I saw in the Washington Post, on the same page, articles about Congress making billions of dollars in emergency allocations to escalate military interventions on the other side of the planet... and an article about counties in the D.C. area begging local churches to hold paper and pencil drives in order to stock their schools with basic supplies. Then my own church started just such a drive.
I noticed that while Detroit, Cleveland, and New Orleans—among dozens of other places—slowly rust into large reddish blotches in the middle of the continent, and SUVs become de rigeur simply to make it to work for all of the potholes, six-lane highways of shining black tar are being laid in Iraq with American money.
I noticed that the overall tax rate in the United States is 17% of our gross domestic product, but our spending is 21% of our gross domestic product... both of which are amazingly low by the standards of most of the world. I hear a lot of people insisting that the way to lessen the gap is to cut spending; but I rarely hear that it might be a good idea to assess our priorities, or that increasing revenue is also a possible and possibly superior solution.
Then, on August 28, 2010, the anniversary of Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin held an "apolitical" rally seeking to "restore our national honor." In the process, I saw one of the greatest festivals of wealthy, well-educated, white self-pity in recent memory.
I was angry, because, as a relatively comfortable, well-educated, white, Protestant male, I did not want to be associated with this. At all. I found that what angered me most was the call to have your life remade, and to set things right, just as Christ, or perhaps John the Baptist, had done. Glenn Beck is not Jesus, and he is not John. I could not stand for the identification of the kingdom of the Founding Fathers with the Kingdom of Heaven; I could not countenance the identification of the American Dream with the Beatific Vision.
Caesars come and Caesars go, but Christ is forever.
I found that I possessed no way to talk about these issues that was not obviously Christian. I don't know what happened to my ability to talk about these things in secular ways, but I found I appear no longer to have it. Secular ways of talking about things couldn't go any further than to state the facts and, well... res ipsa loquitur. To explain, to talk meaningfully about anything, I found that I had to talk Christian.
I wanted to preach it, teach it, write about it, explain it. I needed to get it out. A trusted spiritual advisor said, "not to be too blunt, but... do so."
So this is my first inadequate attempt.
