Could the Black Church Save us All?

Before you click out, know three things about me. First, I’m not Black. Second, I’m not religious in any conventional sense. I was born and raised in a mostly assimilated Jewish family in Los Angeles.

My family and my grammar school were ecumenical. We put up Christmas trees, sang Christmas carols, celebrated Hanukah, played with dreidels, and dabbled (superficially!) in Buddhism and Confucianism.

Third, as an adult, I consider myself a complete rationalist. For me, science and the scientific method, with occasional nods to accurate history, are the only true and reliable bases of human knowledge.

So why do I put some faith in our American Black Church to save our nation and our species from accelerating planetary heating and the risk of nuclear Armageddon, all in an era apparently headed toward replaying the Imperial Age? Read on.

My realization came upon me quite recently, at the end of the first week of Donald J. Trump’s second term as President. I was reading an op-ed in the Washington Post, listing twelve potential Democratic candidates for president in 2028, presumably with a view to carrying on—or resuscitating—American democracy.

All the twelve candidates suggested already have had strong political careers. All are intelligent, most highly so. With the possible exception of John Fetterman (D, PA), I could imagine any of them doing a creditable job of repairing at least some of the damage to our democracy and our economy that another four years of Trump will have done.

But to be frank, they all leave me cold. Pete Buttigieg is one of the most calmly intelligent and rational public servants I’ve ever seen. I could easily vote for him for president, although several commenters opined that a gay man could never get elected. Similarly, Democratic governors like Gavin Newsom (CA), Josh Shapiro (PA) or Gretchen Whitmer (MI) surely have the intelligence and experience to do the job. But I could not and cannot imagine any of them summoning the charisma or moral authority that I think repairing the immense damage of the next four years will require.

The problem is easy to state but devilishly hard to solve. Without resorting to empty negative superlatives, I can say that Trump strikes me as epitomizing most, if not all, of the defects of human character. Whatever you may think of a regime and policies built on lies, numerous (perhaps “honest”) mistakes of fact, retribution, vengeance, hate, disdain, selfishness, narcissism, whim and bullying, they have little in common with the Enlightenment that produced our nation and its Constitution.

Unlike most of my peers, I never read Machiavelli’s The Prince until late in my own middle age. When I did, I was appalled. I had always thought, perhaps erroneously, that it had something positive to teach us. I suppose it does: we are lucky to have left the Middle Ages far behind.

Although I read it less than a decade ago, I now remember only two things about it: really one thing repeated twice. In two separate instances, partisans of a tiny Italian city-state invited emissaries from an enemy city-state for peace talks and, on that pretext, slaughtered the entire visiting crew.

That sort of treachery may have produced a temporary military or economic advantage in medieval Italy, but I can’t see how it would advance our species’ survival in the Nuclear Age, let alone the Age of AI. Wouldn’t automated “fail-safe” controllers of our nukes make sure that no one at all survived?

Unfortunately, I don’t believe that some kindly Father is looking after us from up in the clouds. If we extinguish ourselves as a species, along with most other creatures on our planet, no one will be left to care. After fifty or so half-lives of Plutonium-239—very roughly a million years—the background radioactivity will be back to baseline, and evolution can begin again. Maybe the next intelligent species will be smarter. (Our Sun has 5 billion years of hydrogen fuel, so life can try to get it right again and again, thousands of times!)

Reluctantly, I came to a sobering conclusion. Our next leader will need far more than just superior intelligence and hard work. He or she will require moral authority elevated to the level of compelling personal magnetism.

As the Sun set on the day of Trump’s second inaugural, I was listening to the voice of just such a man. He was MLK, explaining why he had split with LBJ even after that president had gotten arch-segregationist Southern Senators to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

I’ve written twice about this extraordinary speech (here and here). It’s one of the rarest combinations of superior intelligence, moral authority, inoffensive certainty, self-sacrifice and political courage that I have ever had the good fortune to perceive. I replay it periodically to renew my faith in our species.

It it, MLK predicted—quite accurately—how LBJ’s macho obsession with “beating the Communists” in Vietnam would destroy his Great Society, corrupt our democracy, and, in the end, cause our nation’s first, biggest and gravest ever military loss, the precursor to our stalemate in Iraq and our more recent debacle in Afghanistan.

Just a few days more than one year after delivering that speech, MLK was gunned down. How extraordinary a man was he?

In his ability to “turn the other cheek” to outrageous violence, and to attract a great following in so doing, he was reminiscent of another great moral leader: Jesus of Nazareth. And in MLK’s quest to free a whole people without violence, there are only three like him, to my knowledge, in all of human history: Gandhi, he and Mandela (although MLK’s task is not yet fully done).

But what gives me hope is that MLK was not just a comet out of the blue. He was product of a great movement—the Black Church—that grew out of four continuous centuries of enslavement and oppression of, and discrimination against, Black people in America. And that movement and the Black Church live on.

As I was reading comments to the WaPo article on possible 2028 Democratic candidates, one struck me. A commenter claimed to “love” Senator Warnock, the Democratic Senator from Georgia who first won office in 2021, in the runoff for a special election a single day before the January 6 Insurrection. Just as the odd verb struck me, so did my memory: Reverend Warnock is a product and a leader of the Black Church and one of those whom I called “Saviors of Democracy” after his special-election win.

Less directly, Wes Moore, Maryland’s Democratic Governor, is also such a product. What compelled me to recommend him as a candidate for president 2020 (prematurely, as he did not seek the job), was what I saw as his unique moral authority. Yes, unlike so many armchair soldiers, he had seen actual combat and in fact had led it. But his real moral authority, in my view, derived from his early acquaintance with the Black Church, and his concise recitation of Enlightenment values in his election-night victory speech. I suppose the latter derived from his Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford.

Jesus of Nazareth reportedly penned the two greatest bumper stickers ever, millennia before there were cars. “Love thy enemy,” he advised us. “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” That advice might get us through this age of planetary heating, new imperialism and nuclear proliferation. Science and human rationality alone won’t: there aren’t enough of us who follow them willingly, let alone rigorously.

What makes us remember Jesus is not just what he said. It’s that he died willingly, knowingly, sacrificing himself to help us remember and comply.

Just so with MLK. He foresaw his own death clearly, several times. Yet he didn’t change course one iota, knowing that his own death, like Jesus’, might help us remember and heed his good advice.

The Black Church is, in my view, the only durable institution in our nation that carries that sort of moral authority today. It’s the only institution that has stood steadfastly for non-violent change against centuries of slavery, injustice, oppression and discrimination, some of which still pertain today.

In my youth, white leaders, too, once trod the road of sacrifice. JFK famously told us, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” Injured in his PT Boat during WWII, he lived much of his life on pain medication and with Addison’s disease, and he died by assassination. So did his brother, RFK. Although no one could foresee it then, these three political murders led directly to the end of the Enlightenment in our country and our desperate times today.

The Black Church and its members know about desperate times. Virtually all of its four centuries of life have been filled with desperation, broken briefly by the joy of Juneteenth, Congress’ passage of the 1960s civil-rights bills, and Barack Obama’s presidency. In my view, there is no rival institution in our nation more fit to take on the stark abandonment of human morality that we now see surrounding and swallowing us, like quicksand, as we sink beneath the muck.

There are questions, to be sure. The Black Church is not just an abstract venue for moral authority. Most of all, it’s a community and a refuge for people who have been systematically excluded from almost everything else. Can it welcome or accommodate others and supplant the Catholic and Baptist faiths that are, even now, sinking beneath waves of pulpit-based pedophilia and right-wing extremism? Will it preserve its unique character and its moral authority if it tries?

These questions are beyond my pay grade. All I know is that, as I survey the moral wreckage of our American social landscape, the only real, consistent, reliable refuge from the Storm I see is the Black Church.

Certainly so-called “technology,” once the handmaiden of Science, offers no solace. Today’s Big Tech algorithmically amplifies lies, hate and extremism, exploiting people’s adrenaline and dopamine rushes to make money, as if they were monkeys in some diabolical online array of Skinner Boxes. We will not recover our moral bearings, let alone a rational society, with help from the likes of Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk.

Next to their pernicious influence, which I hold reponsible (along with right-wing media like Fox and Breitbart) for the astoundingly speedy and catastrophic decay of our politics and national mores, the rare sources of moral authority in our society are few and far between. Venerable institutions focused on the law, such as the ACLU, have put far too much faith in the our deeply flawed Constitution, and too little in basic human values— what’s right and wrong. Not all speech is good, and ever-more speech has proved grossly inadequate to counteract algorithmically amplified online lies.

We need less legal technicalities and abstract theories of how right should prevail even as it self-evidently is failing to do so. We need more focus on basic, obvious human values. We need truths that ordinary people without higher education can feel in their souls. Dare I say "biblical" ones?

So count this essay not as a prescription, far less a request or demand. Who am I to ask yet more of an institution that has given so much to suffering people for so long?

Count this the essay as but a mark of admiration of an institution, seen from afar by an outsider, that has done something no other institution has managed to do so consistently throughout American history. The Black Church has hued to what’s right in the face of the most powerful evil that a society badly in need of moral guidance has been able to throw at it for four centuries. If it can lend some grace to the rest of us, perhaps we all might muddle through.



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MLK Day 2025

Am I the only one who’s noticed? That’s hard to believe, but I haven’t seen any comment. This year MLK Day coincides with the second inauguration of the greatest personal threat to American democracy since the Civil War.

What irony!

But for me, it will be a solace. I will have something real and enduring to celebrate Monday. When the inauguration ceremonies are over and the grounds lie empty on what promises to be a bitterly cold day, I will raise a glass of something non-alcoholic and recall one of the greatest Americans never to have held political office.

Ironies abound. Pollsters tell us that Evangelicals were instrumental in electing Trump president a second time. They call themselves “Christians.” But as they viciously prod our social divisions like open wounds, they seem a bit light in Jesus’ virtues.

“Love thy enemy,” Jesus said. “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” “Turn the other cheek.” Although not a believer in the pedestrian sense, I have described these words of Jesus as the greatest bumper stickers ever penned, composed two millennia before there were cars.

Dr. King, it seems to me, followed Jesus’ prescriptions more faithfully and more effectively than any American pol in our nation’s history, our estimable Founders included. In how many peaceful protests did he “turn the other cheek”? How often did he let bigots and barbarians bloody himself and his followers, just to show that love and forbearance are the glue that binds our species together and our ultimate salvation?

The parallels don’t stop there. Herod crucified Jesus for being a politically inconvenient leader of a tiny tribe (Jews) on the edge of the great Roman Empire. MLK was killed for being a politically inconvenient leader of a marginalized tribe of oppressed Black people on the political, if not geographic, edge of the greatest democracy since Rome.

The only salient difference was that the Roman state murdered Jesus, while a private assassin killed MLK. But how great a difference was that when our State, in the person of J. Edgar Hoover (and others), had persecuted and defamed MLK relentlessly for decades, merely for wanting to make the words of our Declaration and Constitution real?

Still the parallels don’t stop. Today we don’t see Jesus or MLK as philosophers or thinkers. We think of them as activists. They made their impact not with words on paper, but with social deeds. They organized. They persuaded. They preached. They drew crowds and followers. They changed minds with their powerful and extraordinary ideas. And they drew authorities’ attention and ire because their deeds caused unwanted and misunderstood social change and promised more.

Yet today we have a signal advantage over Jesus’ early followers. We have the speeches and thoughts of MLK on tape. We don’t have to depend on the interpretations and “spin” of followers who purportedly recorded his words and deeds decades or centuries later. We can read and hear for ourselves.

On Monday, I will do just that. I will sit down before my computer and listen to MLK deliver what I see as his most important speech. (No, it’s not his “I have a dream!” speech, although that, too, was a masterpiece of human love, emotional logic, and gentle persuasion.) I will hear him deliver his speech of April 4, 1967, in which, for the first time, he broke with LBJ on the escalation of our tragic debacle in Vietnam.

In that speech, as I have written before, he laid out in detail—and with astonishing accuracy—the future consequences of our stubborn and illogical persistence in that misguided war. In so doing, he proved to be a “seer” as much as if he had been divine.

I will marvel again at MLK’s brilliance and foresight. I will hear and feel the strong but gentle timber of his resonant voice and the universal love it expresses. I will rejoice that such a man once walked the Earth, even while I was on it and could see and hear him, if only remotely. And I will know for certain that, if our species survives, we will remember MLK—like Jesus, Mandela and Gandhi—for millennia, even as the Demagogue’s name fades from memory like those of the warring chiefs of medieval Italian city-states in Machiavelli’s The Prince.



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Pete Hegseth Could End Our Species

Distraction is Donald Trump’s modus operandi, perhaps second only to delusion. We are now mired in a frenetic national conversation about whether we should acquire Greenland, retake the Panama Canal, and make Canada our fifty-first state.

So We, The People—not to mention our so-called “mainstream media”—appear to have entirely forgotten that Pete Hegseth is up for Senate confirmation as Secdef on Tuesday, just three days away.

So far, the “conversation” about his appointment has focused on his several personal indiscretions, including incidents of flagrant public drunkenness, dismissive attitude toward females, and alleged sexual assaults. These credible allegations of raunchy personal misbehavior are bad enough. Do we really want a man with the discipline and self-control of a pot-headed teenager with his finger on The Button?

But the gossip about Hegseth’s personal faults have totally obscured a far more critical issue in his nomination: his inexperience and ignorance of strategic plans and risks. The highest military rank Hegseth has ever held is that of Major. And he reportedly held it in the Minnesota National Guard for less than a year, training Afghan security forces.

He has never held the rank of general, not even a one-star, and he never had any involvement with, let alone command of, our nation’s strategic forces. In other words, when it comes to our “strategic triad” of nuclear forces—missiles, missile-bearing submarines, and strategic “stealth” bombers—he has about as much experience and knowledge as the average man or woman in the street.

To understand how consequential that inexperience could be, let’s turn to the patron saint of the modern Republican Party, President Ronald Reagan. He had undeniable Irish charm and a way of speaking that beguiled an entire nation. But even as president, he, too, was an utter ingenue regarding the strategic forces, both ours and our adversaries’, that could extinguish our species.

More than that: Reagan was apparently incurious on the subject. It wasn’t until his second term as president that he asked his generals what would be the consequences of a general nuclear exchange. They told him that an estimated 600 million people would die, on all sides, in the exchange and immediate aftermath of the conflict. That was more than double our national population at the time.

With that basic factual information, Reagan turned his attention and legendary charm to a critical problem: avoiding Armageddon. He found a willing partner in Mikhail Gorbachev, the reform- and peace-minded Soviet leader at the time. The rest is history. Virtually all the international agreements regulating the insanity of the nuclear arms race, most of which have now expired or are soon to expire, had their origins in the species-protective mutual understanding of Reagan and Gorbachev in the 1980s.

Now those agreements are gone or expiring. The entire notion of rational choice to reduce the risk of Armageddon is on the ropes.

In his personal resurrection of nineteenth-century imperialism in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has threatened using nuclear weapons multiple times. North Korea’s Kim Jong Un has done the same, and Trump, in his first term, returned the favor by threatening “fire and fury.” Even China, which was never a factor in the nuclear strategic calculus when Reagan was president, now has an estimated arsenal of 500-600 nukes and is reportedly building it out to multiple world-destroying capacity, just like our own arsenal and the Russians’.

The simple fact is that an exploding a tiny fraction of the strategic nuclear arsenal of a single major power—even India or Pakistan—would likely end human life on Earth as we know it. It could do so in two ways.

The first is a so-called “nuclear winter.” Some twenty or so big, roughly simultaneous nuclear explosions could kick up dust and debris high into the stratosphere and so produce a “nuclear winter.” Notwithstanding the current, much slower acceleration of global warming, the resulting massive and sudden blockage of the Sun could destroy human agriculture worldwide, for a number of years, leading to a planet-wide catastrophic famine.

The issue is not a matter of mere temperature, unlike the relatively slow pace of climate change that, even now, is multiplying weather disasters like the recent hurricane destruction of Asheville, North Carolina, or the wind-driven and drought-fed wildfires in Los Angeles. No, the “nuclear winter” would be a much simpler and more direct matter: blocking the Sun’s rays from hitting the Earth’s surface. Those rays are vital for photosynthesis in crops, and crops feed both us and the animals we eat.

With no Sun for several years (until the dust settles), there will be no food, except the leftovers from whatever has been stored. Our species has already experienced similar dust-driven famines, for example, in the medieval “Little Ice Age” thought to have been caused by massive volcanic eruptions.

The second method of likely species extinction would be radioactivity. How quickly we forget! In the 1960s, at the height of the Cold War between the US and Soviet Union, both nations tested nuclear weapons (both fission and thermonuclear, i.e., “hydrogen bombs”) on a regular basis. As a result of this “drip, drip, drip” of atmospheric nuclear testing—just a few weapons per year on each side—radioactive isotopes such as strontium-90 began to circulate in the upper atmosphere, span the globe, and settle down to where people live. The isotopes began to appear in cows’ milk that people drank and to cause unusual cancers in children and others who drank the milk.

In those days, with the world’s most terrible war (and the first use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) in recent memory, our species’ leaders were a bit more circumspect. After the near-catastrophe of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, JFK and then Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev got together, relying on accurate and terrifying scientific information, and adopted the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, banning tests of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, on the Earth’s surface, and under water. That Treaty still stands today.

But the “drip, drip, drip” of radioactive isotopes from nuclear testing was nothing like what a full wartime nuclear exchange could produce. At the height of the nuclear testing binge, in which nations besides the US and Soviet Union participated, the number of nukes exploded were at most a dozen or so per year. Today, the Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that humanity has some 13 thousand nuclear weapons worldwide, possessed by such nations as ours, Russia, China, Britain, France, India, Pakistan, and Israel. If only one or two of these nations start throwing their nukes around in a frenzy of fear or anger, the surface of our Earth could become a radioactive wasteland in just a few months.

Merely to understand these dismal realities, a leader must have a solid grasp of the science of nuclear weapons, the dynamics of radioactivity dispersal and “nuclear winter,” and their many smaller-scale disastrous effects if used. He/she must also have in mind the vast and multifarious forces around the globe that possess nukes, and the details of their command, control and possible use (by mistake or otherwise) in multiple cultures, nations, regions and commands.

Donald Trump does not possess this knowledge and expertise and never will. He’s even more incurious than Ronald Reagan, if only because the beginning and end of his curiosity is himself.

So our protection against stumbling into a nuclear war because of miscalculation, misunderstanding, misperception, bravado, or sheer stupidity depends on our second in command in these matters: our Secdef.

Yes, we have a long tradition of civilian control of our military. But having a Secdef with inadequate military experience has not served us well. In the Vietnam era, we had Robert S. MacNamara—a car-maker at Ford by trade and training—who brought us the longest, most tragic, bitterly divisive military debacle in our history. More recently, in Iraq, we had Donald Rumsfeld, who brought us the long, bitter, and agonizingly slow stalemate in Iraq.

In assessing the risk of nuclear Armageddon, we can’t afford to take that sort of risk again, when a single misstep could be our entire species’ last.

Pete Hegseth is not just a miserable excuse for a man and a leader. Far more important, he has not a whit of the experience, expertise, knowledge and curiosity that we need for humanity to survive the present and coming challenges of planetary heating and our Second Age of Imperialism intact. He is a mediocre, uneducated, incurious, untutored man who reached his Peter Principle long ago, at Fox.

Hegseth is self-evidently the wrong man for the wrong job at the wrong time and the wrong place. His confirmation as a sycophant and yes-man to reinforce President-elect Trump’s worst impulses could facilitate our species’ own self-extinction. He must not be confirmed.


For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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