Category Archives: religion

NOTES FROM A QUIET, HOT, HUMID STREET

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This series of observations began a long, long, time ago as “Notes from a Battered Royal,” which were notes sent out to Missourinet affiliate stations about what we were planning and what they had done to help us.

With the coming of the computer, then the internet, and then the requirement that the Missourinet have a blog, it became “Notes From the Front Lines.”  But the author is no longer on the front lines. He lives on a quiet street.  And its getting quieter.  The folks who used to live in the house across the street now are in an assisted care place in Columbia.  One of the houses next to us hasn’t been occupied for more than a  year because the man living there also is in assisted living. Three nuns who lived in a house just across the street and up one driveway have moved out.

It’s been a while since we made some observations that don’t qualify for fully blogness.  Let us proceed.

Saw a letter to the editor in the local paper the other day that said Missouri’s state motto, Salus Populi Suprema Lex Esto means “The will of the people is the Supreme Law.”  That’s wrong. And it’s dangerous.  Maybe we’ll go into in more depth later but for now, the correct interpretation is, “The welfare of the people is the Supreme Law.”  For now, just think of how different our freedoms would be if the word “will” actually was the philosophy of our government.  The quote, by the way, is from Marcus Tullius Cicero, who we know by his last name, the author of “On the Law.”

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Is there a more pitiful figure in American politics today than Rudi Giuliani?  Of all the people whose lives and reputations have been destroyed by their association with and defense of Mr. Trump, the wreckage that is Rudi is the most pitiful.

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I have a friend who lives in Tucson, Arizona who comes north for a couple of months every summer to find cooler weather (even 10-15 degrees cooler is significant).  I call her a Sunbird.

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There are certain words that have become so politicized that all of the honor has been crushed out of them.  I recall when words such as “liberal” and “conservative” were not said with a sneer and were not spoken as if they were scarlet letters.

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The latest word that falls into this category is “evangelicals.”  The people I heard described as such while I was growing up—-and the people who had the word on their churches—were perceived as fervent believers in God and Jesus, more fervent than us Disciples, Methodists, Presbyterians and my grandmother’s Baptists.  But then came those who discovered evangelical techniques could be applied to achieving political power, making it a third word that is being abused in “the politics of personal destruction.”

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We were talking recently with some friends about the totally trivial things we remember for decades.  I remarked that I still remembered the Army service number of a high school friend who joined the service shortly after we graduated—RA18541439.

Now there’s a new number that I’d like to remember sixty years later—P01135809.  It has a certain rhythm to it, too.

And to think this person was once known only as 45.

We’ve seen the official portrait of PO-1135809.  We are sure that Fulton County, Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis is soooooooo intimidated.

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This is about the most enthusiastic your correspondent has been for the start of the football season in decades. Maybe it’s because this year, it will bring relief from the near-daily disappointments of baseball.

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Can’t help it.  Everytime I see a major sports team or league sign a deal with a sports-betting company, I start thinking its time to cast Cooperstown plaques for Shoeless Jackson and Pete Rose.

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The Capitol regains its heartbeat for a couple of days soon. The lawmakers will decide whether to override some of Governor Parson’s vetoes.  There’s a lot of money available to pay for the things he differs with the legislature about.

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But having a lot of money now means there’s a cushion for the bad days.

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Or we can forget about the bad days and just blow it all now.

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Or we can enact tax cuts so our tax base is even less able to deal with the eventual downturn.

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Anybody else have deer in the yard that just watch you come home and go in the house without ever getting up?  I think that in our case, they’re just resting while they digest  their latest serving of Hostas from Nancy’s garden a/k/a the deer buffet.

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A longtime friend of mine died a few days ago.  He didn’t want a memorial service.  He was a retired reporter who didn’t want his death reported in the newspaper.  Steve Forsythe, whose byline for United Press International read “A. Stevenson Forsythe” was a helluva reporter. Governor Teasdale blamed us, at least in part, for his failure to win a second term.

We could have thanked him for the compliment but we never did.

 

 

Who Are We?   

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The Missouri Senate left early for spring break, hung up on the latest proposal that is part of the constant process of trying to determine who we are.

Senators had been locked in a two-day filibuster on a bill banning gender-affirming care for transgender minors.

It’s never easy to classify people and people’s rights as we learn that human beings are more varied and more complicated than we think. The issue has been summed up by Catholics for Choice:

The Catholic hierarchy teaches that God created a binary system of male and female bodies that are supposed to complement each other. They believe that women and men are equal in worth and dignity, yet their physical and anatomical differences are evidence that God intends different roles and purposes for them in church, society and the family. This system not only reinforces women’s suffering but oversimplifies the complexity of gender identity, erasing whole communities of people made in God’s image.

Men are always awarded power, authority and dominance, women are relegated to the roles of service, nurturing and adoration, and non-binary or gender non-conforming people are not even recognized.

Catholics for Choice believes that God’s creation is far more complex. We do not accept that an individual’s purpose is bound by biology or anatomy, and the notion that sex is a binary of male and female is scientifically inaccurate. We work towards a world that treats all people equally regardless of sex, gender identity, or gender expression.

 It’s not just the Catholic Church that is divided by this issue philosophically. Several Protestant fath organizations divided on the issue of slavery. Another split on the issue of instrumental music in worship. Today’s divisions, philosophically as well as structurally, seem to be on issues of gay marriage or other gay rights.

This is not new to our nation. What’s happening is that we again are at a point where we are re-defining human beings. We have never been able to see each other—as Catholics for Choice put it—as a whole community of people made in God’s image.

African Americans got the 14th Amendment in 1868 saying they were equal citizens under law.  The Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in 1920, gave women the right to vote. Native Americans were declared American citizens in 1924. In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled black and white children could go to school together. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination in hiring because of religion. Inter-racial marriage became legal in 1967. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 eliminated race-based real estate covenants. Gay marriage became legal in 2015.

Now we are wrestling with how to recognize a different kind of identity, the non-binary individual.  Once again, some of the arguments are based on religion and doctrine versus science, society, and self-identity.

We are more complicated as a species than we sometimes want to admit.  Always have been.  As a society we’ve always had problems dealing with those who are different and reconciling ourselves that even different people have unalienable rights, too.

A generation from now, maybe two, some of our descendants will look at our times and ask, “What were they thinking?” in the same way we look at our previous generations and wonder about the race and gender issues that bedeviled them.

Will they still be fighting about what rights people have who are in some way different from the majority of them?

Utopia will always be far away as long as we find ways to define ourselves by our differences

Tomorrow is Utopian Community Day

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Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day. Many of us will simulate a day in Plymouth Colony more than four centuries ago although the way we do it will be a far cry from what really happened.  Often not acknowledged by those who cling to that idea is that the colony we celebrate today was an experiment in socialism and that experiment was repeated several times in Missouri.

Plymouth is an early example of the human search for Utopia, a place defined by British social philosopher Sir Thomas More a century earlier as a place of a perfect social and political system. California historian Robert V. Hine defined such a community as “a group of people who are attempting to establish a new social pattern based upon a vision of the ideal society and who have withdrawn themselves from the community at large…”

Plymouth began as a socialist utopia not by the wishes of the religious group seeking to escape the oppression of the Church of England but by the demands of the businessmen who allowed them aboard the Mayflower.

The Council of New England created a contract that was signed by the church separatists we now call Pilgrims in the summer of 1620. The new colony would be jointly owned for seven years. But the separatists, not having funds to invest in the colony, would have to work off their debt. Profits would go into one pot with expenses paid from that fund. After seven years the profits would be divided according to the number of shares that each settler held.  Land and houses would be jointly owned and the separatists were required to work seven days a week. When several of the group dropped out, the organizers of the expedition recruited other adventurers to take their place.

So the Pilgrims became, in effect, indentured servants in a socialist colony.  Their debt was not fully paid off for 28 years. By then the Puritans, who had first arrived in 1629, far overshadowed the Plymouth Colony. John Butman and Simon Targett in New World, Inc., record that Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay merged along with the islands of Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and the provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to become the Province of Massachusetts Bay.

By then, the leaders of the socialist colony of Plymouth had realized communal ownership and communal sharing was not working.  Colony leader William Bradford and his supporters decided to allow private ownership of the land. Each family was given a parcel. “God in his wisdom saw another course fitter for them,” he wrote.

The search for a utopian community in America did not end with Bradford’s pilgrims giving up on communal living. And in some places, it still goes on.

Roger Grant wrote in the Missouri Historical Review in 1971, “Missouri’s Utopian movement, which became one of the largest in the country in terms of number of colonies established, followed the national pattern of having communities that were both religious and secular, communistic and cooperative.”

The first group of utopians to come to Missouri, he says, were Joseph Smith’s Mormons in 1831 who arrived in Jackson County, planning to establish a “New Jerusalem,” a communistic religious community, near Independence.  But Missourians felt Freedom of Religion did not include Mormons—much as the Puritans of New England felt that those who did not follow their strict Puritan policies had to be expelled—thus leading Baptists Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson to found Rhode Island.

German mystic William Keil created the towns of Bethel and Nineveh in northeast Missouri after becoming dissatisfied with the Methodist Church. As he was forming his movement, some dissatisfied followers of “Father” George Rapp joined up, bringing with them Rapp’s communistic ideas but not bringing with them his ideas about celibacy. But he became worried that the outside world was encroaching on his kingdom, so he took his followers to Oregon, where the movement died when he died.  Bethel still exists as a community.

Others tried to form utopian communities as years went by. Andreas Dietsch founded New Helvetia in Osage County. He believed agriculture was the key to a good life, that all property had to be community property because, as Grant wrote, such an arrangement would prevent “man’s greed from destroying the good life.” But he died before his community could be established.

Cheltenham, a secular community, was founded in 1856 by French communist Etienne Cabet, floundered early and his flock moved to Nauvoo, Illinois after the Mormons abandoned it for Salt Lake City. This movement also died when its founder died. Cheltenham is now a neighborhood in St. Louis.

Alcander Longley created several communal colonies, beginning with Reunion, in Jasper County in 1868, Friendship in Dallas County in 1872 and another Friendship Community in Bollinger County in 1879, Principia in Polk County in 1881, Jefferson County’s Altruistic Society in 1886 and others in other years in other places, and Altro in 1898.  Lack of Capital doomed all of these places within a short time.

Agnostic George H. Walser founded Liberal, in Barton County, as a town that restricted religious buildings and saloons and tried to replace religion with intellectual organizations.  He built a fence to keep churches out but Christians moved inside the fence and held services over Walser’s objection. Liberal survives but not as the isolated intellectual utopia Walser hoped for.

So tomorrow, we celebrate socialism in Plymouth, throughout this country, and in Missouri.  And we celebrate the triumph of capitalism over socialism, as happened in so many utopian communities in our nation’s and our state’s histories.

“Socialism” has lost its meaning as an effort for all to share equally in the bounty of our nation and has become a political epithet spoken largely from one side of the political aisle.

Perhaps there’s room to give thanks tomorrow for the things that have been branded as “socialism” in our history— “every advance the people have made,” as our own Harry Truman put it. “Socialism is what they called public power…social security, bank deposit insurance…free and independent labor organizations…anything that helps all the people.”

The Pilgrims, and people such as Walser, Longley, Kiel, Cabet, Dietsch, and others here and elsewhere show us how Socialism does not work.  But when a farmer is able to turn on an electric light, when the retired person gets a social security check, when our money is safe if the bank is not, a little socialism sure is nice.

The Pilgrims never found the utopia they came here to enjoy.  All these years later, we’re still looking for it, too.

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Is the tax cut the Christian thing to do?

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The question came up in the Searchers Sunday School class at First Christian Church in Jefferson City yesterday.

Perhaps the question arose, at least partly, because on Saturday, the third annual Prayerfest attracted hundreds of people to the Capitol to pray for ten things: marriage and family, religious liberty, fostering and adopting, law enforcement, sexual exploitation, business and farming, government, racial tensions, right to life, and education.

Lower taxes didn’t make that list.

The bill passed by the legislature last week will reduce general revenue by $764 million a year. My friend Rudi Keller at Missouri Independent has noted the state’s general revenue fund had $12.9 billion in revenue in the most recent fiscal year and the state ended the year with almost $5 billion unspent.

But shouldn’t it have been spent?

Just because the state has it doesn’t mean the state should spend it.  But Missouri clearly has public needs that are not being met.  Whether it is more responsible to give a little bit of money back to a lot of people or to use that money to served thousands is an ethical—and religious—question.

The 2003 Missouri General Assembly passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act intended to keep the state from restricting the free exercise of religion except under specific, limited, circumstances.  But we often have been reminded that freedom carries with it responsibilities.

Perhaps we need a Religious Responsibility Restoration Act that relies on Cain’s refusal to accept responsibility for the welfare (or even the life) of his brother.  The Judeo-Christian tradition does say that there is a personal responsibility for our neighbors, even those we don’t like (recall the Good Samaritan story).

The Apostle Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, “Pursue what is good both for yourselves and for all.”  And he told the Romans, “Let us pursue the things which make for peace and the things by which one may build up another.”

Instead of using money legitimately gained for the benefit of many, it appears the governor and the legislature have decided to lessen the state’s ability to pay the costs of the services thousands of Missourians need.

The Missouri Budget Project reports these things:

–Between FY 2007 and FY 2020, there was a 22% cut in Missouri’s investment in programs to support independent living when adjusted to today’s dollars.

–While average incomes and property taxes increase over time, circuit breaker eligibility guidelines and the size of the credit have remained flat since the last increase in 2008. As a result, fewer people qualify for the credit over time and those that do are more likely to fall higher on the phase-out scale – meaning they qualify to receive a smaller credit. In addition, Missourians who rent from a facility that is tax-exempt were cut from the Circuit Breaker Program in 2018.

—When adjusted for inflation, required per student funding for K-12 schools was significantly lower in FY 2022 than it was in 2007. That is, the value of our state’s investment in its students is less than it was 15 years ago.   

—Missouri’s investment in K-12 education is also far below the national average. Our state revenue spending per child is less than 60% of what the average state spends to educate its children.

—Even with today’s rosy budget, Missourians can’t access long term care through the Department of Mental Health, child welfare workers are overwhelmed, and the state’s foster care system is in desperate need. Vulnerable Missourians – including kids – are being put at risk because Missouri has the lowest paid state employees in the country, resulting in staff vacancies.

Others reports indicate services (that in many cases are more important to thousands of people than a small tax refund) are badly in need of the funds the legislature and the governor want to give away:

Stats America ranks Missouri 38th in public welfare expenditures.  $1581. Mississippi is 20th at $2,098. W. Va is tenth at $2,722. Alaska, Massachusetts and New York are the only states above $3,000.

Spending on education: USA Facts. (from the Economics Lab at Georgetown University)  Nationwide, the top spending schools by expenditure per student spent $40,566 or more in 2019, more than three times the median school expenditure per student of $11,953.  Missouri was at  was $10,418.  That’s 37th in the country.

We were 26th in per capita spending on mental health services.  Missouri ranks 40th in mental health care, says Healthcare Insider.com

Average teacher pay 52,481 says World Population review. 39th among the states.

We are 32nd in police and corrections spending.

It’s not as if we are overburdened.  The Tax Foundation says we are 27th overall in tax burden, 22nd  property taxes burden.

Against that background is this assessment of the tax cut enacted by the legislature last week:

The Missouri Budget Project, which evaluates state tax policy and state needs says “A middle class family earning $52,000 will see only about $5.50 in tax savings each month. But the millionaire across town will get more than $4,200 a year.”   (To make sure that we’re comparing apples and apples, the middle class family’s annual savings will be $66 a year under the MBP projections.)

Reporter Clara Bates wrote for Missouri Independent about three weeks ago that “the Department of Social Services had an overall staff turnover rate of 35% in the last fiscal year ranking second among state agencies of its size after only the Department of Mental Health.”

It’s even worse for the Children’s Division: “Among frontline Children’s Division staff — including child abuse and neglect investigators and foster care case managers — the turnover rate last year was 55%, according to data provided by DSS. That means more than half of the frontline staff working at Children’s Division across the state at the start of the last fiscal year had left by the end of the year.”  Why the turnover?  High workloads for the staff. And the high workloads lead to more employees leaving at a time when the state needs to be hiring MORE people.

Missouri has almost 14,000 children in foster care.  The national average for children finding a permanent home within a year of entering the system is 42.7%.  The average in Missouri is “just over 30%.”

The politically-popular pledge to “shrink government” is exacting a terrible price on those who need its help.   The Department of Social Services has lost more than one-third of the employees it had twenty years ago.  The number of employees in the Children’s Division is down almost 25% since 2009

The number of full-time personnel at DSS shrunk by a third in the last two decades. The Children’s Division has had nine directors in the last ten years.

But instead of using the money the state has to ease or correct these more-than regrettable situations, the governor and the legislature are giving away $764 million dollars a year with the bill passed last week.

It’s always politically easy to cut taxes, especially in an election year.  It’s easy to talk about how much an individual taxpayer might get back.  It’s harder to confront the damage that might be done to the services that taxpayer needs or relies on.

A lot of people in the legislature and a lot of people in the broad citizenry of Missouri speak proudly of their religiosity. And many of them think the concept of “shrinking government” is a laudable accomplishment.

We should beware of the Pharisees who do not consider whether they are their brother’s keepers and who fail to realize that freedom of religion also carries a religious responsibility to “pursue what is good both for yourselves and for all.”

In the Sunday School class yesterday we asked whether the tax cut that will become law soon is the Christian thing to do—-a question that we hope bothers at least some of those who are so boastful that this is and always has been a Christian nation.

Well, is it—a Christian thing to do?

Am I my brother’s keeper?  How does saving $5.50 a month in taxes answer that?

Let us (not) pray

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In my church, and perhaps in yours, it is not unusual for the minister or a lay worship leader to begin a prayer with “Let us pray.”

Whose permission is this person seeking?

Actually, it would be more courteous to say, “Please let us pray.”

The prayers go ahead regardless of whether permission is granted, an example of “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission,” we suppose.

And then prayers are often concluded: “We pray in Jesus’ name….”

That’s okay within a group sharing common Christian beliefs. But is it appropriate in situations where there are people from different faith traditions who see other prophets and teachers as their life guides?

Wouldn’t a simple “Amen” without the preliminary phrase show respect for people of different approaches to God?

We once heard an invocation at an event attended by people of diverse religious backgrounds conclude with the words, “We pray in the name of the one we know best….”

I think of that phrase when I listen to the traditional prayer before NASCAR or INDYCAR races or other large public events and invariably hear the “Jesus” reference, and I think about those in the audience who might be Jewish, or Muslim, or Hindu—-or any other non-Christian background.

Christianity teaches, among other things, loving one another. But if we are to carry out that mission, should we not pray to a universal god in those circumstances rather than to one defined by one of many religions represented within a large crowd?

This line of thinking was triggered recently by a podcast called, “Public Witness.”  It is produced by Brian Kaylor, the President of Word& Way, a longtime Baptist publication, and Beau Underwood, the former minister at the First Christian Church in Jefferson City—my church.  Their August 4, 2022 podcast considers the effort of the new President of the Australian Senate to stop the reading of the Lord’s Prayer before the beginning of each day’s session.

They quote President Sue Lines, who observes that the diversity of the Parliament has been praised for many years.  “If we are genuine about diversity of the Parliament we cannot continue to say a Christian prayer to open the day,” she said.

The fact that Lines is an atheist is sure to trigger some jerking knees.  In their Facebook note about the podcast (these guys are young and well-connected to modern communication systems), Brian and Beau argue that Christians should give Lines the benefit of the doubt because “the tradition both violates church-state separation and hollows out the meaning of the words Jesus taught his followers to pray.”

Remember, one of these guys is a Baptist and the other is with the Christian Church/Disciple of Christ, a denomination that tried to be Baptists in its early history but found the Baptists (and the Presbyterians) too, well, conservative.

Their podcast notes the usual reactions to such suggestions. One MP, Bob Katter, claims Lines’s suggestion is proof that Christians are being persecuted.”

Katter obviously has a jerky knee. Unfortunately, a lot of people do.

Christians are not being persecuted by such suggestions as offered by Lines. Actually, she is suggesting Christians be more Christian by loving or respecting others who reach God by a different road.

The Bible justifies all kinds of behaviors if one wants to cherry-pick verses.  But we are going to do that here a little bit.

The Golden Rule is stated in different ways throughout the Old and New Testaments. Jesus, speaking in the sixth chapter of Luke puts it this way: “As you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.”

Paul’s letter to the Philippians urges them, “Let each of you look not only to his own interests but also to the interests of others.”

In First Peter we find: “Have unity of mind, sympathy, brother love, a tender heart, and a humble mind.”

We won’t drag this out more on quotes.

But we do urge you to read and listen to Brian and Beau’s A Public Witness because they approach social/religious issues in a thoughtful way (this time it is thinking about faith and government) at a time when many become unnecessarily defensive and alarmist, behaviors that can become destructive of the commandment Jesus gave to the disciples at the Last Supper to “love one another as I have loved you.”

There are those today who find it more personally and politically popular to anoint themselves as victims of religious persecution at a time when the answer to their concerns lies in them being more Christian.

We pray, in the name of the one we know best, that they might discover that answer.

(You can find Brian and Beau’s podcast at https://wordandway.org/, specifically at: https://wordandway.org/2022/08/04/lords-prayer-down-under/

Two Popes and Christian Nationalism 

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A movement called “Christian Nationalism” is called “a fundamental threat to Democracy” in a new book, The Flag and the Cross by Phillip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry.  When Gorski was interviewed by Sarah Jones for the online British newspaper, The Independent, about the book defining Christian Nationalists as people who “often have a completely incorrect understanding of American history.”  She asked, “Can you talk about what myths tend to be attractive to them and why?”

Gorski responded, “Because it puts people like them at the center of the American story and it puts the American story at the center of the cosmic drama. White Christians like us are the real Americans, and America is the exceptional nation, the chosen nation that is playing a special role in the battle between good and evil…I would add to this that if you think in terms of this narrative, if you’re a white Christian, it doesn’t matter when you showed up in the United States; you have a kind of a birthright. You belong. You were always here, in a sense…You’re part of the founding group.

“I always find this kind of ironic when you think about the folks who get sort of exercised about discussions of race and reject “The 1619 Project.”  Why do they get so exercised about this? In part because it threatens their central place in the story and makes clear that in some sense you’re really talking about who got here first.”

Perry continues, “There is this huge identify-based motivation to believe these myths about America’s past that are factually incorrect oftentimes…A lot of people in these communities are socialized into believing it because there is an entire Christian nationalism industrial complex that is built to continue to perpetuate those myths.”

He says the goal of that “complex” is to “either provide religious leaders with that kind of ammunition or to provide religious consumers, people in the pews, with information about America’s Christian past that may or may not be factually correct. It is designed…to center white Christian Americans within that story and to tell them that this nation was founded on Christian values for Christian people…And, of course, they get to decide what that means.”

(You can read the entire interview at: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/06/white-christian-nationalism-is-a-threat-to-democracy.html)

This movement has been a thousand years in the making. And, to the considerable discomfort (I hope) of those who promote a distortion of our history by claiming our country was founded as a Christian nation, we’re going to tell you about the ancient roots of this misguided movement. In doing so, we hope some readers will ask if the “Christian nation” of the early settlers is the kind of Christianity we should practice today, or honor in our politics and policy-making.

The beginning of the “White Christian America” myth is based on a corruption of the Great Command in the Biblical book of Matthew in which Jesus told his disciples to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.”

Pope Urban II was the first to twist this command into what became known as the “Doctrine of Discovery.”  Urban led the Roman Church from 1088 until he died in 1099. He is credited with triggering the First Crusade by declaring war on all non-Chistian nations and promising absolution to those who fought to take Spain and the Holy Land back from the Muslims. For about four centuries, this doctrine was considered authorization by European kings to “discover” new lands and if they were considered non-Christian, to claim them

The real Doctrine of Discovery that shaped our nation and much of our national self-image came from the Papal Bull Romanus Pontifex of 1452 by Pope Nicholas V that extended Urban’s idea to sanction war against non-Christians throughout the world. It also sanctioned conquest of those nations.

The Boston-based Upstander Project (which says, “An upstander is a person who takes action in defense of those who are targeted for systemic or individual harm or injustice. An upstander is the opposite of a bystander.”) says these decrees are based on two assertions:

“First, Christians were the only civilized peoples and thus, they had the right to treat non-Christians as uncivilized and subhuman who had no rights to any land or nation.

“Second, Christians had the God-given right to ‘capture, vanquish, and subdue the Saracens, pagans and other enemies of Christ,’ to ‘put them into perpetual slavery’ and ‘to take all their possessions and property.’”

Portugal, a rival of Spain’s in exploration at that time, protested Nicholas’ Bull that seemed to grant exclusivity to Spain because Portugal already had seized North Africa as early as 1415 and had explored coastal Africa all the way to India.  Pope Alexander, in 1493, issued a new Papal Bull forbidding Spain from establishing control over lands claimed by other “Christian lords,” effectively drawing a line between hemispheres.  That wasn’t good enough for King John II of Portugal, who negotiated with Columbus’s friends Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, to move the line further west with the Treaty of Tordesillas, clearing the way for the Portugese to claim Brazil.

Alexander’s division line wasn’t just in the Atlantic. It went all the way around the world. A later treaty between Spain and Portugal, The Treaty of Saragossa, gave Spain and Portugal the power to seize and control all non-Christian nations on the Earth just by stepping off a boat onto those lands.

Of course, other nations had other ideas—the French and the English in particular and in years to come, the English especially recognized no papal authority.  And this is where our country’s history begins to take shape.

The concepts of these papal statements influenced the sentiments of European settlement of what is now the United States and laid the groundwork for the erroneous attitude that Christianity should be the motivation behind public policy.

It is the Doctrine of Discovery that enabled European settlers to look upon well-organized Native American socieities as inferior because they were not “Christian” regardless of how those societies interpreted God or what they called God. Since they were inferior, they had no right to the lands they had inhabited for thousands of years if Christians wanted it.

It didn’t take long for the presumptuous, righteous, Europeans to push things too far.  King Phillip’s war broke out in New England in 1675 between the son of Massasoit—the friend of the Pilgrims—who resisted colonists’ grab of his land. The war lasted until 1678 when it ended with the Treaty of Casco Bay. But the settlers did not stop doing the things that led to the war. Another treaty in 1703 also was violated by the settlers.

And so it went, decade by decade, treaty by broken treaty, as the Christian Europeans seized the heathen lands they wanted.

The Louisiana Purchase represents the Doctrine of Discovery for we Missourians.  France had taken “ownership” of that territory from Spain and sold it to the United States. But Fance and Spain only “claimed” the land under the doctrine. They did not own it.  The United States really bought “preemptive rights” to obtain the land within that territy from the tribes, either by treaty or by conquest.

Missouri?  Harvard University’s first tenured professor of American Indian history, Phillip deLoria, told interviewer David Rubenstein in 2020 that the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 established requirements for western territories to become states: “Sixty-thousand free people. What that means is if you’re a territory and you want to become a state, youneed to get your Indian people out fo there so that you can bring in more settlers. What that leads to is either removal—making them leave the state—or moving them onto reservation territories where they’re contained and compressed.”  Missouri is a perfect example.*

Historian Greg Olson has written that it took 22 treaties with 13 Native American nations before the United States had clear title to all of the land in Missouri, a process that was finally concluded in 1837, sixteen years after we became a state, with the Platte Purchase that gave us our northwest corner. .

The national attitude was encapsulated in an 1823 U. S. Supreme Court unanimous ruling that the Age of Discovery had given the Christian nations of Europe “ultimate dominion” over all of North America, that Native Americans no longer had any right to “complete sovereignty, as independent nations” and were only entitled to occupy their lands. Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion said that when this country became an independent nation, it kept Britain’s right of discovery and gained Britain’s power of “dominion.”

The Doctrine of Discovery was carried out until European Christians’ North American empire stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific based on papal bulls declaring Christians are the only civilized peoples and therefore have a God-given right to “capture, vanquish, and subdue….enemies of Christ” and to put them into “perpetual slavery” and to “take all their possessions and property.”

The papal bulls of the Popes were Americanized in an editorial in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review editorial of July/August, 1845 calling for an end to opposition, especially from England and France, to the annexation of Texas.

” Why, were other reasoning wanting, in favor of now elevating this question of the reception of Texas into the Union, out of the lower region of our past party dissensions, up to its proper level of a high and broad nationality, it surely is to be found, found abundantly, in the manner in which other nations have undertaken to intrude themselves into it, between us and the proper parties to the case, in a spirit of hostile interference against us, for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”

(Emanuel Leutze, “Westward, the Course of Empire”)

It is disputed whether editor John O’Sullivan or staff member Jane Cazneau wrote that editorial.  The phrase showed up in a December issue of the New York Morning News, also edited by O’Sullivan, advocating American annexation of the Oregon Territory.

Mainfest Destiny, America’s version of Europe’s sanctified Christian Naionalism,  proclaimed it was ordained by God that this nation had a right to displace non-European residents so the “yearly multiplying millions” had land and livelihood of their own. It led to the Mexican War that added all or parts of Arizona, Californa, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming to our country’s map. With the addition of those new territories, the concept also raised the issue of expansion of slavery into these new areas, an issue that ultimately led to civil war.

Those are things the nationalists prefer we not know, teach, or learn because—going back to the top of this entry, Christians are the only civilized people and as such they can treat others “as uncivilized and subhuman” with no rights to any land or nation.

White Christian Nationalism is not new and it is not unique to our country, nor is it unique to Christians.  Its advocates prefer that neither our school children nor their parents know where it came from and what it has done here and in other parts of the world.

Sadly, there are too many Christians who think White Christian Nationalists will go away.  They won’t.  They’ve been here for more than four centuries and they’re louder than ever, it seems.

So we are presented with a choice: What would you rather be, a Christian living in a free country or someone living in a Christian country—where history tells us we might not be considered a citizen at all?

*David M. Rubenstein, The American Experiment: Dialogues on a Dream, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2021.

Greg Olson, “White Man’s Paper Trail: Extinguishing Indigenous Land Claims in Missouri, Missouri Historical Review, July, 2021

The Chair

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It was one of those little mysteries that we notice that stays quietly in the backs of our minds but doesn’t nag at us.  But then somebody says something and the mystery is solved although they don’t know there ever was a mystery.

This mystery is rooted in the story of one of Jefferson City’s most prominent 19th Century citizens, the donation of a building to the city, the founding of a church, and the creation of a center to help the city’s needy a century after a man’s death.

And a mausoleum.

Joseph M. Clarke, Ohio-born, Illinois newspaperman, Alabama horse trader, Osage County Missouri plantation owner, state legislator, and Jefferson City banker is at the center of the story.

He was a city developer and philanthropist and upon his death toward the end of 1889, he bequeathed Bragg Hall to the city.  Bragg Hall still stands at the corner of High and Monroe Streets, on the southwest corner. For decades, the upper floors were city hall, with the city council chambers (which doubled as the Municipal Court during the daytimes) on the top floor.

One of the provisions of his will was that the city had to pay for a life-size bronze statue of Clarke to be kept in the building. Portraits of his wife, Lavinia, and of his two sons, Marcus and Junius, also were to be placed prominently in the building. All of them wound up in the council chambers, the statue in the southeast corner where it watched the council proceedings, the portraits of his sons on the east wall and the life-size portrait of his wife on the west wall.  In those days, five councilmen sat on each side of the room and I always felt sorry for the councilmen on the east because Mrs. Clarke was, well, a very severe looking woman and I often wondered if any of the council members felt her withering gaze.

Bragg Hall became inadequate as a city hall in the 1970s and after negotiations with Clarke descendants, the city sold the building and moved to a new city hall.  But the new building didn’t seem to have adequate space for the bronze Clarke and the canvas family members.  Four years later, when the city opened a nutrition center, it was named for Clark. And today folks who have meals there do so under the watchful eyes of Mr. Clarke and his sons. And I think Lavinia is watching their table manners closely.

One of the other things Clarke did was to give the First Christian Church a lot at the corner of (then) East Main and Adams Street as the site for its first sanctuary, to which he also contributed liberally.

All four members of the Clarke family are in that mausoleum in the old cemetery.  One day while I was doing some church research about Clarke, I went to the mausoleum, the interior of which was pretty dusty and cobwebby and peered through the locked door.  There wasn’t much to see except for a very old chair that was slowly collapsing under the weight of dust and decades.

Why is that chair there? I wondered.  Were they expecting visitors?   Were they thinking someone would come in a sit with them for a while?  Somebody would come in and tell them what had happened with their gifts?

That chair was the mystery that stuck in the back of my mind for several years.  Since then, the mausoleum has undergone a maintenance and repair effort.

A few weeks ago I think I learned what that chair was and why it was there.

The Christian Church has been without a minister for more than a year, a situation that will be resolved this coming Sunday when our new minister preaches his first sermon.  In the interim we have had “pulpit supply” ministers filling in, including three retired ministers who are members of the congregation.  We’ve had sermons from two lay members. And on June 26, a young woman who was raised in our church—her parents and her grandmother are still active members—and then went on to become a minister stood in the pulpit and asked what kind of a church we would be in the future, one stuck in the old ways or “will we accept the mantles of change and embrace our own giftedness and passions?”

Her sermon was based on the story of Elijah, the prophet from the Old Testament Book of Kings where stories of his miracles are told—one of which is resurrection. Early in the message, Sarah Blosser Blackwell referred to an ancient custom that sometimes is practiced in some homes today:

An empty chair at a family gathering was likely referred to in passing as the “Elijah” chair.  The idea was that since Elijah did not die an earthly death, but instead was taken up into heaven, and we should save him a space in case he returned. According to Jewish tradition, Elijah was known as the messenger of the covenant and, thus, was present at every circumcision, so a chair was left open for his arrival.  Later that became the place of honor for the godfather of the child.

And there it was!

That was why the chair was in the Clarke family mausoleum—the Elijah Chair where he could sit when he returns as a harbinger of the arrival of the Messiah.

I don’t think there’s a chair in the mausoleum since the repairs were made. I could see no sign of it as I peered through the three dingy windows.  It’s unknown if the chair had been put there at the request of the Clarkes or if it was just part of a tradition in 1889.

I kind of think there should be a chair in there now, though.

 

Canning

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John Wesley had a birthday last week. He would have been 219 years old.

He was the founder of the Methodist Church.

Garrison Keillor’s “The Writer’s Almanac” commemorated his birth by passing along “John Wesley’s Rule,” noting that there’s no evidence he actually wrote it.  But it’s a good thing to remember as we breathe the increasingly toxic political air that is being generated in these times.

You might want to print it out and post it in several places in your home.

Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as you ever can.

Sounds like a good platform for a candidate.  A candidate adopting this standard as part of the campaign platform could certainly stand out in today’s political climate.  Certainly wouldn’t hurt to see somebody try it.

It’s Not Over   

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Regardless of your feeling about the U. S. Supreme Court’s abortion ruling last week, here’s something to remember:

It’s not the final word.

It’s not the final word any more than the 1973 ruling in Roe was the final word.  It just turns the tables on the argument.  Abortion opponents have spent the last fifty years chipping away at the ruling and looking for the right legal lever to overturn the whole thing.  Dozens, probably hundreds, of state laws (somebody might add up all of the ones in Missouri) have attacked the issue only to be thrown out at some level of the court system. This one finally worked.

The ruling obviously does not end here.  The anti-abortion element of American society is on the defensive for the first time in almost a half-century. We will be interested to see if a pro-choice population that has watched as pro-life elements have attacked Roe will be galvanized into activism.

It is not generally a good idea to poke a dozing Tiger with a stick.

Survey after survey has indicated a general approval of Choice by Americans.  The Gallup organization in early June reported, “A steady 58% majority believe that the…ruling…should stand while 35% want it to be reversed. These sentiments are essentially unchanged since 2019.”

The wording on Gallup’s poll question has changed somewhat through the years but, “Dating back to 1989, support for reversing the decision has averaged 32%, while opposition has averaged 59%.”

In the most recent poll, the question focused on the impact of an overturn and whether respondents favored letting states set their own standards.  That survey, run last month, showed 63% of respondents thought it would be a “bad thing” to let states set their own policies. Those who said it will be a “good thing” were at 32%.

There has been no doubt this issue has been a partisan thing for a long time. In the most recent Gallup survey, 80% of Democrats and 62% of Independents favored the status quo.  Among republicans, 58% favored what the court ultimately has decided. Only 34% of independents and 15% of Democrats favored reversal.

But the U.S. Supreme Court is not ruled by polls although its makeup might be determined by people whose political positions ARE ruled by polls.

Catholic voters, for example.

A Pew Research Center 2019 survey found 56% of Catholics felt abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Forty-two percent disagreed.  The 56% is close to the 60% of non-evangelical Protestants and 64% of Black Protestants who supported legal abortion. In one of the fastest-growing demographics—people who are not religiously affiliated—83% told pollsters that abortions should be legal in all or almost all cases.

Writing in America, the Jesuit Review in 2018, Patrick T. Brown, a former government relations staffer for Catholic Charities USA, said, “Since 1973, no institution in the United States has been more firmly committed to protecting the unborn than the Catholic Church. Yet Catholics are just as likely to procure an abortion as other U.S. women. Why?

“According to the latest numbers from the Guttmacher Institute, 24 percent of women who procure abortions identify as Catholic, almost the same as 22 percent of all U.S. women who called themselves Catholic in a 2014 survey by Pew Research Center. In the same sources, evangelical Protestants made up 27 percent of all women in the United States but only 13 percent of those who underwent abortions, revealing a greater reluctance toward choosing abortion, a greater reluctance toward revealing their religion on a survey or both.”

Here’s one thing you won’t hear:   Republicans who are critical of “activist” judges when discussing this ruling.  You won’t hear Republicans railing against “legislating from the bench” either.

Again, this ruling tends to reverse the table.

There are fears this ruling is just the beginning of court-established national policies on contraception, LGTBQ+ rights, and gay marriage being dismantled and becoming matters of states’ rights.  Roe does not mean the court’s rulings on those issues automatically will be part of the Right’s version of a cancel culture but those who want them reversed should ponder how hard they want to poke those Tigers and what the reaction will be when they have poked too hard.

This ruling is certain to become a significant election issue in November when we will learn if it and reactions to findings of the January 6 Committee as well as fears of the present court’s future actions will produce less of a Red Wave than many on the Right expect.

Pro-life interests have prevailed.

For now.

But a younger generation born and raised in an era of birth control, abortion, and gender recognition in its various forms might be maturing with different outlooks.

In times such as these and decision such as this, we often return to former New York Governor Al Smith, a Catholic who ran for President in 1928, a time when there was a lot of “anti” attitudes in our nation.  Many think Smith’s greatest liability in the election was his religion.  He warned:

“It is a confession of the weakness of our own faith in the righteousness of our cause when we attempt to suppress by law those who do not agree with us.”

A Reading List

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This is the last week of the legislative session.  Time is even more precious now and the risk that some worthwhile things will be talked to death is greatest.

This session already will be remembered as the year the Missouri Senate became a reading club.  A lousy one.

Not only were the choices of reading material poor, the reading of the material was fingernails-on-the-blackboard irritating.

Not only was their choice of material and their delivery of it lifeless, spiritless, colorless, arid, tedious (we could go on—we found a listing of 50 synonyms for “boring”), it set a low bar for being educational.

If unrecoverable hours of members’ lives will be taken from them, they at least should have the opportunity to turn the torturous time into a learning experience.

To solve this problem, we suggest that the Senate set aside funds to hire temporary personnel who have professional reading skills and employ them as part-time reading clerks—overnight reading hours would demand heftier salaries but it would be a small price to pay for making the Senate a more enlightened chamber.  Accompanying this recommendation is a suggested rule change that any group fomenting a filibuster must commit to staying in the chamber for the duration of the readings, thus guaranteeing that SOMEBODY will learn something.

Herewith, then, we offer a reading list for filibusters in hopes that consumption of those hours will provide participants and listeners alike some value.  We regret that we cannot guarantee that the readers can do a better job than they did this year.

Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality by Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. While most of us have read the Declaration or have heard it read, this book is a highly-informative explanation of the care that went into each paragraph and sometimes each word of our nation’s foundational document and how the elements of the Declaration fit together and constitute the legal framework that led to the writing of the United States Constitution.

America’s Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By, by Akil Reed Amar, who teaches Constitutional Law at Yale College and Yale Law School. Amar is considered “one of America’s pre-eminent legal scholars” who explains why the Constitution does not set forth all of the rights, principles, and procedures that govern our nation. He maintains that the Constitution cannot be understood in textual isolation from a changing world and the laws that change with it.

The End of White Christian America by Robert P. Jones, a former psychology professor at Missouri State University who now leads the Public Religion Research Institute, that examines what is happening because our nation is no longer an evangelical majority white Christian nation and the political and cultural effects of that change. The book explores that change, its implications for the future, and why those who fear the future should instead understand how the positive values of white Christian America will survive.

New World, Inc., by John Butman and Simon Targett. The authors explain that it was commerce, not religious freedom, that was the motivating factor for the earliest explorations and settlements of our nation.

The Wordy Shipmates, by Sarah Vowell. Ms. Vowell is greatly entertaining in explaining who the Puritans on which so much of our standard history is based really were as human beings—and they were pips and not necessarily pure..

Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America’s Origin, by Joseph Kelly, takes us to the dangerous, desperate times overlooked in our usual histories. We do not often consider that those who came to this side of the Atlantic placed themselves in a hostile world for which most were unsuited to settle with no guarantees that new supplies to sustain them would arrive later  It also explores the papal-approved concept that if a land was not populated by Christians, it was proper—a duty, in fact—for Christians to take that land regardless of the cost to those who inhabited it.

El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America, by Carrie Gibson.  Long before the Pilgrims and the Puritans arrived on this side of the pond, the Spanish were here as conquerors, settlers, enslavers, missionaries, and adventurers.  But most of our history is based on, as poet Walt Whitman put it, the idea that this nation was founded as a second England.

There are several others that could broaden understanding of who laid the foundation for our country and the opportunities and the missed opportunities to recognize them that shape our attitudes today, and not always in a positive way.

If the Senate, or a small part of it, wants to kill time and possibly beneficial legislation (for somebody) in the process, it should at least contribute to improving the general knowledge of our nation, at least for the Senator who should fill his mind while killing everybody else’s time, and for those who might stick around if there’s something worthwhile to listen to.  And with these books, there is.

We offer these suggestions with no hope that they will amount to anything.

But that doesn’t keep individual members of the legislature—and the public—from becoming better citizens by broadening their understanding of our nation’s roots.