As a pastor, I dream of a world where everyone can flourish but I must also think in nightmares
René Descartes, of Cogito-ergo-sum fame, helped us to think about, well, thinking. Not that we hadn't been used to thinking all along. Humans had been ruminating for thousands of years before Descartes showed up on the scene.
We also know that before Descartes, Plato and Aristotle had invested much thought in distinguishing good thinking from poor thinking.
But Descartes went meta. What differentiates human beings from other animals isn't our ability to think but that we are capable of thinking about thinking. I can produce the common animal thought, "I want food," but I can also take it a step further, "Why would I want Brussel sprouts when I could have peach pie?"
This distinctive human ability allows us to reflect on what might or might not be. "What if I could have peach pie after every meal? What kind of a world would that be, am I right?" And we're off!
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I spend a great deal of time as a minister dreaming of and working toward a world where everyone can flourish. But I also have a duty to envision what the world might look like if we give in to our worst impulses.
What might a world look like, for instance, where ten-year-old girls—too young to babysit other people's children—are forced to bear and care for their own?
Imagine a world where teaching slavery and the Holocaust is deemed too traumatizing for young minds, but seeing children slaughtered in school with automatic weapons is a necessary price to pay for allowing men who need the compensatory reassurances about their masculinity that only packing weapons of war can give.
Imagine a world in which it's more important to identify a child's gender and make sure they use the “proper” bathroom than to ensure that that child doesn't have to eat gas station food and sleep in the back of a `98 Corolla.
Imagine a world where the wealthiest people sleep like Smaug atop their mountains of gold or spend money on vanity projects, building monuments to their own insecurities, instead of using that money to feed the hungry and house the houseless.
Imagine a world where creating refugees is frequently the result of our foreign policy, but receiving and welcoming those refugees should be somebody else’s problem.
Imagine a world in which a non-trivial portion of the population believes their spiritual duty prioritizes figuring out whom God wants them to hate/fear.
Imagine a world where drugs (e.g., insulin and EpiPens) are viewed first as commodities that increase profits more than as life-saving necessities for those who don't have the funds to purchase them or as convenient clubs to beat on those "immoral" enough to need them (e.g., methotrexate, mifepristone, etc.).
Imagine a world where our most dire emergencies are Drag Queen Story Hour and “parents’ rights” while funding teacher and librarian salaries is viewed as “wasting money.”
Imagine a world where Black people have to keep one eye on the rearview mirror, remaining vigilant in the presence of those who (at least in theory) are paid to protect and serve them.
Imagine a world in which it is morally acceptable (and apparently, logically consistent) to fly a Confederate flag and, with a straight face, still call yourself a patriot.
Imagine a world where it's more important to punish someone for a therapeutic abortion than to prosecute a pack of people for engineering a failed attempt to overthrow the government.
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It's bizarro world, isn't it? Alice and the looking glass. The upside down. It's a world filled with Funhouse mirrors distorting reality until those distortions become reality.
What's more, in this risible world, you can leverage those distortions into a highly profitable media “news” behemoth, the primary purpose of which is to help convince people that what they see with their eyes is the result of a shady cabal held together by unutterably absurd conspiracy theories. This kind of Orwellian agitprop is helping turn otherwise pleasant people into proto-fascists—or if that's too harsh, then perhaps fascist-adjacent.
Imagining the world as a post-apocalyptic hellscape used to be the province of people who write manifestos in crayon or produce zombie novels; now, even harmless pastors have to think in nightmares.
The Rev. Derek Penwell is an author, activist, speaker and senior pastor at Douglass Boulevard Christian Church.
This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: I dream that everyone will flourish, but I also think in nightmares
