Loneliness is an epidemic in the United States these days.

The CDC reports that 1 in 3 adults in the U.S. experience loneliness while the Pew Research Center’s 2024 survey showed similar findings. The Surgeon General tells us that loneliness is bad for our health, both individually and as a culture

There are a number of ways we might address this: I want to suggest one. A substantial body of research reveals that knowing where we come from and knowing our family stories can strengthen our sense of belonging, connection, identity, and meaning. These are resources that contribute to social bonds and diminish loneliness and isolation.

History often provides temporal belonging. It asks, who came before me? What am I part of? Who will come after me? Throughout human history, identity was embedded in family networks and communities. It was transmitted for generations through oral histories, storytelling that was inherited and passed on.

Language makes culture known, stories convey memory, and relationships do both. When that sequence breaks, it’s easy to lose context, to feel isolated and alone.

The Power of Intergenerational Storytelling

The psychologist Lev Vygotsky studied child development, and, on that basis, promoted the cultural-historical theory that psychological functioning is developed through the internalization of cultural tools. From birth, children are often surrounded by intergenerational stories, autobiographical and biographical from family members and community members. Our identities develop through other people who transmit the language, meaning, stories, knowledge, and cultural tools that have been accumulated across generations.

Narrative memories help humans cope with difficulties by drawing on the past. Research shows that youth well-versed in intergenerational narratives, who have grown up with deep stories of family history, have higher levels of well-being.

The reason is simple: these stories provide a framework for understanding the world. The continuity they create across multiple generations provides security for one’s identity. And studies confirm this: adults who share family narratives in self-reflective ways have higher rates of positive psychological health.

This all got me thinking. Language is one of the mechanisms by which accumulated human experience moves from one generation to another. What forms of cultural knowledge and wisdom stopped being transmitted when the language disappeared?

When the United States was created in 1776, it was a very multilingual place. The American constitution did not prescribe a standardized national language. So why does the United States have one? And what was lost in the process?

The Costs of Assimilation

In the 18th and 19th centuries, there were hundreds of indigenous languages spoken in what we now know as the United States. And while we don’t have exact numbers, we do know the following languages were also spoken in the United States in various communities: Afro-Seminole Creole, Akan, Arabic, Aramaic, Armenian, Bambara, Cantonese, Efik, Ewe, Fante, Farsi, Fon, Fula, Gullah, Hausa, Ibibio, Igbo, Japanese, Kikongo, Kimbundu, Kurdish, Louisiana Creole, Mandarin, Mandinka, Mende, Punjabi, Tagalog, Turkish, Twi, Umbundu, Vai, Wolof, and Yoruba. This is by no means an exhaustive list.

All across the United States, there were newspapers that served the non-English speaking communities. Between 1880 and 1890, the number of newspapers published in a language other than English had increased by 45%.

By the 20th century, the 1910 aggregated U.S. federal census numbers showed the following:

• 2.76 million German speakers

• 1.37 million Italian speakers

• 1.05 million Yiddish/Hebrew speakers

• 944,000 Polish speakers

• 683,000 Swedish speakers

• 529,000 French speakers

• 403,000 Norwegian speakers

• 258,000 Spanish speakers

• 229,000 Hungarian speakers

• 229,000 Czech/Bohemian-Moravian speakers

• 184,000 Danish speakers

• 166,000 Slovak speakers

• 152,000 Dutch speakers

• 141,000 Lithuanian/Latvian speakers

• 124,000 Slovenian speakers

• 120,000 Finnish speakers

• 118,000 Greek speakers

I am a white American who grew up in Wisconsin and currently lives in Minnesota. Here, I’m going to focus on these two states and the German immigrants in particular. In 1890, Wisconsin had 123 German-language newspapers and around 30 Norwegian-language newspapers as many others published in a language other than English.

During the 19th century and early 20th century, both Minnesota and Wisconsin schools were taught in many different languages. A 1915 survey of Stearns County, Minnesota’s public schools showed that 100 schools were taught in German, 10 were taught in Norwegian, and 2 were taught in Polish. That’s in one county!

In 1917, C. G. Schulz was the Minnesota Superintendent of Public Instruction. He found that out of 307 parochial schools in the state, 195 were taught primarily in German, ten were taught in Polish, four in French, and others were taught in Czech, Danish, Dutch, and Norwegian.

By the late nineteenth century, hundreds of Wisconsin schools provided substantial instruction in languages other than English and this continued into the 20th century. A newspaper article published in 1907 in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, reported that 7,801 students were enrolled in Polish parochial schools in the city compared to 6,640 enrolled in German parochial schools and only 3,316 enrolled in English parochial schools.

Many places of worship were also conducted in different languages. My great, great uncle was a Lutheran minister who preached in both Wisconsin and Minnesota in three languages: German, Norwegian, and English.

World War I and a Nationalized Language

The shift toward a standardized national language happened unevenly across the United States, but WWI greatly accelerated this. On April 6, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany.

Four days after the U.S. joined the war, Minnesota created the Minnesota Commission of Public Safety (MCPS). Its slogan was, “One Country, One Flag, One People, and One Speech.”

The seven-person commission only lasted for two years before it was dissolved, but it waged war on German language and culture with 56% of its cases involving Minnesota’s German community. Nearly 70% of Minnesota’s residents at the time were immigrants or first-generation Americans with Germans making up the largest percentage of this group.

The MCPS created a 7,000-member army, the Minnesota Home Guard, that was primarily used to threaten labor organizers and striking workers and enforce MCPS orders. On November 20, 1917, the commission directed “that school boards, principals and teachers be urged, as a patriotic duty, to require the use of the English language as the exclusive medium of instruction in all schools in the state of Minnesota, and to discontinue and prohibit the use of all foreign languages in such schools, except as a medium for the study of those languages themselves or as a medium of religious instruction.”

In 2017, retired University of Minnesota history professor, Hy Berman, told MPR reporter, Dan Olson, that the commission unleashed a “reign of terror that wiped out civil liberties, wiped out freedom of expression, wiped out freedom of association — that created a kind of climate where, in fact, it ruled by force.”

The anti-German atmosphere fueled vigilantes. In August of 1918, a German-American farmer, John Meints, was living in Luverne, Minnesota. He was suspected of being disloyal and was kidnapped by a large group of over 32 men who whipped him, then tarred and feathered him at the South Dakota border.

Meanwhile, in Baraboo, Wisconsin, the Wisconsin National Guard burned German-language textbooks in a large bonfire on June 13, 1918. The Milwaukee Journal asked the Pabst Theater to cease all German-language productions (it did), and it attacked local German-language newspapers, accusing them of being disloyal.

When the Ku Klux Klan expanded into Minnesota and Wisconsin in the early 1920s, it promoted and normalized the idea that full American citizenship required cultural and linguistic conformity. In Minnesota, the KKK aimed to root out the “German-ness” in the state. Theodore Christianson, was the editor and publisher of the Dawson Sentinel from 1909 to 1925. He wrote and published many anti-German and anti-Bolshevik editorials. He went on to become the governor of Minnesota in 1925 and met and corresponded frequently with H.E. Kettering who was a KKK Grand Dragon.

Clearly, the assimilation to English was violent. Not only did German immigrants lose out but so did every single American who spoke a language other than English. What did we really gain by this? And in the process, what have we lost?

We not only lost language, but we suffered a catastrophic loss of culture. Some families became afraid to speak their language. And while family stories were likely still passed on, what was lost in translation? Assimilation weakened the intergenerational continuity. Cultural inheritance became cultural fragments.

Consider this. A granddaughter who descended from Norwegian immigrants doesn’t speak Norwegian, but she might still make lefse. She might not understand the jokes her grandmother told her when she learned to make it or the significance of a particular family recipe. She might inherit photographs but cannot read the captions. She might inherit letters she could get translated but might miss the meaning of the idioms. She might be frustrated by today’s job market not knowing the struggles of her ancestors in Norway and the reasons why they left their communities to move to the U.S., knowledge that might contribute to her own resilience.

Restoring Lost History

Today, there are extremely high numbers of people, particularly young adults, reporting loneliness. I can’t help but wonder if these are related somehow, if this is a missing piece of the puzzle.

Genealogy is a multi-billion dollar business. Clearly, people want to know where they come from. They want to reconnect with the past and their ancestors and in so doing, know the story of their own families. These are real human stories—the good, the bad, and the ugly—that offer lessons of resilience and an invaluable sense of the continuity in their own family stories.

People, understandably, want to tap into those intergenerational narratives.

Knowing our family history can help us understand how we got to where we are, and to provide context for the prevailing beliefs and behaviors we inherited.

It can help us discern what to hang on to and where we could do better. We can understand how our ancestors weathered bad times, knowing that “this too shall pass.” We can understand the mistakes they made, the unique sense of humor that developed, and tap into their source of resilience. We can understand inherited wisdom and restore the joyful celebrations lost to time and assimilation.

For me, genealogy isn’t about collecting dates and records, it’s about cultural reconstruction and accessing those networks of memory and ancestral narratives, as best I can. Not just for me, but for those alive today, and for all descendants.

About the author: Jennifer Pennington’s multidisciplinary career spans the non-profit, for-profit, and academic sectors. Jennifer first became interested in genealogy in elementary school and has researched her own family for decades. She has been working as a genealogist for over three years, and she serves on the board of the Wisconsin State Genealogical Society, Germanic Genealogy Society, and the Heritage Education Commission. Check out her new Substack at https://substack.com/@jennproof, and she can also be reached at jenn@jennproof.com

We are always in our lives looking for role models,and we are a networked bunch. No man (or woman) is an island - we are always looking to others for example, to size ourselves up, as models of how to behave and how not to, and for the essential love and companionship we need.

Even as adults with our personalities pretty well formed, we are still capable of change based on who we listen to and what messages we absorb. We can still be influenced, hence the term “influencer.”

What did Jesus do, if not influence us toward the better angels of our natures and right relationship with God and with the other? Plato taught us about the forms, the idealized versions of things, and founded The Academy, a forerunner for higher education.

Martin Luther King Jr. taught us that darkness cannot drive out darkness, that only light can do that. And that hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. And, rather poignantly now, that “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

Desmond Tutu taught us that we are not islands. We don’t exist in a vacuum. The Zulu word for this is ubuntu.

Ubuntu says a person is a person through other persons.

The solitary individual is really a contradiction in terms. I wouldn’t know how to work as a human being. I wouldn’t know how to speak, how to think. I wouldn’t know how to be human. None of us comes fully formed into the world.

I need you all in your giftedness and with all your weaknesses. I need you so that I can be me in all of my giftedness and my weaknesses.

Such profundity can only arise from struggling at the deepest levels with man’s capacities for hate and for love, man’s capacity to inflict suffering and man’s deep desire for beauty.

We need people to teach us and to form us.

Follow those three quotes from MLK and Tutu and you can make a good life, just out of that.

And yet some of the loudest voices speaking into the great void of masculinity are the Doug Wilsons and Mark Driscolls and Pete Hegseths and the Nick Fuentes. The latter gave us such inspiring quotes as:

• It would be irresponsible if I had a wife and kids to live near Black people. It just would be.

• Hitler was awesome. Hitler was right.

• We need re-migration. We don’t need an immigration moratorium. We need to take people out of the country.

And I wonder why, in a world with so many incredible people to listen to, we listen to these guys? Why do we give hatemongers like Nick Fuentes an audience?

We are, and always have been, living in a world of warring ideas and ideals. We have a decision as to how large or small we want our world to be. Who will we welcome into it, and who will we shun?

Who will we welcome into our country, and who will we turn away?

What ideas will we embrace and what ideas do we find threatening?

Ideas and their Modifiers

Time is an arrow that moves forward - physics tells us this. Time brings changing weather and seasons and growth and death, wars and rumors of wars. Generations come and go and with their passing goes ideas.

Europe experienced the belle epoque, a period of extended peace, from 1871 to 1914. Just over three decades later they had lost 60 million people (both military and civilian) to WWI and WWII. They had lived through the holocaust and fascism.

One can only imagine the difference in the cultural ideas from between 1913 and 1946. The postmodern movement flowed, in many ways, out of the wreckage of our belief in human goodness.

Experiences - both individual and collective - change the way that we hear quotations and ideas. Here’s an exchange that I think is archetypal when we consider Jesus’ teachings:

²⁸ One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”

²⁹ “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.^{[e] 30} Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’^{[f] 31} The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’^[g] There is no commandment greater than these.”

How do we take a prophet who told us to love God and love our neighbor, and puts extra emphasis on “whatever you did for the least of these, you did unto me” and eventually get Nick Fuentes? Or Pete Hegseth?

It’s because ideas are modified by other ideas. It’s like you had an equation:

A x B = C

A is the teachings of Christ. B is whatever happened to you as a kid that you never got over, or the fact that you are uncomfortable around people who don’t share your skin color.

C is what you conclude that Jesus actually meant.

There are people, Allie Beth Stuckey being a prime example, who would deny that B exists. The ideas of God in the Bible are eternal and clear.

But let’s consider this quote - this idea - from Ms. Stuckey. “Of course you can be against the death penalty for babies and for the death penalty for murderers. I am for the death penalty for the same reason I’m against abortion: I value innocent life.” (italics mine)

That word “innocent” is sure doing some heavy lifting, is it not?

Her justification for this is Genesis 9:6 “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image” which is a very Old Testament idea (and reality). She says this continues into the present because of Romans 13 “But if you do evil, be afraid, for it [the government] does not bear the sword without purpose; it is the servant of God to inflict wrath on the evildoer.”

“It” in this case is the government. And the evildoer is as defined by MAGA in this case. So there you go. You have undercut the entirety of Jesus’ nonviolent teachings with one verse taken out of context, so they will line up better with your political beliefs.

(The government can inflict the death penalty, but asking citizens to wear masks to prevent the spread of a pandemic that disproportionately affects the medically vulnerable is a clear case of government overreach. And where is that in the Bible?)

But if you are trying to make the Bible line up with your political beliefs, aren’t you changing the meaning in some way? OF COURSE YOU ARE.

(Her website, if you’d like to see her work is toxicempathy.com. No, I’m not making this up.)

I am not saying that we should or shouldn’t modify ideas with other ideas. I am saying that we DO. It is a fait accompli. We always have, and we always will.

The Lasso Effect

It is clear that the tone and tenor of many evangelical leaders of late has moved in a Trumpy direction. And 80% of white evangelicals voted for him despite multiple glaring red lights and a large number of those 80% continue to support him, so it is clear that he is changing the culture of belief.

He is a modifier that is changing the way people read Jesus’ teachings, as they try to find out why “re-migration” is actually a Biblical value, for example. (If you’d like to see how counter to the text this actually is, read this.)

As I watch Ted Lasso, I ask what would happen if we drifted in a Lassoesque direction instead of a Trumpy one.

Ted Lasso (the show and the character) are an example par excellence of humanism. It is the belief that all people have inherent worth and value, whether they are immigrants or native born, men or women, gay or straight. Ted Lasso loves, cheers on, and advocates for, all people he encounters. There are no enemies, just people who are not yet friends.

(If you haven’t watched Ted Lasso and have no idea what I’m talking about, try this video. There are spoilers, however. My better advice would be to watch it all from the beginning.)

He balances his unconditional acceptance and love with the fact that he is, at the root of his being, a coach. And a coach’s role is to improve a team. And you do that by helping the people grow, to get stronger and faster, healthier, more mentally clear.

Sam Obisanya makes a mistake, early in the show, and is beating himself up about it. This happens repeatedly and Sam’s play gets worse. Ted, very good naturedly, pulls Sam aside and says, “Sam, do you know what the happiest animal is? It’s a goldfish. Why? Because it’s got a 10-second memory. Be a goldfish, Sam.”

If Ted Lasso has a specific philosophy, it is belief in a grounded, tangible, relational optimism. It’s something akin to the power of possibility, not as a cliche, but as a goal and a means of being. And, of course, he is right. People often stunt themselves and their relationships through a failure of imagination.

The central figure of the show is BELIEVE written in giant blocky sharpie letters on a piece of yellow posterboard.

BELIEVE.

This speech is perhaps best seen after the departure of an enigmatic superstar Zava in Season Three. This is Ted’s locker room speech when the team learned they would be without him:

Hey guys, look. We got a good thing going here. We didn’t need Zava, yeah? All we need to win are the fellas in this room right now. And all you fellas need to do is believe it.

Belief doesn’t just happen because you hang something on a wall. It comes from your head, your heart … your guts. Only problem is we all have so much junk floating through us a lot of times we get in our own way. Crap like envy, fear, or shame.

I don’t want to mess around with that shit anymore. You know what I mean? Do you?

You know what I want to mess around with? The belief that I matter, regardless of what I do or don’t achieve. Or the belief that we all deserve to be loved whether we have been hurt or maybe hurt someone else. Or what about the belief of hope, huh?

The belief that things can get better. That I can get better. That we will get better.

Oh man. To believe in yourself. To believe in one another. That is fundamental to being alive. If you can do that … if each of you can truly do that … can’t nobody rip that apart.

If I try to distill down the central feature of my Ted Lasso experience it is that sense of possibility and of a very expansive and generous love for the other. And I believe that if that sense of possibility paired with unconditional love permeates my being, it will make me a better human and a better Christian.

The Way of Christ

If there’s one thing I find most tragic about the direction conservatism is going under Trump/MAGA, it’s that they are adopting his habit of fighting with everyone about everything all the time. Trump has been involved in around 6,000 lawsuits as the one suing or the one being sued. This is almost unimaginable to me.

In his mind, there are enemies everywhere. (And if you are bad enough to enough people over a long enough period of time, maybe that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.)

The subtext to everything is conflict, the danger is that our RIGHTS AS CHRISTIANS will somehow be curtailed.

When I watch Ted Lasso, my heart is full. As opposed to wanting to deport and destroy and punish, I want to overwhelm with kindness, with love, with corny gifts, and with acceptance. I want to win people over by getting them to smile and laugh at my puns and eventually I will be able to hug them.

Instead of trying to destroy this person, I ask myself what would it take to make them whole.

And then we will be friends, not enemies. And I will have dealt with a threat not by force, but with the power of love, of sacrifice, and of baked goods.

Love for your enemy is a way of arriving at a better place for both of you.

And isn’t that the way of Christ in the end?

Eye for Eye

³⁸ “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’^{[h] 39} But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. ⁴⁰ And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. ⁴¹ If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. ⁴² Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.

Love for Enemies

⁴³ “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor^[i] and hate your enemy.’ ⁴⁴ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, ⁴⁵ that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. ⁴⁶ If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? ⁴⁷ And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? ⁴⁸ Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Livestreaming

As many of you know, I’ve been livestreaming on Thursday mornings with Pat Kahnke of Culture, Faith, and Politics, and that livestream has been steadily growing. If you’ve been watching us, thanks! If you haven’t, give it a try. It’s fun.

Anyway, it’s a different thing being on a channel with 110,000 subscribers than writing to my 600+ subscribers. You guys are people who have opted in and want to read my writing, and I appreciate each of you, and a HUGE thank you to those who have become paid subscribers. This feels like talking to friends in a way.

A big Youtube channel like Pat’s and an algorithm that pushes it out there is THE INTERNET. It’s a platform, a bigger one than the little cozy one that I have made here.

I read the comments (I know, I know) and the reality is that they are mostly very positive - and there are a LOT of them. Mostly this is a pretty edifying experience, but occasionally a comment catches me funny.

I was making the point during last week’s livestream that white men shouldn’t run EVERYTHING, because we would miss out on the contributions of so many people who have good things to offer.

To extend the idea, think of all the music we’d be missing if we only had music made by white men: I listed some black male musicians and only after a while got to Joni Mitchell, et al.

The comment reads: “Glad you finally acknowledged there are women musicians, too. What about Aretha, Laura Nero, Carole King (whose Tapestry album spent 200 weeks at #1 on the Billboard chart), Joan Baez and her dedication to civil activism, etc.”

I wrote back, a bit snippy at the thought that I had mentioned female musicians, just not soon enough in my little diatribe.

I don’t know how other brains work, I only have mine. So I’m not speaking for you. But, when we are onto a new topic, I’m not giving a speech I’ve given a million times. Nothing is rehearsed, I’m working things out on the fly. My brain sometimes feels sluggish and sometimes like I can hardly keep up. The best operative metaphor is surfing. Though I’m not a surfer, I have enough experience with waves and currents to know what it is to try to cooperate with a fickle and powerful thing.

We have thousands of people watching us talk. Listening to us. People who could have clicked on anything else, but chose to click on us, and then chose to listen to us. That is an amazing thing and an honor really. And my brain hasn’t fully yet made that connection. It’s a wild idea to me that the order that I list musicians in makes a big enough difference in someone’s mind that they’d go to the trouble to write a comment.

For the livestream to work, to have energy, it needs to feel like a conversation I am having with Pat, something I’ve done a thousand times before. But it’s also commentary with a side of performance art and people actually care what we say.

This cozy room I’m in is a network of a thousand other cozy rooms, with people listening to us while they make their morning coffees and cook their eggs and toast. Maybe some are in hospital waiting rooms, and others are listening at their desk at work. This is a strange and kind of wonderful thought.

Thank you for caring. I hope what we do brings some level of light, truth, joy, and humor to the world. And let me apologize right now for the inevitable awkwardness and missteps of FUTURE ADAM. I don’t know what he’s going to say any more than you do.

An Emotional Marathon

Meanwhile, life happens in a way that is very analog, very sensory, and very close.

We lost my mom to dementia when she was just 70. (I’m 50 now, about to turn 51, so 70 feels just around the corner.) She was one of the kindest and most intelligent people I’ve known. She loved people deeply and she was deeply loved.

We cared for her at home all the way to the end. It was beautiful, sacred, and absolutely heartbreaking. We had my dad (a physician by training) fully committed to all aspects of her care, and my aunt (my dad’s sister) moved in to share the caregiving load.

We were hoping to do the same with my dad, who is now suffering from dementia, and we got really close. He’s slowed down a lot, sleeping quite a bit, can be funny in the afternoons when he’s most awake, but is very groggy in the early morning hours. He gets up sometimes late at night.

We’ve had a large and diverse caregiving team of family, friends, and professionals from St Croix Hospice (who have been amazing, full stop) but the needs were too much.

I stayed there for five days just before he went in, sleeping on a twin mattress on the living room floor, just across from dad’s hospital bed. The hypervigiliance of trying to sleep while also listening for him to wake made for little rest.

On Monday we moved him out of the house he’s owned for 50 years. An avowed introvert, there are few people I know who are committed to their habitat quite like dad. The facility we brought him to specializes in dementia care and is very open and light with good staff. It’s a good place to go, and it was needed.

Even so, there were tears all around. Many, many of them. It felt a bit like moving a college student into a dorm room.

It’s a devastating thing to watch a loved one recede inside their mind and eventually have to turn to a care facility, but it also reminded me how fortunate we are that we do have good options. In many countries they simply don’t.

The emotional hangover has been intense, and I just haven’t felt like myself (or maybe my normal self - any of us contain multitudes), but we keep going and try to do the next right thing.

Proverbs 11: The Lord Detests Dishonest Scales

I’m not going to say too terribly much about this, but here are a few verses. This is just intended as a reminder.

The Lord detests dishonest scales,
but accurate weights find favor with him.

When pride comes, then comes disgrace,
but with humility comes wisdom.

The integrity of the upright guides them,
but the unfaithful are destroyed by their duplicity.

Wealth is worthless in the day of wrath,
but righteousness delivers from death.

The righteousness of the blameless makes their paths straight,
but the wicked are brought down by their own wickedness.

The righteousness of the upright delivers them,
but the unfaithful are trapped by evil desires.

I was going to unpack this, but I think it’s excellent to let you see where your mind takes you. It’s a good reminder to me that a book written 3,000 years ago still has so much to say about the human condition. We are seeing a temporal iteration of patterns that have existed for as long as there were people to be righteous or people to be unfaithful.

Here’s to straight paths.

Be well friends. Thanks for reading.

To many of you, this may sound like … well, duh.

But for me (and for many of you) it’s odd, and decentering, and necessitates a change of mindset. Deconstruction and being something other than Republican is a jarring experience.

As is finally belonging to some sort of subculture. I suppose I am in the creative/neurodivergent subculture (if there is such a thing) but in every other way, I am who this culture was built for.

As a tall, white, straight, cisgender, educated Christian man, my tribe (so to speak) owns and runs things. In the blissful ignorance of 2014, I basically understood that, but I didn’t understand exactly the nature of the problem.

The Rule of the White Christian Man

With the advent of pluralism, women’s rights, and civil rights, the hegemonic grip started to loosen, and Trump represents (among other things) a push to retain our grip on the levers of power.

I know most of you reading this essay will be fairly convinced of the idea that America is largely run by white men, but maybe some of you aren’t, or maybe you’d be interested in the statistics around this. Here you go.

Every president in our country’s history (other than Obama) has been a white, at least nominally Christian, man. (Trump, I would argue is only nominally Christian, but was elected to achieve Christian ends.)

85% of Fortune 500 CEOs are white men, 11% are white women, while 2% are black men and 3% are latino men. This actually represents progress: as of 1980, 100% of CEOs were white men.

White men hold 65% of senate seats, and 85% of the “check-writing partners” at venture capital firms are white men. Because investors lean heavily on personal networks, all-white-male founding teams secure 85% of seed capital venture dollars.

70% of sitting judges are men, and 75% of those men are white.

75% of directors of Holllywood’s highest-grossing films are white men.

90% of the owners of professional sports teams are white men.

75% of white families own homes nationally vs 63% of Asian families, 48% of Latino families, and 44% of Black families. Passing down a home is one of the primary means of inheritance and generational wealth. I’m not trying to get too far into the weeds here, just paint a quick picture.

Given such a disproportionate hold on power and wealth, the next logical question is the percentage of the US population composed of white men.

White men are 25% of the US population, and white Christian men are 20%.

So we have a group that accounts for two of every 10 people. To recap:

• 9 out of 10 team owners

• 7.5 out of 10 directors

• 8.5 seed capital recipients

• 8.5 check writing partners at VC firms

• 6.5 senate seats

• 7 judges

• 8.5 Fortune 500 CEOs

• 46 out of 47 presidents

Can You Be Anything In This Country?

This is a country where you can - IN THEORY - be anything. But if you are a black woman born in 1950, for example, your odds of being a Fortune 500 CEO are … low. Or a Hollywood producer. Or owning a sports team. Even your odds of home ownership are lower, though that is certainly a more attainable goal.

Now let’s differentiate here between issues of personal ability governing one’s ceiling vs. an issue of structure. I was born in 1975 and in my full-grown height, I am 6’3”. I could have been the next Larry Bird if I had the athletic skill to do so. No one was stopping me, and in fact, I probably would have been able to tap into some good coaching and resources to pursue it.

I did not have an NBA career because I:

1. Am not that good at basketball

2. Didn’t have a desire to do it, and

3. Didn’t pursue it

If I had shown the requisite talent, there’s nothing and no one telling me that I couldn’t do it. The decision not to try was mine alone.

Contrast this with the same Black woman, born in 1950, who wanted to be president, or a Fortune 500 CEO, or a Hollywood producer, or ….

Can she do it? Maybe. It isn’t legally prohibited for her to try and become a Hollywood producer, though it would be unprecedented. She would be blazing a trail. If you have never actually blazed a trail, it requires a machete (or ax) to cut down undergrowth, and a map to see where you’re going. It’s sweaty, confusing, and frustrating. You can easily get lost or tired and there are a great deal more hazards.

It is really nothing like walking down an established path, where the way is clear, there are signs, all the obstacles have been removed, and there are boardwalks over the wet places.

So if there are only so many spots to do this thing (Hollywood producer, say) and some people are walking a path, and a few are having to blaze their own trails, the trailblazers are simply massively disadvantaged.

The reason the book Hidden Figures was so interesting (along with excellent writing) is that three black mathematicians working at NASA in the 40s and 50s was unprecedented. Being a white man working at NASA in that era was simply the expectation. It was the default setting.

To move up the ranks to those lofty places requires a lot of buy-in from other people who just don’t have a vision that includes people like her.

What’s So Wrong With White Christian Men?

The simplest rebuttal to this sort of talk is “why do you hate white Christian men?”

(This is akin to the “the left hates America” talk. Hey Ted Cruz, the left just thinks that a healthy America isn’t your vision of it. They dislike your America, much as you dislike theirs. Anyway.)

And of course, I’d like to cut off at the knees any suggestion that I’m writing this because I hate white Christian men. That’s an absurd claim, as I am a white Christian man, and I certainly don’t hate myself anymore than I hate Pat, John, Dave, Dan, Matt, Micah, or any other of the white Christian men who are my friends and family.

I would like to see more diversity in positions of power, because white Christian men have some massive blind spots, and said blind spots create a weak point for our culture.

Imagine if the only food we had available to us was that dreamed up by white men. Imagine a world without tacos or pho or egg rolls. The horrors.

Or music. I mean Radiohead; The Cure; Jack White; Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young - those are great bands. Let me say very clearly that I DON’T HATE THESE BANDS. These are great bands!

But imagine life without Jimi Hendrix, or Joni Mitchell, or Miles Davis, or BB King. Imagine a world without Robert Johnson, or Ben Harper. Or Phoebe Bridgers. Without Kathleen Edwards.

Honestly - and I’m being entirely serious here - I cannot imagine the deprivation if all of their efforts and amazing body of work were to be pulled away.

Life is better when we have a plurality of voices to hear from, people who can create beauty, who can show us deep perspective. Shutting those voices out because they lack the currently accepted skin pigmentation and plumbing seems extraordinarily short sighted.

If our leaders are supposed to represent their constituents, how can they do that if they are massively overrepresented by the most privileged demographic? And worse, are unwilling to learn about the experience of other people.

This is so obvious in the Trump administration it’s like a caricature. Their idea of diversity is Marco Rubio. In fairness, I think they are trying to govern disproportionately to white men, as that is their voting base. But if any given administration is supposed to be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, they are very much failing the 8 out of 10 who are not white Christian men.

As Paul Wellstone said, “We all do better when we all do better.”

So What Is It We Are Resisting Exactly?

This is a confusing question with many facets, so let’s start in the simplest place. First we are resisting the rot, the obvious harm. As my friend Doug Pagitt put it, “I don’t need to know all the good food in the refrigerator to start throwing out the bad.”

That sums up pretty well the idea I had when confronting much of this material: first, do no harm. The cornerstone of the Hippocratic Oath is also a pretty good starting point for ethical philosophy as it turns out.

As I thought through things, Trump’s goals are generally:

• enriching himself,

• enshrining his legacy on every coin, building, airport, arch, bill, and golden statue he can,

• and fighting for “white Christian America.”

As I have previously said, he doesn’t approach this last bit as a true believer. Judging by his actions and his words he doesn’t understand Jesus’ teachings well enough to believe in them. To buy in you first have to understand, and I don’t think we have gotten anywhere near that point.

If you doubt the claim that Trump is fighting for “white Christian America” at the expense of others, look at his actions against:

• nonwhite people (demonization, ICE, cutting DEI, cancelling promotions, ASMR videos of migrants in chains, removing black history),

• his “anti-Christian bias task force,” and

• his bullying, bombing, conquest-oriented nature toward other countries.

There is nothing wrong with white evangelicalism being AN option on the worldview menu. There is everything wrong with it being the ONLY option on the worldview menu.

“An option” is pluralism, aka, freedom of choice. “THE option” is Christian nationalism, aka, no freedom of choice.

“The option” is a world without egg rolls, Miles Davis, and Phoebe Bridgers.

To restrict freedom of religion, and codify a particular set of Christian beliefs into law, is deeply unamerican and unconstitutional from my understanding. And the attempt to do so (as we are seeing now) is creating a lot of material, physical, financial, and spiritual harm … again, from my perspective.

If we are talking about what we are resisting, I think that is Thing 1.

Maybe resistance starts with listening to fresh voices, with defending the vulnerable and refusing cruelty. Maybe we make room at the table for new people.

Beauty grows when new voices are allowed to sing.

I know that not all my readers are American or necessarily pay great attention to politics, so a bit more context is probably in order here. James Talarico is a democrat running against Ken Paxton (a republican) to be a US senator from Texas, representing the state in Washington.

Talarico faces an uphill battle as Texas has not had a democratic senator since Lloyd Bentsen in 1988. Remember when you first started getting emails? Go back two presidential terms before that.

Talarico is an eighth-generation Texan. As he puts it “My family has been living here since it was Mexico.” To which Stephen Colbert said, “So you’re going to get deported then?”

Touché.

Talarico is a 37-year-old single man with a vegan girlfriend (the scandal!). He has a bachelors from UT Austin in government, a masters in education from Harvard, and currently is working on a Masters of Divinity from Austin Presbyterian Seminary.

After he graduated college he joined Teach for America and taught middle school in San Antonio, in one of the poorest zip codes in Texas. After teaching for two years he became the Central Texas executive director for a nonprofit called Reasoning Mind, dedicated to bringing educational technology to low-income classrooms.

He is a very vocal christian and said the goal that Christ set for us is a radical view of service and love of neighbor. Cleancut and polite he has a ready, genuine smile and an incredible ability to articulate political realities without oversimplification.

He is scandal free, unless you count the made up MAGA allegations that he is “low T” and a vegan. (The first is unknown and nobody’s business, and the second is flatly untrue. And anyway, bench pressing is not exactly in the job requirements for a US senator.)

He is smart, competent, energetic, and actually cares about people. No one who actually knows him has a bad thing to say about him.

If you abstract out the candidates from their parties and policies, Talarico is just much better qualified. Paxton is less articulate, vastly less ethical, and has a criminal record. As someone who knows him well said, “Ken is just so unimpressive, but don’t underestimate him.”

In 25 years in elected office, Ken Paxton has never lost a race.

Ken Paxton was Trump before Trump was. We have to remember that Republicans purport to be the party of God, family, patriotism, and traditional values.

Ken Paxton toes the line on the culture war issues: gays and lesbians and trans, pro Israel, pro military, pro second amendment, pro christian nationalism, pro life. And these qualities, and the perception that he listens to people and attempts to advocate for them (he’s a lawyer by trade) seem to be enough to overcome the mountain of misdeeds, at least up until now.

Paxton is in the midst of a messy divorce, filed by his wife Angela “on biblical grounds.” (Paxton’s on his second, possibly third, mistress.) He has been indicted for felony securities fraud, a case that took nine years to try and ended up with Paxton paying restitution and completing community service.

In 2008 he failed to disclose investments in a company that received millions in state contracts that Paxton voted on through state spending bills.

In 2013, he stole another lawyer’s $1,000 Montblanc pen which another lawyer left on a metal detector tray in the courthouse: a gift from the pen owner’s wife. Paxton’s theft was discovered by viewing security footage.

In 2020, his top aides reported him to the FBI for abusing his office: bribery, dereliction of duty, obstruction of justice, and abuse of the public trust. He fired four of them, and they sued under the whistleblowers protection act. A judge agreed that they were improperly fired and gave them a $6.6 million settlement that was paid for by the taxpayers.

He was impeached by his own party (republicans held a four-hour hearing with whether to proceed and voted to move ahead 121 to 23) and was eventually acquitted under pressure from Trump and Texas governor Greg Abbott.

His net worth was $175,000 when he entered public service, and now stands at $8,000,000.

There’s your two candidates folks. One of them has a mugshot and documented indiscretions the length of your arm (both legal and personal), while the other has a masters from Harvard, a legacy of actual public service, and the endorsement of all of his colleges, and his pastor who has known him since he was six years old.

So the question stands: WHY IS THIS EVEN A RACE?

AS ALWAYS, THE CULTURE WARS

It was communists when I was a kid.

Then it was radical Muslims.

Then ISIS.

Then Mexicans.
Then MS13.

Then any immigrant.

Then trans people.

Now we’re back to communists.

A friend sent me this on Facebook. It seems a pretty good summation. Every culture war needs an enemy or enemies. The enemy is what makes it a war.

Ken Paxton is a bona fide special ops culture warrior. Immigrants, trans kids, the deep state, the squishy moderate establishment, democrats (or DEMONcrats), Obamacare, foreign aid, DEI, abortion, racial equity: he will fight everyone and everything. He has filed over 100 lawsuits against the federal administration to challenge progressive policies and was a key 2020 election denier.

And if you want a fighter - because you think the primary objective is fighting with everyone who doesn’t think EXACTLY like you do - then what’s an infidelity or two?

Impeachment? There was no conviction. Besides that’s the deep state anyway.

And who among us hasn’t stolen a $1,000 pen?

Fighting dirty is still fighting.

“The guy’s ability to take shots and just keep moving on and stay in elected office is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my career, in 25 years of running campaigns,” said Ash Wright, who worked as a senior adviser to Bush.

Rigid partisanship and the calcification of us/them into JOB #1 has made MAGA voters extraordinarily forgiving of a candidate’s ethical and legal indiscretions.

The Window of Discourse and Black Equality

This is Trump shifting the Overton Window, also called the Window of Discourse. This describes the range of subjects and arguments politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.

Something that was once unthinkable, then becomes fringe (radical!), then acceptable, then sensible, then popular, and finally becomes policy.

The equality of Black people in America (something Paxton has fought tooth and nail) is a good example. In the 18th and 19th centuries, equality was unthinkable (in many white minds). Abolitionism was a dangerous and radical idea.

Then Blacks, for taxation purposes, became 3/5ths a person in 1787. Five enslaved people were counted as three.

Eventually, through hundreds of years, a civil war, Jim Crow and separate but equal, lynchings, Jackie Robinson, the civil rights movement and killing (martyrdom) of MLK Jr, equality becomes policy in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights act of 1965.

But that progress is being rolled back under Trump (and Paxton). With the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, the complete shutdown of Black promotions in the military, and the erasure of prominent Blacks from history (in the Pentagon, in the Smithsonian if Trump gets his way, and elsewhere), equality is receding again.

The Overton Window, you see, is a thing that moves.

Once it would have been unthinkable to have a Republican candidate (they are supposed to be the party of God and family, after all) with the sort of egregious and very public character flaws and rapacious tendencies of a Trump. Ten years later, they treat him like a flawed messiah.

Appeasement Corrupts the Appeasers

The tragic tale of Lindsay Graham’s ever-diminishing moral clarity on Trump is a good example of this movement and the cost.

In 2015, Lindsay Graham said that Trump is hateful; a kook; a demagogue; a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. He “represents the worst in America.” Trump called for authoritarian measures, which Graham condemned. Trump wanted to “take over the oil” from US-occupied countries, which Graham denounced as theft. Trump wanted to deport American citizens, which Graham denounced as “McCarthy-like” and unconstitutional.

The list goes on: Trump wanted to execute an Army sergeant under investigation for desertion. To ban and surveil muslims, to torture terrorists just because, and to target the family members of terrorists. Graham said that would certainly fan the flames of terrorist ideology.

You would be making their case for them, Graham said. If you want to help them portray America as “the great satan,” torture and bombing civilians is a good start.

And you know what? 2015 Lindsay Graham was right. About all of it.

We need to speak out about this, 2015 Lindsay Graham said, because appeasement encourages the aggressor. If you want to make a bully stop, stand up to him.

Appeasement, he said, corrupts the appeasers.

And appeasement empowers the mob. (See 1/6/2021)

The Overton Window moved because many evangelicals decided that the gains Donald Trump could make in the christian nationalist arena were worth all of these very real offsetting factors and drawbacks.

And Ken Paxton’s enduring political career just goes to show this is a pattern, not an isolated event.

We Have to Inhabit the World We Vote For

The person we vote in will represent us in government, and the higher the office, the more they will speak for all of us. If we vote in a person who tries to annex Canada as the 51st state and put retaliatory tariffs on maple syrup and hockey sticks, then we will live with the consequences of that idiocy.

And, over time, the Overton Window will move and some of us will sound like this discussing Canada and the US and our respective forest fires:

This is an actual exchange, on my Facebook page, with a Minnesotan.

We take on Trumpy qualities.

*****

I need to land the plane here. The livestream is coming up and, as usual, I’m finishing this on Thursday morning.

There are legitimate differences here. Talarico is pro choice, for example. Talarico wants to get big donor money out of politics. He wants to tax the richest 1%. He is advocating Medicare for all, which many decry as socialism.

And, crucially, he is a christian who rejects christian nationalism in favor of protecting religious freedom.

His campaign website says:

My faith in Jesus leads me to reject Christian Nationalism and commit myself to the project of democracy. Because that’s the promise of America: a democracy where every person and every family — regardless of religion, race, gender, sexual orientation, or any other difference between us — can truly be free and live up to their full potential.

I hope there will come a day when we simply demand better representatives. When we say, as the Democrats did with Platner, that character matters. That certain things really are disqualifying.

We can debate the positions, that’s all fair. But ultimately we have to inhabit the world we vote for and live under the reign of the people we vote in.

Here’s to better choices.

This is the first “Five Questions With” column, and I hope many more will come.

This column starts with me finding a substacker I appreciate and whose work I resonate with. Someone who stretches my understanding in helpful ways. They agree to answer five thoughtful questions from me, and I react at the end to their responses.

Non-substack people might call this an email interview.

Our first writer is the esteemed Lauren Jones, PhD, author of Pink Parlance on substack.

Lauren’s bio reads: “Interrogating power through a Black feminist, post-Christian lens. Minneapolis. Millennial. Deconstruction, abolition, and love.”

I have learned a lot from Lauren. One recent essay “We Are Not All Immigrants” from July 4th really gave me a lot to think on. I’d highly recommend you read it.

And, with that, let’s dive in.

Hi Lauren,

First, thanks so much for being willing to do this column with me. I’ve been reading your work for a while and I’m looking forward to this.

Just for a bit of context, I had been a lifelong evangelical and conservative up until the Trump era. I had certainly seen some cracks that had me asking some hard questions, but Trump was a real shock to the system. It seemed the culture warriors were saying the quiet part so loud you’d have to be deaf not to hear it.

And yet, a great many white evangelicals still failed to see any of this as problematic.

I can sympathize with this: had my circumstances been different that may have been me. If you live in a pocket of whiteness, if the church is your ultimate authority, and Fox is where you get your news and there’s a great deal of confirmation bias in all of your interactions, it’s a hard thing to break out of.

It seems they (evangelicals who also hold strong MAGA views) are holding onto a theology and philosophy of:

• American supremacy (and white supremacy),

• anti-abortion,

• anti-LGBTQ,

• and pro-Israel.

These are the overriding cultural issues, and it is wrapped in the language of faith, family, freedom, and place. These are the pillars everything is built on.

But this is assumes stratifications of worth (or goodness):

• American

• White

• Male

• Christian

• Straight

• Conservative

The more of these boxes you check, the more their system is designed with you in mind. But of course being white, male, or American is just a matter of the generic lottery. As probably is straightness or queerness to a great extent. And conservatives seem to be grouped geographically as well.

If life is a game of Monopoly, this is a question of where you start on the board, how much cash you have, your social circles and educational opportunities, and - most importantly - is this system designed to advantage you?

That has been my operative metaphor to think about the privilege I carry as someone who checks all the boxes (other than conservative!).

You, obviously, through no fault of your own, were not born into a system designed for you. And that fundamentally is the aspect that is capricious and unjust and we are pushing back against, although you and I are coming to this place via different paths and different perspectives. And you, undoubtedly, understood this long before I did!

I share this simply to try to give a concise statement of where I came from and where I’m at vis-a-vis my understanding, and I think it’s fair to say a lot of my readers would be coming from a pretty similar place.

With that proviso, I appreciate the chance to learn from you, and I’m sure my readers will as well.

Here are my five questions:

Question One

If you could get all white American evangelicals to read one book, and take it well and truly to heart, what book would that be and why?

First of all, this is such a wild question to ask someone with a doctorate in humanities. Its like asking me to pick a favorite child or something (I don’t have children so pardon the expression). I don’t think our understandings or worldviews can be shaped by one book or even 10. But for White people, I think that are newer to learning about racial justice, I would recommend White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo. DiAngelo uses very accessible language and examples to explain Whiteness and how it continues to confound us as a society. I find it to be a good primer for developing a vocabulary and unlearning the violence of Whiteness. I have lots of other recommendations though, a few are pictured!

Question Two

Sometimes I do a thought experiment: if a genie gave me one wish to be used to improve society in some way, what would that be?

My gut reaction was that I would wish all boys grew up with really good, committed dads who could teach them to be trustworthy, humble men who could be secure enough to put other people first.

I don’t know if that’s the best answer, but it would be a decent place to start I suppose.

If that genie gave you a similar wish, what aspect of society would you change?

This is a tough question with so many complex answers I could offer. It’s been a really hard year for everyone with any sense of humanity, perhaps especially for us in the Twin Cities and for Black and Brown people. I have been scared, frustrated, and heartbroken so many times over the last year. And although I do not have children, seeing the faces of kids in Minnesota who have been impacted by gun violence, incarceration, violent immigration enforcement, and the loss of their parents continues to haunt me.

These children will never be the same, and neither will I. So, pretty related to your answer, I wish all little Black girls were able to grow up in complete safety and with complete freedom to be happy, healthy, and learn what they need to learn to become healthy functioning adults. If that were the case, all the other kids would be safe too, because centering the marginalized necessitates healthier conditions for everyone.

Question Three

Here’s a quote from your substack I’ll use to frame this question:

Centering whiteness is often described as a pattern, but in lived experience it feels more like a gravitational pull. It shapes conversations, reactions, priorities, and interpretations without announcing itself. It shows up in who gets protected, whose feelings become the priority, whose worldview becomes the default, and whose reality becomes negotiable. When I write about it, I’m not talking about individual white people being intentionally harmful. I’m talking about a cultural force that teaches white people to see themselves as the reference point for what is normal, reasonable, safe, or true.

- Denise Takakjy, PhD on Substack

This one really hit me. It’s hard to understand how deep this pull goes. It’s like trying to get a fish to understand what water is. There’s no frame of reference - it’s essentially the only world many of us have known.

For the last twelve years my family has lived on the east side of St. Paul. Our neighborhood is African-American, white, Latino, and Hmong. And I love that about it - that’s one of the main reasons we moved there. But even living in such a neighborhood, and even being someone who is really open to those friendships, it’s still hard to do. The cultural gap can seem so wide.

Then I think of white folks living in a small town in the north in farm country. And I think if it’s so hard for me to understand this gravitational pull even as someone with a philosophy degree living every day in a very diverse environment, how hard, how foreign, is it for them?

If you have seen people in a position of privilege change their perspective, what factors typically have been the catalyst?

Is there an “aha moment” or is it sometimes a very slow and gradual awakening?

Thank you for sharing that. I live on the other side of the river in North Minneapolis. Our neighborhood is also very mixed but there is a large concentration of Black folks in North. My husband and I love it here and feel safest in the city around other Black people. I have always preferred cities, largely because of the cultural diversity. And while I don’t encourage White people to move into cities just for the diversity (that is extractive), there is something to be said about the power of proximity. Everything around us has been designed to protect Whiteness and capitalism, so if you want to ‘wake up’ so to speak, you have to deconstruct with deep commitment and intention.

From what I have seen and read, what makes White folks come to their ‘aha moment’ has been humility, stories, and authentic relationships with people of color and it takes years of work. Reading books and newsletters by authors of color, listening to podcasts about race and racism, and watching documentaries like 13th, Stamped From the Beginning, and Descendant will help ground you in history and contemporary realities. Even learning this history is difficult, so reckoning with it internally will take time, and it isn’t as linear as you might think; we progress and regress depending on circumstances. Here is a visual to help you identify where you might be in that journey. You will make a lot of mistakes and cause harm in this work, so you also need to learn how to apologize authentically and take accountability for that harm. You will never be done becoming antiracist or doing this work.

Angela Davis said that “in a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be antiracist.” The White people that I’ve worked with toward antiracism are fully aware of their Whiteness, always willing to talk about race and racism, and eager to dismantle oppressive systems. The thing to remember is that we’ve all been socialized to believe the worst things about race, gender class, faith, and everything else. Deconstruction is really difficult lifelong work but we all have to start somewhere.

Question Four

One of the factors of the success behind the MAGA story is that it’s an easy one. It goes like this:

• America is the greatest country ever,

• there was a golden age we need to get back to,

• we are a white, christian country,

• we are the strongest country in the world,

• go ‘Murica.

It has a conflict narrative, good guys and bad guys, you (christian white person) are on the right side, and we will get you your power back, your money back, and restore America to greatness.

The diversity story is harder to tell, and perhaps harder to sell. It requires white Americans to accept the ideas that:

• America is a vast, powerful country with some great qualities and some profound flaws, both historical and current

• American Founders (and white/European Americans) have committed some quite grievous crimes that echo through to the current day

• A promotion going to a woman of color at your job, might mean you don’t get that promotion. Many aspects of this are positive sum (i.e. equal rights doesn’t mean “less rights for you”), but not all of them are.

I am willing to buy into these ideas because I think they are true, and there is a moral ought to believe true things, even if some repercussions are difficult.

But, this is a difficult task. How do we get people to “settle for equality” when they are accustomed to a position of cultural superiority?

I guess this is a question of what kind of human you aspire to be. I grew up in church learning about the life and teachings of Jesus. He did things like forgiving sinners, healing the sick, feeding the poor, and ultimately sacrificing His life. It was in that same building that I learned about the life and murder of Fred Hampton. So I’m learning about the unjust deaths of two young men for trying to preach liberation.

The Black church also taught me about how we as Black people were being oppressed in the US, not unlike the Hebrews of the Old Testament. So, with that being my foundation, I’ve always been oriented towards justice, not only for Black people, but for all the oppressed peoples globally. I always wanted to be a part of that work. Now, even though I’m not a part of Christianity, those principles are still central to my identity.

For me that includes distributive justice; that is, ensuring that everyone has the resources and opportunities that they need to thrive. Because of historical and contemporary injustices including colonialism, chattel slavery, White supremacy, misogyny, and patriarchy, many of us have been put in positions where we have to work incredibly hard just to survive in this world; rest and joy are but a dream.

Meanwhile, others have more than they can spend or use in ten lifetimes. If those realities don’t enrage you, there isn’t anything I can do to convince you. Even if there is no heaven, I still want to be a good ancestor. Because I know what it means to live under the foot of oppression, I want to make it easier for someone else. If that means I have a little less that is okay with me.

But if everyone actually believed this way, nobody would be sleeping outside or starving. I hope your readers understand that decentering Whiteness, maleness etc is not about them having less, but about everyone else having the lives they also deserve.

Question Five

You get to pick an album that ALL OF MY LISTENERS HAVE TO LISTEN TO CAREFULLY, REPEATEDLY, AND IN ITS ENTIRETY. What album?

I ask about a book and an album partially because I’m a writer and a musician, but also because I think books and music are such an important starting point for understanding each other.

I like this question because I almost never get asked or write about music. I’m going to recommend Cowboy Carter by Beyonce. I have been a Beyoncé fan for over twenty years, so this was something I was going to listen to anyway, but it wasn’t as immediately resonant because I am not a country music fan. I have always associated country music with Whiteness/racism. Yes there are Black country singers but we have traditionally not been welcomed into the spaces that center this music, at least not in my lifetime.

As an example, Beyoncé herself has said the album was borne out of feeling unwelcomed at the 2016 Country Music Awards, and other Black artists have also spoken about their experiences with racism in the industry.

In Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé , a native of Houston, forces us to acknowledge the Black roots of country music, does something special with a couple of covers, and collaborates with a lot of unexpected artists. It’s about truth telling in and through our art, about reclaiming our traditions, and about embracing our shared Southern roots. It’s a really fun and intentional ride through genres and Americana.

I recently wrote a piece about leaving the so-called Beyhive, or Beyoncé fandom because of her marriage to someone with, at best, questionable behaviors. I was writing this piece prior to the most recent news about Jay-Z. I will always interrogate power and our relationships to and within it. I still love her music though, and think the album is worth a deep listen.

Concluding Thoughts

These are my (Adam’s) thoughts after reading and re-reading Lauren’s answers, and working on the things they brought up for me.

One of the most important things that reinforced something I have been slowly realizing over the past decade is how important it is that we allow people to tell their own stories. Imagine you meet a stranger and then proceed to tell them about their life as if you were the expert on it. That would, of course, be absurd.

So it is equally absurd to think that I, as a white person who always has been and will always be white, understand what it is to be Black in this country. I don’t understand it, and the only way that I can start is through this sort of dialogue, through reading and through podcasts.

Fortunately we have an incredible wealth of information now, and the ability to do this work is more accessible than ever.

Here’s a good example that Lauren posted on her substack:

So many of these answers were helpful in understanding that. It takes a willingness to unlearn and to relearn, to rethink some fundamental assumptions, and to be in relationships and be willing to listen to some hard truths.

A couple of other quick things:

“centering the marginalized necessitates healthier conditions for everyone. “

This is a great insight. Full stop.

The Black church also taught me about how we as Black people were being oppressed in the US, not unlike the Hebrews of the Old Testament. So, with that being my foundation, I’ve always been oriented towards justice, not only for Black people, but for all the oppressed peoples globally. I always wanted to be a part of that work.

It’s so interesting and revealing that your experience in the church made you want to work for social justice, and many people’s experience in white conservative churches have led them to the conclusion that the social justice movement is something to be fought against, as it is “liberal.”

I guess that really illustrates it clearly.

Thank you for sharing that. I live on the other side of the river in North Minneapolis. Our neighborhood is also very mixed but there is a large concentration of Black folks in North. My husband and I love it here and feel safest in the city around other Black people. I have always preferred cities, largely because of the cultural diversity.

I have heard this idea often from my friends who are ethnic minorities. In the city it is a lot more diverse and diversity is seen as “normal” or the default condition. This makes a lot of sense. No one wants to live in a place they don’t feel welcome.

Well, I guess we can close with that. My heartfelt thanks to Lauren for her work and for her time to answer questions. I’d encourage you to subscribe to her substack!

For the people of God, the Word of God leaves pleasant bruises.

To say that someone is a conservative does not tell us what he is interested in conserving.

The three quotes above are quotes from Doug Wilson. The title is my summation of Doug’s teachings vis-a-vis the people who hear them … “Look, people, do as I say and no one gets hurt.”

*****

Before we dive into this essay, I’ll confess this has been difficult to write about. I had to check out and take a mental health/self care day on Monday, as much of this is so reminiscent of my experiences with John Piper and the ultra-sure-of-themselves reformed crowd, and how they tolerate no dissent. I disc golfed and lifted weights and basically exerted myself until I could barely move (it was also 95 and humid, so that accelerated things) and I have been fine since then.

We are psychosomatic entities: sometimes mental/spiritual struggles can be greatly aided by physical exertion. I know the explanatory power of that statement varies person to person, but it is VERY true for me, and perhaps for you.

And, while I think this material is extremely important, it may be hard to read. Self care may be in order.

The Patriarch of Moscow, Idaho

Doug Wilson is the self-styled patriarch of Moscow, Idaho. He is the head pastor of Christ Church and has been for decades. He also heads up the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, the denomination they created (more on this later). An advocate for the “classical Christian education movement,” they created Logos School and New St. Andrews College as the educational partner of the churches.

(This is his sketch from his website dougwils.com, which presumably tells us good bit about how he wishes to be perceived.)

Canon Press, once the communications arm of the church, has become a for-profit, independent entity. Doug was worried that “I can’t have a board of elders overseeing a publishing house where the top editors and authors are paid more than church staff. I just foresaw troubles.”

Some of Canon Press’s greatest hits are:

• Leadership and the Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits by Joe Rigney

• The Case for Christian Nationalism by Stephen Wolfe

• Leadership and Emotional Sabotage by Joe Rigney

• It’s Good to be a Man by Michael Foster & Dominic Bnonn Tennant

• Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos: A Defense of Liberty Against Tyrants by Junius Brutus

• Slaying Leviathan: Limited Government and Resistance in the Christian Tradition by Glenn S Sunshine

• Future Men: Raising Boys to Fight Giants by Douglas Wilson

• Loving the Little Years: Motherhood in the Trenches by Rachel Jankovic

• How to Exasperate Your Wife: And Other Short Essays for Men by Douglas Wilson

• The Household and the War for the Cosmos by C.R. Wiley

War is the default condition. God (as per their interpretation) is LORD OF ALL and isn’t big on LGBTQ, equity, vaccinations, women in positions of leadership (or voting, for that matter).

Men rule, women make babies. The government is to be resisted. Empathy is toxic.

The word of God leaves pleasant bruises.

Christ Church’s mission statement is “All of Christ, for all of life, for all of Moscow.” That is a statement about a town. If you extend that vision to America you have Doug Wilson’s view of christian nationalism.

It truly is cradle-to-grave education (or indoctrination) with definite growth ambitions.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Pete Hegseth

This is probably as good a time as any to point out that our Secretary of War is their most famous acolyte, one Pete Hegseth. Obsessed with warfighting, American supremacy, and “peace through strength” this is an ideology tailor made to radicalize a man with Hegseth’s tendencies. (Just yesterday Pete issued a decree saying the Pentagon would have “mandatory testosterone testing” because of course he did.)

And that, in practice, looks like this:

We were led into a war that bears a great deal of resemblance to an ideological (aka holy) war on behalf of Israel, and it is going very badly indeed. The ripple effects of this will manifest in a great deal of global hunger in the poorest areas of the world and incredible economic harm, not to mention the death toll in Iran and elsewhere and the radicalism we are certainly creating.

Pete believes, deeply, in war.

As Bob Dylan wrote in “With God on our Side”

Oh the First World War, boys

It closed out its fate

The reason for fighting

I never got straight

But I learned to accept it

Accept it with pride

For you don’t count the dead

When God’s on your side

The Paleo-Confederate

Wilson’s groomed image is as a kindly, if anachronistic, grandfather type. A southern gentleman from 1847 who happens to live in Idaho in 2026. A “paleo-confederate” he believes that the confederacy is a lost cause now (the Civil War isn’t still being litigated) though one that was “right on all the essential constitutional and cultural issues.” Paleo-confederates reject “modern federalism” in favor of decentralized, localized power, heavily opposing federal overreach, desegregation, and modern secular values.

He also is out of line with Presbyterianism writ large, so much so he needed to form his own denomination. If the purpose of a denomination is to bring support and standards to their churches (and discipline if needed), this frees them from censure or cancellation.

And how much can Wilson’s self-created denomination hold their founder and most famous pastor to account? Not much.

Wilson is a slavery apologist with his book Southern Slavery As It Was where he makes the case that slavery was a mutually-beneficial and biblically sanctioned arrangement. (Link to the excerpt.)

The fact that the South practiced slavery is enough to cause many moderns to feel they do not even have to listen to the various biblical and constitutional arguments that swirled around that controversy....

How could men have supported slavery? The question is especially difficult when we consider that these were men who lived in a pervasively Christian culture. We have all heard of the heartlessness — the brutalities, immoralities, and cruelties — that were supposedly inherent in the system of slavery. We have heard how slave families were broken up, of the forcible rape of slave women, of the brutal beatings that were commonplace, about the horrible living conditions, and of the unrelenting work schedule and back-breaking routine — all of which go together to form our impression of the crushing oppression which was slavery in the South. The truthfulness of this description has seldom been challenged.

The point of this small booklet is to establish that this impression is largely false. It is important to note, however, that the impression is not entirely false. The truth is, Southern slavery is open to criticism because it did not follow the biblical pattern at every point. Some of the state laws regulating slavery could not be defended biblically (the laws forbidding the teaching of reading and writing, for example). One cannot defend the abuse some slaves had to endure. None can excuse the immorality some masters and overseers indulged in with some slave women. The separation of families that sometimes occurred was deplorable. These were sad realities in the Southern system. Our purpose here is not to defend any such practices — where and when they occurred.... But the question still needs to be asked, “How widespread were these instances of unbiblical and ungodly treatment on the part of Southern slave holders?”

Judge George L. Christian observed, “In the first place slavery, as it existed in the South, was patriarchal in its character; the slaves (servants, as we called them) were regarded and treated as members of the families to which they severally belonged; with rare exceptions, they were treated with kindness and consideration, and frequently the relations between the slave and his owner, were those of real affection and confidence”….

There were specific roles for blacks and whites, and each “knew their place” as it were, but what is often overlooked is the high level of interaction between the races which was a common and everyday experience.

AND EACH KNEW THEIR PLACE, AS IT WERE?

Now you may read this and think, surely, if there is one single thing we agree on as Americans, it’s that slavery is bad … right? I mean what about basic human freedoms? What about the chance to actually make your own decisions as opposed to having someone else make them for you? What about the chance to own land?

To Doug Wilson there is one question and one question only: What does the Bible say?

After all, humans have a fundamental problem with sin and are inherently totally depraved and incapable of any sort of goodness apart from God. (That’s total depravity, or the T in TULIP.) God is the designer of humans and the Bible is therefore the instruction manual for human behavior.

If I want to understand my 2012 Chevrolet Suburban, I read the owner’s manual, which was literally written by the engineers who designed it. HOW COULD YOU IMPROVE UPON THAT? YOU CAN’T.

That is sort of the argument being made here. It is - in the most bookish, bloated, and bloviated sense - “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”

To The Interpreter Goes The Spoils

To interpret the Bible thusly is to tell a comprehensive story of human history and intelligence. Of human hierarchy. Of what is good and what is evil. Of where we came from, and where we are going. Of Israel’s place in the story. Of America’s place in the story.

It tells the role of men in society and in families and the role of women. It prescribes who should and should not be able to vote. It prescribes what the “proper and best” point of view is (theirs, unsurprisingly) and how dissenting voices should be viewed (as completely wrong-headed).

If you can tell this story, and get other people to believe it, you will control them and they will give you 10% of their income. The more people believe your story, the greater your control, and the larger your coffers.

Men are to be over women, and serve them faithfully. Men provide and protect.

Women submit to their husbands, make babies, and run things around the house. Theirs is a sacred role in cultivating the family.

Christianity is right (in the sense that it is true) and reformed Christianity of the Canon Press variety is the best incarnation of the true thing. All other worldviews are false and must be opposed.

(Remember here that there are over 200 major denominations in the US, and if you count the splinter groups - like Wilson’s - that number is over 2,000. Presbyterianism, the stream of reformed tradition he claims, wouldn’t have Wilson as his views are too fringe. Why then does he get to decide for everyone else?)

Now … if this ACTUALLY IS HOW THE WORLD FUNCTIONS, then this person would be dispensing invaluable wisdom. If it is true that your family will not and cannot thrive if the husband doesn’t lead in every way, then that’s a good piece of information to have.

If it’s true that women shouldn’t actually vote, and need to make babies and orchestrate domestic tranquility, if that is true in some immutable way, then the sooner you can wrap your head around that the better.

If, however, this is not true in some immutable and eternal way, then this is the literal definition of what it is to be a tyrant. Webster’s defines a tyrant as “an absolute ruler unrestrained by law or constitution” or as “a usurper of sovereignty.”

If you are a woman living in Moscow, Idaho, and you are married to a Doug Wilson acolyte, your sovereignty has been well and truly usurped.

And if you’re a black progressive lesbian living in Moscow, Idaho … well it’s probably best to move.

The Mask Prescription from Doctor Doug

Idaho is one of the least vaccinated states.

Doug Wilson’s argument vis-a-vis masks is that the government often overreaches and it is within the purview of the church to conscientiously object. You’ll be shocked - shocked! - to learn that he believes mask wearing (and especially mandatory vaccinations) were a case of clear government overreach, and he went so far as to forbid masks in their church. He also encouraged his parishioners to forge vaccine passports.

“I believe ruling elites are picking a fight, trying to provoke unrest, and are doing so in order to be able to justify measures that are genuinely repressive,” he writes.

One conservative politician openly supported COVID-19 vaccination - and that would be Mitch McConnell.

Why? Because he is a survivor of childhood polio, and he understands what it means to live with a preventable disease with lifelong implications.

For Doug Wilson to insist that people do not “submit to government overreach” in the form of masks and vaccinations is an ideological position for him. It’s a philosophical position, and a theological one. But it is also a prescription, and Doug Wilson is not a doctor.

He is making a decision, for all the people who listen to him, that COVID is not that bad. That “you’ll be in bed for a few days and you’ll be fine, and your body will then have natural immunity.”

And that’s true for some people (like me). But it is very much not true for people with compromised immune systems. They may take a very long time to recover from COVID and then have significantly compromised health afterwards. Or they may die.

And this is the problem with ideologues. They think in terms of absolutes and the WAY THAT THINGS SHOULD BE (in their minds) as opposed to the WAY THAT THINGS ACTUALLY ARE.

Medicine deals in the real, the observable, the empirical. The Doug Wilsons of the world pay lip service to the empirical, while in fact grinding it to dust under the wheels of their normative ideological frameworks.

And the result of this? The reddest counties in America died at 6x the rate of the bluest counties in America during the height of COVID.

******

This essay is already quite long and I cut it off somewhat capriciously. I plan to do a second essay on a few of the topics I couldn’t fit in this one:

• christian nationalism,

• the constitution that Doug claims to love and subverts at every chance,

• the outright war on pluralism of any sort,

• and the necessity and perils of writing about (and therefore platforming) extremism.

Postmillenialism may also find its way in there.

I know this is difficult stuff, but it goes such a long way in explaining the specific sort of attempt at “christian governance” we are currently undergoing, the one that firmly rejects Jesus’ teachings on the sermon on the mount or in Matthew 25. It sees, instead Jesus flipping tables as the paradigm. Or a warlike Jesus returning in Revelation, “they will wage war against the Lamb, but the Lamb will triumph over them…”

This is far from the only way christians can interface with the world. (See Talarico, James.)

It is, in fact, the most tyrannical.

LINKS for further reading/viewing

Doug’s NPR interview

Tim and April Show

3 of 7 Project - “He Doesn’t Actually Hate Women”

Southern Slavery As It Was excerpt

When Doug Wilson says he lies, Believe Him - Kristin Du Mez

Doug Wilson’s blog on Romans 13 and COVID

That’s exciting territory, and it’s good to explore. When you have been mired in darkness and doubt for a very long time, thinking on things that are good, true, and beautiful is a welcome respite.

As Paul writes in Philippians 4: 7-8:

And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.

Of course it is good and valuable to think on such things, but there is a rather large caveat here.

We can’t ONLY think about these things. That isn’t all that’s happening in the world. To think about the world as it actually is is to think about ugliness. You can’t think about ICE shootings and family separation at the border and USAID cuts and not take in ugliness and to behold evil, often undertaken at the direction of our own government.

So we need to do both. We’re adults, we can multitask. For our mental, emotional, spiritual, and familial wellness, we do need to think on what is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and admirable. A life deprived of these things is a dark one indeed. This can be our compass heading in rough seas.

But we need also to take a realist’s view of our situation, and make such interventions as we can. Anything from prayer to local action to speaking out to supporting refugees to running for office. Or maybe try to bind up the wounds of those ground up by this awful system.

We need to simultaneously have a somewhat hopeful vision for what it could be as well as a clear-eyed appraisal of where we currently are.

Both/and, not either/or.

Positive sum, not zero sum.

So with that, let’s catch up with MAGA and dive into the WORLD AS IT IS:

Immigrants, Evangelicals, and the Language of Immigration

Jesus, it would seem by my reading, says we ought to accept refugees. That it is, in his view, the right thing to do.

“Do not oppress a foreigner; you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners, because you were foreigners in Egypt.” - Exodus 23:9

³⁴ “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. ³⁵ For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, ³⁶ I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ - Matthew 25:34 - 36

The religiously unaffiliated have also come to that conclusion at a rate of 65%, albeit via an entirely different path, one which I would call pluralistic and humanistic.

There’s a humanist vision that says “we ought to take care of people and I don’t really care where you’re from, friend,” and that vision in vastly more in line with Matthew 25 than white evangelicalism.

Two of my most strident critiques of the Trump administration were the USAID cuts and the demonization of immigrants and abuses of ICE. It wasn’t lost on me that the more liberal people were, the more likely they were to share those concerns. The No Kings rallies were an interesting mix of everyone, skewing liberal certainly, but you’d see a lot of proper old school conservatives and also a lot of christians.

The impulse to accept immigrants is also very American, in the words of the young jewish American poet (fittingly named Emma Lazarus), “bring me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

White evangelicals are at a paltry 25%. One in four. Stay where you are, refugee. Shelter in place, even if it’s untenable. Don’t come to America in hope of a better life. I’m trying to think of a nice way to say this, but the long and short of it is we don’t want you.

(Coming to America for a better life is a “pull factor” in immigration. You go to America because of the promise of America: you’re going to a better place. Starvation, violence, religious persecution, or the local gang leader deciding your unusually beautiful 13-year-old daughter would be a good girlfriend for the local gang - true story - would be a “push factor.” You’re fleeing a place that is simply untenable)

So what pray tell, are immigrants supposed to do, if they are unwelcome here and we aren’t willing to help with food, or pay $4 for a malaria net?

Well, you can die quietly and anonymously where you are. Or maybe the NGOs can help you. Or maybe Europe will chip in.

The real rub of the issue here is that evangelicals DO help and do give to organizations like Samaritan’s Purse and World Relief. I just don’t understand now they can also back a president (and a movement) that is doing so much to harm immigrants and minorities alike. How can you be an advocate for immigrants, minorities, and the least of these, while also backing the most open racist, cruel, and hostile president of our lifetime?

(I suppose it’s because of abortion, gays, and Israel, the main evangelical culture war points of the last five-plus decades.)

If you are FOR “the least of these,” then you should also be against the brutal and unconstitutional tactics employed by ICE and you should be against hate speech (aka, everything Trump says on the subject). Pick a lane, please. The cognitive dissonance is deafening.

David French said recently that the evangelical church tends to take on the disposition of the sitting Republican president, and I think that statement has a great deal of explanatory power. Unfortunately, in this case.

It’s just difficult for me that the group who should (according to what we allegedly believe) care the most about “all the poor and powerless” seems to care the least (25%), while those godless leftist atheists embody the teachings of Christ much better (65%), though they arrive through the gate of pluralism and humanism.

Ironic, eh?

USAID Dead Names Names and the World’s First Trillionaire

Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire, has publicly pushed back against the idea that the USAID cuts actually killed people.

Not a pleasant idea, I suppose, the thought that you had the blood of hundreds of thousands of people on your hands.

Here are a few of his tweets on the subject.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Anyway, Kristoff had a few specific stories. Here are three:

Jibia was a 10-year-old girl, ranking third out of 58 students in her fourth-grade class in Rwamwanja, Uganda. Aid cuts meant that the local clinic ran out of $2 bed nets to protect from mosquitoes, as well as anti-malaria medicines. Jibia died of malaria last July, her mother told me outside the family home. Medical records confirmed that, and health workers told me that she would have been fine without the aid cuts: Replacing her tattered bed net with a new one could have prevented malaria, and in any case drugs would have helped her to recover promptly.

Yamah Freeman hemorrhaged while pregnant with her third child in her village in Liberia. The United States had provided ambulances to the local hospital, but the aid cuts under Musk and President Trump meant that the ambulances had no fuel. The strongest young men in the village placed her on their shoulders and raced down the path toward town, shouting encouragement to her as they ran, but she bled to death along the way. Her parents and sister told me about this, and I visited her grave.

Achol Deng, 8, had been infected with H.I.V. at birth in South Sudan but had been kept alive by American-provided medicines costing just 12 cents a day. The dismantling of USAID and the resulting chaos meant that she lost her caseworker and access to medicines, and soon died of an opportunistic infection, health workers told me.

So… The US spent 23 cents out of every 100 dollars of tax income on aid, and saved about 6 lives every minute. That’s 0.23% of our tax revenue spent on foreign aid, or less than ¼ of one percent.

Less than ¼ of 1% is a rounding error. As a christian, I don’t think it’s wildly inappropriate that less than a quarter of a percent of our tax revenues go toward saving lives of the very most vulnerable populations.

Heaven forbid the government use its money (your money and my money) to do something good. Pete Hegseth put in for a $1.5 trillion budget for “warfighting” (aka killing people), but $6 billion is too much to keep people alive?

And even if we were looking at only our own self interest (a very MAGA thing to do) preventing the spread of ebola and HIV in Africa means preventing cases in the US, because we have these things now called airplanes, you sanctimonious blowhards.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure? A stitch in time saves nine?

Wisdom of our ancestors? Anyone?

And, not for nothing, the agent of said dismantling also happens to be the world’s first trillionaire. Let’s say he throws $2 billion of his own money at funding the PEPFAR program. That leaves him with a scant $998 billion left over.

Graham Platner Was Not Fit to Represent Maine, and He Was Shut Down

I keep thinking that Graham Platner had the political career that Trump should have had.

As Trump was rising through the ranks, being the vile, perverse, quarrelsome, nativist, anti-intellectual, and nakedly transactional person that he was, I kept wondering when it would end. When the Access Hollywood tapes came out (the infamous “grab them by the _____” hot mic capture) you’d think that would be the end of it. For the party of Jesus and family. But no.

So I kept asking myself (until yesterday), is Graham Platner the democrats’ Trump? I find him more relatable (I’m much closer to being an oysterman than a nepo baby billionaire) and more intelligent (the qualities those who “found him” wished to amplify) and seemingly equally willing to fight.

He had some serious issues in his past like the N*zi tattoo and sexting scandals, but they were of a piece with Trump’s and probably significantly lesser as he hasn’t … oh I don’t know …. Bilked his followers out of $3 billion on a memecoin. Or started a sham college that filed bankruptcy. If you tally up all Graham Platner’s sexting and sexual assault charges they are in the single digits. To count Trump’s you’d need both your hands, your neighbor’s hands, and also a friend’s, and that’s not even counting the Epstein Files.

But then a further serious and credible rape allegation came out, and the democrats dropped him quickly and with near unanimity. WHICH IS HOW IT SHOULD BE.

Graham Platner is unfit for office, but it needs to be said that Donald Trump is orders of magnitude worse.

MAGA, and white evangelicals, take a hint. Character counts for the godless, pluralist leftists, but not for white evangelicals I guess.

You don’t have credibility as the party that cares about families - or just the right of women to their own bodily autonomy and safety - when you have a known rapist occupying your highest office, because the ends (culture war!) justify the means (Donald Trump).

JD Vance’s Communion and Blood and Soil

I once had a really difficult and temperamental boss, and I was the number two person there. Waiting to clean up messes, solve problems, and navigate all the various harms and petty dysfunctions. JD Vance has that situation times ten. My boss didn’t start any global wars, or trigger any recessions.

Somehow, in the midst of all this, JD Vance wrote a book, worrying that our western christian civilization is being lost to secular global liberalism. You can see this in many countries as they advance: they become “post-christian.” (See: Europe.)

“My big fear isn’t death but that we inherited a great civilization and are slowly letting it fall into disrepair,” he writes. Our civilization is crumbling and JD Vance and Co. are making the last-ditch attempts to save it.

JD Vance lionizes the men who won the Second World War as models of those fighting to save our situation.

“It was Western Christian civilization,” Vance writes, “and the values particular to it: the concept of natural rights, including freedom of speech; a sense of duty to one’s neighbors; an obligation of the strong to protect the weak; a belief in free will and individual conscience.”

I’d like to address these one at a time. Natural rights, and freedom of speech. This administration HATES free speech. And they also have no problem trampling on your rights if you’re not one of theirs. Jimmy Kimmel? Stephen Colbert? CBS?

A sense of duty to one’s neighbors: why do you think Minneapolis was out against ICE, the thugs you sent to harass our neighbors? We were motivated to oppose you from a sense of duty to our neighbors.

An obligation of the strong to protect the weak: Trump took in 1.4 billion in cryptocurrency last year. His Trumpcoin investors lost $3.3 billion.

See that curve? That’s not the one you want on your investment.

A belief in free will and individual conscience: they want conformity, not “free will and individual conscience.” You are free to think on your own, so long as your conclusions are in line with expectations.

Becoming Europe is Vance’s worst-case scenario. They have universal health care, right to choose is firmly ensconced everywhere, they are inherently pluralistic, and there is a vast middle class with few really rich and few really poor.

How deeply unAmerican. Here we have trillionaires and medical bankruptcy and Jesus, daggumit.

“And what I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values — values shared with the United States of America,” Vance said at last year’s Munich Security Conference.

The biggest problem, according to Vance is immigration, “opening the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants … As our leaders have ushered in an unprecedented increase in demographic diversity through immigration, they have simultaneously discarded the most powerful force for social cohesion: christianity.”

And he says the quiet part out loud - diversity is the problem, in his mind.

We would do well to note here that the VAST majority of immigrants come across the southern border are christian, and most of them Catholic - so they are even the right kind for ol’ Mr. Vance. As immigrants come across the southern border, our nation becomes more christian, not less.

And here I need to quote the brilliant Carlos Lozada article “JD Vance Is Worried” from the July 7 issue of The New York Times.

Vance neglects his duties of charity and grace when he does not acknowledge, let alone apologize for, spreading unfounded rumors in 2024 that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. He writes that critics say the administration is “too tough” on immigration, but he waves it all away. “The point is not to litigate this issue on these pages,” Vance writes, “but to highlight that any application of moral principles in the real world requires a constant evaluation of trade-offs.”

It’s just as the hymn says: They’ll know we are Christians by our constant evaluation of trade-offs.

It’s hard being the second in command for America’s Hitler, then writing a book about your christian faith.

I’ll complete the verse for you JD.

“They will know that we are christians by our love.”

Why voluntarily deprive yourself of food, modern conveniences, and speech for 24 hours you might ask? In a world with bacon, why be without?

For the better part of 50 years my mind has felt like the surface of a pond that has had various people throwing rocks into it. Constantly. And that’s not the fault of the people - it’s just the nature of a) not being a hermit, b) having a phone, and c) the internet.

So these rocks get thrown in and make splashes. And the wind blows, and then it shifts and swirls and blows again. Between the rocks and the shifting gusts the waters on the surface of this metaphorical pond never really settle down.

There’s a real sense in which you don’t know what a pond really is or looks like until you see it when the water is smooth as glass. See what it is reflecting back to you. There’s an elegance and a simplicity about that stillness.

So, to extend this metaphor, who am I without the news? Who am I without the normal demands of life placed on me? Without a pontoon boat in the backyard that needs a couple things, a lawn to be mowed, dinner to be prepared, band practice to prepare for?

I am a person WHO DOES THINGS, but who is the person behind that?

The real answer to that question changes of course - in the same way that you never step in the same river twice, we change. My neighbor chose to take her own life: how has that news affected me?

I wish I could help more with my dad’s care, and the difficulty of that situation (and the weight it places on my brother) is hard.

When the water settles out, what does it look like? What does this mirror show?

That is the question I needed to answer.

The First Rule of Fight Club

I will say that this retreat was The Return of the Prodigal Son, that it was hosted by Illuman of Minnesota (a men’ s organization loosely based around the teachings of Richard Rohr, who has been quite helpful to me) and that it was at Osprey Wilds center in Sandstone, Minnesota.

Beyond that I’m not going to talk about some specific aspects, because I think they would be very hard to communicate well … there’s a strong “you had to be there” sense to a lot of it.

I think to try to give you the best sense of it, I’ll add some pictures and try to “put you in my head” as it were, and just tell you, as simply as I can, what I was thinking about in my 24 hours of silence and fasting with 20 acres of woods to myself.

One funny piece of this before we get to the silent part … Actually the fasting was from Friday night at 9:30 pm until brunch at Sunday morning at 9:30 am. So it was 36 hours, but with two sleeps in there.

Some fasts are very strict - just water - but in this one an exception was made for coffee! No reason for guys to have a headache all day. I left for the morning with a full 16 oz thermal mug and came back to camp once in the afternoon for a refill. I wrote on a piece of paper that I was coming back for coffee in case I was asked, so I wouldn’t have to say anything. As it was I slipped in and out of the dining hall undetected, coffee and water replenished.

Since I didn’t know the fasting policy vis-a-vis coffee, I had brought a baggie of coffee beans with me as a backup. Once when Maureen and I got stuck out on a trail overnight when we weren’t planning to be, I was hard up for coffee. I rummaged around in my pack and found about 25 coffee beans rolling around in the bottom. I swallowed them like you would pills and they did the trick!

Hammocks, Oaks, and Friluftsliv

For the retreat we were assigned diad partners - basically the buddy system. We were supposed to camp near enough each other that we could hear a whistle blown, but far enough for privacy. Twenty acres for me, 20 acres for you, that sort of thing. (There were 18 of us solo camping on 783 acres, so space wasn’t an issue.)

My diad partner and I decided to head down to a large prairie on the south end of the property that was entirely circled by deciduous hardwood forest (which is a fancy way of saying “oak trees”).

My partner took the prairie, I took the liminal space/border across a hand laid rock wall about ten yards into the treeline. The first order of business was to string up my hammock and rest. I had 24 hours, after all, and not much to do.

It took about 15 minutes to start to settle out, for my mind to calm down. I often get protracted alone time in the morning (like I have this exact moment) but this was different. The digital fast aspect changes things immensely. And the silence. And that I know that this is life for the next 24 hours. Nothing to do, no one to talk to. Just the deafening silence, shattered by the odd squirrel, woodpecker, mosquito, or logging truck on the highway 400 yards away.

My first, rather pressing, thought was WHY DON’T WE DO THIS EVERY DAY? There is so much beauty in nature and it is deeply restorative. Carry a hammock and find a couple of trees. Hammocks are small and light, and cost around $30. String it up, lay in it, and do nothing for a minute.

I think 30 minutes of hammock time in a day whenever a person can fit it in would do wonders. I was reading the Scandinavian Guide to Happiness recently, and was introduced to a Norwegian word/idea called “Friluftsliv” which means, roughly, connection through nature by being in nature. It is directly translated, charmingly, as “free air life.”

The word and concept was invented by Norwegian poet Henrik Ibsen who writes:

Here in this deserted dwelling

I have housed my wealth of treasure;

There’s a bench, a stove, a sweet-smelling

Air, and time to think at leisure.

This “sweet-smelling air” is friluftsliv. As the saying goes “we are human beings, not human doings.” It’s OK to go out and just be for a while. If we can’t find a way to normalize going outside and doing nothing other than being for a few minutes, it’s safe to say we won’t know what we are missing.

If you need to say it’s your homework for me - if that’s what it takes - then this is your homework. Bring a hammock (or a camp chair), go find a tree or two that you like and is relatively close to you, string your hammock up, lay back, and just be for a while. Put your phone in airplane mode. Let your mind wander. Let your blood pressure come down. Watch the clouds change. Observe nature.

Remember that we too are a sort of animal, although a wildly complex and spiritual one. And an eternal one, according to various spiritual traditions, including mine. (I will write more on this in an upcoming essay.) We have advanced to the point as a species that we can choose to live almost entirely inside of habitations of our own making. You could get a 23rd floor condo, order everything in, and almost never leave your building if you want to, experience nature only via National Geographic and Survivor.

If we make that decision, we lose a great deal of what it is to be human. This wild world of rocks and sky and trees and rivers was our home for a very, very, very long time. You have hundreds of previous generations (possibly thousands, depending on how you think about it) and all of them were very intimately connected with nature up until maybe three generations ago. 99% of your ancestors lived extremely outdoor lives, and somehow we are tethered to iPhones and spreadsheets and popup ads for laundry detergent and real-time sports betting.

And we are forgetting, and losing that understanding - many of us - generation to generation. At the risk of sounding like a conservative, this is a thing worth preserving.

Addition by Subtraction

As I reflected uninterrupted for hours on end, it occurred to me that this was quite simply a process of elimination.

Since there was no talking, I didn’t have the mental load of carrying on a conversation, and the resulting divided mental bandwidth. Since I didn’t need to listen to other people, I could hear myself and the world better.

Since I wasn’t eating, there was no pondering a) what to eat, b) when to eat it, c) wondering if we had that thing, d) if not do I go without, order it delivered, or go get it, e) preparing said food, f) asking if others want this food and preparing it for them, g) eating, h) rounding up all the dishes, i) washing dishes, j) forgetting what the hell I was doing before I started all this, k) browsing Facebook Marketplace for guitars to restore some mental equilibrium.

Fasting and being alone means I cut all of that out.

There was no real traveling from A to B via car, so I didn’t need to worry about that. No communication with the outside world. Whatever nonsense Donald Trump was up to (cutting TPS status for Haitians, among other things) that was a problem for The Adam of Tomorrow! to deal with.

I wasn’t being observed, so I didn’t have to care - at all - about my clothing choices. If mosquitoes were buzzing around my ears, I’d pull up my garish red camouflage gaiter, plop my dirt brown beanie over the top of it, and not have to wonder if I was offending anyone’s aesthetic sensibilities.

I could go on and on in this vein, but you get the point. Soren Kierkegaard wrote that “Purity of the heart is to will one thing.” I don’t think hammocking during a totalitarian takeover in the late stage capitalist era was exactly what he was thinking of, but you know … the written word is malleable.

So What Did I Learn?

I explicitly went out without an agenda. Open mind, watch, wait, and see what comes. I wasn’t trying to “fix myself” or “think through all my problems” just to sit with nature, what our retreat presenter called “the first Bible.”

Here are a few of my observations:

• Sometimes it is advantageous to be still for a very long time while you make an educated decision - fight, flight (like a deer), eat, or slow flight (like a caterpillar).

• Either to blend in or stand out.

• A tick in time saves Lymes.

• If you are looking for nature that moves, then move slowly or not at all and let nature come to you. If you are looking for nature that doesn’t move, then move slowly yourself.

• When I had to go out for something, it felt very good to get back to my chosen habitat. Seeing my hammock brought a palpable feeling of relief.

• Humans are extraordinarily tough, smart, and durable, AND very fragile.

• Appreciation of nature is cultivated, or not cultivated, by the community you keep. Nature is subtle.

• Wind, shade, and water feel incredible after being out in the hot sun.

• Eating when you are truly hungry is one of life’s great pleasures. And you usually want to eat too much. Try to resist that.

• Sometimes a rock remains part of a field because it is too big to move.

• Our detail of vision is incredible. And it’s incredible that it KEEPS WORKING year after year, provided we eat and drink and sleep.

• The center fern unfurls last.

I thought about the admonition in Matthew to not throw your pearls before swine. They will trample the pearls in the mud and then tear you to pieces.

I had some pretty extensive thinking about the discrepancy between “what it is to be human” and “what it is to be any other animal” that was too much for this already long essay. Coming soon.

Overall, I was reoriented to the idea that it’s a vast world out there (especially if you factor in the galaxy, to say nothing of the universe) and my problems are “what is common to man.” They are real, but the nature of being alive is to have questions and doubts and complexities. It is to have people in your life who are completing their life cycle.

The only way to not have problems and things to address is to not be alive to have them. I am very glad for my life, and very glad for the people in my life, and so all of this other stuff is just what comes with it. It’s the cost of doing business.

I remembered that I do need to take moments of sabbatical (even if just for an hour or two) and then to reengage in my life with all the enthusiasm I can.

I remembered to thank my many ancestors for bringing me to this point, and to try to do my best for those who come after me, whether they are in my bloodline or simply people I know.

Overall, I’m quite happy with that. That’s a good weekend’s work.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on all of this.

If the water stills on the pond that is your mind, what will you find there?

How often does a guy get to drive two separate U-Hauls to North Carolina in one summer? Moving my brother and his family and my brother-in law and his family as both migrate south through completely separate mechanisms and to different corners of the state?

Also, do they not know that you migrate south in November, not in June or July? It’s not natural. Anyway. Life is strange.

Since I am traveling I can’t write something quite as in depth as I usually do. My usual essays take quite a bit of uninterrupted time in my home writing/music studio.

I was at dad’s recently in a caregiving capacity, mulling over this little dilemma.

It was 6:00 am and I was up at the dining room table, drinking coffee and pondering, as is my wont. Dad slept in his old man recliner/lift chair in the living room. I kept one ear out for his snoring or lack thereof so I could help him to the bathroom.

My parents had owned this house since 1977, a rambler on three acres with a creek running through a ravine in the back. We grew up seeing deer out the windows, as well as your occasional fox, racoons, squirrels, and crows. All of your normal Wisconsin woodland creatures.

Two decades ago my brother and I had replaced the 70s carpet with hardwood floors, which looked lovely and had held up well, but were now starting to sun fade in spots.

The dining room table is about 100 years old and made from oak. It has been in the family for three generations I believe. Pictures of my mom (since passed), my son (since passed), our family (living), and my grandparents and great-grandparents were spread all over the house.

As his time is growing shorter dad is becoming increasingly nostalgic, which is saying something as he always was one to spend quite a bit of time mulling over the past.

When dad passes we will need to sell the house as it isn’t practical for my brother or myself. It hurts though. It feels a bit like selling one’s ancestral homeland, you know? LIke something you just don’t do, but there’s also no practical way around it.

The sun rose imperceptibly, and the fog in the ravine began to lift, coating the earth in glistening, transparent, life-sustaining drops. On the table was a book of Scandinavian proverbs.

I flipped open the cover. My mom bought this book in 1986 at a gift shop in Holden Village in Washington state for $6.50 as she had written in pencil.

It’s always nice to see her writing in books. This keeps her alive in my mind: we lost her in 2019. As I sat at the dining room table, waiting for dad to stir, a fortuitous solution to the essay problem presented itself: the wisdom of my Scandinavian ancestors.

I’m going to include one essay on a proverb that resonated deeply with me. I hope you enjoy it and/or find it meaningful.

“That Which Is Loved Is Always Beautiful” - Norwegian

I remember talking with my mom many moons ago as I, a young fella, a conservative, was trying to think over who I might want to spend THE REST OF MY ENTIRE LIFE WITH.

Figuring this out is harder than you might think.

I mean, I was 20 years old. I barely knew myself (though, as a philosophy major, I was aware of how much I didn’t know. Thanks, Socrates.).

Given this self-knowledge shortfall, how could I know what I would be like at 50? Or 60? Or 80? I would still be married, presuming both of us were still alive.

How do you pick someone to spend the next 60 years of your life with, through an incredibly unknown future in which both of you change in ways that are now incomprehensible?

My mom had long ago sewn a needlepoint piece that hung in our hallway in a rugged wooden frame: “Choose thy love and love thy choice.”

(I didn’t have a picture handy of that one, so this is another. You get the idea.)

That is the advice she gave me during that conversation.

This seemed to be good advice, and it has echoed through my mind many a time as Maureen and I continue sorting out our differences. When I say “sort out our many differences” I say this not as a bad thing. Everyone has differences: the art of marriage is working through them peaceably and arriving at “good for me, not bad for you” style compromises, where you can both flourish.

(A quick disclaimer here: I realize I am writing a lot about marriage. For me, this is the context that comes to mind. I realize marriage is a thing that doesn’t apply to many people, or maybe marriage has been actively harmful. I in no way mean to say marriage is the ultimate and/or proper way to be human - it is simply a condition I am quite familiar with, now having been married for 26 years. If I were not married, I would write about something else…)

The first thing you might notice in a potential romantic partner is beauty, or maybe intelligence if it’s in a dialogue or a class setting.

These are important factors, of course, but if you’re going to sit across a table from someone over meals for the next 60 years, it’s good to know what they are like as a conversationalist. Is their temperament even and easygoing? Do they smile and laugh a lot? Are they loving?

I’ll return to the quote here as a refresher: “That which is loved is always beautiful.”

We often think of “beauty” as a strictly outward, aesthetic consideration. This sort of beauty is skin deep, and is a depreciating asset. You have “peak beauty” at age 21 or so, and then “beauty” depreciates over time.

What a horrible notion.

Gravity (per Radiohead) always wins. Entropy is a law of the universe. Bellies are standard issue on dad bods for a reason. Wrinkles appear unbidden. As they do, do you then find your partner “less beautiful?”

What this proverb gets at is that beauty is not skin deep. When we say “beauty” in this sense, we aren’t talking about a thing that you preserve with expensive creams. We are talking about a state of being loved for yourself.

What this proverb is saying is that the condition of having love for another will cause you to find that person (or object) beautiful.

In a somewhat less sublime way than my regard for my wife, I find my old Volvo wagon beautiful, for example. And I think I always will. To me it’s just an excellent version of the Platonic form of car. It’s all wheel drive, is made in Sweden, has a turbo, and is rugged. They built them so they don’t rust, which is pretty unique in the upper midwest. Mine is a 2001 with 149,000 miles and no rust. It has heated leather seats, good AC, and never gets stuck. I feel great affection for it, though perhaps not love. At any rate, I find it beautiful.

And this gets to why this proverb is so interesting. Beauty is deeply contextual. To think that standards of what is beautiful are in some way objective and applied to people and things on a 1 - 100 scale is to importantly misunderstand beauty in the context of relationship.

To Put It Another Way …. Bodies

Perhaps we can look at this from another, slightly different, angle.

The body is the shell in which the person is contained, but when the person leaves they go elsewhere and the body is left behind. The body is not the person.

In a relationship, it is the person that is beautiful.

If you imagine being in an airport sitting on a seat in a waiting area of 150 people while other people walk by you in a seemingly ceaseless stream, you see their bodies. (This is a theoretical exercise for you, but my current situation.) And we make snap judgments based on bodies, on language, on T-shirts or suit jackets or track suits.

This is really a form of depersonalization. It would require a godlike perspective to see all of those people as people, so we see them as “hot mom,” “packer fan,” “blues lawyer,” “Harley dentist,” “blue collar guy with belly,” “androgynous teenager with choker.”

Part of the goal of life (I believe) is to try to see beyond this, and see people on their own terms. If we love them before that, we love them in the abstract, which is a different thing. That is more to love our idea of a person than the person themselves.

And this is why I talked about Maureen and I working out our differences. If you are going to be in a longterm relationship with someone, differences will manifest. For me at some point a switch flipped and I started collecting guitars. Maureen couldn’t have known that ahead of time: I barely played back then. So she has had to adapt to my evolving self as I have had to adapt to her evolving self.

And the art of it is to learn how to flourish TOGETHER, each person in their fullness of being. This is the goal, and it’s good to have a thing to work toward I suppose, though it certainly is hard to do perfectly.

Love, then, exists on a continuum from “in the abstract” to grounded in reality, in intimacy. As a love grounded in reality is more specific and therefore more TRUE, it seems this is what we should strive for when we can. And when we find that, we see beauty.

That which is loved is always beautiful.

******

I hope this essay was helpful or clarifying in some way for you. It was for me. As much as it sometimes seems that we live in an ahistorical moment, we are the product of thousands of previous generations.

It’s good to learn from them. Let me know if you liked this. It was a fun essay to write. If it was good and useful, I may do more.

It is clear that AI will change life beyond recognition but unclear exactly how soon that will happen and what that change will look like.

Our birth rate is in freefall as people explore careerism and gender fluidity and alternate sexual orientations while another segment of society longs for tradwives who don’t vote and MEN WHO ARE MEN and the head of the house.

MAGA cues into this fragmentation and calls back to a better time, draping everything in a sepia-toned nostalgia for the 1950s.

If I steel man the argument, I can see the appeal of said simpler time, when you could fix your own car, and you didn’t have to check your work email at night, and you didn’t have to oversee your child’s gender transition. I mean there is something nice about that.

And, candidly, that is the world I grew up in. I was born in 1975 into small town conservatism, and it was lovely in most ways. And looking back on it, the challenging parts have largely faded from memory and I tend to remember the good times, which were plentiful. I understand the pull of the past.

By contrast, our present feels a bit like a time travel show where people traipse back and forth from 1872 to 2053 and all parts in between. It’s no wonder people are nostalgic for a sense of place and some sort of coherent ideology.

Make America Great Again and the Problem of Dislocation

This explains a bit the popularity of “Make America Great Again.” It’s a simple proposed solution to a problem we all feel: the problem of dislocation. It tells a simple story with white hats, black hats, and a conflict narrative. We are going back to a time when Things Were Great (the 1950s) and we will oppose all those people who fight us on it. They are the enemy.

Why the 50s? If you are a traditionalist, the 50s were a great decade. Men were freshly home from an epic, manly endeavor of defeating Hitler and Co, and it was a time of great optimism and technological progress. Things were affordable; cars were giant, powerful, and fun; TVs were in color for the first time; microwaves allowed easy food preparation. Men worked and you could provide for a family on a single income. Moms stayed home and had kids and raised them.

Consequently we had a baby boom (in contrast to our current era where we are under replacement level). Kids played outside until dark, the streets were safe, and the world enjoyed relative peace after the horrors of war.

Churches were full and feminism and civil rights hadn’t “hit yet” in the way they would in the 60s.

Life was white, christian, prosperous, orderly, fun, and driven by men. What could be better? (Or so goes the argument.)

The 50s or the 60s?

I posed this question to a black friend of mine who is an sixth-generation Texan, and the descendant of slaves. He said, “The 50s sure were not a golden age for blacks in the south. My people were still getting lynched.” Fair point.

Jackie Robinson was breaking the color barrier in the 50s, and this was not without its death threats.

If you loved the 50s, you hated the 60s. The 60s were, in a way, a deconstruction of the 50s. When society is thus structured, it is done to benefit those who draw things up. And the decision makers were almost universally white, christian men. This goes back to monism: there’s one way to be and it is conservative, capitalist, and christian. (And being white sure doesn’t hurt.)

In this context we have the white christian population very well represented economically and in the halls of power. And minorities (be they ethnic, gender, or ideological) are significantly disempowered, if you want to look at earning potential, where they could buy a home (if they could buy a home), voting rights, or upward mobility.

The reality of the 50s was that it was great for some, and expressly not great for others. It is worth underscoring here that DEI stands for diversity (aka, fair play for all races, genders, etc), equality, and inclusion.

You can see the issue, and you can see why DEI is so threatening to a monistic white christian status quo. DEI means pluralism, which feels like (from that perspective) nothing is true and everyone chooses what is “right for them” and next thing you know girls want to be boys, or be lesbians, or have abortions.

If you want a world in which conservative biblical values prevail, that’s essentially a worst-case scenario.

If in the 50s we had Buddy Holly and Leave it to Beaver, while the 60s brought us Jimi Hendrix and The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. It ushered in the civil rights movement, first-wave feminism, widespread protests over the Vietnam War, and free love.

Here are the first two verses of “Hey Joe.” You can understand the parental concern with all facets of the Jimi Hendrix Experience:

Hey, Joe

Where you going with that gun in your hand?

Hey, Joe

I said, where you going with that gun in your hand?

I’m going down to shoot my old lady

You know, I caught her messing around with another man

I’m going down to shoot my old lady

You know, I caught her messing around with another man

Huh, and that ain’t too cool

Hendrix’ wall of sound, ear splitting feedback, and burning guitars onstage was a far cry from Buddy Holly.

Roe v. Wade and access to reproductive freedom (whatever your stance on that) was certainly an outflow of this 60s freedom.

If the 60s are where things all went to shit, you probably feel drawn to the MAGA story.

If the 60s are where we finally got it right, you’re a progressive, as the 60s was about progress toward equality.

If you thought the 50s were fine as they were thank you very much, you’re a conservative. If the 50s were a jail cell to be escaped, you’re a liberal.

Now, that’s a bit overly simplified, but not too terribly much.

A Strong Leader to Take Us Backwards

So MAGA now is doing what populist/nationalist movements do, saying in essence: “We got off track, but we can get back. The democrats and liberals led us astray (and you can be mad at them!) and we will need a strong leader to restore this lost great society. It will be a battle, and people won’t like it, but it’s for the greater good.”

That is essentially the MAGA pitch. And, as previously mentioned, the 50s were great for some while others were getting lynched or disenfranchised in quite sweeping ways: separate but equal schools, dining facilities and so on. Lacking the right to vote. Incredible inequalities of income and opportunity. “The 50s were better” is a statement that is true for white christians and untrue for just about anyone else.

Christian nationalism says “our nation is a Christian nation” and of a particular stripe. We should hang the 10 Commandments in every classroom, because we are a christian nation.

If we are a christian nation that means we are NOT buddhist, muslim, atheist, animist, gay or lesbian, and so forth. This amounts to a wholesale curtailment of freedom of religion.

It would be accurate to say that America has christianity as part of its heritage and christian ideas were part of the ideological pie. It would not be accurate to say “America was founded as a christian nation.”

You can see this very clearly in the first amendment to our constitution. It says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …”

You are free to be a christian, but you don’t have to be. We may have come from a christian background, but the pilgrims were fleeing religious persecution and seeking to worship in peace: aka, to have religious freedom. Which is another way of saying pluralism. They were escaping the monism of their time and place. (This is obviously a large and complex historical topic that I am skimming for the purpose of brevity.)

OK, perils of the 50s aside … let’s say we did want to go back there. Suppose we wished to Make America Great Again. Naturally a great many people will be opposed to this push: namely the non-white, non-christian people, or all of those who believe in pluralism, secularism, or the future, or international alliances. The NPR people.

But you know what? The greater good is the greater good. And we need someone who doesn’t give a shit about all that. Who isn’t afraid to step on some toes. Who can buck a firm headwind. A strong leader, unafraid to do battle, because that’s what it will take to restore order.

Peace through strength. `

The Circle I Can’t Square

I had what was largely a very healthy childhood and teen years, and my experience as an evangelical was foundational.

And so that era’s evangelicalism was stamped on my soul, on my heart, on my mind, as good. As helpful.

But somehow between then and now, the gravity of this “culture war” of pluralism vs. Christianity (monism) led christians to become ever more desperate for that man who would deliver them from the clutches of liberalism, feminism, pluralism, and abortion. And, God help us, rock and roll.

And in their desperation they chose one of the most irritable, flawed, arrogant, lecherous, and depraved people in recent human history: Donald Trump.

And so here are the two propositions:

• The christianity I grew up with was largely very positive, BUT

• It eventually produced a wholesale, uncritical acceptance of Donald Trump

I see this acceptance of Trump as extremely damaging both to our nation and to the church. And it has completely fractured any sense of national or international unity. When you take a strong, controversial, principled, and uncompromising stand you force people to pick a side. It’s as simple as the logical expression A therefore B.

On a recent podcast appearance, David French and Russell Moore were discussing the link between the current political climate and the American church’s view of itself and culture. David French said the evangelical church tends to take on the character of the sitting republican president. And Russell Moore said, “Yes, 100%.”

But to successfully complete this massive social overhaul and turn back the clock 75 years, you’ll need to break each and every one of Christ’s teachings in the quest for a more christian (which is to say “christ-like”) nation.

This starts to look like banishing any plaque featuring the accomplishments of women or minorities from the Pentagon. This looks like ICE raids and Alligator Alcatraz. This looks like rolling back vaccine access. This looks like defunding USAID and the resulting 10 million deaths in Africa. This looks like slashing medicare.

All those things look like grinding the poor and powerless under the heel of christian nationalism. There is a body count, and it is rising ever day.

This has a very, very different look than the christianity I grew up with, though it seems the seeds were present even back then.

And, to David French’s point, if the evangelical church takes on the characteristics of the sitting Republican president, then the church has taken a very dark turn, as Trump is essentially the living embodiment of the Freudian id.

That being said, it is also true that if you go to many local churches (including the one I grew up in) you will find a thriving congregation of people who live in a genuinely loving community. And somehow both of these things are simultaneously true.

On the most macro level, the christian nationalist project must completely repudiate Christ and his teachings in order to restore a country built on Christ and his teachings.

This is the circle I can’t square.

`

Lessons from the Underside

You don’t understand why the system isn’t working for people until you have real, frank conversations with those people. And once you do, you have a decision to make.

You can either hear these stories as real and valid, or you have to find a way to write them off. The admonition to gays and trans people to repent or burn in hell doesn’t feel loving, it feels to a great degree like condemnation (which it is) and bullying.

Listen to Matt Walsh on this subject. Or Charlie Kirk. Or Doug Wilson, Pete Hegseth, or any of the usual suspects. Donald Trump is a bully, and it seems that the right wing has followed his lead.

Or you take seriously the children killed in Gaza. Or the children who will die of malaria in the Congo after we have repealed USAID.

This is a time for a christian witness that can exist in a pluralist society. That can advocate for love and for justice. That can take a holistic vision of things.

And so the question I am left with is: How did the christianity that nurtured and formed me also embrace Donald Trump?

Last Thursday my neighbor across the street, a friend, passed away very young and tragically.

Last Monday night my friend Andrew Crowley died of cancer. A very funny man, quite irreverent. He loved people well. He’s a guy who was in your corner all the way.

My dad, as I wrote last week, has hospice coming. We are planning for the end stage, but not quite there yet. We cared for my mom at home all the way to the end. Dementia is a hard path.

An acquaintance of mine, becoming a friend, is fixing one of my boats. He texted me that without a stem cell transplant they are giving him a year.

Last March my brother in law Jimmy chose to end his life in Portugal. We are still recovering from that one.

Death just seems omnipresent lately.

Everything Winds Down

I get that we are mechanical animals of a sort, and we wind down. I have hope in heaven, but it’s just that - hope. I can’t vouch in any substantive way for what happens to our spirits after we pass. What I do know is that our bodies are inhabited and then they aren’t. The body is there but the person is not.

Maybe our bodies are like a house: you can tell when people are home. The lights are on. The garage door opens and closes. There’s music playing sometimes. Mom sets up the sprinkler to water the flowers. Dad mows the grass and gets sweaty.

The kids and the dogs run outside and the door slams, mom yells to quit slamming the screen door, but she’s not really angry.

And so it goes through moments, days, weeks, seasons, years, and decades.

And then they leave. And there are no lights. The plants go unwatered. The grass grows long, vines start to climb the house. The house is there but in an important way, it isn’t. The metaphor strains a bit here, as usually a house will have new occupants. A body (outside of scifi movies) not so much. Bodies are a single use commodity.

Elvis leaves the building.

Death and Traditions

My neighbor is jewish (of the smart, funny, secular/liberal variety) and is sitting shiva for a week after the death of her partner. I am very much a gentile, a deconstructed christian, so I’m on a bit of a different team I suppose, though that’s never seemed to be a bother.

But I don’t know what sitting shiva is. I mean, I’ve heard of it - I’m not a complete rube - but I’ve never experienced it. And I was interested.

See, I think our American/christian rituals around death are lacking (in the sense that they are, basically, nonexistent). There’s no protocol to speak of. No one knows what to do, or what to say, or what to do with their hands. No one knows if we should visit the relatives of the deceased or give them their privacy.

No one knows if we should offer platitudes by way of comfort (well, he’s in a better place/at least they’re not suffering/you’ll be ok) or not.

How long should the family mourn? No one knows this.

How long should the friends be offering support in a proactive fashion? No one knows this either.

What time of day can we visit? No one knows.

Every single human life ends in death, and yet we are still awkward around it.

Jews, on the other hand, seem to have protocols for everything. I imagine (not having lived it) that this has some fairly strong pros and cons.

Like most Gentiles, when I think of jewish traditions and practices, I’m reminded of the song “Tradition,” from Fiddler on the Roof:

Tradition, tradition! Tradition!

Tradition, tradition! Tradition!

Who, day and night, must scramble for a living,

Feed a wife and children, say his daily prayers?

And who has the right, as master of the house,

To have the final word at home?

The Papa, the Papa! Tradition.

The Papa, the Papa! Tradition.

Who must know the way to make a proper home,

A quiet home, a kosher home?

Who must raise the family and run the home,

So Papa’s free to read the holy books?

The Mama, the Mama! Tradition!

The Mama, the Mama! Tradition!

It goes on like that for a while … Say what you will, but in this society at least you know what to do.

Sitting Shiva

“Shiva” means seven, and sitting shiva is a time when the official mourners (the close relatives of the deceased) stay home for seven days with an open door policy.

When you arrive at a house that is sitting shiva, you don’t ring the doorbell and wait to be greeted. They are not hosting you. This is about them, not you. They are sitting shiva, you are a guest.

Mirrors are covered in a shiva house, because they don’t have to worry about their appearance. If they haven’t changed or shaved or combed their hair, that’s fine.

If they are quiet, you follow their lead and be quiet. If they wish to discuss the fine points of Burmese cuisine, then you do that.

It’s good to feed someone sitting shiva. Bring lots of food, put it on a plate for them. Don’t be offended if they don’t eat it.

(If you find this all confusing, here’s a quick helpful primer and a really good discussion.)

If they want to talk about their loved one, then you talk about it. If they don’t, you don’t.

You can say:

• I’m so sorry

• I can’t imagine what you are going through

• May their memory be a blessing

You should not say:

• At least they’re not suffering

• They’re in a better place

• You’ll be ok

The former set of statements is attuned to the mourner and doesn’t try to “make it OK” if it is clearly not OK. We gentiles struggle with things being unresolved. It’s like you are playing a song in G major and G is the anchoring chord that centers everything, it’s what you come back to after a chorus to start the verse ….

And then the song ends, unresolved, on an A minor because the songwriter doesn’t care about your feelings.

Lives are like this too. They often end on a random chord in the middle of the bridge. Because, in the vast majority of cases, the end is not carefully planned. It doesn’t come at the end of a narrative arc. It happens, often, quite inconveniently in the middle.

Sometimes things are unresolved in a fairly catastrophic fashion, and pretending they aren’t is just pretending.

The shiva sitter shouldn’t have to go through the motions of pretending with their guests just for the fact that the guests can’t handle an unresolved chord.

Maybe one of the gifts of sitting shiva is that no one needs to pretend otherwise.

I think there’s a lesson here.

I am committed to releasing an essay every Thursday, and so this one will be a slice of real, actual, as-it-is-not-as-we-wish-it-was, life.

I’m not writing any of this as a complaint or a woe is me. I’m just saying that we are all people, and people have stories. We have ailments and conditions and complexities. We have flat tires and allergies to dogs and leaky pools and bands that need new drummers and boats that we have to get bills of sale for.

So here are a few things:

I Now Have Five Boats

We have a camper an hour north of Minneapolis, and we have a pontoon boat there plus a fishing boat. (Don’t get too excited. None of it is fancy. We specialize in luxury beaters. Cars that have all-wheel-drive and climate control, but also maybe a dent and some rust and 200,,000 miles. Luxury beaters.)

Our camper is on a chain of lakes and our pontoon is big and doesn’t always fit under the low bridge. Our old (small) pontoon always fit. It’s hard to take people out boating and then not be able to pass under the bridge. That’s a problem.

My neighbor passed away and his daughter had power of attorney for his estate. She needed their old pontoon moved so they could get the dumpster in to clean the house. As I was at the right place at the right time (and apparently had some good neighbor karma) she offered me a free pontoon.

Now this is a perfect pontoon, see? It’s an older one, and it is so simple. It just has a minimalist driver’s console and that’s it. No seats! Nothing to snag on the bridge. We can put our camping chair recliners on there. Pitch a tent. The world’s our oyster, and Bob is our uncle. (This is my “what could be brain” that is rendering quick calculations… do I want this boat or not?)

Some people are reasonable and can say no to a free pontoon. I am not one of those people. So now I have a pontoon. (And also an old 14 foot Lund on a trailer that just needs new seats.) Deal!

Ok, so that explains four boats. As for boat five, I got a 14’ Mirrocraft as a trade for a customized remote control rock crawler in January. As one does.

So the good news is I have five boats, and that is also the bad news. I have five boats, and I need to sell three. My father is a minimalist of sorts and coined the phrase “everything you own owns you.” He’s right of course. These boats and I are in a mutual ownership situation now.

And let me tell you, it will be great. I’ll sell three of them, fix up the other two just a bit, and boy things will be good.

We Lost Our Drummer/Things Were Bad/We Bailed the Ship

I used to be in a great band called A Thousand Falls. We were together for four years I think and released an album, Midnight. It was myself and four of my best friends (including Pat Kahnke who you’ll know from our livestreams).

This band was intensely therapeutic for all of us. Recording our album out at a remote farmhouse 16 years ago was one of the best experiences of my life. It was a pinnacle experience of friendship, art, temporary deafness from amps and drums, coffee, beer, and beans in cans. We lived only to record music, taking occasional breaks to shoot guns off the front porch.

Bliss, in other words. Two years later, our bassist and keys players (Mike an Mike) moved to New York to start a church and Pat and Trev and I decided to pack it in rather than finding new members.

And I understand why we made the decision at the time. We were busy, kids, blah, blah. The usual things. And it made sense, but it’s also one of my biggest regrets.

I am now, for the first time in my life at age 50, fronting a band. My band. We are called Owls of the Apocalypse. Trev (our drummer from A Thousand Falls and one of my best friends in the world) came on to play drums. I was over the moon. We play shoegaze folk (or grunge folk or Canadiana) and Trev brought the heat. Practices were electric and all of our problems disappeared for between 6:30 and 10:00 every other Wednesday night.

Trev’s work got crazy, the hours unpredictable, and he had to make the decision to quit the band for everyone’s benefit. Trev isn’t one to do something halfway so if he can’t make practices or give it his all, he’s just not going to do that. And I respect the hell out of that.

And so last night, I had to break this to the band and we talked through what we want out of things. We all said that music is important to us and that we just need the release and the friendship and the creativity. Jon, who is learning drums, ascended the throne (as it were) and sat in.

We played a couple originals I had written. Each song took a little while to find their way but within a couple of plays, it was there again. The electricity, the drive, the passion.

This isn’t to say Trev is easily replaceable. Far from it. The band is different now - a band ultimately is the sum of its parts, and so now we are a different thing. But this different thing is also OK, and is needed. I hope we can introduce some beauty back into the world, and spark a little joy in each of us.

Ten years from now I will be 60, and I hope I will look back on Owls of the Apocalypse and say “what a long, strange, beautiful trip it has been.”

Sometimes you just have to keep playing.

Hospice, Illness, and Caregiving

I am now my a fulltime caregiver for my wife and daughter. As you can imagine, this is a big transition for all of us. It’s a sacred responsibility and I want to do my best at it, but it’s also a big adaptation for me and all of us really.

And me doing substack and livestreams with Pat and the band is part of what makes it work. I know myself well enough to know that I need some creativity to sustain myself. It is part of what makes me a whole person, and without it I can’t give them what they need. And I can’t give myself what I need.

Dad is in hospice in the sense that he has hospice care involved. This doesn’t mean a timetable, just a recognition of a stage. This is the path of dementia.

All of this is heavy, but it’s real. It’s life. People have bodies and bodies need care. Sometimes they don’t work. That’s OK. Just pray for the grace the peace to keep caring.

Brother, Sister-in-Law, Nieces and Nephews relocating

My brother needs to move to North Carolina for work. This is quite bittersweet. I enjoy having them close, but of course a person needs to do what they need to do.

I’m Doing a Cleanse But I Like Pizza

Pizza doesn’t like me back.

Hearing Aids

Yesterday I went and bought hearing aids at Costco. I’ve played in loud bands for a long time, ran a lot of equipment of various sorts, and had chemo. My hearing is still pretty good, but it’s not great, and uncorrected hearing loss is one of the main risk factors for dementia. And I really, really, really don’t want to go there.

So I’m doing the uncomfortable but mature thing, with considerable goading from my wife and daughter. Often they see the importance of something far before I do - it saves everyone pain and frustration if I come around to their point of view. Twenty-six years into our marriage I’ve learned this. Twenty-six years into our marriage and I’m just about housebroken.

Ebook

I’ve decided to package the essays on stages of faith and add a bit to each one (a director’s cut!) and bundle them as an ebook. So I’m working on editing and title ideas and a cover, etc etc. Hence the quick/short/personal essay this week.

Friends with Cancer

I have friends with cancer. This is hard - mostly for them, but also for me.

Our Country is in a Strange Adolescent Phase

Remember when you were growing up and you had pimples and raging hormones and wanted to talk to girls but didn’t know how and everyone was an idiot?

Apparently for people that happens from age 12 - 17 and for countries it hits at 240 (give or take). I hope it’s a phase. I really, really do.

You Have Things Too!

The common thing for humans is that we all have conditions. We have problems and opportunities. We have dogs with fleas, and colds that won’t go away, and all manner of problems.

And to live well is to learn how to ride above them somehow, to still find the things that you need, that make life worth it.

My task for right now is to try to put some better regulations on the parts of me that make things worse, and learn to listen and to cultivate the parts of me that make things better.

This includes, crucially, listening to the right people.

What’s the point of this little exercise?

Maybe you can have a laugh and say, “This guy is nuts! Who has five boats?” If you get a smile and a laugh and you keep your boat count to four or less … you’re welcome.

Maybe this is like reading the Book of Job. Your life seems pretty good, a perspective shift maybe. That’s good too.

Maybe you are also carrying heavy things and this gives you encouragement to carry on. As Winston Churchill said, “If you find yourself in hell, keep going.”

As crazy as all of this might sound, I love my life. It has moments of struggle, but also moments of triumph and joy. It’s a real human life. It’s my only one. Today is the only June 4, 2026 I will ever have. I intend to act accordingly.

P.S. Anyone in the market for a custom painted 17’ Smokercraft with a 55 horse Suzuki?

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell the truth.” - Oscar Wilde

As far as dads go, I hit the jackpot. I had a bit of the best of both worlds: a manly (enough) man who could still articulate his inner life. I know that not all boys are so fortunate. (If there was one thing about the world I could snap my fingers and rectify, giving all boys good dads would be high on that list.)

Some boys grow up in a box, and the boy box becomes the man box.

In this essay we’re going to talk about what the Man Box is, the harm it does, and why it persists.

Boys, Dads, Trucks, Guns, and The Atlantic

I grew up in the 80s in small town Wisconsin: a time and a place where men did “man things.” We hunted deer, gutted them, paraded bucks around town in the back of our pickups, and processed the meat ourselves. We fished, we shot guns for fun, we cut down trees, and split wood for the stove.

My first truck was a rusted out 1975 Chevy 4x4 with a wood box. The first thing I did was get it so stuck in the mud that I had to walk a half mile back to the farm and get the farmer to pull it out with his tractor and a chain. We were cavemen with better weaponry and transportation.

(Adding to this scrapbook of manly endeavors, I went up on my own to work in bush Alaska, 200 miles from the nearest road, for six weeks at a time the summers I was 14 and 15. Carrying guns for bear protection and catching salmon until my arms were ready to fall off. It’s hard to see life getting any better for a young man who loves the out of doors.)

For all of the testosterone, chainsaws, and gunsmoke, I also had a father who understood the value of expressing emotions. He read The Atlantic as well as The Bible; was incredibly smart, loving, a good listener, and monogamous; and treated me and my brother fairly and with love. He talked frequently and openly about God’s sacrificial love, how we should sacrificially love others, and we did so.

On the whole, I was fortunate to grow up with a pretty healthy view of what it means to be a man, as well as the various roles a man should play: husband, father, member of a church, member of a community.

It took a few years, a change in marital and parental status, and a major change of zip code to learn there was a bit more to it.

The Man Box and Dehumanization

The masculinity I was exposed to was, for the most part, healthy, especially when you factor in the context. College years opened my eyes to a great many things (as they often do) and one of them was the unhealthy ideas about masculinity that are everywhere in our culture: Be stoic. If you’re going to show emotion, it had better be anger. Be dominant. Be aggressive.

I understood that this was a problem, but didn’t have good language for it until a friend introduced me to a formulation of this called “the Man Box.”

Tony Porter leads an organization named A Call to Men, working extensively with men in the justice system. He has laid out the Man Box as a way to address the messages men are getting from culture.

The Man Box:

• Don’t show emotions other than anger

• Don’t show weakness or fear

• Demonstrate power/control

• Aggression/Dominance

• Protector

• Do not be “like a woman”

• Heterosexual

• Don’t be like a “gay man”

• Tough/Athletic/Strength/Courage

• Makes Decisions

• Doesn’t need help

• Views women as property/objects

A few observations. Masculinity takes many forms now. This is a far-from-optimal perspective, but it has been the way men have behaved and been trained for a good long time. This view reminds me of the way whitetail bucks fight over women or jockey for dominance. I understand that there is a part of our lizard brains that thinks this way, but it would be nice to think we have made some progress.

That being said, there is enough about this view that seems plausible, and it is quite popular. If you are inquiring about what, exactly, seems plausible … It is good for example to protect your family. It is good to be strong and courageous. It is good to be mentally tough. But to be a whole person is to have a balance of the right attributes held in the right ways and that’s where this goes off the rails.

(Parts of the modern right have rebranded the Man Box as strength, patriotism, and traditional masculinity. This would seem to be an effort to make Trump’s personality make sense. The apologia is expected to extend to the likes of Pete Hegseth, Andrew Tate, Greg Bovino, Doug Wilson, and Kid Rock. They have a type.)

It’s the law of the jungle: nature red in tooth and claw. Kill or be killed. Eat or be eaten. It’s the logic of dominance: the strong rule, and the weak accommodate. (You may now be hearing Trump talk about “Peace through strength” or Stephen Miller saying “Might is right.”)

The essential moral code is strong is good, weak is bad.

The Man Box is an Unhealthy 8

Another way to look at this - as a friend helpfully pointed out - is through the lens of the Enneagram.

(I have gotten some pushback for using the Enneagram as an explanatory model. I’d encourage you to view it as one model of personality, and nothing more than that. It obviously has some resonance and explanatory power or it wouldn’t have such enduring popularity. If a tool is useful for what that tool does, then use the tool.)

Just to recap, the Enneagram views personality through 9 types. To illustrate this point, I am a 4w5, which means a 4 with a “wing 5” or 5 as a secondary type if you will.

The 4 is the Individualist, who is driven by a deep need to be authentic, unique, and emotionally significant. Fours are self-aware, sensitive, and reserved. The communication style is personal, dramatic, and feeling-oriented.

The first time I read up on the Enneagram 4, I felt like it was written about me specifically. It was a bit eerie. If you’ve been reading me for a while, you may see or identify this in my writing.

Given that brief introduction, let’s say I was going to try to fit myself (personality and all) in the Man Box. Some of the things the Man Box tells me to do apply a little bit, but mostly this is a mismatch of category. I’m trying to paint a landscape and the Man Box is instructions for how to play checkers.

It’s largely non-applicable, because that isn’t the way I would ever see the world, or choose to act.

And when we try to retrofit nonapplicable overlays to ourselves as though they were normative, all manner of things go wrong. This is a quest destined for failure from the start. But of course failure is not an option (per the Man Box) so I must either reject the quest or pretend it’s going better than it is.

Let’s recall here that there are 9 personality types, and subtypes/modifiers within those. The Man Box presupposes that the Enneagram 8 is what men ought to be. The 8 is known as The Challenger (or The Protector or The Boss) and is characterized by strength, assertiveness, and a desire to control their environment. Eights are fiercely independent and natural leaders.

They fear being controlled or harmed by others and see the world generally in a threat matrix. Eights operate on lust: a passion for intensity, action, and pushing boundaries. They see the world as a place where the strong prey on the weak and there are “good guys and bad guys.”

It’s always us and them, good and evil, and the “strongman” is needed to protect us from the gays, muslims, lesbians, humanists, Europeans, immigrants, communists, university professors, Volvo drivers, etc.

When maladjusted and operating in the shadow side, eights are domineering, confrontational, and overbearing. In this mode, they will see showing vulnerability as a weakness.

There are nine personality types, per the Enneagram. The Man Box is the worst version of one of them.

(It should be said that eights have inherent strengths and weaknesses, just like any other personality type. One of the best spiritual teachers I ever had was an eight, and he channeled that energy into a passion for justice and combating false narratives. He is a fantastic example of what an eight can be, when they have done a bit of introspection.)

Jónsi, the Skinny Icelandic One-Eyed Gay Vegan Who Saved My Life

Living in a box is … living in a box. If and when we understand the box we are in, there’s often a corresponding desire for freedom.

And for Exhibit A:

The Icelandic band Sigur Rós is … incredible. (Click the link and use good headphones. It’s the only way to understand.) A good listen will change your life, at least it did for me. For sheer majesty and transcendence and power and epicness, it’s hard to beat.

The singer and guitarist, and architect of all of this, is Jónsi . He is very tall, very skinny (looks like he would blow over in a strong wind), gay, vegan, and blind in one eye. He sings exclusively in his falsetto range in a made up language called “Hopelandic.”

If you were looking for “Man Box Nonconformists” he would be near the top of the list. I don’t think he has a dominant bone in his body.

And yet the reality is that he has contributed immeasurably to my life and to the lives of many. He has injected an incredible amount of beauty into the world, and by any measure the world would be worse off if he wasn’t able to be himself.

I posed the question of gender roles and expectations to my subscribers, and got this very helpful response from Jack Bratten:

A lot of misery and hurt can come from people putting on an act instead of being their genuine selves. It’s sad when people exaggerate culturally imposed gender traits just to look the part. When someone cooks a meal, they generally try to use the right amount of sugar or pepper the dish requires, not as much as they can physically fit into the pot.

I am “man box coded” (if that’s a thing): bearded, tattooed, tall, and relatively strong, but I have no interest in being aggressive or dominating people. I prefer to take other people into account when making decisions. I do ask for help relatively often by male standards. I do show my emotions and often am tender.

At this moment in time, my family needs me to be a loving caregiver. That is the role I need to play now. If my concept of self couldn’t flex to meet with this reality we would all be the worse for it. And there have been many times when I would provide care, but with resentment. This isn’t the way things should be. I had that voice in my head, and it poisoned everything for a while. Getting over that took a long time and a lot of work. I think men can do this work but we have to a) believe we can, b) believe it’s OK to do, c) have a more holistic masculinity modeled for us, and d) figure out how to do the work.

If you’d care to comment, I’d love to hear from you.

Are you a man in a box?

Do you know a man in a box?

Do you know men who live box free?

Thanks for reading. More on this next week.

Incredible. Here we have the leader of the anti-apartheid movement, a deeply-educated man of sound and sharp mind, a man who had questioned every presupposition handed to him, and he’s asking the questions the Whites have banged into his head, the very thing he is sworn to overturn. White supremacy entails Black inferiority. Are these men up to the task?

“I think we have gravely underestimated the damage that apartheid inflicted on all of us,” Tutu says, “the damage to our psyches--I mean, it shocked me. I now knew that I was damaged … what those White people had kept drumming into us in South Africa about our being inferior, about our being incapable, it had lodged somewhere in me.”

Our First Reader Question Full Essay!

This is an exciting day. I offered a benefit to new paid subscribers that I’d write an essay on the topic of their choice, and this is the first one.

The question comes from Jack André Braaten of Norway:

“I think it would be interesting to read your thoughts on the power of stories in helping children model Christian virtues—like kindness and courage in the pursuit of justice—and to what extent stories can vaccinate children against ‘might makes right’ thinking and accepting, or even applauding, cruelty.”

It seems pretty clear that reading children bedtime stories (or stories in the classroom, or in a Sunday School class) has an effect on shaping behavior. So I’m going to take that much as a given and let’s dive into some deeper philosophical waters.

• What is a story?

• What options do we have upon hearing a narrative?

• Are we shaping kids toward something resembling some sort of objective good, or are we teaching them to mirror our own biases?

Northern Exposure, the Philosopher/Artist, and the Warrior

Anyone who has known me for a long time knows that I love the show Northern Exposure. It’s about a Jewish doctor from New York City who goes up to Alaska to work for the state and they will pay off his medical debt. It’s a “fish out of water story.”

Joel Fleischmann is an intelligent, ambitious, and verbose young doctor and his receptionist Marilyn Whirlwind is a native Alaskan. She is very perceptive and calm, and only speaks when necessary. The contrast between Joel and Marilyn is a subplot within the larger whole. Every time I go back and rewatch an episode, the mastery of this storytelling enthralls me still.

There is a particular scene between Marilyn and another native, a young filmmaker named Ed Chigliak, that illustrated to me the differences between stories told across cultures.

Ed starts the conversation, saying “Do we live life with no meaning - well, other than survival - or does the Enlightenment view prevail? Does the Creator have a master plan and, if so, what is it?”

Ed here is asking a very Western, Christian question. A science and reason question. A question of telos, or the ends for which we are made.

Marilyn ponders this and replies.

There was a warrior who had a fine stallion. Everyone said how lucky he was to have such a horse. “Maybe,” he said.

One day the stallion ran off. The people said the warrior was unlucky. “Maybe,” he said.

The next day the stallion returned, leading a string of fine ponies. The people said it was very lucky. “Maybe,” the warrior said.

Later, the warrior’s son was thrown from one of the ponies and broke his leg. The people said it was unlucky. “Maybe,” the warrior said.

The next week, the chief led a war party against another tribe. Many young men were killed. But, because of his broken leg, the warrior’s son was left behind, and so was spared.

And that’s it. End of story. This is the story equivalent of a zen koan, like to “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” or “if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

Our Western minds wish for tidy resolutions. A moral. We wish for things to MAKE SENSE. What are we supposed to do with this? In the David and Goliath story, we understand to be brave and heed God’s call to do things. In the Noah’s Ark story we also learn that it’s bad to be wicked and good to be faithful, that God will spare the faithful, and to act in a faithful manner even in questionable circumstances.

What do we learn here about the warrior?

Marilyn has an unflappable quality, a willingness to accept things that drive her boss, our young doctor Joel Fleischmann, mad. Joel is quick to speak and quick to anger.

Marilyn sees the world as mysterious, the meanings of events hard to derive and shifting, and so she patiently watches and waits to see what will happen next. The warrior story seems at times like it is finished: but any moral derived prematurely (as “the people” always do) is inevitably wrong, because the story is not finished.

As Soren Kierkegaard said, “Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other clause—that it must be lived forward.”

For Marilyn this is a story of patience and stoic acceptance. There is a point, just not one that is easy for us of Western/post-Enlightenment persuasion to see and accept.

(Having spent some time in Alaska, I was fascinated to see a preternatural capacity for patience in many of the natives I met and became friends with there. I guess it comes with generations of living off a cold, hard, and unforgiving land. You learn not to sweat the small stuff, and to be very, very patient.)

I actually became a philosophy major due to Chris Stevens from Northern Exposure. He was an itinerant visual artist/philosopher/poet who lived in an Airstream trailer on the edge of town and rode a Harley Davidson. I saw myself deeply in his story. It resonated with me in a way no story had before or since really. It felt deeply true … for me. There was something of my personhood that was finally recognized there and it was beautiful and liberating. (It’s probably why I write this substack, come to think of it.)

The story of Chris Stevens told me something about who I was meant to be, as the best stories do. Marilyn’s story told her something about who she was supposed to be. Stories tell us about who we are and what sort of world we inhabit, what kinds of people matter, what outcomes are possible, and what role(s) we may play.

That’s part of the puzzle.

STORY AS OPERATING SYSTEM

Some stories are intended to be morality tales, like “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” There’s nothing wrong with that per se. While these stories may not be high art, there is the requisite task of raising moral children. Don’t lie repeatedly or people may not help you when you are telling the truth: that’s a good moral to learn.

Kids need to download a basic set of operating principles that allow them to function in civilized society, and this download takes many forms over many years. Since humans are organic computers coupled with free will (of a sort) and moral agency, this isn’t as simple as installing an operating system on a computer. Computers have hardware that is designed to be compliant: run the program, do as you’re told.

Kids? Not so much.

Anyone who has parented a strong-willed four year old knows that they don’t run the program reliably. But they still need to function in society, and training seems to be a combination of creating a vision (via stories) and a complex network of behavior shaping at home and school and church and sports that involves metaphorical carrots and (hopefully metaphorical) sticks.

Peggy Albers, an Atlanta-based educator writing for The Atlantic says, “Scholars have found that stories have a strong influence on children’s understanding of cultural and gender roles. Stories do not just develop children’s literacy; they convey values, beliefs, attitudes, and social norms which, in turn, shape children’s perceptions of reality.”

Here I would like to return to Jack’s question:

how can stories help children model Christian virtues like kindness and courage in the pursuit of justice? Can stories vaccinate children against “might makes right” thinking and accepting, or even applauding, cruelty?

It would seem obvious that a parent cannot teach a child something they themselves have not learned. I don’t understand calculus, so if my daughter wishes to learn about that we shall outsource that knowledge to a local professor or maybe Khan Academy. I simply cannot instill this in her.

But my own limitations are made up for (if I allow them to be) by the other resources we have at our disposal. Hopefully my lack doesn’t create a deficit for her.

Some philosophically-minded people study morality on their own (Kant vs utilitarianism vs. Nietzsche, etc) but many people simply receive morality unquestioned from their culture and then it flows out of them in their actions. Morality is to such people as water is to fish: it simply is.

Stories till the ground from which worldviews grow. Long before children can articulate a philosophical rationale of any sort, stories tell us what strength looks like, if mercy is a virtue or a weakness, whether cruelty is tolerated (or admirable), and if strangers are a threat or to be welcomed.

ME or WE? 800 PEOPLE PER SQUARE MILE

When we see the maps after US elections, we can see that our collective stories scale regionally upward into national myths, political identities, and collective moral imaginations.

Might makes right and cruelty toward the other in the name of “purity” are shifts MAGA is trying to lock in at a cultural level. Obviously these must be made to be seen as “christian values” as Yahweh needs to be a cosigner on this bill or it won’t fly in red America.

Rural America votes red, and cities vote blue. Our election maps all show this phenomenon. But why does this happen?

In less-densely-populated areas, the individual is often (but not always!) seen as the primary entity. It’s the person and that person’s family whose rights must come first. Don’t tread on me! Don’t tell me to wear a mask. Don’t teach my kid about ___________. Don’t tax me to pay for public amenities. If you live out on a farm you may not care too much about the quality of the roads in town or the park being put in; you care more about lower taxes.

In more dense, urban settings (which also tend to me more diverse) “we” becomes the fundamental unit. We might wear a mask because we ride public transportation together and it’s good manners. Or because we know immunocompromised people, or simply wish not to spread disease. We may back DEI initiatives because we know people of color who are affected and wish to see life improved for them. We may oppose ICE because we know some of the people they are hunting and know them to be good people, as opposed to an abstract threat.

One set of values here says people should be self-sufficient and the government should be as small as possible. The other says people are inherently networked and the government has a role to play as a network admin of sorts--and that tipping point from “me” to “we” seems to occur at 800 people per square mile.

(A disclaimer is in order: these are broad tendencies rather than hard rules. Plenty of rural people are deeply communal, and plenty of urban people are fiercely individualistic. There are virtues and vices in both communal and individual thinking. I am just noting that our environment shapes our moral and political sensibilities in ways we need to understand.)

TRUE, BUT INCOMPLETE

The common denominators in Jack’s question that I return to:

• kindness,

• courage in the pursuit of justice,

• vaccinating children against “might makes right”

• can we prevent them accepting or applauding cruelty?

To attempt a long-overdue answer to this, I’ll return to my own questions:

• What is a story?

• What options do we have upon hearing a narrative?

• Are we shaping kids toward something resembling some sort of objective good, or are we teaching them to mirror our own biases?

Stories, for our purposes, are Bible stories, morality tales, the lessons you get from anime and from your friends. They are the narratives told you by pastors and politicians and musicians and philosophers.

Are we shaping kids toward some objective moral good? It seems we have trouble agreeing on an objective moral good (for reasons I have discussed previously) and often we teach kids to mirror our own biases. They see what we say AND what we do. They are very smart, these little organic computers with freewill. For good or ill, they are equipped with robust bullshit detectors.

The stories we tell our kids are influential but not determinative, strictly speaking. Proverbs 22:6 says, “Train up your child in the way they should go, and when they are old they will not depart from it.”

Like most proverbs this is a wise saying, a thing that is often, but not always, true.

Kids develop their own minds. They run their own bullshit detection software. They sometimes find better stories. Sometimes they find worse stories.

I was told a very good set of stories as a child. I was raised very responsibly, with a moral code, but also the ability to think independently. My dad said, as a point of pride, that Swensons are typically two standard deviations off the mean.

I grew dreadlocks and became a philosophy major. I got tattoos. This was very different from my parents, but also in keeping. I was being my own version of two standard deviations off the mean. These stories I inherited were expansive enough that I could forge my own.

We have a corrosive influence--perhaps you could say a cancer--in America now that says that white people are better than minorities, that a dangerous sliver of christian dispensationalist thinking ought to be our mandatory state religion, and that America is the best country and all the other countries can go pound sand.

That is a story we are telling. Some people are buying it, many (fortunately) are not.

I do think that telling better stories produces better children. And many people are telling good stories. And many people, even if they grew up with bad stories, are unlearning them and going through the painful but necessary work of deconstruction and reconstruction.

My goal as a parent is to tell my daughter stories that are true but incomplete. No story is complete: you can’t download the whole operating system at one time. You do it in many stages. Christians call this discipleship.

My sincere hope is that, as she continues to grow up and experience the wider world, she will find that the things we told her were true and just needed to be filled out.

In my view, that’s the best we can do as parents, to tell good, albeit incomplete, stories.

Thanks for the question Jack!

At home we have something called ubuntu. Ubuntu says a person is a person through other persons.

The solitary individual is really a contradiction in terms. I wouldn’t know how to work as a human being. I wouldn’t know how to speak, how to think. I wouldn’t know how to be human. None of us comes fully formed into the world.

I need you all in your giftedness and with all your weaknesses. I need you so that I can be me in all of my giftedness and my weaknesses.

It’s actually quite wonderfully good. You could almost see God rubbing his hands together and saying, “Even if I have to say so, that’s pretty smart, eh?” - Desmond Tutu

Give us this day our daily bread/And forgive us our trespasses/As we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil/For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever. Amen. - Matthew 6:12 - 13

Some of the beliefs I have found most fundamental to Jesus’ teachings are striking precisely because they are so unexpected and, one could say, unnatural.

Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone, for example. That will quiet a crowd out for blood.

Or “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

Don’t fall into the trap of arrogance, false certainty, or self-righteousness, Jesus says. Second guess the desire to overlook your own trespasses while examining the trespasses against you with a magnifying glass.

But of course, this is the human condition. It’s hard to see what is wrong in ourselves, but what is wrong in others (especially when they inflict suffering on us) hovers in our field of view like a flashing neon sign.

Desmond Tutu is touted as an example of stage four/Harmony because he showed a country how to forgive those who trespassed against them, and he did it with empathy, with humanity, and with tears and laughter.

He entered into it fully, he committed to the path, and he changed the world.

A STUPID GAME

There are a million ways for one human to inflict pain on another. Such violence can be intentional or accidental; spontaneous or planned; personal or capricious. A culmination of a decades-old grievance, or wrong place/wrong time.

Whatever the spark, the equation calls for an inflictor and an inflictee. And when we are hurt, there is an animal in us that wishes to settle the score. We want to “see justice served.” (And this generally means retributive justice. Restorative justice is another thing entirely.)

We want an eye for an eye (or perhaps a head on a pike). Discussing this with my daughter last night she mentioned, rightly, that eye for an eye was actually an ethical improvement at the time as it kept retribution proportional. If someone takes your eye, rather than killing them, you just take their eye. See how enlightened we are?

(Also, it’s kind of morbid when you put it that way. Are there people you can outsource eye gouging to?)

When you take a punch you throw one in return. That is the natural order of things, what the animal in us demands. This law is as ironclad as a tennis player returning a serve.

What would happen if a tennis player simply quit returning the serves?

It may function as performance art, but it isn’t a game. There’s no drama, there’s no there there, there’s no justice. There’s no revenge.

We don’t get to relish Hans Gruber’s long descent to certain death from the top of Nakatomi Plaza.

WHAT KIND OF STUPID GAME IS THIS?

THE RABBI’S ODD TEACHING

Two-thousand-odd years ago, God (inhabiting the body of a philosopher/homeless man/carpenter/rabbi) gave a speech revealing great mysteries of human existence. Said speech occurred in northern Israel on the Korazim Plateau. A breeze kicked up off the Sea of Galilee, providing a respite from the heat and a centering olfactory stew of seaweed, fish, and salt.

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth,’” the rabbi says. “But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.”

“Don’t return the serve,” the rabbi says. “It will be a short game.”

FORGIVENESS? FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WHY?

We like the concept of Jesus. Jesus as cultural symbol, Jesus as icon, Jesus as rallying cry. Jesus at the merch table. Jesus in the voting booth. Jesus beckons to us from the fog machine and the blue lasers, from the reverb and the 2,500 watt PA system.

We say our country was founded on Jesus’ teachings. And this administration says they are the most “christian” administration we have ever had. (Is there another Christ hiding somewhere we don’t know about? The bad one? The Jesus of petty grievance and disproportional vengeance?)

This rabbi hangs now on a cross: an enemy of the state, wrongfully accused. Nails like railroad spikes through his hands and his feet support his weight. He can’t clear his eyes from the blood. Mocked and harassed, and now crucified, in his death rattles and blind agony, he says, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

This is Jesus’ quintessential act. This is the character, we are told, of God. This is our example.

Theoretical forgiveness with a pleasant east wind coming in off the sea, is one thing. I can definitely do that. No question.

Practical forgiveness is quite another, coming, as it does, at the grisly end of a wrongful execution. If anyone had occasion to return the serve and nuke the earth and all of its cretinous, knuckle-dragging, ungrateful, petty, vindictive, small-minded, odoriferous, and cruel inhabitants to hell and back it was this homeless man/rabbi/carpenter/God, who (as the story goes) had leagues of angels at his disposal, who are presumably competent as agents of the wrath of God.

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

DESMOND TUTU, TRUE BELIEVER

The central enigma of Desmond Tutu, is that he seems to believe this odd teaching. And this belief helped move a nation toward reconciliation, won him a Nobel Peace Prize, and made him the archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa.

Tutu was born in South Africa, a descendant of tribes that had lived in the land for 1.2 millenia. If there’s a case to be made for finders keepers, they had a pretty strong claim.

A compact man, Tutu had an incisive mind, distinctive laugh, charming smile, impish sense of humor, and a seemingly bottomless well of empathy. A man with every right to be bitter, he was not.

A son of apartheid, Tutu was born into a strict caste system where people were sorted by racial groups into Whites, Indians, Coloureds, and Black Africans. Whites, as the top caste, determined the races of other people. One such test to determine if a person was Coloured (aka, partly white!) or just plain old black African was to put a comb in someone’s hair and tell them to shake their head vigorously. If the comb fell out you were Coloured, but if the comb stayed in: you were Black. Off to the ghetto for you.

Apartheid literally means “apartness.” This was white supremacy quite literally instantiated as government policy and (unhelpfully) sanctioned by the Dutch Reformed church.

Under apartheid 3.5 million people were forcibly evicted from their homes and resettled in segregated neighborhoods. If you were Black, you were settled into tribal homelands (bantusans) and stripped of your citizenship. Land, homes, social standing, economic power, right to vote, and even right to love someone outside your racial group - all gone.

In the American Jim Crow era, we at least pretended to believe in “separate but equal” but apartheid carried no such pretensions. The per-capita education budget for White students was 10x the budget for Black students. That same level of disparity carried over into every other facet of existence: roads, hospitals, restaurants, beaches. Blacks were seen as a supply of cheap labor, referred to as “boy” for men or “Annie” for women. They were to be kept in line and to remember their place. (Whites comprised just 15% of the population, so enforcement of standards had to be rigorous, lest they lose control.)

I know that this sounds horrific and unjust, and it was. It sounds like something that would have happened a long time ago: history book stuff. Here were a few albums that came out the year apartheid ended: Superunknown (Sound Garden), The Sign (Ace of Bass), Ill Communication (Beastie Boys), MTV Unplugged in New York (Nirvana).

This was also the year I graduated high school. This is recent history. We are reminded every day that the temptation to systematically dehumanize others is evergreen.

Living the teachings of Christ, for Desmond Tutu, was about nonviolent resistance. Instead of countering violence with violence, he countered violence with truth or with protest. It’s not that you simply let people run over you. Tutu simply had a broader understanding of the nature of the conflict.

You see, it’s not as simple as a game of tennis. Apartheid is a matter of structure, of dogma, of policy, and prejudice. It resides in the minds of South Africans, black and white alike. A social ill, it must be corrected socially. Some people are stripping others of their humanity and calling it the divine order established by God.

(An interfaith coalition supported Tutu in the fight against apartheid: Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Hindus. “Well,” Tutu said, “you discovered the thing you were fighting against was too big for divided churches, for divided religious community. And each of the different faith communities realized some of the very significant central teachings about the worth of a human being, about the unacceptability of injustice and oppression. Many times, actually, it was quite exhilarating. You know, it was fun.”)

Ever a dehumanizing and brutal system, apartheid became increasingly violent as the resistance grew. From 1948 (the year apartheid was formalized) until 1990 there were 7,000 “political deaths.” From 1990 to 1994 there were 14,000 deaths and 22,000 injuries.

TRUTH AND … CONSEQUENCES?

When the system of apartheid formally ended the country was left broken. Everyone in the country was personally affected by the policy.

Desmond Tutu voted for the first time at age 63. Asked what it was like, he said, “How do you describe falling in love? … For you, going to the ballot box is really a political act. For us … it was a spiritual experience, because you walked into the polling booth one person, with all of the history of oppression and injustice, and all the baggage that we were carrying. And you walk, and you make your mark, and you put the ballot into the box, and you emerge on the other side. And you are a different person: you are transfigured. Now you actually count in your own country.”

Many people had been tortured horrifically by the security forces. People lost their friends, mothers, fathers, siblings, lovers. Not to mention their homes.

An ocean of pain, a tidal wave of anger.

Enter the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Simply put, this commission declared to those who had committed grievous acts in the name of apartheid that they could have amnesty for their crimes if they simply sat in front of a microphone and told the truth of their actions, in detail, in front of TV cameras and the very people most harmed.

You shall confess to what you did, and the truth shall set you free. What an interesting idea.

Notably, the authors of the law did not require saying “I’m sorry” as a condition for amnesty. Tutu commented on this:

When we started, we looked at the legislation, and the legislation did not require a perpetrator who applied for amnesty to express even remorse. And we were very upset: they’ve got to say sorry or … something. But we discovered that actually the legislators were a lot smarter, because had they insisted that it was a condition to get amnesty, each time somebody said, “I am sorry, I am very sorry,” we would’ve said, “Ah, he’s just putting that on.”

As it happened, despite the fact that it was not a requirement, when people were applying for amnesty, they almost always would turn to the victims or the survivors, or the family, if the person had been killed. They would turn to them and say, “Please, we know it’s very difficult, but please, forgive.” And as I say, almost always, the victims would.

In a 2005 speech, Tutu gave his rationale for the non-punititive, nonviolent nature of the policy:

Isn’t that what happens in the Middle East: a suicide bomber, and sure as anything the Iisraeli will retaliate. But as sure as anything there is going to be another suicide bomber, and as sure as anything there will be a reprisal. And then there will be a counter reprisal.

When are we going to learn that ultimately, there is no true peace, no true security, that ever came from the barrel of a gun? When will we learn?

I love this concept of interconnection they call ubuntu. Tutu said, “Ubuntu says ‘when I dehumanize you - whether I like it or not, inexorably I am dehumanized in that process. For my humanity is caught up in your humanity. In order to enhance my humanity I have to work like blazes, as it were, to enhance your humanity.’”

What a profound challenge. What a high bar. What a difficult path. The great G.K. Chesterton once wrote, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”

Tutu tried these ideas, speaking truth to power against an unjust government and the Dutch Reformed Church. He was aided by an interfaith coalition.

I think of Pete Hegseth’s “prayers for ultra violence” and $1.5 trillion war budget while we cut aid to Africa and hundreds of thousands of women die from cervical cancer that stinks of rotting flesh because we couldn’t (or wouldn’t) fund a $4 vaccination. Of the ICE raids in Minneapolis that we lived through just a few months ago, to rid us of “rapists and murderers.”

We still believe violence will save us. We believe peace comes via the barrel of a gun. We baptize our vengeance in religious language, and assure ourselves of its righteousness, so long as our tribe commits it. “Peace through strength” is a more palatable way of saying peace through war, and as we are learning again for the millionth time, war begets more war and war is the opposite of peace.

We don’t know if Jesus’ ideas work: who is trying them?

I think Desmond Tutu gets pretty close.

Over the past week, I think the authors of the Book of Job decided to do a very toned down sequel on us and our friends and family: disease, pestilence, car trouble, boat trouble, emotional trouble, spiritual trouble, surgery recovery trouble … basically everything.

And you know what? That is it. That is the human condition. In this world YOU WILL HAVE TROUBLE. That is simply a promise. And the helpers will help. And they will get mighty, mighty tired.

And that’s OK, as long as they rest. So Desmond Tutu’s going to need to wait until next week.

******

This last weekend was our Man Up to Cancer North Star Chapter weekend retreat. For those of you who may not have been around here long, I’m a cancer survivor.

At the risk of TMI, I had testicular cancer, and gave my right nut in exchange for a chance to continue living. I have an eight-inch incision up my centerline where they took out all the lymph nodes on the right side of my spine (from my heart to my pelvis), and I had BEP regimen chemo. My neuropathy got better, but my chemo brain fog and hearing loss remains. (I have never been good with names - now I am exceptionally bad with names. And, as a musician, hearing loss is a very scary proposition.)

In the year of my diagnosis I lost two close friends to cancer, both excellent musicians. One was my friend Pete Sherry, who had graduate degrees in theology and in counseling but taught yoga and built beautiful custom electric guitars.

The other was my friend Jessa Roquet, a musician I had played in bands with for 15 years or so. She had - perhaps literally - the voice of an angel and such a kind heart, and a great smile and sense of humor.

She led the band Gambler’s Daughter, and I played in the original lineup. Here’s an EP we recorded.

I hope we will see the departed again in heaven, but it isn’t something I can say that I know will happen, properly speaking. Losing Pete and Jessa (and being diagnosed myself) taught me that I need to cherish my friends, family, and loved ones generally speaking. Simply put, we don’t know how much time we have, and we don’t know - properly speaking - what comes after.

I have a hope of heaven, like all christians, but it feels like much more of a hope than something ironclad or contractual. So enjoy people while they are here. They will not always be.

Before he died, Pete Sherry connected me with an organization called Man Up to Cancer. Chartered to support the social and emotional health of men going through cancer, it was incredibly important to me through my own 15 dark months of treatment.

As the group came alongside me, with all the sleepless nights, side effects, and dark wonderings, I made friends and deep relationships with a wide variety of people.

The group gave me social and emotional support, but also a larger perspective. Now that I am healthy I stay on to colead a chapter in hopes that no one has to face cancer alone.

My first experience with a chapter retreat was in Florida in February 2024. Here’s an essay I wrote to commemorate a beautiful, moving, and eye-opening experience.

2.9.24 - Florida Trip

Learning Radical Acceptance

We are shaped by the decisions and views of others from the time we are conceived. The pair that produces you determines your genes, which will in turn determine your gender, how tall you are, your athletic and intellectual predilections, how susceptible you are to illness, and much about your personality.

Once we go through the chute, become cordless, and take our first breath, we immediately start to be conditioned by the world around us. Are we breastfed or bottle fed? Cuddled and held, or left to cry it out? An only child or the seventh of eight? Abused and neglected or loved well, or perhaps some of both? Fundamentalist, catholic, or atheist? Observant jew or secular? Was your father around?

Did you grow up on a farm in northern Wisconsin or in an apartment in Queens? Our circumstances, the expectations made of us, and the cultural stew we are brought up in necessarily condition us. It cannot be otherwise.

Some of your family of origin views will prove useful, and some will not. But, usefulness aside, you will mirror these views - with their attendant merits and prejudices - for a while, maybe your whole life.

If you find a way to break out of said prejudices (or just less-useful beliefs) it will be because you were exposed to a new way of thinking. Some people who existed theoretically and in categories now become real, flesh and blood, with feelings and hopes and dreams, loves and love lost, and grief, the same as I have.

I had the opportunity this weekend to have real talk with men in different demographic categories than me. Northern/southern, straight/gay, gentile/jew, nonaddict/addict, civilian/special forces, American/Canadian, married/divorced, parent/nonparent, healthy/hospice.

You have to find the right conditions to allow you to rethink your beliefs. You have to give yourself the permission to throw out the old. To admit to yourself and others that your views were wrong, or at least incomplete, and possibly harmful. You may find the courage to adopt new beliefs slowly, as you find things that are a) true (as best you can tell) and are b) constructive and helpful.

This is a vital task. It is a truism that we become our beliefs and that strong, misguided belief does most of the harm in the world.

What can bring together men who have little to nothing in common? In our case, cancer. The fact that we all were, are, or are about to be fighting for our lives is the salient piece.

And we find a way to be honest with each other. We talk about neuropathy and how we can’t open bottles and cans or wear socks in the winter. We talk about divorces, failed relationships, and exes who are worried about what will happen to their finances after we die. We talk about marriages that are going well, and second marriages that are going well. We talk about our suicide attempts and rehab. We talk about the credit card bills we ran up when we were sure we would die, and now that we’re not dying, have to repay. We talk about shitting into a bag, and how you can clear a room when you burp it. We talk about what it means to not have a rectum or a prostate. We talk about treatments and second opinions. We talk about fear of dying and being ready to go. We talk about what’s on the other side.

You have to know how rare this is. It’s a phenomenon that doesn’t occur in nature. Men don’t do this. But we should.

And we did here. We listened to each other, and each of us became a little better for it. And we learned, once again, that we are not alone. And that knowledge makes all the difference.

#manuptocancer #goflow