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
Friday, February 26, 2010
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
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
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
Friday, February 19, 2010
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
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
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
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
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
Sunday, February 14, 2010
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
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
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Jesus Talk on Free Speech Alley
It snowed today here in my southern town--a rarity in any event made even rarer by the fact that it was the second or third time this winter that we've gotten such precipitation. All over campus this morning, students trudged to class holding their camera phones out in front of them to capture the scene of big, wet gobs of snow raining down.
I passed by my campus's free speech alley, where tables set up for the day's speakers and activities sat unattended, gathering slush as the snow-drops melted almost instantly. No evangelists today, I thought.
I wrote last time about the "free speech alley fundamentalists"--a group of highly conservative, turn-or-burn evangelists whose outreach techniques seems mainly to consist of telling passersby how wicked and wretched they are. I assume they follow some slightly less polished version of truth-proclamation (kerygma) practiced by evangelists such as Ray Comfort. That is: start with the hard truth of the law (i.e., for all have sinned...the wages of sin is death/hell) and let the spirit convict so that repentance and salvation may follow.
That may be their rationale. The impression they convey, however, has less to do with the awesomeness of God's righteousness and grace and more to do with the irritation and insults Christians cause to others. If the goal is to win disciples for Christ, I can't imagine the free-speech-alley fundamentalists get anywhere close.
But I'm writing in circles. I've ruminated before--many times in this blog--about how evangelism of the "law-then-conviction-then-repentance" variety typically doesn't bother to justify itself in terms of how effective it is. Rather, people like Comfort insist that leading with sinner's guilt is the best evangelical technique because it's what the Bible commands.
The Way of the Master (Comfort's technique) features as its emblem the letters WDJD--What Did Jesus Do? In Comfort's reading, Jesus consistently produced converts by leading sinners to a realization of their own guilt and need for repentance. In the story of Jesus's conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well, for example (John 4: 1-26), Jesus turns a conversation about material thirst into a discussion of spiritual thirst. He confronts the woman with the fact that she's had many different husbands and is now with a man not her husband. She tells her neighbors, many of whom then meet Jesus and become believers.
Comfort strongly believes that without authentic conviction, the honest and deeply-felt realization of one's total depravity and helplessness in the fact of God's righteousness, true repentance and salvation cannot occur. His whole technique nets people into formulaic question-and-answer sessions about the ten commandments that terminate in the conclusion that the person is sinful and worthy of hell. Without the keenly felt threat of hell, argues Comfort, unbelievers have no reason to receive Christ as lord.
I've written at length about my disagreements with this theology. But let me say here that, compared to the evangelists who visit my campus with their "REPENT OR PERISH" signs and "You're headed for hell!" accusations, Comfort is positively charming. At least he recommends engaging a person in a Socratic (if narrow and teleological) exploration and discovery of their own guilt. The Alley Fundamentalists simply bray forth blanket accusations and tsk tsk when "pride" closes the ears of their audience.
We have a saying in performance analysis that "the medium is the message"-that how a message gets delivered conveys as much meaning as the literal content of the message itself. If this notion is even half true, the alley fundamentalists communicate a kind of contempt for those they claim to want to reach. Noisy accusations at strangers, shouting matches with hecklers, and garish shock-show REPENT! signs--no matter what the words used--tend to say, "I couldn't care less what you think of what I'm saying. This whole performance is about my saying things at you. My responsibility as a communicator stops when I stop speaking."
I've been meaning to spend some time watching them on free speech alley, cataloguing what constitutes a day's work for them, perhaps even speaking to one or more of them about their techniques. I doubt, alas, that such a conversation would get very far. They, like most turn-or-burn street evangelists, are likely well-insulated against having long conversations about why they choose to evangelize as they do. They're on the clock, doing work, not looking to chat with some long-haired hippie professor.
I suspect I'd have better luck with a wholly different kind of evangelist who regularly patronizes our free speech alley. This older gentleman simply sits in the shade on a folding chair. Across from him sits another chair just like it. The only sign he displays is a white long-sleeved shirt he wears reading "Jesus Talk." He sits quietly, not accosting anyone, not selling or yelling, but his invitation sounds loud and clear: sit and chat for a bit. Sometimes when I pass I see someone in his chair, usually in earnest conversation as he listens.
I have no idea what kind of theology he professes or what kind of gospel (if any) he preaches. But his evangelical performance stands in sharp contrast to that of the turn-or-burn crowd further up the sidewalk. It may be he believes in the law/conviction/repentance model just as strongly as they do. But if so, he's clearly made the decision that blaring it out with voice or signs just isn't the way to go. Instead, the message he's stating, the truth he's telling, has more to do--again--with the medium in which he says it. That is, just the semiotics of his setup--an open-ended, non-coercive invitation to talk about whatever--suggests a powerful impression about what faith is and how it ought to act in the world. "Come talk," he implies, "Talk about anything Jesus-related. I'll listen. I'm here."
I like that so much. It resonates so much more strongly with my reading of what Jesus actually did. A reading of the woman at the well, for instance, misses the point if it stops at Jesus's pointing out the woman's lifestyle. She fires back with conversation about the well itself and about history. Jesus responds not by returning to the topic of her sin or by lecturing her about her hellish fate but by listening to what she says and building off of that. I see him doing this again and again in scripture: listening, asking, responding. Never does he warp the conversation into a formula of guilt. Sometimes he doesn't talk about sin at all.
But he's there. He's listening.
Surely there's a kerygma--a truth-proclamation--that consists of open presence and attentive conversation. Surely that's closer to the way of the master than street signs and yelling.
More later,
JF
I passed by my campus's free speech alley, where tables set up for the day's speakers and activities sat unattended, gathering slush as the snow-drops melted almost instantly. No evangelists today, I thought.
I wrote last time about the "free speech alley fundamentalists"--a group of highly conservative, turn-or-burn evangelists whose outreach techniques seems mainly to consist of telling passersby how wicked and wretched they are. I assume they follow some slightly less polished version of truth-proclamation (kerygma) practiced by evangelists such as Ray Comfort. That is: start with the hard truth of the law (i.e., for all have sinned...the wages of sin is death/hell) and let the spirit convict so that repentance and salvation may follow.
That may be their rationale. The impression they convey, however, has less to do with the awesomeness of God's righteousness and grace and more to do with the irritation and insults Christians cause to others. If the goal is to win disciples for Christ, I can't imagine the free-speech-alley fundamentalists get anywhere close.
But I'm writing in circles. I've ruminated before--many times in this blog--about how evangelism of the "law-then-conviction-then-repentance" variety typically doesn't bother to justify itself in terms of how effective it is. Rather, people like Comfort insist that leading with sinner's guilt is the best evangelical technique because it's what the Bible commands.
The Way of the Master (Comfort's technique) features as its emblem the letters WDJD--What Did Jesus Do? In Comfort's reading, Jesus consistently produced converts by leading sinners to a realization of their own guilt and need for repentance. In the story of Jesus's conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well, for example (John 4: 1-26), Jesus turns a conversation about material thirst into a discussion of spiritual thirst. He confronts the woman with the fact that she's had many different husbands and is now with a man not her husband. She tells her neighbors, many of whom then meet Jesus and become believers.
Comfort strongly believes that without authentic conviction, the honest and deeply-felt realization of one's total depravity and helplessness in the fact of God's righteousness, true repentance and salvation cannot occur. His whole technique nets people into formulaic question-and-answer sessions about the ten commandments that terminate in the conclusion that the person is sinful and worthy of hell. Without the keenly felt threat of hell, argues Comfort, unbelievers have no reason to receive Christ as lord.
I've written at length about my disagreements with this theology. But let me say here that, compared to the evangelists who visit my campus with their "REPENT OR PERISH" signs and "You're headed for hell!" accusations, Comfort is positively charming. At least he recommends engaging a person in a Socratic (if narrow and teleological) exploration and discovery of their own guilt. The Alley Fundamentalists simply bray forth blanket accusations and tsk tsk when "pride" closes the ears of their audience.
We have a saying in performance analysis that "the medium is the message"-that how a message gets delivered conveys as much meaning as the literal content of the message itself. If this notion is even half true, the alley fundamentalists communicate a kind of contempt for those they claim to want to reach. Noisy accusations at strangers, shouting matches with hecklers, and garish shock-show REPENT! signs--no matter what the words used--tend to say, "I couldn't care less what you think of what I'm saying. This whole performance is about my saying things at you. My responsibility as a communicator stops when I stop speaking."
I've been meaning to spend some time watching them on free speech alley, cataloguing what constitutes a day's work for them, perhaps even speaking to one or more of them about their techniques. I doubt, alas, that such a conversation would get very far. They, like most turn-or-burn street evangelists, are likely well-insulated against having long conversations about why they choose to evangelize as they do. They're on the clock, doing work, not looking to chat with some long-haired hippie professor.
I suspect I'd have better luck with a wholly different kind of evangelist who regularly patronizes our free speech alley. This older gentleman simply sits in the shade on a folding chair. Across from him sits another chair just like it. The only sign he displays is a white long-sleeved shirt he wears reading "Jesus Talk." He sits quietly, not accosting anyone, not selling or yelling, but his invitation sounds loud and clear: sit and chat for a bit. Sometimes when I pass I see someone in his chair, usually in earnest conversation as he listens.
I have no idea what kind of theology he professes or what kind of gospel (if any) he preaches. But his evangelical performance stands in sharp contrast to that of the turn-or-burn crowd further up the sidewalk. It may be he believes in the law/conviction/repentance model just as strongly as they do. But if so, he's clearly made the decision that blaring it out with voice or signs just isn't the way to go. Instead, the message he's stating, the truth he's telling, has more to do--again--with the medium in which he says it. That is, just the semiotics of his setup--an open-ended, non-coercive invitation to talk about whatever--suggests a powerful impression about what faith is and how it ought to act in the world. "Come talk," he implies, "Talk about anything Jesus-related. I'll listen. I'm here."
I like that so much. It resonates so much more strongly with my reading of what Jesus actually did. A reading of the woman at the well, for instance, misses the point if it stops at Jesus's pointing out the woman's lifestyle. She fires back with conversation about the well itself and about history. Jesus responds not by returning to the topic of her sin or by lecturing her about her hellish fate but by listening to what she says and building off of that. I see him doing this again and again in scripture: listening, asking, responding. Never does he warp the conversation into a formula of guilt. Sometimes he doesn't talk about sin at all.
But he's there. He's listening.
Surely there's a kerygma--a truth-proclamation--that consists of open presence and attentive conversation. Surely that's closer to the way of the master than street signs and yelling.
More later,
JF
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Free Speech Alley Fundamentalists
"Well, I'm going to hell anyway," she sighed affably, "what's a few more sins?"
I had been joking today with a student of mine about a recent bout of illness she'd been having trouble kicking. After informing me of the name of her latest med (which seemed to be working), I shook my head. "You mean, you're murdering all those poor bacteria with that third-gen antibiotic?"
I didn't expect that bit of irony to prompt a comment about eternal damnation. I must have looked confused, for she followed up with an explanation. "Well, that's what they told me." She gestured in the direction of our student union. "I'm bound for hell."
Sadly, I knew exactly what she was talking about. The front of our student union boasts a "free speech alley"--a common fixture on university campuses--on which just about any group may (after securing a permit) discourse on whatever topic they please. Typically, our free speech alley blossoms with informational tables about student group activities or corporate-sponsored givaways of some soft drink or another.
About once a week, though, the Christians descend. These would be a small group of evangelists of the kerygma variety I discussed in my last post. They generally feature a few women (dressed in full-length, home-made dresses that signal "very conservative") handing out some tracts or fliers, a few other people with sandwich-board signs reading "REPENT" and the like, and a middle-aged man yelling hoarsely at passersby about how sinful they are. In my experience he's particularly fond of labeling sins based on his lightning-quick assessment of individual students and faculty on their way to lunch. I believe I got dinged once for my long hair ("Immodesty!").
Occasionally (even inevitably) someone will engage him in a shouting match, gathering a crowd of amused (or angry) gawkers. The yelling contest unfolds predictably (i.e., the heckler gets fed up and stomps off) as the women make their way through the crowd, seeding it with tracts informing everyone of their impending doom.
Most people who have been at my university for a while roll their eyes and move along, accepting the weekly visitations as an annoying if colorful distraction. I often use the group as an example in classes when I talk about activist performance.
But, looking at my student today--this young woman whom I know to be full of energy, intelligence, and talent; this woman whom I know endures a difficult home life few people could guess at; this young woman who is getting over a bad illness--hearing her submit, even humorously, to some stranger's telling her she deserves hell, I just got mad.
What a jerk thing to do--to yell at some random person about how bad they are. I get the evangelists' context. I get that they're following a theology that insists that salvation occurs only after conviction, which requires condemnation. I even get that they see their acts as necessary, even loving ("it's like yelling at someone that they're about to walk off of a cliff," I often hear). After all--better to realize one's total depravity now than to wake up surprised in hell.
I get all of that. And I still think that yelling guy is doing a chump deed, a low-down, mean thing.
How depressing is it that this is her experience of Christianity? That encounter--a random kick when she's already down--is the witness of Christ she got that day. I appreciate the evangelists' theology, but I can't for the life of me see how they expect anyone to receive that message and think that Christianity is anything but a mass of caustic dysfunction. "You're worthless! You're evil! Come to Christ!" Who thinks this is an effective message? Who cares about your intentions if your audience never understands them?
Jonah, of course, springs to mind as a counter-example. Did he not go through Nineveh doing basically the same thing? "You're all doomed. You're all evil. God will destroy you. Better repent." And it worked then, didn't it? Through his telling the rough, unadorned truth, a city was saved, no?
Maybe, but it strikes me that the point of the Jonah story isn't Nineveh but Jonah--Jonah who, after (finally) preaching his truth, high-tailed it out of the city to secure a comfy seat to watch the Nineveh Gets Destroyed By God show. Well, Nineveh repented, God relented, and Jonah sulked. And God says (I paraphrase--may God forgive me): "What the heck are you so angry about? So I spared a city of thousands! That's what I do--I'm God. I care. If you don't--tough!"
That's the danger of "truth-telling" evangelism of the turn-or-burn variety: it leads to smugness, to a lack of care about the people you're supposed to be helping to save.
Did the evangelists care about my student? I have no idea, but the message they sent to her was certainly clear enough: drop dead, sinner.
I stammered out a "Well, I don't believe that," but the damage had been done. Another unChristian, successfully taught to avoid those Christians whose only outreach seems to be insults.
Lord, help you-know-who.
JF
I had been joking today with a student of mine about a recent bout of illness she'd been having trouble kicking. After informing me of the name of her latest med (which seemed to be working), I shook my head. "You mean, you're murdering all those poor bacteria with that third-gen antibiotic?"
I didn't expect that bit of irony to prompt a comment about eternal damnation. I must have looked confused, for she followed up with an explanation. "Well, that's what they told me." She gestured in the direction of our student union. "I'm bound for hell."
Sadly, I knew exactly what she was talking about. The front of our student union boasts a "free speech alley"--a common fixture on university campuses--on which just about any group may (after securing a permit) discourse on whatever topic they please. Typically, our free speech alley blossoms with informational tables about student group activities or corporate-sponsored givaways of some soft drink or another.
About once a week, though, the Christians descend. These would be a small group of evangelists of the kerygma variety I discussed in my last post. They generally feature a few women (dressed in full-length, home-made dresses that signal "very conservative") handing out some tracts or fliers, a few other people with sandwich-board signs reading "REPENT" and the like, and a middle-aged man yelling hoarsely at passersby about how sinful they are. In my experience he's particularly fond of labeling sins based on his lightning-quick assessment of individual students and faculty on their way to lunch. I believe I got dinged once for my long hair ("Immodesty!").
Occasionally (even inevitably) someone will engage him in a shouting match, gathering a crowd of amused (or angry) gawkers. The yelling contest unfolds predictably (i.e., the heckler gets fed up and stomps off) as the women make their way through the crowd, seeding it with tracts informing everyone of their impending doom.
Most people who have been at my university for a while roll their eyes and move along, accepting the weekly visitations as an annoying if colorful distraction. I often use the group as an example in classes when I talk about activist performance.
But, looking at my student today--this young woman whom I know to be full of energy, intelligence, and talent; this woman whom I know endures a difficult home life few people could guess at; this young woman who is getting over a bad illness--hearing her submit, even humorously, to some stranger's telling her she deserves hell, I just got mad.
What a jerk thing to do--to yell at some random person about how bad they are. I get the evangelists' context. I get that they're following a theology that insists that salvation occurs only after conviction, which requires condemnation. I even get that they see their acts as necessary, even loving ("it's like yelling at someone that they're about to walk off of a cliff," I often hear). After all--better to realize one's total depravity now than to wake up surprised in hell.
I get all of that. And I still think that yelling guy is doing a chump deed, a low-down, mean thing.
How depressing is it that this is her experience of Christianity? That encounter--a random kick when she's already down--is the witness of Christ she got that day. I appreciate the evangelists' theology, but I can't for the life of me see how they expect anyone to receive that message and think that Christianity is anything but a mass of caustic dysfunction. "You're worthless! You're evil! Come to Christ!" Who thinks this is an effective message? Who cares about your intentions if your audience never understands them?
Jonah, of course, springs to mind as a counter-example. Did he not go through Nineveh doing basically the same thing? "You're all doomed. You're all evil. God will destroy you. Better repent." And it worked then, didn't it? Through his telling the rough, unadorned truth, a city was saved, no?
Maybe, but it strikes me that the point of the Jonah story isn't Nineveh but Jonah--Jonah who, after (finally) preaching his truth, high-tailed it out of the city to secure a comfy seat to watch the Nineveh Gets Destroyed By God show. Well, Nineveh repented, God relented, and Jonah sulked. And God says (I paraphrase--may God forgive me): "What the heck are you so angry about? So I spared a city of thousands! That's what I do--I'm God. I care. If you don't--tough!"
That's the danger of "truth-telling" evangelism of the turn-or-burn variety: it leads to smugness, to a lack of care about the people you're supposed to be helping to save.
Did the evangelists care about my student? I have no idea, but the message they sent to her was certainly clear enough: drop dead, sinner.
I stammered out a "Well, I don't believe that," but the damage had been done. Another unChristian, successfully taught to avoid those Christians whose only outreach seems to be insults.
Lord, help you-know-who.
JF
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
The Kerygma of Reality TV
Up late watching trashy Bravo TV. I've written before on here how I'm oddly, shamefully caught by those reality TV series like Tabitha's Salon Makeover, Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares, or even Millionaire Matchmaker. Beyond showcasing a particular skill set (hairstyling/salon magement, cooking/restauranteering, dating/marriage), each of these programs tends to run on moments of Professional Truth-Telling, where Expert X (i.e., the star of the show) tells Wannabe Y what's what about their salon, entree, or romance skills.
To be sure, the experts Bravo and other such networks choose to focus on aren't merely experts; they're personalities--typically flamboyant, eccentric-bordering-on-unpleasant personalities. They are the harsh, drill sergeants of their particular profession, grinding their subjects down into nothing so that (ideally) they may be rebuilt, rehabilitated, made stronger and better. And episodes do end with the Wannabe eventually submitting to the Expert, overcoming bad habits, and improving. The shows' punch, however, comes from those "come to Jesus" scenes of prideful singles, salon owners, or chefs being told these Harsh Truths in no uncertain terms.
Inevitably, show producers/editors (even writers in some cases) follow these scenes with breakaway reaction interviews with those who have just been taken down a few notches. Reactions range from rage ("I can't believe that #&%@ said that! What does he/she know?") to chastened acceptance ("It was really hard to hear what so-and-so said, but I know it's true"). Sometimes--rarely--the reaction is so extreme that the person simply stalks off, never to be seen again. But the Expert is fine with that! "He/She couldn't take the truth," sighs the Expert, "and now s/he'll be a failure."
I wrote originally that my attraction to such scenes of putting-people-in-their-place stemmed from my own lack of self-assertiveness. These personalities seem simultaneously off-putting and admirable to me, I reasoned, largely because they are unafraid of presenting their opinions and experience as the textbook truth of their particular profession, and they brook no suggestion to the contrary. They know the truth, they know their skills, and--this is a biggie--they all prioritize presenting that truth bluntly over maintaining a relationship with the Wannabe to whom they present it. They establish truth as a standard to which the Wannabe must rise--or else--and they do so with unapologetic forcefulness.
To a degree, I recognize that I myself do something similar from time to time as a teacher. Indeed, I wonder if my fascination with these scenes has to do with how they play out a kind of pedagogical power-trip fantasy. Many's the time when I've felt the need to have a "come-to-Jesus" meeting with my students. "Here is standard X," I'd say, "and you are failing to meet it." Sometimes I want to--I have to--shock my students into a realization of their own ignorance or inexperience, forcing them to see the gap between where they are and where they need to be.
But in practice, I've rarely found that such moments play out like the truth-telling sessions on TV. Harsh truth-telling, in my experience, doesn't work as well as patience and persistence, meeting students half-way and helping them gradually gain more knowledge/expertise. Beyond a few specific instances, those times where I've attempted harsh conversations, tended to generate more problems than they solved.
Why? The difference is this: I am obliged as a teacher to be in relationship with my students in a way that TV Experts aren't with their Wannabes. My investment in my students transcends the space of a single episode. I can't afford do subsume maintaining the student-teacher relationship to the presentation of X or Y Truth about the subject I'm teaching. I have to balance the need for students to learn the skills/knowledge I teach with the fact that they will learn at different paces and in different ways than I did.
It strikes me that the distinction between TV Truth-Tellers and real-world pedagogues provides a way of thinking about a divergence of evangelicalism over the philosophy of Christian witness to the world. Evangelism, after all, involves a degree of truth-telling to an audience of people in need of that truth; it isn't coincidental that hard truth-telling sessions are known as "come to Jesus" meetings.
For some evangelists, the imperative of evangelism is simple proclamation--kerygma (Greek for "proclamation, teaching"). In this view, the evangelist is charged with proclaiming the truth of the Gospel without accommodation or compromise. Anything beyond that (e.g., winning converts) is God's work, not humans'. If the hearers receive and (through God's grace) submit themselves to the saving Gospel--great! If they don't, then all the evangelist can do is pray for them, shake the dust off their sandals (so to speak), and move on. Truth trumps relationships, for (within this understanding) no healthy relationship can obtain between those who know the Truth and those who will not accept the truth.
Other evangelists, while not discounting kerygma, focus more specifically on proselytism--making converts. Proclaiming the word, in this view, is necessary but not sufficient. One must speak the truth, yes, but speak it in ways that listeners hear and may be inspired by or attracted to it. For some within this view, kerygma can only occur effectively within the context of an established relationship of trust between believer and non-believer, a kind of prevangelism that prepares the soil of non-believer's heart to receive the seed of the Gospel. Here a relationship must precede and provide the support for Truth-telling.
While the TV fan in me finds the smackdown kerygma of "nothing but the truth" fascinating, the pedagogue in me causes me to prefer the relationship-first form of truth-telling. It's less dramatic, to be sure, and it often lacks the spectacle of ultimatum. But it seems, in the long run, more effective, more loving.
More later,
JF
To be sure, the experts Bravo and other such networks choose to focus on aren't merely experts; they're personalities--typically flamboyant, eccentric-bordering-on-unpleasant personalities. They are the harsh, drill sergeants of their particular profession, grinding their subjects down into nothing so that (ideally) they may be rebuilt, rehabilitated, made stronger and better. And episodes do end with the Wannabe eventually submitting to the Expert, overcoming bad habits, and improving. The shows' punch, however, comes from those "come to Jesus" scenes of prideful singles, salon owners, or chefs being told these Harsh Truths in no uncertain terms.
Inevitably, show producers/editors (even writers in some cases) follow these scenes with breakaway reaction interviews with those who have just been taken down a few notches. Reactions range from rage ("I can't believe that #&%@ said that! What does he/she know?") to chastened acceptance ("It was really hard to hear what so-and-so said, but I know it's true"). Sometimes--rarely--the reaction is so extreme that the person simply stalks off, never to be seen again. But the Expert is fine with that! "He/She couldn't take the truth," sighs the Expert, "and now s/he'll be a failure."
I wrote originally that my attraction to such scenes of putting-people-in-their-place stemmed from my own lack of self-assertiveness. These personalities seem simultaneously off-putting and admirable to me, I reasoned, largely because they are unafraid of presenting their opinions and experience as the textbook truth of their particular profession, and they brook no suggestion to the contrary. They know the truth, they know their skills, and--this is a biggie--they all prioritize presenting that truth bluntly over maintaining a relationship with the Wannabe to whom they present it. They establish truth as a standard to which the Wannabe must rise--or else--and they do so with unapologetic forcefulness.
To a degree, I recognize that I myself do something similar from time to time as a teacher. Indeed, I wonder if my fascination with these scenes has to do with how they play out a kind of pedagogical power-trip fantasy. Many's the time when I've felt the need to have a "come-to-Jesus" meeting with my students. "Here is standard X," I'd say, "and you are failing to meet it." Sometimes I want to--I have to--shock my students into a realization of their own ignorance or inexperience, forcing them to see the gap between where they are and where they need to be.
But in practice, I've rarely found that such moments play out like the truth-telling sessions on TV. Harsh truth-telling, in my experience, doesn't work as well as patience and persistence, meeting students half-way and helping them gradually gain more knowledge/expertise. Beyond a few specific instances, those times where I've attempted harsh conversations, tended to generate more problems than they solved.
Why? The difference is this: I am obliged as a teacher to be in relationship with my students in a way that TV Experts aren't with their Wannabes. My investment in my students transcends the space of a single episode. I can't afford do subsume maintaining the student-teacher relationship to the presentation of X or Y Truth about the subject I'm teaching. I have to balance the need for students to learn the skills/knowledge I teach with the fact that they will learn at different paces and in different ways than I did.
It strikes me that the distinction between TV Truth-Tellers and real-world pedagogues provides a way of thinking about a divergence of evangelicalism over the philosophy of Christian witness to the world. Evangelism, after all, involves a degree of truth-telling to an audience of people in need of that truth; it isn't coincidental that hard truth-telling sessions are known as "come to Jesus" meetings.
For some evangelists, the imperative of evangelism is simple proclamation--kerygma (Greek for "proclamation, teaching"). In this view, the evangelist is charged with proclaiming the truth of the Gospel without accommodation or compromise. Anything beyond that (e.g., winning converts) is God's work, not humans'. If the hearers receive and (through God's grace) submit themselves to the saving Gospel--great! If they don't, then all the evangelist can do is pray for them, shake the dust off their sandals (so to speak), and move on. Truth trumps relationships, for (within this understanding) no healthy relationship can obtain between those who know the Truth and those who will not accept the truth.
Other evangelists, while not discounting kerygma, focus more specifically on proselytism--making converts. Proclaiming the word, in this view, is necessary but not sufficient. One must speak the truth, yes, but speak it in ways that listeners hear and may be inspired by or attracted to it. For some within this view, kerygma can only occur effectively within the context of an established relationship of trust between believer and non-believer, a kind of prevangelism that prepares the soil of non-believer's heart to receive the seed of the Gospel. Here a relationship must precede and provide the support for Truth-telling.
While the TV fan in me finds the smackdown kerygma of "nothing but the truth" fascinating, the pedagogue in me causes me to prefer the relationship-first form of truth-telling. It's less dramatic, to be sure, and it often lacks the spectacle of ultimatum. But it seems, in the long run, more effective, more loving.
More later,
JF
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Ray Comfort's Atheism Site
Back to posting after some time off.
What's there to post about, evangelical-culture-wise? Whenever I feel stymied about something to blog about for this site, I visit one of several handy-dandy conservative-evangelical blogs. One of my favorite, as I've mentioned, is Ray Comfort's "Atheist Central" blog, where the "Way of the Master" evangelist posts a daily bit of atheist-bait for his flock (herd? gaggle?) of commentators to squabble over.
I've written about Comfort's evangelical technique at some length. His atheist site, however, seems at first more of a side-project, a distraction from his main work of educating neophyte evangelists to spread the faith as Jesus did (i.e., via open-air preaching).
Unlike the random pedestrians Comfort generally focuses on, those who read and comment every day on "Atheist Central" generally have their minds made up about Comfort's views. He has ardent defenders and persistent (almost to the point of fixation) critics. Comfort's postings range from simple scriptural exegesis to announcements about his ministry's actions (e.g., the Origin of the Species giveaway) to occasional commentary on a culture war issue or to. Hardly a post goes by, however, without Comfort's inserting some jab at the foolishness and pride associated with willful unbelief.
Such jabs in turn prompt each day's comments, which feature an almost ritual re-enactment of the same jeers-and-cheers discussion between those who find Comfort mendacious or vapid and those who find him praiseworthy. "There you go again, Ray," write the critics. "There you go again, atheists," write his defenders. And so on. Comfort occasionally responds to this or that poster and will delete any comment that uses offensive language or in which the words God or Jesus are not capitalized.
I have to admit, I've been puzzled in the past about Comfort's attention to this site. His usual ministry, which he patterns after his take on Christ's ministerial example, focuses on street preaching and improvisational Q&A encounters with passersby. His atheist page, however, boasts a "congregation" of regulars seemingly addicted to the flame wars about the provocation du jour. In a sense, he's preaching to the converted, which isn't all that unusual for a pastor. The converted to whom he preaches on that site, though, are those converted utterly against him. His is a site dedicated (ostensibly) to ministry to atheists and atheism. It's preaching to the heretics.
Now, I have a longstanding interest in how activists--which I'll define as people ardently dedicated to changing attitudes and/or material conditions of or for others--interact with those who oppose them. Confronted with someone dead-set against your values, what do you do? (I imagine one of those Windows pop-up choice boxes: "Political Opponent Detected: Ignore, Delete, Retry?") Most political and ideological oppositions play out indirectly, as activists teach insider/outsider distinctions to their own political communities. You learn how to be a Tea Party activist, for example, as much by recognizing common foes as by identifying fellow travelers. It's rare for activists actually to address each other to try to persuade or reconcile. One of the fascinating features of evangelicalism for me is the fact that evangelists regularly reach out honestly and hopefully to those most opposed to them.
Is Comfort's atheism site an example, then, of just such a trans-ideological outreach?
I don't think so--at least not primarily. Moreover, I think that, at least in Comfort's mind (which of course I don't claim to know--this is educated guess sort of stuff), the atheism site does embody an online version of his street ministry. In his evangelism training curricula, Comfort and his proteges discuss the complexities of open-air street preaching. One particular obstacle they mention is the heckler--someone who "answers back" combatively, arguing with the street evangelist's points. Handling such a heckler is a tricky situation, cautions Comfort, especially if they become violent or too disruptive. But often, he says, hecklers are good because they attract a crowd.
As a response tactic, then, Comfort suggests dealing with the heckler directly, addressing him or her respectfully and repeating your key points--but without the expectation that you'll suddenly convince the dedicated atheist (or critic) to accept the message. You aren't there to win an intellectual argument; you just want to get your message across clearly. The real audience, of course, isn't the heckler but the crowd that gathers to hear the squabble. It's at that point, argues Comfort, that a Christian witness can play out effectively, as the audience (ideally) sees how loving, calm, and well-reasoned your arguments are in comparison to the hateful (i.e., intolerant) performance of the heckler.
Atheist Central functions much like the on-the-street encounter between Comfort and an angry heckler. Comfort engages (and enrages) atheists, in other words, not to convince them--his arguments (like theirs) tend toward the repetitive--but to attract net traffic, gawkers who might will get a dose of law/gospel from Comfort's postings no matter when they come.
It works. I encountered the site from a news report, which seemed amused that a dedicated evangelist like him would so spit into the atheist wind by seemingly inviting reams of vitriol from his atheist detractors. I would imagine that similar net passersby drop in, see the debate, and move on. Comfort's self-deprecating style, which his regular critics cite as infuriatingly twee, works well to a first-timer. Comfort seems sincere and calm, just posting his thoughts about topic X or scripture Z. His critics, by comparison, resemble the bitter atheist stereotypes he so often recycles in his posts.
Now, one can argue whether such drive-by (click-by?) evangelism works in terms of creating converts (particularly the "true" converts Comfort seeks), but Comfort's tactic, I find, remains at least consistent.
More later,
JF
What's there to post about, evangelical-culture-wise? Whenever I feel stymied about something to blog about for this site, I visit one of several handy-dandy conservative-evangelical blogs. One of my favorite, as I've mentioned, is Ray Comfort's "Atheist Central" blog, where the "Way of the Master" evangelist posts a daily bit of atheist-bait for his flock (herd? gaggle?) of commentators to squabble over.
I've written about Comfort's evangelical technique at some length. His atheist site, however, seems at first more of a side-project, a distraction from his main work of educating neophyte evangelists to spread the faith as Jesus did (i.e., via open-air preaching).
Unlike the random pedestrians Comfort generally focuses on, those who read and comment every day on "Atheist Central" generally have their minds made up about Comfort's views. He has ardent defenders and persistent (almost to the point of fixation) critics. Comfort's postings range from simple scriptural exegesis to announcements about his ministry's actions (e.g., the Origin of the Species giveaway) to occasional commentary on a culture war issue or to. Hardly a post goes by, however, without Comfort's inserting some jab at the foolishness and pride associated with willful unbelief.
Such jabs in turn prompt each day's comments, which feature an almost ritual re-enactment of the same jeers-and-cheers discussion between those who find Comfort mendacious or vapid and those who find him praiseworthy. "There you go again, Ray," write the critics. "There you go again, atheists," write his defenders. And so on. Comfort occasionally responds to this or that poster and will delete any comment that uses offensive language or in which the words God or Jesus are not capitalized.
I have to admit, I've been puzzled in the past about Comfort's attention to this site. His usual ministry, which he patterns after his take on Christ's ministerial example, focuses on street preaching and improvisational Q&A encounters with passersby. His atheist page, however, boasts a "congregation" of regulars seemingly addicted to the flame wars about the provocation du jour. In a sense, he's preaching to the converted, which isn't all that unusual for a pastor. The converted to whom he preaches on that site, though, are those converted utterly against him. His is a site dedicated (ostensibly) to ministry to atheists and atheism. It's preaching to the heretics.
Now, I have a longstanding interest in how activists--which I'll define as people ardently dedicated to changing attitudes and/or material conditions of or for others--interact with those who oppose them. Confronted with someone dead-set against your values, what do you do? (I imagine one of those Windows pop-up choice boxes: "Political Opponent Detected: Ignore, Delete, Retry?") Most political and ideological oppositions play out indirectly, as activists teach insider/outsider distinctions to their own political communities. You learn how to be a Tea Party activist, for example, as much by recognizing common foes as by identifying fellow travelers. It's rare for activists actually to address each other to try to persuade or reconcile. One of the fascinating features of evangelicalism for me is the fact that evangelists regularly reach out honestly and hopefully to those most opposed to them.
Is Comfort's atheism site an example, then, of just such a trans-ideological outreach?
I don't think so--at least not primarily. Moreover, I think that, at least in Comfort's mind (which of course I don't claim to know--this is educated guess sort of stuff), the atheism site does embody an online version of his street ministry. In his evangelism training curricula, Comfort and his proteges discuss the complexities of open-air street preaching. One particular obstacle they mention is the heckler--someone who "answers back" combatively, arguing with the street evangelist's points. Handling such a heckler is a tricky situation, cautions Comfort, especially if they become violent or too disruptive. But often, he says, hecklers are good because they attract a crowd.
As a response tactic, then, Comfort suggests dealing with the heckler directly, addressing him or her respectfully and repeating your key points--but without the expectation that you'll suddenly convince the dedicated atheist (or critic) to accept the message. You aren't there to win an intellectual argument; you just want to get your message across clearly. The real audience, of course, isn't the heckler but the crowd that gathers to hear the squabble. It's at that point, argues Comfort, that a Christian witness can play out effectively, as the audience (ideally) sees how loving, calm, and well-reasoned your arguments are in comparison to the hateful (i.e., intolerant) performance of the heckler.
Atheist Central functions much like the on-the-street encounter between Comfort and an angry heckler. Comfort engages (and enrages) atheists, in other words, not to convince them--his arguments (like theirs) tend toward the repetitive--but to attract net traffic, gawkers who might will get a dose of law/gospel from Comfort's postings no matter when they come.
It works. I encountered the site from a news report, which seemed amused that a dedicated evangelist like him would so spit into the atheist wind by seemingly inviting reams of vitriol from his atheist detractors. I would imagine that similar net passersby drop in, see the debate, and move on. Comfort's self-deprecating style, which his regular critics cite as infuriatingly twee, works well to a first-timer. Comfort seems sincere and calm, just posting his thoughts about topic X or scripture Z. His critics, by comparison, resemble the bitter atheist stereotypes he so often recycles in his posts.
Now, one can argue whether such drive-by (click-by?) evangelism works in terms of creating converts (particularly the "true" converts Comfort seeks), but Comfort's tactic, I find, remains at least consistent.
More later,
JF
Monday, February 1, 2010
Mister Rogers
Back after a few days away. I think I'll be dropping down to 3-4 posts a week so as not to feel bad when I don't post every single day.
For today: One of the odder things I've been doing with my DVR of late is recording re-runs of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. PBS no longer officially broadcasts that show, but individual stations may show it in syndication. Lucky for me, my local PBS station shows one episode twice a weekend at 6:00 AM.
What can I say? Watching that show is like enjoying a cool cup of distilled water after a week of drinking nothing but lukewarm, off-brand soda pop. It's pure and unpretentious at once. Every episode is the same familiar formula--the "Won't You Be My Neighbor" entrance, the changeover from business to sweaters-and-sneakers, some fairly aimless activities, songs, and reflective talk; a trip to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe; and then back with Mr. Rogers for more talk, a song, and then the final changeover and goodbye set to "It's Such a Good Feeling."
And every activity, every song, every reflection unfolds guided Fred Rogers's unhurried, sincere, gentle attention focused right at the camera, i.e., at you, his "television neighbors." He peppers the show with reminders--all delivered naturally, like an old lesson he's just rediscovered--"You know, there's only one person like you in all the whole wide world. You're special and fine because you're you."
Only now, watching it armed with my Professional Dramaturgical Eye do I see how excellent it is on the level of pure craft. Take Fred Rogers as an actor, presenting himself as a character in every show. I mean, Rogers delivered practically the same basic message every day ("you're a special person") and never does it come off as anything but utterly honest, utterly motivated and appropriate to the moment. He has a talent for tapping into some reservoir of joyful fascination with anything--any object, any process, any person--he happens to meet. I know actors who work years and never achieve anything like that level of conviction.
Watching those 6 AM reruns, I realize that part of what makes the show so refreshing, so unusual, stems from its avoidance of any irony, camp, tongue-in-cheekness, or innuendo. We are used to children's programming that operates on at least two levels, one pitched toward the youngsters and one signaling to the adults. There's a winking awareness of grittier or more sexual aspects of life even in shows like Sesame Street or Dora the Explorer (I won't even get into the hyper-sexualized preteen fare of the Disney Channel et al.).
In Mister Rogers, though, what you see is what you get. What people say is purely and literally what they mean. Even the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, a land of fantasy costumes and characters ruled by a puppet king, remains firmly framed as make-believe. On several occasions Rogers shows his audience exactly how the puppets work, reinforcing a realistic substrate to all of the imagination and disguise play going on.
Of course, such unironic sincerity makes the show an easy target for parodies in which a cynical or sexualized subtext gets laced into the show's format. So pervasive are such parodies that I sometimes find myself thinking of the show through the lens of the parodist, i.e., as a doofy, moralizing, high-handed exercise in naivete.
Watching the show, though, erases such misconceptions. Rogers does a surprisingly minimal amount of moral instruction. Most of his reflections and monologues deal not with what you should do or shouldn't do but how things are. "Sometimes we get angry, don't we?" he says with absolute conviction, "Or sometimes we get lonely." And then he pauses to let that sink in. He's surprisingly frank about the reality of unpleasant events, scary things, and sad feelings. There's no theodicy here; the show scrupulously avoids any overtly religious subtext. Things simply aren't always as we would have them.
And what does Mister Rogers do with such darker realities? He encourages us to express them as such, explores our reaction to them, and reassures us that nothing that happens affects the fact of our worth as special people.
Case in point: from an episode I recorded recently and which by some miracle was uploaded to Youtube:
Aside from noting the truly clever songwriting and the talented performers (Rogers as Daniel and Betty Aberlin as Lady Aberlin), I'm blown away by the simple, powerful ethic of valuing the other that's expressed here.
I mean, isn't this precisely what agape is? How different would Christianity be if we imagined God (not always, but sometimes) as the one who sings to us when we feel like mistakes? This would be the God who doesn't merely tolerate us, who doesn't have to hold God's nose to deal with us, who isn't defined by wrathful-with-a-touch-of-grace. This would be the God (and we would be the Church) who sees everyone as a neighbor. This would be the God/Church that sings to everyone they meet that "it's such a good feeling/to know you're alive."
Be well,
JF
For today: One of the odder things I've been doing with my DVR of late is recording re-runs of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. PBS no longer officially broadcasts that show, but individual stations may show it in syndication. Lucky for me, my local PBS station shows one episode twice a weekend at 6:00 AM.
What can I say? Watching that show is like enjoying a cool cup of distilled water after a week of drinking nothing but lukewarm, off-brand soda pop. It's pure and unpretentious at once. Every episode is the same familiar formula--the "Won't You Be My Neighbor" entrance, the changeover from business to sweaters-and-sneakers, some fairly aimless activities, songs, and reflective talk; a trip to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe; and then back with Mr. Rogers for more talk, a song, and then the final changeover and goodbye set to "It's Such a Good Feeling."
And every activity, every song, every reflection unfolds guided Fred Rogers's unhurried, sincere, gentle attention focused right at the camera, i.e., at you, his "television neighbors." He peppers the show with reminders--all delivered naturally, like an old lesson he's just rediscovered--"You know, there's only one person like you in all the whole wide world. You're special and fine because you're you."
Only now, watching it armed with my Professional Dramaturgical Eye do I see how excellent it is on the level of pure craft. Take Fred Rogers as an actor, presenting himself as a character in every show. I mean, Rogers delivered practically the same basic message every day ("you're a special person") and never does it come off as anything but utterly honest, utterly motivated and appropriate to the moment. He has a talent for tapping into some reservoir of joyful fascination with anything--any object, any process, any person--he happens to meet. I know actors who work years and never achieve anything like that level of conviction.
Watching those 6 AM reruns, I realize that part of what makes the show so refreshing, so unusual, stems from its avoidance of any irony, camp, tongue-in-cheekness, or innuendo. We are used to children's programming that operates on at least two levels, one pitched toward the youngsters and one signaling to the adults. There's a winking awareness of grittier or more sexual aspects of life even in shows like Sesame Street or Dora the Explorer (I won't even get into the hyper-sexualized preteen fare of the Disney Channel et al.).
In Mister Rogers, though, what you see is what you get. What people say is purely and literally what they mean. Even the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, a land of fantasy costumes and characters ruled by a puppet king, remains firmly framed as make-believe. On several occasions Rogers shows his audience exactly how the puppets work, reinforcing a realistic substrate to all of the imagination and disguise play going on.
Of course, such unironic sincerity makes the show an easy target for parodies in which a cynical or sexualized subtext gets laced into the show's format. So pervasive are such parodies that I sometimes find myself thinking of the show through the lens of the parodist, i.e., as a doofy, moralizing, high-handed exercise in naivete.
Watching the show, though, erases such misconceptions. Rogers does a surprisingly minimal amount of moral instruction. Most of his reflections and monologues deal not with what you should do or shouldn't do but how things are. "Sometimes we get angry, don't we?" he says with absolute conviction, "Or sometimes we get lonely." And then he pauses to let that sink in. He's surprisingly frank about the reality of unpleasant events, scary things, and sad feelings. There's no theodicy here; the show scrupulously avoids any overtly religious subtext. Things simply aren't always as we would have them.
And what does Mister Rogers do with such darker realities? He encourages us to express them as such, explores our reaction to them, and reassures us that nothing that happens affects the fact of our worth as special people.
Case in point: from an episode I recorded recently and which by some miracle was uploaded to Youtube:
Aside from noting the truly clever songwriting and the talented performers (Rogers as Daniel and Betty Aberlin as Lady Aberlin), I'm blown away by the simple, powerful ethic of valuing the other that's expressed here.
I mean, isn't this precisely what agape is? How different would Christianity be if we imagined God (not always, but sometimes) as the one who sings to us when we feel like mistakes? This would be the God who doesn't merely tolerate us, who doesn't have to hold God's nose to deal with us, who isn't defined by wrathful-with-a-touch-of-grace. This would be the God (and we would be the Church) who sees everyone as a neighbor. This would be the God/Church that sings to everyone they meet that "it's such a good feeling/to know you're alive."
Be well,
JF
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