News with Nuance: Oct. 14, 2022

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

Welcome to News with Nuance. My plan for this post is, every Friday, I will break down some of the week’s top news stories and put them into context, with special attention to the impact of these stories where I live: Middle America; and also an analysis of these stories with historical, political, and spiritual context. This is the kind of work that breaking news journalists often simply don’t have time to do — and I’m hoping it supplies the needed nuance and context that’s often missing from our news cycle, humanizing the people and places behind the headlines.

The Headline: How Ukrainians define their enemy: ‘It’s not Putin; it’s Russia’

I think sometimes we spend an inordinate amount of time trying to make ourselves feel better about the level of violence and war in the world today. I mean. How could we not?

But this Washington Post column from David Ignatius gives a gentle, important correction to our ultimately unhelpful tendency. He reminds us that those closest to war - those who have actually fled their homes and sprinted to basement bomb shelters in the middle of the night … They do not have the luxury of telling themselves little lies.

So here it is. And this is a lie that I have been telling myself for a very, very long time.

“We are mad at Putin. He has caused this war. But our argument is not with the Russian people.”

(Replace “Putin” and “Russian” in this sentence with leaders of authoritarian nations past and present, and you’ll see this is a common tendency).

And at first blush, it’s true, right? We all saw the news coverage of ordinary Russians protesting the war at great personal risk; the jailing of dissidents like Alexei Navalny; the hundreds of thousands of Russians pouring over the border in Kazakhstan to escape mandatory conscription.

All of these stories are true. And still we cannot simply say that Putin alone is to blame for the death and destruction in Ukraine.

Photo from Atlantic Council

Let me unpack this further …

I think what Ignatius is getting at in his column is the danger of over-personalization of evil. You see this in the United States, too. It’s not quite “Trump derangement syndrome,” but it’s something that happens when the media and citizens alike become so hyper-focused on Trump himself that they lose sight of the huge number of individual citizens, as well as societal trends and political yes-men, who made Trump’s rise to power possible.

Over-personalization of evil too easily excuses the role of the crowd, or what the Bible calls the ὄχλος in the Greek New Testament: the crowd that gave voice to Jesus’ ministry, and then commanded his crucifixion.

The role of the ὄχλος cannot be ignored in Russia, or America either. Putin’s Russia is filled with both victims and cheerleaders of authoritarianism, as well as cynical bureaucrats and billionaires who’ve profited from violence and mass murder. Putin did not and could not do this alone. His military is full of generals and ordinary soldiers who said “yes” to bombing preschools, apartment complexes, hospitals, and power plants. Ordinary soldiers who were not “just following orders” when they tortured and raped Ukrainian civilians.

These were people raised and rising to adulthood in an environment of trauma, yes, and in an authoritarian state where goodness is all-too-rare, and still they made choices: they chose violence and death and nihilism, too.

Most Russians watched as they came for the singers and the poets and the reformist politicians. Only then, “when they came for me,” did massive numbers of Russians start worrying about war. Still, there are those who trumpet and repeat Putin’s lies, and those who egg on the killing of civilians and celebrate acts of terrorism.

Ignatius’ column shouts a warning. Our problem is not only Putin but millions of people who chose Putinism. Nations carry the legacy of violence and death for generations to come. This legacy is carried down in families, as Arnold Schwarzenegger so poignantly reminded us in a video posted last March.

Many of our own families carry these legacies, too. For every Stonewall Jackson and Nathan Bedford Forrest and George Wallace and David Duke, there are millions of Americans who protested against desegregation, who spat on Black students sitting at the soda counter, whose ancestors killed native peoples as European immigrants spread across the prairie like a deadly plague.

There are stories like these all over the world: Robert Mugabe. Omar Al-Bashir. Xi Xinping. Kim Jong-Un. Paul Kagame. Mohammad bin Salman. General Min Aung Hlaing. Ali Khameni. Nicolas Maduro. Jair Bolsonaro. Nayib Bukele. I am missing many, many more.

We know their names, but too often we tell their stories as though each man was unique: an aberration, when instead all they do is capitalize on a singular human tendency to get swept up into greed, power, and evil: and in so doing excuse violence on a massive level, and even participate in it. This is not only Putin’s war.

The Quote: “Through Ukrainian eyes, this terrible conflict has become a clash of civilizations. They argue that most Russians support Putin’s brutal war in the way that most Germans supported Adolf Hitler. Unless Russia as a nation abandons the imperial dreams that Putin has evoked, the conflict cannot be resolved through negotiations.” - David Ignatius, Washington Post

The Headline: ‘We want them gone’: Across generations, Iranians struggle for change

I guess the theme today is the stories of everyday people behind violent, authoritarian regimes. This article struck me because it told family stories, interviewing a mother and son.

Sedat Suna/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock c/o Washington Post

The son, 30, talked about the ordinariness of life and work that marches on in the midst of political unrest, and the near-constant state of restlessness and fear. The mother spoke of near-constant worry for her son.

Their stories are a reminder of the cost of the choice to resist, and of those who are choosing it anyway, at great risk to themselves. And I think this story is a good pairing to the above story about Russia, as we wonder about the endurance and violence of authoritarianism and the resistance or acceptance of the people living inside it.

I was also struck by the mother’s reference to her hope rising amidst her fear, and the sense that real hope only comes when people live according to the truth, and not the lying, hate-filled promises of authoritarianism.

The Quote: “Freedom is when you don’t have to constantly worry that someone is going to bring you the news of your child’s death,” she answered.

Story by Sanam Mahoozi, Washington Post

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: People often ask me what they can do in the face of the idolatry of Christian Nationalism. The problem seems so big, its proponents so loud and well-funded.

This week I want to lift up a hopeful response to that query. And it starts in a maybe-unexpected place: your local church.

This past Sunday I got to share a ZOOM presentation with a local Twin Cities Lutheran congregation. Our technology got off to a rough start, and as the camera finally focused in on their 1921-built Gothic-style sanctuary, with resplendent pipe organ, I wondered if anyone had stuck around long enough to see if my presentation on Christian Nationalism was worth their time.

It’s hard sometimes on ZOOM to see if people are resonating with what you’re saying, but when we got to the end, and people walked up to the laptop to ask me questions, I could hear the wondering (and wistfulness) in their voices. I’d just talked about all the ways the Gospel (and democracy) were under assault in our country, all the hurt and hatred being spewed in the name of Christianity, and they looked up with wide eyes. I could hear the question underneath the question, which was, does our version of following Jesus have any kind of meaning anymore?