It doesn’t seem to matter how often or how soundly the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has refuted the white horse prophecy as having nothing to do with Mormon founder Joseph Smith. Although he made a few vague claims about Mormonism one day saving the nation, the full-on prophecy as we know it was not written until he’d been dead for nearly 60 years.

The Church denounced the prophecy at its October 1918 General Conference, saying it proceeded “out of darkness, concocted in some corner,” and had not come “through the proper channels of the Church.” The religion’s president at that time, also named Joseph Smith (yes, we do know that is confusing) called the so-called prophecy “ridiculous” and “simply false; that is all there is to it.” Yet the prophecy persists in the Mormon American imagination; we Latter-day Saints seem to love the image of ourselves as saviors who swoop in at the eleventh hour to save the nation from itself.

Speaking for myself, I think the white horse prophecy is bogus. That doesn’t mean that every part of it is BS, however. There is a way in which Mormons can save America from itself — and with every passing year, America needs that particular kind of salvation more and more.

Let me paint a picture. Right now, we live in a country in which it is entirely possible for liberals and conservatives to inhabit unprickable bubbles of their own design. Liberals get their news from CNN and MSNBC, while conservatives tune in to Fox News. Liberals log on to their self-selecting Facebook feeds and see outrage about how the Trump administration botched the coronavirus response, cozied up to Russia, exaggerated his administration’s achievements, and rolled back environmental protections. Conservatives log on to their self-selecting Facebook feeds and share their outrage about Antifa, improper care of military veterans, and Trump not getting more credit for pre-pandemic job growth.

Politically, America has not been this divided in many decades, perhaps even since the eve of the Civil War. Since the 1950s, the Gallup Organization has tracked public approval ratings of U.S. presidents by party. Back in the 1950s, a majority of Americans could legitimately say “I like Ike” and mean it: not only did 88% of the members of his own party approve of him, but 49% of Democrats did too. What we see now, by contrast, is a country split right down party lines: in Donald Trump’s America, on the eve of the 2020 presidential election, a stunning 95% of Republicans said they approved of the way he was running the country. Only 3% of Democrats could say the same.

In other words, we used to have a political gap in this country of thirty or forty points separating Republicans and Democrats. In the Eisenhower example above, it was 39 percentage points. In Trump’s America, it was 92 points, making him the most polarizing figure in modern political history.

Such hyper-partisanship shows little sign of abating even now that Trump is no longer in office. Republicans and Democrats are inhabiting completely different worlds.

And in most of the country, they attend religious congregations that reinforce their views. Over the past three decades, social scientists have tracked a remarkable re-sorting of Americans as Republicans have become more, and Democrats less, religious. In the 1970s, there was no “God gap” in American politics — members of both parties were more or less equally committed to faith. Now, though, Republicans are not only more religious, but are a particular kind of religious, with growing numbers embracing a brand of conservative evangelical Protestantism. Churches become echo chambers, and those who don’t agree with the politics preached from the pulpit become increasingly isolated. One study found that two-thirds of Republicans attended religious congregations where they felt that most of their fellow parishioners shared their political views. Only a quarter of Democrats had the same experience. Not surprisingly given how lonely their experience with religion can be, a strong percentage of Democrats are leaving religion, which compounds the “God gap” even more.

I’m in my early 50s and can’t remember a more politically and religiously divided time. In 2018, I voted a straight-party ticket for the first time in my life. I feel great despair at the way so many people in the Republican Party have abandoned their alleged Christian values to cast their lot with a fear-mongering narcissist.

But I find some hope in my own Mormon people. In my life, all the aforementioned echo chambers apply: where I get my news, for example, and what my social media looks like. Even the neighborhood I live in is largely reflective of my political views, judging from the yard signs I see come election time.

But all that fades away when I go to church, because in Mormonism I don’t have a choice about the community I belong to.

Mormons attend church based on geography, plain and simple. You don’t get to congregation-shop based on which ward has the hippest bishop or the largest youth group (though some Mormons will actually hunt around in different wards before buying a house, knowing that once they move they’ll be locked in to those ward boundaries). And you certainly don’t get to choose where to go to church based on your political tendencies.

I used to rail against this policy, especially when I moved to a rural area where I knew no one and had little in common with the long-term residents of that ward. They were Kentuckians born and bred, and I was a carpetbagger, just passing through. Many hadn’t finished college, and I’d just gotten my PhD. I was the only one with a John Kerry sticker on my car in the parking lot.

And yet in the seven years I lived there, something magical happened to me. I came to genuinely love them, and even laugh about our differences. I once pointed out to a woman in my book club that she had stenciled the Mormon hymn lyrics “peace and plenty here abide” right on top of the gun cabinet in her family room. She laughed too, saying she had never considered the irony. She baked me cookies for my birthday.

Back in those days, my Mormon ward was not the only place in my life where I regularly encountered — and loved — people whose views were diametrically opposed to mine. But I would say it is now. The worlds I swim in at work are primarily academia and journalism, both of which have a particular political persuasion. As I’ve said, our online interactions nowadays tend to merely reinforce our thinking. If they don’t, we all-too-quickly unfriend one another, often in ugly ways.

As a Mormon I don’t get that option. In 2016, I noted with dread that a number of key members of my ward had Donald Trump signs in their yards. It was difficult for me to understand how they could be taken in by this man whose actions and values were so antithetical to the gospel we believed in. But because I knew and served alongside these people personally, I had a duty to attempt to understand. My bishop with the Trump sign was a salt-of-the-earth individual who spent Saturdays helping church members and even total strangers, raking their leaves and visiting them in the hospital. While many of my fellow liberals were denigrating Trump voters as dupes at best and evildoers at worst, there was my bishop, a Trump supporter who fit neither of those categories. Because of geography, I had to sit with that contradiction every Sunday. I think I emerged from it a better person. A better American.

Mormonism teaches me that I don’t get to excommunicate folks from my world just because we disagree. And I am so, so glad of it. Being forced out of my comfort zone is — well, uncomfortable. But it’s uncomfortable in an important way, as we become better in community with one another than we are when we can pretend the other side is anything less than human.

America needs that now more than ever before. So if there is a white horse prophecy in which my religion really does swoop in to save the nation, it will surely be because of this: Mormons have not yet given up on each other, and on the possibility of life together.

This excerpt is from How to Heal Our Divides: A Practical Guide, edited by Brian Allain, and is republished with permission. This essay has been expanded and adapted from the Religion News Service column “How Mormonism Can Save America,” which was published on August 3, 2018 and is used with permission of Religion News Service.

The major reason seems to be dwindling attendance at Cumorah and other pageants, which were once a vital missionary tool as well as a source of family fun. The president of the “Mormon Miracle Pageant” in Manti, Utah, which just shuttered production last month after more than fifty years, told the Deseret News that younger audiences have more entertainment options, and therefore aren’t that interested.

That’s definitely true—Netflix, anyone?—but I also wonder if the attrition doesn’t run deeper, stemming from the production’s message and not simply its medium. The Hill Cumorah pageant is a pastiche of Book of Mormon stories and the history of Mormonism’s beginnings in upstate New York, when a young Joseph Smith asked God which church to join and was eventually led to uncover the plates of the Book of Mormon and found a church of his own.

I’d like to think that the Church’s origin story is as compelling and timeless for young adults today as it was for me when I converted to Mormonism in my early 20s. But as someone who researches religion and generational change, I don’t think the story itself has the same pull that it used to.

We are still behaving as though “Which church is true?” is the question most people are asking. Our missionaries tell the story of Joseph Smith’s First Vision, in which he asked that question and the Lord clarified that none of the existing churches were true. Missionaries today affirm that this was because priesthood authority had disappeared from the earth, and that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the one true religion because it still has that priesthood authority.

Fair enough. That’s church doctrine. But it no longer speaks to the questions young adults (in this culture, at least) are actually asking.

“Which church is true?” is a question that’s predicated on certain cultural assumptions. For starters, it assumes a situation of Christian pluralism, but not interfaith pluralism. In the 1820s, when Joseph Smith was a teenager, nearly everyone he knew was at least nominally Christian. The only confusion was about which kind of Christianity was optimal—Congregationalist or Catholic? Methodist or Baptist? If Baptist, the freewill folks or the footwashers?

Our culture still has a proliferation of Christian choices, but they’ve been joined by world religions that were not a part of daily life in America in the 1820s. Today Islam is growing faster in this country than Christianity. Buddhism, while still a small minority of the population, is also on the rise, from both immigration and conversion. And the fastest-growing religion in the country is . . . not having a religion.

That last point is important. More Americans, especially young adults, are opting out of religion altogether. As one of them said to me recently, “Why do I even need religion? Like, at all?”

Why, indeed?

Such general pondering about the core reason for religion is a far cry from a pointed question like “Which church is true?” The latter presupposes not only a quaint club in which everyone is Christian but also that propositional truth is something that is a) discoverable and b) potentially salvific.

The non-LDS young adults I speak with today—the very people the Church wants to reach through missionary work—inhabit a different set of assumptions. To them, your perception of the truth is determined by where you’re standing and the tribe you belong to, but truth itself is neither contingent upon, nor exclusively owned by, that tribe. In other words, life isn’t about finding the “right” church so that you can pledge your loyalty to it and congratulate yourself ever after for being among the righteous few who hold correct doctrinal beliefs.

This makes reaching them both more difficult and more basic. Missionary efforts that begin with a promise of propositional truth (which Millennials don’t care about) and end with an assurance of exclusive priestly authority (which they also don’t care about) are going to go over like a lead balloon. Those approaches are asking the wrong question for this people in this age.

What, then, are better questions?

In addition to “why religion?” we could be asking ourselves, for a generation that privileges making the world a better place, “How does the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints bless the world?”

For a generation that focuses more on lived experience than propositional correctness, we could be asking ourselves, “What experiences do we have to offer that will help individuals flourish?”

And for a generation that still believes in heaven and the supernatural despite declining involvement in organized religion, we can say, “What hope does our religion provide people of a better life to come, even if they aren’t members of our faith?”

We don’t need to change our doctrine to do this. We need to listen to the questions that people are actually concerned about.

There’s a scene in Season 2 of Game of Thrones in which a high priestess for whom red is the new black gives birth to a . . . thing. A smoke monster, writhing and fearsome. Which then proceeds to murder her master’s chief rival for the throne.

Fair enough. This is Game of Thrones, after all; any candidate for power is also a prime candidate for gruesome death. But what’s different and unexpected about HBO’s hit show is that the smoke monster and many other mysterious events aren’t just drawing upon a technology of magic, like other products of the fantasy genre. They are the byproducts of functional, powerful religions.

These religions are legit—with one glaring exception we’ll get to in a minute.

Consider the priestess, aka the “Red Woman,” aka Melisandre. (Characters on GOT tend to have at least three different names or titles. Just run with it.) She serves the “Lord of Light,” R’hllor, who demands not only his followers’ loyalty in exchange for miracles but also their exclusivity: some of the more violent story arcs of the show stem from the fatal iconoclasm as members of the “Red Brotherhood” destroy the statues—and devotees—of other faiths.

Yet following the Lord of Light has its up side, offering miracles in spades. Future events can be divined by gazing into flames, for example. And death has little meaning because resurrection is an attested reality—not just once but several times over. Unlike in traditional Christianity, where Jesus was raised from the dead to save others from sin and grant them eternal life, resurrections on Game of Thrones are often for the purpose of exacting revenge on enemies. These resurrections exhibit little love, but much power.

And power is what matters on Game of Thrones. While the Lord of Light, like the “mother of dragons” Daenerys Targaryen, uses fire to subdue enemies, their common enemy—the stuff-of-nightmares Night King currently marching from the north—marshals all the power of ice and death. This necromancer with ice chips for eyes is adding to his army every time he kills off a person (or a dragon) from the other side.

There are other religions too, most with a power all their own. In the free city of Braavos, a cult has arisen around death, which has many names and faces. The “faceless men” who rise through the ranks of this religion gain the power to assume someone else’s identity in order to carry out the assassinations required by their god.

These “faceless men” (and girls) serve a particularly brutal god, but in fact most of the religions worth their salt on Game of Thrones are brutal in nature. (The Drowned God, anyone?) The one that’s not overtly bloodthirsty is also, not coincidentally, the only truly worthless religion in the entire pantheon. The plain-vanilla state religion of “the Seven” or “the new gods” features, among other symbols, the seven-hued rainbow and the seven-pointed star in its iconography. It’s almost like a wink and a nod to the idea that religions ought to at least try to be about rainbows or something, well, nice.

Its iconography is, in fact, the coolest thing the religion of the Seven has going for it, because its gods are useless. They do not answer prayers, grant miracles, or deign to participate in partisan battles between Stark, Lannister and Tyrell. But they are invoked in every state occasion, oath, and bloody wedding in Westeros. Their monastic orders of men (septons) and women (septae) care for fallen soldiers—of which there is no shortage—and educate the next generation.

These are noble acts of service, to be sure. But actual miracles and religious efficacy aren’t the purview of the Seven. As a religion, it’s a bit of a dud.

And this, in the end, may be Martin’s most lasting commentary on religion: When it’s merged with the power of the state, it loses its juice. Real power belongs to the marginalized religions, like the “old gods” of the Children of the Forest. When the series begins, these gods’ ancient reality has been downgraded to myths and nannies’ tales. As the show plays out, we see that every fanciful story Bran Stark’s nursemaid ever told him was true: Direwolves are real. Some people can enter the minds of animals, or have true visions of the past, present, and future. And the White Walkers aren’t just a dark fairy story.

The new gods of the Seven cast their lot long ago with the Iron Throne, accepting the trappings of power while also submitting to the uneasy vagaries of shifting allegiances. If the religion ever had any real spiritual authority or ability to harness the supernatural, it went up quite literally in a puff of smoke at the end of Season 6. That explosion of the Sept was one of the more fitting ends of all the deaths on Game of Thrones, and that’s saying something. Long devoid of legitimacy, the religion could be rendered inert in a single moment by a vengeful queen. In Season 7, hardly anyone even noticed that it was gone.

Martin’s commentary on the ineptitude and corruption of a state religion is frankly a bit predictable as a cultural product of a secularizing America. Nothing new to see there. What is unexpected is the fact that so many other religions thrive in his imagination with detailed back stories and a legitimate claim on the supernatural.

It remains to be seen which ones will thrive; surely at least one will be victorious. These people are going to need some hope at the end of eight seasons of warfare.

After all, the night is dark, and full of terrors.

I’ve been a fan of every Barbara Brown Taylor book I’ve ever read, so it’s not surprising that I loved the newest, out Tuesday (March 12): Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others. Like her other books, it blends memoir with theological reflection on a timely topic — in this case, world religions.

In 1998, she began teaching world religions at Piedmont College, which she expected would help her learn the subject matter (is there any better way to learn something than to teach it?). What she did not expect, though, was that the classes and students would challenge and deepen her own Christian faith. — JKR

You say in the book that when you were growing up you had an “empty file cabinet” where religion was concerned — your parents didn’t pray at the dinner table or teach you the Bible — and that this was an advantage when it came to teaching religion.
Students taught me that. The ones who came in with full file cabinets already had so many ideas and were full of so much “right” information that it was hard for them to incorporate anything new, even if they were very interested in it. They were full in some wonderful ways — I had students who were biblically literate, who could find 2 Timothy in the Bible. But it was when a young man who had never read a page of the Bible came to class that it was so much fun. He was always asking the most inventive questions, and taking the discussion in ways it never would have gone.

In your career you pivoted from the priesthood to the classroom. Why?
I left full-time parish ministry in a period of deep disappointment about my ability to lead a small rural church, and spent about three months wondering what to do with the rest of my life, because I wanted to keep living where I lived. So when Piedmont College called me and asked me if I wanted to teach in their new philosophy and religion major, I said yes.

I did not have a Ph.D., but I thought that if they were foolish enough to ask me, I was going to do it! Students taught me how to do the job, in the same way that congregations had to teach me how to be a pastor.

In 20 years of teaching world religions, how did the experience change over time?
I had been teaching about three years when 9/11 happened, and teaching Islam was never the same after that. The reigning stereotype before 9/11 was of Arabs in flowing robes with camels and sand. But after 9/11 that image was replaced with suicide vests and explosions. Neither one was helpful.

I ended up adding sessions to the unit on Islam because I had to do so much deconstruction before we could do any construction. I asked students to go up to the board at the beginning of the course and list the five major traditions, along with what they knew about them. With Islam, one of the first three words would always be “terrorism.” And that didn’t happen with the other traditions. The central features of them went up, though Hinduism was the blankest. Students came to Hinduism with fewer stereotypes. But with Islam, they had gotten so much negative information, and even more than that, negative images. I had to add some days to the unit so we could talk about the relationship between economics, global politics and religion. We might be able to talk about the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism without getting into those things, but we couldn’t talk about Islam without talking about them.

If you think about it, a lot of the students now would have been born around 9/11. That means that the U.S. has been involved in some kind of war with Islam their entire lives.

You say in the book, “However many other religious languages I learn, I dream in Christian. However much I learn from other spiritual teachers, it is Jesus I come home to at night.” Can you explain that?
In many ways, this book is a porthole into a change in my thinking that ended up changing my life and my view of my own tradition. I did learn other religious languages, and flirted with becoming pan-religious or post-religious or interreligious. I finally hit the impossibility of that for me, because we don’t learn to speak language, we learn to speak a language. It is very particular. The stories of Christianity were so much a part of what had shaped my character, my views, my practices, that it would have been foolhardy for me to leave it when I was so embedded in it.

I decided to stick with the language that I knew and loved. It was a matter of recognizing that part of my DNA, which was already so Christian in my formation. It seemed better to reform it rather than shed it or shrink it.

You discuss how the words we use to speak about religion can be unintentionally hurtful. Christians might use “pharisaic” (which I have done!) or talk about the “burden of the law” without realizing how insulting that wording is to Jews.
Now that you mention it, that’s part of dreaming in Christian that I had to keep an eye on. Also embedded in Christianity is the anti-Judaism in the Gospel of John, for example, or the Gospel of Matthew. The text became a part of me before I ever learned to question it, especially the parts Jesus said. It never occurred to me to question. That language of contempt is so familiar and subversive and subconscious that it rolls off the tongues of some of the most well-meaning, ecumenical clergy I know, because it’s embedded in the sacred text.

I loved how you used the biblical story of Melchizedek throughout the book, in which a stranger from outside your own religion winds up teaching you something. You say about an imam after 9/11, for instance, that he was your Melchizedek.
I have loved coming awake to the idea of the righteous gentile, a Jewish phrase that most people are familiar with because of “Schindler’s List.” What I began to realize was that though Christianity didn’t have that category, I could find those people in Christianity’s sacred texts. The three magi came from Persia and returned to Persia, and as far as I know they didn’t convert. The Syrophoenician woman was one of Jesus’ teachers from the outside when she challenged his notion of who he had come to help, though she did it through her own humiliation.

Once I woke up to the category, I could see Melchizedek figures throughout the Bible. There’s even a Melchizedek archetype in the last few chapters of Matthew, in the parable of the sheep and the goats, where the Son of Man is dividing people based not on how they believed, but how they treated the stranger. And there are post-resurrection experiences where people mistook Jesus as someone else. He shows up as an unknown person who takes awhile to recognize.

What was the writing process like for this book?
This book took so long to write. I wanted to begin writing it probably 10 years ago, but started writing it perhaps five years ago. Then there was illness in my family, and the book slowed down. And as always my excellent editor slowed me down again. He wanted it to have more revelation about myself as the teacher. I wanted it to be all about the class and the students. He said I needed to be more in the book — to say more about the ways that teaching had changed me.

What’s your next project?
I don’t know that there will be another project. The writing life has changed so much with social media and the need to be online so much. I’ve never wanted to spend that much time in front of a computer. But if your written work doesn’t have a strong online leg these days, it’s doubtful that anyone will find their way to you.

So describes Wounded in Spirit: Advent Art and Meditations, a gorgeous full-color art book to help the grieving get through the season.

I wish I had had this book six years ago, when my mother was dying. From diagnosis to death, it took just eight weeks, and it all unfolded in November and December. I was horrified to see degeneration from one day to the next: how could cancer spread that fast?

“Advent is a time of waiting,” I wrote then, “but this kind of waiting is the worst of all.” Waiting for the doctor’s phone call, waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for your life to irrevocably change—and not for the better.

One thing I hated about that Christmas was the false cheer that seemed everywhere around me, from the hospital hallways to the fast-food restaurants where I would pull through exhausted after a long day of caregiving.

I just could. Not. Think. About. Christmas. There was nothing left in me to give.

The following Christmas, the first without my mom, was little better. It seemed like everything reminded me of her: the Advent calendar we would stuff each day with leftover Halloween candy, the ornaments she saved from my childhood that I was adding to my own tree for the first time.

It was hard. And I think it would have been better if I had been able to spend a little time each day that December with the new book Wounded in Spirit, by David Bannon.

If you like art and find that it feeds your soul, and you are struggling with grief as Christmas approaches, this may be the Advent book for you.

Every day there is a new artist, with one or two examples of their work and several quotations about grief and loss and love. Here’s a two-page spread of a typical day’s meditation.

The liturgical season of Advent begins this Sunday, December 2, but the book is organized by the month of December, with the daily reflections beginning on December 1 and ending on Christmas Day.

Instead, the book focuses on what was going on in the lives of the artists themselves. The answer: a world of pain.

Some of the artists profiled here are famous for their suffering, like Vincent Van Gogh, whose infamous ear mutilation happened the day before Christmas Eve. But many are painters I’ve never heard of, and their stories are heartbreaking. Nineteenth-century French painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau lost four of his five children, and his depiction of Adam and Eve discovering the body of their dead child Abel

They lost spouses, friends, and especially children; their art reflects this. The painting of the twice-widowed Francisco de Zurbarán “hints at his sorrow” and points always to kindness between his subjects, which Bannon says is characteristic of those who have grieved many losses. “Studies show that there is often a sense of transcendence or transfiguration in the hearts of the bereaved: in their search for meaning they turn outward, commiserating with the suffering of others.”

Or, as Richard Rohr puts it in one of the book’s well-chosen quotations, “I think your heart needs to be broken, and broken open, at least once to have a heart at all or to have a heart for others.”

This Advent, may you work through grief and beauty simultaneously. God is good.

This article originally appeared at RNS. 

I found myself grieving, and it was hard to concentrate on my work yesterday as I mourned this loss of a wise teacher. Peterson, probably more than any other writer, has taught me how to read the Bible — and still teaches me again because I keep making it more complex than it needs to be at the exact same time that I reduce it to something overly simplistic and undemanding. I tend to treat it as a rulebook, or a recipe book, while Peterson shows it to be nothing less than “the message” — the hidden word of God.

So I pulled his books off the shelf and spent some time last night revisiting passages I’ve marked through the years as meaningful. Here are seven favorites.

Rest in peace, Pastor Peterson, and thank you for your witness.

1. Resurrection starts with grace

“Nothing and no one is a mere object, a thing that we can ignore or dispose of as we like. This is resurrection country. Resurrection is not something we add on to everything we are already accustomed to; it makes alive what has been ‘dead through … trespasses and sins’ (Eph. 2:1). It is understandable that we will still carry old cemetery habits and assumptions into this resurrection country. We have, after all, been living with them a long time (if you can call it living). And so we require a patient, long-suffering reorientation in the resurrection conditions that prevail in this country, living into the ‘full stature of Christ’ (4:13), our resurrection pioneer and companion. Paul begins our resurrection with the word ‘grace.’ It’s a word that he uses a lot.” — Practice Resurrection, 89-90

2. There are no shortcuts to prayer

“What I want to insist on is that prayer is not something to be added on to the Christian life (or any life for that matter). It is the language in which that life is lived out, nurtured, developed, revealed, informed: the language in which it believes, loves, explores, seeks, and finds. There are no shortcuts and detours. Prayer is the cradle language among those who are ‘born anew’ and then the intimate, familiar, developing language of growing up to follow the way of Jesus.

“But because in our secularized society prayer is often associated with what people of ‘spiritual’ interests pursue or with formal acts conducted by professional leaders, it is necessary from time to time to call attention to the fact that prayer is the street language that we use with Jesus, who walks the streets with us. We can’t put off prayer until we ‘get good at it.’ It is the only language available to us as we bring our unique and particular selves, ‘just as we are without one plea,’ into the daily, hourly speaking and listening to God who comes ‘just as he is’ in Jesus.” — The Jesus Way, 264-265

3. We need the Sabbath

“Sabbath: Uncluttered time and space to distance ourselves from the frenzy of our own activities so we can see what God has been and is doing. If we do not regularly quit work for one day a week we take ourselves far too seriously. The moral sweat pouring off our brows blinds us to the primal action of God in and around us.

“Sabbath-keeping: Quitting the internal noise so we hear the still small voice of our Lord. Removing the distractions of pride so we discern the presence of Christ ‘… in ten thousand places, / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his / To the Father through the features of men’s faces.’” — Working the Angles, 72-73

4. If you’ve ever had the Bible used as a weapon against you …

“Reading the Bible, if we do not do it rightly, can get us into a lot of trouble. The Christian community is as concerned with how we read the Bible as that we read it. It is not sufficient to place a Bible in a person’s hands with the command, ‘Read it.’

“That is quite as foolish as putting a set of car keys in an adolescent’s hands, giving him a Honda, and saying, ‘Drive it.’ And just as dangerous. The danger is that in having our hands on a piece of technology, we will use it ignorantly, endangering our lives and the lives of those around us; or that, intoxicated with the power that the technology gives us, we will use it ruthlessly and violently. …

“And so, as we hand out Bibles and urge people to read them, it is imperative that we also say, caveat lector, let the reader beware.” — Eat This Book, 81-82

5. Less is more

“We do not progress in the Christian life by becoming more competent, more knowledgeable, more virtuous, or more energetic. We do not advance in the Christian life by acquiring expertise. Each day, and many times a day, we return to Square One: God Said. … We adore and we listen.” — Subversive Spirituality, 30

6. A totally different take on Revelation

“Pastor John of Patmos showed me the way. He wrote what he saw. His Revelation is the result. … What I have come to see and to recognize is that if I had to put in a single sentence what I have learned from John regarding the way he wrote what he saw, it is this: godtalk — depersonalized, nonrelational, unlistening language — kills. In the land of the living it is blasphemous, whether spoken from pulpits or across the breakfast table.

” … And here is something that never ceases to astonish me. Pastor John of Patmos knew his Bible inside and out. The Revelation has 404 verses. In those 404 verses, there are 518 references to earlier scripture. But there is not a single quote; all the references are allusions. Here was a pastor and writer who was absolutely immersed in scripture and submitted himself to it. He did not merely repeat, regurgitate, proof-text. As he wrote, the scriptures were re-created in him. He assimilated scripture. Lived scripture. And then he wrote what he had lived.” — The Pastor, 243-244

7. Christian maturity for the long haul

“The Christian life is not a straight run on a track laid out by a vision statement formulated by a committee. Life meanders much of the time. Unspiritual interruptions, unanticipated people, uncongenial events cannot be pushed aside in our determination to reach the goal unimpeded, undistracted. “Goal-setting,” in the context and on the terms intended by a leadership-obsessed and management-programmed business mentality that infiltrates the church far too frequently, is bad spirituality. Too much gets left out. Too many people get brushed aside.

“Maturity cannot be hurried, programmed, or tinkered with. There are no steroids available for growing up in Christ more quickly. Impatient shortcuts land us in the dead ends of immaturity.” — Practice Resurrection, 133

This article originally appeared at RNS.

For example, religious people are more likely to be Republican—but what’s growing fastest in America is nonreligion, and nearly seven in ten Americans who leave organized religion, or never claimed it earlier in life, vote Democratic.

Likewise, white people are more likely than nonwhites to be Republican, but whites are losing market share a little more each year as the United States becomes more racially diverse. In the 1960s, more than 8 in 10 Americans were white. By the 2060s, that’s projected to be fewer than half.

Lest you think I am letting the Democratic Party off the hook, however, let me be clear: Democrats are in every bit as much trouble as Republicans are, but for different reasons. That’s because Democrats have largely forgotten about core moral values that once defined the party.

The social psychologist who has built a career on this argument is Jonathan Haidt, who in The Righteous Mind outlines five core “foundations” of morality. (He later added a sixth, but for simplicity’s sake here let’s discuss the original five.) Liberals excel at two moral foundations: Care and Fairness. Care means having compassion on the less fortunate and standing up for the underdog, even at great personal cost. Fairness means an emphasis on justice, equal rights and freedom from oppression.

This is why liberals like programs like Affirmative Action, which appeals to both those foundations, and why they are furious about how Trump is handling immigration. He is harming people who are weak and vulnerable, including innocent children who did not ask to be brought over the border. Harm to innocent people is a major trigger for the Care foundation to kick in.

Where liberals fall short is in the other three moral foundations, which may have cost them the 2016 election — since conservatives traditionally uphold all five moral foundations. Those are:

Loyalty: This includes values like team play, military service, patriotism and sacrifice for the group or nation. Liberals are more concerned with individualism and making sure the group or nation doesn’t rob the individual of rights. Conservatives, by contrast, emphasize cooperation and sacrifice for the greater good.

Authority: This is respect for leadership and social order to stave off chaos. Conservatives emphasize that authority is necessary for a civilized society, while liberals are primarily animated by avoiding authority’s abuse.

Sanctity: Haidt defines this as a concern for social purity and the idea that some things are just sacred. The Right has set the terms for this conversation so that “sanctity” is attached to some things but not others: “sanctity of life” connotes a position against abortion but not necessarily against the death penalty, for example. But at least conservatives talking about sanctity at all, even if inconsistently. Liberals have largely abandoned this language and score lowest here of all five foundations.

Conservatives, then, have a built-in advantage when it comes to winning elections: their moral palate is broad enough that they have something positive to say about all five moral foundations. That is, conservatives also uphold care and fairness. Liberals, at best, speak positively about only two of them.

When Haidt first began his research, he received hate mail from liberals who dismissed conservatives out of hand as narcissists who cared only about their own self-interest. Reactions like these are fine—so long as liberals want to keep losing elections. If they would rather start winning, they need to pay attention to values they used to care about.

Think of John F. Kennedy, asking young Americans to forgo their individualism and “ask, rather, what you can do for your country” (Loyalty). Think of Franklin D. Roosevelt, strengthening American power and uniting disparate factions under his leadership (Authority). Or think of Harry Truman enlisting religious leaders in the fight against communism. He did so not only because he realized he needed to tie the global struggle for democracy to deeply held religious ideals in order to motivate his followers, but also because he believed in the connection between religious faith and democratic ideals (Sanctity).

When was the last time we saw a Democrat actively court religious leaders—not merely in a calculated way to achieve a political end, but because he or she sincerely tied that political end to sacred principles?

Democrats have ceded the moral high ground in these three areas over the last several decades, but right now is a perfect opportunity to learn from their mistakes. That’s because of the bizarre fact that conservatives have elected a man who pays lip service to their values but does not himself believe in them. Jealous for Loyalty, Trump demands it of others but does not extend it himself — as evidenced by his undisguised fascination with America’s enemies. He cares more about sitting down with dictators and thereby being perceived as powerful than he does about showing Loyalty to the nation.

Moreover, the president who called himself the “law and order” candidate has proven that he sees himself above the law. In his brief time in office he has accumulated a long list of ethics violations, revealing just how shallow his regard for Authority is. His legal troubles have been bottomless.

And we don’t even need to delve into the irony of Trump, an adulterer, being the poster child of conservatives who are enamored of the Sanctity of marriage and family.

In short, the president is vulnerable. That, combined with the aforementioned weakness of the Republican Party as the nation’s demographics shift toward Democrats, should make for a reversal of power.

But I fear that liberals, having long accustomed themselves — ourselves — to speaking with less than one-half of a moral language, will falter.

If liberals cannot regain our fluency with all five elements of morality, we will remain a fractured den of individualists whose best days are behind us.

This article originally appeared at RNS.

Parker Palmer’s new book, On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old, isn’t like that. The Quaker writer and activist focuses instead on the spiritual gifts of aging that our youth-obsessed culture has largely ignored.

I’ve chosen six of them out of our wide-ranging phone conversation this week, and arranged Parker’s wise words around these themes. May they help us all age more grace-fully. — JKR

1. Recognizing you’re “on the brink”

For me, as I approach age 80, I’m “on the brink” of everything. What I mean is that from this vantage point of age and being metaphorically in a high place, on the brink, I can look back, I can look around, and I can look ahead and connect the dots in a way that allows me to discover something about my own life. I’ve led a very zig-zagged life when it comes to work, and had many kinds of jobs for which I wasn’t particularly prepared, because at the time they seemed right.

The best example I can give is that I got a PhD from Berkeley in the late 60s, and got job offers to become a professor. But by 1969, the cities were burning, Vietnam was raging, and my heroes had been assassinated. So it seemed to me that my calling was to become a community organizer, working on issues of racial equity and justice.

So there’s an example of one zig or zag among many. There was a period of time — a couple of decades, in my 30s and 40s — when I kept making those zigs or zags. People would ask me why and the best I could tell them was, “This is something I can’t not do.” I wasn’t a trust fund baby, and I had a family. I was facing all the real-world circumstances and had three kids. But I couldn’t not become a community organizer at a time when there seemed to be a compelling need that I felt called to meet.

2. Looking back and finding the patterns

The discovery piece of aging is being able to look back and say, “Aha, that is how it all connects.” If I can use the metaphor of a tapestry that you have been and are still weaving, I can also say that there are ugly threads of failure or misunderstanding. But looking back, you can see how those become an integral part of the weave, not only adding beauty but also contrast, and they strengthen the resilience of the fabric. These are things that I couldn’t see in my 30s, or even into my 60s.

When you discover these patterns in your life, then you can look around you with new eyes, and look ahead with more perceptiveness, with your feet on the ground, and not be carried away by fear. I can’t imagine a sadder way to die than realizing I never showed up in this world as myself. That would be a particular kind of psychological pain that I would find almost unbearable. If you can say you showed up, more often than not, with your heart in your hand, you can die with a certain sense of satisfaction. You have become what you were meant to be.

3. Reframing your purpose

There’s a whole existential crisis that many people feel when they come to the end of the road of whatever has brought them meaning and purpose. For some, that’s because they’ve been compelled to retire from work. Or perhaps a person who has been devoted to raising children, which is one of the most important jobs in the world, finds that his or her children have left home, and is left with questions of meaning and purpose that they don’t know how to answer. I think we give people very little help in distinguishing the job they do and the vocation they have. It’s partly that our educational system trains people for the workforce, but very rarely do we start preparing people for a meaningful life after “the job” goes away. The job I’m doing every day for money is not necessarily my vocation — my calling, the reason I was put here on earth.

Maybe their job is not simply child-rearing, but caring for the growth and development of other human beings. If you put it that way, there’s no need to ever leave your post unless you want to, because people who need that kind of support are legion.

4. Listening to, and learning from, young people

I have a whole section in the book on the importance of intergenerational relationships. When older people do tend to reach out to a younger person, our tendency is to say, “Sit down, young man or lady! I’m going to give you the recipe for success.” But when you get to that age, you have a very mixed record of failure and success.

This thing of always giving advice is deadly because it kills off any chance of relationship. The thing to do is listen, to hear them into speech. Young people suffer deeply from feeling they’re not listened to; they’re not seen as who they are. When an elder expresses generous interest and doesn’t immediately fall into advice mode, that builds relationship. That’s step #1. Step #2 is dealing with failure, and telling them not to be afraid of it. Factoring failure into your story is not only honest but also reassuring to young people. I have learned so much more from failure than I have from my successes. For my successes, I pat myself on the back. But when I fail, that’s when I stay up late at night chewing on things. That’s when deep learning happens. Failure is a big teacher and also a big thing to model with younger folk.

5. Facing up to mortality

The older I’ve gotten, the harder it becomes not to think about my own mortality. When you’re in your 20s and 30s and 40s, it’s a lot easier to pretend that you’re going to be the exception, that you’re not going to die. Teenagers think they are bulletproof. But we carry that habit for quite a long time. As a writer I used to spend 15 hours a day at the keyboard when I had something hot going. These days, I don’t do that. I’ll instinctively get up from my chair, get outside, and take a little walk. Or if it’s winter, I’ll sit in an armchair and look outside at the weather in Madison, Wisconsin for a while before I return to my work.

St. Benedict said to “Daily keep your death before your eyes.” No matter how rich or important and famous you are, there is death coming. Two things happen when we meditate in a healthy way that our lives are finite. One, we become more appreciative of life and its gifts. Two, we can prepare ourselves for the Big Death by embracing all the little deaths that come our way: the death of a dream, of a relationship. Instead of trying to avoid thinking about those things, it’s important to embrace the motto, “If you can’t get out of it, get into it.” There’s no way out except in and through.

As you do that, as you embrace the little deaths, your heart becomes less brittle, more supple. These deaths are more likely to break your heart open than to break it apart. These little deaths allow us to exercise our hearts in the same way a runner exercises a muscle so that it won’t snap while running.

6. Speaking out with wisdom (or, “you’re not dead yet!”)

In the section on “Keep Reaching Out,” there is a fair amount of politics. In the context of what is happening right now, it’s not only a disgusting spectacle, but it’s fundamentally damaging to our democracy. The only answer is to reclaim the concept of “we the people.” We are falling prey, big time, to the old divide and conquer strategy, which is aimed squarely at “we the people,” so that we will become so fragmented that we cannot stand united.

This is not a problem of any one party or administration, though it’s going on today more than ever in my experience. But that’s not the real issue. The real issue is: are we going to put up with it, and succumb to these tactics? Are we going to allow “we the people” to be taken apart and left in fragments and shards? So that’s the real political message I want to advance: Do not give up your citizenship. Elders get the message that they’re over the hill and out of the game. But they still have a voice and gifts to give.

Parker Palmer’s writing has changed many lives in the last three decades, particularly the bestsellers The Courage to Teach and Let Your Life Speak. He is a regular columnist for On Being and was the founder of the Center for Courage & Renewal.

It makes a certain kind of sense that some white evangelicals voted for Trump instead of Hillary Clinton in the general election because they objected to Clinton on abortion and other issues. It does not, however, make sense that many of these same voters supported Trump as early as the primaries, when there were experienced evangelical candidates still in the race.

How did this realignment happen in American religion and politics? Or is it even a realignment?

John Fea has recently written the book Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump, which takes a deeper look at how this fits into nearly two centuries of white evangelicals’ history. Fea, a historian at Messiah College, traces it to three things: fear, power, and nostalgia.

Religion News Service interviewed Fea about the book. His responses follow.

Of the three elements you highlight, you start with fear, saying that white evangelicals’ embrace of Donald Trump stems out of their long history of being afraid of certain kinds of change. So did you see his victory coming?

No. Frankly, I was so caught up in the moment myself that I kind of lost my historical sensibility for a month or two. It wasn’t until the emotions died down that as a historian I began to see the pattern, the continuity. This is not new.

At every moment of social, cultural or demographic change in history, there have been Americans who have felt threatened and have responded with fear. Almost every time that happens, evangelicals seem to be at the forefront of the backlash to change. For example, when Catholic immigrants start arriving in the country in the 1840s and 1850s, it’s evangelical Christians who are fearful about a change taking place in their Protestant nation. Or when slaves rebel in the 19th-century South, there becomes this great fear of slave rebellions, which prompts evangelicals to promote slavery in their writings.

So white evangelicals see Trump as a strongman who will protect them from their fears? He seemed very adept at stoking those very fears.

It’s not that the other GOP candidates didn’t also appeal to fears. Ted Cruz was one of the biggest fearmongers that there was. But somehow Trump managed to convince voters that he was stronger and better at protecting them than these other candidates.

I think this gets at why evangelicals turned to Trump when there were other, more traditional Christian conservative candidates in the race, like Cruz or Marco Rubio or Ben Carson.

Your second point is that white evangelicals have bought into the idea that the only way to have an impact on the culture is to seize upon worldly power. What were the roads not taken? What else could they have done instead?

The history of American evangelicals appealing to political power is a relatively new history, maybe going back to the late 1970s and 1980s with the rise of the Christian right. I argued in Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? that evangelicals had been in power in America up until the 1960s in terms of determining what would be America’s cultural symbols, understanding of marriage, and position on other social issues. It’s not until those traditional values become challenged in the 1960s that evangelicals begin this new strategy of pursuing political power as a way to reclaim the culture.

Since the 1960s, there have also been some evangelical approaches to politics that are unrelated, or do not call for the pursuit of political power, like James Davidson Hunter’s idea of “faithful presence” or Michael Gerson’s call for evangelicals to learn more from Catholic social theory. Or there are Dutch Reformed people who are followers of Abraham Kuyper, who did not advocate seizing political power in the way the Christian Right wants to do. And since the early 1970s, people on the evangelical left, like Jim Wallis and Ron Sider, have called for a different kind of evangelical power. But the Right refuses to adopt any of these models, and has instead built their entire political philosophy on changing the culture by trying to elect leaders who will follow their agenda.

Your third point is that white evangelicals voted for Trump because of nostalgia. “Make America Great Again” is a slogan custom-built for white people, men especially. For the rest of us, the past really wasn’t so great.

I think a lot of people, when they hear “Make America Great Again,” tend to focus on the word “great.” But as a historian, I’m immediately attracted to the word “again.”

If white evangelicals are going to embrace that slogan, I think they at least have to articulate: When was America great? What golden age do they want to return to? The 1980s? The 1950s? So as a historian, I want to think more critically about the phrase “Make America Great Again.” First identify which period they mean, and then look at the period in more depth. Who was benefiting in that period, and who was not included?

Race is at the heart of this. I ask my African-American friends, “What is the best time in American history to live?” and they say, “Right now!” No African Americans want to go back to a previous era.

You’ve coined the phrase “court evangelicals” to describe religious leaders like Robert Jeffress and Paula White who have cozied up to Trump. What do you mean?

I was struck by the fact that Trump created an evangelical advisory council, which he did not do for any other religious group. When religious leaders invest in political power in that way, it becomes very difficult for them to speak with a prophetic voice to the political leader they are hoping is going to champion their views.

So as I watched many of these evangelical ministers visiting the White House for photo ops with the president, then sharing these photos on Twitter and boasting about the “unprecedented access” that they had to the president, all of this reminded me as a historian of the Renaissance-era priests and other courtiers who came to the king’s throne to flatter him and praise his greatness. They did not speak any kind of prophetic critique to the king — they were there for selfish reasons, to get in his good graces. So I worry when evangelical ministers like Paula White, Jerry Falwell Jr., and Robert Jeffress praise Trump as the most Christian president we’ve ever had. This has the potential of weakening their credibility among people who may actually need to hear the good news of the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ.

Finally, you dedicate your book to the 19 percent of white evangelicals who did not vote for Trump. What do you want to say to them with this book?

I dedicate the book to the 19 percent not because they’re my primary audience, but because they seem to have seen through Trump. They’ve made a decision that Trump is not good — not just for the nation, but also for the church. So I hope the book might provide some history and arguments that the 19 percent can offer to their evangelical friends who did vote for Donald Trump and are having second thoughts, or are at least open to further evidence and dialogue. But my main audience, I think, is those evangelicals who voted for Trump who are open to reason and evidence and historical arguments that may suggest electing Trump was a bad idea.

This article originally appeared at RNS.

Editor’s Note: An interview with theologian Diana Butler Bass on her new book, Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks.

Thanks for your beautiful new book on gratitude. A few years ago I took an online course called “The Science of Happiness,” then attended the International Positive Psychology conference in Orlando. (Because where else would you hold a positive psychology conference?) It was remarkable how much interest there was in learning how to be happy. So: What explains this obsession?

I’m a bit of a deconstructionist about these things. When people are asking questions about how to be happier, it means that they’re not. It reveals a spiritual longing that people have.

I think Americans have a tendency to equate gratitude with stuff. It’s primarily about being thankful for economic benefits, like the things we have in our houses. It’s good to have a comfortable life, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but that’s not entirely what gratitude is. It’s not a thank-you list for material blessings. It’s a disposition of our character in which we can experience the fullness of life beyond our immediate circumstances.

You confess early on in the book that gratitude doesn’t come naturally to you, which I suspect might be the case for a lot of us.

The reason I wrote this book was not because I’m an expert in gratitude. I wrote from the exact opposite perspective, that of a gratitude klutz. When I write about church history or congregations or theology, I’m actually an expert in those things, and I have academic authority to speak about them.

I wrote this because gratitude had eluded me. I was getting into my late 50s, and I realized as I looked ahead, there are people who when they age are not very grateful, and in fact are full of regrets. But I also know older people who are wonderful to be around, and usually those are people that have significant practices of gratitude. I wanted to be more like them. So this book was, in part, a deeply personal impulse to put myself on a path and experience gratitude as part of the mature spiritual life. The book’s authority emerges from this desire and from my own struggle to be a better person.

I appreciate the honesty in the book when you say that sometimes that kind of gratitude is impossible because of very real impediments. You tell a story of surviving abuse when you were a teenager, and how you struggled for years to forgive.

That section is key to the personal authenticity of this book. Before I wrote, I thought to myself: “The last thing the world needs in 2018 is another book on gratitude by a privileged white lady.” When outsiders look at someone like me, they generally see a successful person. They don’t know about the times in my life when I’ve been victimized and have suffered.

For the book to be real, I knew I had to share the story about when I was a teenager and was abused by a relative. It was very hard to write about, as I’ve never told it in public. Never. But I wanted readers to know that I wasn’t telling them to feel gratitude even in the midst of their pain, but was sharing as someone who has found — after a really hard struggle — gratefulness beyond my pain.

Christians say the worst things to people in pain. I had a friend who was raped and a person who wound up being a pastor told her, “This feels terrible right now, but the Bible tells us we should be grateful for everything.” We do this all the time, saying you should be grateful for getting cancer, or that your spouse left you, or you lost your job.

But you should never tell a person who has been a victim of injustice or pain to be thankful for those things. Instead, the Bible says we’re thankful through or in those things. For isn’t the same as through. Prepositions matter.

I have been deeply angry about being abused. But at the same time, what I learned through the longer trajectory of life is that, ultimately, the violence did not own me. And that’s what I became thankful for. I still feel some level of pain — even rage — about it, but I can look back now and say, “Oh my gosh, no matter how horrible that was, I’ve never succumbed to letting the pain define me.” I can be thankful for my resiliency, and for my friends and family who helped me and loved me.

So this is not your typical hearts-and-flowers gratitude book. This accounts for suffering and despair and unexpected election results. Gratitude is not a happy pill or Pollyanna. This is gratitude on the ground with the feet of people who are fighting and marching for a better world.

You talk about several spiritual practices that can help cultivate gratitude. What are they?

In the book I share some of those. There’s a difference between a tool and a practice. When you’re planting a garden, sometimes you use a hoe, sometimes a shovel, sometimes your fingers — all these different tools can change over time. But the practice is growing the garden. With gratitude, the “tool” might be writing in a journal or doing meditation. For someone like Phyllis Tickle, it really was a lifetime of fixed-hour prayer. The tools are different, but the practice is thankfulness.

I’ve always wished I could be like Phyllis, but I’m a person who likes to change up my tools! Right now, two things are very helpful for me. One is poetry, which helps me to see deeply past the immediate moment to a deeper reality. So much of poetry is about seeing abundance and thanksgiving. During Lent, my husband and I read a poem before dinner together every night, and connected it to gratitude.

And the second thing is really kind of goofy. Instead of keeping a journal right now, I have a river rock with the word “gratitude” inscribed on it. That rock sits on my nightstand. Every night when I go to bed, it’s the last thing I see. When I wake up in the morning, I hold it in my hand and say, “Thank you for the new day.” Or “Thank you that the sun is shining.” So, this little act — of rock holding — frames my rising up and my going to sleep. It’s so important to me that I carry the rock around in my travel bag, so I can also have it with me when I’m in airplanes or at a hotel.

I’ve noticed that your last two books, “Grounded” and “Grateful,” really go for the “Gr” words. So on a lighter note, I’ve come up with a list of possible future book ideas for you! These are topics I would love to see you tackle: grammar, grumpiness, greed, gregariousness.

I do think I do have another G-word book in me. I was thinking of a book called “Grovel.” That would be a good title for a book about prayer!

That would be awesome.

Another one I also wanted to write was “Grit,” but that one’s already been published. For now, I’m content with being grounded and grateful.

This article originally appeared at RNS.