“The human condition is not one of problem solving, of wanting to know better in order, then, to do better, but rather, to be human is to not to see that which is right in front of you.”
Anne Kennedy, Demotivations, at Substack, on the horror of Nigerian genocide of Christians and the public media neglect of it and why neglect, even derision of the intersection between spiritual perspective in politics and policy is so ridiculed in America today.
She quotes David Brooks…..
“My problem with the Kirk memorial service and all the conversation about his assassination generally is that many people seem to have no coherent idea about the proper relationship between faith and politics. In their minds, the two spheres seem all mixed together higgledy-piggledy……..
It’s possible for faithful people to wander a long way from the cross.”
Anne continues quoting David Brooks, “it’s from “We Need To Think Straight About God and Politics,” a title with which I couldn’t agree more. He begins by lamenting how politicals, quotingb the Charlie Kirk memorial was, and he says this:
“Some people are made nervous by this mingling of God talk with politics. They legitimately fear that religion is such a divisive and explosive force or that it’s being imposed on them, that it should be kept from the public square and practiced in the privacy of church and home. Keep God and politics separate.
The piece is really long but it’s full of interesting thoughts, as though Mr. Brooks is trying to peer through the gloom to apprehend some kind of transcendent reality beyond himself:
I’d add only that a naked public square is a morally ignorant public square. American public debate was healthier and the conversation more profound when religious leaders like Reinhold Niebuhr, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Martin Luther King Jr. and Fulton Sheen brought their faith to bear on public questions. Today morality has been privatized and left up to the individual. The shared moral order is shredded, and many people, morally alone, have come to feel that their lives are meaningless.
Wasn’t it Mr. Brooks who wrote a whole piece about the politics of eating sandwiches? Anyway, he also says this:
You may be religious or not religious, but you have an interest in living in a society that produces people who are spiritually, morally and intellectually healthy. Thus, the crucial question is not how to separate spirituality (of religious and nonreligious varieties) and politics but how to put them in proper relation to each other.
And this: ( Brooks, again)
“My problem with the Kirk memorial service and all the conversation about his assassination generally is that many people seem to have no coherent idea about the proper relationship between faith and politics. In their minds, the two spheres seem all mixed together higgledy-piggledy.”
He goes on, baffled, in this way for quite a long time, and concludes, at the very end, that:
“It’s possible for faithful people to wander a long way from the cross.”
Never was a truer word spoken, I think, though with so little energy or focus. If I had hoped to be able to think clearly about God and politics after reading this piece of deathless prose, I would have been severely disappointed.
Fortunately, there are some texts appointed from the Bible, so that if you go to church and listen carefully, you might have a lot of the fog blown away. Today we have one of those very hard teachings that answer questions most people like to ask, hoping against hope that there will be no answer. For the human condition is not one of problem solving, of wanting to know better in order, then, to do better, but rather, to be human is to not to see that which is right in front of you.
You know how it goes, I’m sure. Jesus is tangling with the Pharisees who know themselves to be the right sort, to be heaven bound, to have correctly mixed politics and religion according to the proper measures so that there is not too much of either one in the public sphere. So Jesus tells them a little story:
“There was a rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate was laid a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man’s table.
How could Lazarus see what the Rich Man was eating? Well, the Rich Man was eating it all publicly, ever day, in his courtyard, surrounded by an audience. The cut of his robe, the arrangement of his table, all of it was to be seen by other people so that they would all know how blessed by God he was.
In a time without Instagram, without the proper separation of each person from the other by the screen, so that we can always see and envy, but never have to look into each others’ eyes, the Rich Man, though I’m sure he never actually looked into the face of Lazarus, saw him lying there, thrown down, every day.
Moreover, even the dogs came and licked his sores.
The picture Jesus paints here is of utter destitution and humiliating ruin. Lazarus is crippled, starving, alone, unloved. He is the poor of the earth, the stench in the nostrils of the functional, the dregs of the earth. He is the sort of person politicians talk about all the time but can never sort out a social program to help.
But he has one thing going for him:
The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried, and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side.
When considering the relationship between politics and religion, the thing that most people forget, even people like Mr. Brooks, is that it doesn’t really matter what any of us think, whether we mess it about all higgledy-piggledy, because we are all going to die. It is an easy thing to say, of course—we are all going to die—but it’s true. One day Mr. Brooks will die, hopefully not in the way that Charlie Kirk did, nor any of the hundreds of thousands of Nigerians who every day are being killed. You will die, I will die. And what then? Because no matter what you have convinced yourself about the nature of reality, about yourself and your life, what happens next is really the only thing that should matter. What happens after you die is the only thing that should motivate you in your life today.
Lazarus died and went straight to the blessed side of Abraham, to recline upon his chest at the great feast that lasts forever. All his sorrows, his sores, his hunger, his pain was erased in an everlasting consolation. The Rich Man also died, and he went to hell.
Nobody likes to talk about hell, of course, though I suspect that most people have a list of people they secretly—or not to secretly—hope will go there. And in this hour of late stage global capitalism where wars are managed by people in boardrooms who never have to go near the death and mayhem, there are certainly plenty of rich people to villainize.
In fact, I once heard a sermon by a prominent Anglican about how the rich really all are going to hell. He, of course, did not include himself in the category of “rich” though the building was bright and full of expensive art and I cannot imagine that he agreed to attend the event without some manner of speaking fee. He couldn’t have been more wrong, of course. It is possible—though hard—for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. Lots of rich people do. No, the problem with the Rich Man is that he loved himself and hated Lazarus and did not think there was a God who could see into his soul. He had no faith and therefore he had no love.
It’s so strange, how he hated Lazarus. It doesn’t seem like it on the surface. It seems like he is only filled with empathy for his brothers. But no, look at what he desires Lazarus to do:
And he called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am in anguish in this flame.’ But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner bad things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us.’ And he said, ‘Then I beg you, father, to send him to my father’s house— for I have five brothers—so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment.’
The Rich Man first wants Lazarus to come to him in hell to relieve his torment for a single moment, as if the hell of lying at his gate dying of hunger and pain had not been sufficient for him. Then he wants him to go back to the hell of earth, to the place where he had been rejected, where he had suffered, to try to win over the calloused brothers of the man who would not lift a finger in life to cool his tongue or relieve his agony.
What’s so curious about it is that, in death, in hell, the Rich Man still cannot hear himself. He speaks, but he does not hear the implications of his own words. He sees Lazarus, but he does not see a person.
But Abraham said, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them.’ And he said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ He said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.’”
The great irony, of course, is that Jesus will raise his friend, Lazarus, from the dead in a short time from this, and the Pharisees will be so angry about it, that they will want to kill Lazarus again. Then they will deliver Jesus himself into the hands of sinful men who will strip him naked in the public square, beat him, nail him to a cross, and trust that the political and the religious will have finally been fully sorted out.
Except that Jesus does rise again, so that complicates everything. Which is to say that every single person—known to Mr. Brooks and all of us in the West, or unknown—who dies in the Lord goes immediately to the bosom of Abraham. The poor, the lame, the rejected, the murdered, the depressed, the lonely, every person who dies with the name of Jesus on his lips in faith and desperation goes to be with him forever. And all the people who can’t be bothered to work it out in the short amount of time they have on earth will not.
And if that doesn’t clear away the fog and help everyone to think clearly, I don’t know what will. Hope to see you in church!”
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Demotivations With Anne. Copyright 2025 Anne Kennedy
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From the 1950’s on, every institution in America (military, academic, social services, human resources, government,etc banished discussion of spiritual considerations from policy debate and education about faith implications from the public square and embraced , endorsed, and enforced a secularist version of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, by lopping off the top level of his model “peak transcendent experiences,” i.e. “spiritual awareness and development” as being too “higgledy-piggeldy” and divisive to include in public policy discussion and education of any sort. But his model for full attainment of human potential, “self-actualization” as he called it, did include that factor. His original six-level model of human development is, in fact, the same six areas of human development described in the growth of Jesus in Luke 2:52. This is a key “hinge” verse covering 18 years of Jesus’ life from the age of Bar Mitzvah (12 years old, where we see Jesus in the Temple in profound discussion with priests in the Temple) to age 30 after his baptism and the beginning of his public ministry. It says,”And Jesus grew in wisdom, in stature, in favor with God, and favor with people.”
From a human development perspective, capacity for wisdom includes both INTELLECTUAL and EMOTIONAL maturity.
“Stature” includes both PHYSICAL growth, including the capacity for maintaining self-care, wellness, and
hygiene. But stature is also the capacity for MORAL understanding and maturity, including empathy, respectful communication, compassion, respect for self and others, etc.
Favor with God is SPIRITUAL connection with the divine and living in harmony with one’s faith principles.
Favor with people is SOCIAL maturity, including respect for civil law and common community values, amiable and valued as part of social groups.
These six ways of growth are the human ideal as created by God and as exemplified in the life of Jesus as a standard for all humanity. It has been corrupted by human ignorance, unwillingness to engage in holistic debate, policy, and practice and the acceptance of a lesser model that denies the role of spiritual knowledge and practice as part of human need and development. That failing has resulted in the degeneration of all other ways in which people and communities should grow.
Just as clay is formless without the potter, humanity is spiritually shaped and given purpose by God. In Jeremiah 18:4, the prophet sees a potter take a marred vessel and reshape it. God does not discard His flawed creation but works with it to make something new and beautiful.
As Ben Stein author, actor, and comedian, has written, “We’re asking ourselves why our children have no conscience, why they don’t know right from wrong, and why it doesn’t bother them to kill strangers, their classmates, and themselves.
Probably, if we think about it long and hard enough, we can figure it out. I think it has a great deal to do with ‘WE REAP WHAT WE SOW.’
Funny how simple it is for people to trash God and then wonder why the world’s going to hell. Funny how we believe what the newspapers say, but question what the Bible says. Funny how you can send ‘jokes’ through e-mail and they spread like wildfire, but when you start sending messages regarding the Lord, people think twice about sharing. Funny how lewd, crude, vulgar and obscene articles pass freely through cyberspace, but public discussion of God is suppressed in the school and workplace.
Funny how we can be more worried about what other people think of us than what God thinks of us.”
It is why communities of faith are increasingly pushed aside, attacked or are finding it necessary to remove themselves from public institutions’ policy and practice .
