Commentary
MORE THAN A year ago, during the early days of Hong Kong’s anti-extradition bill protests, a Christian hymn echoed in the streets. “Sing Hallelujah to the Lord” had become an unofficial protest anthem. A year later, the spirit of hope that permeated the song’s adoption has evaporated.
This summer Beijing overrode the “one country, two systems” principle agreed to in 1997 by implementing a new national security law (NSL) in Hong Kong that gives China’s central government a broad set of powers to silence anything deemed subversive. The effects have been swift and chilling. In August, legislative elections for 2020 were delayed a year; pro-democracy candidates were disqualified. Controversial texts have been removed from public libraries, pro-democracy professors silenced, and newspaper offices raided.
Some of Hong Kong’s leading democracy activists, including legal scholar Benny Tai and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Joshua Wong, confess Christian faith. During the height of recent protests, many pastors invoked Christ in their participation. For example, pastor Roy Chan organized Protect the Children, a civilian peacekeeping collective, to shield young protesters from police violence. Under the new NSL, actions like Chan’s could be prosecutable, with potential life sentences.
FOR ABOUT TWO decades I was part of a small, unaffiliated fundamentalist religious community in South Carolina. There I learned that Jesus’ condemnation of religious hypocrisy was a warning to adhere tightly to the church’s long list of superficial rules for holy conduct. It was a holiness defined more by rule compliance than goodness of heart.
Later, in college, I learned that Jesus was making an institutional critique more than an individual one in those biblical passages. He was in fact condemning a devotion to rigid rules that emphasized appearance over substance and venerating law while neglecting the soul.
Such beliefs are an apt metaphor for the fundamental defect in a near-century of U.S. police reform efforts. Most have ignored the heart and soul of our policing and carceral institutions; they have instead tinkered with these institutions’ appearances. Many of these reforms likely reduced some harms of U.S. policing. Yet, they have left largely in place the ideas and practices that taint the heart of American policing: Police techniques—even those blessed by law—maintain an anti-Black, gendered, heteronormative, and ableist status quo. As Christian faith teaches, mere adherence to rules is not holiness. As we learn by examining the limitations of police reform, reduction of harm is not justice.
PEOPLE OFFER MANY reasons for not voting, from “one vote doesn’t matter” and “there’s no real difference between the parties” to the conviction that an election “won’t bring about real justice (or the reign of God).”
The latter, at least, is certainly true. Voting—even electing the best-available candidates for the most important positions in government—definitely won’t bring about the peaceable kingdom.
But who is ultimately elected—especially at the presidential level—can make a world of difference in the lives of those in the most vulnerable conditions. For instance, in the past three-plus years, more than 200 judges have been appointed to the bench, many of them to lifetime terms. Of that number, zero have been Black. And judicial appointment is only one of many powers in executive hands, which affect everything from education, housing, and immigration policies to whether our society makes the hard choices of confronting racialized policing and combating climate change.
THERE IS A nationwide trend of Republican state lawmakers rethinking the death penalty, and their faith is playing a central role. From Catholics to evangelicals, Christian lawmakers on the Right are abandoning capital punishment like never before.
Take Colorado as an example. For years a bill to repeal the death penalty ran into a wall in the state Senate. This year three Republican senators co-sponsored the bill and provided the crucial votes for it to pass. The Colorado House of Representatives approved it and the governor signed it into law in March—making Colorado the 22nd state to abolish the death penalty.
Why did they do it? These Republican lawmakers decided the death penalty does not align with their Christian or conservative values: the sanctity of human life, individual liberty, and limited government. They see a system that exonerates one person on death row for every nine it executes, with more than 160 people in the U.S. being freed from death row due to wrongful convictions since 1973. They see a bloated government program that does nothing to make people safer.
“We were created in the image of God and that is a very good thing. And part of what that means, in my understanding, is it is against the natural order for one created in the image of God to willfully take the life of another created in the image of God,” said state Sen. Owen Hill. “My conscience demands that I vote to abolish the death penalty in Colorado.”
IN JUNE, NEARLY 700,000 DACA recipients could breathe a sigh of relief when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the Trump administration’s decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The court determined that the basis for President Trump’s action was “arbitrary and capricious.” The grounds presented for termination failed to consider the impact of the program’s rescission, wrote Chief Justice John Roberts.
The grounds of the ruling are important because the court did not address whether DACA was legal. For now, DACA remains fragile. People who have benefited from the program, put in place by executive action under President Barack Obama in 2012, can continue to obtain valid work permits and are protected from deportation. An estimated 130,000 people would have been eligible to submit new applications for the program, except that the Trump administration released a memo on July 28 saying it would “reject all initial requests for DACA and associated applications for Employment Authorization Documents.”
This momentary reprieve and upsurge of hope resulted from decades of fierce social, political, and legal organizing by undocumented youth and their supporters, often at great personal risk. The Trump administration may decide to attack DACA again. It would likely be a costly undertaking since a substantial bipartisan majority of Americans support DACA.
While DACA prevents the eviction from the U.S. of a sector of immigrants, it does not dismantle the massive deportation machine that operates in this country nor create a pathway to citizenship—key components of comprehensive immigration reform. Authentic immigration reform begins with the recognition that U.S. immigration laws, from their inception, have been informed by discriminatory narratives. The first immigration law, the Naturalization Act of 1790, made it possible for those born elsewhere to become citizens—but only if they were “free white persons” (“white” meaning certain Europeans, and “persons” essentially meaning men), excluding enslaved people, Native Americans, those without property, most women, and all others not defined as white. Only property-owning white male citizens could vote.
IT IS TIME for radical change. This summer Black students in Oakland, Calif., demonstrated they deserve it—schools without police. After a 10-year organizing effort, students of the Black Organizing Project were victorious. The Oakland school board voted unanimously to pass the “George Floyd Resolution to Eliminate the Oakland Schools Police Department,” which will dismantle the school police department and redirect $2.5 million to pupils’ needs. Like students across the country, Oakland scholars want to reimagine safety because too many of them have been dehumanized, disrespected, and criminalized by police in their schools.
Following the brutal murder of Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers in May, the United States has seen a surge in progress in the movement for police-free schools. While this demand is not new, the moment made it real.
The Minneapolis school board led the way when it unanimously voted to end its contract with the police department. Then Portland. Then Denver. Then Charlottesville, Rochester, Milwaukee, and San Francisco.
Fueled by Black and brown students, the police-free schools movement asserts that removing police from schools will increase students’ chance to thrive and feel safe from state violence. The presence of police in schools increases the chances of youth interaction with the criminal legal system. Whether we call them “school resource officers” or police, they enforce the criminal code. Moreover, police too often aggressively suppress what they perceive to be disobedience or disorder. They ticket, arrest, and violently impose their will upon young people.
IN MARCH, THE National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service sent recommendations to Congress for changes to the Selective Service System, the military draft. For people of conscience, the issues at the heart of our concern were the expansion of Selective Service and the draft and protection of the rights of conscientious objectors (COs). Conscientious objectors are defined by the Defense Department as those with “a firm, fixed, and sincere objection to participation in war in any form or the bearing of arms, by reason of religious training and/or belief.” Some consider draft registration to be participation in war and a violation of their conscience.
During the commission’s two years of public hearings and debate, religious communities and peace organizations advocated for the commission to recommend that the Selective Service System be put into deep standby, as it was between 1975 and 1980. Short of that, we advocated for a process for COs to make their objection to war known at the time of registration with a “CO check-off box.” The commission ultimately rejected that option, stating that though it “would probably require minimal expense,” it would cause “confusion, during a draft, for those who indicated their intent to file for conscientious objector status.”
DURING THE COVID-19 pandemic, most Americans have respected government directives to keep in place and avoid participating in large gatherings. Now, several months into this crisis, governors are loosening restrictions or expanding exemptions, including for religious institutions. An April poll by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 77 percent of Americans oppose such loosening.
However, there is a contingent of Americans openly opposing self-isolation policies, especially among the religious community. A third of white evangelical Protestants support loosening restrictions, and their pastors have thumbed their noses at health and safety restrictions. Even in April, President Trump was pushing hard to have churches packed by Easter, in contradiction to the directions of public health authorities.
Why are so many willing to risk their lives—and the lives of others—to attend a worship service? For centuries, a sector of American Christianity has believed itself to be citizens of “God’s special nation,” and they are willing to risk contracting the potentially deadly COVID-19 to prove they are God’s chosen.
Americans are outliers regarding levels of religious fervor. As income and industrialization increase in nations, religiosity is expected to decrease—the U.S is the exception and the most religious nation (by statistics) among its industrialized counterparts. Religion is so deeply entwined with American culture that a 2015 PRRI poll found that two-thirds of Americans agree that believing in God was very or somewhat important to being truly American.
WHILE WE WERE not strangers to grief before the pandemic, these months have been something of a master class. “Each person’s grief is as unique as their fingerprint,” writes grief counselor David Kessler. “But what everyone has in common is that no matter how they grieve, they share a need for their grief to be witnessed.” We are witnesses to one another’s grief.
In our witness, we must acknowledge that loss is not equally distributed. Those of us with privilege have allowed this to happen, and we have much to answer for before God; there is so much that we must work to change. And we don’t have all the time in the world.
I hear empathic grief in parents who can’t spare their children the sudden disruption of their lives and the loss of rites of passage for which they have spent years preparing. And I hear it in children of elder parents who are sick with worry, and in family members of those deemed essential workers who, by choice or compulsion, risk their lives each day. I hear it in the business owners doing everything they can to keep employees on the payroll; in teachers, caregivers, advocates, and in my fellow clergy.
Grief propels us to do whatever we can to make things better and to offer hope and meaning for those we love. Spouses stand outside nursing-home windows with signs that say “I love you”; lines of cars drive by the house of a child celebrating a birthday or graduation; concerts are organized via Instagram; volunteer networks provide food and essential supplies to undocumented families. This is grief mobilized for good, helping us to do something to redeem the time we’re in.
AMERICAN CHURCHES HAVE long harbored suspicion of certain types of government aid.
During the 1930s, clergy worried that federal relief would supplant the churches’ role in local communities and undermine their status. Theologically, church and state often are viewed as rivals. State overreach can lead to dangerous empire, a false idol, or threats to religious freedom. Church overreach can court theocracy. The U.S. Constitution requires the government to walk a careful (and sometimes ambiguous) line between enabling religious freedom and avoiding its establishment.
Yet, in a global pandemic with concurrent economic collapse, the state is crucial in protecting public health while also delivering relief to the millions facing financial hardship as the economy grinds to a halt.
AS ISRAELI PRIME Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepared this spring to annex significant chunks of the West Bank and further tighten control over Palestinians, with the acquiescence of erstwhile rival Benny Gantz, the blueprint and rationale for his actions has been clear: Donald Trump’s so-called “peace” plan. Since the announcement of the U.S. plan in late January, some have explained why it is harmful to even the most basic requirements for peace—but few have analyzed how the Trump plan dealt with Palestinian Christians.
The architects behind the so-called “Peace to Prosperity” plan prefer the nonexistence of Palestinian Christians. These authors share an ideological bias that is troubled by the fact that Christians are an integral part of the Palestinian people.
The plan mentions Jews and Christians on one side and Muslims on the other, as if to communicate that this is a religious conflict between the Judeo-Christian tradition and Islam. While this may serve the partisan domestic purposes of Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu, this is not our lived reality as Palestinian Christians.
PRESIDENT TRUMP “DISCOVERED” this spring that African Americans are disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. “Why is it three or four times more so for the black community as opposed to other people?” he asked during a live coronavirus task force briefing in April. Black social media erupted.
One friend wrote, “The white man said it, but we have been screaming this for years.” Another person posted, “Blackness is not a risk factor. Anti-blackness is the comorbidity.”
I began to seriously consider the impact of race on health while becoming a registered nurse. Combating health disparities in the black community eventually brought me to midwifery. As a health care provider, the language of “comorbidity” (two or more chronic health conditions) and “modifiable health risk” (a risk factor for illness that can be lowered by taking an action) has become part of my vocabulary.
Following Trump’s question at the press briefing, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, responded, “When you look at the predisposing conditions that lead to a bad outcome with coronavirus ... they are just those very comorbidities that are unfortunately disproportionately prevalent in the African American population.” A few days later, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams noted that minorities are not more predisposed to infection “biologically or genetically,” but rather they are “socially predisposed” to it.
IN 1998, I was 24 years old and had just been hired as an assistant to Harvey Weinstein, one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. Within two months, my new boss attempted to rape me in a hotel at the Venice Film Festival.
I wanted to report Weinstein to his superiors; instead I was silenced by an egregious and restrictive nondisclosure agreement that prevented me from speaking to family, friends, doctors, lawyers, or therapists about what happened. I was imprisoned in this silence for 20 years.
Two years after The New York Times and The New Yorker broke the Harvey Weinstein story, I broke my nondisclosure agreement. I also published an op-ed in The New York Times: “Harvey Weinstein Told Me He Liked Chinese Girls.”
I was deluged with messages of support from the Asian American community, from the Christian community, and a few from the intersection of the two. One message from a member of my home church stopped me in my tracks: “I’m so sorry you felt unable to share your struggles with us, back in the day. I wish we had been able to pray with you.”
Nondisclosure agreement aside, could I have come to my church for support at the time of the assault?
HOW HAS AMERICA honored its avowed commitment to human rights over the last four years? Fellow nations will consider that question later this year during the Universal Periodic Review, a quadrennial evaluation by the U.N. Human Rights Council to which all member states are subject.
The review, scheduled for this spring before postponement due to the COVID-19 pandemic, promises a thorough accounting of U.S. progress and failings on human rights at home. Given the Trump administration’s withdrawal from global processes designed to safeguard human rights and its dubious moves to redefine the scope of human rights protections, this review is vital.
Central to human rights and our modern conception of justice is the idea of equality. No one is above the law. All should be treated fairly, without bias or favor—a value reflected in the biblical juridical instruction to not “be partial to the poor or defer to the rich” (Leviticus 19:15).
This principle of equality animates the review, a uniquely democratic process in which every nation can speak truth to every other and none is exempt. “Universality, impartiality, objectivity, and non-selectivity” are guiding principles. With no regard for American “exceptionalism,” the UPR’s egalitarian structure aims to blunt the politicized use of human rights, in the U.S. and elsewhere, against adversaries alone.
WE DON'T KNOW the full extent of the coronavirus pandemic. We know of the many who have died as a direct result of infection. We know that whole countries have turned on a dime to shield themselves from the shadow of death as it passes over. We don’t know where it will lead.
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Rebecca Solnit wrote, “Horrible in itself, disaster is sometimes a door back into paradise, that paradise at least in which we are who we hope to be, do the work we desire, and are each our sister’s and brother’s keeper.” Solnit reminds us that disasters and plagues sometimes signal liberation.
COVID-19 has forced the human community into mourning. In our retreat from the work-a-day world, it has imposed a global sabbath and Jubilee. Staring into this “cruel scourge,” as John of Ephesus described the Justinian plague in the year 545 C.E., can we also see that another world is possible?
The Jubilee legislation found in Leviticus 25 lays out a vision for “social and economic reform unsurpassed in the ancient Near East,” according to Robert K. Gnuse. The Jubilee laws declared that Yahweh was the rightful owner of all the earth, and therefore all Israelites—rich and poor—have an equal right to its abundance, within limits. In an economic system based on land and its produce, this was a radical transformation. The legislation undercut wealth disparities by preventing land speculation and by mandating debt forgiveness and interest-free loans. Finally, it ordered the release of the enslaved and those in debtors’ prison.
WHEN SOMEONE IS dying, most of us know how to offer support. We don’t question their treatment choices. We bring them meals and rake their leaves and shovel their sidewalks. When a congregation closes—or dies—such acts of kindness are no less important. As a Lutheran interim pastor who has led two congregations to “holy closure,” I offer some suggestions for how to accompany a congregation as it ends.
Don’t make a decision to close more difficult by questioning it. A closing congregation has likely tried all the stewardship programs, read all the church-growth books, and revamped its outreach program a hundred times. For any number of reasons, none of those worked. Members feel as though they have failed in mission for God. What they need from the wider church is compassion and a reminder that Christians are people of resurrection who believe that life can spring from death. In fact, sometimes something needs to die so that something else can be birthed in its place. They will struggle to believe that, and you can remind them as often as they need to hear it that closure can be a faithful choice.
IN OCTOBER LAST year, protesters stood silently in the streets of Kraków and Szczecin in Poland. This gathering was not criticizing the ruling political party. Instead, their banners bore the slogan “We Want the Church Back,” echoing “We Are the Church” movements directed at the Catholic hierarchy by laity around the world.
These Roman Catholics call to account sermons offered by conservative Polish clergy. The clerical leadership is “dividing people and spreading hostility toward others instead of teaching about our merciful God,” the group explained in a petition. Many Catholics in Poland feel homeless because they experience hostility, condemnation, and exclusion from the pulpit. They want to publicly demonstrate that the Catholic Church is larger than priests and bishops; that everyone, regardless of their sexual orientation or minority status, should be able to find a place in the church that calls itself catholic (which means “universal”). Finally, they demand that the priests and bishops not reject Pope Francis’ message and that Catholic social teaching, the church doctrines on human dignity and common good in society, be returned to the mainstream of Catholic life.
A month later in Gdańsk, 150 members of the archdiocese protested the bishops’ negligent handing of sexual abuse cases. They were responding to a study by the conference of bishops released in March that noted nearly 400 cases of Polish priests accused of abuse of minors between 1990 and 2018 and to the release of a documentary, Don’t Tell Anyone, in which priests are confronted by their victims. The hierarchy refused to investigate reported incidents and failed to openly support the victims. Lay Catholics also specifically criticized Gdańsk’s Archbishop Sławoj Leszek Głódź for his lavish lifestyle and confrontational communication style.
PRESIDENT TRUMP SPENT a large portion of his State of the Union speech in February touting his economic accomplishments, including cutting taxes and “job-killing regulations.” But what has America gotten in exchange for the 2017 Republican tax overhaul?
First, 2018 showed the largest drop in household charitable contributions since the Great Recession and the first drop in more than five years. Despite steady economic growth over the past 10 years and a more than 5 percent increase in individual giving the year before, this dramatic decline has left many organizations—including local churches, food pantries, and homelessness services—struggling to meet the needs of those they serve.
The Republican-passed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was the most sweeping overhaul to the federal tax code in decades. Among other things, it doubled the standard deduction. It is no longer cost-effective for most Americans to itemize donations. This creates a “giving gap” between middle-class donors and ultra-wealthy donors.
Even some Republicans found these changes controversial. They were unable to hide that most benefits would accrue to Americans with incomes in the top 5 percent.
ON AN OTHERWISE quiet Thanksgiving weekend last year, the riverbank next to Revere Copper and Brass, the company known for making pots and pans that also made parts for nuclear weapons, collapsed into the Detroit River. The event was missed not only by many Detroiters but by most Americans, who remain largely unaware of the dangers of our crumbling former nuclear weapons sites. Michigan state agencies claimed that no radioactivity was released by the literal “fall-out”—or in this case, “fall-down”—but can they be trusted? Decades of misinformation about our nuclear weapons plants should put everyone on guard.
Work on the United States’ first atomic bomb took place at Detroit’s Revere site during World War II, and the facility continued to make uranium rods during the Cold War. During this era, intensive nuclear weapons production systematically contaminated lands surrounding such Department of Energy sites as Rocky Flats in Colorado, Pantex in Texas, and Hanford in Washington state. As we enter a new era when these now-defunct sites are either remediated or left to crumble, what do we need to know?
Water safety is only one concern. The fact that Michigan’s state agencies only found out about the spill after the Canadian side reported it should be a red flag. It took a full week for the state’s environmental agency to test the water at the Revere location, just downstream from the intake pipes for drinking water for most southeast Michigan residents. Michigan especially should be vigilant regarding water safety, with Flint residents still waiting for safe drinking water.
ELECTIONS ARE A chance for voters to throw their support behind leaders they think are going to best bring about our hopes and visions for what this country can be. But there are a lot of reasons why eligible Americans may have a hard time casting a ballot that counts. One reason is sloppy purges of the voter rolls.
Purges are a practice—often controversial—of election administrators removing or cancelling voters from registration lists in order to update state registration rolls. We all benefit from clean and accurate voter rolls, which are used by poll workers to identify who is registered to vote. There is no real dispute that people who are not eligible should be removed from the rolls. Too often, however, purge processes are shrouded in secrecy, prone to error, and vulnerable to manipulation.
Part of the reason purges are so controversial is because more voters are being purged than in the past, and there is no satisfying explanation as to why. Between 2006 and 2008, the U.S. purged about 12 million voters. Between 2016 and 2018, however, the U.S. purged about 17 million voters. That’s an increase of more than 33 percent—during a time when total population growth was about 6 percent and the number of registered voters increased by 18 percent.
Another reason purges are controversial are their locations. Battleground states like Ohio and Wisconsin have had recent purge flare-ups. Ohio has a practice whereby voters who miss one election are put on a track for removal from the rolls. While voters can take steps to get themselves off that track, many believe that starting the process after missing only one election is too aggressive.