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You may know that I have had concerns about Christian nationalism and civil religion for some time–and its many incarnations in many political movements. In reality the seed of this concern goes all the way back to my childhood. That’s a long story for another time–but this is nothing new for me.

I am uncomfortable for the United States but more importantly for the Church when our government and politicians engage in civil religion celebrations and mixes terms like “sacred” in when talking about places in DC. I want to give our country due respect and be patriotic, but I serve a higher King and so does every Christian. Let me talk about the particulars here.

No matter how much politicians talk religious talk, or pray, or share their spiritual experiences, we cannot allow Christianity to be co-opted by the left or the right or the center or the green party or the libertarian party or whatever factions or parties exist in whatever country you live in and even have appropriate patriotic feelings for.

Yes, it is okay for me to see people pray, or sing Christian songs at a rally or at an official government event. I wouldn’t advise it, but it’s not necessarily wrong inherently. It is a reminder to me that while many of my friends are atheists or a part of other religions, the dominant historical religious persuasion of my country is generally Christian (although with a civil religious mixing and matching of faith traditions in a way that is clumsy and imprecise in my observation, even starting from the Founding Fathers of the US who are some of my favorite biographies to read–I have about 50 I’ve devoured.)

They key is that when they do these things, it doesn’t make their political acts Christian–it more often weakens Christianity, or makes it seem like the Faith is put on top of things as a sort of icing on a cake to make it more sweet to the masses, or to “borrow credibility” from religion to make them seem more legitimate. I am generally skeptical of people who do this overmuch whether it comes from someone wearing a red tie or dress or a blue tie or dress, if you catch my meaning.

When a former president in the US shared his recovery from alcoholism and his embrace of faith through it, that was meaningful for me to hear. When a first lady of the US shared that she came back to faith after losing it when her son died, that is meaningful to me. I am thankful for those stories, even tear up about them, and I am grateful for their transparency and testimony. I’ve heard countless stories by supporters of personal spiritual experiences or backgrounds of those who are elected to office. The Spirit comforts and convicts powerful women and men. God moves in the halls of power!

But those examples don’t make their offices or their practices and certainly not their policies inherently CHRISTIAN. That is the error. An American might find it unlikely that any political party is in total alignment with them. As a Christian I am quite certain that no political party, nor one politician, is likely to be in total alignment with me. How likely is it if any of the above will be in total alignment with God? Christians have a higher citizenship than any partisanship can ever accomplish. A Christian always has a qualified secondary allegiance to any flag, much less allegiance to any party.

If we lose our distinctiveness from partisanship, Christians, wherever the political winds blow this year or in another 4 years or another 40, or 400, then we lose our saltiness.The only people God has chosen was the people descended from Israel, and we who follow Jesus are grafted into that vine alone, not any other ethnicity, people, tribe, tongue, or country. “There is no one holy like the Lord…” 1 Sam 2:2, so I don’t look to monuments and buildings for the holy. We will not find the sacred and holy vine in the capitals of DC, Buenos Aires, Paris, Cape Town, London, Ottawa, Tokyo, Mexico City, Bangkok, Wellington or wherever earthly power resides. We find it in Jesus, and through Jesus we can become holy, not by policies, politics, or power.

I want God’s will on Earth as it is in Heaven, but not by letting political movements USE the church for their own aims. This is true for the last POTUS, it is true for the current one, it will be true for the next one. We must refuse to be used.

So let us not be deceived by politicians of any slogan or button or platform. Let us not be shamed by our peers who have been lured in by a heavy coating of sweet religious icing on a donkey or elephant cake either. Yes, there are policies Christians should be applauded in their advocacy for, and there are deep evils in our nations around the world that Christians should be encouraged to work against systemically. Justice matters–and we can reform the people for God’s glory, not our own or for “our side.” Likewise, there are some who disengage from politics and they should not be shamed for avoiding it all together so as to focus on other eternal aims. Many Christian traditions do this, historically including many in my own, and that is admirable too.

This, I think, is the way forward, instead of letting the pendulum swing from one political movement to the next. The only movement I’m interested in is the one that became simply known as “The Way” in the countries of the Eastern Mediterranean 2,000 years ago. That’s the movement I would die for–the one that was birthed when ordinary people spoke in the tongues of the nations, foreshadowing not only the rapid spread to the ends of the earth, but even gave a taste of glory to come when every knee will bow, and every kind of tongue will confess, and every ethnicity from every nation will rejoice in a higher joining.

The others movements are all temporary, and so let’s not let the temporary use and abuse the eternal.

So be encouraged. This too shall pass. Whatever angst you have, whatever struggle pains you about the world… in the scope of your eternal soul it will be over in what will someday seem like the blink of an eye to you.

I want to talk about that more in the days to come. Soli Deo Gloria.

From here on out I want to give some of my philosophical and theological thinking about the afterlife based on the show The Good Place which, after all, takes place almost entirely in the afterlife. Because of this, the rest of this will include spoilers for all 4 seasons of the show.

Major spoilers for The Good Place below this line!

The first surprise comes out in the first few episodes: The Good Place is not about The Good Place at all, it’s about The Bad Place for 3.5 seasons, then a little bit about The Middle Place, and then in just a few final episodes it is actually about The Good Place, which turns out to be a let down, intentionally for the plot, unintentionally for the viewers. So, a show that is portrayed as being about heaven is mostly about hell, because humans, one might suggest that especially the Hollywood kind of humans, lack the imagination to conceptualize much beyond painful existence… but more on that later.

The basic gyst of TGP, to remind the forgetful, or the brazen spoiler consumers among us, is that Michael (Ted Danson) welcomes sleeze-bag Eleanor (Kristen Bell), indecisive philosophy prof Chidi (William Jackson Harper), name-dropping socialite Tahani (Jameela Jamil), and bimbo Floridian Jason (Manny Jacinto) into The Good Place–a heaven like afterlife that has been designed perfectly for them. It is a wonderfully diverse, charming, and believable cast that we end up loving for a variety of reasons, even when they are acting in such a way as to totally deserve The Bad Place, which is kind of the point.

Of course the twist is that TGP has been designed perfectly for them indeed, but not as a reward. It has been created as an inventive trick punishment. Perhaps the worst form of torture is expecting heaven and getting hell, or expecting hell and getting heaven which is actually hell. In one sense it is an extrapolation on the “sheep and the goats” speech of Jesus in Matthew 25:31-46, but the LORD remains uncredited on IMBD for this show at the moment. 

The Bad Place has a new corporate initiative spear-headed by Michael, who is actually a Demon. In TGP Hell has a tight corporate hierarchy and forced culture including conferences, reports, banners, and slogans, as we all might expect of Hell at this point. The plan is for The Bad Place and Michael to create a seeming utopia but then do things to infuriate the four condemned people–all of whom deserve to be tortured for all eternity (within  the narrative virtue points system logic of the show). It is a wonderfully inventive plot reminiscent of Aldous Huxley’s imagination, who said “Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.” 

An A.I. named Janet is summoned to make impossible stuff possible, or just to summon one’s favorite beverage. Each person is has been assigned a soul-mate–at first for companionship, but later on we learn it is actually to torture them. The plan goes awry because Elanor actually falls for Chidi, who was supposed to drive her nuts. She then discovers the big secret that they are actually in the Bad Place after all. So Michael has to erase all four of the human’s memories and start over. This happens over and over and almost every time Chidi and Elanor fall in love, and each and every time they figure out the truth and the experiment fails. It’s a little cheesy in print but love always wins in Hollywood hell and it works.

At this point a Judge gets involved–but before you think of it as a kind of God-figure I should remind you that she is a little checked out and distract-able–obsessed with TV shows and podcasts, as mundane as any of us. The Judge is a Deist figure, if divine at all. The Judge rules that the four are to return to Earth to be judged again by their moral progress, but they figure out the plan yet again (it’s kind of like a metaphysical game of Clue each time) and in the process learn that no one has been admitted to the real Good Place in as long as anyone can remember. The system of judging doesn’t let anyone in.

[Here of course is when Drury should point out that he could make a long extended soliloquy on the nature of fallenness and total depravity and how The Good Place is actually doing some pretty biblical Pauline reflection on sinfulness here but he’s not going to as he wants to talk about the ending as soon as possible.]

The humans claim the points system is not working, obviously… because it’s not working for *literally* anyone. So in the final season they do an experiment for a year to prove that humans can show moral improvement, a sort of search for the “inner light” in four humans (J. Calvin bows out of the plot at this point). They succeed in seeing some humans improve but one does not, so they fail the test, but all agree the system is broken, so the Judge is determined to restart the whole system with what appears to be a garage door clicker that makes that happen (weird, I know, but it’s all a long con to get the clicker into Jason’s hands for a joke which was worth it.) Then, through an act of self-sacrifice and innovative philosophy they convince not only the Judge (because she’s kind of flighty, and even the boss demon, Shawn, because he’s kind of bored by torture by now) of an entirely new system for the afterlife. 

They basically invent a kind of “Middle Place” where someone can earn their way into the Good Place. There were no mentions of indulgences, although such a jab would have been obvious to most anyone forced to go to Catholic school. Suffice it to say they are doing their best Dante impression here in TGP: “The path to paradise begins in hell.”

Then comes the big problem with the entire series. But before that, I digress…

Ted Danson is one of the key stars of this show, and most people my age think of Ted Danson they think of Cheers (this is important, trust me). Cheers was one of the successful television shows of all time, but one of the key dynamics was the spark of chemistry and conflict in the personalities and the sexual tension between his character (Sam) and Shelly Long (Diane). One of the key problems of many shows like this is the “will they or won’t they” problem–and shows often fall apart because the stars get together and there’s a wedding and then the writers can’t figure out a way to make the show have enough tension and plot anymore.

For The Good Place there is never this problem, because even in an infinite number of universes the love story of Chidi and Elanor usually ends the same way. But the real love story in TGP is the actual real Good Place itself. As soon as the four characters have their consummation–the great wedding of finally going to the real good place… when they reach this actual perfect environment of eternal bliss that is The Good Place the entire show falls apart.

Everyone in the final few episodes has a fair shot with an altered points system to make it into the Good Place right from earth (unlikely and maybe impossible) or by performing in the middle place good enough to earn the Good Place. The problem is that once they get there and can do anything they want forever their brains turn to mush. Brilliant people lose all their brilliance because they have nothing important to do or think about. There is no progress to be made. This is illustrated in a cameo of Phoebe From Friends who plays a famous philosopher who is now a spaced out bimbo. And yes, she has a real name and also a character name in this episode, but clearly you and I and everyone else thought: “that’s Phoebe From Friends” the whole time, and she was basically playing the same character as Phoebe From Friends, right?

Apparently, when you can summon anything you want ever, and go visit any place you desire, for all eternity–it can get not only boring but it also becomes a complete soul-crushing experience. In fact, one might say, given enough time, The Good Place is worse than the Bad Place in TGP. And of course this makes sense within the narrative logic of TGP, even Pascal, a Christian, said, “I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise.” And the paradise of The Good Place is pretty stupid.

Why?

The problem for the writers of TGP is that infinity must proceed to boredom for the human mind. Even the demons are bored of torture in the Bad Place, we discover. Perhaps these demons believe and shudder, only because torture is SOOooo last Bearimy (if you didn’t watch this show this makes no sense to you.)

This problem is what I want to talk about, and it is not isolated to TGP or Hollywood, or even writers in general. The problem is human. 

We have an instinctual desire to explain away the existence of Hell, and a certain drive to develop philosophies where everyone gets into Heaven. But we also have a contrasting lack of capacity to understand and even conceptualize Heaven compared to Hell. Another way to put that is: humanity has a much better ability to imagine Hell than Heaven.

This problem is not limited to the trope of winged cherubs floating on clouds strumming dainty harps, although that is bad enough. It is hard to find a presentation of heaven that is not endlessly sterile and white–Heaven on the silver screen is often a blank white spaced Mac Store with no electronics or color, or like the Matrix movie empty space before any programs are loaded up. Heaven is an empty space in the modern mind. Heaven can be seen as good, but only because it’s the absence of bad.

It is also a little telling that the greatest tragedy one can think of in TGP for Heaven, in the age of streaming and personal electronics, is boredom. So the TGP writers have a solution to this boring actual Good Place. The solution, the culmination to the entire series of fascinating philosophical discussion, creative twists and wonderful ideas, is suicide.

You read that right–Heaven is so boring for The Good Place that the final solution is to offer a door by which anyone can walk through and end their consciousness, to go back out to the ocean like a wave, in Chidi’s Buddhist rephrasing. And that’s what happens (final spoiler alert)… they all kill themselves, but for one who becomes a new Demon Architect.

One might say the point The Good Place is trying to make is not about heaven and hell, and so these “peaceful” consciousness suicides are somehow supposed to make living meaningful in the first place. A major problem with the “bad place” torture is that the scale of the punishment doesn’t fit the crime or the evil of those who go there. The Good Place helps us see that the scale of the reward of “the good place” also doesn’t fit the rightness or holiness of those who go there either.

Ursula K. Le Guin told us one of the worst habits of humanity is “considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”

And this is the bad habit TGP, an otherwise brilliant and well-executed show, succumbs to in the end. But I don’t blame the writers, I don’t blame the creator, Michael Schur. I blame us.

The us at fault is Christians. We have failed, time and time again, to ourselves display an imagination for Heaven. Christianity, like Dante, is known for its Inferno, not Paradiso. If you have a conversion with an atheist or someone who has deconstructed their faith, they will bring up thousands of times they heard about Hell, and none where they heard about Heaven. The old song goes “There’s a Heaven to gain, and a Hell to shun” but there is a whole lot more experience in the latter than the former for most that experience our version of Christianity.

I am asking you what you think. What is Heaven like? What will we do? How will happiness be intellectual and interesting, in the absence of pain? If we do not know, how we might fulfill the only prayer Jesus ever taught us to pray? How will we ever know how his will is to be done on earth, if we don’t know how it is done in Heaven?

This is my call to a new imagination, a fresh investigation, a radical obsession with Heaven. You might worry that we become so “heavenly minded that we’re no earthly good.” But I suggest we are too often more Hell-minded as believers than Heavenly-minded. Our problem is not an excessive Heaven-focus, at all, but a lack of imagination for it. CS. Lewis may have been right when he said, “Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.”

And in The Good Place show, it turns out, we get neither Heaven or Hell in the end either.

1) MJ is the greatest basketball player and greatest player of all time. There, I said it. He’s the GOAT and in my book only LeBron, Kareem, Magic, Bird, Russell, Wilt and Kobe have a chance of being mentioned as possible contenders, and none of them had the impact of Jordan. He may also be the greatest team athlete any ANY sport as well (Gretzky is perhaps the only one who I could argue elevated his sport as much, or was as skilled as a player–averaging almost a hat trick in one playoff year with 47 goals as I recall.)

2) Scottie Pippen still doesn’t get enough credit, and far too many Bulls fans remember him for just two bad decisions. MJ would have only 2 rings without Scottie Pippen (or someone of his similar caliber, for instance, if John Stockton, Karl Malone were on Jordan’s team, he could have won perhaps 3 or 4, but the MJ/Pip pairing is the best duo ever, with Magic and Kareem as the closest competition. I was also impressed that Pippen didn’t throw ANYONE under the bus in his interviews. Class act. No wonder so many still love and respect him in the game today.

3) The Paxon and Kerr storylines were really great–and it is clear that MJ learned to trust other teammates in a way that not only helped him overcome the Pistons, but to permanently win as a team (while still taking over when he needed to.)

4) MJ and other Bulls interviewed gave credit where credit was due: the Pacers gave them the hardest challenge of any playoff team ever. As an Indy native and big 90s Pacers fan this was gratifying, and Miller was one of the more fascinating interviews.

5) It was awesome to see the teams of the 80s and 90s again. I would love to see a documentary like this on the 80s Celts, Lakers, Pistons. I do believe that the defense of these days was a huge part of the story. Say what you want to say about which era was hardest to play in, but I do think the 80s and 90s were the most physically demanding, and the fact that a finesse and precision player like MJ refashioned his body and Jackson the team to overcome that is a great accomplishment alone. They out bodied and out-defended the most physical teams of their era, which may have been the most physical teams ever, including overcoming the Pistons (eventually).

6) I liked how the nostalgia of the soundtrack worked–using songs that peaked near the events shown was a great way to get you into the “feel” of those days and it also mirrored the fashion… I forgot how many athletic men in their 20s would tuck their t-shirts into their belted shorts back in the day! (Jordan had some super-dorky outfits actually, hilarious). The series was well-crafted.

7) The behind the scenes jawing between the players before and after games was the most “insider” stuff I’ve ever seen. They truly had unprecedented access–and that word is thrown around too loosely, but they delivered.

8) The Pistons feud and rivalry, along with overcoming the Celts and Lakers, was all treated really fairly and there was a true sense in which those were the “teams to beat” of the 80s and it showed that MJ really couldn’t overcome them alone. This by it self underscores the critical necessity of teamwork–even the GOAT can’t go it alone. Good positive lesson of the series.

9) The Bulls lost a LOT of games they shouldn’t have lost–some of these other teams beat them just when you thought they were unbeatable. And while Jordan is never accused of being a nice guy–he and the Bulls were focused on the next game and using the loss as motivation.

10) I now think that Phil Jackson may be the top coach of all time in the NBA. I think this series shows he overtakes Red Auerbach in my book. The challenges of the modern NBA and the fame of Jordan, the way he coached them when MJ retired the first time, his ability to adapt to a league where players had more power, his leadership in key moments, all that stuff really impressed me. The person who elevated in my estimation the most in The Last Dance was Phil Jackson. I haven’t given him enough credit.

I say all this above as a die-hard Pacers fan who also cheered for the Pistons in the late 80s and early 90s because I thought the Bad Boys were fascinating. I loved that the Pistons teams were basically taking down the Celts and Magic from their holy pedestal at the time, and holding back MJ from carrying a team on his back into championship level basketball.

You’ll have to wait for my next post for anything I have to say that is NEGATIVE about the Bulls. Yes… I ended up with 10 in that list too.

I had already heard Andy Crouch speak several times and read a few of his other books when I came across the little red book Strong and Weak. Crouch is clearly brilliant, an effective communicator, and someone with a lot of credibility in various environments many Christians do not walk. I respected Crouch before I read this book.

But Strong and Weak made me a raving fan of Crouch. The book is perhaps not as ambitious as others he’s written, but it is compelling and sticks with you for so long, with its short and simple approach. In this book Crouch found a way to make a core leadership concept so portable and memorable that it stands head and shoulders above most other leadership books I’ve ever read but for a handful.

I’m not alone, a few others I’ve gifted the book to have decided to keep a whole stock on hand to give to others like I do–because it’s just the perfect little gift book that later on people thank you for giving them. 

Why? 

“Leadership begins the moment you are more concerned about others’ flourishing than you are about your own.” This is the core idea of Strong and Weak by Andy Crouch

He explains how this plays out with a four quadrant diagram that displays the two main elements of flourishing leadership: authority and vulnerability:

Those without authority and vulnerability are withdrawing, those with only authority and without vulnerability are exploiting, those with vulnerability and no authority are suffering, and those who have both are flourishing, and cause the flourishing of those around them.

This simple thought is spun like a prism throughout the book, exploring each of the 4 quadrants in depth and helping a leader learn how they might be unbalanced in one way or the others. It has helped change my perspective on so many other leadership books, which often help a leader exercise authority more effectively (which is needed) but fail to help them access their own vulnerability. 

And of course without being heavy-handed with it (for those who might not be believers) Crouch helps point us to the ultimate example of flourishing in the one who exercised both authority and vulnerability perfectly, Jesus Christ:

“We see Jesus’ authority and vulnerability come together in the most astonishing way in the scene we call the transfiguration…  [Elijah and Moses] speak not about Jesus’ power, but about his impending condemnation and crucifixion. What is revealed is not authority alone, but authority with vulnerability. Power with self-denial, divinity with humanity–unconquerable life and imminent death… [likewise] we are called to risk hidden vulnerability, finding a way to bear authority without becoming an idol or tyrant.” -Andy Crouch, Strong and Weak p139-141

The next time someone mentions any injustice and I am tempted to say, “But what about…” I need to remember that in the scope of history I am sounding a lot like a communist propagandist:

“’Whataboutism’ was a favourite tactic of Soviet propagandists during the old Cold War. Any criticism of the Soviet Union’s internal aggression or external repression was met with a ‘what about?’ some crime of the West, from slavery to the Monroe doctrine. In the era when you could be shot for trying to leave the socialist paradise and with political prisoners rotting in Siberia, whataboutism was little more than a debating tactic.”

*this quote is from a 2008 history overview written by a Eastern European–not written in our decade or on our continent