Esoteric Religious and Political Views

When we edit our public media profiles we use that information to proclaim our spiritual thoughts and our political views.  We add emotive modifiers to proclaim spiritual or secular ideological bias.  My circle of friends and family includes many unabashed, unapologetic liberals and many unwavering and consistent conservatives, whose profiles presage all their comments in internet media dialogue.  Some acknowledge membership in a political party without hyperbolic extremism.  Others add liberal or conservative as adjectives of redundancy. Occasionally one will add moderate to party affiliation, but more often moderate implies marginal allegiance in voting patterns, and would deny them a place at the table of either party.

Profiling is usually considered prejudicial for making hasty judgments about others from non-substantive preconceptions.  Profiling in internet media is a method of self-expression.  We open a window to our mind and soul to tell our friends and their friends, ad infinitum who we are.  This demographic multitude, created by some college geek, is now the third (?) most populace country in the world.  We are willing to sacrifice our privacy in a quest for approval and commonality beyond our education, occupation, books, music, progeny, pets, culinary arts, and our voluntary and physiological habits.  We post photographs in our finery and our grungiest, immaculate or disheveled, seductive or grotesque, sharing conflicting first-impressions with strangers we will never meet.

Why?  I can only answer for myself.  The internet came to me after I left entrepreneurial retail and I missed the benefit of internet customers. I miss my USPS mailing list of 5500 pre-sorted, bulk-rate customers, who shared my world at 4^th & Main in Historic Downtown Franklin. Many have died; some are too old to use a computer; many live far away; the store is closed; sixty-thousand new people moved to Franklin and without email, I was destined to premature anonymity. Unless you have lived in a town of 5,000 or fewer people, you may not feel the sustaining elation of knowing people and being known.

With our profile information we reveal who we are in exuberant avowal, protective ambiguity, or intentional omission.  This is who we are, maybe.  This is what we believe, read, listen to, watch, join, buy, or would impose on others.  Under a broad category of philosophy we are allocated limited space for “religious views, political views, and quotes.”  After some thought, I entered rational Christianity and liberal Democrat.  Some Democrats choose to define their party affiliation with either Yellow-dog or Blue-dog for clarity.  Some enhance the image of liberal with bleeding-heart, tree-hugging, or flaming. I didn’t think that was necessary.  One person questioned my rational designation with Christianity.  Was there an irrational Christianity?  Time and space did not provide for explaining my respect for the Unitarian Universalist religion and a lifelong membership in the Church of Christ, and the interconnectedness of faith and reason.  Pollsters will tell you that how often you attend church is a better political indicator than denominational labels.

Those who advocate separation of church and state would not advocate separation of religious views from political views.  We cannot, nor should we want to, separate our principles of ethics and morals from our faith and spirituality, nor from our philosophy of civil government.  I did find some patterns of linear probability – Baptist Conservative Republican, Unitarian Universalist Liberal Independent, United Methodist Flaming Liberal, Catholic Elephant, Bible-believing Conservative Republican.  Some were less specific with – non-partisan, moderate, open-minded, progressive, not quite libertarian, crossing party lines, and sometimes a simple yes or no to religion or politics.  Some posted the assumed generic ecumenical word—Christian.  Some indicated religious views in degrees of alienation in non-denominational transition, or the skepticism of disbelief.

Much of what I write on the subjects of politics, theology, and philosophy is intentionally esoteric.  The long paragraphs, the disjunctive sentence structure, the unlikely choice of words are deliberative efforts at concurrent conflicting ideas, or at least reader perceptions of conflicting ideas.  Media profiling for any author, cleric, or public official is designed for self-promotion to enhance image of reputation and collection of work. Yet it is not ourselves, or our books, or our religion or politics, but rather our ideas that we brandish for praise and agreement.

The reader’s window into my mind and soul is a collection of four [5]books, 94 [372] blog posts, and five emails each month to persons, with or without their approval.  Two frequent negative comments are my being too cerebral and being too non-committal on issues that should be obvious to everyone. I admit to both. My email contact list includes about thirty preachers, a dozen or more college professors, and about twenty politicians, left and right, plus writers and editors, and high school English teachers who are tough critics.

I like to believe my writing is esoteric — something understood by or meant for only the select few who have special knowledge or interest.  Remember, I read your profiles, and you have told me who you are.  From this, I have determined that you are among the special few.

Diametric Certainty

An opinion is a belief or judgment, though firmly held, without actual proof of its truth.  Opinions have incremental stages of development from postulate to theory, to logical convincing conclusions.  Opinions may or may not have populist consensus, expert testimony, or secular or sectarian documentation.  Belief or judgment implies the absence of verification or evidential certainty.

The polarity of debate often ends when proponents “agree to disagree.”  This is usually a pact between friends in an effort to get along well with each other.  Its only value is a temporary cessation of nonproductive dialogue.  Ending debate does not lessen polarity, but enables friendship and civility.  It gives respect and forgiveness to the intransigence of stubborn inflexibility and unwillingness to compromise.  The civility and compassion is validated by each person retaining some basis of sincerity of moral or logical principle.

The agreement to disagree on judgment does not rise to the level of diametric certainty.  Belief is predicated on interpretation from sensory evidence or a body of academic knowledge or popular folklore.  To differentiate between belief and certainty, I will identify pitfalls in argumentation.  Of the three fields of discussion in much of my writing – politics, religion, and philosophy – only philosophy has as its essence the continuity of Socratic uncertainty.  Religion, based on faith, is the greatest source of inflexible affirmation.  Both religion and politics have some periodic measurements of merit, based not on apocalyptic ideology, but on cyclical tangible value or result.

When we combine adjective and noun combinations we open discussions of philosophical religion or philosophical politics, or in contrast, we have religious philosophy or political philosophy.  In either combination, the noun is modified and possibly diminished by the adjective.

There is a subfield of philosophy devoted to the study of religious phenomena.  Although religions are typically complex systems of theory and practice, of myth and ritual, philosophers concentrate on some evaluation of truth claims.  The major religions –Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—concern the existence, nature, and activities of God. These claims identify God as something like a person, disembodied, eternal, all-powerful, all-knowing, the creative and sustaining force of the universe, and the proper object of human obedience and worship (Audi, 696).

Strategically, when we combine theology and philosophy, we remove some of the religion from theology.  Theology implies either a study of religion which implies continuing inquiry, or it is a system or religion which implies some codified doctrinal conformity.  The result is multiple belief systems based on divergent assumptions of divine intent.  Religious diversity runs the spectrum from ecumenical inter-faith interaction for a common good, to genocidal acts of sectarian violence.

The combination of religion and politics is the greater source of diametric certainty.  Politics is, or should be, secular.  Theocracies tend to be oppressive.  Political theory forms the basis of government – monarchy, plutocracy, meritocracy, republic, or democracy.  We establish a body of civil law including mandate and prohibition to protect individual rights and restrain harmful acts.

Questions arise.  Behavior prescribed in systematic religion may or may not be addressed in secular governance.  Behavior permitted or mandated within secular law may be inconsistent with religious interpretation.  Herein is the preponderance of issues of diametric certainty.  Our Constitution prohibits secular establishment of religion and any interference of free exercise of religion.  Secular law does not designate behavior as sinful or moral; it designates behavior as legal or illegal.

Our culture is marked by impatience and intolerance.  We refuse, and rightfully so, to abandon our principles, but recognize the diametric certainty of principles in conflict.   Some religious people tend to consider religious law to be inerrant, literal, inspired, absolute and universal.  Some religious people see a more transcendent deity and sacred documents worthy of instruction and edification, with some acceptance of historical context and human authorship or translation.  Some see truth as absolute; some see truth as the compilation of components which create the greatest common good.  Many find a way to agree to disagree on beliefs and judgments about which they are certain.

____________________________________________

1.      Audi, Robert, Editor, Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (1999, 2^nd Ed).

The Ninth Amendment

Anytime I refer to historical documents, I do so with trepidation.  Philosophers notoriously misinterpret history, and historians have an equal ineptitude in fields of philosophy.  The recent reaffirmation of allegiance to the Constitution has been propagated by expressions of affection or revulsion reflecting marginal comprehension of its content.  We have looked at images of the segmented snake and given rebirth to the Tenth Amendment and States Rights, and demagogic reference to secession and nullification.

The founding of our democracy involved 13 sovereign colonies drafting Articles of Confederation, soon supplanted by a Constitution establishing Federal authority.  In the Bill of Rights, they not only drafted guarantees of individual rights, but also reserved certain un-enumerated powers reserved to the States, or the people.  With our recent emphasis on the Tenth Amendment, the Ninth Amendment has been ignored by legislators and the courts.  It has often been referred to as the “silent amendment.”

The Founding Fathers did not see the Ninth Amendment as creating certain liberties, but rather acknowledging some of the rights that no government could properly deny.  This has been the history of the evolution of human and civil rights in voting eligibility, gender equity, emancipation, integration, and rights beyond the imagination of the monolithic demography of 18^th century political theory.

For example, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments were ratified by the several states from 1789 to 1791, at a time in which the dignity of some individuals was diminished by 40%, for the purpose of enumeration for proportional representation.  That exception to interpretation of the Ninth Amendment was in theory rectified by the Fourteenth Amendment after emancipation.  The three amendments defining or extending the rights of individuals and states are as follows:

(IX) The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

(X) The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

(XIV,1b)  No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of laws.

South Carolina recently observed an anniversary of the “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union” during which prominent political figures were called upon to defend or repudiate attitudes voiced in defense of secession or nullification.  “The guarantees of the Constitution will no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost.  The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.”

Throughout our years in school, and general conversation, we all have listened to a polarized debate as to the cause of the Civil War.  Was it States Rights?  Was it Slavery? This question is a matter of regional semantics, with a nuance of subjective validity, but intrinsically inseparable.

In U. S. history, nullification is a doctrine expounded by the advocates of extreme States Rights.  It held that states have the right to declare null and void any federal law that they deem unconstitutional.  The doctrine was based on the theory that the Union is a voluntary compact of states and that the federal government has no right to exercise powers not specifically assigned to by the U. S Constitution.

The Fourteenth Amendment recognizes, and imposes some restraint, on the potential conflict of rights between states and individuals.  This includes the phrases “due process of law” and “equal protection of law.”  It was passed as part of the three Amendments (with XIII and XV) effecting abolition, citizenship, and voting rights related to race and involuntary servitude.

Those who defend the heritage of the South and its traditions of life style and chivalry, do so within the shadow of the Confederacy with some measured restraint.  We want to believe that racial conflict is a vestige of extremism of another time.  Our attention to the Ninth Amendment, largely ignored by the courts, has raised new voices of state and regional politics.  The conflict of will between master and slave has been replaced by conflict of privilege in other matters of economics, religion, and status.  Many affirmations or denials of human dignity not foreseen in 1789 or 1866, will be continue to be debated within the context of those historic amendments.  We may be on the eve of a legislative and judicial transition from, or toward, the “denial or disparagement of other rights retained by the people.”

Differentiated Instruction

I recently watched a video of South Park look-alikes explaining differentiated instruction, totally beyond my comprehension.  During my early childhood years of learning in a one-room school (grades one through eight) I received a lot of unintended differentiated instruction.  My boredom with single-digit addition and recognition of sight-words was often distracted by some interesting discussion of early American history or the political geography of Western Europe.  In that limited space, it was difficult to fend off information that should not be learned until the eighth grade.  I was blessed to have had a first- and second-grade teacher who challenged me with optional homework beyond my designated grade level.

Knowledge is not only differentiated, but also anachronistically incremental.  I have enjoyed my adult 8 hours (post-degree, but not graduate) earned at Lipscomb University in fields in which I had no previous formal education.  Learning only for pleasure also takes away the stigma of a 3.00, for which I feel no inclination to apologize to my daughters who are quite tolerant.

The accepted sequence of education as a requisite for a career had no meaning for me.  Owning a business on Main Street in downtown Franklin seemed a sufficiently challenging goal. At no time did I think of education as preparation for employment, but understood the imperative of some economic security to pursue education as a lifetime goal.  Of course, I did not realize that until after 47 years, and by that time it was too late.

This paradox of thinking it is too late to learn something makes no more sense than thinking it is too soon to learn something.  The class I just finished at Lipscomb, I took with sixteen young people seeking an education major.  Having watched my three daughters attain education degrees and certification, I felt the pain of their portfolios and years of required courses, practice and evaluation.  I had the luxury of taking the exams and writing the papers purely for the pleasure of writing.  I don’t know how we convince five-year-olds and doctoral candidates that the value of learning transcends pragmatics and documentation.  Academia seems to have greater value in retrospect, than in the present or immediate future.

The myth that everything we need to know we learn in kindergarten has some element of folkloric truth, but is more often used to rationalize arrested intellectual development.   Those who avow that common sense is more to be desired than lesser-practical intellectual skills often do so in defense of skills in spoken and functional common sense.

Our educational determinism is shaped by necessity and expectation. Curiosity and imagination drive differentiated instruction in adulthood.  Continuing education, however, can impose impractical complexity. This puts at risk some decisions, judgments, opinions, and solutions developed from years of paradigmatic common sense and repetition.  It is possible to confuse the interaction of knowledge, faith and wonder. There is an exchange in the trial in Inherit the Wind which raises the question, “what do we think about the things we do not think about.”  I have found that knowledge does not diminish wonder, but only amplifies the vastness that we still do not understand.  Faith is either validated by knowledge, or retained and revered as unexplained wonder.  Or it may, in the absence of evidence, become a logical reason for doubt, pending further inquiry.

The Written Word

Several years ago, at a Dickens of a Christmas event in Historic Downtown Franklin, the Council for the Written Word rented and staffed a booth to display our books and promote our literary projects, including an anthology with 31 local authors.  We were a non-profit organization with our goals – to educate, encourage, and empower local writers and the written word.  We researched and documented our literary heritage.  We have on our website, the names of 450-plus persons who have lived in Williamson County and written and published at least one complete book.

Frequently, people would see our name and for some reason assume we were a religious organization.  That probably explains a conversation that took place.  A lady from out of town, who was attending the festival, came to our booth and asked a question which took all of us by surprise.  She wanted to know if John, the Baptist, baptized Jesus in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.  Did he, should he baptize Jesus in the name Jesus?   Reaching into my Sunday school background, I came up with the “to fulfill all righteousness” response from Jesus, and admitted that I knew of no precedent for ritual or verbiage for baptism prior to John’s baptism.

She had been a Baptist, but now was non-denominational having found something more spiritual, she said.   Among her new-found faith she referred to tongues and snakes, and signs and wonders.  From her mannerisms, speech, and dress, I would have thought she might have more likely been an Episcopalian or up-scale Presbyterian, not someone with Pentecostal inclinations.

Many of our Williamson County authors write in the religious or inspirational genre, possibly half of those in our bibliography. Much of our heritage and current successes have been from historical fiction or non-fiction, much of it focused on the Battle of Franklin and life in the mid- and late-1800’s.  Our Williamson County writers Hall of Fame includes noted historians—Virginia Bowman, Jim Crutchfield, Vance Little, Rick Warwick, and Robert Hicks.

In 1993, when The Council began its research, we found 98 Williamson County published authors.  We published a small bibliography and presented our first Hall of Fame award to Virginia Bowman who at the time was the County historian.  Since that time we have worked with the Williamson County Library to put our bibliography on line.  If you google Council for the Written Word and find the home page and click on bibliography you find the full list of biographies and titles.  This is a continuing work in progress.  You may know a local author whose name is not included in our bibliography.  If so let me know and I can follow up for inclusion.

The first time I put my writing in book form, I was not aware of the vast heritage of Williamson County literature.  We find that people are impressed and surprised when they learn that we have 450-plus authors, past and present.  When I first published my play, To Think As a Pawn, the first question was, “is it about chess”, a logical question.  It was a good title and indicative of the plot, but I don’t know that anyone in Williamson County had published a play before 1990.  For my next book, I chose the title Politics, Preaching & Philosophy, thinking nobody would ask what the book is about.  Instead they have asked, “Are you a preacher?”

Back to our original premise, there is (or was, maybe not so anymore) a consensus that the published written word in Williamson County is either some commentary or exposition on the inspired word of God, or a stratagem of troop deployment and pageantry of the Confederate Army.  Consequently, most of local authorship was religious, or historical and archival narrative related to the War Between the States, specifically the Battle of Franklin.

Persons who teach creative writing often repeat the expression “finding your voice”, which defines your interests, knowledge, passions, and whatever grammatical skills you have found to convert thought to a readable configuration of written words.  I have often wished I were more astute in local history, or trained in the art of ministerial eloquence, to more easily fit the paradigm of local literature.

When you go to our website bibliography, you will find as many writing styles and subjects as you find listed authors.  The goal of the Council is to promote writers and the written word, religious or secular, fiction or non-fiction, poetry, humor, memoir, essay, and sponsor events– workshops, book-signings, lectures, and readings.  I am grateful to the Council for being supportive of my effort to find my voice in a play, a memoir, short stories, and essays.  My third book title was Random Thoughts Left & Right, which I also have not been able to explain, but a lot of people have read it, right and left.

Speculative Optimism

We seem to live in a cyclical pattern of extremism of gloom and doom and fleeting moments of hope and change.  As I listened to the repetition of “the best deal we could get”, I was reminded of a quote from a friend from a neighboring state.  He said their state motto, repeated by repairmen, mechanics, schools, churches, elected officials, and the general population was “you just have to learn to live with that.”

The combination of demand for instant gratification and the fall-back assumptions of “lame duck” acquiescence to election cycles do not foreshadow a doomsday graphic decline of our democracy.   Compromise and appeasement are not synonymous, and both are tempered by subjective critique, with neither being a clear victory or surrender.  Compromise comes from comparative positions of weakness, and rarely from the magnanimity of strength or wealth.

Idealism is expressed in euphemistic absolutes of universal acceptance.  However, idealism with multiple voices of diametric obstinacy is an ill-defined impasse.  Things that we universally designate as values or rights flourish best in an environment of sharing, but rarely prevail in competition for things indivisible or endangered.  The philosophical concept of synthesis, or any viable position between thesis and antithesis, does not find its voice in diametric confrontation.  For example, the conflict between a progressive proposal and the inflexible obstructionist has an obvious identifiable idealist and villain.   However, if the proposal is framed as a conflict between reckless abandon and the austerity of tradition and good judgment the roles are reversed.  Much of the debate about the arrogance of power and the fragile transition to a position of weakness has been either defense or apology for bartered conciliation of uncertain disadvantage.

Much of the debate fails in inductive and deductive fallacy.  That which benefits or harms the whole applies to the individual, or inversely, each individual superimposes a personal insight for governing the whole.  Historically, we have confused equality with equal opportunity.  We often designate ourselves as either equal or unequal to others, and add sound-bite categories of non-substantive inequality.  The tradition of blood, sweat, and tears for economic ascendency has been supplanted by non-productive speculation and preferential legislation.  Some of which are designated as temporary and others designated as permanent, both subject to the will of a transitory legislature.   A rising tide lifts all boats, with some quantifying contingency of weight of anchor and buoyancy.

The optimism of equality or advantage rises and wanes with our status of affinity for, or commonality with, those in power.  In a democracy, the wheels of change roll slowly.  The consensus of populism is usually a herd-like reaction to shared misfortune, void of ideology.   Ideology ensues to assign causation of misfortune to the fortunate, while wealth continues to flow upward.  In this cycle, the optimism of perceived advantage and the anguish of the disenfranchised is likely not in sync with political incumbency.  Supply-side and trickle-down economics neither supply nor trickle. Denial of gratification is immediate; alleviation of suffering is cyclical or even generational.

Two analogies come to mind.  Someone mentioned the truism that if two men ride on one horse, one sits in front and the other sits behind.  This goes unquestioned until you consider who owns the horse, if it is he who feeds and grooms the horse, whether he bought or stole the horse, why the other man does not own a horse, and that riding behind beats the hell out of walking.

The second analogy is the dilemma of a poor fellow who by accident of genetics is four feet tall in a crowd watching a parade.  He, in the biblical tradition of Zacchaeus, climbs a conveniently located sycamore tree for a better vantage point.  The government, seeing the inequality of opportunity cuts down the tree and gives everyone a six foot ladder.  I don’t know that either of these has any relevance to compromise or optimism.

As a liberal, one of several of labels which one might embrace or deny, I tend to be overly optimistic.  My belief in the things I envision, is not diminished in that they have never been, or is it an indicator they will ever be.  I can accept compromise when reality demands some reappraisal of seasonal optimism derived from choices of lesser options.   I think all of us who hold adjudicate positions as unelected trustees of ethics and logic question any trade-off of idealism and pragmatism, which we demand of others, and for which we chastise our own.

Mister Bob

From Random Thoughts Left & Right (1998) pp.71-74.

On a Tuesday morning, Mister Bob came in the back door of our store.  In my best retail manner, I asked if I could help him find anything.  “I just came in to check on you, ” he said.  “I just wanted to find out who that shine was that you were in such a hurry to shake hands with on Sunday night.”

Shine was an epithet I had forgotten.  I had painfully ignored the word nigger most of my life.  In Franklin, Tennessee, most old people still said nigra, while younger people used the term colored people.  Only occasionally was the word nigger spoken out loud.

After a deep breath, a forced smile, and a pause, I tried to recall the Sunday night event to which he had referred.  Sunday night had been the first night of our protracted meeting.  In the Church of Christ, we don’t have revivals, we have protracted meetings.  They are basically the same thing.  A protracted meeting lasts about eight days.  With or without counting Sundays, it would be six or seven days.  The purpose of the meeting is to build enthusiasm to encourage many to be baptized or restored.  This is enhanced by inviting some notable, dynamic preacher.  For eight days, rational or lukewarm theology yields to hell-fire-and-brimstone rhetoric.

The eldership at Fourth Avenue had invited Brother John Allen Chalk to preach for the protracted meeting.  I had never heard of him.  Usually, I wouldn’t get too excited about any preacher with two first names.  After twenty or thirty years in the church, preachers all start looking and sounding alike.  Such was not the case with John Allen Chalk.

In the pulpit he was guarded in his delivery.  His sermons were Christ-centered, with the usual plan of salvation woven into them leading to an eventual invitation to come to the front to be baptized, or to confess some need for prayers and forgiveness.

At the time of my encounter with Mister Bob, I really didn’t know much about this new preacher.  Mister Bob called him a liberal, which to me was a broad umbrella of normality that could apply to any college graduate.  In the short time I had spent with John Allen on Sunday night, I had not detected his liberal leanings.  It wasn’t until Wednesday or Thursday night when he whispered to me aside, “Power to the people.”  This was a period in our history when the people was a reference to somebody else.  Nobody that I knew in the Church of Christ considered themselves in that category.

This was in the sixties and many of us were in some stage of unrest over integration and Vietnam.  I don’t think John Allen or I had mentioned Woodstock or Kent State or Montgomery or Selma to each other, but in the span of four days I had come to believe that in the seating arrangement of the Church, John Allen and I were somewhere on the left in the near-empty pews of liberalism.

But, back to Sunday night, a friend from my days at David Lipscomb College came to the meeting at Fourth Avenue with a group of seven or eight young people from a church in Nashville.  One member of the group was black, or African-American.  After church, we all went to Shoney’s for strawberry pie and coffee.  The seven or eight visitors, John Allen, and I rounded up several others and extended the Sunday night service into the secular realm for a more concise critique of the revealed word, which more often is clearer when discussed over dessert and coffee outside the walls of holy places.

Either fate or the universal appeal of Shoney’s strawberry pie brought Mister Bob to the same destination.  I probably gave little attention to his icy stare at the black member as he passed our table.  I later learned that Mister Bob had moved his membership on several occasions as churches had integrated.  I had not known the depth of his racial feelings.

Mister Bob was a faithful churchgoer at Fourth Avenue.  He was in the Sunday school class that I taught on Sunday morning.  I had always been cognizant of the fine line I had to walk when teaching a class of older people, including elders and deacons.  I had not considered Mister Bob’s scrutiny any more incisive than that of any other.  Any discussion of God’s being “no respecter” of ethnicity, or any reference to nonviolence, or turning the other cheek, or any liberal teachings of Jesus had to be modified to fit into southern tradition and Church of Christ orthodoxy.  Southern gentlemen are more impressed by the macho Jesus who drove the money changers out of the temple with the cords than the soulful, weeping Jesus of John 11:35.

My Tuesday morning visit with Mister Bob could have been an unpleasant confrontation, but we were friends.  Neither of us let disagreement detract from our friendship or respect.  I reached for my mask of humility and innocence.

Mister Bob continued his exploration of my feelings, “I don’t see why we had to invite some liberal preacher.  They just cause trouble.  We just need somebody who preaches the Bible and don’t mess with other things.”

I listened, not finding a response.  We talked for a long time.  He looked around, tried on a suit, and bought some socks and handkerchiefs.  We talked about Sunday school.  He was very complimentary of my teaching, giving me some concern that I might have been too compromising in my efforts not to offend anyone’s traditions.

With his package in his hand, he paused at the back door as he was leaving, and turned for one more remark, ”I just wanted to find out who that shine was that you were so anxious to make welcome.   You almost ran over me trying to get through the crowd to shake his hand.”

The words of Christ insisted that I turn the other cheek.  The fires of liberalism in my soul defied those admonitions.

“Mister Bob, this is very difficult for me.  I don’t know how to answer your question.  But, it is much easier and less painful for me to try to explain to you why I shook that man’s hand than it would be to stand in front of God someday and try to explain to him why I didn’t.”  Without another response, Mister Bob went out the back door without looking back.

The rest of the week, Mister Bob and I exchanged amenities at church and in Sunday school.  The revival ended and John Allen Chalk was gone.  He later left the ministry and became a lawyer.  Our black visitor, as far as I know, never came back to Fourth Avenue.  Mister Bob and I continued our friendship until he died at the age of eighty-four.  I miss all three of them.

On a Sunday night, we had gathered together in the house of God to worship and have fellowship.  Like in early church history, liberal Christians and conservative Christians were in one place, and with some minor differences were of one accord.

Years later, I attended worship on a Sunday morning at the Cummins Street Church of Christ.  I was welcomed by the entire congregation, which included maybe forty or fifty persons.  The preacher, Brother Curtis Cathey, is a big, dynamic man, and astute Bible scholar. While the words are the same, the emotion and phrasing of the black pulpit tradition always seems a little different.  I was very comfortable as the only white person in the assembly.  I wondered if Cummins Street had a counterpart to Mister Bob who might ask who that honkie was that everybody tried to make feel so welcome.  Brother Cathey introduced me to the members during the closing announcements and asked if I had anything I would like to say.

After the basic amenities that I had enjoyed the sermon and fellowship, I related to him a thought that had just crossed my mind during the service.  “I sat here thinking about all the people who have suffered and died to open doors and tear down walls, and I realized that Jesus’ dying enabled me to walk through the front door of the Cummins Street Church of Christ.”

I kept wishing that Mister Bob and John Allen could have been with me and could have heard several voices answering, “God bless you, Brother.”

Class Warfare?

I begin so many of my essays with, “back when I was growing up in the country”, but I have found that this to a great extent is the defining factor in my politics, theology, and epistemology.   I grew up in a community of country people, with some perception that town people were different, not better or worse, just different.  I frequently visited my aunts and uncle who lived on Cummins Street in Franklin.  My uncle owned his own home-building business; his sister-in-law worked in downtown Franklin at the only newspaper.  By family standards, they were rich.  They were also Republican, by straight party-line voting, and also by family standards.  Being Republican was some combination of privilege and suspicion.  And, I loved them, and all their children and grandchildren, genetically Republican for three generations.  I never understood the enigma of being Republican.  Some blamed it on the War Between the States and Lincoln; others associated them with the Hoover depression.  Whatever the origin, the sequence of Stevenson, Kennedy, McGovern, Kerry, and Obama has blurred and maybe reversed the partisan stigma outside my immediate family.

Southern families have an amazing tolerance for class differences, which we never allow to diminish the depth of our love and family bonding.  We loved our Methodist cousins, who had never been baptized, and a few cousins who never went to church.  Country people seemed to love the Constitution and their own unique brand of selective democracy.  Country people were usually content with whatever fate had given them and whatever joys and miseries they believe to be God’s will.  Most country people I knew either sold or lost the family farm and bought or rented a house in town or a subdivision.  Rich people, and college educated people, and country-music icons and executives bought big farms and houses in Leiper’s Fork and moved to the country.  Our young people went off to college and learned to read, write, and speak the language of the realm, married well and found sophistication, and now don’t have a hill to climb or a creek to wade.  Executives, brokers, bankers, surgeons, and health care providers bought some jeans, boots, and baseball caps with some acreage and some fences, and acclimated to life in the country with some degree of rustic pleasure and unprecedented tranquility.  And, we all live next door to each other and we get along.

When I watch MSNBC and Fox and hear references to “class warfare” or “class struggle”, I don’t believe it.  We are a democracy, or republic, and we don’t have a class system.  I watch Tea Party demonstrations, and Glenn Beck demonstrations, and Jon Stewart demonstrations, and know that we are not a nation divided by class warfare.  We are all angry at Bush, or Obama, for the depression, bailouts, two wars, deficits, taxes, and costly health care.   I don’t know how we — rich and poor, black and white, male and female, liberal and conservative– became so diametrically angry for all the wrong reasons.   I don’t know how in a short period of one or two decades, we all came to believe that we are all oppressed common-folk, clinging to our Bibles, guns, values, textbooks, pleasures, health-care, jobs, private property, entitlements, deductions, investments, and God-given rights that we for some reason believe we may be losing or have already lost.

So many arbitrary indicators of the class stratification are not economic.  We assign values along lines that seem to have no relevance to the values we learned in Sunday school.  We attribute virtue to candidates whose demeanor would have in the past provoked God to destroy a city.  I think I watch too much television news.  I watched a television preacher defend and forgive another television preacher whose sin of sexual indiscretion was not with a homosexual or transvestite, but with a Christian woman.  I watched a red-neck preacher threaten to burn a Koran, and a young fanatic try to blow up a Christmas-tree lighting ceremony.  I watched an interview with a Wal-Mart shopper lamenting that nothing is manufactured in America anymore, and all the plants have closed, but she saved two-dollars on a designer dress.   We talk about tax breaks for the corporate CEO, and we applaud the small business man who has survived the blood-letting of unregulated free enterprise.   We vote to cut social programs for the elderly, the sick, and the poor, and quote the admonitions of Jesus about love and charity.

Unlike the great empires of history, we do not have a national religious hierarchy of indulgences and ostentatious metals of vanity.  We don’t have corrupt royalty.  We don’t have a ruling class, or an elite educated class.  We don’t have rich land owners and peasants and indentured servants.  We don’t have poverty, and hunger, and cries for the heads of tyrants.  Maybe occasionally, but not yet a level of pitch-forks and guillotines.

Within our free enterprise system and our commitment to some delicate balance of freedom and equality, we seem to introduce the concept of some designation of class into our political conversation.  We talk about elitism with advantage either of intellect or an inversely common folklore.  We talk about success in the prestige of being part of the top 1% who make 23% of national income, or the hard-working labor of the hourly wage-earner.  We question the intellect of Bible-thumping fundamentalists, and deny God’s pleasure in the secular scholar.  We display crayon-quality placards of misspelled freedoms, while we grant preferential citizenship to corporate anonymity.

As we have eventually learned that being Democrat or Republicans is no longer a logical linear configuration.  And yet, as we make the transition of majority in the House, and hone our skills of Senate filibuster, we have narrowed our legislative priorities to only two.  Should we increase the tax rate from 35% to 39% on higher personal income, and should we extend unemployment compensation for those who have lost their jobs.  We have drawn our lines and signed our documents of intent based on affinity for and aversion to accumulation of wealth by the fortunate few, and the plight of the less fortunate.

We have taught our children that in America we play by rules that are fair, with equal opportunity for all.  I think in theory that is true, but somehow our economic system of free-enterprise has lost its vision of success based on skill and merit.   We have fallen afoul of the historical pitfall of poor distribution of wealth.  Our poverty and plenitude are based not on privilege or birth, but by manipulation of corporate monopoly and financial speculation.   But, I still like sitting at a table at the Country Boy Restaurant in Leiper’s Fork with a millionaire friend audibly pissed about capital-gains-tax, and a local sixth-generation school-mate stopping for lunch before feeding his cows, concerned about too little work in his part-time job as a carpenter.  Those sitting at the table are friends. They don’t always vote or think alike, but they are still friends.