My ambitions to post more regularly are being challenged by a generally rough patch in my life currently. But then, I suppose ambitions to strengthen or re-establish disciplines--mental, physical, and spiritual--often do face early challenges by life's general roughness.
I think it's often forgotten that one of Christianity's longstanding strengths is its willingness to openly and often acknowledge life's rough spots. I suppose the over-exposure of word-and-faith, prosperity gospels that cast Christianity as a naive set of beliefs about how good life is (or should be) if only you trust in Jesus. At best, such pie-in-the-sky Christianity seems willfully blind, creating churches full of dupes all to eager to dump "seed" money into the pockets of hungry charlatans. Religion becomes, in the eyes of skeptics, a "stupidity tax"--like lotteries--catering to the gullible.
The darker side of this image, of course, is the Pat Robertson-esque (or Fred Phelps-esque) drive to explain natural disasters, ill health, poverty, or personal tragedy as some directly God-ordained punishment for individual or communal sin. Ugly Christianity has few nastier faces than the well-ya-shouldn't-have-sinned rationale.
In my experience, though, few Christians, be they mainline, liberal, Catholic, or evangelical, actually espouse such balderdash. Sure, the idea of a fallen world (whether literally or figuratively due to to the Edenic Fall) gets a lot of play, but--and this is a fine nuance often lost in communication--invoking the Fallen World is of a different order of explanation than the Robertsonish cause-and-effect narratives used to, for example, blame AIDS on homosexuals. The fallen world--or as I like to think of it the broken world--doesn't assign direct blame; it's not a juridical rationale. It's a way of describing the sick, sad, fact that s--t happens.
I find that assessment of life, frankly, throughout the gospels. "It rains on the just and the unjust," Christ tells us. Or (in Luke--and I paraphrase), "Don't go thinking that those people Pilate had killed or those folk who died when that tower collapsed were any more or less righteous or guilty than you were." Yes, you should repent of your sins, Jesus insists; but your repentance or lack thereof doesn't cause disasters to happen. Mortal life is full of suffering and disease. Paul has a thorn in the flesh that doesn't leave no matter what his prayers. Sometimes healing happens. Sometimes it doesn't. That's just life.
Heck, we have (from our Jewish cousins-in-faith) the book of Job, where God's puzzling, frustrating answer to Job's all-too-human question of why, God? is basically, "you're better off not asking."
Much of the skepticism I hear directed at religion, and Christianity especially, castigates it for its inability to deal with the reality of pain and suffering--the fact that life sucks sometimes. But (and this echoes a rebuttal voiced by critics like Stanley Fish and Terry Eagleton) Christianity itself has a rich history of reflecting on how life does in fact suck, asking why it must suck ("why have you forsaken me?" our own Lord demands of God), and--most of all--demanding that we attend to each other as neighbors, as sisters and brothers, in the midst of the suffering.
I would never want to be seen as asserting that pain occurs simply to remind us of our own shared mortality; that'd be like saying that tornadoes happen to remind us of the need for storm shelters. I don't think most pain comes to us with lessons hidden within it, bundled away for us to unpack. To affirm the world is fallen or broken isn't to ameliorate the frustration that it is so. But, sometimes, we can create of pain an occasion do what we can to make the world less broken.
Judaism has a great phrase, tikkun olam--"repairing the world." Generally, as it was introduced to me, the phrase describes how certain good or ethical acts should be done not because of their direct or indirect benefit to the doer but because, in general, they contribute to the betterment of the world at large.
I am drawn to the idea of "repairing the world" as a way to describe our joint endeavor with Christ in this broken, fallen world where bad things happen. It is because the world is broken that we can (and should) decide to act in ways that repair it, in ways that make the suffering of life less for our neighbors.
Lord, help me, in this rough spot of this rough, broken life to remember to do your work of repair and to receive with grace the repairs you may grant to me.
More later,
JF
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Phelps Counter-Rallies and Tolerance Fads
Back from some time away due to sickness and a conference. Now I'm on the long, slow climb back to being caught up. Part of the catching up process involves re-establishing my habit of regular postings. Thus--
It seems none other than the Rev. Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps will be protesting here in my own town soon. A local high school is doing The Laramie Project, Tectonic Theatre's documentary play about the aftermath of Matthew Shepard's murder. The play itself features an extended scene that references Phelps's protest of Shepard's funeral and of the trial of his killers. One of the characters (based, of course, on a real person) responds to Phelps's protest by staging a counter-protest of people dressed as angels. As Phelps and his crew yell anti-gay invectives, the angels stand in front of him and raise their wings, blocking him from the funeral (or from the cameras).
Since then, Phelps and his Westboro Baptist church regularly choose to protest various productions of the play, which in turn inspires large counter-protests along the lines of those represented. Given that Laramie Project has become something of a high school staple (low tech requirements, large cast, easy-to-prove liberal credentials), Phelps is rarely at a loss for some site to protest, and communities are rarely at a loss for occasions to prove how liberal they are in response.
Don't get me wrong. I think it can be admirable to organize and stage a counter-protest. I've participated in some counter-protests against him myself. Certainly Phelps's message merits a counter-statement...
...or does it? Something about the formula of "Phelps comes/counter-protest staged" makes my alarms go off.
His ministry depends upon people at least seeing his bright neon signs. As I've written before, he's not so interested in creating converts; his hyper-Calvinism leads him to see most everyone else as hopelessly non-predestined anyway. Phelps's demonstrations function more as God's pointing finger of judgment, a conduit of divine disapproval for the nation's refusal to impose the death penalty on homosexuals. (One wonders if they believe in positive reinforcement, traveling to Uganda, perhaps, to praise legislators there for considering a death penalty measure for homosexual acts).
But, as just about anyone who's seen Phelps in person knows, the Westboro presence is generally anticlimactic. There's generally a handful of protesters, like a smallish family on vacation, waving their admittedly eye-catching signs. It's sort of pathetic, really--so pathetic that I wonder honestly whether they would continue at all were it not for the fact that their well-publicized presence guarantees a massive counter-reaction from the community.
More disturbingly, and with all due respect for the good intentions of the organizers: what is the point of the communal counter-reaction? It certainly won't convince Phelps et al. that their cause is hopeless or wrong-headed. Quite the contrary--the more resistance they inspire, the more the Phelps crew become convinced of the meaningfulness of their action. Doesn't the counter-reaction itself give Phelps just what he wants, i.e., proof that his righteous condemnation is making waves with the heathen? Could it be that the automatic counter-reactions by communities that Phelps visits have the unintended side-effect of encouraging Phelps to continue?
The stronger argument for counter-protests, of course, is that they aren't for Phelps's benefit but for the community's. A strong counter-rally against Phelps demonstrates to that community that his level of intolerance is, well, intolerable. I suppose that community audience has a number of sub-divisions. There's the GLBT sub-community, for whom their community's gesture of support could be a meaningful counter-message to Phelps's "God Hates Fags" rhetoric. I can see, also, how a communal counter-rally could encourage connection and mutual awareness within the left-liberal-activist sections of that community. I could even see how the occasion of a rally in contrast to Phelp's message might push some otherwise stand-offish (or apathetic) "moderate" folk to make an active choice. The rally re-casts Phelps's visit into an either-or melodrama, forcing the audience of the community to take sides.
But if I might play devil's advocate: speaking as a GLBT member of my community, it's nice that my city wants to rally to say that, at the end of the day, gay people shouldn't be called fags and given the death penalty. But I would hope that my community thinks that in any case. More directly, there's lots of ways I can think of for my community to express support for me that I'd rather see happen than a one-time counter-rally against a fire-and-brimstone caricature like Phelps. How about a non-discrimination policy? How about domestic partner benefits? How about health care for GLBT couples? (how about health care for everybody, come to think of it)?
I'm sorry, but I'm incredulous toward the notion that my civic community has my back, as demonstrated by a one-off reaction to the cartoon-level intolerance of Phelps, when that same community fails consistently to enact the day-today recognitions of equality that would make a material difference in my life and in the lives of other GLBT people.
That, I think, is the danger of Phelps and Westboro--not that they will actually inspire people to adopt their wacko beliefs but that they give people who otherwise do little or nothing for GLBT people a chance to acquire pro-tolerance credentials simply by standing up and saying, "You know, it's wrong to call those people fags and say they should all die and burn in hell." Phelps makes tolerance easy, a matter of standing up against him. If tolerance within a pluralized democracy means anything beyond beautiful phrases, surely it means an ongoing work of standing up for the rights and equality of people unlike you.
Now, if a counter-Phelps rally represents for some people a first step toward a broader perspective on what tolerance means--then super. But the danger I fear is that Phelps can just as easily be an occasion to participate in a facile fad of tolerance chic.
More soon,
JF
It seems none other than the Rev. Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps will be protesting here in my own town soon. A local high school is doing The Laramie Project, Tectonic Theatre's documentary play about the aftermath of Matthew Shepard's murder. The play itself features an extended scene that references Phelps's protest of Shepard's funeral and of the trial of his killers. One of the characters (based, of course, on a real person) responds to Phelps's protest by staging a counter-protest of people dressed as angels. As Phelps and his crew yell anti-gay invectives, the angels stand in front of him and raise their wings, blocking him from the funeral (or from the cameras).
Since then, Phelps and his Westboro Baptist church regularly choose to protest various productions of the play, which in turn inspires large counter-protests along the lines of those represented. Given that Laramie Project has become something of a high school staple (low tech requirements, large cast, easy-to-prove liberal credentials), Phelps is rarely at a loss for some site to protest, and communities are rarely at a loss for occasions to prove how liberal they are in response.
Don't get me wrong. I think it can be admirable to organize and stage a counter-protest. I've participated in some counter-protests against him myself. Certainly Phelps's message merits a counter-statement...
...or does it? Something about the formula of "Phelps comes/counter-protest staged" makes my alarms go off.
His ministry depends upon people at least seeing his bright neon signs. As I've written before, he's not so interested in creating converts; his hyper-Calvinism leads him to see most everyone else as hopelessly non-predestined anyway. Phelps's demonstrations function more as God's pointing finger of judgment, a conduit of divine disapproval for the nation's refusal to impose the death penalty on homosexuals. (One wonders if they believe in positive reinforcement, traveling to Uganda, perhaps, to praise legislators there for considering a death penalty measure for homosexual acts).
But, as just about anyone who's seen Phelps in person knows, the Westboro presence is generally anticlimactic. There's generally a handful of protesters, like a smallish family on vacation, waving their admittedly eye-catching signs. It's sort of pathetic, really--so pathetic that I wonder honestly whether they would continue at all were it not for the fact that their well-publicized presence guarantees a massive counter-reaction from the community.
More disturbingly, and with all due respect for the good intentions of the organizers: what is the point of the communal counter-reaction? It certainly won't convince Phelps et al. that their cause is hopeless or wrong-headed. Quite the contrary--the more resistance they inspire, the more the Phelps crew become convinced of the meaningfulness of their action. Doesn't the counter-reaction itself give Phelps just what he wants, i.e., proof that his righteous condemnation is making waves with the heathen? Could it be that the automatic counter-reactions by communities that Phelps visits have the unintended side-effect of encouraging Phelps to continue?
The stronger argument for counter-protests, of course, is that they aren't for Phelps's benefit but for the community's. A strong counter-rally against Phelps demonstrates to that community that his level of intolerance is, well, intolerable. I suppose that community audience has a number of sub-divisions. There's the GLBT sub-community, for whom their community's gesture of support could be a meaningful counter-message to Phelps's "God Hates Fags" rhetoric. I can see, also, how a communal counter-rally could encourage connection and mutual awareness within the left-liberal-activist sections of that community. I could even see how the occasion of a rally in contrast to Phelp's message might push some otherwise stand-offish (or apathetic) "moderate" folk to make an active choice. The rally re-casts Phelps's visit into an either-or melodrama, forcing the audience of the community to take sides.
But if I might play devil's advocate: speaking as a GLBT member of my community, it's nice that my city wants to rally to say that, at the end of the day, gay people shouldn't be called fags and given the death penalty. But I would hope that my community thinks that in any case. More directly, there's lots of ways I can think of for my community to express support for me that I'd rather see happen than a one-time counter-rally against a fire-and-brimstone caricature like Phelps. How about a non-discrimination policy? How about domestic partner benefits? How about health care for GLBT couples? (how about health care for everybody, come to think of it)?
I'm sorry, but I'm incredulous toward the notion that my civic community has my back, as demonstrated by a one-off reaction to the cartoon-level intolerance of Phelps, when that same community fails consistently to enact the day-today recognitions of equality that would make a material difference in my life and in the lives of other GLBT people.
That, I think, is the danger of Phelps and Westboro--not that they will actually inspire people to adopt their wacko beliefs but that they give people who otherwise do little or nothing for GLBT people a chance to acquire pro-tolerance credentials simply by standing up and saying, "You know, it's wrong to call those people fags and say they should all die and burn in hell." Phelps makes tolerance easy, a matter of standing up against him. If tolerance within a pluralized democracy means anything beyond beautiful phrases, surely it means an ongoing work of standing up for the rights and equality of people unlike you.
Now, if a counter-Phelps rally represents for some people a first step toward a broader perspective on what tolerance means--then super. But the danger I fear is that Phelps can just as easily be an occasion to participate in a facile fad of tolerance chic.
More soon,
JF
Friday, February 26, 2010
Evangelizing Whys and Hows
Ugh. The creeping crud has descended upon me, so I'm home this evening doing what research my mushy brain will allow. I suppose I could draw a punnish parallel between hacking through various popular evangelical texts and hacking up... well, I'll not go into that.
Something that keeps coming up in my forays into comparative evangelicalisms is the differential impulse for evangelizing--and for choosing how to evangelize--that I sense from different writers.
On the "why evangelize?" question, I find a surprising amount of variation. For some, evangelization is essential for Christians because of the here-and-now problem of perdition. People are lost and going to hell. They could die tonight. I've read two different accounts now of 19th century evangelist Dwight L. Moody's Big Regret. The story goes that Moody preached a sermon to a Chicago audience that outlined most--but not all--of the gospel. He left his audience with a challenge to think on what he had said and return the next week to hear the conclusion (i.e., Jesus's saving grace). Alas, that night was in October 1871, the night of the Great Chicago Fire. Moody berated himself from then on for failing to give the full gospel to people at every opportunity. Similarly, "urgency evangelists" will point to the fact that every single person you meet may have only a day, an hour, a minute left of life here on earth. A failure to evangelize--fully, explicitly, from start to finish with an invitation at the end--could be eternally fatal.
Others seem to answer the "why evangelize" question more with a sense that Christianity, a living relationship to the living Christ, makes life in the here-and-now better, fuller, more ethical and rewarding. I was surprised, for example, to read how-to-evangelize guides from the 1960s by the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship that presented Christianity not as a get-out-of-hell-free card but as an answer to the emptiness of modern life. I found that the seeker-sensitive pastors (e.g., Hybels, Warren) profiled in Hunter's overview of evangelistic theology similarly stressed life fulfillment over turn-or-burn.
The idea here, and it's one I personally find compelling, is that the Christian life represents a better way to live out life here on earth. This isn't to say, of course, that Christians live easier lives free from suffering--quite the contrary. These evangelists typically admit that life here on earth is nasty, brutish, and short--but that Christ's solidarity with us in the midst of suffering gives us strength and hope. More, Christ's grace towards us impels us in turn to adopt a life of solidarity with those who suffer. We share the gospel message, then, not merely as or apart from the ministries of grace but as part of those ministries.
Now, in practice, there's plenty of overlap between the urgency model and the better-way-of-life model. While I myself have theological and ethical troubles with the notion of hell (as I've written about on here extensively), pastors like Rick Warren or Bill Hybels are hardly hell-deniers. Nor would most urgency evangelists deny that Christianity is ideally more than just a one-time profession of faith that saves. Nevertheless, in the context of any one ministerial approach, the emphasis--urgency or better-way-of-life--is marked.
Evangelists diverge more sharply over the issue of how to evangelize. The key issue here concerns efficacy. What's the point of sharing the gospel? Ostensibly, the goal is to bring people to Christ so that they are saved from hell and/or part of the body of Christ on earth. An evangelical technique is effective when it results in authentic conversions to Christianity.
But for a number of evangelicals I'm reading, the results criterion for any evangelistic technique takes a back seat to the orthodoxy of the evangelical technique. A number of evangelicals--Ray Comfort, for instance, or even Greg Stiers--insist that the only proper evangelical techniques must imitate patterns clearly outlined in scripture. The science of evangelism thus comes from studying (and categorizing) instances from the Gospels and book of Acts (mainly) of how Jesus or the disciples preached or witnessed to unbelievers. Indeed, even Old Testament examples of preaching/teaching/proclaiming like Elijah or Nathan or Daniel serve as how-to guides for the modern evangelical. The what's-in-the-Bible approach to evangelism matches the conservative evangelical doctrine of inerrancy whereby the Bible's plain sense words, properly contextualized, serve as the ultimate authority for Christians. Wondering how best to evangelize? Why, look in the Bible, which is God's Instruction Book for All Things Christian.
Typically, the what's-in-the-Bible approaches tend to tack more toward the turn-or-burn tactics. Gospel presentations must be brief and complete. You may have only one chance to witness to an unbeliever, so you'd better make it count. This means that, whatever trick or tactic you use to catch someone's attention, you steer quickly and directly to a presentation of the full gospel--human sin/depravity, God's judgment, Christ's atonement, and the possibility of salvation by grace.
In particular, there's no skimping on hell here. There is the hard sell of the gospel--or it is nothing. Ray Comfort, for example, excoriates any gospel presentation that soft-pedals the harsh truth of eternal damnation. Greg Stier, in a parallel way, suggests that the sure-fire sign of a good gospel presentation is audience incredulity at the depth of God's grace and judgment (i.e., the "You mean to tell me that my kindly agnostic aunt will go to hell but a rapist-murderer who repents will go to heaven?"). Comfort and Stier--who in practice pursue quite different ministries--both argue that muting the more extreme or potentially offensive parts of the gospel result in an evangelism that is both less effective and unbiblical. Or rather--it's less effective because it's unbiblical.
The assumption here--an essential assumption, Stier contends--is that the kerygma of the gospel (the plain, full presentation of sin/judgment/atonement/salvation) is effective regardless of time/place/method of presentation. It is God that saves, not humans. The Holy Spirit transforms the human soul, enabling it to turn to God, through the power of the Holy Word. To decide not to present the Word in its totality hinders the action of the Holy Spirit and, more insidiously, suggests a lack of faith in the power of the Gospel.
Such is the allegation sometimes leveled (not particularly by Comfort or Stier) at evangelists who imagine evangelism differently. A number of other evangelical approaches--worldview evangelism, Greg Koukl's tactical apologetics, Randy Siever's "Doable Evangelism"--consciously avoid the up-front/hard-sell approach. These approaches counsel an awareness of the fact that most non-Christians begin by being fairly closed to the gospel and even distrustful of overt proselytizing attempts. Prior to such full-gospel pitches, in these techniques' views, the Christian needs to stop and take stock of where non-Christians are in terms of their worldview or relationship to Christianity. These techniques teach modes of general interaction with non-Christians that allow evangelists to get a sense of who they're dealing with. Only after establishing a base-level relationship of trust and mutual sharing does it make any sense to present the gospel. And even then, gospel presentations don't stand wholly on their own; they must be accompanied by apologetic work.
This is long-term evangelism, seeing the work of outreach as a process of relationship-building that works over time. It's also an evangelism where efficacy means more than "copying Biblical examples exactly." Relational evangelism, in these evangelists' views, works better, gets more and more substantive results, than does the sudden turn-or-burn technique. Of course, most of these practitioners would dispute the accusation that they aren't being Biblical. They would point to the variety of Christ's interactions with non-believers (everything from a party to a one-on-one conversation at a well) or especially to Paul's sermon to Greek non-Christians at Mars Hill (Acts 17).
Again, I don't mean to draw too strict of a line between the Bible-copiers and the relationship-ers. Greg Stier (of Dare 2 Share ministries), for example, grounds himself in Biblical examples and full-gospel presentations but draws a great deal on relational techniques as well. But the more obvious fractures amongst evangelicals--between the emerging church and the old-style evangelicals, for instance--mirror the fault lines around these questions of evangelical technique.
More later,
JF
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
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
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