Month: February 2016

The Spiritual Bias in Politics

Posted on by James C. Struck

On February 23, 2016 at a CNN town hall meeting in South Carolina, Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Bernie Sanders was asked to elaborate on a statement he had said about his belief that “his spirituality is that we are all in this together”.  Sanders, a non-practicing Jew, then gave what I consider a brilliant response.

Four days later, Bernie would go on to lose the South Carolina primary by nearly a 3:1 margin, his worst showing yet by far.  The group that he did most poorly with was with African-Americans, who made up 61% of the voters that came out, despite the fact that he has a documented background as a civil rights activist. One interesting result from the exit polls showed that only 46% of the African-American voters consider themselves as liberals. More data from ABC here.

Now, there are any number of reasons that Sanders performed as poorly as he did in SC.  Part, I am sure, is his insistence on connecting racial issues and economic issues.  Another is his lackluster responses to the Black Lives Matter movement, especially earlier in his campaign.  But I think his answers in the video above highlight another contributing factor, especially among more conservative voters; the unspoken belief that no non-Christian candidate is electable.

That the Vermont senator is a strongly moral man is quite apparent, and his political record bears that out with stunning consistency. His message would make any true-blue follower of Christ smile: help the poor and needy, tax the wealthy, protect the planet.  But the views he espouses above, no matter how logical or kind, speak to a spiritual point of view that few traditionally-religious people would truly find comfortable.  Christianity as it exists today has a significant selfish streak in it that their Founder would not applaud.  Salvation today is now a personal, individual thing, and it is considered far better to be right than to be good.  This is not a universal malediction on my part, but it is common enough that the image that comes to people’s mind when they hear the phrase “devout Christian” is not one of kindness and mercy and generosity, but one of  close-mindedness, pride, and judgmentalism.

So when 54% of a certain voting demographic in South Carolina on Saturday does not consider themselves liberal, I see red flags.  An answer like in the video above will not play well to a religiously conservative crowd.  The moderator asked about a “Creator” in the senator’s philosophy, a question that was neatly sidestepped.  There is no clear right or wrong invoked, merely an idea of interconnectedness.  Are these ideas logical and correct?  Yes, but that doesn’t matter.  A great many voters choose their candidates based upon a sense of camaraderie, not logic.  Is this person like me?  Will they sympathize with my desires and needs?  And there is little that a Southern Baptist churchgoer would find in common with a socialist Jew from New England.

I am probably overstating the influence this town hall had on Bernie Sanders’ performance in the SC primary.  Hillary Clinton has a relationship with the African-American community that goes back decades, and as I said above, Bernie made many missteps.  But it does sadden me that, when at last I see a candidate speaking of a spirituality I resonate with, it seems that those very beliefs and ideas are undermining his electability.

My Spirituality is that we are all in this together. - Bernie Sanders

The First Warm Day

Posted on by James C. Struck

blueskychurch

February 20, 2016, 1pm.

58 degrees. 

I am walking to the park with my youngest two kids. The sun feels like spring already, and the sky is the soft blue of March or April, but the rest of the scenery is decidedly wintery still.  The trees are bare, the grass is still a matted brown, and the air, while unseasonably warm, smells of nothing but wet soil.

My town is at the bottom of a hole.  Two streams empty into the Illinois River here, making it prime territory for coal mines back at the turn of the century.  Between the streams and the now-abandoned mines, the entire town is a series of large steps working their way down towards the broad expanse of the Illinois.  What this means is that from our home by the riverfront and the library is as much a climb up as it is a walk across town.

My kids ride ahead and fall behind on their bikes, loving the flat areas but lagging as we tromp up the inclines.  I am not old yet, but I can’t call myself young or in particularly good shape, so by the time we make it to the library my legs buzz and I can feel my heart working in my chest.  The library is an odd looking building.  A century-old original structure at one end, a larger extension done in the ‘90s at the other, and city hall and the police department sitting next door, the entire effect is slightly Frankensteinian.  It is small by my standards; I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, where libraries were multi-story monsters with entire floors devoted to genres.  Here, each section consists of a handful of shelves, the staff no more than 4 older ladies.  But that’s what happens when you move from a city of 60,000 surrounded by others cities just as big to a town of 5500 surrounded by cornfields.

We wander the stacks for a while, pick out a few choice volumes, then make our way back out into the sunshine.  The kids bolt right for the park across the lot, racing for the best locations on the swings or monkey bars, bickering as usual.  They are only 19 months apart in age, and the competitions between them are kind of a default setting.  I turn my face up to the sun and let the south wind whip my hair back.  It’s getting long again, time to cut it unless I decide to ponytail it up again like I did for so many years.  For now it curls around my ears and hangs down to my collar.  The sunlight is still a bit watery, but I can feel it is stronger than it was just a few weeks ago.  I drink it in like an elixir, feeling it soak into me, filling me up.

I love these first hints of spring, these first reminders that winter is not eternal.  I know that in a day or two, the temperature will drop back into the 30s and the clouds will roll back in.  There will probably be at least one more measurable snow, at least one more snap that leaves frost on the car windshields and puts blades back into the wind.  But for now, just for a bit, I can pretend that winter is over.  I can pretend that the dark is finished and the sunlight has won again.

At least until November.

Politics, Religion, and Spirituality

Posted on by James C. Struck

Mahatma-Gandhi-Political-Quotes

Let’s talk politics.

Yeah, yeah, I know, that’s a forbidden subject.  Keeping a blog is a little like going to Thanksgiving dinner; there are certain subjects you don’t want to broach because you know it will get messy.  But I’m not here to talk about my personal politics (though I will use them as a jumping-off point) so much as I want to talk about how politics and spirituality intertwine, whether we want them to or not.

So let’s start with the obvious.  I am a college-educated, non-affluent, Gen-X white male who writes alternative spirituality books, so my political leanings should be pretty predictable: liberal as they come.  Part of the reason I am such a complete and utter hippie is because of my distaste for the encroachment of traditional religious views into modern public and political discourse.  For someone whose spiritual views put the ideas of Werner Heisenberg, Lao Tsu, and Origen of Alexandria on the same footing, the idea of young-Earth creationism appearing in school textbooks is horrifying to say the least.  So of course I trot out the same arguments so many others of my ilk do: the First Amendment, the Deist leanings of many of the Founding Fathers, the mountains of evidence for evolution and an ancient Earth, so on and so forth.  We of a liberal mindset believe that we are bastions of reason against a sea of antiquated myths and fables, doing our best to hold our secular government sacrosanct from the influences of religion and its biases.

But are we really?

Look at the quote at the beginning of this post.  Mohandas Gandhi is remembered in the West as a political leader, one who used nonviolence as a brilliant weapon of propaganda to push Britain out of India.  Yet in his home country he is revered as much for his spiritual teachings as his political influence, earning the title Mahatma, meaning “great soul”.  For him, as you can see above, spirituality and politics were inextricably intertwined, and for good reason.  Both are structures by which we govern and decide what is acceptable or unacceptable in a society.  One uses social pressure and upbringing to enforce behavior, the other uses law and punishment, yet the both work toward the same end.

Americans sometimes forget that we and our time period are an anomaly.  For the majority of human history, political and religious power were interconnected and often indistinguishable.  For centuries kings ruled by divine right, popes held more influence than rulers, and a threat of excommunication was worse than death.  Our ideas of the separation of church and state are unique in history, and also almost impossible to enforce 100%.  How many laws have made it to the books in the United States whose basis is nothing more than assumptions based on Judeo-Christian teachings?  Every malediction against family planning, every heavy penalty for substance abuse, every attempt to criminalize non-traditional relationships is really nothing more than the Bible creeping into our lawbooks.

Yet this is not all bad.  Many of the finest dignities of humanity enshrined in our laws have their basis in religious doctrine.  Prior to Judaism, human sacrifice for religious purpose was the norm, property was only held through strength, and women were purely chattel to be stolen, bartered, and enslaved.  Religion changed all that, and I think we can all agree that it was for the better.  To deny religion’s hand in the creation of our current ideas of morality is disingenuous at best and blind at worst.

That really is the main division between American liberalism and conservatism; can law and morals be separated from traditional religion, and should it?  The former says yes, we can find the dignities in our traditions and keep them while discarding those which no longer reflect the society we desire.  The latter says no, we cannot separate our laws from their source without undercutting them completely.  Problems then arise, because the stalwarts of either side end up taking things to their extremes.  Liberal extremists deny religion any hand in our laws or morals despite their obvious source, conservative extremists insist that all religious tenets must be included in laws, no matter how archaic or inappropriate.  This is exacerbated in American politics by a myriad of other influences: gerrymandering, campaign financing, religious tax exemption, and others.

So where does that leave someone like me?  How do I ditch the bathwater while keeping the baby?  What part of morality can be separated from religion, if any?  For me personally, I feel the need to take things back to the source.  Is there a basis for morality, and therefore law, that runs even deeper than what traditional religions teach?  Is there a kernel, a perennial philosophy that underpins religion and therefore can be used as a basis for law without interference from cultural accumulations?  This is what I search for and what I try to express in my writings.

I think I’m onto something, but whether you agree with me is up to you.

#10LittleThings

Posted on by James C. Struck

February sucks.

frown

It does, admit it.  We’re well past the holidays, the weather is either -74 below zero or 34 drizzling and windy, the days are a bit longer than in January but not really that much yet, and then there’s Valentine’s Day which, let’s be honest, you only look forward to if you’re between 15 and 25 and in a relationship for less than a year.

February doubly sucks for me because I’m always creatively constipated during this Gray Bucket of Suck Month.  In the deep winter, as I’ve mentioned here before, my creativity hibernates due to mild SAD and job stress.  Come April or so my creative juices go nuts and I can’t get the ideas out of my head fast enough.  But during February I can feel the ideas waking up, but they’re not there yet and it’s bloody frustrating.  I need something to get me out of this funk, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one. So what to do?

We help each other out.

Each of us have things that make us happy no matter what.  I’m not talking about big meaningful stuff here, not the linchpins of your existence.  Just the stupid little things that get you through the day, the little reminders that this is a pretty neat world we live in, even if it does suck the pain pipe now and then.  And right now is one of those Nows for a lot of people, not just me.  So let’s share.  Let’s show the world the list of the little things that get us over the bumpy parts of our lives.

So here’s my list of #10LittleThings

  1. That first sip of coffee in the morning. Yeah, it’s a drug and I’m addicted, so what?A_small_cup_of_coffee
  2. That moment when you’re laughing with friends and it turns into a feedback loop where everyone else’s laughter just makes you laugh more even if it is because of the stupidest thing in the world and you end up with your stomach hurting and tears in your eyes and panting like you just ran a mile and then someone giggles and it sets all of you off again.                                                          laugh
  3. A patch of sunshine coming in a window on a cold day, one that looks so inviting that you just want to curl up in it like a cat.sunshine
  4. Soft blankets.soft-coral-fleece-blanket_3
  5. Perfectly clear blue skies, the ones so pristine they don’t look real.clear_blue_sky_by_nescio17-d656th1
  6. Watching big thunderstorms roll up like the Wrath of God.storm
  7. Genuine hugs, not the stupid, one-arm-pat-your-back ones.love-hug1
  8. Those times when you really fall into a book, when everything around you ceases to exist and it’s like you’re living a movie.magic-book
  9. Chocolate.  Duh.dark-chocolate
  10. Deep conversations, the kind where you feed off each other and you get that rush like you could solve every problem in the world.conversations

My plan is to share this across FB and Twitter with the hashtag #10LittleThings.  Please share, comment, post, etc.  We all need a little boost during this time of year.  Let’s help each other out.