150 leading evangelical pastors met in Texas last week to decide which Republican presidential candidate they, as a group, would support. There is simply no biblical model for this. These men, most of whom are dogmatic, hard-line biblical literalists, routinely violate their own professed beliefs by organizing politically and involving the church in the political process. Look all you want, there is not one single example of Jesus Christ organizing a rally to overthrow Herod or Caesar. Not one instance of the Apostle Paul painting up “Vote Romney” signs and encouraging the faithful to throw their support behind an ordained elder of a false religion that prostitutes the Gospel of Jesus Christ as its veneer of legitimacy in order to deceive.

Continue reading "Not Christian Enough" »

Many people reading this are likely too young to have ever heard Martin Luther King, Jr. speak live. I was just a kid and kind of blew it off while playing with my toy trucks or what have you, but, yes, I distinctly remember hearing Dr. King when he was living. Growing up, I became used to the nightly casualty reports from Vietnam—a grisly and horrific death count that dwarfs anything you folks may have heard from the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. As a child, I just assumed that’s the way the world was. Each and every day, for most of my childhood, these reports came in enumerating teenage boys killed over in southeast Asia every single day. And I thought nothing of it. I mean, that’s just the way things were. If 45 teenage boys were shot dead in Los Angeles in a single day, that would be all any of us would be talking about. But, in 1968, it was commonplace. We lost 16,592 American soldiers that year, an average of 45 per day. And that's how it was: 45 teenage boys were shot to death today in Vietnam, and now a word from Frosted Flakes.

Continue reading "In The Shadow of The Gun" »

America has moved on from places like Haiti, Sudan and Somalia, places which demanded our attention with breaking headlines while testing our compassion by the unthinkable scale of the misery visiting developing nations. These are places trapped in a perpetual cycle of tribalism whereby a nation, liberated at great expense of foreign (often U.S.) blood and treasure, becomes a black hole of foreign aid as mismanagement, ignorance and corruption inevitably co-opt relief efforts. Two years later, billions in foreign aid remain undistributed even as relief groups, including the initiative helmed by former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, struggle to keep America from forgetting Haiti. But America is growing tent cities of its own and Americans are circling the wagons, fearful of this brutal economy and this man Obama who's brought all this misery upon them. America has an extremely short attention span, our impatience with this devastating economic recession a key example. Haiti has been long ago swept off the front page, our limited capacity for compassion not having yielded instant results.

The sad record of these situations: at the end of the day these impoverished, under-developed nations inevitably choose yet another unhinged bully to lead them. They do this because unhinged bullies are all they've ever known. The cycle is sadly obvious: strongmen overturning the previous dictator by promising liberation and change, only to bring neither. While his early intentions may have been noble, his focus and drive inevitably becomes only about amassing more power and more wealth for himself. We've seen this time and again: King Saul, King Solomon, no different from Charles Taylor, Robert Mugabe, Issayas Afeworki, or any number of thousands of tribal warlords roaming a continent afflicted by poverty and disease, robbing, raping and killing at will. And, right now, America has problems of its own.

I learned absolutely nothing about God from the black church. From black people. I learned about God from the bible. I learned about the bible from white people. White teens, sixteen and eighteen years old, who sat with me on cold Adirondack evenings, while I scowled and hissed at them and called them names. I’d grown up in church, I knew what these kids were teaching could not possibly be true. Knowing God, becoming “saved,” required endless nights of crying out to God, hollering and rolling on the floor and weeping and working yourself into a frenzy. You had to speak in tongues as proof that God was in you.

For weeks, these young people sat with me, bible in hand, making me read passages that said bizarre things like the evidence of knowing Jesus isn’t tongues—it’s love. That we are saved by grace and not by works. That the pastor is not a god to be served, upon whom we lavish gifts and unquestioned loyalty. The bible said the pastor is a servant. To be loved, to be trusted, but that he’s just a guy like everybody else. He puts his socks on one at a time the same way I do. I was immensely suspicious of their teaching, but they didn’t show me these verses in their bible—they showed them to me in mine, in the very bible I’d brought with me, the one my grandmother gave me when I was eight or nine. And there it was: the truth of God, and the fork in the road between the inbred tradition of the black church and the truth of God.

Continue reading "Putting Our Socks On" »

I hesitate to mention former Senator Rick Santorum, the latest of a series of footnotes to the Republican presidential nomination scramble, other than to say that Santorum, in his own way, represents the white conservative version of this Matrix we are discussing this week: the intolerant, homophobically obsessed wingnut fringe who, likewise, look nothing like Christ. These people are the Christian equivalent of ultra reactionary Shia or Sunni Muslims blowing each other up in a power struggle over religious control of a civil government. The ultra-conservatives believe America is a Christian nation, and claim to seek smaller government and less government even as it attempts to expand government’s reach into private behavior, most especially any and all personal behavior related to sexual activity (abortion, contraception, LGBT rights, etc.) Flying the banner of Jesus Christ, they spit hatred at LGBT persons, routinely spew racially intolerant and insensitive rhetoric, and seek to repeal the tepid, half-a-loaf health care reform set to kick in in 2013, thus denying affordable health care to the poor while fattening the pockets of the out-of-control healthcare industry robber barons. These praying, sacrificing, mostly white people are not Christians. They are, as are most black Church Folk, Lost In The Matrix. They claim Christ but hate is their motivator. Their number one priority is not the relief of the poor or even the welfare of the nation. Their number one priority is to get Barack Obama out of the White House. It is an irrational and personal hatred of this man, whose unassailably and historically productive presidency has unquestionably bettered American lives, that fuels the Stockholm Syndrome of White Christian America coalescing around a northern liberal Mormon whose universal healthcare and pro-choice stances mirror Obama’s and whose religious beliefs not only deny Christ but are, by definition, antichrist.

Continue reading "Family Plot" »