This fact is also causing profound attempts from some of the best designers (and also fascinating companies) in the world to think about how to design reading experiences in the digital age. These attempts are trying to wrestle with the vast amounts of interesting information available to us, as well as innovations in product design, interface design, and technology around the ways we read content.

I’m fascinated by all of these things. I’m a designer, of course, and hope to be involved in some of these attempts to shape the reading experiences we have. I’m also a person who loves to read, and hope to experience the things we shape. I love to read intensely into subjects I’m passionate about, and have no interest in losing that part of my life. But I’m also a deeply curious person, and I love to learn about all kinds of things whether I’m qualified to do so or not.

As designers, one of the initial things we need to do when we try to design things is figure out what problem we’re trying to solve. If we don’t know what the problem is, we need to stop designing until we do. With reading in the digital age, there are likely enough problems to keep us all busy for decades, or to overwhelm us into not doing anything. These problems will at times have solutions that attempt to solve several of the problems at once, or that only attempt to solve one of them, and both courses of action are necessary.

How do we digest the content available to us online?

At the moment I want to look at one of the problems: how, as readers and people who want to know things, to digest the content available to us online. For most of my life (aside from some awkward years growing up), I’ve been given and have developed a curiosity and willingness to try to learn things, and this only increased when I got the chance to spend most of my teen years growing up with the web. The two things fed each other, but they also focused each other. In a very literal sense, my life would be nothing like it is without the web and my experiences with it.

Partly because of this, I have a way that works for me to digest the insane amount of content that is available and interesting to me, and I think it has something to offer to this problem in a broad sense. This, then, is the goal I’ve learned to use and encourage others to use:

Find something(s) that you care deeply about. Read deeply into those things. Branch beyond them by following the trails led for you by people you trust.

Here’s how it has worked for me.

Find something(s) you care deeply about.

As you know, I care deeply about spirituality and theology, and specifically the kingdom of God as Jesus defined it, lived it, and invited us into it. This means a number of disciplines (ecclesiology, missiology) and practices (of creating a life rooted in that kingdom) are very important to me.

I also care deeply about design, or “how things work” in addition to how they look and feel, as Steve Jobs has defined it, and specifically design on the web. This means that the code and disciplines (web standards, interaction design, typography, user experience, etc.) that create good websites are very important to me.

And finally, I care deeply about justice in the world, or “what love looks like in public” as Cornel West has defined it. Again, this means that the struggles for and against justice that occur among the oppressed, the oppressors, and everyone in between are deeply important to me.

Of course I think these things are worthwhile passions, and I love to share them with anyone who will listen, but at the moment I’m suggesting that everyone can find the things that they care deeply about, and this is no less important now than it was in the age of books made of paper, and I think those who suggest that it is have failed to understand the internet, and failed to understand human nature.

Read deeply into those things.

The three things I mention have defined my life in a very real sense. Each one feeds into and is fed by the others, and together they shape the things I try to do and the person I try to be. While it has also happened in relation to offline content in books and things, I have learned to read deeply into each of these things online.

Certainly I don’t read everything written about these things, as this is impossible, but I’ve developed relationships of trust (sometimes just me trusting these folks, but often mutual trust) with people in each of these areas who have deep things to say, and they help fill my mind and my heart each day. I’m a better person, I think, and also better at the things I do because of this.

This can be true of anything that anyone cares deeply about, and that’s the beauty of the web and the ways it shapes us. Whatever the things that people are passionate about have the potential to shape the ways they read and use content online. This, again, is part of human nature and is not unique to the web, though the amount of stuff certainly is. But it is one of our core tasks, as designers of reading spaces, to create opportunities for people to experience these things deeply.

Branch beyond them by following the trails led for you by people you trust.

This is the part of my goal that is most unique to the web. Few people with things to say online are only interested in one thing. They usually talk about a number of things, and there is literally no end to the trails down which the ones you trust can lead you. This is the way that the web broadens our worlds. It should never cause us to leave our physical, embodied spaces behind, but it can always make the ways we live in those spaces different by helping us see what else is out there.

There is not necessarily any need for these trails to become things we’re equally passionate about. But maybe they will, and maybe we will find other people we want to trust on those trails. I wasn’t always passionate about Africa, but it has become a thing that drives me, and leads me to people I love and trust, because of the web. On the other hand, I don’t understand quantum physics and am not particularly passionate about it, but I will often read things about it because people I trust link to them, and I find it fascinating.

I think creating these experiences is also one of our core tasks as designers of reading spaces. It doesn’t have to be contradictory to helping people read deeply. Rather, the combination can give such work structure and ways to evaluate it.

Putting it together again

As I said, the goal I’m looking at is this: Find something(s) that you care deeply about. Read deeply into those things. Branch beyond them by following the trails led for you by people you trust.

There are tools (especially Twitter, Google Reader, Readability, Instapaper, and some others) that help people to do these things, but it’s only beginning. If I am able to contribute anything to the evolution of reading online, my hope is that it will be in designing things that help others to adopt this for themselves as I have, and see where it can lead them.

But while I still believe that the September 2001 article I reposted from the vocalist of Ballydowse is the best response to the event, I think there are words to be said about our national response since then, and it is those I decided to give attention to.

Obviously, from the article I found so life-changing, I was against most of our responses then, and have continued to be so, from the initial bombs that fell on Afghanistan to the full invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, from the torture of our potential enemies to the trampling of our own rights under the weight of fear, and from the baptism of all of our actions as if they were part of our own jihad to the joy we’ve taken in our own violence, hatred, and revenge. We have responded as I expected us too, of course, but I and many others have mourned these last ten years as we did it.

I believe these responses are symptomatic of the narrative we have created to tell ourselves about America’s place in the early 21st century. It is a narrative of the wronged but triumphant hero, determined to do whatever it takes to pursue whatever we define as freedom and justice, and determined to get past everything in our way, whether enemies or financial crises or just people we think are unpatriotic. Both sides of our political spectrum have created and bought into this narrative, though (at times) in different ways and to different degrees. We have put everything we’ve done as a nation under this narrative, and we can trace it all back to 9/11 when we want to (though of course the issues are older and much more complex).

It occurred to me today that one of the consequences of this construction is that those of us who reject this narrative are left without a way to process 9/11 that is not defined by (positively) our desire to create and live a better narrative or (negatively) by our opposition to this dominant narrative. This means, because there are so few spaces that do seek to live narratives of real justice and peace, that all the responses around us are shaped by the narratives of blind patriotism and violence, even if they are deeply human responses of grief and remembrance.

This is certainly intentional on the part of the political systems of our country, and it has worked incredibly well for them in getting us to go along with things. But I think it has done so to the deep detriment of any actual grieving, healing, forgiveness, or peacemaking that might otherwise have been available to us. And so these are still, ten long years later, the things we need the most.

I said something to the effect that I think one of the biggest challenges (because I don’t think there is one biggest challenge) is how we as the church will, and should, engage the web. As more of life moves into digital spaces, there will be areas we need to challenge and offer alternatives to, and there will also be areas where the web, and its effects on us, can improve our theology and spirituality. This will happen in ways at least as profound as it did in the aftermath of the printing press.

Now, I don’t know if you’re like me, but whenever I say something that might be heard by a number of folks, whether it is teaching a group of people, or calling into a podcast hotline, I tend to go over what I said later. For a little while after, I think about the words that I used, how they might be taken, how they might be mistaken, and what I could have said differently.

With this, I thought about it for a little while, but then a couple of days later I started to think about it again when I saw a completely unrelated tweet about how the web is “seeping into other places.”¹ That took my mind back a bit further to a quote from Jeffrey Veen, one of the web’s masterminds, who was speaking at a conference:

quotable @veen: “The web is spilling out into the real world… so let’s not fuck it up.”

Quoted by @davemcclure

This is one of those statements that won’t leave my mind, even though the tweet that quotes it was posted in March, far longer than the lifespan of most tweets. So in light of that, I want to continue my thoughts on how the web is one of the biggest challenges facing us.

The web is spilling into religion at least as much as religion is spilling onto the web, and we have barely begun the theological, spiritual, and overall cultural reflection that is necessary to understand those implications.² I want us to think about what this means, when we need to respond (because certainly we don’t always need to say something) and what our response should be when we do.

Specific issues for examination

From my perspective, there are a number of specific issues we can think about – and there will continue to be more – but I want to mention some of these.

Theological work

The leading folks in web and user experience design are working on many of the ways the web is spilling out into the real world. Some of them are now designing the experiences of physical spaces as often as they are the experiences of web spaces. Others are working to design web experiences that reach into physical space to make it better, or to help us retrieve valuable cultural modes we have lost in the modern age that again are viable for us.

Still others are working to design web experiences that bring physical things onto the web, or that blur the boundaries so that the web is more an extension than it is a distraction. These things, as far as I can tell, are some of the things Mr. Veen was thinking about. We can do these things well, or we can do them badly.

Theology itself can be affected by, and can affect, the web in these same ways. It will be a beautiful thing to start to see how this works, and I’m hoping to be one of the folks involved in this. It will give us new ways to think about God, and I don’t think we’ve even begun to see how much. But again, we could do it well or we could do it badly. We will probably do both in different areas, and we will need to be aware of which is happening.

More dramatically, maybe, are the ways the web will affect the church and the ways we think theologically about it. We’ve seen people start to observe these shifts in small ways, I think, but too often these observations look specifically at Facebook, for example, (I don’t fault the church or theologians for this, as the business world is the same way) instead of looking at a broader perspective of what the internet actually means.³ The ways we create new faith communities are already being affected by the web, and the more we observe and think critically about this, the more this will be able to happen in positive ways.

We’ll be able to (as we were before) create faith communities where we can avoid nuance, as this often happens on the web. But this is not the nature of the web, and we don’t have to design things that way. We can instead learn from the real, beautiful networks that are created as we design communities.

Life in the Spirit

I’m also increasingly convinced that the very ways we interact with the Spirit of God will be affected by the web, in good and bad ways.

The web is a place of “maybe.” There are few ideas that, if they can exist online, have no chance of success. In a negative sense, this is why it becomes easy for folks to put online communities on pedestals they don’t deserve, but in a positive sense it gives us unique ways to learn, connect, and exercise hope. This is always a good thing, but on a deeper level I think it can give us metaphors for thinking about the possibilities of God’s activity in the world and our relation to it. Not perfect metaphors, but valuable metaphors.

Justice work

Maybe the hardest thing for us to think about is how the web will affect the poor and oppressed among us, and what the church needs to know and do about this. The reason it’s so hard is because when we’re online, doing this kind of thinking, at this point the poor and oppressed are often not with us.

One beautiful exception to this is the relationships that are being built with the LGBT brothers and sisters that are among us, and taking part in our conversations online. They are helping us understand their struggles and advocate for them when we can, and this is powerful. To an extent, there are also exceptions as we can hear the voices of people of color, whether they are discussing racism in America or freedom in Egypt, and this is an equally powerful thing.

But as a rule, those who are poor and oppressed too often do not have access to our conversations and our relationships online because they are not online. Internet access is still prohibitive in many parts of America, and in many parts of the world.

Make no mistake – this is changing at a rapid rate, and it will continue to change. As it does, I’m hopeful that we will build the same kind of powerful relationships with these brothers and sisters, and that we will walk together toward our mutual liberation.

But this is also a place where the web could spill out in bad ways. It brings to mind yet another old tweet that I saved:

Today we treat being online as a sign of wealth. One day we will consider the freedom to be offline the same way.

@fernandogros

It’s somewhat possible that the web will become integrated into our lives enough, economically especially, without reaching into the real world in the positive ways that we can hope for. If it does, it may be that we’ll be spending our leisure time looking for ways to disconnect. Pilgrimages to offline places, and times of re-integrating with the physical world.

If that happens, it will again be the poor and oppressed who are affected most by this, as they will be the ones without the resources to make that disconnection happen.

This will be a space where the church must respond. We must provide space for people that, regardless of whether our optimistic dreams for the web’s engagement with the physical world come to pass and regardless of whether they have the luxuries to sequester themselves in the physical world from time to time, allow them to meet the embodied God, and live in embodied, mutual liberation.

What’s next?

This is only an initial set of thoughts, sparked by a question on a podcast and a tweet from a conference that I didn’t attend, and another tweet from a man across the world. But I hope you can see the importance of this conversation. The web is spilling out into the real world, and I think we in Emergent, specifically, have a lot of opportunities to shape the way we do things in light of this. I’m hopeful that we can be led to do it well.

1. The article it referenced is about how the web is expanding beyond the browser into mobile apps, tablets, and dedicated reading services like Readability, among other things.
2. Too many folks are running around telling us about how Google Makes Us Stupid, on one side, or The Internet Is My Religion on another side, and there isn’t much nuance. It is important to note that John Dyer, a web developer in Dallas, is releasing a book called From the Garden to the City that, to me, shows promise for doing that. I also think The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture from Shane Hipps, released in 2006, was a good effort as well. But again, we have barely begun.
3. A great start, I thought, was Thy Kingdom Connected from Dwight Friesen. From my own perspective, I recently reflected on user experience design and ecclesiology, as I think this is a fascinating place where we can learn a lot of things.

I’m somewhat interested in all of the political talk and questioning of international consequences to both our actions and our reactions to our actions, but I’m far more interested in what all of this (both the event, how it was announced, and how we have responded to it) says about us than I am in what it says about anyone else.

I learned about the event on Twitter, where there was a chorus of responses, and then watched Obama’s announcement. While watching it, I was struck (and added to the chorus of Twitter responses) that his definition of justice is deeply flawed if it can contain death, even death of an enemy. I was also struck by the irony that it may be this event, not the (deeply flawed, but valiant) attempts to bring universal healthcare to our country and keep us out of a depression, that will propel him to re-election.

Then, it hit me (not for the first time): we are a country of revenge.

In my lifetime, it is around revenge that our country has become united. 9/11 and it’s ridiculous aftermath. The lead-up to and early stages of the invasion of Iraq. And now the death of bin Laden. We don’t want justice. We want revenge, but we want to call it justice.

At some point that evening or the next morning, I saw this tweet:

Remember these words by Dr. Martin Luther King’ Jr. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Now, King used this quote a great deal, but he most often used it in defense of nonviolence. Besides that specific quote, it has been incredible for me to spend the last several months immersed in King’s actual words (books, speeches, articles, essays, etc.), in which he explains, on an in-depth level, his thoughts on justice, violence, and loving one’s enemies, among other things. This is often done while taking on American violence and militarism in ways that make it fairly clear that he wouldn’t see bin Laden’s death as justice, whatever else he may have thought of it.

No one calls out people who take him out of context like this, because it’s easier to pretend that King would like our desire for revenge. Instead, we call out folks for an (admittedly odd) meme on Twitter and Facebook that combined a quote of King’s with something else, even though the full quote fits quite well with the ways King thought. And that’s because it’s uncomfortable for us to think about our culture blatantly disagreeing with a figure who is, at this point in history that feels distant from his life, almost universally admired.

It’s easy to point this out about King, because we have such a large body of his work that we can turn to and say, “He’s writing about our culture when he says these things, and we haven’t changed.” It’s a bit harder, but still deeply necessary, to point this out about Jesus, as most Christians rejoice in bin Laden’s fate, assume that he’s in hell, and that it’s a good thing that we’ve murdered him so that he can’t hurt us anymore.

Jesus stands against this, asking us to love our enemies. The implications of this in a pluralistic, non-Christian society are myriad, and I’ll grant this, but it’s often Christians who are the loudest advocates for revenge and violence. It is to them that Jesus (along with Paul, when you read Romans 12 – speaking of the kingdom of God before 13 – contrasting it with the kingdoms of the world in which we live) speaks, and, I think, asks for resistance of the violence of the State. He’s not ignorant of the State when asking us to love our enemies, but nor does he expect us to allow it to tell us what justice is in treatment of those enemies. Justice cannot be defined by violence.

Revenge, and the violence associated with it, is an unkind master, aside from the obvious effects it has on our enemies. King was one who tried to encourage the State to realize these things in light of the teachings of Jesus and Gandhi’s methods of nonviolence. Revenge will not make our lives safer. In our case, it won’t fix anyone who was hurt by bin Laden, or anyone who was hurt by us in our pursuit of bin Laden. It will also not be satisfied, as it will not lead to the end of war in Afghanistan, and we will find other figureheads to whom we can attach our anger.

Finally, it won’t increase the freedom, or decrease the allure of Al-Qaeda, to folks in the Middle East. Once again, we can see the stark contrast between the way of nonviolence that Tunisians, Egyptians, and Syrians have pursued, the sacrifices they have made, the brutality they have endured to seek their freedom, compared to the violence we have used to push our agendas on their neighbors. These are messy situations, but the contrast is there and is deeply powerful.

Our violence, whether exemplified in foreign policy, specific acts of war, or torture and refusal to prosecute it (or, on the Right, the willingness to defend it), have given many folks a reason to radicalize against us. But nonviolent resistance, arising from within their countries, has begun to take away the desire for violence and oppression as a means to escape from violence and oppression.

We don’t know if it will work in bringing freedom to all of these countries, and if it does we don’t know what it will look like (thank God, for example, that Egypt doesn’t seem to be a pawn of America’s policy toward Israel), but it is beautiful, powerful, and it has just as much of a chance to work as our own strategies do without resorting to our methods. This is what should give us cause to rejoice.

Others, of course, have just been worried about the interests of the United States in all this. Questions of whether Egypt’s new government will favor us, what it will think about Israel, concerns that Islamists will win the day, and criticisms of the Obama administration from both sides have abounded. I don’t have any interest in these U.S.-centric questions. This is not about us, and we do Egyptians an injustice by pretending that it is.

But the questions around the importance of social media, Al Jazeera, and other such things are important to me. I’ve had great respect for Al Jazeera ever since watching them cover an attempted peace talk with Joseph Kony in Uganda a couple of years ago, and obviously have various opinions about social media as a cultural phenomenon, and about social media sites as specific things.

Within all of this, something became clear to me the other day: this revolution, just like every other one we look at from the outside, is being misunderstood. We should no longer say “the revolution will (not) be televised,” or “the revolution will be tweeted,” or whatever — we probably never should have. Doing this makes us look as though we are incapable of holding multiple ideas in tension, and belies our sense of how intelligent we are. We should instead say “the revolution will be misunderstood.”

This became clear to me when reading this post from Peter-Paul Koch, in which he points out the overwhelmingly higher percentage of Egyptians that have cell phones compared to those who are online, indicating that it is this that has played a more important role. He then says this:

Fortunately it seems the Egyptian government actually believed the blogosphere’s self-satisfied description of the Tunisian revolution as Twitter- and Facebook-driven, and concentrated on the Internet first, while leaving open the mobile net for a while more (meanwhile voice is up again, but SMS is still down), and not doing much about Al-Jazeera, which is closed down only now.

And this is where we in the West have the same problem that Mubarak has — we want to make this about one thing. Whatever our own favorite thing (or least favorite thing, depending on our ideology) might be, it is that which is causing Egypt to revolt. If we didn’t have that, it wouldn’t be happening.

Do you see how silly this is? Very few things in this world can be boiled down to one factor. Much less something as complex and large as a revolt against a 30 year old dictatorship. Most of us are okay with complex arguments if they fits our own biases (discussions often go this way among people who agree with each other and want to attack a strawman, for example), but it’s time we allowed ourselves to recognize nuance, even when we don’t like it.

Grace and peace to Egypt, in all of its beauty and complexity.

Recently, I read his last presidential address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, given in 1967 in Atlanta, and I’ve found it to be possibly the most meaningful thing I’ve read in this volume. The radical nature of what King is saying combines with the relevance that all of it still has today, and indeed the fact that many of the issues he raises are worse today than they were then. I couldn’t find any audio or video to link to, I’d love to encourage all of you to read it here, in its fullness.

This should cause all of us who dream of better economic, political, and cultural systems to pause and see where his brilliant imagination was going these few months before his death. I’m not interested in the conspiracy theories here (though I think many of them are very likely true), but I am interested in how much of a threat King was, and remains, to the status quo.

The issue that I find myself more and more annoyed by, each year that I learn more about this man and his message, is that American cultural discourse has watered it down so much that we call it a “Day of Service” when we celebrate his birthday (not that he’d be against service, but that it is so much less than he did stand for), and randomly use him to justify violence and oppression and political stances that are antithetical to his own. People like to quote sections of his speeches that make us feel good about being Americans and all the things we do, and ignore the rest of what he had to say. The extent to which The King Center did not allow this was compelling to me, and I feel a responsibility to spread his words as well, in the hopes that his message will stand as it is.

Where do we go from here?

Southern Christian Leadership Conference
Atlanta, Georgia
16 August 1967

Now, in order to answer the question, “Where do we go from here?” which is our theme, we must first honestly recognize where we are now. When the Constitution was written, a strange formula to determine taxes and representation declared that the Negro was 60 percent of a person. Today another curious formula seems to declare he is 50 percent of a person. Of the good things in life, the Negro has approximately one half those of whites. Of the bad things of life, he has twice those of whites. Thus half of all Negroes live in substandard housing. And Negroes have half the income of whites. When we view the negative experiences of life, the Negro has a double share. There are twice as many unemployed. The rate of infant mortality among Negroes is double that of whites and there are twice as many Negroes dying in Vietnam as whites in proportion to their size in the population.

In other spheres, the figures are equally alarming. In elementary schools, Negroes lag one to three years behind whites, and their segregated schools receive substantially less money per student than the white schools. One twentieth as many Negroes as whites attend college. Of employed Negroes, 75 percent hold menial jobs.

This is where we are. Where do we go from here? First, we must massively assert our dignity and worth. We must stand up amidst a system that still oppresses us and develop an unassailable and majestic sense of values. We must no longer be ashamed of being black. The job of arousing manhood within a people that have been taught for so many centuries that they are nobody is not easy.

Depiction of Blackness and Negro Contributions

Even semantics have conspired to make that which is black seem ugly and degrading. In Roget’s Thesaurus there are 120 synonyms for blackness and at least 60 of them are offensive, as for example, blot, soot, grim, devil and foul. And there are some 134 synonyms for whiteness and all are favorable, expressed in such words as purity, cleanliness, chastity and innocence. A white lie is better than a black lie. The most degenerate member of a family is a “black sheep.” Ossie Davis has suggested that maybe the English language should be reconstructed so that teachers will not be forced to teach the Negro child 60 ways to despise himself, and thereby perpetuate his false sense of inferiority, and the white child 134 ways to adore himself, and thereby perpetuate his false sense of superiority.

The tendency to ignore the Negro’s contribution to American life and to strip him of his personhood, is as old as the earliest history hooks and as contemporary as the morning’s newspaper. To upset this cultural homicide, the Negro must rise up with an affirmation of his own Olympian manhood. Any movement for the Negro’s freedom that overlooks this necessity is only waiting to be buried. As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free. Psychological freedom, a firm sense of self-esteem, is the most powerful weapon against the long night of physical slavery. No Lincolnian Emancipation Proclamation or Johnsonian Civil Rights Bill can totally bring this kind of freedom. The Negro will only be free when he reaches down to the inner depths of his own being and signs with the pen and ink of assertive manhood his own Emancipation Proclamation. And, with a spirit straining toward true self-esteem, the Negro must boldly throw off the manacles of self-abnegation and say to himself and to the world, “I am somebody. I am a person. I am a man with dignity and honor. I have a rich and noble history. How painful and exploited that history has been. Yes, I was a slave through my foreparents and I am not ashamed of that. I’m ashamed of the people who were so sinful to make me a slave.” Yes, we must stand up and say, “I’m black and I’m beautiful,” and this self-affirmation is the black man’s need, made compelling by the white man’s crimes against him.

Basic Challenges

Another basic challenge is to discover how to organize our strength in terms of economic and political power. No one can deny that the Negro is in dire need of this kind of legitimate power. Indeed, one of the great problems that the Negro confronts is his lack of power. From old plantations of the South to newer ghettos of the North, the Negro has been confined to a life of voicelessness and powerlessness. Stripped of the right to make decisions concerning his life and destiny he has been subject to the authoritarian and sometimes whimsical decisions of this white power structure. The plantation and ghetto were created by those who had power. both to confine those who had no power and to perpetuate their powerlessness. The problem of transforming the ghetto, therefore, is a problem of power — confrontation of the forces of power demanding change and the forces of power dedicated to the preserving of the status quo. Now power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political and economic change. Walter Reuther defined power one day. He said, “Power is the ability of a labor union like the U.A.W. to make the most powerful corporation in the world, General Motors, say ‘Yes’ when it wants to say ‘No.’ That’s power.”

Now a lot of us are preachers, and all of us have our moral convictions and concerns, and so often have problems with power. There is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly. You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites — polar opposites — so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love.

It was this misinterpretation that caused Nietzsche, who was a philosopher of the will to power, to reject the Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject the Nietzschean philosophy of the will to power in the name of the Christian idea of love. Now, we’ve got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. And this is what we must see as we move on. What has happened is that we have had it wrong and confused in our own country, and this has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through power devoid of love and conscience.

This is leading a few extremists today to advocate for Negroes the same destructive and conscienceless power that they have justly abhorred in whites. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times.

Developing a Program?

We must develop a program that will drive the nation to a guaranteed annual income. Now, early in this century this proposal would have been greeted with ridicule and denunciation, as destructive of initiative and responsibility. At that time economic status was considered the measure of the individual’s ability and talents. And, in the thinking of that day, the absence of worldly goods indicated a want of industrious habits and moral fiber. We’ve come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that dislocations in the market operations of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. Today the poor are less often dismissed, I hope, from our consciences by being branded as inferior or incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands, it does not eliminate all poverty.

The problem indicates that our emphasis must be twofold. We must create full employment or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this position we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted. New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available. In I879 Henry George anticipated this state of affairs when he wrote in Progress and Poverty:

The fact is that the work which improves the condition of mankind, the work which extends knowledge and increases power and enriches literature and elevates thought, is not done to secure a living. It is not the work of slaves driven to their tasks either by the task, by the taskmaster, or by animal necessity. It is the work of men who somehow find a form of work that brings a security for its own sake and a state of society where want is abolished.

Work of this sort could be enormously increased, and we are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished. The poor transformed into purchasers will do a great deal on their own to alter housing decay. Negroes who have a double disability will have a greater effect on discrimination when they have the additional weapon of cash to use in their struggle.

Beyond these advantages, a host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result from widespread economic security. The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts among husbands, wives and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on the scale of dollars is eliminated .

Now our country can do this. John Kenneth Galbraith said that a guaranteed annual income could be done for about twenty billion dollars a year. And I say to you today, that if our nation can spend thirty-five billion dollars a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam, and twenty billion dollars to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God’s children on their own two feet right here on earth.

Commitment To Nonviolence

Now, let me say briefly that we must reaffirm our commitment to nonviolence. I want to stress this. The futility of violence in the struggle for racial justice has been tragically etched in all the recent Negro riots. Yesterday, I tried to analyze the riots and deal with their causes. Today I want to give the other side. There is certainly something painfully sad about a riot. One sees screaming youngsters and angry adults fighting hopelessly and aimlessly against impossible odds. And deep down within them, you can even see a desire for self-destruction, a kind of suicidal longing.

Occasionally Negroes contend that the 1965 Watts riot and the other riots in various cities represented effective civil rights action. But those who express this view always end up with stumbling words when asked what concrete gains have been won as a result. At best, the riots have produced a little additional antipoverty money allotted by frightened government officials, and a few water-sprinklers to cool the children of the ghettos. It is something like improving the food in the prison while the people remain securely incarcerated behind bars. Nowhere have the riots won any concrete improvement such as have the organized protest demonstrations. When one tries to pin down advocates of violence as to what acts would be effective, the answers are blatantly illogical. Sometimes they talk of overthrowing racist state and local governments and they talk about guerrilla warfare. They fail to see that no internal revolution has ever succeeded in overthrowing a government by violence unless the government had already lost the allegiance and effective control of its armed forces. Anyone in his right mind knows that this will not happen in the United States. In a violent racial situation, the power structure has the local police, the state troopers, the National Guard and, finally, the Army to call on — all of which are predominantly white. Furthermore, few if any violent revolutions have been successful unless the violent minority had the sympathy and support of the nonresistant majority. Castro may have had only a few Cubans actually fighting with him up in the hills, but he could never have overthrown the Batista regime unless he had the sympathy of the vast majority of Cuban people.

It is perfectly clear that a violent revolution on the part of American blacks would find no sympathy and support from the white population and very little from the majority of the Negroes themselves. This is no time for romantic illusions and empty philosophical debates about freedom. This is a time for action. What is needed is a strategy for change, a tactical program that will bring the Negro into the mainstream of American life as quickly as possible. So far, this has only been offered by the nonviolent movement. Without recognizing this we will end up with solutions that don’t solve, answers that don’t answer and explanations that don’t explain.

And so I say to you today that I still stand by nonviolence. And I am still convinced that it is the most potent weapon available to the Negro in his struggle for justice in this country. And the other thing is that I am concerned about a better world. I’m concerned about justice. I’m concerned about brotherhood. I’m concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about these, he can never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a murderer but you can’t murder. Through violence you may murder a liar but you can’t establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can’t murder hate. Darkness cannot put out darkness. Only light can do that.

And I say to you, I have also decided to stick to love. For I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind’s problems. And I’m going to talk about it everywhere I go. I know it isn’t popular to talk about it in some circles today. I’m not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love, I’m talking about a strong, demanding love. And I have seen too much hate. I’ve seen too much hate on the faces of sheriffs in the South. I’ve seen hate on the faces of too many Klansmen and too many White Citizens Councilors in the South to want to hate myself, because every time I see it, I know that it does something to their faces and their personalities and I say to myself that hate is too great a burden to bear. I have decided to love. If you are seeking the highest good, I think you can find it through love. And the beautiful thing is that we are moving against wrong when we do it, because John was right, God is love. He who hates does not know God, but he who has love has the key that unlocks the door to the meaning of ultimate reality.

I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we talk about “Where do we go from here,” that we honestly face the fact that the Movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here. And one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s market place. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. You see, my friends, when you deal with this, you begin to ask the question, “Who owns the oil?” You begin to ask the question, “Who owns the iron ore?” You begin to ask the question, “Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two thirds water?” These are questions that must be asked.

About Communism

Now, don’t think that you have me in a “bind” today. I’m not talking about Communism.

What I’m saying to you this morning is that Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the Kingdom of Brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of Communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say question the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.

If you will let me be a preacher just a little bit — One night, a juror came to Jesus and he wanted to know what he could do to be saved. Jesus didn’t get bogged down in the kind of isolated approach of what he shouldn’t do. Jesus didn’t say, “Now Nicodemus, you must stop lying.” HE didn’t say, “Nicodemus, you must stop cheating if you are doing that.” He didn’t say, “Nicodemus, you must not commit adultery.” He didn’t say, “Nicodemus, now you must stop drinking liquor if you are doing that excessively.” He said something altogether different, because Jesus realized something basic — that if a man will lie, he will steal. And if a man will steal, he will kill. So instead of just getting bogged down in one thing, Jesus looked at him and said, “Nicodemus, you must be born again.”

He said, in other words, “Your whole structure must be changed.” A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will “thingify” them — make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally, economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together. What I am saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, “America, you must be born again!”

Conclusion

So, I conclude by saying again today that we have a task and let us go out with a “divine dissatisfaction.” Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds. Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort and the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice. Let us be dissatisfied until those that live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security. Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history, and every family is living in a decent sanitary home. Let us be dissatisfied until the dark yesterdays of segregated schools will be transformed into bright tomorrows of quality, integrated education. Let us be dissatisfied until integration is not seen as a problem but as an opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity. Let us be dissatisfied until men and women, however black they may be, will be judged on the basis of the content of their character and not on the basis of the color of their skin. Let us be dissatisfied. Let us be dissatisfied until every state capitol houses a governor who will do justly, who will love mercy and who will walk humbly with his God. Let us be dissatisfied until from every city hall, justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. Let us be dissatisfied until that day when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together, and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid. Let us be dissatisfied. And men will recognize that out of one blood God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth. Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout “White Power!” — when nobody will shout “Black Power!” — but everybody will talk about God’s power and human power.

I must confess, my friends, the road ahead will not always be smooth. There will still be rocky places of frustration and meandering points of bewilderment. There will be inevitable setbacks here and there. There will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair. Our dreams will sometimes be shattered and our ethereal hopes blasted. We may again with tear-drenched eyes have to stand before the bier of some courageous civil-rights worker whose life will be snuffed out by the dastardly acts of bloodthirsty mobs. Difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future. And as we continue our charted course, we may gain consolation in the words so nobly left by that great black bard who was also a great freedom fighter of yesterday, James Weldon Johnson:

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod
Felt in the days
When hope unborn had died.

Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place
For which our fathers sighed?

We have come over the way

That with tears hath been watered.
We have come treading our paths
Through the blood of the slaughtered,

Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last

Where the bright gleam
Of our bright star is cast.

Let this affirmation be our ringing cry. It will give us the courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom. When our days become dreary with low hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

Let us realize that William Cullen Bryant is right: “Truth crushed to earth will rise again.” Let us go out realizing that the Bible is right: “Be not deceived, God is not mocked. Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” This is our hope for the future, and with this faith we will be able to sing in some not too distant tomorrow with a cosmic past tense, “We have overcome, we have overcome, deep in my heart, I did believe we would overcome.”

In these thoughts, I’m coming from a specifically white and American context. I’m confident that the civil religion of this context is practiced, to some extent, by most people in that context whether they choose it, have positive feelings about it, or are aware of it at all. I’m even more confident that this civil religion is not synonymous with Christianity, even though most people, whether they are people of faith or not, see the two as the same.

Wikipedia has a useful article on civil religion, and though there are volumes written about it from a theological, political, or sociological framework this is as good a place to start as any. In its simplest sense, a civil religion is a set of beliefs that are embraced, practiced, and yet not official, in a country that doesn’t have its own established religion. It is primarily used to promote the interests of the State by getting its citizens to feel like those interests have virtues above and beyond politics or economics or whatever.

I’m not interested in saying that countries shouldn’t have civil religions. I don’t care either way. My issue is with the syncretism that most American Christians practice, and I want to expose this when possible and examine ways that we can get out of it. To clarify, I don’t think it’s possible (nor has it ever been done, to my knowledge) to practice a religion that is free of syncretism. The goal is to examine the parts of American civil religion that are antithetical to seeking first the kingdom of God through following Jesus, and see them as the heresies that they are.

This topic is something that I spend a great deal of time thinking and talking about, as do many others within the broader emerging church, but this is not new. Within church history, it dates back at least to the time of the Desert Fathers and Mothers of the post-Constantinian Roman Empire, preferring to seek God in the desert rather than wealth and power in the cities. Since then there has always been a remnant that has sought to see following Jesus as submitting to an entirely different kingdom that is, itself, antithetical to the kingdoms of the world in what it desires, the means by which it seeks to get those desires, and the ways it affects those who follow it.

From that perspective, there is a serious problem with American holidays. Most of them serve, often as their sole purpose, to promote our civil religion. Memorial Day, Veterans Day, and Independence Day do this in blatantly obvious ways, and that would be fine if it weren’t so endorsed by the church. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard folks compare the deaths of American soldiers, “sacrificing for our freedom,” with the sacrificial death of Jesus, who died for his enemies – regardless of your preferred atonement theory. It doesn’t end there, as Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday is itself used to co-opt the legacy of a man who constantly sought to promote nonviolence, to the point of death, in order to promote the violent interests of the State.

The bigger holidays are not immune to this. Thanksgiving is, in essence, a celebration of the beginning of our unjust takeover of our land because we felt its inhabitants weren’t human. Black Friday (and the ritual of standing in line on Thursday, which I think will soon become Wednesday and Tuesday) and Cyber Monday are ways for us to intensify our already insane addiction to owning things, which is encouraged because it fuels our economy. Christmas is much the same.

Now again, none of this is new either. But the thing that strikes me as important to talk about is the massive fear that Christians have about Halloween, while desperately supporting the other holidays, especially Christmas. Yes, it has Celtic and other pagan roots. Yes, it’s deeply important to folks who believe different things. But really? Why does that holiday have to get all the attention? And why doesn’t it get attention because most of the candy and chocolate that is sold during that season is made by slaves?

This is the issue: it’s because most Christians don’t have a problem with America’s civil religion. As a whole, the church in America has such a lack of prophetic critique that it will support any holiday that serves the purposes of the State, especially if it can get a few irrelevant mentions of the birth of Jesus devoid of its social and political consequences, and it will fight any attempts to break the connections between Christianity and American civil religion.

We who would like something better than civil religion need to make something better. We need ways in which we can let “our thankfulness for our blessings move us to repent of the ways those blessings have come (and still do come) at the expense of others” as Julie Clawson said yesterday. We need to stop rewriting history, as Eugene Cho said, and instead figure out how to create other ways to express thankfulness.

And finally, as Advent starts, we need to remember that “the story of Christ’s birth is a story of promise, hope, and a revolutionary love.” I’m thankful for Advent Conspiracy giving us something for that. Let it change the world.

This year strikes me as different than the last several, probably mainly because of the anti-Muslim talk that is plaguing our country these days, and the inability that so many folks have to separate fundamentalists who fly into buildings from folks who want to build a community center, and the ridiculous desire to burn the Koran in response to that community center.

In 2001, I was a freshman in college. A few months before, I had attended Cornerstone Festival for the first time, and one of the bands I saw there was Ballydowse. Ballydowse was a Celtic punk band based at JPUSA, the intentional community on the north side of Chicago that puts the festival on each year. Ballydowse sang songs about politics, economics, and society that were (and in general still are) very unique. They sang songs about Oscar Romero, George Macdonald, Iraq and the sanctions we placed on it, and a number of other such topics. They also operated a section of their website that provided a place for dialogue about these and other issues.

In the first couple of days after the attacks happened, the lead vocalist wrote a beautiful piece in response, seeking to encourage us to be slow to speak, slow to anger, and quick to listen; in the hopes that we would have sought to respond in the right ways, rather than to answer terror with terror. While his words, being from a band in an underground music scene, went unheeded in the national conversation, they changed my life forever. Ballydowse’s website has been down for years, and the band no longer exists, but this year I managed to find an archived copy of his article. I post it here, as the formatting isn’t what it was when the site was operating, and it’s not very easy to find.

The power and beauty of his words have not been lost in these last nine years.

These were my thoughts shortly after the World Trade Centers horror. Since then too few have been rescued, and the death toll is in the thousands. It is very sad and our prayers go out to those families.

It is hard to begin speaking when so many arms are emptied of loved ones and for them our hearts feel only silent grief. It has been just a few short days since the world turned and Terror murdered so many. The Towers were no longer symbols. Suddenly, we realized that they were nothing, but the lives they contained were everything. These unique lives cannot be replaced even if a thousand towers, twice as high, rise again in our cities.

Who among us can describe such loss? The necessary transformation to a numerical body count will only be a vulgarization. Each one of my children, alone and unaided, outweighs the world. How can a mere number shroud such unfathomable depths of vanished possibilities? As the dead are gathered- and we hope against hope that more survivors will be found-already we know that over three hundred firefighters, police officers, and emergency personal were lost. This world is hard enough to doctor without this terror. The pain and accidents that come with our freedom fill the days of the service people with enough grief, we all wonder why humanity elects to add to such a brimming cup. As the days go on the numbers will rise. God be with these families and let us offer whatever we can, for those who still struggle in the hospitals wards or beneath the rubble and for those who mourn. That is our first response.

Beyond that let us be slow to speak, slow to anger, and quick to listen. The talk today is full of payments long due and vengeance swift preparing. As to the payments long due, it is one thing to speak of a nation’s collective responsibility for its words and deeds. It is another to overturn all constructive foundations that any such talk must have and embrace the murder. Let this point be clear- there is no past actions or present policies that can justify the targeting of innocent civilians in any nation’s cities. No cries to call America to justice for its past actions can be mingled with blood arbitrarily drawn from the mothers and fathers, sons and daughters of this land. The murders in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania contribute only to the glory of evil. The historical dynamics, the discussion of what lies between the birth and death of those who commit such deeds may form a bridge to understanding the temptations of rage but at the crossing of the line into terror, the actors must be left naked without excuse. Murderous actions cannot be dignified as necessities, they must remain unable to drown out the still small voice that offers each of us freedom to overcome our past.

However, to the cries for vengeance, we say remember the words of Chesterton, that shipwrecks are not avoided by doing Something, but by doing the right thing. We have done many a something these past years and have suffered no small number of shipwrecks. Yes. We must respond, but responding we must look to caution and restraint now more than ever. We have been deceived before. Pain and fear will grasp for the relief at hand, be it a healing courage or the maudlin delusions. The murder must be answered. This Terror is without excuse and it is our rightful enemy. But Terror is a coward and likes nothing more but to slip out the back door at the last minute only to re-enter through the front, guiding the mob and ensuring that all hopes of ending its eternal return are incinerated by the torches of vengeance.

Many voices are hearkening back to another day of infamy, to the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese Imperial Admiral Yamamoto had engineered the attack despite his misgivings about war with America. Shortly after the attack he is quoted as saying in regret “We have awakened a sleeping giant and have instilled in him a terrible resolve.” We are awake and the giant is forming. But there are giants and there are giants. Which giant we awaken and to what end our resolve will be the measure of our society.

This attack was rooted in hatred, in the ability of evil to remove all threads of empathy with the victim. It relied upon black and white delusions where god or virtue is completely united with the desired action. Terror seeks a specific response. Like calls to like. We must think long and hard about our response and refuse to awaken the giant that Terror desires for its company.

Whatever offer of true comfort for our grieving families, whatever sacrifice it takes to prevent actions such as this, we must make. Save the one that will be most tempting and most counter to true need. “We are never in greater danger than in moments when we deceive ourselves as to the real nature of a threat and when we summon all our energies for defense against the void while the Enemy approaches from behind” wrote Denis De Rougemont shortly after Hitler was driven from France. “It is the Devil who invents our moral sophistries, blots out our categories, transforms that habitual sin into a delirious “virtue”, into a fit of false innocence, into an exaltation of destructive power.” We must not offer our compliments to the Terror. We must not awaken it in ourselves.

Hannah Arendt, in the years after the Holocaust said how often people would come and tell her that they were ashamed to be Germans. She answered that she was ashamed to be human. Tuesday, as lives were hijacked and sacrificed to violence and force I was ashamed to be human. As desperate people, themselves no strangers to grief, danced in celebration I was ashamed to be human. And this morning, as Arab Americans who grieve along with us began to receive death threats in the name of freedom I was ashamed to be human.

The great myth of injustice has been it ability to instill moral strength with every lash of its whip. When men and women are placed beneath grief and pain, the outgrowth is not always noble. Any war against terror that does not seek to guarantee a continual renewal of enemies will demand to know whether the suggested tactics truly uproot more than they seed. We have laid siege to nations and encampments only to harvest hate. Let us seek to starve hate and see if we might not reap something desirable for our children’s future. No more bitter rage and collateral damages. The price of each human life must be marked according to its irreplaceable and unrepeatable value. And from this day forward any voice that says “Yes such and such is innocent of this crime, but the price of their lives is worth the reward”- that voice will be recognized as the call to seed terror and a great cry should rise against such tactics.

We cannot hope for absolute security. The chief weapon of terror is the human mind and a society secured against it absolutely is a cemetery. But, with Camus, we can resolve never to legitimize the terror. We are not speaking of forsaking action to prevent or answer terror. We are asking that we refuse any means that cannot be reconciled with the ends we propose. If the end we desire is the rule of justice then let the means be ruled by that same justice. If the end we desire is the rule of violence and vengeance unchecked then by all means we know what we can do to accommodate that desire.

Within hours of the horror voices are rising saying that for too long we have allowed security to take a back seat to civil liberties and that those days should end. Is Democracy to be defended by its death? Or is its pulse so low that a bed or a grave is of little difference? Proclamations of “We are one!” may sell papers but do not let the instant homogenizers sell the tensions and differences between us, for the tension is democracy itself. Now more than ever we must resist propaganda and support calm dialogue that does no violence to our plurality. To borrow from Pierre Joseph Proudhon, “in nations as in children reason seeks unity in all things, simplicity, uniformity, identity” but when the situation is not elementary, simple answers are popular lies. Without full depth of perspectives unbalance will drive us in circles slowly sinking beneath our own weight. Terror thrives when the exchange of ideas is replaced by “that august silence of all perfect orders” that Camus spoke of when “nothing anybody says will rouse the least echo in another’s mind.” If this is the unity that we are tempted with, it must be denied.

But that is not to say we might not come together and accomplish something. The self sacrifices that have filled the past days, the drama of flight 93 to the weary work in New York, have answered our shame with no small hope. If we did not rise to respond to this, if seeing these children wondering when mother or father was coming home we did not feel the fury we would not be human. But such precious worth cannot be entrusted to fury. Rather than surrendering to the fury, we must speak and act with power. That power will only arise where men and women speak and act together “where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities.” We must forsake the doing of something and begin seeking right things to do. If we answer terror with terror, again deluded that a salty spring will bring fresh water, we send the vicious circle of eternal return around again.

Gustav Landauer said in times like these we must “be the type of innovators in whose anticipatory imagination that which [we] want to create already lives as something finished, tried and tasted, and anchored in the past, in primeval and sacred life. Therefore let us destroy mainly by means of the gentle permanent and binding reality that we build.” Let us starve the Terror by binding ourselves not to become it. Let us seek the actors of this terror and with severity end these actions but let us do nothing without the remembrance that children are not born ready to hurl themselves and others in fury against steel and concrete. It takes an entire species to allow such pressures to build and such techniques to be mastered. Those who did these things are uniquely responsible but we are all involved. Let us rely on the gentle permanence of humility and build a sense of forgiveness, by daring to ask what sort of pressures tempt humans to become bombs and why so many trace those pressures to these shores. And in turn acknowledging whatever honest examination uncovers. As we promise to answer the actions of others, as we must, let us promise to answer for our own as well.

These words were penned by Hannah Arendt on Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility half a century ago as the world still reeled in the horrors of the Third Reich. That her conclusions speak so fluently to us today bears witness to how little we have learned. She describes the only giant we may safely awaken.

“To follow a non-imperialistic policy and maintain a non-racist faith becomes daily more difficult because it becomes daily clearer how great a burden mankind is for man. Perhaps those Jews, to whose forefathers we owe the first conception of the idea of humanity, know something about that burden when each year they used to say “Our Father and King, we have sinned before you,” taking not only the sins of their own community but all human offenses upon themselves. Those who today are ready to follow this road in a modern version do not content themselves with the hypocritical confession, ‘God be thanked, I am not like that,’ in horror at the undreamed of potentialities of the [characteristics of terror]. Rather, in fear and trembling, have they finally realized of what man is capable- and this is indeed the precondition of any modern political thinking. Such persons will not serve very well as functionaries of vengeance. This, however, is certain: Upon them and only upon them, who are filled with a genuine fear of the inescapable guilt of the human race, can there be any reliance when it comes to fighting fearlessly, uncompromisingly, everywhere against the incalculable evil that men are capable of bringing about.

His post looks at the excuse that the gospel is offensive and therefore we are allowed, even expected, to be offensive also. You should read the whole thing, but I want to look at this part:

How does this translate today? Does it mean we need to post status updates about the extremist muslim that will surely burn in Hell? The homosexual or the stay at home dad who is worse than a non believer? I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s offensive, I think that’s more of the same. It’s the same hate that this world is filled with. It doesn’t surprise anyone, and surely, it can’t offend…

The same hate the world is filled with. Not surprising.

Now. If we could just grab onto that, I think we’d be alright, but he’s got me thinking in a different direction. The folks who he’s talking about, and I’m sure their counterparts who post status updates about other things, may think they’re being offensive for the gospel. But as they do it, the vast majority of them are easily offended when people who disagree state their cases. The ones who rant about Muslims get offended that the Muslims want to built an Islamic cultural center in a neighborhood they have served for many years, and the ones who rant about homsexuals are offended that they want to be able to get married.

Clearly, there is a double standard. We – whoever “we” are – are allowed to offend people because we think we’re doing it for the gospel (even though, as Andy points out, we’re just using the same hate everyone else does). But others are not allowed to offend us (by our criteria of what offensiveness is) because they’re doing it for their own reasons?

As I reflected on why this is the case, it occurred to me that there are a couple of reasons. One is that we are too busy thinking of ourselves. We think everything that we disagree with is an offense to us, and therefore it must be an offense to God. If it is an offense to God, our logic goes, it is our job to do everything we can to stop whatever the offense is. The problem, though, is that God isn’t like us. Brennan Manning wrote an incredible book called Ruthless Trust that dealt with some relevant issues. One of the things he wrote forever changed the way I try to look at myself:

Feelings of insecurity, inadequacy, inferiority, and self-hatred rivet our attention on ourselves. Humble men and women do not have a low opinion of themselves; they have no opinion of themselves. The heart of humility lies in undivided attention to God, a fascination with his beauty revealed in creation, a contemplative presence to each person who speaks to us, and a “de-selfing” of our plans, projects, ambitions, and soul.

Can you imagine if folks who are easily offended lived this way instead? A heart of humility, in the way he speaks, can’t be offended by ridiculous culture wars, and isn’t preoccupied with what other people are doing. Deeper still, if we lived like that we wouldn’t be preoccupied with what we are doing.

And that’s the issue, I think. It’s possible to think that God needs us to defend him, and to be preoccupied with doing that instead of living humbly before him. This is why folks think it is a positive thing to be offensive for the sake of being offensive. If we don’t piss people off, the logic goes, we aren’t defending the gospel well enough. And it spirals from there.

Now instead, as Andy mentions, the offensive thing of the gospel is its love. It’s Jesus eating with sinners, it’s the divine dying on a cross to deliver people from their sin, it’s people loving their enemies, and it’s people who have no opinion of themselves.

Again: I really don’t care where the center is. I’m not a Muslim, although I find much beauty in Islam. I’m also not a New Yorker, although I find much beauty in New York City. So really: wherever they want to put the center is alright with me, and I think that should be the default position for everyone who is not immediately affected by its presence¹. Nonetheless, almost everyone who is weighing in on the issue is not affected at all by its presence or its location, and I have to admit at this point that anything that can add or restate intelligent words to this conversation deserves to be there.

If you’ve followed the maddening discussion, you know that there are a number of talking points that folks representing American conservatism are using.

One is, of course, from Sarah Palin, and is the idea that the specific site is somehow hallowed because of its proximity to the World Trade Center. If you’ve taken this statement with any seriousness at all, I’d encourage you to look through these photos of the “hallowed ground”. All of these things are the same distance from the site of the WTC as the Park 51 Center.

Another point that folks have used is that Muslims should be allowed to build a mosque near 9/11 when there are churches in places of various sites that they think are equivalent, from Saudi Arabia to the older Ground Zeroes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As for Saudi Arabia, when Gingrich wants us to model our religious freedom on Saudi Arabia’s, he can run his mouth as much as he wants. If you’re curious about Japan, there are Christian churches within a mile of each of the Ground Zeroes in Japan, one mile in Hiroshima and half a mile in Nagasaki. The Japanese, after enduring disasters massively worse than ours at the hands of a “Christian nation” in an act that is still defended by many Christian theologians, have not decided that a mile is too close.

The other one I’ve seen the most is that the imam who runs the Cordoba Initiative has said things critical of American foreign policy, and stated that U.S. policy was an accessory to what happened on 9/11. Most of the vocal conservatives go insane when anyone who is not one of them says this, whether it be Jeremiah Wright, Ron Paul, or Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf. But the fact is, it’s true. It doesn’t change the nature of the attacks, though it should have changed our response to them.

In any case, I don’t think the point of these talking points is really to have an answer for why the center shouldn’t be built in the proposed location, as the people using them are (I think) well aware that they are just things that sound good to their base, rather than solid logic. But I think it is important to deal with these talking points anyway, simply because if they go away it will become clear that the opposition to the center is based on anti-Islamic sentiment and an inability to separate terrorists from the rest of Islam the same way we can separate Christian theocrats from the rest of Christianity.

That is what needs to go away; not a cultural center on the progressive side of Islam in a neighborhood with strip clubs, Burger Kings, BBQ, and pubs. We can’t afford to keep these sentiments, and to his credit even Bush was willing to admit that.

1. I don’t think that families of 9/11 victims are immediately affected by its presence. Rather, folks who live and work in that area today are, and the vast majority of them are heavily in favor of the presence of the center.