A Web of Power

[This article appeared in the July 2011 issue of Sojourners magazine.]

On Jan. 1, 2010, a group of four undocumented students embarked on the Trail of Dreams, a 1,500-mile march from Miami to Washington, D.C., to call for passage of the Dream Act, a pathway to citizenship for undocumented students who serve in the military or attend college. At the end of their first day of walking, a member of the team tweeted a message to the group's few Twitter followers: "VERY TIRED at the end of this first day, but going to bed with a smile and fully inspired."

Because their Twitter stream is synched to their Facebook page, they immediately received responses of empathy and encouragement on their Facebook wall. "It's worth the work ... long way to go but y'all are not alone," wrote Elder Eduardo Canul Montero. "We are with you and we thank you!" said Deborah De Santos. And Naomi Florentino-B offered: "As a Dreamer, it hurts too much not to be with you during this walk. However, in prayers and spirit, my support follows your steps. Be strong."

Interpreting the Language of God

[This article appeared in the February 2010 issue of Sojourners magazine.]

Francis S. Collins has long been known in the science world for his leadership of the Human Genome Project, an ambitious 13-year joint endeavor by the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Energy to identify all of the approximately 20,000 to 25,000 genes in human DNA. The project ended successfully in 2003, guaranteeing Collins’ place in history as a vital contributor to the progress of genetic research. More recently, however, Collins has been making a name for himself in a different realm—that of religion. As an evangelical Christian and advocate for the peaceful coexistence of faith and science, Collins is a controversial and puzzling figure for many. Conservatives call him a heretic for suggesting that Darwinian evolution is not just truth, but God’s truth, and liberals protested his appointment last summer as head of the National Institutes of Health, claiming his faith makes him unfit to be the director of a major scientific organization. In this interview with Sojourners assistant editor Jeannie Choi, Collins addresses the concerns from both sides, and shares how studying DNA sequences is not just research for him, but worship.

Jeannie Choi: How did you come to faith?

Francis Collins: I wasn’t raised in a home where faith was considered important. I became an atheist and held that view as a graduate student in chemistry. It was only when I went to medical school and faced up to life and death issues that were surrounding me in hospitals and clinics that I realized my atheism had been arrived at pretty much because it was the answer I wanted, not because I’d really looked at the evidence. I realized that if I was facing death, I would be terrified. I needed to understand what the faith issues were that seemed to be such a comfort to so many of my patients.

Meditations on Disbelief

[This article appeared in the February 2010 issue of Sojourners magazine.]

Since 1994, David Bazan has put sharp questions about faith, justice, and his Pentecostal-evangelical upbringing front and center in his songs. Like many doubters who came before, from Augustine to Mother Teresa, he wrestled with God while still counting himself as a believer. However, on his most recent solo album, Curse Your Branches, released last September, Bazan’s forceful, prodding lyrics find him still grappling with the big questions, but no longer counting himself as a Christian. With his trademark candor and thoughtfulness, Bazan, former front man of Pedro the Lion and Headphones, spoke with Sojourners assistant editor Jeannie Choi in the musty green room of The Black Cat, a music venue in Washington, D.C.

Jeannie Choi: How did your faith journey move from a place of belief to disbelief?

When I was in eighth grade, my mom got this book called The Light and the Glory; it was one of the first in the wave of Christian revisionist histories of the United States. It claimed things like the founders were born-again Christians just like we are. It just dawned on me—I couldn’t really trust the leaders of this movement to be intellectually honest. They were just trying to stack the deck so that they could get a leg up in the cultural battle.

For the longest time, I was concerned with reform more than anything, because I felt like the ship of the church was way off course. The church’s desire for political power and its relationship with wealth and the wealthy seemed to me to be unbiblical. But when I really started looking at the foundations to try to get those things right, I realized there were all of these fundamental assumptions that I’d made—from the inerrancy and authority and inspiration of scripture, to just the mere existence of God—and I started to think, “Well, if you’re really going to make this your own, then you can’t begin with these assumptions. You have to go below them.” And I just don’t really see a lot down there.

How much of your agnosticism is a result of your disdain for the evangelical subculture rather than the tenets of Christianity?


There isn’t, at this point, anything I find unique to Christianity that isn’t a first principle or a core idea. I really think that within natural revelation—which is, of course, a Christian way of putting it—there is enough to know how to live in harmony with the people around you and with the land and our environment. For me, that’s just enough.

When I think about the tyranny of the afterlife, and how people live in such a way because the possibility of the afterlife distracts them from doing good to others and living at peace with one another, the less it’s even plausible to me that a being who created the genome or DNA or our bodies or the ecosystem—things so elegant and finely tuned—would use the blunt instrument of physical violence as a way of getting people to stay true to the system. It just doesn’t seem compatible to me. I think that living for the here and now, fully committed to one another with no “escape hatch” of Jesus coming back anytime soon, is more compelling to me.

Is there anything still attractive to you about Christianity?


On a song on the new record I talk about these “beautiful truths”—justice and honesty and the belief that who you are when you’re alone is who you truly are. These basic principles of fairness I feel I understood thorough my Christian upbringing. So one of the themes I still feel like I have in common with Christians is when Jesus is asked to sum up the law, and he says, “Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.”

Now, ironically, these same principles have pulled me out of Christianity and caused me to reject it. Believing the right things and not doing any of the right things is the norm in evangelical Christianity, and it’s really perplexing. I’m flabbergasted every time I run into this, because basically there’s this whole movement of people who ostensibly believe the right thing, but are the pawns of the military-industrial complex, and that’s just too bad. It seems like high comedy, like a very twisted joke.


In a song on your new record, you wonder how your mom is going to react to your rejection of Christianity. What was her response?

She really liked the record, but it’s hard for her and my dad. I sent them that song—“When We Fell”—as soon as I wrote it and said, “I’m not necessarily asking for permission, but I just wanted you to hear this, and if it’s just not going to work for me to sing this tune, then I want to know.” They wrote back and said, “This is perplexing, of course, but this is your tune.”

My mom said something really sweet not too long ago. She said, “I just want to clarify that the only reason I taught you to follow your heart was because I thought Jesus was in your heart.” And, well, I thought that too. And I told her that I learned to follow my heart just from watching her. She’s where I learned compassion for the underdog, and my sense of justice comes from my mom and her impulse to lift every voice. So, I worry about my parents, and it makes me feel a little bit of sadness, but at the same time I hope that they can see that all of this is honest, not just messing around.

Many of your songs are declarations about what you see as wrong with this world. Are you writing those for yourself or do you hope they’ll cause your listeners to also question?


I always think of it like I’m back in school and in class. If the extrovert raises their hand and asks the question, the five or six introverts think, “I’m really glad that person asked that question because I really wanted to know that too.” For me, so many times a way of thinking is opened up just because somebody spoke truthfully about something.

You’ve described “introvert” Christians as unable to ask questions about faith. Why do you think that is?


Well, I can understand the impulse to have a cultural identity that is defined and that you can broadcast easily. I empathize with that impulse, but it strikes me as fundamentally misguided.

I have to go with my gut about these things and try to figure out what I think is right and true, and I’m really encouraged when I see other people doing that, even if we come to different conclusions.

The Farmer in the Swell

[This article appeared in the December 2009 issue of Sojourners magazine.]

Search “Joel Salatin” on YouTube, and you will find him resplendent in a slouch hat, white T-shirt, and jeans, talking about the virtues of sustainable farming. His family-owned farm, Polyface Inc., nestled in the heart of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, is fast becoming the most famous sustainable farm in America, in large part due to Salatin’s outspoken advocacy for organic, sustainable, and local food. What many don’t know, however, is the source of Salatin’s passion for sustainable farming: his deep Christian faith. Salatin spoke with Sojourners assistant editor Jeannie Choi about the evils of industrial farming and agribusiness and his vision for healing the land God commissions us to steward.

Jeannie Choi: What’s the vision behind Polyface farm?

Joel Salatin: Healing—healing in all dimensions. We want to develop emotionally, environmentally, and economically enhancing agricultural prototypes throughout the world. We want to heal the relationships of the people involved with the farm and our business and our family. We want to heal the land, soil, air, water, and, ultimately, the food system.

From what disease is our current food system suffering?

Well, when is the last time a farmer went and asked for money from a banker and the banker said, “Well, that’s all well and good. I’m glad you’re going to be able to grow a corn crop. But what is that going to do to the earthworms? Or to the topsoil? Is that going to go down the Mississippi and add to the Rhode Island-sized dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico that’s been created because of erosion and run-off chemicals?”

We don’t measure those kinds of things, and yet each of us intuitively understands that those immeasurable or non-quantifiable parts in a business plan are actually the most precious resources we have.

So there is a disconnect between humans and the earth?

Oh, yes. For the first time in civilization, you can actually move into an area, plug your microwave and appliances into energy and not know where it comes from, get food from places and not know where it comes from, hook your pipe up to get water and not know where it comes from, put an outlet pipe in to take your sewage to places you don’t know about, and in effect never have a sense of the ecological umbilical cord that connects you to everything that’s most important.

How did we get here?

I think it has a lot to do with not wanting any kind of relationship with the earth. We talk a lot about relationships—marriage, work relationships, family—but another very critical relationship is the one we have with the nest we’ve been entrusted to steward. This actual divorce from our ecological umbilical is an abnormality in human civilization.

Sometimes I want to go down to [New York’s] Times Square, stand on the sidewalk, and scream at the world, “Folks, this isn’t normal!” It’s not normal to get food in little packages. It’s not normal to live in homes with ‘food nooks’ instead of kitchens. It’s not normal to eat food that you can’t pronounce. All of these things are extremely abnormal and have only come as a result of cheap energy during the industrial food system. So when you look at the continuum of human history, you and I are very much living guinea pigs in a radical experiment that is changing our relationships with each other and the world.

How can we revolutionize the food industry?

Healing the food system would fundamentally flip-flop the political and economic powers of our culture. Wendell Berry says that what’s wrong with us creates more gross national product than what’s right with us. It’s a fantastic observation. Right now, our culture thrives on things being sick. Dead soil brings more people to chemical companies because they need chemical fertilizers, which makes people sick. When people are sick, obviously the medical establishment thrives. If a neighborhood or community’s food system is sick, then of course you need to import food from a foreign country, which stimulates global trade. So when you start talking about healing the food system, we need a fundamental realignment of all the power and money in our culture, and that’s why there is a tremendous amount of inertia against healing the system.

So what can we do? If you want to dream out of the box for a minute, here’s an idea: If every American for one week refused to eat at a fast-food joint, it would bring concentrated animal feeding operations to their knees. What can one person do? We have a sick, evil system, and a healing system, and the question is, which one are you going to feed? Have you gone down to the farmers market or patronized local livestock farms? Or have you had candy bars and cokes? Whichever one you’ve fed is going to get bigger, and the one you’ve starved is going to get smaller.

How does your faith inform your work?

It makes me want to farm like Jesus would if he were here right now, in charge of this place. God actually loved us and provided a salvation experience for us that shapes the way we should, with the same grace and appreciation and respect, honor the creation that God made. It’s in respecting and honoring the “pig-ness” of the pig that we create our ethical and moral background for respecting and honoring the “Tony-ness” of Tony and the “Mary-ness” of Mary. And so it’s how we respect and honor the “least of these” that creates a theological and philosophical framework for how we respect and honor the creation that God made. It's in respecting and honoring the "pig-ness" of the pig that we create our ethical and moral background for respecting and honoring the "Tony-ness" of Tony and the "Mary-ness" of Mary. And so it's how we respect and honor the "least of these" that creates a theological and philosophical framework for how we respect and honor the greatest of these.

Our culture simply views our plants and animals as so many inanimate piles of protoplasmic structure to be manipulated however cleverly hubris can imagine to manipulate it. I would suggest that a culture that views its life in that respect will be a culture that views its citizens and the citizens of other cultures in the same manipulative and arrogant way.

What would you say to Christians who believe it is their biblical mandate to have dominion over the earth?

“You’re wrong!” (laughing). The scriptures are full of admonitions about creation. God knows when every sparrow falls. The Pentateuch is filled with references. Further, in 1 Corinthians 10:31, Paul says that whatsoever you eat or drink, whatsoever you do, do it all for the glory of God. If I were writing 1 Corinthians, I would have written, “whatsoever you catechize, whatsoever you sing in your hymnal”—I would have made this a very spiritual thing. But Paul didn’t. He took the most mundane, necessary things in life—eating and drinking—as his examples of how much God desires to penetrate into our lives. And so we must ask the question, how would Christ raise these animals? Would Jesus make genetically modified peanuts? Would Jesus apply something to the ground that made three-legged salamanders and sterile frogs? I don’t think he would, and that’s why I don’t—because to the believer, all life must be sacred.

Refusing to Forget North Korea

[This article appeared in the September/October 2009 issue of Sojourners magazine.]

During the 2004 presidential election, North Korea was consistently used as a political football between John Kerry and George W. Bush in debates and media appearances, escalating to an angry phone call from Kerry to The New York Times 50 days before Election Day. Kerry accused the Bush administration of having directed focus away from North Korea’s nuclear threat, “taken their eye off the real ball,” and shifted it to Iraq.

A small group of Korean-American students would have pointed out a different focus problem, however: The United States has grossly ignored the humanitarian crisis suffered by North Korean civilians.

During a Korean-American leadership conference at Yale University, several students realized that reports of famine, inhumane work camps, torture, and ideological enslavement in North Korea no longer captured the attention of U.S. leaders, policymakers, or even humanitarian organizations. Who would bring justice to North Korea? The students decided they would. In 2004, they started Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), the first nonprofit organization solely dedicated to ending North Korea’s humanitarian crisis through education, advocacy, and aid to refugees, according to LiNK’s associate director of awareness Justin Wheeler.

Begun with just five students, today the organization has around 100 chapters in the U.S. and more than 10 chapters elsewhere in the world. “The focus at the time was predominantly on policy,” says Wheeler. “Students realized that there wasn’t really anyone who was focusing on the crisis, so these students took it upon themselves to spread the word, and that’s what keeps us alive today.” Through protests, campus rallies, and calls to congressional leaders for passage of a reauthorization act for North Korean refugees, LiNK—composed largely of second-generation Asian Americans—has proved to be an effective student movement, bringing attention to the forgotten millions suffering in North Korea.

That beginning year also saw LiNK’s first mission to help North Korean refugees get away from the Chinese border and into shelters throughout Southeast Asia and the United States. LiNK’s founder, Adrian Hong, and five other members travelled to the North Korean/Chinese border and led three unaccompanied minors out of China. Today, the young men are happily resettled in the U.S., and the organization continues to house North Korean refugees in undisclosed shelters throughout China and Southeast Asia.

LiNK maintains strict confidentiality about the shelters’ whereabouts, but connects their constituents by updating them on the safety and progress of refugees, particularly when a team of LiNK members and refugees are on the move. Once refugees are brought to safety, LiNK raises funds and provides resources to support successful integration in the refugees’ new home countries. “We use our chapters to help refugees find jobs, learn English, get to doctor’s appointments, etc. Refugees are often placed somewhere around the United States, and often we will have a chapter there,” Wheeler says.

Sadly, since LiNK’s founding in 2004, the situation in North Korea hasn’t changed much. Threats of nuclear war continue to emerge from the country’s leadership. The case of two U.S. journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, detained by North Korea and each sentenced in a closed trial to 12 years in labor camps, is emblematic of the kind of harsh treatment that North Korean citizens also suffer. North Korea has remained a political mystery since isolating itself from the world after its 1953 armistice with South Korea—an agreement renounced by Kim Jon Il this May.

Despite these challenges, the leadership and members of LiNK continue to bring liberty to North Koreans and honor their mission statement: to exist “so that one day the crisis in North Korea will not.”