News with Nuance: Jan. 27, 2023

Your Friday dose of News with Nuance: the week's biggest stories, unpacked + more ..

One of the biggest themes of contemporary modern life is that of winners and losers. As much as parents might want to emphasize shared victories and cooperation, kids grow up early learning that we live in a dog-eat-dog, competitive world. Your win means nothing unless it equates to someone else’s loss. And unless someone else is losing, you can’t win.

This kind of thinking, strategy, and economy leads to all sorts of practical consequences for attempts to live life together. And you’ll see it in this week’s News with Nuance, where we’ll unpack

lyz

’s take on public funding of private education through vouchers, as well as the state of the nation in Germany, where decades of pacifism after instigating two World Wars are being challenged by calls to provide tanks to Ukraine. Wars are a classic example of the consequences of a world dominated by competition and zero-sum thinking. But you can’t fight missiles with ideas. Or can you?

Finally, we’ll look at the looming political crisis in Israel, where a new right-wing government is being pushed further right, especially around rights for Palestinians and all non-Jews. This is just one example of what Christian Nationalism looks like when exported to non-Christian majority nations. Ultimately, it’s all idolatry and theology of glory.

So here’s the news … with nuance …

The Headline: When Public Money Becomes Private

The story of the attempt to destabilize and even destroy public education in America is by now an old story, replete with tales of corruption, racism, sexism, blatant untruths. Maybe the difference, though, is that when I heard that story growing up - public education was generally still robust and healthy in America.

Now, public schools and teachers and students are doing everything we can to hang on: weathering the after-effects of a global pandemic as well as a lengthy list of unfunded mandates from states and federal government that require schools to prioritize social services for students (filling in the massive gap left by defunding other welfare and housing programs for needy families) over academic progress, and then blaming teachers and schools for dropping test scores.

As Lyz Lenz documents in this article, the push to privatize public education is part of a broader push that began in the 1980s suggesting that privatizing public services would be cheaper and more efficient. This argument, again documented by Lyz, has been proven over and over again to be untrue. Instead, private industry and wealthy individuals simply suck up more and more available public money (just look at the case of charter schools, for example, or even all the start-up companies who received huge influxes of government money early in COVID, with little results to show for it, other than the successful drive to create vaccines).

One of the biggest challenges for public schools is their mission (which, for the record, is absolutely the right mission): to educate any child in their area. Private schools don’t follow this mission, so they discriminate in direct or indirect ways towards kids with disabilities and kids living in poverty. More privileged families see the chaos that ensues with schools being tasked with such a lengthy list of service needs for kids and families who the system has failed on every single level, and so they leave those schools, leaving public school systems as the refuge of last resort.

As any educator can tell you, this isn’t working. At all. As a parent, as much as we’ve faced challenges and frustrations in our urban school district, I would also not want my kids to attend a school where kids with disabilities and kids living in poverty simply become invisible. We do enough of that (my family included) by siloing ourselves in towns and neighborhoods with people of similar social class, race, wealth, education, and political background.

Public education is one of the few things in America that everyone could point to and say: this is for all of us, and we are in it together. In my home state of Minnesota, quality education across the state: from the Iron Range to the Iowa border, was long a point of pride, though the state has also only recently begun to reckon with the ways in which our education system primarily served white students at the expense of students of color.

I still want to hope that it’s possible for everyone to care about every kids’ education. But the rise in support for vouchers that will further segregate our kids and enable teaching that is ahistorical or outright discriminatory suggests that American education is moving from reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic to “survival of the fittest.”

The Quote: “There is a problem with public education in America. But the problem isn’t that public schools aren’t trying hard enough. The problem is that they have been cut off at the knees and asked to stand up taller.”

Article by

lyz

,

Men Yell at Me

The Headline: ‘War scares us stiff’: Germany’s reluctance to arm Ukraine is rooted in its bloodstained past

There’s much to admire about the ways in which Germany has atoned for its sins of the past, in World Wars I and II, and particularly the sin of Nazism and Holocaust: an attempted genocide of the Jewish people and anyone considered to be “non-Aryan” or a political enemy. Germany has not attempted to whitewash its sins or paint them over with politically correct terms, in contrast to much of the ways in which America attempts to cover up the sins of the Civil War, and the fact that nearly half of America went to war to preserve the right to enslave Black Americans.

Whereas in America too many still argue about taking down Confederate statues, and states like Alabama still celebrate Robert E. Lee Day alongside MLK Day, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis brags about disallowing the teaching of AP African American studies — in Germany the lessons of the carnage of war and violence have generally been taken seriously (the reemergence of far-right groups notwithstanding).

In response to these historical remembrances, many Germans are very hesitant to exercise their country’s military power. Adding to the complication, many Germans - especially in the East - still feel some kind of connection or loyalty to Russia, especially as the Soviet Union was instrumental in ending World War II in Europe.

But now war has come again to Europe, with the authoritarian Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and indiscriminate killing of civilians. Germany finds itself in the awkward position of being called up militarily, not at least to provide approval for tanks to be sent to Ukraine.

In big news this week, Germany officially gave its approval for tanks to be sent, after an American announcement and promise of American tanks as well. Ukraine has been begging for this advanced war materiel for months. And many other European nations, and possibly the U.S., were growing frustrated with what they saw as German dithering and foot-dragging.

Undoubtedly, Putin’s murderous drive must be stopped. Because too one of the enduring lessons of WWII is that appeasement of murderous dictators never works. It only leaves them hungry for more. And Putin will not be appeased, either.

At the same time, I have to commend in some ways the German tendency to hesitate and weigh the cost of engaging in war. There are no easy choices, not least when human lives are at stake and Russia holds within itself the possibility to destroy the entire world with its nuclear might.

I think often military leaders and members know this better than the rest of us. If only more American politicians would really count the cost of war and violence, too, at home and abroad.

Photo published in the L.A. Times, courtesy of the Polish Defense Ministry

The Quote: “Germany is to blame for two world wars, and that disastrous history is deeply embedded in our soul,” said (Harald) Welzer, who joined scores of other intellectuals in an open letter to Scholz last year pleading with him not to send arms to Ukraine. “We are past war as an option. We are post-military. We are past wartime heroics. We are beyond national patriotism that leads to war. That’s been totally disgraced by our history.”

Story by Erik Kirschbaum, Los Angeles Times

This Week in Christian Nationalism and Religious Extremism

While this newsletter won’t focus overall on Christian Nationalism, each Friday I will include a brief update from that week, as it’s both a continuing focus of my work and also, I think, a critical threat to both American democracy and the faithful witness of Jesus’ Gospel, which exists independently of the United States!

In one sentence: Christian Nationalism is a version of the idolatrous Theology of Glory, which replaces the genuine worship of God with worship of a particular vision of America, often rooted in a revisionist history of white people in the 1950s, before the Civil Rights movement or the women’s movement. Christian Nationalism supports a violent takeover of government and the imposition of fundamentalist Christian beliefs on all people. Christian nationalism relies on a theological argument that equates American military sacrifice with Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross. It suggests that Christians are entitled to wealth and power, in contrast to Jesus’ theology of the cross, which reminds Christians that they too have to carry their cross, just as our crucified savior did.

This Week: I just finished recording a podcast episode where I was a guest to talk about the pastoral side of ministering to people in a time of growing Christian Nationalism. I’ll be sure to share the link when it airs.

One important topic that came up in the podcast conversation was the decoupling of Christian Nationalism from contemporary American politics. I think one of the unfortunate parts about the ongoing news media coverage of Christian Nationalism (particularly during the 2022 mid-terms; I wrote about this here) is that in some ways it became yet another wedge term used to separate Republicans and Democrats.