An Unexpected Fourth of July Reflection
July 4, 2011
I was born in Milwaukee. But I only lived there ’till I was five, so my memories of it are vague and fleeting. When we moved, it was for my father to take up a senior pastor’s position in a small Wisconsin town, Boscobel. Which is, if I recall, the wild turkey hunting capital of the world. At the time, it was in many ways, an iconic small American town. We had an A&W, a Dairy Queen, a movie theatre with a single screen; it bordered the Wisconsin river, and a small creek ran through town and flooded every Spring. In it, I used to catch crayfish. One time a friend and I caught one about the size of a small lobster and were able to sell it to the local pet store. We had a single public elementary school and there wasn’t much of a public middle school, we just moved to the public high school building when we hit the 7th grade.
Some of my earliest memories are from the elementary school. In second grade, Mrs. Waters taught me math and in music class I learned the fifty states song, which I still know by heart. I was in children’s plays on a stage that was part of the gymnasium; they didn’t have a separate auditorium so all large events happened in the gym. In the fifth grade, I started band. I desperately wanted to be a percussionist but Mr. Barrens said I didn’t have any rhythm, so he recommended I take up the trumpet. Three years later I was his first chair trumpeter…and the drummer for his jazz band – the other percussionists were only good enough to bang on a bass drum at pep rallies.
I didn’t pursue sports for very long, so most of my memories from school revolve around band. In 7th and 8th grade, I would stay after school for at least an hour every day and bang away on the drum kit in the practice room. No doubt I sounded terrible and drove Mr. Barrens crazy, himself being quite an accomplished drummer. Some years later, after moving to Minnesota, Mr. Miller had to put up with me learning guitar. Lord knows I’m still terrible at that instrument. When state competitions came around, Mr. Barrens would give me special lessons so that I could play the highest level pieces. Mr. Miller even let me compete on the snare drum (I was his jazz drummer too). I’ve got more than a handful gold, silver and bronze medals from years of State competition. Music still plays an important part in my life, and I owe it to the public school system, to Mr. Barrens and Mr. Miller as well as to my choir director, Mrs. Halverson
During the summer, I would spend at least five days a week at the public swimming pool – my family had unlimited summer passes. I would hop on my bike and ride down the public roads, over public bridges (I told you that creek ran right through town) and spend countless hours there. It had a high dive, a low dive, and very few rules. By the end of my time in Boscobel I could do a pretty rad ganor and even a double front flip. It was the same public pool where I first learned to swim.
Just down the road was a huge public park with tennis courts, playgrounds, a hill that in winter was the town sledding hill and from which we launched fireworks every fourth of July, a grove of pine trees and freshly built public softball diamonds. It bumped right up against the public school running track, football field and baseball diamond. I played tee-ball on that diamond and little league at the new softball diamonds. When I wasn’t swimming, I was often at those diamonds. You see we had a very competitive public softball league and even though I was too young to play, my dad, a pentecostal pastor and volunteer fire fighter, played alongside all the town’s men – despite the fact that all that beer made us uncomfortable. So I would buy sodas and watch, or take my BMX with my buddy and jump the piles of dirt left from the construction. Town parades often ended here and sometimes we had big tractor pulls. But mostly I remember the softball and the bike jumping.
We never had much money. If it wasn’t for the frequent generosity of my grandfather, things could’ve been fairly rough. To help make ends meet, my mom ran a day care out of our parsonage. This was made easier because of the public WIC program that provides food and/or vouchers for those in need. You might say that, in an indirect way, the government helped to serve Boscobel Assemblies of God, since that faithful and lovely church couldn’t afford to pay my parents much.
In the winter, I still played with public water, but of the frozen variety. Just a couple blocks down from the house, across from the mysterious Catholic parish (we heard they had beer at their gatherings) was a public ice rink with a quaint little warming house where I would come in for a little respite from Wisconsin winters and frozen toes to buy a pack of Swiss Miss hot chocolate. The town kids and I left one half of the rink open for “free skaters” but as for us, we set up two oil barrels and played hockey. Sometimes a truck would come out to plow but when we were impatient, the kids and I would just bust out some shovels and clear the ice for ourselves. Those piles of snow sure did get hard. Some of the kids who had parents with a little money had helmets and pads, but most of us just needed a stick and some hockey skates. Once, a kid who often bullied me challenged me to a 1 on 1 game in which I resoundingly whomped him. Often, I would come home from school and skate until dinner time.
This pattern remained much the same when once we moved to Monticello, MN. Though the town was still larger than Boscobel, it still had the same small town feel. (Though many places I once knew as fields are now filled with big box stores) I still played in the school band and was in two musicals, Bye Bye Birdie and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I even gave sports another shot, joining the Cross Country team my junior year to spend more time with my close friend.
There was something of a shift, though, because the larger youth group, plus our newfound independence on account of our driver’s licenses meant that school had less the social role it once had, nevertheless I’ve always been a public school boy.
I hope by now a pattern is emerging. Time fails me to mention all the times, simply of those which I am able to remember, that public spaces and services have been there for me. My family has taken vacations to national parks; my wife and I too had WIC for a while and even now are a part of the state health care service for poor folk; I am in my senior year at the University of Minnesota – schooling which I will put to use in the Church; come Winter I’ll be taking public transportation to school; and I take my girls down to the public parks several times a week. In looking back, I find myself exceedingly grateful for all that the public has given me and enabled me to do.
The thing is, it has only been in the last few years that I’ve ever gotten into politics. Though now it seems odd, my dad was never very political, he certainly didn’t think any party was closest to God’s will for “this Christian nation.” And indeed, for the life of me, I couldn’t tell you anything about the politics of the towns I was raised in. Whatever anyone’s political inclinations, it was apparently taken simply for granted that a healthy town needed healthy public services. I shudder to think what my life would be like had there been multiple “private” swimming pools or parks charging admission like a golf course or something. Do you ever see poor people at a golf course? As much as I hear about it “not being government’s job” to provide health care, there aren’t any Churches prepared to provide insurance for my family. Instead, the egalitarian nature of public space meant that I swam and learned with kids who had lots more than our family. Yet, I never got the impression that anyone perceived my family as lazy or selfish, or my teachers as greedy and ungrateful, or that these were indulgent luxuries.
But the landscape seems to have changed. Now even the idea of public schooling is viewed either as some utilitarian good meant to be used in the service of private capital (which somehow will be for the greater social good) or a “bulky and inefficient luxury” that should probably be done away with in favor of “competitive” private schools. Do you ever see poor people at private schools? Or, at least at ones that don’t have huge funds available to meet minority quotas?
I mention schools so often because at my age it’s been one of the most significant and long lasting public institutions that I’ve been a part of. But as I’ve already made clear, the influence is much, much wider. I owe the very kind of existence I have to “big government.” In fact, I’d venture to say that taxes aren’t even something the public should be lucky to have out of me, as if it was ever mine in the first place. It’s more appropriate, I think, to consider taxes as something I never owned, because I’m not a self-made man.
So whatever else is true about the tragic and unfortunate affects of nationalism in the Church, and whatever can rightly be leveled against America and her war mongering expansionism for global capital, the threat of a dissolution of a public space, a recognized place where people of disparate ideologies and income brackets can work together toward a common, public good because of an honest assessment of our interdependence, frightens me as well. I may not be a patriot, and I won’t be singing any patriotic songs today, but I just might raise a glass to the Boscobel Public Swimming Pool.
Some Notes on Bulgakov’s Political Theology
April 30, 2011
I’m taking a survey course this semester on the history and culture of Eastern Orthodoxy. A fair amount of time has been spent on Russia and I used it as an opportunity to read up on some Sergii Bulgakov, though I’ve not read as much as I would’ve liked yet, and I’ll certainly need some help with his massive trilogy, The Lamb of God, The Comforter & The Bride of the Lamb, which is so far above my skill level it’s insane.
The primary book I worked with is +Rowan Williams’ book introducing Bulgakov’s political theology. It consists in a group of texts edited and translated by +Williams himself and his own introductions to each reading. The total effort is a minor intellectual biography focused more on politics than his larger works in theology. In a large part this introduction is already out of date since the publication of many works of Bulkagov in English in the last few years, thanks in no small part to the effort of Eerdmans and the tireless labor of the translator, Boris Jakim. But the introductions by +Williams are worth the price of the book.
Bulgakov, the son of a priest, went to seminary but dropped out and became an atheist Marxist. But during his time working on his doctoral thesis about “Capitalism and Agriculture,” he found himself shifting from received Marxist orthodoxy. This was eventually to put him in deep water and Lenin eventually shipped him and over a hundred other “rogue academics” out of Russia. What’s the point of having an authoritarian state without using it to excommunicate heretics and political dissidents?
In The Economic Ideal, Bulgakov is critical of notions of the human being reduced to a homo economicus. For him, it is fundamentally necessary to speak of the larger goals of wealth creation and distribution, that for which spirit is working. There are two errors that theorists can fall into, according to Bulgakov. The one is a hedonism, which he saw reflected in the bourgeoise pseudo-capitalism of Sombart. ”Naive hedonism is always allied to a conscious or unconscious economic philosophy, in so far as wealth and high consumption or demand are ultimately taken to be the absolute good” (31) The other is a social asceticism as reflected in certain kinds of buddhism. ”asceticism strives for its complete liberation from matter…All pleasure is slavery for the spirit. Life is a mirage, a malign deception, an illusion.” (35) For Bulgakov, the historical task is one of labor, indeed the centrality of labor to his work is pervasive. At the same time, he remains strident that freedom from poverty is the fundamental foundation for entrance into the moral life, the life of spirit. Without it, one remains subject to the elemental powers of the world. The fall was for him a sort of reversal; in the beginning humanity was the “master” of matter and nature, and the post-lapsarian condition is a kind of enslavement to nature. Labor and creation, freedom from sheer survival, is the move toward salvation, the imitation and realization of the divine Logos/Sophia in the human and created sophia. What here is mostly political commentary, eventually flowers into his full fledged work on the Divine-Humanity.
In fact I got the impression that Bulgakov’s dogmatic work was in a way an attempt to give a solid christological and dogmatic foundation to an understanding of human poetics, to supplant his former Marxism with a Christian vision of the world as a household. (The whole series of works based on oikos is relevant) There’s a lot of unworked potential in conversation with Bulgakov, and his hasty denouncement by the Russian patriarchate and men like Vladimir Lossky and Georges Florovsky, and the only very recent translation of his works into English, has pronounced this. I for one can’t wait to read some more.
Like this:
On Getting Pissed About the Right Things
November 12, 2010
There’s a well worn old quote by Tony Campolo that goes something like this:
“[According to a profile in Christianity Today entitled] The Positive Prophet, … I have three things I’d like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don’t give a shit. What’s worse is that you’re more upset with the fact that I said shit than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.”
It’s one of those quotes that gets spread around because people, even the people at whom it was directed, find it has a way of disturbing ones presuppositions. I know when I first heard it some years ago it made me uncomfortable.
I recently heard a similar quote from Zizek:
“I am told that here in New York a man can have his penis cut in two. …So you can do it with two women. You can achieve immortality. You can go into space. But maintaining a little bit of health care is impossible.”
Perhaps I’ve become too jaded but I didn’t even think that the penis bit would arouse any frown but it did. Now, both who seemed to find the bit a little crude are people who I really respect and I hope that this post is not viewed as a simple reaction to what may well be a legitimate sense that FB ought to have some cleanliness about it; but I found it sparked an idea in me that I’ve not been able to shake yet. Why is it that attention was drawn to the perceived offensiveness of the mention of genitals but not at the idea of the rich taking leisure cruises in space while the rest of us plebs can’t even find jobs?
Today I just read this piece by Adam Kotsko which I think hits right on the mark and I was about to post a link to it until I thought about it and realized that many of my friends and family would find his use of fuck excessive and unnecessary. (do go read the whole post)
“We passively accept “cuts” in everything else because of the “cut” represented by the tax “cut” — the “cut” that would “cut us loose” from shared responsibility, from anything that would challenge the ever-more-dominant attitude of “I got mine, and you can go fuck yourself.” Are you being foreclosed on? Fuck you, you fucking bum — I pay my bills. Are you out of work? Find a job, you lazy fuck — I work hard.
The result is a society based on the premise of looting. We are all “cashing out,” taking whatever we can hold onto — because fuck you, I’ve earned it. The CEOs are the most visible offenders, rigging companies to give themselves insane bonuses worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but isn’t that the model for everyone? The dream of homeownership: I’ll live in my own little detached box and go to my job in my own little individual box as well, and everyone will have to leave me the fuck alone. I’ve got mine, so leave me the fuck alone — did it ever occur to you to get a fucking job like I did? Did it ever occur to you to work hard like I did? Obviously not, if you don’t have what I have — so fuck you. Don’t ask me for a hand-out, you stupid fuck.”
Yet, that is exactly how the word fuck is supposed to work. It’s meant to make one feel uncomfortable much in the same way an evangelical preacher like Campolo using shit is meant to direct ones attention in a certain way.
But we get angry in certain ways because we are trained to get angry in certain ways. In our day we’re trained to sympathize with the ultra-rich. ”Don’t tax them, we need them for (poor paying and unstable) jobs (jobs which are quick as a wink shipped overseas at the first dollar sign); Don’t demonize them, they worked hard to get where they’re at.” Moreover we exalt them because they idealize the strange myth of the American Dream. Rags to Riches for everyone. Of course the massively overwhelmingly vast majority of people in this country never make that cut and ride it out in the lower and middle classes; tales suppressed because they contradict the normative narrative and if you don’t agree you’re a communist.
Why people are afraid of government instead of corporations honestly is beyond me. It defies anything like empirical backing. And things simply won’t change until we care more about space rides than about genitals.
Prayer and Fasting for Peace
June 4, 2010
Today, as I sat contemplating the possibility of (more) war in the Middle East, I realized something: I don’t pray nearly enough for peace. Sure the deacon recites this prayer every Sunday:
“Guide the people of this land, and of all nations, in the ways of justice and peace; that we may honor one another and serve the common good…Lord, in your mercy”
To which I heartily reply: “Hear our prayer.” But that is by and large the extent of my prayer life concerning peace. What’s more, I’ve never fasted for peace.
It occurred to me that there are thousands–maybe tens of thousands–of Christians out there who don’t believe that peace is possible or even beneficial, who believe that America’s wars are blessed by God, who believe that violence toward Muslims, gays and other perceived enemies is just fine, and who pray and fast on a regular basis. There are National Days of Prayer when God has to listen to (among better things) idolatrous, nationalistic prayers about how He needs to bless America and Israel and destroy China, Iran, and North Korea, and how the Holy Spirit needs to touch Obama’s heart and make him repeal the healthcare bill, and resign, and get ”born again.”
But, when do I (we) pray that God fulfills the prophesy given in Isaiah 2:1-5? When do I (we) pray that God changes the hearts of human-beings–myself included–who harbor violence and hatred in their hearts toward fellow human-beings?
I may be an E-whisk-i-palian, and I even voted for George W. Obama (in answer to the billboard: “How can I miss George W. Bush, when we have one of his clones running the country right now!”) but, I still believe that God intervenes in human history. Don’t get me wrong, I also believe that we are God’s hands and feet, living Icons of Christ and representatives of His coming Kingdom. Right action must accompany prayer, but it is all too often the prayer part that gets left out in my life.
So, I propose that those of us in our little blog community who a) believe in peace and non-violence, and b) believe that God answers prayer start to assign some action to our beliefs. Maybe I’m the only one of you guys who isn’t, in which case, I need your guidance.
Shall we set aside one day a week to fast and pray for peace?
Shall we plan a week of fasting and prayer this summer?
How do you guys pray and fast for peace? I hope some of my peacenik friends will chime in here…
*PICTURE NOTE: I was looking for a cheesy prayer picture. I think I did pretty well. Gotta love lightning emanating from folded hands, accompanied by a dove and and open Bible. All that’s missing is an American flag and a M-16.
It is perhaps predictable for readers of this blog that at least one of us should write about Memorial Day. We are not often shy in our youthful enthusiasm and naivity about our conflicted loyalties as American citizens and also of the Church; and of the necessity of radical discipleship in the face of what we, or I at least, perceive as a nation state who has hijacked a Christian soteriology.
I am an American. My life is pretty good. I am grateful for the gifts and opportunities that I have had throughout my life, some of which I would not have had in some other countries. It would be dishonest of me not to note this. I often hear that these benefits are only possible because of the sacrifices of soldiers who have bravely fought and willingly sacrificed for the United States. That may in part be true, but it also points to a larger picture that I should like to address.
It would be easy to blame Constantinianism, blame the Enlightenment, blame the rise of atomistic politics for war, but the old adage about pointing your finger seems to ring true: “If you point your finger, you’ve three fingers pointing back at you.” My life is what it is with reference to these things. I cannot transcend the history in which my identity is tied up. So a simple blame game can only implicate myself in those things which I blame. I am not an island unto myself: who I am is only as it is in relation to other people and to the past which we narrate into our identities.
I’d like to think through this with reference to a few Christian doctrines:
It is common to hear Augustine blamed for the doctrine of “Original Sin.” This is, as most such “blame the fathers for a doctrine” schemes are, reductionistic and crude. Whatever the case though, we can thank Foucault for making the doctrine much more plausible in the contemporary scene. There seem to be structures of power and violence in place before I even come to be in the world. They are things over which I have little to no control and are fundamental to my existence, so much so that for most of my life they are invisible. I am born into a world already organized politically, economically, sociologically, religiously. This is essentially the doctrine of Original Sin: that structures of oppression, violence and rebellion against God are ‘already in place’ and work to form us as people before we are able to understand or critically resist them.
Because these structures are there from the beginning, they are easily taken for granted; assumed to be a natural given, something inevitable and often even good, as in being American, or at the very least ethically neutral, as in market economics. Memorial Day fits in well here. It is easy to assume that, because we have a relatively good life, the given social structures that we have are ‘how things are’ or ‘how the world works.’ The thought follows, that if we as Americans enjoy “freedom” and “prosperity” then the possibility of war as means to defend this freedom and prosperity are a necessity.
But no sooner is that thought out of my mouth than I realize that this implicates my own well being in a cycle and chain of violence and oppression. We return again to the fact that our world still operates in a cycle of “Original Sin.” My life is implicated and intertwined in the lives of others and that life is often manifested in and guaranteed by war.
This is why classical theology is so very important. Christ enters into this world as one not implicated in this cycle. His sinlessness means for us that by the power of the Spirit we are brought into the life of a God whose very nature from all eternity is one of perfect peace, perfect mutuality. We are not merely shown a way to live well, as if Christ was a mere moral exemplar – which is good as we are rather bad at such imitation – rather, by virtue of our baptism and infilling of the Holy Spirit, we are incorporated into that life of peace and given the means to live it.
This is why the Church is a politics and why it can and ought to challenge the givenness of Memorial Day. In the Church, we are commanded to live reconciled lives to each other, submitting to each other, loving each other, giving to each other even as Christ gives perpetually and without reservation to the Father, a giving we are able to do only on account of the Spirit. There is no other name by which we might be saved.
This then is what I mean by the crisis of doctrinal imagination; that we have become accustomed to imagining the Christian Gospel as one merely effecting ones personal salvation post-mortem. Original Sin, Christ’s sinlessness, God as Trinity, the exclusivity of the Church; all of these reduced to crude propositional statements needed to fill a gap in narrative logic become worn out quickly and whither and die. The Gospel makes a difference as to how we conceive our political allegiances. This isn’t about some stupid “Right vs Left” thing. This is an Isaiah 2.1-5 kind of thing:
1 The word that Isaiah the son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.
2 And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the LORD’S house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it.
3 And many people shall go and say , Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
4 And he shall judgeamong the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
5 O house of Jacob, come ye, and let us walk in the light of the LORD
This raises the problem of the Church’s need to relearn how to read the Old Testament Christologically, but that is for another day. For now I hope I’ve hinted however poorly at the ways in which the Christian proclamation ought to revise other stories which we tell about ourselves. I also hope I’ve done it in a way that does not reduce to finger pointing at American soldiers as such essays as this even of mine have been prone to do.
Which Comes First, the Religio-Ethical Chicken, or the Geo-Political Egg: An Inner Dialogue
April 22, 2010
What follows is a sort of dialogue with myself. In italics you will find the words of James the citizen of the United States, and in bold (because it’s more important) you’ll find the words of James the citizen of the Kingdom of God. This is not an attempt, of course, to speak definitively the words of the Kingdom, or even the proper opinions of a US citizen, rather this is a first attempt to disambiguate for myself where my opinions are coming from, and what foundation they ultimately have.
One of the things I am trying to work out here is whether my citizenship in the Kingdom of God actually determines my behavior as a citizen of the US, or whether it is the other way around. I am working off the premise that my committment to the Christian tradition and Christian ethics SHOULD determine my behavior always and in every way, and that any allegiance to a place, or that places’ history, culture and politics is ONLY important as much as it lines up with my commitment to Christ (A more controversial corollary is that all the things that make up the citizenship of any earthly kingdom SHOULD be held with a certain amount of detachment, if not suspicion by citizens of God’s Kingdom).
Again,
Italics= James, Citizen of the United States
Bold= James, Citizen of the Kingdom of God
– — – — –
I can think of two reasons why I am interested in politics and engaged in political discourse. 1. Self-interest. 2. I honestly believe that following Jesus demands I speak out and act for and against certain social issues that inevitably have a political element.
If anyone wants to be a member of the Kingdom of God, they must die to self.
President Bush was one of the worst presidents of all time. Far from breaking with Bush’s flawed and misguided (if not evil and totally corrupt) administration, the Obama administration seems to be a continuation of it. The warmongering continues. The torturing continues. The wholesale disregard of the common good for the sake of profit and power continues. In fact, the essence of the American presidency hasn’t fundamentally changed since…well, maybe it never has: democrat, republican, or whig, Catholic, or Protestant, the President of the United States has presided over atrocity after atrocity: the Trail of Tears, the Japanese Internment, the Atomic Bomb, wars or covert actions in the following places: Mexico, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Columbia, El Salvador, Mexico again (I’m talking about NAFTA), many other Central and South American countries, Iraq, Iraq again, Afghanistan, now Yemen, maybe Iran…and those are just the ones off the top of my head.
Christians are not to put their trust in earthly rulers, but in God alone. Christians do not believe in revenge. Christians do not believe that overcoming evil with evil is even possible, much less pleasing to God.
I almost sympathize with the Tea Party crowd. I say almost, because, if they are successful, they are going to put into place leaders whose moral compass will not be fundamentally different than either Obama, or Bush, or Clinton, or Bush I, or Reagan, or Carter, or…Nixon… or Roosevelt (take your pick)…or Jackson…or Jefferson…or…
I do not believe that any of these men had the best of interest of EVERY member of their country in mind when they made the most important and far-reaching decisions of the terms. I believe every one of them put power and money before the common good when making many history altering decisions.
There are ultimately several other reasons why I don’t quite line up with the Tea Party crowd.
In I Samuel 8, God warns the Israelites that if they get a king he will not have the common good of the people in mind. Even the best Israelite kings commit atrocities.
I, like the conservative faction of the US, am not a big fan of the healthcare bill as a matter of principle. However, to call it socialism is ridiculous and confusing (I am suspicious and at some level, somewhere, someone desires this confusion). The bill that creates billions of dollars in debt so that the government can subsidize millions of private insurance policies, thus enriching the very companies the politicians claim they want to change, is the essence of FREE-MARKET CAPITALISM, par excellence (to borrow Zizek’s favorite way of saying things).
Our government is not seeking and has never sought to bring capital and the means of production under its control. On the contrary, Capital has been in the process of bringing our government under control since the Industrial Revolution.
Jesus came and in direct defiance of Caesar Augustus claimed to be the Son of God. His early followers defied the empire by refusing to worship the emperor, and instead giving Jesus titles that by decree were only to be used by the Roman ruler: Prince of Peace, King of Kings, Lord of Lords.
You cannot serve both God and Money.
I, like the majority of the conservative faction of the US, claim to take a PRO-LIFE ethical stance. However, pro-life means more to me than anti-abortion. I feel like you have to be pro-ALL-LIFE in order to use the term without becoming a hypocrite.
The Tea Party loses credibility when they a) complain about the national debt, then b) claim to be pro-life, then c) support war efforts that are costing our country 3 TRILLION dollars.
Jesus says, ”Love your enemy.”
I recognize that under secular political philosophy dating back to the Greeks, a government by definition has the right and the power to violently punish crime, and violently protect its own interest.
Paul recognizes the “power of the sword” in Romans 13. But, how can a Christian honestly adhere to the injunctions of Romans 12–do not take revenge, overcome evil by doing good, live at peace with all people, etc.–and still participate in earthly governments as described in Romans 13?
I’m not a Republican, or Democrat, or Independent, or a Libertarian. I am a Distributivistic, Anarcho-Liber-Agrarian Localist.
My association with Christ and His Church is really the only one that matters. I desire to follow Jesus in the world, awaiting His return to reconcile all Creation to Himself. I suck at it.
– — – — –
Discussion questions:
1. Do my religious views, including my hermeneutic(s), determine my political philosophy or is it the other way around?
2. How would one go about determining which comes first political views or religious ones?
3. How are my political views in my self-interest?
4. How are my religious views in my self-interest?
5. Whatever else anyone wants to ask or comment on.
Non Sequiturs from the Political Realm
November 12, 2009
This one is just for fun, kids.
I rarely write about politics, and for good reason. As one who does not trust politicians as a general rule, it’s hard to follow the politics of any given party long enough to become well versed in the arena. However, I’ll venture out on to a limb and see if anyone wants to cut it out from under me. Here are few of the things I hear happening in political conversations that make me scratch my head in wonderment. Each of these, mind you, are statements coming from a single individual in any given number of settings.
1. We should fight against abortion — We should fight for capital punishment.
2. We should restrict (or cut) welfare benefits going to the poor and disabled, because they are really lazy and worthless for not working for a living — We should repeal “death taxes” because the rich ought to be able to make sure their children never have to work for a living.
3. We should vote against healthcare reform because Universal healthcare (single payer, public option or no) is socialism (er Marxism, er communism, wait… aren’t those all the same? Oh, I know it’s Nazism) — We should keep dumping money and resources into public schools, public transportation, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Medicare Advantage. They are programs that are helping the American way of life after all.
4. We should fight to get prayer back into the schools — We should fight to keep all Muslims out of the military.
5. We should fight for the sanctity of marriage and not allow same sex couples to be wed — We should uphold an individual’s legal right to divorce, prenuptial agreements, and annulment because over 50% of marriages fail.
Again, I’m no political expert, and the people I hear making these statements in the same conversation may not represent the accurate or “best” of their respective political ideology. Feel free to add your own or talk about how stupid I am for not understanding the nuance behind these contradictions. [Author’s Note: Just so you know, I am a registered Republican and voted for McCain, even though Palin scares the bejesus out of me, still - so please don’t assume I am one of those wacky “liberals” or one of those crazy "conservatives" for that matter.]
Tony Hunt
jstambaugh
Shawn Wamsley
