The Super Bowl of MAGA Hypocrisy

They’re clutching their pearls in Red America.

The Super Bowl Halftime Show got them all hot and bothered.

Too sexual.
Too disrespectful to women.
Too much skin.
Those outfits.
The gyrations.
The sexual innuendo.

Oh, the humanity!

“Won’t someone please think of the children?!” they shout with raw-throated urgency through the streets of social media.

Suddenly, in the span of ten minutes on Sunday they became concerned with the welfare of women and girls.

I wonder if they were thinking of women and girls three years ago when they voted for the guy who said:

“I don’t think my daughter Ivanka would pose nude, although she does have a very nice figure. I’ve said if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.”

How concerned were they about the exploitation of women, when they cast their ballot for a man who bragged:

“I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it.

I did try and f*ck her. She was married. I moved on her very heavily.

I moved on her like a b*tch. I couldn’t get there and she was married.”

Was the dehumanizing of young women heavy on their hearts when they declared Presidential, the guy who’d just weeks earlier said:

“I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.

And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the p*ssy. You can do anything.”

I’m pretty sure if irony were fatal, these folks would have expired by the end of the third quarter on Sunday. They are terribly afflicted with it.

Their moral flexibility has been astounding. The Internet is littered with pornographic images of the First Lady, which doesn’t seem to be a moral quandary for Trump supporters*, no matter how Christian they claim to be or how loudly they trumpet their “Family Values” convictions. They’ve made peace with that long ago. (Apparently, full frontal nudity between two women simulating sex, is perfectly fine—so long as one of them later becomes the third wife of the serial adulterer and professed predator they want to vote for). But two talented, powerful, and accomplished women delivering a carefully choreographed and brilliantly executed dance number, while wearing as much as the cheerleaders walking the sidelines—is a pressing moral problem.

Let’s be honest: supporters of this President don’t care about women. If they did, they’d have voted differently. It’s really that simple.

They don’t care about women’s safety or their consent or their choice regarding their bodies. Otherwise they wouldn’t have vilified sexual assault survivors or confirmed Brett Kavanaugh or ridiculed the #MeToo movement or be fighting incessantly to overturn Roe V Wade.

They want women on their terms. They want to define and control them. They want to determine how they are to express empowerment or assert their physicality or wield their sexuality or exercise their talents.

The unbridled misogyny of this President and his supporters explains why a far more qualified, more intelligent, and more prepared candidate (who happened to be a woman) isn’t the Leader of the Free World—and instead we have the lecherous, toxic male-mess we do.

If Red voters really care about women as much as they claim to this week, they should put their ballots where their mouths are—and elect a woman to lead.
They should stop casting their lots and their votes with a guy most of them would keep 100 yards from their wives, sisters, and daughters.
They should give women the choice over how they dress and how they move and what happens to their anatomy and what female empowerment looks like—for themselves.
They should stop perpetuating a male-dominated Evangelical church that defines women as less-than and original sin-committers.

Until then, these random and selective moments of moral histrionics and righteous indignation, and their crocodile-teared declarations of concern for women are all going to be world championship-level hypocrisy.

Dance on, ladies: wherever and however you decide.

Dance all the way to the friggin’ White House.

I’ll be cheering you on.

 

*To be clear, I’m not at all making the assertion that a woman posing nude is anything to be ashamed of, but merely pointing out the inconsistent, selective moral outrage of Trump’s Christian base, who had a problem with one First Lady baring her shoulders—but have no issues with another one baring her breasts.

The Horrible Groundhog Days of This Presidency

Photo: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment

Today is Groundhog Day.

I didn’t realize that when I woke up, but that makes sense if you’ve ever seen the movie of the same name. It’s about a man who is stuck reliving the exact same day over and over again, trapped in an endless loop that he can’t seem to get out of and trying to figure out how to change his fate. He keeps repeating the same 24 hours.

Today is Groundhog Day for me.
For many Americans.
Maybe it is for you.

I was struggling to put words into my feelings lately, and part of the reason is because I recognize how often I’ve felt this way before. I noticing how similar and repetitive these days seem to be. I sense a repeating pattern:

I wake up too early after a night of restless, interrupted sleep, because of some disastrous cluster—f the day before. When my head had last hit the pillow, I’d been thinking about how difficult and stressful and sad the day had been, but trusted it would be better tomorrow.

The next morning my eyes open, I realize I’m awake, and for a brief moment I forget. I feel a split second of hope and expectancy and optimism—but then the sameness sets in when I remember what we’re still living in.

I check Twitter or turn on the news and suddenly it seems to all be repeating again.

Once again I see that we’re in another Constitutional crisis, another national emergency.
Once again the bigots and the fear mongers and the supremacists are having a field day.
Once again justice is sidestepped, decency is cast aside, and compassion declared useless.
Once again Evangelicals are betraying Jesus for Supreme Court Justices and control over people’s bodies.
Once again America is becoming a white Republican dictatorship.

And with all that there is the muscle memory that comes with it: a repetition of grieving, a repetition of loss, a repetition of separation.

That is not a healthy daily diet.

I think that’s what is weighing me down: the pattern of attrition. Routine can be helpful at times, it can be stabilizing, it can be healthy—Structure is normally good, but when fear and grieving and conflict become routine, when instability is the norm, when inhumanity is commonplace—you can find yourself growing hopeless.

When people grow hopeless they give up.
When people grow hopeless that stop trying.
When people grow hopeless they believe the days will never change and so they stop trying to change them.

Someone who’d spent years as an activist recently said to me, “I don’t pay attention to anything political and I block people who talk about all that.” That is a person who has decided that way to not live the same horrible day over and over is to ignore it all.

I’m worried that too many of us have this same repetition sickness, that we are feeling so used to bad news that we are beginning to expect it as normal. We have lost the expectancy of the future and the possibility of being surprised by goodness.

Hope is the belief that somewhere off in the distance, things will get better; they will be right sided. Hope sees possibility despite the evidence arguing against it. It propels us into the day even when that day includes stuff we really would rather not deal with. And in days when cruelty seems to be gaining traction and so many people seem content with the upside-downness, we can easily grow hopeless.

Hopelessness is resignation: It believes that the way things are, is the way things will always. This is what the hateful people count on.

So we are again and the beginning of a new day: with so many familiar feelings, such a similar sense of loss. Such a pattern of pain.

The question becomes how we live in such a way that we can shape a different reality, that we can escape the cycle of grieving?

They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. I don’t believe that. I believe when the days are insane, you do the same things you know to be the right things: those “small acts of great love” Mother Teresa spoke about.

I think we have rather than always having your gaze fixed on the horizon and being overwhelmed by all that seems so wrong in the big world stretched out for miles ahead of you, focus on what is within reach.

This happens in the place you call home, the conversations around the dinner table, and the quiet, intimate moments with your children or your spouse.

In the friendships you’ve carefully cultivated over time, the ones that have endured and that transcend religion or politics or any manufactured barrier.

In the streets where you spend your days, in the churches and shops and neighborhoods you pass time in and pass by and know from memory.

In the lives of people whose names you know, whose stories you’ve participated in, whose journeys you’ve intersected with, in whose presence you feel at home.

In your family, your community, your church, your circle of friends—your adopted tribe.

In the way you choose to spend your resources of time, money, and influence—how you decide what is worth giving yourself away for.

In the work you come alongside other like-hearted people to do as you seek to be the kind of person the world needs.

And it will come as we support candidates and volunteer and register to vote and show up to the polls in one, massive unified voice that cannot be denied.

If we do that, even in the days that same to be repeating, we will slowly and surely recreate ourselves and the place we call home.

If we live well today, then individually and collectively we will wake to a new day that is not this horrible day.

Here’s to a slightly better version of America tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

You are the Hero the World Needs

Heroes show up in unexpected places—even funerals.

A few days after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida I stood alongside a few hundred strangers in the parking lot of an inner city church here in Raleigh to honor 17 students and teachers who were killed. I wanted to be with people who were in mourning the way that I was mourning.

Such gatherings seem commonplace in these days. We came together to remember those who died, to grieve their premature passing, and to lament the violence that seems to only be escalating, to ask why we’re doing this again: burying people taken too soon—again.

Though was certainly a heaviness befitting the gravity of the moment, there was something else. The event had largely been planned by teenagers, and there was a palpable sense of defiant joy scrawled onto poster board signs they’d created, etched deeply into their brave smiles, and embedded in the warm embraces they greeted friends and strangers with.

As the memorial service began, 17 local students came to the microphone, each speaking the name of a fallen teenager or adult, and lighting a candle they would then carry close to their chests on the way to the nearby State Capitol ahead of the assembled crowd. As each person’s name was read, a dove was released into the evening sky; a visual prayer lifted in their memory.

A few moments earlier, a handful of young people (not adults) had stepped to the platform to speak words of encouragement to those gathered. They spoke prophetically and powerfully, and I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck involuntarily rising and tears spill out onto my cheeks, because they were doing something beautiful in response to something so ugly—boldly affirming life in the face of senseless death.

One of the young speakers approached the microphone and said, “I am happy to be here today… I not happy because of why we gather. I am happy today because I came here for hope,” He slowly scanned the crowd and continued “—and here you are.” 

This young man was right. We were there together, mining hope for one another. This is what people of faith, morality, and conscience do. We are the stewards of hope in times when that hope seems most vulnerable; like carriers of a small candle in a storm, we keep that hope close to our chests and protect it from the winds and the weather that threaten to snuff it out. We show up in the small space of our daily life, we give what we are able, and we remind others that all is not lost, that this is not the end of the story.

We all have this same potentially world-saving power.

On dispiriting days we need to do all we can to see people in distress and to keep trying to give them reason to keep going. We need to continue to speak and care and love and forgive, and do our work and raise our families and live well; to look into the eyes of strangers and to ask how they are and really want to know—because other people are watching us and counting on us. For someone else, either at close proximity or from a great distance, and in ways we may never realize—we might be the difference in the day.

Friend, at the end of your time here, the world will either be more or less kind, compassionate, generous, funny, creative, and loving because of your presence in it—it’s really that simple. You’ve been given a priceless gift here. You get to go wake up every morning, go into your living room and your neighborhood and your school and your city; a world filled with imperiled, exhausted people all waiting for someone to do something, and in ways you are solely wired and prepared to—you get to do something.

You know who you are, you know the beautiful arsenal at your disposal, you know the need and the stakes and the cost—and in the deepest recesses of your heart you know exactly the kind of people this place needs right now.

All that’s left is for you to do what you were specifically and precisely made to do in ways that no one else can: go and bring hope where people have forgotten what hope feels like.

Steady yourself, lift your head skyward—and save what you can.

Taken from my latest book, ‘Hope and Other Superpowers.’

We Need Christian Missionaries to MAGA Nation

The Bible records Jesus imploring his students and those willing to follow him in the ways of compassion and mercy and love and justice, to “go and make disciples of all nations.”

It has been labeled by the Christian Church the “Great Commission” and in addition to being a heartfelt plea and solid mission statement, it has turned out to be something of a marketing masterstroke, rivaling the greatest advertising campaigns in history:

Just Do It.
Have a Coke.
A Diamond is Forever.
Where’s the Beef?
Eat Fresh.

Go and Make Disciples.

Growing up a Christian, this was drilled into my head as the central purpose of the life of a believer. It has served as the theme of summer camps and youth conferences; been emblazoned on t-shirts, slapped onto bumpers, and woven into catchy alt-rock worship choruses.

Nearly thirty years ago when I became a pastor, it was made the very heart of my job description: produce people who resembled Jesus, who embraced his teachings and aspired to his goodness and who wanted to replicate him in the world.

The same charge to “go and make disciples” is the daily bread and butter of professional religious people like Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell, Paula White, and of the White Evangelical Church they serve as willing and passionate ambassadors for: the very cornerstone of their sermons and pledge drives and new member initiatives.

The mantra is being repeated right now in Baptist seminary courses and morning chapel services and church staff meetings: let us go and make disciples of Jesus. It is what propels young Christians into foreign villages and onto stranger’s doorsteps and into their schools and onto street corners you’ll drive by today.

The phrase is creating an army of steadfast, sold-out evangelists, sharing what may not be good news, but is certainly loud news.

I’m all for more people meeting Jesus, in fact—I really want these Jesus people to meet him.
I believe we need a new generation of Christian missionaries.
I believe we need to take the Gospel to MAGA nation.

We need to bring the real good news of Jesus to rural Trump supporters and FoxNews-weaned Evangelicals and Conservative single-issue voters and to people embracing a white America-centric theology—because the truth is: the compassionate, generous, diverse, barrier-breaking movement and message of Jesus are as foreign to them as anyone on the planet.

If “reaching people” for Christ is what disciples are supposed to be doing—they’re the most important mission field on the planet because they are the least acquainted with him.

When I see how crippling fear has taken hold in their hearts, I realize that it is precisely because they have not been introduced to the gentle rabbi Jesus, who welcomed the stranger, who touched the hand of the leper, who fed the hungry, who turned over the moneylender’s tables, who set a table for the world.

When I hear their partisan catch phrase talking points about “illegals” and “the radical left” and “socialism,” I grieve because I realize that they don’t know the Jesus who built a sprawling, interdependent community of disparate people who shared all they had—and whose inclusion knew no walls or prerequisites or proof of need or political issue litmus test.

When I encounter their passion for gun ownership and their embrace of war and their adoration for a malevolent bully, I see how far they are from the tender heart of an itinerant street preacher who petitioned his followers to turn the other cheek and to not fear violence and to be peacemakers and to not live by the sword. 

When I see professed Christians embracing an arrogant, exclusionary, don’t tread on me religion, I see how estranged they are from the kindness and generosity and gentleness of a Jesus they would likely brand a socialist, a soy boy, and a libtard.

As someone who has spent the past half a century as a student of Jesus, that’s the greatest tragedy I feel in these days: that the very people who most imagine themselves carriers of The Great Commission, have no idea what they’re selling because they have never experienced it themselves—and I want that for them.

I’d love to see Christians making this as their mission as believers: to take the radical, audacious, relentless love of the Biblical Jesus into the places he is most absent right now in America:
into car service waiting areas and retirement home recreation rooms where fearful FoxNews fiction is on a continual loop,
into Republican organizations and Southern Baptist seminaries and Christian youth camps and White House prayer gatherings where white supremacy and nationalistic religion is thriving,
into the heart of red America where the trappings and symbols and iconography of Jesus are everywhere—but his scandalous hospitality to outsiders and his open-handed generosity for the hungry and the hurting are absent,
into Evangelical churches this Sunday, where the directive to make disciples will again be preached and prayed and sung—without the beautiful heart of the one who is supposed to be sending them,
into the kitchens and break rooms and classrooms, where people don’t need more religious tribalism: they need the oneness that comes when you really love your neighbor as your own.

Often evangelism in that world is steeped in conversion: in changing people and winning them over and defeating their immorality.
I’m not interested in that.
I don’t want to beat anyone.
I’m not interested in “winning them for Christ.”

I just want to release them.

I want them to find themselves in the wide open, expansive, perfect love that casts out fear—because then they be able to feed and heal and include and welcome and embrace people without seeing other people as threats or sinners or damned souls, because they don’t look or sound or love or vote the way that they do.

In that place the will understand that every person they encounter is someone who, just like them, could use a little more kindness and something that feels like love.

I want to bring the good news to everyone.

I want to make disciples of MAGA nation.