Happy Birthday, Senator Graham!

In Japan a person’s 60^th birthday is a time of special celebration. I was in Japan in 1998, and numerous people acknowledged my 60^th birthday that year in various ways.

Turning 60 means that one has gone around the 12-year zodiac cycle five times. Even though there are many today who go around that cycle two or even three more times, in the olden days five times was considered a noteworthy accomplishment.

Maybe it was because of living in Japan so long, but I took special note when I saw that yesterday was Senator Lindsey Graham’s 60^th birthday.

Actually, I don’t know a lot about Senator Graham other than he has been a U.S. Senator from South Carolina since 2003. Even though I once met his immediate predecessor, Sen. Strom Thurmond—who was a S.C. Senator from 1954 until 2003!—I have never met Sen. Graham.

I also know that he is one of the many Republicans running for President—and one of three Southern Baptists who are doing so. He now lives in the small town of Seneca in the very northwest corner of S.C. and is a member of the Corinth Southern Baptist Church there.

Last month I heard Sen. Graham interviewed on one of the Sunday morning news programs (which I recorded to watch that afternoon), and I became more favorably impressed with him by hearing what he had to say on that program.

And recently, even though it was not his initial position, not long after the tragic Charlestown shootings last month Graham commendably stood in agreement with South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley when she said it was time to move the Confederate flag from the Capitol grounds.

Graham is campaigning on a hawkish foreign policy, however, insisting that he would maintain “security through strength”—that is to say, through a further projection of U.S. military power throughout the world.

According to a May 18 Washington Post article, Graham has declared, “If I’m president of the United States and you’re thinking about joining al-Qaeda or ISIL, I’m not gonna call a judge,” Graham said. “I’m gonna call a drone and we will kill you.”

It goes without saying that such extrajudicial assassination would be illegal and unconstitutional. Such “hawkishness” is a major reason why I could not support Sen. Graham.

Although Warren Harding was the first Baptist to be elected President, Harry Truman was the first Southern Baptist to occupy the White House. (Years ago I preached in Truman’s home church in Grandview, Mo., near the Truman Corners shopping center; Truman’s Bible was on display in a glass case in the foyer of the church.)

Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were also Southern Baptists. As a fellow Southern Baptist at the time of their election, I was happy that they were elected—partly because they were SBs.

Sadly, I was not so happy with the Carter administration—he has been a far better ex-President than he was President—or with Clinton’s personal conduct when in office.

There is almost no possibility of Sen. Graham being the 2016 Republican nominee for President or being elected to the high office. And that probably can be said for Sen. Ted Cruz and former governor Mike Huckabee, the two other Southern Baptists running for that nomination.

And that’s the good news.

While Sen. Graham especially may be a good and honorable man, his political ideas are not what the country—or the world—needs. So while sincere in wishing Sen. Graham a Happy Birthday, I cannot and will not be supporting his bid for the White House.

What about Physician-Assisted Suicide?

"There's more to life than living and more to death than dying.” Those are the intriguing words on the cover of Finding Frances, a 2010 novel by Janice M. Van Dyck.

Frances is a 74-year-old woman who, beset by illness, is ready to die. She doesn’t want further medical care that might save her, so she asks her son to help her bring closure to her life. But permission to die is not easily granted. The doctors want to keep her alive by all means possible.

As is noted early in the book, “medical intervention saves lives, but there is a point when medical intervention stops being a life-saving measure and starts interfering with a natural death” (p. 39). That is the situation Frances faced.

After two interventions, Frances exclaims, “I don’t want any more saving” (p. 60).

A Washington Times review of Finding Frances remarks,

Our current medical system is required to do whatever it can to prolong life. Is there a way for us to improve on that model? Van Dyck brings these questions smoothly to the surface without ever pushing an agenda or setting up arguments. She leaves the reader wishing death could be made easier and glad that the family and hospital finally helped Frances go.

The sticky matter of euthanasia has been discussed/debated for a very long time, but it is even more relevant, and stickier, now than ever before because of the way medical establishment can extend life almost indefinitely.

Even though I have spent much more time and energy thinking about “youth in Asia” than about euthanasia, I have long supported the idea of “passive euthanasia.” That means allowing a person to die with dignity as comfortably as possible without using all means possible to prolong their life.

Back when “Obamacare” was first being debated, critics charged that the ACA was sanctioning “throwing Grandma under the bus.” Well, while they certainly want a gentler way to “check out,” there are many grandmas, such as Frances, who are ready to die and who do not want massive medical intervention to sustain their physical life.

Perhaps the government (whether through Medicare, Obamacare, or whatever) does not have a mandate to provide funding for extending the life of people who no longer have any desirable quality of life left or any hope for things to get better.

For many years now, 25% of the Medicare budget has been spent on the last month of people’s lives. Probably most of these people, and their families, would have been better off had the patients been allowed to die naturally rather than to receive extensive treatment that extended low-quality life for only a few days or weeks.

There are many helpful articles about such issues available here in a 2014 Wall Street Journal webpage.

But is there any possibility of affirming physician-assisted suicide, which would be a form of active euthanasia?

Suicide has sometimes been called “a permanent solution to a temporary problem.” But some people have a terminal illness, are in great pain, and have absolutely no hope for the restoration of health or any satisfactory quality of life. Theirs is not just a temporary problem that might be solved.

In spite of widespread opposition, maybe for such people physician-assisted “suicide” should be a viable option. That might well be the most loving, and thus the most ethical, course of action.

Note: Finding Frances and related end-of-life issues will be discussed at this month’s Vital Conversations meeting beginning at 1 p.m. on Wednesday, July 8, at Mid-Continent Public Library in Gladstone, a suburb on the north side of Kansas City. Visitors are always welcome.

The Plight of the Palestinians

As you know from my recent article, this month I made a week’s visit to the country of Israel. My daughter Karen, who is a professor at the University of Arizona, was going to an academic conference in Tel Aviv, and she invited me to go with her. We both had a wonderful time there.

On June 24 while Karen was attending her conference, I made a trip to Bethlehem. By taxi I observed the current conditions there. Then I visited the Church of the Nativity and walked up and down the streets in the center of that recently walled city.

Since the early 2000s, the Israeli government has been building an extensive network of walls to restrict the movement of Palestinians, essentially imprisoning them within their cities/towns.  

Those imposing walls are from 20 to more than 25 feet high. Some of the sections are covered with graffiti, as you see in the picture below. That was part of the wall my Palestinian taxi driver took me by.

Bethlehem is within what is known as the West Bank, which is Palestinian territory under Israeli control since 1967. Tourists are able to enter and leave the city without much hassle, but Palestinians (which make up almost the entire population of the city) are greatly restricted and cannot leave without permits, which are difficult for most people to get. 

Seeing the people of Bethlehem virtually imprisoned in their own city was my initial introduction to the plight of the Palestinians.

Whereas Tel Aviv is a modern city with upscale department stores and restaurants, teeming with affluent people enjoying eating and drinking at sidewalk cafes as well as swimming and engaging in other fun activities on the beach of the Mediterranean Sea, Bethlehem is much more like a “third world” city.

Almost all the people in Bethlehem are Muslims but my taxi driver said he is a Christian. Like most of the Palestinians who live there, though, he bemoaned the lack of freedom and the restriction of basic human rights.

The next day, I was able to join Karen’s group for an all-day study tour of Jerusalem—and by all-day I mean we left a little after 8:30 a.m. and didn’t get back to the hotel until well after 10 p.m. Although quite tiring, it was a superb time of seeing significant sites and of learning about the history and current situation of Jerusalem, the most fascinating city I have ever visited.

Part of the tour was conducted by an NGO Ir Amim guide, who showed us how Israel is steadily building “settlements” in East Jerusalem, territory originally designated for Palestinians.

According to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, by 2013 there were nearly 360,000 Israelis living in such settlements. There are far more than that now. And by settlements, I am talking about fine residential communities built to last permanently.

While these Israeli settlements are illegal according to international law, Israeli citizens continue to move freely to and from those settlements. Palestinians, though, remain trapped by the “separation walls” that have been built on their own lands.

The human rights of Palestinians have been grossly trampled on since the formation of modern Israel in 1948 and then by the nation of Israel, especially since 1967. It is high time for peace and justice advocates to stand with the Palestinian people in opposition to their demeaning and unjust treatment.

Supporting the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) Movement for freedom, justice, and equality is one concrete action we might take. You can learn more about that Movement here.

Countercultural Christianity and the SBC

The Economist recently had a review of Baptists in America: A History, a new book by Thomas Kidd and Barry Hankins, history professors at Baylor University. Among other things, the reviewer avers that current Baptist opposition to abortion and gay marriage is “a throwback . . . to their roots as outsiders resisting the mainstream.”

Certainly there was much countercultural activity by the early Baptists in this country. For example, they rejected the practice of infant baptism and the establishment of a state church—and some suffered because of that countercultural stance. (I wrote last year about one of June’s relatives who spent time in jail for the “crime” of preaching as a Baptist.)

But in some ways Baptists in the South were not countercultural as they became entwined in and ardent supporters of the culture of slavery. As The Economist article says, “. . . white Southern Baptists will forever labour in the shadow of having been badly wrong on civil rights.”

(Most commendably, though, at the 1995 annual meeting the SBC did “genuinely repent of racism”; while some saw that as too little much too late, surely that was better than not doing it at all.)

Last week at the 2015 annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, David Platt, the (relatively) new president of the International Mission Board of the SBC, had a major part in Tuesday evening’s call to prayer “for the Next Great Awakening and to Reach the World for Christ.”

David Platt at the 2015 SBC Annual Meeting

Platt has recently written a book titled Counter Culture. I had a very mixed reaction to Platt’s new book when I read it earlier this year. The second chapter on poverty was excellent, I thought. The eighth chapter was also a strong, and good, rejection of racism.

The fourth and fifth chapters were also quite good, but I had some serious questions about most of the other chapters.

Platt had previously written Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream (2010). That New York Times bestseller was my first introduction to Platt, and I found it quite impressive. He is also the author of Radical Together (2011) and Follow Me (2013).

In his first three books, there is virtually no mention of abortion or LGBT issues, but those matters dominate Platt’s new book. In fact, the implication is that being completely and absolutely opposed to all abortion and homosexual activity is necessary for being a Christian.

This, it seems, is a new fundamentalism.

According to Platt, “Abortion is an affront to God’s authority as Creator, an assault on God’s work in creation, and an attack on God’s relationship with the unborn” (p. 69). Consequently, if we believe the gospel, then we must speak out against the injustice of abortion” (p. 72).

In the chapter on the gospel and sexual morality, Platt declares that the Bible is clear that “homosexual activity is sexual immorality before God” (p. 170). He goes on to assert that “unrepentant sexual sin will ultimately lead to hell” (p. 177).

There is a quite different, and much better, view of what it means to be countercultural Christians in Robin Meyers’s book Underground Church (2012), and I plan to share and critique ideas from that book soon.

Early Baptists in the U.S. were, admirably, countercultural in their emphasis on individual freedom and freedom from the state.

But there is nothing commendable in their current “countercultural” efforts to deny freedom to others, such as to pro-choice women or to gays/lesbians who want the freedom to form a legally-recognized, permanent relationship with their partners.