Bill's Faith Matters blog

Racial and religious varieties can strengthen our nation

Once upon a time, when I knew a lot more than I know today, I thought, sort of, that the world would be a lot more peaceful if everyone became, say, a Presbyterian like me. Or a Methodist. Or a Muslim. Or a Jew. Or, or, or. . .

My immaturity and foolishness were little short of monumental. My thinking at the time, as I recall, was that such unanimity would end a lot of fighting that is rooted in religious differences. But I abandoned that naivete when I realized, among other things, that some of the most bitter religious wars happen within, not between, religions.

As the decades since then have gone by, I've certainly recognized the growing religious diversity in American life. But I've come to recognize that the strength of that diversity isn't just that there are more voices at the table. Rather, the strength is that we can begin to learn what is most beautiful about traditions not our own and can begin to have a deeper appreciation for the common humanity of everyone at the table.

Which is why I see considerable value in the religious diversity we are seeing at the national political level as described in this Religion News Service article.

We have now a Christian presidential candidate with a Hindu maternal background who is married to a Jewish man. That candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, is running on a ticket with a Lutheran man who is governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz. In the other party, the vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, is, as the RNS story notes, "a Protestant turned atheist who married a Hindu woman before converting to Catholicism in 2019."

My friend Eboo Patel, founder and president of Interfaith America, is quoted in the RNS story this way: “It’s a positive diversity story for America, for people from different religious backgrounds to be married to each other and to say, my experience with the other person’s faith strengthens my own and makes me a better person.”

As a Protestant Christian, I am aware that in his second letter to the church at Corinth, the Apostle Paul wrote this: "Do not be mismatched with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and lawlessness have in common? Or what partnership is there between light and darkness? What agreement does Christ have with Beliar? Or what does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols?"

This is generally referred to as Paul's warning to couples not to be "unequally yoked." It was written at a time when an internal battle was going on within Judaism over whether this new band of Christ followers could or should remain under the umbrella of Judaism. And Paul was writing specifically to address a series of conflicts and problems within the body of Christ followers in Corinth.

The question, then, is whether his advice to that small group of people 2,000 years ago should be universalized to all places and all peoples at all times. I'll let the professional theologians wrestle with that question, but it seems to me that Paul was trying to strengthen a newly forming religious body that needed to focus and define itself internally before it could be taken seriously by the rest of the world.

In our world, the faiths I've mentioned above -- Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism -- have found their sea legs and are prepared to stand on their own and to be strong enough to be in relationship with other faith traditions from which they can learn a thing or two even as they maintain their own integrity -- a divided integrity, to be sure, but with divisions that in many ways give strength to the core of the tradition.

I grew up in a family in which my three sisters and I had a second-generation Swedish-American mother and a third-generation German-American father. In our childhoods, we were six white American Presbyterians.

Today our extended family from that narrow, white Protestant base includes people of Japanese, African-American, Korean, Filipino and Chinese descent. And we're pretty much all over the map in terms of religious affiliation, including those with no religious affiliation at all.

I consider that change healthy and good because I've been enriched by it. In the same way, I think our country is being enriched by the variety of racial and religious expressions we're seeing among those active at the national political level.

I prefer not to go back to my earlier vision of a nation where everyone would be a Presbyterian. For one thing, if that were the case, pretty much all we'd ever do is hold committee meetings.

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ANOTHER ECHO OF THE ABUSE SCANDAL IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

The despicable, long-running sexual abuse scandal involving priests and bishops in the Catholic Church will be brought into the light again on the upcoming visit of Pope Francis to East Timor. As the Associated Press story to which I've linked you reports, "(T)he church in East Timor today is stronger than ever, with most downplaying, doubting or dismissing the claims against (Bishop Carlos Ximenes) Belo and those against a popular American missionary who confessed to molesting young girls. Many instead focus on their roles saving lives during the country’s bloody struggle against Indonesia for independence." It's not yet clear whether the pope will meet with victims on his trip or how he will interact with this compromised bishop. But the whole saga is one more reminder for the church -- and for all other institutions and individuals who have tried to cover up the crimes of sexual abuse -- that eventually the truth will emerge. Given that, the only rational and moral policy is to tell the truth from the start and to seek justice for the victims. It's not clear why that seems to be such a hard lesson to learn.

What can the process of 'restorative justice' offer?

Do you know what "restorative justice" is?

The link I've given you will give you a definition from the Law School of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

I've been aware of the term for quite some time and thought I had a decent sense of what it is about, but my knowledge and understanding were increased recently when I watched this Zoom presentation on the subject offered by the Equal Justice U.S.A.'s Evangelical Network, which, among other things, works for the elimination of the abhorrent death penalty across the U.S.

What I found particularly interesting in the hour-long presentation was the idea that the principles of restorative justice -- recreating order and fairness as opposed to simply punishing wrongdoers -- also can be applied in arenas outside the criminal justice system. Even in families. And in countless ways, the principles behind healthy religious traditions are in harmony with the idea of restoring right and healthy relationships versus merely administering retribution for crimes or sins.

It's what the whole theology of salvation in Christianity, for instance, is all about.

In the Zoom presentation, EJUSA's Evangelical Network manager Sam Heath spoke with Lindsey Pointer, a restorative justice author, educator and researcher. Heath noted that the criminal justice system often is unable to repair relations and make sure that everyone involved in a crime -- from the criminal to victims to witnesses -- has a chance to be made whole again.

Pointer said that using restorative justice principles outside the legal system -- in traumatic family situations, for instance -- "can be a more challenging area of application " than using it for its original purpose. Despite that, she said, people increasingly are seeing the use of restorative justice techniques "as a way of life and bringing it into all areas -- bringing it into families, bringing it into workplaces, bringing it into spiritual communities."

The restorative justice approach to conflict resolution, Pointer suggested, requires participants to ask open-ended questions to try to understand how the original act of injustice happened and why.

The phrase that emerged in the Zoom conversation was that participants need to be "curious, not furious." Which, of course, requires those victimized to hold their fire at least for a bit while they seek to understand what led the person who committed the unjust act to imagine that it was necessary or justified.

In all such cases, Pointer emphasized, the use of restorative justice techniques is voluntary. If both sides (or more if there are more than two sides) don't agree to try this way to resolve and restore things, one side cannot do it alone.

Again, I was struck by the many ways that restorative justice parallels the best techniques promoted by healthy religion -- forgiveness where it is appropriate and healing and deep conversation about how the injustice happened in the first place.

Lindsey Pointer's website, to which I linked you above, offers additional resources about restorative justice that you may find helpful.

(And speaking of restorative justice, it can't happen to someone to whom the state has applied the death penalty. That's one more reason I oppose capital punishment. In that view, I differ from my boyhood friend from India, Markandey Katju, former justice on India's Supreme Court. He has written this column to tell his readers why I'm wrong. See if you think he makes sense.)

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WHY DOES THE STORY OF JESUS' ON EARTH MATTER? 

The Jesuit magazine America has just reprinted this 1971 article about the historical Jesus of Nazareth and his relationship to current Christianity. The piece remains amazingly relevant as it explores the thorny question of how much of Jesus' life on Earth his current followers need to know to be able to follow him as savior and a member of the Holy Trinity. The author, an Australian Jesuit priest who died recently, wrote this in the piece: "First, Jesus must not be turned into a contemporary. He is rightly viewed within the historical framework of the first century. To describe Him as a revolutionary leader, a truly secular man or the first hippie may be emotionally satisfying, but for the most part these stereotypes are intellectually worthless." In fact, if Jesus is not first understood in his original Jewish context, he cannot be understood at all, I would say.

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P.S.: If you missed my latest Flatland column -- about clergy who come from families full of clergy -- it is still available for free here.

An Olympic athlete who's also a pretty good theologian

I have never known quite what to do with athletes who publicly praise God for what they achieve in competition.

That's because it always has seemed presumptuous to me to imagine that God cares even a little whether the Tigers beat the Royals or the Blue Streaks smash the Lasers or Jill beats LaToya in a 100-meter dash.

And yet there must be -- and are -- successful athletes who are grateful to have a generative relationship with God but who don't praise God for helping them win or blame God if they lose.

Maybe I've found such an athlete in four-time Olympic gold medalist Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone (pictured here).

As this story recounts, she says her growing Christian faith helped her see that her self-worth wasn't based on whether she won when she was racing or hurdling on the track. She came to grasp the idea that her value as a human didn't depend on whether she won fancy metals.

She now understands that her value is, instead, rooted in knowing that she is loved by God.

Learning that, she says, "really just washed me clean of a lot of those thoughts and feelings and emotions that I had, and it’s my source now of how I overcome fear.”

As a multi-metal winner at this year's summer Olympic games, she naturally has gained more media attention and has not shied away from trying to explain what part faith plays in her life. That advantage often seems to turn athletes into misguided theologians who think they won because God preferred that result. Athletes who talk about their faith in God can lead people to imagine that they are crediting God for their victories.

I don't think that's what McLaughlin-Levrone is saying. And if I'm right about that, good for her.

The flip side of all this is about religious leaders using the language of athletics to encourage their followers. For instance, in I Corinthians 9:24, the Apostle Paul says to those receiving his letter, "Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it."

Not all such language is theologically silly. But it's easy to imagine that the vicissitudes of life are some kind of athletic challenge for which we just need better shoes or more aerobic training. The comparison of life to an athletic contest almost inevitably breaks down.

But sometimes athletes -- and achievers in any field -- come to understand that they aren't worthy human beings just because they won a gold medal or a Pulitzer Prize. Rather, their lives are precious because they are made in the image of God, who loves them without reserve.

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MORE QUESTIONS ABOUT THE SHROUD OF TURIN

Yet another investigation into the mysterious Shroud of Turin, which some people think is the burial cloth of Jesus, has been completed. To the surprise of many, as this story reports, this time researchers suggest the cloth may really be about 2,000 years old and might actually be Christ's burial cloth. All of which raises the question of how much actual, verifiable history is required for the claims of Christianity to be true. Might it be possible for followers of Jesus today simply to adhere to his moral teachings and ignore the faith tradition's claims of history -- his birth, ministry, death, resurrection? Or is the incarnation incomprehensible without verification of historical events surrounding Jesus?

Oh, and this New York Post story describes how artificial intelligence has been used to show us the face of the man on the Shroud of Turin. To me, the image looks a little too much like a white man who has had a hard day wrestling cattle, but I'll check that out if and when I get to see Jesus.

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P.S.: You can get an email with a link to my blog every time it publishes by registering here. It's free and easy.

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ANOTHER P.S.: Here's a link to a Zoom gathering (about an hour long) in which Mindy Corporon and I participated a few days ago. The subject was religion-based violence and how to respond to it. The gathering was sponsored by the Interfaith Center of Miami University in Ohio. Mindy founded the SevenDays organization about 10 years ago after a neo-Nazi murdered her father, son and another person at Jewish facilities in the K.C. area. I serve on the SevenDays board.

A path toward renewal in a time of religious decline

Several years ago, when John Philip Newell (pictured below) and I were teaching different classes at the same time at Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico, we had a conversation that led me to rethink the idea of "original sin."

Philip, former warden of Iona Abbey in Scotland and a leading expert in Celtic spirituality, has a way of making me and others rethink things.

His new book does that over and over again. It's called The Great Search: Turning to Earth and Soul in the Quest for Healing and Home, and it was published just yesterday by HarperOne.

In many ways, the book is Philip's response to the decline of participation in institutional religion that has been evident first in Western Europe and now in North America. In short, one of his primary explanations of this movement away from traditional faith is that people are not very interested nowadays in learning what religion has to teach about God. Rather, they're much more interested in some kind of personal experience of and with God in their lives. So they're searching.

"We are," he writes, "seeking healing as an Earth community, and we are longing for a new sense of home spiritually. . .(W)e need new vision if we are to find healing in our relationship with Earth and one another."

To help readers with this search, Philip introduces them to the lives and writings of nine people who can be guides, including Martin Buber, Carl Jung, Julian of Norwich, Jalaluddin (sometimes Jalal al-Din) Rumi and Rabindranath Tagore.

This, Philip writes, is a wonderful time to be on such a search because we "are living in a moment of grace. It is the realization of the interrelatedness of all things. It is a consciousness rising to the fore in nearly every great discipline of thought and study, inviting us to know that what we do to a part we do to the whole, and that the well-being of each is fulfilled only in the well-being of the whole." (That view seems similar to what's called Ubuntu theology, which is often associated with Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa.)

The chapter on Austrian-Israeli philosopher and theologian Martin Buber is especially helpful as Philip unpacks what Buber meant by an "I-Thou" versus and "I-It" relationship. He writes:

"'Everything is waiting to be hallowed,' says Buber. Everything and everyone is yearning to be truly seen and reverenced." That idea contains within it one of the cores of healthy religion -- the concept that each human being bears the image of God and is precious in God's sight. First, of course, we have to recognize that about ourselves before we can usefully acknowledge it about others and prevent ourselves from dehumanizing anyone.

To achieve that, Philip writes, will require us "to commit ourselves to turning again to the sacred essence of one another and Earth. It is this that will enable a true restoration. . ."

In the chapter on psychologist Carl Jung, Philip notes that Jung questioned whether the world's religious traditions "have penetrated deeply enough beneath the surface. Many of us today share Jung's doubt. Is our desire for light being sufficiently nurtured by religions as we know it? If not, how do we more fully access the yearnings of the Spirit within us? And how can our religious traditions more deeply serve these yearnings?"

Philip's warning to institutional religion is clear and sharp: "If religion fails to enable a direct experience of the divine, depending instead solely on the testimony of great teachers and prophets of the past, it will collapse. If it is not pulsating with the warm red blood of experience and a fresh awareness of the living presence of the Spirit within us and among us, it serves no useful purpose for the well-being of humanity and Earth today."

And in his chapter on Rumi, he adds this: "Let go of everything that is not love. This will be the rebirth of true religion."

My hope is that all people of faith (or of little or no faith) will learn from this book that each of us can find a road that leads to a lively, generative spirituality that can help heal our wounded world.

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A GRASSROOTS EFFORT TO UNPLUG CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM

This RNS opinion piece describes how a mostly apolitical couple in Texas began to put two-and-two together to figure out a source of much of the political and social division they were finding. What they found was Christian Nationalism.

"Understanding this worldview," the article says, "helped the (couple) connect dots between the fights they saw fracturing their small Texas community and, increasingly, the entire country. They created a website, called 'See It. Name It. Fight It.' to educate others about Christian nationalism, how to identify its influence in their communities and how to fight back against it. Today, they have more than 20,000 followers on X."

I find that encouraging because recently I've given a couple of talks to different church groups about this subject and have used a book called Baptizing America, which I wrote about here, to acknowledge the role that Mainline Protestant denominations, like mine, have had in creating and maintaining Christian Nationalism, which I describe as being rooted in the unbiblical idea that God has blessed the U.S. in a unique way -- an idea that amounts to idolatry.

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P.S.: You can get an email with a link to my blog every time it publishes by registering here. It's free and easy.

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ANOTHER P.S.: My friend from boyhood, Markandey Katju, a former justice on India's Supreme Court, has written this article about anti-slavery activist John Brown and, well, me. So if you need an airy diversion today, now you have one.

The choice of hate over love repeatedly scars human history

At least two things about the human species continue to surprise me. First, the capacity to love unreservedly. Second, the capacity to destroy people and things with vicious acts of hatred.

As for love, I'm reading (and soon will review here on the blog) my friend John Philip Newell's about-to-be-released new book, The Great Search: Turning to Earth and Soul in the Quest for Healing and Home.

The pages are full of examples of great teachers who have shown us how to love and why it's so central to being the people we were created to be.

At the same time, I've just read this article from The Conversation about the 10th anniversary of the start of the Islamic State (ISIS, or simply IS) group's genocide in Iraq. It's an account of the destruction that hate can rain down upon its targets.

And I am left to wonder again why hate so often seems to trump love.

Part of it, of course, has to do with false certitude when it comes to religious beliefs. The list of wars, crimes and other destructive acts that are rooted in malformed religion is depressingly long. And the ISIS-led genocide is included in that list of sorrows.

As The Conversation article notes, "thousands of people from Iraq’s marginalized communities, including Yazidis, Christians and Shiite Muslims, were killed in Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, and the surrounding areas" starting in 2014.

As the author of the article, Alda Benjamen, who teaches history at the University of Dayton and who was born in Iraq, writes, "Yazidis and Christians continue to suffer marginalization, the regions they inhabit remain unstable, and their heritage is subject to ongoing destruction. As a scholar of Iraq, I have a particular concern about the loss of intangible heritage such as prayers, songs and historic narratives -- which I am now working to preserve."

Benjamen also concludes that the "aim of IS, as my colleagues and I found, was to erase not only these communities themselves but also the forms of intercommunal coexistence that had characterized northern Iraq historically. Many of the religious sites IS targeted were revered by multiple religions."

The ongoing results of such acts of hatred scar human history over and over. And movements to repair some of what and who has been damaged often get dismissed as unnecessary or too little and too late. But humanity cannot recover from its brutal history without a recognition of what humans did and to whom. Without that, there's no path toward healing and reconciliation and, well, love.

My hope is that the work Benjamen and others are doing will begin to bring healing and a better future to Iraq. But similar reclamation work elsewhere will always be necessary until love replaces the hatred that led to such destruction. And that change may have to happen one person at a time. Sigh.

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A CAMPAIGN OF DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS

Religion scholar and analyst Mark Silk, in this essay, describes the two approaches to politics that are rooted in the religious views that guide Donald Trump and Kamala Harris -- one that looks back to an imagined American past and one that looks forward to an imagined American future. He notes that Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan was borrowed from the 1980 slogan of the Ronald Reagan-George Bush ticket and is "simply a continuation of this restorationist ideology." Harris' new slogan, "We're not going back" is a rejection of that. Makes me wonder whether a candidate who advocated just staying where we are as a nation would have any chance of winning. Maybe not.

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P.S.: You can get an email with a link to my blog every time it publishes by registering here. It's free and easy.

Both citizenship and active faith happen in the wounded world

More than a week after primary elections in Missouri, where I live, and in Kansas, to which I can walk in about 15 minutes, I remain appalled that only about 20 percent of registered voters in the Kansas City area voted.

One in five. No wonder our democracy is at risk. No wonder a tiny number of people can make bad decisions for everyone else.

As I fretted about this, I came across this opinion column that gave me a little hope and reminded me that much of the work for the common good happens between elections, not necessarily on election day.

The column was written by the Rev. Natalie Webb, a Baptist pastor in Austin, Texas. She clearly understands that the need to vote doesn't end one's civic duties. "Change-making advocacy," she writes, "extends beyond election years. In my experience, it falls into two distinct but equally important forms: public witness and strategic change."

She describes how active she is in showing up at the offices of lawmakers and at events designed to educate the public about this or that public policy issue. Yes, she votes (unlike a bunch of my neighbors), but she doesn't stop there.

"You can care for your community," she writes, "by showing up and speaking out -- whether at your state capitol, city hall, church prayer group or social media platform. Public witness is not just about getting our people in office, but about sustaining our communities regardless of election outcomes."

It strikes me that if this is true of the body politic -- and it is -- it's also true within faith communities.

Having a perfect attendance record at weekly worship services may be laudable, but what really counts is what you do between services to put into effect the lessons you learn there about how to go about the task of "tikkun olam," a term Jewish people use to mean "repair the world." (And also how you experience God's presence in the world.)

That happens inside congregations, for sure, but it also happens when people of faith work to make sure every person in the community is safe, housed, educated, fed and loved -- and has the opportunity to pursue dreams.

If we never move our religious beliefs outside the sanctuary and into the world, we shortchange the world and pay only lip service to what our religious leaders are trying to teach us.

No one, of course, can do everything that needs to be done to repair the world. We must narrow our choices and place ourselves where we think we can be most effective. But, as Pastor Webb writes, "Knowing the difference between public witness and strategic change can help us figure out how and when to engage for the greatest impact. And that will be different for each of us."

But, for God's sake, other human beings died to protect your right to vote. So at the very least start there.

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RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE SLIPS AWAY

We sometimes hear that someone who has reached a difficult goal has found the "Holy Grail." The term, as this article from The Conversation shows, is full of religious meaning and connections. But as participation in institutional religion declines in the U.S., we have begun to lose a cultural connection to phrases with religious roots, and that impoverishes us in some ways. Lots of us no longer know what a "Holy Grail" is or what it means to "go the second mile" or why living in a place called the Garden of Eden might be wonderful. But I guess that's one of our crosses to bear.

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P.S.: You can get an email with a link to my blog every time it publishes by registering here. It's free and easy.

The pope is right: Great books can make good people

One primary purpose of religion is to help people become fully human, which means tuning our heads, hearts and spirits to the shimmering presence of the divine in the world and to the idea that each of us is made in the image of the divine.

Various faith traditions, of course, offer different paths for this task, but common among them is helping people be aware of gaps in their knowledge and understanding of the world so they can more fully appreciate the Creator and each other.

Pope Francis spoke about this matter recently when he wrote a letter to future priests in which he emphasized the importance of reading -- especially, as this article from Vatican News reports -- "reading novels and poems as part of one’s path to personal maturity."

Reading still takes place using printed books, but it has moved to an online experience for many people, and it worries me that in some ways online reading may not allow the reader to draw as deeply from the words as when they are stationary on a printed page. That worry may be unfounded but I find it true for me, who learned to read in the B.C. era -- Before Computers.

In any case, Pope Francis is right to encourage priests and others to plant themselves in the ideas found in good writing, whether that's fiction or nonfiction.

As the story to which I linked you above notes, "Francis aims to encourage 'a renewed love for reading' and above all 'to propose a radical change of course' in the preparation of candidates for the priesthood, so that more space is given to reading literary works. Because literature can educate 'the hearts and minds of pastors' to 'the free and humble exercise of our use of reason' and to 'a fruitful recognition of the variety of human languages,' thus broadening human sensitivity and leading to greater spiritual openness."

One question for priests in training and for the rest of us is this: How do we find time to read? One answer is by making reading a higher priority than playing video games, watching mind-numbing TV shows, falling down social media rabbit holes and shopping for stuff we don't need.

The pontiff says as much in his letter when he writes that a good book can "provide an oasis that keeps us from other choices that are less wholesome." And surely passing on dis- and misinformation on social media ranks as a "less wholesome" activity than reading a great novel or even some of the theologically oriented books I review and recommend here on the blog.

And let's not forget about reading poetry. At my congregation, we celebrate poets once a year with "Poetry Night," which happened just a few weeks ago as part of our "Front Porch" concert series, and we were reminded again about the fabulous variety and skill of poets from our area.

So good for Pope Francis for emphasizing the humanizing the role that literature and all good writing can play in creating not just great priests but, more broadly, well-rooted and rounded humanity. Now quit reading this and pick up a good book, please -- even some of the ones I've written, if it comes to that.

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WHICH OF THE MANY CHRISTIANITIES DO THEY MEAN?

Here is a good piece from a woman who teaches law at the University of Pennsylvania arguing persuasively that if Christian Nationalists really want the U.S. to be Christian, they have an obligation to tell us which of the many varieties of Christianity they mean. She includes this great quote from James Madison, who wrote the First Amendment: “Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other religions, may establish with the same ease any sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other sects?” A majority of the U.S. population has identified as Christian since the beginning (though the percentage is shrinking), but the term "Christian" includes lots of people who don't agree with each other about matters theological.

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P.S.: My boyhood friend from India, Markandey Katju, has written this column about the staying power of history. He included me (though his description of me could use a bit of reworking) and asked me to post it here. So I am.

The theology that politicians adopt matters to all of us

To understand what's happening in American politics and our various culture war battles, it's really important not to miss the theology advocated and lived out by the people who are leaders in both areas (and they overlap).

What, for instance, does it mean that when it comes to the issue of abortion, President Joe Biden, a Catholic, veers away from the position of the church?

What does Donald Trump mean when he says God saved him from being assassinated recently and that if Christians elect him this time they'll never have to vote again?

And how does the interpretation of biblical prophecy affect the political positions of people who identify as politically or religiously conservative? And on and on.

Keri L. Ladner's helpful new book, End Time Politics: From the Moral Majority to QAnon, is a pretty good place to start if you want a sense of how politics and religion have danced (and sparred) together for the last 50-plus years. As Ladner focuses deeply on the many ways that the malleable theology (premillennial dispensationalism) of the late Jerry Falwell (pictured below) influenced American politics, she also raises questions about today's political news in a way that yields this lesson: Understanding the theology behind various political movements is essential to understanding those movements at all.

As Ladner explains, Falwell thought he had a talent for interpreting and (especially) reinterpreting current events in light of what he believed to be biblical prophecy. From his start as a pastor who "lacked formal theological training, having attended an unaccredited Bible college and deciding against going to seminary," Falwell, Ladner writes, essentially made up a way of interpreting biblical prophecy by relying on the invention of dispensationalism by John Nelson Darby (1800–1882), a former priest in the Anglican Church of Ireland.

It was Darby who created -- not quite from whole cloth, but close -- the idea of the "Rapture," when, he taught, true Christians would be lifted into the air to meet Jesus and go to heaven. And, in turn, it was Barbara R. Rossing, professor of New Testament at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, who so thoroughly debunked the idea of the Rapture in her 2005 book, The Rapture Exposed.

In that book, she concludes this: "(I)f the doctrine of the Rapture is so central to Christians' future, why did God bury the treasure for 1,800 years? Why do we have to piece it together only to find it now? As I have argued, the answer is that the Rapture and the dispensationalist chronology is a fabrication."

The standard way of thinking about premillennial dispensationalism today is that it divides world history into seven eras, or dispensations. As the Christian History Institute page to which I linked you above says, the eras are: "Innocency (before the Fall), Conscience (Fall to the Flood), Human Government, Promise (Abraham to Moses), Law (Moses to Christ), Grace (the church age) and Kingdom (the millennium)."

And Falwell was always looking for the start of what he said would be seven years of "Tribulation" that would happen after true Christians were "raptured" from Earth to heaven. When those seven miserable years ended, according to this thinking, Christ would come to Earth to rule in peace for 1,000 years. (The word "premillennial" means that the Tribulation will happen before the 1,000-year reign of Christ.) Falwell -- and some other dispensationalists after him -- suggest that if America can become a truly Christian nation with all the values pushed by conservative Christian leaders, America may be spared some of the worst of the Tribulation.

Which is why he pushed to elect politicians who would implement his ideas. And why he said over and over that the job of Christians now is not to repair the broken world but, rather, to work to save individual souls so they will be spared the horrors of the Tribulation and can be among the raptured.

It's all in how you read the book of Revelation in the New Testament. As you can see, some of these theological systems may make at least some internal sense or have some internal consistency. But when they are used to interpret current events, thousands of years after the prophecies in the Hebrew scriptures were written, they can lead down some pretty strange streets, the Rapture being one of them -- and those strange interpretations can lead to political positions and even government policies that may make sense to the interpreters who are (mis)using the Bible but that may have almost nothing to do with reality.

And that's where we all need to be careful.

Ladner wraps up her book this way: "One question I have found myself asking repeatedly is whether Falwell and his dispensationalism matter anymore, if the movement has moved so far beyond him that his thought has become irrelevant. I do not believe that it has. His hyper-nationalist, anti-U.N., anti-one-world-government paranoia; his embrace of unregulated capitalism and insistence on dismantling all social-aid programs; his fear of Christian martyrdom and of non-Christians having a place in America's public sphere; his hatred of the queer community; his rejection of civil rights for African Americans with the smokescreen of the anti-abortion movement; his unwavering belief in the imminent fulfillment of prophecy even when global events change direction; these things and more all have shaped the belief that America is indeed one nation under God's wrath. And that belief persists to this day."

In a word, theology matters. And it especially matters when politicians use some variety of it that sharply divides us because it dehumanizes some of us.

That's why it helps to know how politicians' religious beliefs might affect the kind of public policies they will advocate and try to make mandatory for all of us. If they are likely to result in a more deeply divided citizenry, voters would do well to say no to that. But to say no, they need to know the theology behind what the politicians are advocating.

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GOV. TIM WALZ, A 'MINNESOTA LUTHERAN'

Speaking of politicians and their religious beliefs, this Religion News Service story describes the religious connections of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who yesterday became Vice President Kamala Harris' choice for running mate for this year's presidential election. He's described as a "Minnesota Lutheran," meaning a member of a church that is part of the Mainline Protestant denomination known as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The RNS story also points out that Walz has been active in interfaith relations, especially with Muslims, who make up an important group of voters in his state. But it will be worth paying attention to what Walz has to say about how his faith might affect his policy choices, so let's pay attention -- to him and the other candidates, too. (By the way, the ELCA is the largest of more than 40 Lutheran denominations in North America.)

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THE BOOK CORNER

In one sense, Judaism is the root from which Christianity sprang without itself disappearing in the process. The third Abrahamic faith, Islam, owes much of its theology to both of those faith traditions, beginning with Judaism.

That's just one important reason to learn about Judaism. Another important reason us to try to understand the Middle East and the role modern Israel plays there.

I can recommend two books to help you grasp the core of Judaism -- one just published and one that's regularly been on and off, then on and off my bookshelf since it was published in 2004. The older one is Accessible Judaism: A Concise Guide, by Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn, who was my co-author when we wrote the book They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust.

The new book is The Triumph of Life: A Narrative Theology of Judaism, by Rabbi Irving Greenberg. This is a compelling description of the central points of Jewish theology and is written in clear, accessible language that people who know almost nothing about Judaism can track and that uses fresh insights to keep Jewish readers turning the pages.

Early in the book, Greenberg, president of the J.J. Greenberg Institute for the Advancement of Jewish Life, makes clear why even non-Jews might be interested in this book: "Modern civilization has achieved tremendous improvements in material well-being for billions of people. This accomplishment, however, has become detached from the classic Jewish values of partnership, respect for Creation, acceptance of limits and accountability to a Higher Power. This disjunction has generated new crises: climate change, species destruction and the misuse of power to inflict oppression, racism and even genocide."

And here's a brief example of the insightful thinking you'll find here. Greenberg writes: "From asexual reproduction, life has moved to sexual selection; from chemical and instinct-governed behavior, life has matured to include emotional reactions and the capacity to love. The Torah describes this process in its language. Humans, like all life, are planted in the ground of the Divine. Just as plants rooted in alkaline soil evolve to become more alkaline and more absorptive of the nutrients in the ground, life itself absorbs the distinctive God energy and evolves to become more and more like its ground, the Divine."

A bonus: At the end of the book is an easy-to-read chart describing what Greenberg calls "the three great eras of Jewish history." If you are Jewish or if you know any Jews -- or are just curious about them -- this book can be a valuable resource.

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P.S.: I've written this special column for The Kansas City Star today about the U.S. defense secretary's outrageous cancellation of the recently announced plea bargain in which three of the 9/11 terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay Prison would plead guilty to the murder of nearly 3,000 people in exchange for avoiding the death penalty. For members of many 9/11 families like mine, this was another painful gut punch.

Why this religious idea must be at America's political center

An upended plea deal. Now what?

First, news broke last night that the U.S. secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, has "revoked plea deals agreed to earlier this week with the man accused of masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and two accomplices, who are held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba," as this Reuters story reported. As a member of a 9/11 family who applauded the deal, I'm beyond disappointed. I need many more details to know whether this is a final decision or something else. The plea deal would have required the three men to plead guilty to murdering almost 3,000 people in return for not being subject to the death penalty. It was the right deal to make after all these years, but now it's unclear how our government plans to deal with these men, whom it had tortured after they were captured.

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As Americans are well aware, our political landscape has been altered rather dramatically with the recent decision by President Joe Biden to withdraw from this year's presidential race in favor of having Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket.

Add to that the Republican Party's decision to renominate former President Donald Trump -- despite him being a convicted felon and the instigator of an insurrection against the very government he wants to head again.

And to that add Trump's decision to select as his running mate Sen. J.D. Vance, who has labeled women without biological children, including Harris, "childless cat ladies" with "no direct stake" in America.

I will soon get to what any of this has to do with faith matters, the presumed subject of this blog. So hang on.

It's pretty clear that a lot of people who voted for Trump in 2016, when he won in the Electoral College but not in the popular vote -- and in 2020, when he lost across the board -- did so out of a sense of resentment for feeling ignored or left out of the American dream despite their contributions to the country, a sense that Vance affirmed several years ago in his interesting book Hillbilly Elegy. (The Democratic Party, to its shame, ignored many of these feeling-ignored people.)

It's my theory that at least some of that sense of grievance -- and maybe a large part of it -- goes back to the unwise 1971 decision to create an all-volunteer military (starting in 1973) after the deeply flawed draft system was abandoned. The gifted author Marilynne Robinson makes illuminating reference to that in a recent article called "Agreeing to Our Harm" in The New York Review of Books.

She notes that in the Vietnam War era, college students (like me then) could get a deferment (as I did) as long as they were full-time students (as I was for four years). The result, she writes, is that "universities became associated with draft dodging." This gave the appearance -- because it was the reality -- that people who could afford to go to college (including those who, like me, barely could afford it) were given benefits unavailable to those who could not go or who chose not to. As Robinson notes, this was an "immunity" the government offered to some "from the stark claim the government was making on the lives of the population as a whole."

So, she writes, universities became "centers of resistance to the war, an opposition that could not entirely mitigate the appearance, or the reality, that some lives were being treated as having more value than others."

And right there Robinson points to a system that acts in a way contrary to the foundational religious idea (later expressed in America's founding documents) that all people are of equal value in the eyes of God and, thus, should never be treated as second-class citizens.

The resentment that such a draft/deferment system fostered was later compounded when our national leaders decided to scrap the draft and rely on an all-volunteer military. Today that military is predominantly made up of people who, in the Vietnam era, would not have been found in college. Rather, the military today comes largely from working-class adults who understand that the all-volunteer system puts them in harm's way much more than it does more well-to-do, college-educated people who avoid military service by not volunteering for it.

From there the resentment builds as people also notice how various social and economic systems are created to benefit people who are more highly educated and wealthy. No wonder politicians who appeal to and exploit that resentment get elected.

One possible answer to this system of fundamental inequality of opportunity and duty would be to restore the draft but then also require -- of those physically and mentally capable -- a period of national or community service equal to the minimum length of service required by a military draft. That would level the playing field in many ways and remove at least some of the cause for people to feel like the system is rigged against them, an attitude that makes them vulnerable to the politics of retribution and revenge.

One possible good result of a national system that requires some kind of service from everyone is that more people might be real patriots, not the self-named "patriots" of the Q-Anon conspiracy theory followers who caused so much mis- and disinformation damage to America.

When our governmental and social systems are built on the destructive idea that some lives have more value than others, we need to listen to the voice of the world's great religions, which insist that each person is of inestimable value. That idea is what political scientist and author Glenn Tinder once called "the spiritual center of Western politics." And we lose or abandon it at our peril.

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WHERE IS OUR FIRST LOYALTY?

As you may be aware, Israel, in the midst of its war with Hamas, recently (as this piece from The Conversation reports) "sent out the first 1,000 conscription notices to ultra-Orthodox Jewish men, following a unanimous Supreme Court ruling that the government must stop exempting them." The "ultra-Orthodox" are called the Haredim, and some of their leaders don't want them to serve in the Israeli military because they're already in "the army of God." This article explains some of that and raises the question for everyone everywhere what obligations we have to the military of our own country. It's a complicated question about our first loyalty and whether we can be dual citizens of both a nation and the people of God.

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P.S.: More than two years ago here on the blog, I wrote about the first federally led report on the scandal of boarding schools for Native American children who had, in many cases, been forcibly removed from their families and taught to be white kids who speak only English. The feds promised a follow-up report, and it was released the other day with all of its appalling statistics, as this AP story and this Indian Country Today story report. At least 973 Native American children died in the U.S. government’s abusive boarding school system, the report says. There certainly has been progress made in recent years for Indigenous people on this land, but because of such outrages as these boarding schools, there still is much more to do. Voters may wish to pay special attention to which elected officials are committed to helping with all of this and which candidates don't care much.

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ANOTHER P.S.: Recently I wrote this short item about a Nazarene pastor, Thomas Jay Oord, whose denomination had charged him with affirming and advocating for the inclusion of LGBTQ+ members, contrary to the church’s teachings, as this RNS story reports. Now the church, RNS reports, has found Oord "guilty of conduct unbecoming a minister and of teaching doctrines out of harmony with the doctrinal statement of the Church of the Nazarene.” It's a sad result that shows again how damaging it can be to read the Bible as if it condemns homosexual orientation. It doesn't, as I argue in this essay. And the decision places the Church of the Nazarene in league with other religious groups that think it's their job to decide who should be treated as either a second-class citizen or subhuman. In a note that Oord sent out after the verdict, he wrote this: "The Board of Discipline is right about one thing: I’m guilty of aiming to live a life of love. As I see it, loving people fully affirm LGBTQ+ identities, orientations and healthy sexual behavior."

Why the plea agreement from three 9/11 terrorists is laudable

Almost 23 years after terrorists, inspired by badly deformed religious ideas, murdered nearly 3,000 people in the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S., three of the people who planned or in some central way participated in the operation have said yes to a plea agreement that will spare them the death penalty.

The three are: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind under the direction of the late Osama bin Laden, plus Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin ‘Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al-Hawsawi. (Here, by the way, is a more complete story about the agreement from Lawdragon.com.)

I say thank God -- for two results: First, if this agreement is finalized, it will give 9/11 families like mine the opportunity to hear from the terrorists their explanations of the role they played in this international catastrophe and why they participated in it. Second, I'm grateful that the agreement will not add capital punishment to the sordid history of U.S. officials torturing the terrorists while they were in custody.

The families (like mine) whose members were murdered on 9/11 have worked hard to come to this incomplete resolution through such groups as the September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows and others. There's relief but also renewed pain at the loss of such people as my nephew.

Aaron Rugh, chief prosecutor on this case, said this in a letter yesterday to 9/11 families:

"In March 2022, this office notified you that it had entered into negotiations with the defense counsel in this case regarding possible pre-trial agreements. As we entered into these negotiations, members of the Prosecution team and the Director of VWAP (Victim Witness Assistance Program) sent you a letter, and then later met with groups of you in several locations, to discuss the possibility of pre-trial agreements in the case and answer any questions you may have had.

"The Prosecution did so to also solicit your various views and comments on the pre-trial agreements as Victim Family Members (VFMs) of the September 11 attacks, as required by law and regulation. The VFM comments you provided were then communicated by our office to the Convening Authority, the United States Government official empowered by the Secretary of Defense with authority to, among other things, enter into pre-trial agreements on behalf of the United States government. These negotiations have been on-going for the past 27 months, and this letter is sent to inform you that the negotiations have reached resolution with three of the Accused agreeing to plead guilty in this case.

"During the July/August 2024 session of the Commission, Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, Walid Bin ‘Attash and Mustafa al Hawsawi entered into pre-trial agreements in this case with the Convening Authority. In exchange for the removal of the death penalty as a possible punishment, these three Accused have agreed to plead guilty to all of the charged offenses, including the murder of the 2,976 people listed in the charge sheet, and to be later sentenced by a panel of military officers. As part of the pre-trial agreement, the Accused have also agreed to a process to respond to questions submitted by VFMs regarding their roles and reasons for conducting the September 11 attacks, should you have any unanswered questions about the attacks you would like answered."

The agreement leaves two other key prisoners at Guantanamo out of the agreement. So far it's not clear what will happen to them. However, in a Zoom call that I was part of last evening set up by the September Eleventh Families group, we learned that one of the two remaining central prisoners continues to negotiate for a separate plea deal while the other is injured physically and mentally to the point that it's unlikely he'll ever be able to consent to an agreement of any kind.

Three attorneys who have played a part in the negotiations that led to this agreement joined our Zoom call last night and generally expressed confidence that, in the end, it will be approved by authorities as well as by the prisoners and go into effect, though they acknowledge that the cases against all the prisoners held at Guantanamo have been complicated, lengthy and unpredictable for many reasons, including a few good ones. So it's too early to think that the cases against these three men have been settled for good.

Every time there is some kind of news story that relates to the 2001 terrorist attacks, of course, the families of those who perished are forced to relive the horrors of the day and to feel the excruciating pain of loss again. Which makes this long, long process seem unconscionable in the way it has battered families.

Still, there were brief words of congratulations on last evening's Zoom call, but no serious celebrating, even though the families organization has worked hard to make sure any plea agreement would allow families to ask hard questions of the terrorists so they can better understand why they engaged in this murderous madness. And that ability is part of the agreement.

If I could ask the three men any single question, it would be the one I raised in my book (I gave you a link to it above with the words "my nephew") about the murder of Karleton D. B. Fyfe: "What made you think that such a cruel act of ghastly destruction against people you didn't even know could be sanctioned by the religion you claimed to follow, Islam?" My hope is that, by now, they would confess that they were horribly wrong and acknowledge that Islam would never sanction such an act.

Until we've had a chance to ask such questions, however, we'll have to continue waiting -- but today I wait with a little more hope than what I had when yesterday began.

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