What the world needs now? Handwritten cards and letters.
No other written method of communication shows you care as much about connecting personally, than pen, ink, and, when called for, a stamp. It asks for more of us, more time, more creativity, and more commitment. That’s a good thing. Whether we realize it or not. Sadly, it appears that most people don’t realize it, haven’t been taught it, or, have long forgotten it.
Besides fame and success, what do all of these people have in common?
Something surprisingly unglamorous and gloriously analog: a love of physical cards and letters. Of notes that need a lick and a stamp instead of a click and a swoosh.
Over the past decade, the number of first-class mail items sent through the Postal Service has dropped by more than 50 percent. Not counting holiday cards and invitations, the average American household receives just 10 pieces of personal mail per year. Nearly half of British children, according to one survey, have never sent a handwritten letter.
In an age of torrential email, incessant group texts and lackadaisical Facebook birthday posts, snail mail has become quaint, almost vintage. But that doesn’t mean its days are over. As a recent CityLab story pointed out, we can save snail mail — if we want to.
David Sedaris, the best-selling author and humorist, is known for writing letters to his fans, his boyfriend and everyone he works with on book tours. He will also send a thank-you note if you have him over for dinner.
“I just feel like it’s classy to do it with real mail,” he said. “It’s too easy to do it on email. And it also doesn’t mean as much.” Not to mention, he added, “It’s nice to be thought of as classy.”
Whether it’s to say thank you, hi or I’m sorry — or to send a Q-tip attached to a sheet of paper, as Mr. Sedaris’s pen pal, the late comedian Phyllis Diller, once did — here’s why it’s time to bring snail mail back.
Writing by hand feels good.
When we write by hand, we retain information better and may even boost our creativity. Plus, because we do it so rarely these days, it can be a welcome respite from typing.
“It’s more fun,” said Margaret Shepherd, a professional calligrapher and author of “The Art of the Handwritten Note.” “It is such a delight to see that ink go on that beautiful paper — to pick out a stamp, to slow down and realize you thanked or consoled somebody in the best way possible.”
The warm fuzzies that accompany writing are more than anecdotal. In one study, Steven Toepfer, an associate professor of human development and family studies at Kent State University at Salem, asked participants to compose three “letters of gratitude” over the span of a month.
They could write to anyone, as long as the content was positive. With each letter, the writers experienced higher levels of happiness and life satisfaction, and lower levels of depressive symptoms.
Mr. Toepfer said we all have a base of gratitude inside us, which can lead to positive psychological effects. “But we have to tap into it — and use it — to get its benefits,” he explained. “I think writing letters does that.”
Handwritten notes spread love.
If you want to show you care, snail mail is an effective method. Think about the last time you received a hand-addressed missive — didn’t it make you smile?
Saeideh Heshmati, assistant professor of positive psychology at Claremont Graduate University, recently researched what makes people “feel loved.” She found that “small gestures in everyday life,” like people supporting you without expecting anything back or showing compassion during tough times, were what participants most agreed upon as “loving.”
Since cards require more effort than email, Ms. Heshmati said recipients will likely “feel more loved because you took the time to do that for them.” She added, “It’s the care that comes with it that signals the love.”
Snail mail is, well, slow (and unique).
Whereas emails are something to rush through on the way to Inbox Zero, cards and letters are something to cherish; to set on a desk, to stick to a fridge, to bind into a book for future generations.
In the digital age, we are “assaulted by a barrage of information — much of it having little or no importance,” Florence Isaacs wrote in her book “Just a Note to Say.” “Yet personal words on paper often are saved in a shoe box, becoming a memory to be revisited through the years.”
For proof, look to Letters of Note, a popular site that offers an intimate window into history and the characters who shaped it. While there may someday be an “Emails of Note,” it wouldn’t impart the same romance. After all, the swirl of the letters, the smudges of ink and the pastiche of paper are what brings us into each writer’s world.
You don’t have to be a writer or an artist to send meaningful notes.
Because of snail mail’s novelty, what you say — and what it looks like — often matters less than the act itself.
“My husband sends handwritten notes scratched out with a pencil, and people just sit up and sing,” said Ms. Shepherd, the calligrapher. “They’re so happy to get something in the mail, even if it doesn’t have a lot of production value.”
If you find yourself struggling to find the appropriate words, she recommended keeping it simple and writing as though you are talking to your recipient. If you don’t know who to write, start with the children in your life or reach out to deserving strangers through initiatives like More Love Letters or Operation Gratitude.
When one of Mr. Sedaris’s friends comes out with a new book or play, he sends a card with specific details like: “I loved it on Page 38 when you did this.”
“I just realize how much it means when somebody goes into details,” he said. “I know it makes me feel good, and it’s not that hard. … A little effort is all it takes.”
Getting started is easier than you think.
Mr. Sedaris is right: Although snail mail requires more work than its digital kin, it’s still not hard.
Avoid the agony of scouring last-minute, overpriced $5 cards in the drugstore by purchasing a set of blank cards to keep at home. Craft fairs and farmers’ markets usually have lovely handmade ones, and even the dollar store sells passable sets. If you have a favorite artist or illustrator, they may have an Etsy or Gumroad shop where you can buy their work printed on blank cards.
Then grab a book of stamps and a nice pen and toss it all into a shoe box. Now you’re ready for snail mail — with minimal hassle. (You can even batch cards at the beginning of each month by scanning your calendar for upcoming birthdays and celebrations.)
The next time you’re tempted to send a congratulatory email or a digital birthday message, try a card instead. If you’re looking for an event to kick you off, consider making this holiday season the one where you offer friends a chance to get on a holiday card list — no strings or reciprocation attached (if that’s O.K. with you) — and send a personal note to each loved one who signs up.
“There’s something permanently charming about getting an envelope in the mail,” said Ms. Shepherd. “It’s as if somebody gift wrapped their words for you.”
Laura Nolan, a software engineer in Ireland, left Google in June over the company’s involvement in Project Maven, an effort to build artificial intelligence for the Department of Defense.
Really important! This is exactly how to truly evaluate a company’s real values, if not, their moral position towards development technologies.
By Kate Conger and Cade Metz, NYTimes Oct. 7, 2018
SAN FRANCISCO — Jack Poulson, a Google research scientist, recently became alarmed by reports that the company was developing a search engine for China that would censor content on behalf of the government.
While Dr. Poulson works on search technologies, he had no knowledge of the product, which was code-named Dragonfly. So in a meeting last month with Jeff Dean, the company’s head of artificial intelligence, Dr. Poulson asked if Google planned to move ahead with the product and if his work would contribute to censorship and surveillance in China.
According to Dr. Poulson, Mr. Dean said that Google complied with surveillance requests from the federal government and asked rhetorically if the company should leave the United States market in protest. Mr. Dean also shared a draft of a company email that read, “We won’t and shouldn’t provide 100 percent transparency to every Googler, to respect our commitments to customer confidentiality and giving our product teams the freedom to innovate.”
The next day, Dr. Poulson quit the company. Mr. Dean did not respond to a request for comment, and Google declined to comment.
Across the technology industry, rank-and-file employees are demanding greater insight into how their companies are deploying the technology that they built. At Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce, as well as at tech start-ups, engineers and technologists are increasingly asking whether the products they are working on are being used for surveillance in places like China or for military projects in the United States or elsewhere.
That’s a change from the past, when Silicon Valley workers typically developed products with little questioning about the social costs. It is also a sign of how some tech companies, which grew by serving consumers and businesses, are expanding more into government work. And the shift coincides with concerns in Silicon Valley about the Trump administration’s policies and the larger role of technology in government.
“You can think you’re building technology for one purpose, and then you find out it’s really twisted,” said Laura Nolan, 38, a senior software engineer who resigned from Google in June over the company’s involvement in Project Maven, an effort to build artificial intelligence for the Department of Defense that could be used to target drone strikes.
All of this has led to growing tensions between tech employees and managers. In recent months, workers at Google, Microsoft and Amazon have signed petitions and protested to executives over how some of the technology they helped create is being used. At smaller companies, engineers have begun asking more questions about ethics.
Jack Poulson, a Google research scientist, quit the company when he found out his work would contribute to censorship and surveillance
And the change is likely to last: Some engineering students have said they are demanding more answers and are asking similar questions, even before they move into the work force.
“What people are looking for — not just employees — they are looking for some clarity,” said Frank Shaw, a Microsoft spokesman. “Are there principles that get applied? Even if you don’t agree with the decision that gets made, if you understand the thinking behind it, it helps a lot.”
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.
The lack of information about what tech employees are working on was recently evident at Clarifai, an artificial intelligence start-up in New York City.
Last year, a small team of Clarifai engineers began working on a project inside a private room at its downtown New York office, said three people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition that they not be identified for fear of retaliation. Paper covered the windows, and employees called the room “The Chamber of Secrets,” in a sly reference to the second Harry Potter novel. Even the eight engineers and researchers working inside the room did not entirely realize the nature of the project, the people said.
When employees asked about the project in meetings, Clarifai’s chief executive, Matt Zeiler, said it was a government project related to “analytics” or “surveillance” and would “save lives,” according to the people.
After employees read documents posted to Clarifai’s internal systems, it became clear that the company had won a contract for Project Maven and that workers were creating something for the Defense Department, the people said. One engineer quit the project immediately after a meeting with the Defense Department where killing was discussed in frank terms, they said.
A Clarifai spokesman said that at the very beginning of the project, the company sat down with those chosen for it to brief them on the nature of the work, and one employee quit the project then. “Every member of Clarifai’s Project Maven team agreed to work on the project, and the two people who chose not to participate were assigned to different efforts across the company,” the spokesman said.
Dr. Poulson, whose work involved incorporating a variety of languages into Google search, said he did not initially think his research could be involved in Dragonfly — until he noticed Chinese had been added to a list of languages for his project.
“Most people don’t know the holistic scope of what they’re building,” said Dr. Poulson, 32, who worked at Google for over two years. “You don’t have knowledge of where it’s going unless you’re sufficiently senior.”
“You can think you’re building technology for one purpose, and then you find out it’s really twisted,” Ms. Nolan said.
The difficulties of knowing what companies are doing with technologies is compounded because engineers at large tech companies often build infrastructure — like algorithms, databases and even hardware — that underpins almost every product a company offers. At Google, for example, a storage system called Colossus is used by Google search, Google Maps and Gmail.
“It would be very difficult for most engineers in Google to be sure that their work wouldn’t contribute to these projects in some way,” said Ms. Nolan, who helped to keep Google’s systems running online smoothly. “My personal feeling was that if the organization is doing something I find ethically unacceptable, then I was contributing to it.”
Yet executives at tech companies have claimed that complete transparency is not possible.
“We’ve always had confidential projects as a company. I think what happened when the company was smaller, you had a higher chance of knowing about it,” Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said at a staff meeting in August, according to a transcript provided to The New York Times. “I think there are a lot of times when people are in exploratory stages where teams are debating and doing things, so sometimes being fully transparent at that stage can cause issues.”
Such policies have rippled beyond tech companies. In June, more than 100 students at Stanford, M.I.T. and other top colleges signed a pledge saying they would turn down job interviews with Google unless the company dropped its Project Maven contract. (Google said that month that it would not renew the contract once it expired.)
“We are students opposed to the weaponization of technology by companies like Google and Microsoft,” the pledge stated. “Our dream is to be a positive force in the world. We refuse to be complicit in this gross misuse of power.”
Alex Ahmed, a doctoral candidate in computer science at Northeastern University in Boston, said she organized a student discussion on campus this month to debate whether they should work for tech companies that made decisions they believed to be unethical.
“We’re not given an ethics course. We’re not given a political education,” Ms. Ahmed, 29, said. “It’s impossible for us to do this unless we create the conversations for ourselves.”
Over the summer, she said, students at Northeastern also protested the school’s multimillion-dollar research contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, under which it would provide research on technology exports to the agency. A Northeastern spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.
Bridget Frey, the chief technology officer at the online real estate company Redfin, said job candidates had increasingly raised ethical questions in interviews. This summer, interns questioned Redfin’s chief executive, Glenn Kelman, about whether the way the site displays school information and test scores could contribute to socio-economic divides in neighborhoods. In response, the company said it planned to add more context about the test score information early next year.Employees are now frequently asking, “If you don’t share the information with me, how can I make sure this isn’t happening here?” Ms. Frey said.
As good a read as it is difficult to execute. Take the headline itself, which contains the word, if not offered remedy, contentment. Well, that’s not loaded. Is it? Thing is, its a tough proposition for most (not all) people, at any age, say…over…50? Give or take? Why? Number of reasons. may justified. Really.
Why are they justified? Because life is just hard-ER, without certain things in our lives. Those “things” are another article, another essay. Lets just say, when it comes to these things, where there is more agreement, than disagreement, among rationally, realistically thinking human beings, there’s more truth, than fabrication.
With that, comes the real challenge. Its not going to be the pursuit of a spiritual zen-like stance that magically overcomes the lack of these things, but, a deliberate, almost forced acceptance, and yes, begrudging, acceptance of the particular, but common shortcomings any one of us may feel slighted from. This includes the wealthy, who are not immune to feeling the lack of things beyond the grasp of what money can buy.
Finally, the idea of rising above health problems has always been its own thing. To fight that adversity off even as we age into more physical frustrations and battles is, ironically, easier to do than most of us, or others think. Why? Because its not really in our control. at least, not once it happens. At that point, its in medicine’s hands, doctors, hospitals, viatical oddsmakers, and fate. Where do we go from there? Contentment? Hmmm. Not sure I can work with the one word alone. Too tidy. If only…
The body text is helpful, just not, the quick fix hook in the headline. Look for kinship among positive leaning souls of a like mind. A full sentence that says more to me.
The Secret to Aging Well? Contentment
“Despite having many friends in their 70s, 80s and 90s, I’ve been far too slow to realize that how we respond to aging is a choice made in the mind, not in the gym.”
By Robert W. Goldfarb, NYTimes
At 88, I remain a competitive runner, always sprinting the last hundred yards of a race to cross the finish line with nothing left to give. The finish line of my life is drawing close, and I hope to reach it having given the best of myself along the way. I’ve been training my body to meet the demands of this final stretch. But, I wonder, should I have asked more of my mind?
I have no trouble taking my body to a gym or starting line. I’ve done a good job convincing myself that if I didn’t exercise, I would unleash the many predators that seek their elderly prey on couches, but not on treadmills. The more I sweated, the more likely it was my internist would continue to exclaim, “Keep doing what you’re doing, and I’ll see you next year.” It was my way of keeping at bay the dreaded: “Mr. Goldfarb, I’m afraid I have some bad news.”
My mind, on the other hand, seems less willing to yield to discipline, behaving as though it has a mind of its own. I have dabbled in internet “brain games,” solving algebraic problems flashing past and rerouting virtual trains to avoid crashes. I’ve audited classes at a university, and participated in a neurofeedback assessment of my brain’s electrical impulses. But these are only occasional diversions, never approaching my determination to remain physically fit as I move deeper into old age.
Despite having many friends in their 70s, 80s and 90s, I’ve been far too slow to realize that how we respond to aging is a choice made in the mind, not in the gym.
Some of my healthiest friends carry themselves as victims abused by time. They see life as a parade of disappointments: aches and ailments, confusing technology, children who don’t visit, hurried doctors.
Other friends, many whose aching knees and hips are the least of their physical problems, find comfort in their ability to accept old age as just another stage of life to deal with. I would use the word “heroic” to describe the way they cope with aging as it drains strength from their minds and bodies, though they would quickly dismiss such a term as overstatement.
One such friend recently called from a hospital to tell me a sudden brain seizure had rendered him legally blind. He interrupted me as I began telling him how terribly sorry I was: “Bob, it could have been worse. I could have become deaf instead of blind.”
Despite all the time I spend lifting weights and exercising, I realized I lack the strength to have said those words. It suddenly struck me I’ve paid a price for being a “gym rat.”
If there is one characteristic common to friends who are aging with a graceful acceptance of life’s assaults, it is contentment. Some with life-altering disabilities — my blind friend, another with two prosthetic legs — are more serene and complain less than those with minor ailments. They accept the uncertainties of old age without surrendering to them. A few have told me that the wisdom they’ve acquired over the years has made aging easier to navigate than the chaos of adolescence.
It was clear I lacked, and had to find, the contentment those friends had attained. The hours I spent exercising had given me confidence, but not contentment.
The 30-pound weight I no longer attempt to lift reminds me that not far off is the day when lifting anything, or running anywhere, will be asking too much of my body. My brain would have to become the muscle I counted on to carry me through these final years with the peace and purpose others had found. Aging had to be more than what I saw in a mirror.
But rather than overhauling my life completely in the hopes of undertaking a fundamental change in the way I confronted aging, I felt the place to begin would be to start small, adopting a new approach to situations I encountered every day. A recent lunch provided a perfect example.
I’ve always found it extremely difficult to concentrate when I’m in a noisy setting. At this lunch with a friend in an outdoor restaurant, a landscaper began blowing leaves from underneath the bushes surrounding our table.
Typically, after such a noisy interruption, I would have snapped, “Let’s wait until he’s finished!” then fallen silent. When the roar eventually subsided, my irritation would have drained the conversation of any warmth. The lunch would be remembered for my angry reaction to the clamor, and not for any pleasure it gave the two of us.
It troubled me that even a passing distraction could so easily take me from enjoying lunch with a good friend to a place that gave me no pleasure at all. I wanted this meal to be different and decided to follow the example of friends my age who know they are running out of joyous moments and will let nothing interfere with them. They simply speak louder, accepting the noise for what it is, a temporary irritant.
My years in gyms had taught me to shake off twinges and other distractions, never permitting them to stop my workout or run. I decided to treat the noise as though it were a cramp experienced while doing crunches. I would shake it off instead of allowing it to end our conversation.
I continued talking with my friend, challenging myself to hear the noise, but to hold it at a distance. The discipline so familiar to me in the gym — this time applied to my mind — proved equally effective in the restaurant. It was as though I had taken my brain to a mental fitness center.
Learning to ignore a leaf blower’s roar hardly equips me to find contentment during my passage into ever-deeper old age. But I left the lunch feeling I had at least taken a small first step in changing behavior that stood in the way of that contentment.
Could I employ that same discipline to accept with dignity the inevitable decline awaiting me: frailty, memory lapses, dimming sound and sight, the passing of friends and the looming finish line? Churning legs and a pounding heart had taken me part of the way. But now the challenge was to find that contentment within me. Hoping that contentment will guide me as I make my way along the path yet to be traveled.
Robert W. Goldfarb is a management consultant and the author of “What’s Stopping Me From Getting Ahead?”
The General James M. Gavin Power Plant, a coal-fired facility in Cheshire, Ohio. New rules would weaken restrictions on mercury emissions from coal-burning plants.
Trump Administration Prepares a Major Weakening of Mercury Emissions Rules
By Coral Davenport, NYTimes
The Trump administration has completed a detailed legal proposal to dramatically weaken a major environmental regulation covering mercury, a toxic chemical emitted from coal-burning power plants, according to a person who has seen the document but is not authorized to speak publicly about it.
The proposal would not eliminate the mercury regulation entirely, but it is designed to put in place the legal justification for the Trump administration to weaken it and several other pollution rules, while setting the stage for a possible full repeal of the rule.
Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist who is now the acting administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is expected in the coming days to send the proposal to the White House for approval.
The move is the latest, and one of the most significant, in the Trump administration’s steady march of rollbacks of Obama-era health and environmental regulations on polluting industries, particularly coal. The weakening of the mercury rule — which the E.P.A. considers the most expensive clean air regulation ever put forth in terms of annual cost to industry — would represent a major victory for the coal industry. Mercury is known to damage the nervous systems of children and fetuses.
The details of the rollback about to be proposed would also represent a victory for Mr. Wheeler’s former boss, Robert E. Murray, the chief executive of the Murray Energy Corporation, one of the nation’s largest coal companies. Mr. Murray, who was a major donor to President Trump’s inauguration fund, personally requested the rollback of the mercury rule soon after Mr. Trump took office, in a written “wish list” he handed to Energy Secretary Rick Perry.
The proposal would also hand a victory to the former clients of William Wehrum, the E.P.A.’s top clean air official and the chief author of the plan. Mr. Wehrum worked for years as a lawyer for companies that run coal-fired power plants, and that have long sought such a change.
A spokesman for the E.P.A. did not respond to a request for comment.
The proposal also highlights a key environmental opinion of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, the embattled Supreme Court nominee, whose nomination hearings have gripped the nation in recent days.
The coal industry initially sued to roll back the mercury regulation, and in 2014 its case lost in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. However, Judge Kavanaugh wrote the dissenting opinion in that case, highlighting questions about the rule’s cost to industry.
Should the legal battle over the proposed regulatory rollback go before the Supreme Court, some observers expect that Judge Kavanaugh, if elevated to a seat on the high court, would side with the coal industry.
Specifically, the new Trump administration proposal would repeal a 2011 finding made by the E.P.A. that when the federal government regulates toxic pollution such as mercury from coal-fired power plants, it must also, when considering the cost to industry of that rule, take into account the additional health benefits of reducing other pollutants as a side effect of implementing the regulation. Under the mercury program, the economic benefits of those health effects, known as “co-benefits,” helped to provide a legal and economic justification for the cost to industry of the regulation.
For example, as the nation’s power plants have complied with rule by installing technology to reduce emissions of mercury, they also created the side benefit of reducing pollution of soot and nitrogen oxide, pollutants linked to asthma and lung disease.
The Obama administration estimated that it would cost the electric utility industry an estimated $9.6 billion a year to install that mercury control technology, making it the most expensive clean air regulation ever put forth by the federal government. It found that reducing mercury brings up to $6 million annually in health benefits — a high number, but not as high as the cost to industry. However, it further justified the regulation by citing an additional $80 billion in health benefits from the additional reduction in soot and nitrogen oxide that occur as a side effect of controlling mercury.
The new proposal directs the E.P.A. to no longer take into account those “co-benefits” when considering the economic impact of a regulation.
Should the proposal become final, it would mean that the mercury rule would, on paper, incur far greater economic cost than it would provide quantifiable health benefits. The Trump administration would then be legally justified in weakening the rule.
And that change could also give companies like Murray Energy a legal justification to sue for its deletion entirely, while giving the E.P.A. the legal basis to craft weaker pollution regulations that no longer take into account the co-benefits of eliminating additional pollutants.
“This is a sweeping attack on considering the benefits of cutting hazardous pollution from coal plants,” said John Walke, a legal expert on the Clean Air Act with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group that expects to take a lead role in the legal effort to uphold the mercury standard. “This is the first legal step toward eliminating the standard entirely.”
A spokesman for Murray Energy cheered the expected move.
“E.P.A.’s proposal to revisit the outsized role that so-called ‘co-benefits’ play in the cost-benefit analyses used to justify costly regulations targeting pollutants such as mercury is appropriate and long overdue,” wrote the spokesman, Cody Nett, in an email. He said the process is “nothing less than double-counting,” since the E.P.A. already controls pollutants such as soot and nitrogen oxide in other regulations. He also called on the E.P.A. to review what he called “the questionable scientific foundation” for calculating the co-benefits.
Supporters and opponents of the proposal believe that the Supreme Court is likely to uphold it, particularly if Judge Kavanaugh is confirmed. In his 2014 dissent to the mercury ruling, he wrote, “The benefits of this rule are disputed.” He added: “Industry petitioners focus on the reduction in hazardous air pollutant emissions attributable to the regulations, which amount to only $4 to $6 million dollars each year. If those figures are right, the rule costs nearly $1,500 for every $1 of health and environmental benefit produced.”
The following year, in a decision that echoed Judge Kavanaugh’s dissent, the Supreme Court blocked the Obama-era mercury rule, ordering the E.P.A. to conduct a new cost analysis. The Obama administration did so, and ultimately reinstated the rule in 2016.
Murray Energy then sued to block it, but last year, the E.P.A.’s administrator at the time successfully petitioned the United States Circuit Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia to delay the oral arguments for that case, as the Trump administration sought to rewrite the rule entirely.
Singing hymns at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., before an appearance by Donald Trump in 2016.
A nicely written essay on the challenges between well meaning people and our imperfect, if not broken, political system.
The example of the traveler to Scotland, illustrates one of the primary, most enduring themes of how a single individual, and any of us, can be deeply affected and changed by meaningful exposure to other people who live elsewhere.
The historical Christian positions on social issues don’t match up with contemporary political alignments.
By Timothy Keller
Mr. Keller is the founder of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York.
What should the role of Christians in politics be? More people than ever are asking that question. Christians cannot pretend they can transcend politics and simply “preach the Gospel.” Those who avoid all political discussions and engagement are essentially casting a vote for the social status quo. American churches in the early 19th century that did not speak out against slavery because that was what we would now call “getting political” were actually supporting slavery by doing so. To not be political is to be political.
The Bible shows believers as holding important posts in pagan governments — think of Joseph and Daniel in the Old Testament. Christians should be involved politically as a way of loving our neighbors, whether they believe as we do or not. To work for better public schools or for a justice system not weighted against the poor or to end racial segregation requires political engagement. Christians have done these things in the past and should continue to do so.
Nevertheless, while believers can register under a party affiliation and be active in politics, they should not identify the Christian church or faith with a political party as the only Christian one. There are a number of reasons to insist on this.
One is that it gives those considering the Christian faith the strong impression that to be converted, they need not only to believe in Jesus but also to become members of the (fill in the blank) Party. It confirms what many skeptics want to believe about religion — that it is merely one more voting bloc aiming for power.
Another reason not to align the Christian faith with one party is that most political positions are not matters of biblical command but of practical wisdom. This does not mean that the church can never speak on social, economic and political realities, because the Bible often does. Racism is a sin, violating the second of the two great commandments of Jesus, to “love your neighbor.” The biblical commands to lift up the poor and to defend the rights of the oppressed are moral imperatives for believers. For individual Christians to speak out against egregious violations of these moral requirements is not optional.
However, there are many possible ways to help the poor. Should we shrink government and let private capital markets allocate resources, or should we expand the government and give the state more of the power to redistribute wealth? Or is the right path one of the many possibilities in between? The Bible does not give exact answers to these questions for every time, place and culture.
I know of a man from Mississippi who was a conservative Republican and a traditional Presbyterian. He visited the Scottish Highlands and found the churches there as strict and as orthodox as he had hoped. No one so much as turned on a television on a Sunday. Everyone memorized catechisms and Scripture. But one day he discovered that the Scottish Christian friends he admired were (in his view) socialists. Their understanding of government economic policy and the state’s responsibilities was by his lights very left-wing, yet also grounded in their Christian convictions. He returned to the United States not more politically liberal but, in his words, “humbled and chastened.” He realized that thoughtful Christians, all trying to obey God’s call, could reasonably appear at different places on the political spectrum, with loyalties to different political strategies.
Another reason Christians these days cannot allow the church to be fully identified with any particular party is the problem of what the British ethicist James Mumford calls “package-deal ethics.” Increasingly, political parties insist that you cannot work on one issue with them if you don’t embrace all of their approved positions.
This emphasis on package deals puts pressure on Christians in politics. For example, following both the Bible and the early church, Christians should be committed to racial justice and the poor, but also to the understanding that sex is only for marriage and for nurturing family. One of those views seems liberal and the other looks oppressively conservative. The historical Christian positions on social issues do not fit into contemporary political alignments.
So Christians are pushed toward two main options. One is to withdraw and try to be apolitical. The second is to assimilate and fully adopt one party’s whole package in order to have your place at the table. Neither of these options is valid. In the Good Samaritan parable told in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus points us to a man risking his life to give material help to someone of a different race and religion. Jesus forbids us to withhold help from our neighbors, and this will inevitably require that we participate in political processes. If we experience exclusion and even persecution for doing so, we are assured that God is with us (Matthew 5:10-11) and that some will still see our “good deeds and glorify God” (1 Peter 2:11-12). If we are only offensive or only attractive to the world and not both, we can be sure we are failing to live as we ought.
The Gospel gives us the resources to love people who reject both our beliefs and us personally. Christians should think of how God rescued them. He did it not by taking power but by coming to earth, losing glory and power, serving and dying on a cross. How did Jesus save? Not with a sword but with nails in his hands.
Timothy Keller, founder of the Redeemer Presbyterian churches in New York City, is the author of “Prodigal Prophet: Jonah and the Mystery of God’s Mercy,” from which this essay is adapted.
