11/04/20 08:05 PM
Christianity and Trump
Whether we are Christian, Muslim, Jewish or something else, a common tenant of faith communities is to be faithful to something greater than ourselves, not to place ourselves as supreme. Parents of all beliefs try to teach their children to believe this. Donald Trump has exploited certain Christian groups in unprecedented ways and in-so-doing has exposed the hypocrisy of trading Christ for power. I try to be a Christian, so I will comment in that context, but other religious traditions can make similar observations.
If we are really, truly Christian, we try to teach our children to love and follow Christ. The prophet, Micah (6:8) writes that the Lord requires only this: “to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God” (NIV). John says that “Whoever does not love, does not know God, because God is Love.”- 1 John 4:8. God is Love, not hate. Peter said that all things that are excellent and good are of God. Paul had a lot to say. We are not “some of Peter and some of Paul and some of Apollos,” no we are ALL of one God (and He requires that we respect others who seek God from different traditions). We are all sinners, deserving one awful fate but hoping for a better one. None of us can “be of Christ” and also “be of” an avowed demagogue. Judas Iscariot was a member of a political sect called the Zealots. The Zealots were, well, zealous about having political power over the Romans and would do anything to get it.
Judas followed Jesus when he thought Jesus was seeking an earthly, political revolution, but when he saw that this was not the plan, he betrayed him. Any of us who abandon Christ and HIS teachings in favor of one who promises political power in exchange for loyalty is taking the road of Judas. There is no middle ground. Christ’s way, God the Father’s way, is love not hatred.
For some, Christianity has truly meant following Christ’s example of love and grace. For others, the “Christian” mantle is merely a vehicle for advancing a quest for power or preserving the pre-eminence of a white, rural, unevenly educated majority. They have sold out Jesus in favor of political power through Trump. Paul said that “they will know we are Christians by our love”. No real Christian could have anything to do with Trump’s doctrine of fear and hatred. No real Christian would ever lock a child in a cage away from his or her mother and father in order to “Make America Great Again”. If one claims allegiance to Christ, taking this path is an admission of apostacy. People in America who identify themselves as “Christian” need to consider that voting for such a person as Trump has something to do with their soul and salvation.
Jesus gave us the prescription for our lives in The Lord’s Prayer. God is God, and he has a paternal relationship with us. He is in heaven, which is a place, a place that is perfect in peace and forgiveness, and love. He is “holy” which means that he alone is Him. He isn’t a perfect example of love or power, or anything else. Those things exist because they come from Him, not He from them. We pray that His kingdom might come here to earth, a fallen place, not perfect like heaven. The Kingdom comes to the extent that we bring it by following the Father’s will and Christ’s example of love and forgiveness and mercy, and faith. We ask God the Father to gives us just what we need to get through the day and to forgive us for more or less continually making mistakes, “trespassing” upon his will, trying to take things into our hands instead of his. The condition for this is that we do the same for others, including others who don’t look or act like us, who don’t approach God in the manner that we do. We are not all of Peter, or Paul, or Apollos, or Mohammad, or Abraham, or Pope Francis, or the Dalai Lama, or Franklin Graham, or Jerry Falwell, or Trump, or Barney the big, purple dinosaur. We are all of God, who simply is whether we acknowledge His existence or not.
Paul also helps with understanding God’s love, but he has more to say about what it isn’t than what it is. It’s interesting that Paul knew the importance of confronting our urge to pull others down more than to help them up. From 1 Corinthians:13, “Love is patient and kind”. Yes, good start. But what is it not? “It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others. It is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered. It does not keep record of wrongs (hold grudges). It does not delight in evil but rejoices in the truth.” What “love is not” reads like a list of the seven deadly sins: Pride, Envy, Wrath, Gluttony, Lust, Sloth, Greed. It reads like the clinical definition of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. It reads like Mr. Trump’s defining characteristics.
Jesus did not seek political power, he transcended it. The prophets did not seek political power, they transcended it. As for Jesus, as for the prophets, as for any disciple, it is hard. It is not the life of power and privilege that Trump or his sycophants crave. It is not the false gospel of “the victorious life”. No, for the actual, real disciple of Christ, this isn’t about who wins an election, it is about their soul and its destiny. For those who got lost in the moment in 2016, for those who meant to follow Christ and got led astray before, this is a chance at redemption or a chance to double down in following the way of Judas. It is about the way of Christ or the way of a demagogue. The way of a real disciple or the way of Judas. God’s Kingdom here on earth through our own actions or a demagogue’s agenda in exchange for personal power. The real cost (and reward) of discipleship or the path to the “blood field”. The Kingdom of God or the 30 pieces of silver. Neither is it about endorsing everything the alternative might support. That would just be picking another political agenda. It is about picking the decency of a man, Joe Biden, who does seek God vs Donald Trump, who proudly proclaims that he has done more than Jesus for his Evangelical base. It is about picking one who attempts to follow the path of discipleship, however imperfectly, over one who does not. It is about us seeking to live the life of real discipleship, trying to realize God’s Kingdom on earth through actions of faith, hope, charity, and love, not accepting uncritical membership in a demagogue’s club.
We owe a great debt to Mr. Trump. God’s love is everything he is not, and he has made very clear for us the path that we, if we are to be disciples, simply cannot take. If Christians, that is REAL Christians, want to follow Christ, he or she must follow love. If we want to serve God’s Kingdom and define our own, we have only one way to go. It is not possible to approve of and follow Mr. Trump and his brand of self- deification and hatred at the same time. We must pick. God or Trump. God or hatred. God or ...
05/03/14 11:13 PM
The political pendulum had swung back and forth for a while. After scandal and a period of liberal drift, there had been a strong leader, a return to the patriotism of the old days. After an unwarranted attack, and in the name of patriotism, a war had been undertaken to re-establish pre-eminence in the world, but it left the country economically weakened and unpopular with friends and rivals alike. In the period that followed, national pride seemed to take a back seat. A new liberal republic emerged, pandering to the outside world, even to the point of following a growing socialist trend in allied countries. The order of the old days was changing. Indeed it looked like the sky might really be falling.
But a spark of nationalism, of pride in the past and a return to the heady days of world leadership remained. True believers must lead, not watered down moderates and certainly not the liberals or socialists. Supported by aristocrats of industry, with the blessing and encouragement of the Christian evangelical community, a new movement was born. Even the Catholic Church signed on. You let us do our thing, you do your thing. Finally, and critically, a loyal media outlet was created that would define the enemy, speak pride to weakness, expose the liberal status quo, and set things right again.
Bold enough to speak out, brave enough to address the issues, the true believers would rise again. There were national threats. Other ethnic groups were taking jobs from deserving citizens with a natural birthright. Worse, they were polluting a national identity that had been won over generations. The liberal politicians were giving away the country’s natural right to world leadership. The national defense had been whittled down and was becoming dangerously weak. The sky was falling. There was much to fear and it was vital that the populace saw it and felt it.
Germany, 1933.
Time to act. A devil’s bargain was made with the very socialists so hated in the east. Poland would be divided up. France would be short work, Britain an afterthought. World conquest would follow, turning on the previous socialist “ally” in an extreme conservative revival, all in the name of returning Germany to its rightful place as the leader of the developed world. By using fear in everything not German, by channeling it with a controlled media, the Nazi’s could inspire the nation that they alone could and would save the country from ruin and return the pride that had been lost at Versailles.
But another kind of conservative, another believer in national pride and tradition, had another idea. Churchill’s view was not of conservative, despotic power but of a legacy of stewardship. His patriotism was not authoritarian but rather a love of freedom and a way of life, of protecting first the dignity and the freedom of all. The truth that he fought to protect was not a truth of dogma or an ideology defined and pitched by a media outlet, but a truth proven in the decency of humanity and in the resolve of humanity to live free. And he believed that the sky would not fall. The truth holds up even a heavy sky.
And he won the fight in collaboration with a liberal. Franklin Roosevelt was a practical man like Churchill with the same belief that while beliefs are good, ideas are better than ideology. They shared a passion that right is right, something to be discovered not dictated. A passion that right would win, that the sky would not, and in fact could not, fall.
Hope was the fuel, not fear. Where despots manipulate with fear, leaders inspire with hope. Despots frighten people. Leaders empower them. Despots arbitrate truth. Leaders search for it.
Truth. It always bubbles up. It finds a way. Like grass through cracks in the concrete. God blesses the grass. He blesses truth. Truth prevails. The sky never falls, because truth never falls.
What lessons are there from history? We have to learn from it or we will repeat it.
- That hope is better than fear.
- That truth is something worth the trouble to seek, rather than taking the easy way out and just defining it.
01/03/12 05:23 PM
Once upon a time, most schools had multigrade classrooms and kids of different ages helped each other and the teacher. And the teacher was an extension of schooling that occurred at home. And character and mentoring was taught as a lifestyle, because it was natural and sensible. And the building was a place of necessity mostly for socialization rather than a prison.
Then a tidal wave of kids showed up, unannounced, in 1949, when the baby boom hit school age, and kindergarten was born out of necessity. And, again out of necessity, kids were segregated into single aged classrooms to keep things organized. And mentoring didn’t seem so important, but competition did. And, out of necessity (or was it convenience?), we catered to the mediocre and left the most needy and the most gifted to fend for themselves because it seemed like the democratic thing to do.
And once you can measure something, by God you’d better measure it. And if you’ve got the data, you’d better normalize it, which is another way of saying standardize it, which is another way of saying govern it. And if teachers are now running kinder-factories, shouldn’t they have the same collective powers as other factory workers, and the same job security, and don’t bother us with performance when we’re talking about workers’ rights here.
And schools became institutions where commodities are made and measured and boxed up according to grade and size and shipped, and don’t ever stop us to look at what’s best for the commodity, and don’t tell us its not a commodity because we’ve got more coming and we can’t stop and neither can they, just to get it right.
And somewhere along the way education as we once knew it stopped. As did mentoring, and recognizing the educational value of homes, and cherishing the emotional needs of little people, who didn’t sign up for this and sure as hell aren’t to blame for our shortchanging them.
And education stopped being the main thing. The industry did, the textbooks, the teacher’s unions, the politicians, the budget….
And to preserve these status quos, we started getting “efficient”, cutting nutrition, programs, arts, sports, socializing skills, home support, anything that didn’t have a lobbyist to protect it. We retained every nut and bolt in the education-industry “car”, but we entirely forgot that the point of it all was that our kids might know where to drive it!
But somewhere along the way, a spark survived, a lingering idea that there was beauty in a child’s mind. An idea that maybe Einstein was right in observing that, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” And maybe after years of worsening failure, maybe we have finally dared to consider that maybe the politicians and the regulators and the lobbyists, and the unions and the lawyers might not know best.
Maybe, just maybe, the kids do, and the teachers who do care, of which there are still many, and the moms and dads, and the artists, and the athletes who still love athletics for athletics. Maybe, just maybe, it is no accident that home-schooling when done well knocks the socks off of most public education. Maybe it is not enough to preserve the nuts and bolts of education and forget about what the nuts and bolts are for, especially when stripping the institutional experience of any social nurturing leaves only a shell that is emotionally and too often physically dangerous.
So we’ve cut arts and music and athletics and everything that is enriching and made the institutions into factories churning out a culturally vacuous product. To preserve what we are used to, the disastrous status quo, we’ve left home schooling and other educational models as often daunting but none-the-less necessary alternatives.
Maybe the solution is right in front of us. George Orwell was right when he noted that, “sometimes it requires all of our effort to see what is right in front of us.” Or maybe the system is just as corrupt as it seems. Maybe getting back to home-centered schooling is the answer. It seems to work the best anyway. Maybe the teachers need to get back to being extensions of life-learning rather than its replacement. It was like that before this disastrous experiment started in the fifties with the industrialization of education. And now we have the Internet, which has proven itself as a powerful enabler of home education. Maybe we need to support and develop this, which can be done at a tiny fraction of the cost current practices. School buildings can use this model too, to give kids a safe place to go and access focused self-paced, teacher-assisted education if both parents have to work.
Maybe the real value of the institutions isn’t rote education at all, but rather the very arts and athletics and music and other social interactions that have been banished. Teach “the basics” on line in the home or in safe environments for those students who need them. Make them self-paced and therefore multi-yeared experiences where students can get back to helping each other. Students of different ages and abilities who are doing the same work but maybe have differing skills and maturity levels that they can share. Above all, make the institutions into cultural centers that don’t banish the arts and athletics but rather specialize in them. They should be places where culture and society can again be celebrated, practiced, and taught using the skills that students can demonstrate that they have mastered on their own. It would be cheaper. It would utilize the immense educational resources and communications capabilities of the web. It would emulate the learning metaphors that kids have already adopted on their own. And it would dismantle the violent and emotionally and physically dangerous cauldrons that have become our public schools in so very many instances.
04/03/10 05:30 PM
Ca. 2010…The US economy in a shambles.
There is an unquestioned assumption that the solution is complex and expensive. In reality what is most complex and expensive is preserving the status quo. This is what the status quo wants, which is why those with power and privilege are fighting tooth and nail against any new order. The genesis of our problems is not found in structural economics. The real genesis of all this is the death of honesty and accountability in society. The death of integrity.
We keep judging the effectiveness of the latest government intervention by how the markets respond, forgetting that the people in the market trenches may not be as smart as the strategizers and if they are, they are most likely judging the intervention on whether it will restore what they know. Wall Street isn’t “not responding” to efforts at intervention because it lacks faith that the intervention will work. Wall Street is not responding, because the financial industry correctly feels that “the jig is up”. They don’t want to change the system, and they’ll be damned if they’re going to respond positively to any attempt to regulate the orgy to which they’ve become accustomed.
That orgy is defined by the mantra from the movie “Wall Street” that “Greed is Good”. Everyone on “The Street” may not be making millions in obscene bonuses by looting their own companies and in turn the clients they serve…..but even those who aren’t too often aspire to. Because of this, they are happy to accept the inaccurate assumption that we can fix this with an incrementally tweaked version of “business as usual”.
Well, you know what? Greed isn’t good. Good business management isn’t about getting an MBA to learn how best to prop up your business for the short term and then loot it on its way down the drain. Good business management isn’t about doing anything you can get away with to maximize profits “for the good of our shareholders”.
Good business management is about being a good steward. It is about growing a strong company and strong industries within the context of what is good for your workers, your clients, your shareholders, and the economic ecosystem within which you live. CEO’s used to have a stewardship ethic. Now, too many see themselves as rock stars who deserve 21 million dollar offices and private plane rides to everything from ski lodges to bailout hearings. We have lost that sense of stewardship, and we need it back. The old system is broken and we shouldn’t want it back. The only people who do are those who had the advantage in that system, those who lack the vision to move ahead not only into new markets but also into old values.
We have fallen into a snake hole wherein what is right is defined by what you can get away with. Financial people skimming clients and companies. Ponzi schemes. Bonuses and luxury junkets on taxpayer money. Athletes making more in 10 minutes than teachers make in a year, while they too often set examples that destroy the efforts of those teachers. I am an eye surgeon. Too often, I see patients from other practices with healthy eyes that have had unnecessary surgery because “who’s gonna find out?”. I see doctors who withhold accepted therapies in order to sell patients into drug company marketing projects disguised as “studies”. This is not addressed as it should be because, frankly, the drug companies have infiltrated the medical industry and government so thoroughly that even those who would fight too often throw up their hands in frustration, or hopelessness, or fear. The phenomenon portrayed in the movie “The Insider” is very real.
Well, you know what? There is a right and a wrong in most things. CS Lewis wryly argued that we can all agree on the “right” as that thing which most of us fight against doing. I would argue that we can get pretty close to doing right by remaining accountable to the values that define our roles, our own “stories”. Our stories are defined by what we are: doctors in service of our patients, lawyers in service of the law, business people in service to clients, politicians in service to constituents rather than lobbyists. Anyone in service to another. Not that you can’t benefit in the process. We all deserve to make a living, but when you’re primarily out for “number one” at the expense of another, that’s a red flag.
We can get back on track, but it’s not by throwing trillions at the status quo. The stimulus is valid to the extent that it helps people victimized by others’ greed or helps people build new productivity, such as green energy, but make no mistake: The reason the financial sector doesn’t like the new order is that it challenges the old order. When “they” say it won’t work, what they mean is that it won’t get them back to where they can make billions on the backs of the common man. The shakers and movers who got us into this mess, who until the crash were so admired by their minions, have become accustomed to the era of mutual funds and online trading that has allowed the individual investor to become the “easy money” for these pros at the Wall Street Casino.
The way back will depend on a return to honesty and integrity. It will require a return to accountability and stewardship. Given the degree of corruption we have come to, it will require a return to regulation. This does not mean socialism. Socialism deteriorates to arbitrary governmental control of society that is just as self-serving and corrupt as unprincipled and unregulated corporate self-interest. Regulation is simply the act of codifying the values that we can all agree protect us as individuals and as a fair and free society, and then holding our institutions and each other accountable to those values.
Getting back can be at least partially self-funding. There is enough fraud built into the system now to get a good start on funding the new order. We have pumped billions into the banking system only to see hoarding and 18 billion in year-end bonuses. We need to pass legislation requiring these institutions to pass on money to qualified borrowers. Lending to no one on the pretense that the lenders are “just being careful” is a self serving copout. Legislate them. Mr. Obama’s foreclosure protection plan has merit, but proposing 75 billion to prop up predatory subprime mortgages misses the point. Simply recast all of the troubled mortgages to 40 year terms with interest rates capped at 7 %. A 100,000 loan at 9% and 15 years costs $1014.00 per month. At 7% and 40 years this decreases to $621.00. Almost all mortgage payers would once again be solvent, lenders would be hurt but not killed, and once the crisis was under control, we could always look at recasting again to shorter terms.
And health care? Health care is ruined at many levels but there is low hanging fruit that could get us back on track. Reinventing healthcare from the ground up at this point would be prohibitively complex, but there are things we could do that would at least get us solvent and back to a fixable mess. There are 50 million uninsured Americans. Individual HMO coverage costs around $3600.00 per year. That would be 180 billion per year to give every uninsured person basic coverage not even considering that family coverage rates offer significant savings. A huge amount, but “chump change” compared to bailing out AIG alone. There is enough fraud in the pharmaceutical industry alone to pay for almost all of that bill. This has been extensively documented in scholarly and well researched books such as “The Truth about the Drug Companies”, “On the Take”, “Hooked”, and many others. There are additional savings in liability reform and reigning in defensive medicine. Embracing true evidence based medicine would help, but what we have now is the bastard child of EBM, where the “evidence” upon which doctors are supposed to make decisions is often defined by the marketing departments of the drug companies who fund much of the research.
Another costly source of waste is that we simply don’t use the things we already know. In many cases we actively suppress known inexpensive therapies in favor of equivalent or inferior but new and more profitable ones. Pharmaceutical and device companies defend their exorbitant pricing as necessary to fund ever more research to replace therapies as their patents expire. Consider the development of Nexium when Prilosec went generic. Now consider that Nexium and Prilosec are the same molecule. Nexium is just the isomeric form of the molecule, enough of a difference to renew the patent and quadruple the price. Another example is the comparative study of the newest and most expensive blood pressure meds, a study in which good old thiazide came in first at pennies a dose. Then there is the eye drug Lucentis, the ultimate me-too drug in that the “me” version, Avastin, is actively suppressed because it was already approved in much higher doses for cancer and was therefore priced too cheaply to make money in ophthalmology.
The truth is that if we simply worked to fully utilize and keep proven treatments, we would do better at a small fraction of the cost.
Much of this corruption is made possible by the same kind of deregulation that has brought the financial system to ruin. If the government was willing to declare independence from pharmaceutical industry purse strings, we could easily re-establish regulations that would rein in the fraud, remove the entanglements between this industry and doctors, again protect patients from predatory and dishonest marketing, and in the process, we could pay for universal healthcare without reinventing a 2 trillion dollar industry. At that point, we could reinvestigate further reforms. The task would then look more doable.
I had voted Republican much of my life, until Mr. Bush and the neo-cons highjacked the party in the service of their own hegemony and self interest. Historically, the Republicans have been the party of individual responsibility and accountability. The past eight years has seen its conversion to the party of deregulation and wanton self interest. I believe in Mr. Obama as a post-partisan, which I know some would see as naïve. Time will tell, but it is also naïve not to see that with Democratic majorities in both houses, the Republicans have decided that they can oppose things that they know must pass simply so they can point fingers if something doesn’t work. It is politically pragmatic but also cowardly to play this game with the country’s future. Part of the integrity we need back is for politicians to consider that the country is where we all live and not a chess board upon which to play games of partisan brinksmanship. It is time for all of us to be post-partisan and take issues for what they are instead of being arbitrarily packaged and traded in endless quid pro quos.
We need to get back to the best traditions of America, to live with integrity, and honesty, and accountability to our values and to each other. Our leaders need to be stewards and models, because it is right to be so. We need to have values that respect each other. We need to be a bit less fancy and less obsessed with the big score. We need to rediscover a sense of conscience, and of shame. We need to get back to fundamentals. The way forward to a self-sustaining future is to go back to the values and self-control that made us great in the first place.
