Why is the idea of “wokeness” such a problem for some? I thought it might be helpful to unpack some of these buzzwords and catchphrases all in one place, to provide a kind of handy lexicon of “wokeness.”

So, if it’s clear Donald Trump is a racist and you’re still willing to vote for him, you have to come to terms with the fact that either you too are a racist or that you’re willing to abide racism to get/keep something more important to you—tax cuts, a chance to feel some satisfaction at the distress of liberals, louder rhetoric inveighing against abortion and gay wedding cakes. And if that is your deal, then at least have the courage to own the fact that you care more about something more than the life and dignity of people who are different from you.

"In short, because of the continued rise in infection rates, it doesn’t look like we’ll be getting back together face-to-face anytime soon. And if that’s the case, we have to ask a painful but obvious question: What if for the foreseeable future, as seems likely, this is the new normal?"

True Christian freedom doesn’t have anything to do endangering public health by whining like a petulant adolescent that your right to do as you like is more important than everyone else’s public health and their need to be protected from entitled wingnuts with guns, flags, and crosses.

Instead of making us more insular, what if our enforced time of separation opens our eyes and ears to a world we were conveniently able to avoid when going about our daily lives as we chose was something we took for granted?

What if we used this as an opportunity not to isolate ourselves from threats, but to embrace other humans?

For moderates, the only cause over which it is worth getting exercised is getting exercised over causes. Any conviction, on this account, must take a back seat to the primary conviction, which is that no one should hold any conviction more strongly than the conviction that no conviction is worth holding strongly.

All of which is to say, there can never be any state of affairs in which it is acceptable for those who wear the name of Jesus to ignore politics. For us to ignore politics, to “check out” because it’s too loud and doesn’t really affect us anyway, is to say to those whose lives are being trampled that, Jesus to the contrary notwithstanding, you’re just not someone we have to care about … and so we won’t.

What if the reason that the youngest generations are falling all over themselves to find the exits to Christianity isn't because liberals don't hate gay people enough, but because young people have stared into the abyss of evangelicalism and seen the dead-eyed gaze of Franklin Graham, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell Jr., and Robert Jeffress staring back at them?

The question that keeps coming back to me is: Why do racists get to define racism?

Why do we have to take the word of a racist that they’re not racist … all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding?

WLEX 18—link to article

"If you're going to talk about somebody else's faith - that seems to me to be a higher standard that one ought to hold one[self] to and the governor has failed at that," said Pastor Derek Penwell.

Penwell openly supports women's reproductive rights, and tells LEX 18 that he is not Baptist, but as a Christian, he said he doesn't believe it is fair to judge Beshear's faith based on his political stance on abortion.

"It's one thing to say 'we disagree with the Attorney General on this issue.' It's an entirely different thing to say 'because he does not agree with us and this point of our theological understanding, he is therefore not one of us - he's not a Christian,'" said Penwell.

It is now possible in large sections of Christianity to feel oppressed by powerful satanic forces vying to rain down imagined persecution on a perpetually aggrieved faithful, while simultaneously offering servile obeisance to the powers and principalities who rain down actual persecution on people of color, feminists, LGBTQ+ people, Muslims, refugees, children, and the impoverished. It is a damning indictment of Christianity that according to white evangelicals, one can now unashamedly serve Caesar … as long as Caesar covers himself with the thinnest patina of patriotic Jesus-y-ness, wearing the belt of anti-Christian conspiracy, the breastplate of anti-abortion politics, the shield of patriarchy, the helmet of barely disguised white nationalism, and the sword of anti-LGBTQ+ policies.

Our moral failure to welcome the those who come to us in need—not to mention our national amnesia about our country’s refugee past—is contemptible, especially to those of us who claim to be guided by faith. Our inability to offer welcome to refugees and asylum-seekers brings shame on us all.

What’s especially infuriating about white evangelicals rolling over and showing their bellies to the Republican party’s clown car full of fascist-wannabes isn’t just the street magic soul-contortions they must fool themselves into believing they’re not performing, but their remarkable lack of empathy and compassion.

How can people who claim to follow Jesus hear the cries of the wounded, who’re forced to live in fear and squalor, adjusting themselves to our view of a safe and just world . . . how can we hear those cries and think only about the most effective way to drown them out—just because we find those cries inconveniently challenge the world we’ve built for ourselves, cries that plead with us to adjust ourselves to a different world than the one we’re comfortable with—to see things through someone else’s eyes?

Good Friday and Easter don’t mean that now God can finally love us unqualifiedly because God’s tricked Godself into thinking we’re pure; it means that God loves us too much to let the power of subjugation and oppression be the final word—that in fact, God was determined through Jesus to shine a spotlight on a new world in which peace, justice, and love inevitably and irresistibly overcome violence, injustice, and hatred.

I mean, how else are you going to get through to people who’ve inoculated themselves against the encroachment of the reign of God’s peace and justice—especially since the way Jesus asks people to live stands as a rebuke to the very comfort and stability so many people cling to? 

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to follow Jesus after hearing of the recent decision from our friends in the United Methodist Church. Specifically, I’m thinking about what hearing Christians who’ve dismissed the dignity and faith of LGBTQ people must sound like to LGBTQ people when those Christians talk about the “love of Jesus.”