Wretched Refuse

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” (Emma Lazarus, 1883)

Once again, the tempest-tossed find their way to the United States. They join a long line of previous refugees—escapees from Europe’s religious wars in the 1600’s; then joined through the centuries by the poverty-stricken, seeking economic opportunity; followed by survivors from Nazi concentration camps; then the “displaced persons” of World War II; then Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, and now Afghans.

In between, the descendants of black slaves and native Americans have fought prejudice. From south of our border, economic migrants added to the mix.

Our population history is a mixture of marvelous acceptance and depraved hatred. Yet, from these struggles, the country has continually been blessed by new life.

Nobel prizewinners and philanthropists, inventors and scholars—as well as ordinary business owners and stalwart middle class citizens have descended from this jumble.

May God give us the grace and wisdom to once again be blessed by this newest “wretched refuse.”

Decline of Religion

According to one academic study, religious practice in the world appears to be declining:

“From about 2007 to 2019, the overwhelming majority of the countries we studied—43 out of 49—became less religious. The decline in belief was not confined to high-income countries and appeared across most of the world.” (Ronald F. Inglehart, University of Michigan, “Giving up on God; the Global Decline of Religion,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2020)

A previous study analyzing 49 countries from 1981-2007 had found that 33 of the 49 countries had become more religious. The 33 countries included most former communist countries, most developing countries, and even a few high income countries.

The more recent study, however, showed that religion was practiced less even in many lower income countries.

Inglehart concluded: “Modern societies have become less religious in part because they no longer need to uphold the kinds of gender and sexual norms that the major world religions have instilled for centuries.”

What is interesting for me, however, in a personal look into Christianity’s place in the world today, is how it is, this moment, continuing its tradition of breaking new barriers.

In times past, religion in western societies usually revolved around families and communities. Schools, politics, and other forms of civic life tended to uphold norms held by the majority. Religion included a kind of civil religion, generally Christian or Jewish.

Mass migration of young people away from birth communities as well as modern inventions like social media have played havoc with community norms. The multi-generational family long ago gave way to the nuclear family which gave way to young people setting up single person households or with a significant other. Religion as encouraged by family suffered greatly.

Now, however, a next generation Christianity is proving that Christianity is not dead but evolving, perhaps closer to the model lived by Jesus.

A minority, but a significant minority, are espousing issues like racial reconciliation and care for the struggling—the homeless, the mentally ill, and the migrant, to name a few.

From the time the disciple Peter struggled to accept Gentiles into the Jewish Christian community, Christians have broken bounds, sometimes willingly, sometimes after fallow periods—but the conquest first named in a letter from the missionary preacher Paul continues today: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you all one in Christ Jesus.”

Vaccines Then and Now

I grew up in the dark ages. Children died from diseases like polio and measles. I remember attending a funeral for a young girl in my neighborhood who died of complications from measles. Another child died of complications from polio. A classmate was crippled by this disease. We saw images of children in “iron lungs”—large metal tubes they lived in to help them breathe after suffering polio. Measles could be a short childhood illness or it could kill or blind a child.

My parents were constantly worried about my brother or me catching one of these horrible sicknesses. We came back early from a vacation because a polio epidemic had suddenly broken out where we were planning to visit. During the summer, swimming pools required swimmers to get out of the water every hour and rest for ten minutes because overexertion might encourage the disease. Nobody complained about this restriction harming their civil rights.

Of course, we had immunizations against some diseases. Death and serious illness from small pox and typhoid no longer visited whole populations as they once had. My great aunt told of almost dying from typhoid, with a fever so high, she said, that her hair had fallen out.

Immunizations against these diseases were given each year in our public schools. The county nurse would make the rounds inoculating all students against the diseases for which we had vaccines.

When vaccines against polio came out, parents rushed their children to schools to be vaccinated—it was midsummer, as I remember—but schools opened for mass inoculation. Almost immediately, the fear of polio vanished in this country because almost every child had been vaccinated against it. It was a miracle.

If only, I remember thinking, the vaccine had come out a few months or a year earlier, my classmate’s life could have been saved.

With this history and these memories, I have a hard time understanding the massive resistence to vaccines. To me, science and vaccines and modern medicines are a gift God has given us with the power to create good for the world’s people.

Evacuations from Harm’s Way

Following recent events in Afghanistan, I’m reminded of my own two departures from danger zones, as a U.S. Foreign Service officer. Mine were much less harrowing than the departures in Afghanistan.

Mentors for my orientation class in the Foreign Service told us we could expect at least one evacuation experience during our career.

Mine came in Algiers in 1993. Groups wishing to bring back a more fundamentalist government in Algeria began attacks against foreign interests. It seemed prudent to draw down embassy personnel. My job there as an economic reporting officer was deemed nonessential, and I was ordered to leave Algeria.

I flew out on a crowded commercial plane to Paris, where I spent an interesting afternoon and evening exploring the City of Light, attempting to make myself understood in very broken French. Eventually, I was reassigned to the U.S. consulate in Montreal, Canada.

My second exit, from Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, was a more serious affair. Americans in that country had been killed in attacks specifically targeting them, including one on a compound housing Americans. This followed the beginning of the second Gulf War in 2003. In this one, I managed to remain until my tour was up, then left by a commercial flight after being driven to nearby Bahrain.

Even this one, of course, never approached the danger level of the evacuations in Afghanistan.

I pray for those in danger, foreigners and Afghans. I pray that one day, the country may become a safer place, as well as free for women. I pray for God’s help in figuring out the complex world we live in. I pray for an appreciation of differences and respect for those with whom we disagree.

Syria and Dante’s Inferno

“. . . the Syrian conflict, with its bloodshed, destruction and human suffering, seemed immune to all our efforts to find a diplomatic solution.” (William Roebuck, “Raqqa’s Inferno: A Diplomat Reads Dante in Syria,” The Foreign Service Journal, May 2021.)

Such are the words of a weary U.S. diplomat, retiring after a 28-year career, on his last assignment to war-torn Syria, another country ripped apart by a dictator’s desire to hang on.

My own diplomatic career didn’t take me to places as devastated as he experienced. I was assigned to Saudi Arabia for two wars with Iraq and was in Algeria at the start of civil conflict, but I was never close to the terrible suffering recounted in Roebuck’s article. Nevertheless, I identify with the hopelessness of conflict which never seems to cease.

Lacking easy hookups to the internet, Roebuck caught up on his reading in off hours, including Dante’s classic Inferno. This is Dante’s literary picture of his imaginary journey through concentric rings of Hell.

Roebuck fits his daytime journeys into Syria’s destruction with his evening reading of Dante: “I had never seen anything like it—blocks and blocks where every single building had been hit. Slabs of concrete jutted out at wrong angles, like fractured limbs broken beyond any cast would ever repair. More concrete hung from blasted ceilings, dangling in a mesh of wrinkled steal rebar like insects caught in some horrific, oversized spider web.”

At night Roebuck returned to the Inferno. “Dante’s intense, bizarre, even grotesque imagery seemed to my mind to capture the depth of suffering and destruction in Syria.”

The situation in Syria is still bleak, but Roebuck took some comfort in the defeat in Syria of the Islamic radical group, ISIS, leading to a chance for recovery.

In the Inferno, Dante eventually makes his way out of the underworld, where he then notes a refreshing view of the stars. Roebuck compared that to evidences of life again in the broken towns of Syria: some refurbished schools, a bit of night life, families chatting on carpets outside their homes.

Fulbright Scholarships and Segregation

It’s one of those paradoxes—America’s sometimes heroic leadership in the post World War II era and its torturous dealings with its racist sins at the same time.

A recent article in Foreign Affairs about J. William Fulbright, a senator from Arkansas from 1945 to 1974, mirrors this struggle. (Charles King, “The Fulbright Paradox,” July/August 2021).

Fulbright’s name is attached to the famous scholarship awards program begun in 1946. The program has allowed thousands of American and foreign students to study each other’s learning and culture.

Senator Fulbright also led the successful fight to end Senator Joseph McCarthy’s reign of terror. McCarthy’s false conspiracy theories had destroyed careers and people’s lives.

In addition, Fullbright began hearings on the Vietnam war in 1966. Testimony was taken from numerous people, including John Kerry, then a young anti-war veteran of the war. Kerry’s testimony is remembered to this day for his question: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

Here is Fulbright, then, espousing such liberal causes as opposition to the war.

But Fulbright shows another side to his character: “In 1956, Fulbright signed the Declaration of Constitutional Principles, also known as the Southern Manifesto . . . .The document codified southern resistance to racial integration . . .”

The idea of black Americans in Arkansas having as much power through voting as white Arkansans was simply, for him, a bridge too far.

Though he could advance learning and understanding between nations and could see the folly of Vietnam, he, like many Americans today, could not see our own racial sins.

As King writes: “He was a figure who committed his life to global understanding yet found it impossible to apply the same ideals to his homeland. What seems like a contradiction in Fulbright’s outlook, however, is really a blind spot in Americans’ own. Ths combination of open-mindedness abroad and bigotry at home was not unique to him.”

Growing Up Is Always

Organized Christianity since its inception could rate an A or an F, depending on which bits you examine.

One could point to religious wars killing millions.

On the other hand, where Christians have become a force, slavery generally has been abolished. The status of women has improved. The sick and the poor are more often cared for.

Jesus himself said to judge his followers not by whether they say they are his followers. Rather, have well do they follow his examples? Do they feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, take care of strangers, clothe the naked, and visit the prisoners?

Bill McKibben in his column in Sojourners (“A Mad and Dangerous Spell,” July 2021) faults those evangelicals who talk of the power of God to keep them from harm from the Covid-19 virus. For this reason, they say, they don’t need to be vaccinated against the disease.

“These sentiments sound pious,” he writes, “but they’re in fact the opposite—individualism masquerading as faith. God gave us a world that works in certain physical ways, and God gave us the brains to understand it.” Science developed the vaccines that have saved countless lives from Covid.

Against the anti-science of some evangelicals and others today, one must point to the books and learning kept alive in Christian communities during the European Middle Ages.

Ignorance is always being pushed back, for Christians as for anyone. Some of the first Christians owned slaves. Women were often placed in inferior positions. Some Christians (or calling themselves Christians) murdered each other and non-Christians in vicious wars and pogroms and crusades.

But change came. And Christians often led the changes, even against co-religionists.

The apostle Peter had to overcome his prejudice against Gentiles becoming Christians. In every generation since, we fight these battles to grow and overcome. We are always children striving to become the adults God wishes us to be.

Small Patriotism

“What does it mean to be patriotic and should Christians even want to be?” Bonnie Kristian asks in “The Case for ‘Small’ Patriotism.” (Christianity Today, July/August 2021.)

Kristian identifies with the Anabaptist faith, a group traditionally placing their Christian call ahead of secular allegiance.

She asks: “What does it mean to be an American evangelical, to mark July 4 after January 6, when supporters of our former president—many of them professing evangelical Christians . . . overran the US Capitol in attempted sedition?”

She refuses such a patriotism that would support an “idolatrous civil religion.” Instead, she calls for a patriotism that doesn’t countenance conquest of others. It is more concerned for local communities and for foreigners than is the blustery nationalist kind.

Equating love of country with love of God is a dangerous heresy for Christians. Conquest and global power for Great Britain in the nineteenth century ended in two disastrous world wars in the twentieth.

Christians perform the role, first of carers, then of guardians. Caring includes rescuing the poor among us as well as welcoming refugees from destroyed countries. One generation’s poor refugees became the country’s future scientists and educators and leaders.

Christians also guard against pride misleading us to engage in wars having nothing to do with our survival.

Christian patriotism is an humble, watching patriotism, aware of how easily pride can become sin.

Jesus and the Disinherited

Howard Thurman’s book, Jesus and the Disinherited, let me peer into the racial sins we Americans have inherited, as no other book has done.

I was raised a white Southerner by parents and church and culture which was not overtly racist. Ours wasn’t the Ku Klux Clan kind of racism. We were a working class/lower middle class church in a similar kind of neighborhood. I will be forever grateful to that church and its love.

It was only in reading Thurman’s book that I began to understand the less violent kinds of racism. Thurman helped me understand how a black in America, particularly in the South, had to live.

He talked of a visit he made to India. His host, as they prepared for bed, told him he must be careful at night if he got up to go to the bathroom or for any reason. He must always shine a light ahead so that he would not inadvertently step on a Cobra, curled soundlessly in his path.

And that is when I began to understand the insidiousness of racism.

I never had to think, when I left my house, about my white skin. I never considered, as I went into a store or applied for a job, how my white skin might be noticed.

In a white majority society, Thurman showed me, a person with a dark skin has to be aware of it all the time.

Fighting Reality

One rainy day when my oldest son was a preschooler, I told him he wouldn’t be able to go outside to play because of the weather.
Me: “It’s raining.”
Small son: “No it’s not.”

My son wished to overcome a reality he did not like by pretending that the reality did not exist. I am reminded of this episode when I read of those who question Donald Trump’s losing the U.S. presidential election in 2020.

Despite numerous court decisions upholding Joe Biden’s win, some of Trump’s followers insist: “No, he didn’t.”

Normally in a supposed democracy like the United States, the winner, as directed by the Constitution, takes office. The losers may grit their teeth, but they follow the usual concession of power.

Not this year.

Just as we mortal beings sometimes fight the reality of dying, some Americans fight the death of the America they knew in years past.

Trump’s win in 2016 was perfectly legal, but it was an electoral college win. The majority of voters favored Hillary Clinton.

Nevertheless, those unhappy at a changed America, and in favor of a country more like that of the one they knew in years past, were encouraged by Trump’s win. However, in 2020, the majority of votes for Biden was sufficient to also win the electoral college vote and bring in his presidency.

Regardless of election outcomes, however, the America of years past is not coming back. Americans have changed. That one may cheer those changes or despise them does not alter the changes.

We may be tempted to power—to try to force our way—when we are losing. We may be tempted to support democracy only when the votes come our way.

The question is whether we really want to wrest our way by undemocratic means, even by lies which have no basis in reality.

Democracy only works when democratic rules are followed. If your side loses, you can choose legal means to regain power next time: perhaps better organizing voters of your political persuasion, spending money for your candidates, or writing opinion pieces on public forums.

To refuse the reality of your loss, however, is to betray all the efforts of the United States during the Cold War to lead nations to accept democratic rule.

Greater America

The United States is fortunate in that the potential immigrants into our country on our southern border are from populations with whom we have known and interacted for centuries. Unlike other migration movements in the world, our cultures share many similarities.

The United States has not always proved helpful to Central Americans. In the past, we have supported dictatorships friendly to corporate interests taking advantage of poorly paid workers.

We can atone for some of those sins by pushing for reform by those Central American governments whose corruption we have often overlooked.

In an effort to deal with increased flows of migrants toward our borders, President Joe Biden has begun meetings with our Central American neighbors at various levels to develop programs around issues that connect us. These include migration but also economic development and climate change. Dealing with these issues might reduce the northward flow of immigrants.

Of course, this flow into our country is not necessarily bad. One of these days, we may look back with envy on those movements sending us the immigrants we needed for our birth-deficient nation.

Christianity as Default

Christianity is alive and well, but Christendom is not. In the former places of Christendom, many regard it as somewhere between a harmless superstition and a deadly virus.

Christianity bested paganism as the default European religion in the latter days of the Roman Empire. It has endured centuries of peaks and declines since then as it spread throughout the planet, in one form or another.

But Christ is never fully realized in any society. When Christianity is lived by enough of its adherents as it should be, it gains followers and popularity and influence. Then people begin to think they are Christians by default because of the culture they were born into.

But of course, they are not. “Even when Christianity is the default mode of a society, Christ is not.” Christian Wiman writes in My Bright Escape.

Living the Christ faith is never by default. Christ must be chosen deliberately, new in each generation.

World War II Hangover

One of the greatest things the United States ever did was lead Europe to defeat the Nazis in World War II.

Even greater was leading the world against Soviet communism without a major war that would have destroyed the planet.

We have lived on the laurels won in those conflicts ever since.

Every righteous victory has a day after. The Protestant Reformation, unfortunately, was followed by terrible religious wars devastating most of Europe. One of the mistakes was the use of religious ideas in political conflicts.

We run similar risks today. The United States is not Jesus. Criticism of some of the country’s policies is not blasphemy. Recognizing and confessing our sins does not diminish the country but, instead, can be part of its renewal.

David P. Gushee, a professor at Mercer University in Atlanta, Georgia, has spoken about the beginnings of black slavery in America. The practice of slavery after 1619 “required an intensification of white racism. It also required an intentional deformation of other aspects of Christian belief and practice so that Christian people accommodate themselves to slavery.” (“Born in Heresy,” Sojo.net, Sept/Oct 2020. Italics are mine.)

Even after the United States was formed, Gushee says, “. . . we could have followed the British lead and abolished slavery. Instead, we deepened our excuses, weakened our ethics, and denied biblical theology.”

We even fought a Civil War. Technically, slavery was abolished after that, but the refusal to atone for our sins led to Jim Crow laws justifying segregation and denying black Americans the right to vote.

This is not ancient history. In the South where I grew up, blacks rode in the back of the bus and sent their children to underfunded black schools. As a child, I remember the separate water fountains in department stores neatly labeled “white” and “colored.”

Some white Americans seem unable to understand that centuries of racism continue to exert influence. The George Floyd murder by a white police officer is a reminder of the deep need for both repentance and change.

Killing Ourselves

It’s called the American sickness—the dissent into despair and addiction and suicide, recently chronicled by a couple of university professors:

“In the twentieth century, the United States led the way in reducing mortality rates and raising life expectancy,” they stated. “Now, the United States may be leading Western nations in the opposite direction.” (Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “The Epidemic of Despair,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2020.)

This reversal especially affects the working class. “Marriage, churchgoing, and community,” hallmarks of this class, have all lessened. The authors single out “serial cohabitation,” the practice of men and women more frequently having children by different partners.

The authors fault the loss of good jobs as well as the lack of affordable health care. They call for practical measures like better regulation of the pharmaceutical industry and a more inclusive social safety net, as well as fair wages for the non technical workers.

However, notice the authors’ observation about the decreasing importance of “marriage, churchgoing, and community.”

An article by Charles E. Moore, Plough, Summer, 2016, suggests ways we have destroyed community:

“How would you go about destroying community, isolating people from one another and from a life shared with others?”

He quotes Howard Snyder (at the time Visiting Director, Manchester Wesley Research Center):

“Over thirty years ago Howard Snyder asked this question and offered the following strategies: fragment family life, move people away from the neighborhoods where they grew up, set people farther apart by giving them bigger houses and yards, and separate the places people work from where they live.

In other words, ‘partition off people’s lives into as many worlds as possible.’”

To facilitate the process, get everyone his or her own car. Replace meaningful communication with television. And finally, cut down on family size and fill people’s homes with things instead.

The result? A post-familial, disconnected culture where self is king, relationships are thin, and individuals fend for themselves.’”

Snyder’s words are harsh. Not all communities are healthy. Nevertheless, healing them is basic to overcoming today’s social isolation. In addition, the separations he talks about have grown with our addiction to social media.

Whatever solutions we develop for dealing with our social despair, building up families and communities must take the lead.

UnChristian Christian Nationalism

Peter Mommsen writes the following in an article in Plough (“Can Violence Be Good?” Summer 2021): “ ‘Christian nationalism’ is a conspicuous player in the political violence of the past few months, not least in the attack on the US Capitol. This movement combines exhibitionist public prayer and Jesus 2020 banners with strong elements of White supremacism and a readiness for lethal violence. . . . All this, it should go without saying, is not Christian . . ”

Plough is published by members of the Bruderhof community, self-identified as “an intentional Christian community . . a fellowship of families and singles, practicing radical discipleship in the spirit of the first church in Jerusalem. We gladly renounce private property and share everything in common.”

Similar views of white evangelicalism in American churches are expressed in sojo.net, a publication of a different kind of Christian organization. Sojourners identifies as an American Christian social justice organization. Here, Gina Cilberto writes of churches struggling against Christian nationalists: “Pastors across the country see them raging within congregations: beliefs that powerful, hidden, evil forces control human destinies.” (June 2021, “Can White Evangelicals Be Deprogramed from Trumpism?”)

Thus, the anger and hatred that produced the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol are being condemned by concerned Christians of vastly different theological views and practices.

Their concern is justified. One sometimes gets the idea that Christian nationalists revere the United States as the new Jesus, to be worshiped as God himself. Criticism is blasphemy.

But nations, like humans, are sinners. To serve one as a god is to forget the Jesus who refused to worship “the kingdoms of the world.”

Us and Them

Working for the U.S. State Department in the diplomatic corps changed my life. Serving my country in cultures as varied as Saudi Arabia and Canada gave me a new perspective on this wonderful human community.

Anyone who has read my novels knows I have tried to incorporate these discoveries into my fiction.

Often the characters, like their creator, have little knowledge of foreign cultures before they leave the United States. They find, especially if they serve in a culture quite removed from their native one, that they make mistakes because of this cultural ignorance. I remember with embarrassment in looking back at how I sometimes showed up for meetings with my skirts shorter than they should have been for that particular culture.

Coming home from a year or so immersed in foreign happenings, I also wondered at the lack of interest my fellow Americans showed in the rest of the world. We were the premier leader of the free world, yet sometimes Americans seemed to have not the remotest interest in anything except mall shopping and eating.

I also think Americans tend to be unaware of the responsibility given them by their privileged position. Once you serve as a visa officer in a U.S. embassy and see the long lines of people who want to visit, study, do business, and, yes, will lie to get a visa to enter your country, you realize it will be a while before you take for granted the blessings given you.

You also understand that if Americans squander the opportunities given them to lead humanely and humbly, they will forever forfeit their privileged position.

Community Fails

The Covid pandemic has shown us how dangerously shallow are our community connections.

Several decades ago, Americans transformed from generational living to the nuclear family: mother, father, and minor children.

In the more recent past, community often disappeared altogether, becoming a collection of one-person units or single parent families. Singles and studio apartments and temporary live-in romantic relationships proliferated. Some apartment dwellers didn’t know the name of a single neighbor.

The pandemic saw many single Americans working from home with few ways to connect, given the danger of catching Covid from physical proximity.

Parents, especially single parents, may have lacked grandparents or aunts or uncles or cousins to help them through the pinch of forced home schooling.

Obviously, a family doesn’t automatically make for healthy living. Some families, unfortunately, are toxic. However, closer connections require overcoming our propensity of the past few decades to equate freedom with singleness. Families, it seems, are actually necessary.

While avoiding too much dependency for young people who need space and time to spread their wings, rebuilding family and community relationships is a task for our times.

Nomadland: This Land Is Your Land

I watched the movie Nomadland the day before it won the 2021 Academy Award for best picture.

Merely watching the picture was itself a momentous event—the first time I’ve publicly attended a move in more than a year. Our local movie theater recently re-opened to masked, socially distanced audiences. I attended a matinee exclusively for those patrons vaccinated for the Coronavirus.

Frances McDormand, who won best actress in the awards, played a widow, living a fairly normal life until the main employer in her small town shuts down, and the town begins to die.

An employment official says her best choice is to go on early social security. McDormand says she can’t make it on the reduced benefits. “I only want to work,” she says, voicing the cry of so many of today’s unemployed.

So McDormand, in her small van, joins other rootless men and women who, for one reason or another, cannot find a place in mainstream America.

The movie did not have a villain, so far as I could see. Not Amazon, where McDormand finds seasonal employment to help her get by. Not the woman who nervously tells McDormand that she can stay the night in a store parking lot and mentions that a nearby Baptist church offers food. Even a policeman ordering McDormand off a public space, is I suppose, merely doing what he’s paid for.

McDormand wants to support herself. She works seasonal jobs and travels in between, sometimes stopping for a while to stay with other nomads, sometimes seeming to enjoy the solitariness of camping alone.

I was touched by the precarious existence of so many in America, no matter whether they remain stationary or travel around.

Bank accounts? Medical emergencies? Vehicle breakdowns? The simple need for bathroom facilities?

Others with more expertise perhaps can offer solutions. I only know that simple human kindness requires that we seek ways to help the non-belongers find a place in their country.

Ann Gaylia O'Barr

Culture and World Events from a Christian Perspective