When (If) We Gather

When (If) We Gather     Nov. 29, 2020   Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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This has to be said; so let it now be said. Whoever you are, whatever in other respects your life may be, my friend, by ceasing to take part in the public worship of God, as it now is, you have constantly one guilt the less, and that a great one: you do not take part in treating God as a fool . . .^[1]

—SØREN KIERKEGAARD

 

Christian liturgy should intensify the “cognitive dissonance” between the community of faith and the world surrounding it.^[2]

—RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS

 

 

I had the opportunity to host Christine and Bishop John Shelby Spong for a dinner in my home a few years ago. The conversation got around, as it usually does among senior citizens, to talk about our children. We both remarked that our children were evidently sufficiently affected by growing up in the home of a pastor to choose to never go to church again. John shared with me that his daughter had explained to him, “The church has all of the answers to questions that no one is asking.”

 

Generally speaking, I couldn’t agree more! It was at about that time that I was becoming aware of the fact that people of the 21^st century, especially progressive people, were just no longer interested in hearing any more about the Bible. John continued to write new books about the Bible, as have some of my other friends in the academia. But once we had convinced our liberal constituents that God didn’t write the Bible or any other so called “sacred” books and that scripture is a product of sometimes very sincere and often quite misguided ancient authors, then the obvious question becomes, why should anyone make knowing more about that a priority? A generation ago, most people would have at least believed that the content of the Bible was important but now, those tables have turned, and only the fraction of society that still goes to evangelical churches still pretend to care about scripture and, let’s be honest, it doesn’t seem to have a lot of influence on even them. 

 

Once we are set free from the mental prison of traditional religions, we realize that both heaven and hell are creations of the church that have been used by the clergy to control their congregations. Fear of eternal punishment in hell and the desire for eternal retirement in heaven have served as the invisible carrot and stick to keep people coming to church, making offerings, and tolerating tedious sermons and enduring absolutely horrible music. 

 

So, once you accept that heaven and hell are not real, that God is not a finger wagging puritanical parent in the clouds, and that not only is the Bible not a reliable repository of eternal truths but nothing else is either and it is up to us to figure out what is true, what is right, and what is good, then, if you are still inclined to get together with a bunch of like-minded people, what do you do when you gather? And here is the big challenge:

 

I believe that the number one thing that poisons modern communities of faith is nostalgia. Let me give you an illustration of what I mean:  In 1997 the congregation of National City Christian Church in Washington, D.C. extended an invitation for me to come and be their senior minister. It was an amazing opportunity for a 40 year old preacher. I didn’t end up accepting the invitation for a laundry list of perfectly good personal and professional reasons but one of the issues that made me shy away from the opportunity was the list of expectations that I was going to inherit had I gone there.

 

The sanctuary building is a cathedral, immense and imposing in its architecture. The cathedral was flanked by an office building on one side and an education building on the other. In the 1950’s and 60’s, when Washington was largely populated by the people who worked in government, for the military, or in local businesses, the church had a thriving Sunday School program, replete with all of the youth groups, children’s choirs, and family centered activities that were a part of almost all churches of that time. But as Washington became either too expensive or too dangerous for people to raise their families there, and as life was being modernized by the new technologies of entertainment and communication, they found themselves with a much smaller congregation, only a remnant of a Sunday School program, and not even a hint of youth groups and children’s choirs.

 

Their remaining members commuted in from Maryland and Virginia, as did the staff. Some traveling a couple of hours each way. But, without saying it just this way, the leaders of the congregation wanted me to recreate what they remembered as being their halcyon days of the 1960’s. I wanted their pulpit. I wanted to be preaching blocks from the White House with an opportunity to have an impact on the elected officials on Capitol Hill, but I knew that there was no way to actually succeed in what they were asking me to do. 

 

National City Christian Church was, at least in 1997, an extreme example of the way nostalgia is strangling the life out of most denominational churches. It is true in a corporate way, in that there is an institutional memory of a more vibrant and exciting church that they want to get back, and there are individual memories that make people cling to ancient liturgies and hymns that defined their childhood but which they would never choose to play in their car or their home because no one really likes that music, and more than merely not enjoying it, it no longer carries the theological meaning that it might have carried in decades past. 

 

For nearly a century, educated clergy have been trying to make the church experience relevant again by gradually making their services more progressive. They redefine the meaning of religious terms. They toned down the fear and made nearly universal promises of eternal reward and they even tried to update the language of scripture and hymns to make them less gender and race biased. 

 

To a certain degree, such changes have been helpful even if, in the end, only slightly more helpful than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Look, people can change. People do change. But the sorry truth is that people don’t change very much and even then, they don’t do it very fast. When we started this progressive congregation in 2008, I think we had a firm grip on a modern and fairly academic view of theology. But when it came down to what we were going to do when we all got into a room together on Sunday mornings, our habits tended to have much more influence than our intellect.

 

We had preludes and postludes, candles and doxologies, prayers of intercession and communion and even an occasional baptism. We sang progressive hymns, written by intelligent liberals, that were largely set to what I can only describe as being absolutely unbearable music. Initially, at least, we even gave some homage to the common lectionary, increasingly ignoring the authority it once held over us.

I eventually all but ceased to wear vestments and I often found myself more ready to discard elements of the liturgy that were mere shadows of the supernatural theism of the churches we had all left behind, but I regularly found members of the church to be less eager to abandon these nostalgic ties to what made church meaningful to us in the past.

 

It is difficult to pinpoint but you will hear people saying that a particular service did or did not “feel” like church. It is akin to the smell of popcorn when you go to a movie theater. Most of us have not been in a movie theater since the Covid-19 pandemic began, but when we get to go back, whether you want to take off your mask and actually eat popcorn in the theater or not, the smell of it when you enter the theater is closely associated with seeing a movie. They might, for health reasons, stop serving concessions at movies and most of us would still go to see our favorite films on the big screen, but without the smells associated with the experience, it just wouldn’t feel the same. 

 

Maybe the decade of transformation was necessary for us to begin to give more weight to function and less importance to form but now, at this writing, when churches that care about the lives of their members are not meeting in person, while we are a church in exile, appearing only on the internet to those who seek us out, we have to ask what we will do when the current health crisis is past? 

 

Surely the advent of vaccines will eventually bring the current pandemic to an end but none of us are so naive as to believe that there will not be another pandemic in the near future on this over-crowded, stressed planet. We went from having a fairly formal though reformed service in our Sunday gatherings into a stripped down, made for internet live-stream service, that was comprised of a meditation, a wisdom lesson, a sermon, three secular songs performed by professional musicians, and a benediction/charge at the end. 

After several months of this, we further reduced our online offering to just a sermon or speech. What will we do when we can invite our congregation to reassemble for an in-person service?

 

As a matter of health safety, I assume that we will no longer have a formal “passing of the peace” asking church members to shake hands and interact is just not smart. I further assume that there will be no more virus spreading congregational singing or unison readings. And I hope that we will take this forced break as a time to take final steps in ridding ourselves of the vestiges of the more magical elements of traditional faith. Even a reinterpreted ritual of communion cannot help but reinforce some of the supernatural theism and magical thinking of our more sacramental past. 

 

Why do post-theistic people gather at all? Isn’t it to build community? Don’t we gather to give one another mutual encouragement, sometimes support in times of need or crisis, as well as organizing to be a positive force in a changing world? Don’t we try to educate, inform, and inspire one another in our times of gathering? 

 

So, while I am not throwing down the gauntlet to rid the modern church of all rituals, I do want to emphasize that what is useful to our purposes as a community is music that lifts our spirits and informs our noble causes, sermons that inspire and teach, as well as meditations and wisdom lessons that both educate and emphasize the values we share in common. 

 

I hope that progressive churches will economically survive the current pandemic and the inevitable pandemics that will follow. Most of what passes for spiritual education and inspiration will likely continue to migrate towards online formats but for those of us who find value in community, I hope that by summer of 2021, we will have a place to go. And even more, I hope that the church we go to will not be tethered to nostalgia and continually offering profound answers to questions no one is asking. 

 

I hope that our churches will emerge as healing and empowering communities of faith that can bind up the wounds of the broken and make those in power nervous. I hope that our churches will be centers of education and activism, organizing intelligent people of good will to become advocates for the environment, for the poor, to fight racism and classism, to welcome immigrants, and provide safe space for those of different sexual orientations and races. 

 

This time of pandemic church closures will end up killing off a lot of congregations. There is a part of me that isn’t even sad about that. As important as the church has been to me in the past, if churches are going to just reopen to try to reignite a passion for nostalgia, I would just as soon they stay closed. But if we can use this time to reinvent the church, so that we can emerge from our time in exile as a more meaningful, a more useful, a more prophetic church then I hope we come back from this sabbatical roaring like a lion. The world doesn’t need our dusty old texts and tedious hymns, but the world is in desperate need of real leadership. I never tire of that line in Bruce Cockburn’s song, “Lovers in a Dangerous Time,” where he reminds us that we have to keep kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight. 

 

We have a lot of darkness in the world that still needs kickin, and, if I may appropriate the saying, “I just came here to do two things: chew gum and kick darkness, and I’m all out of gum.”

---

^[1]. Kierkegaard, “This Must Be Said.”

 

^[2]. Neuhaus, Catholic Moment, 65.

 

“Reuniting a Once Great People”

“Reuniting a Once Great People”   Nov. 22, 2020   Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

 

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Probably everyone in America has heard some echo of a tweet posted by an exhausted and exasperated emergency room nurse in South Dakota. Jodi Doering spoke of the painful irony of caring for patients who denied the existence of Covid-19, even with their last breaths on an intensive care respirator. 

You could ask how that could be so? Why would they stick to such an obvious ludicrous belief against all evidence, even as they prepared to take their place in Memorial Gardens? Well, South Dakota’s very cute, 40-something governor, Kristi Noem, might be a part of that answer. She has declared this week that even if a President Biden mandates mask wearing coast to coast, that she will not enforce the mandate in South Dakota. How did the pandemic become partisan in the United States and a few other hot spots around the world? Why did, for example, most Asian nations immediately start wearing masks and maintaining distance, cutting their death tolls to a tiny fraction of ours, while Americans defiantly go to grocery stores, bowling allies, theaters, and even hospitals, bare faced and insisting that the virus was all just a hoax?

It may not be fair to lay it all at his feet, but you know the old saying, “the fish rots from the head.” Donald Trump rose to power in the United States through the use of grade school playground bully rhetoric. He reached down into the brain stem of his base to provoke their fear, but he did by talking tough, and with chest thumping bravado, he divided and divided and divided our nation.

The incoming Biden administration is well aware that they have a Herculean task ahead of them, trying to reverse the damage Betsy DeVoss has done to education, what Bill Barr has done to our Justice department, and what a series of coal and oil executives have done to the EPA. But task number one for the new occupant of the White House will be trying to reunite a country that is now so accustomed to always choosing sides and resolutely fighting that you could not currently get a bipartisan declaration out of the Senate saying that grass is green, and the sky is blue. 

 

I am willing to contend that it is a habit. The way prejudice or even handwriting is a habit. You don’t consciously think about how to make a R or a T when you are writing, you have done it so many times that it would take effort to do it differently. Prejudice is like that. It is a kind of shorthand that allows you to get on with living without having to think about everything. If you had to look at everything on the store shelves in a grocery store, read every label, it would take you days to buy groceries. Your prejudices, your preferences, your pre-determined judgements, allow you to coast through the isles…. You know what cuts of meat you prefer, which brand of peanut butter, what kind of bread . . . prejudices are not all bad. It would be hard to get through life without them.

 

But, of course, they are also not all good. An ideological prejudice can be lethal. We saw that at its extreme more than 40 years ago when Jim Jones had so much power over the followers who had move to Guyana with him that more than 900 people committed mass suicide. Somehow the phrase, “drinking the Kool-Aid” has crept into common speech to reference venial things but I remember the suicides at Jonestown, and you will never hear me referencing any mindless event as “drinking the Kool-Aid.” It will never be lighthearted and certainly not funny. 

There are worse examples, if you think back to the holocaust, or the many ethnic cleansing events that have occurred in history, but Jonestown stands out in my own mind as the end of the ideological line for people allowing their minds to form a prejudice around a leader who, fundamentally, cannot be trusted. 

 

Politicians and preachers all dabble in this to some degree. We hope to gain credibility with an audience, a constituency, a base, and hopefully, most of us earn that credibility and use it for the good of those with whom we share a connection; but what we have seen in this pandemic are political leaders who are using the virus to further divide people and in so doing, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, are being unnecessarily infected and, shamefully, many will die, and some will die holding onto their belief that Covid-19 is all a hoax. 

 

We have talked a lot in the last few years about having arrived at a “post truth” era in which people make unsubstantiated assertions and, if your mind is properly prepared to accept the source, you will believe that there are mind control drugs in the chemtrails left in the sky by jets, that George W. Bush planned the 9-11 attacks, that vaccines cause autism, that 5G cell phones cause Covid-19, or that Bill Gates is using the vaccines to inject us all with tiny GPS tracking devices because, I suppose, he is desperate to know when I go to the grocery store or a fast food drive through . . . with all that money, doesn’t it seem like Bill Gates could get a life?

 

Since we have stopped having public services, and I have packed up all of our belongings and history to be stored until we can resume church services, I have realized how far we traveled theologically in just 12 years. When we started in 2008, at least I and I know several of you, brought with us the muscle memory of having been a progressive but pretty specifically Christian Church. We had an Ash Wednesday service with imposing of ashes and afterwards several of us just said, “You know, that doesn’t really make any sense anymore.” For a few years we did Palm Sunday, Christmas Eve services, and even Lent. I look back on some of that with a mild sense of shock that we were so Biblically based, so unconsciously theistic.

 

You can change your familiar prejudices, but it doesn’t usually happen very fast and it is almost always uncomfortable. It is accompanied with a sense of loss. I am convinced that in a couple of years, the red MAGA hats that Trump supporters have proudly worn will be as embarrassing as finding a Richard Nixon campaign sign in your attic. It is hard for those of us who saw through Trump’s lies and manipulations from the beginning to be patient with those who voted for him a second time and who now repeat the false claims of massive voter fraud. Right now, having lost the election, there are very many people who are sad, depressed, angry, and even fearful. I counsel patience. We don’t want to keep writing people off. We want to help them to engage in critical thinking so that they can examine their prejudices and correct the ones that need to be corrected. 

 

Covid-19 is not a hoax. It was not caused by the development of 5G cell phone towers, it was not a product of a Chinese military lab, and the vaccines will not let Bill Gates know when you go somewhere you shouldn’t be. 

I suppose that we were all a bit outraged at the recent firing of Chris Krebs who, until this week, was in charge of our nation’s cybersecurity and who did an absolutely laudable job of insuring that our recent election was free of foreign influence and that social media was scrubbed of a great deal of false information. Unfortunately, an awful lot of the false information he was identifying came directly from our current Commander in Chief. In fact, the website he put up to flag false election claims started to look almost exclusively like a Trump filter since almost everything Trump said was a lie. His firing certainly did not come as a surprise to him and I feel like it will end up being a gold star on his resume. But you have to remember, the little boy in the parable who first shouted out, “The emperor has no clothes,” was not immediately regarded as being a hero. 

 

Almost every elected Republican and most of the White House staff have played along with the circus that Trump has created. A few wrote “tell all” books after they left the administration, but few have been as clear eyed as Chris Krebs who, like the little boy in the parable, just wasn’t going to turn off either his brain or his character to play along with the crowd. 

 

You have heard me say before that only dead fish always swim with the current. We are coming to the close of a chapter of American history in which nearly half of our peers have been swimming with the current. No one likes to be made to appear to be stupid. No one wants to cop to having been tricked, manipulated, or conned. So, let’s be patient and try to hold out an olive branch and hold open to the door to those who are willing to try to restore some unity to our divided land. 

 

Not many of us were born into progressive homes. Not many of us started our spiritual journey in an open minded, inclusive, post-theistic context. Someone gave us encouragement and support along the way. 

We may not be conscious of the steps we took over the past decades to get to where we are, but think back, you were not who are you now and aren’t you glad that people gave you the time and space you needed to evolve?

 

Prior to the Trump era and the pandemic, I was inclined to believe that only about 2 or 3% of the population were sociopaths. But when you start to hear people insisting that we not have universal healthcare because they like the insurance they have, literally insisting that we leave millions of people without any access to healthcare because they are afraid they might lose some personal benefit, then you start to look at society differently. When you see politicians railing against a pandemic stimulus package when millions are unemployed, being evicted, and probably hungry, then it starts to look like there might be 10 or 20x as many sociopaths as I had originally thought. And I want to caution you against lumping political conservatives, Trump supporters, or even covid-deniers into a single basket of deplorables. Even if they are saying deplorable things today, we must hope that all of us can change.

 

When we were starting our church, I had a meeting with an older pastor who had experience with a new church start. The one piece of advice he had that turned out to be the most useful thing that I could hear was this: He told me, the people who help you to start the church will not be the same people with whom you celebrate your second anniversary. Don’t take it personally, it is not your fault. This is just the nature of the beast. 

 

His words turned out to be prophetic. There was a lot of coming and going in the first years. I hated it. 

People would join us, be very active, they were a part of every social gathering and event, and then either disappeared quietly and slowly, or they burned out in a more explosive ego driven fireworks display. Again, the people who came in, got really active and involved, and then left were not a basket of deplorables. They were not bad people. Some came and got what they needed and left. Some came and found that they needed something else. And, of course, some died, some moved away, and others had big life changes: they got married, changed jobs, something that made the congregation that once was vital to them, no longer a good fit. It is painful. It feels like losing a friend and a lot of times it is exactly that, but it rarely calls for our judgement . . . just our loving acceptance.

 

But, of course, sociopaths do exist and there are those who do harm because it gives them a sense of personal importance or satisfaction to lash out at others.

If any aspiring pastor ever asks me for advice about starting a new church, I will share this proverb with them: Be careful who you let on your ship, because some people will sink the whole ship just because they can’t be the captain. You will never meet anyone who will introduce themselves to you by saying, “Be careful, I am a sociopath, and I will eventually tear your heart out and eat it in front of you.” There has never been a sociopath who knew that they were a sociopath. What they feel is lonely. They feel that they are being ignored by the world, overlooked, under appreciated. And so, they seek out voluntary associations . . . whether it is a church, the Kidney Foundation, or some other charity . . . and at first they are generous with their time and resources and they are friendly to the point of being absurdly flattering, and then they consciously or unconsciously, try to take control. 

And not even necessarily because they want to be the captain of the ship but because, for reasons they do not even understand, they just like to see ships sink. It gives them a sense of personal importance and power. Some people are not looking for fame or wealth, they just like to watch the world burn. 

 

Most of us are wounded by life. All of us have issues. We are aware of some of them and we are unaware of most of them. Many times, the worst things we do in life were unintentional and we have no idea why we acted the way we did. The purpose of creating a community is to both find healing and to heal others. Building community within family, within a church, within any free association of people in a charity or a political movement, helps us to learn how to bring healing to the divisions in our nation. Without forbearance and forgiveness, we have no hope of ever healing our nation. 

 

But, the truth is that there are sociopaths in the world who do not want to be healed. They just want to watch the world burn. And if I have any advice to give on that front, I would implore you to err on the side of generosity. You cannot always tell who is trying to find healing and who is trying to just get your trust to deliver a dagger to your back.

I hate it when a familiar face disappears, and people come to me for an explanation. “Whatever happened to so and so?” I am left to try to make sense of something that is often so embarrassing that it would embarrass Charles Darwin if you said it out loud. You cannot always win over the haters and you sure can’t give a logical account of illogical conduct. Give yourself a break. You are not, after all, the jackass whisperer. 

The most important and the most difficult task ahead of us is to reunite a deeply divided nation. Not everyone wants to be reunited. Not everyone will be able to set aside their loss and hurt to accept your olive branch. All I can say is that it is not up to us to control the outcomes, it is simply up to us to sincerely try to be forgiving, understanding, and reconciling.

 

Secondly, and this is the real crux of the matter. Don’t you be that person that sinks the ship. Don’t set fires just to watch the world burn. Human beings should not be treated as if they were expendable. Don’t sever a friendship unnecessarily. Don’t abandon someone in their time of distress. That doesn’t mean you have to act like conspiracy theories aren’t stupid. It certainly doesn’t mean that you have to act like you believe lies and propaganda. But it does mean that you can be nice about it. It means that you can give those who have not yet felt their connection to the unemployed, the uninsured, the poor, the disabled, the elderly, or the lonely, the space where they feel safe enough to change. 

 

No one ever changes when they feel unsafe. It is nearly impossible to draw someone into the light by insulting them, deriding them, or by being condescended. Someone loved us when we were jackasses. Now it is our turn to be that someone. Consider it a gift that you are giving to them. You don’t have to remind them that they made a 15 on the ACT or that the never finished college. They remember. Their condescending tone is because of their insecurities. You don’t have to put them down and you don’t have to believe their Fox generated conspiracy theories. But you can give them the gift of patience, of kindness, of listening, asking questions rather than retorts, and see if they can find their way out of prejudice and  darkness.

 Unlike Motel 6, for the last few years, a lot of us have forgotten to leave a light on. Now, perhaps, it is time to welcome some old friends back. 

“Waging Peace”

“Waging Peace”   Nov 15, 2020    Dr. Roger Ray   

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I could not have easily found Nicaragua on a map the first time my old friend, Keith Jaspers, asked me to go there with him. He had followed my work in poverty programs through the local media for years and when we had a chance meeting, he asked me to come and see what the charity he had founded was doing in Nicaragua. His persuasiveness literally changed my life for the next several years. Keith was a self-made millionaire, who pulled himself up from poverty in agriculture to embrace the world of business, first buying a bowling alley and then a small hotel and finally several hotels. 

 

He had been recruited by Habitat for Humanity to serve on their international board and he saw from their work that simply giving someone a house didn’t always change the course of their lives and that sometimes it literally made things worse. Keith used his own money and a lot of his own history to devise a model for working in third world poverty settings to combine education, medical care, housing, feeding programs, and micro business loans, to create an economy where one had never existed before. He required the villages where he worked to invite them in, provide exhaustive volunteer efforts on their own, always with the goal of raising up leaders and a functioning economy so that his organization was no longer needed.

 

I worked with Keith’s organization, the Rainbow Network, for about 15 years, as a volunteer, a board member, and finally as the national director on an interim basis just before we started our church. I’ve lost count of how many times I have been to Nicaragua but I can tell you that I visited the same villages over a period of many years and saw many of them literally graduate from the program, creating successful businesses, neighborhoods, schools, medical clinics, and ending the need for feeding centers. Words that I had heard in the news during the 80’s, words like “the Contras” and “the Sandinistas” came to life for me. I knew that President Reagan had illegally sold arms to terrorists in Iran to fund the Contras in Nicaragua, but I had no idea why the Contras and Sandinistas were fighting and why Republicans wanted to take sides.

 

Obviously, my education about the issues began with my first interest in the country but it got real when I walked along the market in Masaya and saw the bullet pocked walls, and the memorial mound in San Ramon where thousands of weapons were buried with the pledge that they would never take up arms again. 

 

Over the century before my first visit there, the USA had invaded Nicaragua four times. Initially to make it a de facto colony, literally coining the phrase “Banana Republic” because we put dictators in power to run the country like a slave colony producing coffee and bananas for American consumers and serving as the most efficient way to move goods between our east and west coasts before the Panama Canal was dug. The Vanderbilt family built their fortune by operating the bi-costal railway across Nicaragua. They became so powerful that they were able to prevent building the canal in Nicaragua which would have been much easier and less expensive than building it in Panama, but their private railway was so lucrative, it was almost like they had a permit to print their own currency.

It was our colonial exploitation that made socialism look attractive to the poor in Central America and it was the fear of the spread of socialism that caused the USA to militarize most of Central America to make sure that Cuba was unsuccessful in spreading their anti-colonial revolution. The free election of socialist leaning Sandinistas is why the US got involved in organizing the armies of the former dictator, Samosa, into the Contras, to unseat the Sandinista government through bloodshed. We had kept some member of the Samosa family in power for more than 40 years. Franklin Roosevelt is famously remembered to have remarked, “Samosa may be a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch.” 

 

We have often been given the impression that the USA provides foreign aid throughout the world, solving humanitarian problems wherever we go. And some of that is true but it is also true that we have snuggled up to dictators and tyrants to keep our own supply lines of natural resources open and to contain our political enemies. 

 

I bring all of this up about Nicaragua only to say, that as I discovered what a horribly exploitative relationship we have had with them, I wondered why they were always so nice to me and my American traveling companions when we were there? We were basically equivalent to a Japanese tourist in Hawaii in 1950. Somehow, they instinctively did not see Americans as a homogenous whole. They understood the difference between those who wanted to help and those who wanted to exploit them. I had only one uncomfortable evening, sitting in the hotel lounge in Matagalpa, on June 5, 2004. CNN international was on in the background and they announced the death of Ronald Reagan and went on to run historical roll, praising him as a great hero of American history. 

That was more than my Nicaraguan friends could stand. They had all lost family members and friends in the Contra wars and for them, there is no greater historical demon that Reagan. My server slammed my next beer down in front of me and announced, “Reagan no fue un héroe.” (Reagan was no hero) I replied, “No sacarás ningún argumento de mí.” (You will get no argument out of me). And it was never brought up again. 

 

It is an easy thing to say that we want world peace, we want an end to war, but how to get from the highly militarized globe we now inhabit to a generally peaceful world is not simple. But, it remains true that it is virtually impossible to work for peace while preparing for war. The United States maintains between 700 and 800 military installations and bases around the world. That is a huge investment. The old proverb that says “If all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail,” becomes our de facto foreign policy. Other than the nuclear arms race, there has never been a historical example of a military build up in which the arms were not put to use on a battlefield almost immediately. I believe that it was only the fortunate placement of some military resistance to Trump’s carelessness that prevented him from using a nuclear weapon. His recent changes in Pentagon staff should be of concern to the world because he has two months now in which he might try a military action that would allow him to hold onto power. It is a nightmare scenario but, would any of us really be surprised?

 

We want peace but we get it more often by a threat of overwhelming military force than by more civilized methods. We are all familiar with President Kennedy’s initiative in the “Peace Corps,” which is a great idea, right, send Americans as ambassadors to poor countries to teach and work along side the poor in agriculture and economic development but even the Peace Corps volunteers were often used as pawns to soften up public opinion in a country where we wanted to establish a military base. And even though the noble cause of the Peace Corps has been coopted for intelligence and military purposes, it has also been kept to such a small budget that it has never been more than symbolic.

 

In this year, in this season of transition as we are thinking about how the world might evolve, how we might turn away from our militaristic and economically abusive past, towards a better and more peaceful world, I would like to offer two observations:

The first is that most of the world is prepared to welcome and forgive a better America. It would be a rare American these days who would immediately think of Pearl Harbor when Japan is mentioned, or who would assume that every German was secretively a Nazi. And, good news, people in our economic colonies, and yes, we still have them, would be elated if began to treat them with greater consideration. I’m telling you the truth. I have friends that I correspond with every week who were, themselves, or their family members, were forced to fight in the Contra War, and everyone has lost someone in that conflict, but they do not blame America generally. If we want friendships, and why wouldn’t we? Friendships are there to be had.

 

Old resentments can fester, see Israel and Palestine for more on this point. And some can disappear for generations and resurface in civil war. We saw that in the 1990’s when Yugoslavia fell apart and neighbor turned on neighbor with shockingly lethal ancient rivalries between Serbs and Croats. But the good news is: for the most part, a sincere effort is met with sincere acceptance, forgiveness, and friendship. Global peace is possible through friendship that has never been realized militarily. 

I will quote my favorite Sting song here, “I’ve never seen a military solution.” It is hard for Americans to let the fact into their skulls, but we removed Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq because he killed and imprisoned his own people and oppressed many others. We cruised into town, killed a half a million people and in following years under our management, we have ended up killing more, imprisoning more, oppressing more, and now the electricity, hospital, and school systems don’t work. This is not a military solution. I don’t personally know much about how to fix an ailing computer, but I am pretty sure that using a hammer has very little to do with it… America has to be willing to put our hammers away.

For three quarters of a century, we have depended upon a world war deterrent that is called “MAD” – mutually assured destruction. We assume that our nuclear arsenal is so daunting that no one would attack us because we could totally wipe them out in response…. Which assumes that rulers like North Korea’s Kim Jong Il will always make a rational decision. But the more amazing thing to me is that it has sort of worked.

 

Late in the 19^th century, Alfred Nobel, set up the foundation from his estate to award the annual Nobel Peace Prize. Nobel had become wealthy by inventing dynamite and he ironically believed that the explosive had such an overwhelming threat on the battlefield. Seriously, he thought that bombs and missiles would make people unwilling to fight any wars in the 20^th century because these weapons were just too lethal. 

 https://www.nobelprize.org/alfred-nobel/alfred-nobels-thoughts-about-war-and-peace/

 

Thirty years earlier, during the American Civil War, Jordan Gatling unveiled his invention, the Gatling Gun, which allowed a single soldier to hand crank out a burst of bullet fire that he believed would immediately end the Civil War because 

it was so deadly; it was unthinkable to use it.

https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-the-gatling-gun-1991839

 

Truman’s fateful decision to use atomic bombs in Japan at the end of World War II may have precipitated the end of that war, historians do not agree and at least Howard Zinn felt that we Truman really did it to show Russia that we had this weapon. I’m not qualified to enter that fray but whether it ended World War II or not, it did not make modern war unthinkable because the Soviet Union saw it and said, “I want that,” and so did China, and France, and the United Kingdom, along with some very unstable states that tend to sponsor terrorism. 

 

I think that it is important to say that our use of Atomic weapons in the 1940’s did not make war unthinkable, it just made it more likely and more deadly.  As Albert Einstein famously said, "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." Believe me, we do not want to have a world war III. 

 

I was traveling all day on Wednesday but if you tried to go to the bank or the post office, you were reminded that it was Veterans Day. There is, however, a movement afoot to reclaim Veterans Day for its original name and purpose . . . Armistice Day. A day set aside after World War I to declare that WWI was the war to end all wars. Obviously, it wasn’t, but there was a moment of idealism, a season of hope, that the modern world might finally be woke enough to stop having wars.

 

But there are two problems: the first and most obvious is that we have never tried very hard. If we took one fifth of the military budget and provided clean drinking water for the world, basic literacy education, and mosquito eradication, we could very probably avoid almost all major conflicts. I will be happy to argue that proposition anywhere and anytime. But what if we went further? What if we turned 2/3rds of our military bases and installations into universities? Or more specifically, trade schools. What Nicaragua really needs is more carpenters, plumbers, and electricians, and not more soldiers. What if America saved the world, making wars obsolete?

 

But the second thing that I want to mention very gently is that people tend to glorify war and many of those who participated in it believe that it has not been glorified enough. Armistice Day, a day designed to advocate for never going to war again, became a day to honor veterans for going to war. I don’t want to be dismissive or disrespectful of anyone’s military service. I understand better than most what sacrifices veterans have made and the degree to which invisible wounds continue to drive veterans of war to suicide years after the shooting has ended. I grew up with a father having night terrors from World War II and I can tell you, he never got over his PTSD, even when he died in his 90’s…. that war was never over for him. Veterans deserve our respect. War deserves our ardent condemnation.

 

An organization called “Veterans for Peace” has been celebrating Armistice Day as Armistice Day since their inception and for the past decade they have been working to change the name back, to get the focus off of them, and onto the cause of peace.

 

Creating global peace will not cost as much as global war but it won’t come cheap. It won’t be done by donations and the efforts of good men like Keith Jaspers who started the relief agency, the Rainbow Network. It won’t be because we field a few hundred Peace Corps workers. Even such noble efforts as Bill Gates’ and others who have spent billions fighting malaria and AIDS, won’t get the job done. 

 

America is the only nation in the world that could actually do it and because we are the only ones who can, I believe that we should. I realize that is just my opinion but, you know what we say around here, I just happen to also be right.

 

 

“When the Voting Ends”

“When the Voting Ends”    click here to see the video

David Ketchum

November 8, 2020

 

Last week, Roger gave an impassioned plea for us to treat each other civilly, to take the high road and not to give in to the urge “to be petty when our cause is so great.” And, in the spirit of honoring that aspiration as long as possible, he planned to be away on the weekend after the election and asked me to preach instead. So I’m going to do my best to be honest without being cruel, but I don’t want that to be misconstrued. This week’s election revealed again that the United States is still swimming in very dangerous waters. 

 

Because this presidential election should not have even been close. After an outrageous 2016 campaign, when Trump clearly showed us who he was, followed by four years of brutal, vindictive, delusional cruelty as president, Donald Trump should have lost by a landslide. That he did not says more about the people who live in the United States than it says about Trump. 

 

 

Performative Fascism as a Way of Life

 

But it does say something about Trump, and that’s a good place to begin. Jason Stanley, a philosophy professor at Yale and author of 2018's How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, described Trump in this way: 

 

“I’m not saying that Trump is a fascist. Trump is certainly performing fascism … . It’s the tropes of fascism, and I think that’s worrisome enough. What’s to stop him from escalating? What’s to stop a future person, a future president from escalating, whether Democrat or Republican? … There are already existing structures. Our prison system is an already existing structure that’s sort of ravenous for prisoners, for bodies. Trump is showing how you can use existing structures in fascist ways, if you so desire. He might be doing it merely performatively – we don’t know. But you want to stop it early, so you don’t allow this performative fascism to be something that could be turned non-performative and degrade our democratic norms.” (https://www.businessinsider.com/is-trump-fascist-jason-stanley-says-it-is-wrong-question-2020-7 )

 

But instead of showing a collective will to put an end to performative fascism, half of the voting public of the USA demonstrated that they will, at the very least, tolerate it and, in many millions of cases, they will even celebrate it. Put another way: we wanted this election to be a landslide defeat of Donald Trump because we wanted it to be a referendum on democracy, on saying “NO” to the continued slide toward fascism. And that did not happen. 

 

Stanley went on to say that the USA’s long habit of leaving our social problems “unsolved and unaddressed” leaves us continually vulnerable to demagogic politicians and fascist forces. He said: 

 

“We have these fascist forces, … and we have our prison system; we have these enormous budgets for our police; we have an enormous military budget; we have all these returning Iraq War veterans; we had a war on terror that gave us the Department of Homeland Security. They are tools that someone can pick up and push further. … What we need to do is remove the fascist forces. We need to address our prison system, address our over-policing problem, address our inequality, cut down the insider dealing between corporate elites and the government. And then we won't get people who can do this kind of thing.” (ibid)

 

 

The Normalization of White Nationalism

 

That said, I have to confess that I personally doubted that the election would be a landslide, because I don’t have confidence in the people who had to make that choice. And, yes, I am talking about and to fellow White people. 

 

It’s no secret that the White majority is in decline. According to the Brookings Institute, White people made up almost 80% of the US population just 40 years ago. Recent data shows that number to be roughly 60%. And a growing percentage of that number is older and rural. By last year, 27 of 100 of the USA’s largest cities had minority-White populations, and more than 50% of the nation’s children (under 16 years old) “identified as a racial or ethnic minority” for the first time in national history. (https://www.brookings.edu/research/new-census-data-shows-the-nation-is-diversifying-even-faster-than-predicted/ )

 

While much has been made of the uptick of racial and ethnic minorities voting for Trump, don’t be distracted from the essential role of White people. We can clear this up by taking some lessons from the New York Times exit polls. (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/exit-polls-president.html )

 

• White voters still made up 65% of voters, and 57% of them voted for Trump. And, despite Trump’s well-established reputation as a misogynist, 55% of White women still voted for him. 
• And while White people aged 45-59 voted for Trump at the highest rate, 60%, more than half of the White people in every age group voted for Trump. The lowest rate was for White people aged 18-29, and 51% of them still voted for Trump. 
• No other racial or ethnic group voted for Trump at near these levels or numbers. The next highest was Latinos over 6o years old; 39% of whom voted for Trump, but who make up only 2% of the voting population.

 

If you want to understand why White people voted this way, you don’t have to look far. The Times asked respondents to tell them which “issues mattered most in deciding how you voted for president,” and priorities became very clear, very quickly. For Trump voters, the key issues were the economy, especially related to COVID-19, and “crime and safety.” That latter phrase is very important: if you’ve paid attention to Trump, you know that talking about crime and “law and order” is how he talks about race in the USA. 

 

The issue of racism and White supremacy was, unsurprisingly, then, one of the biggest and probably the most important differences between those who voted for Trump and those who did not. 

 

• Of the 26% of voters who called racism “A minor problem or not a problem at all,” 82% of them voted for Trump. Conversely, of the 71% of voters who correctly noted that addressing racism in the USA should be a top priority, 70% of those voted for Biden. 
• Similarly, of the respondents who said that the criminal justice system “Treats all people fairly,” 83% were Trump supporters. However, of the respondents who correctly noted that the criminal justice system “Treats Black people unfairly,” 81% of them voted for Biden. (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/exit-polls-president.html )

 

My phrasing is deliberate. That racism is still rampant in the United States, and that the criminal justice system disproportionately targets and punishes racial and ethnic minorities, are established facts. There isn’t anything to debate here. Unfortunately, we can see a pattern among Trump supporters of rejecting reality. As another example, 31% of respondents said that climate change was not a serious problem, and 84% of those people voted for Trump. And of the voters who viewed wearing a mask in public as a personal choice, rather than a public health responsibility and vital part of our efforts to slow the pandemic and prevent unnecessary suffering, 72% voted for Trump. 

 

This is all part of performative fascism. It twists everything around. White Supremacists aren’t viewed as a problem, but people protesting racism are the objects of fear, hatred, and violence. Climate change isn’t acknowledged as real, even in the face of the increased natural disasters, wildfires, and diseases that follow in climate change’s wake. Instead, we’re told that all of this is a plot to damage the economy and usher in a totalitarian regime. What this all amounts to is the increasing normalization of White nationalism. This election turned out to be a referendum on how socially acceptable it was to tolerate and promote White nationalism and performative fascism, and more than half of White people voted that they approved. This is important. 

 

 

More than Words

 

Because the threats are not imagined; the risks are real. By now, you have all heard about the way a Trump Train of around 100 vehicles tried to run a Biden-Harris campaign bus off the road in Texas. Driving mainly pickup trucks covered in Trump campaign flags, they shouted profanities at and eventually blocked the Biden campaign bus. Later, the Biden campaign canceled an event scheduled for Austin. In response, Donald Trump tweeted, “I LOVE TEXAS!” (https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/31/politics/biden-bus-2020-campaign-texas-trump-supporters/index.html ) If a collection of right-wing extremists trying to run the campaign bus of an establishment candidate off the road isn’t a symbol of the current state of American society and politics, I don’t what is!

 

Since the election, the threats continue to escalate. Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon used his online platform to announce that Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray should be beheaded as a "warning to federal bureaucrats." He went on to say: 

 

"I'd actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England, I'd put the heads on pikes, right, I'd put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you're gone—time to stop playing games." (https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/11/06/id-put-heads-pikes-former-trump-adviser-steve-bannon-calls-beheading-fauci-and-fbi )

 

And Scott Walden, a police captain in Alabama, is now under investigation for a Facebook comment that insisted “they need to line up [every Biden voter] and put a bullet in their skull for treason." (https://www.newsweek.com/alabama-police-captain-put-leave-after-threatening-shoot-biden-supporters-1545338 ) This should be shocking; instead, it’s a sad commentary on the state of our society that we’ve become almost unsurprised. 

 

But words matter, and this isn’t empty rhetoric. Violent hate crimes in the United States continue to rise (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/nov/12/hate-crimes-2018-latinos-transgender-fbi ), and domestic terrorism continues to be an increased risk. In fact, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project and MilitiaWatch assessed that Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Oregon had a high risk for activity and violence by armed extremists before and after the election, and North Carolina, Texas, Virginia, California and New Mexico were at moderate risk. They identified threats from both individuals and groups, such as the Three Percenters, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Light Foot Militia, Civilian Defense Force, American Contingency, Patriot Prayer, Boogaloo Bois and People’s Rights. (https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/523078-study-warns-five-states-at-high-risk-for-election-related-armed-violence-by ) These are not the actions and warnings that characterize a healthy, functioning society. 

 

 

The World We Inherited

 

I know that most of the White people who voted for Trump would likely disagree with that assessment. I know because I’ve had so many conversations with White people who insisted that racism just isn’t a problem, that we’ve moved passed all that. They insist that White supremacy went away with slavery. If I press them, they admit that, yes, it was still a problem with Jim Crow. And if I press a little more, they’ll usually even admit that segregation was bad. But the Civil Rights Movement, they insist, fixed all that. Now, they tell me, the only reason that racism is a problem is because we keep talking about it. They insist that, if we’d just shut up, there wouldn’t be a problem. They don’t understand that this kind of deflection has been the weapon of White people to avoid dismantling racism at every stage of history. Please, fellow White people, we have got to do the work. 

 

If I sound a little desperate when I ask this, it’s because we are staring at a long history of White people’s refusal to dismantle a system of privilege and power that benefits us at the cost of the well-being of fellow human beings and the earth itself. We’ve been having this conversation and doing the work for hundreds of years, with limited results. 

 

For example, in preparing to speak today, I went back and read the words I offered four years ago, on the weekend that Trump won the election. Then, as today, Roger was away, leaving me increasingly suspicious that the post-election sermon responsibility is some kind of hazing ritual for associate ministers that I don’t know about. But when I went back to what I had written, I found the words still relevant. I hope it is not considered poor form to quote myself, because I think it holds up: 

 

“That human history is overflowing with injustice is one of the most bewildering and difficult realities for people to face with honesty, especially by those who benefit from that oppression and exploitation. It’s a price we have been all too willing to see paid, as long as someone else was doing the paying; it’s the price that has been paid by a planet squeezed to death by our insatiable, ignorant greed. … Yet we have proved, again and again, and I’m especially talking to white people here, that we would rather not be honest about the ideas and actions that have led us to this point, and that sustain systems that are overwhelmingly and obviously unjust. As long as there is profit to be made or power to be grabbed, as long as our conveniences and adoring self-views are more important than justice, as long as we feel helpless in the face of it all, there will be easy reasons to excuse, justify, or hide our complicity.” (https://www.welcomingpath.com/2017/11/a-fragile-whole-one-year-later.html )

 

Those words are even more poignant when we consider another result from the Times’ exit polls. 41% of voters said they were better off financially during the Trump administration, and 72% of them voted for Trump. In other words, the perception of their own financial gain justified indifference for the well-being of others. Perhaps this is true of most people, but it certainly applies to us as White folks: when we think things are going well enough for us, we step away from the struggle. 

 

And this brings us to a more difficult point: there is a reason that all these existing structures have been so easily used in fascist ways and turned against the well-being of the people they were ostensibly designed to protect. The hard truth is that the United States of America was birthed in oppression and those in power have long relied on polarizing its population in order to accumulate wealth and power. The world we have inherited after four years of Trump is consistent with the world we lived in before the Trump administration. As I said four years ago, 

 

“… the current global economic system came into existence on the bones and backs of millions upon millions of human beings, through the tragedies of genocide, slavery, and colonialism, and the ruthless extraction and use of natural resources without consideration for disastrous ecological impacts on natural and human communities. Further, the current global economic system is maintained through the continued exploitation of billions of human beings working, living, and dying under oppressive, dangerous, and economically unjust conditions, and the continued ruthless extraction and use of natural resources with little consideration for the impacts. For those on the margins, crushed under the glittery boot of capitalist expansion, the meaning of life is reduced to survival. For those outside of power but within the circle of privilege, the meaning of life is reduced to consumption. We sustain it with the choices we make when we shop, invest, and spend our time. The earth and everything and everyone on it is reduced to a potential source of profit, and we are reduced to a pool of data that can predict what we are most likely to buy and when.” (https://www.welcomingpath.com/2017/11/a-fragile-whole-one-year-later.html )

 

 

A Better Inheritance 

 

So I’ll be honest with you: in my experience as a queer, working class person who is also working to unlearn and dismantle White supremacy while living in southwest Missouri, the lives of oppressed people here generally did get worse during the Trump administration, but they did not generally get worse in new ways. These last four years have indeed been overflowing with suffering and cruelty, and marginalized communities have suffered the most. But, for many of us, these last four years represented a difference of degree. We already lived in a world that wasn’t designed for us. 

 

This is why you will hear us emphasizing the importance of organizing, building community, and developing networks of mutual aid, while simultaneously working to heal from internalized oppression, unlearn internalized dominance, and dismantle White supremacy in ourselves and our organizations. People who belong to communities that are typically dehumanized, exploited, and then quietly disposed of – such as black-indigenous-and-people of color; gender and sexuality minorities; and disabled folx – have been doing this work for decades and decades, across generations. Why? Because there has never been a federal or state government that was genuinely interested in and committed to equality and justice for oppressed people. This didn’t start with Trump, and it won’t end with Biden. It arrived here in the oppressive minds and hearts and cultures and systems that colonizers brought to the Americas, and it still lives in the minds and hearts and cultures of our neighbors and, yes, our government officials and, yes, sometimes ourselves. 

 

And that’s also why you’ll keep finding us fighting, no matter who wins what election. These elections are clearly important, but voting was never going to be enough. Voting has never been enough. No matter what the final count in this election, the work is always going to include dismantling White supremacy, fighting corruption, and creating safe, accessible, inclusive, just communities. The work didn’t begin with an election, and it will not end with an election. Our movements have always had a larger vision. We understand that we need to share the work, take breaks, learn from one another, and care for each other. And we stand in a long line of people who have been doing this work, inheriting their courage, grace, determination, and love, and passing it on to the next generation. So we insist on creating a society where we – where all people – can thrive. 

 

That said, our collective movements do impact elections and we celebrate that. For starters, we celebrate Cori Bush, Missouri’s first Black congresswoman. We celebrate Mauree Turner, Oklahoma’s first Muslim legislator and the USA’s first nonbinary legislator. We celebrate Ritchie Torres, the first openly gay Afro-Latino Congressperson. We celebrate Deb Haaland, Yvette Herrell, Teresa Leger Fernandez, and New Mexico’s election of three women of color to the U.S. House of Representatives. We celebrate Sarah McBride, Delaware’s first openly transgender elected official and the USA’s first openly transgender state senator. We celebrate Taylor Small, Vermont’s first transgender state legislator. We celebrate Stephanie Byers’ election to the Kansas Legislature, the first transgender Native American to be elected to office. (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/11/05/historic-election-wins-sarah-mcbride-mauree-turner-deb-haaland-more/6176847002/ ) And we celebrate the incredible community organizing in Georgia, including Stacey Abrams and Fair Fight, the New George Project, Black Voters Matter, Georgia People’s Agenda, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice. (https://www.democracynow.org/2020/11/6/anoa_changa_georgia_2020_election )

 

Four years ago, I stood in the pulpit and challenged us to keep insisting on justice and peace, to live up to our commitment to not stand idly by and, more than that, to actively create a society where everyone’s voice was heard and everyone’s needs were met. It’s hard work, and the violence, coercion, and exploitation we face is exhausting. But it’s joyful work, too, and we have proved, again, that the work can be done. It is also urgent work. We are, hopefully, coming to the end of the Trump administration. But the work is just as important as ever. Unless we put an end to the vulnerabilities in our society that leave room for fascism, we are likely to face an even more cruel and terrifying future. So I’ll close with more of my words from four years ago. Because the work remains, and we must do the work. 

 

“How we work for what we love is something we discover together. There is so much being done already, and we may find our place in these movements or find ourselves in the midst of something new. But the first step is to begin reflecting and acting now, so that wisdom has a chance to start her work. … we must announce the way-things-could-be as insistently as we condemn the way-things-are, with all its injustice. We must dream of a future and re-imagine a society where people live peacefully with each other and the earth, our health bound up together. We must remember to work for what we love with even more enthusiasm than we expose that which we fear.” (https://www.welcomingpath.com/2017/11/a-fragile-whole-one-year-later.html )

 

So we pause to take a breath, to grieve, and to celebrate. And then we rededicate ourselves to creating a future where kindness and compassion, justice and wisdom, are not only possible, but real. Let’s get back to work.