Category: politics
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Fiet: Wheaton College and the Fear Machine
Midwestern pastor (and Wheaton alum) April Fiet has some really good thoughts today about the Wheaton College brouhaha around professor Larycia Hawkins’ comments about Muslims and Christians worshiping the “same God”.
Fiet doesn’t tackle the comments themselves, but rather our approach to them, regardless of our position.
What troubles me the most deeply about what is happening at Wheaton has very little to do with statements of faith, and more to do with a hermeneutic of suspicion. More narrowly, I am troubled by the fear that seems to be driving much of the conversation. It seems to me that too many conversations within the church are being powered by fear rather than by love for one another.
She talks about some of the fears she sees, and some of the really good things she has seen happen when fear was not so prevalent. And I really like this reminder:
Fear cannot be the motivating factor for the way Christians live, move, and exist in this world. When writing about the Christian life, the author of Hebrews put it this way: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.” (Hebrews 12:1-2a) We run as people motivated by the cloud of witnesses all around us, and we run with our eyes on Jesus. We are not running because we’re afraid. We are not running because there’s something scary chasing us. We’re running as part of a group that has all eyes fixed on Jesus.
I really appreciate her focus here. It dovetails nicely, too, with something one of my pastors has been saying recently on this topic, which is that even if we disagree with Professor Hawkins’ position, we can make good progress in not “othering” our Muslim neighbors simply by remembering and adhering to God’s command to love our neighbor.
Anyhow, Fiet’s piece: recommended reading.
Infrastructure and the Common Good
Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker last week:
What we have, uniquely in America, is a political class, and an entire political party, devoted to the idea that any money spent on public goods is money misplaced, not because the state goods might not be good but because they would distract us from the larger principle that no ultimate good can be found in the state. Ride a fast train to Washington today and you’ll start thinking about national health insurance tomorrow.
My family just returned from a two-week vacation road trip that took us through Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Alabama before returning home. You notice things while driving for days.
While in Tennessee we stopped at a state park built around a Tennessee Valley Authority dam that was built in the 1930s as a part of the New Deal and is still going strong. (I had no idea the TVA system of electrical generating dams was as big as it is.)
[Norris Dam, commissioned in 1936.]
The only way our road trip was possible was thanks to the massive Interstate Highway system kicked off in the 1950s. So beneficial to be able to drive between major cities at fast speeds without having to slow down for each town. But many of the roads were in bad condition, with a minimum number of apparent ongoing repairs.
While in North Carolina we saw the news of the terrible Amtrak crash, in a Philadelphia neighborhood familiar to my mother-in-law, not far from where she used to live.
While in Alabama we visited the US Space and Rocket Center. We marveled at the almost indescribably huge Saturn V rocket and pored over displays detailing the US space program from the 1960s to the space shuttle and Skylab in the 80s and 90s to… well, not much today.
So…?
It seems obvious to me that the days of infrastructure spending are past, and that seems like an increasing problem. Sure, it’s easy to say “the government is the problem, not the solution” when you do your taxes and have to figure out the tax code that even the IRS doesn’t really understand.
But if the government isn’t going to maintain the roads, who is? Does anybody really think we’d be better off without the federal Interstate Highway system, or without the TVA’s utilities? Thousands of commuters use the train system every day, helping ease the strain (and pollution) of car commutes. Should we hope somehow that private enterprise will fund those repairs and infrastructure investments?
It’s enlightening to spend a few minutes looking at the Federal Government spending breakdown over on the National Priorities Project. Of a nearly $4 trillion federal budget, a full two-thirds of it is commitments to Social Security and Medicare.
Then here’s how the remaining third breaks down:
It’s striking to me how small a fraction is spent on infrastructure-type things. The entire budget for transportation, energy & environment, and science is only 8% of discretionary spending. We spend seven times as much on the military as we do for highways, airways, power, environmental protection, and space combined.
This is not workable for the United States in the long term. Regardless of our party affiliation, we should recognize that the government is at its best when it is pooling resources for the common good. And from my vantage point in the driver’s seat of a minivan these past couple weeks, there’s a lot of good that needs to be done if we could just agree to make it a priority to do it.
American Oligarchy
The kerfuffle around Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act this week has been a mess of ugly rhetoric and heat generated without creating a lot of light on the subject. The RFRA was passed by the Indiana legislature and signed by the governor, only to elicit massive outcry from corporate leaders who immediately did reactive things like restricting business travel to Indiana.
Joe Carter lamented thus on Twitter this morning:
He was quickly retweeted by, among others, Russell Moore, who is president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission for the Southern Baptist Convention.
The fact that American is (and has been, for some decades) functionally an oligarchy isn’t really breaking news. I find it interesting, though, that the religious wing of the GOP is suddenly this week finding it concerning.
More interesting is that, if you want to try to change things and eliminate that oligarchy, you’re going to have to take steps that the GOP opposes. (The obvious first one that comes to mind is restricting the amount of money that corporations can dump in to influence elections.)
Hmmm…
Internet filtering and government 'protection'
Internet filtering has been a hot topic in the news the past few days. In Britain, prime minister David Cameron has proposed that all British internet service providers must turn on a “family-friendly filter” by default for all users, which would only be turned off at the account holder’s specific request. The goal: to keep pornography away from children.
Today, Gospel Coalition blogger Joe Carter published a piece titled “Why Online Pornography is Being Blocked in the UK—and Why It Should Be in the U.S. Too”. Says Carter,
[T]he support for unlimited access to pornography, distributed freely in every home with an Internet connection, is not a cause that any Christian should tolerate, much less support.
Now on one hand I want to agree with Mr. Carter on this one. I think internet filtering is an excellent idea. I have my home computers set up with filters to help keep myself out of trouble and to try to help protect my children. But I’m hesitant to support filtering as a government requirement, for at least a couple of reasons:
Technical Implementation To put it simply: it ain’t that easy. Existing filtering sites/mechanisms are typically based on blacklists - lists of domains known to contain objectionable material. And the granularity on those blacklists isn’t so good. An image sharing site, for example, could contain both perfectly acceptable and very improper material. So do you block it or let it go? And secondly, let’s face it: how many teenage boys with hacking skills are going to let this slow them down? It won’t last long.
On Principle… I’m also concerned about establishing the precedent that the government should dictate content filtering of some sort. Sure, right now in Britain you can request to have it turned off. But once the filtering is there, it’s a much shorter step to just say it needs to stay turned on all the time for some content. And who decides which content?
Sure, it’s easy for Christians to agree that porn should be filtered. But what happens when the government decides that maybe certain “hate speech” should be filtered, too? What happens when the government decides that “hate speech” includes speaking what you believe the Bible says about, say, homosexuality? Suddenly that government-mandated filtering doesn’t seem so wonderful, does it?
There’s a right way to do it Here’s the thing: I’m not against filtering. Not in the least. And if ISPs want to provide filtering, even turned on by default, as a service to their customers, and as good citizens, I think that’d be excellent. Every parent should be encouraged to take steps to protect their children from things they don’t need to see.
I’ll be honest: I’ve been wrestling with this position quite a bit this morning. I’ve had a good Twitter conversation with my friend Andy Osenga, who disagrees with me on this one. And I’ve certainly not complained when the government has taken steps to restrict unhealthy/destructive personal behavior for the public good. (I love Iowa’s no-smoking laws.) But I think this situation is different.
Unrestricted internet communication is the 21st century analogue of the free speech that the First Amendment prohibits the Congress from infringing upon. And I’d rather not start giving away that freedom.
And yeah, I know I’m making a slippery slope argument. But this is the government that in the past decade has told us that it’s just “enhanced interrogations” of the really bad guys, and next thing you know we have drones killing a 16-year-old American citizen without any due process. So forgive me if I’m not inclined to believe that the government won’t expand its reach at every opportunity.
There are a lot of current rights / privileges that American Christians enjoy that we could consider worth giving up in order to better follow Christ or to have a better society. But speech? Eesh, let’s be careful there.
Closely intertwined
I think it may take the American evangelical church another decade or so to really realize how closely intertwined they are with the Republican party, but my prayer is that the realization hits sooner rather than later. What compounds the issue is that our view of American exceptionalism makes us prideful enough that we are resistant to learn from our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world on the topic.
-- me, in an email a few minutes ago
My Favorite Elected Official
The primary focus this election day is on the race for President, as well it should be. After I leave work I’ll head over to my precinct to cast my ballot. (I just can’t get into the early voting thing - I like voting in my neighborhood on the day of.) Unfortunately, I won’t be able to vote for my favorite elected public official, since he’s only on the ballot in one small township in Wisconsin. However, let me take a couple of paragraphs to remind us that elected officials serve in roles both great and small, and we should be thankful for all of them.
This is my dad. He serves as the town clerk for the tiny township of Marshall in Richland County, Wisconsin. He was first appointed to this post to fill out the term of the previous clerk. He has since been elected to the post at least once - maybe a couple of times, I can’t keep track of their election cycles.
As township clerk, Dad is responsible for keeping the township’s paperwork, paying the (few) employees, keeping the books, setting the agenda for and recording the town board meetings, running elections, and in general making sure the town’s business is conducted efficiently and legally. For this he gets paid a minimal salary - not anywhere close to full-time, but maybe a little better than minimum wage. (Mom has been appointed the volunteer assistant town clerk so that she can cover township meetings if he’s out of town.)
Town business is seemingly never done; any time we visit the phone seems to ring on a daily basis with some issue or another. Maybe the town patrolman (who drives the plow in the winter and fixes the roads in the summer) needs help with a persnickety citizen; maybe some citizen needs reassurance on why their property is being reassessed for tax purposes; maybe the town chairman wants to confirm the next meeting’s business. Each phone call gets a patient and thorough discussion as Dad walks them through the issues.
The responsibility of running the elections is, by itself, a significant role - especially when you consider the number of elections that have been held in Wisconsin the past couple of years. During the recall effort for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, first there were primaries. Then there was the recall. Then there were some county elections sandwiched around those. Dad was running a different election every second or third week for a few months. Craziness.
There can’t be many elected positions more minor than that of town clerk for a township of less than 600 people, but I’m proud of my Dad for taking the responsibility seriously and serving the people in his township to the best of his ability. Today as we vote for our leaders at the highest levels, let’s not forget the servants at the lowest levels, too. They are worthy of our respect, our prayers, and our thanks today and every day as they serve.
Single Payer
I was stuck in a hotel last night watching Paul Ryan’s speech, and after he ripped on Obamacare, I had to comment on twitter:
Fellow BHT patron (and, so far as I can tell, staunch conservative / libertarian) Randy replied this morning. twitter.com/rmcrob/st… twitter.com/cjhubbs/s… twitter.com/rmcrob/st… twitter.com/cjhubbs/s…
So, stuck in another hotel room tonight (headed home tomorrow, thank God), as promised I want to write down some thoughts about single payer health care.
I’ll lay out my disclaimers out front: I haven’t done a lot of research on this. I’m shooting more or less from the hip. I’m not a doctor, nor do I have experience with the medical industry, save as an infrequent consumer.
So, about single payer… Maybe I should be a good engineer and first define what I mean by “single payer” health care. I use the term to describe a system where the government provides the funding for the health care system in the country, paying for services directly. Examples of single payer systems include the British National Health Service, and, to an extent, the Canadian health care system.
Why might single payer be a good idea?
Lower costs It’s a fair question: do we really think government is the most efficient way to run things? But let’s face it: the current system isn’t efficient. Administrative costs eat anywhere between 10 percent (if you believe the insurance agencies) and 30 percent (per a Harvard Medical School report) of the total health care dollars in the US. With $2.26 trillion dollars spent each year in the US on health care, percentage gains for administrative overhead will equal savings. Think about the number of insurance companies and billing middle-men that can be avoided in a single payer system.
Better understanding of actual costs
Any time I look at a bill received from the doctor I realize there are a bunch of shenanigans going on with the pricing of health care. The “list price” for a procedure (i.e. the price I would pay if I didn’t have insurance?) is really high. But then there’s this “negotiated” price listed. Which is a lot less. And I only have to pay a percentage of the “negotiated” price. It’s bizarre and hard to explain.
It works other places
Republicans will tell you anecdotal horror stories about the British or Canadian health care systems, but in the less-biased opinions of my British and Canadian friends, those systems actually work decently well. They’re not perfect, but they’re not atrocious, either. It’s doable.
It’s different than housing and transportation
Randy asked why, if we’re going to go the public funding route, don’t we also publicly fund other needs, like housing and transportation?
First off: we often do. It’s called public housing assistance, and public transportation.
Second off: health care is a different sort of beast. Lack of basic health care can be the reason that poor people are physically unable to work a job. A preventable dental condition or disease can be the difference between being able to show up to work and having to stay home.
The Social Contract
Whether you fully buy in to Thomas Hobbes’ idea of the Social Contract or not, I think he got at least one thing right: that there are certain ills which the government is the appropriate remedy, and that citizens should agree to give up some freedoms to that government in return for the benefits it provides.
Heck, even the Apostle Paul (Romans 13) notes that God designed government to “wield the sword”, so it seems that God isn’t completely opposed to governments.
Reading the Old Testament (and the New), it’s also clear that God places priority on caring for the poor, and in treating all classes and races of people with justice and mercy. The Marilynne Robinson essays I read a couple weeks back spoke strongly on that topic, noting that the OT law is designed in multiple aspects to protect the poor and the week, by outlawing usury, time-limiting slavery, and forgiving debts in the jubilee year.
As the people of God, I believe we should value justice and mercy more than personal freedom and rights. Perhaps our Christianity has been tied to our politics for so long in the USA that we’ve forgotten that the church has flourished over the years under many different political theories and types of government. America’s version of democracy may have attractive features, but it’s not God’s only righteous design for governments.
Shouldn’t the church do it?
I’ve been down this discussion path enough times before that I know the next objection that gets raised: “it’s the church’s responsibility to care for the poor, not the government’s.”
To which I say great, if the church can fund it, let’s go for it. But if you look at the money that each church would need to raise in order to start covering things like welfare and health care, you’d quickly exhaust the coffers of every congregation in the country. The church simply does not exist as a significant enough percentage of the population for this to be feasible.
Yes, the church should give funds to care for the poor when they can. (And probably more than most of them currently do.) But it’s not a logical jump to assert that the church is the only group that should do it.
OK, that’s a lot of words already… get to the point!
When I boil it down, I conclude that if a society values justice and mercy toward all, ensuring provision for basic health care is a necessity. If I have to choose between the current unjust mess that we’ve got, and a system that, while run by the government, provides care for all, I’ll support the government-run plan.
For an equally-lengthy, but much-better-put piece on this topic, I’d encourage you to read Michael Bird’s piece from back in June over on Patheos.
Also Bring Cold Water
Responses from right-wingers and evangelical Christians to the so-called “Ground Zero mosque” have been spread broadly throughout the cable news media and online news and opinion sites over the past few weeks. Initial responses were typical God-and-country red meat, proclaiming Ground Zero to be “hallowed ground”, and declaring that allowing Muslims to build a mosque on that site would be, (to borrow a tired phrase,) to let the terrorists win.
This response, despite the patriotic fervor with which it was proclaimed, has now finally widely been debunked (including a great bit by Frank Rich today in the New York Times). First off, the proposed building isn’t a mosque, but a cultural center. And it isn’t planned for the “Ground Zero” World Trade Center site; it’s actually two blocks away. And similar “hallowed ground” within a two-block radius of Ground Zero houses an off-track betting establishment, a strip club, multiple fast-food restaurants, and several souvenir shops (just to name a few), so it’s not like the whole area has been somehow ‘set apart’. And finally, what does it say about our belief in religious freedom if, after due process has been followed, we then want then government to prohibit the building of a religious center based strictly on the particular religion in question?
Those points may not yet have gained full acceptance, especially among Republicans looking for an election-year issue, but in general I’ve seen them make inroads in he past few weeks.
But yesterday on the Christian group blog Evangel, a post by Tom Gilson (a strategist with Campus Crusade for Christ) brings up what I believe will be the next round of argument against the project: saying that if we look at this strictly as a religious liberty issue, we are making the mistake of believing that Islam is simply another religion.
[A friend] views Islam as a religion that deserves the same rights and privileges as any other. That’s questionable, to say the least….
If you think the Ground Zero mosque comes down to a simple matter of symbolism, or of religious freedom, then you don’t understand the issues deeply enough.
Instead, the author proclaims, Islam is a way of belief whose ultimate goal is domination, and that if we don’t watch out, America will simply be Islam’s next conquest.
On this topic I have heard and seen much from both sides. I have read Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s chilling account of growing up in Somalia and her passionate assertion that Islam, as a religion, denigrates women. I have also heard first-hand from a Zimbabwean Christian pastor who warned that the Islam he encountered in Africa was intent on conquest. But by the same token I have worked for many years alongside Muslims who are gentle, family men, who had no aspirations but to provide for their families and to live here peaceably as neighbors and friends. (And, let’s face it, I can no more fairly hold all Muslims responsible for 9/11 than they can fairly hold all Christians responsible for Timothy McVeigh, Aryan separatists, and, oh, the Crusades.)
The more I think on this subject, the more I am convinced that once again right-wing Christians like Mr. Gilson have mixed up their politics with their religion and gotten it wrong. Nowhere does the Bible instruct us to protect our turf, to repel the unbelieving alien, and to presciently foil those who might intend to persecute us. But it does instruct us, often, to love our neighbors. To turn the other cheek when wronged. It reminds us over and over that our battles are spiritual battles, not physical ones. That Jesus already is Lord, and that we need not fear what mortal men can do to us.
We should stop fighting new mosques at every opportunity, and stop making enemies of dear people for whom Christ died. Instead, we should follow Christ’s command and love them.
It’s time to apply Jesus’ teaching about giving both coat and cloak. If someone comes and says ‘give us land to build a mosque’, don’t just give the land; also bring cold water (in the name of Jesus) to those who are laboring to build it.
What Would Jesus Want Us To Think about Healthcare Reform? a Quick Response
What would Jesus want us to think about health care reform?
That’s the question that Justin Taylor proffers at his blog, courtesy of Brad Green, theology professor at Union University. Professor Green’s response to the “what would Jesus do” question has four main points:
- Conservatives don’t think that big new legislation will fix the problems with the system
- Conservatives are opposed to the expansion of federal powers as an infringement on liberty
- The Constitution doesn’t explicitly enumerate power in this area to the Federal government, so Health Care reform would be unconstitutional
- Christians have a “strong view of human sin and thus are often not inclined to want to grant large amounts of power to any governmental body”
While I will concur with the final point, in the first three points Professor Green misses the boat in two critical ways.
First, he fails to acknowledge the reality that, regardless of how strictly he’d like to interpret the Tenth Amendment, the United States Supreme Court has a long history of allowing the Federal government expanded powers via the Interstate Commerce clause of the Constitution. Just because he, personally, disagrees with that interpretation doesn’t mean that health care reform legislation will be unconstitutional.
Second, and far more greviously, Professor Green, by virtue of his first two points, has somehow assumed that Jesus’ political views were American Evangelical Conservative. How else can he leap from “What Would Jesus Do?” to “Conservatives are opposed to this”? If he wants to make the argument that Jesus would’ve held those views, he can try to make that argument, but he is foolhardy to think it can just be assumed.
If the evangelical political Right in America wants to oppose increased federal involvement in the health care system, there are reasonable arguments that can be made. Shoddy reasoning, though, as demonstrated in this article, only makes them look silly.
Fox News, knee-jerk reactions, and out-of-context statements
If my previous posts in which I declared my support for Obama and for civilly-recognized gay marriage weren’t enough to convince my church friends that I have become a heathen leftist Commie pinko, I’ll probably do it with this post. Why? Because I’m going to be mildly critical of Fox News and of those who blindly follow it.
Yesterday I linked to a Rod Dreher column entitled “I was wrong about Sotomayor speech”. (Yeah, there’s an article missing somewhere in that sentence, but live with it.) To catch anyone up who hasn’t heard about it, the controversial statement from Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor was made in a 2002 speech at Cal Berkeley, where she said this:
I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.
There was (as one might expect) immediately a lot of noise made by conservative groups like the Judicial Confirmation Network and bloggers (I’ll link Michelle Malkin here as just one example), and when I was on the treadmill at the gym for 30 minutes on Tuesday afternoon, Fox News host Glenn Beck had that quote up on the screen seemingly every minute of his show. And let’s face it: as a stand-alone statement, it seems bad. It’s not the sort of thing that a “judges apply the law, they don’t make it” conservative like me likes to hear at all.
So back to that Dreher article I linked. Conservative columnist Rod Dreher candidly notes that after reading the full text of the speech in question, he says he is
…still a bit troubled by the remark, but not in any important way. Taken in context, the speech was about how the context in which we were raised affects how judges see the world, and that it’s unrealistic to pretend otherwise. Yet – and this is a key point – she admits that as a jurist, one is obligated to strive for neutrality.
And then he quotes another passage from Sotomayor’s speech, one that didn’t ever make the screen at Fox News:
While recognizing the potential effect of individual experiences on perception, Judge Cedarbaum nevertheless believes that judges must transcend their personal sympathies and prejudices and aspire to achieve a greater degree of fairness and integrity based on the reason of law. Although I agree with and attempt to work toward Judge Cedarbaum’s aspiration, I wonder whether achieving that goal is possible in all or even in most cases.
Now, that puts a whole different spin on things, doesn’t it? All of a sudden Judge Sotomayor sounds a lot less like a radical legislate-from-the-bench sort of judge and more like an idealist who nonetheless understands the role of the judge in the three-branch governmental system.
At this point I have to put a disclaimer in, because just as my support of civilly recognizing gay marriage caused friends to think that I no longer believe homosexual behavior is sin, this post suggesting that Judge Sotomayor isn’t quite as radical as Fox News suggests will cause some friends to think that I’m soft on abortion. So here’s the disclaimer. Judge Sotomayor does not appear to be the type of judge I’d prefer to see picked for the Supreme Court. I much prefer the staunch conservative views of Justices Roberts and Scalia, and the late Chief Justice Rehnquist. And abortion remains a heinous sin. OK? Are we cool? So let’s proceed.
Here’s the thing I want to get to in regard to Fox News: if you watch it and for a minute think that you’re really getting a “fair and balanced” view of the news, think again. Is it truly “fair and balanced” to hammer on Sotomayor for the one line that sounds bad, without bringing in the other line from the same speech that balances things out?
So next you’ll say to me “OK, Chris, we’ll admit that Fox News is biased towards the conservative viewpoint. But all the other networks are biased towards the liberal side, so why can’t we have our one network?” And that’s OK, I guess, as long as you recognize the bias. Because, let’s face it: if your only news source is Fox News, you wouldn’t even know they have a bias. (Me personally? I don’t watch TV news at all. But my news sources of choice should really be the topic of a separate blog post.)
So my plea to my friends this morning: read, watch, and listen widely. Think about things and come to your own conclusions. Don’t just assume that if it shows up on Fox News, it’s the gospel truth. (Don’t assume that it isn’t, either.) Be willing to see shades of grey in areas where there isn’t a black-and-white standard. And be gracious and loving to all as you do it.