Please Impose Your Religious Views on Me

I’m a corporation whose business is to convince you to buy as much expensive coffee as frequently as possible. My religion is profit.

The confederate flag hanging in my truck’s rear window makes a statement about my rugged independence and it inspires pride or discomfort in those who see it as they are challenged to consider where they stand in the face of my public display of pride. My religion is independence.

Racial diversity is a core value to me. I go to meetings and ask challenging questions of others in hopes of helping them to more highly value what I value. My religion is racial diversity.

My three kids are each in four different activities after school and I spend my life running around getting them to their different activities. In telling you this I’m challenging you to introspection about whether you are a good mom or not. My religion is busy mom-ism.

I’ve started a non-profit to help fund a women’s sewing cooperative in Africa and I’m trying to convince you to also value this endeavor and show your commitment by donating money to my non-profit. My religion is help-the-poor-ism.

The magazine I work for usually has pictures of young, thin beautiful white women on the cover and tries to manipulate its readers’ insecurities so they will buy things that help them feel better about themselves. My religion is vanity.

I follow a man named Jesus who I believe is the Son of God. I believe Jesus knows me completely and loves me unconditionally. I try to honor the poor, serve my wife, defend the defenseless, run a business with integrity, and be a good dad because that’s who I am but also in hopes it might encourage you to seek this same all-knowing and unconditional love. My religion is Christianity.

Religion is a system of beliefs or values. We all have them. Religion involves worship which simply means giving significant time and attention to something we value. We all do it. And we are all always trying to "impose" our views on others if impose means trying to convince others we're right and by implication they're not. We do it consciously or subconsciously, overtly or inadvertently but we are all always doing it. It's at best hypocritical and irrational and at worst discriminatory and malicious to criticize me for trying to "impose" my religious views on you while by so doing you are simultaneously trying to "impose" your religious views on me.

We all aspire to live holistically whether we realize it or not. To be fulfilled, to be fully human, we need to be who we are regardless of the context and regardless of the consequences. So please go ahead and continue to be your authentic self and integrate your values into all of what you do in your personal, work, social, business and political lives. Advocate strongly for what you value and I’ll do the same. And if your values are attractive to me, I’ll likely start to take some of them on as my own and hopefully vice-versa. If not, then I’ll reject them, but I’ll endeavor to dialogue and to not be offended because I may value some things differently from how you value them.

Liberal Arts Education for Pre-K through College

My children's school district superintendent recently published a piece titled, "The future of our educational system is being shaped today." He posits that the district's mission is to help students be "effective critical thinkers, problem-solvers, researchers, communicators, and responsible citizens, is right on track," and I agree with him. However, he prefaces the topic with recounting a trip to China where he met students who said, "American students don't work very hard. We're going to take your jobs." The implication was that an important part of the motivation for this mission is for our children to be able to compete for jobs against their peers living in China.

I recently had the privilege of listening to Andy Crouch speak at Gordon College. Andy is Executive Editor at Christianity Today and popular speaker and author on sociology and Christianity in America. One of his themes was that a Liberal Arts education is about developing whole human beings who are able to bear the burden of responsibility that comes with being a free (liberal) person. He goes a step further in saying that this valuing of the whole person implied in the Liberal Arts tradition stems from a recognition that all people are image-bearers of God. At its foundations, it is this perspective that motivates the Liberal Arts tradition. Without it, as reflected in college demographics today, the Liberal Arts tradition will fade away.

Our school district is one of the best in the country and has gone above and beyond what we would have hoped for in caring for and training our children. We are very thankful to be part of this district and we believe its mission is aligned in many ways with this Liberal Arts focus on developing the whole person. I worry, however, that the mission is in danger of becoming skewed if its underlying motivation is to create graduates who will be able to effectively compete for jobs with the Chinese. I hope instead our district's mission will continue to build on its roots in the Liberal Arts tradition, simply honoring the reality that all students are "fearfully and wonderfully" made.

The Dulles Brothers - a System of Global Governance

Influential in American Foreign Policy and the global political economy for over four decades, the Dulles Brothers, Allen and Foster, reached the pinnacles of their power in the 1950s as Director of the CIA and Secretary of State respectively.

They arguably played a critical role in not just fighting the Cold War, but starting and escalating the Cold War in a way that likely would not have happened without them. They very directly deposed foreign leaders from Guatemala to Iran and were instrumental in leading the US into the Vietnam War. A fundamental principal of their approach to US foreign policy was a belief that the world is and should be run by a cadre of international elites.

As Foster told the International Chamber of Commerce in Berlin in 1937, "It is a well ordered domestic economy which provides the greatest assurance of peace, and the problem of international peace is but an extension of the problem of internal peace." They were founding members of the Council on Foreign Relations whose one-word Latin motto "ubique," meaning "everywhere," spoke volumes of their belief that it was only through international capitalism tied into all workings of society in all corners of the globe that international peace and stability would be achieved.

None of the above is necessarily flawed reasoning. But regardless one's worldview, a governing system left unchecked in the hands of humans will become corrupt. It is only by a set of values that transcend the governors and the governed that a system will be just. As James Madison, America's fourth president said, "You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself."

In the name of effective (probably even "just" in their eyes) global governance, the Dulles brothers perpetrated fraud and supported cronyism of epic proportions. They made policy that directly benefited their business clients and their friends or made it in retribution for slights of their clients and their friends. Those on the right side became incredibly wealthy and powerful in the process. Those on the wrong side were deposed and bankrupted or on a grander scale died in unjust wars or suffered poverty through a flawed system.

Then is the right answer to work to remodel global political economic systems around universal truths? A topic for another discussion, but this I believe is the definition of a society and the reason societies have been birthed and the way they have been governed from time in memorial. Yet we still are where we are today, so there must be something more to the answer that we have yet to fully grasp..

Much of the thinking above is derived from Stephen Kinzer's "The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War"