The Justice System and Our Prison Nation

Chapter 14 - THE JUSTICE SYSTEM AND OUR PRISON NATION
Roger Ray, D.Min.

When a great man like Nelson Mandela passes, it's also common to wonder if we'll ever see his kind again. But there's no doubt that the Nelson Mandelas and Martin Luther Kings and Václav Havels of the 21st century are striding among us. But you can't see it, because if he or she was shaking hands with world leaders and greeted by adoring throngs and serenaded by children's choirs, then they wouldn't be the next true Mandela or King or Havel.
No, the next Nelson Mandela of the world is rotting in a jail cell tonight, just like Mandela nearly withered for 27 years on Robben Island. Or he is on someone's terrorist watch list, or she is segregated and searched every time she travels through an international airport. Somewhere, government spies are reading the emails of the next Nelson Mandela. They are tracking his cell phone and listening to his calls, or monitoring her meetings with their undercover cops.            
-Will Bunch, Huffington Post, December 9, 2013

For the past several years there has been a very unusual cross-country bike race in France that is for prison inmates.  The "Penal Tour De France" is a program that leaves many Americans scratching their heads.  We think of jail time strictly as punishment, like societal revenge for crimes committed.  In France, however, they take a different perspective.  They are trying to figure out how to use prison time to help inmates learn how to live productive lives within the French society.

We tend to beat down our inmates.  We will not allow them to earn degrees or job certifications in prison.  We used to, but in a "get tough on crime" mentality, we do not want to give a prisoner an opportunity not afforded to people who have not been convicted of a crime.  One could argue that we should give these opportunities of education to everyone in financial need but that, evidently, would be deemed as dirty socialism rather than common sense.

If you agree with my insistence that the future of the church is dependent upon our ability to become morally relevant in society, it is quite possible that one of the primary arenas where we must turn our attention is towards the two million Americans who are currently in jail or prison.  This hidden nation within our nation may need what we have to offer the most while being the least likely ever to have contact with us.

Admittedly, the prison system does not make it easy.  In the early 1990's I tried repeatedly to set up college classes in the Federal Medical prison near my home.  Initially I was told that it would take too much staff time to move prisoners into and out of a classroom; then regulations changed around the use of Federal Pell Grants that made it impossible to find tuition dollars.

Then I applied for clearance to teach basic self-help classes in the local county jail where some inmates live for more than two years without meaningful programming.  The day of my first class there was an incident at the jail as I sat in a waiting area preparing to teach.  Two new guards had urinated on inmates through a screen in the roof of the gymnasium and the prison officials decided that it would be best not to have outsiders working too closely with convicts. I have suspected that my role as an opinion writer for the local newspaper may have increased the warden's discomfort because they really needed to keep prisoner abuse out of the media.

Far from the experience of a bicycle race in rural France, prisoners in our penal system experience violence, rape, and deprivations of every sort and are often put into situations where they have to extort money from family members and friends to pay other inmates for protection from abuse.
Once out of incarceration the humiliations can multiply.  With a criminal record it is very difficult to find employment and yet ex-cons are required to pay fees for their mandatory probation officer visits and follow up supervision.  Some even have to pay back states or communities for the cost of their incarceration.

People on parole are making many of the annoying telemarketing calls we receive because these commission sales jobs are one of the few places where they can find work.  As infuriating as these telephone interruptions can be to us, can you imagine what it is like on the other end of the line as people suffer angry verbal abuse all day long?

Not that it is easy to garner sympathy for sex offenders but may I remind you that nearly all sex offenders were once victims themselves.  They are the most likely to be violently treated in prison and the most likely to be reviled, unemployed and homeless out of prison.  Most homeless shelters will not give them even temporary shelter.

Permanently placed on a publically available sex offender list, they often cannot even live with willing family members or friends because of the reactions of neighbors.  Though we cannot afford to be too lax about the threat posed by those who are likely to repeatedly offend, we also have to do something much better than what we are doing.  If their offenses are not sufficient to merit killing them, then we must find some way to allow them to live!

Because reintegration into society has been made so very difficult, our recidivism rate is the worst in the world.  This has been complicated by the fact that the one thing Americans have been really good at is finding a way to make a profit, even in the midst of tragedy.  Building prisons and then operating them has become a huge profit center.  So much so that some states have started privatizing their prisons so that every night an American is kept in jail is another transfer of money from citizens to corporations.

When for-profit prisons are paid by volume, what possible motivation do they have to try to help prisoners to reform and succeed outside of prison?  In fact, recidivism fattens their profits and so they will do what they can to prevent education, job training, counseling and anything that might make a prisoner less likely to come back and bring more tax dollars with them.
Every nation has citizens who are entirely convinced that their own homeland is the greatest country in the world.  Americans have not only had a loudly stated conviction that ours is the greatest nation on the globe but, for much of our history, we've had the immigration statistics to back that up.

However, our dramatically growing income disparity and class divisions threaten to destroy any plausible defense of that claim. I will discuss income disparity in the next chapter in greater detail. Beyond the issue of the increasingly impassable gulf between the upper and lower economic classes that now keeps the poor in America forever poor we have the former inmate, the growing subclass in our society for whom there is little opportunity for change and even less social sympathy.
We are no longer world leaders in many categories but in one way we are unrivaled at the top of the list, but shamefully, that is for having the largest percentage of our population living behind bars. Seven out of every thousand Americans are incarcerated.

China, long famous for their government's repression of their own citizens, has an incarceration rate that is less than 20% of ours.  Vietnam has less than 10% as many citizens in jail.

How does this once great nation disown so many of its own sons and daughters?  It is, in many ways, a failure of our schools, of our economy, our families and our judicial system.  We must also say that is reflective of a failure of our churches.  In the big picture, it is a failure of our society.

There are too many drugs, not enough decent jobs, too much violence and not nearly enough love. We have too much moral judgment and not enough compassion.  We are too committed to revenge - style punishment and not enough interest in reform and recovery.

The United States is one of the only countries in the world that allows for a huge disparity in education spending based on school districts that allow the affluent areas to have well-funded schools and lock poor regions into ill-equipped, underfunded and understaffed schools.  Anyone can see that it should be the other way around.... The children of the poor need more enrichment in education than their middle and upper class peers whose families can well afford the kind of travel and cultural experiences that give their kids a leg up in life.
We have created a broken school system and a for-profit prison system that work together to fast-track kids from poor neighborhoods from school to jail a tragedy complicated all the more by race.  Even though blacks and whites use drugs at about the same rate, blacks are three times more likely to go to jail for their drug offenses than are whites.

Some of that is simple racism but a lot of it is an indication of just how corrupt our judicial system has become.  We have prided ourselves on the strength of the belief that our constitutional government creates equality in our nation.  Our courthouses are adorned with images of the blindfolded image of Justice that does not consider race, class or gender but our judicial system does not measure up to these high-minded ideals.

Howard Zinn said that our judicial system does not so much decide on who is right and who is wrong as it decides who can pay their lawyer the most.  Far too little of our justice system is engaged in the pursuit of justice and much too much of it is an institution that serves the interests of income for lawyers and profit for corporations.

There is one judicial system for the wealthy, another for the poor, and, in my experience, a third one that legal professionals use for their own issues, giving lawyers a literal court system for their own fraternity and sorority.  There could not be, in any third world country, more personal favors, disappeared tickets and inexplicably favorable rulings based on kinship and friendship than we have allowed to exist in our court system.

Somehow, over the past half century, the laudable "War on Poverty" evolved into the "War on Drugs." We were making progress in the war on poverty. We don't talk about it often enough but when President Johnson set out to substantively change the face of poverty in America it was working.

But as that movement became focused on drug abuse and all of our resources were devoted to arresting and imprisoning drug users the earlier progress was lost and we have now done something much more insidious.
Technological advances and the deportation of manufacturing jobs have left us with a surplus in our workforce.  We are removing many of the extra laborers from the pool by imprisoning two million of them and leaving millions more with a criminal record that leaves them out of competition for decent jobs.

It is no exaggeration then to say that our nation is in need of a spiritual revival.  Religious people must convincingly teach the message of compassion to our society that has far too often chosen profit over people.

We have continued to pour resources into the complete failure of the war on drugs that could be used to build up schools and fund public infrastructure projects that would pull us meaningfully into the 21st century.

Western European countries that have almost no church attendance compared to the United States also enjoy an incarceration rate that is less than a fourth of ours.  That hurts.  Why would the nation with the most churches also have the most prisons?

I cannot help thinking that traditional religion has played a role in teaching people to deny reality, disregard the aspects of our society that are seriously broken by focusing on perfection in an imagined heaven, and distracting us from the real work of loving one another.

The progressive church has a mission to tell the truth....to shine light into the dark places of our world.  If we are a prophetic church, then we must stand up to things like income inequality, unequal public schools, joblessness and a senseless devotion to the energy sources, transportation technology and foreign policy of war that really went out of appropriate implementation sixty years ago.

We can employ more people by rebuilding our infrastructure, renewing our power grid, building alternative energy production facilities and mass transit.  We can decide to fund our public schools, make it possible for the poor to attend college and make prisons places of healing and learning rather than places of rape, torture and training in how to be a better criminal.

We can decriminalize addiction and assume that anyone who says that they need a prescription for medical marijuana to cope with how crazy our country has been for the past generation probably deserves to have it and they certainly don't deserve to be in jail.

A society bent on revenge is a sick society.  A society intent on healing, forgiveness, compassion and peace is a nation that can deserve to call itself the greatest nation in the world.

Just War Theory in a Nuclear World

Chapter 13 - JUST WAR THEORY IN A NUCLEAR WORLD
Roger Ray, D.Min.



So, yes, I came to a conclusion that war cannot be tolerated, no matter what we're told. And if we think that there are good wars and that, therefore, well, maybe this is a good war, I wanted to examine the so-called good wars, the holy wars, and -- yeah, and take a good look at them and think again about the phenomenon of war and come to the conclusion, well, yes, war cannot be tolerated, no matter what we're told, no matter what tyrant exists, what border has been crossed, what aggression has taken place. It's not that we're going to be passive in the face of tyranny or aggression, no, but we'll find ways other than war to deal with whatever problems we have, because war is inevitably -- inevitably -- the indiscriminate massive killing of huge numbers of people. And children are a good part of those people. Every war is a war against children.

So it's not just getting rid of Saddam Hussein, if we think about it. Well, we got rid of Saddam Hussein. In the course of it, we killed huge numbers of people who had been victims of Saddam Hussein. When you fight a war against a tyrant, who do you kill? You kill the victims of the tyrant. Anyway, all this -- all this was simply to make us think again about war and to think, you know, we're at war now, right? In Iraq, in Afghanistan and sort of in Pakistan, since we're sending rockets over there and killing innocent people in Pakistan. And so, we should not accept that.
We should look for a peace movement to join. Really, look for some peace organization to join. It will look small at first, and pitiful and helpless, but that's how movements start.
Howard Zinn speaking at Boston University on November 11, 2009

In the 1997 film, Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon plays a young genius named Will Hunting who was working as a janitor at MIT.  At one point he is required to see a therapist, played by Robin Williams who sees the huge potential that Will has.  To open the young man's eyes to the reality of the world, the therapist suggests that Will read Howard Zinn's book, A People's History of the United States, because, he promises, it will really blow your mind.
Matt Damon's character may have needed an introduction to Howard Zinn but Matt Damon didn't.  Damon actually grew up living next door to the famous historian and he volunteered to be the voice on recorded version of the book.  I have met a lot of famous people in my life but I treasure the memory of hearing Zinn in person, first at Missouri State, then at Drury and finally at Harvard where I had the chance to meet him.

When we started Community Christian Church in 2008, the first group study we did was this same book.  We spent nearly a year discussing because we wanted to ground our shared life in the painful reality of the nation we have inherited.  Zinn died while we were still reading his book together.

The progressive movement doesn't really have a cannon of saints but if we ever do, I want to place the late Howard Zinn's name in nomination.  If, as I have suggested, the mission of the church is to speak truth to power, Zinn is certainly the best modern example of doing just that.

I have been saying that there are four primary arenas of concern for the progressive church in the 21st century.  The first is poverty and social justice.  The second is related to ending racism and prejudice.  The third is a renewed concern for caring for the environment.  The fourth has to do with advocating for peaceful resolutions of international problems and the avoidance of war.

For centuries any religious conversation about a just cause for war begins with the thinking of St. Augustine as formalized by St. Thomas Aquinas.  It is always unfair to try to condense the thought of either of these two giants of church history but for the sake of time, I will boil the tradition of just war to these three points:
1)       The war must be waged as a last resort and only by a sovereign nation.
2)       The war must have a just provocation and not be motivated by the prospect of gaining profit or power.
3)       Finally the war must be fought with a reasonable expectation of success and it must end in peace.

Every war that our nation has been involved in has been sold to the American people as having met these criteria.  We always posture ourselves as either acting in self-defense or we are carrying out a police action that stops the abuses of a tyrant. The particular genius of Howard Zinn is in taking a serious historical look at those claims and helping us to see how we have been lied to and manipulated in almost every case.

In his last major address, quoted above, Zinn talks about the use of the belief in a kind of "holy war" to gain public approval or at least acquiescence to our modern military adventures.  He describes the American Revolutionary War, the Civil War and WWII as our "holy wars" whose virtue is beyond question.  And then he goes on to question the historical memory of each.

We then use those holy wars to justify subsequent wars by comparing, for example, the Nicaraguan Contras to the freedom loving Revolutionary War soldiers of our history or comparing Saddam Hussein, or Manuel Noriega or anyone we decided to stop paying to work for us as being the same as Adolph Hitler.

Zinn points out that, yes, the Revolutionary War gave us independence from Great Britain but was that war really about equality, freedom and independence?
It wasn't for the black slaves, indentured servants, or the women or the landless poor.  No matter what high sounding ideals were articulated in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution is a document that established a white, male aristocracy in the former British colonies.

And yes, slavery was ended by the Civil War but was that war really fought to give American blacks liberty and equality?  Did they get liberty and equality at the end of the war..... or a generation later, or two, three or four generations later?

WWII did end with the defeat of fascism.  So, do we believe that fascism is now defeated?  Even our most defensible wars have a much more tarnished halo than we like to believe.  You have been told that we dropped atomic bombs on Japan to avoid the greater casualties we would have experienced by having to invade Japan.  That is an absolute lie.  We had killed a hundred thousand Japanese in Tokyo with conventional bombs just before dropping the atomic bombs.  No one ever talks about that and I suspect that most of you didn't know it.

Japan was defeated and ready to surrender before we dropped those atomic bombs.  We dropped them to show the Soviets that we had this terrible weapon and that we had the will to use it.  Do you believe that everyone in Hiroshima was an enemy to freedom and liberty?

We killed 600,000 Germans with conventional bombs, a 100,000 of whom died in a single night in Dresden.  Were all of the residents of Dresden Nazis?  The women, the children, the elderly?  Were they all Nazis?

We like to think of ourselves as liberators, defenders of justice.... We want to be that city on a hill but, in the wise words of Yoda, it is a very rare thing when wars make a nation great.

At the time the United States launched a war against Iraq, a majority of Americans had either been tricked into believing or they had tricked themselves into believing that Iraq was responsible for the 9-11 attack on the United States.

There was no connection, of course, nor were our weapons inspectors mistaken in their repeated attempts at telling the Bush administration that there were no WMD's hidden in Iraq.  It is true enough that Hussein was a bad guy but any kind of intellectual honesty compels us to acknowledge that he wasn't killing Iraqis at the rate that we did for a decade nor can we claim to have, on average, much improved their circumstances.

Earlier this month, Curtis Reeves, a 71 year old retired policeman, shot and killed Chad Oulson in a Florida movie theater because Chad wouldn't stop texting during the movie.  Now, you know how annoying it is to be sitting beside someone in a theater, or in class, or in church while they are starring at their phone and texting but whatever punishment may be appropriate for this annoyance, we're all pretty clear that lethal shooting is insane.

Somehow, we are not able to be similarly clear about when our use of military force is an insanely out of bounds response to provocation.

On September 10, 2001, there were "What Would Jesus Do" rubber bracelets being sold on the counters of book stores and gas stations all over Springfield.  In an entirely uncoordinated but massively hypocritical gesture, every one of those bracelets disappeared on 9-11 because no one wanted to ask that question anymore nor would they tolerate any corollary questions like, "Who Would Jesus Bomb?"

The moral problem for Americans was that we were not attacked by a nation.  If any country could actually have been reasonably blamed, it would have been Saudi Arabia but their government was not directly responsible.  Any reasonable military response to 9-11 would have been police action going after terror cells and training camps.

I said at the time and I am repeating now, more than a decade later, that our wars in Afghanistan an Iraq were not wars on terrorism.  They were wars of economic opportunity.  The waging of war makes some people very rich.

The flow of resources to military industrial corporations slows down when there is not a hot war or at least the threat of one.  There are thousands of examples of individual and unit courage, valor, genius and sacrifice from the battlefield.  No one should ever fall prey to the ruse that admiration for the contribution of any individual soldier must also necessitate supporting the politicians who made the decision to put that soldier in harm's way.

You will be told that if you support the troops that you must not question the war and that is an outright lie.  Sure, if I lost a loved one on the battlefield or if I had left my legs or my sanity on foreign soil then you want to believe that this sacrifice was made in cause of defending freedom.... Who wouldn't want his or her sacrifice honored with such accolades..... but what we want doesn't change the facts.

The inconvenient truth is that most wars are an economic scam.  We were told that the proceeds from the oil fields of Iraq would finance our military action there but that was never really the plan.  Already, nearly $200 billion in contracts have been given to the corporations that are involved in Iraq, with the largest winner being Dick Cheney's former employer, Halliburton.  Some very sober estimates place the actual eventual costs of these two wars at about $2 trillion.

Did we, with this huge expenditure of human life, financial and natural resources, bring an end to the threat of terrorism?
Again, in any honest estimate, we not only did not put a dent in terrorism, we have succeeded in aggravating the problem and virtually assuring ourselves of future terrorist strikes for the rest of our natural lives.

Probably every peace advocate in the world knows by heart the warnings given by President Dwight Eisenhower against the threat of our own military industrial complex.  Most of the time, people mistakenly put together pieces of two speeches delivered by the 5 star general who had become president of the United States.  Shortly after he took office in his first term, Joseph Stalin died.

It was then that he delivered a speech about the prospects for world peace in which he said that, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.  This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people."

Eisenhower was no idealistic peacenik.  He was not advocating disarmament or pacifism.  But he was pointing out that every dollar we spend on military hardware keeps us from spending that dollar on food, medicine, education and housing.

It was eight years later that the President shocked the world by delivering a farewell speech that concentrated on a warning against the irrational military spending of a coalition between congress and the corporations that build military hardware.  He saw this threat growing larger during his presidency as the cold war sent military spending through the roof.  He saw it, but he failed to stop it.

Since Eisenhower, Republican and Democratic presidents have both found themselves incapable of reasonably curtailing the power of a congress that is controlled by military industrial interests.

Where has the church been in the midst of all of this?  Who are our prophets?  There have been a few and some of them were absolutely of biblical stature.  But for the most part, the church of the United States has been as much of a silent partner to immoral and illegal wars as were the churches of Italy and Germany during WWII.

As Thomas Jefferson famously said:
"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection of his own." (Thomas Jefferson Writings Vol. XIV p. 119)

So here is what I have to say to the progressive church of the twenty first century.  Don't ever play the part of a whore for any despot, tyrant or lying chief executive every again.  Don't every play dumb or remain indifferent during a time when someone is trying to sell our nation another war.

And even more importantly, we must ask ourselves what peaceful measures can be taken to avoid the kinds of international hostilities that end up in war.  Wars are very rarely ideological in nature.  They are almost always economic.  Beyond all talk about radical Islam, Communism, Socialism or Fascism there is, simply, poverty.

We currently deploy an army of around 200,000 people at a cost of between one and two million dollars per year per soldier, depending upon where they are deployed.  We deploy this army to help foster global peace and stability.

Let's just imagine, just for conversation's sake, that we cut that military deployment by 75%.  We close all of the bases that were built to fight WWII, pull back weapons that we will never need and radically move our priorities away from the threat of violence and towards creating stability.

Rather than deploying 200,000 soldiers, we could deploy nearly as many teachers, agricultural specialists, doctors and engineers.  What if we make it our goal to raise the literacy rate of the world over 90%, make safe water and food universally available and to wipe out malaria, AIDS and polio?  It is reasonable to suggest that we could accomplish all of these goals for about one fourth of what we spend on the military so that we could cut our military spending in half, transform the world into a stable and safe place and still have the strongest military in the world for those instances when only a military action can do the job.

There are always people who get very rich off of wars and so the proposals I have just enumerated would not be popular on Wall Street or on Capitol Hill but if they can't find traction in our churches, synagogues and mosques then religion really is a fraud.  The program I am suggesting, of diverting military resources to medicine, education, agriculture and infrastructure is not only a workable goal that could create global stability and peace in less time than we have had troops in Afghanistan but, frankly, we would have to be crazy not to do it.

Holy Water, Sacred Land

Chapter 12 - HOLY WATER, SACRED LAND
Roger Ray, D.Min.
January 12, 2014


A tall, beautiful model strides confidently across our TV screens assuring us that coal is our friend, providing both abundant energy and economically important jobs for Americans.  Is she trying to persuade us to rush down to the mall and buy some coal?  No, but the apparent motivation for such campaign advertisements is not always the only one.  Clean coal, which is different from coal only because you say "clean" first, is a myth that the coal industry wants to sell to the voting public so that environmental concerns about the impact of coal on our water, air and global temperatures will not interfere with their profits.

But more than that, buying advertisement from corporate media is a way of protecting a vulnerable industry from unfavorable news coverage.  In the same way the hospitals run PR ad campaigns advertising the services of their physicians when most of us have little choice in which cancer service or emergency room we might go to.  We use the one that is in our insurance provider group.  But when hospitals buy up large blocks of print and broadcast advertising, they are trying to protect themselves from investigative reporting.

In some instances, where the disaster is bigger than mere bribes can manage, governments have been known to step in and silence the media rather than depending on the uncertainty of trying to buy influence.  More than a year after the damaged reactor in Fukushima, Japan began leaking radiation into the adjoining ocean water, the government passed a law preventing any coverage of the environmental risks.  The law carries a potential of ten years in prison for any journalists who actually do what we depend upon journalists to do.

It is understandable that the government has an interest in avoiding public panic but repressing important and possibly life saving information is shameful at best and more likely a kind of governmental malfeasance.

Similarly, in North Carolina and Virginia, state legislators have refused to fund research into anything related to global warming or rising sea levels as if refusing to address the science related to what is happening to their shores will somehow keep it from happening.  After Hurricane Sandy, the largest and most devastating storm in America's history hit New Jersey, that state's Republican governor began to show a great deal more respect for the more fact based conversation about how human dependence on fossil fuels is pushing our planet towards a dangerous tipping point of climate disaster.

Major world religions have had a hard time getting a handle on the topic of environmental ethics. There are a number of important explanations for our past failure, all of which are barriers we must over come.

First, western religions have been very text oriented, seeking authoritative direction from their scriptures, all of which were written in a time when the balance of power between the earth and humans was decidedly on the side of nature.  While we find examples of cherishing life, discovering awe in nature and declarations that certain rivers or places were uniquely holy, there is much more about domination and fear of nature in all of our ancient scriptures.

Progressives must get past this devotion to ancient religious literature.  We do not, for example, have to find a way to interpret the Genesis creation story to create an environmental urgency nor do we have to play fast and loose with truth claims about either Native American or Druid spirituality to insist that we will find substantive direction from these or any other ancient sources.  The motivation for trying to make the Genesis account a demand from God to care for the planet is, at one level, laudable but doing so requires abandoning our efforts at moving away from supernatural theism and the assumption that God somehow wrote the Bible.  You can certainly find examples of a more respectful approach to creation in some primitive religion sources but you can also find contradictions that would only foster more debate about issues that are, substantively, beyond debate in the real world.

The modern world is in a present crisis, not foreseen by ancient prophets or in ancient texts.  Now is a time when we must apply our devotion to both ethics and truth to join the moral will of the faith community to the information provided by environmental scientists.

Secondly, we have, at times, associated our religion with too specific pieces of land or rivers.  Poets often express more urgent truths than do our holy scriptures.  I love the line in Michael Franti's song "Hello, Bonjour" where the poet boldly states, "Every drop of water is holy water and every piece of land is holy land."  Again, the Jewish claim of a Promised Land, the Christian identity with holy sites, Hindu attribution of holy status to one river and Muslim claims to traditional governance of specific nations and holy sites undermines the larger issue that there is nothing about Jerusalem that is more holy than Lexington, KY or more sacred about Mecca than can be found in Belize City.  The Florida swamp is a part of the same earth as the Grand Canyon or the Alps.  Our reverence for one place or body of water should not be determined by tradition, or what we may have believed happened there in our own faith history but that we are a part of the earth and all of the parts of the earth are connected to one another.

Finally, there has been way too much emphasis placed on belief in an afterlife that can devalue the only world we actually know exists and whose existence we can now threaten.  Even for those who feel the need to hold onto belief in an afterlife, I would offer the corrective of Søren Kierkegaard who cautioned that there are things that are true when they are whispered that become false when they are shouted.  Belief in heaven may bring comfort to the dying and solace to the grieving but this belief has been used to dismiss efforts at saving this world because, as some legislators have asserted, God is in charge of the world and nothing will happen to it without God's approval.

From my perspective, the spiritual passion to protect our planet is also threefold.  The first is simply a reverence and awe for the creation in all of its wonder and beauty.  Henry David Thoreau was not the first to find more of the divine in nature than in church and he will not be the last.  One should not exclude the other but they should certainly be partners in inspiring and educating the spirit of both.
Secondly, environmental issues have a huge social justice concern.  Many of the major sources of pollution are profit driven industries that are choosing short-term gain over long term environmental health.  Also, the poor of every nation generally wind up living in the areas where these industries dispose of their harmful byproducts. The resources of the earth should not be the sole possession of those who have manipulated governments and banking interests into giving them exploitative rights that are, in any rational analysis, not the right of any individual or narrow interest.  We an innately understand that the air belongs to all of us but it would be helpful if we could maintain some of that sense of global connection when it comes to real estate.  As we saw in the 2004 tsunami in southeast Asia, when the rising sea level and stronger storm surges send a wall of water onto shore, in most countries, it is the poor who are living there in very poorly constructed homes who are the most vulnerable.

Finally, this is a matter of compassion for future generations.  The present generation that stands on the face of the earth does not have a right to use up the earth that will shortly be inherited by future generations.  We talk about owning land as a part of our economic and personal safety interests but how can any mortal own something that lasts forever?  We are stewards of the land and as stewards we have a much more vital interest that trumps our desire for personal profit.

This should go without being said.  What could be more obvious than the fact that we must leave behind a planet that can be successfully inhabited by future generations and yet sometimes the most obvious truths are the ones the faith community must repeat the most often and the most loudly.
It would not be difficult to become exhausted with the virtual panic in the voices of many environmental advocates.  However, we should not fail to note when we have become convinced that it needed to be done, we have been able to reverse the trends of planetary degradation.  We have been able to restore forests, clean up rivers and lakes.  We even, through individual effort and changes in governmental policies, reversed the erosion of the ozone layer of our atmosphere even though no one goes camping in the ozone layer or posts vacation pictures from there on their Face Book page.
People can, when given the correct information and the reason to act on it, stop poisoning their own habitat.  Environmentalists often look more like Michael Moore than that lady who keeps telling us that we should have more coal in our breakfast cereal because mercury poisoning isn't all that bad but we have to first choose not to be either gullible or fatalistic.

Understanding how to care for the earth is complicated and it takes an investment of energy and, at many junctures, personal sacrifice will be necessary to make the needed changes in our use of the earth.
The largest consumption of fossil fuels is expended in two arenas, the heating and cooling of our homes and in transportation and this is where we must concentrate our efforts.  It would be wonderful if we were all motivated to do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, however, human nature being what it is, doing the right thing is always a bit easier if it saves us some money at the same time.  Strengthening our conscience and protecting our financial resources are not always mutually exclusive.

Learning to recycle, to refrain from using disposable items, insulating our homes and being more cautious about the use of energy with our appliances, lights, television as well has heating and cooling can all lower our bills while acting to save the planet.  Investing in energy efficient light bulbs, water heaters and appliances have upfront costs but they promise long-term savings.

Transportation is a larger and more complex issue.  Larger, more powerful vehicles are attractive to us for comfort, safety, and utility and for reliability in inclement weather.  However, choosing smaller, hybrid or alternative energy transportation is an option for most of us and it is something we can do proactively to help conserve limited resources and to cut back on pollution.

Still, a huge percentage of the consumption of gasoline in major cities is used by drivers who are looking for parking places.  All of us have experienced sitting for long periods of time in traffic jams where there are rows and rows of cars, stopped in multiple lanes as far as the eye can see, all burning fuel while waiting to move.

The creation of energy efficient mass transit would require a sea change in priorities for nations such as ours.  We are not only accustomed to private transportation but our economy is deeply invested in the manufacture, sales and maintenance of automobiles and all of the accompanying road construction.  Both government and private corporate interests will continue to use their influence to keep Americans in cars.

Mass transit could cut down on pollution, consumption of fossil fuels, traffic accidents, the amount of land taken up in parking, personally owned garage space and the time it takes to move from one place to another.  There certainly would be a huge upfront investment to build this kind of infrastructure but that is a small concern compared to the hurdle of persuading Americans to want mass transit rather than bigger cars and more highways.

The technology exists.  Other nations have taken great strides in this direction.  All that stands between us and making huge progress in protecting both our environment and our personal incomes is the collective will to change.

The most important task of the ancient prophets, of the early church and of any meaningful incarnation of the church in the future is to speak truth to power.  Our news media is almost exclusively corporate owned and profit driven.  Even our public media is influenced by government grants and corporate sponsorship.  The church must maintain its independence from profit driven interests and even find the courage to be faithful to the truth in the face of changing public opinions.

Pastors are not environmental experts but we sure do need to expose ourselves to their research and insights.  We need to articulate a passionate, informed and prophetic message to a public that may not hear the imperative truth about our ecology anywhere else.

One of my favorite old hymns, "Once to Every Man (sic) and Nation," says, "Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne, yet that scaffold sways the future."  I fear that too much of the main stream church is cowering in a self-defensive posture, trying to hold onto its meager existence for another generation.  What I am trying to say to you about being bold in the area of environmental activism is what William Shedd meant when he said, "A ship in harbor is safe but that is not what ships are for."  The church exists for telling the truth and given the crisis that is at hand in the environment it is past time that we stop being afraid of the consequences of being prophetic because the consequences of silent consent are surely much worse!