Recently in Christianity Category

About a year ago, I started saying that most important and difficult race in '08 was going to be Obama vs Clinton, not Ds vs. Rs. Now, I'll be straight with you all: I'm a big Obama fan, and have been since the beginning of his national-level political career: his 2004 Democratic convention address. This is what I wrote then:

Everyone's talkin' bout Obama. First black president?... that speech set out a vision of liberal values in terms that no conservative could disagree with. Compare this with Clinton, whose method of triangulation took up conservative buzzwords and values, essentially conceding that liberalism was a moral vacuum. I've been thinking for quite some time that liberals need to stop talking in terms of rights and starting talking in terms of what IS right.

Oh, what a cute, naive, idealistic, 23-year old I was!

Intuitively, I felt that Obama could reestablish a Democratic majority, and make progressive values mainstream again. I'd just read What's The Matter With Kansas, and to hear Barack succinctly dismiss the red-state vs blue-state paradigm as a fiction meant to polarize and manipulate America and prevent us for working together for our common interests was exhilarating.

And obviously, it helps that he's an incredible orator, able to authentically tap into black religious discourse in a way that is still inclusive and accessible. Back in 2004, the liberal evangelical Jim Wallis was trying to tell us "God Is Not A Republican Or A Democrat". But John Kerry's patrician inability to connect with white evangelicals made that line a hard sell. I remember wincing at this during the 2004 presidential debates:

QUESTION: Senator Kerry, suppose you are speaking with a voter who believed abortion is murder and the voter asked for reassurance that his or her tax dollars would not go to support abortion, what would you say to that person? KERRY: I would say to that person exactly what I will say to you right now.

First of all, I cannot tell you how deeply I respect the belief about life and when it begins. I'm a Catholic, raised a Catholic. I was an altar boy. Religion has been a huge part of my life. It helped lead me through a war, leads me today.

But I can't take what is an article of faith for me and legislate it for someone who doesn't share that article of faith, whether they be agnostic, atheist, Jew, Protestant, whatever. I can't do that.

Translation: Abortion is morally wrong, but because of these lofty abstract liberal ideals about separation of church and state, rights and pluralism, I'm unable to prevent it from happening. Morality doesn't really figure in to how I govern, but I feel your pain.

Compare that with Obama.

Questioner: I see a great a contradiction going on in our society, right now, and I don’t understand it. Maybe you can help me out. On the one hand, we see a guy like Michael Vick, who will likely lose his livelihood and spend some time in jail and there’s been a tremendous outcry against this man because of fighting dogs. There’s been a huge, huge reaction. On the other hand, we have 34 years and counting where thousands of innocent, sweet babies are being killed every day through what we call abortion, yet that voice has seemingly died out. What would you do about that and what’s happening in our society when people can’t seem to see this contradiction?

Obama: The issue of abortion, I don’t think, has gone away. People think about it a lot, obviously you do and you feel impassioned. I think that the American people struggle with two principles: There’s the principle that a fetus is not just an appendage, it’s potential life. I think people recognize that there’s a moral element to that. They also believe that women should have some control over their bodies and themselves and there is a privacy element to making those decisions.

I don’t think people take the issue lightly. A lot of people have arrived in the view that I’ve arrived at, which is that there is a moral implication to these issues, but that the women involved are in the best position to make that determination. And I don’t think they make it lightly. I don’t think they make it callously, so I reject a comparison between a woman struggling with these issues and Michael Vick fighting dogs for sport. I don’t think that’s sort of how people perceive it.

Now, this is one of those areas – again, I think it’s important to be honest – where I don’t think you’re ever going to get a complete agreement on this issue. If you believe that life begins at conception, then I can’t change your mind. I think there is a large agreement, for example, that late-term abortions are really problematic and there should be a regulation. And it should only happen in terms of the mother’s life or severe health consequences, so I think there is broad agreement on these issues.

One area where I think we should have significant agreement is on the idea of reducing unwanted pregnancies because if we can reduce unwanted pregnancies, then it’s much less likely that people resort to abortion. The way to do that is to encourage young people and older people, people of child-bearing years, to act responsibly. Part of acting responsibly – I’ve got two daughters – part of my job as a parent is to communicate to them that sex isn’t casual and that it’s something that they should really think about and not think is just a game.

I’m all for education for our young people, encouraging abstinence until marriage, but I also believe that young people do things regardless of what their parents tell them to do and I don’t want my daughters ending up in really difficult situations because I didn’t communicate to them, how to protect themselves if they make a mistake. I think we’ve got to have that kind of comprehensive view that says family planning and education for our young people and so forth – to prevent teen pregnancies, to prevent the kinds of situations that lead to women having to struggle with these difficult decisions and we should be supportive of those efforts. That’s an area where there should be some agreement.

Translation: Morality is important in how I will govern. Things aren't always black and white, though. We live in a complicated world.

That brings me to another factor that is really going to bring it home for Barack, if he makes it to the general. In 2004, I was just starting to feel it but couldn't fully predict how far it would go: the hemorrhaging of the religious right. Jerry Falwell is dead. Pat Robertson is marginalized, disliked by many evangelicals. Ted Haggard got caught with his pants down. To me it seems that evangelicals are looking for a way out, or a path forward. They're embarrassed by the way their leaders have conducted themselves. They're embarrassed by George W Bush. By degrees, they seem more and more ready to embrace new narratives about the role of faith in politics, about the relationship between Christianity and the broader culture. They're getting curious about environmentalism and anti-poverty movements. The once-sturdy alliance between economic conservatives and social conservatives is getting more fragile. They're realizing that we live in a complicated moral universe.

For someone who can successfully reach out to that audience, this is an amazing opening, and BHO is taking it. Despite a solidly liberal platform, and solidly liberal record, the guy is wildly popular with evangelicals who don't even agree with him about policy! My old archnemesis Relevant Magazine, the self-appointed voice of young hip evangelicals, asked their readers who Jesus would most likely vote for, in a readers poll conducted in November/December. Barack Obama came in first. Mike Huckabee came in second! Hillary Clinton was voted "least Christian". (Leave it to Relevant to ask a poll question about which candidate was "least Christian!")

Many of these people are still pretty damn conservative. According to the same poll, their pet issues are illegal immigration and bioethics! And yet they're way stoked about voting for a candidate with a very liberal record on these issues. This is big.

These are kind of obvious meta-narratives, sorry. I'll go into more detail in future days. I'm getting back into the blogging business. 2008!

A troubling update: Nora Conner at The Revealer notes that not all the leaders that the U.S. media is identifying as "leftist" are actually all that progressive. Zeroing in on the victory of new Nicaraguan president, former Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, Conner notes that "the New York Times described it as "another gain for leftists in Latin America"; and the Washington Post insisted that the Ortega victory was "an embarrassing setback for the Bush administration."

Conner argues persuasively that Ortega's basically abandoned his leftist roots. For example, he's allied himself with an old rival, retired cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, in support of an awful, extremely strict ban on abortion. Yikes.

By now you've all seen Stephen Colbert's career-defining performance at the White House Press Correspondent's dinner, right? Okay, I want to zero in on one joke:

"And though I am a committed Christian, I believe that everyone has the right to their own religion, be you Hindu, Jewish or Muslim. I believe there are infinite paths to accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior."

Funny, right? Colbert's satire of religion has always been especially notable because it's religiously literate satire. Here, Colbert nails Bush because he pushes his pluralistic rhetoric up against his conservative evangelical exclusivism to highlight the fundamental incompatibility of these two ideas, thus demonstrating how Bush's use of religion is at best shallow and rudimentary, at worst disingenuous and opportunistic. He's funnier than, say David Cross or George Carlin when they mock evangelicals, because Colbert's not using satire to paint a broad, unflattering caricature of religious adherents. Rather, he's making a substantive critical point about the incomprehensibility of Bush's theology.

Today I discovered that Colbert is a practicing Catholic, and it all made sense. He's able to satirize Christianity effectively because he knows it from the inside! It explains the sense of moral outrage that drives his satire--no one does moral outrage better than a progressive catholic (Michael Moore, Dorothy Day, Octavio Paz for example). It also explains his attention to labor and education issues, which are unusual topics for political comedy but key issues for the Catholic Worker movement.

As he told Time Out New York:

I love my Church, and I'm a Catholic who was raised by intellectuals, who were very devout. I was raised to believe that you could question the Church and still be a Catholic. What is worthy of satire is the misuse of religion for destructive or political gains. That's totally different from the Word, the blood, the body and the Christ. His kingdom is not of this earth.

Thanks Stephen Colbert, for demonstrating why we need the Christian Left.

Here's an NPR interview where Colbert talks about his faith, among other things.

Anyone familiar with the evangelical right's rhetoric about homosexuality has undoubtedly run across the work of Paul Cameron. As chairman of the Family Research Institute in Colorado Springs, Cameron has made a career out of publishing studies that supposedly offer scientific justification for antigay public policy, depicting gays as diseased perverts. Of course, his studies are so flawed and biased as to render them entirely meaningless; Cameron was even thrown out of the American Psychological Association for violating ethical principles and repudiated by the American Sociological Association for posing as a sociologist. Nevertheless his work is still frequently referenced by relatively "mainstream" opponents of LGBT rights. When William Bennett claims "the best available research suggests that the average lifespan of male homosexuals is around 43 years of age", he's talking about one of Cameron's bogus studies. When televangelist Rod Parsley stands next to Texas Governor Rick Perry, celebrating the passage of yet another anti-marriage amendment and says "Gay sex is a veritable breeding ground for disease", when the American Family Association claims gays are more likely than heteros to molest children, or some nutjob on the internet starts shrieking about how gays average somewhere between 106 and 1105 different partners a year, they're talking about Cameron's work. His research has even shown up in state supreme court opinions in Massachusetts and Florida, in service of arguments that discrimination can be justified for public health reasons.

So, no secret that dude doesn't like the gays. But here's what's news to me: Cameron actually tells parents to encourage their teenagers to engage in heterosexual sex play as a method of warding off homosexuality!

In a 1978 book called Sexual Gradualism, Paul Cameron offered a "solution to the sexual dilemma of teenagers and young adults." The man who would go on to become America's most vitriolic anti-gay researcher proposed that teenagers and unmarried adults be encouraged by their parents, church leaders and society in general to engage in sexual activity that gradually increases in intensity, but always stops short of "going all the way" before marriage. What follows are excerpts from the meandering, 70-page manual, which is part social theory, part how-to guide.

Gradualism is a process-oriented approach to learning the physical skills of sexuality in step with gaining maturity in the psychological aspects of sexual intimacy. Gradualism is anchored on set levels of sexuality activity. These levels are:

Level 1: Being near another.
Level 2: Holding hands, hugging and the like.
Level 3: Kissing.
Level 4: Breast fondling.
Level 5: Mutual hand exploration of the genitals.
Level 6: Total nudity, perhaps in a bathtub. Manual stimulation.
Level 7: Oral sex.
Level 8: The final level of sexual intimacy.

Level 5 is the break-off point. Only people who truly love can care enough to handle beyond Level 5. Level 5 provides 60 percent of the overall fun of sex.

Gradualism would best be practiced at home. A responsible set of parents might allot a room, privacy, access to a bathroom, a television, and snacks to their teen-agers to practice gradualism. Some parents may shudder at this prospect. But they should remember that the minute a teenager leaves in a car, he or she is able to do anything desired.

Another advantage of gradualism is the insulation value it provides against homosexuality. By gradually introducing a young person to the opposite sex, gradualism steers in a heterosexual direction. While no parent wants his child starting the sexual process "too young," better too young than homosexual. (Link)

To this, I say, huzzah! It's about time the Christian right came out in favor of teenage bathtub handjobs. And parents providing snacks would be such a thoughtful touch! What teenager hasn't found himself thinking, mid-breast-fondle, "Damn, what I wouldn't give for a can of Pringles and some Sunny D right about now!"

Further reading:
An overview of Cameron's career from the SPLC's Intelligence Report.
An extended discussion of Cameron's bogus methods.

iTunes is currently offering a free download of Dolly Parton's Oscar-nominated song "Travelin' Thru". It's not my favorite thing she's done--pretty well-worn territory lyrically--but significant because of its context in a movie about an MTF transsexual. Oddly enough, this is one of her more overtly religious songs, drawing a connection between the traditional born-again experience and the experience of claiming one's gender identity. Maybe a little cutesy, but very much in line with Dolly's history of using the language of her Baptist upbringing to talk about progressive Christian theology.

Questions I have many, answers but a few
But we're here to learn, the spirit burns to know the greater truth
We've all been crucified and they nailed Jesus to the tree
And when I'm born again, you're gonna see a change in me

God made me for a reason and nothing is in vain
Redemption comes in many shapes with many kinds of pain
Oh sweet Jesus if you're listening, keep me ever close to you
As I'm stumblin', tumblin', wonderin', as I'm travelin' thru

Download it while you can from

Celtic Christianity often makes reference to "thin places", a concept that has its home in a particular kind of thinking about God, as Marcus Borg explains:

This way of thinking sees God, "the More," as the encompassing Spirit in which everything is....In words attributed to Paul in the Book of Acts, God is "the one in whom we live and move and have our being." God is a nonmaterial layer of reality all around us, "right here" as well as "more than right here." This way of thinking thus affirms that there are minimally two layers or dimensions of reality, the visible world of our ordinary experience and God, the sacred Spirit.

"Thin places" are places where the fog is lifted and we see things as they really are. The universe is shown. Christmastime is thought to be one of those "thin places." It's a story about God becoming human, about word becoming flesh, about the division between different layers of existence being bridged. It's a time when "joy and wonder is in the air," blah blah blah.

My recent lack of posts can be attributed to the fact that i'm spending most of my time working on my senior thesis project, about RELEVANT magazine. It's going okay...I don't think i'm going to make my "complete draft by Monday" deadline but hopefully that will be alright. I'm very proud of sections of this project, especially the part about brand identification as expression of faith. Basic theme of the project: the evangelical church is embracing the language of mass cultural fake rebellion just as the mainstream culture which invented fake rebellion is embracing the evangelical church. It's not so much a question of co-optation or appropriation as much as a simple confluence of interest.

In my absence, some fellow UrHo bloggers have been covering the religion beat and offering some really fascinating posts.

I grew up in the United Methodist Church, and I've been feeling really bummed out by recent decisions made by the Judicial Council (sort of like the church's supreme court). Starr Ahrens, writing at her blog Updates cheered me up immensely with her sweet and funny post about teenage experiences with her hometown Methodist Church and the practice of keeping church doors unlocked at all times.

Isn't that the premise of Christianity; trusting your fellow man, providing him with sanctuary for faith, not just at the hours that are convenient for some. Isn't it the way of Christianity to reach out to all walks of life, no matter how downtrodden, and invite them all in to share their faith with each other or just with god? Christian churches, to my understanding, are not supposed to be members only social clubs, but instead community buildings, where people are welcome to come and worship together or separately. Regardless of the nature of my belief system today, I found that in my hometown, churches were accepting places where the community came together. The expectation was not one of conversion, but one of acceptance (read the rest)

Meanwhile Lucie at Overarching is spending time at a Buddhist monastery in Nepal (? at least I think it's Nepal). She finds that contrary to our American romanticized vision of Eastern religion, Buddhism is prone to the same problems that plague other religions–-institutional authoritarianism, scriptural literalism, suppression of criticism, etc--to the point that it feels like brainwashing.

Some of the people who have gone to speak to the nun in charge of the course have been told, upon saying they're not sure this is for them, that they're arrogant, superficial and negative minded, and that they'll never find happiness outside the gates of the monastery.

I guess it will work out well for some people, but I have to be honest with you: if it wasn't a Buddhist program, people would be calling it a cult. Seriously. The way things are presented, the way you're told it's all true, the way they cut you off from the outside world and deal with doubters... it's just kind of troubling. (read the rest)

Yikes. Stay safe over there, Lucie!

Via the reliably weird WFMU:
"Lil' Markie" is the creation of evangelist Mark Fox, who uses his ability to sing in a terrifying "childlike" falsetto to sing cautionary Christian tales.

Start with "Diary of an Unborn Child" (8.0 mb MP3). If you can handle that, go here to download the entire 17 song album. Don't miss the video clips; the voice is even more surreal when you see it being produced by a jolly mulleted man.

edit: Usually I avoid posting this sort of thing. Though often accurate, the whole "What did they do now? Gosh those evangelical christians sure are nutty!" trope is trite and not particularly productive. I made an exception because this was just too crazy to keep to myself.

Harper's magazine has impressed me with its religion coverage lately, centering around several stories about the Christian right.

"Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that 'God helps those who help themselves.' That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin's wisdom not biblical; it's counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor."

- Author Bill McKibben, in his Harper's magazine essay, "The Christian Paradox"

I think a lot of people go through a stage of being really into individualism. It's sort of an adolescent thing, asserting yourself as independent from your parents and upbringing. In this country it hits a little harder, because we have this strong laissez-faire economic streak, as well as the whole romantic idea of the rugged individualist as popularized by the transcendentalists. Thoreau seems so badass when you are a sophomore in college and you enjoy thinking of yourself as iconoclastic and revolutionary. These days though, I am really loving the secret truth that his mom was visiting him at Walden and bringing meals of fresh bread. The big secret is that people rely on each other for everything.

We are told this story and tell each other this story about the great transcendent artist who changes perception. I can think of a couple of really clear cases in our shared music culture where this is the story but not the reality ... the great artist was a product of a community, what made them great was that they succesfully took the insights of the community to the larger world. Examples from our shared musical culture being for instance Fugazi who when they came out it seemed like such a revelation - eight-beats, loud/quiet, a dub approach to punk, a layered vocal. When I started to see that Fugazi were a product of Rain, the Bad Brains, Happy Go Licky/Rites of Spring it really changed this perception for me. They created their style within a community of people exploring these ideas. Same with Beat Happening with the antecedent being Supreme Cool Beings (and others). Something hits the larger world and when it resonates -- Fugazi, White Stripes, the perception is - OK this is what the idea is, but instead it's one subset of a mass of connected ideas and approaches that are being explored by that community.-Al Larsen

Granted, my experience of Christianity has been way different than a lot of people in my peer group (i.e. mostly positive) but it's weird for me to realize that for many others Christianity is being conceived as this springboard for individualism. For most evangelicals the pivotal religious moment is the individual born-again experience, when they personally accepted Christ. It was never like that for me. Most of my memories of going to church over the years are of feeling I was part of something larger, feeling connected and supported. Singing together. Sharing stories (and cookies). Little old ladies complimenting me when I played the piano at the 9:00 service. Standing in a circle and linking arms, heads bowed.

Funny thing: this entry started out about me thinking about social consequences of individualism, but now I am thinking more about very personal connections and the lack of community in my own life. I think I'm going to try to start going to church regularly again. I will keep you informed.

When you study religion at a secular college, you learn to maintain a certain scholarly distance. You learn to avoid making normative claims and judgments. You learn to bracket your own biases and allegiances and interests and faiths in favor of "objectivity". One of my goals for this blog is to practice writing in that balanced but critical voice.

It's taken me a couple days to post anything here about the selection of Cardinal Ratzinger as the new pope. This is both because I'm struggling to live up to those lofty academic ideals, but also because I'm struggling to find anything to say that doesn't come from a meanspirited ugly place within me. All that "love your enemies" stuff is effing difficult.

Today, I could try to be witty or scholarly or objective. Instead I'm going to be honest. This is really bad news. This is bad news for anyone who care about the plight of the poor, for anyone who cares about the status and role of women in society, for anyone who thinks LGBT people deserve to be treated with human dignity. I am filled with anger and despair and I am not even Catholic. In long-term human costs, the election of Ratzinger will probably be far worse a disaster than 9/11.

from Michaelangelo Singorile's Queer In America (via Atrios):

.... Chills ran up and down my spine as I watched the protestors and then looked back at Ratzinger. Soon, anger swelled up inside me: This man was the embodiment of all that had oppressed me, all the horrors I had suffered as a child. It was because of his bigotry that my family, my church -- everyone around me -- had alienated me, and it was because of his bigotry that I was called "faggot" in school. Because of his bigotry I was treated like garbage. He was responsible for the hell I'd endured. He and his kind were the people who forced me to live in shame, in the closet. I became livid...

Suddenly, I jumped up on one of the marble platforms and, looking down, I addressed the entire congregation in the loudest voice I could. My voice rang out as if it were amplified. I pointed at Ratzinger and shouted: "He is no man of God!" The shocked faces of the assembled Catholics turned to the back of the room to look at me as I continued: "He is no man of God -- he is the Devil!" (read the full account)

Bishop Desmond Tutu:

As you know, I have expressed hope for a new pope from Africa or the Third World. A candidate from these parts would have placed on the agenda some burning issues like poverty in this skewed international order that disadvantages the poor. I would have hoped such a candidate (would be concerned with) issues of disease and the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

I hope sitting on the papal throne will take off the edges and have an effect on easing his rigidity. A less rigid candidate would have been more likely to lift the ban the Roman Catholic Church has placed on the use of condoms. Everywhere else it is recognised as an effective way to combat the spread of HIV.

National Coalition of American Nuns:

We pray that he will be open to the full partnership and full participation of women in a church that suffers because of the lack of women's creativity and lived experience. We do believe in miracles.

Jurandir Arauj, of the National Conference of Bishops Afro-Brazilian Section:

It seems that he is too conservative. Hopefully the Holy Spirit can help him change!