Recently in Media Category

What would you do if you found out that people in your neighborhood had a 30% higher cancer rate, 25% higher infant mortality rate, and 95% higher cirrhosis of the liver rate than the surrounding area?  Then you found out that hair sample surveys of your neighbors showed that 34% of the population have toxic levels of mercury, 55% are contaminated with lead, 69% with arsenic, 69% with cadmium, 90% with aluminum, and 93% with antimony.  What would you do?  What would you expect your government to do? 

The truth is that this is just a hypothetical for most Americans.  If those problems showed up in New York City or St. Louis, MO, the response would be immediate and overwhelming.  But sadly when those problems began to emerge in Vieques, Puerto Rico, and the Americans affected were very poor, often spoke Spanish, and were living without direct representation in our government, the response has been to try to sweep the problem under the rug. 

Thankfully, TIME Magazine has just broken a story at the national level that has been well known to the people of Puerto Rico for a long time.  Studies by Yale, UGA, San Juan College of Engineers, and many other have proven beyond a doubt that the people are being poisoned by the results of 60+ years of naval weapons testing on the island.  But until this Time piece, there was virtually no attention being paid to this crisis. 

The health situation in Vieques is a black and white moral imperative.  We must address the needs of our fellow citizens down there who are truly the least and last in our society.  Americans will demand action if they understand the facts.  Please spread the word and contact your Congressman.

Click here to read the Time article: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1924101,00.html

And click here for more details and history:  http://americanvaluesnetwork.org/vieques/

Media analyses of President Obama's health care speech were divided on whether he had indicated serious support for a public option or had, instead, cleverly tossed a bone of "recognition" to the progressives while simultaneously demanding that they drop their insistence that the health care reform undercut insurance company profits.

The confusion, for once, is not with the media but with the incoherence of a centrist politics.  Obama wishes to relieve the suffering of Americans, but he does not wish to challenge the profit-uber-alles old "Bottom Line" of the competitive marketplace. Unfortunately for him and for most Americans, he can't have it both ways. FDR recognized that--and so was willing to stand up to the vested interests of the class from which he emerged, not only rhetorically, as Obama is willing to do at some rare moments like his Health Care speech, but in the actual policies he promoted. 

Goodness knows, Obama has tried. He understands the suffering caused by the military-industrial complex's insistence that American security can only come through economic, military and diplomatic domination of the world, and would like to alleviate it. He would prefer a world of peace. But he can't get that without challenging the fundamental equation of security with domination and presenting an alternative, e.g. that security might best be achieved through generosity and genuine caring about the well-being of others around the world, manifested in the kind of G-8 funded Global Marshall Plan that has been introduced into Congress by Keith Ellison (D,Minn). So, instead, he has escalated the war in Afghanistan. 

Obama is aware that unless we can get down to not more than 350 particles per million of carbon emissions that life on the planet is finished. Standing up to the corporate interests that have resisted this and managed to eviscerate his environmental program into a corporate-giveaway called "cap and trade" would require championing a carbon tax that he fears would make him unpopular with the corporate polluters and with the public whose consciousness these polluter are able to shape through the media.

Obama knows that a single-payer program--extending Medicare to everyone--is far more rational than what he has proposed to Congress, but he also believes that eliminating the insurance companies, hospital chains, and other medical profiteers would require a battle beyond his current capacities.

To address any of these problems fully would require a fundamental challenge to the old Bottom Line.  Obama would have to call for a New Bottom Line--to advocate for defining governmental and private corporate policies as "rational," "productive" or "efficient" not only to the extent that they maximize money and power, but also to the extent that they maximize love and caring, kindness and generosity, ethical and ecological sensitivity, enhance our capacities to respond to other human beings as embodiments of the sacred and our capacities to respond to the universe with awe, wonder and radical amazement at the grandeur mystery of the universe.

He actually reached in that direction momentarily at the end of his Health Care speech to Congress by seeming to endorse Senator Ted Kennedy's  "large-heartedness: a concern and regard for the plight of others" which he defined as "our ability to stand in other people's shoes; a recognition that we are all in this together, and when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand."

Yet over and over again in the details of his plan it was not this large-heartedness that he championed, but a belief in the positive outcomes of the competitive marketplace. What Obama omitted from mention is that the ethos of that marketplace, which rewards selfishness and materialism and "looking out for number one," as the "common sense" that guides individual as well as governmental behavior, is a product of the fear that we cannot count on others, that there will be no one there to take care of us, and that we must therefore maximize our own advantage lest someone else do so for themselves in ways that will permanently hurt or undermine us.

Yesterday, Ed Schultz posed a question on both his radio program and his MSNBC show:  Where is the religious community on health care? 

Ed, a Christian who admits he is not a regular churchgoer, sees the issue in pretty simple terms.  Jesus healed the sick.  For free.  Period.  Why aren't churches out on the front lines arguing for a compassionate government that will care for the infirm, ill, and dying?  After all, don't these same people understand that America is somehow a Christian nation?

Hey, Ed, I'm a fan.  And since I was driving to the beach, I listened to you for two hours get more and more heated--and take some pretty heated calls--on the issue.  I was with you, buddy.  But I think you missed a thing or two.  Let me help you get the religion story straight.

First, many mainline and liberal churches are on the front lines with this issue.  For example, the Episcopal Church's policy office issued an alert to Episcopalians to contact their members of Congress and has tried to answer questions regarding the current legislation.  And they aren't the only ones.  Most American mainline denominations have policy offices working on this issue (and some have for quite a number of years now, around SCHIP and other health concerns).  In addition to denominational efforts, on August 10, cooperating groups across a theological spectrum kicked off "40 Days of Health Care Reform" campaign to rally faith communities to support new health care policies.   There are lots of Christians--mainstream, mainline, moderate, liberal, emergent, and progressive ones--who care about healing as a social and spiritual issue.

Second, and I say this quite ruefully to you, Ed:  mainstream religion is of little interest to most of the media.  Ed, while you may be quite supportive of the Episcopal Church or the 40 Days Campaign, you really wanted to know where James Dobson, Joel Osteen, Rick Warren, and Franklin Graham stood on health care.  Ed, you wanted to know about the leaders of the conservative evangelical community--the big TV preachers and religious right political types.

I can tell you where they are.  They are hiding.  Some people think that evangelical opposition to abortion is keeping them away from the health care bill (the abortion issue is a factor worrying some Roman Catholics).  But I think that many conservative evangelicals are using abortion as a way to duck addressing the issue.  In Washington, religious leaders know that abortion is pretty much off the table in regards to the health care bill.  The Hyde Amendment will keep the government from paying for abortion (as long as the Hyde Amendment remains in force) and private insurance companies will--or will not--pay for abortion as their policies dictate.  As you rightly pointed out, Ed, abortion stays status quo in the current discussion.

The real thing keeping these leaders from speaking out is that large segments of their audiences suspect that President Obama is the Antichrist, the long-predicted evil political leader who will usher in a universal socialist state, complete with a false religion that will doom untold millions to eternal damnation with "666" stamped on our foreheads.  "Becoming Russia" is code language for these fears--whether overtly or intuitively understood.

In other words, Ed, this isn't a health care debate.  This is the Apocalypse.

The most chilling aspect of the apocalyptic fever gripping the Bible Belt right now?  I can't think of a time when American fundamentalists believed that the Antichrist was the President of the United States.  Typically, fundamentalists have identified the Antichrist as someone outside the United States--Hitler, Stalin, Gorbachev, or Saddam Hussein to name a few recent candidates.  A few fundamentalists thought Bill Clinton might be the Antichrist, but he was more often seen as the "forerunner" the real bad guy, a kind of wicked John the Baptist-type preparing the way for the big apocalyptic show.   And for whatever perverse reason, Barack Obama is seen as the real thing.  Some Christians have turned inward for the Antichrist; President Obama is the darkness (and I mean "dark") within.  

In other words, Ed, don't expect any sort of rational discussion--or even biblical argument about a compassionate Jesus--to convince these folks.  This isn't rational and sophisticated theology is out of the question.  This is pretty much the worst kind of religion that can be imagined--apocalyptic fervor and biblical literalism stoked by the fears of racism and xenophobia--the sort of stuff that makes me think that the neo-atheists have a point.  Wonder why the town halls are so heated?  It isn't that religion isn't in the room.  Bad religion--and lots of it--is present in the room.  It just isn't the sort of religion that you or I approve of Ed.  It isn't about healing the sick; it isn't about caring for the least of these.   It isn't really about Jesus.  It is about wide-eyed fear over the end of the world as some people know it.

And the only thing that can possibly speak to it is sane religion, the simple teachings of Jesus:  Heal the sick, care for the poor.  

People often ask me why I don't blog more often in the crucible of the news cycle when an issue is "hot."  My friends and editors are always trying to get me to speed up--as I tend to be slow with my words.  Last week, for example, I was quiet as the war of words escalated between partisans in the Professor Gates/Cambridge police affair.  President Obama did, of course, jump in the fray with his poorly chosen assessment that the Cambridge police behaved "stupidly," only to apologize a couple of days later and invite the wronged parties to the White House for beer

President Obama's actions underscore my reticence to enter the blog-fray in heated battle.  By inclination and academic training, I'm a historian.  Historians believe that the more time we have to understand a situation, the better.   When seeing the picture of Professor Gates hauled away in handcuffs from his own house, I was shocked.  But I also suspected that something had happened of which I was unaware.  As a commentator, I had a sense of my own limitations.  Better, I thought, to let the picture speak for itself.  And better to hold back before starting to call someone names like "racist" or "bigot" or "idiot" or "rogue cop" or whatever.  The escalation is even more shocking than the original event--culminating yesterday with Glenn Beck calling President Obama a racist!

If nothing else, the events leading up to today's Beer Summit at the White House have underscored the importance of slow words.  Although progressive Christians are known for activism, liberal and progressive Protestantism also is marked by a commitment to intellectual analysis.  As a group, we are often painfully slow at decision-making--sometimes to the point of institutional paralysis.  But we are so slow because we believe that the world is a complex place that defies black-and-white (no pun intended) characterizations.  In particular, morality and ethics are often shades of grey, a shadowy realm of mixed human motives and less-than-perfect choices.  In my religious tradition, moving slowly is a spiritual practice--one that accounts for careful and thoughtful engagement with important ideas and events.

The progressive emphasis on thoughtful analysis is more than a matter of taste or the privilege of educated elites.  It is drawn from--what is arguably the most important of all liberal Christian sacred texts--the New Testament Letter of James.   This week's shouting match is well-described in this ancient paragraph:

For all of us make many mistakes . . . The tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits.  How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire!  And the tongue is a fire.  The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell . . . No one can tame the tongue--a restless evil, full of deadly poison (James 3: 2-8).

The letter's author goes on to say that the tongue is corrected only by "works done with gentleness born of wisdom," by those who "make peace."  Quick and uninformed judgment must be restrained by a quest for wisdom.

Here, at Progressive Revival, Paul Raushenbush and I are trying to create a blog space that reflects the deepest virtues and values of mainline Protestant traditions--a way of being in the world that believes to hold back the tongue--even for a moment--creates the space for understanding, opens new possibilities, and allows us to glimpse God's reign.  Consideration, discernment, and thoughtfulness should never be an excuse to avoid action; rather, they should frame the way we act.  We're not in a contest for speed; we're on a journey toward wisdom. 

In the midst of the fray, I humbly invite spiritual progressives into a "slow word" movement.  Like the "slow food" movement that argues food must be savored to be healthy, so care-filled words also need to be digested in order to be wise, to act justly, and to make peace.  Slow words are a spiritual practice, one much needed in a world of junk politics and faux news events.  Slowing down, guarding our words, might reintroduce a measure of reality into our lives. In order to change the world, we must first learn to bridle the tongue.

Walter Cronkite's death reminds us how full one person's life can be if he puts his mind to it.  For most of us, Cronkite was a news man and the most important anchor person (and most trusted man) in America in the second half of the 20th century.  He was also a man with political and religious opinions. Among them were the importance of inter-religious understanding, civility and religious liberty.  Rev. Welton Gaddy, a friend of this blog and head of the Interfaith Alliance, offers this tribute on KNOE 

Rest in peace Walter Cronkite