Asymmetry Is A Feature, Not A Bug

(1/X) Sorry to keep doing these, but I wanted to do one more thing about how poorly media handles the asymmetry between Trump and Democrats. This is torn directly from my real life experiences watching deans empower an abusive narcissistic sociopath...

— New York Times Pitchbot (@DougJBalloon) April 17, 2024

It occurs to me I saw something similar in seminary.

In my second year, a new student arrived among much fanfare. She was reportedly brilliant and a very highly regarded student with impeccable credentials. She was also quite obviously very self-centered and enjoyed all the attention she could get (the term “narcissist” wasn’t widely bandied about in those halcyon days).

I didn’t have many classes with her, but in one I quickly realized she was not only bit “brilliant,” she didn’t know what she was talking about. I mentioned this to someone, and learned most of the faculty had figured that out. I did have one run in with her, while I was still living on campus.

I took a job at the seminary library, basically closing the place at night. She started there shortly after I did, and came into work shortly before closing, announcing to me that she was “here,” as if that was supposed to mean something. When it came time to close, the building was empty. But she came downstairs telling me there were noises in the upstairs bathroom and someone was hiding up there. I had been upstairs earlier and knew it was empty, and I needed to get home (it was nearly midnight). She wanted me to call the police (not campus police, we didn’t have any). I laughed and refused. The other worker (another student) didn’t know whether to go with me or stay with her (I’d have forced her to leave and locked up. So they stayed, and I left them to it.

The head librarian fired me the next day, saying I should have stayed because someone might’ve been upstairs. She had been called in, and found no one. But I was at fault, because the narcissist convinced people she couldn’t be wrong. She wanted to be important; she wanted to be powerful. She wanted to cry “wolf!” and have everyone come running.

That was my only dealing with her, but the system finally worked; sort of. I took a small church as pastor, cutting my time in class and extending my studies an extra year, so we graduated together. She was ordained almost immediately (required a call to a church, in our denomination. My ordination came months later.). It’s supposed to be a solemn and humble affair, where calling church gives gifts in celebration. The story was she reveled in the gifts like it was her birthday,?which left a lot of people wondering who, exactly, they had called to ministry for their church. Shortly after that, word came that she didn’t have the requisite undergraduate degree to get into seminary. How that slipped by was an administrative mystery. But it leant impetus to withdrawing her call. I don’t know how it ended up, but I’m sure it didn’t end well.

She was, I’d say now, a narcissist convinced of her own importance and glory (unless you plan to lead a megachurch, not goo qualities for ministry). The system let her through longer than she deserved, but then, we give people the benefit of the doubt, don’t we? Or the benefit of being persuasive. I remember the whole campus was buzzing with the reputation of her genius that preceded her. We all soon realized that was because she said so, and for no other reason.

I knew a lawyer like that, but for him it was not brag, just fact. He was still an asshole, though. Even his partners said so. But he was a good lawyer, so who cared?

Asymmetry in politics? Eh, seen that all my life. What brought down Sen. McCarthy? Not the courage (hah!) of the press; nor of the Senate. Not even Eisenhower. Nixon did in Nixon, just as Falwell outlasted his welcome. Jim and Tammy Faye got too greedy; Gingrich got too self-important (he always was, he just got worse). People seldom bring down such people; the “system” does because they linger too long, and become old and tiresome. What made them new and bold becomes old and dull. We honor people like that in the beginning; in the end we bury them with the refuse. We honor people like Dr. King in death, having dishonored them in life.

So it goes.

I’m Feeling Strong “Let’s Make It Worse” Vibes

It is my sense that there is a major shift underway in this country. https://t.co/adtymFxjV7

— Heather Cox Richardson (TDPR) (@HC_Richardson) January 12, 2024

Context:

Evangelicals have buyer's remorse for 'deal with devil' that let MAGA devour church: op-edhttps://t.co/0Vgum9oq6q

— Raw Story (@RawStory) January 12, 2024

Goldberg cites Tim Alberta's recent book “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” which is full of preachers and evangelical activists expressing second thoughts about their unwavering support for Trump. One is Texas megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress, who said that he had "perhaps" crossed a line with his boosting of Trump. 

There's also former member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board Mike Evans, who wrote in an essay saying that he left a Trump rally “in tears because I saw Bible believers glorifying Donald Trump like he was an idol.” Even the Family Research Council's Tony Perkins told Alberta that Trump "went a little too far." 

"But if the polls are right, Iowa’s evangelicals don’t care what their ostensible leaders think. Trump’s rise has been accompanied by a collapse in trust in many American institutions once valued by the right, including the F.B.I. and the military, and that loss of faith extends to many religious authorities," Goldberg writes. 

"As Alberta, the son of a conservative evangelical pastor, documented, preachers who’ve balked at parts of the MAGA agenda have been abandoned by many of their congregants." 

According to Goldberg, the Trump-evangelical phenomenon has caused a version of evangelicalism "that sometimes seems like a brand-new religion" to emerge. 

"There’s no way to know if evangelical leaders could have prevented this devolution of their faith by joining together to stand up to Trump before he became such a mythic figure. But now, more than seven years into their deal with the devil, it’s probably too late."

"Be careful what you ask for” and “baptized heathens” come to mind. As well as Paul’s anger: “You stupid Galatians! Who has bewitched you?” But we have to leave the exegesis of Paul’s cri de couer for another time. The question here is: what happened?

My short and sweet response is that evangelicals and their even more radical cousins the fundamentalists took a chapter from their spiritual ancestors, the American Puritans, and long ago decided that if they couldn’t run society according to their lights (William Bradford’s attempts at Plymouth colony failed within a few years. He couldn’t keep ‘em down on the farm after they’d seen Paree), they’d just run their churches their way. Which was fair enough, but sometime in the 1970’s Jerry Falwell got the bug to run things, and to cut to the chase, here we are.

And a damned fine mess it is, too.

Now my sympathies are for the “follow the rebel Jesus” crowd. And I’m all for living in the basilea tou theou. But we aren’t going to get there by replacing Caesar with a different Caesar. Christianity through politics is not ultimately going to work, and the object lesson there is when the Christianity of the Rev. Dr. King came up against the Christianity of the Christian churches he addressed in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” or from the pulpit of Riverside Church when he condemned the Vietnam War. As ol’ Ez said to Robert Browning: “There can be but one ‘Sordello.’ But Sordello, and my Sordello?”

Which one does the super supermajority impose on the minority? As Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out, societies cannot be moral entities. Who among us would countenance a father physically sacrificing his children for his moral principles? Thomas More was very proud of his morality, but he really left his family in the shit. Would Abraham really be as admirable if he had plunged the knife into Isaac? As it is, honestly, he’s a little scary.

So, again in a nutshell, thanks for the offer, but no thanks. Evangelicals and fundamentalists were wiser to stay out of the world’s politics, even as I’d have liked to see them engage the world through charity and help to the poor, the sick, the imprisoned. But giving Caesar what is Caesar’s is not just about whose image is on the coin (does it bother anybody else how close our coinage is to ancient Rome’s? No? Just me, then? Fair enough.) It’s about what you leave to Caesar, and what responsibilities you take for yourself. The speck in your sister’s eye, after all, is just the reflection of the log in yours.

Gotta keep that in mind when you want to tell other people what to do.

Because, Lorry Nose, the polling sites

Gov. Greg Abbott's new statewide mask mandate exempts voting sites and churches. https://t.co/62ATRf4HjB

— Texas Tribune (@TexasTribune) July 3, 2020

Can't be expected to hand out masks.*  And churches are safe zones, right?

At least five members of the choir and orchestra at the Dallas megachurch visited by Vice President Mike Pence this weekend tested positive for the coronavirus in June, according to Facebook posts and internal church emails reviewed by BuzzFeed News.

An additional orchestra member had symptoms several days after being exposed and was awaiting a test result in mid-June, according to a call for prayers sent to the church’s musicians.

None of those six people were at the First Baptist church in Dallas during Pence’s hour-and-a-half-hour visit on Sunday, but it's unclear how many of the musicians who performed for Pence may have been exposed during previous practices and performances with those who were infected.

Public health experts have expressed particular concerns about the dangers of indoor singing and wind instruments in large groups, which can readily spread the respiratory virus.

The choir and orchestra performed for Pence without masks, according to a video of the event reviewed by BuzzFeed News.

*Kinda wonder how many people will stand in line with even one maskless person.

It Passes All Understanding

I’ll never understand how the, “America is the best country in the history of the world” true believers can make excuses for stuff like this. I guess a lot of practice making excuses for gun deaths. https://t.co/gQMVYGsSUY

— Schooley (@Rschooley) June 28, 2020

TEXAS C-19 HOSPITALIZATIONS CONTINUE TO RISE.
Pence is making a campaign appearance at a mega-church. No masks.https://t.co/8FHH0oSEgF https://t.co/2N2uZOxBZw

— lindan johnson (@lindanjohnson1) June 28, 2020

Mike Pence is at First Baptist this morning. So of course the (high risk) choir is shoulder-to-shoulder, singing. pic.twitter.com/W0eJkMoEfw

— Matt Goodman (@goodmoine) June 28, 2020

Here's what the social distancing inside First Baptist looks like this morning as the Downtown Dallas megachurch's congregation welcomes Vice President Pence to its facility for an event called "Freedom Sunday." pic.twitter.com/v4EQ5ZPjiv

— Central Track (@Central_Track) June 28, 2020

This is just funny.

Peaceful protestors tempt @DallasPD officers, stationed outside the church where Pence is currently speaking, with doughnuts. pic.twitter.com/4HFzoDIdfC

— Trace Miller (@w_tres_mil) June 28, 2020

Trump's Favorite Pastor

Looking forward to my meeting at 2:00 P.M. with wonderful Inner City Pastors!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 29, 2019

Will he ask them if they are Christians?

Trump's favorite pastor, or perhaps the pastor whose favorite President is Trump, is Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church in Dallas.  It's a storied "mega-church" once led by W.A. Criswell, a reprobate and racist who accepted integration but never really, to my knowledge anyway, repented of his segregationist ways.  Criswell like the world the way it was in Texas and wanted it pretty much left alone from what he'd grown up with, and Robert Jeffress seems to be much in the same mold.

That's what I draw from this Texas Monthly article I've mentioned twice already.  It's not a particularly good article.  The author interviews Jeffress several times, and avoids any easy critique of his subject's weltanschaung, which restraint is admirable.  He even likes Jeffress as a person, which is almost laudable, since we too easily equate ideology or theology or personal philosophy with character.  But the article doesn't give you any real insight into Robert Jeffress, either.  It may be he is a remarkably opaque person, someone who knows what he thinks and stands by what he believes and offers no more self-reflection than a brick wall; a kindly, polite, personable brick wall, but still.  Still, Robert Jeffress likes Donald Trump.  He considers Trump a friend, and that friendship breeds a loyalty that is apparently unshakeable and make Jeffress forgive, forget, or just ignore, whatever Trump says that is troubling, disconcerting, immoral, or even evil.  Which is, in a way, an insight into Jeffress:  he has faith in Donald Trump.  That faith may be an adjunct of his faith in God, or faith in himself, or faith in what he believes.  But the only faith we can verify from this article, is that Robert Jeffress believes in Donald Trump, and he's not going to allow anything to interfere with that.  He seems to think it is his duty.

It's almost admirable.  I have friends I've known since childhood, and I would not speak against them lightly for any reason.  I would admit their flaws, if you were a reporter and my friends prominent public figures you were interviewing me to learn more about.  I don't mean I'd reveal stories I alone know (I don't have any, actually), or uncover things they'd wish left covered in perpetuity (ditto), but I'd be honest about their weaknesses and their strengths, as I see them (though, being a friend, strengths would be easier to identify, weaknesses just an acknowledgment they still put their pants on one leg at a time).  Jeffress doesn't know Trump that well, and it is obvious from the anecdotes in the article Trump's relationships even with his most devoted sycophants (it's hard to think of Jeffress any other way, from this article) are all transactional:

A few months after that, in August, the White House hosts an elaborate dinner for a hundred or so evangelical leaders from across the country. Franklin Graham is there. So are James Dobson and Paula White, a TV host and pastor of a Florida megachurch. Jeffress is one of the preachers Trump thanks by name.

Reading prepared remarks, the president lists his evangelical-friendly accomplishments: issuing orders limiting government funding for groups that provide abortions, helping to free an American pastor being held in Turkey, moving the embassy to Jerusalem. Of course, there’s no record of him mentioning any of these issues before campaigning for president and meeting people like Jeffress.

At the end of his short speech, Trump thanks the religious leaders. He calls them “special people.” Then he looks up from his script.

“The support you’ve given me has been incredible,” the president says. “But I really don’t feel guilty, because I have given you a lot back.”

Jeffress gives Trump his unqualified support.  Why?

“Basic core spiritual issues” is usually his answer when I press him on why he goes out of his way, again and again, to defend Trump. He cares about religious liberty—which for him essentially boils down to whether churches and businesses should be required to provide birth control for employees and whether businesses can deny service to gay or trans people. And nearly every policy discussion eventually comes back to what he sees as the national battle that started in Dallas when he was a teenager. He believes Roe v. Wade, not the issue of sexual assault or of judicial temperament, was at the heart of the fight over the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. The Democrats were worried that Kavanaugh’s rulings would “somehow lessen the number of babies being murdered every year in the womb through abortion.”

Which is not much of an answer, frankly.  Jeffress, it turns out, is a careful public figure, a politicians himself.  He says his congregation welcomes all political persuasions, all races, all types (well, not gays; they're going to hell.  Jeffress is quite happily clear on that point,  Like many a conservative preacher I've known, they always seem comfortable with damning some people to eternal torment just because.)  He speaks in defense of Donald Trump on television at the drop of a hat; but he never quite says just why he's so devoted to Trump, except, at the end of the article, to say he considers Trump "a friend."  Maybe it's because he and Trump share a trait in common:

This is why Trump is the sort of warrior evangelicals have long craved, a warrior who will fight for their beliefs regardless of whether he holds those beliefs himself. This is why Jeffress doesn’t worry about Trump’s personal behavior. “When you’re in a war, you don’t worry about style,” he explains. “Nobody would have criticized General Patton because of his language. We’re in a war here between good and evil. And to me, the president’s tone, his demeanor, just aren’t issues I choose to get involved with.” (When I look this up later, I learn that some top commanders and many members of Congress did criticize—and discipline—General Patton for verbally abusing and slapping two soldiers. He was suspended from his command and made to apologize.) 

I could have told you Patton was reprimanded for slapping that soldier.  My father remembered the incident (he remembered nothing else about Patton) and he despised Patton for it, decades later (the subject came up when the George C. Scott movie came out).  Jeffress, like me, is far too young to have ever known that story except as history; and he gets the history wrong, but it's the example he needs, not accuracy.  Early in the article Jeffress is on Lou Dobbs show, defending Trump's border wall by declaring the Bible describes heaven as a place with a wall around it.  The Bible says no such thing.  Revelations 21 describes the "New Jerusalem," but that's a concrete metaphor of the "basiliea tou theou" announced in the Gospels; it's not a description of an existent reality. Revelation describes a city as it would exist in the 1st century, not an eternal structure that cannot be altered.  I know Jeffress takes the Bible literally, but this is laughable, and as impossible to literalize as the nativity stories (Luke moves the Holy Family back and forth from Nazareth; Matthew moves them from Bethlehem to Egypt, and then to Nazareth.  It can't be both.).  But Jeffress wants a wall to keep people out of America he thinks don't belong here (he also balks at AOC's reference to Matthew's nativity story, where the Holy Family flees to Egypt, refugees fleeing the death sentence of Herod.  AOC is a good Catholic, and knows her Bible stories well.  Jeffress scoffs, claiming Egypt didn't have a border patrol, so the Family couldn't be refugees.  No, it's not an argument that holds up to the barest scrutiny.  Then again, it's not meant to.  One reason Jeffress never defends his positions in an interview; he has no interest in defending what he says.  He believes it, that's good enough for him.  Self-reflection, self-examination, seem as foreign to him as the concept God loves all of creation, not just the part that is Jeffress' brand of "Christian.").  He has an anchor, in other words, for his claim "the Bible says," but that anchor depends on a very particular and peculiar hermeneutic, and I doubt Jeffress is any more reflective on that than Trump is on himself when he gathers his Cabinet to hear them praise him on camera.

The only conclusion I can draw from this article is a rather obtuse one:  Robert Jeffress has faith in Donald Trump.  Maybe it's the abortion issue, and Trump's Supreme Court nominees will eventually overturn Roe v. Wade, an issue Jeffress is adamant about but which he can't explain to his interlocutor except on the grounds that “We didn’t have the ability to view a life inside the womb as we do today and understand that that’s a real, live human being.”  Who are of value until they are born:

What about children at the border and the administration’s policy of separating families? Doesn’t he think we should protect babies at our borders too?

“Look,” he tells me, “if you have a woman who is convicted of a bank robbery and she has an infant child and she’s sent to prison, I mean, her baby is going to be ripped from her.”

But of course, we have gradations of crimes in this country, and crossing a border—even if it’s illegal—is a far different thing than robbing a bank. This policy was instituted as a deterrent. I remind him that many people, including some Baptists, believe it’s a callous way to treat children.

“If we don’t secure our borders, we’re enticing the needy people, the persecuted people, to make a dangerous journey to come to this country or try to enter illegally, and I think, in part, we are morally responsible for doing that,” he tells me. He compares it to laws that hold homeowners responsible when a child strays into an unfenced pool and drowns. “We’ve got to figure out a way to secure our borders and at the same time deal equitably and justly with people who want to enter this country for legitimate reasons.”

A wall at the border is a fence around a private pool is the New Jerusalem; somehow.  And the difference between a "real, live human being" in the womb, and out of the womb, is:  the womb.  Huh.  Wonder what he'd think about that?

Jeffress has told me he was drawn to Trump’s leadership and intellect. “He’s a very smart person,” he’s said. “You don’t become a billionaire and president of the United States by being an idiot.” But none of that quite explains why a pastor goes out of his way to publicly defend the president’s every indiscretion. He could easily vote according to his views on the Supreme Court or according to his conscience on abortion without also going on TV, over and over, in front of hundreds of thousands of viewers, to explain away things like Trump’s adultery and language that inflames foreign policy. He could be in favor of immigration reform, for example, and not feel compelled to rationalize the separation of families. He could believe that God has put someone in power and still hold that person to a high moral standard.

What, at the end of the article, is Jeffress' explanation?

 “I’m his friend,” he says. “I’ll never walk away.”

I won't walk away from my friends (even if they wish I would!).  But neither will I defend fervently and publicly everything they ever said or did.  It seems to me this is beyond friendship, that this is faith.  Faith as trust, I mean.  Maybe that's a bit disturbing, since it seems very much to be blind faith; but Robert Jeffress faith in God has earned him a prominent position of power and authority and prosperity, even if he doesn't sound anything like Joel Osteen (plenty of pastors of my childhood, especially of the Southern Baptist variety, were only a whisker away from the prosperity gospel, anyway).  His faith in God has been amply rewarded, even if I'd argue it was his faith in mammon and American culture, not God.  Who am I to judge?  I don't wish to.  I just find it interesting his faith in God has led him to have what I can only understand as the very same faith in Donald Trump.

Still, Jeffress told Trump that God wanted Barack Obama to be president, so maybe God is backing a Democrat in 2020, just to fulfill God's mysterious plans.  It could happen.

Asking For A Friend

Slippery James Comey, the worst FBI Director in history, was not fired because of the phony Russia investigation where, by the way, there was NO COLLUSION (except by the Dems)!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 18, 2018

A convenient negative example, because the best way to examine a question about what you are doing

 or should do is NOT to deflect responsibility onto anyone but yourself.

There is a risk here, let's begin by acknowledging, of judgment rather than analysis.  Let's keep in mind that the splinter in your brother's eye is a reflection of the log in yours, that one finger pointing at someone means four are pointing back at you.

Anyway....*

Evangelicals long for a mythical Christian past, and Trump’s “Make America Great Again” mantra appeals directly to that troubled nostalgia. But Fea presses, “Christians should be very careful when they long for the days when America was apparently ‘great.’” Are we appealing to the post-war boom in church attendance, which occurred with Jim Crow in force and when marital rape was legal? And by embracing prominent evangelical leaders, whom Fea labels “court evangelicals,” Trump assuages evangelicals’ gaping wound—disenfranchisement—by granting them access to power. Readers will come away with a nuanced appreciation for fear, nostalgia, and power as fundamental elements of evangelical discourse.

"Fea" is Messiah College historian John Fea, a professor at an evangelical college and member of an evangelical megachurch.  I'm interested in his comment placing church attendance in historical context ("post-war boom") and cultural context ("Jim Crow" and "marital rape"), though I'm not sure those two contexts are necessarily connected (or applicable to each other, although both are elements of a mythic past Trump supporters want to recover, so there's that), but I'm intrigued by the reviewers statement in that last sentence:  "fear, nostalgia, and power as fundamental elements of evangelical discourse."

We have to be careful not to counter that analysis with our own assertion of power, as if their use of power were illegitimate, and ours pure and sanctified.  I'm subject to bouts of nostalgia, too, when the churches I knew were filled with reasonable people and led by pastors who appealed to the head and not the heart.  Even in the Baptist churches of my youth those pastors would today be considered "liberals" among evangelicals (evangelicals were distinctly the fringe even in Southern Baptist-dominated East Texas).  I've been back to one of the churches of my childhood and wasn't sure I hadn't stepped into a Baptist church, the preacher was so different in style and tone and even theology from what I knew there 50 years ago.  My fear and nostalgia is real to me, my desire for the power to return to what I knew as potent as that in evangelical discourse.  If I don't have the numbers to support it in the polis, I am no less driven by it, especially in my analysis of evangelicals.  Still, things are getting interesting among the evangelicals, who aren't nearly as monolithic as one might suppose:

In a hard-hitting lecture yesterday at Princeton University in New Jersey, Moore, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, said: 'So often in 2018 America, evangelicalism is associated more with Iowa caucuses than the good news of Jesus Christ.'

This is not new for Moore.  He's no fan of Donald Trump which Trump himself has noticed:

.@drmoore Russell Moore is truly a terrible representative of Evangelicals and all of the good they stand for. A nasty guy with no heart!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 9, 2016

Let the record reflect that Donald Trump calling you "a nasty guy with no heart" is rather like being lashed with a wet noodle than with a barbed comment.  But Moore's comments are is interesting to me, because he's on solid theological ground there.  And I like his definition of "Evangecalism," even if I don't agree with the theology of that group:

Moore, who in recent years has distinguished himself among prominent Christian leaders in the US for refusing to offer unconditional support to Donald Trump, added: 'God does not need the evangelical movement; the evangelical movement desperately needs God.'

In the comments, reported by the Daily Princetonian, Moore defined evangelicalism as 'the link of renewal and revival movements which unite historic, conventional orthodoxy with the necessity of personal conversion and evangelism'.

He added that any true evangelical movement must be focused upon the Cross.

'An emphasis on the Cross is one of the hardest thing to maintain in any Christian group, and that includes American evangelicalism,' Moore said.

And he argued that many modern movements have strayed away from the values of the Cross, instead becoming 'market focused', preaching on topics that people want to hear about, but choosing to ignore other sins or issues in society that are less popular.

His "focus on the Cross" and my "focus on the Cross" would not look all that similar.  But his critique of "market focused" preaching is one I agree with, even if I think the focus of preaching should be on a very different kergyma than Moore would sanction.  I even like where he's going with this:

In contrast, Moore said, 'The Cross means that the gospel can thrive on the margins, because that is where it started.'

The president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission called for a pluralistic evangelical society and a government that does not 'adjudicate' on religious differences, but instead gives people the freedom to debate with one another.

He said: 'Those of us who are evangelicals should work for reform. For a multi-ethnic, theologically robust evangelicalism that can pass the torch to a new general with the message that we first heard down with the Cross.'

The vision of Brueggeman is ultimately a vision of the utility of the gospel, and I'm still not sure just how "useful" the gospel should be.  Nor is it just a matter of personal adherence and private choice, to be kept silent and so marginalized as to be non-public, like one's sexual or even sanitary habits (in some circles even sexual habits are allowed more public discussion than would be allowed to religious beliefs).  I resonate with Moore's idea of the gospel withdrawing to the margins in order to remain the gospel; but I agree with Brueggeman that the basiliea tou theou is not some pie-in-the-sky-bye-and-bye wish fulfillment that has nothing to tell us about how we should then live, or organize our society.  The more the gospel is used to draw near to power the more the kerygma is corrupted, but the more it withdraws to society's margins the more its truth is denied.  These are deep waters; and what of "fear, nostalgia, and power as fundamental elements of evangelical discourse"?  How much objective truth is in that, and how much of that can simply be a critique wielded like a club rather than like a scalpel?

Simeon tells Mary that, because of her infant son, "the schemes of many minds will be exposed" (Luke 2:25b, SV).  There have been many times in history when that could have been predicted, and this will be one now as the world struggles between old (represented by Trump) and new (represented by the future).  The Age of Trump will force us to face many harsh realities and assumptions and face just how hard it is to set aside racism and classism and even regionalism and parochialism, things we may never full set aside until we finally enter the basiliea tou theou.  I'm always talking in grand and sweeping tones, and then moving on to the next incitement and tweet-produced outrage, without putting the pieces together.  I wouldn't choose a starting place with a dissection of and disagreement with evangelical and fundamentalist theologies (for one thing, how negative is that?), but the hold of those groups on public consciousness is giving way, and the arguments of the atheists are not rising to replace it.

So maybe it's time to start something new, or different, or just calmer and more compassionate and even sensible.  But using what?  and how?


*And I quote from Raw Story because I've banned myself from RD.  I tend to be a troll when I get over there, and I've decided to lead myself not into temptation, at least on that website.

So, here's the thing....

Oh, that guy!

Salon:

On Monday, millionaire pastor Joel Osteen taught more Americans via his actions than he’ll ever do in a sermon. At least initially, Osteen refused to open the doors of his Houston megachurch to people displaced by Tropical Storm Harvey. Even though he eventually reversed himself and defended his conduct in evasive media interviews, Osteen’s message was clear: Don’t count on religious leaders to do what’s right.

But, here's the thing:

Houston Christians did more than pray from the dry refuge of their homes or evacuation spots. Clergymen were featured in a couple viral news reports from Sunday: a preacher who checked submerged cars for trapped drivers, and a priest who tried to paddle his way to Mass at Houston’s Catholic Charismatic Center.

Several churches located on higher ground served as temporary shelters or meeting points for evacuees. Members with clear routes shuttled friends or dropped off supplies.

“Right now we are getting supplies together to take to a few area shelters. Baby stuff seems to be in short supply,” said Jason Crandall, pastor of CityView Church in Pearland, a southern suburb. 

The 24/7 press coverage on local TV I'm watching obsessively (it's on practically 24/7 at Casa Adventus) runs a continual crawl of churches open as shelters for those displaced by flood waters.  And mosques in Houston opened their doors almost immediately, and kept them open. 

You see, the thing about "religious leaders" is they tend to be people anointed by the media as "leaders."  Osteen leads his church, and nothing more.  Robert Jeffress leads his church, and serves on the President's evangelical council, and nothing more.  The true "religious leaders" are pastors and priests serving congregations and putting the concept of "pastoral care" into practice through their actions and the lives of their congregations.

As my wife pointed out today, Joel Osteen doesn't provide any kind of ministry at all.  He just preaches about money.*

*I can't pass up the chance to republish Matt Taibbi's assessment of Osteen, from back when McCain was running against Obama:

Of all the vile, fake, lying-ass, money-grubbing shyster scumbags on the face of this planet, there is perhaps none more loathsome than Osteen, a human haircut with plastic baseball-size teeth who has made a fortune selling the appalling only-in-America idea that terrestrial greed is actually a form of Christian devotion. "God wants us to prosper financially, to have plenty of money, to fulfill the destiny He has laid out for us," Osteen once wrote. This is the revolting, snake-oil-selling dickhead that John McCain actually chose to pimp as number one on his list of inspirational authors. So much for "go, sell everything you have and give to the poor," and all that other hippie crap from the New Testament.

Yeah; I still pretty much see him that way.  As Salon points out,

Generally speaking, he only mentions the name of his alleged savior around Easter, never around Christmas. In fact, within the past three years, he has mentioned “Jesus” or “Christ” only 14 times amid hundreds of tweets. 

I pretty much don't have any use for him, and "religious leader"?  It is to laugh.  Honestly; before this, when was the last time you heard anything about Osteen?

Adding:  This is what Christians and their leaders are doing.

Regarding Joel and Harvey

I had a run-in with Osteen's church, back before it moved to downtown Houston, and maybe before Joel took over; I can't remember that detail now.  The Houston UCC churches had set up a low-income housing facility many years before I got here, and every year the churches tried to round up Thanksgiving dinners for the residents.  But our churches were getting smaller and more elderly and on more fixed incomes, so donations were not what they used to be, and Lakewood was near enough by it had brought Thanksgiving dinners for a few years.

But the year in question, they decided not to do that.  They told the residents, few of whom had cars, to come to Lakewood to pick up the food.  We found another way to provide Thanksgiving that year, as I recall.

So now comes this contretemps over Lakewood's downtown former basketball arena being open to Harvey victims.  What I know about this I've read on in the internet, but this article seems the best summation of the story.  It does seem Osteen had to be shamed into doing the right thing, and he took his own sweet time and offered up a bevy of excuses for not doing it (and the place still isn't a shelter; or it only will be if they are satisfied no other shelter space is available, so I'm not holding my breath).

And it's worth noting J.J. Watt has already donated $500 million of his own money toward relief for Houston, and is taking donations through his charity that's already established.  Lakewood is collecting clothes, pillows, towels, etc., for distribution.  But I don't think they're distributing the stuff themselves (that would be helpful) and no word on any donations from the Osteen's.  All we've had from them is tweets.

I guess God will make the newly homeless rich, or something.

My daughter's comment on this was that Lakewood is not a church, it's a business.  Spoken like a preacher's kid.  Still, there are businesses, and then there are businesses.

When your megachurch is less welcoming to #Harvey victims than a furniture superstore, the IRS should terminate your tax exemption pic.twitter.com/77W6aWsZH7

— Robert Maguire (@RobertMaguire_) August 29, 2017

Please note these two furniture stores opened on Sunday, and Lakewood finally opened as a "distribution center" today.

More entries for the commonplace book

Now with more Niebuhr!

And apropos of this post (and to introduce a few entries from another of Niebuhr's books):

We had a great Easter service today....We received our largest class of new members into the church thus far, twenty-one in all.  Most of them had not letters from other churches and yet had been reared in some church. We received them on reaffirmation of faith.

This matter of recruiting a membership for the church is a real problem.  Even the churches which once believed a very definite conversion experience to be the sine qua non of entrance into the fellowship of the church are going in for "decision days" as they lose confidence in the traditional assumption that one can become a Christian only through a crisis experience.  But if one does not insist on that kind of experience it is not easy to set up tests of membership.  Most of these "personal evangelism" campaigns mean little more than ordinary recruiting effort with church membership rather than Christian life as the real objective.  They do not differ greatly from efforts of various clubs as they seek to expand their membership.

Of course we make "acceptance of Jesus as your savior" the real door into fellowship in the church.  But the trouble is that may mean everything or nothing.  I see no way of making the Christian fellowship unique by any series of tests which precede admission.  The only possibility lies in a winnowing process through the instrumentality of the preaching and teaching function of the church. Let them come in without great difficulty, but make it difficult for them to stay in.  The trouble with this plan is that is is always easy to load up membership with very immature Christians who will finally set the standard and make it impossible to preach and teach the gospel in its full implications.

--Reinhold Niebuhr, "1919."  Leaves from the Notebooks of a Tamed Cynic. Louisville, Kentucky:  John Knox/Westminster Press, original publication date 1929.  p. 23.

This is Reinhold Niebuhr, recording contemporaneously his experiences as a new pastor in Detroit at the beginning of the last century.  It is the conclusion that makes the point:  what is church for?  For anyone, including non-believers?  And how many of those can be allowed in before it is "impossible to preach and teach the gospel in its full implication"?  Yet I have pastored churches where that was already impossible, and no one in that congregation would admit to being an atheist.

They were more likely to label me a heretic.

"Make it difficult for them to stay"?  The only person who would find it difficult to stay in that church would be the pastor.

And I've held fast to the idea that church membership today means nothing more than the "efforts of various clubs as they seek to expand their membership."  It makes me sound terribly cynical to out-Herod Herod on this point, but it is my experience nonetheless.  I served two churches that insisted increasing membership was a necessary goal; but all they really meant was to make the club more popular, by enticing more people like them to appear on a more permanent basis.  There is comfort in numbers, but greater comfort in people like us.

But for many churches, there are fewer and fewer such people around.  Interestingly, in 1919 only about 41% of Americans considered themselves affiliated with any kind of religion.  (I use this study constantly because I find context around these issues constantly important).  So Niebuhr is contemplating an America even more different from our own, but not in the way we might imagine.  Like the church today, Niebuhr had to work with, and accept into his church fellowship, the "unchurched."  Believers, but believers who really don't want to be asked to do anything for the sake of their belief.  Should they be winnowed later?  Willow Creek Community Church uses that model, but studies have found it doesn't really lead to any greater commitment than to show up on Sunday morning for the show.  Especially in the "seeker service" that was "a pretty good show for a buck."*

Robert Wuthnow makes much of something that never seems to occur to Niebuhr:  the need for the church to raise the money it takes to continue being a church:  building, programs, employees, etc.  But is that what church is for?  Upon re-reading his book I want to introduce him to Walt Kallestad:

Walt led Community Church of Joy in Phoenix, a megachurch that had been an average congregation of 200 before he took over in the 80s and oversaw it's growth. But in 2002 he suffered a massive heart attack requiring six-way bypass surgery. The heart attack, says Walt, was a "wake up call" for the leaders to develop a succession plan to ensure the megachurch continued to thrive after Walt's tenure.

Kallestad began networking around the country looking for a young pastor he could bring onboard and eventually hand the church over to. One conversation stuck with him.

"It's a pretty good opportunity," Walt said. "We have 187 acres just off a major freeway, multipurpose buildings, and a great staff."

The leader looked him in the eyes and said, "Who'd want it? Who in their right minds would want to run that?"

"That's when it dawned on me," Kallestad reflected. "By the time we service the $12-million debt, pay the staff, and maintain the property, we've spent more than a million before we can spend a dime on our mission. At the time, we had plans for a spectacular worship center with a retractable roof. After that conversation, I scrapped it."

Making those changes, by the way, cost Kallestad 4000 church members.  I've never been even associated with a church with that many members, much less one that could lose that many and still exist as an institution.  And maybe the lesson of the Crystal Cathedral is instructive here:  when Schuller died, the church had to sell the building to the Catholic diocese just to pay its debts.*

So how do we make Christian fellowship unique?

*An old joke I picked up in seminary, about what it "costs" to attend worship on any given Sunday.

**I got carried away with this, but you can have my footnotes.  I couldn't find any numbers on the membership of CCJ, a church I had some encounter with in seminary.  According to Internet Monk, at it's height CCJ had 12,000 members.  In 2009, when it broke with the ELCA over the ordination of gays and lesbians (CCJ was agin it), they reported 6800 members, an attendance of 2500.  Where their membership is now is anybody's guess, but Internet Monk provides more information on how two megachurches decided "seeker services" weren't the alpha and omega of Christian discipleship.  We always come back to the Church of Meaning and Belonging v. the Church of Sacrifice for Meaning and Belonging.  And if I keep repeating all of this it's only because I long for a serious conversation on these topics, and the best I get is people misreading and misunderstanding the latest Pew polls.  No, I don't mean to be haughty; but damn!, the signal to noise ratio on the internet is low!

We were talking (and talking, and talking, and talking....)

I realize I've been talking about this since I started this blog; when will I ever tire?  But The Thought Criminal puts me on to this article, which I can't help but quote-mine:

Prominent figures in the evangelical establishment have already begun sounding alarms. In particular, the Barna Group, an evangelical market research organization, has been issuing a steady stream of books and white papers documenting the erosion of support for evangelicalism, especially among young people. Contributions from worshippers 55 and older now account for almost two-thirds of evangelical churches’ income in the United States. A mere three percent of non-Christian Americans under 30 have a positive impression of evangelical Christianity, according to David Kinnaman, the Barna Group’s president. That’s down from 25 percent of baby boomers at a similar age. At present rates of attrition, two-thirds of evangelicals in their 20s will abandon church before they turn 30. “It’s the melting of the icebergs,” Kinnaman told me. Young people’s most common complaint, he said, is that churches are too focused on sexual issues and preoccupied with their own institutional development—in other words, he explained, “Christianity no longer looks like Jesus.”

Stop right there and ask yourself:  "Why, again, is Pope Francis so popular?  What is it so many people are saying about him?"  But going a bit further, and on another topic altogether, this is an excellent summation of the recent history of churches in America:

Schuller, like Billy Graham and other name-brand evangelical ministers, led a mid-20th-century spiritual resurgence that corresponded with the birth and subsequent coming of age of America’s baby-boom generation. Even as older, inner-city mainline Protestant congregations withered in postwar America, suburban evangelical churches gained members when boomers, now having children of their own, began showing up in the late 1970s. A decade later, evangelical megachurches—some of the largest of which were in Orange County—were the dominant trend in American Christianity, growing in lockstep with the suburbs that gave them birth and set their spiritual tone.

I've seen the churches in my neighborhood, and indeed in every area of the country before I left Texas to go to seminary, affected this way.  Born by a new growth in the neighborhood, new churches would spring up or old ones would be revived.  A few decades later (one or two is all that's needed), the neighborhood has changed, especially in rapidly growing areas (or rapidly declining ones), and the old churches are empty or nearly so, everyone gone to newer churches in newer, or at least younger, neighborhoods.  And there's also this:

The Christianity practiced in these suburban churches was not of the fire-and-brimstone variety. Evangelicals are far looser and more theologically diverse than Christian fundamentalists, who emerged in the late 19th century in reaction to the destabilizing effects of industrialization, the Civil War, and advances in science. Fundamentalism, especially the view that the Bible is inerrant in all of its teachings, has been steadily declining as a force in American Christianity for decades. Recent Barna Group research shows that just 38 percent of Christians—down from close to half two decades ago—regard the Bible as “totally accurate in all of the principles it teaches.” Evangelicals, by contrast, while acknowledging the authority of scripture, place greater emphasis on the believer’s personal relationship with Christ. They trace their roots in America to Jonathan Edwards, an 18th-century Massachusetts divine who paired Calvinistic theology with scholarship, evangelism, and spiritual conversion. The preeminence of conversion has produced huge variety and creativity in their outreach to nonbelievers. For nearly a century, evangelicals have been at the forefront of innovations in church music, worship style, architecture, and use of media to engage the non-Christian world.

Despite the fact Sam Harris insisted only a few years ago that all real Christians are fundamentalists, and the fact that, on the internet at least, all believers are Christian fundamentalists (and therefore lunatics), only 38% of Christians identify with those claims.  The reference to John Edwards there is ironic, since his most famous sermon is "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God."  Not the kind of thing Robert Schuller would ever preach.

And this description sounds like the town I live in (which, according to the U.S. Census, is the most ethnically diverse city in America; and my neighborhood the most ethnically diverse in the city):

Young people in Orange County, no matter their ethnic or economic background, no longer view themselves as living in a suburban appendage of urban Los Angeles. The county is dense with Vietnamese pho joints, boba tea shops, Asian shopping malls, halal markets, Mexican swap meets, punk-rock nightclubs, and art galleries. 

There is a non-denominational "commnity church" within walking distance of where I sit, a new occupant of a building used by a Mexican Pentecostal church until it got big enough to purchase the emptied out Baptist church (it died mostly of old age) across the street from the church I came here to pastor over a decade ago.  There are Thai and Mexican and Korean and Vietnamese diners a stone's throw from me, as well as national chains, barbecue joints, Spanish speaking psychics, herablists, juice joints catering to cultures from south of the border, within two miles of where I sit.  Oh, and a huge and growing retail center catering mostly to upscale and middle class buyers, just across the freeway.  Rick Warren might find a receptive audience at the biggest Baptist church in Houston, which is about 15 minutes away from me just now; but he'd never try to open Saddleback in my neighborhood:  too many of his followers would be afraid to drive over here (the grocery store I use still courts the upper class shoppers by putting security guards in the parking lot, to reassure them).

This is equally fascinating:

 “The megachurch was a baby-boomer suburban phenomenon that folks under 45 typically aren’t perpetuating,” says Ryan Bolger, who teaches contemporary Christianity at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. Young evangelicals “want to start communities in cafés, and this isn’t just whites. We’re starting to see with Koreans and Latinos a desire to move away from the churchiness of church, to be multicultural and in an urban context, church in the profane areas of life.”

One of my professors in seminary (this was, mind, circa 1995) wondered if mega-churches weren't the sign of yet another "Great Awakening" in America.  Well, maybe, but if it was, it's worth pointing out those "Awakenings" were never really fundamental shifts in American religious life (the first one, led by Edwards, was; the rest?  Not so much.).  And again:  this explains the appeal of a Pope Francis.

This, in fact, very much appeals to me; and I say that as a pastor, as someone who dedicated four years of his life to being educated so he could be ordained as a minister in a denomination, and seek a pulpit in a church where he could earn a full-time salary.  I soon realized that such salaries were a drain on most churches, which needed to raise a six figure budget every year just to open the doors and pay the pastor to minister to them, and effort that put a tremendous strain on the real reason a church should gather:  to be the people of God.  This place seems to have figured that out:

At Epic Church, a 200-member, decade-old congregation in a northern part of Orange County populated mostly by Koreans and Hispanics, members gather for weekly worship in a rented office building but spend much of their time together working as tutors to low-income students at a nearby neighborhood center. “We haven’t been a church that understands ourselves as goods and services,” said Kevin Doi, Epic’s founder and pastor. The church welcomes gays, makes no overt effort to raise money from members, and regularly invites residents at a neighboring homeless shelter to its services. Doi said he has no long-range plan for his church and wouldn’t mind if it ceased functioning as an institution altogether. “We didn’t feel like our goal was to get people to come to our church,” he said. “We wanted to be present in the neighborhood, where we’re the guests.”

That last line, especially, puts me in mind of Dorothy Day:

I am reading (Simone Weil's) essays as a part of my Lenten reading...She says that we "...must experience every day, both in the spirit and the flesh, the pains and humiliations of poverty...and further we must do something which is harder than enduring in poverty, we must renounce all compensations: in our contacts with the people around us we must sincerely practice the humility of a naturalized citizen in the country which has received us."

I keep reminding the young people who come to work with us that they are not naturalized citizens...They are not really poor. We are always foreigners to the poor. So we have to make up for it by "renouncing all compensations..."

Dorothy Day, from The Dorothy Day Book, p. 11.

And this:

“Evangelicals are good at whipping people up into a frenzy, and then you’re like, ‘What was that?’ ” Bell told me. “I was the pastor of a megachurch, and lots of people came, and I did book tours and interviews and films. That’s fine. But I’ll take seeing God every day, which is washing dishes with my kids and walking my dog and interacting with someone I just met.”

Or what Kathleen Norris called the "quotidian mysteries," the presence of God in daily life.  Frankly, this is a guy I resonate with.  And the article ends with this startling observation:

Robert Schuller’s brand of worship might just turn out to be nothing more than a spiritual fad. 

That, in the context of this earlier statement:

America will not become like Europe, where ossified state churches proved unable to compete against the inherently secularizing forces of market capitalism—and where immigrants’ faith expressions are often met with hostility. America will remain exceptionally religious. But traditional evangelical Christianity will no longer be a dominant presence in that religiosity.

Gives me something to think about, even to feel hopeful about.

The treachery of the pursuit of happyness

But is it art?

"The number one question facing anyone who wants to help improve the quality of public discourse is: how the hell do you get a look-in?"

Actually, I think it's:  how do you lead a horse to water AND make him think?  The sad truth is, you can't do both.

So, yeah:

The critics pushing the oversimplification argument seem to believe that if only people weren't wasting their time on silly TED talks, they'd be reading books, taking evening classes, poring over scientific papers, or at the very least subscribing to the critic's uniquely brilliant blog.

But that doesn't change the fundamental point:  TED talks suck!  They're a glib excuse for feeling like you're suddenly knowledgeable and insightful and maybe even clever, without having to do any of the hard work of reading books, taking evening classes, poring over scientific (or academic, or philosophical, or theological!) papers, "or at the very least subscribing to the critic's uniquely brilliant blog" (and when ARE you people gonna subscribe to my uniquely brilliant blog?  Huh?).  They aren't much different from the college student who occasionally attends lectures, occasionally pays attention, but never reads the assigned materials, seldom does the assigned work, and then complains that the whole thing is boring because it didn't entertain him enough to get him involved.  Knowledge for the masses is not knowledge; it's just a confirmation of prejudices and commonly accepted ideas.  One interesting contrast between the two columns I've linked to here:  one is full of middlebrow "thinking," the other is a challenge to most of what you might accept as "conventional wisdom."  That doesn't weigh them out on the scales of "who's right/who's wrong."  But it does underscore the critic's point:  TED talks are "middlebrow megachurch infotainment."

I have as much use for them as I do for megachurches that assure their attendees Jesus is just alright with you, just the way you are at this moment; and only wants you to be happier than you are now, on into forever.  TED talks are all about as challenging as that kind of religious pap.

But I don't come here to denigrate TED talks (I'll put my cranky old man rants aside); I come here to praise some of the insights presented in the guise of a critique of TED talks, a critique that is actually a lament that we so much love lazy thinking.

On the subject of TED talks and their virtues, read some of the works of Michel Foucault.  When he was alive and infrequently lecturing in Paris, at the institute that paid him to think, write, and infrequently lecture (sort of like Princeton's Advance Research facility, except I don't think Princeton required Einstein and Godel to lecture), his lectures were crowded with people, most of whom taped the remarks for review later.  Foucault didn't dumb anything down for his audience.  He didn't reduce his thoughts to 18 minutes, or express much concern that what he was saying was too complex.  He spoke of power, existence, medieval history, and arcana, and let his audience keep up if they could.  And still they crowded the halls when he came to speak.

Well, that's France, you say; and probably that's it, more than anything.  But the contrast is revealing:  TED talks are an American version of that, I suppose; but even the American Chataqua has a better pedigree and promises more thinking among the speaking.

I write about entanglements of technology and culture, how technologies enable the making of certain worlds, and at the same time how culture structures how those technologies will evolve, this way or that. It's where philosophy and design intersect.

Benjamin Bratton says; and that could be academic bafflegab and jargon speak, or it could be some truly meaty stuff.  But his point is:  if you are going to take things seriously, take them seriously; don't just imagine you take them seriously because you watch an 18 minute TED talk instead of 18 minutes (between commercials) of a talk show, or a cable news program.  As Bratton boils it down:

The key rhetorical device for TED talks is a combination of epiphany and personal testimony (an "epiphimony" if you like ) through which the speaker shares a personal journey of insight and realisation, its triumphs and tribulations.

What is it that the TED audience hopes to get from this? A vicarious insight, a fleeting moment of wonder, an inkling that maybe it's all going to work out after all? A spiritual buzz?

I'm sorry but this fails to meet the challenges that we are supposedly here to confront. These are complicated and difficult and are not given to tidy just-so solutions. They don't care about anyone's experience of optimism. Given the stakes, making our best and brightest waste their time – and the audience's time – dancing like infomercial hosts is too high a price. It is cynical.

I won't quote the whole thing, though it's tempting  Bratton points out that technology is not really changing everything; not fundamentally.  We want, as he points out, everything to be new, so long as everything remains the same.  We go home to buildings based on "kitsch architecture copied from the 18th century," and it's worth pointing out here the technology which makes our houses "smarter" doesn't really change them fundamentally at all.  The fundamental change in architecture, actually in construction, was the "balloon frame" house, the kind you're probably sitting in right now.  But it was pointed out to me in college, 40 years ago, that such buildings consume too much wood and other materials, that we needed a new alternative just as the balloon frame had been the cheap alternative when it came along, well over a century ago.  The more things change, the more they remain the same; and that's the problem.

I connect this with a story I heard on NPR yesterday about how the next "revolution" equivalent to the invention of the steam engine is in machines that can "think" at least well enough to begin replacing human thought the way steam engines replaced animal (and human) muscle.  This change was presented as inevitable, as a natural force like a river carving the Grand Canyon or making the deltas of the American South.  It's no such thing, of course; yet we yield our power to affect it, and simply have to change ourselves and our society in order to accommodate it.  There is, it seems, nothing else we can do.  And I hear such things and think more and more of the dystopias of "Elysium" or "In Time," dystopias which, in the worlds of their stories, were equally inevitable and necessary and to which we simply must bend.  As the villain of "In Time" says, for a few to be immortal, many must die.

Is it time yet to say no one deserves to be immortal if even one person must die?  Are we yet ready to examine the terms of our Omelas?

I dare say I would not confront "the challenges that we are supposedly here to confront" the same way Mr. Bratton would, but I agree with him we aren't confronting them now.  Middlebrow thinkers assure me the future is inevitable and all I can do is adjust to it.  Oddly, the future that was inevitable when I was 5 years old never arrived, and the collapse of the middle class which was never supposed to happen (George Jetson was as bourgeois as could be imagined) is hastening apace because the future we have now has become the inevitable one.  Or, to put it as bluntly as Bratton does:

 Phones, drones and genomes, that's what we do here in San Diego and La Jolla. In addition to the other insanely great things these technologies do, they are the basis of NSA spying, flying robots killing people, and the wholesale privatisation of biological life itself. That's also what we do.

The potential for these technologies are both wonderful and horrifying at the same time, and to make them serve good futures, design as "innovation" just isn't a strong enough idea by itself. We need to talk more about design as "immunisation," actively preventing certain potential "innovations" that we do not want from happening.

I would not limit the idea of "innovations" to new technologies or new designs for old technologies (the kind of thing Apple excels at, for example).  I would expand it to consider the very idea that technology itself is an unalloyed good which must be allowed to run free and reshape human society even as we adapt to it's demands and make technology the paramount goal of human existence.  The great concern of Romanticism was the impact of the Industrial Revolution, but they never engaged the fight so much as gave us an alternative to it (and in doing so invented the modern idea of humanity, a shift in perspective as profound as Augustine's invention of self-consciousness, albeit thoroughly in line with the saint's insights).   Then again, its from the Romantics that we get the idea that transformation, radical, revolutionary change in human existence, in what it means to be a human being, is not only possible but necessary.  Jefferson all but announced it (no Romantic, he, but still) when he declared the chief end of man to no longer be glorifying God and enjoying God forever, but "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

The question we have to ask our selves now is:  are we pursuing transformation, or is transformation pursuing us?  Are we still chasing down happiness, or being chased down by it?  Does the way we live merely need to be summarized and described in a TED talk?  Or do "we need to raise the level of general understanding to the level of complexity of the systems in which we are embedded and which are embedded in us. This is not about "personal stories of inspiration", it's about the difficult and uncertain work of demystification and reconceptualisation: the hard stuff that really changes how we think."

And all manner of thing shall be well

A handful of selections from Huffington Post's "Religion" page:


Atheists are Redeemable

Well, Maybe Not....

God uses Tornadoes in Mysterious Ways

God Uses Anne Heche in Mysterious Ways, Too

The Devil Speaks Spanish!

No criticism intended as to any of these articles, or the fact the HuffPost decided to republish them, or even that I found them yesterday morning.  We could consider Wolf Blitzer's faux pas or Glenn Beck's bizarre reaction to same (where would you be with me to aggregate the news that HuffPo already aggregates?)  But I slide over those and other issues, such as whether free speech means the majority gets to promote religion with the support of government entities in Texas or Kentucky (in neither case do those proclaiming the "rights" of the majority have my sympathies.  As a religious Christian myself I resented the Southern Baptist theology of my peers in high school, and could well have done without any expression of Christianity as listen to their public prayers.  Oddly, it never occurred to me to sympathize with the Jews and the atheists in the audience; but it would now.)

I slide over them because there is a connecting thread in all of these stories:  the ones I highlighted as well as the ones mentioned in passing.  And that connection is:  soteriology.

Redemption, for example, is a part of salvation.  That metaphysical part which says today is a down payment on eternity, if you invest it wisely.  (Pardon my simplicity of metaphor, but there's no reason to beat around this particular non-burning bush.)

What really got me thinking about this, though, was the "theological controversy" stirred up by the tornado in Oklahoma.  It seems someone I've never heard of (more fool me, I'm sure) decided the words from Job were appropriate to the occasion:

“Your sons and daughters were eating and a great wind struck the house, and it fell upon them, and they are dead.” Job 1:19
“Then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshiped.” Job 1:20

Now, admittedly, I turned to the Psalms; because Psalm 29 always comes to mind on these occasions, even though I'm quite sure a natural disaster is not what the Psalmist had in mind, or what the community of believers has had in the centuries those verses have been used in whatever context.  And context is not an insignificant consideration, here. I hesitate using scriptures at all in this blog, because scriptures aren't meant to be used as instruments, blunt or otherwise, among just anybody.  Scholars approach the scriptures quite differently than preachers do, and I can tell you from experience that I use scriptures very carefully among congregations I don't know well  (I recently did a funeral sermon and relied almost exclusively on poetry, so the people I was talking to wouldn't bring their own preconceptions to the scriptures and stop listening entirely to what I had to say.  Scriptures can be a barrier as much as a doorway.)  But I was trying to stir up a small community of readers of this blog and I knew I'd get feedback from what I said.  I didn't, in other words, offer it up as a tweet.

And I didn't use the Book of Job.

Anyway, this stirred up a theological tempest in a theological teapot; and my first thought was:  Is this really a theological matter?  But it is, because it's a soteriological matter.  The furor went something like this:

Piper, who recently retired from the pulpit of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, is a leading theologian of the neo-Calvinist movement that’s sweeping many evangelical churches. In essence, Desiring God staffer Tony Reinke wrote, Piper was highlighting God’s sovereignty and that he is still worthy of worship in the midst of suffering and tragedy.

In response, popular evangelical writer Rachel Held Evans blasted Piper’s “abusive theology of ‘deserved’ tragedy,” and said Christians have to stop the idea of responding to tragedy by suggesting God is inflicting his judgment.

“The only thing we need to tell them is, ‘I don’t know why this happened but God is good and God loves us,’” she said in an interview.

 However, she apologized in a follow-up post. “Piper’s tweet was vague enough that I don’t know that he was necessarily saying this point this time. Maybe it wasn’t the best time to call him out.”

 And maybe that was right, since Piper later tweeted:

 “My hope and prayer for Oklahoma is that the raw realism of Job’s losses will point us all to his God ‘compassionate and merciful.’”

 But still, Rick Warren had the most pastoral response (at least in this article):

 Megachurch pastor Rick Warren tweeted a few days after the tornado, “In deep pain, people don’t need logic, advice, encouragement, or even Scripture. They just need you to show up and shut up.#Love.”

What does this have to do with soteriology?  Well, the reference to Neo-Calvinism is one hint.  The reaction of Rachel Held Evans is another.  And lest her reaction seem a little, well, reactionary, there is a context other than Piper's leadership on the Neo-Calvinist front:

Piper also came under fire after suggesting in a blog post that a small tornado during a conference of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America was a “gentle but firm warning” as it debated its position on homosexuality.

 This is a guy who has confused the God of Abraham with the gods of Greece (who liked to inflict plagues on cities for doing what they didn't like; as Apollo did to Thebes because of Oedipus), and who clearly puts soteriology at the center of his faith, because that's what Calvinism is really all about.  Then again, that's pretty much what most people think Christianity is all about.

Otherwise, why would the new Anne Heche TV series about a woman who talks to God be titled "Save Me"?

If I may say, already wandering abruptly off the point a bit, this is a bit of what I'm talking about:

 Late antiquity was an era of fear and melancholy, and contempt for the body was a leitmotif of many of its thinkers. Christianity provided a liberating message, in which the resurrection of Jesus offered hope of the transfiguration of the flesh and the glorification of all creation.

How many people today here in the message of Christianity any hope of the transfiguration of the flesh and the glorification of all creation, and hear instead fear and melancholy and contempt for the body as a leitmotif of Christian belief?  Is there anything in the reference to Job, above, out of context as it is in the original tweets, that doesn't speak of melancholy and fear, even as its defenders argue that

“The Christian church has to return to a robust understanding of who God is,” [Idaho pastor and blogger Doug] Wilson said in an interview. “If we do, we won’t have to hash through this with every tragedy.”

Well, maybe we do; and certainly a natural disaster with 24 people dead and hundreds homeless is not the best place to start that discussion.  But there's also the fact of what we mean by "robust understanding," because if you are going to try to return us to the fear and melancholy of pre-Christian Europe, then I for one have no need of it.  That such traditions have returned over the centuries to become "Christian" is indictment enough; that we perpetuate them in the name of "love" and "forgiveness" is downright perverse.  Which is not to say Christianity hasn't contributed its own contempt for the body and fear and melancholy to the historical mixture.  But it cannot be denied that it did so in the name of salvation.  It did so because of soteriology.  And there's the fundamental problem:

There's precious little in the gospels about salvation, and even less in Paul regarding soteriology.  It is not a Hebrew construct at all, but a Gentile one, created in an attempt to universalize the Christian message.  None of the sermons in the Book of Acts regard salvation from sin and redemption from eternal damnation.  The thrust of Peter's famous Pentecost speech is to bring recognition of Jesus as Messiah to the Hebrews.  He doesn't speak to Gentiles who know nothing of the God of Abraham; and Jewish traditions from Isaiah on are that the nations (meaning peoples; today we might well say "races") will come to the holy city of God because of the blessings poured out on Israel for their faithfulness to God's guidance.  They won't come because they will recognize they need to be saved from hell.  They will come because they recognize the benefits of the life given to God's people.

Not a strong enough message for Christianity, however, so hell and damnation had to come along, and come along double quick.  If "in Adam's fall we sinned all," then Christianity has the superior message, and you can see the fight for that upper hand in the early 2nd century, recorded in the Gospel of John.  Even then the famous phrase of John 3:16 only speaks of those who will perish, and those who will not.  It doesn't say those who don't believe in Jesus as the Son of God and Messiah will burn in endless fire and everlasting torment.  But take away that threat of eternal damnation, and what leverage does Christianity have?

Love?

Yeah; like that'll work!

If someone does not love you, to hunt them down and kill them is the worst kind of obsession and insanity.  But, says every variation on Christian salvation I know of, if you don't love God, God will remember and at the last day, will hunt you down and kill you.  Worse, actually; God will condemn you to everlasting torment.  Why?  Because God so loved the world.....

Sorry, but I've never been able to see anything reasonable in that.

This actually makes more sense to me:

"AFTER this the Lord brought to my mind the longing that I had to Him afore. And I saw that nothing letted me but sin. And so I looked, generally, upon us all, and methought: If sin had not been, we should all have been clean and like to our Lord, as He made us.

"And thus, in my folly, afore this time often I wondered why by the great foreseeing wisdom of God the beginning of sin was not letted: for then, methought, all should have been well. This stirring [of mind] was  much to be forsaken, but nevertheless mourning and sorrow I made therefor, without reason and discretion.

But Jesus, who in this Vision informed me of all that is needful to me, answered by this word and said: It behoved that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

"In this naked word sin, our Lord brought to my mind, generally, all that is not good, and the shameful despite and the utter noughting that He bare for us in this life, and His dying; and all the pains and passions of all His creatures, ghostly and bodily; (for we be all partly noughted, and we shall be noughted following our Master, Jesus, till we be full purged, that is to say, till we be fully noughted of our deadly flesh and of all our inward affections which are not very good;) and the beholding of this, with all pains that ever were or ever shall be,—and with all these I understand the Passion of Christ for most pain, and overpassing. All this was shewed in a touch and quickly passed over into comfort: for our good Lord would not that the soul were affeared of this terrible sight.

"But I saw not sin: for I believe it hath no manner of substance nor no part of being, nor could it be known but by the pain it is cause of.

"And thus pain, it is something, as to my sight, for a time; for it purgeth, and maketh us to know ourselves and to ask mercy. For the Passion of our Lord is comfort to us against all this, and so is His blessed will.

"And for the tender love that our good Lord hath to all that shall be saved, He comforteth readily and sweetly, signifying thus: It is sooth that sin is cause of all this pain; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner [of] thing shall be well.

"These words were said full tenderly, showing no manner of blame to me nor to any that shall be saved. Then were it a great unkindness to blame or wonder on God for my sin, since He blameth not me for sin.

 "And in these words I saw a marvellous high mystery hid in God, which mystery He shall openly make known to us in Heaven: in which knowing we shall verily see the cause why He suffered sin to come. In which sight we shall endlessly joy in our Lord God."

Julian is a subtler theologian than she is given credit for.  She carefully avoids treading on the Church doctrine of salvation, but she essentially says that all will be redeemed (as Pope Francis did, before he slightly corrected himself).  One could read the "all" there as only believing Christians who follow strictly church teachings; but that makes a mockery of the sentiment and the vision.  If all is not well, and all manner of thing is not ultimately well, then only some things will be well, and only part will be well, and the rest will not.  The sentiments attributed to Jesus in the vision are either universal and inclusive, or they are gibberish.  What's more, the sentiment expressed in the vision are in keeping with the promise of the future made by the major prophets.  And their promise is not premised on the entire world worshiping the God of Abraham.

What, then, is redemption?  Pie in the sky bye and bye?  The hope of things unseen and unknown?  Or the improvement of life here and now?  There have been arguments that Christianity has done a great deal of good in the world.  I find such arguments interesting, if not overly broad and difficult to defend; but the counterarguments that Christianity is the source of all evil in at least the Western world, is equally full of vague and glittering generalities, and as firm a defense against religion as the Maginot Line.  The good that can be credited to Christianity is not solely the result of believing in a better after-life.  The thrust of the gospels, over and over, and of all the letters, is about how to live here and now.  When that lesson is turned inward, is perverted into personal salvation that lets you off the hook for how you live now, we get Christians who boldly proclaim the poor will always be with us because their concerns are not our concerns, where we are "saved" and they have obviously sinned and fallen out of God's favor.

Not exactly the message of the gospels.

And here is the rub of the matter:  if salvation is truly a free offering from God, if we truly cannot earn salvation with works, then how can we earn it with faith?  One exchange is as good as another, but without an exchange at all, there is no salvation.  So is salvation a gift?  Or a purchase?

If the woman in Luke 7, who bathes the feet of Jesus with her tears and wipes them with her hair, has done nothing but make clear she is a prostitute who is trying to seduce a man so she can buy her bread that night, what faith has she shown?  What good work has she done?  Picked the right man?  Recognized the Messiah?  Or just become a valuable object lesson in the love of God available to all, even if they don't realize it until after the fact?

Connect that to the story of the sheep and the goats:  "Do you see this woman?," Jesus asks Simon the Pharisee.  "Lord, when did we see you?", ask the sheep, as they receive the blessing; ask the goats, as they are put out of favor.  They were not told to believe a doctrine, accept a creed, remember a prayer:  they were told that how they had lived was all that mattered.  Who they cared for, was what was most important.  When Elijah met the widow in the time of the famine, she shared with him the last food she had, just enough for her son and herself.  That simple act of hospitality guaranteed her survival, with food enough for all three, until the famine lifted.  When Jesus met someone he didn't say "believe these three things," he said:  "See as I see."  The halt, the lame, the blind, the beggar and the prostitute and the tax-collector:  all children of God, all just like you.  Love one another, he said; as I have loved you, so you are to love one another.  Because when you do, then you love God.

And if that doesn't buy you anything in the afterlife, it certainly makes this life a much, much better one.