Please spend a few minutes to get to know my friend Samir Selmanović. Samir is the Executive Director of Common Good Christians and invited me to speak this week at San Juans Summit, a gathering of progressive Christians who want to reclaim their faith and their strongly held beliefs from the grip of the hypocritical right.
https://www.facebook.com/frank.schaeffer.16/videos/1260005044129599/
How do we make our way back into love, beauty and creation? Discover my new book Letter to Lucy: A Manifesto of Creative Redemption—In the Age of Trump, Fascism and Lies, a multi-touch book about art, love and parenting, from the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the prophetic music of Green Day and everything in between. Read the first chapter for free on your kindle fire or iOS device. Available now on iBooks and Amazon.
Want more political videos and commentary? Show your support.
3 Comments. Leave new
thank you for the heart-breakingly simple truth. it is breaking my heart to see what is happening to our world. no longer is commonsense common . No longer is there community of heart and spirit.
I was not surprised by Donald Trump. We have all known similar people. I was totally surprised that more than 80% of the white evangelistic Christians voted for him. Many of my own relatives and friends were somehow totally deceived.
I am grateful for your reports from the various conferences you attend. This one, with these two interviews is especially thought-provoking. I’ve seen Pavlovitz’s Facebook posts, but never heard Samir. I will look up Common Good Christians when I leave this page.
I was impressed when Samir spoke of the desire of us disaffected people to remain, regain, and revive the faith we depended on for all our lives. I was impressed by his description of the same dislocation of feeling upon seeing the people you had been assured were Christian people but knowing you’d been looking at the pristine outward skin of a rotten fruit—these people said the right things, maybe seemed a little “off” now and then, but they seemed to be Christian people—and then, on November 10, 2016, one of them mentioned she had voted for the Abomination and the sense of shock overwhelmed me—and kept getting worse the more of them I realized were so far off the path I had assumed them to be on. This same woman told me how “good” they were–how her son-in-law took food to the homeless every Sunday, etc., and I’m wondering, why do the homeless get peanut butter sandwiches instead of someone advocating government policy that would help them become UN-homeless. Why do you feed people to keep them alive to experience compounded misery dished out by the people you vote for?
Samir spoke of the same shock and disbelief that people claiming to be Christian and not having a clue about what that actually looks like in day to day life—but living instead in some fictional fantasy where all that matters is that Jerusalem is declared the capital of Israel and THAT—THEIR work, not the work of Christ, not the work of God, but THEIR declaration of a physical designation of importance—would force Christ to return to earth. Astounding. Pathetic.
This is rambling, and I don’t know if anyone ever reads it. But what I need to know is how to hear what work is being done by these organizations and groups and movements you seem to hear and know about—how do you know about these things? How do you know these people and where they meet and what they’re doing? How can the rest of us know?
Recently I’ve come to understand that I have been allowing the evangelical cult to define Christianity and have rejected it because I refuse to be associated with such evil. You can tell by that statement that I’m slow on the uptake, but it has come to me that MY faith is not theirs and is not defined by their apostasy. I can attend no church because they all seem contaminated. I have been mainly interested in the Psalms as far as the Bible is concerned because they are mostly praise instead of conflicting exegesis. I am interested in The Journey of The Universe and the various devotions to honoring the Creation as evidence of the Creator. I no longer trust the liturgy, certainly not the dogma (I’m RC—I will remain so, but cannot practice). I don’t trust preachers. I must be quiet and listen to the voice of poetry and praise and hope healing and connection and renewal will rise from the alchemy of these devotions.
Please tell us how you know where these people are and how to access their teachings.