freedom from fear? how are we doing?

If an alien from outer space were dropped down in our society one day, having not been briefed with any kind of backstory or cultural shading, what would she think about things? 

For instance, if the alien saw a quadruped creature leading a biped around by a rope and forcing the latter to pick up its excrement, which species would she have to assume was in charge of things?

If she saw one group of said bipeds on a trading floor on Wall Street jumping up and down and yelling at numbers on a screen, how might they compare to another group that was conversing and laughing around a table covered in playing cards and glass bottles? Which group would she assume was high on a more destructive intoxicant?

She would find herself backwards and confused on a range of such ironies running from the fun and quirky to the sad and horrific.

She might discover that

2,977 was the number of American civilian deaths resulting from the attacks of 9/11/01.

Then she might find out that

210,000 is a conservative estimate of the number of Afghani and Iraqi civilian casualties resulting from the back and forth aggressions between American, Afghani, Iraqi, and extremist forces since 2001.[1]

How is our alien friend to figure out which of these totals will barely get a newspaper blurb, let alone a memorial, and which is the perpetual justification for over a decade of calculated drone strikes, the deaths and psychological devastation of some of our own society’s most precious young people, a standing foreign military presence in a sovereign nation, torture tactics, and numerous other breaches of constitutional and international law?

If our alien friend wants to pick a side, then there may have been a short window of time, following 9/11, where she may have easily picked out which side was the victim and which side the aggressor. God help her, sorting them out at this point.

If one is having trouble stepping outside of the narrow set of platitudes and biases given by one’s culture and imagining an outsider’s perspective, there are little linguistic tricks that we can use to help get ourselves inside the mind of an alien.

For instance, lets imagine a seedily clad guy told you that he’d invented a device in his basement called a Death Dealer 100. He can’t get into the details of how the DD1 works, but the long and short of it is, he can walk into a room filled with people and at the push of a button fire 100 death rays in less than a minute, each one capable of killing a full grown adult. You might be quick to say to him, “Oh, God help us, no, I must alert the authorities. Such a thing must never be found in a lawful civilization.”

But upon a moment’s reflection, you’ll remember that an almost identical invention very much exists in society, quite affordably too, and the authorities aren’t concerned. And unlike so many of our compatriots, our alien friend may not have a subtle enough mind to distinguish why a “DD1” should never be allowed to exist in polite society whereas a “rifle” can be grandfathered in with constitutional impunity because it shares a name with another invention from centuries ago.

It’s a good exercise to try to see our society through the eyes of an alien from time to time, because an alien isn’t susceptible to kind of cultural drift that not only shifts individuals along the continuum of a given debate but can shift the entire continuum itself. For instance, an alien would see objectively that even our liberal presidents today would’ve looked like war mongers to a conservative living in the pre-World War I United States, when non-interventionism was the mood of the day.

Through alien eyes, we can see that there has been a tectonic shift not only in the sides of the debate but in the ground beneath it. What brought this shift on is simple: fear. We have allowed ourselves to become a culture of fear. And you don’t need to get sucked into a conversation on guns or foreign policy in order to sense it.

One day, an older man told me how, when he was a kid, he and his friends used to run around the neighborhood completely unsupervised, and the only rule was that they each had to be home for dinner. Then he made a statement, which one hears from all angles, today—a statement which is regarded as so self-evident that the speaker never puts it forward as a controversial assertion but simply assumes that any other sentient being would agree: “You would never let your kid run around like that in this day and age. Too dangerous.”

When I politely pressed him for some kind of evidence that the world had, in fact, grown more dangerous since he was a kid, he looked at me like I was asking him to prove that fire is hot. He took a moment to recover and then stumbled through a predictable litany: a couple high profile abductions in far away states, a local convenience store hold up and a recent murder (over a drug deal gone awry)—basically, the bread and butter of local TV news.

To his credit, at one point, he was thoughtful enough to say, “Well, maybe we just know about these things today in a way that we didn’t back then.” But it was too late. He had already shaped his parenting practices, his political views, and his blood pressure around a worldview of fear.  

Why force an otherwise kindly older man to justify what everyone is supposed to know is common knowledge? Because I no longer believe that such throwaway comments are as harmless as they seem. I believe that that kind of unchecked anxiety, spread across an entire society, is capable of producing evils far more powerful than those that brought it on in the first place. Even a casual student of history can confirm this. The Nazis didn’t come into power on a “Let’s all be evil” platform. They came into power by promising that they could rid their society of evil and keep everyone else safe.

And in a society where even suggesting that maybe we should resist a drone strike on a key target if there is going to be “collateral damage,” or that we should kill and incarcerate fewer criminals, or that we should limit the ways in which you can “stand your ground” is considered unpatriotic bordering on treasonous, someone needs to stand up and act as a fear circuit breaker. Doing this in a chronically fearful society will take independent thinking, integrity and confidence in oneself, and a deep-seated hope. 

I even tend to think that, long before sentimentalized baptism ceremonies and altar calls, a “Christian” was someone who did precisely this—someone under the leadership of Christ, who refused to concede to the chronic anxiety of the age and the greed, the violence, and the scapegoating that always comes with it.

Doesn't "Christian" mean, at the very least, in this jittery time, someone who hopes in the life-giving promises of God? Does God offer us nothing more to place our trust in besides a large magazine clip and a beefed up military?

Would an alien from outer space ever think that we are a “Christian nation?”

---

[1] I’m assuming, of course, that the second Iraq war would not have happened, had our leaders not been able to focus the emotional reactivity of the post 9/11 political climate into an invasion of an otherwise unrelated country. Anyone who would like to argue this point might have a hard time citing a reason for invasion that doesn’t make the whole thing look like even more of a debacle.

how are we doing on the freedom from want?

Freedom.

For a word that has become almost synonymous with the United States of America, the more worldly among us are gradually becoming savvy to the fact that freedom can only be spoken of as a goal, not an achieved reality. There is a huge splotch of grey that exists between free and not free. We should never just toss the word out there unqualified but should always speak of degrees of freedom. A child whose one parent is lacking a high school diploma and who is trying to learn to read in an inner city class size of 45 is quite a bit less free than the child of a cardiologist and a CPA who is learning in a private classroom of 16. A family in a safe neighborhood is more free than a family in a dangerous one, and so on.

As his own country (Germany in the 1930s) was trying to achieve a certain version of freedom at a great cost to its cultural soul, Dietrich Bonhoeffer pointed out that the idea of freedom, if it is only defined in the negative (freedom from), can achieve nothing more than a paranoid hysteria as a society tries to eliminate anything that could be perceived as a threat. Any freedom that is worthy of the name, needs to be defined positively (freedom for), because only after discovering something to live for outside of ourselves, can we escape our enslavement to obsessive self-concern.

In this blog and the next one, I’d like to take the last two parts of FDR’s famous “Four Freedoms” speech—“freedom from want” and “freedom from fear”—and ask the question: how are we doing?

In a not-so-recent Ted Talk, psychologist Barry Schwartz laid out what he calls “the paradox of choice.” The long and short of it says that if you give someone three different kinds of vehicles to choose from at the dealership, she will be a little happier than if you only give her one choice; but if you give her 50 choices, she will be much less happy than if you had only given her three.  That is, our conventional assumption that more freedom to choose is better is true to a point, but that point comes fast and hard. And once that threshold is passed, the happiness graph can plunge downward as far as you like.

Most of us probably know this from experience. At the grocery store, where they give me three brands of cheddar cheese, I can be reasonably confident that I’m walking away with the one that I like best. But when I come away from the golf shop with one of 50 drivers, I’ll always wonder if one of the others wouldn’t have added 20 yards off the tee or reduced my slice. And it’s best for my mental health, if I don’t even consider the possibilities of switching to Romano or Fontina cheese.

Obviously, golf clubs and cheese are fairly trivial issues. But think about what this means for our larger aspirations. I’ve read of a study where people rated their own happiness more and more highly up to a household income of  $75,000 (gallup.com/businessjournal), after which there is a hard cutoff. There may even be some drop-off as added income isolates people and eliminates any impetus for them to build a strong social network. The study depended on self-reporting, which has its limitations, but the findings certainly ring true to my experience, growing up in a part of town where many households would’ve considered $75,000 unlivable but where happiness was scarce.    

It is an old, old insight from a myriad of philosophical and theological traditions that wanting what we don’t have leads to unhappiness. And even modern pop culture is aware of it. The nineties band Sublime’s words, “Life is short, so love the one ya got,” were ubiquitous in the dorm rooms of my generation of young scholars, and the sentiment is just an echo of an older generation’s “Money can’t buy you happiness.” But a few chart toppers and homespun sayings notwithstanding, the modern western world has created an economic and political belief system that is more or less designed to keep raising the happiness high jump bar just beyond our reach, even as, deceptively, it encourages the invention of mechanisms that help us to jump higher. We have colluded with the free market and the advertising industry to make the satiation of our own appetites impossible. Like a child trying to grasp a floating dandelion seed, the prize gets further and further away the faster we fling our limbs at it.

I don’t want to be misheard. Our system does a better job of incentivizing innovation than perhaps any other before it, and this has resulted in creature comforts, convenience, entertainment, and consumer options that I benefit from everyday. I’m definitely not ready to undo all of that just yet. But all great thought traditions have recognized that it’s not easy to discern just what causes happiness. And comfort, convenience, entertainment, and consumer options are regularly given more credit than they deserve by the popular mind.  

As a society, we are forever deceived into speaking, purchasing, and voting as though the stated goal of our society is to “create wealth,” something that we’ve succeeded at indisputably over the last century. But if we think that the wealth we’ve created should be put in the service of happiness and not the other way around, our successes are much more ambiguous.

This is why church leaders should never be afraid to ask people to give up their money.  The primary reason to press this issue in faith communities is not to cover staff salaries, renovate buildings, or pay the electric bill, nor, fellow well-meaning liberals, is it primarily to do good projects in the world (but by all means, let’s, if we have the cash, and we can be intelligent about it). The primary reason to press this is in order to smash idols.

The acquire-wealth-in-order-to-obtain-freedom-from-want experiment failed. We acquired the wealth. We have more money now than any generation before us. I read once that the average middle class home has more different kinds of consumer goods than King Henry the VIII had in his palace. But the “want” remains. It could even be argued that we have more want now than previous societies, which never stated “freedom from want” as a goal in the first place and so never thought to provide so many choices.

The word for something that promises you happiness but doesn’t deliver is an idol.

It’s not “greedy” for church leaders to ask for money (assuming it’s not going into their back pockets, which, if you’ve ever seen the financial statement, is not how it works in your typical neighborhood church). It’s a decision not to enable. It’s the refusal to give in to a lie.

a Screwtape Letter on guns

My dearest Wormwood,

You’ll remember our first correspondence on the issue, it seems like eons ago, following a mass shooting at a school (I hardly need to remind you of the country where it happened), in which I cautioned you to temper your novice like hope that this event might be some great victory for the one whom we serve. I believe I wrote to you something to the effect that the dissolution of our Enemy’s creation is a marathon, not a sprint, and that such loud, public outbursts of violence can be as much a hindrance as a help to our cause. My concern at the time was that—in the same way that some have said the crucifixion of the Despised One may have been the moment where we went a step too far and showed our hand for what it was—such an outburst of senseless violence might reveal, to even the dullest of our patients, the truth of things. Things, I’ll say, that are better left to the obscuring, point-counterpoint rhetoric of partisan politics. And there is certainly a kernel of truth to what I said to you then, that one day of episodic destructiveness gets us nowhere if it should lead the vile creatures whom our Enemy inexplicably adores to start questioning the way of things and whether or not it could be different.

Alas, though, nephew, I see the miscalculation that I made. I had drastically underestimated the extent to which these patients of ours would grow accustomed to these orgies of death. For they have very nearly become an annual or biannual occurrence. And the citizens of said country seem to be increasingly convinced that this is unavoidable, despite the fact, as surely everyone knows by now, that such events are rarely if ever seen in other rich nations around the world and the statistics of individual to individual murder are dwarfed further still.  Yet, far from making the most obvious changes to reduce these occurrences in either frequency or scale, the amount of press and attention that they give to each event seems to be dwindling, steadily.

Now I know that it makes you nervous how, for a short time, each of these episodes brings out all those Enemy-like qualities that we find so incomprehensible in the biped creatures: the tears, the embraces, the songs, the prayer vigils, yada, yada, yada. But I wouldn’t get too hung up on that. Remember, a marathon, not a sprint. Their emotions of love and sympathy pose little threat to our cause as long as they’re not channeled anywhere practical. It’s real, concrete change that we want to mitigate.  It’s not grief and human feeling that are threats to our cause but hard questions asked, rights sacrificed, minds renewed.  

Whatever produces that repulsive desire in them to hold each other and to speak softly to one another on days like these, I suspect it’s too deeply ingrained for you to try and rid them of it. So use it. Sometimes the best way to keep compassion from getting away from us is to provide an outlet for it. Make it routine. It’s normalcy that we’re after. Allow them to really feel the catharsis of it. Try to get inside their heads and make a ritual of it: “Bad stuff happens. Then we mourn. Then we sing. Then we pray. Then we go home.” A typical patient’s memory tends to be short enough that each time they say through tears, “Never forget” or “Never again,” they’ll genuinely expect that that emotion will still be there to inspire action on the morrow. And once you’ve convinced a patient that positive action is fueled by emotion, he’s yours. Rest assured, by the time the sun sets again, the A/C unit will have gone out in his condo, or his boss will have asked him to come in on Saturday, or the Oscars will have been recorded on his DVR, or his father will have shared with him all the devastations of yesteryear that caused him to become a “realist” (oh, how I do love a “realist”), and your patient will go to bed having forgotten all about the big plans he had to rally his society for change.  

Sure, with each new high profile shooting, there will be some enthusiast, who shouts something idiotic about how you can kill someone just as easily with a pillow (you can’t), or how other nations with heavy gun restrictions see the same number of tragedies (they don’t), or in one inspired case, how the victims brought it upon themselves by not going to Bible Study armed to the teeth, as if thousands of years of civilization have only led us to an anarchist hellscape where the fastest trigger finger wins.

You’ll be tempted to think that this great sage is serving our cause. Don’t be deceived. Evil is a poker game. We thrive on calm, even keeled banality. It’s always the loudmouth who unwittingly threatens to pull down the curtain on what we’re about. He was too clever by half who said that evil does not happen on a large scale because of evil people but because of good people who see what is going on but do nothing.

You’ve learned this sort of thing from past experience. Most humans already agree that exploiting cheap labor is wrong. Everybody knows that gang violence is devastating. Most believe that gross economic inequalities are unjust. So we don’t waste our time trying to convince them otherwise. Instead, we divert their attention to the benefits of cheap merchandise, the pros and cons of increasing funding for inner city schools, and the successes of crass, unregulated capitalism.

It’s no different with this. We’re not going to convince anyone that gun related deaths are a good thing. Fine. No need to. We just need to convince them that there is nothing that can be done. The goal is for moderate, sensitive people to finally throw their hands up in the air and say, “We are saddened that it must be so, but…you know…Que sera, sera.”

In short, don’t let imbeciles give the game away. Let the prayer vigils go on. Let the flags fly at half-mast. Let the politicians give their “Our hearts go out to…” speeches. These are the little gaskets that allow us to safely dispose of the sympathies of your ordinary concerned citizen. In a few days, the headlines will shift to some new political scandal or some celebrity shenanigans, and we’ll be in the clear.

Now you’ll find some who do want to speak out against the unregulated use of our Master’s favorite toys. Don’t beat your head against the wall trying to censor these ones, either. Instead, encourage them to be as abrasive and immoderate as possible. You want these ones to be all or nothing in their reasoning and unflinching in their ideals. Make them so adamant that all the guns should be thrown on the pyre, that they begin to dehumanize and mock anyone with a more moderate position. I know, this always puts us in an uncomfortable position where we seem to be encouraging the goals of our Enemy—who, after all, wants all weapons beaten into plowshares and pruning hooks (Is. 2:4).

Not to worry. Remember, it’s not the ideas but the bipartisan division that we’re after.  They could all be agreed on giving bread to the poor, for all I care. As long as one faction angrily insists that the bread should be rye and the other is just as adamant that it should be wheat, we win, my dear Wormwood!

Finally, don’t get down on yourself. We’ve made real progress, here. Last Sunday, I saw one of their bumper stickers. It had “Pro Life,” “Pro God,” and “Pro Gun” all in a row (in that order!), same size, same font, same sentiment. That’s not the end of it! The vehicle was pulling out of a church in which the driver had just heard a sermon on the evils of idolatry. I’m guessing the irony was lost on him.


All that’s to say, keep up the great work.

                                                                        Your affectionate uncle,

                                                                        Screwtape   

The Screwtape Letters is a famous book by C.S. Lewis in which each chapter is a letter from Screwtape, a veteran demon, who is mentoring his less experienced nephew, Wormwood. It was a clever enough concept, but the true brilliance was in Lewis’ ability to upset the notion, that all of us assume on some level, that evil happens only in ugly, acute episodes and is perpetrated solely by a few bad apples. Instead, he was able to use his fictional demons to bring out the day to day “banality of evil” in a way that his more optimistic contemporaries found uncomfortably indicting.

I hope that it will not come off as flippant, publishing this right on the heels of the events in Charleston. I’m horrified, if a shooting like that can ever become, as this Screwtape suggests, something that we just begin to tolerate every few months. But is that not precisely what the evidence would suggest? Since the issue of mass shootings (let alone what goes on in our inner cities everyday, which is a whole other can of worms) first came onto my radar with an event that I was close to over 16 years ago, I’ve seen zero substantive policy changes and even fewer and fewer policy suggestions.

I don’t want to sound dismissive (as my Screwtape is) toward prayer vigils and other acts of concern, which I truly do believe give us a glimpse of what’s best in humanity, albeit for a short time. After a while, though, with the next candle lit memorial, with the next moment of silence, with the next interchangeable “Our hearts go out to…” speech, do we not have to be honest with ourselves? If our displays of concern are never accompanied by even the most modest change and doing nothing is still entertained as a serious political option, do we not have to admit that we’ve decided, as a society, that tragedy every few months is acceptable?

Lastly, though I consider it a matter of discipleship to never own a gun, I would never lay responsibility for these tragedies at the feet of the peaceful and moderate majority of people who do. I have many friends and family who fit this description, and I’ve found that it’s just not politically constructive to get too all or nothing on this point.

But to the Christians, and only to the Christians, within that circle, with regard to the tired debate on second amendment rights, I would ask (and let’s assume the constitution provides for any and all firearms without restriction, with the loosest possible interpretation of “firearm,” regardless of what inventions may come into existence down the road), Since when do Christians take their ethical marching orders from the constitution? And what more is taking up one’s cross and following Jesus than giving up one’s “rights” for the sake of others? And most importantly, what else is discipleship but following someone even when you disagree with that person’s methods.

And to any who would reflexively come back at me along the lines of “Sometimes you have to defend the weak by use of force” or “What would you do if someone broke into your house…” and so on, all I can say is that your arguments seem logical enough to me. But you have to admit that your methodology is very different than the one that Jesus chose. He didn’t defend anyone by use of force, though that was the very clear job description of a Messiah at the time. He just died.

You might argue that the “stand your ground” method is better. You might argue that it is more reasonable. You might argue that the modern world necessitates it in a way that the ancient world didn’t, somehow. You might argue that you’re a realist (whatever that means). But you can’t argue that it is the Way of Jesus, whom you call the Christ.

the big unsort--God's plan to get'm all to the same dinner table

According to Bill Bishop, author of The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-minded America is Tearing UsApart, “In 1976, less than a quarter of Americans lived in places where the presidential election was a landslide [meaning a greater than 20% difference between the winner and the runner up]. By 2004, nearly half of all voters lived in landslide counties.” That trend has continued since, and this, despite the fact that two of last three elections have been neck and neck.

The argument of Bishop’s book confirms with some more rigorous data, what many of us already intuit anecdotally, our country is now more polarized than perhaps any time since the Civil War. And the polarization is as much a geographical and sociological phenomenon as it is an ideological one. Believe it or not, as far as the data can show, just 40 years ago, you would have very little idea what political party a stranger was going to vote for simply based on whether they were a school teacher or a roofer or whether your conversation was taking place in Austin, Texas or Hays, Kansas. But the last 40 years have shown that people whose beliefs, political, religious, or otherwise, lean a little bit in one direction will tend to find people who think like them, thus having their own beliefs confirmed and confirming those of the other, which then pushes each into a slightly more extreme position in a mutually reinforcing cycle.

Anyone who isn’t disturbed by this trend hasn’t been paying attention. Regardless of how convinced I might be that my own side is the correct one, everybody loses in a gridlocked system where the smallest everybody-wins decisions don’t get made and the biggest decisions just drive the wedge deeper between the two poles.

I say this because more and more, with each passing election, the state of our “union,” reveals the wisdom of a God whose strategy for the world assumes that if you can at least keep them coming to the same dinner table, you’ve won half the battle. In fact, in a political climate where, statistically speaking, we don’t even argue with each other anymore, we just flee the conversation and head to the next town over where the people look and think more like ourselves, getting us to break bread together, in spite of our disagreement, may just be the whole battle. Maybe, for our heavenly parent, getting us to the same dinner table isn’t some means to a greater end; maybe it is the end.

And not only is gathering as a group of the non-likeminded less and less common, it may turn out to be more revolutionary than it first appeared. In God’s wisdom, there seems to be an outcome “in the fullness of time,” when erstwhile arguers play nice together, that is greater than the sum of the dinner party’s parts.

Speaking to Jews and Gentiles, a far more visible and seemingly permanent division than conservative and liberal, Paul writes to the Ephesians, “For [Christ] is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us…that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body” (Eph. 2:14-16).

If people who cluster in like-minded groups tend to reinforce and amplify each other’s beliefs toward more extremity, is the opposite not also true of those who intentionally gather with those who think differently?

In many ways, my congregation, St. Stephen Lutheran in Longwood Florida is an impossibility. In a national context where the only growing churches are those that openly declare themselves red or blue, oftentimes from the pulpit, we are growing a community where conservatives and liberals sit side by side and pass the peace with each other every single week. 

Whereas the fastest growing churches in our context are those that define themselves as the lifeboat of the saved in a world that is an agitated sea of the damned, we are growing in numbers and vitality because of a proclamation that all means all—that in Christ God saves the world. Period.

When it seems that every congregation has to stake its claim and say, “ours is the bleeding heart church” or “ours is the ‘I got saved’ church,” around here, we openly confess that it’s not our church at all, so long as Jesus is Lord. And so long as the tomb is empty and our God can raise the dead, who cares whether they themselves are right. We don’t gather here because we’re right. We gather here because God is righteous, and because we got a dinner invite.

It’s looking more and more like it will be neither the ideas of the right or the left but a dinner invite that will save this society.