Deficits - moral and spiritual

Over the last few weeks, I've been thinking about the dearth of empathy, the shortfall of empathy, so obviously at work in these United States of America today.

When Evangelical Christians can get behind a party that champions the Second Amendment but never flinch at the thousands of gun deaths nationwide, I think we have an empathy deficit.

When so-called people of good conscience can get behind public policy that routinely demonizes the poor as lazy and shiftless, I think we have an empathy deficit.

When good citizens swear up and down that they're not prejudiced in any way and certainly not racist, but can manage every blessed time a person of color is shot dead by the police, to claim that the dead are responsible for their own deaths, I think we have an empathy deficit.

When good citizens quote MLK Jr every third Monday of January, squawking about Martin's 'dream' but fail to see Colin Kaepernick & BLM as pointing out how far we are from awaking to the realization of that dream, I think we have an empathy deficit.

When 'conservatism' shouts more loudly about freedom (which they get to define) and free markets than about health care, education, environmental protection or equal rights, I think we have an empathy deficit.

When neither party can manage to speak to the needs of all people without resorting to identity politics as if poor people of one race need something entirely different from poor people of another race, I think we have an empathy deficit.

When a nation can refer to itself as God-fearing, or at least Christian (since the two things seem to be quite distinct and possibly mutually exclusive), and yet have both a defense budget that dwarfs every other nation's, and the sad history of being the ONLY nation on the planet to unleash a nuclear weapon (two in fact) and be incapable of apology for that horror, I think we have an empathy deficit.

from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation
PGPF.org

When a nation has a president who talks of grabbing women's gentalia and refers to women as dogs and yet has Christians claiming that he is sent by God. I think we have more than just an empathy deficit. We are badly broken at a spiritual level.

But then, as I said in an earlier piece:

"This is no ordinary Christianity, but rather it is the founding fathers' slave-holding, slave-raping, child-stealing, Black pogrom-supporting, Native land-stealing, Chinese immigrant-excluding, Jim Crow-loving, lynching party-having, American Christianity."

When, if ever, do we plan on addressing this deficit? We work on trade and budget deficits all the time. They are ever in our mouths and minds. But our empathy deficit? Are we even aware of its existence? Do we even care?

I have to be honest and say that I'm not expecting the Evangelical church to address it since so much of American Christianity is a peculiar animal. Large swaths of American Christianity (Southern Baptists, I'm looking squarely at you) gave their members plausible deniability for the enslavement and brutalization of an entire group of people or the genocide of another. So many American Christians beat their slaves Monday to Saturday and then rolled up in church on Sunday in conveyances driven by those same enslaved people, so it's probably unwise to anticipate much aid and succor from that particular quarter.

Who does that leave as moral leaders though? Politicians? Civil society? EJI's Brian Stephenson? The ACLU? The SPLC? The Heritage Foundation? The Family Research Council? Reverend William Barber and Repairers of the Breach? Who?

And still more important than who will lead us, is the question of what do we do when those upon whom the greatest ugliness has been heaped, eventually cease to extend the empathy upon which this society is wholly dependent? I don't really know, but I can say this: that day is coming. It is surely coming.