Overcoming Our Addiction To Autophilia

Carpooling was widely promoted during
the oil crisis of 1973.

When we moved just outside of Harrisonburg in 1988, nearby Highway 42 entering the city from Broadway was a two lane road with a growing amount of traffic. Now that portion of the road is an even busier five-lane stretch of Virginia Avenue next to where we now live at VMRC's Park Village.

One of the benefits of our location is being within walking distance of access to groceries, prescriptions, eye and dental care, the Park View Federal Credit Union and other services without my having to use a car. 

Speaking of cars, most of us in VMRC's independent living facilities own at least one of them, even as our need for this kind of convenient transportation diminishes. In fact, free transportation service is available to any other part of the VMRC campus, a Harrisonburg transit city bus stops by Heritage Haven on an hourly basis every weekday, and medical and other transportation services are also available on call fir a reasonable fee.

Meanwhile, by far the majority of vehicles speeding up and down Virginia Avenue have only one occupant. In our neighborhood, as is the case across the nation, in the last 50 years we have more licensed vehicles than there are licensed drivers. The average passenger vehicle on our roads and highways weighs over a ton, has all kinds of high tech features, comfortably seats five or more passengers, and offers convenience, comfort and speed even the wealthiest monarchs could never have imagined a century ago.

While only about 38% of the world's households owns a car, we North Americans have felt entitled to our SUV's, RV's, sports cars and monster pickups, resulting in a surplus of energy-guzzling machines that pose a threat to the planet.

So what if we did more walking and biking, carpooled when possible, used public transportation whenever feasible, and created car sharing co-ops as numerous groups have done across the nation? 

While our addiction to comfort, convenience (and class?) may take a hit, I'm sure our Creator God and our beloved earth would abundantly bless us.

Either We Outlaw War Or We Will Perish By It

Some 70% of Gaza, smaller than Rockingham County, has been reduced to rubble, and an astounding number of men, women and children have lost their lives, many of their bodies unrecognizable and/or unrecoverable.

There is a widespread belief that human beings have gradually become more civilized over time, eventually passing laws against things like cannibalism, human trafficking, dueling, torturing, and other practices finally seen as barbaric.

Actually, the opposite appears to be true. In the past century we have become ever more sophisticated in our means of killing, maiming and dismembering people, along with inventing ever more efficient ways of destroying their habitat and the very earth on which we all depend.

Among the books I've read recently are Killing Crazy Horse--The Merciless Indian Wars in America, by Bill O'Reilly and historian Martin Dugard and A Long Way Gone--Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ismael Beah. Each details recent examples in history of barbaric cruelty we tend to think humans are no longer capable of. But we are.

And we now have weapons that are infinitely more lethal than could have ever been imagined in the past. One small atomic or hydrogen bomb alone is capable of creating the kind of instant devastation pictured above, as demonstrated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki near the end of World War II. 

That war resulted in an estimated total of 50-85 million deaths, including millions of innocent civilians who died from starvation, disease, massive bombings and in extermination camps.

Most of us North Americans were spared this level of suffering. But World War III would be far worse for all the earth's inhabitants, and would undoubtedly result in the end of civilization as we know it. Thus there is no way for the world to survive other than through our beating our swords into plowshares and banning war forever as immoral, uncivilized and unthinkable. 

The 16th century reformer Menno Simons wrote, "All Christians are commanded to love their enemies; to do good to those who abuse and persecute them... Tell me, how can a Christian defend scripturally retaliation, rebellion, war, striking, slaying, torturing, stealing, robbing and plundering and burning cities and conquering countries? ...They (Christians) are the children of peace. their hearts overflow with peace; their mouths speak peace, and they walk in the way of peace... They seek, desire and know nothing but peace; and are prepared to forsake country, goods, life, and all for the sake of peace." 

A Record Number of Local Marriages Last Year

Each year I ask for divorce and marriage statistics from our local circuit court, numbers I have been graciously provided since 1996.  I find it noteworthy that while our Rockingham/Harrisonburg population has grown by over 50% since then, the number of annual divorces has remained fairly steady, 400 in 2024. Last year did see the most ever marriage licenses issued, 1025, though that number is only slightly higher than the previous record set over two decades ago, which was 1003.

Of those experiencing marital breakups last year, 141 were contested cases and the rest were no fault divorces. While 400 is well within our average range, it nevertheless means the distressing disruption of the lives of 800 individual partners, to say nothing of the potential trauma created for their children (if any) and countless numbers of friends, parents, grandparents and other loved ones. 

Meanwhile, while we have good records of documented marriages in our community, we lack statistics on the increased number of partners living together without registering their de facto (common law) marriages, though many do not realize that Virginia gives no legal status to such couples. Nor do we have any record of how many of these undocumented couples are experiencing undocumented breakups, with equally stressful effects on children and other close family members and friends.

Here are the numbers of registered marriages and divorces over the past 28 years:

Year       Marriages     Divorces

1996           873                 387

1997           950                 405

1998           964                 396

1999           932                 405

2000           947                 365

2001          1003                438     

2002           976                 421

2003           961                 399

2004           959                 437

2005           889                 381

2006           929                 389

2007           925                 434

2008           950                 405

2009           903                 347 

2010           879                 358     (fewest annual marriages)

2011           933                 433

2012           995                 445

2013           924                 484    

2014           972                 427

2015           955                 474

2016           985                 612     (most annual divorces)

2017           983                 426

2018           935                 476

2019           947                 487

2020           882                 445

2021           994                 466

2022           954                 332     (fewest annual divorces)

2023           961                 366

2024          1025               400     (most annual marriages)

It should be noted that the marriage numbers above are based solely on the number of licenses issued, and include those who come here from other localities to get married, whereas divorce numbers include only the official breakups of people who live here in the City or County. However, it is reasonable to assume that a roughly equal number of residents from here marry in other jurisdictions as marry here from other communities, so the numbers should be reasonably valid for comparison purposes.

It should also be noted that we cannot assume a rate of divorce based on any one year's numbers, as in "40% of first time marriages in our community will end in divorce,” since, for example, many of the above couples are marrying or divorcing for a second, third or fourth time, and future divorce rates could increase or decrease for a variety of reasons. But with numbers like these over a period of decades, we can safely conclude that the odds of a given first marriage surviving are well above 50%.

Separations and divorces may certainly be justified in cases of ongoing patterns of verbal or physical abuse, addictions or adultery. But we would all do well to do whatever we can to support stable and healthy marriages and seeing fewer severed relationships and broken families. At the very least I'm sure most of us would agree with what I once saw on a bumper sticker, "Children Want Happily Married Parents."

Benjamin Franklin In A Conversation With An Anabaptist About Church Creeds

Michael Wohlfahrt, an Anabaptist immigrant from Krefeld, Germany, and a member of the Brethren/Dunker community in Philadelphia, was a good friend of Ben Franklin.

Franklin, like many of the nation's founders, was a deist who acknowledged God as a Creator who established the laws of nature, but believed that humanity alone was responsible for governing human affairs and determining how to live a moral life. He was also a dedicated Freemason who, while he had a Methodist upbringing and occasionally attended Christ Church in Philadelphia (where he was buried), was never known to be a member of any church.

Nevertheless Franklin must have engaged in numerous conversations about religion with his friend Michael Wohlfahrt, and once suggested that Brethren and other Anabaptists should devise a creed to better clarify and define their beliefs. Mennonites did have their 1527 Schleitheim Confession and the Dordrecht Confession of Faith of 1632,  but the Brethren had no such written document.

In Franklin's autobiography, he cites Wohlfahrt's response to his suggestion as follows:

When we were first drawn together as a society, it had pleased God to enlighten our minds so far as to see that some doctrines, which we once esteemed truths, were errors; and that others, which we had esteemed errors, were real truths. From time to time He has been pleased to afford us farther light, and our principles have been improving, and our errors diminishing. Now we are not sure that we are arrived at the end of this progression, and at the perfection of spiritual or theological knowledge; and we fear that, if we should once print our confession of faith, we should feel ourselves as if bound and confin'd by it, and perhaps be unwilling to receive further improvement, and our successors still more so, as conceiving what we their elders and founders had done, to be something sacred, never to be departed from. 

Franklin responded with, "This modesty in a sect is perhaps a singular instance in the history of mankind, every other sect supposing itself in possession of all truth, and that those who differ are so far in the wrong."

According to seminary professor Scott Holland, the member of our son's church in Pittsburgh from whom I got this information, Wohlfahrt eventually joined the Ephrata Cloister, a utopian community influenced by both Radical Pietism and Anabaptism.   

How A Persecuted Sixteenth Century Movement Championed Religious Freedom

Anna Jansz on the way to her execution. Etching by Jan Luiken from the Martyrs Mirror, 1685

The following was published as an op ed piece in today's Daily News-Record:

"If I want kinship with my Anabaptist ancestors, I know where to look: in prison."

- title of an article by Melissa Florer-Bixler in the January 2025 issue of The Christian Century

This January marks the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Swiss Anabaptist movement to which Mennonites and related groups trace their origin. Along with preaching non-violence and a refusal to engage in warfare, Anabaptists (rebaptizers) were influential in promoting the kind of freedom of religion we take for granted today. They simply acted on the conviction that following Jesus meant never using force or coercion, especially in matters of faith.

All of us who believe governments should never determine whether or what kind of faith we are to live by, or rule on what scripture texts or prayers are to be mandated in state funded schools or institutions, owe our gratitude to this once reviled and persecuted group.

For background, on a fateful night of January 21, 1525, a dozen or more like minded believers, mostly young adults, met in the home of Felix Manz, age 26, in Zurich for Bible study and prayer in defiance of a state enforced law forbidding religious gatherings held without official church approval.

The meeting proved to be a watershed event. In defying a law they believed to be wrong, members of the group baptized each other, a revolutionary act igniting the spread of  a free church movement that spread rapidly everywhere in both Catholic and Protestant jurisdictions in western Europe. Their courage also influenced groups like the Moravians, Quakers, Methodists, Baptists, Brethren and countless other later communities of faith. 

Today all major U.S. denominations, Catholic and Protestant alike, affirm and celebrate the freedom later enshrined in the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights, as follows:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

To sixteenth century Christian nation states, this would have been considered heresy, an existential threat to Christendom itself.

Thus two church movements emerged in Zurich, the state supported Swiss Reformed (Protestant) church that met in spacious sanctuaries like Zurich's Grossmünster Cathedral, and an underground movement that met in homes, barns, caves, and other places to avoid detection and arrest. And since the baptism of infants was a part of every person being registered as a citizen of the state, not being officially christened affected many other rights, including land ownership and having ones marriage being recognized as valid.

In Melissa Florer-Bixler's recent article in the Christian Century she quotes from the Martyr's Mirror, a volume with over 1000 pages of accounts of Anabaptists martyrs, the words of Anna Jansz, who in the face of her execution for her faith wrote the following in a letter she left for her young son:

But where you hear of a poor, simple, cast-off little flock, which is despised and rejected by the world, join them; for where you hear of the cross, there is Christ. . . . Honor the Lord in the works of your hands, and let the light of the Gospel shine through you. Love your neighbor. Deal with an open, warm heart your bread to the hungry, clothe the naked, and do not tolerate having two of anything, because there are always those who are in need.

Menno Simons, a Catholic priest in Friesland who a decade later became an influential leader in the free church movement, lived with a price on his head and knew first hand the sacrifices made by those who risked their lives for their radical beliefs. In 1554 he wrote the following defense in a booklet called “The Cross of the Saints”:

… that we are disobedient to the magistracy in things to which they are ordained of God, this will never be found to be true—I mean in matters pertaining to dikes, roads, waterways, tax, tolls, tribute, etc.. But if they wish to rule and lord it above Christ Jesus… according to their whim, this we do not grant them. We would rather sacrifice possessions and life than knowingly to sin against Jesus Christ and his holy Word for the sake of any man, be he emperor or king.

Few of us may be prepared to be so bold in defending the right and the responsibility each of us has in matters of faith. But we are forever indebted to members of a movement in which adherents gave up everything to claim that right for generations to come.

First "Justice Matters" Column Published Today

For those of you who are not subscribers, the following was published as a Viewpoint piece in the January 24 edition of our local paper, the first of a series of monthly "Justice Matters" columns by the Valley Justice Coalition:

We should expand college access to incarcerated people 

- by Debra E. Turner

Did you know Pell Grants are available to incarcerated individuals in Virginia?

Pell Grants, which cover full tuition at public two-year schools and a portion of the cost at four-year schools, can help incarcerated students pay for tuition, fees, books, and supplies. The money goes directly to the academic institution and must not be repaid.

The reason this matters is education programs in prisons can help reduce recidivism and increase employment rates for ex-offenders. In fact, education in prison can reduce recidivism by about 15% and increase employment rates for ex-offenders by about 7%.

Although incarcerated people have been eligible for Pell Grants since July 2023, after a federal ban that lasted nearly 30 years, only about 600 Virginia inmates are currently using the grants.

The Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy (VICPP) is working to expand access to higher education in Virginia prisons. The VICPP is involving stakeholders across education, corrections, justice-impacted, employers, and legislators in a consensus-building process

“College programs in prisons and in jails were relatively normal. It was understood. It wasn’t a boutique,” says Terri Erwin, liaison to higher education for the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy, a statewide public policy advocacy organization. The passage of the 1994 Crime Bill “wrecked the business model for schools. It speaks to how important Pell is as a driver in making it possible for colleges to do what I think plenty of them want to do and will want to do, and that incarcerated people would benefit from.”

In 2015, with the 1990s “tough on crime” era in the rearview mirror, the U.S. Education Department requested colleges to begin rebuilding the pre-1994 model through the Second Chance Pell Grant Experiment. Last year, under the Free Application for Federal Student Aid  Simplification Act of 2020, the doors opened again for incarcerated people to apply for Pell grants (23 community colleges in Virginia).

The Virginia Legislature has also taken action to expand the use of Pell Grants in Virginia prisons with Pell Initiative for Virginia. The PIV is a program funded by the Virginia Legislature to increase the number of Pell Grant-eligible students enrolled in state-supported colleges and universities. The PIV requires annual reports that include data on the recruitment, retention, and graduation of Pell-eligible students.

The Virginia Consensus for Higher Education in Prison is another group working to expand higher education opportunities in prison. The group is calling for the University of Virginia to create a pathway to a bachelor’s degree for Piedmont Virginia Community College students.

Pell Grants are also available to incarcerated students. As of fall 2024, incarcerated students across the country have access to federal Pell Grant funds for the first time in a generation. This change was made possible by the FAFSA Simplification Act, which reauthorized the Pell Grant program through 2034.

Only 11 of Virginia’s 45 prisons offer college classes, but about 14,000 incarcerated people in Virginia prisons have access to Pell Grants.

You must submit a Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form to apply for a Pell Grant, and fill out the FAFSA form every year to remain eligible.

Debra Turner is a legislative advisor for the Valley Justice Coalition. Monthly Justice Matters columns are provided by members of the VJC, a local citizen voice for criminal justice reform in our community and in the Commonwealth since 2104.  https://www.vjcharrisonburg.org/

Celebrating A Movement Few Of Us Would Join

 

"If I want kinship with my Anabaptist ancestors, I know where to look: in prison."

- title of an article by Melissa Florer-Bixler in the January 2025 issue of The Christian Century

This month marks the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Swiss Anabaptist movement to which Mennonites and related groups who practice voluntary believers baptism trace their origin. Along with promoting non-violence and a refusal to engage in warfare, it led to the the spread of the freedom of religion we take for granted today.

Ironically, few of us celebrating the January 21, 1525, gathering in which radical young revolutionaries received adult baptism would be willing to put their own lives at risk in the way some 4000 or more Anabaptist ("rebaptizers") did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most of these were disciples of the Zurich reformer Ulrich Zwingli, who himself had considered some of the very views he found himself too cautious to implement without gaining the consent of the Zurich city council.

Thus two church movements emerged in Zurich, the state supported Swiss Reformed (Protestant) church that met in beautiful sanctuaries like Zurich's Grossmünster Cathedral, and an underground movement that met in homes, barns, caves, and other places to avoid detection and arrest. The former were able to enjoy a relatively safe and prosperous life, the latter were subject to arrest, torture, imprisonment, deportation, disenfranchisement and execution for their faith. Since the baptism of infants was also a form of registration as citizens of the state, undocumented residents were often unable to hold title to property and frequently had their children taken from them to be baptized and raised as members of the state church in their jurisdiction, whether Reformed, Lutheran or Catholic.

Most of us would be inclined to quietly go along with the majority of our fellow citizens in order to keep ourselves and our families safe.  And for the most part, North American Mennonite and other religious groups have been able to do just that for the past several centuries, by becoming "the quiet in the land."

In Melissa Florer-Bixler's recent article in the Christian Century she quotes from the Martyr's Mirror the words of Anna Jansz, who in the face of her execution for her faith wrote the following words in a letter she left for her young son. Her spiritual descendants need to hear and heed them as well:

But where you hear of a poor, simple, cast-off little flock, which is despised and rejected by the world, join them; for where you hear of the cross, there is Christ. . . . Honor the Lord in the works of your hands, and let the light of the Gospel shine through you. Love your neighbor. Deal with an open, warm heart your bread to the hungry, clothe the naked, and do not tolerate having two of anything, because there are always those who are in need.

We should all pray for the courage to be a part of the kind of "poor, simple, cast off little flock" of Jesus followers who, like their Master, gave their all for their faith. Or we can remain comfortable mainstream members of congregations that are more like the established and respected churches that opposed them.