Bootstraps

"The large, muscular man was nearly in tears," she said.

In a talk this past Sunday at the Wild Goose Festival, Catholic activist Sister Simone Campbell described a man she met in Indiana. He was always taught that if you work hard enough you will be successful. After all, that's what his parents did and their parents before them. He was indeed working hard and doing everything he could, but he was just barely making ends meet for his family. In a moment of emotional truth, the shame and disappointment he felt in himself came out.

One of my favorite quotes of all time is George Monbiot: "If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in African would be a millionaire."

People are not poor because they don't work hard enough. In fact, many of them work harder than the wealthy--they have to, because their very survival depends on it. Vacations and "down time" are a luxury that the poor simply can not afford. Let's look at Africa: Poverty is extreme, but there is no shortage of brilliant entrepreneurs doing amazing things to keep their families alive. Still, it's not enough. The full weight of a system that works against them is often too much. Millions and millions of people are just barely surviving, despite their best efforts.

Why can't people "pull themselves up by the bootstraps" like their parents did? It's not because people don't work hard enough or develop innovative ideas to cope with their struggles. It's just that the struggles today are so overwhelming.

My Father

My father graduated from high school in the late 1950s. He worked a job or two before getting hired in a factory of a major automotive producer. Still in his teens, he made enough money to support a family on one income. He could reasonably expect all the trappings of a middle class lifestyle: Health care, retirement after 30 years, a lifetime pension after retirement, time off for vacations and enough money to own a home, automobiles and send kids off to college. It was grungy, dirty work, but it was reliable work. He retired in his early 50s.

Nowadays, those jobs are extremely rare, if not altogether nonexistent. Individuals today are often working more than one job to make ends meet. Both spouses have jobs in order to try to achieve the same standard of living that was once easily accessible with one income. Young adults struggle to find adequate work and continue to live with their parents or with other friends in shared living arrangements. Pensions are a distant memory (the system where after you retire your company continues to pay you for the rest of your life), and young people will wonder if they actually existed or were just a figment of someone's imagination. Even people in the skilled trades or others who have spent years earning full college and masters degrees often cannot achieve the same standard of living that entry level workers once enjoyed. Whatever the economic reasons for this, one truth is abundantly clear: Wealth is NOT directly related to one's willingness to work hard!

We love the stories about people who overcome every obstacle and still come out on top. Those are admirable people who inspire us all. Whether through luck or skill, their stories should be celebrated. The problem is when we make that a basic expectation for all people and blame them when they struggle rather than the system that made their success unlikely.

Do people really believe they aren't working hard enough? Like the man described at the beginning of this post, a lot of people probably do take it personally. They see their struggles as a reflection on their own shortcomings. They have been falsely led to blame themselves, when the real culprit is a system that puts too many obstacles in front of hard-working people.

There are plenty of statistics to back this up, but we need only look around us: A family with multiple income-earners, with advanced degrees, working more hours, struggles to achieve what a single breadwinner could earn in previous generation with (and often without) a high school education. Let's quit blaming each other and rework the system so that the system works for--and not against--us!

4 Tools to See the Biblical Big Picture

They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream - Jeremiah 17.8

Scripture is like a tree. Some parts are the roots, some are the branches and others form the trunk. You will run into problems if you correctly read a line that serves as a leaf but try to present it as if it were the trunk. This is partly what it means when experts advise us to read Scripture within its proper context(s). You could even read your favorite lines word-for-word but end up misunderstanding them if you fail to see where they fit within the whole body. This is, of course, the same mistake the Pharisees made. They were so right--and yet at the same time so very wrong.

I present the following four tools to help us keep the Biblical big picture in view. Whenever we fall into the habit of hyper-analyzing individual passages, it is good to keep the following in mind:

1.  Proportionality: Compare the Numbers

Let's dive right in and talk about a current hot button issue:  Homosexuality. There are, at most, seven Scripture verses that directly address the topic of homosexuality. In contrast, there are thousands of verses addressing poverty, the suffering and the marginalized--hundreds by Jesus himself. There are so many references to poverty in direct, indirect, metaphorical and literal ways that I wasn't even able to find an exhaustive list--perhaps no one thought it was important enough to compile. Maybe there is a list in a dusty book in the back corner of some library, but nothing that is readily available online. But much has been written about those seven verses about homosexuality and you can easily find commentaries on a quick internet search.

Any Christian who takes the Bible seriously has to face the sheer numbers. At some point, the Bible has to start asking you questions:  Why are you obsessed with seven lines about one topic while ignoring hundreds of lines about another topic? What does it mean that Jesus himself references poverty over four hundred times but never once homosexuality? How can homosexuality possibly be THE issue for Christians if they are using the Bible as a guide? The level of emphasis our culture gives it is out of proportion to the level of emphasis Scripture gives it, and we need to wrestle with that.

This article is not intended to argue for or against homosexuality, although I can all but guarantee that if this article gets any comments it will be precisely along those lines. The point here is: Why are we not talking about poverty? Is the focus on other issues a way to distract ourselves from the poor and marginalized?

2. The Bible as Mirror: Who is Really the Subject?

When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”

- John 8:7

We all know the story in the Gospel of John Chapter 8.  A mob had formed to try, convict and punish a woman caught in adultery. What they didn't expect was that they would be the ones on trial once Jesus turned the questioning back on them. This is, I believe, what happens to all of when we dare to read Scripture with an open heart and mind.  We may consult Scripture trying to find an answer about how to deal with those people or that group. But we may be surprised to find that Scripture has just as many--if not more--uncomfortable questions to ask of us.

If you incline your ear and listen deeply enough, you may be hearing Scripture whisper back at you:  Why are you looking for rocks to throw against the homosexual community while ignoring the poor? What is going on inside of you that is making it hard for you to hear Jesus' very clear and direct words about the poor? Maybe the Bible isn't teaching you about homosexuality. Maybe it is teaching you about yourself.

[This section is influenced heavily by the short but sweet book Opening the Bible, by Thomas Merton.]

3.  Trajectory: Keep Your Eyes on the Prize

"The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward Jesus."

     - Russell Moore, President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission at the 2017 Southern Baptist Convention. Dr. Moore is taking a quote by Theodore Parker which has been used by Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. [The original quote ends with "justice" rather than "Jesus," but to a Christian it's not a huge leap to substitute one for the other.]

It has famously been said that you can use Scripture to justify almost anything.This is especially true if you take individual lines out of context. Sometimes the Bible really seems to contradict itself. What is a believer to do?

It is important to look at where the overall direction and momentum of Scripture seem to be pointing us. A relationship with Christ takes us from someplace and moves us toward another place. We are in motion. The Ancient Israelites were a people in motion. Jesus tells us that the Kingdom we are going toward is both here and not here, now and not yet.  But we pray that one day it will be "on earth as it is in heaven."

When reading Scripture, it is important to ask whether a passage refers to the Kingdom "now" or "not yet." just because something is mentioned in the Bible does not mean that it is God's intention for humankind for all times and places.  After all, the Bible has plenty of positive, supportive references to slavery, rape, incest, sexual abuse and the subjugation of women, but we are quite confident that is not where God is calling us today.  Let's not make the same mistake about other verses about other issues.

4. Hiding in Plain Sight

The most devious way to downplay difficult biblical teachings is not to completely ignore them, because that would be too obvious. The most devious way is to give occasional lip service to them--mentioning them but always minimizing them, always qualifying. And NEVER mentioning them with the same frequency or focus as Jesus or the Bible as a whole. This is a variation on #1 above.

A church may hold a canned food drive for the hungry once a year, give an award to someone who cares for the poor, or mention the poor in sermons but always with some qualifiers. We can pat ourselves on the back and reassure ourselves that we've done our duty.  But that level of interest in the poor is nowhere near close to the level of interest that Jesus seemed to have.

It's hard to read the Bible and not come away with the idea that the poor, the sick and the marginalized are the focus over and over and over again. They're on just about every page.  We're not talking about an occasional line here or there.  It's just everywhere.  It's not just what Jesus talks about--he actually says where you find the poor you will also find me (Matthew 25). If we are going to address the issue of homosexuality, back to our first example above, we should do it through the context of reaching out to a marginalized community if we are going to be "biblical" in how we do things.

Conclusion

But we are all afraid of the Bible.  Opening it and reading it are scary. It might challenge us too much.  It might transform us.  So we make sure to put all sorts of brackets around it.  We make sure to tell ourselves what the Bible means before we actually open it., trying to intercept the divine message and make it more palatable before it does any damage and changes us. These four tools are not a guarantee that we won't make mistakes, but they are a good help to step back and see what's really going on when we read a passage.

What's Fundamental to a Fundamentalist?

Do our Holy Books and doctrines point us toward God,
or do we hold them up and block ourselves from seeing God?

"Fundamentalism is not a position as much as a disposition."
Stan Mitchell, Pastor of Gracepointe Church in Franklin, TN

Pastor Mitchell articulates so well something that has been on my mind lately.

The term "fundamentalism" was first coined in relation to the Christian Fundamentalist movements which originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They largely came out of American and British Protestantism. In particular, the series of books called The Fundamentals, published in 1910-1915, gave the movement its name.

Technically speaking, a "fundamentalist" should only refer to a Christian who is part of the specific movements which self-identify as such. Yet, many onlookers have found resonance between the way these movements operate and other religious (and non-religious) movements. People today talk about "Catholic fundamentalists" and "Muslim fundamentalists" and all sorts of other "fundamentalists." How can this be?

I had a pivotal insight when researching the details of Christian fundamentalism for an article. I knew that fundamentalism identified about 5-6 "fundamentals" of belief and doctrine that were non-negotiable, but that was the limit of my knowledge. Doing my due diligence as a writer, I began researching. For that particular article, it made sense to name those half-a-dozen fundamentals.

I was surprised to find out that there was not just one list but several. Yes, there were five points which were tied to The Fundamentals book series, but other groups had their own lists. To a casual onlooker, these lists may seen strikingly similar--all of them include Biblical inerrancy, for example. Some of the other points may have been implied in previous lists but due to a changing cultural landscape, a particular denomination may have felt the need to be affirm them specifically at a later time. But there's no getting around the fact that these lists are simply different from one another.

Here we come back to Pastor Mitchell's quote: It seems like it isn't so important what those fundamentals are, just so long as a group has them.

So what is fundamental to a fundamentalist?  The answer may sound like circular reasoning, but there is a deeper point underneath: What's fundamental to a fundamentalist isn't necessarily a literal interpretation of the Bible or any of the other points--what's fundamental to a fundamentalist is the need to have fundamentals.

This is what Pastor Mitchell means, I believe: It's not so much the position as it is the disposition.

Some people simply need to have several points to rally themselves around in no uncertain terms.  These points distinguish "us" from "them." It's a black-and-white approach to spirituality.  It's tribal. It's rigid. It's exclusionary. This is the "fundamentalism" that can be found across the board in all the world religions, as Pope Francis has said.

But does it open us to God or keep us from God?

In all fairness, every group has to delineate what group membership means--every group has identifying creeds, doctrines, fundamentals or, at the very least, guiding principles for what it means to be part of that particular group. A lot of people don't like rules of creeds, but without them, how to do you identify why your group exists and what it's about? Just having a group-defining list does not automatically make that group a fundamentalist. A fundamentalist is more about rigidity--their list ends with a period rather than an ellipsis.

Modern Evangelical Christians (not to be confused with fundamentalists!) witness to the centrality of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I think they are right. Ours is a living faith. We are in relationship with the Mystery our tradition has come to know as God. And out of that relationship will come beliefs and out of those beliefs will eventually come doctrines. But the most important thing for a Christian is to rally around that living relationship.

Whenever we put doctrines or theological interpretations as the most central, identifying elements, we are at risk of breaking the first and most fundamental (no pun intended) of the Commandments: Putting a false idol in place of the awe and mystery of God. Those doctrines and theological interpretations are going to be flawed, because they are drafted up by humans and written out in clumsy human languages. They may be inspired, but they are all too often the work of human hands. As the mystics say, those doctrines are a finger pointing toward God, but they are not actually God. Big difference. To define ourselves by them is to basically worship the human ego and its own creations.

It is the living relationship with God that is the best axis around which to revolve our lives.