It Might Be About Sex

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August 27, 2017    Dr. Roger Ray

Anna Swartz writing for Mic Daily - "I am sick of coming down to the Senate floor to explain to Republicans what Planned Parenthood does," Warren said.

"I am sick of explaining it provides millions of women with birth control, cancer screenings, and STI tests every year," she continued. "I am sick of pointing out again and again that federal dollars do not fund abortion services at Planned Parenthood or anywhere else."

Warren added that despite repeated, fact-based explanations about the proven health value of Planned Parenthood's services, "Republicans would rather base health care policy on politics, than on facts."

According to Warren, denying people access to the care that Planned Parenthood provides will cause harm — despite House Speaker Paul Ryan's claims that the new bill is "pro-life."

Sex is a prime motivator and common denominator for all of us. Even the most prudent, puritanical-appearing individuals may struggle greatly against their sexual appetites and expression.  For evidence one need only look to the many scandals that have rocked the Vatican and fundamentalist churches alike.  Freud observed this prurient struggle in men and women early on in Victorian Vienna. But our sexuality defines us in healthy and altogether essential ways, too.  If you don’t believe your Freudian therapist, just ask Samantha Jones, from HBO’s Sex and the City.   By Mihaela Bernard, MA, LCPC 

In the exhaustingly repetitive way that the media gets on any topic and beats it to death, during the lead up to this week’s solar eclipse, virtually everyone in front of a microphone or a camera felt compelled to tell people not to look at the sun… except for me…. the kind of people who need that reminder are not in the IQ range of my target audience…. Although I did notice that there were shots of President Trump looking at the sun without eye protection… but, as I said, not my target audience.

One of the things that our astral viewing advisors kept telling us was to notice the behavior of animals during the eclipse. Let me tell you what I noticed, no one had to tell them not to look at the sun.

What is wrong with humans that keeps us from being able to do what comes naturally to every other animal in the world? Now, brace yourself for the most amazing homiletic segue in history: Birds and bees to not look into the sun but, as the song says, they do it… that is, they reproduce.

It took me years of struggling with learned prejudices and a few graduate school classes to finally get over believing that everyone really ought to be, and by “ought to be” I mean, “are intended by God Almighty to be” heterosexual. I grew up in rural Kentucky farm country and if I had just let myself pay attention, what I could have recognized before I ever went to Vanderbilt and Harvard is that there are straight, gay, bi-sexual, and gender fluid dogs, chickens, pigs, cats, and cows, and though we didn’t have any penguins on the farms in Kentucky, there are a number of cute stories from zoo keepers about life long, monogamous male penguins. Ironically, this couple was allowed to adopt and raise a chick without court order or media controversy.

I know a lot of people who would entirely blame religion for creating all of the sexual hang-ups we have but let me hasten to point out that there was never a time that the church told people that the could look at the sun with their naked eyes. Which is to say, people can mess up a good thing on their own, even without the help of the church.

Religions, especially in their original forms, tended to safeguard the values that made it possible for them to gathering in larger numbers. Bees protect their hive, and birds protect their nest but people come up with rather complex understandings of property titles and taxes which makes us have to define family more closely and then regulate it.

In ancient Palestine, restrictions against gay relationships probably had more to do with their need to increase the size of their army than it did with their beliefs about God’s views regarding what you do with your naughty bits. Even though conservatives tend to talk about Biblical values regarding marriage and family, they do so ignoring the fact that the preponderance of scripture regarding marriage praises polygamy, not monogamy. Of course, polygamy also serves the goal of increasing the size of your tribe as long as men can have multiple wives but the advantage is rather less if women have multiple husbands.

 In fact, since property followed patriarchal lines of inheritance in ancient Israel, female infidelity was punishable by death…. Again, not so much necessarily out of sexual prudishness as about clear lines of real estate ownership. You can understand most of human history by considering money, sex, and power but power is mostly about money and, ironically, when it comes to property division, an awful lot of sex is about ownership and money as well. So, as they say, follow the money. 

Let me spell this out for you: the notion that the Lord God Almighty is obsessed with your sex life is absurd. God is not a Peeping-Tom or a neighborhood gossip. God is not the life guard at the swimming pool of sexual opportunity.

Religious rules about marriage, divorce, same-sex or even polyamorous relationships have nothing to do with God and have everything to do with what is good for society or what seems gross to deeply repressed people. God is not the bedroom police and your pastor, your parents, and your elected representatives should not give themselves authorities that even God never claimed.

That doesn’t mean that there is no place for sexual mores, I’m not saying that at all, but I am saying that knowing what is right and wrong is never a static issue.

Even though we want to give permission to consenting adults to be intimate with the person or persons they choose, defining a consenting adult is not all that easy. Many 15 year-olds are more mature than many of their 18 year-old peers but I suspect that none of us would want to see sexual self-determination granted to 15 year-olds. And even though we typically think of an 18 year-old as having reached adult status, we still don’t want doctors hitting on patients, or attorneys on clients, or pastors on parishioners, or professors on students because power relationships draw legitimate consent into question.

Still, even when professors were forbidden to date students, no college required professors who were married to former students to separate or divorce. After my recent speaking engagement at a conference for parents of young men who are incarcerated for sex crimes, a friend of mine wrote to me to tell me that his now 50 year marriage began when he was a 17 year-old dating a 12 year-old girl. He married her when she turned 17. So, their relationship worked out but I bet if his daughter, when she was 12, wanted to date a 17 year-old, he would likely have had a fit.

It is difficult to talk about in inter-faith circles but the prophet Muhammed initially married an older woman and he was monogamous for 25 years. But then he married a dozen women, including the six year-old Aisha. The shocking fact that he married a child was somehow thought to be ameliorated by the fact that he did not consummate the marriage until she was nine but that would hardly calm the outrage in modern society.

Even in the seventh century, many of Muhammed’s peers were very critical of this marriage. Still, Aisha was apparently proud of having married the prophet and she was singularly important in the organizing and composition of the Quran and in the leadership of the movement when the prophet died. 

I’m not trying to baptize any of these relationships which are clearly inappropriate, cruel, or immoral in our eyes. I’m just saying, different cultures and different times have conflicting values on the meaning of consent. Our sexuality is the product of millions of years of evolution. Our sexual rules are the product of 10,000 of civilization. In any head to head contest between evolution and civilization, evolution will always have the upper hand.

As a religious professional, I want to say very clearly that religion has no business claiming divine authority over any love relationship. It is not up to theologians to dictate the rules of marriage, divorce, dating, or intercourse. But sex is always a matter of meaning and of ethics. 

While we need to liberate our sexual lives from religious guilt, we do need effective laws and rational punishments to protect our children from sexual assault and exploitation. And we need meaningful and enforced regulations that protect students, patients, clients, and parishioners from predators in positions of authority.

Freedom and liberty are two of the things we say make America great but there is no small measure of hypocrisy when it comes to conservatives trying to limit the freedom and liberty of people to simply be who thy are.

The political party that constantly calls for smaller government and fewer regulations, still seems to want to legislate requiring the completely medically unnecessary and invasive procedure called the transvaginal ultrasound for women seeking an abortion

Now, I don’t want to go all Freudian on you here in church, but who would you say had some issues here… the woman seeking an abortion or the state legislator who wants to stick this device inside of women? Clearly, this isn’t about health and it isn’t about life… it is about power.

At the same time they spent billions trying to keep gay and lesbian people from marrying the person of their choice… and with Trump’s latest ban on transgender folk serving in the military, they are still trying to preserve a kind of legalized sexual apartheid in America. 

There is almost always some economic or social stability reasoning cited but, as Trump cited the medical expenses related to gender realignment surgery for transgender members of the service, he refused to consider the fact that the military already spends ten times that much on erectile dysfunction prescriptions for active duty military. I’m not saying that Trump as some personal reason to target transgender military members while refusing to talk about impotent men…but if you see a connection you will get no argument out of me.

It is manifestly evident that the battle over funding of Planned Parenthood has nothing to do with being pro-life or about cutting the Federal budget.

It is about power. It is about throwing red meat to conservative voters at the expense of young women, primarily women from economically disadvantaged families. Planned Parenthood does tons of good and spends no Federal tax dollars on abortion and yet Republicans make it a political football as if young women’s health mattered not at all.

Sex may not always be about love but it sure does need to be set free from real estate and power. In our age, with increasingly clear lines of gender equality and more rational acceptance of difference in sexual orientation and more fluid understandings of our sexual selves, it is possible to just let people do what the birds and the bees have been doing without the benefit of either clergy or congress for all of time.

I have heard it said that humans and dolphins are the only animals that have sex for pleasure. I don’t know that I buy that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAwcoFoAk_k

Eagles mate while in a spiraling decent, sometimes exceeding 60 miles an hour…. There has got to be an easier way to lay an egg! When lions copulate, they will sometimes mate as many as 50 times in a day… I can buy once or twice in pursuit of a cub but once Mufasa gets past a dozen, am I the only one who thinks there is something else going on here?

Sex is normal and natural and should never have been turned into a political football or a source of religious manipulation. One of the things that really would help to make America great would be if we got politics out of the bedroom and allowed what the birds and bees made famous to return to simply being a free and liberal way of being human.

So, I have two pieces of advice:

Relax and mind your own business.

“Race in America”

“Race in America”  August 20, 2017  

Roger Ray, pastor  click here to see the video

HuffPost 3-4-17  Stephen Bannon, President Donald Trump’s chief strategist and the driving force behind the administration’s controversial ban on travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries, has a favorite metaphor he uses to describe the largest refugee crisis in human history.

“It’s been almost a Camp of the Saints-type invasion into Central and then Western and Northern Europe,” he said in October 2015.

“The whole thing in Europe is all about immigration,” he said in January 2016. “It’s a global issue today — this kind of global Camp of the Saints.”

“It’s not a migration,” he said later that January. “It’s really an invasion. I call it the Camp of the Saints.”

“When we first started talking about this a year ago,” he said in April 2016, “we called it the Camp of the Saints. ... I mean, this is Camp of the Saints, isn’t it?”

Bannon has agitated for a host of anti-immigrant measures. In his previous role as executive chairman of the right-wing news site Breitbart — which he called a “platform for the alt-right,” the online movement of white nationalists — he made anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim news a focus.

But the top Trump aide’s repeated references to The Camp of the Saints, an obscure 1973 novel by French author Jean Raspail, reveal even more about how he understands the world. The book is a cult favorite on the far right, yet it’s never found a wider audience. There’s a good reason for that: It’s breathtakingly racist.

“[This book is] racist in the literal sense of the term. It uses race as the main characterization of characters,” said Cécile Alduy, professor of French at Stanford University and an expert on the contemporary French far right. “It describes the takeover of Europe by waves of immigrants that wash ashore like the plague.”

The book, she said, “reframes everything as the fight to death between races.”

My daughter is a relatively fair skinned Korean, which, unfortunately, gave my subtly racist father a little reason to bargain for hope.

When she was a baby and we were watching her sleep, Dad said, “I believe there’s a lot of white blood in her.” I knew that he was looking for a way to give himself permission to love his newest grandchild but I had to burst his bubble and let him know that she was 100% Asian and she wasn’t going to change. If he was going to love her, he had to change.

28 years later, I can tell you, even though she does not have a cleft chin or blue eyes,

she is a case study of nurture over nature: that arrogant, smart-mouthed, condescending little Asian rebel is indisputably my daughter!

Still, to be fair, my father was not the worst racist in rural Kentucky. More often than not, he showed at least come empathy for anyone who was poor but he was a product of his environment and there were some real demons in those parts of the woods.

Journalists are not suppose to create news so that they can report on it and in the same way, I guess that it really isn’t cricket for a preacher to create an incident that can be used as a sermon illustration, though that is exactly what I have done this week. I can claim a certain level of innocence in that I didn’t mean to throw a rock at a hornets’ nest but since I did, you get to hear about it.

In light of all of the protests and violence sparked by the removal of Confederate memorials in southern cities, I wrote to one of our listeners in my hometown, Glasgow, KY, to inquire as to the fate of the memorial to “our Confederate dead”

 that had been on our courthouse lawn when I was growing up there. I was sincerely surprised to learn that it is still there.

So, I did something I have never done before. I wrote a letter to the editor of the Glasgow Daily Times. I reminded them that our little town elected the first black mayor in Kentucky and the second of any southern state in 1968 and that in spite of the violence in other cities, we integrated our schools without incident.

I appealed to them to move the Confederate memorial to the cemetery built by a Confederate earthen fort where, in fact, my parents are now laid to rest. And, I suggested that they do this as a municipal decision rather than waiting for the embarrassment of having it pulled down in a riot.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, but other than a couple of Glasgow residents who sent me private messages of appreciation, a couple of hundred people in that small town rose up tell me to mind my own business, and to insist that the statue was about history and not about racism. One lady called me to conduct an exorcism over the phone.

Several others tried to tell me how to be a pastor and a few, not to subtly, impugned my intelligence. They did so with such bad grammar and so many misspellings that it kept Mark Rowland busy for a couple of days trying to correct them all.

I’m indebted to my friend, Dan Goodwin, for pointing out that there are no historical statues in public places in Germany of Adolph Hitler. So, I shared with my hometown critics these observations:

A monument on government property is not there for historical purposes. It is there to show honor. Note that Germany does not have any public statues of Hitler, even though Hitler was historically important. What he represented was extreme violence against Jews, gays, the disabled, and Gypsies. So they don't "honor" him though they certainly remember him. Similarly, we do not have statues of King George in our public places.

Our war for Independence is certainly important to our history but we do not honor the head of the state we were fighting against.

The Confederacy declared war on the USA, specifically to, as William Thompson, the designer of the Confederate flag, wrote at the time: As a people we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race.

For those of you who are concerned about forgetting our history, I have a some good news for you in a single word: books. There is a library in Glasgow, I used to go there every week. You will find many examples of books there. 

Further, as Confederate monuments are concerned; most were erected long after the war. The one in Glasgow went up in 1905, forty years after the end of the Civil War. At that point, it was clearly a secessionist sympathizing tip of the hat to the KKK more than it was mourning the deaths of those who died two generations before. Most of the monuments in the news these days were erected in direct response to the Civil Rights movement and school desegregation decisions from the SCOTUS. The whole devotion to the Confederate flag came into existence as a white backlash against the Civil Rights movement.

Now, let me be clear about this, I would not typically give a lot of time and energy to symbols but I have to admit that they have grown in importance in my mind since they appear to function something like the kitchen light in a roach infested apartment.

When you suggest removing tributes to traitors out of places of honor, you find out how much sympathy there is for traitors in a community.

These people are not history buffs, they are people who harbor racist sentiments that even they may not have been aware of until the statues became a matter of controversy. My dad didn’t articulate racist feelings about Asians until one became his granddaughter.

Most of us who were gathered in the now demolished Ramada Convention center that Tuesday night in November of 2008 to celebrate the election of Barack Obama had tears in our eyes because we really believed that racism in America was virtually over.

We were wrong…. Obama was the ultimate kitchen light in a roach infested apartment. Electing our first black president did not herald the end of racism in our nation but rather it revealed how strong racism still is.

No matter how much of the opposition to Obama was portrayed as partisan politics, such defensive claims could hardly mask what it really was. Racism has a peculiar stench that is hard to miss.

Progressives have been ebullient this weekend about the departure of the Brietbart racist ideologue, Steve Bannon, from the White House staff.

As you can easily see from our wisdom lesson today, taken from the Huffington Post, Bannon was no casual college fraternity Nazi. He was a devoted reader, writer, and promoter of anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-black racist propaganda. From one 60 something Harvard educated white guy to another, let me just say that Steve Bannon represented the lowest rung of the moral ladder in our nation and you need not hold your breath waiting to see a statue of him being erected at Harvard or even any sewage treatment plant anywhere in our nation.

Still, I believe it would be foolish to assume that his departure amounts to a re-baptism of Donald Trump’s conscience. Long before Trump ever met Bannon, his father was arrested at a KKK rally.

Trump spent nearly $100,000 on newspaper ads calling for the execution of the Central Park Five

and reiterated his desire to see these young men of color executed even after DNA evidence had proven them to be innocent of their previous rape convictions.

Trump was in trouble years ago for discriminatory housing practices, and, of course, no one can forget that Trump literally entered politics with his outrageous claims that Obama was not a legitimate president because he was born outside of the United States.

Of course, John McCain was born in Panama 30 years earlier and no one ever doubted his citizenship because, if you are born to an American citizen, you are a natural born American citizen… everyone knows that, except if you are a head to toe racist who cannot accept that any black man can legitimately be the President of the United States.

Steve Bannon was not infecting Donald Trump with racism. He was writing racist ideology into policy and speeches but it wasn’t like Trump needed to be converted to the cause. Trump ran on racism and prejudice. His very first campaign message was a racist screed against Mexicans and Muslims and he rode that apocalyptic horse into the White House.

It is a horrible and shameful thing that an unthinking racist, plagued by malignant inferiority complex has managed to become the President of the United States but as a pastor I have to point out that even though he lost the majority vote, he did get many millions of votes, and even after all of this horrifying racist stuff has come out of the oval office, more than 60% of Republicans still support him.

Now, I realize that there are many Republican elected officials who are also shocked by his evident racism but they are trying to overlook that flaw because they hope that they can use him to get tax cuts for the super wealthy and to take health care away from 20 million poor and middle class Americans… and that is their best claim to a moral high ground.

But I cannot escape the probability that just as the election of Barack Obama revealed the hidden racist strains in America, the election of Donald Trump was a triumph of resurgent racism in America. Even though those who voted for Trump do not want to wear that mantle, the apparent, at least unconscious belief, is that a racist President gives some legitimacy to the racist inclinations buried deep within those who voted for him.

We see the worst of it from those who now participate in Nazi rallies but the root of it goes deep into the hearts of those who would shudder at the suggestion that they voted for him because he is a racist.

Still, I will say this: Those who try to defend themselves by insisting that they are not racist even when they very plainly are have this going for them… they don’t want to be racists.

Their denial betrays their awareness that their racism is something they are ashamed of and do not want to own and that is a hopeful thing. Here is my pastoral invitation, rather than denying your racism, repent of it. Don’t pretend you really believed the absurd claims that Trump was going to bring back coal jobs and protect you from terrorism. Acknowledge that his racist rhetoric called out to your id, he appealed to the fear in your brain stem, and you gave vent to your lower nature.

If you don’t want to be a racist, then start trying to seriously root it out of yourself and out of our nation. President Obama was never famous for his use of Twitter but this week one of his tweets became the most popular in the history of Twitter when he quoted Nelson Mandela, who said,

“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”

My friends, if love is our religion, I gotta tell you that it looks like the fields are ripe for an evangelism harvest…. We have a whole lot of converting work to do.

“Getting the Healthcare We Want”   August 6, 2017

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO 

Roger Ray, pastor          Noam Chomsky, Requiem for the American Dream, p. 139

“…Gilens took about 1,700 policy decisions, and compared them with public attitudes, and closely correlated with corporate interests. Elsewhere he showed that about 70 percent of the population has no influence on policy – they might as well be in some other country. And as you go up the income and wealth level, the impact on public policy is greater – the rich essentially get what they want.”

      

Some of our listeners in Great Britain have lately been asking me to come back for another lecture tour. Our friend in the Progressive movement in the U.K., John Churcher, has been raising the same issue with me. I am flattered to be asked and I would love to go but there is a problem.

When I went in 2015, I had just published Progressive Faith and Practice which is a book about religion. I had a briefcase full of lectures that were as relevant in England as they were here. But my last book, Progressive Conversations, was a compilation of my ethics columns printed in the Springfield News-Leader. The topics addressed in those 100 essays were almost exclusively American problems. And the book we are working on now, America Will be Great When, will be even more specifically American.

Great Britain doesn’t have over-crowded prisons, a death penalty, or a radical rejection of immigrants. Europe is suffering from the income gap that is killing off the middle class in America. Iceland put corrupt bankers in prison rather than bailing them out and allowing them to reward themselves for wrecking the world’s economy with multi-million dollar bonuses. No other western democracy has anything like the gun problem that we have in the USA.  And, every western democracy is done with viewing illness as a business opportunity.

Noam Chomsky’s most recent book speaks at length about the loss of democracy in America as capitalist interests continue to shift power away from the people in favor of corporations. The length and expense of our political campaigns turns the real power of government over to those who can make the largest contributions.

We do have a problem with gullible voters being persuaded to vote against their own best interests but we have a more frightening reality of a basic erosion of democracy that just allows moneyed interests to make decisions that serve themselves without even consulting voters.

There are three times as many pharmaceutical lobbyists on Capital Hill as there are members of Congress and the Senate. They ghost write ridiculous laws that prevent Medicare from being able to negotiate for better drug prices in spite of the fact that the US government is the largest single customer that big pharma has. You can buy American made pharmaceuticals in Canada or Mexico for a fraction of what we pay in the U.S. because their governments are not operated by corporations.

I appreciate our international listeners sticking with us but you can almost feel them gloating a bit. As much as you can find people who complain about their national health services in the U.K. or Canada, you have never seen any nation anywhere in the world that had universal healthcare that decided to scrap it and go to an insane system like ours with for profit insurance companies, hospitals, private practices, and inflated prescription drug prices.

Say what you will about the weaknesses or rationing of services elsewhere, no one looks at America and says, “We should do what they are doing.”

Our Healthcare industry is still nervously balanced on a precipice with a Congress that has voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act more than 60 times and is now impotently wanting to actually repeal it now that they are indisputably in power but they just can’t agree on how deep to shove the knife into the heart of their voters.

We spend more on our healthcare in the USA than any other country and yet we leave millions out of the system entirely and a whole lot of us who are in it get very poor care and inexcusably bad outcomes. Conservatives publicly say that they don’t want the government in healthcare but they know, or at least they should know, that the government already pays for more than half of all of the healthcare in the country. Of course, most medical expenses occur near the end of life but when you add Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Administration together, you already have more than half of the country covered.

The plea for universal healthcare is not some impossible dream that is unattainable. The system is already in place and a mere change in the age requirements would cut our out of pocket healthcare expenses immediately. A whole lot of insurance executives would have to learn to live without billions in bonuses but we could do a canned food drive to keep them from starving in their beach home mansions.

As Bernie Sanders has says, the age of 65 for Medicare eligibility was not handed down from God. We could even stage it in over a period of a few years to give the system time to wean itself off its addiction to the money in your bank account.

A few months ago, Donald Trump was making excuses for why he had not been able to repeal and replace Obamacare on his first day in office as he had repeatedly promised to do. He said, “Who knew that healthcare was so complicated?” Well, in a way we all knew that but it is only complicated if you insist on protecting the insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

Once you can embrace the idea that has already been institutionalized in every other western democracy that illness is a problem to be solved and not an opportunity to exploit a person in the most vulnerable moment to clean out their bank account.

Look guys, I know that I often sound more like a political candidate giving a stump speech than I do a pastor delivering a sermon… these are dark days when you have to turn to the church to find a rational perspective on economics and public policy but that is where we live these days. But I do want to say a pastoral word to you today:

The oldest of the gospels in the New Testament is Mark. Mark starts off like a shot, with no flowery poetry and no embarrassing birth myths. Mark tells us that Jesus was baptized, called some disciples, and went straight to a synagogue to preach and the first thing he encountered, his first day to go to a church, was a demon.

I get that this is an ancient document with some seriously out of date assumptions but if we just let Mark tell his story, Jesus goes to this community church and a demon starts shouting. When I first seriously read that passage when I was in seminary, I wondered, how long had that demon been there before Jesus showed up? How many years had that demon been comfortably in attendance at worship services and no one ever noticed that it was a demon?

Folks, we get comfortable with the evil we know. I grew up in the segregated south. Monday through Friday, I went to a school with all white kids and it never even dawned on me that there was another school for black kids in my home town. I had never seen it. It was never mentioned. It was off in some neighborhood where we never went and I didn’t know anything about it.

I worked on the surrounding farm with black kids. I knew their names and so far as I knew, we were friends. It just never occurred to me that they were not in my school, not in my barber shop, and certainly not in my Sunday School classes. It was not until schools were integrated by the force of the Supreme Court that I had even known about the demon I had accepted for so many years.

You can say the same thing about indentured servanthood, slavery, child labor, human trafficking, and a host of other truly evil aspects of society. We live with homelessness, we accept that millions are uninsured, we let young lives go to waste for want of education because their parents can’t pay for it, and we are not evil people.

We never wanted Walmart to sell slave produced goods. We didn’t want our shoes to be made by children in S. Korea or our iPhones to be made by slaves in China. But we do want everyday discount prices, cheap shoes, and really neat new technology. We have just always lived in a world full of demons and we come to accept that they are part of the landscape. We tune out those who want to change the world because the world just is what it has always been.

The point of writing this book for thinking Americans and to make the rest of the world feel smug and self-righteous….the reason why I will be trying to get myself booked into as many pulpits around the country as I can over the next few months… if I may say it this way… is to cast out demons… and if not to cast them out, to at least reveal them for what they are.

Germany doesn’t have tuition free education because they are better people than we are. Brits don’t have universal health care because they are more compassionate than we are. The Nordic states do not have sane drug laws and restorative justice systems because they are more spiritual than we are. They just woke up to their demons before we did and now it is time for America to turn on the lights, open our eyes, and wake up.