O come, O come, Emanuel....

I wish I knew more history on this subject, but the next time I read some crank on the internet insisting we keep "religion" our of their politics (by which they invariably mean any political idea with which they disagree), I'm going to keep this in mind:

In the wake of the suppressed rebellion, Charleston lawyer Edwin Holland specifically blamed black churches. These preachers, he accused, carried “the Sacred Volume of God in one hand” while spreading ideas “of discord and destruction, and secretly disperse among our Negro Population, the seeds of discontent and sedition” with the other. The city decided the [Emanuel] African Methodist Episcopal Church [in Charleston, South Carolina], which attracted nearly 2,000 congregants, was the problem. New draconian measures were instituted that banned religious services without a white person present. The AME Church, only built four years previously, was then burned to the ground even as the conspirators were hung from the sky.

Seven years later, the state constructed an arsenal just around the corner to house arms and ammunition. They wanted to be prepared the next time their black population conspired an insurrection. Soon, in an agreement with the War Department, this location transformed into the South Carolina Military Academy–also known as the Citadel. The crown jewel of southern militarism, then, was in part birthed as a way to protect whites from the type of racial threats the AME Church posed.

The "Sacred Volume of God" must never, of course, spread ideas "of discord and destruction" in society.  I mean, how is the Kingdom of God like that?  How are the first to remain first, and the last to remain last if ideas of discord and destruction are spread?

Amirite?

Besides, it's not about race, because it's never about race.

Fear itself

Reading about the shooting in Charleston, I realized the difference between a "lone gunman" and a "terrorist."  And yes, it has a lot to do with race.

"Terrorism" is contagious.  It was always a symptom of chaos, of the ground beneath our feet being unstable, the stability beneath our comfortable reality being unreliable.  Charlie Pierce said of the shooting in Charleston that:

There is a ferocious underground fire running through American history. It rages unseen until it flares again from the warm earth. It has raged from the death of Denmark Vesey in 1822 to the death of the Reverend and state senator Clementa Pinckney on Wednesday night.

He's right; except the shooter was a white man, so Mr. Pierce is wrong.  Violence is only terrorism when it is contagious, and it is only contagious when it involves non-whites.  All whites are "lone gun men."  All non-whites are "terrorists," if they aren't "thugs."  The latter terms are distinguishable, but the intent is much the same:  violence among brown people is contagious.  It spreads like fire in dry grass; and white people fear being burned out of their comfortable homes.  Violence by whites is just an aberration, just the act of an individual.  It's nothing to be afraid of.

So when two crackpots travel from Arizona to a Dallas suburb, they are representatives of a wider danger to white people:  "Muslim terrorists."  When a 20-something white kid walks into a Black AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, an historically black church with roots in early 19th century (pre Civil War) America, sits quietly for an hour, then calmly shoots 9 people,  reloading five times to be sure he can complete the task, and tells one survivor: "I have to do it.  You rape our women and you’re taking over our country and you have to go;" then it's the act of a lone gunman.  You'll notice in that statement that the individual must act, but the race is to blame.  Racism, of course, is reprehensible.  But a Charleston reporter no doubt thought himself reasonable when he asked a group of black men what black community leaders could do to prevent shootings like this.   Whites act individually; blacks act corporately.

And the only way to respond is to treat them as a corporate being:  one stands for the whole.  Black men outside a black church speak for a black "community," just as black members of a church are responsible for the sins of that community, as perceived by a white racist.  The white individual, however, doesn't reflect the opinions of the white community.  He is a "lone gun man."  Black men must speak for the black community.  White men are individuals.  Black men are a group entity.

When the shooter is a "lone gunman" we must aver we don't know what the motivation is, that this is an "aberration," because whites are incapable of acting corporately.   Even before the police had caught the suspect, even before the survivors had been interviewed, we knew the shooter was white.  So his acts had to be individual, and also aberrant.  White individuals can never represent whites as a whole.

Conveniently, evil is individual, too.  We can unite against the evil individual:

"I think this is one of those situations — maybe it's a good point where we don't know the motivation of the person who did it," Giuliani said on Fox News' "Fox and Friends." "So maybe this can unite us because whoever did this is just an evil person."

Terrorism is corporate.  White people are incapable of being corporately blamed.  Some individuals are evil, most are good.  Brown people, though:  Arabs, Indians, Pakistanis, African-Americans:  they are capable of being corporately evil.  If two crazed gunman can't get past a school district police officer and a city police officer, they still represent the threat that "Muslims" across the country are about to rise up and slit our throats as we sleep.  If one young white man calmly shoots 9 people in a black church, reloading to be sure he meets his quota, he's neither a terrorist nor a thug (who always travel in groups, in conspiracies, in vast numbers of evil intent and shadowy lives), he is just "evil."

And evil happens.  What're ya gonna do about it?  You can't even properly get upset.  Catch the guy, put him in jail, problem solved.

Terrorism, on the other hand, is an "existential threat."  By which we suppose we mean a threat to our existence; but we actually mean a threat to our being, to our very ability to be.  How right we are; and yet we do not realize it.

In other news, 9 states issue license plates honoring the "Sons of Confederate Veterans."  Texas, said the Supreme Court today, does not have to be the 10th.  In one small way, we stand apart from the rest of the South.

Gotta take your good news about racism in America where you can find it.

Finding the religious connection to almost anything.....

The Kingdom of God is like this

A trader sold all his merchandise to buy a single pearl

(But how is the Kingdom of God like that?)

John Dominic Crossan, The Essential Jesus (New York: HarperSanFranciscso, 1994, 1st ed.), p. 93

Here's the thing about this story:

The law Abbott signed calls for the creation of an electronic payments system that will allow gold, silver, platinum, palladium, and rhodium depositors to write checks against their accounts, making the depository into a bank – one that will create a metal-backed money supply intended to challenge the paper currency issued by the Federal Reserve - or "Yankee dollars" as one of the law's top supporters calls them. 

How is that going to work, exactly?  The depository will either have to issue its own currency (a la Bitcoin), or it will have to loan money (cash) to the bullion owner, against the value of the collateral (the bullion) on deposit.

Which value fluctuates, based on the market; that is, based on how much currency someone will give you for a bar of gold at any point in time.  Because the bullion only has value insofar as that value can be determined in terms of currency.  Otherwise it's just very, very, very heavy trading beads.

The only other way it works is if each check causes a gold bar to be sold and converted into cash in order to redeem the check drawn against that bullion.

So either you cash out your bullion, or you borrow against it; and the latter means the bank nee depository, is going to charge interest on every check you write.   Or the bank nee depository issues its own currency.

And who the hell is gonna take that?

Gold GTT

Because next Texas issues it's own scrip...or something.

After reading about the "bullion depository" now law in Texas (courtesy of NTodd), I went looking for more information on it.

Google "Texas bullion" and you get a lot of websites dealing in precious metals and sales of same.  Quelle surprise.

What the hard news articles don't mention (because they are very short) is this:

....Texas has no gold bars in the Federal Reserve’s New York vault. And what the state has is not worth a billion dollars. Instead some 4,200 gold bars bought in 2011 by the University of Texas’s endowment fund (the second largest in the country after Harvard’s) are stored in the basement vault of HSBC’s headquarters at 450 5th Avenue in New York City, just south of the New York Public Library. For the last four years, the endowment has paid an estimated $1 million per year to store their gold there. (If it had been at the New York Fed the cost would have totaled about $15,400 over that period). And the new depository law does not require the university’s endowment fund to relocate the gold to Texas.

Because, frankly, the Lege dare not mess with UT's endowment.

This small but important fact (that the State of Texas actually doesn't own any gold bullion)  is probably why most of the "news" on the internet about this is from sites selling precious metals as a "hedge" against....well, armageddon.

Because when world economies collapse and we're no longer going to the theaters to see "Mad Max" because we're living it, guns (which need precisely machined bullets) and precious metals (which you can't eat, or even throw) are gonna get you through.

However:  "The law allows state agencies, but also citizens, businesses, nonprofits and banks, to use the depository to hold gold and other precious metals."  So that's okay.  Soon as we build the damned thing, we can get UT to move its less than $500 million in bullion back to Texas from New Yawk Citee.  And other gold bugs can deposit their Kruggerands or what have you, because:  freedumb.

I wonder how much the state is gonna let private investors charge to store the gold in order to recoup the cost of building this depository in the first place.  Or is it gonna wind up like the toll road nobody wanted that not only didn't take any traffic off I-35 between San Antonio and Dallas, but went into default?

Yeah, this one has "genius" written all over it.

Summer time, and a young man's fancy turns to martyrdom

Which is understandable if you're stuck in Texas for the summer.  But this I don't get:

Dr. Rick Scarborough, a prominent Baptist pastor and president of the activist group Vision America tells News Radio 1200 WOAI it is a matter of whether to follow God's law or the politicians law, and he'll go with God.

"However the law is changed, I will do what I have always done," he said. "I will continue to preach that homosexuality is a sinful life style."

Scarborough says some 40,000 pastors and church leaders have signed a petition at www.defendmarriage.org. He says those who signed the petition will 'resist all government efforts to require them to accept gay marriage, and they will accept any fine and jail time to protect their religious freedom and the freedom of others.'

I have no idea what Dr. Scarborough imagines is going to happen, but organizing people to march in the streets in protest against same sex marriages doesn't really have the same appeal as the civil rights marches of Dr. King.  And I don't make that comparison myself:

"Dr. King, in the Birmingham Jail, said Christians have a 'duty to obey and respect God's law," Scarborough said, pointing out that King was willing to go to jail for his opposition to something he found evil...segregation, and he is willing to do the same.

Dr. King went to jail because laws against protest put him there.  Dr. King's letter from jail was about the gross injustice of American history.  I'm not sure what gross injustice of American history will be visited upon Dr. Scarbrough and people who believe as he does if same-sex marriages are allowed under law, but I'm sure he'll think of a way.  Probably from the comfort of his home, though.

You know, like St. Benedict:

Other evangelical Christians are also talking about what has come to be known as the 'Benedict Option,' after St. Benedict, who recommended that Christians retreat into monastical orders to maintain their faith as the Western Roman Empire fell to paganism in the late 5th Century.

The 'Benedict Option' has evangelical Christians forming into insular communities, much like Hasidic Jews in New York or the Amish in Pennsylvania, where the communities can respect, as much as possible, the religious teachings that the find important, including opposition to gay marriage. 

Don't let the doorknob hit ya.....well, that's unkind.  I'm still trying to figure out what "government efforts" will be made to make them "accept gay marriage."  Loving v. Virginia said the states could not criminalize mixed race marriages, or ban them at all, and yet no pastor has ever gone to jail for refusing to sanctify a mixed-race marriage, or a mixed-religion marriage, for that matter.  The First Amendment protects both speech and religion, so Dr. Scarbrough is free to denounce same-sex marriage as loudly and longly as he wishes; he is also free to refuse to every officiate at such a wedding.

He's even free to keep trying to drive those nails into his palms, though self-crucifixion is hard.

Then there's Mike Huckabee, constitutional skolar:

“Presidents have understood that the Supreme Court cannot make a law, they cannot make it, the legislature has to make it, the executive branch has to sign it and enforce it,” Huckabee told Fox News’ Chris Wallace. “And the notion that the Supreme Court comes up with the ruling and that automatically subjects the two other branches to following it defies everything there is about the three equal branches of government.”

Sorry, Governor, but nobody is going to force a Constitutional crisis over this issue, especially since they have ruled on marriage laws before (Loving v. Virginia, for one).  You can ignore the ruling if you want to, but the rest of the country is not going to.

In fact, Loving is really instructive here, because there's a whole series of yahoos, including Ben Carson, Judge Roy Moore, Tom DeLay, and Texas state representative Cecil Bell, who think the Supreme Court has no business messing around with state marriage laws.  We should ask each of them if they think states should once again criminalize, or at least ban, mixed-race marriages.  And I'm still unclear what defiance will mean in this context:  Tom DeLay won't divorce his wife and marry a man?

Oddly, none of these people holds a position in government where they have to issue a marriage license or sanction a same-sex wedding.  So who do they think they're defying, and how do they expect to do it?

"Nothing will mar your mood"

So I've started this inter-blog dialogue, which is a good thing, because I crave dialogue above almost all things (well, beer and hamburgers come in ahead of dialogue, but only barely, and I went with the immediate family to a local brewery today, so I'm ready for dialogue!).

My "potshot" at Fr. McBrien was just that: springing off something he said which I was rapidly informed was an early opinion later recanted.  I remember having much the same reaction to Merton's Seven-Storey Mountain, and being told not to take all of Merton from that one, early book.  It's also a lesson seminary students are supposed to learn:  that no matter how much you think you know, you don't know all there is to know so listen and be patient:  there's more information coming, be it theological or about who gets to put up what Christmas decorations in the worship space.

Dialogue is about listening, not just about talking.

Which brings us here, and an encomium on Reinhold Niebuhr, surely the fastest way to my theological heart.  As presented by McBrien even Niebuhr provides dialogue to me, trained to see the basiliea tou theou as imminent and not quite so wholly transcendent as Niebuhr's version; although the basiliea I perceive/expect is also in constant motion, because the first have to be last, in order to be first, and so there's no triumphalism in it.  It's a way of recognizing that:

every partial realization of justice and love inevitably contains elements which stand in contradiction to both these values.

"Higher realizations of historic justice would be possible if it were more fully understood that all such realizations contain contradictions to as well as approximations of, the ideal love," he wrote. "Sanctification in the realm of social relations demands recognition of the impossibility of perfect sanctification."

Which I like to think of as a theological version of Godel's theorem of incompleteness:  no system we can even humanly imagine can fail to prompt a question it cannot answer, and so all such systems remain fundamentally incomplete on their own terms.  It is something, frankly, the law grapples with constantly.  It is good to recognize our limitations.

Which, I think, are by and large being replaced again, already, with the expectations that technology, specifically "digital technology," will provide the solutions which humankind has been waiting for.  And if not digital technology alone, then just technology as a concept.  We think this because computers have changed everything; although more fundamental changes in human life have come from much more mundane (by today's standards) things:  like vaccines (smallpox, polio, most of the "childhood diseases" we think nothing of anymore, but which terrorized my parent's generation; not so long ago, that); public sanitation (clean water, sewer systems), and antibiotics (until penicillin, doctors could really "cure" almost nothing).  Not to mention modern communications methods, engineering which has provided stable water supplies and control of rivers (Austin, Texas, where I used to live, was regularly flooded until LBJ established the Lower Colorado River Authority and, through a series of dams, controlled the river that runs through it).

Be sensible:  on that scale, computers have done nothing for us except provide access to cat pictures and to people who don't think like us, against whom we rail by joining with people who do think like us, thus producing:  well, the "bowling alone" phenomena and the increasing inability of government to be anything except a polarizing force.

But I digress; except I don't, because it is the very access to contradiction that fuels the internet now.

We don't like contradictions.  Niebuhr insisted we dwell on them.  Kierkegaard called them the highest desire of the thinker (and so we don't honor thinkers, today; we honor people who market  very expensive electric cars on the market and promise to set up quonset huts on Mars for a lucky few to die there).  On-line atheists rant about the "contradictions" in the Bible, as if proclaiming light both a wave and a particle was as commonsensical as declaring August in Texas "hot."  And then they insist that all persons who disagree with them withdraw from public life, thus making the world a better place for:  people who think like them.

And if it isn't atheists, it is people who don't like Jerry Seinfeld because of his comment about college audiences for comedy; or it's police arresting teenagers at swimming pools; or it's people declaring their right to insult other people who hold religious beliefs they think they understand, but they don't; or it's just people being damned fools in public, period, and the audacity they have to be part of the human family.

Never think my thoughts, never share my hearth, whoever does such things.

Sophocles was a bit more specific in his declaration of who was unfit for the polis.  We just react to an opinion we don't share.  We sit as judge, jury, and executioner on the life of any person who crosses our attention, and we KNOW all about that person before the story about them has stopped thundering around the virtual halls of our private marketplace of ideas, a marketplace where only outrage is sold, and that by the half-ton.  We have turned the world into our agora, and declared all others unfit to even be there, and we find a new target for our animosity and our exclusion every week.

And if it isn't the outrage du jour, it is neuro-science or sociology or just something "sciency" which will solve all the world's ills if we just recognize it for the truth it finally, FINALLY brings to us.  It is science which will stop us from being monsters.  Even though it was science which made the monstrous mass deaths of the 20th century possible, and was really the engine of the Holocaust*.  No, science will be our salvation.

This is what technology has done for us.  This is the wonder of the internet.

And the funny part is, this is what Niebuhr was talking about nearly 100 years ago.  And it is part of why the "Lost Generation" was lost.  Today's "New Atheists" are punks and quislings against what T.S. Eliot and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway went through.  They know nothing of the terrors which Jean Paul Sartre endured, they have learned nothing from C.P. Snow or the slaughterhouse Europe became in World War I, a slaughterhouse that was industrialized and trained directly on citizens in World War II.  It was science and technology which made it possible for Stalin and Pol Pot to kill so many.  It was communication technology as much as machetes which turned Rwanda into a killing field in the late 20th century, which allowed a handful of people to so brutally control so many in South Africa; in Haiti; in Uganda; El Salvador; Nicaragua; Honduras.

Europe was civilized, and then Europe went to hell, and hell had reign there for half a century, and it destroyed an entire generation of men in England alone, not to mention the slaughter in the USSR from the war, apart from Stalin's madness.  It was a hell visited on Europe as the consequence of turning as much of the world as they could get their hands on into hell, for the benefit of Europeans.  And now we forget all that, and the horrors of American history and hegemony, and declare our hearts pure because our science is magical and our technology is supreme and we can access all the world's data in the palm of our hand almost anywhere on the planet!

And all that data is not even knowledge, much less wisdom; but it seems to us to be power, and that's good enough.  That's what it's all about anyway:  who has the power.  The internet has given us the power to ignore the world and favor those of like mind, and reinforced in us the belief that those who are not with us are against us, and while we will tolerate their madness because it is not our wisdom, we will tolerate it only if it goes away and leaves us alone.  We seek the holy, the heilige, the pure, the unscathed, and we seek it in creating a community of people who think just like us.

Nothing less will do.

Because we think there is still something, SOMETHING, we can do.  There is; but it isn't that:

"Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness."

 --Reinhold Niebuhr

Father, forgive us; for we still know not what we do.


*The nightmare child of eugenics and the Industrial Revolution.

Potshots

Still waiting for the Big One.  It's in the oven; it's just not done yet.  In the meantime you can see where I'm trending....

When I read a statement like this:

Our balloons were no sooner in the air, floating lazily in the reflected glow of the strobe lights, when word came forth that certain late entries in the secularity sweepstakes were to be given a respectful glance; black theology, liberation theology, feminist theology. Affirmative action, perhaps.

I think about this:

And here’s a grim footnote to this saga: in 2012, in preparation for the new charter school district, cryptically named the Muskegon Heights Public School Academy System, the emergency manager laid off every single school employee.

“We knew it was coming,” explained one of the city’s longtime elementary school teachers. She asked not to be identified, so I’ll call her Susan. “We received letters in the mail.”

Then, around one a.m. the night before the new charter school district was slated to open, she received a voicemail asking if she could teach the following morning. She agreed, arriving at Martin Luther King Elementary School for what would be the worst year in her more than two-decade career.

When we visit that school, a single-story brick building on the east side of town, the glass of the front door had been smashed and the halls were empty, save for two people removing air conditioning units. But in the fall of 2012, when Susan was summoned, Martin Luther King was still filled with students — and chaos. Schedules were in disarray. Student computers were broken. There were supply shortages of just about everything, even rolls of toilet paper. The district’s already barebones special education program had been further gutted. The “new,” non-unionized teaching staff — about 10% of whom initially did not have valid teaching certificates — were overwhelmingly young, inexperienced, and white. (Approximately 75% of the town’s residents are African American.)

“Everything was about money, I felt, and everyone else felt it, too,” Susan says.

Because that last sentence is a perfect summation of politics and governance in modern America.  Contrast it with the wholly idealistic and romanticized soap opera vision of governance reflected in "The West Wing,"  a show that looks even more Disneyfied and Pollyannaish for the fact the worst demons in it are right wing fundamentalists who don't have the bite of Jerry Falwell (who accused Hillary Clinton of murder, and yet somehow was never shamed out of polite company).  The struggles of the staff in the Bartlett White House are to horse trade for legislation in the manner of FDR or LBJ or even Harry Truman.  That show (I never watched it, but now through the graces of Netflix, I'm binging on it) is a time capsule of what truly looks, now, like a simpler age.  The pilot opens with every staff member carrying a pager, and by the third episode we're told solemnly that "The internet is here to stay."  I was reflecting on that in a restaurant yesterday where I could connect to the internet on my cell phone, and only restaurants have pagers (those little "coasters" they give you to tell you your food is ready, or your table is now available).  But the real change is that while they could worry about saying "the era of big government is over" and they could dismiss "fringe" House members and fret over right wing Christian leaders, all of those people now run the Congress.  The troublesome "fringe" politicians in "The West Wing" are senators and former vice presidential candidates and the majority of Congress insists the very jobs they worked so hard to get and keep are the problem with America today.

Except, of course, insofar as those jobs protect and serve the people with the money to put those Congresspersons and Senators in office.  Because the era of government protecting the wealthy, be i in 21st century America or first century Rome (hello, Jesus!), is never over.

The struggles in modern D.C., and more and more in states like Wisconsin and Michigan (we've been doing it in Texas so long we take it for granted), is not over horse trades for votes, but over which throats to cut, which group to disparage.  Don't make me come up with examples, it's too discouraging.

Chris Christie has decided college students have a moral obligation to go into debt, because they'll all be rich when they graduate and why should the state help them with that?  The state, of course, is only obligated to help banks, casinos, and corporations get and stay rich.  Individuals can enjoy the pleasures of indentured servitude.

And while you may admire the work of Karl Rahner and Yves Conger (Fr. McBrien betrays his bias by praising Roman Catholic theologians and disparaging Protestant ones), the work of James Cone and Gustavo Gutierrez and Jan Sorbino and Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, has done more for individuals than the Church has.  (One could make the liberation theology argument that theology should not be used to buttress institutions, an argument that might raise Father McBrien's hackles, were he still here.  That, too, is another topic.).  "The West Wing" is full of people concerned with individuals, not just institutions.  It's noble and fine and good to see that on TV; it was also almost completely a fantasy, and as influential as a snowflake on a balance scale, in the grand scheme of things.

Theology is probably no more than a snowflake in the best of times.  But it should always be on the right side of the balance scales.  There are times when theology becomes just another bulwark of institutions.  At those times, if theology cannot serve the people, it must yield

Things don't matter.  Ideas don't matter. 

People matter.

The Monks are Right

I woke up this morning, as usual, full of beans and words (well, inasmuch as both are metaphors), and just as ready to release the products of both, as is often my won't.

And then I went outside and took 10 minutes to finish a landscaping project, putting the last piece into place for this phase (what a ground sounding term for such a simply effort) of the plan.

So now my mind is on better things, and I can spare the world my...efforts.

"Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."

I'm going to find some more work to do.  Idle hands are the devil's workshop.

O Tomorrow! O Tomorrow!

So, the future, according to Elon Musk, is that we will be living on Mars.  A one-way trip, but hey!  Living on Mars!

Right?  Away from all these people, where we can do what we want!  O, Pioneers!  Right?  (although actually, much, much closer to Forster's machine, except if the machine breaks down, life really does end.)

According to Ridley Scott and Andy Weir, if anything can go wrong on Mars, it will.  But still, a resolute individual will be a shining example of survival to us all (sort of like Elon Musk, only without the electric car).  And besides, there's a basic human instinct to help people in trouble, no matter who they are.  (Which is the most laughable part of that trailer.)

And then there's the question of Christian eschatology.  Not apocalyptic eschatology, but the effort to "engage today’s realities against the horizon of an ultimate divine future."  I connect the film and Elon Musk to this question through this:

Eschatological hope...is active. It demands engagement....This is not the case for Tomorrowland’s futurological optimism. In this Disney-world there are a select few who are chosen to go to Tomorrowland as the innovators who will shape our future. Our hope is in them. Our hope is that someone else will do the work needed to right the world’s wrongs. We can go about our business, confident that someone out there is doing what needs to be done. We can feel free to ignore what is causing those problems, to avoid asking who benefits because of them, and to neglect considering what it would take to fix them.

As in the film, when something momentous occurs, it won’t be on account of us. We, like them, will simply raise our smartphones and post pics. Doing something to change the world? That’s for the elites. For the chosen. Not for me.

Of course, the writers of Tomorrowland certainly mean for us to identify with the heroine. We are supposed to understand ourselves as one of the chosen, with a contribution of our own to make. However, the trope of the Chosen One in such stories always entails the fact that there are many more who are not chosen than who are, more who stay at home than who embark on the hero’s quest.

From a futurological perspective, this makes perfect sense. Building a better world is for those with requisite aptitude and training. From an eschatological perspective, though, this is anathema. The theology of active, worldly engagement that a critical eschatology extols takes its model from Jesus’ open invitation to all to turn toward and labor on behalf of the kingdom of God. All are charged with loving God with their whole hearts and minds and with loving their neighbors as themselves, which means that all carry the responsibility of contributing to the furthering of God’s eschatological mission.


There are to be no spectators.

In stark contrast, Tomorrowland exhorts us to take comfort in the existence of an elite cadre of gifted technologists who, among themselves and apart from most of us, will “make the world a better place.” This is a false messianism that short-circuits hope.

Eschatological hope, on the other hand, causes us to question our world without ceasing because we know that no human technology or system comes without a cost to someone somewhere. It causes us to address suffering and injustice where we find it because that’s what it means to love our neighbors as ourselves. Unlike holding out for a hero, this hope charges us all with taking on that responsibility. The exceptionalism of American-style individualism has no place in eschatological hope, which is held in common for the common good by the common disciple.

Granted, a film like "Tomorrowland" is not a film like "The Martian," but the two aren't that far different, either.  American action films demand a singular hero who saves himself and/or saves the world.  Usually if the hero saves himself (and it's always a "he"; Ripley in "Alien" is the exception that proves the rule), he saves the audience, too, by proving grit and determination and persistence will overcome any enemy (as in "Alien;" or any other action movie).  We don't have to do anything but root for the hero.

We are merely spectators.  We identify with the hero, but we don't have to do any of the work of the hero.  Ironically, Christopher Nolan understood this in his "Batman" trilogy.  Bruce Wayne wanted to inspire Gotham City, not protect it (which is all Tony Stark can imagine doing in "Age of Ultron.").  In the final film, he finally achieves his goal, and he leaves the city to the people he has inspired to make it a place to live, rather than a place to cower.

The basiliea tou theou it isn't, but there are to be no spectators left in Gotham City.  Matt Damon's character, on the other hand, is only there to prove to us that some of us can, under extraordinary circumstances, do extraordinary things.  With the right equipment, we can "science the shit outta this!"   Damon's character won't save the world, but he does make us feel better about ourselves, without requiring us to do anything but watch.  This, too, is a false messianism that short-circuits hope.  It's Beowulf, without the death of the hero and the grim reality that now we are doomed without our hero.  Damon's hero makes us feel all that effort and technology is worthwhile if we can at least save the life of one white man (do you think they'd have made the film with Idris Alba stranded on Mars?).

I dare say there's almost nothing in that film that makes us "question our world without ceasing because we know that no human technology or system comes without a cost to someone somewhere."  Nothing about an action film "causes us to address suffering and injustice where we find it," nothing about watching a hero prevail against all odds "charges us all with taking on [the] responsibility" to address that suffering and injustice.  Matt Damon is not rescued, despite the stirring (and silly) words that open the trailer, "for the common good by the common disciple."  He's rescued because the film proves him worthy of our admiration and our effort.  If he wasn't an exemplary individual, a figure of American-style individualism, we wouldn't cheer others risking their lives to save his.

The common good is really only applicable to those we think worthy of it's protection.  Which is why Christian soteriology came up with the Rapture and various visions of the Tribulation (as I remember from my college years when I did some research on the subject, the three schools were:  Pre-millenialists, Post-millenialists, and, of course, amillenialists.  All a matter of who got to enjoy the "Millennium" and who got to suffer the Tribulation when.  Can't be givin' that grace o' God away without a price, now, can we?).  But eschatological hope that expects the arc of the universe to bend towards justice is not necessarily a hope for punishment, too.  Yes, justice is frightening to the unjust; but that's one of the core teachings of the Hebrew prophets:  not that God is anxious to smite evildoers (the hoary cliche that somehow judges Christians but never Jews, although it's false to both), but that to the unjust, justice would be a living hell.  Mostly because those who had been enjoying the fruits of injustice would lose that privilege, and those denied justice would finally bath in its waters.

Or, as Jesus put it:  the first would be last, and the last first.  Because justice as humans practice it, is never real justice.  The justice of the baseliea tou theou comes from outside humanity; it comes from God.

And there is nothing more terrifying than to fall into the hands of the living God.  It isn't terrifying because you will be punished; it is terrifying because it will be true justice; and who among us wants to be truly treated justly?

Except, of course, the Hebrew prophets always see that as a paradise: a holy mountain upon which nothing is harmed; a beacon to the nations (the people of the world, not nation-states) that will draw them as they want to live as that nation exhibiting God's justice, lives (sort of the way America inspires the world to be consumers, but with much less injustice and wanton waste).  The vision offered by America just demands you participate by buying, by consuming.

The vision offered by eschatological hope is that you participate by making it happen.

Oh, HELL No!, or, Don't Try This At Home, Kids. Leave it to the Professionals

To begin with, this has nothing to do with the 'fundamental order of the universe'

I can't comment at Slate (don't ask, it's a technical thing, and NO, I don't want to solve it), and if I could (see?), I'd just bore everybody there.  And I was going to leave this alone, until I saw this Marcotte post was one of the "Most Shared."

Not that my response will be.

So let me start by saying I've never watched anything but scenes from Game of Thrones, and read only about one chapter of one book that my daughter had (and it bored me silly).  But GoT is a "classical tragedy"?

Oh, HELL NO!

I teach Aristotle's theory of tragedy (the "classical theory," if you will) every semester.  I've also taught both "Othello" and "Hamlet" on more than one occasion.  And frankly, what Amanda Marcotte knows about either play, or Aristotle and tragedy, would get her a "D" in my class.

Ned Stark’s story is lifted right out of the pages of Othello: A great man is brought into a culture that feels foreign to him, so that he can take a leadership role within it. A manipulative villain, with Littlefinger taking the place of Iago, ingratiates himself to our hero, pretending to be his friend while actually undermining him. The villain is jealous of the hero’s nobility, and decides to twist the hero’s fundamental decency—and the naiveté that comes with being trusting—into a weapon with which to destroy him.

Oberyn Martell’s story is informed by Hamlet as well. If Oberyn had acted with haste instead of trying to squeeze a confession out of Gregor Clegane, he could have saved the day. It’s exactly what drives the arc of classic tragedy—the sense that there was some decision the hero could have made to avert disaster, but for reasons of fate or personality, he was incapable of doing the very thing he needed to do to save himself.

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!   Let's start first with Aristotle, whom Shakespeare knew far better than Marcotte does:

“Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its katharsis of such emotions. . . . Every Tragedy, therefore, must have six parts, which parts determine its quality—namely, Plot, Characters, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, Melody.”

We can set aside Diction, Thought, Spectacle, and Melody:  those are peculiarities of Greek stagecraft (despite the 18th century British critics) and besides, this is not a scholarly treatise.  Go with Plot and Character, because for a tragedy, Plot is of first importance.

Consider "Othello:"  Yes, Iago is a villain, something inconceivable to Aristotle's idea of tragedy.  Yes, Iago plots against Othello.  Yes, Othello has a "tragic flaw" (hamartia) that undoes him.  But the plot of the play is Othello's marriage to Desdemona (they love each other, it isn't a rational decision) and the Duke's need for Othello to rout the Turks from Cyprus (it's not Othello's choice to go there for his honeymoon).  Once there, Othello must be a military governor, not just a military leader; a role he is already ill suited for.  Iago's plot against Othello takes advantage of conditions:  he quickly removes trustworthy Cassio from Othello's side, takes Cassio's place, and poisons Othello's already troubled mind.  Character is important, but it is the plot that undoes Othello, that exposes his tragic flaw and pushes him to a reversal of fate and fortune, and finally (and most importantly) a recognition that he is responsible for the tragic (sorry!) outcome of the play:  his wife dead at his hands, though innocent of the crimes he accused her of; Iago's wife dead, and Roderigo, and Othello dead at his own hand.  The hamartia, as Othello puts it, was that he loved not wisely, but too well.  The tragedy is that all the people who depended on him end up wounded (Cassio) or dead (Desdemona), or severely disappointed (the Duke).  Just because Othello was easily manipulated, and Iago a villainous liar, doesn't mean GoT took a page from Shakespeare and crafted a tragedy.

Plot first, Character second.  What is the plot of GoT, except a bunch of characters vying for control over a bunch of other characters, and willing to kill anyone who gets in their way?  And which character is the tragic hero upon whom everything depends (think Oedipus, king of Thebes) whose hamartia leads to a reversal of fate and fortune for which the hero recognizes he alone is responsible? Does this sound like any storyline in GoT?  And is any story in the show or the books plot driven?  Or is it driven by the set of characters all trying to kill their opponents and rule unopposed?

Maybe the incidents are meant to arouse pity and fear, but from what I read they mostly arouse disgust, and the writers say they are meant to arouse moral questions about the actions of the characters.

That is many things, but "classical tragedy" it isn't.  And tragedy is not driven by what might have been, but by what must be.  Oedipus, the most "classic" of all tragedies (per Aristotle) has no choice in his actions: there is nothing he can do to avoid killing his father and fathering children with his mother.  In fact, he's done all that before the play begins; all that's left is for him to find out how doomed he is.  And yet his hubris makes his fall worse (and leaves him blinded, his wife/mother dead by her own hand, and his four children orphans who later fight over the rule of the kingdom).  Hamlet cannot make a correct choice:  if he kills his uncle on the orders of his father's ghost, the kingdom will consider him a regicide.  If he doesn't, he's failed his duty to his father to avenge his father's murder.  He tries to expose the king, to make clear at least to himself that the ghost is not a demon or a delusion, and in the end he does kill the king, but inadvertently rather than directly.  Like Oedipus, he's caught in a situation he can't fix, no matter what choice he makes.  There is no "if" for Hamlet, no action which will "save the day" and keep Ophelia alive so they can live happily ever after.  Othello can't escape either; once he turns against Cassio (thanks to Iago's manipulations), he has no one left to trust except Iago.  And trusting Iago he is doomed; all we can do in the audience is watch as Othello is betrayed and destroyed by the choices he had no choice but to make.

As Barbara McManus notes:

Tragedy...is rooted in the fundamental order of the universe; it creates a cause-and-effect chain that clearly reveals what may happen at any time or place because that is the way the world operates. Tragedy therefore arouses not only pity but also fear, because the audience can envision themselves within this cause-and-effect chain.

There may be a way the world of GoT operates; but it's a world with magic, dragons, "White Walkers," and winters that last years and years, perhaps decades.  GoT is not "rooted in the fundamental order of the universe" (which means the Greek tragic vision of order arising from the Logos imposing order on Chaos; but Chaos eventually wins, as evidenced by the tragic outcomes of the best laid plans of men and kingdoms), it is rooted in a very specific fantasy.  The cause and effect chain it posits includes dragons as a deus ex machina, and winter as the return of chaos.  Possible in a tragedy (Medea escapes in a deus ex machina, after all), but those are really more features of fantasy.

And sword and sorcery fantasy, especially, rests heavily on bloodshed as part of the fundamental order of the universe.  Greek tragedy rests heavily on bloodshed as a disruption of that fundamental order, a sign that order is fleeting and impermanent, and will one day be completely undone.

The world of Game of Thrones, on the other hand, is chaos  That is its raison d'être and the reason everyone keeps watching; well, that and the fact you're almost guaranteed a sex scene featuring a topless woman.  It's premium cable, after all; that's what you're paying for.

And that's a whole different meaning of the term "tragedy."

I will bow and be free

That atheism is "parasitic" of religious belief cannot really be gainsaid.  In a world where no one believes, who would count themselves an "a-theist"?

But more interesting is the argument of many on-line atheists (at least) that religious belief is all about certainty, and so it is a fairy-tale version of reality. Yet it is scientists and atheists who seem to assert the virtue of certainty over all.

Lawrence Krause describes religion as a "precursor" to science; meaning science has displaced religion because the former has better answers now than the latter.  It's a definition that might have found some purchase among British intellectuals in the Victorian Era, but it's really about as absurd a definition today as to still argue radio somehow moves through "ether" to the receiving antenna.  The idea of the electro-magnetic spectrum has made that older idea (which lingered well into the 20th century) completely obsolete, and anyone who mentions it seriously is automatically marked as benighted.  Krause would be similarly marked for his statements, if more people were less ignorant on topics they think they know everything about.

That ignorance is buttressed by certainty.  Yet is is certainty that religious believers are supposed to cling to.  If I am challenged on my religious beliefs by an on-line atheist, the challenge usually takes the tack that I'm actually an atheist, because I don't profess the religious certainty of a fundamentalist.  But I find religious belief based on certainty to be the most brittle and fragile of states of mind, and I don't pursue the certainty of the fanatic, of the "true believer," for that very reason.   Certainty is arrogance; and the one thing life (to give it a name) seems to hate, is certainty of opinion.  On that which you are most certain, is that upon which you will be most shaken.  This is why a sound seminary education is a challenge to anything you hold dear.  Seminaries focus on a professional degree:  a Masters of Divinity, a degree for practicing ministers and priests.  If there is one thing you will face in ministry, it is a challenge to everything you hold most certain.  If you declare the bedrock upon which you stand, expect the storms of life to attack it with all the force life and muster.

And if you think it is your obligation to stand on that rock and never be moved; woe be unto you.

I will bow and be simple,
I will bow and be free,
I will bow and be humble,
Yea, bow like the willow tree.

I will bow, this is the token,
I will wear the easy yoke,
I will bow and will be broken,
Yea, I'll fall upon the rock.

That is not a sentiment you are likely to hear from Rick Santorum; or, for that matter, Chris Hedges (who recently received his ordination).  That is a beautiful hymn to humility and simplicity and trust. The only certainty in it is humility before God, is servitude to whatever God requires, to whatever God presents in life.  That is not the certainty of the blustering fundamentalist, of the Jerry Falwell or Jim Bob Duggar or Robert Jeffress.  That is the humility of the faithful.  If is a faithfulness and a humility I have known in my extended family members who belong to the Primitive Baptist church (which, in many ways, is as "primitive" as the name implies), or in many family members raised in the church for generations, but in no way influenced in the ideas of the Duggars or other like-minded groups.  As ever, there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

And God is more than anything humanity has ever dreamt of; which is why God is God.

Duggary, or, Let us now consider what should NOT be out of bounds

You know, the creepy thing about the premise of "The Truman Show" is that a child (Jim Carrey) was raised solely for the monetary benefit of another (the company producing and broadcasting the TV show of Truman's life).

And I'm trying now to figure out how that differs from the case of the Duggar family.

The distinction is that they are raising their children for the sake of their religion; but does anyone doubt Michelle Duggar keeps getting pregnant because it keeps them on TLC?  Or that they gave an interview to Fox News in order to salvage their TV contract?

They are accused by their critics of trying to raise their children in a bubble; but that bubble does not protect them from laws meant to protect children (who are not assets of their parents), and that "bubble" does not exclude the fact the Duggars make a living from raising their family for TV cameras.  Would the Duggars have any political sway at all, any notoriety and the power that comes with fame, even just within the state of Arkansas, if not for their TV show?

And now they proclaim themselves the victims of their son's "curiosity"?  And they insist Jesus has forgiven Josh, so all is well, nothing to see here, let's get those TV cameras back?

Can anyone seriously argue Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar are not raising their children for the sake of the money they can wring from TLC?

"The Truman Show" was fiction, and the purpose of it was to highlight our strange relationship to reality and reality as presented on television.  Harlan Ellison pointed out years ago that people didn't think reality was real unless they saw it on TV.

Well, now the question is:  which reality is real?  The one the Duggars want to get back to on TLC?  Or the one they say is victimizing them now?

And which reality should society insist on?

Let us now consider what is out of bounds

It's a mattress!  It's a protest!  It's a "rape performance piece"!

I've been struggling to formulate this issue, and I think I finally have.

What is the worst thing that ever happened to you?  And was it traumatic? Or were you told it was traumatic?  Do you even know what "trauma" is, or do you just think it's something very bad you can never forget?

I don't ask to be noisy and prying, I ask because we have social definitions of what is personally insupportable.  In the Victorian era it seems to have been sex (that's the popular opinion) and anything that brought disrepute to a woman.  Forget the Meryl Streep character of "The French Lieutenant's Woman," and think of the literary heroines who faint away because their beloved has broken off the engagement, or tries to hold their hand in public, or has been seen in the company of another woman; or whatever we would find ridiculous and incredible today.  "Barbara Allen" is a famous ballad of a young woman who spurns her beloved on his deathbed, then goes home to take to her deathbed when he dies.  It's a silly notion of romantic love, but someone at some point thought it made at least narrative sense.

So what is the worst trauma you could suffer?  Rape?  Assault?  Robbery?  Bankruptcy?  Someone pulling your pants down on the playground?

I ask because trauma is such a social thing.  Rape is the current aspirant to Worst Event Ever In Life.  I think a miscarriage would be higher, myself; but to claim that is to claim some superiority for "breeders," some moral elevation for those with children which makes the childless (by choice or circumstance) feel they are being shamed, and that is not allowable.  So rape is the candidate of choice, the one horror no one must ever suffer or think they've suffered, and it must be seen to affect us all, we must all agree rape is the worst event in anyone's life, a trauma that scars them forever, that they can never let go off or be shed off or "get over."  Miscarriage?  You can have another one.  Rape?  You must never forget.

I speak of this not because rape is "not that bad," but because it is the assault par excellence, especially among those who proclaim we suffer under a "rape culture" which doesn't take women's claims of rape seriously enough (which seems to mean believe them without question).  And because there is this matter of boundaries:  of what affects me when it affects others, and how the opinions of others does, and should, affect me.

And so we come to the story of Laura Kipnis.  Josh Marshall has as good a summation as you're likely to find, complete with links to everything he refers to.  It seems Ms. Kipnis' "crime" was, as Marshall sums it up, to write "breezily about teacher-student relationships and skeptically about two high-profile harassment/assault incidents on her own campus."  But writing breezily about sex and assault and harassment are things that are not done, and for her trouble of publishing in the Chronicle of Higher Education Kripnis was subjected to a Title IX investigation and is still being investigated for possible violation of the Northwestern University faculty handbook.

As I say, JMM links to both the original offending article, and the justification for the Title IX complaint penned by a Ph.D. student at the university, which Marshall has a hard time believing is not a parody.  And JMM's article is provoking interesting responses:

Certainly Kipnis’s initial Chronicle essay shows that she has an incomplete understanding of current laws surrounding sexual harassment and sexual assault. In a roundabout way, her Chronicle essay shows why Northwestern should have looked into her case. Not because her actions represented a clear violation of Title IX (the dismissal of the case suggests that they didn’t), but because professors like her—and she’s not alone in her views on sexual harassment and assault—maybe shouldn’t be trusted to make sure their universities follow the law.

By this reasoning any law professor who writes a law review article about sexual harassment should be subjected to a Title IX investigation to be sure his/her opinions are suited to following the law as...well, as who determines?  A college professor with no legal training?  Isn't that why we have a legal system staffed by experts in the law?  Pretty much the same reason we staff our universities with experts in the fields they teach?  This college professor provides an excellent review of the rationale behind sexual harassment law; but then turns it into a cudgel with which to enforce "correct thinking" on other professors.  Because there is this matter of boundaries:  of what affects me when it affects others, and how the opinions of others does, and should, affect me.

Or him (the other college professor), in this case.

Your opinions and my opinions may differ; but at what point, and on what subjects, does the expression of your opinions merit a government investigation?  When I'm afraid what you say may traumatize me?  Or others?  Is that what "trauma" means, now?

Everything old is new again

Talked today at the open forum which meets every Sunday afternoon in the high school.  The "lunatic fringe" of the city congregates there, in addition to many sensible people.  The question period in such meetings is unfortunately monopolized to a great extent by the foolish ones, though not always.  Today one gentleman wanted to know when I thought the Lord would come again, while a young fellow spoke volubly on communion and ended by challenging me to admit that all religion is fantasy.  Between these two you have the story of the tragic state of religion in modern life.  One half of the world seems to believe that every poetic symbol with which religion must deal is an exact definition of a concrete or an historical fact; the other half, having learned this is not the case, can come to no other conclusion than that all religion is based upon fantasy.

Fundamentalists have at least one characteristic in common with most scientists.  Neither can understand that poetic and religious imagination has a way of arriving at truth by giving a clue to the total meaning of things without belief in any sense in an analytic description of detailed facts.  The fundamentalists insist that religion is science, and thus they prompt those who know that this is not true to declare that all religious truth is contrary to scientific fact.

How can an age which is so devoid of poetic imagination as ours be truly religious?

Reinhold Niebuhr. "1927." Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic.  Louisville, Kentucky.  John Knox/Westminster Press.  p. 114.

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

There is nothing new under the sun.

And other truisms.

Let us now praise the wisdom of youth

Just for the memory that picture brings, I should dedicate this post to my maternal grandmother

I heard about this study (that the questioner can influence the response on gay rights issues) on "This American Life."  Then this morning I found a link to a story at New York Magazine which, in my pre-caffeinated state, I assumed was another story about that story.  Somewhere in the tabs I had open as I waited for the coffee to boil was that story, then I closed it and thought no more of it.

Until I read this.  I won't quote the article at length, except to note the excellent opening, which deserves more attention than it will get:

Human beings make science. They collect the data. They analyze the data. Other human beings peer review the science, edit the science, and publish the science, and still other humans report the science to the public, who then go around telling each other about the science on Twitter, and at the dinner table, and at the gym, and who knows where else.

Somewhere in this Chain of Fact, things can go wrong.

The very idea of a "Chain of Fact" is exactly what empiricism is based on; but, as any lawyer will tell you about a chain of evidence, links in a chain are easily broken, and not always visibly.

Which is why some of us speak of "fundamentalist atheists," although on-line atheists hate that term the way vampires hate garlic.  But even Hume recognized that "facts" are just a chain of assumptions which are only valid until the assumptions change:  such as when Planck dropped his opposition to atoms as necessary components of the cosmos.

But for me the choicest part was this, which corresponds exactly to any institution, from the church (parish, judicatory, what have you) to academia to the government:

The moment your name is associated with the questioning of someone else’s work, you could be in trouble. If the target is someone above you, like Green, you’re seen as envious, as shamelessly trying to take down a big name. If the target is someone at your level, you’re throwing elbows in an unseemly manner. In either case, you may end up having one of your papers reviewed by the target of your inquiries (or one of their friends) at some point…Moreover, the very few plum jobs and big grants don’t go to people who investigate other researchers’ work—they go to those who stake out their own research areas.

Which might well be why Max Planck said scientific truth changes when the old guard dies off and the young, who have grown up with it, accept it.  But really, that applies to almost any deep social change, doesn't it?  All our "advances" are based on that fact that NOW we know better; and pity those poor, benighted fools who didn't understand as we do.

Of course, at some point, we are the poor benighted fools, and the younger generation is just foolish to take so quickly to new, untested and unproven, and probably untenable, ideas.  Who is right is pretty much, as ever, a matter of who's in charge.

"If I had my way...."

Very interesting stuff here:

When fundamentalists and evangelicals rally against abortion or same-sex marriage, for example, it’s not primarily about their right to stand on a street corner and preach good news to the unconverted. It’s about their right to authoritatively define the fundamentals of truth and public morality, based on an authoritative interpretation of an authoritative Bible.

But the really interesting part is the idea of the paradox at the heart of fundamentalism:

It’s important to understand, as I argue in the book, that fundamentalism is a paradox. Fundamentalists describe themselves as both marginalized and a majority. They speak of national revival and theocratic dominion, but both are always deferred. They celebrate local victories while announcing imminent national destruction. This paradox is rhetorical—meaning that it’s constructed in and through language. I’m a student of rhetoric and, in this book, I’m not particularly interested in whether fundamentalists “really” represent localism or really speak as an oppressed minority. What’s important is that they say they do, and this paradoxical claim drives and justifies political action.
In the book, “superchurch” is one of the words that speaks to this paradox in fundamentalist rhetoric. There was a big push for Protestant unity in the immediate aftermath of World War I, and many of the early fundamentalist leaders denounced ecumenical organizations like the Federal Council of Churches and the Interchurch World Movement as elements in a “super church confederacy” that would eliminate denominational distinctions and eventually destroy “Bible-believing” churches altogether.

There was a kernel of truth in these arguments; some ecumenical leaders were pushing, for example, to consolidate under-staffed rural churches by merging congregations from different denominations. But this kernel of truth became part of a much larger narrative in which national religious and political leaders were joining together to crush local churches and outlaw fundamentalist belief. This narrative, in turn, has continued in different guises over the past century—linked with apocalyptic fears of communism, secularism, environmentalism, socialism, and so forth.

The flip-side of this narrative, however, was that of churches that resisted. Magazines published anecdotes about local pastors who stood up to ecumenicists and local churches that broke away from their corrupted denominations. Fundamentalist publications began celebrating large, independent churches as islands of local resistance. By the 1960s, pastors like Jerry Falwell had begun arguing that local, “superaggressive” churches could “capture” their communities for Christ, reform local politics to reflect fundamentalist authority, and become media centers for global evangelism. These fundamentalist “superchurches” would eventually provide the foundation for national political organizations like the Moral Majority in the late 1970s.

Of course, even as fundamentalists have become more nationally visible and politically active, the paradox remains. Just a couple of months ago, for example, when Senator Ted Cruz announced his candidacy for president at Falwell’s Liberty University, he encouraged Christian conservative voters to think of themselves as both an oppressed minority and an untapped majority. He described the federal government as a monolithic and mischievous force that crushes the dreams of small business owners, the relationships between individuals and doctors, the rights of parents, and the freedom of religious believers. At the same time, he spoke of “millions of courageous conservatives” and “born again Christians” whose votes could restore an idealized constitutionalism and drive the big-government bureaucrats out of the American temple.

That is a history I did not know; and apologies for the long quote (something I always tell my students never to do!), but I'm less interested in the ecclesiology there than the paradox of the soteriology, perfectly captured in this story:

A pastor in Kings Mountain, North Carolina is coming under fire for telling a group of graduating seniors at a public high school that, if they belong to the LGBT community, they are going to hell, WBTV’s Sarah-Blake Morgan reports.

The interim pastor of Temple Baptist Church, Scott Carpenter, spoke before a group of students at King Mountain High School’s annual baccalaureate service. The service was optional, but most students chose to attend.

Carpenter told WBTV that he doesn’t believe he did anything wrong. “Nobody got bashed or anything,” he said, “all I did was simply speak biblical truth.”

He insists that his comments were motivated by love, not homophobia. “Do I hate anybody?” he asked rhetorically. “Absolutely not. I just love them too much not to tell them the truth.”

A paradoxical sense of love, to use it to judge people.  I don't remember that model in the gospels; but maybe my memory isn't so good.  Still, a representative example of yet another paradox of fundamentalist thinking.  If you are going to insist on the "right to authoritatively define the fundamentals of truth and public morality, based on an authoritative interpretation of an authoritative Bible," you're going to sound like a judgmental ass.

Unless, of course, you do it in love.

I went looking for something to close this with; I found something better.  First, Julian of Norwich, from chapters 27, 29, and 33 of the Shewings:

But I did not see sin; for I believe it has no sort of substance nor portion of being, nor could it be recognized were it not for the suffering which it causes. And this suffering seems to me to be something transient, for it purges us and makes us know ourselves and pray for mercy; for the Passion of our Lord supports us against all this, and this is his blessed will. And because of the tender love which our good Lord feels for all who shall be saved, he supports us willingly and sweetly, meaning this: 'It is true that sin is the cause of all this suffering, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.' These words were said very tenderly, with no suggestion that I or anyone who will be saved was being blamed. It would therefore be very strange to blame or wonder at God because of my sin, since he does not blame me for sinning.

And I wondered greatly as this revelation, and considered our faith, wondering as follows: our faith is grounded in God's word, and it is part of our faith that we should believe that God's word will be kept in all things; and one point of our faith is that many shall be damned--like the angels who fell out of heaven from pride, who are now fiends, and men on earth who die outside the faith of Holy Church, that is, those who are heathens, and also any man who has received Christianity and lives an unChristian life and so dies excluded from the love of God. Holy Church teacmes me to belive that all these shall be condemned everlastingly to hell. And given all this, I thought it impossible that all manner of things should be well, as our Lord revealed at this time. And I recived no other answer in showing from our Lord God but this: 'What is impossible to you is not impossible to me. I shall keep my word in all thing and I shall make all things well.'

...the more anxious we are to discover [God's] secret knowledge about this or anything else, the further we shall be from knowing it....

And then Merton, on a  different subject altogether, but still applicable here, as well:

We are living under a tyranny of untruth which confirms itself in power and establishes a more and more total control over men in proportion as they convince themselves they are resisting error.

Our submission to plausible and useful lies involves us in greater and more obvious contradictions, and to hide these from ourselves we need greater and ever less plausible lies. The basic falsehood is the He that we are totally dedicated to truth, and that we can remain dedicated to truth in a manner that is at the same time honest and exclusive: that we have the monopoly of all truth, just as our adversary of the moment has the monopoly of all error.

We then convince ourselves that we cannot preserve our purity of vision and our inner sincerity if we enter into dialogue with the enemy, for he will corrupt us with his error. We believe, finally, that truth cannot be preserved except by the destruction of the enemy-for, since we have identified him with error, to destroy him is to destroy error. The adversary, of course, has exactly the same thoughts about us and exactly the same basic policy by which he defends the "truth." He has identified us with dishonesty, insincerity, and untruth. He believes that, if we are destroyed, nothing will be left but truth.

Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, "Truth and Violence: An Interesting Era," (New York: Doubleday 1989), p. 68.

Starting the day with the commonplace book

This sounds very much like Kuhn:

Surprisingly, [Max] Planck ["father" of quantum mechanics] never requested or expected flexibility from his peers. He famously stated what’s become known as “Planck’s principle”: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” In other words, new ideas do not advance by evidence, argument, and persuasion, but rather by older thinkers with older ideas passing away. One wonders if he was being darkly humorous, but in keeping with Prussian stereotypes, he was not a very funny man in general.

And this conclusion to the article, is just worth repeating:

 Changing one’s mind is a beautiful thing. It requires the hardest work between the increasingly common and more comfortable extremes of outrage and applause.

I've said it before and I'll say it again (mostly because of the on-line company I keep; or rather, I read):  the place that most challenged my thinking and pushed me to change my mind not once, but on a regular basis and as a professional matter, was seminary.  Ministry is the profession that requires the hardest work between outrage and applause, because applause largely means you aren't doing God's work, and outrage often means you are taking pride in doing what you think is God's work.

God, as John Fowles observed about truth in Daniel Martin, is always in the river between.

People don't matter. Things matter. Ideas matter.

Ain't it always the way?

The new Ford car is out....Mr. Ford has given out an interview saying that the car has cost him about a hundred million dollars and that after finishing it he still has about a quarter of a billion dollars in the bank.

I have been doing a little arithmetic and have come to the conclusion that the car cost Ford workers at least fifty million in lost wages during the past year.  No one knows how many hundreds lost their homes in the period of unemployment, and how many children were taken out of school to help fill the depleted family exchequer, and how many more children live on short rations during this period.  Mr. Ford refuses to concede that he made a mistake in bring the car out so late.  He has a way of impressing the public even with his mistakes.  We are now asked to believe that the whole idea of waiting a year after the old car stopped selling before bringing out a new one was a great advertising scheme which reveals the perspicacity of this industrial genius.  But no one asks about the toll in human lives.

What a civilization this is!  Naive gentlemen with a genius for mechanics suddenly become arbiters over the lives and fortunes of hundreds of thousands.  Their moral pretensions are credulously accepted at face value.  No one bothers to ask whether an industry which can maintain a case reserve of a quarter of a billion out not make some provision for its unemployed.  It is enough that the new car is a good one.  Here is a work of art in the only realm of art which we can understand.  We will therefore refrain from making undue ethical demands upon the artist.  Artists of all the ages have been notoriously unamenable to moral discipline.  The cry of the hungry is drowned in the song, "Henry has made a lady out of Lizzy."

--Reinhold Niebuhr, "1927." Leaves from the Notebooks of a Tamed Cynic. Louisville, Kentucky: John Knox/Westminster Press, original publication date 1929. p. 123.

A musical followup

to what I was saying; because what says it better than music?


 

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!