My Rights and Your Rights

My recent reading of a brilliant biography of radical abolitionist John Brown was a fascinating exploration of his life, but it was something more.  In examining that fierce, peculiar life, the author opened up the history of that difficult time in our national story.

What is most striking, wallop-you-in-your-face striking, was the lie that the Confederacy was all about states rights.  It was most certainly not that, as any close reading of the constitution of the Confederate States of America reveals.  I'd always assumed, blindly and from high school, that the CSA went back to some variant of the original Articles of Confederation. That document, which predates the Constitution, gave much more rights to individual states, with a weaker central authority.

This is not my excellent high school history teacher's fault.  I assumed that because, um, well, a Confederacy seems likely to have Articles of Confederation.  Because...um...it has "Confeder" in it.

But the truth of the CSA Constitution was simple: it was the United States Constitution, clumsily edited to mandate slavery as a cultural absolute, and to forbid any state or citizen to ever challenge slavery as an inalienable right of slaveholders.

Meaning, in the name of liberty, it attempted to codify the right of one person to infringe on the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of another.

In John Brown's time, what was called "state's rights" was no different.  Slaveholding states wanted their rights to have precedence over the rights of both blacks and the citizens of free states.  Through legislation like the Fugitive Slave Act, Southern slaveholders sought to prevent the citizens of free states from acting according to the laws of their states and their own consciences.  Meaning, because they treated a person as an ownable object, as subhuman, everyone else was legally coerced to honor their right to do so.  Their rights and freedom have precedence over others.

That's not valuing rights or freedom.  That is violence.

In that long ago era, the truth of that violence was written out in the Kansas territory, where slave-state-funded and armed militias terrorized abolitionists, burning their presses to silence them, and gunning them down on the street.

We are, thank the Maker, not in that place right now.  But that willful, self-interested misunderstanding of the nature of our inalienable rights and human liberty remains, because human sin remains.

It is, now, echoed out in the "religious liberties" so loudly proclaimed by those on the far right.

This false flag "freedom" serves a purpose.  It's great for stirring that sense of aggrieved umbrage that is so useful for motivating a political constituency, but let it be clear: this is the same misbegotten appeal to "liberty" that defined the Confederacy.

Because to truly value religious and personal liberty, you must value more than just your own.  You must equally value the freedom of your neighbors, be they gay or transgender, conservative or atheist or pagan or Muslim or Raelian.

If their lives and their choices do not meaningfully impact your own, you have no standing to claim offense at the mere fact of their existence.

Not if America matters to you.

The Unaffiliated

Christianity is ebbing, here in America, as the tides of culture change.

Why this is will be the source of much handwringing over the next decades, both in the old-line world that I inhabit and among the evangelical, independent churches.   Sure, the culture is still majority Christian, but if trendlines continue, that may eventually change.

Part of this, as I read it spun, has to do with the changed expectations of our society.  You no longer *have* to go to church to be a part of your community.  There are no grumbling pew-sitters, eagerly checking their watches/phones and awaiting the end of the freakin' service already.  There are fewer folks who go to church primarily to schmooze and drum up business.

Either you want to be there, or you're not there.  It's pretty simple.  And honestly, that's a good thing.  Whenever the church relies on the outside culture to drive participation, it's a poor reflection of what we were meant to be as the Beloved Community.

Another part, I have come to think, has to do with the increasing fragmentation of our society.  Net-era relationships are different, more tenuous, less rooted.  Ours is an ephemeral society, in which depth of connection--rooted in place and blood-ties--has been replaced with transience, clicks and likes and follows.  We relate broadly and instantly, with nownownow-neural-immediacy but with less depth.

I'm not sure our culture even values that depth any more.  It is too slow, too intimate, too demanding of time and energy.

And that is not a favorable medium for healthy faith community, in which intentional organic relationships and unmediated presence are central.  There are outliers, sure, places in this virtual world where we can find real connection.  But as we grow acclimatized to this way of being together, and it becomes the norm, that we're increasingly "unaffiliated" is unsurprising.

It got me to thinking about that word, and its root.  

Unaffiliated.

It's Latin, of course, and I could see the root word just by looking at it.  My grasp of Latin being as shallow as it is, I looked it up.

To "affiliate" comes from the prefix ad, which means "towards."  And then there's that root word, familiar in my theologian's ear.  Filia.  Son. 

"Not towards sonship," is what "unaffiliated" means.

Which is, from this side of the ebbing tide, an interesting resonance.

Unfreethinking

I got the letter in the mail, mixed in with the usual miscellaneous advertising circulars, credit card offers, and other debris.

"BLASPHEMOUS," it shouted at me in all caps and bright red lettering.  "SACRILEGE!"

Of course, I opened it.  But I knew what was in it.  It wasn't from a church, because churches don't ever send out general mailers that angry.  Ever.  Never happens.  Warm fuzzy love with nonthreatening multiethnic smiling beautiful families?  That's their schtick.  So who produced this?

It was, of course, from a "freethinking secular humanist magazine."

"You and I are under attack," the letter began, sounding for all the world like a coked-up Rush Limbaugh.  And yeah, I know, it was painkillers.  But imagine what he'd be like if he was on blow.  Lord have mercy.

Anyhoo, the schpiel kicked in, and it was pure fear-based marketing hokum.  This is the magazine "they" don't want you to read!  We dare to ask the offensive questions!  We're the sort of free-thinking forum that they despise!

Inside, a smiling insert of Richard Dawkins.

"And if that's not enough, I'll sweeten the pot," it went on, sounding for all the world like a neoatheist Billy Mays.  "Act now, and we'll rush you a free bonus copy of our book attacking religion!"

Wait, that's wrong.  It was a FREE BONUS.  Sorry.  I'm not quick with the bold and the all caps.

It concluded with an anxiety-tag, as all fear-based marketing does.  If you're intelligent and independent, you'll love this magazine.  You aren't a stupid slave, are you?  Surely, you're not stupid enough not to buy our magazine...and did we mention the FREE BONUS?

It was marketing piffle, of course, but what most struck me was just how unfree it was.

The entire pitch and the promised content focused on "them," the terrible religious people who make everything terrible with their terribleness.  "We are not them.  They are stupid, and we are free from them!  Let's talk about how stupid they are, and how free we are from them.  Have we told you about them, and about how terrible they are?

We have?  Well, we're not done."

They are not free, any more than that friend whose every conversation is a bitter rant about their ex is free.  Freethinking involves not being constrained, to being open to new encounters.  In this country, with freedom of speech and access to any information you want any time you want, freedom of thought is utterly unfettered.

What this magazine promised instead was a smorgasbord of focused polemic, locked into a tight orbit around the object of its hatred.  What it offered was neither progress nor liberty, but the dark target fixation of a bilious obsessive.

So I'll pass, thank you very much.

When I want exciting, critical, rational freethinking, I read Scientific American.

Dear Atheist Mom

The picture of your child stuck out at me, most likely because it was supposed to.  After a recent and somewhat painful debate between a popular elocutor for science and a Young Earth Creationist, some of the Creationists put up images of their unanswered questions, written with markers on pieces of paper.

One might think people for whom the written word is a fundamental absolute would get the difference between "your" and "you're," but maybe they're too focused on translating from the original Greek.  Sigh.

But snark I must not, because Lord knows I still regularly mangle "its" and "it's."

So, of course, it could not end there.  There was a 'net sign exchange, in which atheists pitched up their rebuttals and challenges, with counterquestions written in Sharpie on pieces of paper.

Of the atheistic responses, yours was the one that leapt out.  There was your daughter, smiling and bright eyed.  These were not her assertions, of course, but likely assertions posed by you, her atheist parent.  There was some subsequent net-kerfuffle about the use of a child as a public prop, but the way I figure it, you view religion as a fundamental threat to her integrity.  I'm guessing you're the mom, too, given the handwriting.  From your fierce mom-love and your anger at what you perceive as a threat to her, you want your beautiful kid out there, as the face of the debate.  I'll admit to having struggled with that, myself, especially when it came to including her image in this post.  I prefer to keep my children's faces off the net, particularly around contentious issues where net-trolls can and do say terrible things from the safety of their basement lairs.  But I will follow your choice, and respect her integrity as a person in this post.

She's great, of course, and looks like a charmer.  I will take your black-marker list as a very legitimate descriptor of your hopes for your great little kid.  Just looking at her, one can see that she is full of wonder, and smart, and full of potential, and beautiful, as all creation is.

What such a delightful little sentient creature deserves, though, is our best swing at an accurate representation of things...and I'm not quite sure atheism is serving her well on that front, because atheism as a movement is not interested in truth so much as it is in refuting faith in all of its forms.  It exists solely as a negation, after all, which means it has a problem with non-binary thinking.

That can be observed in the statements in red-ink.  "According to Religion," it begins, as if that's a single and univocal category.  According to Buddhism, are the subsequent statements true?  How about Hinduism?  What about the Bahai?  Or Unitarians?  Or Wiccans?  Is it true for Native American religious expression?  Do Jews believe this?  What about Muslims?   Or Sikhs?

None of the above, I'm afraid, if you understand how the concept of Sin plays out across human religious expression.  It is an accurate statement for a painfully significant subset of global Christianity, most likely the subset that is the dominant culture in the area where you live.   But even there, is this what some corners of American evangelical conservatism teach children about themselves?  In some cases, yes, and that's a pity.  As a Presbyterian Teaching Elder, I can tell you that it is not even close to how the old-line denominations teach our kids, not by a long shot.

But I've reviewed conservative Christian curricula for children in my role as a pastor, and even the ones that are too literal for my tastes tend to go this way:

"Jesus loves you."  "God loves you."  "Here are some wild ancient stories with cool characters!"  "Did we tell you you are loved?  Well, you are."

So is the red-marker-list accurate?  No.  And we owe our children our best shot at accurately representing the world.

Then there's the list in black-ink.  "According to Science," it says.  But is the list that follows according to science?  It is not.  It is the romantic view of science held by most atheists, one that I can understand myself.  Science is awesome and cool, a vital and essential human endeavor that opens our eyes to the ever-unfolding, incredible creation we inhabit.

But "Wonder," "Beauty," and "Greatness?" These are not scientific terms.

"According to science," one could just as easily describe that bright little child as a delivery system for replicating genetic material.  Or as a complex organic machine, interacting with the world through a sequence of biologically and culturally mediated patterns, both learned and hard-wired.  Her smile?  The reflex of a social animal.  The "love" felt for her by her biological parents?  A neurochemical response to visual cues that identify her as a vulnerable near-infant, part of an evolutionary pattern that insures the aforementioned continuance of particular genetic traits.

Her beauty?  She is beautiful the way that everything is beautiful, meaning she is remarkably complex.  From a purely scientific standpoint, her self-awareness is no more and no less beautiful than the amazingly intricate processes of digestion and excretion, or the processes of the human body as it decays following the cessation of life.

You're not going to tell her that, presumably.  You just tell her she is loved, and teach her to appreciate and marvel at the astounding reality around her, and tell her that she is great.  But in that, I would ask you to consider allowing her to engage with the real complexities that are part of faith and religious practice.  Where certain religious communities would bully and belittle and reduce her to nothing, don't allow them to do so.  It's a fight worth having, and I'm there with you.  But if you want her to grow up respecting your guidance, I'd encourage you to allow her to engage with the depth and subtlety of human existence.

Binary thinking does not do that.

Oh, and if you're actually Atheist Dad?  Oops.  Sorry for my assumption and generalization.  You have very neat, rounded, lovely handwriting!  Nothing to be ashamed of, and mea culpa.

Still and all, everything I said still applies.

Religious Freedom, Afghanistan, and The Point of It All

This last week, a little news item flitted across the religion news pages, to be quickly forgotten. It had to do with two Christian relief agencies, both of which provide material support to the Afghan people. The Afghan government shut down the operations of both, alleging that they were involved in proselytizing, which is explicitly forbidden under Afghan law.

Neither Church World Service or Norwegian Church Aid could be described as evangelical. They're not out there trying to convert. They're trying to fulfill the Christian mandate to provide care for those in need. Both are progressive, ecumenical, and sensitive to the needs, culture, and religious sensibilities of local communities. Take a look at the Church World Service web site. Winning souls for Jesus ain't their schtick.

But after a local television station began making allegations based apparently on nothing more than innuendo and the word "Church" in their name, angry mobs took to the streets. Now both groups have been forced by the Afghan government to suspend operations, as it investigates whether these groups have violated provisions in the Constitution of Afghanistan that forbid conversion from Islam. I have two reactions to this.

First, the allegations are clearly false, but that doesn't seem to matter much in Afghanistan. Truth is hard to find, but it ain't like most folks bother tryin'. Rumors that feed existing hatreds are just so much easier. The cultural sensitivities within that community are as twitchy as a recently-set antipersonnel mine. Outrage comes as easily as flipping a rather well-worn switch. Reminds me of the Tea Party, for some reason.

Second, we recently entered into new territory in Afghanistan. It is now the single longest military commitment in American history. We've been there longer than we were in 'Nam. Thousands upon thousands of American servicemen and women have put their lives on the line in Afghanistan, and many have made the ultimate sacrifice in the service of their country. Without the support of the United States, the government in Afghanistan would not exist.

Yet the government that America has put into place there imposes restrictions on human freedom that are totally antithetical to our values as a nation. Yeah, I know, nobody likes proselytizing. But a nation-state that bans it is not worth the blood and sweat of our troops, nor is it worth all the money we've borrowed from China. I'm not saying that as some way of channeling Ann Coulter, asserting that if we just forced 'em all to follow Jesus, things would be copacetic. Not at all. I just can't see the point of creating a nation...and it is our creation...in which a citizen cannot choose not to follow the religion of the majority.

An Afghan should be free to be Muslim. But also Christian. Or Buddhist. Or Hindu. Or Jewish. They should be free to be an Atheist, if they so choose. Not only that, Afghan Christians and Buddhists and Hindus and Jews and Atheists should be free to talk about what they believe, and free to attempt to persuade others of the merits of their belief. Those are the blessings of liberty which were ordained and established in the American Constitution. Those are the values that make America a good thing, even with all her blemishes.

Yeah, I know, imposing this set of values on the Afghan people would have been an affront to their culture. What we don't seem to have realized as we've poured blood and treasure into that region is that the problem in Afghanistan wasn't governmental. What made Afghanistan the seedbed for attacks against our soil wasn't a regime. It was a set of values broadly held by the society.

We've mistakenly assumed that the processes of democracy are the same as the values of our republic. And though we've done some good there, I do find myself wondering, more deeply than I have before, about the point of it all.

Healing Ministry

Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Times flagged an interesting little provision in the Health Care reform bill that is currently trucking it's way through the meatgrinder of American politics. The bipartisan provision, which was inserted into the bill by Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah and Senator John Kerry, would prohibit insurers from discriminating against "religious or spiritual health care."

It's intended as a sop to the Church of Christ-Scientist, whose providers bill customers...er...the faithful...for healing prayer. But the bill is written in more general terms, and that means only one thing for my fellow pastors:

Mo money mo money mo money! If insurers are federally required to pay spiritual leaders for healing prayers and services, then there's nothing in the world to stop me...or any other pastor...from declaring that we have a reimburseable healing ministry.

Pastor needs a brand new Lexus! Or a Buick. The new Lacrosse CXS is really a rather lovely vehicle. It's got the blingtastic wheels and the warm buttery interior that every pastor needs to stay centered and shiny. Yeah, it's cache isn't quite there in the North America market, but we gotta start thinking about impressing the Chinese, for whom Buick is the bee's knees.

I'm wondering, though, what the appropriate insurance billing codes are. If you come by my office for a general prayer for health, I'm thinking Annual Checkup. That's gotta be, what, $125? Then there's managing the co-pay, which is kinda a pain in the butt. I'll need to get one of those card swipe thingummies and some new small business management software for my office computer.

Sigh. I really hope no-one tells Creflo A. Dollar about this one.

It's yet another one of those times when I almost wish government was run by VALIS.