I am an Evangelical Christian, which means I am called to evangelize and share the good news that is the Gospel. My tradition asks me to share this spiritual awakening in a loving and forgiving God by “doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly.” I am constantly challenged to live my life as an Evangelical Christian.
But being evangelical does not mean supporting a political party; it does not favor one ethnic group over another; it does not turn a blind eye to lawlessness and lies, or promote discontent and hatred. In particular, evangelical Christians do not accept any identification with white supremacy, and true evangelicals do not claim that any human being resembles Jesus.
I declare with all my heart that I will not allow my spiritual heritage from the immigrant evangelical church to be exploited by those who would misuse these precious words of the New Testament. May God have mercy on us all.
Pastor Martin Deppe, Chicago
Regarding the June 20 Washington Post article, “Christian right sees opportunity in second Trump term”:
I was extremely upset by the photo that accompanied this article, which showed paintings and prints for sale depicting former President Donald Trump side by side with Jesus Christ during the Conservative Political Action Conference in March 2023. This should never have been allowed to happen. There is only one God and one Jesus Christ, and Mr. Trump is neither.
Lonarram, Selville, Delaware
The fight for compensation
Joe Davidson’s June 22 Federal Insider column, “Harvard Study Puts Federal Government in a Good Position to Pay Slavery Reparations,” failed to justify payments to the descendants of enslaved people.
Davidson cites a Harvard University study of Americans who have received compensation for past injuries, including “coal miners, farmers whose crops failed, workers whose companies went bankrupt, victims of terrorism and natural disasters,” followed by eight more categories and then a catch-all “many others.” All of these examples are payments to identifiable people for specific injuries. These are provable losses, not payments to people based on unprovable, unquantifiable harms suffered long ago by people who may or may not be ancestors of people seeking compensation today.
Harvard should study more.
As The Post reported in June, the Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit brought by the last survivors of the Tulsa Massacre, Lessie Benningfield Randle and Viola Fletcher (and Hughes Van Ellis, who died last year at age 102), seeking compensation. Their claim was denied a week before Juneteenth, ending any hope the state could rectify one of the greatest atrocities committed on American soil in the 20th century. Even when direct victims of racist atrocities present claims and evidence of their suffering, justice is often denied. Though unfortunate, the Oklahoma court’s decision is consistent with a pattern of discrimination against black Americans that dates back to before the nation’s founding.
The United States does not have a problem with reparations, but with paying reparations to black Americans. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan formally apologized for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and signed a bill to pay $20,000 each to Japanese internment victims. In 2009, President Barack Obama signed the Native American Apology Resolution, a statement that “on behalf of the American people, we express regret to all Native Americans for the many instances of violence, abuse, and neglect inflicted upon Native Americans by the American people.”
Other countries and institutions have made similar reparations commitments. The University of Glasgow acknowledged that it had profited financially from the Scottish slave trade and established a £20 million reparations fund to support the University of the West Indies research centre. Since 1953, West Germany has paid $845 million to the German Jewish Claims Council and the newly established state of Israel. In 1988, the country paid $125 million directly to Holocaust survivors, and in 1999 began paying reparations to Jewish slave labourers forced by the Nazi regime. Reparations were also paid to slave owners in Washington, DC, when slaves in the capital were freed in 1862.
In contrast, reparations for black Americans have been little more than ritualistic acts that fall short of repairing past harms.
“We are caught in a network of mutual relations from which we cannot escape, bound together by a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly,” wrote Martin Luther King, Jr. in his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” America’s failure to formally apologize for a narrative that sees black Americans as three-fifths human is a stain on the garment that binds our destinies. Until this stain is removed, this moral flaw will forever prevent America from reaching its full potential.
I read Kate Cohen’s June 23 Sunday Opinion column, “In Memory of Those Lost at Dobbs,” with great confusion.
She sounded like she was complaining that the system saves an estimated 32,000 births and lives each year. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization The ruling, and the resulting rise in birth rates in some U.S. states, is a bad thing. It comes after the Centers for Disease Control reported in April that “the U.S. general birth rate will decline 3% from 2022 in 2023 to its lowest on record, marking the second consecutive year of decline.” A falling birth rate is often a sign of social decline. It arguably means fewer future workers, entrepreneurs and taxpayers to fund Social Security and contribute to paying off the national debt of more than $34 trillion.
I was also struck by what she seemed to imply when she wrote, “And we cannot know how many lives will be lost.” Dobbs “How many educations have been postponed or denied, how many careers ruined, how many families destroyed?” If you believe, as I do, that the act of conception creates a new human being, can you justify killing someone in order to protect their educational goals or career path?
But Cohen said: Dobbs The reasons for this will never be revealed, but they include something she likely did not take into account: the number of women who have now experienced the unexpected joy of bringing a loving, wonderful new human into the world, and have avoided the guilt, depression and self-loathing that comes with knowing they killed their own child.
Unfortunately, this is the underlying issue in every debate about abortion: the two sides can’t speak to each other, or more accurately, they’re yelling at each other, and we don’t have enough data on how many abortions are being had, who is having them, and why, because states aren’t required to report this data to the federal government.
Thus, until everyone is required to report their abortion statistics (including the use of abortion-inducing drugs) to a central repository, we will never be able to have a data-driven, fact-based debate for or against legalized abortion. This debate could lead to common ground and wise national policy. In pursuit of an informed debate, I would like to call on Johns Hopkins University to create an online abortion dashboard similar to the excellent COVID-19 dashboard they launched to facilitate data-driven decisions about COVID-19 mitigation policies. But until that happens, we will continue to rely on inflammatory testimony, bitter rhetoric, and attributing the most evil intentions to people on both sides of the debate.
Kate Cohen refuses to accept the reality that an abortion involves two lives. Like many other advocates of abortion on demand, she uses terms like “reproductive freedom” and the “right to end a pregnancy” as if these were inalienable. Conception produced a genetically unique, irreproducible human being, and now two lives are at stake, and those lives must matter.
Janna Jessen, an activist who was born during her mother’s abortion procedure, asked in 2015 congressional testimony, “We as a nation continue to trade truth for lies. We have neglected souls. What will it take for us to wake up from our callousness and indifference to this? Will we ever wake up?”
Now is a time for national soul searching and healing. Roe v. WadeThousands of lives have been saved so far. Let us continue to work at the national and state levels to pass laws that protect both mothers and children. And may God help our nation if we fail.
Philip C. Wehle Jr., McLean