Cornel West Turns His Gaze On Ta Nehisi Coates

My thoughts regarding Cornel West's schooling of Ta Nehisi Coates.

Recently Dr. Cornel West's critiques of Ta Nehisi Coates have spilled into the public sphere. For some background you can check out Michael Harriot's piece in The Root. 

Dr. West views the American Empire through a Marxist/Christian frame. From this frame to demand redress of oppression, to demand justice and equality from that empire as one who is oppressed by that power is to legitimize the existence and authority of the empire. So from Dr. West’s ideological frame the louder Coates speaks about injustice from the frame of one who has experienced the damage of white supremacy the more that makes Coates an accomplice of legitimizing the American Empire in the role of a victim. West's critique, as I read it, is that Coates would be a better servant of justice if he were to extricate his voice and perspective from that of a reporter of human experience and history and advocate of justice in order to take the role of ideological analyst outside of individual context and historical experience. In doing so Coates would be much more capable of overthrowing American Empire wholesale through the piercing light of complex analysis.
 
In my own experience, try as I might to position myself as outside my history and experience, I simply cannot discover the intellectual, spiritual or moral expertise that Dr. West has found that allows him to exist outside the lived experience of the master/slave dialectic and the American Empire. How West has managed to pull this off while working at Harvard and other established Universities firmly embedded within the neoliberal tradition (taking their salary, health insurance and so forth) is thoroughly beyond my vision.
 
In the meantime, I will continue to agree with Coates that a demand for justice, the articulation and memory of experienced oppression, is not some secret deal with the devil that is an acquiescence to injustice and oppression. I will continue to believe, as Coates has demonstrated so powerfully and my own experience suggests, that white supremacy is engrained in white experience and consciousness so deeply that even if America were able to find a non-violent means to overthrow the current means of production and/or oppression we would still live in a thoroughly racist and white supremacist structure just in new forms and institutions.
In short, I’m not so sure West’s Marxist/Christian frame is superior to Coates’ agnostic-humanist frame in analyzing our history or current situation. West's more academic and philosophical approach working from theory to experience is certainly broader. Coates' more humanist, historical, and experiential approach, however, has the benefit of interacting at profound depths with a narrative within a lived community and shared experience. While Coates may not yet possess a philosophical sheen born of and certified by the academy as does West, Coates’ use of probing historical and personal experience is as effective a case of applied existentialism and good old-fashioned agnostic humanism as exists today.
 
I love what Dr. West has added to my life in thinking broadly. But in this case, for me, Dr. West’s critique of Coates not only reveals some of the contours of thought that Coates may want to address in order to expand his voice, but even more so West's critique reveals the obvious shortcomings of his own analysis and the limitations of a too ideological frame in addressing the depths of lived human experience. West contends that Coates fails the test of addressing everything. This may be true, but Coates approach is such that what he does address is made plain, revealed, and the possibility of change made real. In short, Coates - the agnostic - has acquired the voice of one crying in the wilderness. West, in addressing everything in his ideological critique of Empire might wonder if in fact he actually touches anything at all. Perhaps West - the one who readily adopts the role of prophet - could learn from Coates what it means to deepen his prophetic voice. 

The Slow Creep of Fascism

The thing with fascism is that it just slowly becomes the norm. The sun still shines, the birds still sing, people still pitch in during a hurricane, the SF Giants still suck and the Warriors start up again in a month or so.

But all the while the norms we live with inexorably change. The President's mouthpiece demands that a critic get fired, that an investigator be imprisoned. Law enforcement is encouraged to resort to violent extremes. Our friends, our neighbors, the people we go to church with are transformed into suspects. We find myriad excuses - "Freddie Gray had it coming, learning disabled children don't really need the protection of human rights, America was better off when certain groups couldn't vote." Or, simply, "I wish people would shut up on Facebook and focus on the good things in life." But at the bottom of it all is this one single thought: "As long as it isn't me."

'We Send a Report Every Morning to ICE': Motel 6 Reportedly Outing Guests to Immigration Officials

The Danger of a Propaganda-Driven America

Human beings have always been vulnerable to propaganda and ideology that caters to their darkest fears. Once sufficiently held captive by their fears, by ideology and propaganda groups of people begin to strike out violently and/or look the other way while ideological violence strikes others. Small outbreaks of violence become normalized. Acts of coordinated political violence become permissible. Finally, large outbreaks of violence against groups of people considered 'vermin' become 'righteous' acts of self-preservation.

My dear friends, the US right now has traveled a long ways down the road of this process. A significant number of us have been propagandized into existential fears against Muslims, Jews, gays, people of color, immigrants, liberal 'snowflakes', the disabled, homeless, atheists, the press, climate scientists, etc. Small outbreaks of violence in spray-painted swastikas, an 8 year old boy lynched, 'Patriot prayer' rallies that pose as pretexts for violence pepper local news feeds daily. Coordinated political violence against immigrants are now the norm as ICE rounds up children in schools, breaks up families. The President encourages the police to rough up suspects and treat them violently. Joe Arpaio is pardoned. DACA youths put on notice. Basic norms of political functioning and human decency are transgressed daily. The likelihood of a free and fair national election is remote, if not impossible given what happened in 2016 and our non-response to it.

I believe people don't realize how much danger we are in. The things going in our favor as a society is the utter incompetence of the executive branch as well as a reservoir of goodwill that seems to be ingrained in significant numbers of Americans. But there is an inexorable march to outbreaks of propaganda-driven violence. Truth as a norm, once demolished, becomes nearly impossible to recover without the fire of tragedy. And without truth a society is incapable of neither mercy or justice. My fear is that such a society waits for us just around the corner.

Bernie Sanders Is Not Helping

Bernie Sanders supporters, let me speak plainly. There is historic distrust between the economic left (socialist wing) and the civil rights movement. This distrust is rooted in the economic left's frequent detours into overt racism on behalf of the white working class that goes back generations.

In the 2000's America had two significant pushes for immigration reform, once under George W. and again under Obama. Obviously the extreme right/freedom caucus would have none of it. But neither would the economic left wing. Not only was Bernie not an ally to Hispanic labor, he was overtly hostile towards it and was an ally of racist dog-whistlers such as Lou Dobbs, etc. This is why Dolores Huerta was so hostile towards Bernie in the last election and why Bernie, in response, treated the concerns of Hispanic labor and leaders like Dolores Huerta with open hostility. The treatment that Dolores Huerta received from Bernie and his supporters here in California was frankly, disgusting - worse than Trump and Trump supporters.

On top of this are the concerns of voters for whom Hillary represented a major advancement of the concerns of women. At this moment the Sanders base, as far as I can tell, is more interested in telling Hillary to shut up and leave public life than say, Steve Bannon. The democratic base, on the whole, still see Hillary's accomplishment as the first woman to receive a major nomination and win millions more votes than her opponent as a landmark for women's empowerment. To be told that they and their champion should 'shut up' and that their concerns are not important is not likely to bring a sense of unity. To do so at a moment in time when misogyny is making a worldwide comeback is doubly wrong-headed.

My point is this. The historic tension between the concerns of the civil rights coalition and the economic left have never been more frayed. Telling Hillary to shut up and shaming her from public life merely exacerbates this tension. Watching Bernie's role in this leaves me in a position of supporting key elements of his platform but wishing, very much, that Bernie and his 1950's white savior complex would exit stage left. Frankly, if Bernie were to join Hillary in leaving aside Presidential politics I would be very happy. It's time for a new generation to take the reigns. We need some folks who understand the divide we're in and how to heal these open wounds. Point blank, Bernie shows no signs of healing them and only pours his energy into exacerbating them. He's not helping, he's hurting.

Segundo Galilea: The Power of Christian Contemplation

"Authentic Christian contemplation, passing through the desert, transforms contemplatives into prophets and heroes of commitment, and militants into mystics. Christianity achieves the synthesis of the politician and the mystic, the militant and the contemplative, and abolishes the false antithesis between the religious contemplative and the militantly committed. Authentic contemplation, through the encounter of the absolute of God, leads to the absolute of one's neighbor." 

- Segundo Galilea, from Liberation as an Encounter with Politics and Contemplation

Non-Violence: It's Not What You Think It Is

I hear a lot of voices advocating for non-violence without understanding what non-violence is. Non-violence is not passivity or a willingness to tolerate evil. Non-violence is a type of warfare that is waged strategically with weapons of the spirit. Proponents of non-violence must be willing to die in battle just as any other soldier in warfare. The basic thought of non-violence is that the love-ethic modeled by Jesus is the most powerful force in the human sphere, and perhaps in the sphere of the known material universe. If our ultimate goal is social change in the direction of genuine shalom then non-violence is the best and, perhaps, only methodology. Non-violence rooted in the love-ethic of Jesus finds its antecedents in the mystical elements of radical protestant reformation and Catholic counter-reformation. American transcendentalists and abolitionists began to shape these thoughts but it was Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy, who began to shape these strands into a genuine idea. The idea of non-violence rooted in Jesus' love-ethic moved from being an idea to an actual practice through the work and genius of Gandhi who studied Tolstoy deeply. The non-violent strategies of Gandhi were handed on to Howard Thurman and other black American pastors, mystics and theologians in the 1930's. It was this moment that brought the various strands for social justice together in what we now broadly understand to be the Civil Rights movement. Non-violence should be distinguished from pacifism which generally avoids provocations and conflict while non-violence seeks out strategic prophetic acts that deliberately provoke and unmask unjust power structures. Non-violence should also be distinguished from non-violent communication and consensus building. Non-violent communication and consensus building are methods of communication that seek to build community within a bonded social set. Non-violent communication and consensus building are essential building blocks of a non-violent community capable of living out a strategy of social change through non-violence. However, practitioners of non-violence understand that they cannot be shamed into silence and non-confrontation when supposed allies seek to quiet them with the need to use non-violent communication. It is worth noting that non-violence is not the only path serious leaders for social change have followed. The Civil Rights movement split over the nature and limits of non-violence. Malcolm X decided against non-violence but later in life softened in his stance towards it. Dietrich Bonhoeffer began as a pacifist, moved towards non-violence, but late in his life struggled with the limits of it and ultimately rejected it. In America the greatest practitioner and most widely known proponent of non-violence was Martin Luther King, Jr. However, it has become something of an American pastime (especially among white Christian folks) to throw out a quote or two about how "Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that" without reckoning with how relentless MLK was in confronting hatred head on. If you listen to MLK's final sermons and speeches it is plain that he deliberately provoked and unmasked hatred to the point of his eventual martyrdom. King did not whitewash evil. He did not want everybody to get along while injustice and violence were the structures of society. He did not tell the marchers to stand down. Non-violence teaches us to keep getting up and keep getting our skulls cracked open while polite society shouts, "By confronting hate you are hateful. Hate can't drive out hate, only Love can do that!" Non-violence teaches us that through confrontation we unmask not only those who are filled with hate, but also those whose love has been stunted by cowardice, ignorance and selfishness. Non-violence teaches that through sacrifice and spirit-based combat there is a new humanity and a beloved community that is worth dying for.

For a deeper dive I recommend beginning where Gandhi started, Leo Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You.

Get Radical

About 16 years ago my dear friend Jack Kooreman and I had a chance to ask our mentor and hero, civil rights leader Dr. John Perkins, what one piece of advice would he give as we were about to enter full time ordained ministry. I will never forget his answer, four words:
"Get radical. Get radical."

I have yet to truly get radical but I have been on a lifelong journey trying to get there since then. At any rate, if ever there was a time to get radical that time is now.
In his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" MLK put it this way:

The Beloved Community and the Healing of Whiteness

After re-reading the great essay, "Dylan Roof Is an American Problem," I'm meditating on how Dylan Roof's story and manifesto sheds light on the story of White America as we live in it today. (I will not share his manifesto on my blog, but it is very much worth studying if you are called to dive deep into the darkness). I strongly recommend reading the linked essay and if possible Roof's manifesto before reading my meditation which follows.

White America today is a young child lost in the haunted house of our unspeakable history, unable to find a way out. We created the myth of whiteness and the new Protestant Exodus. We used this myth unto genocide, slavery and oppression. And now we are terrorized and haunted by our own story. Our every impulse is to crucify the truth and create a mythology of greatness despite the fact that we cannot help but spiral into deeper and intensifying violence and degradation. Whether we fight against racism, fight for it, or simply stand by in confusion we are all of us horrified at what we've become.

We stand at a precipice. We are living in the middle of the changing of an age. Our urgent project is to dig deep within ourselves, to eschew our falsely constructed whiteness and to embrace our humanity. Our urgent project is lamentation, repentance, and the journey of humility to listen to brothers and sisters of color who have been patient with us beyond any reasonable expectation. For any who still identifies chiefly as 'white' the only path forward is to embrace what Jesus called, "Dying unto self." That is to say, taking off the old clothing of our false selves and putting on the new clothing of the new humanity Jesus promised we would find. This is a journey through the valley of the shadow of death of our old selves, loss of false identity, loss of false pride and false righteousness. This is a journey of honesty with our history and of dying to it.

We must not, however, give in to despair. We must fear no evil. There is a more excellent path, the path of a deep love-ethic and the community that embraces it. Dr. Martin Luther King and the great heroes of our nation pointed us to the beloved community. In the Beloved Community all true selves are welcome and embraced as beautiful image-bearers of the divine - particularly those who've lost all sense of ethnic identity through historical and lineal happenstance. You can enter as a member of a tribe or as an orphan of no tribe. All are equal and loved in the Beloved Community. As the old song puts it (even though now the lyrics sound quaint and more than a little cringeworthy): "Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red and yellow black and white, they are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world." [Note: here's a wonderful write up of Rev. Clarence Herbert Woolston who wrote this delightful tune during one of America's ugliest racist eras]. Make no mistake, dying to a deeply held identity, even one as false and violent as whiteness, is no easy task. I have been trying to die to my false self in all its manifestations for many years now and I am often discouraged to discover I'm still just beginning. And even though I still haven't found what I'm looking for, there's a joy I've found knowing I've left the haunted house behind as I journey to discover the embrace of the Beloved Community all the while cheered on by a great cloud of witnesses.

Precipice

I'm too tired to do much writing these days, but if I could I would focus my attention on the necessity of building and strengthening our capacity for collective moral and spiritual care for each other. We live in an era where the very concept of such care is under assault. "If masses of people live and die without basic necessities such as food, healthcare, or housing - then so be it. God has willed it to be so and charity for the undeserving is the best we should expect." - or so the thinking goes at its most base level.

This thinking is so wrong on so many levels it is perplexing even to know where to begin. How does one fight such a wave of misanthropy when at institutions like Calvin Theological Seminary (my alma mater) the professor of social ethics (when I attended) spent the better part of an entire semester teaching that greed is the only virtue that can hold society together? (Don't ask me, ask Dr. Van Reken).

But here's what I want to consider. In a matter of one or two generations technology will have increased to a level where we will be able to create superhumans. The elite class will be able to custom design their children's DNA. Are we willing to take a libertarian gospel of Ayn Rand view of such a world? Already we've shown that we simply don't care at all about the children of Flint, Michigan or East Chicago or of countless places like that where the children of the poor are subjected to environmental degradation that will profoundly damage the IQ and life potential of the children who grow up there. We simply don't care, not at a collective level. What happens when the capacities of technology and wealth are so great that simply not having designer DNA will mean your children can't get into college or university? I will not have to face this reality, but my children will.

Currently we live in a nation that struggles with and is on the edge of rejecting basic notions of care such as that a child born with a medical condition has a right to access care. No one wants children to die, but collectively we're deciding to shrug our shoulders if we build a society where that happens with regularity. Our collective moral and spiritual capacity fails on basic norms such as caring for the sick, housing the homeless, and providing water that doesn't poison our children. How will we ever find the the moral or spiritual capacities to answer questions such as who is allowed to access designer DNA? Which people should be allowed to live a mere 75-90 years and which people should be allowed to access life extension to live 150 or more years? What do we do with the record breaking excess wealth that technology and super-corporations create while the class of permanently unemployed reaches 30, 40, 50% or higher? Or are we genuinely so spiritually bankrupt that we think the market should decide such questions? Do we truly believe the 'market' is somehow more real and less demanding of human sacrifice than Moloch or Baal?

Our technical and wealth elites show little or no capacity for moral or spiritual thought and appear to be entirely comfortable with a world dominated by non-democratic norms in which equality of any kind is a curse, restraint an abomination. Add to this the toxicity of our current President's open admiration of so-called genetically superior people (of which he considers himself foremost) and the boost of energy this has given to global white supremacy and we rest, I fear, on the edge of a precipice.

Sandcastles

Watching Trump irreparably harm the NATO alliance this past week was entirely predictable, in fact I predicted it last spring. (I stand by my prediction that eventually much of the world will have to impose sanctions against the US in order to reign in Trump's malfeasance and idiocy).
But just because it was entirely predictable doesn't mean it was easy to watch. I got nauseous thinking of all the bloodshed that led us to understand the necessity of building this alliance, the generations of intelligence and good will that went into constructing it, and Trump smashed it like a 6 year old stomping the sandcastle his older sisters lovingly built. And to what end, to what purpose? To make the world substantially less safe and less stable? To spit in the eyes of our allies and the democracies they have carefully constructed and instead to embrace individual dictators - most particularly, Putin? Trump has a deep longing for a return to an aristocratic and despotic age, rule by fiat and personality rather than law. Trump has always shown disdain for the structures built by the unwashed masses with their messy democracies and constraints of courts, rules, alliances and the like. In short, Trump despises restraint. He sees himself as a great man whose destiny is to be unbound by restraint. It is the most obvious and essential component to his personality. Restraint also just so happens to be the thing that keeps humanity from destroying itself in this nuclear age as well as in the face of global warming.

I think what nauseates me most is how thoroughly so many who ought to know better embrace this idiocy or tolerate it grudgingly simply because they reflexively hate the reality that America has developed a more tolerant and less rigid culture. I have been told numerous times that God will somehow shepherd us through our own idiocy and protect us so that we need not worry about blithely tearing down what has been painstakingly built. John Calvin had a word for this type of magical thinking that posed as an imposter for genuine faith - superstition. We live in an era awash with religious superstition - with malice masked as righteousness and superstition masked as faith. If history teaches us anything about a generation like this it is this: buckle up for safety, this won't end well.

Ditching the Siren Song of False Narratives

I've been mulling over the role of religious myopia for many years. But over the past few months I've been thinking about it with some urgency as it seems to me it has become central to our current national crisis. What do I mean by religious myopia? I'll begin with this jarring exchange from Isaiah 6: Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, 'Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?' And I said, 'Here am I. Send me!' He said, "Go and tell the people, 'Be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving. Make the heart of this people calloused; make their ears dull and close their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed." One of the most puzzling features of Jesus' ministry was how he put these words of Isaiah 6 front and center of his mission. For instance, here is Jesus talking to his disciples in Matthew's account: "Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. This is why I speak to them in parables: Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand. In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah: 'You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving. For this people's heart has become calloused; the hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them." The reality that Jesus is acknowledging here and the language that he uses is rooted in the Torah (Deuteronomy), the Psalms, and then is one of the central themes throughout the Prophets. Paul goes in hard on this theme in Acts 28. The theme is sprinkled throughout Pauline and non-Pauline epistles. Religious myopia, this 'seeing but not seeing, hearing but not hearing,' is not a sub-theme, but a central theme in the overarching biblical narrative of the struggle to realize shalom. So what is religious myopia? In every case the idea is that very religious people who have all of the language and rituals of God are incapable of grasping not just the universality of shalom but even its most basic aspects because of their willful hard-heartedness. This willful hard-heartedness and spiritual blindness is the typical and particular danger of those people who most vigorously wield the identity of being God's special or chosen people. And so the biblical narrative is laden with a particular tension, that of a people who are chosen to become a focal point of God's blessing upon all nations (Abrahamic covenant) and the danger for those who identify as elect that they will become instruments of destruction of Shalom because of their religious myopia. This danger, of becoming instruments of destruction through the fervent practice of religion, is held up for a particular form of God's wrath throughout the biblical narrative. Jesus' repeated discussions about hypocrites are particularly helpful in understanding religious myopia. The popular understanding of hypocrites and of Pharisees is that that they believe one thing but say and do another. While this may be a form of hypocrisy and is certainly not a healthy state of affairs, this is not what Jesus was driving at. When Jesus said that hypocrites pray in public, give alms in public and so forth (Matthew 6, etc.) the trouble with this behavior isn't that the hypocrites didn't believe in what they were doing, or that they believed something different in private than what their public practice was displaying, but that their displays of religious fervor were no longer rooted in the humble practice of being servants of shalom but were instead acts that further cemented their identity as God's chosen ones, heard-hearted and blind. The trouble for a hypocrite, for one who is religiously myopic, hard-hearted, spiritually blind is not a lack of belief, but too much belief. The cure, then, is not that they should believe more, but that their faith should be shattered. The biblical testimony throughout is that the more vigorously the hard-hearted elect children of God believe their now false narrative the more dangerous they become, both to themselves and to the world. Healing is no longer a part of the story of the hypocrite, the religious zealot who cannot see or hear. The next move is simply that God casts them out of the narrative altogether. God doesn't create a new narrative for them but rather finds a new people to take part of the narrative, the people who have been cast out, left out, spat upon and ratted on, the lepers, the Samaritans, the prostitutes and tax collectors.

So, what does this deep dive into religious myopia have to do with the crisis we face today in America? A few months ago I wrote in this blog about Bad Religion and the Banality of Evil: "The danger we face during in this current outbreak of authoritarian ethno-nationalism is that many people genuinely are feeling the pain of displacement due to globalism. We genuinely do lack the spiritual and moral capacity to adequately address the loss of identity and meaning that are essential components of being human. The power of false leaders always rests in the vehemence and energy of those who follow, the joiners.  The synergy is toxic and impossible to steer."

The danger with this particular existential crisis is that those who feel it most strongly are ready to be drawn into a vortex of economic and racial resentments that are clearly destructive of shalom. The moment we've been drawn into is one where these resentments have been attached to an already existing narrative of American exceptionalism, providentialism, and the strongly held pseudo-Christianity in which America exists as a refuge for white people. (I lived in Oregon, where this was explicitly the ethos well into the 20th century and still is a vibrant belief system to this day. Ditto for Evergreen Park, Illinois and Utah - other places I have lived). Donald Trump, Stephen Bannon, Stephen Miller and those at the core of Trump's rise have been able to take advantage of this moment and turn it into a political reality.

But what makes this already dangerous powder-keg scenario of an ethno-national political movement of racial and economic resentment a full-blown crisis is the way these resentments have been seamlessly blended into a unifying religious movement blessed by not just by religious leaders such as Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr., but more importantly galvanized by the 81% of evangelical voters who voted for him. Recently, in an essay in The New Republic, Sarah Posner convincingly argued that Trump, or Trumpism, has hijacked and is now powerfully steering America's conservative religious ship. But perhaps it's not so much a hijacking (as Posner argues) as it is the natural outgrowth of a form of nationalist Christianity that has long ago grown accustomed to its myopia. Perhaps the more fervent American religious expression becomes the more dangerous we become to ourselves and to the world.

In her observations of mid 20th century atrocities Hannah Arrendt famously observed that normal people are capable of tremendous evil - an observation that is now widely understood in shorthand as the banality of evil. I believe that this is simply another way describing modern religious myopia. Normal people, good people, deeply religious people, otherwise nondescript people when captured by a structure of 'seeing but not seeing, hearing but not hearing' are capable of any manner of atrocity.

In his highly perceptive essay 'Misreading Eichmann in Jerusalem', Roger Berkowitz writes:"That evil, Arendt argued, originates in the neediness of lonely, alienated bourgeois people who live lives so devoid of higher meaning that they give themselves fully to movements. It is the meaning Eichmann finds as part of the Nazi movement that leads him to do anything and sacrifice everything. Such joiners are not stupid; they are not robots. But they are thoughtless in the sense that they abandon their independence, their capacity to think for themselves, and instead commit themselves absolutely to the fictional truth of the movement. It is futile to reason with them. They inhabit an echo chamber, having no interest in learning what others believe. It is this thoughtless commitment that permits idealists to imagine themselves as heroes and makes them willing to employ technological implements of violence in the name of saving the world."
Exactly. Religious myopia. Spiritual blindness. Seeing with your eyes but not seeing. Hearing with your ears but not hearing. Hardness of heart. Destroying shalom not out of a lack of belief, but too much belief.

One of the great heroes of today's evangelical movement is Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Rightly so. Bonhoeffer was one of a handful of Christians in Nazi Germany who was able to pierce the darkness of false religious narrative that took over his nation. Shortly before his death he wrote a letter that wasn't nearly as poetic as the prophet Isaiah. He didn't feel the luxury of time to speak in parables. He didn't talk about religious myopia or spiritual blindness. But he spoke of the power of hypocrisy, of a false religious narrative, to destroy the individual person's capacity to struggle for shalom just the same. The letter is bluntly titled, "On Stupidity." He writes:"Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. … The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.”

What then is needed to counteract this stupidity, this religious myopia that tends to make us simultaneously capable of any evil and incapable of seeing that it is evil? Going back to Bonhoeffer we see that in his time of overwhelming religious myopia he called for a 'religionless Christianity' capable of detaching from ideology, from mythological narratives that blind us. 

In his letter, "After Ten Years," written in December 1942 it is clear that Bonhoeffer had already divorced himself from the false narratives of bad religion. It was as if he was living through the moment Isaiah faced when God came to him and asked, "Who will go for us?" Bonhoeffer's response to the question is to acknowledge the dreadful choice faced by so many: to acquiesce to the empty pursuit of false narratives or to be ground into a form of cynicism as the community attempts to hold on to whatever shreds of unity remain."We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds: we have been drenched by many storms; we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretense; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical. Are we still of any use?"

But Bonhoeffer doesn't remain there. Again, without artifice, without poetry, Bonhoeffer brings us to the precipice of the truth that was beating in his heart like a sledgehammer:
"What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, and straightforward men. Will our inward power of resistance be strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves remorseless enough, for us to find our way back to simplicity and straightforwardness?"

And then the dreadful truth of the loneliness of the only true way forward:"Only the one for whom the final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all these, when in faith and sole allegiance to God he is called to obedient and responsible action: the responsible person, whose life will be nothing but an answer to God’s question and call." 

Bonhoeffer does not entertain the siren-call of religious narrative. He eschews all sense of Christian unity that is willing to walk the terrain of myopia. Instead he walks the path of a voice crying in the wilderness in honest and humble simplicity. This requires an individual reckoning in which the words of Jesus about losing one's life in order to find it ought to haunt any of us. Which side am I on? No one wants to choose to live outside of a false narrative just because it's false. It's lonely and dangerous to live on the outside. But such a choice must be faced when our narrative actively destroys shalom. 

We face a new context of an ageless crucible. If any of us have ears it's time to listen.

Shalom and Jesus' Tears

When Jesus looked at Jerusalem, the most religious city in the world at a time of high religious fervor, he wept. He wept because Jerusalem, steeped as it was in 'godliness', despised the work of shalom - an all-encompassing cosmic peace that comprehends and lives out the basic truth that everything and everyone is sacred because everything and everyone bears the imprint of God's love.

"But as he came closer to Jerusalem and saw the city ahead, he began to weep. 'How I wish today that you of all people would understand the way to peace. But now it is too late, and peace is hidden from your eyes.'" (Luke 19:41-42)

In both Hebrew and Christian scriptures (Old and New Testaments) the goal of all things is summarized with this word, 'shalom.' Justice and compassion are the tools of God's love that bring healing to a world 'sick unto death' with oppression and hard heartedness so that all things can be made new. Justice and compassion are the pathway to shalom.

Individual salvation is a whole-hearted participation in God's shalom, a welcoming of the process of justice and compassion into the center of one's own being. Individual salvation is not the goal of Christian faith so much as a byproduct. Any form of Christianity that isn't dismantling oppression and overcoming hard-heartedness is profoundly out of line with the teachings of the scriptures. Frankly, most of what passes for Christian faith in America today is simply old fashioned idolatry dressed up in a culture of religious mumbo-jumbo and self-righteousness.

I genuinely believe Christianity in America today needs reform more urgently than in the day of Luther, Calvin and the gang. I genuinely worry that the current religious posture in America is so blinded by the cult of individual salvation and so enmeshed with oppressive structures of racism, militarism and greed that we have become a serious threat to humanity. I genuinely worry that we have thrown shalom in a dungeon and grown so used to calling this state of affairs 'righteousness' that nothing short of a new dawn of the Holy Spirit outside the bounds of the church will bring new life.

Lenten Reflection

I am not going to give up donuts, chocolate or beer this Lent. Not while Romulo Avelica-Gonzalez remains in detention. Not while Daniela Vargas is targeted for revenge. I will not assuage my private sense of being a 'good' Christian while hatred rests on our land like a choking toxic cloud.

We're a nation that has an undeniable self-defining history of hyper-violent white supremacy. But what makes us so dangerous is that our brand of white supremacy has been melded with a national theology of exceptional divine providence that guides, protects and calls us. Few people are as capable of this amount of destruction with a simultaneous self-congratulatory celebration of righteousness. As a result we're simply incapable of honestly assessing who we are and how to repent and heal. If ever a nation needed a truth and reconciliation process it would be America. Instead, we're on flight MAGA with no landing gear and both engines on fire.

This Lent I am calling for justice to flow through our land like a mighty river. My Lenten prayers and self-reflections will focus on these words from Amos 5: 
'I hate, I despise your religious festivals;
your assemblies (civic/religio services) are a stench to me.
Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them.
Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,
I will have no regard for them.
Away with the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.
But let justice roll on like a river,
righteousness (public justice) like a never-failing stream.'

What is Scapegoating?

Scapegoating is derived from the instinctual fear of and most particularly, resentment towards, the weak, the poor, the stranger, the immigrant, the outsider, the sick, the vulnerable, the other. Scapegoating occurs when this instinct metastasizes around an identifiable person or group of people as 'impure' or 'unclean'. This scapegoating leads to ritualized violence as the social order sees itself as threatened and its need for purification becomes a part of its deeply held spiritual/religio faith. By cleansing society of its filth (annihilation of the scapegoat) the wrath of the divine order can be assuaged and the purified community can return to blessing and prosperity.

It is essence of the lie of Satan.  See Abraham's non-sacrifice of Isaac, the crucifixion of Jesus, Psalm 22, the holocaust, American religio lynchings and in particular the work of Rene Girard.

See in particular: Psalm 22, the first known human record of a prayer to God from the perspective of the person scapegoated, a victim of lynching.

See how carefully Jesus' own lynching mirrors the prayer of Psalm 22.

See the work of Rene Girard. I recommend in particular "I See Satan Fall Like Lightning"

See Orlando Patterson's chapter on ritualized violence in America from "Rituals of Blood"

See the Holocaust

See Rwanda

See Bosnia

Further Thoughts on Dialogue and Moral Resistance

I'm highlighting this paragraph near the end of a NY Times Books review of Martin Buber's Life and Work: The Middle Years 1923-45 because it gets to the heart of a conversation that I am having not only with others, but with myself about a key question - what is the boundary of dialogue and resistance? 
I want to make it clear that I am not comparing Donald Trump to Hitler. However, I also want to be clear that Donald Trump's Presidency has triggered a crisis in many of our lives where the kind of judgment that Martin Buber made about Hitler, may also be a judgment we have to make about Trump. Is Trump someone who cannot be answered "because in no sense could he be a partner in conversation"? What is particularly stark about Buber's judgment is that Buber's thought revolved around the central principle of "hallowing" in which dialogue between authentic persons is the substance of holiness. To refuse dialogue, then, is to enter a realm outside of God's creative word.
As far as I can tell (and I'd have to go back and dig into Buber again for a while to double check and be 100% sure) Buber's refusal didn't come with much of a theological defense but was largely a concession to experience.
The way I think of it is captured well in this canto by Dante. 
Or, as JFK slyly misquoted it, “The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time of moral crisis preserve their neutrality.”
The question is this: are we in a time of moral crisis? We all must answer and act accordingly.

Solidarity Draws Boundaries

I am not a 'bridge' person when it comes to conversations about human rights. Never have been, never will be. I believe that inalienable human rights actually exist. I believe they are built into the fabric of existence by the will of our Creator. That is to say we are endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights. These rights can be protected, or they can be attacked and destroyed, but they are not up for negotiation. We cannot confer dignity on people. We cannot say who gets to have dignity as human beings and who doesn't. We either acknowledge inherent dignity or we're spitting on it.

So, brass tacks time. If someone claims that the treatment of students with disabilities is a states rights issue, then the dialogue de-facto moves to the territory where people with disabilities are now considered to be less than fully human, individuals whose inalienable rights are up for discussion. This is a state of affairs that I reject with every fiber of my being. No matter how 'good' of a person you may be in your private life, no matter how generous, if your goal is to have a 'dialogue' about the humanity children with disabilities I am your enemy. I do not hate you, I may even be your friend and love you profoundly. But the humanity of people with disabilities is not up for debate in my heart, in my mind, in my spirit or in my soul. We are working at cross-purposes and I will not find a way to 'negotiate' or 'dialogue' on this issue. I will not bridge the chasm with people who want to have this dialogue. I will do everything I can to stop them. I do not care about how this makes them feel. I do not care if they feel that my intransigence makes them think I am angry or hateful. My concern is that someone will stand in the gap on behalf of those whose inalienable rights and inherent dignity are under attack. My concern is that when we have contempt for the poor, the vulnerable, the disinherited we despise their Creator.

The same principle applies when it comes to students who are transgender. If the issue is how do we best support their needs and balance those needs with that of the broader community I am for that conversation as long as it is within the framework of the basic truth that all LGBTQ people are human beings endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights including the right to be in public and use a bathroom (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness). As soon as someone says they want to have this conversation under the rubric of states' rights we have now moved into a territory where the conversation puts up for grabs the actual full humanity and dignity of trans students. Again, this conversation is one I am not willing to have. I am not going to engage in a dialogue with someone who wants to discuss whether or not a trans student is a human being. Period. I don't care how uncomfortable it makes someone. My concern is for the child whose humanity and dignity is being questioned. My concern is that when we have contempt for the vulnerable we despise their Creator.

Yes, this has everything to do with why I oppose Betsy DeVos. But you can extend this logic to people who are undocumented migrants, documented refugees, worship Allah, etc. If a country's perceived need to secure it's borders drives us to destroy the fundamental idea of and actual lived reality of human dignity I am not going to try to be a bridge person with people who are rounding up children at after school programs and be concerned about how they feel if I resist their work. Instead, I will look for the people who have been demonized. I will see how it is I can live in greater solidarity with them, protect their rights, uphold their right to have an existence.

I am reminded of an experience Nicholas Wolterstorff shares of an encounter with white South African Christians during the age of apartheid who vigorously argued that if blacks were given equality the efforts of the church to show love and compassion towards them would be greatly diminished. If your perception of compassion and love requires you to build a world filled with injustice, that is not a project I will join. That is work of profound evil and hypocrisy that I will attempt to diagnose and destroy. I may love you, I may even be your friend, but I am plain and simply not on your team. Not now, not ever.

Prayer for Migrants and Refugees

The more I think about what it means to be a migrant, a sojourner, a stranger (a category of person that is urgently upheld for society's protection in the biblical texts as a signature concern of God's) the more damning this 11 million person round up seems to me. Here is a prayer from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops that I filed a few years ago when I was taking some classes from the Sisters of Mercy. In my time of prayer and reflection I am letting this prayer sink deep in my heart. "Lord Jesus, when you multiplied the loaves and fishes, you provided more than food for the body, you offered us the gift of yourself, the gift which satisfies every hunger and quenches every thirst! Your disciples were filled with fear and doubt, but you poured out your love and compassion on the migrant crowd, welcoming them as brothers and sisters. Lord Jesus, today you call us to welcome the members of God's family who come to our land to escape oppression, poverty, persecution, violence, and war. Like your disciples, we too are filled with fear and doubt and even suspicion. We build barriers in our hearts and in our minds. Lord Jesus, help us by your grace: - to banish fear from our hearts, that we may embrace each of your children as our own brother and sister; - to welcome migrants and refugees with joy and generosity, while responding to their many needs; - to realize that you call all people to your holy mountain to learn the ways of peace and justice; -to share of our abundance as you spread a banquet before us; -to give witness to your love for all people, as we celebrate the many gifts they bring. We praise you and give you thanks for the family you have called together from so many people. We see in this human family a reflection of the divine unity of the one Most Holy Trinity in whom we make our prayer: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen."

The Meaning of 'Refugee'

What is the moral and spiritual meaning of being a refugee? What does it do to a child's consciousness to be raised as a refugee - a person the world has officially deemed worthy of no home, no official status, no meaning? I ask this because Jesus was a refugee and his articulation of how God stewards blessing for the poor despite the world's treatment is stunning and revolutionary (try reading the beatitudes of the gospel of Luke from the perspective of a child refugee).

Again, our times force me to turn to Hannah Arendt, who experienced first hand the total rejection of being human that is the status of being a refugee.  Arendt's thoughts run, in part:

What does it mean to use people as a weapon, as Putin has done in Syria, by turning millions of 'undesirables' into refugees? What does it mean to refuse refuge to those whose de-humanized status is being used to destabilize democracies, to undercut the principles of rule of law and inalienable human rights? These are the pressing questions we must ask in this time if we are to remain morally and spiritually resistant to genocide. 

Shock and Awe of Horrible

Update: I originally wrote this on January 3. I thought I'd give this a bump up to the top of the blog where it might get some play now that it looks to have been prescient. I have had a number of people share with me a thought along the lines of , "Give Trump a chance, he intends well" sort of optimism. I find this delusional. I'll be very, very happy to be wrong, but there is every indication that we are about to go through a sort of 'shock and awe' of horrible. Trump not only professed admiration of Assad in Syria, but in particular noted his admiration for him in the context of Assad using chemical weapons on innocent civilians in his own country. Trump thinks of this as a sort of 'necessary roughness.' He not only professes admiration for Putin's treatment of the press (killed 47 journalists in Russia over the last decade or so) but has deep financial ties with Putin. Here's some reading that should give you nightmares: "The-curious-world-of-donald-trumps-private-russian-connections" from The American Interest. The collected facts could not be more clear, the dogs of war are howling. The wise are preparing.

Let me put it another way. We are used to fighting over the contours and limits of a liberal society - the scope and nature of a social safety net and so forth. We are entering an age where the battle isn't over the contours of a liberal society but over its existence. Such things as: inalienable rights for all people, free speech, free and fair elections, freedom of press, right to free association and public gathering and so forth. Trump has attacked each of these ideas and has vowed to use violence when necessary to get his way. This is all part of the public record. We all heard and watched all of it, too. We don't have the luxury to ignore it or set it aside. There are no silver linings in the near future. Trump will move fast to destabilize democracy and either find or manufacture as quickly as possible a use of force against the American people. (All my humble, alarmist opinion).

'Carnage' and the Rise of Fascism

Some days ago I analyzed the language Trump used in his inaugural address focusing on the keyword: "Carnage." I argued this would be a pretext for authoritarian moves of force. It is no surprise that Trump's first overt call to use the power of his office in an authoritarian show of force is against the city of Chicago, home of his very successful and popular predecessor, Barrack O'Bama.

My piece on Trump's inaugural address and our Christian and humane response is here

: http://danhuttshadow.blogspot.com/…/the-rise-of-fascism-in-…