Tag: Diana-Butler-Bass

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Just one more war

I’m going to wade right into discussions of war, foreign policy and faith. What could go wrong?

No simple stories

First of all, I want to acknowledge these matters are complex. And simple demonization of either side of a conflict doesn’t speak to the truth. And simple wishing for peace can feel really naive, ignoring the real reasons people are upset and afraid.

Through-out the brutal war in Gaza I’ve appreciated the voice of Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, who consistently faces the harsh reality of what’s going on and refuses to dehumanise either side. She can unpack the history, the ideology, and the politics on both sides of a conflict. She can call out wrongdoing when she sees it. And she can draw us back to the truths tied up in our shared humanity.

Her post from the days after the October 7th terrorist attacks on Israel, and then the Israeli military response in Gaza, talks to the complexity – and the truth of hurt – on both sides. But then calls us to the greater truth. Her 19 dot points still are helpful grounding points several years into this war.

We can refuse to root for the safety and lives and rights of human beings like they are sports teams.

In which there are winners and losers. In which safety is a finite resource that must be hoarded.

I don’t know what the way out is politically, but I believe in finding the will, and in finding the way. If we choose to look for it, we can get there.

At the end of the day, everyone must be safe, free and allowed to flourish, because everyone is holy, created in the image of the divine.

Nobody’s children should be killed. Nobody’s.

Danya Ruttenberg, A Lot of Things Are True

Read it here: A Lot of Things Are True (by Danya Ruttenberg)

Bombing Iran, and dangerous concepts of God

So this month, that war expanded, and Israel attacked Iran, with a seemingly overwhelming mix of air strikes and assassinations. The justification was over Iran’s nuclear program getting too close to completion – though what the global intelligence community has publicly shared so far doesn’t give confidence there was a strong consensus. (Also as Jon Stewart points out, Netanyahu’s government has been warning they’ve been weeks or months away from the bomb for well over a decade. Perhaps it was more real this time??)

After being so successful in their first strike and with Iran not having much ability to fight back, Israeli leadership wanted to eliminate the nuclear threat. But Iranian nuclear facilities were buried in a mountain, so without a land invasion, only one country has the kind of bombs that could help. So Netanyahu asks the US to help with their “bunker buster” bombs. And here in comes the awful mix of faith and war.

Mike Huckabee’s, the US ambassador to Israel, sent this message to Trump. A mix of patriotism at Trump’s writing level, ass-kissing, and weird theology:

Mr. President,

God spared you in Butler, PA to be the most consequential President in a century—maybe ever. The decisions on your shoulders I would not want to be made by anyone else.

You have many voices speaking to you Sir, but there is only ONE voice that matters. HIS voice.

I am your appointed servant in this land and am available for you but I do not try to get in your presence often because I trust your instincts.

No President in my lifetime has been in a position like yours. Not since Truman in 1945. I don’t reach out to persuade you. Only to encourage you.

I believe you will hear from heaven and that voice is far more important than mine or ANYONE else’s.

You sent me to Israel to be your eyes, ears and voice and to make sure our flag flies above our embassy. My job is to be the last one to leave.

I will not abandon this post. Our flag will NOT come down! You did not seek this moment. This moment sought YOU!

It is my honor to serve you!

Mike Huckabee

Source: MSN

And then Trump authorises bombing. And in his press conference afterwards, ends on this note:

There’s no military in the world that could have done what we did tonight, not even close. There has never been a military that could do what took place just a little while ago.

Tomorrow, General Caine, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, will have a press conference at 8am (12:00 GMT) at the Pentagon, and I want to just thank everybody, and in particular, God.

I want to just say, “We love you, God, and we love our great military. Protect them.” God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel, and God bless America.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

Source: Al Jazeera

Trump has often claimed Christians as his followers but hasn’t often given much lip-service to following Christ himself… but it seems when the obsession some Christians have with prophecy about the middle east and the end times mixes with conspiratorial thinking and ego-stroking… it’s cutting through and influencing his decision making.

Diana Butler Bass wrote about this in War and Prophetic Ecstasy: Bombing Iran and Evangelical Dreams – also worth reading to understand how this branch of Christianity mixes ideas about “end times prophecy” with nationalism and ego to create this horrible system.

Which makes me think: when Christians talk about demonic activity and “powers and principalities”, often the thinking is about some kind of spiritual force taking over an individual. But my mind goes to the power of systems, where many people don’t feel evil, they might even feel they’re doing good, but somehow the whole collective system works for evil, destroying and degrading humanity as it goes.

When people make the state a god, they make it a demon. We see it all around us in our world, too, even though a good many people would mock the idea of there being actual demons. We, too, appeal to the “forces” of economics, of political theories; or, at a personal level, to the forces of aggression and sexuality; and increasingly people talk about such forces as if they are known to be things that it is pointless to resist. The pattern is that of paganism, even though in polite society we ignore [the real pagans].

From The Crown and the Fire by NT Wright. Read in “Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter“.

But did it work?

I was in an online chat with friends and one said this line:

Israel may feel that they have achieved their goals.

At a cursory look it seems that way. They’ve significantly weakened the Iranian military and killed much of the leadership. They’ve convinced the US to drop bombs on the nuclear sites, they’ve survived the retaliation and now there’s a ceasefire.

But has it actually taken away the nuclear threat that they said justified it? Trump says yes, leaked memos from his intelligence agencies say it’s likely only set back a few months, and it’s clear he won’t accept anyone saying his victory was anything but complete. So who knows how far set back Iran’s nuclear program actually is.

But they’ll definitely want a nuclear bomb now, because what else could act as deterrence when your enemies have so much air superiority? If there was any chance they were not rushing for a bomb before, I find it hard to imagine they’re not now.

And back to that idea that Israel may feel they have achieved their goals… is the ultimate goal to block nuclear weapons, or is it safety for their own people? Like Danya Ruttenberg said in the post I quoted earlier – it is flawed thinking to treat safety as a finite resource.

Making your neighbour less safe won’t make you more safe!

Terrorising people with overwhelming force might subjugate them for now, but it’s going to breed enmity for generations.

And this story is evidence of that! Iran and the US had good relations, until the UK and USA helped back a coup in 1953, taking down the democratically elected government to protect their oil companies. Iran’s current “Death to America” slogan emerged in the revolution, in large part because of the anger over that coup and US support for the authoritarian monarchy. Then Iran taking American hostages in 1979 built up enmity on the US side. And so the cycle has continued over and over.

The kind of peace Jesus’ calls for

Jesus also lived in a time and place where cycles of violence perpetuated over and over. And some of his followers hoped he would bring peace for Israel – by crushing the Romans. But that would merely continue the cycle of violence.

Instead he came with a message: “love your enemies“.

And with an example to follow: “do not resist an evil person“. (The examples he gives in this are a different form of resistance, a non-violent resistance).

The cross of Christ was the price of his obedience to God amidst a rebellious world; it was suffering for having done right, for loving where others hated, for representing in the flesh the forgiveness and the righteousness of God among people both less forgiving and less righteous. The cross of Christ was God’s method of overcoming evil with good.

…

Christians whose loyalty to the Prince of Peace puts them out of step with today’s nationalistic world, because they are willing to love their nation’s friends but not to hate their nation’s enemies, are not unrealistic dreamers who think that by their objections they will end all wars. On the contrary, it is the soldiers who think that they can put an end to wars by preparing for just one more.

From “He came preaching peace” by John Howard Yoder. Read in “Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter“.

Reflection and response

It upsets me deeply that violence is being done in the name of Jesus who preached peace and pioneered it with non-violence. It feels so wrong.

But scrolling news articles and analysis endlessly won’t help. I’m probably overly attentive to the news cycle, particularly politics and foreign affairs. And when Trump is in power the whole cycle is designed to generate news and outrage non-stop. I escaped the addiction of social media to fall into the addiction of the news cycle. It’s heavy, but following the latest outrage isn’t making it any lighter.

Again, Danya Ruttenberg has wise advice, and a link to a beautiful prayer for this moment:

Make conscious, intentional space for your feelings. Something that’s not, “scrolling endlessly while feeling kinda sad, and sublimating your emotional life into intellectual, political things,”– which we all do, especially these days, but I urge you to Make. Time. To. Stop. And. Feel. (And this is for all of us, with regards to everything going on these days. Please.)

Danya Ruttenberg: On Hostages and Broken Hearts

And this “Prayer of the Mothers” from Rabbi Tamar Elad Appelbaum and Sheikha Ibtisam Mahamid, is a beautiful interfaith prayer for the current moment:

God of Life
Who heals the broken hearted and binds up their wounds
May it be your will to hear the prayer of mothers.
For you did not create us to kill each other
Nor to live in fear, anger or hatred in your world
But rather you have created us so we can grant permission to one another
to sanctify Your name of Life, your name of Peace in this world.
For these things I weep, my eye, my eye runs down with water
For our children crying at nights,
For parents holding their children with despair and darkness in their hearts
For a gate that is closing and who will open it while day has not yet dawned.
And with my tears and prayers which I pray
And with the tears of all women who deeply feel the pain of these difficult days I raise my hands to you
please God have mercy on us
Hear our voice that we shall not despair
That we shall see life in each other,
That we shall have mercy for each other,
That we shall have pity on each other,
That we shall hope for each other
And we shall write our lives in the book of Life
For your sake God of Life
Let us choose Life.
For you are Peace, your world is Peace and all that is yours is Peace
And so shall be your will and let us say Amen.

This “Prayer of the Mothers” is from Rabbi Tamar Elad Appelbaum and Sheikha Ibtisam Mahamid. Translated by Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie.

Writing this post has helped ground me in what I believe – even in the midst of such turbulence. But ultimately, the work of peace is a big and lifelong work, and it needs to permeate all parts of my life – from the internal world, to friends and family and colleagues and neighbours and local people I just don’t like, to nations and world religions and empires.

Jesus showed us what peace looked like. And it’s far harder work than dropping another bomb and then demanding a ceasefire.

Categories
Faith Personal Reading & Inspiration

Reading Notes: “Christianity After Religion” by Diana Butler Bass

(Still some TODOs in here, but I’m posting anyway and hope to get back to them)

I first came across Diana Butler Bass on her Twitter account. I can’t remember how I came across her, but I’ve appreciated her voice, her tweet-thread-sermons, her perspective on current affairs and more.

So when a family member gave me a book voucher to a local Christian bookstore that didn’t seem likely to stock much I was interested in, I was stoked to see they could order in one of her books. And that’s how I ended up reading “Christianity After Religion”. When it arrived and I read the praise on the cover from Richard Rohr and Rob Bell, I hoped I was in for something good.

The main point

Since the 1960s the USA (and other western nations) have seen a massive change in how they’d describe their religious/faith life. A common line has been “I’m spiritual, not religious” and rather than being a thoughtless throwaway line, this actually captures a big part of what this shift is about.

Rather than viewing it purely as a move toward secularism, DBB argues this is an awakening – in the spirit of America’s past great awakenings. This is faith evolving, not faith disappearing.

By changing the way kinds of questions we ask when we approach a life of faith, and by changing the order in which we ask them, we can participate in this new awakening – an exciting evolution in what it means to be Christian, or even what it means to be human – and some would argue, an exciting movement of God.

Overview

The “spiritual vs religious” dichotomy isn’t describing two opposites, rather it’s a lense to understand how our people’s experience of their faith is changing.

We can broadly break experience of religion of spiritual life into three categories:

  • Belief – how we understand the world and it’s meaning
  • Behaviour – how we choose to live, and the habits which make up our life
  • Belonging – the sense of community and shared purpose

For each of these categories, DBB looks at how Christianity (and American Protestantism in particular) has approached this category, and the questions it has deemed most important to ask. These are the “religious” questions. She then offers alternative “spiritual” questions: ways of revisiting the same category with a different approach, focused on lived experience.

Belief

Often when we think of “belief” in the context of religion we think of doctrine. Belief in a god. Belief in the Christian bible as an authoritative text about God. Belief in the resurrection, or the virgin birth, or the 7-day creation. Some things are easy to believe in – we’re pretty sure a person called Jesus of Nazareth existed – but many are increasingly hard to take literally.

TODO: copy the questions asked

This chapter concluded with some amazing examples of Christian communities writing their own creeds. Creeds were written by communities at points in time – a point DBB made in this twitter thread that I found memorable. After reading this section of the book, I journal led and wrote out, for the first time in a long time, not a description of what I no longer believed, but a description of what I still believe.

Behaviour

When we think of “behaviour” in the context of religion, we often think of moral guidelines. Don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t drink, don’t look at porn, don’t charge interest on loans… Do look after the needy, do love your neighbour, do attend a religious service etc.

Beyond this though, a lively faith usually consists of habits, or spiritual practices, that make up the day-to-day of our life. When the purpose of such habits isn’t understood, they lose meaning, they become meaningless rituals. But when learned carefully, many habits and practices have a transformative impact on your life.

DBB uses floristry as an analogy. Her family were florists for generations, and she learned the craft by sitting in the workshop with her dad, gradually gaining the skills herself. This kind of gradual exposure, where an experienced practitioner shows you, guides you, and gives you increasingly challenging work until you are fully competent – is similar to many spiritual practices.

Another thing we can learn from this analogy, is that people are less like to simply do what their parents did. Where successive generations in her family had all been florists, she has chosen a different career, because these days, you have options. When it comes to our spiritual habits and practices and rituals… this is even more true.

TODO: copy the questions asked

Belonging

For a long time, belonging meant having an identity tightly linked to the religious community you are part of (and probably grew up in). “I am baptist” or “I am catholic” or “I’m part of Riverview Church”. There was an assumed stasis in this model: you’ve always been one of us, you are one of us, you will always be one of us. You’ve always been here, you are here, you will always be here.

But most stories of faith are journey stories: Abraham leaving the land he grew up in, Moses leaving Egypt, the fishermen leaving their nets to follow Jesus.

We need to craft a different identity that respects this journeying nature of faith. And a way of belonging that allows growth, change, pilgrimage and exile, and still offers community, acceptance and love.

A traditional approach to identity asks “who am I?”, and Christianity has encourage you to ask “who am I in God?” One of my favourite moments in this section was reframing the question: “who is God in me?” Where and how does God act in the world through my life? How can people I interact with experience God through my actions?

TODO: copy the questions asked

Reversal

After examining these three categories and asking how we can revisit them through a “spiritual” lense, DBB did my favourite thing in the book: she suggested we reverse the order we tackle these questions in the faith journey.

Rather than beginning with “belief” (you must believe in the trinity, and creation, and the resurrection, and the virgin birth, and whatever other doctrine is hard to literally believe), then progressing to behaviour (follow these moral guidelines and adopt these habits) and then being able to experience belonging, DBB suggests we approach it the other way.

Begin with belonging: unconditional acceptance, loving community. From there learn the way of life: the habits and the choices that shape your faith (behaviour). And from here, you will begin to find your beliefs changing. You might find you believe in the resurrection after all: but it is coming from having experienced yourself countless ways where life overturns death.

By reversing the order we no longer have as our starting point adherence to a religious doctrine. Rather, we have as our starting point an experience of love and community, and the entire faith journey now takes that approach.

And when people say “I’m spiritual, not religious” – this is part of the distinction. The starting place is experience, and the whole journey is lived experience.

Awakening

The book ended on a real message of hope.

DBB looks back at the three great awakenings of the past, and in the debate about if there was/is a fourth great awakening, she joins the group who sees the social and religious change beginning in the 1960s constitutes a new great awakening. People began exploring new ways of experiencing faith, experiencing God, and this came out of, and fed back into, massive cultural changes.

She describes her college campus in the late 1970s having multiple thriving communities and chapters of people taking their faith and discipleship seriously, resulting in a bold vision for what could be in the world. It certainly felt like a religious awakening. Something new and bold and exciting was happening, and it felt like God was very active in it.

But then she returned to the campus in the 1980s, this time as faculty, and the life was gone, the diversity was gone, the experimentation and bold visions for change were gone. Replacing it where some standard Christian groups pushing a standard political/conservative agenda.

DBB paints the growing political power of the “religious right”, the “moral majority”, Ronald Reagan and co, as a pushback against the awakening – and describes how similar pushbacks have happened in past awakenings. This time however, something that began in the 1960s is continuing over half a century later… the pushback was significant, and so the change is drawn out.

In describing past push-backs, she seems to describe the rise of Donald Trump. (The book was written while Obama was still president, but the rise of tea party conservatism was evident).

It’s interesting to frame the success of conservative evangelicalism – in political power, in megachurch attendance, in mindshare – not as the awakening, but as the pushback on the real awakening. Though it uses the language of revival, and the metaphors and service structures of past awakenings, this is actually by now the old thing, and the comfortable thing, and the thing some are trying to protect from change.

But as she describes this tension between the “old lights” and the “new lights”, she describes the new light in ways that I completely identify with: for all of the struggle I’ve had with the church and structure and faith I’ve grown up in, she describes exactly the bits that I’m still holding onto, the values I hold most dear, and the hope and vision I have for what a renewed world might look like.

In reading this, I suddenly felt less like I (and those like me) are stepping away from our faith, and more like the steps we’re taking are part of a journey of renewal. It does feel like upheaval and uncertainty, but it’s not an abandoning of faith, it’s faith finding a new form to match the world we now live in.

And the world we now live in is globally connected, and past modes of tribalism over religious dogma no longer make sense when we can see the other tribes, and see that they too are human, and we can see that despite our differences the fruit is good, and so we’re learning that our religion isn’t the only way to meet God, our tree isn’t the only tree that produces good fruit – we can learn from each other, and perhaps we can discover that God has been showing up to all people in all cultures and religions. And perhaps this acknowledgement that God can show up to anyone in any culture or religion should have been more obvious to us from the beginning:

“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’

Acts 17

And so every religion worldwide seems to have up-shoots of renewal at the moment. We’re seeing up close people who we’d used to consider “other”, and discovering they’re not so different. And there’s a tribalistic pushback, but in many ways, this renewal is underway and somewhat unstoppable. Any way of faith which defines at the outset that only some experiences are “valid” and “true” is brushing up against our lived reality that we’re finding God in all aspects of life, on many different and intersecting paths.

And this is where we can join in. By joining (or forming) communities. By embracing spiritual practices that lead us to experience God, to love others, and to grow in maturity, and by allowing our beliefs to be formed by the experience of God among us – we can be part of this renewal.

It won’t be the last time humanity’s relationship with the divine God needs to adapt and evolve. It’s not the last awakening. It’s not necessarily the greatest awakening. But it’s our generation’s awakening, and our chance to be part of it.