Bill's Faith Matters blog

Francis was the right pope for a changing global church

Pope Francis (pictured here), who died Monday at age 88, revivified the important reforms of the 1960s Second Vatican Council and, in doing so, became their protector and, indeed, their embodiment. He knew the limits of what a single pope can do to move the church, but was willing to test those limits and to challenge the church to embody, in turn, the risen Christ for the world.

Francis, being human, was not without his faults and hesitations -- characteristics that often got magnified way out of proportion by his critics on the theological and social right who seemed uninterested in hearing about his (and God's) concern for the poor or about climate change. But he clearly was the pope the Catholic Church needed just when it needed him.

Not long after the Argentine-born Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Pope Francis in 2013, my then-pastor and I wrote a book exploring how the new pontiff's work and thinking were attracting a lot of interest and even support from Protestants. It was called Jesus, Pope Francis and a Protestant Walk into a Bar: Lessons for the Christian Church.

As we wrote, "Francis began to turn heads immediately upon his surprising election -- and not only because he was the first Jesuit pope, the first pope from South America and the first pope to take the name Francis. Rather, his appeal seemed rooted in his genuine humility, his insistence that the church should be a stalwart defender of the poor and his desire not to focus on the hot-button culture-wars issues that had so often dominated the papacies of his two predecessors."

Well, we got most of that right, but, in fact, Francis had a few choice words to say about such hot issues as the place for LGBTQ+ people in the church and about the structural weaknesses of capitalism, weaknesses that help to keep millions, if not billions, of people in poverty.

In 2022, my co-author, the Rev. Paul T. Rock, was invited to the Vatican along with other English-speaking American clergy in Europe (Paul by then was -- and still is -- senior pastor of the American Church in Paris). Paul's wife, Stacey Perkins Rock, accompanied him and strategically placed a copy of our book in her purse in case she got a chance to hand it to the pope. Well, she did get that chance, which explains this photo. (But we're still waiting for the pope's Amazon review of it. Perhaps he'll finally have time to get to that now.)

In almost everything Francis said or did, he sought to bring to the table as many voices as possible, which became the basis for his international conferences on what he called synodality, a word my computer's spellcheck system still underlines in red. The National Catholic Reporter has spent considerable time and space on the idea of synodality. Here is a good recent example. The essential idea of synodality, as I understand it, is that church leaders must bring to the decision table as many voices as possible and really listen to the concerns of everyone. If that's done, people still may be disappointed with whatever decision is made on this issue or that, but at least they will feel as if they've been heard. And their voices might actually change things.

My friend Melinda Henneberger of The Kansas City Star made a similar point in this account of her interview with the new archbishop of the Catholic Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas. If a paywall stops you from reading that, you can find much of the column on Melinda's Facebook page.

Over its 2,000 years, Christianity often has been frustratingly slow to change. In some ways, that has prevented the church from simply (and foolishly) mirroring the zig-zag culture. But it also has meant that the church has taken far too long to reform what has needed to be reformed. A significant example of that problem: Christianity preached a virulent anti-Judaism almost from its beginning, and that anti-Judaism helped to create modern antisemitism, which again is now on the rise. Where was the Catholic Church in all this? It was part of the problem. It took the church until 1965, in this Vatican II document, to declare that Jews now and at the time of Jesus should not be held responsible for his crucifixion. What finally got said needed to have been said almost 2,000 years ago -- by all branches of the church.

Similarly, the Catholic Church was ridiculously slow to respond to the scandal of priests sexually abusing children and of the do-nothing bishops who protected them. There's still much to do about that, but Francis at least has not ignored that terrible situation, even if he made occasional missteps as he oversaw the church's response.

In Europe and in North America, participation in institutional religion has declined -- sometimes precipitously -- over the last half century or more. But Christianity is growing elsewhere, and the Catholic Church, because it is catholic, meaning universal, is in a unique position to draw in residents from third and fourth world countries who have suffered from colonialism and its after effects.

Pope Francis, although his family roots go back to Italy, understood that and became something of a beacon to such people at least partly because he wasn't straight from Europe or North America. Whether the Catholic Church now can choose a pope able and willing to continue the outreach and popularity of Francis isn't yet clear, of course. But because Francis got to fill the ranks of cardinals, who will choose the next pope, there's at least a realistic hope that something in essential harmony with his papacy will be next.

If, by contrast, the next pope is mostly interested in preserving papal powers and rigid rules about who may do what in the church, the opportunity to grow the church and make it serve as the heart and soul of the risen Christ in this wounded world may be lost, at least temporarily. That's an opportunity that comes with severe challenges, as evidenced by this recent story from India.

Throughout his papacy, Francis has served as a living reminder of what true leaders look and act like, which is to care first about others and to live out a consistent, generative ethic and morality that inspires others to do the same. Political leaders: Are you watching and learning?

The wild and wonderful story of a unique American evangelist

On this faith-filled weekend, when important Christian, Jewish and even Baha'i holidays and commemorations overlap, I want you to know of a new book that can serve as a caution about religious leaders who seem at times to abandon their first love, God, and instead choose fame, fortune and the awesome power of the mysterious.

The book is Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous, Scandalous Story of Aimee Semple McPherson, by Claire Hoffman. Its official publication date is this coming Tuesday but the book can be ordered now. It tells the story of a remarkably talented but morally susceptible American Christian evangelist who began life in poverty but moved quickly -- by her wits and, she would say, divine help -- to wealth and fame.

But after a career that often played out on the front pages of the nation's newspapers (and later on her own radio station), she disappeared into the arms of unrelenting death two weeks before her 54th birthday.

Aimee Kennedy (1890-1944), her birth name, was born on a farm west of Salford, a small town in Ontario, Canada. Today she is remembered as the founder of the Foursquare Church, a Pentecostal body that, as Hoffman writes, now "counts 67,500 churches with more than eight million members in 150 countries.

"Aimee's legacy lives on at Angelus Temple and in Foursquare churches, but it is not a cult of personality. Aimee is presented as an upright religious pioneer, a revolutionary woman of historical importance, of the distant past." She was all of that and more (or less).

On this website, that church tells its carefully selective version of McPherson's biography, including this part: ". . .as Aimee’s reputation grew so did the threats. In 1926, she was kidnapped and held for ransom. After she escaped from the tiny shack in Mexico where she was being held captive, the media cast it as a ploy to cover up an affair. A district attorney tried to indict Aimee for conspiracy, but admitted that he couldn’t produce a single witness to testify against her. Aimee’s public image took a beating but, as always, she continued to work hard to bring the gospel to those who needed to hear it."

But hold on. Was there really a kidnapping? (The Wikipedia piece about that to which I just linked you may be the longest article on that website I've ever read.) Was there ever really a tiny shack in Mexico? Was McPherson really held captive? Was there, in fact, an affair? Was there really not "a single witness to testify against her"? And did the prosecutor really admit that?

Oh, my, are those complicated questions. The church clearly promotes one version of history. Hoffman's book tells a much more nuanced and credible story. And it's one that faith communities of any kind today would do well to pay attention to today because it raises all kinds of important questions about current religious leaders and how members of congregations can feel confident that they are genuine, committed to the faith, honest, trustworthy and not doing their work for just money, fame or other less-than-holy reasons.

Aimee Semple McPherson seemed to be profoundly committed to spreading the good news of God's love to all. And the evidence is strong that Christian evangelism was her first love. But was it enough to keep her from drifting into the seductions the world offers at nearly every turn? Maybe not.

There are many parts of her story that are true but hard to imagine. But now and then in an otherwise-well-sourced book, Hoffman writes things that are, well, questionable. A small example: "By the time she was five years old, Aimee knew much of the Bible by heart." I take the word "much" to mean at least half and maybe more.

What a treat it would have been to hear five-year-old Aimee recite from memory the so-called "begats" chapter of Genesis 5, which lists the supposed descendants of Adam all the way through Noah and his sons. Or to hear the child recite all 176 verses of Psalm 19, to say nothing of many of the other psalms in that book. Telling readers that Aimee knew all that and more "by heart" undercuts Hoffman's credibility as an accurate observer, though on the whole she seems careful in her research and plentiful in her sources.

Although much of this story is set in the Los Angeles area, where McPherson finally settled and built a huge temple and a new church, there are parts of the story that may intrigue especially those of us here in the nation's heartland because they happened here.

For instance, Hoffman takes the rise of Pentecostalism in the early 20th Century back to its true roots in Topeka, Kan., and to a man named Charles Fox Parham, whom she calls "a mustachioed Iowan with a taste for the mystical." Most people who know much about Pentecostalism and its origins, I would guess, associate the its beginning with the 1906 Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles. But Hoffman is right to dig deeper than that.

For instance, Hoffman mentions that McPherson appeared in Kansas City in January 1927 after her alleged kidnapping and during her effort to reclaim her legitimacy.

If you click on the photo of The Star's Jan. 22, 1927, front page you may barely be able to read the top-left headline in the photo. Its says "AIMEE POISED AND SMILING." That story reports McPherson had decided to change the event to free from one requiring a ticket. A Star story the next day reported that Aimee may have lost money because of that choice because her expenses at the Convention Hall may not have been covered by donations received at the event.

Throughout the book we find reports of times when McPherson said she was in touch with and driven by God. When she was 23, for example, she was hospitalized, as Hoffman reports, "with bouts of vomiting, internal bleeding and heart tremors that would result in two nervous breakdowns, appendicitis and, finally, a hysterectomy."

But then this happened: "A voice of authority and divinity came into the hospital room, a voice that matched her dormant sense of destiny: 'GO! Do the work of an evangelist: Preach the Word. 'The time is short; I am coming soon.'"

Hoffman then writes that "Aimee had no choice but to follow this divine call and let go of all earthly expectations of who she should be."

What followers of people who have such experiences must try to discern, of course, is whether God really is guiding events or whether the person somehow simply imagines so, whether sincerely or via delusions.

That's not always an easy call. Even in the most staid religious traditions, perfectly sane people describe a sense that God has "called" them into ministry. Which is why it's important to understand what the person who says that means by those words and what the calling experience was like.

At the time that Aimee was an active evangelist, there were plenty of others who were high-strung, emotional and who resorted to tactics that were, at best, questionable. But Hoffman describes McPherson's as "the Goldilocks alternative -- not too hot, not too cold. The just-right message on Jesus."

Well, there is much more to the Aimee Semple McPherson story in Hoffman's engaging book. And even if you're not a person of faith with responsibilities to be discerning about your clergy, it's an excellent read. But, as I say, it's also a cautionary tale for people who have religious leaders in their lives and who want to make sure they're more than entertainers. So read and be instructed.

* * *

THE PAIN AND BLESSINGS OF EASTER

Recently here on the blog, I reviewed a new book about the spiritual dimensions of travel. I want to go back to that book this Easter weekend to share with you something I didn't put in that original post.

Douglas J. Brouwer, in The Traveler's Path, points readers to a book by Anglican Bishop N.T. (Tom) Wright, The Way of the Lord: Christian Pilgrimage Today, in which Wright describes being in Jerusalem where Jesus was crucified, a hill named Golgotha, "the Aramaic words for 'place of the skull.' As Wright tells the story, he spent a considerable amount of time there, thinking and praying. And, along with his thoughts, he reports that 'in a way I still find it difficult to describe, all the pain of the world seemed to be gathered there. . .(S)o much pain; so many ugly memories; so much anger and frustration and bitterness and sheer human misery. And it was all somehow concentrated on that one spot."

I have been to that spot, which I think of as the collected totality of loss, and I believe I know what Wright means. But I also think I know what he means when he concludes his account of that experience this way: "I emerged eventually into the bright sunlight, feeling as though I had been rinsed out spiritually and emotionally. . ."

It is -- or can be -- a sharply painful experience. But, in the end, it allows Christians to greet one another this way: "Happy Easter." Or this: "Christ is risen," with this response: "He is risen, indeed."

* * *

P.S.: You can sign up for free to get an email each time my blog publishes. Just go here. And thanks.

What is 'Holy Week' about? In some ways, important history

In the last few weeks I've written a fair amount about how our history shapes us and why we need to know that history to be able to make sense of the present. You can find two examples of that here and here.

That idea about history includes not just the history of our nation but also religious history. For instance, here we are in the middle of what we Christians call Holy Week (see graphic above) and in the middle of what our Jewish siblings call Passover.

The history of how what became Christianity eventually separated itself from Judaism helps us understand how and why that painful separation continues today. If we don't read such books about that split as The Reluctant Parting, by Julie Galambush, our grasp of reality today will be faulty and misleading -- perhaps even in destructive ways.

And if we don't have an understanding of how and why the new Christian faith, almost from the beginning, preached a virulent anti-Judaism, our ability to make sense of modern antisemitism will be severely limited. I've linked you in this paragraph to my longish essay about how Christian anti-Judaism helped to birth modern antisemitism. Read it and weep.

Beyond that, in a world in which brutal acts of terrorism sometimes get approved and even applauded by certain people who claim to be following Islam, which is the third of the Abrahamic faiths, we must understand how the late Osama bin Laden and others cruelly misinterpreted and misused traditional Islam to reach the conclusion that terrorism was justified. I wrote a fair amount about that subject in my latest book, Love, Loss and Endurance: A 9/11 Story of Resilience and Hope in an Age of Anxiety.

In the adult Sunday school class that I attend at my church, we were speaking recently (and briefly) about the Protestant Reformation, and I mentioned that although the person credited with starting the Reformation, Martin Luther, did advocate for wide and deep education of people, he excluded Jews from that. I was surprised to find that when I mentioned Luther's vicious 1543 publication, On the Jews and Their Lies, a long-time member of our class said he'd never heard that or about Luther's eventual hatred of the Jewish people.

With famous people in history, we need to describe not just their victories and their achievements that have helped humanity but also their failures.

An unrelated aside: Speaking of important dates in history, did you know that two days from now, April 18, is National Columnists' Day, chosen because the patron saint of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, Ernie Pyle, was killed that date in World War II? And do you know how the day got created? Find out here. Take a columnist to lunch that day and learn some more history. You'll be better for it.

(The graphic art at the top here today came from this site.)

* * *

THE ANTI-JEWISH ACTS CONTINUE

And speaking of important history, as I was above here today, Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, a regular columnist for Religion News Service, writes here that in response to the recent Passover attack on Gov. Josh Shapiro and his family in Pennsylvania, Jews return to their memories of previous attacks on Jews -- and should. After all, he writes, "There is a long and ignoble history of antisemites scheduling their attacks on or around Jewish holidays." And then he lists some. Somehow what's often called the world's oldest hatred -- antisemitism -- continues, and Christian history is stained with it.

The good news is that Shapiro and his family were physically unhurt, though there was damage to their home. And there was an arrest. But this is one more traumatic time in this Jewish family's story that its members will have to process and from which they now must try to recover.

Why we still need to know about the 1921 Tulsa race massacre

Tulsa, Okla. -- Because the 1921 race massacre here received a fair amount of media attention on its 100th anniversary four years ago it's now more widely known among Americans.

But I still run into people who say they've never heard of it. Perhaps that's at least partly because white Tulsa, including the media there, ignored it for so long but also partly because the renewed effort to whitewash American history has resulted in not enough coverage of this racial catastrophe.

In any case, it's well worth a trip here to learn how deeply the destructive idea of white supremacy was embedded in early 20th Century Tulsa (and much of America) and how that purposeful racial nonsense was a major contributor to the deaths of hundreds and to the destruction of the Greenwood district, which was also known as Black Wall Street because of its residents' surprisingly successful attempt to live freely and even prosperously  -- at least for awhile.

Hannibal B. Johnson's 1998 book, Black Wall Street: From Riot to Renaissance in Tulsa's Historic Greenwood District, captures the importance and inescapable presence of white supremacy (which had some of its roots in the 1493 Vatican document called "The Doctrine of Discovery"):

"The culture of the day was decidedly racist. Despite this, Oklahoma booster E.P. McCabe, himself African-American, beckoned blacks to Oklahoma with an appealing promise of equal opportunity. He simply could not deliver. Given the blatant prejudice, discrimination and racism facing African-Americans in early Oklahoma, it is remarkable that they achieved so much so quickly. . .Cast adrift in the crucible of a racist culture, Tulsa's African-American pioneers nonetheless managed to create a remarkable degree of prosperity."

Indeed, the 1920s was a time when the Ku Klux Klan flourished in Oklahoma and in many other parts of the U.S.

(A quick aside: In his book, Johnson reports that eventually Greenwood "became one of the cradles of so-called 'Kansas City jazz.' Nowhere were the hypnotic rhythms of African-American life in Oklahoma expressed more poignantly.")

As you can read on the opening page of the Tulsahistory.org site to which I linked you in the opening paragraph above, the trouble started after the arrest of a young Black man, Dick Rowland, accused of attacking a young white woman, Sarah Page, an elevator operator in a downtown building.

Here's part of what you'll find on that website that describes what happened after that arrest:

"An inflammatory report in the May 31 edition of the Tulsa Tribune spurred a confrontation between black and white armed mobs around the courthouse where the sheriff and his men had barricaded the top floor to protect Rowland. Shots were fired and the outnumbered African Americans began retreating to the Greenwood District.

"In the early morning hours of June 1, 1921, Greenwood was looted and burned by white rioters. Governor Robertson declared martial law, and National Guard troops arrived in Tulsa. Guardsmen assisted firemen in putting out fires, took African Americans out of the hands of vigilantes and imprisoned all black Tulsans not already interned. Over 6,000 people were held at the Convention Hall and the Fairgrounds, some for as long as eight days.

"Twenty-four hours after the violence erupted, it ceased. In the wake of the violence, 35 city blocks lay in charred ruins, more than 800 people were treated for injuries and contemporary reports of deaths began at 36. Historians now believe as many as 300 people may have died."

And here's how Johnson reports the crucial Rowland-Page connection in his book:

"Dick Rowland was picked up by the police on Tuesday, May 31, 1921, booked into the city jail and questioned. Summoned to the jail, Sarah Page provided a statement corroborating, in all material respects, Dick Rowland's account of the events of that fateful day. She admitted that her encounter with Dick Rowland had been inadvertent and innocent. She told officers that Rowland had come close to her on the elevator and that he had stepped on her foot. Of her own admission, she had panicked and overreacted. Page told officers that she slapped Rowland, at which time he grabbed her arm to prevent her from slapping him again. She screamed. He fled.

"Despite this less-than-sinister, straight-ahead 'reinterpretation' of the Page-Rowland incident by Sarah Page herself, the original story meandered its way through Tulsa, gathering steam at every turn. The chance encounter between Sarah Page and Dick Rowland touched off an all-too-familiar pattern of race-tinged events, culminating in an unprecedented catastrophe. The match had been struck. The fuse had been lit. The inferno awaited."

Later in his book, Johnson describes what was happening at the height of the massacre:

"(C)arloads of marauding white Tulsans streamed into the streets, firing indiscriminately at any African-American target in sight. Women and children proved no exception. An elderly African-American couple, kneeling in bedtime prayer in their Greenwood Avenue home, was startled by an invading mob. After murdering the couple execution style, the mob ransacked and pillaged the house before setting it ablaze. The line between civilization and savagery had been crossed."

How did all of this turn out in the courts? Johnson writes: "Despite the utter devastation -- the loss of life and property -- in the Greenwood District, not a single white Tulsan was made to answer to the criminal justice system as a consequence."

It's to Tulsa's credit that in recent years some of its residents and leaders have created the "Greenwood Rising" museum and other ways to remember this brutal history for the same reason we are obliged to remember all brutal historical events -- to try to prevent something like them from happening again. If only that approach always worked.

As I wrote here on the blog a few days ago, it's crucial that we remember all aspects of our nation's history, not just the parts that make us look good and generous. President Trump's executive order to rescue our history from telling the whole truth is an invitation to ignorance and repetition of those things in our nation's past that we got wrong.

After the racial massacre in Tulsa happened, it got widely misnamed a "race riot," making it sound as if Black people, finally having had enough, went on a destructive spree. That's not what happened at all. It was white Tulsans who went on such a spree. So now the whole event is much more often referred to as the Tulsa Race Massacre. But a commission created in 1997 to issue a report on what happened was called The Tulsa Race Riot Commission. That group's final report, issued in 2001, is found in full in Johnson's book that I mentioned above. But you can read it online here.

Here's just the beginning of some of the commission's findings:

• Black Tulsans had every reason to believe that Dick Rowland would be lynched after his arrest on charges later dismissed and highly suspect from the start.
• They had cause to believe that his personal safety, like the defense of themselves and their community, depended on them alone.
• As hostile groups gathered and their confrontation worsened, municipal and county authorities failed to take actions to calm or contain the situation.
• At the eruption of violence, civil officials selected many men, all of them white and some of them participants in that violence, and made those men their agents as deputies.
• In that capacity, deputies did not stem the violence but added to it, often through overt acts themselves illegal.
• Public officials provided fire arms and ammunition to individuals, again all of them white.

Again, the point is not to wallow in this history as a way of making white Tulsans feel guilty about being white. Rather, it is to know this history in profound ways and to understand how it affects both Blacks and whites today in Tulsa and around the country. And the point is also to work to create a moral world of equity and respect in which nothing like the Tulsa race massacre ever could happen again.

* * *

IS FAITH-BASED ENTERTAINMENT HELPING?

For the second item here on the blog this weekend, I'll simply ask a question or two based on this article from The Guardian that declares this: "Faith‑based entertainment is booming like never before."

Why do you think that is? And do you think that kind of entertainment really leads people to make a religious commitment or at least to learn more about religion? My own worry is that entertainment almost always and almost inevitably simplifies complex stories at best and gets the story painfully wrong at worst. But I'm open to argument.

A proposal to 'rescue' American history is both weird and ruinous

Tulsa, Okla. -- A few weeks ago, President Donald Trump signed an astonishingly misguided executive order called "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History."

The bloviated first paragraph tells you way more than you need to know to decide that if we were to follow his twisted logic in "restoring truth and sanity" to any kind of history -- American or otherwise -- the results would be calamitous:

"Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth. This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light. Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed. Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe."

To honor what has gone well in American history and the many good things our nation has done, Trump seems to want to skip over the horrors of that history, starting with the cultural and physical genocide that the early European invaders committed against the Indigenous population of this land. And if we ignore all that, what's to prevent us from ignoring the history of human slavery in the U.S. or the Jim Crow era or the many ways women were (and in some cases still are) kept as second-class citizens or the international errors of judgment the U.S. has made -- including some just in my own lifetime, from wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq to attempts to assassinate leaders of other nations?

Indeed, what's to prevent us from simply ignoring such history as the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, which some people from my congregation came here to Tulsa a few days ago to study in more detail to see how that history applies to today. (I plan to write more about that visit later here on the blog. Stay tuned.)

The problem with the Trump approach is that no one would ever learn a useful lesson from history. After all, we learn much more from our failures, it turns out, than we do from our successes, though all of both categories plus all the neutral stuff should be included in any fair account of history.

I once audited an excellent two-semester class in Christian history at one of the Protestant theological seminaries in the Kansas City area. If the teacher had adopted Trump's unifocal approach to history, I'd have learned almost nothing that might be helpful today as Christianity tries to sustain its message in a time of decreasing participation in institutional religion.

If you wrote a Trumpian-shaped history of Christianity's development in the world from the beginning to now, you would have to set aside, among much else, centuries of bitter anti-Judaism that the church preached; church support of human enslavement; church teachings about history's alleged first woman, Eve, being responsible for Original Sin; wars and wars and more wars, including the Crusades, in which Jews and Muslims both were excoriated targets; church support of colonialism that stripped freedom away from people around the globe; church split after church split, both before and after the Great Divorce, or Schism, that separated Catholicism from Eastern Orthodoxy (see the map); bitter theological debates that led to physical wars in abundance. . .This list is making me ill, and even though I'm leaving out a great deal, such as countless examples of sexual abuse of children by clergy and numerous examples of church leaders who have been simply money-grubbing charlatans, I'm going to stop now.

You're welcome.

One problem, however, is that it's becoming easier and easier to alter the historical record if you really want to. Consider, for instance, how smartphone cameras powered by artificial intelligence can easily create photos now that don't reflect reality. As Costco Connection magazine recently noted, such cameras "can combine multiple shots to ensure that everyone looks their best." They also can remove people or objects from photos and rearrange people or objects in photos. In other words, the photos will become completely useless as historical records of reality. Which sounds like what would happen if we were to rely on versions of history that follow Trump's ridiculous executive order.

Both religion in general and Christianity in particular have done wonderful things across history, and we should know that history. Similarly, over the almost 250 years of U.S. history, Americans and their government have helped the world in countless ways. But if we tell only that side of those stories, we would be dishonest and would distort history so calamitously that we'd never learn a damn thing from it.

* * *

CHANGES IN THE AMERICAN RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPE

For quite a few years, the Pew Research Center has been keep track of what the American religious landscape looks like. And it's just published its latest findings.

It shows that 62 percent of the American population now identifies as Christian, while seven percent are followers of other faith traditions and 29 percent are religiously unaffiliated.

Among American Christians, the largest group is made up of evangelicals at 23 percent, followed by Catholics at 19 percent and Mainline Protestants at 11 percent. A group called "historically Black Protestants" came in a 5 percent of the population.

Anyone who has been even vaguely following religious membership trends in the U.S. over the last 50 or so years finds nothing very surprising in these figures. But if someone from either the 1820s or 1920s popped in to see what's happening in American religion these days, the results would be little short of shocking -- especially the nearly one in three Americans who make up the "nones," or religiously unaffiliated.

It's interesting but not surprising that 78 percent of Americans over 65 identify as Christian while only 45 percent of Americans between 18 and 29 do.

There is some recent evidence that the decline in institutional religion in the U.S. has slowed and maybe even stopped, but it will take at least another 10 years to know whether this is just a statistical anomaly or whether it represents a real, lasting change.

* * *

P.S.: Related to the first item above, what's often called the first draft of history is written by journalists. But when government does what it can to block them from doing their job, the public suffers. So I was glad to see Kansas City area journalism organizations gather together to send this message, published yesterday, to official at KC's City Hall, asking for a more open approach to providing journalists what they're asking for to keep the public informed. It's a good start. We'll see what happens.

When we misdiagnose woundedness as sin, solutions fail

How we conceive of the divine can -- and often does -- make a big difference in how we see each other and our places in the cosmos.

If, for instance, you think of a God of wrath who checks each thing you do and think and, in that process, looks for even the tiniest sin as a pretext to assign you to burn in hell for eternity, you have a much different view of life than if you think of God as a loving, creative parent who, in various self-giving ways, looks for opportunities to show you love so that that, in turn, you will be healed enough to show love to others.

In his latest book, Jesuit priest Gregory Boyle takes those two views even deeper in a way I find helpful and think you might find it helpful, too.

In Cherished Belonging: The Healing Power of Love in Divided Times, Boyle asks: "Is the God of love looking down on a sinful world in need of salvation or does our God see a broken world in pain and in need of healing?"

In some ways, I suppose you could say it's both and not be terribly far off the mark (though probably Boyle would disagree). But it strikes me that there is much insight and even liberation in the latter view of God.

Recently, a Jewish friend sent me this article about a Catholic leader's views on antisemitism and the need of the church to work against what's been called the world's oldest hatred. In the article, Timothy Cardinal Dolan writes this: "I hope this message is clear enough: Antisemitism is a grave sin, the work of Satan himself. The devil hopes to divide God’s people, to make them fear and eventually hate each other."

In response to reading that, I sent this note back to the friend who had forwarded the link to the article to me:

"I understand what Cardinal Dolan is trying to say, but I've come to believe that when you cast certain behavior simply as sinful and/or evil, you miss a central point, which is that such behavior indicates that the person expressing it or perpetrating it, is unwell and needs to be healed.

". . .(N)o one who is whole and well would hate or express hatred for Jews -- or any other group. Describing that expression of hatred as sinful is not the start of a path that leads to healing. (It is, rather, the start of a path that leads to making institutional religion a necessity for its ability to forgive sinfulness or at least point to the necessity of such forgiveness.) Only when we understand the expression of such hatred to be a sign of illness can we begin to create remedies to heal the person with that illness."

 

That is the point that Boyle makes in his new book, and I think he gets it right.

"A bad diagnosis," he writes, "can't ever lead us to a good treatment plan. It matters how we name things. . .In the face of senseless gun violence, political treachery and revenge, hate crimes, mass shootings and terrorist attacks, some people will just say, 'Sin and evil are on display.' When we do this, we've given up. We're not even trying. We declare that we will no longer be seeking solutions because we believe that human beings are somehow stained from the start. Original sin doesn't explain the trouble. Lots of thing do. Original sin is not one of them. . .

"No one healthy thinks Israel has no right to exist. No one healed thinks Hamas doesn't belong to us. No one well thinks Palestinians shouldn't be free. . .We don't have enemies; we have injuries. We don't have hate; we have wounds. We don't have fear; we have the shared ruin of our common human brokenness. . ."

And by now we should know that the solutions we come up with to deal with sin aren't likely to deal with the real problem, woundedness, brokenness, unwellness.

* * *

THE SILENCE OF FAITH LEADERS

Climate change clearly poses challenges to people of faith, many of whom believe God has tasked them with being good custodians of the planet. But a new study, described in this article from The Conversation, shows that "while the overwhelming majority of Christian religious leaders accept the human-driven reality of climate change, nearly half have never mentioned climate change or humans’ role in it to their congregations. Further, only a quarter have spoken about it more than once or twice."

That's a problem for many reason, including, as the article notes, that "churchgoers who were informed about the actual consensus among religious leaders in accepting climate change were more likely to state that 'taking action to reduce climate change' was consistent with their church’s values."

Are your faith community leaders being silent about this crucial matter? If so, ask them why.

* * *

P.S.: If, like me, you're a longtime reader of The Atlantic magazine, you know the excellent journalistic work of lots of writers, including the magazine's current executive editor, Jeffrey Goldberg. Yes, that Jeffrey Goldberg, who recently wound up, apparently by accident, plugged into a highly secret U.S. government conversation in which military plans were revealed. Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, a columnist for Religion News Service, writes this good appreciation of Goldberg, describing him in words much more laudatory than those being used by members of the Musk-Trump administration. It's worth a read.

Salkin, for instance, writes this: "Jeffrey Goldberg has not only been one of my journalistic heroes. He has also been one of my Jewish heroes in the world of letters — along with Yossi Klein Halevi, Leon Wieseltier, Martin Peretz, the late Nat Hentoff, the recently departed Max Frankel of The New York Times — the people who not only made me want to write (thank you, Nat, for that early inspiration), but who made me want to write as a Jew."

A congregation finds a way to help its neighbor through trauma

It's a traditional and important responsibility of a religious congregation to support families going through grief and other types of trauma. There usually are carefully prepared liturgies on which to rely for funerals or memorial services. And clergy and others in the congregation can serve at least in short-term ways as amateur grief counselors.

But what responsibility, if any, do such congregations have to help not just individuals or families but a whole community -- or a major part of one -- come to terms with trauma, with grief, with communal pain and suffering?

That's the question at the heart of a helpful new book, No One Left Alone: A Story of How Community Helps Us Heal, by the Rev. Liz Walker. The answer that the church Walker was pastoring in Boston when a promising young Black man named Cory Johnson was murdered was an approach called "Can We Talk. . ."

It's a regularly scheduled but loosely structured gathering of wounded and traumatized people, and it now is not just a single program in the Roxbury section of Boston but a network that has spread to several other states and even beyond congregations to secular groups. Here is a 2017 Bay State Banner story about the organization and its development.

Walker sums up this initiative near the end of the book this way: "In 'Can We Talk. . .', we define healing as finding wholeness and reconnecting with that part of self that was lost in the pain. In working with major health institutions to evaluate that healing, we use terms like reconnection, safety, alignment and integration.

"But ultimately, healing happens through love: agape love. Agape love gives continuously in the midst of pain. This is the 'love everybody all the time' love."

The roots of "Can We Talk. . ." go back to the 2010 murder of a young black man in Roxbury, Cory Johnson, and the wounding of his brother Justin in the same shooting. What Walker quickly learned, as she writes, is that "the aftermath of such tragedies in our communities is exacerbated by the deep and persistent barriers to mental health and care and trauma counseling."

So the church decided it had to find a way to fill that gap, and "Can We Talk. . ." was the eventual result.

"Over the years," Walker writes, "Roxbury Presbyterian Church did its best to support Cory's grieving family. The calls, prayers and visits were all heartfelt, but something was missing. Mental health care has never been a prominent part of our Christian tradition. It should be. Sometimes -- and I say this as a pastor -- prayer alone is simply not enough."

First, of course, Walker had to recognize what she didn't know: "(I)t dawned on me that I had no idea how to talk to someone whose loved one had been murdered. I imagined that it couldn't be that different from a pastoral approach to any conversation, and I tried to remember what I had learned in seminary about pastoral counseling with people in grief."

But it was clear to her that something was missing, some way to allow those in grief and trauma to share their stories as a way of starting to heal. That's because, as she notes, "grief is wild and random. There are no prescribed steps that run in easily discernible patterns."

The name "Can We Talk. . ." was drawn, serendipitously, from one of Cory Johnson's favorite childhood songs."

One of the values of this new book is that it can help white people like me understand the destructive dynamics that often are at play in predominantly Black neighborhoods that have been crushed by redlining, by disparities in housing, education, health and other areas and that have been either over-policed or under-policed.

As Walker writes, "Popular culture tells young Black males that only the predator will survive." In such a context, even clergy whose job it is to bring good news to the world often ask what Walker asks: "Where do pastors take their wounds? Who ministers to them?"

Walker and other clergy involved in "Can We Talk. . ." began to discover that the process of carefully listening to the hard stories others were telling was a helpful step for them to become more effective pastors, counselors and listeners.

"When suffering rattles the doors of the church, God is demanding something of us," Walker writes.

One of the responses to that demand was to learn that "some people come to our gathering anxious, hypervigilant and overstimulated by everything around them. Our focus is to create an atmosphere of calm and peace in this space -- not with low lights or candles but with our presence, our attention and our spirit of abiding."

"Can We Talk. . ." may not be the perfect model for every community in trauma, but it's a solid, proven model that can be modified where necessary to meet local needs. The one thing we know for sure is that such local needs exist everywhere and that they cry out for answers.

* * *

WHY PEOPLE OF FAITH ARE IN THE STREETS

Across the U.S. these days, people are struggling to find ways to respond to what they perceive, correctly, to be the authoritarian tendencies of President Donald Trump as his new administration. The question quickly gets theological in nature for people of faith. As the Rev. Jim Wallis, the Arch-Bishop Desmond Tutu chair and director of Georgetown University’s Center on Faith and Justice, writes in this opinion piece for Religion News Service, "Authoritarianism is not only a political issue, it’s a theological one. The human capacity for evil is too great to allow individuals to have too much unchecked political power."

Which is why Wallis is encouraged that, as he writes, "For many reasons — theological and moral — people and communities of faith are mobilizing, acting with courage and leadership for the common good." We're seeing it across the country, though so far we don't know what difference it will make. But we do know silence is no answer at all.

* * *

P.S.: You can sign up for free to get an email each time my blog publishes. Just go here. And thanks.

False certitude leads us to imagine we grasp reality's complexity

As the world has become more complicated, intertwined, confusing, imponderable and, well, weird in the way that quantum physics is weird (I'm against the death penalty but will make an exception for Schrödinger's cat), many people have sought the alleged comfort of certainty, of doubtlessness, of Truth with a capital T.

But that's both fool's gold and a fool's goal.

As understandable as the desire for simplification is, it means chasing the goal of never having to question much of anything (God said it, I believe it, end of conversation). In both religion and politics, that's dangerous.

Well, that's true of any other field, too, no matter how much we value certitude or long for answers that can't be questioned. But if we get this wrong with religion, we shut ourselves off from revelation, insight, divine-to-human conversation and more.

Almost certainly (there's that word again) this hunger for a widely accepted single answer to every hard question began with the earliest human beings. But in modern times, it seems to have become ever more intense and ever more destructive. This trend did not begin with the 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. To imagine that it did would be to ignore the Scopes Monkey Trial in the 1920s and centuries of earlier history in which people, especially religious leaders, sought to lock up truth in an impenetrable vault.

But this report from the current issue of The Christian Century on the history and repercussions of that 1978 Chicago inerrancy statement gives us a window through which to see how the longing for certitude has affected so much that has come after that statement from 47 years ago, especially how it has divided Christianity even as other religions also have become divided over issues of what's true and what's heretical. (That's part of what the current battle for the soul of Islam is about.)

But let's back up a bit to ask this: What is biblical inerrancy? Here's my answer: It's the conviction that the Bible (we're mostly talking about the Christian version of it without the books of the Apocrypha) is historically, scientifically, theologically and in all other ways without any hint of error or simple misstatement in the "original manuscripts," which, by the way, so far haven't been found anywhere. In other words, every word in the Bible is literally true and should be considered "the word of God" -- even words translated from the original Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic into English or any other language. Whew. (I add a "whew" there because, in fact, every translation is also an interpretation.)

The Century's article, written by Liz Charlotte Grant, reports that the Chicago Statement sparked "a revolution within thousands of American churches and parachurch organizations, a revolution that included a purge within the existing institutional structures of evangelicalism. Its influence continues to this day."

You can see the kind of false certitude in which the Chicago Statement is marinated play out today in, for instance, the idea of "constitutional originalism." That's the notion that judicial interpreters of the law today should do their work as if they know no more about American life than what the Founding Fathers knew when they adopted the Constitution in the late 1700s. It's a way of turning the 18th Century into an idol. Similarly, declaring the Bible inerrant makes the Bible itself an idol. No doubt there are worse idols to have but perhaps none more ironic or more misconstrued, given that the first of the Ten Commandments stands squarely against idolatry.

Grant adds to that picture this way: "The Chicago Statement had a broader impact as well. Its signatories fed the emerging New Right, which would elect Ronald Reagan in 1980 (Tammeus note: Even he is starting to look wise and compassionate compared to our president today). They established a religious parallel to the constitutional originalism that would come to dominate the Supreme Court. And they primed evangelicals for the utilitarian groupthink required for Christian nationalism to thrive. In the end, the importance of this weekend in 1978 would exceed any of its organizers' loftiest expectations."

I have written in opposition to biblical inerrancy before, even saying (probably repetitively) that you have a choice: You can take the Bible seriously or you can take it literally, but you can't do both. And I've even written a book describing how doubt itself can be a useful tool in constructing religious faith: The Value of Doubt: Why Unanswered Questions, Not Unquestioned Answers, Build Faith.

But I worry today that the "no gray" approach to truth has infected much of the world, from religion to politics to jurisprudence and beyond. In a cosmos some 13.8 billion years old, human senses today can observe only about 5 percent of what exists, scientists say. How foolish to imagine we know absolute truth about anything with such a limited reach of our senses.

Which, of course, is not to say that we are unable to commit ourselves to certain ideas, principles and ways of living. Religion encourages that kind of allegiance to notions such as the inestimable value of every human being, the need for justice, for equity, for being caretakers of and partners of and with nature. And on and on.

That's what faith is about. It's committing ourselves to generative principles in a world in which we see the destruction that can and does happen when such principles are ignored or devalued. Because there's so much of that failure in our history, the great Protestant Reformer John Calvin insisted that humankind is in a state of "total depravity." But that in itself is another example of no-gray thinking (the word "total" is a clue) because it dismisses or at least fails to account for a creation that, as the Genesis story has it, God called both "good" and "very good." It also fails to account for the millions of generous and sweet deeds people around the globe do hourly. (And I can tell you as a member of a church in the Presbyterian denomination, a theological founder of which was Calvin, that the "total depravity" idea isn't the only one Calvin got wrong.)

As for how Jesus might have viewed biblical inerrancy, I loved the short story that Jesuit priest Gregory Boyle tells in his book Cherished Belonging: The Healing Power of Love in Divided Times: "One of the magnets that adorn our refrigerator in my Jesuit community is of Jesus preaching the Sermon on the Mount. In this pious, 1950s illustration of Jesus addressing the throngs on the hillside, Jesus says: "Okay, everyone. Now listen carefully. I don't want to end up with four different versions of this." It's an almost perfectly ironic Jesuit approach to the Bible.

The principles of love, justice, equity and so forth in no way depend on biblical inerrancy or judicial originalism or any other truth-falsehood binary way of living. Those systems distort reality. The reality is that religion in general and Christianity in particular would be much better off today had the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy never been conceived, written and signed.

I'm, uh, certain of that. Or at least as certain as I can be.

* * *

IT'S TIME FOR WIDESPREAD MORAL COURAGE

In this time of political and social turmoil in the U.S., citizens have a duty to speak out and to insist that their representatives in Congress do the same. So as this RNS column notes, in Washington, D.C., "leaders from numerous faith traditions are gathering each week in front of the Capitol. . .calling on Congress to show moral courage." It's a reassuring sight. But moral courage also is needed from many others -- from lawyers to journalists, elected representatives to judges, law enforcement officers to health care workers to teachers and beyond. After all, silence puts you on the side of the oppressors.

* * *

THE BOOK CORNER

Seeing Things: Poems, by Marjorie Maddox. I don't write much about poetry here on the blog, but in a time of national distress, when so much seems adrift, surprising and lamentable, it may be helpful to have some examples of lament, of clarity, of crises faced. That's what you'll find in this small book of poetry by a professor emerita of English and creative writing at Commonwealth University.

There is lament here about a mother with dementia and a daughter with depression. Maddox shows us how to put such things into words -- and, ultimately, into perspective. She speaks of a physician who ignored a woman's complaints until he realized he might be sued for malpractice now with the woman's "blood cell count swimming/swiftly towards death and lawsuit."

She writes of speaking to a childhood friend who also has a daughter in distress: "My daughter recovers. Yours will as well. Let's utter lies to each other/until they're true."

And yet, in a final poem, she declares, "Enough of the lamentations. . ." Then: "And enough of windows/Praise doors! Step out/with arms open, and eyes gathering vim and vision;. . ."

Maybe she has part of the answer to what we're living through: "Let's utter lies to each other/until they're true."

* * *

P.S.: The Equal Justice U.S.A. Evangelical Network is offering a free webinar on "The Religion of Whiteness: How Racism Distorts Christian Faith." It will start at noon (CST) on Tuesday, April 8, and you can register for it here. The speaker will be Michael O. Emerson, co-author of the 2024 book that bears the same title as this webinar: The Religion of Whiteness: How Racism Distorts Christian Faith. 

Properly done, travel can change even your spiritual life

So far I've managed to spend time in more than 30 countries and have visited every U.S. state except for Alaska, Idaho and Montana. I plan to knock Alaska off that list this summer.

All of that travel has given me a better sense of the astonishing breadth and depth of the people on this globe and of how they live, think and dream. But it's also caused me to do what Douglas J. Brouwer, in a new book published just yesterday, urges readers to do: Think about not just the cultural and educational value of travel but also its spiritual value.

The book is The Traveler's Path: Finding Spiritual Grown and Inspiration Through Travel. Brouwer is a retired Protestant pastor who has served congregations in the U.S. as well as in Switzerland and the Netherlands. I can't imagine how many miles (or kilometers) he has traveled in his life but way above average even for us restless Americans.

"Travel," Brouwer writes, "changes who we are as families, communities, nations and even as a living species on Earth. It's that truth about the transformative power of travel that lies at the heart of the world's great religious traditions."

Does that mean that people who don't travel much miss opportunities to grow spiritually? Not necessarily, but the author thinks that we might inherit what he calls a "thirst for adventure" by "growing up in families that encourage exploration and risks associated with travel."

My own childhood full of travel was proof that Brouwer is correct when he writes that "taking ourselves away from what we know -- having new experiences, eating unfamiliar foods, encountering new customs, meeting people who are unlike the people we know best, using medical services in another country, taking trains and trams and buses instead of driving cars, discovering what it means to be in a minority and making mistakes -- these are some of the way we learn and grow. . ."

But Brouwer is right that truly fulfilling travel -- the kind that changes you by giving you new perspectives -- requires some preparation. That's one reason that, in preparation for an August trip to Alaska, I've just finished reading a book called Native Cultures in Alaska: Looking Forward, Looking Back, edited by Tricia Brown.

There still is much I don't know about the astonishing assortment of native Alaskans, their many languages and cultural practices. But at least I'm beginning to know what I don't know and that may help shape the time I spend there.

Travel, Brouwer writes, seem to have the "potential to shape our vocations." That's certainly been true in my experience. The globe-circling travel I did when I was 11, 12 and 13 helped to create in me an endless curiosity about how others live and how they experience their own spirits and the spiritual world. It's that curiosity I wanted eventually to explore in my journalism career and it has given me countless opportunities to see the amazing breadth and depth of humanity, along with human failure at times to live in compassionate and generative ways.

Could I have understood all that had I never left the small hometown of my birth, Woodstock, Ill.? Maybe. After all, Woodstock, too, has changed considerably and offered residents a broader view of life, as I note in my book Woodstock: A Story of Middle Americans.

But seeing beggars on India's crowded streets, walking through the monstrous Holocaust sites of Auschwitz and Treblinka while working on a Holocaust-related book and sitting quietly in the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris has made me cautious about easy answers to almost any of the eternal questions.

Well, there is more to Brouwer's sweet book of stories about travel, but I'll stop with his observation that a "calling to get spiritually lost in a journey may well be universal."

Travel is that, but it's also a way of making us ask ourselves where our true home really is. In the end, that may be the most important but most challenging travel -- and life -- question of all.

* * *

DO CONGREGATIONS BURNED IN WILDFIRES HAVE A FUTURE?

The recent wildfires in the Los Angeles area may be out, but among the damage they left behind, this Guardian story reports, were the destruction of more than 14 houses of worship. It's scramble time for mosques, churches and other religion centers there, and it's not easy to see the future through the lingering smoke. As the story notes, "Some of these religious institutions have the resources to find stable alternative locations for their congregants. But for smaller, family-run places of worship, recovery is a rockier process. Some have no alternative worship site yet. Others are adjusting to a state of 'temporary normalcy.' But all face uncertainty." Perhaps you can help, particularly if one of these congregations is from your own faith tradition. A year or two from now I'd love to read about burned-out congregations that now are thriving.

* * *

P.S.: As some of you know, I serve on the board of the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education. Recently our executive director, Jessica Rockhold, spent an hour talking with Joel Goldberg (yes, that Joel, a broadcaster for the Kansas City Royals) on his "Rounding the Bases" podcast. It's on YouTube, and you can watch and listen to it here. Joel's interests go well beyond baseball, as is clear in this conversation. And Jessica does her usual great job explaining the work of MCHE. I hope you'll check it out, just as I hope you'll support MCHE by becoming a member.

* * *

ANOTHER P.S.: You can sign up for free to get an email each time my blog publishes. Just go here. And thanks.

* * *

A BOOK CORNER UPDATE

Last October, in this post, I introduced readers to a small but carefully crafted book called Debt and Taxes: Defusing America's Debt Bomb, by Howard Mick, a member of my congregation. Its publication preceded the November election, which has produced an administration with policies and practices that are making the crisis of our national debt even worse. So, in response, Mick has added a chapter to his book. It tries to take account of what's been happening since the Musk-Trump administration began. Like the original book, the added chapter is not a raging attack on anyone. Rather, it's a calm, helpful analysis of what the results of this or that policy are likely to be. Mick is simply trying to educate readers about what is happening with our growing national debt and what the consequences are likely to be if that growth continues. The new chapter also is a plea to our elected officials to have "the necessary political will to take decisive action" and to avoid extending the previous Trump tax cuts, which have made the national debt only worse. Even if you've already read the original book, you'll want to read the added chapter.

What would you say is 'the first task of the church'?

Christians are in the midst of the Lenten season, which leads, in a few weeks, to the most important day on the church's liturgical calendar, Easter. Without Easter and the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, there would be no church.

So this period of time -- which is, in purpose, in harmony with Islam's current season of Ramadan and Judaism's upcoming season of Passover -- is a one in which to ask a foundational question: What is the purpose of the church? And, by extension: What is the purpose of the mosque? And: What is the purpose of the synagogue? And: More broadly, what is the purpose of any particular religion?

Today, as a Christian, I will share an answer to the question about the church's purpose from a wonderfully wise theologian, Stanley Hauerwas, (pictured below) an emeritus professor at Duke Divinity School. I've read some of his books and I heard speak a few years ago at a Kansas City church.

In this essay written for Plough magazine, Hauerwas offers a simple but perhaps surprising answer, one that I hope may guide people from other faith traditions to ask and try to answer the purpose question for their religion.

At the beginning of Hauerwas' Plough essay, he insists that "the first task of the church when it comes to social ethics is to be the church. Such a claim may well sound self-serving or irrelevant until we remember that what makes the church the church is its faithful manifestation of the peaceable kingdom in the world. As such, the church does not have a social ethic; the church is a social ethic."

What does that mean?

It means, he writes, that "the church must never cease from being a community of peace and truth in a world of mendacity and fear. (Tammeus note: If I didn't know the world as well as I do, I'd be insulted by that description of our world.) The church does not let the world set her agenda about what constitutes a viable social ethic; the church sets her own agenda. She does this first by having the patience amid the injustice and violence of this world to care for the widow, the poor and the orphan. Such care, from the world’s perspective, may seem to contribute little to the cause of justice, yet unless we take the time for such care, neither we nor the world can know what God’s justice looks like."

One way to think about this is for people of faith to remember that they are not, first, beholden to their secular/political government, though they may support whoever is currently in power and may devote their time and efforts to get the government to behave efficiently and effectively. Rather, in the case of Christians, they are beholden to the gospel, the good news of Christ Jesus and what the church, as the body of Christ on Earth, is called to say and do to show the world, as Hauerwas puts it, "what God's justice looks like."

It's important here to remember that the term "God's justice" means more than how society on Earth functions. It means that, for sure, which is why Christians are called to care for "the widow, the poor and the orphan." But it also refers to an eternal system of justice that is to result in God eventually redeeming not just us individually but also the entire creation, the whole cosmos (and beyond, if there is a beyond).

So on the one hand God's justice may require people of faith to stand against the abusive powers in government, business, society or anywhere that those powers are failing to treat all human beings as precious in God's sight and as bearers of the image of God. On the other hand, it requires faithful people to keep an eternal perspective about life, which means recognizing our Earth-bound limits and not giving up the struggle on behalf of God's justice just because we recognize that we can't achieve total victory today.

In the end, given all that, we would do well to remember the assurance that the wonderful mystic Julian of Norwich is famous for citing: ". . .all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

Stanley Hauerwas is an intriguing writer and thinker, and I hope you'll read the whole essay to which I've linked you. But I also hope you'll engage with leaders of your own faith tradition, if you have one, to explore what that tradition's "first task" might be. If you've never asked that question, it's way past time.

(The first image above here today came from this site.)

* * *

LET'S PAUSE ONCE MORE AND AT LEAST FEEL OTHERS' PAIN

Can we, at least for a few moments, simply pause and feel the pain in this season of Ramadan and Lent, with the High Holy Days coming soon? We need to lament once more humanity's warring ways. The recently renewed Hamas-Israel war is producing yet additional bloodshed, grief and death. And even if we can't somehow stopped the fighting, we can lament, we can pray for peace, we can ask our leaders to do what they can, we can gather together and cry as we think of human lives -- each one precious in God's sight -- being wasted in Gaza, Israel, Ukraine and elsewhere.

* * *

P.S.: You can sign up for free to get an email each time my blog publishes. Just go here. And thanks.