The central problem for we humans is that we are able to imagine eternity but find ourselves trapped in finite, fragile and frequently messy bodies. An event like the coronavirus throws this in our faces, reminding us of our fragilities not only as individuals but as a species.
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   In some ways, our imaginations make it worse. The animal who gave the virus to its first human host only knew it felt sick. It wasn’t worried about its children, unemployment or a breakdown in the food supply chain. We can imagine all the possibilities, good and bad.

   The good possibilities include human medicine, which exists because a number of imaginative humans started looking through microscopes to find reasons for human illness beyond the anger of the gods. The good possibilities also include our ability to feel empathy for each other, to communicate with each other and to work together for the common good.

   The bad possibilities include getting too close to the wrong person in the supermarket, a massive economic depression and, worst of all, that this thing just won’t stop no matter what we do and, even if it tapers off, will be back next year and the year after to keep killing us.

   I think and write a lot about the human need for meaning and the various ways it expresses itself. In many ways, it’s our best way of keeping our heads when general chaos starts gaining on us. In fact, it’s our only way. But this time there’s no room for armchair philosophy. Reality is using real bullets. We need to as well. The pen may be mightier than the sword but you don’t go to a gunfight with a pen. You go with a song.

   God didn’t do this to us and God can’t fix it. He’s off the hook for this one. It’s our own success as a species that has done this to us. We’ve been fruitful and multiplied beyond anything they could have imagined in Eden and our skill with inventing machines that drive, float and fly has eliminated the protection that mountains and water used to give one tribe from another tribe’s troubles. We’re one big tribe this time. We’ll all get through this or none of us will get through this.

   The thing we have in common, the thing that makes us different from all the other fragile creatures scurrying around the planet, is, once again, imagination - our ability to make pictures in our heads and impose them on the raw stuff rolling around us. A sunset is beautiful only because we say it’s beautiful. And the virus is ugly only because we say it’s ugly. God didn’t make the sunset, we did. And God didn’t make the virus, we did. In fifth century B.C. China, this would have been a local problem. We made it, with cities full of people and international travel. And we can fix it. With faith. And that song I was talking about a few lines up.

   There are two kinds of faith. There’s external faith, where you believe in a system someone else has constructed for you as your way of dealing with the unsolvable.  Then there’s internal faith, the faith every one of us needs to get up in the morning. You need to have faith you’ll make it through the day alive. You have no way of proving or guaranteeing it, but if you can’t make that act of faith you won’t be able to take your first step. Whether you’re a soldier going into battle, or just a person pulling into Philadelphia traffic on the way to work, there are plenty of things waiting out there to kill you, some of them maybe already inside your body. The virus simply reminds us of that, and brings the commuter’s real odds of getting killed uncomfortably closer to the soldier’s. 

   External faith is in over it’s head with this one - going to church can literally get you killed. It’s up to our internal faith, individually and together, to get us through this. We’re bluffing. We know it, just like we do every morning we get out of bed. But we get up anyway – we breathe, we move, we act – and that’s our song.
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   We’re counting on the same imaginations that get us into this mess to get us out of this. The odds are good that it will, for the species, and hopefully the survivors will learn something from it. But no one of us knows for sure we’ll make it, far less our kids, parents, friends, jobs or security. But our only way through is to keep up that bluff and that song, to keep up that faith.
​
  More to come (an act of faith if there ever was one).

​The sudden resurgence of Anti-Semitism in the United States is as disturbing as it is surprising. There was no “event” that triggered it. Jews in America are as assimilated as the Irish and are, in most cases, just as hard to identify in a crowd. Consequently, the attacks tend to be focused on Synagogues or the Hassidic Community, where the symbols of Judaism are easier to target (and kill).
 
          The fact that Jews tend to be identified as liberal-leaning, urban, powerful in the business and media worlds and, worst of all, intelligent  to some degree explains why they wouldn’t be popular with one side of the current American divide. Also, as is perhaps the most dangerous reality of our media-driven world, one highly publicized attack inspires the next. But that’s certainly not enough to explain why this is happening.
 
          Sometimes in trying to understand a modern problem you need to go back to its roots. The anti-Semitism that has been business as usual in the western world - general disenfranchisement, persecutions, inquisitions and, ultimately, the Holocaust - finds its source in the notion in the “Christian” World that the Jews killed and rejected Jesus. This idea, like most ideas that feed mass paranoia, couldn’t be further from the truth.
         
          The Jews didn’t reject Jesus as the Messiah. All of his followers, everybody who accepted him during his lifetime – his apostles, his disciples, John the Baptist, Mary and Martha, his Mother, everybody – were Jews. The Jews who rejected him were the members of the religious leadership, an elite group who were in collusion with the Roman Empire to keep their own people in line and who were the frequent targets of Jesus’ verbal attacks. He attacked them because they didn’t represent their own people but instead used their religion to exploit them (a trend which has survived). The priests had good reasons for wanting Jesus dead - but the simple truth is that they didn’t kill him. The Italians did.
 
          The exoneration of the Roman Governor in the official Gospels and the shifting of blame for his execution to “the Jews” is beyond improbable. The high priest was appointed by the Roman Governor. Caiaphas worked for Pilate. His job was to keep the common people under control.  The conversation between priest and governor regarding Jesus would have been very brief:
 
Caiaphas: “This guy is stirring up the people. Help me with my problem before my problem becomes your problem.”
 
Pilate: “String him up. And you owe me one.”
 
          The notorious image of a Jewish crowd yelling “His blood be on us and on our children” that was used to justify two thousand years of persecution is one of two things:
 

1. A scripted ploy by a handful of the high priests’ people, or​
2. A complete fabrication to whitewash Roman involvement in Jesus’ death after Christianity was co-opted by the Roman Empire in the third century with the formation of the Roman Catholic Church. 
   

          Either way, “The Jews” had nothing to do with it. St. Peter’s Basilica is named for a Jew. So is Christmas.
 
           While the current resurgence in anti-Semitism seems to have regurgitated the “protocols of Zion” myth about a secret coven of Jewish millionaires plotting to take over the world, it undoubtedly has its origins in its “Anti-Christian” back story.  Which is what it is, a story.
 
          Somebody needs to say so.
 

A few days ago, I posted an account of my encounter with the Cathedral Rock “vortex” in Sedona, Arizona. I had assumed prior to my visit that the reports of “swirling energy” at the vortex sites were simply New Age tourism. To my surprise, when I made my way to the top of the mountain trail and put my palms against the looming rock face, I felt a totally unexpected “vibe” – some kind of energy I couldn’t account for.

Never one to just let things alone, I went out of my way over the next couple of days to climb two similar mountain trails with large rock formations on top that are NOT identified as vortex sites, just to check for vibes.

Nothing.
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When I put my palms against the formations on top of both Bear Mountain (AZ not NY) and Chimney Rock, I could feel the roughness of the rock face, some feedback from my own heartbeat, still pulsing after the climb - but no trace of the “hum” that had come off Cathedral Rock.

Only one thing to do – scientific method – look for replication. So, early this morning, I hauled my aching bones up Cathedral Rock for a second time, arriving at the “End of Trail” sign on top of the mountain a little after 8 AM. I wanted to allow myself a little time with the spirits before the Arizona heat kicked in. ​

This time I made sure to rest and rehydrate for a few minutes before approaching the rock face. My biggest anxiety, after going through all this sweat and trouble, was that I’d feel nothing and would have to conclude that my first encounter had been some kind of fluke or my overactive imagination.

No problem. The vibe was still there.

It’s hard to describe – the closest I can come to it is the idea of an electric fan running on a table top and what you might feel if you lightly squeezed the leg of the table – vibration without movement, hum without sound. This time I also noticed a slight feeling of warmth from my palms to my elbows. So here I am standing on the edge of a cliff with my palms pressed against an unknown energy source (the rock face is to the right of the "End of Trail" sign in the picture).

​Now what?

After I posted my first experience with “the rock”, I was advised to try seeing it with my “third eye”, which is, to those who know, located in the middle of your forehead (every day I learn something). So, having nothing to lose, I pressed my forehead against the rock and waited. The vibration was, if anything, more intense. I held my position for about a minute, then went back to pressing with my palms, just waiting to see if anything would “happen”. For no particular reason, I closed my eyes.

Click.

In my mind’s eye I could see a swirling cloud of dust and twigs. A face emerged out of the swirl, an old face, at first threatening, then smiling. The swirling cloud expanded till it seemed to be hanging over the valley at my feet. Then the whole cloud silently exploded over everything (as in “swept to the four winds”) and was gone. I opened my eyes. It had only taken a few seconds. Everything was the same around me. Oddly enough, I had no sense of fear or the  “what the hell was that?” feeling  like I’d had on my first encounter. I guess I’m getting used to chatting with the spirits. I leaned my back against the rock face for a few minutes to rest and then began the long trek down the mountain.

Unfortunately, I have no words of wisdom or message for mankind to report, at least not yet. After making the first report, I felt it was only right to share the follow up. The official pamphlets on the vortex tours (in little pink jeeps, with professional guides) urge the participants to have no specific expectations, but to simply be open to whatever comes or doesn’t.

​Went there, did that. Twice.
​

I can always be surprised. In case I’d forgotten it, I was handed a reminder this morning a couple of thousand feet up on the side of an Arizona Mountain.
​
For readers who have not been keeping up with my day to day affairs, I’ve been spending the last few months in Sedona, Arizona, house sitting for an old (and generous) friend. I’ve taken frequent hikes along the trails through the Red Rock Mountains for which the town is famous. The Sedona area is also famous as a center for New Age activity, due in great part to the fact that the scenery lends itself to a sense of awe – awe being defined as “there’s something a whole lot bigger than me going on here”. Psychics, Astrologers, Alternative Healing Practitioners, and Spiritual Centers abound, as well as tours to several local sites described as “vortexes”.
 
What a vortex is is somewhat ambiguous, though the broadest definition is “a swirling center of energy that is conducive to healing, meditation and self-exploration”. Some go a bit further and suggest that a vortex represents a gateway to other dimensions, but that’s another discussion.
 
At any rate, it occurred to me the other day that I had been hiking around the trails for weeks but had never checked out any of the vortexes. As a lifelong student of philosophy and religion, this felt like an oversight. My basic position on such things is that they manifest the human need to believe. The Red Rock mountains were formed millions of years ago by massive geologic forces. Reportedly the entire region was once under an inland sea – hence the mountains’ resemblance to giant coral reefs. But there’s something about the austere beauty of it all that suggests to many that some other force is at work, some center of energy that an open heart and mind can tap into. The similarity to kneeling in a candle-lit church is inescapable (been there, done that - a lot).
 
With that similarity in mind, I set off early this morning  to climb the trail to Cathedral Rock, a reported vortex site which looms like a …well… Cathedral over route 179 just Southwest of Sedona Center. Getting to the rock involved a steep and sometimes tricky climb up 500 feet of ascending boulders and red gravel. I wasn’t alone. The Rock is a well known local attraction and there were several climbing groups and a couple of young families joining me on my trek. The kids had an easier time in some of the tight spots.
 
When I finally got to the spot marked “end of trail” I found myself very high in the air, with the Cathedral walls on my right and a smaller pinnacle on my left. The view of the surrounding hills, valleys and mountains were worth the sweat and effort, not to mention the serious contribution to my weight loss program. After a few minutes to catch my breath and some necessary hydration, I decided to check out the Rock up close. So far, aside from relief at having made it to the top, I hadn’t noticed any special “vibes” or feelings at the site.  But since I’d been drinking Gatorade instead of meditating, I thought a closer inspection was in order. So I went right up to the rock face, leaned forward and put both palms flat against it.  Surprise time.
 
When I put my palms to the rock, I could feel a deep, quiet vibration that reverberated down to my elbows – the "felt" equivalent of a low hum but with no sound. It was constant, with no change or variations. I took my hands off the rock and it stopped. Nothing had changed around me. After a few seconds of “What the hell was that?”, I put my palms on the rock again. Vibration is back. I held my position for a few minutes but nothing changed, no increase or decrease. I went back to my pack for another hit of Gatorade. My mind was distracted by some of the climbing challenges I expected on the way down and the day was getting hotter by the minute, so I didn’t stay around long. I mentioned the “vibe” to a few of my fellow climbers at the top and they gave the Rock a try. The vibes were still there (probably have been for a million years or so). They weren’t as surprised as I was. They’d hauled themselves up the side of a cliff to see a vortex and they got their money’s worth.
 
So – I made it down the cliff in one piece. No mood changes or visions yet, but I’ll let you know. It wasn’t a great big occurrence, no burning bush or anything, but since I was expecting nothing a vibrating wall rock that looks like a Cathedral is worth reporting.
 
And my New Age friends can have their “I told you so”  laugh.
 
 

 We’re all familiar with “The Grapes of Wrath”, the iconic American film based on John Steinbeck’s novel about 1930’s Dust Bowl Refugees trying to find a new life in California.  I’ve seen it couple of times over the years but a few days ago an insistent  little voice in the back of my head said “You need to watch this movie NOW”. So, for $3.99 on YouTube, I revisited Tom Joad, Preacher Casey and the Joad family’s bumpy odyssey across America. I was stopped in my tracks like an overloaded Ford truck. It could have been filmed yesterday.

            Just to hit the main points:
         
         Thousands of ordinary working people have their ability to make a living pulled out from under them by a combination of climate change and a market crash they had no control over.

          Having heard of “enough work for everybody” in a far off State, they pack up their meager belongings and make their way with great risk and difficulty across highways, mountains and deserts to reach the “promised land” of California.

          When the migrants finally arrive at “the promised land” they are stopped by police at the border and treated like unwelcome refugees.

          They manage to gain entry to the promised land, but can only survive by working long hours for meager wages and living in deplorable conditions in camps designated for them.
 
          When a Government Agency offers them decent living conditions, the locals accuse them of being “Reds” and attempt to use violence to make the migrants “go back where they came from”.

          For further details, turn on CNN.

          With a change in language, and a switch in direction from West to North, this scenario is playing out with a vengeance along America’s southern border. Instead of southwestern and midwestern states, whole countries in Central America are no longer able to economically sustain their populations due to a combination of climate change, population growth, crime and government corruption. Thousands of people are making the long and dangerous trek north in hopes of finding some way to survive in the “promised land” of America. Americans, fearing that the refugees will take jobs away from U.S. citizens and bring disease, crime and overcrowding with them, are tightening border controls and setting up internment camps.

          Fact check: there wasn’t enough work in California for all the migrants seeking it, any more than there are jobs and housing waiting with open arms for the tens of thousands of refugees teeming at our southern borders. In both cases the migrants are acting out of a combination of desperation and misinformation.

          Second fact check: In neither case were or are the migrants an invading force. There is no orchestrated evil intent behind either these movement, just ordinary people trying to survive and feed their children.

          Third fact check: existing government policy either here or in Central America is insufficient to deal with this situation. The great Depression and the effects of the Dust Bowl droughts were only “fixed” by the radical shift in American Political Policy referred to as the New Deal (and referred to as a “Red” conspiracy by its detractors), as well as changes in farming methodology to conserve topsoil and the eventual return of rain to the Midwest in 1939. The New Deal happened because the American people voted for the president who pushed it through.

          In his second inaugural address, Franklyn Delano Roosevelt said:
“I see one-third of the nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished . . . the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”  

         At this point in history, over a third of the world is “ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished”. Across the world, whole continents are approaching that situation. We can’t hide from it any more than California could hide from the stream of fellow citizens coming down Route 66.

          A major part of America’s identity has been our image of ourselves as a refuge for those seeking a better life. At this point, that image is wearing thin. The call for a wall to “keep them out” was supported by enough Americans to elect a President who promised to build it for them. This isn’t just racism, any more than it was in the Dust Bowl days, when people on both sides of the border were white. In both rural and urban areas, American poverty is on the rise, despite statistical postings of a “surging” economy. Our sense of our country as a place of abundance where there’s enough for everybody no longer matches the facts.

      That being said, attempting to see the fate of today’s refugees as “not our problem” and thinking we can “send them back where they came from” is a serious failure to see the big picture. Borders are at best artificial, especially in today’s interlinked world. A political solution will be impossible to come by without a human solution to create it.

       In the last scene of the “Grapes of Wrath” film, Mother Joad, despite the hardships her family has suffered, affirms that they will survive because “we are the people”. The people did survive. The Dust Bowl came and went.

​      Our new twenty first century Dust Bowl is bigger, deeper, and threatens all of us. It will take all of us to survive it. All of us or none of us.

      Tom Joad for president.
 
         
 
         
 

​     It seems as if the whole world took a deep breath yesterday when Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral caught fire. It didn’t matter if you weren’t French. It didn’t matter if you’d never actually been to the Cathedral in “real life” (I have – more on that in a moment). It didn’t matter if you were or weren't a believer – in the Catholic Church that built it 850 years ago, in the Virgin Mary for whom it is named, or in any God at all. French or not, believers or not, we all felt something important was being lost, or at least threatened. In an increasingly divided world, I think we need to take a good look at anything that brings us together.
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    An evangelical atheist might be quick to point out that the building is a living symbol of the union of Church and State that oppressed millions for centuries and that the modern world might be better off without it. The raw fact is that it was built with funds extorted from the sweat of the working people by a Church and Nobility who were glorifying themselves as much as they were honoring Jesus’s mother. This was not lost on the crowds during the French Revolution, who beheaded the Cathedral’s statues of Kings (but spared it’s Pieta). All true. In this case, however, the truth is beside the point.

    I visited Notre Dame many years after leaving the Catholic Faith I was raised in. It made no difference. In that looming hall, lit by its gigantic stain glass windows, in all that echoing silence, I knelt. I couldn’t just be a tourist. The question of what I was kneeling to has been placed on the table by fire.

    Notre Dame means many things symbolically. First of all – Paris. Paris is more steeped in mythology that any spot in the Western Hemisphere and Notre Dame is central to that mythology. Second perhaps only to the Eifel Tower, Notre Dame is Paris. And Paris is love, romance, illusion – the city of light. To have so massive a light go out would be unthinkable. It would shake our world. It did. Why?

    The answer is painfully simple. Human beings don’t live by the sweat of our brows. That’s how we eat. We live by the strength of our symbols. Notre Dame is a symbol not only of Paris, but, perhaps more importantly, of immortality. If it had been built in the 1990’s, the fire would have grabbed the headlines but nobody would have held their breath. This Cathedral has lasted. It has survived wars, neglect and time itself. Adolph Hitler ordered it burned with the city around it and his own general refused, the mythology of beauty being stronger than the mythology of war, even for a warrior.  

    These days, I’m enjoying a sojourn among the Red Rock mountains of Sedona, Arizona. The fact that Sedona is a center for New Age activities is, I believe, entirely due to its surroundings. Walking a trail among these massive stone monuments, I find myself having the same feelings I did when I knelt in Notre Dame – a sense of humility before the beautiful, the immortal. The fact that the mountains are no more immortal than Notre Dame’s flammable wooden ceiling is, as I mentioned before, beside the point.

    To the human observer, both the mountains and the church are, ultimately, works of art. And art is art because of how it speaks to us. The argument about whether the Red Rock Mountains are the work of a chance geological upheaval a few million years ago or the work of a Divine Artist I leave for another discussion. The impact is the same.

    Mountains are called “cathedrals in stone”. The reality is that churches are mountains in brick and wood. From the beginnings of human religious thought, the gods came down from the mountains. Art of any sort is our attempt to make our own mountains, our own immortality.

    A thousand artists took 300 years to build Notre Dame. The kings and bishops didn’t lift a finger. Beauty that endures says something to all of us. It’s what keeps us going. It’s what keeps us human. We need it now more than ever. Parts of Notre Dame are made of wood. Other parts are made of stone, stone from the mountains of France. The wood is gone as all things go in their cycle. The stone remains. New artists will rebuild the rest.

    Long live Notre Dame!
 
​

     Although I have not been a practicing Catholic for many years the powerful symbolism and messages contained in the stories that fueled my belief still affect me deeply. Although I’m not in church, I know very well what day it is.

   In the Christian tradition, Palm Sunday is seen as the first step on the final path of Jesus of Nazareth’s ministry – steps that would lead him to the Temple, the Last Supper, Gethsemane, the Cross and finally to Resurrection. The event is reported in all four gospels and is described as the first time in his ministry that Jesus, the itinerant preacher, entered Jerusalem, the center of the Jewish faith. He had initially built up a following in Galilee, his home district, and his influence had steadily grown despite, or perhaps because of, his ongoing criticism of the official religious leadership. His entrance into the city in so public a manner was an overt challenge to that leadership and set in motion all the events that followed. Whether or not any or all of this took place exactly as reported is beside the point. In matters of religion, as with most serious events in human life, the significance of the event is more important than the details.

      In Jewish religious tradition, Jesus arriving riding on a donkey was significant in that it invoked the prophecy from the prophet Zechariah, "See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey".  The combination of arrogance and humility in this  act is worth looking at. Riding in at the head of a procession of cheering supporters was a dramatic statement that “I am important” and a clear challenge to the existing order. The fact that the mount was a beast of labor and servitude, as opposed to a horse, a beast of combat and military authority, sends a message that is central to the Christian Idea: your “King” is one of you.


    In the Roman world, a victorious general would enter Rome the head of his army in a horse drawn chariot, in an orchestrated display to the public of the power of the existing order. The irony of this Passover in Jerusalem was that the Jewish people were celebrating their deliverance by God from oppression in a situation that found them once again under the control of an oppressive power, with no Moses in sight. There is little doubt that to many of Jesus’ followers, he was seen as the one who would drive out their most recent political oppressor along with the religious leaders who were cooperating with them. The poor, the vast majority of the population, paid taxes to both Caesar and the Temple.  How times have changed.


    The twist, or, given its massive historical impact, the “swerve” in the Christian message is that the “King” did not oppose his enemies by force of arms or thunderbolts from heaven, as in all previous mythologies, Jewish or Roman, but by his total and utter humiliation and surrender – not by the sword but by the cross.  The only crown he would win was a crown of thorns.


    Palm Sunday sets that dynamic in motion. Its implications continue to be celebrated, revered and for the most part misunderstood. On Palm Sunday, Jesus was riding not to a celebration but to his death. The burning of today’s palms to be used as next Ash Wednesday’s ashes acknowledges this. Given the continuing similarities between his world and ours, It’s not a message we can afford to miss.

​One of the major seeming contradictions in the contemporary national meltdown over immigration is the insistence by some that America’s identity as a “White Christian Culture” is being corrupted and threatened by a constant influx of non-white non-believers. Those on the other side of the debate, citing the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth about charity toward all people, sees this position as anything but Christian. The answer to this seeming contradiction is actually very simple if you look at the facts. “American Christianity” has little or nothing to do with the Jewish preacher who faced down a lynch mob two thousand years ago to save a woman caught having sex with a man she wasn’t married to.
 
          To start with the obvious, Jesus wasn’t white. He was a Semite. He was of the same race as Mohammed, Albert Einstein, Osama Bin Laden and all those Muslims we’re trying to keep out. The only white people Jesus ever met were the Italians who executed him. He never heard a word of English in his life. In fact, anything we would recognize as English didn’t exist during his time. By the time Christianity came to America, in this case the thirteen original British colonies, it was twice removed from its Palestinian origins.
 
First Remove:
 
          Christianity started out as a small Jewish sect centered around Judea and Galilee, but very quickly took off as an international religion of the poor, who were, even more than now, the vast majority of mankind. It was the first religion to jump tribal/national boundaries. As Christianity spread through the Greco-Roman world, it took on many of the mythological and philosophic underpinnings of the existing cultures. The most significant of these underpinnings was the idea of Jesus as divine. In the Greco-Roman religious world, demigods were plentiful. In the Jewish religious world such an idea would have been incomprehensible. God was one, an invisible spirit, who could not even be depicted artistically - remember the commandment against “graven images”. The idea that he would impregnate a physical woman would have been blasphemy.  The apostle Paul, a Jewish Roman citizen who never actually met Jesus in the flesh, is credited with fusing these two traditions into the “pregnancy by the holy spirit” that became the core of the Christian tradition.
 
          The destruction of Jerusalem by Rome in 70 AD effectively put an end to the original Jewish version of Christianity. Alexandria and Rome became the centers of Influence among the numerous Gentile-driven sects that replaced it. In 325 AD or thereabouts, the Roman emperor Constantine, recognizing that the spread of this new religion was a threat to the State/Church union that supported his empire, made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. But in return for that, he insisted that the various local sects organize their divergent regional beliefs into a consistent body of dogma. The resulting Council of Nicea effectively created the Catholic Church, with Rome as its center of influence.
 
          For the next 1,200 years, the Catholic Church for all practical purposes was Christianity, with the Popes, the vast majority of whom were, unsurprisingly, Italian, exercising a high level of international influence that both supported and competed with the existing secular Governments. The fact that the Church outlasted the Roman Empire might be seen as Jesus’ revenge, but the fact of the matter is that the wealthy and dogma-driven Church that emerged had little in common with a penniless Jewish carpenter executed for stirring up the common people.
 
Second Remove:
 
          In 1517, Martin Luther, the real father of American Christianity, wrote his “95 Theses” in Latin, protesting what he saw as abuses in the Catholic Church. The printing press, which had been invented less than 100 years before, allowed his objections, after being translated from Latin to German, to be widely distributed among the newly literate populations of Germany and Austria. The resulting Protestant Reformation was centered in Northern Europe, in opposition to the Italy-based Catholic Church. Luther’s most transformative idea was that the individual rather than the Church was chiefly responsible for his own relationship with God and had the right to both read and interpret the scriptures as he (or she) saw fit. Perhaps Luther’s most important contribution was a translation of the entire Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek into German so that everybody could read it.
 
          Luther’s bible influenced William Tyndale, who lived in Catholic England, to translate the New Testament into English from the Latin version used by Church clerics. His translation was too much influenced by Luther’s ideas for the Catholic Authorities, and he was arrested in Brussels and put to death for heresy. But the damage was done. Henry the Eighth of England was influenced by Tyndale’s earlier writing in his decision to break with the Catholic Church and create the Church of England. Tyndale’s translations became the basis for subsequent English translations culminating with the King James Version in 1611.
 
          The impact of the fact that these events in the religious sphere were occurring just as America was being opened to European colonization cannot be overstated. The thirteen colonies that became the foundation of the United States of America were populated by English Protestants, with a small Catholic population in Maryland (the non-white, non-Christian indigenous population either fled west or were decimated by smallpox).
 
          Luther’s principal of the individual’s right to read, think and choose for himself took fertile soil in the White Americas and culminated in a revolution against English rule that swept aside the very concept of a State religion. When the colonists threw out the King of England they also threw out the Church of England. For the next couple of hundred years, America was a white, Protestant country, the Civil War notwithstanding. Other religions were allowed to practice, but certainly not to run things. As recently as the 1960’s, the biggest obstacle to John F Kennedy’s bid for the presidency was that he was a Catholic. The black population, who had been forcibly converted to Protestant Christianity at the time they were imported for slavery, were kept for the most part illiterate, just as the Church had done with its people before the printing press, and were definitely kept out of the centers of influence.
 
          Since the 1960’s, this “White Christian Culture” has taken some serious hits, with the election of a Catholic President, the insistence on equal civil rights and education for minorities,  and culminating with the election of a half white, half black president. Although Barak Obama was a Protestant, the same push back that kept trying to prove he wasn’t an American also kept insisting he was secretly a Muslim.
 
So Here We Are:
 
          Those who are trying to cling to a “White Christian” national identity are clinging to a Christianity that the Carpenter of Nazareth could not have imagined, far less endorsed. Those who think that the true American ideal is an acceptance of all races and religions on every level of society also look to statements attributed to Jesus for their moral underpinnings.
 
          The question of our national identity is one we will have to answer for ourselves. Jesus, who never once in his life heard himself called by that name, has nothing to do with it.
 
          Anyone wishing to fact check any of the above has only to boot up their Google.
 
          We’re on our own.