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Are Liberal Churches Dying?

September 13th, 2012 / tags:, , , , , / categories: church, fundamentalism, politics /

It’s funny that I started this blog with the intention of focusing on conservative Christianity, but the hot topics in the blogosphere have led me towards more critiques of liberal Christianity. Recently Ross Douthat, Scott Mcknight, and Tony Jones engaged in an interesting discussion about the future of liberal Christianity. I highly recommend reading each of these articles (including Ross’s initial post, which I did not link to), but I tend to side with Ross’s take more than the others. I admit that I’m a bit of a latecomer to this dialogue, but since it’s an ongoing issue I’ll chime in anyway.

All of them agree that the liberal church is dying – at least its current form. I agree. I live near Penn State, which is a small town with a population that doubles in size when college is in session. The surrounding boroughs have a population of  40,000, and the university currently has approximately 42,000 students. There nothing but farmland and Amish for miles around us – the nearest city is Harrisburg, which is ninety miles away. (This gives you a good idea why the Cult of Paterno has been able to fester unchecked for so long. It’s essentially a giant compound of JoePa indoctrination.)

But enough about Penn State. I’ve spent most of my energy being one of the lone voices willing to recognize the rotten core of Paterno, the university, (and even the community) that I’m burned out on the topic. Maybe another day I’ll tackle it here.

My point of raising demographics here is that, due to the well-educated population (our county almost always the lone county in the middle of the state goes blue in Presidential elections) the town has the potential to be a hotbed of liberal Christianity. The future leaders of the left-wing side of the faith, so to say. It isn’t.

The town’s church population can be summarized as follows: two Catholic Churches (one of which is the “main” Catholic church in town, while the second church is more contemporary.) We have about five main evangelical churches comprising different denominations. The relationship between them is very friendly, and collectively they’re big enough to collaborate and have as big an impact on the community as the Catholic Churches. There’s also a lot of mainline churches of varying sizes, and on the outskirts you’ll find more overly fundamentalistic churches (they even advertise themselves as being fundamentalists!). These churches tend to have much less cultural influence on the community than their Catholic and evangelical counterparts.

Among all these churches, you’ll find only four that recognize homosexuality as a valid lifestyle. I think that the homosexuality question is a good barometer for the theological tone of the community. In my view you have to look where the young people are attending to gauge the future of the faith. They will be the ones raising new families in church and becoming the next generation of pastors and leaders.

Despite all of the talk about evangelicals growing tired of the politicization of Christianity and the rigid stance against environmentalism and homosexuality many churches take, young people aren’t flocking to the liberal churches. They’re flocking to the evangelical churches.

I’ve attended about half of the churches in town at some point over the years. Most recently I’ve begun attending the Episcopal Church. The evangelical churches are young. Everywhere you look you see teenagers, college students, young couples. There are older members of course, but the energy within these churches is in their youth. One of the Baptist churches in town  has huge branch campuses attended almost exclusively by teens and college students. The church I recently left had an average age of 40, meaning you had a steady stream of couples having kids and raising them in the church. The next generation of Christians.

The mainline churches, on the other hand, are old. The Episcopal Church is full of friendly elderly people and almost no one under 40 in sight. So you have a strange paradox of gray-haired Christians eagerly embracing both liberal theology and liberal politics, and young, dynamic churches boning up on Creationism and revving up for the culture wars.

If you’re young and a liberal Christian in this town, you’re invisible. You probably don’t attend church, and you probably aren’t inclined to seek one out.

Part of the problem is that the liberal churches generally don’t advertise themselves. They advertise their food drives and soup kitchens, but the conservative churches do their share of that, too. In fact, the right-wing churches are the biggest advertisers for the liberal churches, although the advertising is universally derogatory. I didn’t realize that the local Episcopal Church respected homosexuals and had a environmental committee until I heard evangelicals grumble about the Episcopals’ godless embrace of both causes.

But the bottom line here is that it’s not just a question of attendance numbers. It’s also a question of bringing in and nurturing the next generation of Christians. The liberal churches are depending on their longtime members to keep things going. When they leave this realm, the church may leave it, too. The evangelical churches are growing even as we speak, and given the transient dynamic of a college town, they’re sending of dedicated Christians already conditioned to attend and volunteer to become the future of the church. Liberal Christianity is dying, and one of the reasons it’s dying is that it hasn’t attempted to reach young people. I’ll get into that question in a later post.

 

 

 

 

 

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Thinking Outside The Box On Abortion

September 8th, 2012 / tags:, , , , / categories: Uncategorized /

Recently i got into a surprisingly civil discussion about abortion on Facebook. Because of my beliefs I find these debates easier to navigate than most people probably do, since I can find common ground with both sides. The downside is of course that finding common ground with both sides means that I’m not perfectly aligned with either of them.

As I see it, we need a solution to the abortion issue that gives both sides something they want. Odds are my ideas will make both sides more unhappy than not. But this is my Quixotic attempt at finding a compromise.

Full confession up front: I am pro-choice. But i do think that the pro-choice side is on the losing side of the moral debate over the viability and humanity of the fetus. And as science improves, there will be more opportunities for treating infant disabilities and maternal health concerns in utero, which are two of the reasons women may choose abortion. In other words, over time science will shrink the number of cases where the life of the mother is at risk. Medical research will eventually reduce the number of cases where the child is irreversibly severely or fatally disabled.

I’ll address my moral reasoning on abortion in a future post. I want to spend this post on the policy solutions I have come up with. I presented these ideas to my pro-life friends, so much of this is skewed towards meeting their concerns. I hope that tucked within these solutions are ideas that will appeal to pro-choice people as well. I confess that most of these solutions play dow my belief that a woman’s right to do what she wishes with her body outweighs the fetus’ life. However, since I geared these solutions towards my pro-life audience, the language here will mainly address their concerns.

First, the context. The conversation arose when a Christian friend of mine made the statement that he would be willing to go along with any politician or policy if it meant saving children from abortion. I was impressed with the flexibility within his statement. You can parse whether you thought he really meant it, but I decided to treat his statement as if he did. It’s rare to get someone from the pro-life position make such a statement, so I leaped on the opportunity to get on my soapbox.

I began with presenting him with some rough date. The demand for adoption isn’t high enough to meet the number of abortions. Every year there are roughly 1 million abortions and 100,000 adoptions. I knew that in recent years the number of abortions has declined in the neighborhood of 700,00, but since most past years it has hovered around 1 million, I decided to go with it rather than debate data specifics.

While in an ideal world I’d love to see the the number of abortions go to zero and have all women give birth to babies who are healthy and loved and have no impact on overpopulation concerns, that’s not reality. We have to deal with the world we live in.

So to begin with, if we are going to fulfill my friend’s goal and save a million babies per year from abortion (or as close to that number as can be achieved), there has to be a place for those babies per year to go. I will assume her that Roe V Wade will not be turned ove. Again,I’m setting aside the debate over whether the Supreme Court might overturn it or the awful ways states are denying women access to health care and abortion.
So let’s look at some of the key reasons why women choose abortion. Among the most common reasons are: health of the mother or child; ignorance about birth control; inability to access birth control; concerns over quality of life for the child;  and concerns over career or losing a job to care for the child. I know that there are a lot of other reasons, and I think that all of these are good reasons to have an abortion. But I think there are ways we can address them to reduce the number of them.
As I see it,  adoption is a persuasive alternativs because many mothers are concerned about their child’s prospective quality of life. For a variety of reasons they may be financially unable to care for the child or fear they wil be unfit mothers. Adoption  helps assuage some of these concerns.
The problem with adoption is twofold: the demand isn’t high enough to meet the number of abortions per year, and the process takes too long and is too strict and costly for many prospective adoptive parents to endure.  Again, keep in mind that my language in these solutions was skewed towards a pro-life audience. My ideas are sincere, but I avoided making apologies or defending the pro-choice position in order get my ideas across:
So my first suggestion would be to make adoption as easy as having a child by pregnancy. Drop all fees related to the process. The only people who should be screened out are people with a criminal record related to abuse of children. Accept the fact that this will mean lots of abuse cases and awful stories. Since they believe that a live child with bad parents is better off than a dead child, let’s respect one of their primary solutions and expand it.
2. Guarantee that a woman can keep her job at full salary if she gets pregnant. Set up a government fund where the employer can apply for financial aid and temp assistance if needed. Make the employer rather than the pregnant woman obligated to apply for aid, because the goal is to eliminate areas of concern that might lead a woman to abortion.

3. Treat sexual politics the way we treat other facets of political life. In my view, most Christians recognize that good foreign policy and good economic policy often results in actions that are inconsistent with scripture. My friend is a Republican so I knew I had a different set of moral inconsistencies in mind than he has. But aside from pacifists, even most liberal Christians agree that going to war against Hitler and Al Quaeda were justifiable actions even though they violated Jesus’ teachings. Heck, a good case can be made that the Revolutionary War was unbiblical. But consciously or not, almost all Christians accept that there are times when our worldly concerns supersede Biblical edicts against violence, deception, or loving our international neighbors.

(I don’t personally equate abortion with Hitler, by the way. But pro-lifers do. And if you’re going to persuade them to see the unfeasibility of their political positions on sex, then you have to point to an example they may be willing to concede. I know plenty of conservative Christians who will admit that killing Bin Laden doesn’t line up with the Bible, but they justify in secular terms. That’s an opening that allows for my analogy as a path into their thinking.)
But more than any other topic, Christians tend to want to have “everything” with sexual politics: abstinence, patriarchy (obviously I didn’t bring up that one!) and a culture that has a conservative Christian outlook towards sexuality and life. Waiting for that to happen is like waiting for all of the terrorists to drop their weapons and accept Christ. As I see it, to meet their goal of saving babies from abortion, the pro-life movement has to accept that their values (especially their conservative Christian values) are not values shared by most people who live in this country. Even those who self-identify as conservative Christians tend to prefer a secular society over a Theocratic one.  So they need to meet the interests of  people who would never seek out a church or a Crisis Pregnancy Center, or anyone else who might judge them for their pregnancy.
Currently studies show that usage of birth control prevents more pregnancy than abstinence education does. Abstinence education will persuade a percentage of women, so keep it for those families who will support abstinence values. Yes, I know that currently many states insist on abstinence only. That needs to change.
But I think we have to be realistic about the values at home. A teenager who gets an abstinence education but shares none of the values intrinsic towards abstinence education will end up being a person with a poor or misleading sexual education and no moral inclination to wait for sex until marriage. Studies show that teen pregnancy is most common in Red States, so obviously many teenagers aren’t on board with abstinence education. That said, I think we should give pro-lifers abstinence as an option for their child . It’s naive to believe that a “secular” sexual education wil get support in a conservative Christian home. These parents will nullify the benefits of a good sexual education by giving them alternative views that cause their kids to distrust and reject their  ”secular” sexual education.
4. In terms of pro-life interests, the people who don’t accept abstinence values are the ones they need to be reach if they want to lower the number of abortions. (By “reaching” I mean options that do not include their pro-life intervention or their sexual values.)
So make it very easy for women (even teens) to gain access to contraception. No screening or judgement. Put the proverbial condom machine in the school if necessary. Since their primary goal is to lower the number of abortions as much as possible, they must sacrifice other related concerns. They can still teach their kids the value of abstinence, but they have to drop the push for getting other people to live they way they want them to. An atheist teen won’t see any point in waiting for sex until marriage, so they have to stop pretending that they can persuade them. Denying them contraception just raises the number of unwanted pregnancies and therefore the number of abortions.
Finally, I think we should invest a huge amount of money into foster homes, prenatal care, and childcare. There should be almost as much money invested in supplying pregnant and new mothers with care and support as there is the elderly. Personally I would go for universal healthcare (even socialist health care). But we’ll never win them over on that cause. The point here is if women live in a society where they can’t afford a child, then create a society where all women can afford one. Conservative christians can continue their ministry services for pregnant women as they always have, but their goal should be to reach those women who would never walk into a Crisis Pregnancy Center. In other towards, forget the humiliating ultrasounds, denying access to Planned Parenthood clinics, and the “slut shaming’ they love to engage in. Accept that women will make sexual choices they disagree with in the same way they accept that women will make religious choices. (Despite what it may seem, most Christians- even fundamentalists -care more about the culture wars than they do evangelizing.)

I don’t pretend that all of this jibes with scripture or addresses every issue related to abortion. I realize that most of my solutions address teen pregnancy, but for now that’s where most of my ideas are. But if the goal is to lower the number of abortions as much as possible, then conservative Christians have to give up on a large cross-section of the culture wars.

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Liberal Christians Have it Backwards

August 10th, 2012 / tags:, , , , , / categories: Uncategorized /

I’ve seen a number of variations of Susan Strouse’s   essay about her path to liberal Christianity. The moment of revelation for her came at a friend’s funeral:

“I attended a funeral and happened to sit next to a friend from my interfaith women’s group. The service was in an Episcopal church, and when the priest read the gospel, I heard the words I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no one comes to the Father except through me through the ears of my friend—who is Jewish. I myself have read that text at countless funerals, but this time I was appalled by its apparent exclusivism. I was profoundly disturbed by this and found myself unwilling to leave her sitting in the pew when it was time to go up for Communion.”

I empathize with her reservations. It’s always awkward to be in a social setting and realize that you or you friends are not welcome to partake in the ritual at hand. But let’s use a less extreme example. I have frequently found myself in attendance at Catholic Mass. Usually this has been because I was visiting Catholic friends or family members. The Catholic Church practices closed communion. I am not Catholic.

Now for the longest tine I didn’t understand the reasoning behind closed communion. I was a Christian, after all. How dare the Catholic Church deem me unworthy of the Eucharist? I confess that at times when I was a teenager I went ahead and took Catholic communion anyway because darn it, I was a believer. But as this blog explains there is a legitimate reasoning behind the Catholic practice of closed communion. I recommend that you read it if you have time, but the gist of it is that the Catholic understanding of communion is radically different than the Protestant understanding, and it is an insult to Catholic beliefs to be presumptive enough to partake in their sacred ritual if one does not accept their beliefs.

Strouse’s reasoning illustrates the biggest flaw I see in Liberal Christianity. Liberal Christians begin with a diagnosis that God is problematic, then prescribes a man made solution intended to accommodate society’s unease with God. Who God is and what God desires is irrelevant. What matters is what people want from God, and what desires they believe God should reasonably expect of them. In theory the end result would create the most pleasant and harmonious society.

The highest priority for Liberal Christians are societal rather than religious. Interfaith dialogue is the goal, and to attain it individual religious beliefs must be subservient to it. Interfaith dialogue cannot work unless people of all faiths water down their beliefs to make allowances for other possibilities.

So a Muslim cannot state that the Koran is the Word of God,  Christians cannot state that Jesus is the Messiah, and Jews cannot claim to be the Chosen People.Each of these beliefs is in conflict with one another, and while one can pay them lip service as possibilities, they cannot be taken seriously.  So while most of the debate over Interfaith dialogue comes from Christians, it is equally insulting to the closely held beliefs of people of other faiths.

In the case of controversial verses like John 14:6, there are two basic tacts Liberal Christians take. One is to dismiss the Bible outright as unreliable, and the other is to claim that it doesn’t really say what it appears to say. Strouse goes for the latter approach. I don’t want to focus here on proofs that her reasoning is in error, what I am concerned with is the “Man first/God second” dynamic I see within Liberal Christianity. There are many ways that it manifests itself , but all of them – whether we are debating Hell’s existence or the Ordination of women – begin with the wrong premise. This is not to say that all liberal conclusions are false. Rather, it is to say that correct answers are arrived at almost by accident.

The question should not be what kind of God would most effectively accommodate all beliefs and modern sensibilities. The question should be who is God, and what does He (or if you prefer, She) want?  If God wants everything you want and believes everything you believe, then there’s probably something off. We have to accept that God’s Will is not our will, and that mean sometimes we’ll disagree with God, perhaps even strongly disagree.

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Noisy Services

July 5th, 2012 / tags:, , , / categories: church /

Mark Vernon has written a good post about the lack of silence in churches. It struck cord with me because it’s been of one of my gripes about church services, except I’m coming at it from a different angle. I’m addicted to noise. Silence makes me feel naked and self-conscious. I don’t know what to do with myself when I just have the voices in my head to listen to,  and my first instinct is to turn something on. For me the ideal way to spend an evening alone is listening to music, watching tv, talking on the phone with a good friend, and painting…all at the same time.

I thrive on the cacophony. I love the way the audial and visual stimuli mix and collide with each other, especially if they reflect different moods. In other words, listening to The Cure while watching Titanic is much more interesting to me than listening to them while watching The Crow. And if I can have an hour long conversation with a friend of mine while all of this is going on, then that’s perfection.

But i know that when it comes to my faith, all that noise isn’t good for me. The uncomfortable silences that I instinctively avoid are what one needs for prayer and focusing on God. So when I go to church, I feel as though church services should be there to help me get over my anxiety over silence. As many pastors and many worship leaders have said, we’re at church to focus on Him, not us. So it becomes extremely frustrating my when the prayer times -during and after communion especially – become time to play the piano or sing hymns. In other words, make sure the service doesn’t allow for silent moments.

What’s interesting is the conflicting answers I’ve received over this issue. There was a short while when I first started attending my evangelical church that they did have silence during prayers and communion. I admit that I wasn’t a stalwart of prayer and focus during those silent times, but I was hoping that practice would help. Then a new pastor came along and suddenly silence was a problem. He was concerned that the congregation was (ironically) getting bored and distracted during silent communions. He was willing to concede that my concerns made a lot of sense, but he went with the noisy communion on the grounds that the noise helped people focus on God.

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Killing Childrens’ Imagination

July 5th, 2012 / tags:, , , , , / categories: fundamentalism /

Mike Wall has an article  at space.com about the problem (or lack of one) the discovery of extra-terrestrial life would pose for the world’s religions. The gist of his essay is that he doesn’t expect that there would be a significant impact on them, largely because many religious people have already embraced the notion that there is life on other planets.

I think that’s a reasonable assumption, but let me tell you about the other side.

Two years ago I was teaching Sunday School to my fifth grade class.  We were talking about how God created the universe, and I asked the kids if they’ve ever wondered if there is life on other planets. Now I’ve asked this question many times before in different forms to Sunday School kids, elementary kids, and so on. Immediately you expect their faces to light up and think: Star Wars! Star Trek! Men In Black! and so on, and then dive deep into speculating about what life on other planets might be like. Most of the time as a teacher I’d have to manage the discussion so kids won’t talk over each other.

Not this time.

This time when I asked them if they thought there was life on other planets, I got silence. Dead silence. Then slowly, they all shook their heads. And it wasn’t the kind of head-shaking where  they sensed that they were supposed to shake their heads because maybe Mom and Dad wouldn’t approve of them talking about aliens and outer space. It was numb, indifferent head shaking. It was like I had asked them if they knew what the higgs-boson particle was.

I jumped in, my face full of shock. “Haven’t you ever wondered if there are aliens out there? Maybe with green skin or six arms or scales instead of skin?” My voice was bright and joyful to show them that this was something that was fun to think about.

Again, heads shook. “There is no life on other planets,” one of them said with supreme confidence. Others chimed in with similar statements. Their responses weren’t defiant; it was simply a fact to them that earth was alone. They could care less about speculating over something that wasn’t true.

I tried to drill them on movies and  tv shows they had surely seen or read about. None of them had seen any of them. Not even comic books that dabbled in science fiction. I’ve never been a Star Wars fan, but I wanted to whip out that bar scene from one of the earlier movies with all the different aliens hanging out together. Forget science; I wanted to wow their imaginations.

I didn’t need to ask their parents to know what was going on. Some fundamentalists – not many, but some – see astronomy as just as dangerous to faith as biology, if not moreso, since the logistics of explaining distance and time in space makes it much harder to defend a 6,000 year old earth than evolution does. So they shut down any secular ideas about outer space the same way many parents forbid their kids to read Harry Potter. Except usually the kids who aren’t allowed to read Harry Potter know that the series exists and that Harry Potter is “bad” because of witchcraft. These kids (mind you, they were 9 and 10 years old) didn’t even know that Star Wars or Star Trek were things that existed in our universe, pop culture or otherwise.

As a friend of mine put it, those parents should have been arrested for killing their kids’ imaginations.

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Femdom Marriage

June 29th, 2012 / tags:, , , , / categories: dating /

(Warning: the article this post refers to gets pretty graphic in its description of a BDSM marriage. I promise that I will leave the lurid details out.)

Dan Savage (known best for his It Gets Better Project, a series of  anti-bullying videos intended to help LGBT youth) has been writing an ongoing series about sexually unconventional marriages. One of his more recent columns describes a femdom (= female dominant) marriage. The wife completely controls her husband’s behavior from sex to household chores, and the husband doesn’t complain about getting bossed around because he loves the thrill of her controlling his behavior.

It’s a revealing illustration of one of the arguments I’ve long had against courting, which became a huge fad in the 90′s and has pretty much latched onto many conservative churches as the Godly way to go about finding a soulmate. The gist of my argument was that the nature of courting (and chaperoned dating) prevented couples from really getting to know each other.

The counter-argument I’ve always heard was that good Christian couples would never hide anything from each other before they walked down the aisle. If there was anything they couldn’t talk about in front of Mom and Dad or their trusted Christian friends, then they shouldn’t get married in the first place.

Even though the couple in Savage’s article didn’t start out with BDSM, they provide a real-life example of my argument. Sometimes couples have  issues they need to discuss if they’re going to be compatible, and there’s no way in hell they can discuss them in front of their parents or their youth group buddies. Because sometimes people do know what they’re looking for sexually, and it’s not just a question of how many kids you want to have.

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for pointing this article out.

 

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Fight Club Theology Pt 1

June 28th, 2012 / tags:, , , , / categories: my story /

If you troll the web even a little bit, you might notice that Christians are fixated on gender roles, and over the past few months it’s almost impossible to avoid the debate. I’m not going to pretend that this is anything new, but it seems as though the debate has escalated in the last few years.

But before I dive into this, I’ll give you a little context. Unlike most of my evangelical peers, I never bought into the standard Christian propaganda regarding gender roles, modesty, and premarital sex. (I’ll delve into homosexuality at a later time, but for now I’ll just say that I’ve always held a liberal view of that topic as well.)

So why was I even bothering with a bunch of Christians whose social values so clearly clashed with my own?

The answer lies within the unspoken spiritual contract I had with the Church. And that contract was: if Jesus is more important to you than your politics, then I’ll let the political stuff slide.

As a Christian Vagabond, I’ve spent most of my life wavering between liberal churches who emphasized the values I believed in but fell short on my religious convictions, and conservative churches that were more in line with my religious beliefs but fumbled badly on  applying those beliefs to the world around them.

After a lot of bouncing around from church to church, I joined an evangelical church. The people were friendly, and they were very serious about the Bible and Jesus. I think it would surprise a lot of liberal Christians just how willing they were to set aside political disagreements for the sake of living like Christ and getting along with fellow believers.

And I am still drawn to their daily commitment to reading scripture (even the messy parts that liberal churches like to skip over), and despite their crazy interpretations of gender roles, I could look past it because I resided in a demographic black hole that largely shielded me from it.

I was (and still am) a single guy who was content with being single. I was too old for college ministries and youth pastors, and my singleness meant that I didn’t have to deal with the pressure to live according to the traditional marriage model. More importantly, my church picked up on my personal contentment, so not once did anyone ask me when I was going to get married. And no one thought I was gay, either. It was a perfect arrangement: they accepted me as I am, and in turn I gladly set aside the differences I had with them.

So despite my distaste for the patriarchal values my church upheld, I could ignore them. It was staring back at me  from the bookshelves of the people who invited me into their homes, but these were polite people who were content to talk about football and TV and leave any haggling over gender roles off of the table. Our church’s sermons were (for the most part) nonpolitical and focused on easy to digest topics like using Jesus as a role model.

All of that started to end when the gender wars heated up. I realized that the priorities of the people around me had shifted, and winning the gender wars (and the political wars) had become more important to them than living like Jesus.

I’ll explore more of this in Part 2.

 

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The problem with the Pledge of Allegiance

June 27th, 2012 / tags:, , , / categories: politics /

 

Try this thought experiment for a moment. Most of us are familiar with the Pledge of Allegiance:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation Under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.

Now imagine if this is how it went:

I pledge allegiance to the republic, one nation Under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.

Recently a thirteen year old girl settled a lawsuit  against her school district regarding her unwillingness to say the Pledge of Allegiance. I’m not sure of the details, but it sounds as though she refused because of her personal convictions. As a result, she was suspended by the school, and her parents fought the suspension unsuccessfully before they went through legal channels.

I must confess that when I was a kid, I didn’t say the Pledge.  I didn’t make a big deal about it, but starting around 3rd grade I had stopped saying the words altogether. On the rare moments when I sensed the teacher might be looking in my direction, I’d put m hand to my heart and mouthed the words without saying them. As I got older and more confident, I’d just stand and wait it out without making a fuss over it. I doubt that any teacher ever noticed or cared that I wasn’t saying the Pledge.

Now most debates over the Pledge center around the “under God” clause. I was an atheist up until I turned 16, but to me “under God” was harmless. Most of my peers weren’t that religious to begin with, so being in a room full of kids who never went to church made ”under God” meaningless.

My problem with it was pledging allegiance to the flag. I felt no allegiance to it, and it struck me as strange to pledge allegiance to a piece of cloth hanging on a pole. Besides, Brazil and Argentina had cooler looking flags. So when I heard the pledge, I felt as though the flag was just a little misdirection so people wouldn’t notice what it was really saying: I pledge allegiance to the republic. To my childhood sensibilities, that sounded like something that Darth Vader would have his subjects recite out of fear.

As I got older I outgrew my Star Wars analogy, but the flag still struck me as a frivolous symbol that actually got in the way of what we were really pledging allegiance to, which was the United States of America. So as a teenager I wouldn’t say the pledge because it sounded insincere, particularly given that God and the flag weren’t terribly important to most of my fellow high schoolers. The United States meant a lot to me, but Pledge was still meaningless.

I still feel no allegiance to the flag. I respect what it symbolizes, but my allegiance is to the people here and the sacrifices of people who made this nation possible, not the flag.Nowadays I do say the pledge, and to be honest I “get” its noble intentions a bit more than I used to, but I mostly say it because it is meaningful to a lot of people who served this country.

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Progressive or Liberal?

June 26th, 2012 / tags:, , / categories: politics /

 

I decided to open my blog with a recent conversation I had regarding political labels. A friend of mine was frustrated at how quickly liberals flinch at being call liberals. This was a hotter topica few years ago,when “progressive” became a popular alternative to the dreaded L-word, but time gives us the luxury of seeing how things played out. In my opinion, it did not play out well.First, a little background. A few decades ago conservatives like Lee Atwater, Newt Gingrich, and Rush Limbaugh helped turn the word liberal into a slur. Their efforts were so successful that now when people hear the word, even moderates envision unamerican malcontents.And so we’re left with a political climate where it’s safer to come out as gay than to admit that you’re a liberal.  Even our local liberal rag takes pains to scrub the L-word from its pages and relabel itself as “progressive.”

The underlying problem of all of this label-changing is that too many liberals have embraced the conservative argument that liberalism can only succeed if people don’t fully realize that they are supporting liberal causes or candidates. Throughout Obama’s first term, Democrats have taken pains to identify their policies as pro-Republican. They felt safer operating under the guise of conservative policies and feared admitting that  their legislation reflected liberal ideology.

The end result is that too many liberals have embraced the meme that conservatism is the norm in our country, and that leaves liberals working within the margins of society while trying to reassure people that they’re not really liberals, they’re progressives. I say that we should reclaim the word “liberal.” let’s not forget that there was a time when the word “conservative’ was just as much of a political liability as the L-word is now.

Sure, there will be short-term consequences, but we shouldn’t live in fear of offending  people. It will take time, but people respond to the courage of ones’ convictions, and once we reclaim the label, more people will see that liberalism really isn’t that radical, and many moderates will realize just how liberal they are. That’s why I proudly call myself a liberal.