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COVID-19 as spiritual moment, Part 2: the community

This is the second in my three-part series about a spiritual and political response to COVID-19. The first centered on our personal needs and self-care. The third will attend to public/political policy and ramifications. Today, my focus is on community.

The community

Every spiritual movement of which I’m aware focuses on connectedness and community. It’s hard to imagine that anyone could nurture a spiritual consciousness without also being aware of and concerned about all of humanity.

“Community” can refer to the people who share your home, your neighbors, or people who live on the other side of the globe. All of us inhabit the same planet; all of us have equal value as human beings.

Some gatherings of like-minded people are faith groups, or those who hold certain ideals in common. Such affinity groups can be important to our spiritual development and even to our humanity. However, it is also essential that we look beyond those with whom we feel a particular bond. In difficult times like these, we recognize – if our eyes and hearts are open – that we are all connected, interdependent, and that we must focus on what is good and right for everyone.

Here are a few guiding principles for difficult times in community.

  • Don’t be an a-hole. It isn’t all about you. The things you do affect everyone. So…
    • Stop hoarding. Just. Stop. It. You have enough TP. When you realize that you have more than you need of something, call local food banks. They accept food, and also toiletries and personal products. Many unemployed and underemployed people are in desperate need of everything right now.
    • Don’t call it the Chinese virus or the Wuhan virus. Doing so is a lame attempt at saying this pandemic is someone else’s fault. A virus is no one’s fault; it’s just biology. Bad things happen, and laying blame on a specific country or race simply divides us at a time when we should be more united than ever to end this disease.
  • Do the right things. Remember that social distancing isn’t just a healthy practice for you; it’s good for everyone and even saves lives. The more we care for each other now, the sooner we’ll be back to normal.
  • Stop meeting in public gatherings, including for worship. When you gather for religious (or any other) purposes, you’re defying your spiritual tradition’s admonitions to care for others, especially the most vulnerable. All of us have heard of COVID-19 outbreaks, including some deaths, resulting from religious meetings.
  • Find out who is in particular need and what you can do about it. You don’t have to leave home or put yourself at risk to donate to a non-profit that is working to alleviate suffering.
  • Don’t assume your experience is universal.
    • Are you struggling to get your kids to participate in Zoom classes? Remember how many households don’t have internet access.
    • Frustrated about working from home? Consider those who’ve lost their jobs, or those whose jobs have greatly increased.
    • Are you feeling cooped up? Remember people who are confined to their homes or institutions all the time, or those who are quarantined with their abuser.
    • Tired of cooking? Recognize that many have lost income and aren’t sure how they’re going to feed themselves and their families.
    • Missing your friends? Keep in mind those who are ill or elderly and suffer far more deeply from social isolation.  
  • Celebrate those who keep us going:
    • Those who work in every sort of medical assistance, including those who work service and low-wage jobs at medical facilities;
    • People who grow and harvest our food and those who transport it, stock grocery shelves, cook and deliver meals;
    • Trash collectors, postal workers, delivery drivers, and others who perform public services;
    • Factory workers who manufacture and package essential items;
    • Politicians and bureaucrats who try to effect policies to keep us safe and flatten the curve;
    • Teachers who create new ways of learning remotely, and who are concerned about all the needs a student may have;
    • Persons who risk their own health to provide for our needs.
  • Find ways to honor the connectedness of humanity. Whether your family, your neighbors, or people you will never meet, be grateful for the relationships inherent in being human.

Pray or meditate, if that is your thing, and lift up individuals and groups who are in tremendous need. Then turn your imagination to ways in which you can serve them now, and ways in which you can serve them later when social distancing restrictions are lifted.

In our generation we may never experience another event like COVID-19. Horrible as it is, it’s also an opportunity to learn, or to relearn, how connected we are.

That is the only way we will get through this together.

© Melissa Bane Sevier, 2020

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The Attorney General of the United States, and religious liberty

Sometimes I just can’t believe my luck. After starting my Political and Spiritual website and blog last week, what a surprise that William Barr, US Attorney General, made a speech about religious liberty at Notre Dame University. It’s a perfect illustration of some of what has become backwards and upside down in our country. You can read his full speech here. Here’s my critique. I apologize in advance that’s it’s lengthy, but—oh my—there’s just so much to say.

  1. The Attorney General has the religion clauses of the First Amendment only half right. Or less than half. I’m no lawyer (and I don’t even play one on TV), but I have studied much over the years about the First Amendment’s relationship to religion. Here’s what the amendment says: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Barr only seems to need and want the second clause that prevents congress from prohibiting the free exercise of religion. I don’t know of anyone who disagrees with that clause. The freedom to worship and believe is at the heart of our country’s foundations.
    1. a. It’s the first clause to which Barr gives brief lip service but apparently doesn’t like—no establishment of religion. This first clause was extremely important to our founders; they had seen the abuse of state-sponsored religion. In Europe, state religions led to discrimination against other faith groups. This pattern reasserted itself in the colonies. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, among others, took the lead in keeping that abuse from being a part of our foundational documents. Madison was behind a change in the Virginia Declaration of Rights that concerned religion. The change from “full Toleration” to “free exercise of religion” marked the difference between having a state religion (Anglicanism) in Virginia that would simply permit other faiths, and granting rights to individuals to follow their consciences with vigor and equality, and without interference. Madison later wrote to Jefferson: I flatter myself we have in this country extinguished forever the ambitious hope of making laws for the human mind.
  2. That Madison quote is compelling, because Barr claims that “secular humanists,” as he calls them, would do just that—make laws that govern others’ beliefs. Barr is not only wrong about that, it’s actually his own combination of law and faith that wants to govern and curtail the beliefs of others.
    1. a. The Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the Constitution) was designed to protect human rights—individual rights—from government overstep. Yes, this certainly includes religious rights, but also includes the rights of those who are not religious. It definitely isn’t just for the protection of the rights of conservative Christians, which is oddly what Barr seems to advocate. It’s admirable and understandable that AG Barr believes his personal faith is the best and most important expression of right beliefs and morals. It is wrong when the government’s highest legal official makes this a public policy stance.
    1. b. Freedom to exercise one’s religion in America isn’t confined to Christianity. As a matter of fact, all Christians don’t believe the same things, and many Christians don’t conform at all to the beliefs contained in Barr’s talk.
    1. c. Barr either fails to understand or refuses to acknowledge that the founding documents, including the Constitution and its Bill of Rights, were informed not only by Christianity but also by those who espoused Enlightenment ideals and/or Deism—two related philosophical platforms. Deists talked of God, and by that they meant a creator who set things in motion and then stepped back as the universe ran on its own (like a watchmaker building a timepiece). Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Washington, Franklin, and others identified as Deists or followers of the Enlightenment, or some mashup of the two. Both Enlightenment principles and Deism focused on laws that flowed from both reason and morality.
    1. d. So, if the AG is going to disparage “secularists,” he needs to start with the secularists who wrote the very founding documents he uses to support a different view from what they intended.
  3. Secularism vs. faith? This isn’t a reasonable division. Barr is a conservative Catholic, and many other Catholics have already expressed disagreement and dismay at his comments. The Attorney General speaks of an orchestrated scheme by secularists. He says: This is not decay; it is organized destruction. Secularists, and their allies among the “progressives,” have marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values. What’s interesting is that the people he calls secularists and progressives are the ones who are fighting for the rights of all people, including all religious people and the rights of those who do not belong to a particular faith—not just the rights of conservative Christians. Though Barr speaks often of “religion” in his sermon (yes, it’s a sermon—I know a sermon when I see one), he plainly does not mean any other religion besides conservative Christianity. That view is the opposite of what our founders intended.
  4. And there’s more. Barr goes on: Similarly, militant secularists today do not have a live and let live spirit – they are not content to leave religious people alone to practice their faith. Instead, they seem to take a delight in compelling people to violate their conscience. Wow. Really? Because from where I sit and stand and preach, it’s people like Mr. Barr who don’t want to live and let live. They want every person to conform to their beliefs. I say beliefs and not actions, because their own actions often don’t conform to what they say they believe. And “militant” secularists? What does that even mean? It recalls the days when women who stood up for their rights were called “militant feminists.” Maybe we still are called that and I haven’t noticed?
  5. Men. Several times Mr. Barr uses the term “man” or “men.” Like this one: Men are subject to powerful passions and appetites, and, if unrestrained, are capable of ruthlessly riding roughshod over their neighbors and the community at large. While I don’t disagree with that theology, and though I acutely appreciate his accomplished alliteration, I am both surprised and relieved to know that I’m not included in that sentence. I’m not a man. Mr. Barr, please note that while referring to all people as “men” may have been socially acceptable when the Constitution was written, it has been neither socially acceptable nor good writing/speaking for a very long time.
  6. Your freedom to swing your arm ends just where the other person’s nose begins. This famous quote was taught to my first grade class by Mrs. Pippin, our teacher. No lie. On the first day of school she was talking about rules, and the way she told her example story—or the way my 6-year-old mind remembered it—was that a person claimed he hit someone else in the nose because “it’s a free country.” The injured person replied, “Your freedom ends where my nose begins.” Why use this expression in a blog about religious liberty? To remind you that while you have all the freedom you need to express and practice your religion, you may not swing your arms of faith so as to impede someone else’s freedom.


The bottom line. Secularism has never been an enemy to democratic principles, and secular people were a driving force in the foundational documents of our country. Far more dangerous are the ideas of those who want to defy our Constitution and laws by claiming their own faith rules for everyone.

I have stood proudly, and will again stand, shoulder-to-shoulder with people who profess other religions or no religion, as we demonstrate for human rights and freedom for all. This is what the framers envisioned.

© Melissa Bane Sevier, 2019

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A spiritual response to the impeachment inquiry

When I set out to start a website, blog, and podcast about politics and spirituality, never could I have guessed I would launch the website and blog during an impeachment inquiry. If we are to discuss politics here, it would be ridiculous and wrong to avoid a conversation about the most politically volatile events in the last 30+ years.

I hope you’ll join in the discussion, and reflect on it in your faith communities. Here are a few things I believe we should keep in mind as the process unfolds. It’s not an exhaustive list, and I’m certain I’ll add more ideas in the future. Maybe some of those ideas will come from you.

  1. Look for the truth. Everyone is claiming to speak the truth, and often the truth of one speaker is the exact opposite of the truth given by a different speaker. This isn’t new, of course, but in a social media age where the label “fake news” is thrown about many times a day, and where bald-faced lies are sometimes recounted as if they were truth, discernment takes a little more work. How do we look for the truth? As a starter we turn to trusted news sources. Even there, it’s our responsibility to read, watch, and to listen with a critical eye. Any source that is perfectly aligned with a party or particular politician should be highly suspect. That doesn’t mean that even those sources can’t speak truth; we just have to stop being lazy about receiving everything as truth, and about being uncritical. And we must call out leaders who attempt to shut down the truth, or who repeat lies. In the midst of untruth, we recommit ourselves to speaking truth, in love.
  2. Skip the glee. This one is particularly difficult for me. I have to admit that I find some degree of satisfaction when a policy or person with whom I profoundly disagree and who is, in my opinion, deeply flawed is finally expected to answer for misdeeds, lies, and harm done to others or to our political system. I am striving to limit my public responses to ones that are measured, as kind as possible, reasonable, and spiritual. I’m working on making my private conversations equally even, but that is a work in progress, and a determination I have to renew daily. We must all remember that every actor in this crazy current national narrative is a real person even if that person has done really bad things. That humanity is an essential part of our reaction. When we lessen the humanity of another person, we also lessen our own.
  3. Use our power. Together we have far more power than any one of us has alone. Not only should we be exercising our religious and spiritual power with meditation and prayer, we also must exercise our political power. Without the power of the people and the ballot box, those who represent us lose influence. Now is exactly the time to call and write our elected representatives. Again, this is something I find hard to do because my senators and my district’s representative are all wildly interested in retaining and improving their positions of power by supporting the current administration and all its policies. However, that should not keep me from making sure they know what I believe about current events. As a matter of fact, this is precisely the time when I should be speaking out the most – remembering, though, all that I wrote above in my first two points.
  4. Never forget those who are suffering most. When a horrendous decision withdraws our troops and support from the border between Syria and Turkey, we remember the Kurds who are caught in the middle. When policies separate families, or when the President requests cost estimates regarding moats filled with alligators and snakes, we remember the immigrant and the refugee. When officials enact guidelines that favor one race, we remember the non-white citizens and residents. When economic strategy values only the wealthy, we remember the poor. And when we remember, we act.

What happens next in the current administration is very much a question mark. So we listen and pay attention with open hearts, minds, and spirits. Let us not abandon who we are in the face of a crisis of leadership.

Let us hold on to the people and things that give us life even as we watch and wait and hope for a good outcome and a better future.

© Melissa Bane Sevier, 2019