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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

Politics of church, politics in church

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.

Harry Potter redux, part seven.

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

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.