Pride Day after the Louisiana Annual Conference 2019, or Two Cheers and an Apology

Baton Rouge Pride celebrations are tomorrow (Saturday). I've signed up to staff the Reconciling (LGBTQ+ affirming) table there.

I'm wondering what I can ethically say there to the people at Pride.

Here's the raw results from the Louisiana Annual Conference this week:

• Andrew Smith's petition to denounce the passage of the Traditional Plan had a robust debate but failed to pass with a narrow 340-360 vote.
• Four of the eight elected lay delegates to the 2020 General Conference (1 of 3), Jurisdictional Conference (2 of 3), and alternate (1 of 2) were people who align with progressive or centrist views.
• Seven of the eight elected clergy delegates were identified as progressive/centrist (the lone non-progressive is an alternate).
• In terms of race and gender, the elected delegation represents an impressively representative cross-section of Methodists. One of these, Adam Philley, is (I believe) our first out gay delegate (an alternate).

For Louisiana Methodism, these are amazing outcomes, a cause for celebration.

Such a victory bespeaks hard work and careful planning. Spurred by dismay at the 2019 General Conference's support for the Traditional Plan, progressives and centrists in Louisiana organized a "Big Tent Coalition." We strategized, politicked, coordinated, and prayed our Wesleyan butts off. To all the people who labored behind the scenes and in public fora to bring this about--Katie, John C., Brandon, Adam, Mickie, Marissa, Jay, Andrew, Karli, Marty, Juan, Lane, Donnie, Laura, Jen R., Jen S., Buzzy, all our delegates, all who spoke and advocated for us, each person who checked in with me and hugged me and cried with me, everyone I'm forgetting or haven't mentioned by name--I can't possibly thank you enough.

So, yes, I'm happy. Three cheers.

Well...two.

Why? As thrilling as these victories are for those of us eye-deep in Louisiana Annual Conference politics, our witness to the world beyond the Church--and to LGBTQ+ folk--remains broken.

Since at least February, the United Methodist Church's loudest message to the world has been this: we don't want gay people here. Yeah, I get that's not literally what our Book of Discipline says. Yes, I understand--truly, I do--that this message runs counter to the intentions of most people who supported the Traditional Plan. But the fact remains that the take-away for most people who've heard anything about the UMC boils down to two points: (1) we voted against LGBTQ+ inclusion, and (2) we may split over this issue.

Back when I blogged here regularly--about a decade ago--I wrote a lot about David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons's 2007 book unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity . . . and Why It Matters. Researchers with the evangelical-aligned Barna Group, Kinnaman and Lyons conducted a series of surveys with younger folk to pin down what they thought about Christianity.

Two findings stay with me after all these years. First, most young adults who don't go to church aren't "unchurched"; they're de-churched. They have had some experience going to church, usually because their parents made them. And then they fell away when they hit late adolescence and early adulthood. Something about church failed to hold them--or even repelled them. The authors' other major finding: when asked what words they link to "Christian," survey respondents' top three answers were, in decreasing order, anti-homosexual, hypocritical, and judgmental.

Reflect on that for a moment. At least in 2007, at least according to these researchers, the major impression most young people have of Christianity is that they disapprove of homosexuality.

I would love to say that in 2019 the atmosphere has changed. I'd love to think that Christians, or at least Methodists, are best known for helping the poor, clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with our God. I see evidence of those priorities in my local church. I saw evidence of them in the lives and work of Louisiana Methodists this week.

But I can't blame casual observers for looking at the results of our major meetings--including the 2019 Louisiana Annual Conference--and getting the impression that we're fixated on debating and condemning homosexuality.

Tomorrow, as I staff the Methodist table at Pride, I wish I could tell attendees that impression was wrong. I wish I could point to a strong statement from our Annual Conference that we in Louisiana care more about doing no harm, doing good, and staying in love with God than we do about stressing--again, as if the world were not already convinced--that Methodists think homosexuality is bad.

But that's just not where we are. We're a reflection of the nearly 50/50 split on Andrew Smith's petition: divided. Mixed. Purple, not red or blue. And part of me loves the fact that we're so deeply conflicted, so diverse. Part of me loves that we're the church of George W. Bush and Hillary Rodham Clinton. I love it because that's our nation. Our church reflects where the country as a whole is on so many issues. Our messy mix empowers us to model love for one another in the midst of disagreement, to be the community about which the world says, See how they love one another?

That's part of why I as a gay Methodist stay in the UMC. I feel called to be part of that witness. If I wanted to be in a Church whose membership perfectly reflected my beliefs, I'd be Episcopal or Lutheran or UCC (all fabulous churches). I'd probably live somewhere other than Louisiana. For now, though, I'm committed to my spiritual home, asking daily how I may serve here. In this know I stand with many LGBTQ+ Methodist siblings as well as countless Methodist allies. Together we hope and pray, work and weep for a holy transformation of hearts and minds.

But before that blessed day comes, there's tomorrow. There's me at a table at Baton Rouge Pride representing the United Methodist Church. There's me talking a non-Methodist LGBTQ+ person  looking to connect or reconnect with a Christian faith community. What do I say?

So many queer folk have been hurt by the churches of their childhoods--denounced, shunned, or excommunicated. When people like that ask me if my church is safe--my local church but also the UMC as a whole--they're asking if they will be spared the kind of rejection they're used to receiving from Christians. Now, I'm comfortable affirming that most congregations in Louisiana would never condone abuse toward an LGBTQ+ person. Even under the Traditional Plan, Methodists are enjoined not to reject lesbian and gay laity.

Nevertheless, Methodists continually reaffirm rules and doctrinal statements that install sharp cutoffs on that acceptance. "Sure, you're welcome to come," we say, "but just keep in mind that your sexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching. Also? If you feel called to ordained ministry or want to be married in our Church, forget about it." It's We love you, BUT... To me, and to most LGBTQ+ folk, that attitude just seems, well, anti-homosexual, hypocritical, and judgmental. And, like it or not, those beliefs manifest at every level, even in the local congregation I love.

As a gay Methodist, I can see the purple tensions that underlie our conflicted stance. I can appreciate the Church as a work in process and sometimes even draw strength and meaning from that struggle. I can sense and participate in the long-ball game of moving the UMC away from such stances. I have committed myself to a discipline of patience and forbearance with my mixed community (whether I'm successful at that discipline is an entirely other matter).

But I cannot ethically ask an LGBTQ+ person to join me in that commitment. I cannot recommend the Church I love to my LGBTQ+ siblings--even after the wonderful, hard-won, immensely encouraging victories we saw this week. To evangelize, to invite someone into my church in the hopes of making them a disciple, is to make a promise: Your Creator loves you as you are, and we will strive to embody God's love in our welcome to you. I lack faith in that promise, which hinders my evangelism.

My message this Pride day may thus be rather less proud than I would wish. As our Bishop modeled in her phenomenal Episcopal Address, all I can do is apologize to the LGBTQ+ community and promise that we're trying to do better, to be better. This message I give at the same time as I hold hope and thanks for the progress we've made this last week.

So, to my Big Tent Coalition friends: thank you so much. The Spirit of God is moving!

But, to everyone else, and especially to LGBTQ+ people:

I'm so sorry.

I'm so, so sorry.

We're working on it, really we are, as hard as we can.

For now, though, maybe try the Presbyterians next door.

Gut Checks about Gay Debates and Women's Ordination

One of the tensest moments at the Louisiana Methodist Annual Conference came up on Tuesday during a debate about "Petition One." This petition, written by brave layperson Andrew Smith, called for the Louisiana Conference to denounce the passage of the Traditional Plan, to apologize to LGBTQ+ people (and their friends, family, and the Church as a whole) for the harm the plan did, and to reaffirm opposition to injustice and oppression.

Our "Big Tent" coalition of progressive and centrist folk prepped like mad to ensure the petition got a thorough hearing and a fair vote. We knew some traditionalist-minded folk would move to "postpone indefinitely" this petition (effectively killing it). Thanks to the brilliance of Rev. Donnie Wilkinson, we responded with what amounts to a "postpone definitely" motion that (according to fine print rules in subparagraph X of codicil Y of paragraph Z) superseded the kill motion.

Then we had a debate. Mikie AndrePont and Adam Philley had been preparing for just such a time as this. Each gave poignant, superbly crafted, and deeply moving stories of their own struggles with exclusion. Traditionalist voices responded with Expected Gambit #1: "But Scripture Says..." Andrew's petition contained a "Whereas" clause that nodded to the fact that it's hard to justify the Traditional Plan's fixation on homosexuality with the Bible, as scripture contains few references to same-sex behavior at all and zero references to a modern understanding of sexuality. All true.

Still, the mention of scripture opened a door to speakers to bring up once more the "clobber passages" as well as the fact--also true enough, technically--that little in scripture seems to affirm long-term, sexual, same-gender relationships. (Of course, little in scripture explicitly affirms abolishing slavery, fighting sexism, or using the internet, but whatevs.) Responses to the clobber passages--and responses to those responses--circulate regularly in this struggle.

I'm not a fan of this particular debate, or of any debate involving verse-by-verse interpretive differences. It's a rabbit hole traversed largely by people already convinced of the rightness of their interpretation. Everyone usually knows each other's responses already.

As the debate was playing out, though, I got a blast of déjà vu. In the rhetoric of the traditionalists I heard echoes of arguments my mother and other women in the Southern Baptist Church endured--and still endure-- they defend their call to ordained ministry as pastors.

As it happens, the NPR show 1A had a segment about the Southern Baptist debate about women's ordiantion yesterday. I listened to it as I drove back to Baton Rouge. Host Joshua Johnson invited onto his show two (male) SBC pastors, each of whom staked out different interpretive territory about how this or that scripture passage restricts the role of women or not. Their debate had the same rabbit-hole, we've-all-heard-these-arguments-before feel as the UMC's homosexuality debate. It's tiring and not especially productive.

The episode's best moment, though, came from Johnson's other guest, the Rev. Dr. Jerusha Matson Neal, professor of homiletics and ordained American Baptist minister. Her response to the debate, I thought, captures about as well as anyone could my view of the debate about the clobber passages and about sexuality in scripture generally. The show lacks a formal transcript, so I type a bit of her response here:

One of the most interesting books for me in the New Testament is the book of Acts because there you see an early Christian community doing its best to discern, with new data on the ground, how to interpret texts that they thought they knew. They thought they understood: black and white, clear codes. What's in, what's out, what's allowed,  what's clean, what's unclean, all of it. And here they were having to rethink because of the evidence of the Spirit on the ground, that perhaps their interpretation of those texts was incorrect. And so I would not simply say yes, scripture interprets scripture. But I also think that the Holy Spirit, the Living God, helps us interpret scripture, given what God is presently doing.

One of the questions that was asked to me--I was speaking to a room of about fifty women who were discerning whether to come to seminary or not, many of whom were in denominations where their call to preach, their call to leadership was dismissed or diminished in some way. And one of them said, well can you please explain what should I say when someone asks, "Why should the church ordain women?" My answer was not that submission is bad or that somehow we kind of have to "follow the culture" or something like that. My answer was because God is calling women!

And if God is calling women, we have this whole room full of people who are feeling God's calling in their lives. There has to be a gut check in us which says perhaps we have interpreted these scriptures incorrectly. Perhaps we need to be responding to what the current need is on the ground and how this is getting lived out in communities. 

I love that gut check. What do you do when the authority of the written word smacks into the reality of the Spirit's movement? It's a gut check, a rich phrase that suggests some uncomfortable combination of Is this right? and What the heck did I eat?

Eventually, the Conference voted the petition down The tally was 360-340, which for Louisiana was amazing but which for LGBTQ+ folk was still dispiriting. More on that later.

But perhaps that petition, like Andrew's petition and Adam's and Mickie's stories, was less about winning a point and more about provoking a gut check in the conference.

I like that: the movement of the Spirit experienced less as divine breath and more as, well, holy gas, a tummy rumbling of productive discomfort. Something's changing in the church. We're checking our guts.

Tense Love at the Louisiana Annual Conference 2019

Long time, no post.

I've just gotten back from the 2019 Louisiana Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church in Shreveport, LA. Most Annual Conference meetings are a combination of dull procedure, happy fellowship, and occasionally tense votes.

This year, "tense votes" was practically the conference theme.

The actual theme was love. "All you need is love," we sang nervously, anticipating the next vote, the next motion, the next speech.

Some 800 clergy, laity, and assorted staff gathered for the first time in the wake of February's Special Called Session of the General Conference (i.e., the quadrennial global meeting of the UMC). That session was a rare, desperate, emergency measure to resolve intransigent debates about homosexuality in the church. Rejecting the carefully vetted "One Church" plan, delegates narrowly approved the "Traditional Plan," a hodgepodge of alterations to the Book of Discipline that reaffirmed and redoubled stances against homosexuality. Penalties became more severe, surveillance and inquisition more invasive. News media everywhere reported how the Church had delivered a strong message: homosexuality=yucky. 

For many of us, especially LGBTQ+ folk and their allies, that outcome constituted a shock on par with the 2016 US Presidential election.We're still reeling.

My own reeling has turned into heavy involvement with national, state, and local conversations about What To Do Next. Secret gatherings. Whats App strategizing. Zoom meetings. Constant texting. Politicking at Aaron Sorkin movie script levels. Plans within plans within plans.

It's been all-consuming, a heart-soul-body-mind ordeal, exhausting, incredibly complicated, and nearly impossible to explain to non-Methodists. I liken it to waking up from some fugue in which you experience an entire lifetime in full, vivid detail, only to snap back and it's only been three seconds later to everyone else and they're staring at you funny and you're like, "No, see, I had grandchildren..."

In a way, the strategizing sessions--and Annual Conference itself--become one of the few places where everyone else got it. Everyone there is living that same fugue life. No funny looks, no strained explanations. Just hugs and "how ya doin'?" inquiries from people who have earned the right to ask that question and expect an honest response.

I've met so many amazing people across the state and nation I'd never have encountered were my Church not on the verge of shattering into a million little Wesleyan shards.

And what makes it church, in part, is how we salt all of these processes, all this tension, with reminders of Why We're Here, living this Game of Thrones-ish version of Methodism. We touch. We embrace. We pray.

We pause to support, to reflect, or even just to hum along to an old pop song repurposed as a hymn.  

All you need is love. Love is all you need. 

In the tension, the tune's comfort becomes a challenge: make love all you need. Need only love.

Can strategy be an act of love?

Un-Christian Crosses in the Desert

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More later,

JF

Anticipatory Confidence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on him next time.

JF

Differences and Deadlines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hm.

More later,

JF

Mortal Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More later,

JF