Monday, September 16, 2024

Part I

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A Second Assassination Attempt Against Former President Trump – No Society Can Survive a Descent Into Political Violence

Well, we’re now talking about a second attempted assassination of the former president of the United States, Donald J. Trump. This time it wasn’t in Pennsylvania. Just barely two months later, it took place in Palm Beach County, Florida. It took place as a matter of fact on a golf course owned by President Trump himself there in the West Palm Beach area, and even as it took place, in this case the Secret Service we now know acted very quickly in order to neutralize this threat, and in this case it is not clear that the attempted assassin, and it becomes increasingly clear that he was an attempted assassin, got off a single round before the Secret Service started fire. An agent ahead of the Presidential golf party in this case detected the scope and the rifle, and it was quick action that almost assuredly prevented a deep national tragedy.

President Trump is unhurt. He was able to tweet that fact and his campaign affirmed it very quickly. At the same time, someone was able to get information on the car in which the attempted assassin had fled, and it was not long before law enforcement authorities had the individual in custody. The man arrested was born in 1966. His name, Ryan Wesley Routh, and he’s identified as a man who has had many brushes with the law in the past, both misdemeanors and at least charges or investigations related to felonies, and he had made some kind of threats against President Trump or former President Trump before. But it is also clear that he has a deep interest in the nation of Ukraine and in Ukraine the military effort there undertaken by the nation after Russia’s brutal invasion, and it appears that he was upset with President Trump and very upset about the prospect of a second Trump administration as related to the war in Ukraine. CNN was reporting late last night that the man had actually traveled to Ukraine and gone to the war front.

There are a lot of dots that need to be connected here, but at this point the most important issue from the Christian worldview perspective is to be very thankful that violence did not happen, that the former president, and for that matter no one else, was injured, much less killed in this incident. It appears that it underlines the effectiveness, in this case, of the Secret Service. But as I said, there are a lot of dots yet to be connected, but the most important issue after just being thankful that there was no violence in this case and that all human lives involved were protected, including, of course, the life of the former president, we also need to recognize that this underlines that we live in a violent age and that sinful human beings are capable of plotting and carrying out horrible acts of violence.

Now what this means for the 2024 campaign and all the rest, we simply don’t know. At this point, it was a disaster that was averted, and it is an investigation that is ongoing. So we’ll be tracking this with you, but at this point it is clearly the biggest news of the day. What it means in the big picture and in the specifics of this case, that is not yet clear, but we’ll be following the issue with you.

Part II

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The Complexities of Immigration and Internet Narratives: The Massive Issues Behind Strange Claims About Haitian Immigrants in Springfield, Ohio

At this point, one of the strangest turns in a strange electoral season is the fact that Americans have been debating whether or not an influx of Haitian immigrants into a city in Central Ohio are stealing, and killing, and eating pets. Now by now, it should be apparent that this is not true. Certainly what’s presented at face value, it is not true. It has not been sourced to any credible source. It appears to have emerged on the internet and perhaps even from some rather rare postings on social media, and with the emergence of some memes, that is to say digital units that have conveyed this accusation. Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump picked up on it and began to repeat the claim, even bringing it into his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, and the vice presidential nominee, J.D. Vance, senator from Ohio, has repeated some of the same, although with some qualifications.

Ohio’s governor Mike DeWine, also a Republican, very clearly and adamantly went on national television to say that there is no credible basis for the accusation that these Haitian immigrants are killing and eating pets. “That is simply,” he said, “untrue.” There’s not a single police report to back that up, nor can anyone find a resident there in Springfield who says anything about their own pets suffering such a fate.

So this appears to be an internet reality, but the liberal media is turning this into a very different story, and quite frankly, conservatives are handling it incompetently. There’s just a lack of truth, a lack of directness, a lack of candor of what’s going on here. So when President Trump begins to talk about this, is he talking about anything that’s real? Well, the influx of Haitian immigrants there in Springfield, Ohio is very real. As a matter of fact, it would be a problem in any American city of any size. Proportionately, you’re looking at a city that probably had about 60,000 in population. The influx of Haitians coming in, most of them we are told by our own government, legally coming in, particularly because a special permission with the very violent situation there in Haiti, that you’re looking at a large influx of people who come in just in recent months, the past couple of years, and the numbers are staggering. The New York Times says between 12 and 20,000 Haitian immigrants. Now this is a city of about 60,000 people, so you can do the math very quickly.

I’ll just state the obvious. There isn’t a city in the United States that could handle proportionately this kind of influx without severe problems, and when you’re looking at a clash of cultures you’re looking at a particularly acute problem. Everyone should have sympathy with this town. Everyone should have sympathy with all involved. We should all have sympathy with the government there and the state government, with Governor DeWine making a public statement just yesterday on the mainstream news that the state needs help from the federal government because the federal government has made decisions that have impacted Ohio and this local community beyond anything the community can handle.

Now there have been problems. There are always problems when you have an influx of population that size. Let’s just state if you just had another town this size move into Springfield, Ohio from another Ohio County it would be a problem, but it’s particularly a problem when you have a clash of cultures, and that’s exactly what is going on in this case, and we need to speak honestly. I’m going to do my very best to speak of this in a way that is honest and direct and tries to take this into consideration, and as a Christian, my goal is to help Christians think about how to think about an issue like this and separate the truth from the absolute nonsense, and frankly there’s absolute nonsense just about everywhere you look.

So I’m going to say some things in terms of today’s edition of The Briefing that I don’t think you’re going to get virtually anywhere else. Part of it is rooted in my own personal experience. It’s also rooted in an understanding of what this kind of clash looks like. And so when I talk about my own personal experience, let me just say it’s very personal. I spent my teenage years in South Florida in a coastal community called Pompano Beach, Florida, and that town was an epicenter in terms of an influx of Haitian refugees when they were then known as the boat people. They got into boats out of desperation with what was then the corrupt Duvalier regime. And when I was a teenager, my own town, at that point a rather sleepy town in South Florida, it experienced an incredible influx of immigrants, and frankly, it wasn’t the only time. There had been waves of immigration from Cuba, and even as most Cubans began to settle more in Miami as well as in areas like Tampa that’s an even previous immigration pattern in Florida, the reality is that the Haitian immigrants presented a huge challenge.

Now I want to say I think South Floridians did their best to be hospitable and understanding. There were conflicts. There were all kinds of pressures. For one thing, you’re looking at a clash of cultures. You’re looking at a clash of languages. My own home church, the First Baptist Church of Pompano Beach, Florida, led on behalf of our denomination in much of the effort, the Southern Baptist Convention’s effort to try to help with refugee ministry, refugee resettlement, and with trying to help these refugees to settle in in terms of having what they need to take care of their children. They needed diapers, they needed food, they needed shelter. And so even as my church was very involved in it, I’ve never talked this personally before, my own late father was very involved in that ministry, and that meant as his teenage son in the car with him, I became involved in that ministry as well.

So I can just state firsthand in that context that I understand something that many Americans might not understand, and that is what it means to live in a community where you have a very large influx of immigrants unexpectedly, and it does test just about every social service. It tests all kinds of things. For instance, I’m not going to go into the particulars of the automobile accident, but a young boy was killed in an accident and the driver was Haitian and evidently should not have been driving the car. But this is the kind of thing that you see when all of a sudden you have people move from one culture to another culture, and this is something people don’t want to talk about honestly. When you’re talking about Haiti, you’re talking about a very different culture.

Indeed, I’m going to say what I must say honestly, when you talk about Haiti you’re talking about a failed culture. You’re talking about a culture that fails repeatedly, that fails constantly in terms of the most basic responsibility to create a workable government, and when it comes to establishing peace and order, Haiti is an historical failure. It is basically one failure after another. As a Christian, I have to say there are worldview implications and there are worldview reasons behind much of that failure. That’s not a popular thing to say, but in honest terms we understand that culture has consequences, and the culture in Haiti, well, it produces consequences. And when you’re looking at a large percentage, a large number of Haitians moving into a community, you could say they are from any number of different cultures and it would be a problem. And it’s particularly a problem right there in the center of Ohio which after all is not coastal Florida, and was not expecting this kind of influx.

But there’s another honest part of this, and that is that industry there in Central Ohio was basically looking for new employees after a declining employee base. And so even as the federal government tells us the vast majority of these Haitian immigrants or these Haitian refugees arrived with some kind of legal status, the fact is that most of them, we are told, have ended up in this town in Ohio for reasons of employment. That was also very clearly affirmed by the Republican governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, who said, “Yes, that is one of the reasons they’re here.”

And by the way, this is an immigrant pattern. It’s one of the reasons why you have various patterns of immigration going back centuries and you can track. You had a few families from one particular identity or nationality or ethnic identity, they show up in a place and then extended kin begin to come. You begin to have corner groceries, and then you start to have of course a language group that is embedded within a community. It begins to grow. There are social support services that grow out of it. And this is one of the reasons why in large American cities you have neighborhoods where you have an ethnic concentration precisely because culture matters, and worldview matters, and language matters, and there’s a reason why there is such a grouping. We should also say that much of it has to do with extended family.

So I’m trying to say on the one hand we have the issue of immigration. I’m going to come back to that momentarily. Right now it is the issue. What is the Christian responsibility? I think the Christians in my hometown responded appropriately by establishing a ministry and trying to reach out, but the culture clash I just want to say honestly was massive. It was massive in the sense because if you’re looking at a worship service it’s not going to be an English and Creole equally understood. And so establishing a Haitian ministry in this case meant establishing a place, and establishing leadership to start and financially support, and spiritually nourish a community of Haitian Christians who would hopefully be able to bear witness to their own community, and there’s lasting impact right now in Broward County, Florida from that ministry and from that church.

But I want to come back to the fact that it was also very clear to me in the 1970s and this just isn’t changing. That personal experience when I was a teenager convinced me that even as I saw the attempts to assimilate in the public schools, it was not an easy process. It wasn’t easy at all, and cultural patterns matter. They matter immensely. And when you’re looking at this particular meme, this particular claim, well, the mainstream media simply says, “Well, there’s no truth in it.” Well, it appears right now, I just want to state honestly, it appears right now no one can produce proof that such a thing happened in Springfield, Ohio. Former President Trump needs to drop this for any number of reasons and move on, for instance, to the issue of immigration which is a live issue of great American concern and it’s what’s behind this issue. He needs to get to that issue, and on that issue I will argue that Vice President Kamala Harris is extremely vulnerable. There are big arguments to be made. We need to be confronted with those arguments. Voters need to know what those arguments are.

But there’s something else going on here. When you look at this meme, you have to come to the conclusion now, it appears this is something that just emerged on the internet, but it didn’t come from nowhere, and this is where I want to point out that Christians need to develop the instinct to source things, that is to say, well, is this credible, is this truthful. We don’t want to base our judgment on something that’s not true. How do we know it’s true? Well, there are a lot of reasons behind that. There are a lot of reasons why you’d believe something’s true or you might doubt something as true, but let’s just say that credibility has a great deal to do with this. And so I just want to state right away that one of the most credible sources you can imagine is the Supreme Court of the United States of America. Okay? So that’s not an internet meme. It is known as the Supreme Court of the United States. It has a building in Washington DC. You can go see it. You know exactly what I’m talking about.

Okay, in 1993, there was a Supreme Court case known as the Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye versus Hialeah, Hialeah being a South Florida city, and this came up because of the practice of the mixture in terms of Caribbean immigrant communities of a form of occult paganism that included the ritual killing of animals, most particularly of goats, and this ran into conflict with laws there in Florida, laws in this case of the city of Hialeah, Florida. There were those who were making the case that those who were practicing this religion, it is often known as Santeria, that is to say it’s a mixture of paganism, including an occultism that is very much rooted in animal sacrifice and Catholicism. And so you need to know that this kind of mixture, whether it’s known by the name Santeria or not, in many cases it is not, it’s often referred to as voodoo. It is a mixture of occultic and Catholic theology, and in many cases it does involve the ritual slaughter of animals and then the eating of those animals.

Okay, I’m not asking you to take my word for it. Check the case at the United States Supreme Court, 1993. We need to source these things definitively, authoritatively. I happen to know about this because I grew up in the area and knew of the involvements, and of course this came immediately to my mind. Someone who’s creating an internet meme in this case didn’t necessarily create it just out of whole cloth imagination, but may have been confused in some sense but certainly bears responsibility for being confusing when it comes to this particular Ohio town. I can’t tell you that nothing like this is happening. I’m even telling you that there’s a clash of cultures that could involve at least a knowledge of such things taking place. But there is no evidence whatsoever that this is taking place, certainly with pets in this town in Ohio.

And so our credibility and truthfulness comes down to the fact that we can’t go with the mainstream liberal media in saying, “We have no idea what you’re talking about here.” But it also means that we don’t go with an internet meme making accusations against an immigrant community in a town like Springfield, Ohio when we have no direct personal experience, and quite frankly, this can’t be sourced to anything a reasonable person would take as authoritative. But if nothing else, let’s come back to a basic worldview principle we have to return to over and over again. Worldview matters because theology matters. And if you are going to have a situation whereby most religious assessments, that is by most even sociological assessments, the majority population in Haiti is involved in some syncretism between Roman Catholicism and ancient practices of voodoo.

That is not just something I am coming up with as a point of analysis. You can look it up in authoritative studies. You can look it up in terms of what is published in the academic world, some of the same people who are all of a sudden acting like they don’t know what we’re talking about. And so when we’re talking about authority here, let me just mention again, how’s this for authoritative, the Johns Hopkins University Press, a journal known as American Imago, the title, Ritual Goat Sacrifice in Haiti by Ari Kiev, MD. Again, Johns Hopkins University, like Supreme Court of the United States, they take responsibility for what they say. What they publish in this article in an academic journal was sourced all the way back to winter of 1962. So guess what? People can look it up.

For Christians, the reminder that theology matters means also, of course, that the gospel matters, and we’re concerned not just here with the impact of a rather significant influx of refugees in this case of Haitian identity in a small town in Ohio. We’re also concerned for the Great Commission as how to reach all those persons we can reach by our influence with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Part III

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No, Trump and Harris are Not ‘Against Life’ in the Same Way: Pope Francis Confuses Political and Theological Issues Once Again

But there are two related issues here that we also need to discuss, and the issue of immigration is front and center right now in the American presidential election. I should say perhaps it should be front and center in the American presidential election because I don’t think Kamala Harris really wants to talk about it and Donald Trump has not talked about it very helpfully. It would help a great deal if he would talk about that issue which is behind what he’s been spending time talking about but is not that issue.

And here we just need to recognize that sometimes an external source can stir the pot, so to speak, and that’s exactly what has happened in the case of Pope Francis, and you may have seen the headline, the New York Times reported the story yesterday this way, “Both Harris and Trump against life,” Pope says. And so now you have the Pope, Pope Francis, a liberal pope who is offering, again, some real theological confusion, confusing even the teaching of his own church of which he is supposed to be the steward after all. So as a non-Roman Catholic, I can simply say here you have a Roman Catholic pontiff, a Roman Catholic pope who appears to have less interest in defining Roman Catholic doctrine and more interest in discussing his own personal moral evaluation.

He said, not using names, but referring to the American election, he said that both candidates are against life but for different reasons. As the New York Times reported, “Ask his advice to Catholic voters in the coming US presidential election, Pope Francis said, ‘They must choose the lesser of two evils,'” those are his words, because, and I quote, “both are against life,” Kamala Harris for her supportive abortion rights and Donald Trump for closing the door to immigrants. The Pope said about the second issue, “Sending migrants away, not allowing them to grow, not letting them have life is something wrong. It is cruelty.” He went on to say about abortion, “Sending a child away from the womb of the mother is murder because there is life, and we must speak clearly about these things.”

Well, how in the world can you say you choose the lesser of two evils when your own church clearly says that murder is a more grave evil and when you find yourself after confusing the issue by talking about a mother sending her child away in abortion, the Pope did get to use the word murder? So how in the world can you say these are two equivalent concerns? But when it comes to the abortion concern, the Roman Catholic Church in its official teaching says that it is among the gravest of sins. So he spoke of the rejection of migrants, even the New York Times noted this as a grave sin, and spoke of abortion as murder and then said that both are against life and clearly wrong. Well, you know, when it comes to evils, when it comes to sins, they’re all wrong. That’s the sinfulness of sin, but they’re not equal in effect, otherwise you’d be putting toddlers in prison. No, we put murderers in prison. We put toddlers in the corner or deal with them in another form of discipline.

Part IV

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Immigration in the United States Deserves an Honest Conversation: Love of Neighbor Does Not Mean Confusing Our Immigration Policy with Open Borders

But there’s something else that’s quite bothersome behind this particular issue and this particular spokesman when it comes to the Pope, because when the Pope speaks this way, and when he speaks of immigrants and refugees and migrants this way, he is not acknowledging the morality of the context nor the scale of the problem. Indeed, he becomes a part of the problem. So I want to say that a big part of the problem right now is when you have world leaders such as the Pope making a statement which basically incentivizes persons to move from one part of the world to another part of the world.

Now sometimes these individuals are genuinely refugees who are fleeing direct threats to their life, threats to their family, and we understand that, but we also understand that right now the biggest cause of immigration around the world and immigration specials, even the United Nations of all confused sources acknowledges this, acknowledges that the main issue behind most of this is economic. It’s not to say there’s not repression around the world, but quite honestly, if we are simply going to say that every nation in the world is legally and morally obligated to receive everyone who is suffering repression, then the world’s civilizational structure will completely break down.

Now let me just give you an example, and I want to say this as pointedly as I can. One of the strange thing about the papacy, one of the strange aspects of the Catholic papacy is that the Catholic Pope is not only the head of the church, he’s also the head of a state, the Vatican state. It is an incredibly small piece of real estate. And you know what? It is not saying, the Pope as a head of state, he is not saying, “All the repressed peoples of the world are free to come to the Vatican for refuge.” That is not what he’s saying. And honestly, one of the big problems right now is that you have nations all around the world who are simply saying, “This isn’t going to work.”

For instance, headline, same newspaper, same day, we’re looking at yesterday’s edition of the New York Times, even where that was on page 17 with Trump and Harris against life, the Pope says, just very, very close to this in the same section is a headline from Sweden, quote, “Sweden plans $34,000 offer for migrants to go home.” The New York Times says that even a nation as liberal as Sweden, and this is true for many Scandinavian countries, frankly it’s true right now in an incredible number of European countries, there is simply such an uprising from the citizens of those countries against patterns of immigration that you have Sweden multiplying its offer to migrants to go home by a factor of 34, increasing the amount promised from $1,000 to $34,000.

Well, if Sweden is willing to give immigrants, migrants $34,000 to leave, well, it raises all kinds of questions, including what economists call perverse incentives. In other words, you can evidently get $34,000 if you can get to Sweden and get Sweden to ask you to leave. But it also shows you that the issue of immigration is bringing pressure just about anywhere and everywhere. It is not just Springfield, Ohio, a town that so far as we know is really doing its best to deal with this challenge. It is also nations in Europe like Sweden, and we just talked about the fact that there was an uprising in terms of the transformation of German politics, even with a party that had not been able to gain victory in statewide elections. It won, the Alliance for Germany, and a large part of it was because of the pressure coming from the citizens who are quite concerned about immigration.

In the United States, let’s just bring it to home, this is a live issue and it deserves an honest conversation, and quite frankly, I think it also deserves something far more than just moral posturing. We’re going to have to talk about the true challenge that faces us as we think about how we deal, in national policy, in state policy and local policy, just one small town, in this case, in the headlines, trying to deal with this challenge, how we rightly deal with this challenge, how we deal with it in terms of national immigration policy. I do not believe that it serves human flourishing for any nation, including the United States of America, basically to have an uncontrolled border, in which case you have the process of immigration meltdown in that there’s no real meaningful distinction between legal and illegal immigration. There’s no meaningful control of the border, and Americans are rightly concerned about millions and millions of undocumented persons coming into this country.

This is not without moral consequence. Yes, love of neighbor says we need to seek the welfare of all, to the best of our ability, but I’m going to argue that does not mean that confusing our immigration policy to say anyone can come and you can therefore somehow find a way to stay. That is not true and it is not fair. It’s not honest. I don’t believe that that’s any kind of righteous or just immigration policy. But I should also add that it should not be too much to ask, even in the hyper-partisan, hyper-political moment we are experiencing, for at the very least the two national presidential candidates bearing the standards of our two major parties, it’s not too much to ask, to ask, even to demand that they deal with this issue in a way that has to be honest and straightforward. When it comes to so many of these issues, we’ve had a consideration that’s neither honest nor straightforward, and quite honestly the mainstream media has done us no favors in trying to deal with these issues when the analysis is presented to the American people.

But if we begin with the Christian understanding that every single human being considered in this entire equation, in this entire controversy, in this entire story is a human being made in the image of God and thus every single human being deserves our respect, then we also have to respect the questions of how rightly to respect all of those who are presented to us in this kind of story. The issues are too deep to make them simply a matter of either an internet meme or an irresponsible headline. As Christians, let’s remember to pray about this issue, and let’s pray right now for communities such as Springfield, Ohio, where there are evangelical churches presented not with just a challenge but also with a gospel opportunity. Let’s pray for the advance of the gospel even in the context of national controversy.