ave you ever considered that if you lived in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, you would have voted to convict someone of witchcraft?

Over a period of about 16 months, good and decent people, Christians, sent 19 of their friends and neighbors to their deaths, based on false testimony and a belief in spectral evidence.

It wasn’t the witches who believed in magic, it was everyone else.

People often say that attending a rally or a protest doesn’t change anything. They are wrong.

Corporeal politics is about showing up in the flesh, having our voices heard and our bodies seen. Those of us who claim to follow Jesus are called to be the body of Christ in the world, we are called to be corporeal beings that represent Jesus.

That summer revealed where the body of Christ could be found.

Christianity is supposed to be the “force” that resists evil, the light in the darkness. People actively being formed as disciples of Jesus should have a built in resistance to this kind of formation.

I am not willing to give up on Christianity. After looking at where formation practices went wrong, we need a plan to do better.

Did you know that grasslands have only covered the earth for around 5 - 7 million years? 

I was taught that evolution undermines “biblical authority,” but I don’t think that’s true. Evolution is the scientific evidence of the great narrative arc found throughout the Bible: the meek always inherit the earth while the mighty always perish.

It’s not just a promised future outcome, it’s history, and it’s the story embedded in the earth.

Christianity should not instill within us a spirit of fear or of superiority, but modern evangelicalism has embraced the fundamentalist idea of holiness through separation, which is biblical, but not Christlike.

In a time when so many leaders use their words and actions to dehumanize, let us take every opportunity to humanize, and allow ourselves to be changed for good.

“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits.” -Matthew 7:15-16

When the wolves in sheep’s clothing have been in the herd long enough, they normalize wolflike behavior to such a degree that the sheep begin to take on the characteristics of the wolves.

The wolves are running amok now...

How did millions of American evangelicals become stormtroopers (and not even know it)?

Maybe it’s a story, right at the beginning of the Torah, that says: “the path to freedom begins by developing languages that the oppressors do not understand, so that only those with ears can hear.”

Tyranny triumphs when all the truthtellers are successfully silenced and the lies define reality.

Don’t be silent.

Liberalism, the rights of the individual over the State, dealt a crushing blow to the patriarchy.

The forces of oppression - greed, racial supremacy, religious fundamentalism, and patriarchy - had been exposed and were eroding, but they did not disappear.

Imagine for a moment, a Christmas Eve service; the people are singing Silent Night, one candle lights another until the room is filled with light.

“…heavenly hosts sing Alleluia!”

Then, with two verses remaining, someone starts blowing out candles. It’s not a child, it’s an adult, walking down the aisle, quietly extinguishing the lights.

The voices soften and begin to quiver, “…with the dawn of redeeming grace…”

I began this series talking about a different view of the peak of Western civilization, one from the much more distant past, when men were men and everyone knew their place in the order of things.

Two competing views: cooperation vs. order; peace through negotiation vs. peace through strength; democracy vs. autocracy; liberalism vs. authoritarianism.

I wonder if the nostalgia that people have for the 1950s and 60s is for liberalism. They picture it as a time when church attendance peaked (at 49%) as families went to their local mainline churches to learn the Golden Rule.

There was no authority on earth that could force the South to end its practice of slavery or become a true democracy, because the Bible did not compel them to do so.

Appeals to biblical authority are often used to abuse power and escape accountability.

Yet, again and again, the sword called to them.

The dual state does not exist accidentally. It is constructed through fear, codified, and protected by “tradition.”

The civil rights movement sought to dismantle the dual state.

Those who advocate for equality are often demonized as leftists, socialists or even communists. Demanding equal application of the Bill of Rights is neither; it is the liberalism on which the United States was founded.

It is also the way of Jesus.

I understand that this might sound a little too mystical, but I wanted to go through this exercise to remind us that Christianity is more than a ticket into heaven when we die.

I also want us to see how when Christians mature into stages 4 and 5, when they see those cracks, they become awakened to the suffering in this world and they try to do something about it.

The Constitution is the authority, not the Bible, nor the Church, nor any creed.

As concerned as they were about the abuse of power by a despot, these men did not extend the freedom and authority they took for themselves to all the people around them, but over the next two centuries, the distribution of power increased.

Not everyone likes that. Christian Nationalism seeks to return power to the few.

I have felt the pain of what happens when a handful of “well meaning” people forget professional ethics. When a necessary lie is followed by another and another; when self-protection becomes the mission; and when those who ask for transparency and accountability become the problem.

Today, we will explore the dark side of stage 3 faith (synthetic-conventional stage).

In Healthy Church Christianity (stage 3), people grow. They discover that something they once believed was incomplete and they take in new information, adapt their thinking, and turn and go in a new direction. If their old views caused harm, they make apologies.

This is repentance. This was the message of Jesus, and the Law and the Prophets before him. It is to live a life of mercy, humility, and justice. It is rooted in love.

Our relationship with the Bible and with our faith should be the same. We’re not supposed to leave these stories in our 8 year-old brains; they’re supposed to grow with us.