Find Your Welfare

Reflections on the Lectionary for October 12th

Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash

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For me, it’s the Scottish Highlands, where I could imagine finding a teaching job at a religious secondary school and living in a quaint stone house on some glen. The kids have decided that it should be Norway, or failing that, at least Finland (where I think I could get citizenship based on my Finnish ancestry). My wife is agnostic about where we go, but she’s convinced that we should go somewhere. With three teenagers who all have diverging passions and diminishing interest in talking with their parents, it’s one of the few reliable conversation-starters we have left: where should we go when we flee the country?

Maybe you’ve had those conversations too. I have heard people talk up the virtues of Italy or Portugal, or Costa Rica or Mexico or Thailand. My TikTok algorithm figured out quickly that I might be the kind of person interested in becoming an expatriate, and it began serving me videos breaking down the visa requirements and financial implications of far-flung nations. For almost a year now—since the 2024 election—a lot of the people I know have, for the first time, given serious thought to how and to where they might leave the United States.

There’s an element of these conversations that feels like those what would you do if you won the lottery questions. Just like the question of how I would manage a sudden four hundred million dollars, the question of where I would go if I fled the country is 99% abstraction. Fleeing might be an option for someone with lots of money in the bank or few attachments in the States, but it doesn’t feel like a real option for me. I don’t have a large savings account or skills that are particularly in demand abroad, and leaving would mean abandoning too many of the people I care about. So those conversations feel like a certain kind of fantasy escapism, useful for when I am faced with the continually unfolding horrors of 2025 America, but the possibility does not feel especially real.

That’s not to minimize the very real gravity of the situation here at home. As someone who has studied autocratic and authoritarian movements and governments, and as someone with more than a passing grasp of history, I am indeed very worried about the future. (I am even writing a book about it, which you can support here). I think we are entering a very hard time in American history, and that we are likely to see increasing violence and division before things get better. I would love to be wrong, but the history of hard-right nationalist movements suggests that we are in for a period of increased xenophobia, racism, homophobia, economic austerity, violence, and fear. It makes sense to want to flee all of that. Escape is the simplest and most obvious strategy, and it’s one that many people have chosen in response to the rise of authoritarianism before.

But something about it doesn’t sit right with me.

I don’t say that to criticize anyone else’s choices or desires; if I had millions of dollars in the bank or an easy way to do it, I’d probably think hard about parking myself somewhere else for a decade or so too. And for some people, it might become a matter of survival. But beyond the practical reasons to stay put, I also have my ideological reasons. And the lectionary for October 12^th helps me think about that.

Jeremiah 29:1 and 4-7 speaks to this kind of dilemma. (I am not sure why the lectionary skips verses 2 and 3, since they help fill in some details…maybe it’s because of all the hard-to-pronounce names). This part of Jeremiah preserves a letter written and sent by the prophet Jeremiah to the exiles from Judea who were living in Babylon. Exile in Babylon was certainly a different situation than those of us living in (and thinking of fleeing from) the United States face right now. The Judean exiles had been defeated in war and taken by force—kidnapped, essentially—and made to live in a foreign place, as a tool of suppression by the empire that had defeated them. Forced exile is a very different thing than chosen exile, even if both can be painful. But the underlying question posed by Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles is useful for us, I think, as we contemplate why we might want to go—and how we should live if we end up wanting to stay or having to stay.

The question for the exiles in Babylon, and the question for those of us who oppose what’s going on in the United States but have to (or want to) stay here anyway, is: how much should we invest in the place where we live? How hard should we work for a society and a culture we might not believe in? If we are here—in some sense or another—against our will, how then should we live?

During the first Trump administration, there was a sloganistic and I think simplistic answer to that question: RESIST. Everywhere everyone was telling you to resist, claiming to resist, and offering evidence of resistance. The so-called “deep state” supposedly resisted, people held mass demonstrations to resist, and institutions like universities and churches instituted programming to resist. This resistance felt good and it was likely somewhat effective, though not effective enough to prevent a second Trump administration. And so here we are, still looking for an answer to the question of how to live.

The 2025 Trump response to the RESIST movement seems to be to unleash more of everything, and worse. Steve Bannon’s famous practice of “flooding the zone with shit,” in which the government simply does too many appalling things for people to react to and does them all at once, appears to be the working theory of the second Trump administration. These days there are too many atrocities to even register each day, let alone resist. You can’t resist everything, all at once. You still have to go to work every day, figure out how to fix your icemaker, stop by the store on the way home, think of something to make for dinner, and pay your student loan payments. All of us have things to do and lives to lead, and we can’t go around resisting everything all the time. Therein lies the challenge of this moment in American history, therein lies the seduction of moving abroad, and therein we find the genius of Jeremiah’s advice to the Judean exiles.

Build houses and live in them, Jeremiah writes, plant gardens and eat what they produce. He goes on telling the exiles to take wives and have sons and daughters, go on building families, and seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. That last part is important. When you find yourself in a hostile place against your will, Jeremiah says, when you find yourself in a place full of people who wish you harm, the best form of resistance is to strive for flourishing in your own life, and to work for the flourishing of your neighbors and the place you live, and there you will find your welfare.

It feels a little futile to me, right now, to seek the welfare of the United States. From my perspective as someone on the left of most American political questions, it feels like the well-being and welfare of the United States is on a losing streak. This is true across a broad range of questions: climate science, epidemiology, the economy, housing prices and availability, the cost of higher education and the academic freedom of those engaging in it, human rights, reproductive freedom, marriage equality, scientific research, free speech—in every case things are worse off than they were a year ago, and many of them significantly so. To seek the welfare of the place where I find myself feels hopeless in a moment when the full apparatus of the American government is turned against the very efforts and results I would be seeking. To take just one issue that I care very much about, it feels futile to work to prevent gun violence at a moment when the world’s biggest promoters of gun violence have full control of the United States government and nearly unchecked power to enact their agenda. What could my actions on that issue possibly accomplish right now? And the same calculation bears out for so many other questions too. What could it possibly look like to seek the welfare of the United States by working for renewable energy or ensuring the rights of immigrants or funding education when the full power of the government is arrayed against the success of those efforts?

Things are bleak, for sure. Perhaps that is why Jeremiah wrote to the exiles in Babylon—because the times were so hopeless. It is easy, in times of captivity and exile, to feel nihilistic about the future. It’s easy to throw your hands up and declare your own uselessness. Escapism becomes more attractive, either as a realistic option or as a fantasy, because escaping seems like it would solve more problems than you could possibly address by staying behind and working for the future. But Jeremiah wrote to the exiles encouraging them to use their presence in Babylon for good. If you want to thrive in captivity, he wrote, work for the good of the place where you are captive. If you want to live a better life, work to make everyone’s life better, whether everyone else wants a better life or not.

In other words, in times like the ones we live in—times when the possibilities of changing the world for the good seem so remote and impossible—our purposes ought to be unchanged. Our calls to justice and equality are just as important in times of rampant injustice and inequality, and probably more so. When our world is taken captive by people who want to hurt us and other vulnerable people, the response cannot be to surrender or to give up. Our response has to be to redouble our efforts, and to seek the welfare of the place where we are, as much as we are able and in any way we can. That will look different for different people and communities, but the basic calling remains essentially the same. Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you, and work hard—even when it feels like you are moving backwards, to see the world become more like one where all of God’s people can flourish. Flee if you have to, but stay and work and invest if you can.

I might still daydream about the Scottish Highlands and a stone house on a glen. And I won’t discourage anyone who feels like they need to flee for their own safety and mental well-being. The day might even come when that’s the choice I need to make. But I find truth in what Jeremiah writes: in the welfare of the place where I live, I will find my own welfare.