In Support of Harris and Walz

Delegates of the Democratic National Convention in a virtual roll call vote (completed on August 6) officially certified Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as the Party’s nominees for President and Vice President in the upcoming November election. 

How greatly the political landscape changed in just four weeks! On July 13,  ex-President Trump was wounded by a young man who apparently sought to assassinate him.

Then on the 21^st, just eight days later, Pres. Biden announced that he would not accept the Democratic Party’s nomination for POTUS.

Beginning the very afternoon of Biden’s announcement and his endorsement of his Vice President to be the Democratic nominee, there was an outpouring of verbal and financial support for VP Kamala Harris.

In light of the overwhelming early support received by Harris, virtual voting by the DNC delegates began on August 1, and by the next day, Kamala already had enough votes for the nomination. Now, she and her pick as a running mate are the  Democratic candidates for the election to be held in just 88 days.

The nation’s short-term, and perhaps long-term, future depends greatly on the November 5 voting outcome. This is the fateful decision facing the country: will voters elect Kamala Harris rather than “the worst presidential nominee in U.S. history,” as I dubbed Donald Trump in my July 20 blog post?

There is also this worrying question in the minds of many: if Harris is elected, will Trump accept the election results? Or once again will he claim that the election was stolen and seek to use unlawful means to attain election?

Kamala Harris has my full support. When in 2019 there began to be talk of who the Democratic candidate might be in 2020, Harris was my first choice. I already thought Joe Biden was too old to be President. (Now, though, I think he has done a very commendable job—and was wise to “pass the torch.”)

Kamala has a diverse religious background, but she has long been a member of Third Baptist Church in San Francisco. She is quite complimentary of her pastor, Rev. Dr. Amos C. Brown, as is he of her.*¹

On July 22, Thinking Friend Brian Kaylor posted “The Next Baptist President of the United States?” on his blog (here). It was largely about the interview he had with Brown in 2020. The elderly pastor told Brian that Kamala “is a role model for womanhood, and just human decency and dignity at its best.”

MAGA Christians, though, are highly critical of candidate Harris in many ways, including denigration of her Christian faith. At the Turning Point USA Believers’ Summit in West Palm Beach on July 26, TP president Charlie Kirk declared that Harris “stands against everything that we as Christians believe.”*²

Christian nationalist Lance Wallnau, says that Harris represents “the spirit of Jezebel in a way that will be even more ominous than Hillary (Clinton) because she’ll bring a racial component, and she’s younger.”

What about Harris’s pick for Vice President? Gov. Walz (b. 1964) has not been widely known nationally, but I think he was a good choice. In some ways, he reminds me of Harry Truman, another plainspoken Midwesterner, who 80 years ago in 1944 was elected VPOTUS.

Like Truman, Walz is more of a “commoner” than many high-profile politicians. JD Vance, the GOP VP candidate, graduated from Ohio State University (BA) and Yale (JD); Walz graduated from small Chadron State College (BS) in Nebraska, his home state, and Minnesota State University, Mankato, (MS).

Before becoming a politician, Vance practiced law for slightly under two years and then moved to San Francisco to work in the technology industry as a venture capitalist; Walz was a high school teacher and football coach for about ten years before entering politics.*³

Tim Walz and his wife, Gwen, were married in 1994, and they have two children, Hope (b. 2001) and Gus (b. 2006). They are affiliated with an Evangelical Lutheran Church in America congregation in St. Paul.

Please join me in support of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. I am confident that they will not only preserve our national democracy but will also work to enhance liberty and justice for all U.S. citizens—and will have compassion for the needy people residing in our country who are not citizens.  

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*¹ Brown (b. 1941) has been pastor of 3BC since 1976. That church is duly aligned with the American Baptist Churches USA and the National Baptist Convention USA. He is also currently the president of the San Francisco branch of the NAACP. Brian refers to him as “a civil rights icon.” You may also like to read this pertinent article about Brown posted by Sojourners on July 25.

*² Donald Trump also spoke at that TP meeting, and among other things, he said, “Get out and vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what: it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians…. Get out, you’ve got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.” (From Heather Cox Richardson’s July 26 newsletter.)

*³ Jess Piper had this to say (here) after hearing that Walz was to be the Dem. VP nominee: “Walz is so perfect for the job of VP. He’s a rural progressive. He’s my people. A dirt road Democrat. He’s a liberal guy who lives among conservative folks.” (Some of you may remember that I introduced Ms. Piper in my March 14 blog post.)

  

 

Deep and Wide: On the Importance of Expanding One’s Worldview

Many of you remember the children’s church song “Deep and Wide,” which some say teaches kids the depth and limitless amount of God's love for us. Perhaps it does. But recently I have been thinking about those words in a much different way. Can we also have a deep and wide worldview? 

(Photo taken in Florida by Barbara Stellwagen)

Developing a deep and wide worldview is something that all of us who grew up as regular participants in Sunday School and church worship services needed, or maybe still need, to do. That is because our respective worldviews were largely shaped by what we learned there.

Few people would think that their understanding of history, science, economics, and the like that they had as children or teenagers would be sufficient for grasping the contemporary world. The need to have deeper and wider knowledge is readily acknowledged in those areas.

Why should it be different with regard to one’s worldview or theology? (Note that I am referring to theology not just as an academic study but as “faith seeking understanding.”) The search for greater comprehension of reality can and should be engaged in on several different levels.

As I have written in a previous blog post, I was greatly influenced as a third-year college student by D. Elton Trueblood’s book, Philosophy of Religion (1957), in which he emphasized that an unexamined faith is not worth having.*¹ An unexamined worldview is also far less than adequate.

My philosophy of religion college course with Trueblood’s book as the text helped me greatly in beginning to develop a deeper and wider understanding of Christianity, the foundation of my worldview. That process has lasted for more than sixty-five years now. Learning and growing must never end.

Jim Wallis has emphasized the importance of going deeper. Many of you will remember that I have spoken highly of Jim in the past. In fact, he is on my “top ten” list of stimulating/challenging speakers/writers I have heard/read in my lifetime.

Wallis’s book God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It (2005) is on my top ten list of favorite 21^st-century non-fiction books. It was probably there that I first saw the words, “Don’t go right, don’t go left, go deeper.”*²

Those words apply both to theology and to politics—and perhaps to many other aspects of our worldview as well. Even with a broader view of things, one can still be situated near the extreme right or the extreme left. More important is having a deeper understanding, not just a wider one.

In Jim’s newest book, The False White Gospel (2024), he tells how he became estranged from the conservative evangelical church and the theology that he had grown up in. He joined many others who were protesting the war in Vietnam, racism, and poverty.

He says that like many student activists at that time, around 1970, he was seeking answers by reading Karl Marx, Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara. But then he realized that he “needed something deeper.” He found that first by reading Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

Jim Wallis’s going deeper also led him to go wider.

In 1971 when he and his friends began publishing what became Sojourners magazine, it was mainly in protest of U.S. warfare in Vietnam. Now they say their mission is “to articulate the biblical call to social justice, inspiring hope and faith-rooted action” (from the August 2024 issue of Sojourners).

“There is a Wideness in God’s Mercy” is one of my favorite hymns. It was written by Frederick Faber (1814~63), an English clergyman.*³

1 There’s a wideness in God’s mercy / like the wideness of the sea.
There’s a kindness in God’s justice, / which is more than liberty.

3 But we make God’s love too narrow / by false limits of our own,
and we magnify its strictness / with a zeal God will not own.

4 For the love of God is broader / than the measures of the mind
and the heart of the Eternal / is most wonderfully kind.

Like Jim Wallis, many of us grew up in churches that had a theology that was too shallow and too narrow. I am grateful that Wallis has helped some of us develop a deeper theology/worldview—and also that Faber’s marvelous hymn text inspires us to embrace a wider view of God’s mercy and love.

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*¹ I wrote about this in a June 2018 blog article, which referred to that same subject in the 16^th chapter of my book Thirty True Things Everyone Needs to Know Now (2019).

*² Even though this book was published nearly 20 years ago, Wallis still uses those words often. In The False White Gospel, his book published in April of this year, he writes, “As I always advise my students, ‘Don’t go right. Don’t go left. Go deeper’” (p. 35). He also has those words on his “God’s Politics” Substack opening page (see here; click “No thanks” at the bottom to read without subscribing).

*³ Faber was ordained in the Church of England in 1839, but he greatly admired John Henry Newman (1801~90) and followed him in converting to the Roman Catholic Church in 1845. His hymn was first published in 1854 and more verses were added later. The words above are from the Voices Together hymnal (2020), and the text is from an 1861 hymnal.

Did the RNC Just Nominate the Worst Presidential Candidate Ever?

Disclaimer: This blog post was planned and partially written before the despicable attempted assassination of Mr. Trump on July 13. I categorically deplore all political violence and am thankful that Mr. Trump was not seriously injured or killed. Still, I think the following needs to be carefully considered.

Last week, I conjectured that the current Supreme Court Chief Justice is in the running for the worst in the history of the U.S. Now I am raising the question of whether the Republican National Committee this week nominated the worst presidential candidate ever.

According to Mary Trump, ex-President Trump’s niece, they did. Three days before the beginning of the Republican convention on July 15 in a Substack post, Ms. Trump said that her Uncle Donald is  

The public media’s focus was on Pres. Biden from June 27 until July 13. On June 28, after Biden’s “disastrous” debate performance the previous day, the New York Times editorial board posted an opinion piece titled, “To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race.”

For nearly two weeks, there was an onslaught of newscasts and posted/published news articles questioning Biden’s suitability to be re-elected President. Strangely, very little was said about the suitability of Trump being re-elected—until last week.

On July 11, the editorial board of the NYTimes posted an impressive opinion piece declaring that Trump is “unfit to lead” the country. (If you haven’t seen that post, please take a look at it here.)

The next day, Dana Milbank, the prominent Washington Post journalist, posted an article (here) asserting, “The national discussion needs to shift back to where it should be: on Trump’s fitness for office.”

Also on July 12, Ms. Trump (b. 1965), posted “Joe Biden Deserves to Be Elected” on her Substack blog. She pointed out that while Biden was having a press conference with NATO leaders last week, “Donald Trump, fascist and kisser of dictators’ asses [sic], hosted the autocratic prime minister of Hungry.”

She concluded, “Pres. Biden knows what he’s doing. So does Donald. Only Biden wants what’s best for the people of this country. Donald wants only what’s best for him—and what’s best for him will destroy this country and get a lot of people killed.” Strong words from Mary, who has a Ph.D. in psychology!

Nevertheless, Donald Trump was unanimously nominated as the Republican candidate for President on July 15.

Why might Trump be declared the worst presidential candidate ever? Well, many more reasons could be set forth here, but consider these:

    ◈ Trump is the only ex-President to be convicted as a felon—and in addition to those 34 convictions, he has been charged with 54 other felonies. No felon has ever before been a major Party nominee for President, although Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party candidate, was an imprisoned felon in 1920.*¹

    ◈ Trump is the only President to refuse to hand over the power of government to his elected successor.­ Rather than conceding, he sought to manipulate the electoral college vote to his favor on January 6, 2021, and promoted insurrection activities. And he still contends the election was “stolen.”

    ◈ Trump has publicly stated he will seek revenge on his political enemies if he is re-elected. A year ago, ABC News posted, “Trump's unprecedented campaign pitch: Elect me to get revenge on the government.” He apparently (and alarmingly) intends to use the Department of Justice for that purpose.

    ◈ Trump has been heavily influenced by The Heritage Foundation in the past (they recommended the three Supreme Court justices that he appointed), and it is quite certain that if elected he would implement many of the proposals in their “2025 Presidential Transition Project” (aka “Project 2025”).*³

    ◈ In addition to the specific reasons given above, in general, Trump can be considered the worst presidential nominee ever because of the existential threat he poses to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the ongoing democracy of the United States.

In light of the attempted assassination of Trump last week, should those who support the Democratic candidate for President not say negative things about Trump? Is that what fueled the assassination attempt, as some Republicans have charged? There is no evidence at all of that being the case.

What I have written here is not “hateful rhetoric” but a carefully considered opinion based on what Trump has said and done from 2015 to the present.

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*¹ On Nov. 2, 1920, Eugene V. Debs received one million votes in the U.S. presidential election on the Socialist Party ticket while in prison serving a 10-year sentence for a speech protesting World War I. He was arrested and convicted in federal court under the Espionage Act of 1917.

*² Project 2025 has often been in the news in the past few weeks. One recent, helpful explanation of it is found in this Washington Post article.

Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, has stated that Project 2025 would lead to a “second American Revolution” and would be “bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Sen. J.D. Vance, the Republican Vice President nominee, has strongly endorsed Project 2025. Among other things, he has written the foreword to Roberts’s new book, Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America,” due to be published in September. [Note (added on Aug. 9): A couple of days ago it was announced that Roberts has requested that his book not be published until November, after the election.]

*³ It is noteworthy, and completely inexplicable, that back in 2016 Trump’s pick for Vice President referred to him, the Republican nominee for President, as “America’s Hitler.” (Here is the link to what he wrote.)

 

 

 

Original Sin and the Supreme Court

Miguel A. De La Torre is an acquaintance with whom I have had delightful personal conversations and whose written work is always thought-provoking as well as (to me) questionable. “Rejecting Original Sin,” his article posted on Good Faith Media (here) on May 13, is no exception.*¹ 

“We must reject the heresy known as ‘original sin’.” Upon reading those opening words of De La Torre’s brief essay, I decided to write this blog article about it, but last week I altered considerably the content of what I planned to say in the envisioned article.

What Miguel rejects is primarily the traditional interpretation of original sin by Augustine in the early part of the fifth century and then by the Protestant reformer John Calvin in the sixteenth century. Both believed in the historicity of a literal Adam and Eve and the biological transmission of sin.

I agree with Miguel’s rejection of original sin as propounded by Augustine and Calvin. However, he did not deal with the neo-orthodox theologians such as Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr. They affirmed original sin but rejected the idea that it is a hereditary trait passed down from Adam.

Niebuhr emphasized the paradox of human nature, where humans are both created in the image of God and yet profoundly flawed. This duality explains why humans are capable of great good and great evil. I think that is a correct assessment—and it may not be so different from Miguel's point.

“I argue not for human depravity but simply for their stupidity.” Those are the striking words with which De La Torre ends his essay. Upon reading that, I wrote in the margin of my printed copy, Is he replacing original sin with original stupidity?

Perhaps we humans are not born sinful as declared by traditional Catholic and Calvinist theology nor born “righteous” (basically good) as asserted by much contemporary liberal theology. Maybe we humans are just born stupid.

Just as original sin doesn’t mean that all humans are equally sinful in how they manifest their sinfulness, neither does acknowledging “original stupidity” mean that all humans are equally stupid. Rather, we are all prone to think, say, and do stupid things.

And that is what led me to think seriously about the U.S. Supreme Court. Back on April 30, my blog post began with the adage called Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” I conjectured that many of Trump’s followers may not be guilty of either.

But in analyzing the Supreme Court’s recent decisions, perhaps they were made not because of malice stemming from “original sin” but because of stupidity.

A “dangerous political heresy” were the words used by the new Republican Party regarding the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision issued in March 1857. That ruling by Chief Justice Roger Taney is widely regarded as the worst Supreme Court opinion ever.

In recent years, though, the Supreme Court has made a series of “stupid” decisions, beginning with Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010). Jimmy Carter called that ruling “the most stupid decision that the Supreme Court ever made.”

Back in November 2022, the eminent Robert Reich posted a Substack article titled ”Why I still think John Roberts is the worst Chief Justice since Roger Taney.”*² He says that Roberts was “the moving force” behind Citizen’s United.*³

Last month, on June 28, the Supreme Court issued an opinion that overturns Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. That same day, environmental journalist Jameson Dow (here) wrote, “Among many incredibly stupid opinions the court has issued recently, this is among the stupidest.”

But just three days later, Donald J. Trump v. United States, a stupider decision was handed down, and especially because of that ruling, Roberts may well replace Taney as the worst Supreme Court Justice ever.

Decided by a 6-3 vote on July 1, Roberts wrote the majority opinion, holding that presidents could expect absolute immunity for acts related to key powers granted under the Constitution.

If because of the desire for power (an aspect of Eve’s “original sin”) of political agencies, domestic and foreign, and because of the ignorance of the voting public (“original stupidity”) of U.S. citizens, Trump is re-elected President, the nation will most likely soon see the disastrous effects of the Court’s ruling.

May it not be so!

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*¹ For biographical information about De La Torre, see this helpful Wikipedia article. As noted there, Miguel completed his Ph.D. at Temple University in 1999. My daughter Karen was also doing graduate work in religious studies at Temple at that time and received her Ph.D. the following year. It was through her that I first became acquainted with him.

In a December 2018 blog post, I was somewhat critical of De La Torre's emphasis on hopelessness. I was intrigued, then, by Brian McLaren’s quite positive reference to De La Torre’s ideas about hope/hopelessness in “Hope Is Complicated,” the fifth chapter of Life After Doom, which I wrote about in my June 29 blog post.

*² Reich (b. 1946) worked in the administrations of presidents Ford and Carter and was a Cabinet member of presidents Clinton and Obama. In 2008, Time magazine named him one of the Ten Best Cabinet Members of the century. His Substack post can be found here.

*³ In 2013, Roberts wrote for the court’s conservative majority in Shelby County v. Holder, gutting the Voting Rights Act’s requirement of prior federal approval for voting changes in states with a history of discrimination. For those of us who believe that voter rights should be protected for all, that also was a “stupid” decision. 

Confronting Life After Doom with Resilience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Are You (a Supporter of) MADD?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seeking a Raceless Gospel and a Desegregated Church

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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