“So the people shouted, and the trumpets were blown. As soon as the people heard the sounds of the trumpets, they raised a great shout, and the wall fell down flat; so the people charged straight ahead into the city and captured it. Then they devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys.” – Joshua 6: 20-21

When the Israelites conquer Canaan as described in the book of Joshua, this scene repeats itself over and over again. Israel engages its enemies. God intervenes. The enemy is given into the hands of Israel, and, by the edge of the sword, the entire population of the city is killed. Men, women, children. There are no survivors. There are dozens of verses describing dozens of different military encounters that result in the total destruction of armies and civilian populations in an effort to eradicate the people living in Canaan. It’s impossible to read this as anything other than genocide.

I didn’t learn about this in Sunday School when I sang about the “Walls of Jericho” as a child. Like my peers, I was unfamiliar with and unprepared for arguments against Christianity regarding biblical violence when I first encountered them as a young adult. The church has failed its youth in preparing them for an adult faith by attempting to protect them from the harsh realities of scripture. These texts need to be seriously engaged in every youth program and from every pulpit, or else youth will enter an unforgiving, cynical world unprepared and disillusioned resulting in either fundamentalism or non-engagement. Either the church will teach these texts, or someone else will do it for us. Protection by avoidance has been a disaster.

Instead of addressing difficult questions, the church would rather preemptively defend itself. The battle of Jericho is made into a cute story for children. The text describing the murder of infants has been forgotten. There is no need to defend against charges of divinely ordained genocide when children sing cute songs. There is no need to defend against biblical violence when we have learned, since childhood, to ignore the unpleasant realities of our faith.

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The response by the church to violence in Charlottesville has been disheartening. The church should never equivocate over the “rightness” or “wrongness” of opposing sides, especially when one side includes Nazis and the KKK and when that side initiates violence that results in the death of the innocent. Christian moral teaching does not claim that “all sides are to blame” for moral error as if guilt can somehow be reduced if the other side is not perfect. Christian witness does not back away from assigning fault or choosing sides, but it reminds us that we are not blameless before God, so we should be honest in our accusations and gracious in our judgment. We do not seek vengeance or retribution. We seek forgiveness, reconciliation, and justice.

Unfortunately, the self-serving confirmation bias displayed by the church has been shocking. We have been eager to support people whose views match our own and eager to demonize people whose views do not. The information bubbles in the ideological divides of the church has left each group largely unaware of what and how others think, leaving us eager to decide for ourselves what our opponents views are.  This should terrify a global church whose members will never and have never agreed with each other with regard to faith and politics. If someone opposes us, we gleefully label them the “racist alt-right” or the “extremist, socialist left” as if the myriad of people who reacted to the events in Charlottesville can be easily classified into a limited number of groups that the rest of us immediately understand in full. The church should reject and fear such fallacious, reactionary thinking. Our forebearers have made this mistake before and the result was “destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city” and have called such violence “faithfulness”.

Many churches and Christian leaders have rallied to claim that those who marched in Charlottesville to advocate for racial violence do not represent the nature of the church. By immediately claiming the moral high ground and affirming what Christianity “really is”, of course in opposition to the racist nationalists calling for violence, the Christians advocating “true Christianity” have obscured, rather than revealed, the nature and mission of the church. The church, even the “true church”, is not a body without error or sin. There is not some quasi-Platonic “true church” out in the heavens free from the stain of violence and sin. The only “true church” is the one that we have. It is not innocent. Both our sacred texts and history show the church as both victim and culprit of racist, nationalist, and tribal violence.

The Book of Joshua is a prime example. In it, Israel destroys multiple cities and murders all of its inhabitants to take possession of land that God has promised them. This is done at the command of God, and it’s God, not the people of Israel, who is responsible for military victory. Most Christians do not want to think about or seriously engage a text that describes God as ordering the deaths of thousands of children at the edge of the sword. God is the actor in the genocide of Canaan. Israel is just faithful in carrying out God’s slaughter.

Is this the God of the modern egalitarian church who preaches tolerance and love? Or is the Nazi’s God of violence and racial purity? Without attempting to answer, the church has little meaningful response to those who preach racism and violence while claiming to defend a western Judeo-Christian culture.

The church has an opportunity to seriously engage with violence, racism, and tribalism using our own history and theology. We should be well-equipped for this task, but so far, the best we can muster is a faint, generalized criticism of our tribal opponents and praise for the myth of the “true church”.

We could proclaim loudly that those who call for or commit racist, tribal violence are not beyond redemption. The church of Jesus Christ holds the book of Joshua as holy scripture and is comprised entirely of sinners. We could hold up on our violent past. We could confess our sin. We could ask for forgiveness for not living up to our ideals and work together to change.

We could confess that the racist, tribal legacy of the church through the stories of Israel conquering Canaan in the book of Joshua has no archaeological or historical support, but was instead developed centuries later to support a centralized monarchy in the attempt to justify violence. We could claim that the various texts who describe this event in the books of the Bible contradict each other, and that the best historical evidence available to us does not show the rise of Israel as outsiders conquering the land of Canaan through violence as described in Joshua, but shows a social revolution in Canaan in response to local needs and from the threat of outside violence from powerful empires. We could confess that our ancestors “changed history” and codified this myth into scripture. They created this myth of a more violent past to justify desired further violence against its enemies. Enemies who are defined by their ethnic, cultural, and political identities.

We could admit that Christian history, like the rest of human history, is one in which racism, tribalism, nationalism, and violence are the norms, not outliers. Our tradition, our saints, nor our scripture are free from this. Neither can we hold up Jesus as a modern egalitarian who unequivocally loved and accepted everyone. The god who became human, actually was an ancient human whose ministry cannot honestly be ripped from its context of religious renewal and opposition to outsiders into our own context of western liberalism, equality, and universal values. To the Syrophoenician woman (Mark 7: 24-30) who was asking Jesus to cast a demon out of her daughter, Jesus said in reply, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs” – meaning, she was a dog and she wasn’t worthy of Jesus’s blessing due entirely to her heritage. No amount of excuses or historical revisionism can remove Jesus from his own context of being a 1st century Galilean in a culture that was historically abused and oppressed by outsiders. Instead, we could admit that the story of God’s history of salvation is one in which God is continually revealed through human action which necessarily involves human mistakes, misunderstandings, and sin, including the evils or racism and bigotry.

We could teach our children that we don’t have it all figured out. That we don’t know the answers. That our heroes, our ancestors, and our saints believed and did things that we find morally outrageous because the church, like our democracy, is always striving for a more perfect union and that the God who acts in history to reconcile and forgive us isn’t finished yet. We could admit that we will not see its conclusion and that our own children will remember us for our many mistakes and errors. We could admit that we don’t have to be embarrassed of our humanity because our God isn’t, but we do have to correct and learn from our mistakes.

By not doing these things, the church robs the Gospel of its transformative power. As we are, God dies for us. God’s plan for the redemption of the world is the church – not the “true church” – but the real one that has let you down. The one we love to hate. The one from which I still run. The church cannot be relevant, transformative, or faithful without also being honest. And the response by the church to Charlottesville has not been. In this response, the church has been co-opted by outside interests who have always been happy to use, and then later disavow, the church according to its own needs. While calling out racism, tribalism, and violence as a moral evil is necessary for the mission of the church, doing so without extending grace and forgiveness and without examining one’s own self is antithetical to our calling. There’s no middle ground when it comes to grace.

To love the church and to love the world that God has created, is to love it in its brokenness and to extend to it grace and forgiveness without condition. To choose to love its myths over its reality or to choose to love it for what it could be instead of what it is, is to engage in an act foreign to the Gospel and foreign to the mission of Jesus Christ.

Advice to pastors, church members, and Christian parents: stop spreading the myth of the true church. Instead of telling everyone how the true church really isn’t racist or tribal but conveniently conforms to everything we already think, tell them the stories in our scriptures that show what we really are. Tell them about Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman. Tell them about the Joshua and its depicted tribalism and genocide. Tell them about how Jonah was upset that God was gracious instead of killing all the Assyrians.  Explore our history of racism and violence and struggle with it together. And tell them about how the church, as we are, is redeemed but not yet made perfect.

As a first-year student at Wesley Theological Seminary, I decided to start a fantasy football league with the goals of encouraging friendships and encouraging blasphemy. It was a huge success. Friendships were created, football was watched, beer was consumed, and unforgivable sins were sinned. It’s been going strong for 9 years.

Fantasy football revolves around two things only: 1) Creating offensive/funny team names, and 2) Feeling superior to your friends for little to no reason.

Best team names in John Wesley’s Fantasy to compete for the Kisker Cup:

• Biden’s Death Panel
• Mark Driscoll’s Feminist Workshop
• Like My Weems? No. I Lovett.
• Ocho-Cinco Theses
• 2 Christologies 1 Cup
• And my personal favorite: Secret Muslim November Surprise

For those of you who don’t know, your standard fantasy football league consists of 10-12 teams and each team can select from all active NFL players. A standard team has a starting lineup of 1 quarterback, 2 running backs, 3 wide receivers, 1 tight end, 1 kicker, and 1 defense. All you do is select your players, and after each week’s game, you add up each player’s stats. The higher the stats, the higher the score. This isn’t football. It’s a math game that counts pro football stats alongside really bad puns.

Oddly enough, players who score the most fantasy points aren’t always the highest valued or best players in fantasy football. Because a fantasy team has to use 1 quarterback, 2 running backs, 3 wide receivers, and so on, maximizing total points for your team isn’t about getting players who score the most points, it’s about acquiring players who score more points relative to other players at their position. As a result, while quarterbacks score more points than anyone else, running backs who score half as many points or less are often much more valuable.

To explain, imagine if quarterback (QB) Tom Brady scored 50 points a game by throwing a lot of touchdowns. Running back (RB) David Johnson scored 20 points a game by running for a lot of touchdowns. Tom Brady scores more points, but if the average quarterback in the NFL scored 45 points a game, Tom Brady would only be worth 5 points more than the average QB. If the average running back only scored 5 points a game, David Johnson would score 15 more points than the average RB. A team of average QB + David Johnson would score more than Tom Brady + average running back. As a result, David Johnson is worth more even though he scores fewer points than Tom Brady. The lesson: A fantasy player’s relative value is the fantasy player’s actual value.

In fantasy sports, a player’s value is measured by their draft pick, or in some leagues, actual dollar amounts you spend to get them on your roster. Take a look from fantasypros.com’s standard ranking for 2017:

The top rated quarterback and arguably the best player in the NFL, Aaron Rodgers, doesn’t show up until number 31 (as of posting). The reason is because there are 32 teams in the NFL, which means that 32 quarterbacks will play each week. If your fantasy team only starts 1 quarterback and there are 12 fantasy teams in your league, there are a lot of other options. But if your fantasy team starts 2 running backs and each NFL team only starts 1, there are few fantasy substitutes. Due to the scarcity of good players within the running back position, running backs are more valuable relative to other positions. Wide receivers (WR) are in a similar position.

I love fantasy football for more than just the funny team names and watching my favorite players. I love it because I get to see how economic theories and models play out in non-traditional settings. The mistakes people make, the values placed on players, and how that differs from regular NFL football, can all be accurately predicted. And yet, these basic economic lessons learned in fantasy football are rarely applied to other parts of life, even by people who play obsessively. In truth, immigration policy isn’t all that different from your standard fantasy football draft evaluation, if only those who play fantasy football would apply the same lessons.

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There are two standard arguments for limiting or decreasing immigration into the United States. 1) Immigrant workers compete with native workers thus increasing native unemployment, and 2) Immigrant workers compete with native workers thus driving down the wages or benefits received by natives.

The standard arguments have a lot going for them. They’re simple, easy to understand, and are rooted in basic common sense. If a buyer has two sellers who offer the same product (in this case a job), the buyer can offer less money and play the sellers off each other driving the price down. An employer is in a strong bargaining position if there are many different applicants and can ask to pay a lower wage. This is a rare case of something being both naturally intuitive and also taught by basic economic theory.

But the standard arguments quickly fall apart in reality. Not only is increasing immigration positively correlated with low unemployment, but increased wages are also positively correlated with high levels of immigration as well – immigration, employment, and increased wages all increase at the same time. This shouldn’t be surprising. When there are more available jobs, and employers are paying more money to employees, more foreign workers will try to get them alongside native workers. Also, the standard argument depends on the assumption that amount of jobs is static as if the number of available jobs is fixed within the economy. However, there is no fixed number of jobs. Jobs are a dynamic market response to demand, and when people immigrate, they also need housing, groceries, and computer repair which stimulates even more demand. Economic dynamism through other factors like worker productivity, technological growth, and consumer confidence are difficult to measure, but are far more important factors for employment than simply counting the total number of immigrants.

Still, even after claims like “immigration decreases wages” or “immigration increases unemployment” are debunked both in theory and according to available evidence, people are still hesitant to support more immigration. Another more refined argument is often presented and is often championed by politicians who oppose each other ideologically. This refined argument has been long supported by people like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

The refined argument is a lot like the standard one, but instead of stating that immigration increases unemployment or that it decreases wages, it claims that immigration increases unemployment and that immigration decreases wages for the working class. Opposition to immigration is often sold in this manner as being humanitarian and rooted in a concern for the poor rather than just being anti-immigration. A corollary argument is that we don’t want to stop immigration, we just need the right kind of immigration. The right kind of immigration is of course, immigration that doesn’t compete with the working class (or whatever class or industry from which you want to win votes). As a result, many people support immigration for high-skilled workers but not low-skilled ones. This conveniently fits into nationalist or even outright bigoted views which only want immigration from countries like Canada, the UK, France, or those that share our values – read: rich, white, Christian countries. No one cares if software engineers move to the US from Canada, but those construction workers from Mexico? They’re ruining the economy!

The refined argument, along with nationalist ones, supported by populists like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, are certainly appealing, but as appealing as they are, they run into the same problems that the standard argument does. The numbers just don’t support their claims, and their argument runs counter to basic economic theory.

Remember why running backs are more valuable than quarterbacks in fantasy football? They’re not more valuable because they’re better players, or even because they score more points. In most cases the running backs that you choose over Aaron Rodgers and Tom Brady score fewer points and are in fact, much worse football players in real life. They’re more valuable in fantasy football because they score more points relative to other players at their position. Remember, their relative value is their actual value. You win by acquiring players who score more points relative to other players at their position, not by getting players who score the most total points.

When a “low-skilled immigrant worker from Mexico” enters the workforce in the United States and begins to compete against native workers for jobs, the low skilled worker affects the job market by “taking a job”, but more importantly, by changing the relative value of all workers who are currently competing.

“The low-skilled immigrant worker from Mexico” may be intelligent and hard-working, but compared to the average US worker, the Mexican worker is almost always at a serious disadvantage. English is unlikely to be the worker’s native language. Education quality or level completed is likely to be less than the average US worker. Knowledge of work culture, expectations, and customs is likely to be far lower. Legal status and protection may place the worker at a disadvantageous position creating risk for both worker and employer. Long-term commitment to the job is likely far lower than the native worker as the Mexican worker may choose to leave, or through the laws of the United States, could be forced thus increasing the expectation of staff turnover and costs. Such examples could continue indefinitely. Simply put, on average, low-skilled foreign workers are generally less desirable to employ than native low-skilled workers by employers. If you don’t believe me, go to any union hall in America and ask.

As a result, the native low-skilled workers relative value does not decrease with higher levels of immigration. It increases. By a lot. If you were an employer and you were trying to hire workers for your company and John was an average worker, you would pay him an average salary compared to everyone else with similar skills and experience. But if the job still needed to be done and the quality of worker suddenly declined and your available adequate workers were terribly in short supply, John is a much more attractive option to hire or to retain as an employee. Suddenly, even without gaining skills or working harder, he’s more valuable and his market value has increased. This is the fantasy football equivalent of other available running backs getting injured – suddenly your average running back looks pretty good!

John can get paid more because the quality of the competition has declined. This is exactly the same thing that happens when lower-skilled foreign workers enter the United States. Increased immigration from poor countries increases the relative value of American workers thus increasing their actual value.

The standard argument could only plausibly make sense if foreign workers were perfect substitutes for American workers, but available evidence (and racist nationalists) tell us exactly the opposite. The majority of foreign workers in the United States are not perfect substitutes. They are imperfect substitutes, just as a no-name running back in fantasy football is an imperfect substitute to your average starter who broke his leg. The presence of imperfect substitutes doesn’t just increase the value of the “original”, the imperfect substitute is one of the main reasons why the “original” was highly paid in the first place – the other options aren’t as good. If substitutes weren’t imperfect, but were instead perfect, the price would always be low because workers could be switched around at will. Increasing the amount of imperfect substitutes into a labor market raises the relative value of the “original”. The only group for whom immigrant workers may be perfect substitutes are high school dropouts and the last generation of immigrant workers.

Those who argue only for high-skill labor are actually working against the well-being of the working class. By making working class Americans compete in the job market against only high skilled laborers, their relative value declines and they will get paid less or will be pushed to unemployment.

Many people will take offense at the suggestion that some workers are “lower-skilled” or that others are “imperfect substitutes”. Such complaints aren’t based in reality and only function to protect their own entrenched beliefs. Ironically enough, such people almost always support candidates who want to restrict immigration “for the sake of the working class” resulting in permanent low wages for immigrants in their native countries and stagnant wages domestically. They’re neither humanitarians nor doing anyone any service. Don’t be like them. People actually do have skills that we can quantify and the introduction of such skills into an economy is almost always good – even better if those skills are markedly different than what is currently available. Different skills benefit an economy even if those skills are “lower”.

American working class wages have declined or stayed stagnant over the last few decades mostly because technology has become perfect substitutes for a number of different tasks once done exclusively by laborers and workers have had difficulty increasing their skills relative to the incredible pace of the competing technology. In fact, machines have become so productive that they’re often superior options instead of substitutes. As the number of Americans working in manufacturing has declined and the amount of money spent on capital improvements has increased, productivity has greatly increased. We produce more in the US than we ever have in history.

There are only a few options in front of us if we want to increase the working class relative value again. 1) Increase their skills through education, 2) Smash the machines, or 3) Introduce imperfect substitutes to the American worker through increased immigration. I choose options 1 and 3. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have chosen options 2, in effect trying to turn back time, and they try the opposite of option 3 by limiting immigration. In fact, our politicians have chosen that exact same set of policies for decades. Preventing technological innovation and restricting immigration has long been the policy choice of both Republicans and Democrats.

Has it worked?

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To learn more about immigrant labor as imperfect subistutes to native labor resulting in increased wages and employment, please read the following study by Gianmarco I.P. Ottaviano and Giovanni Peri entitled, “Rethinking The Effects Of Immigration On Wages”. Or you can just play fantasy football. Start thinking of funny team names now.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w12497.pdf

You can read an excerpt from Ottaviano and Peri below:

In taking the general equilibrium approach instead, one realizes that the substitutability between U.S.- and foreign-born workers with similar schooling and experience, as well as the investment response to changes in the supply of skills are important parameters in evaluating the short and long run effects of immigration on wages. We therefore carefully tackle the tasks of estimating the elasticity of substitution between U.S.- and foreign-born workers within education-experience and gender cells and we account for physical capital adjustment in the short and long run. We find robust evidence that U.S.- and foreign-born workers are not perfect substitutes within an education-experience-gender group. This fact, and the yearly adjustment of capital to immigration, imply that average wages of natives benefit from immigration, even in the short run. These average gains are, in the short and long run, distributed as a small wage loss to the group of high school dropouts and wage gains for all the other groups of U.S. natives. The group suffering the biggest loss in wages is the contingent of previous immigrants, who compete with new immigrants for similar jobs and occupations.

I’ll never forget the sound my head made when it bounced off the brick wall. I was more surprised at my reaction – a mix of defiance and fear staring back at the very large human who had just knocked my head backwards with his fist. There were too many to count, especially as one of them was in my face yelling, demanding to know why I had ripped his shirt. I had never spoken to him before. I didn’t even know his name.

He demanded to know why. A number of others were surrounding me yelling. The very large human stood with his fist cocked back, ready to hit me again. I said I didn’t know. I had just come from the locker room. I turned my head back towards the gym. The kid with the ripped shirt slapped me bringing my face back square with his. A very large fist struck me again. My head met the brick wall once more. This time I wasn’t surprised. It just hurt.

I looked over to my friends who had been walking with me. The two of them just watched. What could they do against such a large group? I felt bad for them. A few more fists. A few more threats. A few more names. And they were gone.

The rest of the day at school, I looked around the corner before I walked down the hall. I hurried to class. I carried most of my books so I didn’t have to go to my locker. I kept my head down at lunch. I ran to the bus. I tried to figure out what happened and why these guys who I had never met would corner me outside of the gym. The story went that I ripped this guy’s shirt during a football game in gym, but it didn’t make sense. A small kid like me would never guard the best athlete in the school. I never found out why.

The next few years in middle school were a constant reminder of that day. Threats in the halls. Shoves in the locker room. The same guys always bumping into me for no reason. Football practice was just an excuse to run me over repeatedly. Some of my things would mysteriously disappear. My athletic locker was even luckily assigned right next to a certain very large human. He had a tattoo of a skull on his chest. I was 12.

I never talked about it. I never told anyone. It’s just the way my life was at the time. It became part of my daily routine. I tried not to let it bother me, and I tried to just ignore it. If they hit me again, so what? It wouldn’t be the first time. I told myself that it was okay.

It wasn’t okay.

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For years, I silently struggled with what to do. My doubt and growing shame crippled me. Do I stick it out despite being miserable? Do I keep going despite my growing disbelief in the United Methodist Church? I sat in my candidacy mentor’s office and asked him a question to which I already knew the answer, “If I leave now, will they ever let me come back?”

“No. Probably not.”

Still, I always held out hope. Maybe one day, I could get myself together. I could grow up, make sense of my calling, and somehow serve the church without a feeling of despair and without feeling like I was cheating either God or the church. But, I know the church’s answer is and will remain, “Probably not.” Yet, I still hope.

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In 1982, extremist rebels from the the city of Hama, Syria rose up in insurrection against the government of Hafez al-Assad, father to the current Syrian dictator. Sunni anger at the Alawite Muslim Assad regime had been raging for years with numerous violent incidents including an assassination attempt on the dictator in 1980. Islamism had become a unifying theme among dissidents who opposed the Assad regime’s secular government, as well as their socialist economic policies, which seized lands and businesses from wealthy Sunnis to be redistributed to political allies. These rebels in Hama, with the support of the Muslim Brotherhood and wealthy Sunni land owners, murdered over seventy members of the ruling political party and their families in February 1982 and distributed thousands of weapons to fellow insurgents in the city as they quickly took control. Calls for jihad rang out from the mosques with the hopes that the rebellion would spread throughout Syria to take down the Assad regime.

The Assad regime’s response in 1982 mirrors the response of Syria’s current dictator, Bashar al-Assad, to the Arab Spring in 2011. The regime bombed the city of Hama from the air and shelled it with artillery for three weeks, indiscriminately killing insurgents, Islamists, Christians, and civilians in the city. An estimated 10,000 to 40,000 people, overwhelmingly civilians, died as a result of the siege and subsequent executions. Starving civilians were forced to flee their homes as the military continued to shell the city. Hafez al-Assad was determined to end the uprising against his government that had been waging at low levels for years and was willing to kill tens of thousands of civilians to do it. His strategy worked. After 1982, Syrian Islamists never seriously challenged his rule again.

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The last time I traveled home to the United States, I was stopped and questioned in the Paris airport by a representative of the US Embassy in France. She questioned me for nearly half an hour outside my gate. She was professional and courteous. But still, the whole thing was odd. “Have you ever traveled to Syria or Iraq?” “Do you have a Facebook account?” “Tell me about your work.” “Do you have friends or contacts from or in Syria?”

The questions don’t stop at foreign airports. Every time I go home, I am stopped, detained, and questioned by US Customs and Border Protection. When my information is printed out on the kiosks upon entry, my printout has a large “X” over it and I’m ushered into a separate line. After giving my information to the person at the desk, my passport is immediately taken away and I’m escorted to a holding area. This process can take 30 minutes. It can also take multiple hours. My name is called and I am escorted to a room for “additional screening” where a US Customs and Border Patrol agent asks me more questions. “What is life like in Jordan?” “What is your address?” “What do you mean you don’t really have an address in Jordan?” “Do you feel safe?” Do you have any Syrian friends?” “Do you travel to Israel? Why?”

The last time I was detained, I asked the agent if there was anything I could do to avoid this in the future. What if I applied for TSA pre-check or Global Entry? He laughed and said no. I was permanently flagged. This is just part of my travel routine now. I am detained. I am questioned. My bags and I go through extra screening. People who pick me up from the airport know to show up at least an hour late. I cannot book short or medium length layovers in the US when traveling from a foreign country. The US government considers me a security threat. This post will be read by them to analyze me (Hello!). That’s just the way it is now.

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“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”  –Voltaire

I didn’t plan on making a scene. All I wanted to do was to eat lunch with limited social interaction. The refectory, also known as a cafeteria to non-theological nerds, at Wesley Theological Seminary, was the center of social life on campus. It was there where we ate, studied, argued, and often slept. It was my favorite place on campus, but it was also the place that I most dreaded going. I planned on eating quickly and leaving without talking to anyone outside of a handful of friends. I ended up with an audience. As much as normal social interaction terrifies me, an audience I love. Arguments, I love. Being outnumbered, that’s even better. That day, I got all three.

I was quietly eating when someone casually mentioned their thoughts on a subject that had come up in class. The poor soul said, “I just don’t understand why anyone is against the minimum wage!” I misunderstood the statement completely. What was an expression of frustration made toward a group of people who the poor soul assumed were like-minded, I mistook for “I want someone to tell me why I should be against the minimum wage.” And I did. It involved graphs.

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Years ago, I was in an argument with a friend about Jesus and evolution. It ended with him saying, “You know how badly I can kick your ass, right?” I did know. It was obvious. It was like a scene straight out of Adam Sandler’s Billy Madison.

The debate was pretty simple. I supported evolution. My friend supported creationism. I argued that the biological record showed no support for creationism in agreement with conclusions from a number of other established sciences. My friend argued against evolution through “irreducible complexity” or the argument that modern life is too complicated to have slowly evolved into its modern form. I had read extensively about this argument before and repeated responses from mainstream science educators. My friend abandoned his argument and declared that the Bible clearly detailed a creationist account. I argued that his position is a denial of the world that God actually created while attempting to build up a world of his own, and that his argument was nothing less than a rejection of what God had done and blasphemy to God’s work and plan for salvation.

In my mind, he couldn’t just be wrong. He had to be a blasphemer. And a heretic. He was rejecting God. Also, he had to be stupid. I was all too excited to let everyone know.

He attempted debate. I attempted humiliation. He didn’t succeed. I did.

“You know how badly I can kick your ass, right?”

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For the first time in my life, I’ll be voting for a Democratic candidate for a major public office. I’m not happy to do so, nor I am I particularly excited about the public policy consequences if my chosen candidate is elected. I have been, and will remain, a libertarian who believes in open markets, a free society, a peaceful foreign policy, and good news for the poor. Oddly enough in this strangest of election seasons, the best way to advance such beliefs and to safeguard many of our hard-won liberties is to vote for Hillary Clinton for President.

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I arrived at Wesley Theological Seminary for my first year of grad school in the fall of 2007. It was only a few months prior that I decided to visit the school on a whim. I wasn’t seriously considering going there as I had known since I was a little kid where I would be attending seminary, but a free trip to DC to check out a grad school sounded like a good idea. Wesley wasn’t like the other schools that I had visited. Other places talked about how great their school was or how great their programs were. They talked about the quality of their library, their prestigious alumni, or their advantageous church connections. Not Wesley. Instead, its students, professors, and staff talked about something else. They talked ideas. They talked students. They talked politics. They talked DC. They were brash and idealistic, and they were not ashamed about it. At the end of my first day, it was over. That was my school. I accepted their offer as soon as it arrived.

(It also didn’t hurt that my girlfriend decided to move to DC, but whatever.)

Wesley also had something else to which I was attracted that was a bit muted during my visit but became apparent as soon as I became a full time student: Outrage. They called it “righteous anger”, but I still think “outrage” is a better description. The students, the faculty, and the staff were outraged at injustices throughout the world. Racism, sexism, homophobia, war, and greed were the main culprits. It wasn’t just during conversations or during political debates, outrage extended to the manner in which we interpreted the bible. It was present in our reading of history. Outrage poured out from our creation of church liturgy. It was broken and consumed during communion in our weekly chapel services. Outrage became a lens through which I would read and preach the biblical text and how I would approach ethical problems. I was a better preacher because of it, and I am still better person for it. After years of being away, I remain outraged, and I am grateful to Wesley.

At first, the amount of outrage left me with a strange feeling. I was intimidated. Intimidation over ideas or disagreement was a new feeling for me. I had never before backed down from an argument and I was never anxious about some disagreement, but at Wesley, especially my first year, it was a constant feeling. I could not escape a feeling of dread and fear so I addressed it by doing the only thing I knew to do. I read constantly. I studied more than everyone else. I studied subjects of which I wasn’t a student. The prayer room in our dorm became my personal reading room. Every bit of my anxiety was channeled into trying to prove myself or others wrong.

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