The Birth of Humanity

Occurred on the day we celebrate as Christmas. On that day God revealed to us that we do not in fact travel a path from ashes to ashes, dust to dust, but from eternal life to eternal life.

In his book The Anticipatory Corpse Jeffrey Bishop (MD PhD) offers a brilliant history and analysis of how modern medicine, and modern society, came to understand the human person as a living machine that began dead and inevitably becomes dead. Medical science, and indeed science generally, is bounded on what Marcelo Gleiser (physicist and philosopher of science) calls The Island of Knowledge, an island that can neither see transcendence nor grasp life as anything more than a self-reproducing machine. 

In the eyes of science the human body is a wonderful machine to be sure; one whose fantastic origins through a combination of matter, energy, chance, and natural law are fascinating. And the way it creates the human person who inhabits it is equally wonderful if still not understood process. But vitalism, the idea that there is some mysterious something other than the functioning of the machine has been banished from science and medicine. And indeed, under the assumptions of modernity it would be intolerable in an age of organ transplants, ICU’s, and living wills. 

The power and control we wield over human bodies kept functioning by machines would be unbearable if when we chose (whether as patients or doctors) to die we were also choosing to end something we did not create, do not own, cannot measure and may only have the power to destroy. And so we locate life in some part of the machine and it's particular function; earlier in the heart, and now more commonly in the brain. Complex rationalizations of what constitutes a functioning human machine allow us to both manipulate the moment of “death" to best serve the purposes of medical science and legally identify the moment when organs that once belonged to one person can now belong to someone else.

This death to death story of human life told by biological science and affirmed by medical science is usually just the vague, uneasy background of human existence. A characteristic of the machine, as scientists note, is its ability to both be self-reflective and to focus that capacity on solving the problems immediately posed by the tasks of maintenance and reproduction. We’d all be morose philosophers if the machine that is both our person and personhood didn’t find food and sex so much more interesting, and entertainment an acceptable substitute for both. In a pinch (and here we have the birth of both theology and philosophy) a thinking machine unable to distract itself with food, sex, and entertainment turns its thoughts about death, life, and the meaning of life into complex puzzles to be solved (another form of entertainment) - again avoiding the confrontation with its own inevitable self-destruction.

Alas, in our time the human machine, even with its marvelous abilities in the field of distraction, is proving incapable of facing the environmental challenges posed by the decisions forced by modern medical science on one hand and the despair of a modern economy on the other. Always destined to self-destruct by our ever shortening telomeres, we increasingly choose to either rush the process through suicide, hide from it with drugs, or desperately delay it by ever more complex methods of repair and replacement. (Not that I object to delay. In the foreseeable future I’ll need a new heart valve, and I’m not anxious to pursue the other option.)

Yet there is this other story, one fewer and fewer people in our society have ever heard or truly know. It is the story of how we humans came to live on the Island of Knowledge, and indeed how it came to exist at all. It is the story of the true origin of our personhood, and of its true end. The story in no way denies the story of science. It begins with dividing cells, fetal formation, and ultimately a birth. It ends with a death and a burial. And yes, although the body disappears to make a point about what it means to be a person, there is no hint that it doesn’t ultimately decompose. Wherever it went, Jesus didn’t take it with him, because he was before it was, and is after it is gone.

He’s the story, the true human story, the story that doesn’t begin with the emergence of a self-conscious biological machine, but with the love of God. And which does not end in death, but in the love of God. And Jesus' story is all our stories. He is the true human, the one in whom we can know who and what we really are.

Philosophers and doctors may debate (and there are good reasons to do so) the moments at which the capacity for personhood emerges in the biological machine, and when it becomes impossible to sustain. We will have to make decisions that are impossible on the basis of knowledge we cannot possess. But if they are impossible they need not be unbearable. Because they cannot change this: the origin of each of us, and our end, is the eternal love of the Triune God. And it is with us even now. Who was born on Christmas? We were. We all were. 

Christ is Never Naked

I’ll  offer a prediction. The upcoming split in the UMC over same-sex marriage and ordination will be the first of many to follow. 

What has drawn and held the UMC together for the last 150 years hasn’t been doctrinal unity, but the mutual advantages of growing social power for Christian witness. Now UM social influence is waning to the point that groups within the UMC see internal cohesion and external alliances as more advantageous than the current UM unity; unity that has little to commend itself to either the most ideologically committed or the most individually powerful. 

For the WCA and related United Methodists an alignment with conservative Christians in a broader evangelical coalition gives far more direct access to political and social influence than continued association with a socially liberal and politically impotent UMC. And a close alliance with African United Methodists insures the appearance of vitality and relevance on a global scale. 

Meanwhile progressive United Methodists, having chaffed under the restrictions of a Social Principles creed dominated by conservative values, will find alliances with other progressive Christian denominations  and political groups a far more effective path into exercising the kind of social and political power they long to have.

And in the rest of the world? Unity is already hard to maintain, and its main advantage has been a link to the resource-rich American church. When that church divides, and its resources divide and diminish with it, expect United Methodists globally to divide along their own particular fault lines. It is too much to expect that only US United Methodists have disagreements over Biblical authority, sexuality, and gender roles.

And the root of these coming divisions will be a fundamental misunderstanding of human diversity and the roots of heterogeneity of doctrine and practice. 

When Christ was born we are told that his mother wrapped him in swaddling clothes. When he died he was disrobed but not naked, for even on the cross the culture of Roman occupied Judea couldn’t abide such a thing. Even in the grave, much as in the cradle, he is clothed. And what do we see in the empty tomb? The clothes. The Christ never appears to us unclothed.

This places Jesus in the world God created for Adam and Eve and their descendants, a world in which the naked man was unimaginable. Noah’s nakedness was an unbearable scandal, and even Paul in imagining death and its aftermath does not want to ever be make, but to be over-clothed in Christ. 

When Noah emerges from the Ark he plants a vineyard, the surest sign that he isn’t just clothed, but is clothed in culture (albeit one that carries with it the danger of nakedness - subject of at least one country-western song.) And when Paul longs to be over-clothed he speaks of tents or tabernacles; perhaps the products of his profession but more likely to that ancient product of Israelite culture created simultaneously with its covenant with God. The covenant is never seen naked, is it? (Indiana Jones got that right.)

Even the sex of Christ, which would seem to be a universal biological fact, comes to us only in the form of sexuality and gender. We don’t see Jesus’ genitalia, only his gendered interactions with other men and women in a 1st century Jewish context. Indeed, biological sex is left behind in the Garden with God’s clothing of Adam and Eve, a quintessential creation of culture, and mere biological sex is evermore hidden by the cultural clothing of gender and sexuality.  God made us male and female. Culture made us men and women, husbands and wives. 

It is worth looking closely at Genesis 2:21 to 2:24. First a description of the event of Eve’s creation, then Adam’s personal appropriation of the event, then an interpretation into Jewish culture. 

Doctrines, witness, and worship are simply the necessary clothing of a God Incarnate whom we can look at in no other way. They are the dressing by which Christian communities in various times and places have made Jesus present-able to themselves and others. Otherwise, as Peter, John, and James experienced, there is only blinding light and the command to listen to a voice once again clothed and comprehensible in a familiar human language. 

Belief and practice are inevitably bound to the languages (and hence cultures) through which they are articulate. They never give us access to the naked Christ because he is decently, and for our own protection, hidden from sight. All we can ever see is Christ clothed in culture. And not surprisingly he is thus seen in a variety of different kinds of clothing. 

Some believe the diversity of belief and practice, the diversity of cultural clothings of the Christ, is a result of sin, or at the least our human finitude. This is wrong. In the narrative of scripture cultural diversity isn’t created by sin. Sin, in the run-up to Babel, is manifest in the human drive to avoid diversity, to live as a culturally homogenous people in a walled city. The diversity of languages and thus cultures that God inaugurates is the cure to sin. Cultural diversity is the root expression of God’s righteous demand that humans be obedient to the Divine will that we be fruitful and multiply and cover the face of the earth. 

When we understand this we can see that our efforts at doctrinal purity and unity of witness and worship are the repetition of the sin of Babel by the community of believers. They are an effort to build a walled city in which we’ll be united and never scattered. And so it is hardly surprising that God is scattering us, and will continue to scatter us among the nations until we exhaust our sinful desire for uniformity and purity and turn from Babel toward Zion. 

The only unity we can ever enjoy is spiritual, masked by flesh and robed in culture. And only scattered through the assembly of the nations in all their diversity can we hope to see the glory of the Lord. 

And when if we recognize each other it won’t be by our clothes, but by the fruit of love. 

To Stake A Claim

The problem with staking a claim is that in the end you are staked to that claim.

Perhaps the greatest characteristic of the age we live in is the primacy of doubt and the admission of limits to knowledge as the key markers of credibility. Nowhere is this more marked that in the intellectual enterprise called science, which is built on questioning every assertion, seeking evidence, and always assuming that knowledge is incomplete.

Nowhere is this less evident than in theology, which seems to be based not on theories but on doctrines, not on the expansion of knowledge but on defending doctrinal borders.

In our time this is most evident in Christian evangelical theology, which has confidently advanced doctrines of human personhood, and the origin, purpose, and end of the natural order with no basis other than shifting interpretations of supposedly inerrant scripture. 

The result has been what would be, if dogmaticians were capable of embarrassment, a series of embarrassing drawbacks from claims that finally proved so inane in the court of public opinion that they had to be withdrawn simply to maintain the credibility of Christian witness. A few of these? 

There was the claim, still extant in some Evangelical circles, that the King James Version of the Bible  represented the oldest and best textual tradition. (This claim was still being taught into the 1990s by Dallas Theological Seminary) Closely related was the claim that the Bible read in its plain literal meaning was true, and flowing from that a series of embarrassing claims about the age and natural history of the world. (The Institute for Creation Research in my home town still holds a candle for many of these claims.) 

As it stands most Christians have backed down from a literal seven day creation to long periods of creation following roughly the plan of Genesis, to guided evolution, to creation science. The final redoubt of Evangelicals, apparently unassailable, is an arcane mathematical analysis of probabilities that is supposed to demonstrated that Someone or Something other than natural law guided the unfolding universe. But in building this redoubt Evangelicals have simply flown into the hands of science, and far from offering dogma, are offering just another theory in search of further experimental proof. Why not admit that the so-called doctrine of creation is really just a theory of creation subject to revision?

And what about the nature of the human person? Having failed to stake any defensible claim about the natural order can Christian theologians stake some kind of claim about the nature of being human? Well they have certainly tried. Fortunately the most embarrassing claims about human nature, that persons of non-European descent were sub-human, was rejected rather early in the modern era by some Christians, and by the early 19th century by most Christians including Evangelicals. But of course a few held on, notably Evangelicals in the southern United States and perhaps the last public holdouts - the loathsome bigots who used theology to justify apartheid in South Africa. So why not admit that theological anthropology is actually just a theory of human personhood that may be subject to revision?

And then there is marriage. Until the modern era almost all Christians regarded marriage to be indissoluble within the Divine order, and many Evangelicals and all Catholics still regard divorce and remarriage as a willing and continued state of sinfulness disqualifying such a person from leadership in the church. Yet in the last few decades Christians, including those who held on longest to the traditional view of a lifelong marriage commitment have changed their minds. A divorced and remarried Protestant pastor isn’t nearly as remarkable as the unrepentant attitude of those theologians whose minds were changed only after causing immeasurable heartache for countless people by calling them sinners and adulterers. So why not admit that the traditional view of marriage was actually a theory about human relationships subject ultimately to revision? 

The more serious and difficult area of human personhood is one where Protestant Christians are divided most. The vast majority of Evangelicals have staked a claim in relationship to sex, gender, and sexuality. Most Evangelical Christians still believe the differentiation of social roles according to sex is part of God’s created order. And thus many if not most Evangelicals will not ordain women. However, American Evangelical theologians have mostly fallen back from this and have modified their theology of gender, even recognizing that gender roles are a cultural rather than a divinely ordained construct. Why not admit that for 2000 years the theological assertion of distinct gender roles was actually just a theory of human relationships based on cultural norms and thus ultimately subject to change. 

And what about human sexuality? Here we find that Evangelicals continue to take a hard dogmatic line. Some, notably United Methodists recognize that there are individual humans who identify themselves as possessing a sexuality, not merely a sex. In other words they recognize that humans self-identify as straight, lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, trans-sexual, or queer. But their dogmatic construction of human personhood does not allow them to admit sexuality as an essential attribute of human personhood. Unlike sex, or even gender, it is not part of God’s plan for humanity. So while self-identified LGBTQ persons must be accepted (like all sinners) into God’s house their self-understanding must be dogmatically denied. But really, isn't this just another theory that may be and probably will be revised in the future? Aren't we facing, as we were with gender, concepts of the human person rooted in culture rather than revelation? And if so, why make one stance on human sexuality an essential doctrine of the church? 

Scientists have, as they have demonstrated over the last century, the humility to admit that human personhood is more complex than than their own earlier understandings. The AMA has admitted that its earlier characterizations of homosexuality as deviant were wrong. Scientists recognize that older understandings of human sexuality are inadequate and that more study is necessary before theories can be fully formed, much less tested experimentally. Thus the latest scientific studies yield complex understandings of the origins and innateness of sexuality. And as one might expect, a healthy disagreement among colleagues that leads to more research rather than institutional fracture. (Scientific American has a book that explores this in depth: The New Science of Sex and Gender. As one might expect it explores a variety of viewpoint rather than simply reinforcing a long standing dogma.)

But evangelical theologians will have none of this. They have a confidence in their ability to interpret revelation that appears completely unjustified in light of their previous mistakes in understanding the natural and social orders. So evangelical theologians have staked a dogmatic claim that sexuality is not essential to human personhood, and that what is called homosexuality is just a decision about human behavior made under the influence of sin.

And to be fair, their progressive opponents have staked similar dogmatic claims, in some realms more and in some realms less acceptable but equally likely to be embarrassing in the end.

The result is the appearance the Christians possess an unjustified epistemological hubris, an unjustified confidence in the human ability to fully understand God's order. 

Small wonder that our contemporaries increasingly find the Christian religion unpalatable. It lacks the basic humility of its founder and assumes the pride of his adversary.

Or if that is too strong: it is because whenever Christians have ventured beyond their knowledge of Christ and him crucified they have embarrassed themselves. As theologians we keep trying to speak of things about which we have no knowledge, and then when we inevitably are forced to change our minds it looks like another case of foolish pride.

The truths about creation, human society, and human personhood that we know don't arise from Biblical descriptions of God's order, which are inevitably reducible to the culture in which they are advanced. They arise from our knowledge that Christ has redeemed everything from bosons to galaxies, from hunting and gathering bands to empires, from the child in the womb to the last breath of life.

Theology must give up the absurd claim to be the Queen of the Sciences and become just another servant of humanity, offering the one thing it knows to a world in desperate need of just that knowledge. I expect that when we quite trying to know everything we'll find what we actually know is respected for the genuine contribution to human knowledge of reality that it is. That is certainly my experience in the University. And if this takes away our aura of certainty, it will thereby restore our credibility. 

The Christian Extinguishing of Identity

“We hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues.”
“There is neither Jew nor Gentile . .”

Those present at Pentecost were all Jews, and yet hearing their native languages at the Temple was clearly remarkable. It affirmed a real diversity, anticipated in prophecy, but obscured by the dominance of Hebrew as a unifying liturgical language.

Paul’s letters dating from little more than a decade later attest to the diversity of the Christian community even as they seek to define a transcultural unity in Christ. But note the negative in the quote above from Galatians. Being one in Christ means giving up an identity, specifically a Jewish identity tied to being part of a people created by the Covenant at Sinai. The word Gentile (sometimes mistranslated as “Greek”) isn’t ethnic, it's simply a generic term for non-Jews. “Neither Gentile” doesn’t negate anything anybody cared about. “Neither Jew” does.

Being Gentile wasn't intimately bound up in idolatry or immorality, the only things forbidden to those reclothed in Christ. Nor did Paul expect men and women to quit acting out the sexual identities. He didn’t expect slaves and masters to cease the relationship that defined them socially.

Only Jewish identity, an identity centered on the covenant at Sinai, was  extinguished by accepting Christ as Messiah. Paul’s history of salvation in Galatians and Romans leapfrogs Sinai to move from Abraham to Jesus. Yet Sinai, present in the Jewish community as the written and the oral Torah, is exactly what makes a Jew a Jew.

True, in Romans Paul affirms that because of the covenant at Sinai Jews have many things. But note well that Paul redefines the covenant at Sinai, the “Law,” in a way that no Jew as a Jew could possibly affirm. And all these things the Jews have fade into obscurity in light of Christ. He grants the Jews their covenant, but only by redefining it in Christian terms. And what he gives the Jews on one hand he takes away with the other.

This is a major shift away from the Jerusalem Council which allowed a way into the Jesus movement for Gentiles. At Jerusalem Gentiles were to be accepted into the Christian community, but on Jewish terms. They would have to follow the covenant of God with Noah as understood in the rabbinic tradition.

By the time Paul is fully engaged in his mission to the Gentiles he has significantly changed the ground rules. Gentiles are now the dominant culture, and Jews are only allowed in on Gentile terms - as the introduction to the book of Romans makes clear. Paul frames his mission in terms of the Gentiles, and in Paul’s churches it is the circumcised who must conform, not visa versa.

The result was inevitable as Gentiles came to dominate the church: Jewish Christianity disappeared, because the gospel Paul proclaimed undermined and in fact denied Jewish identity at its core.

It would be nice if, in fact, Christianity was a genuinely new identity that equally undermined and replaced all the old ethnic identities. Such was the argument of Tertullian, but the claim was specious. By the time of Constantine Christianity had become a new religion laid on top of first Greek, then Roman cultural roots. Later ethnocultural groups were likewise affirmed. A small tweak in their pagan customs and they too could be Christian. Sure, there would be efforts at hegemony in terms of using the Latin Bible and mass, but this was less cultural hegemony than a means of concentrating power in the hands of the emperor and the Bishop of Rome.

Until the era of modern missions and their hegemonic advancement of European culture, it was only Jewish identity that was extinguished by conversion to Christianity. And the reason for this is that the essence of orthodox Christianity has been the repudiation of the covenant at Sinai as a witness to God’s righteousness. True, a Jewish Christian could always keep the law as a cultural memento, in the same way I as a Texan can still wear cowboy boots up to the altar to receive communion. But keeping the law doesn't mean what it means to those for whom it is God’s witness to God’s righteousness. It doesn't mean what it means for those who understand that living out the covenant at Sinai is precisely how the Jews are a light to the Gentiles and a blessing to the nations.

Given these reflections Messianic Judaism can now be seen more clearly for what it is: a modern way of being Christian. Modern because it appears to treat Jewish identity in terms of cultural mementos and ethnic legacy rather than as participation in God’s mission cemented at Sinai. It is a Judaism that, by accepting the Pauline perspective, reduces the Law as understood by rabbinic Judaism to mere customs. Because in the orthodox Christian understanding the Law is a witness only to sin, while it is the Messiah who reveals the true nature of righteousness “to faith for faith.”

In short, Messianic Judaism is possibly only because it redefines Judaism in terms that most Jews cannot recognize. And in fact a constant theme in my dialogue with Jewish partners has been exactly this; I’ve never met a rabbi, orthodox or otherwise, who would affirm that Messianic Jews are Jews.

And yet - well modernity brings another complication - the redefinition of Judaism precisely as an ethnic identity tied to the promise of the land that need not be enacted in affirmation of God’s covenant at Sinai. The Zionist movement of the 19th century, coupled with the Nazi effort to exterminate world Judaism, and completed with the birth of the modern nation of Israel brought about new complexities in Jewish self-understanding.

Both rabbinic Judaism and European and American anti-Semites defined Judaism based on ancestry rather than belief or practice even if they disagreed on just how the identity was passed down. (The rabbis had stricter rules.) Zionists added the promise of the land, but without necessarily the cultic worship originating at Sinai. (Yossi Klein Helevi has documented the crisis posed when modern Israel actually came into control of the Temple Mount.)

In the state of Israel the concept of a “secular Jew” became possible, so that for the purposes of state of Israel one is Jewish based on parentage rather than either belief or practice, and being a Jew is the only qualification for becoming a citizen of Israel. The only exception, and one that is fascinating, is that even for the state of Israel a Jewish convert to Christianity ceases being a Jew. One can be an atheist and a Jew, or a Buddhist and a Jew, but not a Christian and a Jew.

And there is a reason for this exception that bears consideration: the fundamental conflict between the claims at the heart of Judaism and Christianity. Christianity is defined by its claim that the Messiah has come in Jesus. A fundamental claim of rabbinic Judaism, the Judaism of the Talmud, is that the Messiah has not yet come. Or as one rabbi at a large synagogue in Dallas put it to me: "The day you accept that the Messiah has come you cease to be a Jew."

Which really gets us right back to what the rabbi Paul said, “in Christ there is neither Greek, nor Jew.”

The challenge for Christians is to now develop a theology that doesn’t effectively lead to the extinction of Jewish identity - whether now or in some anticipated future when all the Jews will acknowledge that the Messiah has come. And that, it seems to me, will require we that learn to affirm that Sinai, and not just Golgotha, is a witness to the righteousness of God. But of course when we do that we’ll have opened the way for other witnesses to the righteousness of God beyond the narrow history of the children of Abraham.

Freedom and Speech

There is an utterly silent but totally effective power by which alone a nation finds redemption.

Two Washington Post editorials on October 29th, one by Dana Milbank and one by Huge Hewitt nicely capture the dilemma currently at the heart of our nation. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/?nid=top_nav_opinions&utm_term=.890704dbf1fe.

On one hand there is surely a link between accepting anti-Semitism and hatred of Jews and violence against Jews. On the other hand it isn't a strict causal link. America is full of anti-Semites. I know quite a few. But they would never murder anyone. And America is full of haters - and again at least some appear on my Facebook pages. But they aren't mass murderers. I know lots of people that deplore Ted Cruz, I'm one of them, but I came into the same room I'd just ignore him.

(This is best with any politician. Their egos feed on notoriety, so calling attention to them, even making their lives miserable, just throws gasoline on the fire of their egos. They'll be the first to tweet what happened in happy self-satisfaction while the votes and donations keep rolling in. The problem with the Maxine Waters strategy isn't merely that it degrades political discourse, it's fundamentally ineffective as a political maneuver. The only way to hurt politicians is to vote against them. Otherwise they only care if you spell their name right.)

Mass murder is a lot like forest fires. 99.9% of the time the hot exhaust pipe, the dropped cigarette, the flying ember from a campfire just cool down and burn out. It's the .001% of the time when they just catch the dried leaves that they cause the conflagration.

With some of these correlations between constant causes and rare effects there are individual causes we can legislate. Take our various smoking bans, or those related to food additives. But when it comes to speech the problem is tricky: 1. because we believe that freedom of speech is of such superlative value that only a direct and demonstrable cause of violence justifies curtailing it. 2. And because we still live in the macho fantasy of "sticks and stone may break my bones but words will never hurt me." The first provides a legitimate reason to be wary of restricting speech. The second simply provides verbal bullies an excuse to blame those whom they harm for being hurt.

As an American society we still haven't negotiated between the reason for free speech and the excuses for its abuse. And the only way that we can negotiate between these two is to so marginalize hateful speech in the public realm that no politician would dare use it. But we don't.

A significant portion of the American public across the political spectrum not only embraces hateful speech it valorizes it, seeing it as a way of speaking "truth to power." And as listeners when we are confronted with hateful language we double down on the power of hate by posting and reposting words we ourselves would never say. Does it all seem a little vicious? We cheapen the value of free speech by dismissing those who name the viciousness as PC whimps and snowflakes. "Sticks and stones" we chant like 5 year olds, "if you can't stand the heat. . . " we sing.

Whether its the mockery of religion by Bill Maher and the late night comedy shows, or the Islamophobic anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of the alt-Right we've become a nation of exorcists: shouting out the religious demons we think we see in public life and public persons while our supporters stand by and applaud our performance with shouts of "Amen!"

I'll let you in on a secret. The demons aren't out there. Not out there beyond our borders and not out their among our political opponents. They aren't out there in the political parties or out there in the politicians, or the media.

The demons are within us. We are a nation of the demon possessed. We can shout our mockery and curses and our condemnations at others all we want, but the demon simply burrows deeper into our hearts. It feeds on our anger and outrage and grows with our curses and our taunts. And if we think that we personally, because of our righteousness or our innocence, are not possessed then we are fools. Neither Sin nor Satan have a political ideology: they will possess any who live by anger, arrogance, or hate and draw them toward their doom. And they love to chant, "and words will never hurt me."

It may be, of course, that our nation can limp forward, muttering its curses under its breath with each labored step, while its relative freedom of religion is merely damaged but not destroyed by its freedom of speech. But not as long as we hold on to the fantasy of sticks and stones. That fantasy will destroy us as those with bigger verbal sticks and harder verbal stones gradually take over our society, and having subverted the freedom at the root of our freedom destroy the freedoms that are left.

Or we could vote them out of office, using that utterly silent but totally effective power by which alone a nation finds redemption.

Religious Freedom

Opening and Closing Remarks to the First DFW Summit on Religious Freedom

We live in society more diverse and complex than was imagined by the founders of the United States. And this isn’t just a matter of demographics over the entire nation. We each personally experience this diversity and complexity in what appear to be ever accelerating forms. Moreover this experience is becoming a global human experience. Almost no one in the world lives in a monoculture any more.

It's worth thinking about this diversity as it is manifest in the public spaces in the United States.

• First there is greater ethnic diversity than ever, and it is more and more evident in the public space. 
• There is more religious diversity than ever, and it is more and more evident in our shared public spaces. 
• There is more ideological diversity that we have known, with the traditional binary of conservative and liberal being fragmented into different groupings that only partially claim or own the legacy of those names. 
• And finally there are new forms of diversity as humans re-imagine what it means to be human. Most notably the sexual differentiation of male and female is being reimagined in terms not just of sex, but gender and sexuality as well. So that individuals may identify Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual, Trans-sexual, Queer, Twin-Spirited and other. 

This last form of diversity reminds us that in our post-enlightenment culture the centuries-long consensus in the West of a divinely mandated order bound by golden chains beneath God’s feet has been largely obliterated by the reality of cultural difference. The imago Dei is contested in both its meaning and substance.

One may wish to blame the rise of materialism and science for this, but the critiques of the Western conception of humanity and thus human diversity would as inevitably come from the Islamic world, or the world of Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, and various forms of animist thought. What Christians have thought to be foundational to civilization itself is really just one possibility for organizing concepts of the human person in what may be not so much civilization as an unusually well-armed and organized barbarism. 

This diversity of diversities brings forth new religious options, and new ways of being religious. And all of those who adopt these options wish to exercise their freedom to express their particular religious beliefs and ethical mandates in public along side the older more recognized forms of religion. 

This means that we live in a period of constant negotiation between conflicting narratives of religious expression, and conflicting narratives between religious expression and public rights. And importantly, we live in an era in which governments at every level are called upon to mediate these conflicts. 

And so we call upon the establishment clause of the 1st Amendment for guidance in law, and ultimately as the arbiter in disputes. And that is why we need to talk to one another. All social progress depends on dialogue between competing understandings of the common basis of our social imagination. The greatest danger we face is any effort to delegitimize voices in our public discourse, to push anyone away from the tables at which we negotiate our future. 

Perhaps that is why right after the 1st Amendment restricts Congress from prohibiting the free exercise of religion, the 1st Amendment forbids Congress from prohibiting freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. We are here in Southern Methodist University because SMU understands its mission is to uphold those freedoms the responsibility they entails. 

Closing Remarks:

After a full day of workshops, speakers and panels it is becoming clear that the foundational documents (the US Constitution in this case) have their own foundations. What lies beneath our constitution are sets of ideas more complex that we usually realize.

So when you have a dispute over what it means to be human in society, and which rights adhere to our humanity the question arises: who decides and what basis? 

The Enlightenment basis of the US Constitution understood what it meant to be human largely on the basis of the Jewish and Christian traditions laid over those of Greek and Roman philosophy. This logically followed the Renaissance of classical learning that helped spur the Enlightenment. A brief quote from the US Declaration of Independence shows this.

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.  

Let’s begin with the final line fo the first paragraph, “A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires. . . “ This is a statement thoroughly rooted in the Enlightenment ideal of rational discourse as the basis of human decision making. Individuals and societies do not undertake to act without having and declaring their rational reasons for doing so. To fail to do so is indecent, an offense against humanity and the human mind. 

In the preceding line we can see how the classical Enlightenment understanding of humans is built on the Western theistic tradition. It refers to "The Laws of Nature and Nature’s God" as if they are indivisible, which seems only logical. Yet it is now contested. 

The Enlightenment opened the door to a new way of understanding what it means to be human, one based on the scientific exploration of what it means to be human. And that exploration, in order to realize its own integrity and freedom, disestablished nature's law from any purported lawmaker. And with this we find the rise of evolutionary, biological, medical, anthropological, sociological, and psychological definitions of what it means to be human that are not only incompatible with those of the Western Theistic tradition, but deny its relevance entirely. There is only nature, no God. 

But there is something else implicit in these short paragraphs. The Enlightenment pushed us toward concepts of human persons as free to choose their own company and destiny. They may dissolve political bonds and forge new ones with the blessing of Nature’s law and even God. But there is more than that to their autonomy. It is personal, all are equal and endowed with inalienable rights. The new citizens of the United States were no longer tied to their old hierachires, the old-world ethnic identities, clans, and religions. They could choose their personal identity and the social groups they wished to relate to. Eventually they would claim the right to choose their own sex and sexuality as well as to upend all established views of gender. As they continue to do. 

So as we discuss religious freedom we do so in an American culture that accepts three different authoritative basis for understanding the human person: 1. the classical Western tradition, 2. science, and 3. individual choice. And these three both assert themselves, are called upon in public debate, and come into conflict in our time. And all three are in fact being continuously re-negotiated. We don't agree with our founding fathers about what Scripture teaches about human nature. Science has and is changing continuously with regard to its normative understanding of the human. And even what it means to be an individual is in question as we try to understand ourselves as essentially social beings.

What we do not have is a social consensus expressed in legislation regarding the relative values for decision making of these three independent authorities. And given that, we rightly suspect that the courts that ultimately arbitrate real cases may be more influenced by the ideological commitments of the judges than existing laws.   

But if this creates conflicts, some of which Judge Starr referred to in his lecture at lunch, it also creates the demand that we continue to talk together and work together. Because only through dialogue that we reach a consensus on what is essential to our humanity, and thus the meaning of human freedom and human dignity. 

Our American English language is promiscuous to a superlative degree. As we have interacted with new and different cultures over centuries our language has continuously become enriched with new ideas and re-constructions of the world. We aren’t unique in this regard. The most basic of human actions is speech, and since the dawn of humanity we humans have spoken with one another until a common language emerges. I’ve seen this first hand as children in my granddaughter’s preschool, who speak German, English, Turkish, and Chinese at home manage quite nicely to work out how they can both communicate and work together. You can see this process in where youth gather in Europe mixing English with German, Spanish, French, and different Slavic languages. The idea of linguistic purity is as nonsensical as that of racial purity. That which humans universally can do they will universally do with one another; whether it is speak or procreate. 

To create new languages that better express a shared experience than any one older language is our greatest gift. But it only comes to us through speaking to and listening to one another across cultural, linguistic, and experiential boundaries. And more, it almost always comes about in face to face engagement that allows the full richness of our abilities to express ourselves. 

And that is why, to repeat, we are here in a university, have been here today, and will come back. Because our university is dedicated to that process of creating the language by which the Americans of the 21st century will understand themselves as humans together, and continue to defend their freedom of religion.

The Proper Product of Humans is Humanity

The most important story of humanity up to the present day has been the story of socialization; humans creating ever larger and more complex societies. 

Social anthropologists, historians, psychologists, sociologists, and economists may study this process from many perspectives, but the underlying object of study is the same: the long and continuing emergence of the humans as a social creatures in the widest sense. The emergence of humanity.

There is another perspective, however, one that emerges in the modern era and is closely linked to the self-understandings of modern humans. This perspective understands humans primarily in terms of production and consumption of things. Humans are tool makers, makers of art, makers of ritual, and builders of villages, towns, and cities. And they are consumers of the same.

This focus on production and consumption can lead us to forget that production initially served only one human purpose: the creation of societies. The earliest tools were used not merely to obtain food, but to obtain enough food to share. Plastic arts, rituals, stories, and the earliest shelters were all produced to draw people together even as they provided the means for doing so. Even weapons and war were products with the distinct purpose of protecting or allowing for the expansion of societies; and were often a direct means to the end of creating stronger social bonds.

The rise of the industrial age has obscured the relationship between production and the creation of the social human, or properly humanization and thus humanity. As production reaches new levels of sophistication individual products become less directly related to human uses, much less socializing uses. The final assembly of a automobile or a mobile phone both uses and obscures tens of thousands of component products with no apparent relationship to humans or humanity. And it obscures the fundamental purpose of both for communication between humans. 

An almost inevitable result is that more and more humans, perhaps the vast majority, are valued and value themselves not as producers of humanity, but as producers and consumers of artifacts. Add to this the fact that our products, which should serve to allow us the leisure for greater and greater human interaction, also provide the means for greater and greater isolation and we have the phenomenon of humans products implicitly supporting and even forming anti-social, anti-humans.

For those of us who are religious, that includes our products. The ritual worship we produce and the teaching we offer doesn’t necessarily support the creation of greater and more expansive societies and the deeper and deeper humanity of those within them. It can as easily reinforce tribal and even clan structures, or even (as it often does) isolate humans from their fellow humans - particularly when the focus is on personal salvation and personal success. 

My notes above clearly offer a way of attaching value to those things we humans produce: they have value only so long as they humanize. But such valuation and re-evaluation isn’t our greatest challenge. We are quickly coming to a time when more and more of what humans produce will be produced by machines. And I don’t just mean the things humans produce, although in that realm alone the dislocation humans as producers will be vast. 

Take a typical artistic product, something we humans believe is pretty exclusively our realm. 

This last few months I decided to produce a series of educational videos. In the old days of just a few years ago I could hardly have produced anything worthwhile on my own. Even if I possessed a video camera the process of editing, copying, and distributing video involved a host of professional video producers; each an artist with their own expertise. It would have been impossible without a community.

But last week I recorded my lectures, by myself, with two cameras (and two perspectives) in front of a green screen, using a teleprompter and with three studio lights. Old fashioned increases in theproduction of things, largely created by eliminating human workers and using automation, made the equipment available to me for less than $500.00. And instead of a human community, the final video could be created on my computer using smart technology that replaces, or allows me to replace, all of those artists who would have edited, color balanced, audio balanced, created backdrops and sets, etc.

Of course the final product lacked something. It was acceptable, but missed what is inevitably added by community. Its easy to forget there would be no Picasso without Paris, no Van Gough without Arles, no Rembrandt without Leiden. 

But most of us aren't them. So what about replacing me? Almost trivial given my acting skills. Computer programs exist already that could have created a digital lecturer giving my lectures in a digitally created environment. They are expensive now but they won’t be in the future. And writing the lecture? Without doubt computer algorithms are already absorbing everything written on religion into vast data banks and will be able to create not only sensible but even brilliant lectures. 

So if I value myself as a producer of lectures apart from the learning community that gathers around them,  then mine is a rapidly diminishing value. 

Do you value yourself as a salesperson? You are already being replaced by an algorithm that specifies where a computer will place products in a digital world, or a robot in a de-humanized store. 

Do you value yourself as a politician? Get serious. At any level above city councilman you could be replaced by a sophisticated Max Headroom whose image is entirely the product of marketing surveys. And those marketing surveys are increasingly surveys of digitally reproduced and refined versions of imagined humans. Why do you think a poll of only 1200 people can be accurate within 5%? Because a smart machine recreates an entire population of voters with its algorithms. And like you, but more efficiently and with no feelings of remorse or ethical distractions, Max would also vote for whatever attracts donors and insures reelection. 

Do you value yourself as a voter? A decider? Without a community of diverse humans and their views and interests you are a puppet of machine-driven marketing algorithms that know your habits and desires better than you know them yourself.  

And you marketers? Yeah, you are gone too. The focus group of the future will be an artificial intelligence evaluating the interactions of algorithms representing market segments and determining which product most appeals to them. And the product will be designed by a computer that observes consumption trends, analyzes them, and proposes new products. 

No matter what you produce, if you derive your value from production of things you are doomed to be valueless in the coming age of smart machines. With one exception, and only one exception. 

The only way to produce human society and thus full humans is through human interaction and relationships. Our true human value is manifest when we come together we make one another into a community, a society. These relationships may be mediated by things we produce - all forms of art, ritual, religion, teaching, therapy, and media come to mind. Yet the value of those things is derivative of and directly linked to our human engagement with each other. Producing things has human value only in so far as they are useful in the work of creating humanity.

And the corollary, the use of products has value only when they are used in the work of humanization. 

The reader can imagine the revolution in economics that is coming when most of us have no work producing things and all human activity must be re-valued. We will either begin to offer compensation to the humanizing, but largely uncompensated tasks now done by volunteers in their spare time, or have most of the population living idly on the dole. 

We will either begin to offer compensation for the kind of art that humanizes or see it disappear while smart machines create all the decorations and entertainment we could possibly want. 

We’ll either recognize that every human person has the capacity to humanize the rest of us, even if only by the demand on us to be humane. Because if we evaluate those who cannot efficiently produce stuff as worthless we will very soon join them in being worthless. 

Doctors, lawyers, politicians, computer programmers, CEO’s, CFO’s, pundits, and academics. All you thinkers. Do you think you are on the right side of Ayn Rand’s objectivist political philosophy? Well in the future you’ll just be a second-hander like everyone else because machines will out-think you. 

Schools and universities? We’ll either turn away from training producers of products back to the study of, and work producing, humans in human societies or we’ll be rendered irrelevant. We’ll either create humanizing communities around service, learning, and the arts or we’ll be rendered irrelevant. We’ll either serve the human task of producing humanity or we’ll disappear.

And the church? We are not immune. Many of our pastors and much of our worship will be replaced by computer algorithms and intelligently created animations. After all, a pastor who knows only a tiny fraction of the congregation face to face, and who is known only through an image on a screen will be as easily replaceable by an advanced Max H. 

The best worship leadership in the world, from choir and organ to praise band and laser light show, detached as they usually are from their audiences, will soon be created and streamed by smart machines. Indeed, most of the music coming from the major Christian publishing houses is so formulaic as to almost demand automation, and the look and feel across thousands of churches varies so little as to be negligible. 

Its easy to imagine a future where Pandora or Spotify will deliver to thousands of churches 3-D holographic worship leadership tweaked to the personal preference of the worship committee - assuming the committee isn’t replaced by careful surveys of congregational taste created for and evaluated by smart machines to maximize attendance and giving. 

The reality is that offering motivational entertainment for a market share already drawn to the higher production values of Hollywood will be literally worthless. The Christian church will either create community and foster humanity or have no value. It will be entirely our choice. Because the only proper product of humans is humanity. 

And the Gospel? The story of God’s love for the world is the greatest humanizing story ever told. But only when it is delivered in person. And that is the future of the church, or it has no future.

We are not Freaks

This weekend I was in a different city, and spent my usual time walking in a mall, because of rain. The community I encountered was ethnically diverse, and as is often the case in malls, represented a fair cross section of class, physical ability, and even degrees and types of aging. When you have a Target, a Nordstroms, and a movie theater opposite a major hospital complex all kinds of people are there.

All kinds of very normal people. People like all the people I meet on the university campus where I work, at the church where I worship, and the boat club where I waste my time. Or engage in worthwhile recreation as you wish.

I didn’t meet a single freak. I don’t think I’ve ever met a freak.

But when I turn on the TV, or read the Washington Post, or the Dallas Morning News, or look at Facebook I see freaks. Pop-eyed men and women with contorted faces. Red-faced bawlers, robo-cops with steel covered faces, bizarre avatars, shadows branded by political tattoos, distorted limbs carrying hollow cheeks with hollow stares. Hour after hour, page after page of freaks. Right wing freaks, left wing freaks, conservative freaks, progressive freaks, evangelical freaks, Pentecostal freaks, freaks in clerical collars, freaks in suits, freaks in haute couture, freaks in kitchens. Supermodel freaks, super ugly freaks. But still freaks.

All the normal people I meet every day never seem to be make it to either the major media outlets or even their alternative doppelgängers. All those people in the malls, the churches, the clubs, the civic service groups, the schools: they don’t seem to make the news or social media reposts. Or maybe its just that face to face no human is a freak.

Now its easy to blame the media for this, accusing them of running a freak show. But they wouldn’t run the freak show if we didn’t line up to step inside the tent. And at least on social media we, the facebookers, instagramers, tweeters, whatsappers are running the show.

Its an interesting question why we want to represent ourselves as Americans to ourselves as Americans this way. Why, given our vast normalcy, normalcy in many shapes and forms and interests and loves and fears for sure, but still normal, do we focus on the extremists and the extreme moments?

Part of this may be human nature. We have evolved to notice extremes because this is where danger and need are greatest. Turn someone into a freak and it gets our attention, like violence, and thus draws us in to the places where products are being sold.

But Christian preachers have played their own role. I was raised on gospel preaching that consistently raised the emotional temperature by calling on the human extremes. It reveled in the conversion of murderers, adulterers, drug addicts, and gang members. It rejoiced in the pathos when the physically disabled were displayed for healing. The spectacle of tortured souls in hell, twisted with their well-deserved pain was always on call as a warning to the unrepentant, as were vividly described scenes of a violent and sudden death that might transport even the youngest straight to those fires.

And I was raised in the Methodist and then UMC. But in the South that old time religion, that feeling-fueled effort to get an equally emotional response, was everywhere, including Methodist churches.

Preaching, especially revival preaching was frequently its own kind of freak show. And it helped create, maybe still creates, the cultural taste for freaks that the media feeds. Certainly it validates it.

Its time for Christians to put a stop to that, indeed to resist from all sides the media/social media freak show. I’ve started in my own little way. Does the TV news lead with a freak? I turn it off. Does someone repost a freak on facebook? I turn them off (30 days first, then permanently). Does the Post, or the Times, or the DMN show humans contorted with outrage or anguish or grief? I skip to the next story. I don’t need bludgeoned in order to know that there are injustices to be righted and hearts to be healed. People don't need to be displayed as freaks for us to get it. They don't need to be dehumanized to inspire us to be humane.

And then I walk out of my house, out of my office, out of my car and look around at the mall, the church, the scout troop, the boat club, the library.

Because that is where we are and who we are.

Recently I’ve been block-walking to get out the vote for local political candidate. Made me nervous because I’ve heard so much about our “highly charged” political environment. But guess what? I've now talked to more than 100 people, and knocked on way more doors. I meet some supporters of my candidate. I meet a few who support the other guy. No one has shouted at me, yelled obscenities, or even objected to my knocking at their door. Last week three supporters of our opponent thanked me for my service to democracy.

We are not freaks.

A Birth Certificate Shouldn't Be Your Destiny

Who decides who you will be? 

The other day I needed to find some documents, so I delved into the family file with all the legal stuff. There I found both my birth certificate and that of my wife Lilian.

Mine is a pretty standard official copy of a Texas birth certificate, detailing where I was born, when, sex, parents names, etc. 

My wife’s was a very different document. Long and narrow, with a coat of arms and a note that it is created according to the 1951 ordinance for registration of births and deaths. It shows she was born in Sarikei, Sarawak and gives the names of her parents (both born in China), as well as the registrar of births and deaths. The country in which she was born, Sarawak, appears in no official US government database. She was born in end times of the last "white raja" of Borneo, Viner Brooke. It wasn’t modern Malaysia. And it wasn’t a British colony, and strictly speaking it wasn’t quite a country, since Raja Brooke was sort of under the Sultan or Brunei. Sort of. Still, there it was, an official government document from a government that no longer exists. (And let me tell you, trying to talk to the Social Security Administration about a country that doesn’t exist is a pain.) 

Now I’ve been to my wife's hometown of Sarikei, but I don’t remember the house in which I was born because we moved when I was just over a year old. And suddenly here I had the address. Which I instantly recognized. It is just a block from where Lilian and I have lived for the last 14 years. How about that. After 50 years away, and 20 overseas, and parent’s long passed, I moved back to within a block of my birthplace, which I pass every day while out walking.

Destiny? No. A series of choices we made about the kind of house we could afford close to the lake and SMU. 

In another drawer there is another stack of documents. Our passports. With all those years abroad we both have many, most now punched or mutilated to indicate they are no longer valid, but had still valid visas we needed.  

The two most recent passports for Lilian and I are both blue, both US passports, and both have the same address just a block from my birth place. All her older passports are red, and came from Malaysia. From before she was a naturalized US citizen.

Destiny? No, choices that she was free to make about the country she would call her home. 

If there was anything clear at the founding of the United States, and its subsequent history, it is that your birth certificate is not your destiny. It can tell you who you were. It cannot tell you who you will become, where you will live, and what you will do with your life.

Deeply embedded in the vision of humanity at the core of our country is this simple idea: We as individuals, and as a nation, choose our destiny. It isn’t handed to us by the “old country” with its ancient religious bigotry and fawning subservience to fading political structures. A new nation is a chance for a new identity, new friends and acquaintances, new political parties, new professions. And always at the root is personal choice. No one can tell you what religion you have to follow, what job you have to do, who you have to vote for, which party you should join, where you have to live, who you can visit, and on and on. You can even choose your ethnicity if you don’t like the choices you are given on the form.

(I think about this sometimes, since my granddaughters have a Euro-American grandfather of mixed European heritage, An Austro-Hungarian Jewish grandfather with a little English mixed in, a Chinese grandmother, and a Ukrainian Jewish grandmother whose family may have come out of Iran. Their mother and father already stretch the ethnic label boundaries, and thus what are they? Here's an answer: humans.)

When I told some Austrians I'd worked with for years that I was moving back to the US one said, "Amerikaneren sind wurzzelos." Americans are rootless. She was right, and its the best thing about us. 

There is an interesting article in the Washington Post about a different kind of roots. It spurred some of these observations: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/06/27/feature/seeking-a-scientific-explanation-for-trans-identity-could-do-more-harm-than-good/

It ends by noting that the matter of sexual identity is determined by the individual as they discover who they are and want to be. It isn’t determined by science, and it isn’t determined by their birth certificate. Regardless of the influence of biology or genetics it is their choice. And it is a choice they fully have a right to make. And in our country, in the United States, it is a choice that we should all respect. Because our nation is founded on that fundamental idea that individuals decide who they are and whose they are. 

None of us should have to carry our birth certificate around, much less wear it like a ball and chain.

Except that’s whats some politicians want, Dan Patrick and Ken Paxton here in Texas in particular. They are demanding a law that people can only go to the bathroom that matches their birth certificate. And more than that, that all bathrooms be gendered as well! They are demanding that a birth certificate also be a destiny.

As others are demanding, in another way, of all those who want to come to the United States and make us their nation. "Give me your tired, your poor, your wretched masses yearning to breath free" has become "Stay out and stay home. Your birth certificate is your destiny, and you are destined to oppression, violence, poverty, and war."

Those of us who believe in the vision on which the United States was founded need to oppose these enemies of our values every step of the way, whether they are in public office or hidden behind the facades of PACs . They need to be voted out of office as quickly as possible so that we can return to being a state, and nation, in which words on a document filed at your birth never determine who you are, or what you dream about becoming.

The Outrage Factories

Get their raw materials from you and me.

We all have psychological pain within us. It is part of the human condition - what the Buddha called dukkha. Dukkha is often translated “suffering,” but I think a better definition is the condition of permanent dissatisfaction with the world, arising from the fact that it is transient. It is our abiding sense that happiness is fleeting while disease, decrepitude, and death are inevitable. It is suffering in the sense that suffering is the anticipation that pain will not end.

Now one would think that dukkha is something we all want to escape, and that anyone with a conscience would want to help us escape it. But we don’t and they won’t help. Because this permanent state of dissatisfaction is an itch we love to scratch, and a terrific resource for those seeking power and wealth. We’ll buy almost any thing or any idea, we’ll follow almost any course of action that promises us some relief from dukkha. 

One way to monetize dukkha is to tap into lust, which is the desire for distraction that takes our minds off dissatisfaction. Lust is the inevitable psychological accompaniment to dukkha, its flip side really. To be human is to be either desiring or to be dissatisfied, and you know which feels better. 

Advertisers have understood the power of lust for a very long time. If you can attach lust to a specific object or action people will buy and buy again. Because even as they experience the exhilaration of being distracted from their dissatisfaction they are dragging it along behind them like a ball and chain. 

Distraction is the meal that makes you hungry instead of full. 

But there is much more insidious use of the dukkha. If you can tap into the primal dissatisfaction in all humans, and attach that dissatisfaction, that suffering to an object or idea or event, then you can create outrage. You create a burning psychological pain that focuses a lifetime of suffering in one place and time on one thing. And once the rage is out, you can put it to use. 

To do that all you have to do is offer release, a way out of the dissatisfaction, and end to the suffering. Not realrelease of course, then you don’t have anything to manipulate. But you can promise release, you can promise that the pain will go away. And people will buy. 

The promise of release from the pain of outrage can take many forms, since we humans have a whole range of built in mechanisms for escaping psychological pain. Distraction is illusory but common. Drugs and alcohol have been around a long time. 

Then there is violence directed at whatever we’ve been taught it outrageous. Making other people suffer, or even causing yourself pain, is a great way of taking your mind off of dukkha. And of course that can run the range from harassment, to verbal abuse, to  physical violence. Turning dissatisfaction to outrage, and outrage to violence is one of the oldest political tools for those seeking power. We see it deployed daily worldwide and in the US.

Another possibility is to incite actions that will supposedly create an imagined future. The energy of present outrage can be directed into activities, like talking to this therapist, taking this medicine, voting for this party, marching for this cause, or donating to this charity or advocacy group will drain off the outrage and quiet the persistent pain of dissatisfaction.

It won’t, although it may change things for the better for others. The danger here is that the persistent pain will require stronger and stronger medicine. The danger is that frustration with the failure to reach impossible goals can eventually fuel the flame of violence. We’ve seen it again and again.   

The manufacturers of outrage and the promised relief are no different from the manufacturers of any good or service that objectifies our suffering then promises to relief from the pain. They want something in return for the relief they offer. It may be political power. It may be money, or less directly book sales. It may be eyeballs on ads. It may be celebrity as they pursue their own futile efforts at escape from dukkha.

Ultimately what they want is for you to lose freedom, becoming chained to whatever object they’ve convinced you causes your suffering, and whatever drug is on offer to cure the pain. Because they want to control your life, not you. 

Whether its HuffPo or Fox, the DCCCP or the GOP, (or many a religious group) the goal is to keep you and your outrage chained to their cause and their promise of relief, in exchange for dollars and power. 

This does’t mean they are necessarily bad people, although some are. The deeper problem is that this exchange, this psychological and economic transaction, is the root transaction of all human relationships not built on love. 

There is a better path to an end of dukkha, permanent dissatisfaction, and indeed the end of the suffering of our fellow humans and all creatures. It is the path that begins with self-realization, through acknowledging the dissatisfaction at our core. It leads to giving up all naiveté about ways to relieve it, understanding that only the silenced mind, the detached self, is unburdened by suffering. And it ends in cultivating compassion, a love for others that leads directly to acting in their interests without a detour through outrage. To put it in Christian terms, it is to abandon either law or punishment as a resolution of sin, and embrace God’s grace given freely in Jesus Christ. And then to act out of that grace.

Because only when we are set free can we do what is right for others, and not merely what gives temporary relief to our own suffering. 

Sticks and Stones

May break my bones, but words will never hurt me. 

I was taught as a small boy to say this in answer to the inevitable bullying and insults that are part of growing up. I suppose it was a kind of psychological defense if you were too scrawny (or in my case fat) to mount a more physical defense. 

Once I was older I realized it is complete BS, a bizarre post-Enlightenment gnosticism in which the mind is totally under the control of the will, and the body is irrelevant. It works, but at a high cost in self-dehumanization. 

Actually, as the Bible makes clear, words cause plenty of good and plenty of real harm. Some of it is direct, damaging permanently people’s minds and hearts. Much of it is indirect, providing the emotional and even intellectual rational for actual physical violence against others. 

Unfortunately the current core of American political ethics can be summed up in two words: plausible deniability. You can say anything you want, however hateful and inflammatory, as long as you go on and say, “but don’t hurt anyone,” or “no violence,” or “but I love them anyway,” or “that’s just a joke", or "locker room talk", or “a little hyperbole for effect,” or “its just politics,” or even “they deserve it.” After all, "sticks and stones. . ." and man-up and all that. 

So you get to fire your words out there like arrows, to use a Biblical image, and then quickly throw away the bow and deny you meant any harm. 

Well I call BS on that too. Are you shouting in someone’s face, using demeaning language, launching verbal attacks, lying, insulting or marginalizing some group of people (Muslims, journalists, liberals, conservatives, Jews, men, women, gays, transgendered, Republicans, Democrats, the poor, the rich, etc)?  Well you are causing real harm, real hurt, and you are engendering real violence even if you never personally lift a finger.

Jesus said, (Luke 6 for all those Christians from left to right who seem to have forgotten the Bible.) “But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.”

I don't recall Jesus saying, "unless you are really offended, frightened, angry, or hurt." or "unless it is a useful political strategy."

Attributed to Gandhi is an appropriate comment for our times. “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” Jesus' words are the secret to remaining human in dehumanizing times, they are the secret for keeping our vision in a world gone blind. And we have never needed humans with vision more than now. 

"Government of the people, by the people,

and for the people, shall not perish from the earth”

Lately it seems that some Christians believe that once something is legal, or constitutional, enacting it becomes moral, and that our lawmakers, and executive rise above moral responsibility when they act within the law. This is dangerous non-sense. 

Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg pose the most ethically challenging description of a democracy in the modern era. They underscore this simple fact: In the United States the people, the voters, bear direct moral responsibility for the actions undertaken on their behalf by the government. They created the government and they have to own its actions. 

Of course the term “government” is misleading. It isn’t just the voters who are responsible for government. The government itself is made up of elected individuals. Because legislators have the power to create, change, and end laws they individually bear moral responsibility for their actions as law makers. 

And even the executive branch cannot evade moral responsibility in its enforcement of the law, because the legislators have given the executive branch wide latitude in exercising its judgment in how to best enforce the law.

In short, and to repeat, there is no such thing as “government.” It is a meaningless abstraction. There are morally responsible (or irresponsible) people making and enforcing laws.No one of voting age in the United States and no one elected or appointed to office can reasonably speak of the behavior of "the government," or "the law," as something separate from their personal moral behavior and responsibility.

I make this point as we focus our attention on the present situation with migration and immigration. Legislators are personally morally responsible for their failure over decades to pass reasonable legislation addressing the challenge of economic migrants and asylum seekers in relation to American aspirations to be a moral nation. Because the laws they pass affect many countries outside the US, they bear moral responsibility for having helped create the need for economic migration and asylum on countries outside the US, and for America’s economic need for workers. 

At the same time the executive branch is morally responsible for the policies it has created as the chief agent of foreign policy and their negative impact on people outside the US. And it bears responsibility for implementation of recognizably problematic immigration laws, particularly in areas where it has the power to determine when, how many, and under which circumstances to issue visas or deportations.

And yes, that is as true of the past voters, legislatures and administrations as it is true of those currently in office. 

But finally it is you and I, the voters, who are morally responsible for what is happening on the border. We elected our legislators and our president, we have access to them to influence their decision making, and we will vote to change them. 

Nor does our moral responsibility end just because we didn’t vote for the winning person or party. None of us is a moral island who hasn’t influenced and been influenced by our neighbors. We are responsible for the sins and righteousness of our society even if we didn’t directly commit the former or encourage the latter. “Ask not for whom the bell tolls. . . .” Its worth looking up. 

I suggest that instead of moaning and pointing fingers of blame at “the government” or even a particular political party, (and parties are also a moral fiction hiding individual responsibility,) we get to work changing things. Protest if that’s your thing, write letters to the editor, call your congressman, volunteer for any of the groups that aid migrants and their families, do business in Latin America in a way that resolves rather than creating social problems if you have the capacity, run for office yourself. But most of all VOTE and encourage your neighbors to vote.  

Responsibility, Blame, and the Criminalization of Need

We're responsible even when we’re not to blame.

As our nation considers the question of who, when, and how we’ll allow immigrants to come into the US, and our president leads with his well known moral constancy, it is worthwhile to consider what Christians believe about the relationship between responsibility and blame. 

The answer is easy. The life of Christ, and the parable of the Good Samaritan make the same point: We are responsible for the welfare of others even when we are not to blame for their suffering. And as Christ showed on the cross, it isn’t just a matter of innocent victims. As he took responsibility for us because of our entirely self-inflicted sin, so we have responsibility even for those who brought their problems on themselves. 

The problem we face living out a Christ-like life is that we have multiple overwhelming and conflicting responsibilities for the welfare of our neighbors and family. They are overwhelming because no amount of personal time and energy will solve even one of these problems. I know a woman who has given her life, every minute of every day, to promoting the welfare of orphaned children. Still, there are more and more orphans every year. The list goes on of those types of individuals to whom any one of us or our whole community could give everything without solving their problems. 

Even Jesus could not cure all the diseases of his Galilean world, or feed all the hungry in his neighborhood. Even in the first century a meal for 5,000 was a drop in the bucket of hunger. 

Then there are the conflicting needs. The victim on the side of the road calls for a Good Samaritan, but the person who passes by may have a sick child at home, a dying mother, or just a job that will be lost if he’s late again. The moral demands on our time and energy never offer simple choices.

So we are all caught up in the complex ethical problems created by overwhelming need and competing goods. And we have no choice but to make difficult choices about how we’ll use our personal and social time and resources to take responsibility for our neighbors, regardless of their blame.

And that is as it should be if we are followers of Christ. The unease, the psychological pressure from making moral choices, helps us grasp God’s love for us. It cuts off our self-righteousness at the roots, and leads us to fully embrace God’s gracious judgment on our lives; far more gracious the that of our neighbors or than the judgment we so regularly render on others.

Unfortunately we’ve found a way to avoid those moral choices. It relieves our psychological pressure. And ultimately it relieves us of reliance on God. We’ve found a way to maintain and even increase our human self-centeredness and the autonomy to which Sin continually calls us. 

We’ve discovered the criminalization of need. 

By making human need a crime we’ve alleviated ourselves of responsibility for it. After all, what decent Christian person should support crime? Drug addiction, alcoholism? Make either the addict a criminal or the behaviors that follow a crime and you don’t have to help addicts get sober.  You just thrown them in jail. Poverty? Make debt a crime, whether it an inability to pay traffic fines, for example, or failure to pay taxes, and you can safely and quickly toss poor people out of their homes as a prelude to putting them in jail and never take responsibility for helping them out of poverty. 

And what if children are being murdered by gangs, refugees are fleeing from from war, or pregnant women are starving to death? Make migration across national borders a crime and you can shuttle them into pens, or let them die in the desert of thirst, or just shoot them down when they run. Because Christians in a Christian nation don’t have to take responsibility for criminals. 

Jesus knew something about the criminalization of need. Hungry on the sabbath? Too bad, eating is a crime. Sick? Whoops, healing on the sabbath is a crime. Did you happen to get mugged on the road? Well being unclean is a crime and I don’t have my rubber gloves to help you up. Blind? Yeah, that’s a crime too - your parent’s if not yours. Maybe you need to pay your tithe, but got your salary in the emperor’s coin? Well its a crime to use that money. 

The enemies of the gospel have always maintained their righteousness and ignored their responsibility for the welfare of their neighbors by criminalizing need. Its the oldest trick in the book. So it is surprising that Christians who actually have that book, and claim to know its author, and accept the validity of his rebuke of those who use this trick, have used it themselves. Indeed Christians in Congress and in the Whitehouse, fully supported by their Christian constituencies across the US are still using it: a nation of whitewashed tombs.  

Is America a Secular Nation?

No. 

The term “secular,” in terms of a public realm absent all religion or reference to transcendent values didn’t exist in the time of the founding of the United States. The founders of the United States were careful to exclude both religion generally, and distinctly Christian expressions specifically, from the constituting of the US as a nation. And of course the First Amendment forbids the government from establishing a religion. 

Yet references to transcendent values that are assumed to guide the public are foundational to the beginnings of the United States. Take the Declaration of Independence:

"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Here "Nature's God" is given equal place to the "Laws of Nature" in entitling people to their political rights, as it is their Creator who endows them with unalienable rights including Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. 

Since that time the public practice of religion by politicians and even political bodies has never been forbidden by the courts so long as it does not “establish” religion or deny anyone’s religious freedom. Legislatures have chaplains and open with prayer, so long as they are non-sectarian and non-exclusive. And however relatively new and controversial we have the Pledge of Allegiance and “In God We Trust” on our currency. 

So religion is neither excluded from the public realm or even from the specifically political realm. Indeed religion is a critical player in public discourse as the founding fathers no doubt anticipated.  

As I noted in the last blog this doesn’t mean the United States is a Christian, or even religious nation. 

The United States is rather a nation with no established religion but which in offering freedom of religion makes room for religion in the public and political realm. This creates an intentionally religiously plural public environment. 

The birth of the United States would eventually give birth to what has become the most difficult problem for contemporary Christian life: sharing the public space as a realm of religious witness. 

As the United States has become more complex, and as it is now in the midst of de-Christianization, we find ourselves in an environment in which the claims of the gospel must be heard amidst other, and sometimes contradictory claims about God, God’s self-revelation, and God’s love. More can be said of this evangelistic context, but I’ll assert here that to be taken seriously in our cultural context our witness to Christ must explicitly recognize the right of other religions to the public space. In this cultural space we can neither ignore them nor deny them them a place without denying the basis of our own religious freedom of witness. And it seems to me that we both assert our right and theirs best by engaging in dialogue over matters of mutual interest. 

Secondly, all political theology in the public space must become inter-religious theology. We cannot separate out what it means to be a faithful Christians in our political actions from what it means to be joined in the common democratic work with people of other religions.

And finally, as our public space has become more religiously complex, and thus not dominated by a single religion, it has left room for those who are not religious or who are even anti-religious. And that has been affirmed by the Supreme Court as a natural result of the establishment clause of the constitution. This forces us to consider a public political theology that recognizes and cooperates with committed political engagement not based on religious principles. 

This challenges us in a good way, for it forces us to ask with renewed clarity about how God's providence is alive beyond the boundaries of not only our religion, but all religions, and thus to proclaim a God whose engagement with our social world is comprehensive enough to be worthy of worship.