Month: March 2016

This has all happened before. The white rage, the white fright, the white embracing of a demagogue who means none of what he spews. George Wallace was Donald Trump back in 1968. Capitalizing on the civil rights gains, the baby boomers getting all freedom-ee and listening to that hippie music and smoking that stuff and Afros, Wallace, the Guv-nah of Alabama who had famously stood in the schoolhouse door to keep the blacks out for an extra 5 minutes or so, was on a roll.

Let a tornado or flood devastate a community, and local pastors are often the first ones called to help the community understand the devastation and destruction. Let a student shoot up the local high school, and local pastors are called upon to help students cope with the senseless violence. Let a school bus carrying high school athletes veer off the road, resulting in the death of several notable students, and local pastors are asked to come to the school and console and support grieving students. No one bothers to ask: WHY should pastors be called for support when tragedy strikes? What possibly could pastors offer people other than a shoulder to cry upon?

In rural Northwest Ohio, the place of my birth and current residence, Evangelical pastors are routinely called upon to give help when tragedy strikes. I have to ask, what could Evangelical pastors possibly say that would help anyone make sense of tragedy? These men of God literally have nothing to offer but meaningless clichés: