Deadly Distractions

Comic from Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
(click to enlarge)

What are these bears going to do if the ice melts?

It is sad indeed when character assassination and “polar” thinking become part of the political process in a country in which we, the people, are the government. At times like these, the political debate should be well reasoned, thoughtful, and policy oriented. If we, the people, are influenced by these tactics, we do our country a disservice and diminish our moral influence in our individual families, churches, and communities.

Comic from Rubes, by Leigh Rubin.
(click for enlarged image)

Exorcising Our Demons

by Melvin Bray

This is a Home-Training essay...

If properly understood, Senator Barak Obama's remarks last week at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia, PA, constitute one of the most significant and honest public addresses ever made on America's 400-year struggle with race. Had we heeded DuBois' 1903 prophetic warning, The Souls of Black Folks, it would have found voice in the 20th century. There is a conversation America has, literally in some cases, been dying to have. That conversation is not in favor of any particular presidential candidate. Please don't relegate and dismiss it on those grounds. However, it is unlikely that we would be so inescapably confronted with such issues outside of a person of color experiencing some measure of success in a bid for the highest elected office in the land.

In her God's Politics post, "Putting Rev. Wright's Preaching in Perspective," Diana Butler Bass implored us to listen better to one another. Now let me suggest something to listen for. The thought is simple, but the lesson is not: Not everyone has experienced America in the same way. And we must lay down the self-absorption that makes us think this doesn't matter, if we are ever to begin to appreciate each other.

Permit a timely example. If you are not Black, you may not know that the Black church is the theatre in which Blacks have historically exorcised their demons—with the pastor as both theologue and thespian embodying the collective process of redemption for his/her people every week. Initially, church was the one place we could go that we weren't under massa's whip, which is why we relish it. Eventually, it became the center and sustainer of our community. So most of us understand Rev. Jeremiah Wright in a way that may escape others.

Church equaled life for us. Where else could we go to exorcise the demons of injustice and intransigence? Where else could we go to exorcise the marginalization and invalidation, the defeat and depression, the struggle and scorn? Where else could we go when our children asked—as my daughter did while coloring just the other day—if Jesus were brown or white? My answer was that he was born to Jewish parents, people of color, whom we usually refer to as olive-skinned. And her heartrending response at 5-years-old was: Why can't he be white? In all the pictures, he's white! Where else could we give cathartic voice to our inner demons in hopes of being transformed like the phoenix into "the better angels of our nature?"

Continue reading on God's Politics blog>>> Part 1 & Part 2

MLK and Identity Politics

by Melvin Bray

The 40th anniversary of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination - April 4, 1968 - will soon be upon us. As I remember Dr. King against the backdrop of this 2008 presidential election cycle, I reflect on what a brilliant political strategist he was. He was able to bring corporations to the point of acquiescence without resorting to violence or bribery. He was able to pass legislation that changed the daily lives of not only blacks but also women, people of faith, and immigrants - without ever being elected to public office or attempting to buy political influence. He was able to garner and leverage the attention of the entire international community on behalf of America's poor, marginalized, and disenfranchised - without ever being appointed to an ambassadorship or other high-profile international post. He was able to remind U.S. citizens what a democracy was and to engender a sense of moral responsibility that, more than 40 years later, challenges us to be the good we want to see in the world. King was a political genius.

With a vision this grand, one would think that the lion's share of King's work would have been on the national and international stage, yet somehow King expected to bring all this about by local, contextual, direct action: organizing to gain political access and self-determination for Blacks, advocating on behalf of unemployed Appalachian whites, striking with sanitation workers. I believe his ability to accomplish each of these things was predicated on a very simple, but profound realization: All politics are identity politics. The question is: whom does one choose to identify with?

Complete the article on the God's Politic's blog>>>

The Ordination of Women

From the comic Non Sequitur, by Wiley

Christo-fascism

Fellow US Christians (and other interested parties), please allow me to offer this bit of perspective.

Whether we can fully appreciate it or not, it is unmistakably arrogant, malicious and inflammatory for a Western, non-practitioner of Islam to use any derivation of the term "Islam" (e.g. "Islamo-fascist" and "Islamic Terrorist") in an attempt to designate America's enemy in the so-called War on Terror—and unless you are a follower of Islam any assumed right to rebut this point goes a long way toward substantiating my assertion. I can make this assertion as a non-Muslim in humble 'others-interest,' because it is a self-critique, but for a non-adherent of Islam to try to defend the practice of constructing such labels is an act of self-absorption predicated on the hegemonic idea that we have the unassailable right to characterize anyone else however we see fit. If that's not arrogance, then the word has lost all meaning! All one can do as a non-follower of Islam, is take a moment, consider the possibility and pay attention to how Muslims themselves perceive what we do.

In last Saturday's New Hampshire Republican debate and again in Thursday's South Carolina rematch, most candidates sought to treat Ron Paul like he was the crazy uncle at the dinner table, belittling him for pointing out that Islamic discontent with America doesn't ferment in a vacuum. Though reactionary in instances, it has cause, and perhaps, justification. (Note I said discontent, not terrorism, has justification.) Why do so many refuse even to consider such a rationale? All it asks of us is to put ourselves in the place of the majority people of the Middle East? Why is Arab and/or Muslim humanity so hard for us to concede?

What brought all this to mind for me was the exchange in last weekend's debate in response to Huckabee's characterization of the Bush administration's policies as "arrogant" and evincing "a bunker mentality." The conversation reminded me of a Seinfeld sketch of Kramer arguing with himself, "I'm not arrogant; you are! No you're arrogant, not me! But let's not forget those good-for-nothing Islamic terrorists! They're the transcendent bogeymen of the 21st century!"

How dare we freely associate the hatefulness of terrorists such as Osama bin Muhammad bin 'Awad bin Laden with the faith of over 1 billion peace-loving people who walk in the way of submission to Allah? With all the indisputable, documented atrocities perpetrated by the Western world over the last two millennia in the name of Christianity—up to and including the war on the Middle East—have we ever once dubbed the proponents or perpetrators of the Crusades, Colonial Expansion, the Inquisition, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, Jim Crow, the Holocaust, the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or South African Apartheid "Christian Terrorists"?

No! Emphatically no. And we never will. Why? Because we believe that such historical "excesses" (isn't that such an wonderfully disingenuous term), though unapologetically supported by Christians of that time and place, do not reflect the beauty of the fundamental tenants of the Christian faith. And since those in power continue to be predominately of Christian heritage, we get to tell our story however we want to remember it.

It wouldn't be arrogance that we won't afford Muslims the same right to define themselves—would it?

The Irony of Evangelicalism

"For many [Iowa] Republican caucus participants, faith was a determining factor. More than eight in 10 Huckabee supporters said they are born again or evangelical Christians, compared to less than half of those who supported his rival Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor. Nearly two-thirds of Huckabee backers also said it was very important that their candidate share their religious beliefs, compared to about one in five of Romney's."

The last sentence above is perhaps the most intriguing and ironic factoid I read about Huckabee's caucus win in Iowa yesterday. What's intriguing is that it is so telling, but why one would want to confess that about themselves, I do not know. What's ironic is that it is perhaps shear opposite of what the first Christians in this country, or at least the writers of the Constitution, thought most conducive for an experiment in freedom.

If I remember my history lessons accurately, Pilgrims ran from the Old World to the New because those in power in the Old World thought exactly like the two-thirds of Huckabee's Iowa caucus supporters. Thus it was that 167 years after the arrival of the Pilgrims religious liberty was enshrined in the Constitution as one of the highest ideals in the land. More than a century and a half could not erase the memory of the damage done to human dignity when a subset of a nation's citizenry believes it is important that those with power share their specific religious beliefs and sensibilities. Yet it has only taken 2 centuries more, plus 20 years to begin to do so. That's, in a word, SCARY.

Those who tout the importance of religious commonality often self-identify as "conservatives." In conservation of what? It can't be in conservation of the founding ideals of this nation. No such ideal existed. At most it's in conservation of the parts of the old that inevitably hold over into the new, but why would one want to hold over the seeds of religious intolerance and possibly even fascism? Perhaps its the conservation of notions of divinely ordained dominion aggrandized by unfortunate misappropriations of biblical imagery used in furtherance of political ends (e.g. America as Reagan's "city on a hill") and validated by a misinterpretation of the biblical commission to "possess the land." I find neither conservatism nor liberalism useful ideological constructs in a global, 21st century, post-modern world. Most of the world that conservatism is trying to conserve and from which liberalism is trying to liberate itself no longer exists, accept in instances where shear stubbornness or abuse of power have preserved it. Nevertheless, if one is going to conserve in a democracy, shouldn't it be the conservation of something that exists for the good of more than just those trying to keep it?

The further irony is that Huckabee presents as a populist. I pray it is an authentic persona. Sure, he has strong religious convictions. Some of his views based upon those convictions sound downright kooky when exploited by the unforgiving hands of an unsympathetic media. Perhaps they are no more kooky than my own (okay, maybe a little more). However, he seems to have reconciled himself to the fact that in a democracy his convictions are not the "one ring to rule them all." He does not seem predisposed to legislate his belief system upon everyone else. Moreover, he expresses believable compassion and actionable concern for those unlike himself, which has not been a trademark of the typical religiously or otherwise motivated conservative.

Don't get me wrong: I don't agree with many of Huckabee's policies (e.g. imigration reform, the war on the Middle East and the bodily autonomy of women). But in Huckabee I find a conservative with motivations beyond his own self-interests. That may be ironic, but it's also refreshing.