Confronting Life After Doom with Resilience

Those of you who are regular readers of this blog are likely aware that I am a big “fan” of Brian McLaren. In a March 2017 blog post, I placed him on my list of “Ten Most Admired Contemporary Christians,” and he is on my list of “Top Ten” theologians and/or philosophers by whom I have been influenced.*¹

Beginning with McLaren’s book A New Kind of Christian (2002), the first of a trilogy that was significant theology written as novels, I have read many of McLaren’s fifteen sole-authored books and learned much from them.

In a March 2018 blog post, I made extensive reference to his 2006 book, The Secret Message of Jesus, in which he emphasized that the Kingdom of God is more about society than about individuals.*²

That emphasis on the Kingdom of God being primarily about human society in the present world rather than the heavenly realm where individuals are transported upon death is a major reason many contemporary conservative Christians do not regard McLaren highly.

Brian (b. 1956) first wrote about the growing global ecological crisis in Everything Must Change, his 2007 book which I finished reading in June 2008. I thought it was so significant that in 2020 I placed it on the list of my favorite non-fiction 21st-century books.*³

Since I don’t include more than one book by the same author in my list of favorite books, I have replaced McLaren’s previous books in the list just mentioned with Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart, which was published the middle of last month.

McLaren’s Life After Doom is essential reading for all of us who know about and care about the future of life on planet Earth. On the dust jacket, environmentalist Bill McKibben says this book is as “rich and thoughtful as all of Brian McLaren's work, but with a particular urgency!” I fully agree.

Early in “Welcome to Reality,” the second chapter, McLaren succinctly sets forth the diagnosis of the predicament he examines throughout the book: “Our global civilization as currently structured is unstable and unsustainable” (p. 23).

Some scientists and eco-theologians, especially William Catton, Jr., and Michael Dowd, have made this same diagnosis.*⁴ But this is the first time a major Christian writer has analyzed that predicament so thoroughly and so clearly—and with a pastor’s heart.

Throughout this challenging book, McLaren explores four possible scenarios for the years ahead. In the second chapter, he calls those scenarios 1) “Collapse Avoidance,” 2) “Collapse/Rebirth,” 3) “Collapse/Survival,” and 4) “Collapse/Extinction.”

Since it is clear that he thinks only the last three are feasible, at the end of the first chapter he warned his readers that the following chapter would be “rough sledding.” Then chapters three and four are “pastoral” in nature: he helps his readers face the fearful future in ways that are not debilitating.

How can/should we live life after doom? In the fourth/last part of his book, McLaren elucidates what he calls “a path of agile engagement.” Michael Dowd’s emphasis on “post doom, no gloom” provided helpful light for these dark times. McLaren’s last chapters are even more beneficial and encouraging.

In chapter 17, Brian repeatedly stresses that despite all the ugliness, “beauty abounds.” In the next chapter, he cites and heartily agrees with the words, “It is a magnificent thing to be alive in a moment that matters so much” (p. 224).

Chapter 19 emphasizes the need to live with the dream of the kingdom of God which is “not a destination after death: it is the higher, bigger, vaster, deeper way of life here and now” (p. 236).

The following chapter is “Find Your Light and Shine It.” If we do that, even in this time of doom, we can have “an abundant life, a meaningful life, abounding with beauty … whatever the future may hold” (p. 249).

“Whatever you do, it matters.” Those words (on p. 253) are the crux of McLaren's final chapter, which closes with 15 numbered paragraphs expounding that basic assertion.

So, even if we are—or because we are(!)—living life after doom, let’s live resiliently, not giving up, giving in, or giving out. Paraphrasing Maya Angelou, let’s do the best we can until we know better—and then, let’s do better!

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*¹ I first published that list in my book subtitled The Story of My Life from Birth until My 82^nd Birthday (2020).

*² That emphasis was also the title of  #7 in my book Thirty True Things Everyone Needs to Know Now (2019).

*³ In the 2023 updated version of my life story book, I replaced McLaren’s 2007 book with Do I Stay Christian? which was published in 2022.

*⁴ In Appendix 1, McLaren lists what he considers the five best books dealing with “our predicament.” The first is William Catton’s Overshoot (1982)—and “The Most Important Book You’ve Never Read,” my 2/23/23 blog post, is about Catton’s book. Then McLaren gives Michael Dowd’s videos as the first of the five best video/audio resources. Many of you will remember that I have written about Dowd several times, the first being in my 1/25/22 blog post. McLaren mentions that Dowd was his friend who died while he (Brian) was writing this book.

 

Are You (a Supporter of) MADD?

The 4-Ls series of blog articles ended on May 30, but this post harks back to the first L. It is about the unnecessary and preventable loss of life of many thousands of people each year in the U.S. 

Do you know who Candy Lightner is? I didn’t until this past March when I heard a church woman talk about her in a worship service at First Baptist Church of Kansas City (Mo.).

Ms. Lightner, whose name was Candace Doddridge when she was born in May 1946, had the devastating experience of having her 13-year-old daughter Cari killed by a drunk driver in May 1980. Just four months later, she founded MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving.)

By 1985, MADD had grown into an international organization with over two million members in more than 400 chapters worldwide and an annual budget exceeding $12,000,000.

Amid allegations of financial mismanagement, in 1985 Candy left the organization she founded, but MADD has continued to be a strong organization to the present day.

While writing this article, for the first time I made a contribution to MADD and became a supporter. (Click here if you’d like to do the same.) The receipt I received notes,

Gifts from friends like you have helped cut deaths from drunk driving in half over the last four decades. More than 450,000 lives have been saved, and we’ve been able to compassionately serve more than 900,000 victims [bolding added].

In 2011, Lightner started a new organization. It is called We Save Lives and focuses on reducing drugged, drunk, and distracted driving. It is still active, but it seems to be less effective than MADD.

Surprisingly, Lightner said in a 2002 newspaper article (see here) that MADD had “become far more neo-prohibitionist than I had ever wanted or envisioned. I didn’t start MADD to deal with alcohol. I started MADD to deal with the issue of drunk driving.”

In that article, she also said that she disassociated herself from MADD because she believed the organization was headed in the wrong direction, that is, putting too much emphasis on not drinking.

Accordingly, she doesn’t encourage people not to drink; rather, she wants people to “drink responsibly”—and that is the same appeal made in beer advertisements I hear while listening to baseball or basketball games on the radio.  

Candy seems to think that it is not alcohol that causes so many traffic fatalities, it is drunk drivers who cause those deaths. That sounds to me very similar to those who oppose gun control when they say it is not guns that kill people, it is those who do not use guns responsibly. Aren’t both technically correct?

Most people who drink alcohol do not drive drunk, and most gun owners do not misuse their firearms and shoot other people. But are we OK with the number of people who die each year both as a result of gun violence and drunk driving?

Despite all the good work that MADD has done, a large number of people die in drunk-driving crashes every week. According to this website, the U.S. Department of Transportation states that over 13,500 people died in alcohol-impaired driving traffic deaths in 2022. Then they say, “These deaths were all preventable.”

If there were a U.S. airplane crash that killed more than 200 people, it would be considered a major tragedy and would long be in the national news. Except for the terrorist-caused crashes in 2001, the last U.S. airplane crash with 200+ fatalities was TWA flight 800 off the coast of New York in July 1996.

But think about it: there is now an average of about 260 deaths caused by drunk driving in the U.S. every week of the year! But these deaths don’t make more than the local news.

If MADD has, indeed, saved more than 450,000 lives in the last four decades, and I have no reason to dispute that claim, I am truly grateful and plan to continue supporting their work.

Doesn’t more need to be done, though? Will we just ignore the likelihood that far more than 260 people will be killed by drunk drivers during the first week of July? Or is that something that causes us to be/support MADD?

Seeking a Raceless Gospel and a Desegregated Church

Recently I have been thinking about race and racial segregation. Last month I finished reading Starlette Thomas’s impressive book Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church. Then on June 2, I learned about the end of segregated schools in Kansas. 

Starlette Thomas, according to her website, “is an author, activist, visual artist and race abolitionist.” She has a Doctor of Ministry degree from Wesley Theological Seminary. Her book was published last year under the same title as her doctoral thesis.

Dr. Thomas is currently an associate editor at Good Faith Media (GFM) and the director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative. That program is

a didactic, multifaceted ministry of communication that decenters the sociopolitical construct of race and its progeny for the sake of Jesus’ gospel and in hopes of practicing an inclusive hospitality for a raceless ‘kin-dom’ of God to come.

In the fifth and final chapter of her book, and just before one of the many times she cites Galatians 3:28, Starlette writes, “The raceless gospel, rooted in baptismal identity, is an embodied ecclesiology that aims to drown out all competing identities” (p. 90).

On the following page, she asserts her belief that “human beings were not created to be color-coded”; rather, “all bodies are created equal” and “our allegiance to a racial group directly conflicts with our baptismal identity.”

Because she embraced that decisive identity, Starlette has been on a spiritual journey “of decentering whiteness, decolonizing identity and deconstructing race.”*¹

The Madam C. J. Walker School was built about 1860 to house the Black students of the South Park area in what is now the city of Merriam in Johnson County, Kansas. A new building was constructed in 1888 after Johnson County organized School District No. 90. 

Black and White children went to the school until around 1900 when the school district began separating the students based on race, and the South Park Grade School was built for White students.

In 1947, the school district built a new South Park Grade School for White students using taxpayer funds. Black students had to continue attending the two-room, markedly inferior Walker schoolhouse even though their parents had to pay taxes for the construction of the new South Park School.

The following year, Alfonso Webb filed a lawsuit with the Kansas Supreme Court in the name of his sons who were second and first grade students at Walker School. That case was won in 1949 and Black children were allowed to attend the South Park School.*²

That decision in Kansas was a precursor of the Brown v. Board of Education lawsuit. In May 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court settled that case by ruling unanimously that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.*³

Why are there still so many segregated churches since segregated public schools have been ruled unconstitutional for seventy years now?

At the end of the first chapter of her book, Dr. Thomas cites the well-known words of MLK, Jr.: “It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 o’clock on Sunday morning” (p. 29, citing an address King delivered in 1957).

In that seminal talk, King stated, “Racial segregation is a blatant denial of the unity which we have in Christ. Segregation is a tragic evil which is utterly un-Christian.” Starlette’s advocacy of the raceless gospel is her endeavor to continue doing what King was urging Christians to do 67 years ago.

Fortunately, most church segregation now is not because of opposition to integration so much as it is because of the importance of the Black church for its members. (In this regard, consider ”The Downside of Integration for Black Christians, Jemar Tisby’s 2017 essay.)

King declared that the church “cannot rest until segregation and discrimination are banished from every area of American life. It has always been the responsibility of the Church to broaden horizons, challenge the status quo, and break the mores when necessary.”

Starlette Thomas is currently endeavoring to do that admirably—but in a way that doesn’t bypass “the beauty of particularity” seen in the Black church.*⁴

What can we who have benefited from White privilege do to promote the raceless Gospel and to combat the vestiges of racial segregation?

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*¹ These words are from Starlette’s column titled “The Raceless Gospel as a Proclamation of Somebodiness,” which was first posted (here) on Good Faith Media’s website in April. Also, please consider reading this June 5 “conversation with Starlette Thomas” about her book.  

*² On June 2, two of Alfonso Webb’s five daughters (and he also had five sons) were honored guests at Rainbow Mennonite Church, and I was able to chat briefly with one of them. The former Walker schoolhouse, enlarged and completely remodeled, is now the Philadelphia Missionary Baptist Church, and June and I much enjoyed attending their Sunday morning worship service yesterday.

*³ My blog post on May 10, 2013, was titled “Brown v. the Board of Education.” Here is a link to that post, if you would like to read it (again).

*⁴ The quoted words are from Felicia Murrell’s book, And: The Restorative Power of Love in an Either/Or World (2024). This link will take you to an article with the author being interviewed about that insightful book.