I had coffee with a clergy colleague recently, and the conversation quickly turned to national politics. He and I come from religious traditions that would be considered “progressive.” We agreed that the term does not begin to embrace what is required of one who calls himself a Christian.

We decided that a better descriptor would be something that gets to the heart of Christian discipleship and ethics—something like “orthodox” or “faithful.” But I suspect that might confuse some folks.

Now, I have been a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) for probably three years. To date, my involvement has been mostly through financial support. Honestly, like a lot of Dems, I have been a bit leery of my brothers and sisters on the left.

I repent of that reluctance here and now, and I sense that the time for boldness has come at last.

I’m not entirely certain as to why I've been so cautious because I am pretty far left myself and could probably live in a nation like Norway. I actually have a little Norwegian DNA, I’ll have you know!

Yes, I know Norway is a much smaller country, and more homogeneous, but I can’t help being impressed with the way they care for one another through social programs and with how they welcome immigrants. Imagine that.

Photo by Pablo Merchan Montes on Unsplash

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I was brought up in the two-party milieu in which it was understood that one must be either a Democrat or a Republican. Americans have never had much of an appetite for third parties or for anything that looks even faintly like a parliamentary system.

It is therefore unfortunate that we are expected to define ourselves narrowly. We seem to have bought into a myth which holds that there are only two choices in a universe which is full of intellectual and political possibilities. However, I suspect the two-party system is here to stay.

Looking back as we strain forward…

America was once great. Yes, we saved the world from fascism in the 1940s, but we have slipped in terms of our moral clarity and our dedication to helping each other live our lives without compromise.

America’s original sin first saw the light of day in August of 1619 when the first slave ship landed in Virginia. It was the beginning of a prosperous venture for those who were suddenly able to largely eliminate the cost of labor for their agricultural enterprise.

And while most of the world abolished both the slave trade and eventually slavery itself in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in the United States, it took a bloody civil war with more than 600,000 deaths, a monumental loss of property, and assorted other wealth to bring the evil institution to its knees in 1863. Sort of…

It was not as if slavery suddenly ceased to exist. For one thing, it persisted in certain areas where enslaved persons were simply unaware of their emancipation—which is why Juneteenth is so important—and even after 1865 and the post-war rise of the KKK, there was more than enough control of newly-freed African-Americans throughout the Jim Crow South.

Some would assert—and I would agree—that the new Jim Crow 2.0 is quite evident in the penal system of 2026 and in the cash bail system used in most states that keeps pre-trial defendants locked up indefinitely, and long before being convicted of any crime.

Add to that mix the dubious provisions of the 13th Amendment, which creates as an exception to involuntary servitude, “punishment for conviction of a crime.” The U.S. never did abolish slavery entirely.

The América of today is the sum total of our collective history—some of which is cruel and unjust. The same is true for individuals.

We are not well-served by denying the unsavory parts of our history. To those who suggest that slavery was not so bad, I tell you that it was much worse!

Collectively, we seem to gravitate toward a political mindset with an easy dichotomy of up/down, left/right, good/evil, etc. And in this election cycle, we have dredged up the old fear of communism, except that now we mix in the fear of socialism. The Republicans are the ones fanning the flames, and it’s clear they don’t know the definition of either!

The progressive versus conservative spectrum is inaccurate.

My clergy colleagues would agree that we don’t much like being labeled “progressive” when describing an ethical mindset that most right-wingers would probably label as “woke.” In fact, they do—all the time.

It’s not that we embrace some sort of social progressivism, which humanity might find desirable. No, it is so much more than that; it is the ethical command of God.

And it answers the gnawing question of “if not now, when?”

In his book, Liar’s Kingdom, former USDOJ attorney Andrew Weissmann, poses an intriguing question: Would Richard Nixon be forced out of office if his Watergate crimes occurred today?

Given the extent to which overt public lies, i.e. intentionally misleading the public by elected or appointed officials, has become commonplace, the answer might be that Nixon could likely survive what was—in 1974—a political and ethical liability.

Because nowadays, nobody cares. We are so accustomed to lies that we hardly notice when we are being lied to. That’s how far we have fallen since Kellyanne Conway first used the term “alternative facts” in a “Meet the Press” interview in January of 2017. It was just as absurd then as it is now.

If only there was a legal price to be paid when a politician deliberately misleads the people s/he is sworn to serve. For now, we rely on the ability to turn a dishonest politician out of office as a method of accountability—theoretically, anyway. The greatest liar of all time still won a second term in 2024!

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My fear is that we have arrived at the place where lying has become insidiously irrelevant. It is especially troubling when we minimize the reality by suggesting that “both sides do it.” Public dishonesty seems to have worked its way into the very fabric of American politics. Perhaps it was always so, but the stakes have never been higher.

Some of the underlying cause, in my view, is that the dishonesty has become intertwined with our own prejudices. When a leader’s prevarications somehow fit one’s perverted inner narrative, with all the psychological baggage that carries, it becomes essentially irrelevant whether the lie is in fact a lie.

Humans have a remarkable capacity to dismiss obvious lying. I was alive and politically aware in 1974, and I seem to recall a certain collective revulsion at the lies of Richard Nixon. But that was then. Trump has no shame.

Not to be discounted is the extent to which the Watergate scandal and the nearly contemporaneous Vietnam debacle quickly blended into a larger narrative of distrust of political processes. The current Liar-in-Chief has become quite adept at this tactic—such that the integrity of our most cherished institution has become suspect. That is the worst part of all.

The political and economic malaise of the 1970s and 1980s, in which working class Americans began to feel left behind, was a fertile environment for a “savior” to come along and declare that it was now “morning in America.”

It was not, but Reagan’s incessant lies propped up the illusion that Americans wanted so badly to believe. It happened again in 2016. Do you remember, “I alone can fix it?”

It is far from being fixed.

Many will recall how that several months before the 2020 presidential election, there were declarations that the only way we lose, is if there is cheating. And sure enough, when they lost, the MAGA forces dutifully asserted—without any evidence—that there had been fraud. The allegations of election-rigging became a veritable mantra for the MAGA Right.

Someone has said that the best time to steal an election is before the election. What better way than to discourage people from voting in the first place?

The theologian in me distresses over the ease with which good people accept lies as truth. It goes to the very heart of our humanness. We have heard that the truth will set us free, but what if it becomes impossible to know the truth? Worse yet, what if we become so discouraged, disoriented, and weary that we give up trying to find it?

For those who sat out the process in 2024, shame on you. This next time might well be your last time. I seem to recall being told that we would never have to vote again.

It has been 52 years since Nixon’s resignation in disgrace—about two generations. God help us if we fail to extricate our democracy from this hell.

As is often the case, we humans bear some responsibility for our current predicament. That is certainly true when it comes to the environment and to the state of our climate. Fossil fuels have contributed heavily to the heating up of the planet.

According to NOAA, the global average surface temperature is roughly 1.46°C (2.63°F) above the pre-industrial baseline. The earth's surface has been warming since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Reasonably, how could it not?

And each successive summer just gets hotter and hotter, while super storms have become much more frequent. In my formative years, one severe storm per season was the norm. Now, there are several in one summer.

Coincidence? I suspect not. Meanwhile, we just cannot seem to muster the political will to address climate change.

Photo by Vasily Kulinich on Unsplash

This year, we have seen the world's worst air quality in the Upper Midwest (where I live) due to wild fires in Canada and in Minnesota, hampering commerce, affecting outdoor recreation, and presenting health challenges to those with breathing difficulty.

Such has become the new normal, and climate inaction is but one casualty of a failed political system.

On some level, we seem to have settled for a scenario in which we are captive to monied interests controlling every aspect of our lives, while demanding more and more political obeisance—such that we have become virtually powerless to effect anything good or beneficial to the commonweal. The wealth hoarders own us.

The morbidly rich have banded together as oligarchs, and they control all of American civic life—with the blessing of a Supreme Court, which has effectively legalized corporate bribery. Perhaps worse yet, is the cavalier manner in which this lawless regime has openly and brazenly committed innumerable infractions against both the law and any expectation of good governance.

Who would gave dreamed that a president would raze part of the executive mansion without permission in order to construct a ballroom? Or how about that Qatari “gift” of a 400 million dollar jet—which we the people will foot the bill toward the necessary security outfitting—and the president takes it with him when he leaves office! WHAT?

Make no mistake: those who did not speak up are just as much to blame as Dear Leader, and history will be unkind to them for many decades.

It has been a crazy summer with the wildfires for sure, but it gets worse. We now know that measles cases are at record highs. Polio seems to be making a comeback due to the dubious “medical” advice of an unqualified DHHS secretary, who Has confessed to once snorting cocaine off of a public toilet seat. And most recently, we endured thousands being sickened by a preventable cyclosporiasis outbreak.

That last one was largely due to the DOGE cuts that resulted in the firing of thousands of USDA inspectors. Same reason one cannot get a Social Security representative on the phone these days. So much winning!

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As bad as thing are, I submit that folks are beginning to awaken to to the danger we are in.

I attended a neighborhood conversation with my state rep and my state senator at the local library recently. The attendance was far greater than similar events in the past. The recent 2026 Michigan primary election voter turnout was at a record high for Democrats, and I suspect that will be repeated—if not surpassed—in November.

Six months ago, I might have observed that Americans were largely oblivious to the ongoing destruction of our pollical system—in fact, I’m rather sure that I did! It just seemed that far too many folks had their heads buried in the sand. But something has changed, and I think it began with the ascension of NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose political leanings were a bit further left than some would gave preferred.

But NYC did not cease to exist, and foils did not move our in huge numbers, as predicted. Life in the Big Apple seems to be working well. Imagine that!

Then, Democratic candidates—some with the “Democratic Socialist” label began to win decisively in primaries across America this summer, and suddenly, hope seemed to spring up where it had been merely an aspiration!

It has been a little frustrating to watch the media try and tamp down the new-found progressive enthusiasm, but they always want a horse race, so pethaps they can be forgiven for their cynicism —NOT!

So-called “establishment Democrats” have also engaged in a fair amount of hand wringing, but even some of them seem to have come around to recognize that the electorate wants change that leans left.

We are still wrestling with that in my home state of Michigan where a certain charismatic public health official narrowly defeated the establishment candidate for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination. Abdul El-Sayed happens to be a Muslim, so you can expect the Islamophobia to peak around the first week of October.

Did I mention that his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, actually resides in Florida? That is similar to Rep. Jack Bergman in Michigan 01, who lives in Louisiana. He is being credibly challenged by Democrat Callie Barr.

As for Abdul, his message is simple: Money out of politics, money in pockets, and Medicare for all. I think that sort of thinking will prevail in November. You read it here first, folks!

And to think that we nearly threw in the towel. The haze is beginning to dissipate—God bless America!

As America turns 250, we are confronted by some painful truths, chief among them that the MAGA Right is perfectly fine with a majority white populace. Native-born is best, according to the Supreme Court.

All of this, of course, is militated against by the demographic predictions, which suggest an approaching non-white American majority just a few years from now.

If that is the country we want to be, then we need to own the dubious aspiration. Somehow, I suspect that it is not!

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As NPR reported last March, Raphaël Glucksmann, a member of the European Parliament with the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, said at a party convention on Sunday that he had a message “to the Americans who have chosen to side with the tyrants … who fired researchers for demanding scientific freedom.”

“Give us back the Statue of Liberty,” he said with a smile as the crowd cheered. “We gave it to you as a gift, but apparently you despise it. So it will be just fine here at home.”

Glucksmann was being facetious, of course, but his sentiments were accurate. And that was before SCOTUS ended temporary protective status (“TPS”) for tens of thousands of Haitians and Syrians.

The moral implications are enormous, not to mention the likely economic consequences that will come from the job vacancies created by the absence of those very immigrants. Even Republican Governor Mike DeWine of Ohio gets that!

Certainly no single political or judicial development defines the total political landscape, but consider how the Court so easily gutted the rights of African American voters in the recent congressional redistricting initiatives in several—mostly southern—states.

What would have been unthinkable in decades past has now become agile rhetoric from the likes of Stephen Miller, from some members of Congress, and even from the Vice President. Their faux outrage over the Court’s refusal to invalidate the language of the 14th Amendment in the birthright citizenship case (even a stopped clock is right twice a day) was appalling.

That decision should have been a resounding 9-0 affirmation of a bedrock constitutional principle, instead of a reluctant 5-4 acquiescence to our darker angels.

Stories have surfaced about Miller berating ICE for failing to meet his quota of 3,000 daily immigration arrests. The vast majorly of those detentions have involved non-white persons. Do you see a pattern here?

Saying the quiet part out loud is now the norm, and America is diminished by it. Language shapes and defines reality.

Some of us have expressed a certain weariness with the status quo, while far too many of us seem to ignore it. I get that; it’s too much for me to think about sometimes, too. But I do think about it because it’s infinitely important.

On the eve of our 250th birthday, America is in an existential crisis. Our concept of who we are as a nation is being challenged, even as an unattractive underbelly is being revealed. The Stephen Millers of the world are rejoicing, while the JD Vances stumble over themselves trying to cosmetize something quite ugly.

Every American ought to be outraged.

We know that America is an aspirational ideal, and for the greater part of our history, we have recognized the incremental nature of our efforts to form a more perfect union. It has been too slow in the minds of some, but we have embraced the notion that the moral arc of history indeed does bend toward justice.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin illegal in the United States. Before signing the bill into law on July 2 of that year, President Lyndon Johnson addressed the American people. In the speech he said, “This is a proud triumph. Yet those who founded our country knew that freedom would be secure only if each generation fought to renew and enlarge its meaning. From the minutemen at Concord to the soldiers in Viet-Nam, each generation has been equal to that trust.”

“So tonight I urge every public official, every religious leader, every business and professional man, every workingman, every housewife—I urge every American—to join in this effort to bring justice and hope to all our people—and to bring peace to our land.

My fellow citizens, we have come now to a time of testing. We must not fail.”

We can glimpse the dreadful moment when the hope that is America is no more, and nowadays, many of us are heartbroken. God, help us!

America is at a crossroads, one which demands that we make a collective political moral choice with profound moral implications. We have seen the destructiveness of an obscene imperial presidency, with governance funded by oligarchs and propped up by a corrupt Supreme Court, and we are horrified.

We are now 16 years past the disastrous legal fiction of the Citizens United decision, which held that unlimited corporate campaign spending was justified under some absurd reasoning that equates money with speech.

Like I said: absurd!

The morbidly rich and the corporations they run continue to have inordinate influence over elections, and that is abominable!

Photo by Lea Kobal on Unsplash

I like to believe that the more thoughtful among us reject the vision of a country that is hostile to people of color—a country that would willingly and intentionally disenfranchise a large swath of its citizenry in order to retain a corrupt hold on power.

And I am pretty certain that people of goodwill find it morally reprehensible to murder citizens in broad daylight while acting “under color of law.” We dealt with that aberration during the discussions around the passage of the 14th Amendment, and it’s still good law.

I continue to find it puzzling how ordinary people work against their own (obvious) interests. It is the sort of mindset that causes a poor rural resident in Mississippi—living in a home with a dirt floor—to express concerns about protecting the estate tax!

Don’t laugh; I have heard just such nonsense. It reminds me of a quote, erroneously attributed to John Steinbeck, about how socialism never caught on in America because the poor do not consider themselves to be the oppressed proletariat, but merely “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

Even if Steinbeck never uttered those precise words, the theme is clear: most of us have a built-in suspicion about poverty—one that requires our demonization of the poor. It is so much easier to assign the state of being poor to some sort of moral incapacity or defect than to own up to the inherent unfairness of a system that helps to keep people in poverty.

I have to be careful here because I am coming perilously close to condemning capitalism for its inherent abuse of humanity by its glorification of profit over people. I am however encouraged of late by the success of the democratic socialist message we have seen coming to the fore in the candidacy of politicians like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

I suspect that the Democratic Party is only now beginning to hear from some of us that we are tried of waiting—weary of the lame excuses—as to why we cannot have universal healthcare or a livable minimum wage. And we are asking the age-old question of “If not now, when?”

We simply must find our common humanity, or risk the destruction of our democratic republic. We have been lied to for many decades now by those who benefit from keeping us disunited and suspicious of one another. The morbidly rich do not have our best interests at heart!

Those of us who work for a paycheck must recall how dependent we are on one another—of how our needs and our aspirations align—and we must find encouragement in the realization that our numbers are far greater than theirs!

Saving America will not be easy, but it is an achievable goal. The work begins in earnest on November 3, 2026.

I grew up loving America, and I still do. I still get a lump in my throat at the playing of the Star Spangled Banner. Yes, I know that it has racist lyrics that we never sing, but I cherish the pride that its words engender.

America has always been an aspirational ideal, and with everything that is wrong with America, there is still much to be celebrated.

For at least six of the last ten years, I have been embarrassed by the crassness, the cruelty, the ignorance, and the criminality of the man who should never have been elected to the residency as second time. The insurrection of January 6, 2021 should have been a deal killer. It boggles my mind that it was not.

Photo by Harry Ive on Reddit

But I had a pride flashback when the crew of Artemis II splashed down in the Pacific on April 10. It reminded me of how many of us Boomers felt when the young and hopeful John F. Kennedy spoke of a “New Frontier” and the conquering of space.

Oh how I yearn to feel that sort of pride in America again.

Here’s the painful reality of how we got here: America suffers from a congenital defect, which enables the sort of destructive dysfunction of this corrupt, inept, and lawless regime. Quite plainly, we have enabled all of this by our incapacity—or refusal—to demand accountability.

This defect of which I speak is the dark underbelly of America, and it often manifests in the sort of racism that has allowed—indeed encouraged—the hopelessly corrupt Supreme Court to gut the Voting Rights Acts of 1965.

It should be noted that, given SCOTUS’s shameful wink and nod, at least half a dozen southern states immediately moved to create new congressional districts, specifically redrawn to limit or eliminate black representation in Congress. One or two have since repented.

That does not make me proud to be an American, and unless we exorcise this darkness, our experiment in liberty could well come to an end sooner than we might have thought.

This content is aimed at my white brothers and sisters, and particularly to my colleagues in professional ministry. We must speak clearly and forcefully about both the stupidity and immorality of a systematic plan to disenfranchise African-Americans and other minorities.

This white political hegemony, which seems to be the ultimate objective of the MAGA Right, is hostile to a vision of America where all people are created equal and entitled to the same rights as white people. It really is that simple.

It pains me deeply that we have been subjected to so much psychic trauma in the past decade—but most intently in the very recent past. I am distressed that two murders in the streets of Minneapolis earlier this year have not been avenged—yet. But I am a huge believer that justice always catches up with us—any of us— when we have done wrong.

Justice will be realized for Renee Good and Alex Pretty.

Like many of you, I am weary of the chaos and the cruelty, designed for maximum impact by the audacious frequency of it all. I have heard it said often how many of us are not excited by the prospect of a 250th anniversary celebration of American independence. This does not feel like the bicentennial celebration of 1976, and that saddens me.

But I had a twinge of deja vu last April as the Artemis II crew returned home. It reminded me of the recovery of Alan Shepard’s Mercury space capsule in 1961 and the return of John Glenn’s “Friendship 7” spacecraft after orbiting the earth the very next year. I watched both events on television while in school. There was a palpable sense of optimism loose in the country then in stark contrast with the sense of dread many of us feel every day.

Instead of an inspirational space program, America now suffers from the twin embarrassment of the Iran debacle and a destroyed reflecting pool. The former cost both humans lives and billions of dollars, whelk the latter was a $14 million no-bid contract. More incompetence.

So, thank you, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen. We needed that moment of pride this spring. It was so good to see four Americans operating from their love of country, and for no other reason. We salute you!

May there be many more such moments to come because America might be deflated, but it is not defeated!

Oh, to be proud of America again!

I was in Mrs. Saunders’s eighth grade English class at West Junior High School where we were assigned Longfellow’s epic poem Evangeline. It was in the springtime, a very pleasant season in the Ohio River Valley where the temperatures typically hover around 70 degrees during the day.

It was a few months after the assassination of JFK, at the point in which when I was becoming aware of who I was and of who I hoped to become.

The front porch of the home shared by my maternal grandparents was a safe place, a loving place, a good space to absorb Longfellow’s artful language. I do not know if Mrs. Saunders was merely fulfilling some curriculum requirement when she assigned the work, or if she knew something mystical.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from the 1893 Cambridge Edition
(Originally published in 1847).

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This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight…

Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie is a narrative poem about a young Acadian woman, Evangeline Bellefontaine, who is separated from her fiancé, Gabriel Lajeunesse, during the British expulsion of Acadians from Nova Scotia.

An elegant poem—much like a moving piece of music—animates us for reasons beyond our ability to explain the experience. All I know is that it captivated me at a time when I was both impressionable and incredibly optimistic about a future I could not possibly divine.

I sat on the porch, taking in the warm breeze and the gentle spring sun, as I plowed through Evangeline. It seemed as if I was doing something important—something that would help prepare me for the rest of my educational journey. And perhaps it did.

When I got to college some years later, I declared a major in English with an emphasis in American literature. I often recall fondly those years when I became immersed in the work of Faulkner, Steinbeck, Dreiser, Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe. I did not neglect Shakespeare or Chaucer in the bargain, with an occasional dash of Thomas Hardy thrown in for good measure.

It was good to be on my grandmother’s front porch in the month of May, located in a town I loved and where I had been born. Reading Longfellow was partly an academic task and also a pleasant pastime.

With the stress of this current American moment, I need a break and an opportunity to regroup mentally, emotionally, and psychically. This is all so draining after all.

As much as I’d like to, I can’t go back to my grandmother’s house and sit on the front porch while reading Evangeline. I hope Mrs. Saunders is proud of me!

In another striking embarrassment, the arrogant incompetence of this regime is on full display in the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool. If only some experts had advised against painting the bottom “American flag blue,” as DJT calls it.

Well, of course they did, but somebody wouldn’t listen. We have seen that movie many times before, and I am becoming weary of the same confused, disjointed, and dishonest drama being played out every day in America. I want my country back.

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There has been no shortage of dysfunctional moments since January 20, 2025. The algae bloom invasion in the reflecting pool is but a metaphor for a nation in decline. And the Republican majority in the House and Senate still refuses to do their job.

Shameful…and dangerous.

Bear in mind that this latest display of esthetic idiocy occurs in the context of a very confusing set of facts relative to the new Iran deal and that pathetic display of crudeness on the south lawn of the White House on June 14. It was hard to miss the disgraceful subtext of racism, homophobia, and white supremacy.

It hurt my heart to hear the crude comments about former First Lady Michelle Obama from the lips of UFC fighter Josh Hokit. That is the culture of this regime and the man at the top who never calls it out because he is part of it. Disgusting doesn't begin to describe it.

In roughly the same timeframe, Kash Patel, the supremely incompetent director of the FBI, jumped the gun by revealing on social media an alleged plot to attack the event—even as warrants were being prepared! Patel’s record in doing his job is less than stellar, and that is being polite.

And let’s not forget Pete Hegseth, who has now comprised a list of recognized DOD-recognized religions. His ignorance about such matters is astounding but consistent with the overall incompetence theme of this regime.

The list of missteps in appointing inappropriate regime officials is expansive. I would even argue that nobody in authority today is fit to serve, and one has to wonder if intentionally breaking the system is the point.

We are coming up on the first anniversary of the passage of the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill.” I chair my county’s Human Services Board, which is the statutorily mandated liaison with the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, so I am privy to the anticipated draconian changes to public assistance coming in January, 2027. Affected programs include food assistance and Medicaid, and it is going to be—excuse my coarseness—a veritable shit show come New Year’s Day!

The most vulnerable in my state and all over America will find it even harder to live, while the obscenely wealthy get tax breaks. I recall that scene last summer when House Speaker Mike Johnson raised his folded hands to heaven in gratitude for the passage of the One Big Ugly Bill. I suggest that the High and Holy One was not pleased.

Those sentiments are far away from the demands of divine justice. They are in fact an abomination. I think I know something about the Bible and the ancient prophetic tradition, which is at the heart of Jesus’ message. That is not it!

History teaches us that empires rise, and empires fall. America has become an empire in its 250-year history, and I submit that we are declining because we have lost our moral center.

That has nothing to do with any of the culture issues we love to argue about, but it has everything to do with prioritizing political power over human wellbeing—with the glorification of wealth over the needs of the poor and disenfranchised—with the shameful subjugation of people of color—with the systematic stripping away of cherished human rights—with the sanctioned perpetration of public violence against the existential “other.”

No amount of hiding the sordid truth by banning books and rewriting history will negate the fact that America is a failing state.

The latest screw-ups with the reflecting pool and that hideous cage fight on the White House lawn are symptoms of cultural, moral, and political decline at the hands of a boldly lawless regime, which clearly does not love America, but only considers it a prize to be plundered. That one fact nauseates me to no end.

I do not know if the decline is past the point of no return, but it is close. There is nobody but us coming to save us. You know the assignment.

"This is the truth which still flies in the face of the segregationist who has declared that democracy is not worth having if it involves equality. The segregationist's goal is the total reversal of all reforms, with reestablishment of naked oppression and if need be a native form of fascism." —Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Photo on Unsplash.

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King used language about segregationists in 1967, but the mental processes that produce such a mindset are strangely similar to the American Right Wing of today. It is predominantly white, so let’s not pretend that race does not matter.

At the risk of being accused of overstatement, I submit that race is everything. The nexus with slavery—of which America has never entirely absolved itself—is obvious. We managed to elect the first Black president in 2008 and reelected him in 2012, but whatever progress we might have made up to that point was sadly illusory.

And ever since 2016, race has been at the forefront of elective politics in what is a serious bit of white backlash. Come on, my fellow white Americans—let’s finally own our deep-seated racism and misogyny. Otherwise, Kamala Harris would be president today!

Do we have to be reminded of who beat that dead horse about Obama’s citizenship? It was the same guy who took out a full-page ad in four New York newspapers, under the heading "Bring Back the Death Penalty, Bring Back Our Police," and proceeded to castigate the “Central Park Five”, while demanding stricter law-and-order.

Yeah, that guy!

We are perhaps too polite to speak publicly of race inequality as bluntly as they did in the Old South of yesteryear, but let’s face it: the sentiment survives in American politics.

Anyone who thinks evangelical opposition to abortion is genuinely “pro-life” misses how the issue simply became a more genteel way of ensuing white hegemony in the political process, beginning in 1979—a full six years after Roe v. Wade.

Anti-abortion rhetoric replaced overt white supremacy talk, but the sentiment never went away. It merely went underground.

To be clear, Donald Trump did not initiate renewed racial strife, but he has made it much more tolerated in a society that has prided itself on having eliminated such animosity.

If we are the colorblind society conservatives love to imagine, how is it that minority voting rights can be so easily eclipsed by the Supreme Court, who appears to have bent over backwards to eviscerate the historic Voting Rights Act?

How is it that the great majority of individuals so brutally rounded up by ICE are people of color? Coincidence? I think not!

The struggle remains one of who will control the destiny of America—a critical issue as the nation becomes more and more diverse. That realization is very much on the collectives mind of the white power structure, and they do not like it.

The Supreme Court of the United States, the once-revered anchor of our Judicial Branch, ought to be ashamed of themselves, but they are so blinded by their own corruption that they miss the profound impropriety of their recent holdings that cut to the heart of any recognition of racial fairness.

Denial to ballot access is a profound statement about who is and is not a genuine human being under the elegant pronouncements of the Declaration of Independence. Let us be clear about that.

So, as King asked, where do we go from here?

It is up to you and me. There are 139 days until the 2026 midterm elections.

.

A very conservative friend and I recently had a moment of reconciliation. He and I are miles apart on politics, and we were comfortable with that until Trump took the national stage and things became contentious.

Tolerance used to be the norm for most of us. We all had friends, acquaintances, coworkers, and even relatives with whom we did not discuss politics. There was a sense of normalcy in agreeing to disagree.

We each knew the other’s leanings, and we respected them. We were able to coexist peacefully without the rancor that seemed to come from out of nowhere beginning in about 2015. None of us saw it coming, although we all felt that something was not quite right.

Demagoguery easily slips in and begins to occupy the void created by the sense of existential uncertainty, the suspicion that “the system” has perpetrated a fraud upon us all. There was no name for the frustration until a certain NYC businessman gave it one. That same man fashioned himself as the sole cure for what ails America.

And here we are a decade later.

And then, seemingly just like that, civil political dialogue and mutual respect vanished. Oh, the groundwork had been laid by Newt Gingrich way back in 1985, but you can see the pattern beginning to develop. The message became Republicans good—Democrats bad. I suspect that a lot of low-information voters are it up!

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Before we knew it, we began to hear about “fake news” as certain new outlets were publicly demonized and the Fourth Estate was deemed to be “the enemy of the people.” The absurd phrase “alternative facts” came out of the mouth of the White House press secretary, no less. You can’t make this stuff up, folks!

Unfounded election fraud has been alleged in the past decade—not once—but every time the results were unfavorable to the MAGA right. And just this past weekend, Trump reiterated his unfounded claims about the California primary election to NBC’s Kristen Welker, whom he once again disparaged and disrespected, and then walked off the set in a huff.

This latest on-air meltdown was preceded by his accusations about the California primary and unfounded allegations of fraud. You will recall that such rhetoric about 2020 actually began several months before the election was held!

To make things worse yet, House Speaker Mike Johnson weighed in with similarly vague accusations about the vote counting in California. He made a bizarre observation that amounted to an assertion that the California process was so corrupt that it could not be proven!

What?

This is all the prelude to how the MAGA right plans to create chaos around the November midterms. I shudder to think of just how far “they” will go in discouraging voters from going to the polls.

Our democratic republic is in great peril when Americans no longer believe in America. We need to confront that reality as America turns 250.

The only antidote is to turn out in HUGE numbers. There are 143 days until November 3, 2026. You know the assignment!

It recently dawned on me that all the patriotic posturing and the unholy alliance with religious nationalism is just a well-conceived subterfuge, designed to distract us from the real purpose of remaking America into something less than a democratic republic.

The MAGA Right wants to destroy the America we have come to love.

I figured that out when I realized what the disastrously corrupt Supreme Court has been doing with voting rights lately. It should be obvious. The oligarchs and their Republican allies intend to fashion a new—and whiter— America.

We should not be surprised; the Right been at this since the infamous “Powell Memo” in 1971. It was the brainchild of a corporate lawyer and future Supreme Court Justice named Lewis F. Powell, Jr. and was created at the behest of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as a blueprint for how the American Right could regain power.

The memo was sort of an earlier version of Project 2025, that detailed right wing plan that so many folks thought it expedient to downplay or ignore way back in 2024. How did that turn out, eh?

Both the “Powell Memo” and Project 2025 were devious, both in their conception and in their intent. They represent an unapologetic power grab by which policies and programs once considered foundational and essential have been curtailed or eliminated entirely.

But that’s not the worst part. Considering recent jurisprudence regarding voting rights, it is clear that the MAGA end-game is the eradication of key provisions of the U. S. Constitution!

In the middle of the Civil War, Abe Lincoln was able to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, while freeing slaves in the states currently in rebellion as of September, 1862. The Emancipation Proclamation took effect January 1, 1863. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments came later, but the impetus had begun under Lincoln.

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Let’s take a closer look, shall we?

The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution officially abolished slavery and involuntary servitude across the nation. Ratified on December 6, 1865, following the Civil War, the amendment declared that forced labor is illegal everywhere in the U.S., with the sole exception as a punishment for a crime.

That last part needs to go, and under MAGA influence, that will never happen—especially in the era of private detention facilities, with a lot of money being made on the backs of black and brown people.

The Fourteenth Amendment is foundational and was ratified in 1868. It grants citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States and guarantees them equal protection and due process under the law. It also limits former Confederates from holding office and nullifies Confederate war debts.

The MAGA Right has expressed great interest in eliminating “birthright citizenship.” Perhaps the guarantee of due process would be a collateral casualty. Imagine that!

The 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, prohibits the federal government and state governments from denying or abridging a citizen's right to vote based on that citizen's "race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Acts of 1965 created a mechanism to enforce the Fifteen Amendment. It created a permanent, nationwide ban on any voting practice, qualification, or procedure that discriminates against citizens on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group.

That part of the Voting Rights Act was abrogated by SCOTUS in the Callais decision in April.

And very recently, the Court gave Alabama permission to use a redrawn congressional map that eliminates one of the state's two majority-Black districts in this year's midterm elections. Never mind that a lower court had already found the map to be discriminatory toward black voters. My God, they don’t even try to hide their bias, and John Roberts ought to be ashamed!

Reform of the Supreme Court must be a priority if and when Dems re-take control of Congress.

We are naive if we believe that SCOTUS can overcome its corruption. We are equally gullible if we do not see that the end-game is the disenfranchisement of people of color. If the SAVE Act were to pass, that disenfranchisement would extend to women.

The MAGA Right Wing is coming for our rights. Mark my words, the Fourteenth Amendment will be changed substantively, if not declared unconstitutional if this current Court is allowed to survive after November, 2026. The process has already been initiated, just waiting for the right case to be taken up.

But then, we didn’t think Project 2025 was a threat, right?

God help us!

We lefties are cautiously optimistic about the chances of reclaiming the House and Senate this November. Several special elections and most of the primaries so far have gone our way, so we probably have some reason to be hopeful.

Oddly enough, the MAGA forces seem to have doubled down on some of their most objectionable policies, even though there is evidence that the base is beginning to crumble.

It would appear that Democratic dominance in November is almost a certainty. Not so fast, my friends!

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Do you remember those Musk-initiated campaign shenanigans in Pennsylvania in the fall of 2024 and Trump’s publicly-expressed gratitude to Elon Musk?

Here is what Trump actually said just before he was inaugurated in January of 2025:

“U.S. President Donald Trump said his adviser, tech mogul Elon Musk, ‘knows those computers better than anybody, all those computers, those vote counting computers, and we ended up winning Pennsylvania, like, in a landslide.’”

—Amelia Clarke on Snopes, March 30, 2025

Now, to be fair, this was not a clear-cut admission— but what do you think?

More recently when Trump, traveled to China, he took Musk and several other billionaires with him. Those are his people.

We already know that we are where we are because of the obscenity known as Citizen’s United and the continued unwillingness of the Supreme Court to reign in dark money in political campaigns.

Hell, several of the justices are known to be on the take themselves!

Dems are doing well at the moment. What do you think will happen when the really big money weighs in to the midterm elections this fall—when the incessant television commercials begin and Meta has tweaked its mysterious algorithm?

It will not be pretty, and it is most assuredly coming, my friends.

In my community organizing experience, we have learned that power is organized people and organized money.

As somebody once said, “we gotta fight like hell, or we won’t have a country anymore!”

We also know that power does not give up power willingly. It must be seized.

And we know the assignment. There are 157 days until the 2026 midterm elections!

I am indebted to John Pavlovitz for turning me on to this awareness. He writes at “The Beautiful Mess” on Substack.com.

I know many people, and most of them at least try to be decent folk. Often, when I suggest that the election of Barack Obama in 2008 caused a white backlash in 2016, I am met with a lot of uncomfortable denial.

It seems nobody wants to admit any level of hidden racism. Instead, we say stupid things like “racism doesn’t exist anymore.”

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I am a student of American history, but even I missed just how much the Right hated FDR’s New Deal—or for that matter, the advancements of LBJ’s Great Society. They have plotted against them for 80 years, and now—with the help of a corrupt Supreme Court—their aspirations are gaining ground.

Who would have believed that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would be effectively and unapologetically gutted?

I did not realize, until I began to research it, the extent to which the Christian Evangelical movement was co-opted by the political Right Wing beginning in the 1970s. For progressives, it has been a downhill slide since then.

Consider an interesting point, one which reveals the inherent hypocrisy of the evangelicals. It seems that their very vocal opposition to lawful abortion after Roe v. Wade in 1973, finally bubbled up as a political issue—in 1979!

If lawful abortion it had been a genuine moral concern, it seems reasonable that the opposition might have come right away. In fact, until 1980, even the very conservative Southern Baptist Convention did not object to lawful abortion. So, what changed?

The Moral Majority, founded by Jerry Falwell, latched onto reproductive freedom and feminism as a more palatable substitute for white supremacy as an organizing strategy. Nobody on the Left called that out.

Nowadays, it seems that the Right—sprinkled with not a little religious nationalism— is far less inhibited about being blatantly racist.

How far we have fallen, right?

Right Wing Political discourse these days—if it can be called that—has devolved into the recitation of erroneous “facts”, blatant falsehoods, and confusing doublespeak. And for at least the last ten years, it has involved social media pronouncements by the chief executive—statements which float unchallenged out in cyberspace, without any legitimate mediation. And that is a problem.

Meanwhile, Democrats and other so-called progressives have been playing the game under the old rules, which presumes of the honorability of the process where clearly there is none.

We Lefties have been asleep—or maybe we were just naive. Perhaps it has been a matter of both conditions.

We thought we had a real chance at ushering in a truly progressive era beginning with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. To be fair, there were some notable advances—like the Affordable Care Act in 2010—but reality soon set in when the Dems eventually squandered their chance at effecting lasting change.

Like water, the political equilibrium seems to seek its lowest level, and the process is always subject to inordinate influence from external forces like dark money. The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, a step-buy-step blueprint of just how the Right would accomplish its goals, came to public prominence in 2024—while we asleep.

Do you recall how many people blew off the threat? And here we are now, with most of the subversively sinister wish list having been implemented. It has been a rude awakening, and now the question remains of whether it is too late to stop the Right Wing juggernaut.

Our democracy is hanging by a thread, and it remains to be seen if it shall survive. It is time to wake up!

The 2026 midterms are now 160 days away, and that is only the first skirmish in a much broader war.

I often suspect that my younger friends and colleagues do not understand my outrage over the way American traditions and institutions have been dishonored—destroyed even— by the very one sworn to protect them.

I find it baffling that we have allowed this to happen, but then, it is what it is.

I am one of those born after WW II, but close enough to it to have absorbed some of the received wisdom that came with the experience. My parents and grandparents spoke of the war years often, and so I am grew up feeling that I knew something about it first-hand.

I was born six years after both VE and VJ Day, but I internalized something of what it must have been like to live during those difficult days. I acquired a deep reverence for the sacrifices that had been made—some by those who gave all—and the greater sense that everybody who participated in the war effort had been brutalized by the profound national effort.

Nobody emerges unscathed from such a thing. I hope we survive long enough to consider how all this affects us in a future that I can only hope we shall see. There is no guarantee.

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As a child, I knew men in my community who had been in combat—including the male relatives on my mother’s side of the family. My dad was the oldest of his brothers, all of whom were too young to have served—and even my father, born in 1928, was able to enlist only at the very end of the war. His tombstone reads “World War II” because the conflict was still considered operative upon his enlistment.

I think my dad always felt that he had missed out on something big—something glorious. He would have kicked some ass, I tell you.

One of the men who lived across from my elementary school playground was rumored to have been a victim of “shell-shock.” There was no PTSD in those days. His occasional and awkward appearances outside the schoolyard fence offered a clue to the horrors of war.

Now, I have never worn the uniform of the U.S. military, although I considered enlisting in the Air Force. I would have liked serving as a chaplain, but that would have entailed graduating from seminary so I could be commissioned as an officer. That was still a few years off at that point. As it tuned out, I took a detour after college and first went to law school.

I like to think that the dual competency, which I eventually achieved, gave me an edge in the pursuit of justice. I am proud of my work.

I did receive a draft notice when I was a college sophomore because I had fallen behind in the accumulation of my credits. This was in the waning days of Vietnam.

The Army docs discovered two physical defects: an easily repairable inguinal hernia and a slightly more sinister heart murmur. Taken together, I was declared physically unqualified for military service.

The hernia was repaired shortly thereafter, and I still have the heart murmur 55 years later. A fifth of the population does, I am told. I also have a bit of sorrow over all those young men in my high school who died in Vietnam. There were several.

This is Memorial Day, an observance often conflated with Veterans Day. The former is a day to remember those who gave all, while the latter is the time to give thanks for all who have served.

I have found those who served and survived—especially in Vietnam—to be gracious whenever I have clumsily expressed regret over not having been there with them. Some of them have even reminded me that I have served in other ways. I cannot say how much it means to hear that expressed, which is why I am so disgusted with the likes of DJT, his family of grifters and his billionaire cronies.

I love my country as much as anyone, and I am offended by those who seemingly do not. Many of those are in the federal government.

The systematic dismantling of the government and the unequivocal damage to America’s standing in the world is shocking in a way that leaves one searching for some reasonable rationale. My God, the European nations are now preparing to forge ahead with NATO without the U.S. This is madness!

And yet the Congress does not object. This MAGA madness might well be our epitaph.

America’s global soft power and diplomatic goodwill has all but disappeared. We are embroiled in a categorically stupid and ill-conceived war, prosecuted by an inept team, who constantly reminds us of how we could easily slip into the wholesale commission of war crimes.

America would be the laughing stock if the rest of the world were not so alarmed by our incompetence. How different from our standing in the world in 1945!

Now, I am no global strategist, but even I understand how China might be in a position to take advantage of our momentary weakness. We have made no secret of how we have expended much of our weapons stockpile in Iran, so there’s that.

Do you think our enemies have noticed?

I am a believer in the practice of leaning in to our suffering. I have done that all of my life because I know that nothing stays the same—that even life does not last. The best we can do is to endure what comes while working like hell to defeat it.

I am angry that we allowed such an and intellectually and morally vapid man to rise to power—even after we had seen his disastrous incompetence a few years earlier!

But it’s perhaps worse than that: he does not love America even a little. Presumably, many of us do!

This victory over tyranny, if there is to be one, will not come easily. The forces which would destoy America once and for all, will throw everything they have at us. They will continue to lie and brazenly steal from us in the hope that the resulting entropy will cause us to surrender.

But one glorious day, the sun will rise again. I only hope that the “proof through the night” will find that our flag is still there.

The midterm elections are 161 days away.

The obscene display of phony religious devotion that we saw on the National Mall this past Sunday was an abomination in the eyes of God!

I can say that because the ancient prophets have said as much in another time:

I hate, I despise your festivals,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them,
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like water
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

—Amos 5:21-24 (NRSVUE)

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Sorry if that offends you. It seems the God of the Bible is not fond of outward displays of devotion while engaging in acts of injustice.

As of March 18, 2026, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reported that 46 people died while in their custody or detention facilities since the start of the second Trump administration in January 2025.

And in the ICE surge in Minneapolis earlier this year, two American citizens were murdered in the streets!

Our tax dollars at work, and some of us claim to be Christians.

“The lives of immigrants in this country are sacred to God, and the church cannot stand idly by and witness the cruelty that ICE is perpetuating. We must do the only thing that the church can do in such times: We must confess,” wrote the Rev. Michael Woolf in the Christian Century recently.

Woolf spoke of the concept of status confessionis, “a Lutheran theological concept with roots in the 16th century that declares an issue to be a core part of the Gospel, [emphasis added] so that remaining neutral on it isn’t an option. Either one confesses, or one does not, and this confession forms the basis of one’s membership in the church. The rising totalitarianism and the cruelty that we are witnessing from ICE are at odds with our faith, and we ought to be clear about that,” writes Woolf.

Because being genuinely Christian—which is to say a disciple of Jesus—is not about parading around on a stage decorated with bunting and exhorting the country to “return to God!” It is about pursuing justice and opposing that which is unjust.

In 1930’s Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer called upon the notion of status confessionis to lay the foundation of the effort to oppose the Nazi German Christian movement, which has disturbing similarities to the religious nationalism we are seeing today. I will no longer refer to it as “Christian” nationalism because there us nothing Christian about it.

Woolf reminds us: “As Bonhoeffer puts it in ‘The Church and the Jewish Question,’ there are times when it is important not just ‘to bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, but to jam a spoke into the wheel itself.’ Such a scenario does not present itself when the state is merely failing in its duties, but when it ‘has created either too much or too little law and order’ and thereby either directly persecutes a group of people or allows it to happen.”

I recognize that I am speaking to those who claim allegiance to the Gospel. I suspect we are in a moment of confession. Let us not be distracted or deceived by sappy and disingenuous displays of religious devotion covered in red, white and blue.

For those of us who preach and teach, the time to speak a word of truth to power is now—and the window is closing.

What follows is an article by Jamil Smith/Guardian UK. It deserves wide circulation. Please consider a donation to Reader Supported News at rsn.org.

‘A speaker of a state legislature stripped legislators of every committee assignment, in part, for the distribution of earplugs.’ (photo: Seth Herald/Reuters)

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Early this month, a single pen stroke effectively ended representative Steve Cohen’s career in Congress. The man who has represented Memphis for 19 years will turn 77 later this month, but he wasn’t planning on retiring. He hadn’t lost any primary. The reason was that his district had been erased around him.

A new electoral map, passed by the Republican-led state legislature and signed by Bill Lee, the governor, divides the ninth district three ways. “Last week Tennessee Republicans silenced the Black vote here in Memphis to make Republican victories likely,” Cohen said in his statement. That’s succinct and accurate.

The new map folds a significant portion of Cohen’s Black constituents into Williamson county, which sits south of Nashville and was, until recently, the subject of a different fight.

To this day, the Williamson county seal depicts a Confederate battle flag draped over a cannon. It was adopted in 1968, at the height of the civil rights movement. A Tennessee court ruled in 2024 that the county could remove it. The state legislature responded the following year by passing a new law specifically designed to keep the flag on the seal. The vote was 70-24 in the House and 27-6 in the Senate, with no Democrats voting in favor. Lee, who is from Williamson county, signed it.

The same statehouse that just folded Memphis Black voters into Williamson county is the one that legislated to preserve the Confederate flag of the county absorbing them. The cartography doesn’t require translation. Tennessee is being precise, and they aren’t alone.

This is the aftermath of the supreme court’s disastrous 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v Callais, decided less than a month ago, which gravely weakened the Voting Rights Act’s protections for Black representation. Ever since, Republicans have resembled eager children on Christmas morning, tearing our electoral maps to shreds. Louisiana is set to eliminate one of its two Black-majority districts. The court let Alabama erase one of its two Black-majority districts before this fall’s primaries.

In Mississippi, the Republican state senator who chairs the Medicaid committee said this week that it was time to “erase Bennie Thompson’s district”.

Thompson is 78 years old. He is the only Black member of Mississippi’s congressional delegation in Washington, from a state where 38% of the population is Black. He is also the man who chaired the House investigation into January 6. Yet Tate Reeves, the governor, who proclaims April Confederate Heritage Month every year, recently vowed that Thompson’s “reign of terror” will be over soon.

Who, precisely, is terrified here? And of what, or whom?

Yvette Clarke, the chair of the Congressional Black caucus, told NBC News recently that 19 of the caucus’s 62 members were at risk through the 2028 cycle. The US has gone from 13 Black members of Congress in 1971 to 62 today; almost a third of them are in jeopardy. As Hakeem Jeffries is poised to become the first Black speaker of the House, the ground is collapsing beneath Black officeholders across the south.

Representation without architecture is brittle. The presence of a Black speaker matters; but it cannot, by itself, prevent the unbuilding of the conditions that made the speakership reachable. What the Voting Rights Act produced—not just officeholders but the constituency-mapping that allowed Black political coalitions to cohere—is precisely what Republicans are now undoing.

They have a roadmap. In 1913, Woodrow Wilson’s administration resegregated the federal civil service that Reconstruction had pried open. They did it by executive action and administrative memo. Department by department, lunchroom by lunchroom. Wilson never issued a proclamation that named the project. The most consequential racial reordering of the early 20th century happened via paperwork.

Between 1900 and 1903, Black voting in Alabama fell from 180,000 to fewer than 3,000. The 1901 state constitution gave county registrars administrative discretion. White men could vote without anyone vouching for them. Black men required the recommendation of a white voter. After George Henry White left office in 1901, no Black American was elected to Congress until 1928.

That collapse was a procedure. The architects did not call it apartheid. They called it “states’ rights”. They called it reform.

Plessy v Ferguson, which upheld segregation, outlasted, by 58 years, the presidents who appointed the justices who decided it. The Jim Crow settlement, built between 1877 and 1896, held for nearly nine decades. These are lifetimes. The architects of that settlement were not building for a midterm. Theirs was a generational project, and they succeeded.

The price of disobedience is rising. Last week, the speaker of the Tennessee house of representatives, Cameron Sexton, sent a letter to the Democratic leader, Karen Camper, stripping members of the house Democratic caucus of their committee assignments. The alleged offenses, in his own listing: interlocking arms in the well of the House. Blocking aisles. Distributing earplugs to a colleague. A speaker of a state legislature stripped legislators of their committee assignments, in part, for the distribution of earplugs. Other red states will surely recognize the template; some will use it themselves.

Yet while Tennessee was carving up Memphis, Democratic party stalwarts—including Pete Buttigieg, Elissa Slotkin and Barack Obama—were in Toronto at the Global Progress Action Summit, gathering to learn affordability messaging from Mark Carney. How do we fight the authoritarian right? The president of the Center for American Progress asked from the stage. The answer offered was to message better on groceries, move slightly to the right on immigration, build housing faster.

There is nothing wrong with affordability politics – but it will not save us, or our electoral maps, from a Republican party that would rather decimate representation than persuade voters. There is more at stake here than our grocery bills. America has its own version of the structure other countries call apartheid. Ours is older. Ours is Jim Crow. Republicans are adapting it for a new age. By the time the next census is conducted, it will be conducted under these rules. By the time a Democratic president takes office, the federal courts adjudicating that president’s executive orders will have been shaped by a decade of Republican appointments.

It is tempting to believe that November can return the country to a sort of racial status quo that existed before Trump’s political ascendancy. Frankly, even that America was never what it claimed to be. But rather than bringing the nation closer to becoming a free republic worthy of the name, Republicans are dragging it backward, again.

Saying so is not despair. It is where the fight begins. You cannot resist what you refuse to name, and you cannot outlast what you have decided is temporary.

###

Democrats could easily dismiss all of this as simply a disruption in the normal ebb and flow of politics, and they would be wrong.

They could conclude that this emergent dissatisfaction with MAGA, which seems to be in the news daily, will aid their effort to regain control of the government. Some of that is likely true. This is worse than any of us would have believed at first blush.

Because the truth runs much deeper and is finally much more sinister: America is sick, and American democracy is highly vulnerable—thanks to Citizens United and a hopelessly corrupt Supreme Court.

We will not know if this is a sickness unto death until 2028 at the earliest.

Now, I have less and less hair each year, as my wife reminds me. Still, I like to go to the barber every two weeks for a clean-up. I can’t stand to look shaggy.

Barbershops are places where there is a lot of nonsense being discussed, but also a fair amount of current affairs talk as well. In the shop I patronize, there is usually a YouTube podcast playing on the television.

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On a recent visit, my affable Syrian-born barber—who is married to a medical resident in neurology—spoke some wisdom about how this present chaos might well become the occasion for hopefulness.

I was reminded of the Latin phrase that is often associated with the Reformation: Post tenebras lux—in English, “after darkness, light.”

His comments came in the wake of an intense exchange between another customer and me when barber chair talk turned to the topic of voter fraud and the necessity of tighter regulations. I let him push my buttons, and I came at him rather hard!

I should have been more circumspect, if not more mellow.

When the words became heated and I felt my blood pressure rise, Sam spoke sincerely of his disappointment in the way Americans are at each other’s throats these days. I thought for a moment that he was upbraiding me for my passion.

But then he acknowledged that Trump has been the source of a great deal of chaos and the resultant tension that most of us are feeling. What if, he posited, Trump has actually done us a service by showing us just how corrupt the political process has become?

His thinking reminded me of the very definition of the word “apocalyptic” as an awakening—a peeling back of hidden layers to reveal the truth beneath the surface.

Sam placed another patron in the chair to replace the one who just left, and as we continued to talk, I found myself agreeing with his premise. We have seen just how bad things are—with a feckless Congress that refuses to hold the president accountable—and a hopelessly corrupt Supreme Court intent on dismantling voting rights.

These perversions have a common root: unregulated money in politics by way of Citizens United.

But there is evidence of an awakening going on, and even a portion of the MAGA crowd is beginning to question the cult. There is evidence that Gen Z is being motivated toward a future that is not MAGA, and that is huge!

These past 10 years have been a time of darkness, but I suspect there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Lies have a shelf life after all, it seems. I heard that at the barbershop.

Post tenebras lux. Let us hope so.

On this coming Lord’s Day, millions of Christians around the world will observe the Seventh Sunday of Easter. The Feast of the Ascension was this past Thursday.

The church has its liturgical calendar, and that is as it should be.

In our sanctuary—which has no flags present as a conscious choice—we will not be worshiping America; our devotion is to the God of the Ages.

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In my congregation are men who served our country in military service. We vote because it is our civic duty. We serve on juries when called, and we pay our taxes.

We are Americans by birth, and we are Christians by the grace of God.

We understand that our allegiance is always to God.

And we are grateful to live in a country where religious liberty is protected.

Our particular religious tradition is part of a lager narrative which understands the history of humanity as being infused with godliness, even given the many instances where humans have failed to pursue divine justice as preached by the ancient prophets. We appreciate the pursuit of repentance, both individually and collectively.

We are the inheritors of the Reformed tradition of the New England pilgrims of the 17th century, and we take pride in the progressive thinking of the early Congregationalists in obedience to what God had called them to do.

Our forbears were opposed to slavery and child labor and worked for women’s suffrage when the idea was not popular.

None of this is because we are clever, but because we cherish the message of the prophets of ancient Israel—all of which is made manifest in the life and teaching of Jesus.

The American form of government is the product of Enlightenment thinking. The Founders were largely men who embraced the idea of Divine Providence, but they were not exclusively “Christian” in their orientation. To suggest that we are a nation founded on Christian principles is inaccurate—an overstatement of sorts.

What we were then—and still are—is a nation where one is free to be a Christian, or anything else for that matter. Those who fashioned our government had experienced the tyranny that comes with the “divine right of kings” loyalty.

Much has been written about Christian nationalism these days, such that, as the New York Times recently reported, the phrase is becoming commonplace. This Sunday, there will be a Christian nationalist rally on the National Mall.

The flag of the United States, juxtaposed with an image of the cross of Christ, is idolatry. It is not the sort of devotion appropriate for the faithful Christian.

Each Sunday, at about 10:55 AM, I mount the pulpit in my congregation’s worship space and prepare to declare a prophetic message. It is not a partisan enterprise, but it cannot help being political, if it is to be faithful. It is the function for which I was called and for which I have been educated.

We sing hymns. We read the Psalms and the Bible in general. We pray, and we listen for the revealed Word of God in preaching and in sacrament. We do not sing patriotic songs, nor do we salute the flag—which as I have already said, is no where to be found in our worship space.

We are a church—not a government building.

And demonstrations of religious devotion have no place in the seats of political power because our government is intentionally secular, as it should be.

Democracy—not theocracy. Not my brand or anybody else’s.

“We are at the cusp of a second nadir. America stands at an inflection point where we will either choose what some scholars are calling neo-segregation/resegregation or commit ourselves to working towards a more egalitarian society.”

—Nikole Hannah-Jones

Photo by Reyna on Unsplash

Scholars in the 1950s coined the term “nadir” to describe the lowest point in American race relations, which lasted from the end of Reconstruction in the 19th century and extended well into the 20th century.

Some very thoughtful people, including New York Times Magazine writer, Nikole Hannah-Jones, now suggest that we are approaching a second nadir. The recent flurry of disenfranchisement activity in southern states would suggest that the observation is valid.

We ought to be ashamed.

This regime has not been the least bit shy in pursuing an agenda that is dismissive of people of color—in some cases downright cruel—and in every instance dedicated to ensuring that non-white Americans are purged from participating in this great experiment in liberty.

At least half a dozen former Confederate states are happy to oblige. Taking their cues from the corrupt Supreme Court in eviscerating the Voting Rights Act, these southern states have embraced the effort to make it harder for African Americans to have a voice in our democracy.

Here is the stark reality: If you and I are not about the business of protecting black voting rights, we are not in the fight for democracy.

The ideal of America has always been an aspirational notion, and we are nowhere near where we need to be in order to be considered a true democracy. Some of us recognize that. We know that progress has been incremental as we approach America’s 250th birthday.

Some of us are uncomfortable with America’s racial past, including the institution of slavery—that abomination that lasted far too long. But we are gratified that progress has been made, and we are simultaneously saddened that remnants of racial hatred have survived—that we have been far too accommodating of racial inequities contained within the very laws we cherish.

Some of us are sickened by the manner in which people of color have been victimized by systemic racism that refuses to exorcise itself. And when honest scholars attempted to do just that by the creation of The 1619 Project, too many of us looked the other way and pretended that the history of slavery really was not all that bad. It was worse.

Do you remember that stupid claim by Ron DeSantis that slaves acquired “useful skills” during their bondage? We have been far too accommodating of a history that ought to indict us.

Shame on us for not speaking out more forcefully. I hope we do not make the same mistake in this dangerous moment.

Others of us do not get it at all. I am reluctant to level this charge, but here it goes: white supremacy is the greatest threat to our democracy ever—and we have tolerated a regime for the past year and a half that has declared war on people of color, and I have had it!

This illegitimate and lawless regime has made no secret of its disdain for people of color, as evidenced by the hateful rhetoric regarding movements like Black Lives Matter and the cruelty of ICE. They speak openly of the necessity of encouraging the birth of more white babies, leading to the observation by some that this current iteration of the GOP is just the Klan dressed in a business suit.

And the ways in which the Supreme Court has enabled all of this—beginning with giving immunity to a lawless president—is downright reprehensible.

The Jim Crow south thrived from the end of Reconstruction and well into the 20th century. It survived largely with a wink and a nod from legitimate law enforcement and the courts.

Between 1882 and 1968, the NAACP recorded 4,743 lynchings in the U.S., with over 70% of victims being black. More comprehensive research by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) documented over 4,400 racial terror lynchings of black people between 1877 and 1950, with many historians believing the true number is higher due to underreporting.

Then, of course, there were the literacy tests and the poll taxes, which had the effect of discouraging black participation in the electoral process, with the “night rides” of the KKK thrown in for good measure.

And now, here we are with a new and improved way of curtailing black involvement in government: the lawful gerrymander based on race!

As I said. We ought to be ashamed.

But there is a hopeful side to all of this, I think. White Republicans must be especially frightened of the 2026 midterms—and they should be.

Election Day is just 175 days away!

If I read the Hebrew scriptures correctly—and I think I do—the Deity has created all humans in the very image of the High and Holy One. So far, so good, right!

Not only that, but we are called to live in harmonious community with one another. The Founders did not express this concept using religious language, but they were clear that “all [men] are created equal.” That is the genius of the Declaration of Independence of 1776.

Photo by Pablo Merchan Montes on Unsplash

It was, as historian Heather Cox Richardson reminds us, the centerpiece of Abe Lincoln’s thinking in 1862 when he composed the Emancipation Proclamation. It remains as the central tenet of the American narrative. Lincoln reached back to this founding language as he articulated his opposition to slavery.

But when the Constitution went into effect in 1789, it was largely a codification of property rights rooted in the presumed right to own slaves. There is no getting around that inconvenient truth.

Consider that even the much-celebrated 13th Amendment, which abolished involuntary servitude, contains the infamous exception clause, “except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”

The exception clause was a nod to former Confederates states during Reconstruction. Kind of gives one a new perspective on the likes of chain gangs.

We are loathe to admit it, but we say one thing, while permitting racially-tinged legal atrocities. And we look the other way when states—and the corrupt Supreme Court—fashion voting restrictions that turn the country back to the days of Jim Crow.

If you think I exaggerate, consider the recent suspension of the Louisiana U.S. House primary election—even after many citizens had already voted by mail! Gov. Jeff Landry claims he took the action in response to the SCOTUS decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which held the state’s current congressional district map to be an unconstitutional gerrymander. The decision effectively guts the provisions of section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

Gov. Landry was quoted as saying, “The best way to end race-based discrimination is to stop making decisions based on race.” Is that so?

It should be noted that both the SCOTUS decision and the governor’s suspension of the election effectively disenfranchise African American voters.

And make no mistake, my friends. This unprecedented executive action is a trial run for the rest of the country come this November!

Whenever we hear some right-wing pol declare that the Voting Rights Act is unnecessary because racism is no longer a problem, we can be sure that the truth is being obscured.

As the Rev. Jim Wallis of the Sojourner’s community asserted a couple of decades ago, racism is America’s original sin, and we deceive ourselves when we deny it.

Obstructing the right to vote is a fundamental denial of one’s humanity. Keep in mind that access to the ballot has been a gradual process since our founding, which at the outset, granted the franchise only to white men who owned property.

We have come a long way since the 18th century, and now a frightened Republican Party (they have to reason to be alarmed), acting in concert with a hopelessly corrupt Supreme Court, seeks to subvert the will of the people by denying every American human being of legal age access to the ballot.

It is the fundamentals sin of the American Right, and what shall we do about it? It is 25 weeks until the November midterms.