, successful career man—listened to his daughter. And that may have made all the difference in the world, for our world. Out on the march, shuffling along, enjoying being outside, watching other marchers suddenly recognize Greta, watching her patiently pose for another selfie, I turned to Svante and said, "You know, Greta gets a lot of admiration, and it is deserved. She's pretty remarkable. But I want to say. . . Dad. . . that I think you are pretty remarkable too."
It was announced last week that Greta Thunberg has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Hey you, Dad. . . Mom. . .if you are listening to your kids' concerns, if you discover the strengths in their disabilities, if you are determined to raise adults who care, if you are open to change. . . well, I think you are pretty remarkable too. Good job!
Svante Thunberg and his daughter, Greta wait to go on-stage at COP 24, Katowice, Poland. (Photo: Lowell Bliss)
March 18, 2019 /Lowell Bliss
Greta Thunberg, Svante Thunberg, climate change, COP 24, Lowell Bliss, The Liberator Today
I Have a Climate Dream . . . actually, sorry, not quite
Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the last decade since I first rented An Inconvenient Truth from Blockbuster Video.
I have a dream that one day I will be acknowledged to have been right, and that this vindication will include people I admire like Al Gore, James Hansen, Bill McKibben, Katherine Hayhoe, etc.
I have a dream that it won't be as bad as it could have been with a business-as-usual scenario.
I have a dream that we will "avoid dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system," as per the UNFCCC's original mandate.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that we will finally put a price on carbon, fully accounting for externalities.
I have a dream we will hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2° C, increase the ability to adapt to the adverse impacts, and make consistent finance flows, as per Article 2 of the Paris Agreement.
**This is the trailer of the speech with which I hope to recruit 250,000 people to stand with me in the sweltering heat beneath the symbolic shadow of the Great Emancipator. How do you access my chances?
I have yet to hear a compelling "climate dream." I'm praying for one.
Climate Change, Lowell Bliss, The Liberator Today, I have a dream
Second Lt. Sand and his bicycle infantry unit helplessly watch the Luftwaffe fly toward Copenhagen in a scene from the Danish WWII film, "April 9th".
What We Talk About When We Talk About Climate Change
January 31, 2019 by Lowell Bliss
What We Talk About When We Talk About Climate Change:
A Review of the Danish WWII Film April 9th, and an urgent appeal to artists
Climate change is no longer a problem to be solved; it is a journey we all must undertake—both individually and collectively. Now, don't mistake me: I am NOT saying that we must simply resign ourselves to the consequences of our inaction on climate change. I am saying that even our problem-solving will take the form of journey or narrative. For example, if enough Republicans in the US Congress finally join the bipartisan Climate Caucus, it will not be because some policy report touched their hearts, but because their own individual path (or party path, or institutional path) took an unexpected turn, like the climax of a story, and a whole new vista opened up for him or her.
Climate change is no longer a problem to be solved; it is a journey that we all must undertake. If true, this suggests that another transition is underway, and it is a transition that we would be wise to encourage. When it comes to climate change, scientists and politicians must decrease, and artists and spiritual leaders must increase. Consider this a call to action: artists of the world arise! As theologian Walter Brueggemann taught us in his book The Prophetic Imagination, the prophets of the Old Testament weren't primarily prognosticators or preachers; they were poets.
By way of example, let me offer up a film review. The 2015 WWII film entitled April 9th is not about climate change, but only if the plot and setting of a movie is allowed to dictate what a film is about or not about. On the morning of April 9, 1940, panzer units of the Nazi army crossed the border from Germany into the Southern Jutland region of Denmark, and within six hours had occupied the entire nation. A Danish film with English subtitles, April 9th is the story of a bicycle infantry platoon that is deployed (too little, too late) to the border, ordered to hold the Germans at bay until reinforcements arrive from neighboring garrison towns. April 9th is the story of bravery in the face of overwhelming odds, of the impending horror of watching the inevitable advance kilometer by kilometer, of what happens when a government abandons its citizens, and of how to care for each other during such a journey. Like I said, this film is about climate change.
Yes, you also heard me correctly: a bicycle infantry platoon. The opening scenes show them at drill, first firing single-shot bolt-action rifles, and then practicing changing flat tires. They can change a flat in an impressive two minutes, but could never manage to get their time down to 1.5. (And thus the whole war is in danger of being lost, I suppose.) While the Prime Minister puts all troops on high alert on April 8, he refuses to deploy units to defensive positions on the border, even when border patrols report German activity. The Prime Minister wants to do nothing to antagonize the Nazis. When the border patrol frantically radios in that panzer units have indeed crossed over the border, the bicycle platoon must quickly pedal the ten kilometers to engage the enemy. Technology which is insufficient to the challenge is a theme of April 9th, as it is of climate change. In one scene, the one surviving unit of the platoon, commanded by Second Lieutenant Sand and played by actor Pilou Asbæk, have commandeered a flat-bed delivery truck, thrown their bicycles in the back, and are using backroads to fallback to the town of Haderslev. One of the soldiers hears the drone of an airplane. Second Lt. Sand stops the truck, gets out, stands by the side of the road, and stares upward. You watch his face as he watches in silence as a squadron of Luftwaffe passes overhead on their way to Copenhagen. Sometimes one can simply not pedal fast enough.
The film features the character of 2nd Lt. Sand. He is an officer, but as the lowest commissioned rank, he is not in charge of much. Decidedly, authority and control over one's own destiny—what little there is of both—is a theme of the movie. Sand is repeatedly stopped short by his commander, the First Lieutenant who is not allowed to ask questions of his commander, the Lieutenant Colonel, who in turn can not violate the commands of the generals who must follow the lead of the Prime Minister. That same regimentation, Sand passes on to his own men. Nonetheless, this is not a movie about the ridiculousness of the chain-of-command, similar in that way to Gallipolii or M*A*S*H; it is about coming to grips with having no control over protecting what is precious to you. At one point, while temporarily hiding out in a farmhouse, the farm wife tries to convince Sand to hide his men in the hayloft until the inevitable but as-of-yet unspoken surrender occurs, thus possibly sparing the young lives of the men. Sand tells her that he will do his utmost to protect his men, but he will not hide them while the war rages. (It is a line which will come back to haunt him, though I will not spoil for you the tragic twist at the end.) The woman says, "Twenty years ago [Southern Jutland] was Germany, now it's Denmark. Shame on me as you may say, but it's never meant a whole lot to me." Sand tells her, "It means a lot to me," and then leaves to sneak his unit out to the next fallback position. As the unit moves from fallback position to fallback position, each location—whether it is a woods, a stretch of road, or a village—is revealed to be familiar to one of the soldiers. It is home. It means a lot to them. With the issue of sea-level rise alone, certain homelands like Tuvalu and the Maldives are in danger of being lost altogether, but each of us have landscapes, and ecosystems, and ways of life that mean a lot to us. If we could protect them, we would. I confess that for all its imperfections, the Paris Agreement is precious to me; I was there in Paris at COP 21 when it was written. Then, on June 1, 2017, one man, elected President by a minority of the popular vote, against the advice of his senior advisors, decides to take my nation out of the world's first cooperative good-will climate treaty. Sometimes, I find my powerlessness heartbreaking.
Second Lt. Sand does have authority over seven men, and the arc of his story touches on the theme of how we treat one another as a devastation unfolds beyond our control, as our own leaders begin to abandon us. It was apparently the custom at the time in the Danish Army that officers refer to infantry soldiers by their assigned numbers. Sand orders "225" or "218" to do this or do that. By the end of the movie however, he refers to them by their names, even in the heat of battle. He bothers to learn that Private Juestesen wants to be a "grocer, find a nice girl, have lots of children, lead a simple life," just like pretty much everyone else here in the Anthropocene Era. Whether circumstances will allow that for Juestesen is part of the end of the movie, but how Sand will care for Juestesen and the other men in those circumstances is the story of Sand's journey. Considering what we know of Denmark's history on the day of April 9, 1940, it is no spoiler to say that Sand must agonize over his own moment of surrender to the Germans. Perhaps his anguish was the same experienced by the Danish King, Prime Minister, and High Command; but I doubt it. Sand shows us what it means to be overwhelmed by circumstances beyond one's control, but to do so with bravery and with your first thought being given to those who have been given into your care. The final scene—following one last act of betrayal, the tragic twist—is of Sand and the surviving members of his unit riding in a bus back to their barracks. The Germans never disbanded the Danish military. These men would continue to journey together, and Sand would continue to be their leader on into a changed and unknowable future. These men could do worse than having Sand as their leader during the remainder of World War II. I aspire to be such a man.
I find so many parallels between April 9th and climate change that I am tempted to write a scholarly article. Let me mention one last scene. When Sand's bicycle infantry unit fallback into another village, one of the soldiers is handed a leaflet that had been dropped from a German plane. It is an appeal to Danish citizens to not offer resistance. The leaflet however is written in Norwegian, not Danish. The Germans didn't even grant the Danes the dignity of their own language. For that matter, the occupation of Denmark wasn't even a "victory" for the German army. It was just a staging ground for the Nazis to attack Norway. When the German officer refuses to accept Sand's pistol, when he offers him a ride back to the barracks in his own vehicle, when the Germany army decides not to disband the Danish army, the apparent effect is of the common trope: "the noble and worthy adversary." But no, Denmark is just one more "shithole country" on the road to whatever Superpower is determined to be First, or Great Again, or uber alles. I aspire for my country to travel more graciously in our collective planetary journey.
April 9th is written by Tobias Lindholm and directed by Roni Ezra, and we desperately need more such artists to journey alongside us in a warmer world. Perhaps you yourself are a film maker, a poet, a painter, a novelist, a dancer. Artist, arise! We need your help in making sense of what is happening. We need wisdom and counsel. We need help in moving from our heads to our hearts. And, while you are at it, throw in some literary critics as well, because as April 9th demonstrates, nowadays we will inevitably be talking about climate change even when we are not.
April 9th is currently available for streaming on Amazon Prime.
January 31, 2019 /Lowell Bliss
Part of the Poland pavilion at COP 24, the UN Climate Summit currently going on in Katowice, Poland. The conference site itself is built on an old coal mine.
COP 24 and the Anxiety of Transition: stones mined from the ground and from the kidneys
December 04, 2018 by Lowell Bliss
NOTE: I'm currently attending COP 24, the latest UN climate summit, in Katowice, Poland. I have been posting on Facebook. One unfortunate topic has been an attack of kidney stones that I have suffered along the way. This latest post, because of its length and topicality, I place here as a blog post.
I'm tempted to start with a good Canadian apology, and say that I am sorry for another update about my kidney stones, but actually, looking at this from the standpoint of the COP 24 Climate Summit, it has got to start being about my kidney stones, and about James Balog's knees, and your pains, and the suffering of Silesian coalminers in this region, and all of the other painful adjustments of society as we go through this God-ordained transition away from fossil fuels.
I was fine through all the first day of the COP, but then was wakened by some pain after three hours of sleep. I'm now writing this from underneath my blanket. I've had a couple hours of pacing around the room and have added the indignity of peeing in a bottle since I don't want to keep going to the hallway water closet.
"This too shall pass." That's a good reassurance for anyone who is suffering, though agonizingly ironic for someone passing a kidney stone. A better rendering of this statement would be "The passing will occur," because the passing is the point. The passing is the "This" as in "The passing will pass." The pain occurs only when the kidney stone is on the move, when it is on its way out. I know that this stone has been in my kidney at least since March. An MRI from a previous passing showed that I still had one stone in the queue. So long as this stone was lodged in my kidney, unmoving, I experienced no pain. Once it drops into my bladder for a layover, there will be no pain. But if I want the stone removed from my system, there is some necessary pain in the removal.
I think that's why Friday morning's attack was so violent. My father-in-law was at our house installing some new doors. He has had some massive kidney stone attacks and has required surgery for at least one of them. He asked if my attacks are so painful that they result in vomiting. "That only happened during the first one, when I was in India," I told him. "I don't normally vomit." Ten minutes later I was in our bathroom with my head in the toilet and was dry heaving for the next hour-and-a-half. I think my attack was so violent because I knew that I had tickets to fly to Poland the next day, and so I prayed, "Lord, I know how this works. Please move the stone far and quickly." Two of Jesus's prayers in the Garden of Gethsemane are recorded for us. The first is "Abba Father, please remove this cup [of impending suffering]." It is a prayer of deliverance. The second prayer is "Father, if this cup cannot be removed except by my drinking of it, then not my will be done, but yours." It too is a prayer of deliverance—the cup is removed in the end—but it is deliverance THROUGH the pain, not deliverance FROM the pain. It was the Father's will that Jesus had to drink the cup for it to be removed.
I have had numerous people tell me, on the occasion of each of my attacks including this one: "I hear kidney stones are the closest that a man can feel to the pain of childbirth." Then the joke is, "Yeah, that may be true, but we are still not allowed to say that to our wives." Honestly though, now I think I could say it to my wife who is a certified spiritual director. Robynn helps others accept their own pain without comparing it to other's, or without questioning whether one's own pain is less worthy of solace from God. She also understands that pain and suffering bring forth something new and alive in the world. Robynn gave birth to three wonderful human-beings. To date, I have given birth to three small pieces of crystalized calcium, and yet I also sense the birth of other things in me: humility, vulnerability, empathy, perspective. Additionally, maybe my reflections will prove to be life-giving to you too and to the Christian climate movement.
The pains of childbirth and kidney stones are about transitionary movement through a constricted space. Last week, Robynn and I listened to Austrian monk David Steindl-Rast being interviewed by Krista Tippett on the podcast On Being. Here is an excerpt from their dialogue:
BR. STEINDL-RAST: Well, when we look at things like global warming, or the destruction of the environment, or this uncontrollable violence that's breaking out here and there, and can't be — you can't touch it, you can't grab it, that is really — I think that justifies us to say we are at the brink of self-annihilation. However, we must acknowledge our anxiety about it. We must acknowledge our anxiety. But we must not fear. . . .
MS. TIPPETT: We have to acknowledge our anxiety, but we must not fear.
BR. STEINDL-RAST: Not fear. There is a great difference. See, anxiety, or anxious, being anxious, this word comes from a root that means "narrowness," and choking, and the original anxiety is our birth anxiety. We all come into this world through this very uncomfortable process of being born, unless you happen to be a caesarean baby. It's really a life-and-death struggle for both the mother and the child. And that is the original, the prototype, of anxiety. At that time, we do it fearlessly, because fear is the resistance against this anxiety. See? If you go with it, it brings you into birth. If you resist it, you die in the womb. Or your mother dies.
The host nation, and therefore President, of COP 24 is Poland. From what I've been able to pick up from some of the sessions and some of my reading, Poland is not only anxious—that is, "moving through a constricted space"—they are also afraid of the Paris process. Many of us raised our eyebrows when it was announced that COP 24 would be held, not in Warsaw or Krakow or even Lodz (pop. 700,000), but rather in Katowice, which is off the beaten path, without a major airport, whose population of 300,000 is suddenly expected to absorb 30,000 visitors including many heads of state. Katowice however is located in Silesia, the center of Poland's historic coal-mining region. Poland seems to be using this COP for its own domestic purposes, to bring in some global cash to this depressed region, but to also make a "just transition for the coal-mining industry" a front-and-center topic for this COP. Coal has a featured space in Poland's national pavilion, and we've all heard that the only presentation from the Trump administration will be, like year's COP, a panel extolling the virtues of so-called "clean coal." One official with the Council on Energy, Environment and Water said in a seminar yesterday that, while "just transition" is important, at this COP it represents a distraction and an abdication of leadership on Poland's part, the President of the COP. The parties at this COP must stay focussed on the purpose of this particular COP, which is the crucial establishment of the Rulebook which will rigorously guide implementation of the Paris Agreement.
"JUST transition" is important, but often its discussion is a way to resist the pain and suffering of just (or mere) TRANSITION. No transition will be free from injustice, though we should work our hardest at excising as much injustice as possible. Nonetheless, transition will always have some element of childbirth or kidney stones about it.
MS. TIPPETT: So, anxiety is a — not just an understandable, but a reasonable response to a lot of human experience.
BR. STEINDL-RAST: It's a reasonable response, and we are to acknowledge it and affirm it, because to deny our anxiety is another form of resistance.
MS. TIPPETT: Right. And so, that is reasonable, but the fear is actually that moment of resisting.
BR. STEINDL-RAST: But the fear is life destroying.
MS. TIPPETT: And it's a completely different move, and it takes us, our bodies, our minds, in a completely different direction.
BR. STEINDL-RAST: Destroys it, yeah. And that is why we can look back at our life, not only at our birth, but at all other spots where we got into really tight spots and suffered anxiety. Anxiety is not optional in life. It's part of life. We come into life through anxiety. And we look at it, and remember it, and say to ourselves, we made it. We got through it. We made it. In fact, the worst anxieties and the worst tight spots in our life, often, years later, when you look back at them, reveal themselves as the beginning of something completely new, a completely new life.
We conclude however with a different Roman Catholic, a Polish one. Pope John Paul II was the Archbishop of Krakow and shepherded over this region where COP 24 has been convened. In his inaugural homily, he proclaimed to us: "Do not be afraid." It became a theme for his papacy. In July 28, 2002 at Mass for World Youth Day in Toronto, John Paul said:
You are young, and the Pope is old. Eighty-two or 83 years of life is not the same as 22 or 23. But the Pope still fully identifies with your hopes and aspirations. Although I have lived through much darkness, under harsh totalitarian regimes, I have seen enough evidence to be unshakably convinced that no difficulty, no fear is so great that it can completely suffocate the hope that springs eternal…Do not let that hope die! Stake your lives on it! We are not the sum of our weaknesses and failures; we are the sum of the Father's love for us and our real capacity to become the image of his Son."
"We must acknowledge our anxiety, but we must not fear." That must become the cornerstone of our climate messaging. And, oh yes, also "drink lots of water."
If you are interested in further exploring considering a fossil fuel transition from a Christian perspective, may I recommend my chapel presentation at Houghton College: "Job 28 and Wisdom for an Energy Transition." My remarks begin at 4:38.
December 04, 2018 /Lowell Bliss
James Balog, Chasing Ice
"By Balog's Knees. . ." we will overcome climate change
November 29, 2018 by Lowell Bliss
The opening scene of the climate change documentary, Chasing Ice—destined to be a classic—features photographer James Balog carefully making his way between ice boulders and into the frigid surf of Jökulsarlon Beach, Iceland. Right before the title sequence begins, we hear Balog declare, "The story is in the ice somehow." He is wrong. The story is not in the ice, and the writers and the producers know it. The story is in the knee-caps.
The opening dialogue in the first seconds of the film is as follows: Balog and his assistant contemplate the crashing icy waves and Balog says, "The worst that would happen is that I would get really wet if I just stood in place."
The assistant, a local guide, corrects him about the worst that could happen : "No, you fall. You try to run. You bang your knee on a piece of ice and you bust your knee."
Balog simply replies: "I have to get this picture."
The story is not in the ice; it is in the knees. Chasing Ice is the story of James Balog's knees and the extent to which he is willing to sacrifice them in order to get the most compelling pictures of retreating glaciers and thunderous ice melt. He knows that the water he sees rushing to the sea will fuel the king tides and storm surges which will overrun whole island nations and erode our great coastal cities thousands of kilometers away from Greenland. Balog has got to get this picture.
After my first viewing of Chasing Ice, I knew that I wanted to write an article entitled "By Balog's Knees," thus coining the phrase that can become the rallying cry for all future climate action: "By Balog's Knees, we will stop climate change!" Admittedly Balog is a Hungarian surname, not the moniker of a Norse god, and "By Balog's Knees" doesn't sound half as inspiring as "By Odin's Ravens," or "By Thor's Hammer." Nonetheless, "By Balog's Knees" is perfect for someone like you and like me, the small climate actors, the ones who do want to act heroically and to do great things, but who have yet to connect the dots between our small actions, our kneecaps, and the preservation of hundreds of thousands of our fellow human beings. By Balog's Knee, we want to act heroically on climate change, but we just don't believe our small actions qualify.
Chasing Ice was released in 2012. What finally triggered my writing of this article is the curious way an old friend of mine changed a weight loss challenge of mine. Last week, I posted this on Facebook: "I will donate $50 ea. to the Trump 2020 campaign and to the NRA if I am NOT below 175 lbs. on April 4, 2019." I went on to say that if I do make my target weight I will, instead, donate $50 ea. to Climate Caretakers and to Relate 360. The former is a Christian climate action organization; the latter focuses on relational and sexual health among teenagers in NE Kansas. I got a large number of Facebook "likes," one or two jokes, and a great deal of encouragement. One friend wrote, "You've obviously read the latest motivational research...you've made your goal public, you given yourself powerful negative consequences for failure and positive ones for success. Expect the peer pressure because none of us want your negative consequences."
Then suddenly Thomas, my old friend, did something in my comment stream which changed the whole meaning of my personal challenge. He thought he was upping the ante by writing: "I will match amounts either way if you move your deadline to March 4." What happened instead was that he changed my challenge from a weight loss one to a climate action challenge. (My apologies to Relate 360 who will get their donation, but who are edited out of the rest of this article.)
My original challenge was a weight loss one. Thomas didn't challenge me to lose an additional five or ten pounds. He just changed the date. I went on-line and learned that losing twenty pounds (healthfully) can take from 10-20 weeks. March 4 would still give me 15 weeks. That's doable. March 4 is such an arbitrary date; it just happens to be a month earlier than my deadline. April 4, on the other hand, is my birthday. It is my 57th birthday and so I had been contemplating in what degree of fitness I want to enter my 60's. The April 4th deadline is about my weight, my body, and my health. March 4 has no meaning except the meaning that I choose to ascribe to it, and the only meaning that comes to me is that here is another chance to procure $50 more in donations for climate action. On the one hand, I will have to ratchet up my exercise and calorie-cutting a bit. I will also have to adopt an even more rigorous perspective toward Thanksgiving, Christmas, and four family birthdays between now and March 4. Mostly though, and this is how I feel: I feel like I'm being asked to give up this challenge being about me, about my health, and about my birthday celebration. If I choose to accept the March 4 challenge, it will be about $100 contributed to climate action, not just $50. It will be about climate change, and whether sacrifices, no matter how small are worth it.
You may find my line of reasoning overblown, but why should it be? Donations of $50 or less are the lifeblood of small organizations like Climate Caretakers. Fifty dollars is fifty dollars, and since Thomas would be unlikely to contribute to Climate Caretakers otherwise, and since in my current financial straits $50 is all I can afford, Climate Caretakers would miss out. More importantly, when it comes to climate action, small seemingly-unheroic sacrifices are often all that are available to small climate actors like us. Nonetheless it is precisely those small seemingly-unheroic sacrifices, made in their millions and billions, which is going to win the day. By Balog's knees, we will do our part!
Chasing Ice portrays the work of the Extreme Ice Survey as Balog and his assistants set up time lapse cameras in some of the world's harshest frozen landscapes: twelve cameras in Greenland, five each in Alaska and Iceland, and two in Montana. These cameras, often set up high in the mountainside in order to catch the panoramic view, will bear witness to the retreat of glaciers. Other times, the crew repels down into crevasses, or perches over precarious ice bridges to snap individual photos of rushing torrents of ice melt. Or, as in the opening scene, Balog wades out into the surf to catch the crash of waves upon the ice boulders. The landscape is spectacularly beautiful, and . . . spectacularly dangerous. In one scene, the crew is in a helicopter over icy water when they lose the use of one engine. The camera pans down to the ice sheets on the water surface and Balog informs us that should they fall in such waters, they would have only five minutes of physical function before death.
Nonetheless, again, it's the knees which run the heroic risk and in the end are sacrificed. In one scene shot inside the tent, Balog is wrapping a knee. He explains, "This knee has had two surgeries already. It could use a third." In the next scene, however, Balog is repelling down into a crevasse, the crampons on his feet kicked into the ice wall, the weight of his body borne as much by his knee caps as by the ropes. "Oh," he exclaims, "there's all sorts of curious crinkling and crunching effects in my knee," and when he returns to camp, we hear, "There were audible chunks of gravel-like substance that I could feel rolling around in there. I was covering up the soreness with anti-inflammatories and pain killers so that I could function in the field." It's enough to make you grab your knee-caps in sympathy, but also to ask why "functioning in the field" is so all-fired important.
During the shooting, Balog does have his third surgery. At that point, the storyline, as well as some of the heavy lifting, get taken over by the young assistants. They shake their heads in disbelief and yet are still mightily inspired. One says,
Jim was told after his surgery that hiking is not a form of exercise that they want him to pursue anymore. . . . James is doing now exactly what his doctors said he shouldn't be doing. Ice-climbing with axes and crampons. . . . It feels like, yeah, he goes to that point where he can't anymore and sometimes it feels like he goes even further. Yeah, and he speaks about it, he says, well, so I'll just do a fourth knee surgery, you know? Like however many it takes to keep him going. Like most people say, I'm going to get knee surgery to fix me, to make it better. But for him, it's to make it better so he can keep on pushing it, destroying it, basically, then he has to do just do it again.
In the very next scene, James Balog is climbing the glacier on crutches. When he finally gets a chance to explain, he tells us: "When my daughters, Simone and Emily, look at me 25 or 30 years from now and say, what were you doing when global warming was happening and you guys knew what was coming down the road, I want to be able to say, 'guys, I was doing everything I knew how to do. '"
That's the challenge invoked by Balog's knees. I want to be able to say the same thing to my two daughters. By Balog's knees, I did everything I knew how to do, not matter how small.
Mr. Thomas Powell, I accept your challenge. See you on March 4. Climate Caretakers accepts donations here. (Relate 360 here.)
November 29, 2018 /Lowell Bliss
Naaman's Voters Guide for 2018-- Vote Resiliently
October 30, 2018 by Lowell Bliss
But as for me, I almost lost my footing.
My feet were slipping, and I was almost gone.
For I envied the proud
when I saw them prosper despite their wickedness. (Psalm 73:2-3 NLT)
Resilience: the capacity of a system, enterprise, or a person to maintain its core purpose and integrity in the face of dramatically changed circumstances.
-Andrew Zolli, Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back
We need to be able to bounce back. After an election that yields results which disappoint us, we need to exercise the resilience which can honor disappointment without yielding to devastation. After election results that seem promising but which then, over the course of the next two years, wither amidst the realities of our new "illiberal democracy," we need to be able to bounce back after each hit. The Apostle Paul remarks, "We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body" (2 Cor 4:8-10 NIV).
After the midterm elections of 2014, when the campaigns of five incumbents that I was voting and/or praying against —including Kris Kobach and Mitch McConnell—all won, I certainly felt perplexed. I guess I even felt struck down. But when Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, I felt crushed, despairing, abandoned, and destroyed. I didn't feel like I was carrying the victorious death of Jesus in my body; I felt like I was carrying his bleeding corpse on my back. It paralyzed me for a period. Eventually, I walked out of my depression, and I knew that I didn't want this to happen to me again. That resolution could have taken the form of a tragic vow, the picture of Scarlett O'Hara dressed in repurposed drapery and declaring futilely to the world, "Ah will never be poow-ah again." But I knew that I needed to do more than redouble my efforts to campaign for and vote for a "different person." A House of Representatives that flips Democrat in 2018 will have its own disappointments in store for us. Donald Trump is still president for the foreseeable future. Most importantly of all though, God is trustworthy to his own mind and his own purposes, but not necessarily to our own agendas nor to our own understanding of how history should unfold. For then on out, I didn't just want to vote for a different person; I wanted to learn how to vote differently.
To be disappointed in 2014 and devastated in 2016 and then to pretend that you just don't care in 2018, can be any number of things: despair, cynicism, surrender, hyper-religious piety, self-righteousness. The one thing it is not is resilience. We need to be able to bounce back after taking a hit. We especially need to be able to bounce back in a period of illiberal democracy and encroaching fascism. Dark and evil times are called dark and evil for a reason.
You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains. Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me. At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people. Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved (Matt 24:6-13 NIV).
"Such things must happen." Jesus himself warns us that things will fall apart, and that we will be personally affected. We can certainly, if we choose, construct eschatalogies wherein we manage to escape; nonetheless, whereas God is trustworthy to his own mind and his own purposes, we should never presume that he is necessarily so to our national agendas nor to our understanding of how the end times should unfold. "Many will turn away from the faith." They were unable to bounce back from the hits. "The love of most will grow cold, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved." Rocky Balboa, the patron saint of desperate times.
Here are four tips in how to vote resiliently:
1. Make sure you have fully fulfilled God's calling on you in the moment, to the best of your ability. (See previous issue of the Naaman's Voters Guide: Vote Faithfully.) If you apply effort to grace, you will become practiced in discerning the voice of God in your life, and these questions will become easier to answer. Did God call you to vote? Then make sure you did vote. Did he call you to vote for a specific person? Did he call you to campaign, to volunteer hours, to donate money, or to mobilize your friends? Did he call you to run for office? Did you feel a spirit of petitionary prayer move within you? If so, did you pray? I'm not asking how successful you were at any of these efforts; I'm simply asking whether you were faithful in seeking out the Lord's leading and then responding to it to the best of your ability. If yes, then take a deep breath. Faithfulness is a soft cushion even if you are thrown from a great height.
2. Learn to abandon the outcomes to God. I find myself quoting often from page 209 of Dallas Willard's book Renovation of the Heart. I quote it because I myself need to hear it. I am a "One" on the Enneagram, a perfectionist, a reformer. I am an endeavorer by spirit. I endeavor greatly, which means that when I fail, I fail dramatically. Willard writes:
We will find his yoke [the easy yoke of Christ, Matt 11:28-30] an easy one and his burden a light one, because in learning from him, we have found rest to our soul. What we have learned, is primarily, to rest our soul in God. Rest to our soul is rest in God. My soul is at peace only when it is with God, as a child with its mother. What we most learn in his yoke, beyond acting with him, is to abandon outcomes to God, accepting that we do not have in ourselves—in our own "heart, soul, mind, and strength"—the wherewithal to make this come out right, whatever "this" is.
Our longings are strong but they are weak in the face of (fill in the blank): PAC money, habituated voting, Russian hackers, Trump's ability to mobilize his base, gerrymandering, hostile high courts, entrenched incumbencies, authorized voter suppression…, the ascendency of the idolatry of Power and Money. Even if the system was working perfectly, we would still find ourselves powerless to change the mind of another of our fellow human beings. Can you get 51 percent of the American electorate to care like you do for asylum seekers? Can you even sway members of your own family? Willard continues, "Even if we 'suffer according to the will of God,' we simply 'entrust our souls to a faithful Creator in doing what is right' (I Peter 4:19). Now. This is a major part of that meekness and lowliness of heart that we also learn in his yoke. And what rest comes with it!"
Back when we were living in India, and going through a rough patch, and badly in need of resilience, one of our dear friends interacted with us over this passage from Willard. "Always leave room for God," she told us. You do what you can (see item #1 above) but you don't fill up the gap between desire and success with worry or energetic frenzy. Instead, declare that space to be God's space. Let him do with it what he will. I think a corollary to this, post-election, is to politely refuse to listen to the phrase "God is still on the throne" unless you hear it from his lips first or simultaneously. I'm not disputing that this phrase is always true, whoever says it and in whatever context. Nonetheless, false comforters will tell you to lift up your head because "God is still on the throne." God the tender shepherd knows how much time you need for grief and healing. False gloaters will quote Daniel 2 and allude to Cyrus in the Old Testament, and try to convince you that "God is still on the throne," and that Donald Trump is a mere two seats away. You don't have to buy it. Perhaps you will need to ask him directly, maybe in the presence of a skilled spiritual director: "God, are you still on the throne?"
3. Treat election results like prayer, answered or unanswered. I for one am praying that Kris Kobach does not become the new governor of Kansas. Of course, I prayed that he would lose to Jeff Colyer in the primaries, and I prayed that he would lose the Secretary of State race in 2014. So much for prayer, huh? So what does this data reveal?: That I suck at prayer? That I am not interested in discerning the will of God? That I wasn't "prevailing" enough in my prayers? That God isn't interested in politics, and therefore no Christian should be? That Kris Kobach is favored by God? That God hates Mexicans? That God hates me? That I should give up on prayer? The only thing the data reveals, once again, is that God is God and I am not. I am not God but neither is Kris Kobach nor any majority of voters who might put him in office. The history books might be written by the victors; not so the Bible.
There is little answer for unanswered prayer. Unanswered prayer is for all disciples of all times what that Saturday was for the original disciples, that Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. There is no earthly explanation for the existence of that Saturday, except perhaps to fulfill a prophecy derived from Jonah in the belly of the fish (Matt 12:40). But one day, like that Saturday, we'll return to those unanswered prayers and call them Holy. Meanwhile, we breath through its minutes and hours and await the Resurrection.
Athanasius once wrote about St. Anthony, the desert father:
This was the advice he gave to those who came to him. And with those who suffered he sympathized and prayed. And oft-times the Lord heard him on behalf of many: yet he boasted not because he was heard, nor did he murmur if he were not. But always he gave the Lord thanks and besought the sufferer to be patient, and to know that healing belonged neither to him nor to man at all, but only to the Lord, who does good when and to whom He will. The sufferers therefore used to receive the words of the old man as though they were a cure, learning not to be downhearted but rather to be long-suffering. And those who were healed were taught not to give thanks to Antony but to God alone (56.)
4. Move straight from the voting booth to the temple sanctuary. I am referring to Psalm 73. I suggest you read Psalm 73 in its entirety, then "as needed," as if I was a doctor writing a prescription. Here are a handful of guiding thoughts:
The Psalmist is not afraid to recognize that there are indeed people afoot in the world who appropriately deserve the label "wicked." Their hearts are rightfully called "callous" and their imaginations "evil." There is no equivocation about it. The Psalmist doesn't name names, but it is obvious that he has some specific examples in mind.
The success of the wicked manages to delude and/or confuse many. Verse 10 (NIV) reads: "Therefore their people turn to them and drink up waters in abundance." Hebrew scholars are uncertain exactly what this verse means. It may refer to the masses who are hoodwinked by the wicked, or it may refer to how perplexing this situation is for everyone. The NLT translates it: "And so the people are dismayed and confused, drinking in all their words." Either interpretation indicates that Psalm 73:10 might be a theme verse for our times.
The prosperity of the wicked represents a legitimate spiritual crisis for many in their discipleship. The wicked flaunt their violence and ask, "Does the Most High even know what's happening?" The Psalmist is asking the same question in his heart, and is tempted to give up and join in: "Surely in vain I have kept my heart pure and have washed my hands in innocence."
Once again the Psalms validates our emotions. Grief, perplexity, anger are all amoral and legitimate responses to what happens to us in the world. Admittedly, there are temptations for unexpressed and unprocessed emotions, such as the acquiescence to evil to which we've already mentioned. Bitterness is a temptation (v. 21) as is abandonment and desertion (v. 27.) A "weak spirit" however is not a sin, nor is lament which, on reflection, might come across as "foolish, ignorant, or senseless" (v 22.). Instead, even senseless animals belong to God (v. 23) and "God remains the strength of my heart" (v. 26).
When does the Psalmist bounce back? It is NOT in verse 16 when he tried to understand WHY. "So I tried to understand why the wicked prosper. But what a difficult task it is!" In the middle of your pain and perplexity, we don't need to add the "difficulty" of trying to figure out what God is up to?
When does the Psalmist bounce back? Verse 23: "Then I went into your sanctuary, O God, and I finally understood the destiny of the wicked." He couldn't hope to understand why the wicked prosper, but apparently "the destiny of the wicked" is an understanding that is granted us. "Truly, you put them on a slippery path and send them sliding over the cliff to destruction. In an instant they are destroyed, completely swept away by terrors. When you arise, O Lord, you will laugh at their silly ideas as a person laughs at dreams in the morning.
Resilient people lament their pain, admit—like Job eventually does—their inability to figure things out, rests in the WHOM they belong to, and contemplate their own destiny.
Then I realized that my heart was bitter,
and I was all torn up inside.
I was so foolish and ignorant—
I must have seemed like a senseless animal to you.
Yet I still belong to you;
you hold my right hand.
You guide me with your counsel,
leading me to a glorious destiny v. 21-24).
We can bounce back.
My health may fail, and my spirit may grow weak,
but God remains the strength of my heart;
he is mine forever. (v. 26)
But as for me, how good it is to be near God!
I have made the Sovereign Lord my shelter,
and I will tell everyone about the wonderful things you do. (v. 28)
Next issue of the Naaman's Voters Guide for 2018: Vote Forgivingly
October 30, 2018 /Lowell Bliss
Naaman's Voters Guide for 2018-- Vote Faithfully
By all accounts, William Lloyd Garrison, the famous abolitionist, was a faithful man.
He settled on his convictions about slavery early, eventually purified them of all half-measures such as gradualism or colonization, and then stuck to them through much persecution and threat. Garrison published his first issue of The Liberator on January 1, 1931 and didn't miss a deadline for 35 years. He stopped publishing on December 29, 1865 only after "The object for which the Liberator was commenced—the extermination of chattel slavery—[had] been gloriously consummated."
However, William Lloyd Garrison is unlikely to be considered a faithful voter. With the exception of 1848, Garrison refused to cast a ballot, and encouraged others to boycott the ballot box as well.
The Naaman's Voters Guide, when it first appeared before the 2016 election, attempted to address the dilemma of HOW does one vote when one has no good choices. The answer is found in the question itself: instead of focusing on the dilemma of "for whom" to vote, you can explore other more life-giving ways of "how" to vote—in other words, "in what manner" to vote, or with what attitude, perspective, understanding, or spirit. And so the Guide advised you to vote freely, peacefully, quickly, worshipfully, and dolefully and hopefully. In these 2018 midterm elections, we are still voting with no good choices. Oh sure, one can conclude (as the intended audience for this series has ostensibly done) that Laura Kelly is a better choice for Kansas Governor than Kris Kobach. One might conclude that O'Rourke is a better choice than Cruz in Texas, Scholten over King in Iowa, and Democrats over Republicans everywhere in order to protect the Mueller investigation, provide checks and balances that are lacking on Trump, and to generally give the Republicans a "time out" to consider their souls. What we don't have, however, is a good choice that will fix the system. The 2018 midterm election is an exercise in damage control. I agree that we must do everything we can to staunch the bleeding, but for however much you might get excited about the record number of women (256) who are running for House and Senate seats, the proto-fascist autocrats still control the valve on an open artery, and America's unrepentant heart is feverishly gushing to a racist, sexist, and xenophobic beat. Sure, I hope you vote for a different person in 2018, but as we contemplate life in an "illiberal democracy", we must train ourselves up in how to vote differently.
VOTE FAITHFULLY
There is certainly a time component to faithfulness. God's faithfulness "continues through all generations" (Psalm 100:5) and it "endures forever" (Psalm 117:2) but it is also "new every morning" (Lam. 3:23). We might say that it knows both chronos and kairos time. God's faithfulness extends chronologically throughout all time--we will never out live it--but it is also there for us in the moment we need it, in the kairosmoment, in the moment of opportunity. For example, in I Corinthians 10:13, we are reassured that in the crisis of temptation, "God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear."
When we think of "voting faithfully," we think primarily of chronos time. We honor the old geezer who proclaims, "I haven't missed a primary or general election since 1956," never mind if he voted for a scoundrel every single time. This is similar to what we mean by a "faithful church attender." She hasn't missed a Sunday since the "Great Ice Storm of '72". Never mind whether she slept through every sermon, mouthed the words of every hymn, and couldn't look across the pew without rehearsing old grudges—the lady was a faithful church attender. But what does kairos faithfulness look like when someone enters a church service and opens his or her Bible? What might kairos faithfulness look like when you step into the voting booth? It is possible, if we choose to perceive things differently, that William Lloyd Garrison may have been one of the most faithful voters America has ever known.
"When God made his promise to Abraham, since there was no one greater for him to swear by, he swore by himself" (Heb. 6:13). The essence of God's faithfulness is that he is true to himself. There are certainly many promises and covenants which God faithfully upholds, but every one of his promises emerged from who he is. God does what he says, because he is who he is, always, through all generations, and also each morning, in each moment. The faithful voter, regardless of whomever's name might be printed on the ballot, always casts a ballot for his or her own self first. The faithful voter is true to himself or herself.
William Lloyd Garrison was true to his principles and convictions. He knew that he bore a greater loyalty to God than to Man. When Man contradicted God, as Senator Henry Clay did, Garrison remained true to God. Henry Clay of Kentucky was the only politician that Garrison ever seemed to believe in, but when it was revealed that Clay too was a slaveholder, Garrison never recovered. Additionally, Garrison knew that he bore a greater loyalty to the Declaration of Independence than to the US Constitution. When the Constitution with its protection of slavery contradicted the founding principle that "all men were created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain alienable rights," Garrison remained true to Jefferson's words.
In an era of illiberal democracy and encroaching fascism, it will be more important than ever to enter the voting booth having figured out who you are, rather than trying to figure out "how your vote is going to help make this work" or "whether your vote will lead to victory." For example, I was talking to an old friend who told me that in the Kansas primaries he voted for Kris Kobach over and against "a perfectly suitable Brownback Republican" (my words), namely the sitting governor Jeff Colyer. His explanation was: "Because Kobach has a better chance of winning against the Democrat in the general election." My friend was trying to understand and game the system. I wanted to ask him how "true to himself" a vote for Kobach was? Maybe he was being true to himself. Maybe he didn't know. Maybe he thought of the Kansas primary as just a primary and missed what could have been a kairos opportunity for the spiritual discipline of examen.
The more that the US electoral system gets rigged—in tangible and intangible ways—the less your vote will have any chance to accomplish anything at all, let alone success, progress, or reform. Wendell Berry—a Kentuckian that Garrison could maybe have believed in again—has fought his entire life against the coal companies that are destroying the landscapes and communities of his beautiful home. Berry says, "Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success, namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence." Elections inevitably invoke promises of gaining the whole world. It's not worth it if we lose our own souls.
Faithfulness also means being true to God. And so to "vote faithfully" is to vote in a manner that is true to God. There were plenty enough arguments from Trump voters in 2016 that that is exactly what they were trying to do, and plenty enough incredulous outrage that Hilary voters might also be trying to do the same. All these arguments were based on the false assumption that we had any chance in Hell of figuring it out and "getting it right." (Elisha never explains to Naaman how best to maneuver himself when in the Temple of Rimmon. He simply says, "Go in peace." ) We thought that we had to take all the data at hand—filtering it through years of Bible training—and arrive at a faithful decision. We forgot that God is ready to be faithful to us in the kairos moment itself. We can ask him, "For whom should I vote?" We can ask him whether we should vote in this cycle or not? Plenty of other voices, pesky eavesdroppers on your inquiry, will pipe up and say: "Of course, you should vote—and here's why—and of course you should vote for so-and-so—and here's why?" Learn to quiet those voices; learn to listen to God.
As long-term veterans of life in Varanasi, India, my wife and I were often quizzed by new arrivals and visitors. Invariably, they wanted to know how to respond when encountering one of the city's many beggars. Usually, the new arrival had his or her mind already made up. Some would tell us, "According to the Bible, we should ALWAYS give to the poor and needy." Others would say, "I've heard rumors that the money just gets shuttled to the Mafia; one should never give." Some settled it according to prioritization: they were called to preach, not to give material gifts. Others developed schemes and strategies of giving food not money, or escorting the beggar to some social service. Here's the answer that my wife and I gave them: "Err on the side of generosity. You don't want to appear before with Jesus with the boast, 'I've never once allowed myself to get ripped off.' But more importantly—if you want to remain here long term with any degree of sanity—learn to listen to the Holy Spirit in the moment. Ask him if you should give to that particular beggar at this particular time." The younger visitors looked at us with what we took to be wonder at our great wisdom, but I suspect it was rather fear in their eyes. "The Holy Spirit? He's never spoken to me, and I'm not sure, given my track record, that he would deign to do so. And would he speak to me outside a Sunday morning, without my Bible open, without someone like James Dobson exegeting Scripture for me?"
We don't know much about Garrison's spiritual life. Certainly he repudiated contemporary church life. I recall reading that he was very faithful with his nightly family Bible reading. But did Garrison ever stop and pray, "Lord, should I vote this year?" I don't know. As befitting an essayist, Garrison spent a lot of time reasoning out his course of action, even employing Scripture. You can read one such example here, as Garrison responds to a Letter to the Editor in 1856:
It follows logically, and as a matter of sound morality, that if 'the American government [constitutionally] upholds the great crime of slavery,' voting under it is wrong; and it is wrong for this among other reasons – knowing the pro-slavery compromises contained in the Constitution – we refuse to touch the ballot, stained as it is with the blood of four millions of slaves."
And later he answers a common objection that we might hear in 2018: "But, 'shall we leave government to be conducted wholly by men not troubled with a conscience?' This is only to ask, 'shall we leave the dead to bury their dead?'"
Nonetheless there seems to be an element of "calling" to Garrison's boycott of the ballot box, and this allows us to view Garrison as attempting to be true to God in the moment. For example, he did switch things up and vote in 1848. He was immediately accused of hypocrisy by doctrinaire abolitionists, but Garrison apparently saw something in Amasa Walker, a pacifist and Free Soiler, or in their friendship as co-founders of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, that made him respond differently in that particular moment. And when other abolitionists cornered him about voting, Garrison spoke in terms of strategy: he was called to devote his energies to form people's consciences. He didn't think that abolitionists needed to be voters, but he did think that every voter needed to be an abolitionist.
Once more, I beg not to be misapprehended. I have always expected, I still expect, to see abolition at the ballot-box, renovating the political action of the country—dispelling the sorcery influences of party—breaking asunder the fetters of political servitude—stirring up the torpid consciences of voters—substituting anti-slavery for pro-slavery representatives in every legislative assembly—modifying and rescinding all laws solely by a change in the moral vision of the people—not by attempting to prove that it is the duty of every abolitionist to be a voter, but that it is the duty of every voter to be an abolitionist.
"It has never been a difficult matter to induce men to go to the ballot-box," Garrison explained, "but the grand difficulty ever has been, and still is, to persuade them to carry a good conscience thither, and act as free moral agents, not as tools of party."
Vote faithfully in 2018 by being true to yourself and true to God in the kairosmoment. If you have never taken the time to identify and list out your principles, take this opportunity to do so, even on paper. If you don't know your own mind, or are curious about the fears and doubts which keep you from being true to your best self, then consider meeting with a spiritual director. (My wife Robynn is launching her website this very week and taking on new clients.) If you don't know how to listen to the Holy Spirit, learn through practice. If you want a good head start, I recommend Dallas Willard's book Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God.
Next edition of the Naaman's Voter's Guide for 2018: Vote Resiliently
Naaman in the River Jordan. (Victoria & Albert Museum)
Naaman's Voters Guide for 2018-- Vote Differently
(The Liberator Today is now published on the far side of the Peace Bridge, at the terminus of the Underground Railroad.)
Former Kansas Governor Mike Hayden is voting differently in 2018, but he is not really voting differently. A lifelong Republican, Hayden is voting for a Democrat in order to prevent Kris Kobach from obtaining the Kansas governorship. The Des Moines Register, known for its balance, is advising its readers to vote differently in 2018 (but not really). The editors write:
In becoming the party of Trump, the Republicans have forsaken traditional conservatism and given voters no rational alternative to the Democrats. The party needs to be voted out of power and spend a few years becoming again the party of Lincoln, not the party of Trump.
All across the country, people are voting differently, but not really, because they are merely voting for a different party's candidate, or for a different person than the one--the incumbent--that they sent to office two, four, or six years ago. That's voting for a different WHO. We need to vote with a different HOW.
I'm resurrecting the Naaman's Voters Guide in time for the 2018 midterm elections.
You may recall the 2016 story of the Guide. Some people who were genuinely perplexed by the dilemma of the two parties' two candidates in a two party system came to me and asked, "Lowell, how should I vote?" I deliberated for a bit and then told them that I would answer their question, but not in the way they intended. They had asked "How should I vote?" by which they meant "For whom should I vote?" Instead, I would attempt to answer the question "[In what manner] should I vote?" I was going to focus on the adverbs. And so, as you can read if you care to jump back, I advised people to vote freely, peacefully, quickly, worshipfully, and dolefully and hopefully. (And by the way, puhleeeeze don't vote for Donald Trump.) I got both affirmation and rejection. One church in my hometown sent weekly links to their congregants. Another church printed out my "worshipfully" issue and passed it out the Sunday before the election. I do not believe I changed any minds, and Heaven knows, I swayed nothing in the election outcomes. But I do believe I faithfully shepherded some of my readers who were feeling distressed and downcast.
You may also recall the story behind the name of the Voters Guide. Naaman had an impossible situation, as recorded in 2 Kings 5 in the Old Testament. Healed from leprosy, he vowed to worship no god but Yahweh. However, Naaman had civic responsibilities. When he attended to the King of Aram, his boss, he was afraid that he might have to bow when the king was in his temple bowing to the idol Rimmon, if the king was leaning on his arm. The prophet Elisha responds, "Go in peace." In the run-up to the 2016 election, we were all in need of a similar benediction.
Finally, some of you may also recall my previous experience with a midterm election, 2014. I prayed that the Lord God Almighty would turn five incumbents out of office. One was Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (of Trump's voter fraud commission infamy). Another was Mitch McConnell. I wasn't a Kentucky voter, but McConnell had an autocratic stranglehold on a Senate that the Constitution said belonged to all people. Anyway, long story short, all my prayers went unanswered. All five of the candidates were returned to office. McConnell has caused so much damage in the last four weeks, let alone the last four years, that historian Christopher Browning recently wrote in the NY Times Review of Books: "If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell." The morning after the election, I walked down to my favorite coffee shop—Radina's in Aggieville. Parked right outside was a car with this bumper sticker in the back window: "Proud white American English-speaking male. Don't like it. Leave." I went into Radina's, ordered a decaf coffee, and wrote the first sentences which would become The Liberator Today and eventually the Naaman's Voters Guide.
But what is our dilemma in 2018? No one is asking me this time around, "Lowell, for whom should I vote?" There have been numerous crisis points in the past two years that everyone, it seems, has made up his or her mind months in advance. Nonetheless, I would argue that now more than ever it is important to keep our focus fixed on HOW one should vote? In what manner? With what attitude or perspective? The reason I say this is because none of us have ever been asked to vote in an era where one's vote has lost all meaning.
What I more precisely mean is that your vote has lost its traditional meaning, the meaning that we ascribed to it before 2016, the meaning that our fore bearers generally brought to it, the meaning that was embodied in the US Constitution. Russian meddling, gerrymandered districts, voter fraud, voter suppression, disenfranchisement, unmatchable PAC money, voter apathy, Senate filibuster rules, the strength of incumbency, a politicized judiciary. . . these are just some of the developments that has changed the meaning of your vote. It used to be that voting was our way to staff the government of the people, by the people, and for the people. It was meant to make the will of the people known, to reward those with the skills, knowledge, and commitment to advance what George Washington called The American Experiment. Now your vote is no longer able, nor even meant, to accomplish those purposes.
Even those who are advising us to vote for a different WHO (and I still think Atlantic's March 2018 article "Boycott the Republican Party" is the best argument for this) are proof that voting as we have known it has lost its old meaning. The subtitle of the Atlantic article is "If conservatives want to save the GOP from itself, they need to vote mindlessly and mechanically against its nominees." In other words, unlike how you used to do it, don't weigh the issues. Don't choose the "best person for the job." Don't honor old loyalties. Instead, we are being asked to vote in such a way as to put a band aid on the next two years of governance, to provide "checks and balances" on an autocratic faction (Trump, McConnell, Ryan's replacement, a 5-4 politicized SCOTUS). The opposition party was never meant to be the "checks and balances" in the system. There is a story--possibly attributable to Rep. Al Swift of Washington, possibly apocryphal, quoted on TV's The West Wing: a freshman Democrat looked across the aisle in the House of Representatives and called a Republican his enemy. "Republicans are the opposition," a veteran House colleague corrected him, "the Senate is the enemy." As per the Federalist Papers, the two houses of Congress and then the other two branches of government were all supposed to view each other with suspicion, to cooperate but not collude. As per the Constitution, the system of checks and balances was never supposed to be dependent on an election cycle.
So people are already ascribing new meaning for your vote, encouraging you to use it in ways that you may not even be aware of. It's your vote. Just as you are free to cast it for WHOMEVER you wish, you are also free to cast it HOWEVER you wish. In other words, reassert control over the new meaning of your vote. The problem is that the old meaning for voting still has a mathematical justification. If enough people of good will can be convinced to turn out and vote for the best candidate—and if this phenomenon is replicated across enough states and districts—then, yes, the autocrats could be thrown out of office and reform of the system could commence. I concede. It works on paper. Browning's article "The Suffocation of Democracy" is a worthy read, in part because it argues that dictatorships in the 21st Century will look and smell like democracy. Dictatorships in the 21stCentury will continue to present an inarguable mathematical legitimacy. But Browning writes:
The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power. Perhaps the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term "illiberal democracy." Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.
Total control of the press and other media is likewise unnecessary, since a flood of managed and fake news so pollutes the flow of information that facts and truth become irrelevant as shapers of public opinion. Once-independent judiciaries are gradually dismantled through selective purging and the appointment of politically reliable loyalists. . . [And that is only a portion of Browning's analysis of what is becoming true in America.]
We have never had to cast votes in an illiberal democracy before. If our vote has lost its traditional meaning, then it is the responsibility of all freedom-loving people to construct new meaning, if only for our own survival, health, and liberty. Our best chance of finding new meaning is to stop fixing on the "Who?" of the act of casting a ballot, and instead explore the "How?" Another way I might say this is that the mechanics of voting physically have not changed, but the dynamics of voting spiritually must. There are only two weeks left before Election Day. Let's see if I can generate three new articles in the Naaman's Voters Guide: How to vote faithfully; How to vote resiliently; and How to vote unexceptionally.
(I was tempted to end this article with the line: "And puhleeze don't vote for Kris Kobach," but my audience is truly those who are voting differently than Kobach already, but who have yet to explore that simply voting for the Democrat is NOT the health and freedom available in the concept of voting differently. I am writing to those who have had heard the same call Jesus issued to his disciples: "Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their own dead." (Matt 8:22)).
I grew up assuming that the figure in this photo above the slain body of Robert Kennedy was his assassin, Sirhan Sirhan. It is actually a hotel bus boy, Juan Romero, who came to cradle the dying senator's head.
Coming to Both Praise and Bury Bobby Kennedy
INTRODUCTION-- Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Robert F Kennedy, I've always been fascinated by Bobby, have read various biographies, even visited his gravesite in Arlington National Cemetery, as you will read in this article. I should write a new and more fitting tribute. Instead I am reprinting a portion of the political manifesto that I wrote up in 2014 when I first started publishing The Liberator Today. I am trying to shed as many labels as I possibly can, and burying RFK helps. The context of this excerpt is an explication of the prophecy of Daniel Chapter 2: the statue of golden, silver, bronze, iron, and then iron mixed with clay. The rock which is the Messiah Jesus comes and pulverizes the whole of imperial history. (The last two episodes of our Hope videos feature Daniel 2.)
The Conservative Myth is one of two things: either of reconstruction or of exceptionalism. First, there can be an imagined golden age of headship, from which we have fallen, true, but which we can nonetheless reconstruct. For America, our golden age is the Founding Fathers and the Constitution is the deposit of gold tucked away, albeit insecurely, in our consciousness, a Fort Knox of our own imagination. Liberals are perceived as gold thieves. A book like Howard Zinn's The People's History of the United Statesis under persistent threat of ban (such as in the State Universities of Indiana under Governor Mitch Daniels, or in Denver School Districts) because it dares to speak of Columbus complicit in genocide or of Teddy Roosevelt complicit in betraying the Filipinos.
The second possible conservative myth however is that America stands outside, transcends, Nebuchadnezzar's statue and outside history as a whole. We are followers of the Rock, perhaps even the hand that flung it. We are the allies of Jesus. The toes of the statue, the iron ones at least, are whomever we must combat to make the world safe for democracy. Unfortunately for the myth of American Exceptionalism, the explication of Daniel 2 above indicates that America participates in the extension of Caesar's crushing power and that Jesus the Rock brooks no co-regents. Even Daniel, who might have reason to boast, humbly tells Nebuchadnezzar: "As for me, this mystery has been revealed to me, not because I have greater wisdom than anyone else alive, but so that Your Majesty may know the interpretation and that you may understand what went through your mind" (Dan 2:30).
The Liberal Myth is more complicated. It does not look from the golden head down, but rather from the mixed toes up. It is keenly aware of the fourth kingdom: "Finally, there will be a fourth kingdom, strong as iron—for iron breaks and smashes everything—and as iron breaks things to pieces, so it will crush and break all the others." If it is "outside" of the statue, similar to one of the two Conservative myths, then it is under the statue's feet, excruciatingly crushed beneath the weight of empire, and thus deserving of our pity and political activism. Its myth is that it may one day climb upwards to iron, to bronze, toward the goldenness that it knows it possesses in its self-righteousness. But here's the crux of the myth: that it will have its chance of exercising iron's power or gold's superiority, but will be able to do so without being imperial itself. There is a power, they surmise, that is not made of Empire, nor of Christian faith, and they dream to one day wield it. It is the dream of Orwell's pigs in Animal Farmwho continue to spout "four legs good; two legs bad," even while being fitted for trousers.
Since this prospectus will more likely get me accused of "becoming liberal," I want to examine one manifestation of the liberal myth in particular. When America's first black president campaigned on "Hope and Change," he was not channeling Martin Luther King, but rather Robert Kennedy. (Remarkably, Kennedy once said in a Washington Post interview in 1968: "In the next 40 years, a Negro can achieve the same position my brother has." Obama was inaugurated forty years later.) In 1968, Bobby Kennedy was rallying black voters and young voters, and running a campaign of rock star proportions. His obvious goal was to finish the unfinished promise of a Kennedy presidency that had been interrupted by Oswald's bullet and LBJ's boorishness. His campaign (and its promise) however was also cut short and left unfinished.
Ronald Steel in his book In Love with Night: The American Romance with Robert Kennedy claims that both Kennedy brothers are shrouded in myth, and that the strength of their legacy (including JFK's thousand days in office) is not what either of them accomplished, but rather in "what they would have done" if they had lived. They are enshrined in "counterfactuality:" what would have happened, but didn't because Johnson and then Nixon were left in charge. For example, although JFK, and his brother the Attorney General whose fingers were in the foreign policy pie, are arguably most responsible for the Vietnam War, President Kennedy, the myth tells us, would have reversed course by 1964 and a President Robert Kennedy would certainly have done so in 1969, IF they had been allowed to live. And so now, Robert Kennedy's destiny is also left unfinished. Bill Clinton famously flashed a photo of himself as a young Boys Stater from Hope, Arkansas shaking hands with President Kennedy in 1963, but President William Jefferson Clinton almost always invoked the spirit of his middle name instead. Clinton distanced himself within the Democratic Party, seeking a centrism that demanded, "it's the economy, stupid!" and which presided over a welfare reform in 1996 that policy scholars now say was rife with racism. No, it was Barack Obama who undertook to finish Bobby Kennedy's campaign. Obama certainly rallied the first youth vote since the Sixties, and the largest black vote. He possessed in spades the Kennedy sense of cool charm. He preached "Hope and Change" and vowed to take us out of a mired war that had grown tiresome, if not unpopular. John McCain by contrast was a bejowled Nixon.
Now we have thus had it in Barack Obama—a completed RFK campaign, a two-term JFK presidency. The myth has shed contrafactuality. How does it feel, liberal dreamer?
I once visited Arlington National Cemetery as a quick stop before a conference in Washington, DC. I wanted to visit, not John Kennedy's gravesite, but his brother's. I had just finished reading my second biography of RFK. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., author of Robert Kennedy and His Times, was a Kennedy insider and active in RFK's 1968 campaign. He was well-versed in the myth-making of the Kennedy family and his book perpetuates it. As for me, JFK was president when I was born, unlike my older sister who was Eisenhowerian. Martin Luther King was assassinated on my sixth birthday. So the Kennedys and their era had an allure for me and I was first successfully seduced by a chapter on RFK in Robert Cole's Moral Leadership, just as I was being seduced by the concept of moral leadership itself. But even as I was reading RFK biographies, what was "factual" about Kennedy's life was enough to give me pause about what was mythically counterfactual. Who would Bobby Kennedy have been? Answer: likely what he was. Who would he have been? Answer: likely what Obama has been 2008-to-the-present. Those who want to lay the Liberal Myth to rest, like I believe I have done, should read the book mentioned earlier, In Love with Night. Steel is intrigued by the Bobby Myth and doesn't intend to be iconoclastic, but his book helps you return to the other biographies and see Bobby Kennedy's short life as this progression:
a privileged childhood under Joe Kennedy's ambitious tyranny; a lackluster law school career; an accomplice to McCarthyism; chasing Jimmy Hoffa, Fidel Castro, and finally Lyndon Johnson as if chasing white whales; the assigned hatchet man for each of his brother's campaigns; implicit in the Bay of Pigs debacle; obsessed with counter-insurgency and the assassination of foreign leaders; holding civil rights at arms length as Attorney General except when forced by others to act; reckless brinkmanship in the Cuban Missile Crisis; turning to Greek philosophy instead of his Catholic faith for solace following his brother's death; no challenge to the Warren Commission lest his brother's alleged Cuban and Mafia connections come under scrutiny; peevish and petty towards his brother's successor; disingenuous about opposition to the Vietnam War; courting blacks and youth to find a powerbase in the Democratic Party that didn't belong to LBJ; courting poverty as an issue to embarrass LBJ's failed Great Society; carpet bagging as a New York senator; equivocating on whether to run for President; begrudging and then betraying Eugene McCarthy who was the true anti-war candidate.
What I admire in Bobby Kennedy is what Robert Coles pointed out to me, the possibility of a moral leadership which reveals itself, as it did for Kennedy, in such places as the tar paper shacks of Appalachia, the empty bellies of Mississippi, the slums of Bedford-Stuyvesant, the hopelessness of apartheid South Africa, or in his openhearted speech in Indianapolis on the night of King's death. I remain in love with moral leadership, but any leadership which is built on myth, whose hope is not in the sure and jealous return of Jesus Christ, is vulnerable to its own Sirhan Sirhan, the crazed assassin. Letting the Bobby Myth die is a good way to let the liberal myth die. In one of Steel's concluding paragraphs, he speaks instructively to us abolitionists in 2014:
The mythology that has been generated around Robert Kennedy in the years since his death is simply that: a mythology. Like many legendary figures, the Bobby of legend has been created by us. There is little, beyond hope and need, to lead us to believe that he would have bridged the divisions between blacks and whites, narrowed the chasm between rich and poor, dedicated himself to the values that inspire liberals, quickly ended a divisive war, or brought about the magical restoration of a mythical golden age. Only from his early death have we, as with his brother, created a heroic figure to fill our needs.
Don't call me a liberal. I buried that myth on a visit to Arlington National Cemetery. I look for no golden boy to come wield power unimperialistically. Though I often fail, I try to keep my hope in Christ alone.
"Figure Kneeling in Prayer," Francois-Barthelemy-Marius Abel (1832-1870)
Daniel, Tim, and a Prayer for Our Age, Lent 2018
February 19, 2018 by Lowell Bliss
The prayer of the prophet in Daniel chapter 9 is an intriguing thing. His own diligent study leads him to state: "I, Daniel, understood from the Scriptures, according to the word of the Lord given to Jeremiah the prophet, that the desolation of Jerusalem would last seventy years." I picture Daniel like that scene from The Lord of the Rings were Gandalf leaves the Shire to go consult the dusty archives of Gondor to learn what he can about Sauron and the ring. "History makers" according to theologian Walter Brueggemann, have a "capacity for discerning social analysis and criticism."
Let's imagine, as I believe we can, that Daniel reads Jeremiah's prophecy with both faith in God and confidence in Jeremiah. He can calculate the years. He believes that the exiles' liberation is close at hand. How would you expect Daniel to respond? Surely he would celebrate. Surely he would go spread the good news. "Take up those harps that you laid by the rivers of Babylon. Restring them. Tune them to a Hebraic tonality. We are going to sing again!"
Instead, Daniel tells us, "So I turned to the Lord God and pleaded with him in prayer and petition, in fasting, and in sackcloth and ashes" (v. 3). What?!
The prayer of Daniel 9 is the prayer of unfinished business. There is work that Daniel must do, and do on behalf of his people. "Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps his covenant of love with those who love him and keep his commandments, we have sinned and done wrong" (v. 4-5). Later the angel Gabriel comes and seems to confirm that there was something necessary about Daniel's prayer: "Daniel, I have now come to give you insight and understanding. As soon as you began to pray, a word went out, which I have come to tell you, for you are highly esteemed" (v. 22-23)
Daniel's petition was also, apparently, the prayer of invisible battle. In the next chapter, Gabriel inserts his fellow archangel Michael and demonic forces ("the prince of the Persian kingdom") into the history of Daniel's prayer:
Then he continued, "Do not be afraid, Daniel. Since the first day that you set your mind to gain understanding and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard, and I have come in response to them. But the prince of the Persian kingdom resisted me twenty-one days. Then Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, because I was detained there with the king of Persia. Now I have come to explain to you what will happen to your people in the future, for the vision concerns a time yet to come" (10:12-14).
You know, we read these stories from the Bible and we marvel at them, but we rarely imagine that we can be such people. Nonetheless, we too can read the Scriptures and inquire of the Holy Spirit who indwells us: "What does this mean for our age?" We too, by the gifts given to the Church, have the "capacity for discerning social analysis and criticism." Surely we can make the long trek to Gondor since there is so much at stake. What if we sat down to write our own prayer for our own time?
My friend Tim Peverill has done just that.
Before we get to Tim's prayer however, there is still one last intriguing component to Daniel's petition. He claimed to be "confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel." Are you allowed to do that? Are you allowed to confess another's sin? Apparently so. It's part of the mystery of prayer that God himself confers a priesthood upon us (c.f. I Peter 2:9). We are expected to "stand in the gap" (Ezekiel 22:30). Confessing your own sins is hard enough, but confessing the sins of your people will feel very strange. Like me, you likely don't have much experience in a priestly role where you proactively choose to identify with your group even in their transgressions, so that out of your own individual mouth emerge the words, "We confess," as compared to "I confess." Your head and your heart are going to have a debate between themselves over whether it "makes sense" that you should confess something that "those people did" or that "those people did back then." Your head rebels: "I'm not a racist!" Your heart, reassured by God's great forgiveness, rejoins, "Of course you are. All human beings are." But just as importantly, for the sake of unfinished business and invisible battle, you can temporarily choose to identify as a racist, so that God may finally hear the prayer of a repentant one, and this on behalf of your people enslaved by sin and death. Be prepared for some push back from others who may interpret your actions as impugning the nobility of your country or your people group. (Daniel may not have had to pay the price; but Jeremiah sure did.)
I knew that my friend Tim had been working on this prayer. He was writing and revising it. He struggled over individual phrases. I also know that it emerged from a period of strenuous study about prayer, about racism, and about "faithful presence." He published the prayer on Saturday. I won't say much about his credentials—since the prayer must stand on its own—but I say of Tim what Gabriel says of Daniel: he is "highly esteemed" by me.
I recommend that you make the prayer the basis of a short little Lenten retreat. Read it through first, without praying it. What phrases speak most meaningfully to you? What triggers you? If you find yourself resisting something, be curious why. Even inquire of God: "Father, what are trying to say to me in this line or that?" When you are ready to pray the prayer, give some thought to circumstances and posture. Daniel fasted and wore sackcloth and ashes. Francois-Barthelemy-Marius Abel drew the figure in the prayer's background as someone kneeling, his face buried in his forearms. Gabriel described Daniel's actions as "setting your mind to gain understanding" and as "humbling yourself before your God" (10:12). What posture or setting would convey for you this sense of humility, this sense of understanding the severity of our desperation? Then having prayed the prayer once, consider praying it regularly throughout the Lenten season.
Tim has given us permission to print out his prayer from these .jpeg files and to disseminate it wherever we wish. I don't know about you but I am sick and tired of our own exile in Babylon. This prayer feels like unfinished business, invisible battle, and priestly calling. It's time to help marshal the heavenly host. "Do not forsake us Lord, nor let us settle apart from your tent in this land of anger/ Have mercy. Have mercy on us we pray."
February 19, 2018 /Lowell Bliss
Jorge Breu, 1530, "Questions to a Mint Maker," a depiction of the sale of indulgences
How Much Do We Value Trump's Soul?
New Introduction by the Editor-- I was ready to go to press, and then I saw this headline: "Tony Perkins: Trump Gets 'a Mulligan' on Life, Stormy Daniels." The sub-header reads: "The Family Research Council head says that evangelical conservatives are willing to overlook Trump's past behavior so long as he delivers for them on policy."
This headline warrants a glossary:
Tony Perkins—president of the Family Research Council, long-time Religious Right Activist
Stormy Daniels—claims to have had an affair in 2006 with Donald Trump three months after Melania gave birth to his son; in 2011, she told her story to In Touch magazine who claim to have verified it with two sources and a polygraph test; latest development is a Wall Street Journal article which reports that, before the presidential campaign, lawyers for Trump paid Daniels $130,000 to keep silent.
'Mulligan'—a golf term, an gentleman's agreement granted by the other players to give a player a 'do over' because of a bad shot.
And one other term for our glossary—
A Religious Indulgence-- "a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven, which the faithful Christian who is duly disposed gains under certain prescribed conditions through the action of the Church. . ." (Catechism of the Catholic Church); a practice understood by Martin Luther in his day to be a cynical "payment for services rendered" which only serves to further condemn one's soul to Hell.
Perkins gave an interview to Politico's Edgar-Isaac Dovere. Dovere asks, "What about the porn star stuff [Daniels affair]? What about all that? Doesn't that do anything?" Perkins contends that "evangelical support is not unconditional. If the President were to all of a sudden revert back to some of that behavior as president, the evangelical support will not be there for him." But of transgressions in the 70 previous years of Trump's life, Perkins says, "We kind of gave him—'All right, you get a mulligan. You get a do-over here.'" When Dovere challenges him about the possibility of hypocrisy, Perkins interrupts him, ". . . Why should I not support him now when he is actually doing the things I have asked him to do?"
As long as Trump doesn't disappoint evangelicals politically, Perkins predicts, they'll stick with him. Perkins calls him "a very transactional president," but what exactly is our bargain? Perkins says, "From the policy standpoint, he has delivered more than any other president in my lifetime." "Whenever the policy stops, and his administration reverts to just personality," Perkins adds, "that's where I believe the president will be in trouble."
So apparently an on-going "transaction" is taking place between Donald Trump and evangelical conservative leaders. He delivers policy or, in the words of Perkins, he continues "doing the things I have asked him to do," and they give Donald Trump a "do over," even if he has famously said that he has never apologized nor repented for anything in his life.
The article below was looking for an angle. I could have written about another accusation of Trump's immorality and corruption. I could have written about the seeming hypocrisy of Graham and, now, Perkins. I could have written about another blow to the credibility of evangelical witness. I could have delved into the nuance of Graham and Perkins's comments—that the past is ultimately unknowable and easily faked; that the past is the past; that the past is forgivable; that the past is made up for by present performance. But Perkins's interview spotlighted what I found so troubling in Graham's response, and it gave me the image of a modern day sale of indulgences. Do Trump's transgressions matter to God if they happened four, five, or ten years ago, as Graham says? If so, how do they matter? "In all candor," Perkins says, "I don't think the president is using evangelicals." Okay, fine, but are evangelicals using the president, to the risk of the human's soul?
One expects to watch Saturday Night Live on—hello?!—Saturday night. One expects to hear from the son of the world's most famous evangelist on a Sunday morning. Instead, I saw in my Saturday news feed an interview with Franklin Graham, wherein he was asked about President Trump's alleged extra-marital affair with Stormy Daniels. As reported by NBC News:
"President Trump I don't think has admitted to having an affair with this person," Graham told MSNBC's Alex Witt. "And so this is just a news story, and I don't even know if it's accurate." Pressed on the possibility that the Journal's report, and subsequent confirmation by multiple news outlets, were accurate, Graham argued that any such transgression would have no bearing on the man Trump is today. "I believe at 70 years of age the president is a much different person today than he was four years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago," Graham said. "He is not President Perfect."
Notice of the Saturday Night Live skit appeared in my Sunday news feed, and so I watched it on a Sunday morning. The week's host Jessica Chastain leads a sketch built around a game show. She steps to her podium opposite the three contestants and says, "Hey folks, welcome to What Even Matters Anymore?, the show where I tell you something our president did or said, and you tell me 'does it even matter anymore?'" The first question has to do with Trump's comments about African countries and Haiti. The Kate McKinnon character buzzes in: "That's really bad. That has to matter. Yes." Her answer is apparently wrong. Chastain shakes her head and says, "Unnnh, actually, it does not matter. Zero consequences, and everyone just moves on."
In the second round question, imagine Franklin Graham with his hand on the buzzer, or you yourself as a contestant.
Chastain: "Next, the president has an extra-marital affair with a porn star right after his wife gives birth to a son, and then he pays the porn star to shut up. Does it even matter to, say, his evangelical base?"
Kenan Thompson as a contestant: (buzzes in) "To evangelicals, of course it matters. It is against everything they stand for."
Chastain: "You would think so, but no. They say he has just repented, and they forgive him. And Mike Pence is, like, "This, my dude!"
The direction that I want to take in this article was determined for me by two things: 1) the presence in this story of Franklin Graham, whose family name is associated with the concept of modern day evangelism; and 2) an old editorial by Erick Erickson that I had been working through even this past week. Erickson, a influential conservative Republican blogger and evangelical Christian, did publish something new this week that in mentioning the "spread of the Gospel" highlights at least one thing that still matters.
The [Republican] party was supposed to be the party that championed the concerns of people of faith. Instead, it is a party that demands people of faith support a party ahead of their God. Trump's statement about Haiti and African nations runs headlong into this. Many of these evangelicals take seriously the need to spread the gospel and so have funded many missionary causes around the world.
During the week however, I had been reading an Erickson article from 2016, from a month before the election. He was explaining why he was withholding his support from Trump the candidate. One of the reasons he gave I never imagined I would ever see in print: Erickson believes that the eternal soul of Donald Trump is at stake. When an evangelist fails to hold a person accountable for his sins, he fails to offer the only "support" that really matters, the support of a forgiving God in Christ Jesus. When the reason that the evangelist fails to hold a person accountable for his sins is because he wants something out of the transaction, well, Erickson finds that too loathsome to contemplate.
Here now is a man in Trump who sees no need to be saved and has no understanding of a faith he professes. And he sees Christians cheering him on in his rebellious state, defending him when they blasted others for the very same sins. The whole purpose of shunning the unrepentant sinner is to drive him to God. Yet, Christians in America are cheering on this rebellious sinner providing him no reason at all to repent. All Christendom should be ashamed we are putting our needs in this temporary place ahead of saving a soul bound for eternity.
The following paragraph has four sentences each detailing a reason why Erickson was not supporting Trump. After reading each one, you can ask yourself whether that reason matters. Then ask yourself whether the fourth sentence also matters, or matters as much as the others?
That I see so many Christians justifying Trump's immorality, defining deviancy down, and turning to anger and despondency about the future tells me I cannot in good faith support Trump because his victory would have lasting, damaging consequences for Christianity in America. We harm our witness by embracing the immoral, unrepentant strong man. We harm our American virtue by buying into the idea that one man can make America great again. Further, we risk losing Donald Trump's soul for the sake of our selfishness.
The selfishness that Erickson refers to is that we evangelicals want something from Donald Trump. He explains: "Christians looking for a strong man to protect the church instead of the strongest man who conquered death is a terrible thing to see. . . . I have to say I was truly blown away by having a Christian sit next to me on Friday and argue that we should support an immoral adulterer who had never asked for forgiveness because of what he might do for Christians." In his NBC interview, Franklin Graham alludes to the specifics:
"We certainly don't hold him up as the pastor of this nation and he is not," Graham said. "But I appreciate the fact that the president does have a concern for Christian values, he does have a concern to protect Christians whether it's here at home or around the world and I appreciate the fact that he protects religious liberty and freedom."
Trump met with evangelical leaders twice in the run up to the election: once in New York City (June 21, 2016) and once in Orlando (August 11, 2016). You may remember that immediately after the New York meetings, James Dobson had started a rumor that Donald Trump had professed a saving faith in Jesus Christ and should be treated as a "baby Christian." The Trump campaign never responded. Listen however to how Trump finished his remarks in Orlando two months after Dobson's pronouncement. He exhorted evangelicals: "So go out and spread the word. And once I get in, I will do my thing that I do very well, and I figure it's probably maybe the only way I'm going to get to heaven, so I better do a good job. OK?"
I can't help but believe the evangelist Billy Graham would say, "Actually, not OK, Mr. Trump. Let's rewind. There is only ONE WAY for any of us to get to heaven, and it is NOT what we do or don't do to 'show concern for Christian values,' or 'to protect Christians whether it's here at home or around the world,' or 'to protect religious liberty and freedom.'" Instead—and you can verify this on the C-Span video—the immediate response of the audience was to laugh.
According to NBC News,
When asked about the legislative dysfunction currently plaguing Congress, [Franklin] Graham had a more fervent response, citing "sin" as a major reason for the budget impasse that eventually led to a government shutdown. "Our country's got a sin problem, and I believe if these politicians in Washington would recognize the moral failure of so many of their policies that maybe we could fix it."
Suddenly Franklin Graham adopts the language of his dad, but it's the country, not the eternal soul, that has a "sin problem" and "their policies" that have "the moral failure" and not an adulterous husband hanging, as evangelicals believe we all do, on the precipice of Hell's damnation. For Erick Erickson however, the Gospel matters. He declares: "I will not harm my witness nor risk Trump's soul to serve my political desires."
What if in the end, Graham, Dobson, and the other evangelical leaders who so famously have access to Trump, are judged not because they loved Trump too much, but because they loved him too little? In his new article, Erickson claims, "Trump was always a devil's bargain for most evangelicals." This is a reference to those stories wherein Faust sells his soul to Mephistopheles for worldly gain, or wherein Robert Johnson sells his soul to the devil in order to become the world's greatest blues guitarist. You can't sell your own soul to the devil and still be considered Christian. You can't sell another person's soul and still be considered a preacher of the Gospel.
One expects to pray on a Sunday morning, and my wife and I did. We were convicted that we too had placed too little value on the soul of the person Donald John Trump. "What Even Matters Anymore?," the game show host asks. We felt God buzz in with an answer.
Sources and Links:
Politico: Summary and audio of Perkins's interview
NBC News: Franklin Graham's interview
Vanity Fair: SNL Skit with Commentary
Washington Post: new Erickson editorial
Washington Post: old Erickson editorial
C-Span: video of Trump's speech to evangelicals
Trump, Franklin Graham, Tony Perkins, Evangelicals
A foot-powered well, installed by IAS, located near Mongo, Chad.
A Direct Flight from Chad to Paris
An Eden Vigil edition of The Liberator Today
"What has changed in the land since you were a child?" We were sitting together with a chief, two or three elders, and a group of other men and women, on the edge of a village some ten kilometers distant from N'Djamena, the capital of Chad. On the near horizon, just across a seasonal floodplain was the silver glint of the Chari River. Across the river was the Republic of Cameroon.
It took a moment for my question to get translated into French. It was a premeditated question on my part, one I had packed in my mental luggage to bring with me to this country on the dry plains of Africa, the sub-Saharan region known as the Sahel. It was a question I had heard asked before in numerous documentaries and books. I had heard it asked of weathered Inuit seal hunters in the Arctic. I had heard it asked of Polynesian fishermen on the beaches of islands in the Pacific. For that matter, I had heard old Kansan farmers discuss the same question. It's a great question to bring to any place where meetings take place outside on straw mats, or standing above the icepack, or on raised wooden planks up above the beach, or in where the kitchen curtains are always kept open out unto the back forty. It's a great question because it taps into what can only be called expertise.
Not the chief, but a man sitting cross-legged on the mat spoke up as soon as the translation was complete. "So much has changed," he said. "We used to have more trees, more animals, more food. We used to have enough food."
"So what happened?" I asked.
"The rains have changed. They don't come like they used to."
Chad's rainy season has traditionally run from August through September and on into mid October. It was late October during our visit and there was still some standing water in the flood plain and at various waterholes we had passed in coming. Evaporation in the 100 degree F temperatures, and the daily visitation of herds of camels, cattle, and goats would soon render these holes dry.
The day following our visit to this village, we travelled out to the central Gehra region and got our first real glimpse of the landscape of the Sahel: gravelly sand, acacia trees, low scrub bushes that sprout territorially apart from each other. Here we talked to a different type of expert, one with statistics at his disposal. Emmanuel is from Kenya, and among the huge number of NGOs operating across the Sahel, he is one of the most sought-over of all well-diggers. He knows where to find water. ("See that tall tamarind tree there? I look for those. They grow near fractures in the bedrock.")
"In this region, we used to reach the water table at 20-30 meters," Emmanuel explained. "Now we need to go down 40-50 meters." His crew only has the capacity to drill 60-70 meter bore holes, and anything beyond that can't be easily brought to the surface with the hand pumps that they install, plus there's no electricity to run submersible pumps. Even if you sink a sixty meter bore hole into a fifty meter water table, that only gives you ten meters of reservoir. In such cases the women and young girls who do the daily pumping have to take turns and wait for the flow of water to recharge.
"Emmanuel, why the change?"
"The rains. The rainy season used to be August, September, October. It used to rain every day. Now maybe we get one rain a week, a few during a month. The water table never recharges."
Emmanuel works for a wonderful NGO called International Aid Services. IAS had sponsored our visas to Chad and had arranged our visit out to the villages. Their water work primarily deals with proximity and purity. A bore well brings water closer to the village. Our last site visit was to a repair job at a village north of Mongo. During the time while the pump was unusable, the people had to travel two kilometers to the nearest water source during the long dry season. Purity refers to protection from waterborne diseases. Standing water--what might remain around a village immediately after the rainy season--is quickly befouled by the livestock. To drill down below the meters of sand is to tap into water that has been naturally filtered. IAS conducts extensive testing. IAS didn't drill a well in that first village that I mentioned, though the women of the village asked our visiting group to do so. A well that close to the river would only bring up contaminated river water. In that village instead, IAS was installing bio-sand filters, locally-sourced concrete units, to purify the drinking water. Proximity and purity are crucially important issues for Chad, the eighth poorest country in the world, but we have two days left in our visit here, and we have yet to find anyone who knows of work being done on other issues of water retention—the rains, the water table, in French: changement.
Or more precisely: changement climatique.
There is a direct flight on Thursday at 11:55 pm from N'djamena, Chad to Paris, France. I am scheduled to be on it. Two years ago this same month, I was in Paris. I was with my intern Sammi Grieger and colleagues from the American and Canadian Church along with other global evangelicals from the Lausanne Movement to participate in our small, but prayer-ridden way with COP 21, the UN sponsored climate summit that would result in the world's first good-will cooperative (though still voluntary) effort on climate change known as the Paris Agreement. This year I will simply be a transit visitor in Paris on my way to the climate summit in Bonn, Germany. Nonetheless, I think I will take a day in Paris, return to the steps of the Sacré Coeur, replicate our prayer meeting, and take some time to reflect on all that has transpired in two short years. These climate summits are annual affairs and the really big ones happen on a five-year basis, but COP 23 is important in a few unique ways. First, it will be the first climate summit after Donald Trump's election and after he has "pulled the US out" of the Paris Agreement, something which legally won't go into effect until 2020. Secondly, the presiding nation for COP 23 will be Fiji. (Fiji didn't have the facilities to host the summit, so Bonn is acting as the host.) Fiji is a member of the Coalition of 42 Vulnerable Nations, those countries which are already being hit the hardest by sea-level rise, desertification, typhoons, and other effects of a changing average global temperature. Fiji is also a majority Christian nation. These are our brothers and sisters.
In late 2015, Thomas Kemper, general secretary of Global Ministries, visited Fiji, an island state where the Methodist Church of Fiji is the largest religious group in the country (34.6 percent of the population). "I learned from our Methodist church partners," Kemper said, that "the rising sea levels are forcing people to resettle farther inland. Two communities have already been forced to move and another 30 communities will be resettled. The positive effects of the Climate Change agreement [COP21, Paris] simply can't come soon enough for our Fijian brothers and sisters."
Thirdly, COP 23 will be important, for me at least, because I am coming directly from Chad where I have been helping our conservative mission agency scout out an environmental approach to a new church-planting effort among unreached and unengaged people groups. A study was done this year of 186 nations to list them in order of "vulnerability" to climate change. Vulnerability is not only a function of how adverse weather patterns, like a sporadic rainy season, will harm a country but also whether a country has the material resources and the conflict-free opportunity to adapt to inevitable changes. According to the study, Chad is the most vulnerable of all nations in the world. (Chad is the Country Most Vulnerable to Climate Change—Where's Why). Participating in COP 23 is not an "add on" to my missions trip to Chad, as if I fortuitously had to fly through Europe anyway. In my opinion, based on what I've seen and heard here in Chad, and based on my sense of the Lord's voice in prayer, the best way I can immediately love Chadians is to go to Bonn and do my part alongside my Fijian brothers and sisters in Christ to fight for the Paris Agreement.
Chad, Trump, Climate Change, COP 23, Fiji, Bonn, Water, Vulnerable Nations
They Thought They Weren't Voting for Trump
Living with the Evangelical Tribe in the Trump Era, Part 4
The first time I heard someone say, "I'm not voting for Donald Trump; I'm voting for the Supreme Court" as a way to indicate that yes, indeed, she was voting for Donald Trump, I was astounded by the violation of logic. After all, the Principle of Non-Contradiction (PNC) is the second of the three classic laws of thought: [A is B] and [A is not B] are mutually exclusive. I could imagine the scene where some magistrate seeks to arrive at the truth:
A. "Yes or no, Ma'am, did you vote for Donald J. Trump in the 2016 election?"
B. "I voted for the Supreme Court, not for Donald Trump."
A. (Showing her a copy of the 2016 ballot) "Please show me where the Supreme Court's name appears on the presidential ballot? What? You cannot? Okay, then please show where on this page you touched the stylus that registered a presidential vote. . . . Let the record show that her finger rests next to Donald J. Trump/ Mike R. Pence (Republican). So, Ma'am, did the computer then count your vote for Donald J. Trump?
B. I suppose that's how electronic voting works.
A. So you did vote for Donald Trump.
B. No, I voted for Justice Neil Gorsuch.
A. (Sigh)
Last week in The Liberator Today we considered those of our evangelical friends who voted for Donald Trump, but who did so without a particular reason. They were "apathetic voters" who voted, but whether out of ritual, disconnect, or weariness, they didn't care to develop a rationale behind their vote. I can release them from my worst projections of why they voted for Trump. This week's group of Trump-voters had reasons, or at least rationalizations. To release them from our worst projections, to give them the "benefit of the doubt" and to give us the benefit of some breathing space in relating to evangelical support of Trump, we need to proactively look past the "who" of their vote, because, despite the protestations otherwise, they did in fact vote for Trump. Nonetheless, to look at "what" they voted for is still not sufficient. We will need to isolate that portion of the "what" which they voted for.
In May 2016, after Trump had wrapped up the Republican nomination, I wrote a Liberator Today article entitled "If You Pick Up One End of the Trump Stick. . .". It was based on the old proverb: "If you pick up one end of a stick, you pick up the other end too." It's a package deal. You may choose (i.e. "pick up," e.g. "vote for") a stick because of what you see on one end of the stick, but you can't pick up only that one end. The whole stick comes up with you. I told the story of cleaning up brush near my house and picking up a crab apple branch that looked innocuous enough, but unbeknownst to me, on the hidden end of the branch was a colony of red ants. I paid the price with stinging red welts up my forearm.
Evangelical voters genuinely saw some things that they found appealing, or at least tolerable, on one end of the Trump candidacy. For instance, consider the evangelical voter who had longed for a Rubio, a Carson, or at least a Cruz, and who got Trump instead as the Republican nominee. Since she couldn't find a person she believed in, she instead looked to the values or issues she could believe in, which in this case was her desire to see conservative Supreme Court justices who might finally overturn Roe v. Wade. The appointment of a conservative Supreme Court justice was not just a wishful thought. There was an actual slot that Republicans had forced open in refusing to hear Merrick Garland's nomination. Was the Non-Trump candidate, Hillary Clinton, likely to appoint a conservative justice? No. In fact, the scuttlebutt in Congress at the time was that if Hillary won, Republicans would rush through Garland's appointment because he was sure to be more moderate than whomever Hillary nominated. But what about other Non-Trump options for their voting: a third party candidate like Gary Johnson, an independent Republican like Evan McMullin, a symbolic vote for someone like Libby Dole? Here the question for our Trump-voting Supreme Court voter changes. The question is not "Who would be most likely to appoint conservative justices?" but rather "Who would most likely have a chance at appointing conservative justices?" They rationalized—correctly, no doubt—that our next president would be either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, not Johnson, McMullin, or Dole. If they were voting for a "what" of actual Supreme Court appointments, they couldn't risk any other "who" than Donald Trump.
I have no patience with the rationalization of a person who truly wanted to vote for the package deal of Donald J. Trump— the "whole stick" of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, narcissism, lying, bullying, proto-fascism—and who landed conveniently on a more socially acceptable rationalization to present to the evangelical tribe. This kind of rationalizer is a wolf (a proto-fascist in his own right) in sheep's clothing (the familiar stance of an evangelical as pro-life.) But I can understand the logic of someone who worked through the decision tree of "Who would most likely have a chance at [giving me at least something of my highest priorities.]" I heard other rationalizations: people who were "not voting for Trump," but who were instead "voting for the Republican party platform" or "voting for party loyalty" or "voting to shake up business-as-usual in Washington." We can argue with their perceptions of the clean end of the Trump stick. For instance, I think Neil Gorsuch is the last Supreme Court justice we'll get from Trump that is picked on a conservative or strict constructionist basis. The next appointment will likely be more in keeping with Trump's modus operandi—either sold off to the highest bidder in Rod Blagojevich style, or picked to exonerate Trump himself from the Russian investigation.
What remains problematic however is that these voters, by necessity, picked up the other end of the Trump stick too, and they can claim no ignorance of what that other end was. I at least didn't know about the fire ants on the partially buried end of the crab apple branch, but by the end of the primaries, the facts about Trump were on the table: he lacks both character and competence. We will have to apply some mixture of grief, forgiveness, and freedom to how our Trump-voting friends chose to process that knowledge. And we will have to come to grips with the fact that both sides of the Trump stick got picked up on all our behalves. We are all left holding it, including deportable DREAMers, banned Muslim immigrants, debased "grab-able" women, Las Vegas concert attenders, the American citizens of Puerto Rico, 30 million nervous residents of Seoul, and a planet that continues to warm under a renewed commitment to the fossil fuel industry.
Part of our freedom will be a prophetic freedom that calls white evangelicals to be responsible for their choices. Certainly this means not equivocating about for whom indeed they voted. Neil Gorsuch was NOT on the ballot. Responsibility means admitting that their choice was not without known and foreseeable consequences, and that they participated in the unleashing of those consequences. I'll have more to say about our prophetic freedom and additional responsibilities at the conclusion of this series. Our Trump-voting friends will be called to loosen their grasp on their shiny favorite end of the Trump stick and join their brothers and sisters in Christ in resisting the evil and attending the suffering on their other end. The anti-opponent chant of "lock her up, lock her up" must be replaced with the solidarity chant of "set them free, set them free" (cf. the mission of Christ in Luke 4:18-19).
We will never be able to call evangelical Trump voters to a new compelling project of love and justice in the Trump era unless WE stop beating them with the other end of the Trump stick. This morning an old friend from my Moody Bible Institute days posted on Facebook a meme of Bill and Hillary Clinton and asked the question: "What one word would you use to describe this family?" She chose the word "corrupt." My immediate thought about her meme was, "Who cares?! What does Clinton corruption have to do with anything anymore?" My friend is still fighting the 2016 election (and probably the Barack, George W. and Bill elections as well.) She's also fighting a counter-factual election. She invites us into an apocalyptic fantasy of "what if Hillary had won instead?" But then I stop and see in myself that I too expend so much energy re-fighting in the pit of my stomach the 2016 election. I so badly want people—even certain people—to come up to me and say, "Lowell, you were right, I was wrong, I shouldn't have voted for Trump." To my shame, it's eroded my compassion, which is a problem because while my Trump-voting friends are free to make their choices, they themselves are not exempt from the consequences of those choices. And so I do confess thinking: "Well, will you look at that, the climate deniers of Houston, TX just got hit with a hurricane," and "Well, will you look at that, the worst shooting in American history was reserved for a country music concert in the state with the most lenient gun laws." You pick up one end of the Lowell stick, and I cringe at what you will surely find on the other end.
My old friend voted for Trump in November, 2016; but what's that got to do with anything that could be true of her in October 2017? She wants to lock Hillary up in October 2017; but what's that got to do with the person she could be in 2018? I have the same hope for myself. I can't spare a single "thought and prayer" for the victims of the Las Vegas massacre; but what's that got to do with the compassionate intercessor I could be the next time around?
When my family lived in Varanasi, India, I used to do a mental exercise whenever I visited a Hindu temple. I was so enamored with Christ Jesus, that it was hard to see prayers offered up to a murthi, or idol. And I was so in love with the Indian people, I couldn't bear the thought that their sincere prayers might go unheard and unanswered. So I developed in my mind a "split screen" like what is occasionally used in film-making. I created a split between the murthi on the one side and the human being doing the intercession on the other, and then I made the pro-active decision to limit my field of vision to the human side. They had real human concerns. They were praying for dying children, for unmarried daughters, for poor employment prospects, for rain for their parched crops, for fears and longings. In the same way, I can create a split screen between the two ends of the Trump-voter's Trump stick. It doesn't erase the fact that the two ends exist, anymore than Varanasi's split screen erased the fact that Jesus was denied the devotion that he deserved. Nonetheless I can meet the Trump voter on the end of the stick that had meaning for them. Even if I don't find as much common ground there as I might hope, I can nonetheless release them from my worst projections about them. In doing so, I find the space that I need for grief, forgiveness, and freedom to choose a new relationship with the white American evangelical tribe in the Trump era.
"May the Lord bless and keep the czar. . . far away from here."
Voters Without Pathos (living with the Trump-era evangelical tribe, Part 3)
September 28, 2017 by Lowell Bliss
"One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic," so said Jozef Stalin in a moment where he seemed to achieve the perfect bastardization of empathy and cynicism. The first statistic that The Liberator Today reported in our current series is that 81% of those who identified themselves to Pew Research pollsters as "white evangelical/born again," voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election. Here are a few other statistics: fourteen percent of church attenders report leaving their church after the election, mainly doing so because of politics. Ten percent of American evangelicals report leaving.
But what does "leaving" even mean? Some have seemingly left the faith altogether, although hopefully just for a season. (I still remember a line that Garrison Keillor once wrote about a character in one of his short stories: "She no longer believed in God, but there was plenty of evidence to suggest that God still believed in her.") I know people who still attend church on Sunday mornings but who no longer call themselves evangelicals. Or inversely, they are still evangelicals but they haven't been in the church building for months. Others have told me that they attend, but that the offering plate now comes and goes by them without their tithe. They now give instead to other Christian ministries, many which serve the refugees and the immigrants which they believe 81% of white evangelicals have abandoned. Some sit in the audience where the worship leader may as well be playing an organ grinder's box, and the preacher may as well be Charlie Brown's grade school teacher: the sermon sounds to them like "wah WAH WAH wah wah." You may think that I am referring to jaded Millennials, or to those we used to call naturally-prone "backsliders," but every example in this paragraph is of someone who we used to call "pillars of the congregation." They taught Sunday School. They built the new wing on the building. They added four-part harmony to the old hymns.
As a million-person statistic, these "leavers" are targets of cynicism and shame-throwing: "How dare you stop attending church or stop tithing just because you lost an election?" "Shut up and start being obedient." And then there's this vibe: "Good riddance. If you can't get with the [Republican] program then we are better off without you"—a case of white nationalism applied to non-conforming white evangelicals as well.
By contrast, one death is a tragedy. Your story is important. On a recent Sunday morning after a church service I was met in the foyer by a tearful friend. A few years ago, when they were either uninsured or underinsured, Jackie's husband Roy contracted cancer. (Note: all names changed.) "Obamacare saved my Roy," I heard her once say. They were able to pay for the chemotherapy. But on this Sunday--maybe because the Republicans were trying to sneak through a healthcare Repeal and Replace that week, or maybe because she had just stepped out of a church service that reminded her of past fellowship --Jackie was thinking of an old and mutual friend of ours, Dorothy. "I don't understand why Dorothy voted for Trump. Doesn't she know that she voted to kill Roy?"
If Jackie had said this directly to Dorothy—a genuinely kind, godly, and discerning woman—Dorothy would have reserved whatever offense she may have felt for private. She would have instead been taken aback, a little bewildered, scrambling to make this all compute. Dorothy loves Roy. Of course she didn't vote to kill Roy. And if then Dorothy sought consolation with her circle of Trump-voting evangelical friends, some might have elided the possibility of Dorothy's being implicated by a Trump vote: "Dorothy, you were one vote in a thoroughly Red State. You aren't responsible for Trump's victory." Others might take the policy approach: "There is no way that Obamacare is responsible for Roy's healing. And actually this new Graham-Cassidy healthcare bill is way better than Obama's socialism." In the end however, you still have. . . Jackie, Roy, Dorothy, cancer, insurance, the fellowship of the saints, and a vote which meant one thing to Dorothy and another thing to Jackie. There's been a death in the family. We've never had an election where everything felt so personal.
This is the third installment of a The Liberator Today series about reconciling with the fact of, and the relationships in, the evangelical church's support of Trump. I want to reveal my strategy. Since I'm writing exclusively for those who didn't vote for Trump but feel confused or betrayed by those who did, I hope to write pastorally, not rhetorically. I can imagine ending up with three concluding articles: one about grieving what you must grieve, one about forgiving what you perceive must be forgiven, and one about exercising the freedom that is yours in Christ Jesus. Perhaps you already match one shade in the category of "leaver." The ambassadorship that I hold in Christ Jesus would certainly seek to draw you closer to him while professing that I am under no obligation to woo you back to your white evangelical tribe nor to your particular local evangelical church. Nonetheless, I've held it as an adage that, except in cases of threat or abuse, if flee you must, it is always better to flee TOWARDS something (new and better and glorious) than to run away FROM something. If leave you must, can you claim to have made a conscious exercise of your freedom to do so? And if you chose to "stay" (in all the shades of meaning in that word too) can you stay with new footings, new hopeful perspectives, new positive relationships?
Before we get to grief, forgiveness, and freedom, there will be a handful of articles that tries to carve out some breathing space. In the first two articles, I spoke of how the headline "Evangelicals Support Trump" doesn't have to be as biting to us as first felt. Not as large a percentage of total evangelicals voted for Trump as is commonly reported. You are, in essence, not in the minority. Secondly, the "evangelical leaders" who provoke such headlines were self-appointed leaders long before they were Trump-appointed. You yourself can discount them as "not my elders." Today we now turn to those of our pastors, elders, family, or friends (your "Dorothys") who did vote for Trump. We first seek to release them from our worst projections. What were they thinking when they entered the voting booth? We'll likely never know, but it probably wasn't "I want to kill Roy." This edition of The Liberator Today is entitled:
Part 3: Voters Without Pathos
What were they thinking when they voted for Trump? Some weren't thinking at all.
We apply the term "voter apathy" to those people who are eligible to vote, but who never bother to register, who never bother to show up at the polls. America's voter turnout rate is between 56 and 58 percent, putting us behind at least 58 other countries including Uruguay (the highest at 93% in 2009), Venezuela (78.9% in 2012) and Russia (63.4% in 2012). But who says that apathy is left at the door of the polling station? Some people made it inside the voting booth, but once inside, didn't give their vote much thought at all. We shouldn't underestimate the power of ritual, disconnect, and paralysis at work among some of our Trump voting friends.
One Trump-voting friend listened to my post-election angst and said, "You know, I don't think about these things as much as you do. I think about doing my job, about raising my kids." He didn't necessarily follow the news leading up to the election. For many people, I suspect that voting on the first Tuesday of November is as ritual an action as putting flowers on a grave on Memorial Day. This is not to say that the act of voting is unimportant to them, but rather that the act of voting is more meaningful to them than the actual person for whom they voted for or against. Showing up feels like a sufficient act of patriotism. They cast their vote and proclaim their affection for America and Democracy. Why did they vote for Trump? I don't know, and they might not either. You may as well ask why they bring the same raspberry jello salad each year to the Fourth of July family picnic?
Others I suspect voted for Trump from a sense of disconnect. There is a Chinese proverb: "The mountains are high and the emperor is far away." Some voters genuinely feel the same way about national politics. "What's the president of the United States have to do with ANYTHING that concerns me on a day-to-day basis?" They voted for Trump in the same way that the Rabbi in Fiddler on the Roof prayed for the Czar of Russia: "May the Lord bless and keep the czar. . . far away from us." Unfortunately the actual history of serfdom and pogroms proved to the Jews of a thousand Russian villages that there can be a big difference between an Alexander II (generally good) and an Alexander III (consistently deadly.) "One-third of the Jews will convert, one-third will die, and one- third will flee the country," it was announced at the beginning of Alexander III's new regime.
A final set of apathetic voters seemed to have voted for Trump out of paralysis and weariness. "I just want to get this election over," some of them told me. They were tired of the debates, tired of the scandals, and—perhaps most of all—tired of being put between the rock and a hard place of what they were convinced was an inviolable Two Party System. I and others tried to show them that there were other options, that they didn't HAVE TO vote for Trump, but they were too weary to listen, too exhausted to follow any new line of reasoning. To reconsider their default reaction to Hillary Clinton seemed like a thorny, rocky uphill climb. To explore third party candidates felt like backtracking on the trail. Leaving the presidential ballot blank for the first time in their voting history—well, even that felt like a rigorous bushwhack into unexplored territory. They only had enough energy left to stumble into the voting booth, close their eyes (possibly even their noses), vote the old familiar party line, and hope for the best.
None of these people particularly brought much conscious choice to their vote for Trump. Next week, we'll consider those who did bring some thought to their vote, including the person who reasoned with me, "I'm not voting for Trump; I'm voting for the Supreme Court." This week however we want to recognize that some Trump voters voted without logos, without conscious logical argument. We might also say that they voted without pathos. They didn't care. They didn't particularly care about Trump one way or another. Unfortunately, they didn't do the innovative, engaged, and rigorous work of extending their em-pathy out beyond their own comfort zones, their own disregard, or their own weariness. They didn't think about how a Trump victory might affect Roy, or DREAMers, or refugees, or how it might affect the witness of the evangelical church. They didn't think how their vote might affect their relationship with you.
The troubling question is whether these Trump voters voted also without ethos—whether they voted so as to require your forgiveness. I hope you can find some "breathing space" in allowing that some of your friends voted without logos. They made no conscious choice for Trump and no real conscious choice against you or against black people or against women or against the witness of the evangelical church. Voting without pathos, however, is more problematic. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said, "The opposite of love is not hate; it's indifference." Psychologist M. Scott Peck said, "Laziness is love's opposite." The difference between "I didn't care about the election" and "I didn't care [period]" is just a prepositional phrase away from causing you pain. I'm so sorry. Your pain is real. Your story is important. The "death" that you experienced in 2016 is a tragedy. One hope we have is that there are many Trump voters who are like Dorothy—they are genuinely kind, godly, and discerning. What if you scheduled a conversation with him or her? The great missionary to India, E. Stanley Jones, used to organize his Interfaith Dialogues around one central question. Participants weren't allowed to debate the tenets of their faith; instead, they each took turns answering the simple question: "What has been YOUR experience of religion?" Similarly, tell each other your experience of the 2016 election, your experience of deciding, your experience of learning the results, your experience of how the evangelical church voted. Don't tell each other your analysis. Tell each other your stories. You do run a risk: maybe Dorothy cares more about other things than you or your values. But maybe you will find that she can hold you in her heart at the same time. And maybe you will hear her say, "I certainly intend to be more mindful the next time around."
September 28, 2017 /Lowell Bliss
#Not My Elders (living with the Trump-era evangelical tribe)
"The Bad Shepherd," Jan Brueghel the Younger, 1616. Wikipedia Commons.
This series is not meant for evangelicals who voted for or otherwise continue to support Trump; it is for those who know and love Trump voters and who have been somehow devastated by them. This series is a search for a way forward within one's own tribe, which in my case is white evangelical Christians. Do you find the recurring headline "Evangelicals Support Trump" deadening? How do you reconcile the FACT that a plurality of American evangelicals remain steadfast in their support of a man who embodies the idolatry of Money, Power, and Sex? How do you reconcile with RELATIONSHIPS in a Church that has seemingly betrayed values that you hold dear? This first set of articles primarily seeks to provide some breathing space. For example, in the last edition, we saw how, even though the plurality of evangelicals may have voted for Trump, it can't be said that the majority of evangelicals did. Today's article looks at the reputed leaders that the media seeks out in order to produce headlines like "Evangelicals Support Trump" and concludes:
Part 2: #Not My Elders
Way back in 2004, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote:
Tim Russert is a great journalist, but he made a mistake last weekend. He included Jerry Falwell and Al Sharpton in a discussion on religion and public life.
Inviting these two bozos onto "Meet the Press" to discuss that issue is like inviting Britney Spears and Larry Flynt to discuss D.H. Lawrence. Naturally, they got into a demeaning food fight that would have lowered the intellectual discourse of your average nursery school.
This is why so many people are so misinformed about evangelical Christians. There is a world of difference between real-life people of faith and the made-for-TV, Elmer Gantry-style blowhards who are selected to represent them. Falwell and Pat Robertson are held up as spokesmen for evangelicals, which is ridiculous. Meanwhile people like John Stott, who are actually important, get ignored.
It could be that you have never heard of John Stott. I don't blame you. As far as I can tell, Stott has never appeared on an important American news program. A computer search suggests that Stott's name hasn't appeared in this newspaper since April 10, 1956, and it's never appeared in many other important publications.
Way back in 2012, after Stott's death, I had occasion to interview Stott's dear friend Peter Harris for a podcast. I quoted to him the next paragraph in Brook's article:
Yet, as Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center notes, if evangelicals could elect a pope, Stott is the person they would likely choose. He was the framer of the Lausanne Covenant, a crucial organizing document for modern evangelicalism. He is the author of more than 40 books, which have been translated into over 72 languages and have sold in the millions. Now rector emeritus at All Souls, Langham Place, in London, he has traveled the world preaching and teaching.
I asked, "So Peter, was John Stott our pope and we just didn't know it?" Peter Harris chuckled and said, "Well you can imagine that would be a notion he would be [protesting] as vigorously as anybody else. I suspect the media often misses those who are truly influential."
John Stott was not our pope. Neither was Falwell, Sr. in Russert's day. Neither in our day are Falwell, Jr. nor Robert Jeffress nor James Dobson nor Kenneth Copeland nor Paula White nor anyone else who serves steadfastly on Trump's "Evangelical Advisory Board." We evangelicals don't have a pope.
Immediately after the election, a hashtag emerged: #NotMyPresident. It received a great deal of ridicule, because of course, the Electoral College upheld the constitutionality of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States. I was struck harder by a hashtag that appeared from a young friend. She wrote: #NotMyElders. She was tweeting in response to yet another unbiblical and unloving statement by Franklin Graham about Muslims and refugees. Franklin Graham was NOT her elder. And it is true: she grew up never knowing Franklin's father, Billy Graham. Why should she care? And why should we care that Franklin happens to be Billy's son? (Graham's own autobiography confesses that he did little to disciple his own children.) And for that matter, Billy Graham was never our pope anyway. He doesn't speak for us.
The latest round of headlines that read "Evangelicals Support Trump" came out after Charlottesville, and this time, the headline was not based on any statistical projection about the majority (or plurality, please) of evangelical Christians. It was only based on the responses of the handful of men and women who form Trump's Evangelical Advisory Board.* If you want to scan through their names, included below in a footnote, you can do this little exercise. How many of these names do you even recognize? (I scored 11 out of 26.) Of the names you know, how many did you respect BEFORE the election, let alone now? (I scored 0 out of 11—though I still grieve my loss of respect for Dobson the child psychologist.) Former Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann?!! Really? No, she is NOT my elder, and any headline that claims "Evangelicals Support Trump" based on Bachmann's support has no hold over me.
Businessmen from Trump's Council of Business Advisors bailed out quickly and vocally after Trump's white nationalism became evident with Charlottesville. I lamented publicly that only A.R. Bernard seemed to possess the same strength of conscience and so resigned from the Evangelical Advisory Board. But now I understand that this was NO test for American Evangelicalism's response to white nationalism. Trump's Evangelical Advisory Board may speak TO Trump but they don't speak FOR me, nor for any sort of evangelical Christianity that I recognize. "Let the dead bury the dead," a friend advised me helpfully on Facebook. Let whitewashed sepulchers belch their noxious gasses. Why should we care what they think?
Liberty University professors and students can't very well say that Jerry Falwell, Jr. is #Not My President, but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that many of them consider him #Not My Elder. A couple years ago, the city of Lynchburg, VA voted into existence a separate voting district for Liberty University. Students could now vote on campus. They are the Third Ward, Second Precinct. Now admittedly, in the general election, the newly minted precinct went overwhelmingly for Trump over Clinton, but the results of the presidential primary are interesting. Falwell Jr. infamously endorsed Trump on January 26, 2016. Less than two months later however, on the day of the Virginia primary, Liberty's precinct went 43.62% for Rubio, 32.91% for Cruz, and 13.78 for Carson. Falwell's pick—Trump—only got 7.65% of the vote. If you are leading, but nobody's following, are you really a leader?
Do you remember the (Reverend) Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, KS? He used to organize protests at the funerals of slain servicemen with signs that read, "God Hates Fags!" I was raised as a Baptist in the State of Kansas. Shame, being what it is, never asks permission to be shared, and yes, I was embarrassed that Phelps called himself a Christian, a Baptist, and a Kansan. I grieved that so many people stepped away from the lovely and loving Jesus Christ because they mistakenly thought Phelps represented him. Nonetheless, I never felt self-implicated by Phelps nor did I feel that Phelps implicated my tribe. I knew that Phelps represented the far end of a temptation that my tribe might one day choose: namely to not include in God's love those of God's creatures who are LGBTQ, even though they are created in God's image, even though Christ died for them too. Falwell Jr., Jeffress, White and others on Trump's Advisory Board are on the far end of a white nationalist, proto-fascist idolatry—but I refuse to be self-implicated by them. I reject the shame. And, sometimes, I even find the courage to enjoin the battle. Why should we allow Trump and Falwell to get any more than 7.65 percent of true followers within our churches? Why should we let them get any?
Reputed national evangelical leaders who attract the headlines?
Sorry, not my elders!
Of course, the difficulty are those men and women (primarily men in our conservative churches) who do serve as Elders and Pastors in our local churches. I can see their faces. I can recite their names. I have prayed for them, with them, and they have prayed for me. They are my elders. I feel enjoined by such verses as 1 Thessalonians 5:12: "But we request of you, brethren, that you appreciate those who diligently labor among you, and have charge over you in the Lord and give you instruction," (NASB). These pastors and elders cannot be dismissed so easily—not in our hearts, not in our past relationships, not in our practice of the "one anothers" of Scripture, not in our continued participation in our local evangelical churches. These elders seem to fall into three categories: 1) those who voted for Trump and are true believers after the mode of Falwell and Jeffress; 2) those who silently voted for Trump when they could have just as easily, and more advisedly, done something differently—without voting for Hillary; and 3) those who didn't vote for Trump but who either remained/remain silent in opposing Trump, or silent in shepherding us through this spiritually-agonizing season. These elders are more important to us, and reconciling with the facts and relationships of their sounds or their silences will have to await future articles in The Liberator Today.
*Michele Bachmann, A.R. Bernard, Mark Burns, Tim Clinton, Kenneth and Gloria Copeland, James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Jr., Ronnie Floyd, Jentezen Franklin, Jack Graham, Harry Jackson, Robert Jeffress, David Jeremiah, Richard Land, James MacDonald, Johnnie Moore, Robert Morris, Tom Mullins, Ralph Reed, James Robison, Tony Suarez, Jay Strack, Paula White, Tom Winters, Sealy Yates.
First in a series in search of freedom within my evangelical people group. (Photo: "Freedom" by Ozan Hotipoglu (Flikr CC: 2011)
How to Reconcile Evangelical Support for Trump: Part I
"Evangelicals support Donald Trump." I am troubled by all the ways that this statement is true, but also by all the ways it isn't. It seems to persist as a headline, in both conservative and mainstream media, certainly after the election, but agonizingly after every Trump outrage, including Charlottesville. Journalists speculate as to whether there is anything that Trump can do that will cause evangelicals to abandon him. Apparently not.
I feel like American evangelicalism has abandoned me. I can't see however how I can abandon them. Christianity is my faith, not Evangelicalism, but evangelicals are my people group. With this article, I begin a series where I seek to reconcile with the Trump-supporting church. Mostly I am seeking a personal freedom, a way to go forward with my fellow evangelicals. Sometimes I will use the word "reconcile" in the relational term: our "ministry of reconciliation" is not thwarted by any new Constantine who may poison the witness of the church. At other times, I will use the term in an accounting sense, like one who "reconciles his bank statement." There is no guarantee in moving forward that the ledger is in the black. Today though, we start simply:
Part I: Do the Math
The statement "Evangelicals Support Trump," is based on a published statistic: "Eighty-one percent of evangelicals voted for Donald Trump." This statement however is as inaccurate as Trump's claim to having won the popular vote. Pollsters from Pew Research conducted an exit poll and asked voters to declare a religious affiliation, if any. They however had only one option for evangelicals: "White, born-again/evangelical Christian." If you were black and born again, or Latino and evangelical, the nearest category you could check was"Protestant/other Christian," where you get mixed in with a sizeable section of WASPs. When it came to surveying Catholics, the researchers did differentiate. Sixty percent of white Catholics reported voting for Trump whereas only 26 percent of Hispanic Catholics voted for him. So all we can, in truth, claim is: "Eighty-one percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump." This suggests a reconciliatory move for me: namely, to repent of the arrogance which presumes that all evangelicals are white, or that only white evangelicals have a voice.
But even our revised statement doesn't go far enough. It should at least read: "Eighty-one percent of white evangelicals who bothered to vote, voted for Trump." Reportedly only 58 percent of eligible US voters went to the polls in 2016. I suspect that turnout among evangelicals is higher than the rest of the population (though perhaps not in this disgusting election), but nonetheless if we say that 81% of the 58% percent of eligible evangelicals who bothered to vote, voted for Trump, the most you can claim is that 46.98 percent of the total group of eligible evangelical voters voted for Trump—a minority, in other words.
And of course the most accurate statement of all should read: "Eighty-one percent of white evangelicals who could vote and who bothered to do so, voted for Trump." If evangelicalism is simply an American voting bloc—which is how the Religious Right and the Republican Party value us—than so be it: "Evangelicals support Trump." But if Evangelicalism is a spiritual force, an expression of the euangelion, a potent vessel for the Spirit of Holiness, a living expression of our quadrilateral definition of Biblicism, crucicentrism, conversionism, and activism—then that spiritual force is not limited only to those evangelicals who were eligible to vote. For instance my wife Robynn could not vote. She is a Canadian green card holder, but nonetheless a vibrant part of the American evangelical church. Even our friends Brendan and Leif, who are Aussies living in Southeast Asia, exert a strong influence on the American evangelical church through their prayers and exhortations. My daughter Adelaide couldn't vote. She only turned 18 in January. She wouldn't have voted for Trump. I even know ex-felons who have left prison and who have strong ministries for Christ. By law, they could not vote. By voice, they did not vote for Trump. These people don't signify to Pew Research exit pollsters, but they certainly signify to the building of God's kingdom in a country where Trump is nonetheless president.
But this leads to the flip side of the equation, and where most of our freedom will be found: if 81% of [white, etc.] evangelicals voted for Trump, then that means that 19% did not. Nineteen percent is a significant number. It evokes the Pareto Principle. Perhaps you've heard the Pareto Principle stated this way: "Eighty percent of the work is done by twenty percent of the people." The actual principle is more like "Twenty percent of the input results in eighty percent of the output." To choose to focus on the 19 percent who didn't vote for Trump is to be hopeful of the prospects of what God might do among us.
Nineteen percent is also in the range of the Law of Diffusion of Innovation. Simon Sinek draws a bell curve in his famous TedTalk: How Great Leaders Inspire Action. He then bisects the curve with four vertical lines, dividing the curve up in categories. "The first 2.5 percent of our population," Sinek explains, "are our innovators. The next 13.5 percent of our population are our early adopters. The next 34 percent are your early majority, your late majority [also at 34%], and your laggards [at 16 percent.]" He points to the laggards and jokes, "The only reason these people buy touchtone phones is because you can't buy rotary phones anymore." The audience chuckles. He continues, "We all sit at various places at various times on the scale, but the Law of Diffusion of Innovation tells us is that if you want mass market success, or mass market acceptance of an idea, you can not have it until you achieve this tipping point between 15 and 18 percent market penetration, and then the system tips."
If true, at 19 percent, we've already reached a tipping point, even among white evangelicals. We will tip into loving our neighbors, Blacks, Mexicans, Muslims, immigrants, refugees, women, creation, the poor and the LGBT community in obedience to the commands of Christ. Let the tipping begin, and let it begin with me!
Trump, evangelicals, Pew Research, Evangelical voters
The Lynching of Rubin Stacy, Ft. Lauderdale, FL, 1935
"You rape our women and you're taking over our country and you have to go."
July 26, 2017 by Lowell Bliss
Donald Trump was riling up the mob at his campaign rally in Youngstown, Ohio on Tuesday night. He was talking about gangs of illegal immigrants when he said,
"And you've seen the stories about some of these animals. They don't want to use guns, because it's too fast and it's not painful enough. So they'll take a young, beautiful girl, 16, 15, and others and they slice them and dice them with a knife because they want them to go through excruciating pain before they die. And these are the animals that we've been protecting for so long."
So let me ask us a question: If you could close your eyes and picture that "young, beautiful girl, age 16 or 15"-- what color was she? What race do you think the Trump mob imagined in their minds as they pictured someone being sliced and diced with a knife by illegal Mexican immigrants?
Dylann Roof walked into the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina and killed nine brothers and sisters in Christ who happened to be black. Reportedly, before he killed Twanyza Sanders, he said, "You rape our women and you're taking over our country and you have to go."
I will allow you to say that there is a difference between a President at a political rally and a young terrorist at a massacre, but I will allow no difference in the frame that they have set, and the articulation of the Spirit of the Age. "They have got to go," both say. Why? Because they are a threat to our women.
Sure, go ahead and scour the full transcript of Trump's speech here, and you will be able to argue in a court of law that Trump was only referring to illegal gang members: "predators and criminal aliens." You will be able to tell me, with textual evidence, that Trump was not calling all illegal immigrants "animals," but only the "gang members." You will win your point; but you will lose your humanity, or at least erode it. That's what proto-fascism does: it chips away at our mitigating narratives. The Hutu of Rwanda recast the Tutsi as "cockroaches" (i.e. animals), and soon they could squash them beneath their heels. The segregationists of Jim Crow recast black males as sexually unrestrained stallions, and soon they could lasso them around the neck and hoist them up into lonely trees.
I am so weary of talking about the continuing outrage of this single man. He is our man. He is our outrage. He is us. We need to begin talking instead about the nation who elected him and that portion of the Church of Señor Jesucristo who continue to support him. We need to repent. We need to renounce the idolatry of race and security. We need to resist the Spirit of the Age.
July 26, 2017 /Lowell Bliss
Symbols, including phallic ones, are the result of interpretation.
Simple Headline: Sexual Harassment is Wrong
April 24, 2017 by Lowell Bliss
Second Headline: Dear Daughter, You are Worth Infinitely More than $2.6 Million.
I was puzzled about what to write for this edition of The Liberator Today. "Should I write about the Mother-of-all-Bombs, or about sexual harassment?" I asked out loud.
"Write about sexual harassment," my fifteen-year-old daughter said from the back seat of the car.
And that settled it.
The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) is the most powerful non-nuclear bomb ever detonated. When dropped on an ISIS cave system in Afghanistan recently, it reportedly left a one-mile blast radius. I have a cousin who tried to get his mind around the devastation by superimposing the blast radius on a Google map of his hometown, Grand Rapids, MI. I perhaps had a brief glimpse in how my daughter Bronwynn must feel when she hears the latest news report of a settled and excused case of sexual harassment, this time, the case of FOX News Commentator Bill O'Reilly. I'll never know for sure since I'm a man, an adult, and her father—but it's possible that when Bronwynn hears about O'Reilly, or about Donald Trump, or about Bill Cosby, it's like a 22,000 pound bomb just exploded in her soul.
My daughter was not solicited by O'Reilly. She was not grabbed by Trump. She was never drugged by Cosby. Instead, she listens. She listens from the back seat of our car and wonders what social issues her father will prioritize in his writing. She listens to the news report about O'Reilly and wonders what this word "settled" really means. FOX News "settled" five lawsuits on behalf of their money-making celeb. Thirteen million dollars was dispersed between five women. My daughter can do the math. That's $2.6 million a piece. That's a lot of money, but my daughter was born with a sense that she, like all girls, like all human beings, are "priceless." Her sense of worth is priceless. Her sense of integrity is priceless. Her sense of safety and security is priceless. She wants the world to feel the same way about her as she feels about herself. Certainly she wants her dad to feel that way. She wants men to feel that way about her. She wants her leaders—whether in the White House or in the church pulpit—to feel that way about her.
My daughter was listening when President Trump was asked by the New York Times about O'Reilly: "Personally, I think he shouldn't have settled, because you should have taken it all the way; I don't think Bill did anything wrong. I think he's a person I know well. He is a good person." Bronwynn wasn't particularly surprised by Trump's comments, because she was also listening when Trump bragged about his own consequence-free escapades of sexual harassment. When you've got at least a spare $2.6 million, you can apparently "get away with it," as Trump said on the Access Hollywood tape.
By the time I had finished writing this article, it was reported that the FOX News Corporation had indeed fired O'Reilly. I'm sure it was a blow to one billed as "the most powerful voice in cable news." Why now though, after fifteen years of these allegations against him going uninvestigated by FOX? And what are we to make with the $25 million severance package being paid to O'Reilly? O'Reilly has already announced his intention to re-launch a podcast. Supporters are rallying. I'm not saying that Bill O'Reilly should be ground under our heels. I am saying that our children are listening to all these details, and interpreting them PERSONALLY.
The most important warning that we were given in January at the time of Donald Trump's inauguration is that there would come a point when we all just assume that this is normal. We were admonished that we would have to keep reminding ourselves: "This is NOT normal." Sexism, misogyny, sexual harassment, and sexual predation are not normal. Such things are never "settled." The wealthy's ability to purchase the "settlement" of sexual harassment is not acceptable. We would have to keep our outrage at Donald Trump's outrageousness close at hand. If we put it up on the shelf for a moment, it would be only because we can't handle something that hot for too long without burning ourselves. But if left on the shelf for too long, our outrage cools and hardens like a pumice stone. It becomes a curio, a part of the backdrop of our lives. We could begin to think that sexual harassment is just a normal part of life in these United States. Even worse, we begin to inadvertently communicate to those we love the most: "Young lady, just settle down on sexual harassment already!"
My daughter has also been listening to Christian leaders. She heard some national Christian leaders verbally defend, excuse, or otherwise ignore Donald Trump's sexual harassment: "that was ten years ago," "that was just locker-room talk," "he's a baby Christian," "we need to forgive, right?" "this wasn't as bad as when Hillary enabled Bill's adultery," "that's fake news." Other leaders were silent. Where was the Church when they should have been gathering our adolescent girls together? Christian leaders could have sat them down, admitted their own perplexity, their own lack of skill at navigating the abnormal political waters of the 2016 election, but they could have at least said this:
"Listen, we don't know what's ultimately true or not true about Donald Trump's crimes (or Bill O'Reilly's or Bill Cosby's), and we are momentarily clueless about how to advise you about the politics or the media, but we do want to make two declarations: 1) Sexual harassment is wrong; and 2) you are priceless in the sight of God and the Church. How do we know? Because Jesus Christ died in part because of sexual harassment and he died to redeem you in whole at a God-sized price."
April 24, 2017 /Lowell Bliss
Bill O'Reilly, Donald Trump, Sexual Harassment