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’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.

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.

But recently, I’ve seen a different side, that of nonviolent activism for peace, on the part of Israelis and Palestinians, starting with this interview on The Daily Show a couple of months ago, but really becoming something else entirely with the trip that Brian McLaren, Mike Todd, and other folks have been on a trip “to see the places where the Spirit of God is working now – for reconciliation, justice, and peace in the midst of turmoil.”

I want to draw attention to the things that have been said about and during, and the issues that are being examined. I’m sure both of them will continue reflecting now that they are home, and I encourage you to read all of their thoughts on this.

Brian, at one point, writes several things that have stuck out to me:

If you get a chance to go to Israel and Palestine, I encourage you to take it – but only if you can go on an alternative tour that will have you spending time in the West Bank, meeting both Palestinians and Israelis so you can see for yourself how different the reality is from the impressions gained from our well-managed media and highly-lobbied government.

January 29

We have spoken with many Palestinians in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem so far in our pilgrimage, both Christian and Muslim. Their voices are seldom heard in our corporate media, so it has made sense to meet, listen to, and understand them. But of course we’ve met with Israeli folks too. Yesterday we had some particularly important conversations with Israeli Jewish voices. They agreed that there will be no change in Israeli policy until the US decides to stop giving Israel a blank check.

January 27

If you’ve never been in both Israel and Palestine, I hope you will start questioning what you think you know about the situation here. I’ve been an avid reader on the subject for quite a while, but being here now, I see how many of my most basic assumptions were skewed from a lifetime of half-truths, unfair and imbalanced news, well-planned propaganda, and misinformation.

January 25

It was a reminder that the struggle here is not about people. It’s not about Jews versus Palestinians or vice versa. It’s not about choosing who the good guys and bad guys are, as our media so often portrays it (and sadly, as our religious leaders so often do as well).

January 23

But what is especially powerful – and what keeps us from being overwhelmed with cynicism or anger – is the lack of hatred among the Palestinians we are meeting with – both Christians and Muslims. Again and again we hear the word “non-violent” and we see a desire not for revenge or even isolation … but for reconciliation. To my surprise (based on expectations from the US media), I haven’t met a single Palestinian who wants a two-state solution. They want to live in peace with Israelis.

January 22

Mike writes equally poignant things, though he does not blog as much when he travels and will write more in the coming days and weeks:

The church has for too long swallowed the prevailing narrative about Israel’s policies in the occupied territories without question.

January 29

This is not about choosing sides. However, I’ll repeat an earlier assertion I’ve made, and that is that we have been fed a narrative that is simply wrong. It’s fiction, if you will. More about that to come I’m sure, but this is a big one: The church in the west must start thinking again, and not simply buy what we are told. From where I’m sitting this morning we are looking very foolish.

January 25

Again, I can’t encourage you enough to read the full posts, and the other things that Mike and Brian will be writing as they continue to process.

But I have to say: this honestly makes me willing to go to Israel on this kind of trip, should the opportunity ever arise. There is a beauty that is present there that, certainly we could assume was there, but I at least hadn’t heard anything about – people who have voices that we need to hear, stories that would inspire and change us, and a real desire for peace and nonviolent reconciliation.

I would like to see Barack Obama sit in this realm with his discussions of and with Israel. He is often accused of standing against Israel, but this is a completely unrealistic accusation as there is never any criticism or attempt to talk about the issues of segregation and oppression by Israel. This is consistently bolstered by the unwavering support of Israel in whatever it does by the mainstream media, to the point that it really is politically impossible for anyone on any side of American politics to criticize Israel for any of the oppressive things it does, or to suggest that there really is a necessity for reconciliation.

The American church today should be in this part of the story, seeking ways to encourage peace and reconciliation, but instead it is contributing to this kind of political climate, using various theological concepts to suggest that Israel is blessed by God regardless of what it does. Do you see the opportunity we could have?

I’d love to see more people go on trips like this, and come back to tell us what they see and learn. I’d love to see our role in this change.

In addition to these thoughts, I have spent the last couple of days in a suburb of Chicago at our annual company kickoff, which does, and evokes, this kind of reflecting upon the previous year and the new year, in the context of the company. Each year various leaders from different areas of the organization speak, and a couple of outside folks speak as well. This year, we had the fascinating privilege of hearing Bill Clinton speak.

I want to look at that event in particular, after encouraging you to read the links above, as a way to open the year. Happy New Year.

Clinton on The 21st Century

A big part of Clinton’s speech was about the idea that the 21st century will be a “contest between positive and negative interdependence and interconnectedness.” It was a brilliant concept, exemplified by the internet, the energy crisis, terrorism and its connections to globalization, and any number of other positive and negative things in our society. He further developed this thought by observing that the world today is:

• Too unequal

  Both in the United States and abroad. This is exemplified in the States by the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor, and the healthcare situation. Most of the examples here do relate to money. In the developing world, his examples varied from water to health to technology, and discussed things that his foundation is doing in various areas.

• Too insecure and unstable

  With examples from terrorism, economics and disease, he talked about the state of the world in which all of us live. We cause and are affected by terrorism, we have a demonstrably insecure economic state, and diseases from many causes continue to affect most of the world.

• Too unsustainable

  Obviously, climate change is one of the most upfront examples of the unsustainability of our environmental systems. Aside from this, though, I’ve written and spoken about how, regardless of political viewpoints, we should see our current systems as unsustainable, from perspectives of ethics, human rights, and our own disconnectedness from things around us.

Clinton spoke further on issues of economics and human rights with regard to the current recession and whether or not America will retain its global primacy to which it has become so accustomed. He observed that America’s primacy is due, in many ways, to the fall of communism as much as it is anything else, and it’s okay if we are not the supreme power in the earth, whether we lose it to India, China, or some other situation entirely. He put it this way:

It is immoral for us to keep others poor so that we can be number one.

For Clinton, the biggest problem in poor countries today is lack of capacity, from perspectives of money, health, and resources. The biggest problem in rich countries is rigidity. We have large, entrenched systems in which many people have many things invested, and thus have a lot to lose from any kind of evolution in these systems. These are people who should care about changing these systems to deal with the world’s problems, but they have become rigid in the interest of self-preservation. This is exemplified by our policies on healthcare, energy, the environment, and any number of other things.

Q & A

Whenever there are speakers at these company events, there is usually a Q & A period at the end, between our CEO and the speaker. This one had a couple of questions that really stood out to me.

What contributed to his success

Clinton was asked to give some things that contributed to his success in life and as a leader. He responded with a couple of things that I didn’t at all expect that really stood out to me:

• Growing up in an oral culture of storytellers. This, for him, taught him how to listen- knowing that everyone has an interesting story, as well as how to see things playing out in individual lives.
• Growing up in the Civil Rights movement. This taught him how to find something bigger than himself that he could fight for.

Things to focus on

He was also asked what kind of things he would say to folks like us, many of whom are young in our careers. He responded with several important things:

• The vast majority of humans do not have choices like we do. We have choices, and should not give them away.
• Know our minds and hearts.
• Try to do something we like and love. If we can’t do the best we can, even if we don’t like the job, but only do it until we can get out and do what we love.

Overall

So in essence, the talk was perceptive and challenging. It intentionally focused on stories and facts, to a large extent avoiding asking folks to take political positions on the stories and facts. I haven’t been a huge fan of Clinton as a politician, both in the 2008 primaries and in parts of his presidency, but in the recent times I’ve seen him talk, both on the Daily Show and in this event, he has been fantastic.

So when I went to see him, I had a pretty good idea of what to expect, and it was a great conversation. The event lasted for an hour and a half or so, and was (very) roughly divided like this: Socratic questioning, prophetic critique, and question/answer time. All of these things related in one way or another to race, but much more broadly applied and dealing with humanity, as that “which is born between urine and feces.”

During his thoughts on Socratic questioning, Dr. West spoke profoundly to our unwillingness to critically examine and question ourselves, both individually and as a culture. He spoke of Plato’s statement that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” and led into another of Plato’s statements, that “philosophy is a meditation on and a preparation for death.”

Through this, we were led into transformation, both as individuals and as a society, because in Plato’s mind (and, in West’s view, the mind of Paul), transformation doesn’t happen without death. We must learn how to die to things. Further, for West, we must learn how love relates to all this, because in love we die as isolated selves and are reborn as selves that are entangled with another self.

It is fascinating and beautiful how all this speaks to the story of God, and yet clearly does it in a way that sidesteps the traps of overt religion, which still allows him to bring in his thoughts on Jesus, thoughts on the cross, thoughts on the spiritual traditions that were birthed in slavery and empire, and how all of these things are preserved in churches, art, and music.

So from this, he spoke to us about the Hebrew prophetic tradition, that which lived and suffered under empire – both its own, as Brueggemann tells us in The Prophetic Imagination, and under the empires that surrounded and oppressed it. He spoke of Isaiah, weeping over injustice, Amos asking for justice to roll down, and of Jeremiah. Here, he reminded us that he wasn’t speaking of Jeremiah Wright, though he does feel that they were doing some of the same things.¹

That these were empires that forgot their humanity, forgot the poor and oppressed, and forgot to examine themselves, as we have done. He talked at great length about these aspects of justice, and again reminded us to “Understand that justice is what love looks like in public.” He spoke of the ways in which this has been lived out in nonviolence through the black tradition, and how it has led to the creation of arts of compassion – Negro spirituals, blues, jazz, and so on that were birthed out of suffering.

Dr. West looked back on the creation of our experiment in democracy that didn’t address slavery in the Constitution, not because it was below the ideal but because it didn’t examine itself. He reminded us that the birds came home to roost during the Civil War, and that Abraham Lincoln had supported a Constitutional amendment that would have made slavery permanent until the abolitionist movement caused him to be great. The people who sought justice rose up, and he listed many of these names, and caused Lincoln to become a great president.

In light of this, Dr. West reflected upon the end of the Reagan era in American politics, and expressed great hope that we will stop caring for the rich and strong, which he sees as a marker of that time,² but care for the poor and weak. Not to be against the rich, but to be for the poor, and to have that place from which to look at things – that place of Matthew 25.

Finally, he spoke of Barack Obama’s election, and the fact that he has not yet shown that he will care for the weak and poor, but has continued to care for the rich and powerful. From a race perspective, he reminded us that this election is not the end of racism or beginning of a post-racial era, but a marker that white America is less racist. This is a wonderful thing we can all rejoice in, but that is all it is. Blacks, he reminded us, have looked past the color of a candidate’s skin for decades, and no one has asked if they were post-racial.

Dr. West offers a critical support to Obama and seeks to be a prophetic voice in that space, as he has since before the Iowa vote last year, and recognizes that Obama is the leader of the biggest empire in the world, and has a different calling than Dr. West does, which reminds me of Martin Luther King’s statement that the church must be the conscience of the state. As he did in his video remarks a few weeks ago, Dr. West said it will be hard to be a war president with a peace prize.

The official event ended along these lines, reminding us to bring Obama, and culture in general, to greatness and push him to care for the poor and weak. There were some questions from the audience, including one that I especially appreciated on the Israel/Palestine issue. Dr. West responded at length, reminding us that the Israelis were victimized in the heart of Europe, and still think of this even as they are victimizing Arabs. We in the United States are afraid to even have a conversation about what they are doing. The hope in this, for Dr. West, is that the Jews will begin to have love and compassion for the Arabs, and that it will be seen as a tragedy for anyone to be victimized.

So all in all, this was a profound, challenging event that taught me a great deal and filled me with any number of emotions and thoughts. Dr. West is currently on a book tour that you should see, if you can.

1. In light of that, though Dr. West didn’t go into it, I want to look at that similarity, as I think it was profoundly missed during the discussions of Rev. Wright last year. Though there are many places where the two Jeremiahs meet, it is the most controversial that I want to look at:
   

   …wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, not God Bless America. God damn America — that’s in the Bible — for killing innocent people. God damn America, for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America, as long as she tries to act like she is God, and she is supreme.

   Jeremiah doesn’t specifically use the words, “God damn America,” though many prophets have this essential message for oppression, but what I specifically see is that the statement, “God bless America,” is a statement of civil religion that Jeremiah Wright has turned upside down. Jeremiah the prophet does an identical thing, standing in the temple in Jerusalem:

   Do not trust in deceptive words and say, “This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD!” If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, if you do not oppress the alien, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your forefathers for ever and ever.

   Jeremiah has taken the saying of civil religion, “this is the temple of the LORD,” and turned it against oppression. Civil religion didn’t like it, and it doesn’t like it anymore today than it did then.

2. Though there is great disagreement with Reagan, Dr. West still rejoiced in the times when Reagan did care for the poor and oppressed, such as those in Eastern Europe under the empire of the Soviet Union.

First of all, I’ll say this: I don’t think any United States president is really worthy of an award for peace. As Blake Huggins put it on Twitter, “if the president of the US winning the nobel peace “prize” signifies anything it is that we haven’t a clue what peace really is.” I think, in faithfulness to its name, such an award should go to someone like Bono, or the Invisible Children organization, or any number of similar organizations that are able (willing?) to really focus on peace.

That being said, it is clear from his remarks that Obama realizes this. He doesn’t feel worthy of it, and acknowledges the fact that he is engaged in wars. Some will know that Obama is influenced in his thoughts along these lines by Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian Realism (and you should read this short article, as it gives a good glimpse into what is present in Obama), which is at the least a compelling view, though I do not embrace it.

And I’ll say this: oftentimes I’d like to embrace it. It feels easier than an active pacifism. But it doesn’t resonate with the heart of Jesus, and I’m skeptical of any who think it does. Our challenge as followers of his heart is not to be realistic; our challenge is to follow his heart when it is realistic, and when it isn’t.

But the fact that Obama at least goes that far clearly indicates an advancement from the utter heresies that our last government used to baptize its empire.

Obama’s early summer speech in Cairo has had potentially world-changing effects, from the immediate Iranian uprising to unknown future things. His refusal of the temptation to lend America’s voice to the Iranians further allowed the country to move forward, and today we see Ahmadinejad with a weakened administration that, in all likelihood, will fall to a nonviolent revolution at some point. His wise diplomacy with Russia, and his attempts to get Israel to act like decent human beings, have all lent weight to the argument that he has done wonderful things.

However, many of us know that Nobel Prize nominations were due shortly after Obama took office. None of these unique accomplishments in trying to bring a more peaceful world had happened. Perhaps the only thing he had done was order the prison at Guantanamo closed. So why the Nobel Prize?

I can’t answer this and don’t agree with it, though I think it is clear that the vast majority of the world views Barack Obama as a dramatic improvement in America’s ability to be a decent citizen, and has been willing to give him political capital that he may not deserve at all, simply because, as another person on Twitter said, he could be praised “for ‘not starting any wars yet’ and being ‘way cooler than Bush’.”

As Andrew Sullivan says:

I’ve had some coffee now. Reading through all the reactions, compiled by Chris and Patrick, there are two obvious points: this is premature and this is thoroughly deserved.

Both are right. I don’t think Americans fully absorbed the depths to which this country’s reputation had sunk under the Cheney era. That’s understandable. And so they also haven’t fully absorbed the turn-around in the world’s view of America that Obama and the American people have accomplished. Of course, this has yet to bear real fruit. But you can begin to see how it could; and I hope more see both the peaceful intentions and the steely resolve of this man to persevere.

This president has done a huge amount to bring race relations in this country to a different place, which is why the far right has become so vicious in attacking him and lying about him. They know he threatens their politics of division and rule. He has also directly addressed the Muslim world, telling some hard truths, and played a small role in evoking a similar movement of hope and change in Iran, and finally told the Israelis to stop cutting their nose off to spite their face.

And this may be the essence of it. Unfortunately, the insanity that is today’s Right will be able to trash this for years to come because of their own unwillingness to be introspective. But fortunately, the essence of Barack Obama’s acceptance of the prize could very likely make it worth it:

But I also know that this prize reflects the kind of world that those men and women, and all Americans, want to build — a world that gives life to the promise of our founding documents. And I know that throughout history, the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement; it’s also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes. And that is why I will accept this award as a call to action — a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st century.

And that I can support. History will judge it.

The root of my position rests upon the passionate care that God has, and expects us to have, for the poor. It does not rest upon liberal politics, though in general I am a liberal, nor does it rest upon trust in government or an expectation that government should act like the kingdom of God. I do not trust the government, and do not confuse it with the kingdom of God.² Finally, it seems relevant to say that it also does not rest upon personal need. I have great healthcare, provided by my employer. It has paid for several surgeries, for both my wife and myself, and in general is very satisfactory.

Faithful disagreement on healthcare

The reason I start with those things is that I am well aware that people can hold all of those beliefs as passionately as I do, and disagree on whether or not the government should provide healthcare for everyone. I’ve made clear my passionate admiration for the Anabaptist way of the kingdom of God, and many people who follow that way do not believe this is the government’s place.

The reason I’m okay with this is that many of these people devote their lives on a daily basis to helping the poor themselves, including providing them with healthcare through co-ops and relational giving. I love this, and this is one of the things the kingdom of God should be doing in the world today. One of the reasons the early church spread as much as it did was that it devoted the vast majority of its money to helping the poor and taking care of the sick. Instead of doing as we do, and spending it on salaries and buildings and giving the leftovers away, the early followers of Jesus gave it all away, and spent the leftovers on their own survival.

Fantastic. I want to be in communities like this, and give money and time to communities like this.

I also started with the root of my position because I believe it is essential to the kingdom of God. Most of the conservative part of the church rejects government involvement in healthcare, not because it wants to provide healthcare for the poor itself (which is possibly the biggest understatement I’ve ever written on this blog), but because it conflicts with Republican ideology. This is the same reason it supports economic avarice, war, its own definition of marriage, and imperialism, and I often wonder if it is not also the reason that it does not support abortion.

This is not something on which I think compromise is warranted or faithful: if conservative Christians do not want the government to provide an affordable healthcare option for everyone, they should do it themselves.

Why I support a public option

In light of all this, I want to end with why I do support the government providing a public healthcare option, though I’m willing to see faithfulness in the alternative position I’ve mentioned.

I’ve indicated my love for those who are devoting their time, money, and lives to the poor and oppressed and include healthcare as part of this. But the fact is that the vast majority of the church does not do this, or have any interest in doing this. It’s incredibly unlikely that any large denomination or religious organization will ever put the kind of financial resources behind an effort like this that are necessary to have a significant impact, or even compare to the kind that the government can devote.

This is fine, as denominations and organizations often have the same issues that government has. But it is also true that there are not enough individuals, individual churches, or non-profits with the heart that is willing to work for this in the small ways of the kingdom of Jesus. I believe we should pray and seek this, in the hopes that the poor can come to us rather than going to the government, but that cannot happen today.

In light of this, I believe that the most realistic way for us to care for those without healthcare, right now, is to support a public option. But realism is not the only reason, as it is often realistic to support war and other government actions that I cannot support. The combination that I can support is realism with compassion and justice. I do not expect our government to act with compassion, but whenever it does I can support it and go alongside it, even while hoping for the kingdom of God to bring those things.

1. especially Barack Obama’s most recent speech
2. I think it is worth saying here that conservatism, at least in the last few decades, is much more guilty of confusing government with the kingdom of God than is liberalism, but the solution to that is of course not to switch sides in doing the same thing, but rather to do something different.

The coinciding emergence of these two sides happened most recently in the beginnings of the Pentecostal movement, as I’ve said, though the pacifism and, indeed, political independence of any kind, of the early Pentecostals has all but faded into allegiance to conservatism as it now exists in America.

A story to illustrate this: when I was in college, dating Kiera, we were invited to attend a certain rally/meeting/event with a specific speaker who is still fairly well known in certain circles on Valentine’s Day of 2003. For whatever reason, we went. First mistake, I’m sure. As you may remember, this was the time when the United States was preparing to go to war with Iraq. The political figures of both parties were busy scaring everyone with tales of weapons of mass destruction, links to terrorism, and other such things that we now know were false.

At the time, I had just begun to be interested in politics, after having spent several years writing it off as irrelevant, for various reasons. I had already been unwilling to see the Religious Right as the Christian option, and didn’t know enough to look into other visions of political activity. But by this time, I was angry at the government’s response to 9/11 and its evil rhetoric leading up to the invasion of Iraq, and anger had made me care.

So on the religious side of things, there were events like the one we attended. The main thrust of the message (which came after a statement that we should “pay” for revival instead of “pray” for revival) included the worst scriptural interpretation I have ever encountered, where the speaker believed that Jeremiah prophesied that God would “Bush Babylon.” He proceeded to tell us, of course, that the American invasion of Iraq was God’s method of “bushing” Babylon. During the time when the speaker had the crowd march around the sanctuary, with its crystal dove-shaped chandelier, chanting “War, War, War,” Kiera and I and our two friends, who were equally against the war, walked out, shaken by the heresy we had witnessed.

As the year moved on toward the invasion, I was one of the voices on the Pentecostal college I attended that asked, when classes prayed for American soldiers, to pray for the Iraqi soldiers, and the other people there. As my theology and understanding of how God has worked in the church has developed over the years, I have moved into the belief that nonviolence is an integral part of following God in the way of Jesus.

As I have reflected on these things, I have grown a desire for people to see the division that has come into the Pentecostal movement in the last several decades, from the original Pentecostals who refused to fight in the World Wars to the present day, when examples like the one I have recounted are not as isolated as I wish they were. As I have become acquainted with the present-day peace churches – the various streams of Anabaptist faith that have preserved this understanding of the kingdom of God, and the ways they have moved into Emergent and the broader emerging church – including people like Shane Claiborne, the wonderful folks at Jesus Manifesto, and others – I have wondered why the link isn’t observed more often than it is.

Anabaptist theology, from what I know of it, has always been open to supernatural experiences and such things that characterize the Pentecostal movement these days. At their beginning, Anabaptists were the “heirs” of what we now call Pentecostal experience in the 16th century. The movement has also had at its core the vision that the kingdom of God looks like Jesus, and that Christianity must imitate him, and thus cannot resort to hatred and violence. As another example of my overall point, they are currently in danger of losing this core vision of the nonviolent kingdom of Jesus.

Greg Boyd has written several important posts specifically related to Mennonites, as the heirs of the Anabaptist tradition, about how they must not run away from this vision.

My current question, then, is this: can the two distinctives that have been, throughout church history, the easiest to de-emphasize, choose one and then lose the other, or pretend never existed, be brought together again? Can this happen within Emergent, and the broader movement of emergence Christianity?

1. For more on this, see Jesus For President, A People’s History of Christianity, The Politics of Jesus, and other works, including Peace to War: Shifting Allegiances in the Assemblies of God for a specifically Pentecostal perspective
2. For more on this, see 2000 Years of Charismatic Christianity, especially, though there are other good works. But I’ll admit – this one is harder, since there are not as many good scholars of Pentecostalism as there should be