Category: political parties

Is a Vaccine at Odds with the Christian Faith?

The Christian faith is all about loving God and neighbor. Get immune, save and love your neighbor and their children. Get the Covid vaccine.

Perhaps it’s never been possible to have agreement on the definition of a faith tradition; ideas about what it means to follow a religion have always been fluid and contentious. I read a news article this week that a settlement was reached in an employment religious discrimination lawsuit, granting a Minnesota man $65,000 in back pay and damages from his former employer over his refusal to be fingerprinted for a required background check. He said it was against his Christian faith to do so.

Henry Harrington claimed that his employer, Ascension Point Recovery Services (APRS), a debt collection company, had failed to make the required accommodation for his belief and fired him. A similar employment case was filed four years ago in Pennsylvania, when a local school bus driver refused fingerprinting as part of her background check, claiming that the process would leave the “mark of the devil” on her, preventing her future entrance to heaven. That’s news to me.

Many more of these religious objection cases have been filed across the country in recent years as social and legal changes have pressed up against long held personal beliefs about social responsibility, employment requirements, privacy rights and our own physical autonomy.

Can a life insurance company, considering you for a new policy, require you to release to them your full physical and mental health record, disclose your family medical history, take your blood pressure and a sample of your blood? Might they also review the public filing of your divorce decree from 10 years back? They have been doing such things legally for decades. Can a federal employer take your photo, driver’s license number, Passport information as well fingerprints to screen you for a job? Will it search for any records of arrest or legal charges brought against you in national data bases? Most certainly it will.

As more information about our individual lives is collected and shared, many of us are pushing back. Where does my right to security of person and property end and legal or social demands begin? And when we must make arguments for protecting those intuitive, personal boundaries, it’s no wonder that issues of faith, meaning and core values come front and center.

These same issues, it seems to me, are at the center of the debate around Covid vaccine mandates. For most of 2020, we prayed and hoped for the miracle of a safe and effective vaccine to be created by our nation’s research scientists, folks who have been steadily working on similar virus strains of influenza, bird flu, and SARS for decades. Because of the previous research, the vaccines came quickly, tentatively released after multiple trials with eager volunteers, giving us hope that it would snuff out the pandemic and its possible mutations with our majority immunity.

The vaccine is free for all. Now anyone over 12 can get immunized! And even after weeks and months of pleading and even cash incentives, 20% of eligible Americans have refused this life-saving medicine.

I have come to understand this refusal by so many as the result of all the loss of privacy many of us feel over the last two generations mentioned earlier. Some people, claiming conflicts with the vaccine and their faith practices, have received exemptions from vaccination in the past few months, risking their own health and the life and wellbeing of those around them.  Even when such exemptions don’t seem to be wise or practical, current law does allow such freedom when it comes to boundaries set by a person’s sincere religious practice.

But people are still dying, children are still not protected, and our medical personnel are traumatized by the continuing demands on their health and stamina. As new mandates are announced, reluctant employees are claiming a religious exemption, requesting letters of support from their Christian clergy. I want to go on the record with this admonition: Don’t ask your pastor for such a letter. Your pastor can’t make a coherent faith argument against receiving an approved vaccination that will save your life and the life of those around you.

Why? Because, quite simply, the Christian faith is centered on the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. And if there is a central theme to his life and teaching, it is love of God and love of neighbor. In this, Jesus taught, is all the Law and the Prophets. It’s not about creating a cover for your distrust of government, or resentment that you are expected to take medicine because someone else says so. It is not so you can live your life exactly on your own terms, shouting “freedom” until you are hoarse. Every day of his life, Jesus spoke and demonstrated his gospel, that as God loves us, so we are called to that same love of one another. To take proven medicine when you can, to save your own life as well as the life of the weak, young or vulnerable, is discipleship work. There is no religious excuse that makes any sense to me. Love Jesus? Love your neighbor. And get your shots.

 

(Written for The Savage Pacer, Spiritual Reflection column; Published Saturday, 9/18/21)

 

 

A Divided House

Perhaps like you, I have been thinking continuously of how we have failed to overcome our national crisis of pandemic while other countries, such as New Zealand and Canada have had such different progressions of disease. There is a reason the pandemic continues in our country: we haven’t found a way to come together and fight this virus as one people.

Over the last 5 months our nation’s leadership seems split in two camps, one urging attention to strict social mitigation strategies, and the other minimizing the severity of the danger and ignoring the direction of our nation’s public health and infectious disease scientists. A portion of the population protests wearing cotton masks in public while others in their communities die. So, this is how we are going into a new school year: attempting to get back to in person learning, while trying to be safe, generally assuming that teachers, staff and families may all, at various times, come down with Covid19.

         I have run out of words to describe my feelings about the sorry state of our national attitude toward science, public health, the vulnerable, the poor, and necessary sacrifice for the common good. I am so sorry that you and I are kept from friends, from grandchildren, from vacations, graduations, weddings and normal on-campus college classes. But it’s not just our summer we have lost. Service and medical workers are exhausted and getting sick. Seniors are suffering from isolation and deep loneliness in nursing homes. Indigenous people on far flung reservations are falling ill without adequate fresh water sources or health services. Young adults are frozen in their job searches, businesses declare bankruptcy and millions have lost their jobs and benefits. And just this past week, current efforts to re-size the Postal Service come just as millions of Americans plan to vote by mail, threatening to impact the outcome of our November presidential election.

The days are long past that people of faith can say politics is not appropriate in church. White clergy have kept silent long enough. Many in our country seem intent on returning our nation to some kind of nostalgic vision of its past self, where we can pretend that black lives don’t matter, that individualism cloaked as “freedom” is the highest good, that we can build walls to keep out anyone who isn’t here already, and that white wealthy business owners know what is best for every American. If that is what Christianity looks like to you, you have only come in contact with a kind of white cultural American Christianity, one that worked hard to insulate itself from the actual life of Jesus Christ.

The God I believe created the world is the same God who, in Jesus, sought out the powerless, healed the sick, blessed the forgotten and challenged the way some accumulated wealth, privilege and power at the expense of the weak. He spoke of God’s kingdom as the power to free us from selfishness and fear and turn toward healing the world. This kingdom talk so threatened the men in power in Israel 2000 years ago that he was whipped and publicly crucified in order to silence him.

         I believe many Christians are so offended by Jesus they don’t want to hear how his priorities judge human politics. The values and policies we vote for and fund are exactly the way that we live our faith in our hometowns and states. Jesus called us to recognize the dark powers of sin that exist in us all, to turn from their illusions and be sent to live courageously in community with one another. What that means to me is that I’m called to be consistently for my neighbor and not against her.

         In a few weeks’ time, voters will again get a chance to choose a direction for our nation at the highest levels. No set of candidates is perfect because perfection isn’t humanly possible. But I urge you to reflect on how your faith intersects with politics, because if we claim to be Jesus followers, his kingdom critiques how we live together, how we solve problems, set laws and create vision for our nation. May we find a renewed commitment to become one people from many, as we seek to recover from such a difficult year.

The Huge Problem of Binary Thinking

There is so much the small child’s brain is figuring out about the world it’s no wonder human memories don’t begin to form until our third or fourth year. And even then, they are impressionistic: a beloved face, the flash of a dog running across a lawn, the yellow wallpaper over a grandparent’s shoulder as he lifted us out of a crib. So much experience and so few ways to describe it to ourselves.  One of the very first ways our brain organizes the world is to divide known things in two: night, day; up, down; yes, no; cold, hot; mother, father. This binary division is one of the first ways we know how the world is.

By the time we are ready for kindergarten, we can expand those mental and linguistic maps. We know there are more than two temperatures of things, the day is divided by clocks into hours, and we have a box of crayons which contains a dozen or more different colors. But this automatic binary thinking seems to really stick when it comes to sorting people. Small children believe the world to be clearly sorted into good and bad people, boys and girls, rich and poor, young and old, black and white. A critical problem in our country at the moment is that many adults refuse to grow beyond these mental labels. And spend enormous energies reinforcing these labels when they are shamelessly simplistic or just plain wrong.

I’ve been lamenting the way we compartmentalize one another this way as we approach the midterm election this November 6th. Nothing is as distorted and illustrative of this binary division than the current crop of negative campaign ads. While officially a multi-party political system, our politics have evolved into a binary choice: the Republican Party or the Democratic Party. Dividing our political visions into two teams has created an Us vs. Them strategy that currently draws no one to middle ground.

Push, pull, left, right. Yes, our politics have been in this tug of war for generations. But the new pervasiveness of personal technology, the internet, and social media have allowed white racial anxiety to reemerge from the far shadows into a frighteningly broad cultural attitude, fanning the anonymous rage of some into flame. Just this week over a dozen mail bombs were sent to Democratic leaders, and neo-Nazi anti-Semitic rhetoric spurred one gunman to slaughter 11 Jewish worshippers at prayer in Pennsylvania.

Some of us were once naïve enough to believe that the election of Barack Obama marked permanent social change in America. The 2016 campaigns demonstrate that racial fear is still at the heart of majority America. With no political experience and a self-professed history of exploiting women, with a campaign promise to build a giant wall on our southern border and reverse trade agreements with China, Trump won his party’s nomination and then the national election. His current policies attempt to upend sexual minority rights, stall climate change efforts and reverse laws that protect women’s reproductive decisions. Every one of these choices repeatedly divides us, each speech he gives shamelessly promotes himself, all the while Russian efforts to sow political unease in America by planting false political stories in social media, shared instantly by millions across Facebook, succeed. Putin must be thrilled.

Us/them, either/or binary thinking never could sustain a complex democracy. The answers to our personal and social challenges are too complex. I urge you to become part of the solution, and vigorously resist the racial bias we have all grown up with; to question political rhetoric, even from your own party of choice; and to recognize that the words we use to think, describe and talk with one another can have life and death consequences in the real world. Leadership at every level of government matters. Vote.

 

(First published 10/31/18 in Savage Pacer “Spiritual Reflections” column)

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My Christian Faith IS Political

How does human culture change? If we tell the simple story, the kind that gets written for elementary school textbooks, change looks explosive, like it was shot out of a cannon. Continents are discovered by a single explorer, wars end with the stroke of a pen, inventions burst onto the market. But that simple moment is far from the entire story. What lies behind human change are innumerable people, their imaginations, choices and behavior, and the repeated sharing of new information which shifts many toward a converging point of difference. Something new has begun.

Yet while human creativity moves us toward discovery and difference, there is an equally powerful force in human life to prefer the known, the familiar, the past. We are fiercely loyal to what we have been; it has formed our identity. The current presidential administration, with its failure to denounce white supremacist groups, ignoring the danger of climate change, dismissing professional journalism’s historical integrity, isolating our country from our international allies, starting a massive trade war, soft pedaling the rising numbers of school shootings, separating children from parents seeking asylum at our southern border, and attempts to restore glory to the old technology of coal mining, is all about amassing power, promising renewed security and courting those who feel they are losing their assumed, rightful place in America. It is government for those who are fundamentally afraid and believe that security can only be found by returning to an imagined, familiar past.

Unfortunately, nowhere is this drive to preserve the known and idealized American past is more visible than in the life of many Christian church leaders and members. For generations, local congregations have reflected the majority culture and resisted any real move to change the status quo. At every crisis point of growth, a majority of leaders and members hold on to the past. Slavery? Post-civil war racial segregation? Women’s suffrage? Civil rights? Vietnam? Birth control? Treaty rights with native tribes? LGBTQ rights? At every turn, among the loudest and most vociferous supporters of maintaining status quo have been church-going, educated, Bible-quoting, privileged middle-class adults .

Nearly every mainline church in Europe is empty on Sundays. Why? They have failed to respond to the world around them. The generations of children born following the horror of World War II found the focus of church life to be rigidly focused on reestablishing the past, a past that was not important to them as Europe recovered and turned outward. This same loss of importance and impact is happening in our country, too. The old systems are losing ground, and every day churches are closing.

I believe we are in the midst of major culture change, much like that which occurred following the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam protests and Watergate. There is a split in the culture between those who do not fear the present — new technologies driving an ever increasing economic globalism, a lessening of white majority population, smaller and more flexible institutions, an economy based on renewable energy, invention and service, and increased urban populations – and those who want life to return to the last century’s industrial economy fed by mining and burning coal, a massive military, a stable white majority population, clear racial and gender roles, a conservative judiciary, and rigid institutionalism. These tensions led to Donald Trump’s election and now play out dramatically in the news every single day.

I believe that the good news that Jesus preached is a message for all time, to every culture. It is news that God, who is the divine energy of all life and creation, is a God of love, welcome, healing and renewal. And that those who feel that power are called to live into those values in every time and place. The church began as a response to the resurrection appearances of Jesus and to the way his gospel life reshaped his disciples into people of peace, community, healing and hope. If our churches are not about proclaiming and living out this gospel, if all they do is maintain the status quo, it’s time to leave them empty. What many courageous people of faith are doing in this culture now to respond to this cultural change is messy and inspired. I am eager to see what the American church will become. It may need to die in many ways in order to reborn to its original purposes. God give us courage to speak when so many demand the church stay “out of politics,” as if politics, the way we use power to order our common life, was of no concern to Jesus.

(my Spiritual Reflections column, originally published in the Savage Pacer, 6/30/18)

Why I’m a Moderate

When it comes to politics, each side of the American major two-party system holds certain beliefs about everything. Including, but not very explicitly, human beings.

Conservatives (Republicans, Libertarians, etc.) seem convinced of the power of the individual. In this worldview, people have unlimited possibilities if they/we just try hard, sacrifice, invest, produce, invent and risk. The human person is strongest as the independent “I” who may contribute to the general welfare, but only because of personal choice and acting out of personal moral or spiritual values. The conservative man or woman buckles down, works hard, and enjoys the fruits of their labor, contributing to the general welfare in limited (roads, bridges, national defense) ways. Success? Well, you deserve it because of hard work, luck, or some other feature of your life. At’a boy! Think Warren Buffet, Ayn Rand, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

Liberals (Democrats, Green Party, etc.) are focused on the welfare of the whole, particularly those whose life experience, health, social status, age or race makes them vulnerable to fewer advantages in the classroom and marketplace. In this worldview, the whole needs protection from the individual run amok; the individual meaning someone Anglo-European, privileged, educated, and middle-class. The environment, exploited by industrialization, needs protection and renewal. Women, children, people of color, the sick, impoverished, and aged, perpetually disadvantaged by the economic system of the last 200 years, deserve legal protection and help from the government of the whole. Think Barack Obama, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, and Ralph Nader.


Here’s why I’m between the extremes: because human nature is imperfect, and both of these polarized views of people and communities are true. We are both ingenious and productive AND careless and profoundly selfish. We need all of us working at our personal best as well as joint efforts for justice, economic opportunity, education, and health care. The very best of American politics is an effort to balance out these perspectives on the human condition. Our extremist rhetoric of the last few years is an exhausting waste of all our time.

We need a government that is committed to hard work and effort as well as the common good. The vast majority of voting Americans know exactly what I mean, and can’t wait for common sense to infuse politics. Won’t that be a glorious day.