Tag Archives: Ann Gaylia O’Barr

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.

White Woman

Like a lot of white people, I have been affected by the George Floyd murder and its aftermath. Indeed, for several years many whites like myself have come to better understand the bitter harvest our country has endured due to racism.

One thing, however, remains true. I may sympathize with what people of color have suffered in my country. I may be sorry when I think of our history. However, when I go out the next day or even the next hour to the store or walk the streets, in most places I can forget about my color. I don’t carry in my skin the color that the person passing me in the street or serving me in the store will likely note.

Most of the time, I don’t think about my skin color or how it may affect those who deal with me.

Not so, the person of color who walks into a store or jogs or shows up for a job interview. Blacks can, I suppose, be themselves in some neighborhoods, often the poorer ones, or in their churches, or in a few other places.

Most of the time, however, people of color know they are noted because their skin is not white. They can rarely forget about their skin color when they leave home, as I can the knowledge of my skin color.

“Black lives matter” is stressed not because people of color matter more than others. It is stressed because their lives haven’t mattered like white lives.

The emphasis will no longer be needed the day we can all leave home without thinking about the color of our skin.

Those Immigrants Aren’t Going Away

No matter if the United States votes in a Trump or a Biden, those immigrants highlighted in our media feeds—scaling the wall, crossing the desert, detained at the border, massed in a border facility—aren’t going away.

Writes Bloomberg columnist Max Hastings: “Whereas in 2000 there were estimated to be 150 million migrants — people living outside their country of birth — today the figure is 272 million and rising. In 1970, there were fewer than 10 million migrants in the U.S., which is overwhelmingly the global destination of choice; today there are 44 million. In Europe, there are 82 million migrants, representing a 10% rise since 2015.” (“Immigration Is the Wealthy World’s Challenge of the Century,” April 11, 2021)

If you are threatened by war, crime, or starvation, you will search for any avenue offering escape. You may climb a wall, risk drowning at sea, or pay a smuggler who stuffs you into an overloaded truck where you risk smothering.

What is ironic is the need of developed countries for migrants. They need them for jobs, for new ideas, and for shoring up their shrinking birth rates. Immigration has been a part of renewal since the beginning of recorded history.

But as Hastings says: “Everyone but the most fervent libertarians, however, recognizes that the Western democracies would be overwhelmed if all those who wish to live among us should come to do so.”

Hastings believes the United States is fortunate in that migrant-sending countries in the Western Hemisphere are more susceptible to help at the source. That is, with economic aid for smaller populations.

However, the take home point from the article is the need to address the sources of migration—the dysfunctional governments, the wars, the famines caused by climate change, for example.

Obviously, these problems were a long time in the making and will not be remedied by band-aid solutions.

We may derive some hope, however, by remembering that the Cold War, threatening global nuclear disaster, was averted by unusual global cooperation. These efforts included NATO and humanitarian aid and, through all those tense years, continued talks between supposed adversaries like the United States and the Soviet Union.

Averting a devastating major war called for tremendous cooperative efforts. Solutions to the global migration crisis will demand no less.

Democracy Is Not a Given

For a while, in the glory days of the late 1980’s and early 90’s, we thought democracy was a given. The Soviet Union vanished. The democracies of the world appeared ascendant. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait was repulsed by a U.S. led multi-national military force.

That was a long time ago. To those under thirty years of age, it’s not even a memory. We’re mired in Afghanistan, stymied in the Middle East, dealing with China’s rise.

On top of that, even the United States, supposedly the lynchpin of democracy, experienced an attempt to overcome an election by mob rule.

Writes Michael J. Abramowitz, president of Freedom House: “Over the past 14 years, my organization, Freedom House, has tracked a steady erosion of political rights and civil liberties around the world. The decline has affected, not just the states that were already repressive . . . but also . . . long-established democracies, including the United States. Our reports show a long-term decline in the vitality of our own democracy, a trend that has become especially pronounced in recent years and undermines our credibility as a champion of human rights globally.” (“Diplomacy and Democracy: Putting Values into Practice,” The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2021)

How do we overcome the forces that would overwhelm us, even here?

We can support responsible journalism, going beyond Facebook feeds and twitter posts.

We can curb our anger and listen to those with whom we disagree, setting up avenues of civility.

We can continue and even improve our voting presence. Unprecedented voting in the last election overwhelmed several years worth of lies and deceits and endless challenges. We can fight any attempt to limit voting that makes it harder for ordinary working people to vote.

We might even consider changes to our Constitution allowing the election of our president and vice-president by popular vote.

Foreign Service Officer: What’s That?

The call from the Marine on duty in the U.S. consulate in this Middle Eastern country came late in the evening. I was the American consular officer, responsible for, among other things, being available for American citizens with problems.

“There’s an American lady here who says she wants help. She’s had some kind of fight with her husband, and she left him,” the Marine said. “ Her baby is with her.”

I hurriedly dressed and made my way from my house to the Marine’s post. The young American woman waited with her months old baby. I took her into the consular section where she could nurse her baby and we could talk.

She was one of many American citizens who show up, sometimes literally, on the doorstep of an American embassy or consulate asking for help. Working as a Foreign Service consular officer for the U.S. State Department, I was privileged to know some of them.

Writes one Foreign Service officer: “The most urgent calls rarely came during embassy business hours — the wee hours of the morning were much more common, no matter the country. ‘We found the body of a young American male at the airport hotel. It appears to be suicide,’ one caller reported. ‘I’m 14 years old,’ pleaded another. ‘My parents brought me here on vacation to visit family. But it turns out they want to marry me off to a 50-year-old man I don’t even know. Please help!’”
—Matthew Keene, “For Americans in Trouble Abroad, a Consular Officer May Be the Only Hope,” Washington International Diplomatic Academy,” March 21, 2021

Some of my own experiences as a consular officer included the following: An American killed by an apparent terrorist. Americans arrested for making booze in a country where any alcohol consumption was forbidden. An apparently mentally ill American showing up at the consulate needing money.

Oh, yes, we used to say. Consular officers have the best war stories, better by far than our colleagues working at more rarified heights. They visit the jails. They make welfare checks on American children of divorced parents when the child lives with the foreign parent. They check the bodies of dead Americans at the morgue before calling a relative in the States with the sad news of the death.

Working for our country is a noble occupation: A soldier serving in a foreign land or one setting up hospitals for victims of Covid-19 in the U.S. A diplomat working out an agreement for free trade or one visiting an American in a foreign jail. A U.S. Supreme Court justice deciding between differing views on the Constitution or a judge seeking the best outcome for a juvenile offender caught shoplifting.

Easy work? Often not, but justifying the honorable title of “public servant.”

The young woman with the baby I mentioned earlier? Her husband, a young man who seemed to deeply love his wife and child, came to the consulate later in the evening, and the two made up. Sometimes we witness happy endings, too.

Immigrants: Push and Pull

Vibrant economies need immigrants. The highly skilled have immigrated for centuries, as they continue to do, spreading skills and innovation. The less skilled have contributed workers to harvest crops, begin new businesses, and save money to prepare their children for better lives.

Immigrants can shore up falling birth rates in developed nations. Countries stagnate if the number of births falls below replacement rates, the recent norm in developed societies. A continuing flow of immigrants lessens fallout from the drop in birth rates.

At the same time, immigration can be uneven and inundate some societies, as in various African and Middle Eastern countries and to a lesser extent in developed nations on the fringes. Wars have upset whole societies. Peacekeeping not only prevents bloodshed, but decreases huge migrations of people, desperately fleeing for their lives.

Differences from the past also multiply today’s movements of people. The world’s growing population means more of us are affected by conflicts. In addition, climate change causes drought and less dependable weather patterns. Finally, social media spreads news of better places to live.

Successful immigration results from managing both the push and the pull factors. Most immigrants are not criminals or freeloaders any more than were the immigrating ancestors of many of us.

Developed nations have obligations to lessen the push factors that send boatloads and truckloads searching for a better life. Some of the factors leading desperate people to flee are the result of decisions made by those nations.

For centuries, developing nations were seen merely as sources of raw materials or military outposts with little regard for the country’s citizens. Since the 1800’s, the United States has often supported dictators guilty of gross human rights violations in Central America, for example.

For the sake of righting wrongs as well as for reasons of self-interest, developed nations would be wise to work on both the push and the pull factors fueling immigration.

That Distribution of Wealth Thing

Why should the wealthy give up money they have accumulated (though not necessarily worked for) only for the money to be enjoyed by those who didn’t earn it? The dreaded “S” word, socialism, haunts these discussions.

But what about our systems of public education? Aren’t free schools a distribution of wealth? We pay for them through taxes whether we have children or not, whether we send our children to them or, instead, pay for our children to receive a private education. Children of the poor may attend them as well as children of the more affluent.

We have decided that our communities and our nation as a whole will benefit from educated citizens.

Most of us believe roads and bridges and infrastructure should be maintained by our taxes. We believe this even though a poor person who pays little or no taxes (except perhaps sales taxes) can use the roads and sidewalks. We all benefit from cheaper goods facilitated by an efficient transportation system.

What about health care? Won’t the nation benefit from more productive citizens if they are in good health? To be sure, preventive care should be a major part of any health care system, not simply paying hospital bills. Obviously, some systems of health care are more efficient than others, as are systems of education, but the aim is a healthy population that will benefit the nation. Proper health care is an investment, like schools and roads.

The best investments yield gains in the long term. Some distribution of wealth is an investment.

Ann Gaylia O'Barr

Culture and World Events from a Christian Perspective