Recently in Evangelicalism Category

Via Atrios. Tucker Carlson on this weekend's Chris Matthews show.

CARLSON: It goes deeper than that though. The deep truth is that the elites in the Republican Party have pure contempt for the evangelicals who put their party in power. Everybody in...

MATTHEWS: How do you know that? How do you know that?

CARLSON: Because I know them. Because I grew up with them. Because I live with them. They live on my street. Because I live in Washington, and I know that everybody in our world has contempt for the evangelicals. And the evangelicals know that, and they're beginning to learn that their own leaders sort of look askance at them and don't share their values.

MATTHEWS: So this gay marriage issue and other issues related to the gay lifestyle are simply tools to get elected?

CARLSON: That's exactly right. It's pandering to the base in the most cynical way, and the base is beginning to figure it out

In a rare moment of intellectual honesty, Carlson is confirming the thesis of Thomas Frank's What's The Matter With Kansas. The GOP's electoral strategy is to run on moral issues (gays, abortion, evolution) that they don't necessarily even give a shit about, then once elected pursue a neo-con/freemarket agenda. Thus they get the working class to vote against their own interests.

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.

My thesis is done, I turned it in on my 25th birthday, and after I have orals on Tuesday, college is done forever. Hooray! You'll see some version of the final project up here at some point. Here's a bit about AIDS activism and the degaying of U2.

In many ways, the AIDS epidemic in Africa is an ideal issue for RELEVANT. First, the fight against AIDS is a cause to which many prominent musicians and entertainers from the secular world have lent their public support. By signing on to this cause, RELEVANT is able to associate itself with these celebrities and capitalize on their aura of cool. Bono, lead singer of the hugely popular rock group U2, has been a prominent leader on this issue and has particularly sought the assistance of evangelicals to join the fight. Bono agreed to a interview so he could talk about the importance of debt relief and fighting AIDS, and was featured on the cover of the March/April 2004 issue. Bono’s image has since been used repeatedly to advertise subscriptions to the magazine.

Second, AIDS is an issue where there is broad consensus, at least on the abstract level, if not in terms of policy goals. Unlike war, abortion, tax cuts, universal health care, and homosexuality, everyone agrees about AIDS; it is very bad. RELEVANT is able to fully embrace the hip progressive position, because there is no opposition except apathy. No one is likely to write angry letters to RELEVANT saying “I think AIDS is good! Cancel my subscription!” Christian advertisers are not likely to be scandalized; Bono had already been a cover subject for Christianity Today in March 2003. It’s a safe issue for RELEVANT to take a firm stand on.

That safety also comes with an aura of edginess. Because AIDS was associated with gays and intravenous drug users, evangelicals were slow to respond to the epidemic, and sometimes outright hostile to victims of the disease. Taking up this issue as an important cause rewards young evangelicals with a sense of rebellion against old-fashioned, vindictive conservative Christian attitudes. At the same time, by focusing on foreign elements of the crisis rather than domestic public health, and focusing on relief rather than prevention, RELEVANT is able to talk about AIDS without talking about controversies such as condoms or needle exchanges. And while Bono’s primary goals involve pressuring political leaders to take action, RELEVANT largely shifts the focus to the work being done by private charities.

RELEVANT, of course, never mentions that Bono has been criticized by some NGOs and leftist activists for encouraging multinational corporations to see the AIDS crisis as an opportunity to sow the seeds for new markets in developing countries, expanding globalization and opening these countries up to exploitative economic “development”. It also never mentions that the Bush administration has been has been described by Bono himself as one of the biggest roadblocks in addressing the crisis. Indeed, readers are given the opposite impression, when Bono is quoted as saying in “I believe the president is sincere in his convictions to put America up front in a way that hasn’t been done before on these issues.” RELEVANT fails to note that this quote was seven months old at the date of printing, and that Bush had since backed down on some of his promises. RELEVANT certainly never mentions Bono’s history of support for reproductive choice and LGBT rights.

To be fair, Bono hasn’t mentioned his feelings on these issues for a while either. U2 has made a calculated artistic retreat from the wildly creative if inconsistent 1997 album POP which saw the band playfully borrowing elements of house and techno music and indulging in campy Warholian appropriations of pop music and commercial imagery. Their 1997 POP-mart tour was themed around a critique of consumer culture; the stage was framed by a golden McDonalds arch, and a giant video screen featured the classic image of the ascent of man tweaked to include a man pushing a shopping cart as the ultimate step of evolution, The screen also displayed video footage of transgender performance artist Leigh Bowery bellydancing, and animated images based on the work of the late gay artist Keith Haring. Each night, the band would emerge from a forty-foot-tall lemon-shaped mirrorball, dressed as the Village People, to perform their hit “Discotheque”. That song, a synth-heavy departure from their classic sound, was based around a house beat of the sort popularized in gay dance clubs. However, by 2002, Bono was courting evangelical Christians for his causes; when U2’s Greatest Hits 1990-2000 was released, “Discotheque” was included only in a remixed form that had its squelching synths, filter sweeps and drum machines pulled out of the mix. The song now resembled stale Stones-y blues rock; it had essentially been degayed—stripped of any musical references to gay culture—and made more palatable for middle American evangelicals. The band also abandoned their campy, irony-laden stage show for straight-forward sincerity and scripture quoting. This suggests that just as evangelicals are changing the way they present themselves to better engage mass culture, mass culture may be changing the way it presents itself to better engage evangelicalism, though the motive in this case may have been noble.

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.

Director David O. Russell describes I ♥ Huckabees as an attempt to introduce audiences to the principles of Eastern Religion, particularly Buddhism, without framing these principles in explicitly religious terms. The film seems to target a young progressive audience that is aware that something is very wrong with the state of the world but is feeling alienated and somewhat hopeless. You know, people like me, and like you and like most of our friends have been feeling since November 2. That audience is personified in Albert (Jason Schwartzman), a frustrated environmental activist, who recruits a pair of existential detectives (Dustin Hoffman & Lily Tomlin) to unravel his personal mysteries.

Huckabees teaches so artfully and efficiently that we barely notice that we're learning. Complex Buddhist concepts seem like common sense; Hoffman's character (based on Buddhist teacher Robert Thurman) demonstrates, with the help of a blanket, in 30 seconds, the concept of interbeing-everything is everything else. We learn of interconnectedness: between people, between events, between the psychological and the interpersonal, and the political. We learn of impermanence as we watch Albert and his sleazy corporate arch-nemesis Brad (Jude Law) experience devastating losses. But along with Albert, we learn how to be compassionate toward Brad; we learn to see that even our "enemies" are suffering. It is this insight that allows Albert (and us) to let go of our attachment to anger and move on.

The movie is not a thinly disguised religious tract promoting Buddhism as an easy ticket to Happytown. It is honest about the temptation and dangers posed by nihilism dressed up in a zen disguise. This is important because the whole "fuck as many people and do as many drugs as I can and ignore the consequences because I am beyond good and evil" mentality has haunted American Buddhism since Kerouac and Ginsberg.

The portrayal of a family of a typical American evangelical Christians needs a little work. Russell depicts the family as warm-hearted but narrow-minded and oblivious to their complicity in world problems. Sadly, that sounds about right. But he gets the theology behind their arrogance wrong when he has the clueless daughter state that “Jesus is never mad at us if we live with him in our hearts.” Actually, very few evangelical christians would say that. Russell seems to be hypothesizing that their confidence in their salvation-by-grace is responsible for their self-righteousness and lack of attention to social justice, but in fact personal piety and the struggle against sin remains a focus even for those who consider themselves "saved". A more nuanced diagnosis would find that the real issue is the shift in emphasis from social holiness to private personal holiness since the 19th century, or what Jim Wallis calls the "great heresy of 20th century American Evangelicalism."

Not enough films have something important and substantive to say beyond an interesting story or a character study. Huckabees doesn't provide empty escapism or deny how screwed up the world is, but still leaves you feeling hopeful and empowered to keep fighitng the good fight. And it's all delivered with sincerity and humor, like a little smiling buddha in movie form. I ♥ this movie.

Please read this cool interview with David O. Russell, written by Jeffery Overstreet for Christianity Today. It features a guest appearance by devout catholic/sexy underwear model Mark Walhberg, who says of the film, rather confusingly, but sincerely: "It's all about Jesus"