Embracing Equity: Project 2025 and PA School Funding

Lately I've been stumbling over references to something called Project 2025. I'm not big into conspiracy theories, so didn't pay much attention until I saw repeated mentions and warnings from columnists I respect. This week I tracked down the 900+ page Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, released in April,
2023. As the introduction explains:

The 2025 Presidential Transition Project is the conservative movement’s unified effort to be ready for the next conservative‌ Administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025. ...

History teaches that a President’s power to implement an agenda is at its apex during the Administration’s opening days. To execute requires a well-conceived, coordinated, unified plan and a trained and committed cadre of personnel to implement it... 

For conservatives to have a fighting chance to take on the Administrative State and reform our federal government, the work must start now. 

From start to finish, the Project 2025 mandate sets up an us-vs-them dynamic that mischaracterizes opponents and politicizes long-standing areas of settled bipartisan policy. The forward summary sets the tone: 

Contemporary elites ... repurposed the worst ingredients of 1970s “radical chic” to build the totalitarian cult known today as “The Great Awokening" .... The bad news today is that our political establishment and cultural elite have once again driven America toward decline. The good news is that we know the way out even though the challenges today are not what they were in the 1970s. Conservatives should be confident that we can rescue our kids, reclaim our culture, revive our economy, and defeat the anti-American Left—at home and abroad. We did it before and will do it again.

Over 400 individuals, from dozens of conservative foundations and other institutions, contributed to detailed plans to dismantle federal infrastructure and roll back efforts to promote equity and inclusion. The word equity appears throughout the document as a prime indicator of "woke" agendas in schools, land conservation, military oversight, health care, even the Treasury Department.

I'm doubtful I'll read the entire 900 some pages, but the parts I have read suggest the authors believe "equity" is an anti-Christian, anti-conservative, radical, racist, destructive concept.

What's so bad about equity? Here's a derisive summary from one of the contributing organizations, the Center for Renewing America: 

Equity: A forced equality of outcomes and a rejection of equality of opportunity. Equity contradicts the basic constitutional promise of equality under the law and instead requires identity-based prioritization (oppressed) or discrimination (oppressor) in hiring, distribution of benefits, services, government contracts, and any aspect of society where opportunity, resources, and power can be redistributed. 

The document would suggest that equity was a fairly recent evil, launched in the radical seventies but brought to fruition by Barack Obama and, even more, by President Joe Biden.

But here's what I read in Psalm 99:4 this morning (scholar-endorsed NIV translation):

The King is mighty, he loves justice—
    you have established equity;
in Jacob you have done
    what is just and right.

The Hebrew word translated here as "equity" is meyshar (מֵישָׁר) an architectural term sometimes translated as level, at other times translated as fair. 

It's hard to be 100% certain of the translation of ancient words from a culture far different from our own. But read the prophetic books with a halfway open mind and you'll see very quickly that part of God's covenant involves treating others as we would want to be treated and ensuring that the least among us are provided for. 

Woe to those who mistreatment the poor, the defenseless, the needy, the stranger.

Woe to those who deprive workers their due, or hoard resources while others go hungry. 

That sounds like equity to me. Yet any hint of a leveled playing field seems offensive to the authors of Project 2025. 

I'll likely be writing more about Project 2025 and prophetic words that apply to current politics, but for today, to bring this closer to home: I've been grieving and praying this week about Pennsylvania budget discussions. The budget deadline was June 30. A final budget has yet to appear.

PA has had decades of inequitable, inadequate funding. A seven year school funding lawsuit ended over a year ago with a Commonwealth Court judge decision that current funding levels are inadequate and unlawful. A proposed budget would take partial steps toward a long-overdue remedy, but some PA leaders are holding out for a new voucher program, more money for tax credit scholarships, and a decrease in PA's flat income tax that would benefit PA's wealthiest earners while doing little to help lower wage earners. 

Press statements and social media posts rejecting proposed increases in funding insist instead on school choice and parent empowerment. 

Project 2025 lists that as the first agenda item in the section on education:

Advancing education freedom. Empowering families to choose among a diverse set of education options is key to reform and improved outcomes, and it can be achieved without establishing a new federal program. For example, portability of existing federal education spending to fund families directly or allowing federal tax credits to encourage voluntary contributions to K–12 education savings accounts managed by charitable nonprofits, could significantly advance education choice. (p322)

That all sounds great for hearts shaped by privilege and power. 

My own heart was shaped by loss, need and a deep gratitude for God's love for the poor and powerless.

I know, from my own experience and that of low-income friends: public funding of school choice may work well for families with two educated parents, ability to research and choose the best (elite) options, and finances available to make up the difference between funds provided and total funds needed.

Choice doesn't work so well for poor rural families where even the local public schools are a long bus ride away.

Or in regions where the only "choices" are small religious schools taught by uncertified teachers.

Or for English language learners whose parents don't speak English. 

Choice has little to offer special needs children rejected by private schools that can say "we don't serve kids like these."

It doesn't work well for children whose parents or guardians have no background or bandwidth to seek out options or fulfill private school requirements of volunteer hours.

There's plenty of evidence about the failures of vouchers and misuse of public dollars to provide parents with school choice. 

And when it comes to budget bottom lines? 

Every dollar spent on private school choice is a dollar less for Pennsylvania's hundreds of underfunded public schools. Many don't have libraries, auditoriums, music and art programs, full-time counselors or after school programs. 

Parents, teachers and PA school boards have been crying out for years for adequate, equitable school funding. Will they be heard this year, after decades of being ignored?

For today, NOW, as budget discussions continue, I ask your prayer. 

For wisdom for Pennsylvania's legislative leaders as they finalize the budget, for equity and justice in their school funding decisions, and, for us all, to see our own part in embracing equity and ensuring a more just future for every child, no matter who their parents are. 

Seed Parables

I’ve been doing battle lately with invasive plants that are taking over a park near my home. Mile-a-minute, or Asiatic tearthumb, (Persicaria perfoliata) is an annual vine with beautiful blue berries. Back in the 30s, a grower in York (two counties west of me) planted some holly seeds from Japan, and mile-a-minute grew up alongside the hollies. The grower found it interesting, propagated more, and now it’s smothering fields and meadows in a constantly spreading circle hundreds of miles wide. Those beautiful blue seeds can linger in the soil for six years before germinating, and every plant produces hundreds of seeds, carried to new locations by flocks of hungry birds.

Mile-a-minute is prickly (hence the name “tearthumb”), but with gloves, not too hard to gather: it pulls off easily, and can be rolled into a ball. The difficulty is that it climbs over everything, far into trees, over bushes, out of reach of diligent weed warriors. Once it’s seeded, seeds fly off when the vine is disturbed. Despite the efforts of a faithful band of volunteers, in Exton Park and areas beyond it seems to be winning.

Purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria) is the other thug we’ve been battling. It has beautiful flowers, butterflies love it, and it blooms for months, which is why it’s still sold as an ornamental except in states wise enough to ban it. Some loosestrife is marketed as “sterile,” suggesting it's okay to plant, but researchers have shown that the so-called “sterile” plants are as prolific as their peers.

The problem with loosestrife is that, grown on a continent where it has no natural insect predators, it takes over wetland habitat. It spreads from its roots, a foot a year in every direction, and seeds so prolifically (two to three MILLION seeds a year) that in just a few seasons there’s a solid mat of purple haze. It crowds out everything: native grasses, fish populations, wetland birds. And digging it is hard, mucky work, since its roots are huge and it grows in wet spots, often under water.

The Synchroblog topic this month is “Parable: Small Story, Big Idea,”  and as I’ve been thinking about parables, it’s occurred to me that quite a few are about seeds. In simple stories, Jesus catches the complexity and challenge of seed, and the interplay of natural forces, human effort, inherent risk, distant reward.

Maybe the most familiar of the seed parables is the story of the farmer sowing his seed in good soil, rocky soil, hard soil. The seed on hard soil is eaten by birds. The seed on rocky soil grows fast, but dies prematurely. Some young plants are strangled by weeds, but some seed finds a home in productive soil and grows to produce good fruit. 

I’ve seen firsthand how easily young plants, even trees, can be strangled by weeds. One of our weed warrior jobs is to chop back invasive vines that threaten the health of older trees, bend saplings into strange, contorted shapes, weigh branches toward the ground.

I’ve also seen firsthand how troubles and temptations strangle faith, which is probably closer to the point of Jesus' story. I’ve seen even mature believers sink under the weight of tragedy, or snap in the stranglehold of unattended sin. For young faith, the hazards are many, and it takes real care to help roots grow deep enough to face the pressures that will come.

Another parable is about enemies who come to sow weed seeds in a farmer’s wheat field, and the farmer instructs his servants to let weeds and crop grow together, rather than disturb the wheat by pulling the weeds. Both will be harvested when fully grown: the weeds bundled to be burned, the wheat stored in the farmer’s barn.

I remind myself of this parable when I fall behind in weeding my own small vegetable plot. But I’m fairly sure Jesus wasn’t advocating sloppy gardening, but rather reminding his listeners: it’s sometimes hard to see what’s a weed and what isn’t. It sometimes takes time and patience to recognize the good from the bad, the helpful from the harmful. And sometimes we aren’t wise enough to know. And sometimes it isn’t ours to judge.

A third seed parable is so short I can quote it here in full: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.”

Wrestling with purple loosestrife this past week, I found myself reflecting on the growth of the mustard seed, and Jesus’ mention of the birds perching in its branches.

The mustard we know (Sinapis hirta or Brassica juncea) doesn’t grow into trees. It’s an annual plant that grows three or four feet tall. Sparrows or wrens might land on mustards, might even pick at the seeds, but you wouldn’t call it a tree, and a bird would have trouble perching.

The mustard seed of the Middle East (Salvadora persica) grows into a small, multi-branched tree, with edible seeds, shoots that provide nutritious forage for camels, sheep and goats, and sweet fleshy fruit that can be eaten raw, cooked, or dried: great habitat for birds, and a welcome food source for a wide mix of hungry creatures. 

In Jesus’ very short, simple story, I hear the resonance of the green equity I wrote about last week: God’s kingdom, as it becomes visible, is good news not just for those who follow him, but for all creation. As his restoration and goodness become evident, it provides space for even those creatures we’ve ignored, or crowded out.

The challenge is to sow seeds of the Kingdom, and provide space for them to grow. 

We are constantly sowing seeds, sometimes wisely, more often foolishly.

And the impact of those seeds, while felt by us and those around us, is often multiplied in the natural world.

Mile-a-minute, purple loosestrife, kudzu, norway maples, Japanese honeysuckle, oriental bittersweet, Phragmites australis, the list goes on and on of plant species introduced in expectation of beauty, pleasure, financial reward. The harm to humans is sometimes in time and effort trying to control the runaway invaders; the harm to birds, insects, fish, habitat is far greater, pushing some species to the edge of extinction.

I’ve had the good fortune to hear Doug Tallamy speak at a nearby arboretum about the interplay of plant, caterpillar, butterfly, bird, and the danger to the ecosystem when native plants are replaced with plants from other places. He and his enymology students at the University of Delaware have done years of research on the feeding habits of insects, and have found that very few non-native plants provide essential food for the biodiversity essential to a healthy ecosystem.

We’re often so busy sowing seeds that suit ourselves (the biggest flowers, the longest bloom) we often lose sight of the larger system, and the seeds we sow crowd out the rarer butterflies, the song birds dependent on bugs for food. And as some of those seeds become invasive and spread, they threaten the biodiversity, beauty, and function of the natural world.  

But Jesus’ discussion of seeds was not so much about physical seeds as about the seeds of the kingdom of God: the humility, love, patience and mercy that grow into wisdom, compassion, self-control, grace. Those seeds are choked out by the patterns of the day: fears of betrayal, grief over loss, self-protective anger, habitual cynicism.

And those seeds are strangled even more by the patterns of our life together: unabated competition. Constant judgment of those around us. Unrestrained consumption. Insatiable hunger for success.

The seeds we sow scatter far beyond us, rooting deep in our communities, carried along by social media to communities far beyond our own. Daily I find myself struggling to root out attitudes and ideas that have taken hold that have no place in the kingdom of God.

And daily I ask God to teach me to sow wisely: seeds that will bring nourishment, beauty, places of rest, not only to the people I love, but to the larger world beyond me.

Photo by George Tallman, an Exton Park weed warrior, 2013

Your thoughts and reflections are welcome. Link to "comments" below.

This post is part of the August Synchroblog: Parables: Small Stories, Big Ideas. Other posts:

Jesus’ Parables are Confusing? Good! – Jeremy Myers
Parabolic Living – Tim NicholsParables – Be Like the Ant or the Grasshopper – Paul Meier
The Parables of Jesus: Not Like Today’s Sermons – Jessica
Penelope and the Crutch – Glenn Hager
Parables and the Insult of Grace - Rachel
Changing Hearts Rather Than Minds – Liz Dyer

God’s Green Equity

Swamp White Oak at Exton Park

Say among the nations, “The Lord reigns.”

    The world is firmly established, it cannot be moved;
    he will judge the peoples with equity.

Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be glad;
    let the sea resound, and all that is in it.
Let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them;
    let all the trees of the forest sing for joy.         (Psalm 96:10-13)

This summer I’ve found myself involved in some new projects that have me thinking more than ever about the physical world around us, how we use and abuse its resources, and what it means to be stewards of what we’ve been given.

And I’ve been digging deeper into that strange stew of words that swim through scripture: justice, equity, righteousness, faithfulness, shalom.

I’m involved in a League of Women Voters national committee studying the state of food and farming: confined animal feeding operations, subsidies for ever expanding monocultures of corn, transgenic salmon, nanotechnology in food, health impacts of pesticide exposure.

As part of my involvement in the League, I attended a convention in Lewisburg, PA, and a council meeting in Leesburg, VA, where I found myself talking to a wide mix of women concerned about food, farms, and environmental impacts: a beekeeper from Illinois, worrying about bee colony collapse; a daughter of generations of shrimpers from Louisiana, grieving the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico; a professor of energy policy from Nebraska who explained quietly over a leisurely dinner that natural gas drilling has turned the expansive grazing lands of native grasses into industrial landscape. I carry her voice with me as she said, very softly: “The Wind River Valley now has the worst air quality in the country.”

Yes, and I carry the voice of the woman from rural Erie County, who explained that abandoned oil wells not far from her home are being used as repositories for contaminated natural gas waste water – too near Lake Erie, and too near the small family farms that supply the few jobs of the region. “We finally got the lake clean, and now this. And what happens to those farms when they can’t get clean water?”

My other involvement this summer is with Friends of Exton Park, a group I’ve helped start to promote and protect an 800 acre park in the middle of our county, a pond, wetlands, and surrounding fields and woodlands, a green jewel in the middle of the suburban sprawl of shopping malls, highways, and developments.

In the park, we’ve been removing invasive plants that threaten the native habitat: cutting back oriental honeysuckle bush, freeing native trees from the stranglehold of oriental bittersweet, balling up miles of mile-a-minute vine, digging up purple loosestrife before it fills in chokes the fragile wetlands

In both arenas, I’ve encountered people surprised to find a Christian concerned about such things.

Here’s what I’ve been told: 

Christians don’t care about climate change or global warming.

Christians believe the earth is here for us to plunder.

“Green,” to Christians, is pagan. Or pantheistic. Or both.

And God will destroy this earth, the sooner the better, so why bother? 

Let me take a moment to grieve.

I wonder, sometimes, how God feels when his people misrepresent him so badly.

Yes, there are loud voices that insist emphatically that climate change is a propaganda tool of godless liberals.

Voices that equate unfettered consumption with patriotism and righteousness.

But surely there are other voices?

Several years ago, Byron Borger of Hearts and Minds bookstore posted “ Learning to love what God loves: Creation care and Christian discipleship”. He described almost four dozen books on what he described as “green theology--a strong emphasis of the doctrine of creation (what Calvin called "the theatre of God.")”

Just a sampling:

• All Creation Sings: The Voice of God in Nature, J. Ellsworth Kalas
• Wild Thoughts from Wild Places, David Quammen 
• Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough, New Planet,  Bill McKibben 
• Living Beyond the "End of the World": ASpirituality of Hope, Margaret Swedish 
• Green Revolution: Coming Together to Care for Creation, Ben Lowe 
• Tending to Eden:Environmental Stewardship for God's People, Scott Sabin
• Christianity, Climate Change and Sustainable Living, Nick Spencer, Robert White & Virginia Vroblesky
• Walking Gently on the Earth: Making Faithful Choices AboutFood, Energy, Shelter and More, Lisa Graham McMinn & Megan Anna Neff 

Reflecting on the many strong titles about love and care of creation, Borger wrote: 

“It breaks my heart to know that so few of these kinds of resources are well-known, most not on the shelves of church libraries or resource centers, not selling well at most Christian bookstores. Some fine green titles quickly go out of print since customers do not buy them from the stores, or the stores don't by them from the publishers.  (Some stores refuse to stock them, even, which is another sad story.)”   

I’ve been spending time in a series of psalms: 96 to 98. Parts of them are familiar: “Sing to the Lord a new song.” “Shout for joy to the Lord all the earth.”

But there’s something going on in these psalms I hadn’t noticed: the joy and celebration rest in confidence that God will return to act on behalf of the suffering earth. 

“Let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them.
Then all the trees of the forest will sing for joy;
They will sing before the Lord, for he comes,
He comes to judge the earth.
He will judge the world in righteousness
And all the peoples in his truth.”
       (Psalm 96:12-13) 

These psalms and other parts of scripture make clear: the earth is part of God’s plan of redemption, and his justice will be occasion of joy for nature itself: fields, trees, seas, mountains.

Which suggests that those who want to understand the joy and hope of God’s justice might need to engage in some way with this earth we call home: its struggle, its pain, its beauty.

In Engaging God’s World, theologian Cornelius Plantinga says:

“Biblical hope has a wide-angle lens. It takes in whole nations and peoples. It brings into focus the entire created order—wolves and lambs, mountains and plains, rivers and valleys. When it is widest and longest, biblical hope looks forward toward a whole “new heaven and new earth” in which death, and mourning, and pain will have passed away.” (13)

I’ll be spending the rest of the summer looking for ways to engage more volunteers in caring for Exton Park.

Experimenting with best practices of phragmites control in wetlands.

And wrestling with my own expansive crop of smartweed and creeping charlie.

Spending as much time outside as I can, bird-watching, kayaking, traveling to the Adirondacks to spend time with extended family in my favorite New York wilderness.

And finishing my part of our national study, trying to understand how federal policy shaped our current food supply and what needs to change to support more sustainable farming.

I’ll be exploring some of the voices listed by Byron Borger, and looking for other voices as well that affirm “green theology.”

And I’ll be blogging about food and farming, Jesus’ nature parables, and the intermingling of justice, sabbath, shalom, and the sweet, shared hope of God’s green equity. 

Let the sea resound, and everything in it,
    the world, and all who live in it.Let the rivers clap their hands,
    let the mountains sing together for joy;
  let them sing before the Lord,
    for he comes to judge the earth.
He will judge the world in righteousness
    and the peoples with equity.
           (Psalm 98)