Country Parson

TIME TO MOVE!!!!!

2019-11-12T08:45:00.002-08:00

A FINAL REMINDER THAT COUNTRY PARSON HAS MOVED TO WORDPRESS. GO TO STEVENWOOLLEY.COM, SCROLL TO BOTTOM OF PAGE, SIGN UP TO RECEIVE COUNTRY PARSON BY EAMIL.

A Reminder of a New Location

2019-11-04T07:51:00.001-08:00

Grace and peace to you,
If you have been following Country Parson by email and have not yet done so, I invite you to go to stevenwoolley.com, scroll to the bottom and enter your email address to continue receiving it. Country Parson had been going out via email to over 2,000 addresses, but when I moved the site from blogspot.com to wordpress.com I could not move the email list. Let’s face it, it’s an ego thing. I would hate to lose any one of you. So, if you haven’t already, go to stevenwoolley.com, scroll to the bottom, and enter your email address.
Peace

Follow Country Parson Anew

2019-11-01T17:03:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,
I have migrated Country Parson to stevenwoolley.com on the WordPress platform. To continue receiving Country Parson via email, please go to stevenwoolley.com and enter you email address under “Follow my Blog” at the bottom of the page.
Thank you to all 1,200 of you,
Steven

Five Foundations of Trump Support

2019-10-28T11:09:00.001-07:00

Bob Gorrell, a popular syndicated editorial cartoonist, has deftly summarized five key symbols of Trump’s enduring loyalty among a great many voters for whom his questionable behavior can be easily overlooked.

The stock market hitting historic highs
Unemployment among all groups at record levels
America now energy independent and exporting oil and gas
Tax cuts and deregulation increase productivity
Isis caliphate defeated and its leader dead

They can’t comprehend how, in the face of such heartening good news, Democrats think he should be impeached. Obviously, Democrats are out of touch with reality and the voting public.

Have Trump supporters built their case on solid rock?

The stock market has been bouncing around its high water mark, holding steady, if one smooths out its wild gyrations. But it isn’t going anywhere, and hasn’t for the last two years. To be fair, the Dow rose about 700 points during Trump’s first year in office. But market indexes are not economic indexes. As popular as they are, daily reporting on their ups and downs is an odd ball reflection of political winds, economic data, computer algorithms, emotional hiccups, historical trends, and quarterly earnings reports that aren’t always connected to sales and productivity. What it all means to the average voter is an entertaining mystery.

Unemployment is at an all time low, and that’s good news to be celebrated. Once more, it’s not a trend that accelerated under Trump, but an extension of one long underway. As is widely known and felt, much employment is low pay, part time and without benefits. Making enough to afford a decent lifestyle has not got easier for a great many. Bold promises of revitalized heavy industrial and coal mining jobs have never materialized.

The U.S. has become an exporter of gas and oil, but it’s not energy independent. It’s a dramatic change from previous decades, yet for multiple reasons it still imports between 5 and 6 million barrels of oil per day, simultaneously exporting bit more, mostly to Canada and Mexico. In like manner, we continue to import gas, mostly from Canada and Mexico, even as we have become a net exporter of gas, mostly to Mexico. It’s a world wide commodities market of buying and selling, trying to make a profit on the spread while fulfilling each nation’s need for fuel. What Trump supporters are willing to overlook is environmental damage being done now, and extending into the foreseeable future. No one expects us to eliminate fossil fuels. We depend on them for too much, but we can become less dependent, and do less damage to the environment in the process. As an aside, the term ‘environment’ often conjures up something somewhere else abstractly related to nature. What it really means is human well being in the places where humans live, as well as the surrounding world of nature making up the whole of the world’s existence.

The tax cut legislation continues to be touted as a great victory, even as it’s been revealed as a total bust. Most benefits accrued to large corporations and the very wealthy. It produced no new investment, did little to help raise low end incomes, and did not stimulate the economy to greater growth. Productivity took a nosedive in 2016, recovered in 2017, and has dribbled along since then, dipping a little in recent periods (which may not signify anything). The point is, productivity hasn’t shown any trend that can be associated with tax cuts or deregulation. Which brings up another question: Deregulation of what? Of things protecting human health and safety?

Indeed, the caliphate is gone, and its most recent leader killed. Isis is not gone, and like many polycentric groups, new leaders will arise with revenge in their hearts. Would that it were not so, but it’s the nature of terroristic movements motivated by religious fervor. It should not go unnoticed that the very people and institutions Trump has blasphemed are responsible for this hard and dangerous work.

It adds up to Trump loyalist convictions anchored in the shifting sand of factually true events given meaning they can’t bear, and credit to Trump for achievements that aren’t his. They dismiss his immoral and criminal actions as behavioral shortcomings no worse than any others. They deny the damage his trade negotiations and international policy blundering have done to American honor and credibility. They cannot see his ignorance and incompetence. They remain steadfastly blind to his betrayal of the Constitution. To them, he is a political savior defending American pride, and they cannot be shaken of their convictions.

Telling the Story through Biblical Metaphors

2019-10-24T20:21:00.001-07:00

The Way of Love is the theme of the Episcopal Church, and Presiding Bishop Michael Curry (of royal wedding fame) is its most compelling advocate. It resonates well with the general public, but not always in realistic ways. It may be that the phrase itself implies a naively rosy outlook in the face of obviously troubling times, or maybe a doormat meekness lacking the strength to confront evil.

It’s too bad, because The Way of Love is grounded in the practice of following where Jesus has led, and that means walking with courage straight into the valley of the shadow of death. In the Episcopal tradition it is the way of the cross, which we understand to be the way of life and peace. It requires trust that in that valley there will be a table prepared by God that nourishes and refreshes, with our enemies sitting down to eat with us.

While that paints a vivid word picture for most Christians, it’s completely opaque to the greater number who have no idea what meaning biblical metaphors such as The Way, Valley of the shadow of death, the Way of the Cross, or a table set before us might have, because they’ve never heard of them. Nor are they familiar with any of the other biblical stories through which Christianity is revealed. It’s not a recent phenomenon, it’s been true for fifty years or more, but Christians remain puzzled that their treasured stories are so utterly unknown.

Christianity once maintained a thin veneer over contemporary social values, but it’s gone. Western society is more secularized than ever. One reaction is to blame the government for allowing it to happen, and insist that (Christian) godliness be legislated back into the public arena. Proponents have a point. A vague, watery Christian gruel was once imposed on public school students, and mumbled in public assemblies. It never produced any Christians, and was blatantly unconstitutional, but it had one redeeming value: biblical stories and metaphors were known, if not understood. Now they’re not.

Another reaction is to be honest about how poorly the depth, breadth and strength of the faith was passed down within the church from one generation to the next. Some part of it can be laid at the feet of clergy, and some at the feet of parents who went to church as little more than a social obligation. That, I suspect, is the greater truth.

If we are to recover Christian momentum, we must be able to tell old stories in new ways. What makes Jesus different from other respected prophets? For that matter, what makes him different from the variety of mythological saviors that populate recorded history? Why should anyone care?

Door knocking Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons may be anathema to many, but they have an opening gambit to be considered. They ask if they can tell a story with the assumption you have never heard it before, and have no idea how to understand its meaning. They start with metaphors common in popular culture, metaphors about national loyalty, hopes and dreams for a better life, guarantees one can depend on, and use them to introduce texts and the unique metaphors that make up their story. More doors are slammed in their faces than not, but now and then their story can be told in compelling ways.

Episcopalians, and other mainliners, are never going to be door knockers, but learning to tell their stories, starting with popularly understood metaphors, is a way to become comfortable about sharing the “good news” that “the kingdom of God has come near” in Christ Jesus. But you must have a story that’s authentic and feels comfortable without being door knockingly offensive. Learning your own story has to begin with the old core metaphors of the Christian faith as recorded in the gospel records. Maybe the greater pubic doesn’t know them, but we do, or should, because they’re essential to knowing who we are.

A recent diocesan gathering worked on it by refreshing our memories about who and what we are: dry bones, lost sheep, mustard seeds, vines and branches, trees of good fruit, sickness and injuries healed, pearls of great value, and all the rest. They’re metaphors for instruction because they say something important about who we are as followers of Jesus. Participants began to discover how they helped to focus on how God has been present to them in the ordinary issues of life everyone faces. For instance, no one has ever been in the belly of a big fish, but everyone has felt what it is to be closed in, trapped, unsure of a way out. Many have experienced what it means to be forgiven, strengthened to endure, and the freedom of deliverance from captivity. Sharing their experiences of living into biblical metaphors helped illuminate how important shared congregational life and worship are as sources of support and hope. In other words, it gave sharable substance to what it means to be part of the church.

It’s one thing for each person to have an authentic individual story to tell, but what story commends the church of which they are a part? Twenty-one groups working independently discovered they had a shared metaphor: we are branches on a vine whose life comes from the root to which we are connected. In one sense we are also the fruit of the branch. In another sense, those to whom we reach out also join us as bearers of fruit. To be Christian is to be connected to God through Christ, through Christ to one another as the church, through the church to the world.

Nevertheless, it remained an insider’s story that helped explain to other insiders who and what we are, but offered little of value to outsiders who remain unfamiliar with our core metaphors, and would find little reason to value them if they did know. Why should anyone pay attention to followers of an itinerant preacher and wonder worker whose short career ended in crucifixion over two thousand years ago? There are plenty of other prophets and teachers around. Many of them lived long lives. Some started religions that have endured. Why not listen to them, or to a modern prophet, or to one’s self? What makes Jesus so special? Yes, he was a great teacher, a person of uncommon wisdom for one so young, a teller of stories, a healer. It’s even said he came back from the dead. So what? There are lots of others like him, even some who were said to have come back from the dead.

How are we to respond? It begins with recognition that most people, even many self proclaimed atheists, have a sense of the holy, a belief in a higher power of some kind, a vague idea of God, and a conviction that there is something more to life that comes after death. We are not without a place to begin. Taking a lesson from Paul’s speech to Athenians, we might say, “Friend, I see you are aware there is something more, something holy, something yet to come. What you are seeking, I boldly proclaim to you. It is the God who created everything that is, seen or unseen. In God we live and move and have our being. It is God whom we know through Jesus, not because he was a teacher or performed a single miracle, but because he is the Word of God made flesh. There is no authority higher than he. He willingly endured the humiliating death of crucifixion to demonstrate he wasn’t a myth or trickster. He rose from the dead not as a resuscitated body, but fully revealed for who he was and is, the manifestation of all that God is. Who is God? What is God? All that is true of God is revealed in Jesus because he is all of God that can be represented in human form. So pay attention. There is no other.”

Following Jesus is the way of love and life. Following Jesus is to be connected: root to vine, vine to branches, branches to fruit. Following Jesus is to become an agent of God’s redeeming love in a broken world, inviting others to join in that work.

The Athenians laughed at Paul, ridiculing him as a babbler of religious nonsense. But not all of them. For those who listen to us, the old stories can be told, and the old metaphors given new life. We know little of what the other apostles and disciples did. Peter and Paul were executed around the year 65 c.e., others died earlier from the same fate, and many others later. It wasn’t a promising start. Nevertheless, by the end of the first century, Christianity had spread throughout the Roman Empire and beyond. Two thousand years of stress, trials and tribulation, including centuries of ecclesiastical corruption and theological misdirection, have not diminished the power of the Word of God made flesh to lead followers into the abundance of life for which they hunger. The deep hunger remains, and we have the holy food and drink of new and unending life that will nourish them.

It's a Question of Justice

2019-10-17T20:56:00.002-07:00

I’ve been thinking a lot about justice these last few days. Maybe it’s because the parable of the unjust judge (Luke 18) came up in the lectionary readings, and it reminded me of news segments about families seeking justice for their murdered loved ones, and of those seeking justice for immigrants held in harsh conditions on no charges. Appeals to justice dominate the current impeachment investigation. Letters to the editor demand justice on all kinds of issues. It brings up another demand: What is justice?

Philosophers and theologians have argued the case for justice for centuries, with words so thick, and sentences as long as paragraphs, they’re all but impossible to understand. I’m more interested in whether the popular understandings of justice are more able to lead in a useful direction that might help us become a more just society.

The parable of the unjust judge gives at least a hint of what justice might be, because we have to ask, what made the judge unjust? Jesus said he neither feared God nor had respect for people, and I think that’s a part of what made him unjust. It wasn’t a question of how he ruled on matters of law, but that he didn’t acknowledge divine authority to declare what is right or wrong. On a more secular level, one might say he didn’t acknowledge a higher authority than himself. Moreover, he had no respect for the people who came before him. Justice, it seems, requires submission to God’s ultimate authority, and a commitment to caring for the needs and interests of God’s people.

In defense of the judge, I had a professor many long years ago who taught that courts and judges must be disinterested in justice. They’re to decide on what’s legal or illegal. What is just or unjust is a legislative responsibility, not a judicial one. I guess the unjust judge was his kind of guy. To be fair, my old professor understood the importance of justice, and was passionate about what he believed it to be, but defining it was not the job of the courts. But I digress.

The parable also features a woman who was aggrieved by something, we don’t know what, and demanded vindication against the one who aggrieved her. What can we learn from her about the meaning of justice? The parable doesn’t say what she meant by vindication, but for many it means vengeance that would inflict an equal measure of pain on her opponent. Is vengeance a legitimate element of justice? In any case, she relentlessly pestered the judge until he gave in, granting her petition, not because she was in the right, but because he was tired of her pestering him. It was, perhaps, another sign of what made him unjust. Rather than deciding on the merits and the law, he decided on what was convenient for his own comfort. The complaining widow wanted restoration of comfort in her life, and so did the judge. Is one’s discomfort or inconvenience an element of justice? Apparently not when it’s labeled a sign of unjustness.

From the parable we gain an idea that justice has to do with recognizing who has the ultimate authority to set the standards; it requires caring for the well being of others; and one’s personal comfort is probably not a part of the equation.

Does it leave room for vengeance: the settling of scores by inflicting pain and suffering on the one who caused pain and suffering? God says no. “Vengeance is mine,” says God (Deut. 32). Paul, writing to the Romans says, “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’ No, if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; …Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” (Rom. 12)

As clear as that sounds, it runs headlong into vengeance as the central theme of all the action and super hero movies, many t.v. series, and more than a few of what we see on the news. We want our pound of flesh no matter what God says, and we call it justice. Even Paul, in his testier moments, got more than a little vengeful with his words.

What is comes down to is this: the question of justice comes up when something beyond the usual has upset the equilibrium of life. Life is filled with little disturbances, but they usually fall within a tolerable range. When something happens outside that range, it becomes an injury, a betrayal, a threat to safety that cannot be tolerated. Justice, in this sense, is the restoration of personal or social equilibrium. But how?

By the standards of vengeance, the offending party must be made to pay by inflicting a requisite amount of pain and suffering on them. If possible, they should be removed from the community so they can’t do more damage. Then things can get back to normal. God’s standards put a check on that, and demand that retribution be replaced by ways to not only restore social harmony, but restore the offender to a state of harmony with society. Maybe God can do it, but we haven’t figured it out yet, so it’s always a struggle to find what works without being cruel.

You see where the conflict is. The parable teaches that important elements of justice are acknowledgement of God’s authority, caring for God’s people, and willing disregard for one’s own comfort, if it comes to that. Holy scripture rules out vengeance as a tool for getting justice, but secular stories tell us that justice means getting even, and maybe more than even.

It gets more complicated when people who have been oppressed, held in subjugation by others, denied access to the good things of life reserved for some, rise up to claim their fair share, shaking the very foundations of social equilibrium. Those who have been privileged are likely to see it as insurrection against the natural order of things, and unjust act by out of control others. Those who have risen up are likely to see it as a long overdue fight for the right to enjoy all the benefits of justice in a new social equilibrium that doesn’t exclude them.

My old professor was right. Justice is not a question of what is legal or illegal, it’s a question of what is moral or immoral, and it’s always a moving target. In the pursuit of justice we try to move from what we now recognized as less moral than we used to think it was, to what is more moral according to what we now believe.

Questions of justice will always arise when the social equilibrium is sufficiently disturbed. Restoring it will always be the goal. In some cases it will be a deeply emotional struggle at a very personal level through which a restoration of equilibrium, if it happens at all, will not be like the way it was before. In some cases it will be a struggle to redefine a new moral order in a social equilibrium more just than it used to be. Both cases will always get tangled up with each other in ways taking generations for resolution.

Martin Luther King, Jr. cited Theodore Parker in one of his speeches when he said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” It’s become a popular rallying cry for those who believe the arc has been a little too long. For Christians, the arc, however long it is, must bend quickly toward the elimination of barriers that have prohibited a portion of the population from enjoying all the available benefits of justice, moral and legal, that exist in society today.

I end this brief article not with a conclusion, but with questions. Can we ever define what justice means, or is it always in the process of becoming? Are we able to become more just persons in more just societies, or can we lose it all? As a Christian, guided by the authority of God’s word, I cannot keep from working toward more just societies, regardless of the outcome. As a human being of limited capabilities, my ability to hear and understand God’s word is always changing, so my moral judgements about what is just or unjust must always be provisional.

Celebrating the Trump Economy

2019-10-16T09:54:00.003-07:00

Trump supporting friends argue that the impeachment investigation is a rush to judgment without due process. It ignores the greater crimes of the Bidens, not to mention Hillary, which they do not fail to mention. It’s followed by tepid dislike of his character flaws, which, they claim, are no worse than those of other politicians and business leaders. They can be overlooked in view of how he has strengthened the country’s defenses, and restored its respect after years of being mocked by other world leaders thanks to the weaknesses of Bush and Obama. Their parade is not dampened when dumped on by tomes of facts. They have their own facts, generated by dozens of propaganda machines, they throw down with the accusation that, in their narrow mindedness, the radical left (anyone not in agreement with them) refuses to consider them.

There comes a point when even they become aware, however vaguely, that they’ve constructed a cardboard shack offering neither shelter nor safety. It’s when they pull out one last argument: the economy. The economy that had been struggling to gain traction has thrived under Trump. Just look at the low unemployment rate and surging stock market. What more could one want?

So I’ve been looking. I think we can all celebrate the low unemployment rate, and the resilience of an economy that has been in slow, steady expansion since 2008. The Great Recession of 2007-08 was frightening, but bipartisan legislation, the administration’s steady hand, and the hard work of a fully independent Federal Reserve, set the country on a path of recovery lasting until now. It would help if wage growth at the lower end would pick up, but the overall economy is doing well. Yay.

Has Trump contributed anything to our fundamentally healthy economy? Yes he has, but not the easy to get 4% GDP growth rate, new steel mills that never materialized, heavy industry jobs he promised, booming export market, return of off shore production, coal mining, nor any of another dozen things he promised. So what has he contributed?

We can start with a tax cut for the wealthy and large corporations that cost the federal government nearly $30 billion in tax revenues. Small government types love the idea of starving the government of revenue, but it didn’t cut spending, just added to the deficit. Tax revenues are almost back to where they were at the end of the previous administration, which is not bad news, but neither is it good news.

Partly because of the tax cut, and partly because of “easy to win” trade wars, federal debt has continued to climb into danger territory well above the 100% of GDP range accepted by most economists. Previous large debt increases paid for wars or recovery from recession, not good things to be sure, but at least not tax cuts for the wealthy and blundering trade wars.

The deficit, which had been shrinking under the previous administration, is now roaring toward the trillion dollar mark, which is an unfathomably high number, but not unmanageable over the short run. Sadly, the current administration has not shown much interest in managing it.

Industrial production, which had been on an upward swing, is now staggering to maintain its current level. The best one can say about U.S. exports is that they were trending up until the tariff jousting; now they’re trending down. A necessary price, Trump says, that will pay dividends in the future. In the meantime, he’s single handedly demolished international trust in the United States as a dependable trading partner or military ally. Whatever future Trump envisions is not on anyone else's radar screen.

So, yes, Trump has contributed quite a bit to our strong economy, little of it good, most of it in the form of economic junk food.

Oh, lest we forget the surging stock market, if one evens out its wild gyrations, it nearly flat.

A Nation in a State of Angst

2019-10-10T20:03:00.000-07:00

The nation appears to be in a collective state of angst. Never before before has one party expressed such unreflective loyalty to a president whose corruption, ineptitude, and mental instability have been on such public display. Never has the nation’s international reputation been so sullied. The beloved myth of the United States as the leader of the free world, the paragon of civic virtue, the protector of weaker states, the promised land for immigrants, the shining torch of democracy and respect for rule of law – it all lies tattered in the gutter.

Trump, who has betrayed wives, girlfriends, associates, friends, employees, creditors and customers over the course of his entire life, has now betrayed allies, befriended foes, and made enemies of competitors. He’s cozied up to dictators and ridiculed democratically elected leaders. His most recent betrayal, the betrayal of the Kurds in Syria, is inhumanly cruel, and of it he makes light.

America has been through tough times before. Our collective behavior has never lived up to our beloved myth of national virtue, but we’ve always aspired to do so. A brutal civil war nearly destroyed hope for a united nation committed to a federal system defined by a constitution whose enduring stability was guaranteed by a strenuous amendment process. We more than survived, we made progress toward living more fully into the myth. We did so even as charlatans were in political leadership, robber barons tried for plutocracy, and America First movements thirsted for fascism. As destructive as the era of race riots was, the greater number of Americans remained convinced that civil and human rights were not to be reserved to some and withheld from others.

Through it all, the United States emerged as a sign of democratic and economic hope for the entire world. Respected by many, feared by some, it became a reluctant imperial super power greater than any other in recorded history.

In less than three years, Trump, Senator McConnell and the Freedom Caucus have eroded enough of its foundation that the nation will never recover its former glory. It may not be all bad. A few years ago I wrote a column arguing that we Americans must learn to be one nation among many. It’s not important that we be first in everything. We can be content with the good life that is at hand, and not lust after a richer life to the detriment of others. I thought it was a reasonable argument, but did not expect to achieve it at the cost of ignominy casting Americans as foolish rubes easily led by an imitation Mussolini. It stuns me that there remains a core of the electorate not simply loyal to him, but convinced he is the savior of all that’s important to them.

We will survive again. Hopefully, a new administration will be elected next year. It will not be perfect. Right wing howling about a dive into socialism may raise emotional hackles, but it’s entirely without merit. The most liberal of candidates is pretty mainstream, even if the right wing is easily persuaded that anything to their left is dreaded socialism, leaving no room for traditional conservatives. For hard core libertarians, any form of government is suspect. May they ever remain a small sect. Curiously, committed as they are to individualism free from governmental interference, they’re the most likely to opt for autocracy. But I digress.

A new administration will restore public decorum, adherence to the rule of law, and hesitant trust among other nations that the U.S. will again become a reliable partner in international relations and trade. In keeping with previous Democratic administrations, it will probably restore fiscal discipline as well, and that should reassure traditional conservatives.

Should it not happen, we will have more years of digging deeper holes taking longer to get out of when the time comes. We may even lose our democracy.

Are All Equally Corrupt?

2019-10-08T07:13:00.002-07:00

I have a libertarian Trump supporting friend with whom I maintain regular correspondence. He’s unhappy with Trump’s “character flaws,” but likes his policies because they’ve been dismantling the federal government piece-by-piece, something he’s wanted for a long time. He’s not persuaded by accusations of Trump’s unethical, perhaps criminal track record because he believes all politicians and corporate leaders are equally corrupt, so what’s the difference? There was a time, he thinks, fifty or sixty years ago when it wasn’t so, but it is now.

In his view, Trump is no worse than Hillary, Biden or any other politician. They’re all equally bad. Regular people, real people, are not as fallen as that, but politicians and corporate leaders are. Left on their own, regular people, real people, would do very well with limited local governments and smaller family owned businesses. It’s a romantic ideal prizing the rural life of small towns populated by self sufficient citizens right out of Hallmark Channel movies. What’s keeping us from it is the evil of big government, socialism, and greedy corporations, all led by corrupt people. They’re represented by the worst of the darkest of Batman’s Gotham City.

Having spent a good many years working on the edges of public policy at the federal level, and with a wide variety of corporate leaders, I disagree. I don’t believe politicians and corporate leaders are either more or less ethical than ever. In fact, I have a generally high regard for most of them, but there have been systemic changes making ethical commitments harder to keep, or, maybe, more costly to keep.

For instance, in that magical time of fifty or sixty years ago, many of the largest corporations had strong ties to their home communities, the places where they came into being. Major share holders were often heirs of the founders, or executives with deep roots in the community. Minority share holders were widely distributed among the local population. The result was an implied commitment to the well being of the community. Those connections have faded away. Major shareholders are more likely to be mutual funds, pension funds, and impersonal hedge fund types. Computerized algorithms create wild gyrations in the stock market, as technotraders try to eke out profitable margins on the casino tables of the floor, rather than investing in a company’s future. When connections to communities and their people are severed, so are implied ethical commitments.

Current tax and corporate governance law, as I vaguely understand it, requires CEOs and boards to manage affairs for short term maximum return based on share value. It means manipulating the business to keep stock prices as high as possible outweighs all other commitments, no matter what the annual report and press releases claim. Moreover, the seductiveness of super salaries for senior executives can easily subvert good intentions to be ethically responsible decision makers. Paul warned his student Timothy that ”a love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.” (I Tim. 6) I can’t ask the corporate world to adopt Christian values, but I can point out the universal truth of Paul’s warning, and encourage actions that might mitigate the corrupting influence of demands to maximize monetary return to the exclusion of all other forms of return.

It seems to me that a few minor changes to the law, together with a high marginal rate on super salaries, would do a lot to change things for the better. Corporate tax incentives for better wages at lower levels, and tax disincentives for excessive stock buybacks and super salaries might work to improve both investment and wage distribution.

Over the course of many decades, I’ve met and engaged with hundreds of politicians at the local, state and national levels, as well as staff on one hand and corporate lobbyists on the other. For the most part, they have been people who desired to do what they believed to be right for their constituents, and tried to do it with integrity, keeping in mind that defining integrity is always influenced by the social mores of the time. There were always exceptions. They often made the headlines. Some went to prison. I think it’s still true.

Yes, the political life is filled with dangers. You can’t be a politician and not have an ego that delights in public approbation. Doing whatever is needed to get it is dangerous. Being skilled in the give and take of political negotiating with other ego driven politicians is a must. Losing one’s way by making it a zero sum game is dangerous. State capitals, and Washington, D.C. to an even greater extent, are filled with people attracted by power, intent on getting as close to it as possible, and competing with each other for position and influence. It can be very seductive. There’s a fine line between legitimate influence and bribery paid with money, sex, and insider trading tips. Moreover, what’s moral and what’s legal are not the same thing.

That’s life in any capital city at any time in human history. An honest reading of American political history reveals the ebb and flow, push and pull, between political integrity and political opportunism, between corruption and reform, between justice and injustice. Over time we have made enormous strides toward “a more perfect union”, but we have made them stumbling and lurching. Popular memory prefers another image of smoother progress combined with reverent patriotism, and faith in the future. It’s a wonderful image now torn into polarization that I think came from sources claiming patriotism for themselves while denying it to others.

The rise of extreme libertarianism (tea partiers, freedom caucus, etc.), combined with propaganda machines skilled at using the internet and social media, have undermined respect and support for the institutions of government, and led their followers in an authoritarian direction, all in the name of patriotism. It’s worked well for a relatively small number of corporate barons (Koch, et al) who have little respect for the libertarian masses, and would prefer Oligarchical control over as thin a veneer of democracy as they can get away with. But even they have convinced themselves it would be for the good of the nation, claiming and believing in their own integrity.

Is it cause for despair? For worry, certainly, but not yet for despair. Politics remains the art of deciding how we want to live together in community, whether local, state or national. It is, in that regard, a noble art worthy of our best efforts, and one in which every citizen should play their part. Our federal system of representative democracy is unique in the democratic world, and it’s lumbered through several centuries to prove itself enduring, flexible, and resistant to being overwhelmed by those who would corrupt it for their own benefit, or push it away from democratic ideals. We have reached a nadir with the current administration, but House investigations and the 2020 election may yet turn us in a better direction.

Honoring Conservative Values in a Progressive Agenda

2019-10-04T17:32:00.000-07:00

The impeachment express is full ahead, and not without justification. Combine it with Trump’s bull-in-a-china-shop blustering about other peoples’ corruption, and we’re all distracted from important issues that must be addressed by the next administration.

Democrats will nominate a liberal candidate who will be quickly labeled as a radical left wing socialist, in spite of the fact the he or she will be about as mainstream as can be. We’ve already seen how Trump’s mastery at slapping the socialist label on primary candidates resonates with those who think of themselves as conservatives, even if they dislike Trump. Consider these talking points currently used by the GOP:

Pelosi & Co. are holding hostage Trump’s agenda and the good of the country
Democrats will raise taxes (on you), squander resources on free health care and college tuition, open borders to all immigrants, let inmates vote, allow dangerous abortions, and abolish the electoral college.
They promote a big government socialist agenda.
Big and social media are in their pocket.

They’re points engineered to raise emotional angst to a high level, and they work very well, partly because they can cite something some Democrat once said that, out of context, lends them credence. To be sure, Democrats have their own emotional trigger pulling talking points, but right wing Republicans have honed theirs with more skill to better effect.

On the other hand, the GOP is also raising issues that show concern for:

Stagnant wages
Soaring deficits
Rebuilding infrastructure
Fixing health care
Adequate funding for Social Security and Medicare
Veterans health care
Global instability
Cyber security

Each of these issues is addressed as a priority in various campaign messages. They’re also issues of concern to progressives because they’re important to the future of the nation. In an age of polarization, they cross the divide. It means a key to wining the election will be how well the candidate and party can truthfully present a progressive agenda appealing to the values of voters who have voted Republican, or who tend to not vote at all. They will never win over libertarians for whom the federal government is a malevolent creature in need of dismantling. But they can win over those whose conservative values can be honored by a progressive agenda.

What would such and agenda look like? Here are a few thoughts that might be worth considering. Advance warning: there is nothing here about climate change as such, and no grand scheme for health care.

Modest changes to the IRS code to encourage higher rates of wage growth for low and middle income earners. Use corporate tax credits to create incentives for higher wages at lower levels. Apply tax penalties for overuse of stock buybacks and excessive executive compensation.
An infrastructure plan focussed on the Interstate, bridges, water & sewer systems, and regional airport improvements.
Demonstration of ability to restore respect for American leadership on the world stage.
Free but fair trade through reengagement with multilateral negotiations emphasizing worker rights, and protection for intellectual property. Make agriculture a public priority.
Revise the tax code to make it more fair to all, with a significantly higher marginal rate at the top end.
A health care plan expanding the ACA and allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices for all.
An affordable housing program that restores special advantages for tax credit financing to build low and moderate income housing through Housing Authorities and NGOs. Expand and fully fund the voucher program. Strengthen HUD enforcement of rules for safe, clean housing financed under its authority.
Offer planning assistance to encourage economic diversification in distressed areas.
Restore regulations protecting health and the environment, but streamline processes, and require federal agencies to adopt customer service practices replacing impersonal bureaucratic enforcement.
Reconfigure FEMA to accommodate greater frequency of severe weather events. Restrict rebuilding grants to reasonably safe areas.
Restore the integrity of government, particularly in the: FEC, SEC, Inspectors General, CFPB, Consumer Protection Bureau, and federal R&D agencies.
Immigration of course, but keep it simple. Make it clear, no open borders; simplify and speed up processing asylum seekers; allow higher numbers of legal immigrants; reform CBP; guarantee dreamer protection.
Restore Federal budget integrity: eliminate debt ceiling; commit to getting budgets and appropriations out on time; improve the sequester system to once again initiate deficit reduction without jeopardizing core social programs.
Celebrate low unemployment numbers as long as they last.
Celebrate military preparedness, but avoid promises of new weapons systems. Restore funding highjacked for the wall.
Celebrate House passed legislation stopped in the Senate without further consideration.

It’s not a perfect agenda, not even a beautiful one. The intent is to appeal to conservative minded voters who represent significant numbers of electoral votes, as well as urban voters in traditionally Republican neighborhoods, because we need them.

A Welcoming Congregation? Maybe Not.

2019-10-01T19:35:00.000-07:00

A recent day long gathering of congregational lay and clergy leaders focussed its attention on conditions that favor and oppose inviting and welcoming newcomers into the fellowship of worship. The usual menu of all the good things they do to was posted, with everyone nodding that, yes, these were good things. In addition to coffee hours, greeters at the door, follow up with personal contacts, new signage, and better access, there things like soup kitchens, room for AA and other community groups, and a variety of other social service activities. Each and every one a good thing indeed. Yay for us.

Conditions that were unfavorable to inviting and welcoming were a little harder to come by. Compliance with ADA standards was a big one. Poor signage, and lack of good things mentioned above of course. One brave soul admitted that the matriarchs and patriarchs of her congregation didn’t want any new people because they knew everyone in town, and anyone new would be someone they didn’t want. She was grateful that none of old leaders were in the meeting with us. Another admitted that, in spite of the congregation’s financial support of community needs, few knew where they were located, or wether an Episcopal Church was even Christian.

The common denominator linking all the discussion was the subconscious assumption that new people, invited and welcomed into the fellowship of worship, would probably have the same cultural values and expectations of church as did the congregation. They would certainly know who Jesus is. Even those who desire to open the doors to people not like us tend to think about what would be more welcoming from their own point of view, which includes assumptions about what “those others” would find attractive.

It’s not our problem only. It’s the same set of assumptions shared by every organized assembly wherever, in what ever culture. We, mostly white Episcopalians from the intermountain west, are not unlike a congregation in Nigeria, Lakota lands, suburbs of a big city, or the rural deep South. It’s human nature. What we stumble over is our inability to look at the question from the point of view of the other whom we think we want to welcome. The real question is: what is it about what we offer that the other will find uncomfortable and unwelcoming? What is it that will make them feel vulnerable, not fit for the likes of those present, embarrassed or humiliated? They’re hard questions to answer because it requires us to step out of our area of comfort to see things from an alien perspective. To experience it for yourself, go to church in another denomination in another part of the country where you are a stranger. Better yet, make it a church attended predominantly by a race other than yours.

The dean of the Episcopal cathedral in Portland, OR was featured in a Whitman College magazine article, in it he described the difficulty of opening the congregation to the others who are a part of the neighborhood. It’s already an LBGTQ friendly congregation, so how hard could it be? Very. The poor, unwashed, and mentally ill – what is it that prevents them from feeling welcome? What makes non-whites feel uncomfortable? What makes the never-gone-to-church-know-nothing-about-Christianity feel uncomfortable? What makes the straight, white newcomer feel uncomfortable? You can’t know unless you ask them, and you can’t find out from them unless you’re willing to engage with them in listening conversation. Engaging in listening conversation is an active way to encourage others to open doors from the outside and come in. It’s not easy, and it can raise anxiety to a high level.

There’s a more passive way to open doors from the inside, and that’s by losing the anxiety associated with trying too hard. It means giving up on cultural projections and expectations. The congregation from which I retired struggled with how to attract some of the growing percentage of Hispanics in the community. Some suggested adding Spanish prayer books, reading the gospel in two languages, or maybe hosting a popular Mexican saint’s day. It was all well intended. No one noticed that the church is in a part of town not frequented by the Hispanic population, nor that what the expected was their easy adaptation to the warmth of our Anglo Episcopalian ways, albeit with a Mexican touch. It was all well intended, but nothing happened.

Curiously, with that failure behind them, they became less uptight about who they were, and less anxious about welcoming the other not like them. They began to discover gay couples among their number, a few Africans (not American), some struggling with behavioral issues, and a number of odds and ends who were definitely not your typical middle class whites. They even discovered that noisy children, who sometimes wandered around the nave during worship, could be welcome with only an occasional tsk-tsk and tut-tut. It’s remains a struggle. A large apartment complex of low income elderly on the same block remains an untapped well. The twice weekly luncheon for any who are hungry is oversold, except for an invitation to join worship, which remains undersold.

The point is, we can sometimes allow our anxieties about not being welcoming enough get in the way of being more welcoming congregations. How about simply opening the doors and welcoming whoever comes in? What really gets in the way is reluctance to make the open door more well known in the neighborhood. Maybe it’s fear of looking too evangelical, in the worst sense of what that means.

A final point. Some, in their desire to welcome all, absentmindedly obscure the special characteristics of our Anglican tradition. Denominational differences are important. We Episcopalians have a particular way of expressing our faith within a tradition that has real meaning. Diminishing what makes Episcopalian polity and worship different demeans what is important in our understanding of what it means to be Christian. We aren’t more right than others, but our Anglican tradition has value. We are not just another vanilla variation. We’re reformed Catholics for a reason.

Moral Justification for Anti-intellectualism - and a response

2019-09-26T12:50:00.001-07:00

Headlines and social media proclaim we’ve entered an age of anti- intellectualism. It wouldn’t be the first time for us, nor for the world. There’s a restlessness among those who believe they’ve been ignored and left behind by a ruling elite that cares little about their welfare. Economic welfare is clearly at the head, but being left behind intellectually is close behind.

The introduction of new technologies, and new fields of knowledge, that demand assertive curiosity and critical thinking skills to be understood, can easily leave many behind. When they’ve become popularized through application to every day use, indeed when they’ve become essential to every day life, perhaps needed for workaday livelihood itself, they can flood whole populations with overwhelming angst about being left behind intellectually.

It’s not hard for popular forms of anti-intellectualism to grow and prosper when that happens. There was a time when technological innovations, and new fields of knowledge, arrived in reasonably predictable waves separated by enough years that one could anticipate earning a living based on what one learned in school or apprenticeship. New developments came, but at a rate most could accommodate. WWII changed all of that, and the rate of technological and knowledge base change affecting every day life has accelerated ever since. It’s jarring, disorienting, and frightening.

No wonder ant-intellectualism found fertile ground, but where did it find moral justification permitting it to accuse an undefined intellectually elite of culpability? In the bible; more particularly in Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth, not buried in the middle, but right there at the beginning. In it Paul wrote that “God made foolish the wisdom of the world.” The foolishness and weakness of God, he wrote, is wiser and stronger than that of human beings. In fact, “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise.” “God chose what is low and despised in the world…to bring to nothing things that are.” So, Hah!, take that you intellectual snobs who look down on us. Anti-intellectualism had found its moral justification.

What’s the right response? I’m not sure. Anxiety, with its roots in rapidly accelerating technological change, combined with uncomfortable developments in society’s core knowledge base, must be recognized and respected. There’s no point in being one of Agnew’s (remember him?) nattering nabobs of intellectual superciliousness. That’s nothing but bait for defensively angry attacks. Based on my own experience, there’s not much point in trying to change firmly held convictions that have become treasured possessions.

Jesus’s warned us not to store up treasures on earth where corruption consumes them, but in heaven where there is no corruption. “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” We treasure nothing more than holding grievances close to our hearts. What could be more corrupting than treasured grievances held so close that we can’t-won’t give them up. The great advantage of a grievance is that it creates an enemy who must be defeated if justice is to be restored. But to declare intellectualism to be the enemy is to smite the potentially best ally one could have.

Maybe the best we can do is calmly, patiently assert the utilitarian value of intellectual disciplines that help bring order to the apparent chaos of overly rapid change. There will always be a hard core who refuse to budge, but there will be more who show willingness to learn and adapt, however hesitantly –– if they are acknowledged with respect as worthy peers.

The Importance of Church & Episcopalians Do It Well.

2019-09-25T17:32:00.000-07:00

Why regular worship in church is important is not easy to explain. Add to it a sense that denominational differences shouldn’t matter, and it get’s more difficult. I think they do matter. This column tries to address both, and is a revision of a recent article for a local paper

In a nation where church attendance continues to decline, belief in God retrains an important place for most people. Recent studies suggest about 80% of Americans believe in God, but only half of them believe in God as described in the bible. The others are from non-biblical faith traditions, or believe in some kind of higher power. Among those who believe in God as described in the bible, Christians and Jews have different ways of interpreting the text. Among Christians there are differences between those who believe God determines what happens in one’s life, and those who understand God as engaging but not micro managing. Of the nearly 20% who do not believe in God, a healthy subgroup does believe in an undefined higher power.

So what does that have to do with the people here? You’re not that different from the population as a whole, and it means there are a lot of folks wandering around in a fog of unknowing who believe in God in some way but don’t know who God is or how to have a right relationship with God. Participating in the worship life of a congregation is where they will find answers to their questions, and I encourage them to take the risk to discover for themselves how much richer life can be. Moreover, as a Christian pastor I boldly proclaim that it will lead to a fuller, more abundant life not for now only, but for all eternity. Is church really necessary for that? Can’t you do it on your own? God says you can’t. God calls us into community that is the worship life of a congregation. But which one is the right one?

Denominations differ in how they understand and express faith in God, whom we Christians believe is most fully revealed in Christ Jesus. It can get confusing if we think there can be only one right way. Let’s face it, not one size fits all, but in our differences there is a size for every person. Episcopalians proclaim God’s love that heals, restores, nourishes and strengthens. We dedicate a large portion of our services to hearing the bible read and offering prayers. Sermons are biblically focussed and short. We believe Jesus is truly present for us in the bread and wine of Holy Communion that we celebrate each Sunday. All who would meet and be received by Jesus are invited to participate with us in it. We work hard at helping each other understand God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) more thoroughly, more deeply, and more personally, but we don’t demand that everyone believe in exactly the same way. Because we’re a liturgical church with priests and bishops, people often ask whether we’re Protestant or Catholic. We’re a bit of each.

Other denominations have other ways of understanding and expressing faith in God. They’re not wrong, only different. The idea that there has to be one, and only one right way to be Christian seems odd to me. We don’t insist on that with anything else. Is a Ford the only right truck to drive? Is a Nike the only right sneaker to wear? We are a nation that treasures differences and the freedom to discover for one’s self what is right and good. But in all that is right and good, there is one that is highest and best. It comes to us from God because it is God. We Christians are certain the highest right and good is revealed in Jesus Christ, and can be fully experienced only through participation in a worshiping community.

Take a risk. Find a church that fits you.

(Data from April 2018 Pew report)

Using Conservative Vocabulary to Express Progressive Policies that Fix Potholes

2019-09-25T16:54:00.001-07:00

(Note: I was asked to speak to a Democratic group in Washington’s 5th District. This article is a revision of that talk, and repeats themes from previous Country Parson columns.)

For Democrats to win in the fabled heartland, including our own Fifth District, we need to learn how to speak with voters suspicious of anything they think might be from the left. I don’t mean hard right wingers, tea partiers, and others whose beliefs cannot be challenged. I mean voters who think of themselves as conservative because they’ve always been conservative, Republican because they’ve always been Republican, and have bought into the small government - low taxes theme without giving it much thought. I mean non-voters who would turn out if there was a good reason. I mean Trump voters who are sick of Trumpism, but wary of crossing the border for someone who might be worse, perhaps even a dreaded socialist.

The people with whom we need to speak believe in Truth, Justice, and the American Way, and they want to hear from candidates who speak their language of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. We need to talk with them about progressive ideas in the conservative vocabulary of earthy concerns about everyday life. It’s a vocabulary surprisingly progressive on social matters, unsurprisingly conservative on fiscal matters, and always colored by the experiences, prejudices and limitations that formed their world view. I call it pothole language.

Show me you know how to fix the potholes in the street that is my life, and the life of my community, and I’ll listen to you. The problem with too many Democrats is they don’t know how to speak in pothole language. The more rabidly liberal they are, the less able they are to express progressive ideas in the vocabulary of potholes.

We need to translate lofty policy proposals, using conservative vocabulary, into pothole language.

Millions, who were once dependable Democratic voters, turned away in part because lofty proposals, not expressed in pothole language, were enormous disincentives. For the most part, they are ordinary people who feel forgotten. Quick to take umbrage when they feel put down, they enthusiastically engage in reverse snobbery to protect themselves from even snobbier liberal elites, real or imagined.

Trump, who cares not one whit for the average Jane and Joe, understood the importance of using the right vocabulary as he flimflammed them with his second rate steaks, fake university, and tawdry casinos. He may have failed at each, but they taught him how to woo disaffected voters by picking at their wounds while promising healing salve at no cost to them. That he had no salve, and no intention of getting any, was irrelevant. What he learned from steaks, fake schools and casinos was how to talk about their hopes and dreams in the language of fixing everyday problems, the potholes in their lives.

He learned how to talk convincingly about big national problems as if they were neighborhood potholes that he alone could fix. Of course he was manipulating the system the whole time to make money for himself. It’s what he does. If a pothole or two got fixed along the way, so much the better.

I was reflecting on this phenomena while on hold calling a local business. Their hold music was Sammy Johns’ 1981 song “Common Man.” It goes like this:

I’m just a common man, drive a common van

My dog ain’t got a pedigree

If I have my say, it gonna stay that way

‘Cause high-browed people lose their sanity

And a common man is what I’ll be

It’s a thirty-eight year old lyric written in the first year of Reagan’s presidency reflecting the theme Reagan ran on: Democrats were out of touch with the common man, and common man Western Cowboy Reagan would be their own true voice in Washington.

As it turned out, Reagan and Reaganomics set in motion structural changes that began the erosion of the American Dream, the downward slope of middle class income, and the climb toward greater extremes of wealth inequality. But Reagan was sold as one with the common man, and they loved him for it, they still do. And I think he believed it too.

It didn’t flip a switch. Reliable Democratic voters didn’t flip over night. It was a slow process that gained acceleration with the election of an intellectually articulate, professorial black president whose presence on the national stage triggered long suppressed racial prejudices. And Trump knew how to make the most of it.

Mr. Johns’ song remains popular today for a reason. It’s an anthem of reverse snobbery declaring that high-browed elites (intellectual, liberal, sophisticated, well read, articulate) not only look down with contempt on common people, they’re shallow and corrupt to boot. Strip away their veneer, and there’s nothing there. It’s emotional and political self defense for (mostly white) self identifying common men and women. They clutch it close to the breast.

Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson, and even Bill Clinton, understood the dynamic well. They knew how to present the most important issues facing the nation in pothole language, and it wasn’t flimflam. They intended to do real work for real people to make their lives better. Not all their ideas were good, not all worked, but there was genuine intention to do well for ordinary people. To be sure, the legacy of systemic racism corrupted good intentions, but that’s a subject for another time.

Today’s subject is the need for today’s Democratic party to use the conservative vocabulary of pothole language to talk with, not at, ordinary people about the major issues facing the nation, and our plans for dealing with them. It has to be authentic because the trumpian GOP has done a superb job of painting Democrats as coastal elites who care nothing for common people. Even worse, they’re liberal big government socialists who will take away rights and guns.

My own take is that Bernie’s ranting and raving may raise cheers in some quarters, but he never explains how he’ll fix the potholes. Warren’s academic erudition nails the issues to perfection, but she never explains how the potholes will get fixed. Beto dances on table tops, which is entertaining but avoids potholes (Note: his recent forceful stance on border and gun issues marks a change, but probably too late). Harris is still in prosecutor mode, responding to questions as if cross examining hostile witnesses. The one who comes closest to getting it right is the young mayor of South Bend with the funny last name. Mayor Pete takes on national and international issues, speaks about them as if they were South Bend potholes, and makes it clear that he knows how to fix them – and not all by himself. He speaks respectfully but knowledgeably, without condescension, to the concerns of ordinary people. It seem unlikely he’ll be the nominee, but he knows how to present progressive ideas with the conservative vocabulary of pot holes.

It’s Truth, Justice, and the American Way as ordinary people want to hear it.

Stacey Abrams can do the same. Combine a Georgia legislative leader with a romance novelist, and you’ve got someone who knows how to connect with the common person’s deepest desires. She’s not running, so learn from her.

So, what exactly is the vocabulary of pot holes?

Pay attention people. If a dishonest grifter like Trump can fool enough people, and he knows how to do it, he can win again. Honest opposition can do better by authentically, honestly speaking with quiet confidence in pothole language. And remember, all modern soap boxes have very good audio systems. No need to screech and yell.

If we want to reach across the divide between progressives and the dominant conservative ethos of this region, it will pay to have fluency in the their language. Liberals, including me, have exhausted themselves with fact checking and rebuttal arguments to no avail, and must change their tactics. They need to adapt mainline conservative vocabulary to illustrate how progressive agendas will preserve and enhance cherished American values.

The most important vocabulary words honor American individualism, personal freedoms, and economic security. Democrats don’t believe government is the enemy, but a valued agent helping make good things happen - not perfect. We can can present progressive policies as enhancing freedom, making life more secure, and opening ways toward a more rewarding life. To do that, progressive agendas need to be expressed by answering three questions: why do we need it; how will it work; how will we pay for it?

Focus on national pride. Celebrate patriotism that believes in the fundamental value of American democratic ideals. Boldly celebrate how progressive programs will enhance all that has made America a great nation. Americans who twice voted for Obama, then switched to Trump, want their sense of patriotism to be honored.

Emphasize a tough stance on international trade. Proclaim intention to reenter multilateral agreements with higher standards for worker rights, environmental protection, intellectual property, and commercial code transparency.

Celebrate the economy. It’s progressive policies that have enabled our decade long period of economic growth. Claim it. But claim it with recognition that Trump has run it out onto thin ice through ill advised tax cuts, surging deficits, and failed tariff wars.

Admit we have an immigration problem, and poor control of our borders. Voters want simple solutions, so keep it simple. Streamline asylum and refugee admissions that keep families intact. Help Central Americans understand that the U.S. may not offer the land of hope they’ve been led to believe it will. Create a form of immigration admissions similar to the Ellis Island system.

Conservatives favor a strong military well poised to fight the previous big war. Progressives can use the vocabulary of national defense to promote preparation for emerging threats, while illuminating the systematic erosion of current readiness through fund transfers to Trump’s latest whims.

Promote revitalized public education for all. Make rural areas and inner cities the priority. Emphasize state-federal partnerships.

Commit to infrastructure with a real plan that begins with bridges, highways, water & sewer, and other utilities. They are the things of every day use. Then go on to broadband, air traffic, mass transit, etc. Never promise shovel ready projects. There aren’t any.

Affordable housing is an issue in every city and town. Talk about practical ways to make progress that a person making less than $100k can easily understand will benefit her or him.

Face the obvious. The federal bureaucracy gets a bad rap because they’re lousy at customer service. There is a huge difference between enforcing regulations and customer service that facilitates user adaptation to them.

Health care. Don’t over promise. Keep it simple. Nothing is free. How will it be paid for?

It’s a simple vocabulary of ordinary life that expresses the value of freedom, economic opportunity, pride in nation, and governmental restraint.

Not the End

Travel as Pilgrimage Unintended

2019-09-18T16:44:00.001-07:00

I haven’t been writing as Country Parson for a while. We were able to spend some time in Europe, with writing time devoted to keeping a daily journal of our adventures. We’re back home, a day earlier than we had planned. For reasons known only to our subconscious, my wife and I were convinced we had another day in Amsterdam, but Delta sternly informed us that we didn’t. We made the plane. But I digress.

What struck me on this trip was the reality of travel as pilgrimage. Pilgrimage is usually thought of as a trek to a holy site, a spiritual quest for a holy grail of one kind or another. The historic Camino de Santiago de Compostela (a system of trails leading to the shrine of St. James) may be the most well known pilgrimage these days. Many of us remember reading at least a portion of Canterbury Tales, the 14th century story of pilgrims on their way to Britain’s Canterbury Cathedral. Our own century is rife with church sponsored pilgrimages to the holy sites in Israel that have attracted pilgrims for millennia.

They all have a religious or spiritual purpose, but the kind of pilgrimage I have in mind is different. Travel can sometime be a form of pilgrimage without the expectation of a spiritual experience, without the goal of reaching a holy site. God’s spiritual presence comes unbidden. A sense that one has stumbled on holy ground where it was not expected to be.

I experienced some of that in our visits to the museums of Paris, a river cruise down the Seine to the Normandy beaches, and time in the museums of Amsterdam. Not unexpectedly, the great cathedrals visited along the way were breathtaking, but not spiritually uplifting. On the other hand, visits to smaller, uncrowded churches, where a worshiping community was still present, provided opportunity for quite time in prayer where God’s presence was unexpectedly and deeply felt.

Churches, as holy places consecrated by centuries of prayer, are one thing, but being overwhelmed by God’s presence in more secular settings is where pilgrimage comes in surprising ways.

It was The Good War, perhaps the only good war, but evil saturated it. The D Day beaches and American cemetery were emotionally overwhelming for nearly everyone with us. Unexpectedly, God’s Holy Spirit came as a gale of outrage over the slaughter of her children brought on by the immoral hubris of evil, and all those who served it willingly. The thousands buried here, the thousand buried elsewhere, the thousands whose bodies were never found, they were teenagers and young adults. Some who opposed them were unwilling conscripts taken from among prisoners of war captured on the Eastern Front. The villages around, destroyed, their people dead or wounded. Milton and Dante could not describe hell more vividly. There are other memorials to other battles against other evils, but this is where we were. In its aftermath the dead were cared for, the land liberated, villages rebuilt, farms again fruitful. Forces of darkness could not overcome the light. It was a sign of hope as the world teeters once more on the brink of conflict brought on by human avarice, hubris and ignorance.

For all our human weaknesses, there is a indomitable spirit in human kind, perhaps a remnant of being created in the image of God. In the extravagant glory of Chartres’ cathedral, there are faint outlines of finger labyrinths traced in the wall where the blind had found a way to experience their own version of a prayerful path to experience the light of Christ. In the village churchyard at Giverny there is a grave for seven British airmen who were shot down not far away. The villagers, bombed, hungry, scared, respectfully cared for their remains in spite of danger from all sides, and care for them still. Love, as deeds done in God’s name for strangers who come uninvited, is stronger and more enduring than evil.

In the Musee d’Orsay is an exhibit of the art of Berthe Morisot, a woman of the last half of the 19th century who was among those ushering in the age of impressionism. Her art, and recognition a century late in coming, are memorials to the courage and perseverance of talented women who were rejected, ignored and ridiculed. It’s one thing to canonize women long dead whose deeds have drifted into legend. It’s another to witness the living work of those who were present at the dawn of our own age. Coleridge said the image of God in us is most evident in our power to create something new out of our imagination, manifesting it through art. Prophecy is not limited to Hebrew scriptures and crusading preachers.

And so to the Rijksmuseum and Rembrandt. What made him the greatest of all Dutch Masters was his grasp of light, light that darkness cannot overcome. Sometimes it illuminates blessings, sometimes our brokenness. In Rembrandt, the human condition is never hidden, our attention is always drawn to questions left for us to ponder. The canon of what is holy scripture remains open –– it may contain more than printed words.

What is a pilgrimage may be more than intentional treks filled with spiritual anticipation. It may come unbidden in bits and pieces, in odd places and at odd times. Travel can get us out of our places of too much comfort, opening the door for pilgrimage to enter.

Observations on Trump’s Negotiating Style

2019-09-04T23:46:00.001-07:00

Political news is breaking so quickly it’s hard to know how to think about what’s happening, much less make sense of it. What made some sense yesterday is highly questionable today. I wanted to reflect on Trump’s style of negotiation, only to be interrupted by Iran’s arrival in Paris for important talks that bypass Washington, German elections keeping Merkel off balance, and Johnson’s loss of a parliamentary majority further undermining his already flimsy claim to national leadership. What’s next is anyone’s guess. Oh yeah, for America there remains a truly dangerous hurricane, the Amazon is still on fire, and there’s rioting in Hong Kong. Among it all, my gun toting friends are slowly waking up to the fact that most of us are sick of their NRA talking points.

So, what the heck, back to Trump’s negotiating style. He has one, and it’s very predictable. It’s manifested in two parts. Part one is relatively simple: after a little Trumpish glad-handing, he makes an offer. When the other party counters, he amplifies his original offer with intimidating threats, making it clear the only acceptable agreement is the one he’s proposed. Sometimes he wins, but in the presence of those who can’t be intimidated, he folds.

Part two is more complex. He can’t abide the success of others, especially predecessors, and revels in portraying himself as the only person who can solve difficult problems. When he enters an arena of negotiation where another has prepared the ground for progress, he is compelled to demolish it as incompetently done so he can promote himself as the only reliable source of a way forward. We’ve seen it reported in the media as his penchant to create controversy where there was none so he can be seen as the one who resolves it. Having thus created a state of negotiating chaos, he unpacks the few tools he’s accustomed to using, which is to demand agreement with him or face retaliation. As a private citizen he was not taken seriously by most people of power and means who felt free to ignore his bloviating. Lesser folk sometimes endured his wrath. As some have noted, his is the track record of a bully who always punches down, but turns coward in the face of real power and money. Unfortunately, as president he has substantial means of retaliation to employ, and many perceived challenges to his competency to avenge. Instead of representing the interests and dignity of the nation, he uses the power of the presidency to indulge his ego and satisfy personal whims.

It’s made worse by the ease with which sycophants and political axe wielders have been able to infiltrate the White House, each gaining momentary influence that whipsaws chaotic presidential decisions. They always settle down to those satisfying his narcissistic needs of the moment. It means no one can last long. It creates an environment of predictable instability in national and international affairs, with other world leaders biding their time hoping to ride out the last two years of his term.

How the nation will recover remains to be seen.

Labor Day Thoughts 2019

2019-08-30T14:24:00.002-07:00

Labor Day was once a day for union members to celebrate with pride the value of blue collar workers as the backbone of America’s economy, and worthy of their pay. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they did it with parades and sponsored picnics at a time when unionized labor was just gaining traction. I don’t know when the first Monday in September became the unofficial last day of summer dedicated to backyard BBQs or one last long weekend in the RV, but that’s what it now is. Labor Day in recognition of the labor movement has been replaced by brats and beers.

If nothing else, the 2016 election raised the problems and importance of the working class to renewed visibility. It may have even opened the door to renewed appreciation for the role of unions in a democratic republic like ours. At their peak in 1954, labor unions accounted for about 35% of the labor market. It’s been a down hill slide from then to today when about 11% of the work force is unionized. The power of old time industrial unions is all but gone, and newer unions in service industries struggle to gain footholds.

I never much cared for labor unions, although I once belonged to an association that acted much like one. I figured I could make my way in the world on my own better than being shackled by union work rules and their antipathy toward management. I had watched union greed strike for wages, benefits, and work rules that would help break companies, and eventually help break the unions themselves. I saw the open hostility between labor and management that led to intransigence on both sides, and the bullheadedness of each to resist change that would improve the economic well being of both. I even aided clients who wanted right to work laws in their states. No union fan I.

But I did wonder. Earlier in my career there was a big push to stop an increase in the federal minimum wage. White papers were sent out claiming it would eliminate jobs, and cause a recession. Neither data nor experience supported their claims. It was really about holding union wages in check. At the time, some union contracts had automatic wage increases tied to minimum wage increases, and management didn’t want that to happen. To combat union power, Right to Work laws were sold as union neutral, but they never were. They all but guaranteed a union free environment in right to work states. I blamed big unions for blowing it with their bellicosity, but it was also clear that without union representation, management would take every opportunity to hold wage labor costs down with little regard for the effects it would have on the fabric of society.

About the same time, many of us were selling and teaching what some called the Japanese way of management. It was really the product of W. Edwards Deming, and others, who brought the best in American practices to help rebuild the Japanese economy after the war. It was based on team work, empowerment at the lowest levels of labor, and simple tools of statistical feedback every worker could learn to use. Many CEOs bought into it. Few practiced it. It just became another flavor of the month among management fads, in spite of its proven track record. But it was a handy tool to sell the idea that unions were outdated and unnecessary.

And here you have it; my version of bellicose big unions and 19th century management mindsets blundering with fisticuffs into the latter half of the 20th century. What kept it from being a true disaster was the size of the American economy, and it’s unquestioned place as the super power of all super powers.

The elections of 2010, 2012 and 2016 may have been what was needed to begin the restoration of labor union strength. We shall see. Right wing libertarians made enormous congressional gains in 2010-12 by running as the voice of the common ‘man’ who had enough of big government, taxes and regulations. For them, the idea of good faith negotiation was anathema. The could not be budged. They were egged on by authoritarian minded corporate interests, exemplified by the Kochs, for whom a society as close as they could get it to genuine laissez faire would be ideal. Then along came humbug Trump, who was talented at pretending to be a common ‘man’ loving libertarian, and gifted at preying on the economic and social fears of vulnerable whites, especially the so called working class. He promised the moon and stars if they voted for him, and they believed it.

I think for all those common ‘men’ it’s beginning to sink in that rank and file workers need unions to represent their collective interests in a private enterprise based economy where, given the chance, owners and managers will treat them as expendable commodities. If a renewed union movement can refrain from pugilistic antagonism, they may find management more amenable than they thought. They’re still up against virulent anti-union Koch type interests who will fight tooth and nail to keep unions out. They’re still up against long established conservative bias against unions as usurpers of management rights, and closet socialists to boot. But there is also a deep conviction among Americans of every class in the value of fairness and equity. A stronger labor union movement would undoubtedly help create a stronger, more equitable economic society for all.

God & the Game of If-Then

2019-08-21T18:08:00.001-07:00

If-then is a favorite game. It begins with childhood bribery: if you clean your plate, you can have dessert; If you mow the yard you can borrow the car. It’s in childhood that we learn the rules of transaction in which if and then become implied obligations rooted deep in social norms that influence behavior in subliminal ways. Years ago Robert Cialdini wrote a popular book (Influence, 1984) in which he described the excess to which if-then transactions can go when a “gift” of small value can subtly impose a social obligation to return the favor with something of much greater value. He called it the principle of reciprocity. Fund raisers play on it when they send out dimes and quarters attached to fundraising letters, knowing it will significantly increase the likelihood of a contribution. One of the most popular and sleaziest forms is the oft repeated scheme: If I buy dinner and a movie, you owe me sex.

Prayer is another popular setting for if-then transactions in which we try to employ the principle of reciprocity, but to make it seem less manipulative, we reverse the terms and hope God won’t notice. Instead of offering a small gift to obligate God to respond with something big, we ask for the big thing, and offer something small in return. It comes out like this: If God will grant my petition, I will do something for God, like go to church more often, be nicer to someone, work harder, or stop doing the thing I should never have done in the first place. It’s not new. It’s almost the entire theme of the book of Judges, and the Psalms are filled with if-then bargaining with God: “Save us from the Assyrians and we will quit worshiping idols,” that sort of thing.

God is not fooled and can play the if-then game as well as anybody. I was reminded of it by the lectionary’s offering of a portion of chapter 58 in Isaiah: “If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday. The Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places, and make your bones strong, and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water whose waters never fail.”

It’s pretty straight forward. If you, as one of God’s people, do what you can to create conditions in which the least among you have what they need for life and opportunity, God will lead you on the path to an abundant life.

It raises several problematic questions. For one, it turns out that an abundant life is not necessarily a life of wealth, nor is it free from the usual troubles affecting us all. Yet, it will be a life of great abundance. Most of us would prefer a more definitive offer, and have difficulty accepting it on faith alone. But that’s the offer, and those who have accepted it have known the true meaning of abundance.

It also makes some of the politically conservative among the faithful nervous that God leans too far to the left for them. As morally good as personal charity is, it cannot atone for a society that won’t address systemic inequities. God, it seems, expects both generous personal charity and social righteousness in communities from towns to empires.

Then there’s the question about non-believers who dedicate their lives to feeding the hungry and satisfying the needs of the afflicted. Are they to be among those blessed with abundant life too? Jesus said he came to redeem the world, and we who claim to follow Jesus are expected to be agents of reconciliation in the world. At the same time, whether righteous unbelievers might also receive God’s blessings is none of our business, not our place to judge. That doesn’t stop us from making it our business and declaring our judgments.

Questions such as these set the negotiating agenda we present to God, and brandish as defensive shields in conversations with others. God, it appears, is not open to negotiation, at least not on matters such as these. There are times, however, that make us wonder. Consider Abraham’s bartering with God over how many righteous people in Sodom would be needed to prevent its destruction. God respected the deal making because it was about the possibility of saving the afflicted. Or consider the man who negotiated with Jesus for the healing of his son: “I believe, help my unbelief.” It was about the possibility of healing, not of the son but of the father. When God appears open to deal making, it always goes in the direction of making us more aware of how important it is to feed the hungry and meet the needs of the afflicted.

In other words, don’t get the idea that there’s a more foolproof strategy for negotiating with God to get one’s way at little cost.

Chance, Coincidence & God’s Plan

2019-08-18T14:39:00.003-07:00

Theologians have scoured three questions so thoroughly that it’s hard to imagine there’s anything left to say, yet they come up frequently in conversation because each person experiences them anew, and few church going Christians read much theology.

What does it mean to say we are a fallen people? What do chance and coincidence have to do with the plan everyone says God has for our lives? How are we called to follow Jesus? So, I’m taking a shot at this, not for theologians, but for ordinary Christians who wonder.

Let’s start with The Fall. Augustine got us hung up on Adam and Eve way back in the fifth century, and shame on him. It led to centuries of Christians blaming the pair for humanity being kicked out of paradise, and having to endure the hardships of life as we know it. ‘We’re victims of their sin. It’s not our fault, it’s theirs.’ At least that’s how some have understood it. Are we all among the fallen because of them? Maybe not.

It should not come as a surprise that the story of Adam and Eve is not an historical event. It’s a metaphorical explanation of human nature in which each of us aspires to be our own god. Individually and collectively we create a variety of other gods we endow with human strengths and weaknesses, and create religious rituals to manipulate them. The ancient Greek poets recognized that gods, made in our image, have selfish egos, don’t play fair, and are not easily manipulated. We keep doing it anyway.

It isn’t that we would all be innocent but for Adam and Eve. It’s that we each, as if for the first time, repeat their story in our own lives. In that sense, the evidence of our fallen condition is in our history of wars, cruelty, injustice, and feeble attempts at being good people living good lives. A sociologist recently interviewed on NPR observed that people in relatively small circles of friends and neighbors can be extraordinarily generous and kind to one another. But in the larger context of region or nation, prejudices erase most of their good will toward others who are not our people. It’s a pattern indicative of our fallen nature.

The point is, yes, The Fall is real. We are a fallen people, and we can’t blame anyone but ourselves. Leave poor Adam and Eve out of it. Failing to recognize that prevents us from being honest about the reality of our situation. Calvin was at least partly right; we are a depraved lot, and there is no part of us that isn’t corrupt in some measure.

Holy scripture tells the story of our fallen condition in brutal honesty, but it also lays out the way God has established for us to move away from it. We are not condemned, but given holy guidance. It’s available to all. No one is excluded, and none is predestined to condemnation. To the contrary, the abundance of God’s grace for humanity, and presence with humanity, is the whole point of scripture’s unfolding that reaches its fulfillment in Jesus. If it appears we’ve failed to make much progress in the last two thousand years, it’s because we commit the original sin over and over again. It also means we can’t blame the devil for all the evil in the world. It’s of our own creation. If we can create a spirit of good will and good times, we can create a spirit of bad will and evil times, and we have. Each act of violence and betrayal, from the most trivial to the most unthinkable, adds to the inventory of evil that reverberates across the centuries and into our daily lives. It permeates every thing and every age, and it comes at us in unpredicted ways from unexpected directions.

If there is the dark of evil, there is also the light of good. It would be going too far to equate it with the yin and yang of Eastern philosophy, but the basic idea is similar. If we have created evil that echoes across the centuries, we have also created good that echoes across the centuries, and it too comes at us in unpredicted ways from unexpected directions. The popular memes about random acts of kindness are an example. But there’s more. Scripture testifies that God, who created light and said that it was good, and who, in Jesus, is the light that darkness cannot overcome, engages with the world we live in to bring good to us in unpredicted ways from unexpected directions. For lack of a better word, we call them miracles, but it’s misleading. We’ve come to think of miracles as rare events of awesome mystery overcoming natural law and impossible odds. Sometimes they are, but on the whole, they’re frequent, many, and often go unrecognized because they come to us through the agency of other human beings.

Which brings us to chance and coincidence. The universe is filled with randomness, events that happen by chance, which, if they are beneficial to us, are called coincidences. There is no plan behind them, nothing intentional about them. The virus that gave me a cold didn’t pick me out from among all others, and I certainly had no intention of getting in its way. That’s the way it is for many of the so called bad things that happen to us, and it conflicts with the oft repeated claim that everything happens for a reason. I think for most people it means someone somewhere has made a decision that causes an event to happen. It’s partly true. Although many things happen for no reason, that is, no one acted with intention to do something, it’s also true that most events in our daily lives have some degree of intentionality behind them. For example, we spend time at the ocean shore, and I was thinking about things happening for a reason as I watched some tourists get knocked down by the shore break. The waves roll in and break on the shore, as they always do, without intention. It’s just what waves do. Tourists, on the other hand, come with intention to enjoy the shore. With a degree of poorly thought out intention, they get in the way of the shore break, and find themselves facedown in the wet sand. No one intended it to happen, but it wasn’t a matter of pure chance either. It’s a mildly comical example that avoids the many others with more tragic consequences you may have already thought of. The point is that chance, coincidence and intention are all mixed up in events that come at us in unexpected ways from unexpected directions.

Where does God and his plan come in? If we have the freedom to engage the world about us for good and ill in ways that intersect with random chance, how much more freedom does God have to do the same? I cringe every time I hear someone say that God has a plan for you, or that nothing happens without God ordaining it. The testimony of scripture is about our freedom to act on our own volition without God’s interference. But it also testifies to God’s freedom to engage with us as guide and guardian to the extent we are willing to allow it. Finally, it testifies that our fallen condition is not fatal. God does have a plan, and has executed it in Christ Jesus. We are rescued from our fallen condition on the other side of death. In the meantime, as followers of Jesus, we can begin walking into our eternal life now, if we pay attention to what God has told us in plain everyday language about living with intentionality to love God with all our everything, love our neighbors, and love each other as Jesus has loved us. If there’s any question about how to do that, Jesus has given specific directions nicely summarized in Matthew 5-7.

Following in the way of Jesus doesn’t make us perfect, won’t prevent events of chance from happening, and can’t stop us from being or causing hurt, but it is the way for us to be agents of good in the world, agents through whom miracles happen, and it is on the sure and certain way to abundant life.

Parisian Anxieties

2019-08-09T15:16:00.003-07:00

It’s time for a little nonsense. A moment of pure irrelevancy and no redeeming social value.

We’re off to Paris in a few weeks, and as much as I’m looking forward to it, there’s a smidgeon of apprehension. It has to do with language, and the Parisian reputation for snobbish sophistication. I could get along in German OK. We’ve been to Italy several times. Italian place names and directions are clear enough, and Italian hospitality can’t be beat. I’ve had waiters patiently help me order in Italian, and have a good time doing it. Nobody expected me to know Turkish or Greek. Can’t understand a word the Brits say, but reading’s not a problem. We drove a Jeep around Costa Rica for a couple of weeks, feeling very much at ease. Most Asian countries post English subtitles under important signs, and every kid wants a chance to practice their English. But Paris?

I’m lost. Have no idea how to pronounce even simple words. Basic phrases elude me. Signage is a total mystery. There’s a certain fear of being seen as another barbarian American not worth the time of day. We once drove from Barcelona to Paris, and had a wonderful time in the countryside where we experienced outstanding hospitality, but Paris was another matter. No one was rude, but, not unlike New York City, there was a sense that it was OK if you wanted to be there as a gape mouthed tourist, but don’t get in the way of locals doing things the Parisian way.

The guide books tell you to try to not look like a tourist, which is ridiculous. Of course you look like a tourist. You are a tourist. However sophisticated your reputation back home, it evaporates the moment you get on the hop-on-hop-off double decker bus. To date I’ve spent time in twenty-five countries, lived in a few big cities, and worked in others, so why this minor anxiety about Paris? It’s all about language, and the anticipation of being illiterate in The Language from which we get the term Lingua Franca, the language every decently educated person is expected to know if they are not to be dismissed as bourgeois trash.

So here I am, working my way through Fodors, grateful that my wife is planning our day trips, and practicing my sophisticated posture.

Games, Movies, Guns, Calvin, Hobbes, Confucius & Buddha

2019-08-07T16:08:00.002-07:00

Violent video games may not have links to mass shootings, but they’ve helped distort our understanding of justice. Not long ago I wrote about violent video games, and action/super hero movies, observing that in each justice is defined as wreaking vengeance. They advertise that peace and security cannot be restored to the community until the bad guys are destroyed in the most gruesome way possible, and that players and viewers should be entertained by it. Their brand of justice is sold as just retribution for the evil perpetrated on society. They teach the worst kind of retributive justice, the kind associated with vigilantes, lynch mobs, white nationalists, nazis and antifas. They’re close cousins of tortured death in Rome’s coliseum, burning at the stake in medieval town squares, and public hangings on our own courthouse lawns. They glorify revenge and violent death. They demean the rule of law. For Christians, they violate everything Jesus taught. Who knows how many buttons they can push.

Fed a daily diet of them might bring some well armed person to look for bad guys in the guise of convenient scapegoats, who are always people not like their people. Games and movies didn’t create today’s gun culture, but they’ve offered justification for it. They can make being well armed for imaginary self defense look heroic. They can encourage the illusion of being the good guy with a gun ready to take out the bad guy with a gun. They can make lethal “stand your ground” reaction to otherwise non lethal confrontations appear justified. They can foster the delusion that killing others, many others, is nothing more than the elimination of dehumanized characters. They portray a monstrous mutation of morality and the ideals of justice held dear by leaders secular and religious.

So yeah, I don’t care for violent video games, most action movies, and even a few of our beloved super heroes, at least in their current manifestations. They wouldn’t be so popular if there wasn’t a market for them, and that says a lot about our collective moral character, but that can’t be. We’re Americans. We live in the land of the brave and free. Our ideals are founded on equality, the right to pursue life, liberty and happiness. It can’t be a problem with our moral character. It must be a problem with somebody else’s moral character. We need to put them in their places, then everything will be OK again. In the meantime, best to stay alert with guns loaded and ready. That’s the way it looks to me, and we’re not unique. It’s pattern as old as human history.

Denying the fallen nature of our collective moral character isn’t a popular subject these days. Fundamentalists blame it on Adam and Eve, and the rest of us ridicule them for such a silly idea. Evangelicals are sure it’s mostly about sex. Rome pins it on Protestants, who return the favor in kind. Conservatives blame it on liberals, the elderly on millennials, nationalists on immigrants, and so on. The point is, everyone recognizes something is wrong, and no one wants to include themselves among the guilty. Maybe it’s time to admit Calvin had a point; we all, individually and collectively, are among the fallen because our selfish self righteousness corrupts the fullness of life, the path to which God has clearly set before us. For the secularists among us, Hobbes was right; we would quickly descend into the depths of mutually destructive savagery without the constraints of government. For others, that puts Confucius on Hobbes’ side, and the Buddha on Calvin’s side.

What are we to do? As citizens, we’re not going to do away with violent video games and action movies, and even if we did they would quickly be replaced by something else. But we can regulate guns. We can license guns and gun owners as we license cars and drivers. As Christians, we can educate our young and each other about the meaning of godly justice, and we can, as we are able, do our best to influence public policy in that direction. That we can do.

Changing Minds

2019-08-03T19:29:00.003-07:00

From time to time The Christian Century publishes a feature called How My Mind Has Changed. In it, well known theologians offer essays about how their minds have changed regarding important issues as they’ve added years of study and reflection to their life experiences. Reading any of them reminds me of how my own mind has changed on many things.

I can’t remember all of them, but they certainly include civil rights, gay rights, American Indian history, supply side economics, the threat of socialism, international trade, Institutional morality, the death penalty, and much more. For example, someone with nothing better to do could dig up a newspaper column I wrote over thirty years ago arguing there was no place in the church for same sex weddings. A more thorough reading of scripture, a study of the history of marriage in Judaism and Christianity, and sustained engagement with gay friends in the gay community, guided me toward a dramatic change of mind. I would hate for anyone to wave that old column around today crowing, “Ha, this is what you really think.”

The point is that well known scholars, and ordinary folks like you and me, change their minds as they grow, learn, experience and reflect. It’s not a matter of being wrong before, but now right. It’s a matter of recognizing that, given what I was able to know and understand then, I believed a position to be the best one I could hold. New information and more experience have led me to a different understanding, which is the best I can do with what I have available to me now.

It infuriates those who demand certainty, and absolute confidence in what is true. Holding positions as provisional truths drives them up the wall. To them it’s wishy-washy, anything goes, out of control relativism. Peter Gomes, in his book The Good Book, says something like, the Word of God remains the same, but our ability to understand it is always changing (I can’t lay my hands on the book, so this is a rough approximation). For many people, that just can’t be so. Truth is truth. A few have demanded to know if there is anything I hold to be absolutely true. Yes there is. Jesus is the Word of God made flesh. Two plus two equals four is a strong possibility. Everything else is provisional.

Which brings me to the current political debate in which candidates are being held accountable for things they said, wrote or did many years ago, as if nothing has changed. Put on the defensive, they’re tempted to deny they ever did what the record said they did, or interpret it in a way to now mean something other than what it clearly meant back then. If they admit they once held that position, but now don’t, they’re accused of flip-flopping hypocrisy. They would be better off saying in plain English that, given the circumstances and information they had back then, their position seemed at the time like the best choice. Times have changed, their experiences have changed, what they’ve learned has changed, and their minds have also changed. Moreover, they will continue to listen and learn from those who are committed to a more just and equitable society, and as new information become available. That’s what would serve them well in a tough campaign season. Whether they will is another question.

When do past deeds, positions and words count as liabilities? When they are shown to have been predictive of current poor judgment and inappropriate behavior. Then they become acts of willful unrepentance establishing patterns of behavior over long periods, now current, and likely to continue in the future.

Paul, Colossians & Politics

2019-07-29T20:06:00.003-07:00

Like many, I have love-hate relationship with St. Paul, the apostle, not the city. On the one hand, I have no doubt his letters included in the canon of the New Testament reveal God’s word and truth. On the other hand, they also reveal a man struggling to deepen understanding of his new found faith, and struggling even harder to guide Christians newer than he. It means I’m in constant conversation with Paul, sometimes agreeing, sometimes arguing, and occasionally proclaiming he’s just plain wrong. It doesn’t commend me to conservative evangelicals for whom what’s in the canon is God’s truth, period.

Right now, as I work on a sermon, I’m in his letter to the Colossians. It’s engaging me in conversation with Paul, with memories of questions raised in adult classes over the years, and with current social media comments.

Paul wants his new Christians to seek the things that are above, where Christ is,…not on things that are on earth… . For some, it’s an invitation to claim a Thomas Kinkade like vision of Christian faith that has no room in the picture for the realities of life. It’s all make nice, avoid conflict, and try not to talk about unpleasant things. To me, if I’m serious about seeking the things that are above, I have to look for them among Jesus’ earthly words and deeds. Isn’t that what his incarnation is about? The incarnate Christ may have ascended, but he left the rest of us to carry on with the daily work of earthly ministry that he demonstrated for us.

Paul also wants the Colossians to clean up their act by giving up fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, greed (idolatry), anger, wrath, malice, slander, abusive language, and lying. Conservative friends jump on anything related to sex, and tend to ignore the rest. By his own admission, Paul had no need or desire for sex, and so may not be the best source of advice about it, but he clearly sees that irresponsible sex is an unhealthy attack on the sacredness of the most intimate act people can have with one another. Given the sexualization of advertising and entertainment that saturates society, I can see how conversation can get hung up on it.

To move on, what about all these other things the Colossians needed to clean up? They hit deep into the ordinary ways of everyday life in our day, as in theirs. Some are good in decent measure. Passion is an asset in work, friendship, marriage, justice, and things like that. When passion becomes an obsession, and emotion turns its back on rationality, sanity turns to insanity.

Anger and wrath are the stuff of every action and super hero movie or t.v. show. Anger plus wrath equals vengeance, and we’ve normalized vengeance to define the popular version of justice. God’s justice goes in another direction. It’s restorative, not retributive. Leave vengeance to God, and don’t assume you know what that means.

We’ve unleashed anger and wrath as political tools to be wielded with abandon in tweets and talks. Bullies use anger to intimidate their way through life, cruelly dominating others. But there is true righteous indignation. Jesus was indignant about things that oppressed, excluded, dehumanized, and marginalized. Turning over tables and driving out crooks with a whip was not beyond him. We’re called to name evil and stand against it, but beware. There’s also a kind of self righteous indignation over things of which one does not approve, but are probably just fine with God.

Greed: that’s a tough one. Gordon Gekko (“Wall Street”) says greed is good. It’s what drives the stock market, monopolies, and gospel of prosperity preachers. Private enterprise and capitalism don’t depend on it, don’t even need it. It’s something like nitro fuel that gives ordinary cars an extra kick, but will kill the engine. It’s the wedge that allows some people to separate their Christian life from their business life. As idolatry, it replaces God altogether. With what? See the bigger barn parable in Luke’s gospel.

Malice, slander, abusive language and lying. They’ve been around a long time, distributed rather evenly over history and throughout the population. None of it is good. It’s all a choice, and anyone can choose not to engage in it. We seem to have made the wrong choice. Thanks to modern avenues of communication, they’ve become the standard for public discourse, led by the president of the United States.

I posted a link to a friend’s column on abusive language to Facebook, and got an instant response that it was a good article until it pointed fingers at the president. He should not be singled out, they said, it’s not fair to the dignity of the office, and besides, others are also guilty. I’m singling him out as a disgrace to the office. Yes, others are guilty of the same, but they’re not the president, they don’t command the bully pulpit from which he bullies others, inciting some to vile and violent action. It exemplifies what Paul urged the Colossians to turn from if they are to seek the things that are above.

Having said that, am I guilty of malice, slander and abusive language? Perhaps, but I think not. There is nothing slanderous, malicious or abusive about stating what is observably, verifiably true.

Can Socialism and Capitalism Coexist? Yes, they can and do.

2019-07-25T19:39:00.001-07:00

Socialism and capitalism: can they be mutually compatible, or are they like matter and antimatter, unable to coexist in the same place? In the heated climate of today’s political discourse, voices from the left condemn capitalism for all the ills of humankind. Voices from the right assert all things liberal are socialist, which is Cuban communism in disguise. For terms that generate such strong emotional reaction, one would expect them to be fairly well understood. But ask any acquaintance to define what they mean, then stand by for garbled non sequiturs and vague obfuscations. And why not? Both have multitudes of meanings covering a lot of territory. What interests me today is how people fill them with opprobrium to be lobbed into the public debate.

Vague, but strongly felt prejudices about capitalism and socialism come in part from popularization of ideas and phrases taken from works by people such as Weber and Schumpeter. Weber’s 1905 “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” was skimmed by political science and sociology majors for what was likely to be on the final. It contributed to the myth that Calvinism equated wealth accumulation with evidence of divine election thus driving the development of modern Western style capitalism. Schumpeter’s 1942 “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy” contributed to popular magazine articles and pamphlets warning about the Red Danger. Students didn’t actually read Schumpeter – they read about him. Echoes of each float around in the political ether infecting conversations of people who have no idea where they came from.

For the record: capitalism and democracy are not the same thing; socialism and communism are not the same thing; capitalism and socialism coexist, more or less harmoniously, in every Western democracy. Forms of capitalism profitably exist in nations claiming to be Marx loving communists. Saying that doesn’t seem to penetrate very far into the understanding of those who prefer to believe otherwise.

For some people, capitalism is demonic oppression of the people, and needs to go. But asked if it means they would do away with private property, private enterprise, mutual fund retirement accounts, and entrepreneurship, they’re aghast at the very idea of it. What seems to enrage them is the amoral monopolistic power of giant corporations able to invade and control every aspect of life. Add to it excessive inequality of income and wealth, and it’s not capitalism they dislike, it's the injustice of conditions present in our democratic society’s private enterprise economy. They want to change the conditions, not do away with private enterprise.

To other people, liberal ideology leads to socialism, which may not be communism but heads in that direction. It puts private enterprise in straitjackets of heavy handed regulation, and over taxation that strips owners and managers of the freedom to make decisions they think best for business. It subjects investors, savers, and entrepreneurs to the whims of greedy workers, government bureaucrats, and social do-gooders who have no skin in the game. It appropriates hard earned wealth to provide benefits for those unwilling to provide for themselves.

There is truth in both views, but only partial truth.

Italian social philosopher Giorgio Agamben notes that capitalism, per se, is amoral and has no purpose other than for private hands to manipulate the flow of money in pursuit of profit. Borrowing from Walter Benjamin, he calls it a religion without dogma. Business people, and businesses large and small, may be committed to socially worthwhile purposes, but capitalism, the ill defined skeleton within which they exist, is concerned only with maximizing return to invested parties. It has no moral interest in what a business is or how it’s run.

Things falling under the equally ill defined umbrella of socialism do have a moral purpose. Advocates believe they will make quality of life better, more just, and more economically rewarding for more people, especially those who are on the lower rungs of society. They intend to open doors to self sufficiency that have been closed to many. Within the context of American progressivism, the fundamental rights of private property and private enterprise are never in doubt, but the amorality of capitalism requires that it be regulated to protect the rights and well being of people, the environment, and the long term health of the economy.

Libertarian advocates of capitalism often talk about the free market. They believe free market capitalism, operating with very little (preferably no) government oversight, can rely on competitive markets to sort out inefficiencies and provide the best products and services at the lowest cost to rational willing buyers. It’s an article of faith that ignores reality: markets are easily manipulated to hobble competition, and consumers are not rational. Moreover, the myth of free market capitalism is uncomfortable accommodating conflicting public interests that jeopardize profit potential.

Therefore, governments have always and everywhere intervened on behalf of the public good to regulate how markets are structured and business is conducted. Greater complexities in markets, with increasing conflicts between public and private interests, require a more comprehensive menu of regulation. It also means some services are better provided by government, or through public/private partnerships, because they don’t lend themselves to privatization that endangers some and excludes others to the detriment of the public good. Conservative restraint is one thing, but obsessing about it becoming out of control socialism is rational only as a tool to incite fear for political gain.

In like measure, liberal outrage against capitalism as such ignores its essential role in guiding the ebb and flow of money to meet the needs of a demanding public. However imperfect, reasonably free market forces create opportunity for entrepreneurial improvements in goods and services that no other economic system has been able to match. With them comes greater economic well being for more people. Crafting economic policy to accomplish social goals that protect the environment, workers and consumers is not antithetical to capitalism. Resolving issues like education, health care, and access to necessities of life with public financing is not free stuff for the undeserving. It’s the nation’s collective investment in its own well being.

And what is there to say about hard core libertarians and hard core Marxists? In my opinion, they have nothing useful to contribute to the conversation, but can be dangerous fomenters of anti-democratic violence. The Marxists are a faint echo of a former time, but they still make useful bogeymen. The libertarians have generated a powerful core of followers who think they have a man in the White House. They don’t.

It’s time to get political in the pulpit

2019-07-22T21:06:00.004-07:00

My preaching for the past several weeks has tried to show how following Jesus involves both individual and political obligations and expectations. To put it another way, there are obligations and expectations about how individuals are to behave, but also about how societies, including nations, are to behave.

Individual obligations to love God and love one’s neighbors are well understood because they so easily fit into the myth of American individualism with its emphasis on self reliance and voluntary charity for those in need. As they should, the parable of the Good Samaritan, and the new commandment to love one another as Christ loves us, encourage us to live in more morally responsible ways with one another. It means our conversations about morals, or ethics, seldom stray from a focus on personal beliefs, attitudes and behaviors. As essential as they are to following Jesus, they also contribute to a comfortable separation of discipleship from the political sphere, leaving it open for opportunists and religious charlatans.

God, throughout scripture, has also laid down obligations and expectations for the way nations are to behave, and has a great deal to say about public policies that fail to meet them. God does not endorse any particular form of government, but is crystal clear about what is expected of any nation’s public policies if they are to embody godly justice. To follow Jesus, whom we proclaim to be the image of the invisible God in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell (Col. 1), requires us to be well informed about what God has to say through the ethical prophets of Hebrew scripture, because that’s where God’s political agenda is most clearly stated. Amos intrigues me the most, but God’s words on public policy are also recorded in Isaiah, Hosea, Micah and Habakkuk. Even the ancient laws in Numbers, Leviticus and Deuteronomy begin the process of limiting retributive justice, deescalating violence, and expanding human rights.

The abundance of religious leaders flying the Christian flag, while promoting political agendas they claim to be biblical, are rarely in the same political arena as God. The religious right is one example. What they call traditional family values, with its suspicion of any deviation from the social-sexual norms they endorse, is an influential political force, however weak its scriptural warrant. The religious left is less organized. It lacks the coherence of the right, but it’s spawned its own array of political activists who wave the Christian flag with abandon, sometimes following Christ, and sometimes ignoring him. In the meantime, lukewarm denominations happily mumble support for the way things are according to the social standards of their congregants. Leaving politics to politicians, they stick with urging members to live good Christian lives. To their credit, they also engineer impressive charitable works in the communities they serve, and of late, most have become welcoming and affirming of all.

In large part, predominantly white mainline denominations have sat out political engagement, leaving it to the black churches on one hand, and conservative white evangelicals on the other. The latter, obsessed with sin and sex, appear to have become Jesus praising agents for secular right wing libertarian nationalism that seems to have little connection with godly justice.

It’s time for mainline preachers to be bold in Christ, fearless in bringing politics into the pulpit. Not as Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, but as prophetic voices proclaiming what God expects justice to look like in any society.

So, what does godly justice look like? I touched on it in a recent column, but it bears repeating. God expects international treaties and compacts to be honored; crops and food supplies to be off limits as weapons of war; weights and measures to be honest; foods to be unadulterated; civil violence to be avoided; legitimate civil authority to be respected; workers and the poor to be protected from manipulation into the bondage of debt; usury to be avoided; justice to be impartial, giving no preference to the rich; the poor not to be cheated out of opportunity and the necessities of life; the courts to be uncorrupted; monopolization of resources to be avoided; taxes to be fairly apportioned; and excesses of income inequality to be addressed.

It’s not an exhaustive list. You might find a few more to add. The point is, what God expected social justice to look like almost three thousand years ago continues to be as true today as it was then. You want truth, absolute godly truth? This is as close as you’re likely to come. It stands up to examination through the lens of Jesus: love God with all your everything, love your neighbor as yourself, love one another as I love you. For Christians, everything in scripture, old and new, hangs on these and is interpreted by them. Prophetic words about godly justice are given even greater authority through Jesus’ words and deeds that break down barriers separating us from one another, heal and reconcile us to one another, and cry out for the oppressed and poor.

Conservatives who are nervous that this looks like a camel’s nose under the tent for a politically liberal agenda, it’s time to get over it. For the lukewarm who would rather avoid conflict than face it, it’s time to take a stand. Each has needed gifts. Conservatives help keep things on track. The lukewarm, gaining courage, help mediate toward agreement. But God’s agenda takes precedent over all.