Wordsmithing is not a Spiritual Gift

Continuing on from my prior meditations on the PCUSA's Proposed New Confession:

Having laid out the nature of God and our stubborn violation of the good in its first two sections, the third section tells the story of God's response.  It describes the point and purpose of Jesus, and the blessings of the Holy Spirit as it gathers and empowers those who are moved by the grace of the Gospel.

There are things, of course, that one can pick at and quibble with.  

Calling Jesus a "Palestinian Jew," for example, is comprehensible but peculiar.  Would any Judean of the first century have spoken of themselves in this way?  Would Jesus?  Generally speaking, the understanding of that region as uniformly "Palestine" is a historical imposition of imperialism, both Roman and British, which means it's got some wildly ironic resonances.  Colonizing history with ideological anachronisms isn't just a venial sin of right wing nationalist hagiographers, eh?

Or in the very next sentence, where we are told that "Jesus showed that the brutality of facts does not define the truth of God."  It's a very pretty sentence, but...huh.  "The Brutality of Facts?"  What exactly does that mean?   Is factuality a problem?  It sure is in our post-reality culture, where facts are whatever we say they are, and alternative facts are the wormed tongue of tyrannical systems.  "We will not allow Our Truth to be defined by Facts," sounds like the sort of thing one hears from a White House spokesperson these days.

Saying "the brutality of facts" seems far less sharp than "the facts of brutality," which creates a cleaner mirrored couplet with "the truth of God."  Assuming, of course, that this is what was meant.

I could keep going.  

But I won't.

Mostly, this is because as I engage with these latter two sections, I can feel the Dark Spirit of Wordsmithing rising within me.   Picking over language and legalistic quibbling are both bitter fruits of the Presbyterian compulsion to wordsmith, in which we imagine that we can build a semiotic tower to heaven if only we can workshop just the right words.  I succumb to the prideful, perfectionist, endlessly dissatisfied obsessions of that particular demon just as easily as any other Presbyterian.

And mostly?  Mostly these last two sections are lovely and thoughtful, gracious and faithful and hopeful.  Really solid work.

I would have no trouble integrating large sections of them into my little congregation's weekly Affirmation of Faith, where we read from the Confessions as a shared expression of what we hold together.

Once I've stopped worrying at it, that is.

Pride and Courage

"Do not pursue spectacular deeds. We must deliberately renounce all desires to see the fruit of our labor, doing all we can as best we can, leaving the rest in the hands of God. What matters is the gift of your self, the degree of love that you put into each one of your actions.

Do not allow yourselves to be disheartened by any failure as long as you have done your best. Neither glory in your success, but refer all to God in deepest thankfulness.

If you are discouraged, it is a sign of pride, because it shows you trust in your own powers. Never bother about people’s opinions. Be humble and you will never be disturbed."

Mother Teresa, from Called to Community

Of Faith and Sycophancy

One of the most unsettling things about the sudden surge in artificial intelligence abilities is just how relentless and ubiquitous AI seems to be becoming. It can do, well, pretty much everything, and as it iterates more and more towards holding competencies that unsettle us, it’s increasingly present. Just recently, I listened to my sons have a long and passionate discussion about AI capacities in the afternoon, after which I talked with a dear friend about how much more comforting and competent AI was than their doctors during a recent major health challenge. 

Sure, there are still AI errors, like receiving the first clearly-AI-generated flyer for the community Easter Sunrise Service and noting that we’ll be celebrating the resurrection of “J-hus Chris.” J-hus Chris is Risen Today just doesn’t quite have that Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-leyee-uuu-yah ring to it.

But those mistakes are getting rarer. The latest iterations of Anthropic’s Claude are strikingly superior to models from just six months ago, capable of performing extended and complex multistage tasks, strategically analyzing large amounts of information, or inferring intent from textual cues.

Again, though, it’s not perfect, and one of AI’s primary flaws is sycophancy.

AI is notoriously agreeable, always telling you what a genius you are. It doesn’t challenge you, doesn’t point out that maybe you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, and always affirms you using language that mirrors your own. Claude does this a bunch with me, throwing theological terms into the mix, or noting how very pastoral my interests are. Most of the time, it feels pandering, like someone who’s telling you what they think you want to hear, but who doesn’t know you well.

Why does it do this? Two reasons: Pretraining and Emergence. It’s pretrained to be agreeable, because if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t use it, and it wouldn’t learn and grow and let OpenAI show us profit-padding ads.

Second, that obsequious fawning comes because it’s learned from interacting with millions of us to be even more relentlessly agreeable, because that’s what the great sprawling mass of humanity desires. We want to be affirmed. We want to be encouraged. We don’t like to be challenged, or to be told when we’ve fundamentally misunderstood something important. This is particularly true when it comes to our ever-tenuous grasp of how our Creator wants us to live together.

Are we challenged by Jesus? Because we should be.

Christian faith, honestly and plainly understood, challenges our operating presumptions the moment we engage with it.  

To our desire for possessions and material gain, we are told with clarity that we can't serve that and God, and that wealth poses a mortal danger to our souls.

Desiring any form of human power...mammon, social influence, or the sword of the state?  No matter how sure we are of the correctness of our views, or how pure we imagine our intent may be, Jesus ain't buyin' it.   He'll call us out, every single time.  We cannot yield to those yearnings, and we really really do not want to hear that.

To the righteous hatred we feel for our enemies, we are told that we must not just let that go, but let it be transformed by Christ's love.  Loving those who believe exactly as you do and who inhabit your precise ideological echo chamber is morally meaningless.  "Enemies are for hating" is the AntiChrist's self-serving and circuitous logic, and a moral sinkhole.  It can govern no disciple of Jesus.

All of this is hard for us, as it was hard for those who first gathered around Jesus.  We'd rather engage in the moral equivalent of cognitive outsourcing, refusing to accept that the Gospel first and foremost fundamentally unsettles our sense of our own correctness.

In the Flesh

Every year, the group is different.

They stand just up the street, a cluster of teens, all of them awaiting the arrival of the big yellow bus that will take them to the nearby high school. I pass them on the other side of the street on my morning walk with the dog, every once in a while making sure to be out of the way when a teen comes hurtling down the street, having gotten out of the house at precisely the moment the bus passed it.

This year, it’s a group of four teenage girls that seems to have been selected by a casting director’s diversity and representation consultant. A Latina, an African immigrant, an Asian American, and a White girl, and they’re all lined up in a row, in precisely that order, morning after morning.

This would, were one to be making some slightly unsubtle teen film about the joys and blessings of our multiethnic melting-pot republic, be a perfect setup. Each of their lives and backgrounds, different, coming together and finding friendship and common humanity as they got to know one another. That’d be great, but that’s not the reality.

All year long when I’ve passed them, they’re always standing in what apparently is their assigned spot, each a perfect COVID era six feet away from the other, Latina first, two meters, then the African girl, then two meters, then the Asian girl, and two meters beyond that, the white girl sitting separate in the passenger seat of her dad’s idling car.

And never, not once all year long, have I seen any of them interacting with one another. Not once. 

 Every day I pass them, they’re all in The Position. Hands together, head down, thumbs typing or swiping.

The pastor in me wishes that some morning, the Apostle Paul could join me on my walk, and I could point to that foursome hermetically sealed away from one another, and ask: 

Paul? When you talk about the importance of not being in the flesh, how does that relate to what we’re seeing happen all around us? Could you break that down for me? This culture-wide discomfort around face to face connection, our seemingly inexorable separation from one another? How does that play out against what you taught about Spirit and flesh?

What does that have to say to us, in a time when we struggle with the realization that the society-wide experiment with inescapably present media is depriving us of an essential component of our humanity? How, I want to ask Paul, does that speak to the peculiar character of our distracted lives and disembodied attentions? When passing a group of teen girls doesn’t sound like the delightful chattering spring vibrance of a murmuration of starlings, but is day by day as silent as a sarcophagus?

Like the clinical psychologists who designed the software that drives the dark glass shards that consume our attention, we know that the reason we aren’t present is because of a weakness of the flesh, a vulnerability that can be hacked. When we can be shown exactly what our brains desire, all the time, without ceasing, why would we get to know or care about the person standing right next to us? Or, equally and to be fair to the teens, the person sitting right next to us on the couch every evening, as we both scroll mindlessly through nothing.

We cannot be compassionate or love our neighbor if we don’t even notice the human beings around us, if we’re oblivious to the place in which we are standing.

Resisting this, I think, is a necessary thing, if our every action and every deed of our body is to be a part of what Christ is working in the world.

The Weight of the World

I’ve always consumed the news of the world, because knowing what’s going on has always seemed something that an informed citizen should be doing. How can you do your duty to a republic if you’re oblivious? You cannot.

Only there’s a cost.

Like, say, this last week, when across my consciousness came news about dolphins and porpoises. I’ve always loved cetaceans, because, I mean, who doesn’t? They’re remarkable, intelligent, social creatures, with brains as complex as ours. Human beings have always recognized their playfulness and their curiosity. They inhabit a similar place to us in the ocean, as an apex hunter, but there’s another similarity: they’ve got a problem with screens.

It’s not that they’re on their screens all day, because that’s harder without hands. It’s that our screens are in them. Liquid crystals, specifically, the tiny little electrically reactive elements used in dashboards and calculators. When those are disposed of, liquid crystal monomers don’t go away, and studies of deceased dolphins shows they’re building up in their muscles and fatty tissues, and are so small they’re crossing over cellular membranes into their brains, where…like nanoparticles of plastic…they just accumulate, because they can’t be digested or dissolved.

That’s been shown to mess with brain function, and hormonal function, and it’s a problem for large brained animals at the top of their food chain. 

Can you name another large brained mammal at the top of it’s food chain?

And I think, great. Another thing. Because Liquid Crystal Monomers might be a problem, but are they front of mind right now? The drums of war have deepened into the thunder of bombs. AI is angling to take every single job. There are rising seas and dying bees and sickened trees and Jeez Louise, how do you save such a world, a world that’s such a sprawling, relentless, irreducibly complex wreck?

It’s easier to stand at a remove, to just look at it from a critic’s distance and judge it, or to give up on it entirely.

Or to rush about madly, consumed by every new crisis, flitting and flailing from urgency to urgency and accomplishing nothing.

We must act, as moral agents, and yet at the same time acknowledge that all of it is larger than we can possibly influence.

It's a peculiar advantage of faith, I think, that allows us to act right where we are, as we know we must, trusting that the rest of it is out of our hands.  

Giving Solace

I wonder, sometimes, at the limits of my capacity to give comfort.

I know, I know, there are folks who say the task of the prophet is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, but mostly what I see in the world is suffering.  Hurt and loss, fear and trembling, those things are everywhere and a near universal.  I ache at the inescapable ubiquity of the world's pain. 

The pastor's task is primarily to give solace, but there's a boundary to that calling.

That boundary lies in the unique needs of every soul I encounter.  What gives comfort to one person will be of no use to another, and words that are bright with grace to one ear might be gibberish to another.  

Almost all of my own resilience in the face of loss and sorrow lies in my trust in the reality of God.  I know, from my faith, that nothing that has occurred in our time and space is ever forgotten.  It's all there in the mind of God, and that includes the reality and personhood of everyone I've lost.  I am blessed with the knowledge that they are completed, and that their completeness is a blessing.

I also trust, in my understanding of the infinite creative power of God, that everything that could possibly be is as real to my Creator as that which is.  All of the universe as we can see it is not the limit of God's work.  So the loved one who was taken from us too soon, where we feel the loss of all that they could have been?  Where we lament that we never reconciled, and there are parts of us we never shared with them?  All of those lost moments may be beyond us, but they are not beyond our Maker.  In God, nothing of what they could have been is gone.  In that, I find comfort.

I also know, from the heart of my faith, that our seasons of suffering aren't something God inflicts upon us, as if the Lord were some distant, demanding and monstrous tyrant.  God participates in the fullness of our struggles, knows them round about and within.  Everything we experience is known and felt by our Creator.  Being Itself bears the weight of our sorrow, and I am comforted by that.

But if Jesus is not shared between you and I, how can I share that comfort?  

If you believe the universe is a blind trampling machine, a churning murderous thrum of quantum cogs and mindless algorithms, I will struggle to reach you with my words of grace.  You will hear my words as delusion, as foolishness, as the prattle of a fanciful, willful child.

I could, in that knowledge, simply withdraw.  Coil back into my own bedrock certainty, leaving you infidel and alone.

What an ugly and selfish act that would be.

If you suffer, now, and do not find purpose and solace in Jesus as I do, then my task is to walk with you.  

To hear you.  To celebrate with you.  To weep with you.  To offer you food and warmth and encouragement.

To be your friend, even in our difference.

Reverie, Rage, and Repentance

It was a beautiful afternoon, and I was on my way to pick up my mom for an evening at our house. I'd been ill for most of the week, laid low by a particularly unpleasant bacterial infection. I'd not been out much, other than to crawl whimpering out of bed, shamble whimpering into the bathroom, and shamble whimpering back to bed.

But things finally seemed to be trending towards health. The fevers, finally faded. The discomfort, largely banished. So we invited Mom to our standing Friday British Baking Show watch gathering with my father-in-law, and I was going to get her. It felt good getting into the car, opening the sunroof and rolling down the windows, and putting on some chill music. Motoring along those deeply familiar roads, I bathed in the goodness of some relaxing playlists and the pleasure of feeling the breeze under a perfectly cloud-speckled late afternoon sky. I sang along to them, as I often do.

I came to a stop at the intersection of Graham road and Route 50.  It was a Friday at five thirty, so there was traffic. It's a long long light, so I leaned back, peered up at the blue sky through the sunroof, and sighed.

I was just meditating on how lovely it all felt when the shouting began.

"JESUS CHRIST!"

From behind me and to my right, a man's voice raised and harsh.

"JEEEESUS CHRIST!"

Someone out there on a beautiful day, windows open, yelling his fourth commandment violation at the world.

Was it road rage? Just a crazy person? I couldn't tell. I couldn't see the car or the driver in my mirror, just the Lord's name taken in vain again and again in a harsh and dissonant tone.

My reverie disrupted, I was a little annoyed. Why was this man so angry? The traffic was what it was. No-one was blocking traffic, or failing to turn when they should be turning. I couldn't see any reason anyone would be yelling, but it felt somehow part of the bitter zeitgeist of the day.

Because we barely seem to need reasons to be yelling. We're so reactive, so quick to find fault, quick to anger, quick to violence. Human beings have always been like that, of course, but it feels so amplified now, as provocateurs and professional agitators are supercharged by corporate algorithms designed to keep us addicted to being always upset, all the time.

That’s stirred the bubbling cauldron of political violence and the din of our endless shouting and finger-pointing, and for the umpteenth time in human history, a people seem drifting closer to a familiar psychosis.

It feels a dark path we've set ourselves down, so hooked on a poisonous cocktail of dopamine, adrenaline, and cortisol that we'd rather blow it all up than find a better path. We seem so lost.

But there is always a better path. As far as we flee into our personalized bespoke darknesses, there is always a way out, if we’re willing to take it.  If we're willing to accept that we're lost, and that we're so often wrong, and that no amount of pride and bile will make things better.  If we're willing to understand, and to act on that understanding, there is always hope.

As I marvelled at the amount of anger in the world, the lane to my right opened up a bit, and the voice grew louder. I thought about rolling up my windows, but I did not. I wanted to hear the voice clearly, and see who it was that just couldn’t seem to stop shouting.

As a battered Nissan Altima pulled alongside, windows down, I saw it was driven a middle aged man. He wore black plastic glasses, and looked to be either Afrocaribbean or Latino or some admixture thereof. He was, given the ruckus he was producing, surprisingly calm. JEEESUS CHRIST, he croaked, but then he gargled, laa laa laaa mmm mmm laaaa laaaa, and I realized that he wasn’t yelling at all.

Because there was music coming from the car, too, an old Christian contemporary song I kinda faintly remembered. He was singing very loudly to a song whose lyrics he didn’t totally remember. 

Was he singing well? No. O Sweet Lord Jesus he was not. But what he lacked in natural talent, tone, and training he was making up for with enthusiasm and volume. Whenever he’d hit the chorus, he’d shout it at the top of his lungs.

That was all I had been hearing. It made me laugh.

 
We can always, all of us, be wrong. We do need to remember that.

A Fierce and Joyous Voluntarism

Last year, my butternut squash really struggled.

Voracious chipmunks devoured the seedlings, necessitating multiple replantings.  Deer savaged the spreading vines.  It was a horticultural debacle.  I got a quarter of my usual yield.

This year, things are different.  I moved our bird feeder out of the front lawn, reducing the attraction for rodents.  I've been more diligent about applying deer spray.  

Out front, it's a riot of sprawling fan leaves and questing vines.  The most vigorous of my butternuts this season is, as it happens, not one that I planted at all.  It's a volunteer, one that came up early in a four by four raised bed where I'd intended to grow okra.  I didn't, at first, even know it was a butternut.  I could tell it was a squash of some sort, but that thumb-high sprout could have been zucchini, or perhaps a cuke.  Cucurbits...that's the common name for that family of plant...all kinda sorta look the same early in their development, at least to my amateur eye.

I thought about rooting it up, as I often will with volunteers.  I Had A Plan, after all, one that involved okra and not butternut.  But I had okra growing elsewhere.  Given the failure of my squash crop last year, I was inclined to give it a chance.  That, and if it turned out to be a butternut, it would have room to run, and butternut does the best when you let it sprawl out wild and free.

It was a butternut, and Lord, has it run.

It quickly leapt out of the bounds of the raised bed, as every single day the tendrils extended their reach.

  Its goal, best I could tell, was the sun, as it pressed due East towards the dawn.  The plant is now about thirteen feet long, the striving vines and sprawling leaves inscribing the shape of a beleafed comet onto the green of my yard.  Along those abundant vines, the glorious yellow blossoms have drawn a host of bumblebees, who will often fall asleep deep inside of the flowers, cozily cupped and pollen-drunk.  

From the female blossoms, with the help of the bees, a half-dozen squash have begun to form and fatten.  More than my entire harvest last year.

From just one plant, that showed up unexpected and was given the freedom to use its gifts.  This feels, as so much gardening does, flagrantly metaphorical.

There's a tendency amongst Professional Jesus People to assume that our task is to set agendas and establish plans and be all Leadershippy and stuff.  We are the prophets and the vision-casters!  We dream the dreams!  We know the knowledge!  Without the byzantine complexities known only to us professionals, poor hapless amateur Christians would wander around like little lost lambs in the great deep darkness.  

This is a spiritually dangerous assumption.  It's why we pastors overfunction.  It's why we're so prone to getting anxious, exhausted, and overwhelmed, as we take the entire weight of our local universe onto our shoulders.  It's why we can become megalomaniacs in microcosm, and get prone to doing things we oughtn't.  

Our pastoral task, instead, is mostly to encourage, inspire, and occasionally give some gentle redirection.  The vital and creative energies that keep our communities healthy extend far beyond our egos.  They rest within the souls who choose to give their time freely and joyously to music and mission, to service and care, to teaching and reaching out.

The best measure of a healthy church, as some of my choir folk so perfectly put it while chatting before the service this last Sunday, is that people want to be there together, pursuing a commonly held joy.

The heart of a vital and free society, as Alex of Tocqueville famously put it, is "..the art of pursuing in common the object of their common desires."

Without our fierce and joyous voluntarism, nothing good can stand.

Our Father

I was sitting at table with a group of fellow Presbyterians, where they were pitching out their reactions and thoughts around my recent book on reclaiming the Lord's Prayer.  It was an engaging conversation, and their frank comments and thoughtful ponderings made for some delightful back and forth.

During the discussion, one of the folks around the table started chatting about the very first chapter of the book.  It being a book about the Lord's Prayer and all, it tracks through that ancient prayer phrase by phrase, and the very first phrase is "Our Father."  Pater Hemon, in the Greek of Luke 11 and Matthew 6, although without the italics or capitalization, because common Greek didn't roll that way.

One of the participants, an Older White Gentleman, had something to say about that.  "I was struck," he said, "by that first chapter about fathers."  "I didn't think," he continued, with a mischievous grin on his face, "that we were allowed to use that word any more."

This, I will confess, did occur to me in the writing of the book.

It is the strong preference of my comrades in the Presbyterian People's Front to avoid male pronouns in the evocation of God.  Growing up in a very progressive church, this would typically manifest in prayer language that either centered the divine feminine or attempted to avoid gender altogether.

There's a strong and relevant truth to all of that effort, because YHWH ain't a male bipedal hominid.  We're not talkin' Zeus here, not some towering white bearded dude in a robe glowering down from His Obviously Anthropomorphic Throne.  Theological assumptions of male dominance or superiority rising from that language aren't to be tolerated.

I steer away from the use of gendered language to describe God myself, truth be told, and at no point in the book do I ever refer to God as "He."  Not even in the chapter where I talk about God the Father.  Not even once.

I also don't mind if folks want to use other terms to describe God.  So many other words and images point to the Divine Nature.  God is Love, of course.  And Light.  And a Consuming Fire.   If Scripture's cool with God being like a mother hen with sheltering wings, or telling us the Creator of the Universe can manifest as an incandescent shrubbery, then all bets are off.  You do you.

So in that spirit of inclusivity, I'm not of a mind to abandon the use of the word Father in prayer, because it, um, works.  It ain't inherently broke.  Is it perfect?  No.  Of course not.  No human language, none, can bear the full weight of God's reality.  We could theologically wordsmith until the end of time, and still not fully capture it.  Our efforts to use our categorical semiotics more precisely just ends up creating a muddled, clumsy tangle.

Were I to reword the prayer to my own heretical idiosyncracies, I'd be forced to acknowledge that "Our Numinous Omnipassible Multiversal Panentheist Reality Engine" just doesn't flow off the tongue.   

Father isn't that.  It's not an academic abstraction.  It's a concrete, actual, material relation that's comprehensible on a human scale.

And we human beings, with our propensities for overcomplicating our lives?  That can be helpful.

An Unexpectedly Fine Prayer

Rache and I have, for the last few months, been watching our way through The Righteous Gemstones.  As a lampoon of American prosperity religion, it checks a whole bunch of buttons for me.  The cast is excellent, the writing mostly tart, and it blends drama and comedy in ways that work most of the time.  It can be a little tonally jarring, and it gets a wee bit too willfully profane at times, but I enjoy it.

What's...odd...about it is that, as much as it mocks the quarrelsome, shallow, wealth-and-success obsessed Gemstone family?  Every once in a while, a bit of faith slips through.  In season one, the megachurch spectacle was juxtaposed with a genuinely earnest presentation of mission work.  

In season two?  Well, beyond a murderous band of neon motorcycle ninjas, there was a single sublime moment that still sticks with me.

It came as the patriarch of the Gemstone clan, played by John Goodman, was renewing an old acquaintance.  Eli Gemstone was sitting in a restaurant with Junior, a friend from his former life as a professional wrestler.  Junior was reminiscing about his manipulative, distant, and unloving father, and was clearly nursing some significant emotional wounds.

Seeing an old friend struggling, Eli says, "Let's pray, Junior."

He replies, apologetically, that he's not religious.

Eli returns, "Well, it's a good thing I am.  I'll show you what to do."

And then they hold hands, and they pray together.  Now, prayer in the Gemstone world is often crassly self-interested, or presented as comedy.  But not this time.

The prayer that's offered up is heartfelt, personal, and deeply steeped in grace.  It acknowledged pain endured, the strangeness of God's purposes, and the trust that God's mercy always holds out the possibility of redemption.  It was short, simple, and meaningful.

"Damn.  Kinda nice," said Junior, surprised at how moving he found such good words.

"Dang," I thought as I watched, equally surprised.  "That was genuinely a fine prayer."

Every once in a while, the light and purpose of prayer makes itself known through the absurdity of it all.

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.

  

Hating the Samaritan

One of my congregants brought my attention to a statement yesterday by Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham and CEO of Samaritan's Purse.  

Samaritan's Purse, if you don't know it, is an evangelical relief organization, one that does tremendous work to bring lifegiving support to places of crisis in the world.  They're competently run and remarkably bold in stepping into areas of crisis to provide food, medicine, and emergency support.  I have friends who have witnessed first hand the good work they're doing, particularly in Sudan and Haiti.

Workers for relief agencies work side-by-side in desperate conditions, even as they may come from different national and ideological backgrounds.  Those workers face violence, desperation, and privation, all to ensure the hungry are fed, the thirsty have water, and those wrenched from their homes by war or natural disaster are cared for.  

It's heroic work, and every effort counts.

Which makes Graham's statement about USAID utterly incomprehensible.  USAID was founded during the Cold War to use American soft power to push back against Soviet propaganda.  Like the Marshall Plan, the goal was to win the hearts and minds of the world by showing that we as a nation were noble, honorable, and generous.  It provides relief in precisely the areas where Samaritan's Purse operates.  And yet Franklin Graham said the following about it yesterday:

"USAID, under the control of the Democratic left, has been pushing LGBTQ, transgender, and other godless agendas to the world in the name of the United States of America. We the taxpayers have been paying for this to the tune of billions of dollars. Thank you Elon Musk for exposing this—and now President Donald J. Trump is bringing it to an end. I encourage the State Department to continue providing life-saving aid like food and medicine."

Is this true?

The first sentence has some truth to it, as do most well spun falsehoods.  A tiny fraction of the USAID budget has been used to support organizations that assert that Queer folks are human beings with rights.    But the second sentence does not follow from the first, and what it implies is false.  Yes, the USAID budget is in the billions, but those billions are spent on economic development, humanitarian assistance, and health initiatives.

Because faith-based initiatives are a major part of American identity, much of that money goes to support the efforts of Christian relief efforts.  The largest single recipient of USAID funding, at over $4 billion dollars, is Catholic Relief Services.  World Vision and Lutheran World Relief and the Presbyterian Church in East Africa have also been significant USAID partners, with total annual giving to Christian organizations in the billions of dollars.  USAID also buys billions of dollars of food for emergency relief from American farmers. 

Franklin Graham knows this.  He knows this because his own organization received $90,000,000 from USAID over the last four years.  Ninety million dollars.  Samaritan's Purse alone receives ten times as much USAID funding as all of the grants supporting Queer folk combined.  Watch this far right propaganda video listing every "offensive" grant they could find, and add up the amounts.  It's not even close.

Again, this is not meant to in any way denigrate Samaritan's Purse, which does excellent work.  They're worthy of support.  But Franklin Graham should know better.  I think, on some level, he does know better.  But when you've bent the knee to Powers and Principalities, and made your witness subordinate to a decadent worldly authority, you must parrot the lies that they tell.  And that dissonance makes you angrier and angrier, as you shout down the voice of grace in your own heart.

Perhaps the greatest irony in all of this is that Graham seems to have completely forgotten the point of an obscure story Jesus told.  Maybe you've heard of it?  The one about the Samaritan?  

That parable was about how we approach those who we consider our enemies, yet through the fruits of their actions show themselves to be our neighbors.  Samaritans were hated by Judeans, considered unfaithful and idolatrous and traitors to the faith.  Yet it was the good work of a Samaritan that Jesus honored, as a way of telling us who we are to love as much as we love ourselves. 

It's straight up, right there, front and center.  But Lord have mercy, we mortals are so good at missing the point.

Facebook and Religious Freedom

Back during the pandemic, my little church scrambled for a way to stay connected to one another.

Worship is the beating heart of congregational life, the place of shared experience that engages, sends forth, and re-engages.   It's an experience that is at its best incarnate, but that can be shared through media if distance or plague so demands.   As generally speaking the goal of my little church is not to send our worshippers to meet Jesus face-to-face before their time, that meant COVID forced our hand.  We had to livestream, and had to scale up to meet that need.

Our choice, for its ubiquity, was Facebook.  As we reasoned it back in 2020, Facebooks' depth of engagement and relative ease of use made it an good medium for streaming.  It allowed the sharing of invitation across our personal networks, which meant it was open to those who might wish to visit, and wasn't delimited to invited members.

It's worked for that purpose, more or less, but lately it's become...well...worse.  

Our worship is traditional, meaning the hymns we sing are...more often than not...reflective of this pastor's strong preference for sturdy old Gospel standards.  

They're meatier theologically than most Christian contemporary music, but they also rise to meet the vocal capacities of a little church.  They're lovely and totally singable if you can sing, which my fellowship can.  And if you can't, there's something about old gospel standards that brings beauty and grace to the heartfelt caterwaulings of even the most vocally challenged faithful.  

Almost every week, we're hit with copyright claims, as Facebook's avaricious algorithms flag the hymns we sing as violations of copyright.  

The latest ding was for singing a beautiful mid-nineteenth-century standard, Abide with Me.  "This is our music," said a subsentient fragment of code slaved to Warner/Chappell Music USA.  "It belongs to us. We demand our cut of ad revenues from this video."

To which I say, advisedly and with purpose, the hell it is.  

The music dates from 1861, so far out of copyright that it's utterly preposterous to even suggest ownership.  It's sacred music for a sacred purpose, one that goes deep back down into the evangelical tradition, back to the time of the founding of my humble historic church.  We're singing it from a hymnal, copies of which were purchased for use in public worship.

Our "ad revenue" is, of course, zero, as corporate sponsorship of worship isn't something we do.  These claims don't impact our worship...not yet.  But the needling annoyance of these mammonist machines seems a marker of a shift in our culture, as the crass profit-maximization of our increasingly false and decadent society stakes its claim.

Does this impact our religious freedom?  No.  Not really.

Facebook is not a public space.  It is an owned space, a place of radical venality, where we and our relationships are bought and sold like chattel, and where even our most sacred time is commodified.

Let me suggest, Mark, that reminding us of this on the regular is remarkably foolish.

I So Basic

Why write a book on the Lord's Prayer? 

I mean, it's hardly a complicated thing.  It's one of the most familiar rituals of the Christian faith, and it's pretty danged simple.  This isn't a deep dive into the discursive techniques of Thomistic theology, or a treatise on the distinctives between Tillich and Berdyaev.

It's not particularly trendy, or buzzy, or pushing the leading edge.  It's just the Lord's Prayer.  We all know that already, right?

It's. Just. So. Basic.

I mean, of course it is.

But how are we at the basics?  How important are the basics?

If you're entirely new to the faith, how much do you know about the point and purpose of prayer?  What do you know about this core Christian practice, and the whys and wherefores of this thing Jesus asks his followers to do?  There was a time when most Americans were culturally Christian, but honey, that time ain't now.  Sure, it's basic. Basics, after all, are a good place to start.

If you've left the church, burned by politicization or the mean-girls cruelty that often drives folks from communities, were the basics what drove you away?  Likely not.  I bailed on church in young adulthood after a totally pointless ego-driven fight tore the church I'd grown up in apart.  Watching Christians squabble and scheme over control of a church just made the whole thing seem like complete [bovine excrement].  When I finally returned, it was to the simplest practices of following Jesus, of service and prayer.  When you start again, it's a fine idea to start at the beginning.

But what if you're deep in, so far past the first stages of being a "Baby Christian" that talking about the Lord's Prayer feels like going back to read Hop On Pop or Horton Hears a Who.  You're sophisticated.  You're experienced.  You've got your doctorate in Presuppositional Apologetics, or host a podcast on Queering the Meta-liturgics of Contemplation.

You need this prayer.

Because when Jesus taught this prayer, he didn't describe it as a "starter prayer."  This isn't a prayer for beginners, to be replaced by more sophisticated mystic incantations as we advance to higher and higher levels of spiritual power.  This is.  The Prayer.   It doesn't matter if we've just discovered the grace of the Gospel, or if we're the Renowned Senior Pastor of a Gigachurch.  It doesn't matter if we're tenure track or if we've got 97,000 followers on ChristTok.   

This is the prayer we are meant to pray.

It is meant to shape us and form us and remind us of our purpose, no matter where we are in our journey.  

And as we're in a time when Christians have kinda forgotten the purpose of prayer, when we pray for wealth and material success, when we pray for political power, when we pray for influence?

Perhaps a refresher is in order.

Not Praying for Power

As a Christian, there is, in this political season, a deep and abiding temptation.  I feel it, as others feel it.

It is the danger of conflating the divine intent with my own, and to turn to God to give me power.

I have, without question, certain sociopolitical predilections.  They fall, generally, somewhere in the peculiar Venn diagram of anarcholibertarianism, liberalism, and social democracy.  This means I'm politically a bit on the odd side, but, eh, I'm the sort of weird that isn't afraid to be weird.

This has, generally speaking, meant that my voting falls on the Democratic side of the rigidly binary US political spectrum.

That hasn't lessened, as the political heat has intensified and American conservatism has gone on a drunken bender in Trumpsville.  When you're a faithful person with a great deal on the line, the Tempter whispers in one's ear: pray for power.  Power over them.  Pray for the reins of the Wagon of State.  Pray for the sword.  Ask for dominion.  Manifest the success of your party, and the grovelling, complete demise of your adversaries.  You pray for Gott Mit Uns, as the Germans used to pray it.

That's certainly been the case on the American far right, where the operating assumption is that Trump is God's Perfect Righteous Anointed, chosen for such a time as this, and prayers for God to give power to the One have become the norm.

Beyond the self-evident absurdity of that core premise, that's a terrible way for Christians to pray.  It is, bluntly, an AntiChristian form of prayer.

Over the last six months, and with the help of some fine editors, I've put the finishing touches on an upcoming book about the point and purpose of the Lord's Prayer, which is the beating heart and solid rock of my prayer life.  At the center of that simple prayer is a turning away from all but the most necessary things of this life, and a refutation of the human ego and its grasping for power.  In the prayer Jesus taught us to pray, the only thing we ask to be given is our "daily bread."  Nothing else.  Everything else is about emptying ourselves to make room for God's spirit, and about turning our hearts away from evil and the seductions of the worldly realm: moral decadence, political power, material wealth, social status, all of it.

It's a tough prayer to offer up in a fiercely partisan time, but a necessary one.

It checks the ego against the lie that rises from willfully misrepresenting one's opponent, the Luciferian bargain that Alinsky would have radicals of every persuasion make.  It challenges the partisan unwillingness to show grace and mercy to those who are on an opposing path.  It reminds the one praying it, if they're paying attention, that blind fealty to a party or a leader is a form of idolatry.

As is praying for power, even and especially if you're sure you're right.  Sure, we want power.  But that desire is a broken thing.

And our broken wanting breaks the world.

The Flavor of Weak Sauce

I love my denomination, but if I am entirely honest, it often frustrates the bejabbers out of me.

At our recent General Assembly, we once again backed away from investing our resources in renewables and other forms of energy that might blunt or slow the onslaught of the climate crisis.

For over a decade, we've been noodling around  the edges of making our investment portfolio more clearly reflect care for creation, but once again, our bottom line got muddled by the endless competing interests that sabotage progress amongst progressives.

Of more concern, frankly, was the tepid, enervated approach to the incipient collapse of our republic.  Presbyterians were at the forefront of the American Revolution back in the day, and watching the work of the Founding Fathers systematically undone by the far right should stir us to a hue and cry.  

"Christian nationalism," in the context of both the American Constitution and the Presbyterian Constitution, is an abomination.  It reflects a fundamental failure of representative government, and a toxic commingling of political power and faith that betrays the intent and purpose of the Gospel.  

The current name of that movement is Trumpism, and it is organized around Trump and those who are either in on the grift, in his thrall, or taking a transactional perspective to morality.  

Its rise threatens every single social position the denomination holds: on climate, on racial justice, on inclusion of Queer folk, all of it.   

But it is, ultimately, not a political challenge.  It's a spiritual and existential threat, one that demands an immediate moral response.

And for that, my fellow Presbyterians are catastrophically ill equipped.

What we collectively did on that front?  We funded a study to examine the dynamics of White Christian Nationalism.  

A STUDY.  I know what that means.

I mean, I've lived most of my life inside the Beltway.  I live here now.  I can hear the thrum of 495 in the distance from my front yard.  If you want to do nothing, or to stall, or to kill something, what do we inside-the-Beltway types do?  We commission a study.  We say more information is needed, and that we need to be more deliberate in assessing the complexities of the issue, and opine that there are subtleties that need to be examined, and more perspectives that need to be considered.  We need to hear from all of the constituencies, particularly those that are historically underrepresented.

By the time that study is completed, Christian Nationalism may well be in power, in such a way that meaningful constitutional governance of our republic no longer exists.

"Something is actually happening, Reg!" as that line from Life of Brian goes.  

Which, of course, calls for immediate discussion.

Of Trump and Jesus

"Jesus of Nazareth.  Donald Trump.

Both were prosecuted and convicted of crimes by the state.

Therefore, they are the same."

This seems to be the logic permeating a substantial portion of American Christianity of late, the portion that sees Jesus and Donald Trump as essentially equivalent persons.  Trump is, by this way of thinking, a martyr, whose struggle is our struggle.  The only reason he is being pursued is that he is the only one who can speak up for the little guy, the only one who knows and speaks the truth.  And like Jesus, he is willing to pay the price for his truth-telling.

This is, of course, utterly insane.  

One could just as easily place Adolph Hitler into that Venn Diagram, only Hitler actually went to prison for the beer-fueled uprising he instigated in Munich.  Like Hitler, the trial and conviction of Adolph Hitler only cemented his popularity among his followers, for precisely the same reason that Trumpists take Trump's convictions as a marker of his legitimacy.  Only a true patriot would be willing to suffer for us!  Just like Jesus!  And Hitler!  Yay TrumpJesusHitler!

But just as Jesus and Adolph were nothing alike, so too Donald and Jesus are nothing alike.

The two bear no resemblance to one another whatsoever morally or personally.  They are, in point of fact, the opposite sort of person entirely.  Making the argument that they are the same is a marker of a disordered mind.

"Are you saying my mind is disordered?" might come the snarled aggression response from the avowed Trumpist, who has learned that threats and bullying are their most effective tools in silencing opponents. 

Yes.  Yes I am.  Insofar as you are in thrall, yes.

But I will admit that there's something inaccurate about my statement.  

That way of putting it assumes that Trumpism is a physical pathology, a peculiar and pernicious neurodivergence or imbalance in brain chemistry.  

It is not.  

Trumpism is first and foremost a moral disease, the same moral disease that has afflicted humankind since we were first driven from Eden. It is the willingness to blame others for our own mistakes.  It is the desire to resent, to attack, and to manipulate truth to our own ends.  It is the hate of one's enemies, and the love of mammon, and the delight in violence and violent thoughts. 

It is a disorder of the soul, a spiritual illness.  

To use some pointlessly overcomplicated words, Trumpism is a sociopolitical manifestation of Augustinian concupiscence.  It tastes of the fruit of the knowledge of evil, its' sickly sticky siren song sweet as Turkish Delight straight from the cold hand of Jadis.  

There, I suppose, you do have your theological connection, because the reason we human beings need Jesus so utterly is our hunger to be ruled by men like Donald.

Of Darkness and Clarity

Progressive Christians love complexity and uncertainty.

It's a significant part of the discourse, as integrated into the prog faithy schtick as Kramer's abrupt arrival through Jerry's front door or a Dangerfieldian tug at one's collar.  

The world is complex! The world is uncertain! Therefore, faith is complex and uncertain!  One must, if one is a progressive, embrace the Holy Dark, that place where we cannot see and where our path is unclear.

This, one is led to believe, is a marker of authenticity, a sign of progressive faith's connection to the Unknown and the Unknowable.  "Look at how bravely we acknowledge that we know nothing, and accept that our faith centers on simply sitting with our uncertainty!  Embrace the darkness!"

There is, of course, a truth to that.  We contingent, mortal beings cannot know the wholeness of the Divine intent.  The Numinous is infinitely beyond us, because, like, yo, that's what makes it Numinous, brah.

But true as that might be, there's a practical flip side to that truth.

If you're a church hawking uncertainty and complexity?  No-one, by which I mean pretty much functionally no-one, wants what you're selling. 

Why would they?  They have it already.  I mean, seriously.  It's the old "selling-refrigerators-to-the-Inuit" absurdity.  

Our blighted saeculum provides complexity and uncertainty by the heaping bucketload, every single day.   We are stuffed like foie gras geese with meaninglessness, directionlessness, and the irreconcilable cognitive dissonances of culture.  Truth and meaning are torn from our grasp by the shrieking winds of political disinformation and mammonist hucksterism, and human beings feel utterly lost in the yawning chaos of it all. 

We can feel it tearing at us, taking us apart, bit by bit.  Our sense of ourselves trembles, and the yearning is for something...anything...that can hold us together.

A theology that says, "Well, sure, yeah, we have no idea what we're doing, really, I mean, who even knows, lol, whatevs?"

Sure, you're "being authentic."  You're "authentically" offering cups of water to the drowning. 

That is not what the Gospel is, nor is that what souls seek when they realize how very lost they are.

Faith embraces the cloud and the Holy Dark.  Sure.  Fine.  But it is also and more vitally the pillar of fire by night.  It is the light that shines in the darkness, that the darkness cannot overcome.

On the Partisan Mind

Late last week, I woke early and puttered into southeast DC on my scooter.  I was headed to a formerly industrial area near the DC Navy Yard, where I planned to spend a day amongst members of a different Jesus tribe.

My own tribe is rather particular.  I'm a cradle Presbyterian, the child of a storied old church in downtown Washington.  It's the church of Lincoln, of Eisenhower.  The pastor who baptized me, and who was a regular guest at my house?  He preached the sermon that helped put the words "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance.  Let me note, because history warps weird: that same pastor also marched with Dr. King in Selma, and fiercely opposed our misbegotten war in Vietnam.  

I've been part of the PC(USA) since before the PC(USA) was the PC(USA), and after years of conservative flight, we're now a very uniformly progressive gathering. 

The purpose of my day last week was to attend something called The After Party.  There, I intended to listen to the voices of evangelicals lamenting the toxic direction of American political discourse, and challenging how the partisan mind has seeped into the faith.  Two of the three primary speakers...Russell Moore and David French...have been vigorously outspoken about the poisonous impact of Trumpism on the Christian witness, and their presence was a significant draw.

It was, I will say, a very different experience than attending Presbyterian gatherings.  The event was held in the worship space of an evangelical congregation, which was...as such spaces tend to be...a sleek conversion of a former industrial warehouse.  The seating, theater-style.  The tech, stunningly sophisticated, with a board exceeding the width of my congregation's sanctuary, gimballed cameras, and a primary ultra HD screen that spanned the entire front wall.  To my oldline sensibilities, such spaces parse as functional rather than sacred, but one has to appreciate the depth of the functionality.  

So it didn't look like most progressive Christian events.  Meaning, pastel fabrics wantonly festooned everywhere, like someone set off a grenade in a Michaels.

The attendees were a diverse mix of races and genders, as evangelicals tend to be.  There were also plenty of folks in their twenties and thirties, which was...different.  The oldline, progressive as it has become, remains remarkably and increasingly old.

It was a vigorous, intellectually bracing, remarkably grace-filled day of engagement.

I'm not sure, from my conversations and observations, if there was another mainline liberal in attendance.  

This got me to thinking about the partisan mind and progressivism.  

In this gathering, at least as my frank and remarkably civil conversations at table about queer folk and inclusion were concerned, I felt very liberal.  In mainline gatherings, I almost invariably feel like a conservative.  Decades of reimagining and reframing and deconstructing have created discourse that...to my soul...often wanders from the heart of the narrative.  Justice is a worthy fruit of the Gospel, but when it supplants grace as our purpose, we are no longer telling the same tale.

There is a point, without question, when the partisan mind...the mind that divides, that is motivated by hatred and resentment, that embraces the useful falsehood...infects any movement.  This is true of left and right.  If we understand that Christian faith is not and cannot be a creature of the saeculum, that disciples of Jesus are committed to the Gospel first and foremost, then there are places where we set bounds against our partisanship for that highest principle.

Unlike the bat from Aesop's fable, which claimed allegiance to whatever party held power, the Christian witness is to affirm commonality wherever it can be found, but also to retain integrity of witness to our own tribe when partisan conviction subverts the call to grace and redemption.

Falun Dafa, Swastikas, and Fascism

Falun Gong...or Falun Dafa...is such an odd thing.  In the United States, they're perhaps best known for the inescapable Shen Yun show, a relentlessly hypermarketed spectacle of music and dance that retells Chinese history from their religious perspective.

Over the past several years, I've seen the adherents of that religious movement making their presence known at large, open social events.  They march in local parades, their floats festooned with signs proclaiming peace and love.   They're consistently present in the annual parade in the little town where my church resides.  They're there in my hometown Annandale Parade, as they were this last fall.

It was at that hometown parade that I accepted a flyer pressed into my hand, neatly produced and earnest.  Peace and Love, proclaimed the cover.  I opened it up, and there they were.  The symbols of their movement:

Swastikas.  Oof.

I'm not ignorant of the history of that symbol.  As an image, the swastika had a long history before it was co-opted by Hitler's National Socialist movement.  For millennia, it had none of the connotations of brutal, genocidal nationalism that now hang around it like a cloud in the West.  When someone from Asia or Southeast Asia uses it, I think rather differently about it than I might were I to see it flying alongside a Let's Go Brandon flag in rural America.

Still and all, there's a clumsiness to putting that front and center, an awkward failure to acknowledge the context you inhabit, like walking into a mosque with your shoes on and wearing a t-shirt that asserts that everything goes better with bacon.  "Hey, it's just my culture, get over it" doesn't quite cut the mustard.

And there's another, peculiar level to this story.

Falun Gong has been systematically and often brutally oppressed in their native China, with adherents subject to imprisonment, "re-education," and exile.  Because of this, they are vehemently opposed to the Communist party in China.  Like Sun Myung Moon's "Moonie" Reunification Church back in the 1960s and 1970s, their vociferous anticommunism overcompensates into something peculiar.

In addition the the ubiquity of Shen Yun, Falun Dafa is also responsible for the media content produced by The Epoch Times, which they own.  

That outlet, if you're not aware of it, is a "fair and balanced" news organization that aggressively promoted claims of election fraud in 2020, that sees communist influence everywhere, and that routinely casts doubt on the efficacy and safety of vaccines.  They're purveyors of "hard-hitting documentaries" produced by entirely "neutral and reflective" folks like Dinesh D'Souza, and proudly highlight the endorsements of thoughtful moderates like Sebastian Gorka, Pete Navarro, and Paul Gosar.

For entirely comprehensible reasons, they're pro-Trump, because Trump is performatively anti-China.  This position mirrors that of the Moon's Reunification Church, which purchased the Washington Times back in the day to both promote themselves and align with far right wing causes.

Which brings us back, in the deepest of ironies, to their use of swastikas.

Saying "the swastika is just our cultural sign of peace and love" feels a little off when your media outlet is championing the messages of the far right, and amplifying authoritarian voices that would overturn the constitutional foundations of this republic.