Tag: Court Evangelicals

I Evaluate Eric Erickson’s Evaluation of Pete Buttigieg’s Evaluation of President Trump (who thinks he is above evaluation)

Eric Erickson has an interesting article at The Resurgent discussing Pete

Eric Erickson

Buttigieg’s interview last Sunday on Meet the Press. It’s entitled, “Pete Buttigieg Shows Why Progressive Christianity is a Hypocritical Farce.”

You can read the entire piece, which contains a video clip of the T.V. interview under discussion, by clicking on the title above. Or you can read a brief excerpt provided below.

I am writing this post for several reasons:

First, I found Erickson’s article interesting.  I agree with his argument about Buttigieg’s moral relativism with respect to Buttigieg’s decision to lead a gay lifestyle, including his marriage to another man.

Erickson is right to point out that Buttigieg can’t call out President Trump’s hypocrisy for ignoring Biblical commands to “help the widows and the orphans” while simultaneously ignoring the New Testament’s condemnations of same-sex intimacy.

Nope, that doesn’t wash, Mr. Buttigieg.

Pete Buttigieg

Buttigieg’s judgments on this score not only look like cherry-picking from among the select pieces of scripture he happens to like (or dislike), it IS cherry-picking of the most obvious sort.

Secondly, however, Erickson commits a few blunders of his own that make me hesitant to call him an ally in my concerns about filtering our political thinking through the presence of God’s kingdom on earth. (Again, check out my book, I Pledge Allegiance: A Believer’s Guide to Kingdom Citizenship in 21st Century America).

My concerns begin with the title of this article — “Pete Buttigieg Shows Why Progressive Christianity is a Hypocritical Farce.”

The title raises a number of troubling questions which Mr. Erickson never tries to answers.

How does he define Progressive Christianity?  What is it exactly? A writer really shouldn’t be attacking something that he makes no effort to describe.

And why should I accept Mr. Erickson’s assumption that Pete Buttigieg is a (if not the) representative of said Progressive Christianity? Has Mr. Buttigieg ever made that claim for himself? Has an official spokesperson for “Progressive Christianity” ever claimed Pete Buttigieg as its chosen candidate?

Nope and nope. So, I have to ask, on what basis is Erickson implying that connection now? In fact, what the heck is he trying to say by making such a suggestion???

Nope, Mr. Erickson. This is an underlying assumption of yours that I’m not willing to share. Such ill-conceived innuendo does not constitute an argument.

Furthermore, demonstrating one respect in which Buttigieg is being hypocritical (an extremely human trait by the way, displayed by all of us at one time or another) is a far cry from proving that the entirety of Progressive Christianity (however that is defined) is either hypocritical or farcical.

You are grossly over-reaching Mr. Erickson, which always makes me suspicious that there is something other than a concern for proper Biblical interpretation and its consistent application animating your arguments.

I think I smell a purely political agenda brewing in the background; partisanship disguised in the popular garb of Christian conscience.

Actually, in a round-about fashion, Erickson ends up showing us that his view of Christianity is every bit as skewed by partisan loyalties as is Buttigieg’s.

In his article chiding Buttigieg for publicly denying the possibility that  president Trump might be a Christian, Erickson begins by pointing out how “badly” Buttigieg himself performs while “trying to play a Christian on television.”

The implication is clear: Erickson can’t believe that Buttigieg is a genuine Christian, either.

Ouch.  I can’t help but wonder if Erickson is “trying to play a Christian” at The Resurgent?

In one way, I agree with Buttigieg.  I do not find Trump’s profession of Christian faith the least bit believable, either. The man is a career criminal who admits that he has never felt the need either to confess his sins or to ask God for forgiveness. Trump’s past, as well as his present, suggest that our president is a sociopath.

And that, sadly, assures us that our current president is (for now, at least) a son of perdition.

On the other hand, I don’t know know much about either Mr. Erickson or Mr. Buttigieg, and I can’t judge either man’s faith in Jesus. (Perhaps I will write another post in the near future about how a Christian may or may not pursue a gay lifestyle.) However, I’ll happily remind them both that being a Christian means submitting the entirety of our lives, in every respect, to the teaching and the Lordship of the resurrected Jesus.

That Jesus was not a progressive or a conservative or a democrat or a republican.  Christ’s only partisanship is to the eternal glory of his heavenly Father. Thus, he remains the eternal Son who requires that his followers seek after God’s kingdom, first, last, and always.

Here, finally, is that excerpt I promised:

“Buttigieg said he thought evangelicals backing President Trump were hypocritical because when he goes to church he hears about taking care of widows, the poor, and refugees, but Trump does not do that. Buttigieg went on to draw a distinction. In his professional conduct, Trump does not take care of widows and refugees as scripture commands and Buttigieg is right on this. Then Buttigieg continues that in Trump’s personal life as well he falls short of Christian behavior (he is right on that part too, by the way, but then we are all sinners). You can see the full, unedited exchange here.

“Interestingly, Buttigieg goes on to note that evangelicals are too focused on sexual ethics these days. He seems to be arguing that they need to drop that aspect of their faith, as he has. Then comes the pivot exposing Buttigieg’s own hypocrisy.

“Buttigieg thinks the President is not really behaving as one who believes in God because, as President, Donald Trump is not taking care of the widows, the orphans, the poor, and the refugees. Chuck Todd asks Buttigieg about his position on abortion and Buttigieg’s response is that abortion is a moral issue and we cannot legislate morality.

“This is why progressive Christianity is so corrupt and flawed. As much as Buttigieg makes a valid critique on the President’s behavior and evangelicals excusing that behavior, Buttigieg wants to reject the inconvenient parts of faith he does not like. He is a gay man who got married; he does not think homosexuality is a sin despite express statements in scripture, and he thinks abortion is a moral issue and we cannot legislate our morality. Buttigieg wants to use the social obligations as Christians against the President, but wants to avoid any implication on the personal obligations of Christians in terms of clear Biblical sexual ethics and how we are to live our lives applying our faith even for ‘the least of these.’

“He wants to have it both ways and in reality is showing he is no better a Christian than Donald Trump. What is particularly damning here is that Buttigieg claims to be governed by some moral code and he claims he will lead as a more moral President than Trump. At the same time, he claims we cannot do exactly what he is proposing.

“Everyone has a moral code and we all conduct our actions by our moral code. Buttigieg just wants a pass on his moral code, which is all about not taking inconvenient stands on parts of scripture that might make his life a bit uncomfortable. He will wield it against the President and abdicate when it comes to himself.”

How Typically American to Punish Poor Brown People Twice

In 2009 the Obama administration encouraged a military coup that overthrew the democratically elected president of Honduras, Manuel

The democratically elected Honduran president, Manuel Zelaya

Zelaya.  This fact is not in dispute.  Hillary Clinton, then Obama’s Secretary of State, admitted as much in a 2014 interview.

Together Obama and Clinton helped to install a right-wing dictatorship that continues to rule over the Honduran people to this day. Not only has this dictatorship overrun the civil rights of the Honduran people, it works hand-in-glove with the drug cartels terrorizing all of Central America.

Those cartels use local gangs of enforcers to extort protection money from poor and middle-class business owners, often driving them out of business and killing anyone refusing to cooperate. These gangs, operating with the

Honduran gang members

silent approval of government leaders, are the primary cause of Honduras’ skyrocketing murder rate.

So, guess what. The U.S. bears the lion share of responsibility for the problems facing Honduras today.

If this is not familiar to you, please take a few minutes to watch two video

Lucy Pagoada

explanations. The first features Lucy Pagoada, an Honduran immigrant explaining the situation in her native country, and why she fled to the United States.

The second is an episode of On Contact with Chris Hedges. He interviews Professor Dana Frank, author of the book The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror and the United States in the

Prof. Dana Frank

Aftermath of the Coup. She poignantly explains America’s role in transforming Honduras into a failed state.

Now, President Trump is threatening to close America’s southern border. He refuses to receive any more applicants for asylum and is ending all foreign aid to Honduras, Guatemala and San Salvador (two additional nations where the U.S. has meddled with disastrous effect).

So, let me get this straight.  First, we intervene in these nation’s internal affairs. We help to overthrow the Honduran government and install a corrupt dictatorship.

Then we support that dictatorship even as it enriches itself at the people’s

Honduran anti-coup protesters arrested

expense by allying itself with violent drug cartels. We stand by and watch as the dictators’ neo-liberal economic policies exacerbate poverty, unemployment and violent crime because those policies benefit U.S. corporate interests.

Then when the poorest of the poor flee for their lives, seeking asylum and a better life in the U.S., our esteemed president stigmatizes them as criminals, rapists, the “worst of the worst.”

He takes away their children, locks them into cages, loses hundreds if not thousands of those children due to poor record keeping, and closes the

Honduran refugees tear gassed

border. For the coup de’grace he orders border patrol agents to shoot these helpless, refugee families with tear gas and rubber bullets.

All the while, President Trump continues his xenophobic rants insisting that this southern “invasion” – vast weaponized caravans of brown invaders intent on destroying the American way of life – is THE greatest national security threat facing our country today.

And many Americans listen.  Too many are persuaded.

They are persuaded because they have never bothered to follow the news. They are persuaded because don’t know anything about our history of

Children cry next to their mother in a caravan of Honduran migrants near Ciudad Hidalgo, Mexico. (CNS photo/Edgard Garrido, Reuters)

Central American interventions.

Worse yet, they don’t care to learn.

They are too busy gulping down the poisonous swill of U.S. exceptionalism to hear the cries of innocent Hondurans crushed beneath the colossus of American geopolitical power.

We are witnessing a textbook definition of oppression unfolding before our eyes. It is more than a national disgrace; it is wickedness incarnate.

America is the beast risen from the abyss.

Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing Preach Partisan Politics

(This post is the 4th in a series that deals with the cultural captivity of the church.  You can read previous posts here, here and here.)

“The political process has failed. Capitalism has failed. Socialism has failed. Libertarianism has failed. Marx has failed. Populism has failed. Anarchism has failed. I say this not because of any glaring flaws in any of those ideas (in theory any of them could potentially work in an alternate universe), but because we are hurtling towards extinction in the fairly near future, and none of them have saved us.”

That is the opening paragraph to a recent post by one of my favorite commentators, Caitlin Johnstone. The post is entitled “Your Plans for Revolution Don’t Work. Nothing We’ve Tried Works.” (You can read the entire post by clicking on the title.)

Ms. Johnstone insightfully  discusses the many ways in which every political party and social movement has “failed.”

They have failed in the sense of not making this world a better place to live, despite all their promises; not lifting the world’s masses out of poverty and starvation; not ending senseless wars; not leveling the playing field for everyone, especially the disenfranchised, enabling them to have an equal say in their future; and especially, by not getting to grips with the inevitability of an uninhabitable planet overheated by global warming.

Despite her best efforts to sound hopeful, her post concludes on a note of despair:

“What we’ve tried up until now hasn’t worked, so if there’s anything that might work it’s going to come from a wildly unanticipated direction, from way outside the failed mental processes which have accompanied us to this point. We need to open ourselves to that kind of idea.

“That’s basically all I’ve got to offer today. A helpless but sincere plea for humanity to try something new, spat out onto the internet in the Hail Mary hope that it might plant some seeds and loosen the soil for something unprecedented to open up in human consciousness. Sometimes that’s all that we can do.”

My heart always goes out to atheists and genuine, secular humanists such as Ms. Johnstone.  I have heard many such laments over the years, going back to my own youthful days in the 1960s.

As a Christian, I want to talk with Ms. Johnstone and let her know that there IS a solution to all of humanity’s problems.  And it does, in deed, “come from a wildly unanticipated direction, from way outside the failed mental processes which have accompanied us to this point.”

Our salvation comes from heaven, from eternity, in the man who walked through Palestine 2,000 years ago and will one day return, the Lord Jesus Christ.

But I know exactly what she would say: “Your answer is one of the reasons I reject your religion. You offer the proverbial ‘pie in the sky, by and by.’ The human race needs rescue now!”

Well, Jesus intends his people to have a specific answer to that question, too. It should go something like this:

“Look to the Christian church! Look at the inter-racial, multi-cultural people of God and how they love each other. Observe their service to one another AND to the rest of this world. Look at their efforts to be peace-makers. Look at the practical ways they implement God’s commitment to equality, justice and forgiveness wherever they go. Look at how seriously they take their duty to care for and to preserve God’s creation.”

Yet, I suspect that Ms. Johnstone would laugh in my face. That gospel message is tough to communicate, mostly because it is so very, very difficult to see in real life.

Where is the evidence?  Where is that church?

God’s vision for his church is especially difficult to defend in Trump’s America where false teachers like Robert Jeffress (pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, TX and ‘spiritual advisor’ to the president) parade themselves on national television spouting the false gospel of Christian nationalism, and the church’s identity with Republican party politics.  (You can watch his most recent 9 minute appearance on Fox News here, complete with a much deserved take-down by another atheist commentator, Kyle Kulinski.)

I pray you are horrified after listening. (Hopefully, I can add to your horror when you read my dissection of these false doctrines in my book, I Pledge Allegiance: A Believer’s Guide to Kingdom Citizenship in 21st Century America).

I don’t disagree with Jeffress’ discussion about the growing number of American’s disaffected by organized religion.  But the hypocrisy embedded in his diatribe is mind-bending.

Mr. Kulinski’s  merciless roasting of pastor Jeffress is spot on and entirely deserved.

Coupled with his own utter lack of self-awareness, Jeffress and his ilk are cardboard caricatures of true ministers of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

While mocking preachers that merely repeat the things that people “hear on CNN or the Rotary Club,” he goes home to offer the same repetitious, sectarian message from his pulpit as he does on Fox News.

He dares to equate “the never-changing truth of God’s word” with the chest-thumping partisanship that binds him to the heart of Fox News executives and the American president.

He maliciously likens Republican voter turn-out with Christian commitment, suggesting that it is a litmus test for piety.

He simultaneously, suggests that anyone who disagrees with him — people like Caitlin Johnstone, Kyle Kulinski, me, and many of my friends — anyone who does not vote for his Republican party-ticket as lacking in “deeper convictions.”

Apparently, the 70% of white evangelicals who put Trump in office and continue to support him do so because “they believe in absolute moral and spiritual truth and vote those convictions at the ballot box.”  Unlike anyone else who votes his or her conscience?!?

Are you kidding me?

This is the non-gospel according to Jeffress and most white, American evangelicals today: anyone who believes in the morality and the spiritual truths of the gospel will vote Republican.

It is false teaching, plain and simple.

It puts political partisanship over devotion to Christ because it confuses political partisanship with devotion to Christ.

Any and every “Christian leader” falling into this trap deserves to be defrocked. For they are not spiritual leaders at all, but wolves in sheep’s clothing.

Clan-Jeffress,  one and all, are false shepherds leading God’s flock in paths antithetical to the paths of our Lord and Savior.

All of us in the American church share responsibility for our failure to provide men and women like Kyle Kulinski and Caitlin Johnstone with genuine, thorough-going examples of real (which means radical), transformational Christian community in this world.

In many respects, we all continue to live “like sheep without a shepherd.”

But false shepherds like Robert Jeffress pose a heightened danger to the church, for they deliberately lead God’s people like lemmings to a cliff.

It doesn’t take a prophet to predict that the choppy, partisan waters below that spiritual cliff will one day drown Pastor Jeffress and his partisan congregation in the same brand of hopelessness and despair that now washes over Ms. Johnstone.

What is So Threatening About the Equality Act?

Last Wednesday, Nancy Pelosi reintroduced the Equality Act for the Congressional Democrats.

The Equality Act is a bill that aims to eliminate discrimination against LGBTQ people in the same way that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination against African-Americans.

Predictably, the Religious Right is up in arms denouncing the bill as another assault upon religious liberty in general, and Christianity in particular.

But is it any such thing?  Personally, I don’t see it.

I am old enough to remember the 1950s and 60s.  A southern block of religious conservatives then described Dr. Martin Luther King as a communist tool of the devil.  They fought to kill any hopes of passing the 1964 Civil Rights Act.  Furthermore, they staunchly defended racial segregation as an expression of their Christian faith, just as so many religious conservatives are now condemning the Equality Act as an attack on their Christian views of human sexuality and marriage.

Andrew T. Walker of The Gospel Coalition has an article entitled, “The Equality Act Accelerates Anti-Christian Bias.”  He warns that “the bill represents the most invasive threat to religious liberty ever proposed in America.”

Monica Burke at the Daily Signal writes that the bill will cause “profound harms to Americans from all walks of life” under the heading “7 Reasons Why the Equality Act is Anything But.”

But even if some judicial tweaking is required as our society navigates the social effects of this new legislation, I have yet to see anyone explain away the fundamental parallels between African-Americans in need of the 1964 Civil Tights Act and gay/transgendered Americans in need of similar protections in 2019.

Christianity in America was not destroyed in 1964, despite the explicit warnings of Christian racists.

Neither will American Christianity come to ruin if gay, lesbian and transgendered human beings are granted similar civil rights protections in 2019, despite the apocalyptic warnings coming from the doomsday, propaganda mills of the Religious Right.

Instead, what this debate reveals is something much more dangerous now deeply rooted in the heart of American evangelicalism/fundamentalism: an insistence that the Christian religion (as defined by highly politicized, partisan, social conservatives) deserves preferential treatment in America; indeed, that this politicized, culture-warrior view of Christianity must become normative for acceptable social behavior in the public square.

I discuss this misunderstanding of Christian citizenship at length in my book, I Pledge Allegiance: A Believer’s Guide to Kingdom Citizenship in 21st Century America (Eerdmans, 2018). This country’s politicized brand of Christianity is a tangled mess of confusion over what is required from citizens in the kingdom of God living as citizens in a secular society.

Mr. Walker throws out the predictably fawning, meaningless sop intended to distract his critics by saying, “To be clear, Christians reject all forms of invidious discrimination. We believe all persons, including those who identify as LGBT, are made in God’s image and deserve respect, kindness, and neighborliness.”

Well, good for you, Mr. Walker.

But pledges of personal affection are no substitute for legal guarantees.

The entrenched racism of the Jim Crow south also declared, ever so kindly, that they loved their black folks and always treated them with nothing but love and kindness, often insisting that their contented “Negroes” were just fine with the status quo.

Then the Civil Rights movement came along.

Turned out that African-Americans weren’t as contented as the white people imagined.

Unfortunately, the conservative Christian church has lost its ability to speak  with any moral authority on issues of justice and equality, because its pronouncements are generally selfish and self-centered.

The misguided case of the Masterpiece Cake Shop (for more thoughts on that debate, read my “Wedding Cakes, the New Testament and Ethics in the Public Square“) exemplified all the problems of the current Equality Act debate:

  1. Conservative Christians confuse the church with the world and the world with the church – which is odd given their tendencies towards intellectual and social isolation. New Testament morality is directed at kingdom citizens filled with the Holy Spirit, not the world at large, however beneficial its approximation would be. (I discuss this issue at length in I Pledge Allegiance.)
  2. Too many would-be Christians simply do not want to love (not really, not with actual tolerance and loving-kindness in person, face-to-face) the people they don’t like, or don’t agree with, or see as the unclean enemies of their beloved Christian civilization. Let’s get real – many evangelicals are homophobes (though I do not like that term). They don’t want anyone telling them that they must accept gay/transgendered people as equally human with the same dignity as anyone else, whether in the workplace, at school or anywhere else.
  3. They fail to distinguish personal preference from public accommodation. The Equality Act addresses issues concerning “public accommodation.”  Read the entire bill here.  The core of the legislation simply requires equal treatment, saying:

The Department of Justice (DOJ) may bring a civil action if it receives a complaint from an individual who claims to be:

  • denied equal utilization of a public facility owned, operated, or managed by a state (other than public schools or colleges) on account of sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity; or
  • denied admission to, or not permitted to continue attending, a public college by reason of sexual orientation or gender identity, thereby expanding DOJ’s existing authority to bring such actions for complaints based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

The bill revises public school desegregation standards to provide for the assignment of students without regard to sexual orientation or gender identity.

The bill prohibits programs or activities receiving federal financial assistance from denying benefits to, or discriminating against, persons based on sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity.

Most of the protests I have seen are in reaction to the protection of transgender rights and its various implications for public space/accomodation.

On this score, the conservative church must get to grip with two problems.

One, we have to enter the age of modern research science and recognize that many (a majority?) of gay people are born gay.  For them, there is no therapeutic cure. Insisting otherwise discredits us and guarantees that we will never really understand the struggles of our gay friends and neighbors.

Two, there is a good chance that similar genetic issues are in play for people suffering gender dysphoria.  I have no idea how it must feel to spend my life tormented by the sense of being trapped in the wrong body.  I doubt very much if anybody decides or chooses to live such an existence.  There is obviously a great deal yet to be discovered in this arena.  The church needs to stop prejudging such people, their histories, situations and motivations while accepting that transgendered people merit the same legal protections as everyone else.

The Equality Act will not affect the policies or operations of churches and other religious institutions unless those facilities accept federal funding.  The obligatory cries of religious persecution, or the loss of religious freedoms are actually laments about the possible loss of federal dollars.  It’s about the money, folks.

Losing one’s tax exempt status is not anti-religious discrimination.  Actually, I have long believed that the tax exemption for churches is actually discrimination against the surrounding community.  Why should the church’s neighbors be required to pay more for their community services (which is what happens) in the way of a public subsidy for the tax-exempt churches, which most of them don’t attend anyway?

The same logic applies to religious schools, colleges, hospitals, etc.  These types of institutions will only be affected by the Equality Act if they accept federal financial support.  Far too many of these groups want to have their cake and eat it too.  They want to benefit from public money (supplied through our tax dollars) while enforcing their own, private sectarian policies.

That is hypocrisy.

You can’t have it both ways and hope to remain anywhere within the ethical ballpark.  Remember when Bob Jones University went to court because it insisted on collecting federal money while continuing to refuse admission to black applicants? (I don’t know why any African-American would want to go there.  But, to each his own.)

I do.

If a religious institution believes that it cannot abide by the Equality Act, then let them surrender their federal grants, subsidies, or what-have-you.  Yes, this will also mean that students receiving federal scholarships or other tuition assistance will either lose their grants or be required to look for another college.  This is one of those arenas where details would need to be worked out in the courts, perhaps.

Let’s face it.  Way too much of the energy invested in these types of fights by Christian social organizations basically boil down to a fight for comfort and/or money.  Christians want to relax in a culture that accommodates itself to them.  We don’t want inconvenient types, like gays, or lesbians, or transsexuals, the kinds of people who challenge our conservative expectations in the moral, social order to raise questions or challenge the status quo.  A status quo that allows us to remain relaxed and in control.

It is long past time for American politicized Christianity to stop acting as if (a) fighting for a Christianized public square were the same thing as (b) being an faithful citizen of the kingdom of God in public.  The two are not the same thing.  In fact, they are two very, very different things.

Venezuelan Opposition Leader in Line to Become Another U.S. Puppet

Max Blumenthal and Dan Cohen have published an excellent piece of investigative journalism at the GrayZone entitled, “The Making of Juan Guaidó: How the US Regime Change Laboratory Created Venezuela’s Coup Leader.”

Remember that Juan Guaido is the young man selected by the Trump administration to be designed the real president of Venezuela, rather than the actually elected president, Nicolas Madura.

The article’s headline reads:

“Juan Guaidó is the product of a decade-long project overseen by Washington’s elite regime change trainers. While posing as a champion of democracy, he has spent years at the forefront of a violent campaign of destabilization.”

Blumenthal and Cohen have done their homework thoroughly, as always.  They detail the long history of U.S./CIA backed rebel training organizations in various parts of the world equipping people like Guaido — he an upper-crust graduate of such a program — to subvert governments that refuse to submit to U.S. foreign policy objectives.

An excerpt of the article is printed below.  I urge you to read the entire piece here.

“Guaidó is more popular outside Venezuela than inside, especially in the elite Ivy League and Washington circles,” Sequera remarked to The Grayzone, “He’s a known character there, is predictably right-wing, and is considered loyal to the program.”

While Guaidó is today sold as the face of democratic restoration, he spent his career in the most violent faction of Venezuela’s most radical opposition party, positioning himself at the forefront of one destabilization campaign after another. His party has been widely discredited inside Venezuela, and is held partly responsible for fragmenting a badly weakened opposition.

“‘These radical leaders have no more than 20 percent in opinion polls,” wrote Luis Vicente León, Venezuela’s leading pollster. According to León, Guaidó’s party remains isolated because the majority of the population “does not want war. ‘What they want is a solution.’”

But this is precisely why Guaidó was selected by Washington: He is not expected to lead Venezuela toward democracy, but to collapse a country that for the past two decades has been a bulwark of resistance to US hegemony. His unlikely rise signals the culmination of a two decades-long project to destroy a robust socialist experiment.”  (emphasis mine)

Trump Appoints Elliott “War Criminal” Abrams Special Envoy on Venezuela — Let the Blood Bath Begin

President Trump recently appointed Elliott Abrams as his Special Envoy to Venezuela.

Abrams is an old hand in the machinations and bloody, dark-arts of

Elliott Abrams with the “exiled” Venezuelan opposition leader David Smolansky

overthrowing South and Central American governments, installing brutal, right-wing dictatorships and training death squads in mass murder, otherwise known as genocide.

I fear this does not bode well for the Venezuelan people.

If you don’t know or can’t recall the history of Abram’s involvement in war crimes, Consortium News has reposted an older article by the eminent journalist Robert Parry documenting the massive bloodshed for which Abrams shares responsibility.   It is entitled “With the US Meddling Again in Latin America, a Look Back at How Washington Promoted Genocide in Guatemala.”

Below is a clip of Robert Parry sparring with Abrams on Charlie Rose about his responsibility for genocide:

Abram’s U.S. trained death squads killed some 80,000 people in El Salvador, 200 – 250,000 in Guatemala and untold thousands in Nicaragua, most of them innocent civilians.

Journalist Robert Lovato tells about his own first-hand experiences with the

Victims_Of_The_Mozote_Massacre_Morazán_El_Salvador_January_1982

U.S.-led Salvadoran coup and Abrams himself.  Find his autobiographical article, “Elliott Abrams: An Unequivocal Sign Trump Is Preparing a Baptism in Venezuelan Blood,” here.

Here is my question:

The U.S. Secretary of State recently returned from Egypt where he proudly wore his Christianity on his sleeve, assuring his listeners that American foreign policy was safely cradled in the ever-lovin’ hands of a born-again Christian whose decisions were directed by his daily Bible reading and prayer.

How in the blazes can those same Bible-clutching fingers embrace a butcher like Elliott Abrams?

Where are all the supposed Christian advisers the Religious Right boasts about, giving Trump their wisdom and righteous advice?

Are we to understand that Jesus approves of mass murder, as long as it’s America leading the way in slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocent, unarmed Central American peasants?

I guess the righteous brother Pompeo says, Yes.

 

 

 

 

CBN Christian News Misrepresents the Issues While Advocating for the Rich

CBN Christian News has recently posted an article that grossly misrepresents Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s suggestion about increasing the marginal tax rate.

The article is written by Stephen Moore, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation (more on this later).  It is entitled, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 70% Tax Rate Won’t Work.”  Sadly, it is another example of the many ways

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

in which so-called Christian journalism regularly fails on both counts – failing to provide either real journalism or a distinctively Christian analysis.

Like so many others,  Mr. Moore is too busy carrying water for the wealthy powers-that-be to offer his readers anything beyond the standard conservative, Reaganomics talking-points.  (See my first post in my series on Class Warfare in America).

Since I recently wrote a post discussing American taxation and Ocasio-Cortez’s suggestion, I thought it would be worthwhile to use this CBN article for another exercise in how to think critically while reading the news.

There are many things that could be discussed here but I will limit myself, first, to dissecting three specific instances of misrepresentation and falsehood.  Second, I will then pull back for a broader discussion of the political origins to Mr. Moore’s commentary.

Three Specific Points:

First, throughout his entire article Mr. Moore’s tone works to conjure up the conservative bogey-man of a predatory federal government hell-bent on confiscating as much of the reader’s money as possible through higher taxes.

Since, his writing is a piece of commentary, I can let Moores’s overt subjectivity slide.  (His obvious disdain for Democrats reeks through every sentence, but he is entitled to his opinion.  I am no fan of the Democratic party, either).

I’ll give just one example:  Moore describes Ocasio-Cortez’s suggestion as “cheery talk of returning to confiscatory tax rates.”

“Cheery talk”?  Notice that Moore’s opponents can’t be taken seriously.  Their heads are in the clouds.

But we can’t forget that all taxation is “confiscatory.”  Should no one pay any taxes at all?  Many libertarians will answer Yes to that question.  But I am not a libertarian.

Taxation is a part of the social contract in which we all participate, allowing our government to provide the numerous services benefiting us all.  It is not a confiscation but a contribution to the common good and the general welfare of the country, of our communities.

Choosing to use that negative word, confiscate, is a rhetorical strategy intended to appeal to every reader’s defensive, selfish, inner-Scrooge.  Sadly, it works, all too well.  Even among the readers of “Christian news.”

Only the selfish – and study after study shows that the billionaire class has a very high percentage of those folks – begrudge assisting their neighbor (who needs the fire department when his house catches fire) or paying their own way (for wear and tear on the roads and highways they drive every day) by paying their share of taxes.

Returning to my main point, what cannot be forgiven, however, is Moore’s clear suggestion that a 70% tax rate would take 70 cents out of every dollar earned by every taxpayer in America.  He knows better, but stoking this lie works to the advantage of his propaganda.

In other words, Mr. Moore is lying and he knows it.  Unfortunately, many readers will not understand that this entire discussion is about marginal tax rates, and Moore has no interest in clarifying this confusion.  He is more interested in sowing fear and anger than he is in educating his readers, so he fails to mention this important fact.

Check out the following sites for easy explanations of how marginal taxation works (here, here and here).  The fact is, only a portion of the millionaire’s/billionaire’s highest bracket of income would be taxed at 70% (or 90% or 50% or whatever); much of it would not.  And the vast majority of Americans would never come anywhere near that higher bracket, remaining unaffected by the marginal tax increase.

Mr. Moore knows all of this.

He is purposely misleading his readers by feeding us misinformation and falsehoods.  This, folks, is utterly unacceptable in any source touting its “Christian perspective.”  It is the most un-Christian, even anti-Christian, sort of writing one can imagine.

In fact, I will say this:  it is worse than printing something overtly Satanic, because Mr. Moore is deliberately abusing his readers’ trust by planting lies which he knows will manipulate his audience into supporting a position built on falsehood.

Now, THAT, my friends is a truly demonic strategy, if ever there was one.

Second, Moore repeats a favorite argument of Reaganomics fans by claiming that Reagan’s tax cuts, and the majority of subsequent tax cuts, increased the national revenue (with no citations for personal follow-up).  In other words, the government gains more money, not less, when it cuts taxes on the rich, according to Moore.

But recall economist Paul Krugman’s claim about “reputable economists”

Professor Paul Krugman

in his article endorsing Ocasio-Cortez’s suggestion:

We need to do some research here.  As luck would have it, I already did some.

Check out this detailed analysis and discussion of the Kennedy, Reagan and Bush tax cuts and their effect on the U.S. economy (at econdataus.com with copious citations and data for follow-up, unlike Moore’s article).  It is fascinating.  Or you can jump down to the excerpted summary below:

“The argument that the near-doubling of revenues during Reagan’s two terms proves the value of tax cuts is an old argument. It’s also extremely flawed. At 99.6 percent, revenues did nearly double during the 80s. However, they had likewise doubled during EVERY SINGLE DECADE SINCE THE GREAT DEPRESSION! They went up 502.4% during the 40’s, 134.5% during the 50’s, 108.5% during the 60’s, and 168.2% during the 70’s. At 96.2 percent, they nearly doubled in the 90’s as well. Hence, claiming that the Reagan tax cuts caused the doubling of revenues is like a rooster claiming credit for the dawn.”

I won’t fault Moore for having a different interpretation of the economic data, but I can fault him for: (a) not citing the sources for his argument in a way that allows the reader to check it on her own; (b) failing to mention that there is a serious debate on the issue among economists; and (c) leaving the impression that all those on the opposite side of the fence are ignorant, dopey-eyed dreamers out of touch with reality and ignorant of history.

Finally, strangely enough, Moore dismisses the idea of taxing billionaires at higher rates by claiming that in the bad old days of higher taxes:

“IRS data confirms that almost no rich people paid those 70, and 80 and 90% tax rates. They hired lawyers and lobbyists to escape paying the taxes, or they stashed their money away in exotic tax-exempt shelters or bought tax-free municipal bonds to avoid forking over the majority of their income to the IRS.”

This is a strange way to bolster his argument.  In fact, it undercuts his point.

His claims may be true, I don’t know.  But, if so, the obvious solution is not to lower taxes on the rich (that is like saying “since a speed limit does not prevent drivers from speeding, we should do away with the speed limit”) but to impose stricter regulation on the many ways created by billionaires for hiding their wealth – methods, by the way, that are not available to the poor or the average taxpayer.

The Author and the Bigger Picture:

Where do Mr. Moore and his article come from?  To answer that question, we need to step back and look at the broader political context of this taxation debate.

For a number of decades, the conservative movement (including Libertarians like the Koch brothers) have brilliantly implemented a strategy

US President George W. Bush speaks on the war on terror 01 November 2007 at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC.  AFP PHOTO/Mandel NGAN.

for changing – even controlling – the terms of economic and political debate in this country.

A key ingredient in that strategy was the creation of the think tank.  Think tanks are “academic” institutions that employ researchers to produce books, articles and position papers legitimizing the conservative worldview held by the wealthiest, conservative Americans.

The Brookings Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation are three examples of U.S.-based think tanks.  Remember that our author, Mr. Moore, works for the Heritage Foundation.

These think tanks are bankrolled by wealthy, conservative donors for the sole purpose of influencing public debate to their own political and economic advantage.  Of course, there is nothing wrong with wealthy donors contributing to a research institution…as long as their money does not control the results of the institution’s research.

Once that shift occurs, it’s no longer doing research but producing propaganda.

These think tanks are not intended to promote academic freedom.  Just the opposite.  Their researchers, like Mr. Moore, are paid for one purpose and one purpose only:  to produce “data” and to make arguments that advance the economic and political interests of their wealthy, conservative sugar-daddies.

So, now that we know who Mr. Moore is, where his ideas come from, and what he is being paid to do, his arguments and information are not the least bit surprising.  Neither are his lies, manipulation and misinformation.  He is a hired gun, paid handsomely to promote trickle-down Reaganomics to the general public, by any means necessary.

I wish I could say it is surprising to see a supposedly Christian news outlet like CBN promoting and benefiting from what is, in effect, a public swindle by a high-priced conman.  But, alas, this has become not only the way of the world, but the way of modern, American evangelicalism.

Has Jerry Falwell Jr. Embraced His Inner Dispensationalist Cult-Member?

Perhaps you have already heard about the latest brouhaha generated by Jerry Falwell Jr.’s interview with the Washington Post.  Aside from the

Jerry Falwell Jr.

political hypocrisy strewn throughout the entire piece, two points, in particular, have gained significant public attention.

If you have been following this controversy, you may want to skip down and begin reading at part two of this post.  Otherwise, beginning with part one will catch you up on the issues involved.

Part. One:

First, when asked, “Is there anything President Trump could do that would endanger that support from you or other evangelical leaders?”  Falwell flatly answered, “No.”

Falwell’s response unveils his cult-follower mentality when it comes to all things Trump.  Ruth Graham at Slate Magazine explains the ridiculous, idolatrous illogic of Falwell’s answer:

“His explanation was a textbook piece of circular reasoning: Trump wants what’s best for the country, therefore anything he does is good for the country. There’s

Ruth Graham, journalist

something almost sad about seeing this kind of idolatry articulated so clearly. In a kind of backhanded insult to his supporters, Trump himself once said that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” without losing his base. It’s rare to see a prominent supporter essentially admit that this was true.”

I will go one step further and suggest that not even Jesus Christ himself demands such blind, a-moral loyalty.  At least, the apostle Paul admitted that he stopped short of offering that brand of devil-may-care devotion to Jesus Christ himself!

In 1 Corinthians 15:12-19, Paul seems to suggest that there is at least one thing the man from Nazareth could have done that would have caused Paul not to believe in him.

Jesus could have stayed dead.

For Paul insists:

“…if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised.   For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either.   And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile…”

Not even the Lord and Savior of the universe demands the type of undiscerning, a-moral devotion that Falwell has placed in Donald Trump.

Folks, Falwell expresses a truly idolatrous brand of politics.

Yes, I realize that sorting out this issue requires a conversation about the relationship between faith and historical evidence, but we don’t have time for that discussion here.  I suggestion that you take a look at my book, Encountering Jesus, Encountering Scripture and then follow up on its bibliography.

The second point of controversy was Falwell’s defense of his position by referring to his “two kingdoms” theology.  He explained:

“There’s two kingdoms. There’s the earthly kingdom and the heavenly kingdom. In the heavenly kingdom the responsibility is to treat others as you’d like to be treated. In the earthly kingdom, the responsibility is to choose leaders who will do what’s best for your country.”

I won’t bother to address the problems created by Falwell’s two kingdoms theology – though I have serious doubts about Falwell’s ability to express an informed opinion on Lutheran theology — since I have critiqued Luther’s own application of his two kingdoms theology, its dangerous uses in 20th century history, and explained what I understand to be the New Testament’s teaching about God’s kingdom in my book, I Pledge Allegiance.

Part Two:

So…this brings me to the thoughts motivating me to add something further to the conversation surrounding Falwell’s interview.  Others, like Professor John Fea (here and here), have covered the issues well, but I suspect there may be another suggestion yet to be explored:  the possible influence of dispensational theology in the age of Trump.  If this term is new to you, start with this Wikipedia page and Google on from there.

Not long ago I came across a separate interview with Jerry Falwell Jr. where he said that he “did not look to Jesus” for guidance in his politics, but was directed instead by his concerns for “a law and order candidate.”  (Unfortunately, I have not been able to relocate the source for that interview.  Any help out there???).

Here are the two interesting puzzle pieces that got me thinking.

 One, Jesus’ life and teaching, items such as Jesus’ own pacifism, the Sermon on the Mount and the rest of our Lord’s ethical instruction, have no role in forming Falwell’s view of Christian politics.

 Two, he believes that Christian values in this “earthly kingdom” are separate and distinct from God’s values in the heavenly kingdom.

Well, it just so happens that those two positions were (are?) identifying characteristics of the earliest, die-hard advocates of American dispensational theology — a stream in which I suspect Liberty University is squarely planted.  Though I can’t cite a scientific poll to prove it, I am reasonably certain that dispensationalism (in one or another of its various forms) is the most commonly embraced “theology” in North America, especially among those who are theologically unaware.

American dispensationalism is the fuel that feeds the raging fire of U.S. Christian Zionism.  That alone is enough to make it highly suspect, as far as I am concerned.  It is also one of the several reasons I abandoned my youthful dispensationalism long ago.

Lewis Sperry Chafer (1871-1952), the founding president of Dallas Theological Seminary, which remains the Mecca of dispensational thinking to this day, was the first American systematician of dispensational thought.  His 8-volume work of Systematic Theology, first printed in 1947, remains in print today.  (My father gave me a complete set as a college graduation present.  Yes, I was, and probably still am, a nerd).

An important feature of Chafer’s dispensationalism was his emphasis on the postponement of Jesus’ ethics.  He taught that when Jesus said the kinds of “irrational” things we find in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere, he was speaking solely to the Jewish people who were supposed to receive him as their messiah.

But since the majority of Jesus’ contemporaries rejected his messiahship, the implementation of that ethical teaching was deferred, postponed until the future arrival of the “millennial kingdom” when all of Israel will finally recognized Jesus as the One they have been awaiting.  (For more detail, check out this page published by someone called The GospelPedlar.  It has a good summary with citations explaining Chafer’s theology of “Postponed Ethics.”

So, for old-time dispensationalists like Chafer and his modern devotees, Jerry Falwell Jr. is reflecting sound dispensational, theological conviction when he ignores Jesus’ ethics while deciding his politics.  For this frame of mind, the church does not now inhabit the proper kingdom age for the application of Jesus’ teaching to the Christian life, certainly not to a Christian’s politics.

This earthly kingdom is not the correct kingdom for Jesus’ ethics to be seriously applied, across the board, to all of Christian living.  Although Chafer’s dispensationalism has nothing to do with Martin Luther’s two kingdoms theology, we can see an important convergence of ideas at this point.

Arriving at the same place by different routes, both groups (Lutherans and dispensationalists) endorse the idea of different kingdoms in different spheres with different behavioral expectations for God’s people.

I admit that I have not called Jerry Falwell Jr. and asked him whether his political thinking has been self-consciously shaped by Chaferian dispensationalism.  After all, he is a lawyer with a B.A. in religious studies from, you guessed it, Liberty University.  Are my prejudices showing?

Maybe I should give him a call someday, but he probably wouldn’t talk to me. (See his refusal to talk with people like Shane Clairbone here, here, here and here.)

What I DO know is that ideas matter.  They matter a great deal.  Theological ideas matter supremely to God’s church.  (Any believer who is anti-theology doesn’t understand what he/she is saying.)  We don’t have to know their source or history.  We don’t even have to be able to articulate them clearly, much less expound upon their ramifications, whether intellectual or behavioral.

We simple breath in the lingering aroma of influential ideas, assimilating

Liberty University

them unwittingly from our (church) environment.  And the American church offers an environment seeped in the aroma of old-time dispensationalism.

As I continue to ponder the damning conundrum of America’s conservative/ evangelical/fundamentalist  church offering up its overwhelming support to Donald Trump, I can’t help but wonder if this is another part of the dispensational legacy fallen like poisoned fruit from the American tree of unbiblical theology.

Fact: Most Political Violence Comes from the Right. It Must Be Confronted

In April 2009 the Department of Homeland Security issued a 9 page report entitled Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.

The report summarized a number of government intelligence assessments and warned that a growing movement of “right wing extremist movements” posed the greatest threat of political violence and domestic terrorism in the United States.

As soon as the report was made public (which was not its original purpose), Republican Congressional leaders, together with a litany of conservative commentators, raised a hue and cry condemning the report, lambasting the DHS, and screaming for the heads of anyone — especially “liberals” or Democrats — who tried to engage in a serious discussion of the report’s findings.

Congressman John Boehner said the report was “offensive and unaccceptable.”  Fox News insisted that the DHS owed the entire country an apology.

Sadly,  none of  this was the least bit surprising coming from the conservative-Republican establishment which remains anti-science, anti-evidence, anti-logic, and anti-anything-that-calls-for critical self-assessment.

Of course, the DHS report was  immediately suppressed.  You probably have never heard of it.  As a result, the nation never had an open public conversation about the rising terrorist threat in this country, and why it was emanating from the right-wing.

It is impossible to have a productive conversation when one side can’t stop denying the facts, as Sarah Huckabee-Sanders continues to do almost every day.

Then in 2017 the Anti-Defamation League published another study, bulging with copious evidence and citations, stating similar conclusions.  A Dark & Constant Rage: 25 Years of Right-Wing Terrorism in the United States  opens by stating:

“Right-wing extremists have been one of the largest and most consistent sources of domestic terror incidents in the United States for many years, a fact that has not gotten the attention it deserves.”

Facts cannot be ignored.  They will eventually have their own way, whether we like it or not.

The rank cowardice displayed by the mainstream and the right-wing media guarantees that the public remains steeped in ignorance on this issue.  Daily we hear the mindless, false equivalencies and bogus comparisons.  Pundits insist that both sides are to blame; everyone needs to compromise; the right and the  left must meet somewhere in the middle.

The Republican party moves in a more and more extremist direction, yet anyone who points this out is accused of polarizing the debate.

What absolute rubbish!  It simply is not true.

The right-wing is to blame.  It is a fact, plain and simple.  No one benefits from a lie.

There is something about conservatism and its social, political rhetoric that, especially when taken to an extreme, becomes fertile soil for unstable people prone to violence.

We all — but especially God’s people — must be more concerned with the truth than we are with partisan defensiveness.  This means being open to correction.  Being willing to learn.  To admit when we have been wrong.

And most of all, we must be willing to change.

Tragically, evangelical Christianity persists in unapologetically identifying itself with a right-wing political movement that has blood on its hands.

Yes, that’s right.

Congressman Boehner, Fox News, and every other conservative spokesperson who helped to muzzled the DHS warning in 2009, who plugged their ears to the ADL report in 2017, who still refuses to admit the self-evident connection between Trump’s violent rhetoric — which has repeatedly embraced and advocated more violence — and the racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant terrorism dragging itself mercilessly across our country, all have blood on their hands.

God’s people cannot be a party to any of this.

Sandhya Rani Jha on Politics in Church

Sandhya Rani Jha is a minister in the Disciples of Christ denomination and director of the Oakland Peace Center.

If you don’t know the story she refers to about the French village, Le Chambon, I encourage you to read the book by Philip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (Harper Row, 1979). It’s an amazing story of true kingdom citizenship lived out in a time of great danger.

The following excerpt is taken from the Christian Century article, “Do politics belong in church?”.  You can read the entire article here.

“My mind has been on the French village of Le Chambon recently. During World

The village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon

War II, the village of maybe 5,000 people saved possibly as many as 5,000 people from the Nazis and the Vichy regime. As President Barack Obama noted on Yom HaShoah/Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2009, ‘Not a single Jew who came [to the area of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon] was turned away, or turned in. But it was not until decades later that the villagers spoke of what they had done—and even then, only reluctantly. “How could you call us ‘good’?” they said. “We were doing what had to be done.”

“In my current itinerating ministry, I have visited a lot of churches that are proud of their commitment to being nonpolitical because it makes them more inclusive. But a nonpolitical church’s politics supports the way things are. That

Jewish children hidden in Le Chambon

doesn’t make it an inclusive church. It makes it a church that is unwelcoming to people who want a different world. To riff off of a popular meme from the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, people of color are saying to the mainline church, ‘The American empire is literally killing us,’ and the mainline church is saying, ‘Yes, but . . . ‘

“The reason Le Chambon keeps showing up in my imagination is this: every Sunday for over a decade before France fell to the Nazis, the pastors of the village preached a message that reinforced their community’s identity and what that identity meant in practice. The message was:

  • We are Huguenots who survived persecution by the Catholic majority. That means we show up for people being persecuted.
  • We are Christians. This means engaging in nonviolent resistance to empires doing harm and protecting the people who are being harmed.

“In a sermon delivered the day after France surrendered to the Nazis, village

Le Chambon pastor, Andre Trocme

pastor André Trocmé said to his congregation, ‘The responsibility of Christians is to resist the violence that will be brought to bear on their consciences through the weapons of the spirit.’

“In Le Chambon, the church’s message shaped people’s identity and behavior.  That is not an inherently political message, but it is a message that demands people act out of a certain ethic.”  (emphasis mine)
Whenever I hear a pastor boast about his/her “nonpolitical” messages, I always want to ask a few questions, the same questions raised by Sandhya Rani Jha.
First, do the ethics of Jesus have any bearing on the way Christians ought to approach their politics?
How can any thinking pastor say no to that question?
Trocme’s congregation being taught to follow Jesus, conspiring to break the law and to protect the oppressed

 

OK then.  Secondly, if you are not teaching in ways that help your flock understand the the practical significance of Jesus’ radical, upside-down kingdom ethics for engaging the politics of this world, then aren’t you failing in your pastoral responsibilities?

The answer to the second question is a resounding yes.
The principle failure of Christian (at least evangelical) teaching on politics today is the near-complete absence of Jesus and his kingdom ethics.
For many pastors, politics is almost all they talk about, but the life and teaching of Jesus have been erased from their playbook.
But those who refuse to talk politics at all are really no different.  They have simply erased Jesus with a different brand of eraser.