Progressive Faith and Practice

Progressive Faith and Practice     June 21, 2020    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

To move forward in our practice, we seek to move from the intellect to faith. We grow from blind faith towards wisdom faith.    The Venerable Lama Migmar, speaking in Dr. Diana Eck’s course on World Religions at Harvard in October 2004

The body of 19 year old Black Lives Matter activist and aspiring artist and model, "Toyin" Salau was found earlier this month in Florida. She had been living in a church shelter and accepted a ride from a man to get back to the church to collect her belongings. She later tweeted that she had been sexually assaulted by the man. Before she lost connection with the outside world, she explained to friends that she had trusted the Holy Spirit to protect her. 

So, there is an evil rapist to blame for this assault and murder. You can mention her own carelessness, and maybe we could dig up some culpability on the part of a family of origin but may I ask you this, “was the church that encouraged her to put her faith in the protection of the Holy Spirit, was a church that assured her that an all-powerful and all-seeing God was watching over her, does that church share some responsibility for setting this young woman up to be murdered?” Is there such a thing as theological malpractice? Is bad religion an accessory to a crime like this?

We have about 50,000 suicides in America every year. Disproportionately, by a factor of 4, gay teens and young adults commit suicide and you have to ask why that would be true? It will come as no surprise to you to know that multiple studies have shown that religious condemnation of homosexuality is a major factor because the religious convictions of people like our current vice-president fuel a prejudice that not only makes mothers and fathers reject and exile their own sons and daughters, but it causes young gay people to despise themselves, and in hopelessness, take their own lives. 

Is it too much to say that evangelical, Orthodox, and Catholic churches literally cause the deaths of tens of thousands of young, talented, intelligent people who just happen to be gay? If you tell a gay person that if they ever actually have sex that they will go to hell forever, isn’t that about the same as putting a loaded gun in their hands and telling them that death is preferable to falling in love? Can the church be held harmless in this tidal wave of annual suicides?

I was a grad student doing my clinicals in counseling right here in Bowling Green when a former nun limped into my office with a bruised face, broken ribs, and injuries all over her body which she told her employer were the result of having fallen down the stairs . . . again. She told me that her priest had told her that this abuse she suffered at the hands of her alcoholic husband was her cross to bear, the consequences of having broken her vows in the convent to live a celibate life of prayer. 

It is a story I have heard repeated many times through the years as a pastoral counselor and a volunteer in spouse abuse shelters. Pentecostals, evangelicals, Catholics, and sometimes even main-stream pastors will counsel women to forgive their husbands. To try to change the husband’s abusive behaviors by being more obedient, less argumentative, and, of course, more sexually compliant. 

We liberals want to be accepting, unjudging, tolerant, freedom loving people. Everyone is free to choose their own spiritual path, their own religious beliefs and practices. But, I have to ask you, is there a point at which tolerance becomes tacit approval? Can we, by being unjudging, telegraph the kind of acceptance that says that misogyny and homophobia are personal choices to such a degree that we, who are trying to be open minded liberals, are also accomplices to domestic violence, suicide, and murder? 

I believe that it is inescapable to conclude that bad religion is at least a contributing factor and, in some cases, directly responsible for these and many other grave social ills. You may not agree with me but as one of my professors liked to say, “This is just my opinion, it just so happens that I am also right.”

I don’t have any tattoos but if I did it would surely be this quote from Voltaire, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Traditional religious teachings limber people up to deny science, research, and even their own experiences. 

There have been times in history when it seemed that we were about to emerge from the darkness of magical religious thinking, the French Revolution, the emergence of modern science, even movements which have sought to preserve the community building and values education of religion without all of the magic and superstition.  In 1822, Thomas Jefferson said that, "there is not a young man now living in the US who will not die a Unitarian."

You could point to the writings of Thomas Paine and many others from the early days of the United States who seemed to be ready to dismiss all supernatural theism and to embrace a religious perspective that was rooted entirely in ethics, a study in morality. But the institutional church always managed to drag the majority back into creedal and ritualized religious practices through three different massive phases of revivals which have kept progressives in the minority, cementing, as it were, a literal wall between academic theological thinking and the actual practices of the people in church pews. 

That wonderful group of scholars who started the Jesus Seminar in the 1980’s, gave a concerted effort to breaking down that wall. They made Marcus Borg, John 

Shelby Spong, Karen Armstrong, and Jon Dominic Crossan famous but their amazing books failed to put much of a dent in the wall of ignorance and magical thinking that defends the traditional expressions of the faith. The numbers of people who are still engaged in the traditional churches have been in rapid decline, other than in the mega churches which seem to defy the social trend, but it remains to be seen to what degree the current pandemic might affect how many and how large the churches will be in this decade. 

Our congregation in Springfield, MO started in 2008 to serve those who were of sufficiently liberal and progressive faith to be a bad fit in any existing mainstream church in our area. We grew for a while and almost made it to the point of being a church with Sunday School and youth groups and mission trips along with social events but about five years into our experiment, our attendance at our bricks and mortar church started to decline while interest in our content online grew. By the time the pandemic hit, we were having about 40 people in our Sunday service, but our sermons were being downloaded at an average rate of 15,000 per month. 

For the past several years, I have been predicting the demise of seated congregations and the growth of online faith groups. When the pandemic hit, we simply took another step in the direction of becoming an on-line church. Some churches in our area are making what I believe to be a very dangerous decision and they are reopening to the public but I don’t think many people are finding their way back into the pews. 

As most congregations are typically older, until there is a vaccine, the majority of those who used to go to church are not likely to do so again and even when there is a vaccine, if it is anything less than 100% effective, most churches will end up closing and a few online services will survive. But, realistically, how many options will that online audience really need? A hundred, two hundred? There are currently about 400,000 churches in America. They will not all successfully make the transition to being online churches. In fact, I suspect that half of those will close in the next year. 

But as devastating as the pandemic will be on churches, it is really only accelerating an evolution that was already well underway. 

While the demise of superstition based religious beliefs has been mistakenly announced many times in the past 300 years, I’m willing to go out on a limb and place my bets one more time. I think that all forms of pie-in-the-sky religion will be going the way of the flat earth society. People who go to traditional churches will be in the same group as the people who still set up cameras around Scotland’s Loch Ness in hopes of photographing a long extinct dinosaur rising from the water. 

Civilizations don’t change quickly but I believe that the churches that are rooted in a belief in heaven and hell and an imaginary friend who lives in the clouds and who authored very questionable books in the distant past, I think that church is going away. I am not certain that any churches will survive but the ones that do, the ones that will be more than an online presence, will be ones that foster community, provide meaningful service opportunities, and which address the real world issues that confront us in a rapidly changing world. 

As I always do when I am invited to speak to a church for the first time, I want to try to sum up what it is that I am trying to say to the world though my books, videos, classes, lecture tours, and to my newspaper readers. In sum, it is this:

Our premodern ancestors tended to interpret natural events by personifying nature, assuming that invisible spirits with human emotions caused events of nature and physics. Depending upon geography and language, these beliefs sometimes coalesced into a formal religion. 

In 2020, it should be clear that while these ancient beliefs often convey helpful insights that can help us to understand our lives and to be better people, we really must stop acting like angels and demons are real, that there is a heaven or hell, that anyone has an imaginary friend who lives in the clouds or that you have a soul because you are a person but apes, chickens, lichen, and daisies do not. The great mystery of the universe that some call "God" did not write the Bible, the Quran, or the Upanishads. No matter how special Jesus or Zoroaster may have been in history, they were no more divine than you and I are. 

So, please, get your heads out of the clouds and look around you. We are in the middle of a pandemic and still don't have universal healthcare. We are a century and a half past slavery and still have a racial apartheid that is just as cruel as slavery ever was. We get distracted by momentary news cycles while thousands of children are still living in unsanitary and cruel circumstances on the boarders . . . just because the pandemic and police brutality are now in the news does not mean that those children have been reunited with their parents, we’ve just stopped talking about it. 

We have labor saving technology and the ability to generate all of the power we need. There is enough wind in Wyoming and enough sunlight in Arizona that, with the right infrastructure, we would never need to burn another gallon of gas or lump of coal. We have the natural resources to build all of the housing we need, and we have the available labor and space to grow all of the food that we need and to do so sustainably but we don't do it because, as I mentioned earlier, it is as Voltaire said, "Those who can convince you to believe in absurdities can convince you to commit atrocities." So we continue to poison our only planet for temporary financial gain while keeping the majority of people in the world locked into the violence of racism and poverty. Hunger only exists in the world because we have not organized a civilized way to distribute food without always focusing on profit.

A 3% reallocation of our military budget could wipe out hunger around the world and why is that not a sermon topic in every church, synagogue, and mosque in the world? I’m getting old and I have to tell you, I am exhausted with liberals switching from serving communion to burning sage and acting like they have done something of significance. Many of my peers know a lot about essential oils but they do not know that we have 2 million people in jails and prisons and 7 million on parole who are forever locked out of getting a decent job. 

We can have a spiritual life that is rooted in ethics and which builds human connection and fosters peace and love. But what I see among most of institutional religion is creedal paranoia that passes racism and classism from one generation to the next. Could we all just grow up and stop that crap? If churches are to survive into the 21^st century, they have to have a useful reason to survive. You can’t say that we are not desperately needed, but we are not needed as havens for racism and sexual prejudice, and we are not needed to foster superstitious and magical thinking.

We are needed to face the real moral challenges of creating a just and fair world that is home to 4 billion people. Journalists have become an endangered species. 

The print media is nearly dead, and the 24-hour TV news channels don’t know the difference between news and commentary and have more propaganda than information. Social networks are falling apart and being replaced with social media which is ten miles wide but only a quarter of an inch deep. 

If churches are to survive, they need to seize their potential of becoming places where people can be informed, inspired, motivated, and dare I say it, organized for action. Churches can be places where your 500 FaceBook friends could become ten or twelve real friendships . . . you know, the people who will mow your lawn when you have a broken leg, made soup for you when you are on chemo therapy, and give a damn when a member of your family dies. I have over 5000 members of my Emerging Church page, 15,000 listeners to my sermons, nearly a 1000 friends on my FaceBook page, and none of them would walk my dog for me if I had to be out of town over night . . . which is infuriating and I don’t even have a dog. 

I look forward to meeting your congregation in person next summer but here is my hope for you:  I hope that your church is personally significant to all of your members individually, and collectively, I hope that your church is morally relevant globally. Loneliness is the single largest form of suffering in America today and your congregation should be the cure for that isolation for one another. But globally, I hope that your church will be a part of the solution to racism, the cure for poverty, the transformation to sustainable energy, construction, and agriculture. I hope you are a voice for #BlackLivesMatter and for brown children in dog cages on our southern border. Advocate for prison reform, reform of militarized policing, and fight against an economic system that keeps shifting resources to the 1% while impoverishing the majority. Don’t ever tell anyone who to vote for but make sure that everyone understands that voting for a racist, a homophobe, a xenophobe, a classist, an islamophobe, or a misogynist, is unacceptable. And don’t make me add  spray-on orange tanner to this list because that might cost me my tax-exempt status.

The future needs us, if we are willing to be relevant. I look forward to seeing you next summer but between now and then, let’s keep kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight. 

Race and Health Outcomes

click here to see the video

Dr. Kyler Sherman-Wilkins, June 14, 2020

Racism is not just an affliction of the mind and heart. Rather, racism, or should I say systemic racism is a public health crisis. One area that receives a great deal of attention is death by policing. 

CHANGE SLIDE

Michael Brown, Eric Gardner, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, Phlilando Castile, Breonna Taylor, and now George Floyd. The names that I just listed off are the names of Black Americans who have had their lives cut short due to the actions of the police. Those who are here to “protect and serve.” The truth is, for Blacks, policing in America is not a story of protection, but of harm. The state sanctioned violence perpetuated by the police on Black bodies has been very costly. Indeed, a recent study published in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health shows that a disproportionate number of total years of life lost due to encounters with the police were experienced by Black and Brown folk. 

Now as a Black man, this is not surprising to me. This is not news. And I would reckon that for many, if not all of you, that this is not news. The reality is, violence against Blacks is not the exception, it is the rule. Indeed, violence against Blacks in the United States is as American as apple pie and baseball. However, it is important to understand the there does not exist one institution in our society that does not perpetuate violence against Blacks. The focus on police brutality is justifiable, but ignoring the other sources of violence can have deadly consequences.

CHANGE SLIDE

You were likely able to identify the faces listed on the previous slide. They received quite a bit of attention. And indeed, the protests that we are seeing today across this country are due in large part to the violence caused to the Black community by the police. But Kira Johnson, the woman pictured here with her husband and infant child, was not killed by the police. She died shortly after delivering her second child. She died in the hospital. She died after receiving inadequate care from those who swore to “do no harm.” 

Now, it is important to say that maternal death is not unique to Black women. In America, we have a higher rate of maternal mortality than in countries like Iran, Turkey, and Kazakhstan. However, as with many outcomes, we find that Blacks are hit hardest. The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Reproductive Health, Wander Barfield, stated quote: “A well-educated African American woman with more than a high school education has a five-fold risk of death compared to a white woman with less than a high school education.” This is not a matter of class. This is a matter of race. The Institute of Medicine published Unequal Treatment that focused on the racial disparities in health outcomes. 

Maternal mortality is but one outcome.

Obesity, breast cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease. These chronic diseases disproportionately impact Blacks. They are more common, and they are more deadly for people with Black skin. We currently see this with COVID-19. 

CHANGE SLIDE 

This chart shows the proportion of Blacks in several states, and also shows the proportion of COVID-19 cases that are Black. Across each of these contexts, we see that a disproportionate number of Blacks are afflicted by this disease. I might add, that they are also more likely to suffer from severe illness. In general, Blacks die quicker and live sicker than whites. 

So why do we see this? Why is race such a profound determinant of one’s health? Biological distinctions between Blacks and Whites have been debunked, though the idea is still alive in well in the American consciousness. If we conclude as social and medical scientists have, that race is indeed a social construction, then racial inequities in health are socially constructed as well. 

Often you will hear that racial disparities in health come down to differences in health behavior across racial lines. Take Type II Diabetes, for example. Eat well, exercise, visit the physician regularly, and you will be able to prevent this chronic disease. The idea here is that one’s health outcomes is the product of their individual choices, so if one is sick, it is because they failed to take proper action to keep themselves healthy. In the context of racial disparities in Type II Diabetes, given that Blacks are more likely to suffer from the disease, what that would mean is that Blacks are predisposed to make unhealthy choices thus leading to higher prevalence of the disease. Educated folks tout this position all of the time. Included the Surgeon General of the United States, Dr. Jerome Adams.

CHANGE SLIDE 

We will return, briefly to COVID-19. When Adams was speaking to reporters and addressing the fact that Blacks are hit harder by the virus, his advice was that blacks should avoid alcohol, drugs, and tobacco. Excellent advice, however this advice fails to acknowledge the fundamental cause of these health related behaviors. And in so doing, it hides the role that systemic racism plays in shaping the health and wellbeing of African Americans.  Now it will be foolish to think that our individual actions have no connection to health. They do. However, any real analysis of health behaviors would be incomplete if we did not consider the social contexts in which people are embedded. A classic idea in sociology is that we as individuals have agency. However, our social structures both permit and constrain our agency. We can eat healthily, but how do we accomplish that if we have the misfortune of living in food deserts, which, by they way, is the reality for a disproportionate share of Blacks. We can visit the physician, but how can we do that without adequate health insurance? Medical sociologists turn to what is referred to as fundamental cause theory, which argues that our health behaviors, these so called proximate determinants of disease, are influenced by more distal causes. And the reality is that in 

America, race, or more appropriate to say ‘racism,’ is a fundamental cause of poor health in America. Redlining, residential segregation, housing discrimination, all of these policies meant to keep Black folk out of well-resourced communities has contributed to an environment, a context in which many Blacks find themselves unable to engage in the very things that may save their lives. Racism is a fundamental cause of poor health. In order to address the inequities, racism must be abolished.  

I want to turn my attention now to medical care providers. As a macro sociologist, I pay a lot of attention to social structures and tend to not really care about what goes on in people’s heads. However, I have enough knowledge of social psychology to be able to discuss the process by which individual physicians and healthcare providers more broadly fail to uphold their oath to “do no harm” to their Black patients. 

This medical racism has deep roots.

CHANGE SLIDE 

            J. Marion Sims, regarded as the Father of Gynecology, regularly experimented on slave women in the mid 1800’s. Operating on them without consent and without anesthesia. These experiments were justified because Blacks were viewed as inhuman. 

CHANGE SLIDE 

More recently, the government’s commissioned Tuskegee Syphilis Study ended only in 1972 targeted Blacks in the south, withholding effective treatments for syphilis among Black patients to see how the disease progressed. Of course, it is difficult to see how this act could be carried out on fellow human beings. The solution? Blacks are inhuman. 

            Flash forward to today. Black bodies are deemed biologically different than their white bodies. A 2016 study conducted by Hoffman and colleagues found that a majority of white medical professionals held the belief that blacks have a higher threshold for pain. That they are biologically stronger. The study went on to find out that these false beliefs lead to differences in pain treatment and management across racial lines. Specifically, physicians tend to underestimate the pain experienced by Black persons which leads to under treatment and the subsequent suffering of Blacks. This bias combined with views of Blacks as susceptible to addiction and media representations of Blacks as drug addicts and dealers is partly responsible for the reluctance of medical professionals in subscribing effective pain medications to their Black patients. 

 Pain is the way that the body communicates to us that something is wrong. It helps us to avoid harmful situations. But if that pain is not recognized by those trained to heal us and make us well, pain is just uncomfortable and debilitating. 

CHANGE SLIDE 

If we return to Ms. Kira Johnson, she experienced excruciating pain which was ignored over and over again by physicians. By the time they addressed her issues and proceeded with an operation, they found her abdomen full of blood and were unable to save her life. Had she been listened to, had her pain be taken seriously, perhaps she would still be here. 

To be clear, I do not believe that all physicians are racist. Excluding, of course many of the founding fathers of modern medicine. Moreover, the implicit bias or unconscious bias that leads to this disparate treatment is just that, unconscious. However, the long standing view that Blacks are less than human, the outright refusal of Whites to recognize the humanity of Black people has put us in a situation where the medical institutions are failing to heal and care for Black people. 

What is the solution? 

CHANGE SLIDE 

Dayna Matthew’s book Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care primarily focuses primarily on legal solutions, for example easing the burden of proof on plaintiffs attempting to prove implicit bias and negligence on the part of their physicians. However, this book also addresses structural solutions and changes in medical training. We know what we have to do. If we were to eliminate residential segregation, we would get rid of Black-White differences in education and income, resources important for maintaining health. Research indicates that first year students hold less implicit racial bias than fourth year medical students, but by the time they complete their medical training, the difference disappears. What does this say? Well it says that there is something about medical school and training that acculturates and socializes physicians into adopting harmful attitudes and biases toward their Black patients. And it is important to note that these implicit biases are present even in Black physicians. So simply diversifying health care providers does not fix the problem. We must change the institution of medicine which perpetuates racial bias. 

But this takes work. This takes advocacy. It takes protests, donations, voting. It also takes outrage. Outrage at the status quo and the belief that things should be better. But change will not come from Black outrage alone. It is crucial that White folk use their privilege to help change these institutions. It is not enough merely to know about these inequities and health. It is not enough to share a Tweet or Facebook post. Changing this system requires active engagement. It requires a commitment to anti-racism, the active dismantling of systems of oppression. It starts with reparations where the economic and living environments for Blacks are made equal to their more privileged peers. It requires a revamping of medical training that focuses on reducing implicit racial bias, or at least preventing implicit biases from manifesting as differential treatment. Only then will we be able to live in a society where physicians can truly claim that they are upholding their Hippocratic oath. Only then will we be able to mitigate racisms role in the ongoing public health crisis.  

Every Barking Dog

Every Barking Dog      June 7, 2020    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor   

click here to see the video

Winston Churchill, “You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.”

In a game of Monopoly, the goal of the game is to acquire so much property and money that you succeed in running all of the other players into bankruptcy. When everyone else is broke, then you are the winner. That is the exact opposite of an intelligent form of capitalism. In the kind of capitalism that actually works, you want to foster an environment where everyone is making money whether through acquisition of property or in production. That way, everyone wins. The only way for capitalism to work, is for nearly everyone to win, or to win to the degree that they have the economic power to go into the market and buy a house, a car, food, clothing, vacations, and maybe get a dog or even start collecting those stupid Precious Moments statues. . . look, it keeps grandma out of the bingo halls.

From the time when the ancient Phoenicians invented money, we have been trying to find the right kind of economy in which we encourage and reward productivity while fairly distributing wealth among the population. We were doing a pretty good job of it after the economic reforms of the New Deal but since the Reagan revolution, there has been a growing wealth gap that has allowed for the creation of super wealthy people while impoverishing the middle class. This fuels the social ills of crushing poverty, racial strife and competition, and rampant crime. Countries that have figured this out, taxing the wealthiest at a greater rate than lower income classes and distributing wealth through social safety nets, do not have the crime rate, murder rate, or racial violence that we have. Inequality, predictably, creates anger and if you save up enough anger, you get anarchy. This is not complicated. We have seen it before and now we are seeing it again. 

There is an ancient Turkish proverb that says, “A hungry man is an angry man.” The press seems to be shocked and amazed by the riots and looting in cities all across America, while I certainly don’t endorse it, I have to tell you, what surprises me is that it didn’t happen a long time ago. Black people have never been fairly brought into the mainstream of the economy. They have forever been invited into the Monopoly game just to provide labor and to temporarily be consumers, but they are always slated to lose. Police violence against blacks is a huge issue but it is not the only issue. An economy constructed to keep blacks in menial labor and constant poverty is another part of it, and expecting them to collectively respect police authority and the sanctity of retail property is totally absurd. 

While I believe that the centralization of wealth in the hands of the few is a disastrous social ill, a truly evil form of economics, still, the super wealthy are not all the same. The Walton family that owns Walmart, and Jeff Bezos who owns Amazon, have amassed their wealth both through business expansion and by paying their army sized workforce so little that they are being subsidized by state and federal poverty programs:  food stamps, public housing, Medicaid, and other welfare programs. Please don’t let this slip past your awareness: Some of the richest families in the world are also the largest recipients of public welfare because they have shifted their labor costs onto the public. I really want for you to remember this.

In fact, let me write this on the blackboard and get you to repeat it with me, all you folks on line too, repeat this and remember this fact:

 

This is an obscenity that shouldn’t even be legal, but corruption has been difficult to weed out in a country largely built on exploitation and theft. Why are people looting stores in their own neighborhoods? Income disparity. An unequal distribution of goods. So unequal, in fact, that some of the richest families in the world are also the largest recipients of public welfare.

 

But then there are super wealthy people like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates who try to use the power that comes to them through wealth in order to do good things. Now, mind you, just because you are inclined towards being a good person does not justify a system that allows for the accumulation of wealth by creating poverty for millions of others but, this is one of those times that it makes sense to hate the game, not the player.

You might wish that people like Gates and Buffet would turn most of their wealth over to a democratically governed trust, but they are a tad too enamored of their own genius to let their resources pass from their own control. 

Still, imagine being Bill Gates, after giving more than $50 billion to humanitarian causes, vaccinating 40 million kids against polio along with many other very laudable causes, and then you go on the internet and find that millions of scientifically illiterate people are accusing you of using vaccines to inject people with GPS tracking devices and, even worse, accusing you of being the master mind of a plot to kill off hundreds of millions of people to lower the human population of the world. That could almost turn you into a Mark Zuckerberg who allows Russian bots to manipulate our presidential elections through misinformation on Face Book . . . because, they pay in Rubles. 

 

We can only hope that those who have benefited from a clearly ineffective form of capitalism will have the strength of ego to not be negatively affected by the barking dogs on the internet. It wasn’t really Warren Buffett who said it, but it has the ring of someone with resources, in any event, it is good counsel:  You will continue to suffer if you have an emotional reaction to everything that is said to you. True power is in sitting back and observing things with logic. True power is restraint. If words control you that means everyone else can control you. Breathe and allow things to pass. 

 

I had a column in the Springfield News-Leader last week in which I rather passionately pleaded with our neighbors to take the Covid-19 pandemic seriously and to maintain the disciplines of wearing a mask in public and maintaining social distancing, something that fewer than 10% of our peers in grocery and hardware stores are currently practicing. 

The column was picked up and reposted by people in the St Louis area and I noticed that one person in our “big sister” city said, “Well, I admire his leadership, but he must be very lonely down there.” 

While I immediately bristle whenever people in Kansas City or St. Louis make dismissive remarks about those of us who live in the Queen of the Ozarks, still, I have to admit that it is not uncommon for me to refer to our local community as being Darwin’s Waiting Room. And while St. Louis is hardly the MENSA Club capital of the world, it is true enough that it is often quite lonely being a liberal opinion writer in one of the most stridently conservative parts of America. But I replied to this woman, “Life got a lot better for me in the Ozarks when I gave up the desire to be popular.

I don’t like getting hate mail. I don’t enjoy public derision. And though I refuse to be frightened by the occasional death threat, no one can say that they ignore those moments with casual disregard. When I first started writing for the News-Leader twenty-five years ago, I had a particularly loathsome editor . . . I have rarely gotten along with editors very well for lots of obvious reasons, but this guy was the worst, but he gave me the best piece of advice that I have ever gotten in journalism. He said: public criticism is the price you pay for airing your views in public. It is just true. If you are going to say something significant, it is only significant because everyone doesn’t already agree. You will note that most opinion writers get down to writing pieces that say, “Apple pie is good,” or, “I remember the good ol days fondly.” 

I have regularly been called into the News-Leader office for a “come to Jesus” meeting with the editor and publisher and they would try to scold me for my controversial columns but I always pointed out to them that I was an unpaid voluntary columnist and that my columns consistently had as many as a hundred times as many readers as their full-time writers. That one never ceased to create a room full of red-faced newspaper executives. Truth is treason in an empire of lies.

Journalism is writing something that someone doesn’t want you to say. Everything else is advertising. Why deliver a sermon that just feeds people back what they already believe? Why write a book that only offers confirmation of bias? But when it comes to a newspaper opinion column, if it doesn’t make someone mad, you are wasting your time. 

Back when I was married, my wife would get furious about my newspaper columns, telling me quite forcefully, “You are wasting your life. No one who reads your stuff ever changes their minds, no one pays attention to sermons.” And, there were times when I agreed with her. But, as James Baldwin has said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” The barking dogs of the world want to keep progressives quiet. They want us to avoid controversy, criticism, conflict, and as long as they can keep us guarding our privacy and our reputation, then they have already won. 

I’m not encouraging you to be arrogant or condescending about this, but if we are going to leave breadcrumbs of a trail for people to escape the mental prisons of credal religion or conservative politics, you have to accept that there will be a lot of  “blah, blah, blah” criticism. I just hear it like the bleating of sheep, and you know, lions don’t lose a lot of sleep worrying about the opinions of sheep.

Almost all of us who are now progressives did not start out being open-minded and aware. Most of us can trace how we escaped the mental prison of conservative religion, right-wing politics, southern racism, and American exceptionalism. And because we know that we managed to change, we cannot give up believing that other people can change too, that other people can stop hating, stop hoarding, stop living in fear of science and facts. Someone confronted our comfortable prejudice and conservative isolation . . . the only way to show appropriate gratitude to those brave people is to be similarly brave ourselves. 

I have mentioned the Dunning-Kruger research before in which they demonstrated why and how those with the least information and who are the most intellectually challenged are often the most self-confident and the most likely to insist on telling others what to believe.

I blame a lot of that on Fox News which seems to offer most of their content in condescending intonations as if that attitude somehow turned their ignorant lies into news. Well informed people should expose themselves to both sides of any issue but watching Fox has nothing to do with balancing your exposure to news. As the saying goes, “I don’t watch Fox for exactly the same reason that I do not drink out of the toilet.” 

Honestly, we got more reliable information from our Magic 8-ball when we were kids. Will Donald Trump win re-election in November? I hope it is right this time!

The issue that has white America all in a twitter is their rather pious sounding response to news of vandalism and looting in response to the police killing of George Floyd. In fact, if you just listen to the news over the past two weeks, people breaking out store windows and sealing Lulu Lemon yoga pants and athletic shoes was much more important than the fact that 4 Minneapolis policemen held George Floyd’s face in the pavement and choked him to death for 9 minutes while paramedics and private citizens pleaded with them to let him breathe. 

I’m not saying that endorse looting or that I agree with it. I’m just saying that I understand. And while white folk are busy shaking their heads with their “tisk-tisk-tisk” face on, you know that Colin Kaepernick kneeling was considered to be offensive. Bre Newsome taking down the Confederate flag or rioters pulling down racist statues were all considered to be inappropriate. You just have to wonder, in what way do white racists want black people to protest?

But here is a fact: these four former cops have been arrested and charged with murder specifically because of those protestors   Along with the rioters and looters. 

Passive protest has allowed almost all cops to get off without being sentenced, or charged, or even losing their jobs way too often. 

The riots have been sparked by, among other things, excessive use of force by police and in an ultimate example of just how tone-deaf police forces can be, they have stepped up their abusive practices. They have used a National Guard helicopter to hover over peaceful demonstrations the way they use military helicopters on the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The president actually had flash-bang grenades and tear gas used on peaceful demonstrators near the White House. And in Asheville, NC some medics set up a first aid tent for a demonstration and these guys in riot gear showed up, took their supplies and destroyed them. They were not wearing badges, no ID, no way to know if they were local cops or federal cops or if they were cops at all. But what you can know, is that they were acting illegally, like an occupation force that considered American citizens to be then enemy. 

Last week, I was talking about the fact that when you put a bunch of white guys together on a police force that their out of control machismo often takes over, but when you militarize the police, put them in heavy armor, helmets, and face shields, then they start to act like an occupying army. You probably saw the video of police officers in Buffalo, NY, knocking down this 75 year old man whom they then left unconscious in a pool of blood on the sidewalk. 

If you have a kid or a grandchild in law enforcement, this might be a really good time to suggest that they find another job. When they lose perspective this badly, and treat citizens this way, then broken windows and stolen tennis shoes is not where this is going to end. If the police keep acting like the citizens are their enemy, then they can expect citizens to return the favor. 

Police brutality has to end. As I was saying last week, no one can stop it faster than the cops themselves. If good cops stop the abusive behavior of bad cops, this conversation could find a peaceful and logical end. But if they keep upholding that thin blue line, as represented in the American flag with a blue stripe in it, like the one that flies over the police headquarters here in town, then, folks, this is going to end very very badly. 

Dr. Kyler Sherman-Wilkins, one of our members who is a professor of sociology, will be speaking here next week, and a couple of weeks later, our other pastor, David Katya Ketchum will be speaking. I hope that they will also be illuminating the concept of the disbanding of police forces altogether.

Before white Europeans brought the concepts of police and jails to this continent, 90 million native Americans lived here without any police or jails. People in New Zealand are also calling for a disbanding of the police for the same reason: the Mari Indians lived there for centuries without police or jails. 

Police and jails came into existence to keep slaves in slavery and to protect the wealth of the rich from the masses of the poor that they kept in poverty through low wages. When there is not a huge income disparity, when everyone has the basics then need in life, there is little reason to have police at all. 

Riots and looting are not the problems. They are symptoms of a problem that we need to fix. Now is either a very frightening time in America or now is a very hopeful time in America. How we behave now will make the difference.

“I Can’t Breathe”

“I Can’t Breathe”      May 31, 2020  Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

p. 181 “Black and Blue: Exploring Racial Bias and Law Enforcement in the Killings of unarmed Black Male Civilians” American Psychologist 2016

With the Department of Justice’s indictment of the Ferguson Police Department for racially biased policing (United States Department of Justice, 2015), as well as their probe into the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore (Verhovek, 2015), there is increased public impetus for police reform. We agree that institutional reform is critical. However, since racial bias neither begins nor ends with police, calls for change must extend beyond police organizations.

Thus, we apply principles of both social and industrial and organizational (I/O) psychology to offer suggestions for society and joint police-community partnering. Then, we offer recommendations for law enforcement to better enable those partnerships and support systemic reform.

Amy Cooper picked a bad week and the wrong victim to trot out her white privilege this week. Christian Cooper is an avid birder and he was out in the fairly wild bramble of New York’s Central Park watching for birds. Signs in the area tell dog walkers that their dog must be on a leash, but Amy had let hers go, and her dog was scaring away birds and bothering Christian. He asked her politely to leash her dog, but she refused. 

When Christian insisted, she played a card that black men have seen far too often. She called on her white privilege, especially the privilege of a white woman, and she called the police and accused Christian of threatening her and her dog. She demanded that the cops come immediately and make him stop.

“I do declare, there is a black man here and he is scaring me!” Amy picked the wrong victim this time. 

Christian, not that it should matter, is a Harvard educated professional, and he just wasn’t going to fall for this old ploy. He recorded her racist attempt to assert her privilege and posted it online where, in the week when George Floyd was brutally murdered by four Minneapolis police, the video went viral. Even Christian feels that the public response to Amy’s racist phone call has been too much. Her employer fired her rather than suffer association with her. Her employment and probably her safety in New York are over. So, I don’t want to just pile on. It is easy to hate someone like Amy Cooper, especially this week.

She is not personally responsible for the racism that led to the police killing of George Floyd, Ahmaud Aubrey, Atatiana Johnson, or Philando Castile, but she is representative of it because her response to her sudden infamy is almost as familiar as the last words of George Floyd and Eric Garner, both of whom uttered the unforgettable last words, “I can’t breathe.” 

When Amy’s name became known she released a public apology that included this familiar phrase, “I’m not a racist.” “I’m deeply sorry, but I am not a racist.” She told the police that he was threatening her life but the next day she insisted, “I didn’t want anything bad to happen to him?” Because, what bad things could possibly happen to a black man in the park when a woman claims that he is threatening her life? 

Last year, police shot and killed 1,099 people in America. That is not counting victims like George Floyd and Eric Garner who were not shot, they were choked to death. In all of last year, there were only 27 days when the police did not shoot and kill at least one person. And, as you already know, a black man is 3x more likely to be shot than a white man. And it isn’t just a deep south issue. A black man is 6x more likely to be shot by the police in Oklahoma City than they are in Georgia. I have been in Oklahoma City several times and I can’t remember even seeing a black man in Oklahoma City! 

When you run the numbers, there is not a direct relationship between the size of the black population and police shootings of black men, there is not a direct relationship between the crime rates or gang related incidents in a city and the frequency of police shootings. The truth about race in America is complicated but, for the most part, it isn’t what you think it is. 

Again, I don’t want to just flog Amy Cooper in public because she is an easy target, what I do what to say to all of my white friends and listeners is that there is an Amy Cooper lurking inside of all of us. I am a white guy from rural Kentucky raised by gun toting, uneducated, children of the south. That doesn’t mean that I have a Phd in racism, in fact, the opposite, I know about racism the same way a fish knows about water . . . we are a part of the culture and the culture is a part of us. I knew when I heard what Amy Cooper did that she was being an unreflective, stupid, white privileged racist… I spotted it in a second.

And what’s more, when I heard Joe Biden telling Charlemagne that if he was undecided about how he was going to vote in November that “You ain’t black,” my stomach hit the floor. Joe Biden is a two-legged gaff machine but for an old white guy, under any circumstances, to say that if a black man doesn’t agree with what we want black men to think that they are not really black . . . that is not a gaff, that is political suicide. But it is hard for a fish to be aware of water and it is hard for Joe Biden, for Amy Cooper, for Roger Ray, David Ketchum, Sean Spyres or any of you white folks here or watching us on line to be aware of your white privilege and how often you consciously or unconsciously use it. 

Amy Cooper says that she is not really a racist, but we all know that, no, really, she totally is. And Joe Biden would insist that he isn’t, but these gaffs don’t come out of thin air . . . he is not nearly as much of a racist as Donald Trump but that is not the issue, Joe Biden has lingering white privilege all over him. I am not going to say that I am not a racist . . . I can say that I have spent my life trying to rid myself of my heritage but I am not going to claim to have achieved that goal because someone here would point out some time when I have recently enjoyed a bit of white privilege, even if it is just being able to walk around the square without being heckled by a bunch of white kids in a pickup truck, yelling racial slurs at me.

But more likely, when I get pulled over by the police for speeding, and I’m not saying that has happened, more than six or seven times, . . . that I have never been given a ticket. Because, I don’t have to say to the police officer, “Hey, I’m white, how about we just chat about this and I’ll promise to slow down and don’t write me a ticket?” He can see . . . 

remember David, when we got pulled over and the police took a long time checking the license tag and looking us over before telling us to have a nice day and to be more careful? Does that happen to black people in Springfield? White people don’t have to ask for privilege at the bank, in the court room, or even when we are protesting in public places, we just get it. And I’m a socialist!

Sure, we’re talking about this today because George Floyd was brutally choked to death by policemen in Minneapolis this week. I want justice for George Floyd and for his family, the justice that Philando Castile’s family didn’t get. Like all of you, I want to see the police involved charged with murder and taken to trial. I want them to receive a fair trial . . . not a white man’s trial, I want them to receive a fair trial and a just sentencing if they are found guilty. But what I don’t want to do is to rant and bluster about this injustice and be guilty of losing the context of it all. 

While we never want to lose the value of any unique human life that is unjustly taken, we don’t want to just have a series of angry outbursts that don’t go anywhere and don’t accomplish anything. It is about George Floyd but you can’t pull his death away from its connection to the recent shooting of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia,  

and you can’t help associate his choking death with the death of Eric Garner, 

And Missouri’s own Michael Brown. Each has their own story, each one leaves behind a grief-stricken family but, and this is as much my fault as anyone’s, we get mad, we get sad, we make demands, and then we just go back to living our lives.

 Minneapolis is on fire this week, sure, because of George Floyd, but not just because of George Floyd. I don’t know much about Minneapolis but I know they have been in the news for police killing of unarmed black men several times in recent years. About 20% of the city is black, but if you have watched any news coverage of the protests, the majority of protestors are white because the city’s heritage of police violence against black men is no secret. Most white people want racism to stop, they want the police killings of unarmed black men to stop. But beyond expressing public rage in the immediate aftermath, what can be done?

I propose 2 foci: first we need to consider what can be done immediately to make things better and secondly, we need to look into the roots of racism and figure out how to get rid of it forever. 

Please forgive me if this seems rather prescriptive but the topic is too important for me to be misunderstood. I believe that we need to immediately reform policing but not policing alone. As I have been saying for years, our justice system is broken. Police who shoot and kill unarmed black men are rarely even charged with crimes and when they are, they seem to magically be acquitted or found to be innocent in spite of the whole world seeing the video of an obvious murder. This two-tiered justice system is primeval and must be reformed. 

And, there is no place as racially charged as our jails and prisons where prison staff are often just as racist as the racially defined gangs they are trying to manage in incarceration. I think that we need to reform all three dimensions of this cultural problem simultaneously and immediately.

How do we do it? Well, here is some good news. There are best practices that are field tested and that we already know will work to reduce race related crime while we work on writing a memorial service for racism generally.

From Ferguson to Minneapolis and all points in between, we see that white men are way overrepresented in law enforcement, the judiciary, and the penal system. We need to intentionally and specifically create a staff in all three levels that is reflective of the culture in which they exist. Recruiting needs to include background and psychological testing to weed out racists and people who have extreme needs for authority and respect. 

Secondly, we need to defuse the whole “them and us” mentality among police in cruisers and people on the streets. We need cops on sidewalks, interacting with business owners and neighbors. There needs to be a lot more facial recognition that isn’t based on a computer program. 

The research literature indicates that the worst of these racially influenced murders take place when white men are assigned to teams together. When a man is paired with a woman or when whites and people of color are put into teams together, they are much less likely to do something like what happened in Minneapolis this week when a white policeman knelt on a black man’s neck for five minutes while he slowly suffocated. I believe that if there had been a black officer there or a woman of any race, I believe that George Floyd would be alive today.

And, fourthly, cultural awareness needs to be taught constantly. We have made progress by including programing on TV that subtly exposes straight people to gay people, sys-gender people to trans folk, and white people to black people. But, and I have to admit that one of my white privilege failings has been that I have paid relatively little attention in my writing to black history month or gay pride month, but we need to be cross-pollenating our minds with the cultures of those around us 12 months out of the year. 

What if every police force, judicial staff, and prison staff in America had to read three of Toni Morrison’s novels in the next year? Maybe everyone can’t really learn what they need to know in a sociology class but just read a fiction novel written by someone who articulates the black experience in such a profound way that you will have to go look into a mirror to be sure that you are not a young black woman in rural Georgia. If there were any way to reliably prove it, I would bet you a $1000 right now that Amy Cooper has never read a Toni Morrison novel because, if she had, what she said to that 911 dispatcher would have stuck in her throat. 

These four proposals are not original to me. This is what I have found in the professional literature, but I have one more thing I want to talk about. I have talked about this before and I have not found it in the literature, I just know that I am right. I am going to conclude with this point, not because I am finished but because I have to stop somewhere. We will have more sermons on this channel this summer on how to root racism out of our society but for now, 

I want to talk about the thin blue line that says that law enforcement officers always have the back of every other law enforcement officer. I get it. The job is sometimes dangerous. Cops can’t confidently face the dangers they try to mitigate in the streets if they can’t trust their peers to have their back.

I had a brief stint years ago as a reporter on a military base. I have felt the camaraderie among the ranks. I know how deep and how powerful that sense of brotherhood is. But, guys, don’t you wonder if anyone on the Minneapolis police force was surprised on Friday that Derek Chauvin was arrested and charged with 3^rd degree murder.

In fact, if we had taken a confidential poll among law enforcement officers last week, asking them to guess which member of their force would eventually be charged with murdering a black man, I bet his name would have come up pretty often. 

Most people who choose to go into policing have a high need for order and most typically a personal desire for power and recognition. When you combine that with a latent sense of racial superiority, then this crap happens. 

I believe in everything that I said earlier about diversifying the force, humanizing policing, mixing police partners by race and gender, and including cultural sensitivity training. But, come on, we could cut down the number of unarmed black men killed by white cops this week if the so called “good cops” would stop covering for the bad cops and report them. And, guys, what makes you deserve to be respected and looked up to, what on earth qualifies you to be thought of as being a “good cop” if you are covering for, if you are protecting, if you are, in every literal sense, an ally with violent, racist, stupid, unhinged monsters who masquerade as people who have pledged to serve and protect the vulnerable on the streets?

Who knew that it would come to this with Derek Chauvin and didn’t report him deserves their shield today? 

Come on cops, look at this headline from the Los Angeles Times:  Getting killed by police is a leading cause of death for young black men in America. You are doing this! You are murdering black American citizens and you are hiding the people who are going to pull the trigger this week and I’m asking you to be a man and put a stop to it. 

I love my friends who are loyal and supportive but when I am in the wrong, my friends need to be the ones to tell me first, not the ones who lie for me and cover my tracks. When you silently listen to racist remarks, you are emboldening racism. When you laugh at racist jokes, you are setting up some black young man to be treated as if he were subhuman. 

And, when you let that openly racist cop three lockers down from you to put on a badge and strap on a weapon and then head out to the streets then you are nothing but the dog feces on sole of the shoes of our society. You are better than this. If you want us to buy this “protect and serve” line then you need to show us some integrity. If every law enforcement agency doesn’t do a deep dive review of their staff and cull at least 10% of their force then we know that they are not taking this issue seriously yet. 

I’m not saying that rioters should have burned down the 3^rdprecinct police headquarters in Minneapolis, I’m just saying that all you morally equivocating cops who didn’t report Derek Chauvin know why it happened and you know that you had it coming. 

There are a lot of things that scholars, psychologists, sociologists, and criminologists have to say about how to change the system to make it better. But I want to be clear about this, nothing gets the individual cop off of the hook for not reporting the racists in your midst. You know who they are, and you need to do your part to protect and serve the people.