Georgia on my mind

In Myers-Briggs language, I’m uber intuitive and de minimis sensing. As 2024 approached, my intuition was ramped-up with a consciousness that 2024 would be very consequential. For me, and for many friends and loved ones, two events loomed large. The first event was the United Methodist General Conference meeting in Charlotte on April 23-May 3. The second event would have a more global impact–the November 5 US elections. I anticipated 2024 with more hope than fear, but just barely.

Somewhere in my deepest self, I believed this General Conference would be different because many delegates who opposed greater inclusiveness had disaffiliated. That proved to be correct, but I was not prepared for the Conference’s swift, thorough and decisive votes to remove one’s sexual orientation as matter of scrutiny for ordination eligibility.

It took decades for Methodists to decide in 1956 (by a vote of 389-297) that women would have full ordination rights. That 56.7% majority came after many decades of effort, personified by Georgia Harkness (1891-1974) a Methodist professor of theology. Much has changed. My congregation’s senior pastor is female, as is my presiding bishop and my newly appointed district superintendent.

Georgia Harkness is on my mind. So is the State of Georgia, which on January 5, 2021 elected a Black senator and a Jewish senator, effecting a peaceful transfer of power in the US Senate. That should have been the big story of the news cycle on January 6, 2021. Six months away from the November elections, it helps me to have both Georgias on my mind.

The struggle between hope and fear takes many forms. Regressive, fearful actions abound. Heather Cox Richardson’s May 6 Substack blog post at Letters from an American provides the historical context for current anti-immigration, anti-Chinese sentiments among us.

R-E-V-E-N-G-E

In 1940, a paper by Harvard senior John Kennedy was published as Why England Slept. I thought of JFK’s sobering title when our son Rob forwarded a Time article, “If He Wins,” by Eric Cortellessa, who interviewed the former and would-be president and some of his close collaborators.

Donald Trump’s Republican Party–win or lose–will inflict great damage on America in 2024. As I read Cortrellessa’s description of Trump’s intentions, I began humming a new version of Aretha Franklin’s RESPECT, substituting the main objective of a second Trump term: REVENGE.

Trump’s litmus test for appointees will be whether they affirm Trump’s lie that he won in 2020:

Policy groups are creating a government-in-waiting full of true believers. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 has drawn up plans for legislation and Executive Orders as it trains prospective personnel for a second Trump term. The Center for Renewing America, led by Russell Vought, Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, is dedicated to disempowering the so-called administrative state, the collection of bureaucrats with the power to control everything from drug-safety determinations to the contents of school lunches. The America First Policy Institute is a research haven of pro-Trump right-wing populists. America First Legal, led by Trump’s immigration adviser Stephen Miller, is mounting court battles against the Biden Administration. 

Among the urgent

Tyranny of the Urgent was a 1967 InterVarsity Press booklet by Charles Hummel. Among the urgent issues before us in 2024, the sad embrace of religious nationalism by evangelical Christianity helps me understand a variety of related issues. Diana Butler Bass helps me understand the insidious temptations of religious nationalism and its impact behind many of today’s headlines.

Bass is a long-time observer of the influence of right-wing politicians over evangelical Christianity. She has a strong presence on YouTube. She’s written eleven books. Her posts from The Cottage are available at Substack. A January 25, 2024 post replies to: “I don’t understand how Christians, especially evangelicals, can support Donald Trump. I don’t understand any of this.”

From her introduction to The Cottage:

… I am a Christian (even though that label is more than a bit awkward these days) and I write from that perspective, with a generous heart toward wisdom wherever it is found. The “creed” that guides me most closely aligns with these 1,000 year old words from the mystical poet Ibn Arabi:

There was a time I would reject those
who were not of my faith.
But now, my heart has grown capable
of taking on all forms.
It is a pasture for gazelles,
An abbey for monks.
A table for the Torah,
Kaaba for the pilgrim.
My religion is love.
Whichever the route love’s caravan shall take,
That shall be the path of my faith.

Or, in the simple words of Jesus: “Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.”

Coffee with Diana

Technology helps me adapt an ancient faith rhythm–an early focus for the day, which I consider prayer, a consciousness that seeks to embrace all reality within the realm of self-transcending grace.

A cup of coffee accompanies Substack emails of the day, sent overnight from several trusted sources: Heather Cox Richardson, Robert Hubbell, and Joyce Vance. Then follows a daily meditation (also emailed overnight) from Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation.

Yesterday, a second cup of coffee was accompanied by a Diana Butler Bass newsletter (which comes twice weekly via Substack email). Her passion is the history of religion and she always moves me deeper into a realm of consciousness that for me is a realm of prayer.

Bass knows evangelical Christianity’s foray into religious nationalism. (More about her on Friday.) Yesterday, Bass covered an evangelical battle among Congressional Republicans.

From “The Great Divorce? Evangelical Style,” in The Cottage, a newsletter via Substack by Diana Butler Bass, April 23, 2024.

History

Professor Ron Robel (1934-2007) asked why I was a prospective History major. I said, “American history.” He replied, “Oh, how tragic!” Robel’s passion was Asian history. Later, I switched to Political Science, but if I had known someone like Heather Cox Richardson, I would have stayed the course.

As a white kid in Alabama, I was “protected” from much of American history. Ron DeSantis isn’t the first politician seeking to sanitize history. Richardson reveals that I have much to learn. Good historians can help us avoid a collective amnesia that is harmful, and can be fatal, to a society.

Richardson’s April 12, 2024 installment of “Letters from an American” describes the context of South Carolina’s April 12, 1861 attack on the US installation at Fort Sumter. Leaders of both South and North underestimated their opponents’ determination, which led to 620,000 deaths. One excerpt:

Southern white elites celebrated the idea of a new nation, one they dominated, convinced that the despised Yankees would never fight. “So far as civil war is concerned,” one Atlanta newspaper wrote in January 1861, “we have no fears of that in Atlanta.” White southerners boasted that “a lady’s thimble will hold all the blood that will be shed” in establishing a new nation.

From “A Bible Salesman: Trump Is Not the First Political Con Man to Compare Himself to Jesus Christ,” by Heather Cox Richardson, Milwaukee Independent, April 7, 2024.

The wall is for our own good

On page 37 of The False White Gospel, Jim Wallis said Doug Mastriano, who lost his bid for governor of Pennsylvania, declared that America is a Christian nation and that the separation of church and state is a “myth.” Wallis cited Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s suggestion: “We need to be the party of nationalism and I’m a Christian and I say it proudly. We should be Christian nationalists.”

Wallis (p. 224) quoted Martin Luther King, Jr., “The church must be reminded that it is not the master of the state, not the servant of the state; but the conscience of the state.” Wallis says faith communities “have the independent ability to challenge the systems because they are based outside of them….”

Our son Rob said, “It’s ironic that right wing Christians attack Jefferson’s ‘wall of separation‘ because it’s precisely that church/state separation that created the free-market of religion that led to the flourishing, for better or worse, of Christianity in the United States in the first place.”

Birmingham’s Jerrod Bearden went to Jonesboro, Arkansas to capture this image of Monday’s total eclipse of the sun. Sometimes, a different vantage point can help see reality more clearly.

A multi-cultural democracy?

Cathey scours libraries for audio books. On a camping trip, I listened with her to the conclusion of Diane McWhorter’s Carry Me Home. Over the weekend we drove to North Carolina for a double funeral. One of our friends was injured in an automobile accident that killed her dad and only sibling.

The long drive provided an opportunity to listen via Audible to Jim Wallis read The False White Gospel. His current “book tour” is like no other, a series of town hall meetings aimed at America’s faith communities and “Nones,” more focused on winning votes for democracy than selling books.

At one point on our trip, we paused the audio book for a break and I said, “If we avoid Trump 2.0, Wallis may be remembered as a guy who helped save democracy.” Wallis unmasks MAGA’s efforts maintain, or bring back, white-dominated politics, largely fueled by white Christian nationalists.

By 2040, white European descendants will be the largest minority in a multi-racial America. The 2024 elections may determine whether we will be the first multi-cultural democracy. Will the spirit of Jefferson, Madison and Lincoln prevail? Can their new idea win over the old idea of authoritarian rule?

From the Georgetown University Center on Faith and Justice, March 26, 2024, via YouTube

A quiet urgency

The Fourth Quarter of life brings a quiet urgency, as clearer priorities become more sharply focused.

Wednesday’s post included a brief interview with Jim Wallis, whose new book arrived yesterday. It was similar to how I felt at mid-career on September 11, 2001, when I moved my unread copy of the Quran from my office bookshelf to my briefcase. I knew Muslim relations would be an important agenda for the second half of my life as pastor, and that night I began a deep, quick dive into Islam.

The False White Gospel, by Jim Wallis, will help me during the Fourth Quarter of my life. Wallis has been consistently on target for fifty years. His prophetic, Amos-like voice challenges my Amaziah-like tendency to go-along-to-get-along. The book’s subtitle will be my Fourth Quarter agenda: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith, and Refounding Democracy.

Eddie Glaude, Jr.’s Foreword to The False White Gospel includes the closing words of Abraham Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address, which profoundly describe the quiet urgency needed in 2024 America:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

From “The Mystery of Lincoln’s First Inauguration Photograph,” by Neely Tucker, Library of Congress Blogs, November 20, 2019.

In case you missed them

It’s easy to be numbed by data overload in our 24/7 news flow. Two articles stand out:

A letter from Cleveland Plain Dealer editor Chris Quinn, “Our Trump reporting upsets some readers, but there aren’t two sides to facts,” includes this:

The north star here is truth. We tell the truth, even when it offends some of the people who pay us for information.

The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power. No president in our history has done worse.

Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch wrote, “A ship crashed into a Baltimore bridge and demolished the lies about immigration,” which includes this:

(Maynor) Suazo and seven men with stories very much like his — migrants from the neighboring countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico — were filling potholes on the region’s major span on a raw March night…. (a job) many other Americans simply can’t or won’t do ….

These six workers who perished were not “poisoning the blood of our country,” they were replenishing it. This is a moment of clarity when we need to reject the national disease of xenophobia and restore our faith in the United States as a beacon for the best people like Suazo. … they died as Americans.

Thanks to Robert Hubbell for sourcing the Chris Quinn editorial. Thanks to Lawrence O’Donnell for sourcing the Will Bunch column. Meanwhile … a Joe Scarborough conversation with Jim Wallis:

From Morning Joe, April 2, 2024

My brother Charlie

Charlie Kirk, 30, of Turning Point USA, appeared with John Randall on March 18, and said: If you vote Democrat as a Christian, I think you can no longer call yourself a Christian. You have to call yourself something else. I do not think you can be a Christian and vote Democrat.

Just out of high school, Kirk was an activist at the 2012 Republican Convention and later started Turning Point, which now promotes Christian nationalism. Kirk has prospered. While we disagree about virtually everything related to faith and politics, I try to see each person as a brother or sister.

Discernment around issues is crucial and I see 1933 Germany in 2024 America. I see my brother Donald Trump as an existential threat. So, I will not vote for Trump or a Trump endorser, but I would never say one cannot vote Republican and call oneself a Christian. We need lively, respectful debate.

From “Charlie Kirk Claims Christians Can’t Vote Democrat, Twitter Reacts,” by J.D. Wolf, MeidasTouch Network, March 20, 2024