Faithfully Following Christ under an Anti-Christian President

    What's it look like to faithfully follow Christ when when much of Christianity has been co-opted by a political kingdom, instead of the kingdom of heaven? Particularly when that political kingdom is *distinctly* anti-Christian?

     How should a Christian who believes in America's founding principles best love America, when America's leader is abandoning those principles like a first or second wife?

     Most of the traditionally loudest Christian organizations are staying silent on this, so I've put together a few thoughts:

• Embrace ignorance. No, don’t accept it - don’t take it in. But give your ignorant friends/relatives a hug. Let them know you love them. Look at them as you would someone about to go to the doctor to get their test results. They’re not evil - their mind is full of toxic, poisonous untruths and they don't even know yet. Jesus said, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” But before they can know it, or hear anything we have to say, they need to know that we love and accept them. That’s what tears down walls, ends defensiveness, and provides space for healing. That will give them room to consider what you have to say. How?
  
• Be kind. Unfailingly kind. I need to work on this one, because the implications of our politics truly hurt people, and can even kill. It’s so easy for tempers to flare up and to attack the person instead of their wrong fact or bad policy. When the stakes are so high, it’s easy to forget Paul’s advice in Ephesians 4:2, that we be “completely humble and gentle” or Philippians 4:5, where we’re told to “let our gentleness be evident to all”. Remember how Jesus viewed the crowds of his day, in Matthew 9:36. “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” These people have been attacked by vicious wolves, which leads me to my next point:
  
• Realize that many Americans are casualties in a decades-long propoganda war. There’s a saying that fish are the last ones to discover water. Similarly, it can be the hardest for Christians to see that what they’ve been *told* their whole life is good and wholesome (Low taxes! Science is a hoax! End handouts! Buy guns! Bomb our enemies!) goes directly against, in many cases, the teaching of the One they follow. The work to co-opt the evangelical church for the Republican party began in the late 70’s, and that work was originally centered around the issue of abortion. We accepted the idea that God was opposed to abortion on demand, and over time, (abortion = evil democrats : republicans = party of Christianity) became a subconscious thought-terminating cliche. It’s taken at least 4 decades to get to this point, and so it will take time, patience, and kind repetition to get out of it.
  
• Explain patiently. Don’t judge. Explain again. It’s so hard to be patient when those we’re talking with talk about our Muslim former president, how ISIS will destroy America if we don’t stop them, or how democrats just want more abortions. All of those are easily verifiable as false, but they’re also (to varying degrees) deeply ingrained in the minds of our loved ones. It’s like someone who has a tumor that makes them angry, but they have tumors that make them wrong. Truth is the chemotherapy, but if the dose is too high - whether that’s in the form of too much information, or too judgmental of a tone (How could you get angry at me?! You shouldn’t have gotten cancer!), no one will want to take it, and they’ll go back to the comfortable lies that tell them everything currently happening is fine and just, and that Trump is saving America and making it great again.
  
• One step at a time! Change doesn’t happen overnight. Realize that believing what you already think is safe and comfortable, while moving to a new worldview is scary and disorienting - and those feelings have *no* correlation to whether the worldview is based in reality or not - just whether it’s new.

     That, I think, is what faithful Christianity calls us to with our friends, neighbors and loved ones who have fallen into fake news, been seduced by fear, and become hungry for hatred. But what about Donald Trump and his advisors and assistants?

• Oppose evil. As Christians, we are certainly called to oppose evil, wherever it may rear it’s head. But as we do that, we should keep in mind the words and model of the author and finisher of our faith. He told Peter to put his sword away, and specifically explained that his followers don’t *fight* for him, because his kingdom is not of this world (Matthew 26:52, John 18:36). We’re also told in the Bible to lead peaceful lives (1 Timothy 2:1-2), honor the king, and entrust ourselves to him who judges justly (2 Peter 2:17-23). At the same time, we live in a democracy now, and to borrow from V from Vendetta, instead of answering to our king, our government answers to us. Here’s what I believe constitutes a Christian role under a hedonistic, uninformed, and anti-Christian president.
• Speak truth, consistently. Repetitively. Every time Trump or his team tell a lie or falsehood, we should work to make sure people know 1) the truth, as all truth is God’s truth - truth cannot ever go against Christianity (assuming Christianity is true, which I do) and 2) either that the speaker is a liar, or the speaker is not concerned with ensuring their words are truthful. People need to know what they *can’t* rely on for information about reality - and Trump’s twitter account is exhibit #1. To some of us, that might feel disrespectul. But Nathan & John the Baptist are our examples. Nathan directly rebuked King David for committing adultery with Bathsheba, and having her husband Uriah killed. John the Baptist repeatedly told Herod that it was wrong to be married to his brother Philip’s wife. One of those lead to repentence, and one lead to beheading, but both were carrying out their duty faithfully to consistently speak truth to those in need. When possible, use scripture, because the Bible says in 1 Timothy 3:16 that “all scripture is inspired by God, and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness.” Rebuking and correcting is what we need, and the more those come from Scripture, the more likely it is to be heard by Trump’s constituents.
• Call liars and propogandists what they are. I said above that we need to embrace the ignorant. But at some point, and this surely applies to Trump’s team and the leadership of the Republican party, we have to assume they know basic facts. Maybe not every detail, surely not everything we’ve read, but Trump knows beyond question that there were not 3-5 million illegal votes, which *all* went to Hillary (particularly as the only one that’s been found so far was for him). When he repeats this, as he does, that is a lie - especially once he continues to repeat it after having been corrected the first time. That means, as surely as 2 + 2 = 4, that Trump is a liar. It is not wrong, disrespectful, or unChristian to say so. That said, fake news is a thing on both sides, and we need to be careful we’re only calling our enemies out on things that are verified to be false. “I saw a headline” or “there was a Facebook meme” doesn’t cut it, and we need to be careful to model concern for truth. We need to have the noble character of the Bereans, who are described as searching to determine if what they heard was true (Acts 17:11). But when we can determine the President or his team know one thing and say otherwise, we should point that out to our brothers and sisters. No need to be mean or disrespectful, just “Here’s another time Trump has been caught tweeting a lie.

• Pray for repentance. Pray for deliverance. The high priest Samuel lived under a corrupt king, Saul. And when God rejected Saul as king, Saul still asked Samuel to pray for him. Samuel already knew, though, that he had that responsibility. He says, in 1 Samuel 12:23 “As for me, far be it from me that I should sin against the LORD by failing to pray for you. And I will teach you the way that is good and right.” Similarly, we have a responsibility (and to be frank, we need God’s intervention) to pray for Trump. We can pray for him to see his need - that he is a sinner in need of God’s forgiveness - and we can also pray that, should that happen, he sees what grace could look like in governance, and changes his policies. Those are both unlikely things - dramatically so, with what we know of his personality, but we serve a God of not just the unlikely, but the impossible. Romans 8:11 describes what God does in us, saying, “And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.” The lesson is the same regarding Trump - if God can raise Jesus from the dead, God can penetrate the impenetrable crust of Donald Trump’s heart to make him see how he hurts people and how he needs to change. That said, it wouldn’t be wrong in any way to pray that Trump might see that he’s over his head and step down, as well - after all, that’s already evident to many Americans and most of the world. But we can pray for God to both change Donald Trump, and prompt him to resign (or Republicans to impeach him). Proverbs 21:1 says, “The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will.”
• Protect the powerless. However, as long as Trump is in power, we also have a Christian duty to stand for those who cannot speak for themselves, and to protect those who don’t have the power to protect themselves. This is a theme all throughout scripture, but it’s particularly clear in the Old Testament, when God was designing a country to work with his priorities. In Deuteronomy 27:19, Moses taught the people of Israel, ‘"Cursed is anyone who withholds justice from the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow." In Deuteronomy 10:19, he told them, “And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.”  Proverbs 19:17 makes clear our concern shouldn’t be for ourselves, but for the poor: “Whoever is generous to the poor lends to the LORD, and he will repay him for his deed.” While I don’t know any reason we wouldn’t want God to be on the hook to our society due to our care and compassion for the poor, for the next 4 years while our government moves away from that, we should look for ways to fill that gap personally. This was a priority of Jesus (feeding the hungry, healing the sick - except those with pre-existing conditions), and also of his apostles. In Galatians 2:10, Paul recounts that they asked him to remember the poor, which he was already eager to do. James, the brother of Jesus, sums the whole thing up when he says, in James 1:27, “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” I can think of no clearer poster child for “polluted by the world” than Donald Trump, and we should, as followers of the Way, do all we can to provide a clear contrast to that in how we care for orphans, widows, refugees, and aliens.

     There’s no promise that if we do these things, we can turn the tides of ignorance, fear, and hatred that have arisen in our land. But we serve a big God, who has a big love for all people (Luke 15), and I think this is what it looks like to be faithful to his love for those who are different, whether they’re “aliens and strangers” from abroad, or “aliens and strangers” in our own neighborhoods and families.

Cart, Cart, Cart, HORSE!

Christians have really messed up the last thirty (40?) years or so, to increasing degrees as we retreat in the "culture war" (ugh). We really seem to be people obsessed with sex, and specifically, other people's sex lives. "If you're not into X, then don't X - don't try to stop other people from X" is something I hear people say (usually meaning don't get gay-married, but the formula would fit all sorts of things). Why can't we mind our own business?

So non-Christians, lapsed Christians, casual Christians, and heck, even dedicated Christians who've gotten cart-focused, here's the horse that goes unsaid, the reason for this "obsession" we have with sex, sex ed, marriage, etc.

Christianity teaches that God loves you, more than you ever thought anyone would love you, and because of that he wants you to have the best life you can*. And one of the biggest parts of your happiness, or lack thereof (I really like what Robin Williams said - the one thing worse than being alone is being with someone who makes you *feel* alone), is your emotional connections to others - and sex is a huge shortcut, or potentially, a short-circuit, for those connections.

So what you do with it is important - who you do it with, when you do it, all that is very important. But it's important because God wants you to be *ultimately* happy - like a dietician won't tell you to go ahead and stick with your Taco Bell diet (even though that always leads to short-term enjoyment), or a financial planner won't tell you to put 20% of your investments in lottery tickets (even though, well, they *could* all come up winners, maybe). God has advice, about sex and marriage, because he loves you and wants you to have the best life you can**.

Christians might disagree about things that go in the cart - sex ed, divorce, gay marriage, etc - with differing positions on those things. But the horse*** - love for people and wanting what's good for them - is worth our focus, attention, and concern.

That's an oversimplification. There are other factors, and other angles, but that's far and away what does drive the cart of "Why won't Christians shut up already and mind their own business when it comes to sex and relationships?"

* Within the scope of whatever things you're going to go through (that is, he doesn't magic away things like war and unemployment, normally).

** I believe God is probably a utilitarian, wanting the greatest good for the greatest number of us, with some constraints and variations. But unlike us, he's good at math and calculating all the impacts. Where we say, "Taco Bell is delicious", he sees the 3 hours shorter *that* beefy 5 layer burrito makes our lives, leading up to a painful heart attack. For most people, utilitarianism in practice boils down to, "Here's a thing that makes my nerve endings happy - and I don't have to stab anyone for it - so I should do it!"

*** More broadly, the horse also includes things like feeding the homeless and housing the hungry, but 1) Keep in mind our leader told us to do our good deeds in secret - a lot of Christians do a lot of amazing things there, and 2) Much as I disagree, it's fair and allowable to believe that's not the role of government, and so we can be compassionate, caring and charitable while voting to shrink those programs.

Running Faster in the Wrong Direction

So, Ted Cruz is running for President, as of today.

For some reason, both he and Liberty University (the largest evangelical college in the country) thought that he should announce his candidacy there. Some thoughts:

This really drives the unspoken narrative that if you're a democrat, an independent, or even a moderate Republican (as Ted Cruz is one of the most extreme members of the Tea Party), Christianity and evangelicalism especially are not for you. Which, if you're here, you know I find upsetting.

It's also just ugly to me that a Christian university is letting an extremely polarized politician speak there, let alone announce their presidential bid. God is not a Republican or a Democrat.

It's particularly ridiculous that they let *Ted Cruz* speak there, as very few politicians have been as callous toward the poor, the immigrants, and the oppressed, which evangelicals who actually read their Bibles will know God wants us to look out for.

The last line of the article about "Liberty" University and this libertarian-ish candidate: "Student attendance at the convocation is mandatory." Ironic, though I suppose that's about chapel, generally, and not this particular chapel (which somehow is being led by a *distinctly* un-Christian politician). While highly ironic, it adds to the kafka-esque "I feel like I'm taking crazy pills" sensation - a Christian university is requiring it's students to attend a political rally. Rend unto Ceasar, indeed - or something.

All that said, the propoganda video he linked on his "announcement tweet" is amazing - my inner 3rd grader (who believes all the ridiculous "America is the free-est place in the world, since we INVENTED freedom" stuff I was told growing up) really wants to vote for him when I watch it.

Sigh.

Lack of World Vision

I was so disappointed to see this week that so many people cancelled their child sponsorships, that World Vision felt they needed to retract their policy change that allowed legally married gay or lesbian people to be their employees.

Regardless of one's view of those relationships, what that means is this: large numbers of Christian people, who claim to follow Jesus, thought it was more important to take a stand against gay marriage, than it is to feed, clothe and educate the 22,000~ children under 5 who die each DAY of easily preventable causes.

"Then He will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me."

"They also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?'

"He will reply, 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.'

I don't quote that to question anyone's salvation; there's only one Judge. But that passage highlights that Jesus' priority is how we treat those in need and those outside the fold. Both groups, sheep and goats, called Him Lord, but only one was allowed into heaven with him, and it was based on their fruit and their actions.

Evangelical Christianity, I share all your theological beliefs, but I could hardly be more disappointed and frustrated.

When World Vision, one of our largest charities, took a step forward to heal the damage we did by not protesting Fred Phelps and not clearly proclaiming the love of God for all people, and elevating homosexuality above our own sin as magically worse than our own extramarital sex, divorce, pride, gluttony, and greed, we not only didn't go along, but to make our protest heard we stopped feeding the hungry.

We stopped doing exactly what Jesus told us to do, what James says in 1:27 is religion that God our Father sees as pure and faultless, what God Himself said it means to "know me" in Jeremiah 22:16, to make what, fundamentally, is not a "top tier" theological point, and in so-doing, rebroadcast to the world our hatred of and disdain for gay and lesbian people.

Fundamentally, we've lost our vision for what God tells us His priorities are in the world - whether or not you believe gay marriage is right or wrong, there's no denying that. We've taken an ultimately insignificant, over-politicized fight, and to win that fight, we've compromised the one thing that is effective in showing the lost who God is and what kind of love he calls us to.

Richard Stearns, World Vision's CEO, is one of my heroes, and everyone should read his book The Hole In Our Gospel. I have no doubt that, under his able leadership, they'll be able to shuffle and stretch things so that the poorest recipients of their aid are not hurt by this. Hopefully followers of Christ step up as well, to keep the ministry going where some have cancelled their support. But I don't believe the same can be said for the evangelical church's testimony, and those who are poor in faith.

It's hard to imagine the events of this week haven't driven some, already questioning their faith, out of the church, and hasn't kept others, who had begun to turn towards Christ and Christianity, thinking that if there *is* a loving God in this world, Christianity isn't the place to find him.

In that respect, I can't help but think that many Christians and Christian leaders who responded to this news by speaking against and cutting support for World Vision, have shown a deep lack of the world vision Christ wants us to have.

Pascal's Wager and the Planet

Without question, Blaise Pascal is one of the smartest men to have lived ________ (you can fill in the blank with any set of time that includes his life - week, month, year, and century are out, but millennium, 'in the last 500 years', or "AD" would all work fine). His intro sentence on Wikipedia says he was a "French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Christian philosopher." A true interdisciplanarian. Further down, "after three years of effort and 50 prototypes he invented the mechanical calculator."  Oops, left out "while still a teenager".

When he was 16, he "wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry" - I'm twice as old as that, and I don't even know what projective geometry *is*. He proved that vacuums do exist (a vacuum had been believed impossible since Aristotle), so you can thank *him* for your Roomba, as well as giving us this great quote, "There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus." I'm leaving out a whole bunch of his achievements, but here's one more: "And, prompted by a friend interested in gambling problems, he corresponded with Fermat on the subject, and from that collaboration was born the mathematical theory of probabilities."

One of his contributions, in the realm of religion, or philosophy, or probability, or however you'd like to categorize it, is called Pascal's Wager. He laid out the following statements: "God is, or He is not." "A Game is being played... where heads or tails will turn up." "According to reason, you can defend either of the propositions". "You must wager" (not choosing a position is the same as believing there's no God). "Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing." "Wager, then, without hesitation that He is."

Pascal recognized that we couldn't verify the claims of Christianity in the same way we would claims of probability or physics, but, knowing what the stakes were, he proposed it was very wise to take measures to protect oneself from the risks of inaction (and, if you're reading this and not a Christian, while I find his vacuum quote more compelling, this is a great reason to consider the claims of Jesus).

However, I believe Pascal's approach is also useful in a lot of areas of life - the basic lesson that, when the stakes are both very high and very one-sided, it's simply pragmatic to take the safe bet. One place this makes *very* good sense, although the individual stakes are not *as high*, is climate change.

If you know me well, you're probably tired of my refrains, warnings, discussions and Facebook posts about climate change. Most people are; congratulations, you find me just as boring as the rest of the population! (Be kind to my wife; she has the burden of living with me *every* day, with no escape.) I believe the science behind climate change is both sound and convincing, but the real problem with discussions about climate change isn't as much disagreement about the science, as it is that most of us don't know what the stakes are.

The danger of climate change isn't that we don't get to build snowmen in the winter, or that our air conditioning bill goes up. It's not even record wildfires like we saw this summer in Colorado, or mega-tornadoes cutting huge swaths across towns like Joplin, Missouri. No, the real threat of climate change involves two "f" words. The first one is flooding; most of us have seen pictures on the news at various times of flooded homes. My parents, little sister and little brother had their home flooded in 2008, and it was one of the most devastating things that's ever happened to them.

But the good thing about flooding, in typical human experience, is that the waters go back down, you're able to go back and salvage what possessions are intact, and if it's feasible, clean or rebuild your home. If climate change predictions are correct, and there are only reasons to think that they are (though perhaps underestimated), we won't be facing floods from rivers, streams, or broken dams that last days or months (my parent's house was flooded for six weeks); we'll be looking at oceans rising (due to melting ice caps), flooding our cities (as many of the largest cities are near the coast, both in the US and throughout the world), and the water never leaving. It's a pretty bad scenario, and by itself, just the risk of it ought to motivate us to get our collective act together in terms of pollution, fossil fuels, and CO2. But that's the little f.

The big F, the much more deadly and disturbing F, and the far less familiar F, is famine. Climate change is affecting, and will affect, global rainfall patterns, and while some local areas will have better growing conditions (parts of Canada and Siberia), the parts of the world that currently excel at feeding 7 billion of us are going to be increasingly more difficult to get adequate yields from - especially regions that are currently more arid. I had the fortune of growing up on some of the best farmland in the country, and as much as I wished I lived in the city so I could have friends, I didn't realize that friends required social skills, and there were a lot of privileges to growing up on the farm, as well.

This summer, I was back to visit our family farm for about three weeks, in the midst of the worst drought America has experienced in roughly 60 years. Not only did I drive from Texas to get there and back, but I did a fair amount of driving around in the Midwest, as well, and on every farm that wasn't irrigated, the corn was either brown and dead, or wilted and unlikely to produce more than a few kernels per ear. My parents were lucky to have an irrigation system for their field, but not only was that expensive, but for their farm, it uses 1100 gallons of water *per minute* (that's twenty 55 gallon barrels). Per minute! It was great for them, and for other farmers during this drought, to have these systems, but many don't because of the cost. And at 1100 gallons per minute, if major droughts should become more common, I question how many years groundwater tables are able to sustain that use.

This is an important question, because while the world *does* produce enough food for everyone, we don't distribute it well enough or use it wisely enough for everyone to have what they need, and about 20,000 children under 5 die every day due to malnutrition and similar effects. If we start producing less food, those numbers will skyrocket, as will the non-fatal effects of malnutrition.

In any case, if climate change occurs as scientists are predicting, many of the world's major cities will flood, but that's not actually the real threat. The real risk of climate change is that droughts will increase, crops will fail, and millions more will die of hunger or be malnourished than is already the case. The ironic thing is that the CO2 emissions that would cause climate change, relatively, come from the global rich and middle class, with our higher rates of consumption, but it's the world's poor who won't be able to afford higher food prices and would be faced with starvation.

I don't know how it came to be that we live in a country where *Christians* are the main opponents of calls to steward what God has given us, but it's past time for that trend to stop. We can't leave care for the planet, and the poor it most effects, to the non-believing any longer.

Developing ways to raise efficiency, use less oil, and lower CO2 emissions has a cost (though probably a lower cost that flooding many of the world's largest cities), but when looking at the overall stakes, the relatively small costs to avert disaster, compared to the ongoing deaths and losses due to floods and famines climate change would bring about, I believe Blaise Pascal would say, regardless of what doubts you may have about the work of scientists, you should wager, without hesitation, that climate change is a real threat we must prevent.

All Truth is God's Truth - Why I'm not a Young Earth Creationist

I used to be a young earth creationist, which made sense to me even though science disagreed, for three reasons: A. I knew evolution was in crisis, and scientists always assumed the scientists in *other* fields surely had evidence for it, because they didn't. B. I knew scientists had an anti-God bias that kept them from checking out what creationists had to say about flood geology. C. I knew if scientists ever *did* take an objective look at creationist writings, they would say, "Oh, wow - this explains what we see a *lot* better than evolution and an old earth."

Turns out, though, each of those pre-suppositions I approached the issue with isn't true. The evidence for both the age of the universe (~ 13.73 billion years) and the common descent of living things is unanimous, overwhelming, and indisputable. Particularly, on the evolution side, since we've developed microfluidic processors (I don't know what those are, but they've enabled us to analyze DNA in around an hour, instead of the years the Human Genome Project took), we can see leftovers in our DNA of viruses our ancestors had, that have been passed down to us. So far, we've found 14 of these virus remnants that we have in our DNA, which chimps and bonobos also have in the exact same position - because our shared ancestors had those viruses (the same "viral strand" would indicate having the virus, but where it would be in our DNA is entirely random - since all of them occupy the exact same position in *their* DNA as in ours, there's no possible explanation but common ancestry). 

The age of the universe is equally well-evidenced; what I learned in my private Christian school - that scientists keep making it older to try to give enough time for the laws of probability to allow for evolution - just isn't true. Most simply, we can see light from stars 13 billion light years away, and light years are both measures of distance, and the time it takes for light to travel that distance, so that light came from a star 13 billion years old, therefore the universe must be 13 billion years old.

There is one other possible explanation for both sets of data, that a few people have suggested. It usually goes like, "Just as Adam and Eve weren't created as infants, God created a mature universe", but if one understands the science, it requires God creating light from stars that never existed, or creating viruses that can only be explained by common ancestry, and that not just implies, but requires, that God is a deceiver, creating a world that looks old but isn't to "test our faith". But we know from Scripture that God "cannot lie" (Hebrews 6:18) and it's actually a trait of the devil, not God, to deceive the non-believing (2 Corinthians 4:4).

What do I believe? I believe it was wrong of me to dismiss the findings of science without having scientific grounds to do so, and I believe astronomy and biology should fill us with awe and wonder, not denial, and finally, I believe learning what science tells us about God's universe, life, and how they came to be, is the most compelling evidence there is backing Isaiah 55:9, "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."

W.W.J.D.?

Who Would Jesus Drone?

I'd like to think that, if American Christians actually knew how we conduct our drone wars, there would be national outrage, but I honestly don't have that much confidence in our national conscience.  I hope to be completely mistaken about that, but it's unlikely we'll ever find out, because it's not a topic that gets a lot of time on the evening news, and a lot of us don't watch the evening news anyway.

I don't claim our pilots in Missouri or Nevada just want to kill people, and I think it's great that we can keep our troops out of harm's way, to a much greater extent, with drones than more invasions (for the most part; at the same time, I worry that for most Americans, only concern over American casualties keeps us from being more war-prone than we already are).

My problem is with how the decisions to fire are made. I find it dangerous and Orwellian to call any male in the area of a drone strike a military combatant: "Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent." (http://goo.gl/WVDzb)

My problem is with our own self-assured dishonesty of how few civilians we've killed (None this year - high five! Except that's been thoroughly shown not to be true, even with very conservative methods). http://goo.gl/ojg3e

My problem is that we've used drones to kill a U.S. citizen, without trial (http://goo.gl/fM7bV), for nothing more than exercising his constitutionally enshrined right to free speech (to say reprehensible things, but the Supreme Court established, without question, that we have the right to do that, even to the point of advocating violence, in Brandenburg v. Ohio (http://goo.gl/T9hU2). Then, just two weeks later, we killed his 16 year old son (who, of course, we described as a military combatant - after all, he was killed in a drone strike), also a US citizen, which Obama's press secretary had the audacity to justify by saying, "I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they're truly concerned about the well-being of their children" - that's right, it's his fault for not choosing a more responsible father (http://goo.gl/c0KW2).

I have a big problem with us using drones, strategically, to kill those who show up to help the wounded or come to attend a funeral - no risk of civilian deaths there (at least not if they're male - those are enemy combatants!) (http://goo.gl/6ZZsb). This swells the ranks of our enemies, because God has given all of us a desire to see injustice against our loved ones avenged. If a far away, faceless foreign government killed your wife, father, son or daughter, in a group, because there might be bad guys there too, are you going to tell me, with a straight face, that you wouldn't consider (or want to consider, for the cowardly or principled pacifists) joining the side that's fighting that? (Lots more details here: http://goo.gl/Ir2tt)

I'm not a pacifist, I'm not opposed to the United States as a country defending herself. But I do think, ultimately, as citizens of heaven and aliens and strangers in the United States, what we do to stay alive is an important moral question with a lot of repercussions, perhaps more important than whether we stay alive. Some may say it's dangerous for me, just a civilian, who's not privy to any classified intelligence on our drone program, to be asking these questions and making moral judgments about what we're doing; I believe it's more dangerous not to. I believe, when government demands the power to kill, it's our job to call for strict care and oversight, and while I don't think any of our military leaders, or President Obama, or President Bush, want to see civilian deaths, I don't think we're trying hard enough to avoid them.

As Christians, when we talk about these things, I think we need to consider the words of Scripture, and especially those of Christ. So I'll leave off with two verses that I think we could benefit from giving more consideration. First, Proverbs 20:7 "Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God." Second, Jesus said to Peter, on the night he was betrayed, “Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword." (Matthew 26:52)