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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.

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.

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.

April Musings

Gideon Yutzy3 Comments

It’s never been surprising to me why Joe Rogan is one of the most popular podcasters in the world. He has obviously worked on the skill of conversation–not easy amid all the preachiness and outrage of today. His pacing is good, people don’t talk over or past each other, and you get a sense of who each guest is as a human being. Every week he keeps millions of listeners engaged with episodes that are nearly half as long as the average audiobook.

But over the last year or two I witnessed, in real time, a tragic change in the mood of Joe Rogan’s podcast. His signature ability to host people with a variety of views, the very thing that made him interesting, has practically vanished from his show.

Then, a few weeks ago, I was heartened to see someone who I knew held different political views than those Rogan has been championing so vociferously in almost all his recent episodes. Great, I thought, Joe is finally getting out of his slump. But alas, in that one episode he avoided the subject of politics–and any opportunity to be challenged.

My takeaway is not so much that Rogan is a coward, but that few media personalities can withstand the terrible self-reinforcing feedback loop that goes with the enterprise. It traps them into telling their audience what they want to hear and getting rewarded for it. Audience capture is the neologism that describes this phenomenon–a term that, tellingly, has entered the parlance since the advent of podcasting.

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The Christian faith teaches us to pray and then say, “Praise God,” even if the answer is different from what we wanted. In the words of Daniel’s three friends, “God is able to save us but even if he doesn’t we will stay true to him” (Daniel 8:17-18).

As a practicing Christian, something about that teaching has always sat heavy with me because it can feel as if it lets God off the hook. But recently I heard something that brought clarity to the conundrum. A group of us from church watched a short presentation by Pete Greig. He believes God does answer prayer but that we all exist in a labyrinthine ecosystem of 3 W’s: World, War and Will.

World–Our world has to work a certain way for life to continue. Except for occasional miracles, God must remain true to the laws of nature or we would experience utter chaos. This affects how our prayers are answered.

War–Satan (original meaning: the accuser) works against God in individual situations, although Christians believe Satan will ultimately be defeated. This also affects how our prayers are answered.

Will–Despite our best intentions, our perspective is finite, and sometimes we are praying outside the will of God. Again, this affects how our prayers are answered.

While the 3 W’s don’t eliminate all the tension–tension is an integral part of faith–it reminds us that we do not exist in a vacuum. Each prayer we breathe is interrelated to countless parts of our lives, not to mention the lives of people around us.

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One of my personal goals is to be less judgmental and that people could feel mercy and acceptance from me. It occurred to me the other day that I often feel judgmental toward people because I feel indignant toward them. How can they do or think or say that, and I don’t! Sometimes, if we’re honest, we are judgmental because we secretly wish we were experiencing something of what they’re experiencing. If you think about it, a close relative of judgment is envy.

Of course, if the other party’s actions are truly wrong, the end results can never be attractive. Once we see things as they are, we either accept the merit of those we have been judging and join them, or we see the pain they are headed for. Either way our heart softens toward them. We certainly don’t get bent out of shape with any form of judgment, or of envy, which is its evil twin. Compassion and goodwill are the beautiful antidotes to judgment.

Stand in Awe at the Constant Unfolding of Time

Gideon Yutzy3 Comments

Is it just me, or does time behave differently as you get older?

In my experience, the past and present blur together more as I approach 40.

When you climb a mountain, the ground you have already traversed can appear very different as you ascend. In the same way, incidents that happened years ago can now feel very immediate, sometimes more immediate than when they happened. And just as strangely, a moment in the present can feel as if I’m living it years ago. I had not observed that elongated dynamic of time earlier in my life.

Having kids has definitely impacted my perception of time’s passing. In a way, time slows down when your kids are young. You get this clear sense that your kids’ childhood is something sacred, perhaps as sacred as anything you will ever witness, and you feel the urgency to drink in their every word and action. But alas, despite your best efforts to live in the present, you realise this period of time will “slip through your fingers like sand,” to quote a slightly mawkish song we used to sing years ago.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, in reflecting on our tendency to lament life’s fleeting nature, used the word evanescent. Everything soon passes out of sight, out of memory, out of existence. Rabbi Heschel believes life’s evanescence is not something to bemoan, but rather an integral part of its beauty. The realization that life is slipping through our fingers like sand can actually motivate us, because we desperately want to appreciate something of its beauty and profundity. Now, all of time suddenly becomes holy. In the words of Heschel: “Who is worthy to be present at the constant unfolding of time?” Reading Heschel made me see that a central part of the human calling is to cultivate a worshipper’s stance as time unfolds.

Recently, on my way to work, I multitasked and listened to a voice note from a colleague as I drove. Maybe it was the stress of my frazzled schedule getting to me, but the predominant thought as I listened was, “What if I were listening to this the morning after he died?”

I am aware that my reverie was off-the-wall, possibly even certifiable behaviour, but don’t you agree it would be eerie to hear a recording of a dead person’s voice? Everything takes on a different sheen when it is seen in the light of our mortality, of time’s evanescence. No wonder so many mystics and monastics start their day with a meditation on death. Remembering life’s evanescent nature does not diminish our experience of the present, but rather expands it.

Imagine if we could go back in time and immerse ourselves in any point in our past, even if it were just for 5 minutes, and could experience it through the lens of what has subsequently unfolded (that routine introduction was actually you meeting your spouse, e.g.). We would be utterly transfixed. Every second would be pregnant with meaning! Sometimes I wonder if the afterlife won’t include reliving scenes of our lives, but with a panoramic view of the whole. (Obviously, I am not rooting that in orthodox Christian theology, though it is fascinating that numerous NDE’s report seeing their lives flash before their eyes.)

What does seem clear is that we must love the unfolding of time. We must love it all–the unpaid bills, our unfinished tasks and unrealised career goals, the quagmires of our human relationships, the turmoil of current politics. We must love it, knowing it is part of a mini-drama that is best understood as one united whole.

With this approach, anxiety about the current moment leads to hope and even worship because we remember our earthly sojourn is one interconnected story. Our mantra can now change from, “This season is really hard,” to, “The God who began a good work in you will also bring it to pass.” And we can stand in awe at the constant unfolding of time