Hello my friends,

This is my first official newsletter and I can’t tell you how excited I am that you are all here. In this current cultural moment, it is so important that we create space for honest, humble, and compassionate discourse. I am glad we get to build that space together in the weeks ahead.

I don't know about you, but I have been deeply lamenting these last few weeks, along with many others in my community. Not only because of those lost in all the recent mass shootings and the multitude of recent legislation that seems to prioritize power over people, but also over the responses I’ve heard from Christians regarding these events.

As I have been reading and thinking on these issues, I have found a few helpful resources I’d like to share with you. Now, as with everything, this isn’t my wholesale agreement with everything you might read or hear from these authors, but that I was able to gain a better perspective and a fuller picture of these issues than I had before.

RESOURCES THAT HAVE ME THINKING

On the topic of guns and Christianity, two resources come to mind:

• First, I really enjoyed this masterful article from Tyler Huckabee, called "No One Said Destroying our Idols Would be Easy," which explores Biblical idolatry and our Christian relationship with guns.
• Second, if you are looking to take a deeper dive into gun culture and its relationship to Christian movements in the united states, I highly recommend the pulitzer prize winning podcast:“No Compromise.”​

On the topic of reproductive rights and Roe v wade, I found these two resources really helpful:

• First, the book by legal experts, Kathryn Kolbert and Julie F. Hay called “Controlling Women: What We Must Do Now to Save Reproductive Freedom.” This book really helped me understand the legal, political, and social aspects of reproductive rights from the perspective of two people who have spent their entire lives in courts working with this complex issue.
• Secondly, one of my favorite history podcasts called “Throughline” from NPR did a two part series on the political and religious history of abortion in the United States, giving needed context to the way things are today. The first episode is called “Before Roe” and the second one is called “After Roe.”​

On the topic of Understanding American Politics:

• Lastly, I am always trying to understand the nature of American politics better. I just finished a book that was written in 2016 called“It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism” by Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann. Even though they wrote this book in 2016, which became a New York Times Bestseller, it is a prophetic account in many ways of how they describe what is happening inside the world of the American political system.

Starting From Radical Compassion

So much of our public discourse lacks a willingness to be nuanced, address complexities, and most of all, it seems to lack so much compassion. I so desperately want us to get better at this. I understand that people have very strong beliefs about guns and abortion, but shouldn’t our Christian response always begin with compassion for others, especially for those who such tragedies and legislations impact the most? Shouldn’t our culture witness us Christians not doing anything for selfish purposes, but with humility think of others as better than ourselves? As Philippians 2:4 says, “Instead of each person watching out for their own good, watch out for what is better for others.”

Unfortunately, so much of what our culture hears instead from us Christians tends to revolve around something like, “this is a Christian victory” and “we are taking back our nation for God.” My heart breaks for how such sentiments must sound to those who are deeply troubled, fearful, and hurt by all that is going on currently around us. It must make them feel so unseen and disregarded. Not to mention, it makes it sound like God's desires for the world are totally reliant on a court's decision. Such a fragile picture of God.

We need to practice so much more compassion than we are. So why do we seem to avoid it?

I think we tend to avoid compassion because it requires us to be honest about how we have contributed to the problems we see. We can’t have genuine compassion for someone without stepping into their perspective and seeing the world through their eyes. We can’t see the world through someone else’s eyes without seeing the problems they face. We can’t see the problems they face without understanding what is creating those problems and we can’t understand what is creating those problems without seeing how we might be contributing to those problems ourselves.

Compassion requires deep humility and a willingness to step out of ourselves, suspend our rigid either/or notions of “right and wrong,” even for just a moment, in order to see another person with love.

I am convinced that this is one of the most underrated lessons from Jesus. Who is fully God, but chose to become one of us, a human being, and live as one of us. This cosmic, infinite God becoming finite for the first time in God’s entire existence. Experiencing aging, growing pains, hunger, thirst, indigestion, human sorrow, longing, and joy. Most of all, experiencing suffering as one of us and even death. Why? Because of love. Love drove Jesus to have compassion for the world and stepped into our perspective so that he could understand and make a difference on our behalf.

Imagine if we looked at gun violence through the lens of compassion, stepping into the lives of individuals, families, and communities of those most impacted by it. I believe it would drive us to honestly reckon how our own greed and a lust for power over the years have contributed to the proliferation of guns and lack of common sense legislations. We would genuinely have to ask ourselves about the ways we value guns over the lives of the victims of gun violence.

Imagine if we looked at pregnancy through the lens of compassion, stepping into the lives of women everywhere in order to understand their nuanced and complex lived circumstances. I believe it would drive us to honestly reckon with the denigrating narrative that has been cultivated about women, especially over the last 50 years. A narrative that downplays the sacredness of their lives, their rights, and even uses pejorative, dehumanizing words to describe them like “murderers” or “criminals” or worse. We would genuinely have to ask ourselves why we don’t apply the same level of sacredness of life to women in our culture that we so passionately demand to be applied to the unborn.

without compassion, we turn these issues into extreme either/or categories, with one narrow belief being right and any different belief about it being evil. Without compassion, we actively arrest ourselves from being able to find a balanced and truthful perspective about reality and the people around us. With that kind of mentality, we destroy any possibility for honest dialogue, let alone any possibility for understanding how social issues truly impact others and what changes we might need to make ourselves to our own ways of doing things.

Let me use some stats to help put this into context:

According to Pew Research Center data from 2017, white evangelicals are more likely than members of other faith groups or the average citizen to own a gun; 41 percent do, compared to 30 percent of Americans overall. A majority of white evangelicals who own a handgun carry it with them (65%, vs. 57% of all gun owners); because they view it as a safety precaution, white evangelicals are more likely to believe most places should allow citizens to carry guns (46%, vs. 35% of all gun owners).

According to the a recent study conducted by the Guttmacher Institute, the majority of abortions (54%) are happening among women in Christian circles. 24% of abortion patients identified as Catholic, 17% identified as mainline Protestant, and 13% as evangelical Protestant.

I cite these stats because they reveal something that is so often ignored in our Christian conversations about these issues. These issues have more to do with our Christian culture than we ever admit. We are contributing to the very issues we so often want to pin the blame on our “secular culture.” This perspective is simply being dishonest about the way things are.

We must always be deeply suspect of any Christian movement that constantly condemns "secularism" for all the problems our society faces while never addressing how we Christians have caused or contributed to those very problems ourselves. This is a refusal to address our own sins, confess them, and repent from them, which is deeply unChristian.

Imagine how gun violence would be impacted if we Christians, especially white Evangelical Christians, reckoned with our preoccupation with guns and the gun culture it perpetuates into our society.

Imagine how many lives we Christians could save and abortions we could reduce if we worked to obliterate the culture of shaming women within our churches, especially in regards to the ways we often interact with issues of sexuality and the circumstances that result in pregnancy.

If we Christians desire to be honest and truthful people then when we look at the problems in our world, we must first look to the ways we have influenced those problems our culture, rather than simply blaming the culture for its own problems as if we had nothing to do with it ourselves. We can't fix problems we refuse to address.

You see, compassion isn’t just a sentiment or a feeling. I believe it is a deep commitment to proactively moving towards healing and redemption within the issues we claim to believe in so passionately. Compassion is the doorway for love to enter in, the perfect kind of love that casts out fear. A love that casts out the fear of nuance, the fear of complexities, the fear of compromising our beliefs, the fear that advocating for the freedom of others somehow reduces freedom for ourselves. In my experience, having compassion for others not only brings me so much joy, but a deep hope that we really can make this world a better place for all people. Compassion is the first step towards lasting and comprehensive justice.

It is my deep and abiding hope that our culture begins to witness radical compassion from all of us Christians in the days ahead.

Looking forward to connecting with you.

Thanks again for being part of this important work!

Sincerely, Ben