"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it." Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010 LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
This play is the one with Mennonites in it, I won't go into more about the plot because what I'd want to say about it would be a plot spoiler.
I'll give you another one since it's only a half an hour.
It's too bad that the CBC stopped producing radio dramas, it was one of my favorite sources for it, listening to these going in and out of tune on short-wave when this was broadcast.
I'm posting this quickly so I don't have time to type out the credits. I'll try to update later.
IN GOING OVER some of the series I posted radio dramas from, I listened to one that I'll try to post soon in which Mennonites play a major role, not Old Order Mennonites or even very conservative Mennonites, which are another matter entirely. Though not entirely unconnected. By chance listening to it soon meshed with my reading Studies in Mystical Religion by Rufus Jones. The Anabaptists play a large role in the book, leading up to both the present day Mennonites and Amish but also the Baptists (English Anabaptists) and Quakers. I hadn't understood the connection before. Jones also ties them in with much earlier movements like the Lollards though he admitted there weren't documentary links to prove that. Once there is a literary paper-trail, the links are more secure.
It's certainly a different kind of Christianity than I'm used to, having been originally a Catholic and now a Catholic+ accepting whatever I find in other kinds of Christianity, Judaism, etc. which seems to be on the right way to me. I've read and listened to a number of things, not by Old Order or the kinds of conservative Mennonites or Anabaptists who don't use that kind of technology. It seems wise to limit exposure to that kind of media if you have impressionable adults or children around, it's what's made so many Americans into amoral idiots. Some use of technology by some Mennonites might give some hints for using it while not being corrupted by it.
Many of the Mennonites, even some quite conservative ones who I am reading and hearing are remarkably reasonable about their religion and those who don't follow it. Some of them are downright liberal in some things as even some of the conservative ones are quite radical by current American secular Mammonist standards. Of course they don't tend to be libertarian liberals because they have a moral center and motive in what they do, they take the New Testament quite seriously, which would lead someone in most cases to be radical if you take equality and justice and economic justice as seriously as that would tend to make you. I can't really take to things like the fixed notion of gender roles in much of it and most of the various denominations are far from welcoming to LBGTQ+ People.
In giving up ideas of an ordained priesthood, the ideas of the Sacraments that are held by Orthodox, Catholic, many Protestants, they certainly give up some things valued in those traditions but they also gain other things, a remarkable flexibility in the creation, implosions and rearrangements of local congregations and larger groupings. They base much of their religion on the local congregations, some of which split voluntarily if the members feel those are getting too large. There's a lot to be said for that. As well as splitting due to what seems to outsiders as minor or major theological disagreements, details of discipline or interpretation of the Bible. There is a great deal of that and there has been from the very beginning of the movement.
It's a bit ironic that most of the public consciousness of Anabaptists is based on the rigid holding to ways of life and conduct that were passed by in the general culture in the 19th, 18th or even 16th century, minor things like buttons and lengths of shirt sleeves have been enough to split up over. If those seem minor to me, well, I'm not in the groups so I don't have any way to know what it means to those who are.
I have a problem with the limits of education some of the groups impose because if the children choose to leave, are kicked out or otherwise lose the support of their family and community, they can be left in a serious state of distress. I've never thought that a religious choice made out of ignorance of the wider world is a real choice or a safe means of finding solid belief. But the same thing can be said of children who go to other private or even many public schools. I doubt that a child whose education was, in reality, replaced by TV, the internet or mindless entertainment so common in secular, a-religious America is much better off. I know of a 19 year old who graduated from high school last year who is as up the creek as anyone who was never educated past an 8th grade level in antique Plat-Deutsch.
I am most interested in what would probably be called "liberal Mennonites" some groups of which have stopped calling themselves Mennonites while staying identified as Anabaptists. One of the things I've listened to were the presentations of the Mennonite Writers Conference held at Goshen College in 2022, the keynote address was given by Casey Platt, a Mennonite trans-woman whose writing I'm planning on reading when I can get around to finding them. The others who spoke were as interesting. It gave me an insight into a world that I never knew existed before. It's a different kind of "evangelical" Christianity than you're going to get from the American media. It's certainly more centered in the radicalism of the Gospel, Acts and Epistles than 95% of what you'll hear called "evangelical Christianity" in the media.
Christianity is changing, that's certainly the case, just as it always has. Reading Gregory of Nyssa and some others, I'm convinced it's supposed to change as the universe and our life in it is always changing. I believe in The Living God and the Living Christ, there is no past that we can ever recover or long preserve. I would bet that even the most reactionary of Mennonites or Amish congregations really live in the past of their families and groups. The trad-Catholic cult may be able to continue to make believe it's still 1952 for quite a while with the billionaires trying to harness Catholicism to push capitalist-fascism in politics - though I'm hoping Francis and his successor can suppress that heresy. "Mainline churches" in Protestantism seem to have problems similar to Mennonites only translated to their own vocabularies. I don't consider many of the Baptists to be Christians anymore, they having gone over to Mammon worship like the trad-Catholics have, and from what I gather from listening to critics in American Orthodoxy they feel Orthodoxy has undergone the same kind of hostile takeover that Catholicism in America has.
Reading in Rufus Joneses book how 17th century English Protestantism devolved into the Ranters looks remarkably familiar in the general outlines of the majority of "white evangelicals" in America. Only those People were more marginal with less money and generally didn't have automatic weapons and memberships in fascists and Nazi organizations. They weren't getting billionaire money or its equivalent. The "white evangelical" and "trad-Catholics" of the Republican Party are if anything more ga-ga than the Ranters were. And I'd include a number of the members of the US Catholic Conference of Bishops in that, Strickland in Tyler, Texas is certainly in their number as is the putrid Raymond Burke. I'd put Barron among them, too, though he has more media savvy.
Maybe the future of Christianity is in small independent churches, probably a lot of them house churches supported by their local congregation and householders. I have a friend who is working on writing and compiling a small hymnal for such a small congregation. Believe me, he never thought he'd be doing that fifty years after we were in college together. But I'd never have thought I'd be writing something like this. Maybe the future of Christianity is going to be a lot like the ferment of the early Reformation in which old forms and ways are going to have to give way to newer ones, Women's roles, LGBTQ+ issues, different cultural and regional ways found where old forms and ways have failed. I don't think that big churches and even many small church buildings are going to play much of a role in it. And there is also the Roman Catholic Womenpriests movement and the Intentional Eucharistic Community movement. Maybe that was where things started to go wrong, to start with, building big churches. Earliest Christianity was pretty much a home-church affair, that's what the Protestants imagined they were restoring, though that's not possible or, perhaps, even what we're supposed to be doing.
I would recommend Rufus Foxes book readable from the link above, though there is some of it I don't agree with. He has slight regard for the great Orthodox tradition in favor of the later Western, Latin tradition. I find St. Gregory of Nyssa quite a bit better than St. Augustine who I think led Western Christianity down a terrible path which it still is far from recovering from. I think his analysis of the early corruption of Protestantism through Luther's and Zwingli's dependence on secular powers and, so, allowed their reforms to conform with what secular powers were comfortable with. The enormous and deadly attempt to suppress and summarily murder to get rid of Anabaptism was, I think, a combination of the attempt to protect the power of both the state and the established churches - I do agree with Jones that the persecution and mass murder of Anabaptists is one of the darkest episodes in Christianity, not that there were not other such mortal sins committed by the Churches as soon as those allied themselves to secular power in the early centuries of Christianity.
I would also recommend reading and listening to the Mennonites and other Anabaptists, even if things like Women covering their hair or the rejection of LGBTQ+ People by some of them might make you angry.
One thing I did like is that so many of them have such a robust practice of congregational singing. I'd heard how impressive it can be to hear how Mennonites who come together from different places can sing in 4-part harmony at the drop of a hymn title. While some of it has the limits of mediocre 19th century Protestant hymnody, some of it is quite a bit better than that. One of the articles I read about churches splitting over being welcoming to LGBTQ+ People ended with a minister saying, well, we can still sing together.
WHILE LISTENING TO some lawyers commenting on the obvious truth that Mark Meadows twisted his legitimate role as Chief of Staff to criminally participating in the planning of the January 6th insurrection into a proper function of a federal official it occurred to me that his claim has some of the same thinking behind it as the even more dangerous idea that someone has a "right" to lie. In fact, that his lawyer would ever leave him unaware of the obvious nature of the lie he has told in court that what he did was a legitimate function of a presidential chief-of-staff is a fine example of how the legal profession has digested that slogan and it makes them unable to appreciate that there is not only a difference between the truth and lies but that the difference is often of the greatest possible consequence. I hope he is successfully tried and convicted of perjury, though I hope even more that lawyers will stop reciting the terrible lie that someone "has a right to lie." It would seem that the rule of thumb under current notions of such things is that a lie is as good as the truth if you can work it the way you want it to. Such thinking would seem to be endemic to our legal system, yet people wonder at how Trump has managed to avoid conviction his entire privileged, rich-straight-white-male life.
I still keep hearing media lawyers like Maya Wiley use the pat phrase "has a right to lie," which it is so far beneath her to say, and many who are not usually at tall above saying such an untrue thing. It is insane that this many years into the deadly examples of why there is no "right to lie," Trump, Bush II (never forget how the Bush II regime lied us into what is still the biggest military-political disaster the United States ever entered into), Reagan's lies that fomented terrorist fascist movements in Central America leading to consequences that we are still dealing with, etc. That is well after the media itself, maybe the greatest source of that kind of criminally insane thinking, has finally noticed that lies are destructive of decent government and the greatest friend that fascism has had apart from armed violence.
Someone, someday, should make a real study of the price that American democracy has paid for the permission of the media to lie given to it by the Warren Court and expanded enormously by every subsequent arrangement of the Supreme Court, the Roberts Court accelerating the empowerment of lies like no other. It's probably at least as great as the enormous cost to American democracy and American decency that our indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy and racism has cost us. Which is not to underestimate the cost of male supremacy, the universal form of fascism that keeps half of the human population under the inhibitions of a reign of terror so ubiquitous that many Women think it's some kind of natural order that they have been gulled into rather liking. American racism is the evil fruit of lies.
There is no right to do something that is wrong.
That is a moral truth that should fall far more easily from the lips of civil rights lawyers, other lawyers, anyone who is entrusted to teach lawyers in any law school, it should be required to be posted in the front of every classroom in the country and preached from every pulpit. I would say that any school that wouldn't post it should be disqualified from presenting itself as a school, any denomination that wouldn't agree with it and so act should be defined as a pseudo-religious cult that shouldn't be allowed to pass itself off as a religion.
I've been having this argument long enough to know the moves of those who defend lying and the liars who lie.
What about lying to save the life of someone you know is in hiding from someone who will harm or kill them. The "is it wrong to lie to the Nazis about where the Jews are hiding" ruse.
Of course that is not a often encountered moral dilemma so easily 99% of the lying shouldn't be allowed to pass on that extreme exception. You could make up any possible hypothetical to demolish any possible assertion of morality. There are certainly times when it is morally responsible to kill someone, that doesn't make murder wrong, it's generally the wrong that makes killing a killer the right thing to do. It's the reason it's morally responsible to lie to a Nazi. Of course it's right to lie to the Nazis under such a circumstance BUT THAT IS A CONSEQUENCE OF THEIR FAR MORE CONSEQUENTIAL EVIL. I would point out that while it would be the right thing to do to lie to the Nazis like that IT'S A FAR DIFFERENT THING THAN CONSIDERING DOING THAT A "RIGHT". That the English language uses the same word for two quite different and far from equivalent ideas shouldn't lead us to pretend that the moral necessity of protecting would-be victims from their killers is the same thing as that the killers had a right to lie in order to whip up violence against those victims. Lying through the limits of our languages is a common form of lying to defraud us of the truth. Failing to navigate such features of language make us idiots such as so many base their professional lives on pretending to be.
It's a rather obvious truth that the empowerment of the Nazis was enormously facilitated by lies permitted to be told, THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL OF THOSE TOLD IN THE MASS MEDIA and by journalists, lawyers, and, it should never be forgotten, academics, including respected scientists of of the time. It's as true that empowering American white supremacy from lies such as the pseudo-history of Gone With The Wind and other fiction and, more obviously dangerous, lies told as "news" was given "First Amendment" protection in ways that the very lives of the victims of lives never has been protected under the U.S. Constitution. We are idiots if we don't understand the malignant effect that lies spread in novels, plays, movies and other entertainment has in enslavement, oppression, murder and genocide. Though suppressing lies as "news" or "information" is and always has been a pressing issue.
What about people who tell lies because they believe they're true? Well, IF there is little consequence to such internalized lies there might not be any good in attaching criminal or administrative consequences to lies like that which are harmless in their effects. But it is certainly a moral good and it should be a legal duty to tell them the truth when those lies are spread casually. When they're spread by the mass media, sold to millions or even many thousands who are so gulled into believing lies are truth, the dangers of lies are enormous - Trump rose on such lies, Bush II sold the illegal invasion of Iraq which has to date resulted in hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths on such lies CARRIED WITH TOTAL IMPUNITY BY THE FREEST PRESS IN OUR HISTORY. To allow lies such as Trump pretends to believe in the belief that he will get off by that ruse - as it's clear his hireling lawyers are telling those stupid enough to take their word for it to tell lies like "I don't recall," is stupid and absurd. Yet you'll hear lawyers in the media pushing that line, too.
Lies told during the Covid pandemic cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans, not a few people died because of lies told by Trump, by Republican governors such as those in South Dakota, Florida, Texas, etc. by media figures, by members of Congress and by those in the media and countless lying preachers on the make. One of those two towns over got People in his cult and out of it killed. They were sold by MDs and scientists and pseudo-scientists such as "Darwinian economists." I doubt there were many of those who ever lost their professional credentials or even faculty positions as a consequence of the most consequential lies they told on FOX Lies, CNN, etc. No doubt the media lawyers, even the supposed liberal ones would call that a "right to lie."
Getting back to the "lying to the Nazis" ruse above, the idea that such homicidal liars "have a right to lie" has killed a hell of a lot of People, so it has a demonstrated effect of doing exactly what the Nazis do. It is an enormous irony of the 18th century "enlightenment" pseudo-virtue that there is a moral duty to "defend to the death" a right to tell such malicious lies has the same effect as Nazism or any other oppressive dictatorial regime. It should never be forgotten that that great event of the "enlightenment" the French Revolution immediately turned into a reign of terror by serially elevated homicidal gangster factions of intellectuals who lied about each other and immediately sent their political rivals to the guillotine. I think the reign of terror is a short quick trip into what will come when such idiotic ideas such as that there is a right to tell lies gain hold. It was and still is a regular feature of "Marxist" regimes and, now, it would seem it's being proposed for whenever Republican-fascists (white supremacists) here take control.
I have pointed out that my opinion of lawyers fell enormously during the House Judiciary and Intelligence committee hearings in which it was the diplomats and the military officers testifying at professional and even personal risk to expose Trump's crimes and it was the lawyers who covered their asses. I believe such professional ass-covering is a large part of most legal educations. Like taking professional advantages and going for the deep pockets. During and after the Trump regime, hearing lawyers saying that someone "has a right to lie" has done nothing to revive my once better opinion of the profession.
Don't bother asking about my opinion of the alleged profession of journalism. It was listening to and reading the lies carried by the mass media, especially such allegedly august organs of it as NPR, PBS, the New York Times, etc. on the "people are saying" and "both-sides" excuses and tracing those back to the Sullivan Decision of the Supreme Court that opened my eyes to the basic dishonesty of our culture under "free speech-press" absolutism. The idea that you can long allow the publication of lies and not suffer enormous consequences is best illustrated to be a meta-lie by how white supremacy has flourished in the United States before and after the adoption of the Bill of Rights. There could never have been the oppressive violence against Black People, against Native Americans and others without the regime of lies that supported it. Subjugated populations, slaves then de facto slaves under Jim Crow - even after legal emancipation and the adoption of the Civil War Amendments* - would never have faced oppression without a tidal wave of lies. Lies fed the terrorism of the slave patrols (as promoted and protected by the 2nd Amendment), of lynch mobs, the KKK and all American fascist groups and gangs. Lies are the power behind Trumpism and Republican-fascism.
The pretenses of the legal profession and, especially, the courts are among the most consequential of lies. It is from such lawyers and judges and "justices" that the idea that someone can "have a right to lie" comes. It was a consequence of the idiotically truncated writing of the golden calf of American liberalism, The First Amendment, drafted by some of the most respected lawyers of the time. That it does not specify that there is a right to tell the truth but there is no right to lie is its major and glaring flaw. Another is that there is no such thing as a "right" which does not inhere to a living being, the "press" has no rights because "the press" is an artificial human construct. So is a religion. There may be a right for a person to believe what they choose to or to associate with others but that does not give their shared belief or an organization they want to associate in anything like a right to do something like discriminate when operating a public accommodation. I am inclined to suspect that some of the language of the Bill of Rights was inserted to thwart the rights of those who were enslaved by James Madison and the others who adopted the wording of them but I think much else was put in because they didn't really give it much thought. I don't think it's possible to hold other People as slaves without it totally corrupting the slaver. And some of the founders were quite OK with genocide, as well. I don't think there is any such thing as a racist or genocidalist who is safe for a democracy to enable and nurture. Or any whose moral or even political authority is safely held up as sacrosanct and above the strongest critical analysis.
Some of it was probably the casual adoption of slogans of "liberty" or "freedom" that didn't have much thought put into them, I don't remember ever hearing those associated with the less audience pleasing feature of responsibility. Such conventional slogans are used with little thought, certainly less thought than Supreme Court "justices" have put into twisting them in directions it's clear no one ever intended in the 1790s or even till 1964 and under which no sane person could still consider them as virtues. Such legalistic lying is certainly consequential. As consequential as that huge whopper put into American legal lore and practices that corporations enjoy "rights" such as the Roberts Court has put over the rights of natural human beings in their "religious liberties" codification of bigotry. Such lies make it clear that it's time for those of us targeted by the Supreme Court regime of lies, think seriously about these issues because it's clear, they're coming for us. Black People and their rights to full citizenship, Native Americans or even their lives, other targeted minorities, Women who are being denied the most basic of rights to determine what happens within their own skin, LGBTQ+ People. The old "civil liberties" lawyers and their slogans and come-ons are no help to us in the end, they have put the "right to lie" AND EVEN TO OWN AUTOMATIC WEAPONS of white supremacists, Neo-Nazis and others ahead of our very lives. They peddle as virtue their enablement of Nazis and the KKK and corporations to get us addicted to alcohol and opiates, etc. And addled by such slogans as I am critical of above, even sober American liberals suck it up like "free press" fentanyl. Even as it leads to the election of Republican-fascists who lose elections.
That old lie that there is a right to lie has had its trial in history and its results are obviously catastrophic. Whatever dangers that can be imagined-up by an acknowledgement that there is no right to lie are conjectural, the dangers of lies allowed is a clear and present danger. We can't live with a First Amendment that permits lying, especially in the mass media. Democracy can't survive it. Equality certainly can't, it has been the continual first casualty in the liars lies against the Truth and it has been the entire time the First Amendment in its present flawed form has been the law of the land.
* Which the Supreme Court has twisted out of any semblance of their obvious meaning and original intent, especially the 14th Amendment. That's one of the reasons I am skeptical that the corrupt Roberts Court will apply the obviously intended disqualification of the insurrectionist-president Trump when the case gets to it. There has been no branch of the government more addicted to lying than the Supreme Court, and it doesn't even have to run for the offices they hold. That goes back to John Marshall and Joseph Story in their white supremacist slavery decisions, which, by the way, fundamentally and enormously enriched the legendary John Marshall whose enormous wealth was founded in slavery. That such self-enrichment by Supreme Court "justices" has been permitted since the start is another important flaw of the U.S. Constitution, one which we are required to lie about but I'm a bit of a thought criminal, after all. I will go so far as to say the Constitution as it is written has become an impediment to us learning from even the most severe lessons in the hard school of experience, the First Amendment as it is written, among the greatest inhibitions of that national lesson learning.
Today, September 3, is midway through Labor Day weekend in the United States and Canada. Labor Day is a day to celebrate workers, for all to rest from labor. It marks the ending of Summer, as the Northern Hemisphere moves toward Autumn. The weather will be getting cooler, even cold. Our dear neighbors in the Southern Hemisphere are looking forward to the first sight of Spring, as they shed the dark and cold of Winter. No matter the season, travel can be difficult.
Do you ever wonder how the traveling people are doing when you hear about a hurricane or flood? Where were they going? Why? Who was with them? Who even knew they went away?
Today, for the Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary time, the Church gives us three readings about our journeys. When called, we went. On arrival, we got instructions. On settling in, we learned what it was all about.
Today the Church also remembers two saints, one ancient, one medieval. Each spent a good deal of time “on the road.”
Saint Phoebe, Deacon of the Church at Cenchreae, lived in the first century near the Greek port of Corinth. She, as you may know, brought Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans. We know very little else about her, except that she made the trip—it would be some 750 miles by sea and over land, even farther only by boat.
Saint Gregory the Great came along later. In the sixth-century, Gregory was classically educated in the liberal arts and in law. He was religious—his great-great grandfather was Pope Felix III—and he left his position as prefect of Rome to become a Benedictine monk. Soon, Pope Pelagius II called Gregory to become a deacon of Rome but sent him off to Constantinople (perhaps 750 miles away) as his legate. By the time the Deacon Gregory was fifty he was elected bishop of Rome, and pope.
What were they thinking? Phoebe, sent off to the small Christian community in Rome, Gregory to negotiate peace terms in Constantinople? Did the words of Jeremiah echo in their minds: “You duped me, O Lord, and I let myself be duped.” They were called by God to be Christians. They accepted the call and went where they were asked. Did a ship they sailed on leak? Was the weather hot, or freezing cold? Did their traveling companions, once they found out where they were going, avoid them, snickering in the background about their stupidity, getting involved in the Christian story? Did Jeremiah’s words haunt them? “…the word of the Lord has brought me derision and reproach all the day.” How many times did they want to quit? Did they say aloud, or hear the voice in their sleepless nights, “I will not mention him, I will speak his name no more.”?
They got where they were going. Gregory had Paul’s Letter to the Romans, the one Phoebe carried five centuries before. The words they brought were their own instructions, too. Can you hear Phoebe preach? “Brothers and sisters, Paul sends greetings and instructions. ‘Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is pleasing and perfect.’ This is from the 12th chapter of the letter he sends you.” Will you imagine Gregory, turning these words over and over in his mind? He would have preferred to stay in his monastery, you know.
No doubt at some point they each learned what it is all about. Today’s reading from Matthew recalls Jesus explaining things to his apostles. Jesus told them things would get rough, very rough. He would be tortured and killed, but “raised on the third day.” Peter, as Matthew writes, was having nothing of it. But Jesus insisted, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” At what point did Phoebe and Gregory accept, fully accept their crosses? Was it when some Roman man made a snide comment to Phoebe? Did he ask why she was in Rome? Did he threaten her, even screaming that no woman should be teaching? And what about Gregory? Were there comments often, maybe always, made behind his back? Was there jealousy of his family, of their land holdings in Rome and Sicily? Did someone mutter, “he’s not so smart, he’s only well-connected”?
No doubt they heard the comments. People are only too happy to let you know when you, your work, your very life has been discredited. Slander is a favorite indoor sport of too many people, even some who claim to be religious.
How has your journey been? How many times have you quit, or at least threatened to? How many times have you thought it is just too hard, too far, too dangerous, to be and to do what God calls you to be and to do? How many times have you tried to ignore the truth of the Cross of Christ, the reality of what it means to be a Christian?
Nobody said it would be easy. Surely Phoebe and Gregory had deep joy and welcomed rest when they were with their own communities. No doubt there were more people who listened to them than who turned away. The people who ignored them did not really bother them because they knew, you see, it was not about them. They were, at heart, both deacons, and their hearts contained the Good News, the message of the Gospels.
When called, they went, and when they got where they were going, they knew (somehow) what they had to do and to say. As days turned into weeks, then months, they understood more deeply what it was all about.
It is the same with each of us. At some point we brush away the doubts and fears and understand that where we are is most probably where we ought to be. Then we can rest. We can rest from our labors in the shadow of the Cross.