Whole Lotta Talk About Love

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.