Eugene and Jan Peterson

It’s always a pleasure to hear from appreciative readers, but it’s a very special joy to get a letter from those I deeply admire. Eugene Peterson and his wife Jan gave me permission to quote this response to Birmingham:

We read this book together over the past two months and feel we have been immersed in a distant world that we had only known previously through the public media.

Jan was born in Birmingham and grew up with a few black playmates. Eugene grew up in an almost completely white world. He only knew one black person, who later became the best man in their wedding. Our only experience with Martin Luther King was listening to his “I Have a Dream” address at Morgan State University in Baltimore.

Which is to say that the world of racial discrimination and violence was almost entirely “black and white.” Tim’s novel introduced us to the enormous complexity introduced by the “movement”–moderate whites, moderate blacks, militant whites, militant blacks, the KKK, fearful blacks, naive idealistic whites. Narrated through the alternating first-person voices of a young black woman, Dorcas, and a young white man, Chris, the tension builds page by page.

We both feel that for two months we experienced the closest thing to being there without being there.

Birmingham is here!!!!

This is a big day for me! After years of waiting I can finally announce that my novel Birmingham is available!

It’s at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, in both ebook and paperback formats.

The novel is set in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963–fifty years ago, when Martin Luther King joined Fred Shuttlesworth in leading what is sometimes referred to as the children’s crusade. This was a turning point for the civil rights movement–children facing into the dogs and firehoses of the Birmingham police.

My story begins with a white seminary student who shows up to help the protests–penniless, naive, idealistic. He gets taken in by the movement and put to work, even though his presence is both illegal and dangerous. Chris Wright is his name, and as the protests advance over weeks of turmoil and frustration, he gets entangled with a faction of the Ku Klux Klan and with Dorcas Jones, a young, hard-nosed agitator.

I wrote the novel because I find these events so fascinating, and so easily forgotten. It was much more complicated than the view you will get from the 50th anniversary celebrations this May!

In many ways, our nation was on trial. We came through–but only because of the courage and vision of countless individuals, mostly poor, Bible-believing African-Americans. This was not a triumph of the elites. It was a triumph of the powerless and the despised.

Please buy Birmingham for yourself and all your friends and relations. If you like it, please write a brief review on Amazon (or any other website). If you have a blog, please feature the book. If you have a book group, please consider reading Birmingham together.

The Inquisition

I just read Cullen Murphy’s God’s Jury, which is a popular history and meditation on the meaning of the Inquisition. Cullen, an outstanding writer, makes the point that the Inquisition was not a pre-modern phenomenon that we have outgrown. Quite the opposite: modernity created the tools of the Inquisition, and they still operate.

“Why was there suddenly an Inquisition? Intolerance, hatred, and suspicion of ‘the other,’ often based on religious and ethnic differences, had always been with us. Throughout history, these realities had led to persecution and violence. But the ability to sustain a persecution–to give it staying power by giving it an institutional life–did not appear until the Middle Ages. Until then, the tools to stoke and manage those omnipresent embers of hatred did not exist. Once these capabilities do exist, inquisitions become a fact of life–standard operating procedure. They are not confined to religion; they are political as well. The targets can be large or small. An inquisition impulse can quietly take root in the very systems of government and civil society that order our lives.” [p. 21]

He points out how the same tools were used by the Nazis, by the Soviet Union… and by the United States after 9/11.

As to the church, I liked Murphy’s citation of Carlo Ginzburg, a historian who played a role in the Vatican’s decision to open their archives of the Inquisition to scholars.  He was at a convocation of historians and theologians, some of whom hoped the pope would issue an apology. “This is all very well,” Ginzburg said. “What I didn’t hear the pope say today, and what I haven’t heard anybody in this discussion say, is that the Catholic Church is ashamed of what it did. Not sorry. Sorry is easy. I want to hear the Catholic Church–I want to hear the pope–say he is ashamed.” [p. 231]

I agree.  But what Murphy doesn’t adequately analyze is the fundamental problem of control and freedom in institutions or communities. Murphy suggests, without quite saying it, that freedom is good and control is bad. It’s easy to feel that way after learning of the horrors of the Inquisition. But what would he say about the pedophile scandal in the church? That there was not enough freedom? Institutional control was needed, everybody agrees. And such control can, and does, turn into inquisitions.

Institutions and communities must have boundaries. Their need for control can easily become institutionalized and abusive. The way through this dilemma calls for wisdom and humility. It doesn’t yield, so far as I can see, to a generalized formula.

Some Reading Suggestions

My son Silas is reading a book I had recommended to him, Blood Done Sign My Name, by Timothy Tyson. He was so enthusiastic I feel like telling the world all over again what a terrific read this is. It’s a memoir of the Civil Rights era in a small town in the South. What’s most unusual is that Tyson is a historian (he teaches at Duke) who went back and interviewed all the people he remembers from his boyhood. He brings vivid stories–memories of his father, a heroic Methodist pastor–and a very thoughtful and unsentimental historical awareness.

Also…. the cover story on the latest Sports Illustrated  (6/4/12) is terrific. Unfortunately you can’t get internet access unless you’re a subscriber, so you have to buy a copy. It’s worth it. [Breaking news: I found a link, which I've included above.]

To Cheat or Not to Cheat is about steroids use in baseball, and it follows four pitchers drafted by the Minnesota Twins and placed on the same Class A team in 1994. They all had similar size and abilities at the start, but one of them used steroids, and as a result grew bigger and stronger and made it to the majors. The rest washed out, though they made it to Triple A. The personal stories of all four bring the dilemma of cheating to life. I won’t tell you how it comes out, but it’s very much worth reading.

Thomas Jefferson, the Original Tea Partier

I admit it’s a stretch. Attempts to claim the Founding Fathers for some modern position are always dubious. Nevertheless, in reading American Sphinx, Joseph Ellis’ biography of Thomas Jefferson, I saw it clearly: Jefferson was the original Tea Partier.

Like today’s Tea Partiers, Jefferson loved grand words like “liberty” and “democracy,” but only gave himself and his allies credit for understanding them. Like the Tea Partiers, he saw those who differed from him (John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and even George Washington) as scoundrels eager to sell out the American people. Most of all, like the Tea Partiers he hated federal taxes and feared the federal government’s power. Jefferson was the original “small government” man.

He despised the American Constitution. His difference on this point with the Tea Party is ironic. Jefferson had been in Paris when the Constitution was written. He regarded it as a betrayal of the American Revolution because it strengthened the federal government. Those who had remained in America knew that a “states’ rights government” didn’t work—that’s why they wrote a new constitution, to bring the states into a single union. Jefferson never understood this. I’m not sure Tea Partiers do either—they wouldn’t heap reverence on the Constitution if they grasped its fundamental goal of restricting states’ rights.

Jefferson became President in 1800, after a very nasty campaign. He found himself in an anomalous position: head of a government he didn’t believe in. Ellis writes that his driving ambition was to downsize government, and he largely succeeded. By stopping expenditures on the military and eliminating taxation on ordinary citizens, he managed to make the federal government all but invisible. He stopped investment in roads and canals and cut staff in all departments.  He strove hard to eliminate the national debt, and at first seemed likely to succeed,

Freed from taxes and regulation, the economy thrived.

Jefferson was wildly popular in his first term, not so much in his second term. When Britain and France went back to war, it turned out that “small government” had made American shipping vulnerable. Jefferson had all but disbanded the Navy, so British and French vessels could kidnap American merchant sailors and appropriate cargo at will. Jefferson countered by closing down all trade. It was a bad miscalculation. The embargo was massively disregarded, and federal agents who tried to enforce it became “big government” very quickly. (Consider the parallel to today’s border patrols and “war on drugs.”) When the economy tanked, Jefferson lost his popularity very quickly. It’s amazing how Americans will turn against a president who presides over an economic downturn.

America’s experience with Jefferson’s Tea Party suggests that real events tend to confound ideology from whichever side. Tea-party government can work, to a point—it’s certainly not the end of life as we know it. Jefferson’s first term confirmed that. But no formula for governing works well under all conditions. Small government is great, except when it isn’t so great—as it wasn’t in Jefferson’s second term.

Our current political polarization, in which both sides think they have all the answers, their opponents are villains, and the fate of the nation depends on winning the next election, sheds much more heat than light.

Going to Church in China

One of the most moving times in our ten-day visit to China was a Sunday morning Catholic mass in the city of Xi’an.

From what we saw, China remains a pretty secular place. Few churches are visible, and religion seems to play little role in everyday life. Historical sites and museums say little about religion, other than Buddhism, which seems to get a semi-official okay.

The Catholic church we attended is an old, elegant building, designed with a mixture of Chinese and western influences. Arches and columns inside are painted mainly with scenes of nature; and I didn’t see any stained glass. There was a large crucifix, and at least two paintings of Jesus. (I didn’t see Mary.) I would estimate that the building held somewhere between 500 and 1,000 people, and it was packed. The congregation was a mixture of young and old, and the presiding priests were very young—in their thirties, I guess.

The service moved me to tears, because it was so obviously heartfelt. Over nearly two hours, hymns and liturgical responses were sung and spoken emphatically by the entire congregation. There was little accompaniment—just an electric organ—but people obviously knew their hymns well and sang with serious enthusiasm. The preacher took the gospel text where Jesus says to “give to Cesar what belongs to Cesar, and to God what belongs to God.” Mostly he emphasized giving to God what belongs to him. “Who do you belong to?” he asked the congregation. “Jesus Christ,” they answered. “Who do your children belong to?” “Jesus Christ.” “Who does your work belong to?” “Jesus Christ.”

He also said, rather boldly, that we should give respect to government but that if the government told you to do something against God, you should not do it.

He was obviously a good communicator, and the audience attended closely. He preached for 25 minutes, and after that the other priest took up the theme or gratefulness, and spoke for about ten more minutes.

We attended that church because one of Helen’s aunts is a member. She is a tiny, bird-like woman with a young son, and she let us know how thrilled she was to meet us. “I thought I was the only Christian in the family,” she said.

Worshiping with that throng, humming along to their unfamiliar tunes, I was overwhelmed by the thought of what believers have been through. I was reading God is Red, Liao Yiwu’s book of interviews with Chinese Christians. Most of them described terrible times under Mao tse Tung, when they were threatened, beaten and imprisoned. Yiwu (who says he is not a believer) interviewed those who had stuck it out, but most of them mentioned that at the time of the Communist takeover, most Christians abandoned their faith. Those who didn’t were targeted by public condemnation meetings, in which their entire village or neighborhood would participate in a gang harassment—spitting, shouting, abusing, beating Christians, and sometimes killing them. Undoubtedly, some of the people I worshiped with in Xi’an had experienced that, either as targets or as part of the mob.

And yet, here was a church full of people who were most obviously inspired to worship God.

He Was a Man

The news that Fred Shuttlesworth died got lost in the flow when Steve Jobs died shortly thereafter. Not to take anything away from Jobs, whom I admired (I was there for his 2005 Stanford graduation speech, and it was certainly the best such I have ever heard–very thoughtful). But Shuttlesworth was the more important, and the more valiant, figure. I’ve read everything I can find on Shuttlesworth, who was one of the great heroes of the civil rights movement. This piece by Diane McWhorter does him justice. (Her book on Birmingham, Alabama, Carry Me Home, is one of my favorites of the many fine books on the movement.) Shuttlesworth is the basis of one of my main characters in the novel I intend to publish next year, Birmingham.

One thing McWhorter doesn’t mention is that Shuttlesworth was a preacher who took the Bible as God’s literal word. He never bought into liberal theology the way King did, nor was he the kind of preacher who used the pulpit for his own purposes and quoted the Bible when it suited his program. The Bible’s vision of justice was his vision, and he took it straight.

Father of the American Mule

After the Revolutionary War, and before the US Constitution was written, George Washington devoted himself to farming. The king of Spain gave him a gray male donkey called Royal Gift and Lafayette gave him a black male donkey called Knight of Malta. “Royal Gift was big and lumbering but lacking in animal spark, whereas Knight of Malta was small but lusty.” Washington bred the two and ended up with a male known as Compound, large like Royal Gift but feisty like Knight of Malta. Eventually Compound (mated with horses) produced 57 mules, and mules were on their way to becoming the preeminent beast of burden for America. “In addition to his better-known title of Father of His Country,[George] Washington is also revered in certain circles as the Father of the American Mule.” (Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life.)

The Long Argument About America

Much of the past year I’ve been puzzling over American polarization. Where did this angry, obstructionist eruption come from? Why does Obama frighten people so much that they feel entitled to call him a socialist, a Muslim and a racist who is eager to inaugurate death panels? I don’t underrate the force of high unemployment in creating desperate, angry feelings. Nor do I underestimate the force of partisan politics. But I’ve felt that something deeper is at play.

(No, sorry, I don’t buy the explanation that it’s a reaction to Obama extremism. While Obama believes in an activist government, he’s chosen a cautious and moderate course at almost every point. That’s why his core liberal supporters are so disappointed in him.)

In reading Joseph Ellis’ Pulitzer Prize-winning Founding Brothers I’ve found some helpful clues. Ellis says the Founding Fathers held two interpretations to the meaning of America: the Spirit of 1776, which put the emphasis on individual liberty freed from governmental tyranny, and the Spirit of 1887, by which the colonies chose to unite under a single, centralized republican government. Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence with its emphasis on personal freedom, led most Virginians in maintaining a very deep suspicion of the federal government. (He had been in France when the Constitution was written and ratified.) Washington, Hamilton and Adams held a very different vision, formed by their experiences with the Continental Congress. They thought that America could never fulfill its destiny without a mechanism for making decisions that everyone would obey.

For Jefferson and his Republicans, the emphasis on getting things done nationally—represented by Hamilton’s plans to set the national economy on a solid basis and to found a national bank—was treason against the revolutionary vision. It threw away the most precious achievement of the Revolution—throwing off tyranny so that the individual farmer could get on with his life in the way he wanted to, uninfluenced by governments or national laws (or banks or financiers).  The positive achievement of America, as they saw it, was the removal of coercive authority.“The only legitimate form of government, in the end, was self-government.” (p.139)

Washington and Hamilton’s vision of liberty was more complex. It involved the positive capacity for doing something worthwhile as a nation. For them, this meant exploiting the vast potential of the wilderness that stretched westward. That required an activist government, to create national financial markets by setting national rules and clearing off debt, to dig canals and build roads.

“Underlying the debate… over Jay’s Treaty lurked a classic confrontation between those who wished America’s revolutionary energies to be harnessed to the larger purposes of nation-building and those who interpreted that very process as a betrayal of the Revolution itself.” (p. 145) The debate grew very nasty, with Jefferson’s Republicans sincerely convinced that George Washington was senile and that the government had been captured by a Hamilton-led cabal intending to proclaim a hereditary monarchy and rejoin the British empire. Jefferson and Adams had worked closely together for a generation, achieving great things in Boston, Philadelphia and Paris, but the polarization of opinion on these contrary visions of America soured them on each other completely, to the point where they regarded each other as monsters threatening to betray all that American patriots had fought for.

Notably, both sides found their vision clearly expressed in the United States Constitution. Jefferson and his followers were fond of declaring Washington’s assumptions of governmental power unconstitutional. Washington and Hamilton thought that “forming a more perfect union” absolutely required governmental power—that was the Constitution’s starting point. Both sides had a case. The Constitution is a compromise document, with many issues fudged, and especially those issues of the powers of the central government.

This conflict between central and dispersed power, between the federal government and the states, between a communal politic and individualism, carries on to our own day. To those currently in power it is simply obvious that something needs to be done: the broken health care system needs fixing, the markets need re-regulating, the economy cannot be allowed to completely collapse while the government stands by. Greenhouse gases need curtailing lest we turn the planet into an oven; a new energy economy needs prodding into action. For those who want to do these things, the opposition is a puzzle. If you have other ideas for action, they say, bring them forward. We can figure it out together.

But for their opposition, heirs of Jefferson, nothing needs fixing except the monarchical pretensions of government. They want liberty, and they are quite willing to take their chances with no regulations, no interventions, no “fixed” health care system. For them, any serious attempt to fix things at a federal level represents a betrayal of what they believe America is all about.

Ellis helped me understand that this argument has continued all through the history of America. Should an activist, centralized, capable government “fix” things? Or should the government get out of the way and leave individuals and local communities to fix things in their own way? My mindset is more with Washington and Adams. Certain things need doing, and only the federal government can do them. That is how we built the interstate highway system, for example, sometimes riding roughshod over local communities and property holders.

However, I have to acknowledge that Jefferson’s party contributes another facet of America’s greatness: its restless, anarchic, permissive faith in the individual’s right to do whatever he wants to do. It’s distinctively American, and as a child of the sixties I cherish it.

The irony with Jefferson is that once elected president he found his political principles needed trimming. In particular, when he had the option of the Louisiana Purchase, he bought the land without scruple even though he had only recently believed that the federal government had no such powers and that such an action would be flagrantly unconstitutional. So it is with most ideological principles:  we trim to fit the circumstances. But the larger argument continues.

Stains on America

I greatly enjoyed reading Joseph Ellis’ American Creation, which chronicles the key achievements in the roughly 25 years from the Declaration of Independence to the Louisiana Purchase—the period that set the DNA of the republic. Most of these developments are amazingly, almost miraculously positive. However, Ellis notes two stains that marred the creation of America. One was slavery, which the founders recognized was incompatible with their ideals but could not see how to remove. The second was the “Indian problem”—how to reconcile America’s expansive character with the welfare of people and nations living just inland.

Reading in abolitionist literature from a generation later, I had never come across a sign that serious governmental powers ever recognized the rights of Native Americans. By the 1820s and 30s concern for Indians seemed to be the province of private idealists and cranks. But Ellis tells how President George Washington, along with his Secretary of War Henry Knox, gave a high priority to finding a just and practical solution. They initiated a treaty with the Creeks that was meant to be a model for the future. It was signed in a gala New York ceremony and ratified overwhelmingly by the Senate.

The treaty proved unenforceable. American settlers simply ignored it, pouring into the west to settle Indian lands without concern for the law. The US Army was too small to stop them, and Washington’s honorable idealism went for nothing. Two hundred heartbreaking years of trouble and turmoil resulted.

Despite the sad result, I took some encouragement from knowing that a serious attempt was made at a settlement. I admire Washington more for knowing that he cared about it deeply.

While statecraft can sometimes achieve near-miracles—and did, in the founding of America—it has its limits. The forces of nature—greed, fecklessness, blindness—are sometimes too strong for even the best leadership to control.