Rest in peace justice Ginsburg.

So many of us are thankful for your life, for your service to our country, and for the way that you’ve inspired us all.

While America really needs to take some time to celebrate the life of RBG and mourn her loss, we’re all on pins and needles wondering what’s going to happen to her spot. Will it be filled by a like-minded lawmaker, or will a more “pro-life” republican take her seat?

Understandably, many conservatives in the US believe that the latter will result in a big victory in the fight against abortion.

For many Christians, that’s the only issue.

If we can’t take care of the “least of these,” as Jesus put it, how can we care about anything else? And if a human fetus is a human, if it bears the human genome, or is at the least the beginning of the spatio-temporal chain that will become human, how can we call abortion a logical choice?

Unfortunately, this plays well into the hands of humanity’s urge to tribalism; a phenomenon that compels us to organize into groups based on a particular set of beliefs, suspicious of outsiders who don’t think like we do. As such, casting a vote for non-republican politics is a deeply immoral deed, resulting in little more than the continued slaughter of unborn innocents.

For a God-fearing Christian, the only way to vote is Republican.

Fiction

Since the 70’s, liberal administrations have done a far better job at stemming the tide of abortion in the US. Every administration has seen a drop, but the drop for liberals is significantly steeper (below: liberal administrations depicted in blue, conservative in red.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You’ll find it interesting that this chart was compiled from CDC data by snopes.com in an article that suggested no correlation between abortion numbers and political parties.

“It is plain to see that abortion rates have risen (prior to their peaking in the mid-1980s) and fallen under both Democratic and Republican administrations, suggesting little to no correlation with whichever political party controls the White House. The overall trend since the 1980s has been a fairly consistent decline across through administrations of both parties.”

It’s also plain to see a sharper decrease in Democratic years, while the Republican numbers appear to be almost flat.

This data tells an interesting story, suggesting, among other things, that liberal politics are more effective in protecting the unborn than conservative politics. I’m left baffled at how the anti-abortion voter, someone who has put so much stock in the power of politics to protect human life, can support a system that has, historically speaking, done such an awful job.

Based on everything we know about abortion in the US, filling RBG’s seat with a pro-lifer probably won’t be a victory in this arena.

Who’s Side is God On?

I’d like to invite you to consider a sermon from Dr. Tony Evans on the importance of avoiding our temptation to go tribal when we approach politics, tying our hearts and minds to one party or the other.

Christians Shouldn’t Be Fully Committed to Either Party, Evans Says

I’m in firm agreement that a human fetus is a human life, I see no reason to believe otherwise. But placing political emphasis on one issue above all the other brokenness that’s in our laps has left us in a deep state of hypocrisy. We take a stance against injustice in the womb while simultaneously villifying those who claim injustice anywhere else because they don’t embrace our anti-abortion cause.

All the while, conservative politics, ironically, haven’t done much in support of our belief that “all lives matter.”

But, alas, single-issue tribalism is a powerful thing, especially because it’s been declared holy. It’s left us racially and politically segregrated from the conversations that we desperately need to engage, and kept us at arm’s length from the people and problems that God has called us to affect.

Is there racism here?

I have Black friends (and adoptive white friends) who are so afraid that they’ve felt forced to sit their kids down to have a difficult conversation about following orders – not out of respect for police authority, but out of self preservation.

A great many others believe that the issue of racially motivated police shootings is a lie born out of some destructive liberal agenda that’s not backed up by any data. There’s not a problem here, we don’t need to make any drastic changes, and we certainly shouldn’t be frightening our children.

To all of this, some reflections.

Before we talk about racism and unarmed shootings, we should first look at America’s overall problem of lethal force. More people die in the US at the hands of law enforcement than in any other comparable, developed country. Consider the following from prisonpolicy.org:

Is this because people in America are more deadly than they are in New Zealand, that this level of force is required? In general, and specifically with regards to violence in the US, crime rates have been on the decline for a few decades, but, according to data collected at mappingpoliceviolence.org, and Washington Post, lethal force rates aren’t.

Unfortunately, there’s not much federally collected data, so we have to rely on studies from third party groups. Legislation was passed in the mid 90’s requiring departments to report lethal force encounters, but provisions weren’t made with regards to enforcement, resulting in our current lack of data. In response, the FBI launched its “National Use of Force Data Collection Program” in Jan 2019, but only 5,043 out of 18,514 federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies participated.

Because governmental transparency in this arena continues to be a marginal priority, other researchers have stepped in to fill the gaps. But their data paints a somewhat bleak picture and is easily condemned as “liberal,” dismissed by the “nothing to see here” crowd.

Regardless, American law enforcement seems to have a lethal force problem, one that’s systemic, i.e., seen throughout the system, not limited to a specific department or geographic region.

The next thing that should be considered is America’s alleged race problem. Personally, I don’t think we’re a racist country, and I don’t believe that all cops are racists. I don’t know anybody who does. But rest assured that America has a problem with racism, one that shows itself in many of our “systems.” And nowhere does our problem show itself more clearly than the burr we get in our saddle when someone tries to bring it to our attention. We’re like the alcoholic uncle who starts throwing things at the suggestion that he might be drinking too much.

There are other signs of course, things I’ve talked ad-nauseum about and will spare you from this morning. But it’s fascinating that we’ve come to believe that a country with our history of racism somehow made it all magically disappear. We transitioned from slavery in our formative years to Jim Crow for another 100, then as we celebrated Civil Rights, American racism changed its clothes and learned to blend in a bit better, ushering in things like mass incarceration, wage/employment/housing disparities, and multiple other inequities that are easy to dismiss because they don’t look like they did back in the day.

It’s still with us, but because we’re convinced that it’s not, it’s guaranteed to leak into nearly every expression of American life. Ever wonder why churches are so (still) segregated? Is that because Christians are all racist assholes? No. It’s simply because we’ve not managed to see the way racism is working itself out in our lives. It also means that racism is a problem among white Christians.

But again, if someone tries to bring it to our attention, we’ll throw our beer across the room and start yelling at everybody.

I have no problem believing that America’s racism has wiggled its way into our law enforcement system; that our police are, at the least, tempted to view Blacks differently than they do whites, especially with regards to which race has a higher propensity to cause harm.

In their defense, violent crime rates in the Black community are significantly higher than those among whites. But if we incarcerated whites at the same rate that we’ve incarcerated blacks for the past 50 years (and well beyond), you’d see a significant shift in white America’s violence as well.

Not only do we have a dysfunctional relationship with lethal force, we incarcerate more people, numerically and per capita, than any country in the world. Again, is that because American’s are inherently more criminal that folks in Russia, or China, Nigeria, etc?

According to the UN, our homocide rates are relatively low compared to other countries, and in general, there’s no data to support the idea that America has a comparatively abnormal crime problem. So why the astronomically high incarceration rates?

Our legal system is driven in large part by the idea that harsh punishment will reduce crime, sending a message to would-be criminals that the consequences aren’t worth the crime. We’re not nearly as focused on the correctional, restorative aspects of law enforcement, as evidenced by our shooting problem. To us, crime is a bug that must be squashed on the spot whenever possible.

In 1976, our incarcerated population skyrocketed and our crime rates followed suit. Today, you don’t have to go far to find a sociologist who believes that our high incarceration rates aren’t helping – especially with regards to their impact on poor/disadvantaged communities – and that our understanding of criminal justice, correction, and restoration, is in need of a massive overhaul.

When someone is released from federal or state prison, they enter life as a felon, with employment, income, voting, and housing restrictions that make life much more difficult. Again, if we were to incarcerate whites at the same rate that we incarcerate Blacks, white life in America would become much more difficult, and you can rest assured that crime rates in the white community would go up.

We imprison Blacks at a rate up to 5x higher than whites for the same crimes, with nobody making any decent apologetic as to why. Seems clear to me that America’s race problem has wiggled its way into the way we punish criminals, or better, that it’s always been there and we’re just now noticing it.

The idea that our race problem is also part and parcel to our lethal force problem should, at the least, be allowed a seat at the table.

But if that’s true, there should be some evidence.

Following is a synopsis of unarmed fatal shooting statistics from 2015 to 2019, borrowed from the Washington Post’s 5 year project to track law enforcement shooting data. I know, WaPo has a heavy liberal bias, but nobody’s arguing with their raw data. Fox News has even referenced it a few times without issue.

It’s tempting to see an even deal; roughly the same number of unarmed whites and Blacks are being shot each year. But what’s problematic, and what doesn’t show in the data, are the rates at which these shootings occur, i.e., what percentage of each group is affected. Those are the numbers that statisticians look at when there’s such a disparity in population numbers. Comparing apples to apples doesn’t work here.

Whites in the US make up 75% of the population, while Blacks occupy 13%. If 32 unarmed whites are shot and killed, and 38 Blacks – as was the case in 2015 – Blacks were shot at a rate nearly 8 times higher than whites.

For the last 5 years, according to this study, a much higher percentage of the Black community finds itself on the business end of lethal force, unarmed. Even in our “best” year – the biggest gap between unarmed white and Black shooting deaths – Blacks were killed at a rate three times higher than whites.

That’s not progress.

Forgive me, as I’ve used this analogy so many times before, but if I slapped you in the face 7 days a week for 100 years, then announced that I’d only be slapping you on the weekends for a further 100 years, I don’t think you’d be celebrating.

If you want to go a bit nerdier, NCBI posted a research paper entitled Findings From the National Violent Death Reporting System, 17 U.S. States, 2009–2012 that concluded:

“This study is one of the first to examine the nature and circumstances of deaths due to the use of lethal force by LE [Law Enforcement] in the U.S. using data from a multistate public health surveillance system. Findings reinforce concerns about racial/ethnic inequities in these cases and identify incident characteristics and scenarios with important implications for prevention.”

On top of this, we have much more video footage and media headlines of unarmed Black victims than we do of other races. Why? Because America only pulls out its phone when this happens to Blacks? Possibly, or it might be that we have a problem that’s articulated throughout our law enforcement system, the same as it has in our correctional system. Coupled with the data above, it’s easy to understand why so many have chosen the latter narrative, and why protests make sense, even when they turn violent.

I don’t condone the violence, by the way, but I understand where it comes from. There’s a deep, tragic unfairness that Blacks in America have been trying to wake us up to for years, but we don’t listen, regardless of how a protest might go down. Colin K. took a knee at a football game and white America lost its mind. MLK protested peacefully and was told on many occasions to stand down. And while Civil Rights Era achievements were nothing to sneeze at, we still find ourselves saddled with an intolerable situation, with much work to do.

And the violence that’s been perpetrated against America in these protests doesn’t begin to approach the violence that’s been perpetrated against our Black brothers and sisters, their parents, grandparents, etc.

It’s tragic how the media is spinning all of this, focusing on the relatively low instances of violent protests, leading us to believe that every Black protester wants nothing more than to burn down the country. The majority of these protesters are peaceful, but that’s not the story we’re given, nor is it the story we want. This all plays into the popular white conservative narrative that our problems would be solved if Blacks could just learn to behave themselves.

We have a long way to go.

If we could all get on the same page, this trip would be way shorter. But because we see Blacks as inherently criminal (as we did in our Antebellum and Jim Crow years), because we categorically refuse to confront racism in ourselves and others, and because we only see a problem when someone removes “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” from our favorite Disney ride, we’re assured a long, painful journey, and many more protests to come.

A couple of years ago, a friend and I were leading sunday school class for some fifth graders, talking to them about the role Jesus should play in our lives when we’re angry, or afraid, or in those special times when punching a sibling in the face seems to make the most sense.

I tried to explain how I personally handle those moments, but it didn’t go very well. The kids chuckled, exchanging awkward looks, and my friend responded with, “yeah, but God’s not a gumball machine.”

Which is true, sort of.

In my years of trying to understand what it means to follow Jesus, I’ve learned some things about our relationship, and His character, that don’t jive with common narratives about faith, obedience, and God’s role in a hurting life. What follows might sound a little gumball-machiney, but I think, in some cases, that might be a good thing.

When I’m hurting, I often try to comfort myself with things that provide good, solid, short term relief, followed immediately by long term consequences. Overeating, drinking, judging others, too much TV, etc., all feel great when I perpetrate them against myself, but the comfort they provide doesn’t last long, while the problems they create do. It’s all exacerbated by a lockdown-induced drought of social interaction that’s left me isolated from the comfort of others, much more likely to pursue the comforts listed above.

I’m also a “7” on the Enneagram, a personality inventory resource that’s pegged me to the core (take a look if you haven’t yet, it’s brilliant). Very basically, like everyone else, I have a personality type that acts out in certain ways when I’m not intentional about healthy living. In these moments, I can feel empty, hopeless, grasping about for whatever quick fix I can get my hands on.

Finally, I’m human. Regardless of how well I might be living, I’m guaranteed to have moments of doubt, anxiety, hopelessness, and general all-around emotional/spiritual pain that will feel permanent, immovable, and incite me to find the quickest way out possible.

Like all of us, I’m constantly tempted to find comfort in the wrong places, compelled to say no, make better choices, avoid sin, etc. And in the moments when the eject buttons can’t be found, I only have two options outside of pounding a few martinis and watching movies ’til 4 AM.

Option #1 is what the psychotherapeutical world often refers to as “repression,” a method that involves sitting in the pain, denying our urges, waiting for it all to go away. This is how many of us consider what it means to be a good Christian. When temptation comes, it’s our job to flex our muscles,  don the “armor of God,” and fight the urge to do stupid things. This view of faith relies heavily on the idea that a good Christian is a fighter, an overcomer, a strong arm that resists the myriad temptations that come part and parcel to our crazy world.

It’s an “active” approach to spirituality, one that places the burden on faith on us and us alone. We might pray for God to give us strength, or ask others to pray for our battle, but that’s about as faithful as we’ll get. The rest is up to us. That’s how warriors roll.

And when we fail, as we often do, not only do we bear the consequences of our sin, we also bear a mountain of shame. We’re suppoed to be winners. Those who fall to temptation are the exact opposite – spiritual losers, weaklings, etc. When we see someone who couldn’t keep their marriage intact, or somebody who eats too much, drinks too much, etc., the judgments fly.

I don’t approach temptation this way anymore. It doesn’t work, and lends itself to too many unhealthy approaches to life, God, myself and the people around me. I’ve said goodbye to the conquering warrior view of Christianity and adopted something much more effective, albeit far less flattering.

When I’m hurting, I ask God to comfort me, to replace the fear and hopelessness with something else.

Tempation is not about sin, it’s about comfort. When we’re tempted, our mind/body/spirit is hungry for something. It is always uncomfortable. Cold. Lonely. To be sure, regardless of how we decide to deal with it, it always goes away, as St. Paul said it would, but it’s silly for us to sit in it and limit our prayers to “God, please give me strength,” because strength isn’t what we’re hungry for, or in need of.

I’ll share with you how I pray in these moments. You’ll be tempted to judge me, but allow a minute to unpack the theology behind my posture – you might find this compelling – it’s changed my life, and my faith.

“God, please take this away. I’ll give you fifteen minutes, then I’m turning to whatever sin I deem necessary to get through.”

Disrespectful, right? If that’s not gumball-machine theology, I don’t know what is.

But I pray that way because I’ve developed a different picture of myself. I’m not a powerful, all-conquering warrior, tasked with singlehandedly prevailing over the temptations in my life. Because of the teachings of scripture, and my ~ 30 years of attempting to follow Jesus, I now view me as a helpless infant, more in need of my morning feeding than anything else.

That made your stomach turn, yeah? It sounds weak, and, well… helpless. What self-respecting person of faith wants to see themselves this way? But if we enter into a moment where we really need some hope but can’t find any, or peace, or, especially, comfort, that’s exactly what we are. And it’s not a bad thing, unless you’ve tied your heart to the idea that you don’t need anybody’s help.

What I’m peddling here is dependence, something that us Americans tend to choke on – a uniquely Western cultural facet that’s leaked into our theology and our anthropology, leaving us at odds with the dependence that the scriptures call us to over and over again. As an American Christian, when I’m hurting, I don’t ask God to bring me comfort, I ask him for the strength to “not sin.”

That’s like a starving infant asking his parent, who’s standing over him, holding a bottle, to help him endure his hunger pangs.

Temptation signals a need, a lack of something good, and in many ways resembles hunger. Our broken places step in with fear and anxiety and try to convince us that bad things will happen if we don’t quickly turn to unhealthy remedies. Some folk say it’s the Devil that’s behind it all, a belief that I can’t entirely reject at this point in my life, crazy as it sounds.

Either way, temptation in and of itself isn’t a bad thing, it just means that we’re in want of something good, though we frequently twist, distort, and live in utter cluelessness about what that might be.

And in those moments when we can’t feed ourselves, why on God’s green earth would we not ask God to feed us? And while we’re at it, why not give Him a time limit? Does that disrespect God? Maybe, but not nearly as much as the division, injustice, idolatry, and all the other sins we find ourselves enmeshed in these days.

I can sit in my pain for 15 minutes. I can feel lonely, afraid, cold, empty, etc. if I know that there’s a clear end-point, that it won’t last forever. You might experience this differently, but within these 15 minutes, things always change. Sure, it might be psychosomatic, or simply be the nature of temptation – if you sit with it long enough it always goes away.

But in these holy moments, my temptation doesn’t just go away, it’s replaced by something that wasn’t there before, something that’s left me fully convinced that God is real, that He cares, and that I can trust Him when everything inside me wants to hit the fridge, or the internet, or whatever.

If this is truly making your stomach turn, it’s probably not because I’m laying down some brand of heresy – I can back all of this up with scripture if you’d like to debate. What’s upsetting in all of this is that it flys in the face of “active” spirituality, a brand of Jesus following that’s characterized mostly by doing, very little be receiving. Clearly, God wants us to do a bunch of stuff, and we live in a warrior/conqueror culture that shuns weakness, so our faith has become a very active proposition.

But we’re also in a relationship… with a deity…

If our friendship with God resembles human friendship (and God is the author of both), there will for sure be things that we’ll have to do, i.e., the active part, but there will also be things that we’ll have to receive, i.e., the passive part. I’ll argue strongly that the passive part is just as important as the active part, and vice versa. An imbalance in either makes for an unhealthy relationship, and in the case of our relationship with God, an unhealthy life.

Praying, “God, give me the strength to do the active stuff” is a great thing to pray, but when we’re dying from a lack of peace, comfort, hope, etc., it’s a little silly, and betrays a posture towards God and faith that makes temptation much more difficult than it needs to be. It’s much more effective to be honest about how we’re feeling, what it is that we’re tuly in need of, and ask God for that stuff first. Then, after we’ve received what we’re so desperately longing for and in need of, go and do all the other stuff.

So, I dare you. Give it a try. Next time you find yourself alone, frightened, anxious, cold, etc., feeling like the only way out is something you know you’re not supposed to do, ask God to give you whatever it is you’re hungry for, even if you can’t come to grips with what that might be.

You can be a little bit more respectful in your prayer if you want to: “Dear father, I’d love it if you’d show up in the next 15 minutes,” or something akin to that, but I like to be a bit more honest with myself when I’m praying. God already knows the disrespect and lack of faith that’s swimming around in my Mos Eisley spaceport of a mind, and yours.

If nothing else, according to scripture, this is the kind of dependence that God is looking for. To be sure, He loves our righteous deeds, but apart from the peace and hope that only He can offer – the stuff we’re supposed to receive from him – we run out of gas, limiting our involvement in this world to social media rants, and… ahem…. blogging, while the truly difficult things that can only be changed by the well-fed go unchecked.

“My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” ~ Psalm 73:26

“He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak.” ~ Isaiah 40:29

“If you love me, do the stuff I told you to do, and I will ask God and He will send to you one who will comfort you.” ~ John 14:15