The “Holy War” Has Begun, When/How Will It End?

Recently I have been reading/thinking about the ReAwaken America Tour (RAT) here in the U.S. I have become even more alarmed about RAT after watching the PBS documentary “Michael Flynn’s Holy War.” I highly encourage you to take the time to watch that October 18 production.* 

The same thing looks vastly different because of aspect perception. That was the main point of my previous blog post, using the widely-known duck-rabbit illusion. In that article I referred to religious ramifications of aspect perception. This post is about political ramifications.

What you see in the duck-rabbit illusion depends on whether you look to the right or the left of the image. In the political world, there is a huge difference in how the Republican right or the Democratic left sees this nation.

As is clearly shown here, in the Oct. 23 edition of Meet the Press, a recent NBC poll indicates that 79% of Republicans and 81% of Democrats think that the “other Party’s agenda will destroy America.”

What a huge and crucial difference aspect perception makes! The two political parties just see and interpret the current situation in the U.S. in radically diverse ways.

According to Michael Flynn’s perception of America, the future of the country is in grave danger and can only be saved by “spiritual warfare.” He is now leading a “holy war” to save the nation.

As you probably know, Flynn (b. 1958) was a prominent U.S. general, active especially during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In February 2016 Flynn became an advisor to Trump for his presidential campaign, and in January 2017 he was sworn in as Pres. Trump’s first National Security Advisor (NSA).

Soon after being forced to resign as NSA, in December 2017 Flynn pled guilty to a felony charge of “willfully and knowingly” making false statements to the FBI. In November 2020, however, he was issued a presidential pardon by Trump.

Since then, Flynn has been active as one of the most prominent leaders of Christian nationalism. As one of the main speakers at the ReAwaken America Tours, since April of last year he has spoken to numerous enthusiastic audiences of thousands. On Nov. 4-5 he will be with RAT in Branson, Mo.

Perceptions of Michael Flynn vary greatly. In the PBS documentary, pastor Jacqui Lewis is shown as a staunch opponent of Flynn. She exclaims, “It’s our calling to disrupt fake Christianity. And we're not going to be nice about it.” Lewis also declares, “It is a battle for the soul of America.”**

The interviewer, Michelle Smith, comments, “Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis is part of a coalition of religious leaders that opposes what they see as a hijacking of Christianity by figures like Flynn.”

While not included in the documentary, a group known as Faithful America is also actively opposing what they perceive to be the false Christianity of Flynn and his supporters. On their website they identify 20 Christian nationalists whom they say are “false prophets.” Flynn is one of them.

Flynn’s supporters, though, perceive things quite differently. This week I checked out journalist Dave Erickson’s book Framing Flynn: The Scandalous Takedown of an American General (2021) from my local library.

The blurb on the back of the book says that it is an “eye-opening and shocking look at the Obama administration’s scandalous set up of an innocent man—General Michael Flynn—to destroy his livelihood, reputation, and job with the incoming Trump administration.”

Author Erickson obviously perceives the same man in a drastically different way than pastor Lewis and Faithful America. They represent the two sides of Flynn’s “holy war.” The November 8—and Nov. 2024—elections will give some indication of how that “war” will end.

Which side of the “holy war” are you on, and why?

Please note: I am not in the least suggesting that one “side” is as true or viable as the other. My use of the rabbit/duck illusion is only to illustrate how the same thing can be seen in diverse ways, not how each is equally correct.

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* This program was produced by PBS in cooperation with The Associated Press (AP), and the main interviewer throughout is AP correspondent Michelle Smith. On their website, AP, founded in 1846, claims to be “an independent global news organization dedicated to factual reporting.”

** Lewis is the pastor of Middle Collegiate Church in Manhattan. Here is the link to her informative website.

Aspect Perception: A Duck or a Rabbit?

There is a difference between seeing (or “seeing that”) and “seeing as.” That difference is due to aspect perception according to the noted philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. He used the following image in explaining the meaning and importance of aspect perception. 

Ludwig Wittgenstein is said by some to be the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, in spite of not being widely known (or understood). He was born in Austria in 1889, taught at the University of Cambridge from 1929 to 1947, and died in England in 1951.

During his lifetime, only one book of his philosophy was published, but he left voluminous manuscripts. Some of those were published posthumously in the 1953 book Philosophical Investigations.

In Part II Section XI of that book, Wittgenstein used the above image, which first appeared in the October 23, 1892, issue of Blätter, a German humor magazine. He used that image to illustrate what he termed aspect perception.

Wittgenstein’s philosophy is not easily grasped. He is one philosopher whom since my graduate school days I thought I ought to read more than I have. Reading and understanding his philosophical views are not easy. But my purpose here is not to explain Wittgenstein’s philosophy.

I am writing this piece in order to think with you about how we humans can “see” the same thing and understand it in completely opposite ways. Here is another illusion, one that was on a German postal card in 1888, four years before the rabbit-duck image was published.

There are newer versions of this image that I have seen many times, but I was surprised to learn just last week that it is sometimes called the “My Wife and My Mother-in-Law” optical illusion.

Depending on which “aspect” you perceive, these images change decisively. The rabbit-duck image changes depending on whether you focus your eyes on the right side or the left side of the drawing. And in the latter, it depends on whether you look at the upper left or the lower right part of the image.

Wittgenstein’s emphasis on aspect perception has religious, as well as political, ramifications. I am indebted to Stephen Law of Oxford University for his thought-provoking essay referring to the duck-rabbit drawing.**

As Law indicates, belief in God may well be far more a way of perceiving things than recognizing “the cogency of certain arguments for the conclusion that God exists.”

Law goes on to say,

Just as some suffer from a kind of aesthetic blindness—they can’t see a particular painting by Pablo Picasso as a powerful expression of suffering—so, some suggest, atheists suffer from a kind of religious blindness that means they’re unable to see the world as it really is: as a manifestation of the divine.

Yes, we would not expect a severely visually impaired person to give an accurate description of a beautiful sunset or the fall splendor of the maple tree I see out my window.

Why should we expect a person who suffers from “religious blindness” to make statements about God as superior to those who have the sight, or insight, that comes from deep faith?

Or, why should those who have a paucity of experience of God think they are qualified to deny the richness of the experience of those who have had, and who continue to have, a deep and ongoing relationship with God?

Law adds a word of caution, though: “Seeing something as a so-and-so doesn’t guarantee that it is a so-and-so.” One can always be mistaken in what they think they “see.” But that is as true for those who “see” no evidence of God as well as for those who do.

So, I encourage those who see only the “old hag” (as she is sometimes called) in the lower image above to shift their eyes upward and you will likely see an attractive young woman.

I also encourage those who see mainly the ugliness of the present world of humans to (metaphorically) shift their eyes “upward.” A change in aspect perception might drastically change what you see—and also help you understand people who see things differently.

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**Law’s article “Do you see a duck or a rabbit: just what is aspect perception?” was posted by aeon.com on July 31, 2018. Aeon is a British digital “magazine of ideas, philosophy and culture” that has been published since 2012.

Note: My next blog post will be partly about the political ramifications of aspect perception. 

The Extraordinarily Important Midterm Elections

It is only 19 days until the midterm elections in the U.S., and since there are some who will be voting early (and some may have already voted), I am writing about those extraordinarily important elections now—although I realize that this post will not likely change how anyone will vote. Still . . . .  

John Darkow in the Columbia Missourian (10/12)

The most important elections on November 8 are those for the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, although there are also significant gubernatorial and other state elections as well.

For example, each state’s secretary of state is quite important as they could skew elections, as The Washington Post clearly delineated last month in an article titled "What an election denier could do if elected secretary of state.”

By far, though, the most important elections are in the 34 states that will be voting for a Senator. The voters in those states will determine which Party will be in control of the Senate for the next two years.

And, as is true every two years, all 435 Representatives in Congress will be elected in November.

The winners of many of those 469 elections are almost certain already. In my home state of Missouri, the Republican candidate for Senator has a 99% chance of winning according to FiveThirtyEight (538), the website that focuses on opinion poll analysis

And Rep. Sam Graves in Missouri’s sixth district (where I live) will almost certainly be re-elected for a twelfth term as a U.S. Representative. So, for us Missouri (and sixth district) voters, voting is important mainly for statewide and county offices.

But there are several states where the senatorial election is of great importance. According to 538, the closest, and thus the most significant, races currently are in Nevada, Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Ohio.

The most troubling elections on November 8 are those that include candidates who do not accept the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

 “A majority of GOP nominees deny or question the 2020 election results” is the title of an October 12 article in The Washington Post. According to author Amy Gardner, there are 291 candidates who have challenged or refused to accept Joe Biden’s victory—51 percent of the 569 analyzed.

In spite of warnings that citizens should not vote for candidates who deny or question the outcome of the 2020 election even though there is ample evidence that it was a fair election and there is no proof whatsoever that it was “stolen,” sadly, many will vote for those nominees anyway.

The article mentioned above links to a list of the deniers in every state. The Missouri Republican candidate for the Senate and for the sixth district are both on that list—and as I indicated above, both are almost certain to win their respective races.

The November 8 elections are extraordinarily important because the future of democracy in the USA is in grave jeopardy if those who deny or disregard election results take control of Congress.

The October 10 opinion piece by eminent columnist Eugene Robinson (b. 1954) was titled, “The 2022 midterms are the most important of my lifetime.” (Click here to read that article without a paywall.) Here is part of what he wrote:

Vital issues are at stake on Election Day. Abortion rights are gravely threatened after the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade. Voting rights, especially for minorities, are imperiled. Efforts to fight climate change and make the transition to a clean-energy economy would at least be slowed if Republicans took either the House or the Senate.
       But the overarching issue is what President Biden calls the fight for “the soul of this nation.” Do we continue our halting but undeniable progress toward making the Constitution’s guarantees of rights and freedoms apply to all Americans? Or do we reverse course?

“Will the U.S. Remain a Democracy?” was the title of my May 25 blog post. Now, nearly five months later, it is even more questionable that democracy will prevail in this country. To a large extent, the answer to the question depends on the outcome of the November 8—and the 2024—elections.

How will you vote?

Admiring the Color Purple

The Color Purple by Alice Walker was a Pulitzer Prize winning novel and Stephen Spielberg’s 1985 movie by the same name was nominated for eleven Academy Awards. Last month June and I both re-read the book and watched the movie again—and were impressed again by both. 

Alice Walker is a talented novelist and poet. She is also a lifetime social activist and the one who coined the term “womanist” (in “Coming Apart,” her 1979 short story).

Walker was born in Georgia, the youngest of her sharecropper parents’ eight children. She was an excellent student, and upon graduating from high school she received a scholarship to prestigious (HBCU) Spelman College in Atlanta. Howard Zinn was one of her professors there.

Under the direction of SNCC, Alice and many other Spelman students joined the effort to desegregate Atlanta. They were supported by Prof. Zinn—who subsequently was fired in the summer of 1963. Because of that, Alice transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York and graduated in 1965.

Through the 1970s Walker was active both as a teacher and an author, and then 40 years ago, in 1982, The Color Purple, her third novel was published. The next year she became the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The Color Purple is a feminist work about Celie, an abused and uneducated African American woman’s struggle for empowerment. According to Britannica, among other things the novel was “praised for the depth of its female characters and for its eloquent use of Black English Vernacular.”

Here is a short conversation between Shug and Celie that shows some of that vernacular—and indicates where the title of the book came from:

Listen, God love everything you love—and a mess of stuff you don’t. But more than anything else, God love admiration. You saying God vain? I ast. Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it (Kindle ed., p. 195).

The same Britannica article goes on to say, “The Color Purple movingly depicts the growing up and self-realization of Celie, who overcomes oppression and abuse to find fulfillment and independence.”  

The novel is a classic, for there are many today who need to overcome oppression and abuse the same as Celie did 100 years ago. More broadly, as a theology professor in Australia writes, The Color Purple is

both a cry of rage and protest against the injustices and inhumanity we humans inflict on one another, and a stubborn affirmation of hope in the midst of suffering, of endurance against all odds, of a kind of triumph in the end as we become more and more who we truly are.*

The Color Purple is also a book about God. The above quote from the book is just one of many referring to God.

The author herself said in a 2006 interview, “Twenty-five-years later, it still puzzles me that The Color Purple is so infrequently discussed as a book about God. About ‘God’ versus ‘the God image.’”**

The blogger cited above explains that Walker clearly holds a panentheist view of God in which “the divine is deeply immanent within everything, a faithful creator and life-giving Spirit. She revolts against the intellectual idolatry that reduces God to the white, to the male, to the human.”

And Walker herself states that the “core teaching of the novel” is delivered by Shug, who says to Celie, “I believe God is everything, . . . Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found it” (Kindle ed., p. 194).

In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “Look how the wild flowers grow. They don't work hard to make their clothes. But I tell you that Solomon with all his wealth wasn't as well clothed as one of them” (Matt. 6:27-28, CEB).

Perhaps when he said this, Jesus was looking out over a field of wild flowers and admiring the color purple.

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* Michael O’Neil in a 2016 blog post.

** From the Introduction of the book in the Kindle version (loc. 80).

Note: For an abundance of information about Alice Walker and her outstanding book, see https://bookanalysis.com/alice-walker/the-color-purple/.

Contextualizing Christianity: In Memory of Matteo Ricci

On March 31 last year, The Economist published an article about “Sinifying Christianity,” that is, seeking to make Chinese Christians more “Chinese.” The article begins by referring to James Hudson Taylor, the famous 19th-century Protestant missionary. They could have looked back much further.

Italian Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci sought to Sinicize (=to change or modify by Chinese influence) Christianity in the 16^th century. His pioneer evangelistic activity is noteworthy even now, and there are Protestants as well as Catholics who remember his missionary work with deep appreciation.

Christianity Today, the flagship moderate evangelical Christian magazine, published an article in June of this year with praise, and a picture, of Ricci. 

Ricci and Chinese scholar Xu Guangqi

Ricci was born 470 years ago, on October 6, 1552. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1581, and the next year he arrived in Macao and prepared for entering China. He did enter the mainland in 1583 and remained there until his death 27 years later, in 1610.

As Baptist missiologist Justice Anderson wrote in 1998, “to win the favor of the Chinese, Ricci adopted their culture and appeared in the guise of a Confucian scholar.” He was quite successful: by 1650, forty years after his death, there were some 250,000 Christians in China.*

According to the article in The Economist, since 2018 the Chinese government has encouraged churches “to use Chinese architecture and Chinese tunes for hymns, as well as Chinese-style painting, calligraphy and other ‘popular cultural forms.’” All this would have pleased Ricci.

The Catholic Church, though, was not pleased with Ricci’s emphasis. Ricci and his successors “permitted converts to engage in ancestral and state rites regarding those as social and civil rather than religious in character.”**

That led to what is known as the Chinese Rites controversy (which is summarized well in Wikipedia). It was settled by the Pope in the early 1700s—against the Jesuits and to the great detriment of the continued expansion of Christianity in China.

I first learned about Ricci when I was a graduate student in the 1960s. Dr. Hugo Culpepper, a Missions professor at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, stressed the importance of what was then often called accommodation.

Later the terms indigenization, inculturation, or contextualization became more common. The emphasis was the same, however: effective mission activity must seek to relate intentionally and positively to the culture in which the missionary is located. That is certainly what Ricci sought to do.

Even now, and perhaps now even more than in past decades, there are many who criticize missionary activity as being a form of imperialism.

The critics think that Western missionaries were intentionally linked to the Western powers that sought to gain political and economic control over Asian and African countries.

Unfortunately, that was often the case in the 19^th and early 20^th century. Missionaries sought to make Christians and churches in non-Western lands look much like the Christians and churches of the West. Converts were given “Christian” names, and church buildings exhibited Western architecture.

My first Japanese pastor was an elderly man who was born into a samurai family in 1890. When he was baptized as a young man, he was given the name Timothy. (Fortunately, he was not using that name when I first met him in 1966.)

As the article in The Economist notes, “long before the Communist Party seized power in 1949, people used to say, ‘One more Christian, one fewer Chinese.’ Officials in China still mutter this phrase today.”

But to cite the same 4/3/21 source again, in 1867 the prominent English missionary Hudson Taylor (1832~1905) “wrote a letter home defending his policy of encouraging fellow preachers in China to wear Chinese robes and the Manchu-style pigtail.”

Taylor’s emphasis was quite similar to what Catholic missionary Ricci had advocated 275 years earlier.

While the specifics changed, the central point of Ricci (and Taylor) was adopted more and more in the last half of the 20^th century.

Along with many of my missionary colleagues, during my 38 years in Japan I intentionally sought to practice accommodation/indigenization as much as possible—and have bristled some when accused, directly or indirectly, of fostering Western (Christian) imperialism.

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* “Medieval and Renaissance Missions (500-1792),” Missiology: An Introduction to the Foundations, History, and Strategies of World Missions (1998), p. 192.

** R. Pierce Beaver, “The History of Mission Strategy,” Perspectives on the World Christian Movement: A Reader (1981), p. 194.

The Legend of the Abplanalp Family

Peter Abplanalp, one of my great-great-grandfathers, was born 225 years ago yesterday, on October 4, 1797. He died in January 1879 and is buried in the Prairie Chapel Cemetery of Worth County, Missouri, 59 years before I was born in that same county.

According to the old Abplanalp family legend (which is briefly told in Wikipedia), centuries ago there was an avalanche on Mt. Planalp, a small mountain located near the northeastern bank of beautiful Lake Brienz in the southeastern part of the Canton of Bern, Switzerland. 

That fateful avalanche demolished the houses on the mountainside as land, rocks, and trees cascaded down the mountain toward the lake at the bottom. Shortly after that destructive avalanche, a basket bearing a baby boy was found floating on Lake Brienz.

The baby boy, the lone survivor of the avalanche, was rescued and cared for —but no one knew his name. So, his rescuers decided to call him Peter and to give him the last name Abplanalp, the prefix “ab” being Latin for “from.”

That Peter was not my great-great grandfather who is buried in northwest Missouri, but one of his grandfathers back many generations. (Many male Abplanalps have been named Peter; both the father and the grandfather of the Peter Abplanalp buried at Prairie Chapel were also named Peter.)

There are records of Abplanalps in Switzerland back to the middle of the 16th century, but it is not known exactly when the first “Abplanalp” baby was found floating in his basket on Lake Brienz. But all of us who have Abplanalp ancestors are grateful for his providential survival.

There are records of Abplanalps coming to the U.S. as early as 1795, and many emigrated to southeastern Indiana. Since 1814 Switzerland County has been Indiana’s southeastern corner county. Peter and Barbara (Stähli) Abplanalp emigrated to nearby Dearborn County in 1834.

Their daughter Margaret was born there in 1840, and in 1865 she married Christian Leopold Neiger (1840~1901), a Swiss immigrant. Before long they moved to Worth County, Mo., and her parents came to live near (or maybe with) them later.

Hans Abplanalp was born in Bern, Switzerland, in 1886 and emigrated to New York in 1906. In 1913 he married Marie Nay in New York, and their son Robert (1922~2003) became the best-known person named Abplanalp in the U.S.

Robert was a wealthy inventor who became a friend and confidant of President Nixon. (His obituary in the New York Times tells of his close ties to Nixon.)

I have been unable to find the connection of Hans and his son Robert to my family tree, but surely they are also descendants of baby Peter, the star of the Abplanalp legend.

The Abplanalps and other Swiss immigrants came to the U.S. primarily for economic reasons. The “new world” of North America offered the promise of a more affluent life than possible on the farms and small villages of rural Switzerland.

My great-grandfather Christian Leopold Neiger was the 13^th child of his family. When he was 21, he borrowed money to come to the U.S. in 1861. Four years later he married Margaret Abplanalp, and in 1869 they moved to Worth Co., Mo., where they bought a farm and lived there until their deaths.

The book History of Gentry and Worth Missouri (1882) includes two pages titled “Christian Leopold Neiger.” It concludes, “Mr. N. now has a fine farm, well improved, and is a respected man and good citizen. Few foreigners, coming as he did, have done better. He has an excellent wife . . . .”

When my Abplanalp ancestors came to this country in the 19^th century, there were no restrictions on immigration such as there are now. A sizable percentage of us USAmericans are descendants of people who permanently left their homes in Europe or elsewhere and freely entered the U.S.

In recent years, a multitude of people, especially from countries south of the U.S. border, have sought to come to this country not only for economic reasons but primarily for their own safety. Can’t they be allowed to live and to flourish here as the Abplanalps and so many other immigrants have?

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 ** The photo above is of Lake Brienz and the village of Brienz, Switzerland, which I took as June and I were riding the inclined railway train up Mt. Planalp on May 26, 2007, our fiftieth wedding anniversary.