Proud and Unfinished

A meme came across my feed with a photograph of a pastor and a caption:

Christian nationalism defends the powerful. Christianity defends the powerless. May we understand the difference.

I understand the difference. What I object to is that the sentence never says what it means. It names no policy, no vote, no man, no wage withheld. It only builds a room with two doors and lets you decide which one you walked through. Anyone who loves both his faith and his country is left to wonder whether he has just been accused of something, and of what.

The Biblical prophets never worked that way. When Ezekiel indicted the shepherds of Israel, he itemized the failure: they did not strengthen the weak, did not heal the sick, did not bind up the broken, did not seek the lost. When he described Sodom’s guilt, he named pride, abundance of bread, and prosperous ease while the hand of the poor went unstrengthened — an indictment for indifference, not for causing the harm. Isaiah said the princes were companions of thieves who took bribes and never let the widow’s case reach the docket. Amos described the rigged balance and the shoe-price paid for a needy man. Jeremiah looked at a king who built his house with unpaid labor, held up Josiah beside him, and said of the father’s judgment for the poor and needy: Was not this to know me?

Every one of those charges can be answered, admitted, or refuted, because every one of them names the deed. That is the difference between prophecy and a slogan.

My pastoral and academic training comes out of the Christian-Wesleyan tradition, and I have heard all my ministerial life that its roots are in social justice. They are. But the men who put down those roots are badly served by the way the “justice” phrase is used now. John Wesley ran a lending fund at the Foundery, a free dispensary, and a school at Kingswood. He visited prisons. He also spent decades attacking the slave trade, wrote Thoughts Upon Slavery, campaigned against the gin traffic, and used the last letter of his life to tell William Wilberforce to keep at it in Parliament. Direct mercy and systemic agitation were the same project for him. He would not have recognized a distinction between doing the Great Commission and doing politics, and he would not have recognized a Christian conscience that discharged its duty by merely holding an opinion.

That is my real complaint, and it is not with the pastor in the meme photograph. It is with the idea that posturing is doing the work. The Torah did not think so. Gleaning left the corner of the wheat field standing, but the poor did the harvesting. Jubilee returned land — productive capital — not rations. The sabbatical release cleared a man’s debt so he could begin again. Honest weights protected the market itself. The whole design restored people to means and to work. It was also compulsory: the corner of that field was not the owner’s to keep. So the Mosaic design hands neither of our modern camps a clean victory. It prefers productive access to dependency, and it makes that access a matter of enforceable law rather than sentiment.

Enforceable law. That is the part I know something about.

In 2002 I founded the Oregon Veterans Association, and later the Oregon War Veterans Association, because I had found injustices in my own state that were not abstractions and were not anyone’s fault in particular. They were simply nobody’s job.

Oregon had roughly forty-five TRICARE providers outside of Portland for a state full of military and veteran families. A wife in a rural county could hold a card that entitled her to care and still drive half a day to use it. We wrote provider incentives into HB 3201 in 2007, and inside two years the network was near two thousand. Somewhere around ninety-seven thousand veterans and family members could see a doctor who was actually there.

Disabled veterans were being reported to credit agencies for child support they had in fact already paid, because the state’s own accounting was wrong. I found it, I reported it, and SB 923 in 2009 put the correction requirement into statute.

A republic is not a machine that returns justice when you insert the correct effort. Some of what I started is still running, years on, and some of it has been fought by the very offices that should have thanked me for the finding. Anyone who tells you otherwise has not filed a legislative bill. But I would rather fight inside this system than win inside most of the others on offer, because in this one I am still standing, still free to say what I found, and still able to come back.

Veterans coming home with traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress were being processed into jail for nonviolent offenses that were symptoms of their wounds. HB 3396 and SB 999 — Shane’s Law — required a district attorney to weigh those injuries and consider diversion into treatment. It became the foundation for veterans’ courts in this state.

Predatory collectors were garnishing disability compensation that federal law protects. SB 731B (Linscott Law) stopped it and awarded legal fees against them. That practice ended immediately in Oregon. And in 2005 we persuaded the legislature to seat permanent House and Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committees, which is the least dramatic item on the list and probably the most important, because it is the piece that outlasted us.

I was involved in seventy-eight bills across those years and wrote sixty of them. Not as a lawyer, nor a political scientist — just a regular guy who cared.

I do not offer that as a credential. I offer it as evidence for a single claim: the system that produced the injustice is the same system that furnished the remedy. Every one of those problems was fixed by ordinary constitutional machinery — a hearing, a bill, a floor vote, a governor’s signature. Nobody had to burn anything down. Somebody had to show up, know the statute, and refuse to go away.

So here is what I want to say to whoever made that meme, and to whoever nodded at it.

Being proud of this country is not the obstacle to justice. It is very nearly the precondition. Ordered liberty, honest weights, secure property, and rule of law have lifted more people out of poverty than every relief program in history combined, and it takes the wealth of a nation like this one to do good at the scale the world’s need actually requires. Pride in that inheritance is not idolatry. It is gratitude with its eyes open.

And gratitude with its eyes open is never finished. I have been proud of this country’s founding and its sacrifices on the same day I was in a hearing room trying to reverse its bad policy. Those are not two men. They are one guy doing one thing.

A better Christian is not the one who has located the correct enemy. It is the one who keeps looking — personally and corporately — for what still stands against the poor, the widow, the fatherless, and the target of injustice, and then does something with a name and a date on it.

I have also washed the feet of Christian men under my own leadership, with a plastic tub from under the sink. And for most of my adult life I have fed people, clothed people, and helped pay for medical care that was not mine to pay for, without my name attached. I am spending some of that anonymity to write this sentence, and I know what it costs — the Sermon on the Mount is clear about trumpets. I am spending it anyway, once, because the argument requires a witness and I am the only one I am entitled to call.

No legislative record substitutes for the plastic tub, or the anonymous gift. No number of tubs substitutes for the legislative record. Mercy demonstrated by one person and mercy in the book of revised statutes are the same obligation at two scales, and the Wesleyans knew it.

They got it right. So, in their way, did the founders — who built this republic precisely so the wrongs of one generation could be argued out and undone by the next, without the scaffold.

So let me be as specific as Ezekiel was and turn his four charges around. He said the shepherds did not strengthen the weak, did not heal the sick, did not bind up the broken, did not seek the lost. Fine. Here is the same list with the verbs pointed at us.

Strengthen the weak. Find out who in your county administers the benefit your neighbor is owed and cannot navigate — the veterans service officer, the county assessor’s exemption clerk, the eligibility worker. Sit beside one person and fill out the form with them. One person. One form.

Heal the sick. Somebody within three miles of you has a prescription they did not fill this month. Pay for it. You will not be thanked, and you should not be.

Bind up the broken. Get the tub. Not metaphorically.

Seek the lost. Read one legislative bill. Pull the text, read the fiscal impact statement, and find the line where it fails the people it claims to serve. Then write four paragraphs, put your name on them, and submit them to the committee — which in this state you may do from your kitchen table, in your own words, without a lawyer, without a lobbyist, and without permission. That is a public hearing record with a date on it. It is the most underused right an American has.

Any one of those is a deed with a name attached. None of them is a social media post.

I have never claimed to be a good Christian, and I am not offering my record as proof that I am one. I am offering it as proof that the excuse does not hold. The corner of the field is still standing. The widow’s case is still on the docket. The bill number is public. The hearing is open. Nothing between you and any of it is illegal.

That is the whole scandal of this country and the whole glory of it: the work is not forbidden. It is unclaimed.

So stop indicting the problem and go be the remedy. It isn’t perfection. It’s responsibility — and here, in these United States, it is completely legal.