Speculation and Morality

Immediately following the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, the religious chatter about Trump got waaaaay more intense.

His supporters felt that this near miss marked him as protected by God, that it was a sign that he was a necessary part of God's plan for America.  Like King David, like Cyrus of Persia, Trump is the anointed one, the vessel of the Divine intent.  Trumpist theology has always had a divine-right ring about it, which...given that his supporters are essentially monarchists...shouldn't be much of a surprise.

Others had very different ideas, ones that seem a little closer to the reality of who Trump is.  Among some fringe communities of evangelicals who haven't missed that Trump is the exact opposite of Jesus in every way, the failed assassination attempt and the wound to Trump's ear fulfilled the terms of Revelation 13:3.  "There it is," they said.  "There's the head wound, and the wondering world!"  Trump is, they suggest, the Little Horn, the adversary of Christ, whose amorality, worldliness, and pathological falsehood marks him as the Antichrist.  The end times are at hand!

Both are...off.

Trump's "faithful" supporters are off, because, c'mon.   Christ's purposes are never served by lies and bullying.  Christ's purposes are never served by showing cruelty to the stranger, or by refusing shelter to a fellow Christian.  Ever.  Not ever.  Period.  The Gospel must be expressed in our every action, and the dark logics of your theological consequentialism can be used to excuse any evil.  Sure, he's done what he promised.  But just because the devil fulfills his end of the bargain doesn't mean you haven't sold your soul.

As the author of the definitive book on Trump's Antichrist nature, I might seem closer to the latter camp.  At least the folks who are freaked out about him have the advantage of not being bamboozled by Trump's transactional schtick.  And I will admit, the whole head wound thing is a little creepy, as is the depth to which the American faithful now stand in Trump's thrall.

The challenge, though, is that none of that matters.  The question, for Christians, is never about the details of the end times, or about the mechanics of messianic fulfillment.  Jesus was really, really specific about that.  Don't speculate about those things, he said.  Don't trust anyone who speculates about it.

Our task, as Christians, is not to worry about when it all comes down.  Because if you're a Christian, if you've committed yourself to being a disciple of Jesus of Nazareth, again: none of that matters.  None of it.  If you're claimed Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, the end times have already arrived for you.

The Christian has already stepped over to a different way of life, one that manifests itself in the values and ethos that Jesus lived and taught.  It doesn't matter where we are in the scheme of things.  We must live, right now, as if that time were fulfilled.  My moral commitments are the same, no matter where we are in the arc of history.  Faced with an cruel emperor, a totalitarian state, a flagrant charlatan, or a decadent mammonist culture, none of that changes.

Love neighbor.  Love enemy.  Feed the hungry.  Clothe the naked.  Show hospitality to the stranger.  Speak the truth, and show grace.  Refuse the sword, and turn your back on the sweet poison of wealth.  This is the basic value-set of discipleship, no matter when, no matter what.

When we get lost in wild end-times speculation, we too easily lose sight of that discipled moral agency.  We start living in a world of abstractions and phantasms, rather than in the reality of our day-to-day choices.  We forget both our Christian freedom and our Christian duty.

 

Values, Faith, and Political Engagement

Earlier this week, the two hopefuls in the Virginia Lieutenant Governor's race went at it in a debate and in the media, an exchange that has surfaced a peculiarity.

On the one hand, there was an Iraq veteran and pediatric surgeon.  On the other,  a firebrand activist and the pastor of a small unaffiliated congregation.  As someone interested in the tension between faith and politics, what was peculiar in the debate and in the public exchanges between the two candidates was their completely different take on the relationship between what we believe and our political positions.

The activist pastor recently and regularly preaches that he believes...as most evangelicals do...that Christianity is the only legitimate faith, the only way one can stand in right relationship to God.  That's a fairly standard interpretation of Christian faith, but it's one that was called into question at the debate and in public conversations.

The veteran/surgeon suggested that having a faith that automatically assumes that 1) all other faiths are inherently and completely false and 2) that anyone who does not hold that position within your own faith is not a real member of your faith...well, that might have some impact on how you approach the people you've been elected to govern.

In response to that concern came the response: well, this is just my private belief.   What right do you have to challenge what I believe if it has no impact on how I deal with people?  One defender of the activist candidate suggested that there's no connection between what one says in a "Biblical sermon" and political speech.  The candidate himself quoted from the Virginia constitution, which explicitly protects religious speech.

On the one hand, I concur with aspects of that response.  Overtly political discourse has no place in the pulpit.  The task of a pastor is to teach the Gospel, not to whup folks upside the head with their political agenda.  When we allow partisanship to become our priority, churches become little more than extensions of a party.  That stifles both the Spirit and our capacity to stand in prophetic resistance to the idolatries of ideologies.  Including our own, as that pesky, pesky Jesus tends to do.

It is also true, and must necessarily be true, that individuals should be free to both express their faith and fully participate in the civic life of the state.

But on the other hand, to imagine that faith has no political implications is to misunderstand faith.

What we believe does impact who we are.  Faith, rightly understood, is the thing that most radically defines us.  It is our purpose, the thing which governs and directs all other aspects of our existence.  If it is real, faith has a direct impact on both our personal life and our civic engagement.

As such, what you profess to believe does have a direct impact on how you should be viewed as both a human being and a citizen.  It is the content of your character.  It is the expression of your values.

It strikes me as a peculiar dissonance to argue otherwise.

Religious Freedom, Afghanistan, and The Point of It All

This last week, a little news item flitted across the religion news pages, to be quickly forgotten. It had to do with two Christian relief agencies, both of which provide material support to the Afghan people. The Afghan government shut down the operations of both, alleging that they were involved in proselytizing, which is explicitly forbidden under Afghan law.

Neither Church World Service or Norwegian Church Aid could be described as evangelical. They're not out there trying to convert. They're trying to fulfill the Christian mandate to provide care for those in need. Both are progressive, ecumenical, and sensitive to the needs, culture, and religious sensibilities of local communities. Take a look at the Church World Service web site. Winning souls for Jesus ain't their schtick.

But after a local television station began making allegations based apparently on nothing more than innuendo and the word "Church" in their name, angry mobs took to the streets. Now both groups have been forced by the Afghan government to suspend operations, as it investigates whether these groups have violated provisions in the Constitution of Afghanistan that forbid conversion from Islam. I have two reactions to this.

First, the allegations are clearly false, but that doesn't seem to matter much in Afghanistan. Truth is hard to find, but it ain't like most folks bother tryin'. Rumors that feed existing hatreds are just so much easier. The cultural sensitivities within that community are as twitchy as a recently-set antipersonnel mine. Outrage comes as easily as flipping a rather well-worn switch. Reminds me of the Tea Party, for some reason.

Second, we recently entered into new territory in Afghanistan. It is now the single longest military commitment in American history. We've been there longer than we were in 'Nam. Thousands upon thousands of American servicemen and women have put their lives on the line in Afghanistan, and many have made the ultimate sacrifice in the service of their country. Without the support of the United States, the government in Afghanistan would not exist.

Yet the government that America has put into place there imposes restrictions on human freedom that are totally antithetical to our values as a nation. Yeah, I know, nobody likes proselytizing. But a nation-state that bans it is not worth the blood and sweat of our troops, nor is it worth all the money we've borrowed from China. I'm not saying that as some way of channeling Ann Coulter, asserting that if we just forced 'em all to follow Jesus, things would be copacetic. Not at all. I just can't see the point of creating a nation...and it is our creation...in which a citizen cannot choose not to follow the religion of the majority.

An Afghan should be free to be Muslim. But also Christian. Or Buddhist. Or Hindu. Or Jewish. They should be free to be an Atheist, if they so choose. Not only that, Afghan Christians and Buddhists and Hindus and Jews and Atheists should be free to talk about what they believe, and free to attempt to persuade others of the merits of their belief. Those are the blessings of liberty which were ordained and established in the American Constitution. Those are the values that make America a good thing, even with all her blemishes.

Yeah, I know, imposing this set of values on the Afghan people would have been an affront to their culture. What we don't seem to have realized as we've poured blood and treasure into that region is that the problem in Afghanistan wasn't governmental. What made Afghanistan the seedbed for attacks against our soil wasn't a regime. It was a set of values broadly held by the society.

We've mistakenly assumed that the processes of democracy are the same as the values of our republic. And though we've done some good there, I do find myself wondering, more deeply than I have before, about the point of it all.

Dammit, Jim, I'm a Pastor, Not an Economist!

Something's been messing with my head for a few months, and I need to figure out where my thinking has gone astray.

My church still exists because it has an endowment. The health of that endowment is tied to the markets, which for a while there were tanking in nail-bitey ways. For a while there, I was spending really unhealthy amounts of time at cnbc.com. Now, though, the Dow and the NASDAQ and the S&P500 are all rebounding. The Dow, for instance, has gained around 3000 points since February, as it pinged off of a sub-6,500 floor. Stock market averages are a pretty standard metric for measuring the health of an economy, and so an uptick of this pointitude must mean things are getting better, right?

I'm just not sure. Why? Because I'm not sure the Dow is ultimately a meaningful measure of economic health. The reason for this is...well...perhaps just my own stupidity.

Here's what I don't get. To my understanding, what the Dow measures is a price-weighted index of the market value of 30 major corporations. As the price of those stocks rise, the Dow rises. As the price of those stocks falls, the Dow falls. Simple. Other market averages act in the same way. Where I struggle with market averages as a measure of economic health is that...as best I can tell...the standard against which the Dow assesses value is not empirically meaningful. "Points" on the DJIA are not fixed units of measure in the same way that centimeters or kilocalories are a unit of measure. Those points are tied to the value of a currency, in this case the United States Dollar. And the value of the dollar can vary wildly. It can be impacted by fluctuations in money markets, as investors express confidence or lack thereof in the well-being of that country. It can be impacted by...oh..let's pick a scenario at random...printing trillions of dollars of new currency into an economy as part of a stimulus package.

If corporations were entities that only existed within one nation-state or currency marketplace, then their value would be largely tied to that nation-state's currency. But with corporations now existing in a globalized marketplace, they cease to be meaningfully tied to one currency. So if both the point value and the points themselves are variable, why is the Dow trustworthy as an empirical measure of the health of the economy? It's a measure of the value of a corporate stock in dollars...nothing more.

Sigh. I'd probably better stick with theology.

God of War

I really do find myself struggling with my own human tendency to violence lately. That doesn't mean I've been getting into brawls at my session meetings or picking random fights with Baptists.

It's that I've bothered comparing my feelings towards the Somalian piracy issue with my Christian faith. On the one hand, I have no patience whatsoever towards individuals who are willing to threaten others for material gain. That is, quite simply, evil. But that's not the only ethos that I have trouble with.

The idea that somehow seizing ships and holding individual sailors as hostages should be viewed primarily in terms of cost/benefit analyses is equally alien. Those ship owners and insurance actuaries who'd rather just pay ransoms seem to just be enabling ongoing violence. Their marketized morality couldn't care less about the terror inflicted on captive sailors and their families. It's all about acceptable risk and maintaining profitability.

I freely admit to desiring an aggressive response to the narced up and heavily armed men who've been seizing ships, and to having taken some satisfaction in the Special Forces action that freed the captain of the Mersk Alabama. For all of the reporting on the anarchy, poverty, and tribalism in Somalia, my willingness to accept varying cultural norms runs out well before I'm willing to tolerate hostage taking and the armed seizure of goods. At some level, I'd like to see more intense responses, in the form of a multilateral effort to both take out the land bases that have been supporting pirate activity and re-establish the rule of law.

On the other hand, I'm troubled that I have such a strong positive reaction to the application of coercive power. I'm reasonably sure that the only authentic Christian response to three perfectly synchronized headshots should be sorrow at the loss of life. Here, I tend to fall back on St. Augustine's City of God for my theological framework. Are Christians permitted to use force? Augustine thought so, but only in defense of an innocent. That use of force can't be vengeful, or driven by blood lust. It needs to be guided not by a desire to destroy, but a desire to build up and restore.

I'm Rather Fond of Trebuchets, Actually

There was a fascinating editorial in the WaPo this last week written by Robert J. Samuelson, a conservative economic commentator whose writings are always thought provoking. It was a description of what he perceives as an assault on the foundation of American capitalism, entitled "Capitalism Under Siege."

Most of the article referred back to the work of eminent economist Joseph Schumpeter, who felt that capitalism contained within itself the seeds of it's own destruction. In addition to it's dynamism, which we enjoy during the boom times but that seriously bugs us during the busts, capitalism's creation of excess resources establishes:

...an oppositional class of "intellectuals" who would nurture popular discontents and disparage values (self-enrichment, risk-taking) necessary for economic success.

As I read this, I found myself agreeing, but thinking that perhaps it isn't just "intellectuals" who are the problem for capitalism. The threat to the core values of capitalism does not just come from leftist professors on campus and busybodies who need to get out there and have a real job.

It comes, I think, from Christianity as well. Working diligently is a Christian virtue, sure. So is being willing to take risks and not cling to the things that this world values. Complacence and indolence wouldn't have gotten the apostles very far.

But self-enrichment? Not really. Christian faith has very little use for self enrichment. If it happens to us as a collateral result of our hard work, then...well...you have more responsibilities in terms of how those resources are used. As a goal towards which we orient ourselves, though, it is rather explicitly and repeatedly rejected by our Lord and Savior.

It's why folks like Ayn Rand despised Jesus people...because within His life and teachings, there lies something very very incompatible with the competitive culture of self that is at the beating heart of the free market.