I remember first following @bellingcat.com back during the ‘little green men’ drama of Russia’s illegal occupation of Crimea in 2014. What I couldn’t have imagined at the time was that a valuable source of news on foreign authoritarianism would need to turn their gaze homeward.
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The limits of certainty as an evangelism strategy
Ryan Burge articulating a concern I’ve held for a long time about the “doctrine is destiny”1 argument for Church growth:
Burge: I just think there’s a certain number of people who are drawn to certainty, and there are certain people who are repelled from certainty. And what does church look like for that second group, those doubtful people versus those certain people?
The mainline’s always been the refuge of the doubters, who try their best to believe these things but just can’t get over the hump sometimes. And if that goes away, if you’re Protestant, your only option is the evangelical pastor who pounds the pulpit and says: “If you don’t believe what we believe, you’re going to hell.” And the person sitting there goes: “Yeah, but how do you know that?”
That’s what we’re missing: This huge chunk of people who were open to the idea of belief are not going to have an outlet to go to a place where they really do feel like people like them are welcome and the conversation’s worthwhile, because it’s going to be: “Unless you believe what we believe, you are less than us.” And why would you want to go to a place where you feel like you’re less than, voluntarily? I certainly wouldn’t.
I would put an emphasis on the connection between certainty and ‘Unless you believe what we believe you are less than us.’ I think that sentiment manifests most frequently as communal subtext more often than being explicitly stated. This sentiment can go to really warped places when paired with a popular/shallow understanding of the doctrine of predestination. Having grown up in congregations that leaned or were populated predominately by conservative fundamentalists–even if there were statements meant to gesture rhetorically towards “your doubts are welcome here”–in practice what was communicated through the weekly preaching, statements of congregants, and broader of teaching was “your doubts are welcome here, but we’re going to work to excise them as quickly as possible or we may perceive you as a threat.”
Certainty can be a short term growth strategy. It will draw in people hungry for that mental/emotional/psychological security blanket. But I don’t think instilling certainty in doctrinal beliefs is the same as setting someone up for a life WITH God. If the good news (Gospel) is “you can be certain of what happens to you after you die if you believe what I believe” instead of “the Creator of the universe is restoring creation from its decaying state, and They want to do it WITH you” then what you may actually end up worshiping is the certainty, not the Creator.
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framed succinctly: the argument goes that liberal or progressive Churches decline because they don’t hold firmly enough to core (Protestant) doctrines such as Scriptural inerrancy, salvation by confession+faith alone, or Jesus’s divinity. ↩︎
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I Keep Returning to King’s Mountaintop Speech
Civic holidays like the one that commemorates Martin Luther King Jr.’s Birthday provide an opportunity for me to reflect on what I think about the big stories we (U.S. citizens) tell about our nation, and how my views have changed as I’ve aged and the world has evolved. I find myself increasingly aggrieved by how significant portions of my faith community choose to interpret the significance of Dr. King’s legacy, and whether it does or doesn’t influence our mass voting behavior.
As a child of late 20th century U.S. schooling (both public and parochial), when taught about Dr. King and his legacy the artifact of choice was typically his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech and the March on Washington it accompanied. The speech and event were framed as one additional wrung on the ladder of the U.S.’s inevitable ascent towards liberty.
As I got older Letter from a Birmingham Jail took a place of greater prominence. Having spent most of my life participating in predominately white, conservative Christian communities, it wasn’t until college that I was awakened to the many complications and half-truths found in the K-12 narrative I was taught about U.S. history. The letter’s pointed message towards white moderates (like myself) remains an important and bracing critique.
Now, I’ve entered a stage of life where my civic/public consciousness has me turning more frequently to King’s Mountaintop speech. The speech’s charismatic (pentacostal) prophetic edge, and dogged determination to hold the U.S. to our highest stated ideals feels particularly relevant in an era when Federal policy is defined by cruelty and antagonism towards the most vulnerable members of our social fabric. The speech spends time reflecting on the parable of the Good Samaritan, with a small excerpt here:
And so the first question that the Levite asked was, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”
That’s the question before you tonight.
I remain committed to practicing the faith (and still hold many of the doctrinal markers) engendered by my upbringing in evangelical Christianity. To our collective shame, many of my fellow white Evangelicals remain the bedrock supporters of a Federal administration that sees an increasing number of its citizens, other residents, and sojourners as threats to be neutralized rather than people who deserve to be treated with the equality demanded by our laws. I was told growing up that character is destiny when it comes to political leadership, and to see this principle abandoned for political expediency leaves a bitter aftertaste I can’t fully rinse out. I (perhaps naively) still believe the character axiom was basically correct.
May the parable of the Good Samaritan and the public witness of Believers like Dr. King–in partnership with the Holy Spirit–work like seeds sown into the hearts of my fellow evangelicals. I pray they not walk the same path as the Pharoahs in the book of Exodus and instead stop their hearts from hardening further.
Find a key excerpt of the Mountaintop speech here:
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Found through Brad East. The 4 Horsemen of New Theism:
I’m assuming these 4 were chosen because of the presumption they speak towards an academic/literati audience, and their publishing world prominence. I think you could have had Elizabeth Oldfield or Lisa V Fields on that list too.
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When a Christian homeschooling family has to confront mass deportations in their community:
“But also I feel like Christians should be the first people to fight for this,” Ben interjected, as Sam nodded. “What have we been taught our entire life? Feeding the hungry, clothing the naked. This is basic, basic stuff. Christians have always been people who are supposed to be there for the marginalized, the people that are being hurt by systems, the people that don’t have a voice…
…The volunteer work has weighed heavily on the Luhmann family, Audrey said. She worries about the relationship between her teenage sons and law enforcement, especially after repeatedly bearing witness to dramatic arrests of immigrants and protesters.
There have been times where my sons have been in tears,” she said. “I’m having to process in real time with my teenage kids the fact that they are watching absolute lawlessness and brutality and violence and cruelty and no one’s coming to stop it.”
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An important observation from Skye Jethani in his daily devotional this morning:
This may be the most pervasive error made by the consumer pop Christianity so common in our society. It reduces Jesus to a device; a means through which we achieve some other desire. Jesus is how we fix our marriage. Jesus is how we change the culture. Jesus is how we overcome our vices. Jesus is how to find purpose and meaning. Jesus is how we receive eternal life. All of these things may be accurate, but each falls dangerously short. All of these practical “Christian” messages will sell; all of them will attract an audience, sell books, and generate revenue. But none of them captures the true audacity of Jesus’ message because none of them makes Jesus himself the goal.
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A common refrain among seniors who spoke to Bridge is worry that a lack of services will force them to live out their lives in a nursing home — and a feeling they are powerless to avoid it.
I have confidence that this is something the state can figure out if it’s given the scrutiny and sustained discussion it deserves. I wonder if the issue isn’t just a lack of attention but a willful avoidance on the part of the wider public. I don’t think many folks are willing to take a sustained look at the realities of aging and have the difficult debate about what we owe each other as a society when we reach that stage in life.
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Trump administration strips legal residency of international students at CMU | Bridge Michigan
Without notice or explanation, the Trump administration has stripped several current and former Central Michigan University international students of their right to be in the US, university officials announced Friday.
There is a sequence to these moves. During the campaign the emphasis was on “criminals,” early deportations have included lawful visitors and permanent residents. The administration calculates these folks have engaged in activity the public will see as egregious enough (whether that activity is constitutionaly protected or not) to shrug off the civil rights of “foreigners” (legal or undocumented). Now they are accelerating efforts to push out as many non-citizens as possible before the courts step in. This is cruel and capricious behavior.
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The Gen X Career Meltdown - The New York Times
Every generation has its burdens. The particular plight of Gen X is to have grown up in one world only to hit middle age in a strange new land. It’s as if they were making candlesticks when electricity came in. The market value of their skills plummeted.
Karen McKinley, 55, an advertising executive in Minneapolis, has seen talented colleagues “thrown away,” she said, as agencies have merged, trimmed staff and focused on fast, cheap social media content over elaborate photo shoots.
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This Rufo take on the Department of Ed clearly states the ideological project at play.
Pulling this series of quotes from an interview between Ross Douthat and Christopher Rufo. I was listening as a means of trying to understand the justification for all the pain being wrought upon the educational bureaucracy. This is such an ideologically driven take on what a government bureaucracy is and how it functions that I don’t know where to start with common ground or compromise.
It’s the worst sort of cavalier slash and burn policymaking:
Rufo: Here’s the problem, though: It’s very easy to cut external contracts. It’s very difficult to change the culture of an institution and the permanent bureaucracy of that institution. I know for a fact that at the Department of Education, replacing the management within the building does not really replace the broader culture… I just think that there has to be a kind of binary choice, agency by agency. Can this agency be reformed or can this agency only be abolished or dismantled to the maximum extent permissible by law? I think the Department of Education is then in the latter camp. I think the F.B.I. could maybe be reformed. Other agencies can be perhaps reformed. But the Department of Education in my view is beyond reform. You have to spin off, liquidate, terminate and abolish to the furthest extent you can by law. All while maintaining your political viability and your statutory compliance for those things that are essential, required by law, and that are politically popular. You always want to maintain the popularity, but can you take those things away ——… Conservatives cannot fully compete for education grants, or university-level research programs. No, conservatives can’t do any of those things.So we have to figure out what we can do. Where can we have leverage? Where can we take over or recapture an institution? And if we can’t do those things, then what do we have to shut down? Shutting things down is actually a very effective strategy.
I don’t know what sort of objective standard you use to ascertain the level of “wokeness” for any bureaucratic agency. The general gist under the current administration seems to be how quick they are to implement structural change that favors the incumbent president–jurisprudence or constitutionality be damned…
Good policy-making is NEVER a binary choice. It is always a sequence of calculated, often provisional, frequently complicated series of balancing acts that requires an informed perspective on national history, the law, the current cultural moment, and domain expertise of the subject matter (e.g. education, law enforcement, national defense, energy, land management). You can’t summarize the bureaucracy’s value and operation in a pithy Tiktok video, podcast interview, or scintillating video essay–it takes decades of usually quite and monotonous work to see a positive social transformation. That is partially what is so gut-wrenching about what I am seeing happen to the Department of Education–and the federal bureaucracy more generally–I may not always agree with our bureaucratic leaders, but to see the centuries of institutional knowledge and domain expertise demolished with glee or a shrug fills me with dread.
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A piece by @jwhawthorne.bsky.social this week pulls some quotes from recent work by @ruthgraham.bsky.social and Katelyn Beaty regarding whether or not U.S. Christians face the reality of rising ostracization from the levers of cultural and political power.
Here, a lengthy quote from Beaty in Hawthorne’s piece:
“When Christian authors claim that we’re living in an ‘anti-Christian’ or ‘godless’ age, they are speaking less to observable fact than to a perception of minority status and worldly hostility. That’s a visceral emotion, and boy does it sell books.
But when Taylor says ‘secular,’ he doesn’t mean that most people are atheists now or even that they harbor anti-religious bias. Instead, he says, modern people now face a spiritual “supernova” of choices for faith, and that this plethora ‘fragilizes’ the religious choices we make, knowing that we might have chosen otherwise, as do many of our neighbors.”
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The pieces conclusion resonate with some of my own thoughts on the subject:
While authors like Renn and Dreher (and scores of others) are writing about how society is downgrading religion, we’re watching an administration stop humanitarian aid by religious nonprofits and threaten religious groups who do refugee relief. The cabinet is full of conservative Christian influencers. The Supreme Court has taken up a case allowing a private religious school in Oklahoma to receive state funding.
Believing in a “negative world” may just be a marker of where you stand within the broader religious landscape.
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18 year old Nic (a dutiful Republican voter) would be absolutely flabbergasted that an ostensibly “conservative” Federal administration would be cheering on the possibility of deep integration of bureaucratic processes and artificial intelligence. This seems like a bad idea of you are skeptical of centralized State power.
Building on that idea in The Human Use of Human Beings, he argues that, once set in motion, machine learning might advance to a point where — “whether for good or evil” — computers could be entrusted with the administration of the state. An artificially intelligent computer would become an all-purpose bureaucracy-in-a-box, rendering civil servants obsolete. Society would be controlled by a “colossal state machine” that would makes Hobbes’s Leviathan look like “a pleasant joke.”
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What for Wiener in 1950 was a speculative vision, and a “terrifying” one, is today a practical goal for AI-infatuated technocrats like Elon Musk. Musk and his cohort not only foresee an “AI-first” government run by artificial intelligence routines but, having managed to seize political power, are now actively working to establish it. In its current “chainsaw” phase, Musk’s DOGE initiative is attempting to rid the government of as many humans as possible while at the same time hoovering up all available government-controlled data and transferring it into large language models. The intent is to clear a space for the incubation of an actual governing machine. Musk is always on the lookout for vessels for his seeds, and here he sees an opportunity to incorporate his ambitions and intentions into the very foundations of a new kind of state.
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If the new machine can be said to have a soul, it’s the soul Turing feared: the small, callow soul of its creators.
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First, they told Khalil, who’s of Palestinian descent, that his student visa had been canceled. But he’s not on a visa; he’s a legal permanent resident. His wife went to get his green card from their apartment, but officers said his lawful permanent residency had been revoked.
“I demanded to see a warrant or have a warrant shown to me or Mr. Khalil before they removed him, and the agent hung up the phone on me,” Greer [Khalil’s lawyer] said.
It’s giving “first they came for X” vibes.
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Here’s a reminder for why you should be excited for Season 2 of Andor:
The Andor series dropped a season 2 trailer announcing an April 22 release date.
Instead of posting the new trailer, I’m just gonna post one of the many moments of writing that made this show a revelation:
I fear for you.
We’ve been sleeping.
We’ve had each other and Ferrix, our work, our days.
We had each other, and they left us alone.
We kept the trade lanes open, and they left us alone.
We took their money and ignored them. We kept their engines turning and the moment they pulled away we forgot them.
Because we had each other.
We had Ferrix.
But we were sleeping. I’ve been sleeping. I’ve been turning away from a truth I’ve wanted not to face.
There is a wound that won’t heal at the center of the galaxy.
There is a darkness like rust, reaching into everything around us.
We let it grow and now it’s here. It’s here and it’s not visiting anymore.
It want’s to stay.
The Empire is a disease that thrives in darkness. It is never more alive than when we sleep…
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I appreciated this taxonomy of Fascism.
Fascism is a term thrown out so often as a pejorative in some of the online social circles I travel in that I can miss the forest because of whatever individual tree warrants a callout day to day.
I found this essay from Jeremy Rios to be a helpful taxonomy of facism, particularly from someone who holds a Christian worldview. This isn’t to say other takes on facism from a different worldview are illegitimate, but he uses language and framings that I think will resonate with folks from my religious circles.
The article gives a 4 part taxonomy and then gives 3 observations about how fascism may appeal to Christians. You should read the whole thing, but I’ll pull out 2 quotes here–this link also includes other highlights from the essay I found helpful:
In simplest terms, Fascism is a concept of political governance that prioritizes the authority and power of the central government. To render this in what might be an effective political slogan, Fascism believes that “Power gets it done.” Give me power, and I’ll get it done. Give the leader power, and he’ll get it done. Give the government the power, and they’ll get it done. In fact, the only thing standing between these agencies and the solution to whatever problems we face at the time is that we haven’t yet given them the power.
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So, what is Fascism? It is not really a model of governance. Instead, Fascism identifies a cultural state where high level figures bargain with society for a pact of power. Give us power, and we’ll get things done. The bargain plays upon a series of common emotions in the human heart: the feeling of a lost past, the grim realities of the present, the incompetence of current government. Fascism promises to solve these unsolvable problems through the application of special power which must be granted to it by a constituency. These generalized feelings of societal distress are, in turn, localized on a sub-group who can act as a focal point or scapegoat for the problems. Fascism thus comes to life when a Fascist leader sings his song to the Fascist Heart—a heart that is, to be explicit, present in all of us—and the Fascist Heart in turn gives power to that leader.
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M.A.H.A. indeed 😩
Trump withdraws Biden administration plan to set discharge limits on PFAS in water