Un-Christian Crosses in the Desert

...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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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