It is early in the morning as I begin to write this—too early in the view of most people I know. I awoke just before 5 a.m. in part because Tyson, our big Husky-German Shepherd mix, seemed to want to go outside in the bitter cold. (He did not; he merely wanted water, but either option meant taking him downstairs from our bedroom.) But I had already spent the past hour asking myself why I had not yet written this blog post but also pondering new and deeper features of its underlying theme.
Readers will notice that it has been a while since my last blog post. Some of that is because I was very busy in unexpected ways, and at times fatigue set in, not to mention profound unease in following the news of the past month. I spent a very full week in Florida in mid-January, working with a co-producer/videographer on the first segment of Planning to Turn the Tide, a documentary on community disaster resilience. I also spent the first week of February in Utah, filling in for another certified instructor for a Federal Emergency Management Agency training course on disaster recovery after she had become seriously ill. It was a hurry-up affair that prevented the cancellation of a four-day training course for 34 people and put me on a flight to Salt Lake City just four days after the course manager had reached out to me. It disrupted much of my intended schedule for a week or two thereafter, partly because I encountered problems with my laptop that were resolved only after I returned home.
But that is all just background noise for this blog post. In the mornings, while preparing for each day’s work in the class, I would turn on the television to hear some news as I dressed, shaved, and got organized. One day, Morning Joe was broadcasting live from the National Prayer Breakfast as President Donald J. Trump offered some rambling remarks that included an insistence that we need to “bring religion back.” After discussing the attempted assassination that he survived and other topics, and praising the late Rev. Billy Graham, he closed by saying, “I really believe you can’t be happy without religion.”
Almost immediately, the worm was in my brain, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. might say. What exactly did he mean by “bring religion back”? By itself, the phrase is relatively vacuous, crying out for definition. It means different things to different people, but what does it mean to him? And if it “came back,” how would he recognize it? The reference to Graham was somewhat telling but indefinite. Graham was popular with many U.S. Presidents, was on comfortable terms with power, but seldom spoke truth to power, at least not publicly. I am not gainsaying what Graham had to offer, but his focus was on individual relationships with God while remaining largely supportive of authority and the status quo.
Still, the question nagged at me for the rest of the week and ever since I returned home two weeks ago. Other than to “be happy,” for what purpose did he want to “bring back religion”? And would he be happy if it returned in some form that did not make him happy? Mature religion tends to unsettle people in their settled ways, making people ask profound questions not only of themselves, but of others and of the society around them. Anyone who has read the Bible and taken it seriously knows the question is as old as the prophets of the Hebrews, who often suffered and sometimes died, as Jesus himself did, for speaking truth to power. The religious conscience is not always at peace with current social mores or official power. What was the point of individual piety in the face of Nazi authority in World War II? What was the point for someone like Alexei Navalny in the face of Putin’s authoritarianism in Russia? There are times when minding your own business and cozying up to power is not the path of faith. I fear that President Trump has no serious understanding of this dimension of religion.
One critical aspect of speaking truth to power is the need to respect all people—regardless of social status, race, nationality, religion, and other factors—with decency, humility, and humanity. We all fail at some times to live up to this expectation, but it is especially tempting for those benefiting from wealth, privilege, and power to overlook the impacts of their actions on less fortunate, disadvantaged, or even just “different” human beings. It is far too easy to categorize and demonize, and it has happened far too often, not only in the seemingly distant past, but within living memory and in the present moment. When our spirituality, our belief in a common God, leads us to the irrevocable conclusion that we are all God’s children and deserving of respect, we gain the courage to stand up to bullies, not just schoolyard bullies but political and economic and military bullies, even and often at considerable risk to ourselves. Recent history is replete with examples, and we can say their names: Cesar Chavez, former U.S. Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, Cassidy Hutchinson, Alexander Vindman (now U.S. Rep.), Nelson Mandela, Bishop Oscar Romero, the list goes on. Many less widely recognized voices of conscience rise up in our communities, our houses of worship, our schools, year after year—peacekeepers on the streets of Chicago, nameless Russians who refuse to support or participate in a genocidal war against Ukraine, volunteers helping in disasters. God knows them by name, every last one.
The Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, bishop of Washington, delivers the Homily during a memorial service celebrating the life of Neil Armstrong at the Washington National Cathedral, Thursday, Sept. 13, 2012. Photo Credit:(NASA/Paul E. Alers)
Occasionally, one of them has the rare opportunity to speak directly to power and does so with remarkable dignity. One of them just two weeks before the National Prayer Breakfast was Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of Washington, who at the National Prayer Service at Washington National Cathedral on January 21, the morning after the inauguration, called on President Trump, who was in the audience, “to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.” He did not appear to look at her while she spoke, and he later demanded that she apologize, referring to her as a “so-called bishop” who was “nasty in tone.” I watched her comments on television. They were not “nasty.” They were respectful but stern, calm but committed, calling him to account, asking him to think about the people who were justifiably and deeply concerned about the direction he was taking and the chaos he was about to unleash. I had this reaction in mind, this expectation of episcopal timidity and subservience, when listening to Trump’s remarks just two weeks later about bringing religion back. Bishop Budde, after all, was bringing religion to him in that moment at the cathedral. He gave every impression of not liking the taste of the message.
On my flight home to Chicago from Salt Lake City, my eyes were tired and I ditched my usual practice of reading a book to pass the time. On the way there and on my final night in the hotel, I had finished reading Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine, which I had borrowed from the Chicago Public Library, a book that filled me with sadness at the torment to which some people have been subjected at the whims of the more powerful. My Nook e-reader was low on battery power, and I had not taken care to recharge it in a timely fashion. As I boarded the airplane, a flight attendant was handing out both earbuds and sterile wipes, and I took both from him, thinking that I may as well enjoy the trip by finding a good movie to watch, something I seldom do while flying.
Maybe the spirit was leading me, or maybe it was pure serendipity. As I scrolled through the options of recent movie releases on the screen in front of my seat, I at first failed to find any that really engaged my interest, but suddenly I saw the title Conclave, about which I had seen some very positive reviews. It is a fictional story, based on a novel of the same name, of Roman Catholic cardinals meeting to choose a new Pope after the death of a beloved leader of the church. Intrigued, I followed the story for two hours until we were nearly ready to land, as the cardinals debated and maneuvered, some wanting to return the church to more traditional ways, others wanting to preserve progress they felt had been made in recent decades. I will not play spoiler for those who have yet to see the movie, but at the end, following a dramatic car bombing just outside the Apostolic Palace, it boils down to a contest and confrontation between Cardinal Tedesco, a hardline traditionalist who shows some disdain for Muslims, and Cardinal Benitez, a Mexican who responds to him by talking of peace and respect for people of all faiths and nations, concluding his rebuttal by saying in his native Spanish, “The church is not the past. The church is not tradition. The church is what we do next.” In other words (perhaps my words), what matters most is the values we express in practice. (Italics are all mine.)
Moved by the film’s ending, but having to gather my luggage and find my way to the CTA Blue Line for the trip home late in the evening, I pulled out the printed version of my boarding pass and used the backside to make a long series of notes for this blog post, pen bouncing off the paper as the train stopped and started along the way. What is the church? What is religion? What is faith?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, reproduced from Wikipedia
I thought of the example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor who had opposed Adolf Hitler and Nazism and was eventually hanged after a drumhead court-martial in the Flossenburg concentration camp on April 9, 1945, just one month before Germany surrendered and two weeks before the camp was liberated. I had had the opportunity to try to enter the mindset of this doomed man when I took on the lead role during the pandemic in a church-sponsored online presentation of The Beams Are Creaking, a play about his life. It has made me think hard about how Christians should respond to tyranny and led me to read Timothy Snyder’s book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, which I used this past fall as the basis for a five-week series of well-attended Adult Forum sessions at our own church.
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. meets with President Lyndon Johnson. Photo from Wikipedia
I thought also about the example of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who had every reason to fear the irrationality and violence of Jim Crow racism in the South through the 1950s and nonetheless expanded his mission into the North in the 1960s and, in the face of brutal police attacks against peaceful marchers in Selma, persuaded President Lyndon Johnson to place his considerable political and moral authority behind the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He was felled by a bullet from a lone assassin in Memphis just three years later.
Both spoke truth to power. Both brought to bear the spiritual power of their faith in God to the society in which they lived. Without worrying about their popularity in the moment, both brought religion back by investing it with the power of new meaning in the context of resisting the iron rod of oppression in their own lifetimes. Both died for what they believed.
I speak only for myself, Mr. President, but my thought after the National Prayer Breakfast was, “Be careful what you wish.” As people of faith react to the problems and injustice they see around them, as they react to the degradation of their fellow human beings, as they follow in a long tradition of speaking truth to power, they may bring religion back. But it may not come in the form you want or expect. The best thing you can do, for yourself and others, is to listen and be open to changing your mind and heart.
Jim Schwab