Go! Fight! Win! Christ is Number One!

Public-facing Christianity in the U.S. isn't a collection of beliefs. 

It is a collection of believers. 

It is a fan base with a popular -- but divisive -- team mascot.

I met a new minister in town pastoring a once-large, now poorly attended, local church. We exchanged names and pleasantries. I asked her what kind of church it was.

"Are you a love-your-neighbor church," I asked? "Or is yours a we-are-tight-with-Jesus-we've-got-ours church?"

She understood my question, and nodded ruefully. She said, "We are a love-your-neighbor church. It is hard now, but there are still a few of us left."

Love-your-neighbor churches exist, but they are not the face of Christianity in public life in America.

Public political Christianity today functions less as a coherent ethical and spiritual framework and more as a form of collective identity, akin to team allegiance. I realize that many individual Christians practice their faith with earnest sincerity, but the public-facing expression of Christianity in the United States increasingly resembles sports fandom. It looks like cheering for the Oregon Ducks or the Boston Red Sox. Team Christian is Team Republican.

Pew Research reports that 72 percent of White Evangelicals support Trump.

Team identity, whether in sports or politics, depends on readily identifiable symbols. Ducks fans rally around the “O” and whatever colors Phil Knight has the Ducks wearing this week; Red Sox supporters gravitate to the iconic “B.”

The cross, Bible, and other Christian imagery serve a similar role. They are displays of group membership. 

The analogy extends further with narratives of rivalry, e.g. between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. The GOP isn't held together by the glue of consistent policy. The glue is dislike of Democrats and their brand symbols. Lock Hillary up! Drink liberal tears!

 

At the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot Christian flags and large wooden crosses appeared prominently alongside Trump banners, “Make America Great Again” banners, and “Jesus Is My Savior, Trump Is My President” signs. 

Team fans do not evaluate their team’s actions on moral grounds; they assess them in terms of advantage and victory. Christianity encompasses centuries of theological debate, multiple denominational histories, and a range of ethical perspectives. When Christianity functions as sociopolitical team identity, its ethical teachings on humility, forgiveness, or care for the vulnerable are reshaped to be consistent with the current Republican political agenda. The tail wags the dog. Christianity bend to politics.

   -- Feed the hungry? Yeah, right. Cut USAID and SNAP. 

   -- Welcome the stranger? Yeah, right. Deport them to Uganda.

   -- Love your neighbor? Yeah, right. They eat dogs; they are garbage.

The liberal church still exists. There are "a few of us left," as the minister said. They are nearly invisible in the public square. Christians wearing MAGA hats sell a more popular product than Jesus' did: What's yours is yours, foreigners are enemies, and America first. Christian practice is hard. Generosity and empathy to strangers and rivals go against the grain of human nature. 

The modern GOP and the modern Evangelical Church are in a sweet spot of easy politics and ethics, each complementing the other. They seem content in this marriage. Public evangelical Christianity is Trumpism: selfish, cruel, xenophobic, and violent. They have made an idol of Trump. It is the best of both worlds from a marketing perspective: un-Christian human nature combined with all the branding and tradition of Christianity. 

This looks like a good partnership -- Trump up front, the watermark imprimitor of Jesus behind him -- but it is not. Christianity is getting the worse part of the deal. 

For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, but lose his immortal soul?  Mark 8:36

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The West scared Russia.

Eventually the Russia-Ukraine war will end.

Two things are true:

     -- Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a brutal, indefensible act of aggression. 

     -- The U.S. shaped the geopolitical context in which Moscow concluded that invading Ukraine was necessary.

I was 13 when I watched President Kennedy frighten my parents and the nation. Missiles in Cuba, 90 miles off our shore. I remember that detail. Only 90 miles.

"Unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites are now in preparation on that imprisoned island [Cuba.]"

In a college class on the U.S. presidency five years later, the fall of 1967, I learned from a professor with highly-placed sources in the White House that our response to the presence of nuclear weapons in Cuba nearly set off the very nuclear war we feared. 

Russia has a problem. The vast Eurasian plain offers few natural barriers. Over centuries, Russia endured repeated invasions from the west—Polish armies in the 17th century, Napoleon in the 19th, and Nazi Germany in the 20th. These catastrophes are foundational to Russian strategic culture. A U.S.-aligned military alliance on its border feels, to Moscow, like a historical pattern repeating itself.

After the Soviet collapse, the U.S. championed a vision of Europe “whole and free,” which meant expanding Western institutions eastward. What could be more natural, Western nations thought, than for sovereign states to choose to be part of NATO and the prosperous, democratic west. This vision collided with Russia’s deeply-rooted belief that its security depends on buffer zones; strategic depth. Buffer zones saved Russia from Napoleon. They saved it from Hitler. Land is safety.  A Ukraine integrated into Western political, economic, and military structures represented, to Moscow, not a neutral choice but a direct strategic loss.

The Maidan Revolution crystallized the perception that the enemy was closing in on them. In late 2013, Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych — elected on a platform that leaned toward Russia — abruptly abandoned plans to sign an association agreement with the European Union. Massive protests erupted in Kyiv’s Maidan Square. Over months of demonstrations, Yanukovych lost control. In February 2014, after security forces fired on protesters and political support collapsed, he fled the country. Parliament removed him from office.

To many Ukrainians, Maidan was a democratic uprising against corruption. Moscow viewed it as a Western-backed regime change. The U.S. had played a visible role: Senior officials like Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Senator John McCain visited Kyiv during the protests and encouraged them to continue. A phone call leaked in which Nuland and other U.S. officials discussed preferred post-Yanukovych political outcomes. Moscow feared an enemy at the gates.

All wars eventually end, either in a win, a loss, or some kind of negotiated settlement.  Deals get struck. Someone is unhappy; probably everyone. The Russia-Ukraine war will end. I expect some kind of unsatisfactory land-for-peace carve-up of Ukraine. I won't like it. It will seem unfair to Ukraine. I will be reminded of Munich, Hitler, and Czechoslovakia.  

My sensibilities here are irrelevant. Russia's sensibilities are central. Russia is a great regional power and it wants what such powers think are essential to their long-term safety. They want space. 

The Hitler-Munich analogy is one way to think about the end of this war. If the war ends on any terms other than Russia's complete withdrawal from Ukraine, then I expect the settlement to be condemned by Americans on both the right and left as another Munich. Any possible end to the war will give something to Russia and that will give excellent justification to complain that the resolution is unfair, immoral, and sets a bad precedent. 

But in anticipation of some future settlement, I am attempting to hold two conflicting ideas in mind. The instructive analogy from history may be both Munich and the Cuban Missile Crisis. It requires something unpleasant to do: imagining the situation from the point of view of Russia. Russia was in the situation that JFK found himself.

The West didn't cause Russia's invasion. But the West underestimated the geopolitical shock of Maidan and how Russia would perceive Ukraine's lean toward NATO and the EU. Russia doesn't think it is acting out of ambition alone. It thinks it is acting out of necessity.  Necessity is a powerful motivator. It is diplomatic malpractice not to think through how Russia might perceive a Ukraine tilting toward the EU and NATO.  America risked blowing up the world to stop missiles from being within 90 miles of our shores. I expect Russia to be equally adamant and I expect that to show up in whatever resolution there is to this war.

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A rsponse to yesterday's post.

Yesterday I published a post arguing that land acknowledgements are a bad idea.

I said they create backlash that hurts their intended purpose.

Click here for yesterday's post

Herb Rothschild has a comment on my post.

Herb Rothschild (Harvard, PhD 1966) taught English literature at LSU and later at the University of Houston. During that time and after he retired, he was active in justice and peace work, first in the Civil Rights movement and later in work to end the U.S.-U.S.S.R. nuclear arms race. Since moving with his wife to the Rogue Valley in 2009, he has continued such work. In 2021, after the commercial paper serving Ashland folded, he helped found the non-profit Ashland.news, for which he writes a weekly column.

Guest Post by Herb Rothschild

Should we take responsibility for the past? If so, why and how? And how far into the past should our responsibility extend? These questions arise from the Up Close blog of December 3, in which Peter maintained that land acknowledgements are “a disastrous idea: bad history, bad patriotism, and very bad politics.”

Am I obligated to make amends for injuries I did to people in the past, even though the law doesn’t compel me to? Am I obligated to make amends if my father swindled someone out of his life savings, even though I’m not legally compelled? And even if I don’t make amends, am I obliged to at least acknowledge such wrongs if for no other reason than not to repeat them?

How much of this can we extrapolate from individual history to social history? If all the parents of my group injured all the parents of another group, can the two groups live in harmony without any acknowledgement of that past? As Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

To illustrate that truth, consider those who wish to sanitize the history of African-Americans in school textbooks. The very politicians who claimed that acknowledging things like the violent denial of Black participation in elections teaches kids to be ashamed of their country (a view Peter came close to echoing in his blog) seized upon the U.S. Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act twelve years ago to pass laws once again making it difficult for Blacks to vote. That was not coincidental. Controlling the past is one way to control the present.

Turning to settler treatment of Native Americans, the focus of the land acknowledgements, Peter casts that enormous harm as something in the distant past: “I don’t feel guilty over the behavior of other people’s great-great grand-parents.” The harm, however, didn’t end once the tribes were confined to reservations.

Forcibly taking Native children from their families on the reservations and putting them in the notorious Indian boarding schools, whose purpose was to eradicate their identity, began early in the 19th century and didn’t end until end until 1969. Remains of dead children are still being excavated at some of the sites. Many survivors are still alive. Jim Bear Jacobs, director of community engagement and racial justice for the Minnesota Council of Churches in Minneapolis, noted that “every Native person alive today is no more than three generations removed from a direct ancestor being in boarding school.”

Native lands are still under attack. Ignoring Native claims whenever there are valuable minerals to be extracted from them is an old story. Uranium mining on many reservations left mountains of tailings still emitting low level radiation. It’s also a current story. To take only one example, the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine is under construction on 18,000 acres of ancestral lands of the Northern Paiute and Western Shoshone peoples.

Peter mistakenly conflated guilt with responsibility. Just as counselors tell addicts, “It’s not your fault, but it is your responsibility,” so the purposes of the land acknowledgements—and any acknowledgement of past injustices—are to recognize what happened, understand the consequences, and make sure there are no repetitions.

I feel no guilt that I live on 10 acres that long ago were wrested by force from a Native people. I have no intention of trying to return the land to their descendants. But I will continue to donate to the American Indian College Fund, to lobby Congress to pass the bill establishing the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies in the United States, and to oppose mining on Native lands without their consent.

Such commitments don’t place me in a political faction (Peter’s “the Left”) constituted by “aggrieved peoples.” They place me among people committed to justice. It matters not which party is in power if its leaders don’t understand that the goal of politics is justice, a community in which each of us has a fair shot at realizing our potential and all of us are encouraged to be our best selves.

 

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A primary election in Oregon senate district 3

Denise Krause files for State Senate.

Incumbent State Senator Jeff Golden has a primary election opponent.

Denise Krause

Last week Jeff Golden learned that Republican Brad Hicks, the former CEO of the Chamber of Greater Medford and Jackson County, filed for the office of State Senate.

Today Golden learned that Democrat Denise Krause filed as well.

Krause is a retired health care executive. She served as the director of research and education information technology at the University of Mississippi Medical Center and has a doctorate degree in preventive medicine. She moved to Jackson County in 2017 after retiring to be closer to her family. 

Krause is a familiar name in local politics. She spearheaded the effort to reform the Jackson County commission with three initiative petitions. One would have made the commissioner job nonpartisan. The second would have increased the number of commissioners from three to five. The third, which would take place only if voters increased the number of commissioners, would have reduced the salary of commissioners to about $75,000 from its current level of about $150,000. The salary-cut measure passed with a large majority, but because the measure that would have increased the number of commissioners did not pass, the salary cut did not go into effect. The effort was the result of a large grass-roots effort, gathering over 10,000 signatures for each measure.

Filing data, Oregon Secretary of State

She said she thought Golden was vulnerable because he supported creation of a fire map to help homeowners identify areas of wildfire concern. He later decided the map caused more problems than benefits, and succeeded in rescinding the maps. The map creates some criticism on Facebook and other social media sites.

Jeff Golden announced this week that he hoped to serve another term as state senator. He said that Republican support in the state legislature for President Trump's agenda, including National Guard troops in Portland, cuts to food benefits, and cuts to health insurance subsidies for health insurance bought on exchanges, caused him to decide to run again. Golden is part of the Democratic majority in the Oregon state senate in a state that has been voting reliably blue for several decades. There are strong Democratic majorities in metropolitan Portland. On Tuesday, Golden said that he thought part of his job was to  represent the interests of Southern Oregon within this Democratic majority of upstate legislators. This district is the only one with a Democratic state senator in the eastern and southern part of the state.

The primary election will take place in May, 2026; the general election will take place in November, 2026.

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Land acknowledgements are a bad idea

Land acknowledgement statements are well-intentioned.

But they are a disastrous idea: bad history, bad patriotism, and very bad politics.

My local university has a prescribed land acknowledgment, with instructions that it is to be read in full and without change. Southern Oregon University's web page on the acknowledgement shows a photo of historic property populated by indigenous people at the time of White settlement in the 1850s: Lower Table Rock. My farm is located just off the right side of this photo, on flat pumice soil where I grow grapes and find arrowheads.

SOU’s Land Acknowledgment: 

We want to take this moment to acknowledge that Southern Oregon University is located within the ancestral homelands of the Shasta, Takelma, and Latgawa peoples who lived here since time immemorial. These Tribes were displaced during rapid Euro-American colonization, the Gold Rush, and armed conflict between 1851 and 1856. In the 1850s, discovery of gold and settlement brought thousands of Euro-Americans to their lands, leading to warfare, epidemics, starvation, and villages being burned. In 1853 the first of several treaties were signed, confederating these Tribes and others together – who would then be referred to as the Rogue River Tribe. These treaties ceded most of their homelands to the United States, and in return they were guaranteed a permanent homeland reserved for them. At the end of the Rogue River Wars in 1856, these Tribes and many other Tribes from western Oregon were removed to the Siletz Reservation and the Grand Ronde Reservation. Today, the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon and the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians are living descendants of the Takelma, Shasta, and Latgawa peoples of this area. We encourage YOU to learn about the land you reside on, and to join us in advocating for the inherent sovereignty of Indigenous people.

A land acknowledgement has a political purpose central to the politics of the American left. At its political apogee about 2020, the left understood itself to be primarily a coalition of aggrieved people: Blacks, Hispanics, Women, homosexuals, labor union members, immigrants, the disabled, the overweight, the unemployed, the homeless, the poor -- everyone except healthy, prosperous White men. Such a big tent, promising huge and growing majorities. Descendants of people displaced by White settlers were archetypal victims, deserving land acknowledgements and casinos.

Land entitlement due to possession from "time-immemorial" is a sentimental falsehood. The pattern of languages and movement of tribes show that indigenous people in North America did exactly what humans do everywhere and always. They move around and fight over land and resources. They kill and interbreed with their neighbors. We are the descendants of nomads and conquerors. There is no peaceful, settled Eden-like original state of native people anywhere. The tribes listed in the land acknowledgement were fighting among themselves over turf and resources when White people arrived, and are fighting now using the courts to see who gets "dibs" on Southern Oregon gamblers. 

The local tribes were displaced brutally by White settlers and the U.S. Army in the 1850s. They moved in and squatted and broke promises and ignored treaties in order to do it. They continued a time immemorial cycle of movement and demographic change. 

The political left imagines itself to be protectors of the disadvantaged groups in its coalition, and therefore entitled to its members' votes. It is time to rethink this. People are voting like Americans, not like aggrieved members of groups. Democrats are slow to get it: a gay Republican; a labor union Republican; a Hispanic Republican; a Black Republican; a female Republican. How can that be??? Answer: They are Americans.

The land acknowledgement is a profoundly self-destructive message for the political left. It declares there is something uniquely criminal and illegitimate about the origins of America. Shame on you, America! Shame on you Americans!

The land acknowledgment does not celebrate pluralism, democracy or liberal respect and toleration. It is the opposite of the Pledge of Allegiance, with the aspiration of liberty and justice for all.

I don't feel guilty over the behavior of other people's great-great grand-parents, wherever they were. I suspect that few people do. Half my relatives were miserably poor and living in Greece when Southern Oregon was being settled. Others were in Connecticut and fought for the North in the Civil War. The land acknowledgement doesn't come across as informative. It reads like a guilt-trip lecture. I want to look forward with hope, not backward with collective guilt that I do not feel. 

Trump is president in part because he is riding backlash to the left's frame of oppressor and oppressed. A great many people who voted for Trump are disgusted by him, but they voted for him anyway because Democrats seemed even worse. Trump said America was great. Voters heard that. Democrats seem to be saying that America is systematically criminal. Voters hear that, too.

Americans don't feel guilty, not for a past they weren't here to shape. 

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Automated misinformation

"Just be for real, won't you, baby?
Be for real."
          Leonard Cohen, "Just be real," 1992

Have you seen the videos where a housecat saves the toddler by scaring off a large bear?

Or have you seen this video, where a helpful man explains the giveaway signs that the video you watched was completely fake, created with artificial intelligence video tools?

Americans are learning not to believe what they see and read. Where nothing is credible, anything can be real. Or not. Who knows?

Guest post author Jim Sims is a retired attorney. His career involved finding, evaluating, and presenting evidence to document what is true. Sims was a member of the Ashland, Oregon, City Council, an attorney in private practice, and then an attorney representing the disabled at the Center for Nonprofit Legal Services in Southern Oregon. He is also a lifelong athlete. He competed in international Ironman triathlons for 35 years, racing to 5th place in his age group at the Ironman International Championship in Hawaii at age 73.

Guest Post by Jim Sims

Degradation of Truth

I practiced law in Oregon and California for over 45 years. The courtroom has safeguards that establish whether information presented is sufficiently reliable to be considered. Society lacks such communication safeguards. Disinformation travels at the speed of light. Looking back from age 81, I didn't foresee what was happening to "Truth."

Truth arises from identifying relevant facts and issues that determine how a matter should be decided. Reaching truthful answers requires adherence to long accepted methods of research and verification—testing whether facts actually support a given proposition. Sharing verifiable truths, however, depends on communication.

One goal of higher education is to develop the cognitive skills needed to distinguish fact from opinion. Primary education, by contrast, often focuses on simple right-or-wrong answers. Yet, as Oscar Wilde observed, “Truth is rarely pure and never simple.” Facts evolve, and our understanding of truth must evolve with them. Human reasoning is shaped by instincts and emotions developed over millennia—particularly fear and self-preservation. To manage these impulses, societies created institutions and codes of behavior that rely on shared truths and agreed conventions. The reliability of those truths, however, depends on the rigor of the methods we use to verify them.

As a trial lawyer, I learned that motive in communication is inseparable from ethics and verification. Legal disputes revolve around facts, argument, and persuasion—and there are always winners and losers. In our culture, “winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing,” as Vince Lombardi said. Today, this competitive mindset has seeped into public discourse. Assertions of every kind are launched daily into a battlefield detached from verifiable fact. 

Such an environment breeds factionalism—exacerbated by the speed and reach of modern technology. From the invention of writing to the internet and artificial intelligence, each leap in communication has expanded both the spread of information and the opportunity for distortion. Algorithms now amplify division by exploiting our instincts and data, targeting us anonymously and continuously. The social compact itself—the shared trust that binds communities—is an unintended casualty.

Factionalism, of course, is not new. The framers of the U.S. Constitution recognized it as a natural feature of human behavior. Washington, Madison, and Hamilton all warned that factions driven by ambition or corruption could undermine republican government. Madison argued that one advantage of a republic over a direct democracy was slower communication—distance and deliberation served as safeguards. He could never have imagined the instant, global communication of today.

Their warnings remain relevant. Madison cautioned that “men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs” might gain power through corruption and betray the public interest. Washington feared that such factions would enable “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” to subvert the people’s power and then destroy the very systems that elevated them.

Today, human instincts are still exploited to incite fear, division, and profit. The difference lies in the unprecedented speed and reach of digital communication. Information once traveled by word of mouth or print; now it spreads globally in seconds.

Madison saw two possible remedies for factionalism. The first—using government authority to suppress dissent—destroys freedom and democracy. The second—addressing the effects of factionalism at their core—requires an agreed method of inquiry and verification. This means insisting on evidence-based reasoning and resisting the temptation to treat unverified opinion as facts. Assertions drawn from “research” that merely recycles internet speculation or conspiracy are not valid.

Commercial and political messaging today preys on instinctual drives using data harvested from our online behavior—what we view, type, purchase, or share. Algorithms convert this data into targeted persuasion, while we remain largely unaware of how our information is used. According to the cybersecurity firm Imperva, more than half of current internet traffic appears human but is actually generated by bots and artificial intelligence.

When human factionalism meets automated misinformation, the result is a profound degradation of truth. Malicious, reckless, or careless communication spreads faster than ever, eroding the public’s ability to discern fact from fiction. The anonymity of the internet further enables cruelty and distortion by shielding people from accountability.

Truth has always required effort—careful verification, ethical motive, and shared commitment to accuracy. What has changed is the speed with which falsehoods travel and the precision with which they target our fears. To preserve the social compact, we must recommit to the disciplined pursuit of verifiable truth—before the very engines of communication that once promised enlightenment become tools of collective deception.

 

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Teach your children well

"You, who are on the road
Must have a code you try to live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a goodbye
Teach your children well"
          Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, "Teach Your Children" 1970

 

Generation Z -- people aged 15 to 30 -- came of age under a presidency characterized by insults, lawbreaking, cronyism, and flagrant self-serving grift.

I was age 10 when John F. Kennedy was elected president. I was awestruck. He said Americans would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty." He called on Americans to be patriotic and to serve the country. That sounded good to me.  "Ask not what the country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country."

Today I need to explain to young readers of this blog that JFK was not being sarcastic in that speech. He was not expecting "Yeah, right" smirks in response. I know this sounds quaint, but he was dead earnest.

Donald Trump defined the modern presidency for an entire generation of young adults who have never really known a political world without him at the center of it. Trump is the baseline. Trump is "presidential."

Boomers are well-accustomed to policy failures in presidents. Vietnam. The Iraq War. The blind eye to the financial industry's mortgage fraud. Some policies we admired, some we disliked, but each president broadly operated within the expectations of democratic behavior. Presidents tried to appear dignified, truthful, and grounded in civic responsibility.

Jimmy Carter modeled civic morality. Even people who disagreed with Ronald Reagan's policies heard his certainty that America must be a shining beacon of liberty and prosperity for the world. We weren't just powerful. We must be good. Obama modeled composure and intellectual seriousness. He wore a tan-colored suit one day. The political right erupted, saying that was denigrating the office. That was then.

Trump remade the office. He is a president who models rule-breaking as strength. He calls opponents “vermin,” mocks disabilities, promises retribution, and insists that any election he loses is illegitimate. The idea of a president as a unifying figure must feel old-fashioned. Older Americans know this is a departure from the past; younger Americans do not.

Trump, not Biden, narrated the American story through the Biden presidency. Trump left office for four years, but never left center stage. Trump's celebration of transgression becomes the new norm. Yesterday's guest post is an example of transgressive nihilism. Blowing up ships: how cool! Arrest Obama? What a smackdown to watch! Shoot someone on Fifth Avenue? Well, Trump's attorney argued in public that he could have Seal Team Six shoot Trump's political opponent and it wouldn't be illegal. That is how the game is played. Rules are for breaking. 

Young people are watching, and they are learning the lessons of the era:

We are raising a generation that will outlive Trump, but they may never outlive their early imprinting. Trump is the new normal for them.

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