Back to Dred Scott and Jim Crow?

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Rachel Maddow was the first American journalist to draw attention to a story the mainstream media has studiously ignored: a Republican plan to score presidential elections using gerrymandered state district maps.  It is thanks to these electoral maps that Republicans were able to hold on to House in the last election while losing the popular vote.  If six Republican states (including Virginia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio) had calculated their electoral college tallies using the same maps employed in state elections, Mitt Romney would now be president even though he lost the popular vote.

In Virginia, for instance, Barack Obama would have won only for of the state’s thirteen electoral votes under this plan even though he won the popular vote.   The trick is to make rural and suburban votes worth more than urban (that is minority) votes.  When you do the math, as several bloggers have done, this means that your average urban vote is worth precisely three-fifths as much as your average white vote. (more…)

Michelle Alexander: Why Police Lie Under Oath

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Tom Coleman receives Texas Lawman of the year award from John Cornyn

By Alan Bean

Michelle Alexander says police officers lie under oath because people are desperate to believe them.  There is only one oblique reference to Tulia, Texas in this opinion piece, but I can’t hear the phrase “lying police officer” without thinking about Tom Coleman, the gentleman receiving the Texas Lawman of the year award in the picture to the left.  Everybody was prepared to believe every word that proceeded from the mouth of this man.

Friends of Justice was organized by a ragtag collection of Tulia residents who were convinced Coleman was lying.  We couldn’t prove it to a scientific certainty.  But, as Judge Ron Chapman ruled four years after our fight began, the man was simply not credible under oath.  A close look at the facts made that patently clear.

But nobody wanted to look at the facts.

Why were so many people willing to bet the farm on Coleman’s truthfulness?  In this opinion piece written for the New York Times, Michelle Alexander provides some disturbing answers.

Why Police Lie Under Oath

By MICHELLE ALEXANDER

THOUSANDS of people plead guilty to crimes every year in the United States because they know that the odds of a jury’s believing their word over a police officer’s are slim to none. As a juror, whom are you likely to believe: the alleged criminal in an orange jumpsuit or two well-groomed police officers in uniforms who just swore to God they’re telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but? As one of my colleagues recently put it, “Everyone knows you have to be crazy to accuse the police of lying.” (more…)

Back to Jesus!

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Charles Kiker, February 2013

          First United Methodist Church in Tulia is presenting Adam Hamilton’s videos on world religions at our Wednesday night fellowship meals.  Adam Hamilton is the senior and founding pastor of Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas—a suburb of Kansas City.

          The video series consists of presentations regarding Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Hamilton presents the backgrounds and major beliefs of the different religions. He points out common ground and differences with Christianity. He holds to Christian distinctives, but always respectfully and without rancor.

A recent video presentation was on Islam. Hamilton’s ground zero difference with Islam is that it is a religion of a book, the Koran, which Mohammed claimed was dictated to him word for word by the angel Gabriel, in the Arabic language.

But isn’t Christianity a religion of a book, the Holy Bible?

The title of a radio broadcast I often heard in the 60s was, “Back to the Bible.” That was and still is a kind of rallying cry for some Christians. Come back to the Bible. Be a people of the Book.

But ultimately, Hamilton insists, Christians are not a people of the Book, nor is Christianity a religion of the Book. Christianity is faith in a person, Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God.

I agree with Hamilton. And Hamilton agrees with John the Evangelist:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it” (John 1:1-5, NRSV). And John continued in verse 14:

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us. . . .”

Jesus is the Word of God. It is Jesus who shows us what God is like. We know Jesus from the book, but ultimately it is Jesus, not the book, to whom our allegiance is due.

My first Bible was a Christmas gift during World War II. It was an edition designed for members of the armed services. It had a patriotic olive drab cover to honor the men in uniform in World War II. It had the words of Jesus in red. It was a red letter Bible. We need red letter Bibles, but what we really need is red letter Christians. (more…)

Five myths about the immigration ‘line’

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By Alan Bean

Daniel Kowalski provides a much needed corrective to much of the political blather surrounding the immigration debate.  The biggest myth about the immigration line is that most people who want to live in the United States have a line to get in.  They don’t.

I was particularly struck by this bold statement:

Our immigration policy runs counter to our national ethos of civil and human rights. Over the past century, we have come to believe that discrimination on the basis of race, gender, faith and sexual orientation — things that cannot be changed or that we cannot demand be changed — is morally wrong. Yet the Immigration and Nationality Act, by setting quotas on how many people can come from certain countries, is another form of discrimination.

Is there a national ethos of civil and human rights?  The anti-immigrant movement, and much of the historical information Kowalski provides in this essay, suggest that two equally powerful ethoses (ethi?) are vying for the upper hand.  This explains why our immigration policy is so radically unfair and why no politician dares tell the truth.

Five myths about the immigration ‘line’

By Daniel M. Kowalski

Daniel M. Kowalski is a senior fellow at the Institute for Justice and Journalism and the editor of Bender’s Immigration Bulletin. He practices citizenship and visa law in Austin at the Fowler Law Firm.

The “line” of people seeking American citizenship or legal status has become an integral part of our immigration debate. In a speech Tuesday, President Obama said that undocumented immigrants should go to “the back of the line” behind those who are going through the process legally. The immigration reform blueprint presented a day earlier by a group of senators contained the same requirement. But misinformation about this line abounds.

1. There is one line.

The federal government has issued more than 1 million green cards per year, on average, for the past five years. But there are several lines — which one immigrants end up in depends on whether they have a job or family in the United States. (more…)

The Lion and the Hyena

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By Alan Bean

I received this graphic from a Facebook friend.  I clicked on “like”.  My friend probably wondered why.  I’m not sure.  Something about the image appeals to me.  The “conservative” is literally lionized, an invisible force for good.  The “liberal” is a scavenger, an impostor, a hyena attempting, in this case unsuccessfully, to feast on the carcass when he didn’t make the kill.

I have often felt like the hyena in the picture, a hapless liberal do-gooder confronting  the conservative juggernaut.  Nonetheless, I feel compelled to mouth off several sentences too many.

Some conservatives would reverse the image.  They see themselves as a lion surrounded by a pack of liberal hyenas.

These savanna fantasies obscure more than they illuminate.  “Liberal” and “conservative”, two grand words with a goodly heritage, are now debased currency.  When liberalism is associated with superficiality, debauchery, and profligate sentimentality, who wants to be a liberal?  When conservatism becomes a code word for racial bigotry, intolerance and privilege, who wants to be a conservative? (more…)

Waco Christians celebrate God’s Love for Immigrants

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Naz Mustakim, an immigrant from Singapore, shares his story.
Monica Lake | Lariat Photographer

By Alan Bean

Last night at Waco’s Calvary Baptist Church, Friends of Justice sponsored a worship “God’s Heart Toward Immigrants”, an ecumenical worship service that brought Christians from Anglo, Latino and African American congregations into one place to consider what the Bible has to say about immigration.  A lot, it turns out.  For those with eyes to see, the Bible is bursting with clear, radical, uncompromising instruction that leaves little to the imagination.  Here are links to the NBC story and the write up in the Baylor University Lariat.  Below I have pasted the text of the sermon I preached at this event.  It quickly became obvious that a good portion of the 140 people gathered in the Calvary sanctuary spoke little English, so a local pastor volunteered to translate as I preached.  After the service, people told me they had never heard a sermon like that before.  One day, I pray, these sentiments will not seem unusual.

A Common Peace Community

The last time I preached in Waco we talked about the ancient confession imbedded in the book of Deuteronomy:

“A wandering Aramean was my father; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous.” (more…)

Rachel Held Evans: The Scandal of the Evangelical Heart

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wallpaper, love, heart, artistic, computer, graphic

This gripping piece from Rachel Held Evans addresses an issue that concerns me deeply.  I hope it concerns you too.  She begins with a frightening quotation from reformed theologian John Piper that effectively eviscerates the message of Jesus.  John Piper’s God isn’t the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.  Piper’s God is the Anti-God; the antipodes of the Abba Father Jesus introduced to the world.

But this isn’t just about one hard-hearted pop-theologian; Rachel Held Evans is addressing the spirituality of what we at Friends of Justice call “the punitive consensus”.  Churches are too theologically confused to respond to ethical challenges like incarceration and immigration.  The vacuum created by our silence is filled by fear-mongering politicians and a news media obsessed with sensationalism.

What drives our theological confusion?

Jesus began his public ministry with a sermon in his home town of Nazareth that almost got him killed.  The message came straight out of Isaiah: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”

Then Jesus reminded his listeners that the God of the Bible often heals the foreigner, the outcast and the Gentile when no such miracles of healing are performed for the citizen of Israel, the insider, and the chosen.  That’s the part that stirred homicidal rage in the hearts of a nice, religious crowd.

In Matthew’s Gospel, the public ministry of Jesus ends with the story about the sheep and goats being separated on the day of judgment on the basis of how they treated the “least of these, my brothers and sisters.”

“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink,  was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.”

Jesus isn’t just saying that we should be kind to the stranger and the outcast; virtually every major religion encourages us to show mercy to the stranger and the outsider and this is excellent spiritual advice.  But Jesus takes it one step further by insisting that he is incarnate within the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, and the incarcerated felon.  He has taken on the flesh, bone and hearts of such people.

Here’s how the theological equation works: God is incarnate in Jesus, Jesus is incarnate in the stranger, therefore, God is incarnate within the stranger.

The word translated “stranger” in Matthew 25, is zenos, a Greek word that can be translated foreigner, alien, outcast or stranger.  It’s the root of the English word xenophobia, literally the fear of foreigners or strangers.

Here’s our problem: Jesus comes to us in the face of the zenos, and we are xenophobic.   Our xenophobia makes us afraid of Jesus in his distressing disguise (to borrow a telling phrase from Mother Theresa).

The portrait of the God’s character we receive from Jesus can be difficult to square with the wrathful God we occasionally encounter elsewhere in Scripture.  Christians interpret the Word of God we find in Scripture through the Word of God that became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth (John 1:14)

Jesus becomes the lens through which all of Scripture is interpreted.

Or, to employ a musical image, we must learn to transpose the Bible into the key of Jesus.

If we don’t, we end up with the monstrous theology of the unfortunate John Piper.  If we do, we are embraced by a loving God who is infinitely more gracious and compassionate than we can possibly imagine.  The judgment of God is reserved for those like the Elder Brother in the Parable of the Lost Son who recoil in horror from the apparent “injustice” of God’s prodigal mercy.

How can we separate the world into good people and bad people if Jesus insists on pitching his tent with the baddies?

We can’t.  That’s the point.

Most Christians in America haven’t learned to view the punitive criminal justice and immigration systems through the lens of Jesus.  We can’t see Jesus in the incarcerated felon or the undocumented woman who wades the river for the sake of her family.  But the moment we feel the prisoner and the migrant with the heart of Jesus, we understand this cryptic saying fro Jesus: “Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.”

Please read Rachel Held Evans’ post in its entirety.   This is critically important stuff.

The Scandal of the Evangelical Heart

Rachel Held Evans

“It’s right for God to slaughter women and children anytime he pleases. God gives life and he takes life. Everybody who dies, dies because God wills that they die.” 

– John Piper

“Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.” 

– Thomas Paine

It’s strange to think that doubt has been a part of my life for more than ten years now.

I remember when it first showed up—a dark grotesque with a terrifying smile that took up so much space, catching every payer in its gravitational pull. That I could grow accustomed to its presence seemed impossible at the time, and yet I have. It  hasn’t changed in size, but somehow it occupies less space. I smile back at it now.

A lot of people, when they catch pieces of my story, assume my doubts are of the intellectual variety. They assume I’m just a smart girl stuck in the Bible Belt asking pesky questions about science, history and politics that my conservative evangelical culture, with a bent toward anti-intellectualism, simply cannot answer.

This is true to an extent. I’ve wrestled with a lot of questions related to science and faith, especially given my location a mere two miles from the famous Rhea County Courthouse where John Scopes was prosecuted for teaching evolution in a public school.  While I no longer believe the earth is just 6,000 years old, I still live in the tension of unanswered questions about the universe, and death, and brains, and Neanderthals, and whatever Neil deGrasse Tyson’s got to say on public television about the earth getting burned up by the sun or our species going extinct after an asteroid hits.  I have questions too about history and Christianity’s emergence from it, questions about the Bible, questions about miracles.

But the questions that have weighed most heavily on me these past ten years have been questions not of the mind but of the heart, questions of conscience and empathy. It was not the so-called “scandal of the evangelical mind” that rocked my faith; it was the scandal of the evangelical heart.

If you’ve read Evolving in Monkey Town, you know that the public execution of a woman named Zarmina in Afghanistan marked a turning point in my faith journey. The injustice of the situation was troublesome enough, but when my friends insisted that Zarmina went to hell because she was a Muslim, I began wrestling with some serious questions about heaven, hell, predestination, free will, God’s goodness, and religious pluralism.

Evangelical apologists were quick to respond. And while their answers made enough sense in my head; they never sat right with my soul.

Why would God fashion a person in her mother’ s womb, number the hairs on her head, and then leave her without any hope of salvation? Can salvation be boiled down to luck of the draw? How is that just? Shouldn’t  God be more loving and compassionate than I?

Oh, the Calvinists could make perfect sense of it all with a wave of a hand and a swift, confident explanation about how Zarmina had been born in sin and likely predestined to spend eternity in hell to the glory of an angry God (they called her a “vessel of destruction”); about how I should just be thankful to be spared the same fate since it’s what I deserve anyway; about how the Asian tsunami was just another one of God’s temper tantrums sent to remind us all of His rage at our sin; about how I need not worry because “there is not one maverick molecule in the universe” so every hurricane, every earthquake, every war, every execution, every transaction in the slave trade, every rape of a child is part of God’s sovereign plan, even God’s idea; about how my objections to this paradigm represented unrepentant pride and a capitulation to humanism that placed too much inherent value on my fellow human beings; about how my intuitive sense of love and morality and right and wrong is so corrupted by my sin nature I cannot trust it.

They said all of this without so much of a glimmer of a tear, and it scared me to death.  It nearly scared me out of the Church.

For what makes the Church any different from a cult if it demands we sacrifice our conscience in exchange for unquestioned allegiance to authority?  What sort of God would call himself love and then ask that I betray everything I know in my bones to be love in order to worship him? Did following Jesus mean becoming some shadow of myself, drained of empathy and compassion and revulsion to injustice?

Perhaps in reaction to the “scandal of the evangelical mind,” evangelicalism of late has developed a general distrust of emotion when it comes to theology. So long as an idea seems logical, so long as it fits consistently with the favored theological paradigm, it seems to matter not whether it is morally reprehensible at an intuitive level. I suspect this is why this new breed of rigid Calvinism that follows the “five points” to their most logical conclusion, without regard to the moral implications of them, has flourished in the past twenty years.  (I heard a theology professor explain the other day that he had no problem whatsoever with God orchestrating evil acts to accomplish God’s will, for that is what is required for God to be fully sovereign! When asked if this does not make God something of a monster, he responded that it didn’t matter; God is God—end of story.) And I suspect this explains why, in the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy, so many evangelical leaders responded like Job’s friends, eager to offer theological explanations for what happened instead of simply sitting down in the ashes and weeping with their brothers and sisters.

Richard Beck has also observed this phenomenon and refers to it as “orthodox alexithymia”:

When theology and doctrine become separated from emotion we end up with something dysfunctional and even monstrous.

A theology or doctrinal system that has become decoupled from emotion is going to look emotionally stunted and even inhuman.  What I’m describing here might be captured by the tag “orthodox alexithymia.” By “orthodox” I mean the intellectual pursuit of right belief. And by “alexithymia” I mean someone who is, theologically speaking, emotionally and socially deaf and dumb. Even theologically sociopathic.

Alexithymia–etymologically “without words for emotions”–is a symptom characteristic of individuals who have difficulty understanding their own and others’ emotions. You can think of alexithymia as being the opposite of what is called emotional intelligence.

Orthodox alexithymia is produced when the intellectual facets of Christian theology, in the pursuit of correct and right belief, become decoupled from emotion, empathy, and fellow-feeling. Orthodox alexithymics are like patients with ventromedial prefrontal cortex brain damage. Their reasoning may be sophisticated and internally consistent but it is disconnected from human emotion. And without Christ-shaped caring to guide the chain of calculation we wind up with the theological equivalent of preferring to scratch a doctrinal finger over preventing destruction of the whole world. Logically and doctrinally such preferences can be justified. They are not “contrary to reason.” But they are inhuman and monstrous. Emotion, not reason, is what has gone missing. Read the entire post.

I encountered this recently after I spoke to a group of youth about doubt. In the presentation, I mentioned that upon reading the story of Joshua and the Battle of Jericho for myself, I realized it was a story about genocide, with God commanding Joshua to kill every man, woman, and child in the city for the sole purpose of acquiring land. I explained that this seemed contrary to what Jesus taught about loving our enemies.

Afterwards, a youth leader informed me that when it came to Joshua and Jericho, I had nothing to worry about…and had no business getting his students worried either.

“I don’t know why you had to bring up the Jericho thing,” he said.

“Doesn’t that story bother you?” I asked. “Don’t you find the slaughter of men, women, and children horrific?”

“Not if it’s in the Bible.”

“Genocide doesn’t bother you if it’s in the Bible?”

“Nope.”

He crossed his arms and a self-satisfied smile spread across his face. He was proud of his detachment, I realized. He seemed to think it represented some kind of spiritual strength.

“But genocide always bothers me,” I finally said, “especially when it’s in the Bible. And I get the idea that maybe it’s supposed to. I get the idea that maybe God created me to be bothered by evil like that, even when it’s said to have been orchestrated by God.”

I’m not sure he and I will ever understand one another, but I’ve decided to quit apologizing for my questions.  It’s not enough for me to maintain my intellectual integrity as a Christian; I also want to maintain my emotional integrity as a Christian. And I don’t need answers to all of my questions to do that. I need only the courage to be honest about my questions and doubts, and the patience to keep exploring and trusting in spite of them.

The bravest decision I’ll ever make is the decision to follow Jesus with both my head and heart engaged—no checking out, no pretending.

It’s a decision I make every day, and it’s a decision that’s made my faith journey a heck of a lot more hazardous and a heck of a lot more fun.  It means that grinning monster, doubt, is likely to stick around for a while, for I know now that closing my eyes won’t make him go away. It means each day is a risk, a gamble, an adventure in vulnerability and trust, as I figure out what it means to follow Jesus as me, Rachel Grace—the girl who cried for Zarmina, the girl who inherited her mama’s bleeding heart and her daddy’s stubborn grace, the girl who digs in her heels, the girl who makes mistakes, the girl who is intent on breaking up patriarchy, the girl who thought to raise her hand in Sunday school at age five and ask why God would drown innocent animals in Noah’s flood, the girl who could be wrong.

It means I’ve got a long race ahead of me, but I’m going to run it with abandon. I’m going to run it as me. Because I think that’s what God wants—all of me, surrendered and transformed, head and heart engaged.

I’m growing more confident in my stride, and I am running faster now, breathless, kicking up dust, tripping over roots and skinning my knees, cursing now and then, but always getting up and gaining ground on that bend in the path where I think I can see Jesus up ahead.

Eight senators present bipartisan immigration proposal. Is this good news?

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By Alan Bean

How much progress has been made thus far on the immigration front?  Clearly, the Republicans, at least in the Senate, have read the writing on the wall from the 2012 election.  Their “no amnesty; no way” position has been weighed in the balance and found wanting.  Thus we see Marco Rubio, a Tea Party favorite, signing off on “a pathway to citizenship” for America’s 12 million undocumented residents.  Will he stick to his new guns?  We’ll see,

The senatorial gang of eight, by the way, consists of Charles E. Schumer (D-New York), John McCain (R-Arizona), Richard J. Durbin (D-Illinois), Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), Robert Menendez (D-New Jersey), Marco Rubio (R-Florida), Michael Bennet (D-Colorado), and Jeff Flake (R-Arizona).

The Senate proposal rests on four pillars:

  1. Create a tough but fair path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants currently living in the United States that is contingent upon securing our borders and tracking whether legal immigrants have left the country when required;
  2. Reform our legal immigration system to better recognize the importance of characteristics that will help build the American economy and strengthen American families;
  3. Create an effective employment verification system that will prevent identity theft and end the hiring of future unauthorized workers; and
  4. Establish an improved process for admitting future workers to serve our nation’s workforce needs, while simultaneously protecting all workers. (more…)

Do White evangelicals have a delusional persecution complex?

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Fred Clark thinks white Christians who lament the loss of their religious liberty are delusional sociopaths.  Moreover, he says a recent study by the Barna Group confirms his worst fears.

Timothy George, pictured to the left, is singled out as a particularly delusional sociopath.

Timothy George is currently the dean of Beeson Divinity School at Samford University, a Southern Baptist School i Birmingham, AL.  Prior to that, George was a highly respected church history professor at Southern Seminary in Louisville and the leader of a new breed of Baptist Calvinists who would influence the theology of Al Mohler, the current president of Southern Seminary.

I have only met Dr. George on a single occasion.  He delivered a paper at Southern in the early 1990s and I was asked to give the response, probably because no one else wanted the job.  The Seminary was in the process of being taken over by conservative evangelicals and professors who publicly decried the revolution knew they would be summarily fired once the new crew, led by a thirty-three year-old Al Mohler, had the institutional reins firmly in hand.

Do men like George and Mohler qualify as sociopaths?  I don’t think so.   (more…)

Can’t the Subject Be Something Other than Guns?

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By Charles Kiker

I am not obsessed with guns. But since the public conversation is so obsessed I feel that I, as a person of faith, should respond. In particular, I am responding to two legislative proposals in two different state legislatures.

First: a legislative proposal right here in the Lone Star State would allow students to carry guns on college campuses and in the classroom. I will be charitable in my characterization of that proposal as seriously misguided.

Widely accepted research into the development of the human brain informs us that the frontal lobe is not fully developed in young males until about age 25. Therefore they are more prone to rash and risky behavior. Insurance companies recognize this in their premium rates for automobile insurance for males under 25. (more…)