Good News and Bad News, June 2017

Good News and Bad News items from Christian Century, June 21, 2017.

1.  Preexisting Condition:

"Mark Meadows, a [conservative] Republican congressman from North Carolina, reportedly broke down in tears when told that the health insurance law passed by Congress would make coverage impossible for multitudes of people with preexisting conditions.  Meadows, who chairs the Freedom Caucus, said to a reporter, 'Listen, I lost my sister to breast cancer.  I lost my dad to lung cancer.  If anybody is sensitive to preexisting conditions, it's me.  I'm not going to make a political decision that affects somebody's sister or father because I wouldn't do it to myself."

2.  "When norms lose power"

"Trump is the spendthrift of our public character," observes columnist Michael Gerson.  He is "squandering an inheritance he does not understand or value."

"The fact that so many people, including members of Congress, are willing to shrug off Trump's actions or seek to explain them away suggest that the moral power of these norms was waning well before Trump took office.  He is the symptom as well as the cause of a moral crisis.  We seem to be losing a shared sense of what it means to be a responsible citizen, of how to engage in the public square with integrity, and of how to pursue the common good---and of whether any of that even matters."

I saw this happening in the 1980s so I coined a phrase to express it---"the American Trinity" . The American Trinity of individualism, materialism, and racism/ethnocentrism.  I called Reagan the high priest of American civil religion.  In 2017, I would call Trump the high priest of the American Trinity of hyperindividualism, hypermaterialism, and hyperethnocentrism.  But all of this was already deeply ingrained in America at the time of our founding fathers, many of whom were filthy rich slave holders, especially Washington and Jefferson.

3.  Kyle Childress is pastor of the Austin Heights Baptist Church located in ultra-conservative Nacogdoches, Texas.  Childress reports:

"Since the election and inauguration of Donald Trump, it's as if we switched the old record player from 33 to 45 rpm.  Our sense of high purpose has intensified.  Genuine concern and compassion are mixed with fear and anger. Immigration issues and ministry have moved front and center.  We're in high gear.

"Our associate pastor and her husband are in the foster-to-adopt system.  They already had a three-year-old foster child when they received a panicky phone call from Child Protective Service.  The parents of two little girls had been deported that morning and a four-year-old and a still-nursing ten-month-old needed a Spanish-speaking home.  Within two hours the two little sisters were delivered to our pastor and her husband.  The congregation has rallied around the family, but every day we receive news of someone else being deported.  Some church members are scrambling, meeting with friends and their immigration attorneys, drafting power of attorney and parental guardianship papers so if the friends are deported, their children will be protected."

4.  Brian Doyle, recently deceased, was a noted Catholic journalist who saw the divisions between Protestant and Catholics as terrible.  Doyle wrote:

"I am older now than they were then and the walls among the Christian traditions have still not crumbled, for any number of silly reasons---mostly having to do with lethargy and money and paranoia.  But sometimes I still wonder what it would be like if they did crumble suddenly somehow, and the two billion Christians on earth stood hand in hand, for the first time ever, insisting on mercy and justice and humility and generosity as the real way in the world.  You would think that two billion insisting on something might actually make that thing happen, wouldn't you?

5.  From a book review of On Inequality by Gary Dorrien:

"Yale historian Timothy Snyder has been writing books for 25 years on how democracies perished in Eastern and Central Europe in the 1930s.  He does not believe that history repeats itself or that the current American president is an outright fascist.  On the other hand, he believes the nation has never been an exception to history and thinks believing in American exceptionalism at this moment is dangerous.  The parallels between Europe then and the United States today are alarming to Snyder, so shortly after the 2016 election he posted a Facebook entry about how to defend liberal democracies from tyrants.  He offered 20 lessons, the post went viral, and soon there was a book version:  On Tyranny."

Another quotation from Dorrien:

"But no democracy can perpetually survive gross disparities in economic and social conditions.  The United States is hurtling faster toward authoritarian nationalism than its European counterparts because it has never established more than a minimum of social democracy. [It has always been governed by a rich, white male elite].  In every nation with a social democratic tradition, everyone's health care is covered, the power of private money in the political system is curtailed, and nearly everyone recognizes that there is such a thing as an intolerable level of economic inequality.  In the United States, millions have no health coverage, private money dominates the political system, and nothing is done to stem staggering inequalities of income and wealth."

6.  "Red state, purple church" by Brian D. McLaren:

"Letting people go graciously, holding to essentials tightly and nonessentials lightly, and telling people directly and repeatedly that they are loved---these practices constitute the staring point for these congregations.  A fourth trait takes them beyond the starting line:  they don't walk on eggshells when it comes to political and social disagreements.  Instead, they identify the tensions and confront the disagreements.  They name the elephant in the room.

"Over and over again, we have reminded our more progressive people that all the people who voted for Trump can't be racists, bigoted, uncaring people, because they have friends at Vintage who voted for Trump and they know them to be more complex, interesting, and profound than that.  And we tell our more conservative people that everyone who is angry and afraid in the face of a Trump presidency can't be whiny losers, because they have served with their liberal friends and know them to be deeply compassionate people of character."

7.  From Mordechai Beck, a journalist in Jerusalem:

"Looking back at biblical history, Melchior sees a 'very clear battle between the power of the kings and that of truth and justice as voiced by the prophets.  The prophets' words inspire us till today, while most of the king's names have been forgotten.  The prophets, who confronted those in power, spoke the truth.  Their words have lasted, not only among Jews but also Christians and Muslims.  Is this a model for today, when political power is more prevalent than ethical, human values?"

"Stern has no doubt about how the Jewish state will be judged by future historians.  "I think we will be judged on how we dealt with the Other, mainly the Arabs. . . .  We should grant everyone equal rights, which we are not doing.  As a religious Jew, I have an obligation to change this situation."

8.  Karl Barth:

"The Gospel says, 'Give everything away in order to hold wholly to God.'  In response we European people said, 'We want the good life.'  The Gospel says, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'  We loved money in place of our neighbor."