What Does Taking Up One’s Cross Mean?

Some of this blog’s readers were surprised that I quoted Jesus’ words in my July 20 post. What I was advocating with those words, though, is certainly relevant for people who are adherents of other religions—or of no religion—also. When carefully considered, many of the latter may well be implementing Jesus’ words more than most conservative evangelical Christians are. 

In this post I am thinking primarily of Jesus’ words in Luke 9:23.** Here is the NRSV translation of that verse: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.”  

Traditionally, that important verse has been interpreted along the following lines, and here again I am using assistance from Claude, my A.I. “buddy.” (He/it told me in less than five seconds what I would have written in 15 minutes or more before chatbots became available.)

For many/most conservative evangelicals, taking up one’s cross means “personal sacrifice or suffering endured for one’s faith—enduring persecution, ridicule, or hardship for holding to Christian belief and behavior (often framed around culture-war flashpoints: refusing certain entertainment, standing firm on sexual ethics, facing mockery for evangelizing).”

This is the “quietist or status-quo-affirming” position. Since the cross is about internal spiritual struggle, it is not seen as having anything directly to do with the political world. If it does become a bit politicized, it is usually understood as bearing social stigma for “traditional values” positions.

However, the real meaning of Jesus’ words in about taking up one’s cross is quite different.

New Testament Christians were opposed by both religious and political powers. The Jewish leaders saw Jesus and his followers as a threat to their religious authority, and Caesar saw Jesus, who claimed to be Lord, and the Christians who called him Lord as a threat to his political power. Both powers first wanted to get rid of Jesus and then sought to eradicate his followers.

Crucifixion was one of the main forms of capital punishment used by Rome in New Testament times. It was specifically used for insurrectionists and rebels against Roman rule. That means of execution was designed to be maximally public and degrading. It was usually carried out along roadsides near cities, precisely as a deterrent against sedition.

“Pilate also had an inscription written and put on the cross. It read, ‘Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews’” (John 19:19).

That’s part of why the charge on Jesus’s cross ("King of the Jews") matters—it marks him as executed for the crime of insurrection/treason against Rome, not blasphemy.

So, what does taking up one’s cross mean in the present day for us USAmericans? Among other things, it means opposing the Trump “regime” and his efforts to demonize his political opponents by calling them Communists (see this YouTube video of his July 4 speech).

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** Were these really the words of Jesus? My local Thinking Friend Phil says that he thinks the same words in the Sermon on the Mount were Matthew’s words and not necessarily something that Jesus said. I disagreed, saying to Phil that even though the writer of the Gospel of Matthew may not have literally heard and written down those words when he heard Jesus say them, I think they would have been accurately handed down by “oral tradition,” which was very reliable in New Testament times, long before there were printed documents to hand down.

 

What about Pastors Promoting Politicians?

Last month, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service stated that churches and/or pastors could endorse candidates running for political office, despite the Johnson Amendment of 1954.*¹ Should we now think it is acceptable for pastors to promote voting for politicians by name? 

Why was the Johnson Amendment passed and long uncontroversial? Lyndon B. Johnson was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1948 and successfully ran for re-election in 1954. During that re-election campaign, he was opposed by some tax-exempt organizations, including churches.

Johnson thought it was not fair for tax-exempt groups and their leaders to engage in direct support or opposition to candidates running for political office. His amendment was passed with little opposition and has long been widely recognized as upholding the principle of separation of church and state.

Even though the amendment was drafted by a prominent Democratic Senator, it was signed into law by President Eisenhower, a Republican. There was widespread agreement across the political spectrum that mixing tax-exempt status with partisan political endorsements was inappropriate.

From the beginning, though, there was some opposition to the enactment of that 1954 amendment.

What was the basis for disapproval of the Johnson Amendment? Even though they thought it was absolutely right for their churches to be exempt from paying taxes, some conservative Christians thought the Johnson Amendment was an infringement on their freedom of speech.

Since they saw the amendment as a freedom of speech violation, they thought it was unconstitutional and needed to be nullified or just ignored, as to a certain extent, it has been through the years.

Pastors, they claim, have the responsibility to speak out on moral issues, and doing so naturally includes mentioning the names of politicians who are aligned with what is deemed to be immoral. Such opposition has grown over the years among those affiliated with the Christian Right and now with MAGA.

With the growth of the latter groups over the past decades, conservative pastors have largely felt constrained to speak out, especially in opposition to abortion and LGBTQ rights and against politicians who are pro-choice and pro-gay.

In recent years, Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, has been one prominent pastor who has expressed strong disapproval of the Johnson Amendment. He has been one of Trump’s most ardent supporters, and in April, he voiced that disapproval at the Easter prayer service in the White House.

At the President’s request, soon afterward, he sent a letter to Trump, outlining what he called “wrongful weaponization of the law” and the “unlawful targeting” of his church. He has also said, “What a pastor says in a church service is none of the government’s … business.”*²

Jeffress and many other conservative pastors think they have the right to give moral instruction to their “flock,” including guidance in political matters. On the website of Jeffress’s church, however, they claim that their weekly telecasts are seen by hundreds of thousands of viewers.

Any pastors who have their sermons streamed on the internet have no basis for saying they are just giving moral instruction to their church members. To promote political candidates, as Jeffress is wont to do, is a clear violation of the Johnson Amendment.

Why is ignoring the Johnson Amendment now a bad policy? Since politically conservative church members overwhelmingly vote Republican, if pastors in such churches promote political candidates, that will make little difference. Most conservative evangelicals will vote for Republicans no matter what.

On the other hand, since members of progressive churches (such as the one I am a member of) overwhelmingly vote Democratic, pastors of such churches mentioning the name of a candidate will make little difference.

The problem is in churches where the adult members are politically “purple.” Pastors promoting candidates by name in such churches could and probably would influence many to vote for the candidate promoted by the pastor. This is why the Johnson Amendment needs to be heeded.

On July 30, over 1,000 charitable nonprofits launched a national sign-on letter to defend nonpartisanship and public trust (see here). The letter strongly objects to efforts by the Trump administration to weaken the Johnson Amendment, which protects nonprofits from partisan politics.

As Amanda Tyler says, this ignoring of the Johnson amendment “threatens to turn churches into PACs”—and that can’t be good for either the government or churches.*³

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*¹ According to Wikipedia, “The Johnson Amendment is a provision in the U.S. tax code … that prohibits all 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations from endorsing or opposing political candidates. Section 501(c)(3) organizations are the most common type of nonprofit organization in the United States, ranging from charitable foundations to universities and churches. The amendment is named for then-Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas.” In July 1954, it was enacted into law.

*² This was reported in a July 30 article in the New York Times (see here). The title of that article is “How Conservative Christians Cracked a 70-Year-Old Law,” and if you are interested in reading more about this issue, I recommend that article. Also, I didn't quote from it, but here is a link to another good article, published yesterday, on the subject. 

*³ Tyler is the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee [BJC] for Religious Liberty. The BJC’s roots go back to 1936 when the Southern Baptist Convention [SBC] established an organization that grew into what became the BJC. The SBC ceased funding the BJC in 1991

The Current Need for Senators Like Margaret Chase Smith

Seventy years ago, Senator Margaret Chase Smith delivered her “Declaration of Conscience” speech. I don’t usually praise Republican senators, but Smith was a courageous politician, and the country needs more like her today.*¹ 

Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) was a U.S. Senator from 1947 until his death at age 48 in 1957. He became widely known nationwide after giving a speech to the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, W.V., in February 1950.

In that speech, McCarthy showed a piece of paper that he claimed contained a long list of known Communists working for the U.S. government. He declared, "The State Department is infested with Communists.” That was the beginning of the so-called “Red Scare” that soon spread across the U.S.*²

According to Wikipedia, “Barely a month after McCarthy’s Wheeling speech, the term ‘McCarthyism’ was coined by Washington Post cartoonist Herbert Block.” He and others “used the word as a synonym for demagoguery, baseless defamation, and mudslinging.” 

Margaret Chase Smith (R-Maine) was a U.S. Senator from 1949~73. She died 30 years ago (in May 1995) at the age of 97, the last living senator to have been born in the 19^th century. She became widely known nationwide after giving a speech on the Senate floor on June 1, 1950.

In that speech, Smith presented a “Declaration of Conscience,” which was endorsed by six other Republican senators. It embraced five statements, the first of which began, “We are Republicans. But we are Americans first.” And here is the fifth statement in full:

It is high time that we stopped thinking politically as Republicans and Democrats about elections and started thinking patriotically as Americans about national security based on individual freedom. It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques—techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life.

Sen. Smith called for the country, the Senate, and the Republican Party to re-examine the tactics used by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and (without naming him) Senator McCarthy.

Where are the senators like Margaret Chase Smith today? Despite all the malicious things done and said by the current POTUS, to this point there has been hardly any dissenting voice coming from the Republican senators (or House representatives). This is a real and present danger to the U.S.

Eminent lawyer and law professor Alan Dershowitz’s book War on Woke: Why the New McCarthyism Is More Dangerous Than the Old was published last year, and it merits our attention.

Dershowitz contends that the new McCarthyism challenges the basic tenets of the classic liberal (in the traditional sense) state: Freedom of expression; due process; presumption of innocence, right to counsel, equal application of the law; and tolerance and respect for differing viewpoints.*³

I disagree with the honorable law professor when in the Introduction he states that the “bedrock principles” just mentioned are “rejected by McCarthyite extremists on both the hard left and the hard right.” He seems to go out of his way to endorse “bothsidesism.”

All the “basic tenets” mentioned above are being primarily disregarded by the President and ignored by the top Republican politicians.

Now, five full months after the inauguration of Trump 2.0, is high time for conscientious Republican senators and House members to step up and speak out against the undemocratic policies of the POTUS and his tendency toward embracing fascism.

There is some limited Republican opposition to Pres. Trump, dating back to his first term. That is mainly seen in Sen. Susan Collins (from Maine, like Smith), Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), and also Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.) since 2024.

Currently, there is also some opposition by fiscal conservatives such as Sen. Rand Paul (also from Ky.) and Ron Johnson (Wis.).

In addition, there are also a few GOP senators opposing the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” passed by the House at the end of May. That opposition is seen mostly in statements made by Senators Josh Hawley (Mo.), Jerry Moran (Kan.), Thom Tillis (N.C.), and John Curtis (Utah).

Still, most Republican senators vote in lockstep with the President. What the country badly needs, though, are politicians like Senator Margaret Chase Smith, who for the good of the nation will speak out against not only their own Party’s senators but especially the President.

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*¹ I am indebted to Heather Cox Richardson for prompting me to write this blog article. Her May 31 newsletter was a long, informative piece about Sen. Smith.

*² It is noteworthy that Clay Risen’s 460-page book Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America was published earlier this year. He writes in the Preface that “Trumpism and the MAGA movement” is not the same “as McCarthyism and the John Birch Society. But there is a line linking them” (viii). It is also worth noting that McCarthy's primary lawyer, Roy Cohn (1927~86), was also Donald Trump's lawyer in 1973 when the Justice Department accused Trump of violating the Fair Housing Act.

*³ Dershowitz (born in 1938 and about two weeks younger than me) became Harvard Law School's youngest full professor and is now Emeritus Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law.

 

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

The U.S. is Now Far Too Musky

You know the word musty (having a stale, moldy, or damp smell) and also perhaps the term musky (having an odor of or resembling musk). But I am writing here about Musky (referring to Elon Musk). 

Timothy Snyder is a scholar worth knowing about and taking seriously.  He is an American historian and a professor of History at Yale University. During Trump’s first year as POTUS in 2017, Snyder (b. 1969) published On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.

Snyder’s book is a short one about how to prevent a democracy from becoming a tyranny (such as Italy did in the 1920s and Germany did in the 1930s) with a focus on modern United States politics and on what he calls "America's turn towards authoritarianism."*¹

On the first page of the Prologue, Snyder states that tyranny means “the usurpation of power by a single individual or group, or the circumvention of law by rulers for their own benefit.”

Snyder now posts regularly on Substack, and “Of course it’s a coup” is the title of his February 5 post, which can be accessed here. In that post, he asserts,

The ongoing actions by Musk and his followers are a coup because the individuals seizing power have no right to it. Elon Musk was elected to no office and there is no office that would give him the authority to do what he is doing. It is all illegal. It is also a coup in its intended effects: to undo democratic practice and violate human rights.*²

Snyder goes on to say, “President Trump … will also perform at Musk’s pleasure. There is not much he can do without the use of the federal government’s computers.”

Some are saying, correctly it seems, that Trump is a PINO (President in name only), and now U.S. executive power is really in Musk’s hands. Time magazine’s recent provocative "cover" puts Elon Musk behind Trump’s desk. 

So, this is why I am saying that the U.S. is now too Musky. While perhaps no one else is using that last word, there are a multitude of Democrats and an appallingly few Republicans who agree with my assessment.

Elon Musk needs little introduction, but there is much about him that most of us don’t know. Briefly, he was born in South Africa (in 1971) and became a citizen of Canada in 1989 and of the U.S. in 2002. He has been married and divorced twice and has fathered 12 children with three women.*³

Until recently, Musk has been best known for founding (in 2002) and being the CEO of SpaceX, for being the CEO of Tesla, Inc. (since 2008), and for being the owner of Twitter (which he bought in 2022 and changed the name to X in 2023).

Also, as is widely known, Musk is considered the wealthiest man in the world with an estimated net worth of over 40 billion US dollars. And now he has become the most powerful person in the U.S. federal government other than (or even more than?) the President.

Musk’s political power comes from his being the head of DOGE (The Department of Government Efficiency). DOGE is not a Cabinet-level department; it is, rather, a temporary contracted government organization created by President Trump’s executive order on the day he was inaugurated.

According to Wikipedia, “DOGE's stated purpose is to reduce wasteful and fraudulent federal spending, and eliminate excessive regulations.” Further, it was “created to ‘modernize federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.’" 

On February 11, the President hosted reporters in the Oval Office, but as Heather Cox Richardson reported, “Elon Musk held center stage,” for the event was Trump signing another executive order, this one essentially putting DOGE in charge of the U.S. government. 

Having someone other than the President in charge of the government and dismissing the place of Congress certainly sounds like it is a coup. In a lengthy, informative piece by eminent journalist Anne Applebaum (b. 1964) in the January 14 issue of The Atlantic (see here), Musk is leading a “regime change.”

If these assertions about the U.S. now experiencing a coup or an illegal regime change are true, which I’m afraid are accurate, surely it is also accurate to say that the U.S. is now too Musky! Aren’t we going to speak out forcefully against that?! 

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 *1 That book topped The New York Times bestseller list for paperback nonfiction in 2017 and remained on bestseller lists as late as 2021. On March 12, the Vital Conversations group in Kansas City's Northland will discuss tyranny, using Snyder's book as the basis for conversation. (Those of you who live in the area are invited to attend this gathering which meets in the Antioch branch of the Mid-Continent Public Library in Gladstone.)

*2 The day before Snyder made his post, Joyce Vance (whose husband is no kin to VP Vance) posted Is It Really a Coup? on her Substack blog (titled Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance). On February 12 her post was titled Call it what it is, reiterating that what Musk is doing through DOGE is, indeed, a coup.

*3 Actually, he married and divorced his second wife twice. In 2020, his “romantic partner” gave birth to a boy they named X Æ A-Xii. On February 11, “Lil X” (as his father calls him) was pictured with his father and the President in the Oval Office.

Happy New Year of the Snake (again)

Although it is still December 31 here in the U.S., rather than making this post at around 5:30 a.m., as I normally do, I am posting it at 9:00 (CST). This later time is midnight, the beginning of 2025, in Japan where I lived for so long. So it is now the Year of the Snake there, the same as in 2013.*¹  

People who are born in the Year of the Snake have positive character traits according to the Japanese (Chinese) zodiac. They are “deep thinkers, speak very little, and possess tremendous wisdom. They are fortunate in money matters and will always be able to obtain it.”*²

June and I are delighted to be expecting our third great-grandchild in May. We hope she will have the characteristics associated with those noted in the previous paragraph. Of course, there are also a few negative characteristics associated with each zodiac sign, so she will have to work to overcome those.

Consider what has happened in the Year of the Snake previously. While the snake does not have the strong negative connotations in Japan/China as it does in the West, awful things happened in the world in the Year of the Snake four times in the first half of the twentieth century.

The first Year of the Snake in the 1900s was in 1905. The Russo-Japanese War, which began in 1904, ended in a victory for Japan in September 1905. That war, fought between the Russian Empire and the Empire of Japan, resulted in 130,000 (or more) deaths, about 2/3 of them Japanese. 

Twelve years later, in 1917, the United States declared war on Germany and became embroiled in what was called the Great War then and World War I later.  As many as 8,000,000 soldiers and 13 million civilians died as a result of that war, although U.S. deaths were fewer than 120,000.

The next Year of the Snake was 1929. On October 29^th of that year, the Wall Street Crash marked the beginning of the worldwide Great Depression. The Dow Jones Industrial Average did not return to its peak close of September 1929 until November 1954. 

And then in 1941, twelve years later, the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7 occurred. The next day President Roosevelt called that a “date which will live in infamy,” and the U.S. declared war on Japan. There were at least 60 million deaths in that war, about 3/4 of them civilians.*³

Fortunately, the years 1953, 1965, 1977, and 1989 were years with no notably horrific world events. But the first Year of the Snake in this century, 2001, was certainly a traumatic one for the U.S.

2025 will be a different sort of “year of the snake” in the U.S. “Snake in the grass” is a common English expression. Since in Japan snakes do not have a “bad” reputation, though, there is no similar Japanese phrase. A Japanese website says the English idiom means “an enemy disguised as a friend,” or “someone you can’t trust.”

On January 20, the 47^th POTUS will be inaugurated. While I am generally careful not to use unkind, pejorative language, I am only one among many who think that he and several of his Cabinet nominees can be legitimately characterized as “snakes in the grass.”

Candace Osmond is a “grammarist writer,” and she says (here) that a “snake in the grass” personality type refers to “someone who appears friendly and likable on the surface but has hidden agendas and will do anything to get what they want. They usually manipulate and deceive others to achieve their goals.”

Ms. Osmond gives no examples, but sadly, it seems hard to deny that the incoming President clearly exhibits that sort of personality, and some if not many of his nominees seem to have that trait also.

So, I wish you all the very best in the Year of the Snake, but I also urge you who are U.S. citizens to be careful not to be deceived by the “snakes in the grass” who will constitute what may well be a kakistocracy, that is, “a government run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens.”

Since snakes repeatedly shed their skins, they are often seen as a symbol of regeneration in Japan. May this Year of the Snake be the beginning of the regeneration of good government here in the U.S.!

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*¹ I have written this article with little overlap to what I said in the post with the same name I made that year. Some of you may want to read that post (here) since many of you were not on my Thinking Friends mailing list then. The only comments on that post were from Craig Dempsey and Anton Jacobs, who are two of the three or four TFs who have commented most often over the past twelve years, and I much appreciate their many meaningful, thought-provoking comments.

*² From “The Twelve Signs of the Japanese Zodiac,” posted by Ms. Namiko Abe in June 2024 at this link. That article gives an explanation of all twelve of the animals included in the zodiac cycle in Japan. The same zodiac is used in China where the traditional lunar calendar is used, so the Chinese New Year won’t begin until January 29.

*³ These statistics come from the website of the National World War II Museum in New Orleans (see here). According to that source, the number of U.S. WWII deaths was under 420,000.

Tarnishing the Name of Jesus

It was a week ago tonight that Pres. Biden delivered the annual State of the Union (SOTU) message. His address was widely applauded by Democrats and by the mainstream media—and, not surprisingly, panned by Republicans and by right-wing news outlets who castigate the “lamestream” media.

This post, though, is about the Republican rebuttal speech given by Alabama Senator Katie Britt. 

Katie Boyd Britt (b. 1982) was elected the junior Senator from Alabama in 2022, defeating Democrat Will Boyd, a Black Baptist pastor. She received nearly 67% of the vote.

I didn’t remember hearing the name of Sen. Britt before I saw that she would give the rebuttal after the SOTU address, so I looked her up on Wikipedia and elsewhere.

In a July 2021 interview, Britt stated, “Jesus Christ is the most important thing in life, and that should be the foundation that everything else comes around.” I certainly would not disagree with that, but surely such a statement should include telling the truth and not bearing false witness.

Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Times candidly stated that “the woman sitting in the kitchen with the cross glittering on her neck lied.” After listening (on Friday) to her Thursday night rebuttal speech, that clearly seems to be the case.

And given what she has said about Jesus Christ and the sparkling (diamond-studded?) cross around her neck as she gave her speech, it seemed to me that she was tarnishing the name of Jesus.

No wonder more and more people in the U.S. are leaving the Christian faith and joining the “nones.”

Sen. Boyd’s rebuttal speech was criticized and critiqued by a wide variety of voices. For example, here is part of what historian Heather Cox Richardson (HCR) wrote about Katie’s talk in her March 8 newsletter:

Sitting in a kitchen rather than in a setting that reflected her position in one of the nation’s highest elected offices, Britt conspicuously wore a necklace with a cross and spoke in a breathy, childlike voice as she wavered between smiles and the suggestion she was on the verge of tears. 

At the close of HRC’s letter, I first learned about Jess Piper and her Substack posts under the name “The View from Rural Missouri.” Her March 8 “view” was titled “The Fundie Baby Voice.”*

But it wasn’t the voice that most disturbed me. It was the lies that Sen. Britt told in that problematic voice.

In his remarks at the Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday evening, Jimmy Kimmel made these remarks about Emma Stone, who had just been awarded the Best Actress Oscar: “Emma, you are so unbelievably great in Poor Things. Emma played an adult woman with the brain of a child, like the lady who gave the rebuttal to the State of the Union on Thursday night.”**

Sen. Boyd did her best to harm Pres. Biden and to lessen his chances of winning a second term as POTUS. She may have done the Republicans more harm than good, however.

I was saddened by the touching story she told of talking last year with the girl who had been a victim of sex trafficking—and then off-put by her blaming the President for that tragic event. And then I was incensed when it turned out the incident in question took place when George W. Bush was President!

On Monday, Washington Post associate editor and columnist Karen Tumulty wrote that the “horrific story” Katie told, “at least by implication, turned out to be a big fat lie.”

Tumulty went on to note that the “Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler awarded Britt four Pinocchios for the way she twisted this tragic story to make a cravenly partisan point.”

Despite her later efforts to walk back what she had said, there was no way her listeners could have known she was talking about an incident that took place more than a decade ago. Even if it wasn’t a blatant lie, it was highly deceitful and told with the intent of harming the President.

It is quite clear, though, that in spite of her prominent display of a cross on a necklace and pious talk, she tarnished the name of Jesus and did the cause of Christ far more harm than good.

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  * Jess Piper lives in (or near) Maryville, Missouri, which is about 35 miles from my hometown. In 2022 she ran as a progressive Democrat to become a Representative in the Missouri legislature, but she was soundly defeated in the district that twice voted for Trump by 80% or so. I am now receiving her Substack posts and have had email exchanges with her this week.

** This was a powerful putdown of Sen. Britt’s rebuttal speech to those who had seen Emma Stone's Oscar-winning performance in Poor Things, but I do not recommend that movie except to insightful, mature adults.

Crises within Crises

For this blog post, I originally intended to write only about COP28, the international meeting dealing with the ever-growing environmental crisis. Then, I read powerful opinion pieces by Robert Kagan and became alarmed at the expanding political crisis in the U.S.

But how can we neglect to consider the crises in Gaza, Ukraine, and other countries where warfare continues, such as in Myanmar and Sudan that get far less press coverage? In addition, there are millions of individuals in our world who are facing personal crises of various sorts.

Indeed, there are crises within crises that threaten the well-being and even the survival of individuals, nations, and the world civilization as a whole. Please think with me about these crises, beginning with the outer circle that includes the whole world and moving down to the inner circle of individuals. 

The ever-growing environmental crisis was the central concern of COP28, which met in Dubai, the largest city in the United Arab Emirates, from Nov. 30 to Dec. 12.*¹ The first COP meeting, convened in Berlin, was in 1995 and there have been yearly meetings since then.

As I have repeatedly pointed out over the last two years, the current ecological predicament is a crisis that threatens the very existence of the world as we know it (TWAWKI). Some progress was made toward alleviating the global environmental crisis at COP28, but it’s probably too little too late.*²

There will be dire consequences for most of the world’s population if drastic changes are not made soon, which is highly unlikely. This is the existential crisis in which all the other crises exist.

The wars in Ukraine and Israel/Gaza are crises for people living in those areas of the world. But there is an ongoing possibility that they will expand into larger wars. In the worst-case scenario, either of these wars could conceivably escalate into World War III.

These crises are rather localized now, but they might conceivably enlarge to rival the ecological crisis as an existential threat to TWAWKI.

Within these two larger crises is the political crisis in the United States. While this crisis is only brewing at present, there is a real and present danger of democracy being replaced in the U.S. with a form of fascism.

I had not been aware of scholar and journalist Robert Kagan until this month, but he is an editor at large for The Washington Post (WaPo) and has been a foreign policy adviser to U.S. Republican presidential candidates as well as to Democratic administrations via the Foreign Affairs Policy Board.

During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, Kagan (b. 1958) left the Republican Party due to the party's nomination of Donald Trump and endorsed Hillary Clinton for president.

Kagan’s Nov. 30 and Dec. 7 WaPo articles were titled “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending,” and “The Trump dictator-ship: How to stop it.” (These are long pieces, but well worth reading and reflecting on.)

Some Republican politicians are sounding the same warning. For example, former Congresswoman Liz Cheney's new book (released Dec. 5) is titled Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning. (Hear her talk about that in this Dec. 4 interview on NPR.)

On Dec. 10, Sen. Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, expressed the same sentiment, although more mildly, on “Meet the Press.”*³

There is a lot that can happen between now and Election Day next November, but USAmericans must be aware of the danger of losing their democracy—and minorities, the poor, and the underprivileged are the ones who would suffer most under a non-democratic government.

We common people may not be able to do much about the ecological crisis or the crisis in Ukraine or Gaza, but we do have the power to vote and to encourage our friends and neighbors to be informed and to vote accordingly.

The inner circle is the crisis of individuals who are suffering from illness, poverty, discrimination, or personal tragedies. We pray that many of these people will experience new hope during this Christmas season. Who is one such person you can help between now and December 25?

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*¹ COP stands for the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. (Click here to access the UNFCCC website.)

*² Here is the link to a helpful summary of the mixed results of COP28 on The Guardian’s Dec. 14 website.

*³ See here; Romney’s discussion of this matter begins at about 7 min. 45 sec. into the program. 

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.