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."