By Alan Bean
I learned about the season of Epiphany from the book of Daily Office Bible readings I stole from the Episcopalians some thirty years ago. First, I wondered why the advent readings focused on the end of the world; then I wondered why Matthew’s Magi stories didn’t show up until after Christmas.
In my Baptist upbringing, the three wise men were right there, with the shepherds and all, at the stable in Bethlehem. (more…)
By Alan Bean
My inbox doesn’t always give me anything worth reading, but today was an exception.
First, you will want to read this interview with David Oyelowo, the British actor who plays Martin Luther King Jr. in the new film Selma. I haven’t seen the film, but I have kept abreast of all the criticism from LBJ fans, and I listened yesterday to a delightful conversation between Terry Gross (Fresh Air) and director Ava DuVernay that explains why it has taken half a century for Hollywood to tackle MLK. The interview with Oyelowo explains why, perhaps for the first time, a major film portrays authentic spirituality. All of the major actors were either professing Christians or they had grown up in the Black Church and understood the context. In other words, this isn’t a film made by secular white people who don’t understand genuine Christianity.
Secondly, there is this disturbing post from Fred Clark, the Slacktivist, inspired by the surprising discovery that the more financially secure Americans become, the more they despise and “envy” poor people. The study shows, Clark believes, that rich people have come what they pretended to be:
So the wealthy didn’t start out as genuinely ignorant, dumb and dull. They started out just pretending that’s what they were. Alas, though, as Kurt Vonnegut warned us, “we must be careful about what we pretend to be,” because we become what we pretend to be. And after decades of pretending to be stupid, it seems that a majority of the wealthiest Americans are no longer merely pretending.
Finally, there is this post from The Boekstool asking why we don’t call misguided Christians who perform violent acts “Christian terrorists”. An excellent question. What is it like to grow up Muslim in America? It ain’t easy, that’s for sure.
Enjoy!
IN THE VISIONS OF THE NIGHT
December 12, 1993
Alan Bean
In the visions of the night
I saw this earth
Lost among the silent stars
I saw this earth lost among the stars.
No established date of birth;
No estimated time of arrival.
In the visions of the night
I saw this earth
Lost among the stars.
In the visions of the night
I saw this earth
Numbering her battle scars
I saw this earth
Numbering her scars.
No sword of retribution;
No tears of absolution.
In the visions of the night
I saw this earth
Numbering her scars.
In the visions of the night
I saw this earth
Cradling a mother’s child
I saw this earth
Cradling a child.
Lost among the silent stars;
Mid the noise of battle,
In the visions of the night
I saw this earth
Cradling a child.
By Alan Bean
More white Millennials identify as “nones” than as Christians according to a post originally published in On Faith.
“Nones”, you may remember, are those who check the “none” box when asked to state their religious affiliation.
But there is no mass exodus afoot in the non-white Millennial segment of the American Church. As a result, although people of color comprise only one-third of American Millennials, they represent over half of Millennial Christians.
By contrast, nearly 7 in 10 of older American Christians are white. The On Faith article highlights the conclusion of Mark Silk, professor of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College in Hartford, CT: “What you have in American religion today are the nonwhite Christians and the Nones.”
And it isn’t just the moderate-to-liberal Protestant mainline churches that are bleeding young people. According to the article:
Among Americans 65 and older, nearly 3 in 10 (29 percent) are evangelicals. That number drops to 1 in 10 for younger Americans.
So, why are white Christians, conservative and liberal, in such a panic to leave the church while religious fervor among young people of color remains strong?
This difference is particularly surprising when you realize that most African American and Latino Christians take the rough outline of their theology from white Christians. If you think non-white churches are bristling with liberation and civil rights theology you are mistaken.
There are three large tribes within white American Christianity: mainline Protestant, evangelical Protestant, and Roman Catholic, and all three are hemorrhaging young people.
Among white American evangelicals, Christianity largely overlaps with Republican political identification. Although it is rare to hear blatantly partisan political preaching in white evangelical churches, even in the American South, the association between Christianity and Republicanism is widely assumed.
American evangelicalism loves Jesus and can’t pay him enough metaphysical compliments: Son of God, Lord of Lords, Coming King, etc. But American evangelicals have a problem with the core teaching of Jesus recorded in the Gospels.
Jesus, to put it bluntly, makes liberal democrats look like Barry Goldwater. His gospel is “good news to the poor”.
Jesus proclaimed an upside-down kingdom in which “the first will be last, and the last will be first.”
Jesus told his disciples to love everyone without reservation, to demolish us-them distinctions, to honor the dishonorable.
Jesus loved and forgave his enemies, even while hanging in agony on the cross and, incredibly, insisted that his followers do the same.
It was once possible to ignore the content of Jesus’ teaching. It didn’t get a lot of attention in sermons and Sunday school lessons and evangelical pastors evolved clever ways of explaining why Jesus almost never really meant what he said.
That is changing. The radical shape of Jesus’ message is rapidly becoming public knowledge, forcing evangelical preachers and public theologians to ratchet up the machinery of denial. Older evangelicals can live with the disconnect between revelation and proclamation; but the cognitive dissonance is proving too much for “the information generation”.
So, how do we explain the mass exodus of young people from the Protestant mainline and Roman Catholic churches of America?
While American evangelicals are overwhelmingly conservative in political ideology, the nation’s white mainline and Roman Catholic churches are evenly divided between ideological conservatives and liberals, people who primarily disagree about money, poor people, and the proper response to the enemy and the “other”; precisely the stuff Jesus talks about in the Bible.
Churches can’t wrestle openly with the alarming tenets Jesus-based morality without pouring oil on the polemical fire sizzling restlessly just beneath the surface of congregational life, so they ignore this stuff as much as possible. Sure, you hear vague references to justice, caring for the poor and feeding the hungry in many white churches, but the systemic roots of injustice, poverty and hunger are rarely explored.
Here’s the big problem: You can’t apply the teaching of Jesus to the moral and public policy issues confronting American society without getting overtly political. But the politics of Jesus transcends the party programs of Democrats ad Republicans. The logic of Jesus-morality suggests a politics so radical and uncompromising that few elected officials in America would consider touching it.
As a consequence, the moral content of biblical Christianity, properly understood, is irrelevant to American politics.
Millennials love the Jesus portrayed in the Gospels and would love to learn more about them. But in the white Christian churches of America they are confronted with silence or bizarre misrepresentations of the Master’s intent.
Are Christians of color more open to Jesus than their white counterparts?
If your congregation is directly impacted by American immigration policy, the Bible takes on a surprising relevance. The Holy family was forced to live as refugees and illegal aliens. The Old Testament insists, repeatedly, that the sojourner and the resident alien must receive just and humane treatment. Jesus injunctions about “the least of these” take on a new relevance in a social context shaped by poverty and the constant threat of family separation, and this is true even if pulpit preaching is primarily about getting saved for heaven.
The same dynamic is alive in the Black church. Only a small minority of Black churches participated in the civil rights movement, but that bold legacy has assumed a normative status in the Black church, even in churches where the preaching presents a Jesus who wants to make you rich. The Black Church is overtly political because bad public policy has had a devastating impact in poor communities of color.
In short, there is just enough of the Jesus stuff in America’s Black and Latino churches to sustain the commitment of a restless Millennial generation. Many of these young people are frustrated by much of what they see and hear in church, but there is a dash of genuine Jesus-religion in the religious stew, and that keeps the young folks coming.
Meanwhile, white American Christianity has a Jesus problem and it’s getting worse with each passing year. The flight of the Millennials is primarily a white problem. There’s something horribly wrong with white American spirituality and its driving our children to the exits.
Jesus is our problem. Mercifully, Jesus is also the solution to our problem.
Reviewed by Charles Kiker, Ph. D., American Baptist Minister (retired)
Unless you can stand deep soul-searching, don’t read this book.
Emmett Till’s body was exhumed in Illinois almost a half century after his murder in Mississippi, to try to ascertain whether there might be evidence involving anyone other than Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam in the murder. Bryant and Milam had been acquitted in a trial in 1955 in which the jury deliberated only 67 minutes. Milam had died in 1980 and Bryant in 1994, so they could not be tried in federal court. But might there be someone else who could be?
Although it does not ascribe a starring role to Emmett Till, it is fitting that this book begins with a description of the exhumation of the body of Emmett Till in 2005, a half century after his murder.
Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 set the stage, but that day in December, 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama could well be designated as the beginning of the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. But America’s attention was riveted on Jim Crow by the murder of fourteen year old Emmett Till a few months earlier in August, 1955. The murder and the rapid acquittal of the murderers reportedly stiffened the spine of Rosa Parks for her stand against segregation. The murder of Emmett Till was an important milestone in my own development regarding race relations. (more…)
By Alan Bean
The Senate Intelligence committee’s report on CIA torture begins with a little context:
It is worth remembering the pervasive fear in late 2001 and how immediate the threat felt. Just as week after the September 11 attacks, powdered anthrax was sent to various news organizations and to two U.S. Senators. The American public was shocked by news of new terrorist plots and elevations of the color-coded threat level of the Homeland Security Advisory System. We expected further attacks against the nation.
The implication is clear: Although our report bristles with official lies, cover-ups, brutality, idiocy and systematic sadism, the Senator’s suggest, none of this should be seen as reflecting badly on the national character. We were a traumatized and fearful nation and we just . . . well . . . we pushed the envelope a bit. You will be appalled, disgusted, even outraged by what you read in these pages, but the folks responsible for the blatant misconduct described therein meant well. They were good, honorable Americans like you and me: ordinary people living in extraordinary times.
The report argues, persuasively I believe, that no actionable intelligence was derived from the “enhanced interrogation techniques” (aka “torture”) employed by the CIA and other representatives of the United States of America. The authors aren’t saying that the information produced by water boarding, rectal re-hydration (aka “anal rape”), sleep deprivation and all the rest produced information of dubious value. They are saying that torture was completely useless as an intelligence-gathering tool.
I suspect they’re right about that. But the insistence that torture produced nary a shred of good intelligence reflects the hidden fear that, if the American public thought sadistic brutality would make them even a tiny bit safer, they would condone it in a heartbeat. (more…)
By Alan Bean
Glancing at the paper this morning over breakfast, I noticed the headline, “Race relations arguably worse in ‘Age of Obama'”.
That banal conclusion is based on a recent poll suggesting that 43% of Americans believe that having an African-American president has not helped race relations, while only 34% believe it has helped.
This assumes that race relations–white folks and people of color getting along–is what we’re shooting for. It isn’t. (more…)
By Alan Bean
The shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson and the choking death of Eric Garner in Staten Island have dominated the news cycle for weeks, making it almost impossible to get any other issue onto the agenda. Immigration, Ebola and ISIS have all been reduced to the status of warm-up acts.
The death of Eric Garner has riveted the nation because we have the video. A few voices on the hard right are defending Daniel Pantaleo’s use of the choke hold, arguing that it was somehow Mr. Garner’s fault for being obese and having high blood pressure. But most commentators, regardless of ideological persuasion, are baffled by the grand jury’s decision. Even when the footage is grainy, the camera doesn’t lie.
The Michael Brown story has captured the lion’s share of media attention precisely because we don’t have the video. (more…)
Christians are people who live as if the kingdom Jesus preached is a present reality.
By Alan Bean
The Mississippi Supreme Court just decided, after a 5-4 vote, that Curtis Flowers does not deserve a new trial due to racial bias in the jury selection process. I wasn’t surprised. After a black juror was accused of perjury and obstruction of justice at the end of the fifth murder trial Curtis has endured, black members of the venire were understandably eager to avoid jury duty. White jurors, by contrast, were eager to serve.
The only surprise was that four justices appear to understand that this case has horribly irregular from the beginning. Since the sixth trial, for instance, one of the state’s star witnesses has been convicted of massive income tax fraud while another has committed a triple murder (with a fourth victim confined to a wheel chair).
The Mississippi Supreme Court once functioned as a check on prosecutor Doug Evans and Judge Joey Loper. That is no longer the case. To find out why, read on. AGB 11-5-17
At the risk of offending people of good will everywhere, I will ask the appropriate question in the appropriate manner: “Is it a crime to kill a nigger in Mississippi?”
If the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the 2010 conviction of Curtis Flowers is any indication, the answer to this distressing question is still “no”.
My offensive framing of the question hails back to the 1964 trial of Myron De La Beckwith, the man accused of killing civil rights leader, Medgar Evers. Prosecutor Bill Waller had the thankless task of prosecuting a man who was being hailed as a hero in his home town of Greenwood, Mississippi. To have any chance of attaining a conviction, Waller had to signal to the courtroom that he shared their disapproval of Medgar Evers and the movement he symbolized. But he also had to find twelve men (women didn’t serve on Mississippi juries in 1964) who believed it was a crime for a white man to kill a black man. So every prospective juror was asked the same question. Here’s how it went the first time round.
“Do you think it’s a crime to kill a nigger in Mississippi?” Waller asked one potential juror.
After a long silence, the judge demanded an answer.
More silence.
“He’s thinking it over,” Mr. Waller said.
The African Americans in the gallery gasped and moaned in dismay every time the hated word was uttered, but Waller got the jury he was looking for.
Little has changed. (more…)
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