Engineering My Faith

At a recent Common Call meeting, we discussed ideas from this blog post that contrasts conservative and progressive perspectives on the Gospel. The underlying questions are: Can there be communal sin without personal sin? If so, can there be communal reconciliation without individual repentance?

When I was young, my dad gave me a sound piece of advice: Beware of making a series of small decisions that add up to a big one. The specific context was career-related, but I think it applies more broadly, including to communal sin. Let’s consider the exploitative conditions that undergird Walmart’s business model. I may claim that I am opposed to the maltreatment of workers in China, or the use of underpaid undocumented immigrants in agriculture, or Walmart’s business practices that destroy smaller businesses. But at the end of the day, I decide every week to buy groceries at Walmart because they’re cheaper, they have everything I want to buy, and their service is excellent. So do millions of other Americans. In principle, I could choose not to shop there, but that would have little to no impact on Walmart, so out of self-interest, I decide—today—to accept the moral compromise.

A similar dynamic plays out in racial segregation of neighborhoods and schools. In many (most? all?) large cities, predominantly Black neighborhoods still exist for historical reasons. Sinful actions were taken in the past that established them, and now a series of individual decisions perpetuate them. Such neighborhoods tend to be poorer and with worse schools. A parent would be foolish to choose to live in a neighborhood with bad schools if they could afford to live in a neighborhood with good schools. And so, the status quo remains, or more often, the gap grows.

I think the answer to my first question above is yes. I did not create the conditions that lead to profoundly different educational outcomes between races, nor did my parents or their parents. I did benefit from them, though. So the second question is still open. Do I need to repent of our nation’s collective history? Does everyone else?

There are certainly cases of such communal and individual repentance. The example that springs to mind is South Africa. In order to transition away from apartheid, they had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. South Africans needed to acknowledge their historical sins, collective and individual, in order to live together.

As I was mulling over the conclusions from the Common Call discussion, I helped record this week’s worship service at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Something in Rev. Lou Ellen Hartley’s sermon struck me. Just as there are communal sins, there are communal fruits of the Spirit.

¹⁹ The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; ²⁰ idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions ²¹ and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God. ²² But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, ²³ gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. ²⁴ Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. ²⁵ Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. ²⁶ Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other.

Galatians 5:19-26

Just as each one of us bears some responsibility for the sins of our community, nation, world, and species, each one of us can be a part of the Kingdom of God and enjoy the fruits of the Spirit. It is not just an individual who has love; a community can show love, to each other and to outsiders. Just as structures of sin can be established and perpetuated, structures of kindness and goodness can be established and perpetuated. As James Clear said in a recent email newsletter, “The more disciplined your environment is, the less disciplined you need to be. Don’t swim upstream.” The right kind of community structures make it easy to show love, kindness, and goodness, living in peace without taxing your self-control.

When Sam and I visited Grinnell, we had lunch in their cafeteria. It’s the kind of place where you pay at the front door, then go through the serving area to get to the seating area that surrounds it. The serving area itself is all-you-can-eat. When you’re done, there are several exits. While we were eating, we saw two young women come into the seating area, set down their phones, IDs, and keys, and go back around the corner to get their food. That’s trust. That’s a sign of a community where people watch out for each other, where people care about each other.

The pandemic has torn a lot of communities and organizations apart. As we rebuild, let us seek to build structures that exhibit the fruits of the Spirit, so we may individually experience the peace and joy that comes from loving one another.

I recently listened to an audiobook of The Upswing, by Robert D. Putnam with Shaylyn Romney Garrett. It describes the 20^th century as an upside-down U, or what I might call a hill. By virtually every measure examined, the first half of the century was a time of growing communitarianism, that is, a growing emphasis on true community, equality, and cooperation. Organizations ranging from Rotary to Boy Scouts to the NAACP were created around the turn of the century. Small businesses grew into large corporations. Unions emerged as powerful economic and social forces. Churches grew, education improved, income and wealth gaps shrunk. Somewhere around 1965, all of the progress stopped. The book gives a lot of reasons; I would argue that a significant factor was that the civil rights movement achieved legal equality, which on the one hand lessened the urgency for continued activism from Blacks and on the other hand triggered a backlash against Black equality.

At any rate, America has spent the last 50+ years moving away from healthy community connections. Church membership has been sliding almost as fast as attendance. Membership in many other organizations has become transactional, where a member’s only connection is paying dues. Income and wealth gaps have stagnated or grown, and educational attainment reached a plateau.

As the crowning event of this age, COVID-19 is tearing apart what little is left of community spirit. Anti-maskers will not do even the bare minimum to keep their neighbors healthy. Most activities have gone “virtual,” which in many cases means that they just aren’t happening anymore. For example, some virtual conferences are really just a set of documents to download or videos to watch, with little to no actual conferring together.

I am afraid that many churches will not survive. A church is more than just Sunday morning worship, but without that anchor, there is little to keep people connected to each other. Most other church activities are restricted just as much as congregational worship. Without regular gatherings, people make other plans with their lives. People get used to doing something else each Sunday morning. When churches re-open, will people rearrange their lives to return? Some will, certainly, but just as certainly, some will not.

So, if the 20^th century was a hill that peaked in the 1960s, the pandemic is a river at the bottom of that hill blocking our path. How will we cross that river? Or will we drown in it, or get swept away by it? I wish I knew. All I can do right now is to pray for guidance, for God to show us all a way to ford the river.

Currently, I have three projects in my life that revolve around community-building. One is something I get paid to do: as the interim director of CREE, my job is to foster relationships that can lead to major research initiatives. The second is a ministry that I inherited, so to speak: as the advisor to Common Call Campus Ministry, my objective is to connect with students across campus and help them to grow into an adult faith. The third is a new initiative that I’ve been thinking about and pushing for a year or two now: an LGBTQ community group. All three have been a struggle in the best of times; all three have come nearly to a halt due to the pandemic.

Let’s imagine that everyone gets vaccinated this month, so in January, everything is supposedly back to normal. What can I do now so that these three projects can take off? Alternatively, let’s imagine that the vaccines are ineffective, slow to roll out, or otherwise hampered so that restrictions stay in place until next fall. What can I do to push these projects despite the stiff headwinds? I don’t know. I do know that humans crave relationships, and will pray that I can be a part of our next upswing, a new way of life in community together.

Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”

So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

Genesis 1:26-27

Recently, a conservative friend of mine posted on Facebook a message something like, “I don’t know if the Democrats DID rig the election, but I believe they WOULD!” This, to me, is a concise statement of the biggest challenge facing America today.

My memory of politics only extends to the late Reagan years, so I cannot meaningfully comment on trends before that, and actually I have pretty vague memories of the pre-Clinton years. What I have observed, though, is an ever-accelerating downward spiral. Republicans and Democrats have both been guilty of demonizing their opponents. The Clinton impeachment was the result of several years of trying to find something—ANYTHING—the Republicans could accuse him of. The election of 2000 was a debacle, at least in Florida, and the outgoing Clinton administration didn’t do any favors for George W. Bush. (I recall a story about staffers taking all of the “W” keys off the keyboards.) A spirit of bipartisan cooperation after 9/11 lasted, oh, three months or so. The last five years have been particularly nasty, starting with a brutal campaign between Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump and ending with Trump accusing Democrats of widespread fraud.

The core issue, which lies at the heart of all sin, is denying the fundamental humanity of our opponents and denying that they are, like each of us, made in the image of God. Indeed, politics has learned the lesson of war: if you deny your opponents’ legitimacy, then all actions against them are justified.

Yet if we look at the presidential popular vote totals, a “landslide,” such as Lyndon Johnson, means that the winning candidate gets 61%. (The Electoral College vote distorts things in a way that is not meaningful here.) A popular vote margin greater than 10% is unusual. That means a substantial fraction of voters do not support the winner. Supposing everything goes as I expect it will, President Biden will govern a country in which 74 million people do not think he should be president, and invested the time and energy to say so at the ballot box.

Seventy-four million Americans. These are not bad people. They are people who think differently than I do, who have different priorities than I do. People whose worldviews are different than mine, possibly in part because we consume different news media.

As a nation, we need to come together and recognize that on the one hand, there are real differences of opinion on priorities, on policies, on global relations, on any of a thousand different topics. On the other hand, though, we are all Americans. From big cities on the eastern seaboard to rural areas in the Midwest, across the Sun Belt, and points in-between, we are all Americans. We all deserve a voice in determining our nation’s future.

Beyond that, we are all children of God. We need to see God in all things, most especially in each other. If we assume the “other guy,” whoever that might be, will cheat us and we respond in kind, there is no way out of our downward spiral. Let us seek instead an upward spiral, where we start by assuming the best of each other, and then helping each other live up to that best.

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My apologies for not writing much lately. I’ve spent a lot of time in the woods, instead of in front of a computer. Next Sunday, I will be preaching at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Hopefully I’ll be back to my normal schedule after that. Happy Thanksgiving!

Over the past few weeks, I have been doing a retreat in daily life, following the guidance from Creighton University. Week 4 is an exploration of the people you admire and the qualities that you admire about them. Both of my lists are pretty long, but a common theme emerged.

²⁵ But Jesus called them to him and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. ²⁶ It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, ²⁷ and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; ²⁸ just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”

Matthew 20:25-28

A common quality of many of the people I admire is that they live out this form of servant leadership. In particular, though they are individually successful in their own fields, they use that success to build other people up. I owe a debt of gratitude to a few senior faculty who helped me along the way—both as a student and as a junior faculty member—and gave me opportunities to be successful. By and large, I cannot repay them, but instead must pay it forward by providing similar help to students and junior faculty as I am able.

In higher education, there are two broad classes of administrators. Some are climbing the ladder: chair, dean, provost, chancellor, president; switching institutions as needed to move up a rung; building their resume, taking credit for success, dodging blame for failures. The other broad class see themselves as faculty first, temporarily assigned to some higher duty. One symptom of the brokenness of this world is that the people in the first group get not only all of the glory, but also all of the money and power, while those who serve out of a sense of duty get used, abused, and discarded.

Servant leaders are still ambitious. The difference is in motivation. What is the objective of achieving success? The people I admire recognize that the people who can make a difference are the people who are in positions of power. Those senior faculty who helped me? They were able to do so because they were successful themselves and had resources and connections that they could use to the benefit of someone who showed promise.

In one of the assignments in my New Testament class, I commented that Jesus preached against the powerful, on behalf of the oppressed. The instructor agreed in part but noted that Jesus actually preached against oppressors specifically. He showed grace to a synagogue leader and even to a centurion, while railing against Pharisees who had influence rather than authority. In the same way, being an administrator or supervisor or other leader with power or authority is not inherently bad. What matters is how you use that authority, whether for your own gratification or to build a better world.

[WARNING: POLITICAL DISCUSSION AHEAD!]

I started paying attention to politics sometime in the Reagan era. Now, a person does not become president by being shy and unambitious. Regardless of how they arrived at the office, though, most presidents recognize that the benefits of office are far less than its obligations. America is a large, diverse nation with a unique global role. The office ages its occupant almost overnight—compare pictures of President Obama in 2008 with 2016. Yet, the presidency is still pursued by those who believe that they can make America a better place. I have disagreed with various policies and decisions over the years, but basically believed that presidents had good intentions.

I think that’s the root of what makes President Trump different. He never really embraced the idea of servant leadership, the idea that the presidency is more important than the president, the idea of obligations outweighing personal glory. He saw the presidency as a prize to be won, rather than as a job to be done.

President-elect Biden just gave a speech that went back to the traditional view. My hope and prayer is that he will maintain the attitude of a public servant, and that he can be an agent for change in the nature of politics. I worry that we are too far gone, but must have hope.

[POLITICS OVER!]

Another common quality of people I admire is that they care both about communities in the abstract AND about specific individuals. It’s easy to forget one or the other. Let me use The Rolla Mission as an example. Each person who comes in to spend the night, to get a meal, or to use the laundry has troubles in their life. Unique troubles, specific to their particular personal history. Figuring out what each person needs, and connecting them to the necessary resources, is time-consuming and sometimes heartbreaking. On the other hand, one of the great things about The Mission is that it’s open and available for people who are going through a temporary setback. That requires attention to the facilities, the staff, and the volunteers that keep it in operation, as well as the financial and other resources needed to support it. What is amazing is that the people involved balance BOTH the abstract needs of the organization that serves the abstract homeless community AND the specific needs of specific homeless individuals.

That is the kind of success that I want to be. Someday, I want to be known as a person who demonstrated caring by helping specific individuals achieve their own success, while at the same time contributing to the success of a bigger organization. Does that mean CREE, where I am currently the interim director? Or some other part of Missouri S&T? Or First Presbyterian Church of Rolla, or some other church or parachurch organization? I don’t know. We will see what opportunities God puts in my way. Until then, I will strive to remember the example set by Jesus, and by so many people in my life today, of putting the needs of other individuals and of the community above my own.

For a while now, I’ve been thinking about what I could do to help the LGBTQ+ community in greater Rolla. I’m a straight, cisgender man, so I’m clearly not a part of that community, which inherently limits my possible contributions. But I have resources and a desire to help, so for the past year I’ve been more seriously looking at needs.

The needs I’ve been able to identify are:

• Dedicated space. Someday, I hope that there is an LGBTQ+ resource center in town, a place people can go to just “be.” I suspect that there are some businesses in town that sort of fill that role, but not in an overt and dedicated way.
• Education and awareness for the larger community. From the “alphabet soup” of the acronym (LGBTQQIAA…), to the prevalence in the population, to the legal rights (or lack thereof), people who are straight and cisgender often have NO IDEA what the reality is. I see this piece as something that I can particularly contribute to, being an educator by profession as well as someone who is still partially (even mostly) clueless and therefore able to empathize.
• Visibility, of both the LGBTQ+ community and allies. Someday, I hope it’s non-controversial for someone to fly a rainbow flag. Someday, I hope that when a teenager comes out, they know they’re not alone. Someday, I hope that someone gay or transgender can confidently go to a doctor or other service provider with no fear that they will be treated poorly. Someday, I hope that talking about sexual orientation and gender identity is just normal, nothing out of the ordinary. Someday.
• Financial support. This idea came from a non-binary person I’ve been working with. They recognize that gender-affirming medical services are expensive and often not covered by insurance. I’m looking into mechanisms that can be used without running afoul of the IRS.

We were all keyed up to have an event today. This is LGBTQ+ History Month. October 11 is National Coming Out Day. We were going to have an educational afternoon, with discussions of the alphabet soup, legal issues, medical issues, and so forth. Ultimately, though, the pandemic forced us to delay. We discussed having a remote version, but that would not accomplish the visibility and community formation goals we have.

So, right now, we just have a Facebook page and a Twitter account (@LgbtqRolla). Better than nothing, but not really enough. We need to get some content out so that people will really engage with it and start forming a little bit of a community. Then someday, maybe we can meet up in person. I’m open to suggestions of other ways to get things started.

I am currently taking a course on the New Testament from the University of Dubuque. Our textbook reading last week was about Jesus and the Gospels, broadly speaking. In church, we normally use all of the New Testament together to get a view of Jesus. In scholarly study, however, each viewpoint is taken first as a self-contained description, and then in comparison. For example, Mark takes up the story when Jesus is baptized, so when studying Mark, we cannot speak about Jesus’s birth and early life. After understanding Mark’s perspective, we can ask, why did he start there? Why did he leave so many things out that are included in other Gospels?

It occurred to me that in a sense, it is like seeing artwork of the same subject by different artists. A good example I found is Mount Kilimanjaro. I found a huge variety of artistic renderings on Etsy.

Here we have a sparse but realistic representation. The artist describes it as “colourful and simple.” A similar option below replaces clouds with trees. Why? What do the two artists intend? This second option is even available with a wide range of colors for the sky, allowing the purchaser to put themselves into the scene, or to put the scene into their home in a way that has meaning to them.

Here we have a vintage map that portrays Kilimanjaro in a VERY different way. Different views for different purposes. All three that we have seen are beautiful in their own ways, useful in their own ways, and tell us about both the artist and the buyer—what they value, what they prioritize, how they expect the artwork to fit into their lives.

I could go on. Some versions have people or animals in them, with varying levels of emphasis relative to the mountain. Some are much more realistic, others much more abstract. Yet all address the same subject.

Humans are storytellers. From our holy books to our daily news, what captivates us is a story. When we hear a good story (or see a good piece of art, which is a visual story), we put ourselves into it. We imagine being a fly on the wall or being one of the characters. We feel what the storyteller wants us to feel.

If we’re not careful, we can easily be led astray by good storytellers who have hidden motives. They show us a warped version of reality, provoke the right emotions—empathy, anger, fear, love—to satisfy THEIR goals. It may be an accurate rendering from a certain angle, but told in an intentionally deceptive way to bring certain features into sharper contrast.

Our task, then, is to make use of different perspectives to get a truer view. A good Christian doesn’t read just one Gospel, but all four, and the rest of the Bible too. A good historian doesn’t just read the “official” version of events, but many writings from both the winning and losing sides, from nobles and commoners. A good citizen doesn’t revere a single news source, but rather gets information from many sources. (I discovered The Flip Side a while back. They send a summary each weekday of different perspectives on a single issue: left, right, libertarian, etc. I highly recommend it.)

One parting thought: Mount Kilimanjaro is in Tanzania. However, the best views of it, the views rendered by most of the artwork, are from Kenya. Make of that what you will.