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Opinion The Last Word

Creating a Cooperative World?

Why is this happening? What can we do about it? (Photo: Robert Hickerson | Unsplash)

“Go back to where you came from.”

This is basic American politics — what I might call spiritual ignorance: a dismissal of refugees fleeing war, famine, and poverty as global sludge, clogging up our way of life. So many media stories about the border — our border — begin with an unquestioned presumption. These aren’t individual humans fleeing hell and trying to reclaim their lives. They exist only en masse — basically, in the millions. And they’re going to be nothing but trouble for us. Either they want to work for a living and, thus, claim American jobs, or they’re simply leeches, utterly without skills, simply in possession of their needs, which of course will drain our resources. Go back to where you came from!

Look what happened last month, when New York City’s mayor bused a bunch of migrants out of town — oh, boohoo, too many for you, Mayor Adams? — to several hotels in Orange County, about 60 miles to the north. It just so happened, according to a bogus claim that made big news for a while, that in order for the migrants to get their living space, a bunch of homeless veterans, aka American heroes, had to be evicted. Yes, this was a lie, fabricated by a small veterans’ assistance organization called the Yerik Israel Toney Foundation, but until actual investigative reporting by the Mid-Hudson News exposed it as such, it was a kick-ass news story for the anti-immigrant right, hitting all the right buttons.

On May 12, the New York Post, for instance, reported: “Nearly two dozen struggling homeless veterans have been booted from upstate hotels to make room for migrants, says a nonprofit group that works with the vets. The ex-military — including a 24-year-old man in desperate need of help after serving in Afghanistan — were told by the hotels at the beginning of the week that their temporary housing was getting pulled out from under them at the establishments and that they’d have to move on to another spot, according to the group and a sickened local pol.”

Outlets such as Fox News (can you believe it?) and Newsmax ran with the story, then it came out that it was bogus and then some. The foundation had apparently gone to a homeless shelter and recruited a bunch of the men staying there to attend an event pretending they were veterans. Oops. Story retracted, media outlets move on. Nothing, of course, will change.

But what if …?

The essence of U.S. coverage of global immigration is that it’s simply an unexamined nuisance, which is, of course, growing worse under Joe Biden. And it quickly turns into a political “issue.” They’re coming in by the millions — kind of like rising sea water — totally messing up our wonderful society. We need dams and barriers, not to mention laws and tough guys, to maintain control over this flow, the reasons for which we are clueless.

So not only is there a blatant lack of humanity in such coverage; there’s also a missing question: Why? Why is this happening? What can we do about it? Asking such a question, here in the USA, is, alas, awkward, considering the role this country plays in the surge of global refugees. As Brown University’s Costs of War project points out, for instance, the United States has spent some $8 trillion on its wars in the Middle East over the last 20+ years. Ponder this number as you shudder about migrants’ draining of U.S. resources. These wars have killed almost a million people and have shattered countries’ social structures, displacing millions more. U.S. policies going back many decades, both military and economic, have also played a major role in the chaos and indebtedness of nations in Central and South America, creating turbulent living conditions for enormous numbers of people. As Azadeh Shahshahani has pointed out: “Nearly 24 people are displaced per minute. About 66 million people around the world have been forced from their homes.”

Note to Ron DeSantis: I’m not writing this to make you feel uncomfortable, simply to start opening the causal question regarding global migration. As well as war, there are plenty of other causes, from climate change to God knows what, and no doubt most people fleeing them would prefer not to leave their homes and loved ones.

Throwing the question of “why?” into the media’s immigration coverage will help veer the national focus beyond armed paranoia toward finding and participating in global solutions. It might even start making Americans aware that migration, problematic as it may be for the countries of arrival, is a million times more difficult for the migrants themselves.

Norma E. Cantú, writing at Tikkun, asks: “… why not dream on an even greater scale and advocate for a Global Marshall Plan … and for the eradication of all borders? The reimagined ‘world order’ would be one of cooperation and mutual respect.”

This is what you would call healing, and it’s naïve beyond belief, right? That’s certainly what those would say who cannot let go of their armed paranoia and hatred of outsiders. A borderless world? All people are citizens of the world?

That’s the future. Perhaps it is not yet the present, but the future has to start now, however minutely. The United States of America, armed and pathologically racist as it may be, is also a nation of immigrants. A good place for us to start creating the future is by recognizing that today’s immigrants are arriving not just with poverty and need, but with skills, with wisdom, with value — with much to offer this bleeding country.

Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound.

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Opinion The Last Word

Public Health 101: Guns

Photo: Joe | Unsplash

A Texas “gun enthusiast,” Francisco Oropeza, 39, was firing off his AR-15 in his yard Friday night, April 30th, about 40 miles from Houston. He was known to be touchy, so, despite the noise and danger, no one approached him. Finally, after 11 p.m., his neighbor did. He said something like, “Hey, man, can you not do that? We’ve got an infant in here trying to sleep.”

So, in America, what does a righteous gun owner do when his rights, his dignity, and his command over his own property are threatened by such outrageous demands? Of course, Oropeza marches to the offending neighbor’s home and bravely stands up for his Second Amendment rights. He shoots most of the family dead — five of them, including an 8-year old. Two smaller children were saved by their mothers shielding them with their bodies, and of course that was just an extra affront to the intrepid rifle owner, who shot both women dead. As of this writing, Oropeza is apparently surrounded by law enforcement.

So it goes. There is nothing to be done in our fair land. In Texas, it’s particularly sensitive. That’s where Trump did his kickoff rally to honor those who tried to overthrow the U.S. government when he lost the election. He did it in Waco, naturally, where, exactly 30 years ago, right-wing religious cult members — the Branch Davidians — were killed in a stupid ATF raid that was then marked by the militia members bombing the Oklahoma City federal office building on the Waco siege anniversary. Trump played on all this, either with his speech or with imagery on a big screen behind him. At least one preacher calls Trump “anointed of God … the battering ram that God is using to bring down the Deep State of Babylon.”

Alllllrighty, then.

Trump repeated much of his message at the recent National Rifle Association convention, telling the gun rights crowd, “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

Yeah, you da man, Trump. I’m betting Oropeza heard you loud and clear.

As did Ettore Lacchei, of Antioch, Illinois, who approached his neighbor doing some leaf-blowing in his own yard in the late afternoon. Lacchei didn’t get the neighbor to immediately stop, so he naturally assumed control of the situation by shooting his neighbor dead in the head. That was April 12th.

Most of us have heard of young Ralph Yarl, a 16-year-old Black kid who was supposed to go to a Kansas City, Missouri, house he didn’t know and pick up his younger brothers. He knocked on the door, but it wasn’t the right house. An elderly white man, Andrew Lester, who, according to his grandson, had become increasingly devoted to Trump, didn’t risk opening the door to this skinny kid. He courageously shot the boy in the head right through the glass and then shot him again in the arm as he lay bleeding. Miraculously, Yarl is still alive. Lester explained that he was afraid due to “the size of the male” and described his victim — er, the threatening Black male — as “around six feet tall.” Yeah, um, Ralph is 5-feet-eight and 140 pounds.

The Gun Violence Archive notes where mass shootings happen but no one died, and it seems that, so far this year, Jasper, Texas teens hold that record at a party where 11 were shot but everyone survived. Should we assume the shooter was highly trained and only meant to wound partygoers? Guns, alcohol, and teens. What could go wrong?

What happens, politically, when these routine mass murders committed quite often by MAGA followers, and certainly almost always by NRA believers, are considered by our illustrious elected officials?

We are told most frequently that, in the wake of such tragedy, now is not the appropriate time to talk of change; it’s time for thoughts and prayers. Of course there is no let up to these killings committed by the Proud Boys who defend unlimited gun rights, so I suppose we just deal with an ongoing tsunami of thoughts and prayers and perpetually postpone actual change.

Sometimes some pesky mothers and others do the legwork to get new gun laws passed, as they did in my state of Oregon, but, as always, the alert lawyers from the NRA, sport shooting groups, etc., come to the rescue and those new gun laws are stopped, usually overturned, since we have a Second Amendment to protect access to combat weaponry.

And everyone knows it’s impossible to repeal an Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, right? Well, there was that one time … the 21st Amendment repealed the 18th Amendment. But that was special because the 18th Amendment was Prohibition. Repealing the Second Amendment? Want to try? We know how to deal with such betrayal. Lock and load.

America: where all attempts to curb access to guns are shot down. Should we raise a glass to that? And I suppose we should stop calling children who are murdered anything but our expression for war casualties who happen to be 4, 5, 6 years old, “collateral damage.” If it’s good enough for Vietnamese children, Afghan children, Iraqi children — good enough for your children, right?

Dr. Tom H. Hastings is coordinator of conflict resolution BA/BS degree programs and certificates at Portland State University, PeaceVoice senior editor, and on occasion an expert witness for the defense of civil resisters in court.

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Opinion The Last Word

Staying Alive in a Country of Death

Enough is enough. (Photo: Lucian Milasan | Dreamstime.com)

“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

So screamed the character Howard Beale in the 1976 movie Network, a prescient commentary on the corporate capture and slow suffocation of America. Howard was a prime-time news anchor who’d had enough. To some of his viewers, he was having a mental breakdown on national television. To others, he saw the country as clearly as a prophet, for exactly what it was: a fetid cabal of the rich obsessed with money at the expense of human life and dignity. Howard wasn’t losing his mind, but his soul. And he knew it, so he screamed on national television. Millions followed him, flinging open their windows and screaming the same furious line: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

That film was made almost 50 years ago. The tragedy of Vietnam had just concluded; the disgrace of Watergate was barely behind us; congressional hearings revealed that the United States government had engaged in assassinations of foreign leaders, staged coups to overthrow foreign governments, funneled money to tyrants and terrorists, even worked with the mafia to achieve its political goals. Meanwhile, inflation and unemployment skyrocketed at home; the nation’s infrastructure crumbled; crime soared; cities went bankrupt. Confidence in the country’s ability to provide a decent quality of life for its citizens hit rock bottom.

Today, in 2023, the Pentagon, that Beast of the Apocalypse epitomizing greed, gluttony, and eternal violence, has grown its annual budget to gargantuan proportions. It fights wars wherever it wants without congressional approval or notice. It remains the only government institution awash in unlimited funding and shiny new technology while the rest of the country rusts and goes without. Our tax dollars are consumed fighting a proxy war with Russia, using Ukrainian people and land as a testing ground for a seemingly inevitable war with China. The use of nuclear weapons is openly discussed. Countless civilians in Third World countries die beneath the weight of sanctions while our neoliberal economic policies suffocate the livelihoods of millions of others. Climate catastrophe bears down, causing droughts, floods, fires, and typhoons. The poor initially bear the brunt of this, but soon climate catastrophe, this man-made monster, will come for us all. And plagues, worldwide plagues have struck, killing millions while our disease control centers flail haplessly about beneath a torrent of public and political outrage. At home, wages erode; debt financially cripples college graduates; CEO salaries shoot through the stratosphere. Housing prices soar as real estate conglomerates gobble up the land. Our infrastructure collapses; healthcare grows scarce. Tent cities, school shootings, toxic spills, and oligarchs stain the land. All the while, our elected congressional officials earn an average salary of $175,000 per year while dickering over “wokeism” and perverse ideas of patriotism and faith. In 2022, those same elected officials took in $2.4 billion in campaign contributions from big-time donors seeking big-time federal favors for their bribes.

“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” But simply screaming out the window then slamming it shut isn’t enough. Not now. Not when it’s 90 seconds to midnight. We can’t just be viewers. A death culture reigns in our country, in our politics, corporations, our entertainment and news, our churches, universities, and our workplace. It seeks to dehumanize, desensitize, divert. It asserts that acquiescence is survival, the best you can hope for in this broken world. Give up and play a video game; watch a cat video; take a pill.

In the movie, Howard Beale succumbs to pressure from the corporate conglomerate that owns the TV station and so begins spouting nightly nonsense on the holiness of big business. His viewers tune him out, his ratings take a nosedive, and his TV production team plots to get rid of him. They dare not go against their corporate chieftain who wants the pro-business narrative to continue, but they cannot abide low ratings. And so, poor Howard is caught in the middle and winds up being shot to death on live television. He becomes another storyline scripted by a TV production team.

Howard was one of those Americans who keenly felt the loss of their soul from corporate tyranny and endless war, who were astonished at the absurdity of their news screens, the direction of their country, the helplessness they felt in the face of it. We are not TV viewers but live participants. Innocents across the globe are killed in our name, lands pillaged with our dollars while Americans suffer incalculable indignities here at home. Our souls hang in the balance. The corporate-military state seems intent on canceling this show we call life. If we succumb to the corporate screed and spout its nonsense as Howard did, we will be morally and spiritually killed, shot full of holes. If we tune out as his viewers did, we surrender to stasis and lose our humanity, with the victims of our indifference strewn around us.

The only way to live authentically in a country of death is to resist because it is in resisting that we retain our humanity, no matter the odds against us, no matter the outcome. Being fully human means resisting death in all its forms. It means peacemaking. We have hope because we have the power to nonviolently resist, and that is a remarkable power. When exercised properly, it not only shivers the state but affirms all of life.

Brad Wolf, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a former community college dean, lawyer, and current executive director of Peace Action Network of Lancaster as well as a team organizer for the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal.

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Opinion The Last Word

DACA and the Politics of Cruelty

There is no good reason to deny permanent status to Dreamers. (Photo: Aaron Burden | Unsplash)

It wasn’t long ago that we awoke to images and stories of families separated at the border, of migrant children locked into dirty, crowded, chain-link pens. For many Americans, this was an alarming introduction to the politics of cruelty that have played out in different periods of American immigration history, but with particular force in the past few years.

Today that type of politics is moving back into the media spotlight. As I write this, it’s not yet clear whether DACA, the program created to protect from deportation the young people brought here as children, will last much longer. In response to a lawsuit brought by the attorney general of Texas and several other states, a federal judge ruled last year that the program was illegal, and his ruling was upheld this past October by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Unless legislation is passed during this year’s waning congressional session to extend the protections afforded to DACA recipients, the case may go to the Supreme Court, where its prospects would be dim.

If DACA is ended, it’s unlikely that the 590,000 young people currently protected by the program will be deported, but they would no longer have the federal protections that have allowed them to work and secure other benefits. They would be pushed back into the shadows and precarity of undocumented status.

That is where the politics of cruelty come in. For this particular kind of politics is not only about policies like family separation, which were intentionally designed to inflict suffering and ostensibly “deter” migrants from coming to the U.S. The politics of cruelty also incorporate a language, a discourse, that casts migrants in dehumanizing terms (“illegal aliens”), presents them as threats to Americans’ physical and economic security, and excludes any reference to America’s need for immigration to maintain a robust economy and revitalize communities.

There is every good reason to extend protection, indeed, permanent status, to DACA recipients, and no good reason to deny it. With the umbrella of the program protecting them since 2012, DACA recipients have been able to go to college, enter professional careers, start families, buy homes, serve as essential workers during the continuing pandemic, and pay their fair share of federal and state taxes.

In short, America is their home, and they have every right to a permanent status that legislation can bring. That is why major political organizations like the U.S. Conference of Mayors have supported such protections, and why business organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have called for legislative action on the recipients’ behalf. Polling data from recent years has consistently shown that a majority of American voters support the continuation of DACA or permanent status for DACA recipients.

Certainly, protecting DACA, or giving a pathway to permanent status for DACA recipients in this congressional session, represents a contraction of the original, ambitious Biden administration goal of extending a path to citizenship to the 11.5 million undocumented individuals in America. This contraction only goes to show the power of the opposition to substantive reform. Still, in light of this opposition, the achievement of legislated protection for 590,000 people would represent a significant accomplishment indeed.

As of now, a proposed “bipartisan framework,” co-created by senators Kyrsten Sinema (I-Arizona) and Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), is floating in the Senate. It would provide a path to legalization for DACA recipients, but it would also be accompanied by border security measures that include an additional $25-$40 billion for increased staffing and pay raises for border agents. It also would provide for the creation of regional “processing centers” that would house asylum seekers and ostensibly expedite the processing of their asylum requests. Until such centers would be operational, a Trump-era policy known as Title 42 would remain in effect, turning migrants back to Mexico and preventing them from filing asylum claims. This policy had been set to expire this December 21st.

Protecting DACA recipients is a stand-alone human rights issue that should have no place in negotiations over border security, particularly when those negotiations involve the suppression of other migrants’ rights. That said, there remains formidable opposition even to the Sinema/Tillis framework, an opposition fortified by the filibuster rule that requires a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate. If the current Congress, with its substantial Democratic House majority, fails to extend protection to DACA and its recipients, the failure will represent a victory for the politics of cruelty, a politics powered by demagoguery and the fears it generates.

It will mean, too, that the struggle for human rights will continue, sparked by the kind of organizing and truth-telling that helped push DACA into existence a decade ago. And it will mean, more clearly than ever, that it’s time for the filibuster, that onerous impediment to democracy, to be relegated to the dustbin of history, where it has long belonged.

Andrew Moss, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is an emeritus professor (English, nonviolence studies) at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

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Opinion The Last Word

Zero-Sum Hummers

Photo: Calazonesflics | Dreamstime.com

I adore my hummingbirds, arguably the best in-close flyers in the world, with reaction times so fast they zip in next to angry defensive bees to score a sip of sugar water despite the bees coming at them in a bee fury that would dissuade virtually any other critter, including me.

Two feeders full of sugar water hang not 40 inches from me, just outside my home office window. Who needs Netflix when I can turn to the Hummingbird Channel?

A tiny hummer can dart backwards and hover, waiting a human heartbeat for the bee to either peel off or charge toward it, and if the bee is serious, the bird might wheel and bug out or might zigzag into another port of the feeder to see what the bee will do then.

Of course during that human heartbeat the little hummer’s heart beats some 200 times. They must perceive even the quickest human or bee as operating in slo-mo. No bee has ever caught any hummer at my feeders.

Watching the bird feeders is observing nature as an endless metaphor for our human foibles. Like humans, hummingbirds fall for the zero-sum approach to sharing with others. They seem to be convinced that whatever sips another hummer can take means that much less for them. Classic zero-sum thinking.

There are two feeders with four ports on each. Eight hummingbirds could easily share those. They never do. They expend enormous energy chasing one another in wild aerial acrobatics that make the Blue Angels look staid and clumsy.

I guess their little brains can’t seem to learn what should be obvious. Human beings are at the top of the intelligence pyramid because we learn so much, so quickly, and advance so easily. We wouldn’t fall for the same sort of wasteful error that the hummingbirds do.

Um, yeah.

We barely survived four years of a regime led by the quintessential zero-sum thinker, Donald Trump, who reminds me of a hog guarding a rotting carcass, chasing off other scavengers to keep all that delicious filth for himself. No matter what the comparator, he boasted that he was at the top, smarter about national defense than “his” generals, more intelligent than the U.S. intelligence services, more able to brilliantly analyze the “China flu” problem than world-renowned virologists, and just generally a “very stable genius.”

But we can all fall into similar — if less world-stagey — logic traps. Overcoming our amygdala reaction to seeing someone else doing well is our daily challenge.

My zero-sum white man reaction to immigrants or refugees coming into “my” country might be, “You will not replace us!”

My evidence-based response would be closer to, “Welcome. Like any ecosystem, our diversity is our strength. Work, study, learn, be productive, pay taxes, create a future for your family here. Help us repair and improve our nation’s image around the world. We are glad to make this your new homeland.”

My zero-sum white man reaction to a person of color, possibly an immigrant, being hired by my employer might be, “Stealing our jobs! I gotta figure out how to undermine this one.”

My evidenced-based response would be more like, “Welcome. The most successful work teams are those that can operate well in a complex world economy. Let’s learn from each other and perform at our top potential.”

The hummers are fun to watch chasing each other. It’s like an old Bugs Bunny cartoon, with Elmer Fudd chasing him and Daffy, and the perspective showing a long hallway with many doors and all of them suddenly popping out of random doors with no idea of how they got there. The hummers go streaking past my window, then suddenly sprint downward from above my window, and it’s pure entertainment for me.

But our human zero-sum analysis tendencies have a more malevolent outcome and show us often at our worst. From white nationalists to Vladimir Putin to anyone who feels like someone else’s misfortune is their gain, those stories are ugly.

Can we show that we are even smarter than a bird that weighs about the same as a penny? One wonders.

Tom H. Hastings is coordinator of conflict resolution degree programs at Portland State University, PeaceVoice senior editor, and on occasion an expert court witness for the defense of civil resisters.

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Opinion The Last Word

On Christian Nationalists

Photo: Thai Noipho | Dreamstime.com

As keynote speaker at the Notre Dame Religious Liberty Summit conference in Rome last July, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito said that “religious liberty is under attack.”

Speaking at an earlier Notre Dame event, former U.S. Attorney William Barr claimed there is an “assault on religion … not decay. This is organized destruction.” When Barr and Alito — Roman Catholics — say religion, their concern is Christianity. They, along with evangelical ministers, regularly claim that their beliefs are under attack, that our modern society is decadent, and the cause of our moral decay is a decline in religiosity.

Were this claim valid, one would see moral decay paired with increased crime rates. But the data shows something very different. As religious belief has declined, so, too, have crime rates. And Denmark, Sweden, and other Western democracies that are far more secular than the U.S. have much lower crime rates. The correlation may be coincidental, but the statistics imply that crime and religious belief go hand in hand.

Few would think that, but Freakonomics economists Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner make the compelling case for an indirect relationship. They show that the fall in crime rate is a consequence of Roe v. Wade, which reduced the number of unwanted children who would have been more likely to go astray. Levitt and Dubner’s conclusion is controversial, but if they are correct, future generations will see a rise in crime, due to the Christian crusade, which overturned Roe.

But an even more compelling question is: Who is attacking Christianity? Though neither Barr nor Alito provides an answer, hate-crime statistics offer some insight. Fifty-eight percent of all hate-crime victims were targeted because of racial prejudice, 20.1 percent because of bias against religion, and 16.7 because of discrimination against sexual orientation.

In the religion category, bias against Jews was most significant at 60 percent, followed by anti-Muslim at 13 percent. Christian groups, including Catholic, Protestant, and other Christian branches, comprise 9 percent. So, of all hate crimes in America, crimes against Christians represent less than 2 percent. That is a serious matter, but while Jews are nearly seven times more likely to be the victims of hate crime, it is the Christians who complain. Shakespeare would think, “Christians doth protest too much.”

Yet as Christians portray themselves as victims, they have steadily gained power and influence. Six of the nine presiding Supreme Court justices are Christian. There was also a majority of Christian fundamentalists in the Trump administration. Christians have never been more influential than they were in the Trump administration, just two short years ago. And Christians still dominate the Republican party. Christianity is certainly not in any immediate danger.

On the other hand, the number of people who identify as Christian is declining. Christianity, especially fundamentalism, is threatened, not by a group of elitist liberals or some organized conspiracy. Religion is threatened by progress, the advance of civilization and science, especially the advance of secular humanism. Each generation in the U.S. is less religious than the previous.

From the Revolution onward, personal freedom and human rights have been steadily expanded, ending slavery, securing women’s voting rights, guaranteeing civil rights, permitting interracial and gay marriage, and securing rights for gay and transgender people. Rather than a moral decline, secular humanism has generated a more just society, one that is inclusive, that recognizes that people are simply what nature’s god wants them to be.

Thinking Christians understand that while Christ’s teaching of love thy neighbor is central to a meaningful life, the fundamentalist world views are no longer relevant. People haven’t lost their way; they have found better ways to understand and cope with the complexities of modern society. Reason and fact have proven more effective than myth and mysticism. Prayer may offer hope and comfort, but modern medicine cures.

The success of secular humanism is further reflected in our increased understanding of the physical world and the advanced technology. Whatever one believes God to be, it is certain that humankind has developed, or was given, superior intelligence and the ability to reason, which we appear obligated to use.

Christian fundamentalism may inhibit progress but cannot stop it. Banning books, concealing historical facts that make children uncomfortable, or requiring that creationism be taught along with evolution are wrongheaded and futile. The facts supporting evolution and the facts that led to the Civil War will always exist. Germany sets the right example. There, teaching of the Holocaust is mandatory. Teaching the history of slavery and our treatment of Native Americans should be required here as well. Americans can rightfully be proud of our heritage and aware of our achievements and our failings.

Christianity has impacted our culture in positive ways. Martin Luther King Jr., for example, awakened our collective conscience to the atrocities of Jim Crow. But if Christianity is to be a force for good in modern society, it must reconcile itself with reality and our reasoned understanding of the modern world.

That may be wishful thinking. Today white Christian nationalists would rather fight, openly opposing humanism. Despite having a secular Constitution, they falsely claim that America was founded as a Christian nation. They criticize Jefferson’s ideas of separating church and state, say that our laws should conform to Christian teaching, and work to restrict voting rights and personal freedoms. But then, freedom, equality, and democracy have never been the goals of Christianity.

By opposing secular humanism, Christian fundamentalists oppose the very thing that inspired the founding fathers and the foundation of America. With their confused and mistaken view of American history, white Christian nationalists attack what they claim to be saving. They are on the wrong side of history, and there is no stopping progress.

Bob Topper is a retired engineer and is syndicated by PeaceVoice.