AN INCONVENIENT GOSPEL: THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT SPELLS “PROPHET” WRONG

Being neither a theologian nor a scholar of Greek, Hebrew or Aramaic, I have hesitated to write about what passes as “Christian” in a lot of conservative language and policies.  Especially strange is the way “love thy neighbor” has been lost in the cacophony of voices against immigrants, Muslims, Jews, women, people living in poverty.  Whatever happened to taking care of “the least of these”?  Did our Sunday school teachers have it all wrong?  I really have struggled to figure out how people calling themselves Christians could say so many hateful things – and in public, on posters and t-shirts they’re wearing, sometimes shouting from microphones.

It’s not that I’m naïve about the uses of Christianity to justify slavery or subservient roles for women or wars against Muslim countries. And I know that’s not all just a history that’s nicely wrapped up in embarrassing rationalizations in our history books.

But really!  We have people in office bragging about de-funding Meals on Wheels, determined to take away health insurance from the sickest among us – our neighbors who may be too sick to hold a job, much less a job that provides good health benefits.

And these are the same people (you, Paul Ryan and Ted Cruz and….) who claim Christian values guide their decisions.

Image source:  http://d.christianpost.com/full/70797/img.jpg

I’m not qualified to do an exegesis of the gospel according to these self-identified Christian politicians, so I could not be more grateful that Nicholas Kristof has done it for us.  He writes to Pious Paul (Ryan) in the voice of Jesus, reminding him that our mission is to take care of the “least of these.”  Kristof crushes the transformation of “prophet” into “profit” in the Christian-right lexicon. 

Here is Kristof’s Jesus explaining to Ryan why he should learn from the Good Samaritan, though Ryan’s admiration is for the rich guys who passed by the suffering traveler to take care of their own business:

“A man was attacked by robbers who stripped him of clothes, beat him and left him half dead. A minister passed down this same road, and when he saw the injured man, he crossed to the other side and hurried on. So did a rich man who claimed to serve God. But then a despised Samaritan came by and took pity on the injured man. He bandaged his wounds and put the man on his own donkey and paid an innkeeper to nurse him to health. So which of these three should we follow?”

“Those who had mercy on him,” Pious Paul said promptly.

Jesus nodded. “So go ——”

“I mean the first two,” Pious Paul interjected. “For the Samaritan’s work is unsustainable and sends the wrong message. It teaches travelers to take dangerous roads, knowing that others will rescue them from self-destructive behaviors. This Samaritan also seems to think it right to redistribute money from those who are successful and give it to losers. That’s socialism! Meanwhile, if the rich man keeps his money, he can invest it and create jobs. So it’s an act of mercy for the rich man to hurry on and ignore the robbery victim.”

Then Jesus’s response to Ryan’s idea that prayer is “universal health care,” and that Jesus would be smarter to invest with the Donald in for-profit hospitals, making a little for himself on the side:

Jesus turned to Pious Paul on his left and said: “Be gone! For I was hungry and you gave me no food; I was thirsty, and you gave me no drink; and I was sick, and you did not help me.”

“But, Lord,” protested Pious Paul of Ryan, “when did I see you hungry or thirsty or sick and refuse to help you? I drop your name everywhere. And I’m pro-life!”

“Truly I say to you,” Jesus responded, “as you did not help the homeless, the sick — as you did not help the least of these, you did not help me.”

Read the column, pass it on, and pray (if such is your tradition) for this gospel of hate to wear out its welcome before too many more people get hurt.   Imagine if our national conversation right now kept coming back to the question of whether we and our policies really were taking care of the least of these.

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DON’T LET VOUCHERS KILL THE PUBLIC’S SCHOOLS!

With Betsy DeVos in as US Secretary of Education, we know our public schools are not safe.  A new administration should have come in ready to do away with high-stakes testing and other punitive policies and jumped right in to use the Secretary’s power – and budget in the billions of dollars – as a force for the most academically rich, culturally grounded, child-centered and, of course, equitable schools we can as a nation imagine. 

Instead, we see a Secretary eager to use the power of her office to impoverish the public’s schools by robbing them of our tax dollars, giving them to private schools.  Betsy DeVos wants our public dollars to leave our children’s classrooms and fly across town into the pockets of people who run schools but for some reason can’t make them financially viable on their own.   Religious schools (in her case, Christian ones), corporate-run charter chains, independent private schools – these are the folks who want a handout from the government!   Education “welfare”?

We can call it theft, misappropriation, corporate welfare, or de-democratizing.  Betsy DeVos calls these cash transfers “vouchers,” “freedom scholarships,” “market payments.”

Vouchers by whatever name will take money out of our public schools, making them weaker and – surprise! – vulnerable to closure or take over by private interests.    The president’s proposed budget takes billions of federal dollars away from even basic services to put into vouchers – voucher programs that states may have to go along with to get other federal dollars they desperately need in such areas as special education.  And many Republican governors and state legislatures are voting on voucher bills this very month (including, my Texas neighbors, right now in Austin).

“Vouchers” sound neutral; “freedom scholarships” sound generous.  How can we explain to our friends, our legislators, and our members of Congress how dangerous vouchers are?

A teacher can tell us!  Mercedes K.Schneider is a public school teacher in Louisiana, a careful researcher, and writer who can explain the most complicated policies in clear prose even a legislator can understand!     Her new book is here just in time to give to your member of Congress or state representative before they get sucked into thinking vouchers are inevitable, vouchers “worked” in Michigan (they didn’t), vouchers help poor kids (no).  SchoolChoice:  The End of Public Education?(Teachers College Press, 2016) traces vouchers to their roots in Southern resistance to desegregation:  if white families could take their local school tax dollars to private schools not under the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education Topeka, they could keep their kids in all-white schools – and at the public’s expense.  

Schneider shows vouchers to be fundamentally aimed at destroying democracy, starting with Milton Friedman’s goal of replacing public institutions (the public’s institutions) by private players in a market where “competition” would be the only form of regulation.  And private interests would have no obligation to collective governance.   Her section on “choice” is especially compelling: Schneider shows that when tax dollars – and kids – go to voucher and charter schools, it’s the schools, not the parents and children, who have the power of “choice”: to include, to exclude, to do less than advertised.  Not good for children, not good for the community, and definitely not consistent with our democracy.

Get Schneider’s book today – for you, your teachers and school board, your policy folks, your local library!  Keep our dollars in our classrooms.  Anyone who wants to start a private school should try it; but raise your own money.  The rest of us have already committed our tax dollars to the public’s schools.

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SILENCING CIVIL RIGHTS

Image source:  https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Coretta_Scott_King_1964.jpg

When I described what it felt like to be silenced by school district officials because of my research findings showing accurate dropout numbers in our schools, I could not have imaged that the next silencing to capture our national attention would be the exclusion of our civil rights history on, of all places, the floor of the US Senate.   Seeing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell essentially tell Senator Elizabeth Warren to sit down and shut up was stunning.  Even more stunning was the reason:  Jeff Sessions, conservative senator from Alabama, would be confirmed as Attorney General unless enough senators took seriously his documented history of active opposition to civil rights, voting rights, women's rights -- basically the body of law it would be his duty to enforce.  

Elizabeth Warren chose to make that history known by reading a letter written by Coretta Scott King opposing Sessions for a federal judgeship because of his racist treatment of African Americans trying to vote in Alabama in the 1980's when Sessions was not a US senator but the state's attorney general.   The letter is eloquent, detailed, and credible.   By reading it, Elizabeth Warren would unmask the silence of Sessions' racist past, exposing any senator who voted to confirm him as complicit with an agenda not compatible with the duties of the attorney general or the rights enshrined in the US Constitution and in hard-fought laws and landmark court rulings.

Instead, Senator Warren was silenced.  "Rule 19," which sounds like something out of a children's game, was the weapon.  Mitch McConnell was the silencer.  His demeaning treatment of Senator Warren is now legendary:  "She was warned!" 

Telling Senator Warren she could not speak about Sessions was demeaning, embarrassing to our country and our Senate, and frankly childish.  But thanks to Mitch McConnell, a whole new generation now knows Coretta Scott King as not just the beautiful supportive presence beside Martin Luther King, Jr., but as a force for justice in her own right.  By silencing one powerful woman, Mitch McConnell gave voice to another.  And he quite inadvertently but very effectively showed the nation that his effusive praise of Jeff Sessions cannot hide Sessions' personal racism and his undeniable history of a willingness to use the full force of his public office in its service.

We need an attorney general who will enforce our most just laws and work to improve our justice system for everyone.  Jeff Sessions is not that person. And now, thanks to Elizabeth Warren and Coretta Scott King, we all know to watch every move he makes, speak up when he fails to uphold the law, and stay vigilant on behalf of those least likely to be well served while he holds this office.

Thank you, Senator Warren, for shedding light on Mr. Sessions' role in one of the darkest moments in our history and for bringing into the light another powerful moment of resistance!

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