How Will You Celebrate June 14?

Saturday, June 14, will be a busy day. That day here in the U.S. has long been celebrated as Flag Day. It is also the anniversary of the U.S. Army. Additionally, June 14 is President Trump’s 79^th birthday, and his planned military parade in Washington, D.C. However, many plan to celebrate Saturday as No Kings Day. 

Flag Day in the U.S. has long been celebrated on June 14. The first official national flag was formally approved by the Continental Congress on June 14, 1777. Then in 1861, Flag Day was initially proposed to rally support for the Union side of the American Civil War.

Although President Wilson issued a proclamation in 1916 that designated June 14 as Flag Day, it was not until August 1949 that Congress officially established “National Flag Day” on that date. But even now, it is not an official federal holiday.

Two years before the approval of the flag, the United States Army was founded on June 14. Thus, this year will be the 250^th anniversary of the Army. (Since there was not yet a nation called the United States in 1775, it was first called the Continental Army.)

The current website of the U.S. Army says, “Since its official establishment, June 14, 1775 — more than a year before the Declaration of Independence — the U.S. Army has played a vital role in the growth and development of the American nation.”

President Trump was born on June 14, 1946, so this year his 79^th birthday will be on Flag Day. As has been widely covered in the news media, the POTUS has planned a huge military parade in Washington, D.C. for that day, partly to commemorate the Army.

During his first term, Trump sought to have a big military parade. Those plans, however, were shelved because of the projected cost and concerns that some of the military vehicles, particularly tracked vehicles like tanks, would likely significantly damage D.C. streets and necessitate expensive repairs.

But now by linking Flag Day, the milestone anniversary of the Army, and his birthday, the POTUS has planned an extensive parade on the evening of June 14. At 6:30 p.m., the parade will begin near the Pentagon and Arlington National Cemetery before crossing into D.C.

The planned parade will feature 150 military vehicles, 6,600 soldiers, and 50 aircraft to fly overhead. U.S. Army tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, Paladin howitzers, and other military equipment from Texas arrived by train in the nation’s capital last Saturday to take part in the massive parade.

There will also be a multitude of protest marches on June 14. Most of the marches are linked to Indivisible, the anti-Trump organization initiated in 2016 as a reaction to the election of Trump as the 45^th POTUS.

“No Kings” is the theme of the more than 1,550 protest marches that are planned for every major city except for Washington D.C.* (There are at least five separate marches planned for the greater Kansas City area.)

The No Kings protest marches are in direct response to what organizers view as Trump’s military parade being “straight out of the authoritarian playbook.” It can easily be seen in the POTUS’s attempt to solidify his image as a “strongman” and, thus, clearly contrary to democratic values.**

All of these protest marches have great symbolic significance: the timing was deliberately chosen, of course, to counter the military parade on Flag Day / Trump’s birthday. The flag doesn’t belong to him. It belongs to all U.S. citizens and shouldn’t be co-opted by an authoritarian President’s parade.

It cannot be emphasized too strongly, though, how important it will be for all of the protest marches to be completely non-violent. If violence should break out anywhere, that would likely invoke federal troops deployed to quell such violence as was done in Los Angeles over this past weekend.

Personally, through the years, I have taken part in a few protest marches both in Japan and here in the U.S. Since I am now an old man, however, I don’t have the energy/stamina to participate in a local No Kings march on Saturday.

But if you have the time, interest, and energy to do so, I strongly encourage you to celebrate June 14 by taking part in one of the protest marches on that day.

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  * The NoKings.org website (see here) gives the reason for there being no protest march in the nation’s capital on the 14^th.  

** According to Wikipedia, “In politics, a strongman is a type of authoritarian political leader—civilian or military—who exerts control through military enforcement and has, or has claimed to have, strong popular support. Strongmen typically claim to have widespread popular support, portray themselves as the only one capable of solving the country's problems, and espouse a disdain for liberalism and democracy.” Doesn’t that sound a lot like Trump?!

 

Pentecost Witness for a Moral Budget

Pentecost was a highly significant Christian event that occurred fifty days after Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection. Unlike Christmas and Easter, it is not widely celebrated even by many devout Christians, and certainly not by the general public.

This year, though, Jim Wallis and his friends/supporters are promoting what he is calling “Pentecost witness for a moral budget.”¹ 

U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) speaks to the media on May 22 after the House narrowly passed the "big, beautiful bill."

Jim Wallis’s Substack blogsite is called “God’s Politics.” On May 8, he posted a call there for people to join him on June 10, two days after Pentecost, in “a public procession and vigil led by clergy and congregants, religious and lay leaders, at the U.S. Capitol before a key Senate vote.”

That vote will be “on a reconciliation package that threatens to slash care for the sick in Medicaid, limit feeding the hungry in SNAP, and crippling other vital social programs that support and uplift vulnerable people among us.” It may even restrict Medicare.

It will likely be early July before the Senate votes on the budget bill, but on May 22 (at 6:56 a.m.!), the House passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (BBB) by a vote of 215 for and 214 against, with one dissenting Republican House member voting “present.”²

Wallis has long emphasized that a budget is a moral issue. That is because tax policies and government budgets affect people’s lives. They have moral consequences—and the moral standard is the biblical vision of economic justice. (Jim wrote about that in his best-selling book God’s Politics, 2006.)

The Poor People’s Campaign is also emphasizing a moral budget. At 7:56 a.m. on May 22, exactly one hour after the House passed the BBB, the leaders of the Poor People’s Campaign wrote that “now 215 Republican members of the House have put their name on this one big, ugly payout to billionaires.” (I encourage you to read their full blog post here.)

The prime leader of the Poor People’s Campaign is William Barber, whom I have mentioned, and lauded, several times since first introducing him in a September 2016 blog post. (He was also on my list of Ten Most Admired Contemporary Christians that I posted in March 2017.)

The week before Wallis’s June 10 event, Barber is hosting a protest on the east side of the Capitol, in front of the Supreme Court at 11 a.m. (ET) on June 2. In announcing that gathering, Barber wrote,  

As the cries of the poor grow louder and the policies of the powerful grow colder, we must rise. Across lines of faith, race, and region, moral witnesses will converge at the very steps where justice has been delayed, where truth has been trampled, and where budgets have become weapons against the vulnerable.

Now is the time to protest the harmful provisions of the BBB. Even though it will be more than a month before the Senate votes on their version of it, now is the time to be aware—and to make others aware—of how immoral the House-passed version of the BBB is.

Before the House vote, the President was touting the “merits” of the BBB. He is reported to have said, “This is the greatest bill … the most important bill this country, just about, has ever done, in terms of size and scope. That’s why we call it the great, big, beautiful deal.”

However, as Mark Wingfield posted on May 27, “Apart from evangelicals and die-hard Trump supporters, America's religious leaders find the president's ‘big beautiful bill’ … to be immoral, unkind and un-Christian.”³

That’s why now, a month and more before the Senate vote, as a Pentecost witness for a moral budget, we who agree with Wingfield and the religious leaders he cites need to write our Senators, urging them to vote No—and maybe we can convince friends and family members to do the same.

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*1 On May 29, Jim posted a Stackpost article (here) similar to what he posted on May 8. Many of you know who Jim Wallis is and my longstanding appreciation for him, but if you don’t, please take a look at the blog post I made about him in July 2021 by clicking here.

*2 See here for details about the content of the BBB on a government website. Since it is such a “big” bill, it includes much more than merely budgetary matters.

*3 Wingfield is Baptist News Global’s executive director and publisher. The article cited above is quite long, but if you want to read it all, which I hope some of you do, here is a link to it:
Faith leaders decry 'big beautiful bill' as immoral and un-Christian

Beware of Cruel Optimism and Hopium

People are often bifurcated as being either optimists or pessimists, but I have long tried to be neither. Rather I have tried to be a realist. Recently, though, in an article by Chris Smith, I came across a new term (to me), “cruel optimism,” and that strengthened my stance against optimism.**  

“The Rise of Cruel Optimism” is the title of the eighth chapter of Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, a British journalist. Hari (b. 1979) in turn introduces Lauren Berlant’s book, Cruel Optimism, published in 2011 by Duke University Press.

Berlant (1957~2021) was an American scholar who was a professor of English at the University of Chicago from 1984 until the year of her death. In a July 2021 essay in The Nation magazine, she was deemed “one of the most esteemed and influential literary and cultural critics in the United States.”

Cruel Optimism was Berlant’s most influential book, and Hari states that in it she explains that cruel optimism “is when you take a really big problem with deep causes in our culture like obesity or depression or addiction—and you offer people, in upbeat language, a simplistic solution.

“It sounds optimistic,” he continues, “because you were telling them the problem can be solved and soon—but it is in fact cruel because the solution you’re offering is so limited and so blind to the deeper causes that for most people it will fail” (p. 150).

Consider a couple of examples of cruel optimism. Hari’s first example is stress. Self-help books often suggest that meditation and mindfulness are helpful ways to reduce stress. While it is true that they may help reduce the symptoms of stress, they do nothing to eliminate the stressors.

Hari goes on to say that it is cruel optimism to think that meditation and/or mindfulness can “cure” stress, for the stressors “are often socioeconomic in nature: low wages, poor working conditions, poor or nonexistent health insurance” and the like.

Chris Smith gives another good example: greenwashing. As I explained in a blog post in February 2024, greenwashing is “the act or practice of making a product, policy, activity, etc. appear to be more environmentally friendly or less environmentally damaging than it really is.”

Smith asserts, “Greenwashing aims to make the consumer feel good about themselves, while doing little or nothing to address the present climate change.” It is cruel optimism because it leads people to buy what they don’t need by mistakenly thinking they are helping the environment even though they aren’t.

Cruel optimism is an example of “hopium.” This latter term means holding on to false hopes that prevents us from accepting reality. Hopium differs from hope in that the optimism it fuels is unwarranted or irrational. Like opium, it may make one feel better temporarily but causes harm later on.

Just before the 2024 presidential election, Russell Moore, the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, wrote (here), “...there’s a kind of ‘hope’ that is meant to numb us, to distract us from thinking about what could be a bleak future.”

Moore goes on to say that there is a deficient type of hope similar to the deficient type of grace that Bonhoeffer called cheap grace. Thus, “Cheap hope” is “actually not hope. It’s a hopioid.”

In his book God Can’t, Thomas Jay Oord writes about the danger of religious people praying with great hope for their sickness to be cured. In reality, though, Oord avers, “Instead of bringing hope, prayers for healing lead some to despair.”** Their hope becomes a type of hopium and cruel optimism.

In closing, I share a comment local Thinking Friend Anton Jacobs posted in response to my April 30 blog article. Anton, who admits to being pessimistic often, wrote, “…my main hope is that my sense of hopelessness is mistaken.”

I thought that was a helpful stance that is neither cruel optimism nor an example of hopium.

So, yes, let’s beware of the negative attitudes of cruel optimism and hopium. But for those of you who at times (or often) tend to be a victim of pessimism, I hope that you can embrace the hope that your sense of hopelessness is mistaken.

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** Chris Smith, the founding editor of Englewood Review of Books (ERB) introduced the term “cruel optimism” (which he said was new to him as it was to me) in an April 3 email sent to subscribers to the ERB online book review website, which he launched in 2008.

** The full title of Oord’s book is God Can't: How to Believe in God and Love after Tragedy, Abuse, and Other Evils (2019). I introduced Oord and his book in January (see here).

In Admiration of John Wesley and Methodism

Three hundred years ago, in 1725, John Wesley was ordained as a minister. Hardly anyone has been more instrumental in the spread of the Christian faith than Wesley. 

(John Wesley, c.1766)

Early on a February morning when John was five years old, a fire broke out in the rectory. All the large family except John, who was sleeping on the top floor, were able to flee to safety, and they all thought the boy had perished in the fire. But he was “miraculously” saved by escaping through a window.

John never forgot the significance of that event and not long before he died in 1791, he penned a statement he thought would be fitting for his grave marker. It began, “Here lieth the Body of John Wesley, A Brand plucked out of the burning.”*¹

The first chapter of a recent book about “John Wesley, the fearless evangelist,” begins with an account of that February 1709 fire. In the concluding paragraph of that chapter, the author writes,

In that nearly tragic event from his childhood, he saw a providential deliverance and the call on his life to help deliver those who would otherwise be engulfed in the spiritual flames of the wrath of God to come.*²

Wesley graduated from Christ Church, Oxford University in 1724. Then following in his father’s footsteps, at the age of 22 he was ordained as a minister in the Church of England in October 1725.

After his ordination, John wrote in his diary, “Leisure and I have taken leave of one another. I propose to be busy as long as I live.” And busy he was! During his lifetime, Wesley is said to have ridden 250,000 miles on horseback and to have preached over 40,000 sermons!

The most important event in Wesley’s spiritual life occurred on May 24, 1738, a month before his 35^th birthday. This was not long after he had returned to England with a strong sense of failure. In October 1735, he and his younger brother Charles had embarked as missionaries to the colony of Georgia.

Wesley was deeply impressed by the faith of the Moravian missionaries he met aboard the ships both going and returning from the “new world.” In contrast to the terror he felt when strong storms threatened the ships, the Moravian Christians were calmly singing hymns.*³

Back in England, Wesley sought out the Moravian Christian community on Aldersgate Street in London and went to one of their services on the evening of May 24. There he felt his heart “strangely warmed,” and that was the beginning of a “new” John Wesley.

Shortly thereafter, Wesley returned to Oxford and delivered a sermon titled "Salvation by Faith," based on Ephesians 2:8: "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God" (NKJV).

Wesley’s preaching about salvation by faith alone was not well received by the Church of England (CoE). He soon experienced considerable opposition, especially after he began “field preaching” in 1739. The latter was preaching outside rather than in a “proper” CoE church building.

Wesley began to form small Methodist groups across England, but he never broke with the CoE. However, in 1784 the Methodist Episcopal Church was organized in the U.S. by Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury, and from the 1820s until 1967, Methodism was the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S.

For 240 years now, Methodism has had significant positive impact on the U.S. and countries around the world. It has been a leading force in evangelism by fueling religious revival and emphasizing personal faith and salvation.

Methodists in the U.S. have also been in the forefront of social reform, being deeply involved in social justice movements, including abolitionism, temperance, and women's rights.

According to their website (see here), the United Methodist Church is now

… a worldwide connection of about 10 million members in more than100 countries including Africa, Asia, Europe and the United States. United Methodists are people of God who share a common mission and values. The church and its members are called to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.

Thank God for all the good done by John Wesley and Methodism!

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*¹ These words come from Zechariah 3:2 in the Old Testament. A more contemporary English translation renders these words as “a burning stick snatched from the fire” (NIV). Roy Hattersley (b. 1932) is a prominent British politician and author. Among his many books is The Life of John Wesley: A Brand from the Burning (2002).

*² These are the words of author Jake Hanson in his book Crossing the Divide (2016). The last ten words sound similar to Jonathan Edwards’s famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741), although I doubt that Wesley himself would have phrased it that way.

It is interesting to note, though, that Wesley, who undoubtedly became one of the greatest preachers and theologians in British history was born in June 1703, and Edwards, generally recognized as one of the greatest preachers and theologians in American history, was born in October 1703.

*³ The Moravian missionaries were sent by Herrnhut, the community of faith established by Nicolas Ludwig, Count von Zinzendorf in 1722. At that time, it was a part of Saxony in the Holy Roman Empire. It is now in Germany and roughly only ten miles from the borders of Poland and of Czechia.

The Moravian Church traces its beginning back to Jan Hus, the Czech reformer who was burned at the stake in 1415. The last part of my November 20, 2019, blog post was about Hus and ends with a reference to the founding of the Moravian Church in 1727.

The Five Worst Things of POTUS 47’s First 100 Days

April 12 was the 80^th anniversary of the death of Pres. Roosevelt, who first referred to “the first 100 days” of a president’s term. Yesterday, April 29, was the 100^th day of Pres. Trump’s second term. What a difference between those first 100 days of one of the best U.S. presidents and the first 100 days of one of the worst!*¹ 

The U.S. was in terrible shape when Roosevelt was inaugurated on March 4, 1933. The first 100 days of his presidency were pivotal in turning the nation toward recovery and saving the country, which was “in the throes of an unmatched calamity” and “on the brink of collapse”.*²

In March 1933, almost 25% of the civilian labor force (15,500,000 people!) were unemployed. And on his inauguration day, the most immediate challenge facing the new president was the imminent collapse of the US banking system. 

Jonathan Alter is an American journalist and best-selling author. One of his significant books is The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (2006). On the first page of his book, Alter avers that in March 1933 the U.S. was experiencing “its greatest crisis since the Civil War.”

The U.S. was in relatively good shape when Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2025. Of course, there were problems, but the recovery from the debilitating COVID-19 pandemic was better than that of the world’s other industrialized countries. The unemployment rate was low (4%), and the inflation rate was down to 3% from the pandemic peak of over 9% in 2022.

In the very first paragraph of his inaugural address, Trump said that “the golden age of America begins right now.” He vowed that every single day he would put America first and that his top priority would be “to create a nation that is proud, prosperous, and free.” He emphasized how bad things were currently and declared that “from this moment on, America’s decline is over.”

To a large extent, his promise to “make America great again” meant going back to the way things were before Roosevelt. That had long been the strong desire of right-wing politicians and a large segment of U.S. citizens who had long listened to easily accessible conservative “talk radio” programs and Fox News telecasts. Trump’s campaign rhetoric exploited that desire.

In the early 2010s, I was teaching a night class at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, and on the way home I would listen to a local AM station. That meant I often heard the rantings of Mark Levin.*³ He often said the U.S. needed to go back to the way it was 80 years ago, and I finally realized he meant going back to the way things were before FDR.

So, what are the five most harmful things Trump has done during these first 100 days of his second term? The following is my tentative list with only brief comments about each—and I could be persuaded to revise my list by readers who suggest something they see as worse or who think these “worse five’ should be ordered differently.

1) Harm to world peace. Because of Trump’s rhetoric and actions, the likelihood of warfare with the use of tactical or even strategic nuclear weapons has become greater in the last 100 days. His coziness with Putin, his negative views of NATO, and the current tariff war with China are troublesome signs of what might possibly happen in the not-so-distant future. 

2) Harm to the global environment. On inauguration day, Trump signed an executive order directing the U.S. to again withdraw from the landmark Paris climate agreement. Then here in the U.S., he has made multiple moves to do away with environmental programs designed to slow global warming and ecological collapse.

3) Harm to needy people at home and abroad. In February, the Trump administration said it is eliminating more than 90% of USAID’s foreign aid contracts and $60 billion in overall U.S. assistance, which eliminates the majority of U.S. development and humanitarian help abroad. Other cuts remove funding designed to help the neediest people in the U.S.

4) Harm to the worldwide economy. As CNN posted on April 28, “Trump took the US economy to the brink of a crisis in just 100 days.” On the same day, Reuters wrote, “Risks are high that the global economy will slip into recession this year, according to … a Reuters poll, in which scores [of economists] said U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs have damaged business sentiment.”

5) Harm to the rule of law. Domestically, Trump’s furor over migrants in the U.S. has led to the repeated rejection of “due process,” which is the bedrock foundation of the rule of law. According to CBS on April 23, Trump “is now arguing undocumented migrants should not be given a trial where they could challenge being removed from the country.”

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*¹ According to the conclusions of the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project (see here), Roosevelt ranked number two, following Abraham Lincoln, and Trump was 45^th, dead last—and there is ample reason to think that Trump’s second term so far is worse than his first. 

*² The words cited are those of Naftali Bendavid, the senior national political correspondent of the Washington Post. “Trump claims mantle of FDR’s first 100 days, but differences are stark” was the title of his April 28 post.

*³ As I learned on Wikipedia, “A 2016 study which sought to measure incendiary discourse on talk radio and TV found that Levin scored highest on its measure of ‘outrage’." He also “helped to legitimate the use of uncivil discourse.” Earlier this month, Trump appointed Levin to become a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council. It is not hard to understand why Trump appreciates what Levin has been saying on talk radio for so long and more recently on Fox News.

Note: To those of you who like statistics, I encourage you to take a look at "How Low Can Trump Go" a Substack post made yesterday by Rachel Bitecofer​ regarding Trump's polling numbers (click here--and let me know if you have trouble accessing Rachel's Substack post).

"Good Friday," Easter, and Spiritual Warfare

Today, April 18, is what Christians often call Good Friday, and two days from now is Easter Sunday. These are two of the most significant days for Christians, but they are not usually linked to what is often referred to as spiritual warfare, which is largely based on Ephesians 6:10~17 in the New Testament. 

Spiritual warfare is not interpreted the same by all Christians. As might be expected, the understanding and emphasis of moderates/progressives tend to be quite different from that of conservatives/traditionalists.

The decisive verse regarding spiritual warfare is found in Ephesians 6:

… we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places (v. 12, KJ21).

Conservative evangelical Christians tend to interpret these words as referring to personal struggles of individual Christians. For example, John Mark Comer, a well-known evangelical pastor and author, writes about spiritual warfare in his book Live No Lies.

Comer (b. 1980) interprets spiritual warfare primarily as the struggle of individual Christians against the lies that rob them of the enjoyment of personal peace and freedom.

Shane Claiborne (b. 1975), a progressive “evangelical,” interprets spiritual warfare quite differently:

This [2024] election was about principalities and powers – racism, patriarchy, xenophobia. This is not just about Trump. Certainly he has unleashed some of our worst demons. But this is bigger than one man. It is about spiritual and systemic powers that seek to harm some of our most vulnerable neighbors.*¹

The best interpretation of spiritual warfare I know of is by William Stringfellow, a lawyer and lay theologian. I wrote about him and his understanding of “principalities and powers” in my Jan. 5, 2018, blog article, and I encourage you to (re)read that post (see here).*2

In that article, I cited these words from one of Stringfellow’s most important books, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (1977). He wrote there that “principalities and powers” are not some esoteric spiritual forces of evil in a nonvisible realm.

Rather, Stringfellow explained, they are “all authorities, corporations, institutions, traditions, processes, structures, bureaucracies, ideologies, systems” and the like (p. 27).

That blog post made seven years ago was about the spiritual warfare evidenced by Herod’s “slaughter of the innocents” soon after Jesus’ birth. But even more, Jesus’ crucifixion on “Good Friday,” and his resurrection on that first Easter Sunday, are also prime examples of spiritual warfare.

Jesus, the light of the world, combats Satan, the “prince of this world,” according to the New Testament (see John 8:12, 14:30, NIV). In Paradise Lost, John Milton refers to Satan as “the prince of darkness,” the embodiment of evil.

The Lord’s Prayer points to an ongoing cosmic conflict between God’s kingdom of light and the devil’s temporary kingdom of darkness (Rev. 12:7~10). Through Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, the Triune God won the decisive battle against the formidable force of evil (= “Satan” or the devil).

The good news of Easter is not primarily about the hope of future life in a far-off heaven by those who believe in Jesus. Rather, it is about the kingdom (kindom) of God becoming victorious here and now, God’s will being done on earth as it is in heaven.

But the fight between light and darkness, good and evil, is by no means over. Spiritual warfare continues. That is why God-believers are admonished to put on “the whole armor of God” so that they may be able to “stand against the wiles of the devil” (Eph. 6:11, KJ21).

It is with great sadness that we see spiritual warfare apparent now even between Good Friday- and Easter-celebrating Christians aligned with decidedly different understandings of the Gospel of Jesus.

One side is composed to a large degree by MAGA Christians who see Trump’s assassination attempt as linked to spiritual warfare and also interprets that warfare as being primarily against abortion and LGBT people.*3

On the other side are those of us who see the force of evil working through the destructive power structures elucidated by Stringfellow. Those structures, unfortunately, include the current Trump Administration.

I encourage you to click on this link and read Thinking Friend Jarrett Banks’s Palm Sunday prayer at First Christian Church in Lynchburg, Virginia. He expressed so well the side I want to identify with. What about you?

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*¹ These words are cited in a Nov. 8, 2024, post by John Fea (see here).

*² The Wikipedia article about Stringfellow (1928~85) correctly mentions that his work has been advanced by New Testament scholar/professor Walter Wink (1935~2012), who wrote a trilogy on “the powers.” It also notes his influence on “evangelical social activists” such as Jim Wallis and Shane Claiborne.

*3 About three weeks ago, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “I certainly believe in spiritual warfare. And I think I saw it firsthand, especially throughout the campaign trail with President Trump. And I think there certainly were evil forces. And I think that the president was saved by the grace of God on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, and he's in this moment for a reason."

On March 22 a Catholic priest speaking at a conference in California emphasized “the reality of spiritual warfare in the fight against abortion, the demonic attacks against the family and life issues, and the connection between abortion, the culture, and the spiritual forces of darkness.”

And then this on April 2: “Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and two of her fellow GOP congresswomen discussed her bill banning transgender medical services for children and the ‘spiritual warfare’ surrounding gender ideology” (see here). 

Anne Lamott: A Humorous “Theologian”

This year, I have read four of Anne Lamott’s books. Some of you have also read some of her many books, but others may not know much, if anything, about her or her writings. In this post, I will briefly introduce her and share a few of her “theological” ideas and statements.  

Anne Lamott was born in San Francisco on April 10, 1954, so tomorrow will be her 71^st birthday. As a girl, she grew up in a lower-income neighborhood of Marin City, Calif., a few miles northwest of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Marin City was originally built as housing for shipyard workers during WWII and later became home to a predominantly Black community. Lamott described it as "the ghetto in this luscious, affluent county," noted for government housing, drugs, and crime as well as strong families.

For several years, she also lived in a small houseboat in Sausalito, a more eclectic and artistic environment, where she struggled with addiction and financial instability before finding her footing as a writer.

Most people try to present themselves as better than they are, but in her self-deprecating writing style, it seems that Lamott probably presents herself as worse than she actually is. Still, until she was in her early 30s, her lifestyle was characterized by alcoholism, drug abuse, and promiscuous sex.

Things began to change for the better when she started attending what became St. Andrews Presbyterian Church, an interracial congregation that met for years in borrowed/rented facilities. She was baptized there in 1986, and she wrote that “one year later I got sober” (TM, 51).

For many years, Lamott’s pastor was Veronica Goines, a wise Black woman from whom Anne learned much. It will soon be 40 years since Lamott was baptized, and she has been a faithful member and lay-leader of that church up to the present.

In 1989, her son Sam was born, and in her books she repeatedly writes about her dear son, whom she raised as a single mother.*¹

Lamott’s books are a mixture of humor, ordinariness, and profundity—at least that is my impression from her books that I have read:

Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (1999, TM)

 Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith (2005, PB)

Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith (2007, GE*²)

Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy (2017, HA)

As one who spent considerable time in graduate school studying Søren Kierkegaard, I was surprised that early in TM, she wrote that reading SK’s Fear and Trembling changed her life " forever.” Then, she wrote words directly related to last month’s blog posts about certainty and faith.

She realized that “since this side of the grave you could never know for sure if there was a God, you had to make a leap of faith, if you could, leaping across the abyss of doubt with fear and trembling” (27). Because of reading SK, she “actively made, if not exactly a leap of faith, a lurch of faith” (28).

I was surprised to find such theological statements embedded in her humor-laden writing. Further, her theological understanding of Christianity, as was also true of Kierkegaard’s, is not about “pie in the sky by and by.”

In Plan B, she states that her faith tells her that “God has skills, ploys, and grace adequate to bring light into the present darkness, into families, prisons, governments.” In that regard, she quotes Pastor Veronica: “Nobody gets into heaven without a letter of reference from the poor” (citing James Forbes*³.)

Here are some insightful “theological” nuggets from Lamott’s books:

* We “are not punished for the sin but by the sin” (TM, 128)

* “… not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die” (TM, 134)

* “God loves us exactly the way we are, and God loves us too much to let us stay like this” (TM, 135)

* Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back” (PB, 47).

* Fr. Tom told her that “the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty” (PB, 256).

* “… we’re punished not for our hatred … but by it” (GA, 129-130).

* “Mercy means compassion, empathy, a heart for someone’s troubles” (HA, 51).

* “God doesn’t give us answers. God gives us grace and mercy” (HA, 104)

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*¹ Lamott’s memoir about the first year of motherhood as a single parent, Operating Instructions, was published in 1993. I have not read it, but according to CoPilot (Bing’s AI tool), that book, written in journal format, “captures her joys, fears, and struggles raising her son.” Further, it “was widely praised for its raw honesty, humor, and heartfelt portrayal of single motherhood.”

*² You can hear Lamott talk about her faith in this 2016 interview regarding her book Grace Eventually.

*³ Forbes (b. 1935) served as pastor of historic Riverside Church in NYC from 1989 to 2007, the first African American minister to hold that position.

Faith is Better than Doubt

There was considerable interest in and comments/questions about my March 8 blog post titled “Doubt is Better than Certainty.” This post is also about doubt, but it is mainly about faith in God rather than certainty or doubt about beliefs. 

“The Shock of Faith” is the title of David Brooks’s opinion column published by the New York Times last December 19. It is a long, thoughtful, heartfelt article that is well worth reading and contemplating. (You can access it here [with a different title]).

Brooks (b. 1961) is a nationally known newspaper journalist and author as well as a regular on PBS NewsHour every Friday evening. He was raised Jewish, but he attended an Episcopal grade school as a boy. He says in his Dec. 19 post, he grew up “religious but not spiritual.”

When I first began to hear about Brooks, I thought he was too politically conservative and paid little attention to him. But his new book, The Road to Character, was the subject of a study meeting at Central Baptist Seminary in Kansas City in September 2015. It was led by then-president Molly Marshall.

Attending that discussion gave me new appreciation for Brooks, and his political views, which continued to move toward a center-left position. The point of this article, though, is about Brooks’s ideas about faith, not politics.

Faith is “like falling in love.” This is one of Brooks’s thought-provoking statements. While there are problems with the widespread claim that people fall in love, that expression implies that romantic love is usually far more a matter of the heart (emotional) rather than of the head (cerebral).

Brooks’s article begins with his acknowledgement that he long “thought faith was primarily about belief.” But when faith finally “tiptoed into” his life, as he put it, it was “through numinous “experiences,” that is, through “scattered moments of awe and wonder” which hit him “with the force of joy.”

That’s what caused him to fall in faith. Even though he had been religious without being spiritual, Brooks says that position “felt empty” to him. On the other hand, he also found that being spiritual without being religious didn’t work for him. Religions, he says, “enmesh your life in a sacred story.”*¹

In that regard, Brooks cites important, instructive words of Rabbi David Wolpe: “Spirituality is an emotion. Religion is an obligation. Spirituality soothes. Religion mobilizes. Spirituality is satisfied with itself. Religion is dissatisfied with the world.”*²

“Have mercy on those who doubt” (CEB) are words in the New Testament book of Jude, verse 22. The issue there is not about doubt rather than certainty regarding beliefs, but doubt about one’s foundational faith.

If people who have fallen in love begin to have serious doubts about that love being “real” and reciprocal, the relationship has become precarious. That is what causes couples to “break up” or spouses to divorce. Just as doubt about love is a serious matter, so is doubt about faith.

Doubt is better than certainty concerning ideas or beliefs, for that doubt nudges the doubter to seek to learn more and to examine his/her beliefs. But faith in God (by whatever name is used for the Ultimate) is not basically about ideas or beliefs. It is about a relationship that can be destroyed by doubt.

Rachel Held Evans, the widely respected Christian author whose untimely death is still mourned by many, once said, “I recognize that faith is always a risk. No matter what we believe, there is always a chance we might be wrong. But the story of Jesus is just the story I’m willing to risk being wrong about.”*³

Evans’s faith was not primarily in the veracity of Christian beliefs. Rather, her faith was heartfelt commitment to Jesus Christ. She had doubts about many traditional Christian doctrines, but her faith/trust in Christ was stronger, and better, than her doubts about the certainty of those stated beliefs.

Since robust Christian faith is commitment to Christ, that faith becomes apparent not by what we say or give intellectual assent to. Rather, faith is expressed by how we live and what we do.

As Bill Tammeus says on the last page of his book on doubt, faith keeps “us focused on the goal of demonstrating what a world of peace, harmony, mercy, justice, and love might look like.”

Doubt can’t do that, so clearly (undoubtedly?), faith is better than doubt.

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*¹ Two of the short “chapters” in Bill Tammeus’s book The Value of Doubt (2016) are about whether one can be spiritual but not religious or religious but not spiritual. In the Comment section of my 3/8 blog post, Bill (who is on my Thinking Friends mailing list) referred to his book, and I had to admit that I knew about it but had not yet read it. Since then, I have been able to check out a copy of it from the local (MCPL) library, and I have been profiting from reading that delightful book. I highly recommend it.

*² David J. Wolpe (b. 1958) is a Conservative Jewish rabbi and now Emeritus Rabbi of the prestigious Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. In 2012, Newsweek magazine named him the most influential rabbi in America.

*³ Rachel Held Evans was born in 1981 and died a few weeks before her 39^th birthday. My June 5, 2021, blog article was about her (see here). The words cited above were part of her discussion about faith with a pastor in 2014. It can be found on YouTube (here); that video has had more than 17,000 views.