Author: Paul Louis Metzger

Some of you may be familiar with Pink Floyd’s classic song “Comfortably Numb,” which appears on the album, The Wall. As I understand it, the song is about the character Pink’s battle to deal with the world as a result of abandonment and isolation. The song fits within the framework of The Wall as a concept album. Among other things expressed through the album, Pink had experienced the loss of his dad during World War II and his teachers’ hostilities growing up. These and other experiences lead him to isolate himself from the surrounding society, signified by a symbolic wall.

One may wonder how one can be comfortably numb: how can one experience comfort when one is numb? Shouldn’t the apparent comfort we experience from being numb make us “feel” quite uncomfortable? Just like Pink, the trauma we experience on account of personal abandonment in life can lead us to build walls that isolate us from society at large.

There is no seeming connection in the song “Comfortably Numb” between a medical doctor who inspects Pink and the patient himself, just as there is no connection between Pink and other authority figures on the album, such as his teachers. As I reflected upon the healthcare conference I am hosting tomorrow, I thought about the numbness many people throughout our society are experiencing presently on the subject of healthcare. The government shutdown based on infighting among our nation’s leading political authorities over Obamacare has led many to shut down emotionally and intellectually on the subject of healthcare. And while the shutdown that affected scores of people around the country was only temporary (even though the politicians still got paid!), a long-term shutdown of the federal government may be only temporarily delayed. Somehow or another, they have to bring down the partisan wall of isolation that separates the two parties in Washington, and which also separates them from the public at large.

The rest of us may also have very different views on the subject of healthcare. But we shouldn’t allow our disillusionment with Washington or the menacing and overwhelming healthcare complexities and costs shut us down from caring. Any form of numbness on these issues is a cause for feeling quite uncomfortable. We must be willing to keep pressing into taxing issues such as healthcare no matter how painful and no matter our present view on how we will eventually cover the various costs, financial, relational, and otherwise.

Doctors, patients, government officials, insurance providers, pharmaceutical companies and other businesses must not build walls of isolation from one another on the subject of healthcare. Nor must we as a public be tempted to sink beneath consciousness and become numb, refusing to listen and talk with those who represent different positions. If we shut one another out, we will eventually shut down. Quite often, numbness reflects the loss of bodily functions. Amputation or worse death can result. The best way to stay conscious and alive is to keep talking and feeling—even pain. Don’t stop feeling pain, including on the subject of healthcare. Pain is an indication that you and I and, more broadly, we as a society are still alive. If we do not feel pain in our social sickness, perhaps there is no hope that we will ever be able to address it so that we can be healed as a nation regarding public health.

This is nowhere more true than for we who claim to serve Christ, who is the ultimate wounded healer. Unlike medical doctors who seek to take away pain, spiritual doctors are those who do not anesthetize pain, but rather intensify it so that we are no longer isolated from one another in our pain; instead we share it. As Henri Nouwen wrote so profoundly, “A minister is not a doctor whose primary task is to take away pain.  Rather, he deepens the pain to a level where it can be shared” (See Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society {New York: Image, 1979}, 92–93). Rather than become comfortably or even uncomfortably numb, let us intensify the pain of our healthcare struggle as a nation by continuing to struggle through the various healthcare challenges so that we can share in holistic and healthy change together. Only as we move beyond personal and social abandonment and isolation through shared pain will we become relationally whole.

Join me at The Institute for the Theology of Culture: New Wine, New Wineskins’ conference on Healthcare this Saturday, October 19 to further engage these issues.

This piece is cross-posted at Patheos and The Christian Post. Comments made here are not monitored. To join the conversation, please comment on this post at Patheos.

What makes for healthy theology on the subject of healthcare?

I suppose it all depends on which theologian you are asking. From my vantage point, drawing as I do from certain Trinitarian thought forms, one must be attentive to guard against the extremes of individualism and collectivism respectively. The ground of all reality is neither an individual(s) in isolation who is selfishly concerned nor a collective without distinctive particularity and responsibility. God is three distinct persons in eternal communion. As those created in the image of this God who is eternally one in relational otherness, we are not left to fight for ourselves; nor are we parasites.

While some may find treatments of the Trinity rather parochial, I beg to differ. The Trinity is the very basis for addressing the age old conundrum of the one and the many, the collective and the individual, as my own doctoral mentor, Professor Colin Gunton maintained. Moreover, not only are Christian Trinitarians created in the image of the triune God. All people are created in the image of the Trinity. Thus, Christians should not be surprised when they find people who don’t hold their religious convictions living in a way that models them. Take for example the story of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10. We don’t know anything about the religious convictions of this Samaritan of extraordinary mercy; nor do we know anything about the religious views of the person left for dead whom he helps. All we do know is that Jesus uses this Samaritan to rebuke a religious scholar who knew well the Scriptures.

What would modeling Christian or Trinitarian convictions look like as it pertains to the subject of healthcare? Should Christians and those in the community at large be committed to individualized healthcare, corporatized healthcare, or socialized healthcare? Certainly, opinions vary widely. While I believe we all want affordable, quality healthcare, and better public health, we differ on how that should be effected.

Whatever the case may be as to the specific policy we advance, hopefully we are biblical and seek to account for the biblical exhortation to care for our neighbor and to foster shalom in the communities where we live and work.

Consider once again the Samaritan of extraordinary mercy in Luke 10. He did not leave it to Obamacare or Medicaid, but attended to the person left for dead on the side of the road. So, the socialized soul must also understand that he or she has a personal responsibility to care for the person in need; he cannot leave it to the system.

And yet, that does not mean that the individual alone is left to care for the person in need. Nor is the church alone responsible before God to care for those in their midst. The society at large has a responsibility in Scripture to care for the widow, the orphan and the alien in distress.

Someone responded to one of my posts on public health by saying that the church should not look to the society as a whole to assist with caring for the needs of the poor; the church alone should take up that challenge.  In response I wrote that Christians don’t have a corner on civic virtue. So, why shouldn’t taxpayers, including Christians, care for the poor in our society? In fact, many people outside the church desire to pay taxes to address the needs of people in poverty. Moreover, while according to Scripture, Christians are to care for those in need in their own ecclesial communities, why should our concern as Christians end there? The Samaritan in Luke 10 is set forth as a model for how all of us (Christians and those not yet Christian) are to care sacrificially for our neighbors. The Samaritan’s neighbor in this case was someone he did not know; the person in need was not part of his personal community. Moreover, Jesus tells a religious scholar who does not believe in him that he, too, is to act in this way (like the Samaritan). While this parable does not speak directly to the subject of taxes, it does speak to the issue of how all people are to care for their neighbors in need in a sacrificial manner. The biblical call to care for the poor is not limited to care for our Christian communities or limited to Christians to be those who care. In fact, I often come across people outside the church who have a concern for the poor that outweighs many Christians’ concerns. Such people give sacrificially to the poor and are willing for their tax dollars to go toward the poor. They sense their responsibility to give, which I take to be a reflection of the image of God and God’s grace at work in their lives. They also realize that without the government’s help, we are not able to address well the overwhelming costs and complexities in our society today concerning public health. The individual, the religious community, the government and businesses must all play their parts for the well-being of our society.

We are all responsible, and we must move forward together. In view of the God who is three persons in eternal communion and who makes it possible for us to move beyond individualism and collectivism, we must continue to work together to account for personal responsibility and corporate solidarity. What will such responsibility and solidarity entail for healthcare?

Join me at The Institute for the Theology of Culture: New Wine, New Wineskins’ conference on Healthcare this Saturday, October 19 to further engage these issues.

No system is foolproof. Some people will seek to leech off of nationalized healthcare. When they don’t seek to contribute to the system but simply benefit from it, they injure their distinctive identity as well as harm the social health of the community. When individuals without enough money to pay into Obamacare but too much to benefit from Medicaid have to pay a penalty, the system robs them of benefiting from public health. When we leave it to the market to work it all out without imposing any constraints on human depravity and selfishness, the market will make it possible for the fittest to thrive; even so, a nagging question persists: who will ensure that the truly poor and those approaching poverty survive?

In the biblical world, the poor have a stake in society. What should we conclude about our society, if we were to run it completely like a market driven by shareholder concerns? However, if we approach consideration of the market more communally, we will find that the economic crisis does not have to result in a moral crisis that involves discounting the poor and those approaching poverty in our midst. Nor does it have to involve discounting people generally, reducing persons in communion to commodities in isolation. Trinitarian thought as espoused by this author views God as supremely personal and communal. The named God of Father, Son and Spirit in eternal communion does not allow the creation to be commodified: God has a longstanding stake in making sure that those created in the divine image are valued for their inherent worth as those loved by God rather than for how they benefit the free market’s shareholders.

This calls to mind a recent Economist article that explores the longstanding debate on whether firms should focus their attention on shareholders or stakeholders: “The economic crisis has revived the old debate about whether firms should focus most on their shareholders, their customers or their workers.”

In an article in a recent issue of the Harvard Business Review, Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, charts the rise of what he calls the ‘tragically flawed premise’ that firms should focus on maximising shareholder value, and argues that ‘it is time we abandoned it.’ The obsession with shareholder value began in 1976, he says, when Michael Jensen and William Meckling, two economists, published an article, ‘Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behaviour, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure’, which argued that the owners of companies were getting short shift from professional managers. The most cited academic article about business to this day, it inspired a seemingly irresistible movement to get managers to focus on value for shareholders. Converts to the creed had little time for other ‘stakeholders’: customers, employees, suppliers, society at large and so forth. American and British value-maximisers reserved particular disdain for the ‘stakeholder capitalism’ practised in continental Europe. “A New Idolatry,” The Economist, April 22, 2010, (accessed on 1/20/2013).

Shareholders are stakeholders in corporations, but not all stakeholders are shareholders. While shareholders own portions of companies through owning stocks, stakeholders are concerned about the performance of companies based on various factors, not just the appreciation of stocks. Stakeholders can include employees, customers, suppliers, bondholders, and the general public. According to a May 8, 2009 entry at Investopedia,

The new field of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has encouraged companies to take the interests of all stakeholders into consideration during their decision-making processes instead of making choices based solely upon the interests of shareholders. The general public is one such stakeholder now considered under CSR governance. When a company carries out operations that could increase pollution or take away a green space within a community, for example, the general public is affected. Such decisions may be right for increasing shareholder profits, but stakeholders could be impacted negatively. Therefore, CSR creates a climate for corporations to make choices that protect social welfare, often using methods that reach far beyond legal and regulatory requirements (Reference, accessed on 2/9/2013). See the debate, “‘Stakeholders vs. Shareholders’: Haas faculty debate ‘Whom exactly should business serve?’”.

Whom exactly should businesses serve? Whom exactly should society serve—God or mammon? How should we approach public health? Healthcare providers must guard against raising premiums simply to make more profit. Pharmaceutical companies must concern themselves at every turn with making medicines that the sick really need rather than what won’t help and may even harm them. Injured patients must not seek to get rich on malpractice, raising malpractice insurance costs through the roof. Doctors should not approach their vocations from the vantage point of prestige and financial well-being, but from the vantage point of the Hippocratic Oath. Everyone has a stake in public health; no matter our stock portfolio or position, we all share in the consequences as participants in the greater public.

We must be willing to ask the various hard questions, not to paralyze discussion, but to advance the conversation. What is required is an open table, where we move beyond oversimplified ideology in search of complex solutions. The God who is triune moves forward not by advancing a platform position that is pushed down people’s throats. The God who is triune is not an ism; rather, this God is supremely personal and communal and makes it possible to share a meal at his open table and reason together.

This piece is cross-posted at Patheos and The Christian Post. Comments made here are not monitored. To join the conversation, please comment on this post at Patheos.

A friend asked me the following questions based on my blog post with Tom Krattenmaker on the recent change to the Voting Rights Act:

“Should unqualified individuals be allowed to vote? How do you propose to address voter fraud in a way that is more extremely simple and fair as providing qualifying identification?”

In response, we first need to ask if voter fraud is really such a big issue requiring enormous legislation, or if it is greatly exaggerated. Here’s what New York University’s Brennan Center (at the School of Law) claims concerning voter fraud:

• Fraud by individual voters is both irrational and extremely rare.
• Many vivid anecdotes of purported voter fraud have been proven false or do not demonstrate fraud.
• Voter fraud is often conflated with other forms of election misconduct.
• Raising the unsubstantiated specter of mass voter fraud suits a particular policy agenda.
• Claims of voter fraud should be carefully tested before they become the basis for action.
Here is the link to the full report.

In addition to looking to the Brennan Center, I decided to ask Lisa Sharon Harper, who serves as Director of Mobilizing for Sojourners. Here are her responses:

• Voter fraud as a phenomenon that needs massive legislation to stop is a myth. Check out the link for The Brennan Center’s report. It is a very reliable source.
• Voter ID: When voters register to vote, they have to show acceptable federal ID. To demand that they also purchase or pay the expense to obtain state-issued ID to vote at the polls places an undue burden on poor people, the sick and the elderly, who may not have the financial means or the transportation to drive to the site where the ID is obtained. They also may not have the financial means to pay for the additional photo identification card. In this way, the outcome of Voter ID laws is like that of the Poll Taxes that were required for minorities to pay during the era of Jim Crow segregation. It requires an extra fee to vote and that places an undue burden on less resourced people.
• One of the tactics of people who are trying to limit the ability of particular communities to vote is to narrow the “qualifications” of those who can vote. For example, in some states, one cannot vote if you have a felony record. Seems reasonable. Right? Well, that’s not the way it used to be. Here’s a report on felony disenfranchisement laws by The Sentencing Project.

The long-standing structural dynamics regarding racialization in our society (including the connection between race, economic exploitation and poverty bound up with such problems as the lack of inherited income going back to slavery) impinge on people’s accessing their ability to vote. Even if no one is out to keep people from voting, what many of us take for granted—the financial means and transportation—keep those economically less fortunate from acting on their right to vote.

Now while I reject the claim that voter fraud is a vast problem that requires major legislation, I understand that identification, if handled correctly, could be beneficial. If voter identification were truly free, and if people really had equal access rather than simply having the right to equal access and the right to vote, then it would seem appropriate. But that is just the problem: we don’t all have equal access and voter identification cards are not really free, especially for those without financial means and easy access to transportation. Unfortunately, democracy does not assure us justice for all in every situation, but simply the inherent right to justice for all. We need to make sure that we safeguard justice for all.

Some may say that putting in place voter identification is logical. That’s what makes it so hard to help white people like me see how wrong voter identification is currently for many minorities. We should not enforce voter identification, at least not until it is truly free and universally held by all.

We must make sure that everyone has equal access to voting, not simply the right to equal access. Equal access to voting is not currently available to everyone, especially when voter identification is required. For as Harper argues, “To demand that” voters “also purchase or pay the expense to obtain state-issued ID to vote at the polls places an undue burden on poor people, the sick and the elderly, who may not have the financial means or the transportation to drive to the site where the ID is obtained.”

On a related note, a friend asked me to explain how the Texas law noted in my piece with Tom Krattenmaker creates structural racism. I will quote at length a portion of a Brennan Center report. According to the Brennan Center,

The Texas State Conference of the NAACP and the Mexican American Legislative Caucus of the Texas House of Representatives (MALC) filed suit in federal court to block the state’s new voter ID law because it erects discriminatory barriers to voting in violation of the Voting Rights Act and the 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

A federal court in Washington, DC last year blocked Texas’s voter ID law under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, finding that the law would make it significantly more difficult for minority citizens in Texas to vote on Election Day. In June, however, the U.S. Supreme Court (in a separate case) ruled the formula used in the Act for specifying the states covered by Section 5 unconstitutional. As a result, Texas is not currently required to comply with the Section 5 pre-clearance provision. Just hours after the Supreme Court’s decision, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott announced the state would implement the voter ID law.

In the complaint filed today in the Southern District of Texas, the Texas NAACP and MALC argue the voter ID law violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act because it makes it harder for hundreds of thousands of minority citizens to vote and denies minority voters an equal opportunity to participate in the political process. The measure was enacted specifically to exclude these groups, the filing contends, a discriminatory purpose that also violates the 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

The attorneys representing the civic groups in the case are the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Law Offices of Jose Garza, the national office of the NAACP, Law Office of Robert S. Notzon, Potter Bledsoe L.L.P., Dechert LLP, and The Law Offices of William Bonilla, P.C.

“Texas’ photo ID law could prevent hundreds of thousands of eligible voters from casting a ballot, including a disproportionate number of minorities,” said Myrna Pérez, deputy director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center. “The court was right to block this law in 2012, and nothing has changed since then. We urge this court to stand up for voters and ensure elections remain free, fair, and accessible for all eligible citizens.”

“The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy. Unfortunately, we continue to find ourselves in federal court defending this most basic right against Texas’ leadership,” said Representative Trey Martinez Fischer, Chairman of MALC. “Multiple courts have ruled that Texas has expressed a pattern of discrimination toward its growing minority demographic — from its cumbersome voter identification requirements to its penchant for drawing intentionally discriminatory legislative maps — and I expect that the courts will once again side with Texas voters over hyper-partisan lawmakers.”

“As we all know, Texas has a voter identification law that has already been ruled to be discriminatory by a three-judge panel in Washington D.C.,” stated Gary Bledsoe, president of the NAACP Texas State Conference. “This law is designed and intended not to counteract nearly non-existent voter fraud, but instead to disenfranchise minority voters. This will continue anti-minority voter dominance by drastically reducing the number of minority votes cast in each election.”

“The Texas photo ID law is the most restrictive voter ID law in the country, and the Texas legislature rejected numerous amendments that would have mitigated its impact,” said Bob Kengle, co-director, Voting Rights Project, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “The evidence will show that large numbers of eligible voters in Texas lack photo ID, that the burden of obtaining photo ID will fall more heavily on minority citizens, and that voter impersonation fraud does not occur at polling places because the existing laws effectively deter it.”

While the GOP appears to be the focus of critique in many cases in the reports I read, my remarks are not intended in a partisan way. Indeed, I would hope that the GOP becomes increasingly diverse—to be shaped by a more diverse populace and representing it. See my earlier post on this subject. There I wrote,

Some Republicans fear that the Democrats will be viewed increasingly as the representatives of equality and justice and the Republicans the advocates of a two class system. The Republicans have a long way to go to be viewed as a party that welcomes minority groups.

I hope the Republican Party will make the necessary changes to be viewed truly as a party for everyone.

I also hope that all of us, regardless of our political stripe, will be discerning and vigilant in making sure that we don’t return to Jim Crow days. With this in mind, I call to mind a discussion with a white friend of mine, Robert Wall, who served as the Fire Chief in Palo Alto, California and in Portland, Oregon, where he was given the task to begin the process of diversifying the fire department racially. Mr. Wall asked and answered a few questions, as we discussed my earlier post with Tom Krattenmaker and the objections that people raise to the claim that Jim Crow days may be upon us in various states throughout the Union.

Fact question: Are legitimate voters being disenfranchised by the Voting Rights Act? That question has stood the test of time as “No.” Question 2: If states are free to pick apart civil rights for “We the people,” will they? Well, if history is any predictor of future behavior, there are states that have shown they will. I still can see southern Governors taking a stand against the National Guard to protect the right to oppress. “Just leave us alone,” was their message.

What is their message today? What is yours?

This piece is cross-posted at Patheos and The Christian Post. Comments made here are not monitored. To join the conversation, please comment on this post at Patheos.

One of my fears with screening fetuses for diseases and handicaps, among other things, is the desire to abort “unwanted” pregnancies. Please don’t take this as a right or left thing. The commodification of human identity is no respecter of partisan politics. The danger exists that the market will govern the totality of our lives, no matter our political stripe. However, it does not govern the biblical narrative’s emphasis on the sacredness of human identity. To put a spin on Jesus’ words, it is not simply the Sabbath, but also the market that was created for man, not the other way round.

Jonathan Sacks, who served as the chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth, writes: “The fatal conceit for Judaism” (and Evangelicalism in many spheres, in my estimation)

is to believe that the market governs the totality of our lives, when it in fact governs only a limited part of it, that which concerns the goods we think of as being subject to production and exchange. There are things fundamental to being human that we do not produce; instead we receive from those who came before us and from God Himself. And there are things that we may not exchange, however high the price (Jonathan Sacks, “Markets and Morals,” First Things, No. 105 {Aug./Sept. 2000}: 28).

See also Michael J. Sandel’s work, What Money Can’t Buy: the Moral Limits of Markets (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2012). Sandel argues that we have shifted dramatically over the past three decades due to market triumphalism’s rise. We have gone from having a market economy to becoming a market society, where nearly everything is up for sale based on thinking—faith—that markets provide the primary means to achieve the public’s good. According to Sandel, while the market economy is a valuable and effective tool for organizing productive activity, we have crossed the line. Not everything should be viewed as a transaction. Where do markets serve the common good, and where do they crowd out other important values and goods? Markets should not govern personal and public relations, including education, health, national security, etc. The financial crisis has caused us to back up and reevaluate the ability of markets to solve all problems.

I was eating lunch with a few liberals the other day. While they don’t share my pro-life stance, they concurred that there is a moral tension that progressives like themselves need to account for in discussions of abortion. They added that many in their circles balk at such notions; it would entail conceding to the enemy—those on my side—a moral victory of sorts.

Not so quickly. Conservative Evangelicals like myself need to account for the moral challenges of the progressives. What do we do about the crisis many women face, when they feel they have nowhere to go and are in a desperate state? Crisis pregnancy centers certainly can help quite a bit, but there is quite a bit more that needs to be done. Along these lines, it is not enough to safeguard a fetus’s safe arrival into the world; we have to make sure that their life in the world is safe and that they won’t fall through the cracks. Those like me who are “pro-life” need to be pro-life all across the board. We need to make sure that we safeguard programs for the poor, including food stamps, so as to alleviate malnutrition and related challenges to caring for a child’s health.

Back to screening for pregnancies. R. Kendall Soulen says of the market and the commodification of human life:

The market . . . promises to make the consumer king, and encourages us to think that we are in charge. But the market charges a high price in return, namely, the increasing commodification of human life itself. To take just one example, as genetic knowledge becomes more complete and available to consumers through law, prospective parents will be subject to pressure to screen their pregnancies in order to screen out inefficiencies such as mental retardation, genetic disorders, etc. (R. Kendall Soulen, “‘Go Tell Pharaoh,’ Or, Why Empires Prefer a Nameless God,” Cultural Encounters: A Journal for the Theology of Culture 1, no. 2 {Summer 2005}: 54-56).

What happens if the child doesn’t have a disorder of any kind, but isn’t the “right” gender or have the right genetic disposition for becoming an ideal human specimen? How ideal is a society that allows such preferences to shape our valuation of human life? Wouldn’t it be interesting if the Affordable Care Act were to safeguard the lives of the unborn because of its stance that insurance providers cannot turn away those with “pre-existing conditions” who want healthcare coverage? Wouldn’t it be honorable if we as a society did not judge fetuses and those around us based on their pre-existing conditions and genetic makeup but based on the unconditional regard for the sacredness of all human life?

This piece is cross-posted at Patheos and The Christian Post. Comments made here are not monitored. To join the conversation, please comment on this post at Patheos.