Being Blind to History

The shoutfest about the President's recent comments at a prayer breakfast have me genuinely confused.  In condemning ISIS/IS brutality, he noted, briefly, the dark stain of violence that has colored the past of many faiths, his own included.  He called for people of every faith and tradition to resist violence, and to seek the best in their faith.

For which, of course, he was attacked, through the thoughtful medium of the twitterverse.  What better way to capture subtlety than in a single 140 character blort of blind, thoughtless outrage?

He was critiqued for mentioning the Crusades, and of the use of twisted scriptural interpretation to justify racism.  These things happened, of course.  They were real, historical, actual events.

And honestly, things go deeper still.  Crusades?  Racism?  Pish posh.  Those are just the familiar ones, the easy ones.  We've done plenty more.

There was the Thirty Years war, of course, a sustained period of violence and bloodletting in Europe back during the 17th century.  That involved witch hunts, heretic torturings, and all manner of creative horror putatively in the name of Jesus.  Torture chambers, lined with bible verses?   They were there, and that's taking Sunday school to a whole 'nutha level.  It was right there.

Or the subsequent Marian persecutions in England during the reign of "Bloody" Mary, who publicly burned and drew and quartered Protestants by the score in the 16th century.  Oooh, except for that one guy, who was midway through being burned when someone decided to hurry things along by bashing in his skull.  That'd have made a hell of a Youtube.

Or the unpleasantness of Oliver Cromwell's Protestant roundheads, who executed Catholics, including one whose execution was so badly botched that the victim got up from the chopping block after several tentative strokes and demanded that the headsman just do his **** job already.   Back and forth, bloody and brutish, a horror almost beyond our capacity to grasp.  All Christian, or putatively so.

Even we Presbyterians have pitched in on occasion.  I've read and studied John Calvin, the founder of my wing of the reformed tradition, and I totally appreciate some of the aspects of his theology.  Some.  Others, not so much.  But I also know that he was a significant part of the process that ended when Michael Servetus, a "heretic," was burned alive.  For what?  For being a Baptist and a scientist, basically.  For not believing correctly.  That was it.

Had Jefferson, Washington, and Franklin lived in Geneva at the time and believed what they believed, I'm reasonably sure Calvin would have killed them too.

And that's perhaps most insane about the knee-jerk anti-Obama response on the part of the far right.  It is not that they're riled that he mentioned some of the mess of our past.  It's that their response is also fundamentally not conservative.   Neither is it American, not if the history and purpose of America as a republic has any meaning.  They're so eager to score points that they're happy to score own-goals.  They are so blinded by outrage that they don't see how much they betray the very principles they claim to defend.

I don't buy the hagiographic golden-city vision of America's past, because I'm not an idiot, but neither will I reflexively attack everything about this country.  There were seeds of enlightened goodness there.

One of those seeds of goodness was the flight from religious oppression, from a place where nominally Christian religious violence raged to a place where religious oppression was fundamentally against the law of the land.  We've struggled at times to live into that, but it's right there in our founding.  Where we've failed, acknowledging that failure is the best and only way to ever improve.  Acknowledging you have a problem is step one, eh?  You can't repent and change if you don't recognize your sin, to put it another way.

So here, a president evokes America at her still-striving best, the best hope, the goal towards which we yearn.  He acknowledges where we've been, and affirms our hope as a nation to transcend that blight of violence and oppression.  And he gets flack for it.

Bizarre.

The Leader of the Tea Party Caucus

It was a moment, from waaay back during the last presidential election, that stuck with me.  Lord knows if I can exactly place it, but I think it was in one of the debates between Obama and Romney.  In discussing the Affordable Care Act, Obama noted that it was often called "Obamacare," and then didn't walk away from that or resist that term.

"I've kind of grown fond of that," he said, or words something to that effect.

Hey, I'm getting older.  My cortex only has so many new things it can hold on to.

But that struck me, at that moment, as a very odd thing.  Enough so that it stuck, and resurfaces now.

Why?  Because Barack Obama was a student and a teacher of the organizing techniques of Saul Alinsky.  In Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, one of the core principles he articulates to radicalize and motivate is personalizing an issue.  If you want to get human beings riled up about something, you need to tie an issue to your attitudes towards an individual.  Find an enemy, a name and a face, and allow that enemy to become the face of the thing you seek to subvert or oppose.

If you can do that, you automatically escalate the sense of conflict.  Anyone who's worked in conflict resolution knows the truth of Alinsky's observation.  When people stop seeing things as problems to approach pragmatically, and get personally engaged in an ego-driven conflict, the heat goes waaaay up.

That's why the name "Obamacare" exists.  It's a fundamentally Alinskian tactic, used as a motivational tool to stir up heat among the lumpenproletariat who drive the Tea Party...which is, to my eyes, mostly organized on Alinskian principles of creating change.

Yet for reasons that fuddle me, there's not been aggressive pushback against the use of that term to describe the Affordable Care Act.  There's the occasional wan reminder that the basic idea was promoted by the Heritage Foundation as a market-based alternative to a rest-of-the-first-world-style single-payer universal health care system.   That's the reason conservatism has no alternative to the ACA.  It is a conservative idea, which they're now attacking.  Nominally, that's to insure that our *cough* health care "system" *cough* is left as the perfect beacon of perfection that we all know it to be.  But really?  It's personal.

So here we have Obama embracing something that he knows is being used to energize and motivate opponents.   He knows it, as surely as he knows Alinsky.  And I wonder, frankly, if he knows it well enough to be playing something of a gambit.

If a conflict escalates far enough, as things plainly have here inside the Beltway, a group can completely lose sight of anything other than the annihilation of their opponent.  It's a classic Level Five. Everything becomes defined in terms of that conflict.  All data that does not support the conflict is ignored.  It becomes a form of madness.  I've been there, in churches that have been so driven by division that they've gone basically insane, obsessed with dramas and battles that only have meaning to them.

It's an ugly place...and an undesirable one.  For a group that's driven into that position in a conflict, it's also radically unattractive, visibly insane to a disinterested party.  It alienates others and isolates the community in question, which has become so target-fixated that they're oblivious to the damage they're doing to themselves, and the impact they're having on their relationship with the broader culture.

It's a cliff.  It's a box canyon.  It's a trap.

And I think Barack Obama knows that.

Why Barack Obama Doesn't Go To Church

Of course, the title of this post is wrong on one pretty basic level.

The Obama family does go to church on occasion, perhaps on more frequent occasion than many American families.   They'll visit congregations now and again.   Every once in a while, they'll go to the convenient little Episcopalian church right across the street from their house.

But what they are not is a regular part of a faith community.   For all of the wondering and speculation that DC area congregations engaged in prior to the arrival of our now-not-new First Family, the reality is after four years that the Obamas don't have a church home.

The official rationale on this, as it's been presented, was that the White House did not want to inconvenience a congregation with the President's regular presence.   With all of the security requirements, it would just be too onerous a burden to inflict on a faith community.  So in deference to the well being of area churches, the POTUS has chosen not to be a part of a particular church.

In response to this line of reasoning, I can only say, "What, are you [fornicating][pooping] me?"

Faced with the prospect of the President of the United States of America worshipping in your faith community, what sane pastor/board/session/rectory/coven would say to the White House liaison, "Gosh, you know, I'm afraid that would be just too logistically complicated.  I'm not sure we want that inconvenience.  What about the ramifications for access?  And what about liability issues?"

Actually, I can imagine some Presbyterians saying that.   God help us.

In the case of my tiny little church, well, there are certain things I can't divulge.   But suffice it to say that we realized that once the President and his security detail were in the building, there'd be no room for anyone else.  So, sadly, my session was forced to abandon its plans to construct a helipad for Marine One on the empty plot next to the church.  Or so I've been told.

But c'mon.   For most churches, that'd be cause for rejoicing.   The official line is the kind of argument that might have resonance with The People Who Like To Make Everything Too Complicated, and there are plenty of those people in DC.   But it bears no resemblance to the actual response of a faith community to having the regular engagement of the First Family.

So there must be another reason, you know, the actual one.

It is unlikely that the reason is they can't find a simpatico congregational environment and pastor.   There are plenty of progressive and prophetic healthy-sized churches in DC, of every denominational and nondenominational flavor.   In those churches, there are plenty of inspiring, passionate, intelligent pastors who might quake a bit at the prospect of regular first family engagement, but would rise to the challenge.  That ain't it.

It is possible that it just doesn't matter.   If a President wants to attend church, they do.   Jimmy Carter, bless him, not only regularly attended First Baptist, but also taught Bible Study.  Bill Clinton regularly attended Foundry United Methodist, because Lord have mercy, did he need it.   Abraham Lincoln was a regular attender at the congregation where I grew up, and to the best of my knowledge, security was kinda sorta an issue then, too.

Others, like Dubya, just sort of floated around.

A very few, notably Reagan, almost never darkened the door of a church.  Then again, he did have the counsel of an official White House astrologer, so I suppose having your own magi makes up for that.  Reagan, in fact, was the last president for whom church appears to have had the same draw it does for Obama.

But that just doesn't compute with Obama.  Conceptually, church should matter.   Obama, taken at face value, is all about the value of community and the importance of working together.   While not the full blown pinko that the yammerers at FoxNews make him out to be, the ethic he expresses in his political life is one of collective power and mutual accountability.   Taking him at his word on that front, and taking him at his word that Christianity is an important part of his life, choosing not to be part of a community that lives out those values is a significant dissonance.  His is not the path of the isolated spiritual individual.

Following on that, there's another possibility that's popped into my head now and again.   Obama is a community organizer, of the Alinskian school.  Saul Alinsky's writings form Obama's understanding of community, and his understanding of the dynamics of political power.

Within the Alinskian model, there is a place for communities of faith.   They are useful as pre-existent networks of social connection, which can, if engaged, prove remarkably helpful as a power base for influencing change in a local community.   So if you're an organizer, and you want to create change, you plant your behind in a pew and you get to know people.  That's certainly been the approach of the Alinskian folks at the IAF, through affiliates like the Washington Interfaith Network.

For both local and state-level politics, this reality holds.  Being an active and engaged part of a congregation means you have a power base, a network of social connections that you can leverage.  It is, practically speaking, a smart thing to do.

But that's organizing on the local level.

On the national level, that rationale breaks down.  The scope of national-level politics is simply too large for participation in one particular congregation to mean anything.  Sure, if it's DC, there might be one or two power-players there, and the regular attendance of a POTUS would bring in more.   But in the complex calculus of husbanding and directing one's energies as an organizer, engaging with a single church ceases to be part of the equation at that scale.

One would hope that it's a little less calculated than that.  Might it be a factor?  Hard to say.   I think whatever it is, the real rationale or rationales will remain behind hidden the veil.  And, after all, it's entirely up to the Obamas.  They're free to make that decision for whatsoever reason they choose, and are under no obligation to 'splain themselves, it being a free country and all.

Ah well.   Assuming this thing rolls the way it seems to be rolling, I suppose we DC church folk'll just have to get used to disappointment.

The Unwavering Faith of Barack Obama

So having pitched a couple of faith 'n' politics posts out about the Romney, I figured it was time to balance out the airtime a little bit.

A-ways on back in 2008, Candidate Obama was, quite frankly, impressive.   One of the most significant ways he came across as impressive was to those of us who still dwell in the realm of the oldline.   I mean, you asked the man about his faith, and the next thing you know, you're getting an informed, measured, and thoughtful conversation about Reinhold Niebuhr.

He knows and can appropriately cite Reinhold Niebuhr, we gasped, and went a little light at the knees.

Then there was Obama's church, and his pastor.  Yes, I know, he said "God-Damn America," for which Fox News will never forgive him.   And yes, all the attention did kind of go to Jeremiah Wright's head.   But if you listened to that sermon, really listened to it, it kicked behind.  It challenged the idol of nationalism, it was dead on scripturally, and it rocked out hard against our boundaries in the way that the very best prophetic African American preaching always has.

And so the man had some serious faith bona-fides, and we were all talking about it.

Now, we're four years later, and a month out from a likely re-election, if the current meta-polling trend holds.   And the funny thing is, outside of the whackjobs who are convinced that Obama is a Muslim and very possibly a Red Lectroid fifth columnist, his faith is pretty much immaterial.   It gets no press.   There is no buzz.  It's a non-issue.

The campaign knows this, and so they're putting in the level of effort on that front one might expect.   If you go to the  "Faith" portion of the current Obama election campaign...well...it feels a teensy bit familiar.  Generic.  Perhaps even, dare I say it, stale.   Faith, we hear, was very important as he was getting elected.   It was vital, or so the pitch still goes, on the journey from Chi-town to Chocolate City.

But he's been president for four years.  What has his faith meant during those four years?

Because honestly?  He's not the same guy now that he was four years ago.  He can't possibly be.

It's not just that this campaign is different, though it is.   It's far more muscular, stronger, more in touch with its grasp on power.  He is the president, the POTUS, and he knows it and shows it.   He wears it well, as well as he does the grey flecks that now speckle his hair.

So saying the same things about the role of faith in governance both before and after you've been there just seems inadequate.

Here you've been CiC for four years.  You've sent men to their deaths.   You've ordered the deaths of others, and had your orders carried out.  Presumably, this doesn't happen so much when you are the junior Senator from Illinois, although given Chicago politics, one never knows.

There are other things.  The idealistic struggle for civil discourse with the Other Side of the Aisle, which did not work out so well.  The ongoing systemic crisis in the economy, which ain't over yet.  This has not been easy.

And yet the faith-schpiel of the campaign is the same.  Utterly unchanged.  It's untouched by crisis, unmoved by the reality of what must have been experienced over the last four years.   It does not waver.  It is, truth be told, perhaps the only part of the campaign that hasn't shifted to reflect the experience of governing.  It stands like a tree whose leaves are still and calm, unfluttered by the wind that roars around you.

This feels off, somehow.

Anyone who has leaned heavily on their faith in a time of profound existential challenge knows that faith does not remain unchanged.  If faith is irrelevant, it falls away.  If faith is weak, it crumbles.   If faith is strong, it deepens.

But it does not remain the same.   Faith is a living and dynamic thing.

A faith journey is not static, and finding yourself the most powerful human being on the planet is presumably a nontrivial part of said journey.   It's a pity this campaign won't be showing us that.  It might actually be kind of interesting.

Ah well.  So it goes.

Gay Marriage and The Flip Flopper In Chief

No, this isn't about Obama.

It's about God.

We Jesus folk know that God is unchanging and eternal, of course.    God's Law...which can't be meaningfully parsed out from God's self...remains constant, sure, and absolute.  God never, ever, ever changes God's mind.

So we say.  It's true.  Up to a point.

Because that's not quite what the Bible describes.  God does change God's mind.  When Israel was whining in the desert, and God had seriously had it up to here, and was so going to smite them, Moses persuaded God to change.  If someone is wrong with God, showing injustice and predatory disdain for others and an unwillingness to show grace to the broken and the stranger, God is perfectly willing to change God's mind about that person, too.  So long as they change, that is.

God's relationship to us is not fixed, and God's attitude towards us is not unwavering.  To argue that it is would be fundamentally in opposition to the Biblical witness to the nature of our Creator.  But what makes for or stirs that change?  What causes the shifts we perceive in the relationship we have with God, and in God's attitude towards us?

The answer to that question, if we're being honest, is that God changes God's mind towards us based on how we live in covenant.  The key to change in our relationship to God is covenant.  If we're living in covenant relationship with God and one another, then God's attitude towards us is one of grace.   If not, then all is not copacetic.  But change in the character of that relationship is entirely possible.  Mutual change in our relationship with God is, in fact, the entire point of Christian faith.

So what does this have to do with gay marriage?   I mean, doesn't the Bible say that being gay is an abomination?  Torah does say that, I'll admit.  But given that the same term in Torah is applied to remarriage, popcorn shrimp, buying a dog, bacon double cheeseburgers, and jeans for women, I'm not sure that quite cuts it if we're trying to get to the heart of the matter.

If we're coming at this from a Jesus perspective, the heart of the matter is living into the Great Commandment, which is itself the highest principle of Torah.  You know, loving God with heart and mind and soul, and neighbor as self.   This is the highest order principle of our relationship with God, and it radically defines every other moral and ethical demand or expectation.

If this is the lens through which we understand God's covenantal attitude towards us...and it must be, if we are to follow Jesus...then what does this mean relative to God's relationship to same-sex marriage?  From what we know about God from this covenantal foundation, why might this...um...cause an "evolution" in God's mind?

Well, it does represent a real and significant shift in that "homosexual lifestyle" that some folks are so eager to go on and on about.   That lifestyle has been one forced deep into marginality and shadow by culture, and places of hiddenness and shadow can create some unpleasant psychological and spiritual dynamics.

Those dynamics are not manifest in the relationships gays and lesbians are now seeking in both church and culture.  Those relationships are of a very different character.  They are, in point of fact, covenant relationships.  When gays and lesbians seek to live in open, respectful, loving, and mutually committed relationships with one another, this is a new thing culturally.  When those open relationships are seen and understood as worthy of being blessed and guided by the love of God as expressed in a faith community, this is also a new thing culturally.

Covenant relationship is, in essence, the core of what gays and lesbians are seeking, both culturally and within the communities of faith that welcome them.   So here we see a change of life, a movement towards embracing precisely the dynamics of existence that are at the foundation of right relationship with God.

Why, then, given that most fundamental understanding of how God changes in response to us, should we not expect that God would not joyously flop the doors of grace open to such a new thing?

The Payroll Tax Holiday

I am, once again, completely unable to process the goings on in my own home town.   Here in Washington, there's sustained conversation about how to continue what has been called the "payroll tax holiday."   Americans, after all, don't like taxes.  Taxes are bad.  And we like holidays!  Holidays are good!  And if it's a tax holiday...well, golly!  We can take that money, which should be ours anyway, and use it to buy stuff to create jobs and get our economy moving and yadda yadda yadda.     No tax?  A holiday?  Buy stuff?  What's not to like?

Hmmm.  Let's see.

What is the "payroll tax?"  If it's a tax, it must be bad, right?   Well, let's break it down.

The payroll tax is better known as the Federal Insurance Contributions Act, or FICA.  It exists for a particular purpose.  Well, several, actually. Let's break 'em down, why don't we?

The first purpose is Social Security.   Yeah, I know, Social Security is doomed, or so we've been carefully taught.  But what Social Security actually does is pretty straightforward.    It supports those who are elderly, or unable to work, and in need of basic income to insure their survival.

I encounter those folks a couple of times a month, as I go to a nearby Baptist church, and then drive from home to home in my community delivering food for Meals on Wheels.  These are not the millionaires and scammers that Fox News will drop meaningless and unrepresentative anecdotes about.  They are people who need that check to survive.  It is light and heat for them.  It keeps them in their homes.

Social Security also supports families who have lost a wage earner.  When your husband or wife dies, leaving you without income?   It insures that your kids will have food, and you'll have a roof over your head.   It won't bring your loved one back, but it will make sure that widows and orphans are not forgotten and destitute.   If you're injured, and unable to work?   It does the same thing.  I've had friends who have lost spouses, and who've relied on Social Security to make ends meet for their kids.   It's a real thing.

The second purpose?  Medicaid.  Yeah, I know, Medicaid is terrible and we all hate it because the care is lousy and there's all this waste/fraud/abuse that, again, the media of the right wing is happy to share with us.  But when those who have nothing fall ill, it helps keep them from being frozen corpses by the roadside.   It helps get them care.   That is what it does.  As a pastor, I've seen it at work.  Could it be better?  It could be a whole lot better.  But it's something.

So here we are.  It's Advent.   It's the season before Christmas.  What are both political parties and the president talking about?

They aren't talking about insuring that those who are vulnerable are cared for and protected, the hallmark of justice in a nation since nations were first invented.

Instead, they're engaged in a political dance to see who can take the most money from our Treasury.  Specifically, they want to take it from the part set aside for widows, orphans, cripples, the elderly, and the desperately poor, so that Americans can go shopping.

Happy Holiday.

Teleprompters and Illiteratocracy

The latest line of attack against the current President among the mosh-pit gaggle of Grand Old Party candidates appears to be a resurfacing of an old thread.  The issue:  Obama uses a teleprompter.

What that means, according to those seeking to defeat Obama in 2012, is two things.  First, that he lacks a solid grasp of the issues.   Why should he need a teleprompter if he knew what he was talking about?  Second, it means that he is inauthentic.  Why not just speak from the heart?  Is he afraid he might reveal that he's really a socialist nazi communist in league with big banks and business?

Hearing this unusual line of invective from Bachmann, Perry, and Cain, it rings somewhat familiar in my ears.  I think, in fact, I might know where they got it.

They got it from their pastors.  Or, if you're Herman Cain, you got it from yourself, him being an Associate Pastor and all.   Ain't just the Godfather of Godfather's, kids.

In much of the evangelical world, you see, presenting a sermon from a written text is often interpreted as a sign of inauthenticity.  The best sermon, according to the charismatic/evangelical understanding of preaching, is one that pours out from that moment.   Or from the outline you prepared that morning, or, if you're leading a big-parking-lot church, from the Powerpoint your AV team prepared.

If you write it out, then you're clearly not authentically moved by the Holy Spirit.  Working from a written text is just a sign of artifice, a crutch for the spiritually inert.

As someone who's preached from texts, from presentation software, from outlines, and off-the-cuff, I can say this: this line of reasoning is plain ol' wrong.  Why?  Well, there are several reasons.

First, writing things out makes sense if what you say matters.  If you're dealing with the complexities of geopolitics, and you're tired and you have a bad cold, you don't want to say something that will cause a shooting war in the Taiwan Strait.  That important if you're the POTUS.   It is also, I would contend, important if you're a pastor.  If you're trying to authentically interpret a sacred text, and to teach that interpretation, then writing it out gives you an opportunity to prayerfully consider whether you are preaching the Gospel, or just pitching out veiled digs at that Deacon who's been a thorn in your side.  It's the difference between being deliberate, and being impulsive.  Measuring your words is a mark of wisdom, after all.  There must not be much preaching from the book of Proverbs in Red State congregations these days.

Second, writing something out before speaking means you have a record of what has been spoken.  It's right there.  You can repeat it as needed, or tweak it, or edit it for other uses.   That is, in fact, the point of writing.  

Third, I'm a bit berfuddlepated that the folks pitching this line of attack are almost uniformly evangelicals.  So you are telling me, Representative Bachmann, that writing something down makes it less trustworthy?  That the process of creating a text is not as valid as just speaking?   Should we not believe anything in your books?  More pointedly, how does this relate to a Bible-based faith?  That book of books wasn't just spoken directly onto the audiobook version you listen to on your campaign bus, dear sister.  It was written down.  And then edited.  And translated.  And re-edited.  Is the Bible inauthentic?   You really want to go there?  No, of course not.

Lord have mercy.

In a culture that is increasingly post-literate, I suppose we deserve this.

Birthers and Faith

Yesterday's news was chock full of crazy, but perhaps the craziest event of all was the release of the President's birth certificate.  Not the short form legal document, which has been out there for a while, but the original full length long form.

The reason for this is simple:  there's a significant sub-set of the American right wing that just can't bring itself to believe that Barack Hussein Obama is actually a citizen.  They're called the "Birthers," because they're utterly convinced that Obama was born in Kenya.  It's the name, of course, coupled the fact that he's kinda not Caucasian, which just doesn't process.

After years of suffering through these accusations, most recently stirred by potential Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump...gah...did I really say that...yes, I did, God help us all...the "long form" that has been demanded as proof of Obama's citizenship was finally released by the state of Hawaii.

Which, of course, isn't going to do a single thing to change the minds of Birthers.   Not a thing.  Why would it?  In this era of choose-your-own-reality, those who fervently believe Obama is not American will find places that affirm that belief.  Nothing, not no way, not no-how, is going to get the folks over at WorldNetDaily to admit that Obama has the right to be president.  Ever.

There's no amount of evidence you can produce, no carefully supported tack of argumentation, no appeal to reason, nothing that will change their perspective.  Honestly, these folks will still be going on about this issue well after Obama has finished his second term...just like the leftist "Truthers" can't seem to just freakin' let Occam's Razor deal with 9/11 already, or how some folks still can't bring themselves to believe that human beings on the moon, no matter how hard you hit 'em.

Why?  Because that belief...odd though it may be...defines them.  It provides them with their sense of identity.  It's not peripheral to their sense of self, but is, instead, central.  They orient and structure their lives around it.  And as such, it is akin to faith.

Which leads, conceptually, to something every person of faith needs to think honestly about.   My faith in God, and in the life/teachings/death/resurrection of Jesus, and in the transforming power of the Spirit, that faith is a bulwark.  It's a backstop when all other defining features are dashed against the unpleasant realities of being.  It's a defining and central characteristic of my adult identity.  It is, as existentialist theologian Paul Tillich would put it, my "ultimate concern," meaning that which defines the entirety of my being.  It is the narrative lens through which I understand existence, and from which I derive my purpose and sense of self.

But what faith isn't is negotiable.  Real and robust faith shifts, lives, and breathes, and integrates new concepts into itself.  It grows, and changes, but the essence, purpose, and direction of it does not.

Which is why having faith in things that are not...well...ultimate...leads to a delusional and/or destructive sense of self.  And a delusional and destructive sense of what is real, true, and meaningful.  But really, that's not faith at all.  It's idolatry.

And idolatry is perhaps the most robust and pernicious of human failings.

Innovation and Jobs

One of the core themes in this last week's State of the Union address was the call to innovate and create our way out of the sinkhole into which City-On-A-Hill-America is slowly sliding.  The idea, I think, is pretty classically American.  We grow by seeking the new frontier, chasing our Manifest Destiny right up until we prang into the Pacific.  We improve our lives through new products and pharmaceuticals that suddenly make everything better. 

But I just don't buy it.  Not any more.  Innovation is no longer the engine by which American jobs are created.

Nifty new electronic gizmos and doodads to clutter our rec room?  Sure.  Remedies for ailments we never knew we had?  Absosmurfly.  But jobs?  No.  I don't see it, not in the context of our globalized capitalistic economy.

Let me offer up three examples from innovative, successful American firms.  If you had to think about what American company would be consistently described as cutting edge, profitable, and successful, Apple would be at or near the top of every list.  While not without flaws, the company has created products that are aesthetically pleasing, boundary shifting, and that people want to buy.  My own home has a rather large number of iPods and iPhones and iPads, and I'm composing this on an iMac.

Apple is an innovator.  But jobs?  Yeah, his name may be Jobs, but they mostly ain't American.  Apple maintains a stable of about 25,000 American employees, in design, engineering, retail, and corporate.  But when it comes to actually making the iPods and iPhones and iPads and iMacs, that gets done by  Chinese subsidiary Foxconn, which employs 250,000 workers to make products for Apple.  A generation ago, those would have been a quarter-million American wage-earners, enough to fully fuel the economy of a mid-sized city.  Now?  Nope.

Globalized industry is a game changer.

That painfully neglected reality was reinforced recently by an announcement from Evergreen Solar.  That company, in the event you haven't heard of it, is the third largest manufacturer of solar panels in the United States.  Or rather, it was.  After many millions of dollars of public funds and tax breaks were given to it's leadership to develop renewable energy production, the suits did what suits are obligated to do.  They chose to remain competitive in a global economy.  Evergreen Solar is folding up shop in the U.S., and will now produce solar panels only in it's new Chinese factory.

In a globalized economy, where production chases the region with the lowest possible wages, innovation does not mean jobs.  Not here, anyway.

But innovation poses another threat.  It takes jobs away, particularly as more efficiencies are discovered in production.  Take, for instance, Amazon, another successful innovator.  I buy stuff from Amazon plenty, and the success of their Kindle ebook platform has surprised me...I still like paper for my bookish moments...but I'm apparently now in the minority.  Amazon recently announced that sales of books on the Kindle now exceeded their sales of paperback books.  That's good for the trees, but it's an ill wind if you work in retail.  Virtualized products, be they books or videos or games, well, they don't require bricks and mortar or paper.  If the people who read are increasingly content to read electronically (as you are, dear reader), then there's no need for book stores.  The scores of I.T. jobs that are required to maintain that business model don't counterbalance the tens of thousands of jobs that will be lost as Borders and Barnes and Nobles start to fold.

I wish I could share Obama's optimism about innovation and jobs.  But I think that industrial-era horse has left the stable.

Community Organizing, Jesus, and Saul Alinsky

Way back yonder in the election of Aught Eight, there was a wee bit of a kerfuffle about community organizing. You know, back when Miz Sarah got all high and mighty about small town mayorin' bein' real work, and community organizin' being somthin' only them lib'rals do when they cain't find work for the summer and Mumsy isn't opening up the house in the Berkshires until August.

Folks got all riled 'bout that, and so many Priuses and Volvos started sportin' bumper stickers that said: "Jesus Was A Community Organizer."

I saw one of those bumper stickers the other day on the back of a shiny Audi SUV in the well-off, liberal area in which my church is sited. It reminded me that over and over again, I've told myself that I needed to read Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals." Alinsky, in case you don't know him, is the Grandaddy of community organizing. His work to empower and radicalize communities in Chicago has a surprisingly deep impact on the American political system. Hillary Clinton wrote her doctoral thesis on him. Barack Obama cut his political teeth in the crucible of Alinskian organizing. That's made Alinsky a particularly potent boogeyman of the reactionary right.

He's a...commie! A...socialist! Aieeeee!

I figured it was about time to get down to some summer reading, and Alinsky was next in the rotation. So tonight, I'm curling up on the couch with Saul.

I'm wondering, in particular, just how well the thesis underlying that bumper sticker will hold up.

The Little Boy Who Cried Socialist

Having read the text of Obama's controversial pep-talk to school kids yesterday, one of the most striking things about it is that it was total, down-the-line, unrelenting partisan propaganda. At no point did it vary from the party line. Every talking point, every rhetorical flourish, every turn of phrase...all of it...presented a particular ideology. The speech was a flagrant effort to embed that ideology into the hearts and minds of our young people.

That ideology is, of course, the ideology of American conservatism. Work hard. Study hard. No one owes you anything. To succeed, you have to put in effort. You are responsible for your own success. Listen to and respect your elders.

The intense resistance to this fundamentally conservative speech among conservative ideologues may, I think, be part of a turning point for the American right. Conservative parents, panicked by the fear-mongering of their own media, bombarded schools with calls of outrage. Some opted their kids out of the speech, concerned that the message amounted to the indoctrination one might receive from the Dear Leader in a totalitarian state. While this is certainly consistent with the view of Obama that some folks have been pitching, it poses a problem for the right. Here, with crystal clarity, American conservatives have taught a lesson to the children of America about the current nature of their movement.

It has gone mad.

For the vast majority of kids who listened to or dozed their way through this speech, the idea that there was anything evil or socialist about it will be obviously, basically wrong. Not just a little off. Way off. Paranoid schizophrenic off. "Your mom wouldn't let you watch that? What a whackjob."

That's not to say that one can't disagree with the current administration. I do on a range of fronts, particularly in terms of fiscal responsibility. But the reflexive roaring of the right-leaning media and blogosphere increasingly seems less like legitimate opposition, and more like raving. And if conservatives allow themselves to be painted into that corner, the legitimate critiques they have will no longer seem legitimate.

I think Obama knows this. I think some Republicans are realizing this, which is why the Florida GOP chair publicly recanted his accusations of socialist propaganda after he saw the text of the speech. He even went so far as to say he was going to be sure his kids listened to it.

But the damage is done. If you keep shouting the same thing, over and over again, no matter what, you aren't being consistent. You're being that little boy who cried socialist, and eventually, no one will believe you.

Faith and the "Birthers"

On a whim today, I started taking a look at the "birther" movement. In the event that you've been intentionally hiding from CNN frothmeister Lou Dobbs, this is the group of right wing folk who are absolutely certain that Obama is not actually an American citizen. He's actually Kenyan. That his citizenship has been confirmed and reconfirmed is meaningless to the birthers, because all of those confirmations must be 1) fabricated or 2) evasions.

They have to be, because the "birthers" are completely convinced that they have discovered a great secret truth that has been suppressed since Obama was a baby by...well...someone. Most likely the Commie Fifth Columnists, working collaboratively with the Illuminati. It's also possible that both the K'taal Hive Mind and the surprisingly crafty Boise, Idaho chapter of the Kiwanis may be significant players.

One of the most interesting subthreads of this collective psychosis I've found...and there appear to be plenty of folks in the blogosphere who believe this...is that the birth certificate is being hidden because Obama is actually the son of Frank Marshall Davis, an influential African American progressive. According to this theory, his Kenyan father was a "beard," selected so that Davis wouldn't have to divorce his wife.

Of course, if this is true, then Obama would still be an American citizen, rendering this whole drama completely moot. Sure, but to birthers, that doesn't matter. Nothing matters. The folks who have grasped these "truths" are clinging to them with a presuppositional ferocity. Everything and anything they hear will be bent to validate what they already believe.

So...how is that different from faith? There are many folks of the neoatheist persuasion who would argue that belief in God is similar to being a "birther" or any other conspiracy theorist. If you believe in something, you'll fight to prove it's truth, bending the way you perceive reality so that reality accommodates that belief. For critics of religion like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, that willingness to disregard empirical evidence in favor of defending doctrine is the greatest danger of faith.

There, I think, it helps if we understand faith not as the desperate defense of a rigid system of closely-held thought, but as something that orients us outside of the frameworks in which we find ourselves. Faith in God, if it is authentic, does not harden us against truth. It causes us to realize that truth with a Capital Tee is something that transcends us. To come closer to that truth, we must allow it to shatter our preconceptions, not just once, but over and over again.

I Am More Conservative Than Dick Cheney

As we inside-the-Beltway folks thrill to the duel of words between the current President and the former Vice President over the issue of "enhanced interrogation techniques," what strikes me as most interesting about the debate is the inversion of the usual liberal/conservative moral divide.

According to the pattern as it's generally expressed within conservative culture, liberals are consequentialists. That means that we progressives are morally relativistic, adapting ourselves to the needs of the moment rather than sticking to a set of clear moral principles that permit no wiggle room. Under such an ethical system, there are no absolutes. We basically do whatever the heck we want. Gay marriage, cats and dogs living together, that sort of thing.

Conservatives, by that same metric, are generally assumed by other conservatives to hew to what is known as a deontological morality. That means that ethics are duty based. There are laws and governing rules by which one lives, and they cannot be bent or broken. You must adhere to them, no matter what happens. Morality is not determined by context. It is an absolute, and as such it bears great resemblance to faith, which also orients itself towards an absolute. That, within the self-understanding of conservatism, is what gives an individual or a nation integrity. It's what imbues us with nobility.

What is most striking about Cheney's recent defense of the use of torture is how eloquently he articulates a consequentialist ethic. When he describes the actions of his administration towards detainees as “..legal, essential, justified, successful, and the right thing to do,” that rightness is not measured against any other standard than that of perceived efficacy.

When he says engaging in these acts was "essential," he is describing torture as necessary for maintaining the security of the populace. When he says it was justified, he does so for the same reason. It maintained security. We would not have been safe without the use of torture. It was "successful" because it purportedly generated actionable intelligence. Finally, it was the "right thing to do" because, in Cheney's eyes and in those of his fellow conservatives, it had the desired effect. We were made safe. We were protected. That is proof, in and of itself, that it was the correct course of action. It worked.

Even in the unlikely circumstance that all of those things are true, and if that policy of sustained and systematic physical abuse of prisoners yielded actionable intelligence, what Cheney is articulating at best is a morality of expediency. We'll do whatever it takes to protect ourselves.

To counter this, some conservatives have argued that the legal opinions written to justify this approach were a sign that those actions were being held against a higher standard. What they were, though, was a tacit admission that what for many was a core value within a democratic society was being violated. In seeking wiggle room around the issue of torture, and in endeavoring to redefine it, the former administration moved away from the idea that there are some inviolable values that define our society and make it both noble and worth defending.

Measured against the standards of faith, particularly Christian faith, Cheney's defense fails. Measured against the unchanging values that are supposedly the bedrock foundation of a conservative morality, such actions cannot be justified. They are fundamentally ignoble, and that a significant portion of American conservatism has risen up to defend them is a sign of a movement that has lost sight of its moral integrity.