We visited the Documentation Center in Nuremberg. I hope they build one in Florida when Trump is finally gone. The centers in Germany are dedicated to the ongoing education of the public, so they can understand how their country ended up vilifying certain citizens and either imprisoning them or killing them. How did their country start an impossible war dedicated to world domination? How did a group of thugs from the south manage to scare the whole country into submission? Why did they let these incompetent, greedy, self-interested sociopaths wreck their economy? It is an honest and sobering account.
It sounded so much like our last twelve years I was shocked all over again. The image that stuck with me the most was Hitler’s picture on his famous book. It looked so much like Donald Trump’s official portrait hanging as a banner off the Dept. of Education, I shuddered.
I know people have scoffed at the comparison. But if you went through the Documentaion Center, I think you’d believe we’ve been living through the application of a playbook.
I have not stopped praying for the deported, fired and swindled people living under the wannabe fuhrer’s regime
Our church’s social action team, Voices for Justice, has been connecting with the New Sanctuary Movement in Philadelphia, here and there, since their good work intersects with our goals. They work out dignity, mutuality, community, and spiritual nonviolence as they make a place for the stranger in spite of our xenophobic federal regime. Thank God there are a lot of people who keep the light burning!
Tre Ford, a pastor with Bethel Church (out at Franklin Mills), is the Community Organizer & Congregation Liaison for NSM. He called us together for a prayer vigil at Love Park last Wednesday with the theme “Love Has No Limits.” He said,
After more than 40 weeks of consistently showing up at noon at 8th & Cherry [ICE in Philly], our work continues. On September 30, we will shift our weekly witness into an evening expression of prayer and unity at Love Park. This will be a special moment for our movement, and we want our clergy, congregations, people, and voices there. Please bring your people and come stand with us.
We did not fill Love Park. But we got a good number of people out at 6:30 to form a “sacred space.” It was not a “protest” per se. But there was a lot of protest in it and a group of winsome young teachers came prepared with some pithy posters they made.
The New Sanctuary folks are great at getting Christians and like-minded people out of their buildings and into the public in ecumenical gatherings. This is not small feat. They are persistent, insistent and overtly Christian/religious — right there in Love Park!
Love Park is a noisy place to create a sanctuary
The organizers hauled in a lot of sound equipment, but it was still hard to hear certain speakers. Who really knows how to use a microphone, anyway? We stood at the edge of the group and to the side, so we missed quite a bit. But the point was being present, not just being informed. I kept noting the challenges we faced as we cordoned off some sanctuary:
The Broad St. Beer Garden has been operating in the square around the “flying saucer” pavilion they will later inhabit. I finally realized that loudspeaker was them broadcasting quizzo questions. Quizzo is so distracting.
A man about 20 yards away near Market St. had such a booming laugh he was louder than the speaker. Astounding and infectious.
A passerby saw that an ecumenical peace band was set up and waiting to play, so he came into the group and shouted, “Play some heavy metal” a few times. My wife told him we wanted to hear the speaker, so he gave way. They were both mildly audacious.
A group of preschool and early elementary kids used our gathering as a maze in a serious game of chase. They darted through our legs so many times they seemed like part of the family. Yes, I looked around for their parents.
About a half hour into our vigil, servants from The Everywhere Project started setting up their tables and unloading their food and supplies on 15th St. to help the unhoused. Quite an undertaking.
There are many purposely-loud cars and wild tricycles with blaring music on our streets, as you know.
But we managed to do it
We have nice, quiet church buildings for a reason. Turning into the presence of God takes quite a bit of silence. But if we have turned and invited God to fully inhabit the holy center of ourselves, we can invite people into sanctuary almost anywhere. We’re like a special delivery. And, of course, where two or three are gathered in the name of Jesus, God is in their midst. So I think we did all right. Among the well-turned moments I remember:
There were pastors and a rabbi involved. I know how busy they can be, so I was impressed. And I know from experience they usually decide what is going to happen and it is not that easy to fit into someone else’s program. They did well.
From what I could hear, a soft-spoken Haitian woman told TPS stories. In an unspeakable act of cruelty, the USCIS announced that Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haiti officially terminated on July 27 following a U.S. Supreme Court decision (Mullin v. Doe) that allowed the Department of Homeland Security to end the designation. That means about 350,000 (!!) more people now being hunted by ICE.
A representative from Asian Americans United (AAU) couldn’t help but weep as she talked about accompanying people through the immigration injustice system. The ICE office in Philly is, essentially, in Chinatown. AAU provides case support for families impacted by ICE detention, connects individuals with legal resources, and distributes emergency aid. They were a primary coalition member pushing for the city’s “ICE Out” legislative package, which restricts ICE from entering city-owned spaces without judicial warrants and limits local cooperation with federal agents.
Then there was the interfaith band, full of joy and cajoling us to sing simple songs right out there in Love Park. Just getting themselves electrified and amplified was a deep expression of commitment and hope.
And I must give a shout out to Will O’Brien and Dee Dee Risher who were present. I went over to Will and reminded him that he had welcomed strangers to Philadelphia when we showed up at the offices of The Other Side in Germantown as soon as we arrived in town from California in 1995. Their magazine had been a guiding light for our Sierra St. Household and church planting efforts. Sadly, they had to stop publishing in 2004. I told my wife, “Those are people who have always lived out their convictions.”
Remembering our super-diverse collection of brilliant people and hangers on, like me, gives me hope. I’m encouraged, even though It has been a terrible year for people singled out for oppression by the government. I’m shocked, and I think it is important to stay shocked by how ruthless they are in principle and action.
In the face of that reality, many people are giving their lives to lead us. They are living out their convictions and revealing Jesus in the process. The gospel has always re-emerged after dark times, usually stronger and clearer than before. I am looking forward to that and praying for the tide to turn right now.
Gwen and I are getting ready to write an article that responds to some of the unreconciled relationships we recall and how forgiveness has worked in those places. I was reminded of this post from 2022 when the need to forgive was very fresh and Joe Biden had some issues with reconciliation to deal with too!
The Washington Post surprised me the other day with an op-ed featuring Warren G. Harding – the first president after World War I, who is most-remembered for the corruption in his administration. That’s him, above, throwing out the first pitch. So it has been a weird week. First, I liked Dick Cheney, of all people, for accompanying Liz to the Jan. 6 commemoration. Then I read WaPo and ended up admiring the super-capitalist, Teapot Dome president!
I did not know that Harding forgave Eugene V. Debs! He commuted the sentence of the Socialist who ran against him from prison! Debs’ crime was doubting-out-loud the validity of WWI — he called it a diabolical capitalist war (I guess I would have voted for him). For his free speech, the Woodrow Wilson administration threw Debs in jail with a dubious application of the Espionage Act. When Harding followed Wilson, he decided to forgive Debs, against the advice of his advisors. He even made sure the “traitor” came to the White House on his way home from prison, so he could meet him and form some kind of relationship.
Biden has been acting out a similar public drama for us all year. He’d love to forgive people. But he took the gloves off on Epiphany (which he also loves to to) and laid out Trump. For most of the year he had been restrained, trying hard to bridge the political chasm dividing the country. But that appears to be over.
Are you similarly conflicted by your own relational chasms? Do you rehearse snappy things you would say to your enemies in your head — the zingers you will never get a chance to deliver? What do you do when your offender will not apologize, much less reconcile?
Have you decided how you are going to handle the people who have undermined you, lied about you and then blamed you for what they did to you? Maybe you just wait to see what will happens when the drama starts.
You won’t have to wait long, apparently. A lot of us are having a lot of drama. All over the country divorces have gone up, families have been divided over politics, churches have split and pastors have resigned. You can’t look at the news, if you dare, without someone worrying about American “democracy” – which Eugene V. Debs did not think much of when he was jailed for saying something that 900,000 people voted for.
It can be hard to forgive sometimes, but if Warren Harding can do it, maybe we can too.
What if they don’t say they are sorry?
This is always the big question when it comes to forgiveness. What if the person who hurt me is not sorry? It is not uncommon for someone to protest like this when forgiveness is suggested:
I can’t let my guard down. That would be surrendering and acting like they were justified in hurting me. They would get away with their crime! I would be just as vulnerable to more of the abuse I just suffered.
I will not forgive until the other person: 1) knows that wrong was done; 2) feels an inner sorrow for doing it; 3) apologizes to me; 4) and makes amends. Then I’ll know it is safe to forgive and enter back into the relationship.
Most of us are taught to apologize from a young age along the lines of those last four conditions. Maybe you bit your sibling (well, I did, at least), said something cruel, pushed someone around, and a well-meaning adult intervened and told you, “Now, say you’re sorry.” As kids, those half-hearted apologies, sometimes followed with forced hugs, were enough to help us move on. But something changed as we got older. Aren’t apologies a little harder to come by, now? Aren’t the issues cutting a little deeper than, “She took my Sports Diva!”
What are you supposed to do when someone intentionally hurts you, rips your heart wide open, and then leaves you to pick up the pieces? What if they move on with their lives, and there is no well-meaning adult to come along and demand they apologize?
From our playground lessons, we’ve been conditioned to think forgiveness follows an apology. But things change and people forget how to apologize or think they are avoiding the problem by never having relationships deep enough to matter. We protest that someone is letting our hurt and their perfidy go unnoticed and all we hear is, “That’s your problem. Deal with it.” We get the unspoken message we’re wrong for being hurt. But living wronged with that prickly disconnection installed is a recipe for bitterness and it might even make us sick.
When hurt remains unforgiven, when the memory stays unprocessed, it sits in our hearts as if it is still happening. A lot of us are waiting for an apology in order to get some relief. Do you have anyone on whom you are still waiting? Is it fairly easy to get all worked up when their face pops into your mind or someone speaks about them fondly or you see them succeed? Jessica Harris wrote:
“My dad left our family when I was in elementary school. The pain caused by his abandonment ran deep. I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that someone I loved could hurt me so badly when I didn’t do anything to deserve it. Then, as I got older, I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that someone I loved could hurt me so badly and not care.
That ate away at my heart for years. The hurt remained unresolved as I waited for this man to return to my life and apologize for wrecking it. I thought my anger was my power. My ability to never forget was going to ensure I would never get hurt again. It was how I protected my heart.
That anger bled over into my other relationships. I became angry in general, always blaming it on my dad. If he would just admit he was wrong, my life would be better.”
I couldn’t tell that same story. But I have definitely had to work through similar hurts in the last few years. You probably have had some hurts too. My clients certainly share them every day: a trauma that is lodged in the memory and won’t go away, a loved one who betrayed their trust, an unscrupulous salesman or contractor who swindled them, a family member who hurt them but has since passed on. They still feel deeply about people who cut them deep but have never once breathed an apology. You might feel you have a right to hold a grudge, yourself.
What if anger is not strength?
Bitterness is an enemy of resilience. It is the opposite of joy isn’t it? It is the taste of poison. You cannot be strong and move forward with your life while still dragging around chests full of bitterness from your past like you’re Jacob Marley.
What kids rarely learn is that an act of forgiveness strengthens the heart of the forgiver as much as it frees the offender. Forgiveness is not, “I am OK with what you did.” It isn’t even, “I accept your apology.” It is, “I am not going to hold this in me or against you anymore.”
The point of forgiveness and apologies is ultimately reconciliation. It is great when an apology is extended by the person who committed the hurt; then they can be free of what they are dragging behind them. It is an everyday miracle when forgiveness is extended by the person who was hurt; then they can get over what the offender did to them. If those things happen, then two people who have freed one another can move on to work out how to live together in love, and creation is that much less ruined.
But even if you can’t get to reconciliation you can still forgive, and bring some kind of closure to a wound. Adults take charge of their traumas all the time. You can forgive even if there is no apology.
If you’re too hurt to forgive right away, take time to scab over. But try not to hold on too long. The anger you nurse is just the hurt hanging on. Being angry is not being strong. Forgiving brings strength that lets us really heal and move forward with life without waiting for someone to let us out of our bitterness prison.
Go ahead and forgive
Forgiveness is uncommon enough that it is actually studied — you can be a forgiveness expert. A growing body of research shows that best way to forgive comes from exercising the moral virtue of forgiveness, even if there is no justice or hope of reconciliation. When we are good, within reason, to an offender, we will reduce our anger, anxiety and depression and improve our self-esteem and hope (Robert Enright) — a good reason to forgive is to protect your health!
We dare not conflate forgiveness and reconciliation. People often do, but we dare not. Forgiveness is not dependent on reconciliation, restitution or justice. The offer of forgiveness can be unconditional, not dependent on the other’s response at all, including an apology. Forgiveness like that looks like Jesus, right? Reconciliation is much more likely if it begins with that kind of forgiveness.
Reconciliation, when at least one party is deeply and unfairly hurt, is the fruit of forgiveness and apology and is conditional; it depends on how the offending party or parties understand their hurtful ways and change. Reconciliation like that looks like what Jesus is trying to build, right?
A forgiver is motivated by their desire to be rid of resentment and act as good as is possible toward an offending person. If that person has no inner sorrow, never intends to apologize or to make amends, you don’t need to act as if they do. Yet, you can still have the intention to reconcile if the person changes and a relationship becomes safe. You can even show an outward quality of forgiveness, for example, by not talking disparagingly about the offender to others. If you do that, you’ll be working out Romans 12:18: “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.” If a person keeps abusing you, you can struggle for peace instead of just struggling against hurt. You don’t need to bear their responsibility.
Why not be healthy? If you reject forgiving because you conflate it with reconciliation, you deprive yourself of a chance to recover, lead a healthy psychological life, and even live a healthy relational life with others (if not necessarily with the offending person). Deep anger from injustices can lead to a lack of trust in general, thwarting potentially life-giving relationships.
How we think about forgiveness is important. If we make the mistake of waiting for an apology or holding out for an ideal reconciliation, we allow an offending person or a random act of cruelty dominate us for a long time, maybe even for a lifetime if the wound is deep enough. Forgiveness is a character trait healthy adults exercise. They can suffer the disappointment and loss of not being reconciled. They rely on faith, hope and love more than their capacity to create a preferred harmony. We are free to forgive, if we choose, regardless of the outcome, even if someone refuses to apologize.
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Today is William Seymour Day! Talk about a person who had a lot to forgive! He managed the trials with a radical faith fueled by the Holy Spirit! Read all about him at The Transhistorical Body.
My most-recent favorite book is Face to Face: Knowing God Beyond Our Shame(2023) by Fr. Stephen Freeman. Freeman is an archpriest in the Orthodox Church in America so, for me, he adds an interesting lens to look at life in Christ. I admit I am more familiar with the “Orthodox” church of the first 500 years of Christianity than I am with the one growing up in the United States, so I am enjoying his helpful reframing of how we understand shame through informed by some very old theology with some psychology thrown into the mix.
Jesus enters our shame
The Bible beautifully describes how Jesus is healing our toxic shame and teaching us to endure the reformative and sometimes transformative value of our natural shame responses. Freeman says:
The drama of salvation is described in this divine reversal: God has come among us in Christ, emptying Himself of His glory. Instead of glory, He enters into shame—even the shameful death of the Cross. And entering into that shameful death, He destroys death and ascends in glory. He conquers death by death. He overcomes shame by shame.
That summary may sound a bit foreign to your ears, not because it is foreign to the Bible, but because most American Christians have been taught Jesus came to solve our sin problem. We’ve been taught that sin leads to death rather than death leads to shame and then sin. But look at two iconic pieces of scripture on the subject and see where the Bible starts the discussion:
I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I hid not my face from shame and spitting. — Isaiah 50:6 (RSV)
Jesus is the suffering one Isaiah was talking about. He did not hide from the shame we experience, like we do. Many newer English translations trade the word “shame” here for “insults,” keeping the experience about abuse from oppressors. But the older versions are more correct, I think. Because there is an inner experience of injury to the soul the Messiah is entering as well as an outer. The Orthodox Jewish Bible expands it well for us:
I [Moshiach] offered My gev (back) to them that deliver blows, and My lekhi (cheeks) to them that pulled out [the beard]: I hid not My face from kelimot (humiliations, shame) and rok (spitting, saliva).
Paul makes it clear that the Savior‘s main target for our redemption is our shame. Jesus frees us from our slavery to death and sets humanity on a corrected course toward the fullness of our glory. Jesus left his joy and freedom behind in order to become small enough to fit into our shrunken humanity, bound by the shame of our bondage. He did not dominate us with his splendor
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
assuming human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a human, he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross. — Phil 2:7-8
So please dial down the punitive theology
Since the lawyers and governmental types took over theology in the 1600’s, the preponderant image of the Lord’s work on the cross has been penal, meaning it is a courtroom drama. It says we are sinners who deserve to be punished and only God can stand in for us. He takes our blame because someone needs to be blamed. The most important thing is: who is right and who has rights.
The substitution analogy is not useless. But it breaks down if you push it too far, since it would mean the work of Jesus was about God not being able to let injustice pass unpunished, so he punished himself (or, as some object, abused his Son). What’s more, the actual perpetrators of sin do not receive the “justice” warranted since someone else took it. The Bible does paint the substitutionary atonement picture in serval places, but I think it was meant to be more metaphor than logistics. Paul, in particular, thinks law, in general, and the Mosaic Law, in particular, is a tutorial for something greater, not an everlasting rubric, since Jesus is the definition of the law and the law is love.
Rather than just solving the problem of sin and the resulting guilt, Jesus is entering our shame. In our era people have solved the problem of sin by acting shamelessly. Donald Trump is the flowering of that method. I have often said that Larry David was the prophet of that new “freedom.” But even though people have tried to change the subject, shame keeps bubbling up. My clients keep revealing to me how our trouble with shame will never be “rediscovered” after this generation is done with its version of fig leaves; it is an ongoing, core experience everyone has been weathering since childhood. It is setting the course of our relationships and coloring how we see ourselves. Freeman says,
We are unaccustomed in our culture to thinking of sin and shame as sharing a connection. We have been formed and shaped in the world of guilt and punishment. If we experience shame, we suppose, it is because other people are seeking to shame us. Thus we are likely to imagine that the shame in our lives is external, the result of social ills. If we fix society, our shame will disappear. This is not a surprising approach, given that our habits have long been directed toward sin as an external problem. But other people, regardless of our situation, are not our problem. The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said, “Hell is other people.” He must not have spent much time alone.
We are carrying the problem — and it is not just about doing the right thing or not. Our problem is about not being in right relationship with God, ourselves and others. Our lack of communion with God leaves us ashamed of our fraudulence and incapacity.
It is death that shames us
Back when I was a boy Baptist, sin was that main topic. There was a list of things in the back of the hymnal we were to do and not to do if we intended to be a heaven-bound Baptist. The covenant included being “exemplary in our deportment” (which in our church included not dancing, smoking or card playing), and abstaining “from the sale and use of intoxicating drinks as a beverage” (which is self-explanatory). Our leaders had been influenced by the “holiness doctrine” that purported to perfect us and we determined to be pure. I was ashamed of not being pure and I was not that bad before I was given the assignment!
The theology was so much about me choosing, the whole thing became more about my holiness than God’s! It took a long time to learn the Adam and Eve story is not about “You idiots, you disobeyed God and now you will be punished forever when you could have had the Garden of Eden!” It is more about “You poor people! You got out of communion with God. You turned your backs and now you are dying. You were meant to live forever.” My shame was not about my inability to do everything right. It was about being out of communion with God. With my non-Christian clients I can help identify the shame, which is often hidden under self-destruction or avoidance. But it is hard to cure it if one goes at it on their own steam, even when your therapist loves you! Freeman says:
Sin is much better understood as disease, fatal in its consequences. Sin, in a form of shorthand, can be described as “death at work within us.” At its most fundamental level, sin is the rupture of communion. We were created for a life of communion with God. In our sin, we have severed that communion and become strangers to God. Indeed, we have become strangers not only to God but to creation, to other people, even to ourselves. In an interesting side note, the secular shame researcher Gershen Kaufman describes shame as “broken communion.” Shame itself is not sin (or even sinful). Rather, it is an emotional signal that accompanies severed communion. It is, therefore, one of the things that sin feels like.
In John 6, Jesus teaches us about the mystery of communion with Him.
“I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread that I shall give is My flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world. . . . Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For My flesh is food indeed, and My blood is drink indeed. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him.” — John 6:51, 53–56
I think my childhood teachers taught on these verses. But I think they were mainly talking , as usual, about how Jesus would raise us up on the last day if we trusted in his work on the cross. For me, and many others I suspect, most of what was happening in the mind of my teachers happened in the past. The communion ceremony was like the pledge of allegiance to the Christian constitution more than an emblem of the present communion we were experiencing and deepening. As I remember, if one didn’t “take communion” it usually meant they were too ashamed of themselves to dare. Ugh.
The shame of not being qualified to take communion due to sin and shame turns the Lord’s teaching on its head, doesn’t it? Jesus invites us to live, not die — the fact that we may be as good as dead right now is his main interest. No matter how much we think our good behavior or genius will keep us alive, we are all going to die — that is, we will be given over to the death we prefer if we do not commune with Jesus and live forever with him. Freeman says:
We were created to live in communion with God. His life is our life. When we read about the creation of Adam, we see that he becomes a “living soul” when God breathes into him. Without the life of God, we are dead clay. The warning regarding the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is not a threat of punishment; rather, it is a warning that eating of it will result in death. To break communion with God by ignoring His commandment is to live as though we had no need of God. It is to spit His breath back at Him and demand that we live alone. The result is death, and with the alienation of death, we enter into its companion: shame.
Communion with God is a breath by breath, moment by moment, day by day, year after year experience of discerning and moving with the Spirit. Not doing that is the essence of sin and the seed of the frailty and worthlessness we experience as shame. I do think people perfect their capacity to be OK with their shame. But I say human life without God is, in the end, no life at all, even if some people purport to be happy with their self-selected nothingness.
If you sit down with your frailty, worthlessness or nothingness, you might feel an intolerable shame well up in the silence. Memories, faults, criticisms, or scorn might start collecting. Jesus will enter that place in you just as he willingly and lovingly entered humanity. His presence is divine therapy that heals our shame. As Jesus says, “I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly” (John 10:10).
Our church is reading an interesting sociology book by Christian Smith: Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America. We had a good discussion on Sunday, and I admire my pastor for bringing up what amounts to a delicate subject: your church is obsolete. We agreed that our church, The Episcopal Church, has, generally, been obsolete for years. If it were not so well endowed we’d be in big trouble.
Nevertheless, we have strengths. Our church, in particular, is a small group of intelligent, hard-working and openly loving people. We’re mostly over 55 — but our pastor is 45 and my wife was having a conversation during coffee hour with a lovely member who is 5.
Two comments are sticking with me
I came away from our dialogue encouraged and stimulated. People said some interesting things.
“I belonged to the church for quite a while before I believed.”
In this day, especially, if anyone is going to become part of the church, belonging probably precedes believing.
“Why aren’t we writing our own songs instead of rehearsing the past?”
Our pastor noted the present hymn book of TEC was published the year he was born and has not been updated. My wife pointed out that the composers whose songs are in the hymnbook wrote from the zeitgeist and inspiration of their day. I noted that the 1660 hymn we had just sung that morning probably sounded fresh in its century, but is it sure weird and boring now.
So Smith is helping us get into some good discussion. If anything is overdo in most churches, it is discussing what are we going to do, now, since our model for being the church is obsolete. It may have been misguided to begin with and that is WHY it is obsolete. Regardless, if we want to be the body of Christ with any integrity and purpose, we’d better come up with what were are called to do now.
Further dialogue will meet up with difficulty
I think most dialogue is good, even when it is bad. The fact it can uncover problems on the way to solving them, makes conflict-avoidant folks steer away from it. For instance, I have issues with the book we’re exploring and I feel reticent to share them. I’m not sure I respect Smith’s methods and conclusions. My issues can be encapsulated in two words: traditional religion. Smith is a 65-year-old Roman Catholic professor at Notre Dame. So when he talks about “traditional religion” (throughout this book) he is smack dab in the middle of one. I think it shows.
1) When he talks about “religion” (like in his book title), he’s actually talking about American faith, which means Christianity. Religion is a modern concept which reinforces the notion people have that “all religions are basically alike.” They think that because European intellectuals “identified” them and put them in the same category: “religions” in the 1800’s – genus and species, etc.
2) When he talks about “traditional” he seems to mean “mainstream” or “what the TV might say about it.” I think that term should have been obsolete a long time ago when it came to describing the church — at least in Christian circles. Now that I have met hundreds and seen thousands of Christians around the world, it is hard to nail down “traditional.” I think stereotypic Christianity, or enculturated Christianity, or hollow Christianity, or modern Christianity might all be obsolete. Jesus, however, is historically and presently hanging in there.
But the main thing Smith’s book is missing, in my opinion, comes from being so autobiographical. This book appeared in 2025. But he is really talking about what happened during his lifetime – forty years of studying the data. Much of what he is saying follows up on his books in 2000 and 2005 (George Bush). While I admire him for writing about most of the controversial topics of his day, I get the impression his latest book is kind of out of date. It is light on our recent past.
Any inspiration in a spiritual storm is welcome
I’m not prone to “going to church,” but discussing Smith’s book juiced my normal devotion to building the church. Two things I found missing in his book may be just what we dare not miss as we live out our lives as the body of Christ in the post-Trump era.
Transcendence may be the missing element
What people need to to find when they explore faith in Jesus is transcendence and belonging, not sociological data dumps and critical conclusions. Smith’s sociology, itself, actually sounds a bit obsolete. In an age of mistrust, he asks us to trust his very rational argument.
Experts will not save the church from becoming “obsolete,” which it will never be and is not now. The church in the U.S. Smith is painstakingly criticizing (objectively of course) undoubtedly needed to go as soon as Ronald Reagan pretended to be a part of it and Evangelicals bent the knee anyway. It needed to die when it became about power, not love and service – and martyrdom.
All our dialogue needs to consider how people’s lives are pre- and post-pandemic, now.
The pandemic changed everything. It was like the tornado-like storm in our part of town last weekend — it toppled dead trees that could not stand the wind. The pandemic damaged our societal infrastructure. And it undermined the fragile new growth of the next church.
As soon as Reagan became president, thousands of young people saw the handwriting on the wall and started building a new church; I was among them. They did well. I think I did well and hundreds with me. But we did well before the pandemic. It was amazing what that storm did to all those new expressions. The impact resembles what happened in the Black Plague in 1347 — that year marks the big outbreak of bubonic plague, which hung around for centuries, and you can still get it. People thought strangers caused caused the plague. Europeans said Jews were poisoning the wells. The church abandoned the public roles that made it a mainstay in the culture and people felt alone. Social disparities were exposed: the wealthy could escape to their country places but the poor (essential workers”) had to stay in their roles — just one example of many. The church had been a big part of what glued the society together and it came unglued.
Covid is not the bubonic plague, but the experience sounds quite similar, doesn’t it? The enculturated church fractured with society. I was personally shocked and dismayed at how the new, unenculturated churches started fighting and splitting, not just my own. They threw out great leaders and installed leaders who resembled the powermonger Trump. Good grief, the country elected Trump! (maybe). I think Smith’s whole book basically leads up to the tragedy of Covid.
He observes how the church is diminishing, mainly tracking membership and attendance over his lifetime. He’s kind of shouting from the deck of the Titanic — for every 100 new Catholics, 800 leave the church. If he evacuated his viewpoint, he could just as easily tracked the groundswell of attention to what is transcendent during his lifetime. The emerging churches were all focused on transcendence and community, just what his studies show the obsolete church is missing. They got knocked out by the pandemic and the subsequent tsunami of social fragmentation caused by the unmasked sociopaths in charge. But that desire is still there.
Even our little group in TEC was saying “emerging things.” Belonging and finding one’s path into transcendence, into an actual, personal experience of the Spirit and eventually into a life in love with God is just what the church, nontraditional, of course, disempowered and marginalized, was doing all along. And that is what it is still doing wherever it gets a chance. It is getting a chance right now, since the previous church that Smith eulogizes is quickly dying out, even if it has an endowment and Pete Hegseth thinks he’s protecting it.
Fan favorite at the Juneteenth Parade 52nd and Girard
This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.
Frederick Douglass ca. 1852
Frederick Douglass could not, in good conscience, celebrate July 4th. He celebrated July 5 as his declaration day instead. July 5 became Emancipation Day in New York State when slavery was officially over. It was the day after everyone completed the gradual process of becoming free in 1827. Douglass was 8 years old when it happened, still 11 years away from escaping slavery in Maryland and landing in New York.
Once liberated, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in New York and Massachusetts. In his iconic July 5 speech, given in 1852 to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, he said:
I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”
Douglass is still an inspiration. The U.S. no longer has chattel slavery. But there is a lot left to mourn. So I am leaning into Juneteenth and letting whatever the oligarchs decide to give us for July 4th up to them.
We’ve been whitelashed back into having yearly white supremacy parties on the 4th and I don’t want to be part of it. Even though Philadelphia is right at the center of this year’s celebration, as usual, I’m not feeling it. From what I hear from a lot of people, the whole 250th is sort of “meh.” What country are we talking about and what freedom is likely to be left by #251?
Memorial Hall on opening day
Philadelphia 1876
Philadelphia has always been at the center of major patriotic observances — since 1776, of course. The remnants of the spectacle organized for the Centennial of the Declaration of Independence in 1876 can still be seen in Fairmount Park.
The remnants of Reconstruction after the Civil War, when freedom was won for everyone, were already being torn down in favor of “progress” by that year. Though the decade after the Civil War elevated former slaves and empowered black people in general, by 1875 the winds had shifted, and the former enemies from the North and South were ready for reconciliation.
Frederick Douglass was there on the first day of the big event in Philly. He was invited to sit among the dignitaries on the main platform as President Grant spoke about the “Progress of the Age.” He was not invited to speak; the greatest orator of the day was reduced to window dressing. He almost didn’t make it into the event. First, he had to pass through the crowd gathered outside the gates before the exhibition opened. Then, once he got to the entrance, the Philadelphia police refused to admit him. They did not believe that “a n****r” would be allowed among the dignitaries. Senator Conkling of New York spotted him and got him over the line.
A year before, in the summer of 1875 on July 5 in Anacostia, Douglass predicted that day to a crowd of black listeners. He said:
“Men cannot, ought not and will not quarrel and fight forever,”…So sure as the stars shine in the heavens, and the rivers run to the sea, so sure will the white people North and South abandon their quarrel and become friends. The whole American horizon is already fringed with the portents of this coming union. Boston, Lexington and Bunker Hill have already sent forth their silvery notes of peace and unity to the whole nation, and next year Philadelphia, the birthplace of the Declaration of Independence, will lift to the sky its million voices in one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr. of Princeton says: “He understood what was happening: the centennial celebrations would tell a story of the nation that rejoiced in reunion, and that reunion required the erasure of Black people. The event would be a national affair in which the “silvery notes of peace and unity” from sacred places in our national history would render the true cause of the Civil War invisible in a national ritual of disremembering. The country would revel in its technological advancements, as capitalists celebrated America’s economic resolve despite the Panic of 1873, and as white people reasserted the superiority of white Anglo-Saxon blood. An idea of America, alabaster white, would rise from the ashes of war and Reconstruction.”
Does that sound familiar to you, too?
Philadelphia in 1926
The 1926 extravaganza to celebrate the sesquicentennial was also scheduled for Philadelphia. This time the country was still recovering from WW1 and the Spanish Influenza epidemic. What’s more, although holding the event was procured in order to make Philadelphia look less squalid and corrupt, the whole project was squalid and corrupted.
You can still see remnants of the fairgrounds in FDR Park. The rest is covered by today’s stadiums. If you travel on Vare Ave. to beat the traffic on 76 sometime, remember it is named after Rep. William S. Vare and his brothers who were called the “Dukes of South Philadelphia.” They organized most of the kickbacks and political patronage.
President Calvin Coolidge was there on July 5th, since July 4th was on a Sunday and some people still thought opening the celebration on Sunday was unseemly. He had a prophecy to deliver:
No other theory is adequate to explain or comprehend the Declaration of Independence. It is the product of the spiritual insight of the people. We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren scepter in our grasp.
Coming later in the year, Mayor Kendrick initially approved a “Klan Weekend” on September 9-11. Thousands of the 250,000 Klan members in PA planned a massive parade down Broad St. and a cross-burning at the fairgrounds. The public outcry was so great they were denied their permit, but they held private meetings and hovered over the city. Inspired, in part, by the successful film The Birth of a Nation, the Ku Klux Klan had reemerged in 1915 “to unite white male persons, native-born Gentile citizens of the United States…to maintain forever white supremacy…and {the} ideals of pure Americanism.”
Almost 200,000 black people lived in Philadelphia, in 1926. They had lived through the European War over the spoils of colonialism which spent millions of lives to decide which white nation would rule the world. Imagine your Mayor thinking it was fine if the Klan claimed Broad St and dominated the Nation’s celebration of freedom! W.E.B. Du Bois had named the monster they were up against in 1910 in “The Souls of White Folk:”
It is curious to see America, the United States, looking on herself, first, as a sort of natural peacemaker, then as a moral protagonist in this terrible time. No nation is less fitted for this role. For two or more centuries America has marched proudly in the van of human hatred,—making bonfires of human flesh and laughing at them hideously, and making the insulting of millions more than a matter of dislike,—rather a great religion, a world war-cry: Up white, down black; to your tents, O white folk, and world war with black and particolored mongrel beasts!
Sounds familiar, right?
Parade on the ParkwayJuly 4th Coalition counter parade through North Philly
Philadelphia 1976
Plans for Bicentennial celebration in Philadelphia did not go completely as planned — but there was a 50,000-pound Sara Lee birthday cake served at Memorial Hall the week before! Plus, there was plenty of ceremony to reassert the nation’s myths. For instance, on July 3, six wagon trains totaling 200 wagons, which had traveled for months from all over the nation, converged at the newly-formed Valley Forge National Park in front of a crowd of nearly a half a million people.
On July 4th, a ceremony on the new Independence Mall featured President Gerald Ford — the wounds of Watergate and the evacuation of Saigon still fresh. Governor Milton Shapp and Mayor Frank Rizzo were on the platform. Charlton Heston was master of ceremonies. Following the ceremony there was a five-hour parade featuring floats from every state and 40,000 marchers. An estimated two million visitors came to Philadelphia to attend these events.
Meanwhile, the July 4th Coalition led a counter-parade through North Philly on the same day. Puerto Rican socialists, Vietnam veterans, women’s rights advocates, Black liberation groups like the Black Panthers, and unemployed workers joined into one march that proceeded west along Lehigh Avenue and into Fairmount Park at Oxford Street, ending with a sprawling concert and cookout on the fairgrounds built for the 1876 Centennial. They took issue with the Bicentennial Corporation’s progress narrative and illuminated all the forms of oppression that remained alive and well in the late seventies.
Gil Scott-Heron, “the Godfather of rap,” was formed in the Philadelphia area. Here’s what he had to say about the Bicentennial:
America has got the blues and it’s a bicentennial edition
America has got the blues
It’s got the blues because of partial deification
Of partial accomplishments
Over partial periods of time
Halfway justice
Halfway liberty
Halfway equality
It’s a half-ass year
Here’s the full piece:
It all sounds very familiar, partly because the protest has been the background music of my adulthood and fundamental to my Anabaptist Christianity.
Philadelphia 2026
Now, for the Semiquincentennial, we have Trump putting his name on everything and renaming places — which had just been renamed, after Civil War traitors — again. It has been a hard slog to get some semblance of Declaration-of-Independence-equality for everyone in the U.S. over the country’s history. But even given the progress, it is hard to stomach what the present Administration and Supreme Court have done to reaffirm and protect white supremacy on the eve of the 250th.
Rigging the vote
Gutting the Voting Rights Act: The Supreme Court made it significantly harder to challenge discriminatory election maps that dilute the power of minority voters.
Race-Conscious Redistricting Limits: The Court struck down maps specifically drawn to address racial imbalances in states like Louisiana, setting off a wave of gerrymandering.
Dumping DEI
Banning Systemic Discrimination Tools: The Trump administration aggressively dismantled the use of the “disparate impact” standard—a key tool used for decades to challenge seemingly neutral policies that end up disproportionately harming minority groups in housing, employment, and healthcare.
DEI Restrictions: Executive orders have been implemented that severely limit or outright ban diversity and equity training across federal agencies, government contractors, and grant recipients like UPenn. The chilling effect remains.
Sacking safeguards
Workplace Equality Enforcement: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was directed to stop investigating certain complaints regarding company policies that inadvertently harm specific demographic groups.
Education and Discipline: Civil rights guidance meant to address race- and disability-based discrimination in school discipline policies was rescinded.
Limiting Affirmative Action: The Court struck down race-conscious admissions programs at colleges and universities, dismantling decades of precedent aimed at rectifying historical educational inequities.
Dismantling Civil Rights Offices: Funding and personnel have been severely reduced across federal civil rights offices, including those in the Departments of Education, Homeland Security, and Justice.
Eliminating Inequality Data: The administration has rolled back data-collection efforts previously used to track disparities in environmental hazards, special education, and racial inequality. [For a detailed breakdown of these policy changes, you can explore the ACLU’s Report on Anti-Discrimination Law.]
Whitening citizenship
Threats to Birthright Citizenship: Legal challenges and administrative efforts have targeted the 14th Amendment, threatening the automatic citizenship of children born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants.
Language and Ethnic Profiling: The administration rolled back requirements for language-assistance services for people with limited English proficiency and adopted practices that effectively treat ethnicity and accents as legitimate reasons for immigration stops.
All these actions have been played out with a soundtrack of Trump, Hegseth, and Miller, et al, spouting off reasons the government has had enough of all this whining about equality: “Y’all have freedom because we say so, and we will tell you when you exercise it too much.”
There is a lot more of their wreckage that could be listed, and they are just getting started combing through the nooks and crannies of government and society looking for threats to whiteness. On July 4th (and every day) we are supposed to pretend America is just and good, a beacon of light to the world, and forget about what happens right before our eyes. Such pretending is essential to the national myth that forms our patriotic religion.
So I am focusing on Juneteenth. And I will again say there is no room for slaveholder religion in the Church of Jesus Christ. We’re all poor in the eyes of God and that, if nothing else, is a great equalizer. Whether you believe that or not, Juneteenth, when we all were technically as free as any other citizen, is the real Independence Day for the U.S., at least until it gets to a better one.
Columba Day was June 9, but I think the famous “apostle to Scotland” needs a few more minutes in the spotlight. He may be even more Christian than we already thought.
His traditional story was passed down to us written within the general framework used for about 9000 years, now; it says the powerful deserve their power and have a right to acquire the excess we produce to use as they see fit, mainly to go to war and protect their own power. But if Columba’s story is retold within a Christian framework where individuals have freedom and communities are places for love and sharing, as we were created to experience, the story can be told more truthfully.
This 12th century drawing may be the oldest depiction.
Several of the famous stories about Columba (like how he stopped the Loch Ness monster) should inspire us to stand up to the monsters impeding the mission required in the present day. It is not just the warriors who “make” history. The community builders and family keepers, like most of us, are much more relevant. Like so many old stories these days, Columba’s story (and yours, probably) begs to be retold truer.
As you will see, how Columba stood up to the power-hoarding, private-property elevating people of his day should inspire us to stand up against the billionaires who are the newest perpetrators of an age-old fraud. In truth, cooperation built the world, not conquest. Columba was living according to his own version of the Jesus-inspired economic bill of rights.
I encourage you to make up your own mind about my retelling, since that is what historians do. They always have a point of view – and you do too, even if you think you have no view at all. The view from which the story of Columba is usually told is about how rulers duke it out to own the most and to keep their positions of dominance — and that’s the way it is. The tired, old story tells us we will be punished if we don’t conform, or at least cause too much trouble. But does it tell the whole truth?
Here is the traditional telling of a famous story about Columba (with bullet points!). It is usually titled:
The first copyright law
In 561, Columba secretly copied a rare, religious book belonging to his former teacher, Finnian. When a king ruled “to every cow its calf, to every book its copy,” war broke out over the stolen copy.
The Gift: Columba visited his old teacher, Finnian, in Ireland. Finnian had a beautiful new Psalter (a book of Psalms) which he let Columba use.
The Theft: Columba loved the book so much he secretly stayed up late at night in the church, copying it by hand.
The Discovery: Finnian caught Columba in the act when he was well on the way toward completion. He demanded that Columba give him the copied book.
The Refusal: Columba refused to give him the copy, claiming it belonged to him because his own hard work made it.
The Ruling: Both men went to High King Diarmait mac Cerbhiall to settle their dispute. The King made a famous ruling: “To every cow belongs its calf, and to every book belongs its copy.”
The War: Columba was very angry about losing his copy. He went back to his home clan and started a war against the King. Thousands of men died in the Battle of Cúl Dreimhne in 561.
The Exile: As a punishment for causing so much death, Columba was sent away from Ireland. He sailed to Scotland and started a new church on the Island of Iona, vowing never to return to his home and determined to fulfill the charge by his overseer to convert as many people as died in the battle.
Here is how the story might just as well have happened if the hierarchy had not put itself in charge of writing history. It could be titled:
The word of God belongs to everyone.
In 561, Columba set out to copy a psalter Finnian had locked away from the community-at-large — Finnian being like Gollum protecting his “Precious.” Columba discerned that such a book should belong to everyone, especially since books were scarce and literacy was the key to opening up new worlds. Finnian brought him before the authorities for stealing his book. When Columba lost the legal battle before the corrupt court, his clan rushed to his rescue. He escaped. Ashamed of the bloodshed he had caused, he exiled himself and gave his life to saving as many people in Jesus’ name as had been killed in his.
The Precious: As a trusted graduate of Finnian’s school, Columba was given access to a beautiful Psalter Finnian prized and kept away from the general public.
The Plan: Columba did not think the book should remain locked away and owned by Finnian. He wanted a copy to learn from and to share. So he secretly stayed up late at night copying it by hand.
The Discovery: Finnian caught Columba in the act. He demanded that Columba give him the copied book.
The Refusal: Columba refused, claiming the copy belonged to him because his own hard work made it, just like the Psalms belonged to everyone to whom God gave them, as well as to all the scribes, scrolls makers and teachers who passed them down through generations. Finnian’s position did not give him the right to own the Psalms.
The Ruling: Instead of resorting to violence, the men went to High King Diarmait mac Cerbhiall to settle their dispute. The King made a famous ruling: “To every cow belongs its calf, and to every book belongs its copy.” In this case that meant: “If you own the means of production, you control everything it produces. If you copy the book, you essentially work for the owner.” Note that Finnian did not author the book, he just owned it, a bit like A.I. collecting all the works of history (including this little piece of writing) and then charging you to access and use it.
Yet another battle: Columba was upset about losing his copy. He was also angry that he and others who needed the book were restricted to whatever pieces Finnian wanted to give them. He went back to his home clan in a rage and they jumped to his defense without being asked, since that has always been how nonbelievers settle problems, and since it was an excuse to take power from the king. Thousands of men died in the Battle of Cúl Dreimhne.
Leaving home: As usual, whoever stands up against the status quo is shamed and scapegoated. Columba was made an outcast for being disobedient and causing conflict. So he determined to leave his homeland. A substantial group of men discerned what was really going on and set sail with him for parts unknown. They shook the dust of Ireland off their feet and went to build something new. Columba was ashamed his clan’s warfare, sad to be labeled as an unrepentant rebel, and lonely for his devoted family, but he went off to discover the fullness of what God had been doing when he first dared to quench his thirst for the psalter.
Columba’s new way
Click the picture to learn about a voyage that replicated Columba’s
When the band got to Iona they built a new kind of settlement on the rocky little island. It set the character of what would influence the whole area from then on (and until now!) – a community in mission, open and expansive, full of beauty, not closed and controlling. Iona became the “cradle of Christianity” in Scotland. It also served as a great lighthouse of learning.
It is telling that one of the most famous accounts of their mission includes Columba stopping the Loch Ness monster from devouring one of his comrades. He’s another hero travelling in a band like Frodo, who overcame the temptation of the ring of power, who did not become a new version of Gollum. The symbolic monsters of the past, like dragons, resemble the monsters of today, which guard their territory with fire from above or terrors from the deep and hoard gold.
The new community on Iona built a strong center for education. They copied rare religious and historical books by hand. Their beautiful writing and art changed early European history. By 800, the community began creating their masterpiece: the Book of Kells, an illuminated manuscript containing the four Gospels. It is still regarded as one of Ireland’s national treasures, celebrated for its intricate Celtic knotwork, vibrant colors, and inspired drawings. The book was moved from Iona to the Abbey of Kells in County Meath, Ireland, to protect it from Viking raids around 806. In 1661 it was presented to Trinity College in Dublin for safekeeping where it still remains and where I saw it.
It is telling that the mission which was sparked by a book became famous for a book. It is also telling that Trinity College has monetized their possession of the book by providing an “experience” which gives tourists a way to pay for as little time as possible with books and focus on their feelings about them. The College resemble Finnian. As usual, normal people get the sizzle while the owners get the steak.
The main characteristic that made Columba’s community distinct was their Celtic way of clan life enriched by the radical sharing demonstrated in the New Testament [An Anglican bishop considers how to make it work now]. Iona was egalitarian and planted new communities like itself. These days, “successful” churches, in general have no practical connection to its locale. It is a destination, a program, a product, not a collection of people who live and work together. The community on Iona was different. The missionaries did not conquer the Picts; they moved in with them, became friends, and shared their lives.
Columba is a leader like people in a long line stretching back to Jesus who refuse to live according to the rules of the domination system and the myth of redemptive violence. Constantine may have co-opted the church, the early medieval church may have adopted the Roman model of governance and hierarchy and conquered the Celtic church in its name, but there are always people who see through the lies.
Trump may have co-opted the Evangelicals with the promise they will rule with him, but that unfulfilled promise is already part of the collapse of the latest regime, perpetrating the old fraud. I pray we replace it with a government which functions within a true economy, as a means to distribute the excess we create in an equitable and mutually beneficial way, a government inspired by the truth and love in Jesus and wherever else it can be found, not infected with the repetitive and damned self-destruction perpetrated by would-be kings. We all need a truer story to live by.
Yes, I know you can make an argument for how someone can be “good” in some way even though they are a billionaire. Yes, I know it is a fallen world and strict accountability for anything is going to run into ethical thorns.
But, come on, if you had 5 million dollars (and how would you ever get that?), you would consider yourself free from worry for life (unless you invested it all in Trump crypto). A person with only ONE billion dollars has 200 times your $5 million. Elon Musk has 700 times one billion! It is staggering, right?
There should not be a democracy in which billionaires accompany the president to China instead of elected representatives of the people.
There should not be a system in which people become billionaires, at all. We live in such a system and it is not from the Lord. I added “it is not from the Lord” because people seem to think capitalism descended from heaven — it just is what it is, so you can be good or bad in it. No, an economic system might be used well, but ours is a human conception run by sociopaths, for the most part. The poster child is the president.
I will do a little bit to convince you of that in a second, but first, the complaining.
I got to writing this piece because the women of Indivisible, of all things, posted a picture of “Good Billionaires Who Give Back.” Think about that.
Did you give the billionaires your money so they could give it back? I doubt it — at least not on purpose.
Do you really think the billionaires “earned” their billions like you do or they “made ” it out of the thin air of their genius? I doubt it.
Don’t you think they took it? Their “giving back” is reparations, at the very least. They schemed and competed and defeated and cornered markets up in their higher echelons of “finance” where we do not have the money to pay to play.
Elon Musk once provided some bullet points for how to get rich like he did:
Focus on usefulness: “It’s better to approach this from the standpoint of saying… what are some useful things that you do that you wish existed in the world?”
I suppose the world really needed Warren Buffet’s multibillion dollar holding company focused on making money by acquiring undervalued entities to get a snowball of wealth-building moving.
Solve hard problems: “You get paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of problems you solve.”
I suppose Tom Steyer’s Fallon Capital Hedge Fund “casino” for the ultra-wealthy operating on the edges of ethicality in fossil fuels and private prisons really solved a societal problem. I think it only solved how to make more money regardless of the consequences.
Embrace persistence: “Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.”
Several of the “good billionaires” listed got their billions without lifting a finger — no persistence necessary. With the Federal government acting as a subsidiary of the billionaires, no one is going to force a billionaire to do anything. Bush and Obama just bailed them out, since they were too big to fail, too big to hold accountable.
Is Jesus making a list of good billionaires?
From the perspective of Jesus’ teachings, calling someone a “good billionaire” is problematic, at best. The Gospels make it clear that the accumulation of extreme, hoarded wealth is deeply opposed to the kingdom of God. Whether a billionaire is “saved” is up to God’s justice and grace, so if that’s the definition of “good” than so be it. But if good is living according to what Jesus says and demonstrates as good, then “good” and “billionaire” are contradictory.
What Jesus said about wealth is well known. I grew up with people who always had a “but” right after they said what Jesus said about wealth. But we all know.
Wealth is a tempting idol. You cannot serve both God and wealth (Matthew 6:24). Billionaires need to serve wealth-making to become billionaires.
Living in the kingdom of God as a wealthy person is almost impossible. The famous story of the rich young ruler has driven many Christian parents to be very anxious when their 17-year-olds read it, since they were preparing them to make it in the world as it is. Jesus explained, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24).
It is better give than to receive (or take, or make, or hoard). In the exchange with the young man, Jesus told him to sell everything and give the proceeds to the poor, prioritizing radical charity over material security. In other places he says “Don’t build bigger barns. Don’t lay up treasures on earth. Give what you have been given.” He is not mysterious about this.
Many theologians and ethicists argue that it is structurally impossible to be a “good billionaire” according to Christian ethics.
Nothing is good about systemic inequality. Critics argue that possessing billions of dollars while billions live in poverty amounts to hoarding resources, which fundamentally violates Jesus’ command to love your neighbor as yourself.
Patricia Chan is in the list above. She co-founded the Chan/Zuckerberg Initiative with her husband, the famous Mark, pledging to put 99% of their Facebook shares in this LLC. Their mission is science, education, and opportunity — housing affordability, criminal justice reform, and immigration reform. They want to “build a more inclusive, just, and healthy future for everyone” and to “advance human potential and promote equality in areas such as health, education, scientific research and energy.” Sounds like the work for an elected government not super rich 40somethings. It also sounds like you put 99% of certain funds in an LLC, but you still control it all as a profit-making possibility.
They are robber barons. Critics also say no one can legitimately acquire a billion dollars without some degree of labor exploitation, market manipulation, or systemic extraction.
George Soros made his fortune primarily through aggressive global macro investing and currency speculation as a hedge fund manager. His Quantum Fund made his wildest trade in 1992, when he correctly bet the British government would be forced to devalue the pound. You may not know how this works, but by heavily shorting the pound with borrowed money, his fund single-handedly forced the UK out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and made an estimated $1 billion in profit. He’s “the man who broke the Bank of England.”
Can their be a democracy when a billionaire has such power? Making the most money is the law of the system and they pull the triggers.
The same logic that says “guns do not shoot themselves” and “the unborn have a right to life” says that individuals have a responsibility to be good. All people need to steward their money and do good with it. If some end up billionaires, that’s due to their goodness.
To be fair, it can be (and is) argued that wealth itself is not inherently sinful.
What is in your heart matters. They point out that the Bible does not focus on how much money one has, but whether or not you love it (1 Timothy 6:10). If you don’t read the Old Testament through a New Testament lens then wealthy figures like Abraham and King Solomon are “blessed” rich people (but not the non-Jew, Belshazzar!).
Elon Musk is respected among Evangelicals for just such a reason, he has purportedly good motives and good ends in mind. They respect him despite him being well-known for stiffing vendors, skipping office rent payments, and pushing testing and manufacturing timelines past regulatory limits.
The more one has the more is required.If a billionaire sees themselves as “managing” the wealth they have been given rather than owning it, and uses their resources to create jobs, fund charities, and uplift the marginalized, their wealth can be used for good.
Iranian-American Pierre Omidyar has a reputation built on this premise. He and his wife, Pam have given $1.2 billion dollar to impact investments and nonprofits since 2004.
The answer is “no.” Billionaires are not good.
Jesus did not say that wealthy people are automatically condemned (regardless of the tenor of this post). He did not say it is theoretically impossible for them to be saved.
But with every teaching, parable and example he showed how difficult it is for rich individuals to remain humble, detached from their possessions, and reliant on God. When God was revealed in Jesus, his self-giving, impoverishing servanthood lead him to the cross, not a transhuman search for A.I. eternal life.
It is self-giving love that is good. But it won’t make you a billionaire. According to Jesus, wealth is a massive spiritual burden, and a “good billionaire” would have to actively sacrifice their fortune to the service of others to fulfill His teachings. As is regularly noted, men without a conscience make the best billionaires and those who retain one often have to smother it to keep their power or satisfy greedy stockholders.
It is hard to know “what to do” with anyone, of course. But we are going to do something, regardless. So we should get it as right as we can.
When it comes to what we’re going to do with corrupt leaders, and I can name a few, there are many wrong ways to go. But every way makes a difference. You matter. And if this is how you think about that: unfortunately, you matter.
I think the last sixteen months have been a whirlwind of wrongness. So I am writing to add to the opprobrium which is daily launched in the direction of wrongdoers. We all might be a little wrong; but don’t worry, the Bible will help you.
Prophesying to the drivers in Ardmore
The first answer to “What do Christians do with corrupt leaders?” should probably come from Jeremiah: TELL THE TRUTH, as in PROPHESY!
This is a part of the Bible that especially inspired me last week:
The wise shall be put to shame; they shall be dismayed and taken; since they have rejected the word of the Lord, what wisdom is in them? Therefore I will give their wives to others and their fields to conquerors, because from the least to the greatest everyone is greedy for unjust gain; from prophet to priest, everyone deals falsely. They have treated the wound of the daughter of my people carelessly, saying, “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace. They acted shamefully; they committed abomination, yet they were not at all ashamed; they did not know how to blush. Therefore they shall fall among those who fall; at the time when I punish them, they shall be overthrown, says the Lord. — Jeremiah 8:9-12
The first answer to the question presumes people who follow Jesus would not take corruption lightly any more than Jesus did. He was especially direct with the Pharisees, who thought they were “conservative.”
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and of the plate, so that the outside also may become clean.”
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful but inside are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of uncleanness. So you also on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.” — Matthew 23:25-8
But we can’t presume most of the Christians in the U.S. will take corruption seriously, can we? They seem to think they are serious about the Bible but they are taking Trump’s corruption very lightly, even encouraging it as a means to return the country to “greatness.”
So when we ask “What do Christians do with corrupt leaders?” we have to start with:
They regularly follow them
They sing “It is well with my soul” – the corrupt leader is restoring order in the name of Jesus. And if that order makes me richer and corrals people I secretly hate, all the better.
What do Christians do with corrupt leaders?
They pretend they do not exist
I think this is more prevalent. American Christians, by and large, retreated into having a private faith a long time ago. They are not Jeremiahs!
They sing: “It is well with my soul” — My faith is a soul matter, not a public matter. I don’t get involved with politics.
To be clear, as American Christians are pretending, by and large, they are swallowing a boatload or corruption. Pretending is not inaction, it takes quite an effort to quash reality!
J.D. Vance is fronting a push to combat fraud in public services by illegally withholding $1.3 billion in Medicaid payments from California.
Trump has fired or demoted twenty inspectors general during his terms—the people who are key to oversight. In 2024 alone the people he has since fired or sidelined identified more than $50 billion in waste and abuse.
Trump has pardoned or commuted the sentences of more than 70 donors or allies who were convicted of fraud. One, Philip Esformes, was convicted of stealing $1.3 billion from Medicare.
The Trump family has pocketed over $600 million through cryptocurrency enterprises this year.
Trump’s sons Eric and Don Jr. have invested in a drone manufacturer that is trying to sell weapons to Persian Gulf countries currently at risk from the war their father started in Iran.
The Pentagon recently awarded a $24 million contract to a robotics startup for which Eric is the “chief strategy advisor.”
Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has acted as a chief negotiator for the U.S. in the Middle East. at the same time he has been trying to raise $5 billion from investors there for his investment firm.
Corporations and billionaires have dropped millions of dollars in donations for Trump’s ballroom where the East Wing used to be and his proposed presidential library in Miami.
Trump had raked in more than $2 billion for his projects or causes, more than half a billion of it from 346 people who each gave at least $250,000. Some of those people have received presidential pardons, others have been given jobs, and all have received access to the president.
Trump is using the planned Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event to be held on his birthday on the White House lawn as a new way for donors to funnel money to him. Ringside seats have been selling for $1 million or more. Neither the White House nor the UFC will comment on where the money is going.
Trump took seventeen CEOs with him to China, along with his son Eric, who runs the family business. Paul Krugman said, “He might as well have been walking around Beijing with a sign that says—in block capitals, of course, this is Trump—BRIBE ME.”
Miami residents are suing Trump and others to stop the construction of Trump’s presidential library, charging that state officials violated the Constitution’s emoluments clause when they transferred almost three acres of prime waterfront land, worth between $67 million and $300 million, to Trump’s library foundation for $10. Trump has already said he wants to build a hotel on the site rather than a traditional library.
The Department of Justice was working with Trump to settle his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) after a contractor during Trump’s first term leaked tax returns from thousands of wealthy individuals to the media. They want to settle before it goes to court, where he will probably lose
Trump offered to drop the lawsuit in exchange for the government’s establishing a $1.7 billion fund to compensate his allies who claim they were harmed by the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the DOJ — this includes nearly 1,600 people convicted of committing crimes related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, people Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of shortly after he took office in January 2025.
What do Christians do with corrupt leaders?
They manage them
They take a lot of responsibility for the world. So Christians work very hard to make sure Jesus is not shown up to be powerless and make sure they don’t get in trouble for doing a bad job. People with a narcissistic wound control or manipulate others to protect their fragile egos and avoid their shame — they manage them, all the time. There is an epidemic of such woundedness in the church.
They sing: “It is well with my soul” – I can make others well like I should be. I need to keep things under control. Everyone needs to stay safe.
This grandiosity regularly falls apart. Since there are too many plates to keep spinning and they are the only ones they trust to spin. Besides, the corrupt people often have no conscience, so managing them is more like feeding them your power.
What do Christians do with corrupt leaders?
They undermine them
They sing “It is well with my soul” – I am on the frontline of justice
I don’t think justice is the solution to all the earth’s problems. But without that first step, it is hard to get anywhere else. Our efforts need to be as endless as God’s.
But we need to be honest, people wrestling for power, even in the name of justice, never have rest for their souls. Feeling unwell about something can be addctive. Just witness the work of Climate Defiance, one of my favorites activist groups. This is from last week’s newsletter:
We absolutely NAILED Xavier Becerra. We ruined his whole event. It was so beautiful and so brutal all at once. It was so necessary. You must watch. You can see it here.
Our protest was not just an act of public humiliation. It was an act of JUSTICE.
If you’re just tuning in, Big Oil Becerra is the front-runner for Governor of California. He wants the prestige. He wants the power. We must stop him. Here’s why:
He took $39,000 from Chevron – the maximum contribution. It’s their first time getting involved in the governor’s race there in a decade. Then he defended the legalized bribe, proclaiming, verbatim “they’re not the bad guy.”
Are you serious?
Is it giving kids asthma that he’s ok with? Or spreading climate misinformation? Or searching for new oil reserves when current ones contain enough carbon to make earth unlivable? Which of these things specifically is he ok with? I would like to know.
He then doubled down. He said: “Does everybody here drive an electric vehicle? You need Chevron, I need Chevron, my people of the state of California need Chevron.”
Jesus. Electric vehicles were invented in the 1800s. Companies like Chevron are the main REASON we are not driving them. They have poisoned our political system and blocked the transition.
What do Christians do with corrupt leaders?
They overthrow them
It started with the Roman Empire and kept going in response to every empire-builder since. Yes, so-called Christians have often been on the wrong side. We get sucked into power struggles, too. But wherever there is prayer and community, Jesus-followers are a burr under the saddle of corrupt rulers.
They sing: “It is well with my soul” – I am well and I feel it. You can’t keep me from the love of Jesus no matter what you do. Being well with Jesus allows me to turn my cheek and so turn the world upside down.
Tennessee Democrats locked arms on the House floor in protest of a the redistricting vote that split the state’s only majority-Black Democrat Congressional district on May 7, 2026, in Nashville, Tennessee.
I suspect most of the Tennessee reps protesting the racial gerrymander of Tennessee voting districts are church people. Their two outspoken young leaders, Justin Pearson and Justin Jones were immediately juxtaposed with pictures of Martin Luther King on social media when they got carted off the statehouse floor . They were just saying, “Since the Confederates rule in Washington right now and they say there is no racial discrimination under the law, regardless of the Voting Rights laws that have ruled since the 1960’s, we cannot be silent.” In the picture, Jones’ sign says it all.
What do Christians do with corrupt leaders?
They are a resistant alternative to them
They sing: “It is well with my soul” – Life is worth living and Jesus says I am worthy of living it. We are made to make something which is fit for Jesus and which can withstand the tribulations of the present. I’m referencing Ephesians 4 and 5:
Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes on those who are disobedient.Therefore do not be associated with them, for once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Walk as children of light, for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true. Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness; rather, expose them. For it is shameful even to mention what such people do secretly, but everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says,
“Sleeper, awake!
Rise from the dead,
and Christ will shine on you.”
Be careful, then, how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil — Ephesians 5:6-16
I am astounded that Canticle: A Novel by Janet Rich Edwards has actually been a NY Times editors choice. I enjoyed reading it for another look at one of my favorite centuries: the 13th and one of my favorites places: Bruges. What’s more it centers on some of my favorite Christians; the Beguines.
I was encouraged by the book, but even more encouraged that people were talking about it and what it means to know God and live life as a member of his people. The grassroots devotion of the Beguines and their male counterparts, the Beghards upended their society and the corrupt church ruling it. Over and over again, the Holy Spirit has stubbornly inspired Jesus followers to risk losing their place in the corrupt system which corrupt men made for them and risk following Jesus with all they’ve got. We create an alternative society to the passing away world.
This coming Sunday is Pentecost Sunday, the most radical Sunday of the year. It should launch us into planting seeds of hope whether the soil is rocky or not because one of those seeds is very likely to take root anyway. Pentecost should cause us to look at our lives and our church and reimagine them in the light God sees us, full of love and potential, poised for creation. Pentecost, at the very least, should wake us up from the stupor-inducing rule of the present oligarchs.
Ben Rhodes, who was Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting (whew!) from 2009 to 2017, was a close confidant to President Obama and a key foreign policy advisor. In his NY Times opinion piece last week, he regretted a lot of what he did.
He looked at Trump’s latest expenditure of bombs and laid part of the blame for it on the tepid and toothless response of Democrats. He imagines some Congressional logic for why they were generally feckless:
[W]hat if Mr. Trump bombs Iran, and the regime collapses and is replaced by something better? You could feel this calculation within the Democratic Party as the war began — a hedging that only dissipated when the war’s brutality and insanity became clear. Behind it is a perverse logic: Both Iranian strength and Iranian weakness can justify war.
To be fair, the blame for this dynamic extends far beyond elected officials, to commentators who are at turns jingoistic, credulous of fearmongering and inclined to cover any harm done to Americans or our interests around the world as a political crisis; to think tanks that cast events particularly in the Middle East as problems that can be solved by U.S. intervention; to an entertainment industry that often valorizes American military and intelligence operations; and to people like me who have filled the ranks of Democratic administrations.
We’ve all been in a world of “what if” since Covid, so we can probably relate to the skittish Dems. Anxiety rules.
But “what if” is not the only rule that leads the opponents of Trump to be less than furious — like I wish they would be. You can see those rules in Rhodes’ writing: “calculation…hedging…perverse logic…our interests…problems that can be solved…entertainment industry…intelligence operation.” When we host the 250th anniversary of the Declaration this year, those words could be the key words to describe the new American experiment – put them on a banner over a background of a Minuteman, perhaps, to achieve the appropriate irony. I suppose we could include “brutality” and “insanity,” too. That’s what the country has perfected and who knows what it might do next?
Where are the peacemakers?
I know there are a lot of Christians who are out on the front lines boldly harassing ICE and telling the truth about the world and Jesus. The aging clergy in Philly (and I can still be included in that group) have been out and getting arrested for their actions. At the end of March, twelve of them got in good trouble for blocking the ICE driveway at 8th and Cherry [Inquirer].
They are so loving, the officers smile at them when they help them get up off the street. Love will win if anything good wins.
But we could use some more furious love. Over 225 million people in the U.S. identify as Christians. That percentage used to be declining but apparently isn’t anymore. You’d think at least 100 million or so would actually be like Jesus. What if they were? That would be potent.
Paul says Jesus in our peace. That peacemaking got him killed. But a lot of people just make his peace an inner sense of peace with God and only as outer as getting along with others in whatever church they can manage to stay in.
Jesus is quite a bit more furious than that. Just read Matthew 23, where he tags people who preserve their own power with a perverted reading of the scripture as a “brood of vipers.” A bit later, he contrasts himself as a mother hen longing to brood over Jerusalem, to protect her children. There is nothing more furious than a mother separated from her children.
Or go back a few pages in Matthew to chapter 18, where Jesus says,
If any of you cause one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea. Woe to the world because of things that cause sin! Such things are bound to come, but woe to the one through whom they come!
That is furious stuff. He must be especially inflamed right now. How in the world could any Christian support the brutality and insanity of the Iran War and defend the sociopath president undermining the whole world with it? Jesus knows that sins are going to come, but his followers should do their best not to cause or cooperate with them! They certainly won’t be praying for them to occur with Pete Hegseth and his nationalist pastor/mentor!
Furious peacemakers are out there
I hope the Christians are catching up. Maybe they will be out in force for May Day Strong. In the meantime, other prophets are doing their duty. Here are two of my favorites, in case you don’t know them, yet.
Briefly, start with Matthew Cooke. Cooke is not a Christian; he’s more of a Star Trek, Jesus-adjacent humanist. But he still gives some of the best sermons I have heard about what needs to happen in the world today. He is a furious, filmmaking, philosophizing peacemaker. I don’t sign up for a lot, but I don’t want to miss what he comes up with [Survivor’s guide]. Take a minute to listen as he preaches about taking back the future.
An even better example of what a furious Christian peacemaker should probably sound like is the politician Ben Rhodes was writing about in the Times: Graham Platner of Maine. He’s lightly Jewish if anything more than atheist. But his morality is spot on.
As a 20 year old, Platner had his first epiphany when he was constructing a patrol base near Falluja. A mortar round fired by Iraqi opponents killed the families of the troop’s local co-workers. He said, “There’s this thing I often think about. Those kids were killed because we were spending money to build this base that probably doesn’t exist anymore. [I thought] ‘How horrifically wasteful this is.’”
I agree. Since Sep. 11, 2001 the U.S. has spent more than $6 trillion fighting wars that killed over 7,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of civilians, inflicting trauma on innumerable people. The country is responsible for destruction which has displaced tens of millions of people. The refugees who sought safety in the Eurocentric countries fueled a right-wing backlash to democracy. And what was built in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and now Iran? What couldhave been built at home with those trillions of dollars? Just writing that burns me up.
Platner is with me. Visceral outrage infuses his opposition to the war in Iran: “Nobody is going to be able to convince me that what I did in Iraq and Afghanistan did anything for the people of Sullivan, Maine.”…“I don’t want other young Americans to go through what I’ve been through. And I don’t want to send other young Americans to inflict the horror that I had to inflict on people.”…“I don’t know a single guy I served with who thinks this thing in Iran is a good idea.”…[The reason] they were big Trump supporters — he was the antiwar or ‘America first’ candidate.”
Credit…Mark Peterson for The New York Times
“Here in the real world, most people get it,” Platner says of his campaign events. “Do you think this country should spend more on schools and hospitals and less on bombs? A lot of people are like, yeah, that’s pretty obvious.”
And yet the wars keep happening. The money keeps flowing to defense contractors. Traders, even in Congress, keep profiting from bets on the rise and fall of oil prices while the working class can’t afford to pay for a tank of gas [more here]. Insiders make ghoulish bets about the war on prediction markets while children are killed by American weapons in Iran and Lebanon.
Platner says, “We are so broken emotionally when it comes to our politics that we’ve literally created this story that it’s inherent in being a competent political leader to kill civilians. If you’re not willing to do some hard things and drop some bombs, then you’re not up to the task of power. I think it’s the opposite. You’re not up to the task of being in power if you do not think about the cost of violence. If that’s not at the front of your mind, then I don’t think you are morally in the right place to be in positions of power.”
Most of us know the forever war started by Bush has been destroying America from within, like an organism that must keep growing to survive. It fills the citizens with fear of outsiders and contempt for one another. War does the worst to societies. Once you normalize obliterating people abroad, people don’t value others at home, or even themselves.
They sound like Jesus
Cooke and Platner sound an awful lot like Jesus to me. They are rightly furious. Go back to Matthew 23. Isn’t the blindness and delusion of American leaders just what Jesus is talking about?
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and of the plate, so that the outside also may become clean.”
Just remember, Trump took the slavery placards off of Washington’s House on Philadelphia’s Independence Mall.
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful but inside are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of uncleanness. So you also on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.”
I would not say Jesus sounded like Graham Platner when he was facing off with the radical Pharisees who dominated the Sanhedrin. But I’m pretty sure Jesus would have called him out of the crowd to be a disciple. He’s kind of there already.
We visited the Documentation Center in Nuremberg. I hope they build one in Florida when Trump is finally gone. The centers in Germany are dedicated to the ongoing education of the public, so they can understand how their country ended up vilifying certain citizens and either imprisoning them or killing them. How did their country start an impossible war dedicated to world domination? How did a group of thugs from the south manage to scare the whole country into submission? Why did they let these incompetent, greedy, self-interested sociopaths wreck their economy? It is an honest and sobering account.
What if anger is not strength?
