A parade by any other name would be a controversy

This post was published in the Wilson Times on Sept. 28, 2019.

It would take a dang fool or an idiot to jump into a seething controversy over a parade. Well, here I go.

I should preface this by saying that I’m not much of a parade fan. I never watch parades on television and will not walk far to see a local parade.

According to the Wilson Times and some brief sociable conversations, Wilson officials decided to change the name of the annual parade from the Christmas Parade to the Holiday Parade. Because the parade had to be scheduled before Thanksgiving, it seemed logical to change the name to “Holiday” in order to recognize both Christmas and Thanksgiving.

Some people might think a Christmas Parade before Thanksgiving would be premature by at least a week, which is what happened last year when Wilson’s 2018 Christmas Parade took place on Nov. 17 (Thanksgiving was Nov. 22). So it seemed logical this year to call the event a Holiday Parade. Unfortunately, emotion often trumps logic.

This little brouhaha in Wilson reflects the nationwide hulabaloo over “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays.” Some religious conservatives saw in the late-year greeting that omits “Christmas” a conspiracy against Christianity. Politicians sought to win points by jumping on the “Merry Christmas or else!” bandwagon. There were claims that President Obama or some other politician had used the alternative greeting because they were anti-Christian. “Keep Christ in Christmas” became a slogan for those seeking to commemorate the birthday of Jesus of Nazareth.

Anyone who knows much about church history knows that Dec. 25 is an artificial date for Jesus’ birthday. The Gospels and other Christian writings do not state when Jesus was born. We don’t even know what year he was born (the latest scholarly estimate is around 4 B.C.) Luke and Matthew tell of events around Jesus’ birth but do not say when it occurred. The Gospels of John and Mark do not mention Jesus’ birth. In the early years of the church, there was no birthday celebration for Jesus.

So why do we celebrate Christmas in December? The simple explanation is that early Christians were absorbing pagan Winter Solstice holidays, and even adopting some pagan traditions, such as lighting candles, exchanging gifts and eating a celebratory meal. Bart D. Ehrman’s book “The Triumph of Christianity” credits the early Christians with deftly appropriating the most popular aspects of other religions, helping Christianity to become the dominant religion of the Roman Empire and beyond. The subtitle of his book is “How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World.”

Arguing that Christmas must be maintained in its purest, untainted form ignores the fact that the Apostles would not recognize this holiday, which became part of the church calendar in the Fourth Century, first had its own liturgy in the Ninth Century and was still evolving when Charles Dickens (who has been called “the man who invented Christmas”) wrote “A Christmas Carol” in 1843.

I find it odd that the most zealous opponents of “Happy Holidays” find nothing wrong with retailers hyping Christmas sales in October and people throwing out Christmas decorations just as Christmas is beginning. In the church calendar, Christmas begins Dec. 25 and ends Jan. 6, which is “Twelfth Night” or Epiphany. Dec. 26 is not Throw Out That Tree Day, it’s the second day of Christmas.

Jumping the gun on Christmas with decorations and sales and trees on display before Thanksgiving ignores one of the most reverent periods on the church calendar — Advent, which is celebrated the four weeks before Dec. 25. Advent provides a reflective, quiet time to consider the miracle of God becoming a man and living among us. Without Advent, Christians are not truly prepared for Christmas.

A wise pastor once told me that there are some things worth fighting for in the church and some things that aren’t. What to call a parade, it seems to me, is not a theological issue.

Parents are the key to good education

This post was published in the Wilson Times on Sept. 21, 2019.

Tuesday’s headline in the Wilson Times proclaimed, “Parents are key to student success.” A proper response to this news might be, “well, duh!”

Recent studies have shown that it is not unskilled teachers, incapable students or poor school administration that cause failures in public schools. It’s the home environment that makes the difference between student success and student failure.

America has been trying at least since the 1983 “A Nation At Risk” report to tinker with curriculum, accountability, teacher training and motivation, teaching techniques and school governance in hopes of improving public education. But the problems cited by the Reagan administration report continue to plague public schools in America.

Recent studies have found that schools whose students come from homes with incomes in the top quartile of wealth have higher success scores than schools whose students come primarily from low-income or below-poverty-level homes. You can change teachers, change principals, change curriculum, change school spending and still find the same educational results based on income.

Students from homes with well-educated parents will do better than students with less-educated, lower-income parents. Beyond simple income, there are reasons for the disparity between high-achieving schools and low-scoring schools. Teachers, the focus of much of the educational reforms over the past quarter century, have about six hours a day to alter the lives of students. Their home environments have those students for the remaining 18 hours a day.

The low income of some families often comes with additional educational handicaps: uneducated or poorly educated parents, violence in the home, lack of reading resources (each class of kindergartners might include students who have never been read to), overwhelmed, under-employed parents and unstable family relations.

I’m glad to see Wilson County Schools is paying attention to students’ home environments. The school system is offering a Parents Academy to teach parents how to help their children be more successful in school. Some tips are quite simple: Be in school, be on time, set a routine for school days and ensure children follow the routine, make school a priority.

Unlike most possessions, children do not come with instruction manuals, and some parents have had little guidance or negative influences in how to care for children and help them grow into successful adults. A parent might have had a bad school experience and dropped out. Such a parent might transfer her distaste for education to her children, perpetuating an unfortunate experience to another generation.

A Parents Academy cannot compensate for poverty, a lack of reading materials in the home, absent fathers or other difficulties. The academy can teach parents how to improve their children’s behavior and help them be more successful in school. It can change attitudes, ambitions, goals and values. Children need to experience unconditional love and a stable home. A school system cannot provide that, but schools can show parents how to help their children succeed.

The rest is up to the parents — and the student.

GOP legislators outfox governor

This column was published in the Wilson Times Sept. 7, 2019.

North Carolina Democrats are entitled to feel good about themselves after two successful elections. In 2016, their gubernatorial candidate, Roy Cooper, won the governor’s seat, but his effectiveness was stymied by powerful personalities in the state legislature, who held a veto-proof majority and used a lame-duck session in December 2016 to pare away powers traditionally wielded by the state’s chief executive, leaving Cooper as a governor with relatively few executive powers.

In 2018, Democrats set their sights on taking enough legislative seats away from the Republicans to make the Democratic governor’s veto power an actual power. Democrats succeeded in what has been called a “wave election,” and Cooper soon made it clear that he wouldn’t be shy about vetoing legislation he didn’t like. Democrats won nine previously GOP seats in the House and six formerly GOP seats in the Senate, enough to prevent overrides of his vetoes.

But Democratic officials have made some strategic errors since last year’s election. Gov. Cooper misjudged the tenacity of the GOP legislative leaders. As usual this year, the legislature’s budget and the governor’s budget did not match. Among other expenditures that they disagreed on were teacher salaries and expansion of Medicaid.

Cooper found the legislators’ budget unacceptable, so he vetoed it. He called for negotiations with the GOP leadership. Speaker of the House Tim Moore and Senate Majority Leader Phil Berger have essentially told Cooper, “Go negotiate yourself.”

Republicans have done all they can to minimize gubernatorial powers, and Cooper’s adamant demand for negotiations on the budget is going nowhere, adding to the GOP’s aim to make the governor appear irrelevant. That perception won’t help Cooper win re-election next year.

GOP leaders displayed their shrewdness and strategic thinking by introducing individual parts of the legislature’s vetoed budget and bringing these individual bills up for a vote. Piecemeal is a poor way to plan spending, but it can have some political effectiveness. Among the popular bills passed while this stalemate continues is one giving raises to state employees — raises that had been on hold because of Cooper’s budget veto.

Cooper is likely headed for a difficult re-election bid in 2020. President Trump carried North Carolina in 2016, with Cooper’s success (thanks to then-Gov. Pat McCrory taking a more conservative turn after taking office, having campaigned as a pragmatic moderate in 2012). Being out-played by legislative leaders is not Cooper’s only political problem in 2020.

As Hurricane Dorian aims for the N.C. coast, the Cooper administration has spent only seven percent of Federal Emergency Management Agency block grants to aid recovery from last year’s Hurricane Florence. Cooper says the problem is that the feds have not issued rules and standards for spending block grants to help Florence victims. That may be true, but the Cooper administration has done a poor job of explaining exactly what the problem is and how the governor aims to fix it.

Cooper may also come to regret another veto he issued, this one on a bill requiring North Carolina sheriffs to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention requests. Some newly elected Democratic sheriffs, including sheriffs in urban counties have announced they will not do ICE’s work for them, but in a generally conservative state that has been dramatically changed by hundreds of thousands of immigrants, many of them undocumented, cooperation with ICE doesn’t sound so bad to many voters. Expect this issue to be discussed in the 2020 election for governor.

Cooper has found himself outfoxed by a strategic-thinking GOP while he has focused on playing to the Democratic base.

Evangelicals' embrace of Trump could be costly

This post was published in the Wilson Times Aug. 31, 2019.

The Gospel of Luke records an incident early in Jesus’ ministry after he read Scripture in the synagogue at Nazareth, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor … “ Then he said,

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

His audience, composed partly of friends and neighbors from his boyhood home, found his assertion of a direct link to ancient prophecy blasphemous, and they sought to kill him by throwing him off a cliff. Luke reports that Jesus miraculously slipped away through the crowd.

Knowing this excerpt from Luke’s Gospel, how is it that self-proclaimed evangelical Christians have not condemned Donald Trump for asserting, “I am the Chosen One” and “the Second Coming”? Blasphemy is not a capital offense in 21^st century Christianity, but surely Trump’s assertions should send evangelical voters running away. But they are still with him.

Evangelicals have stood steadfastly behind Trump even as he has left behind a series of acts and statements that would have been answered with derision and repugnance if they came from most any other politician. Trump’s popularity in fundamentalist churches has remained strong even after the release of the October 2016 “Access Hollywood” video of Trump advising a younger colleague, Billy Bush, on how to grab, grope, fondle, and kiss women against their wills. Twice on the recording, Trump says that with women, “You can do anything.”

Trump dismissed the recorded conversation as “locker room talk” but that comparison angered athletes who knew locker room talk was not all about manhandling women. The evangelical leaders supporting Trump, including Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr., have given Trump a pass for his unprecedented public vulgarity.

Trump has shown a shocking unfamiliarity with the Bible, such as when he read a passage from what he called “Two Corinthians,” oblivious to the fact that Christians refer to Paul’s letters to the church at Corinth as First Corinthians and Second Corinthians.

Trump sees nothing wrong with shouting profanity and threats of violence at his public rallies. When asked about his prayers and forgiveness, Trump declared that he had never needed to ask forgiveness because he had never committed a sin. This non-confession comes from a man who has been twice divorced and who publicly flaunted his new girlfriend while still married to his first wife. News reporters have counted thousands of provable lies from Trump’s lips. He even denies making false statements despite a roomful of eyewitnesses or recordings of his falsehoods.

Some of those willing to overlook Trump’s lack of moral scruples are the same people who accused President Obama, a devoted family man still married to his first wife and deeply attached to his daughters, of being insufficiently religious or anti-Christian, although Obama would sprinkle Scriptural references into his speeches and even break into a religious hymn (“Amazing Grace” at the memorial for those murdered in a Charleston, S.C., church). By any neutral judgment, Obama is the more Christ-like president.

Many Americans support Trump with an intense loyalty while others cannot conceive of how Trump managed to win the presidency and now has a chance to win a second term. Although opinions on the 2020 presidential race go from a certain and overwhelming Trump victory to a landslide election with Democrats winning the White House and both houses of Congress as voters express their disgust with Trump and his administration.

In either scenario, evangelical Christian voters will be a “swing” demographic. Will they vote for Trump in hopes of keeping a strong economy, weak regulations, and a conservative, religion-friendly Supreme Court? Or will they rise up against the foul-mouthed, amoral narcissist who has alienated U.S. allies while embracing Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un?

Regardless of the election results, the church leaders who praised Trump as God’s appointee will have a lot of soul-searching to do within their organizations.