​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.
 
         
 
           
 
         

The only good thing to come out of this past week’s series of horrific images of refugee children being taken away from their parents and caged by American immigration officials is that it’s shoved the situation in our faces in a way that is impossible to ignore. What may get lost in the moment is that the situation at the Mexican border is the tip of the iceberg – an iceberg that humanity’s ship is steaming for at full speed.
 ​

          It’s public information, though not being paid much attention to, that immigration from Mexico by Mexican citizens has been on a steady decline, while immigration from refugees from Guatemala and points south who are using Mexico as a conduit to the US is on a steady increase, especially among those attempting illegal entry – slightly more than half at this point. The reasons are also public knowledge – unstable or corrupt governments, civil wars, massive unemployment, mass starvation or near-starvation, total breakdown of fragile infrastructures. People risk sending their children north unaccompanied at the risk of their getting caught, killed or sold into modern slavery for one reason – to give them a fighting chance to survive. At least in their cages, they’re eating.
 
          Take the situation global - over 200 million people displaced by Middle Eastern and African civil wars, crashed economies and “disrupted food chains” looking for someplace to go. Europe is being flooded. Italy is getting heat from the rest of the E.U. for turning away a shipload of refugees. America isn’t the only bad guy this week - small comfort.
 
          The real issue, the big picture, like it or not, is that the world is simply getting too small to sustain the human race or, to put it more correctly, we’re getting to big for it to keep feeding us.  The developed world, who are using most of the planet’s resources (that would be us) have finally begun to level off their population growth. The rest of the world, especially the poorest, don’t have access to a drug store full of birth control options and couldn’t afford them if they did. They also don’t have access to a lot of things we take for granted, like toilets.  If they did, the Ebola virus wouldn’t exist. We’ve got most of the food, they’ve got most of the people. Do the math.
 
          What the situation at the Texas/Mexico border tells us is simply that there’s no way we can shut this situation out. And if Ebola solves somebody else’s population crisis, they’ll take us with them. There’s no wall high enough. The rest of the world isn’t going to sit there and starve while we check our Facebook pages. The entire human race will make it though this or none of us will.
         
         Anyone who wants to fact check any of the above is free to use Google. Like I said, nobody’s trying to hide it. The answer isn’t in the stats and never will be. The answer is right in front of us, where it’s always been - in the part of the human soul that looks at a refugee child crying and sees their own son or daughter.
 
          We’ve got a lot of work to do.
​

​Everybody can’t wait for 2016 to be over. It’s been a bad year for iconic celebrities, people who represent a particular era for those who shared it with then – David Bowie, George Martin, Carrie Fischer, Debbie Reynolds, Glen Frey, Muhammad Ali, Patty Duke - dozens more. We never met these people really, but we identify with them. They represent us, both as a generation and individually. And if death can get them, famous as they are, we all feel a bit more vulnerable. So a lot of us are thinking that if we can somehow sweat it out until this “dangerous” year is over we’ll all be somehow safer. That may be a comforting thought, but, unfortunately, it has very little going for it.
 
Death doesn’t know what a year is. The remorseless process of decline, decay and recycling the left over material has been going on for billions of years all over the universe (which is itself expanding towards inevitable burnout).  The process seems unlikely to stop when the ball drops.
 
What’s a year anyway? The approximate time it takes a single small planet to orbit its star. That was figured out by some very clever people a long time ago, and they used the information to help organize their time -but the rest of the universe could care less. Pluto takes 248 of our years to orbit the same sun we do and there could be planets out there that take a million to orbit theirs. So why does it matter? It matters because it matters to us. It’s our earth, our sun, our lives. This is where we live and this is how we manage it.
 
We are more than our biology. The body-soul split that many formal religions have espoused over the years isn’t supported by the physical evidence, but it still gives a pretty good picture of how we actually live our lives. Our sense of identity isn’t located in our hands, legs or kidneys. It’s in a symbolic “heart” that has little or nothing to do with the organ in our chests that keeps the blood pumping. We are what we imagine ourselves to be.
 
And a year is a year because that’s how we experience it. There are inexplicable trends in the way things go. Some years are better than others, for individuals, for a country, for a sports team, for the human race. We can analyze it all afterwards to try to explain why, what forces are involved, but that’s just to make ourselves feel better. There’s more going on here than we get or are likely to. If organizing it by years helps get us through the night, especially New Year’s Eve, so be it.
 
Hopefully next year will be a little kinder to us all.

             If hindsight can tell us anything about the “surprise” election of Donald Trump, it can tell us this – don’t mess with human belief. Belief isn’t about facts and figures, it isn’t about conclusions reached after careful deliberation - it’s not even about observable reality. It’s about what works for us.
 
          Our deepest held beliefs, the things we feel most - who we fall in love with, our sense of right and wrong, which sports teams we root for – are for the most part unexplainable. Something out there hits us and a part of us responds “that’s me”.  And that sense, once acquired, is hard to shake. Religious belief is obviously so, especially for people whose sense of reality from birth has been molded by it, but it applies to other beliefs as well. It takes a lot of bad behavior on your loved one’s part to make you stop loving them. If you’ve never been a thief it requires a pretty high level of desperation for you to grab someone else’s money and run. Your team can lose all season and you’ll be back in the stands next year convinced that “this year we’ll do it”.
 
          What happened in the election was that Donald Trump was able to inspire belief in his followers and Hillary Clinton wasn’t. It’s as simple as that.  Trumps’ message, hammered home over and over again, was straightforward an uncomplicated: “Your political leaders have sold you out to foreigners – your jobs, your neighborhoods, your security.  Elect me and we’ll take our country back.”  The “foreigner” definition got spread pretty wide, taking in religious and ethnic “others” of all sorts - in short, anybody who’s not us. Almost exactly a quarter of the country locked into that message the minute they heard it. All the confusion, frustration and anxiety of the past two decades, especially the world since 9/11, was explained and solved in a single sentence: “They did this to our country and it’s up to us to fix it.” Once that moment of connection was made, additional information was neither welcome nor relevant. It didn’t matter that none of the experts (the ultimate others) thought that Trump’s simplistic solutions (“a fifteen minute meeting in the oval office”) would work, or how many women he groped. He was the man with the message and the message transcended the man.
 
          Poor Hilary was obviously more “qualified”. But to the true believers, this just made her one of them. The true believers wanted a “non-politician” for the most important political job on earth and Hillary Clinton was the living embodiment of everything they despised. And, worse, while she was able to inspire confidence in her supporters, she was not able to inspire belief. Her message wasn’t simple. She honestly faced the world for the complicated mess it is. The true believers didn’t want to hear it. And even her own supporters were followers not believers. She didn’t have the armor and shield of the message bearer to protect her from the non-stop attacks the other side kept throwing at her. It’s the same problem secularists have with fundamentalists. The fundamentalist’s message is simpler and stronger. When the battle lines are drawn, open mindedness loses out to someone with God on their side. In the end, confidence wasn’t enough. Belief was. It always is.
 
          Half the country didn’t vote. You can bet that the believers did, every one of them. That silent half, whether they meant to or not, have validated Trump’s message – that the American people have lost Faith (capital F) in their political system. He was right about that. Unfortunately being right about that doesn’t mean he knows what to do with the presidency now that he’s got it.
 
          What we do about it now will require more faith then we’ve ever had.

      I had two interesting things happen today. The first was getting the news, the minute I turned on my computer, that Bob Dylan, a guy who dropped out of college so he could go hit the open mics in Greenwhich Village, had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Since the first thing I did after I dropped out of the Catholic Seminary (though I did hang around to graduate), inspired by this same Bob Dylan, was to go hit the open mics in Greenwich Village, I was of course interested.

​

​       The second thing happened a few hours later while I was waiting for the bus. A couple of Watchtower ladies were sitting at the bus stop next to a rack of little magazines, one of which bore the intriguing title “Did Jesus Really Exist?”. I took a copy, thanking the ladies for contributing to my chances of salvation (I need all the help I can get) and paged through the magazine while I waited for the bus. It turned out to be the usual attempts to document the actual flesh and blood existence of “Historical Jesus” from various sources, some more reliable sounding than others. I was still reading when the bus arrived, and that’s when the two interesting events smacked into each other and the question hit me: Does Bob Dylan really exist?
 
          Dylan has some advantages over Jesus in this regard. We know for a documented fact that Robert Zimmerman was born on May 24th, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota, USA. He’s been photographed and recorded to an almost ridiculous extent. On top of that, he’s still alive and breathing. I’ve even seen him myself on several occasions, once from about ten feet away (after some serious pushing). But that’s not what we’re really talking about here. Robert Zimmerman clearly exists. But in many ways Bob Dylan, the fictional character he created in Greenwich Village some twenty years after his biological arrival, is as hard to pin down as Jesus.
 
          To get down to basics, nobody knows for sure when Jesus was born and the Bethlehem story has come under some fire lately. That being said, his birth is the turning point of our entire time measurement system. It’s 2016 because people decided to start measuring time from when they thought he was born. And let’s not even talk about Christmas. If evidence suddenly emerged that Jesus of Nazareth, Mary of Galilee’s flesh and blood baby boy, was actually born on September 22nd, there’d be a major financial meltdown – Macy’s would be out of business.  My point is that the biological facts don’t really matter. What matters, and why there are still magazines about Jesus at a Philadelphia Bus Stop two thousand plus years later, is that, whenever and wherever he was actually born, his ideas are still inspiring people. The same thing goes for Dylan.  If it came out that Robert Zimmerman was actually born on May 23rd and somebody made a typo on the birth certificate, it wouldn’t change a damn thing. 
 
          One of my favorite early Dylan Songs is one called “Long Time Gone”. In it he tells the story of how he ran away from home young and traveled around the country singing songs and working in carnivals. It’s a great song. There’s not a word of historical truth in it, but it’s still a great song – Bobby Zimmerman creating the fictional character Bob Dylan who just won the Nobel Prize, and whose work is still inspiring people. You could say the same thing about the Gospels, and somebody needs to.
 
          The Sermon on the Mount didn’t happen on a mount. I’ve seen it. It’s a great big hill and nobody standing on top of could have been heard by anybody more than ten feet away. Bob Dylan had actual microphones at those open mics - Jesus didn’t. The word that the poor would inherit the earth and that we were all responsible for each other was delivered to small groups on street corners and in houses with dirt floors. Those words inspired the people around him and turned the world upside down long after he was dead. The same thing goes for Dylan (and will keep going long after Robert Zimmerman passes on). There was a biological Jesus of Nazareth. You don’t get this much smoke without some kind of fire. And there is a biological Robert Zimmerman. But it’s what they inspire in other people that matters, not the raw facts.
 
          Jesus exists and, fortunately for us all, so does Bob Dylan.
 
 
 
 

​         
          Good Friday means a lot of different things to different people. Historically, it’s the day assigned to commemorate the grisly execution of a troublemaking preacher who was seen as a threat by the religious and civil authorities of his day and whose luck ran out during Passover. They were dead right about him being a threat. They were dead wrong about what they did about it. The most famous death in human history did more to propel his troublemaking ideas worldwide than they could ever have imagined.
 
          To a great many believers, it means a great deal more than even all that. To those who see Jesus of Nazareth as God incarnate, it means an entirely new twist on religious belief and the whole idea of who or what God is. The Greek and Roman mythology of Jesus’  time had plenty of stories about Gods taking human form, doing wonders and miracles (usually destructive) and impregnating countless mortal women with their semi-divine offspring. The Jesus story is different. In the Christian version, the creator willingly chooses to take on the full burden of creaturehood – cold, heat, hunger, thirst, diarrhea, ear infections, hives, pain, fear, frustration and finally, the big one – death itself – and a brutal death at that, at the hands of the very creatures he supposedly came to save from themselves. Breaking his eternal silence, he uses a human tongue (with a human need to swallow between every few words) to preach a message of love, forgiveness and human equality and seals his credibility by forgiving his killers from the cross with his last breath. That’s a lot to take in. Most people, even believers, don’t try too hard. They fall back on the official story “He died for our sins” so as not to have to take in the enormity of the idea. A God who suffers, who chooses to suffer, who chooses to become his creation, is very different from the idea of a disembodied spirit running things from a safe distance.
 
          Whether you believe it or not, the introduction of such a powerful idea into human thought cannot be underestimated. It changes who we are. If the barrier between the source of all things and the things themselves no longer exists, then anything is possible and we are more than our biology. Most official religions have worked hard to suppress this central truth, or to cloud it in fancy imagery that dilutes its punch. The trick, the game if you will, is to treat Jesus as a one time thing, as opposed to a revelation about the actual nature of things. The nature of things is that all living things suffer – humans are no exception – but what we choose to do about it makes all the difference. We can deny our mortality, fight back, enslave each other to feel powerful, pile up wealth as a protective wall – or we can accept our shared situation, band together and do all we can to make our brief lives as fulfilling as possible. This is the central idea behind all the religions that have managed to survive over time, and the central conflict that has faced the human race since we crawled out of the caves.
 
          This is a Good Friday to remember it.  Jesus died, but he never left.


     

         Once again, events on the political front are turning into “philosophy with live ammo”.  The ongoing success of Donald Trump and his popularity with millions of voters, while confusing and more than a little scary to many conservatives and just about all liberals, is completely understandable given the current state of world and (especially) our national affairs. Mr. Trump is filling a void.
 
          It happens in nature all the time – a stroke of lightning burns the air away and the surrounding air masses slam together to fill the gap - warmer waters in the Gulf of Mexico draw down cold air from the Arctic – it’s pretty much what runs everything. Human beings aren’t that much different. We are more than our biology and we need more than our biology. What every one of us needs in order to take our next step, almost in order to take our next breath, is a unifying sense of meaning that defines our place in the world and how we’re supposed to act in it. It’s not about religion. Religion was created (by humans) to fill part of this need. It drives everything we do, from the clothes we wear to our ideas about right and wrong to whether we pick up a pizza slice with our hands or use a knife and fork.
 
          Everything we do defines us and we create a mental/emotional structure around ourselves to support the definition. When church and state were linked at the hip, and everybody in the tribe was from the same ethnic group, this was easy to maintain. We knew who we were and what was expected of us, by our neighbors, the police, the king and even our God. It’s not so easy these days. What’s an American anyway?  We’re split down the middle politically, we’re ethnically and religiously diverse and faced with an economic disparity that is no longer supported by our culture. In ancient times, the king and the nobility were supposed  to be richer than the common folk. In America that wasn’t supposed to happen, at least not in the mythology that defined us. When we lose our sense of ourselves, especially if we feel that someone has taken it away from us, we get scared, and we get mad.
 
          Now for some of us, defining ourselves by our sense of diversity works. Feeling that we’re part of an all-inclusive global community feels just fine and is in sync with the world around us. This is very much my own reality, supported by the urban multi-racial, multi cultural world I’ve spent most of my adult life (and made my living) in. For someone who sees their own ethnic, religious and economic identity being chipped away at by foreigners who take their jobs, rich CEOs who export whole industries to other countries and murderous terrorists who hate their country and their religion, it’s not so easy. If my sense of identity is “White American Christian with a job” it’s not hard to get the feeling that somebody who was supposed to be looking out for my interests has sold me out. This leaves me with what might be called an “identity gap”. Donald Trump is filling this gap. Last night he spelled it out.
 
          In his speech after sweeping several Super Tuesday primaries, Mr. Trump pitted his “Make America Great Again” slogan solidly against the “Make America Whole Again” slogan his likely opponent had spelled out just a few moments before (in front of the same TV audience).  His exact words were “Make America whole again, what does that even mean?”. He knows perfectly well what it means, and so do his supporters. “Whole Again” means “Diverse and Happy With It”. “Great Again” means “White Christian Again”.  His assertion that he can bring back the money that’s fled overseas with a half hour meeting in the oval office, while flying in the face of reason and why the money fled (non white Muslims work for less) makes perfect sense if you see the whole thing as a case of mythological identity – they’ll come back when they see they’ve got their White Christian country back.
 
          His supporters have, with some justification, lost their belief that the American political system represents not only their interests, but, more importantly, who they are. They want their sense of themselves as Americans back, and feel that restoring it will bring their jobs back too. Blaming the “enemy” (Muslims, Democrats, Barack Obama and anybody who likes him) for the loss of both is the oldest trick in the book and Mr. Trump knows how to play it very well.
 
          None of his opponents, either in his own party or on the Democratic side, have been able to conjure up a competing mythology of identity. They’re going to need to, regardless of who wins the nomination or the election, even more if he does.