The Real Christians

As regular readers of my daily rants know, I’ve been hard on the fake “Christians” who dominate MAGA and are most accurately characterized as Christian Nationalists. I have also been emphatic in noting that Christian Nationalism bears little resemblance to the Christianity practiced by several of my friends and some of my family.

I recently had an experience that underscored my conviction that real Christians are very different from the theocrats who currently (mis)use the name.

My husband and I go to our time-shared condominium in Litchfield, South Carolina for a week each July, and we usually drive there. As I have gotten older–and as retirement has given me more flexibility–we’ve broken up that thirteen-hour drive into three days, and added interesting stops along the way. The first of those stops has usually been in Berea, Kentucky, where we stay at the historic Boone Tavern on the lovely campus of Berea College.

Berea College, for those who are unfamiliar with it, is a truly remarkable institution. It is academically excellent. It was founded in 1855 on a work-study model, to serve Appalachian youngsters who could not afford to pay tuition, and it continues to draw preferentially from that area. Most students still graduate without debt thanks to the school’s practice of offering “Tuition Promise” scholarships to all enrollees. (The average debt of those who do leave with academic debt is $4,712, and the most common debt of students who do have debt is $1000.) Fifty-eight percent of the first year students in 2021 were the first in their families to attend college; 29% of that class were African-American and 14% were Hispanic.

Religiously, the college identifies as Christian:

Berea College commits itself to stimulate understanding of the Christian faith and its many expressions and to emphasize the Christian ethic and the motive of service to others. Berea College welcomes people from all religious and non-religious backgrounds, because of our Christian commitment, not in spite of it. (Emphasis theirs)

Berea and Oberlin were the first two colleges in the U.S. to accept both women and Blacks as students, and this year, I was interested to discover that among Berea’s fifteen residence halls is “a gender-inclusive option for students who identify as transgender, non-binary and gender nonconforming.”

I knew much of the school’s history prior to our most recent stay, but a conversation with the server in the bar prompted my observation that the institution is truly Christian–without the quotation marks.

The woman mixing my drink (yes, they have alcohol on the premises) responded to my verbal appreciation of the college with a reference to its history. In 1904, Kentucky’s legislature passed the Day Law, a measure aimed directly at Berea’s inclusion of Black students. The law made integrated institutions illegal in the state. According to the server, Berea proceeded to obey the law by sending all of its then-enrolled Black students to Oberlin, and paying their tuition there.

I was astonished, and when I went up to my room, I googled the issue to see whether she had embellished it. Sure enough–in the wake of the Day Law, Berea had sent Black students either to all-Black schools or to Oberlin, and had paid their tuition. It evidently continued that practice until the law was repealed in the early 1950s.

(As an aside, the server was also extremely dismissive of JD Vance and his purported emergence from Appalachia…I liked her a lot!)

But back to the question of “real” Christianity.

The founder of Berea College was a man named John Gregg Fee. According to Wikipedia, Fee and his colleagues believed that “God made of one blood all peoples of the earth,” and that belief became the school’s motto.

One of the school’s original bylaws stated that “This college shall be under an influence strictly Christian.” but–unusual for the time– the term ‘Christian’ was not defined in terms of baptism or other theological tenets.

It was assumed that Christians would be marked by ‘a righteous practice and Christian experience.’ For Fee and his abolitionist supporters, slavery, sectarianism, and exclusion on the basis of social and economic differences were examples of ‘wrong’ institutions and practices that promoted schism and disobedience to God. These sins, left unamended, would prevent Berea from being a place of acceptance, welcome, and love.” Therefore, character became the chief qualification for admission, placing education within reach of all who desired its benefits.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if today’s publicly pious “Christians” emphasized character and loving-kindness? America under that definition of a “Christian Nation” would be a place of “acceptance, welcome, and love.”

Unfortunately, those traits are utterly foreign to Trump and MAGA…

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Giving Renters Rights

As I’ve mentioned in prior posts, my husband and I are old. Three years ago, we downsized, as old people are wont to do. We put the three-level house up for sale and considered whether to buy a condominium or move into a rental apartment.

We opted for the rental, in large part because of the less-than-happy experiences friends and families have had with HOAs.

Being solidly middle-class, if we become unhappy with the management of our very nice apartment, we can simply move. (I’m happy to report that we remain quite pleased with that management, and the numerous amenities of our downtown apartment community.)

Rather obviously, that ability–sufficient financial wherewithal to rent an upscale apartment–and to move out and find a satisfactory substitute if we want or need to–distinguishes our situation from that of far too many renters in Indiana. Thanks to our always-retrograde Hoosier legislature, Indiana law massively favors landlords over tenants. The Indiana General Assembly consistently refuses to pass even the most reasonable, minimal protections for tenants–last session, a former student of mine who is now a Democratic state senator proposed a bill that offered renters basic remedies in situations where failure to make needed repairs had compromised habitability–the measure would have allowed the tenant to direct rent payments into an escrow account until the premises were once again suitable for human habitation.

Our legislative overlords were appalled by this proposed mistreatment of landlords. The bill failed.

Unless Indiana’s politics change significantly (unlikely, at least in the short run), Indiana renters whose finances leave them to the not-so-tender mercies of rapacious landlords need to pin their hopes on passage of a national “Renters’ Bill of Rights.” 

In the linked article, Fran Quigley begins by explaining the breadth of the problem.

I teach a law school clinic where my students and I represent tenants who face eviction and live in horrible housing conditions. Too often, we see tenants getting railroaded by the fast, cheap, and easy eviction process in US courts. In many states, they can be forced out of their homes for no reason and with just a few days’ notice. We see tenants plunged into homelessness after their price-gouging landlords hike rent by 30 percent and more. We see tenants complaining in vain when their heat and water are not working, when mold builds up, and when rodents scuttle through their bedrooms. Then they are evicted as retaliation for making those complaints.

These struggles are common among the nation’s 114 million renters. Meanwhile, seven million households are behind on their rent and the number of homeless people is reaching record highs.

A new effort called the National Tenants Bill of Rights aims to change all of that, articulating seven basic renters’ rights that ought to be enshrined in policy. Created by the Tenant Union Federation, the National Housing Law Project, and the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the Bill of Rights confronts the enormous power imbalance between renters and their landlords. The purpose of the document is to lay out a single comprehensive policy agenda that lawmakers, advocacy groups, and tenants themselves can endorse and use as a movement resource.

The proposal addresses a relatively new reality: corporate landlords and private equity currently have the national rental market in what the National Housing Law Project describes as “a chokehold.” Among other things, the bill would require just-cause evictions, and enforceable requirements for decent housing conditions for the one-third of US rental units whose owners benefit from federally backed mortgages.

The rental market has changed dramatically from the days when grandma and grandpa owned a double, lived in one side and rented out the other. Today, private equity and corporate landlords dominate the nation’s rental market.

These mega-landlords own the majority of all US rental units, including 80 percent–plus of the properties with twenty-five or more units, all while gobbling up single-family homes too. That market dominance and the use of rent-setting algorithms that are under federal investigation for price-fixing sets the stage for shameless price-gouging. Bob Nicolls, CEO of one of America’s top corporate landlords, Monarch Investment and Management Group, gleefully told investors in the middle of the COVID pandemic that big rent hikes were coming. “We have an unprecedented opportunity . . . to really press rents,” Nicolls said. “Where are people going to go? They can’t go anywhere.”

Nationally, rents have risen nearly 30 percent since early 2020. One in every five renters fell behind on their rent at some point last year. Far too often, paying the rent means skipping prescriptions, utility payments, and meals.

At the very least, the law should require landlords to provide livable units before pocketing those rental payments.

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A “Faith Based” Future?

I’m not sure when people–okay, mostly Christian people–began using the term “faith-based” to mean “religious,” but like so many other euphemisms being thrown around these days, the term is inaccurate. Many of the earth’s religions aren’t “faith-based,” they are works based, focused upon behavior rather than belief. The term “Judeo-Christian” is a similar contrivance, a term that Christianizes in what may–or may not–have originally been an effort to appear religiously inclusive.

Whatever the original motivation for these terms, Project 2025 makes it quite clear that the “faith” that makes one entitled to call oneself an American is Christianity, and that any lingering “Judeo” part of “Judeo-Christian” is irrelevant.

A report in The Guardian focuses upon that element of Project 2025, using a current discriminatory law in Tennessee as an example of the approach favored by that document. In Tennessee, a Jewish couple who wanted to foster a child were rejected by a Christian state-funded foster care placement agency that informed them it only provided adoption services to “prospective adoptive families that share our belief system”. 

Under First Amendment jurisprudence as it has existed thus far, taxpayer dollars cannot be used to favor some religions over others, or–for that matter–religion over non-religion. (Granted, Justice Alito is probably salivating at the prospect of overturning that long line of precedents…) If Trump is elected, however, and the agenda proposed in Project 2025 begins to be realized, Americans can kiss genuine religious liberty good-bye. 

The predicament facing the Rutan-Rams could become more common under a second Trump administration. Project 2025, a 900-plus page blueprint for the next Republican administration and the policy brainchild of the conservative Heritage Foundation, contains an explicitly sympathetic view toward “faith-based adoption agencies” like the one that rejected the Rutan-Rams, who are “under threat from lawsuits” because of the agencies’ religious beliefs.

Project 2025’s Adoption Reform section calls for the passage of legislation to ensure providers “cannot be subjected to discrimination for providing adoption and foster care services based on their beliefs about marriage”. It also calls for the repeal of an Obama-era regulation that prohibits discrimination against prospective parents and subsequent amendments made by the Biden administration.

According to a professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University, quoted in the article, the image of family portrayed by Project 2025 is “blatantly exclusionary. The Christian nationalist plan rejects unmarried parents, single parents and LGBTQ+ families.”

Project 2025 is divided into four broad pillars, the first of which is to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children”. A conservative vision of family pervades the document, and the authors call on policymakers “to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family”.

The plan envisions upholding “a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family”. It would remove nondiscrimination roadblocks governing faith-based grant recipients, such as the agency that denied the Rutan-Rams. The authors argue that “heterosexual, intact marriages” provide more stability for children than “all other family forms”. In addition to calling for the passage of the Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act, which would allow adoption and foster care agencies to make placement decisions based on their “religious beliefs or moral convictions”, it also calls on Congress to ensure “religious employers” are exempt from nondiscrimination laws and free to make business decisions based on their religious beliefs.

That last paragraph sounds exactly like a speech by Indiana Congressman Jim Banks, currently running for U.S. Senate. Banks–and his clone Micah Beckwith, the Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor–who represent the core of the MAGA effort to remake the United States into a White Christian theocracy.

Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and author of a book titled How to End Christian Nationalism, contends that the scale and reach of Project 2025 pose a far greater danger to democracy than a patchwork of state laws.

“What’s different about Project 2025 is the sweeping nature of its plan,” said Tyler. “It would really rewrite the federal government and change policies in so many different areas at once in a way that would hasten our journey down that road to authoritarian theocracy.”

Trump’s effort to distance himself from Project 2025 runs into several inconvenient facts: his choice of a Vice-Presidential candidate who wrote the document’s introduction, the number of cronies who participated in its drafting, and the GOP’s official platform, which echoes several of its themes.

When President Biden says that America’s constitutional democracy is on the ballot in November, he wasn’t engaging in hyperbole.

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Trust

Back in 2009, I published Distrust, American Style: Diversity and the Crisis of Public Confidence. The book was largely written as a rebuttal to Robert Putnam’s argument that America’s diversity was the cause of diminished levels of public trust. That trust levels were (and remain) troublingly low was incontrovertible, but I argued that the culprit wasn’t diversity, but a pervasive loss of faith in a wide variety of American institutions–especially government. I wrote then and believe now that the remedy lies in policy reforms that would make American government (and businesses, nonprofits and religious institutions) worthy of public trust.

Rather than attempting to limit diversity through divisive measures such as building a wall between the United States and Mexico or imposing stricter immigration quotas, I emphasized the need to begin with government reforms: elimination of gerrymandering, electoral wins that reflect the popular vote, and proper functioning of checks and balances. (And this was before the horrifying decisions rendered by a Supreme Court dominated by Trump appointees.)

Research confirms the importance of public trust. Trump’s nasty, gutter-level approach to politics is only possible because we have seen a precipitous erosion of that foundation–the loss of a widespread belief that most people in government and the political class have the public interest at heart and are ethically and intellectually competent.

Because I spent so much time immersed in the literature documenting the importance of trust, I was interested to come across an article from the Guardian about Denmark, and how it became the world’s most trusting country. As the sub-head read, “There are real benefits to a society where people feel safe enough to leave their babies and bikes on the street. How have the Danes achieved this level of faith in their fellow citizens?”

Over the years, Denmark has emerged as the good faith capital of the world. Nearly 74% of Danes believe “most people can be trusted” – more than any other nationality. On wider metrics, such as social trust (trusting a stranger) and civic trust (trusting authority), Denmark also scores highest in the world, with the other Nordic countries close behind.

The article details the various ways Denmark’s trust manifests itself, but the effect is summarized in a statement by one young person:“You have the feeling that people have goodwill. I think it’s a top-down reaction. We have a system that supports, and that creates the baseline for our trust in each other.”

Exactly. It’s the integrity of the system.

America’s White Supremicists attribute Nordic public trust to the relative homogeneity of the population, but research suggests a different source: the welfare state.

 “That was founded very much on mutual trust,” Rosenkilde says. Denmark has a universal model of welfare, which holds that all citizens have the right to certain fundamental benefits and services. In the UK and the US, we have a “residual model”: bare minimum benefits for the poorest and skeleton services for everyone but the richest. “I think the whole idea of people being as equal as possible is very much underpinning this trust,” Rosenkilde continues. “We have this connectedness because you don’t have a lot of people that are very poor or very rich.” Equality, Rosenkilde says, has decreased over the past three decades, as Denmark is caught up in the neoliberal drag of the globe: its Gini coefficient has crept up, but by that measure it’s still the sixth most equal country in the OECD.“

A nation is an imagined community,” Korsgaard says. “What does that mean? It means I’m able to think of myself as part of a community with someone I don’t know. And in order to do that, they have to look more or less like me. They cannot be super-different when it comes to class.” (Emphasis mine.)

Researchers admit that Denmark struggled as immigration made the population more diverse, but they emphasize the importance of class homogeneity–the absence of huge gaps in income–as a major reason the country has been able to cope with other kinds of heterogeneity. As one scholar put it, diversity required renegotiation. “OK, you can be part of this community, even though you’re not white, even though your birth language is not Danish,’ and luckily, I think that is more or less settled.”

As the article concludes, “This really is the most unbelievably equal country, and while trust is a constantly negotiated state, that appears to be a good place to start.”

In November, if we are very lucky, perhaps the U.S. will once again have a functioning government that can address income inequality and begin to restore both the rule of law and public trust.

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An Excellent Reminder

A recent column by one of my “go to” pundits, Jennifer Rubin, reminded me once again why political communication is so difficult. Terms like “liberal” and “progressive” have been redefined by ideologues to facilitate their use as labels, rather than as explanatory terms. Perhaps the saddest example is misuse of the word “conservative,” which the media continues to apply to MAGA politicians, despite the fact that they embrace positions and arguments that are far–far–from traditional conservatism.

Rubin has tackled yet another term that is widely misunderstood: centrism. As she writes,

Centrism isn’t a mushy tendency to compromise. It isn’t a brain-dead fondness for style over substance. Above all, it is not to be confused with “moderation” — the futile and frankly foolish attempt to carve out a space halfway between the extremes of MAGA authoritarianism on the right and rabid nihilism from the left.

If climate change is a fact, to take one example, then splitting the difference with climate deniers is nonsensical. And if the MAGA movement assaults truth, then telling half of the truth or telling the truth half the time isn’t centrism. It’s absurdism, and a sure path to meaninglessness and nihilism.

Centrism, rather, is a mind-set. It’s more than humility, tolerance and restraint, although all of those are necessary elements. Above all, it’s an approach to governance, and not a list of specific policy prescriptions. It can be bold, pragmatic and popular.

Rubin defines centrism as a willingness to admit that all wisdom does not reside on one side of the political or ideological  spectrum. It “recognizes that capitalism and regulation, individual merit and social justice, and diversity and cohesion not only can coexist but must operate in tandem within a healthy, balanced society. Centrism, in short, stands for the proposition that ideological tensions are best resolved when we incorporate elements from conflicting perspectives.”

The essay proceeds to show how Biden’s immensely successful Presidency has benefitted from a (properly understood) centrist approach to undeniably progressive goals, and how centrism (again, properly understood) has won elections around the globe. As Rubin reminds us, centrism rejects Manichaeism, and respects coequal branches of government. As she also observes, ideologically extreme courts that abandon that measured, centrist approach lose legitimacy. (Someone should tell John Roberts…)

As she concludes:

We can attribute democracy’s woes around the world to failure to spread economic prosperity, demographic change and the decline of civics education, as well as religious fundamentalism, information bubbles and globalism. Some combination of these factors inevitably leads to support for strongmen who vow to fix intractable problems that “messy” democracy cannot solve. But we are looking in the wrong places for our answers.

We can address all those challenges provided the spirit of centrism prevails. Centrism can accommodate diversity, secure democratic norms, and preserve a credible and independent judiciary, all essential and foundational to liberal democracy.

I agree with all of the points Rubin makes, especially her definition of centrism. But that definition prompts another observation. Centrism–understood as Rubin defines it–looks an awful lot like another quality in short supply in our political class: maturity.

Mature individuals are reflective. They exhibit self-awareness. They embrace civility. Maturity includes the ability to consider all sides of a debate, the ability to embrace persuasive elements from different perspectives. If there is any evidence that any segment of the MAGA movement is mature, I’ve missed it.

It isn’t simply the childish and increasingly nasty response to Kamala Harris’ candidacy. Trump’s entire vocabulary (which apparently stopped expanding in third grade) is that of a playground bully. He doesn’t try to communicate–he merely spews insults. (He is guilty of many things, but civility is certainly not one of them.) His MAGA supporters happily emulate his crude and childish behavior. The trolls that occasionally post here underscore that observation–they simply insult, evidently unable to make anything remotely like rational arguments for considered positions.

Rational arguments. Considered positions. Those are markers for Rubin’s “centrism” and for what I define as maturity–and far too many of our contemporary political figures lack both. The GOP is currently the party of Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Green, and it would be hard to find more immature, unreflective (or more embarrassingly ignorant) standard-bearers.

I applaud Rubin’s effort at actual communication, but that effort fails to take into account the fact that today’s MAGA Republicans aren’t just incapable of actual communication, but disinterested in it. They remind me most of monkeys in the zoo throwing feces.

We need to start electing people who display a modicum of self-awareness, and are actually interested in communicating and governing. That apparently excludes MAGA.

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