Daniel Silliman

Hazarding a picture: a survey of U.S. religions right now

2012-02-02T14:00:00.000+01:00

(Revised and updated from Jul 29, 2011)

Note: To end my "Introduction to American Religious History" class, I am giving students a quick, sketchy survey of the religious landscape in the US today. Most freshman-level textbooks tend to have a metanarrative and give a teleological account of American religion(s), and they also tend to place that telos about 10 years before the book came out. Recent text books, e.g., often stop the story with information that was current in the 90s, with an addendum concluding around the time of the terrorist attacks of 2001. I wanted to take my students past the telos, so to speak, and bring them up to the messy present with this brief overview of what's happening now, even up to as recently as the day before the class.

I preface the survey with three warnings:

Warning 1: this stuff is so recent that there’s no consensus on what’s actually happening. Or what’s important. This is, then, a kind of hazarded guess. This is what, in journalism, they call a “first draft of history.” It’s what I *think* is going on, and scholars will revise it (and I will revise it) in ten years, a hundred years and so on.

Warning 2: because this is a hazarded guess, my own position in the world is more problematic. I naturally know more about some things going on right now than I do others – some moves in the religious worlds, right now, I have a thorough understanding of, others it’s more cursory. This is always true, re: limitations and the problem of positionality, but if we’re talking about the Civil War, say, I have the same kind of access to every side, all the positions are more or less equally available to me through documents, etc. With the current moment, I have a lot of access and a lot of ways of knowing what’s going on in some places, where other places are very closed off. I tried/try to note that when that happens.

Warning 3: this makes these groups look static, where really they're dynamic. One of the most interesting things about religion in American right now is the high conversion rates. Though the size of a given group might remain constant, that big picture hides the movement. People are joining these religions and leaving these religions everyday. Presenting them as groups also hides what they have in common. This values differences over commonalities, where we could easily reverse that, and there might be good reasons to reverse it too. At least we can note, if we did this the other way, different things would appear clearer and more pronounced.

What I generally want to do is look at the various religious groups in order of size – smallest to largest, according to Pew's religious landscape report – and with each one give something that has been public about them recently, like a news story, and then, to the extent that I could, say what I think is going on within the faith community, marking the internal struggles or tensions and the forces at work. What I'm trying to give a sense of here is 1) the cultural position of a given religion and 2) any movement or tensions that might give us a sense of what's happening next.

This is now, so it's messy, obviously, but that's part of the point, part of what might create interest for further study, and part of what, really, I want my students to be wrestling with.

NATIVE AMERICANS - .3
Native American religions -- the plural being very important here -- are most often depicted today as struggling to preserve an authentic tradition, and to defend it from encroaching White-American culture or from White-American appropriation and commoditification.

This gets really tricky really fast. Not least because "authenticity" is problematic just as an idea. It's also the case that those who would package it and commodity it, who sell it, are telling exactly the same story about "authenticity" as those who oppose them do. That is, even at it's most commercialized, this spirituality is being sold in terms of "tradition" and "authenticity," and those terms are obviously highly contested.

Here's an example of a "non-traditional" sweat lodge, a Native American religious tradition being made available to non-Native Americans. Note how, though it's non-traditional, it's talked about (sold) in terms of a tradition:

Shortly after this, the issue of these sweat lodge's became publicly controversial when some people died in a sweat lodge ceremony in Az, which was put on by a guy who's maybe best classified as a "self-help guru." James Arthur Ray was found guilty, last June, of negligent homicide.

The news got some stern reactions from Native American religious leaders, who felt like he got off light. They said he desecrated the religion he was selling. They talked, interestingly, of the kind of divine and spiritual punishments he could expect, according to the religion he was misusing. Karma, for instance, and angry spirits, and bad things happening to one over the course of one's life.

There are also tribal, Native American sweat lodges, which are less public, though there's concern about these disappearing. There was an article in a Mont. newspaper over the weekend about a college professor who is himself a member of the Crow tribe who has build a sweat lodge. It's only used by a small circle of friends, though the man, Shane Doyle, was willing to talk about it with the newspaper.

He talked about how it was a tradition -- and how that's important because it's only authentic if it's "passed down" -- but expressed his worries, too, that it is a dying tradition. In one breathe Doyle says he might write the tradition down, to preserve it, and in another says what's special and important would be lost if it wasn't written down.

Which means he feels, at this moment, like it's either going to be lost or going to be lost.

This kind of "catch" seems to happen a lot in Native American spirituality today. There's all this effort to grasp (somehow, in some way), something that, in being grasped, ceases to be what one wanted in the first place.

NEO-PAGANS - .4
A relevant question for Neo-Pagans today -- if no one knows your gods, they totally ignored, lost to history, basically, and then, one summer, BOOM!, your gods are everywhere in the culture, saturating the modern landscape, their images worldwide, is that a good thing?

That's a question the movie Thor raised for some.

Using "Neo-Pagan" as a catch-all for a really, really diverse group of American religions that involves, also, sub groups and sub sub groups and which I find terribly hard to delineate with any simple clarity, I think this is the standard struggle for Neo-Pagans today. Generally, this grouping gets called "New Age." That's actually more problematic, though this is still problematic. But we'll go with this ....

On the one hand, representations of their spiritualities are everywhere. On the other hand, they generally don't have any control of those representations and the public knows more or less nothing true about their rituals and practices and beliefs.

Some of the Neo-Pagans who have a public presence seem to spend most of their time struggling against misinformation. There's even

They're kind of in this weird space where there's this very large space for Neo-Pagans in the public imagination, and yet there's a real struggle for any actual space for real people who are Neo-Pagans.

HINDUS - .4
Hinduism recently caught some people by surprise, which isn't something one can often say about Hinduism today, when a Reformed Christian philosopher of religion announced his conversion to Hinduism.

Michael Sudduth had previously been known for kind of technical philosophical works on epistemology, working from within the Reformed tradition (e.g., with papers like "The Internalist Character and Evidentialist Implications of Plantingian Defeaters"), but announced his conversion last month. And in pretty dramatic terms.

He wrote:

"Around 4:20am (Friday morning) September 16th, I woke suddenly from a deep sleep to the sound of the name of 'Krishna' being uttered in some way, as if someone was present in my room and had spoken his name out loud. Upon waking I immediately had a most profound sense of Krishna's actual presence in my bedroom, a presence no less real than the presence of another living person in the room, though I was alone at the time. I responded to this felt presence, first through my thoughts that repeated Krishna’s name (and inquired of his presence), and then verbally out loud by uttering Krishna’s name twice: Krishna, Krishna. I was seized at this moment with a most sweet feeling of completeness and joy ... continuing to experience a most blissful serenity and feeling of oneness with God, not unlike I had experienced on many occasions in the past in my relationship with the Lord Jesus."

For the most part though, Hindus in America are not converts, but immigrants or the children of immigrants, 88% Asian, and not really integrated into society. Fairly marginal.

There's not a lot of anti-Hindu sentiment. They're looked at as sort of goofy, more than anything. They're not taken seriously one way or the other. In popular culture, their presence is normally played for a joke, with some goofy caricature of Hinduism, for instance the way the character Raj is portrayed in The Big Bang Theory.

As far as I know, there hasn't any public presentation of Hinduism that's more serious than that.

It's still very much a minority religion, and still treated as very outside the American mainstream and American awareness.

The one exception -- kind of a significant one -- might be yoga. Depending mostly on whether or not you consider yoga to be Hindu even in all its American permutations, this would be a way that Hinduism actually has had a large affect and does have a large presence in American life. Yoga is very popular. About 7% of Americans practice yoga, with another 8% saying they're very interested and want to. Besides the percentage, what's more important there is the cross-section of Americans who do this is quite diverse and wide spread, so you have a lot of people -- maybe even most -- who are really quite familiar with yoga, who know someone who does it, who it's helped, etc.

There's been some attempt on the part of some Hindu organizations to use that or leverage that to increase interest in Hinduism, or change the public perception of Hinduism in America. Some Hindu groups want to "take back yoga."

ORTHODOX - .6
The Orthodox Church in America -- one of the larger denominations of Eastern Orthodox churches, though they're divided into something like 20 ethnic groups -- has caught public attention several times recently for forays into public issues. They made an issue over military chaplains and homosexuals in the military, for instance, and marched in pro-life marches. They participated in the March for Life on Jan. 23, for example.

This actually wouldn't be notable for most conservative churches, but the Orthodox have, until recently, basically been immigrant churches, and haven't been in the "public square" in any notable way. Unlike Catholics, say, they really haven't been a part of the so-called culture wars.

The change came, it seems, as part of an internal question about how the Orthodox should be a part of American culture, or whether they should engage with American culture at all, or how much, and most of all how. It coincided with the election of a new leader, Metropolitan Jonah, who was the first convert to lead the church, and the first native-born American. His election was a bit of a surprise, actually, and he made some changes, including moving the headquarters to Washington D.C., and but he's not been without some controversy.

All of this is reflective of a larger question, of how to situate themselves in American space (a question reflected on the academic level as well). There are more thoroughly Americanized congregations now, from not so long ago when they were more exclusively ethnic. Many, many Orthodox churches, even today, have all their services in the language of the mother country -- Greek or Russian or Armenian. They're not eager to Americanize, even as second, third, fourth generations really are thoroughly American.

There's also been several waves of converts, starting in the '60s and lot more recently, most of them coming Evangelicals backgrounds, it seems, as well as quite a few conservative refugees from Mainline churches.

This is a challenge for a church that's anti-change. If your ultimate value is timelessness, how do you also be relevant to the world you live in?

MUSLIMS - .6
Publicly, the argument about Islam and the question about Islam is its place in American society. Pretty much daily, there are anti-Muslim statements from politicians or public figures and counter-arguments about how Muslims fit, like everyone else fits, in American culture.

Most recently (though there seems to be another example every couple of months), there was a reality TV show called American Muslim. The show took this issue as it's thesis:

There was some hullabaloo following this. The argument against the show was that it presented Muslims as "normal" and was thus trying to desensitize the public to the real threat of radical Muslims. This led to an organized boycott of some of the show's sponsors -- specifically the hardware store Lowes, which then pulled all its advertising from the show, and was then boycotted for caving to the boycott.

Turns out, though, that the boycott was a one-man protest. It made for some entertaining news for a couple of days, but the show's ratings were really low and basically no one cared.

Still, there's a controversy over Muslim's place in America maybe three times a year.

This seems to be something that really only dates from the terrorist attacks of 2001. Before that, Muslims were more marginal, basically ignored. For a long time, they were almost entirely immigrants, in their cultural profile, as well as Nation of Islam, which is tiny but has had a public presence at a couple of moments, for instance in the 1990s with the "Million Man March."

Today you see a pretty solid mixture, though, of converts, many of them African Americans from historic black churches, Baptists and so on, and immigrants and descendants of immigrants. There's actually quite a diversity: about half the .6% are Sunni, for example, with the other half made up of Shiite and other, though a lot of mosques don't actively identify that way, and so you get distinctions based on class, and whether the mosque is in a storefront in a ghetto or a permanent building in a suburb. A good review of the diversity can be found at the 30 Mosques in 30 days project.

It's my impression that many Muslims, on the individual level or the level of the local mosque, often don't see themselves as part of America, and may even experience their faith as a kind of dissent from America and American ideology. I've talked with a number of African-American Muslims in Atlanta, for example, mostly former Baptists who converted after 9/11 and almost all of them see Baptists as complicit with the sins of the nation, racism etc., and see Islam as an alternative to the evil system which America represents.

But, on a public level, the argument is more about how Muslims aren't terrorists, Muslims aren't anti-American, etc. There's a lot of similarity to historic arguments about Catholicism and anti-papism, e.g.. They're in a similar place.

The quintessential version of this public argument is Keith Ellison, the county's 1st Muslim congressman, testifying at a congressional hearing about "radical" Islam. Note especially the way he argues Muslims are inseparable from America:

Interestingly, Muslims are exactly as pluralistic as Evangelicals, and so exactly as tolerant of other faiths and open to the way the practice of free religion works out in society: 57 percent of Evangelicals say "many religions can lead to eternal life," and 56 percent of Muslims agree. According to Pew, Muslims in America are mostly middle class, mainstream, and middle-of-the road. Convincing the public that's the cultural position they actually occupy is really the struggle at hand, though.

UNITARIAN/ECLECTIC/SPIRITUAL - .7
A recent news item in the Washington Post had Unitarian Universalists asking themselves, "What's the point?"

That's not really fair, but the pessimism is right. Unitarian Universalist tend to be older, they seem to be shrinking and losing cultural presence. There's a sense that younger people who may agree with Unitarian Universalists just don't feel the need for the organization, which is pretty much modeled on mainline Protestant churches, and might not appeal to those who don't feel a need for that sort of organization.

My sense is that the ideas of Unitarian Universalists are still quite present in American society, but the felt need for the organization just isn't there, so there's this feeling, with Unitarian Universalism and other liberal, non-orthodox churches, of fading away.

BUDDHISTS - .7
The Buddha himself is currently on tour in the US, with about a dozen appearances this year, and has pretty warm reception. In one location in Northern California, about 1,000 people came out to see and be touched by relics of the Buddha, pearly, irregular globes that are believed by some Buddhists to be what remained after the Buddha's body was cremated.

If you look at the news story, it's interesting to see that not all the people that went to see the relics were actually Buddhists. This was a religious service, not an art exhibit or something, but there were apparently varying degrees of Buddhist-ness. From the devout, to those who are spiritual in an eclectic sort of way but not specifically Buddhist.

That's fairly accurate of Buddhism in America today. There are a lot of very devout Buddhists but there is also a lot of what gets called Buddhistm-lite. It's a distinction between Buddhists who practice and are a part of a Buddhist community from those who would, maybe, more accurately be described as "dabbling."

That tension ties into two other tensions that seem to hum within contemporary American Buddhism:

1) Between white converts and Asian's for whom Buddhism goes back generations. A little more than half of Buddhists in America are white, with about a third Asian (32%), and, by most accounts, they're not very well integrated and in many cases are entirely separate, like two different streams.

2)American Buddhism is mostly led by older converts -- boomers and people who converted in the 60s and 70s. The real question, at the moment, seems to be how they're going to transient as those folks start to retire or be less active, and a younger generation rises. Whoever emerges from a younger generation as a significant player, someone who can really set the agenda for Buddhists, will probably tell us a lot about the future of Buddhism in America.

Some of what we're seeing is a kind of connection between Buddhism and American youth protest movements. Some of the younger converts have come from punk rock, anarchist movements, anti-global capitalism movements, etc., and there's a sense that those are the people who are ready for, looking for, and waiting for Buddhism's answers.

We have also seen, really recently, some older Buddhist leaders, converts from a previous generation, reaching out to protesting youth. In October, for example, at Occupy Wall Street, Robert Thurman was invited to say something, and told the gathered protesters that they were beginning to enact the answer the Buddhism offers to the problems of the modern world:

JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES - .7
Three days ago in LaGrange, Ill., police were called because some suspicious women, dressed all in black, were going door to door and seemed to be trying to get into houses. Turned out, they were JWs.

This is very representative of the oppositional relationship between Jehovah's Witnesses and broader American Society. The Jehovah's Witnesses are often in conflict with the society around them, sometimes legal conflict, and always social conflict. They don't celebrate holidays, reject some modern medicine, won't salute the flag, and so forth, and so stay pretty separate. When they can't be separate, for instance with kids in school, they still end up, for the most part, in this clash of cultures.

If you look on the Witnesses' own news site, all the stories about cases of fighting governments forcing them to accept medical care they don't believe in or fighting governments for the right to witness and proselytize.

These are pretty much the only ways they are in public, too. There are a couple of celebrities who are Witnesses -- the Williams sisters, Prince -- but besides that, the only public awareness is their court cases and their witnessing.

This group, interestingly, is more religious, by basically every measure, than any other religion in America. They pray more, go to services more, feel like they have their prayers answered more, etc. They're also the most ethnically diverse, and poor, and cut off and isolated from American society. They see themselves as needing to be totally separate -- you can't be a Jehovah's Witness and part of American society too.

ATHEIST - 1.6
There are Atheists and New Atheists, though pretty much all you hear about are the new ones. They've dominated best-seller lists, and have been the drivers of a lot of religious conversation since the terrorist attacks on New York 10 years ago galvanized them and emboldened them to argue not just that God doesn't exist, etc., but that religion is bad for the world.

The distinct is really this argument against religion, against faith, rather than arguments about God per se. In a sense, it's not about God at all, for them, but about whether religion should be accepted by intelligent and civilized people. They're opposed to belief in belief, specifically.

The arguments from New Atheists are normally some combination of these:

It's easy to over-estimate New Atheists, though. This really is a media phenomenon as much as anything. Their books are bestsellers, though. Christopher Hitchens died before Christmas, and his most recent book shot to the top of lists.

It's an atheism that's stylistically suited to the media of our age, but it's not clear that there will be any particularly lasting impact, or what it will be.

JEWS - 1.7
Jews, interestingly, are the least religious religion in America, by most measures. They're more likely to experience Jewishness as an ethnicity, a heritage, something like that. They're less likely to pray, believe in God, attend a religious service, etc.

Most of the Jews who are in the public eye, who are known as Jews, present themselves this way and treat religion as if it's a joke and really funny (which it certainly can be). Larry David, for example, does this sometimes:

There are also really Orthodox communities who are hyper religious who are very insulated from the rest of American society -- non-integrated -- and so elicit a kind of fascination and attention, often for ways they conflict with the world around them, or try to protect themselves from the world around. There's a bus line in New York, for example, where the bus is run by Orthodox Jews who have a contract with the city to operate the bus, and it's segregated. Women have to ride in the back.

This has been going on since the 70s, but in October a woman who wasn't a part of the community got on the bus and was quite surprised, and complained and the practice drew quite a bit of scrutiny.

Another example of this kind of clash between old world and new happens entirely within the Jewish community, as some groups of Hasidic Jews attempt to proselytize other Jews, specifically non-practicing Jews. The group is messianic, believing that if all the Jews in the world would keep the mitzvot the Messiah would come.

Also -- There's a couple of interesting movements that really seem subterranean at the moment that might actually develop into something interesting. One is the "Minyan movement." This is the rise of lay-led Jewish prayer services, so, without a rabbi. They're more egalitarian, some of them are explicitly feminist, and this seems to be something that's happening with sets of well-off young people who want to be devout and yet resist certain authoritarian forms such as patriarchy normally associated with that.

It's an attempt, too, to reinvigorate the traditions, make them more experiential. There's an emphasis on prayer as spiritual experience, e.g. Most of these have started in the last ten years or so, though it's maybe not as much a new thing as a resurgence of a move that happened in the 70s.

A second, related and overlapping development is the term "conservadox." The idea is there's a gap between the Conservatives, who are well-educated and rather elite but not devout, and the Orthodox, who are devout, but anti-intellectual. There's some sense that there's a section of Jews today who want to bring those things together and develop ways of being intellectual, etc., and also devout.

MORMONS - 1.7
Journalists have declared that this -- right now! -- is the "Mormon Moment." Because journalists love alliteration. They do. The idea, though, is that there's an inordinate amount of attention to this group. Certainly, it's more positive or at least neutral attention that before.

There are several TV shows, including Big Love, which was about a splinter group of polygamous Mormons, but that was critically acclaimed and actually helped people realize there was a difference and got people interested.

Also, there is a Broadway show created by the creators of South Park that's a smash hit:

There's also just a lot of attention because of Mitt Romney's runs for GOP. In the last campaign, there was some anti-Mormon push-back, e.g. an article by an Evangelical with the title, "A Vote for Romney is a Vote for Satan." There's some now too -- especially on the level of ridicule and just uneducated dismissals, e.g., "Mormons aren't Christians." But, this has given the public a chance to think about Mormonism and whether they, the public, are comfortable with it or comfortable with discriminating against it.

The church and many Mormons, in turn, have used this as an opportunity to say, "We're American. We started here and are a part of this. We're not strange to you. The church did an ad campaign featuring pictures of Mormons, for example, and has also -- good news for religious scholars -- been more open with its archives recently.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Later-day Saints has been running ads, for example, like this one:

All this, interesting, coincides with the fact that the church opened its archives to an unprecedented extent, recently, and so we're also seeing, at this moment, a real golden age of Mormon historiography. There are waves of really excellent scholarly work coming out right now.

Just a figure like Parley Pratt -- the third Mormon leader, after Joseph Smith and Brigham Young -- in the last year had a major, scholarly, academically respected biography come out, an edited collection of articles on him, come out in 2011, as well as a special edition of an journal devoted just to issues relating to Pratt. This would have been unheard of not too long ago.

HISTORICALLY BLACK CHURCHES - 6.9
Today, these churches tend to be organized almost entirely around powerful, charismatic individuals. They're not very denominational, even when they're in a denomination. A lot of megachurches or strings of megachurches, with a big, marqueee name at top. Sometimes those names make it into the news and the public consciousness.

Normally not in a good way. Normally it's some sort of scandal:

The thing to remember, here, is that in contrast to the Catholic Church, where a scandal in church in one city is connected to tall the other churches in other cities, one scandal has nothing to do with any of the other historic black churches. It doesn't affect them, it doesn't say anything about them, etc.

This makes it very, very hard, too, to saying anything generally true about what's going on in these churches as a whole.

My sense is there are basically two theological strands -- social gospel and prosperity gospel. Sometimes they're separate and sometimes they're together. I really don't know in what direction that's moving, though, if it's moving, or if there's something else.

To talk about black churches today, though, is (for better or for worse) to talk about dynamic black ministers.

NOTHING IN PARTICULAR/AGNOSTIC - 14.9
By some accounts, this is the single fastest growing group. The "nones."

What that means is up for debate -- are the just not religious at all? Are they spiritual, but opposed to organized religion? Is it personal and not something they share? Is there a general explanation for why they're not religious (and how)?

They're not -- note -- self declared secularists or atheists. This is something else.

What has yet to be determined. And it's not like there's an official "none" who speaks for them as a group.

What you think this group represents -- what it means -- says a lot about your position in America. There's a lot of debate about how to understand this group. Evangelicals especially feel the need to interpret this number, but haven't really established a consensus on what the best interpretation is.

Note, though, that this group, which is pretty large, doesn't fit nicely into what we know are normal, standard teleological conclusions about religion in America today, either the religiousness story or the diversity story, really.

MAINLINE CHURCHES - 18.1
A New York Times article from last summer: Episcopal Bishops in New York are divided over gay marriage, now that it's legal. The church itself is conflicted on this. Which means, different Bishops have done different things, so there's this state of confusion where, if you are a gay couple and you want to get married in an Episcopal church, you can in one borough of New York City, but not another, or in one city, but not another.

In recent years, if there's been a news story about a Mainline church it's been either about internal divisions that basically reflect the cultural wars going on in the broader culture, about the "struggle for the soul of the Presbyterian (etc.) church," or about how the Mainline churches are losing members.

Every Mainline church has had conservative split-offs: the Episcopals have had people and congregations leave and become Catholic, or join other branches of the worldwide Anglican communion (in Africa, e.g.), or leave independently or form new conservative denominations. The details vary, but it's the same story for Lutherans, Presbyterians, etc.

It's not really clear what happens next for these churches. A lot has changed around them, and they're changing, but most of seems to be slow-motion reaction, as opposed to say, a creative impulse or move that might be directing things in the future.

CATHOLICS - 23.9

Two Catholic stories from this last month:

1) Catholics have named the first Native American Saint, Kateri Tekakwitha. She was an Algonquin who was raised Catholic after being orphaned, and died at 24 in 1680.

In Dec., Pope Benedict XVI formally recognized a miracle attributed to her intercession, as a young boy was inexplicably cured of a flesh-eating bacteria after he and his family asked Tekakwitha for her help.

She's set to be cannonized, now, i.e. "formally recognized," though a date hasn't been announced. This has created quite a bit of interest, reflecting, perhaps, the way the church is increasingly identified with ethnic minorities.

2) Also last month, at about the same time, the Catholic Church was in the news because the Obama administration decided all employers that provide health care to their employees would have to also cover the cost of birth control if the employee was on birth control. There won't be any exemption for religious employers.

This was seen by a lot of Catholic bishops as a violation of religious freedom. A number of them have been quite vocal in attacking the administration and decrying the decision.

Bishop David Rickens, for example, the bishop of Green Bay, Wisc., said it was a betrayal of the idea of democracy, where government is of, by and for the people, and a very serious assault on freedom, the First Amendment, and religious liberty.

That's generally been the tenor of the political engagements -- which are frequent -- of the Catholic hierarcy. Here's a Cardinal from Chicago make a similar argument in a slightly different context:

This isn't so simple as being the "Catholic position," though. More than 90 percent of Catholic women use birth control, and lots of lay Catholics think the leadership is too conservative. There's generally understood to be a division within the American Catholic Church, right now, between those who think it's become too lax, too lenient, deviating from true orthodoxy, and those who think it needs to progress, and be more open, more welcoming.

An example of that more open position is a woman, a nun named Elizabeth Johnson, wrote a book called Quest for the Living God. It’s feminist theology, and she suggests (as I understand it) that all names for God are really metaphors, and that in some circumstances it might be right to use non-traditional metaphors, like “mother.” It might also be the case that sometimes traditional metaphors are harmful, so maybe there are times and places where “father,” e.g., shouldn’t be used. A lot of people read it as more forceful than that, but I’m using caution here in the place of nuance, since I don’t have a lot of time. But, the book was condemned by the bishops. The U.S. bishops’ Committee on Doctrine said it didn’t have a Catholic starting point and was “contaminated.”

Johnson, though, seems to represent a minority of Catholics today – minority maybe in size, but, more than that, in cultural power – who want to pull the church into more open positions, instead of entrenching themselves in a certain sort of very-political conservatism.

CHARISMATIC/PENTECOSTAL - 3.4
Generally, Pentecostals and Charismatics are considered a sub-set of Evangelicals, with 3.4% of the American population. That's how they get classified. Partly that's right, but there is also a slightly different cultural profile, and there are things going on in the "Neo-Charismatic" world, as the descendants of Pentecostals get called today, that bear no relation/have no apparent connection to Evangelicalism in general.

Specifically, there's been a notable movement that's classified as "Third Wave" Pentecostalism, which focuses on ecstatic prayer and spiritual warfare, and is less organized, less institutionally structured than previous movements of Pentecostals.

An example of this is the International House of Prayer. The idea is: one never-ending prayer meeting. Which is understood to be connected to an outpouring of God, accompanied by miracles and new, passionate relationships with Jesus. This is in Kansas City -- there are others with similar ideas and models -- and it has been going since Sept. 19, 1999, all day, every day, all year.

It looks like this:

On the one hand, this is part of evangelicalism, broadly understood, but also it's different and distinct. You find here, for example, a similar concern about engaging the culture, but the primary method is "spiritual warfare," i.e., praying.

EVANGELICALS - 26.3.
The largest group in American religion today is evangelicals, and the dominant thing that's going on in evangelicalism is "seeker friendly" movements, Church growth movements, etc. Megachurches have been a major story since the '90s. More relevant right now is the growth of non-denominational churches. The largest group of Evangelicals is Baptists, with 10.8 percent; the 2nd largest and fastest growing is non-denominational.

Almost every Evangelical church you can find has some self-description and self-understanding that reflects this seeker friendly, non-denominational, idea. They're "Bible churches," e.g., have an emphasis on style and format, and other accoutrements to make the experience nicer and more comfortable. This reflects a move away from formal and stiff or stuffy religion, and also, Evangelicalism's anti-intellectual strain (there from the first) plays out in the way theology and theological/denominational particulars are marginalized or played down. They're "simply Christian," just believe what the Bible says, interested in helping you grow in your relationship with Jesus -- this is the theology, which presents as not theology at all.

The video, above, works well because it shows the anxiety wrapped up in this new stylistic turn, and the hope of what a church could be like -- a really good coffee shop, but better. Interestingly, coffee shops like that arose in America at exactly the same time as these church styles and arguably that's not accidental, but they're deeply connected. I don't know that anyone is arguing that, but it's arguable.

A key figure in this is Bill Hybels, of Willow Creek, a megachurch pastor who did a lot to promote certain models of church services. Willow Creek promoted the professionalization of worship, for example, so the people leading the songs weren't just good church people but excellent musicians who were professionals and treated like professionals, the worship run the same way a concert would be, etc.

Another key figure is Rick Warren, of Saddleback, a California megachurch pastor who showed how a church could really use a marketing strategy, which would then shape everything. He conceived of the church attender as a consumer, with a lot of choices of styles of music, for example. He also puts a huge emphasis on practical advice -- his book, a best seller, The Purpose Driven Life, isn't about the details of what's true or not true about theology, for example, but about how to live the best way. (This should tie in to what we talked about re: the "therapeutic" idea of religion).

I think Warren is kind of the quintessential figure in Evangelicalism right now. Most of the stuff you'll read, certainly at the popular level but a lot of academic stuff too, will focus on the political involvements of evangelicals. I think that's a sideshow to what's really going on.

A very key aspect to this focus of evangelicalism is the idea that the faith has answers -- "Bible-based" answers -- to the kinds of day-to-day, normal life problems that people face. This is evangelicalism that understands itself as practical, first of all, and effective.

This can be seen in the evangelical diets -- with the idea that there is a Christian way to lose weight and live healthy -- and with Christian money management books and seminars -- with the idea that there's a Biblical way to handle your income and your spending, get out of debt, etc.

A recent example of this that took some public commentators by surprise was a couple of very public cases of evangelical pastors talking about sex. I.e., "Christian sex," the Bible-way to have sex, the right place sex should have in one's life.

One was a book by a Seattle megachurch pastor named Mark Driscoll called Real Sex. It's been referred to as a "sex manual," as it gives pretty explicit advice. Driscoll's known for being blunt and straightforward. As he sees it, this is how Christianity answers the real questions of real people.

This is an extension -- however odd it seems -- of the "seeker friendly," happy, sociable, church-as-good-experience model that's defines evangelicalism today.

2012-02-01T10:15:00.000+01:00

Interpreting purchases & the problem of ebooks

2012-01-31T15:49:00.002+01:00

One of my favorite explanations for why people buy Christian fiction is slowly withering away. It's slowly, increasingly become less plausible as -- before our eyes! -- the Christian fiction market is changing.

This is what's great about data, and what's challenging about scholarship.

The theory is that at least some of religious fiction's sales can be attributed to conspicuous consumption. I.e., that it's purchased as an act of identity. This is interesting because it takes the purchase as semiotically meaningful, and assumes the act of buying a book has to be interpreted before one can even get to questions about reading.

This theory takes two forms:
The first -- which Daniel Radosh argues -- is that we live in a consumer society where identity is consumer identity, and therefore buying products that are marked and marketed as "Christian" is a basic way in which Christians in a consumer society form and express their identity as Christians. It doesn't matter, according to this idea, whether or not one likes the product, or whether or not one reads the book. The act of purchasing is itself meaningful, and valuable to the purchaser in the way it positions them towards the rest of society. I.e., in how it (the purchase) gives a cultural position meaning.

It's thought of as a good use of buying power.

The second -- which Amy Frykholm talks about -- is that being publicly seen with the book is understood by the evangelical book-buyer as valuable because it's a possible opening for proselytization. This isn't entirely different than the first thoery, and could work along with it. Here, though, it's understood to be more conscious. I.e., the person buys the book, carries the book around, has it in the car where people can see or on their desk at work because, as with Radosh, it works as a conspicuously consumed object to express an identity, but, additionally, that public mark is understood by the marked person as being a conversation starter. It's thought of as being public about one's faith. Maybe in such a way as to create an interest. Possibly so as to prompt someone to ask to be witnessed to.

Call it consumption as evangelism.

Frykholm has at least one of the readers she interviews in her book tell her this was conscious behavior, a wish the reader had while toting the book around (whether it worked or not is another question entirely).

Here's the problem, though: ebook sales.

Publishers Weekly recently noted that 30 percent of the Christian fiction sold is ebooks. That's a number that's continued to grow, even while other genre's of ebook sales have steadied off or declined. The increase in Christian fiction ebooks apparently "dwarfs results from all other segments."

That's 30 percent of a more than $500 million in annual sales. Which makes Christian fiction ebooks worth about $150 million in yearly sales.

While there are still $350 million worth of actual paper books sold, which could be interpreted as one or another version of conspicuous consumption, there's quite a sizable portion of sales here that are inconspicuous. Thirty percent are read wrapped in the digital equivalent of brown paper.

It may even be possible to correlate what looks like a sales boom in erotic fiction to an increase in Christian fiction sales, arguing that both result from the anonymity allowed the reader of ebooks.
Anonymity, here, equaling freedom. I haven't found the numbers to confirm that, but there are indications it could be the case, and it seems at least plausible given the numbers I have.

It may still be the case, of course, that some of these sales or even possibly 70 percent of Christian fiction sales are explainable on one or another theory of conspicuous consumption, but if more people are buying (and reading?) fiction when they can do it essentially secretly, then we'd have to rethink that explanation. And if it's not more people, but the same people shifting to ebooks, it'd be hard to explain how the conspicuousness of their consumption of this fiction was important to them but isn't anymore. If, further, as some research suggests, the people who buy ebooks also buy paper books, then one would have to explain how the conspicuousness of buying Christian fiction is important sometimes and not at others.

All this means we require a rethinking of what, at first, for me, seemed like a fascinating account that took into account a number of important factors ignored before.

I still think it's the case it's necessary to think about the meaning of the act of buying one of these books, and not just jump straight to interpreting the act of reading. The question, who buys Christian fiction, has to come before the more common one, who reads Christian fiction? But the changing market and the new data have messed up what seemed like a good theory for answer that first question.

Now to come at it again.

Which is what's challenging about data and great about scholarship.

Francis Schaeffer at 100

2012-01-30T17:11:00.004+01:00

Today, on his 100th birthday, Francis Schaeffer's influence can be seen in the shape of the landscape of American culture. His affect can be traced in almost every evangelical engagement with art and media and philosophy, science, law, and politics, and in Christian engagements with culture everywhere. It's seen especially in American Christians' need -- their feeling of a pressing, urgent need -- to articulate and demonstrate, defend and perpetuate a coherent and uniquely Christian worldview.

It's in, especially, the evangelical need to have and belief there must be a biblical answer to everything and a Christian version of everything.

The affect of Schaeffer's presence is discernible, 100 years after he was born, though often it's only an unacknowledged specter.

The weight of his influence has a gravitational pull to it. But it's often -- too often -- overlooked. General histories of the 20th century and of conservative Protestants on the contemporary scene tend to note and mark more public (but less consequential) figures, from Pat Robertson to Jerry Falwell to Tim LaHaye, and to not see Schaeffer's influence at all.

It is there, though.

It's not really possible to understand most of goes on in evangelical culture today without understanding how it's building off of and working out of Schaeffer's basic thesis. His work is key to a turn in the 20th century.

If you want to understand why a Baptist pastor performed a "sexperiment" on the roof of his church with his wife, or why there's a market for Mark Driscoll's latest book and great such interest in a "Christian" view of sex, you have to understand Schaeffer. If you want to understand why some Christians talk about "worldviews," and what they mean when they do, you have to understand Schaeffer. If you want to know why Rick Warren thinks he should be interviewing presidential candidates, you have to know what he means when he says "everyone has a worldview," and if you want to understand that, you have to understand Schaeffer. If you want to understand basically anything about the ideas underpinning the religious right, you have to know your Schaeffer. If you want to know why fundamentalists in the 30s and 40s and 50s didn't write books about dieting or debt, but conservative Christians today do, you have to look to Schaeffer. If you want to understand the premise beneath Christian magazine's movie reviews, and why they have them at all, or the shape of contemporary Christian fiction, or why anyone would want a "Christian" painting, and would think a Christian painting would somehow be different from another kind, you have to know this man who was born 100 years ago today.

Francis Schaeffer.

Not that he'd want to claim all of those things or would have endorsed them. Rather, to explain those things, one would have to go back to him.

As Barry Hankins puts it: "Schaeffer was among the first well-known evangelicals to emphasize Christian thinking about philosophy and art, and he did this largely in an evangelical subculture that gave short shrift to things of the mind."

And:

"Schaeffer's primary significance is not in a lasting critique of western thought, nor in a reasoned apologetic that would necessarily be persuasive today. His arguments have not stood the test of time in terms of their historical veracity or philosophical soundness. He was not the scholar, philosopher, or great theologian that his publishers liked to claim on his book jackets. Rather, Schaeffer is significant primarily because when he came back to the United States in the mid-1960s, most American evangelicals were still in the throes of fundamentalist separatism, in which Christian public identity manifested itself primarily in an attempt to shun the secular world. Schaeffer was the most popular and influential American evangelical of his time in reshaping evangelical attitudes towards culture, helping to move evangelicals from separatism to engagement."

There are many who merely profit off the idea of a culture war, exploiting the perceived conflict for their own ends. But there are also those really believe in that clash, that struggle, and think it's the most important issue going on today and that that struggle explains the modern world. And to know why they think so, one has to turn to this man's thinking.

Form a speech he gave the day after his 70th birthday:

His thesis at 70, which is the core of his work and the essence of his legacy, was pretty simply a declension narrative and a binary opposition of worldviews. The simplest expression of it I know is how he put it in that speech for Jerry Falwell's Old Time Gospel Hour:

"Christians in the last 80 years or so have seen things in bits and pieces. Instead of seeing the things which are gradually troubling Christians and other people of good will, such as over permissiveness, pornography, the public schools, the breakdown in the family, abortion and the killing of newborn children. They've seen these in bits and pieces, instead of understanding that they're only the natural outcome, the inevitable outcome, of the change from a Christian viewpoint to a humanistic one. That is, instead of the finally reality, the base of all reality, being a personal infinite God, who is the creator of all else. Instead of that, now the dominant worldview is that the final reality is only material energy shaped by pure chance into its present form. This change explains everything that is troubling our culture."

Most of what people attempt to understand when trying to understand late 20th and early 21st century evangelicals starts from here. It's founded in this pair of ideas -- declension and opposition -- and the conception of Christianity as a worldview. Which were Schaeffer's first, at least effectively, and which, following from him, came to shape and influence so much of the shape of things.

2012-01-28T09:22:00.000+01:00

2012-01-25T09:54:00.002+01:00

The experience of conversion as always-already having been

2012-01-24T14:35:00.000+01:00

However radical a conversion, however different the new-found faith is from what came before, there's a sense in which it's understood by the converted as not radical at all. It's understood as an adjustment, as an alignment with what was always the case. The converted give an account of their conversions -- not always, but much of the time -- as if it were nothing more than a recognition of what was already true.

This can be seen with Michael Sudduth, a philosopher of religion, who recently announced his conversion from Reformed Christianity to the bhakti tradition of Vaishnavism, which is known in the U.S. mostly via Hare Krishna.

These faiths are not normally understood as in proximity to each other.

The Reformed response to Sudduth's announcement reflects this: he's been called an apostate, and his conversion a "deconversion." It's been said his news re-raises awareness about the "dangers of Eastern religions." The harshest analysis claims Sudduth must be mentally impaired, for either physical reasons ("As I recall, Michael has been on antidepressants. I don’t say that as a criticism.") or spiritual ones("I trace Michael’s problems back to when, as a teenager, he and some friends toyed with a ouija board .... I think dabbling in the occult opened a door which he was never able to close.")

For the Reformed, then, the change marked by Sudduth's announcement is a huge, dramatic change. The difference they see in this conversion is the difference between heaven and hell.

For Sudduth himself, what happened to him can barely be described as a change. Certainly not as a sharp turning. It's more like a gradual growth, a continuation, a more complete, more full discovery of what, in fact, already was.

He writes: "I began to see my former 'God conceptions' as limited expressions of a fuller, richer, and more experientially meaningful view of God that was now present in Lord Krishna himself."

And:

"I should add, and I think this is very important, that I felt I was experiencing the same God that I had experienced on many occasions throughout my Christian life. However, I felt like this being was showing me a different face, side, or aspect to Himself, or – better yet – a different mode of my relationship to Him. I felt a certain validation of my spiritual journey, both past and present. I had gone so far in my Christian faith, but it was now necessary for me to relate to God as Lord Krishna."

What this means is, however different these two faiths appear, however different they actually are, they're experienced by this convert as continuous. As of a unity. He understands himself in some important way to have been already worshiping Krishna, to have always, in some deeper reality not readily apparent on the surface of things, already been a Vaishnava.

The conversion is narrated in a sense in the past perfect tense. It's not happening, present continuous, it's not just happened, in the simple past, but has happened, and thus has this feeling of being finished before the narrative begins. The narrative comes as an announcement, pronouncing what's already complete. But also, with that, there's a sense of it having always been finished.

That, at least, is how Sudduth portrays how it feels to have converted.

Now, it might be that this is unique to conversions to universalist religions, such as Hinduism, which understand all the various expressions of spirituality and differing faiths and apparently opposing religions as refractions of a deeper unity. There's space in Hindu theology for what Sudduth is saying. Jesus can be understood as an avatar of Vishnu. So one could imagine that this sense of a conversion not being radical might be possible for someone converting to Hinduism in a way it wouldn't be for other converts.

That's not the case, though.

This experience of conversion as realization and recognition of what is already true, as acknowledgement of what already is the case, rather than as some sort of change, is actually quite common in conversion narratives. This is a standard part of contemporary accounts of conversion.

Consider Scott Hahn's popular account of his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Hahn certainly doesn't see all faiths or even all versions of Christianity as merely reflections and refractions of the true religion, which is most truly revealed in Roman Catholicism. He thinks religions are really different. Nor does he present himself as having been a Catholic before he was a Catholic.

And yet -- he does.

He describes his conversion as a coming home. This is in the title of his book, Rome Sweet Home, and in his description of the moment he converted too. His writes that, after a long time considering Catholicism, he prayed,

"'Lord, what do you want me to do?' I remember praying that and thinking, I wonder why I haven't asked you that before now? 'Lord, what do you want me to do?'

"I was utterly taken aback when, to my surprise, I felt his response back to me, 'What is it, my son, that you want to do?'

"That was easy. I didn't have to think twice. 'Father I want to come home.'"

Hahn doesn't mean he's coming home in that he was already a Catholic in the sense of having been baptized as an infant and then strayed, or something like that. He hasn't left something he's now returning to. His conversion's a homecoming in another sense: "Home," here, has to be taken as something like the right place to be, the place where one belongs.

Which means it's experienced as being a return, whether or not it would be considered such from an outside perspective. It's a restoration.

However much it might look like a change and a choice, it's not experienced or narrativized that way. However discontinuous it appears -- and this conversion can be conceived of as quite a radical break -- even that evident disjunction is taken, in the account of the conversion, as testimony to the true unity underneath.

Hahn writes that as a young man he hated Catholicism. He was a Presbyterian with an active and vicious anti-Catholic streak. He passed out anti-Catholic lit. to his friends. He argued Catholics weren't Christians. He destroyed his grandmother's rosary and prayer book. In the book, this comes across as a protesting too much. There's a continuity between his anti-Catholic and Catholic selves, with the conversion depicted not as a huge, dramatic change, but just his recognition of who he really was. Even where Hahn describes himself as having changed, he does so in a way that makes his former self seem like it was just in rebellion to what was true, and his converted self is presented as if it merely stopped fighting that spiritual reality, accepting what was. The conversion is presented not like a choice, but as an experience of recognition.

This same thing is reflected in the evangelical language of conversions, of course, of being "lost" and "found."

This idea is expressed, too, in the Gospel of John, where Jesus says, "You did not choose Me but I chose you," and in John's first epistle, where he writes, "We love, because He first loved us." There are, just in Christianity, deep deep theological accounts of how conversion is not an action but a reaction, not something that one does, but that someone recognizes as having already been done.

Nor is this unique to Christianity. It seems to be something nearly universal in accounts of conversions.

In Islamic conversions, stories, for example, it's common to hear "Islam found me; I didn't find Islam." Prof. Fidelma O'Leary, describing her conversion, says she was given a Koran and, reading, recognized what she already knew. "I was pretty darn excited," she says, "to know that there's actually a religion that was what I believed."

The tense seems to me to be key. It's as if she believed in Islam before she knew what Islam was. As much as her conversion would seem to be a choice, it didn't feel like a choice. As much as it appears to be a change, it's understood by her to be something more like a becoming, a manifestation or realization of what always was.

It doesn't feel to her like it was radical at all.

This is all very curious. This seems like a feature of conversions -- maybe not all conversions, but more than a few. It's a feature, too, regardless of which religion one is converting too, and regardless of whether one of them or any of them are right.

Yet religious conversion looks like a choice. It seems like it must be choosing. It's hard to think of how we could think of conversion, especially within contemporary pluralism, without thinking of it as choosing. Choice would seem, furthermore, to be choosing among choices, choosing knowing there were infinite other possible choices one could have chosen, and one is, as it were, suspended above an epistemological abyss.

Against theoretical vertigo, though, we have the experience of conversion as it's accounted for by the converted. As stories, these conversion narratives are narratives of choice that act to eliminate the choosing. Or, perhaps, narratives of apparent choice that reveal that the choice was only ever an illusion, that the converted were only seeing what in truth always already had been.

The experience is described as having nothing to do with pluralism or religious marketplaces. If it is about that, that's effaced in the way it feels and in the way that feeling is recounted.

Phenomenologically, conversion apparently doesn't feel like a choice at all. Or like a change. Or a leap. Or like anything really radical. It is, instead, this moment like eye contact and recognition with what has always been the real.

How could one measure anti-Mormonism?

2012-01-23T19:01:00.000+01:00

So, is Mitt Romney's Mormonism a problem with the Republican electorate?

It's long been speculated that evangelicals wouldn't vote for a Latter-day Saint. Speculated and speculated and speculated. With his loss in South Carolina, his religion has come up again as a reason for his unpopularity. For some, it's apparently obvious that his faith is his problem.

Mark Silk writes, for example, "What happened in South Carolina is really pretty simple. The Mormon Gap killed Mitt Romney."

A Romney supporter interviewed on NPR this morning said essentially the same thing. His Mormonism, she said, is "gonna hurt him all kinds of places. That exact part of his life is going to hurt him in many places."

I'm not so sure, though.

It's easy to attribute bias to other people. It's harder to determine if it's actually true.

It seems like there should be some way to actually test for anti-Mormon sentiment, but seems, too, that basically those who speculate this is the key issue keeping voters from voting for the Mormon are just basing that on their assumptions about other people's prejudice.

Is it anti-Mormon bias keeping self-identified evangelicals from voting for Romney? We know that 88 percent of them in South Carolina didn't vote for the former governor of Massachusetts, but how do we know that anti-Mormon bias is the reason?

Certainly there have been some high-profile people who've said evangelicals can't vote for Romney specifically because of his Mormonism, but given that evangelicals aren't exactly following lock-step the recommendations of their purported leaders, I'm not sure we can conclude anything from those statements.

We know, too, that evangelicals tend to say that Mormonism isn't a problem for them. But that's exactly the trickiness with bias: those who have it generally deny they do. I don't see why we should just take people's word for it that they're not biased. Everyone thinks they're more objective than they are. Conversely, asking evangelicals whether or not they're squeamish about the Latter-day Saints isn't exactly enough to go on either. Evangelicals are squeamish about a lot of things, especially when it comes to other people's theology, but there's no necessary connection between that unease and their behavior.

It's better to test for behavior. There has to be someway to actually check for actions, rather than just speculating about anti-Mormon bias.

So how could we actually do that? Is there a way to actually measure anti-Mormonism? What would a test look like that tried to ferret out anti-Mormon bias?

Ideally, one would run two candidates in the South Carolina GOP primary who were identical except for their religion. Is there a way to run a test that would functionally do that?

(Note: Some of the best thinking on the question of Romney's Mormonism has come from Joanna Brooks, aka "Mormon Girl," who's work is always worth reading. On this topic of anti-Mormon bias, see especially: "Thinking Clearly About Anti-Mormon Prejudice," "A Frustrated Romney Loses Lead in SC," and "How Not to React to Anti-Mormon Sentiment in the South.")

Robert Wright's rather weightless ideas

2012-01-23T17:12:00.000+01:00

A materialist account of ideas shouldn't have to deny that those ideas have any power or affect. But in practice, this happens.

A materialist account of an idea explains the emergence of that idea in terms of the material conditions out of which it came. It contextualizes ideas, places them in the conditions of their historical moment, and turns attention towards the economics, the cultural situation, the practical realities that were the environment in which the thought thrived. It denies that ideas are free-floating. It denies that they "just were," independent of how people lived.

This is useful and important.

Yet, it's a weird misrepresentation of things to take that account of environment and emergence and end there, not noting, not allowing, not considering how those ideas had a gravity of their own, in turn shaping and changing and affecting the material conditions out of which they came.

There's really no necessary connection between denying an idea is free-floating and denying the efficacy of ideas. Yet, sometimes people take the two together, as somehow inextricably together.

This is my big problem with Robert Wright's bestselling and well-reviewed The Evolution of God.

Wright gives a materialist account of the emergence of monotheism. Using evolution as a paradigm, he charts the growth and mutations of religion from the earliest polytheisms through the growth of moral imagination through monotheism to today, when "God Goes Global (or Doesn't)."

It's an interesting book, and certainly deserving of its popularity. However, Wright consistently ignores or dismisses the ideas he's trying to account for, and in practice, despite some ritual denials, acts as though materialist explanations commit him to thinking of ideas as weightless and without affect.

There's a way in which, even though he's committed himself to this big project of explaining ideas, he thinks ideas are impotent.

As Wright explains his project, "Attempts to explain changes in religious doctrine come in two basic varieties: the kind that stress the power of ideas and the kind that stress the power of material circumstance." Of this either/or, he has chosen the later:

"The book you're reading, in contrast, emphasizes the power of facts on the ground; it seeks to explain how the conception of God has changed in response to events on earth .... Facts on the ground -- facts about power and money and other crass things -- have often been the leading edge of change, with religious beliefs following along."

If a choice has to be made, then Wright made the right choice. Why choose, though? Why force this either/or?

Both options (thus rendered) make the same mistaken assumption, taking affect as uni-directional. Both are epiphenomenal.

What's wrong with taking ideas as somehow disconnected from their contexts and conditions is that it misrepresents how ideas come to be and how they exist. Taking the "facts on the ground" as somehow free from any influence of ideas, though, is also a misrepresentation.

For one thing those facts on the ground are understood by those on the ground, by means of those ideas that emerge out of that on-the-ground situation. At no point in their exertion of influence were they ever brute enough to be uninterpreted, existing free from the burden of being understood. One can't understand how the ground was understood by those who were there without understanding the ideas they used, the interpretations they gave to their situation (however implausible we take those ideas to be now).

Wright attempts to acknowledge this and then pivot away from it being important, but, in doing so, represents rather weirdly how ideas might be efficacious.

Speaking specifically of the political context for the dispute between the prophet Elijah and two monarchs of ancient Israel, Ahab and Jezebel, he writes: "Of course, sometimes the influence moves in the opposite direction .... It's entirely possible that Elijah had deep faith in Yahweh, and this faith inspired a political movement against Ahab and Jezebel."

This misses the point, though.

The power of the idea isn't necessarily connected at all to whether or not it's truly believed. Here Wright is changing the question, admitting it's possible Elijah wasn't entirely cynical in his use of Yahwehist theology, when, in fact, that wasn't what was at issue. It's irrelevant to the question. Ideas can be believed or not, but that has little if anything to do with whether or not those ideas have any affect. The question in this case is not about belief, but about whether epiphenomenal materialist accounts of ideas are sufficient.

It's not a one-off dodge of the question, either. In an early passage explicitly denying the charge that he's an epiphenomenalist, Wright does exactly the same thing. Instead of answering the question, what affect if any did the idea you're talking about have on the material conditions and contexts in which that idea thrived, Wright sidesteps, and grants that not everyone who held that idea was necessarily cynical. "[T]here is evidence that some ancient kings genuinely believed in the foreign gods they embraced," he writes.

But that's neither here nor there.

Take, e.g., an idea we have every reason to believe was entirely cynical, and really, one we think no one actually ever believed: the idea that "Things goes better with Coke."

To explain this idea, we would of course very much -- absolutely -- need to give a materialist account of the conditions that gave rise to it. We would need to talk about "the crass things," as Wright calls them. Of course. Yet, to account for the slogan, we'd also have to talk about the affect it had on consumption of Coca-Cola. To not do so would be insane. The whole point of the idea of the phrase -- which, note, it's not necessary to believe anyone ever actually believed -- was to affect the material context that, in fact, is also the context out of which the idea expressed in the propositional phrase came.

Understanding the idea without understanding it's function is not understanding the idea.

An epiphenomenal account, a uni-directional account, would not adequately describe either how the idea happened, or what it was, or how it existed, or what its place was in the culture. This is not to suggest that one would be better off ignoring the material conditions, etc., etc., but that the choice itself is silly. We need multi-directional accounts of ideas. It's necessary to look both at how they were affected and how they in turn have an affect.

Wright knows this. He spends a bit time denying doing what I'm accusing him of doing. In the passage after his admission that maybe Elijah wasn't entirely cynical and did actually believe what he said, Wright acknowledges the need for multi-directional accounts of ideas.

He says, "the whole thing is messy, and focusing exclusively on any one 'prime mover' is too simple."

All well and good. But he goes on and does it anyway.

Wright has a specific prime mover in mind, and his whole narrative in this massive book is about this one prime mover as the explanation of everything important about religion. His prime mover -- which he understands as the cause of the evolution of God proclaimed by his title -- is the non-zero sum dynamic of politics and economics. He says as much about 80 pages after saying that to have a prime mover would be too simple. He says "the stubborn growth of non-zero-summness is central to human history, built into the very engine of cultural evolution .... It will be the prime mover behind God's growth."

How he argues for that idea is interesting. Some what he does is really interesting and worth thinking about.

Yet, because he's committed to this uni-directional account, the ideas he's explaining by explaining their material conditions end up misshaped, and misconstrued.

For him the ideas are never more than metaphorical representations of other things. They have no reality of their own. They're weightless and float free, exactly like the idealist ideas the materialist account was supposed to correct, just loose like balloons in the sky drifting away from wherever it was they were once held by "facts on the ground."

On the shittiness of religious liberty

2012-01-20T13:07:00.001+01:00

There've been more than a few hallelujahs in response to last week's Supreme Court decision in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC.

Even those taking a more objective position have called the 9-0 vote in favor of the Lutheran Christian school a win for "religious liberty," even a "most significant" one. For those who feel their religious liberty is under sustained assault in America -- and that narrative has really taken hold, in some circles, a story being told and retold-- the ruling is a real victory.

A reason for jubilation.

At Public Discourse, the decision was described as the court "getting something absolutely, completely right." More: "The decision in Hosanna-Tabor is an occasion for celebration, for dancing in the streets (or, for some Baptists, simply praising the Lord)."

Family Research Council called it a watershed decision, a "major win." And they gleefully characterized the decision as the rejection of "the Obama administration's claim that federal bureaucrats can tell a church whom it can hire as ministers."
That's not actually what the administration's lawyer's claim was, but one supposes the details don't exactly matter with this sort of thing.

First Things echoed the sentiment and the politics, saying "The Obama administration deserves to be rebuked for the hostility to religious liberty."

Thomas S. Kidd described "defenders of religious liberty" as rejoicing at the decision in which "secularists" -- by which he means particularly groups that take it as their mission, actually, to "defend religious liberty," although their defense of liberty, which is defense via secularity, is taken by some religious people as a curtailing of that liberty, of which they say they're the true defenders, defending it in the other direction, via opposition to secularity (sort of); by which I mean to note, only, that the rhetoric here is Russian dolls that have to be unpacked to even get at what the argument is -- were "taken to the woodshed."

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which was involved in arguing the case, called it “the greatest Supreme Court religious liberty decision in decades" and said “This is a huge victory for religious freedom and a rebuke to the government, which was trying to regulate how churches select their ministers.”

And so on and so on.

The tenor of the response was maybe most concisely stated by a commentator on First Things, Don Roberto, who said "Wow. The libertine-pagan-atheist alliance must be steaming. But it's a 'long game,' and we must pray that Obama will not be in a position to appoint any more justices."

While most conservative pundits and religious commentators didn't go so far in naming the bad guys libertine-pagan-atheists, that's certainly the shared sentiment.

The official consensus was summed up by the Heritage Foundation, which called it a major win and a "landmark victory for religious freedom."

And maybe it was.

I accept the legitimacy of a ministerial exception to employment law. That makes sense to me. Religious organizations are going to have to have more leeway in who they hire for ministry than, say, Wal Mart should get in hiring store managers, or the New York Times should be allowed in the employment of editors.

That, it turns out, was the crux of the case before the court, Hosanna-Tabor.

There's another sub-debate there, which is a lot trickier, which is about how a "minister" should be defined.

One side of this case argued that a minister is a minister if the organization in question defines that person's role as ministerial. The other argued that if a large part or even a majority of someone's duties were secular, then that person wasn't a minister.

Both definitions seem pretty problematic.

The latter seems to misunderstand ministerial work, as Chief Justice John Roberts said in the majority decision, and it depends everything, besides that, on the definition of "secular." There's no way that's going to be clear. Is washing lepers secular? Feeding the poor? Preforming a marriage? Counseling? Yes, obviously, and no. So that's too ambiguity-ridden to be much help.

The former is essentially the abdication of a definition, though. As People for the American Way points out, "a test that relies entirely on the employer’s classification effectively relieves a religious employer of legal liability and is easily susceptible to abuse, as religious employers can simply classify all of their employees as ministerial."

The fact someone's classified as a minister in the paperwork doesn't mean they're understood to be ministers, either, or treated that way. If the ministerial except were to work like that, with the definition of "minister" being what religious organizations said it was, that would mean there were ministers and then also ministers, with the one sort being the sort understood as ministers and treated as ministers and self-conceived as ministers in the context or the religious community, and then the other being something that's written on a file. You can call the woman who cleans the church toilets a minister. That doesn't mean she thinks of herself that way. Doesn't mean she's treated that way by the church. It does mean, apparently, that she can be fired for any reason.

But fine.

Cheryl Perich, the actual person whose life and work are at the whim of all these abstractions, apparently considered herself a minister. And was seen as a minister by her religious community.

So I guess the ministerial exception to employment law applies, and this is a win -- maybe even a major one -- for religious freedom.

That doesn't mean it's not really shitty, though.

It can be religious freedom and still make you feel like you need a shower more than a party in the streets.

It is shitty, what happened to Perich. Even if the church had the right to do what it did, and the government doesn't have a right to stop it. The woman wanted to teach. The woman thought God wanted her to teach too, and so did her church.

Then she got sick and went on paid medical leave.

She got better -- her doctor said her disability was under control, being treated, managed by medicine, and she could teach again. Then her church asked her to resign. Mostly, apparently, because how she was sick -- narcolepsy -- freaked them out.

They asked her, specifically, to sign something saying she didn't want to teach any more and also that she wasn't called by God to teach. To resign her position, for one thing, and for another to publicly announce God didn't want her to be a teacher.

They pressured her, that is, to say she wasn't called to do what they had, previously, affirmed was her God-given purpose in life.

She refused, and then they fired for how she refused to resign.

Call it religious liberty. But that doesn't mean it wasn't mean, small minded and cruel. That doesn't mean it's a decent way to treat human beings, much less supposed brothers and sisters in Christ. Doesn't mean it's not morally disgusting.

As Don Byrd, of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, wrote:

"The freedom to make certain employment decisions without government interference leaves intact the moral obligation to act honorably, to treat employees honestly, and to make religious decisions based upon true religious beliefs. Support for a broad definition of the ministerial exception should not imply support for a broad license to discriminate with impunity."

That is to say, religious freedom means the freedom of religious organizations to act immorally. It's the freedom, actually, for them to be less moral, less decent, less humane than equivalent secular organizations. What's protected, here, is the right of the Lutheran church and other such religious organizations to treat people badly.

To treat people worse, even, than they'd be treated if they worked for a bank or a factory.

One hopes defenders of religious liberty may be excused from the celebration of this.

One can support religious liberty and still consider it terribly sad.

2012-01-17T14:56:00.001+01:00

The almost magic Bible in a 30-second ad

2012-01-15T19:36:00.003+01:00

"Conservatives," Steve Bruce once wrote, meaning, specifically, Christians who hold to the literal interpretation of the Bible, "have an almost magic view of the ability of scripture*."

Understanding how this view is "almost magic" explains two things about the 30-second ad spot of scripture aired during yesterday's Bronco-Patriots football game.

First, it explains why it made sense to Focus on the Family to make and run the ad even though it's not an ad for anything. It doesn't ask anything of the viewer or push the viewer to do anything, and Focus on the Family really has no possible way or measuring or judging the affect of the ad. If there is any. But they ran it anyway.

Second, it explains why, beyond the obvious reason, the ad featured children even though though it was inspired by the actions of the Denver Bronco's quarterback, and shown during a game watched mostly by adult men. There's a reason beyond that kids are cute and watchable, one that actually connects to the theology of scripture that makes the ad make sense.

The Bible works, in this view where it's almost magic, it has its effect, on its own power. Of it's own accord. It need not be accompanied by explanations, explication, or exegesis. Bibles, by themselves, and passages excerpted from these Bibles by themselves, without even any context, have, to misapply a refrain from a great hymn, a "power, power, wonder-working power**."

Theologically, the distinguishing doctrinal feature separating the Biblical literalists***, especially historically during the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversies, was not this idea about the power of the Bible. It's related, though. The doctrine the Fundamentalists at that time felt needed to be defended was the hermeneutic of literalism. I.e., that the Bible should be read, in essence, by itself.

Plainly.

Read for what it said, its simple meaning, the meaning easily accessible to readers reading without an interpretive theory, which is to say, without a hermeneutic. Or, anyway, with the hermeneutic of having no hermeneutic.

In most cases, this is argued as reading for the original meaning.

One is supposed to read, when one read's literally, for the author's intended meaning at the moment of actually writing. This "original" meaning is especially also to mean God's meaning, as the texts are understood to have been written under inspiration, which is what religious readers are actually trying to get at anyway. The emphasis in the argument, though, is often mainly on the actual writer, the hand, the author who wrote it.

Yet, where some higher criticism could have been understood as helping one peel off the layers of assumption that come with centuries of distance from the original text, piercing through to the original historical context of a text and, in that, aiding one at arriving at what the original writer might have meant, a historical-critical approach is still considered unhelpful by literalists. One might think that, e.g., to know the "original meaning," it would be necessary to know who the original authors were. Whether, for example, Exodus was written by Moses, or by a school of prophets writing later in the context of conflicts of their own time.

It isn't the original meaning that literalists are after, though.

It's the plain meaning. Or: the simply self-apparent meaning***.

This is the meaning that, when one reads, yields itself up.

The plain meaning is the meaning that gives itself to the reader, so long as the reader reads without bias, in an uncomplicated and easy-to-understand form. A singular form, too. The meaning yields itself, easy and singular, the meaning one single meaning that's self-apparent enough to be beyond complication.

It's with this idea of what it means to read -- to, as it's said, just read -- that people promote the Bible as a means to Christian unity. I.e., if only people would "just read the Bible," there'd be no more denominational divisions in Christianity. The multiplicity of readings is understood as being necessarily the result of misreadings, people willfully adding complication by explication, rather than accepting the one meaning that comes from simple reading, naive reading, reading without interpreting, etc. The hypothesized singularity of meaning is understood as being the pure version of the text; the multiplicity the human corruption. Confusion, even confusion that appears to actually come from reading (or, rather, readings), is thought to be cured by reading. Because reading is understood this way, as having this power.

It's from this idea, this belief in the possibility of simple readings rendering plain and applicable meanings, that one gets the view of scripture as "almost magic."

As Steve Bruce explains: "The assumption that the Word has exactly the same meaning to all people gives the conservatives a confidence in the use of impersonal and mass means of communication which liberals cannot share."

The wonder-working power of the Bible, that is to say, is that it communicates clearly and uncomplicatedly by itself. It needs only be broadcast, gotten out there.

This allows for the Bible to be distributed anonymously -- it works "like magic," in anonymity, needing no context and no interpretive community***. It works even just by showing it on TV. Or leaving it in a hotel drawer. Or printing it on tiny slips of paper and then leaving them like holy confetti on the ground.

It works, so long as the reading is naive. It might work better, actually, in that context-free delivery, since it's a surprise, and more likely to be read in the sense of being just read.

This is why it makes sense to Focus on the Family to pay how ever much they paid to put a 30-second spot on TV in the middle of a football game.

The fact it was out of place or felt out of place, from their perspective, worked in their favor. Distributed that way, it lends itself to the sort of plain reading that allows the powerful text to work it's magic. To yield itself and give itself, unbidden and without burden, it's truth, it's unfiltered and singular meaning, it's life-changing power, to the viewer. Though he may have, at that moment, been drinking a beer and thinking about the last down. The thought is not that the viewer will get up and Google it, or ask "what does that mean?" Rather, it's that he'll know what it means, and more, know what it means in a deeper truer way than he's known anything maybe ever, and know it so deeply maybe even that he, without even thinking about it, begins to pray.

The knowing will be clear. Certain.

As the CEO of Focus on the Family explained it, the whole idea behind the ad was so people wouldn't have to look it up. He said "It just hit us when there were something like 100 million Google searches on [John 3:16]: 'Why not make it easy for people? Why make people get off the couch during the game to look for it?'"

This same view of how the Bible works explains why the ad is kids reading or reciting the text.

Of course it's kids because kids are sweet. And people will watch kids. There's a kind of openness to the too-well-known scripture text that wouldn't be there if it were being read by the local members of AA or a collection of middle aged ministers or, say, believing football players. Also, it may in its sentimentality invoke a kind of wistfulness and longing for wholesomeness and things being OK and innocence.

But also, that innocence and naivety is imputed to the text. The kids act to influence the way one perceives the text, and to model how the text should be taken. The fact they add gosh-wow! asides to the verse helps this. The message around the text about the text is communicated by their wide-eyed kid-ness: just read: just listen. It's really simple and plain.

That's supposed to be it's almost magic power. The power of the ad, yeah, and also of the power of the Bible itself.

*Oddly, this is often held to be true of other scriptures as well. So, there's this idea that one can read any religious texts, without interpretation, get at the plain meaning, and then even be able to disagree with the official interpreters of that religion about what it really believes. Case in point: Islam. Obviously. This goes to show that literalism is understood by literalists as a hermanuetic; It's a theory about texts, and how they work, how they mean, and not specifically having anything to do with the Bible per se. It certainly doesn't involve reading the Bible in a fundamentally different way than other texts, even though that's often the complaint cited against literary theory being applied to the Bible, i.e., that it's being read like any other books.

**The hymn is referring to Christ's blood, not the Bible.

***Mostly evangelicals, though not exclusively. There are evangelicals who don't hold to Biblical literalism. There are non-evangelicals who do. Also, importantly, there's a distinction between Biblical literalism and the doctrine of Sola Scriptura, though the two are as often as not conflated, both by those opposing them and by those supporting.

****There is a function for church, in this theory, but that function is not supposed to be interpreting the Bible.

MAP illustrating the seige of ATLANTA, GA, by the U.S. Forces, under the Command of MAJ. GEN W.T. SHERMAN

2012-01-14T13:58:00.001+01:00

Published 1864. One of the many rare maps available for viewing online at the University of Georgia's Hargrett Library.

The New York Times had a piece yesterday, "News of the Wired," on how technology -- the telegraph, in particular, but also that was associated with the use of maps like this one -- affected the way the Civil War was fought, and, more importantly, transformed the way the war was understood.

I've rearranged parts of my living room / but time is hard to kill

2012-01-14T09:09:00.000+01:00

The Hasid kid is a genius!

2012-01-13T13:37:00.000+01:00

Fundamentalists aren't particularly known for producing geniuses. Except Hasidic Jews.

Isolationist, anti-intellectual religious traditions distrustful of "knowledge" -- science, famously, literary theory, often more acutely -- are common enough. Generally, these are portrayed as producing children who are backwards and weirdly cut-off from the world, something like the banjo boy in Deliverance. Except maybe more sad than freakish, or just kind of awkward and odd, like kids at "Jesus camp" or a Bible bee.

Of course (to steal a bunch of sociological terms from Peter Berger), this negative characterization of communities of "deviant knowledge" integrates them into the general, widely held understanding of normal knowledge and the "real" world, which is the world socially constructed so as to be taken for granted as natural by the "cognitive majority." The integration allows the alternative knowledge to exist without that being a problem for what is taken for granted, explaining the alternative away and re-establishing the dominant, accepted social reality.

In non-sociology of knowledge terms, the fact fundamentalist kids exist in a world that has it's own kind of knowledge freaks us out. Ridicule makes us feel OK again.

When isolated, anti-intellectual religious sects do produce smart, creative people, it's sometimes thought about and understood as having set them off-kilter in an interesting way. Ex.: Lester Bangs, who grew up Jehovah's Witness, or Brad Pitt, who was raised pentecostal. This being best case scenario for those raised fundamentalists. The implicit assumption is one of exception, I think.

Except with Hasids. For some reason. I'm not sure why.

I'm about half-way through Rebecca Goldstein's novel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. There's a genius Hasidic boy. He's discovered the prime number for himself at 6, along with squares, cubes, and so on. He calls numbers maloychim. Angels. The rebbe says,

"Who taught him? The angels! Min ha-shamoyim -- from the heavens. This is nothing. He likes to play with numbers. For him they're toys, and we let him play. He can learn a page of Torah or Talmud like lamdin -- like scholars -- three, four, five times his age."

In a book about religion and genius and the intellect, it appears the boy is going to turn out to be important, and maybe a metaphor for a main kind of religious experience.

He's also pretty immediately reminiscent of Danny Saunders, from Chaim Potok's The Chosen. Also Hasidic, also the son of the fundamentalist leader, the strict, authoritarian father who hopes his son will be his successor, a hope that's both bolstered and threatened by the preternatural intelligence. Saunders, rather than math, has a "photographic memory," an amazing ability to really read and make connections.

Potok's book is popular with some Christian homeschoolers. Which seems both obvious and strange.

I can think, though, of any equivalent work of fiction where a Christian fundamentalist child -- of the sort who might be homeschooled, who might, while homeschooled, read about genius boy growing up Hasidic -- is discovered to be a genius, though a genius who hasn't gone to school and has worked that genius out in, only, specifically, those ways available in the fundamentalist community.

Why not, though?

One of Goldstein's characters makes the point the genius Hasidic boy "belongs to a sect that thinks it reveres education, but their idea of education has nothing to do with real knowledge!"

That doesn't seem unique to fundamentalist Jews, though. Most (if not all) supposedly anti-intellectualist sects actually hold a certain sort of education in high, high esteem, holding it up as actually true knowledge, though it's "deviant" knowledge not accepted as real knowledge. Scripture memorization and recitation, for example. That's a lot of what makes them what they are, and could even be thought to be definitional of fundamentalists.

Why, then, is it the case that this character, the genius fundamentalist child, comes up in literature as a Hasid, but not as from one of the many sects of Christian or Islamic fundamentalism?

Or maybe it does and I've just not found it?

2012-01-12T10:56:00.001+01:00

Belief by means of disavowal Or:Belief about 'belief' in the days of twitter & Beyoncé's baby's name

2012-01-11T21:31:00.005+01:00

People are gullible, but gullible to the second degree. That is, gullible about how gullible other people are.

They are themselves incredulous. Or so imagine themselves to be. Skeptical and cynical. Except when it comes to the question of other people's credulity. People are actually very credulous about how credulous other people are.

Another way to put this: belief, when it happens today, especially when it just sort of bursts forth en masse, a mass phenomenon, seems to happen in third person statements -- "he believes," "they believe," "people believe," and "some people say."

Yet that is also belief: belief about belief, belief by means of disavowal.

Belief happens. But it's displaced onto others. We need belief, and strongly, strongly believe that believing is going on, but no one actually owns it. No one claims it. Except, of course, people do believe and proclaim their belief, but that belief is everywhere the belief that others believe.

The reflexivity makes it sound ridiculous, I know, but it's important if we want to get at what belief is often like vs. how belief is commonly conceived.

Slovoj Zizek explains it this way: "we don't now need to believe, we need another one ... [who is] supposed to believe."

That is, Zizek says, it has the structure of canned laughter: We can experience it, "it" being either laughter or belief, but only vicariously. We are once removed from the virtual, fictitious others actually laughing or believing, and this remove allows us, through that structured distance which alleviates the burden of the responsibility of committing belief or laughter, to have the experience of the same.

We get, in this way, the experience without the responsibility.

The way this structured distancing and disavowal works, though, belief is stronger, actually. One, in this way, can believe without doubting, because one believes without having to think about believing, or at any point actually declare oneself. It's less reflected upon. More credulous, more gullible. It's more what what we imagine belief to be than the believing we imagine to be attributable to other people actually even could be.

As Zizek has elsewhere said, "it's today we believe more than ever."

Literally today, and in the last few days, there's been an outburst, a gushing forth of this kind of believing "more than ever."

The subject, of all things, has been Jay-Z and Beyoncé's newborn baby daughter, Blue Ivy.

More specifically, there's been an outburst of credulity about credulity about Blue Ivy being Satan's daughter.

One finds, first, that there are people who believe that Christians believe this. Lilit Marcus, of Faith Goes Pop, reported on Jan. 9 that "a bunch of Christians on Twitter thought that the name was clearly a reference to Satanism." Today, the blogger returned to the question of Christian's credulity with another post, writing "A church in West End, NC ... has put up this sign claiming that lil’ Blue Ivy Carter is Satan." The post includes a picture of a church sign, which reads: "BEYONCE HAD HER BABY / SATAN IS ON EARTH." There was also a link to the source of the info, the gossip site TMZ.

BUT: that's not what TMZ says. The celebrity gossip site reports the church sign was vandalism. The North Carolina Baptist Church -- which does exist, at least enough to appear in Yellow Pages, although the church signs in the TMZ picture looks like one of those "make your own hilarious church sign" generator things -- didn't put up the message.

TMZ attributes actual belief to the vandals, not the church, though surely a prank should be thought of as a prank rather than a confessional statement.

The Faith Goes Pop writer either missed the update or misread it, and just accepted (credulously) that those crazy Christians down in North Carolina were true believers.

So far as I can find, the only Christian on record on the subject is Charisse Van Horn, a minister and free lance writer who took some time on Jan. 8 to debunk the belief that "Blue Ivy" spelled backwards, "Eulb Yvi," is Latin for "Lucifer's daughter."

Van Horn does not, herself, think there's anything to the "Internet rumor" "spreading like wildfire on twitter," but takes it seriously enough to answer seriously with a bit of Bible exegesis.

"The Bible makes no mention of Lucifer having a daughter," she writes. "There is also great controversy as to whether angels are capable of having sex. Since Lucifer is a fallen angel, he would fall under the category of an angel in terms of reproduction."

The comment thread off the article quickly descends into a debate about religion, with mutual accusations of naive gullibility, one side saying those who don't believe in God will believe in anything, and the other side saying believers are ridiculous to believe.

No one comes forward to claim the idea that Jay-Z and Beyoncé's daughter's name is backwards Latin in Satanic code.

Because no one believes that. Though everyone believes other people believe. But no one does -- there's no evidence, no source, no site of belief except this belief once removed, which is everywhere.

Even "on the internet," which these people write as if they weren't themselves on the internet, one can't actually find real, actual, first person belief that Blue Ivy is Eulb Yvi is Lucifer's daughter. There a million or more tweets referencing "Lucifer's daughter" in the last few days. I can't actually count them, but they go on for pages. There have been more than 10 in the last hour, a few of which have already been retweeted nearly 100 times.

And this is days after the baby was born, days after the rumor started.

In all this, though, belief, the first person kind we find so easy to believe in, is hard to find. One can look at days and days of twittering about "Lucifer's daughter," and what one finds is not naive, gullible statements of belief, but a lot of gullibility about other people's gullibility.

There are only three kinds of statements here:

The first, the most common, is the report. I.e., "people are saying." "People" always being generic, always "other people." Or it's phrased like, "There's a crazy theory," the theory being located "out there," somewhere, free floating without attribution. In none of these reports is it attributed to anyone, but neither is it owned. When there's a link, it's a link to the sites also reporting on gullible people. It's always "someone," but never actually anyone.

In most cases it's only implicit that the report is a report. They're framed and phrased as reports, though, not statements of belief. Explicitly or implicitly, the tweeting and retweeting about what people believe about Blue Ivy's name is done in journalistic terms: we report and you decide, or, "Jst to let u know!"

They're shared exactly in the spirit of "you won't believe this!", whether or not that's actually said.

Ironically (yes, that is the word) -- and this is also exactly my point -- that phrase, "you won't believe this!" is used, if you think about it, to mean that you actually will. "You won't believe this!" means that you will believe this. And it's more believe exactly because there's this disavowal of belief concealing the believing.

This is what's happening in this whole first category of tweets, the largest category by far. It's "you won't believe this!" and "I can't believe this!," though the "I" does and "you" will, without even being particularly skeptical about it, since the skeptical frame of disbelief actually allows for and elicits belief. I.e., "those crazy people, I can't believe how gullible they are."

The second most common category is the correction. That is, tweeting people who believe the reporters' believe, or anyway that the reporters are reporting about people who believe, and are now themselves only responding to other people's belief, calling bullshit. "Total bullshit!" "that shit cray!" "some people will believe anything ... smh" (shake my head).

A good-sized sub category of these are tweets with little Latin lessons, which is very strange in and of itself but beside the point.

The third category of tweets is this tiny fraction where there's some ambiguity. Maybe it's belief. Maybe there's some credulity. Someone being naive. Even in the cases of apparent suckers to the internet rumor, though, it's not just as simple as "I think this is true." Instead it's more like, "for a minute there I thought it was true," or the question, does anybody know if this thing I heard is true?

The true believer here is a fiction. A virtual reality. A hypothesized person to whom belief can be assumed to belong. The believer, the one who holds and confesses to the idea that Beyonce and Jay-Z's baby girl is the spawn of Satan, named the Latin phrase for Lucifer's daughter spelled (for some reason) backwards, is only imagined.

Even if you could roll this twitter flood back to person zero -- the one who started this, who thought this first, who tweeted a moment after the moment of Blue Ivy's birth -- you still wouldn't have the person who "really believers." That person too would be hypothesizing, or reporting a rumor, or making a joke.

The effect, however, is the same. It not necessary for anyone to actually believe, anymore than anyone actually has to laugh at the stupid sitcom of Zizek's example.

Virtual belief is enough to engender belief. To elicit belief without belief, which is, nevertheless, still an experience of believing. It's enough, for believing comes, actually, in the form of believing by means of disavowal of belief.

Because, look, despite appearances of skepticism, this is gushing credulity.

The skepticism itself is a form of naive believing, since in every case the skeptical statement assumes the belief of other people. I.e., once removed and thus safe belief about belief.

Look: Every internet writer knew -- just knew -- that there were people who thought this was true, even though they couldn't quite say who those people actually were. The twittering people all, universally, accepted without even a trace of skepticism that other people accept things without a trace of skepticism. It's exactly the same as how, when someone says "there's a sucker born every minute," everyone knows it's true, but no one ever identifies themselves as the sucker, which is exactly what makes it possible to sucker them.

The structure of disavowal and displacement is exactly such that it makes the disavowed and displaced thing possible, by hiding it.

This can even be seen just in the structure of the statements of skepticism. Statements that, while on one level are disavowals, so we say, e.g., "some people believe (but I don't)," are, in another way actually structured as statements of belief. The third person statements about other people also necessarily involve implied first person statements.

That is: "(I believe) some people believe but I don't."

This second-degree belief allows for and enables intense belief. Unquestioned belief, totally unsupported, hidden in the frame of skepticism.

People are gullible, but gullible specifically in the way they can read that phrase "people are gullible" and agree with it and imagine it not to be about them. In accepting that phrase in the third person: as "people," "other people," "people out there" but of course never, never "you," and certainly definitely not me. It's so easy to assent, and in that exactly prove the point about gullibility.

This idea about belief by disavowal sounds, I know, ridiculous and ridiculously complicated. I think, though, that it's complicated because of how simplistically we conceive of belief, and how systematically we hide our own believing even from ourselves, and how complicated that actually makes actually doing it in practice today.

No good Catholics

2012-01-10T23:43:00.002+01:00

There's been a lot of talk about Mormons in American politics, in the last year, and it seems there's always talk about evangelicals.

Catholics, not so much.

One would have been forgiven for thinking the question or questions of Catholics in American politics had been settled. Dealt with. Evangelicals' anti-Catholic bias ended with the coalition formed in opposition to abortion. Concerns that a Catholic politician would be a papal puppet were famously put to rest with John F. Kennedy's speech on the issue in 1960. Neither Democrats nor Republicans have problems supporting Catholics, and no one in recent memory has opposed a Catholic candidate on the grounds the candidate is Catholic.

No one seems to have a problem with Catholics in American politics.

Except other Catholics.

There is an on-going, low level, rumbling against Catholic candidates. A rumbling -- specifically -- against their Catholicism. Arguments and biases against these candidates on the grounds of their religion alone. But it's coming from other Catholics.

It's the argument that Catholic candidates should not be supported because they're not Catholic enough.

That they're not, in the parlance, good Catholics.

There have been questions about the Catholicism of Newt Gingrich, specifically about how he became Catholic, and how he's used his new-found faith, politically. There've been questions, too, from Catholic critics, about how his own life reflects on the Catholic ideals he's promoting politically.

The question being, as the Washington Post put it: What kind of Catholic is Newt? Which is another way of asking if he's really a good Catholic.

One can find such arguments being made more explicitly against Rick Santorum, i.e., that he's not a good Catholic, and there are specifically Catholic reasons not to vote for the Pennsylvania Catholic. Here it's more than just "questions." It's "The Catholic case against Rick Santorum."

That case, when you get into it, is that the Catholic Church has taken quite a few official positions on political issues that are significantly to the left of American conservatives. On torture, treatment of illegal aliens, income equality and poverty, workers' rights, the environment, etc., etc., Catholic Church hierarchy have taken official stances in stark contrast to Santorum's own positions.

Obviously this raises the question of what counts as an "official Catholic position," and how official it has to be before it's the only position allowed for orthodox Catholic in good standing with the church. Some seem to be under the impression that where the Church's statements about abortion and homosexuality are dogma, maybe even infallible, statements about economics or the death penalty are something more like opinions, about which Catholics of good conscience can disagree.

This is, of course, exactly reversed with Catholics on the other side of the American political divide. With the "bad" Catholics, the "cafeteria" Catholics of the left.

Kathleen Sebelius is the bête noire or some Catholic circles, and two American archbishops have said they would deny her communion because she opposed criminalizing abortion. Other prominent Catholics of the left -- Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, etc. -- have faced similar condemnations, and warnings about being barred from the Eucharist.

Sebelius, that is to say, has been opposed specifically because she's Catholic,the but only by other Catholics, because she's not the right kind of Catholic.

Every major Catholic figure in American politics right now seems to be divisive, but only to Catholics. Andrew Cuomo, for example, who fought for same-sex marriage in New York state, had a canon lawyer make the case he should be disciplined by the Church, but at the same time, he had the support of New York's Catholics, 62 percent to 22 percent. That seems pretty representative.

I take this to mean there's deep disagreement among American Catholics about what being Catholic means. Even when and where there's broad agreement, the agreement seems to be riven with disagreement: agreement on the Catholic commitment to life, for example, is division, on another level, about whether or not that means state-provided health care for poor children, or the state execution of convicted murderers.

There's disagreement, too, on the role the Catholic faith should play in political engagements. One could imagine Catholic politicians of the left or the right harking back to JFK's speech, when faced with this not-Catholic-enough critique, except JFK has been dragged into this now too, as Archbishop Charles Chaput, now of Philadelphia, has argued that Kennedy was wrong. And argued, more, that that speech was destructive, and hurt Catholics and hurt America.

Chaput said Kennedy "profoundly undermined the place not just of Catholics, but of all religious believers, in America’s public life and political conversation. Today, half a century later, we’re paying for the damage."

This would mean Kennedy -- once hailed as a Catholic hero -- wasn't a good Catholic either.

Or maybe we just have to say there's no agreement among American Catholics about what a good Catholic looks like, what a good Catholic does, what a good Catholic is committed to.

It might even be that there isn't such a thing, anymore, in America today. It's not clear to me that one can be a "good" Catholic in American politics now.

On the one hand, Catholicism, more than most religious organizations, has a hierarchy and a procedure that can explicitly spell-out what orthodoxy is. It can, in principle, declare things dogma. On the other hand, there's this deep, deep split, this on-going internal fight over the claim to being a good Catholic, and over what official positions are really official, and who speaks for the Church, and if who speaks for the Church always speaks for the Church, or only sometimes, and when is when. The Vatican has a portfolio of positions it has taken on public policies, but it's apparently impossible for any major American Catholic political figure to embrace all of them. So there's picking and choosing, cafeteria style.

It also doesn't seem possible, though -- though one would think it would be -- for there be a broad Catholic agreement that Catholics can disagree in good conscience, working out for themselves the best they can what their faith calls them to do in public life. Wherever one stands in politics as a Catholic, there's an argument against other Catholics on the grounds of their not being good Catholics, not really adhering to the teachings of the Church, and those same arguments are turned against you too.

Santorum and Sebelius. Gingrich and Cuomo. Marco Rubio and Joe Biden. There are good people who are Catholics, Catholics who are good politicians, but, it seems, no good Catholics.

The national conversation has been about Mormons and American politics, evangelicals and their vote, even atheists and Muslims and their relation to the American res publica. In this election, however, there's also a struggle going on about the role of Catholics. That debate, though, seems to be happening mostly just among Catholics themselves.

2012-01-08T20:19:00.001+01:00

Goodbye for now, America. Stay safe. Take care of yourself. And be OK.

2012-01-07T19:39:00.000+01:00

"What makes an honest photograph? What makes a truthful photograph? ... Photographs are neither true nor false. Talking about the truth of falsity of a photograph is nonsense talk. Truth or falsity is vested in language, how we use words with respect to the world, not photographs.

"I also have this view that all photographs are posed."

-- Errol Morris

Douglas Copland's Museum of the Rapture

2012-01-06T05:36:00.000+01:00

"Secularism" signifying nothing

2012-01-05T17:30:00.000+01:00

But who actually is a secularist? & what do they say that means? What do they say secularism -- that alleged ideology -- actually is?

Secularism is decried, bemoaned, & railed against daily. The Pope regularly names "secularism" as the enemy. American politicians on the right make it their business to regularly oppose themselves to secularism: which is creeping over America, replacing Christianity, responsible for all the problems in America (just to mention one GOP presidential nomination contender).

In all that, though, "secularism" seems to be a empty signifier, not actually referring to anything out there in the world.

As it's used, the word most often means an imagined enemy, an invisible cultural army of hypothesized people that no one has ever actually met.

I won't go so far as to say there are no secularists -- those who embrace and articulate and propagate and ideology of secularism -- but those who oppose secularism can't seem to actually name people who actually agree with the thing they're disagreeing with.

David J. Theroux, e.g., writes: "We live in an increasingly secularized world of massive and pervasive nation states in which traditional religion, especially Christianity, is ruled unwelcome and even a real danger on the basis of a purported history of intolerance and 'religious violence.'"

Who does this? Where is this ruling? Even if one just intuitively agrees with Theroux, recognize it's intuitive. There's no support for this, no evidence. As if it's something everyone just knows.

He continues:

"This is found in most all 'public' domains, including the institutions of education, business, government, welfare, transportation, parks and recreation, science, art, foreign affairs, economics, entertainment, and the media. A secularized public square policed by government is viewed as providing a neutral, rational, free, and safe domain that keeps the 'irrational' forces of religion from creating conflict and darkness. And we are told that real progress requires expanding this domain by pushing religion ever backward into remote corners of society where it has little or no influence. In short, modern America has become a secular theocracy with a civic religion of national politics (nationalism) occupying the public realm in which government has replaced God."

There are, by all appearances, no people involved in this take over, this tyranny of "secular theocracy." This is an entirely free-floating enemy, which one can "recognize" or not, or, better, imagine one recognizes by responding with an emotional identification or at least an assent to the matter of sides, without having to actually ever recognized in terms of people, details, facts or anything "out there," in the world.

One can say "amen," as Jordan J. Ballor essentially does, without actually having to identify any examples actual secularism.

"Secularization" means something, and can be named, measured, explained, articulated. One can believe in it, actually, without having to take a position on it's value. One can say it happens and it's bad, or that it's good and we should be thankful for it, or that it's neutral. "Secularization," as a process, as something that happens in certain societies, actually refers to something.

"Secularism," though, the ideology, seems to be basically a bit of rhetoric, a fantasy, a shadow monster under the bed.

Books read in 2011

2012-01-03T18:47:00.000+01:00

1 Nephilim, by L.A. Marzulli
2 The Last Battle, by CS Lewis
3 The Visitation, by Frank Peretti
4 The Desecularization of the World, ed. by Peter Berger
5 The Power of the Dog, by Don Winslow
6 Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, Vol. 1, by Ulysses S. Grant
7 The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, by Mark A. Noll
8 The Pale King, by David Foster Wallace
9 Rapture Culture, by Amy Johnson Frykholm
10 Rapture Ready! by Daniel Radosh

11 The Shunning, by Beverly Lewis
12 Plain Promise, by Beth Wiseman
13 Desiring God, by John Piper
14 Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
15 Young, Restless, Reformed, by Collin Hansen
16 Crime, by Ferdinand von Schirach
17 Introducing American Religion, by Charles H. Lippy
18 A Cousin's Promise, by Wanda E. Brunstetter
19 American Religion History Documentary Reader
20 Religion and the Marketplace Documentary Reader
21 A Cousin's Prayer, by Wanda E. Brunstetter
22 World of Perception, by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
23 The Sunset Limited, by Cormac McCarthy
24 A Cousin's Challenge, by Wanda E. Brunstetter
25 Every Time I Feel the Spirit, by Timothy J. Nelson
26 Salvation on Sand Mountain, by Dennis Covington
27 Point Omega, by Don DeLillo
28 A Secular Age, by Charles Taylor
29 Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James
30 The Outsider, by Ann H. Gabhart
31 The Amish in the American Imagination, by David Weaver-Zercher
32 Savages, by Don Winslow
33 Sweet Heaven When I Die, by Jeff Sharlet
34 The Sacred Canopy, by Peter Berger
35 Paradise Valley, by Dale Cramer
36 Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America, by Barry Hankins
37 The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, by Philip K. Dick
38 The Good News We Almost Forgot, by Kevin DeYoung
39 Left Behind, by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins
40 The Ezekiel Option, by Joel Rosenberg
41 Pluralism, by Peter Lassman
42 Introducing Marxism, by Rupert Woodfin and Oscar Zarate
43 Nephilim, by L.A. Marzulli
44 Introducing Capitalism, by Dan Cryan, Sharron Shatil and Piero
45 Secularization: In Defense of an Unfashionable Theory, by Steve Bruce
46 Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, by David Lipsky
47 Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, by Walter Mosely
48 The Interpretation of Culture, by Clifford Geertz

2012-01-03T18:27:00.002+01:00

2012-01-02T01:41:00.000+01:00

2011-12-31T20:39:00.002+01:00

2011-12-30T07:46:00.002+01:00

A list of lists

2011-12-29T18:31:00.000+01:00

1 best-selling book of the year
1 best-selling religious book of the year
3 best books on the King James Bible, that "book of books," in 2011
5 best historical fiction of the year
5 ways poets responded to the multitude in American poetry
5 numbers that define the year in book publishing
7 mega news stories of the year, by coverage
7 unforgetable characters from this year's books
8 longreads of the year
8 types of crime that declined in 2011
10 top fake Time Magazine covers of 2011
10 fastest rising searches on Google for the year
10 top Bible translations sold before Christmas
10 worst predictions of the year
10 top science stories of the year
11 photography books
11 best history books
11 top religion news stories
11 top Pagan/Wiccan news stories of the year
11 best science books
11 great new musicians
12 top Christian news stories of the year
13 best coffee table books of the year
14 best books read by a Calvinist pastor
16 not particularly famous but nevertheless interesting people who died this last year
16 space pictures
17 & 23 best and worst film titles of 2011
18 best Jewish children's books of 2011
20 newsmakers of the year
23 works of poetry that "expanded, deepened and/or transformed" Ron Silliman's reading
25 Christian fiction books reviewed by the SF Christian Fiction Examiner
25 albums of the year, according to NPR listeners
32 musicians who died this last year
41 best works on Mormon history in 2011
45 powerful pictures
54 top 10 lists from Time Magazine
100 top music tracks
105 political people who died in 2011
202 writers who died in 2011
46,000 news stories of the year, analyzed by Pew

2011-12-29T03:41:00.000+01:00

2011-12-25T14:18:00.000+01:00

Three scenes @ at a Christmas Eve bookstore

2011-12-24T21:05:00.000+01:00

A. Man: What about Shakespeare?
Woman: Shakespeare's just soooooo Shakespeare.
Man: I guess that's true.

B. (Employee walks up to browsing woman).
Employee: What was that program you were talking about?
Woman: The program?
Employee: That you were talking about.
Woman: What was I ... when?
Employee: You were talking about the program you watched.
Woman: Um.
Employee: With Clinton?
Woman: I don't ...
Employee: You know what? I don't think you're the person I was thinking you were.
(Employee walks away).

C. Woman (holding Marcus Aurelius): Right?
Man: I don't ... what was the ... for, why?
Woman: Because Obama liked the Lincoln book and Lincoln in the book was reading the Marcus Aurelius. And John likes Obama, so.

2011-12-24T14:57:00.002+01:00

2011-12-24T14:55:00.001+01:00

After a few days, it's like my mind's been taken hostage by America & I can only bleat out quivery Ginsberg questions

2011-12-23T16:48:00.029+01:00

Why are your libraries full of tears?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
Where are we going, Walt Whitman?
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

(Your machinery is too much for me. / You made me want to be a saint.)

America?

2011-12-22T16:44:00.001+01:00

That the powers of hell may vanish

2011-12-21T21:26:00.001+01:00

Christmas angst is here again

2011-12-20T15:19:00.000+01:00

I have reservations about Christmas.

The culture-wide promotion of a fantasy coupled with the intense pressure to achieve that perfection, primarily through consumption seems problematic to me. In my time as a crime reporter, I saw enough Christmas-related* suicides, homicides and robberies to make me wonder if, in aggregate, the holiday wasn't a net negative for America.

I'm aware this makes me sound Grinch-y and Scrooge-ish. The fact there's enough social pressure to feel a certain way this time year that we have two names to call people who feel wrong is another reason I have reservations. Are we OK with the "spirit of the season" being so oppressive?

That's not to say I don't enjoy Christmas. There are aspects of it I love. I enjoy seeing family, and trees lit up in windows, and the moments kids start conspiring to give presents. I love some Christmas movies**, your muppets, your Charlie Browns, your It's A Wonderful Lifes.There are some really amazing fantastic hymns that go with Christmas. O Come, O Come Emmanuel. Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence. You can't sing those in June. I enjoy Christmas Eve church services. Some of the worst very worst years I've had as an adult -- bad Christmases -- still I stood in the back of some strange Christmas Eve service and found it refreshing, and filling, and good.

I like the religious aspects of the holiday. Though I guess that's not surprising.

The religious parts of Christmas aren't immune from anxiety either, though. They have their own. What you hear, in a lot of religious circles, this time of year, is a lot about "remembering the reason" and not letting Christmas crush you and concerns about commercialization. There's a very public, TV-fostered fight about "keeping Christ in Christmas," of course, but there's also, in the lives of a lot of Christians, a deep concern that Christ has been replaced by Christmas.

That Christianity has been hijacked by something alien.

"Is Christmas really Christian?" people ask. Or, more specifically, "Isn't this all really, deep down, just really ... Pagan?"

Trees in particular seem to provoke this.

This holiday spirit of worry.

The trees make Christians ask if they aren't, somehow, celebrating Paganism, and, also, somehow make Pagans ask exactly the same question in reverse. Is it really Pagan to have a ~~Christmas~~ holiday tree? Maybe there's a special prayer to emphasize the Paganness of what looks, to all the world, like a Christian tradition?

The angst, it turns out, is universal. The anxiety, ecumenical.

The season is a season of worry and the fantasy of perfection that has to be forced and the question repeated: is this what we're looking for? Is this what we're looking for? Is this right? Does it feel right? Is it this - this? - this? Would I even recognize the real thing, if I heard it?

*This would be one case where "holiday" would not work in American society as a replacement for the word "Christmas." No out-work-father with no criminal record ever borrowed his brother-in-law's gun and drove down to the neighborhood Waffle House to stick it up at 2 a.m., taking off with about $200 and fleeing police through a residential neighborhood only to get trapped at a road block and sprint away on foot through bushes and backyards, and then, when tackled and cuffed and put in the back of a police car and read his rights, start crying, saying he just wanted to feel like a man and buy his kids some f***ing toys and asking if he couldn't go back to the Waffle House before they booked him into the jail so he could apologize for scaring everyone because of holiday presents.

**Obviously, the Christmas movie quote I'm living by here is from Charlie Brown: "Charlie Brown, you're the only person I know who can take a wonderful season like Christmas and turn it into a problem."

2011-12-20T01:35:00.000+01:00


From Jesus Hates Zombies, by Stephen Lindsay

From Evil Eyes, by Jack Chick

Bet you're glad it's over, they'll say by way of welcome home

2011-12-18T15:09:00.000+01:00

The soldier wears street clothes on the last day of the war.

In the line into America, a long long line through Atlanta's Homeland Security and Customs, you wouldn't even know the soldiers were soldiers except for the crewcuts and the backpacks, which are Army backpacks in that pixelated camo color scheme separating this century's wars from the ones before.

They're kids in sneakers and T-shirts, except for the backpacks.

Nine years on, and it's the last day. "Again," but maybe for real this time. And they're in line. It's a week before Christmas, though there are no signs of any holiday in the in-take at Homeland Security, no signs of any season or time of day or year, no signs of celebration or goodwill towards men or the end of a war that's gone on, now, basically half the lives of these kids coming home.

The big sign in front: No cameras or videos! The TV is introducing America, with a bit on baseball, a bit on the Civil Rights Movement memorials you could go see, a bit on diversity and clips of different people saying hello and "Welcome to America."

"Where you coming from?" the agent says.

"Iraq," says the kid with the backpack. "Flew from Frankfurt."

"Welcome home son," the agent says, and he speaks as if all the sudden of behalf of America, though really he actually does. "Glad you're back. Bet you're glad you're back, safe and home and family, holidays. Not in Iraq anymore."

"Sure," says the soldier, who's 18 maybe, 19 at the most. "Yeah," he says.

"But it was exciting over there though."

Rest in peace Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-16T09:48:00.001+01:00

Obits: Vanity Fair, NPR, NY Times, Christianity Today.

Hitchens last work before he died: "So far, I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, and to stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable decline. I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do in slower motion. It is our common fate. In either case, though, one can dispense with facile maxims that don’t live up to their apparent billing."

American Religion midterm take-home exam

2011-12-15T10:33:00.000+01:00

Choose TWO of the following questions, and write a short essay answering each:

1. How does the religious experimentation, as seen in such diverse movements as the “new measures” of Charles G. Finney and the “complex marriage” of the Oneida Community, relate to the political ideas of the new American republic?

2. What does the Ghost Dance tell us about Native American relationships to Christianity in the late 19th century?

3. How did the Puritan conception of corporate identity and the idea that God judges people as groups shape response to (a) Roger Williams or (b) Anne Hutchinson?

4. Frederick Douglass says there are two kinds of Christianity. What are they, and how does he argue for the one type and against the other?

5. Frances Willard, a temperance activist, said “there is no place too good for a woman to occupy.” How did women’s roles in religious organizations affect the reform movements of the post-Civil War period, and how did those roles change during that period?

The essay should be succinct and answer the question, but also thorough, sounding out (if not entirely dealing with) the depth of the issue. Don’t be afraid of complication. The purpose of this exam is not to get you to simply regurgitate correct, factual information, but to give you a chance and the space to think about American religious history and the interpretations of that correct, factual information. Good and thorough thinking is hard to do, and so the purpose of these questions is to provoke you to examine and reflect, giving you the space to explore the sometimes tangled relationships in history, as well as the cultural contexts and consequences of religious ideas. I strongly believe that the value of assignments such as this is exactly the extent to which you engage with the difficult work of thinking. This is an opportunity with a grade attached.

Roughly 500 to 700 words per essay should be adequate. You must use Charles Lippy’s Introducing American Religion as a source, as well as at least one original document. Two would be better. Not using the texts in your short essay will result in a failing grade. You may also consult any of your class notes, consult with your fellow students, ask me questions, or refer to the many, many good sources listed on the bibliography at the class website. The encyclopedias, dictionaries and atlas listed there offer a great starting point.

For questions about late assignments, the penalties for plagiarism, and the percentage of the final grade based on this mid-term, please consult the class syllabus.

Due: December 22, at 4 p.m., via e-mail: dsilliman@hca.uni-heidelberg.

2011-12-15T00:10:00.002+01:00

What do you mean, 'respecting an establishment of religion'?

2011-12-14T09:16:00.000+01:00

Most positions on the First Amendment's Establishment Clause are only intuitive. People have a vague sense of what "respecting an establishment of religion" feels like, rather than a worked-out standard or principle that can be applied.

There's one conservative interpretation of that phrase that's quite clearly articulated, though. It's a very narrow definition. It has the advantage of being clear, and it also has a sense of symmetry, so that the one clause about Establishments is exactly, equally balanced with the other religion-related clause of the amendment, "prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

Kelly Boggs, a Louisiana Baptist and the editor of the Baptist Message, stated this succinct and strict reading this way: "The government cannot enact a law that says you must give allegiance to a specific religion. Neither can the state pass legislation that says you can't pursue a particular religion. That's it."

That is to say, the one clause bars the government from forbidding belief, the other forbids forcing it.

Supreme Court Justice Clarance Thomas takes this same position. He recently wrote that "the Clause only prohibits 'actual legal coercion.'"*

There are (to put it mildly) some problems with this.

As Boggs works out this position, and applies this narrow definition of "respecting an establishment" to the case of a nativity displayed on government property in Texas, governments can be as religious as they want, as long as they don't demand or disallow any religious ascriptions.

So: a county can display Jesus as infant or man, as long as it doesn't mean one has to believe in Jesus. Legislative sessions can be begun with sectarian prayers, so long as no one is forced to pray. Public schools could teach religious doctrines as truth up to the point that students are made to confess those truths. A government could even declare an "official religion," especially, one would think, if it were official in the sense of being the foundational moral code for that government and it's legal system, so long as people are free to join or not join that official religion as they see fit.

So: an establishment of religion is a governmentally respected establishment of religion only when there is force involved.

As it stands, a government-funded, sponsored and authorized declaration of the truth of the Incarnation does not violate the Establishment Clause, since "Those who are offended by the public displays of nativity scenes are welcome to ... just ignore them."

If this interpretation of the Establishment Clause is going to hold any water, we have to imagine it, first, as being a non-Christian religion that's established but not "respected" in this sense of requiring and forcing belief.

Would Boggs, would Thomas, would we be OK with a city or county or state declaring itself Hindu?

Say the hypothetical government celebrated Hindu holidays, opened all sessions with Hindu prayers, used public space and/or funds to make Hindu declarations. One would still be free not to be a Hindu and free to be something else, but the government itself would be understood to be Hindu, and if one didn't like it, tough. Ignore it.

Most likely, Boggs and others holding to this interpretation of the First Amendment would object to this on the same grounds that conservative Germans use to restrict the freedoms of adherents to minority religions such as Jehovah's Witnesses and Muslims, that of leitkultur, i.e., "dominant culture," "head culture," or, more loosely, "traditional culture." One can even imagine the Confederate-symbol-supporting slogan re-purposed from "heritage, not hate," to "heritage, not faith" (which has the odd side effect of emptying that faith of any religious content, but never mind).

Regardless, the question of the thought experiment is still valid. Would that be OK? Would that Hindu town or county being officially and practically Hindu but just not requiring Hinduism of any of its residents be an acceptable set-up, not violating the First Amendment.

I doubt it.

A second, simpler objection, is that, even if one accepts this narrow version of what "respecting an establishment of religion" means, aren't taxes a kind of force? Isn't one, when paying the sales, property or payroll taxes that go the space used for a creche or a cross or another religious declaration, the salaries of the public officials hosting prayers or even themselves praying, or any other act of religion in government, being forced to support it?

One can of course look away from the nativity scene on the courthouse lawn, but one can't opt out of paying the taxes that make that nativity scene possible. Not without risking prison, anyway.

Boggs and Thomas' position on this is not clear to me. Boggs approvingly quotes the late Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, who wrote, "No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions," but doesn't make the connection from that objection to the objection to a publicly-displayed nativity scene.

A third objection, a third problem, the most basic one, actually, is that this interpretation seems like a very weird interpretation of the language of the Bill of Rights. It requires some very elaborate syntactical twists to take "respecting an establishment of religion" to mean forcing one to affirm or assent or ascribe to a religion.

There's really no context, now or historically, where that's what "respecting" means. The interpretation only really makes sense, it seems, if one assumes a necessary symmetry between "prohibiting the exercise" and "respecting." But that's a strain and a stretch.

While the interpretation is nice and clear, and strict and narrow, and would make legal application pretty simple, since it's rather simple to decide if belief has been forced or not, it seems one would have to stomp and stamp on the actual language of the Establishment Clause to make it fit the interpretation that allows for governments to promote and proclaim Christianity.

*Thomas even further restricts this by saying the amendment still only applies to the federal government, despite the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause so that states can at least in principle, if they want, make laws criminalizing unbelief and/or belief or beliefs. That, however, is another argument.

Thesis: people tend to think experimental literature is a lot stranger & newer than it really actually is

2011-12-12T19:52:00.009+01:00

One of these pictures is of Jonathan Safron Foer's experimental fiction, Tree of Codes, published last year. The other is the Thomas Jefferson Bible, the cut-and-paste work of deism completed circa 1820.

2011-12-12T16:59:00.001+01:00

"Some critics of the secularization paradigm misrepresent it by elevating science to a central position .... A zero-sun notion of knowledge, with rational thought and science conquering territory from superstition, was carried into early sociology by Aguste Comte and Karl Marx among others, but is not part of the modern secularization paradigm. We recognize that modern people are quite capable of believing nonsense and hence that the decreasing plausibility of any body of ideas cannot be explained by the presence of some (to us) more plausible ones. The crucial connections are more subtle and complex than those implied in a science-versus-religion battle and rest on nebulous consequences of assumptions about the orderliness of the world and our mastery over it."

-- Steve Bruce, Secularization

The possible political positions for Evangelicals

2011-12-12T12:46:00.000+01:00

Every election season, across the United States, Evangelical churches display and distribute non-partisan voter guides. Not all Evangelical churches, of course. But a lot of them. Enough.

The critique of such "voter education" efforts is typically that they're not really non-partisan, but rather political efforts passing under the tax-exempt guise of non-partisanship.

The Family Research Council's voter scorecard, e.g., claims to merely be "Examining the Pro-Family Voting Record of your Member of Congress," but rates all the Republican representatives of Georgia (to pick the state where I vote) at 90% or more, while all but one of the Democrats come in at only 10%. The ranking is based only on whether the representative voted for or against what the FRC was lobbying for or against, never noting possible conflicts or complications, or possible alternative reasons for those votes besides being simply pro- or anti-family. The Christian Coalition's presidential voter guide from 2008 never makes an explicit endorsements, but also avoids all the issues where politically conservative Christians might have felt uncomfortable with John McCain, overstates the differences between McCain and Barack Obama, actually misstates a number of positions, and dramatically oversimplifies issues in the way they're framed. Vision America -- a less known group in the same vein -- distributed a flyer last year to "patriotic pastors," which, according to the disclaimer on the flyer, was "intended to help voters make an informed decision." To do so, the flyer ranked "All Republicans" as "Excellent," "All Democrats" as "Poor," and included a single, bold bar-graph depicting the difference.

These efforts are not apolitical. But, arguing that they are political misses the primary affect of such efforts.

The voter guides and other such materials need to be understood as arguments.

This is an argument within Evangelicalism about plausible, available public positions Christians can take with regard to politics.

Most Evangelicals, when you talk to them, are more or less not political. For most, politics is not a central issue, not central to their understandings of their lives and their daily activities, or to their faith. Generally they're uncomfortable with politics, and find it distasteful. Sometimes this is in the manner described by Mathew Sutton (and Thomas Frank) as standing distrust of government, and sometimes the distaste is expressed as disappointment and dislike for the tone of contemporary political discourse. These are the people for whom George W. Bush's promise to be a "uniter, not a divider," and to "restore honor and dignity to the White House" meant something. While there's a minority that's hard core, most Evangelicals are just not that into politics.

That's why these efforts exist in the first place. If one takes voting guides as representative, they make no sense, as the voting guides wouldn't be necessary. If this were just how Evangelicals, en mass, saw the world, there would be no need to produce and pass out such "voter information." The assumption of these documents is that Evangelicals don't know or don't care about such things. Without that assumption, there wouldn't be any point to them.

Their whole purpose, their function is to move Evangelicals to political action.

The argument of these efforts is that a Christian must be politically engaged. And that, further, there's only one specific way to do that.

This, actually, is the affect of these voter guides being non-partisan. While, certainly, they're non-partisan (to the extent that they are) so as to avoid possible tax issues and exempt status violations, what happens is they present the politics and issues of the Religious Right as the normalized, generally accepted, simply Christian position.

This has meant, practically, that in many Evangelical churches in America, one can present oneself as a conservative, or as not interested in politics.

Those are the socially accepted options.

Anything else is considered problematic, at best, and is often taking to be a kind of rebellion and acting-out. Certain political positions have been precluded.

One precluded position is liberal, obviously, but it also gets more complicated than that.

It's unacceptable or at least very difficult in most of these churches to take a traditional anabaptist position of complete separation from politics. There's lots of social resistance making it hard to hold the position that one's identity in Christ necessarily is incompatible with a nationalist identity, that citizenship in heaven means one is not an American citizen. Even just being critical of American flags displayed in the fronts of churches is often viewed as being strangely aggressive, needlessly controversial.

Third way positions, likewise, such as libertarianism as held by some Evangelicals, and the sort of New Left politics popular with some Southern Baptists and others who would self-describe as Born Again, are considered quite alien. Even if they accept as the goal the same end as the Religious Right, the alternative means are considered so beyond the pale as to not even merit consideration. A libertarian who agrees with the FRC et al position about the importance of families, e.g., but argues that the government shouldn't have anything at all to do with defining marriage is unlikely to get a hearing. An Evangelical who thinks Clinton-esque reformed welfare that retains people and gets them jobs and that that is good for families is also probably going to have that "pro-family" argument dismissed out of hand in most Evangelical churches.

This is the affect of the political efforts that are presented as non-partisan in Evangelical churches. This is what the voter guides and education efforts do: they make certain things, positions and issues and frames seem normal, and make others invisible.

They make it so certain positions are felt to be implausible, unnatural, and strange, establishing a social milieu where one political orientation and only one political orientation can be taken for granted.

It's in this context that reports of "new Evangelicals," so called, and the "emergence of 'a new kind of Christian social conscience'" concerned about social justice issues and leaning leftward should be understood.

Pretty much, with every major election in the United States in recent history, there are reports of a "new movement" of left-leaning Evangelicals. Without fail, there are one or two data points, reports of Evangelicals who are not voting Republican, and an extrapolation that "something new" is going on. There's a story told, without fail, about younger born-again Christians who, while still pro-life, etc., also think their faith makes other political issues, such as war, poverty and the environment, of real concern.

One hears, for example, as Marcia Pally wrote in the New York Times last week, that

"A sizable portion of evangelicals have left the right, so to speak, in what the theologian Scot McKnight called 'the biggest change in the evangelical movement,' nothing less than the emergence of 'a new kind of Christian social conscience.' These new evangelicals focus on economic justice, environmental protection and immigration reform — not exactly Republican strong points."

Pally's piece is actually pretty good. She does include a bit of the history of Evangelical political action in America, and talks about how, for example, financial issues were once really important to Evangelicals, taking a central place, even, in the first presidential campaign of a Christian fundamentalist. She mentions that about a quarter of voters who self-identified as Evangelicals voted for Barack Obama in 2008, and that some of Bush's policies divided his Christian base.

Framing this as a movement and understanding this as a kind of counter-force or emerging opposite to the religious right misses the more essential and more subtle conflict. The issue at stake here is not what kinds of politics an Evangelical should have, but what kinds of politics an Evangelical can have.

It's about plausible positions that can be expressions and outworkings of this faith.

As Pally says, "where once there was the appearance of an evangelical movement that sang out in one voice, there is now a robust polyphony." This probably overstates the way it is in most Evangelical churches today, taking as fait accompli exactly what is being struggled over. But the point is, it's the possible of polyphony that's the matter of contention.

The argument coming from what gets called sometimes the Religious Left is not -- decidedly not -- about forming a counter-movement to the Religious Right. It's not about being a movement. It's not an argument about the Christian position on this issue, that issue of the other.

It's an argument for the plurality of Evangelical Christian values, and the diversity of possible ways those concerns can legitimately be engaged.

Likewise, the argument from what's left of the Religious Right is about politicizing Evangelicals, but, more than that, it's about dramatically limiting the ways in which good Christians can engage with social issues, precluding certain issues from consideration and concern, and ruling out certain certain sorts of responses to the surrounding society.

The choice Evangelicals face and are facing is consistently misrepresented as between left and right, where really it's about uniformity and creative diversity.

2011-12-10T10:16:00.002+01:00

awful things by Miles Mattix

2011-12-09T17:52:00.002+01:00

Church Name™

2011-12-09T16:08:00.001+01:00

I once knew of a small, conservative Anglican church called St. John the Baptist.

That's not quite accurate.

It was named St. John the Baptist.

The congregants, however, just called it "St. John's."

This frustrated the priest, who thought the name was special. He really wanted that full name. He tried -- unsuccessfully, if I recall correctly -- to get the parishioners to say "St. John the Baptist." Exasperated, the priest once complained, "they just want to be like everyone else."

Church names, for the most part, are not particularly distinct. There's a grammar to church names. There are very standardized conventions. While there are a range of styles, and different types of churches have different naming conventions (so one almost never sees a First Pentecostal Church, nor a Lakeside Catholic Church, nor a Presbyterian House of Prayer), there's really not a lot of variety with church names. It'd be hard, I think, in most towns in America, to find a church with really strange, really unusual, make-you-look-twice name.

And people are fine with this.

If they weren't, there would sure be a lot fewer Second Presbyterian Churches, not to mention First Presbyterian Churches.

There'd be a lot fewer Family Bible Churches.

Not so many St. John's.

To me, this is what makes the discussion about trademarking church names and logos so weird.

Christianity Today has five experts defending the idea of church name trademarks in the Dec. issue. All of them argue the trademark is a way to protect the name and logo of the church.

The first question is, protect it from what?

From misuse, apparently. If you don't have a trademark protecting your church name, "others will use it and devalue what the church has put into it," "misrepresent it accidentally or misuse it intentionally," "misusing its good name and reputation."

This expert advice makes it seem like such name misuse is going on all the time. Like it's a real problem. That seems pretty far fetched, though. I'd like to see some examples of this in practice. One, because I just don't believe it. Two, it seems so absurd, I'd like a little information on what "misuse" might actually mean. Are people accidentally going to church only to realize, half way through or something, that it's the wrong Hope Chapel?

The context for Christianity Today's interest isn't actually a horrible abuse of a name, either. What happened was one Mars Hill Church had their lawyers send a cease-and-desist letter to another Mars Hill Church, demanding, among other things, that they change their name or else. The one church has since backed down from that rather aggressive move. The official comment was, "oh yeah, maybe that wasn't a good idea." The other church has agreed to do a logo re-design, and all is well and good with the Mars Hills (as it is, also, one would assume, with the other megachurch of that name, and all the churches with that same name in 19 other states).

The first Mars Hill's reaction in this situation did more to color it's reputation than any similar-looking logo could have done.

The second question is, protect the name for who?

It really doesn't seem like people particularly want unique church names. Except in just a few cases, such as the Church of God, people don't even seem particularly confused or concerned about confusion.

If the trademark isn't protecting the name for the people, though, then what?

Well: for the money-making potential of the "brand," apparently.

As the experts in Christianity Today say, "Churches are businesses too ... they have a responsibility to operate and serve in responsible business ways;" "Trademarks protect a name or a logo or a slogan from being copied by other people for use with similar goods or services;" it "is good stewardship of a church's assets. It allows the church to secure their marketing and secure the usage of that trademark."

It requires a particular conception of a church to think trademarking a church name is a good idea. Much less important. In the end, it may well turn out the "™" at the end of Church Name™ is the most telling part of a church's name.

Searching for a narrative for Eastern Orthodox in America

2011-12-08T16:06:00.000+01:00

Watch American Religious Studies and American Religious History for even a little while, and you'll see a developing, evolving way of talking about different groups. Go back -- not too far, even -- and one finds almost all the attention given to denominational organizations, and everything framed in terms of continuity or discontinuity with Boston Puritanism.

It's not like that anymore.

Just in recent years, the account of Islam in America is growing and changing. It's now de riguer to note that the first Muslims came to America with the importation of slaves from Africa. Added to that is a new emphasis on the various ways Islam has come to the US: with the slaves, emerging out of the 20th century African American community, with immigrants from South East Asia, with immigrants from the Middle East, etc.

A similar turn has happened in accounts of immigrants in general. Talk about Judaism, talk about Catholicism, and you have to talk about immigrant communities. One of the results of this has been to break up the homogenity of these religious identities. One looks today, for example, at Catholics, plural, focusing on the practices and behaviours of lay Catholics, the way religion functioned in their lives and in their sense of themselves, rather than focusing on Catholicism as an abstraction.

One blank spot, right now, however, is the Eastern Orthodox in America.

This blank spot kind of gets poked at, but there doesn't seem to be a standard way to talk about this religion and this religious experience yet.

Part of this may be the numbers. Pew puts all the Orthodox Christians in America today at about .6%. Muslims also come in at about .6%, though, Orthodox Jews are half that, and Buddhists and Jehovah's Witnesses are only slightly larger, with .7%. All those groups have more established narratives, it seems to me.

When the Eastern Orthodox are talked about, it's often with this very general rubric of "immigrant," without any specifics as to how their experiences and histories were different, if at all, from other immigrant groups.

Charles Lippy, in his brief Introducing American Religions gives two paragraphs to the "wave" of Eastern Orthodox Christians who came in the years between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War I, "Adding to diversity." "Adding to diversity" is Lippy's thing, so by the time one is 100, 150 pages into his book, saying that this is what the Orthodox did is only slightly more enlightening than "they existed."

Most of his two paragraphs are dedicated to noting the countries the different groups came from, as well as the economic draws that brought them to where they ended up.

This is symptematic, more than a problem specific to Lippy. It seems like there's not really a story about the Orthodox that anyone knows. Where, with Jews in America, one talks about the Hassids, or Reform Judaism and Isaac Mayer Wise, with the Orthodox Christians, there's no standard story, no genrally know starting points, public moments or figures.

The second volume of Edwin Gaustad and Mark Noll's anthology, A Documentary History of Religion in America since 1877 has the start of a story, and focuses on one very public moment in the Orthodox's American history. They give 6 1/2 pages to Russian Orthodoxy in Alaska. This is a major improvement, though obviously still really limited. They include two documents, one Father John Veniaminov's "The Condition of the Orthodox Church in Russian America," the other a report on religion in the Russian American colonies and the Russian American Company, which was published in Overland Monthly in 1895. Both documents are really interesting -- Veniaminov, for example, writes that at first the Aleuts only believed in and prayed to "an unknown God" about whom they knew little -- but still only offer the tiniest sketch.

One would even be forgiven for thinking the Orthodox churches in America died out with "Russian America," or, that if it do still exist, it's in the form of left overs. In one editorial notes, Gaustad and Noll write "Russian Orthodoxy continued to be a major religious force in Alaska through the nineteenth century," and "Russian Orthodoxy was planted with sufficient nurture to endure to the present day."

Oddly, these are both statements sort of directed towards establishing the importance of the Orthodox in America. But kind of do the opposite.

I'm not knocking Gaustad and Noll. It's actually a really excellent anthology. The point is not that they somehow failed, but that, really, there's at best only a really limited and sketchy narrative of Eastern Orthdox Christians in America.

There's basically nothing, it seems, when it comes to contemporary times.

There's just sort of not a narrative here, and certainly not one that fits into any larger, broader narrative about religion in America. There's precious little actually on this subject (exceptions: John H. Erickson's Orthodox Christians in America; Alexei D. Krindatch's work, including "Orthodox (Eastern Christian) Churches in the United States at the Beginning of a New Millennium: Questions of Nature, Identity, and Mission").

There should be, though. The more recent history of Eastern Orthodoxy in America is particularly interesting, I think (and not just because a number of good friends of mine are a part of it) and yet it seems basically absent from scholarly work on religious culture and recent history. The evangelical press, by contrast, has paid attention to and noted the movement of evangelicals converting to Eastern Orthodoxy since at least the '80s. Yet there's no standing, standard account of these conversions, and why (in aggregate) they happened, and what that says about American religion at the turn of the 21st century, and what that says about American culture in general.

Instead of a good account that takes this movement seriously (while not, as is sometimes the wont of the converts themselves, over-estimating it as seismic and history-altering), what one gets is along these lines:

"Some years ago a sizable number of American Evangelicals, perhaps in search of a more colorful version of Christianity, became Eastern Orthodox as a group. For some reason they chose to join the American branch of the Patriarchate of Antioch, one of the most ancient Christian bodies in the world. (Its liturgical language is traditionally Arabic. You can’t get much more colorful than that.) Apparently these refugees from Billy Graham embraced their new faith with a fervor that alarmed some who were born Orthodox."

That is Peter Berger -- the great Peter Berger, I would even say -- speaking out of the abundance of ignorance.

Even if it were the case these converts were merely seeking colorfulness, that's a remarkably unsympathetic, un-empathetic way to describe the longings of other people's souls. He could have easily just said the were "perhaps in search of more depth, history and tradition."

But, the point is, there's really no standard narrative of this event in recent religious history that could have been plugged in here by Berger. He's essentially summarizing word-of-mouth and arguments that have been made in Christianity Today and other such publications. He still could have given a better account -- this isn't an excuse -- but at least part of the problem is that the Orthodox story just isn't told.

Father Michael Oleska, a priest of the Orthodox Church in America, recently issued a call to the Orthodox in America to start telling their stories. To themselves. To each other. He's urging the religious telling of stories, arguing for the importance of such stories to a community and a culture. He says, in the video-message, that the Orthodox should start telling their stories because "culture is the enactment of a story."

My hope is that as those stories are told, scholars of American religion pay attention.

When I survey that generic, content-free cross

2011-12-06T18:10:00.003+01:00

American arguments about the relationship of church and state, about the practical meaning of disestablishment in the 21st century, are often framed and understood as arguments between those for and against the cultural dominance of Christianity. In turn, this is understood as those for and against Christianity.

One of the weirder things that this misses in the present day fights over church and state is the ways in which those defending the public displays of Christianity have done so explicitly on the grounds that Christianity is culturally meaningless.

Those arguing for Christian symbols and practices say those symbols and practices are free of Christian content.

In Delaware, right now, for example, Sussex County is being sued to stop starting each county government meeting with a recitation of the Lord's Prayer. The county's response, the county's argument, is that the Lord's Prayers isn't a Christian prayer.

As the local paper reports: "The county has argued that the Lord's Prayer is not an exclusively Christian prayer.... An attorney for the county has described the prayer 'as generic and universal a prayer as can be crafted.'"

Offering even a single argument for why the prayer is not a generic feels ridiculous. This prayer wasn't written up in a Hallmark factory, after all. The prayer was prayed by Jesus, a prayer he prayed to teach his followers how to pray. I really don't see how someone could seriously think calling for "your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is heaven" could be taken as an expression of a universal sentiment, much less a generic one.

Nevertheless, this is a defense of Christianity, as put forward by those who are defending it's public presence: It doesn't actually mean anything.

The American Atheists see this as, somehow, as an attempt at the institution of Christian theocracy. In response to the Delaware dispute, they warn of the "theocratization" of the United States: "The only reason to secularize [the Lord's Prayer] and make it 'generic' is to continue to push theocracy."

This is a very weird understanding of theocracy. To say the least.

Certainly when R.J. Rushdooney was theorizing about capital punishment for homosexuals and assorted others, he wasn't doing this out of the generic, non-religious nature of the Old Testament. When the late Bobby Franklin was trying to turn the state of Georgia into a theocracy -- arguing that government as we know it is an offense against God -- he wasn't attempting to set up a generic, it-really-dosen't-mean-anything, it's-not-really-Christianity Christianity.

Indeed, one would think Rushdooney, Franklin and the American Atheists would all actually agree on this point. They could well join together in rejecting the Sussex County Council's version of a vague, demand-less Jesus. Theocrats are actually on the American Atheist's side, here, in arguing the prayer "your kingdom come" is not neutral.

Nevertheless, this idea that Christianity is not only neutral and not religious, but so neutral as to mean nothing is a standard one for those ostensibly defending Christianity.

In another recent case, The Utah Highway Patrol Association vs. American Atheists, a fight over crosses erected on public property in memorial to dead highway patrol officers, those who were for the crosses argued the cross was not a specifically Christian symbol.

When an appeals court ruled that a cross is the "preeminent symbol of Christianity," this was a ruling in favor of the atheists, against those who wanted crosses displayed in public, on public land, and to the public.

In a brief in defense of the crosses to the Supreme Court, for example, the Roy Moore-headed Foundation for Moral Law argued:

"The cross is 'religious' to some people, but it is not a 'religion,' properly defined, to anyone. Moreover, that which constitutes a 'religion' under the Establishment Clause must inform the follower not only what to do (or not do) but also how those commands and prohibitions are to be carried out. A symbol of the cross does neither and thus cannot be considered a 'religion.'"

Besides being an odd definition of "religion," "religious" and religious speech, it seems like this description of the cross and the uses of that symbol would have to be really weird to anyone who's ever knelt before a crucifix, been urged to "pick up your cross" and follow Jesus, or sung "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross."

There may well be an argument that the symbols and even the practices of Christianity are entirely devoid of content in American culture today. I don't actually think that's the case: government officials publicly leading constituents in the Lord's Prayer and a cross on public property would certainly communicate the Christian identity of government to someone who was alienated by that identification, communicating that the government wasn't their government, I think. If it was the case, though, wouldn't that say a lot more about the cultural irrelevance of Christianity and be much more problematic for Christians than anything these "defenders" are defending against?

There's a top-level crust to church-state arguments where everything seems really obvious. There are sides, the sides have positions, the positions and the sides make sense. Looked at even a little, though, and one ends up in all sorts of weird place. Like atheists arguing for the meaningfulness of prayer, and professional defenders of Christianity making the case the cross has no real religious meaning.

2011-12-05T15:55:00.001+01:00

2011-12-02T00:07:00.000+01:00

Theology, the hidden dwarf

2011-11-30T14:55:00.000+01:00

"It is well-known that an automaton once existed, which was so constructed that it could counter any move of a chess-player with a counter-move, and thereby assure itself of victory in the match. A puppet in Turkish attire, water-pipe in mouth, sat before the chessboard, which rested on a broad table. Through a system of mirrors, the illusion was created that this table was transparent from all sides. In truth, a hunchbacked dwarf who was a master chess-player sat inside, controlling the hands of the puppet with strings. One can envision a corresponding object to this apparatus in philosophy. The puppet called 'historical materialism' is always supposed to win. It can do this with no further ado against any opponent, so long as it employs the services of theology, which as everyone knows is small and ugly and must be kept out of sight."

-- Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History

Next semester's classes

2011-11-30T14:52:00.001+01:00

Proseminar: American Pentecostalism
(B.A. students)

To the casual observer, American pentecostalism may well appear to be the most bewildering of contemporary forms of Christianity. Whether it’s snake handlers or prosperity preachers, healing miracles preformed on television or the exorcism of demons on the radio, “speaking in tongues,” being “slain in the spirit,” or just extraordinarily exuberant prayer, American Pentecostalism seems completely foreign to the culture around it. Yet, it emerged from and exists in that context. American pentecostalism is deeply embedded in 20th century American history. Pushing past the apparent strangeness, this class will examine the pentecostal movement in the United States, looking at its cultural relationships, and its history, beliefs and practices, paying special attention to ways these illuminate America’s recent past.

This course is intended to introduce students to the history of American Pentecostalism, as well as giving them a working understanding of the practice of religious history and cultural studies.

Text: A course reader will be made available.

Grundlagenkurs: American Religion
(B.A. students)

A brief, five-week introduction to the study of American religion, this course will familiarize students with the breadth and width of religion in America, as well as with the development of this field of study. Topics covered will include the genealogies of religions in America, an overview of the crowded and sometimes confusing religious landscape today, a brief history of the study of religion in the United States, and major themes and issues in the field.

In a separate tutorium, students will work through current, topical issues in American religion in a discussion-based format.

American Studies Methodology (M.A. students)

Thinking about culture – if done with any sophistication, any depth or complexity – also calls for thinking about thinking. American Studies, along with cultural studies and the humanities more generally, is marked by this self-reflexive move, where the study itself is taken as the object of study. In this class, we refocus on the frames for and structures of culture, rather than on culture itself. Surveying contemporary critical theory, this class will consider and explore the ideas of the Frankfurt school, deconstruction, post colonialism, queer theory, psychoanalysis, and social constructionism.

Text: A course reader will be made available.

The medialization of pentecostals

2011-11-29T22:10:00.002+01:00

The Los Angels Daily Times reports the birth
of American pentecostalism at Azusa Street.

One of the stranger things about American religion in the 20th century has to be how completely, totally medialized pentecostalism was.

In some ways, there's no group more resistant to modern American culture. No group more intent on being separate, on being foreign. Especially in the early days, and with the groups that were holiness. This resistance persists too in the more polished versions, and in even the most recent developments of the movement. Yet, even at the most anti- and counter-cultural moments, pentecostalism is whole-heartedly mediated by media.

I've been doing some research, as I'll be teaching American Pentecostals next semester, and it's fascinating to see how pentecostals use media today. Miracles on YouTube, for example. And how it was in these early moments, like Azusa Street in the LA Times.

There're elements of medialization in all sorts of American religions, of course. One sees the sense of media, the mediation, even the self-conscious mediation, and the affects all across the religious landscape. Billy Graham's tamer suit, the mass weddings of the Unification Church, the telegenic Pope, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' current add campaign, & so on. Many have used media. Many have learned from media. Many have only been able to imagine themselves & present themselves & position themselves through modern media.

With pentecostals, though, it's so thorough. There's no part of it, no movement of it or way it has been experienced that hasn't been presented or represented in media.

Even from the beginning.

All three waves of pentecostalism's history have been represented by and through media. All work, fundamentally, as media spectacle. They make sense, specifically, in terms of the media of their day.

I wonder if it wouldn't even be possible to map the three so-called waves onto to the major developments in mass media in the 20th century. Maybe: the first outbreak with newspapers & radio, your basic mass media; charismatics with cable & 24-hour television; 3rd wave with social media & the internet.

It's a thought.

2011-11-25T09:26:00.001+01:00

2011-11-25T08:07:00.000+01:00

Happy Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T13:47:00.000+01:00

2011-11-22T17:56:00.001+01:00

"If you put any event under a microscope, you will find a whole dimension of completely weird, incredible things going on. It's as if there's the macro level of historical research, where things sort of obey natural laws, and the usual things happen and unusual things don't happen. And then there's this other level, where everything is really weird.

"On Nov. 22, in rained the night before ..."

-- Errol Morris, The Umbrella Man

'When we set out, I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo, I did'

2011-11-22T11:47:00.063+01:00

My students find the fictional conversion narratives in Christian fiction unpersuasive. The word they use to describe it is "sudden." It happens too fast, like a slip over a line. It's not staged as a deduction or a conclusion, though there are arguments. The arguments happen, and then there's a gap. And then a moment where the need for arguments has evaporated. There's a knowledge in that moment -- the character "knows" -- but knowledge that's not at all like the knowledge of a conclusion.

The characters "just know," and, further, they know they know, though there's not really any clear articulation of how.

Generously, my students assume this is a failure of the fiction. That it's simply staged badly. It makes no sense to them that this is how it happens, so they attribute the implausibility to the badly written books. It must, they say, make more sense in real life, and if only the authors were better writers, the conversions would seem less sudden.

I don't know, though. It seems there is this moment of "slip" (that's not quite the right word for it, though). There is a suddenness to conversions, in how they're described by people who experience them. There's a moment when the arguments, however carefully constructed, however thoroughly labored over, don't matter anymore.

Maybe in one sense this makes it irrational, but it's not exactly experienced as a giving up of reason. More like, something about that which one was arguing oneself towards has changed, been vivified, and is no more like a reason than a butterfly. As inarticulate as that is. It's neither a reason nor a rejection of reason, but a realization.

It's a long silent moment, then "oh."

There can be a suddenness to the experience, which seems so implausible from the outside. Accounts of the experience of conversion -- Christian conversions, but others too -- often involve this moment of a sudden switch, a toggle. A moment of "and then I knew."

I'm finding it rather hard to explain.

2011-11-19T11:31:00.002+01:00

Who reads Christian fiction?

2011-11-19T10:48:00.001+01:00

Almost every time a cultural critic or an academic refers to readers of Christian fiction, the word "reader" could be replaced with the more pejorative phrase, "those people."

I sometimes have the urge, maybe a little facetiously, to ask, "didn't you read it too?"

Their interpretations, though, don't involve the self-reflexivity required to include their own readings in their theorizing about what happens when people read Christian fiction. Reading seems like it's conceived of as something only other people do.

Other people who are crazy, stupid and scary.

Bill Moyers, for example, in the March 24, 2005 New York Review of Books, talks about the success of Left Behind, and then moves straight into an account of the "true believers." Apparently noting no difference or possible difference between readers of these novels and said "true believers," Moyers says "On my weekly broadcast for PBS, we reported on these true believers .... They are sincere, serious, and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring the Rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy."

For Moyers, readers equal "true believers," "people in the grip of such fantasies." No one's reading Left Behind for entertainment, in his schema. No one reads and maybe is frustrated by what they read.

He's not particularly good at distinctions, though. There's a good sized paragraph, early on, where Moyers gives plot summary, and it's totally unclear what plot it is he thinks he's summarizing. It kind of sounds like he thinks he's summarizing Left Behind. But he doesn't say that. He calls it "the plot of the Rapture." Maybe he thinks they're the same? Any possible distinctions between the theology of some Americans and the fiction are elided.

For Moyers, it's all a wave of the hand and "those people."

Joan Didion, two years earlier in the same publication, does essentially the same thing. Didion's certainly a subtler thinker, and can be a superb writer, but her article, "Mr. Bush & the Divine," shows no evidence of either of those things.

She spends the whole first third of her article summarizing the series of books. Rather woodenly, actually. And in boring detail ("In fact the Antichrist has already appeared, in the person of a previously obscure Romanian named Nicolae Carpathia, an advocate of global disarmament who has mysteriously emerged under the shadowy guidance of a cartel of 'international money men,' to unanimous acclaim. Cameron 'Buck' Williams has already interviewed him").

This belaboring turns out to have a point, though, as she takes the series as a primer on evangelicals.

All of them.

The novels equal evangelicals, for Didion, and evangelicals equal fundamentalists (no distinctions necessary), all of who are taken to be eschatologically orientated, with this particular eschatology. They -- the homogenous "they" who are novels=evangelicals=fundamentalists=pre-tribulation dispensational premillenialists (of a particular sort) -- also equal a political constituency, which, in Didion's article, goes by the name "Christian conservatives."

Taking even one of these identities as simply singular is problematic. Conflating two of these as somehow synonymous is sloppy. Sloppy at best.

Even Amy Frykholm, whose book Rapture Culture is really excellent, and is the best thing I've read on contemporary Christian fiction, deserving of serious attention, sometimes slips into this.

She writes, for example, "Readers of Left Behind constantly question their own salvation and that of loved ones." And, "Readers of Left Behind feel tied together by common beliefs." She slips into this use of "readers" that makes it seem like all of them are one way, read the same way, are the same.

It really is a slip, in Frykolm's case. A relaxing of her language. The book is a sociological study of readers of the LaHaye-Jenkins series, and she explores how really various the actual readings of the novels are. Her goal, with the book, was to "disrupt the totalization of Left Behind's audience, and she does that so well that the times where her language implies a singular readership (a hegemony, in cultural-studies speak), are these glaring moments. It seems like an accident, where she does the thing she's critiquing.

Most of the time, Frykolm is careful to note kinds and sorts of readers, doing what I wish all critics of Christian fiction would do.

Being more careful, she writes, "Readers of Left Behind who use their reading as a form of witnessing," making that very specific distinction. Or, she writes, "Many readers express a fundamental anxiety about their own salvation," which is still broad, but doesn't make all readers and every reading the same.

Frykolm -- unique among the critics of Christian fiction I've read -- even notes that some of the readers don't identify with the series at all. There are readers who don't adopt the ideas wholesale, and readers who even find the fiction aggravating (but who are readers nonetheless). These books have, after all, attracted critical attention precisely because they have overflowed the banks of their Christian market. Frykolm writes,

"Readers outside the books' immediate religious context, particularly those with another strong religious identity, however, often find the text difficult to interpret, sometimes confusing, and sometimes infuriating. Nonevangelical readers do not read the series with an enthusiasm that matches that of their evangelical counterparts. They often find themselves annoyed, bored, angry or alienated."

I've found this to be true, as I've casually talked to people who've read the books, and, more, I think it's important to say. There's a fundamental misreading of these books and misunderstanding of what fiction is, and misconstrual of these books' place in American culture and of the American cultural landscape, in the assumption that "readers" are all the same.

It should be obvious that there's this other type of reading. The critics, after all, read it this exactly way (Frykolm, by her own account, among them). This doesn't seem to me to be the kind of mistake one would make with, say, criticism of Dan Brown's novels of Michael Connelly's or James Patterson's. It does happen with fiction designated as "women's," though, and maybe with other genres where the readership is conceived of as being of a marked case.

There's a simple way to avoid this problem. When analyzing the text through the frame of readers' response, what I try to do is use Stuart Hall's model of three types of decoding: dominant, negotiated, and oppositional.

For the most part, when "readers" are taken as a great homogenous group, what's actually being spoken of is what Hall would call the "dominant" reading. This is straight adoption. This is reading where the reader has accepted the ideology of the text. Where, for example, the reader holds the plot of "the Rapture" and the plot of the fictional Left Behind to be interchangeable.

My sense is that most readers read in Hall's second manner, doing "negotiated" readings. That is, they accept some parts of the ideology of the text. Maybe they accept the broadest claims, such as "God is ultimately in control of history," or certain assumptions that bolster such claims, e.g., the naturalness of a 3rd person narrator and of a narrative where everything is meaningful and relates to the conclusion. At the same time, however, readers who read this way are not completely adopting or unreservedly adopting the whole view of the text. The very fact it's being taken as fiction guarantees this, I think.

Frykholm's book is really fascinating precisely because it looks at the way negotiated readings can work as a kind of lever or wedge, where readers use their readings to create more space to think about something, to take a different position where previously only one position had been possible. She tells how, e.g., one woman used the books to question her pastor and church's position that salvation is limited, and will no longer be possible after the rapture. While she couldn't have, by herself, just disagreed with this, she was able to use the books to open up another possible interpretation of the Bible verses on the subject. She was able to use her pastor to criticize the books, the books to criticize her pastor, so reading (this kind of reading) opened a critical space for thinking, which hadn't been possible before.

"Oppositional" reading, Hall's third category, is exactly what critics do when they write about what Left Behind is "really" about. They "detotalise in the preferred code," Hall writes, "in order to retotalise the message within some alternative framework of reference." The clearest examples of this are the ham-fisted ones, but sophisticated interpretive work, it seems to me, could also be categorized as oppositional readings, in that their most basic move is to de-naturalize the text, and make the transparent apparent.

At very least, when we say "reader," we can note that structurally there can be these three theoretical types of reading, three different sorts of responses and interpretations of the text. It's worth asking, first, "who is the reader?" "who reads Christian fiction?", making that overt and making it a question, rather than an assumption. The answer then, further, needs to not be simply singular.

It's more complicated than just "those people."

2011-11-18T11:21:00.001+01:00

Straw man arguments defending straw man arguments

2011-11-17T10:13:00.001+01:00

It happens like this: An atheist (or New Atheist) attacks the idea of God as implausible. Someone, a theist of some sort, typically a monotheist, counters that the idea of God being attacked is not, actually, the idea of God held by the theist, or indeed by the majority of the major world religions, and certainly not by the monotheistic ones. I.e., the God you say you don't believe, no one does.

I.e., you are attacking a straw God.

Then, almost invariably, the atheist counters the counter thus:

"the majority of believers believe in an 'anthropocentric, grey-bearded being.' They believe in heaven, hell, angels, demons, and all the other clap-trap that goes along with these bronze-age era beliefs."

But wait. Really? They do?

I've certainly never seen any evidence of this. Even some of the most conservative, anti-intellectual versions of monotheism, the ones who maybe think the "bronze age" had some things going for it, reject that idea of God. Explicitly. And popularly.

All the traditional versions of Islam adamantly affirm that God cannot have a body, for example. This is one of the standard explanations Islam proselytizers give for not believing in an incarnate God such as Jesus. They hold to and teach the "divine oneness" of God, which, if nothing else, makes the idea of God more complicated than the 'anthropocentric, grey-bearded being.'

Even the most fundamentalist Christians, likewise, hold to a more complicated idea of God. Even children will tell you, for example, "God is love," a claim which is not exactly as philosophically complicated as the "obscurantisms" one would be accused of it arguing against an atheist with, say, apophatic theology. It's a simple idea. An idea taught to and repeated by children. Yet more complex and worked out than their being given credit for.

That, of course, is not even going into the orthodox Christian doctrine of the trinity, which millions of Christians confess to believing on a weekly basis.

Second, so?

Really. So?

Even granting that it's true, a majority of people have this idea of God which is being refuted, why would one reject an idea based on popular, mistaken conceptions of that idea? I'm persuaded, for example, that almost all talk about "black holes" are complete nonsense, and "black holes," as popularly conceived, do not exist. As far as I can figure, that shouldn't have anything at all to do with whether or not I hold that there are black holes.

All this to say, it really is a straw God, being attacked, and the argument that, well, that's "really" the belief of theists is also made of straw.

Which is to say, I wish we had better atheists.

Reading as a kind of believing

2011-11-14T18:03:00.001+01:00

Imagine if J.K. Rowling were to try to make an argument that Harry Potter existed. It would be very hard to convince anyone. Even if she had a lot of logic and history, and good arguments, even if she said it was revealed by God to be true and that many serious and smart people believed in Harry Potter, most of us would remain skeptical.

We wouldn't actually believe.

More, we probably wouldn't even actually engage with the idea. It's just so implausible, we wouldn't even weigh the arguments and consider the claim.

Imagine, on the other hand, that she didn't give us an argument, but a novel, a story, which started with an invitation to suspend disbelief. Imagine if she said, essentially, "you don't have to really believe in Harry Potter, just pretend." She might have started out, if she were going to do this, with the opening, "imagine ...."

Or she might have begun,

"Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense."

That's not an argument to believe something, but an invitation to suspend one's normal disbelief. The text isn't asking you to believe -- since, "of course" it's not true -- but to just not not-believe for a little while.

The opening, which she really does use, is brilliant too in how it stages not-believing, stages exactly the type of person the reader should not be if he or she is going to read this story and enjoy it. By the time you go from "Mr. and Mrs. Dursley" to "such nonsense," you have already had one kind of response to the story exposited, that of disbelief, but, even in accepting the terms of the exposition (e.g., in pretending or "just suppose"-ing there is or was a Mr. and Mrs. Dursley), you have already allowed yourself to enter into a different response, one of being willing to suspend exactly the kind of disbelief on display in that very first set of sentences.

This "suspension of disbelief" should not be confused for belief, though. Part of the reason suspension of disbelief comes so easily is that it's less of a commitment than actually assenting to any claims.

The difference might be understood as the difference between accepting a claim and assenting to it, if that's not too subtle. Or, to use a legal term, a difference between holding that a fact is true, and stipulating that a fact can be taken as true.

The idea is that readers are allowed to still be skeptical, and disbelieve, but they agree to put that not-believing on hold for the time they read. They can, with this agreement, go back to disbelief anytime they want. They can put down the book, they can scribble "unbelievable!" in the margins, and if someone says, for example, "do you really believe in Harry Potter?" they can say, "of course not, it's only for fun." But, even in all that, they're entertaining the idea.

Which is a kind of believing, a tentative or provisional belief. One kind of believes. One believes, that is, on the condition it will always be possible to latter revise that belief, to rescind it, take it back. One believes, but with the caveat that this belief can always be disavowed. One engages as if one is believing, while always having recourse to the position "it's not real."

One always has one foot out the door, here, so to speak, but, then, that leaves the other foot.

At the self-reflexive level, where the reader is thinking about the book as a book, and the characters as characters, the reader has not suspended disbelief, of course. At the level of reading, though, where one engages with the plot as an unfolding of events and with the characters as people with psychology and motives and goals of their own, and at the level of accepting the universe of the story as a universe with certain rules, one has "suspended disbelief."

This can happen fully and totally, or only a little bit. With a poorly written book, part of what makes it poorly written is it's hard to suspend disbelief for very long. Every few pages, something interrupts and our skepticism cuts in again.

With Left Behind, for example, many many readers find it hard to suspend disbelief for periods of time lasting any significant length. There's too much that's unbelievable, or at least very strange and implausible, and also there's this lurking sense in the novel that it's not all "just pretend." Readers often seem to feel like the fact this novel is a novel, rather than a sermon or a pamphlet, is really just a trick. This is one of the ways in which it is a poorly written novel -- its fictionality is fragile, and often falls to pieces mid-reading.

This can actually easily be seen when critics engage with Left Behind as if it weren't a novel. The form gets treated as if were an empty and transparent container of content, and the content is taken as not being novelistic, in nature, but as a series of arguments. That is, it's treated like a staging of theology, but where the staging part can be easily set aside, so the theology can be looked at directly.

It is a novel, though, and the form needs to be attended to.

On at least one level, readers are not being asked to evaluate arguments and weigh evidence, but merely to pretend and suppose, to try and at least imagine that the story being told is plausible.

It may be the case that this books is proselytizing, and thus asking readers to believe, but, on a more basic level, as a novel, given that it's in this form, there are these invitations to simply try and suspend disbelief.

One of the really interesting moments in the book is one where this invitation is made explicit. The text, in a sense, pre-supposes the objections and criticisms of the reader, and nearly overtly makes a plea that those skeptical responses be put on hold.

Bruce Barnes, telling his conversion story to Chloe Steele (his "testimony"), says,

"Could you let me tell you my story briefly, without interrupting or saying anything, unless there's something you don't understand? .... I don't want to be rude, but I don't want you to be either. I asked for a few moments of your time. If I still have it, I want to make use of it. Then I'll leave you alone. You can do anything you want with what I tell you. Tell me I'm crazy, tell me I'm self-serving. Leave and never come back. That's up to you. But can I have the floor for a few minutes?"

Part of what I think is really interesting about that moment is that he asks them explicitly to suspend disbelief, which works in the novel (where we, the readers, have already suspended disbelief, but might be finding that hard with all these arguments that work like arguments instead of invitations to pretend) and on the meta-level (where we, the readers, are thinking about our own reading, and what the text is doing as an argument, and what the author's agenda is, and all of that stuff).

In both cases, it's an invitation to not not-believe (i.e., suspend disbelief), and just see what happens.

I suspect that it may be the case with "faith fiction," and especially with faith fiction where that particular faith depicted in the fiction is also one we feel we could choose in our own lives, that we often think there's a "hard sell" happening. We seem to miss that the soft sell, which isn't an argument at all, but an invitation to "try on" a faith. What's at stake, in the way faith fiction works, may not actually be believing or not believing, but plausibility and implausibility.

There's this invitation that happens, in the fictionality, in the reading experience, which is on par with a free trial offer.

It's "no strings attached." Just try belief, on a temporary basis, and see how it feels.

The injunction of faith fiction is not "believe!", but rather, "imagine ...."

To push it just a little bit further, on the issue of "see what happens": I read there were people who were going to King's Cross Station, finding J.K. Rowling's platform 9 3/4, or anyway where that platform would be, and running full-speed into the wall.

Why?

What was going on there?

Did they just "really believe" the novel, or somehow get so caught up in it that they forgot it was fiction?

Were they just stupid?

Remember that if you were standing there as they were about to run and were to say something like, "that's rubbish, there's no such platform," they'd have already heard that objection in the book. That's what Uncle Vernon says, in the novel. So, in a sense, the skepticism one would naturally have towards running into a wall is already written into the story, and the right response to that criticism is written into the story too. From the very start, the choice to disbelieve was held up alongside the invitation to imagine, that is, to act like one believes. In a sense, then, the reader, by reading, has already made a "leap of faith."

The reader might stop at this moment and say, "that's ridiculous!," but the text is set up in such a way so that that objection is taking into account, and we're not given a counter argument about why one should run into walls. Because, really, what argument would convince someone to do that? Instead, the text works to say, "can you imagine a world with this kind of secret door between the normal, apparent world, and a better, more fantastic world, but to pass through that door you'd have to take a risk and do something that looks a little crazy?"

The answer, of course, is yes, it is possible. The fact we can read the novel and engage it as fiction (with disbelief suspended), shows it's possible.

It's granted, then, in the text, that it's a silly thing to think is true, and we're not given any arguments, but, instead, another invitation to pretend, to imagine, to (kind of but not really) believe.

So what about the people who did it in real life? Did they "really believe"? Or were they maybe doing the same thing we do when we accept the universe of a novel, and just saying, "what if?"

I suspect it's the latter. I suspect they were caught up in the potential of suspending disbelief, and looked at that wall, and just said "what if?" They "knew," "of course!", that the wall was a wall, but at the same time heard Rowling in the back of their heads inviting them to imagine the possibilities of a better world, and inviting them to just try out not not-believing, and "see what happened."

"What if?" the novel says, and some people get so caught up in that imaginative process, they keep asking themselves that after they put the story down. What if? What if? What if? Looking at that wall at King's Cross, the invitation to imagine is almost irresistible.

And really, the worst that can happen if you run into a wall is you run into a wall. There will be bruises, bumps, but not likely any serious damage.

Even if one makes a total fool of oneself, by suspending disbelief to the point of bruises, there is a certain romance to a willingness to wish with that abandon. It's a romance that novel readers often are quite prone to and fond of anyway. "Getting lost" in a book -- "lost" meaning, basically, forgetting reality and what one "really" believes for an extended period of time -- is thought of as a good thing.

Think of Don Quixote, the first among romantic hero-readers. We might think of fiction readers as those who take as a motto the Queen in Alice and Wonderland, who has sometimes "believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast," rather than Goya, and his proclamation that "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters."

I suspect that this is what Left Behind is structured and designed to do, too. To just get readers to the point where they take the natural suspension of disbelief that comes with fiction (that makes fiction fiction, really) and extrapolate it to their real life. To take that leap into the wall.

After all, praying a little prayer to Jesus -- what's the worst that can happen? Maybe you look a little silly, and you get a big bump and bruise of disbelief. You don't have to believe, Bruce Barnes says, but can you just hear me out. Can you just imagine, for a moment, what it would be like if this were the way things really are?

The text isn't an argument -- and if it were, most of us would likely ignore it. It's just too implausible. But it's easy to accept the invitation to try the belief on (almost like a pair of clothes), especially since we know we can take them off at any time. It's "just pretend." That's why this is a novel, and not something else.

The text is structured to work further, I think, just to try to get the readers to that point of "what if?" in their own "real lives," where they're maybe looking at the religious equivalent of platform 9 3/4, thinking, "what if it were true? Shouldn't I at least try to give it a good running leap?"

2011-11-14T10:14:00.000+01:00

"That music was like nothing I'd ever heard before, a cross between Salvation Army and acid rock: tambourines, an electric guitar, drums, cymbals, and voices that careened from one note to the next as though the singers were being sawn in half. 'I shall not be ... I shall not be moved. I shall not be ... I shall not be moved. Just like a tree that's planted by the wa-a-ter, oh ... I shall not be moved!' ...

"They knelt at the makeshift altar and started praying out loud, each a different prayer. J.L.'s voice rose above the others for a measure or so. 'Oh Lord, be with us now, and in thy mercy hold us and keep up, and O Dear God, bless this our little church, amen, and keep it for your own ...'

"Then another voice rose up to meet his, entered into fellowship with it, and fell away, each voice on a separate strand of meaning but weaving with the others into a kind of song, rising and falling, gathering and dispersing ....

"And underneath all the human voices was the incessant rattle of the serpent in the wooden box."

-- Dennis Covington, Salvation on Sand Mountain.

2011-11-12T11:02:00.000+01:00

2011-11-11T20:55:00.002+01:00

Yeah. So, nevermind.

2011-11-10T22:34:00.003+01:00

So I was wrong about Rick Perry. The guy is not going to "run the table," clearly. Run off the table, maybe.

I was wrong.

1. I thought he was a better politician. I based this on Texas journalists' big explanatory pieces when he got on the national stage, & how well played that series of entry moves was. He bumped Bachmann out of the light & made himself the obvious anti-Romney, got himself hailed like it was a homecoming & it was all pretty slick. They said he was coachable, had solid staff & funding, & that he knew how to woo. I thought, too, that a lot of the stupidity that was following Perry like stink clouds follow Peanuts' Pig-Pen could be used & would be used (a la Palin, a la Nixon) to stoke the bases' resentments, & to fake out (a la G.W. Bush) liberal critics & journalists.

2. I really underestimated how unforgiving conservative GOPers would be about a couple of unorthodoxies like immigration reform & state-run vaccination programs. It'd been my impression that the ideas of the conservative base of the Republican Party were frustratingly malleable, rather than too rigid, based on presuppositions about good guys and bad guys rather than actually ideas.

3. If I were actually into political commentary, No. 3 would be, "what's the third one there, let's see, uh ... I can't. The third one, I can't. Sorry. Oops." But seriously, I can't. Even what I just did makes loathe myself, which is why I should play this pundit game even less than I do.

The real number 3 is, I didn't expect primary debates to be particularly important. Not game-changers, anyway. I guess I thought the race would be more or less more or less static between everyone who would be running getting in the race and the first ballots cast. I didn't calculate debates at all, in what I said, but just looked at Perry's profile/image & matched it up w/ those of early primary states. I don't remember an early race being this tumultuous before, this volatile. I mean, the early days of the Democratic primary in the '92 race, but that was mostly at the stage of will he/won't he run, I think.

Candidates, this season, are like market bubbles.

None of this is particularly important. Or at all. Very little rides on my Republican-prediction abilities. I did want to make note of my wrongness, though.

When Billy Graham met Woody Allen

2011-11-09T12:32:00.002+01:00

Billy Graham was a pop culture figure from basically the beginning. In addition to all the other things he has been, there's this really fascinating parade of iconic, pop culture moments where Graham is paired with another famous person. They're often weird and, to me, feel counter intuitive. They're often also enlightening in how they stage the kinds of cultural alliances and divides that marked and made recent history.

E.g.:
Graham and Bette Paige.
Graham and Muhammed Ali.
Graham and William F. Buckley (where Graham says he believes in aliens).
Graham and William Randolph Hearst.
Graham skinny dipping with LBJ.
Graham in disguise at a love-in.
Graham and Nixon talking about Jews.

And so on.

For Graham's 93rd birthday, this week, someone dug up and passed along one of these moments: Graham being interviewed by Woody Allen.

Some thoughts:

1. It's really interesting to me how totally square Graham seems, here. Allen isn't arguing, really. He's in it for the joke. And Graham is completely straight -- offering himself as the set up to Allen's jokes, and not responding with cracks of his own. He's the middle class father, Allen the smart-ass kid. The meeting is an almost perfect face-off between the earnestness of quoting Bible passages that would go well on cross-stictched samplers and the wry humor of one-liners, late-night sarcasm. Depending on your position, this is either a meeting in the genre of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, or of Michael Douglas in Falling Down asking for breakfast.

2. Graham doesn't resist, even in the slightest, being framed as most essentially a moralist. He doesn't counter Allen's assumption that religion or Christianity specifically is about rules, and middle class moralism. He doesn't say something like, "no, you're missing the point," but instead offers an analogy where sex outside of marriage is like baseball without rules. It's an almost perfect presentation of that very American, Eisenhower-esque moral deism that's so centered on being a good person. This is Christianity as the underpinnings of the cultural conservative status quo. Religion, here, is this generic thing that functions to re-affirm social mores, to be valued to the extend it shores up order and staves off anarchy.

3. I can't really imagine any scenario where this meeting of Allen and Graham changes either one of them. Imagine this conversation went on for eternity. Like in the purgatory of John Paul Sartre's No Exit. Could it ever reach the point where they weren't talking past each other? Where they understood each other's fundamental concerns? Is there a possible way this meeting could go that would leave either Allen or Graham somehow changed?

4. There two strangely beautiful and I think moving moments in this interview. First is Woody Allen's pose when he's asked about his worst sin. He's really curled into himself, wracked by the question. Second, Graham says "God is perfect," and Allen quips, "when I look at myself in the mirror in the morning, it's hard for me to believe that." There's applause, which is strange when you think about it. Then Graham says "in God's sight, you are beautiful ... He made you like you are. He made you Woody Allen." Allen all but blushes.

5. Graham isn't just preaching moral deism, but moral therapeutic deism. The ultimate point of religion, of Christianity, of rules and morals, of everything God has said, as presented by Graham in this interview, is individual happiness. His message, here, is consistent with the American self-help hegemony, and the therapeutic turn. Andrew Finstuen explored this more fully in comparing Graham's rendition of Johnathan Edward's "Sinners in the Hands of Angry God" with the original, but it's perhaps never been clearer that personal happiness is the point and the goal, for Graham, than it is here where he tells Woody Allen, "God said 'I want you to be happy.'" There is an argument and a defense for that idea, of course, which one finds in John Piper's exposition of "Christian Hedonism" or, say, in Prosperity Gospel, but this moment is still really striking. Graham makes it seem so obvious that this is God's greatest hope, as if the point needed no argument and there really were a Bible verse somewhere where God said "I want you to be happy."

Religion and the Marketplace conference report

2011-11-08T21:22:00.002+01:00

Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture, Philip Goff, of Indiana University-Purdue Indiana, then issued the challenge of the conference: “What we are doing here,” Goff said, “is turning the table 90 degrees, and looking specifically at what scholars often off-handedly use as a metaphor.”

Starting the first panel of the day was R. Laurence Moore, of Cornell University, the author of one of the major works on the subject, Selling God: American Religion and the Marketplace of Culture. Moore examined the way economic standards and values are baptized by religion. Looking at Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church, Moore noted that prayer is understood as a market strategy, and “the measures of profit and loss remain the same.” Even Osteen’s megachurch itself, Moore argued, is a place both of prayer and commerce without, apparently, any sense of cognitive dissonance. Mark Valeri, of Union Presbyterian Seminar, continued with a look at the way Evangelicalism gave rise to American capitalism, making it possible in the eighteenth-century colonies. Valeri criticized Max Weber’s seminal theory, using more developed idea of markets, which points to the importance of the public sphere. It’s only with the emergence of a public sphere that capitalism is established, as Jürgen Habermas has demonstrated, Valeri argued, and the public sphere in early America was formed by the discourse of Evangelicals.

The full report on "Religion and the Marketplace in the US," is @ American Studies Heidelberg

2011-11-04T11:36:00.000+01:00

Harold Camping is not sorry

2011-11-03T23:16:00.000+01:00

Harold Camping says "when it comes to trying to recognize the truth of prophecy, we're finding that it is very very difficult," a point he, so far as I can find, never made in any of his extensive, definitive exegeses of prophecy, a qualification and a caution he never offered when people sent him money, sold everything, and staked their hope on the parousia Camping said was certain. Further, Camping notes, "Sometimes [God] gives us the truth and sometimes He gives us something that causes us to wait further upon Him."

This isn't just not an apology, it's a statement that, in a very real way, it's not even possible for Camping to have been wrong. He is, in a sense, hermetically sealed against error, since even when he was wrong, that too was from God. God gives truth, which Camping relays, and God gives lies, which Camping also relays. But they aren't lies, exactly, but a method of teaching God uses.

Read the rest of the essay @ Religion Dispatches.

Here the Devil

2011-11-03T13:57:00.002+01:00

"... we improved each moment to get along as if we were fleeing for our lives .... We went down to the Stream but heard no man speak a word all the way for 3 miles but every one pressing forward in great haste and when we got to Middletown old meeting house there was a great Multitude it was said to be 3 or 4000 of people Assembled together.

"... my hearing him preach, gave me a heart wound ... my old Foundation was broken up, and I saw that my righteousness would not save me ....

"Now when I went away I made great Resolutions that I would forsake every thing that was Sinfull ... And at once I felt a calm in my mind, and I had no desire to any thing that was sin as I thought; But here the Devil thought to Catch me on a false hope, for I began to think that I was converted, for I thought I felt a real Change in me."

-- Nathan Cole, Spiritual Travels

Demons & the function of the idea of demons in America

2011-11-01T13:19:00.002+01:00

How strange is belief in demons today?

How obscure is this, in the America we live in?

Not very.

There are, roughly calculated, 150,173,800 American Christians who believe in demons*. That's 150 million-plus self-identified Christians in America, who, when asked by pollsters, said they agreed with the idea there were evil spirits, demons, etc., at work in the world in such a way that they could control or influence a person.

150 million plus is not, it feels necessary to point out, a small number.

That's slightly more than 48% of Americans**.

This, of course, is not even counting people who don't self identify as Christians but who also believe in demons. It's not like demons are unique to Christian theology, after all.

In short, lots and lots of Americans' experience of the world and explanation of the world includes reference to demons. Demons, for them, serve an explanatory function, sometimes, and are part of the furniture of the cosmos, one of the types of entities that inhabit the world.

So: not obscure.

So: while you may think it's strange, and maybe objectively it is strange, and while there may be really good arguments for why people shouldn't believe in demons, maybe shouldn't even be able to believe in demons, what with science today being what it is, people do. Lots of people.

It's actually quite, quite common.

It's also not something to be freaked out about. Not only is belief in demons not that rare, sociologically speaking, it isn't really as freaky as it's made out to be, and, really, the more you know about it, the less important it seems.

Demons keep coming up, in the news, because of Rick Perry's (loose) association with the New Apostolic Reformation, a (loose) group of pentecostals who split with most other pentecostals and all evangelicals on a number of theological issues. People associated with the group talk about demons, and have a developed demonology. This is not what's distinctive about them, but it comes up anyway.

Like blinking Vegas lights: SCARY! DEMONS! SCARY!

The Associated Press recently had a story, e.g., that drops in, without context, the statement: "These preachers believe demons have taken hold of specific geographic areas, including the nation’s capital."

This statement comes after brief mention of the NAR belief that there are still Apostles and Prophets appointed by the Holy Spirit today, which is where they parted ways with other pentecostals and charismatics. It's dropped in with several beliefs that are actually fairly common among evangelicals, and not distinctives of the NAR, like the nearness of the end of human history, that American culture is collapsing and decaying, and that the signs of the falling apart of America are things like same-sex marriage. Then, after demons and homophobia are unleashed in the article (never to be heard from again), we get to what it's really about, which is the question of whether or not these pentecostals loosely associated with Rick Perry want a Christian theocracy in America. Dominionism, etc.

The statement about demons is true, more or less, but lacks context. It's offered up as evidence of weirdness, when really it's not.

More of this oh-my-God-they-believe-in-demons, without any explanation of what that means or how that works, can be seen in Terry Gross' interview with C. Peter Wagner, an apostle of the NAR and an author of a number of books on spiritual warfare. I'm a fan of Gross' Fresh Air, but she does not -- does not -- understand religion. Nor does she seem interested in actually learning anything about it, and so, cyclically, she displays embarrassing ignorance. She often doesn't seem to understand the answers she elicits.

In her interview with Wagner, she spends a lot of time on demons, though this isn't what is unique about Wagner's theology. She pushes him to name people or types of people who are demon-controlled. Gross apparently believes there is a kind of one-to-one correspondence between things Wagner doesn't like and where he sees demons at work. He repeatedly tells her it's more complicated than that -- we're talking, here, about a cosmology, after all -- but she acts like he's being evasive.

One example of this exchange:

Gross: Do you believe that there are people in American politics who are possessed by demons?
Wagner: We don't like the word, to use the word "possessed" because that means they have any power of their own. We like to use the word "afflicted," or, technical term, "demonized." But there are people, yes, who are directly affect by demons. Not only in politics, but also in the arts, in media, in religion, the Christian church. Yes ...
[...]
Gross: I don't know if you're comfortable naming names, but is there anybody, are there any people in American government today, that you would single out as having been afflicted with a demon.
Wagner: No, I wouldn't want to do that.
Gross: You wouldn't want to do that. Let me ask you this, and I know you don't want to name names, but, if somebody, say in congress, was a homosexual, and was out about that, would that necessarily mean that they were demonized?
Wagner: I don't think so. It might. Or it might not. There are plenty of heterosexuals who are demonized. I mean, adulterers ...
Gross: I ask that only because I know you are very opposed to homosexuality. And I think ... Would it be fair to say that you see homosexuality as a satanic expression?
Wagner: Well, I don't think -- let me put it another way -- I don't think homosexuality is the will of God. It's not God's plan A.
Gross: [Long pause] OK.

She further asks him if he thinks Democrats are demon-influenced (yes, he says, but so are Republicans), if Hinduism and Shintoism are demonic (well, he says, "they're not a part of the Kingdom of God"), and if mosques in America represent the advancement of demon power ("We would like Muslims to become Christians, but, in the meantime, if they're here in America, we don't oppose them").

Gross seems bewildered by the idea that a Christian would want to convert non-Christians, or that they might even think religion was important enough that someone would be concerned if people held to the wrong religion. She acts like she wants Wagner to confess to demonizing, in the most literal way, those he opposes in cultural or political conflicts.

This is a simplistic understanding of the function of demons in the thought of those who believe in them. It's not what they believe, and it misses the whole point of demons in the thought process of those engaging in spiritual warfare.

You see this in Daniel Radosh's book Rapture Ready!, too. These are people, Radosh cracks, in a chapter on Frank Peretti and Ted Dekker, who literally demonize their opponents.

"[C]ommon ground will never be possible," Radosh writes, "because they don't object to specific ideas that can be reframed or adjusted. They object to Satan, whose bidding we are doing."

This is exactly backwards. Common ground is not made impossible because of the idea of demons at work in the world, but actually made possible by the idea of demons. Opponents are not demonized when there's this conception of demons at work. Rather, the point is that opponents themselves are not evil. The perceived evil is displaced, in a sense, onto the demons. Opponents are then, themselves, understood as good. They're well meaning, well intentioned, good hearted -- but deceived. People who see demons at work in political and cultural battles believe they have common ground with those they oppose in that both sides want the best for everyone, want good things, and those they oppose aren't evil, just mislead about what that "best" and "good" is.

The abortion provider, the feminist, the Muslim, etc. are each conceived of as natural allies, as sympathetic, as wanting, in their hearts, the same thing that the conservative Christian "prayer warrior" wants. If only they could be made to see what is really in their best interest, there wouldn't be any opposition.

This shouldn't seem strange to liberals or cultural critics. This is exactly the same move as is made with the idea of "false consciousness."

When someone like Thomas Frank asks "What's the Matter with Kansas?", he's making the same move as the people who talk about demons. When anyone on the left asks why working class and low income people vote against their own interests by voting Republican, they're positing that these people -- opponents -- should be supporting liberal programs, are naturally and would naturally be on the side of social welfare and environmental regulations, except that they've been misled and deceived. I.e., that they've been corrupted by some evil force external to themselves, deceiving them to the point they desire their own destruction.

Consider, here, how a Marxist would explain why people believe in demons, and how that explanation functions identically to how a person who believes in demons would explain a person who believes in Marxism.

The Marxist would say, as Louis Althusser*** writes in On Ideology, "men represent their real condition of existence to themselves in an imaginary form." Karl Marx follows Ludwig Feuerbach, here, in finding "a cause for the imaginary transposition and distortion of men's real condition of existence," the cause being "material alienation." In simple terms, this just means that people can't stand reality, and thus make up a fiction, which is sufficiently similar to reality to kind of overlay it, and work as an explanation and an account of reality, while actually hiding and disguising what the reality really is.

This is the same structure as would be used by those who believe in demons: i.e., Marxists and liberals can't stand the idea of reality, which is, in this conception, the reality of the supernatural, the cosmic battle between forces of good and evil (including demons), and so they make up a fiction, embrace an imaginary conception of the world and history.

Leaving aside entirely the question of whether there really are demons, or whether there really is such a thing as "false consciousness." The point is just that the theoretical functions, here, are equivalent.

In both cases, sympathy towards opponents is established. The other side is simply deceived, which is why they don't see that they really should be supporting exactly the opposite of what they do support. Why don't women see that feminism is harmful to them? Why don't ranchers and farmers see that environmentalism is in their best interest? Because they've been blinded by an outside evil.

In this sense, "spiritual warfare" is a form of consciousness raising, of helping people break through the self-apparent reality that's really a mask to the real reality. Which is, the demon-fighters would say, that "our war is not a war of flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers."

Look at the dual function of something like the last panel of some Chick tracts, where two cartoon demons urge the reader of the tract to burn it. Of course Jack Chick "really believes" in demons, and that they're at work in the world, influencing and affecting people, but the way the concluding panel of the proselytizing pamphlet works is more prosaic than that.

It functions, first, to make the non-Christian readers question their own response to the tract. If they find it laughable and reject the cartoony message, they find here that it's already been assumed that that's what their response will be. I.e., the author foreknew their rejection, their assertion of rationality and independence, but then, how independent is it, really, if was foreseen so easily. If the author can know this is what the readers will do before the readers could have even had a chance to come into contact with the tract and come to the decision that this is the response they would choose, how free is that decision? Readers may think, before this panel, that they are just suspending disbelief to entertain this story of cosmic forces and eternal consequences. Disbelief has merely been suspended, not overcome with a conversion, and the readers read presuming (as is always the case with fiction) that they can put down the story, toss out the tract, cease the suspension, and end the story at anytime. Here, however, with two cute demons, they find that escape from the story is already written into the story. Rejecting the story is also already a part of the story, so the story persists. Ceasing to suspend belief doesn't get readers out of the scenario by suspension of disbelief.

It's structured to function like a metafictional trap. It doesn't matter if readers belief in demons or not: the question is, isn't it possible that the choice not to believe in demons is caused by demons.

Is it possible, the panel asks, that that decision isn't the readers' own? What if -- and the fictional form of the tract doesn't need to push anyone past just the hypothetical "what if" -- what if that free and independent and rational decision isn't any of those things, but is actually being done "under the influence" of outside evil forces? Is it possible to question, here, the motivations and the forces at work behind the self-apparently free decision? The problem, for the reader who wants to reject the ideas of the tract and the tract itself, is that of course it is, as evidence by the fact it was just imagined in the act of reading.

The panel also functions, second, in a quite simple way for the Christian passing out the tract. It explains the rejection.

Why don't people see they need Jesus? Why don't they accept? Why do they persist in pursuing that path to destruction? Answer: they're being deceived.

It's easily to think of demons and the idea of demons as strange, obscure theology, a disturbing hold-out of primitive thinking in the modern world. It's easy, too, for people who don't believe in demons to hear talk about spiritual warfare, especially in the context of politics, and to find it really disturbing. It can be unsettling, and very foreign, very alien. You can see, especially with the way the NAR has been in the news, these waves of "oh my God they believe in demons!", and then, "Do you really believe in demons? Oh my God they really believe in demons!"

But the content of that belief and the functions of that belief, when they're examined a little bit, when they're laid out in a clear fashion, aren't that different than a lot of commonly accepted ideas. They're not that strange. It's silly to be freaked out and find appallingly weird something that more than 150 million Americans treat as common place, as part of the natural order of things. In numbers, it's not that rare of an idea, and in practice it's not that different from a lot of other ideas. If one can put the "oh my God" on hold long enough to get a good understanding, there'd be a lot less freaking out.

And sure, it may be the case that people who are outspoken about their ideas of demons and the activities of demons may not really be good at more theoretical, analytical explanations that people who don't believe in demons could find comprehensible or palatable. That doesn't justify not even trying to understand, though.

Gross, for example, asked Wagner the question:

Demons feature prominently in your religious views. You and other people in the New Apostolic Reformation have described demons as if they are alive and functioning in American and in other countries around the world. So, do you believe that there are actually like living demons, like Satan's representatives, who are functioning in American now?

Wagner said, "Absolutely. As a matter of fact, in Oklahoma City, there is an annual meeting of a professional society, called the International Society of Deliverance Ministers, which my wife and I founded many years ago..." and went on to talk about exorcists. Gross didn't ask -- didn't either stop him and ask or come back to it and ask -- "what do you mean by alive?" There's an assumption they both agree on that term, but demons aren't "alive" in the sense of being physical entities that eat or breathe or grow. They don't reproduce or have genes. They don't die. If they "alive," what does that mean? What does Wagner think it means and what does Gross? How are demons aline in comparison to an id?

If one is worried about or appalled by this idea of demons, it's really worth it to push through the simplistic questions, like "demons, really?" and "OK, who's possessed."

You have to push past the surfaces.

When you do push past the salaciousness, though, it turns out it's really not all that important, it's really not all that different, and it's not as big of an issue or as scary as it seems at a glance.

*Back of the envelop math: 64% of American Christians believe in demons. There are 308,745,516 Americans, as of the 2010 census, and 76% of Americans self-identify as Christians. So: 76% of 308,745,516 = 234,646,592 American Christians. 64% of 234,646,592 = 150,173,819 American Christians who believe in demons.

**Another reference says only(!) 41% of all Americans self-report belief in demons, but I can only find the citation second-hand, via not-exactly-reliable sources. Wording differences could account for the difference. It's also worth noting that fewer Americans believe in demons, apparently, than believe in hell, meaning there's 11 percent or so who hold to an idea of eternal damnation that's demon-less.

***Though a Marxist, Althusser actually is criticizing Marx here. He thinks Marx's idea is circular, as the idea that "men make themselves an alienated (= imaginary) representation of their conditions of existence because these conditions of existence are themselves alienating" presupposes its purported conclusion. One should always be aware of the too-many vastly over-simplified accounts (and esp. criticisms) of Marxism.

2011-10-31T16:44:00.002+01:00

The hell you say

2011-10-30T23:41:00.000+01:00

Q. Does Kevin DeYoung believe in a literal hell, and does he believe that belief is necessary for true Christianity?

A1. Yes. Kevin DeYoung says "With sober gravity, we must confess that hell is real and people will go there." Further, he says "God's wrath cannot be wished away from the pages of Scripture" and, in allusion to the doctrine of double predestination, "Sin must be atoned for and sinners must be punished" (The Good News We Almost Forgot, 38).

A2. No. Hell can better be thought of in the spiritual sense, as separation from God. DeYoung writes, "Jesus 'descended' into hell as He suffered the pain and torment of divine wrath. 'Surely no more terrible abyss can be conceived,' writes Calvin, 'than to feel yourself forsaken and estranged from God; and when you call upon him to not be heard.' It should be a comfort to us that there is no hell we can face greater than the one Christ endured" (The Good News We Almost Forgot, 98).

Q. What is the difference between the first answer and the second?

A. 60 pages.

Ha ha, white trash

2011-10-30T16:24:00.002+01:00

If you google "Heath Campbell," the search engine's autocomplete function will recommend "Heath Campbell white trash."

This, it appears, is all we get in the way of explanation. This is the closest thing I can find to any sort of an attempt at an understanding of Heath and Deborah Campbell, despite more than 80 news stories about the couple.

This story is a perfect, perfect example of the kind of journalism I loathe.

The Campbells are the parents of Adolph Hitler, 5, JoyceLynn Aryan Nation, 3, and Honszlynn Hinler Jeanie Campbell, 3. The New Jersey family made it into the news in 2008 when a ShopRite refused to decorate a birthday cake for the boy ("Happy Birthday Adolph Hitler"), and then, again, this last week, when the parents went on NBC to protest the actions of the state's child welfare department, which has denied the parents' custody of the children since early 2009.

The children have not, according to reports, been taken away because of the names, though it's the names that have brought the case into the news. Names, in and of themselves, aren't legally considered abuse.

It's actually not clear what the charges against the parents are. "Abuse," but with no definition, allegations, but no details. The parents claim it really is the names, and child protective services isn't commenting.

This apparently doesn't matter.

Nor, apparently, is anyone interested in any journalism here that goes beyond pointing and laughing at the swastika-covered freakshow.

It's journalism as reassurance, so the over-breakfast reader of the morning paper can say "why Martha" (all partners of hypothetical newspaper readers are named Martha, per tradition), "Martha, we may not be good people, but, by God!, at least we never named a kid Hitler." The reader leaves this story with no new depth, no new understanding of the world, no added layers of complexity or increased comprehension, but just a little pat on the back for not being "white trash."

Congratulations, you're not as shitty as some.

There should be good debate about what it would mean, in a case like this, to "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted," as the J-school phrase goes. No one is even pretending that the stories about the family of Nazi-named children are attempting to do something so-high minded, though. It's entertainment. Nothing more.

Ha ha. Look at them.

Except that it is comforting. And comforting the comfortable.

That's the social function of a story like this. Readers read and are reassured. The status quo is held up, the reader's own rightness (and righteousness) reaffirmed. The function of such a story is to evoke from the reader, to quote a first century religious figure, that old prayer of relief: "thank God I'm not like them."

I doubt there's actually a good explanation of the decision to name a child after Adolf Hitler. The Campbell's own words have actually avoided the question of why they gave their kids such names. They, instead, have gone on and on about how they're victims, how their freedom's being infringed. They've said they're not Nazi's and not Neo-Nazis, and accused people of being racist against them.

The news stories don't appear to even try to push past that, though. There's no explanation at all as to why those names were chosen, or a look, even, at if there are other such controversial names. There's no pretext at context. There's no mention of if it's common practice for certain groups to do this, or why they might. There's nothing, in these stories, that goes beyond the joke: Ha ha, white trash.

I'm not asking for journalists to justify the names. Or excuse those who hold up Hitler as a hero. I want reporting, though, that does more than hold up some 37-year-old and 27-year-old woman in New Jersey for ridicule.

2011-10-29T19:41:00.001+02:00

Are you an angel now, or a vulture?

2011-10-29T08:12:00.000+02:00

2011-10-27T05:41:00.000+02:00

... the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

2011-10-25T20:25:00.002+02:00

Orthodox en-COUNTER-s w/ modern America

2011-10-24T18:36:00.000+02:00

An interesting snapshot of the ways the Eastern Orthodox in America are negotiating with American culture:

"[T]he OCA Department of Christian Education [DCE] invites all [16th All-American] Council participants to attend a workshop in the Juniper Room on Monday, October 31, at 8:00 p.m., for a workshop titled 'Orthodox Living in a Challenging World.' Archpriests John Behr and Michael Oleksa will offer presentations on 'Being Human' and 'En-COUNTER-ing Culture' respectively. Mrs. Daria Petrykowski will offer a presentation on 'Addressing Abortion,' while Archpriest John Dresko will speak on 'Challenging Sunday Sports.' In addition, Matushka Valerie Zahirsky, DCE chair, will highlight various resources offered by the department."

A group like the OCA is unlikely to understand itself as in-transition, in negotiation and re-negotiation of identity. The emphasis, of course, is on continuity, and being unchanged. For that matter, the emphasis is likely to be on theological distinctives rather than points of cultural contact. Yet, as we see in this programing note, the cultural issues also come up.

There is always contact, and at those points you find either adaptation, or resistance, or both.

What makes the Eastern Orthodox in America particularly interesting in this regard, I think, is the way the immigrants and the converts tend to be at cross-currents on exactly question of encounters with the broader culture. Second- and third-generation immigrants often tend towards assimilation and adaptation, while the converts to Orthodoxy often especially value the ways in which these churches are dramatically counter-cultural.

This is also, though, at the same time, exactly reversed: the converts bring social attitudes and cultural practices and concerns which lessen the alterity of the Orthodox church. They often note, for example, that they're not converting to an ethnicity. Yet the division of religious practices and ethnic and national and even family practices can be problematic for immigrants and their children, whose identity in America includes all these ways of living blended together into a whole, that whole being who they are in this new context, these new encounters.

A great unwelcoming

2011-10-24T12:46:00.001+02:00

The disagreement over the new Roman Catholic Missal is set up like this: concerns about theology vs. pastoral concerns.

There's a great middle of Catholics who don't care or are unaware of the pending changes, and then two sides, one supporting and one opposing the new Missal, which will replace the Missal put in place by Vatican II. This is how the sides have been constructed. This is how news accounts of the upcoming changes have presented the disagreement, and how the sides of the disagreement each present themselves.

An illustration from the new Roman Catholic Missal

Bishop Donald Trautman takes the pastoral side, for example, arguing:

"[T]he translation of the new Missal has intentionally employed a 'sacred language,' which tends to be remote from everyday speech and frequently not understandable.... While the translated texts of the new Missal must be accurate and faithful to the Latin original, they must also be intelligible, proclaimable, and grammatically correct. Regrettably the new translation fails in this regard.

"Did Jesus ever speak to the people of his day in words beyond their comprehension?"

Anthony Esolen, in First Things, takes the other side, accusing the translators of the currently in-use English-language Missal of Orwellianisms, and of producing a "thin, pedestrian, and often misleading version" of Catholic prayers. Esolen writes:

"They ignored the poetry. They severed thought from thought. They rendered concrete words, or abstract words with concrete substrates, as generalities. They eliminated most of the sense of the sacred. They quietly filed words like 'grace' down the memory hole. They muffled the word of God. They did not translate .... Those Catholics who grumble about the new translation without looking at the Latin have no idea how much has been lost to us English speakers these last forty years." (Emphasis original).

As US Today summarized:

"Much of the debate within the church is over whether the changes, ordered by the Vatican to achieve more literal translations from the Latin, are good or bad.

"Proponents say the new version is a more precise reflection of the original Latin. They say it is richer in its poetry, more reverent in its references to God and fuller in its allusions to the Bible and church creeds.

"Critics ... call the new version rigidly literal -- difficult for priests to recite and lay people to understand."

This positioning of the sides, however, doesn't explain some of the changes.

It also might obscure the deeper argument going on, the struggle which is the context for the new missal.

The new Missal, for example, contains a different translation of the Nicean creed, so that English-speaking Catholics will now use the word "consubstantial" to describe the relationship of Jesus and the Father. This replaces the current phrasing, "of one Being." This fits the way the two sides of the debate are positioned: the theological side says "consubstantial" is a more accurate translation from the Latin, and is more nuanced, and a better expression of the doctrine; the other side says priests and laypeople alike are going to stumble over the word and struggle with it, and the belief is being made less clear by the use of the weird word.

One might have thought the two sides could just compromise with the phrasing used by Episcopalians, Lutherans and Presbyterians, saying, "of one substance" (this is, after all, the definition of "consubstantial"), but, nevertheless, the two sides make sense with regards to the re-phrasing of the creed.

However, the new Missal also re-introduces a prayer of penitence. Before receiving communion, starting next month, Catholics will say, "my fault, my fault, my most grievous fault," hitting themselves in the chest three times as they say it. This is the mea culpa, a classic Christian confession of sin, a taking-on of responsibility for the death of Jesus.

It doesn't seem like this change can be explained by the paradigm set-up to explain the sides supporting and opposing the new Missal. It can't be argued, surely, that modern people just won't understand the words here. It's not confusing; it's pretty simple. In the same way, though, this change isn't an "improved translation," since the phrase just doesn't exist in the current English-language Mass, nor can it really be argued that this is a theological subtlety and nuance not present in the Vatican II version of the Mass.

This change doesn't fit the set-up explaining the disagreement.

It makes more sense, however, if we think of the new Missal in the context of Pope Benedict XVI's repeated arguments that it would be better to have a smaller, more pure church. The mea culpa isn't hard to understand, but does represent the kind of devotion that's off-putting to many moderate Catholics, and is exactly the kind of practice many of the more conservative Catholics in America feel is absolutely vital to Catholic purity.

Benedict's attacks on secularism have gotten more attention, but he's also consistently pushed for a more rigid orthodoxy, a more rigorous Catholicism, and seems to want a "winnowing" of the church.

In Germany, just recently, for example, he criticized "believers who's life of faith is 'routine,' and who regard the Church merely as an institution." He called for a renewal of faith, which, in the context of the speech, seemed to mean an increased stridency in opposition to liberalization and secularity.

As far back as 1997, he was talking about the Church becoming, again, like a little mustard seed, a "little community of believers."

The Vatican Insider noted that making this happen has been a main goal for the Pope: "From the beginning of his pontificate, Benedict XVI's focus, has been on pushing Christians who say they are Catholic not to be more Catholic but truly Catholic."

Given this context -- and it is Benedict who asked for the new Missal -- I have to wonder if those who have pastoral concerns about the new Missal aren't missing the point. Bishop Trautman and others worry the changes will be difficult for American Catholics, but that doesn't seem to be an unintended consequence as much as it is the actual intention of the thing. However refined this Missal is, in its theology, its poetry, it's also a great unwelcoming. The new Missal a signal, it seems to me, that being Catholic should be hard, Catholic language should be odd to the modern ear, unweildy to the tongue, and that the Church will be, now, less open, less accepting, less accommodating than it has been for the last half-century.

The Missal's difficulty is perhaps better understood as purposefully off-putting to the Catholics that conservative Catholics would like to see less of. The changes may make the Mass more Latin, and give it more poetry, more theological depth, but it's also designed to keep some people out of church, to purify, in Benedict's terms, and constrict the church to the so-called "good Catholics."

It's the same move one sees with talk of church dress codes. To object that imposing such standards might make some feel unwelcome is to completely miss that this, is, actually, the goal.

Update: Bryan Cones, at U.S. Catholic, suggests, interestingly, that the real issue with the Missal is whether it even really matters:

"The big question left unanswered--even unasked--is whether these translations will make any difference in the lives of the faithful; my suspicion is that the answer is no, which is why 75 percent of US Catholics haven't bothered to disturb themselves about it."

2011-10-22T22:42:00.001+02:00

2011-10-21T09:07:00.003+02:00

Tom Waits::

"I have to be willing to look at it like a three-legged table. If you've got three legs, you know it can stand up. Then we can put stripes on its tie or give it a toupee, but you need to have something to hang it on."

"Crows ... they say if you can find a wounded crow and nurse it back to health it will never leave you. I’m always looking for limping crows."

2011-10-20T21:39:00.001+02:00

What makes sacred space sacred?

2011-10-18T15:57:00.000+02:00

Anthony Santoro wrote himself a note the last day of the conference: is there a good definition of sacred space?

It’s a good question, especially in the context of looking at seemingly secular activities that are maybe better understood as sacred. But are they sacred? Sacralized? And what does that mean, exactly? In a world where lots of people understand themselves to be “spiritual but not religious,” there must be spaces understood and experienced as spiritual, but which aren’t institutions, aren’t religious. What are those spaces, though, and what makes them the way they are?

The question is: what has to happen to a space for it to be experienced as spiritual?

Continue @ American Studies Heidelberg.

2011-10-16T17:41:00.003+02:00

We're telling the guys there on Wall Street, 'Hey! Look down!'

2011-10-13T09:58:00.002+02:00

The human microphone may be the best possible way to hear Zizek. The jokes, especially, are funnier when chanted by a crowd.

That said, he does give a concise account of the Occupy Wall Street protests:

"Beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends who pretend to support us, but are already working hard to dilute our protest. In the same way we get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice-cream without fat, they will try to make us into a harmless moral protest. But the reason we are here is that we had enough of the world where to recycle your Coke cans, to give a couple of dollars for charity, or to buy Starbucks cappuccino where 1% goes for the Third World troubles is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and torture, after the marriage agencies started to outsource even our dating, we see that for a long time we were allowing our political engagements also to be outsourced—we want them back."

Now if only Zizek could rally the Tea Partiers, maybe broker a joint protest.

Differences of degree

2011-10-12T12:01:00.000+02:00

Dr. E. Brooks Holifield, speaking at the University of Heidelberg’s Alte Aula, said the marketplace thesis is problematic because it posits as explanations historical conditions which, when they happened elsewhere, didn’t result in the same sort of religiosity. For example, some have said it’s the democratization of religion in America that made the difference, but Wales, Scotland and England also had such democratizations, with “their share of uneducated populist preachers who drew enthusiastic adherents.”

Holifield said the historical conditions that most likely led to American religiousity are only different from other, similar events in the history of Europe in degree. It’s not that they happened in the US and nowhere else, but that they happened differently or to a greater or lesser degree. Picking this up as his theme and thesis, Holifield said:

“Differences of degree make a great deal of difference.”

Continue @ American Studies Heidelberg.

What Karl Barth said to Francis Schaeffer

2011-10-12T09:31:00.000+02:00

"Rejoice, dear Mr. Schaeffer (and you calling your-selves 'fundamentalists' all over the world)! Rejoice and go on to believe in your 'logics' (as in the fourth article of your creed!) and in your-selves as the only true 'bible-believing' people! Shout so loudly as you can! But, pray, allow me, to let you alone. 'Conversations' are possible between open-minded people. Your paper and the review of your friend Buswell reveals the fact of your decision to close your window-shutters. I do not know how to deal with a man who comes to see and to speak to me in the quality of an [sic] detective-inspector with the beheaviour [sic] of a missionary who goes to convert a heathen. No, thanks! Yours sincerely. Excuse my bad English. I am not accustomed to write in your language.

"Sorry, but it can not be helped! Yours, Karl Barth."

From Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America, by Barry Hankins.

Billy Graham & the marketplace

2011-10-11T15:09:00.004+02:00

The market for Billy Graham studies is likely to boom in the coming years, as scholars attempt to assess and evaluate the complete life of the now-elderly crusader. A share of that assessment will be given over to assessing Graham’s relationship to markets.

That was demonstrated on Friday, as three papers were presented on three different aspects of that relationship.

Continue @ American Studies Heidelberg.

2011-10-10T09:52:00.000+02:00

2011-10-08T08:49:00.002+02:00

2011-10-06T14:06:00.000+02:00

For more on the conference, see American Studies Heidelberg, where I and several others will be blogging the conference for the next three days.

Fighting w/ St. Francis

2011-10-04T08:19:00.000+02:00

St. Francis of Assisi, whose feast day is today, is one of those once-powerful religious figures who've been totally domesticated. His radicalness, his weirdness, his challenge -- it's all smothered in quaint-saint gooeyness.*

The power's still there, of course, in potential, but Francis is made safe for the world (Catholic and Protestant, religious or not). We ensure he, the saint of the garden figurine, only ever works to affirm, always so supportive.

I am not saying, here, that it's other people who do this.

I'm saying you do this, unless your first response to Francis is to want to punch him. I'm saying I definitely do this.

I'm saying there's a covered-up part of St. Francis that we cover up that would make you and me go, what the hell...?

E.g.:

"When a brother novice came to Saint Francis, saying: 'Father, it would be a great consolation to me to own a psalter, but even supposing that our general should concede to me this indulgence, still I should like to have your consent,' Francis put him off .... '[C]are not,' he said, 'for owning books and knowledge, but care rather for works of goodness.' And when some weeks later the novice came again to talk of his craving for the psalter, Francis said: 'After you have got your psalter you will crave a breviary; and after you have got your breviary you will sit in you stall like a grand prelate, and will say to your brother, 'Hand me my breviary.' .... And thenceforward he denied all such requests."**

The only response I can summon is, what the ...?

The weirdness and uncomfortableness of saints like Francis can be rescued and resuscitated, same as it can with the Bible, a book you're not really reading if it's not messing you up. It's possible to de-sentimentalize saints so they are challenging and personally controversial, which is to say useful.

To do so would mean, though, that rather than easy adoration, the first response to St. Francis would be to feel appalled, threatened and offended. It would mean wanting to tell St. Francis he's wrong, wanting to disagree, wanting to fight.

I mean, seriously?, he denied the monk a psalter.

*TM.
**Speculum Perfectionis, ed. P.Sabatier (Paris, 1898), 10, 13. Quoted in William James, Varieties of Religious Experience.