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The Church that Fights the Tide

Christianity is in retreat in America, falling back and away, or so says whatever Pew study that American Jesus people are wringing their hands about lately.

The old liners are continuing to fade, of course.  Declining and talking about decline is just what we do.

But even the Big Box Churches of AmeriChrist, Inc. are waning, despite their evangelical fervor and seeker-hungry marketing savvy.  It's an across the board retrenchment, one that should be troubling for any who think the spread of the Way is a good thing.

But as with every trend, there are outliers, communities that have within themselves alternate dynamics that make them buck against the tide.

For years, I've studied such a community, most recently as part of the research for my last novel. 

It's a Christian denomination that has grown ferociously over the last two decades, doubling in size.  The trend-lines, for those who study that community, look really really good.

The sect is, of course, the Amish.

They're bucking the trend, radically so.  There were around 100,000 Amish folk in the late 1980s, when I first studied them as part of my undergraduate Religion program at the University of Virginia. As of three years ago, there were 251,000 Amish folk.  They're on track to have nearly half-a-million within the next two decades.  At which point, given trends, they may outnumber the Presbyterians in my old-line denomination.  Perhaps we'll wave to one another as we pass.

Why? Why are they growing, as all around them more conventional Christianity struggles?  There are many reasons, but I'll highlight three:

Reason One:  The Amish Reproduce.
To our traditional alliterative Amish image of beards and barns, bonnets and buggies, we need to add "babies."  The Amish have lots and lots of babies.  Large families remain a positive asset when you're farming the land using traditional methods.  They don't wring their hands about how to pay for college, because the Amish don't go to college.  They don't  worry about how to coordinate all of that anxiety-parenting soccer and karate and test-prep, because they don't do that, either.  

The Amish do not helicopter, or fret about the ROI on their children.  They just have kids--on average, six or seven--who help out around the farm or business.

This is a real part of their growth, one that isn't "replicable," as they say.  I mean, sure, I could propose that to my church, but somehow I think that'd go over so well.   "My plan for growing this church is that you all start having more babies right now!"  There'd be laughter, right up until they knew I was serious, at which point I'd need to hone my skills in retail.

But there is an irony here that does not escape me.  The Christians who buy into the idea that evolution is just the way God works tend not to procreate.  The Amish, who don't?  Their social structure and set of expectations is more robust, from a strictly Darwinian standpoint.  Go figure.

Babies aren't where that ends, though.  Because babies grow up.

Reason Two:  Amish Kids Become Amish Adults.
One of the most striking features of Amish community is just how little attrition occurs as their children grow to adulthood.   Unlike Catholicism, which produces plenty of ex-Catholics, the Amish have an astoundingly high retention rate.  Depending on the study, between 85 and 95% of Amish children choose to be Amish adults.

This is not because the Amish try to be "relevant" and "young" in their worship services.  They couldn't care less about appealing to kids.  Their worships are long and traditional and unrelenting.  They do not hire hippity-happenin' youth pastors.  And yet there the stat is.  They succeed, wildly, at engaging their young people in community in such a way that they choose to remain.

It is also not because their kids are unaware of the outside world.  Rumspringa, the Amish version of confirmation, actively encourages disengaging from the church for a while and experiencing the world.   And yet a significant majority choose to stay.

Why is this?  Because the entire goal of Amish childhood is to become an Amish adult.  In point of fact, that's the totality of how they orient their children's upbringing.  You're preparing your children to be a farmer or craftsman, a mother or a father.  Period.

And sure, we might cluck at that approach, finding it more than a wee bit claustrophobic and slightly oppressive.  How stifling!  How crushing of the human spirit, to not let our kids be anything they want to be!

But as we do so, we have to ask ourselves: does our culture create paths of life-giving meaning and identity for our children?  Does our economy--meaning the way we structure our life together--give them a sense of belonging, of place, of purpose?

Hah.

More pointedly: does our congregational culture do that?  Really?

And there lies the third strength of Amish identity.

Reason Three:  Clearly Countercultural Economy.
Christians of all flavors like to claim that they stand in tension with the culture.  We leftist oldliners tend to articulate that in terms of our orientation to justice.  The evangelicals assert it as a radical commitment to growth and the spread of the Gospel.  The fundamentalists focus on bible-belief and nation.

But honestly?  The Amish show the lie of our claims.  Can I claim to be countercultural, living in my suburban home, facebooking and tweeting my critiques of culture?  No, I can't.  I depend utterly on culture.  I am embedded in it.

So are you, if you're reading this.

Can the evangelicals who grasp at every cultural trend to further the marketing of their message make that claim?  No.  The medium of consumer culture seeps into their message, and when the medium is itself culturally shaped, it makes spreading a countercultural message difficult.

Can the fundamentalists who fuse their rigid literalism with nationalism, wrapping themselves in both the Bible and the flag?  No.  The blending of Christian faith and the state has always been a betrayal of the message of Jesus, and fundamentalism is just modern-era empiricism applied to the texts of Scripture.

Can the progressive Christian left, which so adopts the language of academic leftism that it can't meaningfully distinguish its own voice from whatever #tropes are #trending on #twitter?  No.  No it can't.

But the Amish?  They are counterculture.  They teach and live nonviolent agrarian counterculture in every aspect of their existence.   Theirs is not a perfect society, and I don't view them through rose-colored utopian glasses.  The Amish are very human, with all of the foibles of humankind.

But the model of life they offer is both faithful and radically distinct.

They do not rely on or mimic the oikonomia of the world.  They have created their own economy, intentionally self-sustaining and separate.  In some ways, it is arguably superior and more robust.

It is not a community that creates anxiety within its members, that sets them against one another.  Their economy is not red in tooth and claw, with a handful of victors and a scrambling mass of losers.   Their economy does not shift wildly on the whims of the powerful.  It does no violence, not just in its pacifism, but in its attitude towards those in times of need.

There is a clear choice, for those who are part of their faith and their community.  You can live like the world--like the English.  Or you can can be the Plain Folk.

And for now, the Plain Folk are trending in ways that the rest of us are not.

Religion and Violence

The followers of the Prophet Mohammed, peace be unto him, have a problem.

It's a problem that surfaces again and again, headline after headline, as those who interpret Islam as requiring violence act out their interpretation.  Villagers are butchered in West Africa.  Bombs explode in crowded markets.  Authors and cartoonists and filmmakers are murdered.  It's ugly, and it's horrific.

Having read the entirety of the Quran, and read the Hadiths, and familiarized myself with the core of Muslim faith in my own secular study of religion, I see no reason Islam must be violent.  It is not, as its most radicalized opponents assert, an inherently violent religion.  That does not mean that I believe Mohammed, peace be unto him, was a pacifist.  He was perfectly willing to pick up the sword, and did on a variety of occasions.  In that, he was less like Jesus or the Buddha, and more like, well, the dude whose picture graces this blog.  If the Quran is to be taken seriously as an authentic exposition of his life and teachings, he was a warrior prophet.  Arguing otherwise is absurd.

But though he was a warrior, the faith that rests on his prophetic critique does not require war.  The framework of the Muslim life is the practice of the five pillars.  Faith in God, regular prayer, pilgrimage, charity, and the discipline of fasting?  Do those things, and you're a Muslim.

Those are gracious, good, positive things.  It's why so many millions of Muslims have no difficulty coexisting with their neighbors.  There's nothing, nothing at all, in the deep and authentic practice of their faith that stirs them to violence.

So why this seemingly relentless drumroll of horror, which is doubly...no... exponentially more horrible to those whose practice of Islam leads them to live charitable, gracious lives?

The reasons are many.  It's...complicated.  Islam exists in a region of the world that is economically troubled, and that in the next century will become even more troubled.  When the oil dries up, developed economies will transition to other sources of energy, ending the temporary growth that has made prosperity possible in that region.  That, coupled with political oppression, the dark residue of colonialism, endemic unemployment, and climatic resource depletion?  Things are going to be...messy. 

But perhaps the greatest challenge Islam faces is a challenge that badly burned my own faith: the fusion of religion and the power of the state.   For a millennia and a half, Christendom--the dominion of Christianity--was enforced at the edge of the sword.  Faith and the state were one.  The demands of faith are enmeshed with the laws of the state.

Whenever this is the case, religion becomes inherently violent, because the power of the state ultimately rests on the power to coerce compliance with a set of laws or social norms.  It is why so many were butchered in the name of Jesus, to "protect the faith" from impurity.  It was a horror, and one that Christianity must never forget.

If an individual can be imprisoned or physically punished for blasphemy or hewing to another faith, then they are living in a violent faith system.   I think folks like Bill Maher or Richard Dawkins are fools, and radically misrepresent faith.  But if a "Christian" government threatened them with imprisonment or sanction to protect my sensibilities, then my faith would be violent.

Therein lies the challenge for a faith tradition that exists in an area of the world where religion and the state remain dangerously entangled.  

Reza Aslan, Bart Ehrman, and the Failure of Fundamentalism

Both of the two books that have been bopping around in the popular Jesus consciousness lately share a common characteristic.  There's Reza Aslan's Zealot, which I recently read and reviewed.  Then there's the latest output of Bart Ehrman.  How Jesus Became God would be on my plate if I hadn't already given him plenty of my processor time.

I have not read this work yet, but I've read lots of stuff by Ehrman.  I know from whence he comes, and this doesn't really seem to expand his schtick much.

Ehrman's a bible scholar--not a bad one, actually--whose work mostly revolves around using historical-critical method to cast doubt on the core dynamics of faith.

Doubt is at the core of his approach, because he's an agnostic now, on the hard side of it.  Meaning, his is not the doubt that resides as an integral part of an existentially authentic faith.  It's just doubt.

Like so many souls in our culture, he got his start in the fundamentalist community.  That's where he learned faith, a faith that mattered to him deeply.  The problem?  When he came into encounter with the actual historical process by which the Bible was formed and shaped, it blew a huge and irreparable hole in his belief system.  Reading his works, one still gets a sense of how cheesed he is at having been duped.  What he has now is just history, decoupled from any engagement with the transcendent.

What strikes me about both these books is that commonality.  Both Reza and Ehrman "came to faith" through the classical evangelical approach. The initial appeal was emotive, and the community into which they were received was fundamentalist. That, for both, defined their Christian journey.

And it also failed both of them completely.  When they reached a point of questioning, there were no longer answers that respected either their intelligence or reality.

Once you allow the reality of God's creation in, literalism comes apart like tissue paper in a typhoon.  That's why the walls and ramparts of presuppositional apologetics are so very high and so fiercely defended.  What lies within is as delicate and fleeting as a shadow.

And so a disappointed Reza returned to the Islam of his childhood, and Ehrman turned on the lie he knew as Christianity with the precise sword of his historian's training.

The terrible effect of fundamentalism was to inoculate both of them against the transforming power of the Gospel.  Let's set aside theology for a moment, they say, as if one can do that and not leave only a dead husk where there once was a living body.

I wish this were less common, but honestly, it happens all the time.  People think they're in encounter with the real thing, only to have their hopes destroyed and their passions made an embarrassment.  Why would they ever trust the good news again?  Or trust that the Spirit that tried to move in them was more real and more potent than what they'd been taught?

And that, perhaps more than anything, is the greatest failure of fundamentalism.

The Cosmos Reboot and Faith

I'll confess I didn't watch it.  Oh, I will, eventually.  No question.  But I don't watch things when they come out anymore, a part of my having adapted to this whole wacky interwebs thing.  I have grown accustomed to watching things...well...when I want to.  Most of us have.

Which is a pesky thing, because it means you miss out on the big launch moment, when the media buzz is out there humming and chattering.

So last night, I missed it.  After a long Sunday of pastoring, my brain was depleted.  But that didn't mean I wasn't aware of it happening.  The marketing for the relaunch of the beloved Cosmos series has been everywhere lately, and I will make time for it.

On the one hand, there's always a little reboot resentment involved.  You know, reboot resentment?  That feeling you get when Hollywood remakes a beloved, perfectly crafted story that needs no remaking?  Like, say, the recent and pointless Robocop.  It wasn't terrible, but really.  C'mon. Why even bother?

Or Willy Wonka.  Lord have mercy, did Tim Burton botch that one.

For those of us who love science, there's not even any question of the place that Carl Sagan's Cosmos has in the pantheon of awesomeness.  For an entire generation...two, in fact...that series was a  wondering, joyful journey through the amazing creation we inhabit.

On the other hand, there are two great reasons to have rebooted this series.  First, an entire generation hasn't seen it.  There's been nothing quite like it since, and the younglings and not-so-younglings of this era deserve it.  Given the scientific illiteracy of American society, we kinda need it.

Second, and even more important, science hasn't stood still.  The thirty-odd years that have passed since Cosmos aired...yes, "aired"...have seen significant advances in both our understanding of the mechanics of being and our grasp of the cosmos itself.  We have peered deeper into existence, and further back into space-time.

And science is discovering that we no longer inhabit quite the same universe we thought we did back thirty years ago.  It goes deeper.  It is infinitely, mindblowingly larger.

I'm sure Neil Degrasse Tyson's going to get into that, and what's even more important is that people of faith listen in.  Because if we don't have a faith that can meaningfully engage with these new understandings of existence, then we may as well start building museums featuring Jesus riding into Jerusalem on an animatronic velociraptor.

So as time permits, I'll look forward to watching it.  Later, without commercials.  I can't stand commercials.  Dangit.  Where's the skip button?

As, frankly should any Christian who cares about whether our faith can stand in conversation with the reality God has placed us in.

Christian Pastor, Jewish Children

This weekend, my youngest son led worship.

As a pastor dad, it was an interesting service for a variety of reasons, the most significant of which was that he'd been preparing for it for years.  Though the kids in my little church did a rockin' job of leading worship for Sunday School Sunday this weekend, my son was not part of that event.  

The worship he guided was, finally, his bar mitzvah.  

Both my wife and my kids are Jewish, making me the sole gentile in my household, and both of my boys part of a rare breed: The Jewish Preacher's -Kids.  I'm not sure how many PKs are bar mitzvahed every year, but I suspect the numbers aren't high.

The little guy did fine, rolling unphased through even some unplanned hiccups in the service, ones that might have shaken more anxious souls.

He chanted Torah, chanted his haftarah portion, and delivered a challenging d'var torah in a tag team with his cousin, who was being bat mitzvahed at the same service.

I watched it all with pride in how much he's done, and with a deep awareness of where he is relative to faith.  He's a thoughtful, complex kid, and his views on faith reflect that complexity.  He's Jewish, but struggles with issues of suffering and justice and textual authority, and is honestly engaged with exploring his identity.  It's an identity I respect.

That I'm a Christian pastor with Jewish kids tends to spark questions with some folks.  How can I be such a thing?

It's not particularly difficult, honestly.

Judaism itself is so utterly compatible with my faith that I have no difficulty embracing it.  When worshipping in the lively, musical services at my wife's synagogue, there's not a single thing said or prayed that I find myself troubled by.  At least, not more so than I'd find worshipping with a similarly-oriented Christian community.  The emphasis on justice, forgiveness, faith, and repentance are completely in line with the teachings of my Teacher.   This is hardly surprising, given that he was kinda Jewish himself.   I am fully backwards-compatible, as they say.

I've talked about faith with both of my boys, and told them about Jesus and why he is so important to me.  They get it, I think, in a way that inspires some respect for both what he taught and who he was.

But I've not forced my faith upon them.  I don't do that, not with them, not with anyone.  I've argued for it, defended it as they've encountered those angry and bitter souls who use Jesus as an excuse for their hatreds, and presented it in a way that shows it is gracious and self-evidently good.  But evangelism is about manifesting and articulating grace, not about blunt force suasion.

Some might argue that I should be terrified for the disposition of their mortal souls, but I just can't get there.  Relative to their Jewish identity, Paul argues at length in Romans, the covenant with Israel hasn't been revoked.  Just expanded and deepened.  

And as Jesus himself articulates in Matthew, what matters isn't our ability to articulate complex theological positions or to defend the propositions of orthodoxy.

What matters is that the manner and nature of our lives express the fundamentally just and gracious nature of our Creator.   Living in the Kingdom isn't a cognitive construct.  It's existential, woven into our doing and being.

So far as my kids do that, they're fine.

And no matter what, I'll love 'em.

Nonlinear Christianity

In reading through the last issue of Presbyterians Today, I was fascinated by a sequence of articles on Islam and Christianity.  In part, it was because...having read the entire Quran last year...I still struggle with the dynamics of that relationship.  Though I was able to find places of grace in that encounter, it was ultimately somewhat analogous to reading through a particularly unforgiving section of Deuteronomy, over and over again.   The Quran was interesting...fascinating, even...but not quite the joyous love-fest that one might have hoped for.

This being a publication of a significant oldline tradition, there was much effort to talk about tolerance and openness and mutual forbearance, all of which was well and good.  But as I read, I was fascinated by what one of the writers suggested were areas of commonality between our two traditions.   To quote:

Muslims and Christians share a linear view of history, a belief in heaven and hell, and a belief in judgement, individual death, and the resurrection of the body.

Problem is, lately I find myself hanging up on that first one.  My recent thinking and writing on the intersection of Many Worlds cosmology and faith have left me struggling a bit with the whole idea of linearity, of creation only being the unfolding of a single preset narrative.  One beginning, one end, with every step on the way neatly and Calvinistically predetermined.

Fate is a big deal in Islam, as my reading of both the Quran and a deep sampling of the hadiths revealed.  Our destiny, our fate, is completely set by Allah, who knows ever last thing we have done and will ever do.  In that, the observations in the article were dead on.

Moving away from linear cosmologies and into the considerably more challenging views of the universe implied by quantum physics, that messes a bit with both of our respective theologies.

As I'm less of an expert on Islam, I can say that it may not be quite a mortal blow to Christianity.  For example, it isn't problematic for most of the teachings of Jesus.  The core and foundational obligations of the Great Commandment aren't touched by such thinking.  The declaration that the Kingdom of God is at hand still stands.  As does the call to evangelize, and the demand for us to hear the cries of the outcast and the oppressed.  The ultimate judgement of all of our actions is also not challenged, or the salvific power of the Cross.

But the whole "we already know how exactly this ends" schtick?  It doesn't fly so well in a multiverse creation.  Oh, sure, things might end with Beasts and False Prophets and Kirk Cameron floating off into the sky.  But it just as well might not.

If the future is actually open, which it needs to be if repentance is to mean anything, then...well...it might not be exactly what we think.

Sounding Like a Buddhist

Yesterday, during a lovely extended lunch with two fellow pastors, we wandered from talking shop to talking Big Picture.  It was a delicious discussion, as we wandered into areas of theological complexity that I thoroughly enjoy.

At one point, things wandered into a conversation about predestination and free-will.  I used to be more traditionally orthodox Calvinist on the subject, but my view has...changed...over the past several years.  My engagement with Many Worlds and the multiverse understanding of creation has caused me to drift away from that old and unresolved argument.

Or perhaps that argument has drifted away from me.  It just doesn't seem relevant any more, a question that is as meaningless as asking about the sound of one hand clapping.

I was endeavoring to explain my viewpoint, but the burrito I'd just eaten was evidently taking up too much of the oxygen in my system, and I could hear myself not making myself clear.  Or I thought I wasn't.  So hard, it is, to hear with others ears.

Midway through an obscure sounding explication of the nature of God, one of my colleagues smiled to the other and said, "He sounds like a Buddhist."

I didn't respond, but smiled serenely, which probably didn't make me seem less Buddhist.

But I thought, hey, no, I sound like a Christian.  Christians sound like this.

In the context of that good company, that observation wasn't what it might have been in other Christian circles.  There are plenty of earnest Christians who might utter that phrase as a cautionary note to a brother or sister who's in danger of wandering off the reservation.  That was not its intent.  It was simply an observation.

I've always respected the teachings of the Buddha, and my depth study of it has only deepened that respect.  I see the value in the Four Noble Truths, and the wisdom of the Noble Eightfold Path.  But it is not the Way I have chosen to follow.   My intention and my focus is teaching what Jesus taught, and guiding people to follow him in intention and deed.

The reality I am describing is the same reality that Buddhism attempts to describe, sure.  But it's not my way.  That does not make it evil, or my enemy, or the enemy of my Master.  There are such paths, and I see their fruits in the world around me.  Those are worth opposing.

Buddhism is simply... different.

And there is nothing inherently wrong with difference.

Reading the Quran: Encountering Jesus

In the checkout line at the supermarket yesterday, the bagger was a kid, likely a north African immigrant.   On his nametag was the name "Issa."  It was a familiar name, because I've been encountering it frequently in the Quran.

It's the name the Quran uses for Jesus of Nazareth.   Jesus is a regularly occurring feature of the Quran, popping up on and off throughout the suras.    As a Christian, I find the representation of him to be fascinating.  It blends the understanding of Jesus a Christian learns from the Gospels with some...well...different ways of looking at him.

Obviously, even though the Quran is not a short book, the point is not to talk about and present the life of Jesus.  It has other fish to fry.  Still, we get references to Jesus here and there.  There are 72 references (both direct and indirect) to be found in 59 verses of the Quran, and they tend to fall into several categories.

There are consistent statements of respect for Jesus as a man who genuinely articulates the will of God. The Quran offers only high praise for Jesus, pitching out all manner of superlatives.  He is given clear signs and filled with the Spirit of God (Al Baraqa, 87).   He is noble and among the righteous (Aal-e-Imran, 39).   He is the Messiah (Aal-e-Imran 45, An Nisa 157), which would a pretty impressive statement, were that term to mean the same thing Meschiach means.

So there's a baseline of honor and respect there, impressively so for a tradition that is in direct competition for pledge units.

But there are also some major differences.   Although Jesus appears throughout Quran, what does not appear is any reference to his teachings.  We hear that he taught rightly, and that he was a servant of Allah.   But there's not a peep about what he actually said when defining our relationship with God, or when describing the nature of the Kingdom.

What we get instead are several stories of miracles.  There's passing reference to a few generic healings.   Jesus takes a clay bird and makes it live.  After the disciples ask, Jesus orders angelic takeout, with a brimming table of food arriving from heaven.

We also get, in a fascinating verse, the intimation that Jesus did not die on the cross, but someone else who looked like Jesus died there instead, while Jesus remained alive and teaching.  (An Nisa 157)

These Jesus datapoints are particularly intriguing.  Why?  Because while they are not in any way representative of orthodox Christian faith and the narratives in the Gospels, they are familiar.  They are familiar because they occur in the non-canonical Gospels.  

The story of the clay bird, for example, is found in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a pop-Gnostic bit of fanciful storytelling about Jesus as a young demigod.  This is Kid SuperJesus, who goes around his neighborhood randomly healing kids, bringing inanimate objects to life, and smiting those who disrespect him.  He raises them again, of course, just to show he can.

The "Jesus Didn't Die on the Cross" bit also draws from the Pseudo-Thomistic Gnostic tradition, as Jesus was understood among the Gnostics to have been a being of Spirit who could not suffer.   The Gospel of Thomas presents Jesus exactly that way.

What is clear so far in my reading is that both the Jesus and the Christianity described in the Quran bears little resemblance to orthodox Christianity.   What it resembles, quite frankly, is the Christianity that probably existed in and around Arabia in the sixth and seventh centuries.   Far from the intellectual centers of the faith, Christianity there would have been a mess of different teachings, popular sayings, and wild stories about Jesus, passed along by a mostly illiterate laity and a semi-literate priestly/monastic class.  The complex, nuanced teachings by and about Jesus that define the heart of Christian faith would have been nowhere to be found.

So in the Quran we have a Jesus, but one without both 1) the Cross and 2) the ethical/moral/spiritual teaching.

That's...um...rather different.

But what about that most central and challenging assertion of Christian faith?  How is Jesus connected to God?   Here, the Quran has something to say, but for that, I'll need another post.

Holy Books, Fire, and Tolerance

Just about a month has passed since I reverently burned my old Bible.  Today, that simple action feels a bit different, particularly in the light of the rioting and killings under way yet again in Afghanistan over the inadvertent burning of some Korans.

The official response of the United States military and the U.S. government has been one of apology, repeatedly affirming the need for us to be culturally sensitive and formally stating a respect for the faith and culture of the Afghan people.   I understand this, and I understand the strategic dynamics that make such statements necessary.

But though I'm progressive, perhaps because I'm progressive, I have a great deal of difficulty finding respect for Afghan culture, and particularly for the form of faith that is manifested in the rioting and killing we've seen.  Yes, I know, some would say it's all our fault that things in Afghanistan are the way they are today.  No one likes an occupier.  There's some truth in that.  I also know that people who struggle in hopeless poverty and under societal oppression often are a tick more...volatile.

And I have no difficulty respecting Islam, with its virtues of charity, mercy and hospitality.  There are plenty of gracious, kind, and peaceful Muslims in this world who find foundation for their graciousness in their faith.

Still and all, I struggle with the idea that the sociocultural and theocratic dynamics of Afghanistan merit acceptance.  There are Afghans who are perfectly decent people, but the culture itself just isn't a positive thing.    It is a train wreck, a mess, oppressive, corrupt, violent, and willfully ignorant.   So I have sensitivity, sure, but in the way you are "sensitive" to that volatile neighbor who likes to get drunk and sit in his front yard with a shotgun, or the way you're "sensitive" to the presence of a nearby piece of unexploded ordnance.

But how can I bring myself to respect a culture that would...if I were Muslim and had burned an old Koran as a respectful way of disposing of it...drag me into the streets and beat me to death?  Or threaten me with violence for associating with someone who had accidentally burned a Koran?  When I burned that Bible and put the video up on YouTube as background for a blog post, I got a tiny speck of fundamentalist trollery on the video...but that's what you'd expect.   It is a far cry from feeling like your life is in danger.  But ours is, for the time being, still a free and open society.

Within the boundaries of my own faith, I have tremendous difficulty with those who take our sacred narratives and turn them into idols.  I see the rigidity of literalism and the idolatrous worship of texts as antithetical to faith, and particularly antithetical to the faith taught by Jesus and spread by Paul.   "..For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life," as the Apostle might say.

If tolerance and acceptance of the other are central values, it is hard to see where to connect with a culture in which those values are essentially rejected.

The True Scotsman

At the actually rather enjoyable meeting of National Capital Presbytery Tuesday night, much of the event revolved around the reflections and insights of the inimitable John Bell.  Bell is a minister, a musician, and a member of the Iona community, an intentional community of Reformed Christians.

He is also, without question, a Scotsman.  He was born in Scotland.  His community and work are in Scotland.  His fashion sense was clearly not Continental.  And when that sweet brogue hummed through the air of the church, there was no question.  We were in the presence of a Scot.  It was so obviously so that the Vietnamese-American elder from my congregation who attended with me admitted afterwards that he'd had some real trouble understanding what was being said at first. 

I adapted more easily, either because that brogue hums in the quarter of my blood that remains fiercely MacDougall or because I was exposed to so much of it from the lips of the Rev. Dr. George MacPherson Docherty as a wee laddie in tha kehrrk of ma bairth.

If you have any real knowledge of a thing, you can just tell what a thing is. You know the truth of it.

Which is why I'm amazed at how virally the adolescent everybody-look-at-me self-indulgence of tamtampamela spread in the blogosphere.   Lil' Ms. Pamela was a particularly successful YouTube troll, one of those benighted souls who say horrible things for the sole purpose of getting attention.   The short videos she posted were all faux fundamentalist pronouncements.  She sang little songs about people burning in hell, which she claimed had been taught to her in Sunday School.  In her second to last video, she pretended to celebrate the deaths of all of the Japanese who lost their lives in the earthquake and tsunami, "praising God" for killing them.  The video went viral, and was so beyond the pale that in addition to the usual outrage, she drew the attention of 4Chan, which found her home address and phone number and posted it.  She then put up a short video admitting, unrepentantly, that she was just a troll, she didn't believe a word she said, and that this wasn't fun anymore.  After which she fled.

What gets me, though, is the readiness of folks to believe that she was actually what she said she was.  Having seen the video, it immediately set off troll bells.  First, her attitude was wrong.  Not earnest, if you will, but a bit sly and smiling.  It was just off.  She didn't sound or act like a zealot.   Second, she didn't dress like someone who said what she said.  Leaning into the camera while wearing little spaghetti strap tops is highly anomalous among religious ultraconservatives.

Most important, though, was what she claimed to believe.  That smug, sly, teasing hatred is utterly alien to the Jesus experience.  It was so far beyond the pale of Christian thought and practice as to be clearly Not Christian.

Here, of course, a committed anti-theist might offer up Flew's 1975 No True Scotsman argument.  That line of reasoning suggests that it is a fallacy to suggest that simply because a thing doesn't meet one criteria for inclusion in a group, it can be excluded from that group.  Example:  1) Scotsmen are sky clad under their kilts;  2)  But my Uncle Hamish wears tighty whiteys under his Campbell Tartan; 3)  Well, true Scotsmen would do no such thing.

This argument surfaces often when Christians argue that Westboro Baptist isn't Christian.  When you say, well, they aren't Christian because their actions and beliefs are alien to us, the counter comes: "Hah!  That's the No True Scotsman fallacy!  You're just excluding them because they're inconvenient."   There is, in argumentation, some validity to that. 

But some categories are meaningful, and even worldviews as multivalent as Christianity do have discernable boundaries.  You cannot, for instance, claim to be an atheist and a Christian.  Well, you can claim it.  But doing so is like me claiming that I am a single celled eukaryote.  It requires not just moving outside of species, but of phyla and kingdom.  If enough distinguishing features are missing, then something no longer can be meaningfully categorized as being part of the group that shares those features.

With tamtampamela's trolling, the issue was being able to...from observation of actual Christian behavior...critically assess that her behavior was so anomalous as to be outside of Christianity as a meaningful category.  As Hemant Mehta, the vigorously atheistic blogger over at thefriendlyatheist put it as he expressed skepticism about her motives:  "...I don’t know a single Christian who would agree with what she says."  He's no lover of faith, and he spends much of his energy attempting to debunk faith in active debate with Christians.

But from his ongoing interactions with Christians, he knew a false Christian when he saw one.  It's a pity that more folks weren't able to similarly see past the falseness.

Osama Bin Jones

Listening to the fading echoes of Koran-burnin' hum in our cybernetic collective unconscious, I'm wondering what the takeaway is going to be from the whole event. Mostly, folks who jabber for a living seem to have come to the same conclusion I reached. It's as if the Rufinol finally wore off, and we all suddenly came to, and are wondering why in the Sam Hill we were all standing around in our underwear talking about this tiny little butt-hair on the body of Christ.

I can think, to be honest, of three reasons.

First, it was controversial. We Amurricans love controversy. Will he or won't he! Ooooh! And we especially likes us some crazy. And we need something to talk about to get the eyeballs on our blog, so as a culture, we spend an inordinate amount of time consumed by the thoughts and actions of our village idiots. If there's a guy standing in the village square shouting incoherently, we don't ignore him or trank him. We all gather around to listen and egg him on. We are, after all, a nation that seems to have an insatiable appetite for the stunted, self-centered souls and faux dysfunctional drama that populates most reality television. Couple that hunger for the extreeeeme with our constant-on media and tendency for things to go self-generatingly viral, and hey-presto, you've got yourself an "issue" with legs. That we are talking about it because we're talking about it may be a tautology, but that's the way new media works.

Second, it was nonetheless a teachable moment. Yeah, I know, it was heinously overblown, but it tapped down into some interesting conversations that had nothing to do with the specifics of this trivial case. Last week, as I drove my kids and the missus to synagogue for Rosh Hashanah services, the entire drive was consumed with talk of this event, used as a case study for the balance between free speech and civic responsibility in our society. It's not often you can get kids engaged like that, but for twenty minutes, our car was full of ruminations on the boundaries of human liberty. It was kinda cool.

Third, and this one is a wee stretch, I found myself so savoring the irony of this event that I wondered, fleetingly, if the Lord's hand might be in this. In my experience, God has this funny habit of kicking our behinds in the most optimal and creatively appropriate ways when we forget ourselves. American Christians have, of late, been willing to believe some pretty impressively narsty things about Muslims. Because of the events of 9/11, and the actions of a few psychopaths, many folks are quite happy to buy into the idea that Islam is inherently monstrous, and Muslims are all potential Al Quaeda fifth columnists.

And suddenly, here's a Christian who seemed willing to act on his own to do something we really, really didn't want him to do. No sane observer can look at this guy and say that he's a meaningful representative of Christianity. He had no real connections to any other Christian group, and came across as a totally loose cannon both interpersonally and in his approach to the faith. He was perfectly willing to consider actions that violate the central ethical teaching of Jesus about our attitude towards our neighbors.

"He doesn't speak or act for us," we all shouted.

I wonder if we realize how familiar those words are to American Muslims.

Collateral Justice

One of the things I struggle most with as a nominally progressive pastor is the whole social justice thing. I'm for it, of course. Pretty much across the board, I'm in favor of stuff that makes it clear to all and sundry that I must be a hard core left winger. Material relief for the poor? Check. A visceral distrust of the processes of capitalism? Check. A deep commitment to conservation and the environmental movement? Uh huh. A radically inclusive and welcoming attitude towards gays and lesbians? Check. A passion for liberty and equal rights for artificial and synthetic sentient entities? Absolutely.

Oh. Wait. I'm getting ahead of myself.

Whichever way, when asked to check a box on the leftist/rightist debates, I come down pretty much consistently progressive and social justicey. Much of the reason for that has to do with my faith, with the radical love towards the Other that is at the heart of the Christian message. Yet as I review those teachings of Jesus, what I encounter has very little to do with using collective power dynamics to resist systemic injustice and empowering the disenfranchised. Yeah, Jesus resisted The Man, and got himself killed as a subversive and and agitator and a general maker of trouble. This sends tingly feelings down the spines of self-described radicals everywhere.

But when you look at what he taught, and the ethic for which he lived and died and overcame death itself, it has very little to do with the socioeconomics and the power dynamics of human communities. Those structures of power aren't even part of the equation. They are immaterial, to be addressed only so far as they must be rejected in order to embrace the Gospel.

When we forget that, it's easy for churches to simply become mirrors of the communities in which they find themselves. It's easy for them to become indistinguishable from the political and social entities that fill the secular spaces around them. When that happens, they lose their grounding, and gradually become little more than an association or a nonprofit entity, organized around a common secular interest or purpose.

There's nothing wrong with such groups. I think they're great ways to get things done in our culture that need to get done. But they aren't church. They do not convey the same message.

That, I think, is one of the primary ways in which both progressive and conservative Christians are prone to stumble. Rather than focusing on instilling in folks a sense of the radical grace taught by the Nazarene, it's easy to get into talk of social issues as the raison d'etre of the church. But what Jesus taught was not sociological, but spiritual. It was not economic, but existential. It is for that reason that it can be such a shattering, dangerous, and transformative thing...not just for individuals, but for cultures as well.

There Has Never Been and Will Never Be a Christian Nation

One of the tubs that American conservatism loves to thump on a regular basis is the idea that America is a Christian nation. Or, if they're feeling a teensy bit more open-minded, a "Judeo-Christian" nation. Cross and country, faith and flag, all woven together, until the blood running from the wounds in His hands and feet and side isn't just red, but white and blue as well.

This takes many forms. It was a major theme in the recent Tea Party gathering, where godancountry was practically one word. It includes the recent "Patriot's Bible" translation/commentary (thanks, Jonathan) that asserts the American journey is essentially the same thing as the great story of the Gospel. This lovely piece of work affirms those who exist to wave the flag and feel good about America in their conviction that America is God's Nation, no matter what. Because we all know that reflexively loving your country above all other things is something that the Bible strongly endorses.

But while I view the order and structures of our society as a blessing, I also am not fool enough to believe that a nation can be Christian. In this, Christianity is...well...different from the other Abrahamic faiths. I had this realization a few months ago during an interfaith conference. You can have a Jewish nation. Or a Muslim nation.

But not a Christian one.

Why not?

Well...what is a nation? A nation is a people, a society, bounded and knit together first by geography, but second and more significantly by laws. Those legal structures provide the common ground upon which the collective life of a people are founded. They establish justice and balance between the inevitable competing interests that arise when human beings share life and space. That legal order can be used to oppress, or to..as the United States Constitution does...provide an equitable foundation for our life together.

In the Torah, Judaism has just such a set of laws, established to govern both the cultic and the jurisprudential life of a Jewish nation. In Sharia, Islam has another set of laws, which serve essentially the same purpose. But Jesus did not provide us with a carefully considered system of governance. He did not lay out the rules and standards for running an orderly society. He only gave us One Law, one which is intended not for the governing of human society and the balancing of competing interests, but for the transformation and spiritual liberation of human persons.

That One Law can, if it is embraced by a significant portion of the population of a country, change the character of that nation. It can help insure that the application of the coercion that undergirds the power of the state is leavened with grace and mercy. Even so, we shouldn't confuse it with the laws in our courthouses.

The kingdom of God is not far from us...but the Stars and Stripes is not it's flag.

Allahu Akbar

One of the best ways to twist the knickers of an ultraconservative Christian is to use the name Allah in a way that seems to imply that the God of Muslims is the same as the God of Christians and two/thirds of the God of Jews.

When progressive and moderate Christians seek that monotheistic commonality, it's taken as either syncretistic or naive. Allah is, like, so not the same, say those on the right. Some point out the variances between the nature of Allah as expressed in the Qu'ran and the YHWH described in the Torah...and there are, certainly, some differences. Others point out differences in ethical emphasis between the God Jesus articulated and the Allah that Mohammed proclaimed. There are certainly some significant distinctives, although ultraconservatives tend to highlight them in ways that are more polemic and intentionally negative.

But many seem...well...less sane. Allah is a pagan Moon God, or so Jack Chick's little psychotronic komiks would have us believe. Allah is an evil demon, say glazed-eye folks who unsurprisingly TEND TO WRITE IN ALL CAPS. There can be no use of that name by Christians!

What I've found interesting here is that once again, Christian fundamentalists and Islamic fundamentalists seem to have ended up on the same side of an issue. An interesting snippet of faith news out of Malaysia recently involved efforts on the part of Muslim conservatives to forbid Christians from using the name Allah to describe God in their speech and in their writing. A law there forbidding that action was recently repealed on the basis of personal religious liberty, and that repeal has the Islamic right-wingers up in arms. It might...cause confusion. Syncretism. Muslims deciding of their own free will that they might want to be Christian. Or worse yet, a sense of mutual understanding and monotheistic commonality. That this is a perfect mirror image of the perspective of Christian ultraconservatives is unsurprising. The extremes always, always, end up looking functionally identical to that thing they claim to hate the most.

I tend not to use the name Allah meself, for the same reason I don't drop into an overblown Latino accent whenever I pronounce a word with Spanish origins. Like, say, "I recently vacationed in "Ghhwaah-tay-Maaal-Ah." It seems a bit forced, a bit too "golly-look-at-me-I'm-so-open-minded-and-progressive." But I'm also not willing to preclude any overlap at all between my faith and that of those who approach the Creator in ways that...while they differ...are not inherently evil.

Churches for Algernon

Back when I was a youngling, I devoured science fiction. Some of what I used to read, like the old classic Asimov stuff, just seems dated now. Punch card computers and 1950s gender dynamics come across as little more than quaint. Other classic sci-fi, like the lucid fever-dreams of early Bradbury and Huxley, is richer and more relevant. These aren't simply grand zappity zappity rockets and robots space operas. They used science fiction to go deep into social and existential issues. It was good stuff.

One of the sci-fi short stories I remember most vividly was the 1960 Nebula Prize winning "Flowers for Algernon." Spoilers will follow, so if you haven't read it...well...you should read it. The tale was told from the perspective of a diarist named Charlie, a mentally challenged young man who is subjected to an experimental procedure to increase his intelligence. It works. He goes from being a gentle, simple soul to being a soaring genius...and then the procedure fails, and he returns to his prior state of being. His struggles with his deepening awareness and his struggles as that awareness fades were intense, meaty stuff. As a bookish seventh grader, it rocked my world.

Yesterday, as I was perusing one of the blogs I feed, I read a pastor musing about whether there is any place for a professional clergy in the modern church. That got me off on a related tangent, not so much about professional clergy as the folks we pay, but about the place of folks who have decided to become "professional." Meaning, to totally focus their lives on the study of our faith. If what counts is emergent church relationality and emotional sharing, the deep knowledge of tradition and language that an educated and specialized clergy brings to the table means very little. Perhaps more significantly, if what matters is JesusMegaCenter skills as a motivational speaker and corporate executive, then you really don't need anything more than a couple of audited Bible College courses and an MBA.

That feels like a symptom of Christianity's decline. I wonder sometimes if the trajectory of the church is heading cognitively downwards, away from the intellectual apogee of folks like Tillich and Barth, of Christian existentialists like Kierkegaard, of well-read mystics like Merton. Maybe we've had our "peak" moment, as our heady exchange with the enlightenment fades. Perhaps we are now drifting downwards, back into a simplistic primitivism where the big and the shiny are the only things that hold our semi-literate twittention. In that church, you don't need someone who has studied deeply, or who spends much of their waking life mulling over the way Christ intersects with culture.

It feels like a loss worth mourning. To paraphrase Charlie's last line in the short story: "Please if you get a chance put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the chirch yard."

Interfaith Roundup

Yesterday's conference of Clergy Beyond Borders made for an interesting day. It's always a bit difficult for me, as a near-pathological introvert, to assimilate myself into a gathering in which I know absolutely no-one. Yet conversation and relational connection was the point, so I leavened my desire to wander and contemplate and just plopped myself into things. And new experiences aplenty were there to be had.

It was a bit unusual, for example, to hear the director of an organization of Muslim women lawyers describing her love of Korean soap operas. The need for prolonged emo melodrama is one of those universal human desires, I suppose.

It was intriguing to talk with an evangelical and a Muslim who were both struggling with the challenge of making inroads in secular Europe. As much of Europe is hostile to Islam, and either indifferent to or hostile towards Christianity, faith communities really have a very difficult struggle there. I have a tendency to think the standard toolset of the American evangelical movement tends to be the wrong one. The reflexive resistance to the modern era and enlightenment principles that has come to define much of American Christianity fails miserably in Europe. The Prosperity Gospel also fails miserably, as preaching endlessly about Health-And-Wealth serves no purpose in cultures where they aren't required to fret so much about those things. Honestly, I think the only Christianity that has any hope of gaining a small foothold in Europe is the real thing. You know, focused on the core teachings of Jesus, and content with being a community of intimate faith and service that bears no resemblance to Christendom.

It was heartening to hear that the little cluster of rabbis who gathered in the early evening to light the Hannukah candles were joined by imams and pastors. Wish I'd been there and hadn't been out walking. That's two nights in a row I've missed the menorah. Fiddle. But I needed to move my legs and be out in creation for a bit. There's only so much sitting on my tushie I can take.

It was awkward sitting across from an Indian Muslim imam at lunch, endeavoring repeatedly to connect on a human level, but finding that he seemed to have no interest whatsoever in doing anything other than telling me his name and giving me his card. The card announced his leadership of HALF-A-MILLION-MUSLIM-IMAMS, a fact that he managed to slip in when we went around the room to share our names, and that appears in nearly every google return of his name. Eye contact? Pleasant sharing about family and background? Nothing. I seemed little more than an inconvenient inanimate object that impeded his view of the people he'd rather be talking with. Ah well. So it goes.

On the flip side, it was delightful seeing the light of warmth and friendship that shone between many of the participants, connections that existed before and were being renewed. It was a genuinely hopeful event, filled with grace and promise and mutual understanding. Seeing the rabbi and the imam who organized the event beaming as they described the deep warmth and connection that they and their families shared was an impressive and joyful thing. Another thousand such relationships would change the face of Israel and Palestine.

Also joyful, although not surprising, was the face presented by the Christian evangelicals who were attending the event. Unlike my oldline brethren, who often hem and haw and fret about the awkwardness of non-inclusive semiotics when in mixed company, these folks were unapologetically Christ-centered, each and every one of them. They were as Jesus-focused as the imams were Qu'ran focused, and the rabbis were Torah focused. What my brethren were not, however, was rigid, judgmental, and dogmatic. Instead, they were leading with grace, and following with grace. The Jesus they professed as Lord and Savior...and they did say that...was described in terms that were so suffused with love and kindness towards all that it was impossible to hear him described and not know you were hearing something fundamentally good. As one panelist talked about the heart of Christ's teachings about love for the other, both the rabbi and the imam next to him seemed genuinely impressed. It was a real and significant witness.

We Can't Ever Go Back To Salem

Having mused yesterday about the peculiar goings on at the Bethel School for Supernatural Ministry, I stumbled across this agonizing article from today's LA Times. The article recounts the more dangerous side of the charismatic Christian obsession with the supernatural, as putative Christians in West Africa root out "child-witches" from among them. The kids are beaten and driven from their homes...or just killed.

This isn't just the hand-wringing of West Coast Leftists about those Kwazy Kwistians. This sort of madness is painfully real. I met one such "witch" years ago at an orphanage in Nigeria. She'd been driven from her village because she'd purportedly caused the deaths of several people. She was a frail little thing, and would have made an easy scapegoat.

As the ties between charismatics in the West and African Christianity grow stronger, most evangelicals are excited by the tremendous growth of Christianity in Africa. We have something to learn from our African brothers and sisters, they say. If only we had the tiniest fragment of their enthusiasm and passion for the faith, they say.

That is, on many levels, true. I find much to admire in African Christianity, particularly as it has cast off it's colonially imposed form and become more authentically part of African culture. On the other hand, there are elements to both traditional and contemporary African society that can put an unpleasant spin on Christian faith.

One of the more notable obsessions of African charismatics and conservative denominational types alike is witchcraft and demonic powers. This is, in large part, reflective of a culture that did not experience scientific enlightenment internally, but had it aggressively imposed through colonial domination. With a significant portion of the population still minimally educated and focused on sustenance agriculture or hardscrabble urban life, the old memes of spirits and possession are still powerful and compelling. There are plenty of African Christians who are not obsessed with the occult...but for far too many, it's a defining issue.

The African evangelist who "blessed" Sarah Palin with protection against all forms of witchcraft is one famous example. Rev. David Githii, the former moderator of the Presbyterian Church in East Africa, is another. He's been the darling of the ultraconservatives in my own denomination, and is well known in Kenya for his relentless attacks on witches, Satanism, and the perils of Freemasonry. Plenty of Kenyan Christians think he's more than a little bit nuts...but his bellowing, self-righteous stridency makes him rather popular among conservatives here.

As African Christianity becomes a more and more dominant voice in our global fellowship, the reintroduction of this false and poisonous meme into Christian fellowship needs to be resisted. The challenge is, I'm not sure evangelical and charismatic Christianity can do it. There are far too many American Christians who've been raised to embrace concepts like spiritual warfare, possession, and the influence of magic and demons.

We really can't go back to Salem.

Polarities

As I continue to slowly digest my way through the theopoetic stylings of Jalal-a'din Rumi, I'm reminded of a strange paradox that occurs in our faith traditions.

That paradox occurs at the outer edge of the world's belief systems, where radically disparate theologies end up looking pretty much identical in practice. Islamic fundamentalists are really not all that different from Christian fundamentalists, who share many characteristics with ultra-Orthodox Jews, who aren't all that different from Hindu fundamentalists. Within all of these movements, the "other" is viewed with suspicion and/or outright hostility. Different traditions are a threat to the integrity of faith. Faith itself is radically dependent on tradition, whether that be in a sacred text or forms of ritual practice. That faith is viewed in radically binary terms, which is often framed by the language of conflict. Though the ultra-orthodox in every tradition would deny any meaningful spiritual ties with the others, they are, in terms of how the rubber meets the road, functionally the same.

On the other polarity of the world's faith traditions, there is an opposite but very similar phenomenon. As I've studied the mystical traditions in Christianity, what I find is that there is very little difference between someone like Meister Eckhardt or Jacob Boehme and someone like Martin Buber or Jalal-a'din Rumi. For the mystics, the divine is radically unifying, even outside of the bounds of their tradition. Their radical love for and yearning for God shatters not just the boundaries of the self, but also shatters the ways they categorically define "us" and "them." More striking, the experience of God that the mystics articulate is essentially the same. It is flavored by the language and concepts of the tradition from which the mystic comes, true, but the underlying experience appears to be something that transcends culture and language. Mysticism steers away from conflict, which is typically seen as a sign of spiritual failure. Instead, mystical faith finds that in seeking union with God, union is found with others. It is suffused with gentleness and grace towards the other.

It would appear, then, that among our many paths of faith there are two poles towards which we can be drawn. Both articulate, in their own way, an absolute. But one leads one way. Another leads the other.