Religious Illiteracy

I've been reading Dear Abby's advice columns for at least sixty years, and I can't remember any as weirdly off as one she published last week, on March 24.

The question she answered came from a Christian woman who'd raised her children to be Christians, and they in turn had raised their children to be Christians.  One of her grandchildren, however, had joined a very strict church and cut off his family.  "He and his wife have decided that no one outside of his church can see his child."  The grandmother is heartbroken: will she ever see her great-grandchild?  What advice could Abby give?  Signed, PRINCIPLED IN FLORIDA.  Abby replied:

I always thought Christianity was a welcoming religion. This is the first time I have heard of a denomination that decides other Christians are not Christian enough. The church your grandson has joined sounds more like a cult than a religion. Before making any decisions about how, what or whether to gift anything to the new baby, ask your grandson whether accepting a gift from an "outsider" is even allowed. 

I could hardly believe my eyes as I read it. Abby has never "heard of a denomination that decides other Christians are not Christian enough"?  That decision is the historical Christian norm. It begins in the New Testament with the apostle Paul denouncing competing Christian teachers for proclaiming what he considers a false gospel: "As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone preaches any other gospel to you than what you have received, let him be accursed" (Galatians 1:9, NKJV).  In the gospels Jesus repeatedly warned against "false" teachers, threatening them and their followers with condemnation.  And -- my favorite - in the second letter of John, the Elder warns "the Elect Lady": "If anyone comes to you but does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your home or even greet him. / Whoever greets such a person shares in his evil deeds" (2 John vv. 10-11). In the third letter of John, the Elder complains to Gaius that

I wrote to the church, but Diotrephes, who loves to have the preeminence among them, does not receive us. Therefore, if I come, I will call to mind his deeds which he does, prating against us with malicious words. And not content with that, he himself does not receive the brethren, and forbids those who wish to, putting them out of the church [vv. 9-10, NKJV]. 

Since those glorious days, Christians have fought not only with outsiders but with each other, often over tiny matters of doctrine that were nonetheless held to be vital for salvation.  After a millennium and centuries of religious wars, some Christians decided that toleration was the better part of valor; as the composer Hector Berlioz said of the Roman Catholic Church in the 1800s, "Since she has ceased to inculcate the burning of heretics, her creeds are charming."

As for "cult," all religions are cults, dedicated to the care and feeding of their gods. Of course Abby was using the word in the twentieth-century sense of "any sect, usually fairly new, whose teachings I disapprove of."  But by every criterion I've ever seen, New Testament Christianity was a cult in this sense: a new, militant, embattled sect that maintained its boundaries by building walls to keep outsiders out and new converts in, teaching them to regard their former religion as demonic and their families as enemies. As Jesus put it in Luke 14:26, "If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple" (NKJV). It's a recurring theme in the gospels. 

Christian intolerance is so notorious that it's hard to believe that Abby was serious.  Maybe she was being snarky or sarcastic; I don't know.  But serious or not, her reply was unhelpful.

But He's So Articulate!

 

I don't get excited over politicians as orators; they're usually overrated anyway. (Remember when Ronald Reagan was promoted as "the Great Communicator"?) I usually prefer to read transcripts so I can concentrate on the content instead of the packaging. It's how I got through the Obama years. When I did listen to him, I was put off by his scolding tone, his fake folksiness, etc.; his dishonesty was just the icing on the cake. I never agreed that he was a good speaker. (Yeah, Dubya was worse - that's supposed to be a recommendation?) 

But I was impressed by this short video from Zohran Mamdani. I watched it all the way through without wanting to bang my head on the table. For one thing, he doesn't talk down, doesn't hide that he's bright, but without being professorial. The content is good too, which is why it infuriated so many of the usual suspects. Which doesn't mean I'm uncritical of him; I reserve the right to be as harsh about him as I am about Obama, Trump, Dubya, Clinton, Harris, and the rest. This clip is just refreshing, that's all. 

You don't have to agree with me, either: whether a pol is a good speaker is a subjective aesthetic judgment, which takes me back to my original point: that it's unimportant compared to the pol's words and actions, which loyalists prefer to downplay if not ignore. In Mamdani's case, it's often difficult to sort out reality from the flood of hydrophobic propaganda directed against him, but as far as I can tell, he's doing pretty well. Compared to his centrist-Dem attackers, he's wonderful.

You Keep Using This Word; or, How Can I Leave This Behind?

I happened on a book called Queering Gay and Lesbian Studies, by Richard Piontek, published in 2006 by University of Illinois Press.  The publisher's blurb proclaimed it 

a broadly interdisciplinary study that considers a key dilemma in gay and lesbian studies through the prism of identity and its discontents: the field studies has modeled itself on ethnic studies programs [sic], perhaps to be intelligible to the university community, but certainly because the ethnic studies route to programs is well established.  Since this model requires a stable and identifiable community, gay and lesbian studies have emphasized stable and knowable identities.  The problem, of course is that sexuality is neither stable, tidy, nor developmental.  With the advent of queer theory, there are now other perspectives available that frequently find themselves at odds with traditional gay and lesbian studies.

Hm.  Okay, that's the blurb, I won't hold the author responsible for it.  I looked in the text, where essentially the same claim is made.

The notion of a coherent and unified gay and lesbian identity also made gays and lesbians candidates for the project of minority history by constituting them as a minority akin to ethnic and racial ones. Minority history lets gays and lesbians be inserted into the historical canon alongside other previously excluded groups. At the same time, however, defining “bad history” as the only problem, and thus merely multiplying the number of historical subjects as a remedy, evades important epistemological questions. Here I take up postmodern challenges to traditional historiography, seeking, among other things, to determine how historical knowledge is produced and how particular viewpoints established dominance and allowed for the exclusion of minority points of view.

I hope to read the entire book soon, so I may be able to account for Piontek's statements.  Some of this makes sense to me. I've thought along the same lines, and I've encountered slighting references to the "ethnic model" of gay people, along with sloganizing claims by some activists that "we are a people."  Those claims resonated for me at times, but they also made me uneasy.

What is "a people"?  The blurb writer seemed to assume that the ethnic model "requires a stable and identifiable community, gay and lesbian studies have emphasized stable and knowable identities.  The problem, of course is that sexuality is neither stable, tidy, nor developmental."  Ethnic communities aren't stable, knowable, tidy, or developmental (where did that come from?) either.  Nor are other identitarian conceptions like gender, disciplines, religion, the arts. "Challenges" to those conceptions aren't postmodern either: they are part of modernism itself, and go back to the beginning of the twentieth century if not earlier.  Jason Josephson Storm has an excellent discussion of this issue in his Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (Chicago, 2021).

Maybe Piontek went into this later in the book, but the divide he starts with has been present since the late 19th century, continued through the response to Alfred Kinsey's work, and has persisted to the present.  It's not a matter of one model succeeding an older, inferior one, which incidentally is a model of linear progress that self-identified postmodernists supposedly reject but have difficulty leaving behind. The field that Queer Theory superseded was never particularly stable either: it originally was simply "gay studies," became "gay and lesbian studies" as gay men struggled with their sexism, then "gay, lesbian and bisexual studies" and so on - just as the formerly gay movement added subgroups, "queer" among them.  

I hope I'll have more to say on this in due time.  It may be unfair to pick on a book that is now twenty years old, but I haven't noticed that the field has improved much since 2006.  It might be worth adding that a cursory online search found many references to "LGBTQ culture" and even to "queer culture." Queer culture is postulated as something that has persisted visibly over centuries, even millennia, despite attempts to stamp it out. That would seem to imply a stable and identifiable community with knowable identities, inserted into the historical canon alongside other previously excluded groups. As I've said before, queer and trans scholars have objected to imposing "gay" and "lesbian" on societies and eras that supposedly didn't have those concepts, but have then imposed "queer" and "trans" on them even though the same objection applies. At best Piontek was over-optimistic about the postmodern challenge to traditional historiography, as queer theory was simply assimilated to existing approaches and categories.

Let Me Go, Lover

This post on the Platform Formerly Known As Twitter was passed along by a "technical" philosopher still working on his Ph.D., with the remark "People are making fun of this, but it worked."

My first thought was to wonder if the man was able to extract himself because of the hour-long prayer session, or because the woman's muscles simply relaxed after awhile, as I think one would expect. It probably didn't save them money, because holy men expect compensation for their services.  You could argue that distracting them for an hour "worked," but it wouldn't mean that the prayer and preaching were direct causes. Or, going on the reasonable assumption that the goal was to get many views for the video, you could say that it worked: two days ago the video had 230 thousand views.  A philosopher should be able to do better than this.

My second thought was that the video was very likely staged.  My third was that from the description, it appears that the man and woman were not married to each other, and that the Lord was imposing the due penalty for their sin on the fornicators (or adulterers?), showing his infinite mercy by letting them go after a little time, while putting a little cash in the pocket of his servant.  My fourth is that there are people who need divine intervention a lot more than these two.

I also thought of a quip ascribed to the glorious snarkmeister Bernard Shaw, about the healing site at Lourdes: "All those canes, braces and crutches, and not a single glass eye, wooden leg or toupee."  I haven't been able to confirm the source, but what matters is the point.  Jesus, according to the gospels, healed a man with a withered hand, and restored life to a man who'd been dead four days. (According to Matthew, many people who'd been dead for much longer than that came to life when Jesus was crucified.)  One of the most famous Christian healing sites doesn't even come close to such feats.

While trying to find a source for the supposed Shaw quip, I found an odd article which quoted it, and tried to answer it.

Point taken, but somewhere in that logic a greater miracle is missed. Consider the cripple. Assuming he was not faking it, the fact still remains that he was able to discard his walking support. Hardnosed rationalists would not call that a miracle. They'd say that if such an event occurred at all, it was probably due to some psychosomatic effect - if they didn't say it was a placebo thing outright.

And that's the common everyday miracle they would be missing; how does the mind effect the body? Consider amputees next. Over 50% of people who have an arm or leg surgically removed report what is called "phantom pain" in parts of the limb which is no longer there. Medical science doesn't have a coherent theory why this happens though, amazingly, medications, including placebos, can reduce the pain.

So phantom pain is a miracle?  I've noticed that Christian apologists often try to confuse the meaning of "miracle."  They point to the glory of sunrise, the wonder of biological reproduction, and other everyday events and call them miracles. 

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
 “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
 “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.”

If everything is a miracle, then nothing is.  Nobody marveled when Jesus walked on land, though it was just as miraculous on this logic, and a literal act of God; they marveled when he walked on water.  Nobody marveled when Mary gave birth; they marveled that she had conceived without sexual intercourse.  There's dispute among philosophers and theologians as to what a miracle is, whether it involves violations of the laws of nature for example.  It's true that earthquakes, plagues, and other events have been called acts of God, though many modern Christians are uneasy about doing so.  So it's conceivable that the eventual separation of the Kenyan fornicators might have been Jesus' doing.  But any other god could have been responsible, or none at all.  

Just because something is unexplained, and never may be explained, that doesn't make it a miracle.  Invoking placebos is an attempt to dodge the question, to distract. The point of the quip about Lourdes is that an all-powerful god's ability to work wonders of healing has some intriguing blind spots. Get back to me when a placebo makes a missing eye or limb grow back. 

Later the same day that I saw the Kenyan video, YouTube pointed me to this video.  (A miracle!  It couldn't be mere coincidence!)  The man who makes them, Andrew Henry, is a biblical scholar.  Unlike some other YouTube biblical scholars I could name, his videos are well-planned and organized.  This one is about reported appearances by the Virgin Mary to ordinary people, which have been happening for centuries.  I learned quite a lot from it, and it occurred to me that when Protestant apologists deride scholars for disbelief in the supernatural, they don't seem to have in mind Fatima or Guadalupe or the many other sightings Andrew Henry discusses.  Why not?  Don't they believe in the supernatural?  I'll have to ask about this the next time I encounter this accusation.

You Think I'm Joking?

A whole lot of people were outraged at Donald Trump's latest offense against civility, his posting of a video which included an image of Barack and Michelle Obama's faces superimposed on apes. The outrage seems to have died down a little, as Fox News has gratefully seized on the kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie to occupy program time, and CNN on the Winter Olympics, but it's still active outside corporate media.  I started this post right away, but got sidetracked by personal commitments and general laziness.  It was easy, though, because I wasn't outraged.  Of course Donald Trump is a pig, but this sort of activity is typical of him; it's dog bites man.

First, the video didn't do the Obamas any harm. They're rich, they have Secret Service protection, they're safely insulated from any features of American life they don't want to know about.  Barry is rubbing elbows with billionaires and superannuated rock stars, posting his playlists and favorite books, they have their various mansions.  Michelle has her podcast and other projects. Every so often they stick their heads out to attend presidential funerals or make annoying statements about, like, stuff.  

I agree that public displays of gutter racism will bother and upset young people of color who don't have the Obamas' advantages, but there are far more immediate displays of gutter racism that also bother them: raids of their schools by masked goons, racist campaigns about immigrants supposedly eating pets, and the familiar grinding effects of poverty. I'm reminded of right-wing concern trolling in the 90s about how Bill Clinton's sex scandal would upset innocent children who were probably more worried about the effects of war and other political violence.

Second, when it comes to repugnant Presidential attempts at humor, Obama yields nothing to Trump.  Obama joked - in public, on camera - about killing the Jonas Brothers with predator drones if they looked askance at his daughters.  "You won't even see it coming. You think I'm joking?" It wouldn't have been funny even if Obama hadn't killed plenty of people with predator drones: American teenagers, wedding parties, hospital patients.  No big deal, all American presidents and their flunkies are blood-soaked butchers; nobody but the Professional Left cared, then or now.  ("Professional Left" was the Obama administration's version of Trump's "paid protesters," come to think of it.)

Obama also found it amusing that people in Latin America should care about US violence there, whether directly or merely funding, training, and protecting its perpetrators.  Early in his tenure he flailed inelegantly when asked about Israel-Palestine: "The Middle East is obviously an issue that has plagued the region for centuries, and it's an issue that elicits a lot of passions as you have heard."  I mean, he couldn't possibly have foreseen that a college student would ask him such a question; obviously the student was a Professional Leftist.  A few years later, he was better prepared.  Asked a hostile but not unreasonable question (which he didn't understand, since it was in Hebrew), Obama mocked the questioner, an Arab-Israeli student from Haifa University, joking, "I have to say we actually arranged for that because it made me feel at home ... I wouldn't feel comfortable if I didn't have at least one heckler."  Remarks like these are, if not anticipations of Trump, at least retreads of Ronald Reagan, the Master from whom Obama learned how to make pithy quips.

Confronted with such performances, Obama's fans may ask me where I was when Obama was president, they bet I liked him then.  No, I didn't.  This blog has too many of my attacks on him from the period to link here.  The best they have to offer is that he was a disappointment sometimes.  Yeah, I know that one too.  I did find it really depressing when the radical writer Marge Piercy, whose work I love and respect, posted the D-word about Obama ("a bit of a disappointment" was how she put it) while expressing her outrage on Facebook over Trump's video post.

So yeah, I take due notice of Trump's latest crime against propriety, good manners, presidential norms. But I won't join in outrage with people who'd be watching football, having brunch, or just having a nice nap if only Trump would disappear.  

A Few Words in Defense of Our Country

"Loser" is a nothingburger as an insult, though I admit it's better than "ret*rd," which is popular not only among MAGA but everywhere on the political spectrum. But then so is "loser." Don't be stupid, people. If that's the best you've got, it's better to keep silent than to remove all doubt about your vacuity.

 

Oh, it's okay because Trump uses it and you're just turning it back on him? Keep digging yourselves in deeper.

He Strictly Charged Them to Tell No One About Him

The discourse on race / ethnicity stinks to high heaven. 

A new movie version of Wuthering Heights will be released next month, and not for the first time there's controversy over the casting of Heathcliff.  It has been more than a decade since I last read the book, and I'm in no hurry to do it again, but as I remember, Heathcliff was a man of mystery, of ambiguous and unknown ancestry.  The discussion I saw on Twitter/X today agreed, but people were still trying to pin him down, while others tried to impose "modern" Foucauldianism on the story.  For example, dismissals of "people who interpret everything through contemporary American racial dynamics," or "But Heathcliff is supposed to be possibly-not-fully-white by the standards of late 18th C Yorkshire, which is not the same thing as being clearly nonwhite by modern standards... He isn't clearly described as nonwhite, but as someone who raises suspicions because of an ambiguous appearance and background."

Whose modern standards?  Which modern standards?  The new movie is a US-UK production.  British racial dynamics are different than US racial dynamics, and both sets are complex and incoherent, even leaving "mixed-race" people out of it.  Jacob Elordi, who plays Heathcliffe in this version, is Australian with a Basque father. Judging by this publicity photo, I think he looks suitably ambiguous by modern standards.

 

"White" and "non-white" aren't clear categories, and never have been. As I've pointed out before, in English usage "black" is applied to human beings along a continuum from black hair to being sub-Saharan African.  Here's how Heathcliff made his first appearance to the Earnshaw family:

We crowded round, and over Miss Cathy’s head I had a peep at a dirty, ragged, black-haired child; big enough both to walk and talk: indeed, its face looked older than Catherine’s; yet when it was set on its feet, it only stared round, and repeated over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand. I was frightened, and Mrs. Earnshaw was ready to fling it out of doors: she did fly up, asking how he could fashion to bring that gipsy brat into the house, when they had their own bairns to feed and fend for? What he meant to do with it, and whether he were mad? The master tried to explain the matter; but he was really half dead with fatigue, and all that I could make out, amongst her scolding, was a tale of his seeing it starving, and houseless, and as good as dumb, in the streets of Liverpool, where he picked it up and inquired for its owner. Not a soul knew to whom it belonged, he said; and his money and time being both limited, he thought it better to take it home with him at once, than run into vain expenses there: because he was determined he would not leave it as he found it. Well, the conclusion was, that my mistress grumbled herself calm; and Mr. Earnshaw told me to wash it, and give it clean things, and let it sleep with the children.  

Children, even little blue-eyed blond-haired rosy-cheeked English children, were commonly called "it" in English well into the twentieth century, so this passage shouldn't be assumed to be racist.  Heathcliff is referred to as a "gipsy," a "a little Lascar [i.e. South Asian], or an American or Spanish castaway" by other characters in the novel.  Whatever the racial dynamics of late 18th-century Yorkshire were, they weren't clear.  Numerous people have pointed out that Liverpool was a terminus of the Atlantic slave trade, and speculated that Heathcliff might have been a slave or the child of a slave. It's less often noted that the reader has at best only Mr. Earnshaw's word for it that he found the boy in Liverpool; what was he going to say, though, "This is my son by a slave wench"?  I don't assume that Emily Bronte had a clear picture of Heathcliff's ancestry in mind, nor that she could have explained herself clearly if pressed. Intentionally or not, she gave an accurate picture of the racial dynamic in her day by showing that Yorkshire folk just threw around a salad of labels for the boy. They didn't care much what he was, only that he was Other.  (I couldn't resist thinking of the various answers the Twelve gave when Jesus asked "Who do men say that I am?" "Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.")

On "gipsy," Roma are not a single "racial" group: see the 1993 musical / documentary Latcho Drom, which ranges from India across Europe to Spain.  If Heathcliff could have been "a Spanish castaway," he could have been Basque; he still wouldn't have been white. Complaints about the casting of Elordi that call him white are as inadvertently entertaining as the complaints that Neo in The Matrix was played by a white actor.  (Keanu Reeves is multiethnic, to put it gently.)  The gatekeepers are as ignorant as their opponents, and contribute little or nothing to improving the discourse.

Are Hispanics white?  Hey, remember the right-wing think-tanker who thought that Spanish speakers are a "race"? But he wants you to know that he's not a racist. Remember the liberal queer diversity educators who insisted that Sunni and Shi'a are ethnicities?  Jon Schwarz likes to remind us that Benjamin Franklin said that Germans are "swarthy," that is, dark-skinned:

Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind. 

You see, it's okay for a Basque to play Heathcliff: they aren't white! And I remember that light-skinned African-Americans sometimes passed, or were mistaken for Mexicans or or Latins.

A similar casting dilemma affects Shakespeare's Othello. What is a Moor, in Elizabethan racial dynamics?  Othello is called "black" by some characters, and he might have been African, but probably not. Numerous commenters in those threads mentioned that in more recent adaptations, Othello has been played by black African actors.  Laurence Olivier (who also played Heathcliff in a film version of Wuthering Heights) played Othello in blackface in a 1965 movie performance. (My goodness, the whole thing is on YouTube.)  Like this:

 

Then there was Andrea Arnold's 2011 version of Wuthering Heights, in which Heathcliff was played by an Afro-British actor.  I found it uneven but interesting, partly because the dialogue included some F-bombs. Was that "authentic"? "Correct"?  Bronte couldn't have published the novel with such language, and I have no idea whether she knew the word, but probably she did, and the expletives were in character for Heathcliff.  The English were notorious for their foul language: Joan of Arc called them "goddens," or "goddamns."

I don't intend to see the new version; I'll see how the reviews are.  But I don't love the book, so why bother? The anxiety and confusion over the casting - there's also an actor in it with an Arabic name, and a Chinese as well - drew my attention to it, that's all.  Is there even any point in trying to sort out the tangled web of race / ethnic discourse?  I don't think it can be done.