Material gifts decrease when you give them away. Spiritual gifts, by contrast, increase the more you use them.. When you are living in conscious connection with this Loving Inner Presence, you are in your True Self. God is forever united to this love within you; it is your soul, the part of you that always says yes to God. God always sees God in you–and “cannot disown God’s own self” (2 Timothy 2:13)... Many Christians live with a terrible sense of being rejected, because their religion is basically a worthiness game where no one really wins. That’s precisely not the Good News. It’s bad news. The Gospel will always be misinterpreted by the false self in terms of some kind of climbing or achieving. Since the false self can’t even understand the command to love one’s enemies, it has to disregard the message as naive, which is exactly what most of Christian history has done. Jesus’ rather clear teaching on love of enemies has been consistently ignored by all the mainline churches. Christians have been fighting one war after another, and excluding, torturing, and killing enemies right and left because the false self can never understand the Gospel. Yet we have been baptizing, confirming, giving communion to, and even ordaining false selves throughout our history. It is probably unavoidable, and God surely must be patient.Once, after I gave an anti-war sermon, a businessman came up to me and said, “Well, Father, maybe in an ideal world. . . .” I know he meant well, but that’s what we’ve done with most of the teaching of Jesus. We interpret his meaning for some ideal world. Of course, the ideal world is never going to come so we can just ignore 99% of the actual teaching of Jesus, as the institutional church (and I too!) have usually done. We concentrate instead on things that Jesus never once talked about, like birth control, homosexuality, and abortion–bodily “sins” because the body can most easily carry shame. We shouldn’t disregard bodily shame or addictions, but they are not the core problem. Jesus focused on issues of power, prestige, and possession–which all of us have largely ignored. I don’t think the church has had intentional bad will. It has simply tried to get the false self to live the Gospel, and that will never work. In other words, we’ve tried to have a church without fundamental transformation. Thus we whittle down the whole Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus’ direct teaching that “he who lives by the sword dies by the sword” (Matthew 26:52); and we look for absolutes in ever new secular places–like the 2nd Amendment to the United States Constitution which allows us to carry weapons. And this is done by a vast majority of Bible-quoting Christians.
Country Music, Openness to Experience, and the Psychology of Culture War
In the car, I listen to country music. Country has an ideology. Not to say country has a position on abortion, exactly. But country music, taken as a whole, has a position on life, taken as a whole. Small towns. Dirt roads. Love at first sight. Hot-blooded kids havin’ a good ol’ time. Gettin’ hitched. America! Raisin’ up ruddy-cheeked scamps who you will surely one day worry are having too good a hot-blooded time. Showing up for Church. Venturing confused into the big wide world only to come back to Alabama forever since there ain’t a damn single thing out there in the Orient or Paris, France what compares to that spot by the river under the trembling willows where first you kissed the girl you’ve known in your heart since second grade is the only girl you would ever truly love. Fishin’! How grandpa, who fought in two wars, worked three jobs, raised four kids, and never once complained, can’t hardly wait to join grandma up in heaven, cuz life just ain’t no good without her delicious pies.
.. general, liberals are more open-minded, creative, curious, and novelty seeking, whereas conservatives are more orderly, conventional, and better organized.
.. country is the most “upbeat and conventional” genre of music. A preference for “upbeat and conventional” music is negatively correlated with “openness” and positively correlated with “conscientiousness,” and so, as you would then expect, self-described conservatives tend to like “upbeat and conventional” music
.. More generally, country music comes again and again to the marvel of advancing through life’s stations, and finds delight in experiencing traditional familial and social relationships from both sides.
- Once I was a girl with a mother, now I’m a mother with a girl.
- My parents took care of me, and now I take care of them.
- I was once a teenage boy threatened by a girl’s gun-loving father, now I’m a gun-loving father threatening my girl’s teenage boy. Etc.
And country is full of assurances that the pleasures of simple, rooted, small-town, lives of faith are deeper and more abiding than the alternatives.
.. My conjecture, then, is that country music functions in part to reinforce in low-openness individuals the idea that life’s most powerful, meaningful emotional experiences are precisely those to which conservative personalities living conventional lives are most likely to have access. And it functions as a device to coordinate members of conservative-minded communities on the incomparable emotional weight of traditional milestone experiences.
.. Even a little change, like your kids playing with different toys than you did, comes as a small reminder of the instability of life over generations and the contingency of our emotional attachments. This is a reminder low-openness conservatives would prefer to avoid, if possible. What high-openness liberals feel as mere nostalgia, low-openness conservatives feel as the baseline emotional tone of a recognizably decent life.
.. And even if you’re able to see that your kids will find plenty of meaning, but in different things and in different ways, you might well worry about the possibility of ever really understanding and relating to them.
.. So when the culture redefines a major life milestone, such as marriage, it trivializes one’s own milestone experience by imbuing it was a sense of contingency, threatens to deprive one’s children of the same experience, and thus threatens to make the generations strangers to one another
.. A lot of country music these days is culture war, but it’s more bomb shelter than bomb.
Lutheran Minister Preaches A Gospel Of Love To Junkies, Drag Queens And Outsiders
I think a lot of congregations have a situation where people are – there are more people talking about God in the basement during the week. The basement of their church is more full of people talking honestly about their lives and connecting that with some kind of trust in God. I think that happens more frequently in their basements than it does in their sanctuaries.
GROSS: The basements where the 12-step meetings are.
BOLZ-WEBER: That’s right, yeah, because I – I mean, you know what organization’s not really having a problem? – is AA. Like, that’s…
GROSS: (Laughter).
BOLZ-WEBER: It’s doing fine. That – they’re not in a crisis. So there aren’t meetings about how – in AA – where they’re like, how can we get people to start showing up more? And so I think that there’s something about people speaking honestly about their lives, and, sometimes, I think church is more about pretending your life’s fine. And I think less and less people have time for that.
.. Yeah, it was – you know, some churches might have a hard time welcoming, you know, junkies and drag queens. We’re fine with that. But, like, when bankers in Dockers started showing up (laughter), we’re like, wait a minute. Like, I – it threw me into a crisis ’cause I felt like, wait, you could go to any mainline Protestant church in this city and see a room full of people who look just like you. Like, why are you coming and, like, messing up our weird?
And one of the values my community has always held is this idea of welcoming the stranger. Like, a lot of times, we’ll start the liturgy by saying, blessed be God, the Word who came to his own. And his own received him not. For in this way, God glorifies the stranger.
.. So I preached to, like, 10,000 people. And when The Denver Post found out about this, they ran this big front-page story about me with this, like, terrifying picture of me. And then…
GROSS: (Laughter).
BOLZ-WEBER: And so the next Sunday, like, tons of people showed up. But the thing is is that – you know who takes the paper are, like, 60-year-olds in the suburbs. And that’s who showed up. And so we’re looking around going, what’s happened? Like, our church – our weirdness is being diluted. And I called a friend of mine, who has a church with a similar demographic in St. Paul, Minn. And I was like, dude, have you ever had normal people, like, mess up your church? And he goes, yeah, you know, you guys are really good at welcoming the stranger if it’s a young transgender kid. But, sometimes, the stranger looks like your mom and dad.
.. And he said, look, as the young transgender kid who was welcomed into this community, I want to go on record as saying, like, I’m glad there are people who look like my parents here because they love me in a way that my parents are finding difficult right now. And I was like, oh, man, meeting over.
(LAUGHTER)
BOLZ-WEBER: I mean, like, meeting over. Like, that was it. Like, that’s what is challenging to me about Christianity – is that exact thing – is, like, being forced to look at your own stuff and being pushed into a space of grace that’s really, really uncomfortable. And I should say that same person, Asher, was ordained. The ordination was at our church. And Asher was the first openly transgender person to be ordained by the ELCA, by my denomination. So we, like…
GROSS: That’s great.
BOLZ-WEBER: Yeah, he’s an extraordinary person. And that day was a huge celebration.
.. Well, that’s the thing – is that I just don’t think belief should be the basis of belonging to a community like this. And so I – everyone – we don’t sort of make that the central reason that somebody belongs. So we don’t even talk about belief that often in my church, strangely. It’s not that I don’t care. It’s that I don’t feel responsible for what people believe. I feel very responsible for what they hear as their preacher, as their pastor. So in the liturgy and in the preaching, I feel responsible for what they hear.
Now, how that’s going to work upon them in their lives is – there’s so many things that contribute to that that I have nothing to do with. So I just don’t feel a sense of responsibility.
.. I mean, I’m actually a very orthodox Lutheran theologian. And it’s a very sort of Christo-centric community. But it’s one in which, really, everyone’s welcome to come and participate.
GROSS: Are you more concerned about people’s actions than their beliefs?
BOLZ-WEBER: I’m not even really concerned about their actions, no.
(LAUGHTER)
GROSS: That wasn’t the answer I was expecting.
(LAUGHTER)
BOLZ-WEBER: Well…
GROSS: What are you concerned about?
BOLZ-WEBER: Nothing.
(LAUGHTER)
BOLZ-WEBER: No, that’s not true. I mean, I’m not concerned about – I don’t monitor people’s behavior. Let’s put it that way. So much of Christianity has become about, like, sort of monitoring behavior. And so far, it’s just failed to work as a strategy (laughter) – right? – for making people better. So on some level, the – Christianity became about monitoring people’s behavior, a sort of behavior – or, like, a sin-management program. And that almost always fails and often backfires.
Like, I would actually argue that conservative Christianity’s obsession with controlling sexuality – I mean, absolute obsession with it – has, in fact, created more unhealthy sexual behavior than it’s ever prevented. I really believe that. I mean, you actually don’t even see that particular level of obsession with, like, the power of sex and how dangerous – it’s like the moral bogeyman that’s hiding behind every corner and every zipper to these people, right? I mean, it’s just like they’re obsessed with it in a way you seldom see outside of say, like, 16-year-old boys.
GROSS: (Laughter).
BOLZ-WEBER: So it feels like there’s an entire culture (laughter) that has not developed past this. And we found that it doesn’t actually make people behave better.
GROSS: To sum up, your issue isn’t what people believe or whether they believe. And it’s not their actions, either. So your goal is – your job is…
BOLZ-WEBER: Is to preach the Gospel. I mean – so my job is to – is to point to Christ and to preach the Gospel and to remind people that they’re absolutely loved and that their identity is based in something other than the categories of late-stage capitalism, for instance, that they are sort of named and claimed by God and that this is an identity that is more foundational than any of the others. And all of these sort of – and that they’re, like, completely forgiven and their – all of their mess-ups are not more powerful than God’s mercy and God’s ability to sort of redeem us and to bring good out of bad.
Like, all of that – like, that message is what I just keep preaching over and over and over. And I think that there’s a particular effect. I think when people hear this over and over, they become free. And I think they actually do start making good choices for themselves and healthy choices, self-respecting choices without the church telling them what that has to look like.
.. Frank Schaeffer once said in an interview that, like, if what he wanted more than anything in the world was to be an atheist, the very first thing he’d do is pray to God to make him one.
.. And then the third thing is, really, this thing called theology of the cross, this idea that God is so present in suffering. Like, in our suffering, we feel like God’s absent. But God’s actually especially present in human suffering. And I feel like I had experienced that, as well.
Christians Tempted By Trump Idolatry
Jerry Falwell Jr.: No other president “in our lifetimes has done so much that has benefited the Christian community” so quickly as Trump.
.. Third, without really knowing it, Trump has presented a secular version of evangelical eschatology. When the candidate talked of an America on the brink of destruction, which could only be saved by returning to the certainties of the past, it perfectly fit the evangelical narrative of moral and national decline. Trump speaks the language of decadence and renewal (while exemplifying just one of them).
In the Trump era, evangelicals have gotten a conservative Supreme Court justice for their pains – which is significant. And they have gotten a leader who shows contempt for those who hold them in contempt – which is emotionally satisfying.
The cost? Evangelicals have become loyal to a leader of shockingly low character. They have associated their faith with exclusion and bias. They have become another Washington interest group, striving for advantage rather than seeking the common good. And a movement that should be known for grace is now known for its seething resentments.
.. the idea that the robustly vulgar, fiercely combative, and morally compromised as Trump will be an avatar for the restoration of Christian morality and social unity is beyond delusional. He is not a solution to America’s cultural decline, but a symptom of it.
.. There is first the temptation to worship power, and to compromise one’s soul to maintain access to it. There are many ways to burn a pinch of incense to Caesar, and some prominent pro-Trump Christians arguably crossed that line during the campaign season. Again, political victory does not vitiate the vice of hypocrisy.
.. to believe that the threat to the church’s integrity and witness has passed because Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election is the height of folly.
One reason the contemporary church is in so much trouble is that religious conservatives of the last generation mistakenly believed they could focus on politics, and the culture would take care of itself.
.. if Trump’s presidency collapses, that Christians in general and Evangelicals in particular are going to be the scapegoats.
.. These diehard Trump-backing Christians will have provided progressives, as well as factions within the GOP who are sick of Christians’ influence in the party, with the pretext they need to crack down. Good luck defending religious liberty when it is associated with Donald Trump
.. He has given no evidence of humility or dependence on others, let alone on God his Maker and Judge. He wantonly celebrates strongmen and takes every opportunity to humiliate and demean the vulnerable. He shows no curiosity or capacity to learn. He is, in short, the very embodiment of what the Bible calls a fool.
Some have compared Trump to King David, who himself committed adultery and murder. But David’s story began with a profound reliance on God who called him from the sheepfold to the kingship, and by the grace of God it did not end with his exploitation of Bathsheba and Uriah. There is no parallel in Trump’s much more protracted career of exploitation. The Lord sent his word by the prophet Nathan to denounce David’s actions—alas, many Christian leaders who could have spoken such prophetic confrontation to him personally have failed to do so. David quickly and deeply repented, leaving behind the astonishing and universally applicable lament of his own sin in Psalm 51—we have no sign that Trump ever in his life has expressed such humility. And the biblical narrative leaves no doubt that David’s sin had vast and terrible consequences for his own family dynasty and for his nation. The equivalent legacy of a Trump presidency is grievous to imagine.
.. Important issues are indeed at stake, including the right of Christians and adherents of other religions to uphold their vision of sexual integrity and marriage even if they are in the cultural minority.
But there is a point at which strategy becomes its own form of idolatry—an attempt to manipulate the levers of history in favor of the causes we support. Strategy becomes idolatry, for ancient Israel and for us today, when we make alliances with those who seem to offer strength—the chariots of Egypt, the vassal kings of Rome—at the expense of our dependence on God who judges all nations, and in defiance of God’s manifest concern for the stranger, the widow, the orphan, and the oppressed. Strategy becomes idolatry when we betray our deepest values in pursuit of earthly influence. And because such strategy requires capitulating to idols and princes and denying the true God, it ultimately always fails.
Enthusiasm for a candidate like Trump gives our neighbors ample reason to doubt that we believe Jesus is Lord. They see that some of us are so self-interested, and so self-protective, that we will ally ourselves with someone who violates all that is sacred to us—in hope, almost certainly a vain hope given his mendacity and record of betrayal, that his rule will save us.
.. If — if — we learn that Trump did what he is alleged to have done, and you stand behind him even so, how do you answer the charge that Christians care so much about access to power that they will turn a blind eye when the president they support blabs extremely sensitive national security secrets to the Russians? Are we really idolaters who would sell our souls to stay in the king’s good graces?
.. There was a time when we condemned Democrats and liberals for standing by Bill Clinton, despite how he disgraced the Oval Office. We accused them of caring more about power than principle — and we were right to. Remember when the liberal journalist Nina Burleigh said in 1998, amid the Lewinsky scandal, that she would fellate Bill Clinton to thank him for keeping abortion legal? Are conservative Christians really prepared to walk a mile in her kneepads for Donald Trump? And for what?
God is not mocked.