Bill's Faith Matters blog

Some post-election political guidance for clergy and congregations

Since the recent election -- and even before -- leaders of religious congregations have been struggling with the question of whether and how to be "political" in what they say and in how they guide congregants to act.

For Christians, it's important to recognize that what became Christianity after its eventual split from Judaism showed its political nature from the very beginning. For instance, the first creed of the church was the simple phrase "Jesus is Lord." And that was a deeply political statement because it asserted, in effect, that in that Roman colony of Israel, Caesar was not Lord.

But there's a difference between being political and being partisan. The latter is to be avoided by American religious leaders, in part because being partisan may jeopardize their tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service. But it does not mean that congregations and their leaders can't openly discuss, wrestle with and live out political approaches to some of life's issues.

In this commentary by leaders of Kansas Interfaith Action, which describes itself as "a statewide, faith-based issue-advocacy organization representing moderate and progressive people of faith in Kansas," Rabbi Moti Rieber and the Rev. Dr. Mandy Todd discuss several of their recommendations to other clergy about all of this. It's worth a read.

Their particular concern is that the incoming Trump administration seems in many ways to promote the abhorrent idea of Christian Nationalism, even White Christian Nationalism, which amounts to a radical misreading of the gospels and a refutation of the idea that Americans should be free to follow any religious tradition without being coerced by the government.

Rieber and Todd write this: "The most important thing religious leadership can do at a time like this is continue to hold and articulate our core sacred values – love, inclusiveness, diversity, nonviolence, caring for the least of these, caring for the stranger. These are the things that last; these are the teachings our religions are based on. If we compromise our values for the sake of political expedience or even job security, then who are we and what are we doing?"

Then they offer this: "There are two issues that we believe any mainstream congregation should be able to talk about. The first is LGBT inclusion. Every Mainline denomination, at least on the national level and usually on the local district level as well, is affirming. Many of the people who are against full inclusion have left already, yet those who remain often maintain control of their church’s position on the issue. Denominational resources abound that can help any skillful pastor have this conversation with their congregation, which can lead to fruitful spiritual development for the whole community.

"The second issue is immigration, about which the Bible could not be more clear. This can be spoken about in terms of caring for the stranger or being against racism or xenophobia. Yes, people might perceive that as being 'political' or 'partisan' but that’s because they are political and partisan and can’t see anything outside of that framing."

In a time when participation in institutional religion in the U.S. is waning -- and has been for decades -- it's important that leaders of religious traditions, including lay leaders, not abandon the core ideas of their faith. That doesn't mean weekly anti-Trump sermons. (I wouldn't put up with that, either.) But it does mean speaking the truth about the responsibilities that people of faith have to love the seemingly unlovable, to care for the downtrodden, to welcome the stranger and to do all those other counter-cultural acts that God (however one identifies God) clearly requires.

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INDIA MOVES DEEPER INTO ANTI-MUSLIM HATRED

In rather sharp contrast to the interfaith peace and harmony envisioned by Kansas Interfaith Action (see above), the political leaders of India, where I spent two years of my boyhood, seem increasingly to be adopting the attitude that Muslims are a destructive, repulsive force in the country and must be dealt with harshly so that Hindu Nationalism can succeed.

This article by my friend Markandey Katju, a former justice on India's Supreme Court, offers his take on this disaster.

"Of late," Katju writes, "fresh atrocities on Muslims have occurred, sparking national outrage. For instance, in Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh, a Muslim couple was forced to give up their newly purchased home in an upscale residential colony after facing protests from Hindu residents.

"Protesting residents raised slogans against the former owner, Dr Ashok Bajaj, asking him to take the house back. The protesters argued that the couple’s presence near a local temple was 'unacceptable' and cited concerns about the safety of their women.

"The Hindu residents, led by figures like Megha Arora, demanded that the house sale be revoked. Under pressure, the couple decided to resell the house to a Hindu family, highlighting the deep-seated discrimination and segregation still thriving in Indian urban centers."

(Just so you know, Katju identifies himself as a Hindu atheist, meaning an atheist who comes from a Hindu background as a Kashmiri Brahmin.)

In any case, India's current leadership has besmirched the country's reputation as a civil society, and, as Katju writes, it could get worse. It all breaks my heart as someone who, for most of two years, lived on a college campus in India near a Muslim village, played with Muslim children and was friends with many Hindus and Indian Christians as well.

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P.S.: I have abandoned disgusting X, formerly Twitter, and have moved to Bluesky, which so far isn't disgusting. You can follow me on Bluesky here, and I hope you will.

Can nature's sharing systems be a model for our economy?

Scripture from many religious traditions has things to say about economic matters and about how we are to treat others, particularly those in economic need.

In the New Testament, for instance, we read this in I Timothy 6:10:

"For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains."

Still true today.

And in the Hebrew Bible, the first use of money occurs in Genesis 23, when Abraham, after some negotiation -- and to be fair to the land's owner -- buys a plot of land for 400 shekels to bury his wife Sarah.

The question today for people of faith in the U.S. is whether our economic system -- which I would characterize as semi-regulated capitalism -- works well for everyone. The obvious answer is no. If it did, the poverty rate would be zero. Instead, it was 11.1 percent last year, the latest time for which U.S. Census Bureau figures are available. (That figure represented a very small decrease from the year before.)

So what can or should we do about that? There are some wonderfully provocative suggestions in a new book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, a book I recommended here on the blog earlier this year.

"In times of crisis," she writes, what she calls the "gift economy surges up through the rubble of an earthquake or the wreckage of a hurricane. . .When human survival is threatened, compassionate acts overrule market economies. People give freely to one another, and bonds of ownership disappear when everyone pools resources of food and labor and blankets in solidarity. When systems of governance and market economies of debt are disrupted, networks of mutual aid arise."

True, but is it realistic to think that something like a "gift economy" could replace our current capitalistic economic model?

Kimmerer isn't so starry-eyed as to suggest exactly that, but she does advocate modifications to our economic activity -- changes that can be modeled after what is seen in nature, when, for instance, serviceberry trees provide food for birds in a complicated, mutually beneficial relationship of soil, seed, air, water, animals and more.

Such changes might challenge the common standard that speaks of economies being based on the idea of scarcity (when bird flu cuts down the supply of eggs, the price of eggs rises). As she writes, "With scarcity as the main principle, the mindset that follows is based on commodification of goods and services."

So, she writes, "the challenge is to cultivate our inherent capacity for gift economies without the catalyst of catastrophe. We have to believe in our neighbors, that our shared interests supersede the impulses of selfishness."

She suggests we pay closer attention to how organic systems work and engage in what she calls "biomimicry," or learning from nature.

"Ecological economists," she writes, "ask how we might build economic systems that meet citizens' needs while aligning with ecological principles that allow long-term sustainability for people and for the planet."

One way to move toward that, she suggests, is to encourage the development of "intentional communities," an idea I wrote about a few years ago here.

What I especially like about Kimmerer's writing is that she doesn't make excuses for systems -- whether ecological, economic or something else -- that don't work for everybody. She challenges them and insists that we can do better.

Kimmerer is a biologist and teacher, but at times she sounds like a prophetic moral voice calling the rest of us to use our own prophetic voices to change broken or inadequate systems. And that'll always preach.

(By the way, until a few years ago I had never heard of serviceberry trees. Then a friend gave me small one, which I planted in our back yard. But within a year or so of that planting, we sold that home. If the new owners discover me sneaking a look over what is now their backyard fence, it's because I'm checking to see if that tree thrived or died. Hoping for the former, and so, no doubt, are the birds that eat the tree's berries.)

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MISSUSING AND DISTORTING DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

German Lutheran martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer has been much in the news lately because of a deeply flawed new movie about him ("Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin.") and because, well, of the times in which we live. If you know only one thing about Bonhoeffer you know that he was involved in an unsuccessful plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler and that the plot's failure led to Bonhoeffer's execution at the end of World War II. But this RNS opinion column says that today's left and right political sides are both misusing Bonhoeffer to score points. Not surprising.

It's hard to pull someone out of his or her historical context and find a perfect fit for today's circumstances. And that's clearly true of the complicated but fascinating Bonhoeffer. That's not to say that his books, especially The Cost of Discipleship, aren't valuable today. Sometimes those books are crucial for an understanding of what it might mean today to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. But it's far too easy to cast Bonhoeffer into a left or right hero by distorting his life.

As Charles Marsh, who teaches religious studies at the University of Virginia, writes in the piece to which I've linked you, "The relative dearth of explicit political discussion in his writings has made it easy for those with differing theological and ideological stances to cast Bonhoeffer in their own image."

People are doing it with Bonhoeffer and they're doing it today with Luigi Mangione, the alleged assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

Also: Here's a piece in which the author asserts that "it isn’t just conservatives who wish to claim Bonhoeffer. I suspect Bonhoeffer would be appalled to see how progressives are using his name, as well." 

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P.S.: Thousands of faith leaders and others across the U.S. are pleading with President Joe Biden to commute all federal death sentences before he leaves office. Capital punishment has been dwindling as a response to terrible crimes, but it's still around and needs to be put to death itself. Here is a copy of the letter to Biden and a list of its signers. Feel free to write to Biden yourself. You can do that here. And here is the Good Faith Media story about all of this.

As 'private religion' gains ground, what's being lost?

Each day I become more aware that I've not been introduced to many interesting writers whose thoughts have complicated the thinking of readers. One I recently discovered is Charles Taylor, a Canadian philosopher who taught at McGill University and who has written piles of books.

Out of curiosity, I picked up his 2014 book, Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays. Reading Taylor takes some work, some commitment and access to a dictionary.

But I was drawn into his essay called "The Future of the Religious Past," in which he mentions "a definite movement toward unbelief. . .among the educated classes," a movement that began to show up in the late 19th Century. Some of this was in response to a change in emphasis among some people of faith who began to move from deep engagement in communal faith practices -- regular worship services at which hymns are sung together, creeds are recited and sacraments (baptism and Holy Communion, primarily) observed -- to a more personal style of religion, which can include meditation, contemplative prayer and other practices that can be done by oneself.

It's what Taylor calls "personal religion," and the core question he raises is whether it is more or less important than what we might call "communal religion." (Taylor favors the latter, though he makes room for the former.) He uses the term "enchanted world" to refer to the kind of collective ritual that religion offers and the term "disenchantment" to refer to a move away from corporate worship and toward a more personal religious style.

The period of obvious religious disenchantment that the U.S. has witnessed for at least the last, say, 70 years has corresponded to an increase in personal religion and a growing willingness to describe oneself as "spiritual but not religious," a term that I often find is almost meaningless except as a way of saying that someone is either theologically illiterate or has been injured by institutional religion to the point of needing to abandon it.

So let's think a bit today about personal vs. communal religion.

And let's start with Timothy Gombis, an affiliate professor of New Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary, who writes in this essay that "(t)he documents of the NT (New Testament), with a few exceptions, are addressed to communities and not to individuals. Many of us know this and it may not be too shocking, but the significances of this reality must continue to transform how we envision Christian identity.

"Nobody in the first century had a Bible. Most people in the first few Christian generations were illiterate and couldn’t have read their Bibles even if they had them. When Scripture was read, it was read to communities who listened to it. When NT letters were circulated and read, they were read aloud by individuals to communities."

Indeed, one of the attractions to people who became First Century Christ followers was the sense of community and the way that community welcomed everyone, especially society's poor and marginalized. Inside of the community, of course, there were things people could do and did do to practice the faith in individualistic ways, but the sense of community seemed to be insistently dominant over what Taylor calls individual religion.

Noting a decline in attendance at worship services since the start of the Covid pandemic, Jim Black, author of this Salvation Army article, says that "(t)he unfortunate conclusion is that more and more people are foregoing corporate worship and claim to be substituting personal worship instead."

He suggests people who have moved in that direction risk losing something important: "(T)hrough Jesus, (God) makes it possible for each individual to be in a personal relationship with Him at any time and in any place or circumstance. What more could we need or want? The answer is that by itself, the personal relationship would be sufficient. But in typical God fashion, He wants us to have more than that! He provides a third level of worship and relationship with Him — 'But if we are living in the light, as God is in the light, then we have fellowship with each other, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from all sin.'” Black here is quoting 1 John 1:7. So there's another argument for communal religion over against personal religion.

Finally, I want to share this article about reformer John Calvin from a writer in the Reformed Tradition, which is where, broadly, I locate myself as a member of a Presbyterian Church (USA) congregation, though there are certain points of that tradition with which I argue.

Phil Majorins, author of the article to which I've linked you, writes this: "Calvin starts by framing his theology of worship within the context of church attendance and participation. He understands regular church attendance and community involvement as a  necessary component of Christian discipleship. It is a bedrock that some take for granted. In my own Northern California context, weekly church attendance is a radical idea. Our church has a small core group of weekly attenders, but most 'regular' attenders of our church show up once or twice a month. An individualistic and 'rootless' culture, compounded by little communal pressure to attend church, means that those who choose to come to church really want to be there. On the other hand, this results in stunted individual spiritual growth and difficult soil for growing a vibrant and stable community. This aspect of our ministry is a regular source of frustration."

So private religion, in other words, can result in "stunted individual spiritual growth." I get that. But I also know that there can be -- and needs to be -- room within communal religion for private practices, perhaps in the way that from time to time Jesus sought to escape the demanding crowds. I think that produces a creative tension that can benefit both the individual and the community.

I'm curious about your experience with both communal and private religion and why you prefer one or the other. You can email your thoughts to me at [email protected]. And let me know whether I can quote you if I decide to do a follow-up on this blog post.

(The photo at top today shows the Communion table on a recent Sunday at my church. Holy Communion, or the Eucharist, is widely considered the central sacrament of the Christian church and is an example of communal religion.)

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ANOTHER STAINED-GLASS CEILING SHATTERED

Mother Bethel AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Church in Philadelphia, the historically Black denomination’s founding congregation, just got its first female senior pastor. The Rev. Carolyn Cavaness, that pastor, responded this way: “Who would have ever thought? It’s such a victory on so many different levels.” It is, but how sad that it's taken so long. This should have happened long, long ago. In the same way, it was sad that it took my Presbyterian congregation until this year to call its first female senior pastor, a mere 159 years after our founding. As welcome as these changes are, there are large parts of institutional religion that still want nothing to do with female pastoral leadership. Sigh.

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P.S.: There's good news in the way of journalism that covers religion. Religion News Service, the stories of which I often give you links to, and National Public Radio have announced a new partnership. Among other things, this means that RNS reporters now will be heard on NPR stations reporting on how developments in religion are affecting our lives. The press release to which I linked you adds that "The partnership is funded by grants over a two-year period from Lilly Endowment Inc. to NPR and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations to RNS."

The reasons people leave religion are, in the end, pretty simple

The growth in the number of religiously unaffiliated people in the U.S. -- called the "nones" -- is a news story several decades old.

But the response to this phenomenon from institutional religion's leaders has been haphazard and often not very fruitful. One reason may be that they simply haven't understood very clearly why people have left their congregations and what they're looking for.

The answers aren't all that mysterious, as this Religion News Service opinion column suggests.

Jana Riess, senior RNS columnist, writes about a new book that explores this subject: "In Goodbye Religion: The Causes and Consequences of Secularization, sociologists Ryan Cragun and Jesse M. Smith say the reality is actually pretty boring."

In other words, people leave for mundane reasons. As Riess writes, "Despite many religious Americans’ idea that people leave religion because they wanted to sin, 'it’s a fairly boring story,' Smith said in a recent interview. He and Cragun studied data about time usage in America and found that nonreligious people use their extra time on Sundays to…do more laundry, basically.

“'They’re just doing normal things, right? None of it is crazy. They’re not out at the bars spending hours and hours. They’re spending a little bit more time with their family and a little bit more outdoors. They go hiking, they watch more TV and they get more work done,' Smith said.

"Oh, and, according to the book, they might be a tiny bit more statistically likely to be having sex. Perhaps in between loads of laundry."

One interesting response to the phenomena of people leaving faith communities comes from this column in the current issue of The Christian Century, by Jonathan Tran: "I want to say, if people want to leave the church, let them go. If they think they’ve found greener pastures, why keep them from them? They will have left the church for what the church should have been. And if they want to leave because they lack hope, we’ve already lost them. What we in the church can’t do is change what we are called to in order to keep people from leaving. The goal of church has never been getting people to stay; it’s getting people to come. We believe the best way to get people to come is by being who we are called to be, holding fast to the hope that if we do, they will come."

Riess mentions another interesting reality about the out-flow from institutional religion: "Leaving religion is not just for white men anymore, if it ever was. In past years, the archetype of someone who left religion was a young, well-educated white male. Today, the nonreligious look as diverse as the general population, a function of more and more people either leaving religion (religious exiters) or being born into nonreligious families (cradle nones). As a result, said Cragun, 'Just focusing on demographics doesn’t tell us very much.'”

There are no easy answers to stopping or reversing this phenomenon, but it helps, I think, to remember that everyone is searching for meaning, for purpose, for an understanding of life's core purposes -- to say nothing of the need for community. If congregations aren't providing plenty of opportunities to help people with all of that, those congregations deserve to slip away to nothing.

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A TRICKY PAPAL TRIP TO TURKEY IS COMING

Pope Francis has announced that he will visit Turkey next year, the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, out of which emerged the Nicene Creed, which declared Jesus Christ to be both fully divine and fully human. That gathering in 325 CE was, in some ways, a way for the church to react to Emperor Constantine's desire for unity in the church -- no matter how theological disagreements got settled.

So there are a couple of issues with this trip. One is that it reopens the history of how theological arguments sometimes got resolved in the early Christian church -- via political pressure (from Constantine), who probably didn't have a dog in the fight over defining the nature of Christ. In secular legislative terms, it opens up the law- or creed-making process so that people can see how the sausage is made -- often in a messy, compromised manner. Second, it puts the pontiff in some kind of relationship with the authoritarian leader of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose record on human rights is pretty abysmal. To maintain his moral credibility, Pope Francis will have to find a way to be critical of the president's policies and actions while the pope is a guest in the country.

But Francis has managed such juggling acts before, and we're confident he can do so again.

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P.S.: It's the season for the annual "Journey to Bethlehem" pageant that my congregation puts on. You can go on the journey (kids, especially, love it) from 7 to 9 p.m. this Friday and from 5 to 7 p.m. this Saturday at Second Presbyterian Church, 318 E. 55th St. (55th and Brookside) in Kansas City, Mo. And if, on Saturday, you see one of the "Wise Men" who looks like me, say howdy. It probably is me.

Can (and should) religious beliefs be tested in a court of law?

Religious faith, as a monk friend of mine reminds us, is always and everywhere a wager. That's because of the otherness (and immanence) of God and because of the limitations of what our limited minds can know. False certitude, however, often infects us so that we become convinced about what we think about divine matters and believe we can answer most or all of the eternal questions.

And yet it's also true that it's possible and helpful to look at religious beliefs and doctrines using our ability to discern sense from nonsense.

It's in that spirit that Adrian J. Adams -- a former U.S. Marine with degrees in psychology and law -- offers his new book, Which god is God?: A Lawyer's Look at God and Religion.

The book is both fascinating and troubling. I'm intrigued by the idea of holding religious doctrine and ideas up to the light to see if they make sense, if they can be proved, if they should be rejected for lack of evidence. In effect, Adams drags various religious claims into a court of law and uses rules of evidence to examine them.

Although that's what Adams attempts here, it's quite clear early in the book that the author is a Christian and will attempt to show that the evidence consistently supports Christian beliefs as well as the whole sweep of the Christian story. His verdict is that other faith traditions miss the mark or, worse, mislead.

So, in the end, this is really a book of Christian apologetics and not a book to use in interfaith settings where the goal is to understand one another's faith tradition and to respect the holders of that tradition's beliefs. This book is far too didactic for that. And at times its condemnatory tone -- especially toward Islam -- is both unnecessary and regrettable.

Beyond that, it sometimes misrepresents or oversimplifies certain religions. In the first chapter, for instance, it says that "Hindus believe in many gods." In reality, it is much more complicated than that. Indeed, there's a good argument to be made that Hinduism, in a unique way, is a monotheistic faith, but even that claim must be qualified. Here is a Vedanta site that wrestles with the question, if you want to explore it. Adams' statement about the matter hides as much as it reveals.

The author's approach here reminds me of the big debate a few decades ago over what's called "Intelligent Design." In many ways, it was a response to -- and alternative to -- teaching evolution and it insisted that living organisms are “irreducibly complex,” and, thus, must have been created by a power many people call God.

One of the many drawbacks to such a method of studying world religions is that it can dismiss the necessary role of mystery in faith and promote the assumption that the divine can be fully grasped by human minds and hearts. That represents an unbecoming arrogance, and it moves its holders closer and closer to locked-down fundamentalism, which pretends to have all the answers.

Adams touches on this point in an odd way as he critiques people who claim to be atheists. He writes that they "can never be sure God does not exist since certainty would require complete knowledge of the universe and everything outside its boundaries. An atheist would have to be God to be sure there is no God." Ponder that.

In the end, taking religious doctrine to court to test its truth is kind of a fun idea, but it's really no way to understand what various faith traditions offer and it's not a guaranteed way to determine religious truth. (Speaking of which, in Christianity, truth is not a doctrine or a dogma at all, but a person, Christ Jesus.)

Perhaps one benefit to the approach Adams tries out in this book is that it might cause people to question religious leaders who have the potential to overtake their lives. As he writes about the 1978 mass suicide of members of a religious movement a few decades back, "The nine hundred followers of Jim Jones would not have died if they had demanded proof that he was God's agent and it was God's will that they commit suicide."

If this book can help accomplish that kind of useful questioning, good.

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LEGISLATIVE THREATS TO U.S. NONPROFITS?

Speaking of courts of law, as I was above, people who are connected to nonprofit organizations in the U.S. are expressing alarm over a bill being considered by Congress. As the RNS commentary piece to which I linked you says, "with Americans in every state serving more than 1.5 million tax-exempt nonprofits in the United States, according to the Nonprofit Risk Management Center, House Bill 9495 should concern all of us." If you're part of a nonprofit organization in some way, this one is worth checking out.

One way to give thanks at tomorrow's table

Dear friends:

If you want to, you are free to use this prayer of Thanksgiving at your table tomorrow. I wrote it to share.

Oh, Holy One:

Everywhere we look and everywhere we go we see both trouble and grace. Because you are the source of that grace, we, the source of most of the trouble, ask you to help us heal both the trouble and the troubled.

We give thanks for this astonishing cosmos, which you started from nothing but love in an instantaneous explosion some 13.7 billion years ago. This universe is a work of art from a great artist, as is our small, challenged part of it, the Earth. Move us to show our love for the planet by taking better care of it, helping to heal -- and not further injure -- it.

We also give thanks for each other. Help us to see that all human beings -- whoever and wherever they are -- bear your sacred image and that to dehumanize them is to insult you and your entire creation.

Help us -- especially on this Thanksgiving Day -- to remember the truth that the U.S. was built by crushing and nearly obliterating the Indigenous people who lived here when the European invaders arrived. And those invaders also used enslaved people from Africa to lay this nation's foundations. Once we are reminded of that sordid history, set our hearts and minds aright so that we may find a way forward that honors everyone who dwells in the U.S. And guide that work so that this patchwork nation may be a model for how to live together in peace and freedom.

We also ask that you help us set aside, at least for today, any differences of opinion we have with the people around us and to let us celebrate the miraculous gift of life -- a gift that reveals your love and grace.

We pray all of this in your holy name. Amen.

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A LANGUAGE MYSTERY RELATED TO PLYMOUTH HARBOR

And here is a Thanksgiving-related story about the gravestone of Gov. William Bradford, longtime leader of Plymouth Colony. It describes a Hebrew phrase on Bradford's gravestone and the mystery behind it. Apparently Bradford had a deep interest in being able to read the Jewish scriptures in the original Hebrew -- a praiseworthy desire. Equally praiseworthy would have been an interest in learning the languages of the Indigenous people whose history was forever changed by the assaults of the Pilgrims, Puritans and other colonizers. That interest might have changed that regrettable history.

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P.S.: My latest Flatland column -- about someone sexually abused by a priest but who has spent decades trying to protect others from that horror -- is online here.

A lesson from Judaism about the need for more love now

I still hear it from various Christian corners: Christianity is a religion of love while Judaism is a religion of rules. Sometimes this misinterpretation of the two traditions leads to the facetious joke that first notes some example of God's wrath in the Hebrew scriptures but then dismisses it with this: "Oh, that happened before God became a Christian."

That belittling charge against Judaism is one that Rabbi Shai Held (pictured below) is doing his best to counter. Thus, his 2023 book, Judaism Is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life. And thus, Held's recent talk at Congregation Beth Shalom in suburban Kansas City, a talk in which he insisted that how we treat others is how we treat God and that one of the tasks of Jewish people everywhere after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel is to respond with more love.

Held's book was published the week after that attack, and he said his immediate response was to wonder who now, in these chaotic circumstances, would want to read a book about love. And yet friends and colleagues told him that it was exactly what the world -- and especially Jews -- needed to hear now.

"But I realized, over the course of a few months," he said at Beth Shalom, "that actually their response was tapping into a deep, deep impulse in the Jewish tradition. . .and that is the claim, the insistence -- just when our hearts are most needy, just when we are most tempted to give into this error, when we feel that grief is all we've ever known -- that the Jewish tradition provides an audacious antidote. It says 'Right now, especially now, more love. Right now, especially when you feel you can't access it at all, more love.'"

Drawing on the history of the people of Israel, Held suggested that "the real purpose of the Exodus was not to bring people to the land. Rather, the real purpose of the Exodus was to free people so that God could live with them." And to live with them in a relationship of love.

That history, however, includes the two destructions of the temple in Jerusalem, first in 587 or 586 B.C.E. and later in 70 C.E. Both were devastating to the Jewish people because it meant the disappearance of God's dwelling place with them. And without the temple, Jews had no place to offer sacrifices to God to atone for sins.

"What do you do when that's gone?" Held asked. Jewish leaders at the time, he said, explained to the people what would replace those sacrifices in the temple: "Acts of love and kindness."

It's interesting how close that theology is to the theology of the Reformed Tradition of Christianity, which is where I live. That tradition insists that we do acts of love and kindness, but not to earn God's favor. Rather, we do such acts out of gratitude for what God already has done for us, starting with the gift of life.

Either way, the result is -- or at least can be -- a kinder, gentler, more loving world in which all people can realize who and whose they are and to live lives of gratitude and love.

To Held's thoughts, it's well worth adding this from Rabbi Irving Greenberg, contained in his book The Triumph of Life: "(L)ove limits itself out of consideration for the other. God leaves some tasks that would be more easily accomplished by Divine power to be done instead by human beings. Thus humans earn their dignity and participate in their own liberation."

Oh, I know that the history of humankind doesn't give us much evidence that we're anywhere close to such a world. Indeed, we're not.

But the failure of our ancestors and of ourselves to reach that goal is no reason to give up. Rather, now is the time to pay attention to what Held said about the Jewish tradition providing "an audacious antidote. It says 'Right now, especially now, more love. Right now, especially when you feel you can't access it at all, more love.'"

And all the world's great religions today said, "Amen."

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WHY IS ISLAM SPREADING IN TEXAS?

Sticking with the Abrahamic faiths today, there's news now that a growing number of Spanish-speaking Americans are converting to Islam, as this story from Texas reports.

It says that while "the majority of Latinos in the state are Catholic, research estimates there are now tens of thousands of Latino converts to Islam throughout the country. A 2020 survey found that at least 9 percent of the country's Muslims are Latino converts, up from 5 percent in 2017."

What's going on? A Rice University lecturer thinks he knows: "It's the quintessential American story of community building. The Irish and Italians did it. And now they're doing it not through Christianity but through Islam. They will have a positive immediate impact on the ground there."

Watch for this to happen beyond Texas.

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P.S.: My latest Flatland column -- about someone sexually abused by a priest but who has spent decades trying to protect others from that horror -- now is online here.

When voters stay home because they're baffled by lies

One of the intriguing results of the recent presidential election was the voter turnout, which was down more than 8.5 million votes compared with turnout in 2020.

As I write this, the turnout this year as counted so far was just under 147 million compared with the 2020 turnout of about 155.5 million.

What happened? Lots of theories, some of which make sense. (It is true that the 2024 turnout, even though sadly down from 2020, was the second highest in the last 50 years. But that gives me almost no comfort at all, given that voter apathy over that time may have had different sources but it's still disturbing. In fact, in some of those years turnout was barely above 50 percent of registered voters. Beyond that, only three times in those 50 years did voter turnout in a presidential race exceed 60 percent of registered voters. Absolutely appalling. And as for any supposed mandate won by Donald Trump, the reality is that he received less than 50 percent of the popular vote.)

What I think may be contributing to the voter turnout problem today -- and what I want to focus on -- is what happens when truth, an idea at the core of religious thinking, gets undermined by lying politicians at a time when there's diminished and distrusted media to report on them.

And so I turn to Anne Applebaum's new book, Autocracy Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. It's a deeply reported and profoundly disturbing book by a great journalist who reports on the spread of authoritarian governments around the world and the tools autocratic leaders use to gain and keep power. And since we now have a president-elect who has shown many signs of loving authoritarianism, we'd do well to pay attention.

Applebaum explores the subject of big lies, a term once associated with Adolf Hitler but now a tactic in widespread use around the world by one autocrat after another.

"The political scientist Lisa Wedeen," Applebaum writes, "has observed that the Syrian regime tells lies so ludicrous that no one could possibility believe them -- for example that Syria, at the height of the civil war, was an excellent tourist destination. These 'national fictions,' she concluded, were meant not to persuade people who were spinning the stories. Sometimes the point isn't to make people believe a lie; it's to make people fear the liar."

In fact, Applebaum writes, such strongmen as Vladimir Putin and the leaders of Syria, Venezuela, China and other countries "lie constantly, blatantly, obviously. But when they are exposed, they don't bother to offer counterarguments. . .

"This tactic, the so-called 'fire hose of falsehoods,' produces not outrage but nihilism. Given so many explanations, how can you know what actually happened? What if you can never know? If you can't understand what is going on around you, then you are not going to join a great movement for democracy or follow a truth-telling leader or listen when anyone speaks about positive political change. Instead, you will avoid politics altogether. Autocrats have an enormous incentive to spread that hopelessness and cynicism, not only in their own countries, but around the world."

I am not suggesting that all of our American political leaders have completely abandoned speaking truth and instead are seeking to control every aspect of the national narrative, though others have made something like that charge.

But I am suggesting that if American voters begin to lose faith in the idea that they can find reliable sources of truth about what's actually happening and use that information to make informed voting decisions, then we will see voter turnout shrink.

And when that happens, the people lose control of their governments and cede it to people hungry for power -- not to aid the common good but to aid their own circumstances and personal dreams of power and wealth. So when voter turnout in Kansas City (the area overseen by the Kansas City Election Board) was barely 54 percent of registered voters in this most recent presidential election, it's not just appalling, it's frightening. It and similar voter turnout figures nationally reveal an electorate that is abandoning its patriotic duties and ceding power to people who want it for their own uses.

The idea of the "common good," which is central to the major world religions, gets crushed when this happens, as does the religious idea that we have a responsibility to care for one another because each of us bears the image of God.

I wish I knew exactly what to do about this horrifying reality. What I do know is that the place to start is by naming it and joining with our neighbors, friends and fellow citizens to talk about it and seek answers together.

Before it's too late.

(The graphic here today came from this site.)

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WHEN RELIGION GETS SIDELINED AS A PEACEMAKER

What the author of this RNS opinion piece says about Israel -- that religion there often gets ignored when it could help solve conflicts -- is true not only there but throughout the world. Or at least it could be true if religion could resolve its own conflicts and disagreements with other branches of religion. What good is religion that doesn't bring peace but more conflict?

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P.S.: Give a read to this this article from current issue of The Atlantic. It's by a Palestinian and may be the best and most hopeful thing I've read about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since Hamas attacked Israel more than a year ago.

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ANOTHER P.S.: I've eXited X, formerly Twitter, and now can be found on Blue Sky here. Join and follow me there, please.

Why ritual and celebration are so crucial to a purposeful life

A dozen or so years ago, I chaired a congregational task force that our then-new pastor had asked to think about what God might be asking us to do now and about how to accomplish those tasks.

One thing was clear to me as we began to organize for this work: We were part of a stream of history that, in our case, began when the church was organized as an anti-slavery congregation in 1865. And if we didn't understand or acknowledge that history our work would be detached from both reality and our own story.

So, in harmony with ideas in Caring Liturgies: The Pastoral Power of Christian Ritual, a book about ritual, celebration and history by my friend Susan Marie Smith, an Episcopal priest, our task force created a small ritual that we used to begin each meeting.

As the photo here shows, we took short strands of red ribbon for each year of our congregation's existence and, one by one, tied them together while saying something like: "In 1879, Second Presbyterian Church (then we said something that happened in that year) and our church sought to understand and follow God's purposes for us."

In fact, in the end, we named our final document the "GPS Report," in which GPS stood for God's Purposes for Second (Church)."

There are, of course, many reasons to be careful with ritual and to make sure that our celebratory gatherings are connected to our history and that they move us into the future in generative ways.

As Smith writes in her book, "Ritual is powerful, both for good or for ill. Positively, it can gather the community in a structure strong enough to hold many people, conflicting points of view and varied emotions together in unity. It can be engaged to empower and heal participants, and to release and redeem them from the stranglehold of emotion, psychological or spiritual oppression."

As participation in institutional religion in the U.S. has dwindled over the last 50 or more years, I'm afraid our understanding of -- and perceived need for -- ritual and celebration dwindled, too. And if ritual and celebration all but disappear, our means of knowing who we are as a faith community also can melt away.

I'm not talking here about empty, repetitive words and actions, songs and signs used to fill a worship service out of some ancient habit, rarely re-evaluated. Those can be either soul-crushing or uplifting. Depends. Rather, I'm talking about ritual and celebration that is imaginative, engaging and even thrilling.

An example: One recent Thursday evening we gathered at my congregation to formally install our new senior pastor. The words, the music, the atmosphere all were deeply moving and highly celebratory. We even had small bags of snacks to share to remind us how much of Jesus' own ministry happened around meals, including the Last Supper.

But despite much new energy in our congregation because of our new pastor's arrival and her excitement and wisdom, the turnout for the installation was disappointingly small. I was, in fact, sort of shocked.

Oh, there were a few understandable reasons (or at least excuses) offered for that. It was an evening event, meaning that some of our older members might have been reluctant to be driving at night. It was a weeknight, meaning families with younger children were busy with their school-day routines. And it was two days after an exhausting -- and, to many of us, deeply disappointing -- election, and some just weren't in a celebratory mood.

But the reality was that many people missed a wonderful opportunity to use ritual and celebration to set our new pastor off on what we hope and trust -- because of her many gifts for this work -- will be a wonderful ministry with us. She told me later she wasn't disappointed by the turnout but just grateful to everyone who showed up. That reflects a good attitude but her saying that also freed me and my wife to be disappointed and a little angry on her behalf.

So my message to my own congregation's members and to you who are reading this is that thoughtful ritual and joyful celebration are vital in a purposeful, examined life. Create new, better and more memorable rituals if that's what's needed, as we thought it was on the GPS task force. But most of all this: Just show up. You'll be glad you did. And, afterward, you'll be rewarded by what you didn't miss.

(The other photo here shows the front lawn of my church, a lawn in which -- in another ritual, both celebratory and sad -- we bury the ashes of some of our deceased members.)

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MORE YOUNGER WOMEN ATTRACTED TO FAITH

A new survey indicates that young women (Gen Z and Millennials) are more religious than young men of the same age -- a significant shift. I'm reminded of a story from my congregation about a woman who was asked to be the first female elder when (nearly 100 years ago) our denomination's rules changed to allow that. She refused, claiming that "if you allow women to be elders, the men around here will do nothing." Not, perhaps, an affirmation of gender equality but not a bad interpretation of reality.

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P.S.: Because every religious tradition has a lot to say about the meaning of death, I write a fair amount about the subject. I also read obituaries -- even of people I don't know. So today I want to share with you one of the best obits I've ever read. It's about a woman I didn't know but wish I had. And you can find it here. It's the kind of obit that makes you sad not to have known the deceased but also makes you more committed to live an examined life of meaning and love -- and joy.

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ANOTHER P.S.: There's some good recent news from Central Baptist Theological Seminary here in the KC metro. Central has been chosen to participate in the Climate Science in Theological Education (CSTE) Grant Initiative of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion (DoSER) program. You can read about the details here.

Maybe a little cosmic perspective will help us now

Years ago, while reading Annie Dillard or maybe Kathleen Norris -- at any rate, some smart female author -- I was struck by the idea that there is something in each of us that is older than we are. Indeed, we carry around atoms that were part of stars that had once exploded.

As Kansas City area singer/songwriter Greg Tamblyn notes in his song "All These Atoms":

Fifteen billion years ago
The big bang was quite a show
All this time and now here we are, but
parts of you were once a star 

Greg might have been a billion or two years off on the age of the cosmos (today it's usually put at something like 13.7 billion years), but he's right that parts of you were once part of a star.

It's both a humbling and an encouraging idea, and I've just run across it again in Timothy Snyder's new book, On Freedom, a book I mentioned in passing recently on the blog here.

At one point in the book, Snyder writes about nuclear fusion, which, he says, can be -- and should be -- our source of energy for the future if we want to avoid the worst results of climate change that's being driven by human activity.

"When stars die," he writes, "they expand and then contract; and in doing so fuse more massive and more chemically complex elements, with more protons and neutrons. The building blocks of your body, molecules of carbon (six protons) and oxygen (eight), were created in this way by fusion inside a prior generation star. Our human bodies are archives of the universe, records of the life and death of stars."

Fusion, Snyder insists, is "the original source of almost all the energy needed by life on Earth. If we could harness it directly, a new kind of freedom would present itself."

I was pondering all this the other day as I was watering the newly expanded native plants Peace Garden at my church. The plants we put into Mother Earth on Oct. 27 are settling in for the winter so, we hope, they'll bloom in the spring, summer and fall of next year. But each of those plants also contains atoms from long-ago exploded stars. Which may be why Indigenous people here who retain their ancient culture understand that plants have been around a lot longer than humans and, thus, we should learn from them.

Plants and larger trees have ways of communicating with one another and helping each other to flourish even when they're quite different. It's a model humanity would do well to adopt, especially in the aftermath of a brutal election season that revealed to us both the best and the worst in humanity.

So I hope the star-carrying native plants that I now water once a week (today's my day again) will survive the winter and emerge with fresh strength and a lively future. And I hope the same will be true for those of us who are star-carrying animals, ones that puzzle over the meaning of life and of our purpose here. (And one of our purposes, surely, is to think about all of this.)

(The image of the Big Bang above today came from here and the caption there bears this note: "Image credit: Romolo Tavani via Getty Images")

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WHAT SOME CHRISTIAN VOTERS FORGOT OR IGNORED

Immigrants from Latin America and their descendants played a big role in the outcome of this year's presidential race. Now one of them, Miguel A. De La Torre, professor of social ethics and Latinx studies at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, has a sharp word to say from an evangelical Christian perspective to white evangelicals (and others) who supported the winner:

"I do have good news, my dearest white evangelicals. You, too, can be saved. Salvation is just as much for you as it is for those you have relegated to your margins. It begins with the rejection of eurocentric theology and philosophy. Like the rich young ruler who asked how to obtain salvation, the answer begins with putting away your idols, specifically this idol you call god. . .

"We all find our salvation, our liberation, when we live in radical solidarity with the oppressed of the earth, signified by the broken body of Jesus given unto us. Those at our margins whom we think we must save are the ones who will bring about our own salvation."