Two lines from this piece stand out to me. First, “anxieties over health-care costs, for their children’s education, for job security, for medical leave, for home ownership, and more, are being ignored in the manic flurry of … executive orders.” And second, “we need to expand our political imagination and broaden our historical memory.”

Part of expanding our imagination and broadening our memory is not to get caught up in that manic flurry, but instead to focus on the real problems.

I think, for example, of something that Thomas Merton wrote: “Nine-tenths of the news, as printed in the papers” —or now, as appearing in social media and on TV— “is pseudo-news, manufactured events. Some days ten tenths. The ritual morning trance, in which one scans columns of newsprint” —or now, doom scrolls social media— “creates a peculiar form of generalized pseudo-attention to a pseudo-reality. This experience is taken seriously. It is one’s daily immersion in ‘reality.’ One’s orientation to the rest of the world. One’s way of reassuring [oneself] that [one] has not fallen behind. That [one] is still there. That [one] still counts!”

Merton continues: “My own experience has been that renunciation of this self-hypnosis, of this participation in the unquiet universal trance, is no sacrifice of reality at all. To ‘fall behind’ in this sense is to get out of the big cloud of dust that everybody is kicking up, to breathe and to see a little more clearly.”

(I take those quotations from The Pocket Thomas Merton, which collects his other writings. The ones above are from his 1968 book Faith and Violence.)

Another part of expanding our imagination and broadening our memory is, counterintuitively, to focus more locally—in our homes, our neighborhoods, our workplaces, and our own faith communities. One of the things that happens in a country this big, and in a world this big, is that we end up spending our outrage on things that are happening far away, whether somewhere else in the country, or somewhere in another country, even when we probably do not fully understand those things. And then when we come together in our own lives, we spend our time completely focused on things that are happening elsewhere.

This is something that I see almost every Sunday at my church. It is a particular “sin” of liberal Christians. We gather to study, pray, worship, or just be together in fellowship, and somebody comes in agitated because of “what’s going on in” such-and-such place (and it is a never-ending carousel of other places), or what emanated from MSNBC on the never-off TV in their home. And what that does is that it redirects the energy of the group away from thinking about where we are, and who we are, and what is happening in our own community, to our own neighbors—or even to ourselves—so that what we must do is calm the anxiety of the agitated person by collectively affirming that their anxiety is actually virtue-signaling, and yes, we all agree that “what’s going on in” that place is terrible. And because we are talking about things happening far away, we delude ourselves into believing that we have some broad and generous imagination and consciousness of the suffering of the world, when really what we are doing is using those faraway things as excuses to disengage from who and where we are. But really what we are doing is we are constricting our imagination and our memory, so that the only narrative we really participate in is the one that is foisted on us by a mass “news” media whose interest is certainly not in prompting us to engage in our communities to their improvement, but rather to keeping us on the treadmill narrative that those media companies are feeding to us.

What would happen if we followed Thomas Merton’s advice of “renunciation” from this “self-hypnosis” in this “unquiet universal trance,” but instead were to exit the dust cloud and see more clearly what is going on around us?

And while I confess that it is exceedingly difficult for me to sympathize with the people whose votes for the current regime brought us into this moment, I do believe that all of those people share the same basic needs as everyone else: to live meaningful lives, to experience beauty, to have access to affordable housing, to have access to affordable health care, to be free from oppression, to be able to envision a future for their children. I think their desires for those basic needs have been twisted and distorted by racist and theocratic ideology that makes them imagine that the primary impediments to those things are immigrants, people with darker skin tones, and federal employees, among others, instead of the real impediments, which are the owner class that is currently sacking and looting our federal government to their own further enrichment. But the only way we are ever going to realize the fact that “there are more of us than there are of them” is if we help each other to remain present, in our own times and places, to see the real humanity of those who are right here with us. That is the expansion of imagination of and the broadening of memory that we need.

The nature of God does not change. But doctrines of God have changed constantly throughout history. We can see them change in scripture itself—from bodied to disembodied; from visible to invisible; from poly- and henotheistic to monotheistic; from geographically local to cosmically universal, and so on. They may do that because they are only doctrines, which are linguistically and culturally rooted. This is how our Jewish friends and our Muslim friends can understand God differently, even though God is, in Godself, only ever God.

And another problem with purporting to limit oneself to just the teachings of Jesus is that we have nothing Jesus wrote (if he wrote anything, and he probably did not), and Jesus did not have anything of our New Testament, all of which was written in a series of decades long after his time in Judea. That means Jesus cannot possibly have had the same doctrine of scripture that we might have (for example, he could not have affirmed the canon of the New Testament), and so saying that we should be limited to the words of Jesus in our scripture is really no different than affirming the Christian, trinitarian doctrine of God—both of those things post-date Jesus.

And doctrines are not just people getting together and voting. They are imagined, and argued, and circulated, and engaged, and argued some more, all out in the wilds of the church universal, until gradually they become part of the substance of the conversation comprising the tradition. That some of those processes of conversation and argumentation might be ecumenical councils is only a small fraction of the life of doctrine.

Certainly there are unitarian Christians. But all of the unitarian Christians I have ever had substantive personal interactions with appear to be unitarian in response to a fundamental misunderstanding of the trinitarian doctrine of God. And right in the beginning of that article you linked, it says Jesus is “not equal to God himself,” as one of the defining characteristics of Christian unitarianism. But even trinitarian doctrine is not about saying that Jesus is “equal to God himself”—that is, trinitarian doctrine is not that “Jesus is God,” but that “the Trinity is God.”

Folks are certainly free to believe whatever they wish, but unitarianism in Christianity as a response to trinitarianism has always struck me as a response to a poor understanding of trinitarianism, rather than as a response to trinitarianism itself. The unity of Godhead remains key to trinitarianism. Katherine Sondregger, in her Systematic Theology: Volume 1, The Doctrine of God, for example, begins by focusing at great length on the unity of God—but she remains trinitarian.

Christianity is a long tradition with many developments in many times places to ensure that the tradition remains relevant. Cutting off that tradition, or pretending that we can some how refuse to “deviate from Jesus’s teachings,” even though we live in a completely different context than Jesus did, is both a denial of reality and a recipe to make the tradition irrelevant. If the Trinity is no longer relevant, then the thing to do is to make arguments based on where we are, the context we’re in, for a development to something else. Purporting to leapfrog back in time as though the intervening two millennia didn’t happen isn’t going to work.

The distinctly Christian doctrine of God is that the Trinity is God. That does not mean that each of the three “persons”—Father, Son, Holy Spirit—is God (in the sense that each can be separated into a separate entity that is God); it does not even really mean that all of them are God (in the sense that God is the addition of the three together). Rather, what it means is that a distinctly Christian way to understand God is as a relationship. An early idea of this is expressed, for example, in the prayer of Jesus in John 17 for oneness between God, himself, and his followers, that all shall be “in” each other. To be clear, however, the Trinity is a doctrine that was only developed after all of the writings in the New Testament. There are lots of ways that people have read the Trinity back into scripture, but the idea was developed only later.

The relational aspect of the Trinity is also expressed, for example, in the idea that Christians pray not to Jesus but through Jesus—that is, that prayer is participation in the divine, through the human person of the Trinity. So it is not—should not be, in my view—that Jesus is worshipped separately from God, because the idea is that Jesus is not separate from God. One way to think about it is that the relation of the Trinity is experienced in the relationship we may all experience, between the divine that is the ground of being (Father), the humanity that is our being (Son), and the connection between all humans and the divine (Holy Spirit). And to worship is to participate intentionally in that totality of relationship. That is, to worship is to experience “grace,” which can also be defined as partaking in the divine nature. Or, from a different perspective, you could say that to worship is to practice rootedness in the true reality of our being, which is as the human experience of the divine in relationship.

Or, as I have heard it said, the Trinity represents the Lover (Father), the Beloved (Son), and Love Itself (Holy Spirit). So when we say with I John 4 that “God is love,” that is what we mean.

Also, the doctrine of the Trinity is not a simple one, but one that has a long history, and many expositors. And there are different theologians who put different emphases on different aspects of it. There are also lots of Christians that talk about it without really understanding it, and in ways that are not really faithful to the complexity of it. You could study it, or contemplate it, for a lifetime—but most of us won’t.

My experience is that I was raised in a “conservative” Christian environment, which I rejected vehemently upon coming of age. Then I spent about 15 years as an outspoken atheist. And then about 10 years ago I found a home in a “progressive” congregation of the United Church of Christ.

I mark the words “conservative” and “progressive” with those quotation marks because, on the meanings of the words, they do not really make sense to me in the contexts where they are used. Fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity is really a modernist reaction that is only about 150 years old, so not really “conservative” in a sense that I find coherent. While “progressive” is one of those silly, broad words that comes with all sorts of baggage and expectations that do not fit together. My church today is more rooted in the depth and breadth of the Christian tradition than where I came from.

All of which is to say that I don’t quite match the parameters of your question, in the sense of coming to Christianity from some unrelated elsewhere. But I did experience a total rejection of Christianity followed by a return.

And I use those words carefully, because I would not say that, in my return, I was “convinced” to “accept” Christianity. What happened instead is that I committed to participate in Christianity. And to participate is, in my view, almost totally antithetical to being “convinced”: to be convinced, in my experience, is to imagine that one has reached an endpoint; while to participate is to recognize that one is always beginning again, where one is. It is the same with “accept”: I would not say that I “accept” anything of Christianity, in the sense of just receiving it uncritically. This, too, is what it means to participate—or, to use maybe a more spiritual-sounding word, to partake. To partake in the Christian tradition is to engage in a dance or a relationship—to be the bush that burns without being consumed, as Moses encountered. There is always a tension, which is the same tension of being fully alive.

So to me the better question would be why did I commit to that participation?

And the answer, to try and keep it short, is that I recognized my deep heritage, which had been cut off from me both by the fundamentalism of my youth and by the atheism that was really just a reflection of the fundamentalism. One way I have put it before is that I was in search of meaning, and I realized that what I had lost from, and then found in, the Christian tradition was a great storehouse and library of meaning-making. Not only that, but it represented ways that had affected my formation as a person over generations before I was born. And what I had been attempting in my atheism (and what before that had been the institutional and ideological foundations of the fundamentalism in which I was raised) was what I would now call the quintessentially modernist fallacy—maybe the primary defect of the modern approach: the idea that one can purport to disconnect from one’s roots and history. It is the illusion, as I have sometimes put it flippantly since, that the life of faith is just a matter of character design and inventory stocking, as though one were fitting out a character in a game. That is not how life works.

Rather, life works in commitment to the reality in which one is formed, which might actually be the reality that extends far earlier than the reality that one has experienced within one’s own life. It is to recognize that truth and freedom are never unmoored from contingency: who and what and how and where and why one is are things that extend far past the limits of what one imagines to be the choices that one has made.

So I returned, and continue returning, in participation with the Christian tradition, which is both broad and deep, and filled with diversity and conflict, but also meaning.

I don’t know what you mean by “open discussion,” but excellent podcasts I enjoy include:

The Bible for Normal People / Faith for Normal People Data Over Dogma Biblical Time Machine

People are going to abuse scripture, the same as people are going to abuse everything.

The lectionary readings for this coming Sunday include Psalm 37, which offers this wisdom:

“Do not fret because of the wicked; … for they will soon fade like the grass, and wither like the green herb. Trust in the Lord and do good…. Take delight in the Lord…. Commit your way to the Lord…. Be still before the Lord, and wait patiently for him; do not fret over those who prosper in their way, over those who carry out evil devices. Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath. Do not fret—it leads only to evil. … Depart from evil, and do good; so you shall abide forever. For the Lord loves justice….”

And so on. The psalm offers an opportunity to reflect on the ways we might best live. It is summed up, I think, in one of my favorite movie lines of recent years (albeit in a much maligned scene in a much maligned movie), that we win by saving what we love, rather than by fighting what we hate.

Peace be with you.

You’re welcome to feel that way, but it simply is not accurate to say “nothing about the god of the Bible is kind or loving.” The love and kindness of God are all throughout scripture.

Those other things are certainly in there, too. But neither they nor their presence in scripture are the end of the story. Throughout history, people have experienced and perpetrated horrific violence. We could just as easily (and just as inaccurately) say there is nothing kind or loving of humanity. We do not, however, because it is not true. And people have generally reflected themselves and their experiences—including the violent ones—into their storytelling about God. The better question to ask about anybody’s ideas about God, including ideas that we find in scripture, is not whether they are objectively true, but what they reflect about the people who are speaking or writing them, and what we should learn from that.

For example, why would people wish to tell a story of how they violently invaded a land and displaced or subjugated its people, as we find in the book of Joshua? The question is even more compelling when we consider the fact that archaeological evidence simply does not support the historicity of such a conquest. What does it tell us about these storytellers that they would wish to fabricate such events as their own story?

Similarly, in the United States, where I live, it is fascinating to see the way people have done precisely the opposite of what the biblical storytellers have done: although European colonizers in fact perpetrated a violent program of displacement and subjugation, that true story is suppressed by many in favor of a false one in which the colonizers are bringers of light and peace.

We can learn a lot about ourselves and others by considering these things. And the Bible is not just some factual account of “what happened” that must simply be either accepted or rejected uncritically. Rather, scripture is an invitation to press more deeply into the difficulties and messiness of human existence and the human relation to the Divine.

This is a great piece, which points in the same kind of direction that I have tried to point in some recent conversations: that obsessive comparisons of our present moment to some prior historical moment (such as 1930s Germany, to take what seems to be the most popular one these days) are not actually helpful. This piece gives me a little more of the vocabulary I need to say why: because they are worse than unimaginative; they are even against imagination. Those kinds of comparisons are the human-participatory equivalent of generative AI: an echo chamber.

But shouldn’t we seek to learn from the past? Sure, I guess. But that’s not what I see in these comparisons. Instead, I see a kind of nihilistic determinism of if this, then that, from which we have no freedom of escape. This must be coded as the nazification of the United States, and every decision must be fitted to that framework.

What we need instead is more imagination—more of the “necessary fiction,” as Butler puts it, of what the world transformed ought to look like. Not what the world looked like 90 years ago, or 80 or 70, but what the world ought to look like today. And that imaginative work must be inclusive and it must integrate all of our reality. We cannot just leave out the bad people.

Anyway, thanks for sharing this.

It’s worse than that. Those are not just things that right-wingers don’t understand or don’t like—they are all things that are focused on prioritizing people and their experiences over property and the interests of its owners. (And in that sense I think the right-wingers understand that perfectly well—they just do not want to say it out loud.)

These damned fools are going to get us all killed.

Yes. Or, as I have often said, and find myself saying even more often, Christianity is simply incoherent when mixed with power.