The Jesus I No Longer Believe In

According to USA Today, four-fifths of white Americans who self-identify as “evangelical Christians” voted for Donald Trump this week. This despite his multiple marriages, admitted infidelities, make-do morals, and disdain for repentance. And America is already paying for it. Literally the day after Donald Trump was “elected” President of the United States, anecdotal reports trickled in of whites giving voice to the ugliest, most reprehensible parts of their id.

In his book The Cross and the Lynching Tree, James H. Cone, professor at Union Theological Seminary, writes something that really struck my heart. During America’s “lynching era,” which he roughly situates from 1880 to 1940, he writes that there were essentially two Christianities. White Jesus told believers that they deserved power because they were righteous. Anyone who disturbed that power was blasphemous, and deserved to die.

Black Jesus, by contrast, reassured believers that they didn’t have to face violence and persecution alone. They didn’t need to shrink into despair because the structure of society left them permanently outside the power structure. They always had a force more powerful than themselves to lean on. Whether we believe a literal God provided that strength, or that faith simply bound believers together, Black Jesus gave African Americans reason to persevere.

The classic “negro spirituals” reinforced this countercultural message. They sang: “If I could, I surely would / Stand on the rock where Moses stood,” that is, outside Pharaoh's gates, demanding justice for the people. The images of prophets standing outside the Temple, decrying the “den of thieves” within, permeate African American religious music. So do psalms of the Babylonian exile, which also find homes in Jamaican reggae. Mahalia Jackson sang:

Ezekiel said he saw him
Wheel in the mid' of a wheel
John talked about him
In the book of the seven seals
Some say the Rose of Sharon
Others say the Prince of Peace
But I can tell this old world
He been a rock and a shelter for me

Searching my heart, I realize one message resonates with the Jesus described in my Bible. The Jesus who drove the moneychangers out of the Temple, who caught the priests holding Roman money in defiance of Jewish law and told them to “render unto Caesar,” who told the Rich Young Ruler to “sell everything you have, give it to the poor, and follow me.” Beyond doubt, this Jesus knew and followed the Law. But he didn’t use it as a lethal weapon against anyone.

When the Temple elders dragged the woman “caught in the act of adultery” before Jesus and demanded justice, in John 8, Jesus called the elders on their moral inconsistencies. He never denied that the Law of Moses called for this woman’s brutal, violent death. He simply kicked the performance of that death onto one morally worthy: Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.

We know the story. Importantly, Jesus did not countenance the woman’s sins. “Neither do I condemn you,” he said after her accusers fled his truth bombs, but continued: “Now go and leave your life of sin” (NIV). Like the men, this woman will eventually be held to account. But it will only happen before the throne of the one worthy to dispense such justice. It won’t happen in the temple courts before white-robed, male elders. And it certainly won’t happen from a sycamore tree.

Perhaps the worst thing that ever happened to Christianity, was its ascension to earthly power. I’m not the first to say this, and certainly won’t be the last. But the underlying reality shift that accompanied Christianity’s newfound dominion did worse than place Jesus’ representatives on the side of princes and potentates. It gave Christians material motivation to defend worldly power structures. It gave rise to White Jesus.

As conservative evangelicals assert, yes, some things are clearly wrong. Giving vent to sexual appetites without building family bonds, creates a volatile, unstable society. But so does allowing the wealthy to accumulate so much money that they disturb their nation’s economic peace. So does marginalizing some people for their poverty, gender, irreligion, or melanin. So does turning our country into an exclusive club with a “No Blacks, Jews, or foreigners” sign on the door.

If we take Biblical Christianity seriously, we do have to call certain things “sins.” But those sins are usually displays of power. Jesus came to “preach good news to the poor,” not to reassure the already righteous of their salvation. We as Christians need to get in the mud with the impoverished, the black and brown, the scared, the powerless. We need, like Isaiah, to challenge the rich in their high places. We need, in short, Black Jesus.

The Monopolists' Manifesto

Alex Moazed & Nicholas L. Johnson, Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st-Century Economy

Let's start by eliminating a source of confusion that fuddled me, and probably you too: this isn't a book against monopolistic business practices. Our authors don't disparage market consolidation (two conglomerates control two-thirds of America's beer distribution, for instance). Moazed & Johnson consider monopoly the bright shining future, provided it's the right monopoly model. And that model, for them, is platform business.

Yeah, I didn't know what that meant either. From the beginning, they define platforms as “a business that connects two or more mutually dependent groups in a way that benefits all sides.” Um, that sounds like commerce to me. A later explanation of eBay clarifies for me that they mean platform businesses create centralized meeting points where commerce happens. They make their profit licensing their location. Some entrepreneurs own individual stores; platform businesses own the whole mall.

Besides defining platform businesses (as opposed to platform technologies and industrial platforms—I admit, it’s confusing), Moazed & Johnson provide a thoroughly source-noted explanation of how their business model plugs gaps in market economics. By diffusing production and distribution decisions among multiple producers, they assert, they allow ground-level producers to deploy real-time decentralized knowledge to market circumstances.

Though admittedly well-founded, this model encounters problems under scrutiny. First, many “platforms” don't behave like they describe. Our authors extol platform businesses for eschewing supply chains and warehouses. Yet their list of lucrative platforms includes Amazon.com, which has warehouses in twenty-four U.S. states, two Canadian provinces, and multiple other nations. Clearly their definition isn't exclusive.

Second, platforms may themselves lack linear distribution structures, but the businesses they connect don't. eBay doesn't store or ship products themselves, but their vendors do. Therefore, dismissing linear business models as retrograde, as these authors do, misses an important point: the digital platform model only works as an adjunct to traditional businesses. Newfangled platforms may add value, but don't supplant older structures.

Nicholas L. Johnson (left) & Alex Moazed

This added layer imposes a quantitative cap on platform businesses, too. Assuming server capacity, digital platforms’ peer-to-peer connections are hypothetically infinite; but their content providers aren't. Each individual Über driver, Etsy knitter, and Twitter writer can provide only one service at a time. Thus, platform businesses have potentially infinite profit capabilities off IRL providers’ necessarily finite outputs.

I don't blame you if that sounds rather abstruse. This book goes down similar cow paths in constructing its fairly intense pro-platform arguments. The economic argument is very dense, bolstered with charts and histograms. As a Distributist, I dispute some of our authors’ premises—though too minutely to explain in a 750-word review. The reasoning is generally sound, but not light bedtime reading; expect your attention to wander occasionally while reading.

Moazed & Johnson are thought-provoking, and shine light on an unexamined, up-and-coming element of the digital marketplace. Yet I can’t get past certain complications. For starters, their love song to monopolistic market domination should give historically literate readers the heebie-jeebies, remembering how John D. Rockefeller created artificial shortages to submarine market forces. If, as our authors insist, free markets rule, we should worry about anybody hoping to monopolize, and render un-free, any market.

Then, even if these “monopolies” are transitory with evolving technology, as our authors acknowledge, they create a bottleneck that potentially squeezes vulnerable producers. Moazed & Johnson repeatedly cite Über; critics have asserted that Über aggregates profits upward, while front-loading expenses onto providers. Platform businesses’ impact on the economy is, to put it lightly, controversial, and this book won’t change many minds.

My most concise criticism, though, comes before page one. Facing the copyright page, the authors include a blurb for their business, Applico, a platform entrepreneurs’ consultancy. Most business books are, fundamentally, billboards for their authors’ consultancy services, and that includes authors I’ve praised, like Jonathan Raymond recently. But Raymond advertises principles he can help you implement. This book is a love song to its own authors.

That doesn’t mean its content is wrong. Moazed & Johnson offer well-documented, thoroughly researched evidence to back their position, and even without their consultancy, platform entrepreneurs could apply many principles to their business design. But this book is much more dependent on its authors than Raymond’s, which explains why, between the good evidence, they pay scant attention to counter-claims.

I can’t completely recommend against this book. Savvy business professionals can utilize its principles to stay abreast of changing markets. But reading it, without its authors present to question, requires a pre-existing familiarity with business and economic fundamentals; shoestring entrepreneurs shouldn’t jump in cold. This book isn’t wrong; it just requires a cold, distant eye.

Murder at the Time Lord Academy

Sally Gardner, The Door That Led To Where

Young AJ Flynn has flunked almost all his GCSE exams. In a British meritocracy that values official credentials, that renders him functionally unemployable—before he’s even turned 17. Post-industrial Britain doesn’t value his love of solitude and contemplation, his fondness for Victorian literature and pre-modern history. But a fluke job interview leads AJ to his long-denied inheritance, including a mysterious door into pre-Victorian London. He also finally discovers his name.

On first face, award-winning British YA novelist Sally Gardner’s latest novel pinches elements of Harry Potter, Doctor Who, and Sherlock Holmes into a fantasy thriller for older youth and young adults. But themes slowly emerge subtly criticizing Britain’s meritocracy, and “skills drillz”-based education everywhere. Young AJ occupies a Britain where he’s unqualified for adulthood, but childhood diversions are costly when you’re poor in one of Earth’s most expensive cities.

Britain’s exam system pigeonholes students into career paths and avocational opportunities at an absurdly young age. The demand that AJ know his desires and calling at age 16 is anachronistically quaint. Maybe that’s why AJ stumbles accidentally into smoggy, cobblestoned historic London, because it’s important he views an era where he’s already considered a man. AJ flits between eras, seeking a time and place where he feels a sense of belonging.

In that pre-modern time, AJ witnesses a culture where science is rudimentary, technology is unreliable, and “madness” is a cultural disease more feared than cholera. He meets a winsome lass as dissatisfied with her own time as he is with his. But the vagaries of pre-Victorian inheritance law, and a long history of conveniently mysterious deaths, threatens Miss Esme’s sanity and freedom. AJ brings modern skills to defend his anachronistic love.

But in his present, AJ also struggles with 21st Century problems: London’s pervasive poverty, and his mates’ mutual lack of skills, lead to Trainspotting-like struggles with nihilism and identity. AJ’s friends Slim and Leon have run-ins with rotten, disreputable characters, and both need to hide. Regency London seems convenient, but that world proves even better than useful. The low-tech city gives two boys with simple manual trade skills a world where they can flourish.

Sally Gardner

Seriously. Slim quickly ingratiates himself with lucrative trading partners because he has a skill both rare and valuable: he can boil tea. The social criticism is blatant. Modern London de-values simple skills, giving unaccountable wealth to bankers, barristers, and other brainpower workers. Young adults who simply make stuff belong to another time. One simple fluke, politely unexplained because “why” doesn’t matter, shows them a world where their lives mean something.

Is this therefore an innate criticism of Britain’s education system? And by extension a rote memorization school system, regardless of nation? Gardner tacitly rejects Common Core and STEM movements, just in how the characters relate to their work and skills. Simply knowing how to filter water makes unemployable teens suddenly valuable. In a time when simple mechanical skills matter, being young isn’t a disadvantage.

How old is a 17-year-old boy? Is age based on anything internal, or does it derive from culture? At that age, teens seek their adult roles, and in a time defined by manual trades and other limitations, maybe 17 really is mature and grown. We’re at our peak physical ability. But in an age defined by mental skills, when accumulated knowledge and skills matters more, 17 is too young to know ourselves, much less our place in the world.

But there’s a trade-off. Like many teens, AJ considers himself as a man out of time, but when he encounters the time with which he feels most comfortable, it doesn’t value the mental skills he brings. The constant evolution of labor markets has trended away from manual trades: what Slim knows how to do, and revolutionizes London doing, is done today by machines. Slim can’t survive in a brain economy. Notwithstanding his scores, AJ hypothetically can.

The very exams that circumscribe AJ, and define his combative relationship with his very angry mother, supposedly channel people into brain jobs. But the attitudes reflect a pre-Victorian, mechanically skilled attitude of what it means to be adult. What constitutes “merit” is decided by bureaucrats structurally out of touch with modernity and its needs. Modern and pre-modern circumstances which metaphorically co-exist within the exam system, literally co-exist in AJ himself.

This book was warmly received when first released in Britain nearly two years ago. Advance responses to its American release, however, have been merely lukewarm. Maybe AJ’s culture clash is too inherently British to travel internationally. Maybe this book mainly attracts Anglophiles like me. But I think there’s something universal happening here. I believe, with time, this book will find its audience, and its message will resonate, regardless of nationality.

Do Old People Hate New Music?

I must admit, I’d never heard the Chainsmokers’ number-one smash “Closer” until I’d been told that proved I was old. An Atlantic online article, quoting a Psychology Today blog, insisted that most people stop listening to new music around age 33, and cited “Closer,” currently in its eleventh week at number one, as proof. While the cool kids are swingin’ with this bouncy paean to romantic disappointment, fossilized fudds like me have never heard it.

Well, yeah, I hadn’t. But mainly because I don’t follow Top-40 pop. You could make the point that, nearly a decade past the age when the Atlantic’s Spencer Kornhaber claims our musical tastes fossilize, I’m no barometer of nouvelle quality. But I regularly listen to new music. At the same time the Chainsmokers monopolize the teen-pop charts, remarkably good recent releases by K.Flay, Phantogram, and Judah & the Lion currently languish unacknowledged on the “Alternative” charts.

Listen, I actually grew up in a musical milieu that disfavored the present. In my family, country music was still current—and this at a time when country radio would slip thirty-year-old songs into its rotating playlist. When I rebelled against my parents’ musical tastes at sixteen, I embraced “classic rock,” crunchy guitar-driven music that was popular before I was born. So I know a little something about fleeing the present in my musical tastes.

But I discovered indie and alternative rock at age 38, five years after my musical tastes were supposed to ossify. It was a nigh-religious revelation, that melodically ambitious, lyrically daring music wasn’t the sole domain of the past. Good musicians are making good, non-imitative music right now. I hadn’t believed such bold musical innovation possible. But here I was, for the first time in my life, listening to popular music being recorded in the present.



So that’s who you’re listening to when I say: the Chainsmokers’ “Closer” sucks. Taking Spencer Kornhaber’s dare, I listened to the song. And it’s every bit as bad as I would’ve imagined going in. Its lightly syncopated dance beat, backed with undistinguished tenor vocals that scarcely vary from a single pitch, struck me for their lack of ambition. Top-40 radio is always attracted to unthreatening, teen-friendly ratings grabbers. This boring pop oatmeal probably pulls numbers.

We could seriously question the value of number one status anyway. The chart success of Elvis or the Beatles misleads us into thinking that good songs produce meaningful airplay. But a brief survey of historic Billboard charts reveals that being the most-played, most-purchased, or most-downloaded song in America proves little. Ernie K-Doe, Paper Lace, and Milli Vanilli all have number one hits. Jimi Hendrix, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Bob Dylan do not. Popularity isn’t quality.

The Chainsmokers, unfortunately, prove that. At eleven weeks atop the Billboard charts, they’re now tied with Toni Braxton’s “Unbreak My Heart” and All-4-One’s “I Swear,” two of the blandest, most undifferentiated songs of the 1990s. Charles Duhigg writes that, historically, bland songs that challenge listeners little generally do better in airplay. Songs pull numbers by sounding similar enough to prior hits that mass audiences, listening with half an ear while driving or studying, feel comfy.

Therefore, Spencer Kornhaber’s underlying thesis, that “Closer” embodies post-modernity’s pervasive ennui (or something), doesn’t survive market analytics. The mostly-young audience that listens to Top-40 radio, actively courted by programmers for their generous disposable income and few fixed expenses, doesn’t want music that embraces their social or spiritual needs. Their musical tastes don’t reflect some high-minded literary analysis or deep meaning addressing their economics. They want something they can curl up in and make a nest.



Citing Duhigg again, significant chart hits are often completely forgettable. Any re-listening of classic Casey Kasem will confirm this. Ambitious artists like Lorde or AWOLnation might occasionally cross over into mainstream success, possibly for their lyrical resonance. But mostly, Top-40 songs become hits because they’re danceable, comfortable, and familiar. “Closer” has a poppy, club-friendly texture so utterly ordinary that they could literally be anybody, singing about anything. That, not their “meaning,” is why they succeed.

And if their popularity rests with a particular age cohort, that reflects youths’ lack of experience. As they get older and develop more sophisticated tastes, they’ll forget the Chainsmokers, like my generation forgot All-4-One. Most chart hits through the Billboard Hot-100 era are entirely forgettable. “Classic” programmers sift the good tracks, which weren’t always hits upon first release. “Closer” will join “Boom Boom Pow” or “The Macarena” as songs everyone loved, until we forgot them.

Life, Science, and their Many Intersections

Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality

Anyone who closely follows academic innovations or social activism has probably heard the term “intersectionality” thrown around recently. But like many authors writing for the already well-informed, these sources generally don’t define that term. That leaves us uninitiated, merely interested audiences struggling to derive its meaning, usually from context or etymology. This has created no shortage of confusion and flagrant misuse of the term. Or is that just me?

Professors Collins and Bilge, of the University of Maryland and the Université de Montréal respectively, strive to overcome this neglect. They define intersectionality as a heuristic (another term scholars toss around indiscriminately) linking different influences that shape individuals and communities. This may include geography, religion, and learning. For our purposes, however, Collins and Bilge focus on the most readily quantifiable: the classic race/gender/class troika.

As an introduction to a philosophical concept, this book rapidly telescopes between global discursion on (putatively) universal notions, and narrow, applied examples. In the first chapter, for instance, after laying out the terms of discussion, our authors address the multiple layers of social inequality exposed by the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil. How do we discuss racism, for instance, in a country that doesn't track race, where race officially no longer exists? How do we discuss working-class issues in a country with widespread poverty, where Pope Francis’ influences have recently muddled the Catholic Church's historical anti-communism? The overlap of issues creates a massive intersectional maze that makes discussion more complex, but more meaningful.

(I think the authors miss a wonderful opportunity. As Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto writes, the notorious Brazilian favelas host a vast off-the-books parallel economy that in some ways mirrors, and in other ways remedies, the inequalities of the official economy. But authors, of course, have to make choices.)

Our authors often use terms in a very self-reflective or “meta” manner that readers will absorb more through osmosis than reason. “Intersectionality as a form of critical praxis,” they write, “refers to the ways in which people, either as individuals or ad part of groups, produce, draw upon, or use intersectional frameworks in their daily lives.” Notice how the definition contains the word it seeks to define? Your Freshman Comp professor would’ve graded you down for this, but it’s common in scholarly writing.

Professors Patricia Hill Collins (left) and Sirma Bilge

Therefore, once Collins and Bilge establish the terms, their reasoning may seem superficially circular. One doesn’t so much receive their writing like information, as contemplate it like a Zen koan. As a heuristic, that is, as a semi-guided experimental approach to learning, intersectionality invites us to perceive a world outside our usual individual experience. It isn’t a research method, so much as an invitation to get lost in someone else’s world. Who could resist?

Like most scholarly writing, this book makes its most important points in the early chapters, then spends the remaining pages explaining, clarifying, and sharpening how those points apply. Less committed readers could dip casually into the first sixty or so pages, get the general thesis, and move on. Admittedly, after that range, the writing gets somewhat abstruse and pointy-headed. Though I consider myself a minor scholar, I found the latter chapters rather slow, difficult reading.

However, that doesn't mean the later chapters aren't worth reading. As Collins and Bilge consider the applications of intersectionality to education or public protest, not exactly fun bedtime reading, I felt the discussion challenging my outlook on areas I assumed I understood pretty well. As a sometime educator, I’ve struggled with how race, sex, and economic standing have influenced my students’ learning capabilities. The intersections of these forces, though, often remain invisible until someone calls our attention to them.

Thus, these authors have a somewhat self-selecting audience. Readers who embrace difficult reading, hoping to see their worldview changed, will find plenty to love between these covers. Running barely 200 pages plus back matter, this book’s fairly standard length for academic writing. Though readers should expect to make slow progress, that progress remains consistently meaningful and transformative.

This book is part of the “Key Concepts” series from Polity Books. Over the last few years, I’ve reviewed several Polity titles, in categories ranging from politics and current events, to history, to philosophy. Polity may be the best, most influential publisher you’ve never heard of. I have not agreed with every Polity title I’ve reviewed, and a few have pushed me into awkward positions as a critic. But they’ve always pushed me. Polity titles always leave me a better, quicker, more refined thinker.