Bill's Faith Matters blog

Must we rely only on rare heroes to help desperate immigrants?

The anti-immigrant rhetoric we're hearing in this presidential election time is nothing new in American history. It is, however, mystifyingly paradoxical coming from citizens who make up a nation of immigrants (excepting, of course, for Indigenous residents who, just 100 years ago this year, finally were made legal citizens of the U.S.).

Daniel Greene (pictured here), who teaches history at Northwestern University and who is what's called a "Subject Matter Expert" at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., was in Kansas City last week to speak about all of this and more at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence. His appearance was sponsored by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education (on the board of which I serve).

Greene first focused on 1930s America, which was struggling through the Great Depression just as Adolf Hitler was seizing and abusing power in Germany.

It was a fraught time everywhere and when careers and lives hang in the balance, sometimes people of faith abandon what the great world religions have tried to teach them. In this case, the idea -- rooted in Judaism and re-emphasized in Christianity -- of protecting the weak, the homeless, the immigrant, the hungry, often got shelved. (Islam, by the way, teaches that all human beings are immigrants.)

The result of that abandonment of principle was a strong wave of anti-immigration sentiment just when Germany's and all of Europe's Jews were facing an existential threat from Hitler's Nazis.

Greene said that he often gets asked this question from people who don't have a good grasp of history: "Why didn't the Jews just leave?" Well, early in the period, some Jews did just that, finding at least temporary refuge in some western European countries, in what later would become the new state of Israel and in several North and South American countries, including the United States.

But, Greene said, "the question should not have been 'Why didn't the Jews leave Nazi Germany?'" Instead, "we want them to ask, 'Why did the United States make it so difficult for immigrants to enter?'"

One answer, he said, was that public opinion polling in the '30s made it clear that a large majority of Americans opposed allowing more immigrants to enter the U.S. And given the Depression and the accompanying high rate of unemployment, that opposition makes at least economic sense even if it violates religious teachings. Elected officials knew that if they adopted a strong pro-immigrant stance, they'd likely be voted out of office.

But the problem is that once you begin to see certain people as undesirable, that attitude can quickly escalate to raw racism, to hatred of "those people," to the kind of bizarre language of bitterness that, as a child, I'd occasionally hear from my maternal grandfather, himself an immigrant from Sweden. He simply had no room for people he called "the Slavs," including a family who lived across from my grandparents' home on East 12th Street in Streator, Ill. My mother was not allowed to play with the children of that family.

I had to ask my older sisters and my parents what that was all about, but I never got a full or satisfying answer, though they found Grandpa's anti-Slav views distasteful and made that clear to me.

So today we again find anti-immigrant rhetoric spewed about by some people seeking political office, including former President Donald Trump. I'm not going to repeat his pet-eating lies and other hateful nonsense here. But if you want an analysis of his thoughts about that, here's one source.

Greene, however, said he did not want to leave the impression that Americans in the 1930s and their government did nothing but evil things when it came to immigration or that somehow America was as bad or worse than the Nazis. He then told several stories of heroic Americans who went way out of their way to save a few Jewish people from Europe. They were thrilling, inspiring stories of heroic citizens who, like so many of their neighbors, could have done nothing -- or worse. (They reminded me of the people Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn and I wrote about in our 2009 book, They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust.)

The world is in a different place almost 100 years later. And yet immigration and the existence of refugees remain difficult matters to resolve in generative ways. Our elected officials for years and years have failed to create fair and equitable immigration policies, and if there is no major reshuffling of power in Washington in the next election, that is likely to continue.

But my question is why so many current American citizens -- many of them people of faith -- seem so willing to ignore or reverse what their religions historically have taught them about how to treat immigrants, the homeless, the stateless, the people who are fleeing for their lives.

I'll wait for your answers.

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AFTER 20 YEARS, CHINA FINALLY FREES A PASTOR

If you needed more evidence of how horrifically the government of China treats people of faith, you need only to read this Associated Press story about an American pastor who was just finally released after 20 years in prison there for helping a church that was not authorized by Chinese officials. The Chinese communist government is among the world's worst offenders when it comes to suppressing religious liberty. Our government should be doing everything it can to call China on this and to make sure the world knows of China's continuing efforts to obliterate freedom.

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P.S.: Speaking of the Holocaust, as I was above, in early 2021, I wrote here about a new book co-authored by D.Z. Stone and by a former German teacher who helped his students uncover a brutal Nazi-era story in their town. The news now is that Germany has awarded the teacher, Dieter Vaupel, the "Merit on Ribbon of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic" of Germany for his work in that regard. You can read about that award here. Vaupel was a true patriot willing to tell a bitter story about his own country, and Germany has done the right thing by honoring that work.

Work on 'reparations' needs more voices of faith

Say the word "reparations," and many white people will picture handing cash to Black people as a way to make up for slavery.

There's a bit of truth in that idea, but it's so woefully inadequate that it prevents a lot of people from exploring the idea of acknowledging the destructive, bleak decisions and policies in our nation's past, then seeing the still-continuing results of all that and finally deciding to do something that can create a better, more just future for everyone.

There are many reasons why faith communities should be helping to lead the campaign for reparations. The most important one is that some of what happened in our nation's history -- from cultural and physical genocide against Indigenous people to enslavement of Black people to the later discriminatory laws and practices that kept most of them in poverty (or prison or both) -- violated a core principle found in all the great world religions: The idea that each person is of inestimable value because each person bears the image of the divine.

But in many places where communities are considering options for reparations, the work is being led not so much by people of faith who are acting as representatives of their religions but by politically appointed folks who see their work as a secular civic duty. In some cases, including in Kansas City, they are doing good work toward finding some kind of solution that can garner enough political support to be implemented. And I wish them success. You can follow the work of the Kansas City Reparations Coalition here and the Mayor's Commission on Reparations here.

But in much of this work, the voices representing institutional religion seem either mostly silent or unable to get much of a public hearing and response for their ideas.

So I was glad to see the current issue of an independent magazine, The Presbyterian Outlook, which covers my denomination (and for which I used to write a monthly column), the Presbyterian Church (USA). It has devoted nearly all the space in this issue to answering the question posed on the cover: "Reparations: How do we right the wrongs of history?"

In one of the articles in that issue, the Rev. Jermaine Ross-Allam, director of the denomination's Center for the Repair of Historic Harms, writes this: "When the Christian descendants of those peoples who committed European colonialism's originating harms finally show up in public -- locally and nationally -- to acknowledge that reparations and reparatory justice are right, necessary and possible, the church can then mobilize other community members. . ."

And William Yoo, who teaches at Columbia Theological Seminary, writes this: "My hope is anchored in my conviction that we must see our church as it is: the work of saints and sinners who did both good and evil, all in the name of God. The sinful history of racial prejudice within our Presbyterian heritage is simultaneously a sobering reminder of human fallibility and a call to enact justice by repairing relations with Black Presbyterians today."

Each faith community has its own history that is part of a larger national story about slavery and its aftermath, a story with both heroes and villains. Which means each one must take the time to understand what happened, publicly acknowledge what went wrong and take actions that can begin to repair what was broken -- often broken on purpose.

Many white Americans, like me, were born into a system that dehumanized other people and, in that process, we benefited in various ways. My job, and the job of others in that category, is to acknowledge that history and to start the work needed to repair the world.

If you are part of a faith community, ask yourself whether that community is responding to this issue in generative ways? If not, maybe you can be part of the solution.

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CAN WE CHARGE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WITH MORAL CRIMES?

Who is morally responsible for actions taken or induced by artificial intelligence? Ah, excellent question. And this RNS article wrestles with that increasingly important question. The authors of the piece write: "According to many modern philosophers, rational agents can be morally responsible for their actions, even if their actions were completely predetermined – whether by neuroscience or by code. But most agree that the moral agent must have certain capabilities that self-driving taxis almost certainly lack, such as the ability to shape its own values. AI systems fall in an uncomfortable middle ground between moral agents and nonmoral tools." It's one more reason that theologians and others who guide our religious lives should be paying more attention to artificial intelligence and both its advantages and its moral vulnerabilities.

The failure behind 9/11 continues to produce a broken world

If Karleton Douglas Beye Fyfe -- a name almost big enough to hold his 6-5 frame and winsome personality -- had died in, say, a car wreck or of cancer at age 31, it would have been a personal disaster for my extended family. (The first photo here shows his name at the 9/11 Memorial in New York City.)

But my nephew KDBF, as we called him, died 23 years ago today as a passenger on the first plane that the 9/11 terrorists slammed into the World Trade Center. So his death instantly became something much larger -- a symbol of radical violence rooted in religiously based vengeance for what the leaders of the perpetrators were convinced were American national sins that could be absolved in no other way.

The nearly 3,000 people who were murdered on 9/11 were, in effect, given the death penalty to pay for what the terrorists' leaders believed were our American government's and our culture's violations of their rigid theological standards.

It was far from the first time that misguided religion had led to bloodshed. Nor did such faith-based horrors end with 9/11, either.

But what they all had in common was the radical failure of some people of faith to understand and act on the key concept at the root of almost every generative religious tradition -- the inestimable value of every human being, a concept that springs from the conviction that each person bears the image of God.

That concept may have been articulated before Judaism enshrined it in its sacred scriptures -- words eventually adopted as part of the Christian Bible and studied by Muslims because Islam requires them to understand the Bible so they can better understand the stories in the Qur'an that are rooted in the Bible. But the book of Genesis is where most people find it today.

As Rabbi Irving Greenberg writes in his new book, The Triumph of Life, "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 Godly energy and evolves to become more and more like its ground, the Divine. . .That is why the bible describes the human being, the most developed form of life thus far, as being in 'the image of God.' This means that human life, however finite and limited, nevertheless possesses capacities so striking and powerful that they bring to mind the operations of the unlimited capabilities of the Creator." (I recently reviewed Greenberg's book here.)

(The small photo here shows a stone marker where KDBF was buried in North Carolina.)

The failure to understand that foundational concept about the preciousness of each human being helps to explain why the 9/11 terrorists murdered Karleton and so many others. And why already this year some 100-plus people in Kansas City have been fatal victims of gun violence. It's why so many of our social systems treat people of different racial and economic backgrounds in prejudicious ways. And it's why the concept of white supremacy has had such staying power.

Had he lived, Karleton (pictured here a few months before his death), would be 54 now. His extended family, including me, continue to miss him like crazy -- his quick humor, his touching sensitivities, his loving, giving nature, his capacious brain.

But as I think about such things today, I am painfully aware that the primary reason he's not still alive today is that some people either were never taught or they never understood or they just willfully violated the idea that each human being is of infinite value because each one bears the image of the creator.

Our continuing failure to live as if that's true is why the world remains in desperate need of what Jewish people call tikkun olam, or a commitment to repair of the world. Let's be about that task today in memory not just of Karleton but of all people who have ever fallen victim to this failure.

(My book about 9/11 and the trauma it put my family and the world through -- and what we can do about that now -- can be found here.)

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A NEW NATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER EDITOR

There's some good, Kansas City-related news about The National Catholic Reporter, the independent newspaper based here in KC. As this RNS story reports, James V. Grimaldi, a member of the Grimaldi family reared here in KC, has been named NCR's executive editor. Grimaldi comes to NCR from The Wall Street Journal and brings a wealth of experience and a history of great reporting (he's been part of reporting teams that have won three Pulitzer Prizes). His brother Mike and I worked together for a time at The Kansas City Star, and I've also known his brother Tom. Mike's wife, Carol, is a leader in my Presbyterian congregation. James Grimaldi will work from NCR's offices in Washington, D.C. The paper is in many ways the progressive voice of the Catholic Church in the U.S. and has been a leader in covering such stories as the abuse scandal involving priests and the bishops who covered for them. I used to write a regular column for NCR, though now I just do occasional book reviews for the publication.

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P.S.: A little KC-area seminary news: Central Seminary (also known as Central Baptist Theological Seminary) will move this December from its current location at 6601 Monticello Road in Shawnee to a new, smaller location at 8620 W. 110th St. in Overland Park. Central is an American Baptist (not Southern) seminary. The Southern Baptist seminary in our area is Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, North. More details about the Central move can be found here.

Loving a forest can teach people of faith how to love congregations

Forests -- not unlike religious congregations -- are profoundly complicated beings. And both often need help to remain healthy.

Which is why I want to introduce you to a lovely and engaging new book, How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World, by Ethan Tapper. (The book's publication date is next Tuesday, but it can be ordered now.)

The author did not write this to help people in congregations think about how to keep their faith communities healthy. That idea might have been pretty far from his mind, I'm guessing.

But so much of what he writes -- quite elegantly, I might add -- corresponds to the questions of the health of congregations, so I'm going to draw from the insights of this Vermont forester and suggest how and where they might apply to faith communities.

Of course, you may read this book as simply a well-written look at one man's commitment to stopping the degradation of a forest that he now owns and to return it to health in a balanced, diverse way -- an individual commitment that may have broad and positive ecological applications. And that may inspire you to do what you can to promote ecological sense and justice. That would be a wonderful use of this book.

But because the interests of this blog tend toward matters of faith, I will draw from it some lessons that congregational leaders might think about applying to rescue declining faith communities.

After finally getting his college degree, Tapper, who earlier in life had lost sight in one eye in an accident, began work as a forester in Vermont. Part of his job was "helping private land-owners understand how to care for their forests."

He eventually bought some land in northwest Vermont and "began to truly understand how forest management could be restorative and regenerative, how it could enrich forests, how it could help forests rediscover their true capacity for life. I began to truly understand how the cutting of a tree could be an expression of compassion and humility, an act of healing, an act of love."

And so it can be with congregational management. Sometimes in religious communities what goes wrong and leads toward their diminishment are things that have been allowed to grow without pruning, to invade areas of ministry the way non-native plants invade a forest to its detriment. The leaders of houses of worship must find ways to grow effective worship services, healthy programs and various approaches to ministry by knowing what to change and when, what to fertilize and what to let die.

And if that's true for programming and worship approaches, it's also true of leadership. There is a time for long-time leaders to hand things over to younger members, even if the elders are worried that the "kids" are immature and won't know what they're doing. Change isn't always life-giving, for sure, but lack of change almost never is.

Here's one way Tapper puts that idea as it relates to forest management: "(F)orests are socioecological systems (and). . .our lives are forever stitched into the green flesh of the biosphere, that the separation of the human world from the wild world is an illusion. We cannot care for ecosystems without recognizing that we will always rely on them and we will always tax them, that human life will always be precious and worth nourishing and will always come at a cost."

What's important, he writes (and here what he says applies directly to both forests and congregations), is "a vision of relationship and responsibility, freedom and power, resilience and humility, legacy, beauty and change. . .In a world that is both human and wild, both wounded and vibrant, both suppressed and emergent, this is a vision both for how we manage forests and take care of ecosystems and how we manage ourselves, how we take care of each other."

Tapper draws an interesting distinction between forests and orchards that he began to notice once he "learned to reimagine the forest as something messy and imperfect, complex and undefinable, dynamic and expansive over space and time." Congregations that become well-ordered, no-surprise orchards can survive for a time, but in the end they will lack the dynamism and the resources to grow and thrive like a healthy forest because they fear the very changes that will save them.

When Tapper purchased his Vermont forest, what he found was "a monoculture of diseased beech saplings." It took courage and foresight for him to begin pruning (and, in some cases, eliminating) things and replanting or at least opening up space for nature to take its course. If that reminds you of some religious congregations, then the leadership of them needs to learn the hard lessons for life-giving pruning and restoration.

There is much more to this sweet and disturbing new book, but if congregations are to learn anything from its lessons that were meant for forests, one of those lessons is to make changes with humility, recognizing that time may prove those decisions to have been mistaken. But the bigger mistake will have been not to try.

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WHY ARE THERE SO MANY EXORCISM FILMS NOW?

Filmmakers are producing more and more films about exorcism, and Joseph Holmes, the author of this Religion Unplugged piece about this trend, thinks it has to do with the shifting place of religion in American culture. As he writes, "People who can speak the language of both faith and film will be in high demand as the people most capable of speaking to one of the only audiences will have a unified meta narrative. And because that unified meta-narrative is specifically religious, the stories being told will likely be more overtly religious as well." The internet and social media have fractured the culture in countless ways, and finding an audience for any sort of entertainment, sport or idea is increasingly difficult. Maybe the culture needs an exorcism, too.

Jesus was more than a morals teacher, but he was that, too

The idea that Jesus of Nazareth was a great teacher of morals isn't new, but it has something of a rocky history. Which is to say that some Christians over the years have thought it was a wildly inadequate thing to say about Jesus.

For instance, the famous British theologian and author C.S. Lewis, in his classic book Mere Christianity, argues that to say he was simply a moral teacher misses the point:

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -- on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg -- or else he would be the Devil Himself."

Well. Oh, my. And similar responses. Lewis had a certain way with words.

The other end of the who-was-Jesus spectrum, however, tends to affirm what Christianity calls the full divinity and full humanity of Christ and his work of salvation but then ignore his moral teachings.

David P. Gushee, who teaches Christian ethics at Mercer University, has written a new book (to be published Sept. 10), The Moral Teachings of Jesus, that looks at 40 different moral teachings of Jesus and tries to unpack the meaning of them for people today.

Gushee seems to be in essential harmony with Lewis' sentiment, though he almost certainly wouldn't have worded it the way Lewis did. And Gushee's argument is that Jesus, the incarnation of God, was, in fact, a wonderful teacher of morals, though often the teaching is so deep that it takes some unpacking to find the core message.

Indeed, Gushee writes, "Jesus says, give me a pure heart and deeds of mercy rather than ritual purity, if a choice must be made." It's a point that Jesus made over and over, as Gushee emphasizes in this new book.

In parables, sermons and conversations with his disciples, Jesus is almost always teaching how to live a moral life, and as Gushee correctly summarizes, "true greatness" for Jesus "takes the form of servanthood." No wonder Christianity is a difficult faith to live out consistently and with grace.

Gushee believes that the "Beatitudes," found in Matthew 5's account of the "Sermon on the Mount," constitute "the most significant body of moral teachings, not just of Jesus, but of any biblical figure." This counter-cultural list of "blessings" shows Jesus challenging the conventional wisdom of his day -- in a memorable way.

Starting with the Beatitudes, Gushee writes, Jesus is "offering a description of the kinds of people who are ready to participate with him in interrupting this timeless, fallen world with deliverance. He is offering a kingdom ethic." Yes, and it's an ethic that runs counter to much of today's focus on me-first, on wealth as a measure of importance, on limiting one's community to people like you.

Indeed, Gushee writes, "Jesus teaches very hard things, offering an aspirational ethic, pretty much impossible, an ideal to strive for but always beyond our reach." And: "Jesus teaches a scale of values that is upside down from standard human values." If only we could hear that message from his brief time on Earth.

In the chapter on loving our enemies, Gushee notes that "Jesus is calling us to action, not feelings. . .People who are determined to love their enemies are the freest and, in some ways, the most powerful people in the world."

If Christians are to "obey God's will out of a humble, meek, just, merciful, pure heart that is seeking God's kingdom," Gushee writes, it "would define a 'Christian' not simply as someone who believes certain doctrines but as somebody who lives a certain kind of life. That is not how Christianity is defined in many churches." You can almost hear a deep sigh from the author there.

As Gushee rightly concludes, "our moral work on Earth is not about judging who is good and who is evil, but attending to the battle between the two that goes on within ourselves."

Oh, and not rooting for evil.

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FAITHFUL SISTERS CHALLENGE CORPORATE AMERICA

One reason I know a little about the women religious who are part of the Benedictine community at Mount St. Scholastica in Atchison, Kan., is that my wife is a Benedictine oblate and her group of oblates does periodic retreats there under the guidance of one of the sisters. So I was especially intrigued to read this Associated Press story about how the 80 nuns there are among corporate America’s most persistent shareholder activists.

They understand that their religious beliefs require some kind of response to help fix this wounded world, and they have chosen to make sure America's corporations (well, some of them, anyway) are considering matters of economic justice as they also make money for their shareholders. As the AP reports, the sisters "have taken on the likes of Google, Target and Citigroup — calling on major companies to do everything from AI oversight to measuring pesticides to respecting the rights of Indigenous people." To which I say, good for the sisters. See what you say after you read the story.

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P.S.: Human rights violations continue in appalling ways in Turkey. Which is why I wrote this blog post and this one, both in 2019, and why I'm giving you several links here to more recent unjustified actions taken by the Turkish government. In early May, as this article notes, Turkish authorities "detained 14 minors, all reportedly aged 15, during raids in Istanbul for alleged links to the Gülen movement." A freedom-advocacy group called Advocates of Silenced Turkey has reacted by releasing this recent call to action. It also has released this report and this one as supplemental information. If you are in the Kansas City area, the organization that knows the most about all of this and that can tell you how you can help is the Dialogue Institute of Kansas City. And it wouldn't hurt to let you members of the House and Senate know you want them to be aware of all this and to help shape U.S. policy that will oppose this kind of abuse. 

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ANOTHER 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.