Christianity | Bob Schwartz

November 16, 2025

American churches: No more sidelines about Trump

“We realize, hey, our churches and the people in our churches have been duped by this guy and so rather than hope someone else will clean up the problem, what we’ve seen is a lot of pastors respond with, you know what, I’m going to jump in and I’m going to be a part of the solution.”
Robb Ryerse in Arkansas, Christian pastor and former Republican, one of 30 Christian white clergy so far running as Democrats in the midterm elections.

Churches in America have taken different positions regarding Trump.

Some have vigorously supported him, going so far as to say he is an anointed savior for the nation. Trump does, after all, sell his own God Bless the USA Bible.

Some, particularly black churches, have vigorously opposed him.

Most churches have stayed on the sidelines. The main reason is that in this divided society, congregations often include supporters and opponents. In those congregations, the position is that the church serves as an elevated neutral ground, not a battlefield, interested in promoting and effectuating the highest principles of Jesus and the Gospels. Whether or not those principles are being advanced or decimated in the public sphere by the chief public executive. Whether or not the tax dollars of congregants are being used to help or hurt people. Besides, a divisive message might send some congregants running away.

From the Guardian:

‘Trump is inconsistent with Christian principles’: why the Democratic party is seeing a rise of white clergy candidates
From Texas and Iowa to Arkansas, faith leaders are wading into politics to counter the rise of Christian nationalism

David Smith
Sat 15 Nov 2025

He grew up on a farm in Indiana, the son of a factory worker and eldest of five children. He studied at Liberty, a Christian university founded by the conservative pastor and televangelist Jerry Falwell, and recalls wearing a T-shirt expressing opposition to Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

Two decades later, Justin Douglas is running for the US Congress – as a Democrat.

He is among around 30 Christian white clergy – pastors, seminary students and other faith leaders – known to be potential Democratic candidates in next year’s midterm elections, including a dozen who are already in the race. While stressing the separation of church and state, many say that on a personal level their faith is calling them into the political arena….

In Arkansas, Robb Ryerse, a Christian pastor and former Republican, is mounting a challenge to representative Steve Womack, adopting the slogan “Faith, Family & Freedom” – rhetoric more commonly found in Republican campaign literature.

Ryerse, 50, from Springdale, Arkansas, said: “I joke sometimes that the two people who have changed my life more than any others are Jesus and Donald Trump, for very different reasons. Donald Trump is absolutely inconsistent with Christian principles of love and compassion, justice, looking out for the poor, meeting the needs of the marginalized.

“But Donald Trump has also used and been used by so many evangelical leaders who want political power. He has used them to validate him to their followers and they have used him to further their agenda, which has been a Christian nationalist culture war on the United States, which I think is bad for both the church and for the country.”

White clergy are deciding to run for office, Ryerse believes, in part as a response to the rise of Christian nationalism and the reality that, according to a Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) survey, Trump won 85% of the white evangelical vote in last year’s presidential election.

Ryerse said: “We realize, hey, our churches and the people in our churches have been duped by this guy and so rather than hope someone else will clean up the problem, what we’ve seen is a lot of pastors respond with, you know what, I’m going to jump in and I’m going to be a part of the solution.

“On a more positive note, there’s also that notion we need to do something for the common good. There’s so much alignment between what I believe personally is good for my neighbor, what it means to love my neighbor, and how that aligns with what public policy ought to be.”

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November 6, 2025

Judging and projection

One of the most famous quotes about judging is from the Gospels:

Do not judge, so that you may not be judged.
Matthew 7:1

Despite that wisdom, Christians and others often tend to forget or ignore it. A lot of judging goes on.

Another similar perspective is taken in Buddhism, which is not to say that Buddhists don’t indulge in judging also.

A maxim from the classic 59 maxims of mind-training (lojong):

Don’t reflect on others’ shortcomings.

We should train our minds to see others as pure by thinking that when we see a fault in someone, it’s because we project imaginary faults onto others due to things appearing to be impure from our own side. Practicing in this way, we will be able to protect ourselves from the tendency to judge others.
Gomo Tulku (1922-1985), Seven Steps to Train Your Mind

This goes farther than the Christian message that we shouldn’t judge others because we might get judged back. We don’t judge because whatever the other is doing, we are looking in a mirror. We are pure, though our self-importance keeps us from knowing it. The other is pure, but is also kept from knowing it. Our role is not to judge, but to help them see it and help ourselves see it.

Note that no one suggests that we put our critical thinking in neutral. If we find that what we or others do, say or think might be better, we can point it out, provided our motivation is making things better, and not proving ourselves better and smarter.

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July 6, 2025

We are passersby (says Jesus) and tourists (says the Dalai Lama)

Whenever we can connect the Dalai Lama and Jesus, we know we are in the right place.

The Gospel of Thomas, sometimes called the Fifth Gospel, is a collection of sayings of Jesus that parallel and supplement the canonical gospels.

It contains this short and simple direction:

Be passersby

This enigmatic saying for me has the depth of any words in scripture.

Today I came across related wisdom from the Dalai Lama, who makes the same point. Just as Jesus is not offering a limited Christian perspective, the Dalai Lama is not offering a limited Buddhist perspective. It is a fact of human life.

Here the Dalai Lama comments on verses from Shantideva’s The Way of the Bodhisattva.

We are all here on this planet, as it were, as tourists. None of us can live here forever. The longest we might live is a hundred years. So while we are here we should try to have a good heart and to make something positive and useful of our lives. Whether we live just a few years or a whole century, it would be truly regrettable and sad if we were to spend that time aggravating the problems that afflict other people, animals, and the environment. The most important thing is to be a good human being.

Dalai Lama, For the Benefit of All Beings: A Commentary on The Way of the Bodhisattva

Passersby. Tourists. Together.

Note: By coincidence—or is it?—this was created spontaneously today on the 90th birthday of the Dalai Lama.

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June 30, 2025

Mr. Jesus Goes to Washington

Republicans in Congress seem to have lost their way. They could use a more altruistic, less self-serving vision of Americans and their lives.

Many of those members identify as religiously faithful, the majority faithful Christians.

What if some famous religious figures visit Congress and talk about its role in helping to make American lives better?

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was made by legendary director Frank Capra, himself a faithful Christian. His movies, including It’s A Wonderful Life, reflect open-hearted idealism.

In the movie, small-town good guy Jefferson Smith, who leads a group of local boys, ends up in the U.S. Senate. There he finds himself among a group of much less innocent men. They reject his ideals, sure he will change or be distracted. He is advised to be pragmatic. When he won’t play along, forces try to stop him. In the end, it is the same group of boys who help good triumph.

What if Jesus visited Congress right now? Would Christian members believe him? Would they question whether he is the real Jesus? Would they argue that his interpretation of the Christian mission is wrong, even though it is his own words at issue?

Not for the first time, Jesus will still preach to these naysayers. Maybe he will filibuster, as Mr. Smith did until he collapsed in exhaustion. Jesus is no stranger to extreme public sacrifice in service of the greater good.

Will Mr. Jesus go to Washington? Many Republicans think he is already there. But is he really?

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June 27, 2025

Why compassion?

There is a notable lack of compassion in some of the public initiatives in America and in other nations. These are nations that officially or unofficially identify as Judaeo-Christian.

For some time I’ve focused on that lack of compassion and considered how it might be improved.

But here I move to a predicate question. Why do those traditions or society value and promote compassion at all?

The question particularly arises for students of Buddhism. It may be an overbroad characterization, but it is not imprecise to say that compassion is at the center of Buddhism.

Which leads to the question of whether and how much compassion is at the center of other traditions.

So why compassion at all?

Here a few of the possible answers.

It is the right thing to do.

God wants it and expects it.

The Golden Rule advises it, because we will be treated as we treat others.

It will get us into heaven or keep us out of hell.

It makes us feel good.

Unlike those and other explanations, Buddhism reaches compassion not as an assigned transactional value but as an unavoidable conclusion. To simplify in my own substandard understanding, if there is absolute equality among us, there can be nothing but compassion. If we don’t recognize that absolute equality—and we so often don’t, instead putting ourselves in an unequal position—how can we be genuinely compassionate?

With that, back to the events of the day, and the open question of how, once we have advanced our own compassion, we can find ways to advance it in our traditions and in our nations.

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April 20, 2025

Jesus says: Be passersby

Buland Darwaza gate to Jami Masjid mosque, Fatehpur Sikri, India, inscribed: “This world is a bridge. Pass over it, but do not build your dwelling there.”

The Gospel of Thomas is a record of the sayings of Jesus. It is a Coptic text, discovered in the twentieth century, and generally regarded as authentic as the sayings included in the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. A number of the sayings in Thomas have parallels with sayings in those canonical gospels, though many of sayings in Thomas appear nowhere else. The Gospel of Thomas is sometimes referred to as the fifth gospel.

Professor Marvin Meyer was acknowledged as expert on Thomas, along with expertise on other so-called gnostic gospels. (See The Gnostic Bible edited by Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer.) The following is from his translation and commentary on one of the deepest and most enigmatic of the sayings. (Note: The numbering is a scholarly convention not in the text.)

(42)
Yeshua said,
Be passersby.*

*Or, “Be wanderers,” or, much less likely, “Come into being as you pass away” (Coptic shope etetenerparage). A parallel to this saying appears in an inscription from a mosque at Fatehpur Sikri, India: “Jesus said, ‘This world is a bridge. Pass over it, but do not build your dwelling there.’”

The Gospel of Thomas: The Hidden Sayings of Jesus by Marvin W. Meyer

This is not only the shortest saying attributed to Jesus, but one of the shortest attributed to any wisdom master. Yet it is open to so much meaning. To begin with, ‘passersby” or “wanderers” might mean different things. And if it is “passersby”, as in the Muslim inscription on that mosque, a bridge is only one way to understand this.

Whether we are advised by Jesus, in just two words, to be passersby or wanderers, how exactly are we to be?

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March 1, 2024

Gaza war: Loss of mysticism means embrace of tragic materialism

What is mysticism? One of many words that can mean many things. As Humpty Dumpty said, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

In The Encyclopedia of Jewish Myth, Magic and Mysticism, Rabbi Geoffrey Dennis tries to define it:

The term “mysticism” is one commonly applied, but imperfectly defined….

Scholars have struggled to give a precise definition to what constitutes mysticism within the Western religious traditions. Most regard it to be the impulse, ideology, and discipline to experience the unmediated presence of God or, more radically, union with divinity or a more broadly defined “Absolute.” Evelyn Underhill calls it, “… the expression of the innate tendency of the human spirit towards complete harmony with the transcendental order; whatever be the theological formula under which that order is understood.” Others see mysticism as a project of human transformation, the radical revision of human nature in relationship to the divine.

There is a substantial body of mysticism in Judaism, as there is in its younger siblings Christianity and Islam. The place of mysticism in these religions is complex and varied over time and circumstances. While mysticism might lead to fierce conflicts (“my enlightened vision is better than your enlightened vision”), the “radical revision of human nature” can also lead to followers experiencing other people and things in a more humane, open and divine way.

I don’t know of research measuring the study and adoption of mysticism among contemporary Jews. My anecdotal observation is that it might be small.

To a certain extent, materialism is the opposite of mysticism. Things are things but also transcendentally more than things. Land is land but transcendentally more than land. As religionists say, the phenomenal and the noumenal. We need and can’t avoid having and using the things, but that leads to attaching to the things, which inevitably leads to trouble, within ourselves and in the world. Mysticism, easily lost in the everyday of religions, including Judaism, and certainly lost in the turmoil, could be helpful right now.

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November 1, 2023

Mad Gods by the sea

Mad Gods by the sea

God of Moses
God of Jesus
God of Mohammed
God of infinite names
Sitting by the desert sea
Pained and grieved.
This is madness.
These people
Every inclination
Is only evil
All the time.*
They take our names
In vile vain.**
There is the water
Let us drive them in
And start again
Just like days of old
Do better next time.
But how would they learn?
Hard hearts may soften
Dissolved in blood and tears.
We won’t abandon
We don’t approve.

*Genesis 6.5-7
**Exodus 20.6

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April 11, 2020

Easter Poem: This Bread I Break by Dylan Thomas

This Bread I Break

This bread I break was once the oat,
This wine upon a foreign tree
Plunged in its fruit;
Man in the day or wine at night
Laid the crops low, broke the grape’s joy.

Once in this time wine the summer blood
Knocked in the flesh that decked the vine,
Once in this bread
The oat was merry in the wind;
Man broke the sun, pulled the wind down.

This flesh you break, this blood you let
Make desolation in the vein,
Were oat and grape
Born of the sensual root and sap;
My wine you drink, my bread you snap.

Dylan Thomas

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April 7, 2020

Pandemic Passover and Easter: Faith without form

Our religious traditions, from their beginnings, have been about form. Practices, beliefs, texts, communities. These are all forms that are required, recommended, unifying.

It is unavoidable to see an identity between the traditions and forms. That is, the point of the traditions seems to be the forms themselves.

There is a Zen thought that the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon itself. We point because the finger shows us which way to go and where something may be found. But the finger is not the way or the thing. The form is not the way or the thing.

There is unique value in gathering around the Passover table, following the order (seder) of together retelling a central story. There is unique value in gathering in church on Easter Sunday and retelling another central story.

The Passover seder is important but not essential. The Easter service is important but not essential. These are forms, the finger pointing at the moon.

What exactly is the moon of Passover and the moon of Easter? To be transformed and to transform the world and all the people in it. If you need examples of that, just look at the central stories of the two holidays and the teachings that surround them. You and the world start off one way and, by the time you are done wandering, you and the world are better. The dark places are a little bit lighter.

How do you get there? You take part in a seder, in person or virtually, or maybe you don’t. You attend a church service, in person or virtually, or maybe you don’t. You wander in a wilderness and find yourself and something new. You die and are reborn spiritually. The seder and the service are forms, valuable but not necessary. You can wander and arrive without them.

Apart but not alone, happy Passover and happy Easter.

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Tag: Christianity