The Conversion of a Conservative to a Liberal

By William Bronson

Growing up, I lived in a bubble. I saw the world working fairly well. My father had a successful small business in high tech carbide tool and die making. He had started it when his employer, a subsidiary of General Electric, was going to close its repair shop, which my father ran. He made a deal that he would continue the work as a private contractor and take on other customers as well. He and his partner worked hard and the company became a success. My brother subsequently took over when Dad retired and now my nephew has taken over from him. My niece also worked for the company and her husband still does. Through all their hard work, wisdom, and diligence, the company has prospered.

I went into aviation and flew first for Northeast Airline beginning in 1966 when I got out of five years in the Navy where I earned my wings. Then Delta bought out Northeast in the early seventies. Delta was originally run by some caring entrepreneurs and we were told we were a family. Then greed walked in, in the form of some savvy CEOs. Ten years into my retirement, they declared bankruptcy as some other airlines had done, and hired people back the next day at a fraction of their salaries. Meanwhile they dumped their retirees on the taxpayers through the Pension (partial) Benefit Guarantee Trust Corp. set up by Congress for the apparent purpose of enabling bad corporate behavior. The bankruptcies were related to the ruse of corporate raiding of pension funds during good times and then finding them short during bad times.

So I learned that not all corporations are created equal. Big business didn’t play by the same rules as small businesses. Looking at big business through historical lenses, it became clear that so-called free enterprise mainly meant that they were free to enlist the services of government and taxpayers through their so-called representatives to gain unfair advantage over competitors and labor.

Looking overseas, the picture appeared even worse. Colonialism and neo-colonialism have resulted in half the world struggling to subsist on less than $2 per day, while most wealth is held by the very few.  Now globalization and so-called free trade agreements have only accelerated the distance between rich and poor.

America is not left out, with financial game playing that resulted in a crisis and bank bailouts by taxpayers who were threatened that things could get even worse. Then foreclosures became rampant due to unemployment due to nervous markets due to all of the above. Then Occupy Everywhere arrived as bright young students burdened with debt supposedly to be paid off by cushy jobs figured out they had been had like the rest of us. They are using the same techniques as the Arab Spring only instead of malicious military dictators, the villain has become the oligarchy, the same oligarchy that was responsible for the dictators. It is a money game and Obama doesn’t know which side of the street he should stand on.

I used to believe, simplistically, that if government stayed out of the way, free enterprise would create utopia and private charity would take care of the poor, especially if our society was liberally sprinkled with conservative Christian virtues.

Now to my horror, much like Frank Schaeffer, I discover that I helped enable a government which with great hubris has spent trillions creating mayhem overseas under the pretense of protecting ourselves and democracy through its escalated war on terror which has become a cash cow for the military industrial complex that Eisenhower tried to warn us against.

Having just observed Veterans Day, we were treated on all channels to a depressing litany of ruined lives by those lured into the military by promises of $15,000 signing bonuses and college educations. Now left damaged and maimed, many of them have to sort out whether they were in fact saviors of democracy or pawns in a very sick money game.

What to do now? I suppose pray that 2012 will in fact bring about some new worldwide epiphany that changes things for the better.

* William Bronson, DMin ’08, was an airline pilot for many years and author of How to Get to Heaven.

What do the words “Jewish” and “Anglican” have in common?

By Larry Wills

Why is religious identity so tightly associated with our titles for things? Is religious identity a timeless and unchanging thing which lies at the core of a people, or does it evolve as a result of changes from outside, and indeed separately, from the titles we apply?

“Anglican” and “Jewish” are adjectives that designate religious bodies, but they have a surprisingly parallel history. Scholars of early Judaism note that Israel was the more common identity term used by those who worshipped God at the Jerusalem temple. There were twelve tribes in all, and the word “Jew” originally meant Judean, one from the tribe of Judah or Judea, where Jerusalem was located.

When the elite among the Judeans were taken away in the Babylonian exile and some of their descendants returned later under the Persians, they insisted that they, and not the people who had remained in the land, were the true Judeans.

So the word Jew or Judean was originally a geographical marker, and probably became an ethnic marker of those who were living in Babylon and Persia, and only when they returned with this marker did it become an affirmation of identity with the center of Israel, the temple in Judah.

But Judean was still not a commonly used marker, and it still had a geographical focus more than a global religious focus. Some Jewish authors used it often, most did not. In the Mishnah, the first collection of rabbinic rulings, it is used only four times. Some texts of the New Testament also use it rarely.

However, globalism influenced the meaning of “Jewish.” When people oriented toward Jerusalem moved out into the larger world (the diaspora) they also identified as Jews or Judeans—those who revered the God worshipped in Judah. Judean was again an ethnic marker but also became a “religious” designation: those whose religion was based on the God worshipped in Judea. One didn’t need to be located in Judea, and one could convert to the religion or leave it behind. So “Jew” began as a geographical term, became an ethnic identifier in the larger world, and only gradually became a term denoting a religion that one could convert to or depart from.

“Anglican” has a strangely similar history. The Christian church in England was called in Latin Ecclesia Anglicana, the English church—a geographical adjective. The Latin term was rarely used, and even after the English Reformation it was more common to say Church of England or even simply the Church. “Anglican” was a geographical term but not very powerful as an identity term.

Globalism affected this term just as it did “Jew.” A new term arose in the 19th century, “Anglicanism,” as a term to distinguish the tradition of the Church of England from other world-wide churches, and it was shifting from a geographical term to an ethnic ideal in colonization, and then to a religious identity in a world of competing global churches.

This situation evidently continued until the 20^th century, when an originally colonized group perched at the margins—American Episcopalians—perceived a need to make reference to the distinction between the two groups. In addition, the greater importance of other originally colonized groups perched at the margins—members of the Church of England in Africa, India, and Asia—perceived a need for a word that was more “religious” than merely geographical or ethnic. A new diaspora of people converted through colonization saw in the word “Anglican” a religious identity that it had not formerly had.

The words Jewish and Anglican began as geographical terms, rarely used, with little power as identity markers, but because of ancient and modern colonization were pressed into service, first as ethnic markers and finally with a much stronger religious identity that claimed to transcend the center. From that point the heated debate could be taken up: “What is a Jew?” “What is an Anglican?” And in both cases, various groups within the bodies have claimed to own the true meaning of the term.

* Larry Wills is Ethelbert Talbot Professor of Biblical Studies at Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts.