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.