protest – Inspiring Change LLC

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.

Racism & Me

How I have come to understand my own racism through my life experience of sexism in the church.

We value learning in our church community. I hope yours does, too. In our small Tuesday night book group we have been reading the new book “How to Be an Anti-Racist,” that is challenging us to see American culture and our participation in it with new eyes. The author, scholar Dr. Ibram Kendi, candidly recalls his own struggle as a young black man to see his own participation in the racist structures in our culture. He then encourages us to become people who stop using the term “racist” as a personal slur and instead see how we all, majority white and minority persons of color, live in a society that has organized itself around the myths and values of white control and racial superiority.

This is not a comfortable critique. I grew up in the 1960’s in a solidly middle class, white Protestant, small town family, with two working parents and a public-school education. I was taught to believe that we are all equal though different. That with the right skills and education anyone can succeed. That we may have different skin color, but that somehow, we should overlook that and carry on. I remember my parents and their friends saying things like “We don’t see color” as evidence of racial sensitivity. The only persons of color in my high school classes were foreign exchange students. Racial issues like Jim Crow segregation, civil right demonstrations, lynching and race riots were far removed from my day to day experience in Connecticut: those were the terrifying problems of the post-Civil War south and impoverished inner cities, where true bigotry was on display.

When I spent a couple of summers working at a church camp in the lakes region of New Hampshire, I didn’t anticipate the tension and fear that descended upon us one week when two busloads of children from majority black Roxbury, Massachusetts were dropped off. Years later I wasn’t sure what to think of the dozen or so black classmates at my very white Lutheran college who stuck together like glue everywhere they went and who seemed to shrink into the background when in class, or my black friend who became his class president and seemed to hold that same group of black kids at a distance and with some distain.

I take my education and spiritual life seriously. I never in my life have consciously belittled or spoken words of hate toward a person of another race because of their skin color. But I have participated in the way our majority culture can’t or won’t see the way we have historically created a rigid racial hierarchy; whites at the pinnacle of this value system, and persons of various shades of skin tone, from light to dark, in descending rank. I didn’t spend much time wondering why Native reservations or black urban neighborhoods were chronically poor and underserved. I have not been seriously concerned that my Lutheran denomination is the whitest church in America or why. I have given modest intellectual ascent to preferential hiring of persons of color or college admissions while wondering if it does any good.

Until I became a woman pastor, that is. I was ordained into public ministry 35 years ago. A young, idealistic, energetic minister, eager to begin serving Jesus as a preacher and community leader. But I immediately began to understand in my bones what systemic prejudice looks like and how it functions every day, in every situation, because I was now the unwelcome minority. I was the female body, the female voice, the female profile, who was getting up every morning to lead an organization that was founded, organized and imagined at every level by white men. Many welcomed me and cared for me. But that welcome was a weak counterweight to the attitude, comments, assumptions and barriers I faced every day in the church. It became clear to me quite quickly that in virtually every way, women are not conceived to be legitimate religious leaders. And that men and women, of every age, economic status, educational level and perspective participate in this gendered culture. I am still amazed I lasted 20 years in this system. It became such a personal burden and just wasn’t getting better the longer I stayed, I finally decided to leave the pulpit, change careers, and re-enter the pew.

It has taken me years to better understand the ways race and gender have organized everything in America from neighborhood real estate and poverty, educational disparity and health care, pregnancy leave and lack of childcare support to the lack of diversity in corporate boardrooms. I am still learning and repenting. I believe these are the groans of our culture, struggling in these days of amazing political polarity around issues of race and immigration, to recognize the hierarchical systems we live under and must reorganize if we are to become a real democracy. My prayer is that if you have read along this far, you will join me in this continuous personal and structural awakening.

It takes a commitment to be open to experience we don’t share. To put down our automatic defenses and listen to voices who are trying to express their experience. To tolerate the discomfort when we feel unsettled. Where can you begin? Try listening to new podcasts like “1619,” watching videos like “13^th” on Netflix, reading recent books like “Between the World and Me” and “How to Be an Anti-Racist”, and innumerable fiction works by minority authors like “Medicine Walk” and “Indian Horse.” We can help make our country better for everyone if we begin to understand that racism is built into our society, and it is going to take some deconstruction before we heal.

(originally published Savage Pacer, Online/print 11/13/19)

Jesus Was Not a Marxist

This fall’s public demonstrations begun as “Occupy Wall Street” follow in the time-honored political traditions of modern cultures. Concord, Massachusetts; Selma, Alabama; Tiananmen Square, China; Cairo, Egypt: people have risen up in massive numbers across the world to seek change. Whether you have joined them, or even disagree with their perspectives, as a democracy we all value the power of citizens to peacefully organize to seek justice and change.

The energy of Occupy Wall Street-like gatherings is born in the increasing gap in our country between the rich and the poor, and a shared impatience with the lingering effects of our last recession. Wall Street in New York City, the geographic center of the United State’s Stock Exchange, is also home to many of the world’s largest financial institutions, many of which were involved in complex tinkering with mortgage lending that sparked our long economic slide. Too big to fail, our own tax dollars have been spent to bail out the biggest banks and other financial giants, as many of us watch our savings, pensions and home values shrink. We have all suffered, the poor disproportionately, and finding the villain in this melodrama seems like a natural thing to do.

When at its best, the Christian community has traditionally been an advocate for the sick, imprisoned, and the poor. Taking it’s mission from the example and command of Jesus, to tend to the sick and suffering, “the least of these,” it makes sense that activists and clergy from all parts of the faith have joined the demonstrations taking part around the country this fall. I celebrate the long legacy of Christian ministries that have sought to bring love, light and relief to those in need. I praise the clergy who gather in the streets with the protesters as witness and support for those who live, chant, and demonstrate for change.

But I won’t sit silently and let one particular claim I have seen recently in social media go unanswered: “Jesus was a Marxist.” No, he was not.

Marxism is a modern political movement that has its roots in the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. They argued that human beings could establish a perfect economy if everyone shared their resources communally. A new communism would develop following a class struggle, the result of failed capitalism. Marx believed that religions are “the opiate of the people,” dulling their will to revolt. While these ideas do serve as a stark contrast to the rigid classes and oppressive, generational monarchies of old European and Asian cultures, the application of these ideas in real human cultures has failed. The Soviet Union, China, East Germany, Somalia, North Korea, and Cuba have been cultures of oppression. The powerful hoard power. The weak are kept weak and anyone opposing the powerful is kept behind bars, barbed wires and walls, or killed. Exactly what part of this broken political model would Jesus advocate?

While Jesus constantly advocated for the sick, suffering and oppressed, he rejected the pressure to start a revolution or class war. In fact, he repeatedly said his “kingdom was not of this world.” Instead of setting up a new government, as some of his disciples believed he would, he lived on the margins of power and when confronted, told the Pharisees to “render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” Jesus’ vision of God’s kingdom is about bringing all people to God’s table: rich, poor, powerful, weak, visible, and invisible. It pointed to a way of seeing the world far different than how human beings do. Jesus pointed to a kingdom of peace and justice that included women and children, the old and infirm, the powerless and the powerful. This is God’s kingdom, not ours. When we live with this vision, we share in the vision of God.

Jesus was a healer, a teacher, a sage, a prophet, and a revolutionary, the Messiah who refused to lead a revolt. After a short life, he was executed because the earthly powers feared his kingdom of peace, healing, inclusion and non-violence. Call him a revolutionary for God. But for Jesus’ sake, don’t call him a Marxist. It’s just plain wrong.

(First published in the Savage PACER, Saturday, 10.22.2011)