Afghanistan & Blue Eyed Jesus

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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT FROM PODCAST:

Hey, y’all, thanks for tuning in. As always, I’m really grateful for your time. If you’re listening on Spotify, or Apple podcasts and you have a minute to give a rating it will really help us get new subscribers. So thanks a bunch. 

So I know I said next time I was going to talk about the January 6th committee, (its now a committee, rather than a commission) but I’m going to wait until theres a little bit more to report. And honestly, given everything that’s going on right now, I think it’s a good time to do a little Afghanistan 101 –  not a deep dive, but it’s helpful for us to understand a little bit of history to figure out how we got to this particular What-the-What place in history where we find ourselves today.

I’m also going to talk a little bit about growing up Evangelical in the Bible Belt, and how that ties in with Afghanistan. I’m going to give you some push backs, because I always do, and I’ll try to keep it light, but this is some heavy stuff, so please bear with me. 

So …. a long, long time ago in a land far away long before Toby Keith ever saying about putting a boot in somebody’s ass… there were these people who were about to get conquered. In fact, they were in for a whole lot of conquering.…

Their first walloping was in 500 BC by the Babylonians. Then Alexander the Great conquered them in 329 BC, and then Genghis Khan, that lovely dude, comes around in the 13th century. By the 19th century, the British were trying to annex them. So they’ve just been smacked down time after time after time. Finally they form some independence, they get a king, things get a little bit better, but then here come the Soviets and they want they want them to be communists.  in 1979, the Soviets invade Afghanistan.  

In the 1980s, the US wants to help squash communism (even though Vietnam didnt work out so well, but old habit die hard) so during the Reagan administration we secretly funded this group called the Mujahideen. If you never saw Charlie Wilson’s War, I highly recommend that you watch it. It’s Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts –  It’s a good movie, but it’s also really instructive of how these covert operations worked and what all went down over there. So it’s really a fascinating story. Here’s the gist… These covert operations we funded put money and weapons in the hands of the militias who fought against the Soviets.  Someone who gained a tremendous amount of power and prominence through his militia work was a guy you’ve heard of before…a guy by the name of Osama bin Laden… see where I’m going? This all ties together…

After a 10 year war, the Soviets are defeated, and they leave. But what the Afghanistan people are left with is sort of a weaker version of the Communist government. But the kicker is they’ve also got these warlords that have risen out of the militias, and they go on to form a couple of groups called the Taliban and Al Qaeda. We don’t hear much from either of these groups during the the HW Bush years, but if you move to the Clinton years, that’s when al Qaeda starts bombing some of our embassies overseas, I think, in Africa, and then Clinton shoots some missiles and tries to kill bin Laden, but misses him. Kind of pokes the bear as it were.  Bin Laden really hates America at this point – hates everything we stand for (which is ironic because we kind of helped him get his start.) Then comes W Bush and we all know what happens on 911. President Bush demands that the Taliban turnover Osama bin Laden and of course they refuse. So then we go in looking for him in 2001. By 2005, they are having elections and women and children are finally being educated – we are seeing great gains in humanitarianism. 

At this point, people began to think about transitioning and finding a way to let the Afghan people manage their own democracy but nobody can figure out how.  

Then comes Barack Obama, and even though about 1/3 of the nation believes one is a Muslim, he is the president who actually finds and kills Osama bin Laden.  We begin the process of handing over the military from the US and our allies to the Afghan people, and by 2014, we are trying to find out a way to leave. I say this, because we’ve been trying to figure this out for a while – and for those of you who seem to feel that this “cant be that hard,” it can.  And if things aren’t complicated enough, here comes Donald Trump.

So Trump sends in a surge of more troops, and then he drops some bombs, and then he decides to have the United States sit down with the Taliban and make a deal.  Ummm…

(Psst: the US doesn’t negotiate with terrorists, remember?) 

There are a lot of problems with this plan, but one of the biggest ones is that he is essentially betting with somebody else’s chips.  So the United States basically says: Okay, in exchange for y’all being nicer to us, and letting us get out of here unscathed, we’re going to release 5000 Taliban prisoners that are in an Afghan prison.  But the problem with that is nobody from the Afghan government was in the room to negotiate that deal. So afterward the Afghan government is like,  You can’t make that deal. They’re not your prisoners. They’re our prisoners! 

So the deal falls apart and the Taliban kills some people.  The thing that Trump actually does do is fulfill the promise to reduce the number of troops from 13,000 down to 2500, and he does it right before he leaves office.  Now, since we all know he never intends to leave office,  (AUDIO: “Stop the Steal!”) I’m not sure what his game plan is…. I would guess that there isn’t one – only because he’s not exactly a long range plan kind of guy.  (AUDIO:  “Im like, a really smart person.”) 

Just like anything else,  starting something is easy. It’s the finishing part that is hard. So on one hand, yeah, he draws the troops down, but theres a flipside.  Think of it in football terms –  It’s like you started with 11 guys on defense. And now you have 2.5…  that’s a tall order. 

So here comes Joe Biden, and his job is to get everybody out of there. But he’s got fewer troops to do it with. I happen to believe that no president is all good or all bad – they all get some things right, and  they all get some things wrong. This is going to be WAY up there on the list of things that Joe Biden got wrong. I mean, everything from the timeline, to the logistics, the communication and the optics – to his stance, his lack of contrition,  lack of compassion… It’s been awful. 

When all of America is watching people clinging to the wings of airplanes, because they’re so desperate to get out of that country, the only acceptable response is compassion – and Biden failed.  Frankly, he sounded way more like Donald Trump than he did like Joe Biden.  

This  isn’t like asking a bunch of junior high kids who left a mess in the basement. 

(AUDIO:  It Wasnt Me by Shaggy)

When mistakes are made, America needs our president to own it.  We cannot become the country where no politician ever again admits to a mistake or takes responsiblity.   Newer have been there for the past 4 years and its a terrible precedent that needs to be broken. 

There were five or six presidents directly and indirectly involved in this shitshow over the past 40 years, So it’s not all Biden’s fault…  But Biden is the president now, and  this part is his responsibility. 

It is a responsibility which extends well beyond getting the Americans out of Afghanistan – It extends to our Afghani friends and partners who who spied for us and translated for us and helped us and trusted us to take care of them. We also owe it to the soldiers and the families of soldiers who lost their lives over there, who lost their limbs over there –  we owe it to them to keep our word and never let them feel like their service and sacrifice was in vain. This was not in vain. Thousands of women and children had better lives because we were there, and we got rid of some very bad guys in the process – the world is a safer place without Osama bin Laden, full stop. 

Democracy is great – but the reason that nation building doesn’t usually work is because we’re trying to take democracy into places where it doesn’t organically grow.  For thousands of years, Afghanis have been broken into tribes. They’re not a nation like we think of when we think of a regular nation  – and their allegiances lies with their tribe, not to their country, and certainly not to some notion of democracy.   

So it’s different… but you know what, as I say that aloud… maybe we’re not so different, after all.   America’s Got our own tribes that we need to contend with, don’t we?

So this is a good time to talk about our religious tribes and their feelings about refugees. I don’t want to bog y’all down with too many facts and figures. So I’ll put this to these charts in this data on my website, so you can take a better look, but two different data points. Number one is a Pew Research poll, that does not bode well for my white evangelical people, 

(AUDIO:  I’ve got a bad feeling about this)

68% of white evangelicals believe that America has “No responsibility to house refugees”…That is 25 points higher than the national average. (sidebar: This is why we can’t have nice things) 

But hold your horses, Catholics…you’re not off the hook. So the second data point I’m looking at is it’s broken down by religious beliefs. So it is white evangelical, white protestant, black protestant, white Catholic, and atheist.   It consists of  questions like, “Do refugees threaten traditional American values”, “Do refugees from the Middle East pose a terrorist threat?”  See below:

The piece that kind of breaks my heart is that the highest negative reaction to refugee assistance comes from white evangelicals across the board, I mean, as high as 70%.   In some categories, two to three times higher than any other category –  except for white Catholics who come in second. Lets flip it over – do you want to guess what group of people was the most accepting of refugees? (This isn’t fair to Jewish people, by the way, because I think they would have ranked pretty well on this testing)  But the most hospitable to refugees of this group tested were the atheists… also known as the godless heathens. 

Y’all remember Luke 10, right? The story of the Good Samaritan? Well, in this particular application, it would appear that the people who are taking Jesus seriously when he says go care for others and be my the hands and feet on earth….  would not be the Christians, it would be the atheists… the only group on this list with no obligation to follow the teachings of Christ.  Does that seem a little off to y’all? Does that bother anybody? It explains a lot though,  like why Fox News’ Tucker Carlson says things like this:

Wow.  so…  I know plenty of evangelicals who don’t agree with this. And if you don’t,  then good!  But if you do…  you might want to take a second look at who, exactly, it is that youre following… because I am pretty confident it’s not Jesus. 

In Matthew 25, when Jesus says, (paraphrased) I was hungry, and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty, you gave me nothing to drink, I was homeless, and you turn me away. And they said, Lord, Lord, when we turn you away when we do these things, and he said, Whatever you do, and to the least of these you do unto me…. Y’all remember that verse? I know you do, most of you can quote it better than I can. So these red letter texts are pretty fundamental….(ha)  They’re a foundation for evangelicals. 

I mean, kids like me, we grew up playing Bible Bowl – as in, racing to see who could find verses the fastest in their Bible. (AUDIO: Nerd Alert!)  So I know y’all know the verses… It’s just that you’re not following them.  We already know we’re supposed to take care of people in need. 

If the Afghanis don’t qualify as “people in need” when someone is about to murder their kids and chop their heads off, who does qualify?

A persistent question seems to be…  Why are white evangelicals so resistant to helping refugees? And honestly, I think it’s because we’ve been conditioned against compassion.   And argh,  I know I’m gonna get some blowback here,  but if you will just bear with me, I will l try to explain what I mean. 

So I follow this guy named Charlie Sykes, who was a conservative political reporter for years but now writes for The Bulwark newsletter and podcast.  He recently quoted a Christian author named Diana Butler Bass, I’ve read some of her books, she’s really brilliant and has some incredible insight (also friends with my pastor and other super smart person, Jason Micheli)  

Anyway,  her thought on this topic was as follows:  

“An easy answer is a secularization of the white evangelical community and how it functions as an arm of the Republican Party, taking talking points and marching orders from the people who have the loudest voices in the Republican party.”. But then Charlie went on to explain Christianism – a term coined a couple of decades ago by a guy named Andrew Sullivan. Its kind of like calling yourself a Christian without subscribing to guiding Christ-like principles  – in other words, if you’re more concerned with justice and obedience and judgment, then you are mercy, grace and forgiveness… Maybe you’re a Christianist, not a Christian. It’s unwavering, fundamentalist certainty. You can see the polling data and read the entire article here.

The reason I include that stuff today is because I think they are both right. I think that Christianism is a thing, and I think it’s a thing because the Christian Right successfully tied evangelicals around the axle of the Republican Party – and they’re so tightly woven together that they cannot be untangled. 

I happen to know this because I was there and I’m sorry to admit that I helped them do it. We used all of the dog whistles and buzzwords that we needed to use to convince Christians that they needed to be Republicans.  We  talked about things like the the “homosexual agenda”, and religious persecution and crime in cities, (dog whistle) welfare queens (dog whistle) we said anything and everything we needed to say in order to make these people feel persecuted –  to make them feel like they had to be a Republican, even if the Republican candidate didn’t remotely represent their values.  I mean, as long as a candidate claimed to be pro-life, you basically could get them to vote for Ghengis Khan – these folks would overlook everything else.  

 Explains a lot, doesnt it? 

Looking back, it’s astounding to me that we saw no irony whatsoever in being pro-life and pro-gun, and pro-private prison and pro-death penalty. Nobody ever called us out on the “pro-life” part of that ( it wasnt pro life, it was merely anti abortion and they are not interchangeable terms. )  The other thing that sticks with me is how genius it was for the GOP to recruit a group of people who are conditioned  not to ask questions, and who are conditioned to follow.  

Think about it this way…It’s incompatible to be a fundamentalist if you are a critical thinker or a skeptic, because you’re constantly going to doubt and question and  push the envelope. If you’re not asking questions and examining doubt, you are a prime target, to be co-opted into a movement… and that’s exactly what has happened. It happens all the time, whether the religion is Christianity or Islam, whether it’s September 11, or January 6. It’s extreme fundamentalism that is the problem. 

I could be wrong, but I don’t think there were a ton of Episcopalians storming the Capitol on January 6, can you imagine their demands would be?   “Pardon me… would you have any Grey Poupon?”  Sorry, Episcopalians, I just need a little bit of levity… 

Anyway, as I mentioned a couple of podcasts ago, in the Bible and the F Word, lots of the evangelical churches are still very patriarchal and a lot of the pastors have a tremendous amount of power – often unchecked power- which is always a dangerous thing. A lot of them sound like this guy from Tennessee…

“I don’t care what fraudulent, fake Joe Biden says. I don’t care what Planned Parenthood says. I don’t care what Chris Cuomo said, I don’t care what Gavin Newsom said. I don’t care what Nancy Pelosi and her insurrectionist nonsense has to say, you better wake up church!  You better wake up! They hate us. We are speedbumps to the deep state on the road to their progressive communism!  I live by what I say and I will die by what I say if I have to.”

My friends, this is real – and there are a lot more of these pastors than you realize.  If you ever wonder why so many evangelicals are unswayed by reason and unmoved by fact, or why they fear their government more than they fear a virus that’s killed millions of people worldwide… Look no further. This is real,  its not even all that rare, and there’s absolutely nothing Christlike or remotely compassionate about this extreme brand of evangelicalism. 

Why are so many evangelicals unswayed by reason and unmoved by fact?

Ugh I feel like I need a shower. 

Lets get in the way back machine and go to someplace in the mid 1970s, small town Oklahoma – the scene is Sunday school class:  So I was a little kid when I realized that the world was on my shoulders, I’ll tell you what I mean by that.   (AUDIO: I wish we’d All Been Ready – Theme to the Original Left Behind movie, and known by many of my evangelical childhood friends as The Song of Nightmares…)

I don’t know what my Sunday school teacher was thinking because this discussion was inappropriate for little kids who should have been just putting felt animals on the Noah’s Ark board.  I think someone’s grandmother had just died and our teacher was explaining that, because she had been a Christian, she went to heaven. Her statement set off some alarm bells in my mind and little Gretchen had not yet learned that questions were a one way ticket on the Hell Express. The exchange went something like this…

Me:  “But, um, what if the grandma wasn’t a Christian? (I caught the qualifier.)

Teacher: “If you’re not a Christian, then you go to hell.  You know that.”

Me: “Everybody?”  

Teacher:   “Yes. Everybody.” *sigh*

Me: “Well, what about somebody who didn’t have the chance to become a Christian?”  

Teacher: “It doesn’t matter. They’ll still go to hell.” (spoken with absolute certainty.)

This did not seem like the God that we sang about 5 minutes ago….the Jesus who loves the little children…. ALL the children of the world…  It did not sit right in my 5 or 6 year old brain and I wanted to cry.

Me:  “But why? That doesn’t make sense  – it’s not fair!”

Teacher:   ”God’s ways are not our ways. We are not supposed to understand. Our job – Your job – is to travel the whole world and tell everyone about Jesus before they die so they don’t go to hell.”  

As you might imagine, her missive created quite a sense of urgency…we are supposed to reach everyone in the whole world before they get like, eaten by a shark or hit by hit by a train, or fall in a volcano…depending on where you live. When your view of the world is shaped by Saturday morning cartoons, there are a myriad of ways you can meet your demise… like maybe even having an anvil fall on your head. Anyway, back to the story….

I think she could sense my panic so she kind of patted me on the head, and said “Dont worry, Gretchen…God is in control. “ 

God is in control. Okay.  So as I sat through ‘big church’ afterward,  I looked around – none of the  grownups seemed concerned that millions of people were about to burn in hell.  When the service was finally over, nobody hurried out  to tell people about Jesus… but they did hurry to beat the Methodists and the Presbyterians to the restaurant for lunch. 

So my little person takeaway was this… mind your own biscuits, keep yourself out of hell, other people are not your problem – God is handling it. I actually call it  Godisincontrolism. It’s very passive, there’s nothing nefarious about it.   Deciding that God is in control of everything just absolves you of the responsibility for…. you know….pretty much everything.  And that’s okay –  It’s just not compassion. I mean, not to me anyway.  But you know, I could be wrong… it  happens all the time. 

Alright, time for some pushbacks –  

1. If people in your circle are blaming this all on Biden, or all on Trump or Bush –  just back up a minute, okay?  The thing is, people like certain and they like simple – but the the problem is that life is usually neither. So if you find yourself around people that are absolutely certain about something, perhaps take everything they say with a gigantic shaker of salt. 

2.  This is the longest war we’ve ever had – thousands of Americans served and sacrificed over there, and their sacrifice is not in vain. 

3.  If you hear any of your friends, especially Christian friends, say things that are anti -refugee and sound a little bit xenophobic, or maybe a little bit racist, please just remind them that Jesus was not a blond haired blue eyed guy from Kansas. 

4.  Call the White House 202-456-1111 and tell President Biden you expect him to defend and protect those Afghan people that put their trust in us. 

Okay, that’s a wrap. Thank you all for listening – I really do appreciate it. I know it’s a little bit long this time, but I did cover the entire history of Afghanistan and my childhood and one podcast. Maybe I should pay you to be my therapists. 

Last but not least… it’s my father in law’s 81st birthday.

So Happy Birthday, Chuck!