Soundbyte Christianity

Whole Lotta Talk About Love

2008-01-24T22:27:00.000-08:00

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, but it's way past time that the Christian church had a conversation about love.

What prompted my latest outburst? Well, I watched the movie Juno, which is about a teen who gets pregnant, and decides to give the baby up for adoption. At the end of the movie, Juno's child is adopted by a loving and infertile woman who is convinced she was born to be a mother, and Juno ends up happily in a relationship with the child's father. There's no guilt, no unhappiness, and surprisingly few negative consequences to her pregnancy.

The surprising thing about the movie (to me at least) has been the astonishingly mixed reaction from the church (where by 'church' I mean the SBC). There have been some reactions of 'good, she didn't get an abortion', but just as many reactions of 'That slut!' or 'That film is unrealistic for not portraying the many negative consequences of pregnancy!". In mainstream culture, the movie has been embraced, and has been nominated for four Oscars. Many review have noted that, contrary to the Evangelical 'it's unrealistic!' meme, the film is fairly unflinching at the undesirable aspects of pregnancy (physical changes, concerns about the worthiness of potential adoptive families, etc).

Which brings me to the topic of this post. I recently ran across an article on Girl With Pen from a noted sex researcher, who talks about Juno. She's not interested in the sex, though, or in the portrayal of pregnancy. She's interested in the portrayal of love, and specifically teenage love. She points out that a lot of objections to the film came from an interesting source: the belief that it's not realistic for a teenager to find real romantic love. The fact is, our (American) culture doesn't talk that much about the possibility of love for teens. Subtly, there's a pervasive message that teenagers can't really fall in love, that somehow one needs more life experience or something in order to be validated in one's emotions, or capable of commitment. Parents tell their daughters not to sleep with their boyfriends, because regardless of the way that the girl feels, she can't really be in love.

And to some degree that's true. More life experience does in some ways deepen emotions or emotional commitment. But I think that it's true to a far lesser degree than many people suppose. Greater life experience also omplicates emotions and emotional commitments, and often those complications can make it more difficult for a couple to remain committed, not less. How quickly we forget that the great love stories of all time took place between teenagers. Romeo and Juliet (however ill-fated) were probably eighteen and fifteen respectively. Mary and Joseph were likewise probably in their teens. History is filled with the stories of teens who fell in love, got married, and lived happily ever after.

Our era, however, looks in askance on a twenty-year old who gets married. 'She's too young', people say, 'She doesn't know her own mind'. There's a certain element of patronization to this statement, especially since many parents were in their late teens or early twenties themselves when they were married. But there's also an assumption, which I don't think that many people realize that they're making: teens aren't capable of valid emotions, because of their age. I think that teens are capable of a lot more than society gives them credit for, personally.

But my personal opinions aside, what implications does this have for the church? Well, for one thing, it makes the whole 'abstinence until marriage' thing more difficult than it ever was before. Even fifty years ago, many couples were married before the age of twenty. Is it so surprising that many place the average age of first sexual experience now at nineteen? The average age of first sex hasn't changed, it's just that the average age of marriage has risen sharply.

Abstinence isn't the only thing that gets complicated when we implicitly tell teenagers that their emotions aren't valid, though. Many people make commitments to religion based on an emotional state, on the feeling of experiencing God. Over the past five or so years, it's been a growing concern among SBC churches that youth ministries are shrinking, and that it's harder to draw teens and youth to church. Most of the literature within the denomination that I've seen attributes this to the supposed evils of secular culture, but I think that's got far less to do with the problem than a more organic cause: it's difficult to keep teens involved in church when the church constantly sends an implicit message that their emotions and feelings aren't valid. From stories of 'summer camp romance', which are winked at patronizingly by adults in the youth group to bombardments of 'wait for marriage, and wait to marry until you're old enough' messaging in literature, teens are assailed by the idea that their judgment isn't good enough when it comes to their own emotions. And I think that this may be the single largest, and single least-acknowledged, factor in the attrition that most churches experience once their devout children become teenagers.

I think that it is time for the church to have a talk about love. And this time, amybe it will include all its members.

Church and Art, Part III: The Beholder's Eye

2008-01-16T02:19:00.000-08:00

In Part I of this series, I established that I disagreed with the way that Evangelical Christianity greeted the film The Golden Compass, for two primary reasons:

1) The film did not seem threatening to Christian beliefs, as it depicted a church and god that were clearly not the Christian church and/or God.

2) Even if the film was viewed as a critique of the Christian church/religion, the proper way to respond to critique is to consider it and then address the critique by showing why it's invalid or reframing the debate, not to refuse to consider the criticisms at all. Refusal to address criticism is not a sign of faith or loyalty, but of weak belief.

Given that, I wish today to address the question of why Christians habitually respond to challenging art in the same way that they did the Golden Compass film: by refusing to view it, and by attempting to censor it without considering or addressing the critique implicit in the art itself. I've thought a little about it, and my conclusion is that Christians, and fundamentalist Christians (cough*SBC*cough) in particular, lack a coherent philosophy of aesthetics on which to evaluate art.

What does this mean? Well, when a secular art critic looks at art, they evaluate it based on a number of metrics: Is it beautiful to look at? Is it thought provoking? Did the artist have a clear purpose or message in mind when she/he created it? Does it succeed in communicating that message? Is it valuable as cultural commentary, or as a symptom of a larger cultural moment? Does it make allusions or enter a dialogue with prior works of art, and if so, what does it add to that tradition/dialogue? There are many, many other ways that art gets evaluated on the secular art scene, but suffice it to say, there is clearly a deep and interesting aesthetic philosophy that motivates a secular art critic's response to a work.

Christians, on the other hand, seem to have a disturbing tendency to evaluate artwork based on a single metric: Does it seem portray a message that is sympathetic to Christian values? A painting that depicts Christian virtues, by this metric, is valuable art. A film that questions or demeans Christian values (as many Christians seem to suppose the Golden Compass would), by this standard of evaluation, is not valuable.

The problem with using this as the only, or even as the primary, metric for Christian art criticism is that it seems to get a lot of situations wrong. It allows for praising common kitschy Jesus art (as one sees in convenience stores and Family Christian Book stores, in the Left Behind series of books and many other so-called Christian novels, or in low-budget Christian films with gooey morals and terrible acting), but eliminates many extraordinary achievements of artistic technique as unworthy (The Dark Materials books, for example. Or most of the work by Titian or Delacroix, films like The Godfather or Citizen Kane, music like Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen or Schumann's Dieterliebe or countless others). The problem with this Christian aesthetic is that it may applaud many works which seem aesthetically bankrupt by other metrics, like measurements of artistic achievement or cultural significance, while ignoring landmark works simply because they are not explicitly Jesus-oriented.

How, then, should a Christian evaluate art? I would argue that the answer is the same as for a secular art critic: by standards of beauty, depth of thought and message, and cultural significance. The (insufficient) standard that many Christians seem to use might be paraphrased as 'how holy is it?' or 'does it cause me to turn my eyes towards God?' It is not art's responsibility, however, to turn our eyes towards God, nor should that be its goal. It is our own responsibility to see to our spiritual condition, to consider the spiritual implications of a piece of art that we see, whether or not that art is explicitly religious. Therefore we should aesthetically evaluate art just as any secular critic might. The 'Christian' aspect of interacting with art should come not in evaluating what art is valuable to see, or what art is worthy or promotion, but instead should come after we see the art, in evaluating our own response as viewers. There's no reason to shy away from or censor controversial art. It's in examining not the art itself, but our own responses to that art that the valuable lessons lie.

Everyone's a little bit crazy, but some are crazier than others.

2008-01-14T17:55:00.000-08:00

It's always funny to me to read/listen to other religions explaining themselves. This, for example. It's Tom Cruise, giving little soundbytes on Scientology.

The funny thing about it is that if you substituted "Christianity" for "scientology", and changed a few jargon words, he could easily be an Evangelical Christian. A Southern Baptist, in fact. It's all so remarkably similar, listening to Tom Cruise talk about how to evangelize for Scientology, and listening to a new Southern Baptist missionary who's still all excited about his job. It's also a little scary.

Killing Bulls

2008-01-08T20:59:00.000-08:00

Unwisely, I suppose, I recently asked the pastor of our church why Jesus died. He looked at me like I'd lost my mind, and said very slowly, as though he was speaking to a small child, "For our sins?"

I rolled my eyes. "Yes, for our sins blah blah blah. But why? What is it about God that demands sacrifice?" The crux of the Gospels is that question, and so very few people ever think to even ask it. Sure, maybe Jesus died for our sins. But what in the world does that mean? Why did he even need to die in the first place?

My pastor was still a little boggled. I don't know that he'd ever considered what those words "died for our sins" meant. "Uh, think about it," he said, "I'm sure you'll figure it out."

Sure, thanks Rev. Lots of help that was. In my quest for an answer, I went online (duh), and one of the first hits on google for "why did jesus die" was this page. It's a rambling little rant about how God respects us so much he gave us free will, and how somehow that means Jesus had to die.

Call me skeptical. Actually, call me laughing my ass off. This person has huge problems understanding what 'free will' actually means (hint: it doesn't mean that a choice made by one person gets passed down to the rest of the human race, who then by definition have no ability to make that choice on their own), so his ramblings are a bit off. But it's mostly a great argument for not understanding the creation story literally.

Even if we ditch biblical literalism, though, we haven't solved the problem of Jesus. Why does God need a sacrifice? What is it about sin that needs a sacrifice to forgive? Yes, it's antithetical to God's nature, but let's think about that a little bit. It's the opposite of God. God hates it so much that he's willing to condemn you to hell for all eternity. Burning, burning hell for all eternity. All eternity. So let's just suppose (you know, for argument's sake) that God really, really hates sin. Think of it as the anti-God. If God and sin meet, maybe they eliminate each other in a huge explosion, I dunno. Anyway, God hates it.

Why sacrifice, then? If sin is the anti-God, then what is it about sacrifice that eliminates the unholiness of sin? Think about the Old Testament: bull calves or lambs were enough to atone for most sins. What magic of bulls, when they're sacrificed, makes the anti-God (sin) okay enough that God can be fine with it? How does this forgiveness thing work, if such a metaphysically insignificant thing as a bull can somehow transmute the anti-God into something that God can be okay with?

If I stop and try to answer that question honestly, I know that there's nothing metaphysically special about bulls. It's the repentance behind the idea of sacrifice that matters. The bull is just a physical manifestation of someone saying "Look, I screwed up, and I'm sorry." But the fact remains: repentance alone isn't enough. Plenty of really poor ancient Jews repented of their sins, but they weren't considered clean again until they could scrape up the money to make the appropriate offerings. So repentance alone isn't enough; there's something about sacrifice that gets to God in a difference way than a simple "I'm sorry".

What am I getting to here? Well, what we think about sacrifice is inextricably related to what we think about Jesus. Wait, let me rephrase: what we think about sacrifice just is what we think about Jesus, if we accept the truism that "Jesus was the lamb of God; a sacrifice for our sins". So explaining what's special about bulls is central to the question of explaining why Christianity matters: both are answers that get at the question of why "I'm sorry" isn't enough for God's forgivenenss, and sacrifice by death is required.

I think that in the future, I'll post more on a few of the schools of thought surrounding the metaphysics of sacrifice in the Christian paradigm. Now that I've started reading about it, there are some interesting things that people have said, and that I want to say in response. But this post is long enough, so I'll leave off here for now.

Barack Hussein Obama

2008-01-04T00:03:00.000-08:00

It's been less than five hours since the Iowa caucuses were certified for Obama, but already a disturbing trend is arising in the media. Barack Hussein Obama. Barack Hussein, not to be confused with Saddam Hussein or other Muslims. Hussein Obama, not to be confused with Osama or other Muslims.

There's been a tendency in both the mainstream news sources and right-wing blogs to pointedly use Barack's middle name. Hussein. Why does it matter? No one refers to Willard Mitt Romney. Your average Joe Oblivious probably can't even tell you Mitt is Romney's middle name, much less what his first name is. Why Obama, then?

Because Barack's name sounds foreign. It sounds like a dictator we went to war to depose, just like his last name sounds like a terrorist we still can't find. Unlike 'Willard', news sources use Barack's middle name because it sounds non-Christian, even if he isn't. Because sad as it is, those things matter to the American people.

The really interesting thing is how closely the 'Muslim' meme (the false suggestion that Obama is Muslim) gets connected to his name. America won't elect a Muslim any more than it will elect a Mormon. The fact that Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ is secondary to how a few syllables sound. Tactics like this in our political scene never fail to frustrate me.

Hegel And I Chat About Spiritless Ages

2008-01-01T20:46:00.000-08:00

There's sort of a funny paradox about the soundbytes I've heard recently about the health (or lack thereof) of Christianity in modern culture. Christians claim that they're persecuted, and that they must evangelize to spread what they view as a marginalized belief system in a godless culture. Atheists and non-evangelicals, on the other hand, have bemoaned the influence of Christianity in the culture, and assert that religion is less a marginalized sub-culture than a pervasive influence, whose often-backwards ideas must be combatted in the name of fairness and human rights.

People on both sides of the debate seem to assume that it's a recent development; Christians in particular often seem to long for a time in the past when Christianity was somehow the only cultural influence. Reading some early analytic philosophy recently, I realized that the feeling is anything but recent. Hegel talks about the same thing in Enlightenment-era Germany.

Ah, Hegel. Kant's truest and brightest idealist son, father of the modern logicians. With Kant, one of the most famously difficult-to-read of all philosophical writers. Without a doubt, Hegel is a giant in the philosophical tradition, difficult to decipher though he may be. He is not, however, to my knowledge commonly read as a religious philosopher. This is actually a bit of a curiosity, since he spent his early years as a theology student, and much of his early writing is religion-centered. The later work on logic is best-known of his oeuvre, but his work in philosophy of religion anticipates Kierkegaard on a number of salient points.

In a series of early essays, Hegel writes about what he sees as the major problem with religion in his day: its objectivity. Hegel defines 'objective religion' as the outward aspects of religious life that can be codified in formal ceremonies, historical traditions, and discursive doctrines. I highlight discursive doctrines, because I think it's important to remember, while reading Hegel, that objective religion isn't just comprised of the religious things one does. It also includes the discourses that represent or typify a large body of believers. Hegel makes the point that in their own ways, these discourses are just as ceremonial as the actual sacraments. Taking the Lord's Supper and ascribing to an anti-choice mindset are both objective aspects of religion, on Hegel's reading of it.

These things are objective in comparison to the other prong of the dialectic that Hegel is developing: subjective religion. Subjective religion is the person-by-person experience of God. It's impossible to codify, because it will necessarily be different for every person who experiences it. Hegel believes that both elements are necessary in a living religious tradition, but worries that in his age the objective is becoming divorced from the subjective, leaving only objective religious structures (or dialogues) that linger long after the subjective reasons that motivated them have left or changed. When this happens, the objective traditions can be maintained only by coercion from authorities, or by "superstitious adherence to pure external formalities". Hegel labels such spiritless belief "fetishism".

On the other hand, subjective belief, per Hegel, is "alive, effective in the inwardness of our being, and is active in our outward behavior. Subjective religion is fully individuated, objective religion is abstraction..." Subjective religion is the only way to interact with God, and is thus in many ways more important than objective religion. But there's a hitch: because subjective religion is so individual, it's not conducive to participating with others in the joys of the faith, as Jesus commanded. To solve this problem, Hegel's dialectic resolves itself: the opposition between the subjectivity of the individuated believer and the objectivity of established religion is overcome through a process of personal appropriation wherein the believer reconciles outward expressions with inner feelings and intentions, so that instead of being coercive, the external forms are adapted to objectify internal dispositions and creatively guide individual and corporate activities for all members of a given community. (That was me trying to clarify his points. See why Hegel is the very devil to understand sometimes?)

The point is, Hegel sees in his age the same problem that many liberal (or even just non-fundamentalist) Christians see in ours: people adhere dogmatically to certain doctrines or traditions "because the Bible says so", or "because it's always been that way", but do so with no understanding of the deeper reasoning behind the doctrines. Death penalty? Reproductive choice? Feminism? Queer rights? All of these are issues that fundamentalists dogmatically oppose, but often with a very limited understanding of why. Hegel sees this behavior as a harmful divorce of the objective from the subjective: an individual Evangelical may oppose feminism because the pastor said women should be submissive, but their opposition has no relation to any subjective beliefs that they may hold about the nature of God. Similarly, if you ask them to articulate a connection between their subjective concept of a God that is all-loving and cares deeply for all his creations, and their objective espousal of a homophobic stance on gay marriage, very few can remain coherent in their explanation under even the most superficial questioning. I think I agree with Hegel that there's a significant way in which the objective practice of religion has become divorced from subjective religious life, to the detriment of both.

But how to resolve this conflict? Should we all become hermits or ascetics, eschewing all to concentrate on our subjective spiritual lives? No, says Hegel, if you do that then you miss out on all the good that worshiping together can bring. Instead, the answer is an effort from every believer to integrate the subjective and objective religious lives. Think about what you're doing, he says, and then think about why you're doing it and how that relates to your most fundamental beliefs.

It sounds so easy. It's not, though, particularly for Christians who have good ideas about what their subjective beliefs are like, but find that most of the objective rituals and discussions in their local church conflict with those beliefs. Hegel describes the ideal reconciliation of the objective and subjective opposites as a sort of 'folk religion', vital yet necessarily localized.

What does one do, though, when the folk religion of one's locality (Evangelical Christianity in the Bible Belt South for me, heretical Lutheranism in Enlightenment Germany for Hegel) necessarily excludes one's subjective beliefs? Well, if you're Hegel, you realize that perhaps the proper folk religion for your beliefs isn't located in space-time, per se, but in a system of ideas. You begin to study Kant, and you write in a tradition that allows you to examine your beliefs in the context of generations of other philosophers talking about the same things. If you're me, you likewise realize that perhaps the proper community for your beliefs isn't located in space-time, per se. So you go online, and discover other scattered liberal Christians, alienated in their own localities, but slowly resolving their dialectics nonetheless by creating a dialogue, forming new traditions and new celebrations, in the communities found online. My method is a lot less likely to make me immortal than Hegel's, but hey, at least I'm easier to read.

May Allah Grant Her Rest

2007-12-27T11:19:00.000-08:00

I'd like to take a moment to mourn the passing of Benazir Bhutto, killed earlier today at a political rally. She will be remembered as twice Prime Minister of Pakistan, and the first woman to lead a Muslim country. Her regime was not without corruption (far from it), but at the same time, she was an example and a figurehead for Muslim women and Muslim centrists alike.

Her killer shot her in the neck and chest, then blew himself up during a campaign rally. About twenty others are also estimated to have died.

Church and Art, Part II: The media is art too

2007-12-25T19:27:00.000-08:00

It's a fascinating thing, watching Christianity interact with today's teenagers. Evangelical Christianity, in particular, is often amusingly out-of-touch with the realities of day-to-day life as an American teen. Take for example a prototypical Focus on the Family advice article about protecting your teen from "bad" entertainment. "Make a family constitution", the article advises, "and then weed out whatever music/movies/games don't fit your constitution!" The thing that strikes me about the article is how juvenile the tone seems. Teenagers now are smart about media: most are adept at getting it online for free, and at keeping it on computers or MP3 players, often in hidden folders designed to prevent parental access. Boys have been hiding Playboys from their mothers for years; girls discover fanfiction online, or pass around Cosmo magazines at school during lunch.

The funny thing isn't that FotF is advising a campaign that won't work with today's media-saavy teen, it's that they're approaching the subject from the same point of view as they approach movies like The Golden Compass: they give a nod to the idea of discussing themes in the media from a Christian viewpoint, but ultimately advocate strongly for a strategy of total avoidance as the only "biblical" approach. Every time I see one of these articles (and they are plentiful in the Christian press), I want to shout "Prostitutes!". Jesus hung out with prostitutes! He slept in brothels, and chatted all day long with heathens. He would have been in the corner with the goths and the yearbook freaks in high school. He'd have written letters to the editors of Playboy, making points about female exploitation.

"In and not of" is the soundbyte that gets bandied about a lot in relation to Christianity and the arts and entertainment world. Christians are supposedly to be "in the world but not of it". This is scriptural, a direct quote, in fact, but I don't think it means what a lot of Christians take it to mean. Jesus didn't mean "shun all R-rated entertainment and don't listen to pop bands", he meant "do those things, then think about God while doing them". Being in and not of the world means being completely in the world, doing what the world does, seeing what it sees, and then engaging your brain to think about how the world is commenting on (or how we could comment on) religion in relation to the secular. Jesus is saying be in dialogue with God, listen to what God is saying about the actual things of the world. Not the hypothetical, "I haven't seen it, but I'm sure its evil because it's rated R" things of the world, but the things of the world that we've experienced and understand.

Why is it important not to avoid supposedly "secular" entertainment? (Secular is in scare quotes because I don't think there's a distinction between sacred and secular entertainment, except for perhaps how "secular" entertainment has better production values.) Because it's impossible to minister to a world that knows you don't understand it. Try talking about a movie you've never seen with people who've actually viewed it multiple times. You may be able to make vague generalizations, but they will understand plot details, be able to analyze tone and intention in ways that will completely escape you as a non-viewer. If you keep the conversation up for long, they will realize that you haven't seen the film, and will discount your opinions about it, because you clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Similarly, trying to minister to people who live in the real world while trying to remain aloof and in the Christian subculture is like asking people who've seen a film to accept your vehement opinions when it's clear that you don't know what you're talking about. That's why Jesus wasn't hanging out with the temple priests (even though he could debate with them on their own level): because if he'd only hung out with the elite temple subculture, he'd have missed the opportunity to realistically minister to the normal people who needed it. Instead, he'd gone fishing with them, he'd eaten in their brothels, he'd held his debates by their wells. They knew that he understood their lives and their experiences as well as they did. So when he said "look, there's a better way out there", it sounded genuine.

Likewise, when a newly-fanatical parent says to a modern teen "This media/art/video game is unChristian! Let's write a family constitution and get rid of it!", the teen is likely to roll their eyes and just hide the porn a little better. They know that the parent, cocooned in their Christian subculture, has no idea what the world the teen is living in is like. It's a common enough complaint for teens anyway ("You don't understand me!"), and in cases like these it's justified. The parent is making no attempt to have the same experiences as the teen and believe in God anyway, they're avoiding it all in hopes that the big scary world will go away. Teens know it's a recipe for being uncool, but the fact is, it's also a recipe for immature Christianity. The only real way to reach teens, or non-Christians, is to be in the world in every sense. That way, when we as Christians talk to non-Christians, we can genuinely say "We get it. We've been there, we've seen the film, rode the ride, got the T-shirt. And you know what? God still matters."

Holding Out For A Hero

2007-12-24T07:01:00.000-08:00

Our church's sermon yesterday was oddly political for a Christmas message. The general theme went something like this: Jesus was born to be a moral leader, and clearly amoral liberal culture is brainwashing us all and killing kittens, so we need a moral leader now. Elect Huckabee as President, QED.

This is something I've noticed for years in discussions about politics: they're never framed as discussions about politics. They're discussions about morality, or about safety, or about anything other than the actual policies that the future President/Senator/dogcatcher in question intends to enact. America cares more about who's holier when electing its President than about who has a substantive plan to prop up Social Security.

Why is this, and does this impulse that we have towards electing happy heroes rather than policy wonks actually have a place in representative democracy?

The reasons for this impulse are plentiful, I think. One of the main ones is that people like to measure candidates based on their own experiences. Precious few of us have ever had to think deeply enough about energy policy to craft a coherent national strategy, but we've all thought about whether the death penalty is good at some point. We relate to candidates' thoughts about topics like the death penalty or abortion, because they're something that Joe Ordinary, sitting in his desk chair and drinking his coffee, can figure out or at least think deeply about. Energy policy, on the other hand, would require Joe Ordinary to do quite a bit of research, and isn't something that he can come up with opinions about on the fly.

Now, ease of contemplation should not be a measuring stick for how important an issue is. The death penalty affects only a very limited portion of the population at any given time, while energy policy affects all of us every minute of the day. Nonetheless, I'd bet anything I own that more people can describe a given candidate's stance on abortion or the death penalty than can describe their proposed energy policy. People fixate on issues they can understand, whether or not those issues are representative of what will constitute a good leader.

Another reason that the electorate focuses on issues that don't matter in lieu of questions of importance is that we aren't electing a Chief Executive. Sure, that's the actual position that the victorious candidate will end up filling, but that's not how the electorate conceptualizes the position when they vote to fill it. No, when America goes to the polls to fill the position we call 'President', most people are in fact voting for Figurehead in Chief. They are choosing someone who will represent them, and the emphasis is placed on 'represent' in the figurehead sense rather than in the policy-making sense. America wants a President who is like them, who represents the electorate in the sense of being the same as much of the electorate. That's why Romney's religion is such a sticking point: most Americans aren't Mormon, and are reluctant to elect someone who is unlike them. Romney's speech addressing the issue was indicative: there was very little actual Mormon doctrine in the speech (something to the tune of two sentences worth), and a whole lot of generalized solidarity. Romney knows where his bread is buttered: he needs to be as like the electorate as possible if he wants them to elect him.

Is this a useful approach to electing a President? Not particularly. The sad fact is, the vast majority of Americans are fundamentally unsuited to holding the most powerful office on the planet. Electing someone who resembles these Americans seems like a poor method of getting someone who will be competent. But national political strategists figured out over a century ago that emotional appeals (and the knowledge that a candidate is desirable because he is like you in some way is a form of emotional appeal) are far more powerful than logical ones. Logical appeals take time, take effort and consideration on the part of the electing public. Emotional appeals bypass the effort and time, and produce instant attachment to a candidate. So national political strategies are crafted around the idea of keeping policy out of debates, while focusing them on how similar a candidate might be to you, the potential voter.

If similarity to the voting public doesn't seem like a reliable way to elect a leader who's good at the things that would make for an outstanding President, why do people so consistently use that criteria as the primary one in making their decisions? Well, there is one argument that gives the impulse a little traction. The idea is that a voter can't possibly know what decisions a President will have to make, so it's best to elect someone very similar in values and life situation to the voter, in hopes that the candidate will make decision in the same way that the voter would when faced with these hypothetical situations. If we elect someone who is enough like us, maybe that person's decisions will accurately track our own decisions in situations that we can't know about.

It's an interesting selection strategy, because it relies heavily on the idea of the grand unknown. The key to making this selection strategy more appealing than a strategy that chooses a candidate based on known values like issues positions is the idea of the unknown. The situation that would come up to make a selection strategy like this plausible would need to be:

a) vitally important, even more important than issues like energy and Social Security on which candidates can produce platforms in advance.
b) completely unforeseeable to the electorate in advance. Basing a selection strategy on choosing someone whose decisions you hope will track yours is only useful if you think they'll be making decisions that there was no way you yourself could foresee (if you could foresee it, you could ask them about it, and the 'trust that they're like you' strategy starts making less sense).

Granted, some decisions like this do arise. Wars are usually unforeseeable. Terrorist events are likewise unpredictable, though I would argue that a candidate's general security strategy is probably enough to give a good idea of how they'd respond to such eventualities. Upon considerations, though, I would guess that there are fewer situations that would fit both of those criteria than one might imagine. The big domestic issues that a given President will face are generally foreseeable by the electorate before the election. If that's indeed the case, why choose a candidate based on how similar they are to us, when we could choose a candidate based on what they actually think?

... I don't know. There aren't easy conclusions here. I only know that people do it, in spite of logical evidence that such a strategy might reliably produce less-than-fit candidates for the job. Can we stop people from doing it? Would a massive, nationwide "Think about Issues!" campaign successfully get Joe Ordinary to take a break from his coffee and decide which candidate can actually present the best plans and policies, and not just a vague sense of moral feel-good?

Probably not.

Church and Art, Part I: Golden Moral Compass

2007-12-08T22:19:00.001-08:00

I haven't blogged in a while (again. some more.), but this is something that's been simmering for a while with me, so I'm going to try and write it out. This may end up being one of a series, since I think I connect a lot of peripheral issues back into the one that I want to talk about in this post.

I want to start by talking about The Golden Compass. I don't only mean the movie, here, I mean the books also, so I will differentiate between the two by referring to the book as GC and the movie as GC-M. Also, I will write about plot details for both, so persons wishing to remain unspoiled for either the film or the Dark Materials (DM) series should probably stop here.

In the past few months, there has been a lot written online in both the Christian and non-Christian communities about the fact that Pullman, author of the Dark Materials series, is openly athiest. The Catholic League called for a boycott. Conservative bloggers warned others not to expose the children. There has been a lot of fingerpointing about atheists (usually with Pullman as the archetype) demeaning Christian beliefs, a lot of defensive paranoia, and a lot of preaching false information to try and scare people out of seeing the film (example: claims that the books promote female genital mutilation). All this for a kids' movie that came out yesterday.

For me, the interesting question in all this hullabaloo isn't how Christians should respond to GC-M, or the DM books. The interesting question is why Christians respond in this particular way. Because the GC-M bruhaha isn't the first of its kind: films like The DaVinci Code and The Last Temptation of the Christ also created this kind of furor. Books like the Harry Potter series and art exhibits like Chris Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary (the one with the elephant dung) or Cosmo Cavallaro's My Sweet Lord (a lifesize, anatomically-correct sculpture of Jesus made out of chocolate) created similar tempests in a teapot. It seems that the instinctive response, when confronted with a work of art that questions, challenges, or explores themes of faith in unorthodox ways is panic.

Note how I added 'explores in unorthodox ways' as the final item of that list. Pullman's books, while undeniably unflattering to organized religion (Roman Catholicism in particular), aren't actually anti-Christian. The religion and god of the books bears little resemblance to the religion or God of any of the common Christian denominations. Pullman's "Authority" is a created being, part of the metaphysical furniture of the world. The Authority is an old man, sitting in the sky and pathetically desperate to control his creations. That... doesn't look like any description of the Christian god I've ever seen. This makes him something that the Bible warns against: a false god, and indeed, one worthy of killing.

Likewise, the Magisterium of Pullman's world bears only passing resemblance to any actual church. The Magisterium is a controlling, authoritarian organization, completely without the concept of a Jesus-figure. Without the idea of a Redeemer, Pullman's Magisterium is a church without hope. The world has a source of Original Sin (Pullman calls it Dust) , but doesn't have a source of salvation from that curse. The Magisterium, therefore, devotes itself to finding a human way to erase original sin. None of this resembles the actual teachings of any Christian church.

So GC cannot be anti-Christian, because it's not crusading against any ideals that resemble Christian ones. This hasn't stopped the stunning Christian response, however. Buzzwords in the panic about GC-M (which downplays all religion found in the books, Christian or no) included "anti-God" and "anti-Christian". It strikes me as a little, well, heretical, really. If Christians assign to God the characteristics of the Authority, and persist in the assertion that books which show characters killing a false god in fact show them killing God, then we've given up the entire point of our religion.

If Christians take offense at the demise of Pullman's pagan deity, then they're claiming that every "god" is sacred.If this god that is not our God deserves defense, then no God deserves to be killed. Christians need to stop reacting with such militant protectionism, and start using their heads when it comes to their religion.

There is another troubling aspect of the Christian reaction, however. Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that Pullman's books and the movies both portray the actual Christian faith and God in a poor light (I argued above that this is not so, but let's suppose). Even if that's true, the calls for boycott are both sad and inappropriate. In fact, if Pullman is raising legitimate criticism, then Christians should respond by considering what he's saying, and addressing why it's wrong. To me, a refusal to hear any dissent indicates weak Christianity. If you're so afraid for your faith that watching a movie could convince you to become atheist, then perhaps you should examine whether you actually have faith to begin with. Every Christian has doubts about God, but I'm firmly convinced that burying them under a cloak of protectionism is not the path to resolving them and becoming stronger in the faith.

Christians who refuse to confront dissent and instead resort to knee-jerk persecution rhetoric in fact become... well, what we're seeing now. So yes, maybe Pullman will end up making Christians look foolish with this movie. Not because the film advocates killing God, or some such nonsense, but because it exposes Christians for how weak they are: unable to recognize their own God when called to do so.

Til death or inconvienence do us part

2007-11-06T10:14:00.000-08:00

Fascinating article on the AP wire today: An Evangelical Rethink on Divorce?

I'm of divided mind when I see this. According to the article, last month's Christianity Today (a leading Christian publication, one of the largest in the nation) ran a cover story about rethinking Biblical divorce teaching to be more liberal. The author of the AP article calls biblical teaching on divorce 'inhumane'; actually, the CT author used the word 'cruel', but it's clear that the sentiment was the same: the Bible's 'no divorce except in the case of abuse' flies in the face of modern realities.

The facts of the matter are clear. According to a Barna report on divorce and religion (Barna is a respected Evangelical research group), couples that self-identify as Christians are more likely to get divorced than atheist couples. About one in three Christian marriages ends in divorce, and fundamentalist Christians are more likely to divorce than liberal Christians. Furthermore, the areas of the country where fundamentalist Christianity are common (South, midwest) have a much higher divorce rate than what fundies like to call the 'liberal enclaves'; couples in the very-liberal northeast are half as likely to get divorced as couples in the South.

The AP backs up these findings with their own poll. According to the AP poll, Massachusetts (the most liberal state in the union, and the only one that affords queers completely equal marriage rights) has the lowest divorce rate in the union, at 2.4 people per thousand. Texas (GWB country and a conservative good-ole-boy haven), on the other hand, has the highest divorce rate at 4.1 persons per thousand. Like Barna, the AP found that the Bible Belt had divorce rates 50% higher than the national average, while the lowest divorce rates were found in the most liberal states.

I'm hardly the first to point out the moral hypocrisies of the fundies, but the CT article goes me one better: it proposes that perhaps biblical literalists had been interpreting the divorce passages wrong, and that perhaps divorce isn't the hated sin that fundies had made it out to be. Naturally, rather than provoking a thoughtful response, the outpouring of letters to the editor that followed indicates panic. One of the more influential Evangelical (read: fundie) pastors, John Piper, posted a reply in his blog. The reply pouts about "cavalier covenant breaking", but eventually concludes there are almost never legitimate grounds for divorce.

The tragedy of this tempest in a tea-pot is that many of the scriptures these men argue over refer explicitly to wives sold into slavery to their husbands. One of the passages under debate (Exodus 21:10-11) talks about divorce specifically in the context of 'if a man buys a slave and takes her as his wife', he may not divorce her except under strict circumstances. Oh good, if I ever get sold into slavery to a fundie, I'll at least have the reassurance that they'll be philosophically opposed to divorcing me before we fall prey to the Bible Belt's horrific divorce rates.

Which is to say, in all of this, I wonder where attitudes about women make a difference. It should hardly be surprising, in a culture of liberated women, that areas who base their marriage/divorce morality on a slave code should have higher rates of divorce. It's easy to postulate that liberal states have lower divorce rates because they contain liberal men, who value things like a woman talking about her own opinions or taking a job outside the home. Southern states, by comparison, educate their girls less completely, and are more likely to contain men who will feel threatened by expressions of female independence. I think that one of the fundamental problems with the Bible (and perhaps the one that Evangelicals avoid the most often) is that women in the Bible had the status of property. Even in Pauline times, women were considered property. How should a culture in which women are considered equal citizens interface with a guiding moral document that considers them property? I don't have all the answers, but I'm pretty sure that the answer isn't a literal interpretation.

The problem with divorce, as with a lot of border-guard issues for fundies, is that the culture has changed. Given that this is true, (because no amount of wishful thinking will return the modern woman to a state where she is chattel), what should Christians do about it? The answer is probably more simple than a lot of people make it out to be: evolve. Who knows, perhaps a move beyond the 'women as property' mental game will even lower the divorce rate for the South. It certainly seems to have worked in Massachusetts.

Women are hungry for more (Oh yeah, give it to me baby)

2007-11-05T12:54:00.000-08:00

I'd like to take this opportunity to highlight the Women's Ministry of the South Carolina Baptist convention, and laugh at the misogyny and double entendres to be found on their website.

Let's start with the current evangelism theme for the state. To clarify, this 'evangelism theme' is the platform around which all women's bible studies are designed, and all women's literature is written. This is the primary thing that the state's Southern Baptist women will focus on for the next twelve or so months. What's the theme? "Request! Rejoice! Reproduce!" That's right, reproduce, in case you had any doubts that it is the official Convention stance that women belong in the house making babies.

The expanded phrases for each tagline do nothing to dispel the idea that the Convention is encouraging women to get back in the bedroom and be baby-machines: "Request by prayer, Rejoice in praise, Reproduce by producing fruit." In case you didn't catch that, "producing fruit" is a euphemism for having children. It comes from the Bible verse "Be fruitful and multiply", which is non-coincidentally the verse that comes up whenever contraception is mentioned in church. The argument is that women aren't supposed to use contraception or get abortions because that's interfering with God's command to be fruitful.

I couldn't believe it when I saw this theme, and to be fair, a number of female Convention employees also had problems with the campaign. But their objections to the (entirely male) leadership of the Convention produced responses of "it's too late to change". Heaven forbid that female employees get the idea their sensibilities matter to the Convention leadership.

Let's talk about some other slogans for the Women's Ministry. Under the auspices of the "Reproduce!" as a theme, the main conference for women statewide is being called "Women are hungry for more!" That's a double entendre if I ever heard one, maybe even a triple entendre. Could the convention actually be exhorting women to have more sex? Or is it just to have more kids? It's as though all the sublimated sexuality (sublimated because women having sex is bad, of course) in the Southern Baptist doctrine is suddenly being expressed through a series of (unfortunately) inspired tagline choices from this Women's Ministry department.

The problem of Hillary

2007-10-28T10:42:00.000-07:00

Hillary Clinton is one of the front-runners for the Democratic Presidential nomination, and seems to have a decent shot at actually becoming President.

Take a minute and think about it. Look at that sentence and read it again. Hillary Clinton, a woman and a strident defender of women's rights, actually has a shot at becoming President. It gives me shivers to think about it. The junior Senator from NY is on the brink of accomplishing something that little girls across the nation have dreamed of ever since the fifties, when society decided we could wear pants. Why, then, isn't there more excitement about Hillary's campaign from women nationwide?

In fact, Hillary's campaign and the public perception of it raise several disturbing questions about our national state of mind. One of them got highlighted today in USA Today's religious op-ed, which asks why Hillary doesn't appeal to so-called 'values voters'. The article identifies two reasons: Hillary's perceived 'church politicking', and her abortion position. While I'll grant that the abortion issue is a legitimate reason for conservative voters to shy away, it's the 'church politicking' that bothers me. The article defines this as 'using her faith for political benefit', and cites as evidence the fact that Hillary did a church tour as part of her campaign for Senator. She visited 27 churches, including six on election day, according to the article.

Such 'church politicking' is distasteful to voters, the article suggests. I wonder about that, though. Obama's campaign in the South Carolina primary has consisted primarily of a tour of the state's black churches (far more than 27), and no one has said a word about how distasteful they find the tactic. Every Republican presidential candidate that comes through the South makes at least five stops at churches. Most of them also do church tours. George Bush, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, and other Presidential candidates use religion as a plank in their campaign, which Hillary has never done. Why is it Hillary, then, who gets singled out as pandering to churches when not only some, but most other candidates seem to do more 'church politicking' than she does?

So we have two questions here: why not more excitement about Hillary as a woman running for President, and why focus on Hillary as a candidate who panders to churches, when every other candidate in the election seems to do it more often? I posit that the two answers are related, but I'll start with the second, as a way of opening the discussion on the first.

I think Hillary gets more notice than anyone else when she steps into a church because she's doing something that's taboo in 'values voter' churches: she's a woman in a position of power, talking from the pulpit. Whenever Hillary talks to a congregation, she's subverting what can amount to centuries of teaching that women should be submissive in churches. The SBC (from which most 'values voters' come) has forbidden women pastors. Catholics likewise won't let women preach. In fact, half of all denominations in America won't ordain women, and in most of the ones that will, female pastors are still rare. So a woman speaking to a church is a big deal to many 'values voters': Hillary is a woman who holds no truck with the paternal SBC's refusal to let women have a voice in their own faith. Hillary, it must be noted, is a Methodist and grew up in a religious tradition that ordained women regularly.

So perhaps the reason that it's a big deal when Hillary speaks in churches is that the very act is a subversion of so-called 'Christian' gender roles. From that point of view, it makes sense to link the 'distaste' this causes in voters to abortion: the pro-choice stance is also subverts gender roles by allowing a woman to make her own choices about her reproductive processes.

If Hillary is all about equality in gender roles, we arrive back at the first question: why haven't we heard excitement from women about the possibility of a female President? I recently asked a female friend this question, and she gave a telling answer: "Because it isn't the seventies." What? Well, she explained, in the sixties and seventies there was excitement about changing old systems, about finding new roles for previously oppressed classes. Women were happy to burn bras and talk about cracking glass ceilings. Now, however, there is a curious lassitude among many women when it comes to finding a better place in society. Especially among social conservatives (the so-called 'values voter' set), there's a sense of nostalgia for the time when child-rearing was a woman's noble profession. Pointing out that women are still perfectly free to raise children if they wish is beside the point. It's a nostalgia for that whole era: an imagined time wherein not only gender roles, but world politics, health-care, education, and environmental issues were simpler and, as a result, less scary. Hillary, as a candidate for President, is a symbol of all the best things that have changed about the female social situation in the past century (she is an educated, politically involved woman with self-agency that extends far beyond any control Bill might exert over her), but by the same token, she is a symbol of all the things that have changed. My friend suggested that women have been hesitant to embrace Hillary as a symbol of women's lib because the 'values voter' set are nostalgic for a time when Hillary couldn't have existed. At the same time, liberal female voters are determined to prove how far women have come by evaluating all candidates on the merits of their platform, without regard at all to Hillary's gender.

I would suggest that while voters nostalgic for a time before the complications of the modern world are misguided, so are liberals who would evaluate candidates without regard to Hillary's gender. Women should be excited about the possibility of a woman in the White House. Just as Bush's religiosity is a key part of his character (and one would not evaluate his campaign platform without taking into account his tendency to appeal to supernatural powers for validation of insane schemes), Hillary's gender is a key part of her character. If Hillary gets elected, we won't just have elected a platform of ideas. We'll have elected a woman to enact them, and I think that means something. Women worldwide should be excited about the possibilities.

The internet is for... hope? Not so much.

2007-08-14T07:40:00.001-07:00

Although my computer still isn't completely recovered from its crash, I felt that I needed to post this.

Recently I received an email from a colleague who works for the Southern Baptist Convention. In her signature at the bottom of the email was a link to a webpage called Here's Hope, and I was curious enough to follow it. Big mistake. I laughed until I cried, and then I got a little mad.

It's a flash movie about indoctrination. Or perhaps I should say it's an attempt at indoctrination via flash movie. It begins with scary red-fonted words ("Depression! Anxiety! Fear! Despair!"), then shifts to black for the question "Is there any HOPE?" Ironically, 'hope' is done in rainbow colors. Unsuspecting LGBT advocates might for a moment think that they'd found a support site, but alas! it is not to be.

The cheap-looking flash movie opens, and after a lot of propaganda and a little scripture, the person is asked if they want to pray to ask Christ to be their savior. They are then reassured that they are now a 'saved' Christian, and are asked for personal information over an unsecured web page (presumably to contact a church in their area).

If a person 'commits' to God after using this page, they will have seen a grand total of six verses of scripture in their life. That's less than 200 words. They will have no idea of who Jesus actually is, outside of the site's assertion that he is the Son of God. They will have no idea why they are suddenly supposed to feel peace and find freedom from their cares. The site implies that Jesus is a magic fix for broken families, diseases, and (oddly) the War on Drugs, but doesn't really give the viewer information about why.

This is precisely the sort of site that I was thinking about when I named this blog. It's Christianity given in tiny chunks, like baby food but in smaller portions. If I had set out to deliberately design a website illustrating the sort of 'fast-food conversion' mentality that I posted about in Killing the Buddha, I could not have done a more thorough job. The fact that people who work for the Convention would recommend such a site (and this woman is the adult ministry Department Director for a state convention. One would think she'd know better) is sickening to me.

Things not to do

2007-08-07T04:36:00.000-07:00

Well, on Friday my hard drive apparently decided that it was going to take its football and go home, so I spent the weekend doing a data retrieval (if you have the choice, never do this voluntarily), replacing the hard drive, reinstalling Windows without using Windows reinstallation disks (because Dell apparently doesn't include them when you purchase a notebook from them), and reinstalling all of my programs.

I got lucky that most of my data could be retrieved. Again, if you have the choice, do not voluntarily do any of that. It's about as much fun as open heart surgery.

Sheriffs, fences and booze

2007-08-03T07:34:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, a Christian friend of mine stopped me and in whispered tones informed me that she had seen me going into a liquor store.

"Okay," I replied. "And?"

"Well, you know that we're not supposed to drink," she said. "It's against the Bible. I'm concerned about your faith, if you're drinking, and God says we should rebuke our fellow Christians in love."

I looked at her oddly for a moment. She and I clearly had very different positions on this matter, and I didn't want a fight with someone who genuinely thought she was doing me a favor. "I'll pray about it," I finally said, and that was the end of it.

Well, in subsequent days, I've thought a bit about this one. The leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention years ago adopted an official stance of total abstinence from alcohol. Part of the contract that students at Southern Baptist Seminaries sign forbids them to drink, and if they're caught with alcohol in their proximity, they can be expelled from the Seminary. Likewise, state Convention staff are forbidden to drink on pain of potentially losing their jobs. Many states in the Bible belt have created blue laws to prevent people from buying alcohol at all on Saturday nights or Sundays, so that the good Christians will not be tempted.

The interesting thing about this hullabaloo is that the Bible never forbids drinking. It says not to drink in excess, but 'in excess' is a far cry from 'not at all'. We know that Jesus and the disciples drank wine with every meal. Everyone did at the time, because often the water was unsafe. So alcohol itself can't be inherently sinful. Why the huge emphasis on abstinence, then?

The answer, strangely enough, can be found in the traditions of the Jewish faith. Judaism, unlike Christianity, tends to take the laws of the Old Testament very seriously indeed, particularly the commandment to keep God's commandments. In order to help Jews do this, the councils that interpret Torah law have, over the centuries, established other laws. These supplementary laws (a good example is 'don't complete a circuit on the Sabbath') are designed to be a 'fence' around the original Torah laws. They are in fact more strict than the Torah laws, because Torah scholars figured that they were a good way to keep people from inadvertently breaking one of God's precious commandments.

Christians, on the other hand, tend to play fast and loose with God's laws. We try and stick to the Ten Commandments, but we ignore large chunks of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers wholesale. Protestantism in particular has never developed an official 'fence' position, but that's what we see happening when Christians believe that all alcohol is forbidden. It's an unofficial 'fence' around a set of teachings that for some reason someone found important. The Convention's draconian policies place Convention leadership in the position of sheriff, riding the fences and looking for lawbreakers.

The problem with fences is twofold: a) how do we know that we're fencing off the right doctrines, and b) how do we deal with the matter of sheriffs? The first prong of this line of thinking leads to some funny conclusions. We have total abstinence from alcohol to fence the doctrine of 'drink in moderation', forbidden use of birth control to fence the doctrine 'be fruitful and multiply', and in many churches, a discouraging attitude towards dancing to fence the doctrine of mental purity. Why are these important doctrines, though? When asked what was the greatest commandment, Jesus replied,

"'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' 38This is the first and greatest commandment. 39And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' 40All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commands." [Matt22:37-40]

The truth is, we Protestants don't really have fences for the two greatest commandments. We often spout them about, but rarely think enough about what they mean in practice to establish effective fences to make sure that we're loving properly. Christians often talk about the power of love unbound, but in this case I think that we need to bind it, to build our fences around God's commands and make sure that we're loving always. Christ places these two commands over all the Law and Prophets, which means above little issues like alcohol or birth control. It's long past time the Christian church had a serious conversation about love, and about the practical ways that we can make sure we're always loving as we have been commanded.

The second prong of my thoughts about fences concerns enforcement: should we be sheriffs for the fences that we build? Often, I think that's not our responsibility. The Bible tells us to support each other in faith, but I'm not yet convinced that that necessarily means policing the sort of fences that the Southern Baptist Convention has built. Rather, I think that supporting someone in faith means encouraging them to put effort into their attempt to walk with God. It means engaging them more deeply in theology, asking the difficult questions about God and faith, then sitting and listening while they work out their answers. It means loving, unconditionally. Things like playing sheriff for minor fences pale in comparison to those duties, and Christians, myself certainly included, don't pay nearly enough attention to the big duties that God gives us as it is.

In short, I think that right now Christianity needs fewer sheriffs, and more scholars. We need to refocus onto what God says is crucial, and trust that the other things will fall in line when the big priorities are right. We need to be less concerned over the appearances of someone's faith, and more concerned over their understanding. I was walking into the liquor store to buy wine for a recipe of coq au vin, but my neighbor was more concerned with the appearance of violating a non-existent command than with my actual intent for my actions. My neighbor has never asked me about issues of faith, like what I think about whether love obligates us to protect someone. The need for change goes both ways, though. I judged her as shallow for her concern about my actions, but I, in turn, have never asked her about doctrine, like what she thinks about Paul's writings on women. Maybe it's time for both of us to become less judgmental sheriffs, and better Christians.

Soren and I chat about Bushonomics

2007-08-01T11:18:00.000-07:00

A Philosophy of Religion class I once took (yes, my degree is in philosophy, which is why you'll see so much of it on these pages) had us reading Kierkegaard, and the professor remarked in jest that "Reading Kierkegaard is a hazard to your faith, you'll either head off towards the straits of fundamentalism or veer left toward liberalization, but any way you go you'll doubt for a while first. " I certainly didn't need to veer at all to become a liberal, but Kierkegaard nonetheless became one of my favorite thinkers, mostly because he's so often eminently reasonable when discussing the Church, and few philosophers achieve that (fond though I am of Descartes, he was wrong about God).

The following quotes Kierkegaard, translated out of the Danish, of course. I know it's long, but it's worth bearing with the passage, because it's prescient of what we see the Republicans doing in our economic policy today, and I'll talk later about how it speaks to their motivations:

Christ was not making a historical observation when he declared: The gospel is preached to the poor. The accent is on the gospel, that the gospel is for the poor. Here the word “poor” does not simply mean poverty but all who suffer, are unfortunate, wretched, wronged, oppressed, crippled, lame, leprous, demonic. The gospel is preached to them, that is, the gospel is for them. The gospel is good news for them. What good news? Not: money, health, status, and so on — no, this is not Christianity.

No, for the poor the gospel is the good news because to be unfortunate in this world (in such a way that one is abandoned by human sympathy, and the worldly zest for life even cruelly tries to make one’s misfortune into guilt) is a sign of God’s nearness. So it was originally; this is the gospel in the New Testament. It is preached for the poor, and it is preached by the poor who, if they in other respects were not suffering, would eventually suffer by proclaiming the gospel; since suffering is inseparable from following Christ, from telling the truth.

But soon there came a change. When preaching the gospel became a livelihood, even a lush livelihood, then the gospel became good news for the rich and for the mighty. For how else was the preacher to acquire and secure rank and dignity unless Christianity secured the best for all? Christianity thus ceased to be glad tidings for those who suffer, a message of hope that transfigures suffering into joy, but a guarantee for the enjoyment of life intensified and secured by by the hope of eternity.

The gospel no longer benefits the poor essentially. In fact, Christianity has now even become a downright injustice to those who suffer (although we are not always conscious of this, and certainly unwilling to admit to it). Today the gospel is preached to the rich, the powerful, who have discovered it to be advantageous. We are right back again to the very state original Christianity wanted to oppose. The rich and powerful not only get to keep everything, but their success becomes the mark of their piety, the sign of their relationship to God. And this prompts the old atrocity again — namely, the idea that the unfortunate, the poor are to blame for their condition; that it is because they are not pious enough, are not true Christians, that they are poor, whereas the rich have not only pleasure but piety as well. This is supposed to be Christianity. Compare it with the New Testament, and you will see that this is as far from that as possible.

It helps, at this juncture, to observe that in the Hebrew, the word 'poor' does not mean 'making very little money, but nonetheless living a sustainable existence'. It means something more extreme, something akin to our 'destitute'. It means living on the very brink of starvation, in a condition where the person literally has no resources. Every time Jesus says "Blessed are the poor", he doesn't mean the people with small houses who can't afford more than one used car, he means the people under bridges and in sewers.

That said, what is Soren saying to us about our current economic situation? Well, one might flippantly quip that Bush is attempting to help America by getting as many people into that 'blessed' condition as possible, but I think that's disrespect to the text by not considering its points carefully enough. Soren starts out by observing that Christ was making a historical observation, one which is no longer true. For two millenia, the gospel has not been preached by the poor for the poor, but by the rich and educated for everyone else. The Catholic Church, the largest Christian denomination in the world today, is also the wealthiest organization in the world today.

The interesting thing about Christianity is that in Christ's time, it had no political power, and it could not be foreseen to gain political power. The apostles had no way of knowing that one day their words would guide nations, because they were preaching to an audience that was the least nation-guiding bunch available: the people with no money and no power.

Let's combine this fact with one other: there are very cogent arguments from across the denominational and theological spectrum that Christ was voluntarily limited in his power. There is good evidence in the gospels that Christ gave up the 'omnis' of God (omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience) in order to become fully human. A number of theologians have claimed that the validity of Christ's sacrifice rests on this interpretation of Christ's power: he was the son of God, he was one part of a tripartite Deity, but he did not have the full power of God.

Take those two facts together: Christ was preaching to the poorest of the poor, in a time when they could not have been humanly foreseen to gain political power; and Christ was God in a voluntarily limited form and did not have the full omniscience of God. The implication of those two facts combined is that the Gospels were never meant to govern a nation. They were never intended as prescriptions for political power or how to use it. There is a reason that the gospels are so intensely focused on personal faith, and on how God can impact individuals: they were never meant for the kind of bureaucracy and power plays that now permeate organized religion. Bush tries to run a country based on the teachings of a book that was intended as a moral guide to life person by person, not collectively.

What does this change in purpose accomplish? Soren lays it out: the poor get blamed again for their condition, and they gain no aid from the faith that was established in their name. Looks like a description of Bush-economics to me. Tax-breaks that favor the wealthy, cuts to welfare programs, an insistence on private health care (which the poor cannot afford), etc are all evidence of an attitude that if you are poor, it is your fault. You are not saving enough, not working hard enough, not blessed enough by God to deserve the benefits of being American (the 'or of being Christian' is implied but not explicit). When you divorce the purpose of scripture from the teachings of scripture, what you gain is not a wider application of the Word, it's a perversion of everything that was said in the first place.

The Bible on money, as translated by Dubya

2007-07-31T08:24:00.000-07:00

There can be little question that Bush's presidency has been one of the most overtly 'Christian' in history. Dubya's first act as President was to cut off funding to any family planning program that didn't teach abstinence. It may be tempting to dismiss the indicators as Rovian meddling, but the evidence is there in deed and rhetoric: Bush himself is a True Believer. But, we ask ourselves, if Bush's politics are based in a theology for which the only commandment more important than 'love others' is 'love God', how can he do the things he has done? Foreign wars aside, even Bush's domestic agenda has been less along the theme of 'give of thyself unto others' and more like 'be given unto'.

The answer is that there are conservative fiscal policies hidden in the Bible! I'm not joking, Jesus says some fairly inexplicable things sometimes. Foremost among them is a certain parable, and it may be the least preached parable in the Bible, that depicts a financial manager defrauding his boss - and getting praised for it. It's like Enron for the B.C. era. Here's the scripture, sourced from Luke 16. It's most often called 'The Parable of the Devious Manager':

1And he said also unto his disciples, There was a certain rich man, which had a steward; and the same was accused unto him that he had wasted his goods.

2And he called him, and said unto him, How is it that I hear this of thee? give an account of thy stewardship; for thou mayest be no longer steward.

3Then the steward said within himself, What shall I do? for my lord taketh away from me the stewardship: I cannot dig; to beg I am ashamed.

4I am resolved what to do, that, when I am put out of the stewardship, they may receive me into their houses.

5So he called every one of his lord's debtors unto him, and said unto the first, How much owest thou unto my lord?

6And he said, An hundred measures of oil. And he said unto him, Take thy bill, and sit down quickly, and write fifty.

7Then said he to another, And how much owest thou? And he said, An hundred measures of wheat. And he said unto him, Take thy bill, and write fourscore.

8And the lord commended the unjust steward, because he had done wisely: for the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.

9What I say to you is this: make friends for yourselves through your use of worldly goods, so that when they fail you, a lasting reception will be yours.

To recap: A man mishandles the company assets, so he's going to be fired. In retribution, he defrauds the company out of large portions of their assets by forgiving debts left and right. Instead of outrage, he gets congratulated! Reading sermons on the passage reveals a startling confusion among pastors as to how to approach this one. Most don't address its fundamental flaw: that it rewards dishonesty. They say things about using money to make spiritual friends, or about how all money is God's anyway. It's one of those scriptures that not many people talk about.

If the point is supposed to be that you cannot serve both God and money, I'm not sure that it's entirely clear. To me, it looks like a defense of corporate malfeasance. It's proof that Ken Lay was a God-fearing man. Bush seems to have taken the point to heart: he has frequently rewarded praise and favors to the... devious. Not just in financial matters: here for instance is justification for unwavering faith in Gonzalez, and for commuting the sentence in the Libby case. Bush is a God-fearing man, all right. Scant comfort.

Killing the Buddha

2007-07-28T13:01:00.000-07:00

There is a famous parable in Buddhism that goes something like this:

A monk approached the Buddhist master Lin Chi. The monk was excited, in ecstasy. He tells the master that he has seen Buddha. He was walking down the road when suddenly, he was enlightened! He has seen the whole of enlightenment, known Nirvana, understands the Buddhamind. Finally the monk quiets and waits to see what the master will say of his revelations.

Lin Chi reaches out and smacks him. "You meet the Buddha on the road," he says, "Kill him".

It's happened to all of us, or to people that we know. We're marching along, going to work, doing the laundry, living our lives, when suddenly, it all seems to make sense. You were just doing your thing, not really seeking for religion, not really thinking about social justice, but then something impresses you so clearly and forcefully that there's nothing for it but to admit that God is great. Or evolution is wrong. Or Allah is wonderful.

Lin Chi says, fabulous. You've found it, and now you can kill it. The Buddha you stumble over like a rock in your path isn't the true Buddha, but an expression of your longing. If this Buddha is not killed, he will stand in your way.

When Lin Chi contributed the idea of deicide to his godless religion over a thousand years ago, he wasn't talking about killing a long-dead teacher who had come to be known as the Buddha, but instead about the ideologies of his day: the One True Path, One True Story, One True Anything. He was talking about the preachers and the gurus, the Family Research Counsel, and the mass media. Faced with an obscenity-screaming abortion protester or a convert who thumps Kabballah aphorisms as hard as any Bible, Lin Chi would say the same thing: Don't be a chump. A single story never explained anything.

What does a Buddhist master have to do with modern society? Well, in the case of Christian theology, all too often Christians today sell their faith in small chunks. A recent Christian publication informed me that all I needed to do to be saved was to 'accept that Jesus Christ died for my sins'. "It's that easy!", the magazine trumpeted. No mention of God, no mention of theology, no doctrine and no morality involved. It's Powerpoint Christianity, God for the fast-food generation.

The same phenomenon happens in political debates. Complex questions of science are reduced to three word memes so that reporters don't have to think too hard when producing headlines. It took me three years of biology education and an entire semester of a focused seminar at a university, conversing with the best minds in the world, to understand enough about cellular function to make judgements about whether stem cells might be helpful in medicine, but pundits pass judgement in thirty-second clips for the news. And it's pundits that define the debate.

The problem with the loss of doctrinal richness is that the more God or an issue of public debate gets boiled into soundbytes, the more people lose sight of what they're actually talking about. When people make judgements based on pundit clips, fields of science get closed down that might have saved lives, but there is no moral responsibility felt by those who pass the laws. And when people lose sight of what God really is, in all His complexity, people start to make and defend wrong choices using statements that sound religious, but aren't. Soundbyte theology is how Bush and company led many to think that Bush represented a Christian outlook on government, when his policies were anything but. Soundbyte science is what allows the debates about abortion or evolution to continue in public, when the people who've devoted their lives to studying the issue aren't debating any longer, because they've reached a conclusion. It's hard to parse the inaccuracies of someone's claims about religion or social issues when you don't know the details of what you yourself think.

In the church, it's not just a problem of pastors preaching repetitive and doctrinally-shallow sermons. It's a problem of conversion methods as well. The large evangelistic religions often rely on a major religious experience for a great deal of their converts. Youth groups on retreat weekends, adults attending special revival services: these emotionally-drenched conversion conventions produce a huge number of new Christians every year. The problem is that all of these people are meeting Buddha on the road. They will be energized by their new faith, but if you asked them what exactly they had faith in, they couldn't give a detailed answer. But instead of urging these followers to kill that Buddha and instead grow slowly towards deeper knowledge, the church rewards these people. If they continue to attend church at all (many don't), they'll hear soundbyte sermons designed to make God understandable in less than an hour a week. You couldn't understand the behavior of the stock market in that length of time, much less a deity.

The truth is that God should be complex, and that faith shouldn't be easily digestible. Science can't be reduced to easy conclusions, and graphs are also the easiest way to misrepresent data. Refusal to confront the difficult theological questions doesn't make for less conflict in a church, it makes for shallower Christians. Debate by soundbyte doesn't make for a better-informed public, it makes for a bunch of ill-informed ideologues. Modern society doesn't care about the details of what we believe in, though. You can't fit ideas that big onto a Powerpoint slide.

Gaming America: the philosophy and math behind choices we make

2007-07-27T08:36:00.000-07:00

It's been said before, and it'll be said again, but the USA is a remarkably paternalistic nation. We have this idea, right now, that instead of doing what the Iraqis want us to do (leave), we must instead do the thing which is best for them, even in circumstances where no one knows what that thing may be. I started thinking about this yesterday while reading a philosophy paper on game theory, and it occurred to me that what America is facing right now is an optimization problem. Optimization problems in game and decision theory literature are most often solved with equations that weigh participants' beliefs against foreseen possible outcomes. This is an elegant way of addressing such problems, and it has produced a number of fascinating insights into human behavior in game situations, but it has an acknowledged fault: one cannot calculate the potential utility of an outcome that is vague or indeterminate. And that is the dilemma that America presently faces. We are trying to weigh the incalculable utility of a vague outcome (what might happen if we withdraw troops from Iraq) against the calculable utility of a known outcome (what happens if we leave troops in Iraq).

Why would I call the outcome of withdrawal vague? Well, it might help first to talk about what an un-vague, or defined, utility value would be. A defined utility is a utility that can be assigned numerical value, or assigned to a range of numerical values. An example is in order. Suppose I have an envelope in one hand that contains $10, and an identical envelope in the other that contains no money. If I ask my friend Jane to assign a value to the envelope in my right hand, according to decision theory the unopened envelope is worth $5, because Jane knows there is a 1/2 certainty that it contains $10. Once the envelope is opened, it will either be worth $10 or no money, and there is no outcome on which it will be worth $5, but while it remains unopened, its expected value is $5. Another way of looking at the question is to ask Jane how much she would pay for the unopened envelope in my right hand. Her expected answer would be $5, which is the value that balances her negative risk (the amount she loses if the envelope is empty) with her potential gain (the amount she wins if the envelope contains money). Jane's preferences can be converted to percentages easily: there is a 50% chance that she should prefer the envelope in the right hand. In this highly simplified situation, Jane can assign a defined value to the expected utility of the envelopes. A 'vague' or 'indeterminate' utility is one which cannot be evaluated in that manner. For example, the Jane situation would become vague if I informed Jane that there was no money in one envelope and some money in the other envelope, then asked her how mush she would pay. She cannot make an educated guess about how much to pay, because she doesn't know the expected value of the second envelope.

Much in the same way, no one knows what will happen if we withdraw troops. It seems likely that Iraq would fracture, but along what fault lines no one is certain. The resulting power struggles might leave Iran in power across large parts of the Iraqi oilfield, or it might not. The end result might be favorable for the US, or it might not. If zero represents the status quo and one represents the best possible outcome of withdrawal, it's impossible to assign a number or range of numbers that encompasses the 'most likely' outcome of withdrawal, because there is no 'most likely set of outcomes'. Since there is no 'most likely outcome', the value of withdrawal is indeterminate, and the choice between the status quo and withdrawal weighs a known option against an unknown option. The choice is "vague," as the philosophical jargon goes. At this point in time, most Democrats in Congress believe that the expected value of some sort of withdrawal plan is higher than that of the status quo, while most Republicans believe the opposite. Because of the vagueness involved, however, there is no truely 'rational' decision to be made, and this is the root of the dilemma in which the nation currently finds itself.

What in the world does this have to do with Christianity, one might well ask. Well, the answer is that it explains other political-religious divides in our nation. If one is a fundamentalist Christian, the expected utility of heaven is infinitely high. There is no decision on which the 'do this and go to heaven' outcome is not better that any other situation. This is the root of all moral absolutism. If there is a set of rules and one believes that they are inflexible (ie, if one believes that the word of God is infallible), then there is no higher expected utility to be found than in following those rules exactly and getting the expected outcome from them: heaven. This is why the religious right campaigns so hard on issues like abortion. The amount of utility that can be expected from the ease gained in a prospective mother's life by aborting a child (even if that is a large amount of utility, since the mother won't have financial troubles in the future, can get an education, won't be forced into a marriage to the child's father, etc) is trumped by the expected utility of going to heaven. An envelope containing the benefits of the abortion will never be more utile than an envelope containing heaven, so our hypothetical Christian will assert for the person's own good that getting the abortion is categorically wrong.

The flaw in this reasoning is the assumption that the rules are absolute. This game only plays out correctly if one assumes that changing social times don't affect what is morally right. If changing social times do somehow affect what is morally correct, then the expected value of getting the abortion increases dramatically, because there is a chance that the abortion envelope will outweigh the heaven one (benefits of abortion+heaven > just heaven). There is no certainty about the will of God, however, in this situation, so the game becomes much like the one that America is currently playing over Iraq. Maybe morality in this particular social climate will be conducive to abortions, and maybe it won't, but if the rules are uncertain there's no sure way to know the value of that envelope. Maybe withdrawal from Iraq will end favorably for America, and maybe it won't, but since the future is uncertin there's no sure way to know the value of that envelope either.

In situations of vague or indeterminate values, like the Iraq war or the question of morality if one believes that the scripture is not completely inerrant, there is no 'right' answer in decision theory. All that the math prescribes is that we all consult our moral intuitions and do as we personally see fit, with the understanding that we may well be making the wrong choice. The real problem arises when, as now with Iraq, people refuse to make the choice at all. As we refuse to make the choice, the expected utility for both options decreases. Sometimes it's better to commit to an indeterminate future than to not commit at all.

Note: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy will explain game theory more rigorously than I did here, if you're interested. It's a field that intersects economics, mathematics, and philosophy, and it's very worth learning about.

Bush's heresy: the theology that guides Manifest Democracy

2007-07-25T09:13:00.000-07:00

It's a soundbyte that comes up fairly frequently in connection with the Iraq: the idea of crusades, of holy wars. Bush has repeatedly given comments to the effect that he believes it's his God-given mission to evangelize the rest of the world with democracy. The sensible thing for the White House to do would be deny, and placate the millions for whom the words 'holy war' can't possibly have good connotations. But that's sort of hard to do when Bush throws off comments like this one:

The other debate is whether or not it is a hopeless venture to encourage the spread of liberty. Most of you all around this table are much better historians than I am. And people have said, you know, this is Wilsonian, it's hopelessly idealistic. One, it is idealistic, to this extent: It's idealistic to believe people long to be free. And nothing will change my belief. I come at it many different ways. Really not primarily from a political science perspective, frankly; it's more of a theological perspective. I do believe there is an Almighty, and I believe a gift of that Almighty to all is freedom.

God wants us to spread democracy, because it's his gift to everyone. Bloggers from across the spectrum get nervous when he says things like this. But is it actually true? The theology behind freedom is complicated in the Bible, but it's worth a second look, because this is the heresy that's currently guiding American foreign policy.

Before we dive into heavy scripture, a few caveots are in order. Bush is discussing political freedom here, but what sort of political freedom specifically? If the statement is read as charitably as possible (an uncharitable reading would attribute 'American-style democracy' as his reading for political freedom), he is discussing a sort of general freedom from tyrany. The best reading that I can come up with is that he believes God thinks all people should be free from oppression from their government. This does not necessarily require a democracy, as reasonably enlightened monarchs have in the past produced governments that refrain from oppressing their citizens. Nonetheless, the sort of freedom Bush discusses is notably distinct from a second sort of freedom that often comes up in these discussions (and in the scripture): freedom of will. Freedom of will is the ability of a person to make choices that reflect his own agency, rather than the agency of God.

That said, what does the Bible think about freedom, and whether we should be spreading it? Perhaps the earliest mention of some sort of freedom comes from the creation story in Genesis 5:

1 This is the written account of Adam's line. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God.

Although it could be referring to physical likeness, a number of theologians believes that this little statement refers to the fact that God created man and gave man his own agency (free will), just as God himself had agency. The Old Testament frequently mentions that God explicitly gives man free will in the matter of worshipping the Hebrew God or other gods (Deuteronomy 30:19; Deuteronomy 30:20; Joshua 24:15; Joshua 24:18; 1 Kings 18:21). Even if a government enforces worship of a particular god (as the government of Israel at the time did), these scriptures seem to reflect the idea that compliance with that requirement is an effort of a person's free choice. The result is the conclusion that even religiously oppressive governments (Islamic governments who forbid Christianity) should not be invaded for the sake of preserving believers' free will: even if the government designates Islam as the religion of choice, following the decree is an individual's choice. Wars to preserve or spread freedom cannot be justified by claiming that a government (no matter how oppressive) is interfering with a person's God-given free will.

What of explicitly political freedom, however? Much of the Bible was written in a time period where democracy was unheard of. The Old Testament is a time of kings, emperors, and dictators. Even Israel's God-given sytem of government involved a king, and the inherit risk of a bad king (Israel famously had several runs of repeatedly bad kings). Moreover, there is a lot of Old Testament law to show that Israel in that era would be considered just as oppressive today as most of the Islamic republics. Women were required to dress in specific ways and were not allowed the same freedoms as men. Women were considered property and were bought and sold in deals between families or towns. Slavery was not only allowed, slavery of non-Jews was encouraged. Punishments for petty crimes included removal of body parts, or even loss of life in some cases. Punishments for murder and other major crimes were always capital. Furthermore, justice was often decided not by an unconcerned outsider, but by town elders, even when the families of the elders themselves were parties to the dispute. Throughout the Old Testament, God shows himself less concerned with the existance of tyrants or oppression, and more concerned with individuals and their choice to follow the laws or not as concerned religion.

If the coming of Christ represented a revolution of theology, however, perhaps the New Testament would be friendlier to Bush's brand of evangelistic democracy. Jesus himself seemed unconcerned with tyranical governments, and in fact seems to advocate a distinction between the concerns of the soul and the concerns of the government:

19Show me the coin used for paying the tax." They brought him a denarius, 20and he asked them, "Whose portrait is this? And whose inscription?"
21"Caesar's," they replied.

Then he said to them, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's."

Caesar's was certainly what one might call an oppressive government, but Christ shows no interest in undermining that government. Later, Paul and other early evangelists emphasize compliance with state laws, even if those laws were oppressive to Christians. When imprisoned for his faith and freed in an earthquake, Paul refuses to leave the prison, and convinces the other inmates to stay as well out of respect for the laws of the (oppressive) state. Once more, early Christians seem unconcerned about oppressive governments. Nowhere in the Bible does a mandate for freedom from oppression appear.

The Biblical attitude towards governments in general (particularly in the New Testament) might best be described as apathetic. God doesn't care what the earthly government is like, he cares about the decisions of individuals. Paul goes out of his way to show that even in an oppressive regime, the oppressive laws are unimportant. The focus is on following God whatever the circumstances. The message of the New Testament is repeatedly 'love all, injure none, worship only one God'.

In my opinion, the appeal of the idea of God is that He doesn't care about politics. The draw for Christianity historically has been that earthly circumstances are irrelevant to faith, and that faith is what will matter in the grand reckoning of things. That message is what's made Christianity such a religion of hope for poor, oppressed people for centuries. It's too bad that Bush seems set on undermining it. The concept that issues of government pale before issues of faith is central to doctrine, though in complex enough ways that someone who isn't thinking very hard might miss it. Bush's idea of evangelistic democracy undermines that concept, by trying to sell freedom from governmental oppression as an issue of faith (which it's not) instead of an issue of political philosophy (which it is). Issues of political philosophy should be secondary to issues of faith for a Christian like Bush, but his evangelistic democracy puts the cart before the horse by elevating a question of government to equal status with questions of God. Bush clearly hasn't thought much on the matter, which tells me that he's less concerned with what the Almighty actually says about freedom, and more concerned with spewing talking points to convince his fundamentalist Christian base. It speaks ill of him that he cares so little for his faith, but speaks worse of the fundamentalist Christians who buy the idea, and should know better.

What part of 'planned' do they not understand?

2007-07-24T07:40:00.000-07:00

Lawmakers are to be congratulated for defeating an amendment that would have blocked Federal funding to Planned Parenthood. Blame Indiana Republican Mike Pence for the amendment, which specifically targeted Planned Parenthood by name, and tried to forbid the Department of Labor, Health and Human Services from giving them funds. Luckily, the Democratic majority shut the amendment down easily.

Sometimes I think some fundamentalist Christians have a translation device in their brains. Someone may say "family planning", but they hear "abortion". The two words get magically conflated. Just to clarify: the two are not the same. Family planning includes information about birth control, sexual health, and (believe it or not) pregnancy care as well as abortions. Planned Parenthood does worlds of good for teens and poor couples that can't afford birth control otherwise. They help with the sexual safety education that the government has been remiss in providing of late. They provide cheap pregnancy monitoring and advice about how to have a healthy pregnancy. When I was in college, I volunteered in a counseling agency for teens, and we regularly referred teens in need to Planned Parenthood. Often parents in denial are reluctant to buy birth control for a teen, or teens are afraid to confess that they may have an STD to an adult. Planned Parenthood is a resource for both of these problems, and teens are often almost ridiculously grateful for a place where they're sure that they won't be condemned for their sexual choices. Planned Parenthood prevents and treats more STDs than any other group I know of. I'd hate to see the country's sexual health situation without it. From my acquaintance with the group, abortion advising is only a minuscule part of the good work that they do.

Politics of church, politics in church

2007-07-23T18:14:00.000-07:00

When one discusses Just War Theory in any decent philosophy class, a distinction emerges between jus in bello (justice in war) and jus ad bello (justice of war). "In bello" implies questions about whether the war is fought justly: do soldiers murder civilians without cause, are the wounded treated ethically and without cruelty? "Ad bello" raises questions about the justifications for the war: was it entered for a just reason? In the politics of the church a similar divide emerges.

More and more, the national news covers politics "ad christo" (of God), but only very rarely does a newspaper run a story of the politics "in christo" (in God). Politics of God includes questions of whether evolution should be taught in schools, whether abortion is ethical or whether stem-cell research should be encouraged. It's the political church that we're all familiar with, and debates are mostly peopled with bible-waving fundamentalists on one side, and athiests on the other.

Today's USA Today religious feature, however, focused more on the politics "in christo". It pointed out that members of the church community are often ostracized for political stances that they take on church/state separation. The article doesn't go far enough, in my opinion. Hot-button political issues are far from the only thing for which members of a church can be ostracized. I've seen churches divided and families expelled over questions of whether to hold an earlier Sunday service with contemporary music. I've known people ostracized from a church because their children are on the wrong soccer team in the town rec league.

The point that the articles tries to make, but misses, is that the church body itself is a highly political thing. Hypocritically, people jockey for power and for position within the church just as they do in town council elections, or in Senate debates. I think that there is the pervasive idea that the church body should be above politics, that because church members are called to love everyone, there should be none (or at least less) of the petty power struggles that mark other organizations in our lives, but this is certainly not the case. Every church, no matter how small, has its politics. People get hurt, people lose friends, jobs are even lost over power struggles within the town church to see who gets to be deacon for a year. Should it surprise us? No. The church is an organization made up of humans, and a wise philosophy professor once told me that any human social gathering is a political gathering, because there are no groups without politics.

Beyond individual congregational power plays, there is a massive political game being played at denominational levels. In the Southern Baptist Convention several years ago, a resolution was passed to forbid women pastors in SBC churches. This resolution did not really reflect an interpretation of scripture (the scriptural arguments in favor were specious at best), but instead represented the attempt by one faction of the Convention to prove to another faction that they had enough power to get a candidate elected in the vote for Convention President that took place later that same night. The decision that the rest of the country saw as a statement of backward, women-bashing doctrine was actually just a power struggle played out by proxy.

Christ calls for Christians to love all, forgive all, and harm none. It's too bad that the most basic tenets of the faith get so often lost in the human tendency to play politician instead of empathizer.

Subversive Scriptures: Colossians 3:22-4:1

2007-07-22T14:17:00.000-07:00

22Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to win their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. 23Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, 24since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving. 25Anyone who does wrong will be repaid for his wrong, and there is no favoritism.

1Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven.

This little gem has been used to justify some real horrors over the years. Three hundred years of slave trade and suffering was built on these words. They popped up a lot (often in conjunction with property rights arguments) in the run-up to the Civil War, to justify our 'god-fearing' country not liberating the Southern slave plantations. Now, they're virtually ignored.

The modern problem of these scriptures is that they force the critically-thinking Christian to ask "How should I read the Bible?" Should it be read as God's infallible word, every verse inspired and inerrant? Or should it be read as inspired by God, but written by very human men, whose cultures and personal perceptions will sometimes influence the verse? Both readings have their appeal, but modern Southern Baptists have often answered the question leaning more toward the first. The current Convention stance on Biblical inspiration is that it's the inerrant and utterly infallible word of God, full stop.

That's nice in theory, but verses like these make it thorny in practice. According to this, slavery is not only justified, but is the will of God! Working in the fields under horrific conditions is just like working for God! Now, sometimes you'll hear the defense that slaves in Paul's day and slaves in the Civil War South were treated very differently. I've heard people inform me that slaves in Rome were normal people, they just didn't have some of the rights of Roman citizens. This is utter bullshit. Slaves in ancient Rome worked in mines, built projects for the Empire as manual labor under the hot Mediterranean sun, and were otherwise subject to horrific abuses. Slavery is slavery. One problem of these verses, for biblical inerrantists, is that they're difficult to explain away or gloss over.

The even larger problem of these verses is their context. They sit towards the end of a passage that has become a large feature of Southern Baptist doctrine in specific, but also Protestant doctrine in general. Even people who've never read the Bible are familiar with this passage. Let's look at the verses in context. They come in a section that the NIV (New Internation Version, the most popular modern translation of the Bible) entitles "Rules for Christian Households."

Rules for Christian Households

18Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.
19Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them.
20Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord.
21Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged.
22Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to win their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. 23Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, 24since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving. 25Anyone who does wrong will be repaid for his wrong, and there is no favoritism.
1Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven.

Just five verses up is the infamous "wives submit to your husbands" that has become the justification for treating women as second-class citizens in the Kingdom of God. It's a verse that gets preached on a lot, usually in conjunction with the "husbands love your wives" that follows. After that comes the famous "Children obey your parents". This verse is part of the curriculum of every childhood education packet that the church produces. Children will have a Sunday School lesson on it reliably once a year, sometimes more often. My point is that these are not portions of scripture that are readily ignored, because the other verses in this little group are lynchpins of doctrine. Yet there sits the slavery verse, like the elephant in the room, and no one discusses it.

The current popular line from Bible inerrantists (and notice how this involves adding content to the Bible to interpret it in a metaphorical way, since none of this is actually in the supposedly 'inerrant' scripture) is that Paul addresses slaves because they were a reality he could neither change nor ignore. Paul doesn't say anything in the scripture about regretting the existance of slavery as an institution, and here in these verses seems to accept it as part of the god-ordained household order: Children should obey their parents, slaves should obey their masters.

Modern Christians, according to the 'Paul addressed what he didn't like but couldn't help' interpretation, should look at this in light of employee/employer relationships. On the contrary, though, Paul says here in the text that the master/slave relationship is a holy one, just like the husband/wife relationship is holy. Just as the Church is the bride of Christ (you'll hear this come up as a reason for defining marriage as between a woman and a man), we are all the slaves of a heavenly master! We are certainly not God's employees, so to interpret the scripture in that way is misleading. To claim this discusses the employer/employee relationship dismisses Paul's point that this is not only how a Christian household should function, it's how the family of God functions. This little passage is about household relationships, and I doubt that very many people would call the employer/employee relationship a household relationship. Paul is discussing how Christians should relate to those closest to them, to the people with whom they shared meals and baths and beds, not those with whom they did lunch once a week to catch up on financial reports. Again, the employer/employee comparison rings false.

How should Christians discuss the passage in which the Bible condones slavery? If asked, most Christians would say that slavery is a moral wrong, yet according to the Bible this is not the case. If it is indeed a moral wrong, it's a first-class example of a way in which changing social norms have changed moral norms. Slavery was fine in Paul's day, and he doesn't address it as a moral wrong, but as an integral part of a household. Slavery today would be morally wrong, and most Christians today would look upon a person making the claim that slaves are an integral part of their household as morally deficient. Often one hears about issues like women's rights or queer rights that Christians are certain their strong morality shouldn't have to change with the times, but here is good evidence to the contrary. This verse (especially since it's so prominently placed next to verses that many fundamentalists hold dear) is a big problem for those who would call morality inflexible and the Bible inerrant. The Southern Baptist Convention falls squarely into this category. It's subversive scripture run amok and causing havoc in the placid streets of fundamentialist moral rectitude.

Our enlightened fathers, and why we should separate church and state

2007-07-22T13:30:00.000-07:00

Friday's USA Today editorial letters in response to the misleading "Founding Fathers" article (I blogged about it here) were generally good. There were two in agreement, and two in opposition. The opposition actually got more word count this time than the agreement, which is encouraging if the paper is reflecting letter volume in its word count.

One thing that I found problematic in the opposition letters printed is the notion that the Founding Fathers included the separation of church and state clause out of a fear that allowing religion access to government's monopoly on force would lead to tyrany. Though this may have been part of their reasoning I don't think it's the main part. More importantly, the Founders were deeply indebted to Enlightenment principles, and the Enlightment believed in government by reason instead of government by superstition. This was the logic that the courts took account of in the Everson ruling that the "Founding Fathers" article laments.

The logic behind the church/state line was that Kantian morality (morality justified by logic rather than by appeal to what God wants) was better suited to making laws that would govern a diverse population than a religious-based morality. Reason-based morality can be argued over logically by people with differing viewpoints, and can be rationalized based on points of argumentation. In short, it's a better way of arriving at laws that everyone can agree with, because it gives laws that everyone can understand logically. Religious-based morality, on the other hand, often can't be explained to a person outside the religion in a way that the outsider can understand. The Jewish faith, for example, doesn't try to explain to outsiders why it's morally wrong to complete a circuit on the Sabbath, because it's something of a lost cause to justify the 'wrongness' to someone who doesn't share the Jewish faith. The idea was that laws made under a religious-based system would be points of division instead of unity.

There are other good reasons to separate church and state, but that's the big one, and it's also the one that never enters the argument when people talk about this divide. Maybe the underlying principles are too complex for the public discourse, but I'm optimist enough to think that's not the case. I think it just doesn't occur to your everyday Joe Christian when he talks about whether the state should post the 10 Commandments. I'm a Christian, and I consider myself devout, but for the reasons above I'd be ashamed of my nation if it did.

Putting the "Human" in human rights

2007-07-20T12:27:00.000-07:00

Normally I blog about the interaction between religion and politics, but this is a subject near and dear to my heart, so I thought I'd respond. Today, President Bush issued an Executive Order directing that torture is not to be used on terrorist prisoners. Finally.

Torture is a subject that I know a lot about. Two years ago, I wrote a grant to study in Europe on the development of the international norm against torture in international law. I've read the primary sources from the Nuremburg trials and the ICJ/World Court findings on torture. I've talked to victims and Amnesty International specialists. I can quote the history of torture beginning with the ancient Greeks, up through medieval France, to modern day conflicts in Algeria and dictators in small Latin American countries. I know the sobering statistics. I've written the first draft of a book which will ouline a history of torture in international law. I know torture law as well as anyone might be said to know it.

The current Executive Order (EO) is both a step forward and a step backward for human rights law. In the order, Bush asserts that the US is still not pursuant to Geneva III, the most recent international convention on justice in military law, where terror suspects are concerned. Geneva III outlines the torture guidelines followed by nearly every other country in the world. For the President to continue to deny US participation is a danger to our troops, and to our international reputation. The President cannot claim that we are in Iraq on a human rights mission to aid the Iraqi people until we are fully party once more to that treaty, not just for some but for all our prisoners. It is a larger disgrace upon our country's reputation than most people realize.

On the other hand, at least the current EO does expressly forbid torture, in the same language that Geneva III uses. It also forbids degrading treatment, and mandates the provision of basic necessities like food and clothing. That the US has not thus far seen fit to write into law these basic human rights is a mark upon our national honor, but better to right a wrong later than never.

The biggest problem with this EO is that it continues not to provide due process to CIA prisoners. The biggest difference between the current (as of this order) policy and the official Geneva conventions is that Geneva III provides that prisoner sentences must be decided through a court. Bush doesn't think that he should have to provide legal rights to his prisoners. Frankly, I'm not surprised. Yesterday he issued another EO declaring that all executive branch employees are immune to prosecution from a US Attorney (a position which decimates the constitutional idea of checks and balances). Bush sneers at the idea of rule of law in this nation, so why should he afford the rule of law to suspects in another nation? The order also fails to ensure oversight from international groups like the Red Cross, whose traditional job it has been to ensure the health and safety of prisoners. The fact that there is no ensured impartial oversight means that frankly this order lacks teeth. It's a feel-good measure more than a serious policy change.

Even with that bad news, however, this EO may be viewed as a victory for those like myself who have claimed that the international moral norm against torture is strong enough to withstand the testing of even a superpower like the US. The pressure from both US citizens and international powers has finally caused Bush to cave and protect US prisoners from torture. He places the decisions about interrogation regimes in the hands of the director of the CIA, which means that now we can only pray that the director is a sane and humanistic man. I will continue to believe that no one with compassion could authorize a torture regime, so now we must pray that the person in whose hands these decisions rests will find the morality to do the right thing.

The right to bodily integrity is at the very heart of every other human right that mankind has ever held dear. Without it, there is no right to freedom, property, happiness, democracy, or religion. Every other debate pales in the face of the debate over whether it is moral to harm a prisoner in your control. Nearly every other nation on the face of the planet has come to the enlightened conclusion that to torture prisoners is a policy that degrades them both as a nation, and as human beings. I'm glad to say that as of today, the US has taken steps toward rejoining the community of civil nations.

Totally Off-Topic

2007-07-20T10:13:00.000-07:00

This has nothing to do with politics or Christianity, but I thought it was wonderful. About a month ago, the NYT did a few articles on cats. I liked this one, which links modern cats' lineage to an ancient form of Middle Eastern wildcat. The article posits that instead of human domesticating them (as with dogs or cows), cats instead domesticated themselves. I agree with the article, it seems like a very cat thing to do.

Oh, Mitt.

2007-07-18T14:06:00.000-07:00

Mitt Romney, Republican presidential candidate extraordinaire, put out an ad recently entitled 'Ocean'. Here's a transcript:

GOVERNOR MITT ROMNEY: I'm deeply troubled about the culture that surrounds our kids today.

Following the Columbine shootings, Peggy Noonan described our world as "the ocean in which our children now swim."

She described a cesspool of violence, and sex, and drugs, and indolence, and perversions.

She said that the boys who did the shooting had "inhaled too deeply in the oceans in which they swam."

I'd like to see us clean up the water in which our kids are swimming.

I'd like to keep pornography from coming up on their computers.

I'd like to keep drugs off the streets.

I'd like to see less violence and sex on TV and in video games and in movies.

And if we get serious about this, we can actually do a great deal to clean up the water in which our kids and our grandkids are swimming.

I'm Mitt Romney and I approve this message.

My initial reaction is that I could have written better copy for the ad than apparently Mitt's campaign managers did (Cesspool of indolence and perversions? Really Mitt?), but my secondary reaction to it is confusion.

Let's suppose for a minute that I'm a Republican instead of a liberal, and that this ad actually has a chance of appealing to values that I fall in line with. Republi-Me is a fundamentalist Christian and likes the idea of children having a safer time of it, but I'm not sure that the presentation here turns me on much. He promises reforms, but doesn't give any specific mechanism, and Republi-Me is wary enough of politicians and weary enough of the war to know that promises without plans are a recipe for disaster. I also know that Mitt was Governor of Massachusetts, so I'm a little wary of his 'family values' shtick. Most fundamentalist Christians are divided on whether they think the government should be legislating morality, but I think that even the ones who think that's okay might be wary of Mitt doing the legislating.

But even if I buy that he can bring cultural reforms and that he does have a plan he's not yet telling us about, I'm not sure that the idea comforts Republi-Me that much. Because Republi-Me is a real Republican in the traditional sense of the word, and after the Bush presidency I'm very much in line with the idea that less government is better government. This ad doesn't say 'less' to me. It doesn't say 'cut governmental spending and governmental interference in industry'. This ad says 'The government is going to mess with your private life some more, and we'll need a bigger beauracracy to do it' to me.

In short, I'm not really sure who his target audience is here, other than people who don't think very critically about the soundbytes their politicians throw at them. Seems to me like he overshoots the target for small-government Republicans by implying he's got a plan that's going to mean more government, and undershoots the target for fundie Christian Republicans by not detailing the plan to accomplish any of the hyperbole.

Then again, maybe this is why I'm a Democrat.

Harry Potter redux, part seven.

2007-07-18T07:18:00.000-07:00

I don't know why I'm surprised to see it. It's happened with the release of every Harry Potter book and movie thus far, and with the fifth film and seventh book coming out so closely in succession, it shouldn't shock me that it's happening again. Yet somehow it always catches me afresh.

I'm talking about the Christian fundamentalist calls to 'protect kids from Harry Potter'. Witchcraft! cries the Christian establishment. Doorway to the occult! Even satirical site Landover Baptist (which, by the way, I recommend as comedy gold) gets in on the action with an article entitled "Harry Potter Driving Our Children Insane!". The Potter series is in the top ten on the American Library Association's list of 'Most Challenged [for banning] Books' from 1990-2000. Why the worry about these books?

Well, supposedly they promote witchcraft in children. I would argue even this point, but let's grant it for argument's sake. Now let's take a look at some of the most beloved Christian allegories of times past. The Narnia series? Yup, contains magic, children doing magic, and a magical lion that is not-so-subtly associated with Jesus. The Wrinkle In Time series? Yup, contains magic, children participating in magic, and a series of magical creatures not-so-subtly allegorical of angels and demons. Let's assume, for a second then, that the right-wing fundamentalists aren't actually objecting to the magic in the books (which, after all, resembles real-world paganism much like the smiling and dancing orphans in Little Orphan Annie resemble the real-world foster care system).

What could they be objecting to? I would guess that their objections are more about the lack of a clear biblical allegory in the books than anything else. After all, prior to Harry Potter most of the wildly popular children's series did have something to do with Christian symbolism. There wasn't really a series written for children who grew up in time when Christianity wasn't a strong enough cutural influence to shape the narrative of a text. Harry Potter marked the first enduringly popular, completely secularist work for children and young adults that nonetheless addressed questions of morals and ethics. In a time when Christianity was already struggling to impart religion to an increasingly well-informed young population, the Potter books were a serious blow. Thus, the consistant fervor over their content. If it wasn't witchcraft people complained about, it would have been something else. By accurately representing the secular humanist worldview as one which could nonetheless imbue a hero with morals and a strong sense of the good, the Potter books were a church's bad dream. Luckily for the reading public, they're too many people's best fantasy for church criticism to keep them down.

Culture of silence, culture of scared

2007-07-17T11:07:00.000-07:00

Big news in the Catholic world the last few days: the LA diocese agreed to pay $660 million in abuse lawsuit settlements. Today, the Vatican released a statement that the

"problem of the abuse of childhood and its adequate protection certainly does not regard only the (Catholic) Church, but also many other institutions".

I personally thought that this was a little tasteless, since it smacks of blame-sharing at a time when the Church should be sucking it up to take responsibility. But it's also sadly true. The majority of Catholic and Protestant congregations don't have policies in place designed to protect children from abusers. This makes the church a haven for paedophiles and molestors.

Part of the problem with church sexual abuse scandals is that the church itself unintentionally creates an atmosphere that is hostile to abuse victims, and therefore friendly to abusers. Churches everywhere preach the 'wickedness' of sex in many forms, whether through pronouncements about abstinence, vilification of church members who are percieved as promiscuous, emphasis on modesty and covering up the (implicitly shameful) body, or crusades against gay people and types of sex outside the missionary position. By contrast, not many sermons are preached about the evils of child molestation. It's such an obvious sin that pastors and priests (rightly) don't feel compelled to mention it. Because of this, though, what children hear on a continuous basis is a message of 'sex is bad, and people who have sex are bad people'.

In a culture that stifles mentions of sex as shameful and ungodly, is it any surprise that victims are reluctant to tell a Christian parent or church leader that they're being abused? A child who's being told weekly that being gay is evil is far less likely to report his male priest's advances than one who knows that he himself won't be looked down upon for the revelation. A church that reliably preaches that non-virgins are sinful may have a lot of trouble convincing young girls to tell a pastor that they are no longer a virgin because their teacher has been abusing them. Despite the Church's good intentions, the messages it's giving about sex and sexual abuse are decidedly mixed, particularly to children whose reasoning capacities aren't developed enough to tell the difference between 'he's sinful for making me do this', and 'I'm sinful for having participated, however unwillingly'.

It's for this reason that every denomination, and every individual congregation, needs to formulate and enforce policies designed to protect children. In an ideal world, the Church would drop its unreasonable sex-phobia (nowhere in the Bible does it directly say anything about many of the stances that the Church has adopted over the years on sex). The optimist in me hopes that one day even churches will come to a more progressive understanding of human sexuality. But in the meantime, steps must be taken to protect children:

Adults should never be alone in a room with a single child.
Parents should provide teachers and caretakers with a means of identifying them as the parents of their particular child when the child is dropped off into church care, and children should not be released from care to anyone but parents, after the parents provide appropriate identification.
All teachers should submit to criminal background checks, and known molestors should not be allowed to teach or supervise children (many states have programs that allow businesses to check whether a person is a sexual criminal for free). This may seem like an obvious step, but most churches have no idea whether the people who teach and watch over their children are criminals or not.

All of these are common-sense tactics to reduce the likelihood of abuse. In a culture where sex is a taboo subject, churches should be obligated to take proactive steps to protect potential victims. Too bad most of them, like the Catholic Church in the LA case, will only issue tepid apologies when it's already decades too late.

Fact-checking

2007-07-16T15:52:00.000-07:00

On Friday I posted a response to the USA Today letters about gay rights and the Christian church. Those articles were part of a larger series that the paper has been doing about religion (by which they apparently mean Judeo-Christianity, no other faiths have thus far been discussed), and which I anticipate will continue to provide interesting blog-fodder (look for updates and responses on Mondays and Fridays).

Today's piece, entitled "The founders got it right" is all about how the evil government is trying to trample our freedom of religion. The money quote?

Now, the secularist storm troops of the American Civil Liberties Union and its like drive religion from the public square with the mandate of the Everson ruling in hand. Religious symbols are removed from cemeteries, student prayer groups are driven from public facilities, and religious leaders are threatened if they dare speak about political issues from their pulpits.

Let's fact-check this little soundbyte, because it's one that gets repeated ad infinitum by radio personalities and conservative think tanks when they bemoan the de-Christifying of America. "Secularist storm troopers"? Classy. Name calling is always a good way to start a constructive argument. But let's talk about his substantive points, starting with those religious symbols removed from cemeteries. Most likely he's referring here to an internet rumor that the ACLU was attempting to remove cross-shaped gravestones from Arlington. This chain-letter myth gets neatly deconstructed and disproven in an article (including caselaw on this point) from Snopes. Religious symbols on gravestones and monuments are alive and well in our government cemeteries. It's also irresponsible of the author not to check his sources to be sure he's not discussing urban legends as support for his point.

Well, even if he got the cemeteries wrong, surely student prayer groups are no longer allowed in schools? Actually, not so. See You At The Pole is a nationwide group that sponsors prayers around school flagpoles, and student-led school religious groups have over and over been ruled Constitutional. So hmmm. Apparently student prayer groups are alive and well in public facilities.

So what about the religious leaders 'threatened' if they 'dare' talk politics to their flocks? Well, this one's partly true. The IRS allows churches non-profit status, but only so long as they don't endorse particular candidates in an election. The rule of thumb is that churches are allowed to endorse issues but not people. So a pastor is completely free to do a sermon about the evils of abortion, or how stem cell research is murder. Those are political topics. And if the church doesn't care about its non-profit status, the pastor even endorse particular candidates. I personally don't think that this is an unreasonable stance to take (it's always seemed tacky to me for a church to endorse a candidate qua candidate rather than endorse a specific stance on issues). It allows the churches room to preach their message as much as they like, and it avoids the complex campaign-finance issues that could arise from pastors endorsing specific candidates. To recap this one: pastors aren't forbidden to talk about politics at all. They're forbidden to endorse a specific candidate.

In short, everything in that little soundbyte was either a direct lie, or a gross distortion of the truth. It's people like this, giving messages like this in the name of 'protecting Christianity' that give all Christians a bad name. After all, wasn't one of the commandments "Thou Shall Not Lie"?

These very (post)modern times

2007-07-15T20:36:00.000-07:00

Often in church debates today, one hears a pastor or speaker disparage "postmodernism" as the scourge of the Christian church. Postmodernism is supposedly corrupting our children, opening the gap to terrible crimes against morality, and disrupting our understanding of theology. There is a great deal of difficulty to this little soundbyte, mostly because what Protestant theologians mean when they say "postmodernism" and what the rest of the academic community means when they say "postmodernism" are two very different things.

Academic Postmodernism

When an academic says the word 'postmodern' to you, unless he is specifically an architect or a fine arts major, he is probably talking about literary postmodernism. This is a breed of writing that sprouted up in English and philosophy departments around the Western world in the latter half of the twentieth century. It was a reaction and often a critique (in the academic, dialogue-ish sense of critique) of a movement called Modernism (I know, big surprise), which had taken place in those same spheres in the early half of the twentieth century. As a reaction to Modernism, postmodernism is heavily defined relationally; it finds its boundaries in the spaces excluded or questioned by Modernism.

The postmodern writers called for a re-evaluation of the whole concept of modernity, in a 1920-ish sense of the word. The Modernist movement had positioned itself to advocate against widespread ignorance, superstition, and resistance to technological and cultural innovation. Postmodernism, far from advocating a return to those conditions, was a dialogue with modernism about the need to be 'modern'. It consisted of questioning traditional authority structures, experimenting with finding meaning in dialogues outside the traditional means of dialogue. Hence, the famous postmodern authors who broke down constraints of genre or even grammatical conventions to explore new ways of communicating. These authors were not necessarily disagreeing with the ideas that Modernism had brought up (the need to embrace innovation and the need to question orthodoxies that had long stood qua orthodoxy were both strong and common threads for the two movements), but instead were exploring different ways of doing similar things. In this way, postmodernism might be viewed as an extension rather than a debate with the Modernist ideas. Postmodernism was, in a very real way, the efforts of a group of scholars to adapt the ideas of modernism to a newer time and social climate engendered by events like the Vietnam war.

Most literary scholars, in fact, now agree that the postmodern moment has passed and that contemporary writings along that vein are in fact dialoguing with (as opposed to being integrated as part of) the postmodern canon. Postmodernism was a movement situated in a very particular social climate.

Theologians and the 'postmodern' ethos

The explanation given above has nothing to do with what your average pastor means when he says 'postmodernism'. Even if he is aware of the history and the conversations surrounding the idea of modernity, the academic sense of 'postmodern' is almost certainly not what he intends. The catchphrase 'postmodern' is now used almost as a jargon term among Christians, and it roughly denotes the forces in society, whether moral, social, political, institutional, etc. that are opposed for whatever reason to the moral doctrines of the Christian church. In the Christian sense of the term, society's obsession with Paris Hilton is obviously symptomatic of the postmodern condition. It is in opposition to the morals of the church, and a competitor for the primacy of the church in the hearts of potential converts. In the academic sense of the term, it is not clear that this has anything to do with postmodernism at all, because social fascination with an heiress has nothing to do with questioning institutional norms (in fact, if anything it strengthens institutional norms by providing a pervasive image of the wealthy as a specific social class with specific behavioral expectations and obligations).

At any rate, 'postmodern' is a term with very different meanings depending on the context in which it is used. Someone hearing the word in conversation (whether with a pastor or with an academic) must be careful to consider the meaning behind the word, and not to apply with a broad brush a connotation which may not be intended at all.

"Love the sinner, hate the sin" and other myths of the anti-gay campaigns

2007-07-13T07:02:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, USA Today's opinion page printed a piece by a Lutheran about the problem of gay clergy in modern Protestant churches. America's Evangelical Lutheran church recently expelled a gay minister who wished to marry his partner. The Episcopal church in America has confirmed an openly gay bishop, and the worldwide Anglican church responded with an ultimatum: defrock him, or the Episcopals would no longer be an arm of the Anglican church.

Today, several letters appeared on the opinion page in response to the piece. Two were lengthy pieces condemning the writer as theologically misguided, and one was a shorter piece in support. To be empirical, my version of Microsoft Word informs me there were exactly 607 words in the letters against the article, and 96 words in the letter in favor.

USA Today's editorial choice here is curious. Were they trying to proportionally reflect the volume of mail received on each side of the debate, or are they expressing tacit agreement with the dissenters? Either way, one sentence in one of the condemning letters caught my eye: "Luther would condemn the behavior of gays while still loving them. He'd love the sinner and hate the sin."

The problem is that in the case of gay rights, I'm not convinced this cute little sentence makes any sense. "Love the sinner and hate the sin" sounds nice, but what exactly does it mean? Is it possible to love gay people while denying them legislation to protect them from hate crimes? At what point does love include the provision of basic rights?

It has always been my opinion that professions of love are worthless without actions to back them up, but many of today's Christians seem unwilling to take any actions that might show love for the queer community as people, by giving them rights that are afforded to other groups as a matter of course. It's hypocrisy that Christians believe people practicing other religions are living in sin, but jump to embrace hate crimes legislation that protects religious beliefs, even the 'sinful' ones. If one group of 'sinners' deserves protection (even if it's for the selfish reason that Christians are protected from religiously motivated persecution under those same laws), then why not this other group of 'sinners'? Christians defend legislation that allows other religions to practice in peace, because they feel such legislation might one day protect them. They don't feel the same threat in relation to the queer cause (naturally, what good Christian needs to worry their personal rights might get trampled if they decide they're gay? Good Christians just aren't gay, so of course the possibility is remote. It's a likelihood that seems more distant than religious persecution). The worst kind of "not my backyard, so it's not my problem" mentality prevents queers from being afforded the same rights as all other people.

'Love' is a soundbyte that packs a punch with many people. The problem is that for love to have teeth, it also must pack a set of obligations. Morality in action is a system of duties attached to beliefs, and the belief of love comes with certain duties to insure the well-being of the loved as much as possible. One cannot claim to love while depriving someone of basic safety and self-respect, or willingly permitting others to do likewise. It seems natural to me that in order to truly claim to love someone, you should as a matter of course desire for them a better quality of life, and hope they are afforded all the same rights and privileges that you yourself are afforded. In the case of gay people, it's hypocritical to claim to love them on one hand while withdrawing basic protections and liberties on the other.

Many Christians grew up with pastors feeding them the soundbyte of "love the sinner, hate the sin". The problem is that in the case of gay rights, it's not clear the two are distinct, and the modern church all-too-often errs on the side of hate.

Today's News of the Religious Weird

2007-07-12T12:11:00.000-07:00

Today, a Hindu man was scheduled to give the morning invocation for the Senate Chamber. It is in fact the first time that a Hindu prayer has been given in the Senate, and the man who gave it has also given prayers in his state chambers of congress (he's from Nevada).

The chamber was interrupted when three Christian protesters invaded and began shouting slurs. The morning's presiding officer (a Pennsylvania Democrat) ordered them thrown out of course, but their behavior was shameful and cast a pall on the morning that should have been a small celebration of religious freedom in our country. An anti-abortion group has since claimed credit in a press release (check out the group's website, linked from the press release. It pushes the boundaries on comically nuts).

EDIT: The blogosphere's response has generally been eyerolling, but I thought John Scalzi's piece "Jesus Says: Don't Be A Dick" was particularly good.

Subversive Scriptures: Romans 9:10-21

2007-07-12T08:35:00.000-07:00

10Not only that, but Rebekah's children had one and the same father, our father Isaac. 11Yet, before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad in order that God's purpose in election might stand: 12not by works but by him who calls she was told, "The older will serve the younger." 13Just as it is written: "Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated."
14What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Not at all! 15For he says to Moses, "I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion." 16It does not, therefore, depend on man's desire or effort, but on God's mercy. 17For the Scripture says to Pharaoh: "I raised you up for this very purpose, that I might display my power in you and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth." 18Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden.
19One of you will say to me: "Then why does God still blame us? For who resists his will?" 20But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? "Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, 'Why did you make me like this?' " 21Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use?

Let's recap: before Jacob and Esau were born, before they had a chance to sin, God declared that he hated Esau, and loved Jacob. In the case of the Pharaoh that refused to allow Moses to leave Egypt, God actively 'harden[ed] those whom he want[ed] to harden' so that Pharaoh would spoil Moses's plans, and then punished the whole of Egypt each time Pharaoh refused to let the Israelites leave. Pharaoh's sole purpose, actually, was to exist so that Egypt might be punished for his folly. All so that God's glory could be shown to the Israelites. The firstborn son of every Egyptian house died because of Pharaoh's decision not to let the Israelites leave his country, and here God claims that the decision was a result of God hardening Pharaoh's heart.

Ironically, this scripture fits amiably with the hawkish stances on war that many Christian denominations have taken. Who cares about collateral casualties so long as the glory of God is shown to his people? As long as the chosen ones are all right, there's no need to keep track of Iraqi casualties.

Any way you take it, Paul's writing here has difficult implications for the Christian faith. Is god the kind of God that would actually create a person solely for the purpose of punishing a nation for that person's decisions? Would he actively harden Pharaoh's heart against Moses, then take out his wrath on the children of a nation? Read literally, the answer here is yes.

Read more charitably, one might say that Paul was simply pointing out that God knew the result of Pharaoh's confrontation with Moses before the confrontation occurred. It would on this reading be all right for God to say that he has loved Jacob and hated Esau before they were born, because God knew in advance which he would love and which he would hate.

I think that this is a rather disingenuous reading, because it ignored the bits about God 'loving whom he would love and hardening whom he would harden'. Those are fairly active statements, not statements of God's knowledge, but statements of God's direct action.

Another disturbing implication of this passage is to point out that God doesn't actually love everyone. God is not an all-charitable being. God knows in advance whether you will be one of his people, and if you are not, then you can become collateral damage for the sake of his people. If you are not among the chosen, then in fact God does not love and value you, but may hate you (and has even before you were born!). The Bible has numerous examples of what has happened to civilizations or cities or people that God has hated. Most of them end bloodily.

I am not claiming that these interpretations are the correct ones. I am, however, pointing out that they are not unreasonable extrapolations. It's all there in the text, in a little passage that no one really talks much about. I've never seen a pastor preach on it. Frankly, I think most pastors are either unaware of it or are ignoring it because of the implications. This isn't the theology that a pastor would want a church full of prospective Christians to hear.

It contradicts a lot of modern soundbytes, and several major doctrines of various modern denominations. This is subversive scripture at its best.

Subversive Scriptures Index Post

2007-07-12T08:18:00.000-07:00

How many people have actually read and considered the whole of the Bible? The answer, unsurprisingly, is 'not many'. Even many pastors have not read the whole Bible critically and analyzed the importance of its scriptures. We see verses about love in Sunday School, but we don't see the verses about slavery, or about god's power to harden the hearts of those people whom he has not chosen.

The truth is, if a number of Christians would read the Bible completely (and think carefully about what it says), today's religions might look very different than they currently do. In the spirit of reminding myself (and others) that sometimes the Bible is not a warm and fuzzy book of Jesus-loves-us-all, I'm starting a list of disturbing scriptures from the Bible. This will probably be updated on a rolling basis as I find more verses that fit onto this list.

I hope that this list raises questions in its readers. Is it actually good or right to believe that the Bible is infallible? Was the Bible authored solely by god, or by men who were divinely inspired? What things in the Bible should be interpreted at face value, and which are the results of a culture that no longer applies to or interacts with our own? What is the meaning of faith, in the face of scriptures about God's divine will? Don't read this as a list of scriptures posted solely for their controversial nature, but as a list of scriptures that, if taken seriously, project a very different view of God than the one commonly taught in all Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant denominations.

The truth is, no Christian believes completely in the whole of the Bible. These are the verses that get ignored.

I will post these under the tag 'subversive scriptures', but this post will serve as an index of all the Subversive Scriptures series. Scriptures without links are planned for future posts, and the links will be updated as those posts are forthcoming.

God's Nature / God's Will

Romans 9:10-21

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Culture wars: science vs religion, again.

2007-07-11T11:55:00.000-07:00

The American political landscape of late has been saddening, littered with scandals and corruption investigations on both sides of the aisle. Several days ago, the former surgeon general gave a landmark statement to Congress about the current Administration's attempts to suppress scientific research into promising stem-cell discoveries for political reasons. Tomorrow, the Senate will begin hearings on a new surgeon general, Dr. James Holsinger.

Today, the NYT ran an editorial about the prospective surgeon general. It describes his position as part of the church judicial council for the United Methodist Church, and details his views on gay people and the church. As part of that council, Holsinger supported a minister who refused to allow a gay man to join his church, and argued that a lesbian minister should be removed because homosexuality was incompatible with church doctrine. Holsinger argues that he was merely interpreting church doctrine, and that these issues had nothing to do with his own personal views. Tellingly, however, other council members opposed his stances, and bishops in the church later even rejected one decision. Holsinger also authored a 'scientific' white paper for a church committee, entitled 'Pathophysiology of Male Homosexuality'. Supposedly it was a medical review, but its conclusions that gay sex was anatomically abnormal and could lead to rectal injuries and STDs seem more like propaganda than reasoned science. What about the many, many heterosexual couples engaging in anal intercourse? What about the STDs transmitted through 'normal' vaginal intercourse? No mention of these sexual hazards were considered in the paper's findings. Our prospective surgeon general apparently (at least at the time) considered gay people as diseased and abnormal. Comforting.

This is the man who will represent the nation's 6000+ doctors in the coming years on any number of health issues, and whose decisions will have guiding influence in the direction of medicine to come. This is the position that the current administration has hobbled into an ideological puppet. The person put into this post will be one of the warriors on the forefront of the battle between science and religious culture, so it's important that Congress think carefully before installing a bigot.

Ironically, these hearings come as the American Psychological Association makes the final preparations for a series of meetings about the potential harms of ex-gay conversion 'therapies'. The Southern Baptist Convention has joined with Focus on the Family (Surprised? Anyone? Didn't think so.) to complain that the APA isn't listening to gays whose religious beliefs are against their gay lifestyles. The task force is expected to propose a ban on these so-called 'reparative therapies', and the Convention isn't happy. The problem is apparently that the task force is determined to look at the best science on these 'therapies' instead of listening to religious leaders who would present metaphysics in the face of numerical evidence.

The battle between science and organized religion is being waged on a number of fronts in the next few weeks. The soundbytes of 'speak the truth in love to homosexuals' will be tossed around liberally by religious leaders. The dryer, less catchy soundbytes of numerical evidence will be tossed around by scientists. The problem in these culture wars is that truth, as far as human-kind can determine it, has long been arbitrated by the findings of scientific investigation. Here's one thing I can guarantee Focus on the Family won't talk much about: if the numbers that the APA provides actually do represent the truth, then where, exactly, is the love?

On the purpose of this blog...

2007-07-10T06:41:00.001-07:00

My decision to begin this blog is rooted in a deep frustration with the current state of christianity in general, and the Southern Baptist Convention in particular. I have been christian for years, but have recently found myself disagreeing more and more frequently with the 'soundbytes' produced by various christian organizations.

There is a lot of hypocrisy in the Southern Baptist church, and this blog will take a look at some of the more egregious examples, both theological and practical.