- “Our character is but the stamp on our souls of the free choices of good and evil we have made through life.” --Geikie
- Another week lies before us, filled with choices. I thank you for choosing to spend some time with Growing in Christ as together we explore the cause and effect nature of theology in our personal lives. Your comments and opinions are always welcome.
- In a response to last week’s newsletter, the question was asked about why the unprecedented alliance between the Political and Religious Right is such a concern. One good explanation can be found at TomPaine.common sense: http://www.tompaine.com/articles/stopping_specter.php
- The Rev. David E. Conner, Th.D., pastor of the Wheat Ridge (Colorado) Congregation of the United Church of Christ, shared the following post-election letter to his children with my father, who in turn passed it along to me. David has graciously given me permission to here share it with all of you:
Date: November 3, 2004
To: All my kids (an open letter)
From: Your dad
Re: Attempted explanation (that is, reasons why anybody would vote for George W. Bush)
1. Financial self-interest — 6% of all voters
2. Type 1 wanta-be’s — 2%
3. Anxiety and fear — 7%
4. Always vote “conservative” (??) — 4%
5. Rigid Moral Traditionalism, a.k.a. “values” — 9%
6. Fixated on one issue (guns, abortion, etc.) — 5%
7. Substitute media for brains — 6%
8. Religious ideology — 12%
Total: 51% (that’s all it takes)
As you know, I was born in Mississippi in the first month of 1950. Speaking personally, I think 1950 was a heck of a time to be born. The fifties, like so many other things that were actually national traumas (like the Great Depression and World War II), have now mostly been romanticized by Americans. Remember American Graffiti and Happy Days? But growing up in the South during the fifties and sixties was not really very romantic. It involved a lot more than just souped-up cars and some innocent necking (that’s what it was then called) in the back seat after prom.
The South, in the fifties? The first thing that comes to mind is, of course, the flagrant, often violent racism. Who can forget? When I was only seven or eight we were in the family car on South State Street in Jackson, stopped at a traffic light behind a pick-up truck. In the back of the truck was a black teenage boy. A police car pulled up next to the pick-up truck and the white policeman on the passenger’s side spit at the truck and said, “Sit up, nigger.” Eyes wide with fear, the young man complied.
I was afraid, too.
When I was in the sixth grade we lived in Brandon and used to play baseball in the backyard. (Yards in the South are a lot larger than they are in Colorado.) Since there weren’t enough white kids to form two teams, we invited some kids from the adjoining black neighborhood—it was really just a row of wooden shacks—to create the other team. The teams themselves weren’t even integrated, but people in Brandon complained and we had to quit playing.
We were still living in Brandon in the early sixties when my dad, your grandfather, signed the famous “integration pledge.” Twenty-nine Methodist ministers signed it—a published statement, very non-controversial by today’s standards, favoring racial integration in the public schools. Many of those ministers were harassed so severely that they left the state. My parents and our home were threatened in various ways and we had to move twice, from Brandon to Vicksburg and then to Hattiesburg; but my parents never gave up on Mississippi.
Racism isn’t the only social calamity I remember. Anti-communism was like a plague. In the fifties and sixties anti-communism infected the whole nation, but its spirit of paranoia and vigilantism found a special home among southerners, who have been in the grip of a kind of chip-on-your-shoulder defensiveness and a smoldering belligerence ever since 1865 when we lost “the War” to the damn yankees (not the baseball team). It seemed that in every church my dad served, there was pressure to show anti-communist films, study anti-communist books, and expose any “liberals” or “integrationists” who were really, we were assured, Communists-in-hiding.
Not that Communism wasn’t a real problem. The Cuban Missile Crisis took place when I was about twelve. President Kennedy blockaded Soviet ships loaded with nuclear warheads headed for Cuba. For a while it looked like this would start World War III. Maybe no one has told you that in those days we had “fall-out shelters”—as if there could be such a thing—in all public buildings, even elementary schools. In case of nuclear attack we were supposed to sit and put our heads between our knees, shield our eyes from the blinding light, and pray. In that circumstance prayer was still encouraged at school.
By the time I was old enough to think, if only a little, for myself, Vietnam came along. I did not then nor do I now think that the Vietnam war made any sense, but on the other hand I do remember years before when Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev had threatened the United States, “We will bury you.” Contemplating Kruschev’s threat and the Cold War’s insane logic of Mutually Assured Destruction—M.A.D.—it is not so hard to understand why Democratic and Republican leaders were united in believing the Domino Theory. Even the poor little nation of Vietnam could, it was believed, be a stepping stone to world domination by the Communists.
Fifty thousand Americans died in Vietnam. As a typical American, I don’t know how many Vietnamese died.
Is it any wonder that in those years the youth of America turned to pot, narcotics, and hallucinogens? And those who did drugs were not all college students or hippies. A lot of them were soldiers who scored their first hit in southeast Asia.
During all of these perplexities and problems of my youth, in retrospect, at least, I wish I could have talked more frankly with my parents. Neither of them, and especially not my father, seemed inclined to share their own questions, doubts, or challenges with their children. We children were taught that racism was wrong, but our parents seldom discussed where racism originated or why people were inclined to become racists. We never talked about what communism was or why people held it to be so dangerous. Until I was an adult I never knew my parents’ views about Vietnam or national politics or Joseph McCarthy. My parents never even mentioned the Cuban Missile Crisis, at least not to me. Years later I was astonished to learn that our security and our very lives had been in danger and our parents never told us.
Maybe they were trying to protect us, but I don’t believe it worked.
Of course, the South is legendary for its secretive boundaries between old and young, and for its overall failure to trust in the value of open discussion and reason. Actually, my parents were well educated, and they inculcated at least some modest love of learning in their children. (I suspect that you kids have sometimes had occasion to regret this.) But any love of learning was at variance with their and my native culture. The Deep South is sometimes palpably proud of its own ignorance.
In point of fact, in his enduring book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, historian Richard Hofstadter implies that South Carolinian Andrew Jackson was the first (but obviously not the last) president to run on the now-familiar slogan of “I’m dumb like you—so vote for me.” Jackson lampooned the education and manners of New Englanders and city folk as a way of promoting himself among commoners. As a result he was the first U.S. president ever to be elected from outside of the East Coast elite. He was also arguably the first president to function as a paradigm of bigotry and ethical obliviousness, expelling the peaceful Cherokee Indians from their home in the Smoky Mountains on a forced march over “the Trail of Tears” to the celebrated windswept plains of Oklahoma—in open defiance of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling. As a reward for this daring achievement, today he adorns our twenty-dollar bill—now ironically known as a “yuppy food coupon” because it is the currency dispensed by automatic teller machines.
The southern trend towards ignorance and irrationality does not abate as we move specifically to the home state of your ancestors. Mississippi, the deepest part of the Deep South, is the state where politician Theodore G. Bilbo promised to save money for the taxpayers by paving the streets with bricks. When the bricks wore out on one side, Bilbo reasoned, they could be reused simply by turning them over. Evidently the people of Mississipi found this stunning logic so unassailable that they elected Bilbo as their next governor.
More irrationality. In my own lifetime Mississippi was the last state in the Union to be “dry,” that is, to prohibit alcoholic beverages across the entire state. Naturally this loudly touted illegality did not actually prevent the sale of bootleg booze, or even of beer. Through some long-forgotten circumstance I remember observing for myself that the tops of the beer cans—which were then flat like regular cans of food because this was before the days of tab-tops—were stamped by the state with a black seal indicating that the seller had paid what was universally called “the black market tax”—in effect, a fine paid in advance. This served the double if somewhat hypocritical purpose of supplying the state with desirable revenue while yet placating the hoard of Baptists and Methodists who at least nominally were abstemious as a matter of pious doctrine.
Next in my memory comes Governor Ross Barnett, arch-segregationist and racist, for whom the largest reservoir in the state is named. Barnett was Mississippi’s political equivalent of Alabama’s George Wallace, who had such a fanatical following that his wife Lurleen was elected without pause for thought when George couldn’t run anymore.
Andrew Jackson. Theodore Bilbo. Ross Barnett. George Wallace. In that era, all you had to do to get elected in the South was to proclaim long enough and loudly enough that, whatever else might be true of your opponent, he was more “liberal” than you were. For southerners, voting anti-liberal was an automatic call. Like the black market tax, anti-liberal name calling was hypocritical and cynical—but it worked.
And now comes George W. Bush, proving to everybody in the world that branding your opponent as a “liberal” in frightened tones still wins elections, and that growing up in the United States of America today is a whole lot like growing up in Mississippi in the 1950s.
Unlike my parents, kids, I’m not going to let this pass. I see my fatherly duty, and I’m up for it. I feel it in my heart that, in the face of this egregious irrationality, I owe you some kind of an explanation.
Thus, the table at the beginning of this letter.
The percentages of course mean little. They are nothing but conjecture. I include them only to suggest that an interested person could, theoretically, go somewhere to look up figures based on genuine research, which might be even more accurate than what I made up off the top of my head. In real voters the categories overlap. Most people who voted for Mr. Bush probably had several reasons. The table simply attempts to describe which reasons are most decisive for the individuals in that group.
The point is that there are ways of trying to make sense out of this . . . this . . . debacle, this disaster, this affront to all reason.
In George W. Bush we have:
§ a man who wangled the 2000 election away from his opponent after some dubious vote counting in the state where his brother is governor and by the biased deliberations of a Supreme Court whose members were appointed almost entirely by his Republican presidential predecessors;
§ a man who was at first paralyzed by the 9/11 attacks and then responded with a full-scale war in Afghanistan, when the impact of small-scale covert intelligence forces would probably have been just as effective;
§ a man who manipulated angry, grieving Americans into thinking that a war in Iraq was necessary to uncover weapons of mass-destruction for which there was no genuine evidence, when his real motives seem to have been avenging old threats against his father and protecting vested interests in petroleum;
§ a man who claims to be an environmentalist but who has weakened or attacked every U.S. policy or regulation against air pollution, water pollution, wilderness protection, and the conservation of natural resources;
§ a man who appoints apparent tokens to his cabinet while opposing Affirmative Action by blithely equating it with “quotas”;
§ a man who by his own admission feels no guilt or hesitancy even after over 1,000 American military personnel have died in Iraq;
§ a man who refused to distance himself from the lies and distortions of the “Swift Boat” forces;
§ a man who has transformed the Federal budgetary surplus of his predecessor into the largest deficit in U.S. history, a debt that will have to be repaid by the sweat and toil of you kids and your children;
§ a man who says America is now safer when hardly anything is actually being done to protect our seaports;
§ a man who seems never to think about the constructive purposes the $200 billion wasted in Iraq could have been spent for;
§ a man whose main approach to the healthcare crisis in this country is to propose glibly that prohibiting large-award lawsuits against physicians will somehow bring about a significant reduction in medical bills for all citizens, which is ridiculous;
§ a man who hypocritically claims to be cutting everyone’s taxes when the tax reductions come mainly for his wealthy supporters;
§ a man who has transformed what Lincoln called “government of the people, by the people, for the people” into a government of the people, by the rich, for the rich.
§ a man who gloats and brags that he got more votes than any prior presidential candidate, without mentioning or even understanding that this means that his opponent got the second-largest total and that the election was actually decided by an extraordinarily narrow margin.
There are a number of approaches to this situation.
Some of us are in the luxurious position of being able to shrug and go on with our lives.
You can take the fatalistic approach. Though the South suffered, we somehow made it through open racism and anti-communism, Bilbo and Barnett. Now the country will have to suffer through the Bush years. Someday things are bound to get better.
Cynicism has its rewards. You probably remember Lilly Tomlin’s maxim that “no matter how cynical you get, you can’t keep up.” She was right. Is there any doubt that where John Kerry, who would have been an honorable and worthy president, lost the election, Robert Redford or George Clooney would have won by a landslide? (Democrats, take note!)
Carping and whining against the Evil Empire of Bush also offers a slight consolation. Do you remember the Babylonian Exile of the Jews? About 2600 years ago Jerusalem was conquered by foreign invaders who took their leaders away into captivity. In that situation someone wrote what we now call Psalm 137. Considering the flagrant gloating of Bush, Cheney, and Governor Owens on day after the election, you could insert their names into verse 3:
1: By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion.
2: On the willows there we hung up our lyres.
3: For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors—Bush, Ashcroft, Cheney, and Owens—required of us mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
4: But how shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?
5: If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!
6: Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy!
As a more cheerful variation on the carping and whining theme, you can take the Make Fun of Bush approach. As Leno, Letterman, and other comedians continually demonstrate, the Bushites offer no end of satirical possibilities.
Some form of political activism—call it “loyal opposition” if you want—is a better but more demanding option. For this you have to commit yourself to something, and that seems somewhat unpopular among many liberals these days. Nevertheless I think I am going for it. Let me know if you kids think of any possibilities.
The previous reference to the Jewish Exile reminds us of the permanent “dispersion” of the Jews from their homeland. Though the dispersion weakened the historic Jewish nation in Israel, it spread Judaism throughout the world, though as a distinct minority. As Martin Luther King said, it is still meaningful to think that a “righteous remnant”—a conscientious minority—can serve a vital, redemptive purpose in a society. Growing up in a liberal family in the South, I guess I learned early on to think of myself as part of a remnant.
Today, that kind of imagery is going to have to be adopted by people of conscience all across America.
One final suggestion—and most people would find this odd, but you know that it comes from your dad—I am going to keep going to church. And I am going to do it as a liberal.
You say, “Sure, Dad, you’re a minister. You get paid to go to church.” But I would keep going even if I weren’t paid, and even if I weren’t a minister. I’m committed to it, and not only as a matter of personal commitment, but as a matter of political and social commitment.
Here is my reasoning. There is little chance that my going to church will have any direct impact on unseating the current president. But on the other hand, consider the large number of “born-again Christians” who voted for Mr. Bush because they identified with his religious beliefs. It is should strike us as remarkable that, though many of those who voted for Bush did so because they identified with his religion, hardly anybody who voted for Kerry seems to have been thinking about Kerry’s faith stance.
I absolutely refuse to surrender political, social, and ethical motivations based on faith to the Religious Right. It is wrong, in my view, to grant people like George W. Bush all of the social power of religious faith. It is wrong to allow the American Public to assume that Democrats and liberals either have no faith at all or that their faith is so vague and wishy-washy that it cannot serve as an effective inspiration for public service.
But my reasons for going to church do not center on mere political expedience. The deeper reason is that the gospel that I believe in is too compassionate, too uplifting, too chastening, too enduring, and too compelling to be abandoned to those who would transform it into something unsympathetic, judgmental, convenient, covertly self-serving, or intellectually untenable. Faith is my main inspiration for remaining involved in our struggles for public responsibility and renewal. I am not going to condemn or criticize Mr. Bush’s religion, but I have to admit that my faith is not much like his. Let me try to describe what I believe in.
One of my heroes, Alfred North Whitehead, described three types of religion displayed prominently in human history: the religion modeled after the Ruling Caesar, the religion of the Ruthless Moralist, and the religion of the Unmoved Mover. The “Ruling Caesar” is the conventional Man Upstairs who protects and favors those who worship him in the orthodox fashion. This is the God whom George Bush often seems to believe in. The Ruthless Moralist God is a Supreme Judge who restrains or punishes anti-social behavior. The Unmoved Mover is an abstract philosophical principle who sounds feasible intellectually but who makes no demands upon us. But Whitehead also mentioned another type of religion: the “brief Galilean vision of humility” which “flickers uncertainly through the ages,” ever persisting in what is best in human nature. In a different book Whitehead wrote words that you have probably heard me quote before.
“Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realised; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and yet the hopeless quest. .... The fact of religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it [religious faith], human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.” (Science and the Modern World, end of ch. 12)
In the aftermath of the election it is this kind of thinking and feeling that keeps my head above water.
Today I happened to have four separate encounters with persons who were so distraught over the election that they were on the verge of tears. One, a young woman whom I just met, broke down and cried.
With elections and, really, with just about every significant thing you can think about, if you think about it hard enough you wind up needing more than mere human resources to deal with the eventual results. You kids know that I don’t believe in an anthropomorphic God up in heaven, but I certainly do believe in a Transcendent Creativity that conveys a kind of grace and guidance to the world, and to human beings.
As we move into the next four years, I hope you kids have something to hold onto.
I love you.
Dad
- Until next time…….Shalom!
