I’m not an expert, so I would be pleased to be educated to the contrary by someone who knows, but I think a key difference here is the structure of U.S. federalism versus the Weimar federalism in which Hitler came to power.

Here in the U.S., both the state governments and the federal governments derive their authority directly from the sovereignty of “the people”—either the people of each state, for state governments, or the people of the entire nation, for the federal government. Here, taking over the federal government does not necessarily entail taking over the governments of the states (federal supremacy notwithstanding—and there should still be reserved powers under the Tenth Amendment).

In Weimar Germany, however, the states, I believe, were really administrative units of the federal government, so that taking over the federal government was effectively taking over state governments, too.

And we haven’t always had a federal government as strong and as broad in its assertion of authority as we have had until January 20, 2025. In some sense, what Trump is doing is pushing back to a pre-Civil War federal government—although I expect an aggressive assertion of federal power over matters traditionally understood to be within the realm of the states to be coming: it will be the right-wing revenge tour, for all of the ways they have always bemoaned how the federal government forces them to be nice to people, with antidiscrimination laws and the like. They see that as tyranny, and will turn it around and try to force the rest of us to be white supremacists.

But I think now is the time for us in the U.S. to remember the adage that all politics is local, and to redouble efforts at our cities, counties, and states.

Sure.

Thanks for the resources. It’s been many years since I hosted a website, managed a website, or otherwise did those sorts of back-end things. Very interesting.

My capacity is limited, too, but I am certainly willing to help out, to the extent I’m able.

It would be nice to have a wiki somewhere other than Reddit. But I’m not up on where and how such things might be hosted these days. If I get some time, I will look into that.

As with the original question, almost every one of these follow-up questions is really just a restatement of assumptions.

“What sect of Christianity do you follow?”

None? I am not even sure how to answer the question. I am a member of a congregation of the United Church of Christ, which is the local setting where I participate in the life of the church universal, which extends far beyond my local setting. But I would never say that I “follow” the UCC. To the extent being a Christian is to “follow,” it is to follow Jesus, not some “sect.”

“How long has your chosen sect been around?”

The phrasing of this question is bizarre. “Chosen sect”? My experience of the UCC is more that it found and chose me than the reverse. And I would say the same for the Christian tradition as a whole. I have never sat down to look at some menu of “religions” or “sects” and “chosen” one. That does not even make sense as an exercise to me. If you think you are “choosing” such a thing, then you are so profoundly missing the point that I am not even sure how to help you navigate to a different perspective. One’s faith tradition is not like some element of a character design that one just selects from among options.

As for my local congregation, which is part of the UCC, it is complicated. The congregation has been around for almost 150 years, but the UCC—a unification of several denominations—has only been around for about half that time. And, in any case, our practice incorporates elements from throughout the history of the church universal, extending all the way to the celebration of communion, which is traditionally understood to have been instituted by Jesus (though historically that seems unlikely).

“What book and book version does your sect follow?”

Again, this is a weird question, which assumes that to be a “sect,” one must “follow” a “book.” But that is not really how a tradition works. Certainly, we read scripture in my congregation, and our worship is steeped in scripture. I participate in several Bible study groups. But it would be incorrect to say that we “follow” the Bible, because that is not what the Bible is. The Bible (and more in a moment on what that means) is a collection of texts, written by many different people, in different times and places, for different reasons, gathered together by still other people, in still other times and places, for still other reasons, and read and maintained by yet further groups. To the extent the Bible remains a vital part of Christian life, it is because people continue to engage it through participatory actions, rather than because they “follow” it.

In my congregation, and in all the parts of the church that I regularly interact with, there is no singular, standard version. Indeed, there are multiple canon lists that mean that different people mean different things by “the Bible.” I personally study widely, and look at many different versions of both canonical and non-canonical materials. The UCC generally, and the congregation where I participate, imposes no limitations in this respect.

“How do you know that your sect is the ‘right’ one?”

Why do you assume that a “sect” must be “the ‘right’ one”? And “right” for whom? I participate in the UCC, and in my local congregation, even as I critique them. I would not say they are “right” in any sense, except to say that they are my home within the church. But that does not mean they are above or beyond reproach. Indeed, my tradition, going all the way back to the scriptures that we read, includes a strong strand of continual self-critique—it is what the “prophets” are in the Bible.

And I would never presume to say that someone else’s tradition is “wrong.” I certainly might disagree with them, or critique them. But that does not mean that their entire tradition is somehow “wrong.” They have as much right and legitimacy to their home as I do to mine.

“How do you know that your overall religion is the ‘right’ one?”

Same answer as to the previous question.

“What does your religion/sect say happens to anyone who is not a part of it?”

Nothing, because a “religion/sect” cannot speak. Only people can speak.

This isn’t a simple or an easy piece, and the paragraph that I quoted in the post isn’t fully representative of the ideas, or of my purpose in wanting to share it with others.

Until we are able to recognize that love is rooted in desire, and that our desires have been suppressed and distorted and redirected by the working of power, especially through the power of excessive wealth (in oligarchs, in media moguls, in the capturers of state authority), then we will continue to fail both prophetically and politically to be the body of the Christ in the world, as the hands and feet of transformation.

In my view, the greatest, most profound, and most dangerous ignorance within the church is not the dumb things that people affirmatively believe (although there is plenty of that), but the ways that people in the church remain ignorant about the full breadth and depth of the Christian tradition, and about the harms that Christianity has wrought. Ignorance, for example, about how European colonizers and missionaries were instrumental not just in genocide and cultural imperialism, but also in the fundamental construction of pervasive modern categories like “race” and “religion.” Likewise, ignorance of the depth of the contemplative and mystical strands in Christianity have been extremely deleterious to individual Christians and to the church as an institution.

I am not sure how to say “what Christianity means to me,” because Christianity is at the root of how I understand meaning. It is the tradition—comprising stories, ideas, words, practices, and institutions—in which I live and make sense of my life and the world. I can see that there are other traditions, which by which other people make sense of their lives and the world, but this one is mine.

Likewise, “why I believe in it” is sort of a strange question, which I cannot really answer without first addressing the problem that “believe” is a word with many complex uses. In this context, I suspect you mean “believe in it” in the sense of “expressly affirm the truth of certain propositions of fact,” or something like that. But that is not a meaning that makes sense to me in this context. As I mentioned above, Christianity is something much thicker than just a set of propositions. How could one “believe in” a practice for example? One might have certain beliefs about a practice, but those are not necessarily the reasons why one participates in it. Likewise, a story can be deeply meaningful without being “believed” in that sense. (I like to point to all the people who find the Star Wars universe deeply meaningful, for example, as manifested in the way it shapes their lives. But they know it is imaginary.)

But there is an older sense of “belief,” which we often use in other contexts, which is to have confidence in, or even—in perhaps a very old sense—to love. For example, we say to a loved one who is about to face a challenge, “I believe in you.” In that sense of “believe,” I have confidence in Christianity for the same reason that I am able to answer the first question as I did: because it grounds my sense of meaning for both my life and the world.

This sort of thing is why it is so important to participate in the church, as an in-person spiritual practice. The church is the body of the Christ in the world—we are the hands and feet of the Christ. And if we allow ourselves to be atomized into individual, spiritual-but-not-participant practitioners of feel-good faith, or limited to social media interactions, then the embodiment of the Christ in world is only receding in the face of the enormous institutional strength of governments and wealth—or “powers and principalities,” as Paul famously called them.

If you’ve been traumatized and are not yet ready to return, then keep yourself safe. But if you are hearing the call, then find a progressive congregation near you and show up. Listen and learn, and see how you can help to bring your distinctive strengths to your community of faith, so that we can work to protect the marginalized and the vulnerable against this hideous onslaught of inhumanity.

This is what happens when everything is subordinated to the logic of capitalism. If investors are not seeing short-term gains, then long-term problems be damned.

It’s not a question of blame. It does not matter to me whether gaslighting is imposed upon representatives as a method of providing “support” or whether the representatives are coming up with it themselves. Either way, the result is the same: the support experience is almost universally horrid (see my other comment on a different branch of this thread), and I see no reason to trust the representatives, and even less reason to trust their employers.

I have had too many experiences, from huge, international companies, to financial institutions, down to the IT department at my employer, where the first step of tech support appears to be “deny the reality of the experience that the user says they are having” for me to believe that there is anything dependent on the provider. On far too many occasions I have given tech support people a detailed description of the problem I am experiencing, and everything I have done to try and resolve the issue before talking to them, only to have them tell me, right out of the gate, something stupid like “that shouldn’t be happening” (why the hell do you think I’m contacting you then?), or to deny that what I see on my screen is actually what I see on my screen, or to force me to do again all the things that I have already done. No, I think it is an endemic problem within the technology industry that people who provide tech support basically, fundamentally, do not want to help, and really just want to close tickets and get rid of customers.

The worst experience I had in the last couple years was with a person providing telephone support on an application that I use daily. He gave me a certain task that he needed the to do, and I did it. But apparently I did it too quickly for him, because when I said I had done it, he denied that I had done it, and then accused me of lying to him. It was some of the most egregious gaslighting I have ever experienced from tech support. Then he spent the next thirty minutes on the phone with me trying to convince me that he was trying to do his job, and to help, to persuade me to write a good review for him when I got the email for that. I absolutely did not write a good review for him.

Another bad one I had was with my financial institution a few years ago after a major change in their online system. Significant functionality disappeared. So I got on the phone with them and told them what I needed to do. They kept giving me instructions to do things that were not actually available onscreen. Several times I read back to them every single word and option I could see on my screen, left to right, top to bottom, to explain to them that the thing they were telling me to click on simply was not there. Then they got impatient and angry at me for being obstreperous! Ultimately I had to talk to somebody else, who was able to see that, in fact, I was right, and the instructions the other person was trying to give me were not applicable. And then it still took months for the missing functionality to finally be added back into the system. (Interestingly, when it finally reappeared, it did not even work in the way the first “support” person was trying to instruct me!)

The most recent was just yesterday, when I wanted to change my New York Times subscription from home delivery to all digital. On their own website, they have a help page that says you can do this on your own—just go to the “subscription overview” section and choose “change subscription.” Guess what option was nowhere on my “subscription overview”? “Change subscription.” I read and re-read that page again and again, and tried clicking on various other options, for way too long. Finally I just had to use their chat support, which involved working first through an obvious AI, to a possible human with a script that they refused to deviate from. They changed my subscription, but I have no idea why it needed to be that difficult, especially when their own website had contradictory instructions.

Certainly, I have occasionally had decent tech support experiences. But those tend rather to be the exceptions that prove the rule.

This sort of thing is why I simply do not, ever, trust tech support people. In my experience, most of tech support is just gaslighting users into giving up and going away, and this is just further confirmation.

Two lines from this piece stand out to me. First, “anxieties over health-care costs, for their children’s education, for job security, for medical leave, for home ownership, and more, are being ignored in the manic flurry of … executive orders.” And second, “we need to expand our political imagination and broaden our historical memory.”

Part of expanding our imagination and broadening our memory is not to get caught up in that manic flurry, but instead to focus on the real problems.

I think, for example, of something that Thomas Merton wrote: “Nine-tenths of the news, as printed in the papers” —or now, as appearing in social media and on TV— “is pseudo-news, manufactured events. Some days ten tenths. The ritual morning trance, in which one scans columns of newsprint” —or now, doom scrolls social media— “creates a peculiar form of generalized pseudo-attention to a pseudo-reality. This experience is taken seriously. It is one’s daily immersion in ‘reality.’ One’s orientation to the rest of the world. One’s way of reassuring [oneself] that [one] has not fallen behind. That [one] is still there. That [one] still counts!”

Merton continues: “My own experience has been that renunciation of this self-hypnosis, of this participation in the unquiet universal trance, is no sacrifice of reality at all. To ‘fall behind’ in this sense is to get out of the big cloud of dust that everybody is kicking up, to breathe and to see a little more clearly.”

(I take those quotations from The Pocket Thomas Merton, which collects his other writings. The ones above are from his 1968 book Faith and Violence.)

Another part of expanding our imagination and broadening our memory is, counterintuitively, to focus more locally—in our homes, our neighborhoods, our workplaces, and our own faith communities. One of the things that happens in a country this big, and in a world this big, is that we end up spending our outrage on things that are happening far away, whether somewhere else in the country, or somewhere in another country, even when we probably do not fully understand those things. And then when we come together in our own lives, we spend our time completely focused on things that are happening elsewhere.

This is something that I see almost every Sunday at my church. It is a particular “sin” of liberal Christians. We gather to study, pray, worship, or just be together in fellowship, and somebody comes in agitated because of “what’s going on in” such-and-such place (and it is a never-ending carousel of other places), or what emanated from MSNBC on the never-off TV in their home. And what that does is that it redirects the energy of the group away from thinking about where we are, and who we are, and what is happening in our own community, to our own neighbors—or even to ourselves—so that what we must do is calm the anxiety of the agitated person by collectively affirming that their anxiety is actually virtue-signaling, and yes, we all agree that “what’s going on in” that place is terrible. And because we are talking about things happening far away, we delude ourselves into believing that we have some broad and generous imagination and consciousness of the suffering of the world, when really what we are doing is using those faraway things as excuses to disengage from who and where we are. But really what we are doing is we are constricting our imagination and our memory, so that the only narrative we really participate in is the one that is foisted on us by a mass “news” media whose interest is certainly not in prompting us to engage in our communities to their improvement, but rather to keeping us on the treadmill narrative that those media companies are feeding to us.

What would happen if we followed Thomas Merton’s advice of “renunciation” from this “self-hypnosis” in this “unquiet universal trance,” but instead were to exit the dust cloud and see more clearly what is going on around us?

And while I confess that it is exceedingly difficult for me to sympathize with the people whose votes for the current regime brought us into this moment, I do believe that all of those people share the same basic needs as everyone else: to live meaningful lives, to experience beauty, to have access to affordable housing, to have access to affordable health care, to be free from oppression, to be able to envision a future for their children. I think their desires for those basic needs have been twisted and distorted by racist and theocratic ideology that makes them imagine that the primary impediments to those things are immigrants, people with darker skin tones, and federal employees, among others, instead of the real impediments, which are the owner class that is currently sacking and looting our federal government to their own further enrichment. But the only way we are ever going to realize the fact that “there are more of us than there are of them” is if we help each other to remain present, in our own times and places, to see the real humanity of those who are right here with us. That is the expansion of imagination of and the broadening of memory that we need.

The nature of God does not change. But doctrines of God have changed constantly throughout history. We can see them change in scripture itself—from bodied to disembodied; from visible to invisible; from poly- and henotheistic to monotheistic; from geographically local to cosmically universal, and so on. They may do that because they are only doctrines, which are linguistically and culturally rooted. This is how our Jewish friends and our Muslim friends can understand God differently, even though God is, in Godself, only ever God.

And another problem with purporting to limit oneself to just the teachings of Jesus is that we have nothing Jesus wrote (if he wrote anything, and he probably did not), and Jesus did not have anything of our New Testament, all of which was written in a series of decades long after his time in Judea. That means Jesus cannot possibly have had the same doctrine of scripture that we might have (for example, he could not have affirmed the canon of the New Testament), and so saying that we should be limited to the words of Jesus in our scripture is really no different than affirming the Christian, trinitarian doctrine of God—both of those things post-date Jesus.

And doctrines are not just people getting together and voting. They are imagined, and argued, and circulated, and engaged, and argued some more, all out in the wilds of the church universal, until gradually they become part of the substance of the conversation comprising the tradition. That some of those processes of conversation and argumentation might be ecumenical councils is only a small fraction of the life of doctrine.

Certainly there are unitarian Christians. But all of the unitarian Christians I have ever had substantive personal interactions with appear to be unitarian in response to a fundamental misunderstanding of the trinitarian doctrine of God. And right in the beginning of that article you linked, it says Jesus is “not equal to God himself,” as one of the defining characteristics of Christian unitarianism. But even trinitarian doctrine is not about saying that Jesus is “equal to God himself”—that is, trinitarian doctrine is not that “Jesus is God,” but that “the Trinity is God.”

Folks are certainly free to believe whatever they wish, but unitarianism in Christianity as a response to trinitarianism has always struck me as a response to a poor understanding of trinitarianism, rather than as a response to trinitarianism itself. The unity of Godhead remains key to trinitarianism. Katherine Sondregger, in her Systematic Theology: Volume 1, The Doctrine of God, for example, begins by focusing at great length on the unity of God—but she remains trinitarian.

Christianity is a long tradition with many developments in many times places to ensure that the tradition remains relevant. Cutting off that tradition, or pretending that we can some how refuse to “deviate from Jesus’s teachings,” even though we live in a completely different context than Jesus did, is both a denial of reality and a recipe to make the tradition irrelevant. If the Trinity is no longer relevant, then the thing to do is to make arguments based on where we are, the context we’re in, for a development to something else. Purporting to leapfrog back in time as though the intervening two millennia didn’t happen isn’t going to work.

The distinctly Christian doctrine of God is that the Trinity is God. That does not mean that each of the three “persons”—Father, Son, Holy Spirit—is God (in the sense that each can be separated into a separate entity that is God); it does not even really mean that all of them are God (in the sense that God is the addition of the three together). Rather, what it means is that a distinctly Christian way to understand God is as a relationship. An early idea of this is expressed, for example, in the prayer of Jesus in John 17 for oneness between God, himself, and his followers, that all shall be “in” each other. To be clear, however, the Trinity is a doctrine that was only developed after all of the writings in the New Testament. There are lots of ways that people have read the Trinity back into scripture, but the idea was developed only later.

The relational aspect of the Trinity is also expressed, for example, in the idea that Christians pray not to Jesus but through Jesus—that is, that prayer is participation in the divine, through the human person of the Trinity. So it is not—should not be, in my view—that Jesus is worshipped separately from God, because the idea is that Jesus is not separate from God. One way to think about it is that the relation of the Trinity is experienced in the relationship we may all experience, between the divine that is the ground of being (Father), the humanity that is our being (Son), and the connection between all humans and the divine (Holy Spirit). And to worship is to participate intentionally in that totality of relationship. That is, to worship is to experience “grace,” which can also be defined as partaking in the divine nature. Or, from a different perspective, you could say that to worship is to practice rootedness in the true reality of our being, which is as the human experience of the divine in relationship.

Or, as I have heard it said, the Trinity represents the Lover (Father), the Beloved (Son), and Love Itself (Holy Spirit). So when we say with I John 4 that “God is love,” that is what we mean.

Also, the doctrine of the Trinity is not a simple one, but one that has a long history, and many expositors. And there are different theologians who put different emphases on different aspects of it. There are also lots of Christians that talk about it without really understanding it, and in ways that are not really faithful to the complexity of it. You could study it, or contemplate it, for a lifetime—but most of us won’t.

My experience is that I was raised in a “conservative” Christian environment, which I rejected vehemently upon coming of age. Then I spent about 15 years as an outspoken atheist. And then about 10 years ago I found a home in a “progressive” congregation of the United Church of Christ.

I mark the words “conservative” and “progressive” with those quotation marks because, on the meanings of the words, they do not really make sense to me in the contexts where they are used. Fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity is really a modernist reaction that is only about 150 years old, so not really “conservative” in a sense that I find coherent. While “progressive” is one of those silly, broad words that comes with all sorts of baggage and expectations that do not fit together. My church today is more rooted in the depth and breadth of the Christian tradition than where I came from.

All of which is to say that I don’t quite match the parameters of your question, in the sense of coming to Christianity from some unrelated elsewhere. But I did experience a total rejection of Christianity followed by a return.

And I use those words carefully, because I would not say that, in my return, I was “convinced” to “accept” Christianity. What happened instead is that I committed to participate in Christianity. And to participate is, in my view, almost totally antithetical to being “convinced”: to be convinced, in my experience, is to imagine that one has reached an endpoint; while to participate is to recognize that one is always beginning again, where one is. It is the same with “accept”: I would not say that I “accept” anything of Christianity, in the sense of just receiving it uncritically. This, too, is what it means to participate—or, to use maybe a more spiritual-sounding word, to partake. To partake in the Christian tradition is to engage in a dance or a relationship—to be the bush that burns without being consumed, as Moses encountered. There is always a tension, which is the same tension of being fully alive.

So to me the better question would be why did I commit to that participation?

And the answer, to try and keep it short, is that I recognized my deep heritage, which had been cut off from me both by the fundamentalism of my youth and by the atheism that was really just a reflection of the fundamentalism. One way I have put it before is that I was in search of meaning, and I realized that what I had lost from, and then found in, the Christian tradition was a great storehouse and library of meaning-making. Not only that, but it represented ways that had affected my formation as a person over generations before I was born. And what I had been attempting in my atheism (and what before that had been the institutional and ideological foundations of the fundamentalism in which I was raised) was what I would now call the quintessentially modernist fallacy—maybe the primary defect of the modern approach: the idea that one can purport to disconnect from one’s roots and history. It is the illusion, as I have sometimes put it flippantly since, that the life of faith is just a matter of character design and inventory stocking, as though one were fitting out a character in a game. That is not how life works.

Rather, life works in commitment to the reality in which one is formed, which might actually be the reality that extends far earlier than the reality that one has experienced within one’s own life. It is to recognize that truth and freedom are never unmoored from contingency: who and what and how and where and why one is are things that extend far past the limits of what one imagines to be the choices that one has made.

So I returned, and continue returning, in participation with the Christian tradition, which is both broad and deep, and filled with diversity and conflict, but also meaning.

I don’t know what you mean by “open discussion,” but excellent podcasts I enjoy include:

The Bible for Normal People / Faith for Normal People Data Over Dogma Biblical Time Machine