Biden addresses Congress, 4/28/2021. He ended his address by asking God to protect our troops.
W.J. Astore
President Joe Biden favors ending major speeches with an invitation or invocation to God to protect “our” troops, as he did last night in his address to Congress. I don’t doubt the sincerity of the sentiment, but would it not be far better for Biden himself to protect those same troops by ending all of America’s needless wars?
U.S. Presidents traditionally favor asking God (there’s a sense that God would never deny this ask) to bless America as a way of ending speeches. Biden’s new “ask” of God goes a big step further by specifically identifying troops for special protection.
As a friend of mine, a retired military officer, put it about Biden’s rhetoric:
“This is new programming and it hits me like a scratched record every time I hear it—even his most militant predecessors stopped at ‘God bless America.’ It’s unclear to me whether he’s signaling that we’re all in danger all the time and that the troops will always have to be out there or if he thinks it’s the shibboleth he needs to use to gain some support from unaware Midwesterners and Southerners. Regardless, it engraves a new precedent into our political thought: a constant reinforcement that we are always in danger and you can watch your 70” TV only because the troops are out there.”
To be clear, my friend and I have nothing personal against the troops, seeing that we’re both career military. But why single out the troops for God’s protection? Why not ask God to protect the poor? The sick? The vulnerable and needy and suffering?
Most Americans know that Joe Biden lost a beloved son, Beau, to brain cancer, and that he’d served in Iraq, where he possibly contracted his illness due to exposure to toxic chemicals in burn pits there. One can understand a father’s grief for his son, and his desire for Beau’s fellow troops to be protected from harm.
As a human sentiment, it resonates with me. But I share my friend’s unease with those who would beseech God for special protection for troops whose reason for being is centered on the use of deadly force around the globe. Especially when the sentiment was used in a campaign ad to court voters.
Perhaps we should leave it up to God to decide whom He wishes to protect, and even which country or countries He wishes to bless.
Perhaps my favorite biblical verse comes from the New Testament in Luke 17:21 when Christ says to the Pharisees, “The kingdom of God is within you.” You could spend a lifetime thinking about that.
Recently, I googled it and discovered the Catholic church has tried to demystify it, retranslating it as “the Kingdom of God is in the midst of you” and suggesting Christ here is trying to awaken the Pharisees to his presence and to recruit more apostles. So much for looking within at this most profound of Christ’s teachings.
I have many gripes with “modern” translations of the Bible, which largely diminish, even despoil, the poetry of older translations like the KJV (King James Version) or the even earlier translation by William Tyndale.
So I broke out my Catholic Bible from 1962; it renders the passage as “For behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” My NIV Bible from 1984 is the same, except there’s a footnote that says “within” could be translated as “among.” Is nothing sacred, all you wannabe translators and all you organized church tools?
Christ’s teaching that the kingdom of God is within you is a mystery. What does it mean? This is what it means to me. In trying to understand God, I think we humans are really trying to understand ourselves. The vast power of our own minds and imaginations. It’s not God that’s limitless: it’s our conceptions of what god (or gods) can be. But even as we humans imagine and conceive of god, we become jealous of our mental creations and then start lording them over others. We conceive of god(s) as jealous and vindictive and violent because we are.
Some will immediately say that I blaspheme; that I’m saying that humans are really god in the sense we create god. Of course, the Bible teaches the opposite: that God created us.
It is of course a matter of faith but think about this. We’re told we’re made in God’s image (even though we’ve been so busy creating him in our image). Surely this doesn’t refer to our bodies, which age and decay. Surely this refers to our minds, our dreams, our imaginations, which viewed in the aggregate across humanity continue to grow, to discover new things, to conceive of new ideas. To create. As humans, we create. And when we create, we ignite the divine spark within us.
Yet we are obviously not god. For I was taught God is good. God is love. And we humans are definitely not consistently good or loving. Quite the opposite. But of course we can displace our sins onto a fallen angel who corrupts us: Lucifer. It’s not our fault, or not entirely ours, right? The devil made me do it.
I prefer to think of god as the absolute best of us, the most mysterious part of us, our ability to create, to conceive of new things, to dream, to imagine. That human ability seems god-like in the sense it’s truly unlimited. And if it’s not unlimited, how would we know it wasn’t?
It’s not time to worship ourselves in place of god. Rather, as Abraham Lincoln said in a different context, it’s time to start looking to the better angels of our nature. It’s time to tap the kingdom of God within us. And to share it without jealousy or rancor or exclusivity.
And not only within us; the kingdom of God is also all around us. Humans are an incredibly destructive lot. We must not think much of God when we’re so busy despoiling and destroying her creation.
The sacred is within and without. And if we start thinking that way, and have a proper reverence for the sacred, we can focus on being constructive rather than destructive. We can honor the god within us by cherishing and saving the god without us. That means putting life first, all forms of life, including our own, as manifestations of the divine spark.
Postscript 1: I hope God forgives my random capitalization of her/his name.
Postscript 2: A friend notes how much ink’s been spilled throughout history contemplating God’s nature, the lives of saints, and so on. Theology used to be “the queen of the sciences.” I sent this back to him:
One thing about studying theology with such fervor — you probably won’t invent weapons to blow the world into a literal Armageddon from above. No — you’ll just imagine Armageddon coming from above. That said, it’s also true that religion can be used so powerfully to condone the murderous mistreatment of others. Knowledge is power, after all, even (especially?) knowledge of god [whatever “knowledge of god” means]. God is good, but humanity? Not so much.
In Christianity, God sent a Gospel or “good news.” He told us to love one another. How has such a simple message of goodness and giving become so badly twisted and so often ignored?
My 1st trip to the Continental Divide, about 35 years ago
Is it possible the U.S. hit a peak of sorts in 1969? I know – 1969 was a Nixon year, another year of destruction in Vietnam, though the music in those days was far better than today. But I’m thinking of Apollo, as in our landing on the moon in July of 1969. Having recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, that momentous event is still on my mind, especially when I think of the old poster I had on my bedroom wall that showed the Apollo journey from earth to the moon, its various stages and maneuvers. It was all bewildering to a young boy caught up in the space program, but at least I knew my country was at the forefront of science.
In 1969 America reached the moon! We respected science. Many Americans were trying to end a disastrous war in Vietnam. People marched for civil rights, they fought for equal rights, there was a sense America’s potential was nearly limitless.
WTF in 2020? Many Americans, including our president, don’t respect science. We fire doctors for calling out quack medical cures. We put a breeder of labradoodles in charge of our Covid-19 pandemic response. Wars just go on forever with little resistance. We’re sliding backwards in rights for minorities, for women, for workers. And the space program? Moribund in the USA. We’re very much stuck on earth, an earth that is less hospitable to life than it was fifty years ago.
The years 1970-2020 has defined a half-century of American decline. Perhaps we might speak of five bad “emperors”: Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, Shrub Bush, and Obama, now joined by Trump, our very own blend of Nero and Caligula. He fiddles and diddles while America burns.
Joe Biden and the establishment Democrats are hardly the answer. Even Jesus isn’t the answer unless we start taking His words about the rich (and so much else) seriously. The Jesus of my youth had no use for greed and money and material goods – He taught us our treasure was in heaven, gained by righteous living through faith while manifesting love. That sacrificial message is drowned out today by the so-called prosperity gospel, preached by ministers who are cashing in even as they tell their followers that wealth is the most legitimate form of God’s grace. Back in the Catholic church of my youth, such ideas would have been blasphemous. At my church I recall the example set by Sister Emily and Sister Jane Elizabeth – they sure weren’t living in luxury. Forgive them, sisters, they know not what they do.
Here we are, in 2020, in a land of un-truth, in a universe of alternative facts, in belief systems where money matters more than anything, where even ministers stoke conflict, and we wonder why we can’t come together and develop a clear, coherent, and coordinated response to the coronavirus crisis.
How to change this? How about letting experts lead us? You know the saying: it ain’t rocket science. But Apollo was rocket science, and so we deferred to experts, and they got us to the moon and back six times and patched together an amazing rescue of Apollo 13 when it went wrong. To beat Covid-19, we can’t listen to Trump and his band of grifters and losers. We must listen to the scientists, the doctors, and act collectively based on sound medical science. The “rocket scientists” will get us through this, together with the humanists and the selfless efforts of so many medical workers and (mostly) nameless others.
Longer term, we need to re-create our government, because it has, quite simply, betrayed most of us. Simultaneously, we need to move beyond nationalism and think and act on a global scale to save our earth. If Apollo taught us one thing, it’s the wondrous value of our own planet. The moon may be a place of magnificent desolation, but who wants to live permanently in desolation? We need global vision and action, not only to help prevent future pandemics, but also to preserve our planet as a viable biosphere for a global population projected to top ten billion people in the coming decades.
Nobody said it would be easy; yet if we stay on our current course, just about anybody can guess humanity’s fate. But if we can put a man on the moon, surely we can come together to create a better future for ourselves and our children.
The year was 1969, and this song by the Youngbloods went gold: “Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another right now. Right now. Right now.” It wasn’t – or shouldn’t be — just hippie dreaming. Indeed, it’s the essence of true Christianity.
I’m a Catholic, so of course I know all about Original Sin. For disobeying God and tasting the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden. Eve would suffer the pains of childbirth, and both she and Adam would age and die, their earthly bodies returning to the dust from which they came.
I always thought Eve got a bad rap in that story. She was, after all, tempted by Lucifer, a fallen angel in the shape of a serpent. Whereas Adam simply gave in to a mild suggestion by Eve to join her. Eve was tricked by the Master of Deceit, but Adam just joined in for the heck of it, and she shoulders the blame?
Of course, one might see Original Sin as part of God’s master plan. For without that sin, there would be no need for God to send his only begotten son to redeem mankind. No Original Sin, no New Testament. No Beatitudes. No Roman Catholic Church. No Christianity.
And without Christianity and its evangelizing zeal, America would doubtless be a far different land. Assuming Europeans still came to the New World in roughly 1500, would subsequent history be less bloody in the absence of Christianity? Or would naked conquest have been unrestrained by any moral code of restraint and compassion?
The United States has an original sin as well. It is the impiety of considering our country as being uniquely favored by God. American history shows how we’ve killed, enslaved, and otherwise violated God’s great commandment of loving thy neighbor, even as we continue loudly to shout how God uniquely showers His praises on us. God Bless America!
Is America’s original sin part of some master plan? How will we redeem ourselves from its awful legacies? My dad once joked that in school he almost solved an unsolvable equation; I confess I have no solution to such questions.
Readers, have at it in the comments section below. Is the very idea of Original Sin mysterious and magisterial, or mischievous and misleading? Have humans evolved beyond the need for God and gods? Is “sin” a misleading term to apply to America’s past, too metaphysical, too imprecise? Are there simply too many “chosen people” in this world, too many people who elevate themselves above others just because they believe they share a favored relationship to God?
It’s a grey and rainy day here — a good day for thinking. Join in.
I read old stuff. Heck, I’m a historian: that’s what I’m supposed to do. So I was reading an old pamphlet on “The Indiana World War Memorial” (circa 1940) and came across the Pledge of Allegiance as it was recited before McCarthyism reared its ugly head in the 1950s:
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.
You’ll notice what’s missing: that whole idea of “under God.” Those words were added in the early 1950s as a way of contrasting God-fearing (and God-favored, if you’ll recall American exceptionalism) Americans to the godless Communists.
You’ll recall, of course, that our nation was founded in part on religious freedom. The idea you could worship any god or gods you wanted to, or none at all. We should return to the original “godless” pledge. It served us quite well in World War II; it would serve us quite well today.
After all, Americans have no monopoly on God. Furthermore, God does not uniquely bless us. To believe that is to violate the real Ten Commandments, for to believe you are uniquely blessed by God is tantamount to raising yourself to the level of God. No — as Abraham Lincoln wisely said, we must not assume that God is on our side; we must pray that we are on His side.
Speaking of the Ten Commandments, Tom Engelhardt at TomDispatch.com has a compelling list of his “ten commandments” in America’s ongoing war on terror. Like Lincoln, Engelhardt is wise enough not to assume that God is always chanting “USA! USA!”
Here are Engelhardt’s “ten commandments” for America and for a better world. I urge you to read the rest of his article at this link:
1. Thou shalt not torture: Torture of every horrific sort in these years seems to have been remarkably ineffective in producing useful information for the state. Even if it were proved effective in breaking up al-Qaeda plots, however, it would still have been both a desperately illegal (if unpunished) act and a foreign policy disaster of the first order.
2. Thou shalt not send drones to assassinate anyone, American or not: The ongoing U.S. drone assassination campaigns, while killing individual terrorists, have driven significant numbers of people in the backlands of the planet into the arms of terror outfits and so only increased their size and appeal. Without a doubt, such drone strikes represent a global war of, not on, terror. In the process, they have turned the president into our assassin-in-chief and us into an assassin nation.
3. Thou shalt not invade another country: D’oh!
4. Thou shalt not occupy another country: By the way, how did that work out the last two times the U.S. tried it?
5. Thou shalt not upgrade thy nuclear arsenal: The U.S. has now committed itself to a trillion-dollar, decades-long upgrade of its vast arsenal. If any significant portion of it were ever used, it would end human life as we know it on this planet and so should be considered a singular prospective crime against humanity. After years in which the only American nuclear focus was on a country — Iran — with no nuclear weapons, that this has happened without serious debate or discussion is in itself criminal.
6.Thou shalt not intercept the communications of thy citizens or others all over the world or pursue the elaboration of a global surveillance state based on criminal acts: There seems to be no place the NSA has been unwilling to break into in order to surveil the planet. For unimaginable reams of information that have seemingly been of next to no actual use, the NSA and the national security state have essentially outlawed privacy and cracked open various amendments to the Constitution. No information is worth such a price.
7. Thou shalt not be free of punishment for crimes of state: In these years of genuine criminality, official Washington has become a crime-free zone. No matter the seriousness of the act, none — not one committed in the name of the state in the post-9/11 era, no matter how heinous — has been brought into a courtroom.
8. Thou shalt not use a massive system of secret classification to deprive Americans of all real knowledge of acts of state: In 2011, the U.S. classified 92 million documents and the shroud of secrecy over the business of the “people’s” government has only grown worse in the years since. Increasingly, for our own “safety” we are only supposed to know what the government prefers us to know. This represents, of course, a crime against democracy.
9. Thou shalt not act punitively toward those who want to let Americans in on what the national security state is doing in their name: The fierce and draconian campaign the Obama administration has launched against leakers and whistleblowers is unprecedented in our history. It is a growing challenge to freedom of the press and to the citizen’s right to know.
10. Thou shalt not infringe on the rights of the citizenry to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: Need I even explain?”
Why not make a pledge, America, to these “commandments”? For they will help us to ensure liberty and justice for all.
Eve tempting Adam. I guess Adam didn’t have a mind of his own
W.J. Astore
The other day my wife and I were watching Wadjda, a terrific film about a spirited Saudi girl who dreams of buying and riding her very own bicycle. The film does a great job of highlighting the constraints put on women in traditional Saudi and Islamic culture. Women are not allowed to drive, they must veil themselves whenever they can be seen by men, they are trained to be subservient and not to attract attention to themselves, and so on.
Watching the constraints under which Saudi women live their lives, my spirited wife uttered the following aphorism:
Religion – written by men, for men. And that’s all you need to know.
Having been raised Catholic, it’s hard to disagree with her. The Catholic Church has historically been misogynist. It was Eve, after all, who tempted Adam. She was “the weaker vessel” who was cursed with the pain of childbirth because of her “original sin.” The Church itself, to state the obvious, is run entirely by men. Even the woman most respected by the Church, the Virgin Mary, is an unattainable ideal. A woman who gets pregnant without losing her virtue and virginity? Try aspiring to that.
Whenever a religion, no matter if it’s Islam or Catholicism or some other faith or sect, places half of humanity in inferior and subservient roles, we must question very closely its true intent and inspiration. Surely a just and compassionate God would not sanction a religion that subordinates women to the whims of men.
Obviously, I know many believers, women as well as men, will disagree with this. They will point to their faith, their holy books, the power of tradition. Or they will try to explain how their religion really doesn’t discriminate against women and so on.
Here I recall a saying that Temple Grandin says she will never forget: “Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it, anything but live for it.”
How true. And I’d add that any religion worth living for is one that treats men and women equally as believers. I don’t think God, if He or She (!) exists, would want it any other way.
Leafy Campuses, Ivory Towers, Leading Straight to Wall Street
W.J. Astore
In the 17th century, Harvard was all about preparing men to serve God. It was about educating ministers. And ministers were arguably the most deeply respected men of their day. In the 21st century, Harvard has a new god — mammon. Harvard grads today most commonly reach for the big bucks in the world of banking and finance and Wall Street. And those who succeed in their get rich quick positions are arguably the most deeply celebrated (if not universally respected) men and women of this American moment.
If you accept for the moment that America’s brightest and best attend Ivy League universities like Harvard and Princeton, what does it say that so many of our most promising young aspire as their highest cause in life to make money and lots of it by manipulating financial markets?
Ezra Klein noted the following stats for the top Ivies:
As of 2011, finance remained the most popular career for Harvard graduates, sucking up 17 percent of those who went from college to a full-time job. At Yale, 14 percent of the 2010 graduating class, and at Princeton, 35.9 percent, were headed into finance.
At Harvard and Yale, at least, the numbers have drifted down in recent years. Harvard’s 2008 class sent 28 percent of its gainfully employed graduates to Wall Street, while Yale sent 26 percent.
More than one-third of Princeton grads went into finance in 2010: Incredible!
As the humanities wither at our universities, the financial sector continues to grow and consume our youth with promises of mammon and “success.”
Isn’t it high time to change our national motto? How about “In Mammon We Trust”?
Bracing Views 