That Was Unexpected...

In my last post I talked about a vehicle I would see coming into the middle school parking lot every morning with a lot of stupid and marginally offensive bumper stickers.  The point of them was that Trump Is My Daddy and I Hate Liberals.  I fantasized about plowing into the back of the vehicle to take out the bumper stickers.  

So...a few days later I had a few minutes before my afternoon route from the time I filled up my bus and when I had to get to the school for afternoon pickup.  I stopped at the parking lot across from the gas station and was walking over to get a Dr Pepper, when who should pull up aside me but the Trump Woman and her horrible billboard?  "Are you a bus driver?  I wanted to stop and say thank you for all your hard work driving these kids.  My father was a bus driver, and I know how hard it can be."  And then she drove off.  

I gotta confess, I was not expecting that.  Over a year of fantasizing about plowing through the back of a car, and now the driver of that car that projects such hostility and rage speaks a word of kindness.  Who would have thought that was coming?  

I suppose the answer is the old cliche, that you can't judge a book by its cover.  Of course, if the book has a cover of a bloody robot destroying a handful of newborn kittens, you're not going to expect it to be a love of story.  How does somebody who intentionally promotes herself as a person of such rage then turn out to be a not-so-bad person of kindness?  

Maybe it's a lesson that shows the importance of being consistent in our words and deeds.  Because, for all I know, she might have driven off from me to go to a Trump rally that night or drive through the streets of our town looking for people of color to report to ICE.  I still see that vehicle almost every day and though I know she had a moment of kindness, I still don't trust her.  It only takes a moment to speak a kind word; it takes thought and consideration to put up that many terrible bumper stickers.  She might well be a nice person at times...but her soul is likely still dark as night.  

Middle School Pickup Line Dreams

There's an SUV I see leaving the middle school almost everyday.  It's a fully MAGA-approved vehicle, with a bumper sticker for almost every grievance.  The sticker that stands out the most identifies the driver as Christian.  Conservative.  Straight.  It then follows with a question about whether anybody is offended about this.  More than a few of the stickers use a lot of vulgar language about the intelligence of liberals or socialists or whatever else the owner heard about at some Trump rally.  There's also a big sticker with a hot cartoon blonde holding a beer and screaming Trump Woman.  I've seen the driver...definitely not hot.  But my favorite sticker goes something like, "If after the last year of Joe Biden's sh*tshow you still want to hate Trump, you're a f*cking moron."  Since I've seen that on there now for at least the last two years, I'd be curious to get her take on the last 18 months of the Trump administration's accomplishments.  

As I get stopped at the light right behind her in my giant middle school bus I sometimes dream about the trouble I might get in if I should happen to rear end the SUV and destroy all her precious, precious stickers.  The schadenfreude I might get from doing so probably isn't worth the scratches on my bumper or especially the chewing out I might get from my boss.  But most importantly, I'm not going to do this because I suppose we all need to realize that there's still that 38% or so of Americans who still can't see clearly.  Were they wholly cowed at the foolishness they have driven into maybe we'd forget that they they are there, and even here in Red State America the number of red hats and blue Trump flags (with the requisite "F*CK YOUR FEELINGS!" subtitle) seem to have diminished.  But they're still here, and that's important to keep in mind.  

I suppose I am offended, to her delight, at these stickers.  But not how she might imagine: So here's a woman who thinks of herself a Christian.  Probably loves the idea of Christian nationalism.  Thinks that Trumpy and his administration are doing God's work.  Should I see her SUV parked at Wal-Mart, I'd be tempted to put a note on it.  "So, you're a Christian?  Sorry, I didn't realize that the definition of Christianity has changed, whereby crass vulgarity, a delight in ticking people off, and worshipping an orange deity moved to the top of the creed.  Just wondering how on earth you create the 'Biblical' worldview that's shown on the back of your vehicle.  But hey, I'm sure that in your mind you feel assured in your holiness by the hour you spend at church every six weeks or so.  Good job, I'm sure you are creating the fruit of the Spirit everywhere you go, and I'm sure that you're going to be reaching your friends and neighbors for Jesus, even if it's not the Jesus we read about in Scripture.  Again...thumbs up!  Have a blessed day."

I don't know what to think about our country anymore, but the most depressing thing about it is the downfall of the Christian witness everywhere you look.  I used to think that we were about a half-century behind western Europe in our dismantling of a Christian worldview, but I think we've gone down a very different course, thinking we are yet Christian when in fact those things that some count as Christian are completely and wholly unChristian.  Sometimes I see much different bumper stickers with genuine Christian witness, but even then I am increasingly suspicious about how genuine their faith is.  And am I any better?  Does my contempt for my fellow believer show just how far we have all gone wrong?  

Maybe I won't be the one who rams into the SUV.  Traffic has gotten far worse in front of the school, and it would be a cryin' shame for somebody to wreck all that sweet, sweet hatred.

Labor Day weekend

This weekend is the unofficial end of summer, a weekend in which we honor American labor for their hard work by making the first Monday of September a national holiday.  Sure, many of the people who actually do hard work are still going to be working that day (think restaurant workers, first responders, nurses in hospitals) while the people who already have so much get the day off.  It would make sense to me that we could make Labor Day something like the old British Boxing Day, where the servants are waited upon by their lords and masters for one day.  Maybe have the doctors go and clean out bedpans on Monday?  Executives of Yum! trying to fry up the chicken or make burritos?  Maybe not...our world would likely explode if a lot of the stuffed shirts actually had to sweat a little bit.  

Sepaking of restaurants, this past week we saw the Stupidest Story of the Year that didn't involve our Dear Leader, at least directly.  Cracker Barrel, that old mainstay of countryfied food and a shop with stuff that people who think 'merica! is loved by voting for an old corrupt billionaire who likes to hump the flag occasionally, decided to change their logo.  It...wasn't good.  Basically they took the mustard and brown color from before and watered it down to something even less sexy than it had been.  Likely this was the result of paying some high-dollar PR people some money hoping that they would get young, hip audiences into the story so they might buy rocking chairs or cornhole games after dining on some fried chicken and catfish.  Needless to say, this rebranding made some people who have too little to do in their lives really mad.  

Where the story goes from amusing to downright stupid, however, was that the right-wing mediasphere decided that Cracker Barrel did all these things because they are 'woke'.  Getting rid of the barrel on the old sign, as well as the old dude (his name is Uncle Herschel, we all learned this week) sitting next to it, showed that they are somehow, someway, betraying all that is good about America.  Of course complaints of 'wokeism' have replaced 'politically correct' and charges of liberals of being 'snowflakes' as the great whine of the 38%.  Liberal calls to be 'woke', that is, to wake up and recognize that there are systemic problems of racism and inequality in this country', have been twisted to the point where being 'woke' is now code for 'anything that makes we True Americans upset'.  That is, of course, pure snowflakeism.  Thus a company hiring a black man when a white man applied for the job is now greetied with cries of wokeism.  Pointing out that climate change is real and that we are harming the planet, wokeism.  Any government policies that recognize the value of diversity, equity, and inclusion are now suspiciously woke.  And now a company with a wrong-headed idea about how they should rebrand their company is rooted in a desire to be woke and thereby must be boycotted until obese people wanting to kill themselves with satured fat and bankrupt their savings by buying wooden tic tac toe games get their way, of eating at a restaurant with the right kind of conservative logo.  

Maybe it was a good thing that on this Saturday of Labor Day weekend I didn't venture outside the house except to get two pieces of junk mail from the mailbox.  Catching up on some shows, watching soccer, taking a nap, and having some smoked salmon and wild rice with my wife tonight, was enough for me.  

From Young Conservative to Middle-Aged Disciple

I will admit it: I've changed.  Part of me wants to fall back on the expression, "I didn't leave my party, they left me."  And while that may be partially true (the GOP of today is a dried-out shell of what it was 30 years ago), I've also distanced myself from much of the ideology and politics of my youth.  Occasionally people I knew long ago will be surprised that I don't support Trumpism, that I believe the current movement of mainstream conservatism to be wholly unChristian and pagan.  After they accuse me of supporting abortionists and radical leftists (I don't) because in their dualistic mindset you're either a True Believer or in league with devil democrats, a few may still have enough of a curious mind as to ask why I've changed.  So, having thought about this over a long period of time, let me explain.  

I grew up Republican.  My parents didn't talk about politics much directly, but I knew that they were big supporters of Ronald Reagan and occasional donors to the GOP.  I inherited from them and the conservative community in which I grew up a sense that conservatism was morally pure.  On the one hand I was told that Democrats wanted to support gay rights, abortion on demand, women in the military, and tax increases for hard-working Americans.  Republicans, however, were morally superior.  They supported 'traditional family values', an honest work ethic, and a sense that America was God's great blessing to the world, and even the endless wars we seemed to export were part of a greater moral crusade.  And so if Democrats were not quite the America-hating enemy they would someday become, they were yet Wrong.  I absorbed this mindset as being the proper patriotic Christian worldview with little teenaged rebellion.  

At age 17 I entered into a Christian university of my religious heritage that had a decidedly conservative ethos.  Its leaders in the past had been anti-communist activisits and its leaders in the present were God-fearing American patriots.  The economics courses in which I minored had a decidedly free-market bent (Free To Choose by Milton Friedman was the sacred text).  The American Studies program of which I was an invited member invited speakers like Ed Meese, Alan Keyes, and William F Buckley.  And so while one of my main polysci professors (who has long left there) was a closet liberal and covertly challenged some of the America-first proclaimations that seemed so comonplace on the rest of the campus, it was not suprising that I was strengthened in my resolve to be a good Republican and conservative.  That, after all, was what being a Christian was all about, right?  

After a few years of trying to figure out what to do with my life, I started graduate school in Christian ministry.  While it was of the same university umbrella as my undergraduate work, this school, instead of being in a small rural town, was located in very urban Memphis.  While there I was exposed to a much more critical understanding of my faith, moving me beyond childhood Sunday school religion to a more disciplined and cohesive kind of discipleship that demanded that I read all of Scripture, not just those parts that affirmed my faith.  While I was still very much a conservative Christian at this point, simply being exposed to other ways of thinking became a very important part of my Christian journey.  

And this journey continued on as I began my first ministry positions, first working in campus ministry in the midwest and then as a pulpit preacher for a small rural church on the west coast.  That both of these places were outside of the Bible belt (or at least on the edge of it) might have been important: the only churches that were willing to hire an untested and unmarried minister were ones that had few other options.  Most of my classmates who had more charisma and more family and more connections were able to settle into a classic southern religion heritage, but I was not.  And quickly it became apparent that no longer was I 'comfortable' in my setting; while I still preached with churches in conservative parts of America (and yes, rural Oregon may be the single most politically conservative place I've ever lived), it wasn't so much of a religious conservatism of doing right and pious living that surrounded me.  Rather, it was a kind of ideology that had shed much of its religious heritage and was more firmly rooted in an individualistic ethos of "It's all about me.  Government is evil.  I do what I want to do, and nobody can tell me otherwise."  As I get older in hindsight I can see that in fact this is what mainstream American conservatism was becoming, but at the time it seemed simply a product of the place in which I lived.

This turned out to be a great challenge of faith to me, because as I began my fledgling ministry career, I was still a solid conservative.  Being unmarried and having far too much time on my hands, I began listening a lot more to the growing conservative media that began springing up at that time in response to the perception that mainstream news outlets were too liberal.  Rush Limbaugh became a daily listen.  Fox News became a fascination for me, and not just because of the cute blondes in the short skirts that seemed to be on every program.  And reading other crusading conservatives and connecting with other like-minded individuals on this new thing known as the 'World Wide Web' helped reaffirm much of what I believed.  Bill and Hillary Clinton were evil.  Liberals hated America.  Only conservatism could save America from the socialists who would destroy it.

Yet being in an area in which my social life was greatly restricted while being too socially awkward to do much about it, I had a lot more time to continue digging into the Scriptures and understand more of what it was that I preaching.  It's not that I tore off my old understandings, but I did start challenging them in a way that I had not before.  Reading the prophets of the Old Testament, for example, started to undermine my belief in prosperity as a proof of godliness.  In fact, it started to become clear to me that God wanted much more from me than to simply be a Good Religious Person...he wanted me to walk in his own Goodness.  Passages like Hosea 6, Amos 5, and Zechariah 7 helped me to see that my faith was not this individualistic American piety that I had long believed it to be...rather, it was also to be about seeking out justice for the fallen, showing mercy to those in trouble, and defending the cause of those who were oppressed.  I began to wrestle with the many denunciations of hoarding wealth while others suffered and how many of my conservative Christian brethren sought to separate out religion from everyday life.  We couldn't let our religion get in the way with the American pursuit of prosperity, could we?  Paired with a re-reading of the social laws of the Torah in which the need to do right by one's neighbor was central to being righteous before God, and I began to see that while my earlier understandings were not fully wrong, neither were they complete.  Were we to simply explain away the radical social re-ordering of the Jubilee year, in which society was to economically reset in order to bring about equality and fairness?  Were we to ignore the warnings about the economic injustice so prevalent in that era which were to bring about God's wrath, and rather continue to believe in a 'health and wealth' gospel in practice, if not in name?  

Of course, it was likely the writings of the New Testament that caused me to think most differently.  Having read the Bible through many times, it was (and still is) impossible to fully seek to do as Alexander Campbell advised in trying to read the Bible as if we've never read it before.  Even today sometimes in my reading I find myself simply nodding and affirming myself.  Yet it was in reading about the mission of Jesus in Luke 4:18-19 that I started to see that if the church is really the body of Christ, shouldn't it be doing what Jesus did?  It became much more difficult to explain away the commands of Jesus to sell everything and give to the poor and then come and follow him (Mark 10:21).  It became obvious that we were to honor Zacchaeus (Luke 19) not just as a 'wee little man' but as an example of somebody who gave up a life of radical self-interest in order to radically follow Jesus. And in reading the reality of the early church in Jerusalem as it concerned the social order conforming to the needs of many, it became more challenging to think about how they shared all they had and 'gave to anyone as he had need' (Acts 2:44).  For most of my life I was taught that we were to be New Testament Christians, who were called to do Bible things in Bible ways.  And for the first time in my life, it became apparent that this was true not just in the few hours we met together as a church, but daily as we sought to be disciples in all that we did.  

And so my inner struggle grew, not just with what I was (and was not) seeing in the American church both local and in the culture, but also within myself.  How was I to reconcile the conservatism of my youth with the discipleship I yearned for as a true disciple of Jesus?  I began to listen much more critically to the right-wing media that I had allowed to be my political guidestar...and I began to realize how far away it was from Christianity that I was reading about in my Bible.  Was I to despise liberals, be suspicious of immigrants and people of other races, and be only concerned about my financial well-being and individual freedom?  Or was my Christianity that sought out the needs of others more important?  

I suppose there have been many stops along the way in this journey.  

-Sometimes it symbolic, like the time after 9/11 when on a church down the street from where I lived a huge American flag was planted on top of the cross that graced the top of their building.  Did the flag really trump the cross?  Sure seemed that way for many within the church!  

-Other times it was witnessing the loud and angry nationalist fervor of many of my fellow Christians: were they citizens of the kingdom of God first, or were they American citizens first?  This was long before I really started to dig into the depths of Jesus' teaching about the Kingdom and what that was all about, but even through those days I knew something was not quite right.  

-It increasingly struck me as odd that the 'culture wars' that many Christians were fighting had little to do with authentic Bibilcal Christianty and was more about maintaining social order.  And the generals they continued to follow in such wars themselves time and again turned out to be more morally corrupt than those they preached against!  

-And through it all, I continued to see how many of my fellow Christians continued to nod politely at the preaching of the gospel of grace and love and righteousness, yet only really get excited about kicking ass in the Middle East, whatever football team they rooted for, ensuring that they could buy the most powerful weapons they can get their hands on, and conservative promises to 'take back our country' from the liberals (or libtards, or democraps, or any other derisive names they had for anybody who aren't as patriotic as the flag-waving Americans think themselves to be).  

Even after all this, it's not that I think myself a liberal as I pass a half-century of life.  Far from it...I'm probably still a bit right-of-center on the political spectrum.  I don't think much of some social programs that seem more about good intentions than verifiable results.  I wish there were no more abortions and no more broken families.  I think we are better off with judges who read the law for what it says, not what they want it to mean.  I struggle with why tax dollars ought to prop up the degrading lifestyle of the willfully obese or the careless or the addicted or the many others who refuse to change their ways.  And while I'm more likely than I used to to think that in a pluralistic country we ought to tolerate the lifestyles of those which our faith considers sin, this does not mean that I believe we should be so tolerant as to be restricted to silence when it comes to challenging those who live and promote self-destructive lives, nor seek to enable sin in the name of 'diversity'.  The gospel which we proclaim should not be altered to fit the moral relativity of today.  

It's not easy to find the right balance, especially in this age in which we are so polarized between Right and Left.  I'm not alone in feeling that I have no real ideological home these days.  The GOP has lost all moral and intellectual credibilty, the Democrats have ideas but few of them fresh, and any other position seems likely to make us into a party of one.  I'm a registered Libertarian, but I don't take it seriously because they don't seem to, either (c'mon, win something, anything, anywhere!); nor do what I think libertarianism means (freedom from oppression so that we can serve others) is the same as what most others think libertarianism means (freedom for me so nobody ever tells me what to do).  

Yet do I really need that ideological home?  As a citizen of the Kingdom of God, I feel as if I truly do have a home already.  I'm a disciple of Jesus Christ, not perfect in myself or my understanding of the world around me, but transformed by the renewing power of the Holy Spirit.  I am liberated from sin not to serve myself, but to be a blessing to people around me.  It struck me awhile back that when Paul talked about the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5, his line concerning those fruits 'Against such things there is no law' is not a throwaway line but a recognition that if we truly live as people producing spiritual fruit, there's nothing anybody can do against us, there's no law or government edict that can truly deprive us of the freedom that is most important.  Yes, sometimes because we proclaim that Jesus Christ is King we will face opposition, even persecution.  But the things that far too often define what American Christianity is about today are far removed from the core gospel.  Such things (e.g. gun rights, obsessing about personal freedom, rallying against government involvement in health care or social services, American Exceptionalism, fervorously supporting the military and the police, border controls, etc.) are far more American than they are Christian.  Without a doubt, we are living in an age in which the substance of American Christianity has been diluted to the point that, as Jesus would have said, its salt has lost its saltiness and deserve to be thrown out.  

I don't know the way back for our country, beyond the Biblical pattern of repentance, crying out to God, obedience, and seeking reconciliation with our neighbors.  Unfortunately, as the history of Israel makes clear, such things only seem to happen when God sends a plague upon his people; they have to hit bottom to wake up and see what is righteousness again.  Even then, people often refuse to change...and in the meantime we are so comfortable in our American Christianity that I don't see any hint that there will be revival anytime soon.  Maybe COVID should have been that wake-up call...much like economic recessions, 9/11, or other national crises should have been seen as the bullhorn of the Lord.  But the people most refusing change, it appears, are those many Christians who have accepted Donald J Trump (or, less commonly, amoralistic liberalism) as their Lord and Savior.  Apostasy often appears to be the final portion of any once-great nation's spiral into sin, and as a whole we are going down that road with eyes wide opened, parading ourselves into oblivion.  

As for me and my household, though, I'd like to proclaim as those Hebrews entering Canaan all those years ago, 'we will serve the Lord.'  It's not that we will get it all right.  And over the next years of my life I will continue to change and grow.  Some of the stuff I mention here might be childish ramblings to my older self.  But I do think I'm closer to the truth now than I was as a young conservative.  I'm a middle-aged disciple, and I can live with that.  

Johnny Cash and 'What Is Truth?'

Tonight I came across a fascinating little hour on Netflix about when Johnny Cash went and played at the Nixon White House in 1970.  Johnny Cash was a man of his time and was likely very conservative in temperament, but he'd been through enough experiences to help him see that there were many people out there who were suffering, and that the 'silent majority' was not nearly as noble as they wanted to think themselves to be.  So while he was there he sang a little song that I am ashamed that I had never heard before called 'What Is Truth?' 

It's not a loud and angry anthem that protesters rallied around like 'Blowin' in the Wind' and so this is why it's mostly forgotten.  But it very carefully challenges those who think themselves righteous to consider why there are genuine protests, and that unless one truly lives the truth, then we shouldn't be surprised when everything goes off the rails. 

I'd still like to consider myself conservative.  I don't think that many of the 'liberal' or progressive answers will fix the problem.  But I do believe that conservatism needs to be challenged.  If, as our current president claims, we need to be 'making America great again', what does that mean?  Does it mean that we simply toss around our power and authority?  Or does it mean that we seek to be good and righteous?  If America is truly to be great, it ought to be able to stand up to pointed criticisms of what it has become...it ought to live up to the promises of its divine origins (if indeed that is what it is) by seeking to be a blessing to all people, not just the few. 

Johnny Cash wasn't the first to ask the question 'what is truth?' of course.  Pontius Pilate asked this question of Jesus when our Lord came to be a witness to the truth.  And as one who lived truth, he lived as a blessing to others, to preach good news to the poor, to live up the downcast.  Can we say that our country's conservative element has any concern to do this?  I don't think so. 

Conservo-porn

I have been baffled by the self-immolation of conservatism in recent years.  What was in my younger days a principled ideology of smaller government, individual freedom, and the promotion of America as a 'city set on a hill' has devolved into a love for control, hatred of anybody and anything that says otherwise, and a general indifference towards anything not the immediate short-term interests of the white elite. 

One of the strangest elements I have noticed in this kind of 'conservatism' (it's not really that, but I'll use that term for now) is the growing body of 'art' that acts more as a bizarre ideological statement than anything.  Yesterday my old friend Rob posted this on Facebook (thankfully to mock):

 So on the left are all kinds of Democrat leaders, from Bernie Sanders to Chuck Schumer to Nancy Pelosi.  And let me say, I'm not a big fan of any of these characters.  But here we have them trampling on the American flag while celebrating every other nation out there, even the European Union.  Mexico, in particular, seems to be their guiding force and greatest love.  In the back right of the picture there appears to be some kind of mob...likely it's the immigrant hordes coming across the border, with the Democrats WHO HATE AMERICA leading the charge. 

But resplendent in a sweet, sweet bomber jacket, Donald Trump is there, looking down and clasping his hands in prayer. The pious and earnest Dear Leader is almost weeping, as he looks down at a child's teddy bear and stands at a children's crossing while all these people WHO HATE AMERICA trample on everything he is doing to MAGA.  Our beloved president is the only thing between us and the total destruction of everything we hold dear. 

Of course, this isn't the worst picture.  I think tat honor goes to Jesus guiding the hand of Donald Trump as he sits at the presidential desk in the Oval Office. 

There's a lot of debate about this picture, in truth...is he trying to stop Trump?  Guide him?  Put a choke hold on him?  Who knows what the intent was.  But even as many of us have called out that Trump and Jesus Christ have nothing in common, many of his supporters think he is God's man.  Some even go so far as to consider him a modern-day Cyrus, somebody whom God used to bless his people.  It's ridiculous, to be sure (with the exception being that Cyrus was a pagan, as is POTUS).  But there's a solid 38% of Americans who resolutely will not change their allegiance away from this man, and many of them base their faith in him with something akin to religious fervor. 

One could go on all day with these kinds of pictures, including this one from an Albanian admirer:  .  Yeesh. 

But all these images really betray almost a pornographic fetish that conservatism is now dead, replaced by a Trumpist ideology that means nothing but the acquisition of power and the hatred of enemies.  Trump is bad enough, but his supporters may be even more dangerous than he is. 

The New Liberal Scam...

I grew up in the dying days of the American liberal state.  In the 1970s and 1980s the welfare state of FDR and LBJ was now giving way to the stark reality that many of the people it sought to lift up were in fact become wards of the state.  A legacy of spending other people's money at an exorbitant rate, without any consequences for the failure of these programs, was finally giving way to some common sense: the Reagan revolution that rightly lowered taxes, sought to make people become responsible for their own lives again, and recognized that government was often the problem and not the solution became the majority opinion that has held for over a generation.

It's ironic, however, that a new 'liberal' scam has arisen.  But this scam is being perpetrated by a form of government that has shifted continually to the right, and as such government control has increased exponentially in the name of freedom.  Consider three examples:

1. Here in my home state of Kansas our secretary of state Kris Kobach has made it his signature issue that thousands of illegal aliens are voting and distorting our democracy.  As such, then, measures must be taken to ensure that everybody voting is identified to be eligible to vote.  Kobach has become something of a celebrity within far-right circles for his crusades and has reportedly earned close to a million dollars (much of it while in public office) by selling his services to anybody who wants to shut questionable voters out of the voting booth, even as his plans are often thrown out or are recognized to be ineffective and the problem is in fact not a real problem.  In truth, I think it makes common sense to ensure that only citizens can vote and IDs ensure that we are who we say we are.  In this day and age in which the viability of our electoral process is undergoing multiple attacks, shouldn't we know who is voting, just as we are questioning who is putting money into our campaigning and we are questioning how those votes are being counted?

But here's the scam...who gets to decide who is voting?  The government.  Only by going through a long and sometimes laborious process, all determined by the state, can we then have the right to vote.  Some who do not have government-issued IDs (usually the poor or minorities) are excluded, even if they actually are citizens.  People are not assumed to have a right to vote; only by proving their worthiness to the state are they enabled to vote.  It's like assuming that people are guilty rather than making state in a trial have a burden of proof of guilt.  We decry this in totalitarian dictatorships, but a form of it has crept into our own thinking here in the United States.

2. The expansion of rights to abortion and same-sex marriage and other issues is likewise another area in which government control is or will be restricting these things in the name of 'conservatism'.  As a Christian I believe abortion to be wrong...but who decides whether something or not is illegal?  Conservatives want to restrict freedom to choose, and must necessarily use the compelling power of the state to make their position felt, even as in many other areas (gun control) they vehemently say that the government has no right to interfere.  And as a Christian I believe that homosexual behavior is a sin...but who gets to decide who others should sleep with?  Must the state get to decide who others can and cannot marry? It seems strange that conservatives never say that multiple marriages (which Jesus called adultery) should not be illegal (and are supporting a man on his third!), even as they forbid same sex marriage.  But marriage between two people whom the state says are incompatible to marry one another?  Let the state ban it in the name of conservative freedom.

3. Then finally there's Mr. Trump's wall, which is perhaps symbolic of the modern conservative boondoggle of government waste.  For years conservatives would wail about how the state would spend endless amounts of other people's money trying to fix social problems.  Continually governmental social services failed to fix the problems they were claiming to solve, but yet the programs continued, and the only people to benefit from them were the legions of social workers who got their steady paychecks from the state in an industry that could never die.

Now Mr. Trump seeks to build a wall costing something in the neighborhood of $20 billion.  Will it work?  No, of course not.  People will always find other ways to enter into the country.  Ladders, tunnels, the trunks of cars, and the Canadian border will make this wall look like a laughable inconvenience the day it is finished.  Mr. Trump proclaimed throughout his campaign that Mexico (the modern conservative movement's 'other people') would pay for it, but in fact they are not going to all; the shrinking amount of revenue in the governmental pie will have one more giant fork put into it.  And the people who will be helped the most?  The contractors who build these wall, raking in millions in profit by demanding more and more to make things work, just like social programs during the days of LBJ.  The liberal mantra of the need for governmental control continues on.

At least the old liberals were honest about this.  They knew they had to bring money in via taxes in order to create their programs, and at least they tried making people's lives better, even if they failed.  But these new liberals?  They are only concerned about the few at the expense of the many, even as they increase governmental control in many aspects of lives and spend billions to get their way. 

Another Shooting

It could be just about any day when I sadly announce, 'There's been another mass shooting'.  It doesn't matter when, it doesn't matter where, it doesn't matter that it happened in a red state at a school where there were armed officers.  We live in a nation that loves our guns perhaps more than anything else.  I confess that I'm almost numb to it, and can only pray that it doesn't happen here.  I'm sick of all the rationalizations that come from the gun lobby as to why we shouldn't do anything about this, from 'well, abortion kills far more people!' to 'We need guns to the good guys safe!' to 'I can't think for myself so I have to let the NRA think for me!' to 'We've got to have a well armed citizenry so that we can be free from government tyrany!' Only three of those four have been spoken, but they are all real.

Once again, we have thoughts and prayers for the victims of the families, we put our flags at half-staff, and we engage for a day or two in an endless debate about what to do that will change nothing.  It's easy to put all the blame on guns and their supporters for this, but in fact both extremes are wrong.

The liberals are forever going to be ineffective in fixing this because they are unrealistic in their hysteria.  "We need new laws to stop this NOW."  New laws won't change the fact that there are already 300,000,000 guns out there...even if no guns were sold in the next twenty years, there's still going to be plenty of weaponry out there to keep up with these shootings.  New laws won't change the fact that some people DO need guns...if you live in rural areas, one needs them for protection, and hunting is a noble task that should not be eliminated.  New laws won't stop the hysteria that will happen if government agents come to confiscate guns...'See, we told you this would happen!'  New laws won't change the hearts and minds of the 38% of people who own guns (ironically, the same amount of people who think Trainwreck Trump is doing a heckuva job) and have been fed a diet of fear from the NRA and their willing publicists Faux News.

But ultimately, it's the gun lobby that's more in the wrong because they have lost all common sense.  Because they have completely misread the 2nd amendment to be absolutist (amazingly, few of them see that the point of it was to keep a well-regulated militia ready against foreign intrusion) and individualistic (note that it speaks to the people, plural), they resist almost any common sense ideas to regulate the abuses of gun ownership.  We regulate the building of cars to take out the most dangerous aspects of them (hello, Pinto's exploding gas tanks), we regulate the safety of new structures built to ensure they can withstand earthquakes and won't poison those who live there, we ensure that chemical plants no longer can dump toxins in rivers (well, until recently, thanks to the impending demise of the EPA under TT).  Why can't we have some common sense about guns?  1)If you own guns, you have to own a gun safe.  2)Guns have to be registered at the point of sale.  3)Every gun must be trackable not just in ownership but in ballistic markings...that way we know whose gun was responsible.  4)Let's come to a recognition that the general public does not need to own certain types of high volume, high capacity guns.  We don't let people own shoulder missile launchers or tanks...why should anybody be able to own an AK-47?  5)Limit ownership only to those who can pass strict background and safety checks.  In the time it took me to get licensed to drive a school bus, I could have bought several guns and gone on multiple rampages...this is wrong. 6)Tax the crap out of ammunition.  You you want a trophy to put up on your wall? Fine.  But tax ammunition like we tax cigarettes.  Make it unappealing to buy.  And the money that is collected in this taxation, put aside for victims of gun violence.

In this day and age mass violence would still happen even if all guns were taken away...as long as there are knives, crowbars, and rocks, people will find something to kill other people with.  But can't we ate least stop the most egregious examples?  Law-abiding people can still own guns...but we have to start changing the tone of the conversation in which hysteria on both left and right take over. Until this happens, the shootings will not stop.

Trump's Defenders

A new year, but the same terrible President.  Anybody who hoped that this year he would turn over a new leaf and be Decent Don rather than Trumpy the firebomber are to be greatly saddened.  After all, a 12 year old in an old man's body doesn't cotton to change very easily, does he? 

But I'm still amazed that his support continues to hold steady at around 38%.  I'd ask incredulously 'Who are these people?' but they are my family, my neighbors, my co-workers, and my friends in Christ.  They are living in a different world, perhaps, but I am still caused to tolerate them in love. 

Yet I'm amazed at the defenses these apologists give them.  There are 3, I think:
1)"Look at what he's done!  He gave us the Supreme Court!"  Yes, I'm certainly glad that the conservatives now look at the courts as nothing more than a political football to be won.  Any Republican president would have done this, but his supporters act as if he's saved the nation.  Gorsuch might well be a good justice, but some of his lower-court appointments...yeesh.  Thankfully a few of them have withdrawn after being shown to be incompetent or corrupt.  But more worringly are the many foreign service and other national security appointments going unfilled after he has ridiculed their work and driven many out.  The real work is done by people who do the work that leaders of both parties take credit for...but if there are not these people doing the work that goes unnoticed, how is Trumpy going to claim victories?  Good thing he has the Giant Button on his desk. 

2)"But...Hillary!"  I did not vote for Hillary...but playing the deflection game gets old and proves nothing.  If while growing up my brother had come home drunk, injured after a fight, and having wrecked the car, his defense of "But look at David!  He didn't make his bed!" would not have sufficed.  It's time for people to stop showing relief at what is not and face up to the reality of what is.  And what is, sucks. 

3)"I like Trump.  He's tough and doesn't apologize and makes us strong.  'Mercia!"  What saddens me about this excuse is that it is often up by many of the same Christian people who preach Godliness in so man aspects of life look at the bullying and hatred that is this man's language and then praise it.  It's as if people turn their brains off when it comes to this guy, accepting as good and righteous what in any other situation would be wholly unacceptable.  Taunting a nuclear rogue state?  Undermining the relationships that America has developed over decades of leadership by both parties?  Part of being President is about learning how to play nice with others. 

I suppose I can take solace in the fact that if the Democrats run somebody besides a convicted felon who has a dead hooker in the trunk of her car, they surely will oust Trump in three years.  But man, that seems like a long time. 

Monuments, Statues, and Other Silly Things...

This weekend our family took a quick roadtrip that included Coronodo Heights, just north of Lindsborg, KS.  Here's the backstory: in 1541, Coronado was looking for his cities of gold, and legend has it that as he climbed this little hill on the Kansas prairie he looked out and said to his friends, "Screw it, boys...it's time to go home."  Almost four centuries later some transplanted Swedish scholars at the college in Lindsborg found a piece of Spanish armor on top of this hill and declared that this was where Coronado had made his fateful decision.  Thus they dedicated the place to the principle of "Give Up...It's Good For You!" and built something of a castle monument on top of it that looks out over the prairie...thus the name Coronado Heights.  Likely there's very little to substantiate the claims that Coronado made his decision on this hill.  But it makes for a nice story and it allows tourists like me to to go up on this hill and recount some kind of vision of history, no matter how true or incomplete it may be.

I got to thinking about this today, in light of the marches and counter-marches and general forms of hand-wringing that seems to have consumed our country in recent weeks.  Basically all over the south (and elsewhere) cities are bowing to pressure to remove statues that stand to honor the 'heroes' of the Confederacy, men like Robert E Lee or Stonewall Jackson.  Many white southerners are very upset and have had their feelings hurt about this, claiming that this is simply whining on the part of people who don't want their own feelings hurt, that we shouldn't be 'erasing history' after all these years  Proponents of taking down these statues claim on the other hand that these statues should never have been built, as they give public honor to those who rebelled against our country and supported a slave system that is immoral.

I've come to the firm belief that, while some people are overly sensitive about all things and this can turn into a slippery slope that would even take down Jefferson, Washington, and other slave-owning leaders who fall out of favor of history, it's a good thing to take down these statues.  What clinched it for me was reading about how many of these statues were erected.  Most were built in the 1910s and 1920s during a time in which the Ku Klux Klan was on the march in this country; Woodrow Wilson and other leading politicians were openly anti-negro (Wilson closed off much of government employment to blacks, for instance) and the impending death of the last Confederate war veterans prompted many who fondly remembered 'the good 'ol days' to build these statues as a memorial to the 'lost cause'.  It was not only not politically incorrect to publicly proclaim white superiority, it was almost expected and even demanded.  And so, with claims that restoring Southern Heritage was vital, these statues of heroic Confederate war heroes, always in military pose and dress, were erected.

Needless to say, blacks and other minorities did not have a say at this time...indeed, they were politically powerless to stop the building of statues.  To do so would have meant great danger and even lynching...remember, Jim Crow laws were at their height during this time, and approved of people in the highest of offices in our country.  And so these statues were erected, and have now stood for almost a hundred years.

But of course now we live in a different age.  Racism is no longer openly accepted by most, and the rise of 'alt-right' Klansmen and Nazis brings about universal condemnation (except by the President, but that's another post).  Many who still support these statues are by no means racist...they genuinely do feel that this is a part of their heritage that outsiders do not understand, and they feel that they are being singled out for ridicule and contempt.  They are correct in saying that race is not only a southern problem, but a national one...indeed, many northern cities such as Chicago and Boston have faced equally challenging racial issues over the years and often have a shameful history of their own.

Yet simply crying 'Heritage!' is no longer good enough.  The heritage that is being supported is naive at best and immoral at worst, because it's a form of heritage that looks back to a time in which 'blacks knew their place', a time in which southern values openly tolerated belittlement and hatred of certain people simply because of their skin color and ancestry.  How on earth these things could have been considered Christian continues to amaze me; and the fact that many people still defending these things claim Jesus as Lord shows me that this blind spot is still very real.  Shouldn't Christians want to break down walls of hostility rather than build them up?  Shouldn't followers of Jesus Christ look to the good of others instead of their own in all things?  Yet in this instance Christians have fallen woefully short of living out their faith.

I wonder what would happen if revisionist history came to inspect Coronado Heights.  Again, there's very little real evidence that this hill is anything more than an interesting geological spot on an otherwise flat landscape.  But what if Native American groups decided that Coronado was a villain and a thief, would we need to change the name of that hill?  Would the good people of Lindsborg fight valiantly to keep that name and claim that it's about heritage?

Honestly, I doubt anybody would care that much.   5 centuries in the past is a long time, and nobody has a vested interest in keeping Coronado's name alive; remember, the people who wanted to lift up Coronado were Swedes, not Spanish.  But I'm sure that somebody would fight to the end as a matter of their self-identity, and spout all kinds of foolishness and falsehood to keep the spirit of Coronado's 'heritage' alive.  Maybe they would even claim the economic argument, that this place brings about tourism and jobs and other forms of what has become the conservative religion.  Rather than realize that true history is dependent upon actual scholarship and truth, creating symbols that have nothing to do with reality seems to be the way many want to live out their history.  People will always have a way of getting worked up about the dumbest of things.

A Pox On Both Your Houses

I am so sick of America right now.  Not the beauty of it, not the idea of it...but the reality of 300+ million people screaming at each other.  We're still overwhelmingly wealthy but we run around bitching and moaning about everything.  It's like we're tired of being happy.

We find this the most in our current political situation.  On the one hand there exists Trump and his enablers in whatever remains of the 'conservative' movement.  These are the people who have all the political power and are seeking to use that power only for the benefit of themselves.  These people are easy to mock, though they see themselves as the virtuous persecuted moral majority.   They have lost all spiritual and political credibility with many of us, but their desire to Take Back America, to Make America Great Again continues on in their self-righteous pea-brained minds.  On the other hand is the 'liberal' movement.  These people actually have the upper hand in the culture wars at the movement.  Americans as a whole are tolerant and increasingly acceptable of all that they stand for in sexuality, in lifestyle choices, in whatever is the issue of the moment.  They may have no political sense at this point beyond just screaming about how unfair the other side is, but they are winning the long game.  I have no home here, either.  Calling wrong right will never be right.  Accepting all things, and demanding others do the same, is no way to get me on their side.  Some things are simply wrong, and deserve to be called wrong.

Both sides have so much of what they want, but they're never happy, and led by the increasingly shrill ideological press telling people what they want to hear, they just get angrier and angrier.  And their yelling is giving me a headache.  I'm tired of both, and just once I'd like somebody who is a good solid moderate, like I still think 70% of American really are, who will speak on my behalf.  Who will say,
-I don't really like big government and taxes, but we have to pay for things like roads and schools and national security so that we don't burden the future generations with our bills.  Having to do stupid fundraisers so that after-school activities is not healthy.  Letting our infrastructure crumble because we've had to gut the transportation budget so that we can again cut taxes is stupid.  Things cost money, and squeezing these things down until government does the job poorly and then claiming that all government is inefficient and wasteful is, shall we say, moronic.  Let's figure out what we need to buy, get the money to do it, and do it well.  I couldn't care less about the big government vs. small government argument anymore...I just want good government.  
-I accept that people may have different lifestyle choices.  This is America, after all, the land of the free.  I need to accept that you may live differently than I do, and though I may not like it, I can accept it.  But by gosh, stop telling me that I'm a bigot if I think homosexual behavior is a sin; this is not the same thing as racial civil rights!  Fine...you can be married and have all the legal rights you want, but stop telling me I have to approve of it.   And stop saying I'm a Nazi if I think people should use bathrooms that their genitals suggest they should.  Stop it with this politically correct nonsense that the military, a place of group cohesion above all things, has to accept everybody's individual cross-dressing choices.
-I am thankful that we still have a great social safety net in which the poorest and neediest amongst us are provided for; it's a God-given blessing to take care of some, and in fact there will always be people like this.  But stop thinking I have to enable people to live lazy, fat, unhealthy lives.  I'm sick of making charity calls at people's houses when they can't pay their utility bills and noticing that they have a 60" TV in the front room.  They make their choices in freedom...but don't expect me to pay for them.
-I think it's great that America is a land of opportunity.  Technology and entrepreneur risk allow people to become wealthy.  But stop telling me that it's fair that we keep suppressing wages of the poorest amongst us even as we say that a rising tide lifts all boats.  No, it doesn't.  Too many people are sinking out there because tiny boats are flooded by the wakes of all the yachts.  Raise the minimum wage already.  If it means a billionaire has to sell a yacht once in awhile, fine.  And stop with the argument, "If people on minimum wage just had more ambition, they wouldn't be on minimum wage."  That's just stupid.  There's a reason we don't let some people into medical school.  Some people ain't smart.  Some people are not good at many things.  But they still have a right in the wealthiest culture in history to be able to live without worrying all the time, even if maybe we ought to make them take a personal finance course once in awhile.

Just looking at my above gripes makes me completely ineligible for public office.  Somebody will call me intolerant or a libtard or think I am contradicting myself or something else...I'd be shouted down before I even got to the third line of my stump speech.  But more than anything, I just can't be heard through the roar of the tumult.  I'm not screaming these things out in ALT-CAPS and so my voice isn't going to be nearly as loud as the idiots that have taken to Breitbart or Vox.  There's simply too much common sense for people in an ideological rage to hold onto.  My political career would be over long before it started.

Yet somewhere out there somebody has enough sense to unite those of us in the middle who are sick of both sides screaming at us and making us afraid, and they can do it better than I do without offending everybody.  Maybe we're too far gone, I don't know...but as it stands now, I'm just about sick of it all.

Congratulations. You're Both Idiots.

We've all seen the show or movie in which there is a love triangle.  Two men are fighting over a women, show themselves to be complete and total jerks, and she finally gets between them and says, "You're both idiots, I don't like either of you" and then walks out.

I feel kinda like that right now when it comes to both left and right.  I used to be a solid conservative, but my years of studying the Bible showed me that Kingdom of God was not, in fact, a desperate cry from Jesus to lower taxes on the wealthy or build up our military infrastructure around the world.  Yet the liberal perspective, which in practice seems primarily a cash grab in order to fund do-gooder projects of dubious worth, have never seemed a worthy alternative.  While today I probably sympathize more with the Left than the Right, partly because the Right has moved so far into crazytown that it's impossible to at all accept it, I don't feel home in either ideology or either dominant political party.

The first week and a half of the current Trump administration has not made me feel any better.  Trump...crap.  What an idiot.  Whether it's appointing cabinet ministers who are designed to placate the billionaire class or continue repeating many of our foreign policy adventures of the past half-century, or whether it's Trump himself overreaching to drive away every ounce of goodwill or common sense that may have existed, I'm convinced that ending his reign cannot come soon enough.  Even Mike Pence would be a welcome change at this point...maybe not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I do think he has principles.

But some of the liberal response has, to me, been lacking.  Yes, I am glad that there are protests.  But I'm sometimes worried that their actions fall short.  I wonder how many of the good-hearted liberals speaking of how we should not close our borders to refugees are willing to sponsor those same refugees.  And many of those who are speaking up are doing so in such a crude manner that one can't tell the difference in style between them and Trump.

I'm not happy, and my patient waiting for the center to arise and put away this imbicility is starting to wane.  It's not getting any better anytime soon, and I'm tired with the idiots on both side.  Thankfully the 21st century is the best time in history to engage in some media escapism.

Naked self-interest

I'm glad I have this quiet little spot to post things that will never get read by anybody.  In truth, I don't want people reading most of what I have to say, though as I say in the heading there are certain things I have to get of my head.  Preaching the gospel is far more important than anything I will say here, and I don't want to distract from the gospel, ever.  My ideas may be OK or not, but Jesus can save people.  Big difference.

But I still cannot fathom how people can vote for Donald Trump.  Christian people, people who have been going on and on the last eight years, "We need a Godly man in the White House!"  And now they are firmly behind Trump, who might be the most immoral man ever to have a shot at it (sorry, Thomas Jefferson).

But then I realize what modern conservatism has become: a naked appeal to absolute self-interest (be it about guns, taxation, 'state's rights', etc.), even as it is cloaked in the form of godliness.  That, my friends, borders on blasphemy.  And what makes it even more sad is that many church-going people are completely and totally blind to this fact.

I suppose both major ideologies these days are about self-interest...liberalism champions abortion and gay rights and welfare, which are all about the individual wants...but at least liberalism has the decency these days to do these and rarely call it 'Christian'.  Conservatism has so distorted the gospel message in recent years though that many Christians no longer really know what they are supposed to believe or how they are to live.  Or, what may be more true but more scary, they know and they just don't care.

It's been a long time since I thought this was a Christian nation, and we drift further from this ideal every day.  May God have mercy on us.

Red State, Blue State

One thing I see from my conservative friends on a regular basis is a map of America's presidential vote.  The point they want us all to see is "Hey, this is really a conservative country with just a few outliers of crazy liberals out there!"  The actual electoral and popular count drives them crazy..."How do we lose?  The system must be rigged!"

Yet looking at a map like this I've always seen it a bit differently.  Yes, in most wide-open spaces, people tend to vote more conservative, more 'Republican'.  But in places where lots of people live, they tend to vote more liberal, more 'Democrat'.  Why is this?

So we just got home from a family vacation to Chicago, a far different place than my small town in Kansas.  I really enjoyed it, as it was such a very different place, even if I personally would not want to live there.  Small town living is probably more my speed.  Others decide differently, though, and that's OK...and in living in a large city, people tend to vote differently and see the world differently.  And usually they vote more blue, more democrat.

Two things really stuck out to me while I was there that are illustrative of why one would vote in a more 'liberal' (i.e., more state control) fashion, making the facts plain that if you are on top of people all the time in large numbers, then you probably want a lot more control.  First, when it comes to travel infrastructure, you need much more central control.  We drove a little bit in Chicago...bad idea.  It's not that the roads are terrible in Chicago, it's just that there are far too many cars.  One time we drove late at night after a game and the roads were fine, but during the day when people travel, there are too many people trying to claim far too spots.  Thus, there is a greater need for more centralized, government-led initiatives like subways and buses.  While the wealthiest may be able to drive downtown and pay $35 a day for parking (as the free market allows), most people cannot afford to do that.  They need to take public transport to get to work.  While government trains and buses may not always be the most efficient means of getting this done, they generally work well when they are funded and run in appropriate ways.  Those who live in large cities can see this, while those of us in small towns (where driving is much easier) have a lot harder time understanding why there is such a need.  Just go to a large city, though, and one sees its need.

A second way to see this difference is in how we view guns.  Most of my family and friends in small towns see guns not as only a right, but perhaps as necessary.  Live in the country and you need them to shoot at wild animals, and one might need them for self-defense as law enforcement may be quite a ways away.  But live in a city, in which there thousands or even tens of thousands all concentrated in a tiny area, and loose gun laws simply don't work.  Actually, let me put it differently...lots of guns in a small region with lots of people do not work, just like having too many cars on too few roads.  Gun laws have tried eliminating guns, to little effect, and this is why there are still so many shootings in large cities even though there are laws.  Even against the law, guns still infiltrate these communities, lead to shootings, and make it seem like cities are dangerous places.  Removing all guns still will not eliminate murders...Cain killed Abel with a rock, after all.  But removing the worst of them, or at least making sure they are locked away or giving strong penalties or insurance rates to those who hold onto them will eliminate some, if not many of the problems that are associated with mass proliferation of weaponry.  

Maybe the differences in our country is a reason why limited federal control is actually a good thing...having a 'one size fits all' policy on guns or infrastructure or many other elements may not be helpful.  Let states and counties decide what fits best for their place.  This is not absolute, of course...some of the worst excesses of both sides (institutional racism on the right, extra tight economic or social controls on the left) cannot be allowed to stand.  But in a nation of 300 million people, it's hard to figure out the right balance of these things unless you are on the ground and experiencing them for yourself.

Booing Brownback

Recently there was a storm of outrage about Governor Brownback being booed at the WSU/KU game.  How dare people boo the governor!  Why, it's disrespectful and hateful.  I've seen more than a few of my conservative friends up in arms about this.

And while I think some of the comments were funny (such as, 'how can he root for these teams when he's just as soon cut off funding for their schools'?), I agree at least in principle with what the frustration...leaders should be respected and prayed for.  As a Christian, I should seek to pray for leaders I agree with and leaders I don't.

But I can't help but laugh when, living in the most red of red states, there is this outrage about Governor Brownback when he has been booed.  President Obama, and most Democrats, can only hope to get off with booing from most Christians.  

Will Christians repent for the hateful and slanderous things that have been said about Obama, the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, and the like through most of my lifetime?

Will Christians turn off Fox News when 'fair and balanced' means little more than a token defender of the President while their hosts make endless and unsubstantiated allegations about him and his political allies?

Will Christians stop gleefully listening to hour upon hour of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and the like, who are little more than hatchet men who know that their mostly 'Christian' audiences love to hear mocking and salacious attacks on their political enemies?

Living in a red state, I can guarantee that it takes a lot more 'courage' and 'boldness' to speak against the poor policies of Brownback, the Koch brothers, and their political allies than it does to complain about the President and the federal government.  Everybody does the latter...almost nobody does the former.  Especially at church, when many of my fellow Christians feel that tea partyism is equivalent to Christianity.

So I agree...what happened was distasteful.  But until I hear 'Christian' people start to  be more proper and righteous with their words (and not behave like 'spoiled brats' as one writer said...conservative Christians live with far more of a delusion of entitlement than anybody I know, but that's for another time), I'll not really take those complaints seriously.

The Death of John Waddey

John Waddey died recently, according to an obituary in the Christian Chronicle.  After reading about his death, I got to wondering how we are to respond when somebody dies who was a terrible and corrupting influence on the church? 

For the past decade or so both churches for which I preached received every month this little rag called ‘Christianity Then and Now’, which was a nasty little polemic against any kind of post-1957 change in the church.  It was put together by one man, John Waddey, and mailed to who knows how many other churches in this country and around the world.  It was complete and utter garbage and seemed to serve the singular point of making Christians suspicious of one another.  In almost every issue Waddey would speak about the nefarious methods of ‘change agents’ in the church.  In Churches of Christ, these are those who dare to challenge the dogma about instrumental music, women’s role in the church, fellowshipping with ‘other’ kinds of churches, and basically any kind of move to make the church not seem like a monument to the church methods and structures popular during the Eisenhower administration. 

Not long after I moved here, for about a year I would respond back in a letter each month to Waddey, pointing out his continual misuses of Scripture, his oversimplification of the issues, and how he was instigating divisiveness within the church.  For two or three months he wrote back angry and bitter letters about how I must certainly be one of those change agents and why didn’t I want to just leave the church rather than pull good people down with me.  Eventually, though, he stopped writing, and I decided after a year that this garbage wasn’t worth my time.  It was just getting me mad that somebody could find those willing to pay to have crap like this sent out even while so many other needs were being unmet in the church.  I sought to apply the principle of Romans 16:17-18, in which Paul told them to ‘watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you have been taught; avoid them.  For such persons do not serve our Lord Christ, but their own appetites, and by smooth talk and flattery they deceive the hearts of the naïve.’  I’m not sure Waddey was ever smooth or flattering, as he seemed to hate just about everybody, but from my conversations with other preachers it did appear that he had gained something of a following of those who were naïve. 

So, how can we speak of Waddey, if we do not want to speak ill of the dead?  When I was in grad school at Harding back in the 1990s I often had conversations with some of my fellow students about rags like this (and sadly, there have always been too many to keep track of) which seem to do little more than boast self-righteously about how right their own little group is and how wrong and condemned everybody else is.  Going all the way back to magazines like Arthur Crihfield’s Heretic Detector and continuing on through the 1990s to Ira Rice’s Contending for the Faith, we’ve had far too many magazines dedicated to dogma and destruction rather than building one another up.  But in those days, I used to be on the side of thinking that those magazines were helpful, as 1)they gave an outlet for disaffected malcontents and 2)helped keep those of us who were more progressive in line. 

As I have gotten older, though, I have become much more cynical about the place of these kinds of magazines.  Through their writings malcontents enable themselves to be paper popes and drag others into following them (and thus make them suspicious of others); they become much like the church in Corinth in which everybody has somebody whom they follow instead of all following Christ first. 

What may be worse, though, is that after reading these rags for several years I find how untruthful they are about what the motivations and teachings of the progressives usually are.  It’s hard to have an open and frank conversation with somebody steeped in hyper-conservative dogma when they are convinced that those on the other side are Satan-inspired heretics who are out to destroy the church and nothing will convince them otherwise.  Thus they feel compelled to proof-text Scriptures that have nothing to do with the issue at hand, misrepresent the motivations of those calling for change, and even distort the Bible to make it say something that the Biblical writers never intended to say.  I remember one time with John Waddey when he had used Galatians 1:6-9 to condemn change agent liberals on some issue, and I pointed out in a letter that he was using that Scripture to mean the opposite of what Paul intended (for in Galatians Paul is opposed to the legalists, not the liberals).  He wrote back and basically tried justify what he had done because liberals were the great danger and he had to find something in scripture that would point out the error of their ways.  In the end, his argumentation became even more ridiculous and desperate and unbiblical. 

I’d like to think that there were some whose faith was strengthened by Waddey’s magazine.  Once a year there might be something worth reading, and I’m hoping that the little good it contained was more read than the many other worthless articles.  I doubt that happened, but I can hope.  Regardless of how horrible his writing became in the last decade of his life, though (and in recent years it went straight into the trash), I think that the Chronicle and others who memorialize him will hopefully remember whatever good he did.  He did train preachers and preach (though I can only imagine what that was like and shudder), after all.  Surely some came to Christ by his efforts.   

Most importantly, though, in his death he will have learned that his salvation was not dependent upon his own works-righteousness or his ability to root out error (imagined or not).  Rather, he will have learned in eternity that he is saved by the grace of God, that it is by the blood of Jesus Christ that he had any hope at all.  If Jesus can save me in my wickedness and Paul who was the ‘chief of sinners’, then surely God will also save a divisive and angry man who at one time accepted Jesus and died with him in baptism to be raised forever.  Maybe this is what the death of John Waddey can teach me today.

Fox News Bias, A Brief Viewers' Guide

Recently I was speaking with an older gentleman whom I otherwise hold in high regard.  Somehow we started talking about Fox News...he's an avid viewer and I think he was trying to relate a segment he had seen.  I mentioned how I had no trust in Fox News, as it's is slanted so far towards a Tea Party/neoConservative point of view that it's hard to believe anything one sees on there.  "Oh no, it's true.  It's fair and balanced.  It says that it is."

I didn't really have a good response to his, because when you're so totally believing that your own truth is infallible, how can you even imagine it to be otherwise?  How can I point out the inherent bias on "Your World With Neil Cavuto" or "Fox and Friends" when it seems so benign to those who take it in everyday?  It's not like they come out and admit any form of bias, or disclose to their viewers that they hold to a certain ideology. So how can we tell that this bias exists without driving ourselves crazy by having to watch this crap and point it out each time it happens?

I don't watch Fox News intentionally, but it seems to be on everywhere you go.  I'll notice it is on the TV at the rec center, or be at somebody's house where it is has been left on, and so sometimes it will present itself to me even though I don't care for it.  But I've noticed a few things that show its bias for anybody who is willing to see it.

(Necessary admission: Yes, every newschannel has their own bias.  MSNBC tilts liberal in particular.  I get it.  But I live in a red state where far too many people assume Fox News is gospel truth.  Where I live I don't have to deal with people regularly who think that because Chris Matthews or Rachel Maddow said something that it must necessarily be true.  If I did, I'd probably be just as annoyed with them and be writing about them.  But I don't, so I won't.)

-1. What are the 10-word talking points up on screen during a segment?  Because we live in such a distracted culture where we can't sit for even five minutes to listen to a segment, the producers of these news shows sum it up in 10 words or less in the bottom third of the screen (just above the 'crawl' section that makes people think they know what's going on in the world because they see a two-line summary of some huge event).  For example, here's are some current headlines on FoxNews.com as I write on Friday afternoon (likely very similar to the on-screen points): "Dems reveal 2014 strategy to be smash and grab."  "Under attack on all sides, Obama Democrats return to ramming speed."  "Cost of offering health care might make some small businesses opt for fine."  Three headlines, all painting democrats with a negative spin: they engage in smash and grab and ramming and their policies hurt business.  What other takeaways can you get if you have the attention span of a moth?  These expression are never overtly slanted...but the way they use words (and they are experts at this, I'll give them that) can shape the opinions their viewer form in very subtle ways.

-2. What kind of pictures do they put up of liberals?  I've noticed this a lot more lately in social media and elsewhere.  You can change perception by still pictures without even having to resort to photoshop.  Most of the time when Fox News uses still images, Obama looks like he's about ready to puke, Hillary Clinton looks like a shrew, and Harry Reid looks like a wimp.  No strong, positive pictures are available, I assume.

-3. At any given time, what are the other networks talking about?  Here's a fun game (for sadists): at any given time, compare what CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News are talking about.  What they talk about during their 'in-depth' segments tell you about the narrative that they are trying to push.  Today most channels are talking about the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination.  But as I was working out today the guy next to me who was watching Fox News on his machine was paying attention to the ways democrats are changing filibuster rules (unfair!) and more on the failures of Obamacare (incompetence!).  Tell somebody in so many ways so many times and people will believe that this is the only way to tell the story.

-4.  Who are the representative opponents who allow them to say see, we are fair and balanced because we let them talk?  Yes, Fox News occasionally have liberals, but usually it's just a beaten-down Alan Colmes .  Ever see a lumberjack match on pro wrestling, in which one guy is technically facing only one other guy but has a ton of people outside the ring knocking them around as well?  That's what Fox News must be like for a liberal.  In addition, most of the representative liberals I've noticed on there are not well-spoken; it's like they have taken the time to find the cheapest talking heads they can.  Put them up against an expert from your side, and of course it will seem like that one point of view is markedly better.  It's like comparing the Red Sox with the Wichita Wingnuts: don't be surprised if the Wingnuts aren't going to win a lot of games in a head-to-head competition.

The reality is that most people don't want to believe that their favorite point of view is a product of bias.  We don't listen to what others have to say, and with the fractured 'narrowcasting' of news programs this separation only gets larger.  But the first step of healing is the acknowledgment of the problem.

Christian Nation: A Novel

Last week my brother told me about a novel he had read recently called Christian Nation.  It's a book that is a 'what-if' account that assumes John McCain won the presidential election in 2008 and dropped dead two months after the inauguration, leaving Sarah Palin to became president.  It's written from a liberal perspective that is terrified of the religious right, and is a word of warning about what would happen if the aims of the extreme religious right (personified by a dominion/reconstructionist ideology) gain credence in this country.  I'm about halfway through the book, and though it's not the best book I've read, it is certainly something to pique one's attention.  As a Christian sometimes I lament the fact that we are increasingly a wicked nation, but yet I also lament where conservatism has gone.  I've drifted from my 1990s Rush Limbaugh conservatism into what I think is the sensible center, but sadly nobody looks to centrists anymore...both parties are too busy running so far to the far left or far right that the silent majority of those of us in the middle have been left without a political home.

I think there are two major problems with the premise laid out by Frederic Rich, the author.  First, the novel paints a tea party movement that is swallowed up by the Christian right, when in fact I think that the Christian right has been swallowed up by the tea party movement.  When the Christian right really started getting involved in politics several decades ago they found it necessary to align themselves with others who might be sympathetic to their POVs and would give them a foothold into the corridors of power.  Their aims might have been good as they sought to promote morality and defend life, but in fact they have been co-opted to the point that their message could hardly be considered Christian at all anymore.  When Christians of a particular bent are demanding unlimited gun rights, intervention into foreign conflicts, abolishing education programs, and incarcerating people at alarming rates, it's hard to think of them as truly being guided by Biblical Christianity.  Maybe they think they are promoting the Kingdom of God, but rather they are more hell-bent on promoting worldly values than they would ever care to admit.  Biblical illiteracy may well be part of the problem...they've gotten so far away from what the Bible actually says that they can be deluded into thinking that second amendment rights are found in the gospel.  (This is an argument I actually heard a Christian make recently; it centered on Jesus telling his disciples on the night he was betrayed to take two swords with them.  No, really.)

The truth is that the right wing of American politics is far more concerned with a pseudo-libertarian agenda than they are with Christianity.  Sure, they may throw Christians a bone once in awhile on abortion or gay marriage, but modern conservatism is concerned with two things: 1)LOWER (or better yet eliminate) MY TAXES and 2)CURB (or better yet neuter) GOVERNMENTAL REGULATIONS.  Everything else bows at the altar of these two points.  The pursuit of money and what it can do for those in power, even the promotion of America First and our military might, guides the agenda of these right wingers.  Whether it's right-to-work legislation, NAFTA, or overturning environmental regulations, what really matters is the bottom line...will it make the rich even more money?  The Christian right, having forgotten about the prophets of the Scripture and their warnings about those who would build paneled houses while others starve, have bought into this agenda and made it their own.  Christ may be spoken about sometimes, but in truth this is only a minor portion of the far right agenda.

A second problem with the novel, and perhaps more fundamental to why 'it can't happen here' (or at least not in the way it thinks) is that all evangelical Christians are portrayed with a broad brush.  In the novel all evangelicals are reconstructionists, demanding a right-wing Christian America in which gays and Muslims and abortionists are all shown the door or shot, their choice.  Truth is, this is a caricature that simply does not hold water.  While there are fringes of Christianity that have bought into this agenda, it has become interesting that evangelicalism is becoming a much more broad place.  Writers like Tony Campolo and Jim Wallis and countless others have been having a big impact on the conversation, taking Christians back to issues like social justice and love for one's neighbors.  While some Christians make it hard for the rest of us to tell of the grace of Jesus Christ (and indeed, introlerant bigotism has become the common public perception many people have of Christianity as shown by books like UnChristian, which surveys those who believe that Christianity is a homophobic and intolerant and angry group of whiteys), there are many others looking to dispel that perception.

Most of my friends come from what could broadly be called 'evangelical' in their worldview, but with a few exceptions most have little or nothing to do with the reality of demanding forcibly a 'Christian' nation.  Yes, they are bugged by gay marriage and abortion and similar issues, but most of them simply want to serve God the best way they can.  Most of them can see through the false veneer of the lunatics, and like me are appalled at the extremes in both directions.  This is why McCain ultimately lost the election.  While many were nervous about electing a black man with a Muslim name, most of us were far more terrified at the prospect of a President Palin, she being recognized for the nincompoop she was by even sensible conservative voters.  Yes, maybe we wanted a president that was a bit more white a bit more conservative, but we at minimum we wanted somebody who could string two sentences together.  Obama may not have been perfect (and ultimately he has been mediocre), but we dodged a bullet by not having Sarah Palin be a heartbeat away from the presidency, a bullet that was far wider than the author of this book would have us believe.

In the end, it's an interesting book, and one I've enjoyed reading.  But it's just fiction, and Lord willing will remain that way.

Enterprise Square, U.S.A.

When I was in my early teenage years one of my favorite activities was going to Enterprise Square, U.S.A.  It was located on the campus of Oklahoma Christian University and was a monument to anti-government extreme capitalism.  It was kind of a museum, kind of video games place.  For $3 it wasn't at all a bad day for a 13-year old to spend a fall afternoon.  Mom would drop me off, I'd quickly make my way through the museum portions to play the video games, and several hours later I'd finally get sick of going bust on the Oklahoma oil fields and have my mom come and get me.  I'm guessing the combination of growing up in Oklahoma to conservative parents and visiting ESUSA probably 20 times in two years (remember, this is the time of my life of video game obsession before girls were on the radar) made me the supply-side Republican that I became throughout my early 20s.

Enterprise Square opened in 1982, and even then I thought the museum portion a bit cheesy.  Singing presidents made to be Reagan-era capitalists, Bob Hope reading off of cue cards, aliens crash-landing on earth to examine our way of life...yeah.  That's why I would usually go straight to the video games.  There was always something wonderful about mowing yards and fighting off government regulations and being a truck driver that was something appealing.  It was, after all, the very, very best way to live. the American way.  Even now I still have within me the suspicions of government...though I'm probably more suspicious of large multi-national corporations whose only interest is profit and owe no allegiance to anybody but their biggest shareholders.

Sadly, the thousand visitors a day never really materialized.  Even in the mid-1980s the place already had a kind of run-down feel to it.  Nothing was ever updated, and the building has set mostly empty since it closed down over a decade ago.  Mocked and now mostly unloved, it's a living reminder that capitalism is a dangerous proposition.  When it fails, it fails miserably.

One final side note...only in recent years have I found great irony in the fact that a Christian institution, which Biblically speaks to the nature of fellowship and helping out the poor, allowed such a monument to be built on its campus.  As I remember it now, Enterprise Square loved the individual and spoke to the glories of unfettered capitalism...but where was God in all this?  What about the poor?  Do we just let them get crushed by the overwhelming world economy?  What about those who have been in jail and have no real future?  Do we say sorry, you don't fit into the model of supply and demand?  Nowhere in my memory do I remember anything about God at Enterprise Square.  Reading the prophets of the Old Testament as much as I have for the last few years I have been struck by its call for economic justice and its warnings about the rich growing richer while the poor get left behind.  This, more than anything, has pushed me away from the extreme conservatism of my youth.

The parable of the house fixer-upper

There was a man who was hired to fix up a house.  It was a house that was too small for all who needed to live there.  It was too expensive for those already living there.  It had chipped paint all around, holes in the floor, cracks in the wall, dangerous plumbing and electrical work.  All in all, the house was a mess, though it was located in what all its residents claimed was the Greatest Neighborhood.

Was this man the right man for the job?  Many others had applied, all spending millions of dollars to get the job that paid a relative pittance.  But this man was hired because of his promise.  He worked hard, said all the right things, and finally got the job.  Some never liked this new hire.  Too young, too cultured, too dark, too different, some continually complained about this man.

And so this man began his new job.  Even though he had other jobs to do, his one particular special project in fixing up this house got off to a rocky start.  It seems that while many people wanted this project finished, others did not.  Continually they complained, stalled, worked against the project.  They told all sorts of lies about what kind of project this was and how incompetent the builder was and went on Hound News to speak about how everything had been fine before.

But the man continued to work at his new job.  He crafted designs and plans, yet his opponents kept ripping them apart.  He suggested improvements to the structure of the house, and his opponents kept denigrating them.  He pointed out how floorboards were broken and cracks were in the foundation, and his opponents kept on looking the other way.  Too much money, they said.  Too much work, they said.  Too much change, they said.  Too many people will be able to live in this house, they said.

But the man continued to work at his now not-so-new job.  He met with experts about how to fix the house. He suggested numerous improvements.  And the complainers continued to complain.

And finally the builder presented his plans.  It wasn't like he really wanted; in fact, it wasn't like anybody really wanted.  But the complaints had taken their toll.  Compromise with those who complained about the cost, about the design, about anything in this house had made the project almost unworkable, but plans were made anyway to start building.

And so real work began.  Old structures were torn out, new structures replaced them.  There were improvements, but more and more it began to look like the same old structure.  More cracks appeared.  More age showed on the house.  And all the while, complaints continued, deadlines were pushed back.  Hound News daily reported breathlessly about what a failure it all was.

All the while lawsuits were filed to stop this construction.  Challenges were made as to the qualifications of the man.  Nothing was ever presented as an alternative to his plans, and most people began to forget how bad the home had been that a house-fixer was needed in the first place.

After years of work, and much money spent, things were about the same as they always were.  The once-promising young man, now much more grey and tired, finally left his job in order to write books about his mediocre project.  And all the while, some complained just as much as they ever did, satisfied in their role as obstructionists.  Why did we ever need to change things, they asked?  Their own rooms were just fine.

Now, I ask you, who is to blame for the failure of this project?  The man who tried to fix the house, or those who continually complained about everything from the very first day he worked?