Tag Archives: Stephen Miller

Your conscience is in danger: The Bible can help

A life in the Spirit, Building community, Film/TV, Leadership, Spiritual direction, , , , , , , ,

I was energized as I walked along Market St. on a beautiful day last Saturday. We periodically shouted “No Kings!” and “This is what democracy looks like,” and it felt good to hear my voice right out loud — there in public, and all. At one point we caught up with a couple of people in blow-up unicorn outfits. It looked like they might be young parents on a date — instead of the baby, their stroller carried a boombox. It was nice.

As we exercised our bodies we were exercising our consciences. Both have a tendency to get flabby. The latter desperately needs the restoration of a daily exercise routine before it gets burned out completely by the conflagration of kooks and crooks dominating our lives right now.

The dark side of conscience

I have spent quite a bit of time studying sociopath spectrum of humanity in the last few months. These are the people, probably not more than 5% of us, who either have a broken or missing conscience.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) collects these folks under the description “Anti-social Personality Disorder” (ASPD). The ASPD person has a severely wounded, inactive, broken or absent conscience. Conscienceless behavior is their distinctive across the spectrum. They are shameless.

The TV loves these people. You’d think they are around every corner, mostly carrying knives — they are not. But they make for good stories because they are strange and frightening. And we all know we might meet one and suspect we share some of their traits. Think Joe Goldberg in You, Dexter Morgan in Dexter, Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish in Game of Thrones and Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, to name a few. Eric Cartman fits the description, too. They are more generally men, it seems, but women demonstrate the behavior, too. They are conscience-challenged, to say the least.

A conscience is the inner sense or faculty that allows a person to distinguish between right and wrong and guides their moral decisions. It acts as a moral compass, influencing behavior and causing feelings of guilt or pleasure based on whether actions align with one’s values and, importantly, fit in with one’s relationships. Hindus see this capacity as a seventh sense, beyond our five physical senses and beyond our ordinary awareness; it is “higher consciousness.” Contemplative Christians see it as spiritual awareness, the gift of the Holy Spirit, the place of intimacy with God and personal transformation.

Sociopath training

Conscience is considered a universal human ability, though its judgment can be shaped by experience and upbringing. It is what is happening in the deepest part of us, but not just that. Conscience needs a bond to form and to stay strong. That’s why many observers right now are wondering if we can fight off totalitarianism, since the opposition cannot unite. Postmodern, technology-isolated people have bonding issues.

Our bonding issues may have made us ripe for sociopathic manipulation. I think the  sociopaths are shaping our behaviors right now. The president is their leader. The innumerable lawsuits being filed are all about combatting behavior on the ASPD spectrum.

A sociopath cannot bond, most of the time. According to Martha Stout (The Sociopath Next Door),  leaders with no seventh sense, no inner awareness, no gut instinct for good, no spiritual connection can hypnotize the group conscience which leads to catastrophe.

ASPD leaders and ASPD-influenced systems make enemies “its,” not people, and see them as mere impediments to what is good, threats to safety and prosperity — and they find people to hate these “its” with them. Stephen Miller regularly strokes this proclivity in humanity. At Charlie Kirk’s funeral he said:

The light will defeat the dark. We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil, We will defeat the forces of darkness and evil. And we will stand every day for what is true, what is beautiful, what is good….

And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us, what do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing.

Why don’t we follow our individual consciences and follow sociopaths instead? Stout says we are programmed to obey authority even against our own consciences. Our basic instinct to bond and be acceptable in community can be turned bad. This has been demonstrated repeatedly, beginning with Stanley Milgram’s experiment to see if he could get college students to shock other undergrads who were getting wrong answers. They gave up their power to the authorities and shocked! A sociopath knows this tendency and plays it. Bullying works.

Protecting your conscience

If you are a Christian, you probably agree with the New Testament writers who teach that our consciences can be injured, and blunted — and if you develop a “hardened heart,” it can wreck your all-important bond with God. There is a lot of healthy discussion in the Bible about maintaining a conscience that resembles Jesus’ and stays open to the Spirit of God. But let me give you the teaching in just one little book: 1 Timothy.

But the aim of such instruction is love that comes from a pure heart, a good conscience, and sincere faith. Some people have deviated from these and turned to meaningless talk, desiring to be teachers of the law without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make assertions. (1:5-7)

The antidote to sociopath leaders may be as simple as dancing down the street in a unicorn costume — exercising stubborn joy (which, Jesus says, no one can take away from us), in the face of domination.

Paul reminds Timothy of heart, mind and soul — his spiritual awareness: pure heart, a good conscience, and sincere faith, as he stokes his courage to keep teaching the gospel. Timothy needs a strong inner life. Because it seems like he was up against some shameless, ASPD-type people who won’t stop talking nonsense and people are believing them.

This charge I commit to you, Timothy, my child, in accordance with the prophecies made earlier about you, so that by following them you may fight the good fight, having faith and a good conscience. By rejecting conscience, certain persons have suffered shipwreck in the faith; among them are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have turned over to Satan, so that they may be taught not to blaspheme. (1:18-20)

One’s conscience is in danger if it is not in good shape. The speaker at our beginning rally before the march chided us for being spiritually flabby, essentially. I took exception since I was, after all, in attendance. But she knew that one protest does not make a transformation. Sociopaths never rest. For instance, last week the White House hired Kurt Olsen, the Stop the Steal lawyer, to investigate the 2020 election (!). The resistance cannot rest, either.

It is possible that Hymenaeus and Alexander did not completely reject conscience out of some evil agency. They may have been born without the capacity to have a conscience because of amygdala defects, or their environment was so traumatizing it made them shameless in order to survive — and ASPD appears to be heritable, too.

When Paul “turned them over to Satan” he did not condemn them to hell. He just recognized their intractability. They needed something more than regular church community to teach them.

The word blaspheme, here and many places in the New Testament,  is a direct transliteration from Greek. It means slander, defamation, or reviling, especially against God, and includes speech that defames others. Hymenaeus and Alexander were not just impious, they were bond breakers, dividers, loveless.

Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will renounce the faith by paying attention to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the hypocrisy of liars whose consciences are seared with a hot iron. (4:1-2)

When the Spirit “expressly says” something we primarily hear it with the seventh sense, which is the main reason we should keep it in shape. The message is mainly tested in community, which is why we need to stay connected to discerning believers. That sense can be dulled. A conscience can even be cauterized so it becomes impermeable to grace, joy and love.

Lies are the poison of conscience. Donald Trump’s lies have their own Wikipedia page. They are the main tool of sociopaths who only care about “winning.” Jesus calls liars children of the devil. The capacity of A.I. and our media in general to spread lies is breathtaking. Hopefully you have some children whose consciences are not seared who can build a new society in the wild years ahead.

If you feel like you must be living in the “later times,” you might be right. Pundits, protesters, prophets and preachers are working overtime to stand against the present “hypocrisy of liars whose consciences are seared with a hot iron.” I thank God for that. We need all the help we can get. Because, as Paul teaches Timothy, having a living relationship with God, which keeps our consciences soft and clear, is the daily, fundamental step, not just in our self-care but in the formation of a society worth living in.

Mutualism: Creation keeps speaking the truth in love

A life in the Spirit, Building community, , , , , ,

The little back plot of land behind our new house needed to be reclaimed. Some kind of bamboo-like shrubs had overtaken it over 15-or-so years of neglect. We could not dig them up by ourselves, so our GC found Anthony from the Northeast who came in with his backhoe. He arrived later than promised, since he tried to get his too-tall trailer under a bridge and had to back it out of a single-lane road full of honkers. He had a long day.

Nevertheless, he worked hard. And we had a nice time getting to know each other. He was happy I guessed his unpronounceable last name was Polish. Similarly, the man from Guinea who had been working that morning on our cul-de-sac garden out front was happy I thought he might be from Conakry, which he was. The whole strange day felt like an island of mutuality in an ocean of polarization. My neighbor came out to explore gardening with me. The father groundhog came out at dusk to see what became of his wilderness. The first bird came to the new feeder. We were all in it together.

While Trump vainly tries to reignite the smoking heap of the Reagan Revolution, even as his past with Jeffrey Epstein nips as his backside, we all seem to be wishing for togetherness more and more. Last week lots of us were out in the street on John Lewis’s death day remembering how much we want to live in community. We really like mutual respect and we do not like diseased predators. The burgeoning protests are a natural reaction to the unnatural, survival-of- the-fittest heresy perpetrated by Eurocentric colonizers who still think their ill-gotten gains make them the fittest to rule.

Mutualism

Contrary to the new Darwinism-by-keyboard we face, there is a small backlash of mutualism that lapped on my doorstep last week and then kept reappearing when I got outside my living room and into my new neighborhood.

For instance, I learned in biology, when a symbiotic relationship between two different species is mutually beneficial, it is called a “mutualism.” This month, scientists studying ant plants in Fiji discovered a variation on mutualism. In a particular ant plant, two normally-antagonist breeds of ants were housed in adjoining chambers of the plant’s reproductive chamber. The ants were fed, the plant was fertilized, warfare was averted. The discovery took the biological study of mutualism to a new level [Phys.org]. Christian skeptics of Darwin’s natural selection theory of evolution, based on competition, quickly noted how his theory falls apart if animals and plants of different species are cooperating [UCG Canada].

The original sin may, in fact, be competition. The major achievement of mental and spiritual health may , in fact, be mutualism – a return to nature as built by the Creator for the way of love. As a marriage and family therapist I can give witness to the reality that competition for scarce resources of grace and hope (and the less-useful justice) can destroy one of the main factories of mutualism in the world: marriage.

My testimony this week is a paean to mutuality, again. I may have failed to bring about a golden age of togetherness through the church, as I intended to do. But every day is a new opportunity to be a true self, reflecting the glory of Jesus, who is the ultimate example of mutualism, becoming one with humanity and so teaching truth and love. From Guineans to groundhogs, we are designed to live in harmony. The more survival-of-the-fittest, the less fit we all are.

Three contrary things mutualism teaches

Christians need to outthink this era like they did for the first three hundred years of church history. So Morton Kelsey said when he took one look at Reagan. At the protests, I take heart when I see people outthinking the fraudulent leaders we have in the U.S. You can see their genius in their signs (well, not mine, usually). For example, my favorite sign last Thursday was this lovely piece of 3D art depicting the despicable Stephen Miller as a puppeteer. I wove my way through the crowd to get a close up picture. People who are carrying the weight of art and literature now are important.

Every scrap of community needs to be nurtured. Tony the backhoe man usually takes one-half down, these days, before he gets started because people don’t pay him. He told me he once took a sealed envelope from a business owner he respected and assumed the $8700 in cash he was owed was in it. He did not want to look disrespectful by opening it up and counting it. When he got home it was $8200. He went back in the morning and the guy said, “Get off my property. You should have counted it before you left.” Nevertheless, he took the risk to trust me. Some people never learn how to be bad. I gave him a tip.

Hope will not disappoint us. Ants look for food all day and ferry it back to their queen and the next generation. They are tempted to fight for it. Then an ant plant adapts to their differences and provides a way for both needy groups to get what they desire and provide what they can. It feels miraculous. We wander into goodness all the time, as well; we’re surrounded by it. For instance, we finally got our new backyard to square one by the surprising efforts of someone who went through hell to get to us and was suspicious we might not pay him, but who hoped it would all work out.

If we don’t find our way into Creation’s mutualism we will likely compete ourselves to death, saying that “selfishness is natural” on our way to the grave. If we keep hoping that love will find a way, we might be surprised that the best we could do to help it along, even though we are just one plant in a forest, is more than enough.

Sanctuary: The government wants to approve our altars

A life in the Spirit, Building community, Doing Theology, Spiritual direction, , , ,

Church member can’t find sanctuary in their own sanctuaries. It is still a rare occurrence, but as soon as Trump’s mass deportation plans unleashed the dogs Biden had on a leash, ICE went to church. Some denominations (including Episcopalians and Mennonites, where I connect), recently sued the government for violating their religious freedom. They cited this particular story of ICE coming to the church’s door.

In 2022 Wilson Velasquez fled the gangs in Honduras with his family and entered the U.S. illegally. They presented themselves to U.S. Authorities requesting asylum and he was outfitted with a GPS ankle bracelet. (You can buy one for your kids!). When they got to Atlanta to stay with relatives, the first thing the family did  was find a church. Wilson got a work permit and a job at a nearby tire shop. After a year, they decided to help a church planter start Iglesia Fuente de Vida in Norcross. They led with the music team.

According to Christianity Today:

Media accounts largely agree about the day’s events: At roughly a quarter past noon [on January 26], an usher standing in the church entrance saw a group of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents outside and locked the doors. Wilson was listening to the sermon when his phone rang with an unknown number. When he silenced it, his ankle bracelet—known in Spanish as a grillete, or shackle—began buzzing. His phone rang a second time, and Wilson rose, flustered, slipping out the back of the sanctuary. The usher met him and said there were agents in the parking lot, asking for Wilson by name.

Moments later, Kenia’s phone flashed with a message from her husband: Come outside.

Running into the daylight, Kenia found him handcuffed in the back of a law enforcement vehicle. “What’s happening to my husband?” she asked the agents. Her mind raced to make sense of the scene. Wilson had made all his required check-ins at an Atlanta ICE office. He had the government’s permission to work and had an appointment on a court docket. He was deported once nearly 20 years ago—a significant strike on an immigrant’s record—but otherwise had no criminal record.

The agents told Kenia they were looking for people with ankle bracelets, then they drove Wilson away.

The denominations are saying their right to practice their religion is infringed upon when the government stops a fundamental act of worship: to welcome the stranger.

Jesus said, “If you welcome the stranger, you welcome me.” With deep conviction and joy, we are trust that we exiles have a home with Jesus, who welcomes us into the presence of God.

Protests in St. Louis against Donald Trump’s January 2017 executive order on immigration. Wikimedia Commons

Experiencing and being sanctuary is basic: “Love one another as I have loved you,” and “love your neighbor as yourself.”

So the denominations argue that in the U.S. system:

  • Houses of worship should have the same right to safety as individuals have in their homes.
  • The government should not establish a particular religion (like the cult of Trump).
  • Individuals and groups can practice their own religion so long as the practice does not run afoul of “public morals” or a “compelling” governmental interest.

It is true, compassion may be losing ground as public morality. And it is true, ICE may wantonly decide snatching a church member during worship somehow satisfies a compelling interest. But we make noise when that happens, like hikers in the back country scaring bears before they get too close.

Practicing our faith regardless of coercion has always been a Christian virtue — and sheltering strangers is a main way we live our faith.

The anti-sanctuary government

The theology of sanctuary developed over centuries, from Biblical times to the present.

The story of the Exodus is about captives of an oppressive government in Egypt who are miraculously freed. They flee for their lives and look for a place they can flourish in a land God promises them. The new law of Moses, which identifies them as a nation and keeps them together and healthy, repeatedly refers to Egypt when it addresses how to care for strangers:  “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:21).

J.D. Vance, who schools Germans on Fascism, also sought to school the Pope on Catholicism. The Catholic convert said we should Google “ordis amoris” to see how he justified telling the faithful watching Fox News it was God’s order to love in concentric circles. He said, if you properly love your family and those near to you, you might have enough love left over to get to strangers a thousand miles away. Regardless, it is family then America first. In a rare show of meddling, Pope Francis wrote a letter to U.S. Bishops condemning the Trump administration for “mass deportations” and even indirectly criticized Vance’s for improperly using ordo amoris to defend Trumpist nationalism (see The New Republic).

The MAGA crowd are catechized with alternative facts that go against the Bible and tradition. Walter Masterson got some TikTok views by interviewing MAGA rally attendees about whether Jesus would be welcomed if he arrived in the U.S. as a refugee (see YouTube @ 18:42). Their answer: “If he had the right papers.”

The Emperor’s Darth Vader, Stephen Miller, deployed his America First Legal Foundation to teach various governments how the authorities would be coming after them for preserving the due process of the undocumented. In a Dec. 23 letter, San Diego Supervisors were told: “We have identified San Diego County as a sanctuary jurisdiction that is violating federal law.”

The legal shock troops of MAGA announced they had identified 249 elected officials in sanctuary jurisdictions who, they said, could face “legal consequences” over immigration policies. The California Attorney General’s office and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass were notified [link]. In January. the Oregon Governor Tina Kotek also said she would stand by the state’s sanctuary law despite threats from Miller.

Our history of wrangling

Churches in the United States have a long history of getting into good trouble with immigration enforcement. In the 1980s, hundreds of churches formed networks to protect migrants fleeing political violence in Central America. The Sanctuary Movement, as it called itself, drew the ire of the Reagan administration. Immigration authorities, then known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS, never arrested migrants inside houses of worship. But they did send paid informants to spy on churches sheltering migrants.

The government arrested dozens of church leaders in Texas and Arizona, ultimately convicting eight of them for “criminal harboring.” The trials sparked protests outside INS offices across the country and made for bad optics. Since then, the Department of Justice has not prosecuted any churches for providing sanctuary.

During the Obama administration and the first Trump administration, more than 1,000 churches pledged to join the New Sanctuary Movement and offer shelter to migrants facing deportation. No one knows exactly how many immigrants took advantage of the offer, but stories abound. In 2019, ICE threatened some immigrants taking refuge in churches with fines of up to half a million dollars (it eventually backed off on the fines).

Alexia Salvatierra, a professor of missions and theology at Fuller Theological Seminary who cofounded the New Sanctuary Movement acknowledges that many undocumented immigrants have no legal right to residency. The Movement aims to buy time for people being denied due process to resolve what may be legitimate claims. The “Dreamers,” for instance, who were brought to the US as minors, have been in legislative limbo since 2001. “There were certain people who had a deportation order, but there would be a legal remedy for them if they could get deferred deportation and fight their case over time,” Salvatierra says. “For some of those people, it made sense for them to live in churches or to live with families that were connected to the church to allow them the time to be able to fight through this broken system.”

Sanctuary is a core Christian distinctive

Like I said, the theology of a “sanctuary church” regarding refugees is deeply rooted in how the Bible and tradition teach Jesus followers to provide refuge to the vulnerable, to see all people as created in God’s image, and to act on our moral responsibility to protect those fleeing persecution. “Welcoming the stranger” is a core Christian distinctive. Churches are natural shelters and advocates for refugees or they are unnaturalized churches. The Body of Christ and our buildings  provide a sacred space where those in need can find safety and support.

The ELCA laid out the argument about why they are a sanctuary denomination and it may help us all figure out how to express our faith these days:

  • It’s in the Bible

The Bible contains numerous stories and teachings that exemplify the concept of sanctuary. In the Old Testament if a person accused of manslaughter grasped the “horns of the altar” they were supposed to find temporary refuge (see 1 Kings 1 and 2 for Adonijah and Joab). “Cities of refuge” were designated where such a person could flee for permanent asylum. There are repeated calls in both the Old Testament and New to care for the stranger and the marginalized: “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares” is now folk wisdom from Heb. 13:2.

  • Everyone is made in the image of God

Refugees, regardless of their legal status, deserve dignity and compassion. They are Jesus in his distressing disguise.

  • Compassion and justice are fundamental

We need to act with compassion towards those suffering from persecution and advocate for just immigration policies that protect refugees.

  • Telling the truth regardless of the cost is crucial

Churches have a prophetic duty to speak out against injustice and challenge oppressive systems that force people to flee their homes. Violence and cruelty are not the answer.

  • We must salt the society with truth and love

Jesus is everyone’s refuge. The sanctuary in which we live extends beyond our individual lives and beyond the physical spaces of the Church.  That’s why we actively support refugees through advocacy, providing resources, and fostering community integration, even when we are threatened and even when we find common cause with advocacy groups who do not share our faith.

  • Offering sanctuary is worship

We do not just hear the Word, we do it. Having a mindset contrary to much of the world but aligned with the mind of Christ is normal. It may seem strange in the eyes of others to welcome the stranger the same way God has welcomed us into eternity, but we do it. Making and giving sanctuary is a demonstration of the heart of the gospel. Walking alongside immigrants and refugees is worship. It is not merely a political statement; in essence, it is an act of faith. It does not matter if the government approves of our altars, or not.