I thought I'd written an update on this before, but apparently I didn't.
In late 2021, a "non-LGBTQ+ affirming" church opened in a liberal, artsy neighborhood in Durham, North Carolina. Predictably, it attracted a lot of negative attention, but there were some notably strange things about it, which I wrote about in the blog post I just linked. First, it occupied a space that had been held vacant for some time by a landlord who supported the venture; second, it was planned to include a cafe and crafts vendors because, the founding owner and pastor declared, "I get really cringy about church spaces that are open for like an hour
on Sunday for service and then take up massive real estate and sit empty." As I observed in that earlier post, I don't have the impression that most churches sit empty except for "like an hour on Sunday for service." They have services on other days - Wednesdays appear to be popular - plus Bible study, fellowship groups, charity work including food pantries, and so on. The pastor didn't seem to have any interest in such activities, or to know about them.
Every so often I would do a search for Pioneers, and nothing turned up until early last year. According to this article, the church closed down on February 25, 2024, with a clearance (labeled "Garage") sale to dispose of its stock. I had the impression that the founders hadn't done much to build a congregation, and showed little interest in doing so. They thought that they could run a church like a business, but didn't even do that very well: a business let alone a church would have tried harder to get along in its neighborhood and community, but the pastor did her best to dodge engagement with those who objected to Pioneers' agenda. According to the accounts I read of its beginnings, they thought they could simply "plant" a church without testing the soil. It's surprising they lasted two years; good riddance.
Apropos of Hell, a writer I like on Twitter/X wrote on July 23:
As ever, the downside to being an atheist is that I can't comfort myself with the belief that every single person with even a remote connection to this despicable organization is going to hell.
He was referring to the Gaza Humanitarian Organization, which certainly is a despicable organization, set up by the Trump administration to pretend to deliver aid to suffering people in Gaza - but really to draw them to delivery sites so that the IDF can massacre them.
I sympathize, I really do, and I realize that his post is an anguished cry of helplessness expressing what many people feel about the horrors in the world. That's nothing new. It probably is why people invented the notion of post-mortem punishment, as Dan McClellan argued in the video I discussed last time: people suffer terribly, those who torment them not only get away with it but thrive, so why not threaten the bad guys with punishment after they die? It seems to make those who invent the notion feel a little better. But it does nothing to help the sufferers. It doesn't stop their suffering now or undo their pain. Promising that they will sit at Abraham's right hand and view the torment of the damned doesn't help them either. There is no Hell, there is no Heaven, but even if there were, the threat doesn't slow the bad guys down. Someone, it seems to me, has not escaped his religious upbringing.
It's also unwise to make assumptions about divine justice. In the context of Christian tradition, it's just as likely (zero equals zero) that Hell will be full of Muslims who dared to resist or attack the Holy Land given by God to His Chosen People, while the Christian Zionists behind the GHO who blessed Israel will spend eternity in Heavenly bliss. Anguished helplessness tends to make people overlook such things.
I see many posts on social media from people who react to the horrors in Gaza by saying that they're praying for peace, that God will end the suffering and give the children comfort, that Allah will destroy the evil state of so-called Israel, and so on. These are as empty as the post I quoted above. If a powerful deity cares about these things, it can do something about it. In the Yahwist traditions, it has done so before. The logical conclusion is that it is content with the way things are going and has no interest in stopping it.
The same applies, I think, to atheists like Neil DeGrasse Tyson: "You will never find people who truly grasp the cosmic perspective ... leading nations into battle. No, that doesn't happen. When you have a cosmic perspective there's this little speck called Earth and you say, 'You're going to what? You're on this side of a line in the sand and you want to kill people for what? Oh, to pull oil out of the ground, what? WHAT?' ... Not enough people in this world, I think, carry a cosmic perspective with them. It could be life-changing." Those who lack the cosmic perspective include Tyson himself: "Lastly, you speak as though all War is bad. I tend to agree with you on a personal level. But I know as a matter of political awareness that not all wars are unjust and some wars are, in fact, worth fighting. Many scientists who serve military interests do so because they believe deeply in the value of their work to the security of our country." Like other religious teachers, Tyson contains multitudes and can be quoted on any side of any issue.
I was also set off on this topic by a song I heard on my community radio station on Friday: "The Day the Politicians Died," by The Magnetic Fields.
I was infuriated by it. Unfortunately I can't comfort myself with the belief that every single person in this band will go to hell ... just kidding. If every politician died tomorrow, nothing would change. The world would face the same problems of organization and distribution that it faces now, without the limited expertise that our institutions do have. But I don't know, maybe The Magnetic Fields are MAGA? It doesn't matter, because I've heard numerous people from all over the political spectrum express fantasies along these lines, as if politicians were a distinct race that can be extirpated. They consider other politicians not to be politicians, so they don't really want all politicians to die, just the bad ones. Bernie Sanders, Obama, the Clintons, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar et al.; or Donald Trump, JD Vance, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ron De Santis, Mike Lee, Lauren Boebert et al. -- they aren't really politicians, they're doing the Lord's work and will be spared. It takes a lot of determined stupidity to think like this.
I have no exact solutions, but as a general principle I believe the only way to stop suffering is to stop inflicting it; not in a wishful afterlife, but in this one. You can't wipe out the bad guys, because your own side has an ample supply of bad guys. Removing either Hamas or Israel from the face of the earth would not end the conflict. (Which reminds me of another post I saw recently, that confused "war" with "conflict." More on that soon, I hope.) It can only end through negotiation, and then making change happen. Killing and terror just create more angry, vengeful people, guaranteeing that the killing and terror will continue. And hoping for eternal punishment won't end it either.
I don't usually like engaging with videos on subjects that demand careful attention; I'd rather work from text, which can be quoted and analyzed more easily. But I've been watching the work of a popular YouTube guy, a biblical scholar named Dan McClellan who's also active on TikTok. I first encountered him in the Twitter feed of Candida Moss, whose book The Myth of Persecution (Harper, 2013) I liked a lot. I found him offputting then, and still do, but he knows his stuff and is good on matters of fact. But matters of fact about the Bible tend to bleed into questions of doctrine, as in this short video.
McClellan isn't as different as he might be from the Christian TikTokers he takes on. As you can see in this case, he draws in traffic with a catchy line, "There is no biblical concept of hell." At least he doesn't begin by gushing "This video will BLOW YOUR MIND!" He quickly explains that there are several biblical concepts of post-mortem punishment, and I can go along with his account of the development of ideas about the afterlife in Judaism and Christianity. I believe I've seen another video where he goes into differing terms such as "Hades" and "Gehenna," which some English translation render as "Hell."
So that much is good. I don't think the translation of specific words is that important: if you're being burned by the fire that is not quenched, gnawed by the worm that is not sated, it's not going to matter whether you're in Hell or Hades or Gehenna. As McClellan says, the New Testament has several conceptions of post-mortem punishment, as it has several conceptions of what you must to do be saved, and what is required of you after you've been saved. If you take such things seriously, that can't be reassuring. It's why so many Christians are anxious and unsure that they won't be condemned after all. Quibbles about terminology are like fussing about whether Jesus' name was really or some variant of Yehoshua: do the purists on that issue, who generally don't know any more Aramaic and don't fixate on the Aramaic forms of other Biblical names, think that the Savior won't hear their prayers if they don't address him by the exact correct name, or pray in flawless Aramaic or koine Greek? Maybe he won't, I don't know.
I think it's more important that Jesus in the gospels is consistently punitive, though of course he forgives sins when he's in the mood. (Aren't human tyrants always marketed with touching stories of their occasional generosity and kindness? You don't want to see them when they're mad, though.) God isn't consistent either, he will have mercy on whom he will have mercy (Exodus 33:19, quoted in Romans 9:15). As McClellan points out, Paul doesn't talk about post-mortem torture - that's Jesus' shtick. But the default setting of the New Testament is that you are in danger of God's wrath, and you can only escape it through Christ. As I've argued before, this is a widespread human assumption, older than Christianity and found beyond the borders of Christendom. As with any belief about the afterlife, there's no evidence for it, but it's what many people take for granted anyway. It isn't something that wicked priests invented to control the masses; the masses believe it on their own, and may even have invented it.
Many Christians and what you might call Christian-adjacent types don't like the idea that a loving god would condemn them or people they like to eternal torture, though they're willing to throw Truly Bad People under the bus. Maybe they're right, but they have to work hard to forget that Jesus didn't see it their way. The time, for some reason, was very short, and the gospel must be proclaimed far and wide, but he came to save a few; most would not find the way to safety. The promise of salvation depends on, and is meaningless without, the threat of punishment. Whether you'd end up in Hades or Hell is, it seems to me, a distraction from the main message of danger and safety.
Of course many of his fans react as if McClellan had come up with this information on his own, the way people react to Bart Ehrman or Michael Moore or Noam Chomsky. That goes with the territory. When I read the comments under his videos I often wonder how many of them really understand what he's telling them. Many of the reactions are of the typical Internet line that he DESTROYED the Bible Thumpers. SCHOOLED them. And so on. It doesn't matter whether they understand, as long as they're on the Right Side.
As someone who's read a lot of biblical scholarship over the past forty-five years, I don't see it that way. McClellan likes to invoke "the data" and intone that the scholarly consensus "absolutely" disproves the apologists' claims, and in many cases he's right; but scholars aren't always as unanimous as he implies, and the scholarly consensus has changed in the time I've been following the field. I agree with much of what McClellan says, but I'm wary of being too absolute about it. The data about Jesus are too sparse, vague, and contradictory to say much with certainty about him. Many different reconstructions have been constructed from the data, and despite archaeology and some manuscript finds, very little new data have been found in the past century. Compare William Shakespeare, who lived much more recently than Jesus, in a period and place that is much better documented. But we know surprisingly little about him, almost new documents have turned up in the past century, and his biographers use speculation, often very free, to fill in the yawning gaps. (See David Ellis, The Truth About William Shakespeare: Fact, Fiction and Modern Biographies, Edinburgh 2013.) The great English scholar and churchman Dennis Nineham quoted his teacher R. H. Lightfoot "lamenting that New Testament scholars 'are "so hot for certainties"; if only they would sometimes say, 'we simply do no know'". But scholarship abhors a vacuum. So do believers and unbelievers.
I suspect McClellan wanted to convey that no one knows what Jesus taught about the afterlife, to forestall any claims about it, and I think some of his fans decided that they could fill in the gap with their own wishful thinking. It's possible that the clashing concepts in the gospels go back to Jesus himself. When the time is short and the gospel must be proclaimed with the help of the Holy Spirit, consistency is not a priority. Jesus was not a systematic theologian but a back-country revivalist, exorcist, and end-times preacher, not a serious scholar of Torah. If he had teachers or other influences, we don't know who they were; scholars can only infer them. As McClellan indicates, the gospels show the influence of religious speculation and writing of Jesus' time and place; he may not have bothered to think hard about them when the Spirit drove him into the wilderness (Mark 1:12) after his baptism. Or he might have. It's fun to speculate, and I do it myself, but speculation isn't evidence, let alone certainty.
A few days ago I wrote "White supremacists have historically regarded everyone who isn't 'white' as 'black,' and the N-word has been flung at people of many backgrounds." I was a bit vague because although I knew I'd seen it, I didn't have any examples to hand.
The next day I began reading Ruined City, a 1938 novel by Nevil Shute, who's best known nowadays for his 1957 post-nuclear war novel On the Beach. Ruined City is about a successful English banker named David Warren whose life is derailed when he learns that his wife has been having an affair with an Arab prince. Everyone refers to the prince as "black," including Warren, who in a fit of anger drops an N-bomb but then corrects himself. "In that he was unjust, and he knew it; among the six or seven strains that went to make Prince Ali there was no negro blood." That's actually funny - as if it wouldn't be unjust if Ali did have "negro blood" - but I don't think Shute meant it to be.
This terminology is, I believe, more common in British writing than in American, and it's why it's often difficult to tell which race/ethnicity a character is meant to be - for example, Othello - because the writers are sloppy and don't care. The scientifically-minded Shute (he was an aeronautical engineer and several of his novels deal with flying machines) cared enough to be exact in his labeling, but that led to comedy, as it still does. (Are "Hispanics" a "race"? Are Sunni and Shi'a Muslims "ethnicities"?) Most scientists in Shute's heyday held beliefs about race/ethnicity (and sex/gender) that are considered embarrassing today, but they are still with us in slightly different forms.
Although many people, and I include scientists here, are desperate to preserve race as a valid category, I've yet to see any persuasive case made to do that. I can't find the public-radio program that touted BiDil, a handsomely-funded drug for heart failure that claimed to be more effective for "patients who identify as black." It was boosted even before the FDA approved it in 2005, but it bombed, for several reasons. One, it was overpriced, and since it was just a combination of already existing generics, insurance companies substituted the generics. Two, "in every study, however, the amount of variation within each racial group was far larger than the differences between the between the groups ... As a result, 80 to 95 percent of all black and white patients will likely have indistinguishable responses to each medication. Although racial differences might exist, they are irrelevant for the majority of patients" (167). "Whatever the causes of its failure, NitroMed laid off most of its workforce and stopped marketing BiDil in January 2008 [165]."
Despite this, BiDil continues to be touted as a road not taken, if only in principle; GoodRx, the drug discount site, still recommended it as late as 2023. "Some Doctors Want to Change How Race Is Used in Medicine," this NPR podcast reported in 2022, surprised that some doctors don't want to change, because they believe that there are black kidneys and white kidneys. It's tempting, and comfortable for many people, to see racism as a problem only among ignorant hillbillies, but that notion doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Many highly-educated people, not all of them white, won't give up their belief in racial difference until you pry it from their cold, dead hands; and even then, a new generation takes it up.
I don't object to treating "race" as a scientific category because of "political correctness," or even from scientific correctness, though it has been debunked enough times that if you believe in Science you shouldn't rely on it. What I want to know is how it's a useful category, and by "useful" I don't mean "useful for making a billion dollars by repackaging existing generics." I mean something like what bearing it has on any issue of scientific significance. (See the quotations from Noam Chomsky in this post.) What I've seen so far is a complacent assumption that it must be significant somehow, even if no one has any idea what or how.
* David Jones, "The Prospects of Personalized Medicine," in Genetic Explanations: Sense and Nonsense, ed. Sheldon Krimsky & Jeremy Gruber (Harvard, 2013), p. 163. Future page numbers refer to this article.
“I think it’s going to require a little bit less navel-gazing and a little less whining and being in fetal positions. And it’s going to require Democrats to just toughen up,” Obama said at the fundraiser, according to excerpts of his remarks exclusively obtained by CNN.
“You know, don’t tell me you’re a Democrat, but you’re kind of disappointed right now, so you’re not doing anything. No, now is exactly the time that you get in there and do something,” he said. “Don’t say that you care deeply about free speech and then you’re quiet. No, you stand up for free speech when it’s hard. When somebody says something that you don’t like, but you still say, ‘You know what, that person has the right to speak.’ … What’s needed now is courage.”
And more. In a way these remarks are unexceptionable, but that's just it: they're platitudes. If you imagine them being delivered in Obama's grating scold's voice, they become more annoying, especially when you remember that the speaker collaborated with the most far-right elements of the GOP in the apparent hope that they would be nice and work with him. He let Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy continue before the Republicans asked for them (he later admitted it was a mistake, but so what?). He appointed a commission of deficit hawks in hopes they'd demand cuts in Social Security, and when they didn't he accepted the demand anyway (though again, he wasn't able to do it). He fired at least two staffers when right-wing attack media lied about them. Having kneecapped potential opposition in advance, he scolded activists who criticized his right-wing, anti-immigrant, antigay policies publicly.
WHAT SOME WOULD HAVE PREFERRED: “Now, I know there are some who would have preferred a protracted political fight, even if it had meant higher taxes for all Americans, even if it had meant an end to unemployment insurance for those who are desperately looking for work.” The assumption here is that he would have lost the fight. It’s pretty much always Obama’s working assumption that he will lose any fight. And then, funnily enough, he does.
Read the whole post, which consists of quotations from one of Obama's press conferences. His apologists like to claim that he was helpless because the Democrats didn't control Congress, but that's false. They did control Congress for the first two years of his term, but he was still appeasing the Republicans anyway.
Of course at other times he put up his dukes and announced his readiness to take on all comers (these are from the same press conference);
HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY: “And I will be happy to see the Republicans test whether or not I’m itching for a fight on a whole range of issues.”
WHAT HE SUSPECTS: “I suspect they will find I am.”
HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY: “I’m happy to have that battle. I’m happy to have that conversation. I just want to make sure that the American people aren’t harmed while we’re having that broader argument.”
"My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks."
It was an attention grabber, no doubt, especially that carefully chosen last word.
But then Obama's flat tone turned to one of support, even sympathy. "You guys have an acute public relations problem that's turning into a political problem," he said. "And I want to help. But you need to show that you get that this is a crisis and that everyone has to make some sacrifices."
According to one of the participants, he then said, "I'm not out there to go after you. I'm protecting you. But if I'm going to shield you from public and congressional anger, you have to give me something to work with on these issues of compensation."
No suggestions were forthcoming from the bankers on what they might offer, and the president didn't seem to be championing any specific proposals. He had none; neither Geithner nor Summers believed compensation controls had any merit.
After a moment, the tension in the room seemed to lift: the bankers realized he was talking about voluntary limits on compensation until the storm of public anger passed. It would be for show.
“Stop looking for the quick fix. Stop looking for the messiah. You have
great candidates running races right now. Support those candidates,”
Obama said, calling out the New Jersey and Virginia elections, according
to the excerpts of his remarks.
“Make sure that the DNC has what it needs to compete in what will be a
more data-driven, more social media-driven cycle, which will cost some
money and expertise and time,” he continued.
Again, not such bad advice, though I wouldn't trust the DNC with my money, and he apparently didn't mention Zohran Mamdani, whom various party leaders are doing their best to undermine - "Vote Blue No Matter Who" was never meant seriously.
If you need more evidence that our discourse around "race" and "ethnicity" stinks to high heaven, look no further than the freakout over New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and his college applications. Corey Robin had a good post about it on Facebook today.
A couple of weeks ago, there was a blip of a story that temporarily seized the media and folks on Facebook about Zohran Mamdani's college application, where he checked off the boxes for Asian American and African American, while specifying very clearly that by African American he meant that he was from Uganda. The media, Mamdani's opponents in the race, most notably Eric Adams, and other commentators immediately used the story against him, claiming that Mamdani was trying to game the affirmative action system for his personal advantage by falsely claiming he was Black and Asian American.
In fact, Mamdani is Asian American and African-American. His parents are South Asian by ancestry, and his father was born in Uganda, as was Zohran. Robin continued:
Long story short: the Mamdani family, especially on his father's side,
firmly identified with being African. It was critical to their identity
and family story, particularly when Idi Amin kicked out people of Indian
descent, claiming that because they were not Black, they were not
African. (If you've ever seen Mississippi Masala, which I saw when it
came out and recently re-watched, it tells that story, and of course
Mississippi Masala was made by Zohran's mother and Mahmood's wife, the
filmmaker Mira Nair.) Mahmood Mamdani has written at length on the
importance of his, and his family, being African, creating a world for
themselves in Uganda and Tanzania, not as part of an Asian diaspora, but
as Africans, or as Asian-Africans, if you will.
The ethnicity boxes on college applications (and just about everywhere these days) are notoriously Procrustean, like the ethnicity boxes for the US census. What box should young Zohran have marked, since there evidently wasn't a "South Asian" one, and as Robin says, "African" was also legitimate. Africans aren't "racially" monolithic anyway; due to the slave trade, most black Africans in the US were from sub-Saharan western Africa. White supremacists have historically regarded everyone who isn't "white" as "black," and the N-word has been flung at people of many backgrounds. Racial categories on the US census have varied over the years.
Consider another complicated case: what "race" or "ethnicity" are Latin Americans? Many have predominantly European ancestry, though Spaniards haven't always counted as whites in the US. But Germans and Poles have also contributed to the mix. So have Chinese, Japanese, and South Asians. Many have predominantly "Indian" or "Native American" ancestry, and speak indigenous languages as well as or instead of Spanish, though Americans tend to limit both of those categories to North American Indians.
I've told before of the diversity training session twenty years back at the Big Ten University where I worked, whose instructors told us that "Sunni" and "Shi'a" are ethnicities. They definitely are not, any more than "Catholic" and "Protestant" are ethnicities. I protested, and the instructors insisted that they were so. So I let it go. As I've also indicated before, I don't object to university diversity programs and policies on general principles, only to the ignorance and incompetence of the people who manage them.
I've been collecting anecdotes on this topic for a long time around here, such as the white liberals who thought it hilarious that a white American woman could set herself up as a Zen master, or who mock the Bible as the work of old white guys. (Wait, wasn't it written by illiterate Bronze Age shepherds?) I wish I could track down the white liberals who declared that race is as real as nappy hair, but that claim seems to be lost. If hair color or texture were "racial" markers, then my brothers and I (born to the same parents) would be of different races.
Then there was the Congressperson who threw a tantrum when a Sikh was invited to deliver a prayer in the House of Representatives. First she claimed he was Muslim, then when corrected she insisted that non-Christian prayers should not be allowed in Congress even though Muslims and other non-Christians have led prayer there before. Do I really care that she doesn't have a fine-tuned knowledge of racial, ethnic, or religious difference? No, not really.
The people who attacked Mamdani's choices on his college applications postured as good liberals concerned for the well-being of real blacks and Asians, though they showed that they didn't understand the issues involved, and didn't care. They're just throwing any mud they can at him, in hopes that some of it will stick. One would think that in a time of resurgent US racism, they'd be more circumspect, but of course not.
One of my current projects is reading some of the bestsellers of the 1950s, especially those my parents owned and left around the house. When I was about 6 my father brought home a box of books a co-worker had given him, I think with my mother in mind -- she was more of a reader than he was, especially of fiction. (He was ambitious, though: among the books he got for himself were G. Polya's How to Solve It and John von Neumannand Oskar Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. I don't think he read them, though.)I remember poking through the box and being disappointed that it contained nothing for kids. But over the years I read some of them. Those copies are long gone, but I've tracked down those whose titles I remember.
Right now I'm going through The Last Hurrah by Edwin O'Connor, originally published in 1956. It sold very well and was filmed twice, once with Spencer Tracy and again for television in 1977, starring Carroll O'Connor. It's an interesting story of the last political campaign of Frank Skeffington, an Irish-American machine politician in an unnamed city that resembles Boston. There's general agreement that The Last Hurrah is an accurate depiction of big-city politics in the first half of the twentieth century; one famous Boston pol objected to it at first as a portrait of himself, but when it became popular he claimed he was the model after all.
What I find interesting so far is that although everyone, including Skeffington, stresses that his style of politics is on the way out, partly because of the advent of television, it doesn't seem to have vanished yet. Take these remarks by Skeffington to his nephew, about a prominent local political reporter:
Second, while he did cover politics around here for a number of years, there’s no guarantee that he really understood very much about what he was covering. The fact that he was a newspaperman would suggest that he didn’t. It’s a point of pride with most of our political journalists that they don’t know a great deal about politics; if they did, it would interfere with what I believe they call their ‘objective analyses.’ The finest example of an objective analyst we’ve ever had was a reporter named Mulrooney who used to write a City Hall column. He was so objective that he didn’t know where City Hall was. That was no handicap, however, as he wrote his column for ten years without ever leaving the house; they used to call him ‘Mattress’ Mulrooney because it was believed that he never left his bed, either. Towards the end of his career it was rumored that some informer had smuggled in some valuable information to him: facts about the size of the city, who the officials were, how many parties we had, and what year it was....
I must say the most of our journalists don’t seem to be too strong on facts; no doubt they have an occupational distrust of them.
Anyone who's watched the antics of the political press corps today should find that this description still applies to many of them. So far The Last Hurrah is entertaining; I look forward to the rest of it.
