Tag Archives: Christian

Breaking Our Hearts

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This week, it seemed as if the world was determined to break my heart. I am sure I am not the only one who felt that way, but I may be the one who puts two seemingly unrelated events together and wonders how we come to such a pass. I often write about how we can minimize losses from natural disasters, but today’s topic is tragedy wrought by humans upon others.

Illinois

Let me start closer to home. In Crystal Lake, an outer-ring Chicago suburb, a five-year-old boy, “AJ” Freund, was found in a shallow grave in an isolated site near his home. Police found him during an investigation triggered by the boy’s father, who called 911 to report that he was missing. Police dogs tracing his scent at home found no evidence that he had walked out the door. Interrogation of the father, a 60-year-old attorney engaged to a former client in a divorce case, the boy’s 36-year-old mother, caused the police to become suspicious of the couple themselves.

It turned out that the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) had been involved with the family since the boy was born with opiates in his system, clearly indicating a drug problem for the mother. One police report a few months ago indicated that the home was filthy with pet feces and utilities were shut off, but DCFS apparently found concerns about neglect “unfounded.”

So, how did AJ wind up in his shallow grave? According to the police, the couple kept him in a cold shower before beating him, resulting in his death from head trauma. Needless to say, the couple are now in jail, facing murder charges, and are separately secluded from the rest of the McHenry County jail population for their own safety.

I don’t wish here to focus on the court case. Judge, jury, and prosecutors will make their own determinations as the case proceeds, and like anyone else, the parents are entitled to a defense. What concerns me is what needs to happen at DCFS to prevent many more children from being similarly harmed. This is an agency with serious problems that must be solved.

In the past four years, we had a governor with a serious empathy deficit, who preferred to engineer a stalemate with the Democratic legislature over the state budget while bills went unpaid and progress at agencies like DCFS sputtered, and numerous nonprofit social service providers went unpaid for months on end. But Republican Bruce Rauner did not initiate the crisis at DCFS, which is a product of neglect and malfeasance by several prior administrations, not to mention the frequent unwillingness of the legislature to prioritize funding for social services. But funding is not the only issue.

How bad has it been? According to today’s Chicago Tribune, “DCFS has churned through 14 previous leaders since 2003 and has seen its budget and staffing dwindle.” This turnover implicates two previous Democratic administrations as well as that of Rauner, who had his own revolving door for DCFS executives in the last four years. No one can establish stability and quality of services in such an environment. We can only hope that Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who took office three months ago, can make this a priority and turn the situation around. He has brought in Marc Smith, previously the head of a suburban social service organization, and more importantly, has requested a $75 million increase in funding for the agency. He is taking heat for proposing to amend Illinois’s constitution to allow a progressive income tax in order to gain new revenue from high-income residents, but the money must come from somewhere and the state needs to balance its wobbly budget.

But let me get more personal here. And I do take this personally.

My wife and I have been foster parents since 1991. Two daughters we adopted are now grown, and there are grandchildren. We also have guardianship for one grandson at the moment, so we have a long history of interaction with DCFS. Like many other foster and adoptive parents in Illinois, we have long had reason to question the managerial culture of the agency, which has tended to emphasize restoring or maintaining the custody of natural parents whenever possible. I understand that generally, but not when there is obvious abuse or neglect and caseworkers either fail to take notice or fail to act to protect the children. As headlines have often suggested, that happens more than we may want to know.  AJ has become the latest case in point.

Long ago, two children from a large family reached out to connect with us, and we often let them visit and share their story. We relayed some concerns to DCFS. As a teacher, my wife fell into the category of mandated reporters under state law. Doctors, school officials, and others who may suspect or witness abuse or neglect are legally obligated to report it to the DCFS hotline. In this case, nothing happened until one child died of starvation. Then the remaining children were placed in foster care.

On another unrelated occasion, I became concerned about belt marks on a three-year-old child. I called the hotline, where an imperious responder told me that “under Illinois law, parents are allowed to use corporal punishment to discipline their children.” Appalled by her disinterest, I raised my voice: “We are talking about belt marks on a three-year-old!”

“Mr. Schwab,” she responded sternly, “it is not illegal for parents to use corporal punishment.” Stunned by this indifference, I faced the same dilemma I am sure has confronted others in the same position: Where do we go from here?

Such responses, to be sure, are not always the case. They simply happen too often. Sometimes, an overburdened caseworker takes shortcuts or fails to investigate. The point is that something must change.

Some Illinois legislators—from both parties—were seeking answers from DCFS officials at a hearing in Springfield yesterday. I hope they are all, finally, serious as hell about fostering positive change and not just grabbing headlines in a dramatic case. Too many children’s lives and welfare are at stake.

Sri Lanka

By now, I don’t imagine there is a need to rehash the details of recent bombings in Sri Lanka. It would have been hard to escape the news: suicide bombings by apparent Muslim extremists in three hotels in Colombo as well as several Christian churches on Easter Sunday, killing well over 250 people. The body count has varied, in part because it is difficult to count bodies that have been so badly burned and blown apart. Exactly who planned what is not entirely clear yet, although authorities have blamed a homegrown Muslim militant organization, National Towheed Jamaat. Whether there are ties to Islamic State is a subject of investigation. The precise motive is something that remains unclear.

This comes just a month after the attack by an Australian white supremacist on a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, which I discussed last month. I noted that I had spent time in New Zealand in 2008 as a Visiting Fellow for a research center in Christchurch. Thus, I found it disturbing in part because of a personal connection.

It so happens that I spent 10 days in Sri Lanka in 2005 as part of an eight-member interdisciplinary team of Americans invited by the Sri Lanka Institute of Architects to assess damage from the Indian Ocean tsunami and recommend options for rebuilding. In the weeks before the trip, I made a brief, stumbling attempt to acquire some familiarity with the dominant national language, Sinhala, but found it daunting. But I find such efforts allow me to breathe in a little more of the ethos of the nation I am visiting. And from further reading and from talking to our hosts, I learned some very interesting facts about Sri Lanka.

The civil war that once raged is now over, but that was not the case then. We traveled from the capital, Colombo, on the western coast of this island, along the coast to Batticaloa, halfway up the eastern coast, before we were forced to turn west through the Central Highlands of Kandy back to Colombo. The Northeast and the Jaffna Peninsula were under the control of the rebel Tamil Tigers. Along the way back, we encountered some military checkpoints. Caught in the middle of this long-running tragedy were the people of many rural villages and smaller cities. As one architect on our team from New Mexico, who was a Vietnam veteran, commented, “The rural people are the ones who always take it in the shorts.”

But this struggle had little to do with Muslims or Christians, except coincidentally. They were largely bystanders. The battle was between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority, which wanted rights to sustain its own Tamil language and culture in a multicultural nation. That sounds fair enough, but the Tamil Tigers became an incredibly vicious movement that had few compunctions about sending suicide bombers to blow up public buses. They demanded a Tamil homeland in the regions they controlled. Thousands of Sri Lankans died during decades of armed insurgency. Finally, the rebellion was suppressed by the government about ten years ago.

When we arrived, a cease-fire negotiated by Norwegian diplomats was in effect, but 35,000 Sri Lankans had died as a result of the tsunami—drowned in a wall of water, washed out to sea, crushed beneath shattered buildings. The southern and eastern coasts were devastated. A nation that had suffered so much needless death suffered even more at the hands of the forces of nature, reinforced by a noticeable lack of preparation for such an event.

Even before I left for Sri Lanka, I experienced a personal connection to it all. The Rev. Eardley Mendis, a Sri Lankan-American pastor, had worked as the custodian for Augustana Lutheran Church, of which my wife and I are members, while studying at the nearby Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. By 2005, he was the pastor of a local Lutheran church largely supported by Asian Americans. But his wife and daughter had returned to visit family in Sri Lanka over Christmas in 2004. When the tsunami struck on December 26, they were aboard the coastal passenger train that was destroyed by the second major tsunami wave, largely due to lack of warning of the impending danger. Eardley’s daughter survived; his wife did not. I interviewed him over lunch before I left Chicago. Later, during the trip, a villager in Peraliya took me to see the demolished train, stored on a side track as a memorial. For me, it was one of the most emotionally powerful moments of the entire tour.

The ghostly memorial of the train after the tsunami, May 2005

This man then showed all of us what was left of his home by the sea, including his makeshift oven, where he cooked meals that he sold to travelers along the road. That was his now fragile livelihood.

David Downey, Alan Fujimori, and others visit with my new acquaintance and his makeshift, post-tsumani home.

Sri Lanka has had a measure of peace for most of this decade since the end of the Tamil Tigers insurrection.

A note on Sri Lankan demographics is in order at this point. About two-thirds of the nation is Buddhist, mostly of Sinhalese ethnicity. About 15 percent are Tamil and largely Hindu. The remainder of the nation mostly consists of two religious minorities, half Muslim and half Christian. The Muslims are mostly descended from traders who occupied the coastal cities since medieval times, with Sri Lanka about midway between the predominantly Muslim Arabian peninsula and predominantly Muslim Indonesia. While a very small number of Christians are descended from European colonial settlers of centuries past, most are converts of native Sri Lankan ancestry. The churches, both Catholic and Protestant, are part of the fabric of modern Sri Lanka.

And so it may seem curious that one minority might attack another, but it is far more important to know that the vast majority of Sri Lankans of all faiths have had more than enough of war and bombings and sectarian violence. The perpetrators of the Easter bombings appear to include some children of a wealthy spice dealer in Colombo. Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe apparently has expressed doubt that the father knew what the children were up to, but the police rightly seem determined to find out. Muslims, like other people across the planet, sometimes experience the pain of children who choose an evil path. The Bible is replete with such stories.

So, for the moment, Christian bishops are warning worshipers to stay home and avoid danger. Churches and other houses of worship no longer appear to be sanctuaries, but targets. Here, it is probably worth quoting the words of the chairman of one Colombo mosque, Akurana Muhandramlage Jamaldeen Mohamed Jayfer, in an Associated Press story today, describing the attackers as:

“not Muslims. This is not Islam. This is an animal. We don’t have a word (strong enough) to curse them.”

My only comment would be that he may have inadvertently insulted the animals, who merely hunt for food. Only humans harbor hatred powerful enough to motivate such heartless mass murder.

Jim Schwab

Stop the Madness

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I am angry on Father’s Day. I am deeply disturbed by what I am seeing. I am a Christian who is insulted by the use of the Bible to justify the separation of children from parents who brought them to the U.S. border in search of safety and political asylum. First, it is a policy decision of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Trump administration that the United States will not consider flight from violence and gang warfare a reasonable excuse for seeking asylum. The families now being torn apart with minimal ability even to find out where their parents or children are made a dangerous trek across hundreds of miles in the belief that this country would treat them with some sort of dignity once they surrendered at the border with a request for asylum. Few, if any, expected the treatment now being imposed upon them.

The news reports are now widespread and, however painful to read, I encourage readers of this blog to follow them. The tactics in practice by U.S. border authorities remind us of horrors long ago that we thought this nation had put to rest—slave fathers and mothers sold away from their children, never to see them again, while auctioneers were deaf to their pleas for mercy, American Indian children removed from reservations to be sent to distant “Indian schools” where they punished for speaking English. Are we still no better than that?

I have been a father for decades. My wife and I became foster and adoptive parents in the 1990s, and we know firsthand the difficulties of locating children in a new environment when the state has determined that the birth parents have failed in their duties through neglect or abuse. It is difficult even then but often necessary to protect children whose health, safety, and welfare are in jeopardy. That is and long has been a primary state responsibility. But even then, courts and social workers provide notice of what is expected and give parents an opportunity to improve before taking more drastic steps. And yes, it is true that convicted criminals are removed from their spouses and children when they are incarcerated, but if the convictions are just, we can at least say that the crime was a choice made by the parent, not the state. And despite all this, my heart aches when it becomes clear such intervention is necessary.

It aches even more in this situation because very young children are being pulled away from their parents with no idea why, no idea where they are going, and no idea when or whether they will ever see them again. Even in cases of convicted criminals, the family can visit the prisoner and knows where he or she is and the length of the sentence. In foster care, parents typically have visitation rights. None of that appears to be happening with these refugees.

I find myself all the angrier when I hear people justifying the current Trump administration policy by comparing asylum seekers to these situations by saying the parents at the border are breaking the law. International conventions on asylum do not at all contemplate that asylum seekers will be treated by democratic nations as criminals upon arrival. They need a fair hearing to demonstrate their claim for asylum. In the vast majority of cases, their clear motive for making the dangerous trip across Mexico to the U.S. border from nations in Central and South America and elsewhere is not to commit a crime but to protect their families from political and gang violence and, in some cases, sexual and physical abuse tolerated by a foreign government that is either unwilling or incapable of preventing it.

Quoting Bible verses about respecting the law is no defense of unjust laws and never was, even in Biblical times, when St. Peter once stated, “We must obey God rather than men.” His assertion was the very basis of the insistent rise of Christianity through what was effectively a form of civil disobedience because Christian faith was illegal in the Roman empire, which required primary fealty to the emperor. I do not wish to engage defenders of administration policy in a battle of Bible quotations because such battles generally involve short passages taken out of context amid a larger failure to understand the comprehensive message of Jewish and Christian scriptures, but if there is one passage that may highlight that larger message of Jesus, it is in Matthew 25, and for that reason I have used it before because it goes to the heart of Christian morality:

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’”

Jim Schwab

Power, Perception, and Pilate

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On May 10, my wife and I attended a matinee performance of Jesus Christ Superstar at the Lyric Opera in Chicago. Coming a month after the Easter evening (April 1) NBC broadcast of this ground-breaking rock opera by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, it allowed some comparison of how the show is staged and presented, which was summed up by a woman behind us at the Lyric: “Never the same way twice.” Composed in 1970 and first presented on stage in 1971, the show’s lasting impact can, I think, be traced, like any other vintage composition, to its versatility, universality, and the way it probes deep themes in the human experience. In this case, that involves a search for the meaning of divinity and exactly where the Gospel stories fit into that experience. What could it possibly mean to be human and divine at the same time? How did those around Jesus relate to him in real life? Rice and Webber gained fame by packing a lightning bolt of musical interpretation into a two-hour show. Curiously, in the 47 years since the show’s debut in New York, this recent run, which ended May 20, was the first time the Lyric had chosen to stage Jesus Christ Superstar.

Seeing this performed twice in consecutive months prodded me to think a little more deeply about a question that has been roaming around in my brain for a while already. As a Christian, a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, I have maintained both an intellectual and spiritual curiosity over many years concerning the life of Jesus of Nazareth and the Bible generally. I am anything but a biblical literalist. I feel strongly that the route to some meaningful truth involves a healthy skepticism and a good deal of reading between the lines, so I have little patience with the fixed and sometimes even cartoonish scriptural interpretations that some people cling to. I do not believe that politics and faith are or even should be completely detached, but I am not an ideologue, either. I am a firm supporter of religious freedom and tolerance because I think Christian faith calls on us to be considerably humbler in our relationships with others than some people wearing the label have sometimes been. And that brings me to my topic.

One thing I noted in the Webber-Rice spectacle is that the narrative hews relatively closely to the core of the Gospel stories of the Passion, Christ’s last week of life on Earth—at least within the broad framework of artistic presentation. One question that has dogged Christianity for centuries concerns how Jesus was delivered into the hands of the Romans, which leads to the question of the nature of his startling interaction with Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea. It is clear enough, according to the Gospel accounts, that Jesus was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane by agents of the Jewish high priests, and clear enough that they were upset with his preaching because it challenged the established order in profound ways. After interrogation by both the high priests and King Herod, who ruled Galilee under Roman sovereignty, he was turned over to Pilate. The interactions at this point become much more powerful, given the fate that we all now know awaited Jesus. And this is the point that I wish to explore.

I am not a professional biblical scholar, but my perspective here does not depend on being one. It is rooted more in a lifetime of observing the behavior of the powerful, usually at a distance but occasionally up close. It is an analysis of power relationships in personal interactions. I am not sure most biblical scholars are any better at that, and I will certainly not assert that mine is necessarily the most accurate set of observations possible. I hope only to shed light and spur further thinking by those willing to join me in this search for deeper meaning in one of the more remarkable events in human history.

First, I must note that bad or oversimplified interpretation of these events has led to a good deal of bad blood between Jews and Christians over two millennia. Some of this continues, but none of it is appropriate or necessary. Anti-Semitism, like racism, contradicts the fundamental tenets of Christian morality and respect for others. The fact that Jews were involved in the arrest of Jesus does not change the fact that everyone else in the story is also Jewish, except for the Romans. On the eve of Christ’s crucifixion, Jerusalem was a dangerously divided community. Sympathies ran in all directions. Rome had maintained control for years with unrelenting brutality, including many other crucifixions of real and perceived rebels, and challenging Rome was no one’s route to survival. Jewish leadership was understandably concerned with national and institutional survival (deeply intertwined in their world view), and thus wary of the spiritual challenges this unconventional preacher presented. Christ’s message gained a following in this religious and political tinderbox and thus inevitably triggered a reaction by officials concerned about maintaining control. Ultimately, it was the Roman Empire that maintained control, and Rome was never very subtle in its methods. Crucifixion was a form of state-sanctioned terrorism to achieve such control. It was intended to be both demeaning and terrifying.

We should not be surprised. We need merely look around at the actions of dictators and oppressive regimes in our own time to see how this works. Much of the artistic achievement of Jesus Christ Superstar is to take a story from 2,000 years ago and reframe it with modern music and sensibilities that allow us to reassess its relevance in a modern context. That is the job of any good artist with such a story.

And that is precisely what makes the personal interaction between Pilate and Christ so powerfully intriguing. What I would deem naïve interpretations of Pilate’s reaction and response to Jesus have led over centuries to the unfortunate perception that this Roman governor believed Jesus was innocent but was afraid of the crowds that called for his crucifixion. As many scholars have noted, Pilate had already sent numerous others to their deaths by the time he encountered this itinerant preacher. Assigned to maintain control of a difficult province that most Romans viewed as a backwater, Pilate generally had little hesitation about sending to their doom anyone he saw as posing a threat to Roman hegemony, and such movements persisted for decades until the destruction of Jerusalem by Roman troops in 70 C.E. This history is very clear. As for the crowds and Pilate’s offer to free one criminal for the Passover to placate Jewish opinion, it is not hard to believe that a man like Pilate knew how to manipulate such crowds and play vicious mind games with his opponents. The overriding goal for anyone like Pilate was political survival. Just a generation later, in 66 C.E., notes John Dominic Crossan in Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, the Roman governor Florus sent no fewer than 3,600 of Judea’s leading citizens to crucifixion after mass arrests intended to forestall rebellion, which ultimately led to the Jewish diaspora. Empathy with the oppressed was no more part of the empire’s perspective than it is that of Kim Jong Un in North Korea or Vladimir Putin in Russia. Suppressing and destroying any following of any movement independent of the state is part of the standard playbook for modern totalitarian regimes.

Still, there is this haunting interaction between Pilate and Jesus. We must keep in mind that, in the end, Pilate sent Jesus and two other men to their deaths that day. If he was deeply troubled by his prisoner’s innocence, he could easily have spared him, but at most he went through the empty gesture of washing his hands. It is worth noting the conversation in the Gospel of John, which provides the most detailed report of the exchange between the two men:

Pilate: Are you the king of the Jews?

Jesus: Is that your own idea, of have others suggested it to you?

Pilate: What? Am I a Jew? Your own nation and their chief priests have brought you before me. What have you done?

Jesus: My kingdom does not belong to this world. If it did, my followers would be fighting to save me from arrest by the Jews. My kingly authority comes from elsewhere.

Pilate: You are a king, then?

Jesus: “King” is your word. My task is to bear witness to the truth. For this I was born; for this I came into the world, and all who are not deaf to the truth listen to my voice.

Pilate: What is truth?

Pilate then offers the release of Jesus to the crowd, which demands the release of Barabbas; Pilate then has Jesus flogged, the soldiers place a crown of thorns on his head, and he is mocked and belittled. A further exchange between Pilate and the crowd occurs in which the demand is that he be crucified. It seems obvious to me that Pilate knew how to use the crowd to advance his own ends. Then comes the final exchange:

Pilate: Where have you come from?

Jesus: (No answer.)

Pilate: Do you refuse to speak to me? Surely you know I have the authority to release you, and I have authority to crucify you? (Note that, at this point, Jesus has almost surely been beaten within an inch of his life.)

Jesus: You would have no authority at all over me if it had not been granted you from above; and therefore, the deeper guilt lies with the man who handed me over to you.

What I want to offer at this point is a question that, I think, is often missed or underemphasized in both scholarly accounts and religious interpretations of this powerful dialogue: Why did Pilate take pains to react in this particular manner? Aside from riling up the crowds, why not just sentence Christ and be done with the matter? Surely, Pilate did not take such pains with most prisoners.

But if we take seriously the nature of men like Pilate, we might realize that the horror of the means he would use to eliminate most perceived troublemakers would make most prisoners squirm in terror. He was probably used to, and even enjoyed, making subjects squirm in his presence, the high priests and prominent local citizens included. Absolute power tends to bestow on most human beings a perverse and even sadistic sense of superiority over others.

But at no point in this or any other New Testament accounts does Jesus squirm in the face of political power. He certainly knew what awaited him and was aware of the torture and physical agony involved. Yet here he is, still challenging authority to the point where Pilate may have thought him a madman. Zealots (Jewish rebels of the day) might simply have been defiant in such circumstances, knowing that all was lost once they were captured. They would not have engaged in any philosophical repartee. There is no indication of Jesus seeking mercy or anticipating a way out of his dilemma. Why does this matter?

Because Pilate’s reaction could very well indicate that such a fearless confrontation with his authority, which Jesus even effectively denies, leaves him utterly perplexed. Who does that?

Well, some people do, you may answer, and I suggest this: Jesus’s unflinching insistence on spiritual authority, combined with almost unflappable acceptance of the consequences of his stance, left Pilate temporarily flummoxed, groping for a means to reassert his accustomed sense of psychological dominance over those around him. One does not need even to be Christian to perceive the dynamics of the situation. But it does add some clarity because we know, as Pilate did not, that this nascent religious movement would survive three subsequent centuries of intermittent but vicious Roman persecution. Much of that would occur because of the courage people drew from the story of Christ’s confrontation with Pilate—and, of course, an abiding belief that Pilate did not have the last word.

I will also suggest that the serenity of Jesus in the face of a looming horrific end to his life has become a model that inspired numerous others to challenge unjust power by calling upon a higher morality. These included Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms, who faced potential burning at the stake; Nelson Mandela, who suffered years of imprisonment by the apartheid regime in South Africa; Martin Luther King Jr., who challenged racist violence with peaceful protest and was assassinated; or the Mirabal sisters, who were killed for challenging the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic (the subject of a novel by Julia Alvarez). And then, there is the powerful case of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed by the Nazis after challenging their authority. One can name many other examples.

However, honesty demands a recognition of other sources of such profound witness. Jews, for example, may point to a line of prophets who preceded Christ, some of whom faced dire crises of faith and provide inspiration. Mohandas Gandhi used pioneering methods of nonviolence to challenge British colonial rule in India, only to die at the hands of a fanatical Hindu assassin. His primary inspirations arose from Eastern traditions, although he seems to have blended what he considered the best of Christian spirituality into his Hindu practice, even as he expressed distaste for many of the barnacles that had attached themselves to organized religion. But he clearly faced persecution with an equanimity that put his adversaries to shame.

Of course, like all of us, each of these heroic figures had their human shortcomings. But in each case, their serene courage drew inspiration from a deep well of faith. That faith includes a resolute refusal to cede moral authority while acknowledging political authority. It includes the integrity of one’s belief system with a focus on love, mercy, and peace. And it always includes a recognition of the power of one’s conscience, but that conscience must be driven not just by passion, but by compassion, a clear recognition of the value of others. True conscience involves not just a personal set of beliefs but clarity about one’s moral commitments and their potential consequences, and the acceptance of those consequences. That anyone meets that test is a testament to the capacity of the human spirit to unite itself with divine wisdom. How that occurs is a story I will leave to saintlier souls than mine to tell.

Jim Schwab

Author’s note: The lack of images in this post is deliberate in order to maintain a focus on the ideas presented.

The Voice of Identity

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For many Americans, including numerous prominent Republicans, one of the more troubling phenomena in the 2016 presidential election was the rise of certain groups who seem to attach their own identity to resentment and rejection of those who do not fit traditional images in our culture. The frequently demonstrated reluctance of Donald Trump to distance himself from advocates of white nationalism or supremacy served only to reinforce a sense of unease about the direction our nation was taking. The situation raised some disturbing questions about who we are as a nation at the same time that it also revealed a very real sense of the loss of possibility among those who embraced the Trump messages. Before we hasten to condemn this trend, it is important to keep in mind that many of the people who launched Trump into the White House have felt a very real unease of their own, a feeling of losing their footing in what they experience as a stagnating economy. The feeling transcended party boundaries and went a long way toward explaining the surprising popularity of the Bernie Sanders candidacy in the Democratic primaries. This great stirring is far from over just because Trump won.

I do not raise this issue to reach any partisan conclusions or even to address it in any specifically political terms. But I was moved to think about it in part after observing some of the more blatant instances of racist prejudice in post-election interviews with the likes of Richard Spencer and his National Policy Institute. Spencer grabbed some attention with a speech that included the phrase “Hail Trump,” a barely veiled echo of “Heil Hitler,” and, according to a recent article in The Atlantic, made clear his dream is “a new society, an ethno-state that would be a gathering point for all Europeans,” and has called for “peaceful ethnic cleansing.” It is hard to imagine how ethnic cleansing can possibly be peaceful, so I think one can hardly be blamed for suspecting deceitful propaganda. No matter how many disclaimers the alt-right may use in trying to reframe its identity, the old stench of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi movements refuses to go away.

But I want to make a larger point and then delve into the very question of how we frame identity, and how it frames us. Our sense of identity can be both liberating and oppressive, both loving and resentful, thoughtful and downright stupid. Spencer, in a recent television interview, effectively expressed the notion of simply claiming his white identity in the same way that blacks take pride in theirs. Many on the alt-right take pains to note how much white people have contributed to our society as a means of expressing dominance. This is rather simplistic for the obvious reason that our society long was of predominantly European origin, so it stands to reason that most of our heritage bears that mark. But it is not nearly so simple as all that. The whole notion bears some dissection.

What has come to be identified as the African-American experience, for starters, resulted from a forced common experience of bondage in which most slaves lost any or most of their specific African heritages under circumstances that were not only unquestionably racist but involved violent subjugation as well. It is no accident that black slaves often readily identified with the biblical story of the Israelite release from slavery. Liberation movements throughout world history have played a role in forging new identities through struggle. The fact that the struggle has continued to this day in the form of civil rights battles has served only to strengthen those ties.

And yet—one needs only to observe the assimilation into American society of African and Caribbean black immigrants to realize that there are subtleties and variations in the African identity. President Barack Obama himself, the son of a white woman from Kansas and a Kenyan student at the University of Hawaii, struggled in his youth to establish his own sense of identity, which did not come from claiming slave ancestors in the Deep South. In current American society, one can see expressions of Ghanaian culture, as well as of Ethiopians, Nigerians, and Somalis, all arriving long after the most bitter civil rights and liberation struggles have been fought, seeking to establish their own ethnic identities in a very diverse America. The tapestry is ornate and continues to enrich American society with everything from new cuisines and artistic expression to new ways of understanding what attracts people to the American dream.

These variations and nuances extend to the frame of “white American” experience. Because what became the United States of America began with English colonies, the experience of early Americans was very English in nature—but not entirely. Early on, the British empire absorbed Dutch and French settlers into its universe, as well as a modest number of American Indians who intermarried. (It should also be noted that perhaps one-fourth of African-Americans have some American Indian ancestry, in no small part because of slaves escaping to Indian communities and integrating and intermarrying over time. See Black Indians for just one interesting exposition of this fascinating history.) Over two or three centuries, “white” America gradually absorbed more non-English elements, beginning with the Irish and Germans, and eventually including all sorts of largely non-Protestant immigrants from southern and eastern Europe as well as Lebanese, Turks, and others.

All these people brought with them unique cultural attachments. For example, Greeks brought not only their Orthodox church, but numerous specific perspectives on the world based on their own historic and philosophical outlooks, all tempered over time by new experiences in the New World. In many cases, those initial experiences included some discrimination and challenges in becoming American. Any serious student of American history is aware of such phenomena as the Know-Nothing movement of the 1840s and 1850s, a period when factory doors often sported signs indicating that “Irish need not apply.” Tensions boiled over at times, including one notable instance in Chicago in 1855 known as the Great Lager Beer Riot. Know-Nothing Mayor Levi Boone sought closure on Sundays of the pubs and bierstuben that the Irish and German workingmen patronized, and a confrontation erupted. Boone became a one-term mayor, and his initiative came to naught.

The targets of white-on-white discrimination shifted over time into the early and even mid-20th century, as assimilation proceeded and various nationalities won grudging acceptance. American literature is replete with very personal interpretations of these experiences from Norwegians, Lebanese, Greeks, Russians, and others trying to find their place in American society. One astute student of the subtleties of this evolution, Mel Brooks, generated the biting and wickedly comic satires Blazing Saddles. I have long felt that movie, which I have watched several times, offers far more insight than meets the unlearned eye into the sometimes explosive mixture of influences that shaped the American West. My own discerning eye for the subtleties of this movie came after living in Iowa for more than six years and researching a book on the farm credit crisis, as well as marrying a Nebraskan, all of which made me very aware of the diverse ethnic communities that comprise much of the West. Rural America is not nearly as monochrome as many urban Americans imagine it to be.

Let me return briefly to the phony vision of the alt-right. What I have just described should make abundantly clear that the notion of “white identity” can have only one purpose. That purpose is white supremacy and the oppression of minorities because the overall “white” experience in America is itself so diverse and has evolved so far from its English colonial roots that the only possible meaning one can attach to this “white identity” is that of suppression of any other form of identification with the meaning of “American.” I also do not think a blog article like this can do more than scratch the surface of this subject. Whole books have been devoted to the formation of personal and collective identity in the American melting pot without successfully exploring all the nooks and crannies of the issues involved. Nonetheless, I strongly believe we must keep this subject open for further exploration. We have little choice if we want to understand both ourselves and what is happening around us.

I also want to make clear that I do not believe that Donald Trump is endorsing white supremacy. What troubles me is his willingness to exploit this sentiment to advance his political ambitions. Many of the obvious splits within the Republican party had as much to do with the discomfort of Mitt Romney, John Kasich, John McCain, and the Bush family, among others, with this exploitation of prejudice as with any other stance that Trump took. These past Republican leaders simply found themselves unable to stomach such intolerance. Trade and foreign policy issues are fair game in a presidential contest, but for reasons related to his own view of the imperative of winning at any cost, there is little question that Trump took the low road in making his arguments. That choice will leave him mending fences for the next four years if he truly wants to be president of “all the people.”

Ultimately, our collective national identity is a composite of the many individual identities we construct for ourselves. Some of us construct these identities carefully and deliberately over many years, and others simply accept inherited attitudes, privileges, or resentments. But one of the central claims of the conservative right has been that America has traditionally been a Christian nation. That is a position that, in some respects, also ignores the freedom of religion that is enshrined in the First Amendment, which includes the right of people to observe other faiths or no faith at all. But I would prefer to confront white identity on Christian grounds both because I am willing to claim Christian identity and because real Christian faith flatly excludes white identity: “For in Christ there is no longer Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, male or female.” (Galatians 3:28) Saint Paul did not need to add “black nor white” to make his point perfectly clear. The only thing that is remarkable is how often this simple point is missed or ignored.

Another piece of Christian wisdom is well known and comes directly from Jesus (Luke 12:48), that from those to whom much has been given, much also is demanded. I can think of few things more appalling than to waste one’s life and talents disseminating hatred and bigotry in a world badly in need of greater love and understanding. An honest search for our collective or personal identity demands both an open mind and respect for our fellow citizens. I can think of nothing that would ever alter my perspective on that final observation.

Jim Schwab