A Little Mammon Ruins the Whole Loaf

It only takes the slightest change to make a very, very large difference.

For example, there's the human genome.  My genetic material, the basic information written into our DNA?  It's what makes us human, and what makes each human being different from every other human being.  The tiniest tweak, and we're a different person.

Larger variances make us not human at all.

Eighty percent of our fundamental genetic makeup is identical to that of cattle.  Eighty five percent, we share with mice.  So only a fifteen percent variance, and we're scuttering around beneath the floorboards and leaving little rice-sized poop pellets on the kitchen counter.

We become something categorically different.  A cow is not a human is not a mouse, eh?

I've been meditating on difference and Christian faith lately, as I lead the adult ed class of my little church through reflections on race, difference, and what binds us together as Jesus folk.  One of the great strengths of Christian faith, as I see it, is its ability to exist polyculturally.  The Gospel speaks in every language, and can adapt to the forms and norms of every human culture.

Not that we haven't squabbled over everything and anything, including a single vowel in a single Greek word in one statement of faith.  But Christian unity is formed and shaped by the grace of the Spirit, and our willingness to care for one another despite our manifold differences.  I see Jesus in Methodist and Mennonite, in Catholic and Charismatic, in Orthodoxies both Slavic and Amhara.  We're progressive and conservative, plain and erudite, and all of it can be truly Christian.

Still, there are areas where I'll admit I have always struggled, particularly where the Gospel becomes focused on wealth and prosperity.  

That's kind of a problem right now.

The Prosperity Gospel is ascendant in our culture, the dominant form of the faith, to the point where it's really the closest thing America has to a state religion.  As acolytes of Kenneth Copeland's Word of Faith movement now sit at the heart of power, there's never been a moment when this movement has been as prominent as a form of Christian expression. 

The language of Prosperity Preachin', as I've noted numerous times over the years, about 80 percent comprised of recognizable Christian theology.  Read through the writings of Creflo A. Dollar, or endure one of Paula White's surprisingly listless sermons, and you'll find most of it almost kinda sorta works.  

But that twenty percent variance makes a difference, enough so that it is no longer reflective of the teachings of Jesus.

Money money money, gain gain gain, ever bigger ever more?  There's no version of Jesus who pointed us towards material wealth and social influence. There's no version of the Jesus we know from the Gospels that tolerated venality and indulgence as a marker of spiritual blessing.   You can bowlderize him into a shambling FrankenChrist golem that makes that case, sure, but a plain reading of the Nazarene's intent just won't get you there.  It's uncanny valley Jesus, Jesus shifted and warped to serve the demands of our endless capitalist avarices.

Wealth, as Jesus taught about it, is a dangerous thing for the soul.  The wealthier you are, the more likely it is that you're in some serious spiritual mess.  You have built your house on the sand of human imaginings.  Our material gain is, at best, a dishonorable thing that must be bent to the use of grace with cunning and intention.  

You cannot, said my Lord and Savior in a very declarative way, serve God and wealth. 

The Good Ache of Labor

I ache this morning, and it's a good thing.

Yesterday, the echoes of Easter still in my soul, I spent most of the day engaged in strenuous physical activity.  It began with a brisk three and a half mile walk, as I dropped off our old minivan to get a failed repair redone.  "Do you need a ride home," asked the apologetic manager.  "Nah," I said.  "It's a nice day, and the walk'll be good for me."

The morning was cool and pleasant, the clouds high and solid, and the crispness of the air felt good against my bare arms for the hour I spent putting one foot in front of the other.

For much of the rest of the morning, I was moving mattresses and disassembling beds, as every single bedroom in our house got a new bed.  Well, not "new," not technically.  But newer, as the mattresses that used to grace two rooms in the house of my son and daughter in law found their way to us.

The wife has been agitating for a larger bed in our room for some time, as the joys of perimenopause and the general creakiness of our mutual aging have made sleep an occasionally uncertain thing.  Particularly if you've got a husband who twitches and snorts and fidgets in his sleep.  

So a queen replaced our full, which was moved to our upstairs guest room, along with a beautiful but hefty handcrafted hardwood bedframe.  The downstairs guest room got another queen.  It was a day long bedding do-si-do.

And then the van was ready, and...as Rache was busy in meetings all day...I walked the three and a half miles back to pick it up.  That walk was more leisurely, as I was feeling a little spent.   As I have observed many times in such jaunts, so few other human beings are actually out on foot in the 'burbs.  The flow of our machines is endless, as we rush from place to place, and our bodies sit idle, their energies fermenting into agitation and anxiety.

I can feel yesterday in my flesh today.  Again, it's a good feeling, a feeling I appreciate.  I know, being the throes of middle age, that this sort of day will not always be possible.  That systems will fail.  Knees will go.  Hips will go.  Stamina will fade. 

So even as I walked that return trip, feeling the warmth of the late spring sun on my back, I was grateful for it.  Grateful for each step.  Grateful for another season when my body is able.  

And Lord, did I sleep well.

Jorge Bergoglio Changes Again

The first thing I learned from Jorge Bergoglio was that people can change.

He was, back when he took the reins of the Catholic church, someone that I'll admit to watching with a bit of wariness.  

Before he chose his nom de Papa, Jorge was something of a culture warrior.  He was active on the newly minted Twitter, and back in 2013 I observed that most of his pre-Francis tweets weren't the most gracious and welcoming things I'd ever seen.

On social media in his native Argentina, he learned in heavily against gay adoption, to the point where that seemed...if all you looked at was Twitter at the time...to be his primary schtick as an archbishop.  He was conservative, eh?  

But even at that point in the social media era, I'd realized that Twitter was a poisonous and unreliable thing.  "Microblogging" was already bringing out the worst in human beings, or so I'd observed in myself.  It made us prone to shallow, shortsighted, reactive thinking.  It critically sabotaged attention spans, obliterated subtlety, and caused pathological self-promotion.

And it caused us to blindly attack one another, as online mobs yearning for a daily dose of self-indulgent self-righteousness swarmed anyone for any perceived infraction.

So I committed myself to reserving judgment.  Let's see who he becomes, I reminded myself, not who he was.

In his role as Francis, Jorge was quite different.  His seeming commitment to ideological purity over grace evaporated in the light of his responsibility to minister to billions.  

At the time, Jorge/Francis described taking that mantle as a moment of real epiphany, an awareness that the conflicts that had animated him were below the role Providence had called him to play.  Like Saul of Tarsus, the man before the call wasn't the same as the man after the call.  In becoming Francis, Jorge Bergoglio was transformed.  Instead of invective, words of reconciliation and kindness.  He chose his ground, and that ground was solid rock.  Love for neighbor.  Care for the poor and the stranger.  A willingness to push back against power and falsehood.

This change infuriated those of a legalistic or Pharisaic temperament, in the same way that the actual teachings of Jesus infuriate such souls.  Not that Francis was "progressive."   He understood the task set before him by our mutual Master.

Francis did his job ably, and with integrity.  He presented the central teachings of Jesus effectively and personally.  As did Benedict before him, honestly, and John Paul II as well.

Euge, serve bone et fidelis.

  

Eating Together

For twenty years, I've led Maundy Thursday services, ever since I started down the pastoring path.

It was never a thing for me growing up in church, as my home church was a big downtown congregation at the heart of the nation's capital.  Even if there'd been a service there, it'd have been such a pain navigating traffic that my parents wouldn't have tolerated it.

As I've spent my ministry career in small congregations, I've always run the service in the simplest of ways.  No complex liturgies or innovations, just a good ol' potluck, framed by the breaking of the bread and the drinking of the cup.  It's as simple a way as possible to mark the Last Supper, and the command to celebrate communion with one another.

As a creature that takes deep comfort in habit and ritual, I've always brought both bread (challah, typically, because it's way tastier than matzoh, and the Lord's Supper ain't a Seder) and soup.  The soup is always the same soup, several boxes worth of Trader Joe's Tomato and Red Pepper.  It's pretty tasty.

This year, I started out to do the same thing.  But three things changed the arc of the evening.  

First, there was already going to be plenty of soup for everyone, a tasty homemade vegetable stew.  My contribution wouldn't be necessary, and if prior years were any guide, I'd end up taking it home.  Despite my best efforts to consume it, most of it would go bad, and then get dumped into my compost.  Composting meant that at least it returns to the earth, but it still felt like a waste.

Second, earlier in the day I'd chatted with church volunteers about the ever expanding demand for food in the town.  Our tiny Little Free Pantry pushed through twenty five tons of food last year, and with more and more economic pressure on the DC area, that seems to be increasing.  The stream of souls coming to our door in search of sustenance is swelling.  Across the way at the town's food bank, the shelves are increasingly bare.  Wasting food in that context seems even less tolerable.

And third, well, there were the words of the Apostle Paul from his letter to the endlessly frustrating Corinthians.  In preparation for the service, I'd re-read the section where he challenges them over the mess they'd made of the Lord's Supper.  They'd modeled their communion after the cultural expectations of the Greco-Roman feast.  There, the important and influential guests ate first and abundantly, and the poor and unknown were served last, getting scraps or nothing.

This annoyed the bejabbers out of Paul.  As The Message puts it:

I find that you bring your divisions to worship—you come together, and instead of eating the Lord’s Supper, you bring in a lot of food from the outside and make pigs of yourselves. Some are left out, and go home hungry. Others have to be carried out, too drunk to walk. I can’t believe it! Don’t you have your own homes to eat and drink in? Why would you stoop to desecrating God’s church? Why would you actually shame God’s poor? I never would have believed you would stoop to this. And I’m not going to stand by and say nothing.

With Paul's words echoing in my soul, I set those boxes of soup into the donation crate.  Afterwards, church folk ate and drank together, partaking of bread and cup and remembering Christ's call to love and serve.  It was a gracious time of fellowship, and there was more than enough for all.

And for those who come to us in need today, that soup will be there waiting for them.  

It's pretty tasty.

 

The Dreams in Which I'm Flying

On a recent night, I couldn't fly.  It was most frustrating.

When I was a kid, I didn't have flying dreams.  I regularly dreamed I was falling.  There'd be a yawning abyss, a great terrible drop, and I'd lose my balance.  Down I'd go, and I'd wake in terror.  If you died hitting the ground in a falling dream, or so I understood, you'd actually die in real life.  So my friends had told me.  It was common knowledge among children. 

Then...it was in early adolescence...that changed.  I had a falling dream, just pure stock standard plummeting to my inevitable demise, only with one major difference.  I was annoyed at the dream, irritated that it was yet again going to ruin a night of sleep.  I refused to wake up.

I fell, the ground came up real fast, but I didn't wake.  I felt the impact, and I died.   

Only the dream kept going, and I was elsewhere, as another character in a new part of the dream.   This upended one of the primary tenets of children's dream folklore, but so it goes.  

Upon waking, I wasn't afraid of falling dreams.  I still had them, though.  I'd crash to the ground, and just keep on going.  I started trying to figure out if there was any way to change my downward trajectory.  I could, spreading my arms and pulling up into a long glide.  It was really kind of fun.

For a while, I'd flap my arms, which felt goofy, but worked.

Eventually, I learned that arm waggling wasn't necessary, that I could fly by simply *intending* in a particular direction.  The feeling was, and still is, completely unlike anything I feel in waking life.  I remember it right now, as I write this, but I can't *feel* it.  It's a bit like pushing with my arms, and at the same time like pulling, but the tension is evenly distributed across my entire body.  It's like no other feeling but flying.  Up I'll soar, and it's delightful.

I'll swoop about with only the very slightest bit of effort, shouting gleefully down to those on the ground, often hoping that finally, finally, it's not just a dream.  But it always is.

Flying usually comes so very easily.  

But not always.  Sometimes, I ascend, but only weakly, rising for just a moment and with great effort.  

Or...like that recent night...I'll try to find that sense of intention, and it's just not there, like I'm attempting to move an arm that's completely numb.  Oh, c'mon, I'll grumble, reaching about in myself, but ain't nothin' doing.  I remain as earthbound as I am in waking life.

The ability is fickle, and not simply mine to command at will.

Christian Men and the Manosphere

I loathe the "manosphere."

It's a dismal manifestation of our internet age, as stunted examples of human maleness parade themselves around as exemplars.  I've not been around folks like that for a while, not since undergrad, when I watched aggressive males acting out towards one another, and towards women.  It was the University of Virginia, so those Alpha-Hoos were wealthy, driven, and smart, which made them even more insufferable when they were drunk.  I found social circles that kept me as far away from that mess as I could.

Have stuff!  Treat women like meat!  Dominate those around you!  Bluster and preen!  It's been around forever, but here it is again, all of a sudden, pressing out into the world, supercharged by soulless algorithms.

The "men" who now pitch their stunted ethos over social media never made it through adolescence.  The vision of male self-understanding they present is the same vision held by the middle school boys who used to hit me up for lunch money back in the early 1980s.  They prattled on about girls and their anatomies in a way that showed they had no idea what they were talking about.

Or, more importantly, who they were talking about.   

Men who don't honor women as human persons...as friends, as family, as colleagues, as distinct, complex, and unique souls?  They don't understand what it means to be a person, let alone a man.  And those who treat women in a predatory way, who manipulate and objectify?  They're "lower than dogs," as my Grandfather used to say. 

Nothing is weaker, lazier, and less demanding than the indulgent, reactive, infantile vision of the "manosphere."  In the face of a deformed "maleness" defined by lust and self-promotion, greed and dominance, by the Andrew Tates and Donald Trumps of the world, there's another vision of what it means to be a man.

It's a much, much harder path.  It makes more demands.  It's a path of virtue, honor, and integrity.  It requires self-control and discipline.  It requires strength, courage, and sustained attention.

It's the path we learn from Jesus, and from a sacred tradition that goes back to the dawn of human history.

The Way is more challenging, and infinitely more rewarding, and it looks completely different.  

Here, for your convenience, are five distinct features of a male identity shaped by discipleship:

1) A Christian man is calm. There's a fundamental stillness to the authentically Christian man, a placidity that is not inert, but rather unswayed and unbowed by the endless churn of the world. The ideal among Christian men is not one who gets agitated, not one who is easily riled, not angry all the time about every last thing. He doesn't feel that it's his task in life to shout down everyone he disagrees with.

In that, there's a remarkable functional similarity between our ethos and that of the ancient Stoics, those philosophers of the Greco-Roman era who saw that being unfazed by anything was a significant virtue. In our hyper-emotive era, when we are expected to rage and weep and howl at the least input, this is profoundly countercultural.  

The roots of an ethos of measured calmness are also fundamentally biblical, with a deep foundation in Wisdom literature. The wise soul does not allow anger or lust, panic or anxiety to rule a life. Wisdom does not bellow or shout down. It remains unflappable, and sticks to what it knows is true.

That's true if your day is just an average day. It's equally true if planes are falling from the sky and the world as you know it has come crashing down.

In our reactive, ranting, overstimulated, hyperagitated #tweetstorm era, that's something worth remembering. It's also a fundamental principle for every Christian man.

2) A Christian man is humble. Yes, I know, we're all supposed to be constantly one-upping each other in Trump's America, posturing in an endless display of higher-primate alpha-male dominance. We're told to be brash and bold and loud. We're supposed to build our brands, and self-promote, and claw our way up over the bodies of those weaker than us, while indulging in all of those delightful mortal sins that popular consumer culture reinforces in us.

But that's not the path of Jesus. It just isn't. It has never been. There is no legitimate reading of the Gospel that says otherwise. If you want to be proud and feel powerful, you're welcome to go hang out with with Anton LaVey or Ayn Rand.

Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

For disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, humility is a fundamental virtue. The Christian man, first and foremost, sees himself as a servant to those around him. Though he is resourceful, competent, and able, he sees all of those strengths as existing primarily to be a bulwark to friends and family. Not to dominate or control them, or to advance himself, but to give aid and help bear the burdens of others.

When his community is threatened...by storms, by violence, by discord, he simply does what needs be done. We do our duty, no matter what that might entail, even up to the point of exposing ourselves to suffering and death.

This is, again, a fundamental dynamic of the the teaching of Jesus. It's the cross in a nutshell. And it is utterly alien to the culture of self-absorbed "manhood" taught in our society.

3) A Christian man is diligent. Popular culture presents us with an image of men as eternal man-children, permanent adolescents who like nothing more than to loaf about and can't manage to do much of anything. Golly, Dad just put the diaper on the baby's head again! Men are so witless! Hah! Hah! Better get back to the mancave to yell at the sportsball!

Christian manhood isn't like that. We're not called to be shallow, not flighty, not driven by appetite. Christian men remember what it was to be a boy, the playful energy and creativity of it. We are allowed to still enjoy those things. We're allowed to be childlike.

Childish? Not so much.

Oh, sure one can enjoy life. But we are also no longer boys, and we should know it. There comes a time when we must set aside childish ways, as the Apostle Paul reminds us.

That means attending to duty. It means pursuing labors even when they aren't what we feel like doing right at this very moment. It means not giving up, simply because we're feeling, like, so bored. It means pursuing competence at those things we know we need to accomplish.

Men are called to be pragmatic and results-oriented, who committing ourselves to crafts that require attention and focus.

It means we must be patient, and willing to do what we know Christ demands of us, while letting God do God's work at God's own pace. In this Veruca Salt I-want-it-now age, that requires being intentionally countercultural.

It is also the essence of what it means to be a disciple.

4) A Christian man is reflective. This one is tough.  It means we've got to be willing to look hard at our own lives and admit that we can be wrong. If you err, and you realize there's a possibility that the thing you just did or the thing you just said is incorrect, you correct yourself.

This is hard. It stabs at our pride, at our sense of self and sense of strength. We would rather double down. We would rather be defiant in our correctness.

But the process of growing and developing as a disciple requires that we constantly check ourselves against our primary commitment, which is following Jesus of Nazareth. If we act in ways that don't measure up, we've got to be willing to admit we're on the wrong path.

The operative word here is repentance. Yes, repentance. If you never allow for your being wrong, you won't ever repent. We've got to be willing to let repentance...that turning away from our brokenness that is every day of the Way...actually be what we do.

Truly Christian men are profoundly serious about that form of self-discipline, continually checking their own actions and thoughts against the standards of the Gospel. We must continually check ourselves against what we know our faith requires, and even then, we'll sometimes be surprised to discover that our assumptions about others are completely wrong.

And then we admit it. Then we correct ourselves.

When was the last time you reconsidered something about yourself? Or told someone, hey, you know, I completely messed that up?

That's not being weak. It's called repenting, and if all you do is double down, you do not have the discipline to be a citizen of the Kingdom of God.

5) A Christian man is peaceful. In this peculiar, benighted age, there's a relentless hostility, one that seethes and burns in so much of our communication with one another. Insults and conflict rage, as we take opposition and difference to mean we've got to prove ourselves dominant in every exchange.

That's not the path of Jesus. Never has been. We like to turn to those times Jesus felt and articulated anger to justify our own acting out in rage...and ignore the ethic that is clearly taught in the Gospels. Overturn the tables! Turn out the moneychangers! Booyah!

But when Jesus taught us what to do and how to act, that wasn't what he said. When the Apostle Paul taught how to approach the World, that wasn't what he said.

When interacting with peers and colleagues, we are to be peacemakers. When faced with those who oppose or oppress us, the centurions and jailers? We nonetheless act and speak with honesty, decency, and respect for their persons.

It's how we convince others. It's also how we show that we are who we say we are.

Again, this is immensely challenging. Men are aggressive. It's one of the reasons we do well in the world. Aggression...and the focused energy it creates...is part of our nature, and it can be useful, particularly where large predators are involved.

But the easy embrace of self-serving violence is not and has never been the Christian path. Christians have engaged in violence, sure. Wherever Christianity has subsumed itself into state power, it has become warped into an instrument to justify violent action. Occasionally, there have been Christians faced with demonic, dehumanizing powers so destructive that violence seemed the only option. Faithful men such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer or John Brown took up arms against the brutal demons of their culture, and it's impossible to reject their witness out of hand.

But Christ presents us with a different path.

Christian men must be willing to both speak truth and resist, if our way of life is threatened. But we will never strike out, because to do so would violate our integrity as Christians.

When faced with the choice of using violence, even in self-defense, we don't. This is not because we are weak. Nor is it because we water down our Christianity with dreamy idealism.  There is nothing harder than setting down the sword. Looking at the saints of the church, those who have chosen to give their lives rather than yield to the siren song of violence, it can seem impossible. But it is not.

It's because they're better disciples of Jesus Christ than you or I.

As a lifelong Christian who prays daily, studies the bible, has three theological degrees under my belt, and pastors a church, I can say this. In their radical nonviolence, there is a purity of faith among those who will not take up the sword that I still struggle with.

This was the path of the early church, after all. Complete nonviolence, even unto death. Protestants in particular have forgotten this, as the stories of the martyrs are set by the wayside, replaced by tales of success and prowess and material prosperity.

Despite this, it is What Jesus Did, and What He Told Us To Do.

I wrestle with this, particularly when I see injustices inflicted on the weak. I struggle with this more deeply still, when I feel my loved ones are threatened.  I feel rage that is hard to contain.

But those who have had the strength to stand firm are more authentically Christian...more like Jesus and the first Spirit-fired churches...than I am. They didn't punch back. They didn't attack. They avoid violence, no matter what, because that is what Jesus did. Period.

We don't want to hear this. From our pricked pride and our innate, male aggression we resist it. We come up with rationalizations. We proof text. We wave our flags. It feels good.

But if we do not allow ourselves to see the deeper strength of their nonviolent path, we are being willfully blind, and we are not allowing ourselves to learn from those whose faith is stronger.  In our shallow, violent, hyperkinetic time, it's easy for men who've claimed Jesus as their primary life commitment to wander from his path.

Calmness. Humility. Diligence. Reflection. And a soul turned fiercely and defiantly towards peace.

These virtues are fundamental to every man's Christian journey. They are also, as much as I struggle with pride and aggression, the demands Jesus makes of us.

They aren't easy. But good things rarely are.

The Van of Theseus

It was decision time this last week, as our aging Honda Odyssey sat in the shop.   

After buying it used in late 2013, we've had it for twelve years, and it showed every one of those.  There are minor scrapes and dings and divots on the exterior from our now grown boys bumping into things during the process of learning how to drive.  Inside, it's still functional.  No Nav.  No Carplay or Android Auto.  Just Bluetooth for audio.  Cloth seats, still fine but careworn.  It's gone from being our primary family truckster to our secondary vehicle, our utility people-schlepper, mulch carrier, and furniture mover.  At just under 90,000 miles on it, could go another 90K.  Hondas roll that way.

But not without major work.

The front axle was the reason I'd taken it in, grinding  more and more audibly as bearings and other internals failed.  Driveline losses meant we were seeing about a 20% decrease in fuel efficiency.   The rear suspension had been shot for a while, pogoing about and thunking as both springs and rubber mounts had given way.  But now the head gasket was leaking visibly. The timing belt was fraying. 

To be reliably drivable, it was going to need what amounted to an overhaul.  Thousands and thousands of dollars of work, getting perilously close to the value of the vehicle.  The shop where we've had it repaired before was not even faintly pushy about proceeding.  "This is a lot," they said.  We'd be replacing so much of the vehicle it would barely even be the same van when they were done.  A "Van of Theseus," so to speak, and that comes at a nontrivial price.  

But replacing it with a new-used van would be tens of thousands of dollars.  And it would add to our insurance bill.  And it would quadruple our county property tax.  

All around us, the local economy is beginning to fray.   The tens of thousands of jobs vanishing from the DC job market wasn't going to have an instantaneous impact.  But now, as those who've been jobless for months are starting to burn through their emergency reserves?  Now things are shifting.  More houses on the market.  More people preparing to move to greener pastures in search of work.

The markets, in which our retirement savings are invested?  They're not lookin' so hot.

We're fiercely conservative financially, and so could afford either, right now.  But keeping that cash around for the famine years approaching seemed like a prudent idea.  Dropping thirty two grand on a used van that we'd only infrequently use seemed unwise.

So the choice was to repair and restore, and to take the less expensive course.

The Ones Who Are To Blame

If any one thinker has captured the brokenness of our uniquely blighted era, it's Jonathan Haidt. 

He's a social psychologist and researcher whose focus, of late, is the sudden collapse of a generation's mental health.  Young people right now are a mess.  The kids are not OK, as rates of mental illness and social dysfunction have spiked over the last decade and a half.

For years, this trendline has been notable, as literacy, the capacity to focus, and a sense of cohesive identity and purpose have slipped away from our kids.  

The gut-level answer to this, and the Occam's Razor reason:  the rewiring of young minds by semi-sentient corporate "social" media.   At first, it was considered Luddite to suggest this, and folks would cluck about correlation not being causation.  But we've got the data now, after decades, and in study after study, the toxic influence of algorithm-driven always-on 24/7 dopamine bumps is clear.

I feel it, whenever I'm on too much of a doomscrolling jag.  But my kids feel it, too.  My sons have both bailed on social media entirely, and both feel it had a uniformly negative impact on their minds and their creativity.

The evolved systems of human sociality that shaped our minds for millennia are being short-circuited by profit-driven social media and tech.  Constant, immediate gratification stunts our souls.

In a recent interview with Ezra Klein, Haidt names this as a fundamental cultural failure.  From the perspective of a social psychologist and anthropologist, he compellingly argues that a society that fails to inculcate healthy adult sociality into the young does critical damage to itself.  It destroys our moral core, and without that sense of purpose, we decay and rot.  Such a culture becomes neither progressive nor conservative, but indulgently decadent and mindlessly reactive.

Anxious overparenting and a childhood entirely managed by adults from infancy through adolescence is also a factor, but even that seems to have risen in parallel to new media.  

Long and short of it: thirty years of internet hasn't gone as we'd hoped.  Unmoored from our ethical frameworks, it's done critical damage to our individual and collective psyches.  

So.  How do we reverse this process?  How do we hold the corporate powers responsible to account, understanding that they're kinda sorta in control right now?  It's not just that they've inserted themselves into our minds and shaped the minds of our children.  

They've taken control of our economy.  They've seized and reframed our social relationships.  They manage what we see, and when we see it.  They've been the mechanism that gave the propaganda machines of tyrants access to our people.  And now, they've bought their way into the venal heart of American political power.  

There they were, lined up neatly, celebrating the government that they purchased.  

Meta. Alphabet. Amazon.  X.

Their bright ideas have crippled a generation.  They've subverted both our minds, our economy, and our Republic.

I cannot, for the life of me, understand why we trust these people to rule us.

Faith, Purpose, and Identity

Faith, as I understand it, is that which defines every other thing that you do.

It provides the answer to the question, "Why?"  It provides the overarching and unifying purpose, the moral measure of every action.   It is, in evangelical Christian terms, the thing that makes life "purpose-driven," or so Rick Warren once described it.

I share that essential understanding, although I came to it via a quite different route.  When I began my return to faith, it was through the writings of 20th century Christian existentialists.  Kierkegaard, of course, but also Tillich.  Tillich's understanding of faith was that it was our "ultimate concern," meaning it was that goal that defined all other goals, that was not "contingent," but defining.

I've not taught Tillich over the years, or preached explicitly from Tillich, for two reasons.  One, people just don't get him, and I see why.  His big thinky theology tended to be a wee bit abstracted from the day-to-day choices that define our moral lives.  Second, his form of Christian faith has no purchase in contemporary Christian debates.  His philosophizing ain't gonna fly if you're conservative and evangelical, nor does he...as a dead white man...have any lingering voice amongst the progressive oldline.

But still, that basic truth about faith remains, and it's the plumb line against which I measure both my actions and my inactions.  If I'm committed to following Jesus, which I am, then that commitment defines all other commitments.  It's how you operationalize the Great Commandment.  "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength and all your mind," said Jesus, and if that's not a clear indicator of Ultimate Concern in the Gospel, I don't know what is.

I was meditating on this reality yesterday, after I bumped into one of those peculiar little faith factoids that regularly drop from the table of Ryan Burge.  Burge is an American Baptist Convention pastor and a professor, who gathers and discusses the state of religion in the United States.  

The data point that caught my eye tracked the responses of Americans to this survey question:  

How important are your views about religion to your identity and how you think of yourself?  

The possible responses were: 1) Not at all, 2) A little, 3) Somewhat, and 4) Very much.  Now, I'd prefer a Likert approach to this data, myself.  Four possible responses doesn't provide a meaningful midpoint, eh?  That, and I don't quite like the phrasing, which modifies importance.  "Very much important?"  That's kinda clumsy sounding.  

But the replies, broken down by forms of faith, showed a striking outlier.  

Self-identified evangelicals responded to the question with a resounding supermajority going with the highest category.  As Burge noted, this is a strong signal, twice that of every other group.  Non-evangelicals, which presumably includes the oldline denominations?  Seventy percent replied with an answer ranging from Not at all to Somewhat.

Having bumped into this data point on very progressive BlueSky, the responses I encountered there were all from progressive folks who inhabit the non-evangelical category.  All equated the evangelical response with extremism and oppression.

But I took this another way.  

The Gospel and the teachings of Jesus aren't secondary, or one input among many.  There is nothing in them that would suggest that's an option.  They define all other categories.  They are more important than my race and my gender.  They define my moral actions as a father and a husband, as a neighbor and a citizen.

Why do I stand for the rights of the last, the least, and the lost?  Because it's what Jesus did and taught.  Why do I reject the politics of dominance, resentment, and ethnonationalism?  Because Jesus demands that his disciples set down that sword.  Why do I reject crass mammonism?  Because resisting the corruption of greed is a core theme in Christ's teachings.  Why do I press back against willful cruelty to the stranger and the foreigner in our land?  'Cause Jesus makes it real clear that's a non-negotiable.

If religion does not shape identity, does not form our souls at the most fundamental level, then what is it?  Faith that does not clearly give us both purpose and Ultimate Concern has buried the lede.

It is salt without saltiness, as a friend once put it.