ACROSS THE LINES - Archive (2006-2020)

Widespread conservative indifference to Donald Trump's personal failings raises fundamental questions. If a President pursues policies we like, and advances our party's agenda, why should we care if he (or she) is of questionable personal character? When it comes to Presidents, does personal morality matter?  And if it does, how? Immersed, as I have been, in the study of early American history, I thought I’d seek answers to these questions by turning to the men who led the American revolution and framed the U.S. Constitution. Like many people in the late eighteenth century, the founders of the United States conceived of human societies as composed of many bodies – individual bodies, ecclesial bodies (“the body of Christ”), political bodies, and so on. The struggle to establish, maintain and restore right order in these many bodies dominated every dimension of life in the early American republic - from the practice of medicine, to disputes over church doctrine and polity, ...

I closed my last post   by asking:   at what point should our moral qualms about a politician's character outweigh our other reasons for lending them our support?    Given the current environment, it's very hard to entertain this question as a matter of principle, without getting dragged down in partisan politics.  To assist us in this endeavor, let's imagine, for just a moment,  that Donald Trump is President ... and a Democrat.  Imagine that Donald Trump, the Democrat, defeated an unpopular Republican in the 2016 presidential election - for convenience, let's say Newt Gingrich.   Imagine that President Trump (D) has a Congress controlled by Democrats, and is attempting to pursue an almost entirely blue political platform. Imagine he is nominating liberals to the Supreme Court, pursuing single-payer healthcare legislation, advocating for comprehensive immigration reform, and so on.  Imagine, in short, that his Presidency seems  to...

In  my last post , I shared my struggle with the question of whether, as a pastor, I should post about politics in the age of Donald Trump.  Many of the responses included comments like this: "How can people who call themselves Christian support that man?"  I have decided to take this question literally, and, as a spiritual exercise, I will try to answer it.  In reading these answers, I suspect some of my liberal friends may find their blood boiling.  But I am not trying to articulate these arguments because I agree with them.  Neither am I denying that less noble reasons also drive many people - including many Christians - to support Trump.  Those I will address on another occasion. In this post, I am simply  trying to articulate some of the reasons that good, Christian people I know and love support Donald Trump . Perhaps you know someone  perfectly decent and honorable like this, too - a cousin, a grandfather, an old friend from ...

O God, we, who are Christians and call the United States home, confess that ours is a deeply divided nation. We witnessed the peaceful transition of political power this weekend, but many of us are deeply concerned for the future of our democratic institutions. We inaugurated a new President, yet many of us are deeply mistrustful of him. Many of us protested, and as we did many others of us took offense. We gathered and marched this weekend, O God, but we did not gather and march together. Hear our prayer. Help us, O God, to heal the wounds and divisions that run through our nation, our neighborhoods, places of worship, and families. Stir up in us a new depth of care and concern for friends and loved ones who marched when we were resting, who rejoiced when we were downcast, who are lining up even now on different sides of the causes we care deeply about. Help us stick with relationships marked by strong differences of opinion, so long as these relationships do not cause us harm....

On January 21, the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration as President, I will march in the   Women's March   here in San Diego. I want to explain why.   Like many pastors,  I  feel conflicted because the people I serve are profoundly divided when it comes to politics.  At the (mostly white) congregation where I serve on staff, some people are pleased with the outcome of November's election, others are apprehensive, still others are genuinely upset.   Meanwhile, at   El Faro: the Border Church , the unique community I convene on the US-Mexico border, almost everyone finds Mr. Trump’s election deeply distressing, especially that he won while  vilifying Mexican immigrants  and threatening to implement policies that would  disrupt millions of families .  Finding myself pulled in many directions,  I am trying to respond with integrity to the division that characterizes both our public landscape and my own pastoral predic...

On Monday President Obama became the first U.S. President to  speak the word "gay" in an inaugural address.   And with the alliterative phrase "from Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall," he wove new colors - the colors of the rainbow flag, if you will - into the tapestry that is the history of the United States. But President Obama failed to break another inaugural silence, one that masks another form of denial that is as embedded in the American psyche as has been the denial that some of our citizens are gay.  By failing to utter in his inaugural address the names of our nation's closest neighbors, Obama joined with those who preceded him as President to indulge the popular fantasy that the United States is an island unto itself. The words which cannot be spoken by U.S. Presidents, it seems, are "Mexico" and "Canada."* I am reminded of the wooden cut-out map that American children are given to help them le...

Here are just a few nuggets from a recent National Journal Article on Latino Gains in California: Three in five Californians are now ethnic minorities. Latinos now make up 38 percent of the state, which nearly surpasses non-Hispanic whites (40 percent). 51 percent of Californians younger than 18 are Latino. In the introduction to his 2005 book, North to Aztlan: A History of Mexican Americans in the United States , Richard Griswold del Castillo wrote, “Since 1848 the Mexican people have been engaged in the slow-going process of repossessing the lands that they lost to the United States as a result of war.” "Reposession" may be too strong a word - Mexicans moving to the Uniteds States are not doing so as a part of some imgagined "reconquest," but rather as an expression of quintessentially American aspiration.  Still, the newly released results of the 2010 Census display that the pace of this demographic transformation is picking up. What does the Foundatio...

Published in the San Diego Union-Tribune on Friday, January 28, 2011 At the dawn of a new decade, California is about to launch an unprecedented experiment. In the coming year, a commission of citizens – not the Legislature – will redraw the state’s political map. There is a great deal at stake in San Diego. California’s new Citizens Redistricting Commission will redraw the boundaries of the five congressional seats, four state Senate seats and eight Assembly seats representing residents of San Diego County. Independently, a commission of San Diego city residents will create new City Council districts and for the first time apportion the city’s population across not eight districts, but nine. And the five members of the San Diego County Board of Supervisors ... well, they still draw their own districts, a textbook case in the power of incumbency. Aggregate population numbers from the 2010 Census, recently published by the U.S. Census Bureau, will provide the basis for redistr...