Friday, August 11, 2017

"Fire and Fury": Misusing the Bible to Justify War

This week I sat in the waiting room of my therapist.  The receptionist had NPR playing in the background and the news was about President Trump's threats of "fire and fury" towards North Korea.  When she came to get me, I remarked to my therapist, "Today's news might not be the most calming thing to play in your waiting room, especially if you've got clients suffering with anxiety issues."  She grimaced and agreed.  I'm not sure if the radio station was changed or not after my comment.

When I heard the news that Rev. Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church Dallas, Texas had declared, "God has given Trump authority to take out Kim Jong Un," I thought, "Oh, just shut up!  You are not helping."  Jeffress is apparently incapable of shutting up and has been doubling down on his declaration all week.  A conservative evangelical friend of mine stated on Facebook, "Robert Jeffress is the low-hanging fruit of morons. Criticizing him is taking the easy way. You don't even have to counter-point, just quote the crazy stuff he says."  I have to admit my friend has a point.  Does anybody take this guy seriously?

 The Dallas Morning News stated the following about Jeffress' latest comments:

"By now, those of us living and working in the shadow of Jeffress' church on San Jacinto Street are well-accustomed to such outrageous - and, in the word of former Dallas Morning News editorial board member Rod Dreher, "obscene" - utterances. This is the man who first became internet-famous in 2008, when he preached about "why gay is not OK." Then he called Mormonism a "cult"; blamed the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on abortions; said President Barack Obama's policies "are paving the way for the Antichrist" - just a few of his greatest hits."

To justify his belief that Trump was given authority by God to nuke North Korea, Jeffress has quoted Romans 13:1-4

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Do you wish to have no fear of the authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive its approval; for it is God's servant for your good. But if you do what is wrong, you should be afraid, for the authority does not bear the sword in vain! It is the servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer.. NRSV

The ridiculous nature of a Christian minister saying God is for using nuclear weapons would seem to be self evident.  Jesus' teachings about "blessed are the peacemakers," "pray for your enemies," and "love your neighbor as yourself" come to mind.  Even the secular web site Mashable couldn't resist this misuse of the Bible.  They put out a satirical piece titled "5 Bible Passages Supporting Trump Advisor's Claim That God Supports 'Taking Out' Kim Jong-un" which had mock bible verses such as the following:

1 Corinthians 12:8--"Three times I pleaded to the Lord to take it away from me.  But he said, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness."  Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so the Christ's power may rest on me.  Also, Donald Trump has my explicit permission to bomb North Korea in 2017.  

and Jeremiah 28:11--"For I know the plans I have for you," says the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.  However I do have plans to harm somebody named Kim Jong-un.  He shall die by 'bomb.'  This will make sense in like two thousand years." 

I think it would be easy to dismiss Jeffress' statement, except for the fact that a great many Americans seem to think God did want Trump to be president and therefore God is okay when "God's chosen nation" (the U.S.A.) bombs the hell out of whatever country we consider to be evil--nevermind if the country is populated by people who have no say in their country's policies or actions.  Maybe many American Christians wouldn't say it as loutishly as Jeffress, but they at least passively believe it is a good thing to have a president threatening "fire and fury."

It's not that often that a Bible passage becomes international news.  (Google Romans 13 this week and the top results will be Robert Jeffress' statement rather than a link to an on-line Bible.)  So, I think it's at least worth discussing what it says and doesn't say.

There aren't that many passages in the New Testament, at least, that deal with the role of government, so Romans 13 gets drug out quite often, along with Jesus' statement "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's" in Matthew 22.  Yet, as often as these verses are quoted, they offer us little in terms of understanding the Christian's relationship to government.

Anglican Bible scholar N.T. Wright says in the New Interpreter's Bible,

{This paragraph] is not a fully blown "Theology of Church and Sate"; indeed. . . our post-Enlightenment notion of "State" would have been foreign to Paul.  One can hardly blame a writer if, in the course of a letter about something else, a small aside does not contain the full sophisticated and nuanced treatment that subsequent generations might have liked.  

Wright goes on to make an important point: 

 Romans 13, in short, carries a hidden "nevertheless" at its heart.  Jesus is Lord, nevertheless his followers must obey their earthly rulers.  

In other words, whatever authority God may or may not have given an earthly ruler, their authority is subordinate to that of Jesus Christ.  

Presbyterian scholar Paul Achtemeier describes the limits of government implied by this passage in his commentary on Romans..

The language of this passage, at the same time that it calls for obedience to civil governments, also relativizes that government authority.  In the first place, since governing authorities are in fact God's servants for the promotion of civil order, those governing authorities cannot claim for themselves divine prerogatives.

He goes on to describe what happens if a government demands its citizens do evil.

If then a government claims for itself the kind of devotion proper only to God and demands of its subjects that they perform evil rather than good, and if it punishes those who disobey such demands to do evil, that government no longer functions as a servant of God and is therefore no longer to be obeyed as such.  

That final sentence is the rub, of course.  Critics of Robert Jeffress' claim of divine support for Trump rightly point out that preachers like him never thought God gave Obama any authority.  A president authorized by God is in the eye of the beholder, along with her or his political party affiliation.  A more liberal Christian might question the entire idea of God appointing every ruler in every place and in every time.  History is littered with abominations by totalitarian governments, but even the best rulers often commit actions contrary to what God intends.  Personally, I've never understood why Christians like Jeffries who preach all the time about the "fallen" state of humanity and sin can call for absolute obedience to human rulers--at least human rulers with whom they agree.

People of faith can disagree on what constitutes a government, law or ordinance that should be obeyed, but as with most things we should do so from a place of humility.  We should invoke God's support of our political ideas with fear and trembling.  The best way I know to figure out whether or not God would support a particular policy or law is to question its effects upon people who have little to no economic or political power.  God's consistent concern for "the widow, the orphan and the stranger" (i.e. those without power over their own fates) is a good rubric for bringing scripture into the political fray.

Undoubtedly (at least in hindsight), we can point to Christians who disobeyed civil government to protest unjust laws (e.g. the Civil Rights movement), yet most of the time politics and politicians remain imperfect and full of gray areas.  I believe strongly that Christians who take seriously the teachings about justice in the Torah, the Prophets and the teachings of Jesus have an obligation to engage with politics--apathy is not godly, and when we do so, we must act alongside people whose voices are either not being heard or silenced.  Doing so, however, requires courage as well as humility, lest we fall prey to the kind of self-righteousness Jesus so rightly condemned.

Our particular congregation has claimed it is a "Just Peace" or "Peace with Justice" congregation.  This is a designation given by our denomination to congregations who have studied what God's justice and peace mean, as opposed to charity and the passive or active support of violence.  In these days of "fire and fury" it might behoove us to recall what we committed to years ago.

CCCUCC voted as a congregation to officially become a Peace with Justice Church on January 26, 2007 by adopting the following resolution:

Resolved, that Country Club United Church of Christ now is and shall continue to be a Peace with Justice Church.  We affirm the human community and oppose the use of nationalism to divide us.  We reject the concept that whole groups of people and entire religions are our enemies.  We affirm diversity as the best example of God's handiwork.  We affirm nonviolent conflict as inevitable and valuable.  We affirm freedom to travel, freedom of exchange of ideas, and freedom for open dialogue.  We affirm the worldwide goodness of God's creation and deny that God creates junk.  We commit our community to hone our existing skills and God-given strengths to encourage justice and promote peace.  Be it so resolved this day, January 26, 2007, that we adopt this Peace with Justice covenant, so help us God.

Want to know more about what "Peace with Justice" looks like?  Click here to visit the national United Church of Christ Just Peace resources.
Grace and Peace,

Chase

Recommended Reading and Listening (8-11-17 edition)


Regularly, if somewhat spasmodically, I share a list of things I'm reading, watching and listening to with my congregation.  If I remember to do so, I also post it here on my blog:

 United Church of Christ 
Podcasts
The Religious Right
HBO's Confederate and the "#NoConfederate" Backlash
Religion in the 21st Century

Friday, August 4, 2017

Overcoming P.T.R.R.S.: Post-Traumatic Religious Right Syndrome

Last week I was outraged (justifiably, I think) about President Trump's tweet about banning transgender people from serving in the US armed forces.  As I shared in my "thoughts" last week, I really felt like this was scapegoating of the worst sort and a cynical ploy to change the news cycle from Trump's other problems. I was even further outraged when I read that this ban was precisely what conservative evangelicals urged Trump to do when they met with him in the Oval Office.  Remember that picture of these supposed faith leaders laying hands on Trump in prayer?  That was the meeting in question.

The rogues gallery of power hungry clergy surrounding Trump is grim indeed.  (Seth Meyers had a takedown of Trump's faith and his clergy friends that would have been hilarious if it wasn't so frightening.)  Given Trump is courting (and manipulating) megachurch pastors along with the likes of Jerry Falwell, Jr. and the right-wing zealots of the Family Research Council, I think I can be forgiven for feeling reactionary. 

Pretty much my whole life the Religious Right has been meddling in politics claiming to be building up Christ's kingdom while instead they built up their own kingdoms of earthly political power and wealth.  No small part of why I pastor the church I do is because I feel called to demonstrate a type of Christianity that stands as a refutation of such hypocrisy and religious abuse.  I guess I've got P.T.R.R.S.: Post-Traumatic Religious Right Syndrome.  

I haven't really known life without Christianity in America framed as hating LGBTQ people, opposing equality for women and condemning the poorest of our society for their own misery.  This current presidential administration feels like a bad sequel to a movie I didn't like in the first place.  Yet, I was forced to check my alarm when I read an interview with Robert P. Jones, director of the Public Religion Research Institute in Washington, D.C., who thinks the election of Donald Trump is the "death rattle of white Christian America."  (His most recent book is called  The End of White Christian America.)  He doesn't argue that white conservative Christians are going away completely, but he does compile statistical data to show that it is shrinking in its number of adherents at at amazing rate.  

Already white Christians of all persuasions (Protestant and Catholic, conservative and liberal) have become a minority in our country in less than a decade.  Jones says that when he wrote his book in 2015 he was using 2014 data, and it showed that the number of white Christians in America dropped from 54% in 2008 to 47% in 2014.  That percentage continues to drop: in 2015 the number was 45% and in 2016 the number was 43%.  That is an amazing cultural shift.

Jones cites "the three D's" as the drivers of this change in our culture.
  • demographic changes that are due mostly to immigration patterns since the 1960s; 
  • declining birth rates among whites relative to the non-white population;
  • and [religious] disaffiliation.  
The last item is perhaps the largest driver of the decline of white Christians in America.  Jones says, "There's an internal engine in the churches - mostly young people leaving white Christian churches in large numbers is really turbo-charging these changes. Nothing that the Trump administration could do is going to be able to affect that underlying engine and these changes. ... I do think the Trump administration is propping up the power of White Christian America but it may be the equivalent of putting it on life support and keeping it alive even as its vitality continues to ebb."

On the surface that seems like good news to me, however it becomes less positive when I consider that the decline in white Christians includes not just conservative evangelicals but also mainline Protestants.  In case you don't know the term "mainline Protestant" it refers to denominations that have historical roots in the founding of the country and that generally have chosen more liberal stances on social issues.  Generally by the term "mainline Protestants," denominations like the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, the Episcopal Church, Presbyterian Church U.S.A., the United Methodist Church, American Baptist Churches, Disciples of Christ, and (GASP!!!!!) the United Church of Christ!  So while I'd love to laugh at the demise of the Religious Right, the tradition I have claimed has been in decline to a greater extent and for a longer time.

What does that mean for Christians like you and me?  Well it means that it is no longer enough (and never was) to define ourselves in negative terms (i.e. "I'm a Christian, but NOT that kind of Christian.")  It is not enough only to show up after some hatemongering group of fundamentalists commit religious abuse and denounce them.  Oh, I firmly believe false Christianities that abuse and demean and oppress  those in the minority or with less political power should be condemned and denounced, but I believe we must do so much more.  

If our experience of God is real.  If the God we say we believe in--the God who loves and welcomes ALL people, charges us to care for the Earth, hates inequality in all its forms and calls us to acts of peace and justice--is more than just a fairy tale, then we must live out these values in ways that transform our own selves and the world around us.  Simply being "Plan B" to the Religious Right is not enough.  It never was.

It is an appropriate thing to be outraged by the hypocrites praying in the Oval Office, but we must be careful we do not spend too much of our emotional and spiritual bandwidth upon them.  They and their kind are dying out.  The vast majority of our emotional and spiritual bandwidth must be used for cultivating our own spiritual lives, strengthening our own community of faith, partnering with other like-minded Christians as well as people of other faiths and no faith who share our values, and working for a world that is just and peaceful.  If we fail to do so, we will die out as well--and justifiably so.

If you, like me, have P.T.R.R.S., let us together vow to spend as little time as possible upset about the Religious Right.  Instead lets spend as much time as possible living out the wonderful life together that God desires.
Grace and Peace,

Chase

Recommended Reading and Listening 8-4-17 edition

Regularly, if somewhat spasmodically, I share a list of things I'm reading, watching and listening to with my congregation.  If I remember to do so, I also post it here on my blog:

United Church of Christ 
Podcasts
  • "The Inner Life of Rebellion"--The history of rebellion is rife with excess and burnout. But new generations have a distinctive commitment to be reflective and activist at once, to be in service as much as in charge, and to learn from history while bringing very new realities into being. Quaker wise man Parker Palmer and journalist and entrepreneur Courtney Martin come together for a cross-generational conversation about the inner work of sustainable, resilient social change.
Immigration
Racism
Other Stuff I Think is Cool

You can find more stuff that I think is worth reading, watching and listening to by following me on Facebook and Twitter.

Wednesday, August 2, 2017

Scapegoating: We Hate It (except when we do it)

Last week President Trump announced via Twitter that he would ban transgender people from serving in the U.S. Military.  This came as a shock to the U.S. Military since they've been working for years fully integrating openly transgender people into the military.   For now at least, the U.S. Armed Forces do not treat a tweet from the President as the same thing as an official order, so they will continue to allow trans troops to serve.  It seems like a classic political move aimed at changing the subject of the news cycle.  The news is bad about Trump's staff in the White House, his relationship with the Attorney General and Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, so let's change the subject.   If he can score some points with his supporters in the Religious Right and Alt-Right, then that's all the better.  It's scapegoating at its worst.

I wish I could say that Donald Trump is the only person who scapegoats others, but I do it and so do plenty of people I agree with and even admire.  It seems like humans can't help but cast the blame on someone else, so they do not have to take responsibility for the problems they or the people they care about face.

I'm not letting Trump off the hook.  Nor am I letting Steve Bannon, Trump's racist adviser off the hook either--this reeks of a Bannon move (listen to Bloomberg Businessweek journalist Joshua Green give his take on how Bannon likes to do this sort of thing).  And no, I'm not letting Trump's Vice President Pence who seems to love oppressing LGBT people off the hook either--I feel sure he has been whispering in Trump's ears.  I'm just saying that Trump is not alone in doing this kind of thing--he just has the loudest microphone at the moment.

We get the term "scapegoat" from the English translation of Leviticus 16.  There Yahweh gives Moses instructions on how to observe the Day of Atonement.  Among other rituals, Aaron is told to do the following:

"He shall take the two goats and set them before the Lord at the entrance of the tent of meeting; and Aaron shall cast lots on the two goats, one lot for the Lord and the other lot for Azazel. Aaron shall present the goat on which the lot fell for the Lord, and offer it as a sin-offering; but the goat on which the lot fell for Azazel shall be presented alive before the Lord to make atonement over it, so that it may be sent away into the wilderness to Azazel." NRSV

The goat for Yahweh gets sacrificed in the tabernacle's Holy of Holies.  The goat for Azazel (an ambiguous term that most scholars think represents a demon living out in the wilderness--the Hebrew word is made up of two terms literally meaning "remove entirely") takes on all the sins of the community and is sent out into the wilderness.

"Then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and sending it away into the wilderness by means of someone designated for the task. The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness." NRSV
Philosophers and anthropologists have seized on this image as a way to understand human societies and dynamics of power.  Dictators often attain power by scapegoating a minority for society's ills (think Hitler's rise to power through Antisemitism).  Communities and even families do it to support order and rules (think the "black sheep" of the family).  In the case of Trump--this week at least--transgender people are a convenient minority to pick on to achieve his ends.  He does so with false claims about the costs of medical benefits for transgender military personnel.   

I wish I could say that Trump was the only person I know of who does such things, but scapegoating is everywhere. Conservatives do it.  Liberals do it.  People of all races do it about people of other races.  Religious people do it.  atheists do it.   

Take the instance of transgender people--I've been told by transgender people that the "T" in LGBTQ is the letter most despised by the other letters.  Today's Washington Post political cartoon by Tom Toles shows Donald Trump in the first frame saying, "I needed to throw somebody under the bus to distract from all the bad narratives."  In the next frame we see a bus with a body underneath it marked "Trans" and Trump addressing three people: the first's shirt says "L," the second's shirt says "G" and the third's shirt says "B."  Trump says to them, "I thought you'd be happy.  I picked the least popular of you."  (Here's the link to it, but you need a digital subscription to see it.)  Sadly, even many gay, lesbian and bisexual people who have been themselves the victims of discrimination often disparage transgender people.  

Every group likes a scapegoat.  It happens in politics.  It happens in families.  It happens in churches (usually the former pastor).  It happens in offices--anybody ever known a bad manager who fires somebody else as cover for his own incompetence?  I like them too, because that means everything can be someone else's fault--entirely their fault, not partly their fault.  If it's only partly their fault then I might bear some responsibility too.  Then I'd actually have to do something.  If I've got a scapegoat handy, I can blame them and like the goat bound for the wilderness in Leviticus 16, I can devote my energy to getting rid of them and go on feeling good about myself.

Zurbarán, Francisco, 1598-1664. Crucifixion, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN

Some years ago I was introduced to the work of the French philosopher Rene Girard and his theory of scapegoating.  Girard's ideas have been used by some Christian theologians interested in understanding the meaning of Jesus' death as something other than "penal substitutionary atonement" (Human sin is an affront to God and must be destroyed, but God loves us and sends Jesus to die a violent death in our place to save us--that is, if we accept Jesus Christ as savior, if not then we get the violent death in hell).  

Girard wrote that human societies develop scapegoating rituals--often as a part of religious rituals--in order to deal with instability within that society.  Humans are driven by desire for what others have.  This desire develops into conflict and triangulation of battling groups against one another.  Eventually, the conflict gets bad enough that a scapegoat is found for all the problems.  Society overcomes its divisions and unifies in its blame of the scapegoat which must be destroyed.  Greater bloodshed is spared by destroying the scapegoat only.  Things simmer down until the next time conflict boils over and then a new scapegoat must be found.

For theologians using Girard's ideas, Jesus's death is not a pawn in a cosmic drama within God's self, but rather Jesus is a scapegoat humans used to overcome their differences.  The religious authorities, Romans and the general populace of Jerusalem could overcome their tensions by agreeing that Jesus was the real problem.  A cheap form of unity was found and nobody has to take responsibility for society's problems but Jesus.

Taken this way, Jesus' death, these theologians say and to some extant Rene Girard says too, there is great irony in Jesus' death.  The person scapegoated--Jesus-- is the one person who hasn't done anything wrong!  Since Jesus is the only one who can be truly innocent and he is the one who gets scapegoated, then the falsehood of scapegoating is revealed.  Jesus was not to blame--everyone else was.  Understanding scapegoating, whenever it happens and whoever perpetrates it, means that everyone must take responsibility for her or his own part in the problems facing a group.  There is no more "black sheep" of the family, because everyone in the family plays a part in its problems.

I don't mean to ignore the power differential between say the President of the United States scapegoating transgender troops and an average person scapegoating their neighbor who doesn't take care of his lawn.  I do, however, wish to point out that scapegoating is always wrong.  

It is a tragic irony that a religion which claims to worship and follow the person who stands as the ultimate false scapegoat is so stinking good at scapegoating.  Christianity is currently good at scapegoating LGBTQ people, but it has a long and terrible history of scapegoating whoever the heretic of the week happened to be.  Let's demonstrate a different type of Christianity, one that denounces scapegoating by whomever perpetrates it and does so by first looking in the mirror.
Grace and Peace,

Chase

Recommended Reading 7-28-17 Edition

Regularly, if somewhat spasmodically, I share a list of things I'm reading, watching and listening to with my congregation.  If I remember to do so, I also post it here on my blog:

United Church of Christ 
Podcasts
  • Radiolab--"Revising the Fault Line"--A really provocative episode about how much free will do we really have vs. how much is genes, neurology, etc.? Warning: the main story is a disturbing one--yet also fascinating because of the questions it raises. I'm a proponent of free will, but the more I work with people who have mental health issues as well as the people who treat them, the more I wonder about all the things we do not know about how our brains work. I will be thinking about this one for a long time.
The Political Divide

The Religious Right
LGBTQ
Other Stuff I Think is Cool

You can find more stuff that I think is worth reading, watching and listening to by following me on Facebook and Twitter.