Reflections on CHRISTIANS AND POLITICS: UNEASY PARTNERS, by Philip Yancey

I first became acquainted with Philip Yancey’s writings when I read Soul Survivor. That book traces Yancey’s spiritual journey from a legalistic, racist religion to one in keeping with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Yancey spent years as a journalist and has written articles for Reader’s Digest, Saturday Evening Post, National Wildlife, and Christianity Today. He was the editor for twenty years of the magazine Campus Life.

I was drawn to his more recent Christians and Politics because Yancey’s writing speaks to my concern with Christians driven by hatred rather than love.

Yancey receives his share of vituperative letters for his writing. The world, he says finds itself repelled by the hatred expressed by some Christians.

“When the church accepts as its main goal the reform of the broader culture,” Yancey writes, “we risk obscuring the gospel of grace and becoming one more power broker.”

Jesus refused a political kingdom. Whenever his followers seek power instead of transformation, the church suffers.

 

I’m Already Sick of Election Talk. Could We Change the Channel?

We already know what we need to know about most of the candidates. Why should we spend more than a year escaping attack ads, dodging phone callers and their canned spiels about candidates, and deleting massive numbers of political emails?

Perhaps we could begin a movement to ignore all news about the candidates until at least the beginning of 2016. Refuse to comment on the Internet about them. Flip the TV channel anytime a news story on the elections is broadcast. Advertisers might get the idea.

We might push to have one Extreme Tuesday in September, 2016, when all primaries are held. The parties would convene in October to choose candidates. The election would be held as usual in November.

Who knows, we might even make a dent in global warming without all that hot air.

 

Did You Know Students Used to Be Able to Pay for College with Summer Jobs?

As legislators in Washington State craft a final budget, it appears that tuition at state colleges and universities will be cut by 5 to 20 percent. The move is almost unique among states. Educators said it was long overdue. Tuition for Washington state-funded higher education has risen 34 percent over the past five years.

How was the tuition drop funded? By closing tax loopholes, including a preferential business and occupation tax for royalty income, and an increase in penalties for late tax payments.

Some parents remember when they earned enough at summer jobs to see them through college without future-mortgaging debts. No more. The children of wealthy parents have always been able to obtain higher education. So have a few very brilliant young people with scholarships.

Surely we know that a broad spectrum of our youth need advanced education if the nation is to succeed economically and socially. One way to do this is to lower costs to levels middle class families can afford.

Someday, it may be possible for students once again to pay all their college tuition with income from summer jobs.

 

James Bond Wasn’t a Foreign Service Officer

A blog for those interested in taking the tests for entry into the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Service (my former employer) caught my attention. I quote from her blog:

You: I’m trying to get a job with the Department of State.

Other: Which state?

or

You: I’m taking the Foreign Service exam this weekend.

Other: Really? I didn’t know the foreign legion even still existed.

Then the blogger recounts a home leave to family.

My mother-in-law mentioned that she just started reading a book and the main character is a State Department employee who works in an elite unit who has to uncover some conspiracy or other while infiltrating a mental institution. Granted, I haven’t worked for State too long, but I’ve yet to see this job appear on the bid list. It sounds awesome though.

Why is it that foreigners appear to better understand what the Foreign Service does than our fellow countrymen?

Good question. Her blog supplies some answers.

 

Young Americans and the Islamic State—Closer Than I Thought

According to a recent news article, an American young woman began a relationship with a new group of friends. She found them online after reading about the Islamic State. She was curious about them and wanted to know why they behaved as they did.

She found them easily, and they were willing to spend hours with her to explain their view of the world. They were, she said, very kind. They were interested in what she wanted to do with her life. They told of the new Islamic State, where one could live by God’s laws.

The young woman had grown up as a Christian, but her new friends said she didn’t have to leave Christianity to become a Muslim. She could join a faith that, they said, corrected Christianity.

At one point, she contacted her Christian pastor with questions about the Trinity and what Christians believed. The pastor spent about fifteen minutes with her and said she needed to trust God.

What appears to have won over the young woman were the hours her friends spent with her, listening to her, and answering her questions. Eventually, she converted, online, to Islam. She has considered traveling to a Muslim land to live with fellow believers.

The new convert to Islam was not part of an immigrant family, the kind often pictured as drawn to the Islamic State. She wasn’t trying to find her way within two cultures. She grew up in a more mainstream American society.

We think of our young people as pleasure-seeking hedonists. Perhaps many are looking for our friendship and our time. Perhaps they want to find purpose and meaning and a place to serve.

Here’s the entire story if you’re interested.

 

Four Problems. Which One Should Concern Us the Most?

The Islamic State in the Middle East claimed responsibility for attacks in Tunisia and Kuwait that killed over sixty people. Another gruesome murder in France may or may not be related. The IS already is responsible for horrible atrocities in Iraq and Syria. It has perfected Internet capabilities to entice thousands of young people from other countries to join its ranks.

China wishes more influence in Asia. The country also is establishing economic and cultural ties with Africa, long dominated by European and American interests. How do we reassure our allies in the Pacific and other regions, while encouraging China to increase its global reach within established international norms?

Russia’s Vladimir Putin has stoked the nationalism of his country, still smarting over humiliation at the swift demise of the Soviet Union. How can we best encourage the integrity of countries like Ukraine while avoiding another arms race?

Paralysis threatens our ability to pass legislation in Congress and in many of our state assemblies. The Supreme Court’s decision on Citizens’ United encouraged powerful interests to spend millions of dollars to influence elections and legislation. Vituperative remarks fill the digital world, beamed to millions in sound bytes before anyone checks on their truth or falsity.

Which problem do you think should concern us the most?

 

Nine Candles Burning

In our recent Sunday church service, we lighted nine candles for each person murdered in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston last week.

Perhaps we should have lighted a tenth candle for the person who shot them, in hopes that he will realize what he’s done and ask forgiveness.

Perhaps we should light a candle for the rest of us, too, that we all may turn our backs on the hatred that tempts us. We may not physically kill, but we in this country often murder by words. We spread lies, exaggerations, and distortions, which is a type of killing.

During the service, I thought of times when I’m uncivil in my thinking toward those with whom I disagree, especially, these days, on political issues. It’s my prayer that God lead us all toward more kindness.

Jesus said no one gets credit for loving those who love us. We are called to love those who hate us. The members of the church who lost family and friends have modeled that way for us in beginning to walk the path of forgiveness.

We are all in need of walking that path.

 

Bypassing the Corporate Culture

I live in a collection of communities on part of an island in Puget Sound. The area is referred to as “the South End of the Island,” a distinct semi-rural area that excels in bypassing the corporate culture.

In its early days, the few settlers were mostly farmers and loggers. Their connections with the mainland (“over town”) were limited, since travel between the two places was (and is) only by ferry. In the post World War II era, hippies and other malcontents discovered the South End and encouraged its eccentric bent.

Some of the hippies left. Others became responsible citizens, but the culture of nonconformity endures. Recently, a group discovered that, by banding together, they could loan money to small businesses sometimes bypassed by normal lending channels.

New small businesses include a variety of enterprises: a bakery, a pub, a shop selling local foods and goods to the tourists who flock here in the summer, and a small Latin American restaurant. One of the more recent requests is from a businesswoman with expertise in the travel industry who sees the South End as a perfect place to conduct bicycle tours.

The South End experiment is only one example of how ordinary Americans are trying new ways of doing things that don’t depend on huge amounts of money or mass consumerism.

We Didn’t Worry About Cyber Warfare When We Used Typewriters

I typed my undergraduate college term papers on a portable typewriter. By the time of my graduate studies, I typed my work on a miraculous invention called the desk computer. No carbon copies. Mistakes easily corrected.

When I began a job as a computer programmer, we used a huge mainframe to take over mundane accounting and other tasks. Then networking and the Internet revolutionized what was already revolutionary.

Smartphones, tablets, and the Internet became as much a part of our lives as television and automobiles did in earlier years. We take them for granted. What company, even a small one, doesn’t have a web site?

These inventions cover the globe. Multitudes now have access to them. They include hackers and the foreign groups accused of stealing information from millions of government employees, contributing to mixed feelings toward these postmodern creations. They bring added vulnerabilities, including cyber warfare.

But even as we encourage the necessary technical skills to protect ourselves, we have deeper needs, lost sometimes in the pursuit of our digital tools. They include more face-to-face communities as well as educational opportunities for all our children. In this age, every adult needs education and training, not just a few favored computer techies.

 

When Story Explores How We Became What We Are

I recently discovered two fictional series, one in the detective genre, the other in the mystery category. Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford series and James Runcie’s Grantchester series begin in the mid-twentieth century, a decade or two after World War II.

Critics describe both, as going beyond their genres. They are immersed in the social and cultural changes of their eras as they follow the main characters through time. They appeal to me for that reason.

My own novels have changed. In the beginning they tended toward romance, then women’s fiction, but the characters were wedded to the time period of the seventies and eighties. They explored a time period not considered either historical or contemporary. The era of near history is my niche, because it lends clues for how we became what we are in the present. In addition, nobody writes truly “contemporary” fiction. As one is writing the words, the present becomes past.

Time features even more in the series I’m writing now, which follow a man’s life from the late 1970’s into whatever near present I’m able to reach. Few would deny the tremendous changes during this time period.

Why did the changes happen? How did they develop? What do the changes mean to us today? What do they mean to relationships and families? What do they mean to our belief systems?

Another change occurs, too. The novelist is changed as a result of considering the changes to his/her protagonists. It makes for an interesting journey.

 

Farm Robots Who Toil Far From the Madding Crowd

The movie Far From the Madding Crowd is one created for my own heart. Character-driven, the movie portrays love, rejection, unwise choices, hardships, and redemption for some.

I could have sat all day devouring the movie’s soft visions of the English countryside: a farm community bringing in the harvest, gamboling lambs, galloping rides on horseback through woods and pastures.

Raised in the city, I must avoid too idyllic a view of rural life. I have never chopped cotton, worked until exhaustion as a farm peasant, or slopped the hogs. Watching those close-to-the-land scenes, however, I sensed loss in the evolution to our office-based, smartphone-in-hand culture.

On the same day I saw Far From the Madding Crowd, I read an article on the possible coming use of robots to perform the back-breaking work of farm tasks.

We could say good riddance to a peon type of farm laborer, vulnerable, with little power. Yet, what work will they do then? Will they join their working class brothers and sisters in unemployment?

I hope we reform our employment system to give all our citizens a chance at meaningful work, adequately rewarded. What about shorter work weeks, spreading the work around? Is a forty-hour work week necessary now that so much of our work is performed by digital and mechanical means? Some of us might use the extra time for family, friends, gardens, and rural hikes.

 

The True Story Behind Those Tales of Robin Hood and Tyrant King John

A popular movie in my childhood enthralled audiences with tales of Robin Hood and his battles against the tyrant King John of England and his minions. Robin’s particular target was the evil sheriff of Nottingham. Robin stole wealth from corrupted officials, including the sheriff, to give to the poor. The history may have been hazy, but King John was real, a true despot.

To facilitate better hunting, John destroyed ditches and hedges in the royal forests, even though destroying them meant animal predators could more easily harm the crops of the common people. He appointed officials who used their offices for increasing their wealth rather than governing justly (re the sheriff of Nottingham). Those nobles who disagreed with John’s system risked having their families taken as hostages and tortured or killed.

A group of English nobles united to seek reform and better safeguard the rights of all English people. Clergy and commoners sided with the nobles. (Including, no doubt, Robin Hood, whoever he really was.) John was outnumbered.

Eight hundred years ago this month (June 15, 1215), King John met with the nobles in a meadow called Runnymede, near Windsor Castle, and signed what is called the Magna Carta. By signing the charter, John agreed to remedy many of the abuses.

One of the provisions stated: “No freeman shall be arrested and imprisoned, or dispossessed, or outlawed, or banished, or in any way molested . . . unless by the lawful judgement of his peers and by the law of the land.”

Much remained to be done before true equality of all English citizens was a fact. Yet, it was a beginning. The thread sewn that day wound down to our own Constitution and the belief that all, including the wealthy and the privileged, are subject to the law.

 

On the Passing of a Son

“ . . . Beau Biden was, quite simply, the finest man any of us have ever known.” So said Vice-President Joe Biden after the recent death of his oldest son from brain cancer.

Once in a while, even in the power-mad world of politics, genuine goodness breaks through. It appears the Bidens managed to be a family in the best sense of the word—loving each other, putting family before politics, seeing their careers as a way of serving. According to news reports, both the Vice-President and his son graduated from the same Catholic high school. One of Beau Biden’s main concerns in his job as Delaware’s attorney general was going after child sex crime perpetrators.

Some might ask why a seemingly religious family who emphasized commitment and service has seen so much tragedy. Parents of children whose lives are blighted by drugs or other unwise choices might count the Bidens as fortunate.

We are reminded anew that our families and our friends weigh far more than power, money, or careers on the scale of life.

 

You Can’t Go Home Again; Home Goes With You

The writers’ conference was in North Carolina, in the foothills of the Appalachians. My husband and I rented a car at the airport in Knoxville, Tennessee, and drove across the mountains. From place names to bends in the highway, the times of my childhood floated back to me.

My parents, my brother, and I spent summer vacations hiking these hills, exploring small mountain towns in our car, stopping to spend nights in motels on different sides of the Great Smokies. As a teenager, I attended youth conferences at the center where I now gathered with other writers.

Strange how the going and coming, from childhood to adulthood, finds its way into the series of stories I’m writing now, stories I submitted for critiques and class discussion at the conference. The feedback suggested a green light to continue.

The series follows a young man raised in Appalachia who leaves home, first for university, then for an appointment as a Foreign Service officer with the U.S. State Department. Throughout his adulthood he will fit pieces together from old and new. He discards, keeps, and adds as he matures. He creates a mosaic, as we all do, hopefully with increasing wisdom and discernment.

 

Get Them Out! Removing U.S. Embassy Staff from Harm’s Way

The U.S. embassy in Yemen recently shut down, due to the ongoing conflict in that Arabian Peninsula country. Terrorists have targeted the embassy for years. When the current government fled, the State Department deemed the situation too dangerous for onsite diplomatic work. Personnel were evacuated to the tiny nation of Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa, bordering Somalia.

When I entered the Foreign Service in 1990, my orientation class was told: “You’ll probably be evacuated at least once in your career.” Only once in a career is increasingly optimistic.

In 1993, I was evacuated out of Algeria when terrorists targeted diplomatic personnel of several countries. In 2003, my posting in Saudi Arabia dramatically ended as U.S. missions there drew down due to terrorist threats. Fortunately, I was able to leave on an airplane in both cases. A recent evacuation from Libya included a nineteen hour trek across the desert to Tunisia.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry made a first ever visit by a Secretary of State to the U.S. embassy in Djibouti. His remarks to the evacuated staff from Yemen highlighted the complexity of an evacuation.

“I wanted to personally come here really just to tell the world about the story of what’s behind the news headlines when they read “Refugees trapped in Yemen,” or “trapped in Aden, people trying to get out.” And people have no sense of all the machinery that has to come together to work to find a way to get out, a safe way, get onto a boat, the harrowing nature of traveling across water under those kinds of circumstances; your family huddled on a deck or down below, or if you’re lucky, on a larger military ship . . .

“And the entire State Department family contributed to this effort from – literally, from Madrid to Jerusalem to Casablanca, people have come together . . . And the entire embassy here in Djibouti and the entire embassy community – American and local staff – have all joined together.”

Just another “evac” operation.

 

Writing for People Who Think God is Dead When You Don’t

The writer Bret Lott confesses the Christian faith but writes a different kind of literature from what is usually styled “Christian.” Lott quotes Flannery O’Conner, writing in 1955: “One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is nobody in your audience. My audience are the people who think God is dead.”

My own novels are more mainstream than “inspirational.” The characters live in a world where faith shares little space with the chaotic times they live in, one their parents could never imagine. This world is more likely to associate God and religion with hatred and brutal wars.

In the Old Testament book of Esther, one character asks Esther as she struggles with a difficult decision: “Who knows but you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” Esther is the only book in the Protestant Bible that doesn’t mention the name of God. Different times call for different narratives.

 

Does Permissiveness Disadvantage Poor Kids More Than Rich Kids?

Ross Douthat, columnist for The New York Times, explores the consequences of a “no rules” culture on working class Americans.

“ . . . our upper class should be judged first . . for failing to take any moral responsibility (in the schools it runs, the mass entertainments it produces, the social agenda it favors) for the effects of permissiveness on the less-savvy, the less protected, the kids who don’t have helicopter parents turning off the television or firewalling the porn.”

The abandonment of marriage has harmed working class Americans more than the privileged. The rate at which children are born to unmarried parents has risen drastically, but especially among working class Americans. The higher income parents in our society are more likely to be married. If they divorce, courts oversee custody and child support.

Among unmarried parents, the father is more likely to skip his responsibilities any time he decides to, with no divorce court to oversee child support.

The permissive, less attached partner arrangement has proved devastating for those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. And, as Douthat suggests, the culture shapers, who tend to be the more well-off, bear a great deal of responsibility for the consequences.

 

When the In Group Becomes the Out Group

Political parties do it. Religious institutions do it. Corporations do it. When a formerly influential group loses power, it often responds by fighting to retain that power.

Wiser ones use the opportunity afforded by lessening influence to regroup and search out core principles instead.

Almost everyone in America used to believe in religion as a force for good. Most were members, at least in name, of a religious group. Now something like thirty percent and growing no longer count themselves as religious. A few are atheists, but atheists impart to religion a certain honor by reacting to it. Most of the nonreligious no longer react against religion. They simply ignore it.

Our situation has parallels with the world of the early Christians. Their rulers, the Romans, provided security and a certain measure of economic prosperity. Various philosophies encouraged cynicism and skepticism for old ways. Those with means to do so often lost themselves in an unending search for pleasure. Spiritually, it was a wandering age, like our own.

The religious movement known as Christianity offered a revolution based on a loving community that shared rather than sought power, wealth, or pleasure. Indeed, its founder had refused a political kingdom. It was the ultimate out group. Yet it appealed to more and more, outlasting the Roman empire.

A renewal of that same spiritual revolution goes beyond bemoaning how immoral our society has become. It does not seek political power. Rather it lives in the now, not some supposedly golden age of the past. It seeks to understand and meet needs and hurts of the now.

 

Boat People

A member of my small, mostly expatriate Christian church in the north African nation of Tunisia became a boat person. He was a destitute Nigerian, a Christian, and found his way to Tunis to wait until he could pay a smuggler to take him to Italy. One Sunday he did not appear in church. Word came that he had reached Italy safely. He had broken the law, yet how could we not rejoice for our friend’s safety and hope for a new life?

Boat people appear in our news every few years. After the Vietnamese war, multitudes of boat people rushed to escape. Cubans took to boats to reach Florida. Haitians came, too. Recently, many Central American children flooded across the southern border of the United States on foot.

Now Europe is in the news as growing numbers of boat people from North Africa and the Middle East attempt to reach Europe. Thousands drown when crowded, unsafe boats capsize.

The best way to deal with the problems of mass migration is obviously to reduce the circumstances that lead people to risk their lives in hope of a better life.

Wars almost always produce refugees. The first lesson might be: Do not go to war unless the war is unequivocally caused by a threat to the nation. The war that the United States fought in Iraq is not the only reason for the following turmoil in the Middle East, but it certainly contributed.

Corrupt governments ruled by elites, where ordinary citizens barely survive, feed mass migration as well. Rich nations have an obligation to consider carefully their development and military aid to such regimes. Supporting them comes at a steep price.

 

Al Qaeda and ISIS Aren’t the Same

The terrorist group Al Qaeda so far is a movement, not a nation. In contrast, ISIS (the organization calling itself the Islamic State) holds territories in Syria and Iraq and has a land-based army. These and other distinctions were made by Audrey Kurth Cronin in his article “ISIS Is Not a Terrorist Group” (March/April 2015 Foreign Affairs).

Because ISIS is essentially a nation, some suggest a conventional war against it. Cronin calls this a “folly.” He reminds his readers: “Wars pursued at odds with political reality cannot be won.” Such a war would be exhausting and certainly not supported by the American public over a necessarily long duration.

Cronin advises a policy of containment, the policy generally followed in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. We never fought a hot war with the Soviet Union. We waited out our adversary until it collapsed. While waiting, we shored up allies and built our economy. We knew some colossal failures (Vietnam), but overall, our policy was correct.

Similarly, Cronin suggests that we become a “diplomatic superpower,” rather than one dependent solely on military solutions. Effective leadership requires patience.