Posts tagged ‘Christianity’
Trump, Lavrov, Comey, and Flynn
What a week it’s been at the White House. Last week brought what felt like a one-two punch of political crises. First, The Washington Post reported this past Monday that President Trump, in an Oval Office meeting, shared highly classified information concerning terrorist activity with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Because the information the president shared was first shared with us by one of our allies, the potential exists, according to some experts, to compromise our intelligence sharing relationships with these allies. Then, the very next day, The New York Times published a story claiming that President Trump had asked the now former FBI director, James Comey, to end his investigation into the president’s fired national security advisor, Michael Flynn. As soon as the story broke, many began to raise questions about whether or not the president potentially obstructed justice. The president has since denied The New York Times’ report.
As politicians and pundits debate the consequences, the legality, and the constitutionality of the president’s alleged actions and their implications for our country, and as our political discourse continues down a path that seems to be increasingly marked by fear, distrust, and anger, here are a few reminders for us, as Christians, to help us navigate these heady times.
Pray for the president and for all our leaders.
Whether you love him, hate him, or are on the fence about him, President Trump needs our prayers. Scripture commands us to pray for him along with all those who serve in our nation’s government: “I urge, then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for all people – for kings and all those in authority” (1 Timothy 2:1-2). This means Republicans should be praying for Democrats and Democrats should be praying for Republicans. Political leadership is not only geopolitically treacherous because of the power it wields, it is spiritually perilous because of the prideful temptations it brings. Politicians need our prayers.
Love the truth more than you love your positions.
In February, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote a piece for The New Yorker titled, “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds.” In it, she cites a Stanford study in which researchers rounded up two groups of students: one group that believed capital punishment deterred crime and another group that believed capital punishment did not deter crime. Both groups of students were then given two studies, one of which presented data that showed capital punishment did deter crime and the other of which presented data that showed capital punishment had no effect on crime. Interestingly, both of these studies were completely fabricated so the researchers could present, objectively speaking, equally compelling cases. So what happened? The students who were pro-capital punishment applauded the study that bolstered their position while dismissing the study that called it into question. Likewise, the students who were anti-capital punishment applauded the study that agreed with their position while dismissing the other study. These two groups were so entrenched in their positions that they dismissed, out of hand, any information that called their positions into question, even if that information was presented as factual. In other words, they loved their positions more than they loved the truth.
Politics seems to be custom-made for the kind of thinking that is more interested in holding positions than in seeking truth. I have seen several social media posts where people boast openly that they no longer watch this or that news channel. Instead, they receive their news only from outlets that are sympathetic to their positions. As Christians, we should humbly recognize that there is truth in all sorts of sources – even in sources that disagree with and call into question our political positions.
The nature of truth is that some of it will always make us uncomfortable. Sin, at its root, is based on lies, which means that some lies will inevitably appeal to us more than some truth, for all of us are sinners. Indeed, if some truth never makes us uncomfortable, then we are probably missing the truth!
Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska offered a great bit of moral clarity on the subject of truth in political discourse when he said recently on a morning news show:
Both of these parties, going back a couple of decades now, regularly act like your main duty is to – if here’s the truth, and you think the other side’s going to say this – you think you’re supposed to say this to try to counterbalance it. I think that’s a bunch of hooey … You’re supposed to say what you think is true and try to persuade people to come alongside with you. You’re not trying to counterbalance one falsehood with another.
This is exactly right. You don’t fight one political tall tale with a tall tale of your own. Truth trumps political posturing. In the words of the prophet Jeremiah, we are to “deal honestly and seek the truth” (Jeremiah 5:1). We are not to blindly and sycophantically defend the positions of our favorite politicians.
Trust in the Lord; not in an earthly leader.
In politics, crises will always abound. Politicians, after all, are fallen human beings who are prone to making the same mistakes we are and can, at times, even intentionally and malevolently sin. This is why we cannot trust in them for deliverance from our plights and blights. Only the Lord can deliver us from these things.
Perhaps the thing that disturbs me the most about our current political environment is not what our politicians do, but what so many of us believe our politicians can do. So many of us seem tempted to fashion our politicians not as public servants, but as civil saviors. Sometimes, we can be tempted to believe our politicians can usher in a humanly wrought utopia (think of some of the hopes that rested on the chant, “Yes, we can!”) while at other times, we can be tempted to believe our politicians can repristinate a bygone America full of wistful nostalgia (think of some of the discourse that surrounded the slogan, “Make America great again!”). As Christians, our hope lies not in utopia or in nostalgia, but in Parousia – the day when Christ will return and sin and death will be conquered by Him once and for all. That is our hope. He is our hope. So let’s devote ourselves to proclaiming Christ, Him crucified, Him resurrected, and Him coming again.
The Search for Meaning
In his 1946 classic, Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl candidly and insightfully reflects on his time as a concentration camp prisoner in Auschwitz and how he struggled to find bright spots of meaning what felt like a deeply dark vacant evil. In one particularly moving passage, Frankl describes how he found meaning by thinking about his wife as he was forced into hard and humiliating work:
We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles, along the one road leading from the camp. The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. Anyone with very sore feet supported himself on his neighbor’s arm. Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind did not encourage talk. Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: “If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don’t know what is happening to us.”
That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.[1]
As Frankl thought about the woman he loves, he found meaning for life in that love. He writes, “Love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.”
The human desire for meaning, it seems, is a desire that is nearly impossible to extinguish, even when it is confronted with the horrors of a concentration camp. Whether consciously or subconsciously, everyone lives for something. Some people live for riches. Others live for fame. Still others live for pleasure. Some wiser and more mature souls find meaning in, if you will excuse the somewhat circular logic, more meaningful things. For example, I was talking to a single mom some time ago who lives for her kids. She works long hours and she has gone back to school so she can better provide for her two daughters. She finds her meaning in motherhood.
What is particularly fascinating to me about this mother’s search for meaning is that she is, by her own admission, not a Christian. “Religion,” she admits, “is just not my thing.”
I have known this mom for quite a while and, on the one hand, I am proud of how far she’s come. There was a time, not too long ago, when she reveled in a shallow hedonism – drinking, carousing, and doing drugs. All that has ended. She has fled those demons. On the other hand, however, I can’t help but notice that, as admirable as her investment into motherhood is, she has only kicked her search for ultimate meaning down the curb a bit. Here’s what I mean.
If my friend finds her meaning for life in being a mother, what happens if her kids rebel against her and ultimately reject her? Will she lose her source of meaning because they have pulled away from her? Or, what happens if she falls back into her old habits of substance abuse and fast living? Will she lose her source of meaning because she will not have been the mother she could have been? Or, less dramatically, what happens when her kids grow up and move away? When she no longer has little children to nurture, what will provide her with meaning and purpose?
It is in light of questions like these that Christianity’s answer to man’s search for meaning becomes critical. For Christianity asserts that man can only find ultimate meaning in God and in the hope of an eternity with Him. To use the formulation in the opening salvo of the Westminster Catechism: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.” This is where man finds his ultimate meaning.
The problem with finding ultimate meaning in anything other than God is that no other source of meaning lasts. Every other source of meaning only kicks the search for meaning down the curb, for every other source of meaning eventually fades and expires, which compels another search for another source of meaning. Only God ends such searches permanently.
It is not until my friend finds her ultimate meaning in Christ that her search for meaning will find its final answer. There are greater sources of meaning and lesser sources of meaning to be sure. But there is only one eternal source of meaning. I pray that she, along with others like her, discovers this eternal source. For when she does, she will find that this eternal source leads to eternal life.
____________________________________
[1] Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 36-37.
A Tenuous Time
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. As Christianity faded from prominence in the West, a secularized culture was supposed to emerge to take its place that was more tolerant, more enlightened, more harmonious, and less politically polarized than any other society in the history of the world. But as Peter Beinart explains in an excellent article for The Atlantic, what has emerged as Christianity’s western influence has waned is nothing of the sort:
As Americans have left organized religion, they haven’t stopped viewing politics as a struggle between “us” and “them.” Many have come to define us and them in even more primal and irreconcilable ways.[1]
Beinart goes on to explain how the traditional battle lines between conservatives and liberals have shifted in the wake of this irreligious surge. Specifically, with regard to the spiritually skeptical alt-right, Beinart notes:
They tend to redraw the boundaries of identity, de-emphasizing morality and religion and emphasizing race and nation…
The alt-right is ultra-conservatism for a more secular age. Its leaders like Christendom, an old-fashioned word for the West. But they’re suspicious of Christianity itself, because it crosses boundaries of blood and soil. As a college student, the alt-right leader Richard Spencer was deeply influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously hated Christianity. Radix, the journal Spencer founded, publishes articles with titles like “Why I Am a Pagan.” One essay notes that “critics of Christianity on the Alternative Right usually blame it for its universalism.”
It turns out that as faith allegiances have crumbled, a universal concern for others in the spirit of the Good Samaritan has too. Christianity’s cross-ethnic, cross-cultural, and international appeal has proven too much for the self-interested – or, perhaps more accurately, self-obsessed – spirit of our age.
As Christians, we must think through this irreligious political surge and provide a faithful witness in the midst of it. We also must be prepared to live in a very tricky tension because of this surge. As Rod Dreher explains in his newly released book, The Benedict Option:
Faithful Christians may have to choose between being a good American and being a good Christian. In a nation where “God and country” are so entwined, the idea that one’s citizenship might be at radical odds with one’s faith is a new one.[2]
Dreher’s analysis of the tension between being a citizen of a nation and being a child of God is true, but it is also somewhat amnesic. He is right that there is indeed an increasing tension. But he is wrong that this tension is anything new. Tensions between God and government have been longstanding, even in our society. And these tensions should not surprise us. It was a Roman governmental official, after all, who approved the request for Jesus’ crucifixion. Government has, for a great portion of history, had a problem with God, especially when people put Him before it.
The New Testament understands that this tension between God and government will never be fully resolved, at least on this side of the Last Day. While we may give to Caesar what is his, God also demands what is His, and when what Caesar wants contradicts what God wants, conflict ensues. Just ask Daniel, or Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, or the apostles. Our calling, as Christians, is to resist the urge to comfortably resolve this tension, whether that be by condemning this world and cloistering ourselves off from it or by compromising our faith for the lucrative perks of political power. Our calling is to live in this tension both faithfully and evangelically – holding fast to what we confess while lovingly sharing with others what we believe.
Beinart concludes his article:
For years, political commentators dreamed that the culture war over religious morality that began in the 1960s and ’70s would fade. It has. And the more secular, more ferociously national and racial culture war that has followed is worse.
Yes, indeed, it is worse – which is why we, as the Church, need to offer something better. We need to offer something loving. We need to over something hopeful. We need to offer something reconciling. We need to offer something that continually and conscientiously questions our nation’s nearsighted political orthodoxies for the sake of a time-tested theological orthodoxy. We need to offer Jesus, unabashedly and unashamedly. This is our mission. I pray we are up to it.
______________________________________
[1] Peter Beinart, “Breaking Faith,” The Atlantic (April 2017).
[2] Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option (New York: Sentinel, 2017), 89.
Safety in a World Full of Terror
Credit: Time Magazine
First came a ban on most electronic devices – including laptops and tablets – on flights into the United States and United Kingdom from certain Muslim-majority countries. Then, last Wednesday, terror struck London as Khalid Masood, a British-born citizen apparently inspired by online terrorist propaganda, drove an SUV into pedestrians on the Westminster Bridge, leaving four dead and forty injured. After crashing his vehicle outside Parliament, he ran, fatally stabbing a police officer before he himself was fatally shot by law enforcement.
Certainly, weeks like these remind us of the fearful reality of the world in which we live. With the continuous news of terror attacks and warnings, it is no surprise that when Chapman University surveyed Americans concerning their fears, 41% said they were afraid of terror attacks while another 38.5% admitted they were worried about being the victim of a terror attack.
It can be frustrating that, despite our best efforts, we cannot seem to make this world as safe as we might like it to be. In a day and age that seems and feels scary, here are a few reminders for Christians about safety.
Safety is important.
Mosaic law set up what were known as “cities of refuge” for ancient Israelites who stood accused of manslaughter. The goal of these cities was “safety” for these accidental killers (Deuteronomy 19:4), because, if a man killed another man – even if unintentionally – the victim’s relatives might seek the killer’s life in revenge without due process. Keeping people safe from those who would seek to unjustly harm them, then, was a priority in Israel. It should be the same with us.
Whether it be the security of our homeland, or the plight of refugees halfway across the world, tending to the safety of others is part and parcel of having compassion on others. Thus, we can be thankful for the intelligence agencies who seek to keep our nation safe along with the relief agencies who tend to the safety and even the basic survival needs of endangered peoples throughout our world.
We should pray for safety.
The biblical authors have no qualms with praying for their safety and for the safety of others. The apostle Paul, for instance, knowing that he might encounter some opposition to his ministry in Judea, writes to the Romans, asking them to “pray that I may be kept safe from the unbelievers in Judea” (Romans 15:31).
Martin Luther, in his morning prayer, thanked God that He had kept him “this night from all harm and danger” and, in his evening prayer, thanked God that He had “graciously kept [him] this day.” In the same vein, an alternate version of the famous children’s bedtime prayer reads:
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
Guide me safely through the night,
Wake me with the morning light.
Prayers for safety abound. Praying for our safety, the safety of our families, the safety of our nation, and safety across the world is, at its root, a holy and righteous prayer for peace. It ought to be a regular part of any Christian’s prayer life.
Safety cannot be our only concern.
As blessed a gift as safety may be, it cannot be our only concern. Sometimes, we are called to surrender our own safety for the sake of the gospel. This is why Paul and Barnabas, in a letter to the Christian church at Antioch, honor those “who have risked their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 15:26). This is why each of the Twelve disciples, save one, was martyred for what he believed. A concern for safety that refuses to take a risk for the sake of the gospel does not treat safety as a gift from God to be celebrated, but as an idol that needs to be repented of. The concern for our own safety must never become greater than our commitment to Christ.
Perfect safety is found only in Christ.
As each terror attack reminds us, we cannot ultimately ensure our own safety. Only God can. The Psalmist wisely prays, “You alone, LORD, make me dwell in safety” (Psalm 4:8). Paul similarly declares, “The Lord will rescue me from every evil attack and will bring me safely to His heavenly kingdom” (2 Timothy 4:18). The Greek word for “safely” in this verse is sozo, the word for “salvation.” As concerned as we might be with safety in this life, Christ is finally concerned with bringing us safely into the eternal life of salvation. Thus, we should never become so concerned with temporary safety now that we forget about the perfect safety of salvation, won for us in Christ and given to us by the grace of Christ. In the words of John Newton’s great hymn:
Through many dangers, toils, and snares
I have already come;
‘Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.
The safety our eternal home is the safety we finally seek, for it is the only safety that can never be shattered.
God and Country in Order
In his book, Destroyer of the gods, Larry Hurtado writes about why the Christian claim that there is only one God was especially offensive to those in the ancient Roman world. His analysis is worth quoting at length:
In the eyes of ancient pagans, the Jews’ refusal to worship any deity but their own, though often deemed bizarre and objectionable, was basically regarded as one, rather distinctive, example of national peculiarities…
The early Christian circles such as those addressed by Paul…could not claim any traditional ethnic privilege to justify their refusal to worship the gods. For, prior to their Christian conversion, these individuals, no doubt, had taken part in the worship of the traditional gods, likely as readily as other pagans of the time among their families, friends, and wider circles of their acquaintances…
Of course, a pagan might choose to convert fully to Judaism as a proselyte, which meant becoming a Jew and ceasing to be a member of his or her own ancestral people. By such a drastic act, proselytes effectively changed their ethnic status and so could thereafter try to justify a refusal to participate in worshipping the pagan gods as expressive of their new ethnic membership and religious identity. But this was not the move that Paul’s pagan converts made…
Indeed, Paul was at pains to emphasize that his pagan converts must not become Jewish proselytes. For Paul saw his mission to “Gentiles” as bringing to fulfillment biblical prophecies that the nations of the world would forsake idols and, as Gentiles, would renounce their idolatry and embrace the one true God. That is, unlike Jewish proselytes, Paul’s pagan converts did not change their ethnic identity.[1]
Categories of ethnicity and faith were not clearly delineated in the ancient world. Instead, they were broadly interchangeable. To be a part of the Jewish nation was to adhere to the Jewish faith. To be a Roman Gentile was to be a worshiper of the Roman gods. There was no concept of religious freedom like we know it today – where a person can worship and live out their convictions freely quite apart from their nationality. Thus, part of what made Christianity so offensive to the ancient pagans was that it began to decouple a presumed synonymy between ethnicity and faith. A person’s ethnicity, in the Christian conception, no longer informed ipso facto a person’s faith. A person could be a Roman Gentile and a Christian monotheist.
Not only did Christianity decouple ethnicity from faith, it actually claimed that a person’s ethnicity was subservient to faith! Again, to quote Hurtado:
Paul writes, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28)…Whether you were Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, this was now to be secondary to your status “in Christ”…Irrespective of their particular ethnic, social, or biological categories, therefore, all believers were now to take on a new and supervening identity in Christ.[2]
According to Paul, Christ comes before clan.
Like the ancient Romans, we too have a tendency to couple our ethnicity with our faith, or, to put it in another, more recognizable, way, to couple our country with our God. When this happens, however, it is almost always our God who winds up serving our country. When it appears particularly expedient or reassuring in the midst of a dangerous and changing world, we can be all too willing to sacrifice fidelity to our faith for the prosperity of our nation. Hurtado offers us an important reminder: though we may retain our ethnicities and citizenships and still be Christians, ethnicities and citizenships are subservient to faith. Faith cannot be sacrificed for the sake of the State. Furthermore, as we are learning our increasingly secularized society, faith is often at odds with the goals of the State. Everything from the legal enshrinement of the sexual revolution to the often raucous and raunchy rhetoric of our most recent presidential campaign demonstrates this. So let’s makes sure we keep the State and our faith straight. Faith comes first. After all, the God of our faith will continue to stand, long after the State has fallen.
_______________________
[1] Larry Hurtado, Destroyer of the gods (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2016), 53, 55.
[2] Ibid., 55-56.
An Honest Hypocrite Is Still a Hypocrite
Credit: Jonathan Rolande
Last January, four researchers from Yale University published a paper titled, “Why Do We Hate Hypocrites? Evidence for a Theory of False Signaling.” In it, the researchers note that hypocrisy occupies a special spot of scorn in our society:
Consider the hypocrite – someone who condemns the moral failings of other people but behaves badly him- or herself. Many commentators have remarked on the “peculiarly repulsive” nature of hypocrisy … What makes hypocrites especially bad is that they both commit a transgression and condemn it. But why is this combination so objectionable?
This final line is the question the researchers attempt to answer in their paper. They theorize that hypocrites are uniquely despised because:
They dishonestly signal their moral goodness – that is, their condemnation of immoral behavior signals that they are morally upright, but they fail to act in accordance with these signals.
At issue here is what is popularly referred to as “virtue signaling.” Though this phrase can be defined in different ways, some of which see virtue signaling as inherently and irreducibly hypocritical, the phrase, at least at its most basic level, denotes the public condemnation of a particular practice or position, which is something that most, if not all, people do – at least from time to time. So, for instance, on this blog, I have publicly written about the dangers of racism. People would assume, since I have written against racism, that I would expend at least some effort to root out racism in my own life. If it turned out, however, that I harbored a disdain for a particular race, or if I wantonly turned a deaf ear or a blind eye to the plight of a particular race, people would rightly call me a hypocrite because even though I am publicly promoting one standard of behavior, I am privately living out another.
The Yale researchers continue by explaining that hypocrisy is more dangerous and misleading than what they refer to as “direct lying,” because direct liars do not engage in the moral condemnation of a practice of position. They simply lie about what they have done, usually to avoid getting into some sort of trouble. Hypocrites, on the other hand, go out of their way, often without prompting, to condemn the things they secretly do to make themselves look better than they really are.
The researchers found that, broadly speaking, much of our revulsion toward hypocrisy is excised when people are honestly hypocritical – that is, when they “voluntarily [disclose] their transgressions, which offsets the negative evaluation of their hypocrisy.” Just saying you’re a hypocrite, apparently, is enough to make many people comfortable with your hypocrisy.
Certainly, hypocrisy is roundly condemned in the Scriptures generally and by Jesus specifically. In Matthew 23, for instance, Jesus offers a series of seven woes. To whom are His woes directed? They are directed to hypocrites! Christians and non-Christians alike agree that hypocrisy is bad. What is most interesting about this study is not its assertion that hypocrisy is bad, but its revelation about how hypocrisy is addressed and rectified in our society. Culturally, these researchers note that much of the sting of hypocrisy is salved if one is merely an honest hypocrite. If a person simply says he doesn’t practice what he preaches, our society turns a sympathetic ear. The difficulty with this approach, however, is that an honest hypocrite is still a hypocrite. Hypocrisy needs more than an admission. It needs a solution.
Christianity says that the admission of a sin like hypocrisy is only the first step in dealing with that sin. In his Small Catechism, Martin Luther explains that to address sin, one must not only admit, or confess, his sins, he must receive forgiveness from them. In other words, a hypocrite must see his hypocrisy as an actual sin that needs to be forgiven rather than as a mere embarrassment that only needs to be acknowledged. In short, a hypocrite must see his hypocrisy as something that is actually bad. This is why the bridge between confession and forgiveness is repentance, for repentance sees sins not just as embarrassments to be enumerated, but as spiritual dangers to be grieved.
Admitting sin does not solve sin. Only Jesus’ forgiveness does that. Our hypocrisy, then, needs more than a confession. Confession only reveals who we are. Jesus, however, changes who we are, which means that Jesus can change us hypocrites.
And really, who wants to be a hypocrite?
Michael Flynn, Intelligence Leaks, and Ethical Questions
Credit: Carolyn Kaster/AP
When Michael Flynn tendered his resignation as National Security Advisor last week after only 24 days on the job, it marked the predictable outcome of what had become deepening concerns over some dishonest statements he made to the vice-president about the nature of a December conversation he had with the Russian ambassador to the United States and the potential his conversation created for his blackmail by Russian authorities. In a political climate where dishonesty is often dismissed out-of-hand as part of the job, Mr. Flynn’s forced resignation is a sobering reminder that character still counts.
Of course, in this story, there are not only ethical questions raised by Mr. Flynn’s clandestine conversation, there are also critical ethical questions that must be asked about the leaking of his conversation by shadowy intelligence officials to the news media. After all, unethically leaking the fact the National Security Advisor unethically lied to vice-president seems, well, just all-around unethical.
Sadly, in our hyper-politicized climate, it is difficult not to filter this story through anything other than a political lens. President Trump certainly filtered it this way, at least in part, when he complained on Twitter:
The real scandal here is that classified information is illegally given out by “intelligence” like candy. Very un-American!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 15, 2017
Yes, intelligence leaks are indeed scandalous – and dangerously so. But dishonesty by the National Security Advisor with the vice-president is also scandalous. Both sides of this scandal need to be addressed. Sadly, most politicians only see fit to address whichever side furthers their own political purposes.
The problem with politicizing scandals like these is that we often overlook the sins of one side conveniently while decrying the sins of the other side forcefully. Our argument becomes not that one side is truly good, but that the other side is really bad. In this way, we justify one side’s sins by the sins the other side. But when we address ethical scandals like this, we only wind up creating a circular firing squad, with everyone squarely aiming their barrels at everyone else. We settle for hurting whoever happens to be our political enemy rather than holding onto what is actually right.
Jonathan Bethune, in an article for The Federalist, captures and summarizes our political zeitgeist well when he explains:
There can be no meaningful dialogue premised upon shared values if both sides only apply those values when it lets them score points. The class of moderately intelligent politically aware people are those most affected by this trend. They have become partisan ideologues.
An ideologue is at least consistent in his belief in specific policies. A partisan openly supports his gang above all else. But a partisan ideologue is worse than both. He is a Machiavellian creature: a supporter of “ends justify the means” approaches to pushing an agenda. The gang must be defended that the agenda might be defended, even when the gang violates core tenets of the agenda. Partisan ideologues are dishonest by nature. Worse still, they often cannot even tell when they are being dishonest.
Mr. Bethune is onto something here. He understands that a politics that is more partisan than it is principled can only become pathological. And when this happens, politics becomes a sinister force for moral decay rather than what Aristotle envisioned politics at its best to be – a guardian of societal good. Such pathology in our politics not only points to a problem with Mr. Flynn and with dangerous intelligence leaks, it points to a problem with us.
Perhaps it is time, then, to look not only at the news, but in the mirror.
An Executive Order and an Immigration Debate
When President Trump issued an executive order two Saturdays ago putting a 90-day moratorium on all foreigners entering the United States from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen and a 120-day ban on all refugee admissions, the reaction was swift and splenetic. Protests erupted at airports across the country. Democratic politicians decried – and, quite literally, cried at – Mr. Trump’s executive order. And now, a federal judge in Washington has temporarily blocked enforcement of the president’s immigration stay.
Though much could be said – and has been said – from a policy standpoint about the president’s executive order and the heated debates that have ensued, it is worth it for us, as Christians, to use this moment as an opportunity step back and consider how Scripture frames the broader issues involved. After all, long after the embers of the fight over this particular executive order have cooled, the contentious disagreements that have bubbled to the top in this debate will remain. So here are a few things to keep in mind.
Safety and Sojourners
One of the roles of any government is to protect its people by punishing wrong and standing up for what is right. This is part of the reason Joshua led a conquest through the land of Canaan. This is also why the apostle Paul writes:
For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. (Romans 3:4)
The preamble to our Constitution echoes this sentiment when it explains the very need for such a document thusly:
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Likewise, President Trump, when his executive order was met with fiery backlash, defended it by saying that his order was about “terror and keeping our country safe.”
Safety is indeed a noble goal. But Scripture also has much to say about welcoming and helping sojourners. God commands the Israelites:
When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God. (Leviticus 19:33-34)
One of Jesus’ most famous stories – the Parable of the Good Samaritan – has as its centerpiece a call to be kind to foreigners. In this day, for a Jew to talk about a “good Samaritan” would have sounded oxymoronic. The Samaritans, after all, were the ones who broke into the Jewish temple during Passover and desecrated it by scattering human bones through it. Jews did not consider Samaritans “safe.” But in Jesus’ story, a Samaritan ends up saving the life of a Jew.
As Christians, then, we are called to be concerned both with the safety and security of our families and nation as well as with the plights of others, such as Syrian refugees, doing whatever we can to welcome and care for those who need our help. A concern for safety and a love for sojourners are to go hand in hand.
Local and Global
Donald Trump’s short tenure as president has been marked by the theme of putting America first. In what was perhaps the most memorable line of his inauguration address, the president declared, “From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first, America first.”
Addressing concerns and challenges close to home is important. Charity, the old saw says, begins at home. Scripture echoes this theme when the apostle Paul encourages believers to take care of those closest to them: “Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Timothy 5:8). In this same letter, Paul also wonders out loud how a pastor who “does not know how to manage his own family…can…take care of God’s church” (1 Timothy 3:5). At issue here is a principle of subsidiarity, which encourages a focus on local affairs first.
But once again, as important as local affairs are, they are not the only concerns we should have. President Trump’s call of “America first” must never become that of “America only.”
Rodney Stark, in his seminal work The Triumph of Christianity, notes that Christianity is unique not only because it is:
…the largest religion in the world, [but because] it also is the least regionalized. There are only trivial numbers of Muslims in the Western Hemisphere and in Eastern Asia, but there is no region without significant numbers of Christians – even in the Arab region of North Africa.[1]
Christianity is decentralized because the faith’s founder gave His disciples a global mission: “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19-20). In the book of Acts, Christ encourages the Church to have both a local and a global vision for mission: “You will be My witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8).
As Christians, then, though we are to tend to the affairs of our families, communities, and country, these cannot be our sole concerns. A world that is hurting is a world that needs our compassion, interest, and engagement. We are called to have eyes for both that which is local and for things which are global.
Government and Church
As Christians, we must remember that the affairs of the government are not always coterminous with the mission of the Church. Governments have a specific role to play. They are God’s servants, on a civic level, to promote and defend that which is right and to dissuade and punish that which is wrong. Likewise, the Church has a specific mission to carry out – to reach the world, in both word and deed, with the gospel on a personal level. Thus, while a government may seek to protect a nation, the Church continues to go forth to reach the nations.
As Christians, then, we live in two worlds. We are both members of Christ’s body, the Church, and citizens of an earthly nation. In such a politically-heated environment, however, it can be tempting to exalt the partisanship of politics over the community of the congregation. Indeed, one of the saddest aspects of our current crisis is that the millions of Syrian refugees who have been displaced from their homes and families have become, in the words of Pete Spiliakos:
…footballs in our partisan scrimmages. We insist on certain standards of hospitality to refugees, making those standards a test of “who we are,” opportunistically – when it is useful to our side.
In other words, we do not charitably welcome refugees while carefully stewarding our own national interests because it is right thing to do, we pick either the reasonable concerns of our nation or the sad plight of international refugees and turn one into a cause célèbre at the expense of the other because it is politically expedient. This is wrong both civically and ecclesiologically because it reduces people to pawns in a game of thrones. We are less concerned with doing justice and more concerned with wielding power.
In a debate that has become increasingly either/or, we, as Christians, have a message that is both/and. We can both seek the safety of our nation and be hospitable to sojourners. We can both address our local contexts and keep an eye on global crises. We can both live as responsible citizens and work as members of Christ’s body. One thing does not need to trump the other thing because, ultimately, over everything is Christ. He is the One who ultimately both keeps us safe and welcomes us into His kingdom as sojourners from this corrupt age. He is the One who both loves each of us locally and dies for the world globally. He is the One who both rules all rulers and is the head of His body, the Church. He is the One in whom “all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17).
As we seek to process today’s troubles, then, let us never forget who we are. We are not merely useful political plodders. We are the children of God in Christ, which means that we trust in Him, live with Him, and love like Him – both those who are near and those who are halfway across the world.
___________________________
[1] Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2011), 392.
Marching for Life
This past Friday, hundreds of thousands of people descended on Washington D.C. for the 43rd annual March for Life. The march finds its origin in a decision handed down by the Supreme Court on January 22, 1973, which legalized abortion in all 50 states. From its outset, the ruling was controversial, as can be seen in a dissenting opinion from one of the justices on the Court at the time, Justice Byron White:
With all due respect, I dissent. I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the Court’s judgment. The Court simply fashions and announces a new constitutional right for pregnant mothers and, with scarcely any reason or authority for its action, invests that right with sufficient substance to override most existing state abortion statutes. The upshot is that the people and the legislatures of the 50 States are constitutionally disentitled to weigh the relative importance of the continued existence and development of the fetus, on the one hand, against a spectrum of possible impacts on the mother, on the other hand.
Justice White frames his dissent in a couple of ways. First, he frames it in terms of states’ rights. At the time of Roe v. Wade, four states had legalized abortion on demand while thirteen states had legalized abortion in cases of rape, incest, and endangerment to a woman’s health. Justice White is concerned that the high court’s federal ruling runs roughshod over decisions that rightly belong to the states. But that’s not all he’s concerned about. He also frames his dissent around the morality of deciding “the relative importance of the continued existence and development of the fetus, on the one hand, against a spectrum of possible impacts on the mother, on the other hand.” This moral quandary is the one that remains and rages to this day. The question is this: is the fetus important? Should a fetus be protected in some way, shape, form, or fashion because of what the fetus is – a baby in utero?
The answer from those who participate in the March to Life each year to these moral questions has been a resounding “yes.” And Christianity’s answer to these questions has been a resounding “yes” as well. Indeed, the story of Christianity can be summed up quite accurately as a war on death. Ever since Adam’s fall into sin brought death into the world, God has been working to undo death’s grimly efficient accomplishments. God’s war on death, of course, finds its climax and consummation in Easter, but all throughout Scripture we see that death gets cheated as a warning to death that it will ultimately be defeated. Death gets cheated when God leads the children of Israel through the Red Sea, rescuing them from Pharaoh’s sword. Death gets cheated when the prophet Elijah raises a widow’s son back to life. Death gets cheated when a king of Israel, Hezekiah, falls ill, but God adds fifteen years to his life. And death gets cheated all throughout Jesus’ ministry, where the terminal are treated, the reposed are raised, and the graves are gutted. Yes, the Scriptures tell the story of God’s war on death.
Of course, we know that, in a pluralistic democracy, Scriptural theology doesn’t always translate into broad public policy. Nevertheless, even from the vantage point of a pluralistic democracy, concerns about life must be addressed. Questions of anthropology, such as whether life matters and whose life matters, demand our time and attention if we are to have any sort of a functioning and orderly society. The March for Life dares to raise these questions. And for that, it should be commended.
One of the criticisms I have heard of the pro-life movement is that though it seeks to defend the lives of the unborn, if often turns a deaf ear to the lives of the already born – the economically oppressed, minorities, and the socially marginalized. I agree. I agree that it is hypocritical to defend some life while turning a blind eye to other life. But I also believe it is tragic to privilege the desires of one life at the expense of another life. Yet, this is precisely the argument abortion proponents regularly make. One abortion proponent explained it like this:
Here’s the complicated reality in which we live: All life is not equal…A fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She’s the boss. Her life and what is right for her circumstances and her health should automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of her. Always…
I would put the life of a mother over the life of a fetus every single time – even if I still need to acknowledge my conviction that the fetus is indeed a life. A life worth sacrificing.
This is a chilling – and, dare I say, downright evil – rationalization for abortion.
To speak out against abortion is to understand that it is awfully difficult to defend the lives of the economically oppressed, minorities, and the socially marginalized if those lives are never allowed to leave the womb alive because they are aborted. And studies have shown they are aborted – again and again. It is because of that reality that I am thankful for the March for Life.
Life matters – whether it is in the womb, on this earth, or with Jesus in eternity. And that’s something worth marching for.
Torture, Facebook Live, and Racism
It is supposed to be a platform to broadcast funny moments with family, respond to questions in real time from people who follow you on social media, and provide updates on your life. Now it has become synonymous with torture.
When four young adults took to Facebook Live on New Year’s weekend, they did so to broadcast their torture of a mentally disabled 18-year-old man from a western suburb of Chicago. According to Fox News, the broadcast:
Showed him cowering in a corner while someone yelled “F— white people!” and “F— Donald Trump!” At one point, the man was held at knifepoint and told to curse the president-elect.
The video also showed the man being kicked and hit repeatedly, while his scalp was cut. The group apparently forced him to drink water from a toilet.
Hate crime charges have now been filed against the four involved in the attack. In this particular instance, the four attackers were black and the victim was white. Reporting for The Washington Post, Mark Berman and Derek Hawkins explain:
When asked whether the hate crime charges stemmed from the 18-year-old’s mental health or his race — both of which are factors listed in the state’s hate crime statute — [Chicago Area North Detectives Commander Kevin] Duffin said: “It’s half a dozen of one, six of the other.”
Even though the Facebook Live video is still available through several outlets, I have not watched it. Just from what I have read about its content, I’m not sure I could stomach it. This is the kind of crime that rends any reasonable heart.
A crime like this brings to the forefront – again – issues of racism and hatred. If the language they used on the video is any indication, these attackers seemed to be animated by a hatred for white people, a political animus for Donald Trump, and a potential disparagement of this young man’s mental capacities.
Ironically, the problem with racism of any sort is that racism always goes deeper than race. Racism betrays a fundamental inability to see a certain group of people as actual people. Racism ties a person’s value and dignity either to the color of their skin or to the origin of their birth rather than to the fact of their humanity. This is why, from a Christian perspective, racism is ultimately a spiritual problem. Scripture reminds us that, simply by virtue of being human, we are imbued with a measure of value and dignity. Thus, when human lives are not treated with appropriate value or dignity, God’s anger is inflamed.
Certainly, there are things on a macro-scale that have been done and can continue to be done to stem the tide of racism-at-large. Political legislation, protest movements, and dedicated activists are all important to confronting racism wherever it rears its ugly head. But we, as individuals, can also confront racism on a micro-scale by how we treat each other. Be honest with yourself: do you treat every person with whom you come into contact as fully human? Or do you see some groups of people – whether those groups be demarcated by race, socioeconomic status, or even simple personality type – as less than human? Treating people as less than human can manifest itself in a myriad of ways. Sometimes, it is a declared disdain for a certain group of people based on a certain feature of that group. More often than not, however, we treat people as less than human when we regard them as annoyances, looking past them instead of loving them. In a micro-way, then, confronting racism can be as simple as an act of kindness that affirms a person’s humanity.
To whom can you be kind today? Even if your kindness never gets broadcast on Facebook Live, it will be much more worthwhile than what has become the platform’s most famous – and infamous – broadcast. And that, at least, is a place to start.
Pastor Zach's Blog 