Lose it. Okay, yes, you could listen to more R.E.M. this summer, including “Losing My Religion.” Excellent summer soundtrack, I recommend Green or the early albums. But, if you really want to lose your religion, I recommend reading Brian Kaylor’s Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism. Us mainliners tend to blame the rise of Christian nationalism on the Right, but honestly, the call was coming from inside the house for long before this moment, and this book brings ALL the receipts. We often forget our most religious actions aren’t in church, but at school pledges and flag salutes and our ongoing national expectation that mainline Protestant chaplains serve in the Senate and House. And that on the anniversary of January 6th, Nancy Pelosi and a bunch of Christian liberals like the Bishop of the Episcopalians led prayers and action in the same location that was equally Christian nationalist, if less insurrectionist.
Stop being so damn apocalyptic. There’s been a spate of unorthodox conversions to Christianity of late, mostly for cultural rather than religious reasons, all because some conservatives think “that only the remnants of Christianity are keeping western civilisation from the abyss.” But that’s just ridiculous. There isn’t even a “remnants” to talk about, Christianity is thriving in much of the world, and there isn’t a non-Christian “abyss.” The values espoused by the “left,” which is what the right thinks is western-civilization ending, are basic things that, at the beginning of the 20th century, most of the western world considered worth establishing: social security, health care for all, expanded human rights, women’s equality, a 40-hour work-week.
Eat the rich. Like, seriously, if there’s one thing we should all be getting around these days its collective organizing that reverses massive wage disparites between the super-rich and everyone else. Billionaires should pay their fair share. Fuck, billionaries shouldn’t even be billionaires. Nobody needs to be a billionaire. So let’s tax them, and pass laws requiring corporations to reverse the ever-widening gap between executive and working-class wages. And yes, the best religion is class war. Like James writes in the New Testament, “Religion that is pure and genuine in the sight of God the Father will show itself by such things as visiting orphans and widows in their distress and keeping oneself uncontaminated by the world.” And in Scripture absolutely nothing contaminates as wealth.
Change the climate. Start by knowing more about climate change, and talking about it. Check out Tad DeLay’s new The Future of Denial (read magazine-based excerpt here, which highlights ). Commit your church to carbon-neutrality by 2030. Analyze the forms of climate denial currently deluding you and others.
Travel. Even if it’s just next door. When you do, visit churches. Whether it’s just a peek in the door or the more challenging but also invigorating activity of joining a community for one Sunday you’ve never joined before. When we travel we often decide to take in local concerts, or visit museums, or try restaurants. What is wrong with also including worship as something we do in order to take in the sights and sounds of a place? And whether it’s a chance to hear the local dialect, see the architecture, or pick up on a sense of the place, a worship service is a particularly rich way to do so no matter how you look at it.
Subscribe to a magazine. I often take the summer to reconfigure how I’m doing media. Almost always this means reading at least one classic (I’m going to re-read Whitman’s Song of Myself this summer), but it’s also a good time to re-engage print journalism. One magazine I’ve been reading more and more regularly these days is Jacobin, whose summer issue is on, of all things, religion. I also highly recommend The Christian Century as a one stop shop for religion and church publishing.
Choose one church thing and do it. Yes, I recognize modern life pulls us in MANY different directions, so to keep things simple, pick ONE THING to do regularly with your place of worship. Obviously the most basic would be to show up at the main church service each week. Lots of other cool things can emerge from that regular practice. But you might also consider one aspect of the community life you want to strengthen. Maybe this means setting up recurring giving, singing more loudly, setting up one-on-ones with people in the church with whom you’d like to collectively organize, or signing up to serve the community meal. Use the summer as an opportunity to stop doing enough things to be able to for sure do one thing within your community of faith consistently.
Thanks for reading and subscribing to Lutheran Confessions. That’s an “eighth” thing.
'The Christian Century' would be at the top of a list, if I were to write one. Somewhere below the top slot, I might add the following:
--Any magazine/journal that is not published by your own denomination or ecclesial jurisdiction, e.g. if you are nested among Baptists, read 'Commonweal' or 'National Catholic Reporter;'
--Magazines that focus on faith and the environment, faith and industrial nations' economies, faith and the radical gospel (e.g. 'Sojourners'), or faith and women's narratives, or faith and GLBTIQ voices, or faith and international migration, etc.;
--Magazines with the courage to provoke without fault finding and finger pointing (e.g. Plough);
--Magazine dealing with the intersections of faith and science.