The Threat of Nuclear War: 1962 and Now

Tomorrow is the first day of October, and it was in October 1962 that the world came closest to being engulfed in nuclear war. But currently there is threat of nuclear war once again. Let’s consider the similarities and differences between the ominous threat then and now. 

The Cuban missile crisis occurred on October 16~29, 1962. What do you remember about that fateful time? Well, if you are not at least 65 years old, you don’t have any memories of it. But it was a scary time for June and me as we were in our mid-20s then.

In September 1962, I started my doctoral studies at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Ky., and our family of four was living some 50 miles away at Ekron, Ky., where I was pastor of the Baptist church in that small town.

At that time, we didn’t have CNN or other 24/7 television news to keep us informed—in fact, we didn’t even have a television set in our home. But we kept up by the daily newspaper and radio.

In the narrow daily spaces of her five-year diary, June mentioned the crisis in Cuba on three days in a row. She wrote, “The U.S. has put a quarantine on Cuba” (10/22); “The Cuba situation is very serious” (10/23); “Our Cuban situation is so bad” (10/Oct. 24).

To cut down on driving time and to give me more time for study, on Tuesday and Thursday nights I stayed in seminary campus housing. On the morning of Thursday, Oct. 25, I went to Louisville as usual—and it was probably that afternoon when I thought seriously about going back home.

If there was going to be a nuclear attack, which seemed to be a distinct possibility, I certainly wanted to be with my family.

Fortunately, both President Kennedy and USSR Premier Khrushchev made domestically unpopular decisions and averted nuclear war. What a tremendous relief that was!*

“My Cuban Missile Crisis” is chapter 12 of Daniel Ellsberg’s book The Doomsday Machine (2017). He is seven years older than I, so that notable book was published when he was 86. (His leaked Pentagon Papers was published in 1971, when he was 40.)

Ellsberg finished his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1962, but he was already working for the RAND Corporation and was a consultant to the Defense Department and the White House. As such, he was closely involved in discussions directly related to the Cuban missile crisis.

In “Cuba, The Real Story,” his 13^th chapter, Ellsberg states, “The fact is that on Saturday, October 27, 1962, a chain of events was in motion that might have come close to ending civilization” (p. 194).

The situation in Ukraine now is not nearly as dire as it was in Cuba in 1962, mainly because Russian President Putin has threatened only to use tactical nuclear weapons, not strategic ones such as the ones central to the threat 60 years ago.

(Strategic nuclear weapons are roughly ten times more powerful than tactical ones, and it is only the former that are designed to produce “mutually assured destruction,” with the ironic acronym MAD.)

Yet, way leads on to way and there is no telling what damage might result—in Ukraine, in Europe, and even in the whole world—from even minimal use of tactical nuclear warheads.

Last week during a televised address, Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to use nuclear weapons on Ukraine.

Then on Sunday, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that U.S. officials have communicated to the Russians that there will be "catastrophic consequences for Russia if they use nuclear weapons in Ukraine."

A big question now is whether Putin will be willing to lose face the way Khrushchev did in 1963.**

Let’s hope and pray he will.

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* For factual information about the nuclear threat in 1962, I highly recommend “The Cuban Missile Crisis Explained in 20 Minutes,” an informative YouTube video.)

** In an interview with Norman Cousins in 1963, Khrushchev said, “What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruins, the national honor of the Soviet Union was intact?” (cited by Ellsberg on p. 212).

The words at the end are probably those of Danish poet Piet Hein (1905~96), although there are sites on the internet that say they are from his distant ancestor, the Dutch admiral Piet Pieterszoon Hein (1577~1629), which I think is highly unlikely.

Walking Up “The Road Less Traveled”

Most of my blog posts are about religion/theology, social ethics, and political issues, areas in which I have studied and read about extensively. But even though I haven’t studied psychology so much, this post is about a book by M. Scott Peck, a psychotherapist who died on September 25, 2005.

M. Scott Peck was born in May 1936. He completed his bachelor’s degree at Harvard University in 1958 and then earned a medical degree in 1963 from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.

Peck was a psychiatrist in the United States Army for nearly 10 years, and then was the director of a mental health clinic and had a private psychiatric practice in Connecticut.  

He is said to have been among the founding fathers of the self-help genre of books. His first and most widely-read book is The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology Of Love, Traditional Values, And Spiritual Growth (1978; 25^th anniversary ed., 2002). It has sold over 7,000,000 copies!

Peck’s The Road Less Traveled is a self-help book, but it is far different from the get happy quick emphasis of so many books of that genre. The opening sentence is, “Life is difficult.” The way to overcome life’s difficulties is also hard. Since most people prefer easy ways, it is the road less traveled.

Section I of Peck’s book is titled "Discipline.” He writes, “Discipline is the basic set of tools we require to solve life’s problems. Without discipline we can solve nothing” (p. 15). The necessary discipline tools are delaying gratification, acceptance of responsibility, dedication to truth, and balancing.

The latter refers to achieving the delicate balance between conflicting needs, goals, duties, responsibilities, and directions that gives us the flexibility required for successful living in all spheres of activity.

The second section of Peck’s book is “Love.” His definition of love is, “The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” And he asserts, “Love is as love does” (pp. 81, 83).

Section III is “Growth and Religion.” Peck states that people tend to define religion too narrowly, but he believes that everyone has a religion. Everyone has a worldview, he says, and a person’s worldview is that person’s religion whether he/she recognizes that fact or not.

Following the road less traveled, it is possible, Peck declares, “to mature into a belief in God” (p. 223). In his case, his own journey of spiritual growth led him to affirm the Christian faith. In his second book, People of the Lie (1983; 2^nd ed., 1998), he wrote,

After many years of vague identification with Buddhist and Islamic mysticism, I ultimately made a firm Christian commitment—signified by my non-denominational baptism on the ninth of March 1980 (p. 11).

The fourth section of Peck’s book is “Grace.” On the opening page of that section, he begins with four verses of “Amazing Grace,” which he calls an “early American evangelical hymn.”**

In this section Peck asserts, “Spiritual growth is the evolution of an individual,” and “God is the goal of evolution.” Further, God is also “the source of the evolutionary force” (pp. 263, 270). God wants us to grow into mature, loving people—and assists us in that process. That is God’s grace.

But sadly, humans often resist grace. Peck says that the reason for that resistance is laziness, which, interestingly, he says is the “original sin” of us humans.

The last subsection of the book is “The Welcoming of Grace,” and there Peck avers that “our human growth is of the utmost importance to something greater than ourselves. This something we call God” (p. 311).

Jesus sadly said, “the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it” (Matt. 7:14). 

Yet those who walk up the road less traveled, welcoming grace rather than resisting it, experience a joyful, meaningful life for themselves and a life of loving service to others. How amazing is God’s grace!

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** On Sept. 12, Christianity Today posted an informative/inspirational article titled “We’ve Sung ‘Amazing Grace’ for 250 Years. We’ve Only Just Begun.” 

A Model for Christians: In Fond Memory of Ron Sider

You may find it hard to believe, but I once was a member of the KKK. Well, not that KKK. Not long after moving to Fukuoka City on the Japanese island of Kyushu, I became a member of the Kyushu Kenkyu Kai (kenkyu = study; kai = meeting).*

A little over ten years later, our KKK’s monthly meeting discussed Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (1977). That was my introduction to author Ron Sider, and I was one of his many admirers who was saddened by his sudden death in July. 

Ron Sider (1939~2022) in 2019

Ronald James Sider was born in Canada on Sept. 17, 1939. Following the completion of his Ph.D. studies at Yale in 1969, Sider took a position teaching at Messiah College’s Philadelphia campus and then in 1977 became a professor at what is now Eastern University’s Palmer Theological Seminary.

Sider was an Anabaptist, reared in the Brethren in Christ Church in Canada. He was ordained to the Christian ministry by both that Church and by the Mennonites.

Sider had a long and fruitful career as a professor, author, and activist. He published over 30 books and wrote over 100 articles for both religious and secular magazines.

By far, his most widely-read book was Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. Hailed by Christianity Today as one of the one hundred most influential books in religion in the 20^th century, it has sold over 400,000 copies in nine languages.

Ron Sider was “a model for an evangelical Christianity committed to social justice.” That is how Tish Harrison Warren, an Anglican priest, describes Sider in her Aug. 7 New York Times opinion piece. I heartily agree.

When he was still 34 years old and before moving to Eastern, in 1973 Sider helped convene a group of evangelical Christians in Chicago. They issued “The Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern.”

Writing about that document in 2012, one author explained that “Sider and his colleagues condemned American militarism, sexism, economic injustice, and President Nixon’s ‘lust for and abuse of power.’”** (Sider and his fellow evangelicals then were quite different from many evangelicals today.)

It was because of “The Chicago Declaration,” which in addition to Sider was signed by over 50 progressive evangelicals, including Art Gish and Jim Wallis as well as James Dunn and Foy Valentine, two Southern Baptists I highly respected, that I was able to long self-identify as an evangelical.

Then, under Sider’s leadership, “The Chicago Declaration” became the founding document for Evangelicals for Social Action, a progressive group organized in 1978. (In 2020 the ESA changed their name to Christians for Social Action.)

I did not agree with all of Sider’s positions, such as his unwavering anti-abortion stance. Nevertheless, I appreciate the emphasis he made in his 1987 book titled Completely Pro-Life: Building a Consistent Stance on Abortion, the Family, Nuclear Weapons, the Poor.

Despite some disagreements, Sider was clearly a model for Christians, especially for those in the evangelical tradition, who take the teachings of Jesus seriously.

Ron Sider was an active Christian model into his 80s. In 2020, his succinct book Speak Your Peace: What the Bible Says about Loving Our Enemies articulated his Anabaptist understanding of Christianity and summarized the biblical case for pacifism and active nonviolence.

Also in 2020, Sider was the editor of The Spiritual Danger of Donald Trump: 30 Evangelical Christians on Justice, Truth, and Moral Integrity. In addition to the Introduction and Afterword, he also authored chapters 8 and 11 of that book.

His last blog post, a 900-word article titled “Advance Both Religious Liberty and LGBTQ Civil Rights,” was made on May 29 before his death of cardiac arrest on July 27.

So, I post this in fond memory of Ron Sider, who as Warren wrote “helped birth a movement and blaze a trail. And though at times it seems that trail has been hidden under Christian political partisanship . . . many Christians are still trying to walk the narrow path he left behind him.”

Thank God for faithful Christian scholars and disciples such as Ron Sider!

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* One of my first blog posts, made here on 7/21/09, was titled “James Cone at a KKK Meeting.” Up to this point, there have been only 24 pageviews of it, but many of you would find that brief post about the black liberation theologian to be of interest.

** The words are from Asbury University professor David Swartz’s book  Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism (2012, 2014).

The Good and the Bad in the U.S. Constitution

Saturday, September 17, is Constitution Day, a yearly “federal observance.” And posters in the local library announce: Constitution Week September 17~23. Across the country, many school children will be taught good things about the Constitution. But most won’t hear about its bad aspects.  

“Our original Constitution was both brilliant and highly flawed.” So spoke Harvard law professor Alan Jenkins in a Sept. 15, 2021, interview with Harvard Law Today. He continued,

It beautifully articulated the notion that government’s power flows from the people, and that government serves the people. But it was fundamentally flawed in preserving and propping up slavery, that ultimate form of inequality.

Jenkins also averred that the Constitution was faulty “for excluding women, non-white people, indigenous people, non-property owners, from the definition of ‘the people.’’’ But especially from “a racial justice standpoint it was highly flawed.”

That was the basic self-contradiction of the original Constitution, which to a significant degree was based on the ideas/philosophy of John Locke, as I pointed out in my 8/30 blog post.

Most conservative Americans see and emphasize only the “brilliant” facets of the Constitution. In 1955, the highly patriotic Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) petitioned Congress to set aside September 17~23 annually to be dedicated for the observance of Constitution Week.

That resolution was adopted by the US Congress and signed into law in August 1956 by President Eisenhower. Then, Constitution Day was established in 2004, and this year marks the 235^th anniversary of the ratification of the Constitution on Sept. 17, 1787.

In a wide-ranging interview, Dr. Richard Land, a conservative Southern Baptist who is now the executive editor of The Christian Post, urged American Christians, regardless of their political persuasion, not to allow the Left to define how they see the United States.

“According to Land, the Left-leaning American media invented the hot-button phrase ‘Christian nationalism’ as a pejorative term that serves to undermine the fundamental relationship between Christians and this nation as defined in the U.S. Constitution.”

Yes, patriotic organizations such as the DAR and conservative evangelicals such as Land tend to see only the good aspects of the U.S. Constitution—and there certainly are such aspects that need to be seen and appreciated. But that is only one side of the picture.

Most “Left-leaning” USAmericans also see the “highly flawed” facets of the Constitution. That includes history professor and highly popular blogger Heather Cox Richardson.

“Right-leaning” people doubtlessly see her as Left-leaning, but she is a competent historian who deals with facts not ideological opinions. In my 8/30 blog post, I criticized her for calling the position of Locke and the drafters of the Constitution paradoxical rather than self-contradictory.

But to Richardson’s credit, she also uses the word contradiction in writing about the drafting of the first Constitution. For example, she begins the second chapter of her book How the South Won the Civil War with this assertion:

At the time of the Constitution’s [drafting] in 1787 it was not yet obvious that a contradiction lay at the heart of the nation's founding principles.

Richardson also concurs with Jenkins’s recognition of the “highly flawed” Constitution. She writes, “Without irony, Virginian James Madison crafted the constitution to guarantee that wealthy slaveholders would control the new government” (p. 21).

Although she does not mention maverick historian Howard Zinn, he wrote pointedly about that contradiction in his best-known book, A People’s History of the United States (1980). (Zinn, who died in 2010, was born in August 1922, and last month his centennial birthday was notably celebrated.)**

Zinn’s chapter on the Constitution is based partly on An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, an influential and controversial 1913 book by the noted historian Charles Beard (1874~1948).

According to this website, Beard interpreted the Constitution “as a conservative bulwark against the encroaches of liberal democracy.” That is a “bad” aspect of the original Constitution that is not widely recognized.

But unfortunately, that aspect of the 1787 Constitution may be what the “originalists” on the SCOTUS want to restore now.

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** Zinn’s seminal 1980 book was revised and published for younger readers in 2007 under the title A Young People’s History of the United States. That book cannot be used in many U.S. public schools now, for it is too closely connected to the Right-wing’s opposition to Critical Race Theory and related matters. 
     See here for “Howard Zinn Centennial Week Events” and here for “Howard Zinn at 100: Remembering ‘the People’s Historian,’” an informative article posted by The Nation on August 24.

“Trump Should Fill Christians with Rage. How Come He Doesn’t?”

The title of this blog post is the title of Michael Gerson’s Sept. 1 opinion piece in The Washington Post. It probably has been the most often-read op-ed article in the WaPo this month. For those of you who haven’t yet read it (or can’t because of the paywall), I have posted it here.*  

Although the title appears to be quite politically partisan, Gerson’s piece is primarily about Jesus, about the political and cultural environment in which he lived and about the gist of his teaching. In particular, Gerson emphasizes that

* Jesus preached against religious hypocrisy.

* Jesus welcomed social outcasts whom polite society rejected. 

* Most important, Jesus proclaimed the arrival of a kingdom. 

Granted, those three points do not summarize the totality of Jesus’ message, but surely most Christians would affirm those points as being central to Jesus’ teaching.

Although Gerson’s portrayal of Jesus may appear “liberal,” Gerson has been and has remained a Christian evangelical, as I tried to make clear in my May 15, 2021, blog post titled “Michael Gerson: An Evangelical with Integrity.” Thus, he is not criticizing evangelicals from the “outside.”

In his Sept. 1 piece, Gerson clearly states, “Having known evangelicals who live lives of moral integrity and serve others across lines of race and class, I have no intention of pronouncing an indiscriminate indictment.” Then he goes on to assert that

all conservative Christians must take seriously a sobering development in America’s common life. Many who identify with Jesus most loudly and publicly are doing the most to discredit his cause.

He then boldly states,

The main danger to conservative churches does not come from bad laws—it comes from Christians who don’t understand the distinctives, the demands and the ultimate appeal of their own faith.

Consequently, Gerson declares that the evangelical support of Trump and what he calls the Trump movement “deserves some woes of its own”:

* Woe to evangelical hypocrisy.

* Woe to evangelical exclusion. 

* And woe, therefore, to Christian nationalism. 

I agree with Gerson not because I am a Democrat but because I am a Christian who, like Gerson, seeks to put faith above politics.

Although there seems to be “Christianophobia” abroad in the land, Gerson seeks to make it clear that much (most?) of the anti-Christian sentiment is reaction to the questionable public stance of the Christian Right and not to the core teachings of Jesus.

From soon after 9/11/01, there began to be talk of Islamophobia in this country. All Muslims were being vilified because of the vile deeds of the militant extremists. That was highly unfair to the vast majority of the Muslims in the country, most of whom were peace-loving people.

I first wrote about Islamophobia in my 5/5/13 blog post, and then on 1/25/16 I posted “Combatting Islamophobia.” The former article begins, “Islamophobia is defined as “prejudice against, hatred towards, or irrational fear of Muslims.” Such an attitude has been quite widespread in the land.

While the term is rarer, for several years now some have written about Christianophobia. For example, a 3/27/15 Christianity Today article is titled, “What Christianophobia Looks Like in America.”

In that article, author George Yancey, a university professor of sociology, says that his research has shown that in the United States, hateful bigotry is directed not only toward groups such as racial and sexual minorities, but also toward conservative Christians. . . . . It’s Christianophobia.”

All hateful bigotry directed toward racial and sexual minorities must be staunchly opposed. Christianophobia should also be opposed/combatted in the same way that I previously wrote about combatting Islamophobia.

All Christians should not be rejected/opposed because of the way those on the religious and political right are misrepresenting Jesus. This is one of the reasons I find Gerson’s essay so important and worth widespread thoughtful consideration.**

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* This article is quite long: when I put it on a Word document, it was over 4,300 words, more than the combined length of six of my blog articles, which I limit to a maximum of 700 words.

** It is not mentioned by Gerson, but I highly recommend a closely related book: Christians Against Christianity: How Right-Wing Evangelicals are Destroying our Nation and Our Faith (2021) by theologian Obery M. Hendricks.

Labor Day (and Labor Union) Ruminations

This is the third time that my September 5 blog post has been made on Labor Day, but on this date in 2011 and 2016 I made no reference at all to it being a federal holiday in the U.S. But now I am sharing some reflections on the history and significance of Labor Day—and of labor unions. 

On June 28, 1894, President Cleveland signed S. 730 into law declaring Labor Day a national holiday. Since 1882, Labor Day had been celebrated at local and state levels, and from 1887 to 1894, 23 states had enacted a Labor Day holiday. Now it had become a nationwide observance.

It is highly ironic that the creation of Labor Day in 1894 came in the midst of the Pullman Strike, one of the most consequential strikes in U.S. history.*

Just four days after Cleveland signed the Labor Day bill, the U.S. Attorney General got an injunction against the strike, and on July 3 the President dispatched federal troops to enforce the injunction. Then on the 7^th, the Guardsmen fired upon the strikers; 30 were killed and many more wounded.

What a sad start for the new federal holiday to honor the nation’s working class!

Despite Labor Day becoming an official national holiday in 1894, it took decades as well as much struggle and suffering for laboring people to achieve the reforms they had ardently sought.

From long before 1894, the laborers clamored for an eight-hour workday and a forty-hour work week. They also called for safer working conditions, a minimum wage, unemployment compensation, and the end to child labor.

The appeals/demands of the labor movement were augmented by some prominent religious voices. For example, in 1886 Walter Rauschenbusch began his pastorate of a Baptist Church in "Hell's Kitchen," New York.

His first-hand experiences there led Rauschenbusch to lead what became the Social Gospel movement, which was to a large extent the struggle against systemic injustices foisted upon exploited laboring people in New York and elsewhere.**

Then in 1891, Pope Leo XIII issued “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor,” an encyclical addressing the condition of the working classes.

The Pope’s primary concern was some amelioration of “the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class,” and to that end he supported the rights of labor to form trade unions and to engage in collective bargaining.  

Such efforts and support were still necessary for long after 1894. Finally in 1938, President Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). That law established a minimum wage (of 25 cents per hour!)

The FLSA also instituted a standardized 44-hour work week, which later dropped to 40 hours, a requirement to pay extra for overtime work, and a prohibition on certain types of child labor.

Even though it was forty-four years later, the dreams surrounding the founding of Labor Day in 1894 were finally realized, and labor unions experienced widespread growth and acceptance over the next 20+ years.

Support for labor unions was highest in the 1950s when three-fourths of USAmericans approved of them. According to a recent Gallup Poll (see here), now over 70% approve of unions, the highest point since 1965.

This is a good sign—as are recent initiatives by Amazon employees and Starbucks baristas to form unions.

President Biden, thankfully, is a big supporter of labor unions. In his remarks in honor of labor unions last September, the President said that “a union means there is democracy. . . . Organizing, joining a union—that’s democracy in action.”

In his Labor Day Proclamation last Friday (Sept. 2), President Biden said, “I call upon all public officials and people of the United States to observe this day with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities that honor the energy and innovation of working Americans.”

No matter how, or whether, you celebrate Labor Day today, remember those across the nation who are part of the laboring class, those people who are working for an hourly wage including many who are still working for a highly-inadequate minimum wage and still unable to form a labor union.

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* In May 2022, History.com (here) posted “10 Major Labor Strikes Throughout U.S. History.” Following the disastrous Homestead Steel Strike of 1892, the Pullman Strike is the second of those ten. For more about the latter, see “How a Deadly Railroad Strike Led to the Labor Day Holiday” (here).

** See here for my Sept. 30, 2021, blog post about Rauschenbusch and the Social Gospel.