Tag Archives: American exceptionalism

Hiroshima 75th Anniversary — “You stand; I bow”

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Smiling East-West spirit,
You move with sun and Son,
Shining Peace on us.

Like a child piling blocks
Your words construct new dreams,
Towering poet.

Gentle and strong, as trees
Bend gracefully in wind,
You stand – and I bow.

— In memory of Kosuke Koyama, Peggy Shriver, NY, NY

Bombing of Hiroshima, 75 years ago today

Meeting Kosuke Koyama

One of the great pleasures in life has been the unexpected friendship with Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama.

Ko, as his friends called him with great affection, and his wife Lois, a native Minnesotan, came to Minneapolis following retirement from a distinguished teaching position at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. I knew him only by reputation: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Professor of World Christianity Emeritus; cutting edge Asian liberation theologian and leader in Thailand, Singapore, New Zealand, and the United States; author of Water Buffalo Theology, No Handle on the Cross, Three Mile an Hour God, Mt. Fuji and Mt. Sinai, among others; pioneer in Buddhist-Christian intersection and inter-religious dialogue; spell-binding keynote speaker at the Fifth Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Nairobi, Kenya.

The Firebombing of Tokyo

The friendship that developed, if friendship can be defined to include mentors and those they mentor, great minds and ordinary ones, people of stature and those who look up to them, the wise and the less wise, was particularly impactful because my father had been an Army Air Force Chaplain in the South Pacific in World War II.

During the March, 1945 firebombing of Tokyo, the planes came from my father’s air base. Though my father rarely spoke about the war, a sullenness came over him when I would ask him for stories. All these years later I was learning from Ko what the war had meant to him, the 15-year-old Japanese boy being baptized in Tokyo while the bombs dropped all around his church.

Neighbor-Love — “Even the Americans”

The pastor who baptized him took Ko’s face in his hands to instruct him: “Kosuke, you are a disciple of Jesus Christ. You must love your enemies…even the Americans.”

For the rest of his life Ko pursued the daunting question of what neighbor love means. Who is the enemy? Who is the neighbor? Are they one and the same? Late in his life, before he and Lois moved from Minneapolis to live with their son in Massachusetts, he had come to the conclusion that there is only one sin: exceptionalism. At first it struck me as strange. Can one really reduce the meaning and scope of sin to exceptionalism? What is exceptionalism, and why is it sinful?

The Sin of American Exceptionalism

At the time of our discussion, the phrase “American exceptionalism” – the claim that the United States is exceptional among the nations – was making the news. It was this view that led to the invasions and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – the unexamined belief that the Afghanis and the Iraqis would welcome us with open arms as liberators – that captured in a phrase the previously largely unspoken popular conviction that America is exceptional.

In this American belligerence Ko heard the latest form of an old claim that had brought such devastation on his people and the people of the world. The voices from the White House, the State Department, and the Department of Defense, though they spoke English, sounded all too familiar, impervious to criticism and restraint on the nation’s military and economic adventures.

Hiroshima Day in Minneapolis 2006

Fourteen years ago today, on Hiroshima Day, 2006 he spoke to a small crowd at the Peace Garden in Minneapolis at the exact hour the bomb incinerated Hiroshima. His voice rang with a quiet authority that only comes from the depths of experience. Here’s an excerpt from that speech:

“During the war (1941-45) the Japanese people were bombarded by the official propaganda that Japan is the divine nation, for the emperor is divine. The word ‘Divine’ was profusely used.This was Japanese wartime ‘dishonest religion’, or shall we call it ‘mendacious theology’? This ‘god-talk’ presented an immature god who spoke only Japanese and was undereducated about other cultures and international relations. Trusting in this parochial god, Japan destroyed itself.

“Then, dear friends,”” he said to make his point to his American listeners, “do not trust a god who speaks only English, and has no understanding of Arabic or islamic culture and history. If you follow such a small town god you may be infected with the poison of exceptionalism: ‘I am ok. You are not ok.’ For the last 5,000 years the self-righteous passion of ‘I am ok. You are not ok’ has perpetuated war and destruction. War ’has never been and it will never be’ able to solve international conflicts, says Pope John Paul II.”

Two paragraphs later, Koyama spoke in terms that speak to the policy of drones and other advanced military technology:

“In spite of the remarkable advances humanity has made in science/technological [sic], our moral and spiritual growth has been stunted. Humankind seems addicted to destruction even with nuclear weapons and biological weapons. Today there are 639 million small arms actively present in the world (National Catholic Reporter, June 30, 2006). Fear propaganda always kills Hope. Violence is called sacrifice. Children killed in war are cruelly called a part of the ‘collateral damage’.”

This Hiroshima Day I wish I could break bread with Ko and my father to discuss the meaning of it all and share with Dad the haiku poems published in The New York Times following Ko’s death, written in his honor by his colleague at Union, Peggy Shriver, testaments to hope in belligerent times.

“You stand — and I bow.”

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, August 6, 2015

Critique of American Exceptionalism published today by MinnPost

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MINNPOST published “In the 2012 race for the White House, Is religion fair game?” this morning. Click THIS LINK to read the piece on MinnPost.com.

The first commenter on MinnPost didn’t like it. Here’s the comment:

September 5, 2012 – 8:21am.

but you’ve overlooked the obvious.

This nation was founded on the principle of religious liberty.  The Declaration of Independence mentions God four times and describes the uniqueness of America in that, unlike Europe, where power flows from God to the Throne to the People, in America “we are endowed by our Creator” … power flows from God to the people and then to government.

The issue of religion in this campaign hasn’t been about whether the Mormon practice of tithing is one this society should consider adopting (“If 10% is good enough for God it should be good enough for government.”  –  Romney gave $4 million to the church last year) or whether Obama’s connection to black liberation theology and its demand for “social justice” is compatible with a free society.  No, it’s been more basic than that.

When Paul Ryan reminded us in his acceptance speech that “our rights come from God,” leftwing websites and TV talking heads took issue with that.  Some even expressed outrage as if they’ve never read the Declaration.  They insisted that our rights come not from God but from Government!

And as if to formalize their party’s transition to secular humanism this week, we’ve learned that the democrats have removed any mention of God from their party platform.

So the discussion of religion IS fair game in this election, but not in the minutiae that you suggest, but whether the majority of the citizenry even understands that our founding was based on religious liberty and inalienable rights and is codified in the Constitution that exists to protect them, because frankly, Reverand, I’m beginning to doubt it.

Leave your own comment on the MINNPOST site or here on Views from the Edge. See previously published commentaries on the intersection of religioin and politics, and American exceptionalism on Views from the Edge for more on the subject

Republican Convention Religious Crusade

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The rousing video from the Republican National Convention (“Believe”) played like an evangelistic crusade waiting for an altar call.

From the musical crescendos to the hyped voice to the pentecostal elation of the crowd, it was religious to the core. Here’s the definition of “religion” that leads to the claim:

“Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of a meaning of our life.” – Paul Tillich

The makers of the video know how quick we are to shed a tear. Especially when at a crusade that plays all the chords of American “civil religion” as argued in the recent “Views from the Edge” post on American religion and American politics.

Tillich was the first professor dimissed from his university teaching position by the  German Third Reich. Like the Germans at the Service Club meeting in an earlier post here, he knew that religion is not confined to the four walls of a church, synagogue, or mosque. It is the state of “being grasped by….”

What “grasps those who viewed the “Believe” video?
A poor attempt to answer the quesiton appeared yesterday (“Believe in America“). The post was too obscure to make its point. Thus, this folllow-up elaboration.
The god of the “Believe” video is America iteself. It is the god of American exceptionalism. The video stirs the heart with the cunning of Kafka’s Green Dragon and the seductive voices of Kafka’s The Sirens who know they cannot deliver what we long for. Their wombs cannot give birth to any kind of future.

The following exchange followed the earlier “American Religion and American Politics” post. Both C.A. and I see the world as the theater of God’s glory but also as the Theater of the Absurd.

C.A. left this comment:

If my small experience is any guide, you may get hammered on this one, Gordon.  When someone has been brought up on American exceptionalism, especially if coupled with Caucasian exceptionalism, and one kind of Christian belief the three can be so ingrown as to be more than subconscious,  virtually unconscious.  Working together, they justify any negative behavior that the person believes, and cause outright rejection of much that he or she hears or reads about as impossible. …

I replied:

C.A., You just wrapped it all up very nicely. Willem Zuurdeeg, a Dutch philosopher of religion, linguistic philosopher and phenomenologist, concluded that our deepest “convictions” are unexamined – below the surface of conscious awareness, so obviously true to us that they are what you call “virtually unconscious.” The compelling conviction hinted at by American civil religion is what Zuurdeeg described as an Ordered Home , a world order. In this case. the world revolves around tjhe doctrines of white supremacy and national supiority. These are the spiritual and moral centers.

“Views from the Edge’s” most popular post is the one about the Germans at the Service Club.  It’s gone viral.

“Five folks from Germany recently visited central Illinois as part of a local service club program to improve international understanding.

At one point they asked me about something they did not understand:  why do Americans begin so many gatherings with a ‘”patriotic” song, the Pledge of Allegiance, and a prayer?

Perhaps especially because they were from Germany, remembering the horrors of two world wars begun partly from excessive beliefs in the superiority of their nation and religion, they were sensitive to expressions of exceptionalism at U.S.A. sports events and service club meetings.

What Tillich, Zuurdeeg, and the Germans at the American service club meeting were seeing was a religious people hypnotized by Kafka’s Sirens and Green Dragon.

Go to yesterday’s post “Believing in America” to see the juxtaposition of the Kafka parables and the Convention video.

Leave your comment or question. And thanks again for visiting.

Is religion fair game this campaign season?

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Is religion fair game in the campaign for the White House and in American electoral politics generally?

The question put to John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1960 about his Roman Catholic faith led to a long period when a line was drawn between religion and politics. Religion was a private matter; politics was a public matter. Aside from the  occasional story about church attendance and Jimmy Carter’s statement about lusting in his heart, religion in the White House and in American public life was considered off the table of public scrutiny.

Questions about candidate Barack Obama’s religion in the campaign leading to the 2008 election changed that. The attacks came from two sides. One attack alleged that Sen. Obama was a secret Muslim; the other doubted the genuineness of his Christian faith and insinuating that he was a secret Marxist. After the one-minute excerpt from one of Rev. Wright’s long sermons went viral on the internet and on the evening news, the question was whether Sen. Obama agreed with Mr. Wright that on 9/11 “the chickens had come home to roost.” Religion had suddenly re-appeared from the shadows of American public life. The Obama campaign stumbled at the development but quickly recovered when the candidate himself dissociated himself from Rev. Wright’s views and effectively articulated his own to the satisfaction of the American people, followed by a masterful speech in Philadelphia about race in America.

In the 2012 campaign for the White House, do we consider religion as fair game for the public’s right to know, or are we better advised to return to the 48 year hiatus between 1960 and 2008?

Mr. Romney is a Mormon, a leader in The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (LDS). One can argue that his religion should not be a factor in voter decision-making. The distaste of the impugning of John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s fitness for office led, in part, to a hands-off position. Religion in American public life is regarded as a question of one’s preference of cuisine. It’s a matter of personal taste. Religion is about opinion, not truth or reality itself; one person’s opinion is as good as another. For some of us, all that matters is that a person be “religious,” while, for others, religious adherence represents a failure of intelligence. But for all of us in America, tolerance is the virtue that glues together a pluralistic democratic republic. We are not a theocracy. We are a pluralist society where personal freedom is honored, especially in religion.

Is there not, however, something missing in a complete divorce between religion and politics? More than that, the idea of the divorce is based on a shallow definition of religion as professed creed rather than beliefs one practices daily in personal and public life.

There is an underlying “civil religion,” as Robert Bellah described it, which binds Americans together. At the core of it is the conviction, spoken and unspoken, that the United States of America is the exception to the way of history: the rising and falling of nations. America is the exception. We are proud people. We love our country. Whether or not it is spoken aloud, the ideas of the chosen people and the city set on a hill –a peculiar nation with a manifest destiny to bring light to the rest of the world – is the central belief of American civil religion. It is a peculiar unexamined and mostly un-articulated rip off of the biblical call to Abraham. The allusions to it are mostly between the lines. Sometimes, as in electoral campaigns, it is actually said out loud, and in such times we get to ask whether that is what we Americans really believe…about ourselves, about other nations, and about God.

Listen to the speeches. The idea of American exceptionalism (the idea of singular “election”) runs like the mighty Mississippi through the justifications and rationales for American religious, economic, and military expansionism from the earliest days of westward expansion to the “pre-emptive war” in Iraq and the crusade to bring democracy to the Middle East. Anyone who disagrees is a pagan, part of an Axis of Evil.

The subtle and not so-subtle synthesis of religion and politics that comprises American civil religion has always been a fact of the American ethos. In that sense, religion is always at work in American public life. The only question is whether we are willing to re-examine what we believe as a people.

It is not just agnostics or atheists who take offense at this marriage between religion and politics, the divine and the human, the divine and the chosen people. For Jews, Christians, and Muslims the idea of national exceptionalism lifts the nation to the place of an idol of worship that usurps the mystery and majesty of God and the universality of the Creator’s love

Institutional religion and the American civil religion alike inform, shape, and sometimes determine how a candidate will exercise the duties of elected office.

Gov. Romney, a Mormon, and President Obama, a Christian, will represent their parties on the November ballot. The question for the American electorate is not whether the candidate is Mormon, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or none of the above. The question is how the candidate’s religious beliefs inform how he will conduct domestic and foreign policy in a world increasingly suspicious of America’s belief in its unique divine call and destiny. The Oval office is where those dreaded decisions are often made.

On the road to the White House, President Obama has discussed publicly how his faith plays itself out in public policy. Governor Romney has yet to discuss with the American people how his deepest beliefs will inform the exercise of his duties of office, should he be elected President in November.

The closest one gets to hearing or seeing his core beliefs are the frequent moments when Governor Romney deflects a question by proclaiming how great a country this is and telling us how much he loves it. Which may be a clue to what he most deeply believes. We won’t know until we ask.

Nothing better fits the ideology of American exceptionalism than Mormonism, an American-centric religion that sees the Americas as the geographical center of history itself: the location of humanity’s origin in a real Garden of Eden alleged to have been in the State of Missouri and the place where Christ will come again at the Second Coming.  Human history – from the beginning to the end – is a peculiarly American story.  America is Alpha and Omega, holy ground in a profane world. Such a view explains, in part, why the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints is the fastest growing religion in the United States. It puts in the open the unspoken doctrine of America civil religion that sees America as God’s chosen people.

A great fear of people from other nations and cultures is whether the American people will elect whichever candidate for the U.S. Presidency shouts “Yes” the loudest. Galileo challenged the anthropocentric belief that the sun revolved around the Earth. The church found him guilty of heresy. The question now is whether we will continue to believe the myth that the world and the universe itself revolve around America. Every four years we Americans have the opportunity to reflect critically on what we do and do not want to say about ourselves, our neighbors, and the Divine.

A thoughtful, vigorous debate, led by a dogged free press, offers the best hope for an electorate prepared to meet the complex challenges of the world in the 21st Century. The world is watching, and the planet itself is waiting to see what we do.

Religion, in the broadest sense, is not only fair game. It is the game.

Follow the Money

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money - follow the money

money – follow the money

Eight years as Executive Director of the Legal Rights Center, Inc. in Minneapolis confirmed this perspective by Fareed Zakaria.

Money spent on Prisons is rising 6 times the rate spent on higher education  By Fareed Zakaria,  March 25, 2012.

“Televangelist Pat Robertson recently made a gaffe. A gaffe, as journalist Michael Kinsley defined it, occurs when a political figure accidentally tells the truth.

“Robertson’s truth is that America’s drug war has failed and that the country should legalize legalize marijuana. This view goes against the  deepest political, moral and religious positions Robertson has held for decades, so imagine the blinding evidence that he has had to confront-and  that has been mounting for years-on this topic.

“Robertson drew attention to one of the great scandals of American life.
“Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a
fundamental fact of our country today,” writes the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik.
“Over all, there are now more people under ‘correctional supervision’ in
America-more than 6 million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin
at its height.”

“Is this hyperbole? Here are the facts. The U.S. has 760 prisoners per
100,000 citizens. That’s not just many more than in most other developed
countries but seven to 10 times as many. Japan has 63 per 100,000, Germany
has 90, France has 96, South Korea has 97, and Britian – with a rate among
the-highest – has 153. Even developing countries that are well known for
their crime problems have a third of U.S. numbers. Mexico has 208 prisoners
per 100,000 citizens, and Brazil has 242. As Robertson pointed out on his TV
show, The 700 Club, “We here in America make up 5% of the world’s population
but we make up 25% of the [world’s] jailed prisoners.”

“There is a temptation to look at this staggering difference in numbers and
chalk it up to one more aspect of American exceptionalism. America is
different, so the view goes, and it has always had a Wild West culture and a
tough legal system. But the facts don’t support the conventional wisdom.
This wide gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world is relatively
recent. In 1980 the U.S.’s prison population was about 150 per 100,000
adults. It has more than quadrupled since then. So something has happened in
the past 30 years to push millions of Americans into prison.

“That something, of course, is the war on drugs. Drug convictions went from
15 inmates per 100,000 adults in 1980 to 148 in 1996, an almost tenfold
increase. More than half of America’s federal inmates today are in prison on
drug convictions. In 2009 alone, 1.66 million Americans were arrested on
drug charges, more than were arrested on assault or larceny charges. And 4
of 5 of those arrests were simply for possession.

“Over the past four decades, the U.S. has spent more than $1 trillion
fighting the war on drugs. The results? In 2011 a global commission on drug
policy issued a report signed by George Shultz, Secretary of State under
Ronald Reagan; the – archconservative Peruvian writer-politician Mario Vargas
Llosa; former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker; and former Presidents of Brazil and
Mexico Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Ernesto Zedillo. It begins, “The global
war on drugs has failed … Vast expenditures on criminalization and
repressive measures directed at producers, traffickers and consumers of
illegal drugs have clearly failed to effectively curtail supply or
consumption.” Its main recommendation is to “encourage experimentation by
governments with models of legal regulation of drugs to undermine the power
of organized crime and safeguard the health and security of their citizens.”

“Bipartisan forces have created the trend that we see. Conservatives and
liberals love to sound tough on crime, and both sides agreed in the 1990s to
a wide range of new federal infractions, many of them carrying mandatory
sentences for time in state or federal prison. And as always in American
politics, there is the money trail. Many state prisons are now run by
private companies that have powerful lobbyists in state capitals. These
firms can create jobs in places where steady work is rare; in many states,
they have also helped create a conveyor belt of cash for prisons from
treasuries to outlying counties.

“Partly as a result, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six
times the rate of spending on higher education in the past 20 years. In
2011, California spent $9.6 billion on prisons vs. $5.7 billion on the UC
system and state colleges. Since 1980, California has built one college
campus and 21 prisons. A college student costs the state $8,667 per year; a
prisoner costs it $45,006 a year.

“The results are gruesome at every level. We are creating a vast prisoner
under-class in this country at huge expense, increasingly unable to function
in normal society, all in the name of a war we have already lost. If Pat
Robertson can admit he was wrong, surely it is not too much to ask the same
of America’s political leaders.”

– appeared on-line, IllinoisDemNews@yahoogroups.com

Just one country?

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Kosuke Koyama – RIP

The late Japanese Christian theologian Kosuke Koyama (click HERE for NYT obituary) said, “There is only one sin, and it is exceptionalism.”  Koyama was baptized during the bombing raids of Tokyo in WW II. As the bombs exploded and the building burned around the church, Kosuke’s pastor looked him in the eye. “Kosuke,” he said, “You are a disciple of Jesus Christ. You must love your enemy… even the Americans.”Koyama first saw the myth of exceptionalism in the Japan of his youth where the Emperor and the Divine were hand-in-glove. Japan was an exceptional people that could not fail. In his later years, following his retirement from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, “Ko,” as his friends called him with great affection moved to Minneapolis.

During the 15 years I knew him, he shared his greatest sadness that the ideology of exceptionalism he had experienced as a  boy in Japan he now saw in the United States.

Today in 2012 political candidates cunningly appeal to the myth, believing that doing so  will rally true believers to cast their votes for them as the truest believers in America. Steve Shoemaker sent this piece today.

Verse – Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL May 2, 2012

The U.S.A. actually  is just one

country out of quite many “under God.”

It would be wrong to think the summer sun

shines only on our farms.  In other lands

the children grow as strong and bright as here,

and elders have respect around the world

(in fact, in many places they don’t fear

such loneliness and high cost of health care.)

 

 

Other countries are also free and brave, and have fine soldiers ready to defend

their shores.  It’s sweet and seemly that we give

our lives to save our families,  friends and land,

but we must not think we’re exceptional

and forget, too, the international.

The Origins of “American Exceptionalism”

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In response to “The Sin of American Exceptionalism” a comment arrived from a New Zealander referencing an article in The Atlantic on the history of the phrase “American Exceptionalism” and the irony of how it is being used today for demagogic purposes in this presidential campaign. The Atlantic is one “exceptional” journal. I did not know this history. It’s enlightening.

Click How Joseph Stalin Invented American Exceptionalism. Then leave your comment. Happy reading. And Happy Monday!

The Sin of “American Exceptionalism”

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Last night I watched Mitt Romney at a campaign rally in my home town, Broomall, Pennsylvania. What I saw sent chills down my spine. Demagoguery was on display. The people from my home town applauded the scolding of American President for apologizing. No apology for the tragedy of an American soldier(s) walking into the homes of families in Afghanistan to kill. No apology for … well…for ANYTHING. America is the greatest country in the history of the world. We should make no apology, said Mr. Romney.

In light of that speech, I am reposting this piece first published in February. It’s Holy Saturday for me. The one who lay dead on this day was killed, without apology, by The Myth of Roman Exceptionalism. The Roman Empire is long gone. But the myth never goes away. Only the name of the nation changes. Here’s the piece:

Jacket of “My People Is the Enemy”

“The stairway smelled of piss….This [a tenement apartment in East Harlem] was to be my home.  I wondered, for a moment, why. Then I remembered that this is the sort of place in which most people live, in most of the world,  for most of the time. This or something worse. Then I was home.”  – William Stringfellow, My People Is the Enemy: An Autobiographical Polemic.

I’ve been holding my breath, wrestling with whether to speak aloud what I hear and see.

I’m a disciple of Jesus, a Christian, in the debt to the bold witness of the late William Stringfellow, lay theologian. I’m also a religious pluralist. I believe with Chief White Calf of the Blackfeet that there is not just one way, there are many sides to the mountain and many paths on which the Divine Mystery is experienced.

I have learned over the years to respect the multiplicity of ways different sides of the mountain experience the living God. I work hard to understand my Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, and Jewish neighbors. I often experience these discussions as encounters with God whose vastness, like the ocean, is so much greater than any of the tea cups in which we hold a few drops of the sea.

I also know that some forms of religion are just plain nuts. The religion of Jim Jones whose followers drank the purple Kool Aid in shared suicide in the jungle of Guyana is only the most ludicrous example of why we need to join comedian Lewis Black’s raging objection to political distortions of the truth: “You can’t just make s—t up!” Religion represents the best and the worst of the human psyche (the Greek word for ‘soul’).

Joseph Campbell, among others, long ago opened the aperture on my theological camera. He helped me to see that what we are all dealing with, on all sides of the mountain, is myth, the human spirit’s uniquely creative meaning-making activity that expresses both the grandeur and the terror of finite experience. Myth is not the opposite of truth; it is the story that points us beyond ourselves to the transcendent and the eternal.

My way of looking at the world is shaped by a vast variety of voices. Among them are Fyodor Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose experiences of the horror of the absence of God caused them to poke their fingers in the eyes of prevailing religious traditions whose tidy moral worlds turn God into a cosmic sadist.

Any religion worth its salt in the 21st century has to pass through the existential protests of these thinkers and of the shrieks and cries that still echo across the world from Auschwitz and Buchenwald that poke holes in every theory of a morally ordered universe. The Garden of Eden was lost a long time ago and, in the wake of the closing of the gates to it, any religion has to take account of the human history that looks much more like the trail of tears paved by Cain’s slaying of Abel than like two innocent people in Paradise before the fall.

Yet there is a deep longing for something more tangible, more trustworthy than myth. Something one can touch, see, feel, smell – a story that is not a story but fact. The longing is strongest when we experience great uncertainty and insecurity.

With this perspective, I have been looking again at the fastest growing religion in America, Mormonism, and the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (LDS).

My first experience with the Mormons came quite by accident thirty years ago. I was riding a bus in New York City on my way uptown to visit African-American theologian James Cone at Union Theological Seminary in Harlem when I noticed the sign “Mormon Visitation Center.”  Already stressed by an unfamiliar transit system and feeling quite alone, I decided to get off the bus and take the tour.

Unlike the streets outside that were filled with trash and lit by flashing neon signs, the Visitation Center was spick-and-span. Everything was in perfect order, complete with a hologram of a Mormon family in a tranquil woods sitting in a circle, listening to the white upper-middle-class family’s father sitting on a stump higher than the other members of the family, reading from the Book of Mormon to an enthralled wife and two perfect, obedient, happy children. The hologram elicited two responses. One was amazement. I had never seen or even heard of a hologram. The other was a sense of outrage at the perpetration of a promise that was, in short, nothing but a hologram, the illusionary projection of someone’s idea of Eden that would strike a chord with visitors who long for the lost woods of the Garden of Eden. It offered a world of perfection: orderly, tidy, white, rural – nothing like the urban world on the street outside – the antidote to the realities and complexities of life in New York City.

When I left the Mormon Visitation Center it never crossed my mind that the Mormon vision or mythology would become the fastest growing mythology in America in the 21st Century. I was relieved to get back on the bus on my way to Harlem.

I ask myself now why this is so. I look again at Mormon beliefs and practices to try to understand.

In Mormon teaching, the Garden of Eden was a historical place, and it was not in the Mesopotamian Valley by the Euphrates River, as in the original biblical myth of Genesis. It was in North America…in Missouri.

“According to Joseph Smith [Mormonism’s founder] the Garden of Eden was located in Jackson County, Missouri and following his expulsion from the Garden, Adam traveled northward to a place near modern-day Gallatin, Missouri. Mormon Apostle Orson Pratt stated that the name Adam-ondi-Ahman “is in the original language spoken by Adam, as revealed to the Prophet Joseph” (Journal of Discourses 18:343) – Bill McKeever, Mormon Research Ministry.

It is to this very spot of physical geography that Jesus will return at the Second Coming. None of this is in the realm of myth. It’s fact. You can go there to touch it and  walk on it, knowing that Adam was there long before you and that, after you have walked there, it will prove to be the epicenter of the universe, the very spot where Christ will return.

Why is the Mormon myth gaining such traction in America? And why would I break the code of silence, the well-advised reticence to those of us who share White Calf’s belief that the Divine Mystery is known differently on different sides of the mountain?

Some things are too important to leave unaddressed. The Mormon mythology is quintessentially American.

The myth that America is the center of transcendent goodness and power, the world’s epicenter, the original Garden of Eden and the place of Christ’s return, the people of “Manifest Destiny”, the one exception to the rising and falling of empires and nations, is losing its hold on us at home and abroad. We are losing our sense of innocence. Yet there lurks the nostalgia for the secure home provided by the illegitimate marriage of Jesus’ gospel of the Kingdom of God with America, “the City set upon a hill” of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and of John Winthrop’s sermon to English settlers on their voyage to the new world.

As Nietzsche knew, such gods don’t die easily, even when they’re already dead. When the town crier takes his lantern into the darkened town square at midnight crying “God is dead! God is dead!” in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, the rest of the town regarded him as a madman. But it would be only a matter of time before the news would reach their ears.  It was the god of Western civilization that Nietzsche’s madman pronounced dead.

When something dear to us dies, especially when it is the prevailing religious myth of a nation about its own holiness and invulnerability, we become like starving people who continue to look in the same old bare cupboard for bread.

What better place to go than the reassurance that America is still the center – the ancestral home of a real man named Adam, who came complete with his own (now lost language, the special place to which Jesus (who visited the lost tribe of Israel in the Americas between his resurrection and bodily ascension into heaven) will return? When the Christian story the story is concretized to a finite, mortal place, it power as myth – pointing us beyond ourselves to the transcendent and the eternal – is not only lost but turned on its head.

There are many sides of the mountain, and it behooves all of us to approach people of different religious traditions with open ears and open minds. But approaching another’s religious beliefs respectfully does not require that we pretend not to see what we see or that we conclude that all religions are really the same or that one opinion is as good as another in the free market of religious truth claims. “You can’t just make stuff up!”

Let me say without hesitation that what I see in Mormonism is but the most exaggerated illustration of the idolization of the nation that includes so much of the American churches of whatever stripe where the nation is enshrined as God and where patriotism is the unspoken highest virtue with the cross wrapped in a flag.

The American wars of foreign intervention in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan could not have happened without this widespread faith in American goodness and exceptionalism. It is the cardinal sin that afflicts us across all denominational and religious lines. Whenever the Jesus executed by the Roman Empire becomes the Imperial King of a new empire, those who continue to hear the shrieks and cries of the world that suffers – and who continue to smell the piss on the stairway in the place we call “home”- are obliged to break the silence, violate the code, and get back on the bus to Harlem.

“Get off my corner!”

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Sen Joe McCarthy purging America of disbelieversGordon C. Stewart (copyright)

I’m sitting calmly in my office when the phone rings. It’s a parishioner who lives near the downtown post office. “I don’t know what’s happening,” she says, “but there’s some kind of ruckus on the corner. There’s some kind of booth on the corner.”

I drive to the Post Office. I park the car half a block away and see a large booth on the street corner. The woman handing out literature is yelling at a man who’s crossing the street, and he’s yelling back. I can’t hear what they’re saying until I draw closer.  A man crossing the street to get away from the booth is shouting over his shoulder. “You’re not only anti-Semitic! You’re anti-American!”

The booth features an eight-foot tall photograph of the President of the United States. But this is no ordinary photograph. There’s a mustache imposed on President Obama’s picture, the mustache of Adolf Hitler and a call for his impeachment, “Du mp Obama!”

I approach the booth.  “Just another Jew,” says the woman.

“What’s happening?” I ask.

She slides a flyer toward me across the counter. “Read it,” she says. I put my finger on the mustache. “You don’t want to hear what we have to say. You’re a spy!” she says as she steps backward, tilts her head in the air, and bellows out “O beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesty, Above the fruited plain. America!  America! God shed His grace on thee….” But before she sings the last line of the stanza – “and crown thy good with brotherhood… – she stops and orders me off her corner. “Get off my corner!”

She is carrying the message of Lyndon LaRouche, a perpetual candidate for President whose only consistency over a long checkered history of ideological swings on the political spectrum is the red-hot lava of righteous rage.

The behavior of the woman at the Post Office, like that of the Florida pastor whose threat to burn Qur’ans nearly set the world on fire several years ago, is bizarre. But the rage she expresses is not unique to her. Because it is so outrageous, it shines a light into the darkness of the widespread incivility of our time, an incivility that erupts from a core conviction hidden below the surface of our consciousness.

We’re street brawling over what kind of America we will be, and “Can’t we all just get along”- the plea of Rodney King as he witnessed the Los Angeles riots following the “innocent” verdict  exonerating the police officers whose beatings of him had been aired repeatedly on national television– is long forgotten. We’re dividing ourselves into true believers and heretics, patriots and traitors, suspicious of each other all the way to the White House.

This is not new. This volcano of anger erupted in the trial of Anne Hutchinson (1637), banished by the court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony as “a woman not fit for our society” who, when banished, went on to co-found the State of Rhode Island. It erupted in the execution of Mary Dyer, a Quaker hanged for heresy in 1670, and in the Salem Witch Trials. The horrors of powerful religious dogmatism led the Founders of the new American republic to write into the constitution that there would be no established religion. The American republic would a secular republic with freedom of religious expression. It would not be a theocracy.

As the new nation was being conceived, demagoguery often replaced politics, i.e. the art of compromise, as it often does now.  One does not compromise with the enemy. One eliminates him.   Rodney King’s plea is regarded as the way of the ill-informed, cowards, heretics, and Anti-Americans.

The lava of anger originates from a hidden, unexamined conviction that the United States is the chosen people, the messianic people whose job is to eliminate evil within and without in the war of good against evil. It is an idea born of the rape of the Judeo-Christian tradition by nationalism which installs America as the exception to history, the nation divinely ordained to banish Anne Hutchinson in 1637, hang Mary Dyer in 1670, and destroy the reputations of decent people as un-American in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s purge of secret communists in the early 1950s. It’s the belief that America is the exception…and that the real America is only some of us, the righteous believers.

In the unspoken consciousness of our collective memory, “You are the light of the world” becomes the declaration of fact spoken about America, not an itinerant preacher’s call to a small band of first-century disciples to persist in the hard politics of love and peace in a time of hate and violence. The ensuing lines from the primary text, The Sermon on the Mount – “You have heard that it was said, ‘You must love your neighbor as yourself,’ but I say to you, love your enemy and do good to those who persecute you” – are forgotten, ignored, torn out, blacked out or burned on the altar of messianic nationalism.

Even more ironic is that those who attack others, including a sitting president, as un-American – i.e. heretics  who do not bow to the idea of America as the collective messiah  of history– scream against government and taxes as enemies, socialist intrusions on their individual freedom to hoard what is theirs.  The biblical city is no longer a community of sharing of the wealth and care for the least; it becomes a sandbox of greed and competition where the highest value is my freedom to get and keep what is mine.

The irony is that in the minds and hearts of those who have been raped, “America the beautiful…God shed his grace on thee…” is not a statement of aspiration but of fact.  And the prayer “God mend thine every flaw” –  the flaws of selfishness and greed, our meanness to each other, our name calling and stereotyping, our entrenched partisanship, our collective global nationalist arrogance – become a distant memory of a censored sentiment. In times like these when ugliness replaces beauty, America
the Beautiful is, as it always has been, a courageous aspiration and prayer for sanity and the ancient wisdom of the Letter of James that calls us all to engage each other and the world of nations differently: “The fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.”

Elie Wiesel on Mormon Proxy Baptisms

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Elie Wiesel, Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize winning author and survivor of the Holocaust, has called on Mitt Romney to join him in calling on the Church of Latter Day Saints (“Mormons”) to stop baptizing Jews who have died.  I wrote the following comment on the Huffington Post story:

We’re taught, and rightly so, to be respectful of religions and views different from our own. But that does not erase the responsibility to think critically about one’s beliefs and practices or those of others. I have the greatest respect for Elie Wiesel and am grateful to him for exposing a practice that insults every Jew, every Christian, every Muslim, every Buddhist, everyone who could not in good conscience embrace any religion at all, by imposing Mormon baptism. Nothing could be more arrogant. The proxy baptisms are not the only beliefs and practices that deserve thoughtful examination. More troublesome to me is the underlying Mormon assumptions that make the United States of America the very center of all human history – the alleged geography of a real Garden of Eden (in Missouri) and of the Second Coming of Christ (also in Missouri). As much as the proxy baptisms, those beliefs should send chills down the spines of everyone whose God belongs to no one nation, no one culture, no one religion – the God of the heavens and the Earth “Whose ways are not our ways and Whose thoughts are not our thoughts.”

An earlier commentary on the matter (posted earlier) addresses the matter moer fully. It’s a reflection that includes a visit to the Mormon Visitation Center in NYC. Let me know what you think.

The God of American Exceptionalism

Gordon C. Stewart          February 7, 2012

Jacket of My People Is the Enemy

“The stairway smelled of piss….

This [a tenement apartment in East Harlem] was to be my home.  I wondered, for a moment, why. Then I remembered that this is the sort of place in which most people live, in most of the world, for most of the time. This or something worse. Then I was home.”  – William Stringfellow, My People Is the Enemy: An Autobiographical Polemic.

I’ve been holding my breath, wrestling with whether to speak aloud what I hear and see.

I’m a disciple of Jesus, a Christian, in the debt to the bold witness of the late William Stringfellow, lay theologian. I’m also a religious pluralist. I believe with Chief White Calf of the Blackfeet that there is not just one way, there are many sides to the mountain and many paths on which the Divine Mystery is experienced.

I have learned over the years to respect the multiplicity of ways different sides of the mountain experience the living God. I work hard to understand my Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, and Jewish neighbors. I often experience these discussions as encounters with God whose vastness, like the ocean, is so much greater than any of the tea cups in which we hold a few drops of the sea.

I also know that some forms of religion are just plain nuts. The religion of Jim Jones whose followers drank the purple Kool Aid in shared suicide in the jungle of Guyana is only the most ludicrous example of why we need to join comedian Lewis Black’s raging objection to political distortions of the truth: “You can’t just make s—t up!” Religion represents the best and the worst of the human psyche (the Greek word for ‘soul’).

Joseph Campbell, among others, long ago opened the aperture on my theological camera. He helped me to see that what we are all dealing with, on all sides of the mountain, is myth, the human spirit’s uniquely creative meaning-making activity that expresses both the grandeur and the terror of finite experience. Myth is not the opposite of truth; it is the story that points us beyond ourselves to the transcendent and the eternal.

My way of looking at the world is shaped by a vast variety of voices. Among them are Fyodor Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose experiences of the horror of the absence of God caused them to poke their fingers in the eyes of prevailing religious traditions whose tidy moral worlds turn God into a cosmic sadist.

Any religion worth its salt in the 21st century has to pass through the existential protests of these thinkers and of the shrieks and cries that still echo across the world from Auschwitz and Buchenwald that poke holes in every theory of a morally ordered universe. The Garden of Eden was lost a long time ago and, in the wake of the closing of the gates to it, any religion has to take account of the human history that looks much more like the trail of tears paved by Cain’s slaying of Abel than like two innocent people in Paradise before the fall.

Yet there is a deep longing for something more tangible, more trustworthy than myth. Something one can touch, see, feel, smell – a story that is not a story but fact. The longing is strongest when we experience great uncertainty and insecurity.

With this perspective, I have been looking again at the fastest growing religion in America, Mormonism, and the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (LDS).

My first experience with the Mormons came quite by accident thirty years ago. I was riding a bus in New York City on my way uptown to visit African-American theologian James Cone at Union Theological Seminary in Harlem when I noticed the sign “Mormon Visitation Center.”  Already stressed by an unfamiliar transit system and feeling quite alone, I decided to get off the bus and take the tour.

Unlike the streets outside that were filled with trash and lit by flashing neon signs, the Visitation Center was spick-and-span. Everything was in perfect order, complete with a hologram of a Mormon family in a tranquil woods sitting in a circle, listening to the white upper-middle-class family’s father sitting on a stump higher than the other members of the family, reading from the Book of Mormon to an enthralled wife and two perfect, obedient, happy children. The hologram elicited two responses. One was amazement. I had never seen or even heard of a hologram. The other was a sense of outrage at the perpetration of a promise that was, in short, nothing but a hologram, the illusionary projection of someone’s idea of Eden that would strike a chord with visitors who long for the lost woods of the Garden of Eden. It offered a world of perfection: orderly, tidy, white, rural – nothing like the urban world on the street outside – the antidote to the realities and complexities of life in New York City.

When I left the Mormon Visitation Center it never crossed my mind that the Mormon vision or mythology would become the fastest growing mythology in America in the 21st Century. I was relieved to get back on the bus on my way to Harlem.

I ask myself now why this is so. I look again at Mormon beliefs and practices to try to understand.

In Mormon teaching, the Garden of Eden was a historical place, and it was not in the Mesopotamian Valley by the Euphrates River, as in the original biblical myth of Genesis. It was in North America…in Missouri .

“According to Joseph Smith [Mormonism’s founder] the Garden of Eden was located in Jackson County, Missouri and following his expulsion from the Garden, Adam traveled northward to a place near modern-day Gallatin, Missouri. Mormon Apostle Orson Pratt stated that the name Adam-ondi-Ahman “is in the original language spoken by Adam, as revealed to the Prophet Joseph” (Journal of Discourses 18:343) – Bill McKeever, Mormon Research Ministry.

It is to this very spot of physical geography that Jesus will return at the Second Coming. None of this is in the realm of myth. It’s fact. You can go there to touch it and  walk on it, knowing that Adam was there long before you and that, after you have walked there, it will prove to be the epicenter of the universe, the very spot where Christ will return.

Why is the Mormon myth gaining such traction in America? And why would I break the code of silence, the well-advised reticence to those of us who share White Calf’s belief that the Divine Mystery is known differently on different sides of the mountain?

Some things are too important to leave unaddressed. The Mormon mythology is quintessentially American.

The myth that America is the center of transcendent goodness and power, the world’s epicenter, the original Garden of Eden and the place of Christ’s return, the people of “Manifest Destiny”, the one exception to the rising and falling of empires and nations, is losing its hold on us at home and abroad. We are losing our sense of innocence. Yet there lurks the nostalgia for the secure home provided by the illegitimate marriage of Jesus’ gospel of the Kingdom of God with America, “the City set upon a hill” of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and of John Winthrop’s sermon to English settlers on their voyage to the new world.

As Nietzsche knew, such gods don’t die easily, even when they’re already dead. When the town crier takes his lantern into the darkened town square at midnight crying “God is dead! God is dead!” in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, the rest of the town regarded him as a madman. But it would be only a matter of time before the news would reach their ears.  It was the god of Western civilization that Nietzsche’s madman pronounced dead.

When something dear to us dies, especially when it is the prevailing religious myth of a nation about its own holiness and invulnerability, we become like starving people who continue to look in the same old bare cupboard for bread.

What better place to go than the reassurance that America is still the center – the ancestral home of a real man named Adam, who came complete with his own (now lost language, the special place to which Jesus (who visited the lost tribe of Israel in the Americas between his resurrection and bodily ascension into heaven) will return? When the Christian story the story is concretized to a finite, mortal place, it power as myth – pointing us beyond ourselves to the transcendent and the eternal – is not only lost but turned on its head.

There are many sides of the mountain, and it behooves all of us to approach people of different religious traditions with open ears and open minds. But approaching another’s religious beliefs respectfully does not require that we pretend not to see what we see or that we conclude that all religions are really the same or that one opinion is as good as another in the free market of religious truth claims. “You can’t just make stuff up!”

Let me say without hesitation that what I see in Mormonism is but the most exaggerated illustration of the idolization of the nation that includes so much of the American churches of whatever stripe where the nation is enshrined as God and where patriotism is the unspoken highest virtue with the cross wrapped in a flag.

The American wars of foreign intervention in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan could not have happened without this widespread faith in American goodness and exceptionalism. It is the cardinal sin that afflicts us across all denominational and religious lines. Whenever the Jesus executed by the Roman Empire becomes the Imperial King of a new empire, those who continue to hear the shrieks and cries of the world that suffers – and who continue to smell the piss on the stairway in the place we call “home”- are obliged to break the silence, violate the code, and get back on the bus to Harlem.