What God Has Made Crooked

Un-Christian Crosses in the Desert

2010-05-08T19:55:00.003-05:00

...And the end of the semester slams into me like an out-of-control freight train, one car after another piling up on top of the other. Just when I think I'm caught up --boom!--another stack of papers or administrative duty or student emergency barrels down on me. It's been difficult to focus on my own research/reflections of late.

Nevertheless (to switch locomotive metaphors), I am seeing a bit of light at the end of the finals-week tunnel, and in that dim illumination I've noticed some interesting developments on the faith-in-public-life front.

Stanley Fish wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times this week in which he repeated his compelling arguments concerning the vexed position of faith in an ostensibly secular state. As you may be aware, the Supreme Court recently ruled (in Salazar v. Buono) that a cross erected decades ago in the Mojave desert did not in fact violate the First Amendment's establishment clause. The Mojave Cross's history and conflict is rather complicated, not at all like the clear-cut melodramas of--say--Ten Commandment Monuments built specifically to provoke challenges to church/state separations.

Originally erected in 1934 on government land as a way of honoring WWI veterans, the cross has apparently been rebuilt a number of times by private parties, most recently by Henry Sandoz, who (without government permission) drilled holes into the rock outcropping to make the cross he built harder to remove. The cross serves as a gathering place for local Christians at Easter. Its compatibility with the First Amendment has only recently became an issue. In 1999, a request to build and place a Buddhist symbol to honor war dead was denied. In 2001, retired park service employee Frank Buono challenged the legality of the cross, arguing that it represented a clearly religious statement by the state and therefore violated the Establishment clause.

A number of complex political and legal moves and counter-moves followed; courts tended to side with Buono, but legislatures tended to act to protect the cross from removal. These conflicts culminated in the government's attempt to transfer the land around the cross to a private group, ostensibly negating the First Amendment conflict. "Tilt!" cried Buono and his lawyers. That act, they argued, was a shady dodge by the government specifically to preserve the cross, constituting yet another act of religious favoritism by the government.

The Supreme Court, then, ruled primarily on the issue of whether the government's land transfer was legal. The ancillary import of the ruling, of course, concerns whether or not the cross itself constitutes a religiously specific statement that the government cannot endorse officially. In a 5-4 decision, the court ruled that the transfer was legal, that (in Justice Kennedy's opinion for the plurality), the cross served a secular purpose (honoring veterans) rather than a religious one.

Fish clarifies that he personally has no problems with a cross in the desert on government lands. But the reasoning Kennedy advances, Fish argues, strains credulity. The Court performs what has come to be the standard maneuver for preserving religious (and here religious almost always means "Christian") symbols on government property: it drains the symbols of religious import. The cross, in Kennedy's rhetorical scenario, is not faith-specific but generic, a common cultural marker of respect and homage. This--despite arguments from the plaintiffs that, for example, no Jewish person would consider a cross on her grave to be a generic and unexceptionable symbol of respect.

Moreover, Fish points out, Kennedy doesn't merely stop at declaring the cross non-religious; he also attempts a defense of the government's accommodating religious symbols more specifically. These two lines of argument, writes Fish, undermine each other. The court seems to want the cross to be simultaneously religious and secular, an intellectually dishonest stance that puts the lie to the court's claims to religious neutrality. Says Fish: "The Christian and conservative Web sites that welcomed the decision as a blow for Christianity and against liberalism knew what they were looking at."

To be sure, conservative Christian websites did welcome the decision. But, to extend Fish's argument a bit, I don't think it's actually in Christianity's best interests to praise the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too reasoning of t Salazar v. Buono. Surely for Christians--conservative evangelicals especially--the cross is and must be specifically, specially religious. To claim otherwise is to deny the significance of one of the key events in our faith story.

I should note that, for many conservative evangelicals, their stance on the government's display of religious symbols remains refreshingly honest. For them, the cross (like the Ten Commandments displays or nativity scenes) is specifically, uniquely Christian. Their arguments for having governmental displays of such symbols rest on the concomitant rationale that the US itself is specifically, uniquely Christian. I disagree strongly that the US is "Christian" in the sense they mean, and I therefore dispute their case for using tax dollars to pay for the construction and upkeep of massive Ten Commandments displays. But at least, in those cases, the faith status of the cross is never in question. The cross is exclusively Christian, and its display is advanced by Christian exclusivists (or, at least by people who believe it right and proper for the USA to have a primarily Christian character).

This--the religious nature of the state, the state's proper boundaries for displaying or preferring one religion (or any religion) over another (or none at all)--this is a vital debate to have in a world where states find themselves adjudicating between wildly or even violently divergent faith worldviews. It's vital, too, for Christians to involve themselves in this debate, to test out how and to what extent we want a government to prefer our religion over others (even if that preference doesn't translate to exclusivism). Evangelicals and Religious Right pundits often rail about the dangers of godless governments, but really--can anyone point to an overtly/offically religious state that doesn't have a horrifying history of specifically faith-inspired violence and/or oppression? Does Christianity really thrive when it's in control of the government? Or--if not control--how might faith as such secure a voice in representative democracies? Isn't there a difficult but happier medium between theocracy and utter secularity?

And that's the problem with the "religionless religious symbols" argument. It seems to advance theocratic interests, but ultimately it contributes to a faith-less society. It renders us less able to debate about the role of religion in government or in public life.

If the goal is to ensure that crosses and Commandments displays on government land remain intact, then the legal loophole of it's-not-really-religious seems tactically advantageous; it gets immediate results (i.e., the continued display of Christian symbols). But, aside from the dishonesty involved in pretending that the cross isn't religious, the tactic contributes to a dangerous secularizing trend. It reinforces the view that faith and faith-based stances really do have no place in democratic government, that faith is always only private and personal. Religious motivations and faith-based value arguments become vaguely embarrassing, like bodily functions. They come to exist only behind closed doors or facades of neutrality. Surely such a view of faith is the opposite of what Christians and other religious viewpoints want. We want--we need--for faith to be a part of the public discourse about the Good. Otherwise, faith--and to a certain extent values in general--becomes some subterranean, mysterious force that no one has a vocabulary for.

It helps us not at all, then, to pretend that faith doesn't exist or doesn't clamor for representation in a democracy. Let the cross remain religious, and let the debate begin. Don't settle for arguments that de-Christianize a Christian image. After all, didn't Christ have some grave words for those who would deny him?

More later,

JF

Anticipatory Confidence

2010-04-30T21:42:00.005-05:00

Here at the end of a particularly cruel April, just today, I am experiencing one of those rare moments where a number of different deep movements of spirit and thought suddenly break the surface of consciousness and align.

Here's one movement that surfaced: I had a chat today with a friend whose struggles with faith in part inspired me to start this blog. We picked up on some themes she had raised in earlier conversations, e.g., how to keep a faith when so much of the faith of one's childhood seems nonsensical or repellent. I found myself putting into words thoughts and feelings that had largely been inarticulate for a while but roiling in my subconscious for some time. It felt good to talk about what I believe and why I believe it.

The conversation also reminded me how my absence from writing on this blog, my break from forcing myself to communicate my beliefs, has muted my spirit. The engagement of conversation--with another or even with myself in writing--is a discipline I need to practice more often. I write, after all, about evangelicals training themselves to be articulate ambassadors of Christianity. While I distance myself from many of their methods and theologies, I too am a representative of Christianity.

I especially like representing a Christianity different from the one my friend (and I) absorbed as a child, the black-or-white system of certain belief. "When I was young," my friend explained (I paraphrase), "I just knew that certain things were true: that Jesus was God, that he rose from the dead. Now I don't believe that. Or at least I don't know that.

"Do you," she asked, "believe in heaven? Or that Jesus is God?"

I did, I said. And I do. But, as I explained, this is something I've chosen to believe. I do not believe because I have been presented with an accumulation of convincing empirical evidence. In fact, the whole push toward evidentiary apologetics, "proving," say, Christ's resurrection as one might prove a legal case or scientific theory (Josh McDowell is the go-to example here)--this turns me off.

I believe in Jesus as God not because I've been rationally convinced but because I'm caught by the image of God-with-us, of God's miraculous, shocking solidarity with humanity even at its most painful and alienated from God ("My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?"). I see heaven as congruent with this image of the God who breaks through all barriers to be with humanity. This image of the reconciling God resonates with me, provokes an affirmation of spirit that I cannot justify in purely material terms. It's also, I said, a belief that I feel pushes me towards an ethic beyond myself. I feel I am a better person than I might otherwise be thanks to my belief in a fullness beyond my own temporal life.

And so, without being fully, rationally, finally convinced in some forensic way, I have committed to this belief. It is, to be sure, a leap of faith, an act that Charles Taylor christens "anticipatory confidence." And I have felt as I leap that I have been caught, upheld. Not all the time, to be sure. There are plenty of days where I feel only alienation and uncertainty, the temptation to stop trying, to stop leaping into the dark (or the light?).

But--and this is another difference between my childhood faith and my current faith--my belief isn't a matter of clear certainty. It doesn't depend on my moment-to-moment feeling of confidence. Rather, I keep up a fragile commitment--fragile because I am constantly aware that it could be otherwise, fragile in the sense that I don't take it for granted. Fragile, but not brittle. I look back on my childhood faith, where I like my friend just knew that Christ was God, that heaven was real, that angels surrounded us. I just knew this because the only other option to such certainty was nihilist unbelief. My firm knowledge rested on some absolute truths which, if questioned in the slightest, would shatter the entire framework of my beliefs. The appearance of utter doubtlessness was made of glass.

I sense the same brittleness in the "Bible-believing" (i.e., pro-inerrancy) and material-evidentiary branches of Christianity. The Bible is true in its every literal detail because it must be. Were even the slightest discrepancy, the slightest contradiction discovered, the entire Christian belief system would crumble. Here confidence isn't anticipated but desperately maintained no matter what.

I recognize--largely thanks to Taylor's A Secular Age--how such brittle certainty is both a product of and a reaction to the present age of pluralized beliefs and non-beliefs. Reading him this evening brought other mental wrestling matches I've been waging to the surface. I've gotten (finally) to the part where Taylor addresses and answers some of the current arguments against Christian belief. His writing on suffering and faith captures much of my own thinking, much of my own feeling.

More on him next time.

JF

Differences and Deadlines

2010-04-16T22:43:00.006-05:00

It's that time of the year again, when a deadline for some research project I've committed myself to looms ever closer. This time it's a mega-conference on performance studies. I've done that thing--that trick I tell my PhDs to try when they need to discipline themselves into working, that trick that I've pulled on myself multiple times, that trick I inevitably kick myself for using: if you need to write a brand-new piece of research, just sign up for a conference where you'll be presenting the work before a group of influential critical scholars. You'll get it done.

It works like a charm--most of the time--but it comes at the cost of some heavy stress when said due date is near and said research product is, well, still in the subjunctive phase. Thus my heavy stress.

The project I've promised to complete involves a brief paper laying out some connections between evangelical proselytism and liberal--anti-capitalist, to be exact--activism. In my work on various modes of evangelical outreach, I've run across more than one present-day evangelist referencing some mid-century evangelicals who noted how committed communists (the Stalinist/Maoist/Castro-esque variety) were to spreading their Marxist gospel of anti-capitalism. Why, plead the evangelists (past and present) can't Christians be at least as committed as the godless commies?

My seed of a contention--as yet untested by the rigors of research and writing--is that the situation in US left-leaning activism has reversed itself. That is, I think the time has come for some on the left to ask if anti-capitalist progressives can't get a little old-time religious fervor for spreading their own gospel.

Yet a quick glance at national headlines suggests that we're currently undergoing one of the most polarized and polarizing times in--well, in my memory, at least. I just watched a clip about the Tea Party protests rallying support to overturn the health care reform bill, to return to a more pro-market system (though, as many journalists and pundits point out, the reform bill itself uses market tools, not socialism). Any religious fervor about anti-capitalism must encounter a similarly passionate set of beliefs from Tea Partiers. There's a fundamental difference here that renders the hopes for conversion to or from either side dim.

I've long been drawn to writers and theorists who deal with the problems of plurality, tolerance, and disagreement. To whit: how shall we disagree? and to what end? In a number of different works, literary critic Wayne C. Booth asks us to consider "the company we keep" in life and in fiction. How do we imagine and interact with the other who passionately holds beliefs at odds with our own?

Booth had some personal experience with this as a dean during the 1960s eras of protests and student-led sit-ins. There he found himself confronted by and engaged with activists who were asserting views--or at least methods--at odds with the stances he was obliged/convinced to take as dean. Such was the intensity of disagreement, he says, that at some points one side wouldn't really launch criticisms so much as merely repeat their opponent's views verbatim ("You believe X, Y, and Z!"), assuming that the restatement stood as an obvious rebuttal of the point itself.

I was caught by that image--the disbelieving repetition of another's thesis as (and instead of) an actual rebuttal. Examples from my own life spring to mind: "You believe that health care should be a right guaranteed by government!" To me, or to an audience of like-minded progressives, such a statement functions as a simple affirmation or a happy discovery. But to others, uttering such a statement would be a call for boos and hisses. It would be formally (though not in magnitude) similar to a let-me-get-this-straight-you-really-believe-this statement that, say, person X thinks that kittens should be ground up into dogfood.

The disbelieving repetition-as-argument (I'll have to see if Booth has a better term for it) depends utterly on shared conventions between audience and speaker (repeater, I should say). It's an anti-manifesto. Rather than stating affirmatively what one's side really does believe, you state your opponents' views so baldly as to throw your own side's views into sharp relief.

It's important to distinguish this rhetorical maneuver from a related but unfair variant--the straw man technique or willful falsification, where someone attributes to an opponent views that the opponent simply doesn't espouse. No, in the kind of speech scenario Booth describes, both sides are able to state the others' views fairly and without distortion. I know exactly what you believe, an activist in this situation says, and I disagree to such an extreme that the belief as such is anathema to me and mine.

Now this is fundamental difference. Many of the critics I draw on regularly--Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Ranciere in particular--insist on the value of this level of difference to the operation of democratic politics. Mouffe sees a great deal of danger in the will to mute or smooth over disagreements through the search for consensus or moderation. Honest antagonism--or as she would prefer agonism--is in her view the fuel for the democratic motor.

My problem? I agree intellectually with Mouffe that fundamental disagreements are inevitable and ought not be rationalized away as malfunctions to be repaired. But emotionally, such conflict--the kind of conflict Booth recalls--makes me queasy. I know it's odd for a scholar of theatre to say this, but I hate conflict.

I'm all the more impressed, then, by people such as Booth who make it their life's work to begin at the fundamental disagreement scenario ask "What now? What's the ethical thing to do?" Much of Mouffe's work (and I suspect much of Booth's) involves not so much advocating an exact, silver-bullet answer but warning against the will to give up, to dismiss the other totally and--on that pretext--pursue their destruction.

To restate--what attracts me to present-day evangelism as a subject is how it, too, very often begins from an assumption of fundamental difference--those who believe on the risen Christ and those for whom the gospel is foolishness--and refuses to give up. I'm intrigued especially by worldview evangelisms that enjoin Christians to educate themselves so fully in other (i.e., non-evangelical-Christian) beliefs so that the evangelists could in fact state those beliefs fairly and clearly.

I'm not yet convinced that the capitalist/anti-capitalist disagreements going on in this country (which for the most part are more like very-strict-capitalist versus slightly-less-strict-capitalists) have reached even the point at which either side can state the other's point of view clearly and fairly. I wonder, then, if there isn't the potential for anti-capitalist progressives like me to be the first to show empathy for the other's worldview as a first step to progressive evangelization...

Hm.

More later,

JF

Mortal Thoughts

2010-04-10T17:06:00.003-05:00

I've been a bit off-the-grid this week. For one thing, I'm visiting my partner up in Illinois, and he lacks a steady internet signal. My access is therefore limited to short stints at the local coffeehouse (a great place appropriately called "The Coffeehouse").

For another, this has been a rough week in terms of mortality. It's unfortunate that in the week following the celebration of Christ's resurrection so many people connected--tangentially, for the most part--to my life have passed away. A friend's mother. My sister's mother-in-law.

The world also lost evangelist and writer Michael Spencer, whom I've written about before. Spencer, who blogged under the moniker "The Internet Monk" (see here), was an intriguing and provocative voice for evangelical reform. He's famous for (among other things) publishing an article version of several of his blog posts, collectively entitled "The Coming Evangelical Collapse." His diagnosis/prognosis of the US church's future struck a chord that continues to resound across evangelicalism and beyond. Doubtless his forthcoming book, Mere Churchianity (completed prior to his death), will make similar waves.

Unfortunately, I never did more than read his writing and enjoy some of his podcasts. I regret that speaking with him in person is no longer a possibility on this plane. Though some of the more conservative/fundamentalist sectors of evangelicalism would likely deny it, Spencer consistently represented a sincere, thoughtful, and deep moderate evangelicalism. He was unafraid to pose challenging, devil's advocate questions to his brothers and sisters, and he modeled an ethic of respectful conversation and interaction with non-evangelicals. All this he did without hedging or weakening the integrity of his core beliefs.

I imagine he and I would have disagreed on a number of key issues about our faith, but I think the encounter would have been mutually bracing, productive, and enjoyable.

The other losses concern people and friends whose privacy I will not risk by ruminating on them here. Besides, I didn't know either one--even through some secondary medium like writing. I experience their passing mainly though the pain of those I love and as a reminder of mortality in general. Obligatory realization alert: people die every day from causes natural and unnatural, inevitable and unjust. I recognize it's a kind of hypocrisy to make heavy weather of death only when it touches me personally. But--what can I say?--I'm human.

I have no deep thoughts here. I wish I could say that the Easter reality makes these occasional reminders of death's proximity moot. But that isn't the case.

In lieu of great ruminations, then, I'll direct anyone reading this to an old post by Spencer, whose thoughts on death from an evangelical perspective exemplify his honest spirit of inquiry. See here.

Lord grant that all those who from their labors rest, rest in peace.

More later,

JF

Birthright Citizenship

2010-03-28T23:02:00.004-05:00

I read a disturbing opinion piece today from George Will in which he calls for the US to remove birthright citizenship. In Will's view, altering the laws so that one's birth in the US does not automatically confer citizenship would accomplish two (in his view) admirable goals.

First, it would correct what he sees as a pervasive misreading of the 14th Amendment, which reads in part, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." The key here, for Will, is the middle phrase, "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof." This phrase, according to Will, conveys the authors' intention that birthright citizenship only affect the children of people over whom the US has proper authority. Native Americans, for example, were originally not understood as covered by this clause in that their allegiance was not directly to the US government (this changed in 1924--thanks, Wikipedia!).

Why does Will think correcting (what he sees as) a misreading like this is so important?

The answer lies in the second and greater benefit he sees in his proposal. Removing birthright citizenship (or, as it's known, jus soli) would, Will argues, nearly solve the problem of illegal immigration in the US. Will cites congressional testimony (without citation) that alleges that up to ten percent of all births in the nation are to parents who are in the country illegally. Because these children are by birth US citizens, the question of what to do with or to their undocumented parents becomes quite difficult to address.

In the comments, the supporters of striking jus soli (and there are many of them represented in the comments) mention a variety of other countries (e.g., Canada, the UK, Australia) who have rescinded birthright citizenship. They ask why the US would cling to what they consider an ill-conceived and outdated criterion for granting the rights of citizenship.

The idea of removing birthright citizenship makes me queasy. I must admit my initial reaction was doubtless colored by the fact that I heard it from George Will, whose opinions I often find unpalatable (but who generally makes a cogent argument for them). All my talk and writing about conversion and proselytization, however, pushes me to question my own prejudices. So--prejudice aside, does removing jus soli make sense? Is Will making a good argument?

He's right, on one level. Though I find the anti-immigrant epithet "anchor baby" offensive, the problem it names--what to do when a parent here illegally has a baby on US soil?--does present a conundrum. Rescinding birthright citizenship would take an Alexandrine sword to that Gordion knot of a problem.

One wonders, then, exactly how citizenship would be conferred if not by birth. The alternative to jus soli, historically, is jus sanguinis--citizenship as an attribute of blood. If your parents are US citizens prior to your birth, then you are. I can see how such an alternative would appear attractive to a number of groups. People strongly opposed to illegal immigration (and to the people who immigrate illegally) would be able to push for a harsher (though still impractical) policy of deportation to rid the US of such groups.

Further to the right, nativist groups (I would include paleo-conservatives like Patrick Buchanan here) would find in jus sanguinis an effective bulwark against what they see as the dilution of US culture. Given that, as of this year, the majority of babies born in the US will be non-white, people who feel strongly that US is culturally and historically Anglo-Saxon (a belief not, they would insist, the same as outright racism) have reason to be worried. If as Will asserts a significant percentage of those non-white babies are being born to undocumented persons, then jus sanguinis would allow whites to maintain a majority for a bit longer.

Of course, Will does not tap into such rationales himself. But it's difficult for me to see the right-wing push to abolish jus soli as occurring independently of a rising nativist sentiment in which "native" means "mostly white, with a certain acceptable percentage of blacks and other races."

Thus my queasiness with the anti-birthright citizenship movement. It's not that I think that there's anything magical about US soil that grants special powers to those born on it. Citizenship is a discursive construct, not an essential attribute. Tying it to birth or to blood (or, as many countries do, and as the US to a certain extent does, a combination of both) doesn't functionally change what citizenship confers. The question at stake here isn't definitional-- what is citizenship, really? what does it mean to be a citizen? Citizenship, however it is determined, remains as ever the right to have rights within a particular polity.

No, the birthright debate raises a basically political question: Who counts? And beneath that--how does other people's counting affect how I am counted? Behind calls to limit citizenship hides a tightfistedness about the rights that citizenship grants access to and a fear that giving those rights to others spreads liberty too thinly. Now, I must concede that this proprietary attitude towards citizenship rights has a practical element: the state has only so many resources. Ministering to everyone within its borders regardless of status means that everyone gets a little less.

True enough. But could it be that I already enjoy too much? Through no effort or agency of my own, I enjoy a whole host of rights actively denied to others--all by accident of birth, blood, location, history, culture, language--whatever. It bugs me, therefore, when nativist advocates and their more moderate allies paint citizenship debates as instances of righting a criminal injustice. Was it illegal for this or that person to flee economic disenfranchisement by crossing the border illicitly, circumventing the proper (though lengthy, uncertain, and expensive) channels? Yes.

But such illegality is an order of magnitude different than a criminal act like robbery. The latter implies taking from me something I have worked for and earned a right to have. I did not work for my citizenship. My right to be a citizen flows from something as arbitrary as my birthplace and my parents' status (parents who also did nothing to earn their citizenship). If we're asking who worked harder to earn access to the rights of citizenship, my bet's on the people who risked life and limb to get into this country and make a better life for themselves and their families. Where's the justice in punishing people who work so hard for something most of us US citizens blissfully take for granted? Moreover--where's the justice in punishing the children of such people?

It may be, at the end of the day, that limitations on citizenship are necessary given limited resources. But let's not fool ourselves that these limitations flow from some higher ethic of citizenship. They flow from the need to keep US as the ones who count.

For that reason, high-minded calls to restrict citizenship rights--or any of the blessings of liberty--strike me as the worst kind of selfishness.

More later,

JF

Health Care, Faith, and Kengor's column

2010-03-23T22:47:00.004-05:00

In the wake of the Healthcare Reform victory (hurrah), I found a curious response from conservative Christianity, an opinion piece by Paul Kengor, a political science professor at Grove City College. It's reprinted here on Warren Throckmorton's blog.

Kengor bemoans the fact that so many on the partisan left have invoked Christian themes in their pro-Reform Bill rhetoric, asserting in his view that this bill was God's own bill, affirmed by Christ himself. Kengor contrasts that embrace of Christian rhetoric with the "eight years of outrageous, baseless charges against President George W. Bush on matters of faith" leveled by those same liberals. The left's mobilization of Christian "social justice" rhetoric is all the more galling, continues Kengor, in that it includes provisions for abortion coverage, which Kengor sees as a disqualification for the bill's having anything at all to do with achieving Christlike goals. His piece concludes thus:

It’s a quite radical departure from eight years of scourging George W. Bush every time he confessed he prayed. At long last, there is room for Jesus in the inn, so long as the Savior “supports” a certain agenda. Who says conversions don’t happen?

I want to make several quick observations here.

First, as a left-leaning Christian, I've not been shy about citing my faith as the grounds for my support for the health care reform (i.e., steps toward socialization of health care--and I reemphasize that the bill that just passed is nothing like the full-scale socialization I think ought to happen). I think it's unconscionable that our society makes health care--even and especially life-saving (or quality-of-live-saving) health care--contingent upon a patient's ability to pay for it. My convictions regarding love for the neighbor over love for oneself, the proper ethical treatment of the poor and the sick, the skeptical attitude toward worldly wealth accumulation expressed in the gospels--all of these move me to resist a society where profit for a very few outweighs the good for a great many.

To affirm that my faith inspires me to support this bill, however, is something utterly different than asserting that God personally supports this particular piece of US legislation. I understand God as imposing upon Christians certain ethical guidelines to be applied (in the rich sense of checking in with, thinking deeply about, wrestling with) to life in general. I do not see God or Christ as writing (via verbal inspiration or by proxy) specific laws to be passed. Nor have I ever heard any health care supporter assert anything of the sort. Nor does Kengor cite a single politician, theologian, or social group who asserts anything of the sort.

Kengor charges the liberal left with unfairly castigating George W. Bush with religious fanaticism every time he so much as mentioned his prayer life, even though practically every president before him and Obama after him invoked Christian-religious themes in a variety of circumstances. Now, I believe one can study how and to what extent Bush II mobilized Christian rhetoric (and the kind of Christian rhetoric so mobilized) versus how and to what extent Obama mobilized it and conclude fairly that some stark contrasts separate how each used Christianity and to what ends.

But, insofar as critics decry Bush's (or any politician's) mention of his religious faith in the public sphere as inappropriate, I can agree. I've argued before against the idea that faith is purely private and must remain segregated from public stances. Rather, one's faith (in the broad sense, not just a religious sense) inevitably plays a role in the dynamics of one's positions and arguments. Banning faith from public sphere discourse only drives complicates the democratic process of exchanging ideas and fighting for/against/about different ideals. We need to become more adept at discussing faith-based stances, not less.

Problems arise, however, when faith gets played not as one factor in a decision-making process but as the only factor, a debate-stopper. The battle over abortion provisions in the health care bill,and the related struggles by many faith-based opponents of abortion over whether or not to support the bill illustrates this distinction. For Christians undergoing this struggle, their faith moves them to consider prenatal life as invested with personhood, generally from conception onward (not at all my own conviction, for the record). A bill that refuses to ban abortions in the strongest, most stringent terms, then, is from this perspective, a bill that tolerates medical murder. Yet so much of the rest of the bill moves in directions that do good--that provide coverage for the uninsured, that prevent companies from denying coverage for specious reasons, etc. And proponents of the bill strove mightily to craft policies that limited abortion provisions. The result? Some pro-life advocates ended up supporting the bill; others did not.

This was, I offer, a political struggle in which dynamic conversations about a faith-based conviction played a large role. At the fracture point were people--some people, at least--on both sides who understood and respected the faith convictions of their opponents, even if they disagreed with them.

I detect none of that respect in Kengor's column. For him, the abortion issue in the context of the health care bill isn't a difficult ethical issue that people of good faith--people within the overall Christian pro-life community--can disagree on. Rather, in Kengor's argument Christian faith emerges as a black-and-white stance against abortions (apparently, all abortion, anywhere, at any time, in any conceivable circumstance). Faith doesn't foster debate or conversation; it's instead an end to conversation, a shutting of the books that brooks no nuance or disagreement. Moreover, it wipes away any possible consideration of other things the bill in question might accomplish.

This stance of Kengor's I submit, is as contradictory as the stance he attributes to the liberal left. Faith can and should be part of the public debate, he argues, but apparently only when that faith matches his own exactly. Bush II's faith was fine, for Kengor, and any disagreement with it was just liberal grousing. But Obama's faith, Pelosi's faith, and the faith of other bill supporters (Christian and otherwise, pro-choice and pro-life)--this faith is a fraud. It's illegitimate. Why? Because it isn't his own.

But if you argue, as Kengor does, that faith can and should play a part in the public sphere and in political debates, then you must accept that faith itself--what it is, what it's not; what it enjoins, what it prohibits--becomes an object for debate, a thing contested rather than simply and homogenously affirmed. I suspect that Kengor and other religious right pundits who call for faith in the public sphere don't actually want to talk about faith; rather, they want their own specific faith to end all talk. Because once you start talking about faith, then you have to acknowledge a plurality of faiths, even and especially within your own faith community. This, I submit, has never been a strength of organized Christianity, especially not in its Protestant evangelical iterations.

More later,

JF

Health Care Reform Day

2010-03-21T13:16:00.005-05:00

Ugh. I'm so nervous about the health care reform vote today, but I can't stand to look at/listen to any news about it. I'm for the reform vote, just in case that was unclear. Like most everyone else, I can't claim to have a comprehensive knowledge of its every provision. Nor am I 100% pleased with those provisions with which I'm familiar.

But the key features that attract me are its move away from profit-based health care insurance to a more socialized care. I just don't think that someone's ability to receive necessary medical care should be contingent upon their ability to pay. Health care ought to be a right to be enjoyed by all, not a privilege to be bought by a few. I should think that was implicit in the spirit of "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" (yes, yes--that's from the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution, but we're talking spirit of laws, not the letter, right?).

Will this plan cost money? Well, the Congressional Budget Office's report suggests it will cut the deficit, but frankly I don't think there's much of a way around the fact that a less-for-profit system will inevitably impose more social cost in the short term than a for-profit one.

And I'm OK with that. I hear so much now from folk like the Tea Partiers about how angry they are that government is daring to suggest that they pay for this or that social service. For them--I should say, for some of the people identified as their spokespeople ('cause there's really no leaders, right? It's an authentic grassroots movement that's somehow unified but not responsible for maintaining its unity, right? Thus, Tea Partiers can claim at once that they represent the true, authentic will of the people and still get to act wounded when media organizations call them on the racist/xenophobic sloganeering at some Tea Party functions. It's rhetorical having your cake and eating it, too: "You'd better listen to us! Except when we say embarrassing things!")--

Sorry. Parenthetical rant. For those Tea Party officials I've heard who have cogent quotes, the anti-health care bill bias seems to stem from at least two sources: 1) Health care reform is necessary, but not right now (i.e., not in a time of financial crisis); and 2) Health care simply isn't a right, and to try to make it so (a.k.a. "health care for all") is un-American.

Now, while I disagree with both arguments, the first seems at least more sensible to me. It would take a great deal of argument, for instance, to suggest that the current system is working as-is and that reform of some sort isn't eventually necessary. The question for the first line of thinking seems to be "when is best to institute reform?" They suggest "later." By way of disagreement, I note that throughout most of the last two decades (i.e., between the early nineties recession and the Great Recession now), the US enjoyed a fairly prosperous economy as well as mainly Republican-controlled congressional houses. How much health care reform happened then? Zip. Nada. [Edit: Well, that isn't quite true. Republicans did pass some reforms, such as expansions to Medicare's prescription drug benefit, which as many point out indicates how popular government-run health care programs are once adopted] To my mind, Republicans have signaled as clearly as they can that they are simply uninterested in comprehensive reform. Ever. [Edit: This statement, however, seems to remain true...]

The second argument, though, worries me, as it bespeaks a much deeper divide regarding the purpose of government in general. For some of the Tea Partiers I've heard on TV and radio, the US government exists primarily to protect individual rights, especially when those rights come into conflict with governmental or general-social interests. This isn't wrong so much as it is incomplete. It neglects the complementary purpose of government "to secure the common defence" and to "promote the General Welfare" (from the Constitution's Preamble). In other words--yes, defending the rights of the individual is important, but those rights and that defense must exist in concert with provisions for the General Welfare of society at large.

Perhaps the quotes from and interviews with Tea Party members and other anti-health-care-reform advocates I've heard are incomplete, but too often I hear the "protect individuals from tyrannical government" argument without any mention of the fact that government exists for the good of individuals. For all its limitations on government, the Constitution is not purely a check on government's power but also an imperative that directs that power toward positive ends. Democratic governments work of, by, and for the people.

Sometimes the work for the people in general trumps the will of the individual. I may dislike paying taxes when part of those taxes go to fund roads I never use or civic services I may never need. But taxes aren't about me as an individual any more than roads or fire departments or coast guards are dedicated to only my needs. Similarly, I may never have need of catastrophic health care insurance myself (lord willing). But I still fully support the notion that part of my tax burden needs to be making sure that such insurance is available for those who need it regardless of their ability to pay. Why? Because making sure people don't suffer an die just because they're poor is foundational to the mission of a government charged with promoting the General Welfare.

And, to speak more specifically to the Christian p.o.v., I have trouble seeing the Christ-like rationale behind making health care a commodity rather than a human right. I'm sorrowful that the Christian church in its various forms--particularly its Protestant forms--hasn't been more vocal in supporting health care. I in no way support the Catholic Church's extreme (I do think the word is appropriate) stance against abortion, but at least the various factions within the Church--pro- and anti-health care reform--have been part of the conversation. Moreover, the articulated stances--both the "we can't support it because of the abortion provisions" of the Council of Bishops and the "it does too much good not to support" of the group of 59,000 nuns--both of these exemplified how faith and theology can inform and animate a debate.

Where is the Protestant church? Where is the evangelical church? Within these sectors of Christianity I detect terrible discourse of silence or, worse, a call to resist initiatives for making society more just if those initiatives dare impinge upon the individual's profit margin. I'm hearing more and more references to the very few verses in the Bible that seem resigned to poverty (e.g., "the poor will always be with you"), as if these trump the overwhelming number of verses calling on Christians and Jews to fight poverty, to resist the lures of material wealth, and to put the needs of the neighbor above the profit of the self.

And the hair-splitting rebuttals I hear from some evangelicals--"Yes, but there's a difference between individual charity and governmental thievery"--cuts no mustard with me. Evangelicals more than anyone else have been arguing persuasively for the place of faith as motivator for political stances. More conservative evangelicals are hardly shy about citing faith as a reason for opposing abortion, reproductive rights, and gay rights. That so many of them now seem distanced from or utterly opposed to the expansion of health care for people otherwise unable to afford it reeks of selling out. One can oppose gay marriage without cost. But ask someone to pay more in taxes so everyone can get life-saving treatments (not just "emergency room" care--how sickening that argument is!)--then you ask for an actual sacrifice, an actual cross to take up, an actual delay on one's journey to dirty yourself to help a neighbor in need.

To be clear: I think health care reform (expanding benefits to more and more people regardless of profit motive) makes sense even from a non-faith-based perspective. But my personal support of health care stems from my faith, from the imperative from Lord Jesus to help those in need, to love neighbors as ourselves, to lay down our lives for others.

I hope it passes. [Edit: It did! Hurrah!]

More later,

JF

Precision-Engineered Evangelism? The Camel Method

2010-03-17T22:42:00.005-05:00

For the most part, I restrict my research on evangelicalism's outreach techniques to the US context. But the question of proselytization--its propriety, its status as a human right, its place in a regime of pluralization and tolerance--has taken on a new charge in international venues.

Case in point: Robert Wright's "Opinionator" blog in this week's New York Times online, "Christian Soldiers." There Wright riffs on a Times article chronicling increased resistance to (US-based) Christian proselytizing by Islamic nations. In particular, some of these nations object especially to a tactic innovated by evangelist Kevin Greeson known as "the Camel Method." Aside from its cringe-inducing racist overtones (which appear to be unintended), the "camel" here functions as both an acronym (Chosen Angels Miracles Eternal Life) and as a reference to the proverb that once a camel gets its nose under or into a tent, the rest of the camel is sure to follow.

Geeson's technique is basically in line with the worldview apologetic approach I've written about previously. It involves getting to know the "Islamic worldview" and equipping Christians to engage Muslims on their own terms, in non-threatening ways. The key? Greeson recommends highlighting the commonalities between Christianity and Islam, primarily that, as Abrahamic faiths, they worship the same God. From there it's a matter of appealing to Muslims' reverence for Jesus ("Isa"--whose story the Qur'an relates and parallels the Christian gospel narratives in some respects) and suggesting that, if they really revere Isa/Jesus, then they should take a look at just how unique he was. Moreover--eventually--the evangelist will suggest that Muslims investigate the claims Jesus made about himself, i.e., that he wasn't merely God's prophet but God's son, the Messiah.

This isn't a unique approach, certainly not as unique as the Times pieces suggest. Greg Stier's Dare 2 Share program, for example, espouses a similar technique for talking to Muslims (as well as Hindus, Mormons, Wiccas, Atheists, and anyone else not Bible-believing evangelical). It's grounded in the worldview assumptions that traditional proclamation simply won't work for people living within whole other worldviews. Christians have to meet people where they are, resisting the urge to "close the deal" in the first five minutes by hitting people over the head with Hell-Sin-Salvation (contra Ray Comfort's Way of the Master). Additionally, the trans-worldview conversation techniques encouraged by the Camel Method direct Christians not to attack Islamic beliefs but rather to "raise up Jesus."

For many Muslims whose countries and populations the Camel Method targets, however, the Camel Method seems dishonest and exploitative. Many Muslims scoff at the idea that their Allah is at all the same as the Christian Godhead. Critics quoted in the Times article point to instances of evangelicals "going undercover," effectively pretending not to be Christian, so as to make having a theological conversation easier.

The article dwells especially on resistance by other Christians--other Baptists, to be specific--to this method. One prominent Baptist theologian, Ergun Caner, recently and publicly called out another, Jerry Rankin, for Rankin's support of the Camel Method. Caner is just as resistant as some Muslim critics to the suggestion of identity between the Christian God and Allah. Wright seizes upon this critique from Christians, lamenting that it stems not from a conviction that undercover proselytizing is wrong but from a proprietary shock that their God could be confused with another faith's deity.

Wright, in his opinion piece, warns that the Camel Method and other such Christian proselytizing techniques often get taken by Muslims in other countries as "cultural aggression." Muslims do not proselytize in the same way as evangelicals do, he argues, and they view leaving Islam as a very serious affair. Wright goes on to suggest that such proselytizing may contribute to heightened tension between Christians and Muslims in places like Nigeria, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. "[M]y guess," he writes, "is that [proselytizing] pretty consistently falls in the 'not helpful' category from the point of view of world peace and, ultimately, American security. And some of it — e.g., the 'Camel Method' — is particularly antagonistic."

As I've written on here before, while as a researcher I find proselytizing fascinating, as a Christian I'm turned off by it. But Wright's suggestion that proselytizing constitutes a form of cultural aggression seems, at least, tendentious. At what point does any focused (dare I say "precision-engineered") mode of persuasion that seeks to create converts from one worldview to another cross over into "aggression" towards the original worldview? If I devote focused energies to convincing you to change your mind about something, I do so because I disagree strongly with your original opinion or stance on that thing. But calling such an act "aggressive" in the absence of forced coercion seems unwarranted.

It's seems--again--that the "cultural aggression" argument holds different rules for how religious beliefs may operate versus how political or cultural convictions may operate. I wonder what Wright would think of a "precision-engineered" technique that aimed to get Muslims in certain countries thinking about, say, adopting Western-style attitudes towards women's rights? What about CIA operations to encourage Western-style liberal democracies in countries whose cultural and political traditions resist democracy? Or what about the US culture industries who actively seek to create interest in and markets for Western commodities and the lifestyles/values that go with them?

What renders these acts of attempted conversion allowable (invisible, necessary, or even laudable) while designating acts of attempted religious conversion verboten? I have no interest in apologizing for "the Camel Method"; I have considerable ethical and theological qualms with it.

But I dislike this growing sense that of all the various ways that people holding one set of values attempt to influence people who hold different values, religious modes of persuasion somehow cause unique or special harm. Bolstering such a belief is the present-day assumption that faith is ultimately a private affair, a feature of identity that can and should be compartmentalized away.

It's this assumption, I argue, that really promises to exacerbate Islam/Christian tensions. Because right behind the gripe Can't those Baptists just keep it to themselves? is the gripe Can't those Muslims just keep it to themselves? Do they have to pray in public five times a day? Do they have to insist on the exclusivity of their faith? Do they have to build those minarets?--and so forth. Misconstruing faith as an I-can-keep-it-to-myself affair hinders a clear-eyed understanding of how and why faith cultures produce fields of tension in the first place, and it certainly puts us at a disadvantage for suggesting ways to ameliorate that tension.

More later,

JF

Christianity as the Rough Life Religion

2010-03-14T22:47:00.004-05:00

My ambitions to post more regularly are being challenged by a generally rough patch in my life currently. But then, I suppose ambitions to strengthen or re-establish disciplines--mental, physical, and spiritual--often do face early challenges by life's general roughness.

I think it's often forgotten that one of Christianity's longstanding strengths is its willingness to openly and often acknowledge life's rough spots. I suppose the over-exposure of word-and-faith, prosperity gospels that cast Christianity as a naive set of beliefs about how good life is (or should be) if only you trust in Jesus. At best, such pie-in-the-sky Christianity seems willfully blind, creating churches full of dupes all to eager to dump "seed" money into the pockets of hungry charlatans. Religion becomes, in the eyes of skeptics, a "stupidity tax"--like lotteries--catering to the gullible.

The darker side of this image, of course, is the Pat Robertson-esque (or Fred Phelps-esque) drive to explain natural disasters, ill health, poverty, or personal tragedy as some directly God-ordained punishment for individual or communal sin. Ugly Christianity has few nastier faces than the well-ya-shouldn't-have-sinned rationale.

In my experience, though, few Christians, be they mainline, liberal, Catholic, or evangelical, actually espouse such balderdash. Sure, the idea of a fallen world (whether literally or figuratively due to to the Edenic Fall) gets a lot of play, but--and this is a fine nuance often lost in communication--invoking the Fallen World is of a different order of explanation than the Robertsonish cause-and-effect narratives used to, for example, blame AIDS on homosexuals. The fallen world--or as I like to think of it the broken world--doesn't assign direct blame; it's not a juridical rationale. It's a way of describing the sick, sad, fact that s--t happens.

I find that assessment of life, frankly, throughout the gospels. "It rains on the just and the unjust," Christ tells us. Or (in Luke--and I paraphrase), "Don't go thinking that those people Pilate had killed or those folk who died when that tower collapsed were any more or less righteous or guilty than you were." Yes, you should repent of your sins, Jesus insists; but your repentance or lack thereof doesn't cause disasters to happen. Mortal life is full of suffering and disease. Paul has a thorn in the flesh that doesn't leave no matter what his prayers. Sometimes healing happens. Sometimes it doesn't. That's just life.

Heck, we have (from our Jewish cousins-in-faith) the book of Job, where God's puzzling, frustrating answer to Job's all-too-human question of why, God? is basically, "you're better off not asking."

Much of the skepticism I hear directed at religion, and Christianity especially, castigates it for its inability to deal with the reality of pain and suffering--the fact that life sucks sometimes. But (and this echoes a rebuttal voiced by critics like Stanley Fish and Terry Eagleton) Christianity itself has a rich history of reflecting on how life does in fact suck, asking why it must suck ("why have you forsaken me?" our own Lord demands of God), and--most of all--demanding that we attend to each other as neighbors, as sisters and brothers, in the midst of the suffering.

I would never want to be seen as asserting that pain occurs simply to remind us of our own shared mortality; that'd be like saying that tornadoes happen to remind us of the need for storm shelters. I don't think most pain comes to us with lessons hidden within it, bundled away for us to unpack. To affirm the world is fallen or broken isn't to ameliorate the frustration that it is so. But, sometimes, we can create of pain an occasion do what we can to make the world less broken.

Judaism has a great phrase, tikkun olam--"repairing the world." Generally, as it was introduced to me, the phrase describes how certain good or ethical acts should be done not because of their direct or indirect benefit to the doer but because, in general, they contribute to the betterment of the world at large.

I am drawn to the idea of "repairing the world" as a way to describe our joint endeavor with Christ in this broken, fallen world where bad things happen. It is because the world is broken that we can (and should) decide to act in ways that repair it, in ways that make the suffering of life less for our neighbors.

Lord, help me, in this rough spot of this rough, broken life to remember to do your work of repair and to receive with grace the repairs you may grant to me.

More later,

JF

Phelps Counter-Rallies and Tolerance Fads

2010-03-10T23:05:00.003-06:00

Back from some time away due to sickness and a conference. Now I'm on the long, slow climb back to being caught up. Part of the catching up process involves re-establishing my habit of regular postings. Thus--

It seems none other than the Rev. Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps will be protesting here in my own town soon. A local high school is doing The Laramie Project, Tectonic Theatre's documentary play about the aftermath of Matthew Shepard's murder. The play itself features an extended scene that references Phelps's protest of Shepard's funeral and of the trial of his killers. One of the characters (based, of course, on a real person) responds to Phelps's protest by staging a counter-protest of people dressed as angels. As Phelps and his crew yell anti-gay invectives, the angels stand in front of him and raise their wings, blocking him from the funeral (or from the cameras).

Since then, Phelps and his Westboro Baptist church regularly choose to protest various productions of the play, which in turn inspires large counter-protests along the lines of those represented. Given that Laramie Project has become something of a high school staple (low tech requirements, large cast, easy-to-prove liberal credentials), Phelps is rarely at a loss for some site to protest, and communities are rarely at a loss for occasions to prove how liberal they are in response.

Don't get me wrong. I think it can be admirable to organize and stage a counter-protest. I've participated in some counter-protests against him myself. Certainly Phelps's message merits a counter-statement...

...or does it? Something about the formula of "Phelps comes/counter-protest staged" makes my alarms go off.

His ministry depends upon people at least seeing his bright neon signs. As I've written before, he's not so interested in creating converts; his hyper-Calvinism leads him to see most everyone else as hopelessly non-predestined anyway. Phelps's demonstrations function more as God's pointing finger of judgment, a conduit of divine disapproval for the nation's refusal to impose the death penalty on homosexuals. (One wonders if they believe in positive reinforcement, traveling to Uganda, perhaps, to praise legislators there for considering a death penalty measure for homosexual acts).

But, as just about anyone who's seen Phelps in person knows, the Westboro presence is generally anticlimactic. There's generally a handful of protesters, like a smallish family on vacation, waving their admittedly eye-catching signs. It's sort of pathetic, really--so pathetic that I wonder honestly whether they would continue at all were it not for the fact that their well-publicized presence guarantees a massive counter-reaction from the community.

More disturbingly, and with all due respect for the good intentions of the organizers: what is the point of the communal counter-reaction? It certainly won't convince Phelps et al. that their cause is hopeless or wrong-headed. Quite the contrary--the more resistance they inspire, the more the Phelps crew become convinced of the meaningfulness of their action. Doesn't the counter-reaction itself give Phelps just what he wants, i.e., proof that his righteous condemnation is making waves with the heathen? Could it be that the automatic counter-reactions by communities that Phelps visits have the unintended side-effect of encouraging Phelps to continue?

The stronger argument for counter-protests, of course, is that they aren't for Phelps's benefit but for the community's. A strong counter-rally against Phelps demonstrates to that community that his level of intolerance is, well, intolerable. I suppose that community audience has a number of sub-divisions. There's the GLBT sub-community, for whom their community's gesture of support could be a meaningful counter-message to Phelps's "God Hates Fags" rhetoric. I can see, also, how a communal counter-rally could encourage connection and mutual awareness within the left-liberal-activist sections of that community. I could even see how the occasion of a rally in contrast to Phelp's message might push some otherwise stand-offish (or apathetic) "moderate" folk to make an active choice. The rally re-casts Phelps's visit into an either-or melodrama, forcing the audience of the community to take sides.

But if I might play devil's advocate: speaking as a GLBT member of my community, it's nice that my city wants to rally to say that, at the end of the day, gay people shouldn't be called fags and given the death penalty. But I would hope that my community thinks that in any case. More directly, there's lots of ways I can think of for my community to express support for me that I'd rather see happen than a one-time counter-rally against a fire-and-brimstone caricature like Phelps. How about a non-discrimination policy? How about domestic partner benefits? How about health care for GLBT couples? (how about health care for everybody, come to think of it)?

I'm sorry, but I'm incredulous toward the notion that my civic community has my back, as demonstrated by a one-off reaction to the cartoon-level intolerance of Phelps, when that same community fails consistently to enact the day-today recognitions of equality that would make a material difference in my life and in the lives of other GLBT people.

That, I think, is the danger of Phelps and Westboro--not that they will actually inspire people to adopt their wacko beliefs but that they give people who otherwise do little or nothing for GLBT people a chance to acquire pro-tolerance credentials simply by standing up and saying, "You know, it's wrong to call those people fags and say they should all die and burn in hell." Phelps makes tolerance easy, a matter of standing up against him. If tolerance within a pluralized democracy means anything beyond beautiful phrases, surely it means an ongoing work of standing up for the rights and equality of people unlike you.

Now, if a counter-Phelps rally represents for some people a first step toward a broader perspective on what tolerance means--then super. But the danger I fear is that Phelps can just as easily be an occasion to participate in a facile fad of tolerance chic.

More soon,

JF

Evangelizing Whys and Hows

2010-02-26T22:02:00.005-06:00

Ugh. The creeping crud has descended upon me, so I'm home this evening doing what research my mushy brain will allow. I suppose I could draw a punnish parallel between hacking through various popular evangelical texts and hacking up... well, I'll not go into that.

Something that keeps coming up in my forays into comparative evangelicalisms is the differential impulse for evangelizing--and for choosing how to evangelize--that I sense from different writers.

On the "why evangelize?" question, I find a surprising amount of variation. For some, evangelization is essential for Christians because of the here-and-now problem of perdition. People are lost and going to hell. They could die tonight. I've read two different accounts now of 19th century evangelist Dwight L. Moody's Big Regret. The story goes that Moody preached a sermon to a Chicago audience that outlined most--but not all--of the gospel. He left his audience with a challenge to think on what he had said and return the next week to hear the conclusion (i.e., Jesus's saving grace). Alas, that night was in October 1871, the night of the Great Chicago Fire. Moody berated himself from then on for failing to give the full gospel to people at every opportunity. Similarly, "urgency evangelists" will point to the fact that every single person you meet may have only a day, an hour, a minute left of life here on earth. A failure to evangelize--fully, explicitly, from start to finish with an invitation at the end--could be eternally fatal.

Others seem to answer the "why evangelize" question more with a sense that Christianity, a living relationship to the living Christ, makes life in the here-and-now better, fuller, more ethical and rewarding. I was surprised, for example, to read how-to-evangelize guides from the 1960s by the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship that presented Christianity not as a get-out-of-hell-free card but as an answer to the emptiness of modern life. I found that the seeker-sensitive pastors (e.g., Hybels, Warren) profiled in Hunter's overview of evangelistic theology similarly stressed life fulfillment over turn-or-burn.

The idea here, and it's one I personally find compelling, is that the Christian life represents a better way to live out life here on earth. This isn't to say, of course, that Christians live easier lives free from suffering--quite the contrary. These evangelists typically admit that life here on earth is nasty, brutish, and short--but that Christ's solidarity with us in the midst of suffering gives us strength and hope. More, Christ's grace towards us impels us in turn to adopt a life of solidarity with those who suffer. We share the gospel message, then, not merely as or apart from the ministries of grace but as part of those ministries.

Now, in practice, there's plenty of overlap between the urgency model and the better-way-of-life model. While I myself have theological and ethical troubles with the notion of hell (as I've written about on here extensively), pastors like Rick Warren or Bill Hybels are hardly hell-deniers. Nor would most urgency evangelists deny that Christianity is ideally more than just a one-time profession of faith that saves. Nevertheless, in the context of any one ministerial approach, the emphasis--urgency or better-way-of-life--is marked.

Evangelists diverge more sharply over the issue of how to evangelize. The key issue here concerns efficacy. What's the point of sharing the gospel? Ostensibly, the goal is to bring people to Christ so that they are saved from hell and/or part of the body of Christ on earth. An evangelical technique is effective when it results in authentic conversions to Christianity.

But for a number of evangelicals I'm reading, the results criterion for any evangelistic technique takes a back seat to the orthodoxy of the evangelical technique. A number of evangelicals--Ray Comfort, for instance, or even Greg Stiers--insist that the only proper evangelical techniques must imitate patterns clearly outlined in scripture. The science of evangelism thus comes from studying (and categorizing) instances from the Gospels and book of Acts (mainly) of how Jesus or the disciples preached or witnessed to unbelievers. Indeed, even Old Testament examples of preaching/teaching/proclaiming like Elijah or Nathan or Daniel serve as how-to guides for the modern evangelical. The what's-in-the-Bible approach to evangelism matches the conservative evangelical doctrine of inerrancy whereby the Bible's plain sense words, properly contextualized, serve as the ultimate authority for Christians. Wondering how best to evangelize? Why, look in the Bible, which is God's Instruction Book for All Things Christian.

Typically, the what's-in-the-Bible approaches tend to tack more toward the turn-or-burn tactics. Gospel presentations must be brief and complete. You may have only one chance to witness to an unbeliever, so you'd better make it count. This means that, whatever trick or tactic you use to catch someone's attention, you steer quickly and directly to a presentation of the full gospel--human sin/depravity, God's judgment, Christ's atonement, and the possibility of salvation by grace.

In particular, there's no skimping on hell here. There is the hard sell of the gospel--or it is nothing. Ray Comfort, for example, excoriates any gospel presentation that soft-pedals the harsh truth of eternal damnation. Greg Stier, in a parallel way, suggests that the sure-fire sign of a good gospel presentation is audience incredulity at the depth of God's grace and judgment (i.e., the "You mean to tell me that my kindly agnostic aunt will go to hell but a rapist-murderer who repents will go to heaven?"). Comfort and Stier--who in practice pursue quite different ministries--both argue that muting the more extreme or potentially offensive parts of the gospel result in an evangelism that is both less effective and unbiblical. Or rather--it's less effective because it's unbiblical.

The assumption here--an essential assumption, Stier contends--is that the kerygma of the gospel (the plain, full presentation of sin/judgment/atonement/salvation) is effective regardless of time/place/method of presentation. It is God that saves, not humans. The Holy Spirit transforms the human soul, enabling it to turn to God, through the power of the Holy Word. To decide not to present the Word in its totality hinders the action of the Holy Spirit and, more insidiously, suggests a lack of faith in the power of the Gospel.

Such is the allegation sometimes leveled (not particularly by Comfort or Stier) at evangelists who imagine evangelism differently. A number of other evangelical approaches--worldview evangelism, Greg Koukl's tactical apologetics, Randy Siever's "Doable Evangelism"--consciously avoid the up-front/hard-sell approach. These approaches counsel an awareness of the fact that most non-Christians begin by being fairly closed to the gospel and even distrustful of overt proselytizing attempts. Prior to such full-gospel pitches, in these techniques' views, the Christian needs to stop and take stock of where non-Christians are in terms of their worldview or relationship to Christianity. These techniques teach modes of general interaction with non-Christians that allow evangelists to get a sense of who they're dealing with. Only after establishing a base-level relationship of trust and mutual sharing does it make any sense to present the gospel. And even then, gospel presentations don't stand wholly on their own; they must be accompanied by apologetic work.

This is long-term evangelism, seeing the work of outreach as a process of relationship-building that works over time. It's also an evangelism where efficacy means more than "copying Biblical examples exactly." Relational evangelism, in these evangelists' views, works better, gets more and more substantive results, than does the sudden turn-or-burn technique. Of course, most of these practitioners would dispute the accusation that they aren't being Biblical. They would point to the variety of Christ's interactions with non-believers (everything from a party to a one-on-one conversation at a well) or especially to Paul's sermon to Greek non-Christians at Mars Hill (Acts 17).

Again, I don't mean to draw too strict of a line between the Bible-copiers and the relationship-ers. Greg Stier (of Dare 2 Share ministries), for example, grounds himself in Biblical examples and full-gospel presentations but draws a great deal on relational techniques as well. But the more obvious fractures amongst evangelicals--between the emerging church and the old-style evangelicals, for instance--mirror the fault lines around these questions of evangelical technique.

More later,

JF

Non-Evangelical Evangelisms

2010-02-23T21:15:00.003-06:00

So, after some hard work this weekend, I finally finished a draft of my book proposal about evangelical outreach techniques. Much rejoicing!

Apparently the effort left my brain somewhat drained, as I've been remiss about posting. More brainwork lies on the horizon. Next week I travel to an academic conference where I'm delivering a paper on--what else?--evangelical outreach techniques.

This paper has yet to be written.

But I've started work on it this evening. Now, ostensibly the paper concerns the confrontational evangelism of Ray Comfort's "Way of the Master" system, which I've written about on this blog extensively, as contrasted with more relational, less formulaic approaches like Greg Koukl's tactical evangelism (which I've also written about).

For all their differences, these two forms both fit into the category of "Christian outreach" that I tend to distance myself from since (at least) leaving the Southern Baptist faith of my childhood for more Methodist waters. Both emerge from theological stances much more conservative than my own, which makes them fascinating for me as a (progressive-liberal) scholar but alien to me as a (progressive-liberal) Christian. While I strive in my work to represent their rationales fairly, I do not feel especially compelled to grapple with how their particular form of proselytizing should inform my own faith.

As often happens in research, however, some of the work that I read this evening challenged my sense of (perhaps protective) isolation from my topic. Specifically, I read a book I had pilfered--uh, borrowed--from my minister father's collection of theology texts: How to Reach Secular People by George G. Hunter III (Nashville: Abingdon, 1992).

Now, I had grabbed this book as part of a stack of how-to guides to Christian outreach from the past 50 years or so that I've amassed. I chose it in order to explore how it compared to, say, Paul E. Little's How to Give Away Your Faith from 1960, or to Greg Stier's present-day "Dare 2 Share" program. Having read many of these self-help-style books, I expected to learn about Hunter's own take on why current evangelism is in trouble and how to fix it, perhaps with a sort-of-original set of metaphors and analogies to help the reader (who is assumed not to be a scholar or theologian).

Hunter is less interested, however, in promoting his own homemade system and more in presenting a brief overview of some of the more successful (in his eyes) evangelical endeavors. His chapters tend to consist of annotated lists, e.g., attributes of secular people, different models of conversion, characteristics of ministers who successfully reach secular people, etc.

Hunter writes in 1992, so the ministries that seem new, successful, and exciting are mainly those of the "seeker-sensitive" model (also called the "new paradigm"), like Bill Hybels's Willow Creek or Rick Warren's Saddleback congregations. These ministries distinguished themselves by doing market research (i.e., creating an average unchurched person or prospective member--"Unchurched Harry" or "Saddleback Sam") to determine what about "traditional" church was keeping people away from attending church. So informed, Hybels and Warren designed churches specifically to cater to people who felt regular Christianity was too boring, too irrelevant, and too moralizing to ever include them. Seeker-sensitive services typically strip away conventions of "regular church"--no hymnals, no pews, no offertories, no "churchy" language (what Hunter calls "Protestant Latin"), and a service that plays more like a rally or rock concert with an inspiring speech than a church service.

Especially in 1992, these were successful models. (The 1990s later saw a backlash of sorts against them, and recent problems with Saddleback's fincances and membership have cast doubts on the model's efficacy.)

But Hunter writes as well about Donald Soper, a street preacher who has made open-air preaching into a kind of art form. Now, I have lots of experience studying open-air preachers of the Ray Comfort or Free Speech Alley Fundamentalist variety. But Soper (in Hunter's representation) seems different.

Indeed, all of the evangelistic outreach methods and rationales Hunter relates differ from Comfort and even Koukl. The primary difference? The absence of hell-speak and the Absolute Truth You Must Submit To. For Comfort, evangelism consists of confronting a stranger with the reality of her sins and their hellish consequences (i.e., the Law) before sharing the possibility of Christ (i.e., grace). Koukl doesn't recommend hitting strangers with "for all have sinned," but his tactical apologetics certainly aim toward winning a rhetorical struggle, mainly by demonstrating the incoherence of the unbeliever's worldview.

While I get the sense that Hunter himself (and certainly those whom he discusses) holds a theology not at odds with the reality of hell or the exclusivity of Christian Truth, the model of outreach he presents and praises from Soper and others simply doesn't deal with Hell as a motivator for people to commit their lives to Christ.

Actually--that's another big difference between Hunter and Comfort/Koukl: commitment. In his presentation of evangelicalism, the aim that works is not "get the person saved" but "get the person committed to a life of Christ." To achieve that latter aim, existential threats or rhetorical victories don't count nearly as much as does presenting a compelling, authentic example of a Christianity that is attractive, consistent, and successful. He touches on this distinction a bit, noting that while some evangelistic techniques preach a single necessary conversion, the Christian life often requires multiple conversions, ongoing commitments not to a single belief but to a life lived for and within Christ. The most successful ministries, in his view, inspire unbelievers to see Christianity as alive, relevant, enriching, attractive, and finally irresistible.

And then it struck me--I was finding this read from 1992 so engaging because he was in a sense articulating what I'd like Christian evangelism to be. It's so different from the model of outreach driven by fear and smugly assured of its victory--the model I had absorbed as a Baptist and the model I see preached by so many evangelicals.

Needless to say (and here I engage in a bit of smugness myself), Hunter is a Methodist, not an evangelical. I appreciated, however, seeing how a non-evangelical (in the sense of Protestant subculture) theology can still passionately motivate an evangelical (in the outreach-sense) philosophy.

Of course, that's just a challenge to me as well: no longer can I simply study evangelism as a scholar. I need to begin to develop for myself a theology of evangelism.

More later,

JF

Taylor, Secularity, Science

2010-02-19T22:01:00.004-06:00

So, I'm approaching the halfway point in Charles Taylor's massive, wonderful work, A Secular Age. I'm generally a quick reader, able to rip through texts briskly. As I tell my graduate students, though, some kinds of writing demand that even the speediest reader slow down.

Taylor's is definitely one of those slow-it-down works. This is the magnum opus a senior-level super-scholar like him spends a decade or more producing, and such an epic-but-detailed study requires time and thought from readers. It's the kind of book that, as I read it, I can tell that it's re-shaping the deep structures of my thinking about present-day evangelicalism. Again, I'm only halfway through it, but I can't help but write/rave a bit about it to hash out some of his thoughts for myself.

As the title suggests, Taylor's interested in secularity (he mostly limits his scope to Western culture). He defines secularity not as the simple absence of religious belief nor even (pace the neo-athiests) as conscious rejection of religion. Instead, secularity as he defines it consists of religious belief becomes an option--an increasingly unusual or unpopular one--among an ever-growing range of belief options. By religion or faith, Taylor means (I simplify) a view of the human life-world shot through with the understanding or assumption of a particular dimension or significance (a "fullness" in his terms) to existence that transcends the material world.

How did it come about, he asks, that this assumption of a beyond-the-material, religious dimension of life enjoyed a default status in the 1500s but has in the 2000s become merely an option--and an increasingly discredited one at that? Drawing on a lifetime of study in history and faith, Taylor revisits and revises well-received narratives about the gradual displacement of faith in (mainly Western) culture. Specifically, he refutes two predominant, common-sense explanations for the present-day secular age.

First, he criticizes what he calls the "subtraction story" of secularism, in which post-Renaissance Humanity gradually sheds its primitive, constraining skin of superstition and mysticism, revealing a pure core of ever-maturing (scientific, naturalistic, materialist) reason. Thus, present-day secularity=humanity - religion.

Second, he departs as well from what might be called a replacement narrative, in which the energies previously devoted to religious faith and practice aren't so much shed as transformed by and subjugated to reasoned, scientific naturalism.

Both of these stories, Taylor contends, ignore the extent to which the historical victors in these struggles--the pure core of human reason finally freed from the jail of superstition; or the ever-indomitable figure of naturalistic science--are themselves products of historical processes. The triumph of secular reason occurs not out of some obvious philosophical superiority over faith but because historical processes in Western culture brought about different modes of thought about humanity, about knowledge, about society, about the world--all of which changed the ground rules for what constitutes a legitimate or illegitimate belief.

Or, to tackle this from a different angle: in the present, "science"--meaning materialist, observable-data, no-supernatural-explanations-allowed processes for knowledge--enjoys an unprecedented degree of assumed superiority over other modes of inquiry (e.g., religious or metaphysical modes). I say "science" in scare quotes to designate that this concept refers not to a specific methodology practiced by scientists but more to a general category at work in the social imaginary. If you want truth, nothing delivers today like "science." Why is this so?

For some proponents of "science" (or "reason"), science fully deserves its hard-won reputation for epistemological superiority. It really is better than any other mode of knowledge or study. Or, rather, a particular field or sub-field of study is considered better, more rigorous, more respectable, to the extent that it resembles the practices constitutive of "science," i.e., eschewing supernatural or non-material mechanisms a priori, producing knowledge as quantifiable and accumulative data sets, using inquiry modes that are independently verifiable by different investigators using the same experimental conditions, etc.

Now--lest I be misunderstood--I do not dispute that "science" as so defined works like gangbusters for a number of inquiries. If I want to know what causes influenza (and how to stop it), why stars go nova (and when/if ours will) , or what kind of seatbelt saves the most lives in a front-end car crash--give me science, please. Experiments, controls, repetition, peer review--all of these components of scientific processes produce (at their best) beautifully consistent, usable knowledge-sets. I can create a vaccine to avoid getting sick. I can rest assured that Sol has billions of years left to it. I can choose the safest seatbelt. In these and other fields, science compellingly sets up and passes the test of "does it work? does it produce results?"

But, as Taylor and numerous other historians have noted, the perceived superiority of "science" hasn't stayed restricted to such material questions. Throughout the nineteenth century, the scientific criterion for inquiry crept into and reshaped the groundrules for a number of disciplines that ask less concrete questions--history, law, sociology, psychology, aesthetics, philosophy, and politics. In all of these and more, scholars and researchers scrambled to standardize their practices, to make them resemble this new kind of inquiry that had proven so useful in other arenas.

Such science-ization has proven less successful for the fields of religion and theology. Unlike, say, an anthropology of religion or history of theology, theology per se typically holds as foundational certain warrants that are incompatible with "science," e.g., the existence of God. For this very reason, some thinkers--the neo-Atheists like Richard Dawkins, for example--consider theology (or religious belief more broadly) a non-starter. It isn't, can't be, "scientific" because its very practice, inquiry into and about the supernatural, violates naturalistic precepts. Not scientific=not reasonable=irrational/discredited.

Now, I'm just getting to the part where Taylor deals with the 19th century, where many of these changes I've skimmed over take place. I've not yet read his treatment of that century or of the next, and I can hardly wait to read his lengthy rumination on/response to these developments and their present-day incarnations. But, were I to guess at his response to the religion=not science=compromised equation (which he presages throughout), I would imagine he would point out that that equation only proves compelling from the same vantage point that legitimates science in the first place. That is, religion fails a legitimacy test only when the game is "how scientific is it?" But the notions that the how-scientific-is-it criterion is A) clearly and naturally identifiable as a selfsame concept over time; and B) automatically--always and everywhere--superior to other criteria--these are imminently contestable.

Science's self-evident definition and superiority are new assumptions, new players on the philosophical field. As such, these assumptions don't get to declare themselves victors simply by changing the game's rules for everyone else ("Only purple teams can score points. Purple team wins!").

That's my guess at Taylor's conclusions, anyway. I'll update when I read them for myself.

More later,

JF

Ashes, Practice, Belief

2010-02-17T20:10:00.005-06:00

Ash Wednesday--

Growing up, I was largely unaware of the holiday at all, Lent--or any other Liturgical Year event--not being a typical Southern Baptist observance. My small-town Oklahoma experiences (largely bereft of Catholics) didn't prepare me for our mid-1980s move to south Louisiana, where it seemed that Catholics and Baptists waged an eternal cold war for Cajun souls. I had to learn to create a new mental box for Catholics, an addition to my childhood taxonomy of "Christians" (i.e., Baptists), "sort-of-Christians" (i.e., Methodists and other Protestants), and "Non-Christians" (e.g., Moonies, Jehovah's Witnesses, Hindus).

At the time, Catholics seemed to fall somewhere between "sort-of-Christian" and "Hindu." There was so much that was so different. Their crosses had Jesus still crucified on them. They called their pastors "Father" instead of "Brother." They apparently thought that Mary should be worshiped (not accurate, I know, but such was Baptist propaganda). And one day out of the year, everyone showed up to school with dirty foreheads.

I don't recall thinking too deeply about what the cross-shaped smudges meant. I just lumped the practice into my ever-growing category of "weird [i.e., non-Baptist] things Catholics do."

As I grew older, of course, my concept boxes changed. I asked my father once if he had a Catholic Bible because I wanted to see how their Bible recorded the story of Mary differently. Daddy of course informed me that the Gospel accounts were the same for both Catholics and Baptists. Interpretation and tradition, not the text itself, proved to be the distinguishing factor.

Moving into the Methodist Church (which my family did during my high school years) meant incorporating some more high-church, "Catholic-y" traditions and interpretations into my spiritual life, a practice I initially resisted. I have to admit, though, that the performer in me was thrilled to be able to join the club of smudgy foreheads. It took me a few years, however, to think through exactly what Ash Wednesday means, to realize that it was more than just a piece of liturgical theatre.

The little service I went to at noon today nicely encapsulated what I've absorbed. There about thirty of us gathered in our small chapel. We prayed, sang, and heard a short homily. Then came the ashes, to remind us of our mortality. Then another prayer. Then a silent exit from the chapel, with bowls of water to remind us of our Baptisms (the dialectical complement to mortality). Simple enough.

But in that brief service I realized a deep distinction from the faith of my Baptist childhood. For Baptists, the focus of Christian faith lies primarily in belief--faith in Christ and acceptance of Christ as Lord and Savior. Baptists understand this core belief as manifesting in or prompting certain practices: walking down the aisle to get saved, giving a testimony, getting Baptized, taking the Lord's Supper. But these practices remain secondary effects, radiations of the belief in God's saving grace. It's belief, not practice, that saves.

My pastor in today's service titled his mini-sermon "Practice, Practice, Practice," inviting us to take advantage of Lent as a time to be aware of the practices that define us as Christians. The call to a discipline of awareness echoes a similar call made during Advent. I like to think of Advent and Lent as parallels, two sides of the same coin; both are times of preparation for the coming of God-With-Us. The Liturgical Year in general imposes on believers a call to remember, to keep in mind, to practice awareness of faith. In this understanding, belief accompanies practice, grows from it, rather than causing it. To believe is to do is to believe.

I'm reminded, for example, of the story (I've heard various versions from various sources) of a priest who was asked by a man how he could become a Christian. "I don't believe in God," the man told the priest. "I've tried and tried, but the faith won't come." The priest instructed him to rise at each dawn, kneel, and pray. "But I don't believe," said the man. "Pray every day as I've said," advised the priest, "and you will."

To my childhood Baptist self, and I think for many evangelicals, such advice runs counter to their understanding of how Christianity works. You pray out of belief, not to create belief. I remember hearing sermons warning of such fallacious thinking, sermons that pointed to passages like Matthew 7:21 ("Not everyone who says to me 'Lord, Lord' will enter the kingdom of heaven."). Prayer doesn't save; belief does.

But, as I've written before, belief--the feeling of conviction in certain truths--often proves uncertain. Belief wavers. Confidence gets shaken. Sometimes my faith (as feeling) seems so small that even a mustard seed could dwarf it. Does this mean that my Christianity--my status as God's adopted--wavers with my emotional or cognitive state? For many, many years I thought just that. Doubt became an enemy not just of faith but of salvation. Questioning my faith opened the door to hell.

That I now think differently stems from a number of sources and teachers, but I think my adoption of the Liturgical Year, with its Advents and Lents, has played an important role.

Certainly I'm cognizant of the dangers of empty practice, words and motions that really are nothing deeper than a display of piety. As the readings in today's service reminded us, Christ speaks harshly against such showiness.

Yet I have found a great deal of comfort, a ring of deep truth, in the practice of the Liturgical Year, in the idea of faith as a discipline of awareness and action that persists regardless of my emotional state. Like the service today, the discipline of faith warns me that mortality and loss happen no matter my feelings toward them. But that same faith reassures me that God works for my redemption and reconciliation, that the Spirit intercedes with deep cries, that Christ arrives and is with me always--even when I don't feel it.

Happy Ash Wednesday, all. Remember to remember.

More later,

JF

Texas School Board Article

2010-02-14T22:58:00.006-06:00

I want to highlight a fascinating article in today's New York Times Magazine, "How Christian Were the Founders?" by Russell Shorto.

There Shorto provides a sketch of the divisive politics of Texas's state school board, whose members have the power to re-write carefully devised curricula recommended by the state's teachers. Many of these members Shorto identifies as "Christian" in a fundamentalist sense. These Christian school board members are dedicated to correcting what they see as a recent and unjust drifting away from K-12 texbooks and curricula's emphasis of Christianity as a uniquely prominent aspect of American history and culture. Faced with curricular suggestions and text book choices that fail to so emphasize Christianity in US history and culture, these school board members simply amend the standards to reflect their own views.

Texas's standards prove unduly influential to educational standards nation-wide. Since Texas represents, after California, the largest school system, the largest texbook publishers generally follow its lead. Conservative Texas school boards, then, have the potential to produce conservative curricula more broadly.

In his article, Shorto links those board members' views to a wider sub-movement of evangelicals (though he consistently uses "Christian" as a general descriptor) who combine a particular view of US history with a specific cultural-political agenda.

Their historical view? The US is a Christian nation, meaning that it is founded within a specifically Christian (or at least Judeo-Christian) ethos, by people professing a specifically Christian faith, and with the goal of advancing specifically Christian aims. Whereas many other historians emphasize the founders' Deist and (for its time) pluralist leanings, the new Christian historiography places the majority of US founders squarely within a Biblical Christian worldview.

This historical view leads its proponents to several conclusions about present-day culture and politics. They dispute, for example, the idea that the US relies on a "separation of church and state." Indeed, they tie key ideals of US liberal democracy quite specifically to Christian faith. Human rights, for instance, are God-given, as laid out in the Declaration of Independence. Rights' utility as a legal concept is inseparable from their religious underpinnings. (And, as a side-argument, the Declaration enjoys a "symbiotic" relationship with the Constitution proper; one cannot be considered apart from the other). The US is tolerant of other religions, yes, but it remains by design (and by Divine fiat) a Christian nation. It is thus only proper that its laws reflect specifically Christian precepts.

Bolstering this view are authors like David Barton, of Wallbuilders, who has written several books about how Christian (not Deist) most of the founders were and how shocked they would be at the secular bias of today's politics and culture. I've heard Barton speak and have read several of his articles. He strikes me as an autodidact, extremely well-read on facts and trivia of various Revolutionary era figures and events. But he is by no means an academic historian. He lacks a scholarly sense of history as a discipline, i.e., an ongoing conversation among experts in which participants submit themselves to mutual accountability and peer review to check and refine arguments or evidence. Indeed, his Wikipedia entry links to several of his more infamous gaffes, including using alleged quotes by the founders for which he cannot find primary documentation.

Of course, Barton's lack of formal academic credentials in no way hinders his influence and popularity among his fans, including several members of the Texas school board. Shorto interviews several of these members, noting that they make no secret of the fact that they have no professional expertise in the areas about which they dictate policy--or even education in general (one member, for example, home-schooled her children, specifically avoiding the system she seeks now to influence). The sense here is that, for these board members and those who support them, educators by and large suffer from a liberal, secularist bias. They have twisted true history--the history that reveals the hand of God at work in Instrument America--and require correction from honest believers.

To his credit, Shorto notes that many historians who otherwise do not agree with Barton et al. nevertheless concur that a history of influences on US history that ignores the religious views of major actors also errs. Religion did and does play a role in people's lives, and the founders were often quite open about that role as they saw it. To the extent that history books have shied away from exploring this reality, such squeamishness should be remedied. This is not to say, however, that historians concur that the founders saw themselves as building a specifically or exclusively Christian nation in Barton's sense. Shorto quotes a conservative author, Richard Brookhiser, who puts it nicely: "The founders were not as Christian as those people would like them to be, though they weren’t as secularist as Christopher Hitchens would like them to be."

But such nuances don't cut the mustard in the more conservative school board members' minds. Christian is Christian. To suggest that past understandings and expressions of Christian faith differed significantly from present-day ones seems incredulous to many present-day, Bible-believing evangelicals. They therefore back-read their own present-day configuration of faith into the historical narratives and legal documents US. American history becomes the story of the endurance of (their configuration of) faith.

Shorto's take on all of this (it's mainly reportage rather than editorial) is fascinating and, I think, fair. I wish, however, that he were more careful in identifying the Christians who follow Barton's lead and seek to twist educational standards to fit their faith-pictures versus Christianity more generally. At times Shorto seems to suggest that all Christians (all Christians in Texas, anyway) see US history just as Barton et al. do. The people Shorto talks to on the board--and they do say some alarming things--strike me more as (indeed, identify explicitly as) working on the fundamentalist end of evangelicalism.

A more complicated picture of what evangelicals more generally (to say nothing of non-evangelical Christians) mean by describing the US as a Christian nation emerges in such books as Christian Smith's Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want (Berkeley: U of CA P, 2000). Smith, a sociologist, draws on a great deal of qualitative and quantitative evidence to trouble many of the preconceptions about evangelicals that Shorto's article might otherwise foster. Although a majority of evangelicals in Smith's study did affirm the notion that the US was Christian nation, they do not take that to mean that Christianity should enjoy some privileged status in US schools or laws. "Christian nation" can mean many things, from Barton's quasi-theocratic view to the simple observation that, for a long time, most US citizens identified as broadly Christian (as the UK might be called a "secular nation" even though it formally has a state church).

So the school board members that alarm Shorto represent an especially activist fringe with particularly strong views rather than the "average evangelical" (whatever that might mean). Nevertheless, as an especially activist, vocal fringe, the board members' attitudes and actions are quite troubling. The article is worth reading.

More later,

JF

Jesus Talk on Free Speech Alley

2010-02-13T00:19:00.004-06:00

It snowed today here in my southern town--a rarity in any event made even rarer by the fact that it was the second or third time this winter that we've gotten such precipitation. All over campus this morning, students trudged to class holding their camera phones out in front of them to capture the scene of big, wet gobs of snow raining down.

I passed by my campus's free speech alley, where tables set up for the day's speakers and activities sat unattended, gathering slush as the snow-drops melted almost instantly. No evangelists today, I thought.

I wrote last time about the "free speech alley fundamentalists"--a group of highly conservative, turn-or-burn evangelists whose outreach techniques seems mainly to consist of telling passersby how wicked and wretched they are. I assume they follow some slightly less polished version of truth-proclamation (kerygma) practiced by evangelists such as Ray Comfort. That is: start with the hard truth of the law (i.e., for all have sinned...the wages of sin is death/hell) and let the spirit convict so that repentance and salvation may follow.

That may be their rationale. The impression they convey, however, has less to do with the awesomeness of God's righteousness and grace and more to do with the irritation and insults Christians cause to others. If the goal is to win disciples for Christ, I can't imagine the free-speech-alley fundamentalists get anywhere close.

But I'm writing in circles. I've ruminated before--many times in this blog--about how evangelism of the "law-then-conviction-then-repentance" variety typically doesn't bother to justify itself in terms of how effective it is. Rather, people like Comfort insist that leading with sinner's guilt is the best evangelical technique because it's what the Bible commands.

The Way of the Master (Comfort's technique) features as its emblem the letters WDJD--What Did Jesus Do? In Comfort's reading, Jesus consistently produced converts by leading sinners to a realization of their own guilt and need for repentance. In the story of Jesus's conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well, for example (John 4: 1-26), Jesus turns a conversation about material thirst into a discussion of spiritual thirst. He confronts the woman with the fact that she's had many different husbands and is now with a man not her husband. She tells her neighbors, many of whom then meet Jesus and become believers.

Comfort strongly believes that without authentic conviction, the honest and deeply-felt realization of one's total depravity and helplessness in the fact of God's righteousness, true repentance and salvation cannot occur. His whole technique nets people into formulaic question-and-answer sessions about the ten commandments that terminate in the conclusion that the person is sinful and worthy of hell. Without the keenly felt threat of hell, argues Comfort, unbelievers have no reason to receive Christ as lord.

I've written at length about my disagreements with this theology. But let me say here that, compared to the evangelists who visit my campus with their "REPENT OR PERISH" signs and "You're headed for hell!" accusations, Comfort is positively charming. At least he recommends engaging a person in a Socratic (if narrow and teleological) exploration and discovery of their own guilt. The Alley Fundamentalists simply bray forth blanket accusations and tsk tsk when "pride" closes the ears of their audience.

We have a saying in performance analysis that "the medium is the message"-that how a message gets delivered conveys as much meaning as the literal content of the message itself. If this notion is even half true, the alley fundamentalists communicate a kind of contempt for those they claim to want to reach. Noisy accusations at strangers, shouting matches with hecklers, and garish shock-show REPENT! signs--no matter what the words used--tend to say, "I couldn't care less what you think of what I'm saying. This whole performance is about my saying things at you. My responsibility as a communicator stops when I stop speaking."

I've been meaning to spend some time watching them on free speech alley, cataloguing what constitutes a day's work for them, perhaps even speaking to one or more of them about their techniques. I doubt, alas, that such a conversation would get very far. They, like most turn-or-burn street evangelists, are likely well-insulated against having long conversations about why they choose to evangelize as they do. They're on the clock, doing work, not looking to chat with some long-haired hippie professor.

I suspect I'd have better luck with a wholly different kind of evangelist who regularly patronizes our free speech alley. This older gentleman simply sits in the shade on a folding chair. Across from him sits another chair just like it. The only sign he displays is a white long-sleeved shirt he wears reading "Jesus Talk." He sits quietly, not accosting anyone, not selling or yelling, but his invitation sounds loud and clear: sit and chat for a bit. Sometimes when I pass I see someone in his chair, usually in earnest conversation as he listens.

I have no idea what kind of theology he professes or what kind of gospel (if any) he preaches. But his evangelical performance stands in sharp contrast to that of the turn-or-burn crowd further up the sidewalk. It may be he believes in the law/conviction/repentance model just as strongly as they do. But if so, he's clearly made the decision that blaring it out with voice or signs just isn't the way to go. Instead, the message he's stating, the truth he's telling, has more to do--again--with the medium in which he says it. That is, just the semiotics of his setup--an open-ended, non-coercive invitation to talk about whatever--suggests a powerful impression about what faith is and how it ought to act in the world. "Come talk," he implies, "Talk about anything Jesus-related. I'll listen. I'm here."

I like that so much. It resonates so much more strongly with my reading of what Jesus actually did. A reading of the woman at the well, for instance, misses the point if it stops at Jesus's pointing out the woman's lifestyle. She fires back with conversation about the well itself and about history. Jesus responds not by returning to the topic of her sin or by lecturing her about her hellish fate but by listening to what she says and building off of that. I see him doing this again and again in scripture: listening, asking, responding. Never does he warp the conversation into a formula of guilt. Sometimes he doesn't talk about sin at all.

But he's there. He's listening.

Surely there's a kerygma--a truth-proclamation--that consists of open presence and attentive conversation. Surely that's closer to the way of the master than street signs and yelling.

More later,

JF

Free Speech Alley Fundamentalists

2010-02-10T22:29:00.003-06:00

"Well, I'm going to hell anyway," she sighed affably, "what's a few more sins?"

I had been joking today with a student of mine about a recent bout of illness she'd been having trouble kicking. After informing me of the name of her latest med (which seemed to be working), I shook my head. "You mean, you're murdering all those poor bacteria with that third-gen antibiotic?"

I didn't expect that bit of irony to prompt a comment about eternal damnation. I must have looked confused, for she followed up with an explanation. "Well, that's what they told me." She gestured in the direction of our student union. "I'm bound for hell."

Sadly, I knew exactly what she was talking about. The front of our student union boasts a "free speech alley"--a common fixture on university campuses--on which just about any group may (after securing a permit) discourse on whatever topic they please. Typically, our free speech alley blossoms with informational tables about student group activities or corporate-sponsored givaways of some soft drink or another.

About once a week, though, the Christians descend. These would be a small group of evangelists of the kerygma variety I discussed in my last post. They generally feature a few women (dressed in full-length, home-made dresses that signal "very conservative") handing out some tracts or fliers, a few other people with sandwich-board signs reading "REPENT" and the like, and a middle-aged man yelling hoarsely at passersby about how sinful they are. In my experience he's particularly fond of labeling sins based on his lightning-quick assessment of individual students and faculty on their way to lunch. I believe I got dinged once for my long hair ("Immodesty!").

Occasionally (even inevitably) someone will engage him in a shouting match, gathering a crowd of amused (or angry) gawkers. The yelling contest unfolds predictably (i.e., the heckler gets fed up and stomps off) as the women make their way through the crowd, seeding it with tracts informing everyone of their impending doom.

Most people who have been at my university for a while roll their eyes and move along, accepting the weekly visitations as an annoying if colorful distraction. I often use the group as an example in classes when I talk about activist performance.

But, looking at my student today--this young woman whom I know to be full of energy, intelligence, and talent; this woman whom I know endures a difficult home life few people could guess at; this young woman who is getting over a bad illness--hearing her submit, even humorously, to some stranger's telling her she deserves hell, I just got mad.

What a jerk thing to do--to yell at some random person about how bad they are. I get the evangelists' context. I get that they're following a theology that insists that salvation occurs only after conviction, which requires condemnation. I even get that they see their acts as necessary, even loving ("it's like yelling at someone that they're about to walk off of a cliff," I often hear). After all--better to realize one's total depravity now than to wake up surprised in hell.

I get all of that. And I still think that yelling guy is doing a chump deed, a low-down, mean thing.

How depressing is it that this is her experience of Christianity? That encounter--a random kick when she's already down--is the witness of Christ she got that day. I appreciate the evangelists' theology, but I can't for the life of me see how they expect anyone to receive that message and think that Christianity is anything but a mass of caustic dysfunction. "You're worthless! You're evil! Come to Christ!" Who thinks this is an effective message? Who cares about your intentions if your audience never understands them?

Jonah, of course, springs to mind as a counter-example. Did he not go through Nineveh doing basically the same thing? "You're all doomed. You're all evil. God will destroy you. Better repent." And it worked then, didn't it? Through his telling the rough, unadorned truth, a city was saved, no?

Maybe, but it strikes me that the point of the Jonah story isn't Nineveh but Jonah--Jonah who, after (finally) preaching his truth, high-tailed it out of the city to secure a comfy seat to watch the Nineveh Gets Destroyed By God show. Well, Nineveh repented, God relented, and Jonah sulked. And God says (I paraphrase--may God forgive me): "What the heck are you so angry about? So I spared a city of thousands! That's what I do--I'm God. I care. If you don't--tough!"

That's the danger of "truth-telling" evangelism of the turn-or-burn variety: it leads to smugness, to a lack of care about the people you're supposed to be helping to save.

Did the evangelists care about my student? I have no idea, but the message they sent to her was certainly clear enough: drop dead, sinner.

I stammered out a "Well, I don't believe that," but the damage had been done. Another unChristian, successfully taught to avoid those Christians whose only outreach seems to be insults.

Lord, help you-know-who.

JF

The Kerygma of Reality TV

2010-02-09T00:25:00.004-06:00

Up late watching trashy Bravo TV. I've written before on here how I'm oddly, shamefully caught by those reality TV series like Tabitha's Salon Makeover, Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares, or even Millionaire Matchmaker. Beyond showcasing a particular skill set (hairstyling/salon magement, cooking/restauranteering, dating/marriage), each of these programs tends to run on moments of Professional Truth-Telling, where Expert X (i.e., the star of the show) tells Wannabe Y what's what about their salon, entree, or romance skills.

To be sure, the experts Bravo and other such networks choose to focus on aren't merely experts; they're personalities--typically flamboyant, eccentric-bordering-on-unpleasant personalities. They are the harsh, drill sergeants of their particular profession, grinding their subjects down into nothing so that (ideally) they may be rebuilt, rehabilitated, made stronger and better. And episodes do end with the Wannabe eventually submitting to the Expert, overcoming bad habits, and improving. The shows' punch, however, comes from those "come to Jesus" scenes of prideful singles, salon owners, or chefs being told these Harsh Truths in no uncertain terms.

Inevitably, show producers/editors (even writers in some cases) follow these scenes with breakaway reaction interviews with those who have just been taken down a few notches. Reactions range from rage ("I can't believe that #&%@ said that! What does he/she know?") to chastened acceptance ("It was really hard to hear what so-and-so said, but I know it's true"). Sometimes--rarely--the reaction is so extreme that the person simply stalks off, never to be seen again. But the Expert is fine with that! "He/She couldn't take the truth," sighs the Expert, "and now s/he'll be a failure."

I wrote originally that my attraction to such scenes of putting-people-in-their-place stemmed from my own lack of self-assertiveness. These personalities seem simultaneously off-putting and admirable to me, I reasoned, largely because they are unafraid of presenting their opinions and experience as the textbook truth of their particular profession, and they brook no suggestion to the contrary. They know the truth, they know their skills, and--this is a biggie--they all prioritize presenting that truth bluntly over maintaining a relationship with the Wannabe to whom they present it. They establish truth as a standard to which the Wannabe must rise--or else--and they do so with unapologetic forcefulness.

To a degree, I recognize that I myself do something similar from time to time as a teacher. Indeed, I wonder if my fascination with these scenes has to do with how they play out a kind of pedagogical power-trip fantasy. Many's the time when I've felt the need to have a "come-to-Jesus" meeting with my students. "Here is standard X," I'd say, "and you are failing to meet it." Sometimes I want to--I have to--shock my students into a realization of their own ignorance or inexperience, forcing them to see the gap between where they are and where they need to be.

But in practice, I've rarely found that such moments play out like the truth-telling sessions on TV. Harsh truth-telling, in my experience, doesn't work as well as patience and persistence, meeting students half-way and helping them gradually gain more knowledge/expertise. Beyond a few specific instances, those times where I've attempted harsh conversations, tended to generate more problems than they solved.

Why? The difference is this: I am obliged as a teacher to be in relationship with my students in a way that TV Experts aren't with their Wannabes. My investment in my students transcends the space of a single episode. I can't afford do subsume maintaining the student-teacher relationship to the presentation of X or Y Truth about the subject I'm teaching. I have to balance the need for students to learn the skills/knowledge I teach with the fact that they will learn at different paces and in different ways than I did.

It strikes me that the distinction between TV Truth-Tellers and real-world pedagogues provides a way of thinking about a divergence of evangelicalism over the philosophy of Christian witness to the world. Evangelism, after all, involves a degree of truth-telling to an audience of people in need of that truth; it isn't coincidental that hard truth-telling sessions are known as "come to Jesus" meetings.

For some evangelists, the imperative of evangelism is simple proclamation--kerygma (Greek for "proclamation, teaching"). In this view, the evangelist is charged with proclaiming the truth of the Gospel without accommodation or compromise. Anything beyond that (e.g., winning converts) is God's work, not humans'. If the hearers receive and (through God's grace) submit themselves to the saving Gospel--great! If they don't, then all the evangelist can do is pray for them, shake the dust off their sandals (so to speak), and move on. Truth trumps relationships, for (within this understanding) no healthy relationship can obtain between those who know the Truth and those who will not accept the truth.

Other evangelists, while not discounting kerygma, focus more specifically on proselytism--making converts. Proclaiming the word, in this view, is necessary but not sufficient. One must speak the truth, yes, but speak it in ways that listeners hear and may be inspired by or attracted to it. For some within this view, kerygma can only occur effectively within the context of an established relationship of trust between believer and non-believer, a kind of prevangelism that prepares the soil of non-believer's heart to receive the seed of the Gospel. Here a relationship must precede and provide the support for Truth-telling.

While the TV fan in me finds the smackdown kerygma of "nothing but the truth" fascinating, the pedagogue in me causes me to prefer the relationship-first form of truth-telling. It's less dramatic, to be sure, and it often lacks the spectacle of ultimatum. But it seems, in the long run, more effective, more loving.

More later,

JF

Ray Comfort's Atheism Site

2010-02-06T20:48:00.004-06:00

Back to posting after some time off.

What's there to post about, evangelical-culture-wise? Whenever I feel stymied about something to blog about for this site, I visit one of several handy-dandy conservative-evangelical blogs. One of my favorite, as I've mentioned, is Ray Comfort's "Atheist Central" blog, where the "Way of the Master" evangelist posts a daily bit of atheist-bait for his flock (herd? gaggle?) of commentators to squabble over.

I've written about Comfort's evangelical technique at some length. His atheist site, however, seems at first more of a side-project, a distraction from his main work of educating neophyte evangelists to spread the faith as Jesus did (i.e., via open-air preaching).

Unlike the random pedestrians Comfort generally focuses on, those who read and comment every day on "Atheist Central" generally have their minds made up about Comfort's views. He has ardent defenders and persistent (almost to the point of fixation) critics. Comfort's postings range from simple scriptural exegesis to announcements about his ministry's actions (e.g., the Origin of the Species giveaway) to occasional commentary on a culture war issue or to. Hardly a post goes by, however, without Comfort's inserting some jab at the foolishness and pride associated with willful unbelief.

Such jabs in turn prompt each day's comments, which feature an almost ritual re-enactment of the same jeers-and-cheers discussion between those who find Comfort mendacious or vapid and those who find him praiseworthy. "There you go again, Ray," write the critics. "There you go again, atheists," write his defenders. And so on. Comfort occasionally responds to this or that poster and will delete any comment that uses offensive language or in which the words God or Jesus are not capitalized.

I have to admit, I've been puzzled in the past about Comfort's attention to this site. His usual ministry, which he patterns after his take on Christ's ministerial example, focuses on street preaching and improvisational Q&A encounters with passersby. His atheist page, however, boasts a "congregation" of regulars seemingly addicted to the flame wars about the provocation du jour. In a sense, he's preaching to the converted, which isn't all that unusual for a pastor. The converted to whom he preaches on that site, though, are those converted utterly against him. His is a site dedicated (ostensibly) to ministry to atheists and atheism. It's preaching to the heretics.

Now, I have a longstanding interest in how activists--which I'll define as people ardently dedicated to changing attitudes and/or material conditions of or for others--interact with those who oppose them. Confronted with someone dead-set against your values, what do you do? (I imagine one of those Windows pop-up choice boxes: "Political Opponent Detected: Ignore, Delete, Retry?") Most political and ideological oppositions play out indirectly, as activists teach insider/outsider distinctions to their own political communities. You learn how to be a Tea Party activist, for example, as much by recognizing common foes as by identifying fellow travelers. It's rare for activists actually to address each other to try to persuade or reconcile. One of the fascinating features of evangelicalism for me is the fact that evangelists regularly reach out honestly and hopefully to those most opposed to them.

Is Comfort's atheism site an example, then, of just such a trans-ideological outreach?

I don't think so--at least not primarily. Moreover, I think that, at least in Comfort's mind (which of course I don't claim to know--this is educated guess sort of stuff), the atheism site does embody an online version of his street ministry. In his evangelism training curricula, Comfort and his proteges discuss the complexities of open-air street preaching. One particular obstacle they mention is the heckler--someone who "answers back" combatively, arguing with the street evangelist's points. Handling such a heckler is a tricky situation, cautions Comfort, especially if they become violent or too disruptive. But often, he says, hecklers are good because they attract a crowd.

As a response tactic, then, Comfort suggests dealing with the heckler directly, addressing him or her respectfully and repeating your key points--but without the expectation that you'll suddenly convince the dedicated atheist (or critic) to accept the message. You aren't there to win an intellectual argument; you just want to get your message across clearly. The real audience, of course, isn't the heckler but the crowd that gathers to hear the squabble. It's at that point, argues Comfort, that a Christian witness can play out effectively, as the audience (ideally) sees how loving, calm, and well-reasoned your arguments are in comparison to the hateful (i.e., intolerant) performance of the heckler.

Atheist Central functions much like the on-the-street encounter between Comfort and an angry heckler. Comfort engages (and enrages) atheists, in other words, not to convince them--his arguments (like theirs) tend toward the repetitive--but to attract net traffic, gawkers who might will get a dose of law/gospel from Comfort's postings no matter when they come.

It works. I encountered the site from a news report, which seemed amused that a dedicated evangelist like him would so spit into the atheist wind by seemingly inviting reams of vitriol from his atheist detractors. I would imagine that similar net passersby drop in, see the debate, and move on. Comfort's self-deprecating style, which his regular critics cite as infuriatingly twee, works well to a first-timer. Comfort seems sincere and calm, just posting his thoughts about topic X or scripture Z. His critics, by comparison, resemble the bitter atheist stereotypes he so often recycles in his posts.

Now, one can argue whether such drive-by (click-by?) evangelism works in terms of creating converts (particularly the "true" converts Comfort seeks), but Comfort's tactic, I find, remains at least consistent.

More later,

JF

Mister Rogers

2010-02-01T23:15:00.002-06:00

Back after a few days away. I think I'll be dropping down to 3-4 posts a week so as not to feel bad when I don't post every single day.

For today: One of the odder things I've been doing with my DVR of late is recording re-runs of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. PBS no longer officially broadcasts that show, but individual stations may show it in syndication. Lucky for me, my local PBS station shows one episode twice a weekend at 6:00 AM.

What can I say? Watching that show is like enjoying a cool cup of distilled water after a week of drinking nothing but lukewarm, off-brand soda pop. It's pure and unpretentious at once. Every episode is the same familiar formula--the "Won't You Be My Neighbor" entrance, the changeover from business to sweaters-and-sneakers, some fairly aimless activities, songs, and reflective talk; a trip to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe; and then back with Mr. Rogers for more talk, a song, and then the final changeover and goodbye set to "It's Such a Good Feeling."

And every activity, every song, every reflection unfolds guided Fred Rogers's unhurried, sincere, gentle attention focused right at the camera, i.e., at you, his "television neighbors." He peppers the show with reminders--all delivered naturally, like an old lesson he's just rediscovered--"You know, there's only one person like you in all the whole wide world. You're special and fine because you're you."

Only now, watching it armed with my Professional Dramaturgical Eye do I see how excellent it is on the level of pure craft. Take Fred Rogers as an actor, presenting himself as a character in every show. I mean, Rogers delivered practically the same basic message every day ("you're a special person") and never does it come off as anything but utterly honest, utterly motivated and appropriate to the moment. He has a talent for tapping into some reservoir of joyful fascination with anything--any object, any process, any person--he happens to meet. I know actors who work years and never achieve anything like that level of conviction.

Watching those 6 AM reruns, I realize that part of what makes the show so refreshing, so unusual, stems from its avoidance of any irony, camp, tongue-in-cheekness, or innuendo. We are used to children's programming that operates on at least two levels, one pitched toward the youngsters and one signaling to the adults. There's a winking awareness of grittier or more sexual aspects of life even in shows like Sesame Street or Dora the Explorer (I won't even get into the hyper-sexualized preteen fare of the Disney Channel et al.).

In Mister Rogers, though, what you see is what you get. What people say is purely and literally what they mean. Even the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, a land of fantasy costumes and characters ruled by a puppet king, remains firmly framed as make-believe. On several occasions Rogers shows his audience exactly how the puppets work, reinforcing a realistic substrate to all of the imagination and disguise play going on.

Of course, such unironic sincerity makes the show an easy target for parodies in which a cynical or sexualized subtext gets laced into the show's format. So pervasive are such parodies that I sometimes find myself thinking of the show through the lens of the parodist, i.e., as a doofy, moralizing, high-handed exercise in naivete.

Watching the show, though, erases such misconceptions. Rogers does a surprisingly minimal amount of moral instruction. Most of his reflections and monologues deal not with what you should do or shouldn't do but how things are. "Sometimes we get angry, don't we?" he says with absolute conviction, "Or sometimes we get lonely." And then he pauses to let that sink in. He's surprisingly frank about the reality of unpleasant events, scary things, and sad feelings. There's no theodicy here; the show scrupulously avoids any overtly religious subtext. Things simply aren't always as we would have them.

And what does Mister Rogers do with such darker realities? He encourages us to express them as such, explores our reaction to them, and reassures us that nothing that happens affects the fact of our worth as special people.

Case in point: from an episode I recorded recently and which by some miracle was uploaded to Youtube:

Aside from noting the truly clever songwriting and the talented performers (Rogers as Daniel and Betty Aberlin as Lady Aberlin), I'm blown away by the simple, powerful ethic of valuing the other that's expressed here.

I mean, isn't this precisely what agape is? How different would Christianity be if we imagined God (not always, but sometimes) as the one who sings to us when we feel like mistakes? This would be the God who doesn't merely tolerate us, who doesn't have to hold God's nose to deal with us, who isn't defined by wrathful-with-a-touch-of-grace. This would be the God (and we would be the Church) who sees everyone as a neighbor. This would be the God/Church that sings to everyone they meet that "it's such a good feeling/to know you're alive."

Be well,

JF

Embarrassing Christianity, or Evangelism at Any Cost

2010-01-29T19:27:00.004-06:00

I pause from my tedious tromps through postmodernism to bring you yet another edition of "This Week in Embarrassing Christianity."

I'm late to this party, I realize. Certainly by now you've likely heard of Trijicon, Inc. They make rifle scopes, specifically the kind used by the US military in overseas operations. So far, so good--the military needs rifle scopes; Trijicon provides them. It came to light recently, however, that the company provided just a bit more than quality rifle scopes that shine a light to pinpoint targets.

Etched into the Trijicon scopes were a series of letters and numbers, such as 2COR4:6 or JN8:12, which (for those in the know) refer to biblical scriptures. Respectively the verses are as follows: "For God, who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ" and "When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, 'I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.'"

Cute, no? Except that, as we wage two wars in Muslim countries, we're doing our best to dispel the notion that our actions in Iraq and Afghanistan are Christian Crusades against Islam. What better way to undermine that attempt than to inscribe christocentric verse references onto our weapons?

Now, I can perhaps understand soldiers who are Christians wishing to keep a reminder of their faith close to them--a crucifix, a cross, even a reference to some scripture. Let's be clear, though: these aren't comfort scriptures (e.g., "Thy word is a lamp unto my feet" or "When I am afraid I will trust in thee"). These are evangelism scriptures--turn to Jesus, the light of the world. But here's the creepy thing: the references look basically like hidden code, etched right next to other series of numbers and codes. You almost wouldn't know what they mean if you don't know what you're looking for.

I'm not privy to the rationale behind the little easter eggs from Trijicon. I can only guess that someone in the company imagined a scenario in which a backslider or atheist happened to see the reference, recognize it as scripture, and look it up, thereby opening the door to the Holy Spirit's saving influence. Crazy as it may sound, such a narrative resonates exactly with many of the "how-I-got-saved" testimonials of my Baptist childhood.

Instead of converting, however, some soldiers who noticed and recognized the codes notified a group called the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF). Now, at first glance I assumed this group (like many other organizations mobilizing religious freedom rhetoric) supported the Trijicon inscriptions. Quite the opposite turns out to be the case. The MRFF defines religious freedom within the military very strictly, watching for any indication that one religion (i.e., Christianity) be seen as the "official" or "establishment" faith. The MRFF proceeded to contact media groups, who spotlighted the inscriptions. Public outcry (mostly against) followed, followed by military embarrassment (how could they not know this was going on, now?), followed by a declaration by Trijicon that they would cease and desist inscriptions as well as providing "kits" to remove the inscriptions from the 300,000+existing scopes.

Hopefully the foolishness of stamping US gun sights with Christian proselytics goes without saying, and if it doesn't, this first person editorial by Iraqi War veteran Benjamin Busch says it very well. Particularly quotable from Mr. Busch:

"I did not go onward as a Christian soldier. I went forth as an American, a Marine. I was sent by my country to fight a threat, and thereafter with the best intentions of democracy, not theocracy."

Stamping military weapons with Christian scriptures sends a chilling message, twisting a mission intended (ostensibly) to prevent attacks into the opening moves of a Christian holy war. Busch ends with a quote from Matthew, Jesus's command to love our enemies, noting that this quote was not inscribed on the rifles.

Meanwhile, segments the political religious right predictably interprets criticism of Trijicon as yet another attack on Christianity itself. Missing from this article is any inquiry about whether gun scopes are the best place for messages about Jesus. Also missing: if this is supposed to be evangelism (as is now claimed), why hide it? I know that evangelicals seek new ways to get their message out in a world they consider increasingly hostile to conservative Christianity. But at what point does the imperative to witness override considerations about tactics? Nothing about this situation makes Christianity look good. It's slimy proselytics, faith passive-aggressively sneaking a coded sales pitch into a mechanism functionally at odds with the task of spreading a gospel of peace and love.

Oh, Christianity...

More tomorrow,

JF

The Truth About Truth, and Some Secular History as Well

2010-01-27T21:55:00.003-06:00

By "I'll address it tomorrow," I apparently meant "the day after tomorrow."

Quick recap: postmodernism (that fiendish enemy of worldview-apologist evangelicals) posits that "truth" changes over time, that it's contingent upon factors like culture and era. Any one human in a particular time and place certainly experiences various "truths" as solid and binding, but none of those truths are consistent enough, universal enough, to qualify as trans-historical or trans-cultural. Humans lack any unambiguous access to Ultimate Truth since the only tools they have to conceive of, identify, investigate, and communicate that Truth are culture-dependent variables like language.

I reiterate that this characterization of postmodern belief is actually agnostic regarding the question of Ultimate, Capital-T "Truth" except to say that such Truths aren't available as such for human consideration. All we have are small-t truths that may be (in the long run) changeable and multiple. A worldview-analysis evangelical would take issue with that on a couple of points, insisting that 1) singular, unchanging Truth does exist and 2) humans can in fact know that Truth. I'm dealing here only with the first criticism.

The criticism, then: what about the postmodern truth about the contingency/multiplicity of truths? Does postmodernism apply its position about truth to itself? In other words truth only flexible or multiple within a postmodern context? Worldview analysis teaches to its evangelists-in-training an ace-in-the-hole comeback to postmodern views that runs along these lines, albeit in a more simplistic form: If you don't believe in Singular, Universal Truth, what about the truth-status of your belief about human's inability to know Truth?

As I see it, I have two obvious answers at my disposal. First, I could deny that postmodern arguments about truth apply to postmodernism itself. I could claim that postmodernism's only Certain Truth is the ever-changing nature of truth as humans experience it. In other words, the only thing certain is nothing's certain (except for this statement about nothing being certain, 'cause that's certain). That's a bit too blatantly circular for me.

I prefer option two: postmodernism does accept the contingency of its own truths about Truths. Paradoxical as it seems, truth at some other point in history/geography isn't (wasn't) contingent and multiple but eternal and singular. Contingency and multiplicity are recent epistemological events (at least in the west).

Traveling back in time past 500 years or so would plop you into a world in which many of the truths we now see as culture-contingent or variable existed only as a Singular Way Things Are. Truth back then was not contingent, not postmodern, but singular and eternal. It isn't that the 500 years ago folk were simply incorrect, not seeing the flexing/changing/multiple truths that must have existed; it's that those other, different/competing truths didn't exist as possible Things To Believe.

I'm reading a book by Charles Taylor called A Secular Age that echoes this line of thought. On its face, Taylor's work is a history of the rise of skepticism (i.e., disbelief in religion, especially in Christianity). Taylor refuses, however, to write either a simple replacement story where Science (or Reason) comes to displace Christianity or a "subtraction story" about how Christianity simply got cut out of culture. Rather, his is a narrative of multiplication. He wants to know how western culture went from a point in c. 1500, when belief in God was a given, to c. 2000, when belief in any religion is seen as but one option among an ever-expanding variety of possible belief/non-belief options.

In other words, in 1500, it was virtually impossible to be an atheist in the same way (and certainly with the same ease) with which it is possible to be an atheist today. Crucially, the lack of widespread atheism wasn't due to churches' waging some widespread campaign of repression against the atheist ancestors of Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins. Certainly there were many repressive campaigns and inquisitions, but these were mainly about heretics--people who were seen as faking orthodox faith in favor of some heterodox faith--not atheists in the modern sense. We have tons of records from such heretics, their heresy trials, their horrendous (and to our eyes unjust) punishments. Repression of that sort produces a lot of historical records, a lot of martyrs whose ghosts (and writings, and followers) cry out.

But none of the ghosts of inquisitions past wail a dirge about how "God is not great." None of them died arguing that scientific reason was a superior alternative to religious faith. In other words, it's not the case that there were tons of atheists back then being held down by church power. The church didn't repress Dawkins-esque atheists on any kind of grand scale because the option to be atheist (or agnostic, or "spiritual" instead of "religious," or anything of that sort) simply did not exist as it does today.

Taylor demonstrates that the situation of Christian faith as one truth among many conceivable options is a relatively new development in western culture. This situation relies upon--developed from--a number of cultural and historical and geographic factors that did not obtain in times past. Religious truth, then, was at one point relatively singular in the West. Now it is multiple, postmodern.

It's tempting to say that past generations were just plain wrong. I could argue, perhaps, that the present range of religious/non-religious options did indeed exist in the past--even if only as theoretical possibilities. Past generations just failed to be aware of them as such, much like past generations failed to apprehend the heliocentric solar system. I suppose that's true, but only in the most abstract, hypothetical sense. It's possible, for example, to imagine that someone back in 1300 imagined a whole profession in which people would be hurtled into orbit so as to explore space. But functionally, really, the option to be an astronaut--the truth of astronautics--only emerged in recent times. Only through an act of anachronistic imagination could we even conceive of astronauts sitting around in 1300s France waiting impatiently for rockets et al. to be invented.

It may be odd to consider secularity (or the notion of multiple/contingent truths) as a recent innovation/invention in the same sense as astronautics. But all of these are, I argue, dependent upon technologies, sciences, ways of thinking, tools, and discourses that are utterly of the here and now. In the past they were not merely as-yet-undiscovered but wholly unimagined.

So, in that sense, yes--the postmodern fact of truth's contingent, multiple status is itself contingent and multiple, dependent upon features unique to this time and place. Truth has been different--not postmodern--in the past, and it likely will be different--not postmodern--in the future. Indeed, you don't have to travel far to find places in the present where a postmodern understanding of truth as multiple/contingent simply isn't a viable possibility except perhaps as crazy philosophical science fiction.

More tomorrow,

JF

Devil's Advocating Postmodernism

2010-01-25T22:55:00.004-06:00

I've just poured a load of thought-work into a huge administrative project, so I'm suffering from some brain-fry right now. Wugga.

Be that as it may, I wanted to address some common criticisms raised against the postmodern (i.e., antifoundational) view I've been outlining for the past couple of days. The big criticism--the one central to my interests in this blog--of course deals with how I can take a skeptical/agnostic stance toward capital-T truth and/or toward humans' ability to perceive it on the one hand and yet consider myself a practicing Christian on the other. That objection I'll build to addressing in a later post.

For now--I turn to some hard questions about postmodern stances that don't directly deal with faith and which aren't nearly as riddled with straw-man misrepresentations. The first devil's advocate question asks about the truth conditions of antifoundationalism's own claims about Truth. As I've defined it, postmodernist thought considers most of the truths that we as humans deal with as contingent truths, social facts that, while compelling and controlling locally, prove unstable and in flux when considered over epic time-spans. To be sure, some of these facts present themselves simply as facts of existence (e.g., death, eating, breathing). Antifoundationalist theory, however, denies that even these "brute" facts a primacy of place. They may exist, but they aren't capable by themselves of serving as a solid, stable ground of certainty on which any and all humans may build identities or societies.

Why? Because, as I argued yesterday, even the most brutal fact has an undeniably social dimension. Language, for example, is a social fact. Words and their meanings shift over time. Yet words--or, more accurately, signs (which may be spoken words, written texts, body language, images, etc.)--are all we have at our disposal for thinking about, wrapping our minds around, and communicating brute facts like death, eating, or respiration. Certainly we experience moments of trauma, times of extreme intensity (like a car wreck, a sudden shock, or a surpassing joy) in which we freeze in wordless agony (or ecstasy).

But once we start to communicate that trauma--even if only to put the experience into words for ourselves--we're caught in a web of language, of symbols, that never quite captures what it is we've just experienced. Indeed, performance theorist Peggy Phelan argues that all attempts at representation both fall short of expressing exactly what we intend and get received differently than what we intend. Think, for example, of times when you've awaken from a particularly vivid dream, one that you know was immensely complicated and/or incredibly important. Yet the first time you try to sort out exactly what happened in the dream (to tell a partner, to write it down, to remember it exactly), you just know that your words--even if only the words you tell yourself--are betraying the original experience that was the dream. The dream happened, yes. But the only way we have to conceive of that dream in our waking minds is to use words, and language always changes that which it seeks to represent.

So it is with brute facts, elements of existence we generally think of as "real," universally and homogeneously experienced by all humans. Our only way of thinking about such facts occurs through language, and language exerts a distorting effect on our perceptions of reality. We can perceive, for instance, that what goes up must come down (and I'll grant that there's not been any time in recorded history where this is not so without some logical explanation, e.g., space rockets). But the way that different cultures conceive of this fact of life may differ wildly. We in the present know that things fall to the earth due to gravity. Another time and place, though, might think of the earth as a kind of giant organism, constantly inhaling so as to keep objects and creatures sucked down. Or perhaps falling gets imagined as the result of a kind of invisible force pressing down from above rather than a force pulling down from below.

Now, we in the here and now might laugh at these latter two (admittedly hypothetical) views. We know thanks to science that gravity is "right" in a way that the invisible suck-monster is not. I'm betting, though, that not many of us could explain exactly how gravity operates. Theoretical physicists (and here I draw on my extremely limited, pop-science understanding) are themselves still searching for the hows and whys of gravity (e.g., why is gravity so weak relative to other universal forces? does gravity consist of quanta , like gravitons? is what we experience as gravity residue from other dimensions/branes?). It's likely, in fact, that future models of physics (a Theory of Everything, for instance, that blends general relativity with quantum theory) will present us with whole new ways of seeing even such a basic, brute fact as our falling to the ground when not otherwise stopped. Gravity as we know it now seems like the best explanation we have to go on, judging of course by our present-day culture's standards for what qualifies as a "best explanation" (just as other societies past and future have or will judge other explanations by other standards).

And that's the point: to a certain extent, we as humans are caught within our own culture's sign systems. We have only those lenses available to us with which to view "real" things. Other lenses seem foreign to us, either hopelessly naive/primitive (the suck monster theory of gravity) or science-fictionish (brane cosmology, for example). It's not that we're forever stuck or that we can't ever grow or learn new things, but to really swallow one of these other explanations may very well entail our giving up one lens (could we say, one worldview) for another.

Here, finally, is the question: If all truths as we experience them derive at least in part from our position within a particular culture, a particular (and ultimately transient) system of signs--does the same not go for the truths that postmodernism espouses? In other words, to what extent does postmodern incredulity toward eternal truths apply to its own beliefs? Doesn't antifoundationalism, at the end of the day, itself rest upon a set of foundational beliefs about the lack of foundations?

This line of questioning, I submit, is the more nuanced cousin of the worldview evangelists' simplistic ace-in-the-hole reply to postmodernism: "Don't you believe in the truth that there isn't any truth?"

I'll address it more fully tomorrow,

JF

Postmodernism 3: Brute Facts, Social Facts

2010-01-24T20:59:00.007-06:00

To recap: one of the more fascinating trends in US evangelicalism today involves "worldview analysis," a mode of apologetics and outreach that classifies human beliefs and philosophies into competing "worldviews." For the evangelical worldview analyst, "Biblical Christianity" serves as the only proper and true (i.e., comprehensive, productive, and non-contradictory) worldview. All others, from Marxism to Hinduism, function as some form of intellectual and spiritual folly.

Particularly vexing for worldview evangelists is the "Postmodern" worldview, which they more often than not define in terms of a refusal to believe in Absolute Truth. Instead (according to much of the worldview literature I've read), postmoderns believe that Truth is what you as an individual make of it and that everyone has the right to make their own truths. Such a view isn't only antagonistic toward biblical Christianity (where God as revealed through the Bible is the very essence of Truth); it's a logical non-starter (i.e., the truth is that there's no truth? But isn't that a truth statement? etc.).

I've suggested that this representation of postmodernism is spurious, a straw man that critics can set up and topple easily so as to win rhetorical points. Moreover, this view dismisses out of hand a whole (and growing) sector of Christian faith that actively seeks to articulate Christian belief alongside and within postmodern views. As a part of that sector, it behooves me to correct what I consider to be an inaccurate view of my beliefs.

When I describe myself as postmodern (I would likely prefer a related-but-more-specific term like antifoundationalist or post-structuralist), I do not suggest that Truth is whatever I want it to be. Obviously this isn't so. I can't ignore gravity and fly around like Superman, no matter how hopeful or deluded I get.

That being said, though, I do have problems with the notion of capital-T Truths, "facts" about the way things are that are presented as simply and incontestably so regardless of when, where, by whom, or in what context they are encountered. My problem isn't so much that Truth doesn't exist. As a Christian, I do at the end of the day affirm a number of Big Truths. My problem lies more with the human tendency (pride, one might say) to think that we have an accurate handle on that capital-T Truth.

Michael Berube, a critical theorist and self-avowed antifoundationalist, once related a question he posed to John Searle (a language philosopher who leans more to the foundationalist side). In a public lecture, Berube recounts, Searle made a simple distinction between "brute facts" and "social facts." Brute facts, he explained, are solid, verifiable realities that simply are whether we like it or not. The sun appears to rise in the east and set in the west. Fire burns you when you touch it. People eventually die. These are simply true things, and believing otherwise doesn't make them not so.

Social facts, by contrast, involve elements of human existence that are context-dependent. The definition of what kind of clothes are most fashionable, for example, depends not upon timeless Platonic ideals of fashion but upon the exigencies of time, place, and culture. Fashion is a social fact. You can't ignore it without consequence (fashion and other social facts obviously matter), but neither can you set a stable description/definition of it without being extremely specific as to time/place/context. They lack the Eternal epistemological status of brute facts.

So far, so good, right? Nothing here requires anything like the postmodernism I've defined. Indeed, you could say that all I've done via Searle is suggest that there are in this world big-T Truths (brute facts) and little-t truths (social facts). Both of them matter, but the latter shift over time and place, whereas the former do not.

I'd agree but for Berube's question to Searle, which I paraphrase here: "What about the distinction between brute fact and social fact?" he asked. "Is that distinction itself a social fact or a brute fact?" (source: Berube, Michael. "The Return of Realism and the Future of Contingency." What's Left of Theory? Ed. Judith Butler, John Guillory, Kendall Thomas. New York: Routledge, 2000: 137-156.).

And there's the rub. I know, I know--it sounds like a too-clever-by-half wordplay, but think about it: how ultimately do you know whether a fact is social or brutal? Do you ultimately know? Can you?

To be sure, I can be utterly convinced that X is brute-fact True--unalterably, objectively so regardless of time or place or culture. I can live my life out on the basis of that conviction. What I cannot do, however, is guarantee that others will, after considering my case, agree with me about X's brute-truthfulness. To believe with me as strongly as I do in fact X, others would have to buy all my reasons for believing in X. They'd have to agree to the terms, the meta-arguments, the criteria, by which I define and verify X as true (e.g., empirical evidence, lived experience, sincerity of belief, miraculous powers, survival of ordeals). I have not only to present a cogent, convincing argument; I have to make sure that others share the same ideas of proof and argument as I do.

All of that meta-argumentation implies work (imagine trying to convince a medieval European peasant to accept string theory). Moreover, the necessity of convincing people opens the door to the possibility that others may not buy into my criteria of truth. Even if they do buy my criteria, they may not navigate the evidence/argument to my same conclusion. In short, others may disagree with me. I would think (I would know!) they are wrong, of course (delusional, heretical, immoral, stubborn, whatever), but nothing I can do as a human lets me tap into some reservoir of Veracity and display Proof so universally obvious that other humans have no choice but to agree with me. Even the most brutal fact must ultimately have a social dimension, and yes--this includes the brute fact/social fact distinction, which relies on a whole set of assumptions about culture, science, epistemology, etc. (imagine trying to convince a medieval European peasant of the fine difference between brute and social facts).

The sick, sad truth is that even if we believe in brute facts, even if we accept that some capital-T Truths exist, we as humans lack any reliable means to establish with 100% certainty whether X fact enjoys such a capital-T status. Certainly we can be 99.999999%+ sure about a whole host of facts (e.g., gravity, cellular mitosis), but as any philosopher of science will tell you, even "scientific" statements remain technically open to the possibility that they may be refuted, disproved, qualified, modified, articulated differently, etc. in the face of other discoveries or new paradigms. Indeed, one of science's strengths is not that it arrives at or uncovers final Truths and holds on to them dogmatically but that it offers a useful, consistent system for investigating and constantly modifying "truths" of nature.

But of course I'm not a scientist, and this isn't a science blog. Consider a statement like this, then: "X is the will [or, we could say, the Word] of God." Brute fact? Social fact? Capital-T True? Here's where we wade merrily into some of the choppiest waters in twenty-first century Christendom. Navigating these seas, I argue (pace Stanely Fish), makes the question of foundational versus antifoundational commitments quite relevant.

More tomorrow,

JF

Postmodernity II: Pluto and the Third Umpire

2010-01-23T23:12:00.005-06:00

Yesterday I began a nutshell description of what I mean by postmodernism in the hope of addressing and refuting the suspicion in evangelical circles that postmodernity essentially stands opposed to any meaningful configuration of Christian belief.

I attempted this description by means of a baseball analogy involving three hypothetical umpires discussing their role in calling strikes or balls. "There are balls and there are strikes," states the first, "and I call 'em as they are." "There are balls and there are strikes," states the second, "and I call 'em like I see 'em." "There are balls and there are strikes," says the third, "but they ain't nothing until I call 'em."

I suggested that the first umpire corresponds roughly to a foundationalist view of Truth and Reality, where an objective Real exists in a way that can be perceived, investigated, and communicated more or less accurately by human beings. I should note that this foundationalist view underlies not only most forms of evangelicalism (where the objective Real is of course God) but also many of the more popular conceptions of post-Enlightenment science.

Attacks on postmodernism emerge from both of these foundationalisms (either separately or jointly), and much of the time (though by no means universally) such attacks characterize postmodernism as some version of the second umpire, who apparently relies on personal feeling or subjective opinion in place of an as-is re-presentation of the facts. This mischaracterization imagines postmoderns as dangerous fools who take juvenile ruminations too far ("Dude, how do you know that everything you think is 'real' is not just some super-real hallucination?"). Reality gets replaced by personal whim, and any opinion about life or morals is as good as any other. Thus propped up, this straw man provides endless fun for secular and religious foundationalist critique.

I prefer, however, to think of postmodernism in terms of the third umpire's view, a view I would characterize not as subjective but as discursive. I take this latter term from the work of Michel Foucault, a French philosopher and historian whose name appears both in libraries of respected post-structuralists and in worldview evangelism's hit-lists of postmodern villains. In his work (The Archeology of Knowledge for instance), Foucault offers the idea of discourse.

It's not that unusual a term, to be honest. When teaching about postmodernism, I often ask my undergraduates what a discourse is. "A conversation, a debate," they answer, and they're right. I ask them to imagine discourse as a grand, ongoing conversation among, within, and between groups of people in societies, a conversation that takes place not just in speech but in writing, in images, in actions--really in any kind of communicative medium. For Foucault, however, this special kind of society-wide conversation, however, effectively creates the things (the topics, the objects, the subjects) it deals with. Foucault writes about the discourses that create/define madness, punishment, and sexuality differently in successive historical eras.

Closer to our time, though, I like to explain discouse via reference to the example of Pluto, the little planet that was-but-is-no-longer. Insofar as astronomy (or more specifically planet-ology) functions as a discourse--an ongoing conversation among people who practice astronomy--then the Pluto Affair demonstrates the extent to which the objects of astronomical discourse (e.g., planets) aren't so much described neutrally by astronomers as they are defined or even created by astronomers. Is Pluto a planet? Yes (in 1930). Then no (in 2006).

It's as if the umpires changed the rules for what counts as a ball or a strike mid-game, rescinding a previous call based on the new definition. All of this is to demonstrate that balls and strikes as such don't have any independent existence outside of the context of a particular game. Absent the game's rules, the distinction between a ball and a strike--and indeed, the whole scenario of someone in an odd costume swinging an oddly shaped stick in the hopes of smacking an oddly constructed ball--become nonsensical. Umpires' roles in calling balls or strikes highlights that baseball is a game whose conditions are determined at least in part by the definitions and calls of umpires. (To add a another wrinkle: umpires are themselves artifacts of the game and its rules. No baseball game? No umpires.)

It seems dismissive to call something like astronomy (or medicine, or science, or ethics, or politics, or theology) a game, but to a certain extent any discipline operates by virtue of discipline-bound, context-bound rules and definitions that define what it is to do said discipline.

None of this is to say, of course, that there isn't really a ball of rock and ice orbiting (usually) beyond Neptune out there. That heavenly body didn't suddenly shrink in size after being downgraded from planet to "dwarf planet" any more than it suddenly winked into existence after being first identified in 1930. In that sense, almost no one would argue that there isn't something "real" or "objectively there" that we now call Pluto the dwarf planet. The actions or calls of astronomical umpires don't literally create or destroy that body, just as the umpires' calls don't literally manufacture objects and players out of thin air.

At the same time, though, the redefinition--the umpire's "call"-- does have undeniable effects; the line between "planet" and "dwarf planet" isn't just semantics. Seventy years' worth of astronomy texts, posters of the solar system, educational curricula--all of those documents are now suddenly outmoded. Children have to memorize eight planets instead of nine. Mnemonic devices have to change. A spacecraft, New Horizons, got funding to travel to and take pictures of Pluto back in 2003 (it will reach Pluto in 2015). I remember hearing the scientists in charge of the New Horizons mission saying that, had the redefinition occurred prior to 2003, they would likely not have gotten funding for the project. These consequences aren't minor, and they certainly aren't the product of some individual person's whim.

The point?

To say that postmodernity doesn't believe in capital-T truth is only half right. Very few postmodern philosophers (maaaaaybe Jean Baudrillard in some of his weirder writings) would seriously suggest that there isn't some kind of brute reality in which humans live and move. But acknowledging that a brute reality exists doesn't necessarily equip humans to perceive, communicate about, and move through that reality in exactly the same way. Humans have to filter reality through senses, cognition, and expression (i.e., language), and these filters distort and/or mediate brute reality, limiting it to the sensible, the thinkable, and the expressible. Moreover, the filters and their processes get re-made and re-invented constantly. The way that the ancient Chinese imagined cosmology was vastly different than how Ptolemy imagined it, which was again different than post-Gallileo's cosmology, etc., etc.

In other words, postmodernity doesn't deny that an objective reality exists, but it takes the focus away from that objective reality per se (away from questions like What is really, eternally true?) and puts it squarely on a specific, local representation of that reality (What is "the true" as configured in X time/place?). Note the difference here between a purely subjective, straw-man postmodernity and a discursive postmodernity. The former suggests that truth and reality are whatever you individually want or think it to be. The latter suggest that ideas of truth and reality change radically over long timescales but often seem quite solid and powerful in any one time-place. A discursive formation is not a personal opinion, but neither is it The Way Things Really Are.

More tomorrow,

JF

Defining and Defending Postmodern part I

2010-01-22T21:40:00.003-06:00

Within many evangelical circles, few epithets are more damning than postmodern. On the one hand, evangelical writers sometimes use the label to conjure images of ivory-tower nerds engaged in self-aggrandizing contest to see who can say the least with the maximum number of syllables. "Postmodern" thus serves as code for hipper-than-thou, leftist elitism coupled with essential vapidity.

For worldview apologists, "postmodern" is even worse. It's a cynical, amoral philosophy that jettisons the notion of Truth altogether--including and especially the Truth of Christianity--in favor of self-centered pleasure-seeking. "Eat, drink, and be merry, for nothing really matters." Postmoderns, in this view, disbelieve in moral absolutes, which (for worldview-trained evangelicals) must therefore mean that they have no morals and are incapable of ethics.

Since I identify as a postmodernist myself, I take some issue with the idea that Christianity and postmodernity necessarily conflict.

What is postmodernism, anyway?

Postmodernism, a term originally used to describe a particular style of architecture, designates a general trend (or array of trends) in culture, art, politics, scholarship, and philosophy emerging roughly in the later twentieth century. Like many such labels (including evangelical), postmodern gets mobilized in the service of so many descriptions by so may different people that it's arguable whether it really describes anything specific at all. As is the case with evangelical, attempts to draw clear lines around postmodernism as a set idea or group inevitably fail.

That being said, when it's considered within particular contexts (I myself draw mainly on post-structuralist critical theory within the humanities), postmodern does usefully name a roughly identifiable set of assumptions about reality and truth. A quick analogy that I use in my classes might illustrate how I imagine these assumptions.

During his confirmation hearings, Chief Justice John Roberts claimed that he would, if confirmed, operate as an umpire, calling strikes and pitches honestly without intentionally interfering in the game. His depiction, though, ignores the fact that umping can be conceived of in any one of (at least) three ways. Imagine three umpires talking about how they call balls and strikes (I confess I misremember exactly where I first heard this illustration).

"There are balls and there are strikes," says the first umpire, "and I call 'em like they are."

The second shakes his head. "There are balls and there are strikes," says he, "and I call 'em like I see 'em."

The third umpire thinks a bit, frowns, and says, "There are balls and there are strikes, but they ain't nothing until I call 'em."

Brutally simplifying centuries of complex debate, I'll characterize the first umpire as advocating an objective view of Truth and Reality, one roughly coincident with the predominant mindset of Euro-American modernity (i.e., the Renaissance until the twentieth century). Truth exists objectively and is discoverable by humans, primarily through empirical means. Humans may either represent that Truth faithfully or they may misrepresent it (intentionally or unintentionally).

The second umpire represents the ostensible opposite of the first view, a subjective philosophy where the Truth isn't really known (or perhaps doesn't exist) and is therefore totally open to human interpretation. Subjective impression and personal opinion hold equal status to empirical fact. This view is often the one attributed to postmodernity, painting a picture of jejune academics insisting on the legitimacy of any old crazy notion they can come up with.

I would argue, however, that a totally subjective view of reality and truth such as that doesn't actually exist as a serious philosophical or theoretical position. It's a straw man of postmodern thought that exists mainly so that critics of postmodernity can knock it down. No one really argues that reality is only a matter of individual opinion, just as no one (outside of some mentally disturbed person, perhaps) seriously argues that she could, for instance, ignore gravity or walk through walls by virtue of her beliefs about physics.

My take on postmodernity lies closer to the third umpire's statement, a view I call (after Michel Foucault) discursive rather than subjective.

More on that tomorrow,

JF

Hashing Out Fish's Argument

2010-01-21T22:25:00.004-06:00

Wuff! What a depressing week in politics this has been. The Massachusetts upset equals health care in trouble, the state legislature/governor slashes education funding, the university slashes jobs/programs in response, and now the Supreme Court overturns a hundred years of precedent to enable mega-corporations to donate unlimited funds to campaign advertisements.

I'm a bit heart-weary right now to pursue the question Stanley Fish poses (well, poses and answers, really), but here I go anyway. Maybe it will cheer me up.

Does philosophy matter? By philosophy, Fish means a comprehensive, all-informing belief in the nature of Truth. For instance, you could believe that Truth--the capital-T, it's really there Truth--exists in terms of things like morals or God or the meaning of life. One might call this brand of beliefs foundationalism, since it asserts the ultimate existence of a foundation, a moral-ethical-theological-what-have-you grounding for a host of other, smaller beliefs.

Alternately, you could believe that there's no such thing as Truth, at least no Truth that we as humans can perceive in any unadulterated way. This, of course, would be something like a postmodern antifoundationalism, which would point out that the ideas and ideals a particular time/place/society reveres as absolute, couldn't-be-more-obvious Truth turn out to be bounded to that time/place/society. Other times, other places, other peoples turn out to have their own unique foundations.

Now, the foundationalist might say that those other times simply got it wrong,or perhaps, vice-versa, that they got it right while we in the here and now have it wrong. Either way, the Truth actually exists. Moral Absolutes exist as certainly as planet Pluto does. (See what I did there?) Being trained in postmodernist historiography, I lean more toward the antifoundationalist side of things. Historical study can be awfully hard on notions of transcendent or universal Truths of humanity. The more you search the breadth of human experience through history and geography for a universal Truth of homo sapiens, the more likely you are to find exceptions to just about any Truth you can assert beyond, well, mortality (and even then, any anthropologist can tell you that how cultures conceive of dying and death varies radically across time and space).

But does being a foundationalist or an antifoundationalist really matter? Fish says, more or less, "Not really." At least, he clarifies, your position on Truth generally exists without the world-shattering consequences many would attribute to it. To quote from his "Truth but No Consequences" article I cited in yesterday's post:

"That is to say, whatever theory of truth you might espouse will be irrelevant to your position on the truth of a particular matter because your position on the truth of a particular matter will flow from your sense of where the evidence lies, which will in turn flow from the authorities you respect, the archives you trust, and so on" (Fish 390).

Thus, argues Fish, it's specious for foundationalists to point to antifoundationalists and say (for instance), "Well, since you don't believe in absolute truths, why don't you step out of a window since gravity's just a socially contingent construction" or (and this is a favorite) "So, since you don't believe in absolute truth, on what grounds would you be able to take a moral stand against someone like Hitler?" Beliefs on particular matters like the persistence of gravity or the wrongness of genocide, notes Fish, don't require the backup of an unquestioning faith in Universal Truths. One needn't be a professional physicist, in other words, to not want to fall out of a window (nor does one have to be an ethicist to express a brute-level disgust at the idea of hurting or killing other people).

Nor, Fish continues, is it any better for an antifoundationalist to claim superiority over a foundationalist via some comparison to cultish fundamentalism: "You just believe X because you aren't smart enough or brave enough to question your core beliefs. Anyone who doesn't agree with you in every detail must be an infidel." Plenty of people would dispute such a characterization, actively making an argument about the need for constant self-reflection by referring to Foundational Truths like the goodness of tolerance or liberty. One needn't be antifoundationalist, in other words, to be critical, ethical, or nuanced.

Indeed, Fish concludes, the metaphysical position on truth (foundationalist or antifoundationalist) is by definition a general metaphysical position, detached from "mundane and empirical" matters of a particular situation. Governing such mundane/empircal matters (Fish's examples: how can God exist in the face of the Holocaust? and what are the contingent historical situations that gave rise to the Holocaust?) are not metaphysics but the requirements of a particular discipline--theology (theodicy, to be specific) for the one example and history for the other. Each discipline has its own set of investigative methods, its own rules for defining questions and finding answers, and none of these flows necessarily from one or the other position, antifoundationalist or foundationalist. You can do good or bad historical work, good or bad theodicy, good or bad just about anything regardless of whether or not you believe in Transcendent Truths or in contingent truths.

It's a provocative argument Fish unfurls, especially as he does so in his signature grumpy-old-iconoclast mode. I don't always agree with Fish--I don't totally agree with him in this line of argument, for example--but I nearly always find him a bracing read. He makes me think more carefully about the assumptions that underlie my scholarship, my activism, and of course my faith.

More tomorrow,

JF

Stanely Fish, Truth, and Worldview Apologetics

2010-01-20T22:47:00.004-06:00

To recap from yesterday: Stanley Fish, riffing on Barbara Hernstein Smith's new book on science/religion conflicts, highlights a recurrent theme of his thought--the surprising irrelevance of Absolute Truth to human life and thought. This is an argument he's made before (see "Truth But No Consequences: Why Philosophy Doesn't Matter." Critical Inquiry 29 (2003): 389-416. Print.), but it's not one he's applied to the science/religion theatre of the culture wars.

I'm fascinated by Fish's arguments because I see them as posing an intriguing challenge to evangelical worldview analysis. As I've written about before, worldview analysis is a somewhat new (or at least resurgent) trend in some corners of evangelical thought. Drawing loosely on 1930s-style presuppositionalist apologetics, worldview evangelists posit that human beings move through the world with the help of worldviews, founding philosophies that on conscious and unconscious levels shape values, actions, assumptions, and reactions. Within worldview evangelism, Christians (a particular variety of Protestant Christian, at least) live within the "Biblical Christian" worldview. This worldview competes with other philosophies, be they alternative religions (e.g., the Hindu worldview, the Islamic worldview) or secular belief systems (e.g., naturalist materialism, marxism, postmodernism).

For worldview evangelists, of course, only the Christian worldview enjoys epistemic validity. It is True in a way that other worldviews are not. The task of the Christian, according to the worldview approach, involves 1) becoming conversant with the Christian worldview, learning to live it out more fully; 2) learning about competing worldviews, including how and why they are untrue; and 3) becoming adept at engaging people living within other worldviews, hopefully guiding them to a realization of the inferiority of their native worldviews relative to Christianity.

Fish--by no means a worldview analyst--presents a potent challenge to worldview analysts' assumptions. On one level, he is what most worldview evangelicals would call (or dismiss) as postmodern. That is, Fish does not (at least in his public writings) endorse the idea of Grand Truths that transcend particular times and places. One can believe in them with all one's heart. One can kill for them, die for them, and/or base one's whole life's work (artistic, political, philosophical, religious, what have you) on them. But what one cannot do is demonstrate once and for all that such Grand Truths really are Grand Truths. (Fish clarifies that he is actually referring to grand, philosophical truths and not to specific, mundane facts like "the sky is blue"). The point is that humans lack access to some Unambiguous Guarantor of Truth whose intervention and judgment would convince any and everyone of the truthiness of the Truth.

Worldview analysists tend to simplify such postmodernist beliefs: "Postmoderns don't believe in truth at all." The core of the worldview version of Biblical Christianity, see, is that Truth does exist, it comes from God, and is revealed more or less clearly and completely in the Bible. Other belief systems are flawed ultimately to the extent that they depart from, modify, or deny altogether Biblical Christianity's foundational truth.

Postmodernity, then, is especially scandalous, claiming not only that the Biblical Christian lacks the Ultimate Validity it claims, but that no worldview has such Ultimate Validity. Why? Because either such Ultimate Validity doesn't exist, or (at least) humans lack the ability to access the core of Transcendent Truth in an unmediated way.

Worldview evangelism departs at this point from other forms of Christian outreach and apologetics by refusing to go down the obvious avenue of direct engagement. Faced with a challenge like "I don't believe in Ultimate Truths" (or perhaps "Moral Absolutes"), worldview evangelists do not say "Well, they exist, whether you believe them or not!" Rather, worldview tactics train evangelists to ask questions, to probe the unbeliever's unbelief, catching them finally in a logical contradiction. The favorite for postmoderns? "Isn't the claim that there's no Ultimate Truth itself an Ultimate Truth?"

That's clever enough as it goes, but Fish's arguments are more radical than "there's no truth." At the end of the day, Fish contends, it really doesn't matter whether you believe, deep down, in Absolute Truth or in non-absolute, contingent little-t truths. Why? Because humans don't move through life double-checking every action, reaction, or thought for its conformity to some grand philosophy or worldview. Instead (I quote from Fish, who in turn is quoting Smith), "the sets of beliefs held by each of us are fundamentally incoherent — that is, heterogeneous, fragmentary and, though often viable enough in specific contexts, potentially logically conflicting" (qtd. in Fish, "Must").

In other words, most people live by doing and believing what seems to work, what proves "true," in localized contexts--not by fidelity to specific, all-encompassing philosophies. Science--operating empirically, deductively, via hypothesis and experimentation--works very well for some areas of life. Faith (or art, or sports, or love) works well in other areas. The fact that science and faith are mutually incapable of addressing each other's areas does not prevent people from drawing on both of them (sometimes at once, as when I pray while waiting for a medical test's results). This is as true, Fish insists, for postmodernists as it is for non-postmodernists. Holding and living by (at least potentially) logically contradictory sets of beliefs are just part of human existence.

For worldview analysts, though, logical contradiction within a worldview equals a death-blow for that worldview. Ditto non-comprehensiveness. Biblical Christianity (properly interpreted, of course) has no contradictions, explains everything exhaustively, and is therefore a superior worldview. The worldview evangelist assumes that, being brought to face a logical contradiction within their native (non-Christian) worldviews, nonbelievers will be shocked and disconcerted (and thus ready for the Holy Spirit to guide them into belief in Christ).

To be fair, many atheists place a similar trust in the power of their rhetoric to force believers into looking at the logical contradictions in Christianity (e.g., an all-powerful, loving God who allows earthquakes to devastate Haiti).

Fish, on the other hand, suggests that both die-hard atheists and die-hard evangelicals who make this assumption are in for a shock: most people are actually OK living in paradox, living without the unity of an all-encompassing, utterly harmonious philosophical system.

All this is not to say I agree totally with Fish. I do think there are reasons why faith or non-faith in Ultimate Truths do matter.

More tomorrow,

JF

Stanely Fish, Religion, and Science

2010-01-19T23:06:00.006-06:00

Apologies: this again will be a short-ish post. I have a lot on my mind this evening, from funding cuts and termination notices for non-tenured faculty at my university to the Democrats' upset in Massachusetts (and the threat that poses to health reform hopes) to my first of teaching tomorrow.

I bracket all of these worries, however, to point you to a stimulating blog post by Stanley Fish on his New York Times blog. There Fish reviews (positively) and ruminates on (extensively) a book by Barbara Hernstein Smith, Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion. Smith (in Fish's view) effectively identifies and dismantles some of the common arguments that crisscross debates about the conflict between science and religion (e.g., science is but a kind of religion, religion is nothing more than cultish and anti-intellectual hogwash).

Both of these arguments, she contends--indeed, the whole framing of science and religion as locked in some winner-take-all struggle--are flawed. The argument against science (or perhaps, against materialist naturalism) involves science's inability to prove the ultimate epistemic validity of its own preconceptions. Science, like logical positivism, begins with axioms that cannot themselves be ultimately validated.

Fine, Smith says, but that doesn't make science any less valuable. Its value, she explains, lies not in our unshaken faith in the capital-T Truth of science but science's effectiveness at explaining, predicting, and controlling certain aspects of existence. We value science, in other words, not because we have Absolute Faith in its Eternal Truth (we don't) but because science allows us to meet and overcome particular challenges. Got a broken leg? Science can help. It matters not at all if the patient (or even, come to think of it, if the doctors) actually have Utter Faith in the power of casts and medicine. When it comes to fixing broken bones, science (i.e., medical techniques substantiated with science) works.

For other challenges--how ought we to behave? what kind of laws make for the best society? how can I live in the face of X suffering?--science works less well. For those kind of questions, other human endeavors (perhaps religious faith) work.

As some of Fish's commentators posted (see those under the "highlights" tab), Smith's case appears to echo that made twenty-odd years ago by Stephen J. Gould. Gould famously described religion and science as "nonoverlapping magisteria"--different enterprises differently suited to different tasks. They ask different questions, and they only come into conflict when they are mobilized in the service of tasks for which they are not intended (e.g., creation science).

I sense, however, that Smith's work goes beyond Gould. Fish certainly does. The piece of Smith's book he finds especially enticing isn't only the "they're not really in conflict" conclusion but her contention that contextualized pragmatism (does it work? for what does it work?) and not epistemic certainty (is it True?) ought to form the distinguishing characteristics between science and religion. This rationale offends some aligned with science (the first highlighted comment exemplifies this). The new scientism would argue that science isn't just different but better because it is in fact True. It describes Reality in ways that religion does not and cannot. Moreover, science willingly submits itself to proofs, ever ready for Reality to smack down X or Y hypothesis via experimentation. Religion, goes this line of thinking, fails because it doesn't similarly submit to falsification.

Of course, philosophers of science have moved beyond pure Popperian faslificationism as the sine qua non of science for some time now. The old canard of reflexivity still works: at what point or by what test does falsificationism itself become open to falsification? Historians of science point out that, were strict falsificationism the criterion for science, many of the most famous and influential scientists would fail the test. So too would many quantum physicists or string theorists, whose work is effectively (at this point at least) untestable yet still valid qua scientific work. Other philosophers point out that falsificationism declines to define exactly what constitutes a "test" or a proper "falsification"; one can nearly always attribute a failed test to a bad test ("We just don't have the technology to test this properly") rather than to a bad hypothesis.

Smith's argument is that A) science simply doesn't have access to some objective viewpoint from which one can adjudicate its Truth relative to religion; and B) it doesn't need such access. Why? Because humans don't operate by determining what system of thought (dare I say worldview) is transcendentally true or false; we care more, evolutionarily speaking, about what works in a particular situation. A longish quote:

What this means, among other things, is that the various projects we pursue and engage in may not all cohere in a single intelligible story. We may not be unified beings. In fact, Smith says, “the sets of beliefs held by each of us are fundamentally incoherent — that is, heterogeneous, fragmentary and, though often viable enough in specific contexts, potentially logically conflicting.” The potential for logical conflict, however, exists only under the assumption that all our beliefs should hang together, an assumption forced upon us not by the world, but by the polemical context of the culture wars.

This is an old argument of Fish's, but it's well put here. Humans simply don't work via fidelity to all-encompassing, fully articulated, internally non-contradictory belief systems. We operate, instead, through an ever-shifting hodgepodge of cobbled-together beliefs that we keep or discard based largely on how well they work in helping us move through life. I needn't be convinced of the Theory of Gravitation to know I don't want to step out of an open fifth-story window. Were a wholly different explanatory model of falling things to come about that replaced gravity entirely, I'd still avoid open windows in high buildings.

Why does all of this spark my interest? I feel it captures some of my problems with worldview analysis and worldview evangelism.

More on that tomorrow,

JF

Caveat Emptor

2010-01-18T23:09:00.004-06:00

Short post today, as classes start tomorrow.

Not that I've been procrastinating on class planning--most of my courses are prepped and ready to go. In fact, I thought initially that I could devote this evening to doing some reading for my book proposal. See, I got a religion book whose review I had read and appreciated in the Christian Century from waaaay back in 2008.

The book's author spoke of how faith in the present was changing. No longer could religion--Christianity in particular--assume that it held an assumed position of importance in life and culture. Now Christianity, and indeed faith in general, has become one option among many others. One can be non-Christian today and not be arrested or shunned as a heretic (generally, of course--I'd not want to declare myself atheist in certain back-woods small Oklahoma towns, for instance).

This book, I thought, is just what I need to frame my investigation into twenty-first century evangelical outreach. Part of the sea-change in evangelical techniques (so goes my thinking) involves the shocking realization among evangelicals that the preeminence of the gospel isn't simply The Way Things Are In The West.

The rise of worldview analysis (i.e., identifying and taxonomizing non-Christian systems as all-encompassing, wholly different ways of viewing the world) exemplifies this realization. Rather than dividing the human world into two groups (the "One True Way" and "lies"), worldview evangelism recognizes whole grids and tables of different value lenses. Moreover, it situates "the Biblical Christian worldview" on that same table. To be sure, worldview evangelists believe that the Christian view is in fact the correct one, but (I would argue) the modification from duality (true/false) to grid/table isn't just cosmetic.

So--I needed this book. The trouble is, I had difficulty recalling the name and author; I could only remember the subject. With my Christmas gift of a Barnes and Noble card, I purchased what I thought was the book. Cracking it open for the first time this evening, though, I realized that I had in my hands a book sort of like but not quite the book I needed. had the unfortunate experience of realizing I'd bought the wrong book.

I bought The Future of Faith by Harvey Cox. After some reading and finally some long searching through Christian Century archives, I figured out that the book I actually wanted was A Secular Age by Charles Taylor.

By then, of course, I'd wasted much of my evening. I'll get the Taylor from the library tomorrow. Ah, well. It's not as if I could have read it all anyway. The Cox (which is fine on its own) is a doable-in-a-few-days 200 pages or so. Taylor is almost 900 pages.

Caveat emptor--or should I say, caveat lector.

More tomorrow,

JF

Leaderless Activism and the Tea Party Movement

2010-01-17T18:39:00.004-06:00

OK--one more Tea Party post, and I'm done for a while. Maybe.

Frank Rich, one of the New York Times's more liberal pundits, devoted his Sunday opinion piece to--well, let me specify. I read it because the headline was "The Great Tea Party Rip-Off." In actuality, the piece was mainly about Michael Steele's recent tirade against Harry Reid's ill-chosen words about President Obama's race as a factor in the last election. The Tea Party gets mentioned a bit at the end.

Rich, predictably, uses the Tea Party as a platform from which to launch further attacks on Steele and other conservatives. More interesting, though, was his link to this post by Erick Erickson of RedState.com, "I'm Afraid Sarah Palin Might Be Ruining Herself Unintentionally." Erickson writes specifically the upcoming "National Tea Party Convention" in Nashville, which charges $500 (that's just the registration fee). Like many commentators right and left, Erickson notes a bit of a tension between the idea of an organization ostensibly dedicated to advocating for not-so-rich folk to charge such exorbitant prices. But Erickson takes a harsher tone, admitting that he thinks the convention (and not, as Frank Rich intimated, the tea party movement in general) "smells scammy":

"Let me be blunt: charging people $500.00 plus the costs of travel and lodging to go to a 'National Tea Party Convention' run by a for profit group no one has ever heard of sounds as credible as an email from Nigeria promising me a million bucks if I fork over my bank account number."

I'm a little vague on just who exactly organized this convention. As far as I can tell from the Convention web page, it's a group called Tea Party Nation, which seems to restrict access to info beyond its home page (even stuff like FAQs or Resources) to members only. I guess the only way to find out if you agree enough with the group to join it is to join it to see if you agree with it. Not exactly a scam in itself, but frustrating and fishy all the same.

Erickson's larger point, though, concerns his cooling passions for the tea party movement in general. He touches on one of the features of the movement--its "leaderless" quality--that continues to fascinate me.

The progressive left has for some time been playing around with less top-down models of activism that might be called "leaderless." The more sophisticated cases for such tactics tend to invoke an idea like Barbara Epstein's "prefigurative community," in which groups adopt a guiding principle that their activist tactics--planning, organizing, implementation--all mirror the features of the "better society" they wish to create. They seek, in other words, to make the means and ends resemble each other.

For many of these progressive activists (most visibly in the world-wide anti-globalization movement), the "better society" looks like a voluntary, anti-capitalist, and non-violent anarchism in which small groups make decisions via consensus, share property, resist individual profit at the expense of others, etc. Activism built on this model tends to involve a number of otherwise distinct groups who join together around a common cause on a contingent basis, pooling resources to mobilize peaceful protest against a visit of the World Trade Organization meeting, for example. It's a "movement of movements" that highlight the spectacle of mass, non-violent direct action over more long-term, single-focus movements whose work often calls for working within the extant system (e.g., lobbying, electing candidates, fund-raising, letter-writing).

In my scholarly work, I've argued that the "movement of movements" trend offers a novel way of intervening in/resisting globalized capitalist oppression as well as presenting a productive challenge and critique to more "traditional" forms of social change organization. I question, however, how effective the movement of movements can beyond producing a singular event (i.e., a protest). Grounding myself in more old-school political theorists like Antonio Gramsci, I am incredulous toward the tactic of opting out of traditional politics entirely. A dream of utopia, of a better world, may be necessary for social change, but the dream alone isn't sufficient to realize that change.

Tea Party advocates, always eager to tout their leaderless, grassroots qualifications, are thus in my view latecomers to this tactic. They are also, from what I've seen and heard, less interested in the kind of meta-awareness of their movement that lets them see the plusses and minuses of quasi-anarchist structures.

The Convention offers an intriguing case in point here. On the one hand, tea partiers want to be leaderless--the better to criticize the elected leaders (politicians) in Washington. Yet in order to make any political gains, they must by necessity offer up, rally behind, and elect leaders themselves. Yet elected leaders eventually have to define themselves on the basis of any number of political decisions; a senator or representative is obliged to be a great deal more specific about her beliefs than "less spending and fewer taxes and more rights!" Inevitably, these specifics will reveal internal divisions: "You mean you're for X program and against Y legislation? What about Z issue? You've betrayed us!"

Indeed, you can see such divisions already, as "leaders" struggle to explain this or that frightening or racist or otherwise wackadoo stance or sign or slogan that appears at a tea party rally. The numerous references to violent action (e.g., openly displaying firearms, calling for a second American revolution) are particularly striking. I do not suggest that everyone or even that most people at a tea party gathering say such things. But enough do at enough tea parties that I think partiers disingenuous when they simply deny the existence of such sentiments. "Well, we're a leaderless movement," stammer the leaders (odd how tea partiers at once identify as and disavow the existence of leaders and spokespeople), "so we can't control who comes to our rallies. I can assure you, though, that the sentiment there doesn't represent us."

But there's the rub, no? A leaderless, totally grassroots organization has no "us" to speak of. It's a mass of people--powerful in its destructive force but less effective at getting anything productive done (Jose Ortega y Gasset famously compared masses to lava--powerful, destructive, directionless). I side with Gramsci here, who argues that masses eventually have to become parties, obliged to play the game of politics, where definitions of in and out have to be devised and where appeals to the base have to balance with concessions to other groups.

Complicating all of this consideration, for me, is the question of where evangelical or otherwise Christian-identified motivations and groups figure in the tea party setup.

More tomorrow,

JF

The What About Me Ethos: Tea Parties, Health Care, Haiti, and Avatar

2010-01-16T14:45:00.007-06:00

Odd, isn't it, how seemingly unrelated bits of information, when juxtaposed, often resonate?

This last week I've written about three almost completely unrelated news items: 1) the Haitian disaster and Christians' response to it; 2) the Tea Party movement; and 3) some evangelical leaders' queasiness at the James Cameron movie Avatar. I had really no notion that these would link to a common theme at all until today, when I read news reports about the Massachusetts election on Tuesday to replace Sen. Ted Kennedy.

In a traditionally true-blue state, a Republican candidate, Scott Brown, now seems neck-and-neck with the Democratic candidate, Martha Coakley. At stake in this election is the Democrats' tenuous hold on capitol hill power. Should the Democrats lose this seat, the upset will widely be interpreted as a watershed moment in politics, where President Obama's ambitious domestic agenda is put in check by a more-conservative-than-he-bargained-for public.

Worse, for the Democrats at least, is the fact that the health care reform bill so painstakingly advanced to House/Senate negotiations phase will almost certainly tank, as Brown vocally opposes the administration's reform efforts.

While I've been less than pleased with some of the deals (I think that's a generous word) cut with various Democratic senators to garner their support, I support the health care bill as mainly a good and necessary step. The thought that the months of anxious work on the bill could be undone by a narrow state election bothers me.

How does this all link back to the Tea Party/Avatar/Haiti intersection? It all came together for me with this quote from Mary Beth Cahill, John Kerry's former campaign manager who was queried by the Washington Post about the impact of a possible Republican victory. Like most of the other experts the paper asked, Cahill doubted that Brown would end up winning. If he does, however, Cahill predicts that Democrats will have a round of finger-pointing followed by some grim soul-searching, trying to figure out what things need doing before the midterm elections. Cahill offers one pressing reform: "We will have to provide an answer to voters who think, 'What about me?"

Cahill means that Democrats will have to be better about articulating how and why various administration policies will benefit Americans in the short term.

What about me? This, it seems, is the question roiling about in the many Tea Party protests, most of which identify and vilify any number of Big Red Devils (government, illegal immigrants, other countries, elites, liberals, the poor) portrayed as snatching away the benefits and rights and privileges that should be, well, mine. Enough with entitlement programs! Enough with taxes for foreign aid, universal health care, or welfare! What about me? That question serves as the beating heart of populist libertarianism today, the driving force of free market capitalism.

It is also the antithesis of what I understand to be the agape spirit of Christ. I am depressed beyond measure that an angry, petulant what about me? characterizes so much of the US spirit today. I'm frustrated that the answer to high-level greed of CEOs seems to be an argument that appeals to the lower-level greed of the middle classes: it's my turn for a piece of the pie. I'm upset, as well, that the Democrats--and frankly President Obama--have largely capitulated to these baser instincts in the health care reform process. All through the debates, I hear arguments about how health care reform will or will not lower my personal cost or quality of care. Absent entirely is the deeper question about the kind of society we want to create: one that cares for its members or one that does not. I hear no calls to sacrifice, no appeal to the ideal of a society in which those with care for those without.

Part of the popularity of Avatar, I'm gathering, involves Cameron's presentation of a sci-fi world in which all lifeforms are literally, biologically connected. All animals and many plants have biological "plugs" (a cluster of neuron tendrils) that allow any two of them to connect and share feelings, thoughts, etc. I found the plot device a bit silly, to be honest (the blue-skinned alien heroes have their tendril-things emerging from the ends of their ponytails, so there's a lot of hair-plugs--ha!). But apparently this notion of mutual co-existence and its ethical ramifications have caught many people's attention and passion.

Cameron has created a (for many people) compelling world in which the individual cannot be the prime unit of political or social consideration. In his world, What about me? becomes impossible to answer apart from What about everyone? By contrast, the villains of the film are overtly (one might say one-dimensionally) painted as selfish capitalists: they work for "The Corporation," they destroy nature in order to mine "unobtainium," they worry about profits and personal motives above all. (I should note here there are other aspects of Avatar that I feel undermine such a reading, but I'll deal with these later).

Only rarely do we see something like that trans-individual, others-first ethos in action. And this brings me to the Haiti disaster, which--comments by Pat Robertson et al. aside--appears to be an example of most of the world dropping everything and sending money/supplies/people to help a country in trouble. It's the What about everyone overtaking What about me, and no giant blue CGI figures are needed.

But of course Haiti is an exception, not the rule, and the world's attention to it is certain to be short-lived. It's only a matter of time until someone here begins wondering how and why we spent X millions of dollars to help a perpetually impoverished country (I mean, can't they just pull themselves up by their own bootstraps?) when Y US segment of the population is suffering from Z trouble. Governmental assistance means taxes. And while I've heard many a conservative Christian spokesperson wax lyrical about the virtues of private charity (a check to the Red Cross or something), heaven help anyone who suggests that perhaps a tax could be levied or increased to make sure that no one goes without adequate medical care.

"Rescue the perishing" transforms to "Don't tread on me" faster than a lightning strike. How is this logic change possible? How can Christians consider them selves other-directed in all things except in civil society? I hear constantly from the Christian right how one's faith should dictate one's political orientation in terms of culture-war issues. Why then is it so hard for me to see how Christian faith directs the economic policies the right supports?

I am not, I have to say, a fan of Avatar for a number of reasons. But to the extent that it taps into and cultivates an ethos that disrupts what about me?, I think there's some hope there.

More tomorrow,

JF

Avatar and Worldviews

2010-01-15T22:24:00.004-06:00

First, a follow-up note on Haiti:

Well, the blogosphere's reaction to Pat Robertson's statements about Haiti seems to be fairly unified: how dare he?! Among the more creative reactions are a letter to Robertson from "the Devil" and this segment from John Stewart's Daily Show:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Haiti Earthquake Reactions

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Crisis

Just beautiful, really, Stewart's Bible-based rebuttal.

So consonant is the chorus of voices condemning Robertson (and Rush Limbaugh) that I feel safe in moving on to other things to discuss (though the Haitian crisis is ongoing--our prayers support ought not cease).

Anyone seen Avatar, James Cameron's latest mega-blockbuster? Silly question, really; it's been topping box office charts for the past month or so. I saw it with my father in 3-D. I found it entertaining enough at the time, but I wasn't blown away. Cameron dresses up a thin melodrama (aptly described as Pocahontas meets Ferngully) with $300 million (or is it $500 million?) in special effects animation. Half a billion dollars does buy some impressive images.

Wikipedia provides an adequate plot synopsis if you've missed it thus far. Basically: the capitalist military-industrial complex gets bested by we're-all-connected, back-to-nature primitivism. Jake, the disabled main character, finds new life by downloading his consciousness into an "avatar"--a genetically crafted hybrid of human and alien (i.e., the tall, blue natives of the planet being plundered by above-mentioned military-industrial complex).

Two reactions to this film have caught my interest. First, not surprisingly, some evangelicals take issue with the film's worldview. Alex McFarland, a Christian evangelist and president of Southern Evangelical Seminary, has raised concerns about the film's pantheistic worldview and anti-capitalist critique.

Second, more surprising to me, is that some people are really, really, really, really into this film. The same escapist, back-to-nature pantheism that McFarland cautions against proves to many fans so enticing, so much better than drear reality, that the Avatar movie website's forums have a number of threads dedicated to dealing with the disappointment that Pandora doesn't actually exist (see here, for example). The posts on there range from the light (e.g., "gee, I wish I could hang out on Pandora") to the sad (e.g., "my life is so boring here. I wish I lived there on that world.") to the worrisome, as in people becoming clinically depressed after watching the film. This CNN article on Avatar blues quotes one forum poster:

"Ever since I went to see 'Avatar' I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na'vi made me want to be one of them. I can't stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it," Mike posted. "I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and the everything is the same as in 'Avatar.' "

Yeek.

What's odd is that I had nothing remotely like that reaction to the film. It was a movie with big, loud effects and big, loud dramaturgy (much like Cameron's Titanic, really). Something, however, clearly and strongly touched a great many people watching the film. I'm curious as to whether this something is similar to the elements that triggered McFarland's alarm bells...

I suspect that some of McFarland's unease has to do with Avatar's spirituality.

More tomorrow,

JF

Pat Robertson Embarrasses Christianity Yet Again

2010-01-14T22:21:00.006-06:00

I fear I was a bit harsh on Fred Phelps in my posting a few days ago about Haiti. Reviewing some of the Christian responses to massive tragedies that I find problematic, I referenced briefly the "they had it coming" argument. X catastrophe happened because Y victim was either personally or corporately guilty of Z sin. I dismissed that whole argument as too obviously vile to address seriously, writing that only someone like the Rev. Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps would ever seriously advance it.

Then I hear about Pat Robertson's little theory. I quote from the Time story about Robertson, which relates this passage he offered up on an episode of his 700 Club (thanks to my father for the link):

"And you know, Kristi, something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, you know, Napoleon the Third and whatever, and they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, 'We will serve you if you'll get us free from the French.' True story. And so the devil said, 'O.K., it's a deal.' "
Because of this, Robinson concludes, Haiti has ever since been awash in catastrophe (except, of course, the catastrophe of enslavement by French colonialism. That they got rid of pretty successfully).

Video of the segment can be found embedded with the Time story. The article explains that Robertson refers here to an apocryphal tale of Haitian Voodoo (aka Vodou) priest sacrificing a pig in 1791 to jump-start the Haitian revolution (not, of course against Napoleon the Third, who lived in the mid-to-late 1800s).

Sigh.

A statement from Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network insists that "Dr. Robertson never stated that the earthquake was God’s wrath." It goes on to assert Robertson's humanitarian concern with Haiti's plight, citing the ministry's work in helping those afflicted.

OK, I grant that Robertson did not literally say that the earthquake was God's wrath against Haitians. . . . but exactly what other conclusion are we to draw? Haiti (in Robertson's historical view) made a covenant with the devil (it's worth mentioning, of course, that the Christian devil plays no role in Vodou theology). Now they suffer disaster after disaster.

Why even try to spin that? After all Robertson has hardly been shy in the past about pinning blame for tragedies like Hurricane Katrina, 9-11, and the AIDS epidemic on specific groups of sinners (mainly gays and feminists). His belief in natural disasters as God's Whupping Stick is well-established. Why deny it now?

I get that Robertson probably does sincerely and simultaneously believe that A) most victims of the earthquake need help, prayer, and care; and B) the earthquake and other Haitian misfortunes are the result of that ritual of 1791. Haitians--corporately if not personally--are victims of a curse they brought upon themselves (the history of enslavement, colonialism, and impoverishment was all incidental, apparently). As victims they should be cared for, but it's worth remembering (and reminding everyone about) the source of their victimhood--themselves.

That logic flabbergasts me, and I could rail against it, but whatever. Even if you believe that logic, though, here's the question I want answered: is bringing it up right now the Christian thing to do? Right now--as people are digging through rubble and rock with their bare hands to find their loved ones--this is the time to say, however sheepishly, I know you don't want to hear this, but this is what you get for making a deal with Satan over three centuries ago... Really?

As my counselor sister says, "What do you want me to do with this information?" Exactly what should the Haitians--many of whom are devout Christians themselves and none of whom sacrificed a pig to anything in 1791--exactly what should they do with Robertson's vicious little lagniappe? How does this help them? How does that so-very-sad-tongue-clucking demonstrate the love and solidarity of God With Us?

[Or, in a less generous reading, perhaps Robertson's audience wasn't the victims but those of us here in the US at a remove (not a big one, mind) from one of the poorest countries in the world, a country in whose history the West (and especially the US) has played a large role? What does Robertson's message say to us except "Not our responsibility. They brought it on themselves. We can help, but it's above-and-beyond for us, and it'll never do any real good in the long run anyway. The Haitians will always be Haitians..." Somehow a pig sacrifice historiographically eclipses centuries of slavery before it and centuries of exploitation and intervention after it, absolving non-Haitians of any and all responsibility for the country's economic difficulties.]

I get that Robertson's ministry is on the ground in Haiti helping people. Good for them. But you know what? So are dozens of other organizations, religious and secular, and somehow--somehow--they've managed to render assistance without assigning blame, however far removed historically, to the victims of plate tectonics.

And this is nothing new for Robertson! I mean, he's practically trademarked foot-in-mouth evangelicalism. Remember when he called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez? Or when he intimated that Dover, PN would face destruction because of a court decision involving intelligent design? Or when he--well, heck, there's a whole Wikipedia entry about Robertson's controversies (including this one).

Inevitably, Robertson comes out expressing shock at the extremely negative reaction his comments caused--rarely if ever actually apologizing, mind you. Wait for it--he'll come out doddering about how shocked--shocked!--he is about how badly some people have misunderstood his remarks, doubtless because of the liberal media... Yet he continues to be respected as an authority for Christians. Never have I been a fan of Robertson or his organization, but really: how much longer can any Christian treat him seriously as a beneficial spokesperson for the faith? How many horrible, spiritually tone-deaf gaffes does he have to make before he's declared Unfit For Christian Representation?

I think a lot about evangelicals' concern about how Christianity is seen as mean-spirited, hypocritical, and judgmental by non-believers. So long as someone like Pat Robertson gets credit as a respected mouthpiece of the faith, we can hardly be surprised that this is so.

It's time he stepped away from the petty pulpit.

More tomorrow (and continue to give to/pray for Haitian relief!),

JF

Tea Party Politics

2010-01-13T23:16:00.004-06:00

Brief note: News of Haiti's suffering continues to pour in. Please take a moment to pray and contribute what you can to a reputable relief agency (I gave to UMCOR).

Meanwhile, in less traumatic topics, I listened today to a podcast of On Point with Tom Ashbrook, an NPR-affiliated radio talkshow. The topic? The Tea Party, the populist, grassroots (some would quibble with that descriptor), diverse, and widespread movement of fiscal and social conservatives agitating for a variety of reforms to US policy and government. Given my research interests in the performance of conservative activism, it's perhaps surprising that I've avoided doing much work on this most visible and powerful of political protest movements on the right.

This show served as a good introduction to some of their beliefs and operations. Ashbrook (the host) devoted most of the show to two guests, themselves leaders of local Tea Party-affiliated groups. Throughout the dual interview/call-in, Ashbrook maintained a pretty fair tone throughout, pushing gently when a guest or a caller made an unclear or contradictory statement but never becoming cable-talk-showy (i.e., aggressive, interrupting, belittling, etc.).

For all the conversation, though I remain in the dark about the Tea Party's core ideals. Certainly "less government spending" and "less taxation" appear to be common themes. But the rationales underlying these slogans, as well as the related political/cultural philosophies linked with them, remain inchoate. Both guests tended to speak in rather vague terms about personal liberties or the values of the founding fathers. Beyond such language, however, their worldviews seemed to diverge sharply.

One guest, Lorie Medina from the Dallas Tea Party, cited some relatively specific grievances, instances in which she feels the government has overstepped its bounds by, for example, dictating the leadership of this or that corporation. She was careful to keep her arguments restricted to economic policy, advocating a Reganesque "no big government" libertarianism (though she did not use that latter term). The other guest, Jeffrey McQueen, founded a group (or, perhaps, a website) called "USRevolution2." Its main offering at present appears to be a modified flag available for purchase:

Asked by Ashbrook about the flag's design, McQueen explained that the thirteen stars reference (of course) both the original thirteen colonies of the original American Revolution and the thirteen guests at the Lord's Supper. The second revolution the flag alludes to implies a coming reform of government along general lines of fair tax, fair trade, limited government, and the right to bear arms.

McQueen's rhetoric ranged more widely than Medina's did. The show's more extreme comments came from him, as he at one point drew comparisons between the health care reform bill and the Holocaust (solemnly referring to Jewish relatives of his who died in Nazi camps) and openly described the President as a socialist. Toward the end of his time, he said something to the effect that Americans have "four boxes" to use in order to express themselves: the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box--and the "bullet box." Ashbrook stopped him, asking him to elaborate. Did he really mean an armed revolution? "Just look at ammunition sales," McQueen answered. "They're way up."

Medina tactfully distanced herself from that particular line. She also strained to distance herself from overtly racist images that a caller reported were being sent to him and defended by Dallas-based Tea Party people. Both Medina and McQueen vehemently denied that either they or their fellow Tea Partiers were racist simply because they disagreed with Obama, castigating what they saw as critics' easy recourse to "the race card." As for the racist images and alarming/violent slogans circulated at Tea Party rallies, Medina fell back on the fact that the Tea Party is a leaderless grassroots movement that does not police its members. (Oddly, she coupled this argument with firm assurances that her Tea Party group would never allow such images in its communications).

One caller picked up McQueen's reference to the Last Supper, challenging McQueen to explain how the passionately anti-socialist Tea Party could reconcile its pro-capitalism with the practice of the early church as described in Acts (I think he referenced Acts 4: 32-35--"All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had. . . . There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.").

Here my ears perked up. Pace Max Weber, the collusion between capitalism and Christianity baffles me since passages like the one above seem utterly at odds with the profit/property/individualism values of the "free market." Is not the sharing all things with everyone and giving the needy everything they need more socialist? Medina swooped into rescue McQueen, claiming authority as the daughter of a Baptist pastor. The Acts passage, she explained, described the believers' actions toward each other. They did not, she argued, give their money "to Ceasar" and then ask Ceasar to redistribute it. That would be socialism. Christians give their possessions on their own, not via government.

I've heard this interpretation before, and, forgive my bluntness, but what self-serving tripe! It's the height of hypocrisy for a Christian-right political conservative to hide behind separation of church and state when the bulk of their agenda blatantly pushes US government to mirror supposedly Christian values. Would it be socialism for the US government to adopt and enforce strictly Christian notions of, say, marriage? Would it be socialism for the government to adopt Christianity as its official religion? The Christian right (broadly speaking) consistently holds that the US is a Christian nation. Shouldn't a Christian nation adopt Christian values--not just culturally but economically?

Moreover, Medina's exegesis conveniently dodges the caller's main criticism. Even if the example in Acts 4 doesn't advocate a socialist economic system, no stretching can possibly distort that passage into a Christian case for supporting capitalism, particularly the corporate-freedom capitalism Medina praises. Where exactly does Jesus or the early church throw their support behind trickle-down economics?

But I digress...

Clearly the Tea Party is a diverse movement in the throes of defining itself. Certainly its members have a great deal of passion, but (as Elinor Clift mentioned in a subsequent show segment) passion isn't enough to create meaningful political change. At some point they will need to cohere around a leader who articulates their passion in terms of a distinct platform of policy proposals. And the tricky thing about articulation: it dissolves the illusion of unity conjured by hurrah-words like "freedom" and "values" and "normalcy."

I wait to see how and if the Tea Party confronts and navigates its own internal differences.

More tomorrow,

JF

God and the Haiti Earthquake

2010-01-12T19:39:00.005-06:00

Here I was primed to continue ruminations on evangelicals and marriage stuff when I learn about the awful 7.0 earthquake to hit Haiti near Port-au-Prince. One of the poorest countries in the world, Haiti had already taken a beating this last fall from hurricane after hurricane, leaving billions of dollars of damage and many hundreds dead. To have an earthquake--and such a powerful one--strike them after all that . . .

Well, it's one of those situations that skeptics commonly point to as evidence that 1) God doesn't exist; 2) God does exist but is powerless; or 3) God exists, is powerful, but isn't benevolent toward the very people--the least, the last, the lost, the poorest--God claims to care for most of all.

I gotta admit: I have trouble coming up with a satisfactory answer to that in the face of picture after picture of human loss, injury, and sorrow. I have more difficulty swallowing the ready-made apologetics (or, more properly theodicies--defenses of God's existence/goodness in the face of Evil) that often get offered up in response to the skeptics' attacks, though.

Some of my least favorites:

"God has a plan, and it all works out for the best." I don't want to be ungenerous. This kind of comment means well, seeking to reaffirm a faith in an ordered, ultimately God-ordained universe. In its best iterations, the comment comes packaged with a great deal of humility: "I don't pretend to understand why this happened..." It's the verbal equivalent of a sympathetic shrug and slow shake of the head accompanied by a retreat to core beliefs: God exists, even now.

And I like and respect that very last sentiment--God exists, even now. But I'm uncomfortable with the next logical question: so what? What does it mean that God exists? More--what does it mean that God "has a plan," that God ordains every single occurrence on earth? God caused an earthquake to strike a country like Haiti? God not only knocks Haiti down; God kicks it savagely? If God ordains every single natural event, pushing this shower here, setting off this volcano there, guiding this meteor into a crowded city--then I have to agree with the skeptics: that's a horrific image of God.

Because, let's face it: nature is mean. It's 100% fatal, in the long run. If the earthquakes don't get you, then the lightning will. Or the tornadoes, the hurricanes, the tsunami, the meteors... Or just plain old age. Nature is awesome and beautiful, yes, but it's also disease, disaster, and death. To live is to suffer, and I'm not OK with the notion of a God who directs that suffering.

"Tragedies like this are trials, but don't worry. God never tests us beyond our limit." Ugh. Such a rationale simultaneously trivializes massive catastrophe ("it's just a test") and aggravates divine brutality (i.e., God will kill thousands to test the faith of a few). And about that "God never tests us beyond our limit." If all human suffering is a test, then people get over-tested all the time. People die from cancer, from natural disasters, from accidents, from depression. The "suffering=test" equation invites grisly speculation about the worth or culpability of people who live and die for reasons frankly beyond their hope of controlling. Perhaps tests of faith do happen on the occasion of suffering, but I reject the notion that all suffering is only a test.

"This happens because of man's sin." Now, there are two versions of this comment/rationale. The first, the softer version, lays out that, because of Adam's original sin, death and suffering entered the world. Nature is mean because of what humans (Adam specifically, but all of us metaphorically) did. God's grace, in this view, is that God offers a way to transcend this mean, broken world.

The stronger version of this comment reads a direct cause-and-effect relationship between natural disasters and specific human sins. Katrina struck New Orleans, for example, because the city was so sinful, tolerating and celebrating debaucheries like homosexuality, fornication, drinking, etc. In its extreme form, the natural-disasters-result-from-sin argument characterizes folk like Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps, who argues stridently that we ought to thank God for events like 9-11 since such death/suffering is merely God's righteous punishment poured out upon a nation that has rejected God.

I trust the latter line of thinking needs little refutation. It's vile, creating a God who is not merely indifferent but actively petty, striking back at whole populations for the perceived sins of a few (of course, a die-hard Calvinist would insist that no one--not even the tiniest infant--is innocent; all humans deserve every kind of suffering imaginable). The softer version of this rationale--the world is broken because of man's sin--frankly doesn't quite avoid sharing some of this vileness, I fear. To view hundreds of people dead--men, women, children, old, young--and to attempt to set that into context by referring to original sin (literally or metaphorically) just reeks too much of the Phelpsian cause-and-effect mentality for me. God still remains a petty tyrant in this picture, throwing hurricanes at humans for eating some fruit.

So--where does that leave me? Faced with something like the Haiti earthquake, what is there to say about God?

I don't know. The suggestions I offer to myself, though, go something like this: 1) Tamp down the desire to "say something" grand or comforting or explanatory. It's not likely to help. 2) Remember that the answer to "where is God?" can nearly always be found by looking for the neighbor in need. Right now, God is in Haiti, suffering from pain and loss. 3) Remember that I am called to be the neighbor to my neighbor, the help, the comfort, the sustenance--as much as I can be. Not having medical skills or the ability to drop everything, fly down, and start saving people (Grand Hero), I can make donations to organizations like UMCOR who can and will provide help. 4) Pray. Ask God to help those in Haiti and those helping them. Ask God where God is. Listen for an answer.

Hope.

More tomorrow,

JF

Marriage and Divorce in Evangelical Circles

2010-01-11T21:12:00.003-06:00

Well, that was a longer time away than I had anticipated. I spent time in Illinois with my partner, enduring the northern version of the Terror Blizzard of 2010. Now I'm back in the deep South, where temps in the 20s seem balmy by comparison.

Certainly there's no end of evangelical goings-on to write about. At present, however, I'm planning for this semester's grad seminar in gender and sexuality, so my mind travels to those topics. Specifically, the conservative Christian net is abuzz currently with the current court challenge to California's Proposition 8, which altered CA's constitution so as to define marriage as solely the union of heterosexuals. As you can imagine, I have a number of predictable opinions about this story...

Conservative evangelical interest in marriage--even apart from anti-gay marriage campaigns--proves a fascinating subject on its own, though, all the more so because at first glance marriage isn't all that central to Christianity as a faith practice. Oh, to be sure, the New Testament uses the metaphor of a bride and groom now and again to describe various features of the Kingdom of God or to characterize the relation of Christ and the Church. But compared to, say, caring for the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, the least, the last, the lost--dictating exactly how marriage should happen seems of secondary importance. Paul, for instance, famously (in I Corinthians 7) seems to dismiss marriage as necessary evil for those otherwise unable to live in celibacy.

This sense that marriage serves as a necessary anodyne to human (heterosexual) lust shows up in a recent post on Michael Spencer's "Internet Monk" blog. There the guest poster tracks how the age of marriage in the US seems on the rise. This trend worries the poster because the longer one waits to marry, the longer one is exposed to sexual temptation. Given that rates of sex prior to marriage are high, the poster suggests (citing an article in Christianity Today by Mark Regnerus) that churches begin encouraging couples to marry earlier, with "older married couples mentoring younger ones." The poster ends by posing a series of questions to shape discussions in the comments section (which are themselves stimulating reading):

1. Is sex outside of marriage a sin? If so, why? (I know someone is going to ask the question, so I might as well be the first. By the way, I do believe it is, but I am interested in hearing others reasoning.)

2. Assuming the answer to one is yes, what can we do to help our youth wait for marriage?

3. Is abstinence alone the right message? If it is abstinence plus something else, is this sending the right message?

4. Is early marriage a possible solution?

5. While not discussed above, along with the increase in premarital sex has come an increase in co-habitation. If we are truly evangelistic, we are going to see more and more people coming into our churches who are co-habitating. What do we say to, or do with, the co-habitating couple who starts attending our church?

6. Now this is a question that might seem to come out of left field, but I believe that it directly relates. If our older youth are so likely to have participated in premarital sex, how do we address the homosexual? If seems somewhat hypocritical of us to suggest that they can’t have sex outside of marriage when we are having sex outside of marriage.

The questions, while quite open relative to most evangelical contexts, betray of course a set of presuppositions concerning the marriage issue (sex and sexuality in general, really) and how it relates to evangelicalism. Mainly: the questions betray a fairly common evangelical assumption that heterosexual marriage stands supreme as the Ultimate Goal of Christian adulthood (oddly in contrast to Paul's own opinions, no?). Singleness in celibacy simply doesn't seem like much of an option here. People lust, especially young people, and marriage is the cure for lust.

The questions also overlook an elephant in the evangelical marriage chapel: divorce. Younger marriages tend, as one commenter noted, to be corrosive of long-lasting unions (50% divorce rate, anyone?). Indeed, aren't self-identified evangelicals' divorce rates higher than those of non-evangelicals? Actually, an article I ran into in the November 11, 2008 Christian Century related that the 50% divorce rate so often bandied about drops to as low as 16.7% for adults who marry subsequent to earning a college degree. (source: Stafford, Tim. "Educated for marriage." Christian Century 125.22 (2008): 11-12. Religion and Philosophy Collection. EBSCO. Web. 11 Jan. 2010.). Considering populist evangelical suspicion of higher education, such a statistic doesn't seem likely to get widespread play among evangelicals.

These facts, however, do raise an uncomfortable issue for evangelicals committed both to marriage and to constraining singles' lust. Which is worse: to burn in lust and (perhaps) engage in premarital sex/higher education but then enjoy what will likely be a more stable marriage, or to enter a marriage at an earlier age in order to escape lust? (Of course, the idea that marriage provides an escape to lust is itself a debatable notion.)

More tomorrow,

JF

PS: Prayers for Michael Spencer, who is relying on guest posters as he undergoes treatment for a life-threatening illness. I do not agree with many of his beliefs, but I respect and appreciate his work and influence as an in-house critic of evangelicalism.

Tabatha and Truth-Telling

2010-01-05T21:28:00.005-06:00

Back home from a day of driving with my father! So--I'm tired out from the trip, gearing up for the semester, about to jet off to see my partner in the upper midwest (hopefully beating the January Terror Blizzard of '10)--basically I have 1,001 things I should be doing.

What do I do instead? I watch three back-to-back episodes of Tabatha's Salon Take-over (TSTo). For those who don't know, the Bravo reality-TV series features Tabatha Coffey, a platinum-blond Australian salon owner whom struggling salon owners invite in to critique and re-vamp their businesses. Like many Bravo shows, TSTo works by formula: Tabatha watches video of struggling salon, makes various exasperated and shocked observations, swoops in, tells everyone how and why they're in trouble, makes people angry/ashamed/weepy, and then wins everyone's hearts by introducing various innovations (sometimes impressive tricks of the trade; sometimes just commonsense suggestions), which saves the struggling salon from bankruptcy.

I don't think the show is any more or less well-done than any of the other accented-expert-gives-people-needed-wake-up-call (e.g., Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares, Supernanny). I have no real interest in hair salons or hairstyling. And while I've grown to respect her pedagogical techniques (she's not all sassy British put-downs) I'm not going to go out to start a fanclub for Coffey.

Why did I watch three (count them!) hours of the darn show, then? I watch, I realize, because each episode showcases glowing moments of authoritative truth-telling. "You think things are like X," says Tabatha (or Jo, or Gordon, or what have you), "but I'm here to tell you that I know X, and this [gestures contemptuously] is definitely not X. It's more Y."

It's the same scene, really, as those I most like in shows such as The West Wing--where someone legitimately aware and empowered asserts a Hard Truth to someone who needs to hear it. The scene is even better when the someone being told really thinks he or she is cock of the rock (e.g., the salon owner, the top stylist, President Bartlett).

That dramatic moment--related, I think, to what Aristotle called anagnorisis ("the recognition")--just makes my little self-confidence nerves go all a-buzz. Self-assertion has never been a strong suit of mine. I have bad emotional reflexes. Usually I tend to under-react or react after the fact to slights or boundary violations that I should confront in the moment of their occurrence. At other times I turn my insult-radar up to high, unleashing all my pent-up "Let me tell you how it really is" at the wrong person, in the wrong time, about something that does not merit any such drama. Those few times where I have actually and maturely asserted a difficult truth feel not pleasurable but fraught with anxiety (will the person listen? will my relationship with them survive this confrontation?).

These shows, however, present me with the vicarious fantasy of effective truth-telling, where the Hard Truth gets told without passive aggression or sugarcoating, and--the fantasy part--where the Telling produces results. Inevitably, the recipients of the truth-telling scenes in those shows I like absorb the news, hurt and angry, perhaps, but ultimately surrendering to the epistemic authority (or perhaps just rhetorical authority) of the teller. "Tabatha really pissed me off," says the stylist being dressed-down, "but I realize she's right. I need to do X much better. The truth hurts, but it's important to hear."

How rare that reaction is in life! How much more often my attempts at righteous truth-telling result in the person ignoring me, exploding, or (worst of all) telling me how things really are and making me realize how foolish I was to think X was the case. How rarely do I myself react productively to being told hard truths! Truth-telling of the really satisfying kind presented on TV remains, well, the purview of TV shows. It's the product of editing, dramaturgy, acting, and direction.

But confrontation and truth-telling is nonetheless necessary. My sister (the counselor) often reminds me that confrontation and self-assertion function often more for the benefit of the asserter than they do for the listener. I cannot control how the other person might take my words, but this does not absolve me of the responsibility to make my position--here's how things are--plain to them. The person to whom I speak might recognize my truth, reject it, or sever ties with me. But side-stepping such confrontation can exact longer and deeper costs.

Certainly I see the wisdom of this kind of truth-telling in interpersonal relationships.

What about political relationships? More to my point on this blog, what about relationships within the body-politic that is the Church? My time in Oklahoma this last holiday break alerted me to a number of culture-war battlefields where I feel a particular stance by some person or group--especially one labeling itself Christian--demands from me a strong response. Certainly I wish I could don an accent and a platinum-blond wig and swoop in, giving to this or that person my authoritative take on where and how his or her stance is wrong.

Intra-Christian disagreements about culture war issues, however, differ from such a fantasy in two ways: 1) often the person I want to tell off sees his or her initial statement as the "difficult truth" that needs to be told. 2) I want the other person not only to listen to my counter-statement but to agree with it, to be convinced of it.

We are urged by the author of Ephesians to speak the truth in love. How, I wonder, does that lvoe manifest in moments of confrontational honesty, especially in and around evangelical culture war issues?

More tomorrow (hopefully--still more traveling in internet-dry places),

JF

Happy New Year

2010-01-02T21:40:00.002-06:00

On a break and out of pocket for a bit. Enjoy New Year's weekend! Back posting in about a week.

JF

Custody Battles and Evangelical Civil Disobedience

2009-12-30T23:42:00.003-06:00

Happy New Year's Eve-Eve, everyone. I'm occupied with work-related stuff in an effort to finish up in time to enjoy the next couple of days work-free.

In the meantime, quite a bit on the evangelicals-in-the-world front is going on. I'll relate one such item all-too-briefly:

I refer to the situation involving a custody battle between two women, Lisa Miller and Janet Jenkins. Miller and Jenkins were legally coupled (a la domestic partnership) in Vermont back in 2000. Two years later, they had a baby, Isabella, as a couple (though Miller was the biological mother). Miller subsequently (in the fall of 2003) returned to her conservative Christian faith, renouncing her relationship with Jenkins and becoming in effect a former lesbian. Jenkins, understandably, sought to enjoy visitation rights guaranteed in Vermont's law. Though Miller had moved to Virginia, courts there consistently ruled that Jenkins has the same rights to see and visit Isabella that any straight parent would have in the instance of a divorce with children.

Miller, with extensive support from conservative Christian legal agencies, consistently challenged Jenkins's right to see Isabella. Courts became increasingly impatient with Miller's resistance, finally ruling this last year that the only way to enforce visitation rights is to switch custody to Jenkins.

The switch was to take place on Jan 1, 2010. A last-ditch effort by Miller's attorneys to stay the switch failed, as the Virginia judge noted that Miller had failed to show up to the hearing and had cut off all contact with her lawyers. (The blog Box Turtle Bulletin, always a great source of LGBT-related news, has a nice summary and timeline.)

The latest twist? It seems now that Miller has absconded with Isabella rather than abide by the court's ruling.

Let there be no mistake: the situation with Isabella and her parents is at least as ugly as custody battles usually are. My interest is in the conservative-evangelical response to it. Of course, conservative evangelicals typically oppose any civil union or marriage-like arrangement between same-sex partners (with multiple exceptions, of course). Yet they also typically oppose breaking the law, in this case the direct and repeated orders from Virginia courts as well as kidnapping a seven-year-old. Which tendency will win out?

It's early yet to tell; the story hasn't quite broken the surface of national media. But in the conservative news sources I look at, the spin seems to be that Miller's kidnapping and going into hiding constitutes a brave and necessary act of civil disobedience. Onenewsnow's comments on their heavily slanted reporting are revealing (though in fairness a number of posters seem supportive of Jenkins). More telling (and disturbing) is this web site, proclaiming a "Protect Isabella Coalition." Box Turtle Bulletin links that site to one Debbie Thurman, a semi-prominent spokesperson for ex-gay ministries (primarily her own, called "The Formers"). Interestingly, the site's "think of the children!" rhetoric works alongside some good old-fashioned talk about "judicial activism" and the violation of Miller's religious rights.

"Why aren't Virginia's marriage laws and DOMA [Defense of Marriage Act] not working?" asks the FAQ section. The answer, of course, is that the federal constitution's full faith and credit clause requires Virginia to honor agreements legally made in Vermont. Moreover, the fact that Miller is in contempt of court by disappearing with Isabella does not show her or her case to advantage in the eyes of the judiciary.

Thus civil disobedience--breaking a law one considers unjust--becomes necessary. The groundswell of support for Miller among at least some evangelicals, however, suggests that such civil disobedience may spread. A person that knowingly shelters Miller and Isabella, or who lies about their whereabouts, is also committing civil disobedience.

The question then presents itself: how does this act of civil disobedience (and the pronouncements of support for it) function as political activism? How does it function as Christian witness?

More tomorrow,

JF

Permittted Free Speech and Open-Air Preaching in Georgia

2009-12-29T22:32:00.004-06:00

"Permitted free speech?" repeats the man incredulously, "That's an oxymoron!"

It's March 28, 2008, a sunny day on what looks to be the central quad of Georgia Southern University. A group of people, led by a young man with longish brown hair, confront an administrator, who is flanked by a two burly campus police. What's the problem?

The man, Benjamin Bloedorn, had, along with a handful of other men, been evangelizing in public, "open-air preaching" (with some sign-waving and singing as well) in an attempt to encourage GSU students and passersby to convert. It appears, however, that in doing so he violated GSU's free speech policy, which requires that non-sponsored speakers apply for and receive permission to speak on campus. During the confrontation, which eventually led to Bloedorn's arrest, Bloedorn and his associates argued that GSU, as a public university supported by state taxpayer funds, cannot claim to be private property and thus has no standing to dictate who may or may not speak on their grass and sidewalks.

The police disagreed. So too, according to a story today on the conservative site Onenewsnow, did the Georgia court. Of course, Onenewsnow spins the story as yet another slight in a context of anti-Christian bias by the state: "Christian witnessing a no-no on campus," reads the headline. Other conservative evangelical websites echo this sentiment, alleging both that the act constitutes an attack on Christianity and an unconstitutional hindrance on free speech.

The Bloedorn affair represents something of a trend in which confrontational evangelists (and other kinds of activists) challenge the state's right to police free speech and expression. Other evangelists, such as Michael Marcavage of the group Repent America, regularly run afoul of officers' charging them with trespassing. Such charges, of course, fuel Marcavage's particular evangelistic philosophy, which interprets resistance by authorities as proof that God's word is being preached (and resisted by the devil).

Bloedorn, from what I can tell, seems linked to the Faithful Soldier School of Evangelism, a kind of homegrown training/evangelism group led by Jason and Sara Storms, specializing in confrontational campus evangelism, particularly around issues such as pro-life and anti-homosexuality. Bloedorn is an alumnus of this school (you can see him in Faithful Soldier pictures here and here), though I don't think the GSU protest was FSSE activity. Broadly, FSSE seems to follow a Ray Comfort-type philosophy that the best, most Biblically based evangelism takes place via open-air preaching that uses the Law (i.e., the Ten Commandments) to inspire listeners to confront their own guilt before God, repent, and receive Christ.

I gather that Bloedorn and company were doing just that when the GSU officials confronted them. This being the Youtube age, a video account of this confrontation and the subsequent arrest exists. Here's Bloedorn being arrested:

Videos of the arguments leading up to the arrest are here here and here. These video accounts match up to that contained in the brief filed on behalf of Bloedorn by the conservative Alliance Defense Fund.

Now, Bloedorn's evangelistic strategy of course interests me, given my research interests. But, as a matter of clarification, let me address the free speech arguments advanced by Bloedorn and by the ADF.

Is "permitted free speech" an oxymoron? Only in the abstract. In practice, no such thing as a right to utterly unrestricted speech has ever been recognized by the US government. Indeed, for a long time the "freedom of speech" meant only that the US federal government could not impose "prior restraint"--preemptively forbid speech. This prohibition did not necessarily extend to the state or local governments, nor did this prohibition exclude punitive measures by the State against speakers. Only in the twentieth century did speech rights come to mean more what we recognize today as the right of an individual to say or express whatever he or she pleases without fear of censorship or state reprisal.

And even this right isn't absolute. The right to free speech has never been understood to cover direct threats ("I'm going to kill you if you vote for X candidate"), incitements to violence ("you should shoot X candidate in the face when she gets up to speak"), disruptions of the peace (e.g., shouting "fire!" in a crowded theatre), obscenity, or libel/slander. Nor is speech allowed just anywhere, at any time, whenever or wherever someone pleases. The US relies on a scheme of ordered liberty, not a free-for-all yelling match. The right to express whatever you'd like does not guarantee you an audience.

In this case, the evangelists repeatedly make two arguments: 1) that GSU, as a public university, cannot claim private property or restrict speech on its grounds; and 2) that the notion of permitted free speech is unconstitutional. The latter claim, as I've demonstrated, does not stand. All speech operates under certain prior restraints in the interests of public safety. As fo the former claim, the evangelists use questionable definitions of public and private. Yes, GSU is likely a public university. And yes, GSU has the right to restrict trespassers and speakers--especially when said speakers are not students at GSU (as Bloedorn was not).

The University official had it right when she pointed out to the evangelists that one cannot simply traipse into a courthouse or senate building, set up signs, and begin preaching (the camera operator--whom I think was Bloedorn--tried to argue that point, insisting he had heard of people who had done just that). The freedom of speech isn't the same as a freedom of universal access. Georgia taxpayers doubtless do pay for a great deal of GSU's budget; it does not follow that any one taxpayer has unfettered access to all parts of the University.

Tellingly, the ADF's brief does not attempt to make either of the evangelists' arguments. Instead it suggests that 1) the boundaries between public sidewalks and GSU property are unclear; and 2) GSU's procedures for granting non-sponsored speakers access are arduous and unfair, constituting a prior restraint.

Those procedures, by the way, are as follows (copied from the brief):

It is the policy of Georgia Southern to permit the use of facilities by the general community in a manner which does not compete with the ongoing programs of the University. Speakers who are not sponsored by a campus organization may request permission to initiate a gathering on campus. Request forms are available in the Russell Union Office, Room 2070.

If a non-campus speaker is approved, the University reserves the right to assign space and designate time frequency and length of the proposed activity. A typical length of time for a speaker is one and a half hours. Frequency should be no more than once a month under normal circumstances. Under no conditions will a noncampus speaker be permitted to sell items or solicit funds on campus. (Members of the same group or organization dealing with the same general topic will be considered one speaker for the purpose of scheduling stipulation.)

The administrator confronting the evangelists actually went over this procedure several times, offering them numerous opportunities to leave, fill out the form, get permission, and return. The evangelists seemed unaware of these procedures and, when informed of them, pointedly refused to abide by them.

The legal-civil issues at play here seem clear. GSU had set procedures for non-sponsored speakers to speak; Bloedorn and company declined to follow them.

The theological issues here actually interest me more.

More tomorrow,

JF

A Visit to my Old Church

2009-12-27T18:48:00.004-06:00

So... After a nice make-up Christmas with my family, the inevitable Sunday morning question presented itself: where to go to church? It's a rare Sunday when my father is off from his preaching duties, but impassable streets, ice-slick church parking lots, and the specter of parishioners' broken hips compelled him to cancel his morning services, allowing he and I to travel to the city to visit my sister and her husband.

But my father's cancellation didn't mean "no church," just "different church." We ended up visiting my old church, the Methodist congregation I had attended throughout my undergrad years.

This church is what is called a "reconciling congregation," meaning it aligns with the Reconciling Ministries Network, a parachurch organization aimed at changing United Methodist policy to become more inclusive of GLBT folk. I began attending the church my freshman year largely because it was nearby (I lacked a car in those days), because some friends of mine went, and because the church was smaller than the more intimidating Huge Methodist Churches in the area.

That it was Reconciling was, in retrospect, a God thing--serendipity with a divine push--for my freshman year of college just happened to be the year I came to terms with being gay myself.

I hesitate to go into that now; it's a story I've told so many times it feels old and trite to me. Suffice it to say that, in a time where I was questioning just about every aspect of my life and self-image, that Reconciling church helped me to hang on to a sense of God as reliably loving. I might be changing (at least, my image of myself--my past, my future--might be changing), but two things I knew: 1) my family loved me no matter what; and 2) God loved me no matter what.

To those who haven't experienced a reconciling congregation or other GLBT-affirming worship--I recommend it. Rarely do you see such a cross-section of society (racial, class, gender, age, ability) in a single sanctuary. People--gay and lesbian and bisexual and transgender people especially--hear about this place where it's OK to be who they are and worship as they feel they should. And they come. And they come. And they come. When I first started attending, the church had just voted to become reconciling, and church numbers soared.

You experience the conventions of worship, the vocabulary of liturgy, so differently in an audience of people who come from places where they've been denied those things. To sing a hymn together openly and proudly, to hear a sermon with hope rather than trepidation, to take communion--these things are so easy to take for granted. In a reconciling church, you realize that you are surrounded with people who many times have lived years locked outside of church participation because of who they are. Many had been told that they could never, ever be gay or lesbian and live a life pleasing to God. Many had been subjected to (or had subjected themselves to) intensive, psychologically excruciating efforts to change or mute their sexuality or gender identities, only to fail and, in shame and sorrow (and perhaps with bitterness, too) strike out "going to church" from their future life script.

Some people I knew had even been excommunicated from their congregations. One man described a ceremony where his tiny congregation--the congregation he had grown up with, laughed and prayed and cried and shared and worked and fellowshipped with--formed a circle around him and turned their backs to him, one by one, to demonstrate his out-cast-ness.

I really have to wonder just what kind of picture of God or agape such people had in their minds or hearts to imagine such an act as Christlike.

So, in a reconciling church, if there's mention of the open table of communion--all are welcome--there's an added kick. All means all.

This church had communion every Sunday. It still did. My father and I braved the icy side streets (well, he drove, so he really braved the ice) to find the church open for business. The crowd was smaller than normal, but some people recognized me from 10+ years ago (and my father from nearer to that--he's a more frequent visitor). We met new faces. We shared songs (finally Christmas songs!) and bread and juice. It reminded me of what's best about church and what's great about a Methodist church who takes its call to be loving and open seriously.

More tomorrow,

JF

merry christmas

2009-12-25T22:36:00.003-06:00

Christmas Day--sick with a sore throat and stuck by snow and ice.

It's a nice day nonetheless, home safe with my father and the dog.

No real post today beyond "Merry Christmas."

More tomorrow,

JF

Blizzards on Christmas Eve

2009-12-24T17:01:00.003-06:00

So--a blizzard has hit. Nothing like this has been seen in this part of Oklahoma since...well, ever, really. Drifts are piling up, snow is blowing. Internet is sketchy; power is fluctuating (though, thankfully, we still have some).

Plans to go out to see a movie and then to the Christmas Eve service later this evening? Nixed. Plans to go see my sister in the big city tomorrow? Uh... Not likely. Our Christmas celebrations and family get-togethers will likely have to wait, postponed as we shift from "relaxed and eager" to "nervously waiting to see how bad things will get." And I'm quite lucky. Some people are apparently stranded on the interstate, unable to exit due to blocked-off ramps. Disappointed as I may be not to celebrate Christmas as I'd prefer, I'm grateful to be indoors and warm. Lord, help those in distress.

Now, if this were a different sort of religious-ish blog, I'd segue into some hamfisted comparison with That Christmas Eve So Long Ago. "As cold as we are now," I'd muse, "surely Mary and Joseph were colder--and they had no place to stay, no internet, no cars. Just a manger. And that's where Christ was born! Makes you think, doesn't it?"

Of course it does not. It's vapid guilt-by-coincidence. Yes, yes--the Holy Family had a rough time while I enjoy internet and home heating with snow blowing outside the window. But does this realization move me beyond anything except a vague sense of shame for fretting over an unprecedented blizzard? I often find such smug comparisons are more about the person making the comparison ("see how deep and spiritual I am?") than they are about any novel insight. It's the Debbie Downer act of Christian spirituality, relentlessly dismissing any reaction to a present situation by comparing it haphazardly to some Biblical situation. "You think this weather is bad? Read Genesis about the Great Flood. You'll be begging for the Christmas Blizzard of '09." Cue wah-wah music.

This is Christmas Eve, however, the end of the Advent season of stopping and looking and reflecting. It behooves me to do a little bit of memory work to re-imagine that first experience. In that spirit, then, let me risk smugness with this comment: Yes, the Holy Family had a rough time of it on Christmas Eve. In a strange city, crowded with out-of-towners, going into labor--all in a barn. Terrible conditions--and there Jesus is.

And isn't the point of the story not the terrible conditions but the miraculous birth?

If Christ is "God With Us," then the Christmas story as related in Luke works as a neat acknowledgment of the fact that, many times, where we are is in a terrible spot. Stuck in a barn. Stuck on the highway. Stuck at home. Isolated from reunions, from warmth, from comfort, from everything Christmas Eve should be or mean.

And there Jesus is.

There are worse things to think about as the snow swirls outside and the temperature plummets. Advent is God here, Jesus with us, wherever we may be stranded.

Merry Christmas Eve to anyone reading this, wherever you are. May Jesus be with you, and may that knowledge warm you.

JF

Back On Line and Some Updates

2009-12-23T21:26:00.003-06:00

Back at my parents' house for the holidays and thus (re)connected.

What have I missed in my time away? Let's see... there's a lot, so today I'll give a quick rundown/update on three issues I've been concerned with over the past few months.

* the Ugandan anti-homosexuality bill: Last I wrote, as I recall, I reported that Rick Warren had finally relented and released a pastoral encyclical urging Ugandan Christians to resist this bill. Warren Throckmorton's website (one of the best go-to sources of info on this) reported on a letter written by Ugandan pastor Martin Ssempa (co-signed by a number of other Ugandan Christian groups) ardently defending this bill. Versions of the letter appear here (from Christianity Today) and here (on Ssempa's website). Seempa protests that the main concern involves--well, the letter claims a number of claims: the abuse of minors by homosexual predators, the spread of AIDS/HIV, the creeping influence of homosexual lobbies internationally and in Uganda specifically.

Throckmorton notes that the letter completely ignores Warren's (and others') theological arguments against the bill. He also takes apart much of the evidence the letter links to in order to support its reasoning--not that his arguments (or those of the commentators to his blog posting) seem to matter much. If anything, the pastors' letter suggests to me a level of leave-us-alone intransigence on the part of the pro-bill Ugandan Christians. The relationship of Ugandan evangelicals to their western counterparts is in many ways growing more strained, and this situation is evidence of it. For a detailed overview of the relationship between Ugandan Christianity and US Christianity, see this article by Kapya Kaoma, which itself may deserve a post from me.

* The War on Christmas. Basically, the only new info here is more arguments pro- and anti- War. For example, Matt Barber, pundit-attorney for the Liberty Council, warns us that "the next time you hear someone say 'Happy Holidays,' remember that what they're actually saying – perhaps innocently enough – is 'Happy Holidays, Comrade.' They're playing right into the secularist agenda that seeks to replace the God of the universe with the god of government." His proof? Apparently the Soviet Union at one time discouraged recognition of Christmas. So obviously people's saying "happy holidays" in 2009 US and the USSR's anti-Christmas actions from the past only seem utterly incomparable.

Other Christian writers express impatience at the idea of a Christmas War (declared, it seems, by those who ostensibly want to defend Christmas). See Edward Grinnan's guest stint on the Washington Post's "On Faith" blog. See also this guest post on Michael Spencer's Internet Monk site. Both point out that fighting a Christmas War defeats the ethos of the season. Christmas Warriors are keen on making dire predictions about the awful world that will doubtless come should Christians lose the war. But what exactly would "winning" this War on Christmas look like? What or who would be defeated? Would Christians be happier if the government were to ban other holidays that occur around the end of the year?

* Health Care. This whole subject gets covered so extensively on other areas of the interwebs that I leave it up to you to investigate. Suffice it to say that it looks like a version of the health care plan will indeed be passed in the Senate before Christmas. I am personally for many of the provisions in the bill (i.e., eradicating lifetime caps on coverage, extending coverage to the uninsured, removing pre-existing conditions as a bar to coverage, etc.) though I would have been more pleased with some form of public option.

I continue to be depressed by the widespread resistance to this bill--well, not just this bill but to any health care reform whatsoever. Republican intransigence (there's that word again) to seemingly any kind of legislation whatsoever puts the lie to their insistence that they have the best interests of people at heart.

More distressing, however, is the fact that this resistance has come to be a signal issue for many on the religious right. I find utterly lacking any recognition that, in fact, many people are suffering due to lack of health care in this country, and that fixing this problem is worth the investment of some tax dollars. I get frustrated that the debate thus far seems primarily about money: support the bill to reduce deficits and cut costs or resist the bill because it will increase taxes. Both of these broad arguments pass over the deeper question of what the right thing to do is. Is it right for people to suffer and die because they can't afford adequate care? Is health care a right or a privilege?

I would think that the Christian answer to these questions is obvious. But religious right arguments against health care reform either ignore the questions altogether or--worse--suggest that the poor and/or underprivileged deserve their fate and that the better-off have to watch out for their own stuff.

Anyway--that's all for now. More tomorrow,

JF

Some Difficulteis with Worldviews

2009-12-16T23:03:00.003-06:00

Just a quick note--I'll be visiting my in-laws for a few days, and internet access is likely to be sketchy to non-existent. Don't be surprised, then, if I take a few days off posting.

Back to the worldview evangelism topic from a few days ago. Briefly, worldview analysis posits that people's beliefs and behaviors stem from their worldview, meaning a related set of foundational ideas, values, and assumptions about reality. These foundational attitudes are largely presuppositional or pre-rational, though they may be susceptible to rational inquiry or criticism. The evangelist's task involves sharpening a sense of her own (Biblical Christian) worldview, learning to recognize and critique other worldviews, and becoming adept at interacting with those living in other worldviews, eventually leading them to recognize the superiority of the Biblical-Christian view.

I suggested that worldview analysis represents a positive trend in evangelicalism in that it insists upon critical thinking, self-reflection, and respectful interchange with non-Christians. It is, in any case, a step back from the tone-deaf, "Jesus: take him or leave him, culture!" approach to evangelism (manifested, I think, in artifacts like the CHRIST-mas tree).

That being said, though, the worldview approach itself depends upon a number of warrants that upon reflection seem at least questionable. Let me touch on a few of these:

* The coherence of worldviews: I don't doubt that much of what we do and believe and humans relies not on consciously worked-out, rational processes but on inchoate presuppositions we absorb from culture or family. People live their entire lives, after all, without necessarily systematizing their thought processes. It is less clear to me, though, that our presuppositions or unexamined assumptions about life necessarily group themselves into something as coherent as a worldview that can be identified or diagnosed. Worldview analysis seems to work best with people who already think of their beliefs and values systematically, and then only with those whose systematization matches the descriptions of worldview analysts.

* The definition of worldviews: Lists of various worldviews that I've seen tend to include a wide range of different religions, philosophies, or thought-belief systems. Some of these (like Marxism) are fairly well-defined, formal systems, products of the work of specific philosophers (i.e., Marx and Engels) credited with shaping the system in question. Others, such as postmodernism, name not a specific philosophy but a general trend, style, or era. They have some key interpreters (Jean-Francois Lyotard, for instance), but by nature they lack the orthodox formality of specific philosophies. Still others are religions, like Islam or Hinduism, that identify as vast a range of variants as Christianity does.

The problem here is that worldview analysis forces each of these very different categories into the same conceptual box--the worldview. Such a gesture does violence to the specificity and/or multiplicity of the systems themselves, turning them all into variants of the same thing. Worse, worldview analysis suggests a degree of exclusivity among worldviews--you're one of these, not two or three of them--that many people would balk at accepting. Evolutionary biologists, for instance, typically get categorized automatically as living under the "naturalist science" or "materialist humanism" worldview, even though many of them would also describe themselves as Christian, postmodern, New Age, Marxist, or any number of other worldviews. Worldview analysis proves too simplistic a tool to account for such blended systems.

* The worldview of worldviews: Worldview analysis shows its 19th century origins in its fondness for categorization and taxonomy, a favored post-enlightenment mode of creating and disseminating knowledge. Worldview apologists typically operate by identifying and listing the major competing worldviews as they see them, summarizing these viewpoints into a grid or table for easy comparison/contrast (see pages C-1 through C-4 of this document, for example). Distinguishing features codified on such a grid might include "view of Truth," "main proponents," "primary values," and the like. The complicating factor here, though, is that putting so many divergent worldviews on the same table assumes that, no matter how different the worldviews in question are, they are all amenable to being described and analyzed with the same set of sub-categories.

Perhaps they are. But I think it more likely that the worldview grids that analysts create are themselves the products of a particular worldview, a meta-worldview, if you like, that presupposes "truth" to be a thing that can be atomized, subdivided, and arranged in tabular format. This is itself a particular viewpoint at odds with other viewpoints past and present. Indeed, I imagine many Christian thinkers from history (or even from today) would find this system foreign.

Many worldview thinkers, of course, are themselves aware of these questions and limitations. They are careful to use worldview analysis as a heuristic, a rule of thumb to get Christians to think about themselves in relation to others, rather than as Divine Truth. But the curricula about worldviews that I've seen tends to dumb down an already simplified and simplifying notion.

More tomorrow (or perhaps next week),

JF

This Week in Embarrassing Christianity: the CHRIST-mas Tree

2009-12-15T20:25:00.008-06:00

Today in "Embarrassing Christianity":

You've heard of Christmas trees. You may even have heard of Chrismon trees. But have you encountered...

...the CHRIST-mas tree? Behold its kitschy glory:

Just when you were worried that, in all this Advent rush, we were insufficiently aware of the horrible passion and execution of Christ, Boss Creations, Inc. has offered this marvelous solution: a cross with a Christmas tree growing out of it (or, alternately, a Christmas tree that has been crucified--presumably by Romans with allergies to evergreens).

There's more.

You can, if you wish, adorn your CHRIST-mas tree (the capital letters mean you have to shout when you say it, I'm guessing) with this:

A crown of thorns to put atop the tree (with the star? on top of it?). Perfect for the kids!

Sigh. Oh, Christianity.

The "movement" to which the advertisement refers is the so-called "War on Christmas," the name given by conservative Christians who annually stir up concerns about Christmas's being absorbed into a muddle of generic winter "holidays." Boss Creations explains this view here. A quick search around conservative evangelical (blurring into "religious right") webpages will reveal a host of bumper stickers, ornaments, and buttons to make sure you, too, can strike a blow for Christianity and against... um...

Well, against the recognition that other holidays from other faiths occur around the same time as Christmas, perhaps? Again--judge this gesture of ostensible evangelism as a kind of activist performance: Who's the audience here? What kind of message does this send to non-Christians? What kind of stereotypes does it confirm? I see the cross, but where's the Christ whose presence--whose Advent--we are celebrating and whose God-With-Us love meets people where they are?

I think--I hope--that the creators of this tree (patent pending!) have only the best intentions, even as they seem to be capitalizing on the growing war-on-Christmas niche market. But I just don't see any kind of love or, frankly, reverence in shmushing together a cross with a family Christmas tree, complete with presents underneath and stockings hung with care in the background. The juxtaposition is grisly and gaudy at once, cheapening what should be a sobering symbol.

Worse, it doesn't seem to strike anyone outside of the war-on-Christmas partisans as clever, only sad and a little nutty. This tree says, "Hands off, culture! Keep away!" And you know what? Message received. The CHRIST-mas tree is already a pop culture joke, having been admirably skewered by the Onion AV Club's "The Hater" (Amelie Gillette). The only thing more depressing than the cross's being made into a joke is the fact that the people who buy and sell and promote this tree will in all likelihood interpret secular culture's derision as a sign of success: "See? We got to them! We really, really got to them and made them think!"

It's time to revisit the old kindergarten lesson that not all attention is good attention.

On a brighter note, my father sent me this Time article, which talks about The Advent Conspiracy, a group that proposes a wholly different kind of war on Christmas. Rather than making shrill statements about the exclusivity of Christmas, Advent Conspiracy promotes the mantra, "Spend Less, Give More." They encourage an anti-consumerist Christmas season where money that would be spent on so many gifts becomes donations to charities (specifically those working to help build clean water wells in developing countries). As the Time article points out, Advent Conspiracy appropriates much of the "keep the Christ in Christmas" rhetoric of the war-on-Christmas warriors, but it mobilizes it to a more, well, Christlike end.

Watch this video. It's a refreshing curative to the crucified evergreen:

More tomorrow,

JF

Worldview Evangelism

2009-12-14T22:48:00.005-06:00

Grading down--now just a dissertation to read before 10:00 tomorrow!

As I was winding down from a day of grading, doing my half-hour on the elliptical (a device I refer to as "the sweating machine"), I listened to a podcast from an evangelist named Randal Niles called Think Again (formerly, I believe, Think it Thru). Niles runs a number of evangelical websites aimed at skeptics, atheists, and the Christians who want to reach them. The podcast I heard dealt especially with the notion of worldviews, which I've written about here previously.

Worldview refers of course to a set of ideas, assumptions, and attitudes that shape how one moves through the world. A number of philosophers formal and informal have dealt with ideas similar to worldview (from the German Weltanschauung) for some time (for an overview and comparison/contrast of these notions--from a strictly evangelical perspective--see David K. Naugle's Worldview: The History of a Concept). The term itself rose to prominence in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth century various evangelical apologists latched onto as a way of conceiving of Christianity as a comprehensive, unified mode of interpreting the universe.

Today, worldview apologetics in some form or another has become the preferred mode of outreach for a growing number of evangelicals--thus my interest in the subject. Niles, the podcaster, even hosts a website (one of his "all about" series) called "All About Worldview," which contains a variety of informative and critical articles, many of which come from Summit Ministries, an established purveyor of worldview curricula, conferences, and worskshops.

I have only just begun to sample Niles's particular take on worldview apologetics, but from what I can tell, his version is similar to most others. It's a three-step process. First, Christians have to clarify and become proficient in articulating (and defending, and advocating) the "Christian worldview," more commonly (and more tellingly) called "Biblical worldview." Descriptions of this worldview typically consist of litmus-test affirmations about the inerrancy of scripture, the exclusive verity of Christian doctrines, the superiority of literal-scriptural accounts of science and history (i.e., young-earth creationism), and conservative views of gender and sexuality.

Next in the worldview evangelism approach, Christians should educate themselves about the other competing worldviews operating at present. Different worldview evangelists will categorize these systems differently, but most lists (tables, more commonly) will include, for example, "Naturalistic Humanism" (i.e., materialist science), postmodernism, "new age" or "pantheism," and Communism/Marxism . Also included are worldviews arising from competing faiths: the Islamic worldview, the Jewish worldview, the Hindu worldview, etc. Evangelists in training learn key features of these worldviews, identifying presuppositions and noting salient differences from the Biblical Christian view. Since, as per the Biblical worldview's presuppositions, only the Biblical approach can claim absolute epistemological accuracy, worldview apologetics teaches about other systems in terms of their divergence from the truth of scripture.

The final step involves training Christians to interact with people living in and seeing the world through these other (inferior) sets of lenses. Of course, the approach is more complicated than simply going up to someone and lecturing them about how mistaken their deeply held beliefs are. Worldview apologetics departs from most other confrontational evangelistic approaches, largely eschewing a Bible-thumping, in-your-face approach as unproductive. Instead, worldview evangelists seek to demonstrate that 1) the Christian worldview is in fact cohesive and epistemologically appealing; and 2) other worldviews, in comparison, prove unsatisfactory. The trick, then, is to know the other's (non-Christian) worldview better than the other person does, guiding the person conversationally through an exploration of that worldview, helping the person to see where the non-Christian worldview proves inconsistent ro contradictory (in Greg Koukl's words, showing people how and where their worldview "commits suicide").

This, as worldview evangelists will tell you, is no easy task. It requires training, research, conversational practice, and a willingness to explore--and if necessary repair--one's own faith.

I find much to admire in worldview apologetics of this sort. The openness to others--engage them on their own terms rather than hectoring them from afar--is a refreshing departure from the stereotypical "turn or burn" tactic (or, more gently, from the "if you died right now, do you know where you'd wake up?" gotcha questions of the Way of the Master). I also like how this approach resists the anti-intellectualism that even many evangelicals lament has long afflicted present-day evangelicalism. Worldview apologetics requires that the evangelist be well-read and well-equipped with an arsenal of rhetorical and critical skills. As an educator, I can hardly argue with the value of training people to recognize the difference between logical fallacies and strong arguments. Indeed, I see in worldview apologists the seeds of a new evangelicalism (recognizing, of course, that "the seeds of a new evangelicalism" get discovered by countless writers every day). Worldview evangelism, however, does in fact aim to be an articulation of Christianity that does not just survive but competes in the marketplace of ideas.

That being said, the notion of worldviews as so elaborated by Niles, Summit Ministries, and the like has some features I find less attractive...

More tomorrow,

JF

Uneasy Reactions at a Wedding

2009-12-12T21:22:00.003-06:00

So I just got back from the wedding of a friend of mine.

I think I don't like weddings.

I realized, first off, that this is the first wedding I've gone to in about five years. That one, in turn, was the first I had attended since my sisters some five years before that. In both of those affairs I was either so involved that I wasn't really watching it (the former) or the wedding itself was fairly untraditional (the latter). This seemed like the first traditional-type wedding where I was truly only a spectator. I was struck, first off, by just how many traditional ritual elements there were to the event and about how everyone seemed clued into these except me: when to stand, when to sit, when to applaud, when the cake gets cut, when the garter comes off, and on and on.

What really surprised me, though, was how the wedding celebration itself inspired a bit of, frankly, resentment in me. I'm pretty lucky; it is rare for me to feel keenly any of the various injustices associated with my sexuality. I can't give blood, but then, I don't really like needles (though of course I would if I could). I can't join the military, but then, I don't really want to. My work environment is quite liberal and accepting. My family is unnaturally cool. I know mentally that being gay means being part of an oppressed class, but I typically don't experience that oppression in a visceral way.

I usually have trouble, then, subscribing to the frustration that many GLBT activists feel toward marriage as a heterosexual privilege. Yes, I realize that heterosexuals alone get to be married in most places in the US, and yes, I think that inequality is wrong--but I don't begrudge people's wish to get married or people's having weddings. Indeed, I've always half-joked that I want a wedding myself for my partner and me. "Attention plus presents," I quip, "who wouldn't want that?"

I gotta say, though, that when the bride walked in and everyone ooo-ed and aaaahed, couples grasping each others' hands, eyes glistening, whispered reminiscences of their own--I felt, well, a bit left out, even a little resentful. This was not of course the couple's fault. The bride was beautiful, crying all the way down the aisle in her voluminous white gown. The groom read his wedding vows in her family's native language--no easy feat--while a groomsman held up English translations. Such moments were sweet, and I was and am happy for the couple.

But the event itself reminded me of how far away I am from my own partner, how our relationship doesn't get presents and attention and applause and adoration and an event all its own. It's crazy, this feeling, since I know that my friends, family, and co-workers would be more than happy to celebrate with my partner and I were we to throw a commitment ceremony shindig. It's crazy, also, because my partner is ethically opposed to our having a marriage ceremony.

In his scholarly work, he traces how marriage as a goal of the GLBT movement is a relatively new thing. Many of the gay and lesbian activists emerging in the sixties (especially after the Stonewall Riots) were actually quite opposed to gay marriage--not because they believed marriage was for heterosexuals alone but because they saw marriage as oppressive and GLBT politics as aiming at more than just-like-heterosexuality normalcy. They had a larger agenda on their horizon, not just an us-too/also-ran liberalism but a radical vision of a transformed society in which fundamental rights (e.g., access to health care, fair determination of child custody, access to loved ones) don't depend on the state's recognition or non-recognition of one's sexuality.

Marriage just wasn't part of this dream. Indeed, it was seen as an impediment to it. The notion of love as the raison d’être for marriage is historically quite new. Throughout most of recent Western history, heterosexual marriage has been not (or not primarily) a sign of enduring love between a man and a woman but a way of acquiring property, fomenting a subsistence workforce, cultivating a political lineage, or stabilizing tribal-familial-national relations. Women in such relations were considered property to some degree or another, unpaid labor to cook, clean, bear and raise children. It's not too long ago, remember, that courts in the US seriously pondered whether a husband forcing his wife to have sex could even be considered a crime, let alone rape (see here).

Of course, this history has gotten subsumed by the current gay marriage debate--on both sides. Anti-gay-marriage advocates idolize heterosexual unions as the bedrock of all of society (ignoring the fact that polygamy, not monogamous heterosexuality, has been the more widespread form of familial organization over the course of human history). The present-day GLBT movement has largely endorsed this wholesale idealization, averring that the right to have lifetime commitments of love between two people is just as important as the conservatives say, but that it works just as well with two men or two women as it does between a man and a woman. Gone are previous activists' passion for reformatting society in ways that might even better or more freely allow humans to interrelate. Gone are questions about whether, given its legacy of injustices, marriage is really the best mechanism for extending rights to GLBT people (see this blog by Nancy Polikoff).

All this history and all these issues I've known for some time. Usually, however, I can just say, "Yeah, but I still want a marriage, with my partner and I exchanging vows and my father giving me away..." Presents, tears, attention, a party--remember?

I'm not so excited by the thought just now, especially after hearing this couple's well-meaning but deeply conservative-evangelical pastor wax ungrammatical about the superhuman miracle that is heterosexual love, the unique image of the Divine that exists solely in the joining of male and female in holy matrimony, the grand model for human existence that rests in the strong man protecting and loving his submissive help-meet.

(Actually, lots of people rolled their eyes at the ode to female submission, which the pastor quickly qualified as being "a Christian thing, not a woman thing." Yeah, right. Go back in time 100 years, or even 50 years, and see if pastors, husbands, and wives would subscribe to that bit of spin.)

Even without that piece, though, the whole happy, rambling homily to Glorious Heterosexual Marriage (about which the pastor had apparently written a book) was a bit much. It was hard not to hear the echoes of marriage's ugly history resonating.

I suppose the pastor got to me also because his theology, while not explicitly anti-gay, reminded me of the one area of my life where I do most often feel the sting of exclusion--the church. To hear that--worse, to be part of a party dedicated to celebrating that--heterosexual unions uniquely reflect the image of Christ is to hear that I can never truly participate in the Divine. Ditto single people, divorced people, etc. (I mean, if marriage was all that, why did Christ marry? And don't give me that "Christ married the church, his bridegroom"--that's a metaphor, not a literal reality. I mean, when was the wedding? Who was the best man? Who was the bridesmaid? Who caught the bouquet?).

Again--I don't begrudge my friends their wedding. I'm happy that two people have so chosen to perform vows of their eternal love for each other. And I'd like to think that everyone deserves presents, attention, and a party now and then.

But... well... I'm not so sure I'm comfortable asking people to give me presents, attention, and a party just to mimic an institution like marriage.

More tomorrow,

JF

Strains and Drains and Letting Go

2009-12-11T22:23:00.004-06:00

Ufta. It's the end of a looooong finals week, and today was particularly draining--partially because all I had to eat through most of the day were the sugary treats I bought for my class taking its final.

The other reason--the main reason--for the drain involved some difficult meetings with a student in crisis. I can't go into detail, even in this semi-anonymous environment. Suffice it to say this student is facing a potentially life-altering (even life-ending) challenge and is understandably unclear about how she'll deal with it. It's affected her work in classes this semester, and we (the faculty) have been forced to make various difficult decisions to protect the student as best we can as she faces her problem....

...or doesn't. Given the magnitude of the crisis facing her, the student has thus far made the decision not to do anything, convinced that she should continue to enjoy her life as best she can while ignoring the problem at hand. Her past experience (i.e., relatives facing similar situations) has convinced her that any proactive response on her part may just make the situation worse. She seems hopeless and resigned.

The emotional drain from today came from a small meeting between the student and the handful of her professors (me included) that know about her crisis. We had made the difficult decision--on the basis of the student's crisis and its apparent impact on her studies--that she should withdraw from extracurricular activities (i.e., productions) for a time. This is hard news for any theatre person, especially as theatre serves as a release, an escape, for many. But using theatre as that kind of escape does disservice both to the craft and to the people who practice it. The crisis would only get worse, and its impact would eventually affect any production she participated in. Thus we made the choice to enforce a pause.

All of us were worried how the student would take the news. All of us were worried just what we could say, what we could do. In such a situation, you (and I'm doing what I tell my students never to do, using you in a general sense) want to take the student and say, "You need to take X, Y, and Z step right now to address this problem before it becomes any worse." You want to argue with them, break down their defenses and convince them--batter them, if need be--into doing what you know is necessary.

But you can't. College students are adults; this student has the right to do whatever she wants--including ignore the problem. No matter how wise we think ourselves, theatre professors aren't gods. Heck, we aren't even psychologists. Who are we to tell someone how to navigate a personal crisis? Past asking whether there's an immediate danger to self or others (there is not), we can only listen.

So the meeting today consisted of the few of us cautiously probing, explaining, reassuring, trying to listen, and encouraging--all while reminding the student and ourselves that the student alone wields the power to decide on a next step.

I've been on multi-mile-long runs that were less exhausting than just sitting there, mostly being silent, exuding as much love and care and concern and support as possible, ever-sensitive to seeming too bossy or know-it-all, telling a student that we'll support her decision even though we desperately want her to do X or Y to save herself.

The strain of stepping back, of letting go, when the stakes are so high is extreme--not, of course, as extreme as the student's strain. It's tricky: you have to show that your hands are extended to support the student while making sure that you're not coercing the student down a path she may not want or be ready to take. I suppose it's a bit like a parent teaching a child to ride a bike. You run alongside the bike as the kid pedals, keeping a firm hand on the back of the bikeseat to make sure it doesn't topple. But eventually you have to let go, accepting the fact the the risk of falling must be the child's to face. Your job shifts from "keep him from falling" to "be there to cheer when he rides or to comfort when he falls."

I suppose (and here I exhibit my mother's tendency to insert God as cheesily as possible into a scenario), this is the position my faith imagines God as taking--letting go of God's children, giving them a space to fall or stand, to choose wisely or unwisely, even as God knows the stakes involved. And, similarly, I believe God is there to cheer our successes and join us in times of failure or (in this case) random disaster.

When I was young, I used to ask my father all the time what super power he would have if he could choose. He'd inevitably give the same answer: a magic wand that could make problems disappear. Boy howdy do I want that wand. It would make this letting go thing easier.

I wonder if God--God the Omnipotent Almighty Everlasting--wants a wand, too.'

More tomorrow,

JF

Warren Speaks Out

2009-12-10T22:21:00.003-06:00

Quick post today.

Well--here's a change. Rick Warren has apparently been convinced that his reticence to speak out against the proposed Ugandan bill is not the best course of action. He has released this video, which he describes as an "encyclical," aimed at the pastors of Uganda. There he unambiguously denounces any criminalization of homosexuality, particularly that which would result in executions.

I note only that, by addressing pastors in Uganda and not the Ugandan government, Warren technically stays true to his nuanced (and I do not use that term disparagingly) understanding of the role of pastors as distinct from those of politicians.

Who knows? Perhaps his strong statement may have some effect on the debate in Uganda. Some news media report that already (i.e., before Warren's video) revisions to the bill include removing the execution and long prison term penalties in favor of more "refined" punishments (not sure what that means). The bill, according to the report, will also include sections about the need for counseling in order to (in the quoted words of Uganda's Minster of Ethics and Integrity James Nsaba Buturo) "attract errant people to acceptable sexual orientation."

This could complicate things, making it trickier for US-based ex-gay ministries (and people like Warren) to speak as strongly against the bill. Ostensibly, Exodus et al. oppose coercive treatment/therapy. I would hope that they clarify this in their public commentary on the bill. The relief at having the death penalty removed--while palpable--ought not eclipse critical attention to whatever "refined" punishments the new iteration of the bill cooks up.

Warren himself makes no mention of therapy or ex-gay ministries in his message to Ugandan pastors.

More tomorrow,

JF

"Blood on Your Hands"? Richard Cohen and the Uganda Bill

2009-12-09T22:44:00.006-06:00

Finals, finals, finals. Grading, grading, grading.

Let me pause on Rick Warren for a bit. There's more news on the ever-changing story about the proposed anti-gay Ugandan legislation and US ex-gay ministries' influence on it.

In particular, there's this interview between Rachael Maddow and Richard Cohen, a representative of the "International Healing Foundation" who sent a representative to Uganda to discuss the causes of homosexuality (from Cohen's perspective). Cohen's arguments were subsequently among those cited by the bill's supporters as proof that homosexuality can be cured, is not innate, etc.

I re-post the interview here:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

(Transcript here). Some quick observations:

I don't watch a lot of cable news talk shows, primarily because they usually involve lots of yelling, posturing, and very little substantive, careful debate. Given those low expectations, I was pleased to see Maddow treat Cohen with a bit more respect, giving him time to explain himself.

That being said, however, I'm not convinced the interview is the rhetorical slam-dunk that other progressive commentators appear to think it is. Certainly the interview featured some "slam dunk" moments. Maddow confronted Cohen with several key quotes from two of his books and one of his newsletters--some of which he seemed surprised by (e.g., "race" as a possible factor contributing to same-sex attraction) and some of which he ignored (e.g., his multiple suggestions that homosexuals represent malign, threatening forces in culture; his use of research by the thoroughly discredited Paul Cameron). In these instances, Cohen's insistence that his work does nothing to fuel intolerance of homosexuals at home and abroad comes under some strain.

But Maddow herself engages in some less-than-fair argumentative tactics that unfortunately give some credence to ex-gay complaints that their work gets misrepresented by the liberal press. She quotes, for example, a passage from one of Cohen's books in which he suggests a number of general factors that (he argues) may contribute to developing same-sex attractions, including "[d]ivorce, death of a parent, adoption, religion, race." Cohen interrupts to dispute whether race is in there. Maddow shows him that it is, creating one of the evening's "slam dunk" moments.

Maddow expresses disbelief about the idea that, as she puts it, "divorce makes you gay." Cohen interrupts to insist that she's taking his words out of context. "No, I'm reading it from your book, dude," she says. Now--a petty point, perhaps, but as any first-year composition student should know, "in context" means something greater than just "from the book." Cohen insists that she read the rest of the passage, where he clarifies that homosexuality (in his view) is multicausal. Maddow does so, and as it turns out, the passage she quotes comes at the very end of a long and fairly detailed list. The context does in fact problematize a portrayal of his argument as "divorce causes gayness."

That exchange would actually count as a "slam dunk" in Cohen's favor; at the very least, it demonstrates that in this instance Maddow was straw-manning his argument. It's at this point that Maddow refocuses on the race issue--which Cohen appears ill at ease with--pushing Cohen finally to concede that race is not in fact an influence on same-sex attraction.

Cohen and Maddow also disagree about the "cure" issue. Maddow portrays Cohen as claiming that homosexuality is a choice and that gays can be cured. Cohen strenuously disagrees with this representation, saying that he never claims that homosexuality is a choice and that he never uses "cure" as a term to describe therapy. Maddow dismisses this clarification, citing the "change is possible" mantra he often invokes. To suggest that "change" and "cure" aren't the same, she says, is "semantics."

Yes and no. Yes, in that it's a semantic difference, but no if by calling the difference semantic she means that the difference is meaningless (semantic differences rarely are). Ex-gay ministries by and large are careful to qualify a range of meanings for change. Change might be a lessening or transformation of same-sex attractions, but it might also mean a simple re-prioritizing of one's life. I'm not saying I agree with this logic, but I have to recognize that it exists, that for ex-gays change does not mean cure.

By far the most serious disagreement between them, however, is the allegation by Maddow that Cohen has blood on his hands, that because some of the Ugandan bill's supporters cite Cohen's material, Cohen himself bears some responsibility for the bill.

As repellent as I find many of Cohen's arguments, Maddow's blood-on-your-hands argument is a non-starter.

On one level, there's the simple fact that Cohen himself speaks out repeatedly and unambiguously against the Ugandan bill, saying again and again that imprisoning and executing homosexuals is utterly opposed to his theories, which cite a lack of appropriate love as the main factor in creating same-sex attractions. He insists--and Maddow has no evidence to the contrary--that the speaker they sent to Uganda said nothing at all about imprisoning gay people, nor did any of the US ex-gay speakers have any inkling that Uganda was going to come out with this draconian legislation. As Cohen points out, Uganda has had anti-homosexuality legislation on the books since the 1950s; its government needed no help in becoming intolerant.

In fact, Cohen's ex-gay arguments--i.e. gays are people suffering from a developmental deficit and in need of understanding, not condemnation--represent a weird kind of step in the right direction. As Randy Thomas of Exodus, International, has argued, Ugandan conservatives sponsoring this bill are more likely to listen to arguments against this bill coming from ex-gays like Cohen than from liberals like Maddow.

On another, more basic level, though, the "blood on your hands" allegation wrongly suggests that authors have absolute responsibility for how their readers interpret and apply their words. Now, obviously, if Cohen had called for the criminalization of homosexuality or if he had outlined a program similar to Uganda's proposed legislation, then he might have some explaining to do. But, as he tries to point out, Cohen makes no such argument; indeed, a fair reading of his arguments--homosexuals are in need of love and understanding--militates against precisely the attitude the bill's supporters represent (i.e., "kill the gays").

In other words--the Ugandan bill's supporters are misinterpreting Cohen's work, using it selectively to support a stance that Cohen himself does not endorse. It is simply beyond his control if people misuse his work so.

It is true that Cohen, like other ex-gay groups and spokespeople, undercuts his message of understanding and love by coupling it with more standard religious-right rhetoric about the threat of the "gay lobby" or the "gay agenda." Maddow scores a definite hit when she castigates Cohen for using discredited (read: fabricated) research by Paul Cameron about gays being more prone to pedophilia than heterosexuals (Cohen insists he will excise the latter sections from the next edition of his book). These arguments certainly do not do anything to militate against fearmongering and hatemongering against gay people in Uganda. But neither are they explicit calls to pass laws such as the proposed bill.

As a matter of free speech, people are allowed to express strong, unpopular, even intolerant sentiments--even though those expressions might inspire a listener or reader to act violently on the basis of those acts. One person's statement does not equate to another person's action. Maddow herself has a reputation for making what some might consider provocative statements. Suppose, for instance, some deranged person were to take utterly literally Maddow's charge that Cohen has blood on his hands, using that allegation as a pretext to murder Cohen in retaliation. Would Maddow then be responsible for the murderer's actions? Would she have blood on her hands?

Why am I harping on this? I don't like Cohen's arguments. I don't support his take on homosexuality. I think it's important that people recognize (as Maddow stated) that Cohen's psychological and counseling credentials are not recognized by any major credentialing body. Why bother to defend him at all?

Because, frankly, there are people in this country who do explicitly argue that gay people should be imprisoned and put to death. Extremists like that exist. Cohen--while certainly non-progressive—is not one of these extremists. He's not even in the same ballpark. It’s unethical and plain sloppy argumentation to classify Cohen and other ex-gays as no different, really, from Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps or a KKK vigilante or—yes—some supporter of a bill to execute gays. Doing so betrays a lack of ability (or gumption, or both) to imagine what makes non-progressives tick. It takes a whole swath of people who for whatever reason aren't comfortable with the idea of same-sex love and turns them all into the same species of irrational, immoral bigot--little Phelpses to be feared or dismissed.

If we as progressives ever hope to alter those people's discomfort (change is possible!), we at least need to do them the basic favor of listening carefully to what they are saying rather than lumping them all into one big category of "hater."

More tomorrow,

JF

Clarifying Warren's Stance re: Uganda

2009-12-08T22:51:00.004-06:00

I need to make a couple of corrections to statements I made yesterday regarding Rick Warren and the Ugandan anti-homosexuality bill. A story on Newsweek's website quoted him from two different contexts, one related directly to his stance on the bill itself and one (from Meet the Press) on an entirely different subject. The article noted that the two quotes came from different contexts; I overlooked that clarification in quoting him.

To be clear: the quote from Warren about Uganda is as follows:

"The fundamental dignity of every person, our right to be free, and the freedom to make moral choices are gifts endowed by God, our creator. However, it is not my personal calling as a pastor in America to comment or interfere in the political process of other nations."

The Newsweek article followed that quote with another, taken from Meet the Press:

"As a pastor, my job is to encourage, to support. I never take sides."

Now, the article mentioned that in the latter quote Warren expressed a preference for a neutral stance "in a different context." I should have looked before I quoted. Mea culpa.

That being said, placed side-by-side as they were in the article, the two quotes appear to be speaking about the same subject, giving the impression that Warren advocates a general stance of neutrality--at least on issues of homosexuality. The subtle suggestion in the article (which notes that Warren calls abortion "a holocaust") is that Warren's neutrality is selective and a shade disingenuous. I reacted strongly to this yesterday, wondering how a pastor like Warren could so advocate a stand-offish position.

Having checked the Meet the Press interview myself (transcript only here), I now think the Newsweek article misrepresented Warren's position--or at the very least that I got an incorrect impression of Warren's views from this article (which has been widely linked on gay religious-right watchdog sites).

In the Meet the Press interview, Warren is speaking broadly about his transition from the pastor of a single church (Saddleback) to being a national spokesperson whose opinions on a range of issues is regularly sought. The interviewer, David Gregory, presses Warren on a number of specific issues, from Proposition 8 to abortion to health care. In most cases, Warren acknowledges his (conservative evangelical) beliefs while declining to occupy the role of culture war pundit.

He expresses regret, for instance, about making a video for his church in which he elaborated on his views about gay marriage during the Prop 8 debate. Indeed, Gregory notes that Warren has been quite active on AIDS issues. He asks Warren if working with AIDS patients has caused Warren to think differently about homosexuality. A full quote of Warren's response here is appropriate:

Oh, oh, absolutely, much more sympathetic and understanding the pains and the reactions. I, I have understood that so many people today get stigmatized for different things. Now, of course, I have biblical beliefs on--about homosexuality. But when somebody's dying on the side of the road, you don't walk up to them and say, you know, "What's your nationality?" or, "What's your lifestyle?" or, "What's your, your gender preference?" or, you know, anything else. You just help the guy. And this is the, by the way, the difference--I was asked the other day about illegal immigration, things like that. The role of a pastor and the role of the government are different things. My role is to love everybody. I am called to love everybody. In fact, the Bible says love your enemies. I am forbidden to hate anyone, OK? So I can't--I am to love everybody. And if someone's hurting, I don't walk up and say, "Are you illegally here?" I just want to hurt--help the person. But the government does have a right to decide who's in and who's out and things like that.

This passage more accurately contextualizes the second quote repeated in the Newsweek article, reflecting not a laissez-faire neutrality about political things but a nuanced view about the separate roles of church and state, pastor and politician.

I would like to think this quote similarly contextualizes Warren's views about the proposed Ugandan bill. From what I know of Warren's convictions, he himself, personally, would be against this bill. But in his public statements, Warren maintains a separation of church and state. It is not appropriate, in his view, for him to express an opinion as a pastor on a matter of internal Ugandan politics.

I'm not sure I agree with this stance, particularly on this issue, particularly as other Christian groups and leaders have decided that vocal resistance to this bill is appropriate. I respect, however, the fact that his stance is more complex than it has been portrayed of late, and I regret that I joined in the chorus of condemnatory voices prior to having a fuller context.

More tomorrow,

JF

Ugandan Bill: Warren Takes No Sides

2009-12-07T23:16:00.004-06:00

Finals week=quick post today (I know, I said that yesterday, but...).

Major news entities are joining discussions and reactions to the proposed Ugandan "Bahati" Bill that would sharpen prohibitions against and punishments for homosexual behavior and related acts (e.g., the death penalty or life imprisonment for gay people, hard labor for those "aiding and abetting" homosexuals). I am pleased that my denomination has (finally) come out formally against the bill. So too has an Anglican canon in Uganda.

In odd contrast to these, evangelical super-pastor Rick Warren (The Purpose-Driven Church, Saddleback Church) has come out resolutely as not being against the bill. Warren had initially (back in October) distanced himself from the bill and some of its main pastoral supporters in Uganda with whom he and Saddleback had previously worked. Of late, though, Warren has taken a stance of no-comment on the politics of a foreign nation. He has refused repeated invitations to condemn the bill, most recently stating on Meet the Press that "As a pastor, my job is to encourage, to support. I never take sides." Update: This quote is taken from a context unrelated to the Uganda issue. See here.

I'm going to need to do a bit more investigating there because that just doesn't sound right. Generally counted among the most popular evangelicals in the US today, Warren occupies an odd place in the evangelical spectrum. While his book The Purpose-Driven Life made the best-seller lists, it's his model of "seeker-sensitive" or "new paradigm" church (outlined in The Purpose-Driven Church) that really won him fame.

In seeker-sensitive churches like Saddleback (Bill Hybels's Willow Creek Church in Chicago being the other main example), the main Sunday services aim explicitly at the non-churchgoer, whose likes and dislikes have been market-researched and focus-group tested by worship leaders. Using this data, church leaders re-create the service to appeal to "Unchurched Harry" (or "Saddleback Sam")--the generic niche consumer of church services. There's lots of music, multimedia, high energy, inspiring messages, and easygoing atmosphere. Conspicuously absent are high-church symbols like crosses, altars, pews, hymnals, offering plates, etc.

As Warren explains, the "seeker-sensitive" service is not actually the "true" worship service. It's bait, lure to attract people into membership. Once people actually join, they are expected to participate actively in the life of the church, typically through small-group "cells" that re-create in miniature the community atmosphere otherwise impossible in a church of 10,000+. Members have their own (authentic) worship service later in the week.

Warren's unorthodox approach extends to his inter-denominational politics. Saddleback is broadly evangelical and nondenominational, but Warren has distinguished himself as more willing than most other evangelical leaders to reach out to non-evangelical groups, especially on issues such as environmentalism. For many evangelicals, then, Warren is a traitor, a dangerously popular charlatan peddling a watered-down gospel. For others, he represents the next wave of evangelical leaders--doctrinally committed but willing to reach out. His influence, in any case, is not in question. He was, after all, the one who interviewed both presidential candidates about their faith and values in the last debate.

All of this makes his "I take no stand" rhetoric difficult. Warren has not been so coy about taking a stand on other issues in the past, though certainly he has largely steered clear of formal alignments with religious-right standards like Focus on the Family.

I'm sure I'm not alone here, though, in finding his newly stated neutrality in all things political... odd. Even un-pastoral.

More tomorrow,

JF

Signs and Counter-Signs at Syracuse

2009-12-06T22:16:00.008-06:00

I'm in the H-E-double-hockey-sticks that is end-of-semester grading currently, so my posts this week will likely be a bit short-and-sweet.

So--skimming over my news sites today, I ran into this blog post. The nitty-gritty? This picture:

Apparently, the woman with the "Homosexuality is a sin" sign showed up at Syracuse U (in New York), and one gay student responded with a sign of his own. The originating site quotes him:

"I decided that because this woman thought it was okay to make me feel uncomfortable in my home, I would retaliate and make her feel just as uncomfortable, if not more."

He reports getting tons of support from passersby.

I hope it's no secret to people who read this blog that I oppose the theology behind the woman's sign. Aside from the basic issues of the sinfulness and (presumed) curability of homosexuality, the sign is just an awful witness--bad activism. I wonder just what the lone protester hopes to accomplish.

There's actually a wide range of rationales behind demonstrations of this sort. For some, like Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps, demonstrations are entirely mechanisms of conviction. Christians, in Phelps's theology, are called to be God's pointing finger of judgment, condemning the world (well, specific parts of it) for its sin and thus giving the reprobates "no excuse" for their sin when they inevitably face the Final Judgment. After all, they were told: God hates fags.

Alternately, other demonstrators really believe that signs such as the one in the picture might have some kind of transformative effect--if not immediately than cumulatively. A gay person might see that sign, consciously dismiss it, but unconsciously that message might join with any of a hundred other messages great and small, opening the door of their heart even a crack wider to the possibility that homosexuality is a sin and that Christ might have a better way. Eventually (goes this line of thinking), the Holy Spirit might enter in and begin working to help that person cease their sin, repent, and/or seek professional (read: pastoral) help in battling their sin.

Of course I disagree hotly with both of these possible rationales, both theologically and practically. The former is hyper-Calvinist, loveless fundamentalism that I have difficulty imagining as Christianity at all (Phelps thinks the same about people like me--well, really about everyone outside of his own enclave). The latter rationale's failure mirrors the empty activism I've criticized on the left; holding up a sign reassures the protester that they're "doing something" for their faith, but that affect of "doing something" outweighs the basic question of efficacy. If you believe homosexuals need to internalize the message of sin and redemption, is holding up a sign on a college campus the best way to do that? I suspect not.

Based on her sign, I wager she aligns more with the non-Phelpsian view. I'm only guessing, though; the piece from which I got the pic is silent as to her reasoning. For all I know she's an uber-liberal doing some kind of performance art or social experiment to see how people react to offensive messages. (If so, then experiment Win!)

I'm struck, though, by her expression. At a guess: Resigned. Used to this. Inured to abuse. Not even embarrassed at the fashion slight. After all, Christ said to expect abuse. The sign next to her confirms everything she's been taught about how homosexuals act, just as her sign apparently confirms everything that the counter-protester expects from conservative, anti-gay Christians.

It's worth pointing out, though, that the woman's sign here is not of the "God Hates Fags" variety. It is, as fundamentalist expressions go, fairly outreachy. The "Christ can set you free" message bespeaks a theology that pictures gay people as sinners, yes, but redeemable sinners caught by an addiction or disorder rather than (as is the case for Phelps) filthy animals beyond all hope of redemption, animals that--if the US knew what it was doing--would be rounded up and shot. In the extremely limited context of fundamentalist anti-gay-sign-protests, the woman's sign actually qualifies as being on the loving end of the spectrum. I would be surprised, in other words, if the woman didn't imagine herself as acting out of love for homosexual people.

Again, the fact that to most eyes the sign is manifestly unloving is a failure of activism; the message she means to send (at least, the one I imagine her meaning) isn't the one she's actually sending.

But I'm hardly more impressed by the counter-sign. Yes, on one level it's a clever turning (queering, perhaps) of the woman's sign, swapping the doctrine of church of Project Runway for the woman's fundamentalist beliefs. You give me offensive sincerity? I respond with surface glibness and ridicule. But, like most comic reversals, the counter-sign responds to one form of dehumanization with another, one that plays on tensions of socioeconomic class ("see how backward/white trash she is?") rather than sexuality. In that, the counter-sign is extremely effective activism. It gets the job done.

But, to be frank, the counter-protester's stated rationale ("I'll make her feel even more unwelcome") doesn't exactly rank well when compared to the protesters--which (as an educated guess) I'd say is something like "I'd like for gay people to be in heaven" (mixed, to be fair, with a bit of "I want to prove how good a Christian I am by witnessing to the gays").

I know this won't be a popular interpretation, but I read more loving intention in the woman's badly calibrated, unloving message/activism than I do in the guy's quippy, effective sign. He's not interested--so far as I can tell--in the other woman's well-being, eternal or otherwise. She attacked him, so he's hitting back and getting real and virtual kudos for doing so. Will his activism convince her that gays aren't hopeless addicts mired in their own fleshly desires? Nope. Is it even trying to do so? Nope. It wins by virtue of being the cleverer put-down.

It depresses me, this scene. There's so much distance between the two points of view, and so little hope of anything like meaningful interaction.

Can't we do any better?

More tomorrow,

JF

Two Interesting Church and State Pieces from the WaPo

2009-12-05T22:35:00.003-06:00

A brief post today, due to end-of-semester busyness.

Two items of interest to my recent ruminations about church/state relations have appeared on the Washington Post website. First is a commentary by Asima T. Uddin, an attorney specializing in religious liberty issues. She tackles the Swiss ban on minarets, citing it as an instance of the French concept, laïcité (alas, diacritical marks don't come easily to this blog, so the term will likely appear as laicite here on out). Distinct from our "separation of church and state," laicite positions religion as not just different than public state functions but actively dangerous, meant to be contained in private spheres and invisible/undetectable outside of such spheres. It is laicite that fuels conflicts in France currently about whether young women may wear Muslim head coverings at school.

Uddin argues that laicite backfires, producing more rather than less religious-based influence/presence in public life. From the piece:

"When faith and the faithful are denied full participation in civic life, they don't fade from it: instead, they seek alternative means to influence it. At its best, this takes the form of faith-inspired peaceful protest. At its worst, it takes the form of faith-inspired terror."

Religious right commentators (some of them, anyway) often point to countries that practice laicite as evidence of the dire ends that church/state separation policies create. Actually, I get the sense at times that some of these commentators look forward to such a faith-hostile government, awaiting with grim eagerness the day when they can martyr themselves in the name of their faith. Consider, for instance, the success of the Left Behind series and its imitators. There's an almost romantic fascination with the idea of the underground church that holds its prayer meetings on the sly or keeps its cross-shaped jewelry hidden.

Of course (and this is the point most religious right commentators gloss over), the US's tradition of church and state diverges from that of France. Any country with "In God we trust" printed on its coins or where Judeo-Christian professions of faith are obligatory for major politicians is a long way from laicite.

Laicite, Uddin notes, arose in France during the 1700s and 1800s as a means of checking the percieved influence of Roman Catholicism. Coincidentally, the other piece that caught my attention dealt precisely with the Catholic church's influence on Catholic politicians. Specifically, Joseph A. Califano, Jr. (a former cabinet member in the Johnson and Carter administrations) argues against what he calls "a sort of nuclear option"--the denial of the Eucharist to Catholic politicians who are pro-choice. Such an option was unthinkable, he insists, in previous decades.

Why, he asks, do Catholic Bishops so keen on denying Eucharist to pro-life politicians not also deny the Eucharist to pro-death penalty politicians or pro-Iraqi War politicians? Califano takes no stance on abortion himself in the piece. Rather, he contends, no politician can be expected to kowtow to any particular brand of faith-based ideological purity. To insist that politicians only make or vote for policy utterly consonant with one faith's doctrines is wrong. Yes, he concedes, politicians can and should allow their faith convictions to influence their policies, but he qualifies this concession nicely:

"But to have convictions of conscience and be guided by them is not a license to impose such convictions indiscriminately on others by uncompromisingly translating them into policy. If public policy is to serve the common good of a fundamentally just and free, pluralistic society, it must brew in a cauldron of competing values such as freedom, order, equity, justice and mercy. Public officials who fail to weigh these competing values serve neither private conscience nor public morality. Indeed, they offend both."

Nicely put, I think.

More tomorrow,

JF

A Weather-Related Break from the Norm

2009-12-04T23:11:00.004-06:00

Weather break.

It snowed tonight here in the deep, deep South. This makes two years in a row this locale has gotten snow that typically falls once every twelve to fifteen years or so. It's difficult to witness such an occurrence and not think "global warming"--well, climate change, in any case. This last week has given me reason, however, to examine my knee-jerk reaction ("strange weather? darn climate change!").

As has been reported out the wazoo, the scandal/tempest-in-a-teapot (depending upon whom you ask) called "Climate-gate" broke when some 1,000 e-mails were leaked to the public recently. The e-mails and assorted documents came from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK, a well-respected center for climatology. The leaked e-conversations seem to implicate several prominent climatologists in acts of fudging the presentation of climate data so as to make the case for anthropogenic climate change more plausible to the public. That, along with some disparaging remarks about climate change skeptics, have led some global warming critics to cry "ah ha! We knew all along it was all a conspiracy--and climate-gate proves it!"

I spent quite a while last night (playing one of my favorite games, "avoid going to bed") wading through a lengthy and at times vicious discussion thread about climate-gate on the website of the Chronicle of Higher Education, where scientists, non-scientists, and every kind of academic in between got to have their say (and more) about the issue.

From what I could tell from that debate (and the debaters, being academics, link like mad to multiple and sundry articles, blogs, analyses, and position statements), the following seems to be the case: 1) Climate-gate, embarrassing as it is for the center and the scientists involved, doesn't qualify as the silver bullet to kill/discredit the global warming consensus among climatologists. 2) The documents and mails, many of which are taken out of context, represent at most ethically shady strategies in presenting data, not proof that data were falsified or fabricated.

3) That being said, many climatologists are uneasy with the popularization of global warming data, especially by non-climatologists. It appears that, while most climatologists accept that humans have a definite and likely detrimental impact on climate, determining exactly what that impact is and how realistically to fix it are more complicated issues than is sometimes suggested. Climatology, like any scientific discipline, consists of ongoing debates and uncertainties--areas where more modeling and experimentation are necessary. This scientific uncertainty understands the term in a quite specific sense--as in "open questions posed upon a foundation of accepted knowledge," not "wild guesses based on hunches or political biases." Unfortunately, scientific uncertainty does not translate well into political or lay arenas. Some of the leaked e-mails appear to indicate strategy sessions among some scientists about how to limit or mute the uncertainty factor in order to foster support for, say, reducing carbon dioxide emissions immediately when in fact many climatologists point to human-caused factors beyond or instead of carbon dioxide as equally or more influential.

I write about this here not merely because of the odd snowfall and a late night but because the politicized elements of conservative evangelicalism (i.e., the religious right) seem to have folded a staunch resistance to theories of human-caused climate change into their larger sense of what "conservative"--or at times even "Christian"--means. The conservative-religious news sites I frequent all feature stories about the shocking (well, not-so-shocking, to them) revelations from the UK, which simply go to prove (in that discourse) that climate change as a whole is a liberal hoax.

Exactly what this has to do with Christianity is a bit vague for me. As best as I can make out, the religious argument against a model of anthropogenic climate change would be that God in Genesis establishes a system of human domination over the earth. Adam is to subdue the earth, to make use of it for himself. That earth will endure as God promised until God decides to destroy it (or not--whether earth survives the Final Judgment depends upon one's particular eschatology). I suspect, however, that this argument (which I have not seen articulated often) has less to do with the religious right's resistance to climate change theories than does the right's collusion with economic forces such as secular energy lobbies and with a political tradition that distrusts "big government."

Lately, many evangelicals have been interpreting creation passages in ways that support environmentalism. Dominion, these green evangelicals argue, means that God tasks humans with responsible stewardship of the earth. Environmentalism has thus occasionally served as common ground for faith-based and secular organizations to work together. Of course, the rise of such ecumenical, working-with-the-liberals efforts only strengthens the resolve of more conservative evangelicals, proving that the liberal evangelicals are just CINOs ("Christians In Name Only"--after RINOs--"Republicans In Name Only").

The debate on the Chronicle pages ranged from divergent interpretations of data by experts to the relative take on/trust in scientific consensus from nonspecialist scientists, to good old-fashioned doubt by some non-scientists. This being an academics' row, questions of turf and comparative expertise ("who cares what you say? You aren't a scientist!" "Yeah? Well, you're just a meteorologist, not a climatologist...") got fired this way and that.

Oddly enough, one of the most sensible (to my non-scientist eyes) bits of reasoning came from a professed humanities scholar, who used Pascal's Wager, an apologetics chestnut, to argue for environmental action. Pascal's Wager is, basically, that one should believe in God because believing in God (and presumably becoming a Christian) has a low cost--a life lived in service to God, loving neighbors, etc.--relative to the potential gain (i.e., heaven). If God doesn't exist, then you've at least lived a full life, and you lose nothing. If you don't believe in God, however, and God does exist, you spend eternity in hell. Believing in God makes good sense, for Pascal, because it's the safest bet.

Similarly, this poster argued that environmental stewardship is a good idea. Even if the global warming skeptics are right and anthropocentric climate change turns out to be Y2K all over again, it makes good sense to wean ourselves off of nonrenewable energy sources, to reduce pollution, and to cultivate more energy-efficient lifestyles. After all, the cost of doing nothing if the more worrisome climatological prophets are even partially correct is just too extreme to ignore.

I have some difficulties with Pascal's Wager (e.g., who said a life lived as a Christian is easy or easier than a life lived as a non-Christian?), but the environmental analogue makes sense to me on a secular-reasoning level. I am also persuaded that part of Christian agape involves extending love for the neighbor to creation more generally.

I suppose that's still more confirmation--as if any were needed--of my own inveterate liberalism.

More tomorrow,

JF

Tensions in the Freedom of Religion

2009-12-03T20:41:00.002-06:00

For those just tuning in, I've been ruminating over the debate amongst evangelicals (and amongst people of faith more generally) about the paradox of religious expression in the US. On the one hand, the first amendment forbids the government from making any law that prohibits the free exercise of religion, just as it forbids abridgments of the freedom of speech. On the other hand, however, the first amendment also forbids the government from making any law respecting an establishment of religion, a clause that has mainly been interpreted in terms of setting up a separation between church and state.

The argument I'm thinking about here orbits this question: does a segregation of church (religion) and state (government) itself constitute a religious stance, a de facto establishment of a particular religious understanding? Certainly it would be a stretch to scribe to the establishment clause alone the status of a total religious belief system. Nevertheless, as a working worldview about the proper practice of religion, the clause exerts normative force upon the religions who would operate under its purview. In other words, you may believe your religion should permeate all aspects of your life, public and private. Fine.

But under the establishment clause, your faith-saturated self must submit to the expectation that any acts you may perform as an official representative of the government (e.g., as a police officer, as a judge, as a member of a jury) should be faith-neutral. You may not, as a police officer, arrest people for not following your faith's precepts even if the Bible demands that you define justice using God's standards, not humans'. You may not, as a solider serving in Afghanistan, hand out Bibles or evangelical tracts to Afghan villagers while on duty even though the Great Commission demands that Christians make disciples of all the world. And--as I've been discussing--you may not, as a public school valedictorian, take it upon yourself to proselytize a captive audience at graduation.

Conservative evangelicals do themselves no favors--indeed, I would argue they embarrass Christians in general--when they cite such examples as evidence that the government is singling out and harassing Christians in violation of the first amendment. In those instances it is instead the Christians--the officer, the soldier, the valedictorian--who act in violation of the first amendment. As agents of the state, their acts appear to establish state preference for a single religion (theirs). They've placed their personal religious practice above the general good of the government's ensuring religious liberty for all.

But are there not times in which personal faith convictions should override government's faith-neutral stance? Let us concede that the government does not oppress faith when it operates in a faith-neutral manner, that the first amendment is fulfilled by the imperfect schema of faith-neutral governments and faith-protected citizens. That concession does not erase the tension, the paradox, contained in the first amendment's religion clauses.

Suppose, for example, the police officer I made up eralier lived in the early civil rights era in a state with racial segregation laws. As an agent of the state, the officer is charged with enforcing those laws. But as a Christian (well--as a particular kind of Christian--modern-day evangelicals often conveniently forget that Southern white Christians were frequently--though not universally--among the most ardent supporters of racist practices), the officer may feel strongly that racial apartheid is unjust and sinful. Under the establishment clause, the religious belief may not play a part in the officer's decision of whether or not to enforce the law.

Of course--one hardly needs to be a Christian (or any kind of religious person) to recognize segregation as unjust. The hypothetical officer could very well be an atheist and feel a similar moral conundrum. Such a concession, however, only reinforces the point that religious motivations are not easily distinguishable from secular philosophical convictions save that in the US, faith-based convictions enjoy explicit Constitutional protection. Which ought to be stronger, then: the officer's (ostensibly private) faith convictions or the officer's (ostensibly public) duties as a state agent? What if, instead of a police officer the hypothetical agent were an elected official, a US Representative from a pro-segregation district? Should such a Representative vote against desegregation in concert with his constituents' wishes but in violation of his faith?

Christians of all stripes--orthodox, evangelical, mainline, conservative, moderate, liberal--regularly find themselves confronting such paradoxes today. May a police officer look the other way when learning about an illegal immigrant being housed in her own church's basement if her sincere belief is that immigrants are to be welcomed? May a judge deeply convicted that marriage is a heterosexual-only affair refuse to marry a gay couple in a state that allows gay marriage?

If find it helpful for me to recognize that the faith/civics conundrum here isn't just the problem of conservative evangelicals, although I believe they are more apt to cry foul--inaccurately, many times. Indeed, part of the problem with the religious right's mantra of "government oppression of Christianity!" is that it lets liberal or moderate people of faith (and, I would say, even atheists) off the hook of confronting the fact that the first amendment's establishment clause generates vexing problems for everyone. It opens the door, in fact, to conscientious betrayals of either duty or belief. A betrayal of belief or faith tenet may be, depending on the betrayal or the faith, a sin or an act of hypocrisy. But a betrayal of civic duty represents an act of civil disobedience.

More tomorrow,

JF

State Neutrality and Religious Liberty

2009-12-02T18:55:00.004-06:00

So: do public schools have the right to censor graduation speeches of valedictorians when those speeches contain overt Christian evangelizing (i.e., not merely mention of their faith but an explicit proselytizing pitch)? As a matter of law--as demonstrated in the cases I referenced yesterday--the answer is yes. School officials have a right to control speech given by persons acting as representatives of that school at events the school sponsors.

The underlying debate, however, relates to why schools feel the need to censor said speeches in the first place. One conservative evangelical commentator (posting a comment on a conservative news site report about the story) wondered if the students' remarks would have been censored had the students been speaking about a divisive issue that had nothing overt to do with religion, such as global warming. Of course no one but the school officials in question could offer an answer to that inquiry; I suspect that school officials are fairly controversy-averse and that a screed either for or against environmentalism would at least get some heavy scrutiny.

Clearly, however, the feeling in these situations seems to be--whatever might be the status (censored or allowed) of nonreligious controversial speech--religious speech is certainly suspect. Public schools strive to maintain a "separation between church and state," interpreting this idea (a Jeffersonian turn of phrase that doesn't actually appear in the Constitution) to mean that state entities must avoid any appearance or substance of preferring a specific faith over another. Indeed, the reality of people who do not profess any religious belief at all pushes many institutions to step back from making or endorsing any affirmation of faith (e.g., a reference to a Higher Power, "in God we trust," "one nation, under God").

The evangelical argument I rehearsed yesterday argues that such strict faith-neutrality contains and demands a particular understanding of faith that in and of itself qualifies as religious. In the neutral-state view of religion, faith is a private affair with optional public features. A person may enjoy the right to believe in their heart of hearts whatever they'd like. They furthermore have the right to associate with others of similar belief and practice faith rituals in private space (provided said rituals do not themselves involve illegal activity, such as human sacrifice, polygamous marriage, or drugs).

But, when operating in public space or when acting as an agent of the government, the believer must submit the practice of their belief to norms of social commerce. When private belief and public duty conflict, government agents are expected to prioritize their public duty. A police officer may not arrest a Wiccan simply because the officer is Southern Baptist and believes witchcraft to be evil. A teacher may not use class time to proselytize students in public school.

The counter-argument to this logic would say that faith does not--cannot--map cleanly onto a logic of public and private separations. An evangelical is a Christian no matter where she works or where she travels. She does not shed her Christian convictions when she leaves church or when she arrives at work; indeed, most varieties of evangelicalism would teach that "part-time Christianity" isn't Christianity at all. Faith is all-encompassing, un-ignorable, or it is nothing. For the state to suggest that faith must be otherwise--that it should be privatized--is a religious imposition.

Now, several objections to this line of thinking present themselves. If religious liberty--the freedom of conscience so prized by evangelicals--is to have any real effect, the state must refrain from endorsing any one faith formally. Were the state to declare one faith the "correct" or "official" faith, all other faith practices (including atheism) would instantly assume second-class status. Christian conservatives often draw on authors like David Barton to argue that the US is in fact "a Christian nation," that Christianity (as opposed to other faiths) plays a privileged historical role in US history and is thus due for some acknowledgment and deference. They would contend that such acknowledgment need not translate into hardships on other religions. The UK boasts the Church of England as an official faith but allows the full spectrum of religions to flourish.

I suspect, however, that such Christians would not find this argument nearly so convincing were the US's historical tradition seen as Jewish, Muslim, or Hindu rather than Christian. Calls for a faith-based nation as compatible with a scheme of religious liberty evaporate when the faith in question ceases to be a particular variety of Christianity. At the very least, having an official recognized faith suggests that conflicts between religions would likely be decided in favor of the predominant religion. If the state is to stay out of the business of promoting one religion above another, if the state is instead to maintain space for all religions to co-exist in the same society, then the only sensible scheme involves strict state neutrality.

That neutrality, and the general religious liberty it seeks to ensure, forms the Greater Good to which an individual's otherwise always-everywhere-no-matter-what practice of faith gets submitted. The right to religious expression, after all, exists in concert with other rights and other Goods. The government would ban the practice of a religion that called for the murder of a next-door neighbor, for example, because the neighbor's right to life outweighs the individual's right to practice a murderous faith.

To be sure, the scheme of religious liberty that allows for a thousand faith flowers to bloom does not reflect the exclusivity that is the property of many faiths. A die-hard Missouri Synod Lutheran, for example, believes his faith is uniquely correct. Other faiths aren't just variations; they are heresies, and their beliefs are false teachings. By taking a neutral stance, the state grants a kind of practical legitimacy to all faiths in general that few if any of those single faiths would endorse. But what of it? The alternative would seem to be some form of state theocracy, either soft or hard. Christian conservatives often stray dangerously close to calling for just such a theocracy (indeed, some Christian groups overtly assert that God's law ought to be the law of the land--that's a whole other argument for later).

Thus, religious liberty, state neutrality, and therefore the willingness of state agents to submit their faiths to a public/private division all form part of the given circumstances, the social compact, of what it is to be a US citizen. Those unable or unwilling to accept that the state won't echo their personal religious beliefs should, to put it brutally, find another country.

Clear enough, no?

Perhaps--but I think there's some room in this religious debate for a bit of Devil's Advocacy.

More tomorrow,

JF

Valedictory Speeches, Religious Expression, and Faith-Neutral Worldviews

2009-12-01T19:57:00.006-06:00

Some background:

My interest in the Swiss Minaret Ban controversy stems most immediately from a longish conversation I had with my partner this past Thanksgiving weekend as we made the 10-hour drive back from my family's home in Oklahoma. There we listened to part of a podcast about another event stirring up religious/tolerance issues.

The situation? One Erica Corder, a graduating senior at a Colorado high school, was chosen as one of three valedictorians based on her grade point average. As such, she and was given the chance to write and deliver a 30-second speech at graduation. Her remarks were submitted beforehand and approved by school officials, but at the graduation ceremony, Corder altered her speech (text from this Christian Science Monitor story):

"We are all capable of standing firm and expressing our own beliefs, which is why I need to tell you about someone who loves you more than you could ever imagine. . . . He died for you on a cross over 2,000 years ago, yet was resurrected and is living today in heaven. His name is Jesus Christ. If you don't already know him personally, I encourage you to find out more about the sacrifice he made for you so that you now have the opportunity to live in eternity with him."

The school officials, dismayed at the proselytizing surprise, demanded--on pain of withholding her diploma--that Corder submit a formal apology that both specified that the remarks were her own and that she knew that, had she submitted those remarks to the school, they would not have been approved. This she did, but she then sued the school for violation of her first amendment right to freedom of speech. The court (first a federal judge, then the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals) ruled against her, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

Paralleling this situation in many ways is this case of Brittany McComb, who similarly strayed from her approved valedictory remarks to speak on the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus--only to have school officials turn off her microphone mid-speech. With the help of the Rutherford Institute, McComb also sued for violations of her free speech rights. As was the case with Corder, federal and appellate courts ruled against her, and the Supreme Court turned down her case for review.

Now--the conservative evangelical spin on/reaction to these cases differs significantly from the cases themselves. To many conservative Christian organizations, these cases represent clear instances of Christian expression's being censored from public life, which they interpret as a violation of the first amendment's establishment clause. Crucially, however, the cases themselves involve not freedom of religion but freedom of speech. The courts' rulings against Corder and McComb deal not with whether the student may or may not make religious expressions but whether or not the schools have the right to control student speech at events those schools sponsor (like graduation). Here legal precedent supports schools' authority to so contorl speech.

Moreover (and this is a point that gets glossed over in some news stories), both McComb and Corder entered into understandings with their respective schools that they would deliver speeches pre-approved by school officials. Both McComb and Corder violated that understanding by straying from their remarks. Thus, to frame these events as schools swooping down to penalize Christians for their beliefs is to block out significant parts of the story.

That being said, clearly the religious nature of the women's speeches were at issue in both schools' actions. Indeed, McComb's school had, on previewing her speech, blocked out the religious references contained therein; McComb's change to her speech as delivered apparently consisted largely of restoring those parts of her statements. So, while freedom of speech was the presenting issue, the special nature of religious expression turns out to be the underlying issue. Schools, as official state institutions, are uncomfortable with appearing to support the expression of a particular religious belief. In deference to the first amendment's prohibition against state establishment of any particular religion, the schools restrict religious expression at their official events.

Conservative evangelicals (here I might specify the more politically active, "religious right" segments of conservative evangelicalism) challenge this interpretation of the establishment clause. While agreeing (ostensibly, at least) that government ought not formally declare support for a particular religion, they would insist that individuals can and must be able to express and practice their religion regardless of the particular context in which they find themselves. For the government to restrict religious speech of its employees or representatives, conservative evangelicals argue, is to take the establishment clause too far, intruding upon the individual's right to religious practice.

The most interesting variant of this argument suggests that the logic of state neutrality towards religion is in fact itself a religious belief, or at least a particular worldview about the proper status of religious belief and expression. That is, the US establishment clause as commonly interpreted casts religious expression as a private practice, an aspect of a person's existence and life-world that the person may bracket or mute in particular situations. A Christian could, in this view, practice her faith by preaching on street corners on day and cease preaching/proselytizing while working as a government census taker the next day. The state thus imagines a world where particular religious expression can and should take a back seat to the greater good of state neutrality toward any one religion.

The counter-argument here (and I'm not quoting from any particular argument I've read) would be that religions are not light-switches to be turned on or off as the situation commands. One is a Christian--one behaves as a Christian and does Christian things--all the time. Especially when presented with a situation in which one's faith demands a particular action, one cannot allow the state's interest in faith neutrality to override the individual Christian imperative to faith expression. A Christianity that can be turned on and off, in other words, is not really Christianity at all. To suggest otherwise is to disrupt a fundamental understanding of Christianity itself.

Now, immediately I can think of (and my partner quickly outlined for me) several objections to this line of thinking.

Let's go over these tomorrow.

JF