Is Scott Galloway out of Touch?

For the first time in my life, I attended a Sunday service at a Unitarian Universalist Church, to see Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, in dialog with the pastor. I was curious to hear what this progressive Black mayor had to say to a progressive Northside (White) church.

The pastor began the service with an announcement.

“The Unitarian Universalist Church was established by and for people who do not believe in hell.”

“Whaat?” I was so startled I hardly heard the rest of the preamble. I don’t believe in hell. No one I know believes in hell. But I’ve never heard nor would I ever expect to hear such good news from any church pulpit.

But wait, there’s more good news! The “UU’s” reject original sin, believe in a God who loves and redeems all human beings, and trains congregants in social justice work. These are my beliefs too.

The bias I’ve had against the Unitarian Universalist Church stems from old thinking that Unitarianism is a heretical religion because they don’t display a cross. Where did I get that crap? Since I’ve been attending a Presbyterian Church for over 45 years, it must have slipped into my head when I was half asleep some Sunday morning.

Speaking of old ideas, on Friday, December 5, podcaster Scott Galloway responded to a young man who asked:

“How do I get more involved in politics?”

Galloway said “… because young people don’t vote, old people keep voting themselves more money, right? $40 billion child tax credit gets ripped out of the infrastructure bill, but the $120 billion cost of living adjustment for Social Security flies right through.

…our old people have figured out a way to vote themselves more money, and the fact that people under the age of 18 don’t vote, the budget reflects values, and our values are that we don’t really love our children.”*

This is a typical Scott Galloway motivator: money. He will happily reveal how much he’s worth and how he manipulated the modern system to get there. But his statement pitting the young against the old using the antiquated idea that we old citizens are sapping federal dollars from the young shows a decided lack of sophistication and reality.

First of all, we want young people to succeed. We were young Pete Buttigieg’s biggest voting bloc, long before he announced his Gray New Deal in Iowa 2020. We vote for SNAP and child tax credits. We volunteer at food kitchens, tutor at public schools, babysit our grandchildren and are worried about ours, yours and future generations.

Secondly, we pay. We will pay the government $202.90 a month in 2026 for Medicare Part B, which covers doctor’s visits. That’s a 9.7 percent increase from 2025. We count on the Social Security Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) to offset that Medicare increase. But in 2026, the Social Security COLA is only a 2.8 percent increase, posing a hardship for Social Security recipients who live check to check in this era of (non) affordability.

Third, don’t we all know that the way young people get involved in politics is to volunteer? What? Is that just a Chicago thing?

After 40 years, curiosity brought me, 79 years old, to an unexpected new idea about the Unitarian Universalist Church.

Let’s hope Scott Galloway, 61years old, becomes curious enough to come to a new idea about how the real world works.

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You can find Scott Galloway’s email address here:

*The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway: How to Get Involved in Politics, How Scott Galloway Writes, and How He Follows the News, Dec 5, 2025https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-get-involved-in-politics-how-scott-galloway/id1498802610?i=1000739823645&r=196.38 This material may be protected by copyright.

Fear of Kudzu City

The gardeners in the small neighborhood park I call my own, butchered the beauty out of the spring flowers and attendant bird migration. In their zeal to prune away the dead and diseased tree branches, they yanked out all non-native “invasive” species. This disrupted the seasonal pattern of our expectations. As I wandered through the other day, a neighbor with her spaniel in tow stopped me.

“What happened to our flowers?” She yelled across the boxwood.
“The gardeners mulched it all into last years’ compost.” I said. I don’t know her, but here we were joined by a sudden mutual experience.
“They went too far! Can’t you do something about it?”

Me? I must have spoken with authority about the Chicago Park District’s program to remove invasive species and introduce native plants. As usual, I imparted knowledge based on next to nothing. Last summer as my allergies exploded, I read an article in the Chicago Tribune about the Park District planting more allergen-producing native plants, like goldenrod. A passing employee of the Chicago Park District once educated me on the park’s introduction of native plants, especially those glorious hibiscus. And a neighbor who is a volunteer gardener at the Lincoln Park Zoo spends her summer eliminating “invasives”. That’s the extent of my knowledge on the subject.

“You can go to the Park District Board meetings and ask about it,” was my know-it-all answer.

But Nature has once again reigned supreme in my city neighborhood. On my street, there is no human control over the crow’s nest and its four chicks that are flapping around in the branches. I watch them strengthen their young wings to fly out from their birthplace and fend for themselves. Wildlife never needs permission to be. But it does need protection.

The New York Times reported this week on one of Chicago’s best nature stories. The Lakeside Center at McCormick Place applied a treatment on its glass building to deter migrating birds from banging into it. Last year up to 1,000 birds died in one night at McCormick Place. This year, the deaths, due to the widow treatment, were down by 95%. Chicago’s unpopular mayor should take credit. For some of us this fact alone is enough to vote for his reelection.

Unfortunately there’s no treatment we can apply to protect ourselves from bumping up against the current man-made enemy that is called the United States of America. What can protect us from dirty air and water unleashed by industrial, vehicle and power plant toxins?

I envision a doomsday scenario, a post-apocalyptic environment like “the Last of Us.” Will my city’s native species die off and be replaced by invasive, toxic-loving kudzu? The White Christian Nationalists setting ecological policy have abandoned the Bible as their guide. Genesis 2:15, in all versions, clearly states we must tend to God’s creation.

NIV: The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.

KJV: And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.

NLT: The LORD God placed the man in the Garden of Eden to tend and watch over it.

CSB: The LORD God took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden to work it and watch over it.

NYT: An Illinois Building Was a Bird Killer. A Simple Change Made a World of Difference.

Our President, Our Enemy

At Saturday morning coffee in downtown Chicago, a friend and naturalized citizen joined our small group. They work (or by now, worked) at a federal agency where half the workforce had just been fired.

“Are you next?” I asked.

“I wrote a list of things I can do to make money. Nothing to do with my profession but at least I have options,” they said, “I have EU passport and know some languages. My European colleagues are already strengthening connections between their countries. There’ll be jobs.”

Watching TV on February 28, I was like a six-year old sitting cross-legged in front of a life-size screen expecting it to throw itself at me. The Trump-Vance shakedown of Ukraine President Zelensky in the Oval Office presented TV reporters and viewers with a clear and present danger. The US just changed sides. We would now be the puppet ally of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. The reporting immobilized me. What happened to Putin the mortal enemy? Another historical norm thrown onto the MAGA heap of used-to-be’s. Cafe societies the next day ratcheted up conversations about how to leave the country.

Our President was now our enemy.

How I want to write more about my friend! Their story about growing up behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War intrigues this nosy Midwesterner. But I fear exposing my friend to gotcha algorithms that worm around the internet. I even write “they/them” so the sex can’t be identified.

They said, “Big difference between here and country of my childhood. Before the breakup of USSR, you’d be killed if you wrote forbidden words.”

Alexander Dugin, a friend of Putin’s, on the day of Trump’s 2024 presidential victory, proclaimed that “traditionalism won. Globalism lost. A victory for Russia.”

Globalism has been the hallmark of the devil in fundamentalist Christianity since before Jimmy Carter’s presidency. At my small fundamentalist Christian church in the 1970s, a friend pulled me aside one Sunday during coffee hour. She said Jimmy Carter’s White House Conference on the Family was diabolic. We were both former hippies. We grew cabbage in our back yards. We made our own yogurt. We balanced our immune systems with apple cider vinegar. I thought I knew her.

A Christian convert, she’d been exposed to the idea that Carter would lay out his progressive American family values. Then spread those ideals around the world through programs like USAID.

“Carter is promoting globalism,” she said. “He wants all families to think like him.”

Preposterous? Yeah. I thought so too.

New York Times columnist, David French, is the original Never-Trumper. An evangelical Christian, French teaches history and the constitution. He explains Trumpism from a biblical point of view. Prophesying Christians, Pentecostals and traditionalists believe the Devil is the force behind globalism. Prophesied in the Bible. These Christians tell Trump he’s God’s man to lead America out of the spiritual darkness of globalism, especially because he survived a gunshot to the head. Trump’s leadership in anti-globalism, divvying up the world pie between the four leaders, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, is victory over the Devil. Oh.Yeah.

Long before Trump, when insecurity and doubt began settling in my young joints, I was desperate for certainty. I fell for these biblical prophesies, these absolutes. I sobered up, married and mothered a boy. I worked in a stain glass factory and had a garden. Despite these, I fell into a years-long fever dreams submitting to charismatic prophesying men. When I woke, a Presbyterian preacher told me doubt was good, certainty wasn’t. Putting church friends behind me, I rejected the prophecies of Christian fundamentalism.

Strangely, I thought everyone else did too.

Anita Bryant’s Legacy: Gay Rights Activism

As I was about to cross the threshold toward the elevator with Elsa tethered to my thick gloves, I reached back for the handle to close the door behind me. At that moment, WBBM news radio announced Anita Bryant had died. Out in the park, Elsa tiptoed on the crunchy December earth — a slower walk leading to a longer think. Memories arose about Anita Bryant and her anti-homosexual campaign in the 1970s.

Anita Bryant, a Miss American pop singer who sold Tropicana Orange Juice on TV was so well-known in US culture that her startling attack on homosexuality betrayed her seemingly good-natured Christian persona.

Elders in the fundamentalist Christian cult where I spent a few years in the 1970s never addressed homosexuality. They also ignored any other moralistic culture clash that evolved because of Bryant’s media campaign. I doubt any of us in that community even knew a homosexual. Oh, there were instances of men going off on drug-addled toots and ending up in gay bath houses. They’d come crawling back to church asking forgiveness from an uncomfortable congregation that had no knowledge of gay life. I was never sure what we were meant to forgive since no sin was committed against us.

Bryant, sparked by a Dade County, Florida decision to protect sexual orientation as a civil right, created the Save Our Children coalition to build anti-gay public support. She succeeded. In June 1977, the Miami area voted against homosexuality as a civil right, an act that lasted twenty years.

Fresh from the Florida victory, Anita Bryant brought her teethy bigotry to Chicago to perform a white-bread repertoire including her signature “Paper Roses” at the Medinah Temple. She was met by 5,000 gay rights protesters.

Christian churches throughout the country were called upon to take a stand, including mine. Homosexuality was justified as sin through church elders’ literal interpretation of a few bible passages. It became a disqualifying dictum for church membership. I knew nothing about homosexuality. Shunning people, however, didn’t fit with what brought me to Jesus, namely the parable of the Good Samaritan, or love one another, especially the least among us. I’ve needed that Jesus all my life. Extending unconditional love is a hard practice. In fact, it’s really impossible. I’ve always known it’s required of me nonetheless.

Anita Bryant’s anti-gay campaign invigorated gay activism in the civil rights movement. We had a new cause. We boycotted orange juice. We attended Chicago’s Gay Pride parade that year. We mocked Tropicana’s tagline by wearing t-shirts that said, “A day without human rights is like a day without sunshine.” Gay rights, women’s rights, equal rights, all blended into one big active advocacy movement.

I moved on to La Salle Street Church, which made no small point of accepting all people. Founded by rejects from the Moody Bible Church down the street, these Christians were definitely descendants of the real Jesus. They left Moody because the church elders required blue-jeaned converts to sit in the balcony and wouldn’t allow them to receive the Eucharist. In the 1970s, no one wore blue jeans except anti-establishment long-haired hippies, known these days as Progressives.

The noise generated by the blue-jeaned Christians galvanized the nascent Christian fundamentalists, known these days as White Christian Nationalists.

I’m not sure what happened to separate the civil rights groups. Gay rights, abortion rights, voting rights and anti-violence organizations eventually established their own fundraising machines side-by-side with their own causes. Everyone started marching to a different drummer. We came together to protest the Iraq war and for the pink-hatted Women’s March after the 2016 election. But not all my friends showed at the NATO protest in 2012.

As a straight white old lady, I’ve recently tried with scant success to advocate against ageism. I no longer wear blue jeans. Dress codes are almost extinct. This is evident by Elon Musk’s t-shirt, MAGA hat, and long, black, steampunk coat at an Oval Office press conference.

Anti-ageism is the most difficult cause to rail against. It’s an implicit or subconscious bias, practiced by those who are discriminated against and by those who do the discriminating. Dismissing Elon Musks’ functionaries as teenagers and constantly stating their ages is a display of age-bias. The same applies when stating Joe Biden’s or Donald Trump’s age. Or mine.

“You don’t act like a 78-year old,” remarked a friend last week.

“Yes I do. This is what 78 acts like.” I shot back.

It’s not that age isn’t a good descriptor to place people in their lived experiences. But age as a descriptor is most often used to put people in their place. The unchecked functionaries have stolen my Social Security records inside the US Treasury Department. They are no better or worse than me because of age. They are wrong no matter how old or young they are.

As happened with Anita Bryant, is it too dreamy to imagine a galvanizing backlash? Is a movement forming to neutralize the extreme bigotry falling out of the dirty mouths of Washington DC?

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Click to see Anita Bryant sing, “Paper Roses” https://youtu.be/0UoRKstI8Q4?si=3ar2deoIWIu6YwVN

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Black Hole Jesus

First Holy Communion is a right-of-passage ceremony in the Roman Catholic Church where a seven-year-old is initiated into eating the body of Jesus Christ. I learned the elements of the Catholic service, the Mass, with my classmates in the second grade. The priest transforms the bread into Jesus’ body and the wine into Jesus’ blood. The wine, the blood of Jesus, is reserved for the priest. We the people eat paper-thin white tasteless wafers, the body of Jesus. Catholic children all learn that after we make First Communion, it’s expected we’ll eat the body of Christ every week for the rest of our lives.

“Let it dissolve in your mouth,” the nuns instructed, “It’s a sin to chew the body of Christ. And don’t touch it!”

The pomp and ceremony of my First Holy Communion overshadowed any eww!-ness related to eating Jesus’ flesh. Prim little girls wore white crinolined lace dresses, white shoes and socks, white cotton gloves and angelic white veils. Like brides. Squirmy spit-polished boys wore ill-fitting white suits and ties. Children sang a Gregorian chant, Tantum Ergo, in Latin. The ceremony shined as if the light of heaven broke through the ceiling and blessed us with all good things forevermore.

In the early grades, if anyone questioned how Jesus’ body and blood changed from bread and wine, there was only one answer.

“It’s a mystery,” they said.

I fell hook line and sinker into this ethereal mystical world of Jesus-eating. He was inside me, outside me, all around me, all the time. Jesus, my imaginary friend, was under the bed with me when my parents’ raging drunkenness woke me in the night. And when long-fingered nightmares reached their talons in through the screens, Jesus saved me.

At Jesus’ Last Supper (and his First Communion) before he was tortured and murdered, he broke bread, sipped wine and said, “The is my body. This is my blood. Do this in remembrance of me.” Surely Jesus and his father knew what a theological shit storm this would cause for all time. There is no earthly world where anyone could possibly digest all that’s been interpreted by those simple words.

In the upper grades, Catholic clergy gave fuller answers for Holy Communion, the Eucharist, they called it. Explanations always ended with, “It surpasses understanding.” When I joined a non-Catholic Christian church in my twenties, I learned that Protestant Communion is a public display of piety, not a mystery at all, a non-binding sacramental tradition.

Jesus, like the simple chassis of a computer, hides his infinitely more complex workings from the young in faith. It’s good he came as a baby. People love babies. I would have settled for a dog since I love dogs. This human Jesus soothed me as a child. In the second half of life I’m soothed by and troubled by the man or the myth at the same time. Jesus, a synonym for love, is comforting. His hidden complexities are troubling. Questions arise, starting, but never ending with, “Are you real?”

In Christopher Nolan’s movie Interstellar, a concrete love story moves in and out of a celestial black hole. A black hole forms when a star collapses in on itself, eventually creating a singular point of irresistible gravity. All matter, light, space and time are sucked into it and all instances of time become the present moment.

These days, at my Presbyterian church, I sit motionless at traditional Communion, the Eucharist. When I hear the minister say Jesus’ words ‘do this in remembrance of me’, if I’m aware, I contemplate the past as present, as if in a black hole. The story of the Last Supper reminds me to honor the original Twelve, and others, who were in the room where it happened. They come through a black hole to my pew, in the hope that I see that the whole of the story is swallowed up and Jesus is the present moment.

The veneer of the Communion tradition, like the computer chassis, hides the paradox of a simple complexity. Non-traditional Jesus, that black hole of pure love, that present moment, issues the most complex inhuman commandment, ‘love your enemies.’

Get Up! Eat Something! Christian Fundamentalism and Trump

AMERICAN CIVIC LIFE

By Regan Burke NOVEMBER 14, 2024

Kenosha, WI. Aerial View. (Paola Giannoni/Getty Images)

Hal Lindsey’s doomsday prophecies in “The Late Great Planet Earth,” stoked the born-again Christian fundamentalists in the cult I surrendered to in the early 1970s. One hundred disparate spiritual seekers in Toms River, New Jersey, accepted Jesus Christ as a personal savior, a necessity for inclusion in the Fellowship.

Churchmen directed every aspect of the lives of their blue-jeaned outcasts. Husbands were the heads of the household, women didn’t work. We lived in separate homes but were discouraged from socializing outside the Fellowship, lest we be influenced by 1970s secular humanist ideas — like having credit cards. The proliferation of credit cards, one of Satan’s tools to create a global economy, was a sign of the end times. We boycotted the Bank of America because the bank sought to legalize interstate branch banking, thereby centralizing all the country’s money into a single entity, another Satanic plan, a.k.a. globalism.

Based on his interpretations of the Book of Revelations in the Christian Bible, Hal Lindsey in “The Late Great Planet Earth” sensationalized end-of-the-world Biblical prophecies. He connected them to current events as proof of the coming Rapture where Christians would be plucked from the earth and taken right to heaven, thus avoiding Armageddon. Satan’s plans to form a one-world government and religion, as prophesied, were triggered by the establishment of the state of Israel and the World Council of Churches — both in 1948. Everywhere I looked in the 1970s, I saw signs of the end times: an increase in the divorce rate, recreational drugs, new technology, the gasoline shortage, religious ecumenism, and the birth of the European Union.

When my son joined Little League in the first grade, I sat away from the other parents in the bleachers. I feared the wrath of God if I talked to anyone outside the Fellowship. Church members accepted my volunteering for Jimmy Carter for President in 1976 only because my husband supported Carter. They doubted his born-again bona fides because of his family policy.

After four years, I extricated myself from the Fellowship, left my abusive husband, and drove my nine-year-old son 800 miles west to a new life in Chicago. A group of Christians at La Salle Street Church who had experienced similar religious cults nursed me back to spiritual and emotional health. The ideas of Hal Lindsey dissipated into the ether of bad dreams. After a few years, I no longer looked for signs of the end times.

Until now.

Donald Trump, in a 2017 speech to the Joint Congress, announced he was not the President of the world. Instead, he stated he was the President of America. These words and those of Trump apologist Steve Bannon announcing a nationalistic government free from links to other countries sent a signal to anti-globalists around the world. Alexander Dugin, a friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin, commented on Trump’s 2024 presidential victory, proclaiming that traditionalism won and globalism lost. Alex Jones uses globalism interchangeably with the New World Order and the Deep State. Are these guys aware they’re heeding Hal Lindsey’s warning to resist Satan’s plans for a global economy and one-world government?

In Kenosha, at the door of a new white house in a new white neighborhood with curvy streets, low trees, and developer-landscaped gardens, I knocked on the storm door, bang, ba-bang, bang. A huge white Old English Bulldog slid around the corner from the kitchen. He ran to the front door and barked as loudly as his docile voice would allow. His owner barely held him back.

I shouted through the door, “I love dogs. It’s ok. Can I pet him?” We all smiled, including the dog. He came out to greet me and gently pushed his massive stubby body against my legs.

‘Hi, I’m with the Kenosha Democrats. Have you voted yet?”

“No, we’re voting tomorrow.”

“What’s his name?”

“Arnold.”

“Arnold? Like Schwarzenegger?”

“Yes.” We both cracked up as Arnold dutifully looked one to the other, pleased to hear his name.

“You know, Schwarzenegger just endorsed Kamala Harris.”

Thus, I established my purpose in knocking on her door on a bright white Saturday afternoon.

“I know!” she said. Then she mouthed the words, “I’m voting for her.”

“Oh great,” I whispered, “Thank you.”

As I crossed the street to my next house, a white SUV suddenly sped out of Arnold’s driveway. It stopped in front of me. She rolled down the window and shouted, “I’m for Kamala! Going to vote right now!”

I thought back to her open door and realized someone else had been rattling around in the kitchen. A husband? She couldn’t let her husband know she was voting for Kamala Harris? Is this a sign of renewed influence of Christian fundamentalism?

Anthropologists say that authoritarianism, old-age anxiety, border disputes, memory disorder, pandemic uncertainty, virtual reality, environmental issues, and gender trouble put society in a self-protective liminal state. We now stand in the doorway between the Biden and Trump administrations. The entire Trump presidency may turn into a self-protective liminal state.

Liminal, from the Latin, “threshold,” puts time and space betwixt and between. On liminal days, we often wander aimlessly, unsure where to go, what to do, stare out the window, quiet down. Hush. The past and the future dangle off the edge of time. Do you feel it?

“Why did God dump Trump on us again?” a friend asked, squirming in her liminal state.

“God didn’t do this,” I said. “We did it.”

It began long ago. The anti-globalist cult surrounding Trump follows bunny trails through the woods of end-times literature, movies and evangelists that we have derided, failed to understand, take seriously, refute or diffuse.

Pastor Tom Are of Fourth Presbyterian Church Chicago says, “The church is not always lost in wonder, love, and praise; sometimes, it’s just lost.”

When we step over the threshold, away from our involuntary liminality, into the perfect, friendly, and loving world created for us, we’ll find the wisdom we need to activate our role in the future. Some will join the opposition party. Some will move to Costa Rica. Some will run for office. Some will hide immigrants. Some will help women. Some will march with the saints. And some will find a no-news thin space to wait it out.

While we wait, we can practice letting go of the obsessive hope that the built world of institutions will save us. It won’t. Let it go. Instead, lean on the unseen, the un-built, and the natural world. Eat and sleep.

In the Hebrew Bible, God said to a self-pitying Elijah, “Get up! Eat something!” And after Elijah spent forty days indulging in self-care, God came back and said, “Why are you still here? Get back to it. You’ve got work to do!”

And so we do.

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Reprinted from Interfaith America Magazine, November 14, 2024

The Big Freak Out

Metaphors have frittered away from me. To be fair, they hadn’t much choice. In conveying messages to contemporaries over the past few years, whether speaking, emailing, texting or DM’ing, I’ve developed a necessary plain spokenness, lest the meaning be misconstrued, misunderstood or confusing. Fallout from this mind-bending prosaic language is living at a level of plain thinking, another aspect of old age (I’m 78) that I wish I’d been warned about.

While watching Joe Biden perform at the now-famous CNN debate in June, I came unstrung in the grip of knowing that Biden’s plain-thinking, plain-speaking style was killing any chance of beating Trump in the November election.

“Oh. my. god. He’s like my neighbor Ray,” I thought. Ray, who used to converse like a college professor and remember your name like you were his student, but now he talks only sports and weather. Ray, who cannot grasp metaphors unless they’re baseball sayings he’s used all his life, like “on the ball” or “step up to the plate” when he motions for you to exit the elevator before him.

On an unsually quiet afternoon, that is to say, no sirens, no gas-powered lawn mowers, no garbage trucks beep, beep, beeping as they backed out of the alley, I was studying David Montero’s new book, The Stolen Wealth of Slavery: A Case for Reparations. My book group decided to read two chapters at a time in order to absorb a history none of us had ever known. The premise that the intellect is stimulated through awe and wonder has proven true in this group, with this book. Montero’s research thoroughly tracks how the free labor of Black people in the South became the basis of the entire US economy and her dominance over world markets. His writing is loaded with similes and metaphors.

“The energies of three million enslaved people were organized into an industry, industrial enterprises were increasingly fertilized by slavery, and the output of the system was shipped across the world.”

(All of a sudden, a swift “click-clum” in the room interrupted my reading. I turned and saw a ragged chunk of dried-up old paint on the floor, fallen from the ceiling. Surely there’s a metaphor here. Chip off the old block? Chip on your shoulder? Paint the town red? Naw. Nothing. I got nothing.)

In the chapter, “The Union Must Perish,” Montero included a white abolitionist’s account of his travels to the slave market of Virginia. Published in the New York Daily Tribune in 1850, part of it reads:

“…this was the most heart-sickening sight I ever saw. I involuntarily exclaimed, “Is it possible that this is permited in my own native country—the country I have loved so well, and whose institutions I have exultingly pointed to as an example for the world. If this is Christianity, don’t call me a Christian.”

The emotons expressed are precisely what I feel now that the Trump-appointed United States Supreme Court ruled that the President is unbound from the rule of law and can freely engage in criminal activity. Our Christian Nationalist Supreme Court looks forward to the next president closing the borders to anyone but White Christian Europeans, slashing gay rights, civil rights, and women’s rights, and requiring biblical education in public schools. Echoing the 1850 abolitionist, if this is Christianity, don’t call me a Christian.

There ain’t no metaphor for that.

Me and Jeremiah

Anti-abortion evangelical Christians use the scriptural, “The Call of Jeremiah” to defend their idea of fetal viability at conception. It goes something like this:

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you…”

Frankly, those words take my breath away. I believe in a higher power most days and simple words like those give life to the marrow of my dry old bones. I can feel their power shimmy up and down my spine. My life has meaning if for just one moment of each day I know that spirit, that entity, whom I sometimes call God, has known my name since the beginning of time.

Nothing in those words equates to the government denying women (and men) the right to choose when they wish to become parents.

Christian mystic Richard Rohr teaches “The marvelous anthology of books and letters called the Bible is all for the sake of astonishment—not “proof” or certainty!” He says we don’t read for information but for transformation.

I’m not meant to get explanations from scriptures on how to support my point of view. I’m meant to be astonished. On more days than not, I accept the mystery and power of that astonishment without explanation, without questions, without answers. On some days, like when my body needs medical attention, I dig for certainty and absolutes, even demand them. I throw the spirit of mystery out the window and root around in the soil of black-and-white thinking.

Every week this summer I wake up feeling like Supreme Courts-federal and state—are bludgeoning me with a baseball bat. Their traditionalist interpretation of the Constitution coincides with literal interpretations of the Bible. Prayer in the schools. Public funding of religious education. Dismantling the administrative state of consumer & climate change protections. The license to freely carry any weapons anywhere. Denying reproductive freedom. These and other contrivances are biblically-based ideas embraced by 41% of Americans who believe Jesus will descend on Earth in the flesh by 2050. Yeah. Really.

Christian zealots in every age have found signs that we are in the end-times as described in the Book of Revelation. In my twenties I belonged to a cult that looked for modern signs of the Apocalypse. We were convinced the arrival of branch banking and credit cards signaled the end was near. Globalism was then, as now, a sign. If we had today’s Supreme Court, they’d take up consideration of banning those. The World Council of Churches constituted a fulfillment of the end-times prophecy of a one-world religion. Ecumenism was shunned since it relegated Christianity an equal to other religions. I escaped that cult with a staggering amount of information that took years to dump.

Now comes word about how excited the 41% religious warriors are about the war in Ukraine—another fulfillment of the prophecy of the second coming of Christ.

I know. I know. Who would believe such wacky stuff?

But is it such a leap from my belief that my existence was known eons before I was born?

How I Do Without Hate

As a reward for living through every day since November 8, 2016, I look to Haagen Dazs Dulce de Leche. Each day I try to do without hate. But I judge each day’s news as the worst thing I ever heard. Every. Single. Day. A bit of solace comes briefly through a pint of ice cream.

Doing without ice cream when the emotional alarms clang requires me to Hold myself tight for fear my limbs, my tongue, my head will whirly-gig out of control and irreparably damage my spirit-mind, not to mention my friendships. The Hold relaxes briefly with one simple pint. And then I do without until the wind gusts the whirly-gig back into motion.

Holding myself together generates an inward turn I take without looking both ways. I involuntarily drive straight to the core where I look for Jesus. From 2003-2011 I worked in Cook County government with a lively crew where the listening was easy. I belonged there, with cultures other than mine. God manifested himself through black and brown christs who spoke of Him: Have a Blest Day, Stay Prayerful, Jesus Loves You. Whenever the bosses above dumped demons into my serenity, Big Jim appeared and quietly laid a copy of a page from the Bible on my desk with a comforting Jesus quote circled in red. John 8:10 I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me won’t walk in darkness but will have the light of life.

The Catholic nuns gave me Jesus in grade school. He walked beside me like an imaginary floppy-eared bunny. As a newly-formed adult I moved from certainty about God and his Son to doubt. Preachers told me to welcome doubt, to throw certainty out with the th-6 evening garbage, that doubting God strengthens faith. And it did. Until I started doing my own version of God. I built a periodic table of spiritual elements with blocks of God-info such as heaven and hell don’t exist and Jesus’ Resurrection is simply a symbol of renewed life. Trouble is, I silently scorned those who didn’t believe as I did. When I first met my co-workers I held a colonizing view of their beliefs. Over time my religious formulas fell in the trash heap. As slave descendants, they daily transformed their passed-down spiritual trauma into “I believe.”

Now in my own spiritual trauma I yearn for the comforting words of Big Jim and Shunice, for them to assure me Jesus loves us, all of us, including the remnants of the November 8, 2016 tragedy. I look for faith in my post-work world but Jesus is subtly tucked in for the night. My white-only community seems embarrassed, even ashamed to mention His name.

Well, I miss Him, miss talking about Him, miss Him talking to me through the kindness
and courage of my old work friends. A pint of ice cream doesn’t fill the void but it will do to keep the whirly-gig still until the Floppy-Eared Bunny wakes me in the morning.

Acting Against Type

Sitting in my church pew for the last 45 years I’ve heard from time to time that characters in the Old Testament are types of Christ. For instance, the Jonah story — spending three days and nights in the belly of a whale before the big fish spat him out on the beach is a type of Christ because the tale is a foretelling of Jesus spending three days in hell after he died, then emerging from his tomb onto the shores of Christianity. I don’t know why all this typology is necessary to connect the Old Testament to the New or, for that matter, what it has to do with me.

I suspect looking to the past to explain the present is a natural phenomenon, one we’ve used to nail each generation’s stake in the Oregon Trail of human history. Christian typology fortifies this grand obsession. Just as actors fruitlessly try to escape typecasting by choosing roles that are opposite their types, we cannot escape the age-old pull of seeing signs of our type in those who’ve gone before us.

A cousin named Barb Violi found me a few years ago through FaceBook. My father had spoken of his sister once or twice, but he never mentioned she had children, or that he visited them in Memphis from time to time. When I visited Barb for the first time in her home in Omaha last month, she shouted, “Oh my God, you look just like Grandpa.”

Looking for signs of my type in them, I was hungry for Barb’s memories about Grandpa and our other relatives. There were a few similarities in the dead forebears but nothing like that of Barb herself who is a rabid Democrat, cultivates indoor geraniums, loves her Scottish Terriers, swims and rides her bicycle and has art-covered walls. Her yard is full of birdhouses and flamingo planters. We are the same type

Barb told me our grandmother’s name was Katherine. My father was the type who kept secrets. He’d never mentioned her. She was killed in a car accident when he was a toddler in Terre Haute. My son unwittingly named his daughter Katherine with no knowledge of his great-grandmother’s name. My father’s father, whose looks I favor, had a girlfriend, Stacy, whom my father secretly visited in Indianapolis. My father named his youngest daughter, my sister, Stacy. My mother, who was an east-coast snob, couldn’t have known the connection because she would never have stood for naming Stacy after anyone connected to my father. Barb disclosed that most of my father’s relatives were not the drinking type. My mother found non-drinkers the ultimate in lower life forms. The only thing lower: Midwesterners.

I keep looking for some ancestral typecasting to blame for my body shape, my alcoholism, my arthritis, my murderous thoughts. Jesus and Buddha both taught that we are who we are in the moment, unyoked from the past or the future.

Adhering to this spiritual axiom requires me to act against type.

Regan Burke

Author "In That Number" from local booksellers or Amazon

Tag: Bible