The eCrozier

I fit the basic profile of the type of person the FBI should be profiling as a potential terrorist: I’m white, male, and upset with the government. Now, I write that rather tongue in cheek, since as a follower of Jesus I’m committed to, literally, “turning the other cheek.” Jesus tells me I have to love my enemies rather than kill them. There’s no fine print below the Sermon on the Mount that says: “just kidding.” No, he’s quite serious about what he expects of me. So, I guess I don’t fully match the profile of a domestic terrorist. While I’m upset with the government, I won’t resort to violence. And yet, many people with my basic profile are being ignored even though the data shows we shouldn’t be ignoring them. Angry white males, who are also white supremacists, are engaging in a growing number of extremist-related killings.

The Anti-Defamation League earlier this year reported that in the U.S. white supremacists “collectively have been responsible for more than 70 percent of the 427 extremist-related killings over the past 10 years.” There’s no other single demographic group that even comes close to that percentage. You can read their report here.So, it defies common sense that of the 5000 current terrorism investigations, only about 18% are focused on white supremacists, especially since such people comprise 70% of the people who have committed terrorist acts. After what happened in Charlottesville 18 months ago, one would think that would’ve been a “wake-up call.” But what actually happened is this: Federal monies that had helped local law enforcement address this crisis have been redirected for other purposes.

None of that makes any sense until we think about it. It’s actually something we don’t want to think about. A small, but growing percentage of white males in our country are the number one terrorism threat we face. We’re not dealing with the threat because we don’t want to believe it’s true. If some other demographic group comprised 70% of all extremist-related killings (maybe one with browner skin?), then our leaders would be screaming for something to be done about “those people.” But, of course, that’s not happening. And since we don’t now have the political will to limit white supremacist’s access to weapons designed to kill as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time, then our only recourse is to focus on stopping these bad actors before they act. And that can’t be done until we admit who is the problem.

51 years ago yesterday, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist. So, this isn’t a new problem. But it’s a growing one that was incubated in racial myths of the past and perpetuated today by a continued distorted reading of history. I’m not suggesting a mass round-up of angry white males (even if I were, it would be impractical given that our growing number of for-profit detainment centers are over-capacity with families seeking asylum in the U.S.). Besides, we thankfully still do have a Bill of Rights. But I am suggesting we need to act on what’s actually happening. America is threatened by white supremacists and our leaders aren’t taking it seriously enough. How many more souls will die before they do?

+Scott

Awhile ago one Thursday as I was home writing, I heard the garbage truck pulling into the lane behind our house. I knew our trash containers indoors were overflowing, so I went downstairs, grabbed them, and raced outside to get the bags to the workers before they headed down the lane. I got there just in time. I don’t know what prompted me, but after a small-talk exchange about the weather, I asked one of the workers: “Do you like your job?” He smiled, and as I recall, said something like: “Well, it stinks (literally) most of the time. It’s hard and hot in summer. But I do an important service for people in this city (he’s right, imagine what uncollected garbage for weeks would be like) and I like the people I work with. The money’s enough for me and my family to live on.” I thanked him as he and his co-workers headed down the lane.

Last month, Derek Thompson wrote a piece in The Atlantic entitled “Workism is Making Americans Miserable.” Thompson defines “workism” as “the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose.” This is a significant change that has evolved over recent generations. Thompson contends that our “conception of work has shifted from jobs to careers to callings—from necessity to status to meaning.” Not long ago, work was seen as a means to support one’s family and to “buy” free time so one could enjoy life outside of work. But this is less true today. Work has become for many people a new religion “promising identity, transcendence, and community.” With the decline of traditional religion in the U.S., “workism is among the most potent of the new religions competing for congregants.” More than ever, we are only what we do.

When work becomes our religious devotion, it’ll inevitably lead to spiritual and physical exhaustion because work can never deliver on its promises of “identity, transcendence, and community.” Consistent and repeated research has shown that people who find their identity in work, put in long hours, and keep a “job-first mentality” aren’t more productive, creative, or happy in life. They’re actually more stressed, tired, and bitter. When people hope work will provide them with a purpose in life, they’re chasing after a false god who can never be satisfied; who’ll always gracelessly demand more devotion.

This isn’t to suggest that work can’t be a source of fulfillment and joy for us. Of course it can, but only as long as our identity and purpose in life is grounded elsewhere in what’s truly transcendent, namely God’s love for us in Jesus Christ. St. Benedict often counselled young monks who came to him grumbling about not feeling close to God to “go wash the dishes in the kitchen!” He knew that if they served others in the community then their spiritual attitude would change for the better. And that brings me back to the one I now call the “Benedictine Garbage Man.” More than a lot of people these days, he seems to understand his work from a spiritually mature perspective. He doesn’t expect his work to “save” him, prove him worthy of anything, or give him some deep sense of identity. His job helps others by providing a needed service. He enjoys the people with whom he works. His job supports his family’s needs. That’s all it ever should do. He’s more than only what he does. And so are we.

+Scott

I was born in Lancaster, Ohio in 1957. Lancaster is in the Appalachian foothills of southeastern Ohio. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I learned most of my prejudices growing up in that region. I learned to look down on Kentuckians because they were obviously inferior to us sophisticates in the Buckeye State. “Kentucky jokes” were a staple of my schoolyard experience. Once, when I was in junior high school, I visited Columbus, Ohio with my father. While my father was in a meeting at the university, I hung out with some kids my age whose parents worked at the university. They made fun of my accent, saying I sounded like a hillbilly. Apparently even with the Ohio River dividing the two states, a kid from Appalachia sounded much the same regardless of which side of the river he lived. So much for my cultural superiority to those hillbillies from Kentucky! As Kris Kristofferson sings: “everybody’s gotta have somebody to look down on, who they can feel better than at any time they please.”

Twenty years ago, the term “cultural humility” was invented for professionals working in healthcare. This stance suggested an openness to people who were culturally different than the doctor or nurse treating them. Rather than taking an approach which assumed either the professional’s cultural superiority or the presumption that the doctor or nurse knew all they needed to know about the patient, it offered a more neutral and curious way to listen and learn about the patient’s life experience. We’d all benefit, not just healthcare professionals, from taking a regular prescribed dose of cultural humility.

Ten years before I was born, Forbes magazine proclaimed my birthplace to be what people thought of when they thought of an “All-American” town. At the time, the Anchor Hocking Glass Company was the largest maker of glass tableware in the world (my sister still has our family’s set) and it was the principle employer in Lancaster. At its height, it employed nearly 5000 people. Today, it employs less than 900. Since the 1980s, Anchor Hocking has been corporately raided numerous times by private equity firms. Author Brian Alexander, who also was born in Lancaster, describes in his book, Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town, the spiritual and communal devastation the recurring corporate raiding has caused.

We can dismiss Lancaster’s current fate as just the natural consequences of capitalism. But there was nothing “natural” about it. It was a “hit job” by those raiders who saw an opportunity to make money. And money is all they “make.” They don’t make beautiful glass tableware. I can’t know what those corporate raiders were thinking when they did what they did, so I don’t know whether they even gave a second thought to the human destruction they were causing. But knowing about the power of human prejudice from the ones I’ve carried myself, it seems likely they simply dismissed those dumb hillbillies who were having their community shattered. I’m not a social psychologist, but I believe humility, both culturally and personally, is a necessary precondition for any sense of shared morality. Humility creates the space for us to listen and learn from people we might classify as inferior or unworthy. It then offers us the possibility of placing ourselves in their shoes and thus follow the Golden Rule (Matthew 7:12).

+Scott

“To believe in this living is just a hard way to go”
– Legendary songwriter, John Prine, in Angel from Montgomery

When J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy was published a few years back, many people latched onto it reaching simplistic conclusions about his personal experience as it related to what happened to many of his family and friends. It allowed people to sit back and say: “See, Vance, made it out of poverty and a destructive family system, so anybody can do it if they just work hard enough.” Mr. Vance himself gave credence to this line of thinking in the book’s last chapters where he seemed to blame the poverty of his people on their bad habits and choices. While that’s true to a certain extent, it doesn’t do justice to a larger, more complicated truth.

Automation and technology in recent years has replaced over 4 million manufacturing jobs in the Midwest alone (where Vance writes about). It’s affected many jobs here in Georgia as well where it used to take hundreds of people to bring agricultural crops to market, but now a fraction of those workers is needed. This trend will accelerate as automation becomes more omnipresent in other areas, such as service-sector jobs (retail, call-center, food service, etc.). Driverless trucks are coming next. Soon robots will replace truck drivers. It’s way too easy to blame this massive shift in job loss and change on global trade, immigrant labor, jobs moving overseas, or even on flawed workers (aren’t we all?) with destructive habits. To be sure, those are part of it. But technological change, particularly automation, accounts for much of it as well.

My graduate school economic textbooks would tell me that people looking for work would get retrained for the high-tech world, move to where the new jobs are, and all would be well. But that’s not happening. People don’t actually behave the way economic textbooks say they should behave. They aren’t always as resilient, adaptable, or rational as the “invisible hand” of the market tells them they should be. What we’re seeing is a rise in people filing for disability (more Americans are now on disability than work in the construction trade), rising suicide and opioid-addiction rates, and the lowering of life expectancy rates for the first time in modern America.

It’s all complicated. But we should know that a good-paying job isn’t just about earning a paycheck. It’s part of one’s identity. Jobs provide coherence and purpose to people’s lives. They help shape one’s sense of dignity and relevance in the social fabric of communities. But we’re not going stop all technological change, even if it were a good idea. So, morally speaking, what are we going to do with all these people who are getting left out? They aren’t going away and they’ll only get angrier, or conversely, more self-destructive, as their dignity and social relevance continue to be threatened. This is a moral issue, not just a socio-economic one. It’s about how we’re going to treat one another as some of us benefit from economic change while others of us suffer from it. “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ,” St. Paul wrote to the Galatian church. Yes, because living is so often “just a hard way to go.”

+Scott

Smart people, for a long time now, have been trying to figure out how we humans evolved, grew, and developed into what we’ve become in the 21st Century. And as they’ve tried to figure it out, the old “nature vs. nurture” argument always seems to be at least on the edge of the investigation. That’s as it should be. There’s plenty of evidence that both our genes and our cultural environment have shaped what we’ve become. There are always people out there, however, who are looking for that one thing that will explain it all and be the definitive factor. The smart and wise ones though, at least from my perspective, resist such things and are much more modest in what they propose and think we can ever know with any kind of certainty.

Enter Richard Wrangham, one of the smart and wise ones, and his new book, “The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution.” Wrangham is a biological anthropologist at Harvard who has studied chimpanzees and bonobos, as well as humans, for years. His basic contention in the book is that we humans evolved paradoxically exhibiting throughout the capacity for violence, but also the virtue of collaboration and conflict resolution. Wrangham notes, however, that our violence has been of two kinds: reactive and proactive aggression. In the evolutionary process apes and our forbearers learned to punish “reactive aggression” through planned, coordinated “proactive aggression,” thus punishing those who violated social norms before they could wreak any more havoc. Over time, this reduced the number of people contributing to the gene pool who were reactively aggressive and increased, by default, those who were more inclined toward community and sharing. In other words, proactively aggressive behavior by the community thwarted less virtuous forms of aggression and made possible the growth of civilized society.

That’s a lot to wrap one’s head around, to be sure. I’m thankful Wrangham notes his theory should not be over-subscribed or be used in the wrong hands as way of justifying violence toward people who violate social norms. After all, in referring to the so-called “virtues” of proactive aggression, he writes: “proactive aggression is [also] responsible for execution, war, massacre, slavery, hazing, ritual sacrifice, torture, lynchings, gang wars, political purges, and similar abuses of power.” That means that while proactive violence by the community brought us social order and civilized society, it also has the means to oppress and subjugate those who aren’t in power, whether that power is held by the state or by any group. Alas, a double-edged sword both literally and figuratively.

That’s why Wrangham says we humans are, at the same time, “the best and worst of species” and is modest in his claims as to what evolution can really tell us (or help us with). In the end, it doesn’t really matter much about what’s more significant: nature or nurture? Neither helps us get closer to a peaceful and just society. And neither precludes or guarantees such a desired outcome. We still are faced with the hard work of building a humane culture through the frail instrumentality of one another. But we should be hopeful, even as we are clear-eyed about our human sin and vice. The long arc of human history does appear to be heading toward something better.

+Scott

How does a young missionary’s death speak to our current state of relationships in America? It turns out, maybe quite a bit. You may have read about John Allen Chau, a young American missionary who last November was killed by the Sentinelese, an isolated tribe on an Indian Ocean island after trying to convert them to Christianity. As we’ve come to expect, the judge-jury-executioners of social media were quick to pounce. One wrote: “John Allen Chau is not a martyr. Just a dumb American who thought the tribe needed ‘Jesus’ when [they] already lived in harmony with God and nature for years without outside interference.” The organization who sponsored him, “All Nations,” was equally hyperbolic describing him as a “martyr,” saying that the “privilege of sharing the gospel has often involved great cost. We pray that John’s sacrificial efforts will bear eternal fruit in due season.”

So, who was Mr. Chau: A deluded zealot or a faithful follower of Jesus? His family wishes everybody would just shut up and know he was “a beloved son, brother, uncle, and best friend.” But in order for people to “shut up,” they’d have to step away from the self-righteous judgmentalism dictated by their religious and political partisanships and move toward a different spiritual and emotional place, one that doesn’t demand they immediately define the other, whoever the other is, in simplistic catch-phrases. You see, the story we tell ourselves about who we are inevitably shapes how we try to make sense of a narrative like the death of Mr. Chau. Our culture insists our story requires choosing sides immediately into either the “pro” or the “anti” camp.

My hunch is that Mr. Chau wasn’t the caricature that either his detractors or his hagiographers contrived. Like the rest of us, he was a mixed bag of foolhardiness and love, ignorance and devotion, sin and faithfulness. In other words, he was human. If we have any hope of living together compassionately and justly, then we must learn to accept one another’s humanity for its messiness. Only then can we heed Dr. King’s warning from over 50 years ago: We will either learn to live together as family or perish together as fools.

We need to give one another a break from the incessant calling out of one another’s sins by admitting we often hold other people to a higher standard of moral uprightness than we’re willing to hold ourselves. I’m not promoting moral laxness. As we’re shaped by our faith in Jesus and his teachings, we should respond to people’s behavior as we see it. But it ought to be infused with empathy for their complex humanity. It ought to account for the thrust of grace given in Jesus Christ. And, any response we offer should be grounded in a complete honesty about our own personal story, a story that someday will have its own detractors and hagiographers. Harrison Scott Key, writing in The American Conservative, pokes fun at himself and all of us who have trouble being honest about our own stories: “If there’s one thing my long internship at Jesus Enterprises, LLC, has taught me, it’s that I should be much more watchful of what’s inside me than what’s inside you. That is where we have to start, I am told, by the invisible God-Man who has limitless powers to change the weather or the outcome of a sporting event.”

+Scott

Vincent Cunningham, writing in The New Yorker, offered a provocative piece last month on the history of how we understand Hell, or some version of a punitive afterlife. Personally, Hell would be the Cincinnati Reds confined for eternity to last place (12 days until pitchers & catchers report to Spring Training! Hope springs eternal, as they say). But I digress. Cunningham’s piece covers the waterfront (or Lake of Fire, if you need a different metaphor) of scholarly, pop culture, and historical thinking on Hell.

While the whole article was fascinating, I was especially drawn to the part about his own former pastor. Cunningham recalls how his pastor a while back announced he’d “studied the Hebrew and the Aramaic and the Greek [of the Bible] and had concluded that the words most often translated as ‘hell’ referred to a more general afterlife, or, at worst, to the daily, inward suffering that accompanies a willful persistence in wrongdoing.” The congregational response was swift and angry. Presumably, they didn’t like the idea that there wasn’t eternal torture awaiting other people (they were confident, apparently, such a fate wouldn’t befall them). The pastor was soon forced out of the congregation for his alleged “heresy.” But he landed on his feet and started a new congregation preaching that God shouldn’t be viewed as “a petty torturer.” Alas, his new congregation soon after closed its doors and referring to that outcome, Cunningham concludes: apparently “assured salvation couldn’t keep people in pews.”

And this last observation raises interesting questions for me: Is Hell (or the idea of Hell) a necessary motivation for people to practice their faith? If our salvation is “assured,” then do some people conclude about church: “Why bother?” Do we need God to set up a quid pro quo, that is, we show up every Sunday, get our sacramental assurance, keep our noses clean, and then God has us covered? Do we understand faith as an “eternal life insurance policy” rather than as an invitation to practice the very heart of God?

Social psychologist Azim Shariff has observed that a belief in Hell “does compel people rationally to act in ways which will avoid the wrath of a punitive God who can punish you.” So, it seems, literally “scaring the Hell” out of people is a failsafe method of crowd control, maintaining social order, and getting people into pews.

Except none of that is the Gospel of Jesus. He’s in the salvation business, not the condemnation business (read: John 3-16-17, if you doubt, heck, read the whole Gospel).

This doesn’t mean I don’t believe in a literal Hell. I do. I just believe Jesus isn’t in the business of sending anyone there. I believe it was George Bernard Shaw who said: “Hell is where you have to do what you want to do.” So, people by their own volition consign themselves to Hell by refusing to accept the gracious gift of mercy and forgiveness from God. Jesus will honor our wills, but God never stops offering that gift, even after death (read C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce for a wonderful allegory about that). So I ask: Why wouldn’t we want now to begin a life eternally given over to the very heart of God? Some won’t. Nevertheless, today is still the first day of the rest of our eternal lives.

+Scott

One of my intellectual mentors died last week at age 95. Nathan Glazer was a sociologist who studied how government social and economic programs designed to alleviate poverty affected those they served. When I was working on my Ph.D. (which turned into an AB.D. – “All But Dissertation”) in the 1980s, Glazer was the most important scholar to which one needed to pay attention. He started out as a left-leaning socialist, became a member of the “neoconservative right,” and then ended up somewhere in-between angering in the process both extremes, which seemed to me just about right.

Dr. Glazer insisted that government programs, begun in the 1960s during the “War on Poverty,” worked to lessen poverty. After those programs were enacted, we saw a steady decline in poverty. Only after those programs were rolled back in the 1980s did we see poverty begin to increase again. So, the data showed such intervention lessened poverty. But Dr. Glazer also saw the limits of what government could do, since some of those interventions, while reducing poverty, also gave rise in Dr. Glazer’s words “to other problems no less grave in their effect on human happiness.” He contributed wisdom to the complexity of poverty. We need to remember his insight, because we still tend to divide into two tribes when it comes to the governmental role in addressing poverty.

One tribe says government is the problem; that the more the government tries to help the worse things become; and, that the government should just end all poverty-alleviation programs because they’re counter-productive and discourage self-sufficiency, hard work, and personal responsibility. Of course, this tribe wants to ignore the data on how, for example, SNAP (formerly called “food stamps”) has greatly reduced hunger. There’s also, however, solid data that supports this tribe’s contention that familial and personal choices matter greatly in getting out of poverty.

The other tribe argues we need more, not less government intervention to alleviate poverty (e.g., in education, health care, food supplements, tax policy, income support, etc.). They believe if there were a big enough safety net then we could eliminate poverty all together. They put little weight on the role of familial and personal choices as being determinative or important. Like with the other tribe, they tend to discount data that don’t support their already-arrived-at conclusions.

Both tribes have it both right and wrong. Government can and must have an active, involved role in poverty alleviation. To suggest, as one tribe does, that the government just needs to get out of the way and allow individuals and the magic of the free market to work, ignores both the data and what we know about the messiness of human choice. We all do stupid stuff and if we’re financially well-off, then we can get still keep doing stupid stuff. But if we’re poor, there’s no margin of error. The other tribe has its own magical thinking believing we can always protect people from their poor choices. Sinners that we are, we all sometimes engage in self-destructive behavior. There are limits to what any government can do about that. If we could just learn the wisdom from both of these tribes, then we’d be on to something, now wouldn’t we?