choose your own reality

Our competing realities share one thing in common: they invite us to undergo the demything of America.

We live and die by narrative. Our lives are constructed largely not by what happens to us, but by the stories we tell about what happens to us. This is why language matters, why words matter, and why there’s never “only rhetoric.” Whoever tells the narrative — by what means and in what form — shapes reality. In America, reality itself is constantly unstable. It seems to quiver, spasm, crack, fizzle, contract, expand, threatening to explode; reality feels combustible. Reality is made up largely of our words, and we have no collective language, no consensus on what words mean.

Like the ancient story of the Tower of Babel, we watch as our massive human ego project shakes and sways, built on a myth of unlimited expansion, unrestrained ambition, manifest destiny, and individualism. Constructing a reality that denies our frailties and vulnerabilities on a myth of independence instead of dependence, building as if we were not created, as if we are not contingent — we overreach, over, and over. Speech between people and between peoples signifies nothing, clarifies nothing. Words are trivialized, relativized, weaponized, and then finally just reduced to meaningless, unintelligible gibberish—to babble.

A few weeks ago, I was getting ready to spend the rest of the evening on an online book study I am doing with Drew Hart, PhD, and my mate Jarrod McKenna on Drew’s crucial text, Trouble I’ve Seen, when my phone, like reality itself, started to rumble and would not stop rumbling. I scrambled to read the messages and find out what was wrong. Suddenly, I was bombarded with images of peaceful protestors assaulted by tear gas, bodies thrown around, yet another scene of terror in this chapter of the American nightmare—and then the pantomimed piety of the man standing in front of the boarded-up church. He was making an alien attempt at holding a Bible. His movements were so stilted you’d imagine this was a person mimicking the way humans might hold an object for the very first time. His attempts at playing cowboy are always more Mel Brooks than Clint Eastwood, but the words he spoke were not comic, but ominous. He stood there holding the word of God like it was some exotic, foreign object, and as he Babel-ed on, the words he spoke were words of threats to a nation already at a reckoning. Peaceful protestors were treated violently like sheep in the street for the photo op, like the president is a sociopathic overgrown adolescent hell-bent on getting the perfect backdrop for an Instagram photo.

That is what I saw. Or… was it? Someone else surely saw the photos of the president walking across the street with his entourage with the same kind of reverence I feel when U2 walks out on stage against a bright wall of red light to play “Where the Streets Have No Name.” Someone else heard him speak with false, blustering bravado and called it confidence, and heard not heartless threats, but the reassurance of order. Just like some people “see” protests initiated by “punks” (and what comes to your mind is maybe bored white suburban mischief-makers on skateboards), while the president sees “thugs.” (We, of course, have no idea what kind of image that is supposed to conjure, since 45 claims to not know what any words mean. Maybe you think of rowdy Scotsmen coming in kilts?) Antifa or white nationalists groups—you say tomato, I say tomat-o! George Soros is funding a far-left insurrection, or it’s the defining civil rights moment of the 21st century. Potato, potat-o!

I saw scary clips of what would seem to be only more demonstrative examples of a militarized police force, unhinged. You saw clips of people looting at Target and then checked the deadbolt again on your front door. I saw an old man with a cane knocked down, a Black man singled out for arrest among a group of kneeling protestors — evidently for speaking with too much clarity—an obvious press photographer pounded with a shield (really, many attacks on members of the press). A woman maced from behind while she walked away. An InfoWars crew in Austin allegedly setting fire to a homeless man’s bed, staging it as if it had been done by protestors. A white shop owner in Dallas comes out swinging an actual sword at a young Black man who is running from him, so then a crowd of men respond by punching and kicking him, pelting him with rocks — that’s a very real, difficult scene, but it’s also a Rorschach test — what did you see? Oh, and all of this in the middle of a pandemic and subsequent financial crisis that was designed by scientists working for Bill Gates, or completely fabricated by the Democratic Party to win the election, or maybe it is judgment on your LGBTQ neighbors or God throwing a temper tantrum because there isn’t enough prayer in schools. (These are ever-popular choices.)

Not everyone is experiencing the same terror or the same rage, as a lavalike flow of ever-present white hostility toward Black and Brown bodies is on display right now, replayed over and over on our indifferent little screens. The psychic and bodily trauma experienced within these communities is without parallel. What all kinds of people are experiencing are competing realities as they flicker on and off the screen, and perhaps one more opportunity to undergo a demything of America.

The demything of America

This demything, or unmything, is first experienced as its own (lesser than firsthand) kind of trauma. As Alexander Shaia says, “Trauma is just a fancy word for change.” But transformation is a threat, and the forces that war against its possibility, while invisible, are very real. And change is not yet possible for any of us who still cling to the overreach of our collective Tower of Babel building project, using our words in isolating, alienating, self-aggrandizing, or self-deceiving ways. “The truth will set you free,” but first it will wreak havoc on your fragile ego.

Archetypal images swirl all around us, attached to deep centers of internal meaning and external realities. Images of men and women (especially men) in iconic blue uniforms have deep resonance for good or for ill, as do men in riot gear that you associate with apocalyptic films. These authority figures alternately serve as powerful symbols of stability or terror, conjuring feelings of comfort and relief, or gut-level, excruciating fear. Confederate statues being torn down also have deep mythic meaning. Images of fire — like Dante’s inferno you imagined would be hell from a Baptist Sunday school class? Or in the Christian tradition, like the flames of fire that fell on the day of Pentecost — when the arrogance of Babel was finally undone, and divisive language was replaced with ecstatic, divine speech, so that all of God’s children are liberated to speak wonder in their own mother tongue, and yet all be heard and understood?

Does the fire conjure images of treasures you have held dear going up in flames, or stir in you the hope that an oppressive structure or system that has worked active harm in your life might finally be destroyed? Do you worry about what you’d lose in the fire, or how you’d make it another day if the building that caged you was not set to flame? And what do you see burning in an actual fire anyway? What is emphasized in your mind? A locally owned businesses, a suburban shopping center, or a Christforsaken building long haunted by the memory of tortured slaves? Because you probably have already chosen that reality, too, already judged and assigned meaning.

I believe that America is in need of nothing less than an exorcism.

I also sift and sort stories and assign meaning. I am aware that these stories are not monolithic but polyphonic, not simple but nuanced, complex. I am aware that these stories do not have to or need to add up to an easy narrative that will be commonly shared, and of my own capacity to be reductionistic, and my own inclinations to want to solve tensions prematurely, to construct meaning that will minimize my own internal discomfort. But I must make meaning nonetheless. Like anyone else, my own sense of meaning is not self-generated or formed in a vacuum and is in need of faithful guides in order to be shaped.

The founding myth/founding sin

Andfor a whole lot of reasons, this is a narrative I am willing to bet my whole life on: I believe that America is in need of nothing less than an exorcism.I believe that for 450 years, the principle that is white supremacy has enslaved the soul of America, while we enslaved others and continue to enslave through a criminal justice system that is a literal, concrete extension of chattel slavery. White supremacy is both our founding father and our original sin.I believe that the forces that have enslaved and continue to enslave white America cannot just be explained sociologically, historically, or psychologically. I believe it is spiritual bondage underwritten by demonic power.Ibelieve that racism is a spirit not just in the sense that it is a disposition, but that there isa primal force of evil that is greater than the sum of its parts.

And I believe, from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet, that racism has not been a peripheral feature, but the central, galvanizing energy behind the administration of Donald J. Trump and the larger spiritual reality it represents. The words “galvanizing energy” are strategically chosen because the external political philosophy has always been jumbled and incoherent. With the largest debt in our history, there is no impulse toward fiscal or economic conservatism. There is only a cocktail of nationalism, racism, xenophobia, and nativism. I believe that “America first” is not just a political slogan, but an idolatrous claim incompatible with the worship of Jesus as the Christ, deeply entrenched in people precisely because it taps into a kind of demonizing spiritual power.

I do not buy it anymore when people say it’s about “policies not personality” (even though I believe they might believe it), because beyond Trump’s cynical exploitation of the pro-life movement and vague rhetoric about religious liberty, both the policies and the “personality” have had only one central through line — from the “birther” claims about Obama, to the Muslim ban, to separating kids from parents at the border, to “very fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville, to “shithole countries,” to “they can go back where they come from,” to Kaepernick and others kneeling in protest are “sons of bitches,” while white nationalist militias with semi-automatics in the state capitol are “very good people,” to protestors are “thugs,” to the current, intentional, conscious escalation of racial tensions — it’s only ever been about one thing, and it’s a word he used to all of our governors: “dominate/domination.” It’s always been about white supremacy; it’s only been about white supremacy.

Now, of course,Trump as a person is not an ideological purist about anything, because he has no ideals nor constructive ideas.This is why, as harsh as this diagnostic might sound, I do not have especially deep feelings of animosity toward him as a man.Trump as a man is an empty bag of air. Like the disembodied souls in C.S. Lewis’The Great Divorce, he seems to have no substance at all.You wonder if he walked barefoot through a park, would the glass penetrate his feet? There is no crazy like a fox or three-dimensional chess; there is just ego, an instinct for self-protection, pathological narcissism, lightly firing synapses, and a man fully devoid of empathy, depth, breadth, reading.

Far from a supervillain, Trump is evidence that most real evil done by any of us is born out of garden-variety insecurity and naked self-interest (which should terrify us all, if we are self-reflective).Trump may have a catastrophic impact on people’s real lives, but whatever petty impulses that animate him are perfectly dull and pedestrian.When you see it for what it is, evil is perpetually uninteresting. He has, however, spent time around plenty of ideologues who are very aware of what they are doing and how to animate the hollow man—people like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, who have been quite effective at channeling the insecure “personality” into quite malevolent policy. (Note: The reason I had my public round with Jerry Falwell Jr. at Liberty University was provoked precisely by his explicit call for white evangelicals to unite with Bannon.)

Part of the reason we are in such chaos is that there is an entire alternate reality that both underwrites and actively shapes Trump’s way of seeing the world

It is tempting to try to develop this case further, but I will not do so, both because I have done so at length and at a very high volume for over more than years in pieces that are still available, and for this reason: I am aware that if you don’t see any of this by now, you are probably not going to unless some dramatic event shakes you loose. Part of the reason we are in such chaos is that there is an entire alternate reality that both underwrites and actively shapes Trump’s way of seeing the world, and if you choose that at this point, I don’t know what else to say to you. No one piece or protest or sermon will counteract hours a day of Fox News, even though it is common knowledge that most on-air personalities have more in common with professional wrestlers playing a part than they do with actual journalists. And I certainly will be no match for the ruthless algorithms of Facebook, not only the source of so many cute baby photos and cat memes, but also the most serious and sinister platform for broad disinformation in the history of the world.

Since I have been speaking this way from the beginning (to the consternation of a great many people in my life), Trump’s gesture in front of St. John’s Church was not the “final straw” to make me speak out. I do see his shtick with the Bible to be a kind of performative, ritualized blasphemy, as the definition of taking God’s name in vain is not swearing, but using the name of God to manipulate or coerce others. But I do not believe it was necessarily “worse” than other moments so much as especially explicit, clear, and clarifying as to why the Trump phenomenon has always been so dangerous: its overtly religious character. Trumpism does not merely have religious contours or spirituality but is itself a religious spirit, in which people experience the raw power of sanctifying themselves at someone else’s expense in a powerful simulacrum of righteousness.

Of course, I have countless critiques of neoliberalism and no confidence in the Democratic Party, but I am in no mood to offer tedious disclaimers. It is obvious at this point that the pathological malevolence of the Trump administration is beyond the grid of a broken two-party system, and that the current dangers transcend the existing continuum, however problematic the continuum may be.

Choose your own reality

The reality-shaping words most at stake now are not just expressly political ones — they are our most basic human ones. We speak as if we do not know what it means to be loving, or to be unloving, to be gracious or unkind, to be tender or to be hard. Because I believe in original goodness that precedes any idea of “original sin” (my Bible starts in the creation of Genesis 1–2, not the “fall” of Genesis 3), I am inclined to believe most people really do mean well and want to do what is right to the extent that they understand it. I do fear, however, that it is a much worse thing to purposefully, consciously choose a lie than to merely believe one, or even tell one. This is part of the premise of M. Scott Peck’s People of the Lie, a book that does what most progressive people are unwilling to do: speak honestly about the reality of evil. In his clinical experience as a psychologist, he finds a common thread that in the handful of cases where he deals with patients who seem given over to true evil — who demonically, intentionally take pleasure in harming others — the gateway seemed to be a time when they intentionally chose to believe a lie.

I think this is what Jesus has in mind in the gospels when he speaks of the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit — the “unpardonable sin” that so terrified me when I was young. The idea is not that there is some particular act that is unforgivable, but rather that the Spirit of God is the Spirit of truth. Once you begin to intentionally call good evil and evil good, and thus reject the authenticating witness of the Spirit, there is simply no other path to salvation — to healing, wholeness, shalom — that does not go by way of the Spirit. I wonder if, as a culture, we are getting far too practiced in this most serious sin when we reject our most basic human intuition to recognize that which is good, gentle, kind, and lovely, especially in our neighbors. That even when we see the goodness of God at work in neighbors who are different from us in some way, we label them as evil because we have to choose the particularity of a narrative over the particularity of a person made in the image of God, worshipping an idea/ideology more so than honoring the body of our neighbor: the very definition of idolatry.

“And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). The truth, the terrible truth of our history and of our present, is staring us down from our little screens. It is staring us down through the eyes of a great cloud of witnesses like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery. What is at stake is not what social media platform we will use, what news outlet we will believe, but reality itself. The lives of our friends are at stake. Our very souls are in peril.

The new reality of Pentecost

We have an opportunity to embrace the demything of America. If you are experiencing literal nightmares right now, if you feel reality itself bending beneath you — perhaps you might consider where the Spirit of truth may be extending an invitation to you in the midst of the chaos. The Spirit, for Christians, is the Spirit of Christ, the spirit of freedom. We need not fear the Spirit, because even when welcoming the Spirit means we welcome our own undoing, it always means we welcome the Spirit of the future. A good future, a future that was not made possible before. We are summoned into a new future by way of telling the truth about our present and about our past.

I get annoyed at this talk of some vague white guilt, as if those of us who believe racism is America’s founding and most defining sin, and that this sin exists on a systemic and structural level, want white people to go around self-flagellating or feeling vaguely bad about themselves. You could only imagine this if you know nothing of the Christian understanding of confession.

On the day of Pentecost, when the fire of God’s Spirit is first given to the Church, the apostle Peter gets up and preaches a sermon in which he tells the crowd, “God sent Jesus of Nazareth… you killed him, but God has raised Him from the dead.” And then he invites them to repent and believe. As Peter, like all of the earliest Christians, was Jewish, people who saw themselves as part of a kind of reform movement within Judaism, of course, there was nothing anti-Semitic about this. And, for that matter, surely almost no one who is in that crowd was part of the literal crowd who lynched Jesus of Nazareth! And yet, they are called to own the truth of their complicity in a Love-crucifying, God-denying world. They are called to own the truth of the part they all have played in constructing the kind of world that would reject and torture the Son of Love. They are called to reckon with the truth, not so they can wallow in shame, but that they may ultimately be set free from it. We confess our sins not to beg God to do something God in Christ has already done on the cross, when Jesus says, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” We confess because the rock-bottom truth of things is that we all live much of our lives out of alignment with love, and we want to come back into alignment.

I truly believe these are matters of revelation, not of information, so that when our hearts are tender and open, we are able to begin to see these truths for what they are. If you are ready for such a breaking open, perhaps you can’t gulp down these kinds of ideas and images quickly enough. If you are not, this sounds like stark raving lunacy to you, like more gibberish, more unintelligible babble.

But two days after Pentecost Sunday, here is what this incredibly important day on the church calendar has always been about: There is a time that comes when the Babel Tower project no longer sustains us, and when the old foundations begin to crumble, and we are open to a reality that is more expansive—a reality that is bigger, broader, wilder. It is a reality big enough to encompass any and all kinds of people from any and all kinds of places. It is not a reality in which you can settle down, or expect anyone else to settle down — it is reality born of the Spirit, and of fire.

When those early Christians are filled with the Spirit, and tongues of fire begin to dance above their heads like the Spirit has always been dancing over them, singing over them, delighting in them, something remarkable happens. A crowd gathers outside that tiny upper room, made up of a great diversity of people and dialects. And they, all of a sudden, can hear the praise of God in their own respective language. The worship didn’t start after they gathered round to listen. It was an ancient song that already started and that they were finally able to witness.

A great cloud of witnesses

The truth of which I am writing about today is not mine, but has been carried forth by a great crowd of witnesses who have already been preaching, praying, testifying, dancing, shouting, singing. It is a liberation story that began when God raised Israel up out of Egypt and Jesus the Christ up out of the grave. It is a story full of fire that we can see and hear and feel in both the faith and in the rage of the oppressed.

I have written and talked a lot about how transformative my experience has been and continues to be with the Black church in America and the many faithful guides and witnesses I have found there. This is not because I believe in the romanticized, racist trope of the magical Black person — a supporting character in a book or film with a quasi-mystical nature who comes to the aid of some white protagonist. It is rather because the Black church in America, because of the experience of suffering on the underside and the faithful witness to Jesus, is the spirituality with the deepest tradition of praise, protest, lament, and arguably the only entity in American history ever to engineer a movement of widespread, widescreen moral and spiritual transformation. Instead of trading one sentimentalized, piety-filled kind of fundamentalism that is all about having the proper set of ideas for another, more progressive version of the same, the Black church has consistently demonstrated real community transformation.

And the Black church has given us, and continues to give us, many prophets (though it seems we would not believe the prophets, even if God raised them from the dead). That’s why I love listening to my friend Otis Moss III at Trinity United Church of Christ preach as often as possible — I don’t just want to hear a sermon, I need to hear prophetic speech. I need the flame of Pentecost that transfigures, transforms, and transmutes. I need that fire (unlike my fire) that sanctifies rather than condemns. But from Dr. King on, we have little patience for the reality that is embodied in our prophets, for their truth with hard edges. Fox News, MSNBC, and the Facebook algorithm still let me choose my own reality but do not threaten me with flame.

Perhaps the only sentence I could get a consensus on here is that America is on fire. I believe that the Trump administration thought they could play with the fire of white supremacy, use it like a campfire to keep warm — ignite it just a little to fire up a certain section of the base — to rustle up votes when needed. But it is a wildfire, a demonic fire that they stoke with their words and dog whistles, a spirit that cannot be conjured at will and then stuffed back into a bottle. Protestors did not set the world on fire—the administration did, without reckoning with the fact that this familiar spirit they coddled would come only to steal, kill, and destroy us all, ravaging the oppressor far more than the oppressed, devouring their very souls.

But there is another fire that is still available that burns with the heat of the love of God. It is not wildfire, but it is not domesticated, either — it is the flame of love that cannot be coerced, co-opted, or controlled. It is a holy fire, sanctifying fire, transforming fire — the consuming fire of the Spirit. Like the burning bush, this Pentecostal fire is a fire that never stops burning but never consumes, which will never destroy. It is the disrupting fire of the God of Sinai, the God of the Exodus who is forever on the move. It is power, power, wonder-working power, the likes of which a man who would mow down protestors for a photo op will never understand. But because it is the flame of the Spirit of truth, it is a fire that may cost us everything.