While waiting out three days marooned in Salt Lake City as airlines fumbled with a winter storm, I filled the lonely vigil with reading and writing, thankful for a trusty lap-top computer. Among the distractions of this lengthy delay, I read a column appearing in the local paper, written by Garrison Keillor. Because Minnesota is counted as my resident state, where I ultimately put down the roots of my family, I had to read Keillor, thinking critically about what I read. Nearly all Minnesotans know something about Keillor and Lake Wobegon. Keillor uses latent humor, with insightfulness, on life as it is lived by a significant mass of persons in the population. He sees the foibles of man, and appears to be somewhat acceptant of what he sees, while deploring much of it as naive, hypocritical, wasteful, contradictory, and self-inflicted ignorance. There is a repeated return to religious thought, primarily fixed somewhere in pedestrian life, with a Lutheran twist of sorts. He wins and loses with me, in launching into asides slipping into old leftover rebellions. He seems to be at odds with various religious daemons from his youth including many Christian ideas, but acceptant of others. He finds support for his liberalism in the Bible, but avoids Bible ideas inconvenient to his orientation. He tends to put down groups he dislikes, especially conservatives – political or religious. He makes some leaps of logic.
In this particular article he defined liberalism as: The true measure of a society is how it treats the weak and needy. Succinct but partial as measurement, the definition is to be applauded. Keillor supports the idea with a Bible verse: Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. (Matthew 29:40) He rightly acknowledges that placed in modern society’s raunchiness, the idea appears joyless so liberals may have a difficult time of it. Here he leaves the road he is on, to jab at conservatives, who will have a hard go of it because so much support comes from those who believe in a literal hell so that, writes Keillor: when you believe that, you will inevitably find it hard to persuade the damned to vote for you. Does Keillor really believe that the general public has made the leap from a doctrine of hell to a voting booth? Leaps of this sort afflict Keillor and other writers, analysts and historians as well. We will long wait for a sensible questioner to ask candidates if they believe in hell. The pot would boil over. Further, does he select the good verses of Scripture, and on his own reject the unwanted?
Does Keillor find better leaders in those who hold no faith? Does he find that he prefers they keep their faith to themselves, or should we know about the fact that many persons of faith are liberals and many are conservatives? Does he believe Lincoln, Washington, even the semi-deist Franklin, should not have prayed? Were members of the electorate unbelievers in the paradoxes of the universe – of heaven and hell, of good and evil, of sickness and health, of time and eternity? George Santyanna, a non-Christian philosopher, acknowledged that logic was with the God believer for such a person accounts for the existence of all things whereas the humanist must settle for some theory that gets all he believes perhaps from an unaccounted for blast – no activator or guide. For the believer, the evidence shows, there is peace that comes from believing there is a just God who will, in the end, clear-up matters ending all things well. A Christian is helped with life from God. He believes in cause and effect. He knows that a faith promise is all that he has beyond the grave. What in the world is better? The God of the Scripture is just, holy, gracious, loving and interested. All we must do is believe, and win in love and forgiveness. The process does take humility of acknowledgement of need, and faith in acceptance. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020