Category Archives: Politics and Religion

Welcome to 2025

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Welcome to 2025. What do you think it will be like?

  • Will it be the most interesting year ever?
  • Will it be the happiest year ever?
  • Will we achieve world peace and an economy that serves all the people?
  • Will the globe get warmer or cooler?
  • Will we heal division?
  • Will we start a civil war?

Here’s what I think. I think our national imagination is moving powerfully and rapidly toward destruction of the current order, whatever that is perceived to be, and replacement, for a significant block of time, with violence, rubble, and chaos. Increasingly I read about people on opposite sides of a sociopolitical spectrum arming themselves, convinced that they must engage in violence either to achieve change or to fend off aggression from the other side.

I see the photos of death, despair, and ruin from Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan and I am shaken by the  possibility, moving toward probability, that we will begin to see the same pictures of destroyed cities and ruined landscape, with the displacement of population, crippling of health, education, and physical infrastructure, and accompanying starvation and disease in our own communities. I see shifting coalitions of armed militia and vigilantes abandoning law and decency to force their beliefs and burn out their hatred on the bodies of the despised and vulnerable. I see leaders encouraging and endorsing this violence, allying themselves with other powerful and narcissistic patriarchs across the globe.

Regularly I hear people talking, in decreasingly hypothetical terms, about leaving the country, taking their money, and running.

Perhaps this is pessimistic foolishness. Perhaps it is my suckered response to media hype, both liberal and conservative. Perhaps it is a manifestation of the fearful little aspect of our humanity that is drawn to look at disaster.

No matter. The important thing today is the choice about how I will live my life, regardless of the cultural backdrop. Will I stand and resist? If so, will my resistance include violence? Will I duck and run, even to the point of leaving my country? Will I stick my head in the sand and do nothing to prepare for a world that I don’t want to think about or see?

I am pleased and comforted, though not surprised, that beacons of light appear to guide us, the brighter for their stark contrast to the darkness that threatens. Jimmy Carter’s death on December 29 brings reflections on decency in leadership, courage to stand against the grain of misused power, and the holiness of works, large and small, for compassion, peace, and justice. Photos of him standing in blue jeans and cardigan at Camp David with Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin or kneeling on a roof with a hammer for Habit for Humanity, remind us of and invite us to choices for light and life, the choice to join and stand with others in faithful and compassionate community.

The film Bonhoeffer, which I viewed on New Year’s Day, tells a story of deep faith incarnated in teaching and action, the gathering of saints who became the Confessing Church, standing aside from and in contrast to the forces of darkness that swept up the German populace in the 1930s.

While I have not been in his shoes, I take exception to Bonhoeffer’s choice to join the effort to assassinate Hitler. I am, after all, a tribal Mennonite, grounded in a commitment to nonviolence. But I am also humbled and ashamed that many, perhaps most of my people in Germany at that time, chose to duck and run, to put their heads in the sand, or even to welcome Hitler’s regime. Bonhoeffer’s example of courage to stand for something so much brighter and better, at a time when that stance meant almost certain death, is powerfully instructive as I consider the offering of my life today.

There is no day when the right choice is other than love – love expressed in standing with the oppressed, feeding the hungry, and healing the broken. But there are days when the light of that choice shines out more clearly because of encroaching darkness. Join me, stand with me, let’s share the strength that, together, can make us that bright beacon today and for all the days ahead. Let’s shine that light as resistance to the power of evil and as loving invitation to transformation, a better path, for all who fall under its spell.

© Jerry S Kennell

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Salvation Is Not What You Were Told

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Jesus saves. Boomers grew up hearing it and seeing it on signs by Baptist churches and on the marquees of city missions. The subtext was this: You were born a “sinner.” You “committed” things that were called “sins” because your nature was “fallen.” Jesus was nailed to a cross, suffering and bleeding as a sacrifice so that God would forgive your “sins.” God needed that blood, in fact the blood of his only son, or He (God, who remains He in the more oppressive parts of the cult) was not going to save your soul and would send you to hell, burning in eternal fire.

Other Protestant denominations presented maybe a softer version, but the intent was still the same. Jesus died for your sins. God be praised, because if this plan for salvation hadn’t come along, there would have been no hope for anyone for the past two millennia. At least before that there was provisional animal sacrifice that counted as kind of a beta test of the system until it was perfected.

Sacrifice appears in cultures all around the world, going back ten thousand years, and who knows how many more, before there were drawings on cave walls and, eventually, written language. The gods and spirits had to be pleased and appeased to assure good crops, success in hunting and warfare, and fertility. And generally there had to be a priest or other officiant who was called out by the gods and the community as an acceptable intercessor between sinful or simply vulnerable humans and the deity. And to this day, there are those who find solace in some form of the practice.  

For centuries, Christian scholars and theologians have argued and refined the meaning of Jesus’s sacrifice, but the central concept has held on tight in the consciousness of the Christian tradition. The idea that his death was sacrifice for atonement has remained central.

That’s a funny thing, and probably the biggest reason that Western Christianity is sliding with increasing speed into the landfill of forgotten culture. This is truly a shame, because this whole blood sacrifice thing is not what Jesus spoke about or intended for his followers. His real message has been largely ignored. This also is a shame, as this message has huge relevance for our times.

Jesus addressed an oppressed citizenry during an era of powerful foreign military occupation and, as now, an increasingly irrelevant religious cult. And his message was this:

  • He announced his campaign with Isaiah’s language about release for the captive, recovery of sight for the blind, and declaration of the year of Jubilee, a season of economic rest and readjustment to make sure no one suffered at the bottom of a disparate social order. No wonder Rome had few qualms about killing him.
  • He spent his ministry healing people, often saying people’s sins were forgiven. This is grossly misinterpreted to mean that “sins” were the cause of illness and disability. He was quite specific that this was not the case. His intention was to buck a religious cult that used this system of never good enough to keep the populace obligated. No wonder the cult leadership had few qualms about killing him.
  • What he was really saying is, your “sins” have always been forgiven. You have not been accused; you have been called. The important thing is to learn from errors and grow up.
  • Healing, kindness, sharing with those in need, and absolute nonviolence were the entirety of his message. Love each other. And when you do that, you, just like me (Jesus speaking here), are a child of the Spirit, a true child of your Creator.
  • To make this concrete, he continually invited followers to join him as a citizen of the kingdom – let’s say country – of heaven. This was not imaginary or symbolic. It was a complete change of life – one that should seemingly have been acceptable in any religious or political context because it was so non-offensive. The powers, however, would have none of it because it put people in control of themselves, outside the system of sanctions and rewards, outside the winner takes all economy used by political and religious institutions alike to keep people subjugated.
  • This turning, this move of primary citizenship out of a state of oppression and into a state of freedom, characterized by compassionate community, was the whole call to and meaning of salvation. Zaccheus was saved, for instance, when he made the turn from a life founded on the economic oppression of others through manipulation of tax gathering, to one of sharing. He was relieved, saved, from the burden of his oppressive way of life, finding true satisfaction in joining a community of fairness and love.

Our times, like many, share much with the times of Jesus. The religious cult – in the current western situation, all variants of Christianity – has become irrelevant, grasping at straws to keep its numbers strong and its economic resources flowing. And we can see government collapsing around us as it jockeys for position in the world and has lost touch with all but an elite that is shrinking in numbers as it increases in wealth.

The genuine religious invitation, the invitation to conversion, is the invitation to step out of the institutional rat race of wealth and power and step into true humanity. Government and institutional religion might choose to follow. More likely, they will close ranks and resort to violence to regain what they perceive as lost control.

The thing about the choice of true conversion is the deep sense of satisfaction and peace found by those who choose to turn. Somehow our Creator hardwired us for connection, kindness, and mutual support, not for an attachment to power and gain which can never be fully satiated. What a joy, to consider and make the turn away from grasping and oppression and toward nonviolent and compassionate connection. You and I are invited to make that turn and live that life.

The biblical narrative tells of two trees in the Garden of Eden. But I believe there was only one, the Tree of Life, with its fruit in every season and its leaves for the healing of the nations. We turned it into the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil when we let fear take control, turning us away from sharing community and toward grasping individuality. The call has always been to remove the false mask of isolation and fear, and to come back to trust in a community of kindness and connection.

© Jerry S Kennell

Jesus Needs a New Religion

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America is not a Christian nation. America was never a Christian nation. The label itself is an oxymoron.

Christianity died, institutionally, when it became Christendom with its fourth century marriage to Rome at the altar of Constantine and Eusebius. And it has remained Christendom to this day, especially in the nation that more than any other conflates its image with an imagined Jesus.

Politicians of all stripes close their speeches with God bless you and God bless these United States of America. Our money, ironically, says “In God We Trust.” The laying of the cornerstone of the National Cathedral, conflation at its finest created by an act of Congress, was overseen by President Theodore Roosevelt, and placement of its final finial by President George H. W. Bush.

In 1630, Puritan leader John Winthrop, who became the best known governor of the Massachusetts Colony, likened his vision of a moral society to Jesus’s description in Matthew of a city on a hill, a sentinel of the kingdom of heaven for the entire world to see. In recent decades, this reference has been cited in the campaigns and speeches of John F Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and Elizabeth Warren, to name just a few. The implication is that the United States is Jesus’s own bright city on a hill, a community of kindness, peace, and inclusion, or at least democracy. This is an act of co-optation, not appointment.

Christians left and right claim this territory for the United States, and even more specifically for their own political community. Conservative Christians unite with one party, mainline and progressives with the other. All miss the mark. Followers of Jesus are completely distinct from the Christians of Christendom, the Christian appellation having lost its integrity.

  • Followers of Jesus know no borders. There are none in the kingdom of heaven, as Jesus demonstrated in his meeting of the woman at the well and his parable of the good Samaritan. Every neighbor is to be loved exactly as the self.
  • Followers of Jesus do not go to war. Jesus rejected violence of every kind in favor of inserting oneself, as he did, between victim and perpetrator, taking the blow even if it meant death. No candidate and few Christians, with the exception sometimes of the small sects of Anabaptists and Quakers, advocate this stance. Violence, in defense of “truth, justice, and the American way,” is central to the American myth, the rallying cry that unifies, breaking down the boundaries of all politics in times of threat. This is not the way of Jesus.
  • Followers of Jesus do not judge others. They know only love. How many times have you heard, “Love the sinner but hate the sin?” Those are not the words of Jesus. They are a thin excuse for exclusion of the inconvenient or despised other.
  • Followers of Jesus do not make, carry, or export arms. Christian America claims moral high ground while arming the world to the teeth, defending supposed self-interest while quietly and invisibly padding corporate profit. Eight out of nine parties complicit in the death of an estimated 5.4 to 6 million Congolese in the wars since 1996 used weapons supplied by the United States. And we continue more openly in our current proxy wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.
  • Followers of Jesus serve each other, not the bottom line. This is the biggest and best hidden contradiction of the American myth. Christians, conservative and progressive, throughout American history, have confused productivity with morality. And they have accepted as natural order an economy that demands the service of the poor for the benefit of the rich. Witness the vast community of undocumented immigrants, tacitly ignored when not openly despised, that cut up our beef and serve our fries, or the global sweatshops creating our comfort and convenience. The economy of Jesus serves people. In an American perspective, people serve the economy.

Jesus brushed aside the Pharisees that tried to trip him up about payment of taxes. The coin, indeed, is minted by and belongs to the emperor. But the follower is called to be in the world and not of the world, living with integrity and vulnerability the citizenship of the kingdom of heaven, a realm of the heart that transcends the boundaries of any nation or empire. Give the empire its due, which does not include one’s service to violence or sacrifice of soul. Give your body and soul to love.

Empire and institutional religion, supposed enemies, quickly closed ranks against Jesus and his community of nonviolent love and inclusion. Nothing has changed today. The conflation of Christianity with America has compromised the following of Christ. Jesus needs a new religion.

© Jerry S Kennell

Time to Reboot Religion in America: Thoughts for Thanksgiving 2023

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A talk given November 19, 2023 at Taos UCC

In 1630, John Winthrop, a lawyer, vested Lord of the Manor of Groton, civic leader, and fervent Puritan wrote a sermon called A Modell of Christian Charity. It’s unclear if he wrote it before embarking on a ship to New England in August of that year, or onboard the ship. No matter. The sermon wasn’t published for many years, and we don’t really know who heard it. Again, no matter.

The important thing is that the sermon encapsuled the vision of the most influential governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company and captured the powerful religious impetus that guided the founding of the United States. Its principles are central to our national mythos. Its doctrines are hardwired into national character and practice right down to the present.

To understand the sermon, and Winthrop, we need first to understand the context in which it was created. Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses in Wittenberg, Germany just over a century before the first waves of English migration to the Americas, and three quarters of a century after Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. The Renaissance, with its revival of classical antiquity and love of learning, was in full bloom. The Protestant Reformation was the religious fruit of this energetic cauldron, and its English iteration was reaching its peak in the first half of the 17th century.

Key branches of the reformation included: Lutheranism, the first small step away from Catholicism; Calvinism, the tradition of the Dutch Reformed, Puritan and Presbyterian churches; and Henry VIII’s Anglican Church, a sort of warmed-over version of Catholicism that, conveniently and expediently, moved the power of the church from Rome to England and allowed Henry to annul his various marriages.

Lesser branches included the Anabaptists, who advocated adult baptism of believers, maintained separation of church and state, and, following their understanding of the example of Jesus, refused to go to war. The Quakers in England also adopted pacificism and focused on the discovery of “that of God” or the “light of God”, present, they believed, in each person.

Plenty to pick from and plenty to pick a fight about. Lutherans and Catholics, in the best spirit of Jesus, drowned Anabaptists, except when they beheaded them, or burned them at the stake. Mary I, daughter of Henry VIII, reigned as Queen of England and Ireland from 1553-1558, returning to Catholicism. In her short tenure, she earned the nickname Bloody Mary, having burned over 280 Anglicans at the stake. Charles I, King of England from 1625-1649 and married to a Catholic, attempted a return to an absolute monarchy. He favored the more traditional Anglicans over the further reformed elements, like the Puritans. Unfortunately for him, Oliver Cromwell’s parliamentarian New Model Army, composed primarily of Puritans, overthrew Charles in 1649. Alas he was beheaded for high treason. By then, however, many of the Puritans, having had enough of what they considered to be the other godless rabble, had largely migrated to New England where they intended to find liberty – meaning liberty for themselves – and establish a more righteous civilization, governed by property owning men of Godly principles.

This stuff sounds almost funny. It wasn’t and it isn’t. These were Christians not even killing members of other faiths. They were Christians killing Christians. And it didn’t stop on the other side of the Atlantic.

Perhaps the antiquarian language of Winthrop’s sermon obscures this for us today. But the Puritans did not want religious freedom, they wanted religious exclusivity. So they came to a land which had never known anything of private property or legal ownership until the Kings of England claimed it as theirs and doled it out in colony parcels to the migrants. Forget the natives (truly they did), forget turkey, forget corn pudding. Here was some real cause for Thanksgiving!

How real was the exclusivity? When Quakers showed up in the Massachusetts Colony, they were expelled. If they came back, they were hung. Not that the Puritans could agree internally on what or who was pure. There was plenty of infighting among leadership and the Salem witch trials outdid all in the desperate striving for salvation.

The Puritans, of course, weren’t alone in this religious intolerance in the land of the free. As a matter of expedience, the King of England granted Maryland as a place to isolate and assuage the Catholics. Maryland was tolerant. Sort of. Unless you refused to confess belief in the triune God. That remained a capital offense.

And the Anglicans of Virginia had it best of all. They forswore the ecclesiastical governance and courts of the motherland as well as the stuffy do-gooders of New England and made up their own rules, just like their good father Henry VIII. Talk about religious freedom. How convenient for the import and enslaving of Black Africans.

An auspicious beginning, indeed, for Winthrop’s City on a Hill and, ultimately this one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Where has all this gone in the nearly 400 years since Winthrop’s sermon? The answer, I believe, can be found most succinctly in the 5 tenets of Calvinism, central to the faith and practice of the Puritans and, I would assert, the backbone to this day of Protestant Christianity and national ideology in America.

All you need is the acronym TULIP; T-U-L-I-P. Cute, I guess, when you think of the Dutch Reformed Church as a bastion of Calvinism. Let’s spell it out:

T Total Depravity – We are hopelessly fallen, start to finish and it is only the grace of God that saves us from this deplorable and despicable condition.

U Unconditional Election – God has known from Alpha to Omega, from eternity to eternity, the names of all who would be saved.

L Limited Atonement – Only these preordained elect are atoned for by the sacrificial blood of Jesus, the finally perfect human and therefor finally acceptable sacrifice to appease a righteously offended God.

I  Irresistible Grace – If you are on that list, you will find it impossible to resist the grace of God that will pursue you relentlessly. But there’s a catch.

P  Perseverance of the Saints – Some may think they are saints. But if they fall away, they never really were.

Put this Puritan theology together with two other key aspects of Winthrop’s vision and we have, I believe, a deadly cocktail that intoxicates us straight to the mess we find ourselves in today.

The first issue is conflation of church and state. Let’s go back to Winthrop:

“For the work we have in hand, it is by a mutual consent through a special overruling providence, and a more than ordinary approbation of the Churches of Christ, to seek out a place of Cohabitation and Consortship under a due form of Government both civil and ecclesiastical.”

Pardon me, but when did Jesus mention the need for either ecclesiastical or civil government? Yes, he talked about the Reign of God, the Kingdom of Heaven – which he consistently said had “come near” whenever people reflected the kindness, compassion, forgiveness, healing, and peace of his teachings. That’s all. He advocated being in the world but not of the world, inasmuch as both government and organized religion represent power structures of this world. Give them their due, the due they demand. Put up with them. But live the kingdom of heaven, the reign of God. Serve all. Love all.

That has not been the history of Christianity in America. Much as we parade separation of church and state in the United States, the conflation is deeply embedded. Every speech, it seems, of every presidential candidate ends with God Bless You and God Bless These United States of America. The slogan of the American Legion is For God and Country. The National Cathedral of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington was created by an act of Congress in 1893. According to Wikipedia, “Construction began on September 29, 1907, when the foundation stone was laid in the presence of President Theodore Roosevelt . . . and ended 83 years later when the “final finial” was placed in the presence of President George H. W. Bush.” Fitting, truly, that both were Godly men of war.

Winthrop’s cooptation of the Matthew image of a city upon a hill is now an almost ubiquitous necessity in political success. In recent decades it has been cited in the campaigns and speeches of John F Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and Elizabeth Warren, to name just a few. The implication, my friends, is that the United States is Jesus Christ’s own bright city on what hill, Capitol Hill?, a beacon lighting the way for the people of Guatemala, the Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Russia, Israel, Palestine, Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Venezuela? You name it. Praise God and sell the ammunition. Conflation, dear friends, has served the government far better than it has served the church.

The second big issue is the misguided use and abuse of sin and salvation which, together, serve as an effective valence to distract us from the patriarchal economic violence that acts as the engine of prosperity and comfort, as well as of economic and social abuse, for the United States and its global relationships.

Personal morality, coupled with perpetual striving forward and backsliding on a treadmill to salvation have been the hallmarks of Protestant religion in the Americas from the 17th century right down to the present. While Jesus never created this kind of angst for those who came in great need to him for healing or protection, this intense preoccupation was seeded by the Puritans and has been husbanded by all manner of Protestants in the following centuries. This strong preoccupation, I contend, has helped allow liberal economics to make an end run around a religion that should have been paying attention to this engine of unjust disparity.

Let’s go back to Winthrop’s opening words:

“God Almighty in His most holy and wise providence, hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in subjection.”

Not that anyone is looking back to these very words for permission, but it is significant to note their presence, right up front, in the ideological root of our society.

This patriarchy of wealth and privilege rules Wall Street, the corporate board room, the boards of elite universities, and trickles right down the ladder to the life of the humblest “illegal” immigrant that cuts up the chicken and cooks the fries for these “high and eminent in power and dignity.” And the shrinking middle class seems deaf, dumb, and blind in its steady slide toward the bottom.

But what does this have to do with religion? First, from Winthrop’s words forward, the disparity has been justified as the God ordained natural order of things. Second, religion ranks right up there in this patriarchy of wealth, privilege, and power. The Catholic Church in the United States has over 71,000,000 members. I don’t need to tell you about patriarchal hierarchy for this one. I will share, however, that I was once part of a small gathering hosted for tea by then Cardinal John O’Connor, Archbishop of the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, at the Cardinal’s private residence, 452 Madison Avenue, in Manhattan. The pomp and opulence were profane beyond imagination.

Next in line, on the Protestant side, is the Southern Baptist Convention, with more than 8,415,000 members, overseen by, you guessed it, 100% professing straight males. While the denomination came to terms in recent years with the possibility of male African American leadership, churches ordaining women are still summarily expelled.

So what’s the point here? Let’s start with what it isn’t. The point here is not that nothing good has come out of either the church or, for that matter, the material achievements of the United States. Who’s to judge the good work of the church, for instance, during the civil rights movement, or who’s to say that vaccines for smallpox, polio or COVID should not have been made?

But it is so clear that our excess, created by our dogged commitment to the economy, over and above humanity and the entirety of creation, is on the verge of destroying all of God’s good work on this earth.

Friends, we are not, we were never a Christian nation. The term is an oxymoron. And our religion has moved far from the bounds and message of the one we follow.

Jesus did not advocate taking anyone’s land and turning it into the private property of his followers. He preached the kingdom, or as Pam Shepherd said so eloquently, the kindom of all humanity, with their Creator, right here, right now, just like in heaven. Jesus did not preach a morality code and work ethic. He preached the beatitudes. Jesus did not preach the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, used since the 15th century right through the present to rape the world and its people in his name, extracting resources for selfish gain, disenfranchising, enslaving or just starving and killing any who get in the way. God help them if they flee to our border in hope of real salvation.

Jesus preached forgiveness, plain and simple, not justification by faith, not predestination, and not election of some fixed number of saints, primarily to be found in the economic, intellectual, and political elite of England and their progeny.

We need the body of Christ to be a real life. We need it to be a strong voice. We need it to be an exemplar of compassionate and authentic relationship, separate from the power structures of the world. We need a reboot of religion in America.