Traveling in Place

What America's Charitable Giving Says About Our History

Recently, The Chronicle of Philanthropy released results of its national survey measuring charitable giving.  The results are available at philanthropy.com.  The study doesn’t reveal anything surprising.  By far, the most common form of charitable giving is contributions to churches, synagogues and other religious institutions.  For that reason, giving measured as a percentage of household income is highest in the South, where religious affiliation is also highest, and lowest in the Northeast, where religious affiliation is low.  Equally unsurprising is that, if you subtract giving to religious communities, the results are flipped.  Giving to non-church-related charitable organizations is highest in the Northeast and lowest in the Bible belt.  The Midwest and West rank in the middle on both forms of giving.

A cursory reading of the numbers might lead one to conclude that Northeasterners (who on average give away 4% of their income) are less generous than Southerners (who give away 5.2% of theirs).  But it’s not that simple.  The data reflect trends that are as old as the republic.  Christian revivals transformed all of American culture in the early 1800’s, but even then, very different views of the role of Christianity reflected regional divides.  In the Northeast and upper Midwest, Christianity developed as the means of social transformation.  The revivals spawned abolitionism, the temperance movement, the women’s rights movement, and advocacy for labor reforms.  The fiery evangelists of the North, going all the way back to Jonathan Edwards in the 1730’s, believed that Christianity had the power to convert American society, promoting the common good and ridding our culture of its greatest evils, chief among them the practice of slavery. 

Christianity in the South, however, developed with an entirely different philosophy.  Southern Christianity sought the conversion of individuals – not of society.  Heavy emphasis was placed on personal experience, while the notion that Christianity should exert political influence was rejected as “meddlesome.” 

Remembering a Difficult but Thrilling Hike

Sometimes, we enjoy savoring the memories of what we have done more than the actual doing.  This is not always a good thing, especially when we mythologize past experiences, filtering out all the pain and frustration.  That’s what I call the “golden age” syndrome – misremembering the past as an ideal era that never actually happened but nevertheless stands in judgment over the present.  The power of such mythology is difficult to overcome.  It prevents us from recognizing any signs of goodness or grace in the here and now.

But I have another kind of fond remembrance in mind.  Yesterday, my oldest son Aaron and I completed what both of us believe may the toughest hike we have ever undertaken.  The Henry Goddard Leach trail (named for the great American author and poet who was a leader in the ADK Trail Improvement Society) is mercilessly steep in its climb over four peaks – the shoulder of Noonmark (elevation 3110 ft.), Bear Den Mt. (elevation 3423), Dial Mt. (elevation 4020) and Nippletop Mt. (elevation 4620).  The total ascent on this 5.9-mile hike is over 4000 feet.  Nippletop sits about 3,300 feet above the trailhead, but sharp descents into cols between the peaks have to be made up before gaining more elevation.  Plus, hikers have to walk 1.3 miles down the Lake Road to reach the trailhead.

The views along this trail are outstanding.  The narrow range sits between Dix Mountain to the south and the Great Range to the North, separated from each by deep passes.  The panoramas from the open summits are not of distant peaks, but of the detail in the contours and slides on the surrounding peaks.  The view from Nippletop is widely held to be one of the best in all the High Peaks Region.

Being Useless in God's Presence

In his book Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life, Henri Nouwen wrote, “Being useless and silent in the presence of our God belongs to the core of all prayer.”  When I first read those words many years ago, I got stuck on the word “useless.”  Really?  How could “uselessness” ever be a desirable quality, especially in the presence of God?  Directly or by implication, I had learned as a young man about the importance of productivity.  As I was preparing for a life of full-time Christian ministry, I determined to be constantly active in God’s service.  The work was too important, too urgent, to let any moment go wasted.  Yes, there would be “down time,” but that would be spent in intense (spoken) prayer, Bible study (in preparation for future sermons), and heavy reading (about church and ministry), so that I was always making “good use” of my time.

I came back to Nouwen’s book about ten years later when I was discovering contemplative prayer.  Because I was learning how to embrace solitude and silence, being “useless” in God’s presence made more sense to me.  A decade into pastoral ministry, I was burning out because I had never taken seriously the commandment to honor Sabbath, which is in effect a command to stop being productive and give thanks to God for making life possible.  (Like many of my colleagues, I believed that church pastors were excused from the Sabbath commandment because we have to work on Sundays!)  God commanded Israel to keep a Sabbath day once a week, but Sabbath is actually an important theological concept to be woven into every day of our lives.  To remain spiritually healthy, we need to learn how to be still in God’s presence and give up the need to be constantly productive.  Otherwise, we are committing a soft idolatry, secretly believing that life depends on our productivity rather than God’s provision.

Recently, Nouwen’s characterization of prayer has entered my thoughts again.

God's Economy

One week in July, I preached at our Thursday evening service but not on Sunday morning, since we welcomed a guest preacher that day.  Because we record only the Sunday services, there is no audio file of my sermon from that week.  A couple of people asked for a printed copy instead, so I transcribed it from my notes.  It’s a rather short sermon, so I decided to post it here.  It is based on Ephesians 1:9-10: “God has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.”

It’s amazing to me how much the economy runs on psychology.  We measure “consumer confidence” as a “leading indicator” of economic strength.  So how we feel about the economy has a lot to do with how strong the economy is.  Right now, America’s large corporations are sitting on over $2 trillion in profits waiting to see whether we slip into another recession before hiring new workers, but of course high unemployment depresses demand and threatens to send us back into recession.  This kind of self-fulfilling prophecy is even more evident on Wall Street.  Investors start selling stock because they fear stocks will be devalued.  The sell-off gains momentum, leading to devalued stocks.  Am I missing something?

The strength of our economy, in good times and in bad, depends on how people feel.  If we feel like the economy is getting better, it gets better.  If we feel like its getting worse, we stop spending our money and the economy gets worse.  If Wall Street investors feel anxious about the economy, the stock market tanks.  If they’re feeling good enough about it to make some investments, stocks go up.  This tells me that the economy is always fragile.  Even when it’s strong, it’s just a panic away from tanking.

Original Gift

Earlier this week, on the last day of my vacation, I visited the Pequot Museum in Mashantucket, Connecticut.  The story of the Pequot Indian tribe is both inspiring and fascinating. 

This coastal people have inhabited present-day New England for thousands of years.  When the Dutch and British came to the New World in the 17^th century, the Pequot engaged heavily in trade with both groups.  Growing tensions and misunderstanding led the British to declare war on the Pequot in 1637.  After several inconclusive skirmishes, the British sprang a surprise attack on the main Pequot settlement at Mystic, Connecticut.  The entire encampment was set afire and nearly all the residents were burned alive or slaughtered.  The few Pequot who survived the war were enslaved and the name “Pequot” was declared illegal.  Later, the colony of Connecticut freed some of these slaves and provided them with a reservation, but in the mid-nineteenth century, the state of Connecticut sold all but one tiny block of the reservation to private developers.  In the 1970’s, the state made plans to turn the remaining territory into a state park upon the death of the last two Pequot residents.

That’s when their history changed.  Those two residents began a movement to resettle the territory.  Though the Pequot had been scattered far and wide, many of them had taken care to remember their heritage.  A small group of them returned to their original homeland and began experimenting with sustainable agriculture.  When more joined their movement, they filed suit against the state of Connecticut for selling their land illegally.  They won their claim.  Eventually, the Pequot overcame tremendous legal hurdles to gain federal recognition as a sovereign nation.  Today, some 600 Pequot reside on their reservation in southern
Connecticut.  They have reclaimed their land, built new homes, a school, and a public safety building, and now – through a stirring interactive museum – they recount the history of their land and people from the Ice Age to the present.  All of this is amply funded by the Foxwoods Casino, founded and managed by a member of the Pequot tribe.  I don’t like casinos and I don’t gamble, but it’s hard to object to how native tribes have been able to make use of the gaming industry to reclaim some measure of the dignity that was stripped away from them hundreds of years ago. 

Reconsidering Reconstruction

I hope my readers will indulge a post that is entirely about American history.  Even though I don’t mention Jesus or quote scripture, I believe the subject matter is relevant, even crucial, for informing the Christian witness in American society. 

My summer reading this year included Jean Edward Smith’s biography of Ulysses Grant, general-in-chief of the Union Army during the last year of the Civil War, and the 18^th President of the United States.   For decades, conventional historiography has judged Grant as a brilliant general and a failed president.  But in recent years, his presidency has been re-evaluated. 

Smith and others argue that Grant’s principal fault was loyalty to his subordinates.  In the army, this made him immensely popular with the soldiers under his command.  But in the White House, the same trait tarred his reputation with the corrupt practices of cabinet members who took advantage of his trust.  Still, it was President Grant who, alone among all the post-Civil War presidents, advanced the cause of civil rights for freed slaves.  Grant doggedly sought to put an end to the terrorist activities of the Ku Klux Klan whose members rioted to overturn the results of elections in which African Americans had voted.  Grant dispatched military commanders to Southern cities that teetered on the edge of anarchy.  He was determined to uphold the right of all Southern citizens to vote, as guaranteed by the newly passed fourteenth amendment to the Constitution.

This important aspect of Grant’s leadership was either diminished or deleted from most U.S. history textbooks as early as the 1880’s.  And the reason should give all Americans pause.  As much as I enjoyed reading all of Smith’s trenchant account of Grant’s life, no passage commanded my attention as completely as this one: