faith

How to Stay in the Same Faith as JD Vance

Gideon YutzyLeave a comment

With much of the Christianity you find online, it’s good to steer as wide a berth as possible. That includes the brand of Christianity associated with the current Republican Party in America.

Vice President JD Vance recently wrote a book about his journey into the Catholic Church. I’ve watched a few bits and pieces of his promotional interviews. Now, I know Christians ought to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, but somehow it’s hard to see this conversion as genuine. Vance insists that Mr. Quiet-Piggy Trump really is a virtuous man after all, despite calling him Hitler a few short years ago. And that rounding up vulnerable people Gestapo-style as if they’re cattle is simply ‘enforcing the law.’ Vance’s entrance into the church was convoluted at best and politically motivated at worst, and the only miracle I see is how he has managed to scrupulously avoid any real contact with the Christian faith.

But hey, we must remember the parable of the wheat and tares, and the old truism, ‘Christians don’t get to choose family.’ Let us go outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured, amirite. But I could almost develop an ulcer if I think too long about how that slippery, smiling man seems to drag Christ’s name through the mud at every turn, how he weaponises the Christian faith to create divisiveness, and not the noble divisiveness that comes from a politics that serves ‘the least of these,’ but rather the kind that furthers his shallow political ambitions and agenda.

And yet I know it’s easier to criticize than build. If I reject the Christianity associated with the current religious right–and I do reject it, roundly–then what form of Christianity do I espouse? I remember Tony Campolo’s story about eating at a greasy spoon restaurant in Hawaii during one of his many speaking tours. Unbeknownst to him, the little diner was located at the entrance of a brothel. A prostitute was talking to her colleague (if that is the correct word) and telling her it was her 40th birthday. Impulsively, Tony Campolo planned an impromptu party and had a cake brought in. The burly chef, seeing Tony with the cake, along with ‘wall-to-wall prostitutes,’ wiped his hands on his dirty apron and gave him a look of utter disbelief. ‘I thought you were a preacher!’ he said to Tony. ‘Say, just what kind of church do you belong to?’

Tony said that in one split second, the Holy Spirit gave him the exact right response: ‘I belong to a church that throws birthday parties for sex workers at 2 o’clock in the morning.’ I’m not sure if JD Vance would be throwing birthday parties for the down-and-out, probably not the Haitians in Ohio anyway. Unless the Holy Spirit has been working on him more than what is public knowledge, and that certainly is not outside the realm of possibility given the mischief the Spirit can get up to.

I also remember the great Richard Foster’s seven streams of Christianity. I don’t remember all of them but I think they included missional, sacramental, contemplative and doctrinal. Maybe, given the alarming rate at which the broader church is fragmenting, it’s worth considering which stream of the church we are going to draw from for our sustenance. To me, the stream of Christianity that challenges and questions has always seemed the purest, though I am also aware of how important it is to stay grounded in the faith. You have to know what the basics are before you become too provocative and experimental. Just as all runners need rest and healthy food, so all Christians have to commit to the basics. You have to say your prayers, do penance, recite the creed, receive the eucharist.

Of course. I grant all that. But I also think there is a viable stream within Christianity that sometimes appears divergent to those in some of the other streams. I honestly did not set out to join that stream, but it is, shockingly often, the one I feel most at home in. I have never been able to feel at home in a certain brand of Christianity. I don’t quite know how to describe it other than it’s a little campy and they like to ‘own the atheists’ and toss shibboleths around in order to suss out who else is in their tribe. It’s always felt alien to me. So it seems good and right to put into writing where my allegiance lies: to Christianity, yes, but more specifically the stream that flows turbulent at times. Why should a Trump sycophant get to determine what the faith looks like? If JD Vance can be so bold about his understanding of the Christian faith, perhaps the rest of us can, too. Perhaps it’s our only real hope of staying Christian.

Gurus Are A Symptom of Our Fragmented World

Gideon YutzyLeave a comment

Not to sound all Robert Putnam-esque, but it’s less likely now that we belong to a bowling league, or any other league or club, than it was before Steve Jobs made his famous ‘dent in the universe’ by strongarming through the invention of the smartphone.

Since then, a plethora of idiocies and banalities have competed to fill the vacuum created in the wake of that dent in our universe. Among these is the rise of online gurus, some of whom have reeled in millions of followers. It reminds me of the dynamic between the current U.S. president and his more ardent followers: no matter what their guru says, it is divine decree.

With gurus, even if they blatantly contradict themselves, it can still somehow be spun as pure brilliance, if we as their followers hold the crystal ball under the light in just the right (wrong) angle.

One explanation I’ve heard for the rise of gurus is that we crave certainty. Amid the exponential fragmentation of our world, we like to return to solid ground sometimes. It doesn’t help that we’ve become cyborgs. Literally everyone has grown an appendage on their hand overnight. We can now access billions of brains instantly rather than just our own boring (but still usually trusty) brain. We might remove our bionic limb for a few slots of our day, but only fitfully it seems, and seldom as a clean, surgical break.

The danger is that we are vulnerable to some charismatic guru hacking us. Something about our primordial biology tends to believe information for its own sake, no matter how irrational or ill-founded it might be. If something is said confidently enough, we tend to believe it unless we willfully reverse the inertia of trustingly taking everything in as fact, particularly if it is said in a sleek studio with an army of sound producers and cinematographers working behind the scenes.

And all of which causes one to muse: what, practically, can one do to mitigate the effects of con-men. I remember Kipling’s line in If: “if all people count with you, but none too much.” If some media figure has us eating out of their hand and we tune in to almost all their new content, it just might be a good idea to wrench ourselves away from their orbit occasionally. It has surprised me more than once how a fresh, new take can reframe a situation. We owe it to ourselves to find that new perspective. As Richard Feynman said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” Well, Mr. Feynman, what with the entire body of past and present knowledge at our fingertips, we have less of an excuse now than ever.

I have a proclivity to swallow whole what some charismatic online gurus say. Despite that embarrassing reality, my smug brain wants to whisper that my gurus are more sophisticated and less rabid than other people’s gurus. But that thought is in itself an indictment on how much guru Kool-Aid I’ve drunk. One remedy is to talk back to people on podcasts, literally talk, out loud, as I listen to them on headphones while I cut the grass or jog. It’s surprising how often they suddenly start sounding a lot more foolish, or at least less wise, when I do respond to them. I also like to float what they say to flesh-and-blood humans (novel idea, I know), and notice how they respond, as someone who didn’t get caught in the spell of the technologically advanced media production. I find that people around me who are less invested can be pretty objective, and even ruthless critics, especially my daughters.

That, and also the idea of a True North. A late afternoon plunge in the Irish Sea always has a way of stripping away the BS my mind might have accumulated throughout the day. Beyond blue pills, and beyond red pills, there is our true mother, the sea. I will meet you there. Additionally, the communion service Esther and I have started attending on Wednesday morning anchors us. The priest holds out the wine, uttering the quasi-cannabalist incantation, The blood of Christ, keep you in eternal life, and in every pore of our being, we seek to agree. It’s a bizarre little ritual, but I can tell you it’s been around longer than podcasts, and it is also perhaps the most impregnable defense against overweening gurus that I currently know of.

How to Make Your Mind Unhackable

Gideon YutzyLeave a comment

Park benches are like messengers from another world. Day by day, they noiselessly preside over the wharf, or over a church yard somewhere off to the side of a windstrewn hodgepodge of grave markers. At the church we attend, there is a bench with a message emblazoned on it. Having always assumed it said something like, Rest in Peace, Laura, I never stopped to take note of its message. At least 90 percent of park benches are inscribed to someone who’s deceased, which makes them all the more ghostlike.

Then the other day I took the time to read it. It has that old line, ‘Use your hands for service, your heart for love, your mind for truth, etc.’ It seems an entirely appropriate blurb for a church that claims John Wesley as its spiritual ancestor. So wholistic. John Wesley sought to be a Christian who is both pious and concerned about helping others. I can sign on to that. That said, it does seem like Methodism, in an effort to be wholistic, has become almost too unoffensive, if that’s possible. Someone called it the Canada of the Christian church. (By the way, wholistic and holistic are both valid spellings. I’m just trying to be a good Methodist and acknowledge both spellings.)

Back to park benches, what do you think of the quote? I know it has the ring of a cliche, and that it is almost trite enough to write inside a fortune cookie. But that bit about using the mind for truth is quite salient for anything it may lack in originality. Especially so, given the unprecedented amount of bad and deleterious information out there. Truth, my friends, that’s where it’s at. Just hold onto truth and you’ll be okay.

Of course, I say this tongue in cheek, because who could ever purport to know truth. Jesus said you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. Here’s a mini-syllogism for you: I know very few people who are really free all the time, so that must mean most of us haven’t really found the truth yet. Most times when we find a ‘truth’ that sets us free in one area, it brings with it a fresh bondage. For instance, if you become a billionaire, it will free you up to travel and enjoy all sorts of nice things, but you’re no longer free to be happy-go-lucky about your wealth. You’ll have to manage and invest it. Most billionaires also have to hire security detail, which is a phrase that, to this day, doesn’t intuitively make sense to me. Why the hell do we say security detail? The phrase sounds almost as de-humanising as the concept.

I’m probably being self-indulgent to pick on the rich, but I reckon Elon Musk is an example of someone who doesn’t use his mind for truth. He likes to put forth the image of being a modern day Nikola Tesla, but do we realise we cannot attribute a single invention to him even if we wanted to? But why would anyone want to? Fawn over a person who creates such vast economic injustice. He didn’t personally invent the electric car, internet payments, or any kind of underground tunnels, nor did he personally make any advances in rockets. At least with Grubhub, some dudes named Matt Maloney and Mike Evans invented something: online takeaway websites. But they did it quietly and regally, like park benches. They didn’t launch campaigns to convince the world they’re epochal geniuses. Also, they didn’t con governments into subsidising their failing businesses.

It’s also true that Elon Musk has mused repeatedly that the world could be a simulation video game that he’s playing. It’s not overly comforting: he is the person in charge of more of the world’s resources than any other individual in history, and he sees the millions of people deprived of life’s basic necessities as mere pawns and not even real pawns at that. And yet these same pawns in his game will happily put out for him in marches. How easily we are bamboozled into trusting the very people who have our worst in mind.

The current American president is the quintessential con artist. How was a billionaire huckster whose companies filed for bankruptcy six times able to get half the country to vote for him not once, but 3 times? His personal wealth has doubled since taking office the second time in 2024. How could he be for the working class? He also facilitated the most expensive U.S. House race in history at 35 million dollars to unseat one of the last principled, citizen-centred legislators in America.

It can feel like like a losing battle, but it is important to name and shame people like Trump and Elon, if for no other reason to maintain our own grounding in a reality that still assumes right and wrong. Clearly, these two snake oil salesmen extraordinaire are not operating from reality, at least not the reality that seeks to create justice and flourishing for all people on earth.

We must, however, exert significantly more energy into righting that which is wrong in our immediate sphere of influence. Whatever the best way is to think of the devil, the Christian faith teaches that he is the father of lies. How has he messed up our own minds and made so that we aren’t, as the park bench advises, using them for truth? I find that if I can harness my mind as an ally, the quality of my life improves by orders of magnitude. I desperately need a mind attuned to truth. Every time I turn around, some new lie awaits me. A vast chasm still separates what I want from what I need, from what nourishes me. Wasting two hours on the internet feels like the right thing at the time, but one feels truly horrible afterward. Running 20 kilometres feels unpleasant during the run, but you feel amazing the rest of the day.

My current top 5 hacks for making my mind unhackable:

  1. Do things that are more body-centric. I’ve been acquiring simple physical exercises I can do in my living room, such as glute bridges, planks and sit-ups. None of the activities in my repertoire are terribly fun at first, but I have found some that are habit-forming and not too strenuous. Other activities, push-ups, for example, I find even less fun, so I mostly avoid them.
  2. Breath and breath prayers. Scrunch up the muscles in a given area of the body on the one breath, and luxuriously release them on the out breath. Pray, ‘Jesus, Son of David,’ on the in breath, and, ‘Have mercy on me a sinner,’ on the out breath.
  3. Positive distractions. I try to keep an assortment of interesting podcasts and audiobooks, so that when there’s a lull, I have something I can turn to. I find it good to keep a to-do list of manageable, bite-sized activities around the house.
  4. I like to log on and allow myself one game of Scrabble online against the computer, then note down new words the computer plays. My goal is still to reach a 1700 WESPA rating by 2030. Woogle.io is ad-free, and the best site I’ve found so far.
  5. It’s worth it to pause and get into another person’s orbit. Make eye contact with them and empathise with their problems. Musk is wrong, life is not a simulation. Having a solipsistic outlook makes me miserable. I will schedule a walk or a jog with a friend when I start feeling disregulated.

Is Free Will an Argument Against Universal Salvation?

Gideon Yutzy3 Comments

On several occasions, I’ve met people who recognize the elegance of a Gospel that saves all, but they stop short of embracing it because they think it turns us into robots. To them, a soteriology of universal restoration smacks of God saving people whether they like it or not.

Fair enough, and it’s not the worst argument. They don’t want anything shoved down their throats. I get that.

But part of me also wonders whether they are more affected by a rugged Western individualism than they might realize. If I see myself primarily as an individual, then yes, my salvation comes down to my choices and decisions. However, if I see my identity as woven in and through community (nobody is an island), then it starts to make sense that salvation is a project aimed at the human race rather than individual people.

What, after all, is the essence of a human? Is it our physical body? Hardly. The cells in our bodies change completely every seven years. That’s not to mention the speedy decay and ultimate decomposition of our bodies after we die.

Is it our achievements? Is it our memories? Our experiences? That might be getting closer. In truth, most of us probably attach our identity to non-physical markers such as these.

And that’s where it gets interesting: these markers are all intertwined with other people. Take memories and experiences. If we remove even one person involved with our memories and experiences and consign them to eternal damnation, our identity falls apart.

In other words, we can go ahead and remove people from the picture because they failed to make the heroic act of free will and assent to God’s offer of salvation. But our own identity will be fundamentally altered because of it.

Would we rather enter eternal bliss as robots, or as truncated, lobotomized versions of ourselves?

“That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth” (Philippians 2:10). “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:22). Adam and Eve’s race is saved–or doomed–as one.

Yes, we have free will. Yes, we should make good decisions. Yes, our actions here have a profound impact on our trajectory. But there is a danger of overemphasizing these truths. We also desperately need God’s grace. As much as we want to will what is good, we find that our will is impoverished. Sick. Broken. Our very will is in need of divine intervention, in need of healing.

“Batter my heart, three-person’d God… Take me to you, imprison me.” That’s not New Age fluff, that’s John Donne writing four centuries ago.

Donne understood that if he was to be saved, it had to be the work of God, not the result of his heroic free will. And upon even a moment of cursory reflection, surely we must reach the same conclusion: the entire human race is saved by grace. (Unless, of course, we’re to go full Calvinist and say God will batter the hearts of some but not others, although poor Calvin probably said it with much more sophistication than we give him credit for.)

This Easter, it is good and right to celebrate God’s resurrection power in my life. Salvation is personal. Jesus loves me, this I know.

But it is far more glorious to consider Easter as a harbinger of salvation for all, as extending far beyond the vaguely-defined contours of my puny self to an entire human race and indeed the cosmos.

God, Grant Us the Courage to Be Countercultural–and Mainstream

Gideon YutzyLeave a comment

My theory is that 99.9% of us are mainstream when it comes to certain things. With Novocain injections, for instance, we’re probably more than happy to go mainstream, or in deciding which side of the road to drive on or which calendar to follow (I’m using the Gregorian one this year). And heretical as this may sound, I think part of *being a good Christian* is going mainstream when we’re meant to go mainstream. After all, Jesus practiced radical identification with the masses.

Jesus prayed that God would not take his followers “out of the world,” but that God would keep them from the evils of the world because, “They are not of the world.” Or, in the memorable phrase I grew up hearing, Christians are to be in the world, but not of the world. It’s a great phrase, but unfortunately it’s all too easy for me to reverse it and be of the world, but not in it. In other words, I chase the same shallow goals everyone chases–reputation, status, money, comfort–but I don’t enter the brokenness of people’s lives. I’m like the purity-obsessed Levite in the Parable of the Good Samaritan: I actively cross over to the other side of the road and avoid the beautiful yet broken and messy people I could encounter day by day.

As with so many things, we Christians tend to go for quick formulas (formulae, if I were feeling more pretentious) on this issue. If we stay separate from the world–i.e., we homeschool our kids, attend church every Sunday, have an abiding mistrust of the medical sytem–then surely we aren’t of the world. If only it were that simple.

But as Christians, the world is where it all happens. In As You Like It, Shakespeare has Jaques say that, “All the world is a stage.” There’s an excellent video from the Bible Project in which they teach that “All the world is a temple.” Every human face, every human interaction, every human invention–it’s all sacred. Why? Because God chose to scandalously and irrevocably unleash the divine image into inhabitants on this particular planet (and maybe several of the other billions of planets, but as of yet nobody can prove that). Ultimately, any split between the sacred and the secular is artificial. It may be useful and even necessary for a time, but it is nonetheless artificial. The whole experience of life on our planet is wildly remarkable. As Rabbi Heschel said, our top priority is to cultivate radical amazement.

None of this means that we disregard the ancient practices and sacraments that come down through the church, even the most ascetic ones. Ascetic shares its etymology with exercise. We strip away all the noise and distractions so that we can live in greater wonder and worship, yet we must always make sure we have the right motives in practicing asceticism and separation from mainstream society: we withdraw so we can return to participate with more zest, not to judge it with our holier-than-thou purity codes.

I take it as an axiom that world is used in two different ways in Scripture. In John’s epistles we’re told not to love the world, but in John’s Gospel we learn that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son to redeem it. Additionally, in Psalm 24, we find that the entire earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. In the Great Commission, Jesus tells us to go into all the world.

A final passage, Romans 12, instructs us not to conform ourselves to the world, which might contradict my earlier assertion that it’s all sacred. But I don’t think it has to be seen as contradictory. In fact, if you keep reading in Romans 12, we are to be transformed by the renewing of our mind so that we can prove what is pleasing and good. Where else can we do this proving except among the thoroughfare of everyday life in the real world? It’s true that our base impulses are not all that sacred, but even those can lead us to good places if we allow our redemptive God to bring it to pass.

The best I can say it for now is that we are to reject not the world, but certain spirits and mindsets present in the world. I remember some friends taking us to the Philadelphia airport once, and because of a faulty battery, the car broke down before we got there. It was a highly religious area of the US, but as the time for our flight’s departure drew steadily nearer, hundreds of Levite cars streamed past us. (If you were driving one of them, don’t worry, I would almost certainly have done the same.) Finally, a man covered in tattoos and with questionable bumper stickers on his Prius stopped and charged our car battery.

I know it’s almost cliche to lift up irreligious folk with tattoos, but on that hot, still afternoon in Pennsylvania, he really did remind me of someone who was in the world but not of it, and it doesn’t hurt that we caught our flight because of his actions.