Healthy Liberal Christianity, The Environment, and Climate Change

I believe that strong positions need strong foundations, so as a preface to addressing environmental and climate change concerns I need to lay some groundwork.

Throughout recorded history a fundamental battle has raged between the needs and desires of the individual over against the needs and desires of the community. Anyone who has grown up in a family has experienced the inherent tension between those opposing forces. Let me add that while the tension is not necessarily bad and can, in fact, generate some wonderful creativity, it is still very real and often difficult to manage. To begin to see the implication of this dynamic process in twenty-first century life, it helps to locate it in the wider perspective of human development.

There are a couple of ways of looking at this. One frame of reference looks at how the development of an individual proceeds from dependence, through independence, and ultimately to interdependence. So, human beings begin as appendages to a community and end up as full participants in that community. Said differently, humans go through a process of differentiating themselves from a simple identification with the family in order to develop the capacity to enter into adult relationships. While the move towards independence is an essential part of the process, it certainly is not the end of the process.

Another developmental frame focuses on the breadth of the definition of “family”, or to use Jesus’ reference, on the breadth of the definition of “neighbor.” As we grow spiritually throughout a lifetime, we come to see a larger and larger group that constitutes “neighbor” for us. Jesus pushes his followers to include their enemies in the neighbor category as well. For the human race, there has always been a move to incorporate more of the world into the family. Cultures have used a variety of approaches. Some have done it by force using military conquest and others have used religious persuasion and conversion, as well as trade and economic sanction. Education and the familiarity that comes from increased contact and relationship with others also serve to draw the family/neighbor circle more widely.

In today’s world, we are able to step back to get an even broader perspective so that we see all humanity being interconnected at least through our collective reliance on the health of “mother” earth. We have learned that the decisions of a single country or multi-national corporation may well have a significant global effect. We can no longer “do our own thing” without being concerned about the impact that we have on all. Nor can we ignore the behavior of others no matter where they are on earth, because we, too, are among those who are affected.

I haven’t said a word yet about climate change, but perhaps you can already see where this argument is going. Scientific inquiry and measurement have developed to the point where we can literally “take the temperature” of our world and draw some conclusions about what recent changes might mean for us all. So, considering a broad definition of “neighbor” or “family”, how do we then “love our neighbors as ourselves”?

I see two aspects of our mandate to care in this challenging world situation. The first is the question about human contribution to global warming. I know that some people continue to argue that the scientific computer models are not sophisticated enough to show cause and effect and they argue that fluctuations in global temperature are simply following a natural cycle. From my research in this area, I conclude that, if anything, the scientific models are underestimating the scope and effects of global warming on the planet’s climate. Secondly, while natural fluctuations certainly occur, the amount and speed of this latest increase in temperature is unprecedented! It’s likely that if we do not dramatically limit our production of greenhouse gasses in the next 40 years, we may well make the Earth uninhabitable for human life within a very few generations!

If we are to care for our neighbors, we must reduce our personal production of greenhouse gases and we must help create sufficient political will to require that nations and corporations reduce their production dramatically, too.

But even if we do all this and succeed in saving humanity from mass destruction, we will not be able to avoid the inevitable consequences of global climate change entirely. And this likely outcome leads us to consider a much more urgent issue. Hurricane Katrina demonstrated without question what can happen when a low-lying coastal area has to deal with a rise in water levels. This experience tells us that low-lying areas all over the world are increasingly at risk as global warming raises the level of the oceans and potentially creates the conditions for stronger storms. Just a few months ago one of those storms devastated the coastal population of Myanmar. In areas of the world where people have lots of money, they will be able to make some mitigating changes through stronger sea walls, levees, etc. These efforts will moderate the effects on some communities. But for areas that are poor (and that means most of the world), without the means to prepare adequately, the effects will be truly devastating.

Not only do we have a Christian mandate to love our neighbors, but the whole history of Judaism leading into Christianity has called upon the powerful and rich to take appropriate care for the disenfranchised. That is our most central calling.

We need to figure our how we will accomplish these two significant tasks: creating the political will to change our toxic behavior, and mobilizing effective ministry on behalf of humanity’s most vulnerable citizens. All ideas about how to do this are welcome.

One thing is certain. We cannot insulate ourselves from the concerns of our “neighbors” and we cannot simply look to our own comfort and enjoyment. This is true whether we are conservative or liberal Christians. I call upon us to work together.

Wayne

"Our faith is 2000 years old. Our thinking is not."

The United Church____of Christ

Healthy Liberal Christianity Looks at The Church

I’ve been thinking lately about a TV ad from the early 60’s. It showed a typical Caucasian family (mom, dad, brother, and sis), dressed in their “Sunday-go-to-meeting” clothes, walking into a very Protestant-looking church building. After an interval of somber organ music, the announcer proclaimed, “The family that prays together, stays together!”

Avoiding for a moment the accuracy of the statement, I am filled with a deep feeling of nostalgia. It reminds me of a simpler time with simpler ideas, a time when the church played a central role in the life of every community – at least that’s the way I saw it.

Well, is that the way I really saw it, or is my nostalgia obscuring the finer details of my memory?

Honestly, attending church (yes, it was required) was a crashing bore. The people were nice enough, but most weeks I just couldn’t wait until it was over. I had no idea what the preacher was talking about. There was that vague, but perpetual, sense of unworthiness that I think every teenager felt. Perhaps you remember, “All that fun in the world of teenage exploration must be tainted in some way.”

I did learn the stories, and figured that this Jesus guy must be really important. I learned that generosity was important and that God really wanted people to be praying and doing good religious things. Selfishness was “out” and self-denial was “in”. The Bible was important, of course, but I came to the (liberal?) conclusion that “The Bible is not true simply because it is the
Bible. Rather, it’s the Bible because over centuries, people have discovered it to be true.” So, what if my insight was a bit superficial? At least I was thinking about these things.

My point here is that no matter how narrow and frankly boring my church experience was, it played a significant role in laying down the foundations for my growth into adult thinking. While I see its limitations only too clearly, I also see its value.

But in those days the church didn’t have to compete with the rest of the world for its central position in the community. Of course, religions competed with each other, but for the most part, there were plenty of people looking for some place to worship so every church had enough. The church was the center of the religious, social, and service life of every community. And churches all had governmental support, too, not monetarily, but through the “Blue Laws” that made most other possible Sunday morning activities illegal. Stores were not permitted to open, and it was unthinkable to organize a youth sports program that cut into the church’s time. (This was not a time of social justice for all religions, however. Jewish communities, for example, certainly didn’t enjoy a comparable level of legal and cultural support.)

Twenty-first century America is a totally different world!

So many social, athletic, and educational opportunities compete head-to-head with the church these days. Besides, with all adults in a family having to work to make it in our economic environment, Sunday has become valuable time for shopping and family. The church is no longer the only game in town. It is my belief that if we try to compete for the attention of today’s consumers, we will lose. In fact, we are already losing badly.

There are some churches, however, that seem to be holding their own pretty well in the marketplace. I see three factors that affect their growing numbers. First of all, many churches have put massive resources into the level and quality of the entertainment they offer. Bands playing “modern” music, powerful sound systems, and multi-media presentations grasp the worshipper’s attention with the effectiveness of a hyperactive television screen. Secondly, they are not ashamed to give clear and unequivocal answers to life’s thorniest questions. And finally, the theology of such churches always includes at least one of two themes. God is fundamentally dangerous and will “get you” if you don’t have the grace of Christ to protect you, and/or if you get it right and stay connected to this particular religious approach, God will reward you handsomely – and then you can be rich without guilt!

I admit to overstating the issue a bit, but I believe that it is essentially accurate.

So, here is my dilemma when I think about the place of the church today. I can’t bring myself to lead a church into behavior or beliefs like those “more successful” churches. Entertainment is enjoyable, but my soul requires more substantial food to satisfy it. Simplistic answers to life’s complex questions just don’t help me. In fact, I am attracted to the wondrous complexity of creation and of reality itself. The complexity of life simply means that there is always more to learn. And if God is just a bigger and stronger version of a pathologically jealous and destructive adolescent, what’s the point.

I’m left with these questions, though. If not in the church, where can people find encouragement to transform humanity along the lines of Jesus’ vision of the Realm of God?

What will stimulate people to think more deeply about essential matters of faith, life, and relationship, and where will they get the courage, to say nothing of the encouragement or necessary perspectives, to challenge the quasi-religious beliefs that continue to support systemic injustice in our world?

And finally, how will the church discover its true identity apart from our culture’s consumerist pressures?

If we are to be people of faith who gather together for our mutual support and health, then we will need to move away from our nostalgic views of what the church once was. Its identity will have to be born anew.

Wayne

"No matter who you are, or where you are in life's journey, you're welcome here."

The United Church_____of Christ

A Liberal Christian Take on Spirituality

This week I am writing about an issue that is more about the interior life of the Healthy Liberal Christian. I do this recognizing that liberal Christianity has a poor track record when it comes to spirituality. But if we aspire to practice a version of Liberal Christianity that is “Healthy” as well as liberal, we must consider this mysterious religious dimension.

Let’s face it; the definition(s) of “spirituality” is(are) pretty slippery. Some think of it as being addressed any time we consider “The Divine” (whatever that means). Others think of spirituality as being how we regard our connection to others, to God, to creation itself, and to our own inner being. Then there are those who use “spirituality” and “religious growth and development” interchangeably. In this installment, I am going to see if I can at least help myself to get clearer on these meanings.

My first thought is that “spirituality” actually refers to two different dimensions of human experience, not one. Those dimensions are “spirit” and “soul”. Again, there are those who use these terms interchangeably, too. But they’re not the same at all. Spirit is a high and abstract concept that is sometimes thought to be the direction we must follow to find God. Jesus says that “God is Spirit” and that we should “worship God in Spirit and in truth.” In a sense, worshipping God as Spirit is a way to get out of ourselves, to get beyond our individualistic concerns, to see life through God’s eyes, that is to say, from a perspective that is high and far reaching. We soar with the Spirit.

The other dimension is “soul”. While “spirit” is high and abstract, “soul” is found deep within and may be identical with our very identity. Sometimes I think of soul as the essence of God becoming real in the heart of creation. Genesis tells us that we are created in the image of God, so creation itself has soul. It might help to think about the process of how humans come into being. Egg and sperm join together and create something that is in the image of both but is not identical to either.

(I want to be very careful in using this metaphor. I am not implying that the male essence located in the sperm is the Godlike part and that the female essence located in the egg is the physical world. Such thinking has throughout history been the basis for the subjugation of women in an unbalanced, patriarchal society. I believe that such thinking retards the development of soul.)

Instead, we might think of the spirit as the mind of God and the created universe as the body of God. They unite in this ongoing sacred process to create a multiplicity of unique manifestations of the divine. The task of our spirituality, then, is to promote the growth and development of this nascent soul into its fullness and maturity. It is my observation that this task is greatly neglected in Christian religions of all stripe. Fundamentalism values immature obedience to a paternalistic God and condemns individuals who set out on an unpredictable growth process. And Liberalism, particularly in its humanistic guise, may tend to ignore the existence of a divine essence entirely.

What I’m getting at here is that the place where we find the connection between the divine and the created, where we have the opportunity to promote true spirituality, is exactly at that place we call “soul.”

Our culture doesn’t do a very good job at nurturing the soul, perhaps because healthy, mature souls develop a passion for systemic justice and are, therefore, seditious. Our institutions of higher learning are heavily weighted in the direction of career development, often at the expense of soul development. Our economy depends on promoting our veritable addiction to consumerism. Much of what we buy is made attractive by the promise that it will distract us from facing our inadequate selves, and as a bonus, by the promise that their product will transform us into what the culture needs us to become. This approach has a lot to do with making money and very little to do with promoting the development of our souls. The economic system invites us to change into someone else’s version of who we should be, while the development of the soul invites us to become more who we really are – to be people created in the image of God who strive for fullness and maturity.

Ed Friedman, Rabbi, Pastoral Counselor, and Marriage and Family Therapist identifies several aspects of the well differentiated soul, but the one that sums it up for me is this: “Differentiation is taking maximum responsibility for one’s own emotional being and destiny rather than blaming others or the context.” To illustrate: Our culture of higher education and economic systems offers us a relatively restricted list of who we can become and it exerts enormous pressure on us to select from the predetermined choices. The result is many people who have lost contact with their “souls”, even while enjoying great success in economic or status terms. Jesus reminds us, “When does it benefit you if you gain the world, but lose your soul.” A narrow interpretation means that our worldly selfishness is the “sin” that keeps us from our “heavenly reward.”

From the liberal perspective, I think the situation is more immediate and grave than that. Connection with soul is what makes life actually worth living. Without “soul” we become people who are “making a dying, rather than making a living.”

While differentiation sounds like something that an individual must do for oneself, that does not mean that we have to do it alone. We need a supportive community to help us embark on the courageous search for soul. In some Native American traditions, the person who goes on a “vision quest” goes out into the wilderness alone, but not without ample preparation and ritual within the community. At the end of the quest, the community welcomes the quester back and respectfully receives the insights of the quest and makes use of them in the community. Said differently, we need to be well differentiated “souls” in order to bring health to community, and, in return, the health of the community promotes the differentiation of the individual soul.

It appears to me that Jesus did not teach people to be immaturely obedient. He taught people to be responsible for the quality of their openness to the divine and to life itself. He always empowered individuals to take responsibility and not to attribute their legitimate responsibility and power to him. This is the Jesus we try to follow, no matter how much his teachings may challenge the “common sense” of the culture. This is our “spirituality”. Prayer may help. Familiarity with sacred texts may help. Going to church may help. But none of these remove the necessity for us to take responsibility for our own being and destiny and then to respond to the cultural systems with all the differentiation and maturity we can muster.

Wayne Gustafson

"I love my church because it's sort of like The Wizard of Oz - it's about have a heart and a brain. And courage!"
The United Church of Christ

The Politics and Religion of Fear

Most of the time I stay away from directly addressing political issues even though all theology of every stripe always has political implications.

My concern today is the totally inappropriate (dare I say, evil) use of Christian scriptures and beliefs to generate broad-based fear throughout the electorate. By every account, fear is used to sway elections because (sadly) it works! No matter how unethical it may be or how much lying is used to generate fear, political campaigns continue to use it. While people may believe in the ethical principle that “the ends don’t justify the means”, in practice, the “end” of winning the election has come to justify any and all “means” that are employed to get that result. Truth, therefore, is now completely without value in much of our political system – and the more national the contest, the greater the propensity toward lying.

In an unintended way, the negative approach is working on me, too, because I find that I am afraid a lot these days. Mostly, I’m afraid that the politics of fear will continue to dominate the world of elections, politics, business, and international relations and that any possibility of trusting the process will be lost – in short, that candidates will get elected only on the basis of the magnitude of their lying, not their character or the creativity of their approaches to the problems of the age.

This raises the question about why winning at all costs has come to be so important. At one time I believed that those who aspired to political office actually wanted to be of service to the broader community and had some ideas about how to do that. In their campaigns, they would put out those ideas and if they resonated sufficiently with the electorate, they would win. I have become much more cynical in the face of the increasing mountain of evidence that too many politicians are in it primarily for the money. I have come to believe that all the political rhetoric about moral principles, about freedom, about fairness, and about security mostly boil down to a small “moneyed” elite who only want to protect their “right” to make as much money as they can without regard to how much it will cost everyone else or how much it will cost the health of the planet.

Pardon that slight digression about politics and money. What has my dander up today is a particular example of the dishonest use of religious language and symbolism in the political campaign. In a recent ad by the McCain camp, Barack Obama’s intelligence and popularity are used against him in a particularly heinous way. They refer to him as “The One” who is to come. This is a coded message to religious fundamentalists who believe that a charismatic leader will come onto the scene and rise to a position of great power. Once he is in power, he will show his true intention to destroy everything and will be known not as a great leader, but as the Anti-Christ. There will then be a great battle in which the real Christ will defeat the anti-Christ and will usher us into a new age.

A part of me would prefer simply to ignore such virulent foolishness. After all, nobody would believe such tripe, would they? Sadly, too many people are primed to believe lies just like this. So, I’m trying to think about how to approach the problem. I think there are a couple of issues here. The first has to do with the believability of these lies, and the second has to do with understanding the “coded” language that these ads use. To give another example, Sam Stein, in his Huffington Post article says this:

On Sunday, longtime Washington hand David Gergen took umbrage with John McCain's recent attack ads, charging that the Senator was using coded messaging to paint Barack Obama as "outside the mainstream" and "uppity."

"There has been a very intentional effort to paint him as somebody outside the mainstream, other, 'he's not one of us,'" said Gergen, who has worked with White Houses, both Republican and Democrat, from Nixon to Clinton. "I think the McCain campaign has been scrupulous about not directly saying it, but it's the subtext of this campaign. Everybody knows that. There are certain kinds of signals. As a native of the south, I can tell you, when you see this Charlton Heston ad, 'The One,' that's code for, 'he's uppity, he ought to stay in his place.' Everybody gets that who is from a southern background. We all understand that. When McCain comes out and starts talking about affirmative action, 'I'm against quotas,' we get what that's about."

Of course, it doesn’t stop there. Some, if not all, of these statements find their way into the internet distribution system. One widely distributed post has a description of the antichrist that makes this ominous character sound just like Obama, including that he will be a Muslim. Of course, many people don’t seem to notice that the Islamic religion didn’t even come to being until several centuries after the biblical prophecies were written, or the fact that Obama belongs to the United Church of Christ and is not a Muslim at all.

Also from the Huffington Post is the following that expresses my feelings very well:

A number of progressive religious figures are angry over the McCain campaign's recent ad "The One," which they believe paints Barack Obama as a kind of anti-Christ, specifically to conservative evangelicals:

On Beliefnet.com, Mara Vanderslice, founder and director of the pro-Obama religious group Matthew 25 Network, writes:

I found this McCain campaign ad "The One" to be one of the most offensive ads we have seen in American politics to date.
At best, this ad implies that those who plan to support Senator Obama are looking for a new savior or a replacement Messiah. But many are reading it even more darkly as an attempt to portray Obama as an anti-Christ figure.

A vote for Senator Obama is a vote for the man we think will make the best President, not for a new Messiah. As Christians, we have one Lord And Savior. Jesus Christ. It is blasphemous to suggest otherwise.

And it is beyond offensive to suggest that Senator Obama is a false Messiah or the anti-Christ himself. How low can we go? It shows the McCain campaign is willing to make a mockery of our faith to feed people's fears. Christians need to reject this out of hand.

This leads to my final comment. What do we do about it? Ms. Vanderslice recommends simply rejecting such thinking out of hand. I tend to agree, but it really is not quite that simple. We need to be educated enough to see how political rhetoric is trying to get us to come to superficial conclusions about complex issues and candidates. This is particularly true when people use supposed Biblical references to make their points, so our ongoing religious education is vital. We must think deeply and carefully about what we are hearing. And we need to keep the light of public awareness on the tricks of the campaigning process. This is not easy because “they” come at us often and from all directions. Let’s not be taken in. Let’s stand up for more truthfulness in the process. Our culture and our churches need it.

Wayne
“Our faith is 2000 years old, our thinking is not.”
The United Church of Christ