The Second Pandemic: Authoritarianism and Your Future with Brian McLaren

good evening everyone welcome to another of our you know ongoing series of guest speakers that we've been bringing into our church um for our grow adult enrichment series uh this week we have a very very very exciting treat for you all which is um brian mclaren he's a an author and activist a public theologian and just an absolutely wonderful representative of the church and kind of our local our local superstar that we get to bring in every now and then so very pleased to have him with us um he's here to talk to us about a very troubling and at times a very heavy subject of the recent rise of authoritarianism its intersections with christianity and i want to kick us off by reading really quickly a page out of his new ebook called the second pandemic so it starts like this most of us probably remember when we heard the first reports of a strange new disease a novel coronavirus later known as covid19 in the months since we heard of it it has affected us all it has killed too many and it isn't done with us yet meanwhile another dangerous pandemic has been spreading and too few of us understand it the first pandemic coven 19 is caused by a virus that spreads primarily through breath from person to person it usually infects the lungs but it can quickly spread throughout the entire body causing multiple organs to fail and leading to death the second pandemic also spreads primarily through breath breath in the form of words spoken words together with the residue of words on paper and screen carry this pandemic from ear and eye to brain from the brain this infection controls the entire body and through each host body it reaches out to control more and more large group gatherings rallies for example are prime methods for both pandemics to spread the first pandemic of coven 19 may cause fever discomfort and weakness sometimes leading to long-term debilitation and death the second pandemic can also be fatal but before it kills it fills its host with a feeling of power supremacy invincibility euphoria and belonging simply put when people catch this pandemic it feels like the most wonderful meaningful and fulfilling experience that has ever happened to them the name of the second pandemic is authoritarianism ryan thank you for being with us i would love to hear your thoughts on this rising struggle that we're facing um and our role in it as people of faith sure well first uh leslie it's always great to be with you and always great to be with this beautiful congregation great to see your smiling faces and uh welcome to all of who will be joining us uh through technology later i uh in january of 2016 there was a republican uh primary debate some of you remember when there was long line of people stretching across the stage and that night i said to my wife i think that guy donald trump is going to win uh and at that point a lot of people are still thinking that he was kind of a joke but i said i think he's going to win i think he knows the secret combination to a certain part of the human brain and i i called a psychiatrist friend of mine or psychologist friend of mine or i emailed him and i said could you start sending me anything you can that you feel is psychologically valid that will help me understand donald trump and his unique power i think what it was that impressed me the most was that trump would humiliate mock insult his opponents and then within days they were supporting him and i just thought this is unprecedented this is really a strange amount of power so my psychologist friends started sending me all these articles and i put them away in little file and my computer and then i bumped into another friend who is a neurologist and his his specialty is really how the brain functions and i asked him the same question and he started sending me information and it led me in a number of different directions some of you may have seen i wrote a little ebook on bias called why don't they get it understanding bias in others overcoming bias in others and yourself and so bias was one sort of track but the other track was this reality called authoritarianism and it turns out that in the aftermath of world war ii uh european intellectuals were uh around all across europe were asking the same question and the question was how could the germans do this because everyone thought of the germans kind of as the smartest europeans i mean they wouldn't the french never would have said that out loud right but there was the sense that the germans are super scientific super rational super analytical uh deep religious tradition you know german uh christian scholarship was considered the envy of the world and so all of these uh a a number of scholars started exploring the question how could this happen to to germany many of you probably heard of hannah aaron and others who began writing about the spread of authoritarianism and of course hannah aaron had both the example of stalin and the example of hitler to look at and she started noticing similarities between them and and others mussolini uh and others uh meanwhile some americans started getting interested and um uh they started publishing you know actual research on on uh authoritarianism i i i wonder if you could just show me by quick show of hands uh how many of you you have ever heard of the milgram experiment anybody hear of the milgram experiment i bet when i describe it some of you will more of you will remember the milgram experiment was done at yale by researcher named milgram and uh what they did is they invited people in and said we're doing a test on reading comprehension we're doing a test on education and learning and so we're going to ask you to give a quiz to another uh volunteer uh you'll be sitting in this uh little cubby and they'll be sitting next to you and there's a wall in between you and um whenever they you ask a question whenever they get the right answer that's good if they get the wrong answer you press this button and this button will administer just a small electric shock so um you know the person who's organizing the experiment has a white lab coat and a clipboard and looks very official what the person taking the test doesn't know is the other person who they think is another volunteer is actually an actor and a kind of conspirator in the experiment and so what would happen is you'd be instructed as the participant the first time a person gets a wrong answer you press a button next time you get a wrong answer you're asked to turn up the voltage on a little knob and press the button again uh and then if they get a third wrong answer you're told to turn up the button a little bit more so you can imagine your partner saying ow you know ow and then each time it turns up the the yell the scream gets louder and what shocked everyone in the milgram experiment is what a high percentage of people would keep turning the the dial up as long as the guy in the white lab told them to they would keep turning it up until the person stopped even answering the questions presumably because he or she had gone unconscious so i remember reading about this back in college and then started to see oh the milgram experiment was in this flow of research on authoritarianism well uh it it so so happens after donald trump won the republican primary and then won the election uh suddenly people started paying a lot of attention to authoritarianism uh again um and uh it is a fascinating body of research i think it is deeply significant theologically um i think for all of us who identify as christians there is so much for us to reflect upon uh in in study of authoritarian authoritarianism especially because right now white christians seem to be the most susceptible to authoritarian leadership and this becomes a special cause for self-examination among among christians in general i think of all races and nationalities but i especially think us american christians have a special obligation to grapple with this subject of authoritarianism so i'm going to give you a quick quick definition it's very very simple after you hear this definition i promise you you'll be able to remember it because it's got four parts and and they're in it as soon as you hear them you say oh yes that's very very obvious um and then we can explore some other questions i'd like to talk a little bit about theology and authoritarianism and then um we'll open up for questions and and comments and discussion so four characteristics of authoritarianism first if you can understand that authoritarianism simply put is a process of centralizing power um but it centralizes power in either an individual or a party or a cabal a group of a network of people who align around common interests and here are the four primary characteristics of authoritarianism first fear authoritarian leaders almost always uh and maybe we could even say always identify an enemy to make you afraid of an enemy who is becomes an existential threat to your safety and your existence um and now here's what's interesting the enemy doesn't even have to exist the or the enemy can be completely blown out of proportion in fact the best enemy is not really a threat if the enemy makes up a tiny minority so small that they couldn't be a threat they're even a better enemy to make for authoritarians to use to make you afraid because if there aren't many of them around you can never go talk to one to find out if what the authoritarian is telling you about them is true um and so first is fear of a real or imagined enemy and of course you can think back in history to different authoritarian groups and the enemies that they identified some of you who are my age or older might remember from yourself or from your parents the mccarthy hearings and you remember the the fear uh that joe mccarthy spread was the fear the red scare and the fear that there was a communist uh hiding behind every bush again it didn't matter if it was true or not uh that fear spreads you might remember reading uh uh about the salem witch trials and this and uh you know in salem witch trials were a classic case of identifying an enemy who didn't actually exist but you could imagine this uh enemy would exist and not only you know we know about the salem witch trials but uh witch hunts and witch trials spread were spreading across europe for a couple of centuries uh and in fact protestants loved the witch hunts better than anybody else uh pro is pro the witch hunts happened before protestantism began before the reformation but as soon as the reformation came protestants latched on and the provision of an enemy it fulfills a deep psychological need in people you might say our biggest fear is not actually an enemy our biggest fear is our friends turning on us and when you provide an enemy you give all of the friends a reason to unite with each other against the enemy so you can see there are amazing benefits that that you get from an enemy if you're ever interested there's a christian playwright and one man and an actor who does either a one man or a a two-person show his name is ted schwartz and the show is called i'd like to buy an enemy and uh it's a great show uh because a guy comes into a search says i'd like to buy an enemy and from there on uh you just feel this little parable is unfolding helping us understand how we actually love to be afraid and we love to have an enemy so the first is fear second characteristic of authoritarianism is division now you might say hold it i thought that we're uniting people around fear of a common enemy exactly and the greatest common enemy is an enemy who is among us so if i can make you be afraid that if you aren't with us you're with the terrorists to use a george w bush phrase in other words to say we should be afraid of each other any of you could turn out to be a part of the red menace any of you might be in league with the devil any of you might be a closet al-qaeda sympathizer or isis sympathizer um if if we can make everyone be afraid not only of an enemy out there but of afraid of not being part of the group of people who are united against the enemy then the authoritarianism the the authoritarian leader or party or or cabal has enormous enormous power based on that on fear plus division and eventually division uh the division of the society is based on loyalty to the regime so if you're not loyal you now are as bad as the enemy if not worse uh so in germany uh the jews are made the great enemy every problem is blameable on the jews and you may not know this there's a deep connection between this and pandemics all through the middle ages uh pandemics spread through the black death and a number of other pandemics spread across europe and the christian majority of europe would typically blame jews for the pandemic jews are contaminating our wells jews are spreading this pandemic and so then there would be mass killings of jews or jews who would be banished from one town and forced to flee to some other area so you can see how when hitler brought up the jews there was a long history of of fear of the jews and then here came the real question are you a jew lover um are you a supporter of them because that makes you then an enemy of our own so you've got the first two characteristics fear and division third is distortion or distraction from the truth uh there is just so much amazing evidence of this when people study stalin and hitler and the paul pot regime and cambodia and uh any number of other authoritarian powerful authoritarian movements um what we need to do is have a ministry of propaganda that is constantly spreading either complete lies or partial truths or even changing the story from one day to the next because if we can make you confused enough and distrustful enough so that you won't trust your own eyes and your own ears if we can make you confused and distrustful enough already when you're anxious because of the enemy you're afraid of and the division that you have to take aside in if we can keep you destabilized not knowing what to believe then when the leader or the party or the regime says believe me trust me i'm the only one who's telling you the truth uh then the the authoritarian ruler has a powerful way to tighten up uh unity and and and uh bring the ranks together so uh so distortion or distraction from the truth there's a famous saying among people who study uh authoritarians they cover up crime with scandal so authoritarian leaders love to have scandals they love to have rumors they love to have controversy controversies because if you're talking about the scandal you're not noticing the crime uh and so there's this all this sort of sleight of hand pay attention to this while i this hand i rob you right and uh this constant distraction from the truth or distortion from the truth um is is it's not an error it's not sloppiness among authoritarians it's actually a feature of how they gain power distortion distraction from truth so we've got three uh just mentally see if you can remember them first is fear second is division third is distortion or destruction from the truth and then the fourth is suppression of dissent um this is one of the one of the reasons why the free press is such a threat to authoritarian leaders obviously they compete with the leader for telling the truth um and um the leader doesn't like that so you know stalin originally called the press the enemy of the people uh and so hatred of the press is very very typical of authoritarian regimes um uh and dissent is seen as such a threat to us and to our well-being because of the enemy that we've got you afraid of and the division by which we're cleaving society if you have any dissent you'll be put in the enemy camp and uh you'll be punished you'll be banished uh terrible things will happen and when you're part of the in group you believe everything they say about the out group but then when you dare to question it when you dare to question what's going on you realize i will be the next one to be put in the out group so there's a certain kind of tipping point of suppression of dissent where people become afraid to express their descent when you have those four characteristics when you have remember number one is fear number two is division uh number three is distortion distraction from the truth and fourth suppression of dissent then you have what's called an authoritarian attempt and uh meaning somebody's making a move to gain authoritarian power unaccountable power uh and that authoritarian attempt will continue they'll keep up the pressure until they're either defeated or they experience a breakthrough and the breakthrough can happen from any number of reasons uh but something happens that gives the authoritarian leader the breakthrough after the authoritarian breakthrough then the authoritarian is in control and then the everything changes um now you're in a new a new ball game and now you're surviving in an authoritarian regime and um that's another whole subject uh that that we could talk about but everyone changes when they're in an authoritarian regime uh people stop being able to speak freely all kinds of new social patterns develop and of course millions of people live have lived and do live today under authoritarian systems so that's the basic picture if you remember those four characteristics centralizing power through fear uh division of society based on loyalty to the regime distraction distortion from the truth and uh suppression of dissent maybe the last thing i'll say is that religious communities become great centers of authoritarianism um because of one of the really really disturbing findings of in the post-war era the first wave of research that was done and has been tested and retested and retested and here's the finding about 30 to 35 percent of people in every tested culture test high on authoritarian followership meaning if you put them in a condition of stress a condition of anxiety shame worry uh insecurity if you put them in a position of stress they will feel euphoria if a powerful authoritarian leader comes in and gives them reassurance now about 70 of us we don't buy it but about 30 of us it's it's nobody's fault this just it seems to go across cultures it seems to be a characteristic of the human psyche and i'm sure it has survival value in in the past 30 percent of us are most susceptible to authoritarian leadership and uh so what all that authoritarian leaders have to do is find 30 of people out there well when you're not in authoritarian times when authoritarianism isn't being forced on people where could authoritarian leaders go to find an authoritarian following and now can you see how religious groups could be the place where you go and you have somebody yell at you and scream at you and threaten you and maybe even tell you that god is an authoritarian who loves to torture anyone who dares to disagree can you see how that context would attract people who are attracted to authoritarianism and can you see how a few attracted people through religion and then a political leader were to come along and attract those religious leaders by making deals with them um suddenly religion could be deeply complicit in authoritarian structures now here's where life gets interesting because you look at jesus and jesus comes on the scene and is obviously a very strong leader he attracts huge crowds but what's very very interesting is he doesn't tell them there's an enemy out there you should hate that enemy he says no if if somebody calls themselves your enemy you still love them because god loves everybody jesus refuses to build his community based on hatred of the other in fact he looks at the people who are being excluded and shamed by the religious authoritarians of his day and he invites them to the table he says these people are human beings too i'm not ashamed to be associated with a prostitute or the tax collector or the leper or the sick or the poor i mean he breaks down the whole structure the whole tactics of authoritarianism as soon as i say that those of you who are deeply familiar with the gospels you'll be thinking of other examples remember he says i i don't call you servants anymore i call you friends um he doesn't say i'm the greatest and i always want to be the greatest he says listen i'm leaving and it's better that i leave you don't need me the spirit will be with you you'll do greater things than i've done the spirit will guide you i'm not essential uh you you can you i'm giving you something now i'm you you can bring my spirit you can have my spirit but you have power he's not trying to hoard all the power he's disseminating the power um you look at jesus as an anti-authoritarian leader and it is truly truly striking by the way if you ever want to accuse jesus of authoritarianism i think you would do it over his stories and parables about hell you would say yeah jesus says oh let's talk about hell that's typical authoritarian talk because authoritarian leaders always threaten the rebels with torture but isn't it interesting that when jesus tells these parables about hell it's not it's not the poor people who get sent to hell it's the rich people in other words it's the people with power so i've come to believe that jesus doesn't teach about how jesus unteaches about hell everything he says that we think is about hell and has this whole christian doctrine behind it i think is jesus reversal of everyone's assumptions as a way we would say of deconstructing all of their notions and and you ultimately see this when jesus is hanging on a cross and he and he's dying and he doesn't say i'll be back and get the bastards who did this to me but he says father forgive them they don't know what they're doing um put all that together and we have a very very interesting time um obviously i believe that donald trump is a classic example of an authoritarian leader making an authoritarian attempt i think he has found the 30 percent of the population who loves authoritarianism and the people who are submitted to those 30 so if you have an authoritarian husband you'd better believe he's putting pressure on his wife to vote as he votes and if you have an authoritarian father even if his children are in their 30s or 40s he's putting the pressure on them and they know that if they don't vote the way daddy votes or grandpa votes they will not be welcome at thanksgiving dinner and so i think i think what we've seen happen in the last five years or so has been an authoritarian attempt and it's not over yet uh and this authoritarian attempt could continue um for many many years and what that says to me it says two things one the church has grossly failed in teaching an anti-authoritarian message just as the christian church has failed to teach an anti-racist message by and large the white church has certainly failed to teach people uh to to inoculate people to make to help people understand the dangers of authoritarianism which i think are deeply deeply taught throughout the scriptures you can we can talk about this if you like um but i think it also means now that our churches have to wake up and get busy on what we failed to do in the past and that is to teach people the radical anti-authoritarian gospel that jesus taught and let me stop there and i don't know wesley if you want to start the ball rolling we just can open it up to everybody i'm actually just going to open it up i want to see people's thoughts because i'm i'm curious to know what what really jumped out at everyone just go ahead and unmute yourself and ask no one has a question come on guys i don't have a question but when you talked about the milgram experiments brian um i thought of zimbardo zimbardo too it's um the prison experiments and so yeah that just blew my mind i i have a question since we're talking about milgram that i can bounce off is that okay brian yeah great actually were you going to say something in response to riva i didn't mean to interact no go ahead so um i've heard that there have been some kind of redoings of the milgram experiment where you can see the person you're shocking or the person who's instructing you to shock someone is no longer wearing a white coat or you know there's all these different variables that they've changed to produce kind of less fallen line follow the leader responses um you know obviously suggesting that you know there are certain symbols of power certain levels of encounter with whoever you're you're hurting um how do we do do you have any ideas on how we can kind of unmask in that way in a societal sense that you know could could bring us into direct encounter with the people who were injuring by following directions yeah it's uh well this this is uh what a great question uh wesley um i think this is one of the reasons why having the courage to speak out wisely i mean i think this can be done well and this can be done in ways that actually make things worse but but having the courage to differ graciously those are i think the three key words courage to differ graciously with uh with falsehoods for example that an authoritarian regime puts out um see here's the problem if an authoritarian leader lies and you start losing it and you start insulting the leader and calling anyone who follows the leader a fool what does that make the followers feel we're being attacked now when you love when you feel euphoria about submitting to a strong man and you're being attacked what does it make you do it makes you cling to the strong man even more um on the other hand if you're just silent when the authoritarian leader lies then the message that gives to people is see everybody's falling in line um and so you you need to find a way to speak up and there there's a whole uh well i think that's why it becomes very very important for and in fact it's why i think the um you know the the freedom of speech is such a powerful uh i i don't think that the the real democratic value of freedom of speech is to let people say any stupid thing they want but in in the name of freedom uh obviously they have that freedom but the freedom to speak up against an authoritarian leader is a very very precious freedom because it allows one person to stand up and do what one of the milgram uh adaptations is that you do a group of people they're all in different cubicles pressing the button and turning up the dial and then one person speaks up and says hey this is crazy i'm not doing this anymore and as soon as one person speaks up all the other people have the courage to speak up but finding the person with the courage to go first is is difficult so this says to me we have to have the courage um we have to have the courage to to speak up and we have to teach people how to speak up by the way authoritarianism doesn't just happen in governments it happens in families and and so i i i wouldn't be surprised if some of us in this circle either in our own lives our own families you know where maybe there was sexual abuse going on and one cousin or one niece or one person in the larger family finally had the courage to speak up and tell the truth and you find out that a whole lot of people have known about it and let it go on right so it happens in families it happens in denominations uh it happens in congregations so this courage to speak up becomes one of the things that i think we teach um uh yeah i mean there's so many examples of this as soon as you start thinking about this go back and read a book like the book of esther and you realize the book of esther is a book about authoritarianism and so many things going on there you read the book of acts uh the the disciples are getting arrested not because they're christian but because they're speaking the truth in an authoritarian context and you realize that part of what was going on in in judaism was that the temple was bought and paid for by the emperor the roman emperor um and uh so the temple elite were submissive to the authoritarian leader and suddenly you rise oh what's going on in jesus day is what happens when some of our fellow jews are submissive to the roman authoritarian leader so all of that's all of that's going on i'm not sure if i answered your question well or not wesley but that that would be just one example of i think uh how how some of those follow-up studies to milgram sort of give us some ideas of what to do can i help let me go down for graciously because that's one that you should have written down anybody who's got something so how do we learn to be gracious in the face of this that's my biggest struggle i i feel um from a place of privilege that it's my responsibility to try to speak truth uh regardless and i've been pretty well known for being outspoken um but to to do it with grace um [Music] is sometimes i i just feel like i have to walk away yeah yeah well nancy is it your nazi right yes um nancy um first of all thank god that you speak up like like let's let's be honest all of us make one mistake or the other more often either we speak up a lot but we don't do it with grace or we're very polite but we never speak out right so thank god for people who speak up even if they sometimes go a little bit too far um uh because that courage seems to me to be very very hard to come by um nancy let me tell you a quick uh story um i when the word got out that i was doing some thinking and writing about authoritarianism i got contacted by the women's march and a couple of leaders of the women's march are friends of mine and they said hey we're doing this thing called digital defenders um could you um you know would you help us so i learned what the digital defenders are doing and this is just so brilliant um they recruited a group of people who like to spend a lot of time on facebook and instagram and twitter and all the rest and here's what they said we've got people radicalizing young people um they're they're turning young white men into white supremacists they're turning uh you know young white women into white supremacists they're they're they're turning people into they're recruiting people for extremism and they do it on the internet well if you find any of these people first you find the extremist recruiter then you find the troll of the recruiter who's calling him names and cussing him out and and and making fun of him and mocking him and so what they started to realize how this is playing into an authoritarian dance is that if if a person's recruiting and is sounding very rational and concerned about safety and concerned about america and all this and somebody's attacking him then you think that the person being attacked gains credibility yeah so what the digital defenders do is they go online and they find the person doing the attacking and they teach them to do uh two or three things let's see if i'll remember first thing they teach them to do is agree with the attacker say you're like let's use an example um president uh trump's uh uh inauguration crowd was much bigger than president obama's which was just a fault falsity right there i know better so so uh somebody says this another person says you're a blankety black blankety blank blank blank attacks them right um the the digital defender comes on and says i agree with you that facts matter and that we can count the number of people who are at events using photographs and i agree um i think it's important for us to stand for the truth uh and without insulting people who are only believing what they've been told something like that you see what they do is then they come along and they add some sanity because the people who are being influenced by the recruiter they need a reasonable compassionate voice because here's the deep deal one of the things that authoritarian leaders know how to do they know how to make you belong yes and and in a sense if the only people who respond to the authoritarian leader who's giving you belonging are attacking them you think well i don't want to be like them they'll attack me so that's where the the graciously comes in find a way to agree and then find a way to treat your opponent as a human being yes and so often when i i will ask people why do you believe that yeah what what leads you to that and too often i think folks are just like not willing to engage and at that point i just um but i like the idea of you know supporting people other people to amplifying people who are speaking the truth um nancy um you might be interested you may be seeing this already but uh i wish somebody might even be able to find the link and put it in the chat but there is a ted talk by the daughter of the uh uh westboro baptist church i'm forgetting her name now right um uh anyway she tells the story of how she was brought out of that extremist religious authoritarian group and here's what it was it was a group of people who just patiently it took a long time yeah just patiently kept treating her like a human being yeah and and not being freaked out do you have it wesley i believe her name is megan phelps roper i'm going to put it in the chat right now so if anybody wants to watch that later it's right there in the chat awesome thank you wesley sorry continue sorry dinner that's great further questions i see the team rhodey is unmuted and chris is raising her hand so um who wants to talk first well i would i was just going to share that i remember many years ago ross snyder teaching some of us that the the easiest way to form a group is to have an enemy yes and um you know unfortunately the way to develop a church is to have an enemy yes that's not a very strong way to develop a church but many many churches get developed that way and especially as we look at the fundamentalists of the evangelical churches we can see that they spend an awful lot of time preaching about those enemies um and it gives you a sense of belonging then because you've got an enemy out there that's after you um and i just think that's helpful to look at that um yeah boy what an amazing thing and when you bring that insight uh john to the bible and you go back and you think for example um uh well a great example would be for the jews who would be the ultimate enemy it's those dirty egyptians for how they persecuted us um well guess what when you read the book of genesis you find out that before the egyptians ever enslaved any jews abraham and sarah enslaved an egyptian and so you find the bible is always messing with these easy we're the good guys they're the bad guys who are the bad guys the moabites and then they tell the story of ruth um who are the who are the bad guys the ninevites and then in the story of jonah the ninevites repent in in a way that you know nobody ever could have believed uh so this messing up of the enemy line is is so powerful in the bible can you try to explain how the 30 percent seem to win even though they're 70 on the side of right yes um uh chris let me just say before i um before i answer that um because what i'm about to say is sort of counterintuitive but somebody just mentioned they were reading uh obama's book and um you know something about barack obama he always seems to be having fun like he he seems to be having fun um tell you something interesting about donald trump he seems to be having fun when he's doing these rallies now he's having fun in a different way but the thing i want to point out is that people are attracted to people who seem to be having fun and i think a huge part of the appeal of an authoritarian leader is the creation of euphoria we're finally the people who are willing to stand up to these evil people we aren't being intimidated by you know these other people we're gonna stand up for what's ours um and there's this euphoria that that comes from this so i think there's 30 percent that just like the first time they hear an authoritarian they just think that's what i want that's that's what i've been waiting for i sure wish i could be on that team um and then there's another group of people who say wow they're having a lot of fun over there i'd like some of that you know and then i think they're attracted uh to to join in with it um what becomes really disturbing is when you then start to see once you get to a certain point where you actually think your life would be threatened to disagree with the authoritarian leader it's amazing how the authoritarian leaders approval shoots up even higher because i think there's something in all of our brains that says at some point if you can't beat them join them and and it becomes and then people start to resent anyone who stands up to the authoritarian leader because that just looks like trouble and and something that i don't think we've come to terms with in the united states is that for the united states to plan genocide against the native peoples or to plan or to plan and execute uh a massive project of racial enslavement um required a huge number of authoritarian leaders and i think the irony is we tell this story about ourselves that we're so we love freedom so much but we i think we have another part of our story to tell you what i'm saying we we have to come to terms with how this has been normalized again and again in our history and uh and any any of you who know the stories of how uh how immigration has worked um the deal that that america made to each group of immigrants is if you're irish and you come here we call you the dirty irish the way that you can become white like the rest of us is to join us in hating black people um and then now the irish are considered white and then the germans come and there are all kinds of names that americans call german immigrants but they s but the deal is if you will join us in hating our enemy you'll become one of us and and this assimilation by shared hostility i think actually has enormous power on the human brain and and i again i think it's when you start to look at jesus and the teaching of jesus like just look at the story uh uh you know which is a contestant story nobody knows exactly where it came from but it's inserted in the gospel of john of jesus of a group of men getting ready to stone a woman who was caught in adultery now can you see this it's those sexual sexually immoral people who are our greatest enemy we've got to kill them all you can just imagine pre a preaching that would stir up that kind of fervor and um you can imagine then to tell the story of jesus walking in and standing in between them and the woman who's about to be stoned jesus is disrupting the whole authoritarian uh thing i mean once you start seeing it you can't unsee it if you read the gospel of luke when jesus does his first sermon in nazareth he after he reads that passage about good news to the poor recovery of sight to the blind he then tells a story about how god healed naaman the syrian and the zarephath woman he tells a story that god cares for gentiles hold it hold it hold it all of our authorities authoritarian structures are based on us being pure and gentiles being scum and then jesus goes and messes it up man it you just start to see it it's it's woven all through and and what uh to me what a disgusting and tragic irony that the christian religion doesn't even seem to see this theme that once you see it it's so amazingly obvious in the gospels yes david yeah i i appreciate what you've said is certainly good rich rich food for thought and one of the things that strikes me um in terms of addressing confronting uh authoritarianism is the importance of a free press and i think the whole realm of journalism is um upside i mean it i i can't put my finger on what's going on when local newspapers are dying um our local newspaper here really doesn't do much in terms of investigative journalism per se um and uh um and of course we have just the we have you know sources of information for people that are just that are just lies that are i mean that are untruthful um and and whole social media i just i just didn't know if you had any thoughts on that i just would welcome your thoughts on to me that's always been an important part in looking at history uh in terms of raising the questions of the scent and voices of the scent and it just seems it seems like it's become a very unreliable or an inconsistent medium right now david i couldn't agree with you more um i couldn't agree with you more i think we have uh first and i think it's important to realize that the rise of the free press and the rise of democracy are so closely related and when the press begins to lose power the democracy loses power and authoritarian regimes gain more power i think that uh a hundred years from now if we get the free press back to the degree we need it we're going to find out that by turning the press primarily into business um and especially when our news shifted from newspapers to television which is super dependent on advertising uh revenue um suddenly now we're in a really interesting situation where a word that i used earlier comes into play and the word is a cabal um and so imagine that for an authoritarian leader to gain power he needs powerful business leaders to align with him uh because they provide cover they provide uh you know cooperation um there was a fellow well actually all of you would know the name robert mueller back in i think it was about 2011 robert mueller gave a famous speech and he said the great threat that we face today are iron triangles and he described iron triangles as alliances between corrupt government officials uh business interests and crime syndicates and i think we have to add a force to that iron triangle and in this little authoritarian book authoritarianism book that wesley read a little bit from i say i think there's a fourth and i think it's religious leaders and i think when you put those four together you have this powerful cabal who can align their interests and scratch each other's backs all of them resent the free press and it's funny david you mention this because just today i heard somebody on the radio talking about how he was leaving his job in journalism and what he was doing is starting a a patreon page because he said all i need to do is to get several hundred people willing to pay me a hundred dollars a year and i'll get a better salary than i'm getting now and i'll have none of those corporate pressures so that you know 800 people uh paying me a hundred dollars a year can keep me going to do my work with more freedom than i have now so i wouldn't be surprised if it might take people like us um finding ways to start re-supporting actual especially local journalism um i'll just give you an example uh you know i lived just down the road of marco island and i helped organize an event here uh as part of the uh during the campaign and it was a a pro-biden event on marco island as you can imagine that didn't go too well and um we had about between 75 and 100 proud boys come and block the entrance to our event and make and threaten everyone who tried to come to the event and uh i mean what happened should have been on national news um but we couldn't get anybody uh to cover it and after even after it was up on facebook nobody showed any interest in it uh well what you find out is the proud boys have an awful lot of power in marco island and uh uh so suddenly you start realizing yeah and and the corporate interests uh are playing all these constituencies that they can make money off of against each other ryan i'm also watching in real time a really concerning thing i live in a brand new town that is just forming called babcock ranch oh yeah yeah and um one of the things that i'm seeing is um that there are some church communities who are trying to move in the first ones were assemblies of god and i ask people when a new church starts and they're trying to get everybody to go and say well what denomination is it and they keep saying it's non-denominational i said well what do you believe and they're like well i don't you know i i just like them we have a good time and it's just it's mind-boggling but i know that the people in those groups are coming in to find people who are not willing to ask questions yes they just want to belong yes and check off that box that i have a church home yes um and i start feeling a little peculiar after saying okay well you're lutheran which kind of lutheran are you and you know missouri senate or elka and people going why are you asking these things because it's my faith journey to just say this is what it really is yeah yeah um and i don't know what i don't know quite how to um not combat that but just to introduce people to another a different way yes yes well let me say two things about that nancy first well three things first again god bless you for speaking up and asking those questions because they need to be asked um you know it might help to say something like um i'm really concerned about authoritarianism in politics and religion and that's why i'm asking these questions i i i think religion can be such a powerful and positive force in our lives but i really think it can also end up hurting people and that's why i'm concerned that just knowing that might might let them know where you're coming from um but um uh here's the great challenge and and this is why you know your congregation uh you know i i'm so grateful that you exist uh uh we need non-authoritarian congregations to give people the joy of belonging for non-authoritarian reasons and and if what we have is authoritarian organizations political parties churches companies military outfits uh giving people a powerful experience of belonging in exchange for submitting to authoritarian uh those four authoritarian strategies and then we have other groups that offer very little in the way of belonging the joy of belonging uh you know we shouldn't be surprised uh how things go and it's one of the reasons we need uh uh you know vital vibrant uh what i would call progressive and non-authorian authoritarian faith communities that present a vision of god that's not authoritarian and that that are not embarrassed to say you know one of jesus's greatest teachings is to love your enemies so when we go around dividing the world into us and them um we're actually making it harder to actually live out what jesus taught you know that kind of a thing uh that that becomes important and my hope and prayer is that because we're going to see and i hope none of us expect this is going to get better overnight i think it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better but here's what i hope as we see a resurgence of authoritarian politics and authoritarian religion i think it has to then give non-authoritarian politicians and non-authoritarian religious communities courage to say we better you know stop being complacent this is dangerous times and we have our work to do what's the old saying from edmund burke all that's necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good people to do nothing and i suppose we could say all that's necessary for the forces of authoritarianism to win in the world is for non-authoritarian people to be complacent and that might be a good place uh to uh wrap it up wesley anything you want to ask are any final questions from anybody uh i have nothing and i think that's a lovely note on on which to wrap it up does anybody have a last thought that they that they really really want to get out i'm seeing head shake so i think we're all good um brian thank you so so much for coming we are so glad to have you um so this will be going up on youtube a little later guys so if you want to share with your friends that's when that's what you can do brian again our absolute thanks if you guys want to come next month it's going to be a representative from the immokalee fair housing alliance who's going to come and talk about what they're doing out there um thank you again may god bless everyone and have a lovely december thank you brian thank you so much

Channel: Fort Myers Congregational United Church of Christ

Views: 2,160

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Id: RTRmjChuyRI

Length: 60min 33sec (3633 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 04 2020