Podcast

Make Saints is a podcast by Drew Downs.
Because (eternal) life is hard.

Jubilee

What is the jubilee? Why do we pretend it is impossible? And why are we afraid of it? Because it is true freedom.

Episode 28 of the Make Saints podcast: “Jubilee”

the episode script

With all the talk of the Queen’s Jubilee in England, it seems like a good time to think about what the jubilee is in the Bible.

Which, ironically, looks more like a people’s revolution than a monarch’s celebration.

The Overview

The Jubilee is described in Leviticus as a kind of intentional resorting of the world that restores and reclaims. It is very intentionally a thing about property and resources. So, in that way, it is specifically economic in scope.

But notice also how deeply theological it is. When we talk about restoration, we aren’t merely talking about, say, a simple, single transaction. We are talking about God’s commitment to Shalom: peace, justice, health, wholeness. God’s order is toward restoration.

In a sense, the concept behind the Jubilee is to bring wholeness and life to people whose lives have been destroyed and preyed upon.

It is the original call to overturn the tables of the moneychangers.

That’s the overview.

Let’s look at what the Bible says.

The Jubilee is described in the Hebrew book of Leviticus, the third book of the Pentateuch. We generally know of Leviticus as the book with all the rules and the one people use to condemn people. So, you might be under the impression that Leviticus is not a “good vibes” book. But dismissing Leviticus means missing incredible stuff like this:

Leviticus 25 begins with the description of the Sabbatical year:

“The Lord spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai, saying: Speak to the people of Israel and say to them: When you enter the land that I am giving you, the land shall observe a sabbath for the Lord. For six years you shall sow your field, and for six years you shall prune your vineyard, and gather in their yield; but in the seventh year there shall be a sabbath of complete rest for the land, a sabbath for the Lord: you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. You shall not reap the aftergrowth of your harvest or gather the grapes of your unpruned vine: it shall be a year of complete rest for the land. You may eat what the land yields during its sabbath—you, your male and female slaves, your hired and your bound labourers who live with you; for your livestock also, and for the wild animals in your land all its yield shall be for food.”
Leviticus 25.1-7

Then it goes into the Jubilee:

“You shall count off seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so that the period of seven weeks of years gives forty-nine years. Then you shall have the trumpet sounded loud; on the tenth day of the seventh month—on the day of atonement—you shall have the trumpet sounded throughout all your land. And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family. That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you: you shall not sow, or reap the aftergrowth, or harvest the unpruned vines. For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy to you: you shall eat only what the field itself produces. In this year of jubilee you shall return, every one of you, to your property.”
Leviticus 25:8–13

So if we’re following along:

Every person gets time off every week. No excuses. Bosses don’t get to make you come in on Saturday or stay late. Nobody “grinds” or does a “side hustle” to get a leg up. Because rest is that essential.

But rest doesn’t just go to citizens. It goes to everybody. And everything. So all people get sabbath. All livestock and fields get sabbath.

That’s one day each week. Then after six years, all of creation gets a sabbath year. So all that is good gets rest and restoration. To heal. And grow.

Then after seven sabbath years, we get a special year: the Jubilee. And in this everything gets reset.

You bought some land? It goes back. You went broke? Not anymore. But the point is that everyone gets to go home. Everyone. No matter what.

For many, this is a scary proposition. It doesn’t seem fair.

The bold impact of the Jubilee is obviously economic.

But it remains theologically grounded.

The jubilee is an economic revolution that specifically relates to the material interests of the people. So of course it will be economic. Because the mass of people’s struggle stems from their economic conditions. Throughout the vast expanse of history, the poor suffered in their poverty!

This is precisely because the economic conditions of populations will go toward exploitation. The landed few will collect from the many. Wealth will stream upward.

The promise of restoration in the Jubilee is not that half of the people won’t like the Jubilee. It’s that about 10% won’t like the Jubilee. And of that 10%, the top 0.1% won’t like it because they will lose lots of property. And the next 9.9% won’t like it because they will no longer be special.

But as for everyone else? We would get what is ours. And we would get to go home again.

The Jubilee is a community reset.

It is cause for celebration because the Jubilee is about rest and restoration. It is about restoring justice and equity to our community. And as much as it may sound a lot like social engineering or wealth distribution (which it totally is), it actually has the long view in mind.

Our problem with fully understanding the Jubilee is that we think about it as a singular moment. We’re probably wondering how it would work and what would happen if this coming fall, we had to prepare for the big reset. Who are the winners and who are the losers? How does it play out? What are the politics? How do we get rich people to go along with it?

This view is so devoid of context, it is criminal. Because we aren’t thinking about this as natural or how things work or even what God commands. We’re treating it like a pipe dream that would just be too disruptive rather than normal. As the thing we’re supposed to do. As the way God intends it.

It’s like being told you need to get an oil change every 5,000 miles, then getting to 4,998 and going “why didn’t anyone tell me?” Our existential fear of the Jubilee is unreasonable. Because it isn’t based in a sense of commitment to the restoring love of God.

God wants equity.

That is the point.

So God came up with a scheme that would let the poor get their property back. Rather than let all of the wealth flow up forever, the plan is to bring it back down. Not in a trickle, but a flood.

To free us. Free us from poverty. From servitude and work that prevents our flourishing. Giving us more than opportunity: but genuine peace.

For Jubilee is Sabbath. It is the ultimate Sabbath. It is restoring all things. Bringing justice, peace, wholeness to all of creation.

A promise that if anything gets out of whack and the wealthy and powerful get out of hand again, all that exploitation will end. Freedom will be restored. And all of God’s people can live in peace.

This is the foundation of what Jesus called the Kingdom of God. What we might now call Sabbath for All.

Jun 10, 2022
Bearing Arms

No, Jesus doesn’t encourage us to carry weapons. In this episode, we explore why Luke 22:35-38 says quite the opposite.

Episode 27 of the Make Saints podcast: “Bearing Arms”

The script for this week’s episode comes from the article: Why does Jesus tell the disciples to buy swords?

Jun 3, 2022
Out of the Way

Let’s be honest. The Ascension is strange. But it is strangely important. And it could really help us now.

What we’re called to do now
Ascension Day | Luke 24:44-53

Also recorded as Episode 26 of the Make Saints podcast: “The Ascension”

Let’s get the annoying part out of the way.

The ascension of Jesus into heaven is kind of hard to wrap our logical little heads around.

It is not half as cool as Elijah’s chariot of fire. (Now that’s an exit!)

We’re tortured by whether this is a God-based gravity ray that pulls Jesus out into the cosmos or if he is flying away to some distant planet. Which then brings up the all too easy and all too inappropriate Superman comparisons.

The logistics of the Ascension make this a day so many modern Christians just don’t want to think about.

And when we do, we either dismiss the ideas as far-fetched or we dismiss the ancients for their ignorance. Neither is a particularly good look for people of faith.

Honestly, the Ascension tends to be treated like an inconvenience rather than the moment of glory it is.

In the way

The Ascension reminds me of a trope in fairy tales. This is particularly evident in classic Disney animated features, from Snow White and Cinderella to more recent ones like Frozen.

You have to get rid of the parents.

I’m sure you’ve noticed. All the main characters are orphans. Or they are orphaned by being separated from their parents like in Tangled.

But the easiest way to get rid of the parents is to have them die. Kill them in the opening scene. Then make the child live through that trauma.

In fact, death, loss, and all sorts of trauma abound in children’s stories. Stories we read in school like Bridge to Terabithia and Where the Red Fern Grows. Movies we watched with our parents like Dumbo, Bambi, and The Fox and the Hound. These are all pretty traumatizing!

If we didn’t know any better, we’d think that adults were trying to traumatize us!

But what is at the heart of these stories is not the trauma. It is growth. Who the characters become because of the challenge before them.

And most importantly, how none of that would have happened if their parents were protecting them.

The Ascension is our traumatic event.

It is the figurative death of the parent. The thing that pulls Jesus away from the followers so that they can grow. And change. To become the true children of God.

And much like the characters in any of these stories, we spend the first half of our lives chasing perfection and living out our ego desires. As Richard Rohr points out, we can spend our entire lives in the first half of life.

We look at the literal, the rational, the self-centered version of faith. The one that focuses on what really happened and how this has to be real or a myth; incontrovertible and utterly defendable. And we do this to avoid growing up. To avoid becoming mature, faithful people who aren’t in control of the world around us.

Trying to rationalize the story of the Ascension is like a child trying to make sense of senseless violence. It isn’t the point. And it isn’t what we’re called to do. But it is what we get stuck in. We always get stuck in that.

Every time a young man murders children at a school or drives to a black community to massacre its elders, we try to make sense of the senseless. And so often we get stuck there. Because what we find isn’t sensible. And we knew that from the beginning. Because wise people told us it wouldn’t!

We go looking for sense because we want to avoid the trauma…and what it would mean to grow up.

Growing Up

In our context, growing up would involve dealing with white supremacy; and the fear that undergirds it. The economic, social, and religious priorities of a culture that chooses to not defend its children. While also choosing to not consider all children worthy of defense.

That we refuse to ensure healthcare, education, livelihood, safe movement to one another.

It is so like the reluctant hero spending the first half of the movie complaining about their trauma, running from responsibility, and pretending like they alone have nothing to offer. Life is all about consuming and avoiding.

Until they start to grow up.

The Ascension is our invitation to grow up.

It is the promise that we aren’t alone in this journey, but it is our journey. And we must show up for it.

Jesus gets out of our way. He’s stepping aside so each of us, you included, can step up.

Yes, he is being glorified, but in the same way, he is raising us up. It is our time to shine.

Ten days from now, we’ll have another principal feast. In that one, we’ll celebrate how the Holy Spirit comes to empower the faithful.

It is great for sure. But it’s also a bit like graduation day. Like the day they put the diploma in your hand, tell you to turn the tassel and they say: Now you’ve made it!

But everyone in that room knows they’ve already made it. You’re done with class. Grades are submitted. It’s all done. You’re done. And, of course, the formality is essential. I’m not saying it isn’t. But I’m saying there is that moment in between. And that is something like this one.

Because here they are, watching Jesus go. He’s passed the mantle onto them. It is their turn. They don’t know what that truly means yet, but they know it’s something. All nerves and anticipation. Excitement and trepidation. Waiting. Planning. Crying. Dancing. Scouring the internet for jobs…

That is the Ascension.

Not yet there. But heading in that direction.

Our Ascension

For us, beneficiaries of the Ascension and Pentecost, that moment may seem distant. It’s not. It is the crucible of all faith. And we all go through it. Some of us are going through it now. And some of us keep sending ourselves back into it because we don’t want to grow up.

But we don’t get to choose whether or not we age. Just whether we grow up. Graduate. Make something of this offer Jesus has for us.

To follow. Love. Share his peace with our neighbors. Make our neighborhood more just.

It is like learning to do the dishes. Or pay the bills. Adulting. You don’t have to love it. You just have to love your neighbors enough to do it. To be there for them.

This is why I love the Ascension. Jesus gets out of the way to show us The Way. Because after this, we have to figure out what to do. Which also means that if our children are scared, then we can also do something about it. And we already know what it should look like: a jubilee.

May 27, 2022
Commanded to Love

The hardest part about being required to love is not the obligation itself. It’s that we insist on judging each other’s attempts.

Episode 25 of the Make Saints podcast: “Commanded to Love”

the episode script

Each of us understands that we’re supposed to love people. It’s a thing we’re supposed to do. Love is good.

We ascribe high moral character to love. And we recognize that the generous sharing of love is a necessary component of life.

But what does it really mean to require love?

Let’s talk about love, Baby

One of the things we most associate with love is that it is something that we feel.

So I feel a sensation that I call love.

And then, because I feel that sensation, I desire to express that love outward to the object of my affection.

I feel love for you, therefore I express my love for you.

We all naturally understand the core reality of love has these inseparable parts: feeling and action: inside and outside.

Sometimes we desire to separate them.

We can’t really. But we desire to. We long to make the pieces essentially whole in themselves.

So love becomes only the emotion. Action is something else.

And we can play that rhetorical game for a little while and parse the situation out. But we’ll always get stuck because these divisions only exist in the life of the mind. And they breed a kind of distortion within our sense of reality.

Love as an emotion only is insubstantial. It stops being real.

Even as we know the emotions cause real responses in the body (sweat, attentiveness, arousal), the desire to remove its connection from reality has the effect of making it useless, inert, and lifeless.

If love is just an emotion, and emotions aren’t substantial, then it renders the substance of our very existence as nothing.

To love is action.

It is a verb. It is emotion and reaction. It is reactive and proactive. It inspires us to do crazy things and to sacrifice ourselves. Love is intoxicating and utterly fascinating.

Christian scripture also argues that “God is love.”

So this active: proactive and reactive emotion/passion is not only substantial: it is the same substance as God.

So then let’s be real with each other here. It is hard to overstate the importance of love.

Scripture also tells us that we must love.

Now, before our freedom-loving minds feel the need to go all Declaration of Independence on the idea that we have to love, let’s recognize the intention. If God is love and Jesus is like My Dudes, there’s one thing you need to do: love each other, shouldn’t we want to love?

Isn’t the idea that we must love kinda the point?

I get you might be super into rebellion and all that. I hear you. But just consider that this is kind of like saying there’s only one rule and if everyone follows that one rule we don’t need other rules? If everything hangs on this one thing, then maybe we all need to do this one thing…

Of course the rebellious aren’t the real problem. Most of us really do get it. I don’t worry about the people who never accept commands.

The love command inspires a greater danger.

Legalism.

When we’re told to love; when we are commanded to love, what happens? We now have a requirement. Something we have to do. I now have something I can measure my sense of success against. Did I do what I was commanded to do? Yes or no?

What also happens? I get to see whether or not you have done it too. And if I’ve done the love thing and think you haven’t and I feel bold and secure in myself, I just might tell you how not loving you are.

The thing about this is we know that none of this is hypothetical. This is what happens.

One of the saddest and most repeated experiences in my life has been just how often people come to me to tell me how much love they are not receiving. Some of it in the form of spiritual abuse and hate from people commanded to love them. This is always tragic.

I also frequently have people come who are evaluating the church and saying it isn’t loving enough; or not loving in the way they want it to be. And I don’t always know what to do with that assessment.

It is certainly real. But it also lacks a generous spirit.

We aren’t given a blueprint. We don’t have Ikea instructions to build love like a Billy Bookcase. There is no rigidity to this command or specificity to what it truly looks like.

All we know is that it involves sacrifice. Friendship. A sense that we should give as much love to our neighbor as ourselves. But it doesn’t tell us what to do in every single situation.

I’m starting to think that the enemy of love isn’t hate. It is evaluation.

We only develop hate out of a sense of devotion. But when we evaluate, we judge, make claims about others, and disassociate ourselves from the grace they are offering.

One of my favorite podcasts is The Anthropocene Reviewed, by novelist and vlogger John Green. And the premise of his podcast is to parody the “yelpification” of our culture by rating and reviewing our culture.

The podcast is witty and wise and so very elegant.

It is also revealing how reductive and ridiculous our desire to rate and review everything around us truly is. He gave the disease Cholera the podcast’s first 1 star review.

I suspect our obsession with evaluating one another is a symptom of a wicked disease in the culture toward perfectionism and workaholism.

Expecting perfection is an expression of cruelty.

Anyone who has studied perfectionism, both in psychology and creativity knows that it is a nice way of describing cruel reductive thinking that sabotages our work. Perfectionism is what prevents a novelist from writing a follow-up to a masterpiece or prevents a student from performing on stage in front of her peers.

But perfectionism is also what allows a teacher to berate her students or a customer to leave an angry review.

We understand this enough to share the well-traveled phrase: don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. But I’m not sure we fully internalize what that means throughout our lives.

And I genuinely think that evaluating each other, like each of us is God’s chosen culture critic, is killing us.

The love command is not an invitation to evaluate our neighbors.

Of course I am as guilty as anyone. And there is nuance worth exploring to this. But the purpose is to affirmatively love those around us rather than evaluate the love those around us share.

And as much as it is useful to differentiate one’s sense of love from another’s, to clarify just how your love may differ from their vision of it, we shouldn’t do this as if this critique were actually us showing love.

Love each other. If that’s the point, we really can’t go wrong with keeping that the point. After all, the command is to love, not “rate and review the love of those around you.”

And for me, I’ve found that it starts with loving myself more generously. The de-yelpification of the culture starts with me. And my willingness to even love myself.

May 20, 2022
Equal

What is equal? What is the difference between equality and equity? And why is the distinction less useful than we think?

Episode 24 of the Make Saints podcast: “Equal”

When I buy a bag of Skittles, get in the car, and pick up my kids from school, how do I figure out what to do with those Skittles? Everybody in the car expects that they will get some.

So do I count them out and give the exact same to both? Or do I just let them sort it out?

What happens if I give one of them more than the other?

And what happens if one of those kids always gets more?

It is time to talk about what it means when things are equal.

Equality

So here we are. Bag of Skittles. Who knows how many are in a bag. Let’s say forty-five. How do we make this as fair as possible?

The easiest way to look at the scenario is to split it in half. So half of forty-five is…uh oh. Forty-five isn’t even. So twenty-two each with one left over. I guess that’s for me. I usually call that the Dad Tax. Better make it three. Or five. They each get twenty. Nice round number.

Of course, this assumes the whole bag is for the two of them. Maybe it was for me and I was sharing with them. Well, that sense of fairness disappears instantly; and it’s replaced by an entirely different one. Yeah, it would be rude to eat a bunch of candy in front of the kids, but you know, maybe if they got jobs they could get their own candy.

See how easy it was to throw equality out the window when we established my ownership? Suddenly, I’m being nice if I share two or three with each of them and gobble the other 40 myself.

But let’s say it isn’t about that. How do we make it more equal? It’s actually easier to split it three ways because forty-five is divisible by three, so we each get fifteen! Problem solved!

What about the citrus, though?

Everyone is down for the red ones. And we all like orange (though I love orange, so you know I’m getting plenty of those). But only I like lemon. And this bag of forty-five has ten lemons. Do I just get those ten and then we divide the rest? That’s not good.

Is my fifteen composed of ten lemons and a couple of other stuff? That doesn’t seem fair, either. Yeah, lemons are great, but the kids got a ton of strawberry now and I’m feeling left out.

For the last few years, we encountered this problem every Halloween because my daughter had braces and a peanut allergy. So pretty much all the stuff she could eat, she really also couldn’t. So we watched her pile most of her candy on top of her brother’s pile. Which is totally not fair.

Equality vs. Equity

What we usually think of when we think of equality is this vague sense of things being equal. And really, we all know it when we see it.

When we talk about equal rights, we aren’t talking about pretty decent rights for these people and super awesome rights for these other people. That’s not what any of us has in mind.

The problem isn’t our sense of equal exactly. It is in our lengths to actually maintain equality.

For many, they are satisfied by stopping at the door to equality. They say we all have equal opportunity. As long as you and I both have the same shot at a thing, well then we’re equal.

But what happens when you and I are up for the same job and I get that job over you 75% of the time and the only difference between our resumes is my name is Andrew and yours is Tyrone.

That isn’t equal opportunity. No matter how many ways we try to spin it as equal. When random isn’t random: it’s fixed, we’re not talking real opportunity.

This is the difference between equality and equity.

Equity deals with outcomes

The shorthand for equality is that we all get the same opportunity and for equity we all get the same outcomes.

I think this distinction is a bit rigid, but let’s run with it anyway. And run back to the Skittles and other assorted candies.

Imagine the scenario with my daughter who can’t have much of the candy, but nothing stops my son from devouring everything. What do we do with that?

Well, we could give away most of my son’s hoard so they both get the same amount. Or we could get my daughter a bunch of the stuff she actually can have. Of course, none of that feels great either. But often it’s what we have to do. Who hasn’t gotten both kids the same thing because one of them wanted it and it was just easier?

Another name for this, of course, is affirmative action. Which always seems OK with kids and corporations, but some people really like to hate it when it comes to race.

The fact is that we think that striving for equality means that we can pretend that outcomes are just out of our control. Like we can control what happens when we walk up to the house and ring the doorbell, but we don’t control what candy they give us.

We treat equality as 100% subject to fate. Like, We tried. Sorry kid. I guess your brother gets all of the candy.

Except we do control what candy comes into the house and whether other candy comes in. It is a lie to say this is all about fate and the blessed rules of Halloween candy. We make up the stupid rules! My baby wants white chocolate, I’m gettin’ her some white chocolate! That pile is damn pitiful!

But here’s the other thing.

What if one kid always gets more candy?

He doesn’t just get more on Halloween. His teachers give him more candy. His friends give him more candy. Even we give him more candy.

So now if we give them both the same, it doesn’t really feel the same, does it? Shouldn’t she get more this time since he always gets more? And when is that difference paid up?

It is one thing for me to get the job way more often than Tyrone. But Tyrone gets it more than Shaniqua. And we both get paid a dollar for her 56 cents.

As much as we might chafe at having to come up with how to make it all equal, it is just not acceptable to live with such utterly unequal outcomes.

Let’s call this the “It’s just too hard” fallacy.

The #1 argument trotted out against equity is that it is just too hard to ensure equal outcomes. Now, the funniest thing about this argument, which, let’s be honest, isn’t entirely wrong, but that also isn’t the point. The funniest thing is that it is offered as if we actually cared about making things equal.

People most often use this argument when they want me to also believe Tyrone and I have the same opportunities.

The “It’s just too hard” fallacy is the reason the debate between equality vs. equity is inaccurate. Because we aren’t ensuring equal opportunity or outcomes. Most of our regular practice ensures both unequal opportunities and outcomes. Because the stuff is all intertwined.

Eventually

My son will eventually get braces. And for those next two years, we’ll hear the constant refrain about what he can’t eat. And in a real way, we will all feel the cosmic scales balancing.

But without such actions, the constant presence of inequality might swirl into the usual sibling rivalry. Big sister resenting all the candy her little brother got, yadda yadda. But that might turn into turns in the front seat, sports, college, and who gets more help in the dumpster fire economy of late-stage capitalism.

Just one more data point about why Mom and Dad love one of us more.

Uncle Ben lifts the mask

We can save ourselves the trouble of some of that rivalry by not actually engineering the winners and losers in such predictable ways. Because we currently are engineering the winners and losers. We’re just pretending it is accidental.

It is one thing for racism to affect who gets hired. That sucks, sure. But it is another thing to know that it is easier for white dudes with a high school diploma to get a job than black dudes with a college degree. Knowing that and pretending we can’t do anything about it? Well, that’s no accident. Knowing makes that deliberate.

When the mugger kills Uncle Ben and Peter realizes it was the thief he let run past him, does he go, meh, nothing I could do? No! That junk haunts him. Because he knows that he should have done something about it and chose not to.

And this gets to the most upsetting part of inequality.

We pretend it is accidental because we don’t want to own the responsibility for not acting when we should have. And why didn’t we act?

We didn’t know what to do.

That’s it. We feel helpless. Confused. We don’t know how to fix it. So instead of accepting that reality, we concoct multiple layers of excuse to pretend things really are equal.

But as always, the coverup is worse than the crime.

We need both

Most of the time we don’t share a big bag of Skittles. We let the kids pick out what they want. And they never pay attention that one costs $2.19 and the other $1.89. Nor do they check the weight of the bag. They really don’t need things that equal.

And when it comes to sharing, we usually just eat stuff and hope there’s enough. We aren’t ridiculous. And honestly, none of it sticks. Nobody harps on what happened two weeks ago. It’s forgotten.

But systemic inequality isn’t like Family Movie Night treats. It involves generational trauma and community exploitation. It involves generations of wealth creation for whites and debt creation for blacks; redlining and legal means of making things unequal. This is the true face of equal opportunity.

As the saying goes, born on third, he thought he hit a triple.

Solving this requires course correction—which must include, not only the structural impediments, but the generational advantages afforded certain persons.

It means we focus on both opportunities and outcomes.

Protecting Inequality

And we start with acknowledging how equal opportunity is used as a weapon against equity. How a both/and problem is turned into a fight to (ultimately) prevent equal outcomes. Not because everyone sets out to be a racist. But because they want to exclude it from the analysis.

The argument is obviously: if we do equal opportunities right we’ll get equal outcomes. And if we get unequal outcomes it can’t be that the system is messed up. It must mean we’re fundamentally unequal. In other words, if I have more money, I must be better at math. It can’t possibly be anything else.

Excluding half of the equation is what Americans of the last 50 years love to do. We love to pretend freedom is unlimited liberty and just can’t figure out why we can’t all have everything we want all of the time.

We love arguing that protecting the environment just isn’t profitable…while letting companies dump waste in our lakes and rivers for free—so waste only shows up on the state’s balance sheet when we take responsibility for it.

Our vision of equality, right now, is probably best defined by what we pretend isn’t really happening. And when we’re confronted with the truth, we pretend that there isn’t anything we can do about it. Then, when we’re confronted with what we can do about it, we pretend it is actually too hard.

But when we find out someone has done the work for us, it is actually quite easy, and may benefit all of us, then we pretend that isn’t equality. It infringes on someone’s freedom.

Shifting goal posts

So at this point, if you’re looking for a solution, it means you need to go back and listen again. Some solutions to inequality are obvious and are found in this podcast. But this problem isn’t solved by naming the solutions. Because naming solutions is another opportunity to shift the goal posts.

The problem is that people shift the goal posts.

Not for equality, but to preserve inequality. Redlining housing commissions, bankers, poll-watchers, legislators, county commissioners, real estate developers, restaurant owners, school administrators, and pretty much anybody with any power in our communities always shift the goal posts to preserve unequal systems that consolidate power and protect their own children from the supposed threat of equality. That’s how a middling white student could sue the University of Texas for not accepting her averageness.

The action is always to tell the whole story. Claiming all of the responsibility that is ours. Holding one another accountable for the ways we don’t ensure equality.

Because “nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” That is equal.

May 13, 2022
Abortion

This is not an exhaustive response to the concept of abortion and faith; it is an exhausted one. About missing the point.

Episode 23 of the Make Saints podcast: “Abortion”

The following is a statement I offered in September, 2021 on behalf of those opposing Texas’ Senate Bill 8, which severely restricted access to abortion.

As a person of faith I am taught that God is love.

As a priest in the Episcopal Church, I am taught that God is love. And it is my obligation to participate in that love to ensure that others are blessed by that love.

That conviction, that command, comes from a tradition that has always taught us to love our neighbor. To love our neighbor as if they were us. In other words, make your neighbor’s life as important as your own.

This understanding goes all the way back. Love the person in front of you. They are important.

In recent years, some Christians have tried to change that understanding. They want to protect the unborn without regard to the neighbor in front of them. In the scope of history, this is brand new. For evangelicals, this became an issue in the 1980s. For Catholics it was a century before that. But for all of Christian history, caring for the born has been the standard. This all is new and it is a distortion of tradition.

For many, they see this as an attempt to love. But in light of tradition, it is also a failure to love the neighbor in front of them.

In my tradition, when we affirm our faith in baptism, we make several promises. Our last one is that we will “strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.”

The dignity of every human being.

Every attempt to diminish abortion by law over the last decades has threatened the dignity of human beings. I’m sure a few of these indignities come to mind. But this is precisely why they are immoral because the mechanism they use to protect the unborn is to directly cause harm to the living. And to specifically target their dignity. The Texas law, deputizing neighbors to hunt their neighbors? There is no love there.
The Episcopal Church has long committed to respecting the dignity of every human being. Which means we strive to honor the many circumstances and experiences of all people. Precisely because each and every neighbor is to be loved and is the source of love.

May 5, 2022
Free

There’s a fundamental flaw in the way we describe freedom. And the strange thing is that this flaw is relatively new.

Episode 22 of the Make Saints podcast: “Free”

We’ve been talking about freedom a lot lately. From civil rights to lockdowns and mask mandates, the idea of what it means to be free, and particularly, what it means to live in a free society, has been a constant talking point.

Now that Elon Musk is following through on his attempt to buy Twitter, it seems like everyone is talking about a particular kind of freedom: free speech.

And, as a perfect embodiment of the concept, we all seem to think we know what free speech definitively is. So…why do we seem to be in such disagreement?

The truth is that, for all this talk of freedom, we’re missing something integral to the conversation. The ingredient that makes the concept real.

It’s time to talk about freedom.

Let’s start with Free Speech.

So what is Free Speech?

It basically means that any person is able to say pretty much anything. At least, that’s how we tend to think about the concept.

We use a kind of shorthand to make sense of this kind of freedom. And, because we use the shorthand, we sort of trade in absolutes.

Speech is best when it’s free.
No restrictions on speech leads to better speech.

Of course, we can all easily think of examples of speech that doesn’t lead to better speech, a healthier community, or a more honest world. Anti-semitic or racist epithets, for instance. Those are easy to name.

Then, once we name the examples of why the absolutes aren’t completely accurate, we are able to see some of the contours of freedom.

The most famous examples include yelling fire in a crowded theater or the right of kids to swear at school. Most are willing to allow some restriction of speech as necessary.

What’s interesting is what happens next.

Doubling Down or Expanding

Some don’t like the idea of restricting any speech anywhere at any time. Any restriction gets labeled: “censorship.” They see it as a slippery slope. This is a foundational principle of the American Civil Liberties Union: the ACLU. They famously support both Jews and Nazis in their pursuit of free speech. A path that is relatively intellectually consistent, while making pretty much everybody mad at some point.

Others see the use of exceptions to certain freedoms as an opportunity to make their cause exceptional.

Consider the original RFRA: the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

The first RFRA was passed in 1993 with near universal support among all faith traditions and political ideologies. Persons of these many faith traditions sought to protect the religious freedoms of Native Americans in a broad sense so as to preserve the freedom of all.

Twenty years later, conservative Christians sought a new round of RFRAs at the state and national levels, seeking to expand their freedom. These, however, did not receive broad or eccumenical support, precisely because this expanded freedom would come at the expense of others, including other Christians.

The cake example

The most popular example of this kind of conflict over freedom involves the question of wedding cakes. Can a shop owner use their religious beliefs as a reason to refuse baking a wedding cake?

While this sounds like a simple question of religious conviction, it exposes the root problem in the whole conversation.

If we give the cake owner a freedom to deny a cake for sincerely held religious beliefs, we are necessarily restricting the freedom of a couple demonstrating their own sincerely held religious beliefs.

What some are calling greater religious freedom is less religious freedom for millions of faithful people.

This is the problem with unregulated freedom: many of the things we’re calling “freedom” benefit some and condemn others. This broader vision of absolute freedom works only in a vacuum because the expanding boundaries of your freedom will eventually find the expanding boundaries of mine. And something will give. Either one of us will have more freedom than the other—or both of us will have the same amount.

The origins of freedom

As much as we talk about freedom like it is a constant, or more precisely, that our present conviction around freedom is how we’ve always thought about it, we really couldn’t be more wrong.

The American vision of freedom is famously founded on Roman ideals of the concept. And these ideals understood the inherent tension of balancing freedom of the individual and society. That ensuring freedom for the individual and for everyone often bumps up against each other.

Throughout history, the human understand of freedom could be boiled down to a simple equation:

Freedom = Liberty + Equity

As we saw in the cake example a minute ago, if one of us has freedom to exercise her religion 100% of the time and another has to go find the special place to get a cake to exercise hers, then there isn’t really freedom here.

One person has unfettered liberty and the other does not.

Of course, if the plan is to maximize liberty and we strongly oppose any fettering at all, this seems like a kind of win, right? The baker is exercising a right she should have. But then we have to deal with the other. So what do we do?

We focus on the opportunity. We say that the person seeking the cake is only seeking the opportunity to have a cake. As if the emotional labor in finding a cake shop rounds down to zero so everybody really does have 100% liberty.

Notice also that we never speak of the shop owner’s opportunity to make a sale. Seeing opportunity as the lower bar, or the floor for freedom is our way of upholding a deeply flawed system. A system in which one person gets all of their rights and others have to just deal with it.

So why is it flawed?

We confuse personal liberty for freedom.

One’s personal liberty is not the entirety of freedom. We aren’t free if some get to be more free.

The vision of freedom throughout history, into the founding of the United States, and has formed our history and evolved with our history may be summed up in Martin Luther King’s articulation of the civil rights saying:

“Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”

Because liberty and equity is the substance of freedom.

You are free when we are free.

What we’ve done is redefine freedom.

Over the last half century, many have tried to strip equity from freedom. They have wanted the abstract notion that unlimited liberty is itself the goal and the basis for our understanding of freedom.

Some do this from the side of the silenced. This is how the ACLU sees the world. They see where freedom does not appear to be. And I think, way more often than not, they’re right. In part because a robust individual liberty is consonant with strengthening equity.

Others, however, are seeking to strip equity from the equation on purpose. They want freedom to be only individual liberty. Often because they want a constitutional right to reject a pluralistic society. So freedom can only be real if they get their way every time.

This is all so abstract, so we probably want to get more specific.

We can all easily find the limits of some liberty, particularly when there is a victim involved. But it is hard to describe why. Much like the famous decisions by the Supreme Court around decency. The Court couldn’t actually articulate what pornography is, but argued: “we know it when we see it.”

This is why some worry about any limits on liberty. Because some liberty will be restricted without warrant. Because, in other words, anything can be described as pornographic. And we’re not really interested in trusting that people really do know it when they see it.

But this is not actually freedom.

The ideology of unfettered liberty is never actually satisfied. Nor will it ever find true freedom as possible in the world. Not as long as we see any limits on liberty at all as an affront to our freedom.

Unfettered liberty is itself the epitome of a slippery slope. One that never has an end and takes us further and further away from the summit.

The most obvious place in which we can appreciate the limits on our liberty for the sake of equity is in our traffic laws. In the U.S., we drive on the right side of the road, stop at red lights, and (generally) respect speed limits.

In an absolute liberty sense, I have ZERO freedom. But in reality, I have incredible freedom to make it from point A to point B in relative safety. And to do so pretty much whenever I want to. Not in spite of this supposed lack of freedom, but because of the presence of equity. Equity, which, combined with a great deal of genuine liberty, creates this generally free movement around my community.

We all are freed by the ability to trust one another.

Absolute liberty is not freedom.

No matter how much we seek to measure freedom only by liberty, we will continue to find ourselves imprisoned by our sense of lack. Liberty’s appetite is never sated.

But the experience of sharing liberty, offering more people the liberty I experience, the more freeing it all feels.

Now, I can’t possibly contain all of the nuance of legislating freedom in the U.S. There is way too much there. What we can see, however, is what happens to our understanding of freedom when it is only personal liberty. It not only makes our sense of freedom unbalanced and unequal. It makes it impossible and unsustainable.

Under unfettered liberty, few are truly free.

And we’re making ourselves miserable because of it.

Fewer limits on speech is not reducing division. More guns in our communities is not reducing violence. More power in the hands of police is not reducing incarceration.

The material of freedom, depicted explicitly in the Bill of Rights is built by combining two very different concepts working in tandem: liberty and equity. So we can strive for as much liberty as possible and as much equity as possible.

It is not only about opportunity. It is about a playing field in which all are present. Because the field (not just the players) is protected.

Survival of the fittest isn’t freedom.

It isn’t even human nature.

Humanity thrives by friendship, support, and altruism. Physical and social scientists keep proving this over and over again. The greatest evolution in human history came when humans learned to protect their elders and care for the needs of their weakest members .

The fastest teams always ensure we all cross the finish line.Freedom is a team sport. Letting the fastest cross the line while the rest of us get a DNF (Did Not Finish)? That isn’t freedom. And we shouldn’t let the people with the loudest voices steal our gold medal.

Apr 28, 2022
Politics

The thing about talking politics is we all start with assumptions. We’re just never actually on the same page with them.

Episode 21 of the Make Saints podcast: “Politics”

Nothing clears a room like talking politics. Mostly because we’re doing it wrong. Not so much in how we talk politics, but in how we conceptualize it. The real reason we can’t talk politics with others is not just because we’re saying something wrong. It’s also because we hear it wrong. Because we’re all processing it wrong.

So let’s talk politics.

Loving Politics

[I should probably state from the beginning that I’m talking about politics from a particularly U.S. perspective. A lot of what I’m about to say also fits outside our milieu, of course, so translate it as you need to. But it really applies to us.]

I love politics. And I also loathe it.

There’s a thing about politics that is really revealing; and I don’t just mean ideologically. Or even the caricature we think is our character. I mean revealing about the way we think about life itself. Our purpose. And how we even relate to one another. Much of politics today actually revolves around the idea of whether or not individuals and groups even exist.

But I think the best test to see what kind of person I am talking to is not to ask them whether a glass is half empty or half full (though that can be revealing—especially when they say “both”—because the nonanswer is an answer that is pretending to not be one). It is to ask them how they feel about politics. Because pessimists won’t always cop to their pessimism. Especially when it is dressed as neutrality. But disdain for politics gets it out of them.

Now the real reason we struggle with talking politics is that it is fraught with problems and we don’t want to get stuck.

And at the root of it all is the ridiculous idea that politics is simple. Or more precisely, more simple than it is. And more complicated than it is.

The real reason we struggle with talking about politics is that we can’t communicate. Because we’re all using shortcuts.

That’s Problem #1: shortcuts.

Problem #2: Dualism

We frame all of our politics in the US as a choice between two options. Everything is always either/or. You’re with me or against me. We’re in or we’re out. It is good or it is bad.

This means that everything (and I mean everything) gets filtered in our brains as either left or it is right; liberal or conservative.

Of course, this is helpful for the partisan two-party system. And it is really helpful for giving us shortcuts. Because then we can pick a position based, not only on what we want, but what we don’t want. We don’t have to just be for something, we can be against something because we’re against someone.

This also comes out in our most pernicious of phrases: I want to hear “both sides” of an argument. Now this phrase presupposes that arguments only have two sides.

Of course, legislation has two sides: for or against. But the movement behind the legislation (and against it) have many sides. And almost nothing in life has only two sides.

For example: the car accident

How often do we frame this story as he said/she said? One car collides with another. We want to determine what happened and why. And because we love scapegoating, we want to seek out who is responsible so they can be punished.

We cast this story as one with two characters representing two sides: victim and perpetrator; good and evil.

So we dig into whether or not one driver was distracted, what the laws of the state are, and whether the one did anything on purpose. All of this is useful. And confusing.

What we rarely interrogate is just how our framing of an event with only two points of view blinds us to, say, the drivers that swerve to miss the accident, the police officer taking statements, and the insurance companies granting or denying claims. There are countless perspectives, not two.

The main problem with dualism is that it is a shortcut that cuts out so much of the truth, we often can’t trust the outcomes.

So we start looking for complexity

But dualism and complexity are incompatible. It doesn’t allow for multiple sides. Nor does it allow for difference of opinion within a side.

What happens when someone on our “team” is wrong? Dualism doesn’t care. Your team is your team.

But what if it is the opposite of what her predecessor supported? Dualism still doesn’t care. Consistency is not required of dualists. Everything must be either/or. It doesn’t say we can’t trade places.

And yet, anyone who loves dualism and consistency suddenly has a problem. Because they don’t line up half as much as we think they do, and a fraction of what we want it to. So we seek another measurement:

Problem #3: the spectrum.

We draw a line and put “left” on one end and “right” on the other. Well, now this feels better, right? We can now differentiate within left and right and allow for some complexity around that hazy middle. This sounds good: we’re killing two birds with one stone here!

Now we can demonize the people on both sides of us! It isn’t just both sides of an issue, we can now find enemies who are too extreme and demonize them, too! It is all too brilliant, isn’t it?

Of course, the spectrum theory still doesn’t help us deal with certain objective truths, like when a liberal adopts a classically conservative position. And the vagueness of the spectrum is all so arbitrary. Like, what even is liberal or conservative, anyway?

And what the heck do we do with the center of the spectrum, where people like to hang out and pretend they don’t have any positions at all.

But that isn’t even the worst problem.

Problem #4: Arbitrary Switching

As bad as shortcuts, dualism, and spectrum politics are for communicating with each other, the worst problem by far is that we switch between all of this constantly, within the same argument, and without noticing.

We apply the arbitrariness of the spectrum and the clarity of the dualism at the same time, like a boss pretending he’s “one of the guys” on the shopfloor. It doesn’t work. You don’t get to have both—without one canceling the other out.

So we apply the simplistic clarity of dualism and the simplistic relativity of the spectrum to the same moment. And we do this so we can evaluate something as objectively liberal and subjectively too liberal without doing the work of defining what any of these things mean.

We are being arbitrary, inconsistent, and imprecise without even noticing it. And this is because of our final problem:

Problem #5: Ungrounded Conversation

It isn’t just that we are using two concepts interchangeably. It is that combining these conflicting methodologies still doesn’t solve our problem.

Because none of the things we’re doing actually set up an objective definition of liberal or conservative. They all depend on relational contrast.

We may want clarity and vagueness at the same time, which is complicated enough! And academics love to do this, so yeah, we think we can do it, too. But we are doing this by also mixing objective and relational definitions without really grounding either.

Even though dualism loves clarity, it loathes objective definitions. Because everything becomes dependent on the other. Left must be opposite of right. Even when there are a thousand other options, they must be defined as one.

The clarity dualism brings to spectrum thinking, isn’t objectivity. They are both subjective and relational.

Solutions

So if what is missing from all of our conversations is actually clear, objective definitions, it seems this would be the most logical solution, doesn’t it? This is certainly what political scientists work with.

Of course, if it were so simple, there would be no confusion. The objectivity of academic definitions would rule the day and we’d obviously all be having sober conversations about the effectiveness of certain processes without all this ridiculous partisanship. Which is so obviously fantasy.

I suspect the most viable solution to our problems is in questioning our very first problem itself: that we desire shortcuts. And use shortcuts so we can label something rather than actually deal with it.

Labels like liberal and conservative make it easy to support and dismiss. Just like calling something “too liberal” or “too conservative” does the same thing.

Similarly, we can avoid dealing with something like gun violence because it is “too hard” and ineffective compromises can be harrolded for their “bipartisan appeal.”

But more importantly, this ridiculous view of politics means that you and I feel like we can’t have a discussion about things that directly impact us and the people we love. Because it would be called political.Which, if we think about it, may be the most insidious and destructive political position of them all.

Apr 21, 2022